Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope you're having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. I got an incredible show for you today on the first day of the, after the election. I'm sure many people are happy to be done with all the rhetoric and the craziness that was that whole cycle of the election year, but we can get into some of that today. But before we start diving into the world that we currently live in today, let me go and introduce the one and only Frank Forensich. We're diving into a profound and exhilarating exploration of health, evolution, and purpose with none other than Frank Forensich, a visionary educator, martial artist, and furious advocate for the human spirit. With a BA in human biology from Stanford University and over thirty years immersed in martial arts, Frank's journey is a fusion of physical mastery, ancestral wisdom, and deep philosophical insight. Frank is more than just a martial artist with black belts in karate and Aikido. He's an explorer who has traversed the landscapes of Africa in search of our origins, uncovering truths about the human condition along the way. His passion for understanding who we are And where we came from has taken him to stages at Google, the Ancestral Health Symposium, and Stanford University, where he's reshaped conversations about health stress and the role of activism in our life. Today, Frank brings us a revolutionary idea. Activism is medicine, both a concept and the title of his latest book. In it, he challenges us to see activism not as a weight we must carry, but as a pathway to resilience, purpose, and collective evolution. Frank believes that through engagement with our world and the causes that resonate with us, we can find healing, strength, and an awakening of the spirit. Prepare for a conversation that will stir your mind and heart alike, one that connects the threads of human history, personal empowerment, and the call to action. Frank is here to remind us that our evolution is far from over. It's just beginning. Frank, thanks so much for being here today. How are you? I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here. I'm delighted to be talking to you. And I'm also suffering from the events of last night. And I'm sure we're going to talk about that. So yeah, it's kind of a mixed bag for me this morning. Why are you suffering, man? Like what's there to suffer about? Oh, boy. Well... The way I'm seeing this right now is as a form of collective trauma. And the outcome of this election is going to completely reshuffle and reorder our society. And it's not an outcome that I would have hoped for, to say the least. I'm looking forward to metabolizing this experience. Let me, let me put it that way. Yes. I, it's going to be a while before we can really process this, this trauma, if you will. And then we can formulate, I think a pathway going forward. So maybe I can shed some light on that today. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, um, I know leading up to it, there was a lot of rhetoric on both sides talking about the last election or this is going to happen or that's going to happen. And, you know, I. For me, and I think a lot of people that I speak to, one of the things that never really gets addressed in our politics is this idea of foreign policy. I'm not sure. Do you think that our foreign policy is going to change at all? It seems like people don't really get an opportunity to vote in what our country does or where we send our money that's not in the United States. Do you think that part's going to change? Oh, I don't know. I'm really not an expert on foreign policy. I have opinions, of course, like everybody does. But for me, the biggest missing element in political season this conversation is the natural world the biosphere the state of the planet nobody talks about it in in top leadership circles and for me that's just a yawning gap because that's what keeps us alive that's what sustains our bodies and in turn our civilization and everything else so we're not even talking about our life life support systems. And if we don't talk about it, we're sure not going to do anything about it. So for me, that's the biggest flaw in the whole system right now. Yeah, but it's quite a conundrum when we start talking about that because we talk about global change. We're making these broad changes about saving the planet, but shoot, we can't even take care of our own neighborhoods, man. We can't even take care of each other. You know what I mean? I go down, I just moved to the Bay Area. There's so many homeless people and we can't even take care of that. How in the world are we going to change attitudes throughout the world? Doesn't it seem like a giant sort of a... a problem like shouldn't we take care of each other before we start taking care of the planet well yes and it's not an either or choice totally it's something where where we can and must do both yeah and but what you describe here is an incredibly unprecedented stress is the amount of stress that people are under right now and the degree to which it's chronic. And that is unprecedented in our history as animals. Because for most of our time on this planet, stress has been episodic. We have a little bit of stress and then we go back to camp and we recover and there are these spikes in our autonomic nervous system, our autonomic experience, and we recover. But now there are no spikes. It's just one... horrible plateau of stress that is fundamentally abnormal. So I think that that's a valuable orientation because it explains a lot of our behavior right now. Stress is not just an individual phenomenon. This is something that's coursing through the entirety of our society right now. So we can talk more about stress. Yeah. Well, I think it's a, it's a good segue into, you know, what you've probably learned in master through martial arts, like on some level to achieve the level that you have in martial arts, you have to really. You have to really be in tune with your awareness, whether it's the idea of stress, whether it's the idea of overcoming stress, whether it's the idea of grounding yourself. But maybe you can talk about what you've learned from martial arts and how we can apply that to maybe the bigger picture. Like, is there something that you have learned in self-mastery that will allow us to maybe start mastering our environment in a way that's less stressful? Well, first of all, that word mastery is a little bit tricky because it means different things in different contexts. So in the East, the idea of mastery is contained in this phrase or word, wu-wei. that somebody brings to their experience in the world. And Eastern traditions are full of references to skill development. That's something that a lot of people don't realize. We think of Buddhism, we think of Taoism as being something having to do with acceptance and that kind of thing. And that's true. That's an important part of it. But if you read the ancient texts like the Tao Te Ching and the Chuan Tzu, these texts, there's a lot of references and metaphors having to do with skill, skillful movement through the world. And that's the old martial artists, that's what they trained for was this grace and adaptability to circumstances moving without effort. And in that sense, it's very much like being a musician, because you try to play your instrument and to move and to do it effortlessly. Over in the West, in the meantime, mastery has a different meaning, right? And the European tradition, based on knowledge and scientific discovery, and then knowledge and control of nature, a very different sense of mastery. I have to think about that dichotomy between the two. And of course, I'm really interested in the skill angle of the East. Yeah. I like the way you describe that with grace and efficiency. You know, it does seem like the Western model has, and I would say with mastery in the Western world comes dominance where that might not be the same case in the Eastern. There's no dominance. There's balance. You know, those two things correspond differently too, right? Yeah. Right. And in the Western tradition, that emphasis on dominance has really become manifest in the modern world now with big time capitalism and this extractive economy now that we bring to nature where we try to extract resources from nature and resources from labor from people where it's all about extraction and domination. and imperialism over the world, a completely different idea than what arose in the East. So we can learn a lot from Buddhism and Taoism, not just about how to be calm, but how to relate to the world at large. Yeah, it's well put. Do you think it was, like, when we look back at some of the, you know, what comes to mind for me in whether it's this the hardcore extractive capitalism, you know, I think a multinational corporations and I worked for a fortune five hundred company and it got to a point where, you know, it was us versus them. It was the people that were employees versus the middle management and the higher management and the board of executives that tried to extract from the employees the same way an oil company extracts from the ground. And it was just this incredible force of like, I don't like these people. I don't like these people. It was the classic us and them. But my question, Frank, is has all this been necessary so that we can get to this point where we do realize the mistakes that we made? Like, hey, we've been treating each other pretty bad here. Was that all necessary in your opinion? Do you think that maybe we had to get here in order to get to the next spot? Oh, yeah. Perhaps, but this was a long series of small decisions along the way. And I go back, one of my, I often wonder about the breaking of the world. You know, how did we get to this point? And I think about the Luddite revolution that took place in, in England. Yeah. What, What we had there was a culture of weavers and craftspeople, artisans who actually had a culture. They made a living making fabrics and making crafts. And the capitalists came in and basically took over that whole culture and dominated it. That was, in a sense, the beginning of the end. It didn't have to go down that road. Things could have turned out quite differently. And so now what we're seeing with Indigenous people, Native people, is that, no, we have to get back to that thing that we've almost lost. And that's a way of living in harmony with each other and with the natural world. And it is a possible thing to do. but it's kind of fading into the rear view mirror right now. So we need to keep that thing alive. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I think the Luddites get a bad rap, man. Everyone talks about the Luddites wanting to just destroy technology. What they wanted to destroy was this incredible and cringing force on their freedom. They were doing things their way, and they were not going to be forced into coming into the factory every day for fifteen. They didn't want to do that. They wanted to make it their own way. They didn't need that, but they were forced into that. So I... I I'm glad that you brought that up. I think another book that comes to mind when I think about this, which I think ties in with with your book, Activism is Medicine, is a great book called Black Elk Speaks. And in that book, like the indigenous leaders talks about how when the white guys came came forward and manifest destiny, they came to the to the indigenous people and they said, we want to buy your land. And in the story, he says, like, that's silly. You can't buy the land. The land belongs to everybody. You know, it's sort of like that same sort of motif that we're talking about right here. And, you know, in some ways, like I I think that that is the beginning of activism. Maybe that's sort of the foundation of why activism is medicine. Yes. And what I do is try and create a different way of thinking about this, because for most people. who live a conventional life, activism seems incredibly stressful. Because what it means is you're having to step up and expose yourself to conflicted realities, conflicted relationships. And it's not safe. It's risky. And so activism being perceived as risky and stressful, it's no surprise that so many people avoid it. But I'm trying to offer a counter argument to say, well, yes, it is risky and it is stressful and there is exposure, to be sure. But it is a pathway that is very rich and meaningful. So it's a way to learn about the world. it's a way to establish relationships with really interesting people and it's a way to live a life of relevance and that's what's so important even if you lose and there's a lot of loss in the activist community there's a lot of battles that we fight and that we lose so you have to keep your your focus on the journey and when you do you live this life of relevance it it works it's better for your body and it's better for your life in the long run. Safety is dangerous, you might say. Hanging out in a very safe environment, twenty four seven, three sixty five, ultimately diminishes our experience and diminishes the human animal. So there has to be a getting out and standing up and using our voice. It's really important. And that's the premise for the whole book. So the book begins with the encounter that we have with what I call the knowledge. The knowledge is simply the understanding that human beings now are impacting the natural world in a catastrophic way. And that's the knowledge. And I pose the question, what happens when you have that encounter with that knowledge? And people diverge there. Some people take it on, some people ignore it, some people deny it. And there's a lot of different styles there. So that's, I can't help but see the similarities between the individual having a catastrophic relationship with themselves by fleeing to safety and the catastrophic relationship we have with our planet. In some ways, we're hiding behind this idea of safety. To live a life worth meaning, to live a meaningful life is to get out there and fight for what you believe in. And to light that spark inside of you and watch it blow on that ember and watch your relationships flare up. And if we can fight for what we believe in, then we can also fight for the world we want to live in. Are there some similarities between the fight for individual fire and the fight for living on a better planet? Oh yeah, it's all the same thing. And it's, for me, it always gets back to the human animal because we have systems in our brain that specifically the amygdala, that's a big part of it. That is like the smoke detector in the brain, right? And that is always vigilant, twenty-four seven, to detect threats in the environment. And it's a very useful thing to have if you live in a dangerous environment. And what happens is we detect fear, we detect stress, and a common response to stress then is to revert to the familiar. And we see it in humans all the time, but we also see it in other animals. When there's an ambiguous situation, that animal goes back to what he or she knows. I'm going to go hide in the last familiar place. And it's adaptive and it makes sense in certain situations, but the dose makes the poison. So if that's all you do, you're going to have a problem. And the analogy I use, I've climbed some mountains in my time, and the way mountains were originally climbed with a series of camps. So you go to the Himalayas and you set up a series of camps up Mount Everest. And maybe you have camp one, two, three, four, and then you make a break for the summit. But inevitably, the weather gets bad. And now you have this huge ambiguity that is a big challenge. And what do you do? Well, you say, well, I'm going to either persist or I'm going to retreat to the familiar. I'm going to retreat to the last familiar place, which is camp four or whatever it is. I'm going to go back to the last safe place. That's my retreat to the familiar. And That's the metaphor for how so many of us are living our lives right now. And that means retreating to conventional culture. It means retreating to consumer culture, what we know, what our friends are doing, safety in numbers, all of these things. And again, the dose makes the poison. It's great in short amounts, small amounts. But at some point, you've got to leave camp four and you've got to head for the summit. And that's what's going to make your life meaningful. Yeah. Do you think on the march up the mountain, that which makes you retreat to the familiar is the mountain or the rock in your shoe? Oh. Oh. I love that because, I mean, obviously it's both, but yeah, when you're in a really tough situation like that, every little detail matters. And so those little things can be incredibly significant. The rock in your shoe might be the thing that forces you to turn around. So yeah, attention to detail is very important. Yeah, I love the analogies and the metaphors. They're so telling, and they seem to help people, at least me, think about the details in life. It invites someone to explore the significance in their own life. Your book is rich in that particular type of language, and so are the talks that you give, and thank you for that. I do feel like we are on a march towards the mountain. Yeah. It seems to me on some level activism is contagious. Maybe the person that we see leading the charge becomes an inspiration to us. But can you speak to the idea of activism being contagious? Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because what has happened, especially in the world of liberal politics over the last, say, ten years, is that – A lot of people have tried to put forward reasoned arguments and facts and figures to try and educate an audience about some particular issue, say it's climate or whatever it is. So we put forward these reasoned arguments, and in general, they fail. They fail to persuade people. And there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think when it comes down to persuasion and trying to get people to behave in a particular way, role modeling is what really moves people. And in the world of activism, yeah, if you see your neighbors and your friends Stepping up and taking risks, that's going to move you too. If your neighbors are not stepping up and not taking risks, then you're going to revert to the familiar and you're going to be comfortable at home forever. And that'll be it. So yes, absolutely. start speaking out on behalf of the climate, I was moved. I said, okay, she can do that. I can do that. And she inspired literally millions of people in that action. And I also remember from childhood watching the That was inspiring to a lot of people as well. And talk about exposure. I mean, those guys took some serious risks to do what they did, but it's contagious. Everything we do as human animals is contagious. So activism is no different. Yeah, I love that. I almost feel like there's a bigger language. There's something calling to us, to inspire us, to push us, or more importantly, like a divine attractor that's pulling us in the right direction if we're willing to listen. And it's this idea of passion, whether it's the – Olympics or whether it's MLK's mountaintop speech. There's these things in our lives that pull us in a certain direction. And it's a bigger language than words alone. And I do think that maybe where we've gone wrong with these analytical speeches or this very measured education about how things should be. We're going to do this. I think when the instrument becomes the institution, it loses its passion. It loses the sexiness that draws us to it on some level. But I think that what happened last night, I think this is an invitation to the world. Let's get inspired. Let's find the new heroes out there. Let's find the next people that are willing to change their lives, the lives of their neighbors, that are willing to stand up in the face of adversity and take a chance, man. And I think that your book can be sort of a menu of possibilities or a sort of invitation to the next class of people that want to do that. What do you say about this language that's calling to us, that's trying to inspire us, this activism as medicine? Yeah, the language is very helpful. And I know that one little bit of language that pulled me into this was... I was reading a book about some inner city activists working on civil rights. And this one leader was working with some at-risk youth. And his favorite thing to tell these kids was, the more you know, the more you owe. The more you know, the more you owe. And that one really stuck with me. extremely privileged. You can see my bookshelf in the background. I've been able to read most of my life. I've read hundreds of nonfiction books. And so I've been privileged to know a lot of things about the world. And that, that little bit of advice resonates with me. It's like, okay, I know some things I need. I owe my ancestors. I know I owe my culture. for bringing me to this point. And I need to spread that along. I need to pass that along. I have a duty. I have an obligation to do that. And that really resonates for me. So I didn't just parachute into this world. I'm the product of my parents and my grandparents and everybody else who formed this society and this culture, this civilization. So I feel the weight of that responsibility to go forward. The language is huge. Yeah. It is huge. I'm hopeful that people find a way to express themselves that is dangerously beautiful. You know what I mean by that? Like, Yeah. Like we should be doing, there should be dangerous. Like I speak to a lot of people in the psychedelic movement and it's my opinion that we're like in the late fifties right now. And you're going to see this explosion of hopefully day glow school buses and electric Kool-Aid acid tests and new ideas happening. Maybe recycled, refreshed ideas, but a new sort of renaissance, a new sort of love that sweeps over the world in a powerful, dangerously beautiful way. Do you think that's too imaginative, or what do you think about that? No, well, that gets back to the old idea of crisis opportunity and the – The myth there was that this Chinese character symbolized both crisis and opportunity, which a lot of people have repeated that. It turns out actually literally not to be true. It's not actually meaning that, but it's a great metaphor, right? It should be true, even if it's not. But yeah, absolutely. So what we've got now, especially after last night, is a genuine crisis And a lot of the boundaries that we are used to living with are going to break down, are going to dissolve, are going to be rearranged. And that is a perfect opportunity for creativity and art. And that's why I use this word artivism quite a bit. drawn to these kind of conditions. And we're going to see, I think, a big uptick in art right now. And the energy that animated the nineteen sixties, that animated the Occupy movement a few years ago, that energy is still out there. But people are retrenching. People are trying to say, okay, how does activism change now? What is it going to look like now? And once we get a sense of that, there could be a real big shift. Yeah, I see it wholeheartedly. And it's not... Like, I don't really believe in coincidence. And when I see the title of your book and I see what you're doing out there, like, I just see that as, oh, look, there's just another sign of it. Like, this is bubbling to the top, whether it's artivism, activism, whether it is people living their best lives. Like, I see it bubbling to the top. We've got our first question coming in coming here from Clint Kiles from Arkansas. And he says, you've walked the landscapes of Africa, connecting with our origins and studying ancestral wisdom. How do these primal experiences shape your understanding of the human spirit, especially in a modern world so disconnected from nature? Yeah. Yeah, that's the problem. And the way I think about this and explain it, I've been also to Europe, and I've been to some of the sites of the cave paintings. Nice. And what's really interesting to me is that you go into the... They don't let you go into actual caves, but there are recreations of the caves. And you can go in there, and you can see the paintings, and almost all of the paintings are of animals. And... The idea here is that for ancient people who lived a wildlife in nature with these big and powerful animals around them, They were just captivated by the animals, and they believed these animals to have supernatural powers. So in other words, they were in awe of nature constantly. They were in awe of the animals. They were in awe of the weather and wildfires, thunderstorms, all of these things. Now, what's happened is modern research done in laboratories, believe it or not, they've discovered that having therapeutic for the body. So I think what they do, they bring people in the laboratory and they show them different kinds of videos and they measure their physiological responses. So it turns out that having a sense of awe, an experience of awe, actually it changes your physiology, makes you calmer, but it also makes you more pro-social and it makes you more humble, which are ideal qualities for making our way in the world. So anyway, that is a prelude to what happened with agriculture, because when we started to till the land and domesticate animals, a lot of that awe went away. And now living in the modern world, we hardly even see animals. We hardly even see it. We're not exposed to the weather or awe at all. And so we try and find awe in our electronic devices or whatever. substitute right yeah and so you might look at modern humans as being odd deprived and I I think that's a fair thing to say and and that's dangerous that that puts us in real trouble so that suggests we got to spend more time in nature we got to go out and make ourselves small in comparison to the big outdoors that's out there so that's what I try to do Yeah, I like it. It makes me, I've always wondered, I think maybe you just gave a great example of how this happened, but I've always wondered how the word awful became such a pejorative. Like shouldn't something that's full of awe be something great? Like maybe that's how it happened. Maybe we went from seeing these pristine landscapes and these giant beasts and this living in these miracles that was full of awe to this representation that became awful. You know what I mean? Like, wait, that's just awful. It's not even that good. Right, right. Well, that reminds me of another language thing, because if you read some historical accounts by rabbis and other historians who look at the words in the Bible, and one that comes up a lot of times in the modern world is this phrase, fear of the Lord. And we're supposed to live in fear of the Lord, right? But you go to these rabbis and these historians, and they say, no, that's a misinterpretation of the original language. What it was is awe in the face of reality. In other words, we should live a life of radical awe, to be radically amazed at the nature of life. That is the spiritual path, to be radically amazed. So this mistranslation of these old documents led us down the wrong path to this world of fear. It's, well, awe the path yeah it also it also brings up this idea of surplus you know we talk about agriculture and I think one of the oldest structures on the planet is the the grain tower at jericho and that symbolizes the the first time there was a surplus you know and when you have a surplus you you stop really living in the moment and you start thinking about the past or thinking about the future. And I'm not saying surplus is a bad thing. Like who doesn't want to have more? And you can, you have the opportunity to really work on some, some really fine things when you have a surplus, but at some level, you know, that surplus can become a weight around your ankle a little bit. What do you think that maybe there'll be something there with agriculture and surplus? Oh, totally. Totally. And it also dovetails with stress because a common stress reaction is is because you're faced with this ambiguous future and this possible loss of control. So what do we do? A lot of us anyway, tend to hoard. And hoarding, I think, is a common stress reaction. And it's not just the crazy people we see on TV who fill their house with newspapers or whatever it is. No, we hoard in other ways. So we hoard money. money we hoard power and control we see a lot of affluent people who are not satisfied with having enough and a lot of that I think is a stress reaction so if we could if we could help people with their stress they wouldn't be so motivated to consume at such a high level and they would relax and everybody would feel better so yeah yeah the whole thing with surplus was it took us down a very strange path for the Bushman of the Kalahari living in a wild outdoor environment. The, the habitat that they lived in was their affluence. And there was, there was no need to store anything because you just go for a walk and you can find food. So it's a very different, very different experience for them. Yeah. On some level, when I think of surplus, I think of like, it does allow us to walk down this incredible path of abstraction. You know, try explaining life insurance to a Bushman. I listen, you're going to get, you know, you're going to get this much vacation and then you're going to get some life insurance. What are you talking about? There's no such thing as insurance in life, but like we that live in the Western world, like I don't have health insurance, man. I'm going to die. I can't believe I don't have health insurance. Like it's such an abstraction to think about these incredible things that give us, you know, the, the idea of wealth or the idea of freedom, but may in some ways be really confining us. Right. And the whole insurance industry, I think grew out of the original shipping and maritime world insurance ships to go across the Atlantic. Right. And it always primed, bunch of people, and then you're going to feel safe and secure. And again, the dust makes the poison. There's something to that. There's nothing valuable there. But safety-ism runs out after a while, and then it confines us. We lose our vigility. I don't know if you know that word. I don't know, no. It comes from the world of wildlife biology. Vigility is simply the ability of an animal, a human to walk around the landscape freely. And so if you think of Bushmen living in Africa, if it's a wild area, they can just go wherever they want. The only constraint on their movement is maybe a river or a mountain or wildfire or the animals. That's it. But they have maximum agility. And that is where our bodies and our in that condition of being able to make choices and go wherever you want. But now people have almost no agility. I mean, even if you have a car, you go out and sit in traffic, you don't have much agility at all. And if you're sitting in an office all day, you have almost zero agility. That fact alone is really dangerous for the human animal because we're built to move. So if you take that away, you've got a real problem. Yeah, it's like castration on some level, especially to the human spirit if you're not free to move around, right? Like you can't – what are you going to do? It's like the dog that's chained up in his yard all day, and he can run to the end of the street, but that's it. Pretty soon you take that chain off, and he won't even run to the yard because he knows that he can't. It's this self-imposed sort of limiting beliefs that keep us contained in this false structure. Right. And speaking of the dog and the chain on the dog, that brings up this whole idea of learned helplessness. I'm sure you've run into this, right? Famous experimental world of psychology that if you take a non-human animal and you subject that animal to a series of defeats, and there's a lot of ways you can engineer that, a series of defeats, that animal eventually comes to assume defeat, assume helplessness. And these are non-human animals. They just make an unconscious assessment of their situation, of the world. And they say, well, you know, if I'm faced with a challenge now, I'm probably not going to succeed. And so, or human by exposing them to a series of defeats. And eventually they will come to assume helplessness. And I think for a lot of people in the modern world, that's what we're experiencing now. Because there's so many frustrations. A lot of people simply assume helplessness, assume powerlessness. If you ask them to be an activist, they say, well, I have no power. I have no voice. I have no money. I have no political power. So I'm not even going to try. And that is the source of a lot of our problems. We assume we're powerless. And where do you go from there? You can't really go anywhere. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting you say that. When I think prior to COVID, I think about all the uprisings that were happening, whether in the United States or the Yellow Vest or the Middle East Spring. There was all these just uprisings that almost seemed like we were living in a Diego Rivera mural. You know what I mean? There was just uprisings everywhere. And on some level, I think that that was a beautiful thing to get to see the human animal react to the cage that it was in. You saw things flaring up. And then all of a sudden, things kind of got tampered down. But I still think that that fire was raging. And that's why activism is medicine. This idea of learned helplessness is no longer going to be tolerated by the next generation. I can see it in some of these young men and women that are out on the college campuses that are doing these things that are standing up. And it's pretty inspiring to see what your thoughts on that. Oh, absolutely. And I know some young people. I'm part of a climate group here in Bend, Oregon. And yeah, I love it. I love to see what they're doing. They are struggling with strategy and knowing where to put their efforts because that's not at all clear now. I mean, what are the leverage points? And they run some marches. They run some protests. It's not at all clear that those are effective. And they look to people like me and say, okay, where are the leverage points? What do we need to be doing? And if we can harness their raw energy and put it in the right place, that's going to be really effective. So I encourage them to work at the level of language and presentation, trying to make their case in public forums, that kind of thing. Learning how to be a good public speaker, for example, I think is a really good form of activism. And that's something that they're learning how to do. Yeah. You know, if we can shift gears for a moment on the idea of climate change and activism, you know, I think that there has been a giant monkey wrench that's been thrown into the system. And it's when I was growing up, I'm almost fifty. And when I was growing up, there was this huge problem with pollution. I remember I grew up in San Diego and there was times when the winds came down from like L.A. and you couldn't even breathe. Yeah. Whoa, the smog was so deep, you know, and I remember so many people in my age have asthma. You could say it's probably because of that. But in some weird way, we've switched from like pollution to climate change. And climate change seems to allow for multinational corporations to buy some carbon credits, you know, move some things over here. Like it seems on some way the messaging is. And when I think about multinational corporations and climate change, I can't fathom the idea of a multinational corporation whose profit margin is based on excess consumption, caring anything about the planet. But here they are. Hey, we're leading climate change. No, you're not. Your model is excess consumption. You don't care one bit about the climate. But we've allowed them to lead the charge in so many ways. How do we fix this sort of giant conglomerate problem? Right. Well, at the biggest level, that would require rejiggering the law and constitutions to hamstring the power of corporations. And people are working on that. And there's people who are working on ecocide law and rights of nature legislation. I think these are really good. But the other thing that I would point out, you mentioned air pollution in San Diego. For me, another touchstone goes back to leaded gasoline. And that was a success story back in, I believe, the nineteen seventies, because what happened was the scientists went to the policymakers and they said, look, you've got lead in the gasoline. That's a neurotoxin that's making a lot of people sick. It's going to degrade their brains and we have to get that out of the gasoline. Well, back then people listened to scientists and they said, okay, we're going to adjust our policy. We're going to adjust the formula for the gasoline. We're going to take the lead out of the gasoline and problem was solved. But now would that even happen? What I think people don't trust scientists like they used to. There's so much misinformation in the system. There's so much, um, skepticism and mistrust in the system right now that people don't even believe scientists, which that's a huge red flag and a conversation that we need to have. It's very difficult to find the line between science and company science. When we start looking at who funded that science, that should be on the front page of every report. Who funded this? Let's see who funded it. Then you can begin following the money there. Right. Right. And there is bad science. And there are scientists who are working for some pretty nefarious causes, to be sure. But still, the method is sound. And by far, the great majority of scientists are honorable people doing good work. So and that is a path also, because having a scientific view of the world is means being willing to revise your own personal beliefs in light of new evidence. And that's a wonderful path. That's an honorable path to live. And we can't forget that. You know, science is a useful way to live, too. Yeah, without a doubt. And I'm hopeful that this revolution we are trying to inspire and that we see happening all around us and underscores the idea of activism as medicine is... I'm hopeful that while we value science, I think on some level, it's beginning to come back around to see itself in the mirror and see spirituality, if that makes sense. We're getting to see that thing sort of come back together as a whole instead of two pieces. Maybe you could talk about that idea a little bit. No, I love that because I've often thought about the scientific journey. and the scientific enterprise as being sort of like Joseph Campbell's hero myth, hero's journey, right? Because the young person leaves the town, leaves the village, goes out on this grand adventure, and has all these experiences, learns all these things about the world, and then comes back to the village and say, here's what I learned. But they also, along the way, discovered that Native people, Indigenous people, had a very sophisticated understanding of how the world actually works. And so now we're starting to see sort of that you might call it a green red alliance between science, modern science and native science coming together. And it makes a lot of sense. The key word in all of that is interdependence. I mean, native people are always talking about interdependence and scientists, ecologists now are talking about interdependence all the time. So, yeah, that's a natural brotherhood, you might say. Yeah, I think it's necessary to to, you know, have if you want to have reverence for the planet and we want to we have to believe in something bigger than ourselves. You know, we have to believe that we're part of something that. goes on forever. Whatever word you want to put behind that, whether it's God or Gaia or Jesus or Mohammed or Messiah, whatever word you want to put behind that powerful entity, it's something bigger than ourselves. Once you believe in something bigger than yourself, I think it opens you up to new ideas that become possible and allow you to overcome the small-mindedness of individualism. Like if we can move past that, I think we can have better relationships with everybody around us. Is that, do you think, what do you think? Oh yeah. In fact, I follow a guy named Paul Watson. He was one of the founders of Greenpeace and he's recently been arrested for his activity as part of Sea Shepherd and, you know, protecting the whales. And what he advocates for, he calls it the church of biocentrism. And, calls this the church of biocentrism. And the idea being is that human beings are nothing more or less than one species on the planet, one one participant in this vast biological drama. And what we need is a dose of humility. And that's gonna be the key, but it goes against the modern grain of civilization where we like to think of ourselves as the greatest animal that's ever lived. This is the doctrine of human supremacy, and that paves the way for all kinds of exploitation of other animals and habitats and people. So I think it's a great idea. I love this idea of biocentrism. There was a writer named Aldo Leopold who wrote a book called Sand County Almanac that was very biocentric. And that's an idea that I think needs to have a lot more exposure. It's a very powerful idea. Yeah, it's interesting that we talk about new ideas and we've referenced Joseph Campbell. You know, is it possible that we are beginning to find ourselves outside of the hero's journey? Sort of a more... A more robust myth, maybe like Nietzsche's Camel to the Child. Maybe we're moving into a new sort of mythology where, okay, the hero's journey, let's close this. We all have that. We've all read that story. Let's close that one and open up this new mythology. Is that possible? Can we move into a new mythology? Well, I guess I would call it a new slash old mythology. I mean, Native people have had the mythology of participation for a very long time. And I'm reminded of a Native author named Sherman Alexie. And he's kind of not on the radar anymore. I think he got in some kind of trouble. But he was a poet and a writer of some stature. And he was giving a... a presentation at a bookstore and he was speaking to a wide audience and people were asking about you know the modern predicament and he was saying that you know things are going to get hard for you and speaking about himself and his people his red people he said you're going to need us And that really struck home for me. I was like, yeah, you know, us white people, we're pretty lost. And we need that old story to be revived. We need to remember that. The story has been there for a very long time. And we need to remember about participation in the world. And That's why I'm trying to repeat that story as much as I possibly can. But from another point of view, other, other people have talked about the power of storytelling to move human beings forward. And they've talked about a myth gap because we don't really have a good story right now. We, um, The way I put it, we have a couple of dominant stories. The first one is the Star Trek narrative. And the Star Trek narrative simply holds that we're going to electrify everything. We're going to have every kind of push button technology that we ever need. We're going to mine lithium all around the world. We're going to build all these batteries. And everything is going to work flawlessly. That's the Star Trek narrative. And it's completely a fantasy. But the other narrative we hear a lot, and this is what I call the paleo narrative, and this comes out of the paleo fitness movement, where a lot of people say, well, the modern world is hopeless, and the only recourse is to go back to our lives as hunters and gatherers. That's the paleo narrative. And that's also absurd because... There are too many people. There's not enough land. And we've lost the oral tradition of knowing how to navigate as hunters and gatherers. So that's not really viable either. So we need a new narrative, a new slash old narrative. And that's why we're looking to storytellers to give us some guidance there and to see if we can coalesce around a narrative. Yeah, that's I love that way you put that on. You know, when I was a young man, I was pulled aside by one of my mentors that I didn't know was a mentor yet. And he said, me and my friends, listen, you kids, first thing you guys got to do when you get in trouble is get your story straight. You know, I always think like, yeah, that's great advice. Right now we're in trouble. We need to get our story straight. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. And by and large, our leaders, our political leaders are not offering any kind of story at all. None. The dominant story is all economic. And that's top of mind for voters. Okay. But we have this leadership vacuum at the top. And so people who are not at the top need to step into that role and start telling some kind of plausible story that will pull us forward. And that's what we're doing today. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a great book called The Fourth Turning. And in that book, they talk about the way in which generations have changed, you know, the course of the story and the course. They all have these different roles and stuff. But sometimes on my darker days, you know, I feel like what may be happening in the world right now are the unrealized dreams of a giant class of people that are knocking on the mortality experience. When I look at so many of these leaders that might be in their seventies or eighties, I am thankful for the great ideas that have got us where we are, but on some level, man, you got, we, these people have to step aside. Like some of these ideas are so foolish and so silly and so outdated. And it's just driven by ego. Like these are not relevant ideas anymore. And I fear that if people don't step out of the way, you're going to see a younger class of people. And maybe power has never given up. Maybe power has never relinquished. It's always taken. But on my darker days, I fear this uprising between the youth just saying, okay, I had enough of you guys get out of the way. Do you think that that's a, that's a possibility? Yeah, it's similar to the divide between rural and urban. Yeah. And a lot of people have talked about that recently. I think that's a real thing. But yeah, the young old divide is definitely out there simmering and waiting. And it's going to express itself one way or the other. And hopefully we can... We can side with those people. That's what I try to do. It's like, I'm on my way out. These people are on their way in. How can I help them? How can I help young people to get a voice and to express themselves in a way that makes sense? Because, yeah, I just got a few more years. They got their whole lives ahead of them. I think that this is something that's worth talking about because I think when we look back to mythology or the oral tradition, one thing that we're missing in the West is the handing down of wisdom from people that have lived a life worth living. And so many people that I care about that are getting older – they're really focused on how do I live longer? And my, my, my answer is like by sharing your knowledge, by sharing your knowledge with the next people, by giving all that you have to give what, what you give in life, you get to keep what you fail to give. You lose forever. And I think that's what the book you're doing is, is like, here's what I've learned. Oh, There's some nuggets in here for you. That's why you're on the podcast tour. That's why you're out here activating. He's like, I have, here's the things that I've learned. Hopefully these tools are something you guys can use. But I think we're missing that in a ceremonial setting, in a ritual setting, in a rites of passage setting. Do you think we can regain that? Yes. And this is another native indigenous idea that really struck me. An anthropologist writing about a tribe where he observed that people revered the elders, number one, and that young people looked forward to being an elder because that's where the respect and the power was. And then the elder, in turn... felt this sacred duty to pass along knowledge to the young people. And so it made a perfect circle. And we've lost that because now we trash the elders. We say, well, you're no longer a viable member of the workforce. You're no longer productive. So we're just going to warehouse you in some facility and we don't care what you say. We don't care what you think. You have no value to us as a producer anymore. That alone is a catastrophe because we're not harnessing the wisdom that these people have generated over the course of their lives. So we have to have a new relationship with young and old. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that speaks to the idea of death. You know, when we spoke about the East and the Western traditions, we do warehouse our old. We hook them up to machines and we use words like palliative care, which means to hide away. Like this fear of death that we have is so – while, you know, I should premise it with, look, I'm not currently – I don't know what it's like to be staring down my own mortality. I don't know what it's like. I don't know what it's like maybe to have my children's not called. I haven't faced a lot of these things that I will face when I become an elder. But I do know that I am completely – horrified by the way we treat our elders. Like my grandma was hooked up to a machine. She died a long time ago, but she was kept alive in palliative care. I'm like, do you think that we can, part of this activism could be pointed towards our ideas about death in the West? Oh, yeah. And once again, Native people, because they participated in nature on a daily basis, they saw death all the time. And they saw death as, well, they called it the great journey, the great transition, whatever it is. It's not really, it's not so final. It's just a process. It's a transition. That's all it is. And we can learn from that, too. this idea of warehousing older people is it also points to another industrial model in our society where we segregate people by age. And that's what we do at schools. That's what we do in the workplace. That's what we do with elder people. And it's a completely flawed model because in a, in a native or even a, a lot of rural towns in, uh, In America, we have multi-age populations, multi-age experiences where you go to school and there'd be older kids in school, or you would see older folks around your town all the time. But now we're isolated and we're insulated from people of different ages. And that's crazy, just crazy. Yeah, it's and you may I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. I know that in the Western tradition, like they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And we on some level, we thought, hey, look, if we all participate, the state can take care of us. You know, we can we can have these different ways of segregating things. We don't need to have multi-generational families. We can each be set off, but we sent our kids to school, the parents went and worked, and we sent our old folks to an institution. And in doing that, we destroyed that handing down of knowledge. We destroyed that form of teaching, that circle of life that helped us really be holistic on some level. Maybe that's what's coming now. Maybe all this experiment was necessary for us to retreat back to a way that's more holistic in some ways. Right, right. And there's one sort of perpetrator that I point to in this, in the way that we've industrialized our human societies. And this guy's name was Frederick Winslow Taylor, and he was... today we would call him a management consultant. And this was back in the nineteen twenties, I think. And he would go into factories and he would look at how people worked and he'd say, well, it's really inefficient the way you're working. And he was the first guy to come up with a metric for like shoveling coal or something. And so he's got the metric and he says, OK, your workers should be able to do so many shovelfuls per hour or whatever it was. And This guy was influential and he really caught on and he pushed this idea of metrics and industrialization of all these processes, which in a factory is one thing, but he also went on to apply to schools. in all these processes. And it was, it was like another takeover of the Luddites because these workers, they had culture too. You know, these, these men who would go into factories and work, they had cultures and this efficiency drive basically took them, took those cultures away and just said, Nope, it's all about metrics now. Yeah. And I think that that was probably the first algorithm or one of them. You know what I mean? Right, right, right. Exactly, yeah. And, you know, now we measure keystrokes of workers instead of how much coal that they load into the furnace every day. But it's the same thinking that got us there. So we need to way lighten up on the efficiencies and the metrics and all of that and get back to what's really human. yeah I think that that's you know when when you look back to when cultures got into trouble. You had like the Renaissance when they turned back and we're like, okay, what are we doing wrong over here? You know, and on some ways, I think we're talking about Terrence McKenna's idea of an archaic revival, sort of turning back to a time, you know, not so much the walk down to base camp, but at least turning back to, to different ways of navigating that, that seemed to help the human animal thrive instead of being neutered in so many ways. Right. And in fact, my next book project is called Honor the Animal. I love it. And the idea is simple, that we've stopped honoring the animal. We stopped honoring the animal's life support system. But by honoring the animal, I mean, giving the animal the conditions that it needs to thrive and trusting the animal to make good decisions in those nurturing environments and going with that, giving the animal a voice. And right now, the animal really doesn't have a voice, even in the health and fitness world, not so much. That's kind of a different enterprise, really. Yeah. You know, I've been seeing this sort of idea about rewilding happening. And I'm a big fan of it, you know, whether it's rewilding the environment. In some ways, I see the individuals rewilding. You know, when you see so many youth today turning towards combat sports, you know, they're learning how to fight in a way. I think that that has radical ramifications in the future. It's sort of like the youth today are the stone that was thrown into the pond and they're the first ripple. But when that radiates outward, like you're going to see these kids come up that are willing to fight that, that embrace combat in a way that's respectful. And I think that that changes the nature of authority in some ways that might be the sort of rewilding we need. What would you take on rewilding? Oh, I love it. And, um, I'm a big advocate for the martial arts, teaching people how to fight skillfully in a social setting where the emphasis is on a progression of skill and mastery. in a certain context, I think that's really important. I think young people need to discover what their physical capabilities are. So there needs to be adventure, there needs to be exploration. And children, young people need to have that opportunity. I was really fortunate because I was able to do a lot of climbing in my youth. And That's something where I was able to learn about my physical capabilities. And wow, that's a big eye opener because you learn that your body can do a lot of things that you didn't even imagine. So it's good stuff. And I would, yeah, I would recommend rewilding in that sense. Yeah. And it's not just, you know, the word wild has a lot of different meanings and we tend to think unruly and dangerous and all of that kind of thing. But it really means living with a lot of vitality in the way that humans have always lived. So it's expression. And that's something that I think we're often missing as well, that ability to express our feelings of who we are, which I'll bring up a in the West African drum culture. And this is something that I've been exploring recently. And I'm just really excited about it because West African people have understood this stuff for a very long time. And they've developed actual practices that built community, give people the opportunity for expression and understanding. The ability to feel wild when you are drumming like crazy, you definitely feel wild. And it's a beautiful model. And they're trying to bring it to the world. So something to put on your radar. Look for that West African drum scenes. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, I think it speaks to the idea of frequency and vibration, you know, our words are frequencies and vibration. And if you can get that right, sort of, you know, whether it's the same beat as a heartbeat, you know, a drum, a drum goes a long way into helping you and to even altered states of consciousness or, you know, rhythm and music around us. It's, it is pretty beautiful. Right. And it also builds community. And community. You have to build community. And the West Africans know how to do this. You get people in a circle, you work on the drum together. They are, they know how to build community. So it works. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I, another interesting idea about rewilding, and this is far out there and it's more of a thought experiment than, and I guess maybe in Europe they're doing it in some spots, but when we look at the way the world works specifically in, this would probably be super unpopular, but, and it's just a thought experiment. So people don't get super mad at me. However, like I, Do you think that maybe damming up all these rivers has fundamentally changed not only our ecosystem, but changed the way the lifeblood of our ecology works? Sometimes I wonder, what if we didn't have the dams? How much have all these dammed up rivers... In some ways, I see them as artery blockages. If the rivers aren't flowing their natural course, aren't those blocking major arteries and causing parts of us to die? Oh, absolutely. And these... planet metaphors that we hear more and more now. So we hear about the Amazon rainforest being the lungs of the planet and the Those are valuable metaphors. And as to how real they are, well, that's a big conversation for around the campfire. But if nothing else, they're good, solid metaphors for connecting people in the world. And as far as dams and the rivers go, you've got to turn to Edward Abbey and the whole controversy around the Glen Canyon Dam, because that was the birthplace And Edward Abbey in his book, The Monkey Wrench Gang, talked a lot about that dam and How much precious habitat is now destroyed underwater? And for what? To build Las Vegas? The whole thing has to be seen now as an epic fail. It was even a Darwin Award because what we did was put all that energy, building that dam, building Las Vegas, stringing up wires to make it all happen. For what? It's a real tragedy that we did that. Yeah, I think there's a real chance that, you know, I don't think it's a coincidence that these metaphors are being put out there. They're really causing people to think in ways that, like we spoke earlier, are bigger than themselves. And I think that we're going to see a lot of changes coming in the future. And I'm hopeful that this class that we're bringing up of fighters will find ways to fight for causes that create a better society. better life for them. But man, Frank, this is a conversation we, it's been over an hour and I feel like it was like two minutes, man. But before I even land this plane, man, I just wanted to give you some time to talk about what you got coming up, where you're going to be at, where people can find you and what you're excited about. Right. Well, first of all, go to my website. It's all there. And all the books are there. You can go, you can type in exuberant animal.com. It's there, but you could also type in human animal dot earth and you'll find it or type in my name. I'm sure it'll come up pretty quick. So that's easy. Like I said, I'm working on this new book called honor the animal. And I'm really excited about that. The premise behind that book is I'm, commonality, anybody who works with the human animal. So it could be coaches, trainers, teachers, therapists, any of these people are engaged in what I call experiential design. So you have your human animals, you have your people, what are you going to do with them? You're going to design an experience for them based on what you know about their biology and their psychology. And I'm really excited about that book. So look for that probably next spring. Yeah. I hope you reach out to some of the people in the psychedelic community because I think that some of these coaches or therapists or psychedelic science, there's so many cool people that I think are beginning to understand more about the human animal in that particular sense. So, but ladies and gentlemen, if you're within the sound of my voice, if you're within the sound of Frank's voice right now, go down to the show notes, check out the links, check out his book. He's got some amazing ideas. And I think he's sort of leading the charge and being a wisdom keeper and beginning to hand down information to the next generation that can be cool tools for you to use in transformation. And whether it's today, tomorrow, or five years from now, the show notes and the links will be down there. Frank, hang on briefly afterwards, but to everybody else, I hope you have a beautiful day. That's all we got, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.
