Episode 46
Follow The Host
Rewind: The Future of Entrepreneurialism & The Importance of Ecology
Ecological scientist and former commercial fisherman, Dr. Rich Blundell, joins us in this fascinating conversation. Are you curious to know how a profound encounter with a tuna sparked a life-altering exploration of the world for him? We delve into his unique life journey, from his early days on the sea to his current work merging science with art to explore our cosmic narrative. The discussion sheds light on Dr. Blundell's holistic approach to understanding the world, a stark contrast to the commonly favored reductionist view.
Our journey takes us into the heart of Dr. Blundell's work with Oika, where he discusses the importance of the arts and the relationship between molecular biology and communication. The conversation is an enlightening exploration of how we can engage with science and art in a way that opens us to a new understanding of the world. We also delve into the profound realization that came with his experience with a tuna, which ignited a desire to learn and understand our connection with other living creatures.
We wrap up our discussion with Dr. Blundell by exploring the fascinating concepts of narrative dynamics, emergence, and fractals. He shares how becoming aware of and disrupting our own narratives can challenge others to create new stories and experiences that can have a positive impact on the world. As we part, we also give you a sneak peek into our upcoming projects, Torque United and Citizen Remote. Join us as we build a borderless world through international collaboration. Let's delve into a world of shared prosperity together!
Topics of Discussion
Rich’s Resources
About The Show
Thoughts of a Random (Citizen Remote Podcast) is a podcast oriented around open ideas, entrepreneurship, travel, investing, politics, philosophy, and an odd take on history. Together with Toarc United & Citizen Remote we talk with thought leaders from all around the world to stir the innovative mind. This podcast specifically talks about the importance of having an international perspective, the ins and outs of the business world, the entrepreneurial life, the digital nomad life, investing and ways to enjoy life in the new age.
Businesses worldwide have very quickly oriented themselves around freelancing, digital nomads, remote workers, and diluting borders. If you'd like to find out how you can benefit on an individual or entrepreneurial level from that change, this podcast is for you & Citizen Remote can help.
If you’re a startup, needing to find useful tools, wanting to build custom software or generally struggling with the next steps you should be taking to optimize your companies bottom line Toarc United can help.
Like the show?? Please leave a Review! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Apple Reviews
Spot
Episode 46
Follow The Host
Rewind: The Future of Entrepreneurialism & The Importance of Ecology
Ecological scientist and former commercial fisherman, Dr. Rich Blundell, joins us in this fascinating conversation. Are you curious to know how a profound encounter with a tuna sparked a life-altering exploration of the world for him? We delve into his unique life journey, from his early days on the sea to his current work merging science with art to explore our cosmic narrative. The discussion sheds light on Dr. Blundell's holistic approach to understanding the world, a stark contrast to the commonly favored reductionist view.
Our journey takes us into the heart of Dr. Blundell's work with Oika, where he discusses the importance of the arts and the relationship between molecular biology and communication. The conversation is an enlightening exploration of how we can engage with science and art in a way that opens us to a new understanding of the world. We also delve into the profound realization that came with his experience with a tuna, which ignited a desire to learn and understand our connection with other living creatures.
We wrap up our discussion with Dr. Blundell by exploring the fascinating concepts of narrative dynamics, emergence, and fractals. He shares how becoming aware of and disrupting our own narratives can challenge others to create new stories and experiences that can have a positive impact on the world. As we part, we also give you a sneak peek into our upcoming projects, Torque United and Citizen Remote. Join us as we build a borderless world through international collaboration. Let's delve into a world of shared prosperity together!
Topics of Discussion
Rich’s Resources
About The Show
Thoughts of a Random (Citizen Remote Podcast) is a podcast oriented around open ideas, entrepreneurship, travel, investing, politics, philosophy, and an odd take on history. Together with Toarc United & Citizen Remote we talk with thought leaders from all around the world to stir the innovative mind. This podcast specifically talks about the importance of having an international perspective, the ins and outs of the business world, the entrepreneurial life, the digital nomad life, investing and ways to enjoy life in the new age.
Businesses worldwide have very quickly oriented themselves around freelancing, digital nomads, remote workers, and diluting borders. If you'd like to find out how you can benefit on an individual or entrepreneurial level from that change, this podcast is for you & Citizen Remote can help.
If you’re a startup, needing to find useful tools, wanting to build custom software or generally struggling with the next steps you should be taking to optimize your companies bottom line Toarc United can help.
Like the show?? Please leave a Review! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Apple Reviews
Spot
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Thoughts of a Random Citizen. This is actually an episode that you might have already heard before if you've been a listener from the start. This is because we are currently in the process of repurposing all of our old podcast episodes and cleaning up the entire feed. These changes will allow listeners to enjoy the best episodes and highlight the most insightful content. Now, if you're newer to this podcast and wondering where to find, or why you can't find, season 1 and 2, don't worry. They'll eventually be available on our website, torquianadacom. We do some fun, tear-i-say, innovative things with them, but stay tuned for that. In the meantime, we plan to release rewines every other week to repurpose older podcast episodes. This will simply just allow listeners to revisit classic content from insightful and featured guests and enjoy it in a new light at a different time in their life, to hopefully provide a new perspective. But at the end of the day, it's our intention to bring the best possible content to you. So enjoy this repurposed rewind, but at the end of the day, sticks and stands, people break your bones. The word shouldn't really hurt you. I'm the kind of person who really likes to get to the bottom of things, and I don't let my own belief system get in the way of fact. It's one of the most important financial centers in the world by the terms of freedom of speech, expression and civil liberties. It's a dictatorship. All right, welcome back to Thoughts of a Random Citizen.
Speaker 1:I know I've been hyping up this episode for a while since, well, last year I guess but hopefully you guys are enjoying the new year. I won't make you wait, we're just going to jump right into the episode, so enjoy an amazing interview that I had with Dr Rich Blundell. Rich, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited to talk about something I don't know a whole lot about. I think you're actually the first scientist to ever come on the show, so I'm also very excited about that Chat about your travels, something that I like to focus on as well.
Speaker 1:And for those people out there who are like entrepreneurship what, how are we talking to a scientist, or why are we talking to a scientist? Well, first off, entrepreneurship is a really vast category. You're going through it yourself on your end and it's such a big responsibility that constantly involves kind of upgrading and changing, and that's why I like to talk about a lot of different things on this show. You never know what opportunities are coming around the corner.
Speaker 1:Regarding investing, if you find someone who knows a bunch about something you know nothing about, it's probably good to have a conversation with them to benefit not only you, but you know your many employees that look up to you and follow you, and to be an entrepreneur, you always have to be wanting to learn and talk with people who can help you grow. So that is why I'm so excited to have you on this show, because our pre-call last week that we had that was supposed to last about 15 minutes, I think lasted like two and a half hours. So you've definitely taught me a lot already and I'm hoping that's something that the listeners are excited to hear about, especially kind of this high level discussion that we're going to have. So thank you so much, rich and welcome.
Speaker 2:Sure, you know, thanks, and you know one thing, just to pick up on that entrepreneurial thing you're talking, about.
Speaker 2:I'm actually a big fan of that show, shark Tank, and if you've ever watched that which is like all about entrepreneurialism, and when I watch it I'm just sort of blown away at how much ecological intelligence that I see going on in the exchanges and in the ideas. And so you know what? I am an ecologist, and so it's just fascinating that I see so many sort of ecological dynamics happening in that space that knowing ecological intelligence as an entrepreneur is a way of sort of ushering in this new kind of entrepreneurialism. It's not like old school game A entrepreneurialism, it's more like what the future of entrepreneurialism is going to be, and so having some kind of insight or understanding of ecological principles is essential, I think, to doing real prosperity building. So I don't know, I think it's just it's intensely relevant to entrepreneurialism.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. And so for those out there who might not know what ecology is and we've just dropped that already a bunch of times can you kind of just walk us through the basics of what ecology is, for those who might not know?
Speaker 2:Well, fundamentally, ecology is the study, the scientific study of relationships, that's all it is. We think about ecology in terms of, you know, it's the relationship between this insect and this plant or you know things that are going on in natural habitats and things like that. But actually the principles of ecology, which are derived from observing relationships in nature, apply to all relationships that include social relationships, political relationships, economic relationships, all human relationships actually sort of operate and unfold according to ecological dynamics. So, yes, it is like the study of nature and birds and you know all of that hippie stuff, but it's actually what we're really talking about in ecology are universal principles, universal dynamics that are applied across the whole spectrum of reality. And so, yeah, there's a way to kind of compartmentalize ecology as this scientific study of animals and things like that and ecosystems, but it's also about all systems, and that's the way I've sort of tended toward, this more universal understanding of ecological principles.
Speaker 2:And so that's, when I talk about ecology, I'm actually talking about both Ecology at the level of sort of what we think of as nature, but also ecology at the level of human ecosystems, social ecosystems, economic, and, by the way, just while we're at it, the term eco, as in economy, and the term eco as in ecology. They're both based on this root word, eco. So economy and ecology actually share a root word, which is the ancient Greek word oikos, which meant home, and so I guess it shouldn't then be a surprise that a deep ecologist or a universal ecologist can see the connections between economic systems and ecological systems. And that's a big part of what Oika, the group that I sort of founded it's a big part of what Oika is trying to do is to recouple those ideas of economy and ecology in a mutually beneficial relationship between those two. So I don't want to get too far off, but that's just to highlight that ecological principles, ecological dynamics, extend across all of the dimensions of life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're going to absolutely dive into what you've founded in Oika because it's a really interesting and that's one of the main reasons I wanted to have you on the show. But before we do that, you have quite an interesting background in life that I kind of want to highlight, especially for those who are really interested in the travel aspect of life. Can you kind of walk us through what happened and what got you from being a professional fisherman to a scientist traveling the world I mean, it's just a crazy background and then kind of also highlight some of the most beautiful places you can suggest or that really changed your life, that you've seen around the world?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I think in order to do that I kind of have to go back a little bit further than normal into childhood, and what I've had to reluctantly accept about my temperament is that I'm very sensitive, like a very. When I was a kid I was really sensitive. When you're a kid, you don't know, you don't really know who you are in relation to the world. But I've slowly begun to realize that I was a deeply sensitive kid, just very sort of tuned in and in a dreamy kind of way it looked like at the surface it would look like I was checked out, but I was actually checked in.
Speaker 2:Checked into all these things that are going on around me and grew up essentially given free reign to explore. My parents they didn't do it out of neglect, but they just left me to go and explore and just be out all the time in nature, getting beat up and bruised and scraped, and those two things being deeply sensitive and also having the freedom to be out there that's the story of my childhood that eventually evolved into a career as a commercial fisherman because I had spent all my time instead of going to school. I was out on the bay, in the woods, in the swamps. That kind of thing Became a commercial fisherman because, frankly, those were really my only options at that point, because I had just kind of bailed on school and one day out there, after having graduated from inland fisheries like Lobster and small finfish, out to this bluefin tuna fishery that's off the coast of New England. So I used to take this little 17 foot boat way out to this place called Stellwagen Bank and go for tuna. And it turns out that the childhood that I had had set me up to be a really good tuna fisherman because all that sensitivity and all that sort of paying attention to the little nuances of nature turn out to be really good skills to find fish. And so I did, and it's a long story, but also a short story, because the first fish that I caught was this 800 pound bluefin tuna, and after going through the whole process of getting the thing on board I had a small crew with me we rushed back to the dock to sell it, cut off its fins, bled it out, do all these things that you do to preserve a tuna.
Speaker 2:And by the time I was hooking this fish up to get it into the freezer truck that was waiting at the dock, it had been sitting down in the gunnel, the corner of the boat, the whole time and I hadn't really paid any attention to it. But then, as I was sort of moving it to get it ready to get lifted up, I realized it was still alive and it was looking at me and I was looking at it and then suddenly the whole kind of world just sort of dropped around me and I watched this tuna die. And when it died it went through this process of like losing all of this color and all the iridescence that it had and the life that was in its eye just sort of drained away, and I know this sounds weird, but in that moment it felt like that tuna was trying to communicate something to me, and it was such a like, powerful experience because just prior to that moment, standing on that boat with all my buddies and they're all patting me in the back congratulating oh, we're going to make so much money. You know, you did this Rich, you did this, and then, when it died, all of that sort of attribution to me as the one who got it suddenly flipped.
Speaker 2:I became the one responsible for killing it. I became the one responsible for this act, and it was just a moment that changed me. Suddenly, I became really interested in learning how that could happen. And then this is what really ignited in me, this desire to learn. I mean, I had already been through most of high school. In fact, I had such a bad attendance record that they kept me back as a senior in high school, and so it was just terrible. It was Ds and Fs straight through.
Speaker 2:It was not interested in learning at all in that environment. But once the tuna thing happened, suddenly I had an internal motivation to learn and I was it was insatiable. I wanted to understand how could this tuna communicate something so profound? And again, it didn't speak English, it wasn't exchanging, you know, verbal cues or anything like that, but somehow that tuna and that moment was asking me to do something, was asking me to remember something, and I needed to understand what that was. And that's what launched me on my whole academic career, which ended up in a PhD, you know like.
Speaker 2:So that moment sort of flipped, which gives me a real appreciation for how our educational system fails Certain kinds of learners. I was a failed student, but the moment it became an internal motivation to learn, all my energies went toward it and I focused on it, you know. And so, and the point of that whole adventure through the academic, you know, meat grinder, was to understand how that kind of communication could happen. And by the end of it all, you know, like 30 years later, I think I figured that out. I think I did figure out how that kind of communication can happen. But what I also realized was that how the communication happens is less important than what gets communicated.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:And that, yeah, and that's like the sort of the finals not final, but that's the. The later part was to figure out not just how it was communicated, but but what's the meaning of what was communicated, and that that took another 10, 15 years. And that's what Oika is all about. It's about taking what was communicated seriously.
Speaker 1:Now I mean, that's such an incredible story and really cool. I feel like it's something that a lot of people can actually relate to as well if they've been in a similar scenario and you know they're open to what happened with you. And that gives me a bunch more questions that I want to ask. But first, where are, just if you can mention I know that I was watching a few videos that you had done traveling like Africa, I think there's all some. Were those done, all of your travels through kind of your learning and your schooling? Like how was all that set up? Because I mean it looks amazing and fun. But can you kind of elaborate on that a bit?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, I decided to go into science and it turned out in the beginning to be geology, because that's just was the easiest one to get into. But but yeah, all of those travels and I've been, you know, I've been pretty much all over the world. I I figured out ways of integrating that kind of travel into the actual academic program and it's convenient that scientists, especially ecologists and, you know, like wildlife, biologists and geologists, have to travel the world, have to go out into the field. And that became the opportunity. So I could, you know, I could piggyback all this travel on actual scientific research and teaching.
Speaker 2:So I did a lot of teaching about, like wildlife in East Africa and that, so I lived in East Africa to do that, and and also just the marine biological parts, like that made. That gave me the opportunity to hop on these old schooners that were out doing ecological research and I was out, you know, in the middle of the ocean doing research, and I had a lot and but a lot of other places too, like tropical forests in Central America, montaigne regions in South America you know I ended up going to Australia to finish all of this and all over Europe. So all of that stuff sort of sounds great.
Speaker 2:All of that was kind of, yeah, I was kind of orchestrated as a big sort of I'm going to use this educational opportunity to explore the world, and that worked too. So yeah, it was. It's a great way to have an excuse to go and learn about places. You have to be able to tolerate, you know, the uncertainty of it, and design these, design these expeditions and but you know, in the end it all worked out and brought me around the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah lots of places to be able to have that perspective as well and see all these civilizations and how different everything is. I know, in the tiny amount compared to you travels that I've done, it's really opened my perspective. But you're studying that like you're studying ecology. So I mean, did that help? Obviously, I mean obviously it helped, but how much did that impact, not only the perspective side of things, but that's that being what you did day in and day out. Did you notice a change internally or not, specifically because of the travels?
Speaker 2:I definitely do. Looking back, you know, like having, if I had not had all that exposure to all those different cultures and habitats and animals and things, then you know I wouldn't be able to say what I say today. I wouldn't know what I know today. But my trajectory through all of those different disciplines of science, whether that was geology or biology, or chemistry, or astronomy, or anthropology or sociology, whatever you know, that's not a very conventional path. Most scientists will enter a single field, a single discipline, and hyper-specialize on that, and there was plenty of pressure for me to do that. You know like to say you know why are you gonna go do marine biology when you're studying? You know paleontology, you know like it's not an easy thing to do, and so my route through all of those different disciplines was not typical. However, the fact that I did go through all of those different domains of knowledge, I think gave me access to these other insights that aren't available to people who specialize.
Speaker 2:You start to see how all of these things are connected, how the geology okay actually led to biology. In other words, we wouldn't have biological systems if it weren't for geological processes that were going on in the early earth. Somebody who only studies geology, or only studies, biology is never gonna make that connection. But that same connection also extends from biology into society, you know, into the social systems that we live by. There are biological impulses that we carry into sociological systems. So economies and things like that and politics, they've all got these roots that extend all the way back down through all these different sciences. But most scientists never make those connections and that's part of you know. The message too is that we need to take a more holistic approach to understanding the world as opposed to deeply, you know, reductionist as scientists do I agree?
Speaker 1:So, kind of moving over from that broad background in how you studied all of that and how you've traveled the world in search to kind of understand what that you know, that day meant to you, can you tie into what exactly you're spending your time is doing today with and how Oika ties into all of that? And obviously we're gonna have to break this down a bit because this is such a I guess I don't wanna say complex, but I mean it's a high level conversation.
Speaker 2:It's expansive, is what it is. First, let me just say what it was. The tuna I think you know what the meaning of that was was that moment with the tuna was about remembering all of that sensitivity as a child instilled in me, the fact that I was sensitive and the fact that I was down there in the dirt, you know, in the mud, in the water. What the tuna was saying was you know, rich, when you were a kid, all of this stuff was full of wonder and it was. Everything was like alive, everything was alive, the world was animate.
Speaker 2:And then I got to a point where I became a commercial fisherman and it was that act of becoming commercial. It was like I was betraying all of that history. I was betraying all the friendships that I had made with places and creatures and things like that. And so the tuna was saying Rich, take a moment to reflect on who you were and what you're forfeiting by becoming, by going commercial, by killing me, this tuna, by killing again. I didn't say this in English, but this is what it means.
Speaker 2:This is what it meant. What it meant was by doing that you're gonna forfeit that child's experience of the world. Just don't do that is what it was. That's what it took me that entire academic career to figure out. Don't sacrifice that child's wonder and try to keep it alive while still being an adult. This, I think, helps answer what it is I'm doing today. So what I'm doing today is taking my understanding of the whole narrative of science, in other words cosmic evolution, how the cosmos has evolved over time, to today, to this present moment, and helping people see that. See that so that they can see how their lives fit in that grand narrative of science, not how it fits in any particular bit of scientific knowledge, but how our lives weave into this huge cosmic arc of nature.
Speaker 2:And the best way that I've been able to sort of figure out, the most traction that I've been able to get in doing that work, which is to show this to people, is through artists. As somebody who went through the scientific sort of the scientific academic treadmill, that whole trajectory, I was never asked to engage with the arts, I was never asked to take an art history course or never understand art, philosophy or any of that. But just in the last few years I've discovered that artists are this incredible well, this incredible resource of that same sensitivity that I had as a kid, but they also are intensely creative, intensely aware and motivated to create. And so there's this energy that is in the artistic community that I've found deep resonance with. But, just like I hadn't been asked to do anything in the arts as a scientist, most artists have never been asked to engage meaningfully with the science, and so there's this really nice dovetail, there's this really nice synergy that, and there's a lot of energy there.
Speaker 2:And so lately I've been mostly working with artists to explore and communicate how humans can engage with this cosmic narrative in meaningful ways.
Speaker 2:Because they are meaningful when you actually feel the entire history of the universe, like within you, because it is. It's a 13.8 billion year story. So I can't do the whole, I can't do it right now, but if you can glimpse and if you can capture like emotional glimpses, glimpses that you can feel it changes the whole world, you suddenly realize that you are immersed in this matrix of relationships and you belong in there, like the world isn't just something out there that you're in competition with or that you need to fire yourself at. It's actually that you and the world are in an alliance, that you are collaborating on creating life and the future and all that. So in working with artists, I've really had to kind of I get us this opportunity to clarify that. You know, and I've been learning a lot from artists and I can see what I'm teaching them, find a home in them, which is just really cool. So I don't know if this answers your question about what I'm up to now but yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does, and we'll get into kind of what you're expanding into with the art, but I still kind of wanted to focus on the Oica and kind of how, the power of this communication aspect that people might not fully understand from the conversation that we've had up to this point, but for that example of the fish being able to communicate what it did, communicate with you. You had a life being a commercial fisherman, which nothing wrong with that at all, but now that one moment of communication has led you to this path of a PhD, world traveler, scientist, and this will kind of just dive in and if you don't want to get into this rabbit hole, please stop me now but that cell membrane and that, how you can take and receive, and there's that kind of communicative aspect of the relationship in that regard.
Speaker 2:Sure so, and I'm only going to be taking. I just want to emphasize that I'm only looking at one tiny little domain of science here and that is molecular biology. We're going to, but remember, molecular biology is just one tiny little sliver of all the sciences astrophysics and chemistry, and you know geology, and there's a. There's so many different science. Let's just talk about how the science of molecular biology reveals how that kind of communication with the tuna can happen. Okay, if you look at the history, the evolutionary history of life, that happened on this planet, so 3.8 billion years ago, okay, Not long after the Earth was formed, which was a little over 4. It was 4.6 billion years ago, but not long after the Earth was formed there was no life, there was nothing alive on this planet. Right? But given the right circumstances, given the right sort of chance and tons of time for iterations to happen, what will happen is that and we know it happens because it happened here that certain molecular structures, things that aren't alive, will come together in a certain way, and in the case of our biology, it's a phospholipid bilayer. It's just this little bundle of fatty molecules that arrange themselves in a certain way to create an internal space and an external space. It's like an oily film that creates a sphere. So now there's an inside of the sphere and an outside of the sphere. Anything that gets trapped inside of the sphere now can have its own little ecosystem. There's this own little internal ecosystem Inside this thing that's not alive. But, given enough time and I say this, we don't have the exact mechanism for this to happen, but we have several plausible ways to consider how this might have happened on the early Earth. The point is life evolves out of that system. So it's not that life suddenly comes into existence. It's more that there's this gradient between non-life you know oily membranes and molecules and minerals and then life slowly begins to emerge and you've got this thing that's mutt. It replicates itself. It has these accidental ways of metabolizing to create energy. It has its own energy source, and then one day you wake up and oh, there it is. That actually is life. But it wasn't like overnight. It happened over millions of years across an ontological gradient.
Speaker 2:I'm getting to how this relates to the tuna. Well, that, that, that membrane, that phospholipid membrane, is. We still carry it. All of ourselves are used that phospholipid membrane as a way to contain certain things. Let things in, let things out of the cell. That's what metabolism is. It's this, that's what life is. Life is about things moving across that membrane. Well, the tuna, it has all those phospholipid bilayers. Me, as a fisherman, has all those phospholip. We all use the same cellular mechanics to live.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that we've recently discovered is that cells can bud off little bits of their membranes and set them free into the world. So every cell can then off-bud a little vesicle, it's called, and inside that vesicle are molecules from inside the cell and now they float around in the world, right, and all living things do this all the time. The trees that I can see from where I'm sitting there are doing it. I'm doing it, You're doing it. You know the world is a wash in these little vesicles, these little membrane bound packets of information that organisms release into the world.
Speaker 2:Well, when that tuna was sitting there on the deck and its bloods everywhere and everything, those it's just the vesicles from that tuna are all over the, they're all in around Because, because I'm also share that membrane bound you know biology I'm releasing them. So the tuna's releasing information about itself, about its internal state In its case it was suffering and dying. In my case, I'm, you know, proud and you know, exalting this, you know this thing. But the point is that because I can uptake the tuna's membranes, I can actually get that information. Now I'm not saying I know how to process that.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying I know how to read tuna essence or anything like that. I'm just saying that my biology has a way of processing the molecules that are in that vesicle the DNA, the little bits of RNA, the pheromones, you know all kinds of biomolecules. They make sense to my biology, right, and so there is a way that we are constantly immersed in this sort of sea of molecules of communication. So now I've just given you sort of scientific explanation, right, like. But I don't want to just stop there and say, like, well, we have a scientific explanation now that explains how that communication can happen.
Speaker 2:Because if you, you have to understand that process in the context of all of it not just that particular relationship, every relationship, the relationship between me and the other fisherman on the boat, the relationship between me and the boat, the relationship between the boat and the truck that was, you know, all of those relationships impinge some force, some impact on all of the relationships. This is what ecological sort of insight is that the whole world is just, it's made of relationships, it unfolds according to relationships. That's what ecological, what I call ecological intelligence that there is this intelligence that's out there, that is ecological. It lives in the relationships between things and we can tap into that intelligence. That doesn't mean I know how to decode, you know dog language or birds. It just means that I'm aware that I'm immersed in this sea of interrelationships.
Speaker 2:But there are biological mechanisms that are consistent with what I experienced on the boat that day and with what I experienced every day since. And, by the way, because we're communicating some kind of, some kind of summary of our internal state, our emotional state, our physical state, our metabolic state, we become aware of the internal states of everything around us in a certain way. I'm not saying it's telepathy or any kind of pseudo science, I'm just saying that there are subtle cues in the air about that where these plants that I'm around are communicating, which makes perfect sense that you know, I would feel what the forest feels when I go and spend time in the forest. You know it's like duh, like. Why is that such a radical idea? It's actually not a radical idea and you can experience it yourself. But yeah, that's what Oika is all about. That's what ecological intelligence is about.
Speaker 1:So then, how does one go about taking that ecological intelligence that you've discovered and that Oika mindset and then communicating that and teaching it, you know, verbally, to someone else, because it is such this high level of understanding to even contemplate what this is? So then, how do you yourself go about teaching others what this is and how they can then find some level of understanding of what is being, you know, communicated from their surroundings?
Speaker 2:I think we all know it, because we were all children once you know this is you know, like we've all, if we try hard enough, we can remember what that was like. And again, artists, I think, are particularly well suited to having these kinds of intuitions, and so that's why I feel this, you know, this resonance with them. So how do you? The question you asked was how do you communicate? It takes a long time because we have to deconstruct a lot of our sort of our background understandings that we hold to be so true, which actually are not true, they're fuzzy. But I think it takes time.
Speaker 2:I think it takes a willingness to be surprised, like a willingness, and also it takes a certain comfort with allowing yourself to feel things. And the world as we live in it, you know, as we've created it thus far, doesn't really cultivate these kinds of, you know, letting down your guard, seeing things in terms of cooperation as opposed to competition, these are all things that can blind you from the this kind of beautiful conversation that's going on all around us. So I think the way you teach it is to just I happen to be very intellectual, like in my sort of way of understanding things, so I take, at first I'll take an intellectual approach. That's why science was so appealing and useful for me because it's like, okay, I can understand the science, but ultimately it boils down to can I experience that thing that I know conceptually? Can I feel it in my body? It's called phenomenology, the science of experiencing these concepts.
Speaker 2:I think that's incredibly important. You can either approach it from the intellectual side, like I did understand it conceptually, then let yourself experience it emotionally, or like an artist typically does, to be really comfortable and familiar with the feelings. You know the sensual feelings that they feel. And then I come along and say you know what? There's actually a really deep conceptual basis for that feeling and it all works as part of a big ecosystem that we're embedded in. And so those are the sort of useful ways of converging on this reality that we can either come at it intellectually and conceptually, like I did, but then also allow yourself to feel these things. You know, and I have the advantage of knowing that this is real.
Speaker 2:Like it's not like I actually do know the science. That doesn't mean I'm out to explain it away scientifically. It means that the science can validate the things that we all feel intuitionally.
Speaker 2:And right now the intuitions are that the world sucks, that everybody's out, everybody's out to screw everybody else everybody's out to like, get the you know, to take advantage or exploit in some way, and so that shuts down our capacity to feel the actual community that we're in, as opposed to the competitions that we're in. That doesn't mean I'm a communist, it just means that like it just means that I appreciate how everything is interrelated and that what I fundamentally, what I do to the world, I'm actually doing to myself. That's sort of the you know. The primary insight down at the bottom of all this is that you know it's the golden rule. You know like. So right again, I forgot the question you asked.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, you know. It was about how you instill and teach this into people who, when it's such a complex issue, but taking that and then deconstructing it into someone who might not be as susceptible and open, can you elaborate on why, in meaning the narrative of someone's past, why someone would have difficulty to get to the ability to receive? I guess Is that the way to put it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think you know you're referring to a couple of concepts that I use in a course that I teach, which I call it WAKA for Artists, and I use these concepts. There are sort of. There are three primary concepts Narrative, which is really an understanding of how fundamental narrative is, story structures, how fundamental they are to human cognition and why they are so important and why they've made us so successful. And then the second concept is emergence, which is this it's really an acknowledgement of the mysterious way that nature creates, that. The emergence is the way that the universe creates. Emergent phenomena are sort of unexpected complexity that arises out of simpler systems. And then the third one is fractals, which is this idea that there are patterns that persist across scales, and I don't just mean that in the mathematical sense, I mean it in the lived sense, so that there are fractals in the structure of living things that exist at the scale of, like microscopic organisms that also exist at the scale of whales, you know, as macro charismatic megafauna.
Speaker 1:that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But they don't just exist in like physical structures, they actually also exist in mental structures. So there are, there are mental structures in our heads and our minds that actually get expressed physically in the real world. It's just different scales, but fractals hold true whether you're talking about the mental domain or the physical domain. Like that, fractals can actually carry structure and pattern from one quote unquote, you know domain of reality to another, which indicates that these domains are all linked by the way, they're not actually separate. Anyway, the idea of narrative emergence as fractals is that having an awareness of how narrative works in our heads and in the world is this you suddenly get insight into why we think and why we fall into patterns of thinking. It's because they're narratively structured. Narratives give thinking durability so that they can persist, and then we use that, that dynamic, in order to make sense of the world. We, we structure the whole world narratively. That's what politics are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sorry to cut you off. Is there a way that you can kind of give an example of what that means to somebody who might not completely understand? Like oh, I hear you saying narrative, but can you give an example as to a scenario of a narrative?
Speaker 2:The question is what's not narrative? Like everything is a narrative. Like my story is a narrative. Right, my life story, your life story, the story. But podcasts are a narrative. Oh, podcasts are this thing where two people talk to each other and they have a conversation and it gets beamed out onto the web and it, you know, they exchange ideas and that's a story of podcast. What's not a story? Everything is a story. Who I identity is storied. You know, like I think.
Speaker 2:What I think what might be important to understand is the difference between narrative awareness and what I call narrative disruption. So narrative awareness is simply being aware of how powerful and how ubiquitous narrative is. It's everywhere, it's in, it's at the core of our thinking and our identity. That's narrative awareness. Once you have narrative awareness, once you actually understand that everything is narrative, you can start to play with narrative. You can start to challenge narratives in a playful way. This I call narrative disruption. When you can disrupt your narratives in a way that's safe for you, then you can start to see other narratives and you can start to play and you get this kind of. You get emancipated from being a slave to all the stories and you start to be a creator of new stories. That's a process of empowerment. It's like so once you understand how narrative is so, then you're no longer victim to it all the time. And if you do feel a victim narrative, you've got the power to shift it. You know, you've got the.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying everybody has the same access to resources. The world is unjust. It's obscenely unjust. I'm not suggesting that it isn't, but what I am saying is that we can empower ourselves to shape and change our narratives for the better, for our own prosperity. That's what I mean about narrative, and, yes, that also applies to the facts that we hold to be true about the world. That same capacity to challenge your own little narratives in your own head extends out into the capacity to challenge the narratives of other people. When other people are feeding you narratives about the way the world is, you can actually look at them and say well, is that actually consistent with what I believe, or what I hold to be valuable, or reality itself? So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but that's narrative.
Speaker 1:But that's 100%. What I was getting at is that ability to step outside of one's own narrative and say, okay, is that like? I know that that contradicts everything that I've ever understood or how I've viewed my own life and my understanding. But is that Is that true? You know, like to be able to have that ability.
Speaker 2:To do that is, I think, difficult for a lot of people, but it's also really exciting, oh yeah, this is, and this is why it's a practice, because once you, if you start with the little things that don't really matter to you know like. You know I can't, I'm a dude with long hair versus short hair Something doesn't really matter, it doesn't matter. You know, I mean like, but you can, you can play with that until you're comfortable with it and then you can expand that out into bigger, more important narratives and you feel confident about them and then you can actually see other people's narratives you know at work and you can take care of people by understanding their narratives. You can create the conditions of shared Prosperity by knowing narratives. That and so, yeah, I, I, that's just the whole narrative thing, like, that's a whole. You could do a whole course in narrative dynamics and Because they are empowering anyway, that's not the other two.
Speaker 2:Emergence, that new things, like things that you couldn't even have imagined or predicted, can come into existence through relationship. When certain things come into relationship, in certain ways, completely original things can, can manifest. That's emergence. Understanding how emergent and, by the way, that the quality of the originating relationships. So this thing that emerges, it emerges out of qualifying relationships pre. There are certain relationships where new things emerge from the thing that emerges inherits some of the qualities of the previous relationships. This is why being really aware of the quality of your relationships to things can can result in more healthy, more productive, more joyful, new emergent experiences. That's that's what emerges about. And then there's fractals, which is about that things that exist on one scale Can carry that pattern into other scales. When you take those three concepts together narratives, emergence and fractals and put them together, it's incredibly powerful sort of Game that you can play with the world, like I'm gonna challenge this narrative, I'm gonna see what new narratives emerge and then I'm gonna let those new emergent narratives replicate fractally into the world around me. That's how. That's how you can change the world by changing yourself. You change the world in that through that process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this doesn't sound like ecology, this doesn't sound like like the science of anything, but these are scientific concepts and these are ecological concepts. I'm just applying them to the human world, the social world, and they work and they open up sources of all kinds of new joy and power and energy and new relationships. And so it might sound naive, but it's not, you know. It is idealistic but it's not naive and it sounds, you know, sort of like utopianist in some way. It's not. There's plenty of dystopia to go around. There's no. We have no this. Don't have any fear of not, they're not being enough dystopia. This isn't like naive utopianism, it's just. It's just functional and practical way of moving through the world.
Speaker 1:Well, in having, now that you said that, that kind of leads me up into something that I find is a large connection with this. This intelligence that you're talking about, this ecological intelligence, oika, it's been around and been understood, maybe not on the scientific side, but for a long time, has it not from, from, like past gurus and intellectuals of of ancient times like I mean, this isn't some, you know, maybe on the scientific edge of things. It is, but it isn't some unheard of out there, right like Frequently.
Speaker 2:When I'm telling people about this, you know they'll say, well, that sounds very Buddhist, or the sound, you know that sounds very, you know biblical or what. And the fact is that, yeah, these are insights that we've known all along. We just haven't necessarily had the conceptual understanding of why they, they're valid it, and it turns out, low and behold, that A deep understanding, a deep holistic understanding of science actually confirms and validates a lot of these deep spiritual, ancient traditions and wisdoms. It's just those insights. Many of them hold water scientifically.
Speaker 2:That's not to say that I can take any particular scientific knowledge and and prove this or that religious claim, but what it does mean is that they're on to something that, that, that that those insights that come to us through these other ways of knowing have counterparts that are consistent in in the totality of science. That's what I'm saying, not just a little. I'm not going to sit here and say, like, like we did with the man, the plasma membrane, the phospholipid membrane, yeah, that's an instance where science can say you know, I can explain this sort of thing scientifically. But that's not really what the goal is. The goal is to look at the entire arc of scientific knowledge, the whole story of cosmic evolution and see how all of these insights actually find a home within that narrative, within that scientific understanding. This, it's different.
Speaker 1:All right, and, as always, I do apologize for cutting it off at an intriguing part of the conversation. However, that does conclude part one of the two part episode. Next week will be part two and we'll finish talking about a heap of concepts, art that he is involved with, how he utilizes blockchain technology with his artists, and helping restore ecological intelligence and restoration to specific areas, along with history of Earth, future potentials. It's a very exciting and intriguing conversation. If you guys like this one, the next one's even better. I hope that you guys will tune back in for that and we'll talk to you next week. Cheers.
Speaker 1:And that wraps up another episode of Thoughts of a Random Citizen. If you guys have a question for the podcast, head over to torqunitedcom. It's in the show notes and you can record a question. Feel free to email us if you don't want to record a question On there. You'll also find information about financial advice, travel tips and destinations, broad market analysis and there's a whole heap of stuff on there for you guys. If you like the show, please review, like, subscribe, share with a friend. It goes a long way and, as always, these are thoughts of a random citizen or citizens. There are experts that do come on the show and I always do my best to research before each show. However, do your own research. This isn't advice. This is generalizations. So there is your free disclaimer. Enjoy your week and I'll talk to you next week on thoughts of random citizen Cheers. And that wraps up another episode of Thoughts of a Random Citizen. Thank you everyone so much for tuning back in. For those who are new listeners, welcome and I appreciate you joining. I hope you enjoyed the podcast and our guest today.
Speaker 1:If you are new and you're doing anything remote, be sure to check out Citizen Remote. It is fantastic. If you're already traveling the world, it's a great app to join a very quickly growing community. It's a great tool for those who are just about to begin traveling and figuring out how to navigate that, especially if you work remotely. It's a fantastic platform and we continue to build more and more tools for you guys, week in and week out. Otherwise, if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking for tools or assistance with the next steps of what you need to do with your startup, or if you're looking for software development network connections, reach out to us at Torque United. Otherwise, if you're just tuning in for the conversations, thank you.
Speaker 1:That's why I love doing what I'm doing. Keep tuning in and actually keep a lookout for the not-for-profit that we're about to open up. Its main focus is going to be on international collaboration and helping build a borderless world, because it's something that I'm very passionate about. That's why I'm not only doing Torque United, but Citizen Remote as well. Really exciting stuff on that horizon. Please keep up to date with all of that stuff the not-for-profit and entrepreneurial side of things at Torque United. But again, if you're traveling the world, check out Citizen Remote. If you're wanting to travel the world, if you're a remote worker, check out Citizen Remote. Check out the app we've built for you guys. Check out the platform we've built. It's only growing every single week, so hopefully you guys will take part in that with us. Otherwise, I will speak with everyone in a fortnight. Until then, cheers.