The Evolved Podcast
The Evolved Podcast is a boundary-pushing show that explores the spiritual, psychological, and societal structures shaping modern life — and how they must be dismantled, reimagined, or transcended. Hosted by Aaron Scott, the show weaves together ancient wisdom, metaphysical insight, geopolitical awareness, and personal reflection to reveal the hidden patterns behind power, illusion, and awakening. Each episode confronts the manufactured narratives of our world — from the elevation of utility over humanity to the reduction of identity into performance — while offering a path toward inner sovereignty and sacred alignment.
This isn’t a podcast for passive listeners. It’s a clarion call for those ready to see beyond the surface, to ask deeper questions, and to reclaim authorship of their soul and society. With a tone that’s unflinching yet compassionate, poetic yet surgical, The Evolved Podcast invites you to remember what you've forgotten, challenge what you've accepted, and walk a path that honors both truth and transformation.
Topics Include:
Self-Improvement, Evolution, Manifestation, Consciousness, Empowerment, Identity, Illusion, Social Systems, Economics, Education, Religion, Spirituality, Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare, Media, Physics, Government, and more.
The Evolved Podcast
Capitalism Unchecked: How Globalism Infected The World
The forces that shape our modern world often operate invisibly, pulling strings behind the scenes of our daily lives. This profound exploration unravels how capitalism evolved from a system once rooted in local exchange and productivity into globalism - a borderless machine built for extraction with little regard for what's sacred, connected, or alive.
We journey through capitalism's historical transformation, from its emergence as an alternative to feudalism through the industrial revolution that mechanized not just production but human experience itself. The Gilded Age revealed capitalism's darker tendencies, where surface prosperity masked exploitation and disconnection. As we trace this evolution into modern globalism, we confront uncomfortable truths about a system that allows corporations to transcend borders while people remain bound by them.
The spiritual costs of this transformation run deeper than economics. When forests are cleared for profit, oceans emptied for trade, and human attention harvested as data, we experience not just material loss but a kind of collective amnesia. We forget our essential interconnection. Technologies built without wisdom - from financial derivatives to artificial intelligence to surveillance capitalism - threaten not just our privacy or jobs but our very humanity.
Yet this isn't a story without hope. Alternative systems are emerging that challenge the assumption that extraction and disconnection are inevitable. Economic democracy, universal basic income, sovereign digital infrastructure, and relocalization offer pathways toward economies that serve life rather than markets. The revolution begins not with overthrowing external structures but with reclaiming our internal sovereignty - our attention, relationships, and reverence for life.
You are not a consumer or a product. You are a sovereign soul connected to every living thing, anchored to something no market can price. As we remember this truth together, we begin to imagine and create systems worthy of our shared humanity. Join us in this awakening - follow, share, and support this evolution of consciousness as we level up and master our universe together.
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Let's master your universe together.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to the Evolved Podcast. I'm here to ensure that all knowledge I give you finds meaning and a practical place in your everyday lives. It's only through properly digesting knowledge, in this case of ourselves and the world around us, that we see things clearly enough to break old patterns of behavior and begin a new path forward to a heightened state of consciousness. In this episode, we unpack the evolution of capitalism into globalism, tracing how a system once rooted in trade and productivity has morphed into a borderless force for extraction, disconnection and spiritual erosion. We explore how modern capitalism now possesses systemic and existential risks to humanity, not just economically but psychologically and ecologically, from AI and climate collapse to surveillance and cultural commodification. I challenge you to rethink the systems we've normalized and I invite you to reconnect with one another, with the earth we all occupy and with the source behind it all. Today we're diving into a topic that sits at the root of every modern crisis. Somewhere along the way, we traded reverence for convenience and connection for consumption. We forgot that behind the markets, the technologies and the ideologies, there are people, souls, a shared universal connection, a collective consciousness. This episode is an invitation to remember, because if we don't understand how these systems pull us apart, not just structurally but spiritually. We can't heal what's been broken.
Speaker 1:Let's begin with a brief but critical history. Capitalism didn't arise from evil. It emerged as a response to feudalism, a new vision of individual ownership, merit and trade. It offered the promise of freedom through productivity, ownership, merit and trade. It offered the promise of freedom through productivity. Europe was bound by land and bloodlines, but merchant economies began forming in Islamic trade routes and Renaissance city-states. There was movement, exchange and possibility. Then we see the emergence of mercantilism, which emerged and reshaped global commerce between the 1500s and the 1700s. In this system, nations used empire, slavery and colonization to extract wealth from others. This was capitalism before markets were free, driven by conquest, not consent. And with it came a new worldview the earth as a resource, the human as labor, god as silent. We see, with Adam Smith and his classical ideal expressed in his the Wealth of Nations, a reinforcement in the liberal ideology. See, smith imagined that if people pursued self-interest in a free market, it would be an invisible hand leading to collective good. But what's often forgotten is that Smith also warned of merchants colluding against the public and manipulating markets.
Speaker 1:Nowhere did capitalism take on a more radical mechanized form than in industrial America. The market revolution reshaped early America from a land of farmers to one of wage laborers and commodity producers. Steam power, canals, railroads and the telegraph forged a new kind of infrastructure, one that moved goods faster than nature and people faster than culture could absorb. Textile mills sprang up in New England, while southern cotton plantations, fueled by slavery, fed raw materials into the industrial machine. This was the beginning of what historian Charles Sellers called, and I quote, the birth of the capitalist nation. But it came with spiritual cost. Land was commodified, labor was alienated, time was monetized.
Speaker 1:After the Civil War, american capitalism exploded. The Second Industrial Revolution brought steel, oil, electricity and mass production. Titans like Andrew Carnegie, john D Rockefeller, jp Morgan emerged, consolidating vast empires through vertical integration and monopolies. These men were hailed as captains of industry or condemned as robber barons, depending on who you ask. Laborers flooded cities, often working 12 to 16-hour days in dangerous, dehumanizing conditions. Immigrants arrived by the millions, chasing the American dream and instead finding sweatshops, tenements and exploitation.
Speaker 1:This was the age of capital without conscience. Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age, a time glittering with surface wealth but rotting underneath Churches aligned with business. Labor unions were crushed with violence. The land was stripped for timber, coal and railroads. Indigenous peoples were displaced and massacred in the name of progress. Ask yourself was this really progress or a kind of collective forgetting Progress? Towards what and away from whom?
Speaker 1:By the 1900s, america had become the industrial powerhouse of the world. Henry Ford's assembly line became the model Fast, efficient, soul-crushing. The Great Depression exposed capitalism's volatility 25% unemployment, soup lines, mass despair. Fdr's New Deal introduced social safety nets, banking regulations and labor protections, not to end capitalism but to save it from itself. Post-world War II, america saw a golden age of industrial capitalism strong unions, rising wages and widespread home ownership.
Speaker 1:But this prosperity wasn't shared equally. Women were pushed back into domestic roles. Black Americans remained excluded from generational wealth through redlining and segregation. The prosperity came at the expense of the global South, where resources were extracted to feed US industry. Through it all, something was quietly eroding. Community was replaced with consumerism. Spirituality was replaced with spectacle. Human time was replaced with machine time. The factories didn't just change how we work, it changed how we see ourselves. No longer part of a living web, we became units of labor, replaceable, separated. And as we lost connection to the land and lineage, we lost something else the memory of who we are beneath the machine.
Speaker 1:Capitalism didn't stop evolving. In fact, it was just getting started and in the 1980s it crossed another threshold into something faster, borderless and more invasive than ever before. The next phase was globalism. Let's zoom out for a moment. If capitalism began as a local system of exchange rooted in land, labor and material goods, then globalism is its ultimate mutation. It is capitalism scaled to its logical extreme borderless, stateless and frictionless, designed to serve capital itself, not communities, not nature, definitely not people. In the industrial age, capital needed factories, then it needed raw materials, then it needed labor and eventually it needed freedom, not human freedom, but freedom from laws, limits, taxes and borders. Globalism is what happened when capital outgrew the nation-state. It's not a break from capitalism. It's what capitalism becomes when it's unleashed.
Speaker 1:Where industrial capitalism was about mechanization, global capitalism is about mobility of wealth, production, labor and data. It allowed corporations to manufacture in one country, sell in another and report profits in a third, often a tax haven. It allowed it to exploit labor in the global south while selling luxury lifestyles in the global north. It allowed it to evade environmental regulations by shifting extraction sites across borders and, lastly, it allowed it to capture governments through trade agreements, lobbying and investment leverage. It also gave rise to a new kind of entity the multinational corporation. These institutions hold more power than most governments and yet answer to no one. No electorate, no moral compass. Their only mandate is shareholder value. This is capitalism without a home, without a soul. So when we talk about globalism, we must understand it's not just about open markets or travel. It's about the global consolidation of economic power with no accountability to the places and people it touches.
Speaker 1:Globalism, like capitalism itself, carries a dual nature. It promises interconnection, shared prosperity and a more unified world, but in practice it has produced outcomes that are far more complex and often contradictory. For every benefit globalism has delivered, it has also introduced new forms of vulnerability and equality and disconnection. To understand its true impact, we need to look at both sides of the equation, not just what it offers, but what it extracts. Here are some commonly cited pros of globalism.
Speaker 1:Alongside respective risks or consequences that come with them, we have the argument that globalism allows for specialization and comparative advantage. Countries focus on what they do best, leading to cheaper goods, larger markets and overall global economic growth. The problem is growth and practice here is unevenly distributed. Wealth concentrates in multinational corporations and elites. All workers in both rich and poor countries face wage suppression, job insecurity and loss of local industries. Efficiency becomes a euphemism for outsourcing, exploitation and race to the bottom labor standards.
Speaker 1:There's also the argument that globalism enables consumers to access a broader range of affordable goods, services and technologies. Knowledge spreads faster across borders, thereby accelerating innovation. The problem here is that this access often comes at the cost of domestic industries and local self-sufficiency. Global supply chains are fragile, vulnerable to shocks, and are built up on cheap labor, environmental degradation and planned obsolescence. Innovation then becomes centralized in the hands of monopolistic tech giants. We also have the argument that global trade and investment have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, particularly in countries like China, by creating jobs and infrastructure. Yes, while some countries benefit, many become dependent on volatile markets or low-value roles like raw material exporters and sweatshops. Development is often extractive. Resource-rich nations are plundered while wealth flows offshore. Gains are often tied to debt traps and structural adjustment policies dictated by global financial institutions. That's the reality.
Speaker 1:We have the argument also that globalism promotes cross-cultural understanding, tolerance and cooperation. People here are more connected than ever before through travel, media and digital platforms. The thing is, what's framed as cultural exchange often amounts to cultural homogenization, where local identities are commodified, diluted or erased. There are a few dominant cultures, especially Western consumer culture. These override others, turning rich diversity into marketable stereotypes. Then there's problems like pandemics and terrorism, which require coordinated global responses.
Speaker 1:Globalism fosters international institutions, treaties and collaborations. Again, here the problem is cooperation is often undermined by power imbalances. Wealthy nations and corporations dominate decision-making, like vaccine nationalism or climate negotiation failures. Here poor countries are sidelined. Global institutions often enforce rules that benefit capital over people or the environment. We have another argument here that economic independence makes war less likely, where nations with strong trade ties have incentives to maintain peaceful relations. However, while major wars may decline, asymmetrical conflict, proxy wars and economic coercion have replaced them. Corporations and geopolitical powers often fuel unrest where resources or influence are at stake. Globalism has unended war. It has outsourced, privatized and obscured it. Then there's the open borders argument, with its free movement of people, which allows greater opportunity, education, labor matching and cultural growth. The problem here is migration often benefits wealthier countries and corporations, while brain drain depletes human capital of developing nations. In many cases, migrants face exploitation, xenophobia and loss of rights, while local workers may perceive wage pressure or cultural displacement, fueling a populist backlash.
Speaker 1:What we see in present day is capital operating without a country, where multinational corporations operate across borders but are headquartered in tax havens or deregulated zones. In the real world, present day globalist economy, we have capital claiming sovereignty without loyalty to any country. It creates a sort of sovereignty arbitrage where companies choose the weakest laws, lowest wages and most pliable governments, undermining anything resembling democratic regulation. Globalism has allowed capital to transcend the nation state, while people remain bound by borders, laws and duties their rulers can no longer enforce on capital. The promise of globalism and shared prosperity creates, in truth, a mirage. What has emerged is a race to the bottom for all workers and a race to the top for capital. Trade agreements and investor-state disputes give corporations the power to sue governments for environmental, labor or health regulations that, quote-unquote, threaten profits.
Speaker 1:Again, we see national policies shaped by the interests of lobbyists, hedge funds and multinationals, rather than the citizens or public interest. The power to govern has been outsourced not to other nations, but to entities with no moral. Not to other nations, but to entities with no moral, legal or civic obligation to any nation at all. To be fair, globalism did offer promises Greater access to technology, medicine and information, the spread of democratic ideals and human rights frameworks, more affordable goods in a broader consumer base, a kind of interconnectedness once thought impossible digitally, culturally and economically. And yes, millions were lifted out of extreme poverty, particularly in China and parts of Southeast Asia. These benefits are real, but they came with a huge cost.
Speaker 1:We saw mass deindustrialization in the West. Jobs were shipped overseas. Working class towns in the US, uk and Europe were gutted. Entire communities lost their economic foundation, leaving behind opioids, unemployment and despair. We saw drastic exploitation in the global south Countries in Africa, latin America and Asia became extraction zones of cobalt, lithium, oil, labor and land. When resources dried up or workers demanded rights, capital moved on, leaving pollution, poverty and political instability in its wake.
Speaker 1:Something that we can all remember is the supply chain fragility. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how brittle global systems really are. When just one link in the chain breaks, whether it's medical supplies, semiconductors or food, entire countries are left vulnerable. Another drastic result we see is the corporate capture of governance. Trade deals like NAFTA and institutions like the IMF often override national laws, forcing privatization, deregulation and austerity. Sovereignty becomes secondary to capital flows. This is no longer capitalism in service of society. This is society in service of capitalism.
Speaker 1:So what are the alternatives. If globalism is capitalism without borders, then the antidote isn't isolationism, it's rebalancing, re-rooting. Here are some emerging alternatives. Let's look at localism, where we're bringing production, food, energy and governance back to local communities. We can redefine success as well-being and sustainability, not perpetual expansion, a sort of de-growth. We should look at the potential benefits of bioregionalism organizing society around natural systems, rivers, climates, ecosystems, rather than arbitrary borders. We could look at democratic cosmopolitanism as an option, where we reimagine international cooperation around human rights, environmental justice and shared stewardship, not corporate dominance. And then there's the obvious digital decentralization, where we replace surveillance capitalism with open source, privacy-first technologies that serve people, not platforms and corporations.
Speaker 1:Each of these models asks a deeper question what if our systems served life instead of markets? We don't have to reject connection. We just need to stop mistaking extraction for exchange and homogenization for harmony. Ask yourself this Can we be globally connected but locally accountable? Can we cooperate across borders without corporations deciding all the terms?
Speaker 1:Capitalism now is no longer about local exchange or healthy competition. It's a global machine built for extraction, with little regard for what's sacred, connected or alive. In its current form, capitalism rewards the destruction of the earth. Forests are cleared for profit, oceans emptied for trade, air poisoned for short-term gain. But the deeper tragedy? We've forgotten how to feel it. Since 2020, the world's richest 1% has captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth.
Speaker 1:But wealth doesn't just divide us economically. It erodes empathy, fuels disconnection and creates spiritual amnesia. When we don't see each other as kin, we become eternal competitors or, worse, obstacles. The 2008 financial crisis showed us how fragile the system truly is. Derivatives, high-frequency trading and complex financial instruments aren't just risky, they're soulless. Money, once a medium of value, is now a simulation detached from reality.
Speaker 1:Pause and consider. When did we start measuring life by growth instead of grace? What if our deepest poverty isn't material but spiritual? We have shifted to more of a dire existential risk, where the economic system itself becomes to threaten life as we know it. And that's where we are now. We have AI and automation that is built to maximize efficiency and reduce costs. Ai is being deployed without wisdom, not to serve humanity, but to outpace it. What happens when the profit motive builds something it cannot control? What happens when we create machines without remembering what it means to be human? We have surveillance capitalism.
Speaker 1:Coined by Shoshana Zuboff, this term describes how our thoughts, behavior and even our emotions are harvested as data turned into predictions to be bought and sold. But let's call it what it is it's a spiritual violation. Your consciousness is sacred, your attention is sacred and it's being taken without your permission for someone else's gain. We are now facing the destruction of biodiversity. This isn't just biological, it's cosmic. These are living systems that evolved with us, that speak the language of our universal connection in ways we've forgotten and we are silencing them, species by species, like burning a library we can't read anymore.
Speaker 1:Here's the real question If we keep growing, producing and consuming, but forget what it means to love, to serve, to belong, what exactly are we preserving? We feel the system is broken, but history warns us. Broken systems are often replaced by brutal ones. So how do we transform without collapsing into a far worse economic system such as communism or outright tyranny? How do we protect our rights and our souls? Here's where we begin. We strive for economic democracy. Imagine a workplace where every worker has somewhat of a vote, a company not built on extraction but shared purpose. Mondragon in Spain, with the evergreen co-ops in Cleveland, show this isn't fantasy, it's already real.
Speaker 1:We should look for universal basic income. This isn't a handout, it's a healing, a way to honor the labor of caregivers, artists, thinkers and healers, a way to give people room to breathe, to remember who they are beyond the paycheck. We should have sovereign digital infrastructure. We need tech that respects privacy, protects autonomy and supports meaningful connection. Imagine a digital space where your data is yours and algorithms serve your growth, not your manipulation. There needs to be relocalization, where food, energy and medicine are brought back to community, because reconnection isn't just a feeling, it's logistical. When your needs are met locally, you're no longer dependent on systems that don't see you. There should definitely be legal guardrails. True reform demands safeguards, sunset clauses, digital rights and constitutional protections, so no crisis becomes an excuse for surveillance or state overreach.
Speaker 1:And, above all, we need to remember each other. The most radical act in a system built on disconnection is to say I see you, I honor you. We belong to the same source. We're living in a world built by minds that forgot the heart, that forgot spirit, that forgot each other. But the cracks are showing and through those cracks, something ancient is rising a knowing, a light. You are not a consumer, you are not a product, you are not a cog in someone else's machine. You are a sovereign soul connected to every living thing, anchored to something no market can price.
Speaker 1:And the revolution we seek it doesn't start in the economy. It starts in remembering that we were never meant to be separate. As we close, remember this the systems we live under are not permanent. They are built, sustained and broken by human hands Capitalism and globalism. They have shaped the modern world, but they do not define our future unless we let them. The real revolution begins not in overthrowing the external, but in reclaiming the internal our attention, our relationships, our reverence for life. We are not isolated consumers in a fractured world. We are connected souls in a shared unfolding. So stay awake, stay rooted and trust that in remembering who we truly are, we begin to remember what the world can become, how we can cultivate systems that preserve self-determination and the pursuit of happiness without extinguishing the individual and collective soul we seem to have forgotten.
Speaker 1:As you continue listening to the Evolved Podcast, I'm going to unveil the true nature of the world that exists right under your nose. I'm going to analyze with you, out in the open, the systems at play here and the ways we can grow together and evolve. My aim To provide you with real ways to touch higher levels of awareness through truth and knowledge. Episodes are updated weekly. If you want to change your world for the better and support this evolution of consciousness, please show me by following, sharing this podcast with those you love and leaving a review. If you enjoyed our time today, please donate on BuyMeACoffee, linked in the show notes below. Until next week, let's level up and master your universe. You.