I was 14 years old when I realized that
my species needed me I had normal life
as a child I wanted to do what every
child does play pretend that the world
doesn’t have problems lose myself in my
imagination and I remember as a child
not wanting to grow up because when I
looked at the adults in my life my
parents teachers strangers in the street
I saw this deep worry in their faces and
I couldn’t fathom what were they’re
worrying about why weren’t they enjoying
life and as a child I realized now I was
really really sheltered and I’ll tell
you what happened to shatter that I was
14 years old I was a ninth grader in
school and for some reason we the topic
of Hiroshima came up Nagasaki nuclear
weapons and what really blew my mind was
that this was the first time I came
across the knowledge of the existence of
nuclear weapons and it hit me so hard
that I really still haven’t recovered my
whole worldview was shattered because
here clearly was the most important
thing in my entire life the existence of
these weapons that could destroy me in
the whole world in minutes and yet no
one had told me about this for 14 years
no one had bothered to think that this
was something that I should know and it
was at that point as that 14 year-old
child back at home from school going
into the woods thinking how is it
possible how can the smartest species in
the history of life be so stupid how is
it possible that we could stockpile
50,000 nuclear weapons and have them
pointed ready at each other to blow up
the world and the rest of my life since
then the third of a century that has
passed since that time I’ve been trying
to understand how this is possible in my
whole intellectual research and
in history has been designed to kind of
unravel that mystery so what I’m trying
to do is make sense of nonsense right
because it’s completely nonsensical that
a species would create the means of its
own destruction
and so I had to go back in time to
understand how this happened I realized
very early on that I wasn’t going to
understand our predicament just by
seeing the world today obviously there
was a long history a long evolution of
how these weapons came into being and so
I proceeded from that point on leaving
my childhood behind to try to understand
to try to make sense of this nonsensical
phenomenon this incredible dangerous
situation we were in for those of us who
were born later than that for those of
us were come of age after the 80s it may
be hard to understand but during the
1980s it seemed like we were on the edge
and later in the 80s I remember about
half the people in school and college
really didn’t think that the world would
last very much longer
it was a very scary time and yet
something had changed because as I
looked into the history of nuclear
weapons and nuclear war and
militarization and power politics and
the nation-state system and all these
interrelated phenomena I realized that
denial hadn’t always been there back in
the 50s all the children knew about
nuclear weapons right they had to do
exercises Duck and Cover so what had
happened why did that knowledge
disappear and so I became really
interested in how do societies determine
what kind of knowledge is allowed to be
taught to children
how do cultures decide who is able to
understand what’s happening and so as
that 14-year old boy sitting in the
woods trying to make sense of this I
realized that I had been stripped of all
trust for society because if society
couldn’t tell
the single most important thing relevant
to my life
what can I trust them with and so I
decided I had to figure this out on my
own and as I said the rest of my life
has been an effort to try to make sense
so I’ll try to explain it to you as best
as I can
after a third of a century of thinking
deeply studying this deeply so we have
to go way back in time we actually we
actually have to go back in time
hundreds of millions of years if we want
to understand nuclear war not just they
not just a cold war not just the modern
world but hundreds and millions of years
and I realized that the single most
important concept to understanding our
crisis that we face as a species today
is the notion of power power I think can
explain more than any other concept in
all the social sciences and as I’ve
thought about power and as I’ve studied
powers have I’ve explored different
historical societies different animal
societies I’ve come to understand power
as forming a trinity there are three
fundamental types of power
the first which we can call power one is
power as transformation in every
organism on this planet has to transform
its environment right we can think of it
very simply with Bieber’s Bieber’s come
into the forest they want to make a home
they proceed to check out the
environment to find out where they’re
gonna build their dam they proceed to
cut trees down to use mud and sticks to
build the dam and they completely
transform their environment to find life
to find food to find opportunities for
safety and the same is true from every
organism a bacteria will transform its
environment so power is not something we
should demonize power is an inevitable
byproduct of life right and power one
capacity to transform nature is
fundamental to all life right so no
problems there without power one we’d
all be dead but power to this is when
difficulties came into evolution power
to is about control and domination
exploitation power – a simple example
would be a parasite a virus that wants
to use you to reproduce itself a
predator
an animal that wants to eat you in order
to feed itself so power to now takes on
a combative than aggressive a
confrontational approach true reality
power to organisms will use and exploit
other organisms for their benefit and
this is very important to understand if
we want to understand where we are today
in the world now of course evolution
will respond when a challenge is based
and as these power to organisms emerged
we can think way back to the
predator-prey interactions that we see
in the fossil record after the Cambrian
explosion about 500 million years ago we
see the evolution of sharp teeth of
weapons and fish we also see the
evolution of defense mechanism of
resistance and that is power three power
three is resistance as soon as you have
power to the desire and need to control
another you have power 3 the desire and
need to resist that control so an
example of power 3 would be our immune
system our immune system evolved in
order to protect us from any source of
power to agency that seeks to control us
likewise any self defense the
fight-or-flight scenario those are all
forms of power 3 power 3 also includes
slave uprisings like in Haiti in the
late 1700s when the slaves had had
enough of their masters so ever since
power – and power 3 have evolved they’ve
had this dialectical relationship you
see this in co-evolutionary arms races
cheetahs get faster in order to catch
the Thomson’s gazelle power – the
Thomson’s gazelle gets faster in order
to escape the cheetah power 3 and these
1 to 3 are power also apply very
strongly to human
society’s one thing people are very
unaware of on a general basis is that
humans for a long time were
fundamentally a power three species our
ancestors the hunter-gatherers had
figured out a way to prevent powerful
alpha males from controlling the society
we look at our close relatives the
chimpanzees their society is completely
controlled by power to individuals the
alpha male is a tyrant over the group he
will use violence you will use murder if
necessary to get his way and yet the
other chimps resist as best as they can
but they’re not that good at and so they
live in a tyranny if we look at our
ancient ancestors the hunter-gatherers
they were able to stop that alpha male
logistics the alpha male trying to
control the society and they did this in
a very clever way
first the gossip about individuals I
wanted to lord over them if that didn’t
work they ostracized them if that didn’t
work they sometimes executed them and
for tens of thousands of years human
societies managed to survive without
leadership managed to survive without
inequality managed to survive without
living in fear of the tyrant and then
something fundamentally changed
civilization occurred due to the
overkill that our ancestors created by
their incredible hunting technologies we
decimated lots and lots of big mammals
and suddenly there wasn’t enough meat to
go around and our ancestors were forced
to settle down and grow food and as soon
as we settle down and grew food we are
able to live in larger numbers and as
those numbers got bigger and bigger
small villages evolved into cities
cities evolved into empires and power to
logistics came back to the for the Alpha
Mill mentality
once again rose from the ashes and took
over society and here we are ten
thousand years later in the situation
the unchanged in the last 10,000 years
where certain individuals have a lot
more power than others and those
individuals want to do what power to
individuals also will always want to do
and that is maximize their own
well-being maximize their power of
course it’s a much more complicated
story there’s other things besides power
going on one of the other things that we
need to focus on is technology right now
and chimpanzee mail has limited
destructive capabilities we can destroy
a very small amount of other chimps and
so on but if you look at the world today
there’s more than a handful of
individuals who have the power to
destroy all of us because it doesn’t
take that many weapons to destroy all of
us anymore
and so as societies evolved because of
the nature of human societies human
societies have always had to compete
against other societies for territories
for resources and we’ve developed these
ethical systems that enable us to see
the other as fundamentally different
than us and to treat the other in a
fundamentally different way than we
treat fellow members of our group and we
come into this with a very long history
so here we are now with nearly 200
separate nation-states on the planet
many of them armed to the teeth the vast
majority of them not trusting each other
and the overwhelming majority of
humanity checked out not paying
attention distracted and really really
feeling helpless what can we do to
change the world how can we help our
species well I have some proposals the
single most important thing we can do is
of course to free our minds and our
hearts how do we do that because if you
look at the world carefully you see that
we become conditioned even before we are
born the conditioning starts in utero
and after we’re born the conditioning
continues on and on and on so how do we
addition ourselves well the best way is
to actually study how we’re conditioned
to see how we’re program if we can
understand if we can see how we are
program we have a chance to on program
ourselves so what I’m talking about is
power three spatial species survival
probabilities right how can we maximize
the chance of worse our aunts our
descendants will be here in a thousand
years well the first thing we have to do
is we have to get a control of history
history is like a runaway train heading
for a cliff and most of those passengers
are looking out the window looking at
the scenery how do we change that well
we have to educate ourselves we have to
educate each other we also have to look
back in time to understand evolution we
have to see that the future comes from
the past
in the past is a bloody past now we
could be we could feel helpless we could
stop and just give up but that won’t
stop the train the only way this train
will stop is if enough of us pull on the
brakes and the only way that’ll happen
is if enough of us see how the trains
careening out of control
so I want to challenge you to think
really really deeply about your species
we are told to love our families we are
told to love our nation we are told to
love our so-called race but in reality
your country doesn’t need you your
family doesn’t need you your species
needs you I’m calling on you to identify
first and foremost as Homo sapiens now
Homo sapiens means the wise ones right
we are meant to be the wise species so
how is it possible that these mistakes
are happening well once again we have to
go back in time now after you look at
history you’ll realize that there are a
lot of opportunities for change social
change can happen extremely drastically
extremely fast so don’t give up hope
remember that chaos is on our side chaos
will come
it will change the contours of reality
if we have trust we cannot surrender to
the current situation so just as you as
you have children as you see other
people share with them your truth share
with them the hope that humanity will
survive into a future where we can be
free prosperous happy surrendering to
evil surrendering to helplessness
surrendering to ignorance is really not
an option anymore we have no alternative
but to move forward and transcend as all
humans have transcended the past but now
we are called upon to transcend the past
in a much more revolutionary way than
has ever been possible is it possible
yes it is because once again the future
is unknown I call upon you to think very
deeply to open your hearts to the
suffering of others to see that deep
down we are so interconnected all of us
I want you to think very deeply about
your place in this universe your place
on this earth why are you here are you
here just to have a good time are you
here to help your species are you here
to have hope for the humanity I want you
to know that in the end of course we
will all die but what we leave behind
will survive for a little bit longer so
have faith in yourselves have faith in
each other and trust that humanity will
come together to solve these problems
because we have no choice thank you
my species needed me I had normal life
as a child I wanted to do what every
child does play pretend that the world
doesn’t have problems lose myself in my
imagination and I remember as a child
not wanting to grow up because when I
looked at the adults in my life my
parents teachers strangers in the street
I saw this deep worry in their faces and
I couldn’t fathom what were they’re
worrying about why weren’t they enjoying
life and as a child I realized now I was
really really sheltered and I’ll tell
you what happened to shatter that I was
14 years old I was a ninth grader in
school and for some reason we the topic
of Hiroshima came up Nagasaki nuclear
weapons and what really blew my mind was
that this was the first time I came
across the knowledge of the existence of
nuclear weapons and it hit me so hard
that I really still haven’t recovered my
whole worldview was shattered because
here clearly was the most important
thing in my entire life the existence of
these weapons that could destroy me in
the whole world in minutes and yet no
one had told me about this for 14 years
no one had bothered to think that this
was something that I should know and it
was at that point as that 14 year-old
child back at home from school going
into the woods thinking how is it
possible how can the smartest species in
the history of life be so stupid how is
it possible that we could stockpile
50,000 nuclear weapons and have them
pointed ready at each other to blow up
the world and the rest of my life since
then the third of a century that has
passed since that time I’ve been trying
to understand how this is possible in my
whole intellectual research and
in history has been designed to kind of
unravel that mystery so what I’m trying
to do is make sense of nonsense right
because it’s completely nonsensical that
a species would create the means of its
own destruction
and so I had to go back in time to
understand how this happened I realized
very early on that I wasn’t going to
understand our predicament just by
seeing the world today obviously there
was a long history a long evolution of
how these weapons came into being and so
I proceeded from that point on leaving
my childhood behind to try to understand
to try to make sense of this nonsensical
phenomenon this incredible dangerous
situation we were in for those of us who
were born later than that for those of
us were come of age after the 80s it may
be hard to understand but during the
1980s it seemed like we were on the edge
and later in the 80s I remember about
half the people in school and college
really didn’t think that the world would
last very much longer
it was a very scary time and yet
something had changed because as I
looked into the history of nuclear
weapons and nuclear war and
militarization and power politics and
the nation-state system and all these
interrelated phenomena I realized that
denial hadn’t always been there back in
the 50s all the children knew about
nuclear weapons right they had to do
exercises Duck and Cover so what had
happened why did that knowledge
disappear and so I became really
interested in how do societies determine
what kind of knowledge is allowed to be
taught to children
how do cultures decide who is able to
understand what’s happening and so as
that 14-year old boy sitting in the
woods trying to make sense of this I
realized that I had been stripped of all
trust for society because if society
couldn’t tell
the single most important thing relevant
to my life
what can I trust them with and so I
decided I had to figure this out on my
own and as I said the rest of my life
has been an effort to try to make sense
so I’ll try to explain it to you as best
as I can
after a third of a century of thinking
deeply studying this deeply so we have
to go way back in time we actually we
actually have to go back in time
hundreds of millions of years if we want
to understand nuclear war not just they
not just a cold war not just the modern
world but hundreds and millions of years
and I realized that the single most
important concept to understanding our
crisis that we face as a species today
is the notion of power power I think can
explain more than any other concept in
all the social sciences and as I’ve
thought about power and as I’ve studied
powers have I’ve explored different
historical societies different animal
societies I’ve come to understand power
as forming a trinity there are three
fundamental types of power
the first which we can call power one is
power as transformation in every
organism on this planet has to transform
its environment right we can think of it
very simply with Bieber’s Bieber’s come
into the forest they want to make a home
they proceed to check out the
environment to find out where they’re
gonna build their dam they proceed to
cut trees down to use mud and sticks to
build the dam and they completely
transform their environment to find life
to find food to find opportunities for
safety and the same is true from every
organism a bacteria will transform its
environment so power is not something we
should demonize power is an inevitable
byproduct of life right and power one
capacity to transform nature is
fundamental to all life right so no
problems there without power one we’d
all be dead but power to this is when
difficulties came into evolution power
to is about control and domination
exploitation power – a simple example
would be a parasite a virus that wants
to use you to reproduce itself a
predator
an animal that wants to eat you in order
to feed itself so power to now takes on
a combative than aggressive a
confrontational approach true reality
power to organisms will use and exploit
other organisms for their benefit and
this is very important to understand if
we want to understand where we are today
in the world now of course evolution
will respond when a challenge is based
and as these power to organisms emerged
we can think way back to the
predator-prey interactions that we see
in the fossil record after the Cambrian
explosion about 500 million years ago we
see the evolution of sharp teeth of
weapons and fish we also see the
evolution of defense mechanism of
resistance and that is power three power
three is resistance as soon as you have
power to the desire and need to control
another you have power 3 the desire and
need to resist that control so an
example of power 3 would be our immune
system our immune system evolved in
order to protect us from any source of
power to agency that seeks to control us
likewise any self defense the
fight-or-flight scenario those are all
forms of power 3 power 3 also includes
slave uprisings like in Haiti in the
late 1700s when the slaves had had
enough of their masters so ever since
power – and power 3 have evolved they’ve
had this dialectical relationship you
see this in co-evolutionary arms races
cheetahs get faster in order to catch
the Thomson’s gazelle power – the
Thomson’s gazelle gets faster in order
to escape the cheetah power 3 and these
1 to 3 are power also apply very
strongly to human
society’s one thing people are very
unaware of on a general basis is that
humans for a long time were
fundamentally a power three species our
ancestors the hunter-gatherers had
figured out a way to prevent powerful
alpha males from controlling the society
we look at our close relatives the
chimpanzees their society is completely
controlled by power to individuals the
alpha male is a tyrant over the group he
will use violence you will use murder if
necessary to get his way and yet the
other chimps resist as best as they can
but they’re not that good at and so they
live in a tyranny if we look at our
ancient ancestors the hunter-gatherers
they were able to stop that alpha male
logistics the alpha male trying to
control the society and they did this in
a very clever way
first the gossip about individuals I
wanted to lord over them if that didn’t
work they ostracized them if that didn’t
work they sometimes executed them and
for tens of thousands of years human
societies managed to survive without
leadership managed to survive without
inequality managed to survive without
living in fear of the tyrant and then
something fundamentally changed
civilization occurred due to the
overkill that our ancestors created by
their incredible hunting technologies we
decimated lots and lots of big mammals
and suddenly there wasn’t enough meat to
go around and our ancestors were forced
to settle down and grow food and as soon
as we settle down and grew food we are
able to live in larger numbers and as
those numbers got bigger and bigger
small villages evolved into cities
cities evolved into empires and power to
logistics came back to the for the Alpha
Mill mentality
once again rose from the ashes and took
over society and here we are ten
thousand years later in the situation
the unchanged in the last 10,000 years
where certain individuals have a lot
more power than others and those
individuals want to do what power to
individuals also will always want to do
and that is maximize their own
well-being maximize their power of
course it’s a much more complicated
story there’s other things besides power
going on one of the other things that we
need to focus on is technology right now
and chimpanzee mail has limited
destructive capabilities we can destroy
a very small amount of other chimps and
so on but if you look at the world today
there’s more than a handful of
individuals who have the power to
destroy all of us because it doesn’t
take that many weapons to destroy all of
us anymore
and so as societies evolved because of
the nature of human societies human
societies have always had to compete
against other societies for territories
for resources and we’ve developed these
ethical systems that enable us to see
the other as fundamentally different
than us and to treat the other in a
fundamentally different way than we
treat fellow members of our group and we
come into this with a very long history
so here we are now with nearly 200
separate nation-states on the planet
many of them armed to the teeth the vast
majority of them not trusting each other
and the overwhelming majority of
humanity checked out not paying
attention distracted and really really
feeling helpless what can we do to
change the world how can we help our
species well I have some proposals the
single most important thing we can do is
of course to free our minds and our
hearts how do we do that because if you
look at the world carefully you see that
we become conditioned even before we are
born the conditioning starts in utero
and after we’re born the conditioning
continues on and on and on so how do we
addition ourselves well the best way is
to actually study how we’re conditioned
to see how we’re program if we can
understand if we can see how we are
program we have a chance to on program
ourselves so what I’m talking about is
power three spatial species survival
probabilities right how can we maximize
the chance of worse our aunts our
descendants will be here in a thousand
years well the first thing we have to do
is we have to get a control of history
history is like a runaway train heading
for a cliff and most of those passengers
are looking out the window looking at
the scenery how do we change that well
we have to educate ourselves we have to
educate each other we also have to look
back in time to understand evolution we
have to see that the future comes from
the past
in the past is a bloody past now we
could be we could feel helpless we could
stop and just give up but that won’t
stop the train the only way this train
will stop is if enough of us pull on the
brakes and the only way that’ll happen
is if enough of us see how the trains
careening out of control
so I want to challenge you to think
really really deeply about your species
we are told to love our families we are
told to love our nation we are told to
love our so-called race but in reality
your country doesn’t need you your
family doesn’t need you your species
needs you I’m calling on you to identify
first and foremost as Homo sapiens now
Homo sapiens means the wise ones right
we are meant to be the wise species so
how is it possible that these mistakes
are happening well once again we have to
go back in time now after you look at
history you’ll realize that there are a
lot of opportunities for change social
change can happen extremely drastically
extremely fast so don’t give up hope
remember that chaos is on our side chaos
will come
it will change the contours of reality
if we have trust we cannot surrender to
the current situation so just as you as
you have children as you see other
people share with them your truth share
with them the hope that humanity will
survive into a future where we can be
free prosperous happy surrendering to
evil surrendering to helplessness
surrendering to ignorance is really not
an option anymore we have no alternative
but to move forward and transcend as all
humans have transcended the past but now
we are called upon to transcend the past
in a much more revolutionary way than
has ever been possible is it possible
yes it is because once again the future
is unknown I call upon you to think very
deeply to open your hearts to the
suffering of others to see that deep
down we are so interconnected all of us
I want you to think very deeply about
your place in this universe your place
on this earth why are you here are you
here just to have a good time are you
here to help your species are you here
to have hope for the humanity I want you
to know that in the end of course we
will all die but what we leave behind
will survive for a little bit longer so
have faith in yourselves have faith in
each other and trust that humanity will
come together to solve these problems
because we have no choice thank you
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