When Myth Meets History

Conversation with Alexander Beiner

A few weeks ago, Alexander Beiner interviewed me for his new media platform Kainos. It was a great, wide-ranging conversation! I have attempted to present a full transcript below but I would definitely check the actual transcript on Youtube for any specific quotes. I hope you enjoy it!

Kainos: Welcome back, everyone. This is the third ever live conversation hosted on Kainos. And I'm very pleased to be joined by Daniel Pinchbeck, someone whose work I've admired for many years.

So I'll give Daniel a proper introduction in a moment. But I wanted to just contextualize what these conversations are about and really what Kainos is about before we launch in. The intention is to combine cultural sense-making and, the question of basically what the hell is going on in the world with a deeper sense of who are we and where are we going and why as, as humans. What felt very natural as a place to begin that inquiry was just a question that kept coming to my mind over the last few months with the big political and cultural changes we've seen, certainly in the U S with the reelection of Donald Trump, but also in here in Europe, we have the kind of increasing sense that the liberal world order is ending or changing.

The political and social ideas that arose after World War II in particular, their roots go much further back, and perhaps we'll even touch on that today. But this sense of a ]global community and a celebration of multiculturalism and the idea that national borders in particular and national interests and localized interests are ultimately less important than a sense of global connectivity. Now, that idea is being challenged very heavily, by many different factors. One of those factors, some of the factors are very practical, like large-scale immigration in Europe and the US. Immigration is a hot political topic.

So the question that's been on my mind, particularly since the election of Trump, but also from the large political changes in Europe — certainly that's my reference point, Europe. There is this significant shift from the idea of a multicultural world to something that in some expressions is very traditionalist. It turns to localized national interests. And in other cases, it manifests as a desire to return to the land, a desire to return to the body. So it expresses itself in a lot of different ways. And I'm very curious about that intersection.

We can talk about localization in terms of returning to traditional Christian values, as is happening in the States, or there's plenty of more animistic hippies who would talk about returning back to the body, back to the land, back to sustaining ourselves from our local area rather than large global supply chains.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Daniel is that I think, Daniel, you've been writing a lot about the election of Trump and your feelings about that, which I would think is safe to say are not positive. I'm very curious to just, just to get your, a very simple question to start with. Why don't you feel positive about the reelection of Donald Trump?

DP: Why don't I feel positive about the re-election of Donald Trump? That's kind of a staggering question. One of the main reasons, first of all Thomas Hartman and Greg Palast have been covering the amount of voter suppression in the U.S., which seems that it was well over 3.5 million votes. There's not a strong sense that the will of the people was actually heard in this case. And we're seeing a despotic agenda.

Trump has had a long career as a grifter, a con artist. A lot of his enterprises have been fraudulent or have duped gullible people, whether it's Trump Steaks or Trump University or Trump Coin. It feels like a huge step back into a kind of regressive form of politics. And even the way he is just cruel and nasty about immigrants — all of the lies, all the felony convictions. It's all that on a personal level.

Then in terms of what he represents politically, I'm very concerned we are entering into a prolonged autocratic situation. There's a lot of echoes with 1930s Germany, the demonization of minorities or outsiders and “othering”, the effort to aggregate power under the Executive Branch, the kowtowing to Trump by the technocratic oligarchs, the capitulation by the mainstream media, which happened very quickly, where they don't even want to deal with lawsuits and so on. The monopoly control of media and technology.

Trump supporter Larry Ellison, who's not only a major investor in TikTok or X, also is basically taking over monopoly control of Paramount, which includes CBS. And Trump is trying to see if maybe Ellison will take over TikTok. Elon Musk seems to have some parallels to Goebbels, consolidating state and corporate power around an ideology that in the US's situation has a lot of white Christian nationalist elements to it.

If you go into Elon Musk's past, which I did some deep dives on, his grandfather was part of this political movement, Technocracy Inc., which wanted to see a future of no democratic control, where you had scientists and engineers in charge of the world. And there were basically three big Technates, North America, from Canada, Greenland, down through Mexico, Central America; then Eurasia and Asia. Each of these Technates would be under the control of one dictator, engineer type. It seems clear at this point that Musk sort of feels that he’s fulfilling this destiny of his family.

The more you study into his character, unfortunately, because in terms of me personally having some connections to people in power, I actually have a lot of friends who, through Burning Man and the transformational culture in the Silicon Valley world, have been quite close to Musk over many years. It's unfortunate to see that whatever he's become, whatever social media has done to what was already latent in his psyche and his personality, he seems now to be embracing pretty much a neo-Nazi ideology, using dog whistles to signal to his people.

Peter Thiel is the power behind the throne. He was the first tech oligarch to back Trump and his protege, J.D. Vance, is now the Vice President. It's quite possible that Vance is already pretty much calling the shots of the U.S. I read the book by the Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts: Dawn’s Early Light, originally subtitled “Burning down America to Save It”. That was a bracing read in terms of a future that they see, based on family and patriotism and a very particular idea of what Christianity is or a kind of “God form archetype” which feels very regressive to me.

They want to do away with abortion on the national level, terrorize gay and lesbian people, terrorize trans people. Terrorize illegal immigrants who actually do a lot of the functional work in the U.S. I'm surprised by the level of cruelty, considering that it's powered by people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who've been given so much by the system and had such incredible largesse from the government and basically were the beneficiaries of the Internet, which was created by taxpayer money. These people who are worth billions and billions of dollars now see it in their purview to not only — and nobody's stopping them from buying some islands, having their little private libertarian cities or whatever, but to actually want to really take over the world in this way with an ideology that to me is so reprehensible, to be honest, so negative, so against human values and human freedom and empathy and care and compassion, I'm very upset by it.

I'm also very upset by what I've seen even in the people that I know in my expanded circle of connection, some who've become Trump and MAGA supporters as a result of the filter bubble effect on Facebook. I mean, you can almost feel as if their minds have been co-opted by a kind of alien philosophy. A huge amount of money has gone into using social media and media generally as a weapon. And we can trace back through American history. So I can keep going on. You can stop me at any time.

KAINOS: I’m going to play devil's advocate, Daniel, because I agree with you in terms of I'm not a fan of Trump or of Musk, but I am very critical of the sort of deep technocratic type of governance that at least some people in that sphere are reacting against.

As someone who's written so much about counterculture and we're both sort of in a psychedelic world and have an interest in sort of breaking through you know, oppressive systems. I think a lot of people who voted for Trump and a lot of the intellectual foundations of at least some of the pushback against progressivism has been based on the sense that there is an incredibly oppressive movement. mind-controlling aspect of the worldview that developed

which tried to kind of force a particular idea of progress down people's throats, whether it was through Hollywood movies, whether it was in HR rooms, whether it was in universities. So my premise is that there's a really valid case to be made that pushing back against that system, which is sort of manifest in the economic system we have, it's sort of encapsulated by something like Davos.

And as I understand it, recently, Davos was very, not as well attended as normally, the energy was very low. There's a particular kind of power structure that on one level, Trump, Brexit, a lot of the movements happening in Europe are pushing against because it is itself oppressive.

Now, I think the complexity is that the alternative is also oppressive. So I'm not suggesting that the cure is any necessarily better than what we're facing. But I just wanted to sort of present that and see how it lands with you, like just the possibility that actually what we've just what this sort of revolutionary energy has been trying to destroy was also quite an oppressive, unfair system.

DP: I sympathize with that. I never identified with the establishment Democrats. I couldn't stand Obama. I feel that they've been shills for a corporate state. Obama's principal role was to make sure that none of the bankers who crashed the financial system in 2008 had to ever pay any penalty whatsoever. And there's so many simple things that the Democrats could have done that would have basically ensured mass popular support. For instance, raising the minimum wage, or creating a better health care system, where people are guaranteed health care.

So the fact that they didn't do this shows that they were completely conscripted into this Byzantine corporate system. The whole Kamala Harris campaign was painful to listen to because you could see that every time she spoke, it was focus-grouped. "No, I can't use this word. I can't appear this aggressive because then this group of people won't like me." The Democrats are painful. I'm not for the Democrats, yet still felt they were the necessary choice in this election cycle.

KAINOS: Is this far worse? And also, is it far worse than even all of those areas you named?

DP: I think it's going to be incredibly worse. I don’t think they really believe in freedom of speech. Musk basically has a control panel on X where he can turn anybody up or down as he likes whenever he wants. I did an interview recently with Laura Loomer, who's a MAGA supporter who then realized that Musk and these other guys were supporting the H1B1 visas, which was a way for tech oligarchs to have these kind of indentured servants from other countries who work for relatively low wages and can’t speak up because they immediately get thrown out of the country. When Musk took over Twitter and fired most of the employees, he kept the H1B1 visa people because they couldn't go against what he wanted to do with the algorithms.

She brought up that the H1B1 visas were a problem, and it caused a whole mass kerfuffle on Twitter. One of the first things Musk did was take away her blue checkmark. She was making $27,000 a month through her paid subscribers, which was her income. He took away her income. She was part of this MAGA community that believed Musk was working with Trump, that he was a free speech absolutist, and now they had the freedom to say whatever they wanted. Then she suddenly realized this was just as negative a situation as the previous one.

If you look at Larry Ellison, for instance, he has repeatedly said that he wants to create an AI-powered digital surveillance system in the U.S. to keep the entire population on its best behavior. There’s no difference between what he’s talking about and what we see in China with the social credit system.

Whereas the Democrats and liberals, as weak and annoying as they were, I personally never felt that, due to my own writing, journalism, or thinking, I was liable to go to prison or be hurt in some way. I'm now very concerned about the future, looking past the next year or two, and I think for good reason.

Another book I studied in depth is Unhumans, written by MAGA right-wing nationalist Jack Posobiec. The book is blurbed by J.D. Vance, who says it’s the right plan for America, a good plan. The book says the model for America’s future should be people like Franco and Pinochet. It even says that Pinochet’s famous helicopter killings are the kind of thing we should do—we should be taking liberals, dissidents, people who don’t go along with the prevailing ideology, and throwing them out of helicopters. And now the vice president of the U.S. is saying, “Yes, that’s a good plan.”

You could say it’s our karma coming back to haunt us because the U.S. has been a bad actor on the global stage. We propped up Pinochet. We destroyed the democratically elected government in Iran—Mossadegh in 1952—because he wanted to nationalize Iranian oil and keep the profits for their people. We didn’t allow that. That led to the Shah, which ultimately led to a popular revolution and Iranian fundamentalism. That was the U.S. doing its thing.

So, a lot of what’s happened in the world, America has been responsible for it. We were the great power since the '40s. You could say it's the karma of our country. But the problem is, if the country goes full Pinochet, full Franco, full Nazi—which I don’t see much stopping at this point—there isn't another America waiting in the wings to change the situation. When Nazi Germany went insane, killing and attacking everybody, America could come across the water and kick its ass. Now, there’s no other America waiting. If America goes down this tunnel, I don’t see what’s going to pull it out.

The positive side, which I’ve also written about, is, sure, the system was broken. Maybe it needed to be smashed up. Unfortunately, when we look around the world, when systems get smashed up like this, it usually takes generations to put them back together. And they haven’t even gotten started yet. They’re planning to clean the whole house of government, remove civil servants, and appoint white Christian nationalists who want control of women’s bodies, who want to demonize minorities.

Maybe this breakdown was necessary. But what we don’t really have at this point—and I read all these radicals and people saying, "We’re going to build this movement, we’re going to do something"—I don’t see it happening. Not under the Democratic aegis. Maybe the Sunrise Movement. But whatever that is, I feel we need to start moving in that direction.

KAINOS: That’s actually where I’d like to pick up. There are two things I’d like to pick up on. One is this framing from Yanis Varoufakis. If people aren’t familiar with him, he was the finance minister of Greece during the 2008 crash. Greece had defaulted, so it was Greece versus the rest of the EU in some ways. He describes himself as a libertarian-anarchist-communist.

He has a book that came out last year, which I’ve written about recently, called Techno-Feudalism. I think it's an incredibly useful frame because what we've seen with Musk and Trump, that uncomfortable alliance, and the complete falsity of a real desire for free speech—it’s a ludicrous ideal when someone controls the entire commons, like on X, for example.

What we've seen, especially with the tension around the visas with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, is this division between a more working-class-focused type of politics. I hate the word "populism" because I think democracy should be populist. I find it a derogatory term used by technocratic elites. But for want of a better term, a kind of populist energy is focused on addressing the imbalance between elite interests and working-class interests. Then, there's the extremely wealthy technocratic elite. Varoufakis argues capitalism is actually over because the commons—now not the land but the internet and the data we produce—have been captured by particular fiefdoms, feudal lords who control Amazon, Alibaba, Meta. In some sense, 99% of us are serving these feudal lords.

That’s why, when Luigi Mangione killed Brian Thompson, it was a fascinating moment of what I call breach—when something inherent in the collective psyche breaches into the real world from the internet. I’ve never seen that level of cohesion among left and right. Even Ben Shapiro, as conservative as you can get, trashed Mangione, saying people shouldn't celebrate him. But in the comment section of that video, people were saying, "You're wrong about this, Ben. Just flat-out wrong." He got ratioed by his own audience—very rare in that kind of echo chamber.

I think it's a breach because the real battle now is between elites and non-elites. Someone mentioned Peter Turchin’s work, which I think you're familiar with. His idea is that social transformation or unrest happens when there are too many elites and not enough places, leading to counter-elites. Trump is a counter-elite. Mangione is a counter-elite. He comes from a wealthy family, and their interests align with the disenfranchised many.

Turchin’s analysis is quite accurate in many ways, but I want to take that idea and return to what you just mentioned—right now, we don’t have a counterculture to respond to what’s going on. There isn't really a counterculture. I would place some of the blame on the cultural air of the last ten years, which was very captured by social justice ideology. The art world, Hollywood, HR departments, corporate messaging—all of it was captured. Now, you see a rejection of it by the mainstream. Many of us were critical of it.

I also want to note, and this is a piece I’m going to write soon, that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to postmodernism and so-called "woke" ideology. There’s a lot of deep value in its understanding of power structures and how people are disenfranchised. So I want to caveat that. But the next thing I want to ask you is, where do you see the beginnings of a countercultural response happening right now? Where could they happen?

DP: Wow, that was a good riff! I followed you down a lot of those pathways. I learned about Turchin’s book through your essay on Mangione, which I really enjoyed, and I reached out to you after that. Techno-Feudalism also fascinated me.

I've always maintained an interest in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, though I know many dark web intellectuals like Alexander Bard scoff at them. Their books Empire and Multitude still have valuable ideas. They argue that in post-industrial society, the most important form of production is the production of subjectivity, rather than stuff. That has become pretty obvious.

Marx put his faith in the proletariat as a revolutionary subject, which got us to a certain point—unionization, the New Deal, liberal democracies—but we need a new revolutionary subject. Turchin talks about counter-elites from within the elites who get left behind. Negri and Hardt talk about the multitude, which includes knowledge workers who can be easily marginalized or disenfranchised.

We have to hope this current techno-feudal neo-fascist regime oversteps in ways that cost them dearly and allow for whole other sectors of society to self-identify differently. If working-class people start seeing things in terms of class rather than race, that's a big deal. That shift should be made as apparent as possible. Right now, they're not seeing it that way because the ideological capture, particularly by right-wing media, is so powerful.

But beyond that, according to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, we may be just a few years away from almost all human labor being replaced by AI. Artificial general intelligence could handle all knowledge work in two to three years. Beyond that, artificial super intelligence could build robots to take over all physical labor.

In this transition, we’re going to see the disenfranchisement of knowledge workers. We’re already seeing cuts in Meta, tech companies, software, graphic design, music. This could lead to a movement of knowledge workers recognizing that the outcome of techno-feudalism is going to be very, very bad if it isn’t changed.

The fork in the road: Sam Altman—I just wrote about this today—ran a UBI test program in Texas. They found that giving people $500 a month for three years completely transformed their lives in a positive way. They didn’t squander it on fentanyl; they used it to take care of their kids, live better, eat better. What has to be pushed for is an AI dividend—productivity gains from AI must go to the people as a whole. We have to create a movement that liberates people's time, energy, and attention from this despicable mega-machine that has everyone trapped.

That could become a very popular movement if framed the right way. But then the question is, what do people do? Or as Wendell Berry put it, what are people for?

One of my favorite political essays is Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism. It was his only political essay, and he envisioned a future where people freed from drudgery could cultivate their individuality and their unique essence. Historically, artists tended to come from families with some money, which gave them time to develop themselves—this led to Rilke, Baudelaire, and so on. Most people never get that freedom because they're trapped in an economic system that only values things in terms of monetary exchange.

For Wilde, if machines free people from unnecessary labor, society could be based on cultivated leisure. We could explore different ways for people to self-actualize—through investigations of consciousness, eroticism, creativity, community, participatory economics, mutual aid. All the good things people are denied access to because of predatory capitalism. That’s where we should begin to orient ourselves.

And by the way, Alex, I think you probably know this from my work, but I look at things from both perspectives. Admittedly, I'm an anarchist leftist at heart. I don’t think there should be billionaires. I think there should be a cap on wealth accumulation. I don’t even think, ultimately, that private property is such a great idea.

I'm more in the Murray Bookchin camp. He was a social ecologist and wrote The Ecology of Freedom, where, following Rousseau, he argued that private property was the original force that created inequality in society. Ultimately, we might want to move toward a stewardship or usufruct model for how physical resources are held in common. But we’re far from that right now.

For me, there’s this material leftist framework, but then there’s also an esoteric and mystical side. I wrote a book about prophecies. I’m interested in spirit possession and all that type of stuff, but I try to hold both together.

That’s where I see a movement emerging. On a material level, recognizing that—and then, of course, we also have to reckon with something that is totally off the table right now: the impacts of climate change, global warming, species extinction, and how they severely threaten the continuity of human civilization, even in the next 10, 20, or 30 years.

We really need to be moving in a regenerative and participatory direction. Obviously, we’re going in the opposite direction right now.

KAINOS: Yeah, amen to that. What was coming up for me as you were speaking is that, yes, climate change is critical, but the deeper issue is our relationship to nature and our sense of deep isolation from it. That’s the thing we need to work on.

Charles Eisenstein has written well about the over-focus on climate when, in reality, it's part of a much deeper and more complex system. There’s one thing I wanted to touch on—I want to talk about Star Trek and Star Wars in a moment, but first, what I think we need to evolve into is a culture that genuinely embraces and moves with complexity.

Right now, our culture tries to boil down complexity into component parts, and it doesn’t work because the world is increasingly complex. Evolution is a process of increasing complexity, and both materially and spiritually, we’re going through that. Terence McKenna wrote about this, and I think you have as well.

We simply cannot use the old ways of seeing and being anymore. A great example is the rejection of wokeness in American politics right now—there’s very little understanding that you can simultaneously reject something and still accept elements of it.

Back to our point about class consciousness—I really want to see a rise in class consciousness. It’s fundamental to progress and equality. But my concern is that this could easily turn into a statement that identity and race don’t matter at all, that it was all bullshit, and that only class matters. When in fact, it all matters—it’s just that some things take precedence in different contexts at different times.

That felt important to express, just thinking out loud. But I also want to finish our conversation with Star Trek and Star Wars. I also invite people in Zoom and Substack to submit questions in the chat.

I had dinner with Yanis Varoufakis recently, and we got into a disagreement about philosophy and idealism. I’m a philosophical idealist—I believe consciousness is the fundamental reality. People with a more Marxist perspective, like Yanis, are materialists in the philosophical sense. They believe what’s real is matter, the things you can touch.

I think the biggest shift we need to make is away from this disconnected, isolated sense of ourselves as strangers in the world and toward an embedded, embodied, connected relationship—with ourselves, one another, and reality. At the very least, we need to recognize that consciousness, our qualitative experience of being alive, is as real as my AirPods case. At least as real. I think it’s more real, but we could start there.

So in our conversation, Yanis and I got into Star Trek. We’re both big fans. I also love Star Wars, but he doesn’t. And I think this is an interesting tension.

Star Trek is a kind of communist utopia. The technology is all hidden—like our tech today, it’s "Hey, Alexa," but it’s the computer. It’s clean, finessed, ethical. The messiness of human experience isn’t really there. Everyone is multicultural and gets along. There’s little mysticism—except for characters like Q, but it’s mostly scientific mysticism.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is all about embodied, physical reality. The machinery is right in your face. People fix robots. You get a spaceship to work by smacking it. It’s real, tangible, connected. And it has the Force—something that binds reality together, transcending the games everyone is playing. There’s a sacred aspect that takes people beyond themselves, a sense of mystery, purpose, and agency that’s completely lacking in Star Trek.

I read a lot of sci-fi—it’s pretty much all I read. Iain M. Banks’ Culture series imagines a universe where intelligent, benevolent AIs run everything. People live the kind of life you described—one character is a waiter just because it’s a cool experience, another grafts a thousand ears onto himself to hear at a deeper level. People change genders at will. It’s a hedonistic utopia.

But that vision doesn’t appeal to me. I want a future that’s messy, beautiful, and chaotic. So my last question for you is: What is the kind of future you personally hope for? What gets you excited and inspired in your more wild imaginings?

DP: Thank you for sharing that, Alex. I used to be a big sci-fi reader, but I can’t really read novels anymore. Life itself feels like a psychedelic dystopian thriller—it’s hard to focus on other fictions for that long.

When I was researching Breaking Open the Head and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I started as a scientific materialist, a rationalist skeptic. But then I had psychic and paranormal experiences—supernatural experiences—that I didn’t believe were possible. They kept happening, over and over again.

So I began studying and reading. I got deeply into Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner, who I see as the two great 20th-century Western shamans. I think there are many dimensions of reality. What we know of the universe is just a tiny fraction. Our senses and brain-mind system are shaped for survival, not for perceiving ultimate reality. Evolutionary pressures shaped us that way.

Like you, I’m also an idealist. I love Bernardo Kastrup’s work. Steiner was also a monistic idealist. His first book, The Philosophy of Freedom, was a profound refutation of Kantian dualism, providing a foundation for his later esoteric and occult philosophy.

I’m not a fan of the transhumanist singularity—chips in the brain, Mars colonization. I feel we have no idea how incredible life could be here on Earth. And we’re forfeiting so much out of ignorance, stupidity, and because psychopaths are leading us astray.

For instance, there’s a movie called Tukdam: Between Worlds about Tibetan monks who, after meditating for 30 years, die but maintain themselves in a lotus position. They no longer breathe or have a pulse, yet their bodies remain lifelike for weeks or even months. Scientists have studied this. According to Tibetan tradition, they maintain themselves in a subtle consciousness state, choosing their next incarnation.

Tibetans have a sophisticated science of reincarnation, with their Tulkus and Lamas. Rudolf Steiner said his mission on Earth was to bring knowledge of reincarnation back to the West. He spoke about nature spirits, subtle dimensions, and other worlds that we could access.

Another way of looking at this is through The Psychedelic Future of the Mind by Dr. Tom Roberts. He talks about how we could orient ourselves toward the deep exploration of consciousness for those who want those experiences, using technology to augment or assist in our discoveries.

I know you did the DMT research at Imperial College. But even that—I’m past the hyper-focus on psychedelics. There are so many ways we can extend the range of our consciousness or have different types of experiences.

I’ve been attending ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts, a Western neotantra school, and I’m fascinated by how Eros can be used to enter different consciousness states. Or take the Shipibo, with their use of different plants and dietas, where plants impart wisdom, bringing people into subtle states of consciousness, visiting them in their dreams, and so on.

I don’t understand why we’re rushing to eliminate reality in this techno-monomania when there’s so much more available in the sensuous world that we haven’t even touched. We’re still at a kindergarten level in terms of what we could explore.

Some technology could be enabling—if we could stop and recognize that we’re on a runaway train. The merger of capitalist economics with increasingly destructive technologies is impacting our cognitive space. It’s rewiring brains in ways we barely understand. Kids growing up using smartphone navigation could do permanent damage to their hippocampus, losing the ability to spatially navigate. I already see that with young people.

We’re on this runaway freight train of technology. No one I know demanded an AI takeover of society. We’re being forced into this. We’re being put on a high-speed train to nowhere.

That’s why we need a citizen-led movement—something that brings together different perspectives without marginalizing religious, indigenous, or other worldviews. We need to build a coherent opposition to this momentum. If we did, we could create a much more amazing world. Then, maybe we could explore the stars—and the inner cosmos.

This feels like our final exam, and it looks like we’re about to fail. But until my last breath, I will keep trying to see if there's another way.

KAINOS: Absolutely. We perform best under pressure.

A teacher of mine used to say, "100,000 years of human experience—and we better not drop the ball." We’re the generation holding the ball. Like every other generation, we have to pass it on with hope and energy.

Now, we’re going to open up to some questions. Julius Gunter, in the Zoom, had a great question about UFOs. If you’re up for unmuting, we’d love to hear it.

Great. That’s really useful. Just for everyone in Substack, the question came from Julius Gunter’s wife, who is online while Julius isn’t. It was about the UFO/UAP phenomenon and what exactly it represents right now.

Daniel, do you want to start?

DP: I’ve written about and researched this extensively. In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I dedicated about 100 pages to UFOs, but mainly to crop circles—those patterns that still appear in fields, particularly in the UK. I was lucky enough to visit them during the peak of the phenomenon, around 2001 or 2002.

I did a huge amount of research, and my humble conclusion is that these things aren’t all being made by farmers or bored artists. There’s some kind of communication happening between us and another form of consciousness.

That consciousness could be us in the future. It could be us in another dimension. It could be something else entirely.