The Sh*t Show: control or collaboration, extraction or regeneration

We have an exciting show lined up, where we will go big picture on how we can cut through information overload, understand the "Great Convergence", identify the "350-year empire cycle" currently playing out, connect the dots between seemingly unrelated global events, identify the "hubris syndrome" in real-time, decode AI-driven influence campaigns that shape public opinion and distract from deeper systemic shifts, understand how to develop "future-ready" decision-making skills, and understand a global currency reset and what it means for your privacy, wealth, and economic future. 

A BIG topic, but that is the nature of the polycrisis – and it needs to be understood by interlinking all the challenges and interpreting what that bigger story means to all of us. We will of course discuss the latest news that matters, from the LA riots, to the Madleen, why US RFK Jr removing all 17 members of a committee that issues official government recommendations on immunisations matters to all of us, the World Banks latest report, and more. 

To help us discuss all of this, we are delighted to welcome Michael Haupt as our very special guest, the creator of NEXUS 2030. He is an independent, cross-disciplinary systems researcher and Strategic Foresight Practitioner known for connecting the dots between global finance (like CBDCs and private stable coins), policy shifts (like the Pandemic Agreement, Climate Goals, Mar-a-Lago Accord), and emerging technologies (like AI, sixth generation warfare). Michael has more than four decades of experience analysing complex systems, and he has a passion to help you see the bigger picture, so that you can make sense of accelerating complexity and make better decisions.

You can sign up to Michael’s NEXUS 2030 course https://2030.michaelhaupt.com/class. Use coupon code SHITSHOW for a healthy discount. 

Why not come and have a listen and get involved in the conversation? We’d love to have you. Join us Friday 13th June 2025, 8am UK, 9am EU, 2pm TH, 3pm SG, 5pm AEST. Streaming in various locations. 

The Sh*t Show is a Livestream happening every Friday, where Andrea T Edwards, Dr. David Ko, Richard Busellato and Joe Augustin, as well as special guests, discuss the world’s most pressing issues across all angles of the polycrisis, working to make sense of the extremely challenging and complex times we are all going through, plus what we can do about it. Help us move the needle so we can change the name of the show to something more genteel when (or if) it is no longer a sh*t show. 

#TheShitShow #UncommonCourage

To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

Richard Busellato: 0:00

Joe. Welcome to the shit show. My name's Andrea Edwards, and today in the middle you have me Richard bucellotto,

Joe Augustin: 0:09

and my name is Joe Augustine. Welcome to the shit show. And today's theme is control or collaboration, extraction or regeneration. The show is a show that is trying to make sense of the poly crisis, or, as you'll learn another term today, the meta crisis. And we are always in search of new perspectives and experts, if we can, in the field. So today, our guest is someone, I think, who fits the bill. His name is Michael Haupt, and he is a very special guest, the creator of Nexus, 2030, Michael has more than four decades of experience analysing complex systems, and he has a passion to help you see the bigger picture, so that you can help make sense of accelerating complexity and make better decisions as well. That's the top of the icing on the cake, the top of the iceberg. Introduction, Michael, would you like to share a little bit more about your career? Good

Unknown: 1:06

morning and good afternoon. And Firstly, congratulations on your first show, and I'm delighted to be your first guest. So I listened to your previous show, and I've got a very good sense of where you're going. I think you're going to make some waves. So I'm very honoured to be here a little bit about myself. I've had two very different careers. The first was in technology, and that career took me, it was a corporate career took me to 16 cities on six continents. I lived in each of those cities implementing high end computer systems. But the main thing that came out of that experience was seeing how a system can create huge transitions within the people involved. So it's usually staff. Those are the first people that are affected, and secondly, customers. It was all in the telephony space. So what I learned most from that experience is navigating through fairly significant transitions and taking large teams of people along with you for the journey, then I had a major life change in 2004 and that resulted in a career in the systemic change space. So for the last decade or more, I've been advising think tanks, research organisations, municipalities, grassroots groups, about trying to answer the question, this system that causes the individual challenges in society, can anything be done about the system? I've met incredible people, built an incredible International Network. I've seen just about every systemic approach on the planet, and then when COVID hit, I walked away from the space basically burnt out, because there's a huge amount of talk, talk, talk, and nothing changes. So hopefully that's good enough, setting the scene for where we at right.

Joe Augustin: 2:46

Interesting, in other words, and with due respect to my fellow presenters as well, I think Michael's the most qualified person on the show today.

Unknown: 2:58

Anyway.

Dr. David Ko: 3:02

Rich. Richard's pretty experienced

Joe Augustin: 3:07

preamble with the view, with with a new apology. I speak facetious, facetiously. I mean, we're all, we're all, you know, experts in our field, but I think the attention that Michael has been paying to things is what we're very curious about today. And I think what's really interesting is this idea that for all the stuff that's happening, for all the complexity, there is perhaps a series of prisms or lenses that we can look through and filters that can actually make us it can help us understand that. Oh, okay, so this is what's happening. This is the this is the simple thing that's behind it all. I'm a big fan of systems. I mean, it's completely what I believe. I tried to do this. I tried to implement it in the house. In the home, as you well know, doesn't always work.

Dr. David Ko: 3:54

Everyone in my house follows my systems, trust me, because it's about efficiency right? Now, what I'm looking forward to the most about today is people are so overwhelmed by this, and the only way to look at it is to take that huge step back and look at it from a systems perspective, right? And we all know that people are stuck in these details, you know? And that's not what, that's not where we need to focus. We need to be doing the step back. So I'm really looking forward to hearing what you've got to say, and it's actually quite elegant and simple. When you do that, it's not complex. Is the change complex, sure, but the problem is actually quite simple and elegant when you step back. So that's, that's, that's why I'm excited about today. Completely

Joe Augustin: 4:46

sorry about that. But if I, if I may be systematic about this as well, is at this point, like to please ask you to subscribe, like, do the things you have to do, to remember what this channel is about. And then if the end of it all you think you know what i. That's not what I wanted. You can take it away then okay, and tell your friends about this. Okay, sorry, Michael. I interrupted you.

Unknown: 5:06

I just wanted to agree with Andrea. You know, great analysis. However, there are pros and cons. So what you were talking about is the filter through which you view the world. So this is a very large high level, 50,000 foot view of what's going on? The disadvantage of the high level is that I'm personally unable to intelligently engage at very low levels. So there may well be some conversations in this time that we spent together where I'm just going to say, Whoa, that's way over my head. So you know, you I don't think it's possible to keep both views the very high level as well as the nitty gritty, very detailed level. So to help me do that, and to counter the fact that I'm getting old and my memory is fading, I've created a huge research database where all the nitty gritty detail exists. So I may not be able to do it on this call, but I can usually very quickly dive to the correct place and find the nitty gritty and share it with you know when a question comes up or so on. So that's been a lifesaver for me, a second brain. They call it developing a second brain. Here's the place where I just store the nitty gritties. I can maintain focus on the high level and but the other reason I mentioned that is because there may be listeners to the call who love diving into the weeds of a particular matter, and they may get a little frustrated with the score, because we may not get into the detail of the weeds.

Dr. David Ko: 6:27

It's funny, just I had an epiphany just in the last 24 hours. So, you know, there's certain, you know, I noticed Nate Hagens is someone that you've put in some of your research. So he's someone I listen to whenever I can, and often you'll see in the comments, Oh, it's too high level for me. I don't understand it. And And for someone like Nate, it must be kind of frustrating, because the people who love him want to be communicated to at that level. And there's other people who find that out of their reach. But what? So what we what we really need to be sort of developing, is a communication ripple effect, right? Where, you know, so when I communicate, I'm trying to talk to my mum. That's sort of my mindset, you know, the words I use. And even then, I'm probably, I mean, my mum was a very smart lady, right? But even then, you know, probably, like Joe picks me up sometimes when I'll use a phrase that people won't necessarily intuitively understand like I will, which is great. So I think you know, what we need to do is build a sort of a communication ecosystem where someone who wants, who listens at Nate's feet, takes that and then communicates it in their own way to their audience, in a way that they understand, rather than just having single sources. We need multiple sort of ripples. And it's part of the challenge that we've got is people don't want people don't want to speak up because, you know, there's not enough people speaking up. Well, the more people speak up, the more people speak up. So I think, you know, if you find someone who's too overwhelming for you and too technical, you know, if you listen to the climate scientists or the physicists, you know, they use measurements I don't understand, I still listen to them, but who's who's interpreting that in your in your in your language. And the other challenge we have with this is the people who are interpreting are being attacked for not being experts, and they're being attacked by people within the movement, right? So we need to stop attacking people who are trying their best to communicate it. So that's just an epiphany I've had. I need to come up with a brand for this so that we can start pushing it as a movement. Anyway, there's my epiphany, right? Let's move on

Unknown: 8:30

to that, if I may. So I think we're going to get to the point where there's a new language. So we've got some phrases right now that are insufficient in explaining where the world is going to so you're going to get new words coming up, and I think you'll eventually get new grammar, new ways of expressing what's unfolding our language. When I say language, English, specifically, some of the West Eastern languages are more rich because they come from a pictorial background, but the Western language is very limited in expressing some of the concepts we're trying to deal with now.

Dr. David Ko: 9:07

Yeah, so we've got Julian and Michael saying hi to Michael. Popped up. Hello guys. Alright, so we're going to start where we usually start, and that's what's the biggest story that you got your attention this week. We're going to keep around for later. So anything other than that, what's what's grabbing your attention? Crazy stories, obvious stories, who wants to go first?

Richard Busellato: 9:32

Well, I'm always happy to shoot the boat out with the World Bank downgrading, effectively, the economic outlook for this decade based on the Start we've had. And you have to go back quite a long way to find a decade with worst economic outlook than they're picturing at the moment.

Dr. David Ko: 9:51

But we're going to, we're going to talk about that sort of in the news bit of the show, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. But more details,

Richard Busellato: 9:59

yeah. Yeah, definitely, but it certainly grabbed

Dr. David Ko: 10:05

me, yeah, yeah.

Joe Augustin: 10:07

Well, also, also coming up again, again, with more details later on today is that big, big, big acquisition that that meta just made in in scale, AI, yeah, it's, it's, it's no longer a thing where an accidental outcome is going to be super intelligence. This is the stated goal of this particular project. And the kind of data and kind of tagging is it's set out to do that's, that's the huge implication there. So most times I've been pretty, you know, enthusiastic about AI and thinking this could be great, you know, it's all going in the right direction, whatever, and all that. But this particular play got it really close to the edge for me, and I felt that's, that's a, it's a, it's a little heavy that this particular, this particular strike the way it's been set out, and it's in a stated objective. It's kind of, it's kind of

Dr. David Ko: 11:01

shocking, actually. Okay, I'm looking forward to hearing what you what you think about that. Michael, anything grabbed your attention that's not going to be discussed

Unknown: 11:11

later. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm going to be a little controversial and say that whenever there's a major thing unfolding on the news, I'm reminded of a 1997 movie called wag the dog. And my immediate question is, what is this thing drawing my attention away from so I don't follow any of the major things that happen on the news unless they personally affect me or my family. So I don't have anything to add to this part of the conversation. No.

Dr. David Ko: 11:37

Fair enough. Okay, so obviously we had the

Richard Busellato: 11:40

I want to add one thing to Joe and AI, which actually struck me yesterday morning. It was a really tiny little article in the Swedish daily I write. And it was an interview with a fighter pilot, ex fighter pilot that's now a developer for Saab, who makes these, you know, six generation fighter jets. And he said, we have simulated, and I have been in the Air against the AI, and we've come to the point when it's 5050 in an air battle. And I don't think I will win for very much longer. That's how quick the evolution is.

Dr. David Ko: 12:18

Yeah, kind of that, kind of, that's an interesting like, if you just got machines fighting machines, what's the ultimate outcome of war? Yeah, interesting. All right, so we saw the Air India plane go down yesterday. So it's the first time a 7878, in this case, Boeing aircraft went down in an accident. There was an incredible story about one guy that got thrown and survived seat 11 a by the way, there's a lot of people talking about the reasons for it, and there's a lot of people disagreeing with each other experts, so I definitely recommend hang tight. We will find out what happened. The temperature came up as a possible contributor. So it was basically close to 40 degrees Celsius. So if that's a factor, that's kind of a that's a change, right? But the one thing I would just say is it's, it's terribly sad. And if you've ever been to India, and you sit at the airport, you can see how close people live to the airports. So most major cities, it's a long way to the residential block, and it's usually the slums, but in this case, it was a doctor's hostel. So they really have no idea how many people have died, obviously, the LA rights. So the whole shenanigans around that from, you know, Trump bringing the National Guard, the lawyers have basically said it's illegal. They're fighting it. We've got Trump's big parade tomorrow. But there's one US story that might not have gotten everyone's attention. So Tulsi Gabbard is possibly one of the most interesting and least sort of public figures she I mean, she's in the public, but not like all the other ones. So she's the US Director of National Intelligence, and she released a video on June the 11th, and this was after a visit to Hiroshima warning that the world is closer to NUCLEAR WAR than ever. Now we all know that this is not new information, but what I found really interesting about it is this comment, as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before. Political elite and war mongers are carelessly fermenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers and I the political it's the political elite bit that gets me right. So Donald Trump's in his second term, isn't he? The political elite? Like, at what point do they actually, you know? Like all of the, all of this deep state, aren't they the deep state? I mean, they've been there for a while, right? I don't know. It's a, it's a very strange I don't, I don't disagree with the sentiment of the message, the warning of, you know, the only reason we haven't gone nuclear before is because it was demonstrated and shown how bad it was. I know, Richard, you've been living in Europe. You would have grown up in those times, yeah, but, but I don't know. It just, it definitely felt very strange. It's gotten on the fox, fox news network. It's like, Yay, brilliant, awesome. And then on the left foot leaning, it's more like, What the fuck. So it's had complete opposite reactions. I don't know. Did you guys have a look at it?

Joe Augustin: 15:39

Yes. Well, I saw the story, and, you know, I've always been saying that real change is going to happen when the artists step up and help. Wasn't the example I was looking for. It is sort of what I'm talking about. Because the visualisation and to help people kind of imagine what was happening that was, that part of it, I think was, was was really good. But yeah, this this whole, this whole politicisation of this of it's inherently political, yes, but the shoehorn, the US and them in the middle of all of it, yeah, is, is the part that is weird, but the I do very much agree with it. It is a play. We're really right on the edge right now. Everyone's got a motive. And the moment something leaves the ground and it's heading to somewhere else in your airspace, you're not too sure what it is that could trigger the, you know, the whole thing,

Dr. David Ko: 16:45

it could be an AI fighter pilot,

Richard Busellato: 16:48

absolutely. I mean, I think there are many excellent points made there, and I'm a believer in huge rationality in mankind. So for me, a nuclear showdown is really, really remote in my thinking, because it ain't good for anyone involved, however, and this the caveat you have to throw into the ring when you start unleashing really powerful emotions around subjects, and there are many of these in the world at the moment, and the ones that probably comes mostly to my mind is India and Pakistan. And I know, and I'm good friend with people from both countries, and this is an issue basically cannot discuss. It's just a red flag coming down for people. And there are similar arguments to be made around Ukraine and Russia. That's a very, very infected and long history. And then you have sort of, maybe not quite at that level. But it's pretty clear for China, that if we were ever in the western world to push Taiwan into situation of full independence, that would be a line in the sand, and there, all of a sudden, you can throw some of the rationality out the window, because now it becomes emotional.

Dr. David Ko: 18:17

You know, it's not the geopolitical or political divisions that alarm me. It's concern me about whether or not we could ever go nuclear. It's the end of timers. They're the one. They're the ones who I think are completely irrational. And, you know, the whole Christian nationalism, far right movement in the US is based on End of Times, thinking it's all over the world. I mean, it's a it's a huge movement, and been a lot of political sort of access in that movement. So they're the ones that kind of worry me.

Richard Busellato: 18:54

I think it's on a similar argument, because it becomes emotional and not rational. Yeah,

Dr. David Ko: 19:00

Michael, if

Unknown: 19:01

I may pick up on one point you made, because you were questioning, well, the political elite is Trump, not part of the political elite, in my view. And we'll get into this deeper when we go into the mind map. There is a distinct difference between the political elite, which is the old school people that have for the past 100 years been pushing towards global governance, which is outside of the Trump administration and the wealthy elite, which is the top point 00, 1% of people that have surrounded or been drawn into Trump's gravitational field. And I think that's what she was referring to. It's the old school, which we typically refer to as deep state, and these guys, which represent an entirely new class. I can go into that in a little more detail, but I'd like the mind map just as some context.

Dr. David Ko: 19:47

Yeah. Well, what shall we? Shall we? Shall we begin and hand the floor to Michael. So I discovered Michael on LinkedIn. He wrote a blog, I think it was before Easter and. I think it was called the butterfly revolution. Is that, no, the butterfly effect was one of, one of the two, because the butterfly revolution, I think, is Curtis javin's philosophy. So it's not that one. And then you had a, yeah, you had a bit of a spiritual sort of experience over the Easter break, which you may or may not want to talk about. And now you're this nexus to 2030, is your big focus, so I'll hand it over to you, and you can tell us what it's about and where it all came from. Tell us your journey first. Yes,

Unknown: 20:29

thank you for that. So we're going to look at a mind map, if I can get the sharing screen, or if Andrea can get the file up. Two major things led to the development of this mind map, and just a reminder, we're looking at a very high level view of what's unfolding, but there is a place on the mind map where any world event can easily be slotted in. So that was the attempt that I was trying to do is, you know, with all these random things going on, can I create some kind of pattern? I'm a strategic foresight practitioner, which means you're looking for patterns, and the patterns allowing you to extrapolate and explain what's coming next. So that was the reason for the map coming together, two important things from a spiritual perspective, if I may. And before I mention them, just to add that this is not a woo, woo process, it. So the first happened in 2004 I had an out of body experience on a beach in Thailand, completely unexpected. There was no substance involved. I wasn't going on any kind of spiritual quest. So it was like the universe just hitting me on the side of the head saying time for a wake up call. And that resulted in a two year sabbatical, during which I dived deep into the world of consciousness research discovered a whole world I had no idea existed. I was a left brain technologist, you know, used to coding and very predictable outcomes. And here was something I'd never heard of before. So, you know, I've read, I don't, literally hundreds of books in the consciousness research space, and that's heavily influenced my thinking over decades, now and then over Easter weekend this year, a new maybe one thing I should mention around that out of body experience, I'll take these experiences very seriously. I've met many others who've had similar experiences, and I no longer question the fact that there is a realm to reality that is beyond just the physical side of what we can see now, how you define that and describe it? There's lots of contradictions amongst people who spend their entire life studying this, so we're not going to try and get to a definitive answer on this, but it's just for the purposes of this conversation, except that there is something going on that's beyond science as we currently understand it beyond the physical reality that we experience on a day to day basis. What I think I do differently compared to people who receive these downloads is because I have I'm a left brain pragmatist. I take them very seriously, and I document and research and go and find out as much as I can about the message that he sent. Hence the 3000 research paper database that I've collated and what I'm trying to do. So what happened in 2004 very clear vision of what was coming. Most of it made no sense to me. I'll give you one example. This was 2004 five years before Bitcoin emerged. But in the vision was a very clear thing, which consisted of a currency issued by people rather than currencies issued by banks. But five years before Bitcoin made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. So what that vision became was instead a map. I would concentrate on things that developments that happened internationally, that answered a piece of the puzzle that made no sense at the time it arrived, and slowly building out that puzzle so that I can see this stuff is real. I don't know where it comes from, but it's real, and so it should be taken seriously. And I think if more people who have these experiences, experience took it seriously, perhaps the world would be in a very different place. So what happened over the Easter weekend, I was in a bit of a low space, and I went into the weekend very intentionally holding a meditative question, which is considering that Easter is symbolic of death and rebirth. What is it in me that needs to die to make space for new either belief systems or ideas or something to emerge? And I wasn't quite prepared for the experience because another very clear vision came again with many things that don't make sense to me at the moment, but the Mind Map is a distillation of those two fairly significant experiences. So there is an element of Woo, woo, but I want to stress that this is all backed by science, and all of the research is there. We won't, you know in a short call like this, we won't have time to. Go into it, but in the mind map, which you can download at 2030 dot Michael helped.com they're all the links to the research database to back up what I'm going to say, if I may, add one other quick thing in as well, is the very crucial role that my daughter plays. So I'm a solo dad to a daughter who will turn 21 years old in 2035 there's a whole story about how she came into my life. But basically, through two marriages, I avoided children because my worldview, whether it's right or wrong, is that the world's a mess that place. And if that's true, why would you want to bring a child into it? Anyhow, the universe, again, insisted that I have to have a child. And so she's turned my worldview from look at what's wrong with the world to Okay, now you've got to be responsible for it. What are you going to do about it? What can you do to create a new way of living on the planet? So she drives everything I do, and I mentioned her because I have skin in the game. So I take this stuff incredibly seriously. It's her future that I'm most concerned about, and everything that I do is for her, because many of the changes that we're going to talk about happening that I think are happening, I may not be alive to experience them, but she will. And so I just wanted to mention that that you know, this is not conspiracy, conspiracy theory stuff. There is a little bit of conspiracy involved in it. But again, the public policy papers that back up. What I say is there? The research papers are there? Let me take a breath there and just check and see Are we still on track?

Richard Busellato: 26:36

Yeah,

Dr. David Ko: 26:38

I'm always happy with some we were. So don't worry, I think it's if you're not exploring both sides, the left brain and the right brain, I think, I think you're missing and and I think we need to be the bridges in between that that can communicate to both sides as well. So I think there's, yeah,

Unknown: 26:55

great. So I'm going to attempt to share, and let's see if it works.

Dr. David Ko: 27:03

I could do it if you want.

Unknown: 27:06

No, it's not allowing me to do that. There it is. Oh, great. You've got it up. Yeah, okay, so when you look at this online, it doesn't unpack the entire map like that. It ends up just with a major blocks on it. So on the right hand side is all of the metaphysical stuff. This is the more you know, less than obvious physical things that we see in the world, and the left hand side is all the physical stuff. So if I may start on the right hand side, just to give some context, so I speak about our operating system, and here I'm talking about 10s, even hundreds of 1000s of years. What is the operating system that has driven human progress? And again, at this very high level, what I'm most interested in is the collective use or putting to work, as it were, human ingenuity and creativity. So this is at the species level, rather than individually, what happens in each country. And I'm concerned that there right now, the way human ingenuity and creativity is being put to use is not the best, you know. Let's think about the space race. There were entire nations that got behind an incredibly powerful vision and a purpose, and everybody was aligned. We don't have that vision. We kind of all drifting around saying, oh my goodness, the sky is falling. But there's no real effective direction in which we're all heading as at the species level. So the beauty of good and evil, and what I'm doing here is just quickly going through at a high level what each of these nodes represent. But there's layers of it. So think of it like an onion, lots of layers, and you can dive into whatever level you're most comfortable with the beauty of good and evil. I had to answer the question for myself, how do we justify things like world wars or any major incident that results in high numbers of death? Because although those horrific things happen, generally speaking, the the arc of human progress is still improving. Generally speaking, I know you can speak, you can point to many exceptions, but generally speaking, we've pulled huge numbers of people out of poverty, or rather higher up Maslow's hierarchy of existence. And how do you account for these horrible events that happen? So to address that, I came across Hegelian dialectics, which proposes that there's normally a thesis, which is an idea, a worldview, a paradigm, and up comes an antithesis, antithesis. And those two are usually diametrically opposed to each other, and so they clash somewhere. Both thesis and antithesis have some kind of internal contradiction within them, which means they bound to fail. And in the failure of both thesis and antithesis, out pops synthesis, which takes elements. From both thesis and antithesis, but adds its own unique blend, and something new comes up. So what both World Wars created for us was incredible level. This is the good ignoring the thesis, which was why the wars happened in the first place, but the synthesis that came out of that was incredibly high levels of coordination and cooperation. War is from a logistics perspective, helps us understand how to move people and material and all the rest around, and that eventually led to globalisation. So our current global supply chains, many of what enables those supply chains came from lessons that we learned during First World War and Second World War. So the beauty of good and evil is the thesis clashes with antithesis. Some thing pops out as synthesis, and that's what the beauty of good and evil is all about. So if you look at our progress, we've, you know, generally improved all the way along now within that we've got our own personal freedom. This answers the question about, you know, whether we where, whether everything is preordained, or whether we have personal choice in that. So I believe we've got guardrails. And I refer to this as the evolutionary impulse. So the evolutionary impulse that has been with us for 13.8 sorry, 3.8 billion years, which has driven progress from single celled creatures all the way to human life. The evolutionary impulse is the innate organising principle, the drive within living systems to constantly achieve higher expressions of themselves, and that those are the boundaries. So we have personal choice within those boundaries, as long as we're accomplishing a higher expression of the living system within which we're operating. And that addresses, for me, the personal freedom bit, if I drop down now to consciousness. So the programme and the book and the mind map and all the rest is called Nexus 2030 because you've got so many converging things happen at happening at the same time. And in the metaphysical space, we're having a shift in consciousness. So in the detail, I look at four different they called major evolutionary transitions, and this is in the scientific research. The most recent started with the Neolithic Revolution, or the agricultural revolution, about 12,000 years ago. And that's material consciousness. And we've been in material consciousness all along for the past 12,000 years, what that has resulted in is domination over the physical resources that the planet represents. It's also resulted in significant growth. So again, looking at Maslow's hierarchy, 8 billion people are now no longer in purely the subsistence layer of that pyramid, but they're higher up, which means that as a species, we can afford to have these kind of conversation, conversations, where is the world going? What's our purpose? Why are we here? What is our calling? All of those bigger questions, which you can't address when you're down at the lower levels of existence. The point of material consciousness is that it appears we're now approaching the fifth major evolutionary transition. I'm calling it mycelial consciousness, to represent the underground root system that keeps the natural world communicating with each other in a way that's far more effective than our internet is. And the emergence of that mycelial form of consciousness started, perhaps in the 1960s with hippie movements and so on, but it's matured significantly, and we'll talk a little about why I say that, and what the maturation process is. Some people call it planetary consciousness, Gaia consciousness. There's various words for it, but it's reflecting a new way of thinking about how we coordinate our activities with each other, and how we think. Basically, at the beginning of the call, we spoke about having a new language, it's referring to this mycelial consciousness. How do we even communicate these ideas when we've been so used to thinking in a material form of consciousness. Let me stop there before I go on. Everything still making sense.

Dr. David Ko: 34:26

Yep, yep. Totally

Joe Augustin: 34:29

fabulous. Yeah. I think I should bring the rest of the people who are maybe not watching on online, listening in right now. It's been quite a stack to kind of unravel. I think it's, it bears some explanation about what the my serial thing is about as well, because it's not just some sort of idea that hasn't been shown to work at all. It actually is something that the plant world uses. And you know, if you've, if you've, I don't know if you've heard just. Just for everybody else, right about how mushrooms or that or that part of the world it they communicate, the plants communicate with that kind of network, and that kind of, it's almost a consciousness at a different level. And it's also, of course, I think, used to quite nice, nice effect in The Last of Us, where it poses a whole different kind of problem. But I just thought I'd, you know, bring everybody in on that as well. So because it's been deep, I'm not gonna, not gonna lie.

Unknown: 35:30

Thank you for that context. Setting Joe and for those who can access the map online, 2030, dot Michael help.com under mycelial consciousness, there's probably 500 different examples of how this works. One that I'm particularly inspired by is the wood Wide Web, which is what Joe was just referring to, how plants communicate with each other. But, I mean, there's incredible stuff there. We don't have time to go into it, but it's it's there really, really profound stuff, so profound and overwhelming that to me, It can't even be questioned, but because it's new. For those of us who haven't come across it immediately, your filters go up and say, no, no, I haven't heard about this before, so it must be nonsense, but the evidence is quite overwhelming, fabulous. Let's move on quickly to the next one, which is in the top left hand corner, which is the repeating pattern from Empire to planetary now, this essentially talks about the rise and fall of civilizations, but we're talking here from a pattern perspective. So they've been 26 well documented civilizations, all of them showing a very similar cycle as they go from rising, reaching their peak and then declining. And as a meta study of all of those, they've identified seven significant phases. So you know, from early growth, again, getting to peak and then slowly declining. The real point of all of that bit is that the global civilization. If we start, if we take a start date of 1648, which is the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the pretty tumultuous period after the Byzantine Empire collapsed. So if we take that period as the start of this we're about 377 years into that process, the important bit here is that this is the first time it's a globalised empire, meaning the Western way of doing stuff. So we don't really have an empire. The US has refused to take that label. But generally speaking, the neoliberal way of living can be seen as a globalised empire. And what I've done is map out those seven phases with very specific dates. It may be different for each country, but generally speaking, we can fairly accurately map out those seven phases. The point of all of that is that we are nearing the end of that cycle. The Cycle typically lasts between 250 and 500 years, with 377 years into it. But the length is not that important. It's more looking for the signs that show you that the Empire is in decline. And we'll get into a little bit in the bottom left hand corner that shows you we're very close to the end. The Good News of these cycles is that something new always emerges. So the end of an empire doesn't mean human extinction. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this call. But it means that there's an end of the old way, the normal, whatever we were used to doing in the past, that changes significantly, and something new emerges. So it's not necessarily something to be fearful of. It's more something to be aware of and then make a conscious choice, do I focus on the things that are ending, or do I look for the weak signals of what's emerging? For me, it's much more inspiring to look for the weak signals that are emerging and specifically point my daughter in that direction.

Joe Augustin: 38:59

Okay, so just so we understand this as well. You are drawing this conclusion based on the previous cycles as well. What's another cycle that that that we can sort of like plug into and understand? Because, you know, otherwise, we only have the example of this. This one, what's what was the previous what was the previous cycle? About the previous empirical cycle,

Unknown: 39:21

cycle. The previous empirical cycle was the Roman Empire, so that was the one that collapsed just prior to this. And again, I don't have the dates of the phases and all the rest with me right here, but in the research database, there's a huge amount of this. And basically the 26 civilizations that have been discovered. These are, I beg your pardon, documented. These are highly educated individuals, either historians or archaeologists or they dedicated their entire life to go and writing a book on that one specific civilization. And then there have been a few people who've taken the books themselves. And said, what patterns can we extrapolate from this? So again, in the mind map, there's a particular book that I highly recommend, William oppose, and I've just gone blank on the title, but that's a fairly short book, and it was the most powerful that I read, because he melded together these patterns in a way that finally the penny dropped for me, where we could say, okay, these these patterns are incontrovertible, and therefore it means we can apply it to our global civilization. So there's a huge amount to research and dive into there, if you're interested in it. Jeffrey West book scale certainly touches on this as well. But William, opposite his book, gave the much better in my view, meta pattern. He drew some pretty profound conclusions, which I think he made quite a leap in. But because I'd read all the other books, I could completely see where he was going. Very short book. Scale is quite a lengthy book. William apples to me, really summarised and made it as distinct as possible. But Jeffrey West book is also very good.

Joe Augustin: 41:09

So based on the echoes of the past, technically, it's all downhill from here, right? I mean,

Unknown: 41:16

well, it depends on where you choose to focus. So the ending of the normal Yes, is very much all downhill, and you will find so a lot of my experience in the corporate space, and more specifically, working with an accounting firm for a year trying to look at ESG and different ways of doing it, we tend to get so caught up in the way and so stuck in a rut, basically. So corporates, I don't know if anyone's familiar with the work in the ESG space, they completely focused, not so much on addressing the issues that we can see, but in just achieving compliance. And this came out after a year of really trying to do some creative stuff where generally everybody was agreeing, yes, we need to do this no brainer stuff, but they couldn't get bored and so on to agree, which just shows that, you know, once we set in place a particular system within society, it's very difficult to break out of it. And the being trapped in that system is the bit that has the built in ending of that system somehow built into it. So we my view now is, having spent a decade in the systems change space, there's very little that we can do to change the system. We should rather look at what's emerging and amplify those signals and say, what are the bridges that we can build from old to new? That's generally my mind view from this. So the interesting thing about this whole empire rise and fall thing is that every single one of those 26 civilizations were class based, which means that you inevitably get the elites, the 1% the you know, a group of people that believe they are ordained in some way, they more special than the rest of the people. And so from history, it looks like every class based civilization will eventually collapse under its own weight. Now, the alternative to a class based is a values based civilization. And the examples that we have as far as values based society civilizations are concerned, or any of the long standing indigenous tribes. So in Australia, it's the aboriginals. In South Africa, it's the koi sun. North America, the North American Indians, these were values based civilizations that don't have a hierarchy. They don't have somebody you know, that eventually ends up at the top of the pyramid. So my point of all of this is that as this empire ends, we are standing at a choice point of either repeating another class based civilization, or because our consciousness has developed sufficiently, we have the potential to consider a global values based civilization. Now this gets deep, and it's way beyond you know what's discussed in public or private sectors. Remember, I'm viewing this from the perspective of human ingenuity and creativity. Where are we going as a species? So the date 2013 Nexus. 2030 to me, is highly significant. And there's, I don't know if there's any way of specifically predicting what the outcome will be, but it's helpful. My mission is to make as visible the fact that we are standing as a species at this choice point, to either repeat the next class based civilization, or to make a shift, a conscious shift, because it's not going to happen automatically towards a values based civilization. Let me pause there, because that's also pretty deep. Anything you want to jump in. No,

Dr. David Ko: 44:54

no mate. I've got this visual metaphor where I say we're all standing around the fight with. And obliques, with the with the Romans, and we need, and we need to turn around and say, This is the world we want to create, and move towards that and ignore the fight, right? But, yeah, the the idea of holding on. The other thing that sort of really concerns me about some of the sort of rhetoric in the world right now is, you know, the anti woke, the DEI, you know, that sort of thing. At the time we need to be moving in the value space direction we're actually pulling back. You know the idea that the Ultra, these ultra wealthy white males are the only ones that can solve the problems when they're the they're the reason we're in the problem that we're in. But there's one thing that you were talking about that the world has never been in in a situation at a global scale, and that's the difference between now and the 26 reference points you were mentioning. You know, when the Romans fell, it obviously impacted a lot of Europe, Africa, but we're now, this is global scale, and that's, to me, the the difference between what we're facing now. But, yeah, totally agree.

Unknown: 46:08

And the point to make it very specific is that in previous civilizations, there was some way to go when your empire collapsed this time, Mars is the only place to go. And even that's not guaranteed at this point, and to pick up on your diagram Andrea of the poly crisis. So all those individual things on your chart are indicative and are things that have happened towards the end of every previous civilization. So if we convert the symptoms that you very accurately predict on your graph, maybe you want to bring it up to so your viewers can see it, if you're ready for that. But all of those collectively, are merely pointing to the end of the normal way that we've become accustomed of doing things for the past 12,000 years. So this is not a simple habit to break. This is not going to be an easy journey, but for me, it helps you know position where we're at and what's going on. And those

Joe Augustin: 47:07

of you listening on the podcast right now serves you, right? We're not doing you getting us seriously?

Unknown: 47:16

Yeah, yeah, there's, there's rich things being shared, or maybe you want to, when you finish the podcast, come back to the YouTube channel and get the visuals, but there's Andrea's diagram for those who can see it. Do you want to mention anything specific on there? Andrea?

Dr. David Ko: 47:30

Yeah. I mean, I ran through it as you go, you might have noticed I've added to it from last week, because, you know, you made a point about the meta crisis being different to the polycrisis because it brings in the spiritual element. And I'm torn between the terms. So as a PR person of many, many years, one one term wins out, and I feel that the polycrisis is that term. But to me, they mean the same thing. I think there's a slight difference in the definition, and I think you're right, but, but it's basically everything that all of these things are happening at the same time. So you know, from pollution forever chemicals and their impact on us as well as all living beings, all of the extreme weather events, food insecurity, famine, war, civil war, nuclear war, supply chain vulnerabilities and the impacts that they have, the mental health crisis, the spiritual crisis, the radicalization of people of faith, is something that really concerns me. I think it's going to be one of the biggest problems that we're going to be facing, and we're already seeing it emerging. So there's so many things, social cohesion, that's a really big focus area in Asia. The cultures in Asia are very much focused on social cohesion. And I think the Western, individualistic world could look to Asia to learn a lot, but typically they're too arrogant. But, yeah, cost of living, crisis, you know, energy, peak oil, it's all there. Everything that's happening, it's all

Richard Busellato: 48:55

happening at the same time. It's phenomenal, because what you're describing, I'm quite taken aback here, because you're clearly operating at an extremely high level of thinking, which is, you know, far beyond what I can initially comprehend, even though I prepared reasonably for this. But what we have on the chart here for the poly crisis, and I tend to think very much in 10 to 30 year cycles because I like economic history. I can draw inference. It helps me in my job. I managed money for 30 plus years, but the symptoms also not the symptoms, but what being displayed is actually exactly the same as it is for an empire cycle, exactly the poly crisis. To me, the first thing that struck me when Andrea showed me that chart is that pretty much all of these things are connected. Yes, they just, they just come in different expressions, but actually what's wrapping it is all connected to the same story. And I look, you know, at the much smaller scale and much shorter cycles. Yes, but the one thing for me, which is like the alarm bell and make it in my profession a tradable event, something that I can position for and hopefully exploit to make money from, is always the excesses. When you see the signal of the excesses, and it doesn't just need to be material excess, but it is definitely the shape of how excess is a permeating society. You know, the cycle is very close to an end. Yeah, and on the Empire cycle now we can see what the excesses are and what that will look like. But unlike previous episodes, if I didn't like what I see, I could shut down and hibernate for a couple of months, or even a year or two, and then come back and pick up the pieces and make lots of money this time, there is nowhere to go, right? There's absolutely nowhere to hide. And that makes it very, very different from, you know, there is always a certain amount of predictability to an economic cycle when it ends pinpointing it, that's the hard bit. And if you're really good at it, you make a lot of money. But there was always somewhere to go. And just wanted

Dr. David Ko: 51:08

to mention, I just wanted to mention, Carol Lim has said I subscribe to the theory of the Moloch of the meta crisis. I don't know that I'm going to look for it get a bit, gets a bit depressing sometimes thinking about the pervasiveness and depth of the root of the problem. I think we can all agree we've been on the journey of depression through this knowledge come out the other end. I do believe there is a path forward, and I will never give up, because, like Michael, I'm fighting for my boys, but I do think part of the journey is the acceptance that there will be immense suffering in the world because of the what we're going through, and accepting that is a very difficult thing to do, but denying it is going to make it harder, because there's no way we can get through this without

Unknown: 52:02

it. This is such an important point, and if I may unpack it a little further, because I think it's worth spending a bit of time on this. So one person who's very good at explaining this, he calls it theory u. So Arthur Sharma, who's at MIT, has created a whole body of work called theory U, and the point is that you're going down, down, down, looking at the human condition, reaching the absolute bottom, and realising this is so bad, there's no hope through this. But then eventually starting the journey up the other leg of the you to the point that, well, if we focus on only what's ending, then things are pretty bad. However, if we focus on what's emerging, there's so much more hope to the point that I'm quite optimistic about where the human species could get to. But this point of I refer to it as the abyss, staring deep into the abyss of the human condition. And frankly, until you've done that, you can't really consider the rest of the stuff that we're going to discover in this call. So for somebody who's extremely comfortable now, who thinks that life is hunky dory and everything's ticking along, there's no convincing that individual, and it refers specifically to the elite class, not only today, but in every previous fall of empire, there's a concept called hubris, and the way they think about the world, because they're surrounded by such immense wealth, and people their peers are in similar aspects of immense wealth, so there's no reason for them to consider the kind of things that we're going to discuss next in the call. And it's that thinking itself that ultimately then leads to the collapse of empire. All of the 26 books are pretty clear on this, and the meta study is pretty clear on this. It's the hubristic thinking of believing that their technological solutions, meaning technology, whatever was available at the time, could pull society through, and it inevitably fails.

Joe Augustin: 54:01

I'm looking, I'm looking at this, and I'm hearing, you know, listening back to what we talked about earlier, which was about the beauty of good and evil, right? And I'm thinking about how World War One was supposed to be the war that settled all wars. And then out of that, they came up with some solutions, which, of course, did not quite work. Hence, World War Two. And it was all it was. It was because of the horror and all the different things that happened along the way, the problems that came out. You mentioned, the logistics that came out of war, wartime organisation. There was all the creativity that was unleashed. You know, the British were, well, the British, British and the Germans, to be fair, actually, were highly creative during the war, and that and that stuff has also had impact on our lives, plus the discovery or understanding about how if you punish too much. Much, or you try to make like in the case of what, what they did with Germany, they may just be paid too much for World War One. World War Two happened. I think we're missing sometimes that that the future is bright. The question is whether we'll be there for it. I mean, that really is the and I think that's the hubris part of it, right? We, we can know. In fact, for me, I do know there is a brighter, other side to all of this, but there's a part of us that wants to make it through it as well. You know, I think, I think as an organism, as a as a society, or not actually, the society will not survive. I don't think so, because you're right, it's in decline. It'll disappear and there will be a fight to replace it. There has to be a fight to replace it. Because even all these, these empires you talk about before that are based on values, they didn't just appear based on values. There had to be a conquest of sorts as well. Before then values were installed, and then everyone subscribed to it. And even then, as well, they come to their point where the system breaks right. So that's, that's kind of where we are. So the U sometimes is the U shaped thing is invisible to us. We're all on this thing together. And I think the real, the real terrifying bit is, are we going to come out on the other side? Right? I mean, there is the possibility that as we, as we fight amongst ourselves, someone misses the fact that an asteroid is coming, and an asteroid changes the way the world exists, like it did for the dinosaurs, much as dinosaurs the entire planet at the time. But out of that, you know, came us, came the rest of it, right? So, yeah, I can, I can see that, but it's, it sounds, you know, as much as that's the realistic way to look at it, as if, like, this is what the truth actually looks like, I think the human spirit can't really accept it. That's and that's the real challenge.

Dr. David Ko: 57:00

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Unknown: 57:04

My view on this, but if I may just quickly do a time check we're coming up on the hour. Are you

Dr. David Ko: 57:09

going keep going put your image back up

Unknown: 57:14

please, if you don't mind, and maybe just to pick up on what Joe was saying there. So it's my considered opinion. After all, the stuff that we're still going to go through is that we're in for a period of extreme discontinuity, and there's potentially going to be some very unpleasant things happening where we have conscious agency is deciding on how long that period is going to be. So the period between the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the Peace of Westphalia was 300 years. We could potentially shorten that to 100 years or 10 years. Or why not one year? So when this reset happens, we have enough in place to make that period of discontinuity as short as possible. And you know, it's the first time that we as a species can consider this one because of our global ability to communicate via the internet. But secondly, the emerging form of mycelial consciousness. Maybe this will make more sense as I go into it. So maybe just to move on then to the next one, which is the human condition and what I refer to here is basically Miss DIS and Mal information. If we go back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, there was a whole lot of information being collected on users, but essentially it was used to sway the first Trump election, if I'm not mistaken, the point about that incident is that there are now many more examples, particularly with ai, ai opinion, or rather, AI is being used to influence opinions online. And what I've noticed is groupings of people that are particularly concerned about an aspect so it could be health and pandemics. It could be climate and sea level rise and everything related to climate change. It could be monetary concerns, because there's a huge body of people that are, you know, Richard is probably aware of them that are discussing how best to protect your wealth or to make intelligent decisions and so on. So there's lots of conversations going around in the investment space, but usually within these spaces, there's very little awareness of what's going on in other groups. So these bubbles have been created online with very large, I'm talking, you know, hundreds of millions of people all gathering in one particular aspect, discussing their thing, unaware of similar conversations going on in a different space. And to keep in mind that it is AI bots that are often generating the content to keep you trapped in that little filter bubble, I'm sure Joe would have a huge. Would you mind to add to that? Don't if you want to jump in now or leave it towards the end.

Dr. David Ko: 1:00:04

One of the things, one of the things I think we really, really need to start be thinking about, is we've got to so, you know, the whole social media thing was about sort of global access. I think we've actually got to start going more local access, in person, as well as digitally, the people you know, the people you trust you know, and then I think of you know people doing what we're doing, right? If someone put out an AI version of our show, it should be very obvious to anyone who's been listening to us that it's bullshit, because we've got a body of work behind us, right? But for someone who's just starting out, who hasn't set set themselves up, I think it's going to be very difficult and very easy for AI to someone who's not, doesn't have good intentions behind them, to do something against them. I think that's a problem, Joe,

Joe Augustin: 1:00:52

if I can just say the one thing that makes sure that you can know that this show is not AI is the fact that it goes for two hours, which is not an AI trick.

Dr. David Ko: 1:01:04

It's good to know. So long form content might actually work for the left

Joe Augustin: 1:01:10

well, no long form. The thing about AI is it reveals itself. Even though it's very good and can be of high quality, it reveals itself after a long period. So if you, if you're if you're just watching a show that's been put together for five minutes or 10 minutes, the AI can do a pretty good job, but the moment you talk more and more about something, get deeper into something, then AI becomes repetitive. And it can't, it can't create the new ideas, yet it can't quite synthesise those new ideas and make them non repetitive, so that that's the best for me, sometimes a telltale, and even though the rest of it, I must say, it's hard to tell, it's impossible sometimes to tell

Dr. David Ko: 1:01:50

Bucha that's that's such an amazing opportunity, right? Because I've been saying for people to people for ages. This is a really complex topic, and you can't do it in five minutes. And people like, I've got time. I've got time. I haven't got time. Well, yeah, make time, because now your attention is going to be basically taken by bots who are not going to tell you the truth. So here you go. The right to spending three hours with Joe Rogan. The left can finally spend some time rather than being distracted. So I think that's a good I think that's a win personally.

Unknown: 1:02:20

So if I may pick up on to tie in this AI theme, so the one little square on this, or node on the Mind Map, is the economics of problem perpetuation. So these are basically the individuals holding on to all their investments in the existing empire. Now that means the way of thinking, it means wealth, it means the way of coordinating human activities. It's a whole huge thing, which I refer to as inter structure. Infrastructure is the physical built environment. But then you also have your social aspects of what makes society work, your education, your medical systems and all the rest. And then they have interrelationships between them. So the entire collection is called an inter structure, and there are people that are heavily invested in that inter structure continuing as long as possible. So this is why there are incredibly large benefits in continuing the way things are, rather than trying to change them. And there's a wealthy group of people that do not want any kind of change. Now to pick up on the AI side of this, we must remember that AI can only be trained on everything that we know around material consciousness. So for those that are familiar with how AI works, large language models, they basically suck in all the information, Wikipedia published books and all those good things, but all of those represent material consciousness. Ai cannot talk to us around mycelial consciousness. It has no concept around it. I know because I've tried testing it on this so if we're looking for what's emerging, AI has its uses, and I'm a big fan of AI. I use it a lot, but provided I understand that whatever answers I'm going to get from it are steeped in material consciousness. It's steeped in what's ending. As long as we know that, then we can go and figure out, well, who do I need to speak to who's familiar with what's emerging and have those one on one place based conversations. We're going to get more into that, but Andrea's already mentioned it Okay. Let's move on now to the last group of nodes in the mind map, and this, to me, is the one that is possibly the deepest, most controversial, and makes no sense unless we've been through the bit that we've already discussed as a bit of a preface to getting to this point. But I'm just

Joe Augustin: 1:04:46

gonna put some coffee powder and just avoid I'll miss out the whole water thing. I'm just gonna just inhale the powder to get a bit of a boost to understand this. I.

Unknown: 1:05:00

Yeah, well, I mean, are we okay to keep going? Otherwise,

Joe Augustin: 1:05:03

yeah, absolutely fire away, right? Just ignore me. I'm the clown.

Unknown: 1:05:09

And it's good to be light hearted about these very heavy subjects, because if you can't laugh about it, then it means we haven't understood it enough. You have to, yes, exactly. And Michelle has put a comment in there. Xeon. So Michelle has created, I'm going to talk on your behalf, a platform that allows any chatbot to query the more mycelial consciousness of it. Now I only managed to get it to work once, and then it didn't work thereafter. So if you'd like to link up with Michelle on LinkedIn. He's, he's got something there. I'm not sure it's fully working yet, but I know that he's working very hard in the background to try and crack this really, really interesting stuff worth looking into if anyone's particularly interested in Zeon. Yes. Okay, let's move on to the last blob then. So right at the beginning, we spoke about the beauty of good and evil. We spoke about thesis coming against antithesis, and then a synthesis pops up. So my big question, and this is the bit that came through over the Easter weekend, what is the thesis? What is the antithesis, and what is the synthesis? Now it looks to me, and from this is from huge amounts of research. Again, all of this stuff is in the research database. It looks to me as if thesis is a long standing globalist plan, pretty much funded by money that originally came from the Rockefellers and Standard Oil. And they've pretty much through World War One and World War Two have funded the creation of global institutions like the UN the IMF, and the This plan has been unfolding steadily over 100 or more years. Now. That's typically what we refer to currently as the deep state. So that's the thesis, and they're dead set on implementing full on global control. The mechanism by which they're going to do that is through the issuing of central bank digital currencies. But more importantly, those digital currencies are linked to all kinds of surveillance systems. So Joe obviously, is aware in in Singapore, there's a high level of surveillance. In China, they have the social credit score. I'm sure your audience is already familiar with that idea. So essentially, that's what these central bank digital currencies are attempting to be linked to. Now the antithesis to all of that is Trump and his merry men. Now when I mention him, I'm neither for nor against Trump, nor any political party. I'm looking at this at the very high level, how human behaviour is affected by systems. The system within which we're currently operating is the falling or the ending of an empire. So Trump represents the inevitable, 1.001% of the extreme. Extremely elite class that ends up at the top of a class based civilization. This is inevitable. It's not through. It may be because of his genius, but the point is that, if it weren't him, it would be somebody else. If it weren't musk, it would be somebody else. These are simply patterns that appear at the end of an empire. So they've now come along as the antithesis saying, no, no, this is not right. We're not going to have the deep state. We're not going to have central banks issuing these digital currencies we know better than them. We're going to break down all of the bureaucracy and all the stuff that we don't like about what we've seen unfolding over the past 100 years, and we're bringing an alternative, which is a privately issued digital currency. So this could potentially be issued by Trump himself. It could be issued by one of the very large financial institutions, BlackRock, for example. I don't know how that will play out, but it seems clear to me that that is the antithesis. So referring to Tulsi Gabbard and what she was saying as the political elite, she's referring to the thesis, and she and the Trump and musk groups are the antithesis, and they're clashing heads now, and in my view, there is a race on as to who can implement that central currency linked to surveillance. So on the antithesis size, you've got Palantir. You've got Peter Thiel and all of his guys, which is pretty horrific stuff, all of the technology that's being tested in the Middle East wars, it's all Palantir stuff within the riots that are happening in the US right now. There's all kinds of surveillance that's already going on. All of this stuff is being tested already, and so you're having this very large clash happening now, the key point about the clash. Is that they are internal inconsistencies within both thesis and antithesis, which means that at some point they are going to fail. And usually it's the uprising of the population that says, You know what we've seen through, what's going on. This is enough. We're revolting, and then popping out of that will be the synthesis. So I'm going to labour the thesis and antithesis a little bit further before we talk about the synthesis. So I believe that a monetary reset will be announced at some point. And we've got an example of this after the Second World War, after Bretton Woods, the Nixon shock was essentially the the reset that was announced. And to put it more in context, so we can understand what a reset means. If you think back to how the world was shut down during the COVID reset, think about how it affected you personally. There were all kinds of activities that you could no longer participate in this time. That reset will be linked to a monetary system. So for example, you're going to walk up to the ATM, which you could quite easily do during COVID. You could punch in your PIN number, and you could still withdraw cash this time, you're not going to be able to do that. This is my view, based on all of the readings of the documentation, the key documents to read and then person to look into is Steven Moran, who's in the US administration, who wrote a plan which is now being called the Mara Largo accord. So lots of detail in there. We can discuss a little bit here, but I won't be able to go into too much of the detail Michelle is mentioning 2027 maybe we should ask him how he knows that date. But now and 2030 why do we know it's 2030 because of the great reset announced by the World Economic Forum, many other global institutions have publicly published papers, all referring to 2030, as the date. So I suspect that the thesis group of people will when they believe that they are ready, they will create it could be a health pandemic. Again, it could purely be a monetary thing. We're not clear on what it's going to be, but at some point, there will be another global shutdown, similar to what we experienced during COVID, and then at this, at that time, antithesis will step in and say, Hold on, these CBDCs are not going to work. Here's a privately issued token of some sort, rather, come and accept this. Now there's masses of layers of detail that we need to get into. But this is the framing of what I believe is going to unfold as the end of this empire. It will result in all kinds of disruptions to our normal day of way of living, and the what will make navigating that time easier is being being able to understand that this is what's unfolding. Because what we'll experience in that time is a barrage of all kinds of news articles of different levels and layers of horror, essentially, now those individual news items and events. If you think about a laser pen and a cat, we've all done it where we shine a laser pen on the floor and the cat goes crazy dancing from one spot to the next. Those news events are going are intentionally designed just to keep us busy, like the cat, while the monetary reset is being implemented. So let me pause there. I believe that I may well have opened up a huge hornets nest.

Dr. David Ko: 1:13:48

I was just, I was just going to say, Michelle, I can see your comments on LinkedIn, but they're not all coming over here, so I'm not necessarily putting them all at the right time, but we'll have a look later. But Richard, what do you think?

Richard Busellato: 1:14:00

Well, it's, I mean, taken aback again by your incredibly high level and deep understanding of the subject area. It's fascinating to follow. And you know, we could spend hours and hours debating this, and it links very much with my belief system, which is the shorter cycle is coming towards an end. The excesses are there for us to see, but also the almost, I would describe it as insane drive for growth. And the insane drive for growth is there only to serve the death cycle, which is coming to an end, and the debt cycle is effectively, for me, like, you know, any drug addict, you find something that works in small doses. Initially you keep on increasing, and eventually you need a higher and higher dose to ever get back to that initial feel, a good feeling. And you know, if you get me started on how we measure growth, I think it's a complete insanity, because it's actually not very hard to achieve growth. And. And that tallies incredibly well with the natural aspect of for me, how an economy is supposed to work and how you get good growth. And I know it's a nebulous concept, but to me, growth is never, ever the target variable. It's the outcome of having taken good decisions and and running with good policies, and I don't know if I'm going to get to 2% or 1% and actually I don't care, because I'm doing the right thing. And eventually we have an outcome that, hopefully and in all most plausible scenarios, is good. But if I say I'm going to hit 3% growth, no matter what, I can promise you that the stuff we do on the way to that 3% will have repercussions for years and decades to come. And I just cannot fathom that concept, because I think is an incredibly poor way to run an economy around a company, around a household or your personal finances, because actually, you shouldn't be dependent on achieving specific numbers to have the ability to come out feeling good on the other side, there should be other variables that dictate that. So I'm very, very aligned with your thinking. But you know, my understanding is that big compared to yours, but the mindset tall is totally with how I see it. And for me, 2030 is an extremely plausible date for the end of the debt cycle, because I think that we're already at the edges of the fraying of people feel, and most importantly, a lot of very smart people I know have spent years in finance are coming round to the view that you know what paper currencies are, not all they were set out to be, because at the end of the day, they're only backed by the faith of the US government. And how much can I trust that? Now, if I buy a 10 year note,

Unknown: 1:16:52

it means a huge amount that at least the framing of the thinking fits in with you, because the monetary side of it is something I do not understand at all the cycles. I know they exist, but I don't personally understand them, if I may just highlight a book, which I'm sure you'll be familiar with, is debt the first 5000 years. David Graber and he essentially talks he has another pattern over long periods of time, a pendulum swings between debt based monetary systems and credit based monetary systems. So this is a kind of segue to the synthesis part of it. But let's you know before I go there, just to mention that a book has covered this already, the whole growth thing is all linked to a debt based monetary system, and it simply can no longer continue. We've reached the limits of growth, which was announced in 1970 but it doesn't mean so there's a degrowth movement. I'm not in favour of the degrowth movement only because a living system can never stop growing. When growth stops, the system dies. So the form of growth changes. We'll get into that when we get into synthesis, if we still have some time,

Richard Busellato: 1:18:04

absolutely, and it's a great shame, David is not here my partner, because, you know, he would probably have a much better understanding than I have at the level you operate. But he came up with an expression, which at first, it sounded a little bit wacky to me, but actually, tall is totally with what I'm expressing in financial terms, and you were expressing at the very top level. And that's growth at Nature's pace. Nature moves along. We get the harvest, the tree gets bigger. And you know, there is growth, whether we like it or not, and I don't like the degrowth movement either, for that reason, and for the fact that it's very hard to sell a defeatist story to people. Growth is good. It's just how we define it and how we achieve it. We should have a debate about

Dr. David Ko: 1:18:54

exactly, but I think we also we do need to be careful, like the degrowth movement of very well intentioned and they've come up with a model that they're trying to get people behind, and then they're not wrong. It's just, there's so many people with different ideas, and it's just, what's, how do we move forward? It's a right idea, you know? And so I think that, but I think the defined, defining, I love David's, we've got to grow at Nature's face. It's the simplest thing.

Richard Busellato: 1:19:20

Yeah, and you know, if we have a kind of a warm year with, you know, lots of rain, the Corvis will probably be a bit bigger than the drought later next year, but we will still have something we just don't know that. It's 1.3% and if we miss that, we go out and we explain what we did wrong. It's like, No, you take what you get, you make sure you run the kind of policies and the ideas that are linked to us somehow being able to keep this planet intact, and, you know, ensure that our children and grandchildren and their children are. Also has a place where they can thrive and look to tomorrow in a prosperous way, yeah.

Unknown: 1:20:07

Well, maybe that is a good segue to move into the synthesis, which is the better part, this is the good news, part of the call it took us.

Joe Augustin: 1:20:17

Oh, my goodness.

Unknown: 1:20:21

Now, if I may straight, the synthesis will happen based on historical patterns. So the only question in my mind is how quickly this will happen, and if, when I lay out what I think is unfolding. Now, really, the invitation is for us to consciously make a choice to focus on the synthesis. So yes, the bad stuff is happening. We're not going to stop that. In my view, all of the symptoms on Andrea's very detailed and, you know, accurate diagram of the polycrisis, although there are people passionately working on every single one of those systems, I personally no longer believe, and I was in the space where we can stop climate change, we can end world poverty, all of those things. I no longer believe that it can happen, but that a reset will stop all of it anyway, and the reset is going to happen based on history, and the only thing that we have control over is the length of time during which we go through potentially uncomfortable period of time. So this synthesis is an invitation for anyone who feels inspired by this sort of stuff to try and make this happen as quickly as possible. So firstly, what I think is will happen is that a global shutdown similar to what we had during COVID will occur this time, you will be forced to accept a new kind of currency. So even those who have investments pension funds, you will be forced to switch them into whatever the new currency is, whether it's a central bank, digital currency, or a private issue, privately issued currency. And the risk is, if you don't make the switch, then you lose out your your existing Fiat based in investments are worth nothing overnight. The cost of accepting the new currency is, of course, that it's linked to the various surveillance systems, so you now ended up in what they call a technocracy, and in the mind map, there's a massive amount of research, videos, books that have been written around explaining what a techno feudal future will look like. We won't go into the detail of that because I personally believe that it doesn't have a chance of succeeding long term when we take the evolutionary impulse into consideration this concept of growth of living systems, my worldview is that all technological solutions will eventually succumb to their own internal inconsistencies. It may not look like it when we see the progress in the AI race and technological developments and so on. It looks as if it's going incredibly well, but there are inbuilt inconsistencies that will eventually cause it to collapse based purely on history. That's not my opinion. That's a cycle that is unfolding. So the synthesis, then taking into account David grab his work that a pendulum swings from debt based monetary systems into credit based monetary systems is something called a municipal mutual aid credit. Now this takes into account a whole lot of work happening in the modern monetary theory space. It takes into account what's called a bio regional movement, which is groups of people that, on their own accord, without being coordinated through public or private sector, they coming together and restoring the health of rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, soil, huge amounts of people all over the world, again, in the research database, plenty of examples of what's happening. But these individuals are not being paid. There's no formal incentive mechanism. Most of them are struggling incredibly with funding, mainly because they're trying to fund their if you view the activities happening in that space as weak signals of what's emerging. So it's the entirely new system that's completely separate from what is ending. And the reason they're struggling to get funding is because they the they are values based, which in essence goes against this whole class based system that is ending. And I've been involved in this space, I've attempted to raise funding. It's really challenging. We can unpack what the reasons are, but at a very high level, it's because this group represents the potential of a global values based civilization that's emerging, and so a mutual credit currency name. That I can mention here is Will radick, who's based in Kenya, if I'm not mistaken, but he's currently doing work all over the world, specifically in the US all around mutual aid, forms of monetary systems based on a principle called promise theory. And the way I see it unfolding is that you'll have bioregional groups of people. This is the place based things that Andrea was mentioning earlier. They're coming together motivated by something within their region, be it a river a lake, an ocean, a mountain, and they're issuing their own currency, but this time, it's not debt based, and I'm specifically excluding the majority of crypto based tokens, because their design still follows debt based thinking. If you think about Bitcoin, it's created the class arrangement. You've got people at the top with the highest numbers of Bitcoin. So that's still a debt based monetary system. Mutual credit is where you promising to commit something to the community, commit something to the mountain, to the ocean, to the restoration of some geophysical thing in your bio region, and currencies will then be issued against it. Now there's emerging examples of this, but it's all very early, and all of them are still privately issued. So invariably, it's either a non profit or a privately owned company that are issuing the tokens. And they haven't, I'm generalising here. There are exceptions, but they haven't generally experienced the velocity. Velocity is the speed at which the currency flows through a community. They haven't really achieved high velocity, because there are very few places where you can go and spend those tokens. So I believe what will emerge is municipalities issuing these mutual credit tokens as funding dries up for them, all municipalities are struggling. Currently, they'll issue their own currencies, and an example of this came out of World War One, World War Two, I beg your pardon, the Vogel, which is not Austrian experiment. So we've got an example to follow. There's no municipality that's doing this yet, except for one small municipality in Brazil, and I can share some detail around them, but this model will improve over time, you know, mature, it'll become more accepted, so that as your debt based currency eventually implodes, or as the reset is announced, you potentially have municipalities stepping into this space and saying, You know what, we're going to issue our own token. We're going to get the people of our municipality, which is a place boundaried entity, and get them restoring all of the activities. And we can incentivize those activities through a token that we issue, and we will accept that token as payment for municipal services, which currently, obviously doesn't happen. You can only pay for your municipal services in fiat currency. A lot of this has to do with belief systems. So what we believe about money, this is not going to be a simple shift, but at a high level, let me stop there. That's, in essence, what I believe. The synthesis is groups of people in bio regions around the world absolutely committed to restoring some of the damage that has been done during our very rapid growth period, because we had to extract from the planet to fuel that growth. And so, from a, again, a high level perspective, how the evolutionary impulse has driven the progress of this living system is that it intentionally allowed the creation of class based societies, because class based societies end up consuming a lot, and to in order to support consumption, we had to have high levels of production. So we've had this cycle of class based civilizations, constantly allowing the human species to grow and improve and all the rest. Now we're reaching a shift in how we grow, which is no longer if we think about teenagers, who grow very rapidly physically, and they eventually reach the maximum growth, and now they start growing intellectually. They go to university, they develop their cognitive skills. And so as a species, we're going to develop our spiritual or even planetary cognitary skills. How do we now focus our full attention on restoration of the planet and develop our mycelial consciousness, which will open up all kinds of spiritual angles which we can't currently consider while we caught in the material consciousness phase. Let me stop there. How is that landing? At a very

Dr. David Ko: 1:29:50

I was talking about bio region regeneration as an opportunity last year when I did a series of videos. But one of the other ideas my oldest son has started. National Service. My next son will be starting it, and I think something like an environmental service. So all children, when they leave school for two years, they're obligated to go out and regenerate the land that they're part of, right? I think that would be a really and learn by basic life skills and all that sort of stuff. And then you could bring in something like, you know, they all get paid a basic income. So basic income, universal basic income, that all starts to sort of happen, which could, could, could be the Fiat sort of currency that you're talking about. But, you know, David and Richard talk about nature's coins, so that, yeah, I totally there's, there's so many different things you've just said there that resonate with me for sure. Richard,