environmental studies

If people cannot change the commodities society depends on, then protest alone will never produce lasting change.

Protest is good at signaling pain.
It is not designed to reroute capital.

That’s not a moral judgment. It’s a structural one.

Modern power does not primarily respond to outrage. It responds to demand signals, procurement contracts, financing structures, and commodity dependency. As long as the same materials flow through the same systems, the same outcomes repeat, regardless of who is in office or what slogans trend.

This is why so many movements burn hot and fade.
They change language, but not inputs.
They change narratives, but not supply chains.
They raise awareness, but leave money flowing exactly where it always has.

Real change begins when money moves differently.

Jobs follow commodities.
Communities follow jobs.
Political behavior follows economic reality.

My work focuses on building that missing middle layer, where social intention becomes economic participation. Through platforms like nowweevolve.com and thebioeconomyfoundation.org, I’m working on redirecting consumer demand, public funding, and private capital toward regenerative materials and domestic production systems that create real work, especially in rural communities.

This isn’t anti-protest. It’s post-protest.

If we want durable change, we have to give people a way to participate economically in the solution. Not just speak, but buy, build, fund, and work their way into a different system.

Social change scales when money flow changes.
Everything else is commentary.

Race and IQ. I recently got dinner at a hole-in-the-wall asian spot with a geneticist named Razib Khan. Over noodles, and with a concerned glance over his shoulder, he admitted that the science is clear: race is absolutely tied to IQ. Jews are the smartest. Pretty much everyone on the continent of Africa is at the bottom.

This fact alone is controversial, but we have to be able to talk about it, and here’s why:

I nodded, and asked: How many generations does this take to change?

Razib: As little as three generations. For example, the Egyptians used to be the smartest, but a century of inbreeding knocked them to the bottom. Incest drops IQ by 10 points in the first generation. After that the effect weakens.

This is huge. At first glance, the controversial statement seems like a slamdunk for racists the world over. But dig into the details, and you find out 3 generations is enough to change things—this means that race and IQ are not inherently linked as far as we know, they’re just linked in today’s world, because of today’s policies and systems.

Knowing this could actually help us target where we need to focus our interventions for the next three decades. Let’s get us all up!

If I were King of the World. If I were King of the World and could change one thing (These are weird rules because a king obviously can change more than one thing, but I make the rules, so there.), I would

Ban Advertisement with the Exception of Word of Mouth.

Here are some benefits:

1. There is no more need to grab our data to serve us personalized ads.
2. There will be less ways to construct new needs to then sell us something.
3. Much less distraction in our environment, more safety.
4. Better products because it is harder to get customers to recommend your stuff than to place needs and desires in their heads, often subconsciously.
5. More local business, which will be better for the climate.
6. More privacy.

What do you think?

Is having children selfish or selfless? Controversial question/interesting discussion time!

Is having children a selfish or a selfless act?

I'll put my thoughts in comments - would love to hear yours :)

Who Really Benefited from the Pandemic Housing Boom? The housing debate often frames investors as the villains of Australia’s affordability crisis. It is easy to point to negative gearing, cheap credit and capital gains concessions and conclude that speculators drove the pandemic bubble and pocketed the windfall. But this misses the real transfer of wealth that occurred during the COVID years.

During the pandemic, investors accounted for roughly 30 per cent of housing purchases. Some did well, particularly those who bought established homes in markets that surged. But many others were caught out, not only by labour shortages, soaring material costs and stalled projects, but also by the rapid rise in interest rates that followed. As a class, investors did not profit nearly as much as is often assumed.

What really drove prices higher was a collision of extraordinary demand with constrained supply. Ultra-low interest rates, mortgage deferrals and direct stimulus programs such as JobKeeper and HomeBuilder supported household incomes and encouraged housing activity. These policies were necessary to keep the economy from collapsing during lockdowns, but we did not walk into them fully aware of the long-term consequences. Not only did they fuel demand, they also channelled activity into supply-constrained sectors like construction, where builders already faced material shortages and labour bottlenecks. Many firms simply could not deliver what was promised and went bankrupt under the strain, leaving buyers stranded.

With more buyers chasing fewer homes, and a building industry unable to expand supply, prices were pushed sharply higher.

So if both new investors chasing yield and first-home buyers entering at peak prices often ended up worse off, who actually gained? The biggest winners were long-term owner occupiers. Households that had purchased decades earlier, whether down-sizers cashing out or families simply holding, captured the largest windfall from the surge. In effect, they became accidental investors. In fact, anyone who has ever bought a home is, technically, an investor because they have put capital into an asset regardless of if they were expecting it to hold or increase in value. The fact that so many owner occupiers closely follow the value of their property shows a level of awareness that they are investors, whether they choose that label or not.

The real wealth transfer was not to the people most often blamed. It was to those who already owned, and who were best placed to benefit from extraordinary policy support and tight supply. Unless we recognise this, we will keep misdiagnosing the roots of today’s crisis and blaming the wrong people for it.

A List of Civilizational Well-Being Topics that I believe we can help make happen better.  

You can talk about whatever you want on UpTrust!

And, here is a list of some of the conversations we think have the highest potential for civilizational wellbeing—topics that are currently highly polarized and difficult for our society to make sense of and work with. We believe UpTrust can help make these conversations happen and lead to practical positive outcomes for better futures!

I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts and also see what you think is missing. My apologies on the boring tone—aka the obvious use of AIs to help make this.

Cluster 1. Personal & Cultural Development

Focus: How individuals develop, thrive, and find purpose in a rapidly changing world—and how that personal growth intertwines with collective well-being, cultural evolution, and consciousness shifts.

Meaning & Purpose

• Meaning and purpose—especially in a world with accelerating job automation / emerging AI superintelligence
• Personal adaptation to insane pace of change and informational overload
• Personal development and adult education
  • Polarized examples: hustle culture vs. anti-ambition, “Follow your passion” vs. pure pragmatism, meaning vs. material necessity

Mental Health and Wellbeing

• Relationship with medication & holistic approaches

• Non-standard approaches often dismissed or uncritically embraced (psychedelics, plant medicine, shamanic practices); also legal and cultural issues (appropriated or isolated)

• Integrating indigenous, evidence-based, and postmodern methods; understanding interdependencies of four-quadrant approaches

• Longevity research (Bryan Johnson), framing and relationship to death and dying 

Spiritual/Philosophical Growth

• Traditional wisdom sources, including religion, is often either dismissed entirely or uncritically romanticized
  • Understanding and harnessing / protecting from the influence of egregores (eg: antimemetics)

  • Reality/unreality of morphic resonance, how it works in social systems

    Trans-rational epistemologies (mysticial knowing/unknowing, somatic intelligence & embodiment, dreams, art—including modern archetypes like Marvel movies and cultural phenomenon like Reality TV)

• Ethics and nonduality

  • The nature and role of God and "what's of ultimate concern
• Varieties of nonduality & mystical experience; also related to practice v no practice, drug/plant teachers, etc

• Post-scarcity consciousness, transhumanism debates (enhancement enthusiasm vs. bioconservativism)

• Deep ecological awareness and orienting to Earth as a wholistic living system with a deep-time/big-history view

Power Dynamics and Leadership

• What is good leadership? Who are inspiring global leaders?

• Holding the imperfection of historical exemplars while seeking new paradigms

• Linking personal growth to institutional/societal change (inner work + outer work)

• Evolving collective consciousness: measurement, culture, and “what to do with it”

• What are the ethics of various uses and abuses of power? What are the limits, if any, and how we do we hold accountability? What's the role of community, government, media, social media, religion and spiritual teachers in all of this?

• Cultivating next-level leaders in developing world, not just in USA, etc

Family & Community Structures

• Addressing the breakdown of traditional communities and families

• Balancing preservation vs. adaptation in cultural/family contexts (often polarized between traditionalist and progressive extremes)

• The role of religion, the evolution of religion

Cluster 2. Knowledge, Sensemaking & Governance

Focus: Who we trust and why. How we create, validate, and share knowledge. How we govern ourselves, make decisions, and coordinate at scale.

Truth & Decision-Making

• Including learning from experts and experience, and what’s good about gatekeepers and tastemakers

• Expert advice trapped between technocrat worship and populist rejection

• Research/academic system reform (peer review, reproducibility crises)

• Informing government policy, bridging academia and real-world governance

• Prediction markets and forecasting, including how to use for improving collective decisions in public and private sectors at all scales

Social Media, Information Warfare & Propaganda

• Tracking trust

• Sorting signal from noise in social media

• Understanding algorithmic incentives and echo chambers

• Balancing free speech with preventing disinformation

• Media business models underrepresented in discourse

• Info warfare and propaganda coverage

Epistemology & Values

• Ontological updates: reality as participatory/cocreative

• Automatic/unconscious defenses from materialism

• Trans-rational approaches to knowing (mentioned earlier)

• Values/worldview integration: bridging ideological divides

• Moral realism, ethical alignment, etc

Digital Security & Collective Intelligence

• Cybersecurity, data governance, protecting critical infrastructure

• Split between tech solutionism and traditional processes

• Non-local governance systems (network states, global consciousness) and how they interact with local sovereignty

• Reconciling “Sovereignty and world government” questions, as well as new forms of governance like Holacracy and “Teal” organizations
  
  

Cluster 3. Economic & Physical Infrastructure

Focus: Tangible systems—economics, housing, healthcare, education, energy, emergency preparedness—that shape day-to-day life, and the cultural, policy, and technological frameworks that sustain these systems.

Economic Systems & Markets

• Meaning and purpose in work; personal meaning in an automated world

• Costs, wages, housing costs, making a living

• Current discourse often splits between “everything is fine” vs. “collapse imminent”

• Measuring and addressing economic inequality (meritocracy vs. “system rigged”)

  • Hatred and demonization of the superwealthy, realities of class and upward mobility, etc

• Housing affordability crisis (“bubble” vs. “new normal”)

• Job automation and future of work/UBI

• Market design for public goods

• Innovation funding: “VC solves all” vs. “only public goods matter”

• Digital currency/payment system evolution; cryptocurrency debates (maximalists vs. CBDC control advocates)

• Intergenerational wealth transfer

• Monetary policy and the role of governments & orgs like the IMF

• Global financial flows, tax systems

Personal Finance Culture

• FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) extremists vs. consumer culture

• Balancing spiritual/ethical dimensions of money and work

Healthcare & Education

• Healthcare access and delivery, COVID origins, vaccine debates

• Alternative vs. conventional medicine, universal right vs. market solutions

• Education reform (standardization vs. personalization; religious vs. secular; globally—cultural and developmental questions; role of government, school of choice, charter schools, etc)

• Entrenched incentive landscapes and regulatory hurdles

• The role of AI and technology in education, especially globally

Cities, Infrastructure, & Emergency Response

• Law enforcement reform and justice system design (defund vs. defend, “systemic racism,” crime prevention)

• Building livable cities and homes

• Public transportation design—traffic is horrific and massively polluting; the role autonomous vehicles, etc

• Food sustainability, water security

• Clean, reliable energy: nuclear advocates vs. renewables purists

• Preparing for disasters (supply chain resilience, local emergency systems, pandemic preparedness and various questions on rights and responsibilities, individual v collective)

• Internet and tech that serves people (digital infrastructure, cybersecurity)
  
  

Cluster 4. Global Commons & Long-Term Civilizational Challenges

Focus: Planetary-scale and existential issues: AI risk, climate change, geopolitics, resource depletion, space exploration—let’s ensure civilizational flourishing over the long term.

AI Alignment

• AI Alignment debates: dismissive vs. apocalyptic, government v free-market, so much here

Existential Risks & Technology Governance

• Stopping the next pandemic: surveillance state vs. individual liberty

• Synthetic biology

• Nanotech

• Nuclear war,

• Space weather events, asteroid risks

Climate & Environment

• Climate change: alarmism vs. denial, adaptation vs. mitigation, various solutions and framings, envisioning possibilities and how to get there

• What do with global public goods? Eg: air, oceans, forests; water rights; peace; etc

  • Ocean ecosystem management (acidification, overfishing, pollution, coral reefs)

  • Resource depletion forecasts range from denial to doom

Population & Migration

• Population sustainability discussions, including birth and the role of families and space travel, etc.

• Migration, refugees, and borders, racism

Geopolitics & International Relations

• China (eg: discussions frequently lack nuance)

• Russia/Ukraine (eg: lacks context, extremely drama triangle-y)

• The Middle East (eg: Us vs. them, tribalism, historical of context (and lack), lack of empathy on all sides, sloganism, "if you're not with us you're against us," etc.)

• Role of US Military, “Threat of WWIII”

• Sovereignty vs. world government

  • aforementioned network states, opt-in legal codes, etc

• The rise of terrorism and non-state actors, especially how they coordinate and grow using distributed online systems and attract culturally disaffected

Space Development & Exploration

• Commercialization, space-based resources (asteroid mining, space-based solar)

• Post-scarcity economics and cosmic evolution

• Ethical dimensions of space colonization

What's good about Trump? I don't follow (American national) politics a ton, but I know Trump is an incredibly divisive figure who just got convicted of 34 felony counts, while still being favored as the Republican candidate for the next presidential race.

 What's good about him, what he's done, and his policies? For example, less death in foreign wars—even the biased ChatGPT admits:

Trump's foreign policy led to fewer foreign deaths due to a reduction in large-scale military engagements, and his administration did not initiate new large-scale wars or military interventions—a significant departure from previous administrations that engaged in extensive military campaigns, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

When it comes "the global warming debate," there are often third ways that are ignored. Often the framing is global warming and climate deniers or something like that.

but it seems like there are obviously multiple perspectives here, and these two black and white boxes keep us from really seeing potential solutions.

Bjorn Lomborg for example believes in man-made climate change, but also doesn’t like the alarmism. Although he cherry picks data like he accuses others of, he also I think rightfully points out lots of flaws in the arguments that help us identify solutions. Much of the hurricane damage increase over time is because we’re building bigger and more expensive houses in hurricane alleys; for this problem, we can stop building there; everybody stopping flying altogether until 2100 delays increases the increase by a few weeks, so stopping flying isn’t the solution. Often the solutions are smaller, more local, less sexy: want less polar bears to die? Increase regulation on poaching. (Polar bear populations are up over the past decade because of this, apparently). I would love to identify and popularize these solutions, so they are spoken in the same breath as global warming rather than it being all gloom and doom and end of the world.

There are real tricky questions about what we’re trying to preserve and for whom, as well. If all we care about are humans and climate migration, then building infrastructure in places like Haiti and even evolving to coal power would be more helpful.

Finally they learned to cut off people's mics. Hot take: If the media wasn’t so Green and did this in 2016, I think Hillary would have won.

What do you think are the biggest planetary potentials? I want to think of it in a bunch of ways, but one is through the lens of things we want to improve, eg:

1) What are the biggest problems/threats/embarrassments? and another is

2) What are the greatest potentials? I'll post some examples in the comments

A podcast about more joy. I’m entertaining the idea of rebooting my podcast and having a season of episodes that explore different ways of being that lead to experiencing more joy.

I’m particularly interested in hearing about ways that people don’t often associate with feeling joy. For instance, I had a recent experience where I got to express my anger, take up space, and be more vocal. It’s not a thing I would normally do because I’ve been conditioned to keep things in and be more soft-spoken. But having had that experience, I felt a greater sense of freedom and aliveness. It freed me to speak up in other situations which led me to feel more joy.

I also want to explore what it’s like to lead with joy, to prioritize joy.
(I have it in my body to prioritize being responsible.)

What other angles/perspectives might be worth exploring?
Do you have any experiences/stories you’d like to share on the show?

Racism through a developmental lens. unfinished draft…
note: I’m totally uninformed here…

• Red: Does this benefit me?

• Amber: My race is simply better (or worse) than yours. We perpetuate it because that’s good.

• Orange: Racism is a thing we transcend by being worldcentric and meritocratic; we perpetuate it by constantly looking at everything through the racism lens.

• Green: Systemic racism is everywhere (and at the root of many of our social problems); we transcend it by balancing the scales with education and programs to help the victims and stop the perpetrators; we perpetuate it by taking advantage of our privileges, ignoring it, and doing nothing.

• Teal: Systemic racism is real, but it’s mostly an unconscious self-organizing system that’s perpetuated because of the incentives that keep things how they are. We transcend by owning our projection, and by setting up systems that reward non-racism for each level of development in the currency that level values.

• Turquoise: We never transcend racism, it’s a construct we enact through conscious embracing and boundarying/channeling or we enact through ignorance.

All these are frames that enact world-experiences that overlap, and they’re all us; these frames keep us from being in awareness and seeing awareness as the stuff the frames are made of-which is the way out of the self-referential self refuting trap of this frame into unity of experience…

note: This doesnt mean everyone who’s using the surface language of systemic racism or whatever is actually at that level—for example there’s a red green alliance that uses Green language because it benefits them directly; there’s an amber-green alliance that uses green language to make their in-group good/better and make others wrong/bad.

Metatation - rant - is it . Is Metatation a thing? I’ve been using it as a mantra during meditation. Somehow the metatation mantra helps me calm down all the meta’ing always seem to be do’ing. Metatation has made my mediation practice more fun. Metatation is almost a state of mind that often takes me into too much awareness. Is that possible>? Is too much awareness a thing? Probably not. Probably some complex term to summarize the sensation. But too much awareness does feel like a real thing and overwhelming specially with the sense of sensory awareness. Has anyone heard the term HSP? Highly Sensitive People: which am probably that, can feel like too much awareness of the environment: the noises, the lights, the temperatures, the smells, can be too much for some while other people in the same environment are not bothered by it. Then add on top that awareness, awareness of ecosystems out of harmony and awareness of inequalities and unjustnesses (like to make up words) and in the words of Kristen Wigg: Welcome to me.

Metatation on the app itself:
I am noticing as wirting this that the auto correct feature in this window as a type are not working like i’m use to via text and email. Which is showing me i’m not a great typer, nor do i spell all that well left to my own devices.

In the background of this post, is the metatating that i’m writing a post and imagining if it will be read, how it will be recieved and that it’s a new app and in beta testing. And that i before e, except after c (sorry to non-american educated peeps, if that’s not a thing you got placed in your brain at a young age). received: successfully typed it without autocorrect. Seriously i feel like my keyboard is broken. Oh and also noticing sometimes after the end of the sentence and the period, starting a new sentence, it doesn’t auto make the first letter of the sentence a capital letter.

I’m pretty sure i didn’t make up metatation, but i think i did, at least it felt like it happened that way as a new experience in my world. But metatation.com is taken to help design websites.

Metatation of you reading this:
Was it a waste of your time to take this in? Does that question make it so. Without asking if it was a waste, was it not, but after asking if it, now is it? These types of wonderings.. never ends, is it fun or is it anxiety being acted out?

The end.

And it really is my keyboard! the letter i barely works on my laptop and guess that never noticed as most of the time the autocorrect fixes it.

How to do the basics when your life feels like a dumpster fire? I’m working through some super deep shit in therapy right now. I found out that my dad is a diagnosed Covert Vulnerable Narcissist and I’m going back through all the memories in which I have him filed in my mind as a victim and looking through what I now know reality to be. It’s super duper disorienting and intimidating; my inner world is a mix of emptiness and everything out of place, and my coping skills are patchy.

One of today’s coping skills has been watching videos of a dude detailing very dirty messy cars. Seeing a literal version of what I’m attempting to do in my internal world seems to help somehow.

And watching videos of people playing NES Super Mario Bros. How am I only just now noticing that Bowser is a gay leather bear?