It’s not often you get to cheer on a podcast you’re a guest on — but here we are!

The Suspicious Minds podcast has just been nominated for two Webby Awards (often called the Oscars of the Internet, apparently):

🏆 Podcast: Limited Series & Specials — Documentary
🏆 Best New Podcast: News, Business & Society

And they’re going up against Google, Apple, NBCUniversal, CNN and National Geographic, which for an independent outfit is a wild achievement.

Season 1, AI and Psychosis, went into the unsettling territory where AI is bumping up against the human mind — the delusions, the dependencies, the strange new ways these systems are seeding meaning (and unmaking it) in people’s lives. It’s been in Apple’s Top 100 Series for six months straight and is currently sitting in the Top 25 Science podcasts, which tells you something about how much the subject is in the water.

And yours truly is a guest on the upcoming Season 2 — AI and Apocalypse (more on that soon). We get into the bigger civilisational stuff — what AI is doing to our myths, our institutions, our sense of where all this is heading. A juicy heap to chew on.

If you fancy throwing a vote behind an independent team doing genuinely substantive work, public voting closes Thursday, 16 April — so don’t dawdle:

Documentary category (their best shot):
https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/limited-series-specials/documentary

Best New Podcast: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/features/best-new-podcast-news-business-society

In this conversation, I sit down with Aldrich to explore his ambitious synthesis of neuropsychology, Taoism and evolutionary mismatch theory. We begin with his SAD theory — separation, alienation and discord — which traces how the default mode network enables our separation from immediate experience, how the agricultural and industrial revolutions deepened our alienation from original conditions of living, and how dualistic belief systems have put us in active discord with the flow of nature. From there, Aldrich walks us through his seven principles of nature — creativity, process, relationship, wholeness, equilibrium, spontaneity and transformation (CPR WEST) — drawing on everything from Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience and George Northoff's neuroecology to Winnicott's theory of play and David Sloan Wilson's multi-level selection theory. We discuss how subcortical midline structures may hold the key to our original experience of connectedness, why Jung pointed to the brainstem as the seat of the Self, and how flow states and ego boundary dissolution reveal a deeper layer of consciousness beneath our everyday mental chatter. This is a conversation for anyone interested in what modern brain science and ancient wisdom traditions agree on — and what it might mean to actually live in alignment with nature.

🔗 Links
- Aldrich's website: https://www.drchancnc.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/draldrichan
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drchancnc
- Podcast (CNC Dialogues): https://www.youtube.com/@drchancnc
- Book — Seven Principles of Nature: https://geni.us/7principlesofnature

⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - Neuropsychology meets Taoism
00:43 The new book: Seven Principles of Nature and the CPR WEST acronym
03:58 The SAD theory: separation, alienation and discord
04:53 The default mode network and how we spend half our day mind wandering
06:29 The triple network: DMN, salience and central executive
10:05 The boat metaphor: sailors, spotlights and fishermen
12:58 Separation as a natural phase: the DMN pulling us from immediacy
15:16 Alienation and evolutionary mismatch theory
17:21 Movement mismatch: the Hadza walk 14,500 steps, we manage 4,500
19:09 Social connection as the most obvious mismatch
21:07 The agricultural revolution's unanticipated consequences
27:44 Discord and dualism: when belief systems contradict nature
31:01 The nature–culture debate: is a McDonald's nugget natural?
36:23 CPR WEST unpacked: creativity, process, relationship, wholeness, equilibrium, spontaneity, transformation
39:14 Creativity and the principle of uncertainty
41:18 Certainty is the death of a question
43:55 Vipassana, curiosity and reframing the stress response
45:07 Two stress pathways: adrenaline, cortisol and the loop that won't close
51:06 Jordan Peterson, Dan Siegel and the universal truth of chaos and order
52:57 Relationship: hyper-scanning, synchronised brain waves and neuroecology
54:03 The selfish gene vs. David Sloan Wilson's multi-level selection
57:59 Ego boundary dissolution: where you end and the rock begins
1:00:58 Subcortical midline structures and our original nature
1:02:04 Jung, Gary Clark and archetypes as brainstem activity
1:05:28 Jung called himself a Taoist
1:06:03 Shadow integration, Neumann and the principle of wholeness
1:08:42 Dynamic equilibrium, eustress and finding your set point
1:12:03 Flow states: jazz pianists and the subcortical midline structures (again)
1:13:52 Spontaneity and play: Winnicott, Panksepp and the rat tickler
1:18:26 Transformation: co-evolving with natural currents
1:19:52 Wrapping up and what Aldrich is working on next
1:22:05 Where to find Aldrich
1:23:14 Guest recommendations: Iain McGilchrist, Mark Solms, Lou Cozolino

In this return visit, we dive deep into who actually creates the dream – the Invisible Storyteller that isn’t your conscious self. We explore the neuroscience behind this, discussing the Default Mode Network, Salience Network, and Executive Control Network, and what they reveal about dreaming, meaning-making, and the deeply non-egoic nature of consciousness. Erik shares clinical insights into Dissociative Identity Disorder as evidence of an underlying organising principle, we tangle with what it means for consciousness to be “non-egoic,” and we work through his groundbreaking definition of archetypes through Cognitive Metaphor Theory. It’s a conversation that challenges everything you think you know about who you are.

🔗 Links
- Erik’s website: https://erikgoodwyn.com
- Erik’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theimaginarium

⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - The Invisible Storyteller
01:39 Greeting and reflections on James’s reading
03:35 What is the Invisible Storyteller?
06:01 Jung’s avoidance of reductionism through mythic language
08:16 The Default Mode Network and dreaming
10:27 The three networks: default mode, salience, and executive control
15:27 Memory consolidation, identity formation, emotional regulation, future planning
18:29 Is the Invisible Storyteller the unconscious?
22:18 Deeper processing independent of conscious ego
25:58 Recurrent dreams and the role of conscious engagement
28:40 The Invisible Storyteller as meaning-making
31:07 Dreams versus storytelling: memory Olympics and metaphor
36:58 The role of the right hemisphere and symbolism
41:04 The Invisible Storyteller as process or personality?
44:18 Dissociative Identity Disorder and organising principles
50:33 DID as evidence of an organising intelligence
55:43 The specificity of dissociative amnesia
58:22 Non-egoic consciousness and emergent properties
1:02:14 Consciousness arising from complex systems
1:05:44 AI image generation as analogy for dream creation
1:10:56 The Invisible Storyteller as personality versus ancestry and genome
1:15:32 Jungian vision and updating Jung’s theory
1:18:40 Archetypes through Cognitive Metaphor Theory
1:22:37 Spontaneous thoughts and universal challenges
1:25:58 Primary metaphors and innate mappings
1:29:20 Danger and darkness as innate mappings
1:32:17 Definition of archetype and falsifiability
1:34:47 Building on Gary Clark’s work and Anthony Stevens
1:36:25 Gratitude and future conversations

The first discussion of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals book club is this Sunday, so I’ve been doing some close reading (and re-reading) of Nietzsche in preparation.

For those who want to join, there are still some spots, or if you want to join for the discussions on the second and third essays, you can do that separately (link to the series is here for more information: Interintellect link)

Anyway, I’ve been having a series of lightbulb moments as I’ve been reading. It’s been years since I’ve read the book, and I’m coming at it with different (more educated, shrewd, intellectually playful) eyes. Here’s some:

• Nietzsche’s Genealogy is weirdly like Marx — probably because it’s got that Hegel stench about it

• The “blond beast” is actually a lion, and he talks about Japanese and Arabic blond beasts. So — NOT a racial category; someone should have told the Nazis

• Nietzsche takes a sly dig at Freud before Freud was Freud — but Freud had the last laugh

• This book is less a work of history and more Nietzsche’s own unconscious on the page — it’s voyeuristic

I might polish these into some polished form at some point. For now, you can read them all over in our subscriber chat where I’m dumping these swarthy pearls:

In this conversation, I sit down with Adriana to explore one of the most under-examined questions in contemporary culture: what happens when society is built around a linear, continuous model of productivity — and half the population runs on a fundamentally cyclical one? Drawing on her own journey from Brazil through Hong Kong and India to off-grid life in rural Australia, Adriana maps the hormonal landscape of the female cycle and argues that the oscillation between estrogen and progesterone doesn’t just produce moods — it produces a distinct mode of subjectivity, perception, and thought. We explore the cultural erasure of rites of passage, the psychological costs of the contraceptive pill, the wisdom encoded in perimenopause and menopause, and why Adriana believes the matriarch — the post-menopausal woman — may be the missing counter-energy to the relentless forward drive of modernity. The conversation moves through evolutionary biology, embodied philosophy, grassroots community-building, and genuine hope for a more rhythmically intelligent future.

Check out Adriana’s work:

CLab

A cyclically informed culture in the making where we co-design systems that integrate the menstrual cycle, and more generally, a cyclical worldview.

By Adriana Forte

⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro - Our Bellingen Connection
5:41 How Adriana ended up on this journey
12:56 Critique of Modernity and Birth Interventions
15:23 Rhythms and female psychology
24:38 A map of the menstrual cycle
39:11 The Influence of Modernity on Women’s Psyche
45:59 Transgender and phenomenology of hormones
52:01 The oscillating nature of female psychology
59:25 The spell of the System on modern psychology
1:09:15 The challenge of organising around cyclical society
1:15:03 Adriana’s Matriarch Book
1:18:43 Where to get more from Adriana
1:19:39 Adriana’s Guest Recommendation

Last night I was on a Zoom call with 8 or 9 people talking about Karl Popper’s The Open Society, debating the merits of his attack on Plato and whether Plato was right about democracy decaying into tyranny. It was epic.

Now imagine how good it’ll be when we talk about Nietzsche’s essay on the origins of good/bad and good/evil out of Master Morality and Slave Morality. Or about how our moral values aren’t timeless, universal truths given by God or discovered by reason, but merely the victorious ideology of the weak.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?

If so, then join me over on Interintellect on March 15th, where I’ll be hosting a discussion on the first essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. It’s the first in a three-part series where we’ll be reading through Nietzsche’s most influential (and readable) work.

Nietzsche lovers, haters, true believers, and devout never-Nietzsches all very welcome.

For more information and to reserve your place: here’s the page for the first discussion on the 15th of March, and here’s the landing page for the whole series of three monthly episodes. And here are the dates for the whole series:

• Sun, March 15 (12pm New York / 5pm London): Essay 1: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”

• Sun, April 12 (12pm New York / 5pm London): Essay 2: “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like

• Sun, May 10 (12pm New York / 5pm London): Essay 3: What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?

I’m running a 3-session book club over Zoom on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals on Interintellect.

A friend recently introduced me to Interintellect — a platform reviving the tradition of salons and serious intellectual discussion — …

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I’ve been digging into the (surprisingly) sad, fallible story of Freud and Jung’s falling out recently. It’s a lot more human than you’d expect — with all the love and pettiness that humanness brings.

More on that soon. Today, I want to zoom in on one rich slice of this Freud/Jung story overflowing with this humanness. It’s an argument they had three years before their falling out in 1912, and the letter Freud wrote to Jung in April 1909 about it.

The synchronistic context

A little context: Jung visited the maestro in Vienna shortly before this letter, and they had a bit of a tiff.

Freud asked Jung to cool it on the occult stuff. Freud had a good mind for strategy and optics — learned in the trenches of wholesale ostracism he had spent his career in. There were already enough challenges getting respect from the scientific establishment as it was; Freud felt the woo-woo voodoo was only going to make it easier for the critics to dismiss the movement. Jung got a little triggered. Here’s his account of what went down:

“While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot — a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon.”

“Oh come,” he exclaimed. “That is sheer bosh.”

“It is not,” I replied. “You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another loud report!” Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.” (Jung 1989, p.155)

This is how Jung recalled the event decades later in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He said that Freud merely “stared aghast” at him, and they never spoke of the event again. But Jung’s memory was playing tricks on him because Freud did speak of it again, and this is where our letter from April 16th 1909 comes in.

Fatherly Freud

Throughout the letter (which you can read in full here1), we get Freud’s hurt paternal feelings. It reads a lot like a father mourning his rebellious teenage son. It’s equal parts sad and endearing:

“It is remarkable that on the same evening that I formally adopted you as an eldest son, anointing you as my successor and crown prince — in partibus infidelium [in the lands of the unbelievers] — that then and there you should have divested me of any paternal dignity, and that the divesting seems to have given you as much pleasure as investing your person gave me. Now I am afraid that I must fall back again to the role of father towards you in giving you my views on poltergeist phenomena. I must do this because these things are different from what you would like to think.” (Jung 1989, p.361)

Poor Freud. Later on, after he lays out his arguments against Jung’s interpretation, we get more of these paternal vibes:

“I therefore don once more my horn-rimmed paternal spectacles and warn my dear son to keep a cool head and rather not understand something than make such great sacrifices for the sake of understanding. I also shake my wise grey locks over the question of psychosynthesis and think: Well, that is how the young folks are; they really enjoy things only when they need not drag us along with them, where with our short breath and weary legs we cannot follow.” (Jung 1989, p.362)

And from there, he goes on to make a repair attempt with Jung and show him some of his own superstitions in an attempt to bridge the divide. It warms my heart. It’s a mere sliver of a relationship, but there’s so much love in there and so much of the give and take and compromise of human relationship.

Of course, you can easily make the case for Freud the tyrant, ostracising Adler, Stekel, Rank, Ferenczi and of course Jung. That fits more with my old image of Freud and the picture that Jung paints of him in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Reading the letters though, the vibes are different. I see a man who loves another like a son and is hurt when the latter withdraws from him and rejects him. As we’ll see in the longer piece, the cause of their falling out is more on Jung’s side than Freud’s (for equally human reasons).

Jung’s charisma

In the letter, Freud admits the event “made a powerful impression upon me”, but he wasn’t sold (see: “that is sheer bosh”), and so, after Jung’s departure, he did some investigation. It is here that Freud uses a lovely turn of phrase that cracks open a whole can of worms on Jung that merits a deep study in itself. He says that when Jung left, he was free from “the spell of your personal presence”. Delicious.

This is something I’d love to write about in future — the personal charisma of Carl Jung. Such was Jung’s personal power that, in the moment, he convinced Freud that something supernatural had happened.

It brings to mind Max Weber’s distinction between the priests in the cities and magicians in the countryside. The priests were more like our academics — following the words of the holy books, highly literate and organised. The rural magicians, however, were charismatic (in fact, this usage of the term by Max Weber is where we get our modern concept of charisma from2).

In comparison to the dry academic authority of the priest, the authority of the magician type was more…magical. Their esteem came from otherworldly sources — altered states, visions, possession and journeys. The magicians were less academic theologians than ayahuasca-drunk, psychic channelling hypnotists. They were masters of ecstasy and trance, performing seeming miracles.

If all that makes you think of cult leaders, I’m right there with you. And Jung definitely had that cult leader charisma about him — that sense of an entrancing personality. Freud was a priest from the city; Jung was a magician from the wild Swiss hills.

If you’ve ever met a magician type, you’ll know what an unusual experience it is. Your perception of reality warps around these charismatic figures. I have a close friend cut from this cloth. Since we were teenagers, the joke in the group was that he was going to become a cult leader some day. Like Jung, he had his experiences with psychosis (his induced by a little too much DMT). He spent most of his 20s deep in Vipassana, working up to the 20- and 30-day silent retreats.

My friend was always a frustrating person to argue with because he was dead certain about everything he said. Best-case scenario, you’d wait a couple of weeks, and he’d be espousing your view, saying you’d been partly right but missing the critical piece he had since figured out. I’m making him sound like a terror, but he was (and is) also a delight, an incredibly loyal and caring friend and one of the more interesting people you’ll ever meet.

This kind of charisma is intoxicating. When you fall under the spell of such a magician, your sense of reality begins to shift, and the world becomes an enchanted place. Evidently, Jung had this Weberian charisma in spades.

If this theme of charisma interests you, you’ll really enjoy the podcast with Layman Pascal. And probably also the article on Weber’s three religious types (the third being the prophet). End of sidebar; back to letter.

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Back to the letter

To Jung’s mind, Freud dismissed his occult interests totally out of hand:

“Because of his materialistic prejudice, he rejected this entire complex of questions as nonsensical, and did so in terms of so shallow a positivism” (Jung 1989, p.155)

But that’s not what happened at all. As Jung himself admits, Freud did later go deep into the same subject; he “recognised the seriousness of parapsychology and acknowledged the factuality of “occult” phenomena.” That’s not a normal thing for a materialist positivist to do, and so if you’re looking for my official statement on the matter, I think Jung is being rather unfair to Freud here (as any true materialist positivist who is acquainted with Freud’s oeuvre will undoubtedly agree).

Anyway, after the spell of Jung’s presence had faded, Freud did some sciencing:

“At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never heard again after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge.)” (Jung 1989, p.361)

In the end, Freud dismissed the magical event, but despite this, he extended an olive branch to Jung, sharing an irrational superstition of his own:

“Now I shall exercise the privilege of my years to turn loquacious and tell you about one more matter between heaven and earth which cannot be understood. A few years ago I took it into my head that I would die between the ages of 61 and 62, which at that time seemed to leave me a decent period of grace. (To-day that leaves me only eight years still to go.) Shortly afterwards I made a trip to Greece with my brother, and it was absolutely uncanny to see how the number 61, or 62 in conjunction with 1 and 2, kept cropping up on anything that had a number, especially on vehicles. I conscientiously noted down these occasions. By the time we came to Athens, I was feeling depressed. At our hotel we were assigned rooms on the second floor, and I hoped I could breathe again — at least there could be no chance of No. 61. However, it turned out that my room was No. 31 (which, with fatalistic licence, I regarded as after all half of 61–62). This wilier and nimbler figure proved to be even better at dogging me than the first.

From that day until very recently the number 31 remained faithful to me, with a 2 all too readily associated with it. But since I also have in my psychic system regions in which I am merely avid for knowledge and not at all superstitious, I have attempted to analyse this conviction. Here it is. My conviction began in 1899. Two events coincided at that time. The first was my writing The Interpretation of Dreams (which, you know, is dated ahead to 1900); the second, my being assigned a new telephone number, which I have to this day: 14362. It is easy to establish a link between these two facts: in the year 1899, when I wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, I was 43 years old. What should be more obvious than that the other figures in my telephone number were intended to signify the end of my life, hence, 61 or 62? Suddenly there appears a method in this madness. The superstition that I would die between 61 and 62 turns out to be equivalent to the conviction that with the book on dreams I had completed my life work, needed to say no more, and could die in peace. You will grant that after this analysis it no longer sounds so nonsensical.” (Jung 1989, pp.362-3)

Don’t you love it? History tries to put a sombre visage on our rise from sordid ignorance into the light of reason. But then you scratch the surface a little, and you find we are so wonderfully nuts just under the surface. What I appreciate about Freud is his ability to hold both the superstition and its negation in his mind at once. He doesn’t just shamefully file away the superstition and ignore it. He went searching for its origin and the logic behind it.

But, grand historical reflections aside, I love the human event that’s happening here. Freud has challenged Jung’s supernatural event, but he isn’t tyrannically telling him to wise up. Instead, he tries to build a bridge. He tries to share his own irrationality even if it is embarrassing for him. That’s sweet. I’m drawn to Freud’s humanity here — not just in the repair attempt with Jung but in his self-critical doubt and in his curiosity and openness to unconventional truths. I don’t know about you, but I can relate to that a lot.

I’m also quite partial to Freud’s explanation for the emergence of this type of superstition:

“I only want to say that adventures such as mine with the number 62 can be explained by two things. The first is an enormously intensified alertness on the part of the unconscious, so that one is led like Faust to see a Helen in every woman. The second is the undeniable “co-operation of chance,” which plays the same role in the formation of delusions as somatic co-operation in hysterical symptoms or linguistic co-operation in puns.”

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Bibliography:

• Jung, C.G. (1989) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books

In this conversation, we talk Nietzsche, metashamanism, and the ontology and epistemology of entities.We delve into the role of personal experience in shaping philosophical thought, and the implications of neurodiversity in understanding shamanic practices. The dialogue also touches on the nature of imagination, creativity, and the unpredictability of inspiration, exploring our different approaches to life from the moist pragmatism to dry scholarism.

🔗 More from Layman
Layman's website: https://www.laymanpascal.com/
Layman's Substack: https://laymanpascal.substack.com/

⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - the Feral Philosopher
03:19 Blaise Pascal's spiritual note
05:18 Nietzsche and the irrationality of philosophers
08:55 The power of irrationality in humanity's story
10:41 Layman's book on Nietzsche
12:00 The Integral Nietzsche
14:13 What if Nietzsche hadn't gone mad?
16:06 The enlightened Nietzsche
19:33 The shamanic Nietzsche
22:04 What is metashamanics?
23:07 Shamanic neurodivergence
26:26 Attributes of the well-adjusted shaman
28:33 Liminality and the epochal emergence of the shamanic
31:31 The shamanoid Elvis
33:17 The reality of entities
37:05 Layman Pascal: pragmatist?
47:12 The power of trance
51:50 The muse as entity
56:34 Layman's guest recommendation
57:59 More from Layman

In this conversation, Stefano and I explore the landscape of contemporary Jungian thought, beginning with his distinction between Jungian, post-Jungian, and neo-Jungian approaches—where neo-Jungians like himself aim to make analytical psychology relevant to 21st-century crises beyond the consulting room. We discuss his I+I theory, which synthesises Jung’s individuation with sociologist Ulrich Beck’s individualisation, arguing that contemporary identity formation requires both psychological and sociological lenses to understand. Stefano shares insights from his award-winning work on the fall of the Berlin Wall, explaining how the numinous—an autonomous psychic force Jung described—operates in collective historical transformation, suggesting that major shifts require not just political will but adequate psychic conditions and “the attraction of the symbol.” We explore the concept of enantiodromia, Jung’s idea that psychological and cultural movements tend to revert to their opposites when pushed too far, applying this to contemporary political polarisation and populism. Throughout, Stefano makes a compelling case for why Jungian analysts must engage courageously with war, democracy, and social transformation, bringing depth psychology out of the clinic and into public discourse.

🔗 Links

• For Jungian monthly talks organised by Stefano: https://www.instagram.com/jungianeum_/ and https://www.youtube.com/@psychosocialwednesdays1944/videos

• Stefano’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHpWRYvgyhifcVkNGk9Tq-A

⏳ Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
01:08 Stefano, the international Jungian
02:21 Jungians vs. Post-Jungians vs. Neo-Jungians
07:27 The Post-Jungians
10:15 The Neo-Jungians
12:50 Classical Jungians vs. Developmental vs. Archetypal
15:40 James’s case for a Jungian textbook
20:01 The Jungian language barrier
23:20 The hindrance of jargon
27:11 Stefano’s sociological Jungian work
31:49 Bringing the unconscious into everyday life
34:52 Covid through the lens of Jung
35:49 The fallacy of the end of history
38:05 The fall of the Berlin Wall as a numinous event
43:33 Moments of memetic infection
47:16 History makers as artists
49:42 Jungian lens on contemporary politics
50:53 Returning to memetic infection
58:24 What is enantiodromia?
01:00:12 Populism and energetic release
01:04:33 Stefano’s guest recommendations
01:05:18 Where to find out more about Stefano

Dr Jon Mills is a philosopher-psychoanalyst and Honorary Professor at the University of Essex, whose work bridges Hegelian philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary existential threats facing civilisation. With over 35 books to his name—including five Gradiva Award winners—Jon has spent decades developing what he calls “dialectical psychoanalysis,” a rigorous philosophical framework for understanding the unconscious mind. His latest work, which we’re discussing in this episode, confronts an uncomfortable question: does humanity possess a collective death drive that propels us towards self-destruction?

You can find Jon’s work at:

• Website: https://www.philosophypsychoanalysis.com

• Publications: https://www.philosophypsychoanalysis.com/academics-psychoanalysis-philosophy

In this conversation, I sit down with Jon to explore the darkest questions about our species’ future. We examine whether humanity harbours a death wish, diving into the multiple existential crises threatening civilisation—climate change, nuclear weapons, AI risks, geopolitical conflict, and overpopulation/demographic collapse. Jon brings his formidable philosophical toolkit to bear on these challenges, drawing from Hegel, Freud, and his own dialectical framework to understand how good and evil operate simultaneously in human affairs. We debate techno-optimism versus existential pessimism, explore the psychology behind apocalyptic thinking, and we talk about my previous episode on secular eschatology and we discuss what that reveals about our relationship with mortality. We’re left with the question of whether our species can transcend its self-destructive patterns or whether we’re inexorably drawn towards catastrophe.

⏳Timestamps

00:00 James’s Intro
01:21 Claude AI’s intro to Jon
02:16 Jon’s prolific output
02:59 Does humanity have a death wish?
04:13 The collective forces at play
05:57 Collective and the collective unconscious
09:03 What we mean by humanity - metaphor or reality?
11:03 The crises facing humanity today
12:25 What Jon wanted to achieve with the book
15:45 Universal pessimism?
19:41 James on demographic collapse
23:29 Poverty decline globally
25:21 Optimism on climate
26:09 China and the Thucydides Trap
27:45 James on AI concerns
28:16 Negative trends in prejudice and freedom
31:03 The psychology of the Thucydides Trap
34:35 Good and evil are operative at once
36:43 James’s secular eschatology thesis
41:45 Why are most apocalypse predictions Western?
43:26 Apocalypse as death-cope
44:39 Apocalypse as unmet need gone rotten?
45:35 Jon’s relationship with death
48:18 Jon’s guest recommendation: Michael Montgomery

You can find Paul’s work at:
YouTube: youtube.com/@PFJung

In this conversation, I sit down with Paul to explore the crisis facing political nuance in online spaces. We discuss his co-opting of the Enlightened Centrism meme, why holding mixed political views has become increasingly difficult to sustain online, and the exhausting work of maintaining charitable interpretation when everyone wants the fight. Paul shares his experience growing a channel whilst managing contradictions, navigating the Peterson-adjacent space, and what it means to be at the “edge of the inside” of multiple political communities. We also explore why the online political warzone demands tribal allegiance and whether there’s still room for complexity in an era of constant gotchas and worst-case interpretations.

⏳ Timestamps
00:00 James’s Intro
01:15 What is Enlightened Centrism? Paul’s co-opted meme
02:49 Defining the position: right-wing and left-wing on different issues
04:00 Contradictions of Centrism
05:08 Crisis of National Identity
13:15 Horseshoe Theory vs Fishhook Theory
16:56 The Political Divide
20:29 PF Jung’s most right-wing belief
22:40 Economic shifts and onshoring
23:43 Critique of the US economy
26:42 Economic decadence and hyper-novelty
30:52 Radical Centrism in action
36:50 Constitution treated as religion
42:28 Type I vs Type II errors in governance
43:46 Radical solution for digital culture
45:15 PF Jung’s axiom of faith
48:06 Populist movements and preference cascades
1:00:33 Identity crisis of the channel
1:17:47 Edge of the Inside archetype
1:25:58 Guest recommendation

You can find Brendan’s work at:
Metamodern Meaning podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@BrendanGrahamDempsey
Brendan’s Substack: https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/
Brendan’s website: https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/

Our previous chats:

• Philosophy Wisdom and Metamodernism

• Critiquing Metamodernism

In this conversation, Brendan introduces me to the ambitious world of metatheory – an attempt to create a unified, coherent understanding of all human knowledge by bridging disciplines from neuroscience to sociology to the humanities. We explore his new role researching worldviews empirically at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, where he’s working to bring scientific rigour to questions that have long been speculative: Can we measure the complexity of worldviews? Do cultures develop through predictable stages? How complex is the Bible compared to Homer, or a text message to your Mam? We dive deep into hierarchical complexity, a psychological framework that quantifies the sophistication of thinking across domains and time periods. Brendan shares fascinating research comparing the cognitive complexity of ancient religious texts, from early biblical narratives to the Epic of Gilgamesh, revealing how literacy transforms meaning-making structures. We discuss the difference between metatheory and interdisciplinary work, why spiral dynamics isn’t quite a metatheory, and how this research programme aims to give metamodernism and integral theory the empirical grounding they’ve long needed. This is a conversation for those curious about the big questions: How does all human knowledge fit together? Can we study worldviews scientifically? And what does it mean to truly understand complexity?

⏳ Timestamps
00:00 James’s Intro
01:30 Brendan’s new role at the Institute of Applied Metatheory
03:24 What is metatheory? Situating theories within a bigger picture
06:05 Cognitive science vs. metatheory: Where are the edges?
07:37 Consilience and the unified theory of knowledge
10:27 What is the “normal science” of metatheory?
15:14 Applying metatheory: From integral medicine to worldview research
20:48 Systematising worldview terminology: Paradigms, gestalts, and meaning-making structures
23:03 Measuring cognitive complexity in texts
24:11 Can we validate developmental claims empirically?
25:08 Hierarchical complexity and neo-Piagetian psychology
28:30 Dynamic skill theory: Why you’re not “at a stage”
32:30 What does complexity mean? Is it like IQ?
33:00 Complexity as a scale of task performance, not hardware
35:05 Skill webs and context-dependent performance
37:12 Measuring texts: From texting your mam to ancient scriptures
42:14 Scoring the Bible: Early narratives vs. scribal texts
44:43 The documentary hypothesis and complexity differences in biblical sources 45:09 Literacy’s impact: Hunter-gatherer texts vs. scribal complexity
46:24 Homer, Gilgamesh, and the wisdom of Ptahhotep: Comparing ancient complexity
49:48 Translation challenges in measuring ancient texts
56:49 Education, zip codes, and complexity gaps
59:28 Why developmental models are more optimistic than IQ
1:04:24 Metatheory and metamodernism: How they relate
1:03:15 Testing metamodern and integral claims about worldview development
1:04:24 Metatheory and metamodernism: How they relate
1:10:21 Integral theory and the metamodern landscape
1:12:03 Guest recommendations: Layman Pascal and Nick Headland
1:14:08 Where to find Brendan

Enjoy,
James

Dr. Erik Goodwyn is a practising psychiatrist with a background in neurobiology who bridges the worlds of neuroscience, Jungian psychology, and fantasy. Erik is co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and as well as dozens of academic papers he has written books on the neurobiology of the gods, dreams, and archetypes, and this year published his first fantasy novel, King of the Forgotten Darkness, which won the Literary Titan Golden Book Award.

You can find Erik’s work at:
Website: https://erikgoodwyn.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theimaginarium

In this conversation, I sit down with Erik to explore the neuroscience of dreams and their connection to creativity, trauma, and healing. We dive deep into how the default mode network operates during dreaming, why dreams create “as if” narratives to help us make sense of our lives, and how the psyche uses metaphor to consolidate memory, regulate emotions, and plan for the future. Erik shares fascinating insights from his clinical work, including how trauma dreams evolve during the healing process and why some dreams seem to bookend creative projects. We also venture into the realm of fantasy literature, discussing how writers like Tolkien and Sanderson use fantastical elements to tell deeply human stories about real lived experiences.

⏳Timestamps
00:00 James’s Intro
01:31 Beginning: Wyoming, Mountain Time, and writing fantasy
03:24 Architects vs. Gardeners: Erik’s writing process
08:16 The divine child archetype in therapy dreams
09:13 “as if”: how dreams create meaning through metaphor
11:58 Dreams in crisis mode vs. exploratory mode (PTSD example)
15:08 Memory consolidation and forward planning in dreams
16:37 The default mode network during dreaming
19:32 Creativity and the default mode network
24:19 Dream sequences: Exploration of themes across multiple dreams
29:27 The body’s natural healing process through dreams
40:58 Ernest Hartman and contextualising metaphors
42:14 What is fantasy really about? Beyond escapism
43:01 Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as meditation on the problem of evil
43:04 Evil and grace in Middle-earth
45:29 Morgoth, Sauron, and the continuation of evil
46:37 Guest recommendation: Stefano Carpani
47:19 Where to find Erik

____________

• Greg and Linda’s Metamodern site - https://www.whatismetamodern.com

• Greg’s article on the 11 methods of Metamodernism - https://medium.com/what-is-metamodern/after-postmodernism-eleven-metamodern-methods-in-the-arts-767f7b646cae

• Greg’s book on Metamodernism - https://www.amazon.com/Say-Hello-Metamodernism-Understanding-Reflexivity/dp/B0DHGFKZ8W/

__________

In this conversation, I sit down with Greg to explore metamodernism as the cultural backdrop that’s emerged since roughly 2000, taking over from postmodernism’s ironic detachment. We discuss how metamodernism oscillates between modern earnestness and postmodern irony to defend the significance of interiority and felt experience. Greg introduces his framework of 11 metamodern methods—including empathic reflexivity and the double frame—and we examine how artists like the Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Wes Anderson, Bo Burnham, and even The Beatles navigate this territory. The conversation ranges from David Letterman’s evolution to Don Quixote as a proto-metamodern text, exploring how this sensibility has spread from indie niches into mainstream culture, and what it means for how we make and experience art today.

_____________

⏳Timestamps

0:00 Episode Intro
2:26 Greg’s current work: Sufjan Stevens book
3:26 What is metamodernism? Cultural backdrop since 2010
4:50 From modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism
7:36 David Letterman: from postmodern irony to Metamodern maturity
10:32 The oscillation between modern and postmodern attributes
12:26 Jimmy Fallon and the trend toward sincere enthusiasm
15:56 Felt experience vs. detached observation
19:26 Bo Burnham’s Metamodern masterpiece “Inside”
24:31 Rick Glassman and the Dance of Irony
25:26 The new sincerity and its relationship to metamodernism
28:26 Defending interiority as Metamodernism’s central motivation
31:38 From indie niches to mainstream: Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift
33:29 Everything Everywhere All At Once: metamodernism as hell
38:26 Wes Anderson and the metamodern sensibility
39:28 The 11 metamodern methods framework
40:31 Method #1: Empathic reflexivity
40:56 Method #2: Oscillation between modern/postmodern dualities
41:24 Method #3: The double frame (Raoul Eshelman)
44:26 Quirky as a metamodern aesthetic
46:26 Irony vs. cynicism: an important distinction
49:26 Don Quixote as proto-metamodern?
53:26 History rhymes: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and cultural crossroads
57:26 Exploring quirky and other metamodern methods
59:39 Play, playfulness, and Wes Anderson
1:01:01 Method #4: Meta-cute
1:01:46 Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox as meta-cute
1:03:56 Protecting interiority: the motivation behind metamodern art
1:04:56 Metamodernism as reclaiming something eternally human
1:06:26 Sufjan Stevens and the Illinois album
1:07:16 Proto-metamodern vs. actually metamodern: the key distinction
1:08:26 The Metamodern “Rocky Racoon”
1:12:29 The Proto Metamodern Morrissey and The Smiths
1:14:43 Guest recommendation: Linda Ceriello
1:14:58 Where to find Greg’s work

• https://cjthex.com/subscribe → subscribe to CJ’s mailing list for all things CJ The X

• https://tinyurl.com/asdi708uo → buy tickets to CJ’s show in San Francisco, CA on the 10th October

⏳Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:39 - Reflections on CJ’s Intercontinental Speaking Tour
05:56 - Wrestling with the need to be right
10:27 - Play, fear and the creative process
15:27 - Colonised by the algorithm
17:47 - Search for Signal
19:27 - Exploring the Balance of Routine and Passion
23:52 - Flywheel or Passion?
26:14 - CJ’s journey from chaotic fun to serious philosophy
27:33 - CJ done with YouTube?
32:28 - CJ’s Jordan Peterson video
36:28 - James’s struggle with intellectual responsibility
40:43 - CJ on why passion has to be the guide
44:18 - Is CJ a Platonist or a Pragmatism
45:55 - CJ on the sacred and the profane
47:11 - James on holding knowledge lightly
48:39 - The Metaphysical Club
49:48 - The two strands of pragmatism
50:34 - C.S. Peirce
51:18 - William James and Peirce’s Relationship
53:44 - Pragmatism and Jordan Peterson
55:55 - What is Pragmatism?
57:17 - Pragmatism vs. Postmodernism
1:00:48 - Is Western civilisation the peak?
1:01:35 - Peterson’s Pragmatic Christianity
1:04:19 - The dangers of high status
1:05:51 - CJ’s lessons learned from speaking tour
1:11:28 - CJ’s Anti-mimetic attitude
1:14:55 - James starting Jungian Masters
1:15:38 - James on Dreams
1:16:55 - CJ’s troubled relationship with the dreamworld
1:19:32 - Dreams and creativity
1:24:40 - CJ on James’s excessive curiosity
1:26:18 - CJ’s read on James’s alien dreams
1:27:36 - Connection between dreams and creativity
1:30:01 - James wants to study CJ’s dreams
1:34:44 - Wrapping up
1:35:27 - CJ’s Guest Recommendations

If you feel like watching the podcast rather than just listening you can check it out on YouTube:

So, last week of talking about systems and, appropriate to the acidic arc of life I’m sailing through at the moment, this week’s piece is a critique. Because it’s nice to have delved into a topic deeply, developed some sympathy for it, tested its lenses a bit and found some that you like and then to start hacking at its roots. And I wonder why I feel like I’m chasing my tail.

This article — entitled “Magical systems thinking” — comes from Works in Progress which is afaik Stripe’s publication. Not sure how I came across it but I’ve had their emails coming into my inbox for a while. Some are meh some gold. I’ll let you decide which this week’s reading was.

The first thing I learned from this article is that Systems Thinking is no small fish. I should have known this already perhaps given how much I’ve heard about the Club of Rome and how popular (Meadows’ first book) Limits to Growth was. But I still thought of it as this niche subcultural point of view. I guess I was wrong.

The second thing that jumped out was, of course, the spirited attack on Systems Thinking. It outlined a whole pile of Systems Thinking interventions governments have tried, which have utterly failed. It seems the complexity of systems outstrips our ability to effectively map them (those clouds in Meadows diagrams, it seems, were more dangerous than they seemed). This was a critique I’d been incubating myself what with the horrendous disparity between the pearl-clutching about population overload that accompanied Systems Thinking’s birth and the state of our current dilemma: demographic collapse > overpopulation.

But the real thing that grasped me from this article and why I wanted to share it, was not the negative corrosive work of critique that must be done, but the positive proposition that we can take away.

The takeaway for me was this: start small. Don’t go messing with complex systems. Start over. Start small. Build a system that works then add to it. It’s such a simple realisation, but as I write this in my Obsidian vault, where I have attempted to give birth to many complex emergent systems, I am aware that I write in a graveyard of big systems ambition. The past year I’ve been content to work in the ashes. But I grow more inspired by the idea of starting something simple and small that works. Then I’ll build upon that.

As I begin to work on the Jungian Masters here in Limerick, I am contemplating what shape my scholarly system will take. I’m nervous about having a run at my Zettelkasten system again, but I’m scared by the ghosts of notetaking systems past — the cities of thought whose empty ruins I still sometimes wander through, sad at the dreams that could have been. Why, in the 21st century, does it feel like there are so many basic things still needing to be worked out? There’s so much talk of second brains and second minds. The veterans among us know it for the frothy sales pitch it is. Or, perhaps more charitably, it is merely the enthusiastic proselytising of the starry-eyed novices. We all fell on our knees before the grandeur of Nikolas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. But we were bowing down before a complex system that had decades to grow into what it was. We suffered from the same audacity as the Systems Thinkers and their complex diagrams (which ultimately proved to be all-too-simple): how to start humbly? How to start simply? With Gall’s Law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

A few notable quotes from the article: ⁠

“our successes, when they do come, are invariably the result of starting small. As the systems we have built slip further beyond our collective control, it is these simple working systems that offer us the best path back.”

“With the failure of his World Model, Forrester had fallen into the same trap as his MIT students. Systems analysis works best under specific conditions: when the system is static; when you can dismantle and examine it closely; when it involves few moving parts rather than many; and when you can iterate fixes through multiple attempts.” ⁠

“Starting with a working simple system and evolving from there is how we went from the water wheel in Godalming to the modern electric grid. It is how we went from a hunk of germanium, gold foil, and hand-soldered wires in 1947 to transistors being etched onto silicon wafers in their trillions today.”

⁠“Le Chatelier’s Principle [the idea that the system always kicks back] provided an answer: systems should not be thought of as benign entities that will faithfully carry out their creators’ intentions. Rather, over time, they come to oppose their own proper functioning.”

⁠“The long-term promise of a small working system is that over time it can supplant the old, broken one and produce results on a larger scale.”

“⁠As systems become more complex, they become more chaotic, not less. The best solution remains humility, and a simple system that works.”

In the end, this is what I’m taking away from this flirtation with systems thinking the past couple of months.

Systems are gorgeous. They are miraculous. The idea that a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts is dazzling, especially when it stretches beyond the domain of life into the abstract domain of culture, where our relationships with each other become alive in a way that is not quite human. The miracle of emergence is overwhelming.

Yet, it is more complex than we can hope to architect. Is this not the reason the socialist Communist states failed across the world while the free market bloomed? So, to be candid, my takeaway is Voltaire’s “il faut cultiver notre jardin” (we must cultivate our garden). But this isn’t the fatalist capitulation it might seem — the collapse into “desperate narcissism” that some leftist commentators might see. Instead, this act of gardening is the humble beginnings of a new cosmos.

This read like Donella Meadows’ 12 Rules for Life. I quite liked it.

I deeply related to the humility of this passage that any fan of productivity and personal development will find all-too-familiar:

“The truth was, we didn’t even follow our advice. We gave learned lectures on the structure of addiction and could not give up coffee. We knew all about the dynamics of eroding goals and eroded our own jogging programs. We warned against the traps of escalation and shifting the burden and then created them in our own marriages.” (p.167)

I appreciated her first systems thinker’s rules for life:

“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”

This passage vibed with the guiding idea of the Philosopher’s Toolkit:

“The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible—part of the job of keeping information streams clear. The second step is to enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems.” (p.175)

This one hit close to home:

“Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct.” (p.183)

I’ve been feeling…decontextualised. I feel alienated from the world because there’s no group or narrative or cohesive thing that’s knitting me into it. My vast curiosity draws me in too many directions; any one of which would be worth dedicating a life to. But I grow increasingly convinced that I just need to dedicate myself to one. We need to pick a problem and wrestle with it. The core of a paradigm is the exemplar: the problem/solution of the paradigm founder that points the way to the work of future scientists and provides a concrete example of a solution. Knowledge that has a dynamic body and wants to dance rather than vivisected dead knowledge.

And with that, the book was over.

I got a lot out of it. But what I got most out of it, was the confirmation that this too is not my home. This too, is another lampost on the road to wherever it is my inner compass is steering. There was a lot of signal in here, but also a lot of noise. More concluding thoughts to come at the end of next week’s piece, but for now, that’s my closing sense: it was fascinating, but it’s not mine.

Enjoy,
James

Show Notes:

"Jung was essentially an evolutionary theorist". These are the words of Gary Clark, a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has written a book on the intersection of Jungian Analytical Psychology and evolutionary neuroscience.

If you want to learn more about Gary you can check out his book "Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology" (and grab a free PDF of its intro) ⁠here⁠. You can also dive into the rest of his work on ⁠academia.edu⁠ and ⁠ResearchGate⁠.

In this conversation, I sit down with Gary to explore the intersection of Jungian psychology and evolutionary neuroscience, examining how recent psychedelic research provides empirical validation for Jung's theories about the collective unconscious and archetypes. We discuss how modern neuroscience, particularly studies of primary and secondary consciousness systems, maps onto Jung's framework of ego consciousness versus deeper archetypal layers. The conversation covers the revolutionary potential of psychedelic research for studying previously inaccessible aspects of consciousness and Jung's prescient evolutionary approach to depth psychology.

⏳Timestamps

00:00 James's Intro
01:07 Opening and situating Gary's work
03:35 Affective Neuroscience and the Primary and Secondary layers of consciousness
09:00 Psychedelics, the numinous and evolutionary theory
22:17 Have we found the (neuroscientific) archetypes?
28:40 Psychedelics and the Collective Unconscious
34:53 Jordan Peterson's Jungian synthesis
36:57 Peterson gets chimpanzees and ancient humans wrong
46:01 Leaving Jung behind: Depth Psychology maturation as a science
58:50 Mapovers between Iain McGilchrist's work and Gary's
1:01:19 What Gary's working on now
1:07:32 Gary's guest recommendation: Erik Goodwyn