[00:00]
Stick around to learn about the interconnection between nature

[00:04]
and creativity as well from other intriguing notions.

[00:08]
Our discussion with Dr.

[00:09]
Rich Blondell coming up.

[00:13]
Hi, I’m Denis VanDerGinst join me in a series of entertaining

[00:19]
and interesting conversations with entertaining and interesting people

[00:23]
will explore various aspects of the human experience and what makes life more fun.

[00:28]
This is Uncommon Convos.

[00:33]
Welcome to Uncommon. Compost.

[00:35]
I’m your host, Dennis Band Against, and before we get started with our

[00:38]
conversation today, I’d like to remind you to be sure to subscribe rate and review

[00:43]
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[00:46]
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Com. If you have comments, suggestions,

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or would simply like to watch the video version of this episode or any of our

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[01:21]
Com. Our guest today is Dr.

[01:24]
Rich Blondel. Dr.

[01:26]
Blondel is an ecologist working

[01:28]
at the interface of art, science, nature and culture is research examines

[01:33]
how transformation happens across the skills of person place in planet.

[01:37]
Rich tells a scientific story.

[01:39]
He tells the scientific story

[01:41]
of the universe that includes art and human creativity as natural phenomena.

[01:46]
He is an ecologist and cultural communicator.

[01:49]
I’ve heard him describe himself as

[01:51]
a surfer dude scientist, and I think he kind of defies definition.

[01:55]
He certainly doesn’t fit into one box.

[01:57]
I think you’re going to listen to a fascinating discussion today.

[02:01]
Dr. Rich, thank you for being here.

[02:03]
So as I had mentioned to you before,

[02:06]
I wasn’t really sure where to start with this interview because in kind

[02:11]
of digging in, it appears that your mission and the things that you do.

[02:15]
First of all, there’s some very different yet

[02:23]
distinguishable and similar things

[02:26]
that you are doing simultaneously, but they don’t seem to necessarily be linear.

[02:30]
But I was very glad when I dug in to start

[02:33]
to get a better idea of what it is that you do and what your mission is.

[02:37]
What I’d like to do is have you briefly describe what it is that you do?

[02:43]
And then we’re going to drill down to talk about some of the specifics,

[02:46]
including I want to talk about the fish story that led to your epiphany.

[02:52]
Of course, I want to talk about Oka,

[02:54]
ecological intelligence, the Earth theory, Earth stories, creativity,

[03:00]
the Surfers guide to the universe, and then anything else we can fit in.

[03:03]
And before we get to some of those things, I think it’s important that the audience

[03:07]
knows where you’re coming from, where you came from so that they can have

[03:12]
an insight into your perspective on things.

[03:16]
So can you give us some sense of where you

[03:20]
came from and how you arrived at where you’re at now?

[03:23]
Sure.

[03:24]
Thanks.

[03:26]
But I’m forced to kind of go pretty far back to childhood, really, where

[03:33]
what might be becoming a rarer and rarer kind of upbringing.

[03:39]
And that is to say that I was given a lot of freedom as a child

[03:44]
by the time I’m the third line of three children.

[03:51]
And by the time I was coming of age,

[03:55]
my parents had been put through the Ringer with my older siblings.

[03:59]
And so by the so they had essentially just said, go out,

[04:04]
figure it all out on your own, rich in a loving way, not a neglectful way.

[04:09]
But

[04:11]
I went about doing that and explored where I was and where I was was

[04:16]
New England coastal habitats, forests, swamps, bays, estuaries.

[04:23]
And those were the places that really defined who I am.

[04:29]
And one of the things that I’m only now beginning to really understand is that I

[04:37]
was a very sensitive kid, the kind of thing that you can deny it.

[04:43]
But at some point,

[04:45]
you have to take ownership of the fact that you have a certain temperament.

[04:50]
And my temperament as a kid was like dreamy.

[04:52]
But I wasn’t dreamy in a spaced out way.

[04:55]
I was dreamy in a very tuned in way.

[04:57]
In other words, the world was constantly sort of speaking to me

[05:04]
in the way that the world speaks to children.

[05:08]
It was really a wonderful world.

[05:10]
And I mean, that literally was full of wonder.

[05:12]
And that’s who I was as a child.

[05:14]
And then as I grew up, I got into the whole high school thing,

[05:17]
which is traumatic, I think, for everybody.

[05:20]
And that had a profound impact on me.

[05:23]
It was a time to sort of hide that part of myself that sort of sensitive

[05:33]
child within.

[05:36]
And

[05:38]
that the culture of high school can be very traumatic for people.

[05:44]
I know it doesn’t seem like it could be,

[05:46]
but the lived experience of that can be quite dramatic.

[05:49]
Anyway, that because I didn’t,

[05:53]
Ironically or maybe totally understandably.

[05:57]
I utterly failed at school.

[05:59]
Throughout high school, I

[06:02]
pretty much removed myself from the

[06:06]
educational system and started going out fishing.

[06:10]
Every day. I got hooked onto lobstering.

[06:14]
And it’s a big thing in New England, as you may know.

[06:17]
And so every day I was out there lobstering.

[06:19]
And by the time I was done, it was halfway through the school day.

[06:22]
And so I figured, what the heck?

[06:24]
I’m just going to stay out.

[06:25]
And so by the time I got to be a senior in high school,

[06:28]
the guidance counselor called me in, and then I was like, rich there’s 180 days

[06:34]
in the school year, and you’ve missed about 100.

[06:37]
So how do you explain this?

[06:39]
And I said, Well, I was out fishing and I was out doing my thing.

[06:42]
And so what they said well, we’re going to have to keep it back.

[06:45]
And it was this big ordeal.

[06:47]
And it was

[06:48]
it was

[06:50]
a big failure, basically.

[06:51]
And with that as my history at that point,

[06:57]
the only option I really had was to go into fishing, to commercial fishing.

[07:02]
I was just talking to somebody other day,

[07:03]
and they said, Well, how did you get into fishing?

[07:05]
I said, I failed my way into it.

[07:07]
That’s not to say that commercial fishing is a failure as a career.

[07:13]
I’m just saying for me that given the circumstances of who I was

[07:21]
and where I was, that fishing culture, that was the perfect fit for me.

[07:26]
That’s what I’m saying. And so I started doing that.

[07:29]
And as I as I got more and more into it, I got more and more commercial about it.

[07:34]
And what the trajectory is that you start on the inshore waters and then you work

[07:40]
your way out into bigger and more lucrative fisheries offshore.

[07:45]
And I did that.

[07:46]
I ended up going for blue fin tuna off the coast of Mount.

[07:51]
Today.

[07:51]
These days, there’s a lot of cable TV shows, you know, like Wicked Tuna.

[07:57]
And I forgot that other one.

[08:01]
But, you see, it was most dangerous.

[08:04]
Most dangerous or something like

[08:06]
a dangerous as it was before any of that sort of thing.

[08:10]
I was into it before any of that came onto the scene.

[08:14]
But if you look at it today, especially the tuna fishing shows,

[08:17]
it’s all about the money that the fisherman, you know,

[08:23]
earn. It’s about a competition.

[08:25]
And it’s about they put the graphics up on the screen.

[08:29]
It’s X dollars.

[08:30]
And they’re just all competing for more and more money.

[08:33]
And that’s exactly the kind of culture that,

[08:37]
you know, it didn’t really jive with me.

[08:40]
I was out there because I love the fish.

[08:43]
I love being out there.

[08:44]
I love, you know, I loved handling the fish

[08:49]
with the mud and the seaweed and the algae.

[08:52]
And just the sensory parts of fishing is what I really loved.

[08:57]
That sensitive.

[08:58]
And I realized now that that sensitive kid was

[09:02]
that’s who was present in those years.

[09:05]
But I could feel this tug of commerciality and extraction of resources,

[09:12]
adversarial relationships with environmental

[09:17]
organizations and things like that, law enforcement.

[09:21]
And I I don’t know, at some point,

[09:25]
it just came to a head one day when it was actually the first tuna I ever caught.

[09:31]
And it was actually the last tuna I ever caught.

[09:34]
We were out on Stelwagen Bank and back in those days, we used hand lines today,

[09:40]
they use these really expensive high tech gear.

[09:45]
But when we caught the tuna

[09:48]
finally got it up to the boat and you take the fins off and you bleed it and you

[09:56]
try and keep it cool and rushed it back to the dock.

[10:00]
And when we had tied up to the dock and I

[10:03]
was taking a rope that had been handed down from the dock.

[10:07]
We were going to hook it around its tail

[10:09]
and hoist it up onto the dock and put it into a freezer truck.

[10:12]
I leaned over and I bent down and I was handling the fish.

[10:17]
And as I was doing that,

[10:19]
I suddenly had this flashback of being a kid handling fish.

[10:24]
And I guess it must have been something

[10:26]
about how different it was, how this fish had been down in the gunnel

[10:30]
and the side of the boat now for an hour and a half 2 hours as we motored back

[10:34]
and we never even looked at it, we never even sort of thought about this creature.

[10:40]
And this is the only word I can describe is magnificent animal.

[10:45]
It’s 800 pound

[10:48]
solid piece of muscle and it’s just this huge animal and we never even noticed it.

[10:56]
We were all congratulating ourselves

[10:58]
at all the money we were gonna make and DA DA DA.

[11:00]
And as I was down there in the gun

[11:02]
with the fish and I felt that the sort of rush of memory came back to me and I

[11:08]
looked at the fish and I was looking at its eye.

[11:11]
And then I realized that it was just dying in that moment.

[11:14]
So it had been down there that whole time.

[11:16]
And right as I looked at it and made contact with it, it died.

[11:21]
And I watched it sort of just transform from this thing.

[11:25]
That was just this beautiful creature into something else.

[11:31]
In

[11:33]
that moment, all of the congratulation

[11:37]
and the celebration and the happiness about catching the fish flipped and went

[11:43]
into sadness and sort of in a bit of regret and not regret that I had caught

[11:49]
it and killed it, but that we hadn’t actually noticed it,

[11:51]
that we hadn’t actually seen what we were doing.

[11:54]
So this is to say I’m not against fishing and I’m not against what fishermen do.

[11:59]
I still fish.

[12:00]
I just think we do it in a way that has lost connection to what it is we’re doing.

[12:05]
I think we’ve lost that sense of reverence.

[12:07]
We’ve turned it into a commodity.

[12:09]
We’ve turned it into this thing that isn’t even alive.

[12:13]
And it was that moment out on the deck

[12:16]
of that boat that I decided that I was going to change my life.

[12:20]
And what’s interesting is that sorry,

[12:22]
I know this is running a little long, but what’s really interesting is that up

[12:26]
until that point, I really didn’t want to engage with the educational system.

[12:30]
You know, like I said, I was a horrible student,

[12:33]
but in that moment, I realized that I had missed an opportunity and that fish had

[12:42]
given me this opportunity to re engage with learning.

[12:46]
And so I did.

[12:47]
I enrolled in a marine biology program

[12:50]
because I figure that’s the most logical thing to do.

[12:53]
And

[12:56]
my point is that was a turning point not

[12:59]
only in my career, but it was a turning point in my relationship to learning.

[13:05]
There’s a philosopher named Michael Pollan

[13:07]
is deceased now, but he coined this term tacit learning,

[13:13]
which would never have made sense to me.

[13:15]
I would not know what that means if I had not gone through this experience.

[13:18]
But what it means is that it’s a different kind of learning.

[13:22]
When you go and learn from books, you get book learning.

[13:26]
But when you learn from experience,

[13:28]
when you learn from things happening to you, those things that you learn

[13:32]
through experience become embedded within who you are.

[13:36]
This is what he meant by test learning.

[13:39]
And when that happens, because it becomes a personal

[13:42]
because it becomes part of you as a person,

[13:46]
suddenly, every opportunity to learn becomes an opportunity to grow yourself.

[13:53]
And you feel like

[13:56]
there’s this mystery out there and that everything you learn

[13:59]
is a way of engaging with that mystery and participating in that mystery.

[14:05]
And then it’s like a steam roller.

[14:08]
It starts to pick up speed.

[14:09]
You begin to learn more, you begin to be more and more fat.

[14:12]
And then what I realized that kid was coming back.

[14:15]
This was the adult form of that kid that I was coming back through this.

[14:21]
And then that just set me on this this

[14:24]
trajectory of just absolutely trying to consume all kinds of knowledge.

[14:29]
And that’s why that’s why I think if you look

[14:34]
at the trajectory of my career, it’s all over the place, because I’ve been just

[14:39]
have just been in love with learning ever since.

[14:44]
And so, yeah, the tuna was a big moment,

[14:48]
and I should just mention, too, that, you know what I ended up studying.

[14:53]
I didn’t quite know this was happening as I was going through.

[14:57]
But what I ended up getting a PhD in is

[15:01]
how could that communication have happened?

[15:04]
That wasn’t my research question,

[15:07]
but it was it was like my background research question.

[15:10]
I wanted to know,

[15:11]
how could that tuna communicate something, the profound importance to human being

[15:17]
that would change the trajectory of their life.

[15:20]
And I wanted to understand that.

[15:24]
And I think I have I don’t

[15:27]
mean to make exaggerated claims, but I think I figured it out.

[15:30]
I think I figured out how that communication happens.

[15:32]
So, yeah,

[15:34]
I’m not sure if we’re where you wanted to go, but that’s sort of story.

[15:42]
No, I think it’s I think it’s important for people to understand where someone’s

[15:47]
coming from in order to see where they’re going.

[15:50]
And you’ve set the stage by telling us that story.

[15:54]
The first time I heard what I referred

[15:58]
to as the fish story was actually on your website.

[16:02]
And you do an incredible job of painting this picture.

[16:07]
And the imagery that you invoke

[16:09]
on the video that describes that situation is just beautiful.

[16:15]
It’s poetic.

[16:16]
And I think a lot of what I have seen on the website is very poetic and certainly.

[16:22]
And we’re going to get to OK.

[16:24]
And the relationship between nature and art and creativity, etcetera.

[16:30]
But I think it’s important to upset the stage the way you have in order

[16:34]
for people to understand how you’ve come to where you’re at.

[16:38]
And you definitely pointed out that you continue to learn.

[16:42]
You have very eclectic

[16:46]
background and interests that are apparent with everything that I’ve seen thus far.

[16:53]
So I certainly am happy to let you just

[16:58]
take the reins and run with it as we explore some of these things.

[17:02]
So I wanted to mention, though,

[17:06]
because I think it’s important for this, given the time that we’re in right now

[17:12]
and the situation that we see as a society and politically speaking, etc.

[17:19]
I’ve read or heard you say that you feel

[17:21]
there’s a systemic dysfunction within our world, and that the thinking

[17:26]
that disconnects us from nature also disconnects us from each other.

[17:32]
Let’s start there.

[17:34]
What do you mean by that?

[17:37]
Well, what I mean is that in

[17:42]
much the same way that I became disconnected from the child that I was

[17:47]
we

[17:49]
as a species or at least as a culture.

[17:52]
This Western industrialized culture have

[17:55]
become disconnected with the Earth in a lot of ways.

[18:00]
And I’m not necessarily critical of this.

[18:03]
I think it’s just sort of an accident of history that we find ourselves here.

[18:06]
But

[18:08]
what I mean by that is,

[18:10]
I

[18:11]
believe one of the things that I’ve discovered in my learning in my life,

[18:18]
the exploration of my life is that I deeply belong to this world like I am.

[18:25]
I’m embedded within this world and the world is also embedded with me.

[18:29]
And there’s this real sense of entanglement that feels good.

[18:34]
You know, it’s not so bad entanglements.

[18:36]
It’s a sense of belonging.

[18:39]
And then that belonging comes with a sense

[18:42]
of gratitude, and that gratitude comes with a sense of contentedness.

[18:47]
And the contentedness goes a long way toward

[18:53]
swaging anxieties.

[18:57]
It puts a sort of check on my desire to consume things and pursue other things

[19:05]
because I feel this deep sense of beauty that feels good.

[19:10]
And I think that

[19:12]
in many ways we’ve either forgotten or forfeited that that sense of belonging

[19:19]
that comes from interacting with nature and with the natural world.

[19:24]
And I think that the fact that we’ve given that up creates a kind of kind of

[19:34]
I don’t want to use the word pathology because that sounds really negative.

[19:38]
It creates a void within us that we seek to fill, and we seek to fill it

[19:43]
in the most immediate ways which are normally usually material or.

[19:49]
And I think that those ways of feeling

[19:53]
in those ways of being manifest not just an environmental

[19:56]
environmental degradation, but also in how we treat each other.

[20:01]
You know, I think I

[20:05]
just think that so many of these so called

[20:08]
social problems and cultural problems of our time

[20:12]
are connected to this sense of disconnection that we all carry around,

[20:16]
and we can regain that sense of connection and then suddenly or gradually let’s say

[20:24]
those other problems will tend to resolve themselves.

[20:30]
It’s called healing

[20:32]
will start to heal, just like I healed from the trauma of high school.

[20:36]
I know how trivial that sounds, but.

[20:38]
But I think we can begin to heal from this other kind of underacknowledged trauma.

[20:46]
And then these these things that are

[20:49]
consuming us now, rightfully so social, racial, economic, the xenophobia,

[20:57]
all these things that are sort of the divisiveness of our politics.

[21:00]
All this stuff will

[21:04]
tend to get attenuated

[21:08]
or a swage.

[21:10]
I don’t want to keep using these foreign words.

[21:12]
Webegin to heal.

[21:15]
And so that’s what I mean.

[21:17]
When I say that the sense of disconnection

[21:19]
from the world disconnects us from each other.

[21:23]
That’s what I mean, because there is a category.

[21:27]
There is a category of being.

[21:29]
There is a political identity that’s

[21:33]
bigger than the ones that we currently identify with.

[21:36]
It’s called being an Earthling.

[21:37]
And we’ve just completely forgot what that means.

[21:41]
For most of us, that means take me to your leader.

[21:44]
It means something alien.

[21:47]
Seeing us.

[21:48]
What it actually means is being of the Earth.

[21:51]
And if you look at the history of human

[21:53]
beings, if you look at the history of this planet,

[21:56]
and if you look at the history of human beings on this planet, the inescapable

[22:02]
realization that comes from that is that we are of this Earth,

[22:06]
everything that we are, our creativity are our intelligence, our bodies,

[22:14]
everything that we are comes from this Earth.

[22:18]
It’s a gift. It’s an endowment of the Earth.

[22:22]
And why we have forgotten that or why we

[22:26]
fail to recognize that is, I think something that needs to be addressed.

[22:34]
And I want to address that a little bit more in a bit.

[22:38]
The Earthling theory that you’ve alluded to.

[22:41]
But before we get there, this is probably a good a good time to introduce a.

[22:48]
By the way, I have a question about the origin of the word itself.

[22:54]
So when you explain to us what is, can you tell me where the word came from?

[22:59]
Does it have a specific meaning?

[23:01]
Meaning is OK, a philosophy, a project, a campaign.

[23:05]
How would you describe it?

[23:08]
How do you define it when somebody asks you what is OK?

[23:12]
Yeah, it’s a good question.

[23:15]
Well, I should just say the term came to me one day when I was riding my bike.

[23:19]
I could just see it.

[23:21]
The word CA is a play on the word ACOs.

[23:25]
Cos I-K-O-S is an ancient Greek word that meant basically home.

[23:33]
So the ancient Greek had this conception

[23:37]
of cos as home and home consisted of person place and property.

[23:44]
Those three things made up the ICOs.

[23:47]
But because ancient Greece was patrician

[23:49]
was very hierarchical, society, male oriented.

[23:53]
The person meant the man, and that place meant the house.

[23:58]
And the property was everything

[24:01]
in the house that includes the furniture, the wife, the slaves, everything.

[24:07]
And so that really wouldn’t work as a sort of philosophy for OK.

[24:12]
So what I did was I just kind of feminized the word ICO and made it OK.

[24:17]
Now the thing you need to know about

[24:19]
the word eco is it’s also the root of the word ecology.

[24:22]
So our modern word eco as an ecology comes

[24:26]
from that word ICOs, which makes sense because ecology deals

[24:31]
with the home, the home habitats, home planet.

[24:34]
Well, it’s also the root of the word eco as an economy.

[24:39]
And I think this is a really important thing that’s been forgotten is

[24:43]
that economy and ecology share the same fundamental root of meaning.

[24:50]
And I aim to re couple those two things.

[24:54]
The economy and and ecology need to be

[24:57]
reconnected in some way that works right now.

[25:00]
We have an economy that’s completely divorced of ecological concerns.

[25:04]
And somehow we believe that. But that’s a myth.

[25:08]
And it’s also a fiction.

[25:09]
It’s wrong.

[25:11]
And so OK, which is the word that I sort of used to describe.

[25:16]
This is the organization that I started just to launch projects

[25:21]
that that can cultivate that reconnection of economy and ecology.

[25:26]
And there’s some really, really interesting ways to do that

[25:30]
that are now emerging because of the new economic

[25:35]
systems like cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, all that stuff.

[25:40]
I don’t think we’ve quite grasped the profundity of these new,

[25:49]
consensus based, transparent

[25:52]
economic systems to realign ecological concerns with economic concerns.

[26:00]
And I’m really excited about that particular part.

[26:03]
But that’s what that’s where the word comes from.

[26:07]
I also used the term OK to refer to

[26:12]
the intelligence of nature has expressed through human thought and action.

[26:18]
So so, in other words, as a noun,

[26:21]
Oka means that when you feel the intelligence of nature operating

[26:27]
within you and you act accordingly, that’s a that’s kind of an academic description.

[26:34]
There’s another way that I think about it in terms of the feeling of Aka,

[26:40]
when you feel the intelligence of the Earth within you, that’s OK.

[26:46]
So there’s a few different ways.

[26:48]
And lately another thing that I’m really excited about is OK as a form of beauty.

[26:53]
I use this little catch phrase a lot,

[26:57]
which is the future is beautiful or there isn’t one.

[27:01]
And what I’ve been using that for a while.

[27:04]
And what I’m now beginning to realize is

[27:06]
that if I’m going to use that, I’m going to save that in such

[27:09]
a provocative way, I better be ready to define what that beauty is.

[27:13]
And so I’ve been thinking a lot about

[27:16]
what OK means as a form of beauty,

[27:21]
because I think right now, like in our time,

[27:25]
we’re beginning to be able to see this new kind of beauty that there is this new kind

[27:30]
of beauty that we’re just getting glimpses of it now.

[27:34]
And I think Oka refers to that beauty, too.

[27:37]
So that’s a lot. But

[27:40]
that’s what is.

[27:43]
Well on your website.

[27:47]
By the way, I should mention that you have

[27:49]
Oka courses that you offer where I assume you delve deeper into all of what you’ve

[27:57]
already introduced to us here and on the website.

[28:01]
It says that the OIC courses and I’m going to read this.

[28:05]
All courses are grounded

[28:08]
in the fundamentals of ecological intelligence as defined by Dr.

[28:13]
Glendale’s Earthling theory.

[28:15]
And again, we’ll circle back

[28:17]
to that Earthling theory, and we’ll talk some more about the courses

[28:20]
and how you get funded and things like that.

[28:22]
But what is ecological intelligence and

[28:27]
and how does that, I guess, interact with the idea of OK?

[28:32]
Sure. Well, in some ways,

[28:34]
Oka is synonymous with ecological intelligence, because, as I said,

[28:41]
CA is the intelligence of nature expressed through humans.

[28:45]
Right. So that intelligence is ecological.

[28:49]
But I think we need to do is back up

[28:51]
a little bit and understand what ecological means.

[28:53]
Most conceptions of ecology think you

[28:56]
tend to think about trees and squirrels and Rivers and grass.

[29:01]
You think of nature when you think about ecology.

[29:04]
But all ecology really is is the study of relationships.

[29:09]
That’s what ecology is.

[29:11]
And that could be any relationship.

[29:13]
It could be the relationship between me and you, right.

[29:15]
It could be the relationship to me.

[29:17]
And this pen there’s an ecology of those are horrible examples.

[29:22]
But the point is that ecological relationships are in social systems as

[29:28]
well as nature systems, because society is.

[29:32]
So you’re talking about relationships.

[29:35]
Relational is talking about relational dynamics here.

[29:38]
Yes, it’s a relational intelligence that comes from nature.

[29:41]
Nature is built on relational intelligence.

[29:44]
And I can tell you the story

[29:45]
of the universe that goes all the way back to the beginning.

[29:48]
And to show you where this relational

[29:51]
intelligence originated in the early early universe, the early universe, 3800 years.

[29:57]
Absolutely. Bang.

[29:58]
Which is like if you buy into this whole thing, which I do as a scientist.

[30:03]
But what you realize is that I do to all

[30:06]
of this, all of this complexity, all of it is a function of relationships.

[30:13]
It wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for relationships.

[30:16]
And so understanding those relationships takes ecological intelligence.

[30:20]
That’s what ecological intelligence means.

[30:23]
I

[30:25]
should say that even though I call it ecological intelligence,

[30:30]
it’s really just intelligence because all intelligence is ecological intelligence.

[30:39]
Is it fair to say, first of all,

[30:42]
I guess that Oka is about restoring ecological intelligence.

[30:46]
Well, that’s one way to say it, but it didn’t go anywhere.

[30:50]
It’s just that we’re not using it.

[30:52]
It’s about reminding us about where our intelligence comes from.

[30:57]
And this is what the course that you mentioned seeks to do.

[31:01]
Specifically, I seek to remind artists,

[31:04]
people who create art, that their creativity is a function

[31:09]
of ecological intelligence and and what’s real.

[31:12]
And let’s talk about that.

[31:14]
I’m sorry. I’m talking over you.

[31:16]
I think we have a little delay,

[31:18]
but I would like to talk a little bit about that relationship between ecological

[31:23]
intelligence and creativity, art, et cetera.

[31:27]
Well,

[31:29]
this is one of those

[31:32]
sharp turns in a learning trajectory that my life has taken in the last few years.

[31:38]
You know, I came up through the ranks

[31:40]
of the Sciences, never even gave a second thought to art,

[31:46]
just was never asked to take an art course or study art history or to understand

[31:52]
the economies of the philosophies of art until about a couple of years ago,

[31:56]
when I realized that artists have this in a lot of artists, I don’t speak for all

[32:02]
of them, but have this intrinsic sensitivity.

[32:05]
And that’s a key word, because I’m actually talking about that thing.

[32:08]
I had a child that sensitivity artists have cultivated a sensitivity

[32:13]
in an awareness of the world which they draw upon for creativity to create art.

[32:19]
So it is fundamentally ecological.

[32:22]
Even

[32:25]
if they’re creating stainless steel modern

[32:27]
sculptures, they’re still cultivated sensitivity, and they still ask the world

[32:33]
to participate in their creativity in some way.

[32:36]
And so the a great candidate for exploring ecological intelligence.

[32:43]
And so

[32:46]
the primary message that I try to convey

[32:51]
through an of course, it’s actually aka for artists.

[32:54]
The primary methods that I try to convey

[32:56]
through that course is that there creativity isn’t just theirs alone,

[33:01]
that when they create, they’re creating in an alliance with nature.

[33:07]
And when they realize that when they have

[33:11]
that relationship with nature, when they can establish a collaborative rapport

[33:16]
with nature, it just ramps up their creativity.

[33:19]
It’s

[33:21]
because if you enter into an alliance with.

[33:25]
Nature for as your source of creativity,

[33:28]
you’re teaming up with a pretty creative source.

[33:34]
It’s the source of everything that is all

[33:37]
of the beauty and complexity and not just the nature but the cultural

[33:44]
artifacts and the mystical traditions and the religious impulses.

[33:50]
All that stuff is part of nature’s creativity, too.

[33:53]
And so when artists tap into that,

[33:55]
they just my proposal is that they will have a new ally to create.

[34:01]
And here’s where I get here’s where Oka

[34:06]
fulfills its mission, which is to realign our culture with nature will.

[34:12]
When artists are creating art in alliance with the intelligence of nature,

[34:17]
then the art they create contribute to the culture we collectively create.

[34:22]
Then what we’ll end up with is a culture that’s more aligned with nature.

[34:28]
And this is how we cultivate ecological intelligence in our culture.

[34:33]
And, you know,

[34:35]
pro or a side effect of that is a better society, a more caring,

[34:41]
more open, more curious and more creative society.

[34:46]
So, yeah,

[34:49]
that’s what the course is all about.

[34:51]
I’m also developing one or just for what I

[34:54]
call for Earth links, which is a little more general.

[34:59]
And I want to kind of circle back to that some place.

[35:04]
And I don’t even remember where it was,

[35:07]
but I heard you talking or read somewhere about your background

[35:12]
in big history, which in general terms, I guess, would be

[35:19]
kind of an interdisciplinary focus on things.

[35:24]
It involves physics and chemistry and biology, geology, astronomy, etcetera.

[35:29]
And human history.

[35:30]
How does that if at all, I guess that in human history.

[35:34]
And I was going to say, how does that all influence if at all your Earthling theory?

[35:40]
And then since you mentioned the Earthling

[35:43]
theory, how does that interplay with the idea of creativity

[35:48]
and what OK is doing in general, not necessarily just for artists, sure.

[35:55]
Well, you know, big histories.

[35:57]
It’s kind of an emerging field

[35:59]
that started back in the 2015 or something like that 14

[36:06]
basically, it came about because if you

[36:09]
study history and I think you’ve studied history, your undergraduate in history.

[36:12]
So if you study history and you ask questions about what happened,

[36:17]
what is the context in which this historical event happened?

[36:20]
That means you have to go a little further back to establish the content.

[36:23]
If you want to understand the American Revolution,

[36:24]
you have to understand, you know, the expansion from Europe

[36:28]
and the colonization of the on the continent and the westward

[36:31]
expansion, you have to understand the context of these things.

[36:35]
So if you want to understand the context that you all have to understand

[36:38]
the context of the context, what’s the context?

[36:40]
You could you could follow this back in an endless regression.

[36:44]
And so where does human history start?

[36:48]
In the past, we’ve just set up.

[36:51]
Well, it starts with agriculture.

[36:53]
It starts with the first time, the first modern human skeleton

[36:58]
200,000 years ago or whatever it is.

[37:01]
But those events had context, too.

[37:03]
There’s a there’s a natural history that bleeds into human history, right.

[37:09]
Which bleeds into today.

[37:12]
And what the big historians did

[37:15]
to establish this field was to say, well, let’s not be stuck within any particular

[37:21]
domain of knowledge, human history versus biology.

[37:26]
Or.

[37:27]
And let’s just keep following the story back.

[37:29]
Where does it go? Like, where does this story go?

[37:32]
And it goes all the way back to the Big Bang.

[37:36]
And then I add a little prefix onto it,

[37:40]
which actually explores before the Big Bang as a way of

[37:44]
bringing some humility to the science because, you know,

[37:49]
the days when science knew everything are gone, the days when scientists could claim

[37:54]
to have this privileged knowledge that put all of their knowledge made all

[37:59]
other knowledge obsolete is an absurd thing that is no longer the case.

[38:05]
The point is, if we if we study all the way back, we get to the Big Bang,

[38:11]
and then we start looking at what we know about the way the universe evolved.

[38:15]
How did this complexity start?

[38:18]
This is what big history is.

[38:20]
It’s an account of the entire spectrum of knowledge,

[38:26]
historical knowledge that leads up to this moment without any arbitrary boundaries

[38:32]
in between any of these what you would call thresholds.

[38:36]
So

[38:39]
that’s what it does.

[38:40]
It basically tells the biggest story you can tell, which is the story

[38:45]
of the universe and the story of us within the universe.

[38:48]
There are some really profound realization that come from doing that.

[38:54]
And this is what my research

[38:56]
was really all about was to really

[38:58]
articulate what are the transformative qualities of knowing this story?

[39:04]
And this is why this is essentially

[39:07]
the mission of voice is to tune us into our story of continuity with the world

[39:15]
and then enjoying whatever side effects that may have.

[39:19]
The point that’s what Big history does is it traces the history of the universe

[39:26]
and includes human history as an integral part.

[39:29]
And this is where Earthling theory comes from.

[39:31]
So you ask me about Earthling theory, right.

[39:34]
Well, this is a completely

[39:37]
as far as I can tell,

[39:38]
the scholarship that I’ve done and the research that I’ve

[39:41]
the investigations that I’ve done completely miss this idea.

[39:47]
In other words, so you can it’s an age old question, what makes us human?

[39:53]
And you can have an answer for that.

[39:55]
There’s a million different qualities

[39:57]
of us that set us apart from anything else in the world.

[40:01]
But what that overlooks is if you

[40:04]
trace the history and I’m going to pick an arbitrary date, I’m going to pick

[40:10]
7 million years ago as an arbitrary

[40:16]
divergence point when the dominant primate

[40:21]
organism on the planet was called what we now call Helen Tropes cadences.

[40:27]
So what is this pre human primate

[40:29]
that lives in the trees in Africa, West Africa?

[40:33]
That’s why it’s called Cadenas and that species for some reason.

[40:39]
And we have ideas about what the reason might be.

[40:41]
But for some reason, that species diverged into two species.

[40:44]
One of the lineage of that divergence went on to become modern chimpanzees.

[40:50]
So there is no longer cadents.

[40:54]
So, Helen, this dentist in the world, the other lineage of that split became us.

[41:01]
And there are a lot of little side splits

[41:04]
that went off to do gorillas and other hominid species that have gone extinct.

[41:08]
But the point is, today we have two descendants of that 7

[41:12]
million years ago split on this planet, the chimps and us.

[41:15]
We both represent

[41:17]
the last common ancestor.

[41:20]
Now, if you look at the history of chimps

[41:22]
since that split, they haven’t really diverged.

[41:26]
They’re almost indistinguishable from the Ventus.

[41:30]
But if you look at us, oh, wow.

[41:33]
And it’s great that Dolphins squeak

[41:37]
and bees dance and bears have kinds of communication.

[41:41]
But none of these species do anything on the scale that we do.

[41:44]
What is it that this is the question, what makes us human?

[41:48]
Well, if you trace the history of us, when

[41:52]
that band of primates left the trees in Africa to set out across the world,

[41:59]
they encountered every habitat that this planet has to offer.

[42:03]
In other words, they crossed savannahs.

[42:05]
They crossed forests, they lived along Rivers,

[42:09]
and then generation after generation after generation.

[42:11]
They lived with in mountain ranges.

[42:14]
They lived along the shores of estuaries.

[42:18]
They lived on bays, they crossed oceans, they skirted glaciers.

[42:23]
And over that 7 million years between that split, and today,

[42:27]
only our species, only the species that went on to become

[42:31]
us, Homo sapiens, has had that kind of intimate, sustained

[42:36]
relationship with every habitat on this planet.

[42:39]
The chimps didn’t do that.

[42:41]
And they’re still in the trees doing what the hell anthropos did.

[42:45]
We had every,

[42:46]
in other words, every habitat on this planet over that 7 million years imprinted

[42:51]
its ecological intelligence onto our species.

[42:53]
And what do we do with it?

[42:55]
Well, look at what we did 20, 17,000 years ago.

[42:59]
This intelligence that had been imprinted

[43:02]
on us suddenly emerges as cave art and other art forms.

[43:08]
There’s this explosion of creativity

[43:10]
that only our species has done only because our species has this deep,

[43:15]
intimate and sequential relationship with every habitat on this.

[43:19]
Does this make sense?

[43:21]
Like every habitat has imprinted its ecological intelligence on to us.

[43:25]
This is what makes us human.

[43:27]
This is what gives us art.

[43:29]
This is what will will

[43:32]
determine our future if there is one, it’s whether or not we

[43:37]
remember that intelligence.

[43:39]
And I know this all sounds very grand OS.

[43:42]
And in some ways it is.

[43:43]
But where we got to lose.

[43:45]
So that’s what our fling theory is.

[43:49]
That

[43:51]
it’s a theory of humanity.

[43:53]
Humanity is of the Earth.

[43:55]
And the sooner we get to really own that

[43:59]
that endowment, the sooner we will create a better future.

[44:02]
We’re not going to get off this planet by destroying it.

[44:05]
We’re going to get off this planet

[44:06]
by tapping into the intelligence that it endowed us.

[44:09]
With I studied the Cosmos.

[44:12]
The Cosmos doesn’t need another parasitic species to go and let TerraForm Mars.

[44:20]
What we need is a species that can tap

[44:23]
into the intelligence of nature in order to propagate it.

[44:28]
It’s beauty into the universe.

[44:30]
And I’m not like a futurist.

[44:32]
And I’m really not a science fiction person, but I’m just saying,

[44:37]
destroying the planet to the point where

[44:40]
we need to get off of it is not a viable option now.

[44:44]
It may be painful.

[44:46]
In other words, it may take some

[44:49]
challenge in some

[44:51]
strain to get us into the future, but I’d rather see us do it as

[44:58]
an intelligent species as opposed to a parasitic one.

[45:04]
Right.

[45:05]
And by the way, yes, there’s a lot there that you’ve thrown

[45:11]
at us, and I had the good fortune to have already

[45:15]
heard some of it, so I’ve been able to absorb it and process it.

[45:18]
And probably

[45:21]
well ahead of some of the listeners

[45:23]
who are thinking, what the hell is going on here.

[45:27]
But it

[45:29]
does make one question that occurred to me that I did not see

[45:36]
addressed in any of the materials that I’ve looked at or listen to online,

[45:40]
which is what, if any interplay or intersection,

[45:45]
might there be between Earthling theory or, for that matter, OK,

[45:51]
or ecological intelligence and say, spirituality or the idea of a creator?

[45:58]
Are they mutually exclusive? Are they just not even considered?

[46:04]
Nor can there be overlap? Or how do you address something like that?

[46:10]
They are utterly consistent

[46:12]
when you break into a way of thinking that

[46:19]
tends toward inclusion as opposed to exclusion.

[46:24]
Suddenly, those things that you’re

[46:27]
referring to, these sort of mystical traditions or spiritual experiences or

[46:31]
even the divine, they’re completely accessible.

[46:35]
They’re completely accessible through this

[46:39]
openness to a bigger relationship.

[46:41]
In other words, you know, the big history narrative,

[46:45]
although its scientific and science has its problems in science,

[46:51]
is worthy of deep criticism, and I’m perfectly willing to do that.

[46:57]
However, once you get beyond that and understand that science is imperfect,

[47:03]
I’m not saying that opens the door to dogma.

[47:08]
What I’m saying is that

[47:11]
when you practice inclusive thinking, which is what big history does,

[47:17]
you suddenly see how these inherited stories about profits or gurus or

[47:26]
divine interventions, all of those things become completely

[47:30]
rational and completely part of this big, beautiful story of the universe.

[47:35]
Those aren’t. Those aren’t outside of nature.

[47:39]
That’s nature telling those stories through our creativity,

[47:43]
through our imaginations, which are purely part of nature.

[47:48]
And there used to be this big thing back

[47:51]
in the 90s about, well, that’s a God of the Gaps argument.

[47:55]
And I was never satisfied

[47:57]
with that critique because, you know, there are gaps in our knowledge.

[48:01]
And where else would you put God?

[48:04]
I mean, of course, I

[48:06]
think that’s a pretty good good.

[48:09]
I’m okay with that.

[48:10]
If somebody claims the God of the Gaps

[48:12]
argument, in other words, we put God or let’s call it mystery

[48:17]
in the gaps in our knowledge, which is really just a motivation to get

[48:23]
more knowledge, to get closer to that mystery to get closer to.

[48:26]
So I guess all I’m saying is I find this view of the world this way of being

[48:32]
in the world completely consistent with the experience of the divine

[48:42]
every day.

[48:43]
I feel it.

[48:45]
And it motivates me to do all those things that typically motivate an experience

[48:52]
with the divine to care for one another, to put myself in someone else,

[48:58]
use all these wisdoms that come out of these scriptures.

[49:02]
They’re completely consistent with the ethos of nature.

[49:11]
So I’m not sure if I’m answering your question.

[49:14]
I agree. But there’s no you are.

[49:16]
And I think we could.

[49:18]
Well, sorry, this a little bit of I’m sorry.

[49:22]
I’m going to keep going.

[49:23]
I guess what I’m saying is

[49:26]
this form of beauty that I think I’m referring that OC is trying to refer to.

[49:32]
I somehow speaks to that question that there is this

[49:37]
new kind of beauty that transcends all these old divisions,

[49:42]
these old inherited fictions that the divine and nature are separate.

[49:48]
This beauty somehow reveals that thing.

[49:52]
And in another call,

[49:56]
maybe we could get into what are the qualities of that beauty.

[50:01]
But I guess I’ll just leave it at that that I just don’t see any

[50:06]
adversarial relationship between what a stands for and what,

[50:11]
say religious traditions or spiritual wisdom is referring to.

[50:18]
Yeah.

[50:20]
And I think we could probably have an entire podcast devoted to discussing

[50:26]
the relationships or the consistency between Oka and

[50:32]
religion or spirituality or metaphysical practices, for that matter,

[50:39]
any number of things along those lines.

[50:42]
But that, of course, could take an entire podcast to do that.

[50:48]
And I do want to touch on what you mentioned as this emergent beauty.

[50:54]
And I know that I had seen

[50:57]
somewhere you had said that there’s this emergent beauty that can be disclosed

[51:03]
to humans through art that abuse three intelligences.

[51:07]
And I think that you were just alluding to that which would be nature’s,

[51:11]
intelligence, human intelligence and technological intelligence.

[51:16]
What do you mean by that?

[51:19]
And I know that of itself could be another entire podcast, but just

[51:26]
as a precursor to maybe another

[51:28]
discussion, maybe you can tell us about that.

[51:30]
Sure. It’s funny listening to say that

[51:33]
automated, just like your audience probably does.

[51:36]
I started to tune out like, what is this guy talking about?

[51:40]
So

[51:44]
I think that this beauty, this that we’re referring to is and this is fairly new.

[51:51]
So I’m still sort of developing the language for this.

[51:56]
But what I’m beginning to see as

[52:01]
I spent the first,

[52:03]
you know,

[52:06]
four fifths of my career studying nature took me a long time to figure out nature.

[52:12]
Then I switched to art, and I started learning about art.

[52:16]
And I was on this real fast track to learning about art and also technology.

[52:21]
And then finally, the one thing that I never really was interested in.

[52:26]
Which is economics like money.

[52:28]
I’ve just never really cared about money.

[52:32]
And in the past three months, I’ve suddenly gotten really interested in it.

[52:38]
And the reason is because I see these new technologies

[52:43]
specifically blockchain technology and what that means.

[52:46]
And nonfungible tokens and all these sort

[52:49]
of hyped up code words for what’s going on in cryptocurrency.

[52:54]
But when I see all these things start

[52:57]
to coalesce, these things that I know about nature, about art.

[53:01]
And now about economics, I’m seeing this

[53:06]
is the landscape in which this emergent beauty will appear.

[53:11]
This is what I’m saying.

[53:12]
And so.

[53:14]
So we’ve already talked about what natural intelligence is.

[53:17]
And ecological intelligence and human

[53:20]
intelligence is an offshoot of that intelligence.

[53:23]
We talked about that’s Earthling theories is articulating,

[53:27]
that our intelligence is the intelligence of nature through the Earth.

[53:31]
It’s an Earth flavored natural intelligence.

[53:34]
And now we havehere we are.

[53:37]
We find ourselves in this moment where

[53:39]
technology is becoming this incredibly potent part of the conversation.

[53:44]
It’s entering in, and it’s starting to shape our relationships.

[53:48]
It’s an active participant

[53:51]
out in the matrix of ecological intelligence that we find ourselves in.

[53:56]
And so so what I’m seeing is that as we shift towards

[54:04]
more virtual forms of value, I’m not going to say currency, but value virtual forms.

[54:12]
In other words, ideas away from our old dependence on material forms of value.

[54:22]
Then suddenly we’ve created a new niche.

[54:26]
This is an ecological term.

[54:28]
Well, we haven’t created it.

[54:29]
We we’ve partly created it.

[54:31]
But a new niche has suddenly appeared

[54:33]
where artists who tap into natural intelligence, ecological intelligence,

[54:39]
creating art and culture that has embedded within it.

[54:44]
The value that comes with this

[54:46]
relationship to nature suddenly becomes I’m going to use the word commodified.

[54:52]
Here’s the breakthrough.

[54:54]
Okay, Dennis, here’s the breakthrough.

[54:57]
If we could somehow

[55:00]
re couple

[55:03]
our concerns with personal wealth

[55:06]
to planetary health would have the problem solved.

[55:09]
Right.

[55:09]
If we could put the energy that we put in to generating and accumulating

[55:14]
and extracting wealth for ourselves and our families.

[55:17]
If we could somehow couple that energy, couple that to the healing of the planet

[55:25]
and the healing of the social injuries that we’ve all experienced,

[55:32]
then we’re really on a path toward the beautiful future that I’m talking about.

[55:37]
Right. I

[55:40]
think it’s a subtle Jedi mind trick, but I think if we can pull that off

[55:48]
and my proposal is that we can do it through art.

[55:51]
So in this case, art becomes the Trojan Horse.

[55:54]
It’s actually a Trojan unicorn.

[55:56]
If we could embed ecological intelligence

[55:59]
in art, that is a nonfungible token and use that as a form of currency

[56:05]
in an open market with all the same open market rules.

[56:11]
And if that NFT is somehow,

[56:16]
if it validates planetary healing and there are ways to do

[56:20]
this, there are technologies now emerging that allow us to do this.

[56:23]
Then we are suddenly in it.

[56:25]
We’re suddenly in a new game starts and the new game is your personal well being.

[56:32]
Your personal happiness is tied to the happiness and well being of the planet.

[56:37]
Then, you know,

[56:40]
we’ve game the system in a whole new way.

[56:44]
I’m not sure if this is the question you asked.

[56:47]
I’m sure it wasn’t, but this is what I’m currently thinking.

[56:50]
And

[56:52]
yeah, I think that’s the trajectory that I’m on.

[56:58]
Yeah. No.

[57:00]
You definitely responded to my query here.

[57:05]
And

[57:06]
once again, I think there’s a whole other

[57:10]
podcast that we could get into specifically about that topic,

[57:15]
but obviously we’re running a little short on time at this point.

[57:20]
I do want before we

[57:23]
say goodbye for the day to have a little bit of a discussion about

[57:29]
the Surfers Guide to the Universe and what that is and how it came about and what

[57:34]
your I guess what your goals are with respect to that.

[57:38]
And what if any, in a relationship is there between that and OK?

[57:43]
Sure.

[57:45]
Well,

[57:47]
I’m not going to deny it.

[57:49]
I spent a lot of time surfing

[57:52]
it’s for decades.

[57:55]
It’s been a kind of Church for me.

[58:00]
There’s much to be learned by sitting

[58:04]
in the ocean at the interface of water and sky,

[58:09]
because it trains you to tune into subtleties

[58:16]
that wouldn’t be visible from just sitting on the beach, drinking a beer.

[58:20]
Not that there’s anything wrong with that,

[58:22]
but I guess what I’m saying is that being a surfer, especially a surfer

[58:26]
with the kind of sensitivities that I happen to have,

[58:30]
it teaches you to be very tuned into,

[58:34]
like, for example, really subtle shifts in the horizon.

[58:37]
So next time you’re watching surfers from the beach,

[58:41]
you pay attention to the way they move, because what you’ll see if you’re really

[58:46]
paying attention is some of those surfers will move.

[58:49]
They’ll move in a sort of unspoken, coordinated way.

[58:52]
And what you’re seeing is that people

[58:56]
who have been out there a long time doing that they’ve developed.

[58:59]
They developed a kind of intelligence, a sensitivity to what’s going on just off

[59:04]
the horizon by looking, I can see it in my mind right now.

[59:07]
I can see the way that the horizon

[59:10]
shifts when there’s a big set coming, when there’s a set of big swells coming.

[59:15]
And if I’m really tuned into it,

[59:17]
I can be the first one to get in position, the right position to catch the wave.

[59:22]
And then that comes with this whole other

[59:24]
reward, this whole other ecstatic sort of moment that you’re rewarded with.

[59:29]
These are the lessons that surfing has taught me about that.

[59:34]
So the Servers Guide to the Universe was an early project, a voice.

[59:42]
Well, the other thing I should mention,

[59:44]
I have another career as a wooden surfboard maker.

[59:47]
Back in the early 2000,

[59:49]
I started a company that created hollow wooden surfboards, which became really

[59:55]
popular

[59:58]
as part of this sort of sole surfing crowd.

[01:00:01]
Not the whole not the other kind that’s at the Olympics now.

[01:00:04]
But there’s this other kind of surfing, which is much more

[01:00:09]
old school.

[01:00:10]
I guess

[01:00:12]
it was a project to use the beautiful

[01:00:20]
parts of surfing to help communicate

[01:00:25]
this message.

[01:00:27]
This thing that Oak is about, and it was a lot of fun.

[01:00:33]
We ended up creating some really beautiful

[01:00:35]
art, and there’s a couple of pieces back there on the wall that you can see,

[01:00:38]
maybe just sort of show you that sort of samples of the kind of thing

[01:00:42]
that’s a Cedar tree that was needed to be cut down.

[01:00:46]
And so I

[01:00:47]
created some surfboard art.

[01:00:48]
So that’s what the Surface Guide

[01:00:50]
to the Universe is using wooden surfboards as art

[01:00:55]
as an opportunity to talk about these things that we’ve been talking about.

[01:01:01]
Right.

[01:01:03]
Well, and I want to encourage everyone that’s listening or watching.

[01:01:06]
First of all,

[01:01:07]
if you’re watching the video, you want to check out the surfboards

[01:01:10]
that Rich is referring to, and whether or not you’re watching

[01:01:15]
the podcast or just listening, please check out Oka.

[01:01:18]
Com. So you can,

[01:01:20]
first of all, learn a little bit more, absorb more about what Rich has been

[01:01:25]
discussing with us today and take a look at some of the images of the surfboards

[01:01:29]
and the art that he’s referenced right now.

[01:01:33]
Rich, I want to shift the tone a little bit because with all of our guests before

[01:01:38]
we let you go, we play a little game called would you rather I know this is

[01:01:42]
going to be a silly compared to the depth of our conversation.

[01:01:46]
No, I think we need this.

[01:01:48]
No, I think it’ll be perfect.

[01:01:50]
We probably. Yeah.

[01:01:52]
So would you rather and I try to think of some questions or find some questions

[01:01:58]
that were a little more in in tune with what I knew we’d be discussing.

[01:02:03]
So would you rather have a time machine or a teleporter?

[01:02:07]
And why?

[01:02:10]
Well, a time machine is a teleporter.

[01:02:14]
So I think I would

[01:02:19]
when you see these supposed to be like, really quick answers.

[01:02:25]
Whatever you want to make of them.

[01:02:27]
I would say a time machine because

[01:02:32]
in my conception of space, time are continuous.

[01:02:37]
And so

[01:02:39]
a time traveling machine is, in effect a teleporter.

[01:02:44]
And of course, it’s because I’d be able to get firsthand all this stuff that I

[01:02:51]
teach about, which, by the way,

[01:02:53]
we can we have telescopes that look out at the Cosmos and they travel.

[01:02:58]
They essentially travel back in time.

[01:02:59]
So we can do that already.

[01:03:03]
But I would love to have time machine, for sure.

[01:03:07]
Absolutely. Okay.

[01:03:09]
So would you rather have a lot of mediocre friends or one really good friend one?

[01:03:19]
It doesn’t surprise me.

[01:03:21]
I.

[01:03:24]
Think a lot of people would feel that way. Would you rather be able to talk

[01:03:29]
to animals and understand them or speak all human languages?

[01:03:38]
Those are the same question.

[01:03:40]
I would rather be able to speak to animals,

[01:03:46]
but I should also mention that I do think that there are forms

[01:03:52]
of communication that happen that we overlook.

[01:03:55]
And so I think we have a greater capacity

[01:04:00]
to communicate with animals and the natural world in general than we know.

[01:04:06]
But it would definitely be to know how to speak with animals.

[01:04:13]
Okay, last one.

[01:04:15]
And this is a little bit similar to what I previously asked.

[01:04:19]
But if you were reborn in the new life,

[01:04:21]
would you rather be alive in the past or the future?

[01:04:25]
Oh, man.

[01:04:27]
Oh, man.

[01:04:30]
I

[01:04:33]
guess the past just because I know what

[01:04:35]
to do, but I was sure would love to see what’s going on in the future.

[01:04:40]
I I hope.

[01:04:42]
I hope.

[01:04:43]
Yeah, that’s it.

[01:04:47]
Okay.

[01:04:48]
Well, I appreciate you being here today.

[01:04:51]
As you didn’t let me down.

[01:04:53]
I knew it’d be a really interesting conversation.

[01:04:55]
Uncommon convo, and I hope

[01:04:59]
uncommon combo.

[01:05:01]
And I hope we can have another Uncommon

[01:05:03]
combo in the future and talk about some of these other things.

[01:05:06]
Thanks a lot, Dennis.

[01:05:07]
I think you’re doing wonderful work.

[01:05:09]
I can see that you’re a very empathetic

[01:05:11]
human being, and I know your profession may

[01:05:16]
take a beating sometimes, but you are an exception and maybe not an exception.

[01:05:22]
But

[01:05:24]
thank you for being and doing what you do.

[01:05:28]
Well, I definitely appreciate that to everyone else out there.

[01:05:33]
My thanks again.

[01:05:34]
Obviously the doctor rich Blondell for being here.

[01:05:36]
Be sure again to check out Oka.

[01:05:38]
Com to learn more and thank you all for tuning in today.

[01:05:42]
If you haven’t done so again,

[01:05:44]
please subscribe to Uncommon Combos on your favorite podcast platform.

[01:05:48]
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[01:05:53]
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[01:05:56]
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[01:06:00]
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[01:06:37]
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