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[Music] welcome to spiral dynamics stage purple this is a continuation of my multi-part series on the developmental model known as spiral dynamics i have many episodes in this series in a sense this is the end of the series but also the beginning because stage purple is really the beginning of where you want to start with spiral dynamics and then everything else goes up from there now before we get into that i want to give credit here to the developers of this model claire graves don beck and christopher cohen and also the website spiral dynamics integral dot nl a lot of the phrases and information that you'll find in this episode i pulled directly from the website or i pulled directly from the book called spiral dynamics or from the work of claire graves who was the originator of the spiral dynamics model before it was even called spiral dynamics it was a series of value systems so spiral dynamics again just to recap for those of you who are just joining in if this is the first episode you're watching it's a developmental model that looks at the evolution of culture and human psychology through time both at an individual level and also collectively and a lot of it is about collective evolution because culture is sort of a collective human invention so every stage is a more advanced form of culture no one stage is better than any other stage but they do come in a particular order and generally you don't skip stages you have to go through each stage to get to the next stage this model is extremely useful for understanding your own development throughout your life the development of those around you your family members your friends your co-workers and then also the development of your society and the real value of this model is that you're able to take uh all of the crazy cultural stuff that's happening around you and make sense of it because really what you start to see is when you look at culture and you strip it off of all of its superficiality you get down to the root of culture and what that's about is about a certain level of the psyche uh a certain level of cognitive development of the psyche a certain level of moral development and really a set of values so each stage corresponds with a set of values here we go i'll show you again the chart of the various stages purple is the beginning of the spiral we might say there's one below called beige but it's not really pertinent to us here in our work so we're starting with purple then we go up to red blue orange green yellow and turquoise and as we're going up this ladder of levels as we might say there's an increase in the level of consciousness and increase in the level of complexity to the culture and to one's psyche or to one's mind and so generally what we try to do throughout life is we try to evolve up these stages in a sense as quickly as we can trying to get to tier 2 which is yellow and turquoise that's what we're trying to do personally and that's kind of where our understanding of culture intersects with our own individual development so you yourself if you're joining actualize.org in the effort to actualize yourself to develop yourself then you're probably joining me around stage orange maybe green maybe even blue and then my job is to help to take you into uh high green solid green yellow and to turquoise and uh and basically all of the content that i that i share with you is trying to get you to yellow and turquoise and to see reality from those higher uh elevation perspectives uh higher stages of consciousness more complex ways of looking at the world more nuanced ways of looking at the world okay so let's talk about the essence of stage purple stage purple is about being a member of a tribe and a clan in a sense this is where mankind began mankind has lived this way for hundreds of thousands of years in a clanish tribal sort of little community it's about survival as a tribe it's about sacrificing oneself for your own tribe being an individual subordinated to the group today because most of us if you're listening to me you're probably living in a relatively developed part of the world uh maybe a western democracy in europe or in america or in canada some something like that and therefore you're probably at spiral dynamic stage blue or above probably around orange maybe orange slash green and so at this level of development our culture has so indoctrinated us with this notion of individuality individual consumerism individual property rights my right to have a house my right to have you know my wife my right to have my children my right to have my car it's a very we're living in a very materialistic individualistic age and culture we might say uh all the culture that comes out of hollywood and so forth that is now spread all around the world if you're watching movies and tv shows and all this it's all very individualistic minded and it can create sort of a false notion that this is how mankind has always been we've always just thought of ourselves as individuals surviving this there's just kind of this libertarian myth that i've talked about in my episode about why libertarianism is nonsense this sort of myth of the rugged individual the sort of john wayne character um who survives by himself is self-reliant and if anybody messes with him you know he's got his gun and he defends his right and his property and his family and his wife and this this sort of mentality but this is not how the majority of mankind lives not even to this day but certainly not for the majority of human history the majority of human history was communal life you lived as part of a tribe when you're living as part of a tribe there is not this sense that i have a individual right to a piece of land and to a house and to a gun and to whatever you're part of a tribe and in fact your larger identity sees this is all a function of identity and we talk about identity a lot in my teachings uh because identity is the crux of of all development and really everything that goes on with humans is all about identity so here we're talking about a very collectivist identity and uh you need to start to wrap your mind around the idea that having an individual identity is something that's relatively modern it's maybe a couple hundred years old maybe a thousand years old you know depending on which parts of the world we're looking at but even today i would say probably half the world lives in such conditions where being an individual is simply impossible survival as an individual is impossible survival means surviving as your tribe and your tribe is extremely valuable and important to you it's your whole life it's your whole identity it trumps everything else it trumps your own personal satisfaction of your ego needs and your your desire to play video games or to watch a movie or to have sex all of those are subordinate to the survival of your tribe because if your tribe died dies out nothing else is possible in many parts of the world see but then in the most developed parts of the world we've sort of outgrown the tribe our tribe has become so big that we forget that we're even part of a tribe and that humans are a tribal species and this leads to all sort of absurdities which i talk about in my why libertarianism is nonsense episode go check that out if you want to understand at a deeper level the problems that happen there so the essence of purple is that life not only is it communal but it there's it's it's deeply mystical in the sense that it feels like life is part of this being alive within an enchanted magical village so there's this element of spirituality of mysticism that that's part of stage turquoise because at state turquoise there is not advanced rationality there is not advanced science or advanced technology so there's not this mechanistic materialistic worldview that is so common today that again we also take for granted we sort of take for granted this idea that well everybody since the dawn of human civilization has just assumed that there are physical objects and that the universe is just this physical logical clockwork machine it's like a computer it's like a computer simulation or something like that and this is just not the case at stage purple life is magical life is mystical stage purple seeks harmony with nature's power there's a sort of reverence of the power of nature because people who live at stage turquoise they generally live very close to nature they're not living in apartment complexes or high rises in giant cities they're living in the forest in the jungle on the savannah in the desert and their survival depends upon the water the earth the fish the animals the sun the moon and so on there's an animistic spirituality shamanistic spirituality it's mystical we'll talk more about that as we go forward what that really means this notion of animism uh purple obeys the desires of mystical spirit beings which are just thought to be part of nature nature is seen to be mystical there's a deep connection to nature and there's a sort of uncivilized and i'm putting this in quotes uncivilized quality to stage purple now in many ways stage purple is more has more wisdom and is more advanced in a certain sense we could say than stage orange which is extremely materialistic and disconnected from nature and the wisdom of nature but in a certain sense also we don't want to romanticize stage purple tribes too much because there's a reason that mankind grew out of stage turquoise or stage purple tribes is because they are uncivilized and we'll talk about those uncivilized aspects as we go forward here so when does stage purple emerge really the beginning of homo sapiens there was never a time in the history of homo sapiens where we lived as individuals i remember when i was a kid i sort of thought that that's how mankind used to live i thought that well we were all just individuals living by ourselves and then as we became more advanced we kind of came together and we started to cooperate together and you know build pyramids and build cities and things like that but before that we were just individuals and then later when i when i did a deeper study i was surprised and shocked to learn that no there was never such a time there was never a time when human beings were rugged individuals living in forests by themselves we were always part of a tribe and if you look at our nearest ancestors the chimpanzees and the bonobos you see that they don't survive by themselves you never find a alone chimp walking through the forest the chimp is always part of a troop it might be 20 members 30 members 50 or 100 members depending on the you know the species of the of the primate and so forth you know it tends to vary uh but there was never this time when humans even lived as an individual family you might say well the smallest unit of humanity is just a family of four no you can't survive as a family of four in in the harsh wilderness of the jungle or the the savannah or in the deserts or in the mountains it just it doesn't work it never worked so what happened was that our nearest common ancestor with these apes and and primates was was something like between you might say like a chimpanzee and a human and even back then this was like maybe a million years ago or so even back then they were already highly social highly communal creatures and they didn't survive by themselves and uh and also so that's sort of collectively where stage purple emerged it basically emerged probably a million years ago or so uh even before our species existed it basically emerged we can see a sort of a a crude proto form of it in chimpanzees and in in bonobos they have a certain very primitive culture they even have tool use and other things like that that they that they learn and teach each other and so on but individually for humans uh in early childhood you know we're raised a little bit isolated if we're if we're children you know the first few years we spend mostly at home but then they throw us into kindergarten into preschool and then quickly elementary school and then quickly you're learned and uh sort of socialized and taught how to be tribal how to play in a tribe with other kids how to get along how to share things and you know all the challenges that come with that so you remember what it was like to learn and and that's difficult it can be difficult to to learn how to integrate with other human beings and to navigate the dynamics there there's a certain kind of game that you know social game that's played you have to be polite you have to be able to read their signals their emotions you don't want to be too mean to them you don't want to be too much of a bully you got to make friends there's a sort of a politics game that's going on now you know so all of these social dynamics you start learning this really young as a child you start learning what to say you start learning that you need to do the right things to fit in so other kids don't ostracize you so they don't ridicule you and laugh at you they don't bully you and so then that whole thing and then it just it it keeps evolving beyond that through middle school then into high school you know high school becomes very much social and about playing these politics games of who's the coolest kid in school and how do you be cool how do you hang out with the cool kids and there's different groups and all these social dynamics so this is where stage purple starts to emerge for you as an individual think back into your early childhood and teenage years where you struggled with that and i'm willing to bet that many of you struggled with that and still struggle with it today especially if you're an introvert like me so purple emerges because social life goes way beyond personal survival purple emerges because it's a natural extension of the family unit so if we take the family unit it's just sort of the basic unit of human survival uh but we expand that because you're not surviving as one family it's a collection of clan of families surviving together that you're going to have to interbreed with and so forth and so basically the tribe is one big family so you have your little local family that you deal with now just apply those similar dynamics scale them up by a factor of 10 or 20 and now you're looking at your tribe in this tribe everybody knows everybody else it's not this cold calculating business-like transaction where you are trying to profit from somebody else in your tribe it's much more like your family like in your family think about it when your mom or your dad needs something from you they don't you know they don't they don't call you and arrange some formal get together where you pencil them in you know they don't call your secretary and set up an appointment and then you ask them for you know you sen you send your mom a bill for seeing you for doing some favor for her no it's like she needs some favor don you do it and then when you need something from her maybe she does it and so everybody helps everybody out that's how a family works well that's how a tribe works as well and because the tribe is relatively small it might be 20 members 50 members 100 members even at 100 members this is still a small enough number that you're able to know everybody in the tribe by name and so there's not that sense of alienation and anonymity which exists today if you're living in a big city where you hardly know anybody you probably don't even know your neighbors let alone somebody across town yet in this tribe you knew everybody you knew their business you know you know their strengths and weaknesses you know their faults and problems there's a lot of gossiping going on there's not much privacy everybody sees everybody else everybody's knows and is in everybody's business and the reason it is that way is because it's like a team it's almost like a sports team because we got to survive together we got to coordinate we got to communicate we got to go on hunts together we've got to organize our division of labor you know who's going to be doing the hunting who's going to be doing the gathering who's going to be doing the laundry who's going to be doing the the cooking who's going to be sewing the clothes and all these sorts of things we've got to organize this people have different roles and usually these roles are very fixed at stage purple and cooperation becomes extremely necessary for us to survive as it is for apes that's why chimpanzees live in in groups because that's how they survive through cooperation they're able to survive much easier than they would and as just individuals walking around looking for scraps of food to find as a tribe we can hunt together we can share new inventions that we come up with and we can develop a culture and all these things become very powerful especially later on as we develop even further so here's a list of values for stage purple now values is the core of the stage values is really what spiral dynamics is modeling in a sense so here's the value set for purple purple values the tribe and the clan and the community above all else family and tribal bonds are deeply valued blood relationships are valued living together and contribution to the tribe is extremely valuable and important group activities and group celebration group hunts group ceremonies group rituals many things are done as a group and the meaning of life comes from being part of this tribe and part of this group so you don't want to let your group down you're trying to do what you can to contribute and in a sense this adds an extra layer to survival because if you were just living by yourself in the forest life would be very minimalistic and sparse there wouldn't be much you can do you couldn't do a lot of group activities there wouldn't be you know a dance you could do with somebody else or a party you could go to or or some celebration that you can do like all of those you wouldn't have that extra layer of meaning it would just be you and maybe your wife or your husband and your kids and that's it it would be much more limited so this gives a little extra spice to life is that you know at the end of the day once you've done all your survival activities you've hunted you forged you cook your food then you can enjoy yourselves you can you can do art you can do dance you can do drumming and music and other things like that which adds something extra to life beyond just life as an animal this is probably the first layer at which human life goes beyond just mere animal life the way that like a wolf pack survives a wolf pack i mean they just eat [ __ ] and have sex and maybe they they they lay around maybe they play a little bit with each other by biting each other that's it that's all they do it's just very simple and so humans were able to take it to the next level through culture and through having a larger community purple values honor purple values humility purple values self-sacrifice purple is willing to sacrifice the individual for the tribe in fact every individual sort of takes it as their responsibility they don't do this begrudgingly they they are willing they are happy to sacrifice themselves for the tribe because they believe in the tribe this is not some burden that's imposed by some dictator from from up above this is this is like you being willing to sacrifice for your own family if your mother or father was sick would you be willing to sacrifice to work a little bit harder for them to provide for them to make sure they get better of course you would same for the tribe there's an extreme importance placed upon respecting one's elders ancestors and customs the customs of the tribe and not only are there customs there's also taboos things that you're not supposed to do there's a lot of emphasis placed upon ritual and ceremony tradition there's a very traditional way that this tribe your tribe does things there's a traditional way that we go to hunt there's a traditional way that we cook our food there's a traditional way that we cure diseases which medicines we use there's a traditional way that we dance and celebrate there's a traditional way that we handle funerals and death of loved ones and so everything is very traditional there's not a lot of creativity you're not making stuff up there's not a lot of room for innovation here you're just learning the the rituals the customs and the taboos those things you're not supposed to do and then you're obeying those without question and then your sense of life's meaning comes from that at stage purple purple values mother nature and harmony purple values magical powers the spirit realm and spirit deities purple values mystery and mystical intuition rites of passage sacred objects and places traditional music and dance and dress and oftentimes there's costumes and other sorts of artifacts like maybe masks tattoos jewelry and other sorts of adornments that that are traditional to your tribe purple values myth and the sharing of stories because this is a pre-literate culture these are cultures that existed before there were writing systems so they had spoken language of course but mostly the history of the tribe you know it wasn't written down in a book because that didn't exist it was memorized through stories and myths that were shared in past from ancestor to ancestor and to ancestor and to make sure those stories were kept intact and they weren't corrupted there wasn't a lot of room for creativity and embellishment you had to learn the stories that your ancestors told you and then try to pass them down as face faithfully as you could to uh to your children and then to their grandchildren and so on so there's a lot of emphasis placed upon that and the history of the tribe because it is important for us to retain a sort of a a track record of where did we come from after all if our tribe didn't maintain a shared history through a mythology and through sharing of stories how would you even know where you came from you see this actually plays a very important existential role in one's psyche because today we have science modern science that tells us that oh we came from you know a sperm and an egg and through some genealogical record of ancestors and so forth but this kind of science and this sort of rational materialistic explanation didn't exist uh thousands of years ago and there was no historical record you couldn't go to google and just you know look up different wars and events that happened throughout 5 000 years of human history it was basically you had no idea it was deeply mysterious life at this stage was deeply mysterious because you didn't know how nature worked you didn't know how the gods worked you didn't know about science or evolution or any of these sorts of things so it was really just you relying on your tribe's verbally uh shared history to give you a sense of grounding and a sense of identity of who you are and where you came from and how you're supposed to behave and your tribe has this collective memory and these rigid rules and rituals because without these rules and rituals and traditions you could easily do something that would kill you you could eat the wrong plant eat the wrong mushroom hunt the wrong animal and all of those things if you do them the wrong way they could easily kill you and survival here is very precarious because if you eat the wrong plant and it poisons you there's not a hospital you can go to there's not a 911 paramedic that you could call that will come and save you there's no medicine that will save you so life is very fragile and so that's why there's this emphasis on tradition because the traditions have been time tested for hundreds and thousands of years by your ancestors by your early ancestors they were tested they figured this stuff out through trial and error many of them died but they figured it out and now you are relying upon those to keep you alive so you follow them faithfully and you respect the ancestors and the traditions so there's a great value placed upon retaining ancestral and tribal memory because your survival literally depends upon it it's not just it's not just kind of like oh wishful thinking and a nostalgia for our ancestors no your survival depends upon it when you're living in the wilderness and there's no wikipedia there's no google there's no encyclopedia there's no books how do you know how to survive in the jungle if we took you right now a modern human and we put you in the jungle you'd be dead within a week you see because you wouldn't know you wouldn't have those traditions and rituals and shared ancestral memories and knowledge and wisdom of how nature worked you would die you wouldn't know how to find water you wouldn't know how to find the right food and so on there's a strong emphasis on the value of reciprocity sharing and cooperative interdependence all of our lives depend upon one another so we all have to cooperate share and reciprocate there's a value of warding off evil spirits at this stage you believe in evil spirits you also believe in good spirits there's a value of cursing and hexing one's enemies there's a value on psychic abilities and powers there's a value on out of body travel astral realms there's a value of respect for one's elders and for their wisdom and experience there's a value of family relics and heirlooms religious medals lucky charms wards shrines artifacts of that nature and sacred words words have magical powers because words can hex words can be prayers and blessings words can summon the nature spirits and ancestors they can be used to communicate with the spirit realm so words are not just something you find in a dictionary words are sacred and magical and powerful they are used in dances and rituals and so on here are some more characteristics of stage purple it's pre-industrial usually pre-agricultural and basically hunter-gatherer although of course uh stage purple is also capable of being agricultural but generally as humans became highly agricultural we settled down we became less nomadic less hunter gather and then quickly we moved up into spiral dynamics stage red and blue uh so it was agricultural but maybe like farming on a small scale not on on a massive scale we're talking about small cohesive groups with very tight kinship bonds family bonding is central and in a sense your tribe is your whole family your extended family that's how you think of the tribe so just think of currently what we call the nuclear family in developed nations now you know your mom your dad your siblings imagine that but just expand it out to 50 people an entire tribe so it's it's sort of like a very uh robust family that you're a part of and you're treating others the way that you would treat your mom your father or your uh brother sister cousin grandmother grandfather that sort of stuff there's a deep emotional bonding between members of the tribe just like in a family there's a deep sense of tribal history as we've talked about there's lots of implicit unwritten rules to how this tribe works the tribe over centuries of survival has developed certain rules for how they hunt how they dance how they celebrate how they talk to one another how they eat and and many other things and so one of the challenges that westerners face when they discover one of these new tribes and these tribes they still exist there are tribes tribal stage purple people who live in papua new guinea in africa and south america in the middle east and elsewhere and westerners sometimes western scientists and anthropologists they will go and they will try to study these tribes one of the challenges is that a lot of these tribes have their own unique customs and implicit rules that aren't written anywhere that you have to follow in order not to offend them and in order to fit in and so one of the challenges that they have to go there and have to spend years real really going you know full native as it's as they say and living in that tribe and learning you know through trial and error learning these implicit rules and then once they do then you can fit into that tribe and then you can function but these rules oftentimes they're not scientific they're not very rational they're just sort of intuitive and their heuristics for survival in that particular environment and of course it varies from tribe to tribe because every tribe is living in a unique environment in many cases these tribes have fixed social roles there's the role of the chieftain of the medicine man of the shaman of the hunter of the warrior of the you know the the fertile young bride who is sold to you know to some to some man to have children and so everybody's playing their their role there's a more communal way of raising children where the child is not just being raised by the mother and father but by the entire village by the entire tribe and so that gives a little bit of a different dynamic and in a sense it helps to socialize the child more so than maybe even today because today the child probably grows up just with the mother and father for several years and then we send him off to preschool or kindergarten uh but then the child doesn't really know anybody in preschool in kindergarten it's all strangers and foreigners and the child doesn't really know how to deal with them it feels strange it doesn't feel as intimate the bonds because you're moving between different preschools different kindergartens you know as your parents move around they move you around and so there's not that deep sense of of communal connection that is developed and in a sense that's a negative because that later produces sort of socially crippled awkward humans which are not able to to work well in teams so you know there's pros and cons to that um there's a sense of communal property at stage purple so it's not just my house basically my house is part of the village and of course it can be considered my house but in a certain sense it's the entire village's house and we cooperate and collaborate and we share our resources our food our property to to maximize efficiency there's no strong sense of property rights there's no strong sense of individual rights there's no sense of profit motive where i'm trying to like set up a a stall or a business and i try to profit as much as i can from you the way that we do today sharing is a necessity for survival in this sort of environment and so this creates a sort of a natural insurance policy the insurance policy is that if i have a little surplus supply of food i'll share it with you if you for example go on a hunt and you're not able to find any animals today or you're not able to fish you have a bad fishing day hey you know i'll share some of my surplus with you and your family you can come to my house and eat my food and then next week when i have a bad fishing day you'll share some of your fish with me and in this way we survive it's a natural insurance policy there's usually a gender-based division of labor women do the cooking maybe or they do the the sewing or they do the gathering of the plants whereas the men go on the hunt and they do the the defense you know they manage defensive perimeter and other things like that there is a emphasis on the protection of fertile women because of course the woman plays the central role of reproducing the tribe and usually in these sorts of tribal cultures women have many many children over five children 10 children you know like a lot of children because these children usually don't survive probably half those children will die soon after birth simply from lack of sanitation or diseases or lack of food or whatever and so the woman has many many children and only a few of them end up surviving which is actually very similar to how many animals breed they have many children only a few of them survive to adulthood there's a prioritization of social bonding versus business schedules so one of the challenges that westerners face in dealing with stage purple societies and cultures and for example don't think that stage purple is only literally limited to tribes in the amazon which are totally isolated from the west no you're going to encounter stage purple culture for example in the middle east in india in the philippines in indonesia in hawaii in many other parts of the world in south america right even outside of the deep deep deep amazon you're still going to find it in cities you can still find it in villages and rural areas so don't think that it's only confined to super isolated tribes that would be just you know that would be solid solid purple but you can get examples of purple which is still part of modern society to a certain degree and in in these cases as a westerner you might for example go to india or you might go to hawaii or you might go to indonesia or wherever or to the middle east and you know you try to run a business deal with these people and it doesn't really work because you know you as a sort of a western business person you want them to show up on time and to do x amount of labor at x amount of time this many hours in a week and then get the job done you know build the house by x date that's how we westerners are sort of programmed to think but in these purple cultures they don't have rigorous schedules if you know if if the neighbors are throwing a party they're not going to go do your business and build your house they're going to go join the celebration of the party because there's a marriage a wedding whatever some ceremony that's happening they're going to go do that because social bonds are prioritized over any kind of business productivity and so usually these purple cultures they're not very productive materially because that's not something they really value very much it's not about how much money you can earn it's not about working 14 hours a day to get ahead to you know buy a better car buy a better house these things don't exist really the most valuable thing when you're living in this kind of tribal simple culture because there's not a lot of material goods you're not going to buy a latest video game or you're not going to go you know go to the strip club there's not much to do other than social bonding that's probably the most valuable thing in your life at this stage rather than any kind of material objects so one of the challenges with stage purple is that it's so deeply tribal that there's an intense in-group out group dynamic us versus them which leads to tribal warfare blood feuds potentially ethnic cleansing and racial violence because even though there's a very deep social and emotional bond between this little tribe which is seen as your own personal family what happens when another tribe interacts and intersects with your tribe they're going to be seen as foreigners because they have different traditions different values different culture different ancestry different myths different stories how are you going to make those two mesh together this creates a very serious problem which ultimately will lead to the necessity of higher stages of the spiral because while stage purple seems to work well as a little group it does work well but what happens is these little groups they don't just stay little groups they grow they balloon they take up more resources more of the environment and there's more of these groups they start popping up everywhere on the planet and then pretty soon they start to interact with one another and then of course that's when you get tribal conflict especially because every group is so beholden to its own traditions it's very very inflexible so therefore what happens is that you know one group is rigid about its traditions as is the other group and then they they're they're both closed minded they're both rigid they're both traditional but the traditions they clash so the two groups will clash because they can't understand each other's traditions they can't see the relativity of each other traditions that comes much further up the spiral these uh purple cultures tend to have a natural attitude towards sex sex is not seen as bad or dirty it's not repressed the way that it is at stage blue so that's why you see women who are half naked or even fully naked in these national geographic documentaries in these tribes people just very comfortable with their sexuality the repression of sexuality comes at stage blue with the advent of orthodox religion and the sort of discipline that comes there and the sort of sense of morality which tends to want to repress sex so this is prior to that most of the labor that is done in these cultures tends to be manual labor arranged marriages are very common the selling of daughters is very common women young women usually when they're only 12 years old or 15 years old are sold off by the father and the mother to the highest bidder who can pay a high dowry for for the woman the more beautiful the woman the more reproductive value the woman has uh the the higher the dalary dowry will be and she doesn't have any choice about this so it's both a good thing and a bad thing depending on how you look at it these cultures tend to have a preference for boys over girls because survival is difficult and when survival is difficult the boys tend to be physically stronger and a little bit better at survival than the girls and because of this that's why the girls are sold off often times and uh demand a dowry because that dowry is sort of the the the extra payment that the parents get for nurturing and raising this girl because she was weaker than the boy but to compensate because she has reproductive value then she gets payment from the boys who grew up who are going to marry the girls that's how it tends to work nepotism tends to be a strong characteristic of purple because it's so family oriented if you get a stage purple group of people trying to form a business or a government what's going to start to happen is they're going to naturally start to put their own family members even when they're not qualified into positions of power because blood bonds are more important than competence many times in these cultures and that can create a problem these cultures tend to be polygamous they tend to have naturally emerging leaders based on seniority and experience so the chieftain in one of these tribes will tend to be old very experienced survived many ballot battles went on many hunts has a lot of wisdom and you can see how valuable that is because you know in our modern culture we can go to some university professor at harvard and they are sort of like our repository of wisdom or we can go to google and we can go to wikipedia we can get you know information that is contained in books and from other humans who have lived a hundred years ago you know we can pick up a book by einstein we can pick up a book by isaac newton you know these sort of towering intellectual figures who are our wise men today but you don't have that in a pre-literate society so literally it's it's the most experienced person who's still alive and so there's a lot of value placed upon the elderly in these cultures which is less true today in our developed societies where we tend to discount the elderly as you know feeble and not young and useless and we locked them in nursing homes that's not the case here the chieftain is interesting the chieftain is not a dictator you might think the chieftain is a stage red authoritarian mafia figure no that's not how it works at stage purple the chieftain is not an absolute ruler he's there to selflessly serve the tribe he's very experienced he's usually competent and wise and he facilitates and guides provides wisdom to the tribe he's not in it for personal gain to you know to build his own personal mafia and to get the gain the most wealth and to you know suck everybody dry who's underneath him it's not a a very authoritative hierarchical structure it's not a pyramid structure it's it's a loose uh it's a loose distributed sort of uh hierarchy and um the the chief is going to be on a close emotionally bonded basis with with all of the other people that he's dealing with so it's not going to be a a case where he has a bunch of lieutenants and a bunch of layers where he doesn't even know who's in the bottom of the hierarchy the chief will will be intimately connected with with all of his uh all of his sort of followers we might say there's a very strong emphasis placed upon individuals being willing to sacrifice for the tribe sacrifice itself for the tribe because competitive individualists put the tribe in danger if you're part of this tribe and you just want to do your own thing that's not going to work you need to be a team player see because if you're off doing your own thing that could put everybody else at risk at stage purple there's a a serious concern with natural phenomenon stars the sun water rain lightning seasons plants earthquakes sky fire earth mountains because this is the environment you live in all these things are life and death for you are important you just study the stars you need to know when the sun is rising and setting because that tells you when to plant the crops you need to be able to predict the rain and tell where the lightning is and what it means and understand the sky and the mountains because you're navigating these mountains and you need to know where to go hunt and so forth there's a worship and reverence of nature spirits so oftentimes there's the sun spirit the water spirit the rain spirit the plant spirit the mountain spirit the sky spirit the fire spirit this is that animistic sense of spirituality there tends to be a magical sense of cause and effect things are not seen in a mechanistic materialistic framework reality is not there to be quantified and formalized with mathematical equations there is no formal science yet at this stage so there's a mystical sense of cause and effect for example the shaman might do a rain dance and then that is believed to cause the rain to come and to water the crops or if for example as a tribe we dishonored our ancestors for some reason then that might mean that the crop season next year will be bad there will be famine or disease will come and because there's not enough scientific basis of understanding of cause and effect stage purple can get away with the sort of magical thinking because there's just not that scientific basis and evidence and there's we're not doing double-blind placebo-controlled studies here on how diseases work we don't know where diseases come from at this stage we don't even know for example where lightning comes from we don't really know how to explain it we don't know where earthquakes come from other than from the you know angry earth spirits we don't really understand what fire is what is fire it's you know the fire spirit we don't know that fire comes from some sort of chemical reaction we don't know what chemicals are we don't know what atoms or molecules are we don't know what electricity is we don't know even what weather is we don't even really know what the earth is like all this stuff is deeply mysterious and unknown so it seems magical and we can start to draw causes and effects which are superstitious or fallacious and so superstition tends to run rampant in purple cultures and that's why they have various kinds of traditions and taboos if you break the taboo then superstition says that you know you see a black cat and then that means that something bad will happen or you know you break a mirror and now you violated some spiritual law and then because of this something else will happen to you and so on stage purple tends to be more right-brained than left-brained it tends to be more intuitive and feeling oriented body-oriented heart-centered rather than logical rational scientific emotional attachment is placed on places and things and people and these become important and the reason it works this way is because you're using your intuition basically at this stage to navigate through life and through reality because there's not a writing system you can't carefully document and codify and formalize everything there's not mathematics and science and you know strict logical axioms and syllogisms that you do in order to understand the world you're operating on gut instinct and you'd be surprised how far you can get with that and in fact stage purple people who are very experienced like shaman and medicine men and wise men basically they can be very keen with their senses they can be extremely perceptive because they live like for example been living in their junk in the jungle for for 50 years going on hunts and doing whatever they do and they've become very very attuned to how to track animals how to see you know footprints in the in the leaves how to how to look at weather patterns predict when lightning is going to come when rain is going to come they can they can learn to hear different you know sounds of birds and based on the sound of the bird they hear they can tell whether it's the springtime or the fall or something's going to happen you know because they become very very sensitive through intuition and through feeling and this allows them to survive much better than logic all the logic in the world is not going to help you to survive if we throw you into the middle of the amazon you need keen perception subtle distinctions between all the different natural phenomena that exist there which comes with massive experience and uh and then that that stuff is better handled by intuition than by the logical mind the logical mind is more about analyzing and categorizing things which is good for science for scientific purposes it's good if you're writing a book it's good if you're a university professor but it's not so good when it's a matter of survival in the jungle stage purple tends to blur the lines between reality and imagination there's not such a clear distinction which is where this animistic spirituality comes from stage purple tends to confuse fables with scientific facts these are not distinguished carefully good and evil spirits must be kept in balance and there's usually a multiplicity of spirits so stage purple is not monotheistic but polytheistic there is a sort of a a marketplace of different spirits that you have to appease and work with and it it it creates for sort of a rich and interesting mythology and mysticism because you're not just praying to one god there's all sorts of interesting conflicting different spirits and usually they have they have good ones they have bad ones they have petty ones that have their own you know sort of mischievous characters and then you you can you can find these sorts of figures all throughout mythology nature and objects tend to have a life force and intentionality of their own this is that notion of animistic spirituality trees have spirits in fact that particular tree might have a particular spirit because that's like an ancient oak tree that our ancestors worshipped and it has a particular spirit has a particular name which is different from that other tree over there who our enemies worship that's the evil tree over there it has an evil spirit and an evil name whereas ours is good the stars they watch over us at night the rivers they give us life and they feed our crops and if we anger the river the the river will stop flowing and our crops will die or the river will overflow and it will flood our crops and then we will starve so we must appease the the river by giving it you know uh sacrifices by praying to it by performing rituals and and ceremonies for the river making sacrifices to it the mountains are inhabited it's this sort of animistic spirituality ordinary events are often seen as having mystical signs if a bird flies over the head it's not just a bird it's a crow and a crow means that our enemies are coming because the bird was flooded the crow was flying from east to west our enemies are in the we are are in the east so that's what that means and uh and so on this this there's a lot of these sorts of mystical signs that purple reads into reality of course a lot of this is projection of the mind but purple doesn't recognize that it's a pre-literature culture but it's rich in folk stories songs drawings dances artwork crafts and elaborate customs so they compensate for their lack of writing with these other forms of art and culture which can get very sophisticated and uh and beautiful and worth admiring and in fact that's a lot of what anthropology does is it travels the world collects the stories and songs and drawings and artwork and dances and writings and not writings but uh like artifacts is the word i was looking for the artifacts of these various cultures and then we can put those in museums we can marvel at them some of them are beautiful some of them are are weird and foreign or hideous and just strange it tends to have vivid myths legends and parables spirits are seen everywhere this is where the notion of sprites and pixies and elves and gnomes and trolls and magical creatures comes from and basically every culture european culture russian culture chinese culture japanese culture polynesian culture all these cultures have their own sort of if you if you go into their folk stories it has stories of mystical creatures uh who are often mischievous tricksters uh have agendas of their own have uh personalities of their own who people are sort of forced to deal with to reckon with to appease or to fight and battle against this is a very common theme totems charms curses and hexes witchcraft and shamanism sorcery white magic black magic fertility symbols omens spells sacred herbs and plant medicine all of this is characteristic of purple purple tends to have not a linear but a cyclical sense of time because their time very much is connected to the the movement of of the uh of the sun and uh the stars the seasons and the the zodiac signs so all of that tends to be very cyclical rather than linear they don't understand evolution the way that we do in the west in modern culture and of course this sort of purple animistic spirituality as you should see is the early origin points of all the major religions of christianity islam of uh of buddhism even and of judaism and every every major religion today it all originated from these polytheistic animistic spiritual mystical traditions which then later got systematized and became very orthodox and then many of the many of the sort of black magic elements and so forth were stripped from them the mysticism was stripped out of them and then it just became this monolithic monotheistic religion and you can see especially in christianity for example how almost all of christianity as orthodox christians consider it today has been stolen from pagan earlier pagan cultures perhaps the most obvious example is the birth the birthday of jesus jesus is born on the 25th which corresponds with the winter solstice which was an important point in the in the whole solar cycle for for these hundred gatherer tribes because you know when you're farming the land you need to know when winter is coming and when winter is gonna end that point the 25th of december is basically sort of the the peak of winter after that it starts to go uh towards spring and then based on that you know that's sort of the the life and birth cycle of every season of the crops and so your survival was completely tied to that so you have this sort of cyclical sense of time uh yeah so so many of the traditions and customs that are part of christianity or islam today or part of judaism this this was all actually coming from uh stage purple for example the the injunction not to eat pork was something that would come or you know shellfish that exists within judaism and exist within islam today where did this come from came from purple pagan customs and traditions because that was just part of how they survived back then there were certain foods you're not supposed to eat because they could they could rot faster they could cause diseases that can't be cured and so forth so a lot of these got carried over many of these purple cultures are seen today to be sort of peaceful and easy going and the reason that is is because when you're living in an isolated tribe somewhere in the middle of the amazon yeah life is easy in the sense that there's not a lot of competition you're secluded your only competition is just with the animals that you're trying to hunt basically and maybe one or two nearby tribes and you're not competing very much with people in your own tribe because it's a low scale system with only 50 or 100 members all of you are like one family so there's no there's no sense to compete and you guys have a low impact on the environment due to your small scale the problem is that we though we tend to romanticize this and we say oh well that that was the good life back then that's the kind of life we need to return to today and this is extremely naive because that kind of life is only peaceful and it only works when we're talking about 50 or 100 people it doesn't work when you scale it up to a million or to a hundred million or to a billion people a billion chinese can't live that way today 350 million americans can't live that way today we have nuclear weapons we have jumbo jet airplanes we have tanks and missiles and rocket launchers and grenades and flame flamethrowers and automobiles and trains and cars and god knows what else we have all of this complex stuff that can't work at that kind of low scale and because we've got millions and billions of people of course now the environmental impact is major so although it might seem like well these ancient or ancient ancestors they were so environmentally friendly they were so environmentally conscious well in a sense they were because they were living so close to nature they had to be it was part of their survival today we're more disconnected we're living in giant cities in concrete jungles so we are more disconnected in that sense but also in a certain sense they don't overestimate how environmentally conscious they really were because they didn't need to be very environmentally conscious because they were just so small in scale relative to the environment they lived in that they simply couldn't pollute it all they didn't really need to worry about their pollution and their coal fire power plants and you know dumping toxic chemicals in the river because they didn't have these things so actually true environmental consciousness only evolves at the high level of stage green if true environmental consciousness existed at purple that means it would also exist at red and at blue and at orange but it doesn't see so that means it didn't really exist there to begin with it existed in a sort of primitive level but it didn't exist in the in the true sort of uh deeper systemic understanding of how our actions create all sorts of collateral damage to the environment with modern technology so it's easy to be environmentally friendly when you don't have any advanced technology like advanced chemicals and plastics and oil refineries and and you know uranium extraction so forth then it's easy to be environmentally friendly because all you're using is wood and plants and all this stuff is biodegradable so of course yeah it's easy uh but the trick is to develop an environmental environmental consciousness once we do have all that advanced technology and that requires getting to stage green and beyond at stage purple culture is taken completely for granted and these people are unconscious about their culture they don't even have the notion of a culture because the culture that they are living in is their way of life it is their reality it's not culture it's reality for them and it takes many stages to to get to a point where you start to see culture as something that's socially constructed and something that could be otherwise something that we could change stage purple has no idea that culture is something that we can consciously manipulate and that culture can be counterproductive culture can be destructive culture can be a form of brainwashing sage purple doesn't understand any of this because its culture was something that was created unconsciously as part of its survival activity for hundreds of years by its ancestors and there was no reflection there's no reflection of stage turquoise stage purple about its culture there's no sort of sitting sitting down and wondering like well is it is it proper is it rational that we perform this rain dance every time we need rain for our crops is that rational is that scientific there's no there's no self-reflection like that there's no sense of wandering but what is the cause and effect relationship between my rain dance how does my rain dance cause the rain to fall and to grow the crops no we don't think of it that way at stage purple and we also don't think of alternatives so we might say that well in our tribe we perform the rain dance this way and in that tribe they perform the rain ants the opposite way well maybe maybe their way is better than our way no our way is the only way it's the right way their way is the evil way we don't understand their way we only understand our way because our way came from our ancestors and we value our ancestors we don't value their ancestors see so now we start to get into some of the challenges of stage purple is that it doesn't really handle diversity and alternative world views and alternative belief systems and alternative cultures and and rituals and ways of doing things very well and this quickly becomes a problem once the isolated bubble of this tribe is punctured and we start to interact with other tribes once we get more trade once we get conflict with our tribes this this creates a problem because now we're exposed to new perspectives and new world views but we're so traditional and so closed minded and so rigid in our ways of doing things that we don't know how to deal with it and we tend to deal with it quite poorly which leads to conflict and battle and death and an inability to adapt so there's an attachment to rigid traditional ways of living and it's difficult for stage purple to imagine other alternatives for living or other ways that you could look at the world it tends to be very limited blindered paradigm-locked world view and there's an inability to adapt to changing life conditions that's probably the ultimate downfall of stage purple it's because they're so rigid their world view is so limited and narrow that as soon as their environment changes if it ever does and it hasn't for hundreds and thousands of years probably those those tribes that were living in the amazon that are still living in the amazon today they've been living there for a thousand for like 10 000 years and their environment has not changed but the problem is that today the environment is changing today the climate is changing the rainforests are being burned down there's a there's new types of food and crops there's new diseases there's new technology there's jumbo jet airplanes flying overhead imagine living in a tribe in the middle of the amazon rainforest and then you see a jumbo jet airplane flying overhead as you're going on your hunt how do you make sense of it what is that is that an evil spirit is that god is that are those aliens what what do you do about it first of all it's frightening because you don't have any control over it you also don't understand what the hell it is but then also it's not just frightening in the sense that oh you're paranoid and it's just sort of unknown what it is but it can be frightening like literally that airplane could fly over you and you know dust some chemicals on you and those chemicals could be toxic could kill your whole tribe so it's not a sustainable way to live because the rest of the world is evolving very rapidly modernizing with technology and so forth and if you don't keep up with that you can't just keep living in your isolated bubble forever and that ends up sort of being the downfall of purple all right now we're at my favorite part which is the list of examples here are all the purple examples that i came up with and i came up with some of them some of them i grabbed from the sprout dynamics book so here it is carlos castaneda's don juan and all of the carlos castaneda books these are brilliant books amazing books filled with a lot of ancient wisdom go read these books if you haven't there's like 10 of them or more uh so if you have read the the don juan carlos castaneda books and you've sort of marveled at the wisdom there and you've also marveled at the sort of world view that don juan has don juan has this very animistic worldview where again he's reading signs he you know a crow flies over over his head and he's in attributing all sorts of mystical things to that crow and you start to wonder like how could he believe these things well because he's from stage purple in a certain sense he's kind of naive you get that but in a certain sense he's very wise so yeah it's both at the same time it's primitive and naive but also there is deep mystical wisdom there to be found in these cultures and uh and that's actually a lot of what stage green is doing today stage green is sort of looking back because it's reacting against the materialism stage or just kind of looking backwards at our ancestors and and wondering well when when did we live in harmony with nature that's sort of like what the hippies are doing they're looking back and they're saying ah yeah we need to go back to our ancient roots to our tribal sort of uh communal way of living and draw inspiration from that and so therefore there's a there's a reevaluation of the value of shamanism and psychedelics and plant medicines and organic farming and agriculture sustainable agriculture and and drum circles and all this sorts of hippie stuff and uh and that's that's sort of where the carlos castaneda books fit in historically they they arose after the 1960s counter culture revolution they became extremely popular sold millions of copies because after the 1960s psychedelic revolution people were looking for that sort of tribal wisdom which the carlos cassida books fed very well and they sold extremely well other examples the amazon tribes african tribes indonesian tribes the tribes of papua new guinea the native americans of course all the various tribes the comanches and the lakota and the god there's so many of them the apache and yeah dozens of them many tribes still exist in the middle east in the rural parts of the middle east especially in places like afghanistan um in saudi arabia in iraq syria uh uzbekistan and so forth a lot of tribal cultures there still in bosnia in africa the zulu the boiti hawaiian culture the original hawaiian culture is very much purple with the hawaiian chiefs the kahunas and various kinds of hawaiian ceremonies and so forth they tend to be a very kind of traditional tribal um even yeah those lays that they put up on you when you arrive in hawaii with the flower garlands and uh all the the the ceremonies they have the ceremony ceremonial food and cookouts and so forth and lua luau's luaus is that what they're called anyways yeah so hawaii uh indian culture there's a lot of tribal stage purple stuff going on in india still today uh a lot of indian spirituality is very tribalistic there's like a hundred different languages spoken throughout india every tribe has their own little language which sort of shows you the limitations of stage purple because see one of the problems in india is that they can't even get their [ __ ] together where they can just speak one common language i mean they speak english because the british sort of forced it upon them but if the british didn't come and force english upon them like the indians they don't all speak hindi they have like different dialects and sub-dialects and all these different subcultures all throughout india and so they're very fragmented see for india to be able to rise to sort of a modern level to become a first world country first one of the things it has to do is it has to pick like one language that everybody has taught at school and it has to get rid of all the other languages but of course every tribe is going to complain about that because everybody wants their one language to be the best one and they don't want to get rid of their traditional culture which is based in their language and so forth and so uh see they're they're not well unified and the problem with having 100 different languages is that it creates unnecessary friction and barriers for commerce for business for culture and so forth you know if you're going to create a movie what language is it going to be and you can't create a movie in 100 different languages has to be in one language so this slows them down uh and they have all sorts of really weird arcane spiritual traditions in india uh just and i mean beyond just yoga and beyond the kind of basic stuff that we understand as westerners here like there's a lot of very weird spiritual [ __ ] going on in india if you go there you probably spend a whole lifetime exploring it all uh and a lot of it will be based on herbal medicine and psychedelics or weird like black magic witchcraft voodoo type of stuff they have that going on there so very fascinating but also strange and foreign arab culture also has some of that going on the japanese shinto religion is a stage purple in its origins it's uh it's actually separate and distinct from buddhism so the japanese most japanese subscribe to buddhism but also to japanese shinto and japanese shinto is very ritualistic and it all revolves around the worship of kami k-a-m-i kami which is sort of their word for god but it's not this monolithic monotheistic god it's more like a the spirit the life spirit that pervades all of all of nature really similar to what is called the force in star wars it's the sort of disembodied notion of god which is actually true that's the most accurate form of god that's what god is god is the force god is kami if you really uh become conscious of it it's also you but they don't understand that probably um what else do we have tibet a lot of tibetan spiritualities sage purple in rural china they have a lot of stage purple spirituality still the aborigines in australia super stage purple that's like the purple prototype also the maori uh aborigines in uh in new zealand also sit the same pocahontas shaman shaman is actually a term that comes from siberia i believe the siberian shaman but now we've adopted that term to refer to all sorts of different cultures we talk about shaman in south america and so on but originally it was the siberian shaman um the medicine man in avatar the movie avatar james cameron's avatar those blue cat-looking creatures the the navi they're a great example of stage purple they're basically kind of a ripoff of the native americans a legend of zelda is a is a good video game example because in legend of zelda the whole appeal of that game is it's kind of set in this animistic spiritual mystical world which basically is kind of like i assume where like shinto japanese shinto religion came from so i think that legend of zelda probably draws a lot upon the shinto tradition with its shrines and various kinds of water and fire spirits and so on so that's very much shinto stage purple and it gives you that kind of vibe when you're playing it's sort of this magical mysterious world with artifacts and different races and different people a lot of times the people are half animal half human that's also very common sort of those egyptian gods like that patapon one of my favorite games of all time if you played it on the psp uh patapon is amazing it's it's a it's a solid purple game it's all about uh controlling this this group of little tribal guys who go and fight war against other tribes and defeat defeat creatures and it's a it's a rhythm game it's actually quite challenging to play it but also very rewarding uh turok the dinosaur hunter if you play that on the n64 uh that's kind of a stage purple dances with wolves with kevin costner that movie the medicine man the movie with uh sean connery um gives you an ex gives you sort of an intimate look at stage purple he's sort of a white western guy living in the middle of uh of the amazon rainforest with these natives and he's looking for a cure for cancer it's a great movie go check it out it's a 9 early 90s movie they don't make them that way anymore uh the whole notion of sort of the noble savage uh refers to stage purple various kinds of ancient mythologies if you study mythology through the works of joseph campbell and so on that's all about stage purple voodoo is purple witchcraft tends to be purple curses and hexes animal sacrifice tends to be purple the gift economy is a purple idea this gift economy for example is is used in in burning man and various kinds of burns that are held around the world so if you participate in burns or go to burning man a lot of the vibe and values behind burning man it's spider-dynamic stage green but also it borrows from stage purple as well the sharing of resources paganism is purple those uh cannibal tribes that we hear about i don't know if that's actually a real thing or just a western stereotype but that would be purple if it was real sun worship um animal gods and spirits the idea that animals and have you know a spirit of their own and a life force of their own this is a very pagan sort of idea which is kind of anti-stage blue christianity which doesn't believe that animals have souls and basically at stage blue humans tend to treat animals as just personal property which is not the case at stage purple ethnic cleansing is a purple sort of a force the paleolithic cave paintings like you see at lascaux france and other places in spain and elsewhere in europe stonehenge those large monuments that are found around the world different kinds of stone circles ubuntu ubuntu is not a piece of software ubuntu actually means an african it means i don't know which which part of africa it's from but it means i am because we are ubuntu i am because we are that's how it's literally translated so it's sort of like we are all one tribe it's that idea suicide bombing is actually also a stage purple sort of dynamic because and that's one of the things we as westerners don't really fathom very well is you know how could how could people in the middle east involve themselves in suicide bombing it seems uh it seems so irrational to kill yourself but it's not irrational when you consider that many people who engage in suicide bombing they are pulled from sort of middle eastern very underdeveloped parts of the middle east where it's still staged purple very tribal very clannish and the culture there the value system there is that you sacrifice for your tribe so if you see your tribe is getting exterminated or treated unfairly then you will gladly strap a bomb to your chest and ball yourself up in the defense of your tribe so suicide bombing is sort of a hijacking of that stage purple sacrifice self for one's tribe value system hijacking it combining it with sort of a toxic stage red as well and then kind of weaponizing it uh same thing with uh kamikaze pilots in world war ii that was also sort of a very self-sacrificing force uh that was part of japanese culture human sacrifice is stage purple eating one's enemies you know that sort of uh i guess it's it's a trope where you will defeat your enemy then cut out his heart and then eat his beating heart that might be purple chanting in drum music herbal medicine ayurveda from india acupuncture energy from asia shrines totem poles ayahuasca ceremonies peyote ceremonies salvia divinorum was used by mexican shaman for their divining purposes in witchcraft mushroom magic mushrooms is also used by mexicans by mexican shaman as part of their ceremonies detura is also used that way iboga is used by the bouiti african tribes in similar ways and as a as a rite of passage for their young men i don't know about the women but the men for sure uh amadine muscaria mushrooms which were used by the siberian original shaman sweat lodges vision quests tribal tattoos take a look at the tattoos that the maori of new zealand paint on if you've ever taken magic mushrooms and you look at yourself in the mirror you will see those sort of maori tap pattern tattoos uh on your face and on your body it's it's quite cool uh the notion of the evil eye magical healers ancient burial grounds knocking on wood that old um superstition the lucky rabbit's foot black cats prayer altars the day of the dead halloween urban legends fertility goddesses astrology fortune cookies now of course i'm not saying that fortune cookies existed 5000 years ago i'm just saying that fortune cookies are sort of any a holdover that's the sort of superstitious holdover that we we keep today and in asian cultures you find this uh because there's a lot of purple still in asian cultures uh for example in in japan you will find the uh you know that cat that you see at japanese restaurants it's called actually the maneki neko it's this golden cat with this paw and the paw usually kind of moves back and forth like this is sort of like a good luck charm similar to a lucky rabbit's foot this is this is popular and in asia all throughout asia they have all sorts of little statues and lucky charms and stuff like that which kind of comes from this from this purple tradition that's also i think where the fortune cookies come from originally something like that um [Music] don't think that purple stuff needs to have an origin all the way back thousands of years ago purple stuff still gets sort of like invented and reinvented today so like the maneki neko i don't think that's something that goes back thousands of years it's probably only 100 years old or something or 200 years old but it's still purple folk tales and fairy tales are great examples of purple graffiti gypsies face paint symbolic costumes and ceremonial dress secret handshakes mating ceremonies i remember reading about the most astounding and odd mating ceremony from the philippines i don't i don't know if they still do this today but supposedly they did this so in the philippines like a couple hundred years ago or even further back they had this mating and marriage ceremony where basically the male would have his penis pierced with some sort of like almost like a bone like a sharp bone or something it went perpendicular into the penis like this don't ask me why they i didn't do it so they stick this sort of bone or toothpick through the penis and it stays there then the way that it works is that he gets married and then you know they have the honeymoon he has a honeymoon with his wife and they they like i think they might even tie a rope around the penis around the uh around this bone through the penis then they they sort of they move the bone like this so that you can insert it into the vagina they insert it into vagina then the bone sort of goes horizontal like this and it gets stuck in there literally lodged in there and they're supposed to mate for like 24 hours straight and they can't pull it out because it's too painful it gets stuck in there and so they're supposed to do this very slow it's not a fast pumping mating the way that we have sex in in western culture it's this very slow methodical like joining together it's just kind of like this spiritual ritual marriage mating thing that they did in the philippines and i don't know exactly how they got it out afterwards somehow they did but so this this is what they did uh so so stuff like this uh circumcision i imagine originally also came from this sort of stage purple mating ceremony thing dowries blood oaths communal eating missionaries going to tribes now of course missionaries are stage blue but when missionaries go to tribes that interact with tribal cultures and try to convert them they're converting the stage purple heathens burial rituals burial grounds also small company work environments so if you're doing a little startup and you're just starting a little team of 10 people working together in in a in a garage somewhere that's going to have even though it's a modern invention it's not something from thousands of years ago it's going to have that sort of tribal communal stage purple dynamic to it it's going to feel like a like an extended family you're going to know everybody and you're going to work that way the notion of the sacred tree of life the circle of life from the lion king very stage purple don miguel ruiz and his popular books the four agreements and others that he's written a lot of that wisdom is sort of ancient old mech mexican shaman type of wisdom the book the alchemist has a very stage purpley type of vibe to it and i shot an episode called aztec non-duality where i talk about toyota and the nawa uh notion of spirituality and how it's very non-dual if you like that episode i mean i pulled that from a from a sort of a purple source which is the sort of nawa notions of spirituality in toyota so you can see that that episode shows you that there's a lot of profound effective and practical wisdom to be found within these purple mystical spiritual traditions it's not just all [ __ ] and fairy tales and magical thinking there's some serious deep profound spiritual wisdom there so it's correct that when you get to stage green spelling stage green you will look back at purple and you will reappreciate what's there you will go and mine for it and from that you can get stuff like neo-shamanism the resurgence of psychedelics you know new discoveries of old spiritual texts and scriptures and you can find meaning and value from those um i think yeah i think that episode that i did of aspect aztec non-duality go watch it it's one of my best episodes i mean it's got some really powerful spiritual insight in it and i was amazed when i found that that material and that information because i thought that you know nonduality was this modern advanced you know thing and then it's amazing to look back and to say and to see that like no our ancestors from thousands of years ago had it all already figured out you just got to go and look so those are some examples here are some sayings that exemplify stage purple all for one and one for all don't say it or it might come true you'll jinx us blood is thicker than water this is how we do things around here there's no place like home we must honor our ancestors that would upset the spirits if we did that so we can't do that we are all part of mother nature or the great spirit now what triggers stage purple not showing respect to tradition elders ancestors and spirits that's a huge no no that'll probably get you killed lack of bonding and reciprocity not being a team player trying to do your own thing or acting like some libertarian individual this will quickly trigger them because this is extremely selfish it's rude uh because it it puts the entire tribe in jeopardy arrogance ambition selfishness and greed purple is very sensitive to this the sort of arrogance you might get if you get like a wall street ceo or wall street trader who maybe goes on some ayahuasca retreat in the amazon in brazil or in peru or someplace and you know he walks in there he's all arrogant he thinks he understands the world and he he doesn't take all the ceremony seriously he doesn't take their their sort of mystical visions and shamanism seriously he thinks it's just all a joke that kind of attitude of arrogance and and you know he's just throwing money around he thinks he can just like bribe the shaman because he's got a bunch of money but the shaman can't be bribed because hashana is not interested in money the shaman's interested in spiritual wisdom but the the wall street guy you know he's stage orange that doesn't compute for him and likewise you know the shaman will get offended if you try to bribe him with money you know you might want to pay some extra money to get a nicer room a nicer ceremony for yourself the shaman doesn't you don't want this the shaman wants to keep things traditional the shaman wants to do it the way it's been done for thousands of years another thing that triggers purple is innovation new ideas progress and changing things purple wants to keep doing things the way the ancestors have always done them he's not interested in evolution and innovation and of course this ends up being his downfall because culture is evolving society's evolving technology is evolving so you can't just not innovate you can't just keep doing the same old [ __ ] all the time but purple is stuck on that what else might trigger purple is other cultures and other tribes who have different customs and different ways of doing things in different world views which conflict with his own he can't wrap his mind around them he can't understand them it's confusing and it might threaten their existing ways of doing things they might see it as corruption you know maybe there's a better way to do the ayahuasca ceremony maybe like for example i might go to an ayahuasca ceremony in peru and i might try to show them something like five and meow dmt and it's pure synthetic form but the shaman will say oh no no that's not the traditional way that's not good that's inferior but is it really inferior maybe it's actually superior maybe it's superior to actually get a vape pen with pure freebase dmt rather than trying to get it from some ayahuasca vine it's gonna be better it's gonna be more potent i can guarantee you synthetic psychedelics are mo more potent and better and more spiritual than anything you can get from some ayahuasca vine or from some magic mushroom that grows in the forest it's going to be better i've tried both it's the synthetic is better but a lot of these shaman type people they don't want to listen to that because they don't want something new they don't want something better they want the old way of doing it um another thing that could trigger purple is domination exploitation profit motive strict schedules and strict productivity this desire just for materialism to produce as much as possible to work as hard as possible the sort of workaholic attitude that we have in the west this will probably upset them very much because it's dehumanizing it breaks human bonds for the sake of what some material productivity that doesn't mean much to purple they'd rather have their bonds now what are some downsides and unhealthy aspects of purple well of course tribalism is probably the biggest one when people are deeply tribal this ultimately will devolve into tribal warfare blood feuds ethnic cleansing and genocide in the worst case scenarios and we see this around the world uh it also has the downside of being extremely isolated and tends to be fearful of outsiders like i said it tends to have a narrow world view which limits its ability to adapt which is a huge downside maybe this is the biggest downside of purple is that it simply isn't able to adapt like many of the native americans when the westerners came over here to america uh many of the native americans died out because they weren't able to adapt they weren't willing to modernize they weren't willing to adopt the technology and the advances of western culture and so they got pushed off onto reservations and now they live miserable lives on these reservations and in a sense i mean of course it was a genocide by white europeans against the natives so of course the white europeans are to blame in a sense for that but also in another sense they're not to blame because the nature of life is constant evolution everything is evolving everything is advancing you can't put technology back in the bottle you have to work with the new technology that is available and you have to be able to integrate multiple cultures because the globe is one interconnected system we can't have little bubbles of societies and cultures living completely isolated from each other because they're afraid of each other and because they don't want to integrate what the others have developed that's just not going to work so really what the native americans should have done is they should have integrated with the west with the westerners then they would have been more successful uh but if they just insist on being traditional and live you know living by their old customs well those old customs are not going to be able to survive against the industrialized modern western technological machine that is society with its giant populations and its cars and planes and trains and all of this stuff it's just not going to survive and many of those you know native americans who are still living on these reservations uh they have it really bad because they don't have a sense of purpose anymore uh their their their natural habitat habitat they've been relocated from those or it's been destroyed and many of them are now just alcoholics they're out of work high crime rates in these reservation communities they don't have a sense of purpose they don't have a sense of community don't have a sense of connection so um really they need to be reintegrated into the west but a lot of them don't want to so they sort of are damned if they do and damned if they don't that's exactly what happens when you sort of stay a dinosaur and you don't evolve other excesses of purple is that it tends to be overly traditional and conservative sort of ties into what i just said it tends to be overly superstitious too much magical thinking versus rational thinking there is value to mysticism but there's also value to being rational and practical and material at times sometimes you just need to have simple rational material plans and goals and you got to be pragmatic sometimes another downside of purple is it can be fearful of natural phenomenon it can overly mystify natural phenomenon treated as though it's not understandable through science which a lot of it is and it can be too slow to adapt technology or can resist technology or reject technology which is a shame and and i see that even within the spiritual community for example you know i talk about awakening and enlightenment and then when i bring up psychedelics as a new technology that has been invented in the last 60 or 70 years you know psychedelics are very new in the sense of you know modern chemical synthetic psychedelics that's very new the ability to extract find new molecules and then to to use the exact molecules that are the best for each type of you know work that you're trying to do whether it's trying to access god or trying to heal some childhood trauma wound or whatever or work on your relationships or whatever you know there's different molecules that are good for different things but when i talk about it like this people who are like into the old school awakening they criticize me by saying that oh leo but this is a drug and it's not real awakening because it's a drug well that that's what i mean by this sort of rejection of technology you're not actually thinking for yourself of the potential that this technology can can offer us why do we need to resist technology if it's able to produce enlightenment in 15 minutes why not make use of that technology why meditate for 10 years when you can do it faster now of course i'm not saying there's no value to meditation but those people who completely reject psychedelics like a lot of yogis will reject psychedelics but it's clear to me that they've never even tried it or if they have they tried some inferior psychedelic and so they're they're judging all psychedelics based on one you know bad tab of lsd that they took or something and so uh they're not fully appreciating the power of this technology and how it could transform the world see they just want to be you know strict yogis they have a particular yogic system and yoga is of course comes from stage purple originally and there's all these different yogic systems there's hundreds of different yoga systems they all have their own dogmas their own rituals their own ways of doing yoga each one says that they're the best and that they're the only correct method of doing yoga but of course that can't possibly be true because there's lots of yogis who've used lots of these different systems to become awake and yet none of them are communicating with each other none of them are integrating each other and so this is part of the problem of purple purple can be very gossipy uh another problem of purple is that it only tends to work at small scales when you get into the millions of people purple doesn't work it breaks down and ultimately it's just not innovative enough it's not creative enough it's not progressive enough and it's not adaptable enough to work in the modern world and that's why purple is quickly dying off but also there's a lot of valuable stuff there that we need to mine before it all dies off so that's that here's some statistics on purple about 10 percent of the adult global population we could put at staged purple but it only has about one percent of the world influence so very little influence on the world simply because it's so outdated so archaic and so out of touch with modern times and modern technology so it's been left in the dust purple is sort of like the uh the dinosaur stage it's like the crocodile of the animal kingdom uh the style of government of purple is small-scale communism basically this is true communism is the way that the natives live in in the middle of the amazon it's the way that the native american tribes lived before the westerners came over from europe there's no formal legal system there's no court system there's no laws at least not officially there's no formal market there's no military there's no taxation it's all very distributed it's loose it's based on custom there's a council of elders usually who run the the tribe or a group of tribes and coordinate things but it's not autocratic it's not dictatorial it's not about power hungry monarchs these elders are usually well respected and they serve the tribe selflessly there's a sort of a burning man gift economy that we've talked about and the chief usually distributes goods based on the needs of the people in the tribe so it's not about climbing some sort of ladder and becoming the wealthiest and richest and most powerful as billionaires and millionaires love to do today it's it's about who needs what and that's how resources are distributed so again stage green socialists and marxists today they sort of look back at stage purple um fondly and they try to take examples of this gift economy and the sort of communal way of living and they try to scale it up and they sort of ask the question well how can we turn the globe into this sort of gift based economy how can we distribute the resources of the world on a per need basis because they see the limitations and the toxic effects of stage orange run amok of capitalism run amok and so stage green is trying to figure out how to do that but also that's difficult to do because it doesn't scale so well it works well when you have 100 people or a thousand people but it's difficult to do when you have 100 million people or a billion people so those are new challenges that we need to invent new solutions for that we haven't figured out yet as a species here are the top lessons that you need to learn from stage purple so you might be wondering well leo i'm already stage orange or i'm already stage green or yellow so why do i even need to listen to stage purple what's the point what do i get out of it it seems so archaic but remember you were already sort of raised into a culture that's orange or green based on where you grew up in a modern culture modern society it's very easy for you to have skipped over and to have gaping holes in your development from the lower stages like red and purple so it is worth going back and looking at the lower stages and seeing what are the things you might have missed and not fully integrated or fully developed or have insufficient experience with maybe something that you've turned into a shadow so here are some of these things building intimate social bonds and learning how to socialize and being comfortable with socialization this is something that i think a lot of people struggle with today because of the internet because we're very alienated um we were bullied in school we didn't get properly socialized for whatever reasons and so we developed a chip on our shoulders and uh we have a shadow and we have social anxiety and we're not sure how to socialize in this this hurts us in many ways first of all it's not fulfilling because socialization is just fulfilling knowing how to socialize is fulfilling it helps you to get friends it helps you to get wives and girlfriends and husbands if you're struggling to get laid many in-cells are struggling with this they simply don't know how to socialize it's not that women don't want to sleep with you it's not that you're not hot looking enough it's not that you don't have a sharp enough brad pit looking chin or something like that the way that in cells like to uh whine about uh the fundamental problem that incels have is that you're so alienated you spend so much time playing video games on the internet you spend so much time watching anime and being on these toxic in cell forums uh masturbating about how women don't like you that you don't actually spend any time socializing with women face to face that's your biggest problem if you want to get laid you need to start socializing and many of these these in cells they didn't learn how to socialize properly when they were younger for whatever reasons and so now they suffer from that see if you grew up in a proper purple healthy culture you would have learned these things by the time you were a teen and your life would be a lot more fulfilling and you'd be a lot less suicidal and you'd be a lot less depressed and all that another lesson you can learn is that humans are a deeply communal species so those of you who are stage orange libertarian types and think that you are this rugged individual that you can live life all by yourself and that this is how mankind is supposed to live property rights and all that uh well you didn't really learn the lessons of purple you got to go back and learn that if you're a libertarian then you can start to appreciate what it really means to be a human and you can see yourself as part of a larger global phenomenon that's happening a larger society and community and you realize that to be part of a community means making sacrifices it can't just be all about you it's not just all about what you want and what you need it's also about what you're willing to contribute to your society what kind of sacrifices are you willing to make see then you wouldn't have these silly views of taxation being theft you would see that taxation is something that is necessary actually good for the benefit of your community that would be much more healthy you can also learn the lesson of caring for the entire community and treating the entire human species basically as a family of yours rather than treating other humans as strangers or aliens or illegals or other races that are inferior that have lower iqs and all this kind of nonsense that is so common these days in the conservative right uh rather than that approach you can start to see that we're all in the same boat we're all together we're all part of earth we're all part of the greater spirit of gaia and all of our actions collectively add up to what our community is doing and that really what we should be doing is building a global community multi-racial multi-ethnic imagine if you treated every race every ethnicity every gender every sexual orientation as though they were your family members with that same love and kindness without demonizing them without making them scapegoats without blaming them and trying to distribute resources fairly amongst all of them see wouldn't that be something another lesson of purple is life beyond individual profit many of us are so lost in this trap of materialism and chasing profit at the expense of everything else what if life though is about the quality of your social bonds more than the material possessions that you lust after another lesson of purple is the value of nature living more organically more harmoniously with nature just being out in nature more going for hikes and communing with mother earth so to speak go to the deserts go to the mountains go to the forest go to the jungle appreciate that there's uh there's a spiritual quality of just being out in nature which a lot of us are disconnected from again those incels who are on these forums who just keep writing these troll comments about how women don't like them and how they're depressed and want to kill themselves when was the last time you were out in the forest listening to the birds looking at the sun looking at the stars without all the light pollution of your city probably not in years you would feel a lot better about yourself if you did that and you would feel even better if you did that with some friends and um as part of a group as part of a party maybe go camping with your friends if you have some but of course you probably don't because you live in your mother's basement watching anime and jerking off to [ __ ] porn and stuff another thing you can learn from purple is to connect more with your emotions and intuition versus your logic another thing i noticed with these in cells is that they're so logical everything is about science and facts and all this you know facts over feelings this this sort of nonsense but actually the quality of your life is much more contingent upon the quality of your emotions and your intuition rather than your logic and even to be able to talk to girls to be able to attract girls to date girls you need to become much more emotional and intuitive rather than logical and stuck in your mind living from your body and your heart rather than your head and psychedelics can help you to open up your heart and to get in touch with your body and out of your head speaking of psychedelics that's another huge thing we can we can glean from stage purple ayahuasca mushrooms peyote combo amino muscaria mushrooms and another salvia deterio although i don't recommend you try that one that's dangerous uh but there's a lot of there's a lot of herbal medicines and psychedelics and so forth that that we can we can rediscover and we can modernize we can turn these into modern technologies for for deep healing and personal development amazing stuff and you can also take from purple the importance of spirituality mysticism and psychic powers this is not just [ __ ] it's not just wishful magical thinking there's something very profound in spirituality and mysticism psychic powers are real and you can develop them to various degrees start taking that seriously as a possibility and start to pursue that stuff and you will see the quality of your life improves as you go away from chasing material pleasures and being stuck in survival and getting into being mode another thing you can take from purple is simply slowing down your life being rather than doing living a simpler life minimizing your life getting rid of all the unnecessary distractions and stuff spending less time online spending more time spiritually spiritually connected to nature and to people you can also glean from purple the wisdom of the elders also the wisdom that is baked into ancient traditions ancient traditions aren't just always stupid and silly there can be deep wisdom in them don't take that for granted listen to your elders seek out that wisdom of the elders and actually build your life upon it and you'll see how much better it is than whatever else you're doing right now and lastly what you can glean from purple is a natural wholesome organic diet you know people sometimes ridicule this whole organic foods movement as though like oh organic oh that's that's some sort of elitist luxury thing but you know what all of your stage purple ancestors they lived on organic food their entire lives and that's why they didn't have much cancer or heart disease or all the other modern conditions depression and adhd and erectile dysfunction disorders and premature ejaculation and uh acne and eczema and autoimmune disorders a lot of this stuff comes from the kind of toxic diets that we eat our ancestors ate high quality organic grass-fed food so adopt some of that and then you're gonna start to feel better and then you're gonna start to live better how do you transcend stage purple well i assume that very few of you who are watching are actually stuck in solid stage purple you've already transcended it basically but just for sake of comprehensiveness if you are stuck in purple what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to develop a sense of personal ambition which is gonna lead you into red remember red comes after purple uh you're gonna have to let go of tradition question tradition and let go of your ancestors question your ancestors and be willing to go out into the world and to expose yourself to more of the world especially today there are so many different cultures and tribes that you can experience so go start to open your mind to those experience more of the world which will break down the narrow kind finds of your old traditions and perspectives be willing to abandon old traditions and also let go of that magical thinking and start to think more rationally more strategically and more scientifically study some western philosophy and so forth and through that you will ascend into red and then beyond so in conclusion remember that stage purple is not good or bad it is fairly primitive by today's standards but also i hope you can see here that there's a lot of amazing stuff from purple that is worth your time studying and reading about there are many great books that i recommend some on my book list and more that i'll add in the future there's many great videos that i've shared and will continue to share on my forum and on my blog of different stage purple cultures and traditions that i think are are valuable for you to study on your personal growth journey and in your spiritual work as well if you're doing spirituality there's a lot of spiritual wisdom that you can find within these purple cultures and you can find many great documentaries today about it that are available on youtube and elsewhere so remember that purple has both healthy and unhealthy manifestations what we're really interested in is understanding the unhealthy manifestations and avoiding those and then taking the healthy manifestations and integrating those into our lives and then benefiting from those remember that if you're stuck in purple you'll have to evolve through red before you can go higher you can't just skip red and jump straight to blue or green um so it is what it is so go through red and then blue and all the way up the spiral all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website there you will find my blog you will find the life purpose course you'll find the book list with some good books that will introduce you to purple uh you'll find resources on sproutdynamics on my book list stuff that i haven't shared through the public free videos so check that out come to the forum and on the forum you will find of course threads we call the mega threads for every stage of the spiral where we give tons of examples dozens and hundreds of examples videos images quotes and so forth so you can really learn spiral dynamics through these examples that's one of the best ways to learn it is through these examples so you'll find a link down below to the forum come check it out you don't even even need to sign up to see the examples look for the mega threads you will see a stage purple mega thread you'll see a stage red and blue and green and everything up above that you can support me on patreon by going to patreon.com actualized and chip in five bucks a month that helps to support uh the funding of this work and uh future work that i have planned for you guys and uh and the last thing i'll say here uh this is me wrapping up the spiral dynamics series uh but also in a sense not because there's still a lot more to say about spiral dynamics and i'm going to be covering topics on developmental psychology which will be closely related to spiral dynamics i will still be doing more future videos on spiral dynamics now that i've got an episode on each stage you understand the entire model if you watch all these episodes but still you're going to struggle fully integrating them and fully seeing how to get the practical consequences how to apply the model in the real world how to apply the model to politics to society to culture how to apply the model individually in your own life to grow so i will be probably doing more episodes in the future with a focus on application and like the really practical benefits of this model now that uh i assume most of you following me will be well familiar by having watched this episode so make sure you stick around for those and make sure that you take the time to integrate the lower stages i think a lot of people today simply because our culture is roughly orange green in most parts of the world that are watching me orange and green we take for granted but the lower stage is like purple red and blue i think that a lot of you guys are missing that as you're part of your foundation you're missing the self-discipline and work ethic of blue you're missing the assertiveness the assertiveness and courage of red you're you're missing the connection to nature and to community that communal mindset of purple the ability to socialize effortlessly and naturally you're missing that from purple and probably you're missing a lot more than than that but those i would say are probably three major things that many of you guys are missing and that you're suffering from and that's why you can't get laid that's why you can't get a husband that's why you're like a doormat people keep walking over you and abusing you because you're not assertive enough from stage read and that's why you struggle to hold a job and to pay your bills because you don't have enough self-discipline or that's why you struggle with your life purpose because you can't discipline yourself enough to work every day or to meditate every day or to go to the gym every day that's why you're fat or you struggle to eat healthy foods and that's why you're fat or whatever you see every stage builds upon the previous one and you need that foundation i get a sense that a lot of folks that are following me now because my newest content is so advanced it's so metaphysical and abstract and spiritual and so forth you're you're you're jumping the gun too much you need to spend a good five ten years just building a solid foundation for yourself with stages purple red blue and orange be able to survive be able to navigate your way in the world be able to be effective be able to be assertive to have courage to have discipline have a work ethic to get your material needs met in a healthy way avoid all the toxic elements of all these stages and then we can start to talk about enlightenment and awakening and advance spiritual metaphysical stuff see so just make sure you you get your priorities straight i should not be your only source of self-improvement advice i should be one of your sources i am like a meta source i am probably one of the most advanced sources you will ever find a source that integrates so much stuff i am like the umbrella in your in your plan but then you need all the smaller stuff underneath i don't spend that much of my time giving you super practical dating advice or super practical business advice or super practical financial advice or super practical you know nutrition advice you can find other youtubers and courses and books on that stuff you know one person can't do it all i don't have enough time and energy to do it all anyways so i focus my attention on really the big stuff to give you the big picture the thing that ties everything together that's the most valuable thing i can offer you that's my forte and then you will still need to go and find individual experts who could help you with the other stuff you see it's a lot of stuff it's a lot of material it's a lot of work but also don't like don't treat this as a chore don't treat this also as something you have to accomplish in the next year or five years this is we're talking about the rest of your life right i'm i'm giving you a development plan for the rest of your life there's gonna be more than one lifetime of work here for you to do uh don't treat it as work though do this because you're excited about it do this because what else is there to do in life i mean what are you gonna do in life you're here to be alive and to live the best life possible to grow yourself in every way possible to optimize your life in different ways nutritionally fitness wise psychologically emotionally socially politically spiritually and so on right so you're optimizing all these different areas and um for that you need a big overarching plan and a vision of where you're going and why you're doing it why would you do this stuff unless you saw you know some um some light at the end of the tunnel so i'm here to sort of give you that light at the end of the tunnel and to inspire you to see the the full potential of this work see because when i started out reading about self-help and self-improvement i didn't know what the full potential of the work is nobody told me that's very rare nobody ever tells you the full potential of it uh so that that's one of the roles that i serve is that i try to i try to just show you how much there is here there's so much here and all of this that we're talking about is really just your own potential all i'm ever talking about is your own potential this is your true potential as a human being it's enormous it's astounding how much potential you have of what you can become and of the role you can play in the world if you really get your [ __ ] together and you stop being lazy and you develop some self-discipline and you start to take your life seriously and you start to treat it like a like a project that you're working on and you treat it like a work of art and you make your life a gift that you give to the rest of the world because you're part of a larger global community of a larger global tribe you see so i'm the one who's helping you to interconnect the dots to create that vision which will be the fuel that then allows you to get all the rest of your ducks in a row and there's still so much more work we have to cover there we're not even close to done with that project so stay with me for more because there's still a lot more that we haven't covered you