This week, we have a rad roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we talk Snow Crash, Linguistic Entropy, and The Metaphysics of Video Games; spoil Meow Wolf and Annihilation (warning!); and go deep on the origins of Hypnotherapy and NLP. It’s just part one of an intense three-hour hoedown with some of the sharpest minds I know…

The Guests in Order of Appearance:

Michael Aaron Kamins

https://twitter.com/michaelaaronk

John David Ebert

https://twitter.com/johndavidebert

Ikkyu Sojun

https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue

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We Talk About:

Michael Aaron Kamins:

“Shigiro Miyamoto is the Dante of the Hypermodern Age.”

Mario is a shaman, Link is Percival of the Round Table…

NextNature.net, the Anthropocene, and the Wood Wide Web

Are videogames more effective than books as a form of storytelling?

John David Ebert likes Grand Theft Auto:

“Video games aren’t the problem; they’re the SOLUTION to the problem of living in these bizarre cosmopolitan cities, these huge megalopolitan cities that we’re constantly stressed out by.”

Narrative collapse in the shift from the serialized dramas of print-era TV and the reality shows of web-era TV

Michael Aaron Kamins:

“What does the hero’s journey mean in a world where we have to work 9-to-5 jobs?”

Skeumorphism in digital spaces:

Video games that mimic office life seem inevitable…

…but unlike in Snow Crash, we don’t want to walk everywhere in VR.

Lists, Explosions, & Flows

Why Michael Aaron Kamins disagrees with Daniel Pinchbeck about UFOs.

If Jordan Peterson is our Confucius, who is our Lao Tzu?

MG:

“History is a thing that you make.”

JDE:

“We’ve lost the metaphysics. We have to bring back the metaphysics.”

Why and how civilizations disintegrate.

MG:

“If you’re going to upload me, at least upload me in HD.”

JDE:

“It’s gotta get more fractal.”

Meow Wolf is The Shimmer in Annihilation

Archangel Michael & Garuda, archetypes expressed across the world in time and landscape

Michael and Michael talk about the dragon fighting St. Michael meteor-dinosaur connection thing.

Everybody tries to guess MG’s sign.

Dr Blue aka Norman Katz, student of Milton Erickson

Jungian vs Ericksonian psychotherapy and the importance of combining the two.

We talk smack on the sociopathic founders of NLP.

Mimetic theory.

Evolution, entropy, and the Tower of Babel.

Shout-Outs:

RadioLab

Douglas Rushkoff

Pac Man

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Carl Jung’s Red Book

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

Google Glass

Kevin Kelly

William Burroughs

Meow Wolf

Rudolf Steiner

“The Fighting Dinosaurs”

Paleontologist Robert Bakker

Houston Museum of Nature & Science

Timothy Leary

The Fourth Turning

History, Big History, and MetaHistory by SFI Press

Being John Malkovich

Gilles Deleuze

Peter Sloterdijk

The Joseph Campbell Foundation

Robertson Jeffers

Jon Steinbeck

Buddha Bomb

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

Tom Hui Hu – A Prehistory of the Cloud

The Square in the Tower by Neil Ferguson

The Architects of the Internet Apologize – New Yorker Magazine

Jeff Van Der Meer

Tool & Alex Grey

Parvati

Scott Adams

NLP