A wide-ranging conversation on the experience of sensemaking during the pandemic, with Zubin Damania (ZDoggMD).


Zubin first came to my attention with a viral video at the start of 2020 where he channelled some righteous anger at the medical establishment's response to the pandemic, and said he hoped that the crisis would be the trigger to “burn this broken system to the ground”. For years he's been arguing for a significant change to the medical system, away from treating people as interchangeable parts in a machine and towards a more holistic vision of what he calls Health 3.0.


During the pandemic we compared notes on what we were seeing, through shared frameworks like Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and Jonathan Haidt's “moral tastebuds”. He argues for nuance and complexity, and dubs his political perspective as “alt-middle”.


0:00 - The Pandemic & the Information Ecology


04:02 - Zubin & Health Care 3.0


08:09 - The USP of Rebel Wisdom, curating a conversation


10:09 - The pandemic was a stress test that we failed


14:03 - The internet leaking out into the real world


16:37 - The religiosity of the Covid debate


19:53 - The rise in conspiracy narratives


22:56 - Questioning our own thinking


29:33 - Public intellectuals going off the rails


32:48 - The hermeneutics of suspicion


39:00 - A culture of bullshit


44:14 - Conspiracies thrive in the gaps of the mainstream


46:31 - The pre/trans of the insurgency after 2018


53:34 - Paradox of being outside the institutions - audience capture


58:27 - Warping effects of the tech platforms accelerated on creators


01:00:37 - Attention hijack as opposite of mindfulness


01:02:41 - The tragic arc of Jordan Peterson


01:06:55 - The return of the repressed


01:14:14 - The return of psychedelic medicine


01:18:57 - The limitations of psychedelics


01:22:51 - Meditation & Awakening


01:29:36 - Ayahuasca


01:32:14 - Culture War 2.0 & the memetic tribes


01:43:06 - Post Pandemic Awakening


01:46:39 - The English Taboo Against Earnestness


01:49:30 - Mutual Appreciation Society