Jamie Rumble | Nomadic Becoming in the Anthropocene

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 00:00
Today we're together with Jamie Rumble. This is our third time together. And if you haven't heard the two first episodes, I really think you should go listen to them. I will add the links in the show notes. And one of the things we would talk about today is that Jamie has done this wonderful project, and we want to hear a little about what you've learned along the way and everything that you have gotten to know and stuff like that. But first of all, a late but good welcome to the show, Tim.

Jamie Rumble: 00:33
Thank you. Yeah, so I guess the first two podcasts we did, I was more interviewing you. I'm hoping that maybe you can interview me. That might be helpful to kind of joggle my brain a bit to unpack my learning through all this. And I'm still learning, I'm still reading. It's been extremely fascinating. So I guess maybe I'll give you the a little bit of a timeline. So in 1999, I went to Japan in the midst of a personal crisis. I was getting a divorce. I was at the time I was working in the film industry in Toronto, working crazy hours, very unhealthy lifestyle. And in the midst of that personal crisis moment, I remembered a friend of mine in university who he had gone to Japan one of the summers to work and teach English. And he came back and said, You should go to Japan. You would love Japan. So in 1999, I suddenly found myself to be basically no strings attached. And I thought, okay, I'll go. And during my time there, I started a master's degree with Endicut College in the States. And that was on integrated learning. And it was a really fascinating program. And I actually almost finished it. I didn't finish it. I had to leave for personal reasons again. And that's kind of been a theme throughout my life. I've struggled throughout my life with mental health issues. So I had to stop. And then about, I don't know, more than a decade after that, I tried again and then had to stop for physical reasons. I had a gallbladder attack and was hospitalized for 10 days. And then I tried again with Cape Brighton University here in Nova Scotia, where I am. And their program, Masters of Education program, is focused on sustainability, creativity, and innovation, which really piqued my interest because obviously, having a background work from the film industry, I've always been interested in creative endeavors. When I went to Japan in 1999, it was right at the beginning of the kind of World Wide Web boom. Internet cafes were popping up everywhere. There was still no smartphones. But my intention when I went to Japan the first time was to travel all over Southeast Asia. I ended up staying in Japan for 17 years and came back to Canada in the spring of 2017 to start my master's with Cape Burton University. And I had to once again take a break due to mental health issues, interruptions. And then when I was able to kind of get my life back together, I came back to it again. So the theme here is I don't give up easily. And so now here I am. And my initial focus when I started way back in the early 2000s in Japan, I had through my travels, I basically traveled Japan from top to bottom. And while I was doing that, I came across in my guidebook actually, the Yamabushi are the mountain priests in Japan. And they basically stand under waterfalls. So I was fascinated at that time about flow states. And I thought I really, and this is something I probably still will investigate later on in academic research. But my initial thought was focusing on the Yamabushi experience because they would do, you know, fasting, standing under waterfalls, meditation, things like that. And they would essentially trigger a flow state through that. So I thought, well, that would be really cool to research, you know, a master's of education on flow states in education, which is now like a thing. But when the pandemic started in 2020, when we were all under lockdown and things like that, I went online and I started watching a lot of digital nomads who were still kind of traveling or they were, you know, stuck wherever they were in parts of the world. And I thought this is fascinating because another one of my passions is the environment. I mentioned, I think, in a previous podcast that I'd worked for Greenpeace. And so the climate change, climate collapse, seeing digital nomads, thinking, you know, that's what I was trying to do when I went to Japan, way back when I wanted to be a digital nomad. I still have that kind of, I never really feel like I want to stay in one place for forever. So a couple of years ago, I read this book, Nomad Century, and it's probably backwards right now, but Gaia Vince. Nomad Century, where she talked about how climate migrations will shape our world. So I was thinking, yeah, I think I want to focus on digital nomadism and as a response to climate change, because of a lot of the things that Gaia Vince talks about in that book, that parts of the world will be uninhabitable for some of the year or maybe permanently due to climate change, climate collapse. So with populations on the move, I took another look at the digital nomad community, thinking, well, here's if this is our future, if we are meant to be nomadic, and I believe that we that's our natural state, I believe that humans are naturally nomadic. But if that's where we're returning to, then we've got, you know, now the digital nomad community is something like up to like 30 million people worldwide and growing exponentially. And if that is a trend and if that is the future, then what insights could digital nomads have on nomadic living, adaptability, things like that, transformation vis-a-vis climate change, climate collapse for future generations and for educators. So looking at it through that lens. And my my focus was through the lens of echo-pedagogy, which is of the lineage of critical pedagogy from Paolo Ferrari in Brazil in the 1960s, 70s, which is a lot of critical thinking, dialectical practices, reflection. And so that's kind of what brought me to you. I found you on Facebook, I found Takihiro on Facebook, Anna, I found through Digital Nomad World website, I think. I'd canvassed a whole bunch of other digital nomad spaces online, some of them really funky and radical. And that's, I guess, how I met you guys. And so now I'm writing everything up and you know, drawing some conclusions, and it's been really, really fascinating.

Jesper Conrad: 07:43
If you look at the stories you've heard and you said it was inspiring for you, what I also hear is that you have a past of, as many people have, having battled with some mental issues. Is there anything among the things you have read, learned in dialogue where you think that it can ease the challenges? I ask from a perspective of believing that we have a culture right now that people try to fit into, that they shouldn't fit into. So that is the perspective I ask from. Then seeing this lifestyle, researching these people, is there something in you that is like maybe it's not me, maybe it's the lifestyle, or am I doing my own judgment and put them over you there?

Jamie Rumble: 08:59
No, I think that's a resounding truth that the world that we live in, the systems that we have created over, let's say, give or take, the last 500 years is guilty as charged, I would say, of contributing not only to the demise of the planetary health, but also mental health, physical health. And that's, I guess, one of the biggest realizations that I've had through all of this. And it's it's always been kind of a hunch of mine, and maybe just putting it to you, but I believe more than ever that the health of our planet directly correlates to the health of our species and all species. And so the mental health crisis that we're seeing now worldwide, I think is yeah, completely related to the way that we've been living on this planet. Our planet is sick and we are sick. And until we heal the relationship not only to each other and with ourselves, to with for all of that kind of stuff, we will continue to suffer because we have separated ourselves from nature, and we have separated ourselves from uh traditional role, which, and again, this is one of the themes that came up through through this research is that and and through echo-pedagogy, is that humans our our role was as stewards originally, stewards of the land. It wasn't ours to to dominate or control or extract from, but with capitalism, we have seen the commodification of literally everything, anything and everything, including time, including life, including death. Everything has become commodified. And I think that is one of the reasons we have become so sick, and one of the reasons we have made our planet so sick, because it is a pathological ideology, I think, ultimately. Which I would say capitalism, yeah. And and some people even call this day and age. There's a professor, I think his name is Jason Moore. He calls this the capital scene. Whereas the title of my thesis project is called nomadic becoming in the anthropocene. This day and age, the age of man or the age of humans, our impact on the planet, this is the age we live in. I can't remember the Latin, but it's basically trans translates to the age of fire. So if the future is going to be like, you know, Guy Vince mentions in this book, more climate collapse, more wildfires, more unmitigated disasters. And I it's a contentious issue to you know point the finger at capitalism. I understand that fully.

Jesper Conrad: 12:14
Oh, yeah, but I also think that there's a very simple solution. If we raise our children with love and respect, then I think they will love and respect the people around them and the Mother Earth around them. I actually think that some of the ways the way of going is due to us not treating our children like they should be treated.

Jamie Rumble: 12:39
Yeah. Yeah. That was another one of the common themes. Yeah. Community was, you know, bringing it back to community was one of the common themes through all the interviews that I did. The importance of community.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:52
Yeah, and the communities have become too big to be communities. I see that as one of the driving factors of the problems we have, that all the systems are just too big. And in the name of efficiency, we we make them even bigger. Because if you do the math, it looks like that would be better. And but it isn't. It works for almost everything healthcare and schools and big factories and countries and logistics and food production and tax systems and everything. We just make the systems bigger and bigger to make them more and more efficient, which we're thinking we're taking it away from being a subjective question of who knows who. And that is more fair, and that is more efficient, but actually it's less fair. No one knows anyone, no one's taking any real responsibility with emotions attached. It's only principles. If we if we're lucky, usually it's not even that, it's just covering your own ass. And then you have these huge machines, these huge systems that no one really can wrap their head around and no one feels personally attached to. I think that's a really big problem. I'm probably not as well educated as you are in this field, but I am thinking capitalism. Is that the actually the real monster here? Or I mean, we've seen other systems rise and fall in the same context of things being bigger and bigger, and in the same context of the evolution of technology. I don't know if I'm using the right terms here, but you know, we did some inventions. We can't go back before electricity. We have and use electricity now, all of us. Um, and then you can just go on and pile up a list of maybe 150 really epic things that we came up with. That actually I'm not against it. I don't think it's devastating. I think it's better. I think women don't die giving birth, and children survive the age of two, and elderly people can get help for pains for arthritis, and if we get cancer, that can be solved. At some point, we will even crush a malaria problem. It will happen. And it is because of this, because of the united forces of human brains working to figure out how everything works, how we can work with it, how we can come up with new ways of understanding problems and solving them. And along those lines, we have created a lot of problems. Climate problems being one of the more overwhelming ones, but still, it's part of that process. I'm not sure. And as I said, you know, I haven't put as many years of thought into it as you have, but I'm just not sure it's the political system or the principle of capitalism. I think it's could very well be part of that process. It's just, I'm not trying to say that this is the only way things could have unfolded, and that people who have made more progress in inventing stuff are better than those who didn't. But on the other hand, I have to say that I think it's part of the human mind, human hive mind, if you want to say that, the history of humans, that we will stand on each other's shoulders. At some point, we will come up with the system for writing things down. So we can not only learn from each other, but we can learn from those who are far away or way before us in time. And that means that we will accumulate more and more layers of knowledge. I don't have to come up with trigonometry. All I need to do is to sit down and learn it, which is way easier than coming up with it to begin with. And that that holds true for everything that we humans have learned. And so this this is, I think this had to happen. It had to happen because of who we are, because of the minds we have. We're curious, we're smart, we have hungry brains and we want to move forward. Not all of us, but there will always in a group of people be the odd 15-20% who are experimenting, um, trying things out, figuring things out, and there will be this odd genius here and there who will come up with the steam engine or the smartphone or you know, things that are real game changers. Any piece of the technology, any any human success in any science can be used in a good way or a bad way, or something in between, because it's actually usually complicated, not just either good or bad.

Jesper Conrad: 18:02
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 18:03
So I can't even say that I would be against development. It is what it is, that we will learn more things, we will have more options. I mean, the bomb came from insights we needed to understand cosmos. I mean, you can invent a hammer and you can build a house or crush someone's knee. I mean, it's a question of how you use it. So isn't it really capitalism, or is capitalism just part of that human nature where we have tried out a lot of different ways of organizing our society? And now that we have a global world, we have to organize also the cooperation between different cultures, different local societies have to cooperate with other societies' cultures, and it seems like capitalism is winning. And I wonder in a way, and I mean it's not like I know what I'm saying here, I'm just wondering is it because it's the better option? The trade is actually quite democratic and fair in and of itself. I'm not saying it's unfolding in a democratic and fair way, but in a way, we all understand this. We convert the value into a unit that's not attached to the product, and then we convert it back, and that works for everyone.

Jesper Conrad: 19:33
I I think one of the problems that has arisen over the last many centuries and have escalated in the last 50 years at least.

Cecilie Conrad: 19:45
Oh, I forgot a point. I was working on this point for a long time. Yeah, yeah, no. Can I just we have the evolution of knowledge and you know, technology, and we have the evolution of let's say, political systems and cooperation between societies, and you say capitalism is the driver of destruction, and my hypothesis right here is maybe it's the element of human nature we call greed mixed into this that actually ruins it. It's not about whether it's capitalism or not, it's the greed and it's the untrained human moral, you could say. We're beyond religion now, so we're not referring back to an i a base idea of good and bad that you would have if you were a religious person. You would have an idea that there is actually something good and actually something bad, and we call it heaven and hell. We have a moral code, we have to refer back to it, and we will stand trial at some point. If we have that, greed cannot take over.

Jamie Rumble: 20:57
Yeah, good versus.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:58
But now that we don't have it, greed is in this mix, and I think it's the greed in the capitalistic system that is driving the destruction.

Jesper Conrad: 21:07
It's a really, really interesting point because there's something about the can you say, overall post-religious society where the ethics and moral from the religious areas were inhabited in us, if you can say that. The point I think about is, and I tried to make a small wordplay with it, but I gave up. But in Danish it would be to, which means time. So it's transparency, indifference, and distance. And these are the things I'm thinks, these are the things I believe are missing. And I think it's that to reflect to your point, Sasia, then I think it has to do with the lack of normal morality between people and the greed that has grown in. So if we take them, the transparency. I came to think about, we live here in Denmark when we visit our friends here on their organic farm. Sorry, what was the three again? Transparency and the second one was indifference. Indifference and distance. Okay. Transparency has to do about the honesty. If I roll back to living in more local societies, if I was dishonest towards my neighbor when I tried to sell him something, I would go out of business. If I was that if I take digital nomad and turn it back to just being a nomad and I came by and I sold my stuff, then they wouldn't buy from me the next time I came by if I sold them something that was valuable. Now the distance, so the transparency of what I'm selling is not there any longer. We live on an organic farm. If people buy some of their produce, then they would know how it is. But what when it's sold in a shop? Then you have the distance to from the producer to the consumer, which makes it possible to add in the greed and the indifference. So I take my iPhone because I actually, unfortunately, I am kind of indifferent about how that person in whatever society, probably China, where it was produced, have his life is. I don't think about it. That is my morality, I should work with there. My greed, my I want an iPhone and I like it and it's nice. I mean, unfortunately, indifferent towards the person who has produced its life. But it's because of the distance. If it was produced in this house I'm in, if it was my kids working under those conditions, I would act on it. I wouldn't be satisfied. So I think there is this element of the world getting so big that we lack the transparency. I am hopeful enough that it will happen. I believe that we at some point would be able to scan our groceries and see what product you are buying. And I hope I would be able to scan the groceries and see the life of the product. Right now, people are getting knowledge about whole when you buy eggs, those chickens are not like farm chickens running around clocking and having fun. They're still buying them. That is the indifference. They value something else, maybe their money, maybe something else, over the how this life has been treated. I think we will pass that at some point. I hope and believe it's a bump in societal morals and ethics that we actually at some point will feel we'll be able to see how things are produced due to the internet, etc. I just saw a short movie, one of these shorts about how tennis balls were produced. And I was like, oh, maybe it's not so fun to buy three cheap tennis balls and be like, ooh, what a scoop I made here, when you see how that person who put the glue on with his hands is living. So there's actually the transparency is coming, and I think it will make a societal change. That is my naive hope for humans, because I believe in humanity. I can see the fear, the dangers, etc., but I think that we are waking up. I believe more and more people will become aware of how things are going on, which condition things are produced under. If I had a neighbor coming and buying produce from me, would I spray it with poison? Like they do on the fields today if you buy unorganic food. It's sprayed with poison. I wouldn't sell it to a neighbor and know, because if he would get sick by it, it would be on me. And if it wasn't my morality, then it would be in my money. He wouldn't return and buy from me because he got sick of eating the shit I gave him. So time, transparency, I believe it's coming. I believe all of us should work on how indifferent we are towards other people. And then I think the distance is the problem that we kind of don't care when it's over there somewhere.

Jamie Rumble: 26:29
And we should so lots of interesting thoughts from both of you, yeah, on capitalism. And I I agree with with most of them. And I guess I think there is a lot of well, I guess one of the things that came up, Jesper, when you were talking, and something that that's called the triple bottom line in as a proposal for a new type of capitalism, considering the three Ps, and it's part of a sustainability framework, so that the three Ps would be people, planet, and then profit. So that it doesn't take profit out of the equation, but the people in the planet are now part of the equation. Whereas the people on the planet have not been part of the equation by and large. So I think most forms of capitalism that we've seen in the day, and I don't want this conversation to be too much about capitalism. It's just one of the thoughts, I guess. But since we're on that tangent, I think we assume that it's the most efficient system. But because there is the profit motive without consideration for the people or the planet, or to a lesser degree, consideration for the people on the planet, I think that's definitely one of the reasons why we've arrived where we have arrived. And some people would even say that what we're seeing in the states right now, and believe me, living in Canada, our neighbors are right there. It's very, very much part of the our daily thought, I guess. Some people say what are you seeing?

Cecilie Conrad: 28:05
Can I ask? What are you seeing in your neighbor country?

Jamie Rumble: 28:09
Well, I mean, looking at America right now, some people are referring to what's happening there as late stage capitalism. And it's essentially the rise of fascism, is what we're seeing. Unbridled capitalism. And that's why I think some people refer this to this age as the capital scene rather than the anthropocene. But when you really kind of unpack all of that, and it goes back to, I think, loosely the concept of borders and countries, which are extremely relevant for digital nomads, because we do live in a world where there are nation states and borders, and that has to be navigated with passports and visas and all that. But going even further back to the creation of nation, states, and borders, at least from the Western perspective, very often that translates to colonialism. And I know we talked about that previously through other podcasts about echopedagogy being of the lineage of Paolo Ferrer's critical pedagogy and how decolonization was part of the conversation. So if we talk about decolonization, I think there is an element of talking about maybe even like decapitalization or capitalism to a lesser degree or a more constrained version of capitalism. Because if it's unbridled, it does lead to fascism. And I think even Benito Mussolini, when he first came up with the term fascism, he termed it as the more accurate term would be corporate fascism. And so when we talk even about the internet using all of these amazing inventions, another term that comes to mind. Is something called technofascism, where we have the internet and we use it on a daily basis. Oh, sorry, not technofascism, technofeudalism. That we are using the internet thinking that we are free, yet every keystroke, every web page, every site, you know, whatever, every transaction is being monitored and our daily lives and data is being again commodified so that we can be good participants in this system, but our participation is also being modified, guided, limited, so that we perpetuate the system and become consumers rather than producers or or otherwise. Our lives have been reduced to that of a consumer, and so everything is commodified. So a lot of thoughts. I do have some more on other points that you made, but yeah, I'll go back to you on that.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:05
So I'm thinking lots of people talk about AI, lots of people talk about collapse, lots of people talk about the consumer situation that consumers is what we are all the time, like you just said. And with our lifestyle, we don't read a lot of academic stuff these years at all. I just had a conversation with my friend with whom we're living this morning. Damn, it's sad we're both academics, so we don't read at all. Anyways. So, but one of the few books we did read this year, actually, all of us, I think all of the adults and some of the teen adults in this household this year is the one called Super Stimulated. Did you read that one? It's an English philosopher, but it's translated into a lot of languages. Super stimulated. It's a very interesting book, very easy to read. I it's like a page turner, like a crime novel. You can't put it down. Read it in two sittings, five, maybe. So where am I going? Somewhere where all of these things, all of these, you know, we've talked a few times, and both yes and I are very much against being having like this black outlook on things. We're very optimistic, very positive, very enthusiastic. And actually, I think all of these quote unquote problems, super stimulated, being circling around this idea that that you know we we somehow elements of our shared culture is hacking our instincts and just pushing us around and we can't control it. AI taking over, fooling us, everything, everything online, being basically just there to push us around. We don't we actually think we have control, but we don't, all these things. I think actually what it's doing to us as humanity is we have to rise to the challenge. We have to cut very deep and very close to the bone and figure out who we are. We frequently have conversations with uh my sons. Funny enough, the daughters don't talk that much about those themes, but the sons, both of them, they talk about, you know, what defines us how do we know we're human? What is it about us? And it's not to say that we're better than dolphins or ants or trees or raindrops. It's just there's something specifically human, and it's very hard to grasp. It's very hard to figure out what it is. My oldest son is reading some very interesting sci-fi novels, circling around this theme, playing with the idea of evolution and what if all of this logic, brain power, what we call IQ, is was in ants instead. What would then have been? So basic instincts and all the ant nature plus IQ. Would that equal human in a different shape? No, something human that we can't grasp. And I think that, whatever it is, that specific thing needs to come out now. And it's it really, we really have to rise to the challenge. We really have to understand who we are, and we really need to know what's important because otherwise we're just being run over by by problems we created ourselves because we are who we are, and because we didn't know how far it would go, how far greed would take us, how crazy logic would become. Fascism, many elements of fascism, they're very logical. They make a lot of sense. If you just sit down and shut off your emotions, shut off your humanity, and just use reason and logic, it's not like it's not human. I'm not obviously not trying to condone any fascism, but I'm just saying it comes from us for a reason. And because it's yeah, so we have to figure out what is that core element and how do we stay true to that with the big life choices we make, the way we choose to live our lives, and also on a micro level, with our daily choices. What do we do? And and how do we choose to cope with it if it's not just easy? And what if it is easy? Then we also have to stop and think, is this a little bit too easy? Yeah. Um, so and I think that's a very interesting challenge.

Jamie Rumble: 35:50
You mentioned that book, super stimulated. And I just wanted to comment on that with regards to you know the conversation we're having about capitalism. A friend of mine who is a die-hard capitalist, he actually shared with me some thoughts on that recently, where he said, what we are experiencing now is a form of capitalism that he said is called limbic capitalism. Limbic capitalism is a system that deliberately creates addictive, pleasure-inducing product products and services, targeting the brain's limbic system. So I think in a way, we have become captured by this system because of the algorithms and all that kind of stuff. And I know that Elon Musk has also talked about this. And the the term limbic capitalism was coined by David Cortwright. I'm not sure about his background, but it does explain how pharmaceuticals, food, alcohol, online platforms are designed to foster continual use or habitual use or even dependency. So when those things are taken away, especially we see in young children, there is this reaction because of the dependency that's created. And going back to what Elon Musk has said in the past, he even said that, because when when the online social networks were first created, people were competing for likes. The dopamine response, you know, I want to get likes, and then my brain is going to get that kind of addictive dopamine-seeking behavior. But what Elon Musk said was that actually what increases engagement more than likes is rage. So, and that's a very important point because if you look at the online space now and even the political atmosphere now, it seems to be very motivated. If you want engagement, you create rage. And that drives engagement even more than lights. So it's a little bit scary if we are monetizing and promoting rage as part of the system. But just a few thoughts on that. Yeah. And we're going down a lot of interesting rabbit holes, so it's very organic. And but I do see like community, as you mentioned earlier, Jesper, about the post-religious society. I do agree that through my interviews with you and Cecilia and Anna and Takahiro, there was this component of experiencing the more than human that was driving everyone. You know, Takihiro mentioned he was living and working in Tokyo, and all of his friends were trying to save money to buy houses and get married and all that kind of stuff. And he just felt it was such an empty existence. And so that's why he became a digital nomad because he just it just wasn't for him. So I do see this. We're driven by a lot of things. I think a lot of instincts, and including our limbic system, which gets hacked. But I do believe there is a part of us, and maybe it goes back to my interest in the in the Yamabushi originally, is that there is a spiritual component to life that we can't deny, we can't escape. And it it points to, and this is another book that I'm reading right now. This is by a guy named Dokari Stein. Whoops, there, if we can get it in focus. Essays on the future of schools, technology, and society. And one of the things that he talks about is the work of some of the very famous educators, Piaget among them. And he talks about, I'm just trying to find the graph here. I hope I can find it. But he talks about, and we talked about this in a previous podcast as well, on the role of, or not the role of, but just the about consciousness. And what he writes about is that in human development, there are certain steps of our development. But the the final step or one of the higher levels or capacities for humans is the the spiritual or the yeah, that there's like the going to like universal ethics or universal values. And if we don't, especially when it comes to education, if we don't keep that in mind, if that is not part of the and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're in order, but I think that's something that has kind of been taken out of life by Mark. Maybe it's because it's also been commodified, I'm not sure. But yeah, just a few thoughts on that, and I can't find the exact graph that I was looking for where he specifically points to that. And I wonder sometimes though, we can experience the divine individually, but does it have meaning if we are unable to share it? And and so that's where it comes back to the collective how we make meaning and and through storytelling, we we the other is essential. And I think that's one of the things that motivates a lot of people to be nomadic is novelty, constant novelty, but also a constant experiencing of the other. And I think there is this interesting human attraction, love-hate. On one hand, we fear the other, but on the other hand, it's what we seek. So there's a demonization of the other happening a lot of the time. The other scares us, but when we experience the other, that's when we can also learn about ourselves. And so I see that that's also a big component of the nomadic lifestyle is that you're constantly experiencing novelty and the other.

Jesper Conrad: 42:19
Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 42:19
So yeah, a few broad thoughts on that, but I will go a little back. It's to the limbic system, it is to what is life about, and I actually think that we sometimes make stuff too difficult. We are built with a lot of signs, being that our body are actually producing different hormones for us when we do what is good for us. And then, yes, as you talked about with the limbic capitalism, the capitalistic system have figured out how to work on these so we will consume those things. But if we took ourselves seriously enough as a person to look at which chemicals do my brain produce for me in which situations, then we have a recipe for what we should do in life in many ways. We know it naturally and do it naturally when we have small children. We suit them by cuddling them that releases the, and I can never remember the name of it. And it's the same with the singing together, not singing alone, but singing together releases releases it as well. So when you are cuddling and singing for a child, you are naturally doing stuff that suits the child and releases good hormones in them. So it's not like we don't know, we actually know on a deep fundamental level, which is we do it by ourselves when we have a baby in our hand. Then there is the whole exercise thing. Oh my God, I remember the first time I took a run that was long enough to get the release of the different chemicals because I run as high. Yeah, yeah, but I'm so stupid that I make up rules for myself and I followed them. So for 11 years I've run.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:19
The problem is you follow them.

Jesper Conrad: 44:21
Yes. For 11 years I ran one kilometer every day. That's the shitty kilometer. Your body's not happy, it's not fun, and you don't get the release, you don't get the gift. And one day I ran three, and it was around these 20 minutes because I'm a slow runner. Then I got this. Oh, oh, my brain feels fine, man. Yes. Now I didn't run three.

Jamie Rumble: 44:44
Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 44:44
Yeah. All this oxygen, all these endolphins, all these dopamine releases. So, what I'm trying to say is that in many ways, we actually have the recipe for a good life in us. It is community, it is singing together, it is using our bodies. If we just listen to those voices in ourselves, they're free. Capitalism don't have the you can call it limbic capitalism, but we could also take ownership of our own system. It is actually free to produce these chemicals inside of us, and you feel fine. You just need to sing together with someone, find a lovely person to cuddle with or hang out with closely, and then go for a run or dance and music. Life is not difficult. But we are we are limiting ourselves in a way where doing these things on a daily basis is not part of our daily routine. When is the last time I have sung together with someone? I don't know. Uh Friday. This Friday, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 45:49
Actually, it's about four days ago.

Jesper Conrad: 45:51
Four days ago. But what I'm trying to go to is that there's a lot of these things we know, but we end up living in one family household or two food, one family household with one person in many of them, or two-person and one point four child, where people are not eating together any longer, people are not singing together any longer, and exercise is maybe down in some stupid place where you cannot feel your emotion because there's a loud shitty music on the speakers. So, so I believe that life is easier, and I can when I say this, I'm like, yes, but but do you listen to yourself? Yes, but do you do all those things yourself? No. Would you like to do more of them? Yes. Okay, how? Yeah, I don't know, but I can see the way forward, and I think that again, I believe people are waking up. I see the the amount of loneliness that has increased and the whole COVID thing or the pandemic. I believe more people want to go out in real life and connect with other people, be together, sing together and and do stuff.

Jamie Rumble: 47:03
I I totally agree with a lot of what you're saying, and and it's actually interesting because you're saying, like you said kind of at the beginning, it's easy. But one of the things, again, Takahiro, what he mentioned was one of the reasons he kind of quit and left Tokyo to become a digital nomad. And his intention at the beginning was not to become a digital nomad. And a lot of digital nomads who I've met and talked to, they said, no, I don't even want to call myself a digital nomad. But he said that Tokyo was too convenient, and he felt like he was becoming soft in a way. And so, on one hand, you talk about it's easy, but on the other hand, I think that there is an aspect of inconvenience or doing what's hard that gives us a greater benefit. And so it may seem easy in terms of just describing, but to actually do it, you know, maybe you were doing the easy thing by running one kilometer, but by running three, you did the harder thing, which took more discipline, but the benefit was there. And so, you know, once you realize the benefit, it's like, oh, I want to do this is the right way or a better way. And and Takahiro as well, like he mentioned that he actually was almost seeking inconvenience or or maybe it's more of like a stoic kind of philosophical way of living, you know, denying yourself sometimes or taking cold showers because there's no other option. And then somehow that builds your character. It may not necessarily be for everybody. Again, touching on what you mentioned, and you know, with community doing things together, I definitely see that, and I see it all the time. I'm I'm part of a digital nomad newsletter, and I get you know weekly email newsletters, and I saw again, I think just today I got one, it was saying about loneliness, how that's you know something that digital nomads deal with, because many travelers are solo travelers. But you talked about in in another podcast about co-living facilities. I think that there is an instinct in humans to live in community, and that the digital nomad space is also evolving into the co-living, co-working, hub-like. You know, people are are essentially sleeping in like a tiny little, almost like a capsule hotel, living in these co-living spaces, and then they're having a communal kitchen, a communal working space. And it reminded me of when I lived in Japan, and sometimes I would take the train into the city in into Yokohama or or Tokyo, and there'd be like these massive apartment blocks or brand new apartments they were building, condominiums, things like that, and you'd see the advertisements on the trains, and they were all single unit dwellings. And I just thought, like, wow, I look at that, you know, massive apartment building, and every single one of those balconies is an individual human being. Oh my god. Completely isolated from the next person, right? And I know that, you know, living in Japan for 17 years, I noticed as well, it's undeniable, they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. But I also noticed how neighbors didn't really talk much to each other if you're living in an apartment building. If you were living in a house, it was different. So I do wonder about the future, and I think that's another reason why digital nomads fascinate me. And I did ask you in a previous podcast about the scalability of nomadic living or nomadic lifestyles, because I do think that there is a missing piece for many of us living in this kind of individualistic, you know, my property is my property. Maybe we need to, not just for our mental health, but for other practical reasons, move to more of a communal way of living. And I know that that kind of, you know, as soon as I say the word community or communal, people will jump to communism or socialism or I don't know, but that's what I'm seeing. And there is that evidence and the benefits again, Cecilia, you mentioned about capitalism being efficient as efficiency being a driver. But what is the metric? Is it efficient monetarily? Maybe yes. Is it efficient in terms of material? But when we talk about efficiency, what about the the long view rather than the shareholder quarterly report view? What is the more natural efficiency in terms of humanity and the survival of our species and the survival of our planet? What how does efficiency put come into play in in those terms if we're not using that as a as a metric purely on the best use of resources right now?

Jesper Conrad: 52:25
Yeah. Or best use of time or Cecilia Ans says I have a uh short thing on capitalism, which is I think so many people are externalizing the guilt by putting it on the leaders, fascism, whatever. If I look back at my childhood, we didn't have mobile phones. We had periods where my family couldn't afford a car because my dad was in and out of a job at one point. We went on biking holidays, it was amazing. Wow, yeah, yeah, but it was because they couldn't afford to take the plane, you know. Uh it was amazing. And we had one television in the household. So the whole greed thing is how many televisions is there or screens are there in a normal household here? How many headsets do I have for my computer? I have two. How many glasses do I have? Oh, they're so cheap, I can just buy new ones. I have seven pairs of reading glasses. That is not normal. That is the that's completely normal. Yeah, yeah, that's unfortunately completely normal. But it is the inner greed is that we have gotten ourselves used to living with more and more commodities, and we could just scale those down, then we would have more leisure time, more freedom, more money. So when people sometimes are blaming, externalizing the blame, I'm like, whoo, that's easy. Maybe you should go back and sing together with Michael Jackson, and I'm starting with the man in the mirror.

Jamie Rumble: 53:59
Yeah, yeah, I remember. At the same time, and I want to see the man in the mirror. Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 54:10
Well, I was just thinking about I cannot remember his name, but the guy who left Tokyo because it was too convenient that you also talking to that. This was part of the reason we became nomadic, that we thought we have such a great life here in Copenhagen, but it's only one version of life. It's too easy. And we're going to live the same kind of comfortable, amazing, interesting life for the rest of our lives. And if we stay much longer, at the time we were about 40 when we started planning this, we we might not have the opportunity of leaving. It might be too hard mentally, it might be, we might, you know, we might get anxiety attacks. Or you know, we need to get out now. So I can totally recognize this feeling of this is too easy. And I want, but it's also, but at the same time, it was I want more. I'm losing options if I'm not doing this now. That was one of the reasons we did it. So, yes, there's an element of I want more of a challenge. I want things to be more complicated, I want to explore things I don't know. I want to go out and see who I am in a different context. I want to grow stronger in adapting, and in that might be a different way of saying adapting, but learning new things to understand how life could unfold in any context. Um that was that was part of the you remember I said before about making real choices for your life, not just, you know, am I having pasta or rice for dinner? And you know, what kind of house, what neighborhood do I want to live in in the same city I was born in, but more like a strategizing energy of what kind of life do I want to have? And I wanted a challenge on that respect, and I wanted adventure, and I wanted also for my children that they could grow up knowing, you know, lots of things can make sense and lots of different ways, and you can create yourself a happy day on any almost any in any context, you know. You you have it's your responsibility and you have the power. It's not about whether you have the right PlayStation or the right teens, or you have your own group, or what people say about you in school, all these things. It's about showing up somewhere in your life, showing up for who you are and what you find important, and living nomadically has thrown us into a lot of different situations that we have had to cope with and figure out and do it while running, you know. There's no stopping to think about it. We always talk about planning better. The problem with planning is the planning takes time, you have to plan something before it happens, but usually things happen all the time. There's no there's no planning time, you just have to plan while doing, which is great. It's a part of this whole expansion of who we are, and that's very complicated and inconvenient and chaotic and and draining in many ways. Um it's not easy, not easy. We also have a saying in our family: if you do what is hard, your life becomes easy. And this whole thing is actually a good example of that. Also, if you do what is easy, your life becomes hard. So doing this hard, complicated thing, which is draining and chaotic, and sometimes very much too much, and there's a lot of fear and doubt and confusion that we have to cope with. It's not all beaches and art museums, and you know, uh, but our life has become easy to the extent that we're very, very good at getting up in the morning creating a happy day for everyone. Very, very good at just solving problems. We really do keep calm. Sometimes we think we don't, comparatively compare well compared to other people, not much will sh will rock our boat. I'm not saying this to to try to be better than I don't think I'm better than other people. I just have some specific experience, and and we really do take things quite cool because we've done a lot of things that you could say were hard, now everything has become easier. Yeah. So that's a strategy we've had. I don't want an easy life as such, but there are some of the consequences of choosing the easy option that are so hard that I'd rather choose the complicated option now and get the easy, the ease of the release of hormones when you've been running for more than 20 minutes.

Jamie Rumble: 59:04
Yeah. And I think that's one of the benefits of travel and experiencing novelty and other and and complication, complexity, it challenges our brains. I think our brains are also designed, and we kind of talked at the very beginning of this of this podcast about our evolution. I think our brains are also designed to be problem solving. And so when there is a lack of complex complexity or a lack of a problem, even though we want something to be easy or the goal is to have ease, there's so many contradictions because it's through inconvenience, through complexity, that we maybe then reach that different or new plateau in terms of development, because we have the realization, and then hopefully it leads us to that higher consciousness, which we talked about in the previous podcast too, about about. Consciousness. I did want to just kind of interject one point because I know we only have about 10 minutes left, but there was an experiment I read about with rats. I currently work in the mental health and addiction space. So a lot of my knowledge about mental health and stuff like that is coming to play through what I'm researching as well. But there was an experiment done with rats where they put rats in a space and there was food, there was water, but in the water, they actually put cocaine in the water.

Jesper Conrad: 01:00:35
Yeah.

Jamie Rumble: 01:00:36
You heard that one, right? The space is very barren, and the rats quickly became addicted to the cocaine water. They didn't even bother to eat anymore. They were exhibiting all kinds of you know psychotic type behaviors. And then they had another control group of rats with food, water, also cocaine water. But their environment was extremely stimulating and social, and they had you know mazes and all that kind of stuff. They didn't even touch the cocaine water.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:01:06
Now and then they did.

Jamie Rumble: 01:01:08
Now and then they did. Okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:01:10
Yeah, yeah. That's the funny part. Actually, just for you know, it's Friday night. Why don't we have some fun? But they never got addicted. It's a very interesting story of addiction, you know.

Jesper Conrad: 01:01:20
Yeah, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:01:21
And I think down the line of that, also, this was my son reading this, and and he was sharing it with me that another interesting rat experiment, maybe done in the same, I can't remember, same university or same researcher. I can't, but he told me these two things in the same sitting. So the other one was that they were measuring the complexity of the rat brain, or the size, maybe just by measuring the size of it, I can't remember. And of course, the one in the in the more rich enclosure had a bigger brain, and the one that had other rats to play with had because they're social animals, they need other rats to be happy and to also just evolve and and and grow their brains. They had big brains, and then someday someone came up with the idea of finding a rat in the wild, and that was just out of you know, out of the scale smarter than the other ones, and that was just so interesting how whatever we can come up with in uh in an experimental setting will always be smaller than the reality of being out there in a natural light.

Jamie Rumble: 01:02:27
That's interesting, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:02:28
Yeah, that was very interesting.

Jamie Rumble: 01:02:29
Yeah, it kind of brings me back to another one of the motivators for doing this research. I'm a real history nut, and especially also archaeology and other cultures and things like that. So I remember reading about this archaeological find in Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, I think it's called, which they they dated it to be like 12,000 years old, which completely blows our historical timeline. Like the pyramids are supposed to be three to whatever thousand years old. So I kind of got to thinking, and I'm I'm also a big fan of Graham Hancock, actually got to see him speak in in Tokyo. I was thrilled about that. I've read some of his books, even though a lot of people have have said it's you know pseudoscience and blah blah blah, but you know, you've got these sites around the world that predate all of these other things. And when we talk about civilization and capitalism and things like that and climate collapse, you know, if we are looking at a cataclysmic, maybe it's in in slow motion, you know, where our civilization will essentially kind of come to an end, what kind of civilizations will survive? And so, you know, thinking back 12,000 years ago, that was the the younger dryest hypothesis of a comet or pieces of a comet hitting, putting the the world into a kind of an ice age, and so these these civilizations were lost. If we're moving into that kind of cataclysmic in slow motion type event where after you know, 12,000 years ago, humans had to become nomadic. What once again? I'm assuming maybe there were parallel civilizations all along. There were people living in city-states or you know, settled locations with agriculture and things like that. But if we have to move back into a nomadic lifestyle, what is that going to look like? And that was kind of one of the reasons I just got into all of this because I was just so fascinated. Wow, so we were here before like that. We may be moving into another, you know, civilization ending event.

Jesper Conrad: 01:04:57
Yeah, I personally think features are longer than where they were if you take his theories for good. And for example, we have the seed banks in Norway. Uh, they will survive any cataclysmic kind of any major event, uh, and we are way better prepared to secure and share knowledge. Um, and I think that people, some people are taking the steps to make boxes and stuff that uh survive many things. Then there's a whole solar flare, what will happen with our electricity, etc. What I do in my life is asking myself, how can I make today a good day? Because the other thing is a longer, way longer dialogue. And then I look at what we can do to make the changes. And I think some of the work Cecilia does and I do is to try to help parents or people who are becoming parents to get an even deeper and better understanding of how you can live in a good harmonic state with your children, in many ways, a more correct as a debate but natural way of living together. I think what we have found with not being separated from our children, with having them at home, with Cecilia being there, being the mom at home for all these years, and now me, because we moved into the digital nomad space, make us able to be a whole family. Where earlier we were out, I was out, they were at home. That's one of the interesting aspects of the nomadic life, is that it can bring families that were scattered together. People often refer to families or camping trips as wonderful times before because they were together. Yeah. I see when we are in our we have different states, you can say we have housing states uh in our life where we nomadically co-live in a house. Just in a house, we are more scattered. We are in different rooms from time to time. When we are in a band from time to time, traveling from A to B, which maybe can take a month if we are having a good long fun road trip, we're living so close together. And I really in many ways love it. I like that we have this breathing in, breathing out between it, and and that time together is really valuable. And I think that the nomadic life can bring that forward. At the same time, I do not think people, if you go back to other cultures or states before, if you believe in if you take Graham Hancock's theories for granted, there were at that time both nomad people, I will get, and people who stayed and and farmed the land, etc.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:08:04
With every human culture, there's been this odd explorer. There's always this odd group, in some cultures more than others, who venture out to explore the world, who do crazy stuff. Like they're the travelers and the ones who experiment with how what we can come up with solutions, weirdos. Some of them are sent to jail because they're breaking some sort of religious law, whatever, with their experiments of thinking or doing or or family life, or even farming. I mean, people were afraid of the potato when it first came. So, I mean, this thing that some people just think out of the box and some travel far away from home. Yes, it's part of the human genome, maybe. I mean, it's just part of who we are.

Jamie Rumble: 01:08:55
Yeah, you talked about the wild rat, right? In that experiment. When they found the wild rat. So I'm wondering if if the digital nomad instinct is part of uh an instinct to rewild ourselves.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:09:11
But I rather think I'm very I don't I don't say that you have this opinion personally. I'm just afraid that we're making this assumption that the nomads are doing something that's better or cleaner or smarter or more involved than those who are not choosing the nomadic lifestyle. I think it's just part of I don't think there is a way we will ever be able to describe humans are like this. I agree. Some humans are a lot of things. If you take all of us or a group of a hundred thousand of us, you will see the same pattern throughout cultures, throughout climate zones, throughout all kinds of religious lines or whatever. If you take a hundred thousand human beings, then you get all the different things. And there will be the odd travelers, there will be the ones who think outside the box, there will be the ones who do the grinding, there will be the ones who are very spiritual, there will be the ones who are very rational, there will be the odd psychopath. That one we've had throughout history as well, the one who can't feel. It's strange and we're afraid of it because it's strange and it ruins community. I want to say one final thing. I've no, I've got one minute, just because I want to say it's been like a little thing in my brain tickling since you said it. You said when you talk about community, lots of people would jump to think about communism, and that was so interesting because you're from the other side of the pond and we're from this very socialistic country, but also possibly I don't know, it's a very good country. The Scandinavian cultures actually really work in many ways. We would never think communism if you say community here. We share a lot of things, and in the Scandinavian cultures, people are actually hope it's still true, good at thinking about the community, about everyone, about democratic choices, about inclusion, about how do we share the space and and what is good for the people, and that's not communism, that's being social, which is just part of who we are.

Jesper Conrad: 01:11:38
Perfect. Then, Jamie, if people want to read some of your research, read what you have done, are you sharing your findings with the world?

Jamie Rumble: 01:11:49
Once it's all I guess once I've done my my thesis, defense, and all that kind of stuff, I would love to. Yeah. I mean, this is also another book that I read, Digital Nomad by Siguio Makimoto, David Manners. This was written in the mid-90s, even before. It was a it was a predictive book. Another book that I'm reading is called Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse. This is a lot of my motivation thinking about the future and what how education can prepare people for a potentially nomadic future. It's been a pleasure speaking with you again.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:12:30
It's been fun. Let's do it again.

Jesper Conrad: 01:12:33
Yeah, let's do it again. Jamie, once again, thank you for your time. And I'll already look forward to our next tour. Thank you so much. It's been fun. Happy traveling. Stay safe.