North

Carolina is the better Carolina of the two.

It's just it's not even close.

But it's been a wonderful place to live.

And I am a daughter to a two year old, Roisin.

who is the sweetest thing on the planet.

And yeah, that's pretty much me.

But as we're wrapping up here, any final thoughts, Casey?

Share whatever parts you would like, but especially, you know, I always love hearing What inspired people to transition to functional medicine or integrative medicine? And of course, anybody with a healing journey of their own, we would love to hear a little bit about it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

No, I was one of those weird little kids who wanted to be a doctor.

So I kind of always knew that that is what I wanted to do.

And somewhere along the lines of college, I started to feel really tired.

I would get really winded.

I wanted to kind of start with the basics of, and you, you shared as far as your journey, you know, there's some kind of across the board symptoms we think of with POTS, but what, what is POTS? Like start really like dub it down for us.

And here's Casey Kelly, author of Apocalypse Man, on some of the psychological underpinnings of this kind of thinking.

When we talk about p- people that are like, "Literally I want to, like, live forever in digital space, be able to transcend the limitations of the human body and become a cyborg," or something along th- those lines, or a synthetic, or to live a totally digital existence freed from the, the body, yeah, all of that is like a flight from the, the sort of tension and, and anxiety and uncertainty that it means to live in common with others.

Just even to l- live in a society amongst others, right, requires you to curtail certain impulses, to not get what you want all the time.

There is a kind of, like, death drive associated with that in the sense that it's like, "I want to surpass the physical material realities of my own existence by retreating into this, like, utopian space where it's freed from all the tension of, like, living a physical reality."

It started out rough, sort of like the default ChatGPT voice we're all used to.

Hi, I'm the ChatGPT voice, and I don't sound human at all.

So why is the book Apocalypse Man? Is prepping mostly a male activity?

That's a great question.

I think there's a couple of reasons that we might see that.

Part of the reason to prep is we need to first of all prepare for a world where traditional things that kept society together have collapsed.

And so the assumption then that traditional male authority is what's fundamentally in jeopardy kind of maybe explains why doomsday prepping's attraction to certain men makes a lot of sense if they believe that the traditional, like sort of patriarchal structure of society is imminently, right, in danger of collapse.

I think the second component of it is that this goes all the way back to the, the Vietnam War.

There's a really fantastic book called Warrior Dreams by James Gibson, and in it what he talks about is like the kind of apocalypse in some ways that Vietnam signified for a lot of men, which is that the traditional idea of the soldier, which was like a, an iconic masculine archetype because of our, you know, strategic loss in that conflict, and its unpopularity kind of eroded that archetype of the soldier.

Casey Kelly will give us a quick refresher on exactly what that is.

Gold means by repetition compulsion.

Freud, he identified as something that escaped, uh, his understanding of the pleasure principle.

And the pleasure principle is just the idea that our ego essentially tames our id, and our id is maybe, uh, has some more destructive impulses in it.

Like if we just pursued everything that we wanted without thinking about restrictions or the possibility that it might cause damage to someone else or ourselves, if we didn't have some kind of restriction on that, then we couldn't preserve pleasure.

We would just sort of run amok with desire.

And so he me- he mentioned that there's this sort of regulatory device where we will sometimes restrict our pleasure to preserve it.

And sometimes that even may be painful, like we have to delay gratification for something, or we have to restrict some impulse that may be dangerous to our own selfhood.

Here's Casey again on why we're doing this, and maybe this even explains why I made that movie.