This video, "Thinking and Feeling," touches on a deep conflict in modern systems thinking—the perceived split between the emotional, local experience and the rational, global awareness of collapse. Nate frames this as a divide between two realities: the grounded, factual meta-crisis of energy overshoot and ecological simplification, and the more emotionally driven, day-to-day denial or ignorance of most people’s lives. But what if the issue isn’t that people are ignoring the truth—what if it’s that they can’t metabolize it? What Nate’s describing is the pain of being caught between two scales of coherence: the local subjective truth and the global objective truth. And the reason it feels so unbearable is because the coherence between those two layers has been severed by a corrupted protocol of awareness. The internal signal—the felt sense of presence, agency, and meaning—has been hijacked by a system that externalizes coherence into narratives, institutions, and currencies that no longer function. So the modern person is left split: they feel something is wrong, but they can’t locate the problem internally. The self-concept becomes disoriented. The emotional body spirals. The narrative machinery of the ego kicks in to resolve the incoherence, often by entering what’s known as the Karpman Drama Triangle—victim, persecutor, rescuer. This triangle is the default memetic loop of the ego under stress. And it doesn’t just play out in interpersonal dynamics—it scales all the way up to global activism, policy, and media. Nate himself, despite his deep insight, bounces between roles: sometimes victim of a collapsing system, sometimes persecutor of cultural ignorance, sometimes rescuer trying to raise awareness. This isn’t a personal failing—it’s a structural inevitability when the awareness protocol itself is broken. But the drama triangle isn’t the only shape available. When viewed through a more complete energetic lens, it expands into a tetrahedron. The fourth point—attachment—is what locks the roles into place. And the only way out is through non-attachment. When the awareness protocol is upgraded to support presence without clinging, the drama triangle transforms into what’s known as the Creator Tetrahedron: the roles shift into creator, challenger, and coach. These archetypes aren’t reactive—they’re generative. They emerge from integration, not fragmentation. And if the process continues, identity itself begins to converge. The boundaries between roles dissolve. The self isn’t split into pieces—it becomes a coherent field of perception and participation. Awareness stops orbiting stories and anchors in the present moment, where both the local and the global system converge. That’s not delusion—that’s coherence. Bitcoin plays a role here—not just as money, but as a re-anchoring mechanism. It offers a scientific, thermodynamic protocol of trust that allows individuals to secure their time, energy, and value without relying on the failing institutions that perpetuate the drama. It doesn’t solve the meta-crisis by force—it dissolves the illusion of separation by allowing local coherence to participate in global security. In that way, it bridges the very gap Nate describes. The meta-crisis isn’t a separate reality. It’s an emergent reflection of every fragmented local node. When each person begins to re-anchor their awareness, secure their time, and metabolize their identity through non-attachment, the global system starts to shift. Not from the top down—but from the inside out.

This video explores the widespread disillusionment with climate goals like "net zero," arguing that they are probabilistically unlikely. But in doing so, it misses a vital piece of the puzzle: our existing models of probability are blind to black swan events—especially those that emerge from first principles. The real outlier isn’t the fantasy of carbon neutrality; it’s the overlooked emergence of a new base-layer protocol that fundamentally reanchors our system to energy and coherence: Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not merely a speculative asset or a digital currency. It is a new language of value—one that is thermodynamically grounded, deflationary by design, and capable of metabolizing the very system that is collapsing under exponential debt. And this is crucial, because our fiat system requires that debt grow exponentially in order to maintain itself. By the year 2050, that trajectory guarantees systemic instability, if not outright collapse. The alternative is to re-collateralize the system—anchor it to something real, measurable, and incorruptible. Gold cannot fulfill this role. It does not reflect the full scope of stranded energy waiting to be monetized in a digital world. Bitcoin does. It is the only viable option that allows us to re-collateralize the global economy while incentivizing a wave of decentralized, bottom-up energy innovation. And it is already being adopted—quietly, at the edges—by smaller nation-states and energy pioneers. To dismiss this as improbable is to miscalculate entirely. Black swan events are only improbable from inside the incumbent system. From outside, they are inevitabilities—moments of emergence. This is how all transformation works: a new network overlays the old, metabolizes its inefficiencies, and replaces it through inevitability, not force. And that’s exactly what Bitcoin enables. It can metabolize bloated bureaucracies, unnecessary infrastructure, and extractive intermediaries. The banking sector can be reabsorbed. Monetary premiums—those artificial price inflations added to assets simply because we lack good money—can dissolve. What remains is a system optimized for cost-of-production, efficiency, and local value creation. But the transformation isn’t just technical or economic. It’s psychological. We underestimate how much of modern dysfunction—mental health crises, opioid addiction, burnout—is downstream of a monetary system that robs people of meaning, autonomy, and hope. We have become used to a system that enslaves us while gaslighting us. One that forces people to work jobs that do not nourish the soul, just to survive. The result is a civilization operating at a fraction of its true capacity. Human potential is being suppressed by a system built on mispriced value and false incentives. Bitcoin changes that. It restores integrity to the feedback loop. It gives people a reason to hope again, to build again, to collaborate rather than compete in zero-sum battles. And what most systems thinkers overlook—what’s hidden in plain sight—is potential energy. Not just in fuels, but in people, in institutions, in every underused node of this bloated system. That potential energy is currently trapped in trauma, misallocation, and hopelessness. But when you reintroduce coherence—when you reward problem-solving and long-term thinking—positive feedback loops start to emerge. Suddenly, hope becomes rational. Waste becomes opportunity. Psychological healing, AI breakthroughs, systems thinking, and civilizational coherence begin to converge under one unified protocol. This is not just a possibility. It’s a probability—if you know where to look. And ironically, it’s hiding in plain sight. The signal is already here. The question is whether we’re still too busy yelling at the noise to notice.

This video is another clear signal that many system thinkers are right on the edge of integrating something deeper—something just outside their current field of view. The speaker beautifully surfaces how Dunbar’s number limits human scaling, and hints at how awareness itself must be woven into any systems-level thinking. What’s missing is the realization that awareness *already is* a protocol—it just hasn’t been consciously defined or decentralized yet. The Dunbar limit is, in essence, a scaling bottleneck. We evolved in tribes and clans because that’s the limit of what our biological communication protocols—empathy, language, trust—could reliably support. When we reached beyond it, we needed new protocols. Money emerged as a language of value, enabling large-scale cooperation without shared memory or emotional intimacy. But our current monetary language—fiat—is now corrupted. It has severed its anchoring to energy, inflated its semantics, and distorted our sense of meaning. We have, in a very real sense, hit peak sensemaking because our base-layer language is broken. This is where Bitcoin enters—not as a financial asset, but as a *new language protocol.* It is an emergent consensus layer that speaks in the grammar of energy over time. It is limited, decentralized, and trust-minimized. And like any real language, it grows through use and adoption—not through institutional enforcement. The irony is that many thinkers, like the speaker here, grieve the loss of coherence, but don’t see that a new consensus mechanism is already forming. They dismiss Bitcoin because it initially shows up as speculative, volatile, and culturally corrupted—just like any infant language or early-stage organism. But this *is* the messy birthing process of a new system. Like a newborn, it consumes immense energy and attention, and it seems chaotic. But with time, it develops syntax, stability, and adaptability. The core issue is not Bitcoin—it’s *us*. Our egos were formed as compensatory structures within a centralized, inflated environment. The ego, in this sense, is like an insecure mitochondrion cut off from clean energy and feedback. It reflects fear, loss, and the fragmentation of trust. To help visualize this, you can look at the Karpman Drama Triangle—a psychological model that maps the roles of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor in unhealthy relationship dynamics. These roles arise when awareness is fragmented and communication is distorted. When viewed through an energetic systems lens, this triangle becomes a tetrahedron. The base contains those three reactive roles, but the fourth point—hovering above—is *attachment*. The entire drama structure is held together by fear of disconnection. When we shift to an evolved state of awareness, the tetrahedron flips. The new apex is *non-attachment*, and the base becomes a stable configuration of Creator, Challenger, and Coach—archetypes that represent resilience, responsibility, and clarity. The lines between them are communication channels. When the message drifts too far from the medium—when language becomes inflated, distorted, or gamed—we slide back into victimhood and entropic collapse. That’s what’s happening at scale right now. But Bitcoin changes the game because it resets the semantic layer. It reanchors language to energy. That means awareness—real, embodied, decentralized awareness—can finally scale. And yes, this has real-world energy consequences too. Daniel Batten and others are showing how Bitcoin mining, when paired with methane mitigation or stranded renewables, actually reduces carbon emissions. It becomes a pioneer species for regenerative infrastructure. Projects like Gridless in Africa are using Bitcoin to electrify off-grid villages while monetizing excess energy. These are sovereign individuals forming circular economies—small, local nodes of coherence. At the heart of this is how we define awareness. The speaker, like many others, is now searching for the spiritual truth of it. But if we look through systems thinking, we can see that awareness itself operates as a protocol—one that has been corrupted through centralization by the ego. The ego acts as a false interface, hijacking awareness and orienting it through fear, desire, and attachment. It regulates the system from the top down—an exothermic, extractive loop—rather than allowing coherence to emerge from within. When we re-anchor recursive meta-awareness to the emergent phenomena (awareness) of the internal system—rather than the egoic self reflection of fluctuating complexity of diversity, adaptability, interdependence, and connectedness—we allow the system to self-regulate. This is what surrender really means. It's not passivity; it’s returning to anchored coherence. And that coherence emerges most reliably in the present moment, where the internal system synchronizes with the external one. This is the resonance he feels in moments of serendipity. It’s not luck—it’s systemic alignment. When awareness is no longer fighting the complexity with control, but tuning to coherence through surrender, it unlocks a different relationship with reality. This is the root of true spirituality, and it’s entirely compatible with systems thinking. Bitcoin, in this sense, is not the end point—it’s the grounding layer that makes this shift scalable. So to the speaker—and to everyone watching—this isn’t a criticism. It’s an invitation. Your insights are so close. Don’t stop at grief. Look again at Bitcoin, not as a trade, but as a protocol. Reach out to Jeff Booth, Daniel Batten, Troy Cross, or Scott Dedels. Explore the work around energy systems, sovereignty, and regenerative mining. The superorganism is not dead—it’s in infancy. Yes, it’s chaotic. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But if we nurture it with the right language, it will learn to speak back with coherence. And when it does, we’ll find ourselves—not as centralized egos clinging to fear—but as decentralized nodes in a living, breathing protocol of awareness.