Dylan Bain: Jeddy, welcome to the Human Revolution. Honored to

Jeddy Azuma: be here, Dylan. Great to see you again, man.

Dylan Bain: You as well. I am excited for our conversation because I, I have looked into your work and your work centers on this idea of initiation and the rising man movement. And so I want to, I want to just ask real right off the bat, what is initiation?

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah, it’s so interesting. I’m big on etymology of words and breaking them down and how words are being used over time. So in some ways you look at the word initiation means to start. Right. To begin something, but initiation the way we’re speaking of it in terms of a rites of passage and entry into a community that has a shared common experience is what I think of when I talk about initiation and being acknowledged and, given the merit, the prestige of joining a, in, in traditional terms, they would call it a secret society.

If you open up the dictionary, there’s a lot of secrecy around it, which can turn some people off. But really the spirit of it is that there’s a shared experience and a shared context that people have. And so an initiatory experience is one that demonstrates readiness and preparedness and merit to belong to that community.

So when I think about what initiation really is, it’s going through some sort of ordeal that demonstrates an earning of that prestige to be a part of that community. It’s a distinction to be an initiated person in whatever the community is, whatever those terms are that I think a lot of us, it’s in our DNA to desire that, to belong in that capacity.

Dylan Bain: That’s really interesting cause when I’m working with men, Specifically, I have a lot of them saying like, I don’t know when I became a man or I don’t know when did this start or I don’t know, you know, how do I know that I’ve hit that mark? And it seems like you’re kind of touching on that in initiatory rights. Am I in the right ballpark?

Jeddy Azuma: Absolutely. when I start talking about this and you’ll have to cut me off if I go too long winded about it, cause I can talk all day. Okay. Just keep cooking,

Dylan Bain: baby.

Jeddy Azuma: I was just giving a workshop this morning to some guys in Australia because we’re about to go out and do our rites of passage out there for the first time this year.

And one of the things I share with those guys is that every single one of us, regardless of where your ancestors come from, there’s evidence of land based rites of passage rituals and ceremonies for all peoples. Spending time alone in the wilderness, fasting from food and or water and or sleep. putting yourself in circumstances or conditions that were challenging.

It’s like a crucible. And we all, we all need those experiences in our lives to prove to ourselves and to our community that we’re ready for more responsibility. I think there’s a lot of ways to define when someone becomes a man, you know, it’s different, at least biologically for people who are female and identify as women, there’s biological processes for us men, there are some physical things that happen, but it’s not always equated with a momentary distinction between boy and man.

So these rituals and these ceremonies were something that our ancestors have practiced forever, forever to test the readiness of a boy, to take on the responsibilities of a man. And these ceremonies and rituals were different. They were dependent on what the needs of the people were. So if needing to have the resilience and the grit to go out into the bush for days upon days by yourself and to survive or to be one of the members of, of the African tribes where some of their initiatory rights are going and killing a lion, actually, actually, these days, they don’t kill lions anymore. You have to pluck a hair from the mane of a lion to demonstrate your readiness for manhood.

They were, they were orchestrated for an individual to prove to themselves and to the community that they were ready for those responsibilities. And I think that’s why there’s a lot of confusion for men, because we don’t know when am I ready for these responsibilities of what it means to be a man, let alone what does it even mean to be a man for backing it up more?

So, so yeah, it’s, it’s something that we’ve always had. And, sometimes when I talk about these practices, I say they fell off the boat when our ancestors came to where we all grew up, where that was to be my

Dylan Bain: question. What happened?

Jeddy Azuma: you know, probably a whole podcast episode in and of itself.

I think there’s a lot of practices. I know my family lineage comes from Japan and from Italy in some areas in the Middle East. And I know that both of those areas of the world have distinct initiatory practices that were done for millennia. but when my relatives came and settled here and moved and migrated to the United States, they did their best to assimilate because assimilation was survival. Back where our peoples ordinarily come from and originate from, there was a different survival mission.

It was about surviving on the land and with the land. So the ceremonies and rituals and practices that were priority were connected directly to those lands. But when our relatives came here, it was about assimilating to the culture and society here. How quickly can we learn the language? How quickly can we fit in?

How quickly can I overcome the way I look so that I’m not treated as an outcast or an outsider? It was a different initiation. How can I be initiated into modern Western civilization. That became the goal. So I think a lot of those practices were abandoned because they were either taboo, they didn’t fit, they didn’t belong, or they just simply weren’t a priority when it came to trying to make it in the new world.

Dylan Bain: Amazing. Well, and I resonate really deeply with that in my own heritage of, you know, remember my grandmother in the last year of her life, it said, you know, I’m the last Irish member of my family, she had these traditions and she had, you know, there were cultural things and songs and foods and preparations that we did, but she didn’t pass them on to any of her kids.

And on my mom’s side, my German grandmother, when she got dementia, we suddenly learned she spoke German. Because she would forget this and so when we would talk to her about it, you know, and suddenly she’s like making these weird cakes and she’s hiding a pickle in the Christmas tree and like, these were all traditions that they decided to let go of that that washed out and I never thought about it as like their initiation.

And for going from immigrant to American, that’s kind of what happened, isn’t it?

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. They wanted to belong, right? I mean, we talk about the most fundamental human wound. One of my favorite books is a book called tribe by Sebastian Younger. Have you ever read that? I love that book.

Dylan Bain: Absolutely love the book.

Jeddy Azuma: So good. It’s just such a quick read too. I recommend it to anybody because he, he outlines a very familiar story and desire to belong that every human can relate to. I think that when you really boil things down because of our, our, us being a mammal and the way that we were put on this planet, we really do depend on each other for survival.

We use it so much in cliche and in website copy about the lone wolf story, how that’s, that’s a farce. And it’s true because we don’t have weapons on our hands or in our mouths. Our weapon is our mind and our capacity to collaborate together. And so belonging is the most important thing. So we’re constantly looking for initiation into a community we can belong, to that we can hunt and build with and protect each other’s families. That’s what it really comes down to. So going back to what you said, our ancestors, they were just simply, they were living out a different survival mission at that time.

Dylan Bain: Yeah. Well, and on some levels, I feel like we’ve lost because of that, right.

As society is industrialized, we’ve ended up, you know, removing those survival initiations and then putting in what I would call fake initiations instead, like graduation from high school is one that I think that we we’ve substituted in. I know in my family, it was signing a draft card, right?

When I signed a draft card, my grandpa’s came to get, he came together and we’re like, well, you know, now you’re eligible to die for your country. You’re eligible to drink for your country. So we all had some beers and stuff like that. And I never felt like I achieved manhood just by signing a draft card.

Like I spent a lot of my twenties feeling really lost in that place. And I’ll never forget the one time where I was like, Oh, this is actually me being acknowledged as transition. After the birth of my first daughter, we went to Thanksgiving and my grandmother, when the Thanksgiving turkey came out, she handed me the knife to carve it.

Now, my father, right? Cause the, you know, but cause he had, he’d always had it, but to me, and it was like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if this was, and I had no idea what men’s work was or anything like that. But my whole thing was like, wouldn’t it be nice if this was a bigger thing? A formal thing that was recognized of like, Oh, you now are a member of this particular community.

Jeddy Azuma: Well, and let’s examine that for a moment, because just to give your audience a bit of a breakdown on how I understand rites of passage and initiation, rite of passage is broken down into three stages, three distinct stages. There’s severance. There’s threshold and incorporation. So severance is the time of cleansing, clearing, preparing for transformation.

It’s the shedding. It’s the letting go of. This is the time where I’d be letting the identity I have begin to die and letting go of the things that were attached and associated with that identity to make room for a new identity. So moving through that, the threshold time is the ordeal itself for us.

It’s spending four days and four nights alone in the wilderness without food. Other traditions practice it different ways. For you, that moment was becoming a father, right? There was, there was a moment where before your child was born, you were not a father. And when your child was born, you were a father that in between space, which all fathers know, sometimes it’s stretched out and time just freezes, right?

That’s the threshold. That’s that in between worlds that we go to, to gather the insight, the wisdom, the medicine, and the transformation occurs like being in the cocoon. Like if a, if a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the cocoon is that threshold time. And then on the other side of threshold is incorporation, incorporating that experience and, and not just, Hey, you’re a father now. We handed you the knife and you’re carving the Turkey, but now incorporating the medicine and the path and journey of a father and becoming that new identity. That’s where a lot of the modern rites of passage and initiatory practices have failed. Because for you and your family, it was getting your draft card and having a beer with the other men who had reached that pinnacle, right?

That’s an initiatory moment. You were initiated in that moment, whether you knew it or not. What was the incorporation of that responsibility like? Where was the guidance? Where was the mentorship? Where was the continuation of checking in with how is it going on this path of being a man?

Now they acknowledged you as a man. They had that ritual, that moment, that ceremonial celebration with you, but where’s the incorporation. The community has to envelop the individual and support them in incorporation. We do that for each other throughout the course of our lives and that’s usually where most of these modern rites of passages and initiations have failed.

Or the incorporation is not healthy. When we talk about gang initiations or being affiliated with a fraternity, Greek life on college campuses. A lot of times that incorporation is geared towards something that doesn’t exactly represent an integral path of a man in society. Right,

Dylan Bain: right. It, that is so interesting that you put it that way. Cause you know, for me, it was heading off, you know, I, I left, I graduated high school and left two days later for my first job and then went to college and I went, you go back to my grandfathers and say like, well, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing here and they’d be like, well, you’re a man now you’ll figure it out.

Jeddy Azuma: Boom.

Dylan Bain: Okay. Good. Good.

Jeddy Azuma: It’s like, we got you this far, right? We, we, we put the cap on your head and, and, you know, gave you the blessing. Welcome to manhood. Good luck. And I’ll be honest with you. we’ve, we’ve brought several men, over hundreds of men out with us, in compass to fast with us now. And what I always tell guys who come out with us is that the most important thing that we do is after you complete your fast.

Our job as guides is to bring you safely to the threshold and receive you on the other side. But the most important thing that we do beyond that, as a community, is support you for the rest of your life in incorporation. And we do that. We continue to incorporate guys who fasted with us in 2019. We have meetings and virtual, both virtual and in person to keep touching back in with that experience to keep checking in with those men, because there’s a lot of outfits and organizations out there that offer experiences, whether it’s a ceremonial rite of passage or a immersive experience for a man. But then after their afterwards, it’s like, well, good luck, man.

Hopefully we’ll see you down the road or maybe at the next one. Let me know if you’re in town sometime. There’s no, Hey, how’s it going? What are you doing? What steps are you taking to become this person that you claimed during this experience? So that makes a lot of sense that you had that experience where there was no support or guidance or consistency of checking in with that, probably because your father and grandfather and older siblings, they didn’t know.

They simply didn’t know.

Dylan Bain: Well, and that, that has always been the curiosity point for me of like, where did this, why didn’t they know? And the best explanation I’ve come up with is that the world, the actual resource acquisition of the world changed. Yes. Right. Yeah. We got to a point where it was no longer the humans being the resource and the community being the resource.

It was money being the resource. And once money becomes the resource, now everything’s disposable, right? You need to figure it out or you don’t, because I can, I always got the line of credit, I got an investor, I got something else. I don’t have to actually tend to. This community, because it’s no longer my resource.

So I think with my, my grandparents leaving the farms and going to the factories. And, and, you know, leaving their context where they had been for, you know, they have a hundred years and then, you know, looking at the world by the time I got there, where it’s like, well, he was able to make it without a college degree.

The factory was a good job and a good, he had enough money to go on vacations and buy a house and send all his kids to school. Whereas for me, everything I do, if I didn’t have a degree, I couldn’t do it. And it’s a world he didn’t understand. So I feel like they kind of stepped back from that.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. Well, I think this is a really important point and we need to slow way down on this one because the world moves too quickly right now in modern times that we could say something really important here and guys might miss it. So I want to make sure we slow down for this because you can really look at the breadcrumbs and piece this narrative together in a way that makes a lot of sense. There’s a bit of archeology involved.

There’s anthropological evidence that helps to make what you just said in beautiful, simple terms, make a lot of sense because you’re exactly right. The value system changed what we valued to survive, what we depended on to survive changed dramatically over the course of a very, very small amount of human history, right?

And who knows how many cycles we’ve gone through of this, but just the one that ones that we’re aware of, there’s evidence right here in the Americas. Indigenous peoples who encountered Europeans who are coming over from faraway lands, who saw gold and saw things that indigenous peoples were using in completely different ways as valuable and indigenous people didn’t understand.

They’re like, why do you want all this gold? Why, why do you want all this stuff? Like, we know there’s a use for it, but why are you so crazed over it? Because Europeans had a different value on that. They’re like, here, sure. Take all the gold. Like we don’t need it. There were systems of trading and bartering, but it wasn’t to gain higher status or position.

It was just to have something that would make survival in life a little bit simpler, a little bit more achievable. So there’s There’s always been systems of value, but valuing dollars, valuing accumulation of that resource because of what it means in a society drastically has changed how we interact with each other and how we pursue things because you go far enough back, and there’s plenty of evidence that none of this stuff that we prioritize today really mattered. We, we depended on each other. That was it. And everything that we were ambitioning and endeavoring towards was making sure that we and our children essentially would survive. And the people could continue in a good way life in its entirety was organized around that.

But, I mean, man, you could really go down some rabbit holes and look at the, you know, they’re dialing back the timeline of civilization now that it wasn’t at the end of the ice age. It was actually before that. There are people who and civilizations that existed before the ice age and what were they valuing and it’s very different than the way our society is orchestrated now and any other iteration of large civilization that was based around a money system always led to a collapse, always led to a collapse from what we can gather. So, you know, hopefully that’s not the direction that we’re headed in, man. I like to think that I always say relationships the most valuable resource on the planet. And they’re based on the currency of trust. I have this metaphor I use called the trust bank.

You know, the moment I met you, Dylan, we opened a joint checking account. And every time you did what you said you were going to do, it’s a deposit in that account. And every time I did the same thing, or we showed up for each other, that account grows and it compounds over time. And every time I don’t show up for you or I do you wrong, it’s a withdrawal from that account.

And the more accounts that we have like that, that are based on that currency of trust that grow and compound over time, I think that’s the true wealth of the planet because nobody can take that away,

Dylan Bain: right? This is what terrifies me about the suburbs is that at no point in human history have we ever lived like this.

There is no archaeological evidence that something like a suburb or an exurb ever existed. And it leads to just massive degrees of illness and isolation. And I’m a participant in the suburban system because even if you’re getting cheated, if it’s the only game in town, we all play it and I walk around my neighborhood and it’s like, I’ll pass six or seven houses.

I have no idea who lives there, you know, but then you go back to any other civilization and what do you see? You see mixed use, you know, where you have shops in the bottom and apartments on top, everything’s walkable public squares where people are gathering and spending time with each other.

And I, I’ll never forget, I had a friend, who was born and raised here in the States, in the suburbs, never been to Europe. He went to Europe and he came back and I was like, what was the first thing you noticed? And he was like, how friendly everyone was. And I’m like, yeah, it’s hard to hate people when you see them every day.

And he hadn’t put that together that he had just been around people the whole time. And I just think about so many of the things and problems that we faced. It was like you can, in my mind, you can trace it back to the isolation that we’re now experiencing and the lack of the initiation that we have, you know, There’s a reason there’s so many men’s organizations that are springing up because we don’t have the capacity we used to.

Jeddy Azuma: Agreed, agreed, man. Yeah. And you know, as, as far as men’s work and the men’s organization movement goes, we’re still in the caveman phase, right? Like we’re kind of like banging rocks together, trying to figure out how do we do this again? There’s that innate intelligence that we have that’s written in our DNA from our ancestors long ago that knew exactly what they were doing.

There’s something that happens when men sit down around a fire together. And there’s no technology or distractions. There’s just something that feels ancient about that. Got plenty of evidence from all types of men who feel the same thing. So there’s something activating about re energizing these practices and reintroducing those practices back into our lifestyles.

And I agree with you, man. I mean, I’m here in the suburbs in Austin, Texas right now. Cause it’s what makes the most sense for my family at this moment. But I’ve got my arrow pointed at true North that leads me back to living in community with the closest people that I’ve built up those relationships with.

I talked about that trust account before the relationship as the wealth of life. I have relationships like that. I know how fortunate I am that I have people who I know have my back. I don’t yet live across the street from them, we don’t yet live on the same plot of land with our kids growing up together, but we have made it a priority to constantly bring our families back into the space with each other.

We’re all godparents to each other’s children, our children, we’re raising each other’s children by uncleing and auntie and doing things that as best as we can remember, because we all grew up in the suburban life, in the modern suburban life here in the United States. And it’s a lot of effort and energy.

And it’s a long distance to cover too, to go from the way I was raised back to the village. It’s a lot to do in one lifetime, even just trying to get my mindset out of modern suburban, you know, capitalist mentality into something that’s more shared, communal and collaborative. It feels like a lot to do in one lifetime that, you know, I get that my children will have a different experience than I did, but it feels like the most important thing.

It feels like if there’s anything that I can achieve for my children and for future generations, it’s that.

Dylan Bain: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you bring up the, you know, you’re talking about the trust bank and when you don’t have those human interactions, you can’t be building trust with both individuals, but also with society.

You know how many of us were, most of the time when we’re in a crowd, it’s at the grocery store, with grocery delivery, that’s even becoming less of a thing. and so you can’t gain trust with yourself. You can’t get trained, trust with other people.

You can’t gain trust. I love that, that trust bank analogy.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. Well, and then there’s cyber theft and fraud. If you want to take the analogy even further, right? It’s like you walk around the grocery store and everyone’s like, I can’t trust you. I can’t trust you. Why can’t I trust you? I’m blanking on the concept, but I’m sure you know of it.

The so and so’s number. That there’s only a certain number of people that we can really know. Dunbar, Dunbar. Yeah. Dunbar’s number. I think it was 100, 150 max of people that we can know. Beyond that there’s strangers. We just literally don’t have the capacity to know people at the level required to have full trust and faith in them.

So you go into a grocery store and there’s more than 150 people in there at any given time, so yeah, there’s a lot of things that are backwards about it. Sometimes I used to get overwhelmed by it when I was in my twenties, it seemed like the intelligence that was rising up in me, I knew that there was something not right about the way the world is, and I knew that it needed to change.

But it also felt so overwhelming. I didn’t even know where to begin. So I felt defeated. Like I’m at the mercy of all of this instead of there’s something I can do about it. And thankfully, the mentorship and guidance and just fortune of spirit and fate put me on a path of making this the priority in my life and then focusing my resources and time, energy, and effort into building relationships like that.

And that’s really what I want for all other men. If we’re talking about being leaders of this men’s movement, I want other men to have the kinds of relationships that I have. Not because I think that mine are the best, but I just know how valuable that resource is and how hard it is.

It’s like when they say, you shouldn’t start saving for your retirement too late because you’re missing out on all the compounding interest. Well, same is true for relationships. It’s hard to build really, really, really deep trusting relationships when you’re trying to meet people in your late thirties and forties.

Yeah. There’s a lot of time. It’s not impossible, but just like saving for retirement, you can’t make up for lost time.

Dylan Bain: Yeah, and I feel that it’s, you know, in 2009, I moved to Taiwan because my options were move overseas or be unemployed. So I chose overseas because I wanted to stay employed and lived there for a couple of years. And that kicked off this period of time where I had 10 years and 13 addresses.

And I was constantly moving for the next opportunity. We went from Taiwan to Flagstaff, Arizona, then the Phoenix, now here to Denver and, you know, constantly moving across cities for jobs and opportunities, trying to make our hook in the sky.

And when we settled here in Denver and we’re like, okay, we’re planting our flag, we’re going to be here. I want my kids to have this, to graduate from the schools they’re at right now. My wife and I kind of looked around and we’re like we don’t know anybody. And the one person that we actually, you know, had a connection with was our roommate who, you know, had just moved.

She had done 10 years in Taiwan. She moves back and she’s, we were like, Hey, we’re buying this house. We have an extra room if you want to come, like, come on. And she was like, okay. And we’ve been living together for four years now. And it’s a wonderful, like almost tribal environment, but it’s that relationship we had when we met her in Taiwan that we’ve made a point to continue to foster over this time that became our, our closest social connection here.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. Well, I love that. and I’ll share a parallel two stories, two quick ones. right now I’m recording the podcast and what used to be my office, but at present moment is actually my buddy’s room.

a brother of mine here in the rising man community, here in Austin, there was just like the intersection of opportunity on both sides said, Hey man, Why don’t you come move in, move in with us? So he’s staying here for six months. So I’m actually borrowing his room to record this episode of the podcast.

And that’s a small example of just how my family has arranged our lives and our living situations. when my son was first born, my best friend was, we were in California. My best friend was living in New York cause I had left New York. That’s where I’m from. I’d left all of my wonderful community.

These relationships I’m describing, they were all back on the East Coast. So I met my wife. We started our family in California. And when my son was born, since we’d already been talking ever since we knew each other about raising our kids together, he enrolled his girlfriend at the time, who’s now his wife, and he has a family with to move across the country and move in with us.

And they moved in with us and we spent the next three and a half years living together under one roof and then two more of our friends came out and we were all under one roof because the vision was always to figure out how to do this. It turns out it’s a lot more complicated than you think, even with the people that you love and trust most on the planet.

There’s so much stuff that comes up in learning how to live in collaborative lifestyle. we’ve had many iterations of that. My son’s going to be nine. So pretty much the past 10 years of our lives, we’ve had many iterations of living together in these different configurations, learning what works, learning what doesn’t work.

But I love that you have that experience because I also see how it benefits my kids. I wonder how it is for you and your household, but my kids thrive in a way I don’t see other children, especially because they have all these aunties and uncles around all the time. And they’ve grown up with different adults, not just mom and dad all the time.

Dylan Bain: Are you familiar with Richard Granin?

Jeddy Azuma: Granin?

Dylan Bain: Yeah. He does like a bunch of stuff on narcissism. Some, he was given an interview and somebody had asked, can narcissism exist in a tribal environment? And he said, extremely rarely. And his entire point was that like narcissism arises when you don’t have secure attachment with anything, you know?

And so if it’s just you and mom and dad and mom and dad both suck, you’re going to be in a bad place because your attachment is just not going to work out. And what he said was in a tribal context, if mom and dad suck, that’s fine. Somebody in that tribe doesn’t. There’s a grandpa, there’s an uncle and there’s, you know, uncles it’s a broad term.

It’s all the other males in the tribe. You’re all part of the, so they can attach then to the tribe. But when we shove everyone into suburban homes or, you know, New York print house apartments, now, suddenly if mom and dad suck, we’re screwed ? And so I love that. And the benefits of having a third adult in the house, my roommate, she doesn’t raise my kids.

She’s just there, but she also is there as a comfort for them. She’s also someone that my daughter, who’s getting ready , my little girl is about to become a young lady. And, you know, she has a second female to talk to that isn’t mom about, about those types of things. And they get to share some of my roommate’s talents in cooking.

This is a rabbit hole. I could go down for hours, just the way that we’ve organized society financially in terms of housing, I think is actually going to force us back to generational housing. And I’ve already started having the thought of like here in Denver, they’re talking about changing zoning so that you can put an accessory dwelling unit of like, okay, well, if that happens, then my parents should sell their house in Wisconsin, move out here.

We’ll build them the thing in the backyard and then they’re here. So that would give us, you know, three generations there. And I’ve told my girls of like Our goal is to never leave this plot of land. And so like as you go to college, like you should just live at home and bring people in.

And I actually think that that’s how we’re going to be able to financially make any of this work is slowly and surely through those generational homes.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. Well, I definitely lean on your expertise in the financial side of things. I know that’s your domain and I admire you and look up to you in that respect.

what I’m learning about the housing crisis is that nobody really knows what to do. If there’s going to be a solution that works and when I meet, when I say work, I don’t just mean that balances, the books. I mean, that actually works for humanity as far as our DNA, our biological needs.

That it’s going to be experimental. It’s going to be explorative. It’s going to be something that we haven’t quite, it’s going to be innovative, or at least it’ll seem innovative when in reality, it’s really just a return to our roots, right? It’s like a hundred

Dylan Bain: percent. and that’s exactly what I would say is, you know, I’ve always said, it’s not that we don’t know what to do, is that we are unwilling to do it.

Because if you look at it and say, like, how do you solve the housing crisis? How do we solve the housing crisis when Chicago was doubling in size every year? There wasn’t a housing crisis. Go back on the, you know, rent stayed relatively flat. And the reason was people would say, well, you know, there’s more people here.

I’ll just rip down the single family dwelling and put it in a fourplex on their lots. U. S. zoning laws stop us from doing that. And so if we really want to solve the process, we just, as you said, we got to go back to what we’ve been doing, humans have been doing for literally our entire existence.

We have 70 years of an experiment in restrictive zoning, and this is where it’s brought us.

Jeddy Azuma: And you know, we learn under fire, right? I think if there’s anything that the shutdown in the world, the global shutdown of the pandemic did, it forced people to think outside the box and be creative and clever because they had to be.

There was lots of people who abandoned jobs or relocated, started living out of a trailer or moved back in with, you know, took on a roommate and all these, I would say, less familiar living arrangements and styles, people started to explore with it. I think there’s been a little bit of a regression since then where people have started to settle back in.

Jeddy Azuma: I go, okay, great. COVID’s over now we can settle back into the way things were. But I think there’s also a little bit of a fundamental change. You got people thinking differently. You start to see all these tiny homes, right? I mean, tiny homes were still a pretty novel concept pre pandemic. There’s a lot of people who are starting to do that.

The people like the preppers and the people who are really keen on buying a plot of land and getting a bunch of people on it. But dude, now there’s tiny home villages in downtown Austin. It’s changing, man. We have all the technology. It’s just the willingness. Like you said, man, that was a brilliant statement.

Dylan Bain: Well, I mean, and that, that’s really what it comes down to is the willingness to allow it to change. you know, you had brought up capitalism. There’s a guy across the street for me. Yeah. Talk about the trust bank. our account is always a little bit weird. yeah, but he likes to come over and talk to me, really super conservative guy, really free market guy.

I floated the idea. I said, you know, we live in the whole reason the suburbs are the way they are is through government fiat and control, you know, how would you feel if we just eliminated the zoning law? So I could put up whatever I wanted here, like really let the market work and he was absolutely against it.

Like he was like, that’s not how a market works. I was like, no, that’s exactly how it works.and it was an interesting conversation because here I’m thinking, as you said, you’re trying to think outside the box of like, you know, I don’t think our system is sustainable and I think that we’ve lost a lot of our human, nothing is for human centered, the suburbs are car dependent, cities have become car dependent.

Nothing is human centered. Our food is industrial, our relationships are transactional. Our hearts are repressed, and our lifestyles encourage isolation and loneliness. And it’s like, I actually think that millennials and Gen Z are going to be the generation being like, that baby boomers were insane.

Jeddy Azuma: Hmm.

Dylan Bain: Yeah. And, and I think that’s why we’re seeing so much activitysocially around what, around initiatory rights around trying to think about humanity around starting to wonder, Oh, maybe we shouldn’t be in communities bigger than 150, you know, I think those are healthy thoughts.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. I mean, if you find the right person, maybe your neighbor’s an extreme example, but if you find somebody that’s at least open minded of the generation where anything is possible and we’ve got artificial intelligence. So, Hey, why the heck not? And you just sit someone down and you say, Hey, just imagine this for a second.

We’re so used to perpendicular lines and grid systems, but what if we took all of our homes and they faced inward so that there was a place for us to gather where we could all see our children playing just right from outside of our front door and that our yards expanded back beyond the center but there was a there was a center and in fact, let’s take a park and put that right in the middle with a communal kitchen so that people were encouraged to come out and cook and You know, people would come home from work and the first place you went was in I don’t know if I guess we would call it the town center.

Let’s call it the town center, And what if you started to get to know these people and you didn’t have to go to the grocery store because there was actually a little community garden as part of that park. In fact, the kids played in the food forest because it was there and that’s what kids want to do anyway.

They want to play in wild places. What if that was all right here and you didn’t have to go to the grocery store? You just, you just go pick something right off of the tree or out of the garden and you’d prepare it right there alongside your neighbors, but you don’t even call them neighbors anymore.

What’s the word for them? They’re not neighbors. What are they? Is it, is it family? How far is that distance between neighbor and family? And you really start to paint the picture and you’re like, well, doesn’t that sound kind of nice? And that’s where the idealism of it sounds really nice. Like, well, yeah, I mean, there’s going to be a lot of people who would consider that and say yes to it, but letting go of the things that we’re attached to, the things that we have gotten our hooks into either because we’ve chosen it.

It’s comfortable, it’s familiar, or we’ve been led to identify that as what we should want. There’s a lot of things that need to be let go of, and that’s what I learned in the different configurations I’ve lived in with my closest friends on the planet, who I really do consider family. I really, really do.

Those are my brothers. Those are my sisters. Those are my nieces and nephews, even though we don’t share biological blood, right? We are the closest thing to family that, that I know on this planet. And yet when we were trying to figure out how to do that, we were living on 10 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Surrounded by Redwood trees. It doesn’t get better than that, right? 14 adults, six children on one piece of land. And it was still very challenging because we were all still attached to it, modern lifestyle. So that willingness is so important. Like you said, we’ve got to be willing to abandon the pursuits of our elders, of our ancestors, the recent ancestors to have the courage to explore new territory.

Dylan Bain: A hundred percent. I’m kind of in awe that you gave it the go and to see it. And I kind of like relate to when I lived in Taiwan, you could always tell which Americans would survive and which ones wouldn’t. Like, but like within the first couple of weeks of them being there, and the main difference was the ones that showed up with shoulds and the ones who didn’t.

This is how things should be. This is how you should do it. You know, children should be this. And like in Taiwan, kids are free range animals. I’m a very large pale skinned man, with a beard and a red face and people, you know, kids would come up to me all the time and pet my beard all the time.

And people was like they shouldn’t do that. And I was like, no, we’re in a whole different context and we’re living in an ancient culture. There’s no shit here.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah.

Dylan Bain: We are the interlopers. And I feel like when we try to start these communities here, we start getting into the like well, we’re all supposed to have a single TV. I’m all supposed to have a living room. I’m all supposed to have a table. And it’s like, why? We have a big enough table. We can all sit at it, you know? And that lowers costs. Cause now I don’t need five tables. I need one, you know? And it’s the same thing I see in Europe when people are like, wow, they’re living dwellings are really small.

And I was like, yeah, because they’re living dwellings. Aren’t there everything?

Jeddy Azuma: That’s where you go to sleep.

Dylan Bain: Yeah. Your life takes place outside in the third place.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. Yeah. And, thank you for the acknowledgement. And it’s not that we, I want to be clear. I haven’t given up on that. In fact, we’re closer to it than we ever were.

my friend, family group, we needed some time to really mature into the bodies and the minds that were capable of letting go of more and we’ve never lost touch with each other. In fact, we’ve gotten closer together and there’s things that have kept us together that I won’t go into too much because I don’t want to take away from the topic at hand, but sharing in ceremonial space, showing up for each other, tragic loss in our community that we all rallied around and showed up for to support the people who lost loved ones. Like those moments are the irreplaceable trust spot welding moments that carry you through that start to erode the shoulds and the personal wants and desires to make room for the collective. What do we require together? And we’re actually going to go spend some time out in the Southwest this summer, scouting and surveying land cause we’ve matured in the past several years and we’re ready to start finding where we will do this together and do it in a different way than we have in the past. Cause now we’ve learned something, but it’s still such a big transition. That’s the most humbling part is it’s in some respects, it is simplebut it’s not easy. It’s not an easy thing to do. And there’s a difference between those two.

Dylan Bain: A hundred percent. I love that phrase because it’s both, you know, very liberating and also infuriating of like, it’s very simple. It’s just not easy.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah.

Dylan Bain: You know, it’s the same thing, whether it’s money, food, relationships, it’s very simple and it’s just not easy.

Jeddy Azuma: That’s it, man. But if there’s anything that I leave for my kids, I want to leave for them at least enough courage and curiosity to explore different ways of existing. Cause what I’m confident of is that the way that I learned how to exist on this planet as a kid Isn’t going to work for them. It’s just not.

Dylan Bain: Yeah. What do you see as the future trajectory?

Jeddy Azuma: decentralization, a small return to village. I don’t know what the timeline is, right? Like that’s the part that befuddles me. I don’t know how quickly we return to those models, but I think that the political system is going to decentralize and become smaller and have more of a smart, like small, small city, small, small town and village politics.

Those types of conversations becoming more important. I see a lot of, I think there’s a way in which we can utilize technology and the efficiency of systems to make more space to prioritize relationships. That’s the best case scenario for me is that we leverage technology in a good way that frees up time and space to connect more with each other and have deeper conversations of connection and trust building.

and you know, hopefully we use technology to solve a lot of the food and water problems too so that we can put good healthy things in our bodies as our minds are growing and considering new ways of being together. That’s what I hope for. That’s what I intend for. I also think the realist in me knows that there’s going to be an attrition of people.

I don’t think that everyone’s going to make it. I don’t think that, it’s not that I don’t think the earth can sustain as many humans as there are. I just don’t think enough people will be able to overcome their shoulds and wants to adapt to the change. What that looks like, I don’t know, man.

That’s everybody’s guess, but I just hope it’s not so tragic and I hope that it’s not something that was so self imposed that future generations will look back remorsefully and regretfully that we couldn’t find a solution faster. But I’m determined to spend the rest of my life doing my part to make it so that’s not the case.

Dylan Bain: A hundred percent. And we both have kids in the same age range. Having kids is the ultimate act of hope, isn’t it?

Jeddy Azuma: I think so. I think so. And it’s unfortunate that lots of people, I talked to people 10 years younger than me that are questioning whether they should have kids or not because of the outlook of the world.

And that’s very sad to me because being a father, being a parent to me is one of them. It’s the most important job on the planet, I think. So, Yeah, but I’m also an eternal optimist, man. And I really think that we can, and we will do it. just going to take a lot of willingness and effort.

Dylan Bain: I wish I shared your optimism. I’m aware of how the demographics look, and I’ve had this conversation with people are like, well, do you regret having kids? And it’s like, well, the only regret about kids I have is I don’t have kids. Right. Like, I wish that I had more kids, but I just simply don’t, you know, and the people to your point of saying, well, I’ve lost the trust in society and I’ve lost the trust that this is going to be solvable and I’ve lost the trust that this is even worth doing it. And if you look at birth rates across the globe, like they’re not alone, it’s not a minority of people. It’s a lot of them.

Jeddy Azuma: Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, man.

Dylan Bain: Well, this conversation has been absolutely amazing. If people are looking for more Jeddy Azuma in their life, where can they go to find you?

Jeddy Azuma: Well, everything I spoke about today, you should definitely go over to rising man. org. I’m not sure when this will come out, but we’re relaunching our website, so it’ll be nice and clean and tidy, and you should just go check it out just to appreciate the beautiful work that we’ve done and the message that if you resonate with what I’m talking, it’s all there. We’re on Instagram at rising man movement too.

You can check that out. If you guys just want to follow me and know more about me, I’m on Instagram too. At Jeddy Azuma, you can message me there. I’m not so quick on the socials these days, but you should message me cause I’ll get back to you nonetheless. And I love a good conversation. So that’s the best place to check me out.

Dylan Bain: Fantastic. Jeddy Azuma, thank you so much.

Jeddy Azuma: Honored, man. Thank you, Dylan. Thank you for what you do.