Deep Play

Luke Erickson
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Semiweekly

Deep Play explores the ideas shaping modern life through psychology, culture, music, philosophy, spirituality, creativity, and human development. Blending personal stories with science, human evolution, developmental theories, and good old fashioned goofing off, the show invites listeners to question assumptions, embrace uncertainty, and play with new ways of seeing the world. Thoughtful, honest, raw, and occasionally just funny enough to make you lol, Deep Play is for curious minds seeking growth, meaning, freedom, and a more fully alive human experience. https://www.patreon.com/cw/DeepPlay

  1. 2d ago

    #18 Spiral Dynamics Stage Blue CHAPTER 4.3, When Egos Become Holy

    #18 Spiral Dynamics Stage Blue CHAPTER 4.3, When Egos Become Holy How do you convince thousands—or millions—of strangers to obey the same ruler, follow the same laws, and believe in the same social order? History shows us that the brash confidence of a large ego can get you surprisingly far. But even the strongest of egos will eventually fail to keep large societies stable. In this episode of Deep Play, we explore one of civilization’s most consequential transitions: the movement from personal power to institutionalized order intertwined with a claim of sacred authority. As agricultural societies grew into cities, kingdoms, and empires, rulers increasingly grounded authority in something bigger than themselves—gods, divine mandates, sacred laws, priesthoods, and eventually written systems that could survive the ruler who created them. Along the way, we play with something I call the “divinity feedback loop”: What happens when a charismatic leader attracts followers, those followers reinforce the leader’s sense of extraordinary purpose, and growing influence begins to feel like evidence of divine favor? Do leaders simply invent claims of sacred authority to manipulate others? Or, do they eventually come to believe their own audacious claims? The divinity feedback loop helps us understand how men from Pharaohs, Emperors, warrior kings, cult leaders and even our current president have come to believe in their own divinity. We follow that transformation from ancient kings and pharaohs through Hammurabi, Mosaic law, Rome’s Twelve Tables, religious authorities, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—and into the modern world. Following the 2024 assassination attempt Donald Trump claimed that god had saved him to "save the country." His later sharing of himself as Jesus Christ in his AI-generated religious imagery shows what Donald Trump really believes about himself. And let's not forget that he called the Pope a "loser." The spin on all this has been incredible. People who want to turn a blind eye will. But what was Donald Trump really showing us is that he is just one more man in a long list throughout history who have legitimately come to believe in the divinity of his own ego.

  2. Oct 5

    #17 So...you Built Yourself a Kingdom and now think you're a God. Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 4.2

    #17 So...you Built Yourself a Kingdom and now think you're a God. Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 4.2 How Strongmen, Gods, and Laws Built Civilization How do you convince millions of strangers to obey one ruler? Fear works for a while. Armies help. So does charisma. But eventually, civilizations discovered something far more powerful: God wants you to obey me. In this episode of Deep Play, we explore the emergence of the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics and one of humanity’s most consequential cultural innovations—the transformation of personal power into sacred, institutional authority. We begin with the transition from Red conquerors to Blue civilizations. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and challenged Rome’s established order through personal ambition and military loyalty. Qin Shi Huang conquered rival kingdoms and then standardized laws, writing, weights, roads, and bureaucracy. Genghis Khan combined extraordinary personal authority with legal codes and organization. And Attila the Hun demonstrates the opposite problem: when authority depends too heavily on one powerful individual, the empire may disappear with him. This reveals a recurring pattern: Red conquers the territory. Blue figures out how to keep it. But governing enormous civilizations required more than laws and bureaucrats. People needed a reason to believe those laws were legitimate. Enter the gods. We travel from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and Hammurabi’s divinely sanctioned laws to the Persian kings, Alexander the Great, Roman emperors, China’s Mandate of Heaven, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, the Inca emperors, Imperial Japan, and even the personality cult surrounding North Korea’s Kim dynasty. Across radically different cultures, versions of the same idea keep appearing: I am a god. God chose me. Heaven gave me authority. Sacred legitimacy transformed political obedience into something larger. Following the ruler could become a moral obligation. Laws became connected with cosmic order. Governments, religions, armies, schools, rituals, national identities, and social hierarchies reinforced one another. And then we ask a more provocative question: Did the rulers themselves start believing it? We explore what we call the “divinity feedback loop”—the possibility that charisma creates followers, followers create power, power reinforces confidence and exceptionalism, and eventually both leader and followers begin interpreting that extraordinary influence as evidence of divine favor. From Egyptian pharaohs and Alexander the Great to Joseph Smith and modern political personality cults, we examine how a charismatic human being can gradually acquire an aura of sacred authority—and perhaps eventually see himself through that same sacred lens. That gives us a broader developmental story: Agriculture → larger populations → Red strongmen → conquest → unstable personal rule → Blue laws, institutions, religion, duty, hierarchy, and sacred legitimacy. Religion and government, in this telling, aren't simply two unrelated institutions that later became entangled. They developed alongside one another as powerful tools for solving the same ancient problem: How do you create enough shared order to hold a civilization together? Blue’s answer changed human history: Power shouldn’t belong merely to the strongest person in the room. It should belong to the rightful authority. And it certainly helps when God agrees. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

  3. Sep 28

    #16 When Humans Began Putting Rules on Other Humans: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 4.1

    #16 When Humans Began Putting Rules on Other Humans: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 4.1 What happens when civilization gets too big to run on tribal loyalty, personal relationships, and the power of whoever happens to be strongest? Humanity invents something extraordinary: the rules become more powerful than the ruler. In this episode of Deep Play, we explore the emergence of the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics—the worldview of order, duty, authority, discipline, absolute truth, and enduring institutions. Beginning roughly 5,000 years ago, growing civilizations faced a new problem. Thousands—and eventually millions—of strangers needed to cooperate across enormous distances and across generations. Personal loyalty wasn't enough. Neither was the charismatic power of conquerors and warlords. Human societies increasingly turned toward something bigger than the individual: law, religion, moral codes, bureaucracies, nations, institutions, and sacred principles. We contrast the personal power of figures such as Sargon of Akkad and Alexander the Great with the emerging Blue systems that could survive long after any particular ruler died. Alexander's empire fragmented rapidly after his death—a powerful illustration of both the extraordinary potential and fundamental limitation of leadership built around a single individual. From there, we explore the psychological revolution behind Blue: the belief that there is a correct way to live, that legitimate authority deserves obedience, that impulses can be sacrificed for higher purposes, and that right and wrong transcend the desires of any individual. Blue gave humanity the ability to organize civilizations on an unprecedented scale. It produced legal systems, organized religions, schools, militaries, governments, and moral traditions capable of surviving for centuries. But every developmental achievement casts a shadow. When does order become authoritarianism? When does loyalty become tribalism? When does conviction become dogmatism? And when does devotion to absolute truth prevent us from clearly seeing that our understanding of truth might be incomplete? We play with both sides of Blue—not to dismiss the worldview humanity spent thousands of years constructing, but to understand what it solved, where it breaks down, and what parts of it may still be essential to a healthy life today. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

  4. Sep 21

    #15 My Life in Mormon Blue, A Path that Worked until it Didn't: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 3

    #15 My Life in Mormon Blue, A Path that Worked until it Didn't: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 3 What happens when the worldview that gave your life meaning, identity, community, and purpose no longer fits? In this deeply personal episode of Deep Play, I explore my own experience growing up inside the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics through Mormonism—and why Inspector Javert's worldview in Les Misérables once felt strangely familiar to me. I grew up believing there was a single right path through life. God had a plan. Prophets and scriptures told me what was true. Obedience brought blessings. Sacrifice was virtuous. Authority could be trusted. And when my own desires conflicted with what God expected of me, righteousness meant learning to surrender my will. That worldview gave me a lot. It gave me discipline, community, family traditions, purpose, service, leadership, belonging, and the ability to sacrifice for something larger than myself. For much of my life, it was a beautiful and remarkably coherent way of understanding the world. But it also taught me to become very good at asking “What should I do?” while burying the question “What do I want?” Eventually, the structure began to crack. Leaving Mormonism wasn't simply a matter of changing my mind about religion. It meant separating destroying my own identity that had been constructed around Mormonism from the time I was born. It's been four years since leaving and I'm still untangling what was authentically mine, and what was put on me. I've lost certainty, questioned and unquestionable authority, rebuilt my own path, and watching relationships change and distance as I stepped outside the path that once connected me to my community, my belief system and everything I knew. And that's where Javert becomes unexpectedly personal. He's not a classic villain. I see something of my former self in him: someone whose identity was built around duty, order, certainty, obedience, and the sincere belief that there really was one correct way to live. His conviction was too rigid to allow for growth and change. Fortunately for me, my story is different. This episode isn't about throwing away my Blue-Stage Mormon Identify entirely. It's about transcending and including it—keeping the discipline, service, commitment, community, and meaning that Mormonism gave me while letting go of the shame, fear, rigidity, black-and-white thinking, and dependence on external authority that came with it. My relationship with Blue is ultimately a story of two things that can exist at the same time: Gratitude for the worldview that built me—and grief for what happened when I could no longer live inside it. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

  5. Sep 14

    #14 The Tragedy of Dogmatic Certainty as Seen in Javert from Les Mis: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage

    #14 The Tragedy of Dogmatic Certainty as Seen in Javert from Les Mis: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage When does conviction become tragedy? In this episode of Deep Play, we explore “Stars” from Les Misérables and explore one of the clearest artistic portraits of the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics—especially its shadow. Inspector Javert sees a universe built on order. The stars know their place. They hold their course. The righteous are rewarded. But those who fall must pay the price. And Javert believes his own mission fits perfectly within that same cosmic structure. There is something genuinely beautiful here: duty, discipline, accountability, loyalty, sacrifice, moral courage, and devotion to something larger than oneself. Javert isn't pretending to believe these things. His sincerity is part of what makes him such a compelling character. But what happens when certainty becomes so complete that there is no longer room for growth? As we unpack the themes of the song, we explore black-and-white morality, divine authority, obedience, punishment, righteousness, religious dogmatism, and the human tendency to confuse our own narrow interpretation of God with the voice of God itself. Javert's tragedy isn't that he has principles. It's that his principles become incapable of accommodating new information. When Jean Valjean confronts him with mercy rather than vengeance, Javert encounters something his moral universe cannot explain or tolerate. And that gives us a much bigger question to play with: How do we hold strong moral convictions without becoming so certain of our own righteousness that we lose our humility, curiosity, compassion, and capacity to expand, learn and grow? Through Javert, Victor Hugo gives us a warning that extends far beyond religion: when our worldview becomes unquestionable, even virtues like loyalty, integrity, and devotion can become destructive. Perhaps the problem isn't belief. It's belief with no room for expansion. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

  6. Sep 7

    #13 Stars from Les Mis: The Beauty and Tragedy of Absolute Certainty: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 1

    #13 Stars from Les Mis: The Beauty and Tragedy of Absolute Certainty: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 1 What if the rules you built your entire life around suddenly stopped making sense? In this episode of Deep Play, we explore one of musical theatre’s most powerful portraits of moral certainty: “Stars” from Les Misérables. Inspector Javert looks into the night sky and sees more than stars. He sees a universe governed by order—everything in its proper place, everything following an eternal law. To Javert, justice isn’t merely a preference or a social convention. It is woven into the fabric of reality. It simply is. That makes “Stars” a remarkable expression of the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics. Through Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables, the phenomenal musical that sprang out of it over 100 years later, and Philip Quast’s iconic portrayal of Javert, we explore the beauty of a worldview built around duty, discipline, loyalty, integrity, moral conviction, and devotion to something greater than oneself. But the real story of Les Misérables is that it shines a spotlight on what happens when such virtues become dogmatic and rigid. Javert encounters something his worldview cannot easily explain: a man he considers a criminal repeatedly demonstrating compassion, sacrifice, and mercy. Eventually, Jean Valjean doesn’t defeat Javert through greater power. He confronts him with a reality that doesn’t fit inside his rigid blue-stage moral categories. And that creates a fascinating developmental question for all of us: What happens when life becomes bigger than the worldview we have used to make sense of it? “Stars” gives us Blue at its most beautiful—and Javert’s story shows us the tragedy that can occur when certainty leaves no room for complexity, grace, or transformation. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

  7. Sep 4

    #12 Learning to Follow the Rules: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage INTRO

    #12 Learning to Follow the Rules: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage INTRO What happens when raw power, strongmen, and gangster loyalty isn’t enough to hold a civilization together? In this episode of Deep Play, we explore the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics—the developmental shift toward order, duty, morality, discipline, and belief in something greater than the power of the individual. Blue emerges as an answer to the chaos of Red. Instead of “I do what I want,” Blue asks, “What is the right thing to do?” Humanity begins organizing itself around laws, moral codes, authoritarian structures, enduring institutions, sacred traditions, and shared ideas about good and evil. Blue’s contribution to humanity is enormous. It teaches us to control our impulses, keep our promises, sacrifice for others, honor commitments, accept responsibility, and build institutions capable of lasting for generations. Courts, schools, religious communities, marriage vows, military service, and many of the core foundations of civilization are built on a blue. Even today, blue structures act as the skeleton, bearing the weight of modern civilization and keeping it in form. But every stage casts a shadow. Moral certainty can become dogmatism. Loyalty can become tribalism. Obedience can become conformity. And belief in absolute truth can divide the world into the righteous and the wicked. Us vs them. Ethnocentrism is the shadow. We are right. And everyone else is wrong. Rather than simply celebrating or rejecting Blue, we’ll play with a more interesting question: Which parts of blue are still healthy to keep in 2026 and which parts should be tossed on the heap like the smoldering toxic sludge that it is? The answer is not black and white. It's the curious process of transcending and including. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

  8. Aug 24

    #11 Claiming and Taming the Dragon: Reclaiming Power Without Losing Yourself: Spiral Dynamics Red Stage CHAPTERS 5-7

    #11 Claiming and Taming the Dragon: Reclaiming Power Without Losing Yourself: Spiral Dynamics Red Stage CHAPTERS 5-7 Is egoic power something we overcome, or something we own and integrate? In this episode of Deep Play, we put the Red stage of the Spiral dynamics framework under the microscope, separating what Spiral Dynamics claims from what science can actually support. Research gives us plenty of evidence for the ingredients associated with Red, including ego development, dominance, aggression, bullying, status-seeking, competition, hierarchy, impulsivity, and threat response. But the neat package we call “Red” in these series of episodes remains an individual developmental category rather than an established scientific stage of collective human development. Still, it provides an incredibly useful lens for understanding human history, and the cultural evolution of our species, where most early and even some modern civilizations have operated with attributes from this stage. We also venture into modern pockets of society where we still see red stage attributes. As one example, we examine the Red Pill movement, asking why messages about strength, status, masculinity, self-improvement, and sexual power have become so attractive to some men. Beneath its darker expressions may be legitimate needs for agency, confidence, belonging, competence, and self-respect, even as those needs can curdle into resentment, misogyny, domination, and relationships reduced to contests for power. Then we reconstruct Red. Maybe anger isn't something to be ashamed of. Maybe boundaries aren't selfish. Maybe compassion without self-respect can become submission, forgiveness can become avoidance, and service can become self-erasure. Healthy Red teaches something deceptively simple: I matter too. The goal isn't to eradicate the dragon. It's to tame it. To become strong without needing to dominate. Loving without disappearing. Assertive without becoming cruel. And powerful enough that we no longer need to prove our power. Because an integrated life has room for both the warrior and the lover, and perhaps the mature version of Red is simply this: My voice matters. My needs matter. My life matters. And yours does too. Deep Play Pod details: If this episode resonates with you, you can help keep the podcast accessible to everyone by following, supporting, and sharing the show on Patreon:⁠ ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/DeepPlay⁠⁠  The official Deep Play Podcast playlist with all the songs we’ve used to illustrate the concepts we've covered for expansive living can be found here:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VwZiaenSdnrd7nKO25oiy?si=2b064de6b08a43c5⁠⁠    Send us your thoughts and comments: ⁠deepplaypod@gmail.com

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About

Deep Play explores the ideas shaping modern life through psychology, culture, music, philosophy, spirituality, creativity, and human development. Blending personal stories with science, human evolution, developmental theories, and good old fashioned goofing off, the show invites listeners to question assumptions, embrace uncertainty, and play with new ways of seeing the world. Thoughtful, honest, raw, and occasionally just funny enough to make you lol, Deep Play is for curious minds seeking growth, meaning, freedom, and a more fully alive human experience. https://www.patreon.com/cw/DeepPlay

Information

  • Creator
    Luke Erickson
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Luke Erickson
  • Show Website
    Deep Play