191 - Roland Harwood on Learning To Be Liminal

most people, if not everybody I was talking to was in transition in some aspect of their life or their work. Maybe their moving house, moving city, moving jobs, thinking about doing those things, changing relationships in transition in some aspect. And I just thought, this is interesting. And my thesis is that the transitional periods in our lives are getting bigger and longer, and the periods of stability that used to be sandwiched in between them are getting shorter.

And so I think we need to build a liminal capability, tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, which I think we've always needed in adolescence or first job or getting married or those kind of stepping stone moments in our lives. But I just think this derail train can hit us at any time. There's very little you can do about that, but the way that you respond to that and whether it consumes you or you use it as a trigger for something good, that's the really difficult but important skill and that it's something we need to embody in some shape or form. Greetings Future Fossils.

Welcome back to episode 191 of the Podcast Explorers Our Place In Time. I'm Michael Garfield and I talked entirely too much in this episode. So I'm gonna cut this intro short and just say, I am so, so glad to finally, almost a year after recording this conversation, introduce you to the inimitable mind and heart of Roland Harwood, founder and CEO of Liminal, a collective intelligence community here to solve hard problems is based in the UK where he also co-founded and acts as managing director for 100% Open. The Global Open Innovation Agency is trusting that the Participatory City Foundation, bought at a three, as he says in his Twitter profile, failed astronaut, physicist, and is the host of the On The Edge podcast, which is absolutely wonderful and I will link you to that program in the show notes.

Basically, he's a kindred spirit and I find his curiosity, humility, acuity, and warmth just absolutely wonderful. But before we dive into a characteristically very far-ranging conversation, I also want to thank the new Patreon supporters that have signed on since the last episode, including Oh My God, Eric Davis, John Paravitch, Greg Eisenberg, Erin Gabriel Sol, Christian Champ, and Kelly Matthews, greatly appreciate you and everyone else who has joined the growing ranks of folks helping me keep his show afloat. Future Fossils is an entirely misnervous program. I don't like ads or like selling ads, but I do love facilitating great conversations, sharing interesting ideas, and connecting people within the Future Fossils Facebook group and Discord server, both of which have yielded extraordinary dividends in the last few years of widespread turbulence and hardship.

So, if you like this show and you're one of the people who are already enjoying these ostensibly patrons-only groups online, I really, really hope you'll consider hopping on board and just letting me tilt the cornucopia of cool stuff I've been publishing in your direction, new music, new art, writing, and much else. And with that, thank you. I've already gone on too long. Please kick back and enjoy your introduction or perhaps your reintroduction to one of the most interesting people I know, and it's saying a lot.

Thanks for listening, subscribing, reading, and reviewing the show. And give it up for rolling hardwood. Where is your head today? I'll be honest, it's a little bit all over the place.

That's totally fine. So, I might just need to ease into this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for a while. I've been thinking about what we might talk about, though I kind of have no clue what we're going to talk about either.

But I know I'm in safe hands, so I'm fine with that. And yeah, so I'm all good. Where's your head at today? Well, I was worried I wasn't going to make the call because my daughter was trying to solicit the attention of my wife, who's trying to put the baby to sleep.

And it's like one of those M.C.S.H.H.R. Domino staircases. It just constantly falls on itself. Yeah.

You know, that's been... So, my head is trying to make sense of how to navigate the unmodalable complexity of four people in a cat. And I know you know all about that. I've got three kids, two boys and a girl.

But two cats, who incidentally were castrated yesterday. And we had this slightly insane morning where the cats had to be taken to the vets to be castrated, which we all felt awful about. But that's kind of the... That's what they advise you with cats, I don't know.

At least over here it is. And my car, I just got a new fancy electric car, but that was in the garage because there's a problem with it. And so I didn't have a vehicle, so I had to sort out an Uber and I was running a workshop and the kids, there was a school. Anyway, and then I managed to spell coffee all over the stairs on the carpet.

So yesterday morning was like a horrible, or not horrible, it was just a multi-dimensional chess game. Today's been just a bit more straightforward, but just a bit more back to back in terms of Zoom calls, which is tiring. But I'll try and give you my best energy. Sure, yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, there are no expectations here. I guess I'm just empathising. Yeah, yeah. I'm just empathising with family life.

It's tough, especially when they're so young and I want to ask you questions, but I know I'm here to, well, let's have a conversation. Well, let's introduce you to people because you and I obviously are pretty shy. Sure. But I don't think other than maybe sharing a couple of your things in the various discussion groups, I don't know that I've actually introduced it to this audience.

So how do you introduce yourself to an amazing stranger on the other side of a one-way mirror? Well, hello, amazing stranger. It's nice to meet you. And yeah, no, I don't have a necessarily high profile.

So it's great to be on the podcast. I describe myself as a compulsive connector, which is a label given to me by a former business partner. And I guess that just means I've got a short attention span. I like talking to people.

I like connecting people and ideas. I'm a once upon a time, a physicist of ultrasonic imaging. That was kind of my education and specialism. But then that was almost 20 years ago.

It's been a gradual unraveling into numerous different directions, including music production, which I know is something that you're interested in, some quite hardcore science and engineering in the energy space and renewal energy space. And then a sort of fascination with design and innovation and entrepreneurship, including running a couple of small, but perfectly formed innovation and agencies over the last 12 or so years. So yeah, that's how I'm going to introduce myself today. And I'm a father of three and a failed astronaut and lots of other things as well.

How much of a failed astronaut are you? So I can give you numbers. So in 2008, I can hear a child in the background with you. And I think I had a child of a similar age.

My middle son, Cole, was born and the European Space Agency, so the European equivalent of NASA did its first call for New Astronaut at about 40 years at the time or 30 years. A long, long time, my lifetime was the first time they were made a call for New Astronaut and I applied and so did 40,000 other people from across Europe, apparently. And I got through the first three rounds, which included them flying me to Hamburg and subjecting me to various psychological and psychometric tests. And I hadn't had much sleep.

I had a six-year-old new baby, hadn't really slept much. And then I was having to do these weird three-dimensional puzzles in my head and memory tests and quite hardcore stuff that they subject you to. Anyway, so my excuse is that's why I didn't get further than the third round. So I got to the final 800, which was pretty pleased with, you know, for 40,000.

And I didn't really expect to go much further, but I was pleased to get that far. But just to finish the story. And about five years after that point, I hadn't actually told my wife that had been successful. It would have meant moving to Star City in Russia, which I'd never even heard of.

It's just outside Moscow and it's where they train all the astronauts and cosmonauts. I have a Facebook friend who's working there right now on a space simulator. Yeah, crazy. Shout out to Brian.

But anyway, there's a guy called Tim Peake, who is an astronaut, a British astronaut, who was basically the person who was successful in that application process that I went through. So five years later, when he finally went into space, oh, it was more than five years, I was cycling into London, which was my daily commute listening to podcasts. And there he was being blasted into space. And so there was this alternative universe in which that could have been me, which was interesting.

And I still hold the hope on 47 now of one day going to space, but I have no aspiration to spend or no ability to spend millions of dollars to be part of the kind of visas and musk space tourism crowd. But I still think within my lifetime, it might be possible. I mean, there's no better way to panitard on your back than to spend millions of dollars coming into space as a tourist. Just like begging for people's view upon you.

Yeah. So, okay, two things, because I don't know that we're doing anything other than performing a camaraderie here yet for people. I do want to get to some ideas, but I just want to say that I totally resonate with the alternate life piece of it. Episode 70 of his podcast was with Steve Rusade, who's a paleontologist at the University of St.

Andrews. And we talked about this in that episode. He basically took the path that I chose not to take in school after I kind of had a falling out with my childhood role model and didn't know what to do. And he went ahead and went and studied under the guy that I was going to study under for grad school and ended up researching the very thing that I would have been compelled to research as a paleontologist was like the evolution and lifestyles of Tyrannosaurs.

And then like wrote this book and like ended up consulting on the latest Jurassic world. And I was like, I remember at the time having this thought, okay, so there are other people standing in line behind me that will fill this gap. And this is not what I'm doing with my life. If there, you know, it's like I'm not somebody that walks up to a woman surrounded by men in a bar and tries to like fork through the crowd to hit on her.

And that's how it felt. I was like, I need to find something that's not a completely crowded bar. You know, I need to go find my own path. And actually this is this leads into the thing, which is that I think that you are actually doing something much more non-fungible, if you will, than astronautics, right?

Like, okay, you know, a handful of people out of 40,000, sure. But how many people out of how many people are doing the kind of synthetic, generative, integrative kind of work at the intersections of disciplines and standing there. And so this is just like a way of me taking a kind of grandiose pass into we are liminal because, and I'll add one more piece to this, yesterday, a bunch of people I recognize and I were all implicated in this diagram that this guy in Melbourne, Joe Lightfoot drew of what he was calling the liminal culture or something. And I hear, let me pull this back up actually, because this was quite odd.

Hold on just a second there. So this is a thread I intend to respond to today and I'll tag you in this. Yeah, Joe Lightfoot, he's talking with a liminal web, mapping an emergent subculture of sensemakers, meta theorists and systems poets. And he's got future fossils on there I was pleased to see.

Next to the other others, Tyson, you have the Portis Show, mutations Jeremy Johnson's Show, integral leadership review, Vastoa, Jim Rudd, Emerge, Rebel Wisdom, Future Thinkers, John Viveki, Madam Moderna, a perspective, a few others that I'm not as familiar with. And you weren't on there. And actually the one thing that I kept thinking, reading this piece was, he keeps saying this is not an exhaustive list, but I was like, where is Rowland Harwood? Where is Rowland Harwood?

But of course the thing is that if you're doing this kind of work unless you're constantly in conversation with the other people that are visibly doing it, one of the characteristics of it that we've discussed is that you're kind of illegible or people don't know quite what to make of you. You kind of match the wallpaper, but you're also there. So I don't know. So I think that you're somebody that I identify with and feel a sense of fraternity as a liminal person, basically all you can do is describe yourself as someone that connects things because your daunting hyphenation is, I think, the definitive character here.

Yeah, this is where I want to turn the conversation. And really, this is where I want to spend the conversation. This is on liminality and how you understand it, how you navigate it, how you found your way into it, the struggles you have with it, the joy as you find in it. Yeah.

I need to close the door. Fantastic. You need to do some emergency childcare. There's a finally of the age that I'm probably used to walking doors now, too.

So I'm just quickly, your friend Steve, was it the person with the parallel path? I have my own Steve for me. He's called Rob. And he became what I always thought I was going to be when I was a kid growing up with namely an architect.

And in fact, I persuaded him to become an architect because I thought that's what I wanted to do. And then I ended up doing something very different. So I followed his career and his life with interests and a bit of jealousy and a just curiosity and it was a weird hybrid of emotions because he basically, he was one of my best friends. And it was just a parallel universe that I could easily have occupied, but chose not to.

And so I'm not to and then jumping forward to this guy you were talking to yesterday. Sorry Jeremy, was it? Oh, no, no, no. Joe Lightfoot.

Yes, the author of the speech. So he hasn't heard of me too. I haven't heard of him either. But that's fine.

That's all good. I am what's that Karl Marx quote? I don't want to be a part of a club that would have me as a member. I've always resisted spending too much time with any single group, even the group of people that don't want to be part of other groups.

So there's something, what's that kind of girdles theorem that anyway, so there's something liminal in that. Oh, yeah. But my first job, if I can just sort of take it back to that and walk me onto this path. And I think I told you the story, but I finished my first degree in physics, didn't have a clue what I wanted to do other than I had this passion for music and I was playing advanced.

I want to continue doing that for as long as possible, but that didn't pay me any money. So I needed to do something that would pay me some money. And for me, this makes sound odd, but the easiest thing to do at the time, because both my parents and academics would be to do a PhD. So for many people, that's like a, that was like a very hard thing to do.

But for me, that was like the family business, you know. So I did a PhD, not really because I wanted to, but just because I didn't know what else to do and allowed me to play music. But I also couldn't really afford to just live off the small amount of money that was available to do that. I did a sponsored PhD.

And so I was working for a company whilst doing this research. And so what that meant was I was spent half my time at the company and half my time at the university, or it was kind of, it was kind of 70, 30, but anyway, but constantly no one knew if you were supposed to be in the labs that day or if it was a university day, because it always flexed from week to week. And the problem with that is nobody knows if you're doing a good job, just because you're not present, you're not visible, you're not in people's faces, obviously with COVID. And maybe we'll come on to that.

We're all having to demonstrate our value and impact in different ways than just being present in an office. And I'm talking 20 years ago, just being visible in an office was one way in which you demonstrated that you were adding some value to the organization. And there was one guy who had a profound impact on me. And since we first spoke about this a few months ago, I've tried to go back and find out what happened to him and unfortunately I failed, but he was someone probably 30 years, my senior.

So probably not far off the age I am now back then in my first sort of job. And he would just walk around this research institute going from lab to lab to lab, all these different isolated little labs and spaces and offices. And he would just spend all his day walking around talking to different people saying, huh, that's interesting. You should go and talk to Michael over in building B73 because he's doing something that's linked to this and maybe you'll have an interesting conversation.

And that's basically all he did. But he created huge amounts of value, I think, across that organization. It was a research institute. But the value was very distributed across different teams, across different people.

And so it was hard to pin down the value specifically to him in one conversation that you might have had with him occasionally. But most of the time you couldn't. And needless to say, he was kind of got rid of by the senior leadership team at the time because his utilization wasn't high enough on his time sheets. And I remember at the time thinking, that's such a short-sighted decision.

And anyway, here I am, 30 years later, playing that same role, talking to lots of people, sort of slightly invisible in lots of different communities, hopefully adding some value where I can or making connections where I can. But probably quite often I'm not doing that and a little bit invisible. But I think there's a degree of karma and what goes around comes around. And so the more I do that, the more value I see in playing that role.

But I also don't think it's for everybody, that's for sure. So we need the pockets of expertise. We need the pockets of capability for people like me and you and others to connect the dots in between as well. So I'm thinking about William Irwin Thompson, whom I'm sure I must have brought up when you had me on your on the edge.

You did. Bill, when I had him on Future Fossils, he said he was the impresario of the Lindisfarne Association, this weird sort of para-academic. It almost looks like the liberal version of the University of Austin, everybody who reached Quit Academia in the 70s and 80s and was committed to a life of scholarship, but not because they were upset about some sort of political. It wasn't the change of academic culture, specifically it was the appropriation of the mind by the structures of academia.

And they're concerned that the real work just basically couldn't be supported in that way. And Bill said to me when I had him on the podcast, he's like, yeah, I think if I were to reflect on a life of bringing people together and connecting people across disciplines and exploring these strange spaces between things, I would have been less averse to money and fame. Like I think that I sabotaged the work by King at People, like he was friends with Buckminster Fuller. He saw Buck he is like fame seeking kind of, he would read the newspaper every day to see if his name was in it.

And Bill didn't like that at all. And I feel this responsibility to continue his work in some way, but the question of how do you reconcile those things, the in-nate tendency. Like you were saying, Gratchel Marx, I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me or however it goes. That one of the things Joe Lightfoot said about, you know, looking forward to the liminal web instantiating itself in some sort of blockchain based essentialized social network and or land based community projects.

And I was like, you know, I tried to get a group of us together in what weird studies called the weirdosphere, which is sort of like orthogonal to what Joe identifies as a liminal web, you know, includes Eric Davis and Connor Habib and Jeff and I was like, well, let's just have an informal interdisciplinary working group of disenfranchised academics that just meet periodically. Yeah, essentially like the kind of song that you would have endowed university program, but you can't, that it's not so easy to work. And the thing was, it's like there was surprisingly little interest, even from the most appropriate people. Like a couple of people were like, oh, yes, I'm here.

But there's like this thing about herding cats. And I was thinking about flocking cats. Like how do you get all of these twisted weirdos to collaborate on something when we've been conditioned by a lifetime of experience? It's like too many chefs in the kitchen or something that actually what you and I are are are it's like a vitamin.

It's like, you know, just eat handfuls of vitamins. You're like a seed crystal. You're not going to get in rain if all you have is dirt. You just need that one drop of rolling hardwood in an organization.

I don't know. How do you think about that? What would be the point of bringing together a bunch of people like you and me? I'd love to try it one time, but yeah, it probably would be exhilarating and pointless at the same time.

I think our value is much greater if it's dispersed and distributed rather than concentrated in some way. Though I don't know, I would like to challenge us to think about what, yeah, it might create a different type of value. Certainly not least. It's a kind of lonely game being out there, roving around, connecting dots that are not really being part of any clubs.

We're sure having a family, having a club, having a specialism. So yeah, you said at the beginning performing our camaraderie, but just camaraderie is important. We all need to have peers. We need to have collaborators.

But yeah, I think you're right. The little dose of weird is not a bad thing. If it goes too weird, then you're going to probably go beyond the point of no return or any kind of useful interaction generally. That's I think how I'm feeling about it today.

But I don't know. What do you think that we should have a Gratio Mark style club that won't be accepted into any other club sort of thing? What would happen if we did that? Like you said, it does seem to be kind of recursive.

You know, I think about now, Wolf, right? Now, Wolf is this collective of artists in Santa Fe that they were doing its temporary installations and then they decided they wanted to do a permanent installation and they were a bunch of like desert punks who were very out of place in Santa Fe Art scene, which was very prestigious international gallery type stuff. And they were doing like vapor wave dance party, weird monster trash installations. And what got them from we're basically throwing parties in empty buildings to we've raised hundreds of millions of dollars and we're now working on permanent installations in four or five different cities.

I think they've got Santa Fe Vegas Denver and I think they're working on a place in DC and they were looking at Austin for a while and they're being talked up and all the trade publications now for like entertainment destinations. And as far as I can tell, what got them from one place to another other than the faith and the patronage of George RR Martin, who I bought the building that they could use for their first permanent exhibit is that they had a guy on hands that was a compelled organizer and business person. Yeah, a lot of people that were originally involved left as the organization grew because it just wasn't the weird sort of decentralized, headless, non-computable thing that it had been and it became this thing that was very corporate and organized and driven. And so the people that stuck around through that had to go through profound personal change in order to adapt themselves to this new environment.

And so just a question of scale and of the sacrifices that you have to make in order to make your project interoperable. And I know that people like Phil Ford and Jeff Martell think that the institutionalization of weird studies is completely self-defeating. I know we've talked about this before comparing my time at SFI to the time that you spent at Nesta, that even brilliant, innovative work as it's performed by an organization that scales or even a community that scales. It doesn't even have to be like a bureaucratic thing.

Like there's that work that just came out showing that the larger scientific discipline is the lesson of it's work is simply because people have a harder time knowing what papers to read that are coming out of it. I've given field and so they depend on these short hands like, oh, is it published in nature or is it published by someone I know? And so like the bigger things get the more we follow up on these, who do I trust navigate this stuff? And then it becomes something else.

Innovation is no longer easy to spot. It's like it's easy to miss at that point because you've created something so large that has cracks in it and the innovations happening in those cracks. And so like I would imagine that if people that are doing this kind of work in the cracks were to join and form something that made out of cracks and it would make more cracks and everyone would just rush into those cracks and you would have to fill the wake behind you with bureaucrats just so that you could be as Flower said, be regular in order in your life so that you could be violently original in your work. You need somebody doing the dishes.

And I don't think any of us are like disposed of that unless we can regard it as like a form of like chopped with carry wires or tool practice. We have engaging the weird. What do you think? I think there's at least two ways of kind of scaling.

One is to have a good idea and then that becomes popular and it grows exponentially or however, but when you've got a great idea, a really great kernel of something is often out in the wilderness in some cases for decades before it hits that inflection point. So it's often the more obvious stuff that kind of will bubble up and gain traction and gain our attention. But it's the really kind of weird scenes that where the really genuinely transformative stuff bubbles up and that requires the business oriented person in Meow Wolf, which I never heard of by the way. But that reminds me, so I grew up in Manchester in the sort of late 70s and 80s in the UK, which is a post-industrial city, I guess a bit in some ways has parallels with places like Detroit and it really hit kind of rock bottom maybe in the 60s and 70s and then through creativity and music and startups and universities and a range of other things reinvented itself.

And when I was kind of 16 to 18, you know, formative years for a short brief moment, it was kind of center, certainly of the British music scene and also had sort of international attention clubs like the Hacienda. I don't know if you've heard of that and bands like the Stone Roses. Anyway, but Elbow. Elbow, yeah, well, that was a bit later, but yeah, they're also from Manchester.

You're right. And they're great. But yeah, they were very much inspired by it, but they were the next wave or even a wave or two after that. But to the Hacienda sounds like a little bit like your kind of Meow Wolf.

So it's a pretty like joy division, you know, joy division, they were pretty odd group, the leading a committed suicide, they kind of reinvented themselves in your order. But there was this guy, Tony Wilson, who was this larger than Life Charismatic guy, generally quite full of shit, if I'm allowed to say that entrepreneur, stroke, mogul, who was really catalytic in sort of getting that scene going, he's now passed away. So yeah, a lot to be thankful for, but he was also a quite divisive figure. That sounds a little bit similar to the guy you mentioned in the Meow Wolf scene.

But I also spent a few years in West Berlin, just before the wall came down and then we moved back after the wall came down and so used to visit Berlin, just shortly after reunification from 1989 through the 90s and early 90s. And that was just a fascinating sociological economics experiment of two economic systems, two political systems, two cultures kind of reunifying. And then the physical absence of buildings in the middle of the city where the wall had been, which wasn't of course just a single wall, it was two walls separated by a no-men's land, which then was repopulated. And but it was just so exciting for a period of five years or so where there was clubs and artists, collectives and squats and all kind of stuff going on, totally unregulated.

And I think some of that spirit still survives, but it's not the same. Of course, it doesn't money flows in one and property prices go up and all the rest of it. Yeah, there's something, sorry, I'm just kind of responding to some of what you're saying, but often, so my day job, I spent a lot of the last decade running innovation competitions for corporations. It's not all I do, but I've done a lot of that.

And often it's the obvious ideas that kind of attract the most folks or attract the most investment. And often the best, the best ideas, the best innovations don't get any kind of votes in a kind of crowdsourcing mechanism or, you know, work an investment from investment panel because it's just too weird. So you need a mechanism that allows, by all means, fun, the good ideas. That's a necessary and important part of the world.

But you need to create some space for the weirdness to form in the cracks and nurture that and support that. And maybe that requires crazy people like Tony Wilson or crazy experiments a little bit like that were happening in Berlin after the wall came down to allow some of that stuff to flourish. I don't think that can be planned in advance. I think these things are somewhat spontaneous and occurrences, often after hitting rock bottom in the case of both Manchester and Berlin in some ways and Medellin.

Have you heard the story of Medellin in Colombia? That's fascinating. That's Pablo Escobar's city, which in the 80s was basically the heart of global cocaine trade. But now in recent years, is one of the most innovative cities in the world.

And it's really transformed itself. And I've spent quite a bit of time over there and spoken to people and lots of people seem to agree that the only reason why we can do what we're doing now is because everything was so desperate and awful, you know, only a generation previously. So that's not a very hopeful kind of message. But other than even when you're at rock bottom, I guess the only way is up.

And in some cases, in a generation, you can travel some distance. So sorry, I don't know if that's interesting to you or the listeners to the podcast, but that's what I was thinking of when you were speaking. Oh, it is. I told the story elsewhere.

But I remember in high school after my heart was broken truly. I thought I had feelings for people before. And the time that I wrote a 10 page love letter carried around in my pocket for like a week, finally gave it to the person, had my first kiss, made this elaborate Christmas present for her. And then like by New Year's, she had some sort of like waffle.

She was like, I don't know, you know, I'm gonna blow it off. So the whole thing lasted. We were like best friends and then like the whole romantic thing flared up in the last like three weeks. And in its wake, I was a hot mess.

I was ruined. I was wearing all black going around to my life as an angel. I was dissociated from trauma. I was throwing up in class in high school.

My parents had to take me to the doctor. They were like, this guy is not well. And love sick. Yeah, the doctor had no advice for me.

So I was just wandering in this weird limbo until a train derailed in my hometown during a flood. My town, Parkville, Missouri was on the Missouri River train, ran right between the Riverside Park and the road I took to high school. And that flipped it for me. And then that year, there was a train derailing and there was the flood and that happened at the same time.

So the buildings were taken out downtown. All this coal was spilled everywhere. It took them like six to eight weeks to clean it up. They were real giant machines cutting steel downtown the whole time.

And the floodwaters were right up on the crash site, this vivid display of catastrophe. And then just two months later, my mother was taking me to school. I was driving into school and our car was jackknife by a semi truck. And totaled.

And neither of us were harmed, but my mother was eight months pregnant with my little brother and I leaped out a car and did a jig. So at any rate, this is just the visceral sense of there being something about the way that I guess you're talking about something more diachronic, like one event than another. I'm talking about something more synchronic where the darkness casts a light where you're just in it so deep that you can see up to the top of the well. And you're just like, Oh, there it is.

You know, it's like a there's a flash. And I emerged from that semester with this new appreciation for the way that catastrophic punctuations open up new possibility. You think about depression and like, you know, depression being this sort of overtrained learning algorithm that's you just think you know how this is going to go and then something completely weird happens. There's plenty of, plenty of stories like this where someone starts in a pit of their own device and then there's a divine invasion of some kind, there's a rupture.

And for me, I think that really characterizes my dark, bright, kind of gala's humor or my love for the moment that we're in as a society and to zoom out a little bit and look at, to redirect this back to we are liminal. Because I think there's a question about we are liminal, which is, first of all, given everything that we've said about organizations of liminal people, how does a collective intelligence agency even work in practice? But then there's the context around that, which is the context that we discussed when I was on your show, which is why does this exist? Why is now the time for generalists and sense makers and systems poets as as Joe Life put it?

Why is that? I think it's because we're at that moment where the Berlin Wall was kind of a shot heard around the world and all of the time since has been the falling of additional walls and the reimagination of those no man's lands that were standing between these spaces. And so there are people that are going to live in these these liminal zones and are squat in their inner building art collectives and innovative text-stirgums and stuff. And so there's Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine talking about how capitalism can only eat itself now.

But so does the rainforest. Ultimately, there's a good version of this that doesn't involve the CIA coming in and destroying an economy so that they can make it remake it in their image. There's a version of this, which is about the weeds that come in as the first in a chain of succession to repopulate a parking lot. So those are my thoughts on this and I'll pass it back to you now and just wonder like how this how this shows up in the way that you actually practice your work and the way that you and your colleagues talk about the work that you're doing.

So you mentioned it a few times now, but yeah, I'm founder of and part of a community called Liminal where about 120 people dotted around the world, but probably half or more in the UK and Europe, which is where I'm based in London. Yeah, the idea of liminality is this kind of transitional time or space between people, places and things. And so I've been fascinated with the concept of liminal spaces for quite some time, but it wasn't until I left my last company that I poured my heart and soul into building and also had kids whilst I was running it. So I just had my head down for a good 10 years until about three years ago.

When I left that and I was thinking about what do I do next, I had about 600 coffees with 600 people in about a four or five month period, because I just wanted to sort of re-educate myself. And the one thing not very kind of startling insight really, but I realized is that most people, if not everybody I was talking to was in transition in some aspect of their life or their work, basically, maybe their moving house, moving city, moving jobs, thinking about doing those things, changing relationships, changing something or in transition in some aspect. And I just thought this is interesting. And my thesis and I'll be interested in your and other people's take on this is that the transitional periods in our lives are getting bigger and longer and the periods of stability that used to be sandwiched in between them are getting shorter.

And so I think we need to build a liminal capability, a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, which I think we've always needed in adolescence or first job or getting married or whatever it might be, those kind of stepping stone moments in our lives. But I just think things like your story that this derail train can hit us at any time. There's very little you can do about that, but the way that you respond to that and whether it consumes you or you use it as a trigger for something good or positive or whatever, that's the really difficult but important skill and a cool little muscle because it does feel kind of visceral for me, but it's something we need to embody in some shape or form. But anyway, that's kind of the conceptual thing.

We're essentially a distributed consultancy and we run projects mostly around sustainability and sort of transitioning towards net zero with the companies and big foundations and some government organizations as well. And I spent much of the last couple of weeks in Glasgow where they've had this COP summit, this climate change summit, which has been both simultaneously hugely depressing to see the greenwashing on display and the fudging of language and what have you, I don't know how closely you followed it, but also massively inspiring at the same time. So I managed to spend a bit of time at the youth led March, we've got a toomburg and other activists, there was lots of people from all around the world in Glasgow, which felt pretty strange in the time of post-COVID where we've all been holed up in our spare rooms and not having that much interaction. So it felt exciting and energizing, I think it's too soon to really sort of say how historic and impactful this event, this COP was, it was no doubt disappointing and failed against most metrics that you could put towards it.

And yet I'm 47 as I said earlier, I think, and just being with young people for whom this is existential, I mean, it's existential for you and I as well, but I think the younger you are, the more existential the climate emergency becomes because it's all about collective future. I think to tackle not only are we going through a massive disruption with regards to climate and COVID, but also our food system, our transport system, our energy system, all of these things are going through once in a century, once in multiple generation kind of shift in transformation right now, we're in the middle of it, or at the beginning of it at least, and that disruption is only going to increase. So I think, and what we do as a community is limitals try and build, consortia and collaborations between unlikely bedfellows, whether it's large and small organizations or commercial and not-for-profit organizations and just connect the dots and find ways in which people can collaborate. The one thing I would take away from the cops on that having spent a few days in the city and being involved in a few events is that nobody can sort this on their own.

This is absolutely a global complex issue and it requires this liminal muscle that I talked about, but also just the ability to collaborate at scales and in ways that I think we simply haven't had to do until this moment or this time that we're living through. So liminal is an experiment and it could easily fail like most experiments do, but it's an experiment of creative and entrepreneurial people trying to tackle complex problems and proactively occupy the spaces in between. We're winning some work, we're doing some mentioning stuff and the offers and the asks are getting weirder or bigger and more interesting and so we'll see where all of that ends up. We're having fun, but more than that I think we're learning.

But I still struggle to articulate what the hell this is, especially outside of podcast families like Future Fossils to family and friends and neighbors because I don't even know where to begin with some of those conversations, but I'm sure you find that as well. The thing that I'm thinking about is this week another historic thing that was going on, at least as far as I'm concerned, was the Constitution Dow. I don't know if you heard about this about blockchain based, decentralized, cooperative, pooling money to try and purchase one of the 11 surviving Constitution, US Constitution copies at a South of East auction and they lost. But interestingly, as soon as they lost, they were like, okay, we're going to return everybody's money.

And then the people were like, well, we don't actually want you to return our money. We want to decide together what to do with this money. Now that it's not going to be the thing we originally pulled it for. And so that's interesting because as some of my buddies noticed on Twitter, there's an opportunity here for them to widen their aperture.

And so I mean, even though you're not calling it a Dow and I don't actually know how the business structure for liminal works, it strikes me that the way that you describe it, the way that you describe the processes of collective intelligence and decision making in this organization sound a whole lot like the kind of thing that we're seeing manifest now in these technologically empowered sort of remote coordination monsters that are coming up. And the right that one of the ways in which we're seeing humankind try and rise to the occasion of having to collaborate at scale in this way is through this ostensibly trustless infrastructure. And so that's like a piece that I'm thinking about. And then another piece that I'm thinking about is this piece about you saying that you're requesting a weirder.

I mean, I certainly agree, Eric Davis, I think I bring this up a lot. Eric Davis has this phrase global weirdering because he was always the journalist covering the beat of like the weird stuff, the occult esoteric pulp sci-fi Dungeons and Dragons, the stuff in the sort of gutter of society as it understood itself. And of course, now the gutter has risen up and swallowed everything. And as it seems to with every generation, right, Bill Thompson used to say, evil is the enunciation of the next level of order.

And he would point to the way that the parents of hippies would talk about rock music, like it's just noise. Well, of course, it's just noise because it doesn't match your training data. Jazz was just noise until you'll develop the ability to hear it. And when you look at quantitative studies of the harmonic complexity of Western music over the last 500 years, there's a consistent increase in the complexity of symphonic and orchestral music because people are acclimating to weirder and weirder stuff.

And yeah, so Eric Davis folds global warming into this larger, more fundamental phenomenon of global weirdering where the models that we've inherited don't give us predictive power over the situation in which we find ourselves. And in that place, like lots of things are coming back out. Again, Bill Thompson characterized this as the story in the Rig Veda of how humans and animals teamed up to banish the spirits from our world. And now through the electronic realm, the spirits are coming back.

There's a rupture through the portal of our screen and like all of these, these ghosts have like it's like Ghostbusters. Basically, Ghostbusters is a prophetic film. Super Mario Brothers, 1993 is a prophetic film. These are about hyperstitions, ruptures from the imaginal and into the real.

And this is the world that we live in. It's, you know, I'm curious about all of those things with respect to, with respect to liminal about like, do you think that you're getting weirder requests because people are just learning to trust you or do you think it's because the world is getting weirder or is that a nonsense, either or thing? I think it's both of those things. I think I want to talk about trust because you talked about Dows, you know, decentralized autonomous organizations.

And I think liminal is kind of, well, I don't know if it would be officially classed as a DOW or not, but it's definitely inspired by that whole movement and that thinking and that way of working. And there's probably a lot more that we could learn from that or contribute to that. But again, this is me resisting categorization that I haven't sort of used that label and maybe I should, but you talked about that trustless infrastructure and that pains me slightly. We don't trust each other.

Then it doesn't matter how good the infrastructure is. Something's broken along the way. And I, and I get it, if you want to exchange currency with someone that you're never going to meet and then you need an infrastructure, a banking infrastructure or payments infrastructure that facilitates that. So I do understand the theory behind it, but I think to try and weave some of these things together, I think even though I would say cop by any metric failed and that's deeply disappointing, I also, because I witnessed it with my own eyes, think it was a kind of pivotal moment from which like Manchester in its post-industrial slump or Berlin in its torn apart state in the midst of the Cold War, it's a spark for whatever comes next.

And I think those solutions can come from the cracks, those solutions can come from left field. I don't think they're going to come from the politicians. They may come from some of the corporations, but I think it's dangerous to assume too much power and influence there or it just may come from you and me and the people listening to this podcast. Who knows?

But it's hard to really point to the reasons why, but I do feel a degree of hope from just the rage you talked earlier about, rage quitting something, but just the rage and the anger and the attention put to some of these issues. But I don't think the answer is in trustless infrastructure. I think we fundamentally need to get on board that this is an existential crisis that affects all of humanity in different ways, but it's for sure affects all of humanity. I was talking to a friend in Vancouver two days ago and he was telling me about the mudslides and the atmospheric river affecting very mature infrastructure that exists around that part of the world.

Only a few months after the heat dome was burning up towns not far from Vancouver at all just a few months ago. And that we're all in this together. And so that requires us to put our petty national or other competitive instincts aside and work together to try and kind of dig ourselves out of this crisis that we're in. And so I think it fundamentally requires a rebuilding of trust because we're not going to have legal contracts or technology that kind of guarantees our safety or our investments or whatever it might be.

It requires a very mindful of not wishing to sound overly naive, but that's always a danger with some of this tackling the unknown. But I think it requires trustful infrastructure. And I don't quite know what that looks like. And yes, maybe blockchain and other technologies are part of the thing.

But that's one of the things that bugs me about the whole blockchain stuff is that it's trustless and that feels somehow not right to me. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think?

I fully agree, which is why I wanted to put it in bunny quotes, right? Yeah. I don't think trustless is the right word, right? For the same reason that I...

But you're not the only one using it. I mean, it's almost become accepted that that is what blockchain and stuff is, but that bothers me. Well, I mean, for the same reason that people... Not to harp on this, but I feel like people are missing the point when they critique NFTs as like, oh, you're just trying to sell a JPEG.

Yeah. It's like, no, because that's the whole point is that you're not making a distinction between the ways in which a work of art or anything in this world is all to be copied and the ways in which it is irreplaceable. So that's a deep conversation around art, but it bothers me that people think that what an NFT is about is about selling a digital file, because that suggests that there's been a flattening in people's understandings. I'm going to sound old saying this, but remember when things were not online and things were scarce and we didn't think that you could just make everything infinitely abundant or scalable?

And there's this thing about... Kevin Kelly has critiqued in what technology wants. We're talking about ephemeralization. We're saying there was this whole rhetoric about, oh, technology is getting smaller, it's getting more ephemeral.

You'll get a cell phone out of a box of cereal. If you need a new one, you'll just print a new one and eventually it'll disappear into your brain. It's like, yeah, except no. What's happening is the iceberg is going underwater or it's melting into the whole Timothy Morton hyperobject of everything around you and you're just seeing a smaller and smaller piece of ice and thinking that's all that's left.

And it's like, no, what's happened is that you are now inside the iceberg. All of the invisible infrastructure that's been tucked away to support that tiny little phone is much, much, much bigger than that giant phone that you used to carry around. And I think there's a similar thing going on with trust where it's like, actually, what we're talking about is not trust disappearing. It's about trust being relocated in other places and other things.

It's you're not trusting maybe the other person that you're exchanging something with pseudonomously, but you're trusting the code. And by trusting the code, you're implicitly, I think that what's really happening, other people have said this about machine learning, is that when you have a model that's super human and it's predictive power, but illegible to human beings that cannot be understood, then that really actually bothers scientists because, I mean, other than like engineers, right? In the business of prediction, scientists in the business of explanation are simied by this and those models, I mean, those modelless predictive super agents don't contribute to our understanding of the world, really. They don't contribute or something that's transferable to another domain.

It's not just that AI only works to defeat Go. It's that whatever we extract from it can't be applied to chess either. And so to the degree that we rely on these things, we're not trusting the world any less, but I think that we've lost something that's kind of essential here, which is a distinction between trust and faith. And to connect this to the issue of liminality and transition, the greatest talk I think I ever gave and sadly lost the recording of and I think back on it.

So I'm constantly trying to resurrect pieces of it in conversation was about the book of Exodus and how I feel very much like a wandering Jew somewhere in between Egypt and the Holy Land. And in this time, in this generational turning, because that's like one of the few places that I can point to in history, even if it never actually happened, the story of the Exodus and the wandering of Jews is something where like people were in this space so long that children were born in there and grew up in it. Other generations of people had to come of age and age out die as they were wandering the desert. And in that time, they were completely dependent on manna from heaven.

I'm in these Discord groups where people are engaged in these state-and-reserve currencies built on the blockchain that are highly inflationary but have like hundreds of thousands of percent APY and everyone is just banking on the, like they've audited the code. But there's like, there's a game theoretical component to this where it's like you're trusting that the incentives set by the code are not going to be out competed by external incentives that are not modeled inside the system and are impinging on it. The same way that in theory, one of these proof of work blockchains can be cracked by some kind of alien super computer that comes in. It's like, oh, didn't see that coming.

Right? Again, back to the divine invasion. So all of us are placing our faith in this stuff. I think in a way it's kind of like desperate.

I think, you know, faith tends to emerge when you don't have enough information to make a confident decision and yet you have to make a decision. And actually, I think that's where we are, is that people are financially desperate enough to bet it all on the dog meme coin carnival playhouse or on rejecting that whole thing and doubling down on state actors or whatever. And these are in none of these cases or like just trust the science. We're not really talking about trusting the science.

We talked about C.T. Nagoya and a couple of us to go. Even experts have to basically just have faith in the hieroglyphics of other experts. That's no different from some feudal medieval farmer just taking at face value that stuff coming out of that Bible in written in Latin is what the priest is telling them.

It is. I don't know where you know what that sparks in you, but to me, it's not so much. I think you're right. Trust is not going away.

In fact, the need to trust one another is an important way is getting more and more intense as the world becomes more and more confusing, but that there's this other access which is faith and I didn't intend for this to become a conversation about faith. But I do think that like that something about what Mark Nelson in episode 94, I think called it the yoga of optimism is like you do these things as if they're going to work and you just pull the pin and pray, right? I like that the yoga of optimism. I think the, yeah, maybe I'm saying like a lot about saying this, but I think the trust is in the network of people.

I'm not sure it's in the algorithm or the device or the computer. It's an aggregation of reputation and conversations as this fascinating guy called Ronbert who was at Chicago University, he may have retired by now, but talks about the importance of gossip in sharing of information and how that relates to people's reputations. And he said something which is kind of obvious in hindsight that it never occurred to me until I heard him say it's saying that you don't own your reputation. It exists and lives and breathes in the conversations that people have about you.

So to your earlier question about why liminal is getting weirder and more interesting kind of opportunities is partly because I think rightly or wrongly we've been able to trigger some conversations, not a huge number, but enough we're cropping up on enough people's radars and it's been spoken about, I guess, highly enough that I think a lot of people will look at our website or listen to this conversation or the podcast that I do or whatever it is that we're putting out to the world and probably just say, hey, this doesn't make any sense to me and move on to the next thing. That 1% or that 0.1% or whatever the number is I don't know who think, hey, there's something interesting here, I want to know more. Then there's a high level of maybe it's not trust but certainly engagement to start with. So there's this kind of drip drip of trust or engagement that I'm seeing in my own life and my own work and I think that's kind of how I loosely would interpret what downs and blockchains enable.

It's that distribution and aggregation of all those tiny little raindrops of trust that is kind of distributed out there. But two things just quickly. One is, I was speaking to a guy earlier this afternoon who kind of positions himself as the no-code CTO. So he quite confidently says in a few years' time, five years' time, organizations won't need a chief technology officer or won't be able to afford one or you won't necessarily.

But certainly not one that's maintaining a big kind of code team because all of this stuff is kind of modularized and serviced, which I thought was interesting and I don't know if that's true or not but I'm just, that feels like that links a little bit to some of what you're saying. But in terms of faith, Yuval Harari made the case on a video that I watched a while ago, the author of Sapiens who I think studied philosophy as his degree once upon a time. He made the case quite convincingly, I thought that philosophy throughout history, it's been impossible to say in that era that the philosophers have lived whether they're right or wrong. But you can only really assess the true value of a philosopher and their philosophies, often generations later in terms of how their idea is propagated into the world.

That's how it's been historically. But he was making the case, and I think this is maybe true that philosophies get encoded in algorithms and we can see in real time in some cases whether they work or they don't work. So he was basically making the case slightly flippantly, but I think there's some truth in this, that if you want to go and study something practical and valuable and that will pay you lots of money, advice to young people what they should do with their lives and their education, go and study philosophy because it's much needed and we need philosophers who could tell stories about the world, not necessarily kind of code the algorithms, they of course we need that as well, but who can make sense of all this messiness, tell those stories, hypothesize a theory and then evolve that based on real time feedback. And so I thought that was interesting.

I don't know if that's true, but of course we've got a way to go, but that's from to mind as you were speaking. Well, I mean certainly something that comes up on the show a lot because of our attention to possible future historical significance or insignificance is that question of everybody's self justifying evolutionary narrative in which you get to say, oh well, I'm a philosopher and I'm here to tell you that the future needs philosophers. I'm an artist and I'm here to tell you that the future needs artists. Of course, it's true.

Of course it is. The question is, this seems fairly fundamental. I don't think that we're saying, oh well, I am a guy that goes around behind horse drawn carriages and sweeps the manure. Therefore, the future will need.

Okay, yeah, but at a deeper level, that's actually true. That's still true. We still have agents in the economy that perform whatever that function is now. So I don't think you're wrong.

I just think it's funny how that comes up. Well, yeah, yeah, no, I totally accept that challenge. That's you're completely right, of course, and I'm aware of, yeah, like I said at the beginning, it's an idea I used to talk about hiring T-shaped people that had a specialism, but then a sort of broad generalist set of abilities to talk to lots of different people, which got widely ripped off and copied and talked about in lots of different circles. I think I'm the hyphen on the top of the T, or once upon a time I might have had a downward stroke to my T in a number of different fields.

That is withering. But I think that we do need the horse poo super upper technology and the ultrasonic imaging specialists as I once was. Well, maybe that doesn't reside in a single mind, of course it can or a single capability. I don't know what I think.

I don't think I could do what I do without lots of different people who aren't like me. So I guess I'm, so I think if the world was just for the philosophers, that would be, you know, that wouldn't be a very functional world. But we definitely need a few. We need a little bit of everything I guess is maybe the answer.

Everything in moderation, including philosophers. That's a fabulous place to end it, but just for the sake of due diligence, I have to ask you if we start from the premise that the future is present or in some way, you know, oh, hey, look, the future is present. My kid is banging on the door. Hold on, baby girl.

So yeah, yes, ask not for whom the bell tolls. Well, come on in then. I'll let you the future. The future is in the room.

What's up? I have a chocolate milk. You want some chocolate milk? OK, come here.

Come here. You're going to sit here and you're going to wait. And so my friend Rowan gives his side of this conversation, OK? And he's going to answer a question for me about what he would like to know from the people living in the future of whatever time horizon you prefer.

If you had access to one sure thing about the future, what would it be? And if you wanted to tell the future something that you felt would be useful to them as a way of understanding us in this time from wherever they happen to be standing, what would that be? I want some chocolate milk. You're going to ask for chocolate milk.

It feels like a more achievable question for answering. It's just but how many times have I asked for chocolate milk? Whoa, there's two big questions. And you've been asked for chocolate milk.

You've been asked for chocolate milk, which feels like a more achievable question to answer. But so the first question is, what would I ask people of the future that we can learn from today and then vice versa? Yeah. So I mean, the question I've been fascinated with just recently and I've been asking everyone I've been talking to.

And I would also like to ask people in the future is what have you changed your mind about and why I guess I'm just interested in shifting sands and shifting opinions and shifting perspectives. So that would be interesting. And I think I'd learn something from that about my future fellows and wisdom that I can impart or I don't know what wisdom I can impart other than I'm glad to be having a conversation with these people and that you're there to have it. And how can we be better ancestors?

There's maybe a question I would ask, what can we do now that can best support them? And this is a question that conversation I'm having with younger people in my life as well. And maybe I'm not having it enough, but I'm certainly thinking about people around me in their 20s and my kids who are younger a little bit older than yours. But what can I do to build, to contribute to building a world that they want to grow up into?

So I don't have an answer to that. But that's a question that's a live issue for me right now in my life. What do your kids say? More chocolate milk.

My kids are a little bit older, so it's a slightly different version of that. I think in different ways, they don't say it like this, but I think they need love and they need encouragement to go out and experiment and they need permission to fail. And so I need to try to give them that as best I can. And that's what I'm striving to do.

Well, that's beautiful, Roland. Thank you. Thank you for being on the show. This was fun.

Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it was great fun. I hope it was fun for listeners. I feel like we just sort of bullshit it the whole time.

But like I hope it was fun too. That's what I like about conversations with you. Thank you. Well, I enjoyed it.

You don't need to go and get some chocolate milk. So go and go and be dad. Yeah, I do. Yes.

Yes. I'll go be dad. Thanks again for listening. Follow me on Twitter or Instagram at Michael Garfield.

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I'm excited to share with you. Thanks for holding tight. And until then, have a most excellent now.