community is as strong as it is interdependent, and that it is the strength of the community is directly proportional to the sort of severity of interdependence there is. But I like to say, a bowling league is a community because Frank needs you there on Tuesday night, but it's only so strong. Whereas Sebastian Younger writes this book, Tribe, where he talks about war platoons, where if Frank, if you're not there for him on Tuesday, he dies, right? There's a different level of interdependent community that comes from that.
And so I'm constantly trying to figure out how we can live in more interdependent ways in a society that is for both capitalist degrees and for convenience, pushing us towards further and further autonomy. Because interdependence is inconvenient. If the snow plow didn't come by and I had to shovel your driveway for you, that does something for us. But it's shitty for my day.
Well, we're wired, right? As social creatures, we've evolved for that. And it may be incubating, but there's a specific set of neurotransmitters that are reliant on that level of dynamism and the social sphere. And we all just went through a recently enormous disruption of that through COVID.
And I think as we all get to be here now, it institutes together, and it really called into questions what that interdependence looks like and why. Like, I can have somebody go shopping for me. I mean, never seen anything other than their first name. I mean, they just might drop it off at my door and I don't even see their face or say thank you in person and the leverages that inherent social dynamism.
And this is a wonderful example of the sort of affirmation of the value of that, right? Like, we also had to leave our abodes today or wherever we woke up this morning, we had to head out and eventually wound up here. And I worked today and it was fairly demanding. I'm sure lots of you had responsibilities today, but you're still here.
Like, it was inconvenient, right? To show up and do this. And yet, this is an incredibly meaningful affirmation of why that inconvenience is net positive. This is what we're built to do.
And I just really applaud any efforts that we could muster within our also inherent laziness to rise to the occasion and to continue to embrace the chaos that is our fellow beings. Greetings, Future Fossils, and welcome to episode 207. The podcast that explores our place and time. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and tonight it is the eve of my son's second birthday.
By the time you hear this show, I will be, or will have been, bouncing in a giant trampoline playground with him and my four-year-old daughter. And something I've noticed upon becoming a parent is that I have reignited my passion for excellent playground design. Shout out to my old friend and former roommate, Toforsype, who actually did work professionally on playground design for a while before he and I were friends. And shout out to the cacophony society in Suicide Club, who saw the future of the city as a playground, and hugely inspired the foundational philosophy of Burning Man.
Shout out to the situationists who saw the ability to redefine and claim an urban space through playful movement. Shout to parkour, every act of re-appropriation, of rediscovery, and creating spaces that intentionally afford that kind of movement, of agency from the center to the edge. That's an aesthetic that fits into a larger conversation about what it is to raise something well. This is a topic that I've been exploring on future fossils since forever.
Really, this was a principle preoccupation in mind since well before I became a parent, because it's just so obviously the case that we don't just make technologies, but we actually teach them now as well. And as the old song goes, teach your children well. So I'm especially delighted to share this episode with you, which was originally planned as a trial out between me and the original co-host, Evan Skytree Snyder, and my friend Ryan Madsen, who was a co-founder of Red Penguin Records in Colorado, and then later the Jump Carrot Social Club, an amazing space for all ages where we had this live recording, and ultimately invited up a number of other very thoughtful people from the audience to weigh in on this, including Roger Tounis, Aaron Gabriel Nyer, and Juicy Life, or at least that's the only name I ever got from him, a very bolder 2023 conversation, if I may say so, squarely planted at the intersection between holistic, full body thinking and feeling, on the one hand, and crazy future tech stuff on the other. But before we dive into a fascinating conversation about what it means to steward something, what it means to not just create, but also parent and care for a Frankenstein conversation.
I want to thank Michael Fishman, Matt Buttrill, Jeffrey Silverman, Kaza Ratica, Giuseppe Alcure, Wetflick Studios, and Don Hillman for being the newest to join the generous ranks of folks who are helping me not to totally broke right now, as I look for new ways to apply myself. And Future Fossils is my sole source of self-employment income. Yikes! Well, folks, if you're listening to this and you appreciate the work you sent this site to on the show, I am currently available for contract in strategic advisory positions or short-term consults.
And thank you from the bottom of my heart to a few hundred people supporting the show on patreon.com slash Michael Garfield, or Michael Garfield at substack.com. My entire family thanks to you. And we're doing extremely fun things. Right now I'm hosting a newer learning web course on the science and philosophy of the Jurassic Park films concomitant with a series of boisterous watch alongs.
If that sounds like your thing, the course is entirely by donation. And you can join us whenever you want without feeling like you missed previous sessions because they are available as recorded. Also, I'm setting up for a whole series of delightful book clubs. And I've had to release some music I have been working on for years and years and years.
I hope you find me on Patreon or substack if you haven't already. And again, thank you all. And with that, here is a wonderful conversation. I'm very glad to have had live at Juncker at Special Club in Boulder, Colorado on June 9th, 2023.
Enjoy. And then please go leave a sterling review. Great, thanks everybody. Tonight we have Evan Snyder, dear old friend and original co-host of Future Fossils.
And we have Ryan Madsen, who I've actually known for even longer than Evan, but only internally. And we don't really know where this conversation is going. But I think what I told Ryan was that I wanted to start by talking about this time as being unusual time where it seems unusual to us living through it. And to think about responsibility.
What does it mean to be good makers, good parents? What does it mean to launch an organization? What does it mean to steward an ecosystem right now when everything seems like it feels up for grabs? So yeah.
I also just wanted to add to that just thanks to all of you for being here tonight. This is a perfect little intimate crowd. So this is a sort of organically grown in the moment family experience in a way. So a lot of familiar faces here tonight, and glad to see all of you and a lot of new faces and some of the folks I just met.
So just thanks again for showing up tonight. There's a lot going on, including regional burn and plenty to do in Boulder as always. So this is a great setting. And thanks to Ryan for hosting us in his establishment.
This is a very special place. It's only a few blocks from where I live with my fiance Sean who's here in the back as well. And I have always wanted to stop in here. I've always been curious seeing the structures emerging above the fence line as I drive past here on Pearl.
But it's my first time stopping in. It will definitely not be my last. So just thanks again to Ryan and all the folks here at the John Kerry Social Club. Yeah, this is two of my dreams coming together.
I think this is a pity seat. I'm up here because I have privileges of the space, but I love to listen to things like this. I pay attention and will getting to do this in this space is an incredible collision of dreams. Thanks.
Awesome. I'm very thankful to be a part of that. So I don't want to just for the record, you're a successful entrepreneur and I'm an unemployed weirdo. So this is not a pity situation.
I'm an employed weirdo in the middle here. Yeah, so I want to pitch these questions to the crowd also to the extent that you're a crowd. There's a fine of you. But I want to just, we have a serious brain trust here.
And I just, I want to make this a conversation where anyone feels like they can contribute by which I mean, just come sit here and I'll give you a minute on the mic to say your piece if you're so inspired. Yeah, so anyway, I've just been thinking a lot. This is where my head's been at lately. And this is what I warned Ryan and I believe of him that we'd be talking about, which is.
I don't know if I got a warning, but let's do it. That makes it sound like there's more to play on this. It's come closer. I was just talking about this with Roger moment before the show, which is that several years ago I started thinking about all of the tools that we have, these new tools that are data powered, computation powered, psychedelic, right?
Inherently, in the sense of psychedelic being mind manifesting, that these are tools that the most vocal and eloquent proponents of these tools talk about them as closing the gap between the imagination and what is physically instantiated. Right, obviously your imagination is, what was it? Vsauce talking about the internet weighing as robbery about as much as it's still like your imagination is still a physical object, like memes are a physical thing. But at any rate, 3D printing stuff out of a brain scanner, these kinds of things.
And I think recently as the generative AI systems have come on specifically and really leapt into public awareness and gotten so much better and are being now deployed and all of these things that were as the end consumer, as like the chimp with an iPad, millions and millions of people are using, billions, that it's gone for me from this sort of, oh, the internet is a psychedelic. That's fun to think about. Oh shit, everyone in the world is having a trip that they didn't necessarily agree to right now, or they're surrounded by people who are tripping and no matter how deep you escape into the woods, that's still happening. So it's like suddenly everything that I'm learning from all my OG, like deadhead, fan, old hippie people is suddenly applicable to how to be a good borg.
And that strikes me as really ironic, and this is the last piece I'll say about it, and I just invite you to riff, you all to riff on this, which is that I always felt like there was a seed of truth in the channel teachings of Abraham Law of Attraction kind of stuff, but the cultural presentation of that stuff really pissed me off. Because it's like victim blaming, and everybody's focused on getting a better car, or like three girlfriends or whatever shit. And I was like, there's something, whatever's right about this, there's something wrong in the telling, it's coming through a dirty window. Now I'm like, this is a core competency among people who can just think up whatever they want, and then post it to social media, and then suddenly you're like, whoops, you're seeing this now.
You're like, whoop, somebody, the people that are just obsessed with hillporn imagery on mid-journey, and are just like flooding my social media feeds with this, this is the absolute worst part of your own, this is the darkest corner of your psyche, and you're just like vomiting it into the common space. I've avoided that, by the surprise, this is a new phenomenology to me, so I will continue to avoid that, it sounds like. So the question is a general question about how do we think about our responsibility to one another, and to those coming generations in terms of, we watched The Incredibles the other day, and there's that great line where the villain, who is this sort of rejected tech wizard, says, I'm gonna release all of these tools for everyone to use, all these tools based on your superpowers, and then everyone will be a superhero, and I will be the one that sold it to them, and then when everyone's a superhero, no one will be. And it's okay, that checks, that's exactly what's happening.
Exactly what's happening. It's like Elon Musk is, I will be the one who, you know, and then you will all appreciate my jokes. And it's, so yeah, so how do we all, this is a community sense making thing, like how do you get grip on this situation, and what are the, how are you thinking through all of this? Right now, anyway.
I just wanted to add really quickness to interject this for a moment, but older is pretty ideal, urban, suburban outdoor environment in which to bring up this particular subject, because the three line here is that all of those aspects, the old deadheads wandering around on Pearl Street, on a 10 strip, into somebody wandering around with an Apple Vision Pro next year on Pearl Street, all of it is pretty continuous here, it's a very suitable environment to bring up this dialogue. Ryan, you don't think that's that? You own the business here, you've been on Pearl also. Honestly, I'm still getting my head around the psychedelics of AI and the internet, and the way I've always thought about that before, I think psychedelics experiences have sometimes a connotation that comes with wisdom, of seeing visions, of seeing the future of helpful, which obviously is not always true.
And I'm trying to apply that now to my filter of understanding this technology. I think regardless what these tools are, what the internet was, what AI is now, is intellect amplifier, and amplifier of many kinds. We can, as I've heard now, the phrase we apply to coffee do stupid things faster with more energy. Now is our amplification based on this technology, which has me constantly wondering who we are as a technology.
This is not going to make us wiser, like tripping might. It's just going to enhance what we are currently aiming towards. For me, the reflection is who are we as parents of this, you know, birthed technology, this amplifier that is, we're going to do stupid things faster with more energy. Yeah, I think about it in terms of, that of course being one direction can go, right, of being a walking semi-permeable membrane, which biologically speaking, we all have in our cell walls are epidermis.
Basically the idea being that there's a boundary between us and the physical world, but that boundary in the case of our skin is semi-permeable. Some things can be accepted into it, and some things cannot. And sometimes these system malfunctions and things that are not meant to get into that system do get in. And it's like a biological gatekeeper to provide a buffer, so that you don't completely close yourself off, because of course you just should roll up and die.
But if you take in everything, the same would be true, right? So there's this middle ground. So seeing this increasingly complex emergent phenomena of machine intelligence, and now colloquially speaking, AI, is something that I'm both very excited about and very cautious around. And I see that in most individuals I talk with about this subject.
And I'd imagine this is not all we're gonna talk about tonight, so if you're burnt out on AI, I'm sure we're gonna segue to something else, because Michael has a way of doing that. And with all of our power and bond, I'm sure we'll roll this into something new and fresh here in a moment. Together you can stop me. Yeah.
We'll see, we'll see. But essentially I've been watching all this unfold, starting with I guess going back to in terms of the visual output, like the Google Deep Dream, right, which had a very psychedelic quality to it. And of course going into mid-journey and now increasingly complex forms of artificial intelligence tools. I recently became a beta tester for the Google Test Kitchen Suite, and there's one in particular that's able to generate music.
It's a little bit better than some its predecessors like Refusion, but it's not quite there yet. And allegedly for some pretty recent legal developments, it's not something you can copyright. So I can't make it a track entirely out of some AI-generated output and call it mine. But the way I've been approaching it is very similar to, and legal disclaimer here may or may not have done this.
When sampling, sometimes you live from a source that may be copy-written, but if you demolish it enough, if you slice it and change it, you use granular synthesis, whatever it is. It's already 10 different, something like that. Sure, yeah. Maybe take a sample from Jurassic Park, which Mike will probably narrate from beginning to end in his dreams, let alone in real space, and completely smash it into something new that he would not recognize.
I mean, that's a challenge that I'll try to take up at some point. But that's how I envision utilizing AI tools going forward is just another opportunity to get a novel sound. That'll probably just go in and slice up until it's unrecognizable and combine it with other things and press on. So it's very similar, at least right now, to field recording, just going outside with a field recorder and picking up the sounds in my environment or using a tool like a box called Ether, which is basically a radio receiver that takes in all frequencies at once.
You get a bunch of random noise, and you press it up against chain link fences and use that as an antenna. And here, 15 different radio DJs all talking at once in this random clutter. It's super fascinating. But for me, personally, the Google Test Kitchen results I've had are not too dissimilar from that.
It's just one of many sample fools that I have available. And I may or may not use it. It also isn't necessarily as compelling to me as just taking a sample of the kids playing outside because they're a couple of them. And Michael's children, and it's a very direct representation of where I am now.
And I like to use my music as a diary, as a way of logging where I was at that moment in time. And the AI tools that I've accessed too so far are so much removed from that. So they will have a place and a setting. And I'm using some plugins now that use machine learning to assist with my mastering process.
And that's greatly accelerated my ability to master my own music. And because I'm learning from it, as well as from my own experience, it's accelerated my ability to listen almost impartially to my music because I have to help her as they're at all times. And of course, I have buddies that can go and listen to my music on their system and get their input. But I have another familiar.
I'll be at a very unfamiliar one. So I just want to point that Evan and I, both being fans of boards of Canada, and everything that you're saying about sampling reminds me that music has the rights to children. There is something about when my daughter was six months old, and I took her to Meow Wolf when they had Microsoft at Meow Wolf for this invite-only thing where they had a hemispherical 64 DSLR camera array, and they were scanning people into their augmented reality app, the portal bay app, where you could make a miniatureized version of yourself like you're seeing with all of these AR toys now where you scan the barcode on the dinosaur, and then you can put the dinosaur anywhere. And so it's okay, you and I, before the show, we were talking about consent.
And consent is something that exists in a frame, like the socio-cultural frame of a modern society with a modern idea of a bounded self. When anthropologists go into these foraging societies, and the foragers just raid their suitcase. And so that's because they see you as part of the tribe. They're not thinking about personal property in the same way that you are as a modern American.
And I look at where I am now, and the boundaries around all this stuff, and so where I'm going with this is that we were talking about things not being copyrighted. It's like I'm watching all of these people in the art of my friends, and people I respect, artists I've always respected, that are really pushing back against the way that the corpus of human cultural output has been hovered up into these systems to train them, and they're like, no, this is wrong. And it's okay, but you only believe that this is wrong, because you have come up in a paradigm in which you, as someone who has refined the raw material of your being through practice, have developed a kind of talent or expertise that sets you apart from other people and allows you to compete more effectively within an IP regime where maybe you have a small chance of succeeding professionally as an artist, and feeding yourself, but most likely you'll die in the street. And is that really, when all these people are begging Disney to extend the domain of copyright, to protect this sort of what I want to be in the Hunger Games, is that really the desirable solution here, or is what is needed a whole new kind of construction of intellectual property based on a new construction of self that emerges out of these networks' digital infrastructures.
And so I'm just gonna toss this to you, Ryan, at this point, because you're holding a space where people, you're basically holding a kind of Professor X kind of academy here, you're teaching people to empower themselves with these tools and to use them carefully and always keep three legs on the three limbs on the playground at any time, and there's a really interesting balance of evoking a kind of plasticity and playfulness in the childlike spirit in the adults here, but also empowering people of all ages with these competencies that a lot of adults don't even have. And so yeah, this is, do want anybody from the audience to kind of sit in on this particular piece of it, if you're interested. I'm really curious to know how this sort of egotilic piece of this, how you all see the tension between the reasonable humanistic demands for dignity within a system that we've inherited are going to be reconciled with this sort of, now everything belongs to everyone, and you're everyone at the same time through a Kenji direct brain sharing shit that's coming down the bike, right? You're machine translation layer with dolphins now.
Right. So if you want to feel free, but. And it's a purpose of the recording of the podcast, I just want to mention that if you do feel compelled to share something, feel free to grab a mic, or just try to to us and we can repeat it just so that anybody listening later on on a podcast platform will be able to interpret the contribution you've made, we want to make sure that's cleared everybody. Right, but if you do come up, give your name first.
Okay, anyway. Yeah, I. We're not all one person yet. I love this picture of this interconnected, all this one mind hive mind society where we're all ruffling through each other suitcases.
But I do think that there is a certain type of like technological psycho spiritual bypassing there, which like the fact that we are upset as artists that are work is being hoovered up by Google, by the corporations are that they are not part of the tribe, not whatsoever. In fact, they're part of this giant exploited machine that is going to ruin your life and is for their private and soul benefit. And I think that we have to, I mean, there's a much more fundamental restructuring of corporate law of business, of economy that would have to take place first before I'm happy to hive mind with Google. So what does that look like?
I love the bumper sticker. I don't believe corporations are people when Texas executes one. But then like how do I feel like the layers that are coming online now are basically going to, they seem like they may level the playing field as far as coordinated collective human action against corporate superpower. Like that there was that leaked Google memo, right?
About how open source language models were lapping Microsoft and Google. And so maybe we're at the beginning of seeing the snow speeders knocking down the ATATs. This was the dream of the internet. It was going to democratize the people to give everyone the power of knowledge.
But I think that we're also moving so quickly to the point where power differential is so grand that the many still don't have it. And can the megacorp like common deer at any point in time what they want first and silo it and wall it off in all the ways they're able to first. Let's let open source thrive exactly until I need it to be private and I'm going to steal it all, wall it off, block that, love to believe in this idea that the democratization like this power of open source is going to allow us all to challenge the status quo. And in fact, it must.
It literally has to, but I am pessimistic. Yeah, I'm going to say the same essentially. So I was actually talking to another engineer about this morning, a former engineer for Amper robotics here in Denver area and now works as a engineer in contracting contract manufacturing team that we're working with right now. And we were discussing the recent events in AI and riffing off of the unveiling of the Apple vision system which may or may not become a thing all at Google Glass or not.
I'm rooting for it. Both. You would. I wore my first Google Glass and Michael's presence after taking it off his face.
So essentially we both though talking to this other engineer this morning almost immediately jinxed each other by saying, you'd rather just go out and dig in the mud what the kids are doing outside. It almost drives this compulsion to embrace the true deep elemental physicality. Yeah, there's me wearing Michael's Google Glass back in 2013 in New York City. It almost drives this deeper compulsion to seek more rooted element of my existence.
Not to reject it, but again, to come back to the semi permeable membrane. I'm interested. I'm not going to deny myself the ability to use these tools. But I also drink COVID happen to dive into modular synthesis and build up several rigs which are on stage and dive into novel input sources using minerals and other natural sources.
And I'm referring to that in a soft kind of fashion as geosonification, f off of data sonification. And didn't think about the fact that here in 2023, it would be something that AI effectively can't touch. It's inherently physical. It's directly connected to the natural world.
That's where my inputs are coming from. And by my standard sort of production methodology, I put everything together in the end stage in the final assembly in Adah in Ableton. And maybe the Google test kitchen or other tools in the future will start to increasingly or asymptotically approximate that. But this other side hobby I have in music now is almost until there's a physical Android, like data that we got for a bit lower, are sitting next to me.
That's just for me as a meat bag to experience. And it's interesting. It makes me feel a little safer in the semi permeable space. I'm watching and seeing what's happening in machine learning.
And I've worked a lot in automation and what was increasingly becoming full autonomy in robotics. And this is something that's inherently technological, but it's very meaty. It's very substantive and it's very satisfying. And it's in the moment.
It's coming out of the materials and the conditions around me. And I feel very pleased by the fact that I find myself here with that system available for me to dig into. And there's no computer on stage. This is the first time I think in a long time.
I've had no laptop. And yeah, there are some microprocessors in some of my modules, but they're not connected to the internet. One of them does have its own Wi-Fi hotspot, but we'll ignore that for the sake of convenience. I see somebody from the stage or the flooring hysterendas, so.
No computers, just a few microprocessors. They're not connected to the internet. One's got Wi-Fi. Let me permeable.
Let me permeable. I love the circle there from playing in the mud, through to the technological explosion back to the crystals and the rocks that you're working with. And when we opened the Junkyard Social Club, we had pivoted out of another business. Some of us had worked on prior to that, where this very building was purchased to be a much larger scale for the Steen Science Museum.
And it was an incredible vision, but very technological. We had an entire black box theater that kids would be running around in VR and AR goggles and an incredible 3D sound room and all these wonderful dreams. But when we did make the pivot to Junkyard Social Club, there was this like, aha, yes, of course, when it comes to kids that you put a kid in some goggles and they, you might blow their mind, they might see the aspiration to what technology can do, but their leap that they have to make before they think that they are capable of any of that is drastic and there's no visibility into the engineering. It's magic.
Whereas if you give them a bucket and a rope, those same principles that in the end build this console or build a set of AR goggles are actually being practiced out of way that a kid can touch and we see it every day. It's very satisfying as well, honestly, to just remember this is all here. The playgrounds are still standing and then kids are climbing around on them and maybe getting some splinters, but they signed a waiver and got plenty of splinters without one when I was a kid and was worth it. So it's very much a reminder of that deep seated need to dig into the world and sometimes literally dig a hole just because.
Yeah, the simulated steak tastes delicious. Yeah, hey, my name is Juicy Life and some of the themes that I'm picking up on artificial intelligence and also how to reconcile with where we're at and our culture and society was so much that's evolving, so much that's happening, it's such a quick rate, it's impossible really for most people, anybody, really to track everything that's happening. The really big core thing that comes up for me is how I reconcile it is meaning. What is the meaning?
What is the purpose? I know you're evolutionary biology, I love to pull from evolutionary biology, right? Like, what is our evolutionary trajectory here? What are we doing?
And to me, what has helped me in my journey is going on this path of discovering what my purpose is in the larger hole, right? Like the stomach cells are in the body operating for their own, like the purpose of the whole, doing their own individual task. And I think they were in the same stage of our evolution, endosymbiotic evolution, growing from bacteria viruses to single cell organisms to multi-cell organisms to trillions of cells. Now we're at a planetary scale, but the problem is that the underlying operating system that people are operating on is the individualistic, separate level of consciousness.
Even in the term artificial intelligence, words are important, they're like magic. Artificial inherently deems it outside of ourself or separate than ourselves. I actually prefer the term integrated intelligence. We're working with it, we're working with computers, not just with quote unquote artificial intelligence, but with these cloud infrastructures that have been built too.
And I like to think of it as like the caterpillar to the butterfly. We had to go through this separate capitalistic system, developing all these things, using oil, building the manufacturing capabilities in the computers to be able to jiu-jitsu, the material is there. The caterpillar grew and it dissolved to a point that where then you could reform using new imaginal cells. And so what I see in me doing my work and standing more in my purpose, discovering that within me, making steps, making failures, but learning in the process of who I am and what I'm here to do, I see a more congruent, more aligned, more beautiful reality showing up around me, which is also reflective of the beautiful space that we're in now that has been cultivated by another beautiful creator in the world.
And I think the more that we, I know you're an artist as well. I think the more that we step up into our artistry and our creativity is really the turning point of our culture and society. Recognizing that we are artists, we are creators and everything that we do and every breath that we take, we are destroying and we are creating. The more conscious that we can become of this, more aligned and the more congruent and the more beautiful the reality becomes around us.
And again, with the scientific view, oftentimes puts to the measuring instruments outside of ourselves, as opposed to actually saying, we are the most advanced technology. And what does it look like to optimize ourselves? Not just physically with the biohacking and everything that they talk about there, not just through the consciousness, through psychedelics, but actually weaving those together as a whole and who we are and what the reality experience that we can have around us when we are coming from a more aligned congruent place. And so that's what I see and that's what inspires me to move forward in the world with as many crazy things that are happening.
Yeah, excellent. I think we're starting to get to Terrence McEnany and territory with the Escaton and also a virgins in the force. So it does seem apparent to me that we're reaching some sort of pivot point, which direction it goes? I don't know, I'm hopeful for your perception and integration with the world being what tips us into a new paradigm for the positive.
And I see that as a very strong potential, but there is the potential for the inverse. Yeah, so in thinking about all of this, and again, I was talking about Roger before the show, I was like, it used to be the case that I thought, like being overwhelmed by all of this myself, I was like, okay, there's something that we can learn from the practices of psychedelic harm reduction to mitigate people's like immunological psychic response to this change. Just do what Brand says in his book, The Clock of the Long Now, when progress happens to fast people call it change and they start to reject it, they resist it. And in the sense that quote, a demon is an angel denied, that whether one experiences nervous system intensity as pain or pleasure has to do with the dukkha, right?
It has to do with the amount of resistance to that, which it might be totally reasonable, right? Like it may be that you're just not acclimated to that. And it's just so this constriction around this stuff is perfectly understandable. But for me, the sort of open question with this is you seem relatively well-disposed to surfing whatever kind of weirdness might unfold, but not everyone is.
And I'm sitting here trying to think about how my mentor, Richard Doyle, talked a lot about, he prefers the term ecodelect over the term psychedelic. His whole point is these adjuncts to our intelligence make us exquisitely sensitive to minor linguistic variations, like to the algorithms with which we code to set and setting, with which we code these trips. They expose the nerve, they allow us to meta-program things in the language generally. And so the language that we use to describe this up is extremely important.
So yeah, so talking about it in some other way that artificial intelligence seems to matter. What else do you see as important in the way that we can flip this script from, rather it's the more we talk about trying to prevent a terminator scenario, the more likely it becomes because I'm not hearing no. It's just hearing terminators. So there's a question for me becomes one of technologizing attention.
We've already learned to do this very well, Tristan Harris in the Center for Humane Technology and all this conversation about the attention economy and the capture and the financialization of attention. Okay, great. But we're at a point now where I think it's important for us to hammer the cannons back into bells, to decide how we're gonna use these technologies that started out as weapons, effectively, and to use them for quote unquote deliberation of consciousness or for the establishment of a planetary ethos and practice of stewardship. And then so this is the open question with which I wanna bring this conversation to climax, which is how do you, how do any of you sitting here see, like how are you thinking about encouraging people to turn their attention toward the best of what is possible here because that's what's gonna be amplified?
Yeah, I just wanna add one more thing too, before Roger, you hop on, I'm sure you'll have something awesome to say. But you see, just thank you for your contribution to the conversation. We've been talking a lot about technologies and these esoteric subjects and you brought a lot of warmth and human emotion and feeling to this conversation. And that means a great deal.
And I think something that we could do well to integrate further into these discussions that are sometimes more lofty, essentially. So thanks for bringing that heart. Thank you, I really appreciate that. And one of the last bits that I just wanna pepper in here is another word, which is dialogue, which Latin etymology is flow, logos is meaning.
And so when we can be in dialogue, it's a flow of meaning greater than any individual can bring through a loan. And I just wanna honor that as a space that we're cultivating for something greater than ourselves to emerge. Thank you so much for having us. Hi, I'm Roger Tonus.
I'm a geek. I've got lots of AA degrees. And I've been studying merchant complexity for this 30 years. Answer your question, Michael, about what do we do to make people see this differently, to see that this technology is not just a separator, financialization, it's gotta be something that gives people two things.
And every human being in this room and every human being on this planet, regardless of age you wanna feel safe and you wanna feel in control. And that's different for everyone. Okay, so if we're gonna ask technologists, we're gonna make people feel safe with AI, so they're not gonna be worried about lore or the Borg. Then we have to take the responsibility to communicate what's happening in a way that makes people feel safe and in control.
And to do that, you have to understand them. You don't just have to be spinning around in your head, which I do too much and obviously you guys all do too. And you see as well, it's a responsibility. You have to communicate and communicate with dialogos, right?
You have to get into a flow. You have to bring them into the flow, right? And as engineers, sometimes there's scientists who are like, oh, marketing, that doesn't. But we have to become marketers of the value of what we're doing for the world.
And we're doing a really bad job of it because all we're doing on the internet or whatever is arguing about whether it's gonna be the Terminator or not, is this gonna be Skynet? And the answer is, whatever we choose, and you alluded to that in an earlier comment. And so I just ask everybody to think about that. What makes you feel safe and in control and communicate that to the people so that they understand why you're uncomfortable with technology.
But then we have the responsibilities, technologies that they're pushing this technology. And it's our responsibility to communicate better. And to dial it down from extremely high level places that we love to play in. And you guys all love to play it because you're here.
We have to, it's not dumbing down. It's bringing it down into sort of a gut, right? And I believe we're in this circular spiral. And we spiraled out of tribal.
We spiraled out of everybody on everything. And the reason why is because we could only get 150 people, the Dunbar number, right? We could only cooperate to that level. So this entire last 10,000 years since the plow ruined the tribe and animus and all those things.
We're in a 10,000 year spiral and it's coming to a head right now. Can we use the technology spiraling to raising the Dunbar number to billions, right? So they won't kill each other. So anyway, those are my comments.
Really love what you guys are saying. Thank you, Madam. Thanks for having me. That piggyback's very much off of what Juicy shared as well.
Just bringing the heart to the enterprise desire to explore and satisfy our curiosity and manifest these new ideas in physical form that can interact with others and create new paradigms, right? Like ultimately has to be driven by the desire to serve the greater good in the community and the just joy that it brings us to see other people empowered and laughing and creating with these tools. Absolutely. And helping other people see themselves as brilliant.
My wife wrote a book called The Art of the Lamb and a Practical Guide to Inclusive Leadership. And she downloaded this concept one day in our closet. And she goes, oh my god, I got a download. I'm like, what is it?
It's an acronym. I'm like, oh, right. I'm an electrical engineer. I love acronym.
And she says, what's the acronym? It's Shuvah, SHUVA. And she said, this is the ultimate superpower. And she's going to do a TEDx talk actually in September on this.
And it's to be seen, heard, understood, valued, and appreciated. And that's the thing that we all want individually. That's what our uniqueness wants. We want to be shuvat.
But there's also, we got to turn that around and shuvat the collective, shuvat the group. And we're all afraid that if we pay attention to the collective, we get sucked into this hive mind. And we have all these bad things about the sky nuts and the borx and all that. The reality is, that's where we're headed.
We just got to do a good job of it, right? Because you can optimize. It's like a multivariable optimization problem, which is something I did for many years. It's a control system.
And then you've got to feel it, right? You've got to optimize the need to be uniquely seen as a snowflake, but also to be part of something bigger than yourself. There's a snowflake, totally uniqueness. And then there's the ocean, everything's the same, at the same time.
That's what we're looking for. Is that balance of two variables? And how do we do that? Technology can help us do that and scale it past 150 people.
Yeah. Roger, I want to highlight two things I heard. One thing I think we can turn into a very tangible call. Something that we need is to relinquish our society's belief that technology and science should be agnostic.
And it never is. It never is. We need a call on engineers, on scientists, to build into the technology, to the science, and inherent moral code. And this is not something that is added on later through regulation or in addendum.
But that is somehow inherent to the system itself. As well as the rules of robotics, essentially. Are those hard-coded yet and Teslas? I don't know.
Yeah, but if you've looked at it, I've got a graph on my phone of what happens if you actually do this. I don't know. Let me see if I can pick this up. I'll put it in the show notes.
But most implementations of asthma's laws result in like catastrophe. And so I think that what, because that's the whole thing, is like the alignment problem with AI is due to the fact like the same reason Jurassic Park failed, right? Which is like you can't conceive of every edge case. So it's like you have like the sort of the reason it's going to take so goddamn long to get driverless cars everywhere, like they were hyped to be, is because the trolley problem is not one fork.
It's like this fractal thing. And like you're always going to hit somebody. I was just bitching at Wall Street Bros. on Twitter today about how you talk about like profit.
And it's a profit is actually just simplifying your value model so that it looks like you're creating something that you've extracted. And so the question of like how do you run a business that's going to be sustainable in the long term is like how can you expand to consider all of the people that your revenue model is going to screw and then include them in the conversation of the stewardship of that project so that maybe the kids are mining where Earth minerals in the Congo or whatever are actually getting paid fairly et cetera. And then of course you've got to figure out how to got it. Anyway, that's my masteroids first, please.
Yeah, so in order to make these systems inherently ethical, we can't code for that. They're learning from us the way that the kids are. You have to be good. And then the thing is just going to learn your goodness from you.
And like any rules that you try to lay down are going to be oppressive in another 20 years. And that's like the Jeffersonian Revolution window. Anyway, how do you think? Sorry.
I was going to say that your point. If you're familiar with Daniel Smocktenberger, he has a project called their Conceilience Project. And he wrote a paper called Technology is Not Values Neutral. How you make it value specific.
So what you're saying, we have to take the responsibility to what I'm saying. It's through omneconsideration. Omneconsideration. And the big challenge we have in what Smocktenberger talks about is if people slow down to consider these harmful externalities that might come out of unintended consequences like you were talking about, then you're going to lose in a game that we played today.
But we've got to change the game. And if we use technology to make the consideration of harmful externalities of technology faster than people who are focused on the financialization of everything, then all of a sudden, then we can beat that. That's what he calls a multipolar trap. And that's what we need to do.
We need to put technology in service of a better humanity. And that's something that came to me like 20 years ago, across the street from Bell Labs when I was working there. Technology and service of a better humanity. The reason why is because my friend brought his Unix manuals to have beers with me.
I'm like, seriously, you brought your Unix manuals to the bar. And what's wrong with you? That's technology for its own sake. We're going to put technology and service of a better humanity.
I think there's a question there of the Shishona Zubaf, who gets to decide who decides, who has the power to direct this use of these powerful technologies that we're gaining. And there is the people usurping the open source. And we just hope we get there faster than the corporate or otherwise terrorists that are going to do nefarious things. But I should want to call out one other thing that I heard in what you were saying.
You listed it at control and safety as things that the two things that people are seeking. In what you said, I heard so much about communication, collaboration. And I would love to say that the third thing would be belonging. And for me, and one of the principles that we try to pull into the Junk Art Social Club is this belief that a community is as strong as it is interdependent.
And that it is the strength of the community is directly proportional to the sort of severity of interdependence there is. So I'd like to say a bowling league is a community because Frank needs you there on Tuesday night. But it's only so strong. Whereas Sebastian Younger writes this book, Tribe, where he talks about war platoons, where if Frank, if you're not there for a month, Tuesday, he dies.
There's a different level of interdependent community that comes from that. And so I think I'm constantly trying to figure out how we can live in more interdependent ways in a society that is for both capitalist degrees and for convenience, pushing us towards further and further autonomy. Because interdependence is inconvenient. It's really inconvenient.
If the snow plow didn't come by and I had to shovel your driveway for you, that does something for us. But it's shitty for my day. Well, we're wired as social creatures. We've evolved for that.
And it may be inconvenient. There's a specific set of neurotransmitters that are reliant on that level of dynamism and the social sphere. And we all just went through recently an enormous disruption of that through COVID. And I think as we all get to be here now in situ together, and it really called into question what that interdependence looks like and why.
Like somebody goes shopping for me. And I mean, never seen anything other than their first name. They just might drop it off in my door and I don't even see their face or say thank you in person. And it deleverages that inherent social dynamism.
And this is a wonderful example of the sort of affirmation of the value of that. Like we also had to leave our abodes today or wherever we woke up this morning, we had to head out and eventually want to appear. I worked today and it was fairly demanding. I'm sure lots of you had responsibilities today, but you're still here.
It was inconvenient to show up and do this. And yet this is an incredibly meaningful affirmation of why that inconvenience is net positive. This is what we're built to do. And I just really applaud any efforts that we could muster within our also inherent laziness to rise to the occasion and to continue to embrace the chaos that is our fellow beings and ourselves within that frothy quantum foam of social dynamics.
Amen. So further than just the sense of belonging and control and safety that you get from interdependence, I actually think that being needed is actually a deep source of purpose. And it's in that feeling of being needed that we derive a sense of purpose. And so coming back to some of the things that Juicy said, like how do we aspire?
How do we become the mind that we want to be? That's a great question. And I think the way is because we alternate too much between optimizing for me versus optimizing for we. And we need to do those in parallel.
If you're only optimizing for we, but what you find out is if you optimize for both at the same time, you optimize both. So by creating that interdependent web, it's good for me. But at the same time, I'm creating that web, make it also make it good for me, but also we. And so they're self-enforcing if we do this correctly.
And we've over rotated. And the Buddha came up with the five attachments about the ego thousands of years ago, right? After the plow came in and created this stratification and city states and things like that, as opposed to this dynamic balanced we and me, right? And we need to, again, to use the technology to get back to balancing me with we.
And what we'll find out is we'll optimize both. And it's not a zero-sum game, right? That's scarcity thinking. Then we could store calories in the form of weak because we have the plow, right?
That brought on the scarcity economy. And it's been 10,000 years of scarcity as opposed to now what we have to spin into as abundance or we're gonna have infinite scarcity to ourselves. This is the mythology. The story.
Just, you said some things that I feel like are, I'm just gonna play the conflict angle here because I'm sitting in the middle. When I hear you talking about being able to coordinate at the scale of billions of people, in spite of the fact that as E.O. Wilson made it clear that we have these god-like technologies, medieval institutions and paleolithic brains. And we are not capable, like I was talking about, what's using what I got here?
I was like, I'm at the point now where I feel like I need Apple Vision just in order to automatically bring the name up of everybody I run into. So I can be like, oh, we met at a rise festival in 2014. I've reached far exceeded my ability to contextualize all of my social relationships. And this is creating all kinds of trust.
People are coming in with blockchain and stuff trying to create scalable trust. But all that's really doing is allowing us to have sex with strangers and doing this thing where it's empowering precisely this sort of transactional convenience in our social relationships that it sounds like all of us to some level find kind of suspicious or burned our hands on the stove of a global economy. And what happens when you get to that scale is that there are trade-offs. I do wanna speak from like a position of abundance here, but the reality is the human brain case is smaller than it was 50,000 years ago because of writing and the outboarding of enormous sections of human memory.
And so the more we rely on each other, the more partial we become, and that gives us a sense of a place and a purpose and participation in something greater than ourselves, but it does make us more partial. It does seem to trend into the vision of the gray alien as this sort of biocibernetic community of things. And then when you pull one out, it's like a phone with no network. So this question about the Ubermensch thing on one end, the individual as conceived by rational modernism.
And then we're here in this middle space as the colonial organism. And then on the far end, you have something completely defined by contextual relationships. It has no genetic inheritance, like a world pool. And it looks like we're trending through colonial organism into the amnesiac where it's like the, like Doug Rushkoff talks about present shock.
And like this, again, like this question of is trying to create these extraordinarily large and powerful, but ultimately very brittle and forgetful systems where it's like this culture remembers everything that has ever been recorded, but I don't. I can't even, I forget why I even had for lunch because the pace of information is so intense that basically my default mode network is offline and I'm just like, having a time. Yeah, I don't know. I think sometimes I come down on clearly we need to, clearly we need to collaborate at greater scale.
And then I think you're right, Ryan. People were saying the same kind of emancipatory rhetoric when Marconi invents the radio and then we got fascists, right? And so first radio broadcast, for example, given Hitler. So I know that we're like etching deep into this time where I'm supposed to get up and be like a guy on stage.
Pelibis radio broadcast. I just want to give, I want to give the floor to anyone else who feels like they want to synthesize or stack a cherry on top of this Mind Desk Sunday before we move on into the musical translation of everything that's been discussed. Hey, my name is Aaron Gabriel. I lead a local nonprofit here called Consonous Hacking, which is very much weaving a lot of these conversations, technology, psycho technologies, self understanding, cultural creativity.
One of the things I really want to speak about is your coffee comment earlier. It was what helping us do dumb stuff faster with more energy. Do things faster with more energy. And yeah, I see that with technology.
One of my professors at Naropa, Travis Cox, had a similar term to your mentor. He called it Eco-Scikid-Alex. And in an interview who's doing around that, there was this question around psycho-Alex, are they a non-specific amplifier or not? And that question is also present for technology.
Is it a, does it have a mind and intention of its own or is it a non-specific amplifier? And so I think just dropping that in there, there's this question about technology is the fear about technology that technology is going to kill us. Whereas I think the greater fear is what it has always been, which is that we are going to kill ourselves. And with that, we're killing ourselves because yeah, we have this extremely self-destructive culture.
Like we've had a self-destructive culture for least like a few centuries, probably in many ways a lot longer than that. That's okay, we are separate from nature, which means we are separate from ourselves, which means we're constantly destroying ourselves and constantly doing that. And so this culture seems to be doing it. And so this is the point I was making earlier about, we have to use technology to support us doing more good and creating it.
And so this is the interesting thing, because to ensure that we don't, not that technology is a kill, but that we're trying to do ourselves using technology, we have to foster, kind of have to shift the culture. But this is to me the part that's been really interesting lately, which is that the idea of changing culture has a potential to be inherently violent. If we're trying to force change, then we actually end up perpetuating the same system of trying to force our will upon a thing. And so this is where I've been looking at this reframe of instead of cultural change, which is this idea that there's this one culture and we need to have this one other culture.
Whereas I think that much more necessary conversation is about diversity, diversity of culture, the book done of everything was all about, we are social experimenters. We are always, historically, we've always been experimenting with different social systems. And I think we need to return back to that. So we don't need to necessarily say, we need to get away from the mechanistic culture.
What I think we need is, after you follow, we need to build a new system that makes it a little bit obsolete. So we have to perpetuate new cultures that are able to address the problem, because the mechanistic culture is going to be creating problems in the world. And that culture is not just going to go away. So what I think we have to do is create new cultures and perpetuate those new cultures and utilize technology to help spread those new cultures that are not just not being destructive, but are being anti-destructive and are able to address the destructiveness that is inevitably going to come from these advancements in technology being used by a mechanistic society.
So I think that's the piece I really want to drop in there, is that cultural creativity and how we can utilize technologies to effectively foster new cultural ideas in the world and help spread these new ideas to see how they can start addressing some of these problems. Thanks for that, Dr. Bieshia. That was fantastic.
I'm Biesh, because Buckminster Fuller is my favorite engineer of all time. And some of you might know this, but he early on in his career was running out of money and he had a family to provide for. And in the midst of that tumultuous sense of not being able to provide for his family, he realized that his life insurance through his employer was his most valuable asset. And the reason why I'm mentioning the story is because it connects to equally what you're bringing up here, the nature of the individual in this process.
Bucky, bless his heart, decided to try to jump off a bridge so that he could get his life insurance money for his family because he thought that was the only way he could provide for them. And allegedly, according to his testimony, he, in jumping off the bridge, was pushed back by an invisible force. This is a very substantive logical thinker, one of the preeminent engineers, I think of the last century, is that there was Tesla for me. And he still, even towards the end of his life, had tested to having me and pushed back by some paranormal or invisible or spiritual force.
And then he received a message that he was not ready and that he had a lot to do for humanity and that he was challenged to see just how much he could do with the goodness of his heart and who he was, not just for himself, but for his family and for his community and for all the people that followed him with these technological innovations that he helped to bring us, including the geodesic dome and all these amazing things that we still don't really use enough, like the Dymaxian map, I think is much better method of protecting the world than the Mercator, for example. But there was a deeply spiritual origin story to this hero in our last century of technological development that has often forgotten or not openly discussed because we celebrate his technologies and we did for all of us, like structural engineering has fundamentally been changed because of his understanding of Prangle being inherently one of the strongest unit cells to build a, say, dome out of, for example. And his benefit to the world is enormous and it came out of him realizing in this moment through this deeply spiritual psychedelic, paranormal experience that he could contribute an enormous amount of good if he chose to. And he went back home, did not attempt to take his own life again and made an enormous impact.
Even if not everybody knows his name, I get goosebumps talking about him because he's one of my biggest influences in my drive to contribute to the technological no sphere as an engineer and that's the power of the individual to the collective. Two quick things on Bucky and then I'll let you wrap it, Ryan, if you want. One thing is that for those unfamiliar with his work, he had this concept of tensegrity, which I love, which is about the structural integrity created by opposing tensions within an architectural object. And I think about that all the time because Bucky was friends with and on speaking tour with another person in great high respect, the historian William R.R.W.
Thompson. And when William R.W. Thompson founded the Lindisfar Association, which included a bunch of people in his room might recognize as enormously influential 20th century, eco systemic thinkers. It was a think tank for the articulation of a planetary culture as opposed to global society.
Like this particular thing that you're talking about here returned to a sort of a flowering of nested local to global systems of creative expression and sustenance. And Bill Thompson in forming Lindisfar and specifically made the decision like Obama when he was, Obama was filling his cabinet to fill it with people who opposed him ideologically. Because he saw beyond his own position in an argument when he recognized that the service to the discourse, to dialogue and to sharpening of our understanding and the refinement of our sense of things required. Basically I might live in the bicep.
I might be politically identified with the bicep. But I'm going to encourage the tricep, right? You have to give ground to the opposition in order to create something that ultimately betters everybody. And so 10th-segrity, I feel like it's such an important social principle.
And then the other thing, which speaks to earlier comments that we made here about AI and intellectual property and the future of work or whatever, that is, I'm sure a lot of you have seen this. Okey Fuller has this superb quote about how jobs are a specious notion. And as someone who just left the only adult job that I've ever had and is now back to figuring out how I can play at furthering this cultural project rather than just like working inside the cathedral pyramid hospital, I really, I want all of us to succeed at being gainfully unemployed by organizations while we become gainfully employed by whatever's emerging in the noosphere. And my buddy Oscar Sharpe, who won a bunch of awards for being the first person to film a feature, it was a 15-minute short film called, anyway, Sun Something, anyway, sorry Oscar, but one of my two words and Oscar and I are in this thread of people talking about AI.
And he said, we need to stop thinking about technological unemployment, technical and employability. And so I'm thinking about technological employment where we're using language models to rogers point to coordinate human activity so that you can get into quote unquote icky guy of alignment of personal values with your skills and abilities, with your passions, with what the world needs and what it's willing to pay for, and that we can basically create flocks that are match made by these systems that will so dramatically reach the labor economy that it's like the gig economy becomes this thing where you're given basically like algorithmically proposed contracts that you can jump on and then like flock with people and that we will look back from that world on this world in which people were hiring other people and then some people were like billionaires that were capable of reshaping the geosphere with their whims and be like, ew gross, that's like slavery. We're actually glad that's over. And I don't know, that's one of those things that I want to leave folks with on my end of this conversation is if I'm thinking about what a good trip looks like, it's when, you know, it's like the experiences that I've had when like everyone in my group is dripping really hard.
And so none of us can really like make call about what the group should do next. So like we just all like form a multicellular thing and then somebody's got the talking stick and then we just like spontaneously reassign the talking stick and then like we pursue whatever looks interesting across the festival or whatever together. There's some, there's like an emerging, a gregoric kind of intelligence that ad hoc collective organism take you to else. And I don't know, I don't know, let the pod decide where this is going next.
And that sounds like the kind of job I want to provide me with life insurance. I wish you the best of luck. I would love to see you see that because I mean, that maybe I could do the same going forward and that everybody else can feel empowered. They feel like that's their path.
So the last I want to impart in this conversation, and I know we're going over time since thanks everybody for being patient with us and for joining in. I think that was well worth the extension of the timeline here is that I hope very much for the paradigm that juicy was expressing as well, right? There's this great juicy potential in the now. There's an enormous amount of potential in this asymptotic chaos of multiple disruptors, AI, being only one, another being potentially UAP, UFO, phenomenology, which is increasingly complex and public, among others, but that the outcome of that is unknown.
The individual acts of each one of us is ultimately will drive that over the transition points into potentially this new paradigm, a much more positive one. But being attached to that outcome is a little bit tumultuous and potentially folly. So I can hope for that future. And I can hope almost to the point of it being stubborn and unwilling to, sorry, to TV, even when I feel like the odds are against us in some ways.
And those days come and go, right? And sometimes those days extend as they did through COVID in one example that all of us shared. But it's the sense of being a hope punk, that being hopeful is a driver towards that better horizon. Whether we get there or not, it's exciting to try.
And the more of us that do it, the more probable that brighter horizon becomes. And maybe it doesn't happen. That's okay. There could be a civilization three billion years from now on earth, completely different morphology and completely different structure, for example, in my top of the same conversation.
This could happen all across the galaxy, all across the universe all the time. And this is one chance that we get now. And it's okay if we don't succeed, but I really hope we do, and I'm not gonna stop hoping. Hey man, by the way, that's Future Fossils 116, Kevin Arthur Walnut reads two different scenarios of the Earth 10 billion years hence.
Check it out. Anyway. Yeah, I'm feeling inspired by these thoughts of our age old concept of living the way you want the world to be, finding your own bliss, living in your own unemployed utopia. Fun employee.
Right? And yet, how do we amplify that? So I think in order to escape the sort of gray mesh hive mind of the unplugged cell phone out of the phone bank, you're in nothing, which is also where you are an anonymous ubiquitous cell. I think we have to find a way into fractal pods of neural nets where you are in groups that matter with people that you know, doing work that you care about and depend on.
And then those are hyper-connected. But it's not a flat field entirely. We're still in our groups. For this, I co-founded with a friend of ours, Michael Joe Rammus, a group that we called Fractal Tribe, which originated as a set of principles for a group of decentralized people to come together and do work.
So it was decision-making processes and governance structures that would allow a group of people to come under somebody's inspirational idea, get together, act fast, make crazy shit happen, and then disperse. The concept of fractal tribe is dawning on me at this moment. It is this idea that this is a small pod, but the concept could be leveraged again over here and again over here and again over here and then networked in whole. And I'm feeling inspired by that.
I think take it from that individual level, then further up. What we need to find is a sort of sociological crisper. So we need invent, engineer, design, the virus that infiltrates the current system. And you've surfs it from the inside.
Glen Wiles is speaking to some of this in radical exchange. She does an incredible podcast on 80,000 hours, where he speaks. But the most part that this interviewer is asking him questions about the book that he released about all these very complex economic features. And at the end of the podcast, he's cool.
I actually don't care about any of that. Since I wrote that book, I've learned a lot. And now can we talk about the things that matter? And he talks about bringing more and more diverse voices into the mix to create an emergent behavior that's the plant's democracy and the nation's state.
So I'm curious where his latest thinking is. And that paper, by the way, I got to go to Glen's conference in Berkeley in January. And that work, I interviewed him on Complexity Podcast with Chris Moore, episode 97. We talked about that paper, the decentralized society, which was co-authored with Puzha Olhava and Vitalik Uteran.
And Puzha was actually the woman in that group, was actually the prime driver of this idea for quadratic voting that allows for an intersectional counterweighting to the tyranny of the majority in democracy by assigning non-transferable tokens on distributed ledger system so that you can learn to trust somebody, even if you don't understand the proxies. So it's rather than relying on this antiquated PhD system, or whatever, the systems by which we estimate in the modern world, whether or not to actually listen to somebody or whether we decide to write them off to consider McCrank or whatever. Then you can do this thing where basically you can bridge second-person inter-subjective verification to third-person more objective verification with the system that allows a person's reputation to be established, even though you may not directly know how, that you may not have the, you know, so I'm really optimistic about his thing. God damn it, we're not ending this.
I know. So I do think we're just concept of looking for influence in addition to living your best life, I think, influentially. Like, how are we going to create this spreadable namshub, going back to Snow Crash or this neat-tic concept of better system that will suck people in and take over the one that we have? And I think that's probably going to have to do with serving more people, serving the people that are inherently left out, serving the people that would be attacking the system otherwise, or even gaining from it.
Yeah, as you know, GameB is a Chnock-to-burger thing. Jordan Holland and Jim and all those. Is GameB perhaps not service-oriented enough to be, okay, but now we're having insider baseball. Okay, thanks everybody.
Thank you. Yeah, this was great. I want to take a big thanks to Evan and Ryan, and Juicy, and Roger, and all of you who sat back there and allowed us to perform, having something more important to say than any of you, although I'm sure that's complete crap, and that every one of you got him so sick of, okay, now I'm going to go up on stage and be an entertainer. But no, I'm going to go back to the Dr.
X comment and revoke that. I want to clear my name of the idea that I am some sort of ringleader of the space poaching other people. We do try to sit back, make a container, and then let the community lead. And that's where actually the most interesting things happen.
So stuff like this is occurring, and I didn't do that. So thank you all. Yeah. I wish we could freeze time or have as much time as we wanted, and all of you would be opportunity to contribute to this podcast, and we have a 24-hour long epic podcast.
And somehow, it enacts and analyzes all these changes that we're talking about. So thank you all for your patience. If you really felt compelled to speak, share something, feel free to come up and talk to us. Once we're done jamming, I would love to talk with all of you.
Yeah. Do that point actually, getting to this point where I love singing songs, writing songs. But next time I'm here, we'll have a live looping in the round session where we'll all make noise together. Thanks for listening.
In the weeks to come, we have conversations with experimental filmmaker Ken Adams, a panel on the creative misuse of technology hosted by the Next Museum, a panel that I hosted at the MAPSeculics Science Conference, focusing on the writing of Samantha Sweetwater, a fun on-site interview at that same conference about techno shamanism with Lehman Pascal, a trilog with Mitch Schultz and Shonta Stevens about their project, The Conscious Molecule, follow up to the 2012 documentary DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and much more. Stay tuned at microgarfield.substack.com patreon.com.com. And if I don't see you in the future fossils, Discord server first, have a great week.