you can't have a small group of technocrats like prescribing their biosphere alignment, currency system, that's crazy. Like the failure modes of that are scary and diverse. There's no way that something like that works essentially. Paradoxically, there is actually only one biosphere though.
But people inhabit specific places and specific watersheds with specific ecological dynamics and there's essentially infinite complexity in soil types and biodiversity and the biocultural edge of how people are inhabiting that space. You do need to ground everything in people defining what ecological health means in their specific place. We are evolved to like sugar and now I'm addicted to sugar because we have a system that puts sugar into everything. And this interplay between the longer term evolution and the shorter term memetic evolution has not quite resolved itself, right?
It's playing out in real time. And I think that we're intelligent enough to see and predict that destabilization over time. And the question is, do we act in time to prevent those negative things from happening? Is it just that we have to always be in the state of regeneration, which is the bad thing has already happened?
Now we have to work hard to reverse it versus there is a voice among us that is saying there's something bad going to happen and we nib it in the bud before it becomes a real problem. Greetings, Future Fossils. And welcome to episode 217 of the podcast that explores our place and time. I'm your host, Michael Garfield.
And today I welcome you to join me for a long awaited trial lock with two of the most thoughtful people I know, Gregory Landoey, co-founder and CEO of the Regen Network, a project to bend finance and computing back into the service of regenerative land stewardship. And speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist musician who walked away from his FinTech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on cognacism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom. Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry, techno utopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies.
But both recognize as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology and value, humankind is fully capable of socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve collective wellbeing. It took me a while to come around believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we're doing to the biosphere. And even now I acknowledge the tools like people tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Montford Laubichler and physicist Jeffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal.
And we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it's well past time for us to move beyond a nature good, tech bad or tech good, nature bad, duality. Both sides come from the same flaw and comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits where that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the stewardservants of our living world. Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion and then dive into the show notes for additional resources and links to related episodes with Sophie Strand, Jim Rut, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Amber Kaye, Nora Bates and Ralph Metzner, Brian Swim, and many others.
But first, stick around after our conversation to hear the two newest songs from my new studio LP, The Age of Reunion, Transparent and Signal, which transmit in music my own complicated feelings about living through this period of promise, peril, hope, anxiety, creation, grief, transcendence, longing and communion. You can find links to the videos and pre-order the entire album on my bandcamp page or elsewhere linked in the show notes. Lastly, big thanks to everyone who helps support the show with your monthly contributions on sub-stack or Patreon, including newbies Cecilia Sang, Gregory Batera, Love Light, Moon Shadow, the Gargoyle Library, Van Betauer, Darius Strassal, Anka Popa, and Alison Raymer. I lose a few of you each month and still have a long way to go before this work becomes a sustainable way to feed my family.
Future Fossils is now, as it always has been, a love's labor that exists precariously and depends entirely on listener support. If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up today, or at least, mash Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave me a five-star review. The unborn future archeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you, and it'll help me find time to write my second book and co-found a new guild committed to the cultivation of wisdom in the text space. And now, onto the show.
How are you guys? He's excited here. I love the rain. We had no rain in California.
Wait, where are you? It sucked. Where are you again? For years, I was like, are we becoming a desert now?
I was like, no, I can't live with that. I need the green to be happy. I heard that there was a presentation last year at the USGS that said that El Nino was only going to get stronger and stronger, and that global warming was actually going to bring back Pliocene level monsoons to the American Southwest. So the real issue is not desertification in this corner of the country, but the disruption of desert ecosystems and the erosion of all of those nice cliffs that Malibu homes are perched on.
And the real danger is unpredictability in general. And that's what they've struggled over the last few decades, is how do they communicate about this? Because they want to say something tangible and clear that people can point to as a prediction about what's going to change. But in reality, it's just throwing a wrench into a lot of the existing systems, and we don't exactly know how rapidly changing a lot of variables in the environment is going to change that fluid machine that drives everything.
Indeed. We can at least correct for, we can nail down at least a couple variables, one of which would be names and backstories. So because we are here, and because this is coming out on multiple different formats, hi, I'm Michael Garfield. I don't really know what I am, but that has turned out to be what I'm good for in as much as this is the time that we live in, and therefore people that are unafraid of living in the question of their own irresoluble identity and function seem strangely well adapted to metamorphic terrains.
Who's up next? I think you should also mention that you're a very talented artist and musician. Just straight outside of it. As are you, thank you.
That's just a question. Yeah, that's my sequel to the Land Before Time fan fiction sequel there in the psychedelic future Americans southwest. Passion Way and Bits God would achieve her. I know, but some things are better because they're home.
I'm John Ash. I guess you would call me an AI engineer. Now that's the new hot term. And preferring to identify as an artist and musician and creator, that's what I've always driven to do, but you have to live in society.
So at least in training models and writing code, it scratches that creator itch in me. But I also advocate for a system called Cognisysm, which is designed to be a replacement for a lot of systems and is an evolution of democratic processes and the scientific method and like market dynamics themselves. And it's meant to serve the role that capitalism as is integrated with the state itself as a serving right now and help serve as a means to integrate disparate perspectives in a similar type as a market dynamic, but with very different underlying assumptions and tools. I want to get to that.
But first, I'm Gregory Landway. I'm a regenerative accelerationist. And I've always thought that artists were cool, but my life is my heart. I do work on some things from time to time.
I'm building a giant dragon out of the old maple syrup lines from the maple syrup agroforestry farm that I live on and steward is part of my world. Yeah, and I'm excited for the conversation. And relevant, I'm part of a community called Regen Network that we are all kind of dancing around and engaging with. And the aim of that community is to regenerate planet Earth by linking economic wealth to ecological health.
So I would love, to me, the Holy Grail in this conversation is identifying the handshake moment between cognacism and this kind of regenerative accelerationist thinking. And to understand really overlap and also where they might not or where it hasn't been explored. And so it remains an open question. And also just to give some platform to the relationship between the two of you and, I guess, the three of us, I'm going to back off of assuming host duties and let this be an even three-footed stool here.
But yeah, I would love to know a bit of backstory. And then I'll provide a little, I guess, just to be fair, about where, if we're going to show our work, the backstory in this thinking really matters. I think rooting these things in biography matters a lot. So that's where I'd propose we start.
Great. John Ash, why don't you go first? In biography of just Ramble. Somebody asked me what we were going to talk about today and I assumed that it would generally fall into regen theory, just like that what is, how do we think about actually creating positive change over time?
And for me, that stems out of the concept of keeping a ledger of the state of what you were trying to improve. If you cover your eyes, you can't really see the change over time because it occurs over such a long period of time. And so my background actually is in FinTech. I worked with doing machine learning with transactions.
And there was just this moment when I was trying to model the text strings associated with each transaction. And they're very noisy. But at the end of an insight to what the transaction actually is and get a sense of why they are spending that money. And what I realized was behind every single account was actually a story of change and of growth and of decay and suffering and of joy.
And particularly, it was a moment where I saw there was an account. And all of this information was anonymized. It still has a unique identifier. And I saw an account was bringing somebody to the zoo a lot and to parks or theme parks a lot.
And I was like, wow, they really seem to be spoiling their children or something. And I didn't really understand what was going on. And then I saw that there was a large charge at the end of the month for the Children's Oncology unit. And then at some point, all of those that spending stopped.
And instead, it started going towards paying off debt. And it made me realize that perhaps that what we're recording in our ledgers and what we are tracking over time is being the fundamental unit of value in our society wasn't correct. And that led me down this pathway to rethinking how we keep track and what we're keeping track of. And eventually, the Connected Me with Gregory's work with Regen Ledger.
And that concept, I think, is very powerful in general, just to have a new frame of incentivization that involves keeping record over time. And that is like the biographical background of how I ended up where I am right now, along with just being like having a weird internal arrow that says you have to make things all the time. Well, it's so potent. I hadn't heard that story from you, John.
That's really interesting and powerful. And yeah, it's this sort of the word legibility is ringing around for me after listening to that. And I think about my biographical entree for myself. The personal story that I would tell about how I became fixated on this question of that, I think broadly gets categorized as economics.
But I think I resonate with what John is saying around the depths of what that means. Like the qualitative stories that encompass grief and praise ecstasy and loathing of this whole spectrum is getting patterned through zeros and ones, essentially. And the techno-connected world, we're moving things back and forth. The biographical moment that led me to really be fixated on that for my careers, go all the way back to growing up.
I grew up in Alaska. And I worked as soon as I could legally hold a job. In the summers, I was always working. I grew up working.
And over the time between I was 14 and maybe at 24 or 25 years old, I worked in every single different aspect conceivable of the salmon fishery. So I'm a fisherman. I worked for Fish and Game. I worked for a watershed forum doing independent water quality monitoring.
I worked for the canner, like my first job. I was working on the slime line ripping the guts out of thousands of fish as they went by, like a cog in a machine canning salmon to get shipped to Japan or something. So I got to see this sort of view into this, in quotes, natural resource. And I always was so confused.
And because so many things about how we were going about that, how everyone's going about that, seems really counterintuitive to me. The level of, I guess, almost like ugliness associated with the harvest processing and distribution of this gift, the salmon, who are giving themselves to the creatures of the land in this annual cycle. Like they're literally going up and dying and feeding the bears and the humans and the forests. Something really amazing there happening.
And yet the experience on the ground of being a human engaged in the economy of that is can be quite disconcerting and strange. And one example I'll give of that is Alaska is vaunted as one of the best managed fisheries in the world, where the state of Alaska manages its fisheries in such a way as the fish do keep returning. And there's a fishery industry. And there's personal use, so native Alaskans and Alaskan residents can actually harvest hundreds of fish per family for free.
And there's sport fishing. So people flying from all over the world. So there's all these different stakeholders all utilizing this in quotes resource in a somewhat sustainable way. And it's vaunted as a success story.
But if you're in it ground level, it's like, I don't know. This seems, I don't know. Are we really succeeding? I just remember being out on a fishing boat, miles out chasing after salmon, burning diesel, feeling seasick, being wet and cold and miserable.
And thinking to myself, I know all of these fish are going to the same river. My house is right next to the river. If we let the fish go to the river, I could be partying right now, and still these fish would jump into my lap almost. Why am I out here in the middle of the ocean, like at risk of life and limb and burning petroleum in a moment in which there's climate change?
What the hell is going on here? Why is this the way we've decided to manage? Because the reality is the management system is make it as expensive as possible to catch the fish. Then fewer people want to catch the fish, and therefore we have a sustainable resource.
When you think about it, that's the logic. So it's a total avoidance of any coordination, any cooperation, and the harder questions of how would you account for fairness, how would you allocate resources, how would you be in harmony with the rhythm of what the fish need and what the people need. Instead, it's just let's just make it super expensive and hard. So only crazy people who want to go put life in the limb and have an expensive permit and an expensive boat and buy a bunch of gasoline and basically gamble for a living that they're going to find the fish in the ocean when they already know they're going to the river.
That's who gets to catch these fish. So anyway, that moment of just like, why is it like this? I could think of 30 different ways. And that was in the aughts.
That was probably, I probably had that thought in 2003 or something, that thought, that experience, out in the ocean chasing fish going, what the actual fuck is going on here? And even then, my mind was like, I think we probably have all the tools to deal with this. We probably deal with a lot of this with a council and a spreadsheet. And now we have all of these, we have AI tools, we have machine learning, we have the amount of computational tools that we have at our fingertips.
It's amazing. There's no excuse for not re-approaching these questions about how do we reorganize our experience as humans to attune with the greater than human worlds. We will be more joyful. We will be more healthy.
And the world will respond to that by thriving, by regenerating, by bad rebalancing. But as long as we're still forcing ourselves to chase after the fish in the sea, because we can't think of a better idea about how to allocate resources of time or allocate natural resources or whatever it is, I think we're going to be charging off a cliff perpetually as a species and creating all these unforeseen consequences all over all the time. So that's my little biographical entree into the conversation. Thank you.
Okay, let's see if I can join your stories at the hip here. Because my entry point into this thinking comes from two things. One is just being in a really weird childhood. That sounds weird.
Maybe I guess it weird is relative. Fishery work is actually pretty normal in human history. Not so much when it comes to being the son of travel industry executive and growing up on cruise ships and going in the back door to Universal Studios and Disney. And the thing that messes me up is that those seem like good things to a lot of people.
Like I just took my kids to Disney on the occasion of my 40th birthday because my dad pulled a bunch of favors. He's retired now. But he was like, I want your kids to see this. And so what do you do?
You get on the treadmill and you go through the machine. And it is a machine. And it's a machine not unlike the machine that you just described. There's this sort of beautiful and deep analogy between the fish and happiness.
You see it in what the etching has this, it talks about the fish is a symbol of some fleeting shimmering joy. And the system of entertainment, whereby people's satisfaction is extracted from them, abstracted, productized, and sold back to them. Made it clear to me that a lot of economic activity, like from a very young age I was very cynical about this. A lot of economic activity is completely unnecessary because we've grown up in this in the wake of this like Ed Bernays style thinking about advertising as the manufacture of need, of like a perception of need in somebody.
And so that way you create a niche. You create this opportunity to harvest someone's hard-earned resources. I'm living in a house in the suburbs here. Home ownership is one of these things, right?
I don't know that many people who live in the suburbs of any metropolitan area that feel like they're happier because they've isolated themselves from other people. Like most millennials I know want something like a village. Want to live closer to land. Want to assume why on first pass seems inconvenient.
And there are ways in which it's inconvenient. And that's just the thing is that the economy has become more and more about these abstractions as these control layers have emerged and were embedded in these interdependency mesh works with the shit that got stuck sideways in the sewers canal and all this stuff. So we live in this really weird thing where what matters to a lot of people is several standard deviations or like derivations away from the seemingly undesirable kind of baseline human being to which that we were once anyway. So that's part of it.
The other part of it is that I was always really interested in the evolution of intelligence. And there's something missing in most of the literature on evolution about interiority. Like Charles Darwin talks about this in the Descent of Man. He talks about sexual selection and the role of aesthetics in make choice.
And so there's other people like the evolution of beauty. David Sloan Wilson. Oh no, that was Richard O'Pram. Anyway, both of them have talked about this point.
That aesthetics, the sensed world of an organism is fundamental to understanding the way that life begets more life on this planet and new complexity arises out of these interactions, all of which in the most general or fundamental frame economics is metabolic activity going on in social interactions and technological innovation and so on. To see capitalism and all of its weird predations as part of this process that is ultimately an ecological activity and also the production of ideas and of experiences have metabolic feet. All of these things have an energy cost. Information processing has an energy cost, no matter how efficient it becomes.
And yeah, it's the experience economy, weirdly, in spite of its ostensibly ephemeralized. We're not as interested in consumer goods supposedly as we are in moments that we can post to Instagram. And yet the footprint of that experience economy is actually bigger. So I don't know.
For me, these conversations are inquiries into something really bedrock to an understanding of what life is doing on this planet and how the biosphere is processing information and how information is not merely a physical phenomenon. It's a psychical phenomenon that like Bateson says, information is the difference that makes a difference, which means it has to be perceived in order to be an piece of information. It has to be recognized as a difference in some way. Anyway, so I've taken us way out of the edge of the pier here, but this question of how to participate in this thing which is so much bigger and faster and more unified, then I feel like I hear most ecologists or economists admitting to anyone has become like where the rubber meets the road for me in all of my learning about evolving systems and about our place in them.
Yeah, I think that's great. My addition or just building here and continuing the weave is just what's crossing my mind is the glimmers of this, I'm thinking of the dawn of everything, the book by David Grayber and I'm forgetting his collaborator on that book. My takeaway from that is that to be human, there's something fundamental about humanness which involves the symbolic representation of abstract flows of information involved with reciprocity, both between a group and between that group and other groups and that group and the greater than human world. And that's a foundational piece of what it means to be human if you look at the archaeological record from a certain perspective.
This is referred to as money, but systems of money-ness were multivalent and maybe still are. It's just like the quantum nature of money or something is intrinsically woven into the fabric of humanness. I like to give you two nice examples of this are Wampum and Kakao, both of which were ancestral indigenous forms of money in the Americas before Europeans arrived and during the European arrival and for 100 years after European arrival, you see how that system of money has evolved over time. And Wampum, I don't know as much about its use as money and probably none of us will because there's not a written record.
There are probably some legends. At least during the edge, the colonial edge Wampum was both used as a unit of exchange, a store of value, as well as still it would be assembled into treaty belts that told a story of unions. So the idea that Manhattan was bought for some beads belays the deeper reality in which there was a treaty belt that was created made of beads which told of an agreement between humans, the greater than human world, these two different tribes and the usage of that place. And I think the exploration, I think this gets to the point where John and I's collaboration has been really interesting and creative, which is how, what's that shift?
How do you express the unique agreement between a group of people and the greater than human world and one another about what a right relationship looks like? And what's the quanta of right relationship? I think Wampum, that's a great example. And I've also heard that sort of argument that perhaps there's been more of a European lens on what it was as the system of exchange trying to force it into the frame of money when there's this argument that it was more like you talked about, there was like a chain of beads where each bead represented some part of a larger story.
And weaving that back together with what you were talking about evolution and change over time and what it means to be human, the two primary systems that we refer to that have accelerated change and made use of the energy gradients that exist on this planet were evolution in the genetic sense, which occurs at a much longer time span. And then in humans, there's this new, much more rapid cycle of memetics where there are memes that are born and grow and die within lifespans themselves, starting with perhaps the meme of the name for each individual, like an ability to see each other person as this identifiable unit that we can attach all sorts of other sub memes to say, this is Gregory. And Gregory is this story of interconnected beads, each being like a sort of meme or subunit of information. And the world that we live in that has these systems that we are able to subsist off of, like the reason why there is this fish cycle, this very complex salmon cycle is because over time, there have been gradual, small changes that have accumulated.
And now because there is this more rapid cycle of memetics where we can disrupt those energy flows to extract for them much faster, we can't necessarily see or get back the signal collectively as to the impact that we are having. We could see in the short term that getting more fish for ourselves or getting more of any particular resource is benefiting us, but it's hard to see out and get the signal back that this might actually dramatically destabilize at some point and the whole system could fall apart. And we do see there is a massive amount of extinction of animals on this planet right now because of the actions that we are taking. And my work in particular is also really rooted around the concept of prediction itself and that there are, I think one of you said at some point, there are certain things that we can't see, but I generally view that there's usually like a few people who can see what's happening, who are looking at, like zooming out and looking at that system and they're saying, I can see that this is falling apart, I can see that this is breaking apart and it's not gonna happen right away, it's gonna happen in 20 years.
And for example, Michael wrote this blog or this article a while back, after this, I'd love for you to elaborate on, which I find to be one of the most prophetic pieces of writing that I've ever seen, just like a very clear grasp on how all of the parts work together and how all of the motivations in ourselves, which come from this evolved state, like we are evolved to like sugar. And now I'm addicted to sugar because we have a system that puts sugar into everything. And this interplay between the longer term evolution and the shorter term, memetic evolution has not quite resolved itself, right? It's playing out in real time.
And I think that we're intelligent enough to see and predict that destabilization over time. And the question is, do we act in time to prevent those negative things from happening? Is it just that we have to always be in the state of regeneration, which is the bad thing has already happened. Now we have to work hard to reverse it, versus there is a voice among us that is saying, there's something bad going to happen and we nib it in the bud before it becomes a real problem.
I can't remember his name, but the geologist who went around taking samples of lead all over the planet and made the case that letting gasoline in the levels of lead at the surface levels were not normal. And started arguing that the lead in gasoline in the air was causing a lot of health and behavioral problems and tried to actively argue that needed to change. But because we had these sort of the system of the market and there was all these vested interests, there was a lot of people who literally invested their resources into trying to discredit his work. And eventually we got to this point where we banned gasoline, right?
Because we had one voice that saw something that was able to put together all of the beads and see the collective whole and understand that even though these beads and the story chain don't exist yet, if you take all these chains of possibilities, this is probably where we're gonna go end up if we don't take a change. And I think that it's really important for us to get into this space of not just being regenerative, but I don't know what the word is for it, but learning to listen to the voices who do have that record of understanding where we're going and nipping it in the bud before becomes a problem. Michael, could you talk a little bit about your article? Cause I think it's just a fantastic representation of- Which one was this?
The oral history of the end of reality or- Something like that. Yeah, the one about Deep Face? Yeah, and it's much more broad than that, but yeah. It was like from 2017.
Yeah, okay, so I think the point of connection here is about the cost of knowing versus the cost of not knowing. Maybe, so this piece was prompted LOL. I feel like we can't use the word prompted anymore without mechanizing ourselves. But it was prompted by the tech demo that Adobe did for their voice cloning software in July of 2017.
And you're like, oh, I guess if you can train a voice model on someone in 30 seconds now, and then a couple months later, it's five seconds, then it won't be long before you can have your identity stolen by picking up the phone and saying hello. And at that point, we stopped trusting each other because the thing that you're speaking with on the other end of the line might not be your girlfriend. It might be some sort of Nigerian prince scam pretending to be your girlfriend. And I feel like I got a head start on this thanks to the science fiction of Charles Strauss, who is utterly preoccupied with these weird, scammy, convoluted financial mechanisms as our computing power becomes more and more ineffably large.
And his books, Accelerando and Glass House, and the one he wrote with, Craig Doctor of the Rapture of the Nerds in particular, those books really did it for me. And our large contributors to this work of fiction that basically said what we need is, or I think where we are going to shake out on the other side of this transition in technological platform is hopefully, the world where we have, in some sense, fulfilled the promise of the rational enlightenment. And the last wrong, rah, rah, end state is that we are all really good at recognizing our biases at understanding the fundamental uncertainty of things, at being able to communicate the degree and the dimension of our confidence and uncertainty with one another. Because for instance, I don't think I spent much time on it in that particular piece.
I've spoken with T Nguyen on future fossils about writing that he did on transparency and surveillance and how degree to which we are connected to one another online amplifies this expert identification problem. And this is to the point that you were making Gregory about different ways, different money systems, as different kinds of encoding of intersubjectivity and of the string of wampum beads being basically an outboard ledger for episodic autobiographical memory in the brain's default mode network. It's like a way of starting to track reciprocal relationships at a scale that we're not the first people to point out that money systems are basically convoluted mechanisms for the maintenance and tracking of trust at scale. But yeah, so the.
Exactly. Yeah, so the point with all of that is that. But trust in what and with whom and who decides what the fundamental assumptions of the framework of trust. Because you could trust together, we could trust that humans are bad and that institutions and money is here to try to force us to be less bad to one another within some framework or we could trust that humans.
I guess that's the key questions, like the fundamental question we are programming. And I think this is just saying what you're saying in a different way. There's cultural programming that moves through our money. And there's a reciprocal co-emergent relationship where our money is evolving us and we're evolving our money.
But where do you root it? And I guess getting back to regenerative accelerationism. Yeah, I guess the premise I'd like to suggest is there's really only one arguably nearly objective place to root trust. And that is in the health of the biosphere that gave birth to us, that we depend on, and that depends on us.
And that everything else, there's a lot of subjectivity, there's a lot of room for creativity. But everywhere across the board, that is there's this fundamental unifying field of cultural trust expression. All money should be rooted in some way in a regeneration of the trust relationship between humans and the biosphere. So let me spend this and ask you a question and because I feel like you'll have a really eloquent answer.
This is to both of you really. To me, it's this infinity mirror problem of where the buck stops. And this is back to the point I was trying to make with you, John, is that total knowledge, let's say total knowledge is impossible. But we can asymptotically approach that.
But the cost goes up exponentially as we know more and more. So there's a reason why it's metabolically, at least in the short term, it seems like a better decision to be lazy and to think only in the short term. To have a sugar addiction. And because there's a lovecraftian, take it to the other extreme, and you have this constant calculation of all possibility and it's just incredibly expensive.
And so this shows up in our trust relationships because you can say, OK, yeah, we can bedrock everything at the health of the biosphere. But then not one of us is actually an expert in the thing I love. I'm jumping ahead here with stuff we know about Regen. But the thing that I love about Regen is that the health of any given ecosystem that is tokenized on this platform is determined by the stewards of that particular ecosystem.
There still has to be a kind of local distributed sensemaking operation going on here. And I feel like a lot of the problem that we've gotten into is trying to scale all of that and globalize all of that. And this is true along any metric of expertise. Like a huge piece of the problem with coordination around climate action is because if you are not yourself a climate expert, then you don't know how to recognize one.
And this is true of every imaginable skill or competency. And so you get. So yeah, so I just think that one of the things I love about, both of you and the amount of thought you've given to this is in the address of this particular question, which is how do we restore, if we treat money as a biospheric phenomenon, not like a layer on top of this thing per se, but as something that the planet is doing, then health of our money systems is inextricable from health of the biosphere. It's a measure of biospheric health.
And so what is requisite diversity in money systems? Like clearly, it's not everybody uses the dollar, everybody uses GDP. Yeah. This is such a great question.
And essentially, how do we deal with fungibility? And if you're using already a financialized language, that's the question. What's unique, non-transferable, and in which there's high friction in order to exchange it, and what is there frictionless, highly liquid, and where do we place those? I think first and foremost, from my perspective, two things are true.
Number one, thing one is that there's a forgotten human, which is the ability for a group of humans to opt into and define their own system of money. And that's actually because the premise here is that's fundamental to what it means to be human, is the abstract, cultural, symbolic economy, the home numbers, the logic, and calculus of home. Actually, people need the right to express themselves into that, which is very crazy, counterintuitive, strange thing. But it's radical money localism, in a way.
So that's one provocation. And then the other, as you mentioned, I firmly believe that there's an expression of right relationship between a group of people and the place that they inhabit, the watershed scale, bioregional scale, you can't have a small group of technocrats prescribing their biosphere alignment, currency system. That's crazy. The failure modes of that are scary and diverse.
There's no way that something like that works, essentially. Paradoxically, there is actually only one biosphere, though. But people inhabit specific places and specific watersheds with specific ecological dynamics, and there's essentially infinite complexity in soil types and biodiversity and the biocultural edge of how people are inhabiting that space. And you do need to ground everything in people defining what ecological health means in their specific place in order to generate the unit that they're going to use to express that symbolically and manage right relationship in an automatic way.
And I think that we're surfing around this, but we unconsciously or consciously program our money to, it's like the autonomic nervous system of our collective organism or something. Like just statistically speaking, we behave in specific ways because of the incentives of money. It's just how it is. And I think we have quite a bit of unrealized potential in that specific design area of ecological money as a tool.
It's not just, oh, we need more solar panels. That's another, oh, we must decarbonize the economy by going all electric. That's another example of what we need to do is we need to send everybody out to the ocean to fish. That's another example of just kicking the can down the road and not dealing with the root kind of cultural coordination and challenge, which is getting back to this.
And deeper than this, I want to throw this back into George Court, deeper than this. So how do you then have a set of tools that allows a community to interrogate what their symbolic representation of right relationship with a place is and how to quantify it and how to use it? How does that happen? What's the user experience in quotes?
Or what's the participatory stakeholder process? How does that knowledge gathered? How are the definitions created? What are the standards generated?
And I think this is where I think there's this deep intersection with cognizant, right? Where this question or this dialogue that we're having specifically about ecological state, and the premise I'm offering, which is that's core. So let's deal with this. But if you abstract it away, there's also just a knowledge generation, generally different cultural processes, all of which there's a deeper layer that's happening, which is collective sense making, right?
Predictions, new narratives, what works and what doesn't. So it's a clumsy way of trying to weave this back in and hand the ball over to you, John. It's good. A lot of people know from my work that I'm very critical of the concept of money itself as the end all, be all incentivizer and cultural token that drives everything.
And often in these conversations when people are talking about money, people point back to debt the first 5,000 years and talking about how prior to units of currency that debt between individuals proceeded as a means of record keeping and of exchange and that the resolution of a particular debt between people could be done in a lot of different ways, that there was less of an intense focus on the exact value of one unit that represented the end all, be all of success. And that because the debt was established between individuals and they had this relationship between them, there was inherently a sort of cognition and intelligence that was applied to that. Whereas the benefit that we have from monetary units in terms of the world we live in is the ability to scale because you can engage in a transaction with strangers where you require no trust because your trust is placed in the token itself. But there is also this massive amount of effort to secure that token and its meaning when in reality the meaning of the token, the value of the token is constantly changing.
And so we never have this fixed frame of reference upon which we can make sense of the world. Just talking about the last few years, there's been this massive amount of inflation where everybody has had to recalculate their entire relationship to resources and goods and how they make their life work because suddenly that word, that unit, does not mean the same thing as it did three years ago. Now it's worth far less. And that recalculation, that requirement to reframe and try to fix ourselves to this unit that can never really be fixed, I think is a problem that needs to be addressed.
And in the cognitive frame, there's a greater focus on the concept of expressions of certainty and uncertainty because that is a fixed frame that doesn't change for each individual. If you have something from I am 100% sure to I am 0% sure of some fact, some relevance, piece of information that will affect my community, that will affect our commerce, that will affect our exchange, right? That frame always stays the same. It's subjective and personal to yourself.
But there isn't a need to do a unit of translation or currency exchange there because you're always based in reference to the same frame of 0% to 100%. I do think that there are a lot of things about this world that work and that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater on the systems that have built out all of these like material niceties. There's something about this world that is good, that is easier, it's nice to have plumbing, it's nice to be able to get food, it's nice to be able to order things. But at the same time, we can also observe that there's something lost in the record keeping.
And that is that it is not considering the externalities of each exchange, right? It's not, there's no motivation when you send a super tanker across the sea to consider the externality of if it crashes and spills oil and destroys this massive local ecology. There's no motivation to have to consider that. And we end up having to use this very clumsy mechanism of the state and the threat of violence to try to force somebody who has caused this degradation to take some sort of action to take into account of that.
So money as a unit is a little bit clumsy, I think. I don't think we're ever gonna get away from this idea of quantified exchange of goods. Like that's just always existed. And like the word capitalism came into being in the 1800s or something like that.
But the thing that capitalism is has been done for a long time. Like the idea of taking resources, extracting them from the environment around you, transforming them into something that reflects the want of individuals in a community. And then over time, optimizing for individual benefit, right? Balanced individual benefit where there's no prescribed ruler that is saying this is the way that everything should work.
That has been there for a really long time. But we are just seeing problems when we scale it out to the global scale to the point where it takes people who are not directly involved with each transaction who just are independently motivated like scientists observing the externalities of that transactionalism and saying, holy shit, there's been all these species that have died. I would not know that all these species have died if there wasn't somebody telling me. How would I know that?
It takes individuals that are observing the world to realize where our unit of exchange and our record keeping is actually failing us. But it eventually catches up with us. And eventually there is a clear bubble popping where we see holy crap, we haven't been keeping record accurately. There has been this problem.
And now we have to deal with it via the mechanism of cost rapidly increasing because some system collapsed and now we can no longer get the certain abalone from this particular bay or we can no longer get the bison because we killed them all. So the idea I think is that we can evolve our systems of money and our system, I want to just say money, I want to say our systems of record keeping to be more intelligent. And I particularly feel that this emergence of collective intelligence in the form of AI is a ripe opportunity to reinvent our ledgers, to help us make sense of the externalities of exchange. But the idea I think is that there is a lot of focus in the crypto space on money as a unit.
But we've also built out a lot of really interesting and credible tools that can be applied to all other manner of interactive problems or of coherence mechanisms, like governance itself, that are not being explored to the same degree. And when we rethink that the way these mechanisms work and tie them to something that matters, and I agree with you that the health of the world that we are embedded in really seems to be a good anchoring point, then I think we'll start to see ourselves right. But then I think we won't be just regenerating that there will be a sense and a very natural felt sense that things are just getting better and general all across the planet. And instead of being this place where it's like, you're chasing after the next thing because you're incentivized to through advertisement or whatever, you just feel better and better instead of feeling worse and worse because we now live in this addiction economy or this limbic system economy.
There's a lot, sorry. It's rich. I'm trying not to decolonize myself and not think of it as rich for mining, whatever it is I say next. Well, I want to read you guys something that I provocation I put on Twitter last year because right before I started with this research project to understand the structures and processes of organizations that are regarded as legendarily innovative, orgs like Bell Labs and Xerox Park, that had a golden moment in which they were capable of doing something really new and influential.
And right before it came out of this 10 weeks later, really convinced that what matters is decoupling human creative effort from the burden of the economy. Like everyone I spoke to at Bell Labs said that it died in what like 1984, thereabouts when suddenly the product of their innovation group had to be answerable to management and therefore to the bottom line. Like ultimately it's financialized. So that's a piece and then the other piece is the way that you and I are both talking about uncertainty and codifying uncertainty.
But we live in this weird situation now where the trust that we place in the largest money systems of the world is based on speculative finance. And yet that has collapsed this variable of the uncertainty of the prediction into the sort of instantaneous measurement of its value. So if we could look at the price of Regen token at any given moment and not see not only what it is, but also see its volatility which thankfully is something that CoinGecko and these things, they give you a sense for that. But it's not in the number.
We don't have like richer ways of communicating this in a more expedient at a glance way. And so I think a lot about architecture, information architecture and how. Anyway, so like with all of that in mind, this comment I made on what is now X. Value creation is the export of entropy and the production of externalities.
Measuring and reducing entropy depends on isolating a system from everything else. Show me a case where any economic activity occurs on one side of a perfect air gap. In other words, cheaper, better, or faster always comes at a cost to someone else. Responsibility and long-term success in an economy literate in an attentive to complex system dynamics.
Therefore, it depends on always asking, who's harm am I profiting from? Ask that question earnestly and answer it smartly and you not only protect your business from potentially disastrous blowback. You also actively create new opportunities for synergy and collaboration. And yes, that ultimately means pushing more entropy on whatever lies beyond the horizon of our ability to know and care.
But at least you have made the effort to act from the deepest wisdom and integrity available. The other option is to optimize for blind spots in your models and that logic carried to do extremes will undermine you. And that's where we are. So I don't see, given like within any sort of subgroup, I like that you say scientists have their own motivations.
And they do. And those motivations corrupt just. So most questions to the allocation of research funding and expertise. And we have to come up with again like a requisite diversity in steeple chases or different sort of peaks in an optimization landscape.
The way I'm starting to think about this through this conversation is less that there is, again, I guess we're circling back around to this. There's no way of getting around these kind of fundamental issues. But there might be ways of making all of these different systems interoperable in a way that does not ultimately make them subject to the predations of speculative finance. And this is where Gregory, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the most anxious conversation that you and I have been having basically since we started talking on the regular, which is what is it that keeps regenerative finance systems from these sort of catastrophic outcomes whereby we're just like the thing that you're trying to fix is this thing that's already present in the carbon markets, which is that this metric has become a proxy.
And it collapses the necessary dimensionality of the space whereby these things are measured. And it allows people to gamble on the future with, as you were saying, John, no real, it's total impunity. In a sense, as long as you die before every coastal city is underwater. So I don't know if that ran.
Got us anywhere, but again, it's snowball. Yeah, there's a lot there. So your tweet, I remember that. And I think it's directionally correct.
I think I'm not 100% sure that all value generation or reduction of cost 100% of the time is a result of harm, downstream harm. I think that is oftentimes true. But I don't think it is 100% of the time true. I think that just pointing out, I think there's a really interesting thing there.
It's like a difference. I don't know. I guess the naive Bernie Sanders critique of billionaires is that anyone who's making money made it through extortion, extraction, degeneration, and other things. And it's like, how do we parse?
I think that that's oftentimes true. It's oftentimes true. And maybe it's just the exception that proves a rule or something like that. But I just wanted to parse that and say, yeah, I think sometimes the system does an OK job at rewarding and tracking in a aligned and generative way.
And those examples are probably pretty interesting to think about. And that's just an intuition. I don't have an example that I'm like, oh, yeah. That's 100% good.
An example of someone who did that said, the provocation that you're making, and then the invitation that you're making, the invitation is so poignant and so right on, which is how do we create? It's like wisdom is a process. How do we interrogate what the downstream, second or third order effects of my choices or the effects that I'm surfing on? What created the way that my business is surfing on?
And what's the relationship if you don't catch the way that's still there? Is that true for business? I don't know. This is a question.
Are entrepreneurs just surfing societal waves? Or because of the way business works and the sort of oroborus effect, like feedback, are we amplifying the waves as we surf them instead of just surfing them? Which I think is the assumption behind what you're saying, which is that if I build a business on a set of actions or another business that have extracted value from the commons or use sweatshop labor or other things, I'm actually feeding those activities. It's not a neutral action.
And I'm struck by this ethical quandary, though. So I'm thinking about what's a way, sorry, this is a little bit meendary, but what's a way to change someone's mind? Imagine a world in which I live next to a neighbor who's racist, or maybe not even racist, but avoidant of this responsibilities and realities of the world that put them in the place that they are. If I ever wanted that person to actually have a look at the underlying harm that their life demands, their way of life demands continue, I've been I probably need a pretty solid relationship with that person.
It's very unlikely I can walk up and be like all up in their face pointing out facts about how their life is built upon and based on harm. I probably need to have a deeper kinship relationship. I probably need to know what they love. And maybe love it myself too, and be like in service to something similar so that at some point I could ask a question or make a comment or invite reflection and consideration in the way that you're asking.
So it's in a way a prerequisite for inviting the type of recursive wisdom exploration that you're inviting us to consider is relationship and trust. Because otherwise we're just like it so quickly just turns into a defensiveness. No, I'm not. What do you know?
And what about you? And it's like there's a proverb about glass windows. And so how do you create the container in which it's actually vaunted, uplifted, invited? That level of engagement is nurturing instead of aggressive.
What's that look like? To spin that up and toss it back at you both. What then is the medium or the occasion for trust at the level of our, the fact that you and I are embedded, both embedded in these bigger biospheric processes that other sort of more junior systems seem actively incented to get us to ignore if it's not catastrophe. Right?
I have this weird sort of scottish Irish fixation with, oh, the silver lining of collapse is that we all see that these superficial differences matter less than our collective effort to survive and to rebuild in the wake of whatever. And I don't, I don't see what else gets us to pay attention other than imminent risk, imminent threat. And I'm curious, it's a dark place to take it, but help me see something a little closer. That might be true.
I have a lot of things swirling in my head about cognitive technology in my head right now. And good hearts law, the notion of trying to quantify anything and optimize towards it eventually becomes like the metric that you're optimizing becomes a bad proxy and becomes a bad cultural unit. That's this quantitative type of thinking that I think is often leading us to focus less on relationship, which is very complex and dynamic and multivariate, I guess. I have leaned into with my work these machine learning models because there is a sort of vector math that connects the meaning space to number space.
Like numbers and tracking numbers has been something that I think has been the bedrock of society and has allowed it to scale and to grow and has allowed us to not have to focus so much on getting to know every single person that we have a transaction with, we could have the Silk Road, we could just be like, I don't know you, you don't know me, but I have this amount of thing that you want and I have this amount of thing that we want, we could just fricking exchange them and go on with our lives. But we have this emergent technology that is a marriage of meaning and numbers where you can literally do discrete calculations on meaning itself. Like the classic example with word embeddings is like king minus man equals queen minus woman. There's like a functional mathematical relationship that is embedded directly into this vector space that we can rely on and it creates for a much more rich and dynamic and complex type of record keeping that we're not exactly taking advantage of yet because these models are primarily coming out through corporations and are yet the open source versions are yet to be taken advantage of and then ultimately what I see happening is being placed into the blockchain spaces game where attention itself becomes this attention in the technical machine learning sense behind transformers becomes this mechanism for how we interrelate because attention is something that could be dynamic and relative to a conversation being had meaning if there was some sort of machine learning model that is in between all of us in the space and is tracking all of the language that we are using right now and it had a record of all of our past work with a much greater memory than any of us has in the Spomot with reference.
It's output to mediate this conversation or mediate if we didn't like each other. There was a huge conflict between us and we're like angry each other to be able to bring in say, hey, listen, you're talking about this right now. I trust this voice in particular out of the three of you and I'm amplifying or sampling more from this particular voice because here are all these things that this person said in the past and it can directly sample and bring back all of those particular instances. I think that is a sort of space that has yet to be explored in Kaldnessystak, the name of that is literally trust with a little line through the T so the T looks like a dollar sign so that it's meant to be a sort of different unit of exchange.
All this is very complex way of saying that so much of the bedrock of society is on these quantitative aspects of record keeping because it's something that we know how to do like we can have lines of a ledger and we can add up the numbers and make sure that it comes to zero at the end of the day or if you're optimizing to having more of a time. Great. Now we have these new mechanisms that can really allow us to explore the qualitative aspects of the relationship and also marriage it back to a lot more dynamic and nuanced representations of meaning like they go beyond that fixed unit of account and can pretty easily on a dime change relative to the conversations that we're having and can capture a lot of nuance and what we're trying to establish and the ability to break out of Goodheart's law and the ability to break out of this sort of over-optimization of a particular unit that is becoming oh it's hacked is a lot harder to do with this very large space that's trying to mediate between all of us because it only can ever speak by predicting what we're all going to say next. Right.
And so therefore it is formed from our very words it is forms from the integration of our being itself more so than Italian or voting or even with science when you have the mechanism of prediction in there as an important element with hypothesis testing. You still as you said it gets into this very competitive space where you're competing for resources to just have the money to do your experiments in the first place. So just food for thought. I would not assume that we cannot do a type of qualitative record keeping and I think there's been a lot of work done by some number of people who aren't being lifted up yet and I think Regen Ledger also is doing a lot of work that's a lot more grounded like maybe some people listening or understanding what I'm saying.
But if you go into Regen Ledger as a concept there already is a lot more grounded way trying to expand that out in a way that probably most people are going to understand if you read into their literature and if you speak to me I don't know if Regen has that much about the intersubjective verification and some of Gregory's technical writings but you can also just get Gregory's technical writings and now GPD four has a hundred and 28,000 character limit you just copy all of his writings and they're and start asking questions. And even though Gregory doesn't have time to have a personal conversation with you you can have a conversation with his writing and that's something that's so far beyond I got to get more piles of gold. Like I'll get more piles of gold. Oh no, so we got to go now the value of gold has changed dramatically.
I thought it was supposed to be so strong steady. But Judge EPT is like a tower of Babel, right? Elaborate. Like aren't we better off with a requisite diversity of different that are like leverages move.
Yes, absolutely. Yes, we don't want to have one behemoth model. It's just that's the first introduction is that there is this with Tower Bell. But the ideally like the vision behind contest and have many different communal models that are like you're talking about implementing your money like I would say like implementing your own model that is mediating between your community and trying to keep track of what you're trying to achieve over time and keeping you grounded to that longer term perspective that we can't see as well because the frame of attention has become so much shorter and it can create a marriage between the longer term sort of evolution of genetics and the shorter term evolution of memes and reground it in the reality, reground it in the real substrate and that we will be affected by if we don't pay attention to the effects of our actions.
You want to bring us home Gregory? Yeah. And I'll have to hop here. I was just looking to see if I probably should be on another call five minutes ago.
It's a lot of track time. I totally agree that there's that qualitative record keeping is doable and important and exciting and I'm less convinced that it's an either or and I feel like that initial provocation I made with Wampum is that there's like this dynamic multi valence nature, which is really somehow core to the this creative conversation in a way. Just like what does that look like? How do we exercise our abilities to be playing in that space of regenerating the symbols of relationship and trust between us?
It seems like we have to do that in a world like just to bring it home in a world in which there's deep fakes and there's attention extraction and there's all of this stuff. What do you know is true? How do you engage? It's just you black pill that's a little bit there, Michael, with your like, isn't it that we have to be forced in order to do things?
Isn't it the last minute that people actually step up? It's yeah, it is. It's the last minute that people step up. It's like we'll procrastinate having to grow the capabilities that we need until we're forced to and now we're being forced to across all systems and ultimately, like I can say that and I can still be an optimist because I see a bunch of intelligent, engaged, dynamic humans living at this edge and intersecting with one another and having fun, but also taking deep responsibility, accountability to think through the challenges of how to be as wise as we can by being humble, by learning, by practicing foresight, by innovating new tools to track transparently if we were right or wrong about our predictions, right, which is one of the primitives of cognizant and ultimately I'm pretty excited about it all.
And it's a fun thing to be working on precisely because now it isn't something that is just a hobby. It isn't something that's just like an abstract interest that people who have the luxury to think about it. You can think about this as a thing that we are all as humans being forced to look at every spectrum in every moment. Whether we want to, whether we believe it or not, I think we are actually all, this is the moment we're all living.
Hopefully it's a long moment, but we're in it. This is a fun conversation to explore it. That was a good idea. I love that.
That's very well done. Absolutely. Have fun with your meeting. Thanks everybody.
It's awesome. That'd be right. Bye. Love you guys.
Love you. I best to you. I want to live where there's no signal. Cause even as it makes us if destroy us, gods are all prosthetic.
I am death and lion, but still corporeal and pathetic. Animals and angels making love always all are poetic. But even in our detriment, we're poised to grow beyond these fetters. Lucidbaric wildness, spreading wings and verdomasicae.
To love the world in Tyre. And as brightly as we were intended. I want to live where there's no signal. I want to live where there's no signal.
To live where there's no signal.