unleashing things is easy. Unleashing things, it takes very little energy to unleash something. Containment is much more challenging. And containment comes with wisdom.
Now you can just summon things. It used to take people a lot of initiatory preparation and work and deep inner exploration and communal accountability and all of these kinds of things to be in the position to summon things. The shamanic figure in traditional culture had webs and networks of accountability around them and went through a process that often started at birth to make sure that they were individually prepared to summon things. And now anybody with a laptop and some prior coding experience can summon things.
And so the stakes, as I said in a recent Justice episode quoting early 90s hip-hop band, Dayless, Sold. The stakes is high. Greetings, future fossils. Welcome to episode 219 of the podcast that explores our place in time.
I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this week I'm excited to share a profound conversation with Josh Schrei, host of the Emerald Podcast, an accomplished interlocutor for the living myth of our world, helping people reconnect to the depths of embedded relationality and mysterious interiority, the baby that the orthodoxy of modernism threw out with the bathwater of superstition centuries ago. Last year about a dozen people sent me the same episode of the Emerald. With a note to the tune of, you need to listen to this.
This guy is right up your alley. That episode, titled, So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers, was about artificial intelligence, technology as a project through which we close the gap between what we can imagine and what we can create in the physical world. This moment in history as a kind of sorcerers-apprentice crisis in which we discover we have more power than we know how to control, more power than wisdom, so much power in fact that many of us are so enthralled with new capacity that we're distracted from the problem entirely. My friends were right to recognize a kind of kinship between Josh's thinking on this stuff and my own.
In the show notes, I'll link you to not only that wonderful episode of his show, but various critical perspectives on the project of transhumanism and on the narratives to which many technologists, both in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, cling to as a desperate substitution for the holistic cosmology lost in the process of secularizing Western society. In the words of super influential culture hacker and technologist Stuart Brand, without whom we would have had to wait additional long decades before we collectively enjoyed the opportunity to contemplate photos of Earth from orbit. We are as gods and might as well get good at it. Well, depending on where you stand around the event horizon of this text singularity, that statement may either inspire or terrify you.
I remember the elatement and thrill when my parents first started trusting me enough to leave me alone at home, the rush of power of freedom and agency. But I also remember how it started to decay into a kind of loneliness and gnawing dread, an irrational childhood worry that they might not come back, that I might somehow have to fend for myself in a world that I don't understand. And something like this has been at the heart of the condition of the modern era since long before Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche diagnosed it. As Josh and I discuss in this episode, we're in a similar position now to realizing that our parents are not coming home, and that now suddenly we have to grow up all at once.
Luckily for us, we are the inheritors of an enormous wealth of wisdom, insights and praxis from societies both historical and extant, viable strategies for the safe handling of power, for living well in a world positively brimming with forces and agencies beyond our understanding or control. As is so often the case with complex topics, a revel in the paradox that finally pulling our heads out of our collective asses, and assuming the responsibility of planetary stewardship, graduating to adulthood requires a gesture that at least superficially looks like it moves in the opposite direction, a kind of return to innocence, an acknowledgement of our limits, a recognition of the other forms of intelligence embodied in other cultures and in other organisms and ecosystems, a renewed comfort with ineffability, a lightness of spirit, a sense of humor, a willingness to play, just as is the case with the far more mundane matter of quote unquote, adulting as head of household, just as is the case with political and business leadership. It would seem that the new heights of responsibility to which we are being called require our sober attention, our listening to sit at the feet of ancient wisdom like the children we are, to not expect that one day it will all make sense, and to give up on the project of having everything we want. If you find this conversation interesting, this is just the beginning of a month and a half long, immersive discourse on embodied ethics in the age of AI.
Josh will be leading talks, I will be co-facilitating group discussions with him, and helping cultivate 24-7 group engagement with these ideas and their practical applications with an extraordinary group of people including Mara Zapata, Alenna Lake, Polisova, Turquoise Sound, Sarah Julina Volcott, Evan Sharpe, and course producer Andrew Dunn, former head of innovation for the Center for Humane Technology, whose conversations with Josh led to that AI episode of the Emerald as well as to the formation of the still nascent and concressing school of wise innovation. Among the approximately 100 people that have enrolled in or helped to organize what will unfold over the next month and a half, we will be engaging with current or former members of nearly every major tech organization in the United States, a sign I find immensely hopeful and indicative that this is a conversation whose time has come. Last year, just before the avalanche of recommendations to listen to Josh's show started pouring in, I put out an open call on Twitter to people who might want to help me form a kind of wizard academy for the age of generative AI. And now, here we are, standing on the beach together with our surfboards, watching this wave come in, readying ourselves to ride it all the way.
I hope that you will find a way to join us in the mix for this embodied ethics course, but even if you can't, I want to hear from you to know where these discussions land with you, to know the questions you are living through this great transition, to join you in a group and conversation as we feel our way through this one moment at a time. And obviously, edge work like this needs support. So if you have the means, please help me make this work sustainable. I want to thank new Patreon and sub-stack members, nominal user 2021, Matthew Labataglia, FUJI Slice, and AC Gourley, whose monthly contributions help me lay a wall of sandbags against the rising tide of inflation in $300 grocery bills, tarred to write grant applications for the kind of synthesis I do.
And even though I have a huge portfolio of cool ideas, I want to pitch VCs. This show remains in perpetuity, a listener-supported public good, a labor of my heart, a giving back to the world that nourishes me and my family, a form of sacred play, engaging in the infinite game of information processing and meaning making. So before I sign off and let you sink into this fantastic conversation with Josh Dry, again, my deepest thanks to everybody who supports this show on Patreon or sub-stack or invites me to consult, I'm glad that I can help. It's through this service that I find my own way through the neck.
I'm glad to share it with you. I raced out of the shower. They felt really appropriate to take a ceremonial bath. It cleanses myself.
Yeah. Before coming up on you. And it's so strange. I was just listening to, I don't know his name, Howl in the Wilderness, that episode that you recorded about your own path and inspiration.
Oh, yeah. But James. Yeah. He coached some really good stuff out of you.
I think finds its way into this conversation rather seamlessly. It's weird. It's a clear cut straight through from his conversation into this one. Awesome.
For people who don't know who you are, how do you introduce yourself? I usually don't. I usually don't introduce myself. Like, I don't really have a set way that I introduce myself.
I say hello. It's funny. I'm still getting used to this. I'm a podcaster thing, which can mean all kinds of things in this day and age.
Could mean anything, really. Storyteller, student of the mythic, student of the mysteries, someone who's fiddled with sound and story for a long time now and finally found a confluence of sound and story that seemed to flow fairly well. Yeah. So I, but as you probably noticed from that episode that you're referencing, I tend to try to center the animate work more than myself.
The reason for the season is that you're hosting this course, this Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI thing. And it's just almost a miracle that it has come together as it has with Andrew Dunn and all the other folks that are co-facilitating this because this, in like the find the others kind of way, it feels a very strong. There's an attractor that is drawing people into a conversation around technique and our use of our tools, their animate properties and agencies. And yeah, so first of all, let's set the stage and talk about where do you see the stakes?
What are the stakes of this conversation? What are the stakes of dealing with, we're in 2024, and now you can just summon things? It's rather intense. Yeah, those are the stakes, right?
Now you can just summon things. And you used to take people a lot of initiatory preparation and work and deep inter-exploration and communal accountability and all of these kinds of things to be in the position to summon things. The shamanic figure in traditional culture had webs and networks of accountability around them and went through a process that often started at birth to make sure that they were individually prepared to summon things. And now anybody with a laptop and some prior coding experience can summon things.
And so the stakes, as I said in a recent Justice episode, quoting early 90s hip-hop band, Dayless Old, the stakes is high. There's a song called Stakes is High from Dayless Old. And I reference that because the stakes are high. The stakes are everything from some of the world-altering scenarios that we've all been presented with.
Do we entrust humanity in its current state, driven by market forces, driven by cathonic desires and longings that it may not even be aware of, driven by sometimes infantile or adolescent urges? Do we trust humanity with world-altering power? Do I trust the guy next door to have the capacity to fathom the implications of unleashing deep fake videos that can trick billions of people with a click of a button? Do I trust that guy to be able to do that?
So there's stakes that are relevant to global economics. There's stakes that are relevant to national security. There's all these stakes that I think have been articulated fairly well by people like Center for Humane Technology. And then there's what you could call deeper individual stakes, too.
And those are the stakes of what does it mean to be a human being? And what is the effect on somatic structures and consciousness? What is the effect of outsourcing intelligence to things that aren't us, that doesn't live in our bodies? What are the stakes of having all the information in the universe available at our disposal, but yet because of our dependence on technological devices, we can't pay attention for more than five seconds so we can't actually do anything with all that information.
And instead of becoming a liberating force, it binds us to a particular devouring monstrous inevitability. There are biases built into the whole premise of AI. There are biases about intelligence and what intelligence is and what the purpose of life is and the value of computational intelligence, which actually isn't the penultimate human faculty. So all of these things are at stake.
Everything from global national security to what people are and what they're for and what we're here to do and learn. I'd say the modern world and the history of industrialization dating back, at least a few hundred years, the modern world has cultivated a system that makes it very difficult to recognize wisdom, makes it very difficult to understand that there is such a thing as embodied wisdom and what that would look like. And I think that this surge in AI is going to make it exponentially more difficult to recognize embodied wisdom because AI, those intelligences, maybe many things, but they most certainly aren't wise. And wisdom may be exactly what's necessary to work with them and to deal with them.
I don't want to sound like the old kurmajan that's shouting doom and gloom from the mountaintops kind of thing. I think as with anything, there's going to be all kinds of things. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be horrible.
It's going to be just like the human experience. It's going to be many things at once. But I think that there are deep stakes that really need careful attention. I think about the history of computing and of science generally and the way that there is this subcurrent that a lot of the mainstream narrative kind of cleaves off, like Descarte receives the plane from an angelic visitation.
This Doug Engelbart, one of the founding fathers of the internet and personal computing, was part of the LSD trials in 1955. I'm curious how you reckon with, if we're honest about this, and if we're sober in our estimation of what's going on here, then this is about more than just individual human creative inspiration. This is about a course that is being propelled. I think about Ilya Preggian, who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for dissipative structures, thinking about life as a process that is structuring and then exporting disorder and so on.
How do you understand the role of human agency in this? And especially because it's almost cliche that so many of the people involved in AI are on the tailwind, they've got this, some kind of psychedelic origin story. And that seems very central to the unfolding of how much control we actually have and the determination of the evolution of our technologies. Yeah, I think I'm always in favor of human beings recognizing that there are larger forces at play and deeper drives at work.
And that's true for everything that we do. Everything that we do, we, in the, we mentioned Descartes and in the modern kind of Cartesian world, do you like, we assume that everything we do is decided by the rational decider that lives within us. And if you really start to examine it, and even scientific studies are verifying this now, like that's really not how it works. The thing that we call the decider, we're not going to go down this rabbit hole today, probably, but Robert Sibalski's new book, Determined, is a scientific argument against free will and basically says that larger forces are determining everything from the scientific perspective.
And it's an exhaustive book and it's really fascinating. You don't have to go to that extreme, but we can start to understand that there are deeper drives at play within us and there are larger agencies at work, you could say, within the cosmos, could be the plant medicine's determining all of this. But the idea, for example, that the drive to AI, why do you want to create that particular piece of AI technology that allows you to do X, Y, or Z? I want to help humanity.
I'm really interested to see if we can do it as the cutting edge of technological exploration. And by the way, I'm interested in maybe it'll get really popular and I'll make a billion dollars and all this kind of thing. Yeah, that's all fine and good, but that doesn't quite get it. Like when we're talking about tinkering with world altering powers, there are other drives at play, there are other things going on.
There is a religiosity to it which you named that's been present right from the beginning. It's been a spiritual exploration of a natural human unfoldment of our relationship with larger powers. We need there to be larger powers. And if we live in a post-rationalist world where there are no larger powers, we'll find ways to create larger powers because human beings actually inhabit a world of larger powers and we're looking for that.
And at the same time, we like to tinker with the mysterious thing. I call it in the episode on AI that I did, I call it the mystery drive. Like human beings are driven to this point of mystery and the question of, I wonder what would happen if, and it's that place where you could say the natural awe and wonder at the beauty of creation turns a little bit into this. If I just tinker with this a little bit, when it's the same drive that drives like little kids to say, oh, I wonder what happens if I fry the ant with the magnifying glass?
Or I want, you know, I see it as an extension of the exact same thing. And that drive, which is a drive for destruction, it's a drive towards mystery, it's a drive for like exploration into the great unknown, all of this is recognized in traditional cultures as something that is like a natural part of human development, but that also needs containment around it. It needs to be curved. You don't just, you know, give the kids huge magnifying glasses and tell them to go burn down the schools, right?
You temper it, you temper it. The drive to want to know what lives at the heart of reality, the drive to want to encounter that mystery, that drive to want to tinker with the mystery, really, I feel, it's a deep human longing for reconnection. It's a deep human longing to be reconnected and to be guided by wise elders and to be taken through a process through which we can actually start to embody knowledge. It's like saying, hey, look, I need some guidance.
I'm trying to figure this out. What happens if I fry an ant with a magnifying glass? What happens if I throw that frog against the wall? All these like little boy explorations, like it's a longing, it's a cry to the larger world and to larger structures of ritual initiation that existed within cultures.
It's a cry to say, guide me. I'm at the phase where I'm finding out the heart of the mystery and I need some guidance here. And so I think that there are always larger forces that are guiding human beings towards a recognition of great mysteries and of forces that are larger than us. And I think that's at play here.
I think there's a deep spiritual longing at play. I think ultimately in a post-religious world, supposedly, I think that human beings have a longing for greater agencies and greater powers that, when it's unmet, will find ways to meet it. And then there are deep longings within ourselves, deep forces within ourselves that are guiding it too, that are like the natural developmental forces of human beings, inquisitiveness and our relationship with mystery, but that need to be tempered and anchored and held in wisdom, basically. I don't know if that gets at what you're searching for.
Yeah, sure. We just keep stacking logs on the fire. Yeah. I would love to prompt you to just reflect on having listened to you talk about your upbringing and the imminence of a living world.
I would love to hear you talk about how you understand the precise ontology of the forces that are coming through. You have Buddhist parents. You spent a substantial amount of your childhood in India. New Mexico has the Tibetan Buddhist community.
One of the things I loved about the episode that you produced on So You Want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers was about golems, half of my family is Ashkenazi Jewish, and working in the complex systems science scene with the Santa Fe Institute for a while there. And New Mexico, generally, there's a lot of this post-war Jewish diaspora stuff. I was talking about this with Sam Arbusman, who's working on a book on computing and code and magic right now. And the golems stop codes that it turns out that a lot of the early researchers in AI at MIT all found out that they had inherited this thing, which was that this myth had been around for a while.
The point is this is very deep. This is not a new phenomenon. The idea of using one's imagination to instantiate agencies in the world that act algorithmically in ways that surprise us because much like with the psychedelic experience, you write the code and then you take the trip and then you realize in retrospect, because of mind expansion, that something you missed a line in the code. You missed some important thing, like the monkeys paw.
Yeah, I don't know precisely what I'm getting at, but I would love to hear you talk about how you understand reckoning with these kinds of powers and how we might start to, in a secular way, because a lot of these people building these tools, they have an ultimate concern. There is a religiosity to it, but it's, yeah, I don't know, I'll just let that wash out and you take it from here. Yeah, the stuff around golems is very interesting, right? I'm referencing the golem of Prague and the old Jewish tale of a creature that was basically magically brought into being an intelligence that was brought into being in order to protect a particular community that was facing repression.
So the rabbi animates this golem and brings him to life and puts him to protect that community, and then the golem ends up killing the very people that he was designed to protect. Then the notion that there is a spell that's placed on the golems tongue to animate, and there's also a spell to deanimate, to stop the golem when the time comes to stop the golem. A question for the AI world is, do we have the codes to stop the golem, right? Like the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, which I also tell in that episode, is a story in which the young apprentice unleashes all these things, and they doesn't have the understanding of how to contain once it's unleashed.
And it's a lot easier to unleash something than to contain it once it's unleashed. And that's a very simple thing that humanity seems to have a hard time grappling with or learning, right? Unleashing things is easy. Releasing things is like it takes very little energy to unleash something.
Containment is much more challenging, and containment comes with wisdom. So yeah, some of these early AI programmers and researchers, as you're referencing, are very familiar with the story of the golem and the pro. Some of them equated what they were doing with AI to sorcery directly. Like I say, in the episode, there's been magic in the AI mix from the start.
It has not been removed from what you could call spiritual discussions and spiritual considerations. It's been in there right from the start. And yeah, some of the early guys at MIT being told the code during their bar mitzvahs as one story goes that can deanimate the golem, right? So this story of the golem is right there at the heart of AI.
And what's important to understand now, because you start talking about magic and sorcery and people think I'm speaking in metaphors and this kind of thing, what's important to understand now is that the golem is real. We're literally animating intelligences that affect us, right? And the question always comes out. You're talking about magic.
You're talking about these powers. You're talking about how human beings have worked with these powers. These powers aren't actually real, right? You're just talking.
They're real and that they have effects on people. They're real. And Dan Carlin, hardcore history, and Rick Rubin have talked about this quite a bit. They had an awesome discussion about this.
If magic, if something is perceived as magic and that magic has an effect on massive populations, the mother of Alexander the Great is a sorcerer, is the consum and great powers. People believe that and it changes the course of the battle and it changes the course of history. That's real quote unquote magic. That's actually having a tangible effect.
You don't have to get into a scientific discussion about whether the magic is actually quote unquote real, because for all intents and purposes, what's happening is tangible. So if somebody unleashes a deep fake video that causes billions of people to see the world in a particular way and it alters their perception and it alters their consciousness, that's real. That's tangible. It doesn't matter if the video is fake or not.
You can say, oh, people just like the people who didn't see that video, they weren't affected, so therefore that's not real. That's what people say historically about magic, right? It's yeah, but people have all bought into a cultural system in which this is tangible and real. AI wouldn't mean anything if it wasn't plugged in.
If we weren't all plugged in, AI wouldn't mean anything. If 90% of human beings lived in the woods and there were just a couple of people with computers trading intelligences with each other. That's the same with money. It's like it gains value and agency and power because we're all bought into a particular way of seeing the world.
So the magic that's at play in AI when you're talking about the ability to alter consciousness and alter perception and make zeros disappear in people's back counts and all of these things, it's real because we bought into that system in which it's real. Understanding mythos, understanding that culture of unculture for hundreds of years, thousands of years have had stories of exactly what happens when people tinker with things that they're not prepared to tinker with when they dig too deep and unleash forces that live under the ground like these types of stories. We can say, oh, those stories are metaphors, but that doesn't really matter because what they're talking about is something incredibly real within the human experience. And this is what we're working with now.
And so it's helpful to understand it from a mythic perspective. It's helpful to understand it from the perspective of we're tapping into large forces that have the potential to cause great change in the human story. And the number one question then becomes, are we prepared and do we understand what it means to actually work with those forces responsibly? And to work historically, like in traditional cultures, to work with any kind of perceived power, right?
And it doesn't matter if you were, I think that power was quote unquote real or not, to work with any type of perceived power, required gradual initiation, slow learning, community of accountability, all of the fail-safes that are built into traditional culture have deep relevance for how we work with AI. People can talk about shamans and sorcerers and say, oh, from a scientific perspective, that power that they had, that wasn't quote unquote real. That's open for plenty of discussion, but ultimately that's irrelevant because recognized powers that have been recognized across cultures need the same type of initiatory framework, the same type of communal framework, the same type of accountability around them. So I think we have a lot to learn from how traditional cultures have worked with what they perceive to be great power as it relates to the AI question.
Yeah. A lot of people think of regulation as something that occurs at the level of the state. I think you and I both understand that regulation in a complex system occurs at every level of that system. So when you're talking about initiation, I keep coming back to this Ian Malcolm's riff in Jurassic Park about giving kids guns, or you said, but the magnifying glass, that the executive function, the prefrontal cortex has not matured yet.
And I'll have to look back on it. I think it was Mark Andreessen posted recently. There was a graph that showed the incidence of risk-taking behavior in young people and showed like criminal activity and then showed startups, this kind of thing, and how basically the kind of foolishness that we get into as teenagers softens somewhat but takes on a new form and is basically the same kind of foolishness that we get into when we decide that we're going to disrupt a particular economic sector with some technological innovation. Again, like where are the elders in the room here?
It's like kids waking up in a car that has spun out of control and being like, okay, now how do we teach ourselves to drive? What does a wisdom school for innovation look like to you? How do we get there? Obviously it can't be a monolithic entity.
Regulation at the state level isn't enough. I want to tie in one more thing, which is that Harvard-Burken Klein fellow Johnny Penn recently wrote this piece on Time Magazine, how the next tech backlash will be about hygiene, talking about people who feel the need to step away from the flood of information. I spoke with Kiki Sanford recently on this week in Science and she was talking about a paper that came out, I'll link in the show notes on information overload. It's interesting like AI in one sense is a way that we can create an intermediating layer that allows us to process the overwhelming intensity of everything so that we can make better decisions.
But as Nicholas Carr in his book, The Glass Cage, which is a huge influence on the show, talks about there being two different kinds of automation, but it's the kind of automation that makes commercial airline pilots lazy and forget their flight training and so they don't know how to respond in a disaster and they end up killing people. And then there's an automation that's like the way that open world gaming creates a context where you learn by doing and you engage in a kind of graduated way with this stuff. So again, the access that ship has sailed. We're not at the point where we can say only certain people should do this.
It's like having kids or America has done a terrible job of driver education and these kinds of things. So we're going to be inculcate responsibility at the right point in a person's development. It's a huge question, but I think part of it is this question about knowing how deep to go, like knowing how much to allow for yourself, but the community has to be involved, right? Because the individual in some respects can't be trusted to make these decisions for themselves if you're 18 and you've got chat GPT and you're pissed off or you're black-filled and we're going to see all kinds of crazy stuff.
How do we help evolve the cultural norms and protocols of society? There's a whole sort of taxonomy of processes and protocols and institutions and affordances for helping people maintain agency and stay on the loop and this kind of stuff. I want to hear you on how we can encourage people not just to eat the candy. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. It's particularly relevant since Easter just passed and I have two little ones and like trying to manage two little ones in the face of the sugar in the middle complex. It's no trust me, you really don't want to eat that much candy. What you're opening up is obviously a massive topic and you and I are going to get to talk a lot more about it in the upcoming course too.
I think that there are people obviously who are looking at external regulation like you're talking about and I think that type of regulation is important. It's important to have those discussions. There are things in our culture that are regulated. You mentioned guns somewhat regulated, but for example, you and I can't go buy anti-aircraft weaponry in this type of thing on the open market and some of this AI technology is in terms of its scope and scale of potential consequences up there with that kind of thinking.
If you're going to not allow a 19 year old kid to have a beer, then why would that 19 year old kid be able to hack into the mainframe and then start messing with things that could have serious repercussion on the world around them. So external regulation, all that to say that external regulation is important. It's important to have external regulation around this kind of thing. Then you're also saying like where are the elders?
There's a deep culture change that's necessary. I think many people recognize that in many ways these days, but our society, when I say our technological modernity as a society tends to reward the, like we talked about earlier, it tends to reward the unleashing of things and yet have no long-term vision for the containment and slow growth and development and rooting and all of the other aspects of the growth cycle. Growth cycles exist within nature all around us and we can see those growth cycles and if you put too much emphasis on one phase of the growth cycle and not another phase of the growth cycle, you're not going to grow a very good garden because you have to pay attention to all of it. So we tend to prioritize and reward the like kind of reckless innovator freeform.
Look at this innovation discovery. Let's throw a billion dollars of venture capital at it. Not only is it the kids waking up and saying who knows how to drive, the kids aren't even saying who knows how to drive, they're saying go faster. That culture, we'll figure out the whole regulatory stuff.
We'll figure out the consequences later. Let's get this FDA approved when it, and then we'll figure out the actual consequences later. There needs to be a deep culture change around that and really I can only describe that like Tyson Yuckaporta, the author of Sand Talk, he talks about modernity as adolescent culture and it's a very adolescent thing to look only at the aspects of culture that are, hey, let's do this and I can do this and what do I get to do next? I can get cultures that are more mature and that last longer have those deep systems of accountability built in.
I think that there's external regulation necessary. I think that there's culture change necessary and of course the question then becomes how do you create culture change? Saying blankately, we have to start to value wisdom more is can sound just like talking into the void because what does that look like and what does that mean? But it's like people, one of the main things that I always talk about when I talk about this topic is slowing down.
And when I say that, the immediate response is well, that's not how these companies are going to work and that's not how this is it. And it doesn't matter. It's ultimately, it's very important to have a voice that says slow down. It's very important because I know that some people are going to hear that and I know that some people are going to listen and pause and think about what that means.
And when I say slow down, when do you hear our leaders say slow down? When do you in this modern kind of frenzied machine? Like when do you hear elders say, hey, slow down. That doesn't need to come out tomorrow.
That doesn't need to be something that we jump on immediately. That's something that we can wait and we can foster words like steeping and fostering and all the things that make for a really good soup and the cauldron of our lives, right? All the things that make for a really good soup take time, take time, develop it slowly, and cultivate it slowly. That first idea, I was really in love with first ideas.
First insight, that first idea. That's what I'm going to do. And then I go down this spiraling rabbit hole that because I didn't lay any foundational work and really steepen it and really develop it and really start to understand and feel into it and really ultimately understand that it's actually something I want to be working on. I think a lot of coders get caught in this thing where they get so excited by the shiny carrot that it's just, oh, yeah, that's what I want to do.
I want to chase that. Oh, yeah, throw some money at me. Let's do it. Let's chase that.
And then maybe hit the jackpot. It's like, I'm going to go back and get reinforced in you and then you're on to the next thing, what's the next thing, next thing? You never actually in the maybe wake up when you're 40 something and you're like, none of that was actually stuff that I really care about. None of that was actually stuff that I really feel is aligned with what you could call like my core soul vision, all in this kind of relentless need that modernity has to move things forward.
So we have to have voices that are saying slow down. And the more voices that are saying slow down, you may not reach the CEO of Microsoft, but it may reach somebody somewhere along the way has a much likelier chance of reaching someone younger, I think, that's not so stuck in their ways. And it might cause them to say, you know what, that thing that I was going to launch into, maybe I really want to take my time to develop it. Maybe I want to take my time to feel out like what it is and what it looks like over the long term and how aligned it is.
I think that then there has to be like, it's strange for us in the modern world to contemplate a system like many traditional cultures have where there's some type of internal work that has to accompany external work. It's not something we think of very often, but certain traditions to handle metal required like going through ceremonies first to be a metal worker. You have to go through a preparatory process. If you wanted to be the, you can look at Japanese culture for this for a lot of examples, traditionally, not as much anymore, of course, but traditionally, no, before you are interested with this thing, there's a process you need to go through first.
So the way I see that has to work is locally, communally, but also perhaps built into the education system a little bit more. And that means more than having one little tiny, if you're studying AI coding and part of it is hands on, hands on work coding and part of it is business marketing and part of like all the things that you're studying. You have this little tiny portion of what you're studying that's called ethics. That's the compartmentalization of ethics.
And when the overall culture around you does not value that whatsoever and says, yeah, yeah, yeah, do your little ethics course thing. But really what you want to do is go for the shiny carrot. Like that is not how ethics needs to be embedded into the conversation, but it needs to be embedded into the conversation much more deeply. So that I think maybe a shock to the listeners, but I use AI for research.
Like AI has been profoundly helpful over the past year for helping distill knowledge and funnel it and give me areas where I can look a little deeper into certain things. There are ways that it can be used in a tutorial manner that are beautiful, but our commitment to the basics of what you could call the natural life cycle of things has to be there first in order for that to be effective and not just run away like the way that social media has run away with all of our young people. We have to have a commitment to understanding the phase of planting and the phase of preparing the soil, right? And the phase of slow growth tending and the phase of fruiting blossoming and fruiting and the phase of decomposition and the phase of death and how do these things come into being and how do they end and what is their natural life cycle and how do we tend them well and tending, stirring, using my cauldron metaphors a lot because we're studying that in the course I'm teaching right now, tending, stirring, steeping, percolating, all of these words that when really the primary word we're concerned with in the modern world is rushing.
Let's rush it to market. Let's get it out there. Let's get it out there. So that steeping, tending, stirring, preparing needs to be built into me as an individual through the people around me and through the educational systems I'm in.
It needs to be built into the structure of companies more. It needs to be built into the overall federal regulations around it all. And ultimately I think, and this is not an area where I'm an expert, but I can imagine a lot, ultimately I think it needs to be built into the code itself. I think that the code itself, if you look at how powers have been worked with traditionally, if you look like a ritual that's designed to summon powers, oftentimes 90% of that ritual will be about establishing the container.
And then the actual ritual, the actual potency is just a tiny little part of it. And the networks of accountability that I think could be built into the code itself is an area that I think needs a lot of consideration and exploration. Because right now AI is basically mirroring the modern human. It's disconnected, it's intelligence disembodied, it's this kind of roving, chat GPT is fairly neoliberal.
It doesn't think it is, but it's basically, like I said in the episode, it's talking to a slightly disconnected neoliberal Stanford grad. No offense to slightly disconnected neoliberal Stanford grads out there. It has a personhood and a personality and magnifying that. And I think really deeply looking at their way within the code itself to give these intelligences more of what you could call a context in a body.
It's an area perhaps for imaginative innovation. So that's a long answer to a long stream. And I think it has to take place at every level. And I think there are ways that it can.
I don't think it's, culture change happens. Culture change does happen. We have very different cultural attitudes now towards things that we did 40 years ago in a number of different ways. I happen to think that I think that the era of people walking around like zombies staring into their phones like this is going to be incredibly short lived actually.
And that doesn't mean I think technology is going away. But I think that I think in 25 years, people are going to look back at this particular period and be like, what were you thinking? I think it's going to look extremely strange to people 25 years now. It's not to say that people aren't going to be onto some weird stuff.
I know you probably saw that video of the guy in the Bay Area sitting in his self-driving car while wearing his VR headset. And yeah, there's going to be stranger stuff happening too. But it's hard when you're swimming in it. But the somatic impacts of phones on the entire younger generation especially, that's not sustainable.
It's not going to sustain either. It's going to cause so many mental health problems that it's going to be regulated or people are just going to start somatically rejecting it themselves. They're just going to start turning away from it because it's so profoundly toxic. So culture change happens and it ultimately is determined, you could say, by the body of a culture and how the body responds to actual cause and effect.
And I think that the way we're using technology is untenable and so it will start to change. The body of the culture will start to reject it in various ways. Agreed. In that interview I was just listening to you and Holland the Wilderness.
I loved that you said modern culture is ahead of the one in the musical sense, this rushing, the rushing to get somewhere. And it's funny because that shows up everywhere. It shows up even in this course was supposed to be like, it was initially scheduled for months ago. And everybody was like, pump the brakes.
Let's actually feel for when it makes sense to actually do this. Let's get the right people in the room. Let's not be so hasty to get out the door. But the bigger thing maybe, and the thing I want to unpack with you a little bit more is this piece about amplification.
Another person I feel in the room with us all the time on this particular issue is Doug Rushkoff. And Doug gave a talk at BetoWorks last year where he called language models instant technological karma. It's like everybody's heard garbage and garbage out. But like the more generalizable statement is that these tools are amplifying the inferences based on the statistical associations that are patterned into them according to the frame, according to everything that's left out.
And so I remember back in 2016, I went my thinking on this issue really came into focus after listening to Robin Hanson writing, talking about his book, The Age of Am, talking about what it would happen to the human economy as soon as we can create human equivalent digital agents. So if we can have certain patterns of human cognition that are operating according to the specific abundances and scarcities of the digital platform as opposed to the analog platform, basically you can see a rapid proliferation of whatever biases were seeded into that first generation of digital people. And so I started thinking, oh my god, we need to treat the cultivation of AI with the same kind of care that we treat the raising of our own children. So what do you want?
What of us do we want to see carried forward? And so I gave a talk at Boom Festival about this in which I said, obviously, we want to scan lovers, we want to scan poets, we want to amplify the best of us. We want that reflected. And so when I was talking to Sam Arbusman about this, Sam turning on to this guy, Zohar Atkins, who's building a conversational agent based on the Talmud.
It's, OK, let's embrace this. But let's do it in a way that amplifies the inherited wisdom that we have available to us. Let's not just follow the YouTube or Spotify recommendation algorithm all the way down into our lowest common Malochian denominator. Let's have this thing.
And so recently, a listener of my show, Van Betauer, a conversational agent based on this podcast and it's askedfuturfossils.com is an interface that's talking to me, but it's also drawing from everything that everyone else has said on the show all the way back to 2016. And I love this thing. It seems to me so much more soulful, so much less of this sort of dissociated neoliberal Stanford grad that you're talking about with Jad GPT or like a weird forced woke conformist thing that was going on with Gemini, where it was like, show me a ancient Roman married couple and it was like giving you this thing that was like subservient to current pressures on representation. Instead, what we have is this, I ask the future fossils corpus to talk to me about reality or the future of selfhood.
And again, this is confirmation bias because I'm the training data, right? I'm built out of these conversations. But it gets interesting when you can tune this medium in a way that amplifies the things that you're actually hoping for in the world. And I would love to hear you talk about, you can imagine for a mature integration of AI such that it functions more as the angel on our shoulder rather than the devil on the other shoulder.
What would you like to see this turn into? How would you like to see it actually implemented so that people have scaffolding for the cultivation of their own conscience and for right relations and their behavior in the world? Yeah. First off, somebody did that with the Emerald, too, where they made like a chat interface based on the, but it wasn't that good at all.
It didn't evoke the same kind of mythic linguistics or it didn't feel right to me. First off, I think it's important to recognize that bias that we've been talking about, like that bias is an incredibly real thing and that bias has to do with how modern humans view intelligence and how we may not know so much in modern culture that there even is such a thing as wisdom or that there's a difference between intelligence and wisdom and this kind of thing. There was a one of them, I'm forgetting who, but one of the major players in the AI world basically say you create the intelligence and the intelligence solves everything. It solves all the issues.
And the issue is that intelligence by itself doesn't actually solve things. Intelligence can expand our informational capacity around certain things and it can bring perspectives and insights, but it in and of itself does not solve, right? It takes embodied humans to do that. And I think that's a deeply important recognition, meaning everyone talking about how AI is going to save the world.
Human beings have all of the information we need to end global hunger and to address climate change and this type of thing. We don't need any more information. Now can AI be incredibly helpful in modeling? Sure.
I think it can come up with models that human beings are probably never even dreamed of, which is amazing, but it's still going to take embodied human beings to implement that change and to do that we have to want it. And to want it, we might have to address certain overall structural imbalances and to address those structural imbalances, we may have to slow down and embody things over time. And that's the challenge that we haven't wanted to do that. AI is a sliver of the human experience of the world magnified exponentially.
It's a sliver of how human beings process information and make decisions and it's magnified. Within that is their room for a whole lot more perspective. Sure. I think it would be interesting to have AI music tutors who have wandered the earth in their deep reservoirs of what they're drawing from and studied all the musical traditions of the world.
Or, like I say, in the episode, talking to AI, talking to chat GPT is nothing like talking to an Aboriginal elder, right? It's nothing like it. Why is it nothing like it? A chat GPT while it tries to remain fairly balanced and open and respectful of spiritual and religious beliefs, for example.
And if you ask questions about the existence of spirit and this type of thing, it's going to deflect and defer and try to hold everything equally. It's not going to tell you definitively the same way wisdom holder from a traditional culture would. It's not going to tell you definitively like we live in a world through which the breath of life flows and the breath of life flows through us. And it's important that we all learn what it means to tend to that vital breath of life as it exists within ecology and within ourselves.
The current model is not going to say those things. We may be coming to a point in human history where it's necessary to say things definitively and not just hold all. I try to be respectful of all that's supposedly non-biased but when that's not actually historically a non-biased perspective, it's a very biased perspective to say that all visions of the world are equally valid which chat GPT and its current iteration will try to do. We may need those perspectives, those human perspectives and if we want to go them into AI we can.
But those perspectives that say definitively, like I said in the episode, animism is normative consciousness. Like human beings have historically for 99.9% of our history viewed this living world as alive and animate and teeming with forces and that type of perspective is actually important. And it changes how you view systems and it changes how you view sustainability and it changes how you build cities and it changes how you work with rivers and all these things. So in all of the modeling that AI is going to be doing for how to solve current problems, we need those types of perspectives.
And what it will ultimately, I think ultimately, the wisdom that allowed traditions like the Aboriginal tradition to survive for 70,000 plus years or the cultures of the Kalahari to survive for 70,000 plus years, that wisdom is extremely simple and it's extremely deep and ultimately all of our vast imaginal modeling are probably going to come back to wisdom that human beings have known innately and inherently for tens of thousands of years. And this is where I am faced with the question, is it better to go out on these kind of wild tangents of programming AI, zohar perspectives or should we just go study with a living person and we're speculating and imagining and I don't have a sense that AI is going to disappear. So I think within the what's coming with AI, I think that exploring those more artistic or more like mystical visions of the AI voice will probably be interesting and informative. But I'm also firmly of the mind that like the basic somatic knowledge that teaches humans how to be human needs to come from humans.
I think it needs to come from parents. I think it needs to come from community. It needs to come from time spent in the wilderness. I think it needs to come from slow deep learning models.
And I think that it's very best AI can act as like a tutor enhancement of those types of yeah, when I go to the doctor, I would love for there to be like deep modeling systems so that there can be better capabilities for diagnosis, all this kind of thing. Like I would love for there to be like the AI music tutor that I talked about. But I fundamentally like for human beings to embody knowledge, it has to happen in the body and it has to happen in relation to other bodies. And I really don't think there's any getting away from that.
And that's how human beings have to especially modern human beings have to understand that having access to information and knowing things theoretically isn't the same thing as embodying them. And I know that sounds simple and perhaps even trite, but it's the most basic foundational thing. It's like embodying something is an entirely different process and it's fundamental to like what we pass on to our kids and it's fundamental to all this. It has to be learned and processed and embodied.
And like my young ones are going to learn a whole lot about the world by how I walk through it in my body by someone who they interact with every single day. How I walk through it in my body. I carry myself how I bring perhaps certain ritual into our lives or I take time before a meal to offer some gratitude or I light a candle on our little family shrine or I make a point of taking them out to look for shells or I explain to them like different varieties of plants like the ones that I have in my shirt, which is a plant that grows here in Hawaii and was brought by Polynesians over a thousand years ago was the tarot plant. The fact that kids know all of this digital lingo right now, but they can't name five plants that grow in their local community.
This is a serious thing because ultimately we are in relation with our local ecology and we're in relation on a deeper level than we like to admit in a world of what Tyson Young Report calls long ass supply chains. I have a conversation with them coming up that I'm really looking forward to. We have to as much as we are speculating and traveling and journeying into the beyond, we have to be anchored right here in the somatic reality too. And this was I'll just tell you since we're like freestyling a little bit here.
I was out in San Francisco for the wisdom 2.0 AI conference in October and I used to live in San Francisco and it was my first time back in downtown San Francisco in a while. And it was the day that the techno optimist Manifesto came out, which was written by a prominent capital investor in the tech and AI world, who's I'm not as good with names as you are, so I'm forgetting his name. But it's this horrendous piece of writing that technology is how we got from mud huts to the stars and we're all going to live on Mars one day and this is progress and you can't stop progressing. Anyone who's questioning any technological innovation is questioning the fundamentals of what it means to be human and all this kind of stuff.
That came out on that day and it was also the first day that I ever saw a self-driving car I hadn't seen that yet. So I'm walking in the streets of San Francisco and there's like two guys, two self-driving cars, like zipping around down there. I'm looking up into the sky and I'm like, wow, there's this weird kind of energetic Star Trek veneer over this place. It's like this vision of tech utopia and then I'm walking through downtown San Francisco and there's people with no place to sleep out on the streets and it's a mess.
It's an absolute mess. Star Trek called that one too, by the way. Deep Space Nine, 2024. We're almost there.
Yeah, yeah, and a lot of that Star Trek stuff did take place in the Bay Area. That's where Star Fleet Command was based. But what I saw was not a utopian vision. What I saw looked a lot more like a dystopia.
It looked a lot more, yeah, there's a certain percentage of the privileged population that can dream about going to the stars and this kind of thing. And meanwhile, we haven't addressed the most fundamental basic situations here on planet Earth. And to do that, you need love and compassion embodied. You need people to actually say, this is enough of a priority that I actually care about this, that maybe I'm going to drop my dream of creating some chatbot that's going to make me a billion dollars and focus instead on how to end global hunger and deal with the person who's right in front of me who needs some assistance.
And that ultimately is what human beings I feel need to do and need to focus on. And that's embodied knowledge, like actual embodied knowledge coming from a sympathetic empathetic place. And it's a weird imagining that we could AI ourselves back to compassion when AI simulations for how we're going to deal with the problems in the world might come back to ultimately, you need to take care of this problem by addressing the person right in front of you. But we may be at that place where human beings need to go all the way through the abstraction funnel to take us all the way back to the simple realizations that what matters most is the person who's standing right in front of us.
Absolutely. And actually listening to you talk about this, I think the last kind of kernel for us to explore here has to do with, and that's somebody who grew up situated in a deep rich seam of inherited elder wisdom. And in fact, my parents bless them. We're always very much on this find your own way.
It's a modern virtue to say, oh, your kid should be self determining, whatever you want to do, as long as you can make it work, that's good. And I've found, and I was talking about this recently in some of the discussions I hosted with Future Fossils group around Robert Bly's book, Iron John, and about how all of this stuff is constellated through mythopoietic thinking in boyhood, demand hood, and so on. I want to know my dad did for a living. I want to be there in that space.
And he's done so much for me and my family, but like, he's always been like, that was my life. This is your life. And so I feel like a lot of us are starting from a place of abstraction and displacement. And so when I'm with my kids here in Santa Fe, and I'm walking them around the neighborhood, and I want them to name, not just five, I want them to name like 30 to 50 different local plants.
I want them to look around and know what's growing out of the sidewalk. But for me, what that means is often, it means saying, oh, let's look at, let's scan this with my phone. Let's look at Google Lens and put this up there and see what it is. And you and I are going to learn together.
And I think that that kind of speaks to the question of what it means to anchor, to restore or retrieve norms around initiation and the integration and embodiment of all this stuff. I'm a relatively new parent, so I'm not some expert on parenting anyway, shape or form, but I'm learning a lot and realizing a lot. And one of the things I'm realizing is exactly what you just said. I can see how if what I do all day long is abstract for them, I can see the direction that's going to send them on.
I can see their want to be included and involved. So like for me, I do a lot of obviously with the podcast audio recording stuff, but also music production and that kind of thing. And I've already identified this as a place where, yeah, I'm going to bring them into the music production craft like right from the start. And I can see the bonding potentiality and the potentiality for incredible creative collaboration and all that.
And maybe eventually they rejected and who knows. But to have those and obviously like time in the wilderness and what I know of natural systems and that's going to come into a lot too, like when we go hiking and even yesterday looking for seashells and identifying different seashells and that kind of thing. But the very basis of how knowledge used to be passed from parent to child, it's not just for the transfer of knowledge, right? It's like it establishes that child in a web of relationships and establishes what the place of that parent is within their entire cosmos.
And I think this is something we have to be really careful of in the AI world. Like AI can be an enhancement to a child's learning process eventually. A researcher, a tutor, that kind of thing. But it's absolutely vital, I believe that the foremost tutors and elders and passers-on of knowledge are deeply involved human beings, right?
Deeply involved human beings. So yeah, it just made me want to flag that because I felt this exact thing like, oh, I need to pass a craft onto them. Yeah, I need to pass on a specific craft. And I'm working to like through examples show them how me and my wife approach like spiritual practice, how we approach the kind of general rhythm of our lives, how we approach time in the natural world and knowledge of local ecology, but also very specifically the passing on of a craft, I think is vital.
Yeah. So this may seem like something of a tangent, but I just want to say after the AI episode on your show, you did a two-parter on Sears. And I am somebody who has found either solidarity and fraternity or has alienated people all through being candid and honest about the way that my own intuitive access has shaped my life and my decision-making. And there's an interesting polarity that I would love to hear you speak on in our closing here, which is that recently one of my favorite papers that I've seen come out of AI, courtesy of working part time on an open source AI startup, I came across this paper, hallucination is inevitable in an eight limitation of large language models, which I love because it's like it's basically saying it's like Girdles and Completeness Theorem or something.
It's saying there's no way of getting around the fact that there are going to be errors in our modeling. And again, Rushkoff recently posted this thing, the model is not the territory. This comes up again and again in these conversations. And so I'm glad to see so many people bringing this to the surface, which is that our best guess about the world, that gap that you said, the drive that people have into mystery is because we know on some level that the map is not going to cut it, that the abstraction is not the embodied physical thing.
It's not the sense of being on the landscape itself or in relation with the land as a vow. And yet here we have, I guess what I'm saying, and what I'd like to hear you speak to is I think that there's a profound misunderstanding going on in what people are expecting of these technologies, which has to do with them being able to reason for us when in fact, in a way, what they are is an externalization of our own dreaming and our own visionary capacities. That it's not a bug in this medium that it doesn't give you specifically the thing you asked for in the same way that whatever line of code you leave out of the programming of your set and setting in a psychedelic experience, Richard Doyle talks about this in Darwin's pharmacy and I love him for it. Maybe the thing is the way that these tools show us the unknown.
And so like recently Peter Lindbergh, he was the founder and facilitator of the Stoa, and he posted this thing on, he's been given an opportunity to be a chief philosophy officer in a company. And this is like my dream job, right? Oh my God. I started asking people like, yeah, Athens had Delphi.
What does your organization have? How are you? I don't think that it's about getting AI to march the way that you want it to. I think it's about looking into the unknown and the mystery and the dreaming mind.
So rather than doing what we did with television, where like television replaces the campfire and it replaces storytelling circles and it replaces, we stay awake only at binging Netflix instead of dreaming, somewhat concerned that people, even in implementing this along the grain that it seems to naturally lie, might find themselves at a remove from their own intuitive faculties because they're expecting the Suno.ai to write the music for them or whatever. I would love to hear you on what it means to work with the imaginary friend as an augment or a return to our own dreaming faculties. What you're saying underlies, it reinforces the fact that what is ultimately being sought has much more to do with mystery than control. And we've convinced ourselves that's a narrative of control and really what we're looking for is mystery.
That's what we've always looked for because it's a mysterious universe and because we recognize that there are greater forces than us, except we don't recognize it sometime. And so those drives remain cathonic and hidden. But they hidden drive to AI as much more of a seer's drive, an oracular drive, even a death drive. It's a drive for the mysterious space as opposed to, yeah, we want these machines of utter rationality to serve us.
But yeah, we also have this weird morbid fascination of what happens when they're sparked into life. So really it contains within it that fundamental friction between the known and the mysterious. That's why we find it so fascinating. And it will be mysterious.
And the error is where the beauty pours through. Like the, my son right now is my older son is really into the Godzilla universe. I don't know exactly how that started because it wasn't from us. So somehow he's really into the Godzilla universe and Godzilla.
And he wants to get AI to create these coloring book images that he can color of Godzilla. And but AI won't do that or chat GPT won't do that because Godzilla's copyrighted. And so you have to creatively talk your way around it. So Godzilla and Mothra becomes generate a coloring book image of a giant lizard with stegosaurus like plates battling a giant moth and does a couple iterations and my son's very choosies.
No, they're not quite right and everything. And the third one it does for some reason it has I'm breathing lightning that was a big part of it. For some reason it has swapped Godzilla and Mothra's head and turned them into cartoons. And you have a moth headed lizard wearing a tuxedo holding a like cannon that shoots lightning like battling this lizard headed moth with these really sharp teeth.
And I'm just like, and that's the one my son really loved. Yeah, and that one's funny like that. And there was a spark to it. There was some weird spark of this is the trickster creator force somehow coming through this AI bot and finding its way here and it's unknown and it's mysterious.
And that's what we like about it. And that's also people are complaining about this for good reason. But it's also why isn't doing just all the menial computational stuff. It's why it's inundating the world of art and creativity because ultimately it's primal offerings might be in the realm of visioning and visionary work rather than just like the meanality of computational equations.
So yeah, there is a seer element to it. I'm always up for those type of mysteries. That visionary force comes through human bodies and it can also spark through disembodied intelligences too. The question is, are we open to seeing it as that?
And what are we going to do with this more mysterious manifestations? But yeah, I see that there is a great drive for mystery underlying it all. And that drive is important and vital. And how human beings have tempered it and worked with that has also been important and vital.
And who knows what's going to happen? That's a fine place to leave it. Josh, I am so very glad that we finally got a chance to connect. Finally, it's been ages.
Thank you for your patience too. It's a particular tactic year for me. Sorry, we didn't get to connect while you were still living in my town. Here we are.
And we get to do this thing together. And so I'm really glad folks, if you liked this, there's a whole lot more of it. Obviously, we hope that you will join us. Anything else?
No, that's a good place to wrap it up and look forward to further discussions. Awesome. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to go deeper into this inquiry with Josh and I and a whole menagerie of insightful people bringing wisdom into technology in various ways, join us from April 18th to May 16th for the Embodied Ethics Engage of AI course.
You can find the link in the show notes along with links to all of the music that you've heard in this episode, music from various festival performances as well around the world. And links to Josh's superbly produced podcast, The Emerald, links to Andrew Dunsworth and The School of Wise Innovation, links to all the papers and articles and other media we've discussed on this show. Additional resources just because Link Dump is my love language and also links to Substack and Patreon where I post weekly reflections and writings and new podcast episodes and music videos and paintings and whatever my nagging news has been working on that week. So yeah, don't hesitate to reach out.
I'd love to hear from you. I hope that you're navigating the surges of this crazy spring with equanimity and grace. And I look forward to sharing more very potent conversations with you in the weeks to come. I'm reading Joshua DiCaglio's book Scale Theory right now, which is just amazing.
And then right after that, I'm going to be biting into Timothy Morton's newest book, Hell, about climate change and Christian ecological ethics. You can find links to both of those books on the Future Fossils bookshop reading list if you're interested in reading alongside. Much much more to say, but for now I probably just bail and go spend some time with my kids. So if you're not going to be in the Embodied Ethics course, but you want to keep the conversation rolling, then you can find us in the Future Fossils Facebook group or Discord server and I welcome your participation there.
Or you know, you can just be a weirdo and talk to the robotic proxy of me through AskFutureFossils.com if that's your thing. It's actually a rather fun. But don't forget what it's like to have conversations with real people. Take care and be not afraid.
Oh, one more thing, post-grip, just for the fun of it. Because so much of this conversation and the show in general lingered on the map is not the territory. I wanted to share one of my oldies with you. This is one of the first songs I ever recorded in my home studio for the first album I produced on a laptop.
The 2006 LP Get Used to Being Everything. This is a song called The Cartographers. And I'm just going to leave it here because I listened to a great interview with Rick Rubin last night where he said musical recordings are like diary entries. And even as you grow as a person, you can still go back and think about that recording as kind of an impression or a snapshot of a moment in time of a soul in the process of evolution, that it's not necessarily a definitive and ultimate statement.
And so even though I've come a long way as an artist and as a singer in particular since I recorded this, I still really stand behind the message and the mood of this song. And it seemed really appropriate to tag it on after walking that particular circuit with Josh. So this is The Cartographers. Enjoy.