at analog, we aim to create the space for people to pursue their miracle years, to pursue non-objective driven work, to pursue ideas that might be a little woo. You might have a hunch about something that you can't prove through preexisting literature, but you just want to explore it and experiment with it. We're not solution-driven because being solution-driven means being objective-driven. And yeah, the answer, the approach, might not be a technological startup or a policy situation as an answer.
It can also be a DAO. It could be a permutation of multiple perturbations. It could be policy and system intervention and behavior change and something else. And most importantly, perturbations don't have to be additive in nature.
They can also be subtractive. What can you remove from the system, whether it's a large economic system, health system, to a very small system, like a cell inside your body, to let your body come to equilibrium on its own. Diet and exercise are the best medicine for most things, and that's what's attractive perturbation not an additive one, like a medicine, right? Which is a really interesting parallel, if you think about it, as it relates to the world.
How do you design to not optimize for a certain signal and allow more noise into your system? I think the answer remains the same. It's just the time and space and money to give interesting people doing interesting things to experiment without judgment of, oh, this is good and this is bad. This is gonna be productive and this is not going to be productive.
Welcome to the 13th episode of Humans on the Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and today we're looking at the edge. Because that's where breakthroughs happen. Beneficial mutations take root more easily on island than they do in large continental populations.
Scenes ferment subcultures, but mass media carves a single deep channel for attention that inhibits innovators. The bigger a scientific field grows, the greater the escape velocity for truly novel research that questions fundamentals. And yet we live in an enormous global polity, a sleepless maze of shared limbic and mimetic happening. Collapse in this context is not just the failure of our attempts at tower building, or a breakdown of the great unification, but an adaptive response to homogenizing forces.
Everybody interacting with the same handful of frontier AI models, everybody pegging their money to the same few major currencies, everybody practicing the same religions, secular or otherwise. We are what we do, and at what point does it become an existential necessity to zag when everyone else is zigging? The more we link in with each other, the more apparent it becomes that we must also differentiate. Retreat from the dark forest to the cozy web.
Find the others, but then also form a we that isn't ideologically inclusive. These tensions define us in the 2020s, and often fire in the wrong direction. Toward sectarian or nationalist identity formation, racism, sexism, classism. There's a smarter way to do this, to identify when we can serve the whole by spinning out to incubate a reservoir of creativity, by taking a step back to ask what we are truly good at, and if we can put that to better use for the entire system, by applying it in other places.
The question that I posed last week with Matt Seagal, about how we can foster culture that can't register in balance sheets, but ultimately forms the soil from which all value grows, that question rhymes with the journey of psychological individuation, of discovering oneself so that you can provide real meaning through your work, to serve the collectives on which you are dependent, and from whose interactions you derive your sense of who you are. And that takes listening, so we resolve the paradox by tuning our attention across scales to find the sweet spot where each of us is attentive to the layers of reality at which we could create, and carefully, but permeably partitioned off, so that we're uniform with standards guarantee robustness. What needs to change? At what level?
To come untethered here so it can anchor somewhere else, or to be sheltered now so that it can erupt and run wild later. These are the kinds of questions I would ask, if I were trying to metasolve the metacrisis, where do we need boundaries, and where do we need flows, and how do we ensure that we can redistribute them according to the changing needs of any given moment and location? And this is why I'm glad to share this conversation with you. Today's guest, Aishwarya Konduzha, is a fellow living inquiry, an incandescent and tarobang just like myself, the founder of the analog group.
Let me read you their manifesto. Something profound has been lost in how we nurture new ideas. Our systems have grown rigid, favoring the familiar over the transformative. Like aging organizations, they prioritize self-preservation over evolution.
Brilliant minds outside the mainstream are systematically overlooked. We're slowly losing our ability to imagine different futures. This isn't just an institutional problem, it's a failure of imagination. We're creating something different, not another accelerator or fund, but a garden where breakthrough ideas can take root and flourish.
A place where understanding deep problems matters more than rushing to solutions. We're time flows at the pace of discovery demands, not at the pace of quarterly reports. We tend to ideas that are there's my call to radical. We create protected spaces where unconventional thinking can grow strong before facing the harsh winds of conventional wisdom.
We recognize that some insights need years to mature while others bloom in sudden bursts of clarity. We look for brilliance everywhere, beyond traditional institutions and expected places. We seek out the independent researchers, the midnight experimenters, the hidden innovators working outside established paths. We know that transformative ideas don't come from credentials or affiliations.
They emerge wherever curious minds are given room to explore. This isn't naive optimism. We understand the delicate balance required to nurture true innovation. We know when to offer guidance and when to step back, when to challenge and when to protect.
Our commitment is to preserve our capacity to imagine and create genuinely new possibilities. End quote. Sound familiar? Obviously, this is just the start of something.
Pivens on the loop exists to be the soil in which this kind of thing will flourish. Will you grow with us? Before we start, I'd like to thank the new anonymous donor dropping a hundred bucks a month into this project's fiscally supported and tax deductible collection basket at every.org slash emails on the loop, as well as all of you who helped me keep the juices flowing here on sub stack or patron on take your pick as suits or needs. I deeply appreciate your support and in gratitude and excited to announce that we will book club Federico Campania's prophetic culture recreation for adolescents on April 26th, along with pregame discussion in the future fossils Discord servers members only channels.
This book is a masterpiece of thinking otherwise and just what we need to attend to as we transition from one mode of worlding to another. I can't wait to talk about it with you and hear everyone's reflections and see what emerges from our synthesis. Lastly, I am finally publishing The Big Machine, my anthem for the screen age, and will drop my new single and music video on April 1st. So dive into the show notes and pre-save it on Spotify, follow my YouTube channel for notifications when the song goes live and prime yourself by meditating on the question.
How long can you go without looking at your phone? But first and without any further hype, the wonderful. I schwariya khandoja. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
Sorry it was late. You. I schwariya, you're on the loop. Hello.
How do you know? We've been talking for an hour already. Yes. So somebody is going to be revisited material.
Yeah. But let's start somewhere fresh. I like to invite people to talk a little bit about the origin story, because this is humans on the loop. And one of the premises of this is that we can't really evaluate one another's claims or understand one another's thinking without addressing the entity that is issuing those claims.
So anchoring the show in autobiography allows us to circumvent a kind of reproducibility problem. Let's talk about it like that. So yeah, where do you come from? Why do you care about the things you care about?
Were there incitatory events in your life that prompted or provoked the kind of questions that you're devoted to now? That's really great. Great questions. Yeah.
I was born and raised in India in a very small town in northern India. And I was a pretty smart kid. So my parents were like, not a lot is going to be actualized for her future in this country, with a population of a billion people. So they decided to immigrate to Canada.
So that's where I grew up and spent most of my youth. I did my undergraduate degree in Canada in biomedical sciences, partly because I didn't know what other things existed. And there was a lack of access to resources there. And I was pursuing medical school.
I wrote the MCAT. I thought that's what I wanted to do. And I realized in around second or third year of university that I wasn't doing as well as my peers. And why is that?
And that was because I didn't have the right access to resources at the right time. So I accidentally ended up founding a company to address that problem. And it was so organic that it started in the student-run initiative because I used to teach science at an indigenous reserve. I realized that these kids can go to university for free, but they don't even have that great 11-12 courses required to go to university in the first place.
So I really was able to, I think, very early on understand the importance of access as it relates to progress. And again, it was very organic for me to do this because I was literally googling, like, how do you incorporate a company? I sold cupcakes to raise money to pay the wires, and that's our thing. And I had scholarships for students and wasn't able to still COVID happened, et cetera.
I ended up going to grad school at Cambridge. So it was weird to study in India, Canada, a colony. And then my colonizers country, all different sort of vibes there. I did an M-Filling Biocines Enterprise because I was like, okay, I have a background in biology.
How do I actualize that and meet that at the intersection of all this business knowledge that I have now learned? And yeah, there I learned how to commercialize biotechnology and bioscientific processes. I focused on pathology because cancer is an important problem. I was pretty lost, I would say at this time in my life, I ended up moving to San Francisco to be on the founding team of a women's health company.
And then I moved to Philadelphia, off a Twitter thread, and joined a post-series C company in biotech. And then in the summer of 2022, 2023. Yeah, last summer, actually, I had an existential crisis of sorts. And I'm like, what am I doing with my life?
My life is perfect on paper, but why does there seem to be a gap? And at the time, I had an offer to move to New York to be on the founding team of yet another biotech startup. So I was like, do I not do that and just do the thing that interests me, which I don't know what that is yet? Or do I just join this company?
What ended up happening is I ended up joining the company, but that didn't work out. And the world pushed me into what I was supposed to do, which was analog. And I'll talk a little bit about that. Because in hindsight, I sort of understood what was going wrong.
I realized that so many of these companies and projects that I was becoming a part of were missing a very important piece. They were looking at problems from just a technological lens. And when you were going to start up and they're pitching to investors or whatever, they pretend that they're solving cancer. They're solving breast cancer.
We're going to solve women's health, which is not true, because these problems are multi-faceted in nature. And these technologies, the GTM isn't probably even going to reach the people that need it most. So is it really progress? And at this time, I started studying complexity science to understand what it means for a system to interact with another system and in clings of the analog group started coming together.
Yeah, I guess I'll pause right there, if you have any follow-up question. Oh, I got lots of follow-up questions. But let's go a little bit more into, you've written on a term that I also heard in the years that I was in SFI, which was when people assume that complexity science is about subverting all of the other scientific disciplines to physics. That it comes out of Los Alamos.
It exists because of massive improvements to the capacity for computational research, simulation-based investigation, information theory. It all sounds like it's, let's just make everything a physics problem. And yet, on the inside, the conversation was very much the opposite. It was, what can physics learn from biology?
And so I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about that, about the inversion of all of that. Yeah, and that's actually very much related to how I grew up as well because I realized that I was doing complex and science my whole life because the lens through which I was looking at problems was a lens that was living because most of these systems are living systems, they're not closed systems. And you cannot approach them from just an equation. An equation is not going to solve real problems that we have in the world.
And I think having a biomedical science background taught me how to look at problems that are evolving over time. And in the essay I talk about how in history there has been an implicit hierarchy of sciences and physics is considered super respectable and biology is like its poor cousin. And everybody wants to emulate physics. It extends beyond the natural sciences.
It's also the social sciences, economics, management theories. They all try to get physics concepts to create structures. Everything needs to have a framework or a mental model to work. And I don't think biology works and frameworks.
If you look at the molecular biology of a human system, if you have a perturbation in your Krebs cycle, it can have impacts across the board in the body, which naturally says that it's not an isolated system and you can't just solve everything through one framework. So yeah, I think biotech, that's why, on hindsight I realized I was probably attracted to that field because while it drew inspiration from physics and engineering, you're still able to look at problems through a bio lens. Neural networks are complex systems that are inspired by the structuring function of the brain. So now the world is moving from physics envy to biology envy.
If you look at funding structures as well, all of these fast grants and stuff, they used to fund a bunch of physics based or super like hardcore people, but now they're all funding one Japanese science or they're funding bio-techy stuff. And you can see that happening in the world. And I think complexity science sort of bridges the disciplines through biology, through the lens of biology as the common ground because we're able to look at all the systems that are in the world, so economic systems, healthcare systems, the social security systems that we have all through the fact that they are living and changing. And if we're able to approach a problem through the lens of, this is the cause and this is the effect and you try to solve that cause, it might not solve that effect.
But if you try to look at it through how do we build an adaptive immune response, just like in a body, you would do that. Two systems out in the world, I think maybe that'll work. And that's what I'm thinking about a lot. So one of the main focal areas of this inquiry that I'm pursuing on the show is what I'm calling the Protestant Reformation of Hollywood.
And I'm thinking a lot about folks like Stephanie Lab and Ari Kushner in my network and many other people who are out there exploring with generative AI tools and finding ways to, I think in a way, it's like a fulfillment of the original writing, like 1968, Computer As Communication Device by JCR, like Leidor and Bob Taylor, where they said, rather than just scaling communication networks that eventually will be able to use computers to move ideas out of one conceptual domain and into someone else's. That computer can be a translational instrument. And what we have instead is people who are able to reach other people around the world, but their ideas have been pulled out of context so profoundly in order to make it possible for them to travel, that we've probably done more to foster confusion and misunderstanding. And I think that one of the promising developments that I'm seeing is to make what is going on in your head more tangible to other people.
Like for instance, Stephanie Lepp's series Deep Reckonings had deep-faked various problematic public figures in about face and a kind of a moral transformation moment and Mark Zuckerberg getting up on stage and saying, I didn't realize what we were doing with Facebook was gonna be this complicated and it's really caused me to reflect on all this stuff. And like that idea that we oversimplify things and we just say that language models and the various media that they can generate are giving us new opportunities for reflection, both as individuals and societies. I wanna link what you're talking about now to this piece that you wrote with Navanit Gita on shaping the future with fictional stories. You quote Albert Camus, you say fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
And in talking about an immune response, in talking about adaptive strategies in policy and in research and in innovation, I just wanna quote you real quickly here. The two of you say, the landscape seems to always be about building controlling or influencing narratives. How do we change the zeitgeist? Let's stop building narratives for a second.
We're not saying that storytelling for policy making is always insidious. We think it can actually be very effective but policy makers are too focused on making stories instead of listening to stories. The issue at hand is how to transform the powerful narratives and experiences shared by individuals and valuable resources that can be utilized by communications and policy teams. By engaging with fictional stories, policymakers can gain a better understanding of the lived experiences of those impacted by their decisions and use this knowledge to inform more compassionate and effective policies.
So like I'm going after a really big idea here with you that bridges all of this stuff, which is that the more potent our storytelling devices become, the lower the barrier to entry for people to communicate their inner worlds and lives, the more legacy and incumbent systems have this rich new source of deeply contextual information that they can draw from in enacting these kinds of immunological responses. I'd love to just hear you reflect. I want to start by saying a quote by Kierkegaard in 1848 and I pulled it up as you were talking. It goes, suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little speaking tube that however, was so powerful that it could be heard all over the entire country.
Wouldn't the police forbid it out of fear that its use would result in the whole of society becoming mentally deranged? Question one. 1848. On point.
Right? It feels similarly to that, to this sentiment that we're talking about as it relates to lowering the barrier for deeply contextual information because there's on one side you can simulate narratives and on the other hand you can just listen to the narratives that exist already. Simulating narratives are still biased by the person who is prompting the narratives and the question. And if you don't ask the right question or if you don't frame the question the right way, then you're getting the narrative that you want to hear anyway.
So I think the question here is, how do you ask good questions? How do you identify the right problems? And that just comes from active listening, a lot of empathy, a lot of intuitive decision making, and getting the right people in the right rooms. Yeah.
And I think that's what the piece that I wrote with Naminit also touches on is, let's stop making the narratives for a second and just listen to the ones that exist in storytelling is a great way to do that. There are people who these policies impact who are writing their stories, who are talking about their stories. I think that LLM's and that sort of thing can be a great way to identify blind spots in your question asking. You can scrape all the views that are on Twitter and all of the perspectives that are shared via tweets and put them in an LLM and then ask you questions to see, okay, let's say you're thinking about the great resignation, how have narratives shifted from pre-great resignation to post-great resignation?
Are people still thinking about work and meaning in the same way? How are people approaching the way they work, et cetera, et cetera? But then again, it comes down to the types of questions that you're asking and are they even talking about the same question in the first place? Maybe this is like two men out or like, not at all.
A fraction there, but I'd love to hear yours or who wish on that. Yeah, well, I think the distinction that I'm interested in is again, like who's using the tool and for what? I think you're right that you can do something like Peter Sheridan Dauds at UVM and scrape enormous corpora and create a kind of instrument for seeing human sentiment at scale. In a way, this process, like you're saying, it bumps into the same kind of philosophical problem that you get into when you're asking if you're even measuring the right thing or what are the illegible variables that might be telling you information that would be really useful to the formation of better questions.
The other side of it that I'm seeing is that when we talk about telling stories versus listening, the world I'm imagining is one in which policymakers are doing less storytelling, less propaganda and are doing more listening to people who are empowered to present their perspectives in a way that becomes newly legible to people in a position of authority. And that in so doing, the authority to make those decisions gets spread around a little bit differently. And I think this is a big difference in the transition from broadcast media to social media. Like there are obviously still asymmetries of power and information, but now we have this weird category of the influencer where before we got on the call, we were talking about Frackley University and Pre-Arrows and her comments on Twitter about Nadia Aspera Hova and the independent researcher and the ability to bootstrap one's own credentials.
And when I think about the Protestant Reformation of various modern institutions, be they scientific journalistic or entertainment based, the difference that I'm starting to see, to give a concrete example in entertainment, is that we still have big budget franchises that are managed by large powerful studios. But the people that are directing and writing those franchises grew up as fans and basically entered that convection cell through fan fiction. And it's easy to imagine how in the next five or 10 years studios pivot completely from trying to suppress fan-generated franchise content, to using it as a recruitment pipeline for talent and or even like paying for it as a way of crowdsourcing world building. And I can see something like that going on in the direction of scientific research, in like deciding where we might want to correct for institutional socioeconomic biases in figuring out what's worth funding in the first place, which I think based on what I've heard you talk about, your own interests in structuring pitch sessions and so on, it seems like there will only be more and more tools for that kind of thing.
And I'm curious, ultimately what I would like to do if you is to articulate that kind of thinking with some of your other more personal and reflective writing on, for instance, how to know what to do or harnessing the power of the subconscious mind. Like I think like the people who don't have institutional power are in some sense the subconscious mind of society. And so I think there's a structural similarity in terms of what you've written about learning to trust your intuition and follow your curiosity. And all of that seems to be of a piece with this other piece.
So many different threads there, I think, and I can pull on so many of them, but I'll start with what you started with, policy picking and choosing narratives. And I'll try to follow this thread as well. I think that when you listen, you have to listen to the whole story. But if you're able to manufacture narratives on your own through LLMs, you might just pick and choose the parts that align with your prior vision, rather than integrating the entire story.
And none of my thoughts are like fully fleshed out, polish thoughts, they're very much just, I'm just riffing with your ideas. I think the idea of processing data to identify blind spots, to identify what the right projects are to fund, to identify new people to recruit for franchises, et cetera, is really interesting. But I think that still is missing the piece about, and I hate to say it because I know it's going on Twitter all the time, good taste. Same work.
Yeah, I think that good taste comes from taking in a lot of information, having a lot of epistemic humility, harnessing the power of your subconscious mind in the way that you know what you like and what you don't like. And following the adjacent possibilities of what you like over and over again and iterative cycles and just getting an embodied sense of what's gonna work and what's not going to work. And I'm very pro-technology, but I don't know if an algorithm is going to have that sort of tacit knowledge. I read the story, someone's thread on Twitter about how they wanted to try out a different career, and they started to go intern at an oil and gas company, and they learned all these calculations about where to drill a hole, what to do, all of these sort of frameworks, algorithms and whatever, but they would have a guy named Hans come in once a week, he had just been working there for years.
He wouldn't look at any of these algorithms or any of these calculations. He would look at a map, a couple of the paperwork that was associated with that project and just tell everyone, this is where to drill the hole and they would do it and that was the best possible answer. So this is actually, this is good because this is in your piece on how to know what to do. You talk about something that I actually love when we're talking about agency in the age of automation.
And this has to figure into it too, obviously, right? Let me go back a couple of years to Mark Pesci's appearance on Eric Davis's show Expanding Mind. We said, if you're on Twitter all the time, you're of no use to Twitter. You know, like if you're never on Twitter, you can't contribute anything.
But if you're always on Twitter, you're not contributing anything original. You're just rehashing everything that's in there. So there does have to be, as you put it, you say you can't listen to your intuition without stillness and then elsewhere, you wrote a piece called AirPods, are ruining the world, which like, yeah, as you put it, mental illness rates are only ever increasing, distraction is the name, technology is the game. You say that we say that Gen Z is a sober culture, but they basically just replace drugs with drugs.
Those drugs are called the internet. And so yeah, this question of, if you're tripping all the time, do you ever get to integrate, right? If you're always listening to podcasts, do you ever have anything to say? Like, are you making an effort to synthesize all of that?
And that gets to what we were talking about before, we started recording, which is about where in the cycle of the scientific method, do we actually synthesize everything we've learned from previous experiments and then use that and guided by the tacit knowledge, the intuition, where do we actually make the decision to pursue a new experiment? So I think you're done on here. And I just want to say that like, yeah, I'm not actually interested in the democratization of storytelling if everyone is telling the same story, because they're just constantly absorbed in one another's regurgitated LLM culture or a Boris, right? Like, so that question of reclaiming some kind of individuality, that question of, how do we regenerate intentionality and self-determination is really interesting?
I know you reflected on this a lot. I'd love to kick it back to you with that. Something that popped into my brain when you were saying that about we're consuming the same story over and over again, there's AI's a lot being built on top of AI's a lot, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we know the answer to the question of, how do you integrate?
It's still this and you just have to let your body do its job. And we don't know how it does it. We don't necessarily, I'm sure there's like, coaches of studies around integration and correlation of all of these different factors, but that stillness allows our brain to run all of these permutations of algorithms that, like, whose story is not being told, right? And what is missing, that negative thinking is difficult, because we're being told all the time, what is working, what you should do, what you should want, how should you think?
And I think there's some correlation there with broadcast media, which you talked about earlier as well, and this is a line from succession. And I wrote an essay about this as well called Tasting More Cells from Groovy Hubs. And Roman Roy and the show, he goes, nobody is tuning into ABS News now to listen to what to think, what they care about are the Tasting More Cells. It's all about the more cells, right?
Which can go either way. Some people might just use them to form their opinions, but some people might use them as a tool for discernment, which leads to good taste. So, yeah, I don't know what necessarily to think of as it relates to asking good questions at the right time and the scientific method, but I wonder if it's about just identifying those things through good taste, right? You read, like a really great example of this is Caitlin Kerico who developed the M.
Ernie vaccine. Such an amazing woman and such a great story. She was just really interested in M. Ernie her whole career, and nobody took Ernie seriously at the time.
D&A was all the rage, Ernie was so difficult to work with. And she was always just like, I think what you think is the weakness of R&A could be its strengths. And she was almost fired from Penn like three different times. She was at the end demoted, but she just really cared about this.
And she didn't necessarily know what the application of it was going to be. She was trying out, I believe, with cardiovascular disease. I think she was also looking at neuro stuff. Like she was actually technically in the neural lab there when her research wasn't even neurorelated, whatever.
Ended up meeting Dr. Weisman over a printer copy machine, which I don't know if people use anymore. But at Penn, and he was working on HIV research and they started talking and she's like, oh my God, I have the exact thing for you, right? And in that moment, she was able to identify that M.R.A.
could be used to solve the HIV problem for Dr. Weisman. And they were able to identify the use over and even for HIV, but then COVID hit and they realized, oh my God, this can also be used to save the world. And if she didn't follow her curiosity to its fullest extent, if she didn't have just the determination and courage to follow her own taste, because anyone can be told, oh my God, if you give us more publications, if you apply for more awards, you'll climb to the ranks at Penn, you'll become an assistant professor, you'll become a professor, you'll get tenure, blah, blah, blah.
But she had the determination to stick to her taste that whole time, which led to the vaccine that ended up saving the world. So I wonder if yes, intentionality is important, yes, tacit knowledge is important, yes, taste is important, yes, listening to them correct more souls and ignoring the incorrect more souls is important. Having discernment is important, but I wonder if the magic here, especially as it relates to human agency in the world of technology, is to have the sheer determination to believe in your own consciousness to an extent that just can't be, I don't know what the word is, but you can't shake it. Yeah, yeah, this comes up a lot on the show.
The innovation research I was doing last year with Mozilla on the structures and processes of legendary organizations like Xerox Park and Bell Labs and ARPA. The thing that all of them had in common was that at some point, the organization within which these fabulously inventive R&D groups was going on changed, like famously the divestiture of Bell Labs ended decades of insulation for market pressure. The histories of Xerox Park talked about the fact that, for instance, as long as they kicked out something really lucrative every once in a while, like a laser printer, incidentally that they could basically waste as much time as they wanted on something else. Amber Kay talked about this when I had her on Future Fossils last year about what happened when Google X went from giving people three years to demonstrate the viability of a project to giving them two years and how that really dampened the innovation of those groups.
And so I think that there's another way in which I'm always looking for that, a kind of like agreement between scales here. I feel like subjecting ourselves to the sort of engagement hacking, reward system manipulation of not just news feed algorithms, but of society generally, right? Of like carrying about the way that we are perceived by other people. You talk about this, you talk about decoupling your own curiosity and the way that you follow interests from the extrinsic goal.
And that's what I think what we're agreeing on when we say that stillness, that silence, that uncoupling matters, that we're always in the absorption mode that we never, I really vibe with this whole like actually boredom matters. I'm trying to teach this to my five-year-old daughter right now. But it's like, you might actually want to not watch a movie right now. You might actually want to learn to be, as you put it, you say, it's almost as if we're afraid to be alone with our thoughts.
So what is being alone with our thoughts? Like how do we actually design for that? Because this is a question that comes up in your work a lot also. When you talk about the salons that you've been hosting in New York, and you say, the goal is to foster the necessary conditions for the emergence of new ideas.
I think like one of the main themes of humans on the loop is that a lot of people want more time for art, more time for philosophy, more time for what Abraham Flectioner called, the usefulness of useless ideas, it's like, well, they're not actually useless. They become useful later at some point. Play is evolutionarily valuable. There's a reason all of these complex animals play.
But there's something broken in the way that all of these different systems, be they individuals that have internalized the value of productivity in society. That's like, well, I need to be productive because that's what's legible to my employers. And if I'm not legible to them, they're going to can me. And they have to continue to profit in order to exist.
So where can we start to break that cycle without incurring an unacceptable cost? I think is the probe I want to explore with you here. How do you stop incurring the unacceptable cost odds? Well, how do you decide that you're not going to optimize?
No. How do you invite more noise? Yeah. But I'm quote, which is actually more stillness in another way.
So yeah, this is actually exactly what analog hopes to do. And this is coming out in April. So the method with which we do it might have evolved or changed by then. But talk a little bit to that.
And starting with the fact that these R&D labs existed, like Xerox, Perk, Bell Labs, ARPA, there's also organizations like Renaissance Technologies who've followed very similar vibes, right? They just give people a lot of money, a lot of freedom and a lot of space to do whatever they want for 50% of the time and the other 50% they have to work on rent textiles. There are also other organizations popping up with a similar sort of goal of achieving good science. So you can look at convergent research, you can look at new science, et cetera, et cetera.
And then on the other end of the spectrum in bio, there are flagship pioneering the column groups that are held by staff that are more venture creation in essence. But all of them have enough money, resources and freedom to handle uncertainty. And I think that might be the key. And throughout history, human progress has been shaped by our ability to adapt to an increasingly complex world.
But now our old ways are necessarily going to work because everything is interconnected. We've talked about this, right? Everything is a complex adaptive system. Everything interacts with each other.
The overlaps are insane. And economic issues, for example, should not be divorced from sociological ones or any other issues. So these domains and systems that we have in the world, even the frameworks and the mental models through which we solve these problems, the reason why we do that is because we want to satisfy our own desires for certainty and simplicity. And this innate psychological need to pursue certainty through predetermined objectives creates a sense of control.
So it comes back to that idea of why greatness cannot be planned to the midst of the objective. And if you don't have an objective, just like in Xerox Part Bell Labs, they didn't necessarily always have an objective. They were able to have enough stillness to think and come out of their mental models. But most importantly, they had the time and space to handle uncertainty.
And curiosity breeds innovation. We know that. But what innovation requires is freedom. So it totally aligns with the yes, you had him talked about Google X.
And they talked about people having a prototype from three years to two years. And yeah, I think boredom matters. Boredom includes sitting with uncertainty. Airplads are ruining the world because we can't be alone with our own thoughts anymore.
They don't allow us to be bored. And to your question of how do you manufacture a sense of gardening an environment that allows for emergence, perhaps there's a crowd of salons, perhaps they're giving people opportunities to collaborate with others and think about things outside the shackles of an objective at the end of it. Like the salons we run, we don't have like, oh, we have to solve this question by the end of it. It's just about having an interesting discussion and not being offended by each other's views, building on the previous point, accepting uncertainty and going for clarity rather than fighting with one another.
Another thing that comes to mind is uncertainty and being okay with it allows us to be okay with negative results. Scientists don't like having negative results because they care about their reputation a lot. Negative results are also not published a lot of the times, but negative results allow us to understand what did it work so that we can figure out what did work. And I think these organizations of the past, like Xerox Spark, the labs, they've provided people with enough money, resources, freedom that those people are okay with negative results because they could just go try something else.
And to your question about the value of productivity, it goes back to the objective thing, I believe. So if you don't have an objective, then maybe you're just not concerned with productivity. But people have to have an objective because they have to make money to support their families. So at analog, we aim to create the space for people to pursue their miracle years, to pursue sort of non-objective driven work, to pursue ideas that might be a little woo, that might, you might have a hunch about something that you can't prove through pre-existing literature, but you just want to explore it and experiment with it.
We're not solution-driven because being solution-driven means being objective-driven. And yeah, the answer, the approach might not be a technological startup or a policy situation as an answer. It can also be a DAO. It could be a permutation of multiple perturbations.
It could be policy and system intervention and behavior change and something else. And most importantly, perturbations don't have to be additive in nature. They can also be subtractive. What can you remove from the system, whether it's a large economic system, health care system, to a very small system like a cell, et cetera, body, to let your body come to equilibrium on its own.
Diet and exercise are the best medicine for most things. And that's what's attractive perturbation on an additive one like a medicine, right? Which is a really interesting parallel if you think about it as it relates to the world and we can get into specific examples of that. And I think the last thing you asked was, how do you design to not optimize for a certain signal and allow more noise into your system?
I think the answer remains the same. It's just the time and space and money to give interesting people doing interesting things to experiment without judgment of, oh, this is good and this is bad. This is going to be productive and this is not going to be productive. I wrote an essay called A Case for Strategic Ignorance by Design.
And in that, I speculate that you can manufacture a cognitive reset that allows for being able to handle more noise and being able to bring in that noise because the most popular way to approach a problem these days, any engineer in why so you talk to quickly about it from first principles, we're building a product from first principles. But what first principles is going to allow you to do is build a better color. So it's only allowing you optimization of productivity. If you just go back to the basics, you still have all the tools in your toolkit.
But if you don't have any mental models or frameworks, you might end up inventing teleportation because you get to the essence of the problem. And when you get to the essence of the problem, you have to entertain all the noise. Anyways, I'll stop right there. This is great.
I feel like the conversation gets recursive in a way here because I agree with you about what you have said about wicked problems being infinite games and approaching them with a solutionist mindset. Doesn't work. Actually, this came up in a really intense way in the conversation I had with Jim Ashaunasi where I said, again, how do we make it easier? Just to give another concrete example from society right now, the last couple of years, we have observed a precipitous collapse of festivals, music festivals in the US and in Europe.
You know, people just are not going and NPR did an interesting article on this a while back. And one of the things that they identified about why festival attendance seems to matter less to people in the last few years than it did when I was in the target demographic in my 20s and early 30s was that part of it was the aligned with this broader observation about people who have spent most of their adult lives on devices all the time and isolated from one another during the pandemic. People are connecting through these intermediaries. Now, like my brother, who's 25 has a handful of friends, they all live in different cities.
His social network for in-person interaction is extremely sparse. So they're like, well, maybe younger generations just don't value it as much, but there are two other things that they identified. One was that people have come to expect, this is back to that question of optimization, that they have much more agency over their listening choices and they see multi-genre festival lineups as basically someone else's playlist. You know, something has happened where there was a covenant, there was a trust with the taste makers that curate these festivals where originally it was like, we're going to turn you on to new music you've never heard before.
And now the economics of the festival, due to larger patterns of economic disruption, have been, well, we need to give you the acts that you want to see. And so that's changed. And so unless the festival is basically like, here's your Spotify playlist live, then why are you going? And then related to that problem, for a lot of people, there's just less expendable income.
And so looking at that, I agree with you completely that it's like basically the explore, exploit, trade off in childhood development. It's like kids fall down and get back up. They don't break a hip when they fall over. Their parents are there to catch them and heal them and generally the body's just healing faster.
But biologically and socially, there's greater tolerance for mistake making in childhood. And that supports the kind of noisy learning period that we're talking about. But when I was talking about this just yesterday with Evan Miyazano of Atlas Computing, formerly of Protocol Labs, and he was talking about the way that why is it that people have this expectation that an institution will continue to be a potent hub of innovation for decades. We have this sort of fetishization of youth that goes on again, both the level of the individual and at the level of the organization.
And we're trying to solve the problem that four billion years of biological evolution has not solved, which is how do you get old and still function as though you're young. And so he's like, actually, in a way, what we've stumbled on is the evolutionary innovation of death, of the replacement of overfit agents in these larger learning systems. And that maybe we should be working into, like the group I was working with at Mozilla was launched with a built-in self-destruct clock of five years. And it was like, we're not going to try and live long enough to basically have to reconcile the trade-off between continuing to be innovative and existing in order to exist, like the way that maintenance becomes the dominant metabolic function in adulthood.
So I guess this is all just me ranting around the point that in a way, these questions I'm asking you, it's unreasonable to imagine that either of us are going to come up with a solution to some of these things because they are, in a way, an example of the wicked problem that incites an infinite game approach. It's like maybe the point is not to get locked up into some sort of intra-elite prestige competition and just continue to maintain staff salaries at infinitum. At what point should we just, like the way that Annalyn knew it talks about the collapse of civilization, scatter adapting, remember? It's like, at what point should this thing be divested?
At what point should the monopoly be broken up? At what point is it right for the tree to fall and return nutrients to the soil and start new projects, I think? Yeah. Yeah.
And rant. It's a really good rant. And I don't have answers, but I have more rants. Please.
It was very insightful the way you framed how these days we have more agency of listening voices. And we don't have to take in the noise because we just don't. We have the agency on Spotify. Your day list refreshes every two, three hours and gives you a new list of things to listen to based on your previous listening history from years and years of data.
And now kids don't know how to interact with each other in real life, which is so sad. That's actually so sad. And the fact that market trends are following and essentially just exacerbating our vices because of that, because that helps them make money. And you're right.
Like, what is the point at which the tree falls? Yeah. I don't know any answers to this at all. But it is a really good question.
And worth exploring whether it's our ego that is keeping us tied to these institutions and, as you said, just collecting metals and achievements and status. Or is it that we actually want to do something in the world? Yeah. I want to ask this question to you in a slightly different way because you've written on work-life balance and what a joke.
That is, you say it's astonishing how much of our adult life is spent with our co-workers, much of which is spent masking with performative professionalism. I refuse to be someone I am not in the short lifetime that I have for the majority of my day. It is exhausting. This is another one of those places where I feel like all of this stuff is coming into focus in the way that I'd say you see it increasingly.
I don't really see much at all with Baby Boomers. I see it more with Gen X, more with Millennials, more with Gen Z. This recognition that as you put it work as part of life, not outside of it, the need for work-life balance hints that there has to be a trade-off and that work cannot be fulfilling, but that's predicated on two assumptions that work in life or distinct entities and that life elements are equally, if not more important than work elements. A creative's work is life.
So it's like, I don't want to get just too maudlin about this. I think that there is a sense in which younger generations are very privileged. Something like the trend into more and more customizability as lifestyle consumers is also evident in the way that people are selecting their own research agendas as graduate students or that people have more options about which kinds of companies they want to work with now that we can choose natively remote teams. But that, again, it still gets back to this.
When you talk about taste, you said Richard Feynman said to study hard what interests us the most and most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible. And it's like, I could be misapprehending this, but it seems like there is a paradox between the cultivation of taste and this idea that to be truly innovative or to be truly aligned with being our values and the kind of work that we do requires irreverence. Like, there's a discipline of being undisciplined. Yeah.
Yeah. There is a discipline of being undisciplined and how one can reject current paradigms as much as possible. I think that is so much of, to bring it back to the whole youthful-list thing that you were talking about earlier and people trying to preserve the youth to think in more fresh ways. I wonder what that is, what it is, because youthfulness allows you the time and space to experiment and be as undisciplined as possible.
And as you get older, you become more stability-seeking than more meaning-seeking. Sucka Doyle-Bweick wrote this great book called Quarterlife that talks about this balance of meaning and stability. And some of us are leaning on one end more than the other. It's a spectrum you change over time.
And there are young people who are incredibly stability-seeking. They go into careers that are guaranteeing them their next step for their entire careers. If you go into medicine, if you go into law, you basically know what you're going to do next. Half the time people have existential crises because they don't know what to do next and up until university or high school.
You're being told what the next milestone is. And if you don't know what the next milestone is, when you do, you have all this agency, you have all this power, you have all this optionality. So you have the space to be as undisciplined as possible, but what do you choose to do? Is a question.
But yeah, I'm going to turn this back to you. What is your question for what you want? I'm not disciplined enough to form questions. No, I think when I spoke with K.
They wrote this great piece on neural interpolation, basically saying that life in the age of AI and brain machine interfaces is one in which our media sends back. And we no longer see ourselves as nodes in a network of interlinked devices and social constellations, but as networks in our own right. And that the stories that we tell about who we are, these low-dimensional embeddings of these unfathomably high-dimensional semantic spaces. That there's like a sense in which neural media as a cultural technology of increasing ubiquity in society is making us construct aware, is making us more aware of the stories about ourselves that we tell, like that we realize that in some sense they are practically true without perhaps being empirically true.
And you've written about this too. You wrote a piece about Enesh Hippolito's comments on Susan Schneider's artificial you, in which you talk about rejecting realism in the human cultural roots of AI and where agency emerges out of interconnectedness. And so if I'm going to say when I put together these insanely elaborate yarn balls of reflection, what I think that we're really doing here is rather than asking questions that perform a kind of naive, realist stance about what matters. We're back to where we started in the conversation, which is like here is a cluster of associations of space, of ideas from which I'm hoping to elicit from you what narrative you might draw from it, like what path you might select to cut out of that space.
When that gets to like the main theme that I'm really prosecuting with you here in this conversation is you quoted Kurt Vonnegut in Modern Night, you said we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. And that gets back to the democratization of storytelling and the democratization of the allocation of attention in research and design. And what is the as if that we find most interesting that we are deciding to pursue out of all of this information and all of this complexity and all of this optionality? Like again, the kamoo, like fiction is the lie through which we told the truth.
Like if I'm asking you a question, it's like the question might be how do you decide to cut a path through all of these constellated ideas rather than like is there a right path? It's like how do you personally choose to live with more intentionality and then how might you hope that living in that way provides an example to people who perhaps feel more coupled to social pressure or have less time, less money, less social support in order to engage with the stuff in the way that you yourself are trying to support with the analog. Yeah, there's so many good threats there and I totally understand hunting for alpha here that you're doing is more so not it's the interesting more cells rather than answering a question or whatever. So I really appreciate you saying that and to bring it back to the storytelling and we talked about work-life balance and we talked about what does work mean in your life.
And I've noticed a trend where a lot of my friends are quitting their jobs in their early mid 20s going on quote unquote, sabbaticals to find themselves and they are usually lost and then they become solopreneurs or they become coaches or they become whatever and my view there and I talked about it in that transcendence essay is that's just jumping from one wheel to another wheel. Transcendence is not horizontal, it's vertical but what does the vertical even look like? And my personal philosophy is devotion and I wrote an essay called the Roman Euston theory of genius that sort of touches on Paul Graham's bus to give theory of genius and he talks about how an obsessive young person is what you need to do something great. Obsession and young being like key factors in that essay I think but I refute it by saying that I don't think it's obsession because obsession feels negative.
It runs out, it wanes and trembles in the face of reality but devotion feels more respectful and it feels more so you're devoted to the essence of something rather than trying to get an objective out of it and I think the devotion piece helps me a lot to answer the personal question of completing all the tasks that I have to do to their fullest extent, containing them slowly with a sense of devotion to them. I have had times in my life that I mentioned but I was feeling super lost and my life was worked on paper and the lens of devotion really helps me cut a path through all of that because it takes away the noise of the non-essential to entertain the noise of the essential for me which helps and at the current monogate quote we must be careful about what we pretend to be is really important to me and it comes back to that thing that you said of we construct these stories about themselves and then we end up having these rigid views about ourselves and everyone has a brand now and you have to maintain that brand. It's gross, it's totally gross. It's just it but it's but that comes from having that narrative about yourself and I feel that a sense of devotion and I'm not good at it.
I'm still struggling with like figuring it out and centering myself every single day to be on the path of devotion and I'll still have days where I have doubt and all the noise is there and am I doing the right thing etc etc but I wonder if devotion takes out that burden that comes with perception. I also wanted to touch on the useful part and I don't think that partly I don't think you can only innovate when you're young because so much of tacit knowledge is developed over time and you gain wisdom over time and there are geniuses out there that have a lot of depth to them. Ramanujan Darwin Einstein did a lot of things early on in their lives but if you look at Churchill Kahneman, Albert Claude who won their Nobel prizes at 79, 68 and 75 respectively and I'm quoting this directly from my Ramanu Janasai. Sometimes it takes time to figure it out and you have to go down so many paths in your exploit versus explore problem in your global maximum versus local maximum problem.
Sometimes you have to reach local maximum 100 times before you can reach your global maximum but when you reach your global maximum that's like world ending. That can be amazing and it feels juicier and better than ever before but yeah I'm still thinking a lot about this work-life balance question and I still remain with the perspective that I don't think work-life balance or anything-work is life and life is work and I'm very privileged to have identified my life's work but what does that look like for people today who don't even have time to think about that or can't make time to think about that or are so distracted by all our vices or phones or social media and what does it look like for them? Do they just stay in these bold and ham trust and repeat those cycles over and over again or are they wanting to step away and really question that life and not everyone has that privilege and working on a project with a couple of my friends it's just a fun little thing it's called the kids are not all right and we try to have conventions around this we're writing a couple of essays around this and what does work mean what does having a good life mean Paul Millard is someone who's written a couple of books around this one it's called the Pathless Path and the other one is called Good Work I haven't read the latter one yet but yeah I think that having more conversations and questioning things is probably it's funny that it actually just comes back to community in a sense of belonging and just finding people to talk to. So I'm finally prepared to ask you a simple question which is you talk about like Shoshi and Beginner's Mind and decoupling from the quote-unquote market pressure or pressure to conform socially how do you hold yourself accountable or like how do you surround yourself with people that you trust to hold yourself accountable because to the extent that everything we're talking about is anchored in I would say even more than interconnectedness a kind of prior non-separation but like the individual is something that emerged in biological systems after life itself and so in a very real way each of us is a fragment local instance where like a distinct perspective operating within a whole and so this question of devotion and this question of like giving yourself the permission to derive your own sense of purpose and value we have to hold that together with the like I appreciated that you were like I'm going to quote Ayn Rand even though I explicitly don't agree with her political philosophy like this like in her acknowledgment section she said nobody helped me and it's like what are you talking about your refugee so like there has to be a way that we reconcile self-authoring with there's no denying that we are emergent from and profoundly constrained by the quote-unquote other but then also you said you read the essay I gave to the cosmos on autonomy and freedom and how it has to be freedom with rather than freedom from because there's no lying to ourselves about being discrete atomic billiard ball actors anymore so I'm like curious how you make sense of this in your own life like how do you structure your social relationships or lean into the ways that your personal history constrains your possibility space and therefore the adjacent possible for you and what it is that you notice and what it is that you care about and how you individuate so many great threads there and I just want to practice saying that I don't have answers and I have a personal perspective I don't have it all figured out but I'll share my thoughts on decoupling from everything around me I think part of it is obviously like I just have awesome people around me and it takes a village to raise anishwarya and it's still true to this day like my parents do not understand anything that I do they have no idea what they literally they just they don't even know what I'm working on at all and I think that brings me back to the ground every single time I talk to that which is almost every single day and I think having grounding activities like that helps people who knew you before all of this to remind you where you come from but also I think that the thing you said about personal history constrains I suffer from that so deeply because my personal history constrains have given me a scarcity mindset and to come out of that I found a lot of answers in adlerian psychology and there was for a student he just developed his own field Freud is like your trola your background defines you whereas adler is like your background doesn't have to define you and I think that helps a lot that everything is interpersonal but you don't have to take on other people's stuff you can just be free from that and I think that helps a lot my partner is just so great at calling me out of my bullshit that helps a lot I think that intentionality piece is really important in questioning a journal quite a bit that also is good does that sort of answer most is there something I'm missing no actually I remember at some point I've deleted it from my tome of notes from your blog but at some point you mentioned that this was a lifelong process of discovery for you and that you had to remind yourself that it's not going to be linear and that you had written that down because you knew that later you're going to come back and read that and so yeah like where I think maybe the most interesting place to tie a bow on this conversation would be to talk about time binding and how there is the social scaffolding but there is also the conversation that each of us is having with our legible past and legible future and how the same kind of listening and the same kind of respect that you're talking about policymakers giving to the people who are affected by those policies seems to be like well right now you're making the decisions for who you will be but that person understands things that you don't and so just to put one more glass bead on that I really appreciate you pointing to like far be it for me to say that I am also preoccupied with youth because a big part of the premise for the show and for my interest in podcasting generally is the solicitation of elders and the question of how we make more room for discovery and collective wisdom and so on it's not just about how do we make sure that the kids are all right it's also like I get into this argument on a regular basis with my wife about how we should have left the country years ago because either that graph the US spends twice as much per person on healthcare with worse results than everywhere else in the industrial world there's something about the way that we have optimized as a society in the same way that it's made it hard for people to afford to go out to festivals or to travel it's also made it hard for people to live long enough to be elders and to be healthy and so yeah I would just like to turn all this again to the position of what is your relationship to the present future and like is in what ways do you feel like young you and old you are also contributing the sort of reconstructed social collective self in which you have great friends but you also have crone you holding you accountable and encouraging you to grow beyond yourself and to discover things and again one of the most interesting applications that I've seen of AI lately has been to create hypothetical older versions of yourself as a chatbot and avatar and how it really does something it's like journaling and like the essay and I'm glad that you brought that stuff up that it's that these opportunities for reflection seem to evoke better versions of ourselves so yeah take that in whatever way you want but like I think the question of looking back on the analog in ten years time like engaging with the older version of your project and the community that is built up around it would be an interesting place to land this discussion I think you're well on such an important one of the first thing that came to my brain when you were talking was having older people around to awaken you because they have done it before and they have failed before and they have failed at the same permutations that you've failed at before and I feel that the more we talk about this stuff the more people will wake up and try to be intentional about it and one of the ways to do that is to get wisdom in young people's ears somehow and in their brains somehow and that could look like you having someone who is super experienced and older on your podcast that might look like me having older voices at my isocratic salons which I try to do as well because it's not just about diversity of thought diversity of field diversity in what you look like it's also about diversity of age which I think we forget about a lot and to that and asking your future self I actually love to do this exercise of like what do I look like I'll create a Pinterest board what are the vibes of my life in 2030 years from now what does she do every day when she wakes up what does her morning routine look like what does her week look like what does her month look like is she living seasonally or is she living in the same place where in the world is she living of course that thinking might have walled over time but it allows you to be more intentional about what you do today even subconsciously my answers change all the time sometimes I'm like oh it would be nice to live in Italy on a farm I don't know sometimes it's like oh I'm going to be a career gal in New York City so yeah I think it allows you to mold your future based on all the information that you have today but also learn from the wisdom of your future self which she knows more and I think when we talk about reaching our highest potential with the work that we do at analog or with the work that you're doing with humans on the loop and we think about what is the best as products can be what is the best as company can be what is the best I can do professionally in the world but I think your potential is also what's the best sister you can be I could be what's the best what is my highest potential look like as a member of my community what is my highest potential look like as a wife a mother if I ever become one if I ever have the privilege of becoming one in my future yeah and I think questioning those things allows us to start having inklings of the types of values we want to embody and we want that potential to be maximized in all areas if we're gonna talk about complex adaptive systems as it relates to the external world we can't forget about it in our internal world and for me personally I feel that the words that I'm doing with analog is a direct translation of my personal philosophy just applied to systems and I feel very aligned with that on most points and I feel very lucky to feel aligned with that on most points yeah I think I'm there because I think that's what that question means to me right on with devotion to the epistemic humility that you and I both care about if you were a chatbot and I were prompting you what is the most fruitful question I haven't asked you in this conversation like where do you recognize a blind spot that you and I might look back in six months time and be like wow we could have spent a whole extra conversation on that and we've learned so much and that might be the launching point for the salon that you and I have talked about co-facilitating like what's the missing unarticulated inquiry here I don't know why but the first thing that comes to my mind is what does it mean to be human and whatever that means to other people and it might mean very different to people at different stages in their lives it might mean very differently as it relates to as I said age where you come from where you want to go ambition looks differently for different people some people the answers are going to be I'm this ambitious and this is what it means for me to be human and this is the impact I want to make on the world and yeah I think that would be a good question for us to explore in a non-objective tied way without diverse of a group as we can get together with people who will disagree with each other to their core but while we foster a sense of epistemic humility and openness and humanness as we move forward and that's a lot and I don't know if we're gonna do this in person or if we're gonna do this in online I see like it'll happen organically and it'll emerge in the way it needs to but yeah I feel like that question is an important question to answer as we build anything as we build products we're different complex systems services perturbations because it's like what what it meant to be human 100 years ago is different from what it means to be human now even if you look at time scales right and we are still operating on previous machinery and previous ways of thinking and previous assumptions for what it means to be human and what problems are worth solving and what we value and what do we care about in the world because that is evolved and we have an evolved our assumptions around that yeah so yeah I think as broad as a question can I mean it's probably what it means to be human but as narrow as a question can be what does it mean to be human today that's awesome and just note to future us that this is why I'm so fond of literary post-humanism right it's like your point about going all the way back one of my favorite humanities papers is on the body horror in science fiction in works like the thing and in Lilith's brood as a response to the disquiet of the modern western mind that comes with Darwinian evolution and realizing that the human is not an essential fixed ontological category it's not just what we're thinking is changing it's like what we are is changing biologically we are a lot like the people we were 200 years ago but we're not the same we're back to just our appreciation for this is not a question that's going to get answered it's not a question that my kids are going to be happy with my answer as you said we've learned so much and making decisions based on what we know now versus what we knew previously but also I think what we're doing is we're just uncertainty maxing that's it we're just maxing for as much uncertainty as possible and so many innovations and so many great things in the world have happened because people have been able to tolerate a sense of uncertainty but I wonder if Darwin was able to handle a tiny bit more uncertainty would we think about the world in the same way so would we still try to put ourselves in a Mendelian form of genetics or would we've had a more nuanced understanding of genetics from the get-go we would probably be citing Alfred Russell Wallace a whole lot more right like they probably would have been given equal footing as co-authors if a greater tolerance for uncertainty if we can correlate that with accepting the possibility that you might have been scooped in your work anyway now we're just riffing we've been doing the whole time it's super pleasure you know thanks for always being to the extent that I grapple with uncertainty reduction I think like I can count on you to have an interesting conversation that gives me a reasonably stable place to stand in the sort of ever collapsing Mario World platform game of the 2020s so thanks for giving it a course is one of the best conversations I've had at a long time I appreciate you thanks again for listening if you enjoyed this conversation please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast provider humans on the loop as made possible thanks to gifts from Oshanci Ventures Cosmos Institute, imaginal seeds, BitTensor, and listeners like you explore the shows extensive archives at humansontheloop.com and email humansontheloop at proton.me if you like to work together and stay tuned next Thursday for a conversation with Jim Oshanci the man the myth the legend founder of Oshanci Capital and Oshanci Ventures host of the Infinite Loops Podcast and contrarian Maverick philosopher King power excellence until then take care and remember attention is our greatest natural resource