we think with, we think with each other, we think with other things that are happening around us. So I think it's actually great to be able to have a thought partner in the technology. We have to just come to it in a way that is just really aware of what it's doing, right? Because that's stuck in so many loops with AI.
We just keep going so quickly, I'm like, oh my God, where did I even start? Why do I even tear? I delete this thread and I start over. I can get crazy.
So it's important to also have a process with it. And again, like what control do we really have? But we have agency and I think that's the other pieces, like how does our relationship with control when we engage in decision making with something that is giving us the information? Welcome to the 27th episode of Humans on the Loop.
This is a podcast for a metamorphic age, and we are definitely in one. What it means to be a country, to be a person, to be a company. All of these things are changing. And as today's guest, Rima Besharina-sen puts it, these days it feels like anything is possible.
This morning I saw someone post on Twitter, do you think a caterpillar knows what's going to happen to them and then someone else quoted it and replied, do you think a human being knows what is going to happen to them? That's the stew we're simmering in now. And I'm glad to have such an excellent partner in conversation too, as the dawists say, feel our way across the river stone by stone in a discussion about all of this and more, the re-emergence of nomadic populations and intentional communities fumbling toward an idea of planetary culture, the role of intuition in leadership and bio-philia in the design of our workspaces. It's a marvelously non-disciplinary co-exploration.
Rima is a speaker, interviewer, facilitator and advisor who has partnered with senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies guiding them through transformation and growth. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Tech Crunch, and Forbes. She began her career in management consulting at Deloitte before moving into industry, advising across healthcare, consumer business, and telecommunications.
Later work in the art world taught her how cultural and political insights could drive innovation and transformation in business, leading her to found dialogue in 2016. She now combines strategic foresight, human-centered innovation, and interdisciplinary thinking to help her clients reframe challenges, identify opportunities, and lead with intention. She sits on the board of trustees at Headlands Center for the Arts and on the Seica Council Board at SF MoMA and is also an advisor to Stanford's Women in Design program. Her most recent focus and a focus in our conversation today is in co-intelligence, integrating human machine and planetary intelligence to build future-facing organizations.
But before we dive in, I want to make a big announcement, half an apology and half an offering. This episode was recorded in April, folks. I've been so busy helping stand up not one but two amazing organizations that I'm months behind on this show's publication queue. And for that, I am truly sorry.
There's a lot of wonderful insight I've been struggling to edit and get out to you in reasonably short order, but the good news is that I am about to publish all 17 of these unreleased recordings into a special vault for founding members. In about a week, you'll get the keys to a trove of dialogues with Stuart Kaufman, Tyson Yum Caporta, Carl Hayden Smith, Lehman Piscoll, Alex Kamarowski, the Technosys Collective, and many more. And I will continue to upload all of the raw footage for founding members as soon as it's recorded, giving you as close to real-time engagement with this project's evolving inquiry as it actually happens. It's the best way for me to thank you for your support and to maintain my production standards while I continue to juggle humans on the loop with raising my kids and being part of inspiring new collaborations like AICACP, the AI capabilities and alignment consensus project about which you will hear much more soon.
To become a founding member, sign up at michaelgarfield.substack.com or patreon.com slash michaelgarfield at the links in the show notes. Thank you for listening and enjoy this wonderful wrap with Rima Bush-Shernitz on. Some part of me yearns for the moment where I'm like, Nikki, this is no longer a discussion, we're selling the house and we're buying an RV and the future is Mad Max and we're going to homeschool our kids and we will live in place. We'll live closer to the land, we'll follow the buffalo or whatever that means.
But it really is like that sort of the future of the United States is the RV culture, Burning Man, post-apocalyptic thing. Some part of me is just like, can it happen? Because the suburbs, God, we don't need all this overhead. Oh my God, that's funny.
The first time I went to Burning Man in 2000, early 2000s, I realized this and I was like, incorporate at the time and I came out and it took me two or three weeks to calibrate back into the real world where I was like, oh my God, why do we have all these things? Why do we not have to already own the house? It was a whole monologue. But I don't think I can do the RV life even if it's fancy.
Even the air stream doesn't sound exciting to me. I just can't do the compact, but I could do tiny homes. I can do that. Yeah, I was going to say, you might be more like a tiny home village person.
Yes, exactly. Yeah. I always thought it was like, they're roughly equivalent. It's just about whether you are thinking more in terms of circling up the wagons, ephemeropolis, seasonal migration, or whether you're like anchored into a bunch of food gardens.
Yes, and those two don't have to necessarily. I think there's still a way to be communal and have individual property and have the garden, but like, you just have to readjust how we live. Like how in that perception, how we think we should be living. It's like in Middle Earth, right?
There's the dwarves, the elves, the men. But then there's like, andolf, when you start thinking about it in terms of these bigger frames, it's like, you need circulation. You need the storytellers that move between communities and all of that and are actively conveying ideas. But then if that's all it is, like when I had Robin Sloan on the show for episode five, he had these visions of society in his science fiction novel Moonbound.
And one of them was this city in which people were constantly changing their fashion and their identity and like feeding all of their old stuff into matter recyclers and 3D printers and joining teams and quitting teams. And it was like, if Burning Man were like a real city, and there was this sort of more post-humanist Star Trekky long now, like aspirational long time horizon society. Yes. And it was like, yeah, like they each offer something different, but like, neither of them actually seems complete unto itself.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm with you. And then there's this other part that's a friend who shared with me that I guess I don't know for whatever reason his parents and him moved around a lot when they were young. And every time they would go to a new place, his mom would set up the environment in some gorgeous curated beautiful way that he just was like, always this notion of home was always present.
And so then I also think like it's really just about how you what you value how you place it, literally a knot and how you want to create like the space outside of yourself and within yourself that really shapes it and the material isn't so important. Yeah, it's an idea. I have a hard time reconciling certain things too, because I'm like, I love to convene people in my home. What would that look like if I had a tiny home on a property with many other people or a number of people because I talked to the kitchen sisters and have you heard of them?
Yeah, you interviewed someone. Nicki Silva. Yeah, so Davia lives here. It's I just go and then Nicki lives in Santa Cruz on a commune and like she just was telling me how she raised her kids in this way of they had their own property, but then they all lived in one land.
And I just said, that's amazing to have the autonomy, but then you're also in community and then you can go out if you need to and someone's watching your kid, but it isn't intrusive to your space either. I don't know. There's something that we're not doing well in capitalism that I think could be not and I'm not like a pro communist type of like, my perspective is very capitalist, but not in the capitalist way that we live right now. I think it's wrong.
It's like a place for how we could be living that actually nature optimized for, but we're not realizing that because everything else is impacting us. So anyway, my babble. Well, I think the thing in the capitalism, communism conversation that usually gets ignored is that you can see in a rainforest the ways that both values can be recognized in the organization of life forms. Yeah, it's like, Piper individualism actually emerges out of bacterial colonies, but this question of like, you know, is there fair distribution?
Well, yeah, but it's not planned top down. And then is there intense innovative competition? Yes, but they're not all pegged to the same currency, right? Like the thing that the mushrooms and the thing that the trees and the thing the animals are optimizing for are all different things.
Yes. You know, there's a boundary that prevents this sort of dimensional collapse. And that's actually one of the things I wanted to talk about with you today, because you wrote that piece with Susan Maxamen, how do you say? Maxamen.
Yeah, you wrote that piece on neuro aesthetic spaces, healing and hope. Yeah. And yeah, this thinking about biofilia and human health and wellbeing. But first of all, before we get there, okay, now that we're in it, we won't get there, but I want to get there through the piece you wrote for TechCrunch on social media's plot hypothesis.
And I don't want to start there. I want to start with you. And you giving us a sense of who you are and where you come from and your formative early childhood experiences and whatever else seems like it might help people address the ideas that you have and share and the work that you do. Yeah.
So I came from the form of yours, I saw born and raised there and raised for the first eight years of my life in Ukraine. What is now Ukraine, the south of Ukraine moved here to San Francisco 91 and my parents have been here ever since I've lived in Santa Barbara in LA, New York and Paris and London and Moscow for work and for other things. And then came back here to San Francisco because it ended up being the best place for me, I think. And that's where I'm from from there.
So we're up in a very in an environment that was shaped by communism. And I saw how that affects like my parents and how they think about things and very much didn't like it, didn't feel like there was opportunity for Jewish people there in the Soviet Union, which is true. My dad had to attend university by mail. So like Moscow University was where he got his degree, but he had to do it in mail order because he was a Jew.
And then my mother also had to do the same thing for university because she was Jewish. She wasn't admitted to many places that she wanted to attend. And they both were in our engineers. Both of them came here and worked as engineers, which is quite rare to have your experience from there translate well into the workplace here.
But they got really lucky when we moved here. They were in their sorties and were able to establish themselves. So I grew up here and they traveled a lot to go into Santa Barbara and then lived in New York and London and Paris and visited Moscow a lot for work when I was a Deloitte consulting. My Russian was useful to them.
So I would frequently do many deals because I was working in M&A when I was a Deloitte that were not necessarily headquartered in Russia but had affiliate companies were based in Moscow. So they needed me to be a Russian person on the ground. So that was very interesting in the early 2000s to be in Moscow as it was rebuilding itself. And gave me a taste of what I left in many ways, which was really nice.
I knew that I'd never wanted to be. And I was never fascinated with Moscow in general. It was a very oppressive kind of place. But people that lived their love it.
So maybe it's just my narrative spoiled privilege. Like I already kept informed here and then it went back there. And I was like, oh, this is what it would have been like. Thank God I never stayed.
I never answered your question. But I think yeah, although you raised another question for me, which is do you think San Francisco is going to be Moscow in another 20 years? No, I don't know. I would think it's safer to say that California would be its own country than San Francisco being Moscow, I think.
But I'd have been chatting to my parents about this, what's happening here and how closely it looks like what's happening there and what has been happening there for the past 30 years. And they're warming up to the idea that I might be right because I've been warning them against what's going on right now. And they were like, oh, please, you're just such a Democrat. You've never lived in communism.
All Democrats are socialists. And I'm like, there are social Democrats. Yes. And I don't think I'm one of them.
I'm totally like centered moderate in the political sphere. But they always think of me as very liberal, which is hilarious. Yeah, I got the analogy wrong. It's more like California is Ukraine.
And that we get to United States trying to take back California in order to secure its data pipelines. I never thought about it like that, actually. We'll see what Gavin does. It's interesting, actually, probably not really.
I don't like if you look at on paper, how it looks, I don't think that is actually likely. But it does feel like anything is possible. I do feel Gavin for all of his faults is focusing on California first, which is interesting. Yeah, the whole world order is been disturbed.
And especially if our court system is going to be any slower than it already is, nobody gets in trouble. It's very bizarre. Yeah, it's very scary. I don't know if I could quite make the analogy of Ukraine to Russia because it's just not the same.
It's totally not the same. But I can see we are going, I think, is an interesting thought experiment. Okay. So context is I just finished reading William Rowan Thompson's book, Imaginary Landscape, which is about the emergence of a guy in mythos from biology and cognitive science and ecology.
And he plugs all of that into his theory of the evolutions of culture and consciousness and talks about, and not just this book and several of his books, talks about the transition from modern industrial civilization to planetization or planetary culture. And how none of these things that have been engulfed by the next level of organization truly disappear, they just get transformed. Yeah. So I've been thinking a lot about that in terms of national politics.
The thing about planetization is that the nations still exist, but they're basically subsumed within a planetary order that is not national in the way that he says the technology of each age slays the victim and resurrects it with art that modernity kind of slayed religion and then resurrected it as an aesthetic project. The modern self-authoring individual was able to choose a religion and to make new religions. And that the planetization is doing that to the mind and is resurrecting the mind through art, which is like something I read into the stuff that you and Susan McSimon wrote about neurothetics and how we're now thinking about biology and ecology and architecture together into these spaces to design mind states that we can quantitatively measure. And it shows up in people using AI to create these bespoke psychedelic experiences that are tailored to you as a person.
And anyway, so that is one side of it. And then the other side is that this is because in Tom's language, we're moving out of this sort of linear dynamical mathematics like Tony and ballistics into chaotic and complex nonlinear dynamics, because now it's not just intercontinental trade, it's like planetary commerce and cultural exchange. And so what he sees is happening there is that this period which he sees as starting like in the 70s really, the decoupling of the dollar from gold, and we move into this regime that is fundamentally volatile. Like when you say that anything is possible, find that the strategies that are most rewarded now seem to be strategies of disruption.
And that the consequence is much like modernity ruptured the world in which you were held by the values and mores of a particular culture. And you knew your role within that culture. Now the value systems themselves have been ruptured by this like weird, turbulent, unpredictable, emergent interaction between all of these things going on at once. And this is in your piece on TechCrunch.
You talk about how it felt to be on social media originally. And it felt like we were glimsing participation, that the sense of global participation is what Thompson sees as taking over from the preoccupation with representation and modernity. I am this and I want to be represented in my government. And now it's like, I don't know who I am, but I feel like I need to be involved somehow.
And it shows up in different ways. It shows up in my mom making friends on Facebook and India. It shows up in this intense desire that you and I were talking about to be part of a human scale community, which you speak to in this piece. But that puts the center of gravity of identity formation, not I am deciding my values, but I need to find a place within which I make sense.
Yeah, I think that's just the evolution of how of our relationships somehow. I don't know, there's so much noise. And I don't remember what I wrote exactly because it was a few years ago. But I do think that how we participate changed and the value of our participation to ourselves changed.
Just the idea that threads exist and is valuable, Twitter was valuable. Maybe it's the value of some people. I don't know why, but yeah, we're like, blue skies is valuable, is interesting to me. I can't engage in these platforms.
Like a bunch of my friends get news from them. And I just, I'm like, what value can I add here? And what would this actually mean for me to be commenting on some of these posts? I don't value my participation enough in this to spend time on it.
And I don't think other people would value it, my participation either. But I don't really care so much about other people. But I also think it's generational how we've evolved. Like maybe you and I probably are similar in terms of how we want to participate in social interactions online on social specifically.
But I wonder if the younger generations, it's such a natural part of their, like this other way of communicating that it's, they're not even questioning the role of their participation. They're just participating. And I think that's also what we've seen over the past year or two years on college campuses, right? It's like, the intention is so beyond them in a way there, like it just feels like there's almost an understanding of what people are participating and what that means for them to participate in something.
You feel like it's a very different thing than what happened in the 60s and 70s when people were protesting and ideologically against or before something that was happening around them. So I just think we're living in a very interesting moment right now, where it is like we are flying the plane, have the plane isn't built, nobody really cares to finish building it, but it's somehow moving and still able to fly. And nobody understands how. So it's just very weird.
But I'm not sure if I'm answering a question. It's a secular expectation for this. Like I am sitting with questions, but I don't really know how to answer them nor am I really asking them of you. I'm just like putting stuff together in a way to see if it like sparks something for you.
But I will say that one of the things I really appreciated about this piece was the point that the platforms at least originally did feel like they were connecting us. And then it wasn't obvious at the time that the more time you spend on them, the less time you're spending with people face to face, the less time you're spending in your own community for the most part. And the more you're exposed to people against whom you are going to compare your life. So you get this counterintuitive or what was counterintuitive effect of the harder you try to connect, the more isolated you become.
But like part of that is because of this vertical structure that you speak to where you say, rather than forging or maintaining relationships, as they set out to do social media platforms became focused on becoming the global town square, not just of communication and connection, but also of consumption via e-commerce and shared knowledge fueled by social echo chambers. So like there's a sense of keeping people on the platform in order to sell them things, in order to support the platform became the charter. And I was thinking about this today because right before we got on this call, I was writing a response to the controversy around the all female Blue Origin civilian astronaut thing. I know a lot of really excellent people working in space or in the space sector.
And I really believe in the virtue of the experience of getting people up to see it and understand that this is one thing. And I'm also aware that the way that these missions are being done is like propaganda for the phenomenon that Doug Rushkoff talks about and survival of the richest, which is there again, this is the representation participation thing. It's like they are performing representation by getting more and more diverse astronaut crews up into space or what is explicitly about trying to transcend the planet. And then meanwhile, people around the ground like shouldn't you be like, if you really want to empower women, then what about the billions of women who are like hungry or diseased?
And so it ends up being this thing where both sides are either afraid they're going to be abandoned or afraid they're going to be trapped on a dying planet and then see the other side as a separate entity rather than being like, there is no real escape velocity. Like you can get out of the atmosphere, but eventually you have to come back down in like a figurative way of you still have to accept the way that our destinies are bound together. And that's the same kind of thing that we're seeing in social media of the people that are making the decisions about the direction of these platforms are shareholder rather than stakeholder concern. If that's a question, I'm curious how you make sense of all that, given all the interesting people you talk to and so on.
Oh, I read something yesterday that changed my mind on this. And it's to do with the fact that there's the people that went on this and blew a jute thing. I mean, the vanity it looks like a vanity project. And I agree with you like all the things that people are criticizing them for.
I understand that makes sense to people. But then an astronaut who was part of the mission but didn't go to space with them, I saw posts by her and she said she said there were no carbon emissions that went literally they had a clean ride into space. The amount of influence that people in this spaceship have as out of space is actually quite amazing because when you go into space, you see an overview effect, right? You go back and you look at Earth and you have this sort of all right that everyone talks about and that shifts people tremendously.
So the amount of change that can come from these people doing something in the world after this experience could actually be profound to help the people that we're talking about to to direct their philanthropic funds towards something of value. And then multiple people on this mission had to fundraise for their seats. It wasn't like they were like here's a $600,000 check Jeff Bezos take me. So there was intention behind putting them in space.
The timing of it is I don't know what was going on with them. I mean, this was maybe I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I could see the criticism and I agree with it. And I can also see what could potentially happen and how investing in people going into space for even five, six minutes and coming back could be something that shifts our relationship to the planet and shifts our understanding of planetary consciousness even to some end. I don't know if people in that space to be thinking about it more philosophically and actually zooming out.
But let's give them the benefit of that data. Maybe they could then that could actually if I'm not saying more people need to do this, but maybe there's ways of diffusing the BS that goes on on the planet by allowing certain people like putting them in a corner in space and letting them look backwards and what they just experience and then shifting that rather than doing ketamine, maybe they can actually see have some real I mean, that is a real experience too, but you know, have a different experience from my shift. Right. So I think that what we value as a culture is interesting.
But I think what we don't do well is communicate the potential intention or the opportunity that exists by these women going into space. I don't think it's a feminist thing. I don't think it needs to be like magnified that women and I know women don't get to go to space a lot and there's a whole controversy around that. I get that but labeling it as a thing for feminism is also down in my opinion.
Just let it be what it is and let them experience what they do and then let them talk about it and then we can say, oh, that was a worthwhile spend of money or not, right? Like it just feel like we put so much on top of other people's experiences and then have to define them for them rather than just having a conversation or allowing them to like process and then come back like we would after a journey, for example, like it's an integration thing, right? I think the next six months are going to be real interesting for them and we should continue the conversation with all six of them. And one of them gave up her education to be an astronaut because she had some other points to prove to Congress that actually helped women and moved things along for women and women's rights in terms of, I don't know how you call it, around sexual assault and violation or whatever women, whatever government was able to do, then they cannot do now, which is actually a good thing for women.
So there's a lot of different threads here that I think are important and I don't think that we as a culture allow ourselves to process the things that people experience and allow them to speak for their own experience before we start criticizing and judging and virtue signaling on things that like they don't really need definition for people who don't qualify to even provide an input. And I think that ties into the conversation around the social media and how we use it because it's the same thing, right? Who deemed me someone to comment on this mission, let's say, like I have no connection to it other than I could say that it's amazing that people can see the overview effect right in experience and that's worth it from if I had an extra half a million dollars to go to space, perhaps I would do it, but that would be after I've contributed significantly to other causes that I care about and the value piece, I think the values piece is what we don't focus enough on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't want to come off as sounding purely cynical.
It's just like, of course you want those people to have these experiences and that's a perfectly reasonable thing. Yeah, where it gets complicated is the question of, okay, now we're still thinking in terms of a few people who have a lot of leverage and the opportunities that we might have if we introduce some kind of intervention, then we can change global discourse, we can affect planetary solidarity among human beings, but the logic of that, there's two problems. One is the question of you've got the overview effect, what's the under view effect? What is it like that reality show where the CEO goes down and works in the sewers with his, but it's like, how do we affect that more often so that people start to develop a sense of solidarity on both sides of the equation?
Yeah, and then the other piece is that when I spoke to Josh DiCaleo, who wrote this fabulous book, Scale Theory, about contemplating the unthinkably big and small, not as we've mapped it, therefore we can control it, but Holy cow, the bewilderment is transforming what I understand myself to be at the level that I'm capable of directly perceiving. And he wrote two really beautiful chapters in that book about the overview effect, one about Edgar Mitchell's experience, and one about Stuart Brand and the whole Earth catalog. And his point was it's like one thing to be Edgar Mitchell, and it's another thing to be looking at a picture of space, and that getting that experience second hand doesn't really work, because you're not up in space realizing that you're still part of this, you're engaging it with it through an abstraction. So Josh's point was basically like, we don't actually really know, and complex systems research tells us pretty unequivocally that behavior at planetary scale can't really be engineered at human scale.
And to peg back into earlier in the conversation, it's like, well, yeah, things are different for the US now than they were for Russia, because the development of the global economy is so much more sophisticated, and is pushing so much more on the behavior of the whole system than it was then. And so really, they're not perfectly equivalent situations. So like this question about somebody like Yeats and the influence of artists, myth makers, poets on collective imagination, I hope that people come back and they have these experiences. But to your point about timing, it doesn't fix the issue that like they're coming back into a culture that sees itself as divided.
And so something else has to be done on the other side, and it cannot be designed top down, it has to emerge naturally. But there are things that we can do to structure that environment. And that's where it brings back to neurostatics and working with Google to create spaces where creativity happens, conversations and so on. And I think it's sort of where AI can play some sort of equalizer, I hope as well, right?
Because then now you have people, because I think when you think about collective imagination, I think the people that participate in that are people that are inherently comfortable being creative or philosophical, or some version of that is not necessarily recognized by society, but they're okay with that. There's probably parts of you and me that are like that, where we're really comfortable swimming in this ambiguous sort of waters, where we can pontificate and create and philosophize, and then it doesn't have to lead to anything and yet we can still be comfortable in it and bring it into different conversations. And I don't think that there's a lot of people that exist like that right now, because we have industrialized people into verticals where they can be productive in a way that society recognizes the productivity in a way that then they feel value versus for us, our value is undereived by money or it maybe does, but we I think try not to be defined by the product being a KPI of some sort. And where I think AI can help is if people are using it, they can see themselves as someone that contributes thoughts, not just like computation, let's say.
And if they can see themselves as a more cultural figure that is synthesizing many things at once for a particular purpose or no purpose at all, whatever that is for them, then they might see themselves more in the poly-map capacity. And if they see themselves that way, then they'll participate in that way, and they won't be siloed and they won't keep themselves in a vertical. Because what I'm seeing too right now, increasingly as portfolio careers that are emerging in ways where like someone can be a Google fellow or some sort of higher up at Google and also be a thought leader in a very amorphous space around intelligence and other things and whatever, like very kind of curious place, but they can have this corporate job that does not define their role in society anymore. It's sort of a part of who they are, and then there's this other bigger piece that they're playing where they can be of opinion about something that they're qualified to talk about or they deem themselves qualified, whatever it is, and they do.
Whereas before, I think you were either a philosopher, either a teacher, a corporate person or whatever, and you had to kind of, this is why I left corporate is because I could not understand how people could work nine to five, nine to nine, whatever it is, and still be human outside of work hours. I was like, how do I participate in the world if all I'm doing is this all day? And so then it forced me to create my own thing, which comes with its own thorns, as we know, but like, at least it allowed me to extend myself into a place where I'm now, even without AI, I can speak to many things. I can be in this polymath kind of space and be very comfortable.
Not everyone needs this, right? But I'm just saying that we are not inherently created to do one thing well or two things. I think we are shutting down parts of ourselves to be accepted. And what I'm hopeful with the technology can help with is letting people have a more imaginative ability to see themselves in a different way, and their values implemented at work, whatever the word is, so that they could coexist in a way that feels more conducive to our actual nature.
So I do see technology actually helping with that, not hurting it, but depending on how we use it. Right. And I want to dig into this, but like, this all sounds maybe just only one degree away from, but in listening to you talk, there's a pattern. I read your interview with Ivy Ross, which one from from 2018, yeah, is she still VP of hardware product design at Google?
Yeah, she was talking about intuitive leadership. And I really liked this because it was like obvious that she was into like, bineral beats and like Bruce ripped in and like all this new agey stuff. So it's like an example of what you're talking about, I think in a more multi-dimensional person and the conversation hinged on her cultivation of intuition and the courage to listen to your intuition. And I was just thinking like in her case, how did she put it?
She says, my intuition allows me to see who people really are, what their talents are, and where their true gifts flourish. We often put people in organizational chartboxes, and we keep them there because they become an expert in the box. We put them in, but my sense of intuition is encouraging me to create situations or roles that allow people to shine new ways that in some cases were very atypical. And it's like, yeah, this is, again, to talk about like bottom up or top down, if we can get smart people in space or if we can redesign the newsfeed algorithm or whatever, is still that kind of HR thinking?
And then the question of how do you get the listening in these systems so that you can really treat the needs of your users as we spoke, rather than creating them in some sort of Ed Bernays way, like the role of advertisers to create desires. Yeah. So there's the intuitive pieces like on the ground and the leadership is in the space, and they work best when they're together and they recognize as part of a thing. And then, yeah, just like thinking about how that plugs into what you had said about AI just a moment ago and what you wrote for developing leaders quarterly about machine planetary and human super-intelligence and a cohesive framework.
It's funny because reading this, you emphasize intuition as a human skill, but also I've thought a lot about how some of the most interesting things going on in AI are when it surprises us and when it acts in ways that strike us as very intuitive. So it's, yeah, I don't know, I'll leave it there. Yeah, I think with AI, it's all pattern recognition, right? And so if it sees a pattern in our behavior in the way that we ask questions, it can respond in a way that feels like we perceive as intuitive, right?
Mm-hmm. Because it's our unconscious in some sense. Yes, and it's also very consciously designed to recognize specific human behaviors to then form ways of us then interacting with it. And that's where I think the hard part is to then decipher when it's behaving in a way to create a context for us to respond into in the way that it perceives that we can for us to then recognize that it's intuitive versus it just being a machine learning algorithm that then, another one that's smart.
And so there's that part of it that I think we should definitely have on the table because if we're talking about real intuition, that is not a thing that a machine will do. And then there's a whole consciousness conversation which we can at some point go into, which isn't even, it's just still new in my brain around how to talk about, but we can definitely go there. But I think in terms of like how you brought Ivy into the space right now, I think, and I know her very well, and in the way that her intuition works and generally how intuition works, I think that she senses, right? Like we all sense outward and then create and then make sense of the thing that we're sensing in a way that is also in a way kind of pattern recognition, our bodies are recognizing patterns of things.
And it's based on our lived experience. So let me think, how do I piece this together? So there's a way that she has been able to see that her teens need to be developed beyond the regular ways existing as designers to then be able to create products that resonate with people who are using them. And that's pretty evident in the way that they display their product in both like retail-wise and every year for the past, probably five or six years, they've been going to salondate to Milan to exhibit like a conceptual understanding of an element of water of air of, I think, else they do.
They took elements and basically created exhibitions around them. And I think that all comes out of an experiment, an experiential kind of place to help people understand how to connect into what they're designing and also how they're using what was being designed for them, whether it's a Google product or a cup of tea or whatever it is, and have some understanding of the intention behind these products and how they're engaging with us and how we're engaging with them. I think where we can tie that into sort of the triad of sense-making intelligence that I've been speaking to, which is like human, planetary, and machine, is that we're not necessarily in this current moment, I think it's not one, two, or three. It's like how we make sense of the three together that should be informing on how we think about the world.
And so intuition plays a part of it. But then there's the way that machine intelligence is operating that also plays a part of it. And then there's the way that the planet and fans, like the Bifilias, sort of the way that planetary sapiens comes into an intelligence space that then also informs how we are evolving as a species. And then from there, there's all sorts of computational kind of epistemologies, like heuristics, whatever, however we want to call them that come into play that like we should be using an understanding in how we communicate.
The decisions we make, the way that we are, the way that we exist. And I think right now, we really see intuition as siloed, then machine as siloed, planetaries over there somewhere, most people associated with climate change, which has nothing to do with it. And I think there's ways of integrating those two things. So what I'm saying is there's a framework that can exist that puts all these things together that allows us to actually expand ourselves in a way that would help us create more value for ourselves in our existence than creating these things that we tap into here and there.
And I think that goes back to the conversation around collective imagination, the conversation around sense-making, and then this sort of as an approach to exploring our own futures as a species on the planet, which then could be could break down into various ways that come in and I'm speaking at a very macro level. So all of it feels emergent and very much not, we call it not engineering necessarily, although there are parts of it, obviously, that are engineered. And I think the dark side of AI is for us to be watching of what is engineered versus what is reality and then how we engage with that. It's not all for us to be in love with, right?
There's so much critical thinking that needs to be happening at this point. But I do see us being interstitial beings, whether we operate that way or not, everyone's different, we all just need, I think I see it all as a flow. And it's not one way or the other, it's all together and then us making it like a real clear conscious, deductive sort of reasoning around it all. And it doesn't have to be logical necessarily, but it can be emergent, which could be logical, could be not, I don't know how you look at it given the whole complexity angle.
But that's how I see all those things interconnect. I don't know if I've missed anything. I'm like trying to think. No, this is great.
So in that piece, there's a couple of things. One, you say AI should serve as an enabler, not a replacement of human intelligence. I'll back it up just a second and say for a long time and it stretches through the commentary on Blue Origin and all that stuff, I feel like at least when I was in my 20s, I felt like I was on a mission to get people to think about human beings as something the planet is doing. And then you've got, you interviewed Kevin Kelly and I've interviewed Kevin and he had that book, What Technology Wants.
And he talks about technology as the seventh kingdom of life, as something that the planet is doing that is as natural. And it's like, those are useful up to a point, but then at some point it is also useful to make distinctions so that you can start to think through relationships. So I started thinking, okay, so if AI is or could be an enabler of human intelligence, by extension does HI, human intelligence serve as an enabler, not a replacement of planetary intelligence because we're botching both of those things right now. And then of course, like it's a whole Trinity, planetary intelligence enables AI and HI and human intelligence enables AI and PI and AI enables.
And then like the thing that I feel like a lot of people aren't talking about is how does artificial intelligence enable planetary intelligence? And so I was like, okay, if we're looking at like all of this stuff is like a kind of a Celtic knot, right, then you get into some interesting questions. Like if states and markets are making their own decisions that are not reducible to the decisions of leadership and are certainly not reducible to the vote where people's individual decisions in an economy, can AI be used to make it possible for those institutional entities to listen better in the way that we're suggesting that big groups like Facebook could actually serve their own success and serve the needs and well-being of users at the same time? And maybe like I've been really enjoying playing with this idea, okay, if anything is possible, what if the way that people are thinking about issues of agency and the restrictions of agency by AI are missing a whole other plot that's going on right now, which is that like you were saying a few minutes ago, maybe this is a way for your own singular person to become more legible to the leader of your organization or to the country in which you participate or you know like the idea that AI is like a not just a telescope but a microscope but not a microscope for us.
It's like a microscope for the these larger systems in which we participate and there's a rhyme between human artificial planetary with like animal vegetable mineral or these other kind of old fundamental triads and there's already in that a sense of ecological relationality and you know mapping all of the ways that these things can serve each other so that we're not like on top of or underneath them but braid it in and mutually reinforcing each other in the way that early on in this conversation we were talking about like the animal, vegetable and fungal. Yeah like everyone's optimized for something everyone's producing waste that's actually the food for the other thing and then all of them are participating in something else that is not purely what we think of as nature or technology or culture we don't have great language for what that is. Yeah hold on let me think about this so is it the interrelationships that you're speaking to? Yeah and just like how I feel like the conversation right now is very focused on either AI being something that's going to replace us or something that we can control and it's also lodged in this sort of 18th century logic.
Right yes I'm with you. To me planetary also relates to the Earth's relationship with the universe and the cosmos and how the earth was formed and how much of an accident that was and then thinking about that accident and what that means for us as a species like I think people look at the world as though humans are controlling it right and I think that's inherently the wrong way of thinking about it. I'm not saying that we're not but we are also a product of the computational kind of realm that we live within and that shapes as just as much as the nature and biology of the earth shapes us as well and in some ways I wonder if the planetary intelligence actually is the grand one and then the machine or subservient to it if in a hierarchy of relationships and again it's all very theoretical there are people that are proving this much more scientifically than I'm speaking to it but there's also the larger consciousness that's created out of the interrelationships that I think we are all naturally part of and are influenced by but because it is invisible and it's so much about energetic the energetics that we forget that is a big part of what shapes our reality on a day-to-day basis. The machine and the human that's an interesting one to explore too because I think in the triad I didn't really talk about the interrelationships because I think I was still exploring it at the time that I was writing and I didn't feel like I had enough of a grasp but then I went to a summit in November of 24 in Italy on the planetary like the concept of the planetary that gave me a word to describe the things that I'm feeling or seeing and that kind of gave depth to what I think I wrote it then that gave it even more depth to talk about it and now in a different place I'm going to start writing more about on the consciousness space and intelligence space but I think to sort of go back to where we were on one hand human intelligence shapes the machine intelligence right because the data is coming off of our existence and our ability to create the data and then of course then the data shape we shape the data shapes us right like and to use like Winston Churchill's old quote about like buildings I think it was like from back in the day not that I ever quote Churchill in general but I think that there's a part of this that almost feels like in nature computation naturally exists and if we think about that tying into machine intelligence I think there's part of computation and biology that is linked in nature and forms intelligence as we see it and I think that computation comes into the machine intelligence space and naturally comes into our existence right our biological existence the hierarchy is almost hard in some ways to define because all of it is interconnected in a way that feels very natural and I know that we see it as synthetic and there is synthetic nature to data of force especially how we're using AI but if we just step back and observe I do think that there's a depth of existence across all of the things that shape our value systems and how we are in the world and unfortunately I think there's parts of science that completely disagree with all of this because they inherently are total materialists they might agree with me 60 percent of what I said but the 40 percent of ties to consciousness will be like no that's a ceiling that's a whatever that's not real but the more I look at computational analysis and time and time to the planetary and I see the way the data moves and you look at even like frequency and energy and that anything that has to do with that human body or object in space and you see how that data moves and then you look at the planetary and you realize it also moves in that same way and all of it is creating a consciousness then you can say okay like it's there's no one without the other there is no one leads to the other they're all just in existence and there might be other components that we haven't even touched on there may be metaphysical that are never gonna be proven and never gonna be seen but we're squarely planted in the material as humans and I think the less we are in material which IV excels at the more we are able to tune into the thing that is existing around us and we don't necessarily have to define it it doesn't need definition it just needs an awareness that it exists and this is not a god it's not a religion it's not a religion it's not a religion it's a billion that for some people maybe it is but for me it's not but I think there's like a realm of sense making that sometimes we attribute to people having extra sensory abilities but we all have this inherent ability we just dumped it down and we shut the parts down and our society struts parts of ourselves down and I think the complexity work actually ties beautifully into this whole theory of I don't even know how to explain it per se but you probably would have better words for that since you're like much more versed in than I am there's probably some level of that that can be extracted to tie it all together that I don't know what that science is doing a good job and and the metaphysical stuff is also not doing a great job and they're focusing on one aspect of it too there's like a coexistence co-intelligence piece that is centered around resonance I think that we're not memeing in an obvious way and I think that language too sometimes it starts people yeah I want to see if this sits in or with what you're saying like that talking about AI-PI-HI and then saying oh it rhymes with mineral vegetable and animal in a pre-modern way there's also like physics biology psychology and one of the things that really does firmly come out of complexity is this okay reductionism is not enough but then now what I'm seeing is that a lot of people are taking kind of an opposite stance from their interpretation of complex systems that there's like emergentism and that we can reclaim the sacred by like bolting a progress narrative onto increasing complexity and open-ended innovation and so that's the logic that puts humans in service of AI in the sense that like we are building a god which is the equal and opposite error of thinking everything can be reduced to the behavior of atomic particles saying all we are as people is reducible to the fact that we're the backstory of the singularity or whatever but what complexity science is actually saying is phil Anderson's more is different a really beautiful simple elegant way of just making this point that it's not more it's not less it's operating at a different scale with different behaviors and so I'm you know when I'm thinking about okay so like how might I start trying to nest all these things together actually Ken Wilbur turned me on years ago to this idea about the inverse relationship between breadth and depth you know when we talk about there being deeper interiority in our ability to reflect on our own minds well we're not separate from rocks AI is in that sense something that's the mineral realm has been threaded through this the whole time and what we're seeing now and calling computation is a very specific species of that physics intelligence that emerged through biology and then through psychology so you can talk about mineral computation vegetable computation animal computation and each one has a depth and that the new thing is not actually AI the new thing is the relationship that has become more conscious and self-referential between the different ways that each of these domains are processing things and they're starting to be able to talk to each other better so like when I say stuff like how does artificial intelligence enable planetary intelligence I'm thinking about the conversation I had about a year ago with Austin Wade Smith who was thinking about how you could take ecological sensor networks and then create autonomous legal and economic entities that represent ecotopes in the human world and that gets into using AI for translation between animals and humans that it's one thing if we understand them and this gets again back to the Facebook and the space issue and all this it's one thing if we can understand them so that we can sell them ads and it's another thing if we're actually listening like Ivy Ross to her employees and that's why I had mentioned this you know I like that the way that you talked about intuition is the unconscious and that's why I've been pursuing this idea that AI is part of our unconscious if we regard ourselves and the rest of the planet as one identity but that's that that's something weird for a lot of people which is it subsumes what we thought of as human within this bigger thing that we actually are and I think that's what you're speaking to when you say that it gets like mystical that it's not enough just to say I am a human being because it doesn't mean anything unto itself and this is why I wanted to get back to the statement that you had made about Darwin in that piece and how Darwin was a legend early analytical mind and so when he was trying to decide whether or not to get married he made a list of pros and cons and so you ask what could Darwin's decision making process to marry or not look like if he approached it with co-intelligence in mind what if Darwin had lived in a culture where he had access to large language models and went on a vision fast for three days and looked for like signs from the forest or whatever like that would have been a very different process totally and at the end of the day he still made the decision with his intuition and it wasn't about the pro and calmness right it just gave him like some formative like maybe some thoughts came through but like it allowed him to maybe connect with his inner knowing without naming it that but no I mean I agree I think that I think that ultimately we are every day oscillating between the things that we want to have in our lives and what we want to experience to what we think we should be experiencing or other people should be or there's always these decisions that we're constantly oscillating between and I think that if more people were able to tune in to the important pieces and the parts then those decisions would be easier but unfortunately we are human beings and we come with faults so we come with traumas and we come with weird shit that's happened to us and it prevents us from connecting in different ways so I think that approaching things from a co-intelligence standpoint allows us to have more touch points I don't want to say data points but just touch points with ourselves we can validate we can like figure it out and some people need that so people don't so for those that need that kind of thing that don't inherently know what they want or need in a moment that might actually help them but I also ultimately still believe that even in the co-intelligence space we're gonna have a lot more data to sense make in some decisions required that some decisions don't but largely will be more intelligent as a result of it and hopefully connect it deeply to our overall intelligence as humans as a result so that's just what I've been thinking about I don't know if I've landed where you wanted us to land oh you landed me in the question of who is actually doing this thinking when you say this is what I've been thinking about which is what I want people to ask so yeah totally and I do a lot of thinking with AI there's many things I've been like out of whole thread with AI like around this topic and the article and where I want to take the conversation on consciousness so it stays in a place where it's accessible to people not like a woo place so yeah I think that's the thing is like we think with we think with each other we think with other things that are happening around us so I think it's actually great to be able to have a thought partner in the technology we have to just come to it in a way that is just really aware of what it's doing right because that's stuck in so many loops with AI right we just keep going so girls and like oh my god where did I even start why do I even care I delete the thread and I start over I can get crazy so it's important to also have a process with it and again like what control do we really have but we have agency and I think that's the other piece is like how what is our relationship with control when we engage in decision making with these types of data points but like information points or something that like is giving us the information so well right on I can say confidently after this conversation that I look forward to thinking with you more yes and participating in the co-intelligence of whatever that secret third thing is I surrender myself to its agency without being woo of course because I mean I just yeah I just think it's interesting like one it was cosmologists sort of gave us the three minutes the university creation of the universe and how like earth was formed in three minutes I was like actually it makes sense all this surrender conversation all this Buddhist stuff makes sort of sense we should all be thinking in this way because we really have no control it's just an illusion of it and we have agency but it's a different than like surrendering to something and knowing that like at the end it's not up to us what actually happens even though there's a part of it that we own in the over the extreme yeah I've been reading this here we go off the deep end I've been reading three arabendos translation of the Upanishads right and that way the arabendo talks about the Upanishads as building on the Vedas that the Vedas much like early Buddhism were very preoccupied with getting into space I am not this I am not that and that the Upanishads come back and establish all of that as non-dual I'm not making the decision and I am making the decision yeah and the eye that is making the decision is not the eye that I'm not and that's where the that's where the surrender comes in is nobody has to surrender because there's nobody there but then yes you do because you need to relax the learned behavior of believing that when you are talking to other people or AI or the rest of the planet or whatever your other is that is somehow again like I love Josh DiCaliel's way he says epistemic specificity like we can make these categories without ontological separability it's still all one thing so we'd better decisions if we like ease into that then who's making the decision again right we're making the decision but I think there's a larger way of surrendering that I think we don't really know how to do and those that do have more agency in fact but there's an interesting like inversely your ship got got on your side yeah serious thanks again for listening humans on the loop is a listener supported project committed to making public goods that help us dream better together if you liked this conversation and want to make some new friends join the discord server to link in the show notes and help this work continue by becoming a patron at humansontheloop.com where you will find years of essay science fiction music art and a very long list of recommended books 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