Culture, Consciousness, and the Second Renaissance with Rufus Pollock

We think of ourselves as individuals. We take it for granted. We take it for granted that I'm an autonomous being, I make decision, but that would be completely alien, a way of thinking, and other points in time to where we are today. And so there's something there's this kind of breakthrough.

And what I'm trying to say is that the really hard issue here is how do we find ways of finding collective value, collective truth, collective beauty again, that allow us therefore to act together at new kinds of scales, and new kinds of, new most kind of capacities that could arise out of that. Welcome to episode 22 of Humans on the Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and this week I speak with Rufus Pollock former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow and Co-Founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, DATOPIAN, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called liminal web, an active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging change making organizations who, along with his wife, Sylvie Barber, and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.

Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture, the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in our brave new world, the intertwingling of religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate, however necessary, as we face our crises of collective action. It's an earnest soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching, extra-long conversation, and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did. If you do, leave a comment and visit humansontheloop.com for nine more years of other episodes. Special thanks to everyone else supporting this work.

Special thanks to everyone supporting this work. On subs, special thanks to everybody supporting this work on sub-stack and Patreon, or with tax-deductible donations at every.org slash humansontheloop. All founding members just got free access to all of the recordings and readings for my recent Weirdosphere course, How to Live in the Future Over 20 Hours of Deep Dives Into the Philosophy of Technology, Evolution of Culture and Consciousness, Metadecipally Study of Time, and the Changing Nature of Selfhood in Our Emerging Age of Planetization. In other words, if you like this episode, you'll love that course.

It's something of a preview and something of an expansion on my upcoming book at Integral Imprint with Jeremy Johnson, How to Live in the Future is an all-in exploration that changed, it's something of a preview and something of an expansion on my upcoming, it's something of a preview and something of an expansion on my upcoming book at Jeremy Johnson's Publisher Integral Imprint, and an all-in exploration that challenged everyone involved in a good way. And it's yours too now, if you missed it. And since you're here for this kind of thing, let me just hang out a teaser for that book, my new essay at A on Magazine, Homocrestatius, by far the most work I've ever put into a commissioned essay. In it, I explore civilization's troubled relationship with language technology in the biosphere, laced with riffs on sci-fi, memes, military history, and the evolution of crabs.

The editorial board shorted out when I turned it in and later told me they think it's one of the best pieces they've ever published. Journey on over to the show notes for the link. And with that, thank you for listening and enjoy this extra long immersion with a singular and wonderful Rufus Pollock. Thank you.

So yeah, I was just looking last night over the document that you keep such a structured thing, I don't know many people that take notes themselves in random discovery meetings, and then keep that document and update it with every meeting and invite the person as the collaborator, and then go back and you're actually doing a very active curation of the history of our conversations dating back to October when we first came together and talked about this. And so there was, it's interesting to go back and look at. Yes. Oh, I was reading Robert Poynton's book back then.

I was talking about humans on the loop as an inquiry into the decoupling slash reconciliation of instrumental and intrinsic functions and values. And this, like I was going through a dark night of the soul about how I had led people astray in my 20s by insisting that you should have a job you love. And then now it's like back to that. Like I just gave a lecture to my friend's art class online where I spent a lot of time talking about AI and generally algorithmic concentration and displacement of talent.

And I said to them, basically, you better be doing this because you love it. But that's making art for money and thinking of it as yours and trying to develop your style that you can then fence and market in some sort of competitive environment is actually making you more subject to displacement. And so there's that sort of bioacomalafe, futitivity thing going on. No, the point of the art is never to settle to continue discovering.

Anyway, hey, you're on the loop. How are you doing, man? Well, great to see you, Michael. It's good to be here.

Yeah, and I like the segue. Yeah, I don't know how much of that rambling will keep in there, but it is worth noting that there's this question that you and I both care about, which is the question of value and the question of, what is what makes life good and how do we commit to goodness, whatever we may think that is. I liked your bit on religion, which we'll get to later, that you wrote with Sylvie about real community, deep intention, commitment, saving all of the good parts of religion from the trash without dogma or oppressive scleritization. So yeah, let's tell your story.

I would like for you to go back really far into the misty recesses of your life and try to address yourself for us and explain why it is that you care about the things that you have committed yourself to and your ideas of good and take as long as you like. Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Rufus, Richard Spolek.

And I'm one of the co-founders of Life Itself, along with Sylvie Barbier, performance artist, Liam Cavanaugh and others. And Life Itself is a collective that is dedicated to a radically wiser world and particularly ceding a second renaissance. And we saw a joke that we're a good Buddhist, a collective, although we're not all Buddhist, and we're not all Cabbitsnix, so we're those who are Cabbitsnix. So the thing is, we're really starting 2015, Life Itself.

And I'm going to go back and write my story to that point. But we're now nearly a decade old. So personally, I grew up on a farm in England. And I had, my mother was actually a farmer.

My father was a lawyer. From very early on, I had a lot of questions as a kid. And I also, I think, had a very strong sense. I have justice, I'm fairness and fairness.

I don't know if other people were going to school, but going to school was not always a great experience. It wasn't terrible, but it was just like, it was never that interesting, it was not a lot of fun. And the other thing for me was just, some kids were lovely, but they were also kids who just picked on others, put it there, pushed them around, made fun of them. Not even me necessarily, sometimes, but mainly other kids.

But I was like, I don't know if they came for my parents or where I was, but I can even remember being like seven, eight, nine, and his visceral sense, like how horrible this was. Really, I remember as a kid with glasses very clearly. And he just, at some point, people pulling his glasses and throwing them on the ground. And just, why do we do that?

And what could we do that? I do remember as well, I was a kid who bit me and bit another kid. And my parents said to me, listen, you've got to understand, it's parents are going through a divorce. When I was like six or seven, I had no idea what that meant.

All I know was like, there was something bad or difficult happening for him. And I should be understanding. And I think, but this was a part, from that point, very early, I had this sense of like, how would we have a feral world? Even once I was a teenager, what would that mean?

So I was really an inquiry about that. And there were two parts of that. I think it's one was that I was really wondering, like why do we obey the school teachers at school? In fact, I decided, I tried to do experiments where I didn't obey the school teachers.

And that went interestingly. And I also, I still go into some classes. I started not going to class in some things. And the other thing was I got quite interested at one point.

I was reading books in the school library. I found this textbook on psychopharmacology. And I said, read about pharmacology, and you read about drugs and how they operate on the central nervous system. This is the mid 90s.

So this is still like, basically neurotransmitter time. This is before FMRI, like before the next wave. And I think what interested in psychodemics. I was like, wow, these drugs, they talk about unaddictive, another thing like alcohol or benzodiopodines.

Wow, why? And they sound really interesting. I should get a hold of some. So that was a journey, which was this expiration of consciousness then because who was I?

Who am I? Is there an eye? And there's the connection also like deep social change. How would we have a world where no one was bullied at school?

Where we just had an amazing, loving time? Where how would we have a world where we didn't see, I was seeing starvation sometimes on television or a world where we didn't have the vast differences in money and wealth, which I was already aware of. And I noticed something I definitely got from my parents, which was we worked on a farm and my parents were people who worked with us on the farm. And they were like family.

And I remember very vividly, my mother was saying to me, so it's quite yellow, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they're a king or their homeless. They're equally worthy of respect. There's no difference in human quality.

And that was quite different. I went to a school that was, I got it. I was the day part, I went to a school that was like a private school in England, where many of the people, it cost like, not if I was at the day part, but I was like, boarding part, it was like $30,000 a year ago. And so there were people with a lot of wealth and privilege, I was well, I came from a privilege background, but it was just, it was very split for my parents.

You never thought you were better than someone because of money or something like that. That we were all equally religious, all equally the eyes of God. And so that was really strong influence on me. And the other part was I was really lost.

The other part of my story was that I feel I really got viscerally the experience of the end of modernity and nihilism. So I don't know if people have read or at Eastern Ellis or not, but the depictions that Ellis was having, particularly like a less than zero, were like quite close to experiences I was seeing at school. People, I remember a friend of mine once just in his garden, like just picking a rose, just ripping it apart. I was like, why are you destroying this thing of beauty?

And he was like, look at the cat, why not? Why is it better to have a whole rose than not to have a whole rose? And I had no answer. And I really was confronted at this point by a very short sentence, like rationally, I was like, I don't believe in God, I don't have any spiritual practice.

I was just atoms bumping into other atoms. There's no meaning, there's no purpose. And we're all alone. And that was very strong for me.

And I'm kind of out of this, as I went towards university, I really got interested in, but I really got, I had this aspect about the consumerism of enlightenment from psychedelics, that there was this very powerful experience, but I couldn't really take it with me. I didn't have anyone else also to talk to. I couldn't talk to my parents about it really. And by most of my friends were not into, they found it too much, or they didn't like it.

It was an unpleasant experience. So I felt quite lost and I started meditating other things. But the journey I was on was, I was very lost. I didn't know really what passed it on.

And I ended up really just working on, I guess, what I would call systems change around, ownership of the information, like who, working on proper infrastructure, the definition of open data, and a lot of work in open data and open knowledge, and trying to make it change who owns the information age, more and I would say less successfully, mostly less successfully. And then that was like, what led me was this convergence. It's incredible convergence in 2015, where I met a Soviet, who's actually my partner, and we founded life itself around, initially around this vision about wisdom, what was it actually to be, what is it concretely? Particularly those who are kind of asked me, like, wow, we are really well off in the concept of human history, and even in the world, living in England or France or US, wow, we are immensely privileged, we don't want for food or shelter.

And you have another happy. And also we can see really major crises about the P.R. society, to the climate crisis, even then I was technology regulation and issues I was very aware of. And I'd been an economist, I was an academic economist in the University of Cambridge for several years, working on information, but also basically public goods problems, commons.

And I was very aware of collective action issues. So this was, I was like, okay, we want to get radically wiser, personally and collectively. And that was like life itself's beginning, and this focus ultimately or now like a second running source and the meta crisis. All right, just for the sake of my enjoyment, there are two books that I want to reference throughout this conversation.

In addition to your writing one, as I mentioned is William Irwin-Thompson's imaginary landscape. The other is Federico Campanias prophetic culture, which I'm skimming through now a second time and prep for this. And like both of them are looking at this thing, you talk about the dark night of the soul of nihilism. And I love this image, this encounter that you had with another kid, this why is it better to have a whole rose?

So there's a couple pieces here. And just as a way of delineating, how I'm going to handle my end of this, there's like an alchemical thing here of pulling apart and putting back together that I want to do with you as a way of directing attention to how we are all collectively doing that right now. And where you're thinking and Sylvie's thinking and everyone else in that community comes together. Okay, first from prophetic culture, Campanias talking about middle ages.

He says, these traumatic moments of passage between worlds and times occur as often in the life of an individual as in that of a collective. When the closure of a world refers to the collapse of an entire civilization, historiography tends to define the following period as a middle age, a scenario where life proceeds in the absence of a voice capable of narrating a stable world. A long winter when the material of history is in part congealed and in part slowly rots away. This is of course how these periods are seen and judged from the perspective of a more stable world, but such partiality is revealing of the difference between worlds with unequal narrative rootedness.

You know, that our histories are present as projections of a different mode of worlding. And so, you know, going back to, I just saw to date this conversation, I just saw John Stewart play with this in his riff on Trump and the tariffs where he said, we're going from a simple caterpillar to a dead caterpillar. But what he knows that this analogy has mainstreamed like the idea that the caterpillar is dissolved in metamorphosis and reconstituted through the development of its imaginal cells into a butterfly. And of course, that's not at all obvious to the caterpillar and then the caterpillar in the butterfly represent these two historical regimes.

And we're in that gross like soupy moment. Yes. And then of course, then there's this other question about the rose. It's like, well, it depends.

Like when a rose falls apart, when it scatters its pollen, there are all of these ways in which not a whole rose is actually part of a larger unity. And so then this is where I want to bring in Bill Thompson, whose imaginary landscape is in some part about the intellectual history of the Gaia hypothesis and autopoiesis and chaos theory and the emergence of a planetary mythos. And so he says, in a footnote, 25 years after trying to construct a philosophy of worldview, I find myself coming around again to considering the nature of the human mentality and its changes through time. Now, of course, I would no longer believe in one single theory that could transform the complexity of a planetary ecology into a single linear projection.

Now a theory would be more of interest as one narrative among many, one novel among a library of others for it is the act of constructing an imaginary landscape of history that is exciting. Just as once before, it was the intellectual thrill of constructing a theory that was exciting. If the theory was wrong, then what does it mean? All theories of history are wrong, but as exercises in intellectual mythology, they become cultural performances.

Small wonder that political cultures and academic subcultures have grown up around them and taken their stories to become history. So it's like where I think you and I are dancing around in the same field is in the question of how do you engage in an appropriate allocation of mourning because we are so deeply inside of this thing that is taking in some ways a very long time to unfold, at Thompson wrote this book in the 80s. And the fact that like some amount of grief, like you say in the second run is on white paper, talking about the darkness before the dawn and that we don't mean to trivialize the threats that humanity currently faces. It's vital to acknowledge the darkness and fear that arise in response to societal decline, but not to just give that all of its narrative weight, that it's not just like another story is coming.

It's like many stories are coming. And how are they related ecologically and how do we support that? And maybe there's a reason sometimes to pick apart the rose. Like Josh, the Kali, he's like, well, if all criticism is a hammer, will you still need a hammer to build a house?

So anyway, that's a rant, but that's where I'd like to start with you. Yeah, so one was you could just trace this thread for me of how did I reconstruct truth and value? So in the kind of acid of reason and particular productionist reason, the good and the beautiful dissolve away and we're left just with a sort of kind of truth. And so part of my personal journey about also say what we're trying to do, if all I was saying, how do you, and it's there and integral and other things, very much how do we reconstruct those days in a skillful way without just going back and you have value section, how do we perceive the good?

Now one thing I was going to say at the beginning, I think crucial is to say, there's amounts it with no top. We might know up, but we don't mean we have the top. It doesn't mean we have the answer, but we have better or worse answers. And so that was a huge kind of recovery.

There was a personal aspect for me where I always had this kind of faith somehow that I could feel that was good. You knew that when you saw a kid bully, it was that good and that when they were held and cared for, that was better somehow. That was the first, it's not good in some way. But the more important question was how to do it with others because you can have your own perception, but otherwise we'd say, oh, everyone's got their own subjective perception.

So one is just like this journey and I think wisdom is what I would tell them wisdom is deeply related to that. It's a capacity to perceive and act on skillfully the good. And the beautiful. So this was one aspect of it, which is like, how do we know that?

And then how do we form, how does that spread in a group? So I think one thing there, this is this aspect that's a little bit subtle, which is there are definitely multiple, like there's not like this one truth right now. And we all know, there's multiple futures that could emerge. There's multiple futures that may emerge and there are so many parts to those futures.

And there's a reason just pragmatically why, for example, you end up having cultural homogeneity occurring within societies or language and modernity. There are less and less languages. There are many tragic things about that. And there's a reason, which is as more people interact, you converge on a fewer number of languages to do that.

And similarly, why, for example, is reasonable to talk about modernity and that we live largely in the cultural paradigm of modernity with all of the varieties of that, because modern belief systems, despite huge variation, but there's kind of core and the pinnings are very pervasive. They're in communist systems, they're in capitalist systems, they're in other systems. They're really all over the place there, if you like. And so I think this is also to ask about the future is there's one option where we might break up as a world economically and socially into smaller parts and then have separate areas that people can evolve separately.

But if there is a lot of interconnection in coordination, there's reasons why you end up having some degree of alignment or like core views and values, because otherwise it's pretty difficult to interact. And this is, we could go off from this point, but the thing I think I really want to say is that, how did we recover as lived experience? But in a way that was still amenable to reason and to exchange, not just like me dominating you and saying, this is what's good, this is what's true, and beautiful, you do that, how do we recover coherence, but that is deep-elephant? Because to finish, one of the things that's happening in modernity is there are still some universal agreements, but they're very thin.

The way I think of it sometimes is that a metaphor, if we were on Mars and there's no atmosphere, so we built our membrane over our city for our atmosphere. Now, if that membrane is very thin, the amount of air density might be very low and we don't have very much energy, we'll all be like, I feel very lethargy. And if the membrane is very thick and dense, then there's a lot of, like, it density may actually be higher, we have a lot of energy. And this is true of like cultural membranes.

If we have very thin membranes, what we agree on is everyone's right to do whatever they want. And what we agree on is some basic liberal agreement about negative liberty and maybe a bit of secularism, no one's going to impose or really join anyone else. It's a very thin membrane to get much stuff done. I mean, it's good.

It is a lot to admire about it. And one of the thorny issues to confront is how you have stronger coherence, but without dominating people, without by oppressing people. But I think this is one of the things that is so fascinating at the moment that we're trying to have breakthroughs, like more broadly, I don't mean like you are, but it's generally is how can we move to these new levels where there's still autonomy, but there's a collective again in a different kind. And no one has the answer to that question right now.

But I think it's something, it's a level of breakthrough, as we imagine what the development of like individuation as you and others talk about it was. The degree of difference is hard for us to imagine. We think of ourselves as individuals. We take it for granted.

We take it for granted that Ivan Autonomous Being and I make decision, but that would be completely alienate, a way of thinking at other points in time to where we are today. And so there's something there's this kind of breakthrough. What I'm trying to say is that the really hard issue here is how do we find ways of finding collective value, collective truth, collective beauty again, that allow us therefore to act together at new kinds of scales, and new kinds of new modes, kind of capacities that could arise out of that. Okay, so there's two things there.

And we're gonna have to take them in some order. We'll loop back to whichever one seems worth punting. One thing is worth an add just one, we call it life itself the way it's like we're sharing this term, second-run ASOS as a way of describing the desire for this paramatic shift at the personal and collective level. But acknowledging this breakdown, what I wanted to add is because you said this very, we are in a moment of mourning.

One of the projects we did actually earlier on in life is called Requiem for Modernity. Like we have this grave zone image, like writing poems, if you don't really have a funeral and if you don't really send off the past, you're always haunted by it. Particularly so the, my clarity is beautiful. Like we're haunted by the ghost of the past if we don't set them to rest.

And a lot of the time what we can see in us be myself, and I see someone's in others when we try to dream of futures, we're either like angry teenager, like I'm doing nothing like you dad, I'm gonna do everything differently. You trash the planet, we're gonna love all of the environment, whatever it is, all of it, not even realize what's being our parents to get in some way. We're just gonna ampe it up on the technology. We're just gonna transcend into AI.

We're gonna go fall on into the techno-modernist vision. And so without us healing our ancestors and without acknowledging both what was difficult in our parents and what was great in them and like completing that, it's very difficult to create anything newly in a clean way. And so that's one thing, that Requiem you were talking about, we're in a renaissance tunnel that we use, and it's kind of vision and the project that is like, there is a death and there is a rebirth. In everything, there's, for the hammer birth there is always some kind of death.

And that's, but it's the question of how do we renew? What is the rebirth here? The rebirth, the rebirth, the rebirth. And in particular, the other part I like about it, I wanna emphasize that we're both going forward, but also recovering things that maybe have been neglected or lost.

So just in the first Renaissance, in the West, there was this recovery of kind of the classical traditions, Plato, Aristotle, all of these things, wisdom traditions of the kind. So in this one, maybe in a global level, at least in the West there's a recovery of wisdom traditions that have lost. Maybe there's a kind of cross pollination that's never happened with. Yeah, so to speak to the arrows and the anatose piece of this, right?

And you know, Bill's framework for this, he says we're moving out of what he identified as a fourth cultural mode, this industrialization. And with each of these, the movement from culture, made of bands, society, made of tribes, civilizations, made of city empires, industrialization, made of nations, and the one we're moving into, which he believes is planetization made of the biosphere. Each of them has a principle concern. And each of them, he says, we slay with technology and save the victim with art.

So this process that you're talking about starts with humans becoming apex predators and early religions and artwork being focused on the animal. He references McLuhan as the sloughed off environment becomes a work of art in the new and invisible environment. This becomes something that we are operating on and that we no longer assume as the invisible subject, but it's not the water we're swimming in anymore. It's something that we are sacralizing.

And so he says in industrialization, the victim was religion. The complex was art and science, the technology, print and mechanization. In planetization, the victim is the mind. The complex was music and the technology was electronics.

And so I've been thinking a lot about this in terms of what Doug Rushkoff calls narrative collapse and the mental health crisis, but also this profusion of psycho-technologies that have been made more accessible than ever. I call them what you will, but that's a common term. Esoteric practices, as well as the other day, I just saw, of course, people are launching ventures where they're using AI to create precision psychedelic therapies and the intersection of disciplines afforded by electronic communication brought the monks and the neuroscientists together and afforded the discipline of neurotheology. I had Alex Shakara on the show years ago and he had written this gorgeous book called Luminarium, which was about all of this.

It was about the sort of bright dark coincidence of militarized virtual realities and transcranial magnetic stimulation induced cetori. But the human mind is, I think as a three line through all of this, is the victim of digital planetary culture, but it also becomes this domain, which is the domain in which this renaissance is happening. It's the domain into which we have new insight and have all of these fabulous new artistic instruments. I think most people, of course, because we've been living through the last century has been deeply paranoid and people look at MK-Ultra.

They look at these brainwashing, but there's this question again to go all the way back to the refiguration of our relationship to the animal at the very beginning of what it means to be more broadly speaking a modern human. And it's before we could slay animals and then paint them on cave walls and wear their skins and develop that whole thing. There was also, we had no capacity to develop the kind of relationships with them that we now have some of us anyway, with our pets. Like our own understanding of animal intelligence just gets deeper and deeper.

Our own appreciation of their inner life ways becomes more and more profound at the same time that our ability to investigate and quantify and specify all of that. And so there's this thing about the risk of getting lost in the abstractions and like Westworld. If the human being is an art object, then that means things that people aren't gonna like. It means to the modern industrial mentality, something really horrific or disgusting.

Like the Borg, everyone's worried about becoming the Borg. But then you've got books like Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Light of Other Days, where we figure out how to send information through quantum tunnels. And so the kids that grow up in that world are all, the next Buddha will be a Sangha.

They're this sort of brain linked, like Maitreya, planetary Christ. And they all know that everyone can see everyone else all the time and that the future can see them through the quantum tunnels. And so the kids just stop wearing clothes because they're no longer ashamed of their nakedness. Like this horrific state of total surveillance is also the medium through which this other thing emerges.

And so just to go back to like standards, and I guess where I wanna take this is you're right about the thin membrane of agreement. But like I think about wood, like living wood on a tree is very thin. The atmosphere on our planet is very thin. The neocortex, like these things that were like where the conscious activity is, where the growing edge is, stands on what is actually an enormous consensus.

And we don't see it because we're already living on top of this mound of abstractions. And so part of that work seems to be in recognizing, one, like how much we have in common that we're not consciously attending to. The core of the tree through which all of the water actually flows. And two, to understand that like the formation of standards, like this process of canalization and homogeneity can be, and often is the platform for incredible diversity.

People like talking about the Cambrian explosion now, it's like hip. And it's like there was more disparity between body plants, 540 million years ago, but there were fewer kinds of organisms. Somehow the few phyla that made it out of that period became the basis for all of this other stuff. So anyway, I'm just playing around with that.

And I'll leave it there. Leave it there for me. There are a few things that I will come back to. I think it's always to say, wow, where we are, it's pretty serious.

I think the simplest way to look, you know, we're quite a serious situation. Things are not going great. We look at the existential risk, we look at ecological crisis. And that doesn't seem to be a widespread thing, or it's too terrifying that it gets repressed.

And it takes something for us to look at that. And then what I think the other part of this, which you're also looking to, I want to come back to it says, there are ways that we transport. And even sometimes they're related in the dark, what we call the dark Renaissance version. The second race is called, oh, wow, this is breakdown, this is rebirth.

The dark basis is a dark age, which is what happened in the last Renaissance event, because the 14th century let alone break down off the Roman Empire, but in the 14th century half European population dies out of the play, and famine. And that can be a catalyst just as individually, when we have sadly, often we grow the most as people, when we have some significant challenge. Maybe it's a bereavement, maybe it's losing our job, maybe it's a partner going out of our life. These are often catalysts to our growth.

They can also be a breakdown, but they can also be a catalyst for growth. And there are many opportunities at the moment. I think the two that we refer to for the kind of move to planetary civilization is one is just the fact we're having this call. The technology that allows us to interact at a planetary scale, the ability to, I think even more deeply things are working from home.

Like radical ways to reorganize production and our social organization. Basically, several hundred years, we've been urbanized, we have to move together to work together. And that puts a bunch of constraints and constraints on it, which are organized very differently. And the other, which is perhaps even deeper, is this convergence of ancient wisdom traditions and modern science and technology, which enables at least new levels of insight, maybe they're making available of that insight to many more people.

But that said, the basic concern that sits in the background is the massive wisdom gap, the massive gap between the powers that we've unleashed through modality in its success, in technological and scientific success, that we can kill all of ourselves on the planet, that we can poison the whole ocean, that we can create maybe one day nanobots that will accidentally wipe us all out, that we can build AIs, and the speed of that compared to our cognitive and social capacities, and I don't want to say cognitive, our ontological capacities, our awareness, our lack of reactivity, not just our cognitive complexity, all of the dimension, our ability to hold up personally and collectively is massively out of balance with that. And the social supremacist, which Marx used, this comes in Gertrude. It is really, I think, the fairy tale of today, that we have lose powers beyond our control. And like the first thing would be to do would be to slow down.

The first thing would be like, whoa, we don't really need to go faster, which is a collective action problem we can come to. And the other point is the electronic point also says, we've had a lot of the insights in Buddhism in other traditions for a long time about having a community and about how to develop our, to a way clean the mirror of insight and to see what a wise action is what a traditional action. And we don't do it. So I say, oh man, I've now got this headset, I can put on and do my neurofeedback.

And it's all gonna be like, oh, we'll all just wake up and I'm like, whoa, we could have done that before. And there's many ways you can abuse that. I don't know if people are, I mean, you're calling it, I have a lot of time for Jamie, we are. I never quite know, I've read stealing fire and I don't quite know what way he means the book because the first story is about alchibaly is abusing the mysteries, taking the mysteries and abusing them in an infantile way.

And the book then starts with the Navy seals. Basically you're using mindfulness or group dynamics to better hunt down militants. Now maybe you'll support the Navy seals, but it's a kind of bizarre use of psychotechnologies. And so I really think the first thing is the slowing down.

Now, this comes to a collective action problem. I will talk to that. But I just wanna say that we really in a moment where, when you really simmer, we are mad at it. We are acting in an insane way.

I would not hand my five-year-old a klashnikov and then say, play with your four months old sister and think he would go, and yeah, it's gonna just hand out the klashnikovs. So let's throw in a few bazookas for five, give them to ourselves as kind of toddlers and they run around and see who's lost a limit yet. And I think the thing that I also wanna break through, and this is why I'm on this podcast, is that we can do it. We live in an era, I like to choke, made by the American Enterprise Institute, but we didn't realize.

The beta skill the devil ever had was to persuade you, who didn't exist. We live in an era of immense cynicism and despair about our capacities to act together. Well, it's not easy. And we had, and some of that's what I said, so I wanna end with that one.

I thought like civic tech and open data and open knowledge. And the fascinating thing was I lived in places where people were doing tech for good. In a way, the tech industry, the tech area, is the kind of like leading edge. It is the sociologically dominant, monetarily ideologically of our era.

When I used to be a politician, I was like, well, how would be like a startup or more entrepreneurial? And the point that I had was living around, so I kept thinking, even learning what inter-politics, but the solution was always on a blockchain or a voting app. It was never joining a political party. And I used to say, but don't you realize, you're living in an ideology of the right.

The only thing we can do is to individual action and the market. And the whole thing that doesn't solve is collective action problems, externalities, public goods. And the funniest thing for me was I was an economist, I was an economist, I was an economist, the older professors were becoming like young people that said, they will be Marxists, they will be all joining parties, none of them without now. And so I just wanted to say is that we live and that these things can change.

This is one of the biggest ideologies we live in without seeing, which is that we cannot act together, that we are corrupt in a way. It's a very old question. We are self-interested, rational being, blah, blah, blah. And of course, there's truth to that.

There's greed and ignorance and delusion and all these things in us. And we can transcend those things. And we have frequently in our lives, just even with our own children, let alone what we do for others. Yeah, so for fellow Ken Wilbur nerds or ex nerds, I think you and I are playing a game in our conversations where the roles might flip if we were in conversations with other people, but we've settled into something where you're someone who worked in software and economics, but you stand in what Ken called the left quadrants of phenomenology and culture in the inner world.

And I'm somebody who, for whatever reason, is a poet and an artist, intends to talk in and emphasize the systems we're embedded in, the right hand of that model. And so just becoming a construct aware of this dynamic and knowing that you and I can, musical chairs and suddenly probably take each other's positions and that would be really fun. Okay, so there's a couple things here. First of all, I want to make explicit the piece that you wrote on four types of problem, because you're speaking directly to this.

Problems of science and technology, problems of preference or self-knowledge, problems of will or self-control and problems of collective action. And the point that you make, as you say, I would argue that progress on the last three really comes from the transformation of being and that we do have answers here, they are an easy to follow. They are based on the ontology and practices found in traditions like Buddhism, which you said, and they require will and are not simply replicable because just because I get enlightened doesn't mean you do, but if I invent a better way to grow corn, you can copy it easily. You finish that thought with, unfortunately for a science tech solution seem to help little with the other three items and as we get richer, the value of science tech solutions are less and less important.

So just because I'm feeling mischievous, the weird thing is that I know so many people, and on the one hand, I'm a child of divorce. I see the thesis and I see the antithesis and I don't know where I really stand on this, but I think it's interesting that, we wouldn't have Buddhism without books and that there's swift growth in this domain of genonotech, this idea that as we get more fluent in this stuff, that we may actually be able to pass over the air updates. I used to talk about it in 2013 as being able to tweet each other orgasms and how annoying that would actually be. But again, like Bill Thompson talks about how planetization is defined by this sort of gradient, as he puts it, between noise and rapture, mediated by participation, and that this is a society in which representation of identity is less important because identity becomes more fluid in the chaotic attractor basin of a planetary culture.

And so we're always working this gradient between rapture and noise. And to your point about the dark Renaissance, he says something that I found really pertinent about the way that again, the adult developmental psychology upon which Ken's work is standing, work like Bob Keegan and Suzanne Cook-Greiter at Harvard talks about the maturation of adult egos in the fifth structure of consciousness where you're no longer purely deriving values through an analytical examination of different cultures and authoring them. But you're recognizing that whoever is doing the authoring is defined relationally in process with that which you, the modern self, believe yourself not to be. Thompson says, what does the world look like when one looks out through the inactive embodiment of this new culture of nature?

First of all, karma becomes seen as the generation of unconscious policies in which we do not take responsibility for our own affirmations through negation. We become what we hate and we generate shadow economies such as the drug economy in the United States that are caricatures of the conscious economy. We cannot naively work to eliminate a general Noriega of Panama if we cannot see how a Latin American strongman is a cultural hero who is taking revenge for the development quote unquote of the third world by the banks of the United States for our exports to them or as polluting as their exports to us. But their exports are a much more honest and less hypocritical expression of the damage to cultures and ecologies.

This is going on right now in my country, right? Like that there's this shadow dynamic between the United States and other countries. And it's funny because Paul Levy said something very similar back when George W. Bush was elected about how Bush's rise to power was symptomatic of a process of collective shadow projection and that the hate of the other or the fear of the other was as responsible for his ascension as the people who genuinely believed in his virtue.

That this regime comes out of this clash between selves that in Levy sense, like I have no doubt that George W. Bush actually believes himself to be a good man and therefore projects evil out into the Osama bin Laden's et cetera. But that huge constituency of the United States is doing the same with him and that there's this failure to recognize the interdependent co-arising of things. And I bring this up because I think that all of that just goes back to the four types of problem, right?

And how these four types are related. And the idea that, like you said a moment ago, that collective action problems are contingent on self-knowledge and on preference and self-knowledge is to some extent contingent on will. And like I just look at those four problems and I don't see them as separate. I see them as profoundly interwoven where it's like I wouldn't have access to a lot of the insight that I do.

I have incentives for and against pursuing a transformation of being thanks to science and technology. None of these things are unalloyed good evils. And again, it's like the stuff is all swirling around. Yeah, they work together.

Let's talk a little bit. So one is the motivation for myself is, let's say we want credible. We want to first look at the situation we're in. Personally, like how could I be realy, well, and joyful and flourish?

If I had a Lamborghini and I had this, would I be no? But also we look more significantly at the challenges confronting situation where I'll seem to be coming to where in terms of, as I said, the climate crisis, the way technology advances, the existential risk may be and so on. And then we'll say, what's part of credible hope? And even before I saw those crises, when I was at Teenage, I'd be like, I can't really believe in social more.

I want to believe in something more than just, let's, what I call like iPhone capitalism. Like next year, you'll get a little bit bigger screen. Is that really the best that we're just gonna, I've got unlimited wants and limited resources or just get a little bit better year by year? No, whether it's, you look at Buddhism, you're like, my God, but it's telling me I can be full of liberation.

Like I can be profoundly free and content and joyful and contributing to the world. Or just, you want to look at more political stories. Like, hey, people could form different societies. No, it's something is off where someone has $100 billion and some people don't have enough to eat.

It's can't be a healthy world. I'm not a big fan of actually going in your scene and saying that, but just say, so one of the things I'm trying to do is say, okay, what I was asked myself is what is a credible path to let's say addressing wicked problems and a meta crisis. And I wasn't convinced by communism and socialism. And this is where this typology of solutions coming that's useful and relates to the four types of problems.

And we want to walk through it, which is say, okay, let's pick a concrete one, right? I mean abstract, okay, the climate crisis. So one way to say we're going to invent something. We're going to have a, we'll rebuild Gates's book, we're just going to have batteries and solar and breakthrough and fusion and technology will cut it.

Markets will produce technology and it will be okay. Then there's this is if we're into our world but it's top right individual outer roughly. Although technology always merges between the things. And then we might have system stuff like, well, what we need is we need better international governance systems or we need carbon pricing, which is an international governance system.

Or we need as XR wanted in England, an extension of our demand was we want citizens and assemblies. We will have a new kind of governance. And then there's what I would say is there's the left to what I call ontological solutions. So the first one I said is technological solutionism.

Then we had structural or system solutionism. And then I would call ontological solutionism, which is a mix of the inner personal, like contemplative work. And then there's more, I would say the cultural dimension, which is actually more relevant. I'm not just going to sit on our cushions.

And that was, no, it's like changing views and values. And so the full type of problem refers to this, which is that we are in a world at the end of eternity that is almost always going to science and like techno solutions. We will fix this from technology. And it turns out that collective actual problems aren't that amenable to that.

Unless they can get you out of it and they can get the collective actual problems to go away. Like we will evaluate science officials. And by the way, there's even a memory there, which is the way that we're funding the development of most innovation in solar, at the kind of base level, is through our massive success of the effective action problem, which is the public funding of science. Most basic research underpins, the transistors, silicon, solar, panel, the basic science, the core science was government funded to a significant extent.

Even Tesla would not exist without massive government handouts and some of these, right? Which are public goods in action. But just to say, when we look at collective action, problem, that how amenable is it to science technology? Now, I also come back to seeking support in various ways.

And again, just with the thing we're cooking out, we're all in our kitchen, at our shed, flat. There's five of us living together, Michael, me, three others. And no one's doing the washing up. The washing up, the classic thing, someone's leaving in the sink.

Now, we can't use technology. I can start installing cameras. I can use the cameras to monitor who's doing the washing up and so on. But in terms of actually forming agreements, that's gonna require governance and it's gonna require the culture.

And the real thesis that I'm saying after, that we came to say, of course we need technology. Of course, we'll need governance. But the ability to enact those in the way that we need fundamentally depends on the being, on the culture. The way in the past, if we look at human history, that we had breakthroughs to new scales of ability to address collective actions, is almost always cultural or ontologically led, like in a led.

Now that then manifests in technology and systems and laws and so on. But it's come from that side. And the point I would call this, we call this like the privacy of being. So this analogy with Neil Gilchrist, who's like the privacy of the right hemisphere.

So we have two hemispheres. Crudely one is analytical, the left, the language, and one is the gestalt, the whole. Now we need both hemispheres. We need technology.

We need systems change. We need inner change. But the question is, which has primacy at the present, given our situation? And what actually allows us to scale in the solution to collective action?

So that's the kind of core thesis. So I need to give some concrete examples from history about this. And I also want to make an important point, which is of course, once we create technologies, they do influence our being. This is what's properly done.

And this is hard to do on a podcast. The cause-entry part is a complex ecosystem where culture causes institutions that structure technology and technology structures being in. So for example, right now we have online media platforms that maybe amplify cultural polarization and echo chambers. We have their profit oriented, which is a structure of capitalism and so on.

And those things are shaping the minds of our young people. We now know that social media, separate even from cultural polarization, is having impact on the minds of those brought up on it, right? In terms of attention, in terms of maybe the way they see the world. So there is of course a loop.

It's not a single linear like culture causes the result. However, in this scaling and collective action, that has been crucial. And the obvious example is religions. So the classic one is Christianity, where there's this whole new level of who is part of my group.

It doesn't matter that you were born a Jew or not born a Jew or you had to come. No, very simple way you can become a Christian and then you are my brother or sister. And I bet just an example of that in real life as a collective action problem. E.O.

Wilson in his book Darwin's Cathedral has his beautiful example. Now it's speculative because we don't have data. But he's actually saying, he records that the attitude where Christians based in treating each other during plagues was a major region that Christians had a higher birth rate than Romans. There were other reasons, they were pro-natalist.

But he actually has this example that your willingness to die if your brother or sister is a lot of evidence that if you're cared for during a plague when you have him serious fever, makes a major difference to your outcome. And the payoff, if I'm willing to care for you and you for me, is higher than the risk to me of infection. So this thing that Christians would go and look off with each other during plagues, like really be willing to die for each other, had a major impact and solving one collective action. So Christianity is on, we have other examples.

But I think the other, the kind of weirdest one, which is to go to Henrich, is that maybe the weird package of cultural innovations in the Catholic Church in about 500 AD about marriages leads to much greater trust of strangers and leads to the nation state. So you've got to remember just to end here, the nation state which we now don't like so much of me. But it is a breakthrough compared to empire. In empire, I get taxes from a bi oppression.

I basically can only extract taxes and an army by threatening to kill you or do something to you. And therefore there's a big limit on what tax I can raise. Basically the public good we can support. Now I can get bigger than empire in a certain way.

I can have a big army and control a big area. But nation states work sturnery because people close to voluntarily contributed at a different level because I thought I'm part of this. And so people were willing to vote taxes and participate armies. Famously, the Napoleon's levy en masse, the threatened before Napoleon, when the French are threatened by invasion by all the other places that threatened by the French.

They can raid an army and scale almost unprecedented. But it's an army of citizens. And that was again a cultural innovation in the sense this incredible breakthrough of the vision of equality of man. If you're not my lord and I'm your peasant, why would I really want to go die for you?

They view it in my brother and sister in some sense, my comrade, that's different. Now we do want to look on the scale of human history of how recent the French Revolution is. And you think of Christianity with 200 years from the French Revolution. Everyone says communism fail.

By which joke, have you seen Silicon Valley startups? I mean, they're not communists. Of course they have different equity levels. But the level of self-organizing groups where much higher degrees of equity may be in privileged areas.

But often these are leading edge progress. These are the leading edge of our society. Is dramatic, allocracy and teal circles and theirs and that. So now we'd like that cultural evolution to go faster and for it to cash out more radically and changes in our society, faster than it is.

But there are changes. And I go and end on this hope, which is we often it's like watching paint dry or watching the grass grow. The promise that cultural evolution happens over generations. But if you look back, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, most places had a legal slavery.

Nowhere did women have the vote. A century ago, most places didn't have the vote. Now they're used backsliding. They're many, shallow state.

But my point is we do see sometimes dramatic changes in norms and values very quickly. And so why go back to this four types of problem is that technology can support. Like right now, I'm having this called you. I can coordinate over distances because of technology.

And technology does create being. But these breakthroughs in new levels of collective action happen at this kind of cultural inner layer. And then that cashes out into institutions that reinforce that technology that supports that. Now we can have a debate about the power and like this, we can there's a lot of subtlety in this.

But it's certainly an inversion, if you're in for the new, the Marxist approach of economy comes first, then culture is an effect of the economy or of this institutional structures. That's what we're inverting in the primacy of being. And it is a story of hope. Cultural evolution is possible.

The third noble belief of the second Renaissance, Krato. First is we're in a polo crisis. Second, we're in a meta crisis. There is a common root to the crisis we face.

But the third is hope. Like Buddhist, third noble truth is that liberation is possible. Cultural evolution is possible. And we've done it before.

And it's not easy. So we've done it before. There's a couple of axes I want to play across with you here. One is in bringing up Silicon Valley, I'm reminded of a piece by Paul Millard that he wrote on Pathless called, Our Long Game is Real, I suspect mostly no.

But it's like the notion that we've done this, like you said, is conditioned by a culture of care and reciprocity and the formation of national identity, et cetera, tribal identity going all the way past. And so he says about Silicon Valley, he's quoting Nval. You're living on fumes often. We're living on fumes often.

We're currently functioning. Capitalism, if it really worked on pure rational self, it just would collapse tomorrow. It actually even works because there is a legacy of ethical trust and behavior that underpins the function even of the market. Absolutely.

I said this, this was the meat and potatoes of the conversation I had with Jim Machenis. He was talking about how Wall Street doesn't operate without trust. And we were edging toward this point that in my mind, one of the core themes of this show, I should say, is that when we're talking about multi-scale regulation and understanding what it means to meet power with wisdom in a world of magical technologies, that we have to think about, you're talking about preference and will, that preferences market activity, this bottom up, the conditions of your life, you don't choose your preferences, you discover them. And then will is that executive function, it's regulatory.

But the neocortex that's making these executive decisions is actually, again, Paul Levy's point about George W. Bush, that executive orders are an emergent bottom up effect. These are like this top down stuff. And this again comes out of the time I had with SFI.

I think about papers like Jessica Flex Fabulous, Course Greening as a downward causation mechanism, which is like the number one science paper I would recommend to anyone probably. I'm thinking about policing in primate societies and how alpha male, Rhesus Macaques, the reason that they have the position at the top of a dominance hierarchy is because they are the best at mediating conflicts and that the whole troop is now being selected for as an individual evolutionary group selection. And so in healthy hierarchies, this is a stratification of the ability to mitigate the violence that would otherwise occur in all against all conflict, which is something that we talk a lot about is all against all narrative conflict in the postmodern. We're like, nothing is true, there is no vertical, these kinds of things.

So anyway, go back to Silicon Valley, Paul Miller's quoting Navall, Ravi Khan. He says, if you're in a situation, like for example, if you're in Silicon Valley where people are doing business with each other and they know each other, they trust each other, then they do right by each other because they know this person will be around for the next game. And then Paul says, if you were in Silicon Valley toward the end of the 2010s, you saw evidence that this game worked. Everyone who was around for more than 10 years was successful and likely rich.

But he says, I think the charitable interpretation of what's going on in Silicon Valley is not that there are people thinking long-term at all, but that an environment exists where being more generous and helping others succeed is rewarded and that this is different than many other parts of the economy. So this gets to the question of like, how much will really plays into this? Like it's obviously huge and crucial. And I wouldn't be doing this show if I didn't believe that it's easy to fund power and it's hard to fund wisdom.

And that this is where I want to lean in because the transformation of consciousness, not just flow state engineering, right? Not just stealing fire, which is obviously an, it's like your point about wheeling Kotler is like, this is an instrumental end. This is, you're missing the point if you are trying to use psychedelics merely to ideate. That's, it's going to happen.

It's a what? Okay, just to say, and what, hey, just to say how the full types of pro-mation may be come back to because they release the wisdom for you, make you. So like, one, maybe you could think if I'm trying to assemble, but I'm overweight and I want to lose weight, one thing is that there's some pill I can take. This is the science solution.

The second one is my preferences. What is it that I actually want? I'm like, and what I mean, the problem of preferences is really knowing what we want is actually hard. Do I want to job the cake right now?

Or do I want my weight to be X in two years? No, actually, distinguishing that. Or like, what do I want in my life, truly? It's like in Buddhism, we can see a very deep question or in its cognitive science.

But then this question of will, I know I want to lose weight and I want to not eat that chocolate cake, but I do. So that's what I mean by problems of will is that often we have a challenge, many examples where we know what we want to do in some part of us, but we don't do it. And then the collective action problem is, but there's all this advertising around me promoting like chocolate cakes and I need that to change to help me. Or is it in the climate crisis, it's like the preferences problem is what do we really want?

Do we want more plastic toys or do we want the rainforest around? What do we really want and what do we want in terms of acting on that? Why I say this is that when I grow up, I did economics and every textbook starts with like, our preferences are given and I once wrote a post and was doing work on a Buddhist economics book where I was like, okay, but it starts with a different point which is the preferences are changeable. I can transform my craving.

And it's like the inverse of econ one, which is my preferences are given. And so I wouldn't even say we discover our preferences. We transform our preferences. I mean, we do discover them, we see them deeply, but this is quite a deep point.

Like which calls into question, by the way, many of the state could cowls of Medite as well, which is, but I don't really know what I want. Why should I be allowed to choose what I want in a market or in a democracy? I'm not that saying that someone should decide for you, but I've got a whole piece that she has a beautiful talk by Tigna Han, he's a Z Master called Technology as Horse. And the point is there's a point where he's in Silicon Valley at Google and he says, there should be this bell of mindfulness on mobile phones.

And they're talking about it again. And then he says, yeah, she says, but we've got to make that an option. You should have click it on or off. And Tigna's like, no, it should be compulsory.

And the tension is like, what? And Tigna's like, because they're just like, of course people should be able to choose. They've got to know what they want. Tigna's like, no, they're not.

Of course they don't know what they want. And it was this amazing moment where, of course, it's obvious to him as an enormous that we don't most know what we want. And that is the secret assumption of Medite that I do know what I want. And I should get to choose what I want and so on.

And actually, one side point of wisdom is not that someone else should tell me what I want, but acknowledging how little I know what I want and how little I'm able to act or what I want. You can see that just with your thoughts. It's why meditation is great. I'm going to stop having the thoughts back.

I'm going to stop having thoughts all together for a while. I'm just going to sit and know it's right. It doesn't work at all. And so this is a very deep point once we see it about who we are.

And just to say, it's times like Para-Namadi's ship. If we were all walking around with T-shirts that said, I am not my thoughts and feelings, I have them, that would be a major shift. Like just starting to realize that I am not those things. It has them.

It is itself this beginning of the wisdom. And that's why I'm saying, though, a breakthrough in preferences, a breakthrough in will, and then a breakthrough in coordination for collective action is some of the crucial things for addressing the wicked problems we have, because they are an aspect of corrupted preferences. Now, it's true that then the capitalist system went in, feed those aspects, because we've created a system that rewards a short-term feedback mechanism of reward, resorting, which is based on profit and so on. And so it's very difficult to get out of it, to give one last anecdote about that.

There's a guy called Ed Gushine, who was like the beginning, the pioneer of corporate culture studies, who's at MIT, who's at MIT, who's passed away. By the way, we've read his book, and there was one like, there was a lot of general foods, one of these huge conglomerates in the US for food. And there's a point like the late 70s, and they're like, our mission statement is like, healthy food for healthy people, something like this. And they get really trouble because they see the stuff with a lot of sugar and other stuff is getting to sell them.

And they're actually like a poor level, a really high level discussion, like, okay, this is normal, we stand for, these are not our values. We are going to go out and really market for healthy food and explain this. And basically it's a disaster, like they're like, they come back like, man, we can just not persuade consumers to eat this healthy stuff. It's not going, well, they're going to do this moment.

What are they going to do? Are they going to stay with being profitable in a way, existing as a company, or are they going to pursue their vision, their mission? And they change their mission state. And the thing is, the thing that I joke is that the thing that's going on at the moment also is that we are in their mission, and they change their mission state.

It's like, oh, Paul, it's like, as I'm scaling all these things, you'll start in this world pool. And the way out of that is never going to be like, mine a thing, who's going to be a major shift in both the system and the intervention. Now, do you want to emphasize that the two go together? It's like, we need the right and the left, we need systems change, and then we need interchange.

But often we're trying to do systems change without interchange. And it's like, we're trying to do AI governance. We'll be like, oh shit, why have we got this race to the bottom problem? Oh, everyone should rationy.

All those rationalists in the air. But we don't see that we should do something about this. Yeah, welcome to collective action problems. What I want, the culture is how we've done that.

If I think there's a God watching me, or I think I'm actually interdependent with you, Michael, I actually got into being. Wow, I'm active for me. If I really see my interconnection with others in a profound way, and that's going to make a real difference, just as the fact that we have evidence that believing in a God who's watching my inner conscience all the time, that's significant impacts on behavior. Exactly.

And this is why I think it's funny because it feels like a collective action problem. I think for this, a similar reason that it feels like the hard problem of consciousness, because it's a category error. It's like you're saying, if we're trying to get a bunch of individuals to agree, then it's a problem. If you and I feel that deep sense of solidarity, like if we find a deep commonality of identity, however fluid and contingent and relational identity might be, then it's not a collective action problem because the quote unquote collective action of apparent selves will emerge naturally.

And so this is where I'm getting tired. I said this in the second Renaissance Discord server and had an interesting conversation with some people about it. I'm getting tired of attending to the idea of the meta crisis, because it seems like it's starting to have the same kind of effect that people trying to solve the hard problem are having. If you just don't regard mind and body as separate, it goes away.

And so rather than like first person, third person, interiority, objectivity, kind of access, I want to talk about this in terms of your point about faith and the way that I have constituted something like faith, which as you make very clear is not a negation of responsibility. Like commitment is crucial in religion in all forms. But there is this thing about slowing down. And I just want to say I love this passage in the piece that you wrote.

Let's see. This one was called, you mentioned it earlier, technology is God, the one you wrote with Sylvie. Where you say slowing down is not about rejecting progress. Instead, it is about making time for reflection.

There are moments in life where speed is necessary, but wisdom is about recognizing when it is time to slow down. A wiser approach to technology involves deep inquiry into the source of our actions. When we create new technologies, we must ask, where is this coming from? Is it motivated by wisdom and compassion?

Or is it driven by fear, greed or ignorance? And then the gift is wonderful. It's so funny because the tech company I quit, actually the founder knew Sam Altman from back in the day. I think they had gone through Y Combinator together and hated him and was trying to come up with a different vision for AI.

And so this next piece, imagine if, instead of rushing into product development, the first weeks at an incubator, like Y Combinator, were spent in deep reflection. What if creators were asked to meditate on their intentions to explore whether their innovations were coming from a place of love and compassion or from a place of ego and competition? Okay, hold that thought. And then like most people listening to this are probably rushing in to this question of like, how do we design an incubator for wise technologists?

I have these conversations with my friends all the time. And like part of me is just, okay, you don't. Maybe. Okay, so I could go back to being an SFI and being a cerebral scientific monastery exile, then there's this thing that really stuck with me about their work, which was that the larger an annehill gets, the fewer ants are working at any time because the transport networks inside of an ant colony do not scale at the same rate as the number of ants, like the population density goes up.

And so you literally cannot maintain the same level of productivity per individual in an annehill twice as big without some of them just slowing down. And that's not like the question of whether that is a decision on the part of the ants is a little bit easier to see as a non starter when you realize that ant communication is moderated through pheromone trails. And it looks to us with human eyes, like the down there in Ant World, they're basically just following these props. And it's like harder to see how the ways the ways that our own behavior is constrained has to do with the downward causal pressure of our media diets and of the agrigors that we allow to possess us and all of this stuff, or like capillaries, blood flows slower through your fingertips than it does through your neck.

Because as the tube gets smaller and smaller, the very distal ends of your circulatory system are non-pulsatile flow. It's not going through in these big spurts. And that's again, that's a property of the scaling of the network itself. And so like Brian Arthur made this point that we need, and Hazel Henderson wrote about the importance of redistributing economic wealth production through the taxation on high frequency automated microtransactions.

And I'll link to a cool piece Bill Thompson wrote about Brian Arthur's piece on this in McKinsey in 2011. And now basically, if you think about the increasing scale of the global economy, it's increasing need to be automated again as a channel that regulates all of this coordinates, all of this planet-scale activity. Then at some point, it does need little hearts pumping in it everywhere. And designing that is at a scale beyond our comprehension.

And we can come up with ideas, but then we immediately get into this collective action problem of how do we get people to accept their ideas? Or how do we push the ideas out into this massive communications network? And for me, again, and I don't want to sound like an apologist for accelerationism here, but when Bill Thompson says evil is the enunciation of the next level of order, and when he's talking about the karmic dynamics of affirmation through negation and how so much of this is unconscious to us, then this is where sitting here watching the global economy spin out of control and all of this crazy shit go down, I feel like I am being naturally called to faith. Like again, this thing about meditation is not something you do, right?

You prepare the conditions for awakening, you stand on a hill and try to get hit by lightning. But so again, we're chasing each other around these causal loops here. But I think probably a lot of people who are concerned about this stuff and care about social transformation and the need to promote wisdom in the world are starting from a set of assumptions that makes our responsibility somehow, where it's actually happening at multiple different scales, you are part of this thing, making that more visible to us is like part of the shift of perspective that allows us to relax around this in the way that Josh DiCalia was talking about. This question of what can you do seems to always come back to what are you doing about it, you the individual.

When it's not the nature of the problem. And even call it a problem is to belie a preference maybe for seeing good and evil as somehow distinct from each other. The last thing I'll say about this, because you brought up not discovering our preferences and tick not high. And I just reminded me of the story.

So this is like me making a kind of conciliatory gesture after all of that, that one of the most important experiences I had in college was in chemistry too. And I hated that class. And I hated that teacher. It was a huge 900 person lecture hall.

The guy leading the course thought he was hilarious and he was utterly boring and could not make the material interesting to save his life. And you look around and half the people in the class were doing the crossword. Now it would be everybody's on their phone. But like one day I looked at the front row of the class and there was a student there at a time when laptops in class were relatively rare.

He was sitting there like perched on the edge of his seat, just hanging on every word that this guy had to say. And I was like, if he can do it, I can do it. There's something interesting here. I may not see it.

Like I, and this is again that sort of non-duality of the discovery or creation of preference. That was the moment that my neocortical functions came online. And I was like, if it turns out that what is interesting is purely a matter of perspective, then I can operationalize my attention to make anything interesting. If this guy can find chem too interesting, then I can find chem too interesting.

And if I can find chem too interesting, literally anything will disclose wonders if you attend to it in the right way. And so whether you want to talk about preference as created or like created implies will in some sense, it implies for technology. Yeah, something is a cultivation. There's a subtlety, right?

Like about it. It's not like I can engineer it, but I can cultivate a garden. I can invite certain things in and disinvite other things. Like in Buddhism they talk about these seeds.

You have unwholesome seeds and wholesome seeds. Like a wholesome would be anger or greed. The wholesome seed would be love or compassion. And these things manifest a bit of their own will in your mind.

But somehow, this is a much more subtle question now about what is doing the doing here, who's having, but we could get into that. But the thing is there's some way you could invite the unwholesome seeds to return to the storehouse and the wholesome seeds to manifest. I just want to come back to say just in terms of the artwork going, one is like for me even personally, but maybe for listening to say whether in a personal level you're like, okay, how can I have a really joyful flashlight? Why am I not super happy and satisfied in peace, but also more at a collective level, I imagine.

Whether you're worried about existential risk from AI, well, the possibilities even of using AI in a well way, even without it will die, you know, how to use climate situation and ecological situation. The thesis was like, oh, these are real challenges and they are positive. And they require of course change in these multiple dimensions and understanding those dimensions of at least technology, systems and the inner and distinguishing maybe the personal inner and the cultural is really valid by the integral and the core difference. And the thesis of that we need a focus, which is not the case in the world today on the event.

Now I'd wager bet right now that if we went and counted all the philanthropic spending in the US right now on making the world better on the world today, a fraction of maybe even a percent is on the kind of inner dimension if we also exclude the retreats. But that's a priority. Now the next question will be brief first and like, well, how does that occur? And in the background, the few things is religion and spirituality.

Like these psychotechnologies that we have invented in human history, and are those I don't even want to say that like modernity and science, at least in the form of scientism is kind of religion. It's a worldview, you don't really question, as obvious limitations, mind, body from anyone, you know, other ones, but it's taken as a kind of faith and things outside is remit, don't exist and not allowed to be talked about. But the thing I'm just going to say is we're interested in religion and spirituality. In the sense that religion is something of a dirty word, so we have to recover religion from the taint of the inquisition and dogmatism and all the things at least in the West that is associated, sometimes with.

But the fact is that is the psychotechnology and it's key to our personal flourishing and this collective aspect of things. And it's related even to your question of how we go slow and the moral of other aspects. But essentially this point of, okay, what are the religions of tomorrow? And I want to make one comment here, it's like, it relates to something down what happens in your capillary analogy, I actually was up with Jim Ra because what happened at the end of the Roman Empire, it's going for the look at when paradigms or systems ended and we had the rise of Christianity, Christianity, we have all the evidence, we were telling you on the dark ages, there was less economic activity, there was social trade networks got simpler.

But the thing about Christianity was it wasn't about power and empire, right? It was return to the sacred, it was return to the inner dimension. I'm not saying we're in a moment where the enunciation of eternity is to something like Roman Empire, incredibly expansive, growth-oriented, imperial in a way. And we're in a moment when, I mean, it's an analogy, this return to the sacred, there was a kind of calming down.