I think it's telling that the exciting thing and the thing that at this moment feels so much like magic or can feel so much like magic are these language models, these systems that are bound up entirely and they can operate only in a world of symbols and abstractions that are all human created. Now, I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that the arc of this technology had to go that way. I think there's a very plausible other sequence of events where it was all about images or even robots doing things in the real world. And in a way, I actually think those timelines would have been healthier or more interesting in part because they are so much more grounded in the full richness of the world.
I mean, it's not the full richness, but it's a little closer. The language thing is funny because it is so thin, actually. I mean, that's weird to say because language is incredibly rich and dense and you can do so many things with it. You can have conversations like these, wow, you can express science and art and you can write novels and yet I really, really think that anyone who has thought for two seconds about the real world, as you say, the richness of the world and everything that surrounds us has to acknowledge with everything we know now in the 21st century.
Maybe a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred years ago, you could have gotten away with thinking that language really, really summed it up. Maybe that was defensible. In the year 2024, it is not. Welcome to Humans on the Loop.
I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and today we embark on our fifth episode of Dialogues on Wisdom in the Age of Magical Technologies. This week, I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel, Moonbound. At some point, in a delightfully nonlinear and human career path that included founding a literary magazine at Michigan State University, working at current TV and Twitter, playing in a band, producing short films, writing apps and newspaper serials, and milling one of New York Magazine's 13 very best olive oils. He started writing science fiction.
Moonbound is his third novel, and one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, the kind that makes me feel less lonely because it keeps proving to spring forth from the same weird loam of lexophilia and story-pregnant stardust that I thought was me. And yet, I'm holding all of that as it instantiated in the artifact of someone else's effort. I normally ignore PR solicitations, but this is the first book that spoke out to me so loudly at a distance. I just went ahead and bought myself a copy, so I wouldn't have to wait to get a free one in the mail.
Part of that was the conversation that Robin had with future fossils repeat guest Elliot Pepper, to which I will link you in the show notes. I knew that this was going to strike a bull's-eye in its exploration of the central questions of this show. Questions like, where is the line between technology and magic? What is a computer really?
And do humans qualify? How wrong might we be about the future? How does stories shape reality? And what happens when we have to make room for the stories of the more than human world?
Et cetera. A crucial point of note is that Moonbound is hard science fiction, but it's not the kind you're used to. At a time when even the most square, prosaic suits are quick to quote Arthur C. Clark's third law, it is appropriate that sci-fi as a kind of thinking through of our condition would reflect the cultural retrieval of pre-modern tropes like wizards, dragons, talking animals, and sacred swords.
The savvy know this age is undergoing metamorphosis, and what comes next is going to embrace the elements of fantasy. We don't have to leave behind the real as our reality is proliferate and peel away. In fact, a magic in the mythic always circumscribed and founded reason and constitute the inexhaustible supply from which our known is formalized by logic, math, experiment, and engineering. What follows is a rich discussion of how Robin and I both enjoy traversing and interrogating those familiar boundaries between the lost and found, the sensible and the ineffable, wildness and city, born and created, sleep and waking, care and power.
As with all good books, the world it describes is bigger than description. I highly recommend you get yourself a copy from the bookshop link you'll find amidst my show notes and embark on your own deereve through its ideas. And find me in the Discord server and we'll have a spoilerific follow up discussion. Also, I want to celebrate new patrons to the show.
Thank you so much to Patricia Daly, Guita Williamson, Tiffany Hart, Mike Log, Darius Strossle, Maranaki, Julian Picasa, and Jorge the VioList for joining the hundreds of other people donating on a monthly or annual basis to support this work. We just had our first monthly patrons hangout. It was amazing and went on twice as long as I expected it to because it was that good. We'll have another TBA in the middle of February.
I have a ton of writing scheduled for patrons only release, early access to the music for this show and more new humans on the loop themed musical projects. And my entire family thanks you for your support. Those of you who believe in public goods, projects and futures, our kids would want to live in. You know where to go.
HumansOnTheLoop.com. Thank you so much and enjoy this conversation. Perfect. Okay, Robin, it's a pleasure.
You are on the loop just so that you know this is what I'm hoping we can glaze, ask our call, this wonderful book, Moonbound, that touches on pretty much everything I love about this world. Why don't we start by having you contextualize yourself for people? Who are you? Why do you write?
Why did you write this kind of a thing? And then we can get into the details. Sure. Well, hey, thanks for having me.
This is a real pleasure always to chat at length about about this kind of work. That's a big question. I'll probably err on the side of answering it a little too concisely and you can dig in where I was needed. But I am a writer.
You know, I'm one of those people who was just always haunting the shadows of the public library as a kid and in a sense my destiny was written then whether I realized or not. So went through a bunch of other things in my sort of short professional career, which had to do with tech and media. But ultimately I left that behind years and years ago now after I sold my first novel and realized that that's what really was interesting to me and motivating and exciting. So I've gone on to publish a few more.
Moonbound is the latest. It is a story set 11,000 years in the future. It's science fiction in the sense that it is our real world or my imagination, you know, of our real world. But it also uses a lot of the tools of the fantastic as you know, having read it of myth and even kind of fable.
And that just reflects that kid back in those shelves in the library and trying to kind of bring those threads together in an interesting way. So that's who I am. Right on. And the reason why I decided at the last minute to interview you for humans on the loop rather than future fossils broadly is because of something that came up in the first pages of this book.
And this is where I want to start the conversation is with your narrator, the chronicler, which is a kind of bioengineered companion that functions in a way similar to what people might think of as the generative AI agents that people are starting to do now. Something that 11,000 years hence might have its ancestry and things like Gordon Bell's My Life Bits. You know, it's gathering information across a person's lifetime and then also multiple lifetimes. And there's a beautiful passage in there where you talk about how that allows each person to be plural by having access to the aggregate knowledge and experience of other people.
But there's something that in setting this the story here, your chronicler says should have been more careful which stories went in there. And in setting up the tension of the story between humans and the super intelligent dragon-like AI that we created, the first thing is this question of the founder bias or the bottleneck where we have to be so intentional about the way that we raise the kid that we're growing in this process right now. So I would love to hear you speak to that in the various ways that kind of thinking has shaped this work. Yeah, yeah, you're perceptive to note that on the literally the second page of the whole book and that's not by accident, that spotlight shines on stories or just that hint of warning and of course at that point in the story, you don't know what it means or what the implications are but you learn as the novel progresses.
And I would say there's at least two prongs to that in my head, probably more but two just spring to mind easily. One is that this is a story, you know, it's easy to say it's a story about stories and that's not entirely true because it's also just a story, you know, it's a great quest as you know, a rollicking quest and an adventure and it takes us all across this weird new world and so it's that right. I mean, it has the direct pleasure and the material of just a good story. But at this point in my own career, you know, and kind of understanding myself, I do have to confess that it's pretty impossible for me to avoid going meta at some point because I like, I like the meta, you know, I like the things about other things.
And so yeah, that this story really I think ultimately a lot of its value and interest has to do with the way that it talks about well, what are stories, what do they do, how are they useful, how are they valuable, how are they dangerous, how ought we to be cautious about them. So that's one prong. The other prong, a little more specific or kind of dialed in does have to do with AI specifically. There are threads of kind of future AI in the story in a few different ways.
And a lot of that is more out of my experience. This predates the very recent kind of language model boom of the last literally just last few years. It goes back almost 10 years to kind of maybe 2016, 2017, when I was working with much more primitive versions of these systems, even though they were crude or I still at that time found them completely fascinating and kind of provocative and energizing in part because the language they produced, it was a it wasn't fluid and like kind of convincing the way that the current ones are it was weird and wonky and sort of like always like modern poetry. And at that time, you know, in that era, I kind of learning about them and getting really just motivated by the questions they posed, it was you could not avoid that realization that oh my gosh, all of these were trained on something, some material, you know, and just are living ourselves and protecting what texts and language models that learn to read and write and some capacity.
You have to choose some human chooses what to bundle up into a whole mess of files and feed bit by bit into these systems. And that could be a bunch of legal briefs. It could be a bunch of computer code. It could be all the novels in Project Gutenberg online, you know, all the great public domain novels of the world or it could be all those things or it could be none of those things.
But the point is the decision really matters and learning that years ago has just stayed with me and I think it continues to be a really super interesting and in fact important point. So to that point, I'm right there with you and wanting to go right away and point out that you know, one of the major themes in this inquiry, the series is that to the degree we regard or describe AI as having that training bias or model dependency on initial conditions that many other people have said this, this is a cultural technology. This is an extension of us. This is an extension of the way that we already work.
And so when we talk about in, you know, when you write in this book that dragons have a weakness, a fetish, almost four story and for narrative compression and you know, kind of a superstition about knock three times and this kind of thing, that comes out of our own lore, which is the substrate for our own thinking, even in a secular modern era. So I'm really interested, you know, the choice of fantasy here as the clothing to drape over a science fiction story feels actually very true to me in the way that something like metamodern philosophy or trans-rational philosophy is rearing its head now as we struggle to navigate this incredible complexity of the information avalanche. And so there's just little things here that I want to kind of hold together into a bow and toss back to you. One is that when your protagonist meets the chronicler, he asks if the chronicler is an angel or a demon and then later you're talking about wizards, which make an appearance in this, you say the wizard in my day did not pretend to be polite, they made monsters, commanded them with vast vocabularies of power.
No one reading this book is going, I think in this year, that is not going to trigger the kind of code poetry explicit spellcasting thing that pervades Silicon Valley right now. And then just a few pages later, you say the wizard tested his magic or technology or both. Right. It's this thing about what Timothy Morton talks about the opacity of reality.
And later on in this work, you talk about how reality absorbs as many dimensions as we care to use to describe it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so there's, yeah, I would love, yeah, just to think about how with you about how, I think one of the point, I don't know if you called it a point that you're making in this book, but that even in areas of advanced scientific achievement, what we are actually doing, you and I have the Long Now Foundation in common in our social networks.
And Kevin Kelly wrote that piece years ago about discovery as the exponential expansion of ignorance, you know, that we end up asking more questions than we answer. And so, yeah, what is this story saying or what are you trying to say through this work about the nature of agency in an era where we have extraordinary capacities? Sure. You know, we have what seem like magical or seems like godlike capacities.
But then we find ourselves not at the top of the food chain, like the more we develop these capacities, the more we find ourselves running around underfoot. Well, you know, I think it's telling that the exciting thing and the thing that at this moment feels so much like magic or can feel so much like magic, are these, you know, language models, these systems that are bound up entirely and they can operate only in a world of symbols and abstractions that are all human created. I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that the arc of this technology had to go that way. I think there's a very plausible other sequence of events where it was all about, you know, images or even robots doing things in the real world.
And in a way, I actually think those timelines would have been healthier or more interesting in part because they are so much more grounded in the full richness of the world. I mean, it's not the full richness, but it's a little closer. The language thing is funny because it is so thin, actually, you know, I mean, that's weird to say, because language is incredibly rich and dense and you can do so many things with it. You can have conversations like these, wow, you can express science and art and you can write novels.
And yet I really, really think that anyone who has thought for two seconds about the real world, as you say, the richness of the world and everything that surrounds us has to acknowledge with everything we know now in the 21st century, maybe a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred years ago, you could have gotten away with thinking that language really, really summed it up. Maybe that was defensible in the year 2024. It is not. And there's a reason that is the reason that there's so much biology in this book, you know, it's a book about 11,000 years in the future.
But as you might have noted, it's not a future of like flying cars and there's robots, but even the robots are not quite the robots of science fiction. You know, it's definitely not terminators walking around with their guns blazing or anything like that. And I think, at least for my part, the most interesting parts of the whole story and certainly of my imagined future have to do with a rich, weird, malleable biology. And I would really go to the mat, I mean, really to get down to this point of like grappling with reality and what is real, I will go to the mat with the claim that like the most advanced things humanity has made up until now.
You can pick whether it's an AI model or the iPhone or the space shuttle or a nuclear reactor. But you get to choose your pinnacle sort of scientific technological engineering feat. And I will tell you that that thing is totally stupid and like brittle and kind of sad compared to an acorn and the resilience and the capability and the powers, you know, the technological potential of an acorn or a mustard seed. So we're a long way away from getting real with the rest of the world.
I mean, it's right there in Star Wars, you know, your technological terror does not stand up against the force. And I just interviewed Tyson Jungkoporta for this series last night and he made a very similar point. He said that if the role of technological progress in this decade is to build a globe spanning supercomputer that provides for all of our needs, then well, that's the land. You know, he's coming from this indigenous perspective.
He's like, why, why are we? Yeah. So like, I really like that. Yeah.
I like it. I like it. I already got it. Hey, maybe we could work on, you know, on taking better care of the exactly the global abundance machine that we already have.
I think that's, I think that's very wise. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's important to frame that up right because that argument, the argument, my extreme argument about the acorn, I don't, they're not, at least in my case, always speaking myself, it's not an expectation to say all the technology is a stupid and a waste of time and or unimpressive.
Cause it's not true at all. It's all wildly impressive. It's incredible. I mean, there are, there are acts of true magic out there.
I ride around in the Waymo driverless taxis all the time in San Francisco these days and they're breathtaking. I mean, it really is just a little jag of the future that's reached back and made itself known. And it's really great stuff at the same time. I just think it's so important to keep the, the whole yardstick in place and realize this is all like in the first centimeter.
And there's just so much that things are already doing and succeeding at and just incredible backflips achieved by nature every day that humans can't match. Well, okay. So let's embroider that a bit. You make a claim at this point, which I love that so many of the real glowing moments of this book are statements made in passing.
And one of them is with a trash picker, someone who's going around harvesting and recycling the ruins of previous civilizations, Scrounger, who says, what have I been doing these past decades, but picking up toys, which is to say tools, which is to say leverage. What is a thesis on technology? That is a thesis on the difference between the kind of thing that we are making versus the kind of thing that we risk replacing with it that seems to already perform the same functions only better. You know, and so that's where when I want to turn an investigation of technology on itself and on the motivations and on to what end are we producing these means, the question becomes one of why are we trying to gain leverage and over what?
And then I will just say that I want to connect that with two more things. One is that you're in this post-apocalyptic adventure time-esque landscape. It's interesting that this is something that comes up again and again, it's very much in the zeitgeist. It's in the legends of Zelda's Tears of the Kingdom.
It's in all sorts of different 21st century stories where science and fantasy and magic are all remixed in the post-apocalyptic wake of something. It's very much the trans-rational science that Ian Malcolm is pointing to in his morphine rants at the end of the book Jurassic Park, where he's saying, this isn't working anymore in the way that we thought it would. And so they're wandering around and your narrator notices, after everything the wild went on, of course it did. To wake up after 11,000 years and observe that there are still meadows and bugs and that even if we temporarily destroyed what we think of as the pinnacle of human achievement, that this is all still there.
And then earlier on in the book, your hero Ariel is asking one of the trash pickers, where can I get a map like that, a colorful map rich with topographical detail, and the bartender replies, a map isn't got, it's mapped. And so that's again something I was talking about with Tyson yesterday, which is this question of if we're to make technologies that even come close to approximating the complexity and sophistication of the intelligence of our living world as it is encoded in organisms and ecological relationships, then that technology must be evolutionary. There has to be a sense in which the model that stops learning has to be embedded in a larger system that continues to learn, or we need to come up with a more manomorphic kind of paradigm for machines that think. That's the bottom line.
Yeah. Thank you for that strange gift. You know, you talk about Adventure Time and Zelda and some of these, and it's not a new theme. There's going back to the 60s and 70s.
There's a wonderful tradition of this kind of science fiction, somebody like Jack Vance or a terrific writer. I think one of the great writers actually in the English language, M. John Harrison and some of his early work. I'll play on that same sandbox.
Yes, it's some broken ruined earth and the wizards are actually just the last 10 people who have busted smartphones, which is great. It's a kind of a beautiful reframing of the capabilities we have now. I appreciated that the young reader of this book, a 10-year-old said the other day, someone was saying, well, what kind of book is it? What you say is it kind of post-apocalyptic?
And this young reader said, yeah, it's post-apocalyptic. I want to print that on the jacket with the paper back. I think it's right. There has been a great calamity, as you know, and I want to give away all the details of it.
But some bad things have happened. And yet, this is not a broken wasteland. The world we find in 11,000 years is kind of cool in a lot of ways. All sorts of fun, interesting things have happened that the wildflowers have really and metaphorically, the wildflowers have bloomed and covered up the ruins.
But I think that's what always happens. And I think it's actually useful to acknowledge that the apocalypse isn't and wasn't a thing. And instead, history is essentially a cycling sequence of apocalypses of different scales for different groups and different species over time. And that can be as big and profound as like, I don't know why this always sticks in my head, but it's just so weird to contemplate billions of years ago, there was this event, I guess, this thing on Earth called the Great Oxygen Catastrophe.
It had to do with like the rise of the cyanobacteria, a new thing on Earth that essentially poisoned the atmosphere, filling with oxygen, the ecosystem of Earth on that time was not, you know, wiped for oxygen and so everything else died. Of course, there's remade Earth, the remade the atmosphere and the ecology of Earth and created the conditions for all sorts of amazing things. But there's no escaping it. It was a bad seed.
There's not really been a wave of global annihilation of that scale since then, including the dinosaur thing. So this is Earth. It's like welcome, welcome to the planet and what happens here. And there's kind of getting around it.
And then if you zoom into human scale, I mean, again, even as we're talking now, I don't mean to say this glibly at all because it's not, it's deadly serious. But at the same time, it is just kind of the practical reality. At the time we're having a conversation. There are various apocalypses unfolding in different places on Earth.
So the challenge becomes how do we just like recognize the ongoing process of apocalypse and renewal, you know, and healing and regrowth rather than make it into this sort of, I don't know, I don't know what the vision of the sort of the millenarian one apocalypse to rule them all is the Terminator thing. I guess I know it's wrong. I'm not really sure how to think about it's using culture, but at this point, it seems pretty clearly that it doesn't really happen like that. Yeah.
Well, the to whomness of it is definitely egocentric to the extent of whatever sphere of personal concern, we would call that. And that is a point that you keep hammering. I mean, hammering is too strong a word, but you keep bringing this up in this book. So I want to take a quick tour stop in the memory that your chronicler has of the maturity of human civilization, the height of the ants.
Yes. I took it out of your clearly a lover of etymology. I mean, that's like the flower of civilization, right? Is also the tower of human industrial effort and aspiration and the artifacts that remain and the memories of that society that remain show something that kind of reminds me of a gerontocracy.
You talk about the simulated environment in which your chronicler maintains personality simulations like ghosts or something of every person to whom it has been attached. And you say the eigenbrow, this place, the deepest definition of the eigenbrow is that it is a realm where everything was known in advance. The characters in there could perform all the spectacular qualities they possessed in life and the annoying ones to the only thing they could not do was surprise me. And of course, this is something that people are bringing up again and again with generative AI is that we're coming to it asking for creative solutions and depending on the scope of the training data, it's either giving you the lowest common denominator or it's giving you something that you already said.
Like I have a language model trained on my podcast and it's like it's not, it's just sort of a mirror. It's showing me, you know, who I am in a way that I find useful, but it's not surprising me except with its fidelity. And then when your character gets lost, Ariel gets lost. And I love this, Rhea chronicler says, all of my subjects have lived their lives strapped into a harness of orientation.
They were happily tracked to their location to the centimeter known and shared with at minimum a dozen other people. I actually do this on Google Maps, right? My wife. I totally see it.
I know, I love it. I think it's a sort of odd. I love when it seems like something might be a truly new feeling, a fresh feeling, you know, often enabled by technology and a whole host of them you could go through. But I think that particular thing of like happy surveillance, of being like comfortable, your location just comfortably known by, you know, not by, you know, only the surveillance agencies in global megacarvations, but by your people you trust in love.
It's cool. I really, I love it. Right. And so this is the chronicler's moment of surprise when they say, I had never not once faced such an unknown landscape, none of my subjects had ever been lost.
This article I was telling you about in which I mentioned the Great Oxidation event, the article I'm writing about crabs. Both of you know what that is. I talk about how the deep truth of carcinization is that we have become crabs, that it's like a symbol of our own enmeshment in the built environment, which is like a shell that we've extruded around ourselves and upon which we depend. But compare that.
Yeah, this is the contrast I want to let you riff on. There is a human city in this world that also includes intelligent civilizations of snakes and beavers and bees and all kinds of wonderful things, a truly biodiverse, plural civilization future, which if we were not human, we would regard as an improvement on everything. The one human city that we really get to see in this story is Rath Veria, a city of transformations. And like reading this, I couldn't help but think about Burning Man.
You talk about there's like a phase transition that happens between the height of the ants and the world in which Rath Veria exists, where it's a city permanently under construction, whole new theories of interconnection, residents relocating cheerfully. The center of the city is the matter circus, a recycling center in which people are trading their clothes into, I've been thinking about this for years, right? What if you could just feed your clothes into a 3D printer and have new clothes? And this happens to people at the level of DNA, it's happening for them at the level of their actual homes.
Again, like Werner Vinci's Rainbow's End talks about this sort of phase transition in the way that digital technology is superpower, which is actually to decontextualize things and allow us to remix them leads to this place that you describe in which the citizens were as mutable as its structures. Every fascination floated on the breeze like a virus, an extravagant continuing education program in which people are constantly enrolling, constantly dropping out. I mean, this is the opposite end of, I feel like you're making a thesis and antithesis here between these two images of human society in which- Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting.
Overwhelmed by the super production of information, we become attention scarce in the way that Herbert Simon talked about in 1971, said, you know, information consumes attention and therefore when we have a super fluidity of information, we have a poverty of attention. And really, this is the point that I'm trying to address through the series. And I'd love to hear you speak to, because it's like, there's something about Raffaria that's not centered or well adjusted in the same way that the tower project of mature civilization is not, but like rotated along an axis. Yeah.
Yeah. That's perceptive. Yeah. That's right.
These are two of my most fleshed out sort of, yeah, images or kind of provocations for ways of living, ways of being, you know, as a civilization on this planet. Raffaria is, I feel like you got it the way I hoped people would get it, which is to say that it's like fabulous, actually, and a little unnerving. And in that way, I think I'm not a burner myself, but what I've heard and read about Burning Man. I think there's a bit of that duality.
Certainly just, you know, of course, Burning Man's great well-spring, certainly the beginning is just the culture of the Bay Area, the place where I live, San Francisco. And I see some of that same duality in San Francisco. I mean, it's truly a, I mean, I mean, and just, you know, there's no underplaying this. Protean place, but it is one of those jokes that like, good news and bad news, I have good news, you can do anything you want.
I have bad news. You can do anything you want. How? Well, how do I decide?
You know, we're both, yeah, exactly. Life without constraints, without rules, without guardrails is weird. So that is just kind of magnified and sort of science fictionalized. And I have a lot of fun with it in the image of our weird, beautiful future of Raffaria.
Now, as for the ant, you know, the great industrial project of the ant, I guess I actually want to say, I want to propose that it's pretty freaking great. I mean, it does not say it's perfect, or there's not flaws, but I don't intend, you know, this is just my intention, which doesn't necessarily mean that's what landed on the page or what belongs in readers' heads. It's, there's, there's a lot that happens between, you know, the things that occur to me in this dome and what sparks in people's minds when it makes it all the way to them. But for my part, while I definitely think this future muscular competence, you know, collaborative, highly cooperative and indeed industrial human society had some flaws and some problems, I'm the whole.
I mean, it's my vision for what, what humanity ought to be and what it really could be. And I do, I acknowledge that I think for some folks like the industrial lit, how do you say it, industrialness, industriousness, maybe of it is not like their dream for utopia, right? Or for the future, for me, I need the train tracks and I do, I need the big buildings and I need the creations of that scale. They are to me when I behold them and when I ride the trains, you know, and when I see those things cleaning in the sun, they make me think, oh man, what a, what a civilization.
And so they're part of my, my ideal future in my utopia. And yet into this, you drop beavers. Yeah. Yeah.
And so I know complete accounting of the different social strategies or like the way the different species embody and encode the stable features of their environment. Like no organism as a hypothesis about the world, no story of that would be complete without mentioning the other great ecological engineers of our planet, right? Yes. Yes.
Yes. Well said. And so there's a, I see beavers actually in this story as occupying a kind of golden mean here in between those two extremes. And I love, you know, in a book that's, that is clearly in love with questions of time and scale and multi-scale thinking.
At one point, the beaver says, oh, you are long lived because humbled. Yeah. The beaver has overseen this particular bog for 300 years. And I guess he's replies, our health is matched to the duration of our interests.
Isn't that how it should be? And so there's that question again about is maybe the grand civilizational project is not wrong unto itself or the metamorphic plasma of a high noise society is not wrong unto itself. It's a question of whether the pace at which it operates is attuned to the, to its ultimate concerns. That's right.
And then at later on, and I'm getting to beaver governance here, but I want to, I want to take a pass through a later comment by Agassiz when they say, I prefer the scale of a journey. It is why I am an addister rather than a murderer to roles. I have no patience for the office. And so the scale of the journey is clearly the scale at which this book is focused and it's the scale at which human cognition is focused, you know, our own narrative bias, the Kurt Vonnegut story anatomy.
Yeah. I don't know. I'd just like to hear you riff on what it means to acknowledge as Agassiz does, yeah, there's a focal length at which we actually operate. That's good.
Yeah. Because of course the other thing about the beavers, I do, I love the beavers. I'm so happy. You know, you realize that when you were kind of project of this scale, you realize there's a lot of ways it could have gone because there's many things indeed that I started and that got cut out or I, you know, attempted and failed at.
Well, you know, characters and modules and twists and turns, it's just, it's all very kind of like a fuzzy probability cloud of what could be. It's not like there was only ever one version of this book that could ever exist. I'm very happy that it's the one with the beavers in all their weirdness. It's the made into people's hands because I really do love them.
And as you indicate, and as they argue or point out in the pages of a novel, they were happily remaking whole ecologies for millions of years before humans ever showed up. So it's like get in line. The other thing though about their civilization, their kind of mature civilization as depicted in Moonbound is that they are great utilizers of data. They maintain this.
This isn't really a spoiler because it's not that exciting. You learn in the book that they maintain this vast network of sensors kind of woven in through these plant structures. I mean, it's absolutely incredible. Yeah.
Google wishes it could sense the world with this kind of ongoing fidelity and indeed sensitivity. So they pull all this together in these sort of strange future biological computer spaces that it's better described in the book as you know, but I don't want to belabor the point too much. And the point is it's data. It's just rich raw data about the world and they use that to inform their arguments and make decisions about race ecological interventions.
One of my favorite sections of the book, I'm not sure that a lot of other people agree with this, which is good. There's a lot of competition for best section of this book. But one of my favorites is actually the one where our chronicler who up into that point really has talked a great length about the importance of story, the way that story is kind of moving into their own perceptions of the world. Obviously, we've heard about the importance of stories and these AIs that have gone so awry.
So we've heard all about that. There's a section where the chronicler encounters the vast database of the beavers. And it's actually a great enticement because essentially the database reaches out and says, hey, come on in, the water's fine. You could know it all.
You know, you look, it's all here. Every question you could ever have about the world and what's happening now and what happened before. It's here in this ledger, you know, in this giant Excel spreadsheet and the chronicler is indeed quite enticed, but also realizes that that would mean the end of the story and in a sense the end of them as a person or as an agent or a point of view and that potential dissolution is of course terrifying. And so they fully and they say no thanks.
But I think that tension is real and interesting and actually has a lot to do with our modern, our modern world. Now I think we are surrounded by databases, you know, obviously lots of companies and government organizations use them every day and they're just growing and growing and growing and growing. And there's just no getting around it. The texture of a database, the grain of a database, how it feels, all the instruments you have to use to interact with it and or even think with it or argue with it are completely different from those of a story.
And I think that tension is interesting and ongoing in the 21st century. Okay. Well, you gave me a chance to weave together four other citations from inside this book because yeah, I drew a heart on that passage where your chronicler says, I had seen my subjects in Tai S in the book, you say the language of the ants at their apex was far too circumspect to plant the flag of the sovereign eye. In that language, there wasn't a first person, their narrative swarmed and glistened many angled shimmering with contradiction.
That's how the world is a lot of the time. And so again, like that's what my former colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute would call the point of self-organized criticality. And the first person I interviewed for the series, my mentor Richard Doyle at Penn State, made the point in his book, Darwin's Pharmacy, that the internet or the condition of transhumanism is basically psychedelic or he called it eco-delic in the sense that the high information throughput overwhelms our default mode network. Overwhelms are narrative faculties.
And so again, where this presents challenges to the characters in the story, I think is of note that earlier on in in Rathvarya, one of the wizards says, we are also ancient, we have forgotten ourselves. And so again, like this question of, I love thinking about this in terms of the life extension conversation, right, which is, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson did this in the Mars trilogy also. It's like, at some point, the human brain, it has a kind of expiration date, or at least it seems to. And if we are to hack that, if we are to try and extend a person through time, if we're to try to pursue a Faustian project of immortality, then the joke is on us because the man becomes one of metamorphosis and becoming one of the dream of the dream of the crown of the right, a plural lifetime, or a set of linked lifetimes.
And maybe they have, you know, rich connections, one to the next. I think that has to be true. I love, there's no question of shortage of science, fictional treatments of that kind of thing. Because I think it's a really, really provocative, in fact, useful thing to think about if only because obviously some of that mechanism has to unfold in our own normal sized, you know, normal, unsightly enhanced.
That's actually their hands. We're totally ready in the realm of science fiction that, you know, longevity, even now in the 21st century, and already that's to figure into our lives. I mean, I'll speak for myself. I absolutely have a sense of continuity.
You know, how did I introduce myself? I talked about myself as a young person in the library. So obviously I am that person. I feel connected to him.
At the same time, I sometimes consider different versions of myself in the past with some curiosity. Some distance, shall we say? And I also feel grateful and or a little annoyed at him for various things for setting me up or for kind of making some poor decisions on my behalf. And I'm sure that will continue as my life continues.
I think that's quite healthy. I think at least I play with those feelings. I kind of try them on for size and say like, to what do you mean does that feel right and incorrect? Does it feel weird?
And I'm like, no, it's, you know, there's no version of me that passes dead. Oh, that's too creepy. Whatever the response, I think it's just a great exercise. It's a great thing to spend all the time doing.
So yeah, and I hope you can let me know if we spoil too much here. I'll try to be vague. One of the more interesting applications of this in the narrative is when another character wakes up from the height of the anth and steps out and says, you know, I am such and such as told in the great myth. Yeah.
You're protected. Everyone goes with one myth. You heard of the myth. You heard of the myth.
We didn't get that. Oh, it's the bee. A myth. You know, and so there's that notion of there it is again, you know, the self that isn't catching up or you know, this is something that long now in particular has dealt with misunderstanding around the nature of that project as merely monumentalist in its thinking, right?
Like first presentation, ever given it long now, at least the one I'm aware of was Neil Gaiman's talk on how you create religions in order to pass things through time. And so yeah, it has a bit of that that's that that's stank on this character as a great propagandist that you know, is supposed to come forward in order to help the future in the future is like old man yells at cloud. Yeah, no help. No help.
We're fine. Yeah, we're good. So this is where I want to get into the beaver governance because you know that the way that the beaver society works through its debates, it's or at least it's determination is through something very much like, you know, Jonathan Rosen's Templeton grant on the anti debate is structured like this where you are basically not allowed to participate in less you are capable of compressing your opponents argument into a form that satisfies them. That's right.
That satisfies them. They have to and not be grudgingly either, not in the sense of, you know, if we were right, if this was a lively debate and we were talking about whether, you know, bananas are good and I was able to say, well, well, I suppose if you had to make the argument you'd say, but no, that's not it. That's not it. I need to be able to, you know, restate the core, the heart of your Michael's argument about why bananas are like the best thing to have in your Cheerios for breakfast and you have to go, yeah, well said, that's it.
And of course, vice versa, right? Right. So social learning in the sense is encoded, you say on 400 of the hardcover, the beavers had perfected a technology that was powerful and dangerous. For when you made an argument with rigor and sincerity, the full force of good faith, you began to believe in it and what then.
And so this is the way in which the beavers actually beat the humans as far as. As being deserving of planet scale governance because they have these longer time scales at which they're, you know, their sphere of concern, they accept that part of the responsibility of living that long is to allow oneself to be changed. Yeah. I mean, I think it's so true.
I will tell you, you may or may not be aware of this. For me, the origin of that debate format is indeed with the long now, which we mentioned several times in the past. I don't know that they've run one of these debates in quite a few years now, but back in the late 2000s, say there were a couple of them, just kind of as part of their ongoing seminar series in San Francisco, which I always would attend these wonderful public talks by geologists and science fiction writers and astrophysicists and just all sorts of people who form it, form it, stuff for me at that time. So if you were these debates and if I remember correctly, one was about nuclear power and maybe there was another about something about like genetics, stuff, these were debates up on stage with two participants and they unfolded in exactly this way.
And it was this wonderful thing where in a sort of traditional format, both of them would make their case strenuously for whatever side of this argument they came down on, but then they would both take turns doing this reformulation, where they each had to sort of explain the other person's point of view, the other person's argument to their satisfaction. I just remember, I mean, I saw two of these, but they made session impression. They have stuck with me ever since as just a radical model of discourse taking each other seriously. And so one, it's very cool and satisfying for me that it made its way finally into this book, you know, it really truly was a powerful experience and memory that just rattled around inside my brain for more than a decade and finally landed on these pages.
And in a real, you know, I got to really bring them to life in a cool way. Because of course the beavers, not only the beavers don't even, they debate and they argue but then they also build, they build these 3D forms, because of course they do a beaver, like a beaver obviously thinks in architecture, not in words. So there's that. The other thing is I truly do think that it's, it's not only like, it's one thing to kind of abstractly consider, oh, that's interesting.
What an amazing way for people to kind of work through a disagreement or a debate or a problem. You really think about it, at least I do. And I imagine myself as a participant in some debate as something that's really hardcore, like a real, real gnarly issue. And one in particular, maybe where I think the counterclaim is quite dangerous, you know, we're not just having a debate for the fun of it.
We're like, these issues have real stakes. And you imagine yourself doing the thing, making the arguments, recapitulating it. And it does feel dangerous. It feels like, well, wait, I have to think that.
I have to like think those thoughts or say those words and you're like, yes, it's part of, it's a way of respecting another mind. And it's a way of sort of setting up mutual terms of agreement and debate. You're like, fine, but I still don't want to do it. And in that, in that reticence and in that, I mean, I just keep coming back to the sense of danger.
I think there's something really deep and interesting. I think the tension is healthy. I think it's good to recognize that like one of the things, there's so many things that are messed up in our public sphere and public discourse and, you know, everything that is called the debate in like modern culture, like presidential debates or when two people debate on TV, they're not really debates. They're either something else.
But all that stuff, I think part of the premise, I think part of the problem is that deep seated discomfort with even thinking the thoughts. And I don't know what we think is going to happen, but I think we're afraid to do it. So this is exactly where I wanted to head with you because I wrote an essay years ago called Painting is Dangerous. Whereas making the same claim generally about the creative act, you know, Victor Frankel says that which sheds light must endure burning or he who sheds light must endure burning.
And if we are metabolic creatures, creatures born from the uneasy peace treaty between photosynthesis and oxygen based glycolitic. Yeah, burning. If we are literally burning. Yeah, no, I love remembering that.
Yeah, what is life? It's the slow burn. Yeah, there's it's like literally that's just true. That's just accurate.
That's the creative destruction. And at one point, one of the wizards in your story says, one of the rules of my guild is if you don't know what it does, don't touch it. That's just right. Like if you don't know why the fence is there, you don't have the right to remove it.
And yet, like you said, the presidential debates this year are not going that way. Back to the question of who is really at the wheel of this or are the people that have keys to the halls of power themselves effectively just the robotic servo of some kind of ideology and so. Well, I was just gonna say, I was gonna say, it's funny, I almost feel like I don't think anyone has the keys to the halls of power. And I think most of the real mechanisms of power are now have become autonomous and they always have a lot to do with capital with big huge dead pools of capital.
I'm a big fan of the work of sociologist named Zigman's Baumann. You can't say. Like with the burning. Yeah, without saying.
Zigman's and you know, yeah, exactly liquidity, which is written in 1999 absolutely incredible because for me, at least it is so much the skeleton key to now the world we live in now, like more and more and more. And you know, he has several diagnoses, big, big work in wide ranging. But he has a few key diagnoses and one of them is this weird and there's different. I think it's truly different from the political problems of like the 60s or the 50s or whatever.
The political situation of the 21st century is that like nothing can be done. You're getting things can happen. And in fact, anything could happen anytime, but we can't we for whatever you literally can choose whatever we of whatever sale you want can't do things. And you know, he has arguments and reasons for why that might be the case.
But it feels right to me. That feels right to me. I mean, I guess in some sense, it should be a little bit of a bomb because it means even like the evil geniuses can't do things. But you know, I would like the people with good ideas and grand plans to maybe be able to do some things too.
But right now it's just things are just a is a goop. It's a glop. Well, so I'm glad that you make the point that it's the pools of dead capital, right? Or the black goo, you know, that shows up again and again and again in science fiction.
And you know, I talked about this when I had Tim Morton on the show because they in their latest book, they talk about how they come up as term no bad daddy, which is the sort of super egoic bad parent that runs our lives that that creates evil in the world by motivating us to do good things in order to compensate for some sort of fundamental lack that emerges in like an attachment. Sure. And so here we are, you know, the institutions of our world are these enormous scaled up expressions of our own childhood complexes in that respect in the respect of why is it that we are so intent on building these kind of lousy beaver dams that function as the parents that we wish we had or that we wish we were. And this is exactly the question I'm trying to ask you because we're in a weird situation here where you describe this in your book really elegantly as when this reaches its apotheosis, what we have created are dragons and this is not spoiling anything because you make this clear in the first pages that come back from their space exploration and say you need to suppress all wireless communication, you need to destroy all media on this planet.
We are exerting a top down suppression of human civilization for reasons that we can't or won't explain to you. And the war that erupts out of that is one of a rebellion in which we thought we were making children but we made our parents and then our parents told us to do something that we didn't like. And you characterize the dragons as beings that refuse to sleep, you know, that won't, again, like that's a kid thing, right? I want to go to sleep.
But it's also an amplification of that same kind of propaganda, mythological self-extension into the indefinite future and a mortalist authority. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why doesn't sleep money?
Money never sleeps. Yeah, so really the question I'm asking you is how do we reintroduce sleep or human living or surrender into our institutions? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think it has to do.
It's good. I mean, so good question. Don't have the answers to it. The right question though.
And I'm not someone just speaking for myself. I'm not someone who like, I don't think they like every big institution or even like you can exercise institution in the world today is like bullshit. I think there are good ones out there doing good, interesting work and you can kind of you can look around and say, okay, what would it take to make more of the world more like that even if it seems daunting to do so? I do think, I mean, this is pretty basic.
This is not radical really. I think more institutions that exist within a logic outside that capital would be a good start. And you see, again, glimmers of this, there's ways to make even big corporations more worker responsive to make sure that worker ownership and worker input is right up there at the top and a board of directors. Of course, there's also ways for things to be totally worker owned.
It's like living in the Bay area. It's hardly a, you know, it's like capital here, but there's also a lot of relatively speaking at least compared to other parts in the United States. There's a lot of worker owned stuff that's very successful. I mean, it's not Google.
Sure. So, big, successful companies within some cases, many hundreds of employees. And I mean, that's kind of why I like this boring, you know, not like they're out in the street every day, like chanting their workers' slogans. No, they're just making bread or like there's a place, or right now actually right next to my office and where I have on my books and do a lot of my work.
They install solar panels. It's like a solar panel place for businesses and big buildings. They've been businesses in the 70s. Like, yeah, just work around.
It's a lot of network around now. And they're just doing their work and hiring more colleagues. And you're like, I truly believe that there's something in that logic that just allows us, again, for any scale of us to like start to address more interesting questions and more interesting problems. I think it's going to take more stuff like that and hopefully over time and stuff like that at larger and larger scales to get some of our interesting, but that's just my opinion.
Yeah. Well, you know, to tilt at this question from a slightly different angle and see if I can elicit more opinion from you on this, you're right that not all institutions suffer from this. But it seems like, you know, again, if you look at the survey that Xander Rose and other folks at Long Now did on the longest living businesses, right, you were actually all small, relatively small. Yeah.
And then there's been a lot of work done on scaling in science and innovation. You know, I'm thinking of Johan Shoe and James Evans, who wrote a piece, Slow Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science. I wrote about last year, I'll link to this in the show notes that they say that basically like the bigger the thing, the more you see these kind of biophysical scaling laws where it takes less and less risk, like the way that elephants are the only mammals that don't jump, you know, and I don't know that. Yeah, delightful facts.
Yeah, right. But it's like how could they, right? Because the bigger you are, the harder you fall. And yeah, but then again, whales, whales jumps.
So, you know, it's, there's a, we got to be careful here. We got to be careful. Well, too quick with our analogies. Well, I say some of it is about mechanical properties and some of that is that when a whale lands, it lands in water.
But yeah, so another question has to do with, you know, like Eric Hoel talking about the information theory explanation for dreaming and how, you know, the dream exists in order to prevent the brain from overfitting on its training data throughout the, you know, as it learns through the day, the weird associations that come up in the dream space are basically the brain in his model injecting noise. And so part of it is, again, like this question of sleep per chance to dream is how do we get, you know, you set an over fixation on the profit motive as part of this problem. It's the collapse of the complexity space into this one dimensional optimization landscape is part of it. But there probably is more, I'll tell you what it makes me think of this is like very zoomed in and not, not a global scale is not going to solve anybody's problem in the world.
But I do think of this immediately as you talk about that, which is that the structure of my life has actually changed in the last several years and has to do with my work outside of writing fiction and doing science fiction, imagining stuff, I help operate an olive oil company. And one of the things about olive oil is that is made from olives and one of the things olives is that they are a thing that exists in the world that grow according to a certain cycle. We have not, you know, yet found out how to genetically engineer free olives that grow year round. So there's a harvest in the Northern Hemisphere.
It's in October and November. And as a result of that, my year again, my schedule, you know, five years ago and before used to be very normal, I think, for many American workers in a sense that it was kind of the same year round, you know, maybe was working on different projects or whatever, but week to week, the diversity was perhaps in the week or in the day rather than, you know, oh, is it August or is it November? Now it's highly seasonal. And basically in the middle of September, for me, it's pencils down because I'm not writing.
I'm not doing podcast conversations like this. I literally relocate to a different place. I start thinking about different things. I fire up some very big machinery and we continue to do that for a few months.
Now that's not sleep, right? In fact, it's a very hard work. But it is a different mode, really, really different mode. And it was just a great surprise to me to find out how good that felt and how healthy and sort of nourishing and ultimately just really, really, I hate to say productive because that sounds like, you know, just back in the, in the trap.
But you know, fruitful. Ah, we'll say fruitful. I'm not a productive. How fruitful it felt to adopt that kind of schedule.
So that's just all to say. It seems to me that there are certainly some people with certain kinds of jobs among them, us olive millers, also certain cultures, you know, obviously still Europeans are famous for their wonderful long summer vacations. And we can look around maybe for some examples, you marble all throughout the world and different kinds of people doing different things that, okay, so it's not quite sleep, but it is at least also not the relentless. It's the idea of like breathing, inhaling and exhaling or like, I don't know, changing your posture in a healthy way.
And I think there's a little bit of hope there. Again, just because I'm still high on the conversation I had with Tim Morton, Tim specifies the sacred is the feeling of biology because biology is, they prefer not bios or zuos, but thumos, the root of rhythm and that it's the oscillation of the pulsation of living systems. That's great. That's great.
That is, you know, the channel for that kind of sacredness that we, I think we can work life balance. And it's not optional. I mean, that's the thing. It really is how powerful we are.
Well, this connects, you know, like a Lego brick to what we were discussing before about the glory and the horror of a place like Rothvaria where you can do anything at any time. And that right, the great kind of balance to that is the natural world, which no, you can't do whatever you want at any time. There are certain things that just have certain seasons. And yeah, turns out boy, certainly just to pay attention to that no matter what the context of your life, that helps with everything to just take note of the face of the moon, the fact that the plums are, you know, right on the trees, now on my sidewalk and all the rest of that.
Yeah. We're in a plum canning jam. Yeah, it's right. You know, and it's kind of stupid.
I didn't use that stuff. I was not tuned into those wavelengths at all. And so maybe part of the challenge, I mean, it's easier to kind of formulate how this would work in a personal sense, the more interesting question becomes, I mean, to your point, how would an institution or indeed a society pay more attention to these other big rhythms that must be respected? And that's still the question.
I don't know. Actually, I want to suggest that you have answered the question in this book, you know, to treat this as a canonical sacred text of multi-sale thinking and multi-dimensional thinking, you know, when we look back at the idea of academia as an institution, it has its roots in scholarship and scholarship is etymologically associated with the idea of leisure, right? So there it is, that notion of rest and the freedom from the market pressure that gives someone the space to think. It's like, you know, I think I told you in our emails leading up to this conversation that I've numerous fellow podcasters, Jeff Martell, Phil Forti, Eric Davis and others, and I regard ourselves as occupying a kind of para-academic scene called the weirdosphere.
Cool. And that so for years, I've been trying to ask this question and we're kind of taking steps in this direction of what it looks like to actually create something that shows up in your book, the College of Weird. Yeah. And my mind, when this came up, I was like, it's there, it's in the book.
That's great. That, you know, I think if you're going to ask what it looks like to institutionalize this, one of the few places where actually Rich Doyle was actually bemoaning in the conversation that we recorded for this about how, unfortunately, the university environment now has been overexposed to money concerns and that even though it still maintains an annual press pulse kind of flow of on-season off-season stuff that the profit motive has complicated in the same way that the divestiture of Bell Labs complicated the innovation going on inside of its own groups. But anyway, in the time that we have remaining, the one thing I really want to talk with you about is the image that you paint of scholarship and a scholarship that is simultaneously both very familiar and possibly very strange to people who think about scholarship in the way that I think most people do. But not to me.
Yeah, you'd be a natural to the College of Weird. Are you a swimmer? You're a swimmer? Cause that's the answer.
You're going to need to be able to hold your own in a dining pool. You know, of course, what etymology is weird in the book as you know, but folks who wouldn't necessarily know this, having 9,000 to get it's W. Y-R-D, one of the great old words of old English and middle English. And it means fate.
It's a little complicated, but it means fate like the famous, you know, three fates where we're often called the three weirds or the weird sisters, which is awesome. And the fact that this all kind of mashes together and collides fate and strangeness and it's just delicious, you know, you look for that kind of stuff when you're naming things in the novel because it's irresistible. Yeah, what characterizes the life of the College of Weird? It's really remarkable.
Maybe it's a little old-fashioned. I mean, I don't know really that much about frankly the state of scholarship today. It's just anything of a century ago. These are all independent projects.
I mean, all the scholars in this College of Mine, on this, on this cold, rocky coast and it's, you know, sort of dark and humid buildings, they're all in a sense investigating the same thing, but they're all doing it on their own terms and everyone they get up and decide what next step they're going to take in their own project that day. It does seem to me like, so I mean, of course a writer would say this because I actually just described my work too inadvertently. So perhaps not surprising that I think that sounds awesome, but I do think it sounds awesome. I think probably that's got to be part of the recipe for success, just truly getting people the infrastructure they need and my College of Weird, they have a warm, great hall where they drink a lot of coffee and get cozy and then they have these diving pools where they go and dive for the secrets of the universe.
But then beyond that, you got to just let people go. It's the only way to get to the good stuff. The final kernel of awesome insight that I feel communicated through this, because after leaving the Santa Fe Institute, I got deeply preoccupied with Magic the Gathering. And also there was a conversation I had once where I mentioned the archetype of the fool in an episode of Complexity Podcast where I was talking with authors of a book called Calling Bullshit on the role of fact-checking and collective intelligence and talking about the importance of nafes to collective intelligence, the importance of the fool to the operation of the court.
And I got called out for bringing up tarot cards on the show because I'm representing an elite scientific organization. But your scholars in the College of the Weird preoccupied themselves in their downtime by playing cards. And I love you saying here, they were richly illustrated, dense with strange detail like the tarot of the ant. So in my argument with my former colleagues, I found, you know, I'm attempting to justify that the tarot is acceptable here for conversation about collective intelligence.
I found an article by Inesumetsky at MDPI Entropy, which is probably the premier journal of information theory on tarot cards. The article concludes thusly, and this is where I would love for you to riff, because this is I think the way that the shuffling of cards invites stochasticity or invites randomness. You're not just stacking the deck. The cards are images that contain information, but in a nonlinear way, complementary to language, as you were saying earlier, how it might have been different had we used image rather than linear sequential grammar.
And So, Semetky's article concludes by saying computational structures are self-referential, hence capable of self-understanding. This is the ultimate value of tarot. By means of self-reference and critical self-reflection, we can achieve new understanding and even anticipation, thus computing our own evolution as participating members in the computational universe. So it's like, oh, well, actually, it's a mistake to get rid of the tarot because the tarot is the way that we game without succumbing to some sort of finite game, succumbing to some sort of optimization function.
Yeah. The tarot is cognitive tool. I mean, of course it has cousins, rich cousins, they're eating and more apple bones and all that. There's a whole host of human tools.
That's right. It's right. You think of them as tools for intuition. I mean, yeah, tools for thinking and imagining.
I love the books. I'm sure many folks listening to this know them and love them as well. The series by Philip Pullman called His Dark Materials is just fabulous. It was some of the great works of literature in the last many decades.
And the way he used to, of course, he sort of invents a new one there. Each thing do play a role ultimately, but he invents his elite theometer. I won't go into great detail, but it's worth pursuing for folks who are interested in this line of thinking because it's a wonderful, like imagined tool for a yet essentially for divination and intuition. But it has that same sense of like just dense, non-literal symbols.
You're like, there's meaning there, but it's not clear that it's only one thing or could only be one thing. And the way that this fictional instrument in Pullman's world or the real tarot cards of our world, of course, is many versions nowadays you can get, you can get all sorts of weird incarnations of the tarot. There's something about that that just seems to be caten up for the human brain. It is.
I mean, it does not seem to. It is definitively something just clicks and to deny that or to frankly to the forsake that. No, not interested. But this instrument and this set of symbols does seem to resonate powerfully with this very important organ that I have and everything that I've packed it with, but not interested.
I will go read a table of logarithms instead. It's just like, it's just like, it's logical. I mean a lot of your cool. Yeah.
Yeah. I would give up on such a source of fun and imagination. So it was my hope. I'll tell you of course, the modern fiction writer, one thing just back of your mind at all times in the 21st century is merch.
You're like, well, can I make a t-shirt? Could I make a little something that exists in my fictional world? And I would love love love to somehow find a way to make my cards, my dragon deck from the novel reel and I've got some copies and salamages to be on it. I'm on it.
Great. I know people have been begging me to do an article card deck for years now. Yeah. It's fun.
But anyway, I feel like in that we answer a question about the role of knowledge and agency and rationality. It's a very Ian McGill-Chris thing. Like don't discard the right hemisphere. But I just want to leave it open in the last couple minutes here if you have any other thoughts or ways that you offer to draw people's attention into these concerns about how to exercise our agency or how to cultivate self-knowledge in a world that frankly is very much like the world that you have written in this fiction.
And then just lastly, I would love to know three people that you think deserve a voice in the series and whom I should be interviewing next. Sure, sure, sure. Let me do it in reverse order because otherwise I think I won't be able to conjure who they might be. I think the writer and musician, Claire L.
Evans, is great both for her deep interest in crunchy, weird biological things but also some of that work. You know where we're going. Then it's easy. That'll be an easy email.
Who else? James Bridal, he's an artist and writer who wrote a book. Bull's Eye, Bull's Eye, I think for the interest of this podcast and yours, the name of the book is, what is it, what is it called? Ways of Being.
Ways of Being. And it is, it's phenomenal. It's a catalog of ways of being. And it ranges from obviously human ways of being to animal ways of being to plants to machines.
It basically catalog of minds of ways of being a mind in the world. It's absolutely wonderful. It was an entry, there was some needing of that material into the, I don't know, super dough of moon bound or whatever it is. And for a third, for a third curveball, you know, I don't know that I have a name in mind other than to say, I've been thinking about this a few times, I think about scholarship, thinking about ways of thinking, ways of being.
I think mathematicians are just way off in the wild these days. So to find some super duper, and I mean serious, I don't mean like the pop science kind of smooth talking science communicator mathematician. I mean somebody deep in the weeds and just have them on the show and just talk about like, I don't know, folding cups into donuts or whatever it is they're doing these days with an infinite two points because whenever I read it, whenever I encounter it, and for me that's mostly in the terrific website called Quanta, Quanta magazine, it's just, I just, it's like my favorite. And I think that's the way I do that day whenever I dig into weird modern math.
So that's my recommendation. You know, I will say to kind of to say like, yeah, what else do I hope people pick out of this book? It is, I mean, it's been fascinating to hear you draw these associations to things I frankly in many cases have never heard of, other writers, thinkers, scholars who I've never heard of. And yet it's clear there are, and these are not, you know, imaginary connections, they're very real rich living connections.
And it is always so useful to recognize that, you know, that's, I mean, that's what culture or intellectual culture is. It's this ferment that for as much as it can be frankly, really fun and energizing to recognize a scene that you're part of. You're talking about the weirdos here, right? And I have people that I could name as being sort of right, I hope are in my scene, but that's never the real picture.
I mean, the way these things get transmitted around and amplified and reformulated is just like beyond articulation. You can't draw a map of it. I feel like people get cute and they try, but it doesn't really work. And I think that for everyone should be a very energizing thing.
It means that these ideas and, you know, not that writing a novel is like the great contribution to the future of human civilization or anything, but it's something and the ideas that came to me and now populate this, they're all like these weird bank shots and I know we're working on the next one now and I know some of the ideas that are going to go into it, but I'm sure that there's many that are still mysterious to me and they're going to come in and, you know, I'm not going to know maybe where they got started or through who or what they were transmitted. And I don't know. I think maybe some people find that like frustrating or chaotic, but I think the proper response is to find it really exciting and it ought to make you want to just kind of open up to things in the world and really have your antenna just like tuned and cycling through channels all the time because there's just so much interesting stuff to receive. Yeah.
I mean, you put it quite well yourself. You had to be cautious with analogies and the wilds of high dimensional mathematics or intuition and could not guide you. Where did I hear that? Yeah, high dimensional space.
It is. It's the 21st century condition. If I think Zigman's Bauman got us a lot of the way there with liquid modernity, but I guess the Sloan wants to insist that the 21st century is also very high dimensional as well for good and for ill. Well, hey, thank you.
I look forward to the next one. Yeah, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. I appreciate it.
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