Holistic Technology for Growing a World in Love with Larry Muhlstein

One of the great divides that we have is there seem to be a lot of people who care a lot about spirit and heart and love and care, but are often at odds with technology because they haven't seen how that fits together and they've seen all of the examples that we've created technologies that are at odds with love and care and well-being. And so they set themselves at work with technology and then all the technologists were like, well, we have these powerful tools that allow us to solve all these world problems, but they don't know how to understand things like spirits and God and care and love in a way that is not only compatible, but coherent with all of our deepest scientific understanding. And so this is like the essence of this technological love project that I've come to pursue, is trying to stitch this all together. I think I made a lot of progress, but I'm fighting with my own demons around figuring out how to actually get that into the world and also question ambitious projects.

Welcome to Episode 25 of Humans on Women. I'm your host, Michael Garfield. Technology is an extension of human will, the means by which we enhance our leverage. But leverage over what?

Over the last century, it has become increasingly apparent that our efforts to innovate our way to greater power and control, bring us no closer to the perfection of our frictionless, convenient, and orderly world. Every tool adds to the ever greater larger pool of recombinant possibility and exponential surprise. Risk and uncertainty haven't gone away. They've just been redistributed.

The further we see, the more we realize our non-separation, the more value we extract, the greater our externalities. But what if we approach technology through an ethic of care? What if we strove to make the built environment an embodiment of love? What if we accepted the way our tools shape us and used them to increase our sensitivity to their impact and consequence?

This week we hear from Larry Molstein, who worked at Responsible AI at Google and DeepMind before leaving to found the Holistic Technology Project. In Larry's words, care is crafted from understanding and respect and will. Once care is deep enough and in a generative reciprocal relationship gives rise to expanding, it gives rise to self-expanding love. My work focuses on creating such systems of care by constructing a holistic, socio-technical tree with roots of philosophical orientation, a trunk of theoretical structure, and technological leaves and fruit that offer nourishment and support to all parts of our world.

I believe that we can grow love through technologies of togetherness that help us to understand, respect, and care for each other. I am committed to supporting the Responsible Development of such technologies so that we can move through these trying times toward a world where we are all well together." End quote. In this episode, Larry and I explore the roots of philosophical orientation and trunk of theoretical structure, asking how technologies for reality, perspectives, and karma can help us grow a world in love. What is just enough abstraction?

When is autonomy desirable? And when is it a false God? What do property and self-hood look like in a world where the ground truths of our inner being shape, design, and governance? It's a long deep conversation on fundamentals we need to reckon with if we are to live in futures we actually want.

I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Be sure to visit the show notes for a list of mentioned resources and links to support our ongoing work. The show is just the tip of the iceberg. So much vital discourse is going on in the Discord server and other spin-off groups around these dialogues.

And I hope to find you there. Thanks for listening. You. Larry, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you for having me. Super excited. All right. So I want to take this at a casual pace.

I want listeners to get to know you and your story and the autobiographical details that bring us into context about your work and why it is that you care about what you do. And I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of asking people about the personal hardship that they've endured in their lives. To the extent that you and I recognize this relationship between technology and power or leverage and what compels a person to consider things deeply, et cetera. So have at it.

There's a lot of potential ways to enter this. Start at the beginning. Well, at the beginning, I believe that there's no real such thing as the beginning. Beginnings are when we choose to label them.

So let's see. I think I'll start in now, which is a more defined moment. So now I am this person. I recently left a role at Google DeepMind working on responsible artificial intelligence and am now running this fledgling thing called the Holistic Technology Project, which is like a consultancy around how to grow a world that is in well being and how to do that by supporting the development of technologies that are net good for both the whole Earth system and all of its parts.

And then as part of this project, I'm working on this big philosophical, theoretical and technological system called technological love, which is about how we can support more love in the world. And really how to get all of the pieces of the world resonating and intertwined in some sort of system of love. And I can explain later what that all means via technology. And I think I agree with a lot of the Buddhists and the Beatles and the people that love is the answer.

And I believe that in a pretty principled way. And I think that the only real way to make that happen is via the support of particularly designed technological systems. I can go backwards now from that as to like, why do I care about this? And you know, I think like many of us, I've lived a complicated life full of my share of beautiful things, well, my share of pain, hardship.

Let's see. Some significant components of my life have been a lot of health challenges that I've had to deal with throughout my entire life. Basically, since I was 10, that has shaped a lot of my path for both better and worse, both really be railing me in lots of ways and also giving me deeper opportunities for new kinds of perspectives and really to like understand, I think, more of why the world is as it is. And I really believe that the world is in a great disease right now and that disease is in one sense, like this Buddhist kind of disease thing where things are not functioning in a way that is easeful or healthy or well for most of the parts.

And that it's also in this medical sense, like it's sick, it's coughing and dying and rotting and burning. I mean, I lived in LA for a little over a year. And this week, I've been really feeling a lot of pain like many of us around watching so many beautiful parts of LA burn and so many people suffer in so many just like dreams and possibilities and go up in smoke with the literal fire. And I think that we need to approach our time in the world right now as a healing process.

And my own healing process has involved both these physical kinds of disease things as well as this whole journey of trying to figure out who I am and what my role in the world is. I've, I think, always had some sort of pull towards something specific, but not previously defined. So I've had to make a lot of my own way. And I was originally in high school, like going to become a mechanical aerospace engineer.

I was left flying and building things and fixing things. And some series of events happened where I got an opportunity to explore artificial intelligence as early as the summer before my senior year and just was blown away by how beautiful the theory is and what kinds of like really solid principles we can extract about the nature of intelligence, the nature of action and observation in the world and how it all relates together. prediction, all sorts of things, both from a philosophical side, a mathematical side and a design implementation side, like you can actually build these things and it worked, even back then, where a lot of things that people could build machine learning and it worked. And I got the opportunity to build in high school this machine learning.

Salver for the game helicopter learn that game where you just click a space bar and it goes up and you like go the space bar and it goes down the cave has this different shape and you try to like get it to not hit things and me and some people, records like New Jersey governor's school, we got to build this through reinforcement learning, like reading reinforcement learning textbooks and implementing this with a guidance of some professors from records and around the country. And that really shifted my path to becoming both like a computer scientist and a cognitive scientist and a philosopher and whatever it is that I am now that I still don't really have a label for. I then went to do an undergrad where I was doing computer science and cognitive science and I just wanted to do more things and fill in all the pieces where I was curious and it felt like there was something interesting and I didn't understand so I took classes and eventually I had to make up my own major because the only way to fit everything together was by like inventing this major in embodied intelligence which was really amazing that I had the opportunity to do that. This was at Kecks Western so really grateful for them and then I did most of a PhD in cognitive science which was also very multidisciplinary kind of thing and the thing with these multidisciplinary interdisciplinary kinds of programs especially back then but probably still to this day is that I think that they allow you to pursue a much more accurate and complete picture, less biased picture of the way the world works because you're not held in silos and you're not being constrained by one particular perspective or one particular set of tools from a specific discipline but there is not always a lot of guidance for how to make use of that whether it's in your education or in the world so I went through a lot of challenge about both kind of having to lead and direct my own education in a lot of ways I had the support of amazing people and I really had to figure it out and bumped into a lot of walls and had a lot of challenges and all my colleagues did as well and my peers and we all ended up on our own paths and that path eventually took me out of academia and into industry because I was really interested in actually applying things to real problems in the world and not just thinking about problems but like figuring out how do we build something that actually works and is useful and this is where I get really inspired by a lot of the beautiful technology of maybe a web two days like Google search and a lot of early Google products where they did manage to as they like make information be useful and accessible and really reshape the way that the world works and also things like Wikipedia and all of the free software open source kinds of movements etc but really at my heart has always been this more philosophical way of being I always felt that what we've been investing in insufficiently especially these days as we speed up in the way that we approach things is just really deep understanding of how the world works and I think that we can't really get reliable solutions to things until we understand the thing I mean our world is so complex that if you were to understand the piece of it or understand it to some degree and then say I've reduced the risk of reasonable amount and therefore I think that there's a solution we can implement we can't just sit around and pursue understanding we need to build something like chances are you don't understand it enough and amongst all the complexity you're probably going to cause more problems and I think there's ways to control for this and I mean this like consulting practice that I have slash whatever it wants to become a holistic technology project I've invested in figuring out how to control for that without having to solve for everything all at once all of the time but I really believe that if we're going to solve what I've been coming to call the great disease which is like another spin on thinking about what others have called the meta crisis but really seeing it as a connected system that is sick I think we really need to understand it and so I've been pursuing since grad school and since before that just a connected web of understanding both fundamentals of things like learning theory I think that there's parts of like foundations of statistics that we don't understand that are getting in our way of being able to do more generalized science for instance and things like communication theory I think we don't really understand what it means for me to communicate with a being that has different experience and meanings associated with actions and perceptions and words and symbols than I do and that understanding that more thoroughly allows us to build tools that facilitate this kind of communication and I think we now have the technology to do that so we just are really missing the philosophy and also things like spirituality and things like ethics I think that all of this can be understood in a way that is coherent and fits together and I see one of the great divides that we have is there seem to be a lot of people who care a lot about spirit and heart and love and care but are often at odds with technology because they haven't seen how that fits together and they've seen all of the examples that we've created technologies that are at odds with love and care and well-being and so they set themselves at war with technology and then all the technologists who were like well we have these powerful tools that allow us to solve all these world problems but they don't know how to understand things like spirits and God and care and love in a way that is not only compatible but coherent with all of our deepest scientific understanding and so this is like the essence of this technological love project that I've come to pursue is trying to stitch this all together I think I made a lot of progress but I'm fighting with my own demons around figuring out how to actually get that into the world and also question ambitious projects though there's been lots going on there but I'm making a lot of progress lately both with the project and with my own personal battles and I feel very optimistic about the future of me being able to really give a lot more to the world in these ways and here we are here we are I want to set you up to talk a little bit more about the definitional and fundamental components of all of this because in your writing it's not exactly axiomatic I guess everything that you write is very structured but first we must define the concepts and then you've got on the website where you've laid out the conceptual core of technological love it's your own hyperlinked I like I simple essay often doesn't say enough to contribute to a broad understanding where as a complex essay tends not to get written or read the structure of the site is intended to mimic the natural structure of the theory itself which obviously as somebody who is obsessed with exploring idea networks really appealed to me but it's not just the hyperlinks in the text itself but every time you pull up an idea you can see the cloud of related concepts starting there and bearing that in mind as like I did with K a lot of McDowell being like okay we're going to over the course of this conversation cut a a low-dimensional vector embedding pathway through this thicket of related stuff it seems like the place to start here is I want to just read two bits off of this site and then give you the chance to expand on those as you see fit link them to your other core ideas and then carry that relay to somewhere else in this so you say we aim to control the future in order to make it more predictable more legible but in the process we introduce disease and this disease gives us a predictable but unhealthy world and elsewhere like most diseases addiction does not originate in an individual or in a vice but in the properties of the system a system where people are incentivized to make money at the cost of the health of others and the world will give rise to a plethora of vices shiny tempting and available at the push of a button a world where selflessly helping others is costly and difficult is a world where there will never be quite enough help available a world where those who are suffering are seen as weaker or less worthy of our care is a world that will only breed loneliness disconnection indices so to take those and then just to call the long arc that I see possible first here you gave me a lengthy draft of an essay on reality technologies which I think is an area of special concern to me the issue of if we don't know what's real how do we coordinate our behavior how do we act according to our values which is something that comes up a lot on this show so I think just to note that I think when someone sets themselves up in opposition to the diseased system that is like ironically symptomatic of what you and I might diagnose is the underlying issue which is a disconnect between our ability to perceive and our ability to act on the rest of the world that is in a very deep and important way not separate from ourselves and yet the technologies that we've made as mundane as the ability to see news coming in from all over the world without being able to act in response in any kind of meaningful way to the suffering of other beings or in more or less obvious in more pernicious ways like the ways that we calculate economic value the opposite of that is like we have this extraordinary leverage over the world through the rendering calculable and operable through our mathematical systems and our monetary systems that never fully account for the illegible value that actually exists in the world that the world is bigger than any account of it and so even the most well-intended efforts are going to create consequences that we cannot foresee a lot of this show is dedicated to exploring the middle of this ground between these two extents of high agency low understanding or perception and then high perception low agency and in the middle to talk about holistic technologies and disease at the same time invokes the relationship between holistic medicine and allopathic medicine that I read your stuff and you know you talk about karma in here you talk about karma technologies in your work I think of Carl Schreider's short story that he wrote for ASU's project hieroglyph where he had policymakers in his fictional future British Columbia where haptic vests into the forest where their policies were going to devastate the ecological diversity and there is a prosthetic sense of imminent relationality with all of these beings that were made suddenly and viscerally sensible through technology and invoked a clear sense of what was at stake so I don't know I've given you another huge angle of stuff to work through yeah there's a lot there I don't necessarily know where to start let's start with you're a fan of Bayesian thinking when I hear you say that if you feel like you understand enough and that it's time to act that bad things often happen and that's a simple way of gesturing toward everything that I've been saying that it seems like the reason this show exists is to encourage the set of practices by which understanding is not something that you either train everything at the very beginning and then you just let the model run nor is it something that the search for meaning isn't something that you postpone until you have successfully executed the resource accumulation algorithm you've achieved everything you want to in your career that there's a sense in which in for instance I'm always thinking about the high-stakes situation where you're lost in the woods and if you don't know how to orient yourself you will not survive and so people tend to think of these things as moments along some sort of developmental arc but there's a sense in which survival success and significance are reflected in one another or are woven together at every moment of the process so yeah just thinking about what prediction and understanding have to do with one another in your thinking is seems like a tangible spot let's do the prediction and understanding thing and let's I think start with the question of how do we act in a way that is reliably good amongst all this complexity like where how do we not get paralyzed by complexity or risk or all this when it is an open system you can never measure that for sure so the way that I like to think about this and I've been written about this in a little while so I'm not recalling if I derived a real principle like a mathematical thing here yet I think maybe I did or at least I got like most of the way I think there is a mathematical thing here but basically when we act we have the sphere of influence in some sense there's butterfly effect says that your literal sphere of influence is the entire world system but the sphere of influence of things that you can actually reliably effect in a way that is different meaningfully from the pattern that is going to occur otherwise so we need to think about this concept in chaos theory of the emergent patterns and structures and the actual literal dynamics of molecules for instance so the effect that I have for instance of let's say like choosing to recycle a can or throw it in the trash on the full dynamics of the system is somewhat predictable but not massive in that assuming our recycling systems are filled reasonably and like that are trash systems are built in a way that is not sustainable it is going to be better for the earth system for me to allow this metal to be reused so that we don't have to go extract more aluminum from the earth for instance and when making decisions like that you can look at what is my expected influence what is my understanding of that and what is the cost to taking that action and in this case I mean Berkeley recycling for easy like the cost is very low of this kind of thing the expected impact is positive but not massive and clearly to worse the cost and therefore it is like it makes sense to cycle a can for things that are a lot more complicated what happens if we build this new AI technology and unleash it on the world or like a problem that has been faced recently of should we open source this AI technology or should we keep it closed within the boundaries of our corporation that we believe to maybe have better understanding of the ethics around this thing than other people maybe I just back myself in a corner let's see if I can answer this actually but you want to look at the expected maybe too big to analyze like this but generally if try an abstraction without a specific example and see if it is coherent you want to analyze the expected sphere of influence and really stay on the side of your understanding so examples that I think about sometimes I have this essay that I drafted a while ago that I haven't published that I need to get to call the technologies of power and understanding and it's about you know all technology basically acts as a lever to amplify the amount of influence that we have on the world and our problems that we have are really due to our technologies because without technology we wouldn't have enough influence to cause climate change for instance and when we do things like let's say cut down the rainforest or hydraulically mined rivers in California we have this short-term local value gain in the rainforest case you have more farmland more like in even simpler case than this is using nitrogen fertilizers to farm with so you get more crop yield in the short-term if you use nitrogen fertilizers but you cause that nitrogen to run off into the rivers which harms the river ecosystem and they have remarkably severe consequences on the stability of our earth system and it also accelerates runoff of soil etc and that soil takes way longer to create than it does to destroy and so in cases like this we have enough understanding to know that it's like a question of short-term versus long-term impact maybe when we initially created the technology we didn't have enough understanding but when you do something like create this whole new chemical manufacturing process and put it in all of the soil and all of the planet and you don't really understand the impact of this we need to figure out how to notice first I don't understand really what's going to happen and I don't think that we're unable to notice this I think we're unable to sufficiently care about this and take it into account in the economic systems that prevail so I think even at that time there were probably people who were like is this a good idea and when I read about these periods I hear that there usually were people who questioned it but they were silenced in some form or just ignored for a while and we have these things today as well and so the question should be like what is the extent of the understanding that I have of the impact and how can I dial down the extent of my impact maybe by starting somewhere small and trying experiments maybe by using a less disruptive technology initially etc such that I can still gather more information and try it because maybe there is something good but not have this huge profile of risk and so if we're just looking at this like power versus understanding thing it'd have to spend a little more time mathematically this and maybe other people have already done that but it's not so crazy to just look at how do we keep our power below our threshold of understanding which is from a Bayesian perspective really just like talking about how we update our beliefs and therefore our best understanding using evidence in a way that is rational and unbiased by our desires and our fears and all of the other things that influence how we act is the belief that this is going to be good when you take as much as you can into account clearly on the side of it's going to be good without risking too much of the other side such that it's worth taking this action and there's all sorts of complexity about this about like risk especially because there's cataclysmic risk that you always have this some degree and how much is too much but there's also just a sense of this is clearly likely to be net good and let's pursue this objectively and try to work together to both increase our understanding and improve the world at the same time and I think if we really manage to pursue that path it really does lead us to better solutions and the things that get in the way are all of these fears and attachments and lack of mutual understanding which manifests in inability to communicate inability to work together inability to care for each other inability to construct incentive structures such that everyone is going to be better off and everyone is supported and gets what they need in all the senses of everyone and I don't know where you want to go from here but there's all sorts of directions and the branching of all of this kind of thing is one of the reasons I decided to make this technological level website in a way that is interlinked so just like a alpha or pre-alpha version online right now but it is available because they figured it might as well share it and get some feedback so thank you for looking at that and I don't really know if I've talked with anybody about it yet so yeah yeah so you and I are members of a signal chat Andrew Dunne's group on wise innovation and a while back without naming names you and I ended up in one side of a dispute over the value of statistics for reasons I sympathize with but disagree with someone in that channel was basically saying that statistics are evil and you and I took issue with this and I think for the same reasons but I want to get into the notion that the processes by which we abstract and aggregate information so that we can see big patterns in it I think you and I both recognize as necessary but you have a kind of an apology for the only way out is through at the end of your draft on reality technologies where you say as long as we continue to have modern industry weaponry and any technology that amplifies our powers we must retain our ability to perceive and communicate in a trustable way so this is the bind I want to explore with you because the motivation to say statistics are evil is and I talked about this with Joshua DiCaleo in my conversation with him as well on scale and the transformations of consciousness that you have available by really deeply contemplating scale is that he's got a great section in that book on biophysical scaling laws like Jeffrey West's work and a lot of stuff in complex systems science depends on the observation of these statistical patterns but there is a huge difference that you've already pointed to on recognizing the what of the pattern even if it is a trustworthy pattern if the data is solid and then understanding the causal underpinnings for that data and this person in the chat was basically saying the abstraction vexes the issue of care care for entities as singular the care that emerges through as you put it in your writing for hurry up or dreaming you say for me to care for a being I must understand their essence and what it is for them to be happy healthy and harmoniously co-existent with their environment for example to care for a plant I must first listen to what it needs to be well but if you're looking at socio-physical models of human behavior at the scale of society you can care for society but you can't care for people as singular entities and so this is the catch that I think you and I acknowledged and we're trying to say yes this is true but what are we gonna do because again to jump back to reality technologies you say the defining role of technology is to extend our powers it allows us to perceive and affect the world more than we could with our bodies alone if we retain the ability to use technology to widely affect the world then we must retain an ability to perceive the nature of these effects so DiCaleo and I spent some time in our conversation talking about the fact that this issue of understanding emergent phenomena understanding that to know something at one scale does not confer the same kind of knowledge at other scales and this is what I was talking about earlier when I was saying that a lot of the suffering that we experienced through a perceived lack of agency a disconnection between our ability to witness this flood of information and our ability to act upon it so I mean maybe this is all just to lead you back into a simpler articulation of care and understanding and then will as you lay out on hurry-up we're dreaming but I just want to say that rather than talking about the military industrial complex or capitalism or whatever I see this every day in trying to teach my son cause and effect that it's like look in the moment you want to hit your sister and hitting makes you feel like you have some control over the situation but you need to learn that if you hit somebody they are very likely to hit you back and his predictive horizon hasn't grown that far yet again there's a lot for you to work with but yes well I also tend to learn about these things not by thinking so much about the big abstractions like the military industrial complex but by observing patterns and problems and challenges in my own life or in lives of friends and then try to find the underlying essence and abstract in a way where it's clean and makes enough sense and applies to enough different scenarios that I can then start to ask how does this apply to the big things and when you do this well you get something that does apply across all scales and so that's a lot of the intention of these principles and definitions and things including care and love and understanding but of course articulating something that is general enough is quite challenging so then I put a lot of energy into really trying to get super clear about as much as possible which is a lot of why this is taking a long time in things like this site I have put a lot of energy into you know what I mean by care so my definition of care is to support the well-being of a being and well-being support and being are all defined specifically as well and well-being is very personal or individual like what it is for me to be well is different than what it is for you to be well however we happen to have a lot of things about this in common because we're both humans we both have states etc but what it is for me to be well is more different from what it is for a tree in my neighborhood to be well yet there are still things in common and it's not beyond our understanding to understand what it is just for a tree to be well and therefore to support that but it might be beyond our initial understanding unless we decide to pursue and listen and learn about trees and like what is actually good for them and how do they thrive when are they happy when are they willing to give of themselves in various ways like fruits or like branches or even to be cut down to be used for structures I think that for something like a tree it's very hard for me I haven't spent my entire life trying to learn about trees I really love trees and spend as much time as I really can with them but I think for me it's really hard to know when do I cut this tree down if it's for instance like needed for lumber for a house or if it's in the way of something and the best we can do is really invest as much as we can in understanding both their well-being and the well-being of the systems that they're a part of so the trees not gonna live forever and I'm not gonna live forever and none of the things in our world will be in their current form forever so it's not like complete sac religion for things to die or be killed in my opinion as humans we have to kill to eat in some form so the question as all hard questions becomes like a nuanced subtle one and it's very individual and so pursuing that understanding of well-being is what allows you to support the well-being of that being which is what allows you therefore to care and therefore to get into relationships of love which we can talk about a little later and so you were asking at the beginning I think about how do we both care for individuals that compose the system and the whole system itself and I think that we care for the whole by creating structures and support systems etc.

usually through technologies and often I think by affecting the economic incentives structures etc. which is what government does for instance that allow us to care for the individuals together so it's not just the individuals you know I can't really care for me separately from the other people in my neighborhood it's how do we care for every how do we build things in a way that is good for me and my neighbors and everyone else in different parts and niches in the neighborhood ecosystem with Berkeley ecosystem or the Bay Area or California or United States or the whole earth such that all of our unique needs for well-being are respected and understood and supported in a way that like fits into a puzzle the ecosystem is really a puzzle where everything has a niche and fits together and plays a role and supports one another and I think that when you have something that like a healthy ecosystem everything becomes more useful and this is really the essence of what love is a system where each component is supporting the well-being of other components that if you're a component you find yourself generally supported and generally in a position to be able to support other components in the way that is relatively useful but if we upset the balance of the ecosystem whether it's like a natural ecosystem or a socio-technical ecosystem or some other kind of like complex modern structure then it becomes really hard for the individuals and so like when I think about this problem of how do we care for the individuals together it's like how do we create a technological system that is accountable to the individuals or really I don't think individuation is really even possible so like the pieces however we divide them and often you have to make some choices and that's fine for a while we're going to choose to define me based on my body and probably based on things that I articulate about myself and you'll have to pick boundaries more or less for each kind of thing that you're going to care about and then how do we solve for the joint systems problem such that I get what I need food, water, shelter, opportunity to socialize opportunity to make my own choices in my life freedom etc but such that this is not just true for me but for others so an obvious thing to me which I guess it took some time to extract this as a kind of essential thing is we need to make it such that I pay a cost if I'm going to do something that is harmful to others and this is captured more or less by the economic concept of the externality and the problem one of the really essential problems that we have is that in so many cases I don't pay that cost I can just do things that impact others whether it's other people whether it's the ecosystem or the environment or my neighborhood or my town or something and if I find solutions such that I derive benefit from taking those actions that cost things to others then I'm going to choose those things and then everybody's going to have to pay the price and then everybody is in a situation whether less well off and therefore less able to take good actions themselves and in order to account for being poorly off they need to take more radical actions towards protecting themselves because they don't have what they need and those more radical actions are achievable often only or at least far more easily by taking doing things that hurt others I mean this is where we found ourselves where often the only these like obviously viable action is to do is to hurt others and so many of us are either we get numb to this or we feel the pain of this and so we try to isolate ourselves this is why I think a lot of people try to live separate from society is like they feel the pain from this or they just somehow decide that they don't care and then they gain all sorts of other embedded psychological traumas and whatever and it's all because that is the solution concept that emerges from the current economic incentive structures and I think that we can fix that by figuring out how do we price all of those externalities in a way that makes it so that it is in my best interest for Larry to do something that is also in the best interest of the whole system and I don't think of this as impossible it is quite a large-scale endeavor but if we work together on developing this thing we can really solve the world's problems and this is what I'm trying to write about in my technological love work and in this book that I'm writing called the technological way of being in love I like many others these days find myself in my own personal version of this challenge where in order for me to do this thing which I believe to be best for the world it requires often great personal sacrifice and finding that path where I can continue to make reliable progress towards this goal while continuing to support myself and my own well-being which was required for me to make reliable progress towards this goal is remarkably hard and so I think you often it feels like sometimes find yourself in a similar situation where you really have dedicated your life to doing what you believe to be good for the world and it's way harder because of the world that we're in and the like economic structures and everything that I just described it's way harder to do that and sometimes feels impossible to do that and yet there is no other way we what are we gonna give up on the world so we have to figure it out and I remain hopeful that as I get better at this as hopefully I get more of like my story and like this kind of work and like the importance of this and like the elegance of this approach out I find more and more people who sympathize with this and also like want to work on it together and then if we're working on it together we're all supporting each other we find ourselves in a network of more support we find ourselves therefore with things being more useful and then we can make more progress and things start to accelerate in the right direction because like we are supported well enough that we can really do the work that we want to do in the world that we believe to be actually towards healing our planet so I think that there's a lot of hope but it's one of these things where it takes a lot of the work is and the hardship is in the early days of figuring it all out and getting through this like super marginal precarious part of the path until it's all built up enough that it becomes more useful and it's the same with starting any kind of business but it's easier to start a business and it's easier to do a lot of kinds of paths than this in my opinion because the incentive structures are such that it incentivizes me if I'm just looking out for this isolated extricated part of the world like of Larry and Larry's finances and Larry's ability to give to himself in a way that is gives him the life that he wants it'd be much easier for me to either start a company or just spend my time working at a large corporation or whatever it is then it is to like really pursue what I believe in but I think we all need to be in this time when everything is at risk we really need to be doing what we believe in and then we'll find ourselves working together eventually and it will become more useful and it's certainly more joyful and beautiful to do this kind of work than it is to do something that's maybe more myopic and not as full of care and love. So given you and I recognize myopia as constitutive to the disease I want to try to carry us one level deeper into a rigorous understanding of what we're facing here through a stereoscopic approach not just you and me together on this conversation not just us plus everyone listening specifically I want to take a couple of your passages from these three documents and string them together in a way that I create points on a plane that we can use as a lens to open up a little bit more about what you've written on communication and the issue of trust and the issue of being able to ground our understanding of perception and cause and effect you say technologies of care perform best when they're grounded in reality accountable to a diversity of perspectives and enacted in the causal structure of karma just a plus one everything that you just said I cannot think about anything that we've been talking about on this call without going back to Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil and the notion that again whether it's intentional or unintentional and I got this from Ken Wilbur in thinking about developmental psychology and how in some perverse sense people are always acting toward whatever they locally recognize as the good and Ken's example was intense but he makes the point that Nazis in a submarine in World War II are trying to win the war for their country and their way of life and that if you are caught in the amygdala vortex of just simply trying to survive in a world as chaotic and unstable and precarious as our world seems to be that drowning people tend to pull other people down under the water for error but they're just doing what they need to do so this question of care being a function of our ability to coordinate perspectives is a piece of it of being able to understand this cause and effect that's all stuff that you've already said and because as you say on your website communication bandwidth is proportional to conceptual alignment one of the things that I get really hopeful about with respect to because let's welcome hope into the room here about artificial intelligence in particular as a technology of care is that it can allow us to eventually this I believe fully realized this particular kind of tool allows us to translate things out of one person's conceptual framework and into someone else's or one person's preferred sensory modality and into someone else's and can assuming this issue of we're not being lied to we're not being hacked that we can trust the intermediation of these communication technologies can allow us to coordinate and of course this is like a huge issue that we're facing in society right now with misinformation and disinformation so from there to hop back into reality technologies and I guess a little closer to the understanding from which answers are gonna arise here you talk about perception as reliable information and reliable action as having the expected effect and you say the classical technical understanding of information has nothing to say about where belief change comes from it assumes you have a reliable base model and this model has uncertainty reduced by the receipt of form and that there's a critical distinction between change in belief and acquisition of knowledge if you do not trust that an image of a tree was generated by a process originating in the existence of that tree then you may not update your beliefs in this case you will not gain knowledge regardless of whether that tree is present if you believe that the image was generated by a causal process originating in that tree but it was in fact synthesized by generative AI you will update your belief but not gain knowledge in fact you will lose knowledge so this is the like these are the cataracts that we're trying to row our way through right now as a society and you say coherence is causal consistency and that the truth is coherent with reality and ultimately causes less to produce but then where I want to leave you in light of all of what I've just said is that you know when I went to college to study evolutionary biology one of the things that we could never get away from was that lying false signals in animals is an evolutionarily sustainable strategy meaning that there will always be entities within that population for whom a false signal is less costly than the truth relative to the immediate gain so yeah again we're lingering in this area but when as you say like the plurality of perspectives is good the lack of shared reality is a problem and that we can develop the technology to construct an indisputable and shared picture of the nature of the world in a way that will support productive disagreement and communication we have these two things one is that we never have perfect knowledge that if we're gonna be rigorous about this we have to accept that many of our beliefs are not actually grounded in a coherent causal understanding and then part of that is because we're being lied to and and that there is a sort of I don't know game theoretical justification for lying to other people and lying to ourselves and it's not just people it's entities at whatever scale so again I just want to hear you speak to this particular set of problems one being the challenge of ground truthing what we're talking about and the other in assuming no malevolence we still have the issue of good intentions paving the road to hell and then not all of those good intentions arise from self-constructs with the same radius of care and that we're always gonna have cheaters in the system yeah great questions I think that I'm trying to push back on all of these ideas and I think that these ideas emerge largely from the fact that I don't know exactly which like game theoretic lying phenomenon you're talking about but I think I can talk about it anyway and some can try but occurs between crabs and birds and other animals that don't even have what we think of as a self-model sure I think that these incentives emerge from myopic perspectives and that like myopic perspectives are okay if you're in this domain where like evolution I think actually like we have to go one step up we have to ascend from evolution in a certain way because evolution has evolved us to be competitive individualistic beings in a lot of ways at least like biological evolution has incentivized this for probably the crabs that you're describing and lots of kinds of things it works because individuals find ways to survive and then they survive amongst things but there's also these relationships that evolve where care and mutual support does evolve sometimes it's within between beings of the same species or community sometimes it's like between beings that are very different a bee and a flower for instance like these kinds of co-evolutionary relationships but I think like in the domains that we are in now our actions have such a huge effect on others that there really isn't room for this inefficient solution like we have this inefficient prisoners dilemma solution where if you can't find a way to coordinate and you can't incentivize other beings to work with you then the solution is to do the thing that is selfish we can talk about that is lying in this case but really the better solution if you care about the whole system's value is to somehow find a way to work together and I think that the way you find to work together is by finding a way to care about the other being sufficiently such that their value function becomes part of your own value function and this is where like this article that I'm writing right now called the economics of love falls in where it's about like how do we extend our value functions through this process of growing understanding care and love such that they encompass the values of others and therefore I inherently care about the other crab and therefore there's a cost to me not only in the risk of the other crab treating me poorly treating them poorly or relying to them but there's a cost to me in the other crab not getting something good it's the same as a family you're not going to compete with your children or your wife in a way that gets you something more than that their expense because you actually care about them and you love them and they're part of you in a real way and so if we can figure out I think really like we are all part of each other in a real way there are no real lines that separate us into system so if we can find ways to live that way and act that way and understand that way and make it easier to support each other such that it's not so expensive to do that then the real solution is actually truth and I think that truth becomes possible through what I'm talking about in this reality technology paper because you can actually start to like currently where we live amongst more being as you said being lied to all the time and we don't really have access to grounded truth and so it's really hard to get a shared conception of reality but I think technologies can be developed that change that they change the economics of reality and of lying and also make it just more available to me truth in some meaningful sense more available and there's always going to be room for diversity of perspectives because you're never gonna have all the information and there's also all sorts of ways of framing it and telling a story and I think that diversity is very healthy both in the system's perspective evolutionarily diversity is healthy because it provides robustness to change it provides more solutions to the problem and the wider pool of solutions I was writing about diversity recently it's like another reason why diversity is healthy and I'm forgetting but anyway I think that this is like the current situation that it makes sense for me to lie currently and I don't have access to truth currently and therefore all of the solutions that we find are ones that are worse for everyone but it's my belief that we can develop technology that changes all the economics of all of this and this is what I'm trying to write about in this economics of love paper and reality technology paper in this whole book that stitches all of this together and people can really build it. I just want to double down on this because we were talking about this a little before the recording you brought it up specifically that if you love someone according to your definition which is contingent on care which is contingent on listening and truly understanding the needs of that entity then you will not harm them but I think everyone listening to this can find an example in their lives I think a lot about parent-child relationships and I have what I hope is adequate humility to realize that some of the things that I'm doing for what I believe to be the good of my own children are going to be things that they're going to be talking about with their therapists in 30 years or whatever I want to connect this to what you've written about ownership and stewardship here because you talk about ownership as total control over being and stewardship as the responsibility to care and the toxic ownership patterns include where the owner abuses are inadequately cares for the object and the object hurts the owner due to it's not being well I think about the term in law you know just attendee at Abutendee under which the owner provided he harm no other may destroy or annihilate that which belongs to him but that's a rather large clause that's what you're pointing to is the provided he harm no other and so if we think about the idea that I'm gonna get a little radical here the money that each of us has which represents value that we acknowledge is in an inadequately accounted measure of whatever actual value went into that what we've been talking about this whole time then when you see someone burn money on Instagram or whatever when we see the conspicuous consumption or this particular rocket is being fired by somebody who makes less money every year than the cost of their rocket from every end it's being fired at people who will make less money than the cost of their rocket in their entire lives these the nature of this disjunction which right now I'm reading any human power by Mandascot which is a book about the death cult of the system that we have inherited versus these attempts to create more conscientious and collective forms of economics and governance and it's rendered in her story in a way that I think a lot of people listening to this understand as effectively an intergenerational argument because the more money you have the easier it becomes to rely on transactionality rather than relationality and so you get situations like Doug Rushkoff survival of the richest where you know or like to bring it back to the LA fires I've been I've seen tweets from people that are asking if money is no object can I hire a private firefighting team to come put the fire out of my house and so this when you quote Tory Hayden saying safety is the most basic task of all without sense of safety no growth can take place without safety all energy goes to defense yeah I just before we lean into your vision for how this can be done right I think like I want some sort of answer about how you can love your kids but somehow everywhere I look our parents that are not listening to their children when their children say the world is on fire right now how can you not make the coherent causal connection between the way that you are spending your money and the health and well-being of that which you claim to care for and this seems to be a really intractable issue because as you say in the reality technologies piece if the incentive to deceive is higher than the cost it's difficult to trust that you won't be deceived and there is also a degree of deception that corresponds to a cost for the perceiver to notice the deception the final boss I feel like in the quest to create loving technologies and a holistic framework for this is the epistemic issue that we're trying to pivot into from a world where the way that we account for value has made it there's the hidden cost of the everything we like you were saying much earlier in this conversation the actual cost of everything you buy in the supermarket is much higher than what you actually pay and so it's not just a problem of the the stereotyped boomer mentality that like all of us are in a system that the grain leads us to make decisions based on convenience that result in unintentional harm even to those things that we believe that we care about and so when just to wrap this up when you say that the will to care is not simply a choice but our duty as parts of the world that yeah seems the work to understand all of this and actually practice it requires what are for many people impossible investments in the time and the attention that it takes to doubt our models well enough and to allow ourselves to be uncomfortable enough to really grok the essence of that which we ostensibly care for yes there's a lot here I'm gonna try to answer as much as I can and then if there's pieces that I'm missing that are important let me know yeah I find that I found a very consistent dynamical causal pattern that things that are broken maybe we'll call them diseases like tend to get worse until you finally listen especially things that are deeply broken like it's just gonna keep getting worse until you're finally motivated to change so sometimes things stay stable in like a sick way and things can be stably on well but in the case of a lot of real health problems or the situation that we're in with climate change and all the other intertwined crises is gonna keep getting worse until we finally listen so our duty is really to try as best as we can to listen as soon as we can and to make changes as soon as we can both as individuals and as a society otherwise it's going to keep getting worse until we're either forced to listen or we listen de facto by not being here anymore and not having a society anymore and this is what happens to not say it so bluntly but it's what happens like with things like some of these fires like maybe we weren't even empowered to listen well enough fast enough because it's like really hard and required too much societal shifts but the claim it is changing these risks are real and the risk keeps getting higher and higher until in the middle of January we have the largest most destructive fire LA has ever seen it it's hugely tragic and it's not gonna be the last hugely tragic thing that happens if we don't really make changes and so things are just gonna keep getting worse in various ways that are often hard to predict the individual instances of until we can listen and really make changes systemically different individuals have different perclivities towards being able to change being able to listen or being willing or to change or listen some of them will unfortunately tragically pass away before they're able to do so or before they do so whether they're able or willing or whatever it is and so what we can do is work our best as ourselves to really learn and invest in understanding what is required to make these changes to our world and to try to share this understanding as much as possible with the people around us or just the people we have the ability to influence whether they're around us or somewhere else in the world and so this is why I find myself so called to this kind of philosophical theory writing work is because I found that there's something here that feels like I can make some difference and that I seem to be aligned in such a way from whatever perclivities I had and whatever path I happen to take to be able to be helpful here so I'm going to do my best both to figure this out to live it and to articulate it and share it so that we can all make progress and I'm gonna be missing stuff and I'm gonna fail in some ways and so hopefully other people pick up the slack where I fail and we can all work together to do it but I guess there were some other pieces here that were important we're never gonna not cause harm so you talked about your kids like there's gonna be something inevitably that they have to go to therapy for in 30 years and I think that's probably true I don't know any maybe very few counter examples to this because we all come into the world carrying lots of drama and the best that we can do is reduce it to being less and better than it was before my parents tried very hard and gave me so much and caused me lots of trauma and so hopefully I've created a self that has less net trauma and more net understanding and care and ability to give than the generation before so it's all about the net for all of this I think if we punish ourselves especially as worth editing a system where it is nearly inevitable that we're going to be causing harm on a daily basis if we punish ourselves too much for that then like we're not gonna really have the will and ability to continue to work and do better that's not gonna work so I think this is like psychology says self-care self-forgiveness and keep working and trying and that's what I've decided to do is that I'm like okay I see enough here that it feels clear that I need to walk this path wherever it takes me and I'm gonna keep running into walls and probably causing harm and it does happen and but I see over time it's less and fewer and fewer relationships have problems or get damaged and more there's more and more like love and care that gets built and more and more things go well for me and for the people I'm connected to and the other systems that I'm connected to and as we get better and better things get more useful and things can accelerate and I think that this is how in my experience a lot of healing works is like in the beginning you're stuck and just very little you can do like I've been in states where honestly like I think probably many of us like I'm spending all day in bed really in pain suffering probably going through some mental thought loops and other kinds of things around fears and around that habits and etc.

yet that's where I'm starting and if I can make some progress by taking the right actions by getting up and doing what I need to do some of the time then and I can give things to future Larry such that future Larry has more resources then it's a little easier for future Larry and future Larry will be better off and it's not linear perfectly it's like this hopefully it's getting better over time and then eventually I'm healthier and then eventually things start falling and cascading more and like bigger ways and a lot of the things that are in the way start to just fall down and the progress becomes a lot more tangible and visible and I think this is the way that healing works for any system and it will have to work for a society is it's gonna be a lot of time and energy that we put in that feels like it's not making any progress and we're gonna still I mean basically no matter what we do right now we're still gonna have these fires for a little while and we're still gonna have all sorts of gnarly stuff happening but if we keep working at it and we don't give up because we understand that the stakes are so high it's really the stakes are like all the beauty in our world that we've come to love whatever it is whatever your particular thing that you love is that you care about whether it's other people or just like some hobby or some natural land or some other kinds of creatures or anything it's all at stake and so if we can see that then we can muster up the courage to keep moving towards doing better and caring more and working on our own fears and insecurities and things that are in our personal ways and then eventually the giant ship that we're on that has incredible momentum is going to start to turn and eventually it's all gonna start to be better and I really think there's an incredibly beautiful post-disease world that we can have where things actually are working well and our society is full of people who have what they need get to pursue beautiful lives that are unique and creative and whatever it is they're contributing they're living in balance with the rest of the world so all sorts of species and new kinds of socio-technical environmental ecosystems emerge and the kind of beauty that we can have I think can be incomprehensible but it means that we have to do the really hard work today and now and keep doing it and be brave and this is the kind of bravery that previous generations have had to have in face of a lot more tangible challenges like the Nazis that you mentioned which is not really the people the Nazis as much as their ideology and behavior patterns and all of the things that have we can think about it as like demons that have infected them in their society and caused them to act in these ways that were incredibly destructive killed millions of my ancestors etc and but like today it's not as obvious and clear as here is a society that's in this physical geographical position in the world that we can fight by building ships and tanks and bombs and all of this it's like we actually have to fight the inner demons directly which is like this demon of lack of understanding it's this demon of thinking that the short-term thing both short-term and time and myopic in space of caring only for this local thing that is myself here and now is somehow above understanding the bigger self and caring for the bigger self and trusting that by doing that it's actually going to make me feel better in the long term because it'll be harder in the short-term but better in the long term and if we can like really do that work it's actually like it can all work out I think so in a lot of what you just said there's a philosophy of investment with which I find myself very comfortable and I keep coming back to in the way I think about all of this it's like what makes listening hard is that listening is risky whether it's true or not let's start by assuming it's not true in the long term you have to go through the dip and scary yeah and so to articulate this with the overall motivation for this show which is that we risk losing an opportunity to do truly beautiful and loving things with advanced technologies if we midwife them into the world afraid of what they will do afraid of what they will become like as you say if we treat our new AI creations with curiosity and care and if we build the principles of care into their definitions and code then we will share a world with beautiful weird new technological friends that care for us and the rest of the earth system in turn and yet obviously the whole conversation really is either in how can we use these things so that we can transcend everything in the world that makes us afraid or oh my god what are we doing this is horrible we need to spend all of our time calculating and preparing for various existential risks and that is the bad trip right we're not regarding this stuff with curiosity and care and so to go just briefly back to stewardship and you say if I have not yet learned to listen then I must not yet act and to link it back to this question of the psychology if you're talking about a demon haunted psychology that fears the world so that it is myopically concerned with the accumulation of power then even though it may seem to people without guns and bombs and money that those are unacceptable wastes there's a gap there where it's like both sides of that conversation are focused on we cannot risk this and I say I feel like we're pulling around the bend into the big question that keeps coming up again and again and through the lens of that question we can start talking a lot more about what concrete forms technological love actually embodies the question to me seems to be one of how do we agree on what is at risk or what is at stake and how do we make it possible for people to take risks in a safe way I mean it's like risk is inherently unsafe but like how do we make it easier for people to fail without the concern that no rebound is possible and like the last thing I'll say about that is that when I spoke to Heim Geungold about his book Building Sim City there's a beautiful passage toward the end of that book on why Sim City is not a game that it is a toy because the game defines specific win-and-lose conditions and operates from a zero-sum mentality this is very parallel to James P. Carse's work on finite and infinite games but Heim and the scholars that he references say that what Carse is calling an infinite game is actually play in which there isn't really anything like failure or failure is a learning opportunity and this seems to be why power serves power and points to the beginning of an understanding of what it looks like to thread the needle of the poly crisis or the metacrisis now my commitment with all of these conversations is to acknowledge the very real risks but to do so in a way that encourages the kind of curiosity that is necessary for true listening and to figure out how we reconcile the fact that this living through the six mass extinction coming up with just an equitable world is a very serious game and yet in order to thrive in that game if not win per se that we have to engage it with a bit of non-attachment enough non-attachment that the risk does not seem so overwhelming I'd love to hear you speak to that yeah that's very critical to engage with non-attachment because I mean attachment I spent a lot of time trying to define attachment so I have two different definitions here I've been tuned this page fully but it's disproportionate belief due to fear it's when you believe something to a different degree than you have evidence for like evidence and abasing an inference process due to fear that the world may be different than you hope wish desire to be so it's like irrational belief typically not always due to some form of fear and so irrational with respect to what I think like in order to really get the structures of this game right you really have to embrace this perspective that I am not separate or different or distinct and like really dissolved this ego because that's part of this fear and irrationality so attachment I can be unattached to I'm living in this house that I live in which I love and I'm really grateful for I can be unattached to various other things that I love and I'm grateful for still pursue it and I don't want to move but if I need to I have to not let it get in my way and this is like extremely hard and this is why this Buddhist enlightenment process which I've come to you enlightenment as the lightning of attachment it's like I'm no longer weighted down by all these things that I'm holding on to unnecessarily that doesn't mean that I can't still move through the world based on what I believe in love and whatever and so I don't in theory you can be enlightened in the world but it's remarkably hard and often seems to occur more like as we get older and where like the inevitability of loss becomes like more and more stark and obvious in your face and then it's a weight I'm gonna die anyways I'm gonna live all these things anyways oh wait maybe I should remember to use this last year or whatever it is to care for my family to give to my community to all of these things and the big tragedy here is that we don't realize this sooner and so there's this huge individual work to let go of attachment so that we can really operate in a way that is good for ourselves as part of the world and it's similarly it's at a societal level becoming more and more stark that we need to be unattached if you were to either lose your house in a fire which forces you to be unattached to that house or you're just gonna be mourning at your whole life or to look at the risk of losing your house in a fire or a hurricane or a tornado or any other kind of catastrophe that like is becoming increasingly likely in basically all parts of the world if you can accept that acceptance is the opposite of attachment then you can be like okay well I live here I love it maybe there's some better place to move because the risk is not something that I'm willing to assume but you can make a rational decision about the risk that you're willing to assume and then continue to invest in making your house more fireproof or improve or whatever it is and making yourself more safe and secure and whatever so that you're able to you know be more stable and do more work if you don't have a stable base you can't really move anything it's both a physical law and let this metaphorical level of a law this is why I've had to spend a lot of my time you know I care so much about this writing but I've had to spend disproportionate amounts of time sorting out my personal things like my health and home security and all of these kinds of things so that I feel stable enough to be able to do something to be able to push on the world in some way and yet it's intertwined with the pursuit of the work because if I do the work better then I'll have more security so this is a challenging balance for me personally is like how do I do that but in order to do all of this there's like a separate dimension of non-attachment so I think that the importance of safety and security is distinct from the costs of attachment and both of them like it's important to invest in safety and security and stability and for yourself and for the broader senses of self-assuring your family your community and all of these things you care about ideally really essentially not at the expense of others but with others because the solutions become but it's just cheaper to do things together like you mentioned this thing with this private firefighters which is like you know I hadn't heard that that seems reflective of the world that we live in and if they could band together with their neighbors it would be way cheaper for them all to invest in firefighting together such that they aren't paying for these individual redundant personal costs all sorts of ways that this is very obviously redundant and when you really look at that one step further is oh wait how can we figure out how to invest in firefighting for the whole state altogether so it's not just me buying personal firefighting so that I can survive and everybody else is fucked like how we all figured out together we need to get past that and so much of that is like attachment to this self which is the deepest form of attachment that we have is like I am somehow more important or special or different than others and when you look at this from like a Buddhist lens or like even like a rational lens so I've come to call this like spiritual set of beliefs that are embedded in my way of thinking like Bayesian dauism because I really think that these ideas are super intertwined if you look at them the right way like it is I am obviously not separate from the world like I'm a material system made of the same atoms and stuff that is everywhere else in the world I'm losing atoms and stuff all the time I'm accumulating new atoms and stuff all the time when I eat stuff I came out of the atoms from the ground in the air and the water and all the food that I eat I will go back to those things if you ever try to define me as separate in any way it's not possible to do like you just basically have to come up with delusional ways of thinking in order to do that so I'm clearly not separate and there's all sorts of other ways to look at this and it's really hard for us to get this because we have all this fear that is evolved in us for these reasons that you described in order for me to persist long enough in a human form in order to have come to be here we've found this solution archetype where we're competing with each other but it has created these toxic delusional beliefs that are now killing us so if we can get rid of the attachment to the self and there's tools for helping us do this there's psychedelics and all sorts of things there's philosophy then we can start acting in a way that is beneficial towards the larger self which we can start to be an economic alignment with by pursuing this growth of love process by in so love you mentioned also I wanted to say love is like it's upon care and that like care is when you're supporting the well-being of a being but love is the situation that you find yourself in where you understand that other being to be enough of yourself that it is obvious to you it is natural for you to support the well-being of the being because it's actually just you're supporting the well-being of the self and that love evolves through like these mutual care processes if I understand my partner better for anything or being that I'm potentially going to be in love with better then I can care for it and support it and then it can support me back and we can find a solution such that the ratio of the amount that I get out of this relationship to the effort that I put in is less than or better more favorable than what it would be if we were acting separately and not together and therefore it's not just like I need this kind of spiritual sense of understanding that we're one being in one system which is what a lot of the Buddhists talk about but you can have this economic sense in which it is like actually better for me to invest in us together as a unit than because I have enough understanding of them and they have enough understanding of me and we built enough trust that in patterns of support that we're supporting each other in our own unique ways of being able to do that which make it more efficient so there's like a literal economic benefit of being in love and then when we get this for larger and larger systems like with this firefighting example where you realize oh wait if I care for my neighbors and they care for me then everything's just gonna be easier and better whether it's like us cooking for each other or like going hiking together taking each other's kids to like supporting events or whatever it's like always better and easier if you can find enough mutual understanding to work together on this then like the obvious solution becomes to like pitch in on firefighting and if you realize hey this doesn't just extend to us who happen to live together and spend a lot of time together but we can extend it through technologically supported understanding which is a lot of the point of this technological love work to a bigger and bigger set of pieces of a system and eventually till societies a whole world then going in on a world government and world policies and global firefighting and whatever at the level of scale that makes sense like it's just obvious way to solve our problems and then there's the UN stops being a thing where we're having to fight and put all this energy to just talk about stuff and maybe make make real difference sometimes but not nearly as much as we would dream of it becomes oh wait like Star Trek actually we need a global government it's obvious we got past our individual unique scarcity fighting mode as a species and there was lots of destruction caused but hopefully less than there could have been and we can actually have that and yeah I think I addressed a lot of what you were talking about but let me know if I missed anything yeah yeah I'm down to only one type written page of notes from your stuff at this point so I can feel us getting closer to the light at the end of the tunnel and what all of this is really about which is helping people form a clear image of the better world that we can participate in but of course there's the issue that you and I have both pointed to it various moments in this conversation which is that what you're describing in my language is a major evolutionary transition in individuality where we like the cell participates in something like an economic arrangement with other cells to create the multicellular organism yeah but we keep doing what Joshua de Colleo calls the scalar synecdoche by which he means we can see that thing now with the help of technology but we keep colonizing it with our own identity with our own rules with our own expectations and so when people think about global polity they're imagining something that is writ large like the way that Pobs is Leviathan is well we can see that society is a big body but this is to justify the divine right of kingship in some sense and this is the mistake that I think people make when when Benjamin Olson said one of his favorite quotations is who sees more is more right that can be misunderstood to mean that the people who sit on the top of a status pyramid because they're seeing the abstractions and here we are back to this thing they've got the global economic dashboard in front of them therefore they're justified to make decisions and that's the mistake we're trying not to make yeah it's obvious in the way that you put it the issue of safety and security are distinct from the cost of attachment like safety and security are short-term calculus cost of attachment or long-term calculus and it's obvious now that private security is more expensive than a police force everywhere except in LA but now it's obvious that's true even in LA because whoops the police force came at the cost of the fire department I wanted to link this back to something I brought up in my conversation with Jim McShaughnessy and I don't know if we really reached a synthesis about this but one of the main themes that I explore in this project is multi-scale regulation like I think about regulation as an emergent top-down form of causation and the evolutionary marketplace as the process by which that arises is like the bottom-up thing so even in your own brain you've got different neurofiring motifs competing in some sense to determine the behavior of the organism but out of that process unfolding over evolutionary time you have parts of the brain that are responsible for the inhibition of reflex behaviors that arise in the markets like everyone in finance is there it will quickly admit that markets are crazy and yet that markets are creative you look at the Dow Jones or like crypto and it's obvious it's this huge limbic system but like people are justifiably concerned that captured regulatory frameworks that are shaped by the distribution of power in economic markets are going to determine the laws that exist in order to regulate the market and so when I hear you talk about well obviously if you can dilate your perspective or coordinate enough perspectives enough it becomes self evident that it's much cheaper to just pay taxes except in such cases where your tax dollars end up being appropriated by the concerns of the military industrial complex and its preoccupation with the boundary maintenance of your society and I bring all of this up because I want to make a bold claim here which is that regulatory bodies emerge like the government the state emerges as a consequence of the economic benefit of love that's what I heard you just say and yet in your piece on hurry up we're dreaming you spend the three little things I want to talk about with you and I think the last two will be very quick but this one is interesting to me because I am not saying that we can ever expect to have a world in which teeth exist claws exist animals even in this cooperative world that we live in that's defined by symbiotic relationships we're gonna have competition and cooperation coexisting at all times and you talk about how understanding is required to provide stable and consistent care but it's not sufficient we must also respect every being in the right to self-determination and so this is the again the perennial philosophical concern that I hear people in the agent tech space working out I hear the folks I know at Cosmo's Institute asking about how we design technologies that foster human autonomy and freedom and you say technologies that support respect include governments law police prisons parking meters locks security cameras military and weaponry at first glance it may sound like these have nothing to do with love however they are tools that help us to feel safe and which create incentive for others to respect us many of these technologies are controversial because they are challenging to design and implement and when they don't work as they should they impinge on our well-being and cause harm the key is mutual respect so one thing that we haven't talked about it exactly we've talked a lot about care and understanding and then there's the matter of the relationship between it's well I hate to put it this way but it's because you said it's not as simple as it was in World War two and it's certainly not like the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO did not lead to its presumed intentional effect in as much as it didn't send a message to CEOs that they should be less concerned security but and it certainly didn't cause anyone among the 0.01% to think my gosh I should actually respect human life and dignity because it was itself not an act of their respect for life human dignity so when you say we must design far more nuanced and gentle technologies to mediate respect and this will help us on our way to love I'm curious how you see this in very tangible terms like what does it mean like what is the evolution of weaponry and law and the enforcement of law look like in your framework yeah we're talking about karma technologies showing us the impacts of our actions and just as an like appendix to that question one of my favorite science fiction trilogies is the Golden Acumen by John C Wright who was a lawyer working at the time that he wrote that those books and in his post-human utopia when you are convicted of a crime the punishment is to experience everything that you subjected your victims to because everybody is recorded and so they can be able to face what you did to someone into your own mind and that's an example I think of yeah something like that I like that that's very rolls in in this nice what do they call it veil of ignorance kind of way what is the evolution of weaponry and law and enforcement of law look like in my framework I think I'm not an expert in all of this so to some I mean I have some answers and this is a place where I don't have full understanding and so I'm not gonna like pitch a full solution because it's not my domain and it does seem clear we need to find a way to actually incentivize people to do things that are good for the system so you know gentler sense this means that if you're causing harm to others you should have to pay for that harm in some way and if you're creating value for others you should participate in that value in some way and I think that at some level a lot of this is like what taxes and like government want to be doing but nobody seems to have figured out some of this in like the simplest essence such that it's like actually built or if it is articulated it's in some way that is far enough from the mainstream that I haven't encountered it and like most people who make laws seem to not have encountered it because making taxes and laws seem to be really the wild west in part because people can get away with it and but in part because there doesn't seem like this guiding theory even about what is a good tax what is a good law what is a good punishment and so in the cases where you don't have to resort to punish like serious like punishment like jail time and like all of this where you can actually people can actually afford to pay back in the thing then it feels like the at least the theoretical abstract answer is relatively straightforward now you should have to pay society back at least for the cost of the negative impact that you have probably rounding up for inefficiencies so that you're gonna net out better so that the world's gonna net out better and like the better we get this systematic counting that the other inefficiencies are the lower the cost and also the more accurate it is and then also you have to participate in the benefits and so incentives like negative taxes etcetera should exist for the things that we're doing that are good and sometimes that's another problem is like we don't actually participate in the benefits I think we do often more than we think we do because of like karmic dynamics that's what I call it but really just there are lots of stable patterns of if I am doing something kind for you it will probably benefit me in some way even if it's hard for me to recognize the exact like pattern or dynamical like system that gave rise to it benefiting me like tends to benefit me and I think this is true but in cases where I don't have the ability to pay back the thing so if I'm either too poor and or if I've caused like the kind of harm that there is no obvious like way to do restitution murder for instance like the example you gave then you at least want to both try to get as much restitution as possible and prisons I think like the value of prisons is in like preventing future harm I think that they're really not done well in so many ways but if you can prevent people from doing future farm by separating them from society then that's valuable but you don't have to separate them in a way that is like just gonna be worse for them long-term in the perpetuate the harm you could probably separate them in a way that allows them to learn whether it's like any example that you gave from the science fiction thing where they have to experience it that and that's both punishment and hopefully a lesson but you could probably teach them lessons in a lot more ways than we're doing right now and this exists obviously in some societies I'm not the super expert in this but I know that they're forget they call this I mean there's also terms for a lot of this like restorative justice etc and I think you somehow have to figure out how to account for some of these things beyond the individual but hopefully if you get this stuff stable enough people will not even decide to do all these harmful things because it'll be clearly disincentivized and like things like shooting a healthcare CEO like that is seems to be out of so much rage and anger and whatever that both it has not the desired effect whether whatever they intended to know but it's not gonna cause positive benefit in this direct way because people are gonna respond in fear just because fear tends to be get fear in this same kind of car make these car make patterns but if the person wasn't in this horrible situation in the first place because society was working better and probably they wouldn't have gotten that far so the rate of these kinds of things that are like impossible to pay back would hopefully go down so much that yeah you have to like do something about it but it's not going to be this major societal issue one would hope and also like it's all amplified by power so they have the ability to do this because they have tools like guns and if we have all these powerful technologies without the requisite understanding then these kinds of things are gonna happen there's things like this with guns but then there's like far more powerful technologies like certain kinds of uses of AI nuclear weapons etc and these are where it gets really scary because you can't pay back beginning a nuclear war like it's not possible or like causing the extinction of a species things like this the complete destruction of a major ecosystem and so we somehow have to focus a little less on punishing the people who did it and you still have to do that but more on just like somehow preventing them from doing this by helping them to be well and listening to them sooner if people were able to listen I'm sure there's been huge amounts of complaints and outcry and everything about the way that UnitedHealthcare was operating if we were able to listen sooner to things like that then we wouldn't be in a situation where it's so bad that somebody felt that desperate that they decided to make this choice and hopefully we can do this at a geopolitical scale sufficiently that not only does nobody decide to use nuclear weapons God forbid but that nobody's even scared that anybody's going to decide to use nuclear weapons because everyone feels heard and supported and if there's some real problem that they're facing they're either getting what they need or they feel like they're getting everything that can be done and they're therefore they don't feel the need to lash out I don't think it is inevitable that we have this level of deep suffering that causes us to contemplate these decisions and to fear the consequences of other people contemplating these decisions I'm forgetting if there was some other thing that I'm missing here that you said a lot of things but no and though some may believe it impossible I wanted to spiral one level deeper into this sub domain because you know this whole question of listening sooner like the fact that we don't often participate in the benefits as you said like the very reason that money and law seem to exist is because of the fact that we have scaled social interaction beyond our ability to trust and you say we can only enter love when we're able to fully trust the other being to do what is best for the joint self including for you so that you might be well together through trust and understanding and this brings me back through the last pass on what you've written about trust technologies about the what you call channel based trust about the structure of the message itself which we've lost to a great extent through digital image and video and audio manipulation and efforts like those of Puzha Olhava who I hope to have on the show who wrote the paper on the decentralized society with Glenwile and Vitalik Buteran and the idea that we can basically create a new form of credentialing through trust-based systems that decouple prestige from the reliability of a message and I won't go into all of that now but like I saw that there's this huge gap in our thinking right now between intersubjective trust and objective empirical validity and that work like hers seems to bridge that but you make the point that sorry yet I said channel based I meant content based trust earlier content based trust tools and then there's this bridge between channel based trust which is intersubjective and coherence based trust which is based on the causal coherence of things and you say while this principle has been around at least since humans began to communicate it has not been formally integrated into trust tools so I see something there and this thing about trust and coherence and you're coming about restorative justice I want to bring it all the way back around to where we started this about looking at the health of society and of our planet as through the same logic that we think about the holistic systemic health of the body that again united healthcare allopathic medicine framework is something like the criminal justice system in which imprisonment actually costs more now than the crime where it's chemotherapy it might work but what you're not doing is remediating the cells that are out of balance you're like blaming the cancer but it's like everybody knows that the like you having cancer isn't cancers fault it's because of some structural issue and your genes your diet your behavior your physical environment and chemotherapy doesn't address any of those and so yeah the last piece is all of these issues seem like they bottom out in a question about coordination like really what it's all about is the meta-crisis is fundamentally a crisis of trust debt and that's where we ask ourselves how do we rebuild trust person-to-person between people in our institutions between the human world and the non-human world that obviously unless you if you're an animal like unless you live in the Galapagos you don't trust people how do we begin the long slow inconvenient and risky work of starting to regenerate trust in all these areas that we have damaged it yeah so I think a lot about coordination and I think this is a really critical layer of abstraction but I don't think it's where it bottoms out I think that coordination is made possible by understanding and there's a lot of other things that kind of come out of understanding but when it's not rooted in the fundamentals like there's nothing you don't make progress in the whole system and so for me it's not just understanding but it's holistic understanding so it's understanding yes of the part that you care about yes of the cancer but really not of the cancer separated from the system but the cancer as part of the whole system like you said and for the medical issues that I've dealt with which thank God have been not as challenging as cancer and not as existential they are incredibly complex and systemic and so the only way I was able to make progress is by looking at the whole system and trying to figure out what's forcing what and what's causing what and usually things tend to like self-reinforced so all sorts of things were self-reinforcing each other and then figuring out how do I change the behavior of this system sometimes slowly to start or by making changes in parts of it so that I can get the dynamics to shift and so with this cancer thing yeah maybe you actually do have to do something about the cancer that's already there maybe it's irradiated maybe it's something else but you also have to do something about the process that's causing the cancer and if you think about this at a societal level the solution that we understand but haven't figured out to implement is get people to stop eating so poorly get people that care for themselves and really build systems that help people to care for themselves and eat better and to not eat things that are like full of toxic chemicals or be exposed to toxic things in various ways or to participate in behaviors that are causing this and it's all there's the level of the what local process is causing this person to get this and how can we extricate them from this process I don't know that much about cancer but it's like the advice of somebody who has heart attacks to avoid eating steaks if that's even still a real thing I don't know but fix cholesterol through your diet but like how do you actually embed them in a system where their social structure is not based around like going to steak houses to have business meetings like how do you get them so that their social structure is big makes it easier for that to happen how do you build a whole society in such a way where like the incentivized natural behavior is something that is healthy and if we can figure that out the cost savings is enormous like not only do you not have people who are as unhealthy but like all the costs that we're sinking into treating all these people in this very myopic local way by spending insane amounts of money on health care because our society is making everybody sick in a very consistent way those all evaporate so I think really it's all about understanding whether it's of the system and the details and dynamics of it or of the principles that underlie the system that underlie just your metaphysics or your epistemology or something like understanding that I am not a separate being all of this kind of thing the word understanding is used in many ways here because it really like applies to all of the senses of understanding and we need all of them understanding each other understanding oneself understanding one's impact on the world understanding the nature of the world and if we can understand really the dynamics and stop being so myopic about it we're incentivized to do that right now because there's cost-insters cost benefit incentives for the local pharmaceutical company to push drugs instead of dietary changes because they want to continue to exist etc but if we can somehow reshape all of that then it's not all that crazy and you can avoid the need for like imprisonment and whatever and there's still a role I don't think I'm not usually anti all of these things especially in the context of a world I don't think that we should just get rid of guns and bombs and like all of these things because we need them right now just maintain stability but in the world that we're aiming for that we're trying to evolve into they no longer become necessary allopathic medicine is really powerful and useful but it can't be used outside of the context of an understanding of the system because then it's insanely expensive and doesn't even solve the problem so in my healing journey personally I've had to make use of both allopathic medicine and holistic medicine and often we tend to tribalize and fight for one thing versus the other but this misses the point like really it all fits together into a puzzle and picking a side is just choosing to align oneself with a bigger self that is at odds with a different other and then you're still splitting the world unnaturally and creating this war based way of acting this conflict based way of acting instead of cooperative way of acting and it's really a radical shift for us and so this is why it's so hard because we don't think this way in our society and like the people who did think a lot more like this even though probably not always a hundred percent we killed them a lot of the native Americans and a lot of the native like cultures because they're not investing in fighting so when you're fighting them they're gonna go away and then we realized later that they were actually right and that we needed them and but it's not too late and we can still learn and like the ability to change is still present the ability to learn a new way is still present I promise that it's really beautiful this has inspired my life to see more and more of this picture and you're still so much that I'm missing but just the more I see the more beautiful it becomes and it's a way actually there is a completely coherent other way of thinking about the world that is cooperative and supportive that solves a lot of these things that we tend to think are fundamental challenges of prisoners dilemma or like the tragedy of the commons or the fact that our world is sick and diseased and that we're in a meta crisis it's not inevitable and like by investing and understanding and really trying to do things right and take a breath and be like okay we can afford to slow down just a little bit so that we can do we can actually think about the actions that we're taking and figure out a good way forward I promise you the world's not gonna disappear tomorrow it if we continue to ignore it like it's gonna slowly rot but if we can say okay I'm no longer in this fight or flight mode I am safe I am here I have what I need right now which is true for many of us and in some sense is true for all of us then we can really gather ourselves and start to let go and shed this attachment and these fears and start to really work together on a better way which is just it's more fun doing stuff together anyway so everything's gonna be like more joyful this way too so it's not oh I have to work so hard and strive and fight to make this thing better like most of the real fighting that we have to do is with our demons and I think the way to win those battles tends to be to like find ways of letting them go instead of fighting them like a battle anyways so in a lot of these personal senses I don't know that I can say much better than a lot of the great Buddhist thinkers and Taoist thinkers and people from really all backgrounds and religions people in Christian tradition Muslim tradition Jewish tradition who speak beautiful great wisdom about all this we just need to find whatever calls to us that is about non-violence and about being together and use that as a starting point towards this journey that we all have to undertake in order to either grow a better world or at least do everything we can towards that mission because what other mission is actually worthy amen and yes I feel like I've made a great mistake in this conversation been the allocation of my attention and the emphasis that we have paid here to the map of the problem at Eake and the apparent tension between these things and I really thank you for making sure to emphasize that this is a both and thing just in closing I would invite you in whatever way you feel is right you just done a bit of this already but what I would like to invite you to do in this final stretch is to say if people are having that kind of a bad trip how do you what is your protocol for helping someone rediscover the mindfulness or the curiosity or the presence that allows them to be capacious enough to sit with the trouble and find space in themselves find the good trip amidst all of this because it's clear like I think you and I have both said that it's not through dissociation it's not through bypassing it's not through the negation of the problem slowing down helps but when you're in that state it doesn't feel possible so like how do you in your own life and with those that you care for find room for these things it's a beautiful question first I don't know that it was a great mistake that you made because I think that most of us are coming from this perspective and in order to feel like safe in to embrace this possibility that things like can actually all fit together we have to have all of these questions met and so this journey we just went on was an experience of us working through all of that and I don't know if there's another way to get there so I think thank you for pushing me on all of this and they think we got to do that together and that's how my journey has gone to it's just like pushing on all of it and I think for me like in these personal how do I stay present how do I was not like I believe all these things but it's plenty of time where like I'm not feeling this day-to-day and it's quite challenging there's the one level which is the belief which is all of these things that I've said plus just like all of the philosophy around this then there's the practice which can be grounded in belief so you can have principles like the things that Eckhart Tolle talks about power of now which I think is like incredibly simple and beautiful and true philosophy there is only now everything else is a construct but there is some sense in which there's a future but you're never in the future any like conception that you have of the future is just your model of the future and you're never in the past any conception of the past that you have is just your model of the past which is constructed from traces that have been left around in your memories and traces that have been left around in the memories of the world so like it's not really there and so and the only thing you can directly act on and act in is the present so knowing this can help but there's also like the abadi practices of this of which I continue to get better and like still not nearly as expert in as out of other people I know of meditation of finding all of the things that resonate with you there's all sorts of kinds of meditation so I think some people including myself often try a kind of meditation and it's really not working and it's like when you give up on to these it does a regular practice and just knowing that there's not just one way of doing this there's all sorts of different ways in exploring what works for you and I think the essence of it is really some way that allows you to be present without attachment and so whether that's just focusing on your breathing or letting practicing letting go of like thoughts that come in or just noticing them and allowing thanking them and then that lets you stop holding on and or like moving meditations like yoga I really love to go for walks walks to me are really powerful spending time with friends I think all sorts of like activities are really great and then what kind of keeps me like that maybe star for all of this is just like appreciating the beauty of the world like we live in such a beautiful magical world and so taking time to really just enjoy it and I feel really grateful that I live in Berkeley where so many people care for the city and whether it's their own houses or their yards and like all the crazy different diverse plants and all the animals that are around and all the different kinds of art that people make and I just walk around sometimes and just appreciate all that and that really helps me but wherever you are there's so much beauty in our world and this is what we're fighting for and this is why all this matters because it's all just really magical and beautiful and so there's really no point in spending all of your energy scared and fighting for all this stuff if you don't get to enjoy it so just grounding in the enjoyment I think is actually maybe the step towards feeling motivated to do stuff to make it make it continue to exist which is really what we're fighting for here it's to continue all of the beauty that we have and then to allow more kinds of unique diverse beauty to emerge because it's supported because like we're operating in a way that is like caring and loving in all of this so that's my best way and I'm like trying to get better every day and there's taste that I'm not very good isn't I'm I don't always have gratitude and see the beauty and then there's things where I do and I don't know trying to choose when you notice the opportunity to choose to like appreciate and be grateful I might have to put that right at the top of the episode just before I let you go I would love to know for the sake of your work and the possibility of collaboration like where are you with this and what kind of help do you think you need to really bring this into fruit and then in parting I would love your recommendations for like up to three women or elders that you really respect that you would recommend on the show. Okay where am I in my work so I've written and released not nearly as much as I would like to recently there's that hurry up we're dreaming article there's this alpha pre-alpha version of this website which is mind.technological.love that will continue to evolve over time and if I get like feedback and thoughts about it like that I think will probably give me more energy both on the piece and the website if people are engaging in this beautiful way that you just did that makes me feel like wow actually this matters and then it's easier for me to do more of it so that's like a very simple way to support financial support is always valuable I don't currently have a great mechanism for that but if it feels like there's a will for that we can construct a mechanism anybody who has ideas about how they can help I mean I'm always open to I'm trying to make like better websites or have more collaboration on different kinds of things so but yeah resources are always helpful because then I can engage friends and help support them in us all working together on some mutual solution whether it's around my work or their work or both of ours together in some way feeling safe and not being stressed about were rent and all of the other things that are super expensive these days is always helpful but I also I've like all of us and figuring it out and I'm fine for now so and hopefully it'll continue to get more and more abundant in terms of women and elders you have to think for a minute the person who pops into my head immediately it would be amazing would be Robin Walt clamor writes in such an incredibly beautiful way and is so wise that would be an absolute joy I think to have kind of like I want to look at my books real stuff I can I walk over there and look at my books and let you know just a lot of people who I don't know quite if they're alive still like elders who I respect like I just found I think she's probably no longer like Rachel Carson amazing but what's your name Jessica Fern it's like different I think she does Holly secure and she wrote another book recently it's just a beautiful new way of thinking about relationships and relationality and shedding a lot of the kinds of structures that we already have and trying to like find the essences of what it means to have a good supportive relationship that's secure and so I think that could contribute nicely to conversation what is her name I don't know if you seems like somebody you might have already spoken with I don't know but Sophie Strand would probably be a great person she's on the list yeah yeah for sure there's probably more that I could think of later but that's who comes to mind immediately those are great man thank you so much for the longest episode to date we knew that this was gonna take a while to unpack and honestly I don't know how much justice I've given to your very methodical and deliberate unpacking of this material so obviously I encourage people to read your stuff and seek you out and stay tuned in to what you're doing so I'm glad to know you and I think eventually our root tips will grow together and work at some point I think so thanks a lot man take care thank you this has been really lovely and I feel really seen and supported with this and if we need to dig in more always around we can do more so yeah thanks again for listening humans on the loop is a listener supported project to helping us dream better together if you like this episode please subscribe and review the show wherever you listen and visit humans on the loop.com to dig into the archives and explore the benefits of membership on the website you'll find extensive citations are interactive knowledge graph and a link to the wisdom and technology discord server our next dialogue is with Sam Harbismuth resident scientist at Lux Capital an author of the magic of code will interrogate the distinctions between software and spellcraft explore the unique blessings and challenges of a world defined by advanced computing and probe the good bad and ugly of futures that move at the speed of fun stay tuned and remember imagination and attention are our greatest natural resources