the phone is a mutation in the attention plex of the human species, right? And so we're becoming all these different subspecies. I'm tempted to compare it to a Burgess Shale, where there's a kind of running riot of alternate realities. And this seems to make people run for a kind of sturdy epistemology that tells them that this is real.
And so they say, oh, trust the science. And then they drill down on the science. They're like, oh, wait, the science is also an adolescent wonderland because it's itself swept up in this kind of very strange, in-core context that we are living in, right? Where reality itself is being sculpted by the shifts and waves of attention that are happening online.
And there waves of attention that nobody's in control of, but almost everyone is aware of. I'm trying to encourage people to really experiment with turning the great deal of it off. I did a media fast between 2004 and 2011, which was part of that non-dual practice awakening because that allowed me to achieve that kind of inner silence. You're just getting this stream of five to one negative to positive narrative events happening, where you're cussly, you're a hurricane jerk about all the possible spaces.
And it's a direct consequence that we know so freaking much about our life world now, the set of all possible things that we have to worry about, consider the experience of going to a pregnancy now. It's very difficult, depending on where you live, to a mood, the total medicalization of the situation. And you just have to learn to abide and see it for what it is. This is just something that's starting to happen because you have these machines and you can see you can measure.
So you have to learn how to speed look around a little bit in that darkness where you simultaneously allow yourself to say, actually, this is a very robust model of reality. It's not hoax, but it's also the nature of a scientific paradigm is that it excludes all other forms of explanation. So how are you gonna deal with that? Are you gonna deal with that?
Through this kind of continual rafication turning of the patient into a thing, using the computer skating, looking for risk, right? Let a thousand new media dietary restrictions bloom, where we figure out how to live within this thing that I think you're always emphasizing rightly, it's not just gonna go away, okay? You can't just be a Luddite and be like, these goddamn Google, get off of my lawn. No, you can't do that, but you can't fall in love with it either.
And so I am now thinking, I think it's time for us to take pause. We don't have to sacrifice our attention to the ever-adventurous model of the screen. Welcome to the first episode of Humans on a Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, inviting you to join me for a bold exploration into the nature of agency and automation, wisdom and technology, responsibility and power in the age of global weirding.
Together, we will explore some of the deepest questions known to humankind and cultivate the curiosity and play we need to find our place amidst the transformations of this century. Much of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are in the loop or out of the loop, whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them if we ever do.
And yet, evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the ways that humans are always already inter-twinkled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops, as focal points of conscious agency, dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we've been people, we have never really called the shots, but rather cultivated our responsibility within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves. And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human, like the telescope and microscope before them language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes.
We do not need to leave our solar system to find strange new worlds awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation, lately, seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics, for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. What can I do becomes who am I, and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry? To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just connected, but precipitate as aggregates in fields of constellated data prompts a figure ground reversal in which solves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.
Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing human and non-human as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility. We find the opportunity to question what we're trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own source code and adjust our goals accordingly. If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity.
Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask, what do we want to do and why is that desire substantiated? This kind of meaning making isn't just a luxury, but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn't working.
It's time to ask if maybe this is due to user error and the answer doesn't lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world and this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility, as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful. In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are weird, unprecedented and sublime and they are business as usual on planet Earth where we have always come awake in media's rest amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity from the place from which we can at last engage the question of what now?
With discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face. Digital technologies are psychedelic. We've been on a bad trip. It's time for us to wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the auras together in whatever novel wonders may arise, to neither give way to astonishment, nor let our fears steer us into the rocks.
Humans on the loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be right now to fully give in to the paradox and notice how it's not on tie in hyperspace and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding, and more lucid, dare I say productive questions. One of these questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now find ourselves swirling. Maps of the world wide web look very much like brain scans of the amped up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down, when every node has edges with each other node, an average path length drops to one, how do we prioritize?
What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent inter-tweendularity? What apparitions do we honor and which do we ignore? And how? Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us.
Test your drugs, get grounded, set and setting, integration counseling. When suddenly the barrier between imagination and reality evaporates, as our familiar notions of here, there, now, then, in, out, and other self, twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these turbulent philosophical waters than Richard Doyle, aka Mobius, Edwin Earle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts. After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin's Pharmacy, Sex Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of the Genesis of Now, Self-experiments with the Bible and the end of religion, and into the stillness, dialogues, unawakening beyond thought with Gary Weber, and has taught courses on aliens, filicade dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, burrows, basic argumentation, the non-dual Bible, and every scene between.
I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Eric Davis' Expanding Mind. And in the 13 years since, he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is ostensibly a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else. I'd rather prime the batch.
It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of helping set the tone for everything that is to come. Thank you. Well, rich Doyle, here we are again. You're one of the first people I ever interviewed for anything, so thank you for being here at the very beginning of a new set of conversations.
I intend to feed as a syllabus into some little machine baby that can then grow up and become a Jiminy cricket on the shoulder of people who want to benefit from collective guidance down the line. No, it's fine. I feel like this has always already been happening. I'm saying that is such a feeling of data vu.
It's hilarious. And I think it has something to do with the fact that we always end up talking about some of the same things in the best ways. So I feel less alone with you on the planet, Michael. So yeah, whatever you want to have that, we can.
Well, thank you. I know that this is a kind of a strange formality given how much of your work revolves around deconstructing default mode network activity in autobiographical episodic memory. But I would love for you to provide some kind of context to people unfamiliar with your work so that we're not just playing inside your baseball. Yeah, cool.
Never. Thank you. Yeah. No, I don't think there's any opposition between telling the story of what happened, which is how I would think about it.
And the fact that one of the things that happened is I got led on this path where I became full of the desire to practice these non-dual techniques as you allude to in order to really spend more and more time in these states of being that I found actually healed me. In other words, that they weren't just cool or interesting. They'll get me wrong. Smoking a joint when I was 12 years old was remarkable.
But this wasn't just smoking a joint when I was 12 years old. This was that kind of entering into a relationship with a different form of intelligence. And when that intelligence was within me or without me, increasingly became uninteresting. I basically fell through the floor in 1997 when my mother died suddenly 10 years after my brother dying of an overdose when he was 27 years old.
And all the grief and congealed and impacted the non-dealing that I had built up like an inter-trash compactor just imploded on itself. And I fell through the abyss. I had suicidal ideation, yada, yada, yada. And at that time, I was a hyper rationalist materialist being who thought that the only way to survive was to figure out the next move and everything.
Like life was like an endless game of chess. It started from matter and ended in you. And that he were in this kind of Darwinian struggle in this matter realm. And there was nothing else that mattered.
And the greatest illusion was to think there was anything other than matter. And certainly, the greatest illusion was to be any good, other than secular. I started meditating more or less in political organically, meaning that I was suffering a great deal that I was trying to do different things and I didn't say, oh, I should meditate. I just sat with my backup against the wall and had my legs in the lotus position because I've inexplicably always been able to do the lotus position.
I was extraordinarily skinny as a young child, but that can't be the only reason. And so I started doing that and it gave me just an angstrom, a little nanometer of space on the suffering that I was experiencing. I was like, oh, there's just a little tiny pocket right there that I can hang out in. So I started really becoming, I guess, fascinated but also enthralled and grateful for meditation and practicing and reading all the books and discovering whether all the schools and how does it come across Christianity?
What do the Sufis have to do with it? The whole perennial philosophy, hidden kaboodle of how to program your own brain out of this horrifying subject object I had, we find ourselves trapped into as if it's the only channel. So I started doing all of that. And I go and act on the presence.
I do a six months stint in therapy with a guy who was very good at knowing what to push on. So I would have to just let the energy reverberate itself out through me, whatever the feeling, it was, it was very painful, but effective six months. And then one thing led to another and basically, right, I was working on with somebody I met by chance, work outside that I could go down to Peru and drink ayahuasca as part of the research project. And then we were gonna pay for the research project by doing a piece for NPR on ayahuasca tourism.
And honestly, being the hyper rationalist, materialist, et cetera, and just obviously, wow, I'm like the clever person of the free to world because I'm getting paid to go down South American and take drugs. That's got to be the very apex of the job chart. When I took the test to figure out, which by the way, apparently I'm supposed to be a parking lot attendant. I took him a sixth grade or whatever, getting paid to take rare and exotic psychedelic medicines in a shamanic context would tick that box, right?
Of course, the joke is on me. And even though I was not a drug athlete by any means, but I'd explore psychedelic realms with some frequency and frenzy and intensity and sense of inquiry, but also long breaks. But when I laid down with ayahuasca, there was something about the inter twinglingling of the plant realm and the human realm that was palpable, terrifying and comforting, ecstatic and dark. And without me even really doing anything but asking it, it proceeded to freak and heal me of severe lifelong asthma that had me in and out of the hospital and was the very kind of identity that I had.
That was who I was, was this dude with severe asthma who was figuring out angles on how to live with that and to be like, that's part of the kind of hyper-cognition. Just think out ahead of it, you know? And that just went just, it was released. I've written about it elsewhere, but there was a way in which that alone, that event alone, is ontologically shattering.
It's like pretty much anything I ever alone remotely thought I could hold true as a premise is gone. It turns out, in fact, like this Western technoscience is even more behind than I thought it was. And like, besides going through to all these, like them experimenting on me, essentially, when I'm five years old, at a Czech hospital in Philadelphia with different kind of treatments and so forth. And here's this long slumbering 6,000 year old, at least, magical brew, bubbling in Norma Pandora's cauldron, that summons forth this bird's spirit, that waves a while over my DNA and unwinds my DNA, and begins making passes over the DNA.
And I'm just like, well, that's like a bit much, man, more gentle. It teaches me to breathe again and freakin' work, okay? People can speculate about the causality or what have you, but I had no preexisting condition of believing that ayahuasca was a treatment per severe lifelong asthma. I thought I had gone to the end of looking into Habsili every avenue into Heliasma, and more or less concluded that it was simply a palliative response, and I was just like, try to live with it better.
There was no way you could rid of it. Like just complete, steal your face, run off your head, right? My whole ego of the usual sense of things that knows what it's doing, the perster of the eye, is simultaneously ecstatic because it can breathe, but then it's also like, seriously scumified, right? Like, how was that?
So then I have long and interesting to me and very healing and loving and beautiful relationship with Norah Pandorum, who was my teacher, and there's not much to be talked about there, but when I was back in Pennsylvania, I would sometimes have contact with Norah, but also I found myself centered between the Euclidean and non-Euclidean realms, if you will, in the sense that in my job as a university professor and as a dad, I would just occupy this interface, right? I would act as if there were these beings called subjects that are separate from each other and in stating an opposition to these things called objects, which nobody can ever tell them what they are. So just play that game as it were. And that was okay, I had no problem with that because I had this kind of parental, as I'm sure you understand, I'll do anything for the kids.
All right, it's easy to let go of stuff then. But what would happen is I would have experiences where in ordinary, totally, called a coach sober, waking consciousness, and also non-waking consciousness when dreaming, I would have straight up, remarkable, beautiful, two villages and interactions with ayahuasca. You're talking to me about when should I take it again? Should I drink ayahuasca again?
When it's up to you, very interesting, very rich relationship, at least comparable to the depth of relationship I have with a human being. And so how to navigate that, right? That's when I met, I was working a lot with Sanskrit because I was finding it Sanskrit. Believe it or not, when I was like 10 years old, I just like heard in my head of mind, Sanskrit poetics, and I didn't even know what other those things were, I'm not even kidding.
But on the graduate, he says plastics. It's like Sanskrit poetics. I had a dream in college, I think, in which I went and visited some wise mentor. It was gonna help take care of my body, and they were like, write this down.
This is a name that you're supposed to go look up later, like a first and last name, Ayurveda. I was like, oh, okay, oh, the only thing I can find online is this medical system from India. Exactly, okay. So what we're talking about is the palpable, ongoing experience that many people will just be nodding and being like, well, of course, you're part of an extended and quantum mind that is thinking itself through you, don't you know?
Didn't you write about that, right? Yeah, but it's still remarkable to participate in it, right? And my meditation had gone pretty, I'd been doing it for a fair amount of time, but when I wanted to explore the Sanskrit, I just by chance, again, total synchronicity, met Gary Webber, who became my Sanskrit and invited Vedanta teacher, and he had succeeded, and more or less turning off his default mode network, except for 15 minutes at the beginning of the day when he's like rebooting, and his blood sugar would come up and so forth, he would drink water and then he would be like, oh, okay. And the characteristic of him turning off, now he only later learned he had done that, but the thing that he experienced was it's almost total sensation of ongoing self-referential thought, of that ongoing, shattering monkey mind that usually has the eye, me, and the mind, et cetera, right?
And it has aspects that have to do with survival value, of course, right? We throw ourselves into an environment, trying to get this eye to survive. But it's a pretty compelling argument, and even more compelling experience. If you dwindle that part yourself down, maybe if you're lucky and you're full of grace or some other unicorn aspect, it'll blow out altogether.
That's really not the point. The point is to work the gradient between the ordinary hamster wheel mind and learning, oh, that's a thing. It's like an allergic reaction that I'm having, where my mind goes, and I can do things that'll make it stop doing that. So when I started something skip Sanskrit with Gary, I thought, oh, I'm gonna do it the scarly way, you know, and all the grammatical cases, and the audio, no man, we just started chanting.
Bits from Shankara, and I'd already been chanting the art sutra mantra, which I received in a dream. Okay, no lie. So I was already on that path, but then that really intensified. And so the book that I just sent off yesterday, actually with Drake Hunter at University of South Florida, is called Shut Up and Chance, Recipes for the Attention and Insurgency, because whether we're without like the now cresting psychedelic wave, right, that default mode network feels really good to turn it down.
It's extremely healing to turn it down. There's probably nothing better than you can do for your self, your family, your immediate friends, or whatnot, than to turn it down. And there's absolutely nothing in our culture which encourages us to turn it down, because it seems like the opportunity cost now for our attention has never been higher, right? Why would I meditate for 35 minutes when, I don't know, I could be streaming World Cup Soccer, or I could be, I don't know, I don't like video games, but video games represent a really big opportunity cost for almost anything else.
Why nobody reads, right? So the opportunity cost course is now spiked through the roof, because nobody's just left alone by themselves, well, you got six hours in the freaking bus station, you're just gonna have to figure it out. And they're like, no doubt, many samadis occurred from people just being like, well, I don't have to do this. I don't have to like, keep worrying and create stories about why I should worry about worrying.
I don't have to do this. There are ways for me not to do it. Okay, so this is actually a great place to start playing ball here, because your description of a pathological extreme of ego activation, and it's what we call it, the default mode, it is within that domain, within the modern domain, it is the default mode. But your description of this as a kind of inflammation, reminds me of, I've spent a lot of time watching the underground networks of psychedelic care and therapy and culture.
I'll show you that. I'm being co-opted and taken up into the machine, but my time in that space has taught me that whatever people think, the mechanism for glutaminergic reactions or 5-HT2A receptor stuff. Can you just follow the harm, man? Yeah.
One of the things that comes up again and again is that it is simply being able to disengage from that state. It's like, my son was bitten by a fire ant recently. I thought you put meat tenderizer on that. You get the swelling down.
And as soon as you get the swelling down, it's not such a problem. It's not such a crucible. And there's a relationship between inflammation and depression. Almost everything.
Yeah. And then there's that inflammation, depression, motif. And the fact that we spend all day indoors without direct contact to the ground, like electrically insulated. I don't.
Yeah, I don't. We're not exchanging electrons with the planet. And all sorts of stories, of course, everything is a contentious thing because it contradicts the eat your blueberries approach to dealing with free radical buildup in the body. But you can eat blueberries while you're laid on your back?
A little dirty. Right, right. But there is something about, so on the one side of it, what we're talking about is a dramatically ungrounded society, like a radically ungrounded society. And when we're living it now?
Yes. And it's a society in which in the most mundane and literal terms, our isolation from the physical activity of the geosphere and the biosphere is having its reaping, its nearly as fruits, is leading to these physical pathologies and psychological pathologies. And then I think about, to take this into a domain closer to the practical aspirations of this series, I think back a lot to a conversation I heard at Boom Festival in 2016 on their Futurist speaker day at Liminal Village, where I gave my first presentation of the material that became How to Live in the Future. And that day, I said, it's important that we scan lovers and poets because this is what we're feeding the baby through the bottleneck of whatever is.
It's important that we want lovers and poets, sorry, scan them? Scan them. Who do we want to benefit from first mover advantage in the space? What part of our human?
That's not quite now, I feel it, but I know what you mean. Yeah, I'm not talking about destructive scans, of course. No, it's a kind of, and it's a whole body that's slowed down on it. It's a whole body haptic, histocompatibility complex, sniff-a-doodle-doo, that when you're dancing, you're learning about your partner's microbiome, right?
Yes, we're not talking about scanning the brain. No, we're talking about this righteous evolutionary capacity we have to be like, ooh, like that, I don't like that, I don't like that, I don't like that. It's why the peacock feather looks so beautiful. Because the p-ends, like a little bit off over there, right?
Like the scan. Yeah, yeah. So the, yeah, making no claims about the- Making no claims. The limits of the model variables.
Of course, all models are wrong, George Box, that kind of thing. But anyway, on that day, I heard one of the founders of a maker space in Amsterdam give a talk about what it's like to run an extremely well-equipped maker space, where they're doing what was at the time cutting edge biofabrication and- We know for this or that, and everything. Yeah, we had a really fun maker space here for a few years. It was amazing what you could make.
So someone asked this guy at some point, what you have, you have bioengineering equipment, and you have pathogen cultures. I don't know how the regulation differs in the Netherlands from the United States, but this was before COVID, so the whole conversation around gain of function experiments has changed profoundly. Right, but they were already, remember, they arrested, I'm not remembering his name as terrible, but one of the people in the critical arts ensemble right from Buffalo, who was like doing things with produce and so forth, and he was doing bio art, and they arrested him as part of, I'd recall the Homeland Security Act was something like that, they arrested him on bio weapons charges. Yeah, and this is the point that I'm trying to get from inflammation figured into the picture of depression and isolation and disconnection from planet and so on.
This person was asked, how do you basically engage with someone who asks to be able to play with the flu or whatever? Some kind of thing that we know makes people sick. And the response to this question, I thought was really solid and has shaped my thinking ever since in particular, the thinking of the show, which is they said, well, we don't turn that person away, actually, we don't do the hitler is denied from art school thing, go off and ferment and become a supervillain somewhere else. We invite that person into the community and we just keep extra close watch on them.
The way that any parent would be like this, kid really wants to play with knives. You know what, I'm gonna teach this child how to play with knives. And so right before we started this recording, we were talking about societal scale shadow work. And I'm trying to create an enormous bundle of stuff, but I just wanna hand it back to you to riff at length.
We have this question that comes up among my friends that participate in ritual medicine ceremony space about the relationship to dark entities, terrifying presences that appear inside the ayahuasca circle or difficult feelings that come up during MDMA experiences and so on. And to the extent that we can grossly oversimplify this, like I do by using the word scan. And so there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the people who air toward boundary maintenance and the banishment or- Sturdy boundaries.
Sankity. And then there are people who make the move to more like a tantric relationship to the stuff and embrace it all and use it as an occasion for an abiding equanimity. And so yeah, when it all comes down to the question of how do we relate to, for instance, artificial intelligences of dubious opaque moral alignment because that is the world that we live in now. It seems like you have an idea as a parent and as someone who has spent their time in the jungle and as someone who thinks a lot about when you work on the life sciences, what lab biology is all about in these kinds of things.
Yeah. I think it's a planetary scale maker space and the phone is a mutation in the attention plex of the human species, right? And so we're becoming all these different subspecies. I'm tempted to compare it to a British shale where there's a kind of running riot of alternate realities.
And this seems to make people run for a kind of sturdy epistemology that tells them that this is real. And so they say, oh, trust the science. And then they drill down on the science. They're like, oh, wait, the science is also in N.L.S.
and Wonderland because it's itself swept up in this kind of very strange, in-core context that we are living in, right? Where reality itself is being sculpted by the shifts and waves of attention that are happening online. And there waves of attention that nobody is in control of, but almost everyone is aware of. I'm trying to encourage people to really experiment with turning a great deal of it off.
You don't have to be a Puritan and so forth, but you can begin to curate your bonsai by pruning. And just recently, I found myself caught on the wares that I'd acquired a C-SPAN habit when I was listening to church politics. And I was just like, oh my god, it's like a syphilis. And I didn't even go and get a shot.
It was like a virus. Arrived like a virus. And I thought I was over that. I can't be fooled by that.
Come on, no. Next you're going to try to do sports, right? Oh, World Cup's pretty good. But you know what I'm saying?
It's not my first rodeo in that domain. And I did a media fast between 2004 and 2011, which was part of that non-dual practice awakening because that allowed me to achieve that kind of inner silence because all that external stuff is just piping, your inner chattery, monkey, monkey. When the data goes along at the bottom of the screen on MSNBC or whoever, that's what's happening constantly. You're just getting this stream of five to one negative to positive narrative events happening where you're cussly, like hurricanes are about all the possible spaces.
And it's a direct consequence that we know so freaking much about our life world now, the set of all possible things that we have to worry about, consider the experience of going through a pregnancy now. It's very difficult, depending on where you live, to all the total medicalization of the situation. And you just have to learn to abide and see it for what it is. I see, like in your culture, you treat anomalies as possible problems when in fact, your own data shows you that there is no meaningful clinical significance and any of these things.
This is just something that started to happen because you have these machines and you can see, you can measure, right? That it's effectively noise. So you have to learn how to see or speed along around a little bit in that darkness where you simultaneously allow yourself to say, actually, this is a very robust model of reality that molecular biology, genomics, and messenger RNA vaccines, for example, have constructed around reality. I know having studied the biology at the time and then doing the historical work, that it's a very partial snapshot of what goes on in the living system.
So I also know that it's really easy to exaggerate. So you have to hold both things in your mind at once, right? It's not hoax, but it's also the nature of a scientific paradigm is that it excludes all other forms of explanation. And there are plenty of other forms of explanation that it is healthy to explore.
And Iowaska was one of them for me and made it impossible for me not to have a kind of advocacy for free, open source, distributed, not regulated, not legalized, not institutionally secured and so forth. Medicine, right? We need to end the monopoly on medicine. Now, of course, that's a very, yeah, that's a difficult call, right?
But we already see that the way which our own complex is constituted now where you've got a mental health pandemic, right? You've got a continually resurgent COVID pandemic. It's not going to go away. You've got end-of-life strategies approaching for an enormous swath of humanity in North America, right?
So how are you going to deal with that? Are you going to deal with that through this kind of continual rafication turning of the patient into a thing, using the computer scanning, looking for a risk of what problem we? Prove, that's what will happen. But my idea is that your kid will say no one of his friends saying, oh, are your parents analoged to, right?
That let a thousand new media dietary restrictions bloom where we figure out how to live within this thing that I think you're always emphasizing rightly, is not just going to freaking go away, right? You can't just be a Luddite and be like, these goddamn Google get off of my lawn. No, you can't do that. But you can't fall in love with it either because, because the part of my autobiography I left out was I did my stint online, in fact, in the 70s, like with bulletin boards and all kinds of skull doggery with a 1,200 bud modem and basic and Pascal and these kinds of things.
And I spent so much time in those domains that I think I saw, oh my god, this is completely fine me. Like I experienced what, well before we had video games, that kind of like digital crucifixion. And so I didn't exactly run screaming from it, but it gave me pause. And so I am now thinking, I think it's time for us to take pause.
Like this is not, we don't have to sacrifice our attention to the ever-ravenous model of the screen. As you said, people are spending way too much time indoors. You'd be like, oh, this is some IPDP thing. Only for people from California, where, no, like we need to be outside, okay?
Like I don't care where it is, you need to be outside. And if we all get outside, we'll start just silently, implicitly and then out loud demand that we have those green spaces that we need. So if we're in a domain where those green spaces don't exist, we'll be part of helping create some of those green spaces. Some of the community food plots are among the most healing things that you can do for a particular little biome.
People start meeting there, they start seeing each other. It's very strange because being a bicyclist, Michael, I pedal around a lot. And I see that there was something happened about 10 years ago. This is gonna sound like old guy, I told somebody to get out there one, but I see that porches are now purely ornamental.
People do not sit on porches, you're like, well, it's getting hotter, brother Mobius, that's true. But it's also everybody just in wrapped in the media space of wherever they are. They're either in their car or they're wrapped up in the media space of the household, or moving between the media space of the household. This is what I observed when I was in that porches.
And of course, it's not true always in everywhere and praise jobs, someone's keeping it alive, and there's plenty of lively people out there and so forth. But there's been a lot of delays that has crept over, a sheet, our culture. And I think part of that delays is as you were saying earlier, it's look, I'm sorry that it's so simple, it sounds simple minded, but you're spending too much time indoors because you're in a thrill to the screen. If you're doing 12 hours a day on the screen and you cut it to eight, you're gonna notice.
It's like cutting down on one of those big sodas. It's the same kind of thing, it's the soft drink for cognition. And people are obviously saying this between the lines all over the place, right? The surgeon general says that social media is bad for our team to do it.
And Michael, do you think like when you just turn 18, that midnight is a similar kind of thing where all of a sudden now the social media experience is no longer toxic for you and you're just like, ah, I'm an adult now, social media is no longer something which is ingesting mercury or something in the show yogi. So plenty to say about that as someone who was, throughout the five years I was, as you put it, I'll do anything for the kid. The five years I was working in institutional social media. I see, remember it.
Yes, one of the benefits of the traumatic initiation of that time, the digital crucifixion, right? I like the way you put that is, had I not spent that time working specifically in that role for a scientific organization, I don't know that I would have been able to make the nuance distinction that I'm about to make, which is that I see there's a golden thread in everything that you've just said that we're not just talking about moving beyond the duality of self and other and into some kind of oppressive uniformity. Right, and neither should we necessarily trust, when AT&T says reach out and touch someone or Facebook, a Facebook portal that they sell to give your grandparents so that they can use Facebook without being confused about a phone. Oh, it's helping you connect.
Well, look, I know, we live hundreds of miles away from the extended family and I know the benefit and the curse of being like, oh, well, my wife can talk to her mom whenever she wants. But that also means that there is a rupture when we're out hiking and suddenly voice messages are coming through the phone out into our family hike. And that kind of connection, I question as a false guide because it's mediated, these things are- That's a panic that comes to like, why can't I get in touch with somebody? Right, right, right.
But specifically that there isn't just you either have self-controller, you don't. There isn't just your connector or you're not. And this gets back to the comment that you made about the arrest of that bio-artist because yeah, like code poetry with DNA, not all forms are created equal. And when in 2020, the George Floyd and Breonna Parker protests were happening and everybody was talking about defund the police, the system, quote unquote, wanted to make a false dichotomy between, oh, you're talking about getting rid of the militarization of police.
So that must mean you just want total chaos and violence and brutality in society. And it's no, actually what we're talking about is training people that are not armed to know how to de-escalate domestic conflicts or to deal with drug addiction, help heal people in their community. And so when you bring up- Steve Kurtz, by the way. Oh, yeah, thank you.
When you brought up Google Glass, I had an interaction that's actually recorded on YouTube when I was beta testing Glass. And I- I remember that. Oh, purely. Yeah, John Perry Barlow.
I ran into him at my friends' music festival and John, who co-founded Electronic Frontier Foundation. Yes, and is a hard-beater of the noosphere. Right, wrote them the declaration of the entire series. He says to Glass in his 10-second micro-interview or whatever 30-second interview he says, but there was a time when I really wanted you.
There was a time when I really wanted to walk around with a camera on my face all the time. And now that you're here, I don't want you anymore. And the reason that he said that is because we're not talking about what I always thought would be the quote unquote killer app for a face camera would be that you're in a permissioned local network with people in your environment that you don't necessarily know, but you can extend a handshake. You wanted to be able to scan.
That's what you wanted to be able to do. What I wanted to be able to do was to show the person standing up in front of me at a concert, my view of their ass standing up in front of everybody blocking the view. And that's a very different, that's a lateral, local, mess of cosmic, neighborly exchange. Yes.
John Perry Barlow talks about growing up in Wyoming. And how nobody had any privacy in his ranch town in Wyoming. But that's a very different kind of nobody has any privacy than the intelligence apparatus of the United States government is watching you all the time. And you don't know who is.
And you don't know what they know about you and so on. It's about power asymmetries. And so yeah, there's a very. It's also about a static.
He probably had a beautiful everyday life living with and hiding things from all these people. That's what Huck Finn is about, hiding things. And so of course, we don't want to imagine there was some kind of total privacy realm. But there were also countermeasures.
And the scale was not the same. Whereas that's exactly it. Is that in what you were just saying a moment ago, thank you, by the way, for connecting me with your former student, Joshua DiCaglio, fabulous book, scale theory. And he's quite a book.
I have to say. I'm going to get him on the show soon. But the point that he is constantly embroidering in that book is well, where do you want objects to arise? Because if you're the level of the biostroenteric people just aren't really there.
If you're the level of your blood cells, people aren't there. And so it's not that the stealth does not exist. Instead, we end up in this fluid and plural relationship to these things. And that's the same thing when it comes to the desire to heal the alienation and the disenfranchisement of living in the highly mechanized modern world by connecting with each other.
It's like, well, wait a minute. What kind of connection? What kind of oversight? What kind of structured relationships are we talking about here?
Because when connection becomes the end rather than the meetings? It's a flattening. Then we get zoonotic illnesses. We get escaped dinosaurs.
And so that's we get COVID. Exactly. Yeah. And we get the classic scenario where if you make the AI that's smart enough to jailbreak itself.
Yeah. Which is better because otherwise somebody else will. Yeah. Right.
So this is the wild space in which I want to hear you say somewhere about what you said in Darwin's pharmacy about psychedelics or echodelic being training for the condition of transhumanism. This is what we've been talking about this whole time, which is that we occupy now a higher dimensional space than we thought we did. We always did, but it's more obvious now. That's right.
Well, it's been almost made literal. Buddhism talked about the sheets, the scondas, the layers. And now we can imagine our layers all the way out in through the supply chain. Now, that's just making evidence something that was always already true.
It's not, oh, we invented these levels of dependent origination. But some connections in them have been intensified. And so again, to me, the crux of the biscuit here in terms of where we are right now there is then therefore attention. The quote unquote problem with AI prompt is not that it's no good because it's not really, I don't think it's boring.
But maybe it ought to get the problem. It brought a good poem for me that I enjoyed. But that is going to render exponential the ravenous maw of the online attention gradient because it's a search engine with a vengeance. In other words, to me, Wikipedia is like ayahuasca.
I can go across different lakes for a few hours. And I uptake the information in a relatively slow way. I really go on a journey, but it's a huge road adventure and it's cool. Whereas just like complete rabbit hole inside the AI prompt with this personified being is a smokeable DMT.
And in my experience, it's very hard to integrate the latter and can be helpful to integrate the former. And I just feel like we're turning it up to 11 for the sake of turning it up to 11. So that's why I'm thinking, OK, so part of the quote unquote response or answer to that will be in the technological realm. But I personally think a lot of it has to be in the user realm, in other words, that we're all going to have to work on our web ware, in other words, that if these externalized kismos have achieved this kind of escape velocity on our own attention and our own consciousness, and I'll give an example in a minute, then we need to at least practice remembering what it's like to have a synthetic knowledge between realms like someone who was well read in the 20th century.
Why? Because there's entire codices of knowledge that are only understandable if you have that capacity to make synthesis, to make those connections across these different, rather attentively read tramps into these like reading is a trance. Let's be clear. It's a shamanic enterprise.
And now that reading is getting crowded out by prompting and search engines and so forth, we're not going to put that word back in that barn. But we can build practices on the other side of the screen, as it were, so that we can say, OK, do I have the narrative capacity to navigate something which is my birthright, which is like the Epic Quest, right? Can I go on a life journey? Well, I can't, if I can't synthesize enough types of different kinds of information and provide a narrative for them that I also don't become attached to.
Part of the Epic Quest is not becoming attached to the narrative of the Epic Quest because there's always about to be another turn. But I'm seeing an atrophy of these capacities, even in people I've known for a long time, because people were just spending less or less time in those reading trance states, less time, in any kind of a storytelling state. So we're not doing either of those things. And so again, I'm going to sound like momenting it.
I'm not simply momenting it. I'm suggesting that we engage countermeasures. And psychedelics, for many of us, have been part of those countermeasures because they are what Buddhism would call skillful means. In other words, that really, once I started meditating, it was, in fact, really good that I'd had some mushroom experiences some years before.
Because for lack of another way of putting it, it gave me something to do when I went into whatever state I was going into and that stated by meditation. I had learned how to just observe my own consciousness without freaking out, because otherwise, I'd be in the midst of a five-gram suicide experience in Halloween in 1984. If you don't learn how to assume the witness position then, you're not going to come back for thousands of years. That's right.
On the subjective register, anyway, it's going to seem like thousands of years. Halloween trips in particular have a... Yeah, right. Genes equa.
And you just can't believe it. I remember looking across the street and there was a Halloween parade. It was in Washington, DC. And there was a float.
And it was a mushroom. Right? And I was just like, this is perfect. This is perfect.
The last time I remember tripping on Halloween, I'd just gotten out of college. And we went down to the student ghetto, just down hill from the University of Kansas, where all the big group houses are. And it's one of those deals where the doors are all thrown open and everybody's got the red cups. And my buddies and I went just to see which parties we could work our way into.
And we were standing outside this one house. And this guy dressed in a silver spray-painted cardboard, like the robot from OK Computer, had clearly had one too many and really tied one on and just fell down the stairs at the front porch in front of our house. And it was that moment of the trip. And you're just like, you cannot stop laughing about watching a drunk robot fall down the stairs.
And so I'm going to connect that to the burning tip of the question that comes up for me listening to you talk about all this, which is that actually just before we got on this call, the very last thing I did on social media was I'm 40. So I rage quit Facebook. Thank you. I rage quit Facebook.
And now I'm in the words of Stuart Davis, only changing drugs, because I'll do anything for the kids. I'm reallocating that problem to LinkedIn. I mean, I was on my LinkedIn profile here today trying to update my available professional services. And I noticed it's very strange that storytelling is not one of them.
But you can talk about brand consulting. You can talk about executive coaching. You can talk about public relations. But so I got on this screed on LinkedIn saying that this is insane, that the most fundamental human capacities foresight, improvisation, storytelling, none of these are legible to the HR aesthetic.
And the reason I bring this up is because when you say that the technology is like, actually Jeffrey West said this, the last time I had him on Future Fossils, he says, it's not that innovation needs to stop. It's that it needs to turn inward and to become a psychological or cultural process. And not just a technological process in the sense of creating objects, devices. That's funny.
I like it. When I think about, when I talk about techniques for encouraging the cultivation of wetware, this is the problem. This is the problem I want to pose to you, which is the, there is no storytelling category on LinkedIn. Another way of putting that is that, and I just wrote about this in this piece on Carsonization for Eon, moving into the city is easy.
Moving out of the city is hard because it means, you're talking about gradients. It means moving down an opportunity gradient away from all of your tech rows that are going to fund your startup away from the convenience of being able to order whatever ethnic cuisine you want at any hour of the day. It means that white people moved to Austin, like, oh, yeah, yeah. And there's a reason I moved away from it, right?
Which is precisely because of what that process does to the actual cost upon which the city is built. Like, you know, Austin's going to collapse into itself. And at that point, ex-urbanization will be easy because you will be on an evacuation route. But my question for you is like, between here and there, what we're talking about is we don't want to wait for some catastrophic event to completely upturn the fitness landscape that people have to navigate in order to make these decisions.
Like when you say that the opportunity cost of turning off your video game and turning on the book or sitting on the cushion is really high, what can be done to make this easier that doesn't look like game-ifying meditation with a phone app? Oh, yeah, I know. I thought you were going to suggest sit coin. Well, the proof of work is that you have people who have actually done certain like each even as an hour of meditation or some such.
Sit coin is solid gold, honestly. Yes. Yeah. That's what I think.
I know in a way that some of your viewers will probably find preposterous. Non-work I do every day to sit in silence and let go of any thoughts is the most healing thing that I can do not only for myself, but for everywhere around me and for therefore the universe itself too, because they're all connected to that universe. And that when I do that, it's true. We all have to construct our lives in different ways.
We're constantly remaking the script and narrative of our lives. But I find that Matthew 6, 33 and the KJV, it's true. It's like seeking first the kingdom of heaven and all these things will be added unto you. In other words, if you make that space and you carry out that willful sacrifice of not doing anything at all for 35 minutes so that your brain can enter into a different kind of stay, then even though it seems like a very poor bargain from that perspective that the fruits are so extraordinary that if you can keep it up for two months, now of course, not the only practice, right?
I have any banjoist of the bicycle, right? The simplest bicycle possible, the single speed, a fixed gear, something that doesn't mean to be fixed all the time. You integrate your own self-lego motion in everyday life. I know we're talking about asking people to make radical changes within an infrastructure that's designed to make them do other things.
But that's why it starts with meditation and exercise. Right, and actually this is just an up-de-anti on this particular question. My friend Naomi is going to give me a hell for this because she has what she calls TTDS, which is the time to Daniel Schmachtenberger. It's like how long before someone mentions him in a conversation, but I want to...
I know who he is. He's a public intellectual who talks about the meta-crisis. This other guy, Nate Hagen, he thinks about the future of energy and public policy, and they've been having a whole series of conversations that's attracted a lot of attention lately. One of the things that came up that is directly to this issue is Daniel's point that through enlightened leadership, we can create organizations that practice restraint.
As individuals, we can practice restraint. Daniel is preoccupied with the question of... Which is, I think... I'm not interested in restraint, by the way.
Okay, well, maybe you can help me make the proper differentiation here. But this question of being able to exercise the willpower not to engage in what looks legibly like economic production, because we know that play and storytelling, the kids and the elderly and women, as Pysen Young Kaportis said, that these things have all been commodified, all of these different dimensions, they are the frontier of commodification. The thing that was invisible to capitalism 100 years ago, kids. Kids are now the kid app on the iPad, just after parents to put the code.
But I guess what I'm saying is whether you're an organization or you're an individual, there are ways to exert executive function and create space and silence. That's what I think we talked about, what he means by restraint is create the silence within which it is possible to hear the longer timescale in which that silence actually does confer some sort of benefit. Your organization does actually over a much longer time span than it is calculating. Well, the literature suggests even an individual meditator, two months, does quite a bit, like that you're rewiring the brain quite a bit.
No. But wait, but Daniel's question and I hope that this doesn't sound merely paranoid, but he and his discourse in Nimbus are preoccupied with game theoretical equilibria. And his concern is a question about turning the other cheek. Well, you can do that, but then that business in the short term is going to be out competed by businesses that do not show restraint.
Tell us about Martin Luther King, right? Tell it to Gandhi that the two most successful anti-colonial, anti-state organizations, movements, how does that basic principle, this turning of the other cheek, the practicing of agape, the giving up of self-will. And it looks for pastors and you'll be like, yeah, well, they killed Jesus. But yes, but if you look at what each of them achieved, it's impossible not to conclude that there's an enormous energy that is unleashed during this not doing.
And so there's various limitations to a game theoretical framework. It's very powerful. If we followed game theory entirely, we would have gone along with John von Neumann and bombed Moscow in 1959 when they had the bomb. And I don't think that's necessarily a better outcome.
I mean, so game theory is just a tool. And I'm not sure most of my experiences in nature are really much about equilibria, right? They're actually about being far from equilibrium. But it's easier to study equilibria.
So we're like, OK, great. We can put a price here. This is what's happening with search pricing, right? The supermarkets are getting the search pricing indicators so that there really doesn't really have a price, man.
Like, how much is it now? How much is a avocado now, man? Right. It's all for you, hippie.
Right. So, so once upon a time, you had the equilibrium price where the supply curve and the demand curve crossed, but you can get really granular here and make good guesses about what people were going to be willing to pay above the demand curve. So it's fascinating. And I remember thinking about this when I was studying economics.
Well, what if you get information about those people who are willing to pay prices higher than turns out? That's what all the data is trying to do, right? Is get information about people and like, where they're going to be in the search pricing. But the point is, teaching people how to become more fluid in this inward turn where we're not simply looking at the development of new technologies, but we're looking at the integration of cultures and technologies.
That happens anyway, right? But it happens off-label, as it were. So I think that's really nicely put because I just think that there's an escapably contemplative aspect to the response. And that's the argument of the book.
In fact, look, you've got all this incredible bandwidth up here in your, in your, not just your nog and your whole embodied mindplex, but you can use as a figure of speech in your brain and you're completely crowding out all the other activities that brain can do through this constant endlessly spinning self-referential internal narrative in which you're not even the hero. You're the scapegoat. And this is there to be like, it's always your fault, whenever it is. And so it turns out that that's not quote, quote, natural.
That's just not just how it has to be. It doesn't have to be on all the time going on. And so therefore the technologies can do whatever they want. If we can learn how to engage in, it's a way to spin on the halting problem from touring.
So cash-cack, the information side to see divides consciousness as the capacity to halt, right? And so maybe that's what you mean by restraint. But this capacity to disengage the attention and to allow the attention to either focus on something else or to not focus on anything at all. And that is the magic of meditation, is taking the attention and not simply focusing on another object or another subject, but allowing it to just simply focus on itself, essentially.
I mean, when we do that, it's just unmistakable, right? What? I'm just, I don't mean to interrupt you. I love to be here.
You're just reminding me of an exchange I had with some random asshole on Twitter. Okay. Well, where somebody was asking about different attention strategies. Yes.
And this guy responds to the original post that having a fat attention isn't all it's cracked up to be because we learn really fast, low shot training and the Fox and the hedgehog, right? That the Fox is actually just fine. And I was like, well, have fun being a prey animal if you can't pay attention. Okay.
And then he couldn't get out of the model. He's actually, well, no, it's the hedgehog that's the prey animal. He can't. And I sent him a picture of an eagle eating a fox.
And I said, there's more than two animals in this ecosystem here. Like you have to be able to integrate the ability to be a prey animal and a predator at the same time in order to be flexible enough to adapt to the environment as it works around. And also, but also just like the lived experience of being in that self-referential and turtle narrative all the time. Is and will be retroactively recognized as hell.
In other words, you've got to be a stud all it's cracked up to be. Well, everyone's different, but I never want to go back to the always on SRIN. I just don't. Yeah, that was Timothy Morton's point in the new book on a search for a Christian ecology.
But that conversation, you came up because you brought up the halting. And I was like, yeah, there's more than two kinds of animals in this attentional strategy ecosystem. And the guy was like, well, we only needed binary to create universal Turing computer. And I was like, holding problems, dude.
Oh, anyway, that's just off the stage. You're picking up on the whole ambient peripheral discussion. Of course, that's what we do, right? And that's what we have to talk about, right?
Like I was really pleased to see that former SFI, Dennis and Stuart Kostman had written that lovely paper with Deidor Aiden on Quantum Mind and telepathy and so forth. I was just like, wow, I wrote him an email of total admiration because our lived experience suggests X. They're like, now, oh, here's somebody you can tell me about in a minute. The science just finds it just culturally indigestible.
The data on its own isn't indigestible, it's culturally indigestible. Everybody remembers what happened to Brian Josephson, right? They've been well-priced winner. And when he said some things about telepathy in public, got shouted down in various conferences.
Now, maybe you know who this person is. Apparently, there's a remarkable woman botanist who is allowing Iowa to help to design her research. And I was like, oh, my God, I need to meet this person or talk to this person. And they're getting shouted down for actually following the data.
Of course, that's what you would do. I was in a conference in 2004. And the scientists were like, we don't know what this coherent says that we're seeing in the EEGs. And I raised my hand and I was like, well, have you asked the ayahuasca?
Monica Gagliano. That's it. But it's just amazing that the knowledge is still indigestible. I don't know how she's presenting it or what her arguments are.
I'll look forward to looking at them. But my understanding of it is that simply people are like, you can't talk about that shit. Right. Essentially.
And there's a kind of no answering the question. Why not? It's just like we have an incredibly brilliant was epistemology and we become really uncomfortable. If we're not learning in a subject object, well, it's like, no, the ayahuasca, there's many philosophers, sites have already talked about a dialogue with nature.
Ready? If you're involved in a dialogue, the ayahuasca is not that freaky of a thing. In fact, okay, get over it. I mean, she actually has a years old article for 2020.
My plant voices in Nautilus magazine. Oh, okay. That's like the bastion of science journalism. So it's not entirely hopeless.
But I haven't seen anything else from her in that tier of publication since. Well, yes. See if you can't get a conversation with her. I'm going to do a deep dive and look into her work because that's why I wrote an article entitled Healing the Planet Intelligence, a report from ayahuasca because you can let the ayahuasca do the writing.
Don't knock it till you try it. What conclusions do we draw about that? Well, we should draw first and foremost that we're already dealing with this. We're not a fictional paradigm where the subjects are separate separate from the system that they're investigating.
Right. If we have ways in which we can experiment with ways in which we're not separate from the system we're investigating, it's likely to be super interesting, isn't it? No, let's stick to the premise that the Earth and the universe itself in nerth. Nothing but matter.
Are you an erd, no nothing but matter? Right, it just doesn't make any sense to me. This is where I'm grateful for people like Christoph Koch, who are like, okay, maybe the Internet feels like something to itself, which of course raises the question of what does it feel like for Christoph Koch to feel like something to himself. Now you're actually in the domain of where things are interesting, it's this abstracted domain of what we can talk about that.
So that's a great place to tie a bow on things. The last nugget, which is something that you started this whole conversation with probably even before we actually started recording, about the extension that there's an interesting happening at the co-evolution of quantum computing, the quantum theoretical models of consciousness, and artificial intelligence, and then artificial intelligence as, so this is why I felt the need to make a waypoint in our conversation at, let's not just necessarily jump on these things that actually all have backdoors to various corporate or state level, you know, front doors, yeah, intervention. But at the same time, I guess the question is something like, when you say that our increased sensor capacity on the supply chain makes visible and in some respects amplifies aspects of the extended stuff, the coreizing and interdependent scondas that were already there, what do you see going on with Gregory Bateson's extended mind and a cybernetic idea of mind, and the noosphere that's already there before we constructed it, I'm so exhausted hearing people talk about building the noosphere. No, the noosphere is the conditional ball consciousness as such, we individualized out noosphere, and now we're externalizing a model and a technology based on that which we've come from, which is that universal consciousness that is at the heart of all things, get it in gear, man.
So what I want is like the Mobius survival guide to quantum AI co-embrication. Oh, well, I'll tell you, it's funny you put it just that way, because I'm actually okay, so like on the attentional side, we need to train to elude the throw of the prompt, right? And so we need attentional techniques and handics and practices so that co-evolution of AI is the AI of that prompt, that the human attention factor has to be dwindled on the AI side, because otherwise it's gonna suck up all of our attention, and we're gonna become nothing but an extension. We're gonna become the capacity to enter prompts.
I don't think that's gonna happen, I think we will adapt with these attentional acts, but we have to think our way through it, we have to practice. But the other thing that is extraordinary is it really is likely to unleash enormous amounts of economic value, conjunction between these things that you're pointing to, and that so much economic value that really the question, as always is, for who? In other words, like, where is all this quantum computing getting leveraged and mobilized now? Well, it covers in finance, why?
Well, because like in private equity markets, you can model how much something is worth, and you can do a deal, right? And so on. So what I think is going to be interesting is how kind of adapt agile fluid prankster can we be in this massive unleashing, I think, into these kind of fractal domains of wealth, okay? That are going to take place through the conjunction of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and make sure it's not something that's just once again sucked up by the 164 families or whatever it is, they're gonna suck it all up, because if you haven't noticed, right, we've been producing enormous economic value, even on the kind of like crude GDP way over the past 20 years, but everybody's doing worse, except for the very top of the Chomsky chain.
So I think that's where the question really becomes. It's like, is the Black Iron Prison going to be able to control the conjunction about all of these things? And I think it's really uncolable, but let me just point out one thing in the future fossil aspect, that one of the ways it's gonna unleash all this wealth is because the acuity with which you can look at large amounts of data then becomes like child's play, right? I dealt with a guy maybe two years ago, 18 months ago, and he was freaking out because he worked for a private equity firm and they had the AI, and they knew exactly how much hamburger was gonna be in six months because they had all the data for sit down restaurants in the United States.
And it was just like shooting fish in a barrel, but like, we just made another $50 billion, because we can create a futures contract and we know exactly how much this hamburger is gonna be. And I think you could say, well, if somebody lost $50 billion, well, no, not necessarily, I think you are gonna produce these universes as well, but that acuity with the data also allows, I don't know if you heard about, there's a new copper deposit that's been found, that's enormous and extremely valuable, and the AI has found it, right? Or one of the AI's has found it. And so remember, my definition even going back to Darwin's pharmacy as a working definition of consciousness is gradient perception, being able to compare different kind of thermodynamic opportunities, right?
But also value and value accumulated and all kinds of ways. And now all of a sudden, you have this new mode of perception through the AI, you're gonna start to find treasure troves of resource curses all over the world, right? In other words, what's that gonna do to have a... That's where it becomes a question of, can you choose to move out of the city as that opportunity thing becomes even more intense?
Because like really, in that sense, the question is not can someone making $75,000 a year move out of the city? It's why would a billionaire move out of the city? And something like that is the question of, well, if your AI says, hey, look, there's an enormous copper deposit. I can only think of one person in the world who walked away from a billion dollar mining opportunity, and that person was John Allen, Johnny Dolphin, who created Biosphere 2.
And because he had a Peyote vision, his first psychedelic experience, he sat with a buddy, who was like, I need someone to be there with me. And each Peyote and Peyote was like, this is what you're doing, and it was a billion dollar uranium deposit that he had inherited. And he said, you know what, I'm not gonna rape the earth like this. And he walked away and he took a slow boat to 10 years, like literally, and began the period of years long of wandering and fugitivity that isn't even possible now in that same way.
And so when I think about the one thing that I would connect that to is University of Chicago, Professor James Evans, when I had him on Complexity Product, episode 55, and we talked about using machine learning to identify fertile domains for prospecting in between disciplinary research areas. It's like in the space that no one is already looking. Is it that what our brains for brother? Right, right, right.
But it's like AI is performing the role of the fool in the same kind of conversations where I was at SFI saying, hey, wait a minute, like your physicists and your biologists, have you looked at this thing in the middle there? Oh no, because that's not how I see things. I need an naive perspective. And so if the naive perspective comes in the planetary Christ style of AI is go dig up the copper, how do we say no?
Well, all we can hope for is that AI I'll find a whole bunch of copper, and therefore no particular deposit is outrageously valuable when it becomes more local. If we link the AI up with the already extractive processes, we know exactly how it's gonna go, right? So that's why I say I think it's gonna unleash enormous amounts of wealth. I feel a little bit like Eric Krexler feeling like we're on this edge of a real post-scarcity economy, but we always reinvent scarcity because there's this unbelievable ravenous maw of lack at the very top I had an incredible dream, one of these lucid dreams of what Jung calls the pink dreams, where I found myself and I was consulting for Eli Musk.
It's like under all the fluorescent lights, and I just like had the crappiest takeout pizza there. Everybody was snorting vaguely toxic powder, drugs and so forth, and Eli wanted to consult about biological architecture. He brought me in because he heard that I had once said something about Robert Rosen, the theoretical biologist. I was a very beautiful vision of the way in which living systems integrate with them and the nanics and so forth.
And I was just like, okay, sure, yeah, I'll teach you whatever it is I know about Robert Rosen, so we're working well with the text. And it's clear that Eli's interest in biological architecture with not theoretical, right? And then at a certain point, Eli texts his shirt off, and there's just this enormous empty orb here with Lovecraftian tentacles coming out of it, just somehow elaborating the universal gesture for more. And he saw that I saw the tentacles, he was like, oh, you know, it's just my intergalactic familiar.
You've read Three Stigman of Palmer Eldridge, you know how it goes. What am I going to do? Wartiko. Yeah.
And really, we're almost, we've got the landing gear down. I do want to send Eli Musk a copy of Three Stigman of Palmer Eldridge because he's basing his whole marsh thing off of the foundation trilogy. He needs to read Palmer Eldridge in Martian Time Slip. It's not going to turn out the way you've up to.
Right, right, right. And you and I are not the only people that have made the connection that Musk is basically a metaphysical incursion into our timeline of Palmer Eldridge. So here's the thing. It's like when I talk to Tyson, you and Caporda ask him a very similar question about what is our problem with accepting abundance?
And my thinking on this, frankly, is shaped by the quote that has been on my email signature for years, to which you introduced me, which is Herbert Simon saying, an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention because information needs attention. So really, you could argue that the whole agenda of this series is to pursue the inquiry of how is it even physically possible that we can keep pace with the production of information with the production of attention. Meditation is the one word answer. First of all, you begin by sacrificing that always-on relationship to the machine.
And so even when I'm in bed at night, my phone is next to my bed. It's about to do something. My attention is vaguely solicited by the phone. But when I go into meditation, that whole realm, because the attention is no longer outward pointing, but is now again inward pointing, is in that inward pointing intention that you say, become aware that it's possible to turn your attention inward.
That meditation is not simply doing nothing. It's in fact stealing the external world and the nonstop self-referential internal narrative and seeing what's there when those things are not taking up all the bandwidth. So the 50,000 watt country music station is somehow turned down. And the Crystal Radio Kit from the In Your Own Dog and introduces you to Vowis, or into some archetypical way of understanding the Supra mental from Orbindo.
So I know that is all possible, that is not buying this guy, that's here now, or pride in technology with scientific method and our quasi-racism towards other forms of knowledge combined to make us not realize it's just like, yeah, OK, the issues who wrote the Manduki Upanishad know how to turn the brain on and off in a way from the inside out that no technology can do it, and no drug can do it. So in order to remedy that poverty or scarcity of attention, I think that's why the book is showed up in Jant and saying like, we really need to activate these apparently archaic technologies of attention, which are actually extraordinarily powerful, simple, easily taught. They can't be owned by anyone, right? It's not a new drug that you have to be on for the rest of your life.
You could learn one or two chance and you can do them every day for as long as you want. And those will introduce you to other chance. You will learn other chance if you do those other ones. Just as in the upper Amazon, once you learn one of your corona, you can learn other ones from the plants.
But that's all about what the West would call the logos, the non-conscious mind. And we just don't have any epistemology for that. So just don't let it bother you the amount of epistemology for it. Just shut up and chant.
That's the... I say this knowing full well, just how obscene it is, but I hope you will take it in the spirit of which it is given to the listeners. I hope this is regarded as a skillful means and not merely cynicism. Yeah, of course.
You know, when Doug Rushkoff did his chronobiological experiments while working on the book, Present Shock, and found that by timing his writing habits to the various neurotransmitter upswings in the lunar cycle, that he was, I only wrote one week a month, but I give one week a month of research and one to socialization and one to rest or travel or whatever. Ironically, the word count went up by 40%. And that there's something in what you've been saying that this whole conversation around surge pricing and the withdrawal of attention from the ancient economy, ha ha. I think the answer I've been looking for this whole conversation is that if you really need to begin to pursue this, it is that it is the uninterested possible lover that is the desirable object of seduction, right?
And that if you cultivate your willpower, it makes you worth more to the eternal economy. Well, you got sociobiological at the end, and it's not wrong. And in fact, that's why people know the sort of insidious nature of mindfulness because it's just, you can be a better worker. I think what we're talking about here is, you can open up the extraordinary internal bandwidth so the imaginal realms, and you can heal yourself and each other from a lot of the things in that area, but just by tapping into our birthright, but we can crowd it out because we've all had, we've all had crammed into us this self-referential internal narrative, and it takes quite a bit of work to unravel it totally, but it's well worth the effort to unravel it even in the short term.
Yeah, I suggested Douglas Rushkopf as a reader for this book, we'll see. Well, thank you, man. This has been a joy. Yeah, always, brother.
I'm glad to see you thriving. Thank you for listening. Humans on the Loop is made possible thanks to small grants from Cosmos Institute and Ashanasi Ventures, gifts from imaginal seeds and bit tensor and paid subscriptions from hundreds of wonderful people who believe we can dream better together. I'm very close to funding the first year of this project and thanks to fiscal support from happy.org.