The hallmark of the great conversation for me is where you discover or uncover things that weren't there at the beginning through combination of recombination like Arthur's talking about, through different lines of sight, different angles, different associations. And so it's much, much more when it's functioning well than a predictable communication machine. It's not about getting to these things that you can already see in advance. There's a role and a time and a place for that.
But that to me is a much lesser thing than this kind of joyful and really beast that yields all sorts of things either as soon as you go into it with a precise or contained idea of what you want, then you can only at best achieve what you've already imagined. Whereas the joy of a good conversation is you blunder a cross or things unfold in front of you that you couldn't really imagine. So it's not efficient in that sense, but it can be incredibly effective and it's having all these effects at lots of different layers, the social, the energetic, the connective, the imaginative, the linguistic, all sorts of things are going on all at once. Welcome to episode 16 of Humans on the Loop.
I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And today I'm furthering our exploration of wisdom in the age of magical technologies in dialogue with my friend and inspiration, Robert Pointen, founder of Yellow Learning, associate fellow of the Saeed Business School at Oxford. And author of three beautiful books, Do Pause, Do Improvise, and Do Conversation. His writing conveys insights from decades of designing and leading executive education leadership programs, teaching in the Oxford Strategic Leadership Program, and hosting creative retreats in Spain.
I regard Robert as a model for the kind of life way I consider crucial in our moment of chaos and complexity. And in Future Fossils episode 196, linked in the show notes, he and I discussed how important it is to learn the principles of improvisation as a way of life. As he notes in his latest book, most of us are already skilled improvisers because we spend our lives in conversation, not just with each other, but with our environments. How does trying on this frame transform the ways that we relate to them?
Those of you who know me know how much I like to play with metaphor and see it as a core skill. So I jumped at the chance to talk with Robert about conversations as a technology and technology as a conversation. In an historical moment when so many of us are having wet fields like literal conversations with technology. How do we create fertile conversational fields?
How can we be generous with our improv partners? How do we learn from the structure of conversations in space and time to limit our engagement with AI and allow us to converse meaningfully with the entire history of a person or a culture? At the heart of this project and this episode is the belief that some things are worth doing not because they get us somewhere in particular, but because they're pleasures in themselves. Good conversations are their own reward, not just because they get us where we want to go, but because they bring us together in surprising ways.
So just maybe stretching this analogy to cover all the ways we relate to one another and our built environment will help us bring more wisdom and imagination to the stuff our lives are made of. If you liked this jam as much as we did, please comment and subscribe and then feel free, as Robert said, to go lie down in a darkened room afterwards. And if you want more, I've got great news. Starting May 13th, I'm teaching a five-week course on how to live in the future at Weirdosphere, the online platform hosted by my friends Phil Ford and JF Martell of Weird Studies.
Drawing on over 20 years of research, this course is a guided off-road romp through the bizarre and wonderful moiré's of biology, philosophy and mysticism to help you make new sense of our centuries' metamorphoses and artful ways to participate in the strange new worlds to come. Members get 10% off and partial scholarships are available for those in need. I imagine there are a lot of you. Learn more and enroll at Weirdosphere.org or grab your discounted membership registration link at michaelgarfield.substack.com.
To get a taste of what that course will be like, join the members-only book club call for Federico Campania's book prophetic culture on Saturday, May 3rd, and or join me in turquoise sound for the free public session on right relationship with AI, hosted by the School of Wise Innovation this Thursday, April 24th. Links for both of those in the show notes as well. Firstly, I want to thank everyone for supporting this work, which is my all-in bet that this kind of wayfinding only becomes more valuable as they go and get to weirder. This is the best way I know how to create a public record of my learning and to foster relationships between people and ideas at a time when nothing else feels more important.
I actively dislike playing the solopreneur content creator finite game, but despite appearances humans on the loop is starting to ripen into an infinite game as amazing collaborations take shape in the space around it and the insights generated here are spilling over into many other scenes. Your patronage gives me and all of that the time we need to incubate. So my enduring gratitude goes out to all of you, recognizing that any future we're trading on the market has to start as culture. Big ups to my cripe, Brent Powell, and all members past present and future.
This week, my thanks take the form of an appendix to this episode, 11 extra minutes that would have felt bolted onto our dialogue had I left them in, but we're too good to leave on the cutting room floor. That's in the show notes for you all, and that is all for now. Thank you and enjoy. How are you?
Yeah, good. It's a miserable time of year where I live here in Spain because we get most of our rainfall in this period, so it rains the whole time. And yet you have to remember that's a good thing. I had to learn, you know, when I first came here, I was like, but I'm English.
How can this rain be pissing me off? And then, yeah, but in England, it never rains all night and all day, three days in a row. It just doesn't do that. So actually the key characteristic of British weather is its undependability, not its raininess.
I was just out for a rare moment on the road. I prize these moments. I was up in New York for climate week, which of course is this huge oxymoron. It's like everyone flies in from everywhere.
I have to admit, it was for somewhat selfish reasons of like going to find work. You know, you go fishing where the fish are. But at any rate, I was up there and it was the week that the hurricane hit Asheville, North Carolina horrible, but in New York, it was this lovely rainy weather that we never get in Santa Fe. It rains all day, like what you're talking about.
And I missed it. I was just like, oh, God, like this was like growing up in Florida and it just being wet. Just being like, oh, and then of course you can't enjoy anything anymore in this world without it being like, well, you were just in the Goldilocks zone of what was tragic for someone else. Yeah, that's true.
So yeah, anyway, shall we? Yeah, let's do this. Okay, Robert Pointen, you're on the loop. So yeah, now I've had the pleasure of talking with you on two different shows.
The cool thing, not the cool thing. This is about two different books. And this book makes this conversation awkwardly recursive throughout. We're going to have, the way I'm going to treat this is rather than getting too studious.
There are opportunities to just bibbly, oh, man, see open to various highlights rather than some of the tabs. Because I trust that you really are the person that I hold in highest esteem as someone with whom I can guarantee an interesting and relevant conversation without referencing source material. But because I am trying to be a little bit more diligent about this particular show and to keep it on task as it were, then where I want to take this with you is you do talk about conversations and technology in this book and then conversation as technology. And then the relationship between conversation and improvisation.
And really all three of those are where I want to direct people's attention in getting better at relating to technology in a natural and conversational way. But first, I just didn't mean to have a response. As I was writing, I was reading a lot of reading as I was writing as she might imagine. And I was really struck by the temptation that people have to reach a firm conclusion about the relationship between technology and conversation.
And people reach very different conclusions, but they're very quick to reach those conclusions. It seems to me all perhaps not so quick, but once they do their fairly firm about them. And I remember as I was writing thinking, what do I think? And I spent a lot of time thinking, I don't really know.
And then my conclusion, such as I reached it, is that this is complicated and changing. And I'd never thought of it in the way that you just put it, though it's a very apt description, that there's both conversation and technology and conversation as technology. And that both of those exist. And it just seemed fast out to me to fall in any particular exposition and to say whatever happens on a device can't possibly be conversation because it's lacking the bandwidth to fall human connection.
But by the same token, it seems absurd to pretend it's the same. So then where I ended up with these are interestingly different. And what can it tell us about how we're relating to each other and communicating? And also just to be cognizant of the fact that over time, as different technologies have developed, writing the thing, perhaps the most obvious of them, commentators in the past have reached similarly firm and perhaps premature conclusions about the impact of this technology.
And any technology will have probably more interesting consequences than predictable ones. And our imagination, our creativity and our ability to play with things is a lot of what yields those unexpected and often fortuitous and positive outcomes. So in a very literal sense, watching my kids invent ways to use what's up that I never would have dreamt of. So I just think it's a much more interesting question that I'm reluctant to reach a firm position on than perhaps I realized outside.
I want to take this into some truly weird places with you because I know that you're epistemically open in that regard. As you just said, what I want to do first at risk of killing the vibe is I'm trying to anchor for people in every episode who it is they're talking to. This is sort of like a simulation of actually knowing people, right? So why are you this way?
Where do you come from? I don't think we even really talked about this when I had you on future fossils. Like what is your origin story? What are the catalytic events that led you to care about the orchestration of space and time and props and discussion partners and all of these clever ways that teach people how to kind of garden conversations?
Where did that attentiveness emerge in your life? And like, why is it that you've got these three books do pause to improvise your conversation? They're all coming from a single stem. Like, what is that stem?
Yeah, that's the question I found myself holding when I finished this one. And I'm still interested in it, still exploring it. I think what is that stem? What unites and what's the wellspring which these guys come from?
Because I do think those three books are all different paths through very similar material. I think I'm old enough, perhaps it was more common in the days when I was a child where we were the family that had conversation over dinner and played word games and spoke. And my parents delighted in conversation. So I think my home as a child was a sort of crucible of conversation.
So I think that the early seeds are there. I think I studied at Oxford University and I think at the time I was unaware of the influence of this. But the education there happens intermingled with the living. So again, in those days you would leave home to go and study at university or college.
And the college in an Oxford context, that word means something specific, which is the college is your home. It is the place you live. So it combines both halls of residence and libraries and gardens and all those kinds of things. And so formal teaching, such as it is, because in those days it was pre-minimal, happens much more through a conversational method, the tutorial where you're expected to have read something assimilated into a form that you can read out.
So an essay is not delivered. It was written and then read. And then it's essentially debated with yourself and a tutor and one or two other students. And your ideas are scrutinized and examined.
And the essay really is not a thing which gets graded or marked in its own rights. It's a provocation for a conversation where your ideas are challenged, questioned, and you're responding to those responses. So that's the sort of formal part of it. But the teaching that I enjoyed, if indeed that is the right verb, was perhaps not of the highest quality.
And the informal web of conversation that happened as young people will, you know, staying up all night playing the world to rights, debating both with the peers that you were studying the same subject with, but importantly, in an Oxford college, where people are there studying every subject, you know, you might be hanging out with people who study completely different things to you, chemistry, law, languages, history, political science, whatever. And so that kind of crucible of conversational testing. And I think, you know, Oxford does have a lot to do with this because another part of that is the kind of dinners and dining and conversation over at a table. And so there's a kind of a rich weave of that.
I think at the time I was largely unconscious of it. And I think another strand of my development here, I spent a few years working in advertising where you've got people of very different persuasions and disciplines working together in the same company. So those are essentially responsible and interested in the business. Others focused on consumer and market data and copyright as an art director is really important.
Copyright is not directly as really only interested in kind of the creative part of it. And so I think in that context, I learned that you need to set the room and set your stall out differently to have a different kind of conversation with each of those constituencies. And actually, when you have to have them talk together, you need to think even more deeply about how to bridge across those if you like cultural divides. So I think it was there all along.
And then as my work developed into the realm of teaching and learning, I think I then got very sensitized to how boring most teaching and learning is and that the idea of transmitting information through some sort of lecture format is so ineffective and hopeless. And then you go, okay, conversation on model of learning, not that I was thinking in these terms at that time, but the role of play and playfulness and then the role of setting. I remember really well when I was using informational theatre in this context of executive education for quite some time, when somebody who had chosen to study me came and said, so how do you prepare in the room before the session starts? And they asked questions which at the time I hadn't really thought about.
And I remember saying to what do you mean? You said, for example, where would you stand? And I went, oh, I don't know. And then I realized I did know.
And I'd said, oh well, I drew the room. And I wouldn't stand too close to the door because that would be too confrontational. But I wouldn't stand too far away because I wouldn't have my back to them. And I literally mapped out the room that I just don't essentially in and drew a space and then lines of sight and all that stuff.
So I think what's happened over time for me is the things that were just emerging in my practice and in my work, I then started to pay attention to and articulate and realize that you can make more conscious, deliberate choices about those, even in the simplest of occasions. So, you know, a one on one conversation, opposite them, you sit next to them. That's a basic and fundamentally different choice, which will yield a different set of outcomes. It's not that one's good and one's bad, but you just get highly attuned to all of this.
And then it just seems it's just everywhere. It's completely obvious. So I think that's a version of how I came to the where I am. I resonate with the question of line of sight, you know, where you have improv theater.
I have improv music and working with people together on stage. And I remember at one point last year, I was running this monthly where we had 11 people on a really rather small stage. And the question of like, you know, how you fit all of these people together in a way? Like, how do you organize them in space?
Because it's not like theater, but it's maybe more like a classroom environment where you are where you are. And so, you know, the question of having to attend to each other and then the issue of being visible to the environment and to the audience. And I started noticing that there were conversational sub-clusters in the band. It was like these people can hear each other and see each other really well.
And everyone else can't. And you have to treat them as a unit. I think about that in relationship to these broader issues of her and the way that we're partitioned from one another in our experience. But okay, rather than ramble, I wanted to pick up on something that you said in, was it page 28?
You quote historian Theodore Risselton, that conversation doesn't just shuffle the pack. It creates new cards, which reminds me of Brian Arthur's book, The Nature of Technology. And this is that conversation as technology thing. Brian says that every new technology bans the space of recombinant interaction.
And every technology is a combination of existing technologies. And then on the page before that, you say if conversation is not about solving problems, transmitting a message or getting a result, you want another possibility is that it is simply a pleasure in itself. This is a huge thing in this series about how to intentionally navigate like a figure ground reversal and move back and forth between instrumental and intrinsic reward. Like how to understand philosophy as essential to civilization because we need new ideas.
We need what conversation generates in order to respond to the surprises that conversation generates. The extent that we want to fold it into a broader category of technology, that is also true. But like the thing that I would love to hear you speak to that I think is really hilarious is when people talk about generative AI, and you know you have a section in here about interacting with chat GPT. The business world seems to want to bend it to the goal of enhancing productivity.
You know like Ethan Molick, Wharton has written, you know, has basically created this brand around helping people to understand how co-intelligence with AI improves your ability to perform in the workplace. But I watch his LinkedIn feed and it's mostly him just like fucking around. You know, it's like he's mostly just enjoying playing with new technological toys and then reporting on it. And there's you know, Ken Rick, Eladomik Dao, who I interviewed for the series makes an argument that basically output is hallucinatory because what you're talking about is embeddings, like cutting paths through this high dimensional semantic space and that there's something that like resists being productized.
Or like the people who are getting the most out of it are the people who are willing to play with it. And so like it's funny because we've made the simulacrum of human verbal intelligence that operates in a similar kind of linguistic space, drawing correlations between things. And then you see people making the same mistake with it that I arguably am making right now, which is to try and like bend this messy, playful thing into the service of some known goal. And I would just love to hear you riffle it like.
And I think that's the way that I'm making the difference between the two things that I'm making right now. And I think that the way that I'm making the difference between the two things that I'm making is where I kind of start. So it's paradoxical. So there is paradox here.
There's contradictory things in some kind of creative tension. But it's the idea of the known goal that I think is both distortion. That's what introduces the distortion and actually, which also introduces the possibility if not the likelihood of disappointment. Because as soon as you articulate a known goal, and I should qualify this by saying, I'm happy with a broad intention.
And so all sorts of fabulous outcomes by not knowing that they even exist. And you do that by following the energy, which is a lived phenomenological thing, a human interest energy curiosity zest spark. And that could come from aesthetics that could go, that's a great turn of phrase or isn't that squishy? The word somebody chooses or an image that they call to mind might divert a conversation in a certain path.
And then yield something of value or usefulness that you hadn't meant to explore. And actually, finally, if you just look sideways, it's a bit of a separate point. The history of scientific discovery is full of these serendipitous happenings where people discover and notice things that they haven't set out to discover. Or weren't even working on.
And sometimes there's lags as well involved. So it's familiar even in that kind of more rigorous world of science. But in conversation, it's like, you know, by committing an energetically engaging to the joy of the thing itself, if you like. And I think that word joy is important because there's a human exchange.
There's a delight. There's an unexpectedness. I'm not knowing what the other person will see or do. Seeing what you've said or do with what you've said or how they'll respond.
And all of that uncertainty here is a positive thing, my view, or certainly can be made into one. And then when you follow that energy and fall into that way of being together, it's nobody's sole possession. The hallmark of the great conversation for me is where you discover or uncover things that weren't there at the beginning through combination, or recombination like Arthur's talking about, through different lines of sight, different angles, different associations. And so it's much, much more when it's functioning well than a predictable communication machine.
It's not about getting to these things that you can already see in advance. There's a role and a time and a place for that. But that to me is a much lesser thing than this kind of joyful and a really beast that heals all sorts of things either. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be social.
So I spent yesterday reading the manuscript of the yet to be published book. The author had sent it to me. I know her. It's true.
And I felt like I was having a conversation with her as I was reading. And my task of the day was to read the manuscript so that I could offer a comment or a critique. And along the way, things kept glirting out. It was all that reminds me this.
And, you know, oh, God, I'll look at that artist. She's referenced there. And who's and so things were coming out of it because I was, as it were engaged, even in a solitary conversation with her body of text. So I think looking it back to what you said, I think, you know, as soon as you go into it with a precise or contained idea of what you want, then you can only at best achieve what you've already imagined.
Whereas the joy of a good conversation is you blunder across or things unfold in front of you that you couldn't really imagine. So it's not efficient in that sense, but it can be incredibly effective. And it's having all these effects at lots of different layers, like I say, the social, the energetic, the connective, the imaginative, the linguistic, all sorts of things are going on all at once. This inspires in me a reflection on the sort of introversion and extroversion in conversation because you talk about early in this book, let's make the most of this technical issue here.
I really like that you were talking about on social media that the rough magic of Engleman in live conversation is lost when everything becomes too polished. And yeah, there's something about technology is that which you only notice when it stops working, you know, in the way of it. I was listening to your voice reading this book. I was reading you talk about all of these different structural ways that you can kind of design conversations based to encourage different conversational outcomes.
And, you know, for instance, facing each other versus sitting side by side. And I was thinking about all the awkward conversations that young me and young my wife had in cars, you know, in a parked car, like at the end of some encounter, you know, she's about to leave and we're stuck in a vortex. You know, it's like we're not really looking at each other. We're both staring out into space.
And there is something about the internet here. I've been thinking a lot about this dissociation and bandwidth and the way that when people interact on social media, it's, you know, like you're interacting with the highly diverse people. You're interacting with the highly pixelated version of someone. And just like moments ago before you switched the network, I was in fact interacting with the highly pixelated version of you and like drifting off into, you know, got only knows what introspection projection.
There's a conflict. I wouldn't call it a paradox because I think it's much more just like a stock oxymoron that when we try to reach out to touch each other at and T in the process what technology is doing, removing us from the context of each other. And like, I love the fact that I wouldn't even know you if not for Chris Kuitarna introducing us and Mike Large over COVID, but like COVID was one of those times when we were like working out as a society, what it meant to try and collaborate in any kind of meaningful, consistent way on video calls. And yeah, this is something I'd like to hear you speak to because it seems like it has, again, like I want to draw back and anchor it in something far more general, which is the way that quantitative systems broadly make one thing fungible for something else, you know, like you've got five oranges and five apples now.
And in spite of the fact that they're completely singular entities that they can be operated on economically or scientifically, and that that logic carries us into a place where each of us is constantly in conversation in some way or another. And also I'm alone in a box all day. Yeah, literally. Yeah, I think, you know, when the, I don't know, it's a different thought about this.
When the pandemic began to work, I was mostly doing before the pandemic was live workshops using in brotheta stuff. And so, you know, I've been working virtually since 1994 when I lived in Argentina and worked for a company that was based in Scotland. So no stranger to working remotely stuff. But for the particular work I was doing, the technology seemed so unpromising.
I looked the other way and stayed in denial for a long time. And then needs must, you know, and what was really interesting was when we started yellow, which was the kind of online space that I began to cultivate, we did a number of things which was we chose to work with a very small group. So groups of six, we chose to meet repeatedly every two weeks, two hours every two weeks for six months. So we were weaving some fabric in and amongst a small group of people.
And then doing that, what I discovered was that many of my prejudices were flawed or wrong and actually all sorts of things turned out to be possible that I hadn't imagined. But at the same time, it's still, so, you know, you can eat things and watch pieces of film and all that kind of stuff. But you are, you know, you do breath work. You can do all sorts of things online that I hadn't thought were possible.
But over time, the fatigue kicked in and there's still that separation you talk about. And I think that is an important marker. Like I said, at the beginning, I'm not one of those people who say no proper conversation can only happen in person physically. But at the same time, the lack of the shared context, you know, in a text conversation via a device, what's happening between those months?
And in some movies, we see with the three dots, you know, where the person is waiting for the reply. That's a very different thing than when you're sitting in a room with somebody and they're thinking about what to say next. And so, you know, I think that is a kind of big shift. And I don't think they are fungible.
I don't think you can reduce the ones to the other. What I think is important to do is to accept, again, I think this has been Brown Arthur's work, this idea that technology redefines old technologies as well. So new technologies reframe what old technologies, the space they occupy, the opportunities they afford people. And so this whole new realm, we're still in our infancy with exploring, I think, afford as a whole set of new opportunities.
My skepticism, which was exaggerated, probably then led to an exaggerated enthusiasm. And then I'm kind of reaching, perhaps, a more mature view. But just to use a concrete example from last week, you know, there's a call which now happens virtually amongst the associate fellows of the business school at Oxford where I'm one of their number. And I couldn't make the call, so I chose to listen to the recording.
And I realized, oh, there's great virtue in listening to the recording because I can skip to the bit. I'm interested in it's 50 or 60 people on the call. So there's actually very little virtue in me being there live. And so that's a tiny refinement of technicality almost around an existing technology that I just realized last week.
And I mean, to say, well, constantly keep refining and each of us will do so in different ways. Our understanding of kind of the roles they play, but I think the important thing is to recognize and realize that they are not reducible the one to the other. I think that's the key thing for me and the better at different things. So you and I would not have a relationship with it, not for the technology.
And that is fabulously enriching for me. But at the same time, you know, were we to be able to be in a space together with a whole bunch of other people making music and having conversation and eating food, that would clearly be of a different nature. And I just think, you know, that will always be true. The refinements and how we use them will shift and change.
But yeah, they're different. So this is where I want to get weird with you because there's that, oh my God, who is it? There's that Freudian slip and some fantastically funny, oh my God, I have to look this up. Hold on just a second.
Ah, yes, the big Lebowski. Okay. Yeah, there's this slippery. He says he treats objects like women.
And okay, so there's a question on the one hand of like, you know, what you're speaking to is could this meeting have been an email? And that's the enormous convenience of all of these economies of scale and the ability to choose the orbital at which you're interacting with something, you know, like, if it turns out that you actually do better working remotely good, let's put you there. If it turns out that you get as much as you need to from the recording, that's interesting because later on in this book, you talk about again, the more things change, the more they stay the same, you know, Plato's famous objections to writing the fact that writing, like you were saying about the process at Oxford, it's not just the presentation of an essay, but the argument of an essay and the Plato contested that writing doesn't argue back. But in an important way, chatbots do argue back or they can it to something, they can simulate argument in some kind of interesting way.
My buddy Tom Morgan actually just got retweeted by Sam Altman at OpenAI for opening a protocol to ask chat GPT to tell you things about yourself that you don't know. So I've been having my friends have been doing various versions of this, like asking it to roast you or, you know, like I asked it because of my buddy, Aerothym Bobby West, who's an astronomer who also makes excellent electronic music. Somebody hit him up on Instagram saying chat GPT told us to collaborate and he was laughing because he's like, why should I listen to the authority of, but at the same time people are speed dating one another in simulation with okay, they're like running your digital twin now and then simulating compatibility and then introducing the first day in second life went well or whatever, right. And so, yeah, there's this weird thing about in a way you can use language models to freeze to take a picture or you can use them to remain mutable and responsive like a mirror.
Or you can engage with them adversarially the way that people used to be worried that you're double in the mirror would like kill you and replace you. And like there's all these different kinds of handles on it. Where I'm going with this is I think one of the things I see a lot of people reckoning with right now is the more lifelike technology becomes the more it makes us strange to ourselves or the more we recognize the ways in which like Christian and Merti and Gurgia if we're gonna talk about like the question is not, you know, one of conscious machines. It's one of conscious people like you're already your default is you're a robot.
You're just acting on your training data, you know, and that people struggle with institutions because you are an institution and, you know, that's cool. It's funny. I should mention those two because at the weekend I was at a session of some good Jeff music where one of the readings quoted Christian Merti saying, and I thought it's just so typical with Christian Merti saying, I've been singing a song my whole life to deaf people, you know, in that fabulously patronizing way he had saying everybody's asleep, you know, and they're all conditioned. But when my mom was going to listen to you, I was like, that's cool because maybe then if we look the other way, maybe what we'd say is that I'm quite a language for this book bear with me.
It's almost like we only come into a full of life nurse at certain particular moments of the day, you know, a lot of the time we're like, you know, you could have a kind of scale of a sleep nurse or wakefulness or whatever. And if you did that, then the whole idea of the kernel of true or authentic self is it's called in the literature that make any sense to me then you're that would completely disappear because you go like waves, right? So, and some of the time I'm like full on and really alive and fascinated and sparky and both giving and receiving and sometimes I'm, you know, some of them. I'm like a psalm, and I might look very animated.
I might be talking a lot, but actually it's all dead talk, dead air, you know, and you've got a little glowing light, you know, that's flashing according to my degree of aliveness. And then you get a whole different take on a human self versus a technological self and you get these lines and waves. And it's interesting because in yellow, you know, in yellow is not taking on a new form, which is to do with physical dimensions, physical gatherings, mostly, but not just physical objects and physical gathering. And the question for yellow, both in its online form and now in its new form has always been what brings you live.
That kind of crop top in the first session keeps coming back in different ways and different forms. And so in the context of this conversation, you know, this would be time to say my aliveness I'm not going to take for granted. It comes and it goes, it ebbs and it flows. Sometimes I feel really alive and sometimes I feel a shadow of myself or a kind of deathly or ghostly or mechanical.
And I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. You know, it kind of reminds me of, almost as if like when you talk about, you know, actors can give lively performances or deathly ones and Peter Brooke, you know, wrote about deathly theatre and how even a lavish production could be deathly. So, yeah, that's so maybe they'll come up where aliveness is not binary. You're not alive or dead.
You're alive to a certain degree and technology starts to blur that sharp light. So on the recommendation of JF Martel, I'm about to dive into the work of Federico Campanya. I don't know if you know his stuff, but he writes about technique and magic. And I think if I'm at a distance, it seems like what he's talking about is this is similar to the way that Ian McGill Christ recognizes the attentional modes of the left and right hemisphere as the left being kind of goal oriented and efficient and driven by instrumental concerns and the right being single world's diffused by life and meaning.
And so that's where I wanted to take this with you. Like, I can find myself hitting the same beats in conversation because it's something in my brain has decided that this works. Or like at stage performance can be really, really concerned. Like, that's like Hollywood now, right?
Like, all of the attention is being paid to the drapes and the costumes and the technical aspects of the production. And it's hard, or although I don't think this I think this fleeting transient state, the question of an attention paid to magic in filmmaking has taken the back seat. And I bring this up just because like going back to that trinity of conversation and technology conversation as technology and conversation of technology. There's also technology as conversation.
And from like an information theoretical view, if we strange ourselves and see ourselves as cybernetic computational systems, then in my experience, and many other people I talk to, it kicks in animism. And suddenly the whole world seems like it's talking because you're looking at that very sort of general level of information exchange and a very general definition of information requires some sort of sense making of data. And so then you get into this thing of like, okay, well, like the principles of conversation that you provisionally outline in this book, how can we apply them in novel, interesting ways to our interaction with the non-human with technology itself? How can we be in better conversation, not just with other people, but with?
Well, I mean, that's interesting. Yeah, God knows. But the major response for me is, you know, in my limited, very limited experience of chat GPT, you know, my attitude to what I ask it and how I ask it and the kinds of things I ask it for has changed. And it's changed from, you know, I think I held an unconscious model when I was, you know, I chat GPT appeared on the scene while I was writing this book, which was interesting and challenging.
And so initially I was checking information using it for research, fact checking prior to it going to copy it, those kinds of things. And I was just not just checking David Baum published the book on dialogue, which actually wrote with Krishnamurti. And the chat GPT told me that I did it in 1996 or something, and I sat there thinking, how did I read it in 1990 then? So, you know, I quickly discovered it, you know, everybody does it, it's not about that.
And now, so if I just truncate all of that, whereas before I was wielding a mental model that said, this is some kind of machine that is rendering kind of observable objective bits of data to me, now I ask it for opinions. And I take them as opinions. So in my mind, I'm already framing it as a conversational partner, where it's an interesting question to ask. And I can say I'm using it in an incredibly rudimentary way.
But I'm holding how I think of what I ask it and how it responds to me much more in the way that I would ask somebody who might know something about what I'm interested in, but no more. So at a very basic level, the attitude that we hold to it would change that. And I think, ironically enough, I know there's rest of the answer for morefising. But if we brought the caveats that we bring to bear when we talk to other people to talk into technology, maybe that would give us some clues about, you know, like, do we want to sit opposite chat GPT or next to it?
What would that mean? What would that look like? Do we want to have this conversation that we're having with this informational flying around? And then we'll get a conversation to make a decision.
Is it a conversation to get to know each other better? What's this conversation about? So the framing that you put around any kind of information exchange. So I think it'd be an interesting exercise to take those ideas and map them onto the sort of conversations you're talking about, or conversation as a conceit, you know, in that case.
And just see where it took you. And my hunch is that all of it would be about holding everything a lot more lightly being much more aware of contingency and provisionality and everything being woven rather than welded. You know, that would be my guess. It just appeals to my fondness for alliteration.
But, you know, okay, so there is something about that and about the way that these ideas are anchored or the way that they originate in the body and the body in the broader sense of the body as, you know, co-defined, co-arising with the environment. You make the point very clear in this book as you have in this conversation that conversation is about the body. My old late friend Dr. Blue Norman Katz, who I interviewed on Future Fossils 124, is a big part of why I moved to New Mexico because he has this enormous center of gravity.
He brought all these people into constellation around him. And he used to tell me that hypnosis and psychotherapy are actually more about the body than the mind, which is why they have you lie down on a couch. Right. Like the whole point of being supine and reflective and vulnerable, you know, that you can't have those kinds of conversations if you're standing on your tiptoes.
And so I'm thinking about that, again, with respect to technology and like one of the first books that got me really thinking about the transcendent was a cyber grace by Jennifer Cobb, which in strange ways, seems rather dated now from 2000. And in other ways has remained completely evergreen. And one of the points that she makes in that book is that the internet then and arguably also now, like there's certain things you never change about interacting with chat GPT and things that I'm obsessed with changing. Like you say on page 77, if you book the same old meeting room, you were likely to have the same old conversation.
If that's what you want, fine. But if you want something new or different, then it's a problem. It's even worse online where the experience is so much thinner than in person. You can have great conversations online to your point earlier, but creating conditions for that requires extra care and attention, not less.
And so, you know, I'm thinking about the obvious influence of the movie per on what we are collectively doing with chatbots, the way that they're developing. But one thing that is the huge gap that I see there is not so much in the potency of the software itself as much as in the interface and the fact that all of us remain hunched over gask or over our phones, that the screen is so much more than the screen. And so, fundamental to the experience of interacting with AI, Samantha in her is experiencing the world vicariously through him and they're commenting on the same stuff, even if she has a more limited sensory portal to that life, his oomveld. And I'm just thinking about this in terms of one of the things that I want to do as a technological experiment with this show is to bundle it all together into a chatbot.
And this is completely beyond my technical expertise, but hopefully someone listening to this is like, oh my god, that's cool, let's do it. To get it all together into a chatbot that I can run in smart glasses and like give that chatbot my camera view and to have it comment on the world that I'm seeing and see if the collective intelligence of all the people I'm talking to with this show can like stand in the world with me. But then what you're a bit missing is if you go to Samantha, the chatbot in the glasses, it's getting your worldview, but what it's missing is its own body, right? Because where I was going with this, you were speaking was like, oh, right.
So what we need to do is embody these ais, not so that they can move around and go to the office in a sort of practical project sense, but so that they can hunch over screens. They can lounge, because like you say, the therapist, they don't lie you down. It's not coincidence that everything I'm hearing from you. I'm filtering through my own kind of sensory apparatus, body, history, context, surroundings, you know, so they don't have that.
So how would it be if they had that? You know, how if they were on a windy street and so it was changing their hearing? How would it be if they were a bit hungry? How would it be if they had not slept well the night before?
You know, and so if you go right out there and you emulate or represent in some way or feed in what would be a kind of ursa experience, at least with the technology we have at the moment, maybe one day they won't become ursa, so it will become the real thing. But because you think about it, our cognition is built on top of everything else, right? It didn't come first. It came last.
And so it's couched in all the different layers of the neurophysiology and the sensation and, you know, single cell organisms can still move towards food and away from danger towards heat and away from cold, whatever it is. So they don't have any of, they just got like the thin layer on the top, you know, and if they could feel busy thinking about it in a conversation, you go, oh, god, why, they said that just made me feel slightly queasy, that in the political discourse of late October 2024, there's a lot that when I read the news can make me feel physically sick or uncomfortable. You know, so anyway, it's just an interesting idea to think that the bit that they're missing is their own perception, not a better rendition of your perception. Yeah, yeah, that said, actually something that I've been wondering about, I bring this up on the show a lot, Cosmo Shalisi has this premise that institutions are like the ways that we outboard and compress information, my tacit knowledge that we store it collectively.
It becomes a layer, like a social contract with your democracy or, you know, your employer, the limited liability corporation, and that AI is a beast of this particular type that it's an information scaling meta individual that emerges out and becomes the calcium extrusion of the coral reef of our collective humanity. Many different people have talked about how it's like hard to actually regard it in any kind of rigorous way as an other, you know, like, I think the Nicklands notion that we're, or like you've all heard already talked about, you know, that this being kind of like an alien parasite, I think is just a complete paranoid bad trip, misunderstanding of what's actually going on here. But like the point in that sense, though, then is that maybe we're not actually improving anything by giving artificial intelligence proprioception because we are its proprioception. Yeah.
I guess the way I'm thinking about it is more like, again, Kevin Kelly used to say, you know, what's the point of reproducing human intelligence because we already do that. We already have that. We do it very well. It's very easy in some respect to make a person what's unique and stimulating and new and surprising as this other thing.
Yeah. And I think just to pick up on that finesse or perhaps contradict something I just said, it's like what we tend to do automatically is one to emulate us. And so the questions we tend to ask is how do we make it more like us when maybe the question is how we make it less like us so that it can do things we can do and we can continue to do things. It can't do so.
I suppose in what I was saying just then it would be more intelligible and legible, perhaps to us would make more sense would be more familiar. It were to look and feel like I some have its own perception and then it could say, I'm sorry, I'm bad my sleep last night. But maybe that's exactly the least interesting thing to do. And the least interesting standards to hold it to our own.
So I agree with you the kind of demonization of it to me seems to be imagining it's like us and bad. I don't know. That just feels to me like not what's happening. And actually, I think the more day we could get between us and that, then the better it would be in terms of, yes, it needs to be like us to a certain extent for us to interact with it.
But maybe we need to stop worrying about making it more like us. I was hearing a fascinating conversation with you. You should talk to my friend Tom Chackfield, he's a philosopher of technology and he was talking about AI this morning as time machines, something I had not heard before. But you could basically train an AI on all the literature that the founding fathers of America would have conceivably been exposed to.
And then you can ask it, what do you think they meant when they said X? And of course you could do that with recent history, you could do it with subsets. And that to me was like, oh my God, I've never thought of that. Not that I spend that much time thinking about it.
But then you go, that's incredible. And that's absolutely not trying to make it just another intelligence like us saying it could take us back in time and do a emulation job for how those people thought based on the literature that they had access to. And it wouldn't provide an answer, but it would be a very interesting perspective and a very interesting historical research tool. Yeah, so actually I think we're closer to what I was hoping to explore because you say on 89, it's so funny I read this after going over to my friend Maxwell Lucas's house where an entire wall of his home is whiteboards.
So envious, I was envious of it. Yeah, you say the seed for this book was sewn in an exploratory conversation captured on four huge whiteboards. If we'd only had a flip chart, I would have realized how rich the subject was. I started to get a little awkward and self-reflective about this because I realized that in conversations, I tend to take notes on post-its or like this tiny little clipboard.
You say, even different kinds of post-its spawn different kinds of conversation. The giant flip chart sized ones enable the conversation to cover a lot of territory. Tiny ones force you to work with one thought at a time. I realized I might be playing small.
And this is when we get back to the issue of bandwidth, right? I guess like what I'm thinking about is less the issue of getting the machine to experience the world like we do or even at all. But to look at what it means, honestly, like where this is going, which is a little weird, is into like Neuralink. And what computers can talk to each other, orders of magnitude faster than we can talk to computers.
Can we close that gap? Can we shrink that gap in a way that allows us to preserve ourselves? Because the one thing that when we talk about the Congress of Ideas, the one thing that perhaps politely and intentionally does not come in this book is the notion of information exchange in the far more primordial biological sense of like sexual, intellectual, intellectual, intellectual, intellectual. Sexual encounter.
And that's what it seems like Silicon Valley is aiming for is this complete ecstatic erosion of boundary between the self and the machine. But then where's the conversation once you lose the boundary? You can't have a conversation with no boundaries. You need boundaries.
It's about the kind of boundaries. You know, of what I studied at university, very little remains, but that which does is mostly about the synaptic gap and semi-colmyable membranes and the concentration of sodium and potassium ions. And the idea that membranes, which are barriers, are necessary in order to have information exchange in order to build kind of complexity to send messages, all that kind of stuff. But the important thing being that they vary over time.
So they're responsive to context. So depending upon the decay of the kind of axon potentials, those kinds of things, they'll fire or not. And the kind of accumulation of all of those is what affords another system such a complex range of behavior. So I think that, yeah, if you're ready to boundary, you've got nothing.
You've just got kind of either back to the primordial super or kind of heat death. But if you've got rigid exclusive boundaries, or if you've got, if you've got synaptic gaps, if you like, which are synaptic abysses across which no communication is possible. Either because you've got the wrong ions in it, or the wrong solution, or the gaps too big, or the impulses are too slow, then that's probably about it. So it's all about what kind of difference do you need in order to create the possibility of kind of synergistic action.
But you need difference. In fact, if you think about the potential difference, the more technical and angle voltage, I just think it's such a fabulous phrase. If you go back to McGillcrest, there's a reason we've got two hemispheres that do two different things. The difference is important.
And the kind of, we have hens here at home. And so I see in them the Gilchrist every day, because they're like, I love it, they're pecking madly at a bit of food. And then they suddenly scare, because they switch from one system to the other. And then they're running along as if trying to save their lives.
And then they say, oh, what's that? And so they're like, it's a bit of an integrated, and it's not very well integrated in a chicken. But you need both. The potential difference is what affords, this is a solar off-grid house.
So we've got a big battery array without the voltage that is represented by that difference. And the difference is what gives you the potential for this computer to work that light to shine. So then it's all about the nature of those boundaries, frontiers, and interfaces. And the permeability and the variability of the permeability.
So again, just to bring it back to what we're doing now, when I have a rich, powerful, kind of mind-expanding mind-bending conversation like this, I'll need to go and lie down in darkened room afterwards. And that's me going into my refractory period. So if everything's well on the whole time, that's so good. So you've got the element of time and decay, and obviously that's a musical notion as well, because you well know.
So I think it's not about the erosion of all boundary. And arguably, if you had that, you could argue that the process of complex organic life has been the creation of more and more sophisticated, refined, kind of boundaries. That are modulating the transmission of information, you know, so you can micro-rise on what they're doing and how without them a forest, you know, through them, the trees can affect that we talk to each other and talk with new chins. So there's all these dialogic processes going on that involve things being transformed into other things that are constantly moving.
And they can't always be all on the whole time, or it becomes stultifying, or it becomes locked. And I think that idea about when more information we can transmit, the faster the more perfectly, the more cleanly, in the perfect union is just, that just feels like such a mechanical notion to me. The other book Pause is about how there's a time to slow down and time to accelerate. It's not that slow is good and fast is bad.
It's about sensitivity and modulation and variation, according to what's going on and what's needed. And so we're back to sensitivity and awareness. You know, if you go back to the kind of Krishnamurti, Guru Jeff point, you know, the idea that most of the time we don't have that sensitivity. We're not paying attention.
We're asleep. We're just going through these sort of automatic steps. And so then you've got awareness and consciousness popping up as the mediating device. That's where we have it would appear anyway, the opportunity to make some choices about what information we get, where we put our attention.
So this is where I hope we would get, right? Because two of the main pillars in this project are informed consent and the relationship between addiction and gaming and how we have a reward system. We might as well use it. But if we optimize everything for reward, then we end up diabetic or, you know, with track marks in our arm.
And so you called me out a couple times in this book. If you talk a lot, break that routine for a bit by staying quiet. I was like, oh, I know. But this is, so, and then in the thanks because I knew to read the acknowledgments because you're just generally eloquent in your appreciation of people.
You say to the city of, to the city and the University of Oxford where conversation is in the ether. And in particular to the Telorean library where conversation is forbidden, enabling me to spend so many quiet hours writing about it. So this is to your point about modulation. I want to get back to what you said, Tom Schatfield says about the language model as being able to snapshot a small corpus.
This is what I've been playing with when Van Betauer did ask future fossils for me and trained about on just this show, right? And then trained to chat about on just Eric Davis's expanding mind and chat about on just Terrence McKenna's lectures for the psychedelic salon. And then put those bots into conversation with each other. And you have a corporate interacting with each other in a way that you really can't do yourself when you're engaged in the close read of the material.
Like you can try and model these different philosophers and how they might have a conversation. But this whole genre of simulated AI podcast that's coming up now is really fascinating to me, not because you're saying about technology and conversation broadly, not because it replaces the podcast. Like the fact that you can dump scientific papers into notebook LM and you get what sounds like people talking to each other out of it. That's not a conversation.
And the things that are the most annoying about it are where it affects that. Where there's like the two bots are agreeing with each other. And that's like, that's not just. But it's interesting in that when you talk about silence and bandwidth and proximity and like the variability of permeability, thing that I find most interesting and promising about retrieval augmented generative language models broadly is that now you can find a more abstract distant way of interacting with the complete body of somebody's work.
My friend Ken Adams used to tell me that I needed to come up with something back in the day. You know, you're prolific. I'm prolific and speaking as someone who is prolific. Let me tell you, like I don't know where to start with your work.
I don't know how to interact with it. You need to come up with some clever website that gives people more agency in how to navigate and what to set into your material. Like there is that question about, you know, course greening thing or like you said, to interact with the entire constitutional Congress or the parliamentary debates. I like this notion of voltage.
It's like everybody's trying to use technology to put lightning in a bottle. But without there being a charge, you don't get the lightning in the bottle. And so, you know, the question of there's something about interacting with all over the works of like Philip K. Dick.
I've actually, I've seen a couple people I know this week talk to Terrence McKenna online. My friend Jake Coburn and also Jason Silva both had social media reels of their interactions with this guy, which I consider a kind of unpleasant necromantic thing. You know, it's a little on the nose because, you know, Terrence predicted a lot of this stuff. And the question of those conversations getting fed back into the language models and creating a situation like Matt Cowdisea is where the image of the actual historical person starts to blur out and get replaced gradually by the simulacrum of that person as a serious concern.
But anyway, what am I saying? The issue of informed consent, you have to be able to say no. And so I feel like there's a foothold here where now we can place ourselves on a gradient of consent about the depth of engagement with some body of cultural material. Like before, you couldn't see it from orbit and now you can.
I think that's really interesting. Yeah, I know I think the idea of striking to me how I heard this notion just this morning, but the idea of how to make things more specific, you know, to like take a corpus and look at what was available to the people drafting the Constitution of the United States. In a way, perhaps the more interesting thing is not the superpower of everything it's able to do, but to be able to kind of limit it at get distance. As you're talking, I'm thinking, wow, you know, I don't like Terrence McKenna.
Would it be necromantic to want to hear a conversation between two chatbots trained on, I don't know, Einstein and Newton's work? Or, you know, Kent and Spinoza. With the caveats that you point out about the danger, this is the kind of way I would dub the wedding video problem, right? Which is when the wedding becomes the video you took of it, not the actual wedding itself and it relates all other memory.
But if we just leave that to one side for a moment, you know, I study philosophy at university and I still struggle with some of the basic ideas and have to go back and look it up and read it again. And I can't help but feel that's because I don't have the kind of mind that can get to grips with all of that. And I somehow feel that if I could hear a conversation between yes, but those are in line, for example, even though I've read a book about the rivalry between those two. I think I'd get a lot more of a sense of it.
And if I could engage in that as well and say, no, hang on a minute, when I was in, what Gottfried just said, can you know, so that feels interesting to me. But then I would need to go and lie down to the duck and drum afterwards, you know, I wouldn't want to be straight on to kind of play to against Wittgenstein, you know. So actually, this is the thing that in a sense, it feels like what we're doing here isn't new at all, right? Because we have engaged in narrative historical recreation in historical drama for ages.
And in that sense, it's not new. And in that sense, the problem is the wedding video problem, which I love. I mean, actually, I have the wedding video that I took on the camera. I have not uploaded it to the computer from the summer.
I haven't looked at it. I'm afraid to look at it because I'm still like in that space of, like as soon as I do, then that's the vivid high bandwidth object instead of this feeling. But yeah, in a sense, the question of how to forget or how to make space, again, to go back to, you know, Plato in writing is that in a way we have a permanent record now. Books decay.
They have their own assess. You know, all of this storage media is... And even so, even before you get to the storage problem, the decay problem, you have the kind of the partial problem. You know, dialogues, you know, in a way what Plato was pointing out was that dialogues have, again, a temporal feature to them.
There's an energy to the rate and rhythm of question and response, call and response to use the jazz vernacular. And when you anchor that, as well as making it partial because you're in your very choice of words and even in your choice of the language you write, you know, so Plato's Phaedrus written in Latin or Greek or English or French or Spanish would be, which I would say. But so, you know, there's all manner of questions before you even get to decay problem about the partiality of it. And actually that, arguably, what he was also suggesting was that the kind of the energy and the feeling of the nature of the response, the thing that sparks off in the living organism that's engaged in the dialogue is to be back at the wedding.
And all the writing is to just watch the video. Now, of course, we're at not for the writing, we wouldn't have the Plato, so it's not as simple as that. But I think you're right to say that, you know, in a way there is nothing new here. And yet it's similar problems and issues and challenges are being rendered in very different ways that probably introduces significant elements of novelty, but also sometimes make it hard to see that it is the same thing we've been grappling with.
So there's two things going on. So this is where I want to land it because you're talking about zoom calls and you mentioned, you know, pre-aparker in the Art of Gathering suggests you can't really have a conversation with more than 30. I am more drastic in my experience. Once you get into double figures, things start to change.
Every day, miracles can't be scaled. And then how, you know, breakout groups and zoom calls, which I've noticed becoming more of a prominent phenomenon. It doesn't solve this problem. It recreates it.
Breakout groups give people more chance to speak, but only by fragmenting the conversation into separate shards, which are hard to put together again. This is why the reporting back on small groups is so often dreadful. And I feel like this is what you're talking about here is the same kind of thing. It's like, in a way, there's a symmetry or a parody between scientific efforts to unify relativity and time-symmetrical equations in physics.
And in thermodynamics, where there's an arrow. And then this other issue of recording things in information media. And then how do we keep the space for novelty? So I'd like to take it back to music as a looping musician.
This is how I think about a lot of this stuff in embodied practice. That, you know, once you're like 20 layers deep, you can't really play on top of that. And in closing, I would love for you to reflect on where you see agency in particular fitting into all of this. Yeah, I mean, if I think about where I ended up through the process of writing that book.
It is interesting, as you point out, that I lay so much store by the bodily and the somatic. And this last piece where we've been talking about refractory periods and temporality and the modulation and variation. It makes me wonder whether that really what I'm fumbling towards is this idea of, like, you had to be there. An agency can only come from your being there.
And my point that Priya Paka is kind of optimistic, I think, is because what I describe as conversation as an intimate form. And by intimacy, I don't mean about the sharing of secrets or sensitive information. I describe it as the ability to be in touch with. And so whatever the machine's capacities to be in touch with us are, for us to be fruitfully in exercise our agency, be awake, pay attention, make choices about how we're participating.
We have to be able to sense the others that we are in, in this case, conversation with. And as soon as we lose that sense of being in touch with them, it becomes something else. It doesn't become nothing, but it becomes something else. And the richest and most powerful conversation is about being able to be in touch altogether.
And that's what I call the conversational feel. And there's a sublime sense of that when ones, again, take it back to the kind of Christian that one sense of self in the ego sense of roads. And you feel that you're participating in a kind of co-created field. And it's funny, I feel I have most agency when I most disappear almost.
That's how it feels, because that's when my kind of, I don't know, my egoistic self is eroded. And now I'm just participating in an emergent, unfolding, exciting, delightful process. And I think that's the opportunity that conversation, a good conversation affords us, which was interesting and pleasurable and important enough to me to feel it was a thing worth exploring. And quite how that, quite how what we do with that, I don't know, but that sense of a good conversation isn't just this exchange of information.
It can't just be at this thin level. So then the question becomes, how can machines support that? And we tried several instances in this conversation. So the media idea of eavesdropping and maybe participating in a conversation between two bots trained on a set of historical information.
I'm like, oh, can I do that? Is that available now? That feels like that could help me be in touch with that body of ideas from those, you know, in this case historic thinkers. But the idea that we don't get to exercise that on what we're doing can be just reduced to what you described as the kind of erosible of boundaries in this massive simultaneously hyperconnection of information.
It feels to me still like it's importantly missing something, which is the, you know, physical embodied. So I don't know if that goes any way to what you were asking about, but that's what I'm feeling now. I guess when I think about trying to coordinate the question of how many people can an intimate conversation actually sustain in space. And then the question of how much does the presence of the past and the future constrain what's going on now?
They feel like the same question at 90 degrees. Like when you say that the greatest agency that you feel is when you enter kind of flow state. If I'm looking at you on a brain scan, if there is the augmented reality interface where I can see how awake you are, the moment to moment, right? You're like, I can see.
Oh, I'm talking to the complete rob point that that is where you are. You are processing enough information to put it in that language that you're not trying to derive, extract and consolidate a story. You're not trying to bind yourself in time and in space. And yeah, that just seems like it's to bring it back to where we started about generative art and hallucination and generative conversation.
It seems like in a weird way that the attempt to use technology as leverage in the world actually inhibits or interferes with entering the state of consciousness in which by your definition agency emerges. That feels right. Yeah. And it's interesting because you said at the beginning you contrasted the instrumental within Trinzo talking about conversations to get somewhere known or conversation for the kind of joy there and my observation building on what you turn out of the book was this idea that you actually get somewhere by not trying to get there.
You know, and revisiting that now. So I just want to what would happen if you got a machine intelligence to if you just concentrated on this doesn't make any sense, but it's like, what would happen if you asked it to just like enjoy itself. Like if you and I suppose I don't know how these things work, but I guess you'd have to have it attempt at least to enable the people with whom it was interacting to enjoy themselves. And one way you might do that is to say, you know, use really beautiful language.
So go off and find beautiful language. I have copyrighted friends actually who someone was telling the other day who said that chat GPT is becoming useful to them because they now can hear in their minds here how chat GPT says things. So when they're writing their own copy and they can hear when they start to conform to their image of chat GPT's tone of voice, they don't do that. So clearly has a sort of that instrument anyway has a tone.
So I wonder what would happen if you just said, you know, love the language, enjoy the language you think other people will enjoy and fuck the rest. Would it actually turn out to be more useful because you've given it as kind of joy and delight. And again, I'm very aware of this language is all kind of projecting some kind of experience on the machine, but leave that to one side for the moment. I'm not supposing that is the case, but as if, you know, would I then go to a chatbot because I'd just like to hear its voice.
So I love this point because there is this issue of if you don't specify in the prompt that you want a unique voice, then you get the center of the Gaussian distribution of everything humans have written online, which is why people find it so revolting, right? Like, it's just the lowest common denominator of humanity. Even before we had AI, I used to have that objection because, you know, writing professionally in business, I always thought that business and organizational writing was proto academic and most academic writing is proto scientific. None of it really hits the bar.
Great scientists like Ravelia Einstein actually write poetically like what the fuck is going on people like. So it always felt to me that humans most human writing isn't literature. Most of it's pretty drops. So if you then train very powerful computers on that, of course, you're going to get this kind of, you know, and how about we, you know, how about we had more ordin and Elliot and and stuff like that.
That would, that actually brings me to another place where I felt like you were reminding me of my own growth edge on page 65 under the section be generous, where you make the point that the core practice of improvisation is that everything is an offer that anything can be taken and used. You say, think about the offers you make. Are you making simple, clear, explicit offers? Check you are doing and saying things that give other people something to work with.
And I was thinking, of course, about these like Byzantine 20 minute questions that I asked people on this show and how you either love it or you hate it, right? You either think it's like watching a flock of birds and flight, or you're like, what the fuck are you asking the guest, you know, shut up. But my point has always been to prompt the guest to say something that they're not going to say to the Associated Press, right? And like, this is exactly what you're talking about.
It's like, yes, okay, I could get worse to sink. But I would just change it if we were generous in the ways that we prompt the chat by in that specific way, where it's like, give the bot something to work with. Don't be boring. And that goes back to your earlier question about, you know, what would the ideas I'm exploring this book mean if we apply it to this more technological kind of realm of conversation.
And I think it's in a way with Richard Olivier, Oxford, and so Richard Olivier is the son of Florence with you. And he has this phrase I really love where he talks about acting as if. So acting as if. It doesn't matter whether you believe, you know, that this idea or this character or this piece of language act as if it were true or it could be useful.
You know, and so in this case, why not act as if the bot needed something interesting to work with as if it were a person with a limited attention span and a set of concerns and kids that needed to be got to school, you know, and you might get something back. So that's a price step to what I was talking about, which is about how could these things be programmed so that, you know, perhaps they produced enjoyment or cleaned enjoyment for themselves. You know, actors, if it has that and offer it something different, you know, and I think just to pick up on that on just on the specific point about your, you know, your style of it's not so much questioning. It's like what you're doing is you're offering a million start points.
And so actually that is generous. It's just different. And what you've done is you what you're always doing is offering a kind of plurality of things. And I think then feel often a bit uncertain and discombobulated by the range and scope and wealth of them.
But that's because I'm bringing to kind of if I bring to a kind of media interview frame of the clinical kind, then that's absolutely not going to work. But what it's constantly inviting me to do is to find the thing I haven't thought before. I haven't said before. And that's why I keep coming back to conversations with you is because it's rich and it's learning it's plural is expansive.
And so I would argue that it, you know, it's bringing your blushes. It's generous in a different way than perhaps people might understand, but you're not expecting me to talk to all those points. So as soon as something catches what I'm paying attention to is my energy, my interest. I'm looking at, you know, what is your riff?
Where does it make me want a riff? You know, and you're liberating me as well from having to worry about whether it makes any immediate sense, which is liberating. And that's how you get generated, right? It's because we start worrying about whether it makes sense or whether we sound intelligent or whether we sound like we actually thought about this at all.
And you go, that leads to this leads to that. And this will sit with me and these ideas will simmer. And most of it probably will just, you know, dissipate and that's fine. Except in the quantum computer diamond that will forever trap me in the mistakes of my past.
Anyway, I don't know where we're going to trim this, but you'll find somewhere. Yeah, it's I'm always grateful to talk to you. Thanks again for listening. This show was launched with Sea Grants from Oshana's Adventurer's Cosmos Institute, and the original seeds in BitTensor, and is always looking to plant more seeds.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and comment at YouTube, Apple, or Spotify, or wherever your algorithmic overlords will recommend it to cool strangers. And of course, consider becoming a patron. And if you'd like me in the mix as a general-purpose poet, scholar, weirdo, strategist, slash catalyst, reach out to humans on the loop at proton.me to swipe one of the last remaining spaces on my dance card. And I'm going deep into the mind and work of Michael Dean, a masterful writer and buddy from the OSV 2024 cohort who is mapping the architecture of great essays and building an AI editor that frees your creativity from worries.productmarketfit.
Until then, take care and remember, attention is our greatest natural resource. But then again, my original slogan was imagination is our greatest natural resource. I like them both. Use whichever helps you more.