everybody's model of what everyone else is doing in the economy is altering their behavior and so you can never actually create a perfect Universal model of everything without basically drawing on resources greater than the system itself my degree ostensibly
worthless is in economics quantitative economics and I sit in class just thinking like have any of you ever like talked to an actual human in a Marketplace thinking is expensive that said not thinking is also expensive just at a different time scale
right I'm really interested in this approach to knowledge work that is more like jazz than orchestral and symphonic music where everyone is following a conductor and listening to a [Music] score well hello everyone it's Jim o
shanesy with another infinite Loops I've already like conducted I don't know 20 minutes of the podcast with my guests already uh that's how excited I am about having Michael Garfield as a guest finally on infinite Loops Michael I don't even know how to summarize your
career and I as I was going through it I'm like maybe we should like lead in with a joke of alienology futurist an ex Wall Street guy go into a bar and begin to discuss what you are attempting to do in navigating or accelerating weirdness and cultivate
curiosity and playfulness that we will absolutely need to navigate it again just a couple of things you're the former host of the Santa Fe institute's complexity podcast your current podcast is future fossils I I I mean Michael you have done so so much
but my opening question is going to be about a term that you use that I love and I want you to explain it to our audience what is mind Jazz so one of my great Inspirations in my work is the late historian William Rowan Thompson who famously rage quit his
academic career at MIT in I think 1972 because he said he felt like an atheist at the Vatican uh he was a a scholar of the history of Consciousness and committed to transdisciplinary thinking and felt for uh you know he felt that his his work
with history was basically uh being kind of uh expropriated at Mi to uh forward a a specific agenda so he left and started this group called The Linda far Association which is a a Masterwork of social gardening that uh includes you know you look at the list
of people that were involved with Linda faren and it's like a who's who of Latter 20th century systems thinkers you know you've got Linn margulis and Stuart brand and Brian Arthur and you know Joan alifax and poos saleri and Stuart
Kaufman and like it's just it's Bonkers it was never really a formal uh thing although it had a physical locations in in uh New York and crestone and you know it but the point is that he saw the work of Minds in an age of complex and chaotic systems an era
defined by networked media to be different from the way that information was presented at the be at the origin of the university in like you know the modern University in print culture and you know uh you know an an academic lecturer standing up in front of people
and this one to many communication and you know linear chains of reasoning and he said that what we need instead is what he called uh vent which you know knowledge art and that what we are doing is we're moving through networks of ideas and so that what we what we're
doing instead is uh you know you brought up the Curiosity and play piece that we are uh invoking a more exploratory attitude rather than an exploitative attitude you know like like a book is a great way to crystallize an idea present
it in a linearized Serial fashion and make your argument as concisely and you know as as you can um but uh until very recently books have not been a medium that can uh listen and adapt and uh play off of the world around it the same is true for the the academic Journal paper
and this stuff is changing now thanks to digital media uh but yeah I'm really interested in this approach to knowledge work that uh is more like jazz then orchestral and symphonic music where everyone is following a conductor and listening to a
score um actually I'm reading where is it my very good friend Robert poon I'm reading his book do conversation right now and I'll be interviewing him shortly about this he teaches improvisation to Business Leaders at the
S business school at Oxford and he makes this point that like he got into that through uh theatrical improv because the things that you learn improvising on stage are precisely the kind of things that you uh that give you the the toolkit for having a really
interesting generative convers ation and so you know the act of listening the act of play the act of using whatever you find um this is all also part of what I you know I I come out of a tradition as a an improvisational musician in these
Festival spaces and leading large group long form you know Ensemble improv and I just I love it it's like it's sometimes it's messy and weird and but like the the the fact that it generates a lot of noise the fact that it doesn't behave in the way that you expect it to is the
feature it's not the bug because when we're in an environment where the scripts that we carry into it do not work you know like uh we're institutional legitimacy crisis and what doug rushkoff calls narrative collapse Define our era and so we have to
improvise and so the way that anyone can improvise you know Pointon makes the case that you know if you think you don't know how to do this but you do because all of us are having conversations all the time so it's basically about having a conversation
with knowledge you know with uh Minds exploring high-dimensional spaces together so much to unpack there it reminds me of uh Emerson's idea for a panharmonicon where everything is admissible right philosophy ethics Divinity poetry jokes the highest and
the lowest everything should be part of it uh the idea behind generative books it's like as I Was preparing for my chat with you I'm like God damn it he's revealing osp's entire Playbook our entire thesis because infinite books we're going to experiment with
generative books where the reader can interact with the the book itself now obviously we're not going to be able to do that in the hard cover and the paperback but we're going to be able to do it in the audio book we're going to be able to do it in the electronic
version of the books and I'm fascinated by the idea I mean like I I I was telling somebody this idea and they're like oh well that's like fanfiction right and I said well yeah like one part of it is but the idea to be able to contribute you made
the point we've gone from a time of one to many Communication in almost everything that we do right um if you read uh America One Summer uh that looks at the 1920s Bill Bryson makes a case that like for the first time in history the guy on the radio announcing
lindberg's return was speaking to More Humans than any other human in his his ever had and it fascinates me to build on all of this stuff as opposed to try to freeze I think one of my big problems with people who are like oh that isn't
the way it used to be and we should do it this way this way and this way is that that leads to stasis which in my opinion is death right and we need we need improv I love improv so another one of my handicaps and becoming unemployable is I cannot read a script
from a telepromter uh I they I I did some sub management when I was in asset management for some big companies and the most comedic element was me trying to they because they had lawyers everywhere they're like he can't say that and they were literally there at
the filming and so they have the telepro RO R try to read it and I I just it up so badly that even the lawyers were like all right all right let let him do it the way he wants to do it we'll just take out what we think uh is not going to be
kosher but I mean that's the that in my experience that's how you learn right you you learn by interacting by pivoting by being agile and listen and active listening as opposed to listening to respond right uh you know when with classic debate it's you're you're often
listening not to get the point not to learn something new but to respond right and here's my point of view and godamn it I'm going to defend it at you know it's like the social media this is the L Dion and I and I always say I I embrace the George Patton uh version of that and
i' prefer to make the other poor dumb bastard die on his Hill rather than uh hold to an opinion like that one of the things that attracted our entire team to your Grant proposal um was the idea of humans on the loop let's let's talk about that a bit
and uh let's also talk specifically most people say humans in the loop and you say humans on the loop and I think that that is important and explain to our audience why that is so so yeah uh this again this is like my thinking heavily
shaped by spending five years full-time translation of a whole International Community of complex system scientists but also just you know personal life experience as an artist and independent scholar and my encounters with various philosophical traditions that when we
talk about being in control you know like Q Allen Watts right that like you're never actually really in control or you know the way that like Terren McKenna used to talk about walking past the house of Parliament and the lights
are on at 2 am and it's like it's because they don't know how to deal with like they they're like they they have lost the wheel you know they there's nobody there and so you know it's funny because the whole framework of cybernetics that sort of metastasized
into technocratic globalism and became the the thing that that you know the church that William Rowan Thompson felt that he didn't belong in at MIT uh started from a very humble realization it was the you know the the idea that uh we're in we're in feedback
loops we're made out of feedback loops that we have some capacity to make decisions but it became this thing of you know like uh a way to to fulfill the pro the project of modernity uh to understand and therefore control all of these different variables
and uh you know like what I I think I the more the more deeply I have sat with the ecology and the physics and the you know Zen Buddhism and like all of this stuff U distinct fields that are all converging on the claim that actually
very little of what you are or very little of what you do is something that you're doing deliberately and that actually you know rational thought uh the ability to analyze to derive causal Frameworks to think about mechanism and narrative uh that all of that is a sort
of a post Hawk exercise about a decision that had to be made In the Heat of the Moment on the basis of a a very imperfect model built on very limited information and so you know I uh this is the frame that I bring in with me to when I'm thinking about this
taxonomy that uh Bonnie doery presented to uh the the UN in 2012 about Aon uh like automated weapons she said there's humans in the loop humans on the loop and humans out of the loop and you know I had not really heard about this whole framework I had only ever heard about in
theop Loop or out of the loop you know the idea that you are the one telling a drone to fire on the Target that it has suggested or that it's just like Terminator out there and the reality is that I mean this is this is a framework that that assumes that decision making
is only being made at one level at one spatiotemporal scale at a time like uh you know even in the you know there's in evolutionary biology you know selection is not happening purely on the level of the organism or on the level of the gene
or on the level of the population it's all of these things all at once and moving at different you know uh frequencies or or or you know like uh steuart Brand's Pace layers you know so you're like if you are thinking in a scaler fashion then uh there's this
thing that happens where it's like oh well I am somehow you know a cluster of subatomic particles I am a community of cells I am a society of you know organs I am a person that sort of mesoscopic human layer I am also a you know a
module or a subunit or you know a constituent of the these larger uh intelligence systems and somehow we have to be able to reconcile all of that and speak more rigorously about what it means to exert agency what it means to have choice in a world where
there isn't just one Loop there are many many Loops that are all moving at different speeds and so you know this is you know specifically to name this project humans on the loop was to uh try to find a middle ground between the the folks who are re responding you know
navigating the world in a way that they've been alienated disenfranchised by this immense opaque technological infrastructure and the the you know occult machinations of statecraft and are not you know feel like they have been cut completely out
of the decision making at the scale of society or of ecology and the on the other side you have people who you know you look at the the baronss of technological industry now and you know arguably these are the most powerful organisms that have ever
existed on the planet you know like the anthropos scene is largely determined by the decisions made by you know a few dozen people you know or like a handful of organizations but the thing is that those people like I'm hoping to
reveal uh that seeing them the way that like everyone's always trying to change Elon musk's mind it's like well that's ridiculous because Elon Musk exists within an incentive landscape you know that he he is his decisions are in you know an absolute philosophical sense
every bit as constrained as anyone else's and so it's not like you can get to the like none of us are just changing our minds in a vacuum you know we exist in you know the the uh you know complexity economics talks a lot about bounded rationality and how if someone
else's decisions don't seem rational to you it's well it's because you're not inhabiting their their life world you know you don't share an umelt uh right this this uh the virtual reality that we you know that we construct out of our
interactions and so yeah this this project is basically trying to uh in part I mean I've I've kind of found a number of different uh goals that I'm I'm working toward here but one of those goals is like you said to encourage mind Jazz and
mind Jazz gets us to the point where we can combine different perspectives stereoscopically U actually I'm just I'm about to interview another one my buddy Joshua deaglio who is a a PhD student of my mentor Richard Doyle at Penn State and Josh wrote this great book scale
theory in which he just says uh I just read this last night this was gorgeous um quoting Greg Bateson uh it it takes at least two somethings to create a difference uh end quote he argues that overlaying two perspectives forms a logical typing which produces new
information about information when we arrive at a new scale just such an operation occurs uh with scale we find something new an extension beyond the system of perception that is about the system it provides new depth but a depth that has
to be integrated properly understood and adequately assimilated into our approach to the cosmos so what he's saying is that like in scalar thinking which is a subset of this category of multi-perspectival thinking uh is necessary in order to
redefine the self that is making decisions and so I was just talking with uh K AO McDow who uh co-directs and and launched the artists and machine intelligence program at Google and wrote the first ever book that was a collaboration between a person and and
gpt3 uh pharmaco Ai and we were talking about how the the self like you were saying about the self that emerges in the era of broadcast media uh K just wrote this piece for gropus BA on how we're now living in an age of neural media and so it's like we're networks
that are communicating with networks through the shared medium of language and the the media does it's not just you don't just see it it sees you and so this completely reconfigures who we think we are designing for when we create technology and that's that's the
sort of uh you know the the buck stop on that one is just that you know if we are still thinking about designing this for an individual person instead of this as part of you know what Timothy Morton calls a hyper object like the U plus
technology that extends all around the world and through which you are connected to other beings human and nonhuman as some sort of colonial organism engaged in Collective computation then we're really not going to do a good job of Designing the next
Technologies we're going to be designing Technologies from the perspective uh of like print media or television or whatever and we're not you know we're not going to be able to do things as wondrous or Innovative I think we could not really
be more sympatico because I I I was interested in this I've kept journals for like 45 years and so I'm going through because we're creating Sim Jim on our on-prem Ai and I happened to to have a lovely data source of 45 years of crazy ideas for myself and in the early
80s I was like the biggest Tech Enthusiast of the world and I and I used a phrase called the extend itself and uh you know and and then I I had to wait uh you know 40 years for for that to actually start to materialize that's why I'm so incredibly
excited uh optimistic actually about where we're heading very aware of all the problems uh you just named a few have you read as you were going through the books uh have you read Robert Anon Wilson's the new Inquisition irrational rationalism and the Citadel of science
no but hit me because I feel like I've I've steeped in a lot of Bob Wilson I like I I know people that knew him and so on but I've never I don't have a very de yeah yeah yeah so so what he does is it's a brilliant book I highly recommend
I think you'd love it um he he makes the case that science itself and what uh joged the book in my mind was your comment about the guy thought that he was at the Vatican right and that's Bob's Central thesis in this book it's like I had rert sheldrake on uh who's a
wealth okay and and and so the idea from the editor of nature at the time his you know seminal first book came out questioning all of the Citadel of science the guy is on BBC News literally using as an example the pope correcting Galileo And he as his as his position as
editor and chief of editor had the same right to correct this errant scientist uh professor sheldrake and and so Bob like takes it Bob was way ahead of all this right and he's like watch what's happening what's happening is they're
trying to take one form of thought pure rationality they've taken it to the point where they themselves are to become so irrational because they will un they will not explore any new topic any new idea about how we the some of
our views are incredibly Antiquated and then Howard Bloom's book the global brain I think you'd also enjoy that because yeah I did read that one that's that's awesome okay yeah and it kind of leads me and bound it rationality uh Bloom has another book on Reinventing
and reinvigorating capitalism and uh the beauty of the Beast I think is the title I'm getting that wrong I don't have it right in front of me but the the idea that the old models that is what my degree ostensibly worthless is in economics quantitative economics um and
I sit in class just thinking like have any of you ever like talk to an actual human in in a Marketplace because you know it's the old joke about the economists right there's an engineer and an economist uh I'll just make it those two they're on a desert island and
and um they find a big crate that's boxed up and it says food and so the uh Economist goes well this will be easy all we have to do is assume we have a can opener the engineer actually wants to work on the the the simple engineering
techniques that you could use to to get the that food open um you you've talked also about a hypothesis that I'm kind of fascinated by the Red Queen hypothesis and that's because I love LS Caroll and and I love that name and you know it comes from the quote from the
Red Queen uh in through the Looking Glass to Alice and she says now here you see it takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place right and the idea that predator and Trey are good examples of this right the I I've spent
time in Africa and if you haven't I highly if you get a chance I highly recommend doing it because literally you are watching it unfold right Predators our eyes are in the front freay the eyes are on the side for very very good reasons right and and and yet I I'm
really interested in your take on the idea that there also exists in my opinion and it's a theory that uh the weirdest people in the world advances the book the weirdest people in the world that we are right now really seeing massive advances from cumulative
cultural Evolution how how do you think those two go together okay so uh I'm going to try and Bridge this question to the question of our shared unemployability or like HR illegibility right uh because yeah so the the writing you're referencing is an
essay I wrote on uh my experience with beta testing Google Glass which uh you know the evolution of surveillance is like I'm I'm framing this in terms of the co-evolution of humans and Technology as a a unique instance of a more General thing that's happening uh
you know the evolution of symbiotic relationships and of Predator prey arms races going back at least half a billion years and I wish at the time that I had been writing this that I had known about Ian mcgilchrist right which I know you '
spoken about on this show and his notion that uh the hemispheric lateralization of attentional modes in the brain where the left is function is is concerned with uh like what Allison gnik calls exploit and the right sort of more about
you know what she calls explorer that the right is more uh holistic pattern detection and erors on the side of assigning uh agency or subjectivity to its experience you know the world is is alive and meaningful and then the left brain the world is uh dead object to be
used you know it's an instrumental versus intrinsic and that the these two ways of seeing are because from the beginning of the complex brain we were engaged in uh this you know the evolution of the eye figures in and the ability to sense at distance rather than
across a chemical gradient and then therefore to surveil and to prey on from above and so suddenly you know a troby has to both think about where it wants to go and where it wants to not be in order to get eaten by anomala terorists
or these other weird Cambrian super predators and so that whole thing uh you know these two ways of of knowing uh The evolutionary arms race is in effect uh you know a red queen race in humans and technology is a race of you know
Innovation for enhanced leverage I just actually wrote a piece about this that's in edit right now on at Aon magazine I'm really hyped about that you know that we can think about the the way that technology is uh we can see technology through the frame of enhancing our
leverage of G giving us some sort of competitive Advantage uh and that the more we do that the more we become subject to the kind of cartisian effort to render the distinct and singular and unique and living into a quantitative framework that allows us to
draw to to to make useful abstractions and you know you can think about how at a very Bas layer right like money in the sense that everyone is using a common medium of exchange makes one person's goods and services you know uh comparable to
someone else's without having to get into the the U idiosyncrasies of what I think it's worth in a barter system versus what it's worth it might be worth to you and that has enormous benefit but uh you know in the same way that for example industrialized farming or any
kind of massive standardization approach yields enormous productivity gains uh but we have to be careful that we don't like we were saying at at the top of this call that you know if you think about maintaining uh reservoirs of novelty or you know res
adaptive reservoirs of features that do not seem currently useful like if we collapse into a perfectly optimized framework that uh in which all efficiencies have been sh yeah I mean all inefficiencies have been shed and like fed back into a process of
capitalization then uh when that system in inevitably generates enough novelty to disrupt itself then it has swn the seeds of its own demise and this is the work of uh Jeffrey West and Manfred ler who I spoke with on future fossils episode 2112
about Jeff West's scaling laws in in biological you know biophysical scaling laws and various systems including Tech Innovation and so on and Jeff draws this kind of staggered curve uh the finite time Singularity is that every innovation
cycle uh leads to some sort of endogenously generated crisis or collapse that beckons a new round of innovation to address it even faster and so on until the problems that we are creating through the pr through the exact approach of you like Brian
Arthur's nature of Technology where every technology is a combination of Prior Technologies and so as we in new things the combination space gets larger and larger and larger until it becomes uh mysterious to us again and like we
can't understand it and and we can't adapt to it because it there are billions of people jailbreaking you know chat GPT at the same time and so you know you cannot design a perfect response to this and so uh yeah the the issue of cumulative culture is that it uh
hopefully brings us to a place where we start to appreciate a kind of more polycentric or multivariate value system for Innovation and for currency and for number like all of the different ways that we we measure and track and assign value to the world
um it's becoming more and more obvious that this stuff cannot be uh squeezed into a single unifying framework ex unless you are designing this thing to terminate itself inevitably um that you know this is this is the problem with these these uh hugely ambitious sort of
Theory of Everything efforts and the science is that they actually do a really good job at generating the anomalous evidence that undermines them and beckons a new approach so um yeah I think when it comes to the issue to like fold that all into being illegible there
are actually Perks to Being illegible to whatever system to you know uh the you know if C if Instagram seems like it's selling you the wrong ads then that means that you might be doing something right in that you know you might be uh
you know a you know especially singular or strange in a way that over the long term ter is going to allow us to continue to maintain like Wild Spaces in human cultural diversity or psychological diversity um so I think like being weird in an age as weird as
ours is is actually a a perk because highly specialized extremely efficient ecologies do not do so well when there's like a huge disease or a med impact or whatever and it's the weird generalists that get out and repopulate everything yeah wow
um the my friend and and legendary photographer Joel merwitz uh when we were visiting once he goes you know I gotta tell you Jim uh your Instagram account is my most favorite one and I'm like what you crazy I mean like I'm horrible at taking pictures and he goes
no no no that's the point that's why I love it he goes I was talking to my wife and and I was taking her through it and like see here he posts his grandchildren then something completely unrelated and then this weird like thing and he goes I
just love it because it's it's so completely unpredictable and so I get wrong ads on Instagram all the time well I mean it's it's like really you know again to go on to you know back to baates and and information is the difference that makes a difference it's
like how long can you stay interested in a relationship if the person that you're in relationship with never surprises you exactly and and also that brings up Claude Shannon's what what is information it is that which surprises you you know just uh the not using his
exact terms but it surprises you and one of the pieces that I was writing conj or reading rather in conjunction with uh Shannon's information theory was a guy saying hey uh political speech zero information zero poetry boom all sorts
of information in poetry and and I think that the idea and it and it's always often people always try to get everything down to a dichotomy right the left brain the right brain uh Plato Aristotle Sparta Athens right I I've been advocating for a long time no no no
no no we need all of that we need all of it and yet then I find myself making the argument for why we need to thrive in the new world we need to move from deterministic thinking to probabilistic thinking right and and so the the it seems
like those types of you know yes no zero 100 I mean and bits and bites it have so taken hold of our minds that we always kind of look for the easier dichotomy and I love your work because you make it quite plain that that that is really surface area
stuff and it's like your thing you were talking about optimization earlier um and you say you do not want to optimize your life right and why well well you're optimizing your life for something for a snapshot in time you're living a movie and I always kind of
think of David deuts in the beginning of infinity where he's like the thing that people just can't understand is they think we know everything there is to know and he he has a great piece in it's like hey what were people in 1900 talking about what were their opinions
about the internet and quantum physics they didn't have opinions about the internet and quantum phys because they hadn't been discovered yet so what what do you think like I was looking it I I love the appenheimer quote where everyone's like this is the
solution here is our solution and this will work and then I always think of this Oppenheimer quote where he says it is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to help the only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt
it from doing so to stop it from doing so and that kind of your idea about optimized life really resonated with me because I it like many of my friends were like Jim you are why don't why aren't you wearing the aura ring why aren't you sleeping on the bed that
tells you how and I'm like because you're a Quant man you're supposed to love this stuff and I'm like no no no because I don't want to wake up in the morning feeling God I feel good man that was a great night's sleep and then look at the the uh empirical bed data and
find that it says that I had a shitty night's sleep and then that will make me feel shitty for the rest of the day right well you know there's a a line between that and the literature on uh spontaneous remission right and the no sibo in like you know somebody didn't
have cancer and got the wrong x-ray and then promply died obediently after six weeks because the doctor read them the wrong stats yeah so I do think like that's a good a really good point about having to be you know being more careful
and deliberate about the ways that we reflect on ourselves you know I mean I I really like uh K mcdow's point that neural media senses back and so we are you know a lot of my thinking on what I've been calling the glass age which is you know that our
era like you know Bronze Age uh or you know steel age whatever it's like I don't actually I think it's steel age Falls within an age that's defined by the material agency of uh silica right we've got test tubes we've got lenses microscopes telescopes Fiber Optic
Cables screens this is the substrate for our entire experience as moderns you know and that uh it's it it prompts this this question about the mirror you know I I've been glad to see a lot more people lately talking about how the right way quote unquote to see language
models or at least a very useful way to see AI broadly is as a mirror that doesn't just show you you at your human scale now but allows you to see yourself as you are like I was saying earlier you know as a cluster of you know like the
digital twin of your liver or as you know the the you as a data point in the you know Peter turin's work on quantitative history and social Revolt you know like these kinds of things and you know we can start to curate that you know we can tune our mirrors in really
interesting ways but there's the other part which I just love because I'm morbid which is that uh The Mirror Has always had a kind of uh frightening occult qu quality to it that people there are people who refuse to have mirrors in
their home still you know because they feel that you know like the camera you know with the lens and the the silver you know image it's like this it's the it is it's a a a kind of miniaturization of the mirror and the way that people were worried that the
mirror would steal their souls or that they would become narcissistically obsessed and so I think that there's a lot there's a rich seam of myth and metaphor from Antiquity and the way that we have thought through technologies that allow us to see ourselves in new ways in the
past that gives us a a real handle on the situation as it is now and I'll just I'll add to that that uh future fossils 175 I interviewed C Wen who's a University of Utah philosophy professor and has written a lot about gamification and Age game an
agency if you haven't interviewed him highly recommended very uh eloquent and dynamic guest who I also interviewed him for complexity with Paul smaldino and we talked about the problems of trying to quantify everything so I want to I want
to just for a second uh play some sympathy to the devil here for your note on false dichotomies right um because again like the question of whether we have time to reflect on and think with you know Advance reason into our decision- making or whether you've been
hit on the knee by a hammer and your leg is going to make the decision for you before you do you I think that there there are all of these different uh conditions you know uh the urgency of different conditions that shape wherein a multi-layer system
system a decision is being made and I so I think that the fact that we continue to see these persistent binaries in decision making suggests like a chesterton's fence thing like let's not get rid of this you know like I love like Forest Landry and the
work on the Triad I love pushing people out of binary thinking but at the same time like that takes time it takes effort and ultimately you know like when I when I spoke to uh reie seti for complexity podcast years back on uh police stereotyping and like police
violence you know due to the uh you know the sort of wicked tangle of you know issues with the training and you know just like cultural problems in police social relationships you know with the police and like racism and all this
stuff we got into this thing about the the way that you know you can get probabilistic about everything that you do in your life you can get probabilistic and and say you know like I have to derive from first principles that this chair is actually a chair
before I'm willing to take the risk of putting myself in it um but in reality like there are some things that are stable enough that you know under most circumstances we can be like okay this is a chair and and I think that you know
that this this question of of you know when are the profoundly inaccurate oversimplifications still good enough you know the George box all models are wrong some are a useful thing is like well you know I I I love both sides of this argument to the extent that there
are just two sides um that like that for me it it really does get back to again like a complex systems uh permissioning of some situations being where it's like well we don't have time to sit there and talk about how this two category system isn't good enough or
like the other way of thinking about it is that the more we apply probabilistic thinking you know uh simulation and comp other computational approaches to the world in an effort to understand and thereby control it we're back to what we were talking about
earlier where uh the resource required for those sort of like world simulations are so vast that they are changing the world and that this is the fundamental thing about complexity economics is that everybody's model of what everyone else is doing in the
economy is altering their behavior and so you can never actually create a perfect Universal model of everything without creating without basically drawing on resources greater than the system itself so like if we really want to control the world as a giant
manicured Italian Garden then we're going to I feel weird saying this we're going to have to mine asteroids we're going to have to do all of this stuff so that we are not just raking up all available resources to turn the planet
into matter optimized for computation in order to understand itself and then swallow the spider to eat the fly so yeah so I really uh I too believe that the question of where do you stop where do you stop asking questions about you know like how much information is too
much do you really did you really need the 4K TV did you need to see the pores on the face of your soap stars like that's that has actually changed the way that those people do television it's changed the way people record TV because suddenly you've got this like oh you
know like I've got a blemish we can't record today um and so yeah like the question is like is you know are you misattributing the uh the value of the data that you're getting are you making are you are you just chasing data for the sake of data
or are you chasing leverage for the sake of Leverage uh like the last thing I'll say about this is that you know within the framework of humans on the loop the question of why we are using any given technology right uh gets back to the a
really sort of fundamental uh LinkedIn language problem which is that you know most of the time when I hear people talking about tools they're not asking why they had to adopt them in the first place unless it's been papered over with the story of it
increases productivity uh you know like an enormous number of people have adopted AI in the last few years into their workplace with no knowledge of what they're actually going to do with it or why they're going to do it and when this
kind of thing happens when we are basic Bally allowing ourselves to be the vectors of someone else's story then you get uh enormous footprints in the world of you know like the the externalities created by all of the people that just thought it was cool and so they built a
you know an AI I mean they bought themselves you know smart home devices and have now created this this enormous you know cyber security risk that's going to backck in a whole new paradigm of immunologically inspired cyber security it's like it could have been a
whole lot simpler and it's like the question of you know uh why ask you know if you have the time right like this is always the thing it's like not you know not everyone has the privilege of the time to sit and think about these
decisions but like maybe we should if we're going to optimize for anything maybe we should quote unquote optimize for a world in which we are C capable of allocating resources to idle thinking and boredom and curiosity and these things like um when when EMT
Shear asked uh X the other day how you would measure flourishing in society a lot of the people that wrote back said something to the effect of how much free time do people have you know um and if you're generating all these productivity
enhancements but it's not leading to Leisure then you're not actually the master you know you're you're the slave of this system so yeah yeah I love that I no no no I love that last part because that's kind of the way I look at it I'm a huge fan of
uh uh incorporating the uh data from a huge variety of sources in decision making but you're statement there I think is what I rebel against right I don't want to be a vector in somebody else's system and like would knowing things about like what the mattress
thought I slept like versus how I felt like to me that was not going to add anything to my life right in fact it was going to subtract things from my life as far as like the idea of sitting and you know considering of the uh probability
is is this a chair I separate them between possibilities and probabilities right so possibilities I don't spend a lot of time with when unless I'm trying to generate something that in the future could become a probability right so possibilities are endless right but I
don't go around saying you know what the Sun is going to come up tomorrow and I'm GNA give you a 90 minute lecture as to why that is so because I'm you know like if the sun doesn't come up tomorrow I'm anyway and like why why why put
any of my time effort or cognitive you know cognitive it's very expensive thinking is very expensive right and and when you when you direct your attention when you direct your thinking to something that in my opinion is just mental masturbation you're you're eating
up those calories nevertheless and and right we all have a limit to how long and How Deeply we can think about things and that kind of brings us to you have great views on curation and and the problems that it faced too and have you read the book um reality hunger by David
Shields no I'll write it down it's it's really interesting because he basically makes the case that you know before Industrial Revolution culture was mostly loow local and you know I always bang on about how this new era is so cool in my
opinion because we have because time space geography have collapsed right and and but in the past they were distance separated people distance physical distance separated culture it separated people from exchanging ideas when did
Mass flourishing really start well one part of it was we learned how to sail we learned how to go and find other cultures we learned how to have exchanges with them some of them were very bloody right because we brought our ideas that conflict it with theirs but
now I believe like our thesis that sh cvent if you look at everything we're doing is is very consistent with what Shield says in his book we've moved from mass production to mass customization right and the world has become a bit atomized one of the reasons my opinion
you're seeing all these conspiracy theories Etc because people haven't had to deal with this level of uncertainty in their own daily life really ever before in history of this of this magnetude right and then you look at the world that we came from and I
happen to exist in both of those worlds right I'm 64 years old so when I was growing up there was literally an American monoculture and the monoculture was determined by the three networks and by two newspapers right the three
networks we all know the New York Times And The Wall Street Journal that th those were you could direct 80% of what people believe to be true if you had control of back to Bob Wilson of the means of communication the nervous systems of people right and and like I
was reading Malcolm gladwell's newest book which it has a a very good chapter about how we came to uh understand the Holocaust so I would Rec I would recommend it just for that chapter alone I'm not giving it a general recommendation because he he's got some
weak Parts in it too but he makes a really interesting point and the point he makes is about it's one that I've always kind of obsessed about the idea in the past like everybody watched the same thing on TV and you know he he makes the point by looking at what
happened to TV and he looks at the show The Big Bang uh Theory right and it was one of the most popular comedies in the 2010s and 18 million people watched the grand finale then he says MASH which was a favorite of my mom and and me until
they got all preachy and political towards the last ends of the season was watched by 106 million people and and the point Gladwell makes I think uh bolds in nicely to the point Shields is making which is can you imagine that sort it's I always think of it as the
board right you will be assimilated and and we've no longer are assimilating right we've gone from a a a a log normal distribution a normal distri a Brownian distribution to a metal BR uh a fractal distribution which is very peaky in the middle and has very
long tails now I personally think there's gold in them their tals if you're capitalist or there's really interesting in them their Tales if you're curious and so I'm I'm pretty cool with life speeding up but you make really really good points about the
things that we really need to consider in this environment that we now find ourselves living in thank you yeah there is a lot there again I want to see if I can kind of grab all of that and weave it into some cool shape uh thinking is expensive right
so uh that said uh not thinking is also expensive just at a different time scale right I think that we've been touching on this at different part conversation that you know it's like well it is easy to follow a heuristic until theistic
doesn't apply or you know I think I've been having a lot of conversations lately about this specific thing about Mass customization in the age of a lot of mcdow's neural media uh you know the replica AI all these these uh you know AI companion AI lover services that are
cropping up that are in one sense a an obvious address to an EP you know an epidemic of loneliness uh also an epistemic of loneliness that uh that emerges out of the way that Society has been fragmented in part because you can work remotely
you can you know you don't you don't depend on your village your hometown for economic success you know the like Go West Young Man thing but in doing that uh we have broken intergenerational transmission of tacit knowledge we have disrupted ecosystems
uh and we we've given ourselves a I think a bit of an illusion that uh you know this like idea of Lifestyle consumerism and and mass customization it's like well you know you are free to choose what kind of shoe you know you can design your own shoe on
Nikey but on a deeper level you know all of us are online all of us are subject to the design constraints and the the uh opaque decision making B border boundaries on uh what went into the design for instance of you know PCS and the internet you know I look back I
think a lot of my work actually came out of a a three-month stint doing Innovation research for a Mozilla spin out last year I spent some time with them afterwards uh as a you know Communications and research person and they were working on the next uh
of AI and Computing if you think about how you know like Mainframe Computing remotely accessed Through Time shared terminals at like major academic and governmental institutions became the PC and the internet through the work of you know
arpa and Etc that uh you know Xerox Park and all these groups uh the vision that they had the people like Alan K jcr licklider Bob tayor dog angelar all of the the folks that were uh initially figured in this their vision for the tools that we use now was superficially
similar but at uh profoundly different in the way that they were hoping that two things would happen one would be that you know people would be writing their own code you know like objectoriented programming is about putting the function of of the computer
in the hands of the user rather than like I'm sitting here on a Mac and like Corey Dr o has written excellent copious material on the way that the the universal Computing machine has been you know neutered by digital Rights Management and all this other stuff and
that really like you know that that this the tools that we have are so much more vastly powerful as Hardware than than they are allowed to be and that is true for us as well as users of those tools and then the other piece is about sort
of machine translation and the idea that the computer network would not just allow us to communicate over great distances but would allow us to communicate ideas from one sort of conceptual framework into another and we don't have that hardly at all right now
what we have are massive problems about the scale of communication because everything has been has been uh ripped out of its context and so people think they're speaking the same language when they're not and you know this this is a
huge piece of like the mik or like the communic the coordination problems at scale so you know this this question of you know what what was considered expensive at the time that PCS in the internet were rolled out uh is now looking like uh it it maybe we should
have paid more more attention to it at the time so as to prevent all of these these uh these Downstream problems with the fact that uh you know now we we cannot even agree on who's an expert or you know how does how to you know what what English is um and so I just want to
like this this again like thinking is expensive where this connects to the you know frictionless relationship with highly customized uh you know AI services that are based on you as an individual specifically and also change over time
so it's not just a snapshot of you right but it's it's uh you know like back when they had the Cambridge analytical scandal in 2016 and everyone was saying Facebook knew you better than your spouse you know how do you you know it gets back to that
question of like not sleeping in the smart bed like how do you make room in your own life how do you make uh you know find an aesthetic that is not just tolerant of but Embraces friction in relationships and you've written about this somewhat
you know on the way that you do social media uh you know Greg Thomas and Stephanie LEP who I had on future fossils 205 to talk about jazz leadership and antagonistic cooperation you know that's like if we can meet in good faith if we can agree that we share
some sort of common value then we can disagree all we like as a process of collective intelligence as a way of searching for better understanding and answers together and you're not going to get that interacting with the mirror you know like they're like hell is other
people but hey it turns out that hell is actually really great if the goal is to learn anything about the world and about yourself um and so yeah like I I do think you know in one sense we are not as you know that we're not assimilated in the way that you know someone with
long hair and Tattoos couldn't get a job in my dad's Generation Um but we we are assimilated in ways that are even more sort of pernicious and subtle and difficult to root out out because there because the world looks like you know we get like
many of us in the privileged world you know get the experience that we want and so how do we convince ourselves to step out of the VR pod and into the messy difficult fact of the body and of you know the externalities that that you
know trying to refrigerate ourselves in convenience is all creating that's a great Point um and you know actually it was one of the goals that I had in mind when we created the fellowships and the grant program what what I was hoping for speaking to the
whole idea of new networks and new and and network kind of being your filter was could could we build a network of Minds that were so cognitively diverse that when they came together in discussion beautiful and unexpected and Brilliant things would emerge and
literally I thought it would take five years and we just had an offsite that included the the fellows only we're going to do one for grantees as well at another time and then hopefully put them all together but they're all together already in discussion groups on what
WhatsApp you're you're in there and what we found at the in in in physical presence space really speaks to your point yeah other humans messy and all that but the the the things that result from putting brilliant caely different people
together in the same physical space I actually witnessed last week right like and it was so cool I thought it would take so much longer but out of that that friction right that you know wow I'm trying to develop a uh a scientific way for people to analyze their kids poop uh
at home uh meets the editorinchief of infinite books who says yeah how you gonna Market that and the scientist she looks at him and say I have no idea and literally an hour and a half later she came up to me and she goes I just had
Jimmy just created an entire marketing plan for me I hadn't even thought about it that way but then the the money shot as it were was that makes me think of all the different ways I'm going to change the way I'm doing the research right so it was again a beautifully
generative discussion and and so you know back to one of the reasons I think you'll like Shield's book is one of the things he says in reality hunger is copies held sway they owned the world for a long long time yeah you got Gutenberg gives
you the ability to time bind your ideas send them into the future and then we got all the copyright laws because artists should be you know uh be able to get renumeration for their work and then his point is copies have been dumped and if you look at it what did
the powers that were that you know the IP and copyright holders do when Napster came along when BHS came along they fought like hell to shut them down they're fighting like H to shut down now it's AI training data right and and I one of his you know he goes on on a
pretty long rant about how we the the the future is relationships it's links it's networks it's connections it's sharing and then he's got this great end quote which is reality can't be copyrighted yeah although Monsanto will try I know
I had the same thought when I read that the you know it's so like I I I one of the folks that I want to get involved in humans on the loop is uh Primo Vera De Philippi Harvard birkman Klein who has done this work on the exti tution right
which I see as a natural extension of the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that led to my former parent institution you know the Santa Fe Institute or you know the the kind of interdepartmental experiments that went on you know in in Mozilla groups and so on that like and
and you know I I know I've talked with you and a couple people on the osv team about uh you know Anna gots work with salons and like how we could bring all of this like we've just got great people let's bring them into conversation and
design for the facilitation of emergence because you know you can have an amazing cohort of fellows and grantees and like the the WhatsApp group only does so much like how do we you know how do we get how do we structure conversation so that people are talking
more in a way that uh that that actually stimulates stuff I'm I'm working out an advisory relationship with uh a new AI wisdom company called River that is working with George poror who is a uh a you know a Pioneer in online social working and
and we're kind of trying to answer some of these questions in the in the workplace uh you know how can how can we use the machine to you know help like uh invite people into good you know fruitful generative conversation SPAC is the way that like James Evans at
University of Chicago or the folks at The estera Institute are trying to use AI to map the blind spots in interdisciplinary research and you know it's like having been that a in you know the the work I used to do in scom the thing that I keep thinking
about again is that uh if if you don't do this the risk is that you know like when people try to op like try to pursue Innovation as an end unto itself that uh we we're kind of back to the question of accidentally eating something to pursue that
uh that you actually that you needed you know so like high turnover organizations are not enough like you can have a huge flow of talent through a building and you can put people in that building and they can keep having Amazing Ideas that somebody had last year you know and it's
like if you don't have you again you have to think on multiple different time skills and so like part of the interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity of a well-designed exti has to be intergenerational and has to be uh there has to be a gradient
between people with high context and low context on a on a problem and those are not necessarily the same axis and this is all stuff I'm really eager to to explore in in different environments you know with this grante cohort and also
with the the people that are you know hum on the loop is not a an end unto itself you know it's what my my friend Christino Bowen turned me onto this like mop Punk principles it's like it's a micop punk project in that you can't have an organization without the culture the
conversation that surrounds it you can't have a product and sell it like when you're talking to Rory southernland uh about you know the like all of the engineering that goes into you know marketing something that's ultimately an aesthetic decision because people
understand the like they they eval they have a value of that they assign you know they can understand what you are trying to sell them um yeah so it's this is you know this sort of um weaving social fabric for uh what are fundamentally collective
intelligence problems is like what I hope my work contributes um and I appreciate your help with that well we appreciate uh your work maybe even more uh I I kind of think to Rory's value point that you know in bringing in again what we've
been talking about uh like with reality hunger and and those various topics that value is going to be established in a very different way in the future and it's going to have to do with um collaboration generative collaboration uh you know explore
exploit uh I think obviously we'll do both right and as as value like I think some of the the new watch wordss for creation of value are going to be these relationships these links these networks how how easy are people to recall that
oh yeah they're doing that over there how easy can they manipulate what work you done and your Collective or network has done how how can they annotate it how can they share it how can they synthesize it I think that that becomes very important in the age that we are in
now right and like one of the things that I still kind of shake my head at is the you know Bob Wilson again you all the old uh institutions are collapsing he wrote that in I think 1991 right talking about a guy who was way ahead of his time and and it's like
wienstein said I think something along the lines of don't look for meaning look for use and kind of like your model depending on what you're trying to achieve your model should have some addictive accuracy and if you're using back to box right all all models
are wrong some are useful well some are useful and then stop being useful and so I've always tried to orient my thinking toward figuring out that point right where oh that used to work really really well and that doesn't work anymore so
I'm not going to do it that way anymore I am amazed by the amount of people L all the way up to large institutions who are like yeah this is the model we're sticking with it but you know the model isn't working anymore it hasn't worked for a long time well with patience and
persistence well in certain environments patience and persistence do pay off but to to attach patient and persistent to an Antiquated model rather than to yourself right please good I I I gotta I got a answer the sh for our people who are just
listening yeah I mean this is the the you know consummation of everything we've been talking about right it's just you know we live in a very fast and uncertain world and therefore must get better at being well at learning ourselves as individuals and as learning
together as a society and as organizations and I've learned a lot about what does and does not work as a learning organization you know you uh you have to listen you know listening listening uh can be fun it doesn't have to be a
chore right so I mean if to the extent that someone is hearing this and they're like you know like my cousin used to work at BMW uh as a consultant in their uh in Germany and her advertising firm uh did did work with them on the transition from like seeing the company
as a primarily an automotive manufacturer to seeing it as a provisioner of of Mobility platforms and she said that they figured that out because they had a department of internal disruption and I was like I just found like that's how I'm legible that's my
you know like if you're going to hire me for for anything else I'm going to be a pain in the ass but like you know I want to you I want to help people figure out who are the rebels at their organization and how to empower those people how do
you structure like how do you channel that nuclear energy into helping your Collective learn better and navigate the complexity better is I think a very a very Noble way to make use of the fact that I'm such a difficult employee well Michael we are I'm getting
the hook here from our producers who give me a little uh light uh but first off you you you probably going to be in the running for buying with Alex sto for a number of times on this podcast because we've just touched the surface of uh what fascinates both of us so
thank you for that secondly you probably remember from other listening to the other podcasts that the final question always is we're goingon to wave that one we're gonna make you the emperor of the world you can't kill anyone you can't
put anyone in a re-education camp but you can incept them we're going to give you a magical microphone and you're going to speak to whatever you want to put into it and it's going to incept the entire population of the world whenever their next morning happens to be they're
going to wake up and they're going to say you know what unlike all of the other times where I didn't act on these wonderful ideas when I wake up I'm gonna actually begin to act on these two things today and I hope they're going to really
make my life or the world better place what are you going to ins sec I think what I'm trying to incept with humans on the loop is that we have a thought experiment that we can play now that technology has gotten so sophisticated that just like in passing like the the
wrong way to think about how to engage with AI and bioengineering and all this stuff is how do we prevent the horrors it's like no no we are standing uh you know in receipt of thousands and thousands of years of the striving of our ancestors to improve
their condition and the condition of their descendants and if we start by being grateful for everything that they've done and ask ourselves now that we have finally made it as a species to the point where you know with an asterisk you can do pretty
much anything you want with technology right like that's not absolutely true but let's let's assume it is and then the question I think shifts from you know how do I get this thing done you know like we all assume that you know I'll just be happy if I get this and so
how do I get that and that kind of thinking tends to promote suffering of yourself and of others um if you start by being like this this what world do I want because is I can assume that I will make it closer to that world if I start in a Clear Vision
of that thing I think that that's a really useful you know rather than like it's a protocol rather than the Inception of an ideology it's like I'm not trying to get everyone to think exactly the way I do but I do think that learning how to get better
at reallocating our attention and at telling stories that excite ourselves and excite other people is a far better way to engage with the daunting complexity of the world that we have made for ourselves and that's my answer love it uh as I've often said I
try to find things to root for rather than against it's really really easy to root against things and I think it's far more productive to to find things to rout four so so I love that I guess maybe we will call this uh episode Michael Garfield part
one sure and and then I'm having you on humans on the loop next week so yeah no I know it'll be great it'll be great have to wait for a while but yeah thank you so much uh and until next time thank you Jen cheers all right bye for