Orchestrate all the Things - Connected Thinking: On History, Technology, and the Art of Seeing What's Coming. Featuring Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation Founder

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

What if the chaos around us isn't collapse, but transformation? Michel Bauwens has spent decades mapping the edges of change. From peer-to-peer networks to the commons, from medieval guilds to distributed autonomous organizations, he's been tracking something most people miss: the seeds of a new civilization, already growing underneath the noise. In this conversation, we explore how the internet didn't just connect computers - it created an entirely new plane of human organization. One where people coordinate across the planet without hierarchies, intermediaries, or anyone giving orders. They call it cosmolocalism. What is heavy stays local. What can be shared, travels everywhere. But this isn't just theory. It's a lens. A way of reading history that tells you exactly where you are, and what's worth building right now. Are you post-seasonal, clinging to a logic whose time has passed? Seasonal, playing the current moment well? Or pre-seasonal, working on the seeds that will matter when the time is ripe? The caterpillar, Michel reminds us, already carries the DNA of the butterfly. This is Connected Thinking. Join us. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things: https://linkeddataorchestration.com/2026/02/25/connected-thinking-on-history-technology-and-the-art-of-seeing-whats-coming/

Welcome to orchestrate all the things. I'm George Anadiotis and we'll be connecting the dots together. Stories about technology, data, AI and media and how they flow into each other, save in our lives. What if the chaos around us isn't collapse but transformation? Michel Bowens has spent decades mapping the edges of change, from peer-to-peer networks to the commons, from medieval guilds to distributed autonomous organizations. He's been tracking something most people miss.

the seeds of a new civilization already growing underneath the noise. In this conversation, we explore how the Internet didn't just connect computers but created an entire new plane of human organization. One where people coordinate across the planet without hierarchies, without intermediaries, without anyone giving orders. They call it cosmolocalism. What is heavy stays local. What can be shared travels everywhere.

But this isn't just theory. It's a lens, a way of reading history that tells you exactly where you are and what's worth building right now. Are you post-seasonal, clinging to a logic whose time has passed? Seasonal, playing the current moment well? Or pre-seasonal, working on the seeds that will matter when the time is ripe? The caterpillar, Michel reminds us, already carries the DNA of the butterfly. This is connected thinking. Join us.

I hope you will enjoy this. If you like my work and orchestrate all the things, you can subscribe to my podcast, available on all major platforms. My self-published newsletter, also syndicated on Substack, Hackernum, Medium, and DZone, or follow, orchestrate all the things

on your social media of choice. Right, and that's what I call cosmolocalism, where what is heavy, what is physical, is local, but what can be globalized and shared, or at a higher level than just a local, that would be the cosmic level.

And so the hyperlocal level, the bioregion level, you know, complementarity in a certain ecoregion or bioregion. And then the cosmic level is all the people doing the same in the whole world are coordinating with each other, learning from each other, creating shared resources, maybe using joint capital. And this creates lots of new models for doing things. All right.

So I'm from Belgium. I have quite a rich professional life in working for telco, working for British Petroleum, working for the United States Information Agency, creating two startups, making a movie called Technocalypse. but then in 2003 I quit the business world took a sabbatical to study social change and based on my findings I created the peer-to-peer foundation that was in 2005 and it's also the place where you know some people find that important where Satoshi published his white paper and so then

I've basically been doing this kind of advocacy and research work around peer-to-peer. We can talk about what that means later. And also around the concept of the commons, shared resources maintained by community with its own regulation. And then in 2020, COVID struck, I had some difficulties around that time and I decided to study civilization history. So basically doing again what I did in 2003. in much more depth and actually forever.

So it wasn't just two years. I'm basically doing that all the time. So I've read all the macro historians. And so I'm trying to place technology, AI, social change, the climate crisis, the resource crisis, in this kind of really broad framework of human evolution, even more than human revolution, evolution, you know, like matter, life and humanity.

And yeah, so this is, I guess, where we are. So I'm somewhat known for my work. I have a substack called Fort Civilization, where I really discuss the transition that we are in. You know, what's happening, what should we be doing, what can we expect, those kinds of questions. And so I guess my strength is I have a foot in, I have a foot in business experience.

I have a foot in technology. Yeah. So kind of trying to be integrative. That's a lot of fit actually and a lot of topics that you touch upon. And actually I think it's a good time for me to mention the occasion, let's say, for having this conversation. And a little bit of background. injecting into that my sort of personal history and how I came to know first your work and then you. So for me it was about a couple of decades back because it was at the time I was

also doing research and that's how I first came to to know your work and my research was on the intersection of distributed systems and knowledge presentation and reasoning and I was interested in transitioning this particular area of research to a paradigm that would enable decentralization, but decentralization not just of compute and storage, but also of knowledge and interaction and decision-making. So that pretty much describes the broad paradigm of what's called peer-to-peer, and that's how I came to know your work. And I was wondering if you would like to expand a little bit of

on that and summarize how you arrived at this concept of peer-to-peer and your work with the peer-to-peer foundation. Yes. So first about peer-to-peer itself. So most people, especially in the tech world, would think about the technological infrastructure. But my point is that if you allow computers to talk to each other without centralized servers, you also allow people to talk to each other without centralized intermediaries. And so that creates a new capacity in the world for translocal self-organizing.

So basically what we are doing here, I can see you, you can see me, we talk in real time, we can organize, we can work together, we could manage a business if we wanted to do an NGO. And so that capacity to freely align with other people around similar aims, that is something that actually did not exist. You know, we could communicate fast, but not in real time being in different places and still organized together. So that's what I mean with peer-to-peers. It's the capacity for trans-local self-organizing of peers who have to act as equals over digital networks. And so what does that necessitate in terms of governance, property formats?

So, you know, we entered teams like open source, free software, open design, crypto, you know, all these things are expressions in one way or another of that dynamic. And maybe also tell you that, so I see social change in terms of seed forms. So when a system saturates and start disintegrating, what you have to look at is the people who are, are leaving the system in crisis, what are they doing? What are they reinventing? And so they create seeds that will first exist on their own. And, you know, a new way of doing accounting, a new way of farming and a new energy, but also very important new mentality, new ways of working together, new ways of organizing.

And so people do that separately, focused on their own innovations. But over time, this creates subsystems, and over time, these subsystems find each other and may create actually a new logic. So for me peer-to-peer and the commons together are essential aspects of the new logic. So if you look it over the long term, you know, tribal societies use mostly gift economies and commoning. Civilizations, complex class societies, use market pricing and state command. hierarchy. And I think we are now basically able to coordinate massive amounts of human work and capital through mutual signaling in open digital ecosystems. And AI for me is like this, but without people.

So you have something called StigmaG, which is our capacity to coordinate work through mutual signals. You know what to do in Wikipedia because you know what's missing or what's wrong. Same with free software. And so AI is actually kind of like creating a layer where our digital representations can actually do that without our direct intervention. So it's kind of like on steroids and that creates all kinds of problems

but okay, we can discuss this. Yeah, yeah, indeed. There's a lot of topics to touch upon and actually to define for people who may not be familiar with them or in fact redefine and I'm saying that because I'm thinking in particular about the commons which was anyway the next thing I was going to ask you about

but you already mentioned that when you started talking about peer to peer. So I think for many people, when they hear about the commons, the first thing they would think of is, you know, this widely circulated story about the tragedy of the commons and so on. And I know that you and actually people even before you have sort of debunked that story already. But I'm just mentioning it as a reference point so you can tell us a little bit about the comments and how what's the thread that connects the So, Commons is best understood in comparison. So either private property, it's mine and you cannot use it without my permission or without paying me. Or it's a collective resource run by the state where, you know, basically the state determines how you can use it, not you and not your community.

But then in between, you have this kind of collective resource that is from a community. and historically that used to be physical like a forest or a grazing ground or agreements for fishing or like the mountain flanks in Switzerland why are they so green because the villages manage their own mountain flags and want to keep it for the next generations

so usually scholars and advocates distinguish three elements of the commons one it's a resource so there's something there can be material, so it can be, I don't know, like managing a language together, could be.

Or, you know, or poetry festival maybe. But originally it was also like, you know, so fisheries, forests. So it's a resource. There's a thing there. I think it's important because otherwise it gets disembodied by it with some people. The second, it's maintained, defended, created by, by. group of people, community, a village, a group of stakeholders. And the third, according to their own rules and regulations. So that distinguishes it from state property, right? It's the village

manages its pasture. It's not like in the Soviet Union, a state-owned caucus. No. It has to, so common sense to be communal in some fundamental way. So those three things together. And then you can say there's like a history of commons so first physical as in as the industrial societies because they believe in private property and not in common property start enclosing basically you know putting fences and privatizing the land so then the farmers are chased away to the cities and they create social commons so instead of mutualizing the land that they don't have access to anymore they are mutualized their life risk. That's what gave us in the 19th century, you know, the unions, the co-ops, the fraternities,

the housing co-ops, basically all the things that would become the social welfare state, which is a statification taking over by the state of these social comments of the working class. And then the big thing, and that's how it's related with peer-to-peer, is once we invent these digital ecosystems where we can share knowledge then there is a massive return of the comments digitally so people discovered that they can you know learn together teach each other you know keep encyclopedias for the whole community create collaborative protocols so they they in order to work together online you need comments and so you create kind of a new logic because you know, when you have a well-functioning digital commons, like free software, like Linux, for example,

you know, which is used for all the big computers in the world, then that creates an economy. But from this moment on, these companies are actually dependent on their joint commons. So there's a new dynamic where you have kind of a contributive logic around the commons, where the commons depend on people contributing to it and creating that common value. And then it creates people create added value for the market, but they are also dependent on the success of their cooperation. Yeah, so this would be the digital stage where peer-to-pe is linked to the commons. And I argue that we are reaching another stage, which is like physical,

which is the synthesis of the digital and the physical, where you can now have a co-op, a housing co-op, but you use digital commons to manage it. You can do permaculture in a shared urban garden, but you use digital commons to manage it on a planetary scale and work with all the other people on the planet doing the same thing. And that's what I call cosmolocalism, where what is heavy, what is physical, is local,

but what can be globalized and shared, or at a higher level than just a local, that would be the cosmic level. And so the hyperlocal level, the bioregion level, you know, complementarity in a certain ecoregion or bioregion, and then the cosmic level is all the people doing the same in the whole world, are coordinating with each other, learning from each other, creating shared resources, maybe using joint capital. And this creates lots of new models for doing things.

Okay, so I think a fair question to address in view of this cosmolocal synthesis would be why? So what's the need? I mean, it's pretty obvious how people would coordinate around around a common resource on the local level. And it's also, I think, by now well understood how people coordinate around digital resources globally through open source projects and so on. But how does this synthesis that you talk about works exactly? And what's the need for that, in fact?

Well, it's basically, first of all, a learning device. You just learn. You know, you have to imagine in the network, an open ecosystem, any innovation anywhere, is available to the whole network. So let's say you have a particular type of farmer that works in a mountainous region. And you would have that in the Andes, you'd have that in the Tibetan, you know, Deppan and Burmese highlands. And they encounter them a lot of the same problems. So maybe if they connect, you know,

if they find a new machine that works in these mountainous areas. So now suddenly those two parts of the world know it instantly. But even as a company, you know, if you have, let's say you're a small biotech company, if you're competing with big companies who have 5,000 researchers, there might be actually a competitive advantage in creating a coalition of smaller ones and you all and you create your research comments for all the companies participating in that research. Right. So it's a competitive advantage. It creates more speedy learning, more innovation, create scale. Okay, so this part that you talked about now refers basically to the knowledge exchange and knowledge management aspects.

Is the governance aspect also relevant in the cosmolocal paradigm? Yeah, because you have to invent new ways. And, you know, we can see how that changes because, like, you see there's a reinvention of hierarchy. So it's not totally flat, but what you see, for example, typically in open source communities would be what they call maintainers. So everybody can contribute as long as you have a certain skill level. And sometimes there's solutions to determine who has the skill level. But once okay, you're in. You can do basically you're free to choose your work, you know, which you can do in a normal company.

But you can say, I want to work on solving this particular problem. Nobody can say no. So then you develop this piece of software. and there, but there will be somebody who can refuse it or not. So most of these maintainers, they defend the integrity of the ecosystem. So they don't tell anybody what to do, but they make sure that the new software has high quality. And you know, same with Wikipedia. You have editors that mean, you know, because they're fights, political fights,

so they have to maintain the peace and this. So this is a new type of hierarchy that we didn't know. where they just defend the ecosystem, but they don't command. Right? This is an example. And then, of course, new license types. So again, if you do software and I work out of my free will because I'm motivated, if somebody just takes it and privatizes it, I'm not going to be happy.

I'm going to stop doing it. I will feel like a sucker, basically, right? So that's why we have free software licenses and open source license. say if you collaborate on this common, these digital comments, everything you do is for the whole community and cannot be privatized. And you can only use it if you use the same rules. So you can actually copy the software and put it in another context as long as that context also allows the same rules to be applied. So this, yeah, there's all kinds of things that become necessary just because it's a new logic of working together.

You know, like you're not giving me orders. I'm not giving you orders. You're not paying me. I'm not paying you. We're working together because we found we had an affinity together and we want to do a project together. And that's happened a billion times every day on the Internet nowadays, right? Which is very different from waiting for somebody to hire me who will then tell

me what to do. So it's in my view a true value revolution from a commodity regime where you know you produce scarce goods that you sell at the price to these open systems where you contribute and when there's still a market but the market is derivative from the contributory value. Still I mean you could argue that there are maybe some historical precedents to some at least some of the things that you talked about. So for example, in the previous times you had guilds of craftments that would come together and work in a collaborative and what would seem like a peer-to-peer.

It's a question of scale. So peer-to-peer was local and now it's trans-local. Yeah. It's both like a bigger scale, like planetary scale. And sometimes I argue it's different because it's not just big geography. It's actually another plane. you know, some people call it the new sphere, the sphere of shared knowledge. It's like it has its own geography.

So it's not just bigger physically, it's also somewhere else at the same time. And so if you believe like me that civilization is actually geography, it's the relation between the countryside and the farming with the city and getting a surplus of one to the other, then it's not trivial that we now have a new sphere, which is not directly physical. Actually, if you look at it, the difference from previous forms of, let's say, self-organizations

such as the guilds would be that guilds would be craftsmen that would be also translocal in the sense of moving regions, but they were always collocated, where now you have this sort of peer-to-peer organizations in which people can be scarcely. around the world. They can have, you know, people are like completely in different places. So I, you know, to give like an historical image, I actually believe that the religious

communities were prefigative because, you know, the Pope, he's not the head of a physical nation state. Although, you know, there is like a little piece of land and, you know, it was bigger in the middle ages, but, but he was the leader of all Christian people. believers, all Catholics. Similarly, the Sultan was the leader of all Islamic belief,

of all Muslims, right? Wherever they live. So this is already like a prefiguration of, except it's now not by kinship, not by religious belief, it's by affinity and joint

projects. So I call it an object-oriented sociality. And the object is not physical necessarily it can be you know so what what unites people in these digital commons is join goals and joint aims and that they organize around this common production to achieve those aims okay i like it because we've already from for a while in fact started getting into into historical precedents and the territory of looking at his civilizational patterns and I know this is something that you have been doing

you also mentioned in the introduction actually for the last i think like four or five years give or take so what what brought you there so why how what was it that led you to start investigating this macro historical yeah we can thank can thank COVID in part so okay so I remind the people are listening that I started two years, 2002, 2003. Of course, I continued. So I studied open source communities, free software. Then I studied urban comments for a few years. You know, I advised cities, mayors, governors, and I went to the Vatican twice,

worked for the mayor of Seoul in South Korea. So, you know, I was applying this to kind of politics and policy. and then came to COVID. And, you know, I'm somebody who needs quite a bit of stimulation. And I really thought this is the occasion. Like I'm kind of stuck here. I can't travel. You know, I can't go to where people invite me.

So let's redo it. You know, let's redo the sabbatical. But actually, it's become like a lifelong project now. So I'm actually systematically reading since 2020. all the macro historians. There's three different schools since the 20th century. So I'm doing them quite systematically. And each macro historian brings something to the table.

You know, we can maybe take one of something as an example. So then the other thing is, you know, they all identify patterns, right? So I'm actually building a pattern library, but also cycles. So I did also an independent study of cycles. So what cycles are people talking about? What's the evidence for these cycles? How do they fit with one another? Which is not an easy thing because they all have different temporalities.

And so, yeah, so over time, you know, so starting in 2020, when I'm not in 26, I accumulated a lot more understanding than I had five years ago. But it's just an ongoing process. I'm not stopping. It's almost like food now for me. I just need it. I don't open my computer before 1 p.m. And I do spend at least two hours every morning,

you know, reading and taking notes and then reflecting on what I learn. And then I write about it, you know, to structure my ideas. I'm writing a book online, but also I have a substack. I maintain an encyclopedia, which also kind of really helps to, you know, fixate ideas and see how they're related. And so that's what I kind of bring to the table. So first of all, like how do civilization evolve? What do we know?

There's a lot, quite a lot that we know nowadays about this. How do transition happen? You know, are there any rules in transitions like certain dynamics that happen specifically when one form of civilization change into another? And then especially, you know, the role of technology. you know, how that changes, most of production, most of exchange, most of coordination. And so I'm kind of typically an integrative thinker. I just can't help it.

I'm always interested in how things relate to each other, right? So, you know, if you would be a Marxist, you'd be a historical materialist, looking at physical, geographic mode of production. if you're cultural historian, you know, you'd be more like a historical idealist, like how ideas evolve and how ideas can actually have a huge influence on the world. You know, think about Marxism or Islam, like they completely change the world.

They're just ideas, you know. But I like to have both. I like to see, you know, how does matter influence ideas, but also how do ideas influence the material world? And I try to kind of keep that, you know, in some kind of holistic or integrative way. And so I kind of end up with three levels. The basic level is material reality, you know, level of technology, geography, climate, you know, world powers, armies. You know, second, how do humans organize to survive and thrive in a particular level of,

materiality, let's say, you know, hunter-gathering, agriculture and mining, industrial, cognitive, simplifying a bit, but broadly, that's, you know, there's not the same society, but also the ideas you come up with depend on your level of consciousness. You know, you have shame-based societies, guilt-based societies, conquering societies, societies that isolate. themselves with several centuries. So, yeah, and you know, I would call them actually the values that drive.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can give you maybe a good example. You know, so the Roman Empire is a slave-based society. You know, you conquer and then you get slaves in gold. At some point, it stops functioning because it's too big. It's to conquer, basically.

Right, exactly. And so then it starts, you know, shrinking. So you have a peak, and then you have phase B, which is the shrinking phase of civilization. And so then you see Christianity coming up. And Christianity is a real value revolution, right? A slaveholder believes work is for slaves. A citizen doesn't work. He has to dedicate his life to philosophy.

and to the city, you know, he's a citizen. And also, for example, what that means is that the body has not really a lot of value, because that's what slaves use to work. But you mind what a free citizen uses to think, that's like the value. So you get, you know, platonicism and stuff like that, right? but the Christians say or at labora work and pray

matter and spirit are of equal importance and so now work becomes something you do to help God in his divine plan to make a better world so it's not comparable so it's not like you're evolving from one system to another

it's like a it's a bifurcation and those people react to what didn't work in the old system and they don't want anything to do with the old system and they kind of go in completely different direction and you know Buddhism was the same and maybe Taoism or Confucianism were similar reactions too is where you or non-duo Vedanta

Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism right so you have these religions and you know if you look closely they correspond to certain forms of civilization. They become hegemonic at some point, and they become the official ideology of an empire. So, yeah, I find it fascinating, and of course we're in the middle of it.

This is the thing. We are in the middle of a similar, very deep transformation of society. I think more and more people are realizing this, that it's like the in-between period when there is a transition. Nobody knows. The old isn't died yet, but the new isn't there yet.

And so he says that's the time of monsters. But if you are focused like me on seed forms, you see things like Dow's distributed autonomous organizations. You see universal currencies that don't depend on the state and the market. it, you see universal accounting system being invented. So these seed forms for me are kind of like a potential prefiguration of the future. Of course, we can't be 100% sure. Of course.

Because, you know, it's an open future. But I actually do claim that if you study the seed forms, you can, within reason, actually say quite a few things about where we're going. So I'm not a postmodernist in that sense of saying, you know, oh, big narratives are futile, there's nothing you can know, anything can happen. No, no, no, no, not, not anything. There are structures that and the more you know what determines you,

the more you can be free. If you don't know what is determining your life and your choices, you may think you're free, but you're actually, you know, a ping pong ball of these deeper forces. So one of the things that you mentioned and also becomes quite evident just connecting the different things that we talked about is precisely this, the connections between all these different aspects like the technological aspect, the value aspect, the civilizational aspect and so on. And this is in fact what in my mind I call connected thinking. And this is also the title that we've given to this event that we are co-organizing. And I'm going to just say a few things about this event.

It's the first time we do it. We've been talking about collaborating for a lot of the last four or five years or something. But now this time it looks like it's actually happening. So it's a unique format of an event. It's on site. It's also an example of cosmological. localism in action because it's bringing a group together from any part of the world to talk precisely about these topics so civilizational transitions and the different aspects that

play into that and pretty much in summary everything you've talked about so far so you know just playing the the devil's advocate here because it's my job as the the host of the of the conversation so these all sounds you know know, extremely interesting in theory. And I'm sure lots of people are hooked already just listening to the conversation. So the question that would come to those people's minds would be like, okay, so you're talking about, you know, going deeper into all of these topics. And you're saying like it's going to be an on-site event.

So it's going to happen in Greece, by the way, at Lake Kayaphas, which is an off-the-beaten path, beautiful area with, you know. know a lake by the sea by the mountains close to ancient sites of historical significance an important part is that we're going to do we're going to revive the the peripatetic tradition actually so it's going to be lectures where it's going to be dialogue it's going to happen walking around on these beautiful sites so yes it sounds intriguing i would also love to join that Then the question, you know, in practical terms, we think like, okay, it sounds fascinating, but it's also asking a lot.

You're telling me I have to, you know, come from wherever and join you, commit to join you for a week. What am I going to get out of that? Well, you know, very practically is I'm not sure, but, you know, I'll give you my explanation. So we just had a festival here in Shanghai where I live. It was called Mamotopia. It's about AI. And I gave pretty much like a similar, you know, series of talks that I plan to do. And when I say talk, it's also a conversation.

You know, I'm always organizing in such a way that people can ask deep questions. And, okay, maybe it's good for. my ego to say this, but it was, you know, I was very happy to hear it. So this is a guy who told me, you know, I've been a year in Oxford and I've learned more in an hour here than in that year in Oxford. You know, because I'm free. You know, I'm a free thinker. And especially today, you know, speeches policed in the media. social media, in the media, it's filtered, in the university, there's so many things you can't say. So just to be between free people who can, you know, explore deeply,

you know, what they know and share with each other, that opens up like levels of meaning that you have no idea. And, you know, having a happy life, in my view, is like meaning. It has to be meaningful. If you're depressed, this is my theory, is because your narrative is not functioning. You don't have a narrative where you have a place where you can be happy.

And, you know, a successive psychotherapy is often transforming your narrative. You know, transforming the mantras in your head. So that's, I think, one aspect. The other aspect is I'll use an analogy. So I was visiting a city in France, Limoges. And there was a local guide. It was like a working class club called Gramsci Circle.

And, you know, he showed me a house. And he said, well, 20 years ago, there was this and that and that and that and that. And then he said, and before that, there was another place. And it was that. And then he gave me that history. And, you know, I must have been in my 30s or something. And I just realized that at that very moment, this is. culture. I'm seeing a heap of stones. You know, I can say it's beautiful, it's not beautiful. I like it. I

don't like it. That's it. I go on. And this guy gave me like a whole tapestry of added meaning when I looked at the building, right? So now, okay, that's a physical thing. But that's space, if you like, but I do that with time. I give you patterns with time. In time. And the more you can go to the past, the more you can go to the future. And it's not like you don't apply them mechanically. It's not because this happened at the end of Roman civilization doesn't mean this will happen automatically today. That's not at all what I'm saying. But if you recognize that demographic implosion, literacy implosion, and real estate speculation where like three main characteristics of most civilizational collapses i think that gives you

something you know that tells you when you are and then you can also start thinking does my life makes sense am i post seasonal like i'm nostalgic for a time that is no longer there and i'm doing things that were made sense 50 years ago you know when i was 20 in 68 I was 10. You know, so that would be, oh, let's organize the working class and make a new communist party. Well, I don't think that will work because you're post-seasonal. You're applying logics that are no longer there. I can be seasonal, you know, and, okay, I'm not endorsing anybody here,

but think about Trump how successful he was in winning two elections. He's extremely seasonal, right? he just knows what to do. I don't think he's solving anything, you know, on the long term. But like he knows how to play. Yeah. You know. So that's seasonal.

But you can also be pre-seasonal, which is I want to work now on the seed forms to make sure they're ready when the time is ripe for these seed forms. to, you know, how do you say that word in English? You know, when a flower... To bloom, to blossom. To bloom, right? To blossom. So I want to work.

And so, and why is it psychologically, for example, so enriching is because if you live at the end stage of a civilization or society, anything, everything is going down. Like, it's very hard for your spirit to mobilize energy when, like, for the last 10, 15 years of your life, things have gone south. South. But if you look at seed forms and you see them sprout and you see them grow, and your eyes are trained to see many of them, you actually see not one, but like a whole field, you know, let a hundred flowers bloom. Then like you're different. You know, you're psychologically, like, full of energy because like, you know you're part of this thing that is growing, right? So the,

what do people say about this? You know, it's like the caterpillar actually has the DNA of the butterfly. So if it only sees as a caterpillar, it will decompose. Not a good prospect, but if it knows that is the butterfly in becoming, then, you know, she can be happy, like, I'm going to be this beautiful being that will fly with these colors, right? So that's a bit kind of the effect. that I hope to stimulate.

And to be honest, I know it works because I have hundreds of people told me that the kind of way I talk and I teach that really change their lives. You know, it's not about my person. I'm just like a vehicle. And I just happen to have a few skills that fit that particular role. Anyway, so that's – and then, of course, I could talk about you, George. So I'm not a technical person. You know, I've been in the tech world for many years, so I kind of have pretty good understanding of many things,

but I'm not a techie. And so I'm very happy to work with you because you know the tools, you know, how they work, you know, why they are there. I think the combination of my deep story and your practical knowledge, but also your embeddedness in the physical geography. Actually, I wanted to get to that part.

But before that, I would summarize what you talked about in four points. So what people are going to get by injecting themselves into this opportunity. First, pattern recognition skills. So everything we talked about, so how everything connects. Second, strategic clarity. So when you start connecting things and you start realizing how things, work you stop feeling anxiety and you start seeing seeing how things work basically the deep historic you see opportunities you see interstitial opportunities yeah and what

follows from that is the sense of agency you you feel like you can actually control to the to the extent that you can at least you know your your own destiny let's say so these are actually very practical benefits that emerge out of this combined theory. And then yes, also to come to your point about the actual, I call it situation awareness. It's not my term, but I think it applies perfectly to how we... I'm Jordan Hall used to write these amazing pieces called situational awareness. So we're not just bringing someone you in that case that's going to give a lecture in some backdrop My job actually as a host and co-organizer of this is to connect it to not just the past

which I've come to know very very closely and very dearly so all the sides of historical significance and actually my job is to connect every single day of the program is going to have a different topic so I'm going to take you through different spots in the area and I'm going to tell you okay so today for example we're going to talk about the history of peer-to-peer. This is a site, this is what happened on this site. This is what people did. And then you're going to talk about the theory.

And people are going to see, like, how does that theory apply to this place? What happened here, which I will introduce, connects to the bigger story that you're going to tell. We're also going to have breaks, obviously, because it's going to be quite intense, so we need a day of break. We're going to do tours.

And then actually the last part, so this is going to take a week. Then the last part, which we're going to cover in the next part of the conversation, is the transition to the new technology. So after you finish the first week and you give us the background of the peer-to-peer and the commons and the civilizational transition and all of that, you already touched upon AI and how this leads to a new paradigm. This is what I've been working on for, I don't know, I guess the last couple of decades. And so I pick up from where you live off.

And then in the next week, we're going to transition to the course that I'm organizing and hosting, which is called Pragmatic AI. So learning the first principles of how AI works. Learning how you can use free and open source tools to actually do things, plus real world data. And it's a combination of lectures and hands-on labs. I've done it for the last three years by now. I've given it to individuals and organizations around the world.

It keeps me on the edge, I have to say, because first of all, it's the field itself that keeps evolving, so you have to keep yourself up to date. And then just thinking, just seeing like, okay, how does everything connect? there's this backdrop of connection. How can I use all these different strands of AI? How can I use all these different data sets?

How can I create scenarios that apply to people's day-to-day jobs and tasks and projects? How can I bring everything together and tell a story behind it and get people immersed into that story actually? It's like a full-time job. So I'm very glad that you'll be joining and I hope that. I think we will be a team in terms of complementarity and we know each other already, so we are very confident this is going to work out the way we intend to.

Thanks for sticking around. For more stories like this, check the link in bio and follow link data orchestration.