The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Zak Stein: "Values, Education, AI and the Metacrisis"

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

On this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and educator Zak Stein to discuss the current state of education and development for children during a time of converging crises and societal transformation. As the pace of life continues to accelerate - including world-shaking technological developments - our schools struggle to keep pace with changes in cultural expectations. What qualities are we encouraging in a system centered on competition and with no emphasis on creating agency or community participation? How is unfettered technology and artificial intelligence influencing youth - and what should parents, adults, and teachers be doing in response? What could the future of education look like if guided by true teacherly authority with the aim to create well-rounded, stable young humans with a sense of belonging and purpose in their communities?  About Zak Stein:  Dr. Zak Stein is a philosopher of education, as well as a Co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He is also the Co-founder of Civilization Research Institute, the Consilience Project, and Lectica, Inc. He is the author of dozens of published papers and two books, including Education in a Time Between Worlds.  PDF Transcript Show Notes 00:00 - Zak Stein works + Info, Civilization Research Institute, Education in a Time Between Worlds, Center for World Philosophy and Religion, First Principles and First Values  03:24 - No Child Left Behind 03:56 - Joseph Tainter + TGS episode 03:53 - Iatrogenic  05:30 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (TGS Episodes), Ken Wilbur, Marc Gafney 16:01 - Effects of screens and social media on teen mental health 16:54 - Marshall McLuhan 17:20 - The importance of adult boundary and limit setting for children 18:17 - How social media affects the brain 19:06 - The rise of ADHD in the 90s and effects on education - a timeline 19:58 - Hypercompetitive primary education systems 20:20 - High level of stress and cheating in primary education 22:28 - Scandinavian school systems 26:27 - Cold war effects on the education system 26:35 - Sputnik 27:25 - Tech elites don't give their kids tech 28:35 - Elite overproduction, Peter Turchin 34:10 - Your Unique Self  37:28 - Iain McGilchrist + TGS Episode 38:02 - Moral Relativism 43:27 - Foundations of advertising  47:07 - Negatives of standardized testing 47:22 - Donald T. Cambell - Campbell's law 48:57 - Nature vs Nurture Debate 49:20 - Cooperation and competition 52:10 - Effects of a competitive school environment 55:02 - The effects of an above-and-beyond teacher 55:42 - Legitimate teacherly authority 59:55 - Importance of the environment in the first 5 years of life 1:02:20 - John Dewey 1:10:31 - The best way to learn is to teach 1:11:40 - David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 1:15:25 - How standardized testing increased high education access 1:16:08 - Civilian Conservation Corp, Lawrence A. Cremin 1:17:02 - New Deal 1:22:07 - Risks around artificial intelligence 1:24:58 - Rise of relationships with AI 1:28:41 - First Chatbot ELIZA 1:30:01 - Electricity use of AI 1:37:30 - The Future of Human Nature 1:41:19 - Peak Oil 1:42:29 - Mental Health Crisis 1:46:35 - Correlation of COVID with IQ loss Watch this video episode on YouTube

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. I'd like to welcome philosopher and educator and friend, Zach Stein. Zach is the co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He currently works at Civilization Research Institute. He is the author of dozens of published papers and books, including education in a time between worlds.

We discuss what is wrong with our education system. Zach believes that education and the problems with it are at the root of the metacrisis. He's got some rather radical suggestions on how to go. go forward. But I think his general take on what's lacking in our current education system, which is too based on metrics and standards and less on actually learning, there's a lot there that I agree with. This is a long and interesting and deep conversation with a big mind, Zach Stein. Please welcome Zach. This conversation, is long time coming, long overdue. I wanted you on this show two years ago. And I imagine

we've both learned a lot in those two years. So it's better for our viewers that you're here today. Yeah, agreed. So like me, obviously, you've taken a pretty wide lens looking at our global systems, what we might call the metacrisis. What has been your path, your work life up until now and maybe just give a brief snapshot on what you're doing now. I was a musician first, and then I became a developmental psychologist and kind of an educator, as I were, I went to a graduate school of education and studied human development. And I was dyslexic, so I was always a little bit reflective on the educational system, and that became my practice professionally.

It was just to think about these things as a participant observer. I got really focused on standardized testing. for a bunch of reasons. And so in graduate school, I was focused on, you know, deep philosophical theory in education and human development, kind of revolving around issues of justice and fairness and tested. This led me to realize that it was possible to break an educational system. Like, it was possible to actually do something so sweeping with a policy,

for example, like No Child Left Behind, that you could ostensibly break what the, educational systems function was, which was to facilitate intergenerational transmission, like allow the next generation to step into responsibility and capacity and confront the problems that civilization is addressing. You could break that, and then you'd have this civilizational collapse. And I didn't know there was a field that studied civilizational collapse. I'd never heard of the term catastrophic risk or existential risk or any of that stuff, but kind of stumbled on what in retrospect would be called like a tainter dynamic,

Joseph Tainter, who you had on, I believe, right? The standardized testing industrial complex in the American public educational system ended up having this diminishing returns on investment in complexity dynamic, which meant that they kept trying to solve this problem through testing and was actually making it worse and then wasn't able to see that they were making it worse. And then this compounding kind of aiotrogenic spiral of testing. And what was that word you just, use? Iotrogenic spiral. Yeah, so I don't know what that is.

Iotrogenic just means damage done by a doctor, for example, is the most strict technical term, but it more technically means like damage done with the intention to heal. Right. So like you're putting the standardized testing system in place with the intention to fix the system. But in fact, the thing you're doing to quote fix it is actually kind of making it worse. but because all your optics are built around that way of fixing, you can't even see that it's your way of fixing that's making it worse, right?

So this becomes a spiral that's tied into that tainter recognized, which is a common bureaucratic pattern of just keeping throwing more complexity and money at the same problem in the same way, when you should just switch tactics and entirely or redefine the problems face, basically. So I saw that pattern then in 2015. met Daniel Schmockenberger and then had this whole kind of encounter with the field of existential risk and catastrophic risk. At the same time, I'd been working with, uh, kind of Ken Wilbur and Mark Gaffney in the space of integral theory. So I was taking this broad metathetical view of the whole world

situation. And I actually heard the term metacrisis at the 2015 integral theory conference, um, for the first time, which is where I met Daniel. And so this convergence of like, think about human development in a fundamental way, seeing that there was a way to actually destroy civilization rooted in mishandling human development, right, rooted in breaking the educational system, and then being plugged into this much broader discourse about all the ways that you could kind of like make a civilization self-terminate

to kind of bring some of Daniels language in. But as an educator, psychologist, philosopher type, not a technician, scientist, as it were, hard scientist, or ecologist. or something. I've focused a lot on worldviews, skills, and educational crises, legitimation crises, and a whole bunch of the kind of internal

psychological dynamics of the metacrisis and the kind of tremendous amount of educational, we need like an educational renaissance in order to address the metacrisis, as much as we need incredible economic and technological innovation and political reform and a whole bunch of other things. We need a

a type of educational renaissance that we haven't seen in human history. So I have lots and lots of questions for you. First of all, jumping off what you just said, is there any anthropological research that shows different cultures or civilizations in the past imploded or collapsed or went into senescence because of lack of development or education? Is there a way that we could research that? Do we even know? There's ways to make reasonable inferences, right?

So if you look at the collapse of the Roman Empire, for example, what you have there becomes a bureaucracy that becomes so kind of bloated and also corrupt and complex and fragile, that it becomes hard for the elders to actually pass along the entirety of the tacit knowledge needed to maintain the thing. So it's a way of thinking about institutional decay or other dynamics that just put a drag on the ability of the civilization to adapt. And so you can presume that in a case where other institutions are decaying and where the overall complexity of the civilization outstrips the leadership,

that they're not going to be able to kind of pass on to the next generation what is occurring. And so that's inferences you can make across a bunch of different data. But then when you look at major turnings in civilization, if you look at like, for example, the transition from feudalism into modernity, let's say, from feudalism into what we know now is kind of nation-state, kind of capitalism collaboration, that transition was in a very fundamental way, an educational transition, which meant that the futile education systems simply weren't keeping up with the printing press

and the kinds of accounting and the kinds of technology that were moving history beyond what these educational systems were able to do, quite antiquated. And the move through to the Enlightenment gives us this whole new notion of education of public education, where mathematics, science, literacy is universal. That was not the metacurriculum of the prior civilization. It was an emergent one. And so we're facing a similar need of transition to new civilizational, let's say, metacurriculum, very fundamental new types of literacies and capacities, if we don't want the whole thing to completely go off the rails.

So it's almost, well, I'm just thinking about our modern last 50 years, It's almost like our culture, our objectives, our technology, our governance, our discourse, our social media. All that is evolving and changing rapidly. But the education system doesn't move hardly at all, just 1% or 2% at a time. And we're now, I mean, I taught college not that long ago, a lot of what we're teaching is trivia and facts and figures that mattered. the last century that are not real equipped to prepare young humans for the next 50 years. So education is too slow. It's got a built in that the whole education system has kind of a built-in metabolism and

momentum that's hard to shift. Is that an accurate statement? I mean, yes and no. Like in one sense, you want, in one sense educational institutions, are the thing that can serve the culture. Right? So in one sense, educational institutions are almost by definition, conservative, because they're saying,

here's what we used to do. They're saying, here's the elders speaking to the youth. So in that sense, there's a way in which you don't want every new fad to sweep through the educational system and just change it. In fact, you want a certain amount of due diligence in doing radical educational reform. So, for example, no child left behind was an example of absence of concern about second third order effects of sweeping radical change. And it was the

first time, with the exception of the civil rights movement, that the federal government overrode the rights of states in the United States to set their own internal testing policies and other things. So that was an example of rapid change in the educational system, which was actually not great because of its rapidity. But there's a bigger thing that you're pointing to, which is that in the arc of history, the economy and the technology always flies past the educational system in a way that makes for a certain danger. It's precisely the discontinuity I'm pointing to, this generational gap that get bigger and bigger as technology accelerates. So the first time you even get the sense of a generational gap is kind of in the 60s.

And then it becomes a topic, and then you get the whole thematization of generations again. as I were. And so that notion that there is in a way a acute lag between the education and the technological development that occurs now in our time of kind of like hyper-innovative, hyper-capitalist acceleration, essentially. In that sense, the schools are decades behind. And that's why the kids are completely won over by the technology. I mean, the schools have ostensibly lost to the screens. And most reflective educators are kind of fighting that battle. And one of the reasons that the schools are so subject, I think, to a certain kind of identity, politics, and a certain kind of focus on the wrong things is because we can't address

how fundamentally off the nature of these schools are. They are quite antiquated institutions. Well, I'm sure we're going to get to this, but you're aware of, or even working on alternative education models to the conventional K through 12 and university system. In those successful examples around the world right now, do they make rules and strictly forbid screen use? Or is the educational experience so interesting and rewarding to the students? that they lose their compulsion to use screens all the time. It's a good, it's a really good question.

There's different views, I would say there's at least two or three different views. I know of places, and this includes certain Waldorf schools that are extremely successful, and then also secondary college, especially micro-colleges, as they're called, which is quite interesting, where you go there precisely because you don't bring your screen. and there's a very deliberate engagement with technology and there's a kind of a like a detoxing as part of the curriculum. So that's one view and I think that's very important.

There's actually research going on now studying the effects on young kids of not being with their screen. But you have to get how ubiquitous that means the screen must be if we study the effects of not being with it. Like we just, you go to summer camp and they take your phone away

and what is it like to three days? in. The kids start having withdrawals, basically. So there's a detox perspective. There's a kind of like come back to it after you've been completely detoxed from it and see what it's like. So I've seen that model. But then I've also seen the model, even in monastic communities, where they're actually saying, no, you need to be able to deal with the presence of this thing all the time. Like, you need to go a little bit more cyborg and kind of begin to think about what it means to be adapted to the existence of technology. But that means then you need to do technology education.

Then you need to know what you're actually dealing with. Because I think most young people don't realize how predatory the technologies are, how extractive and exploitative they are. I think if they knew that, they would actually be a little bit more concern slash rebellious against the man is basically extracting and exploiting you as you're having fun on social media. and but it's hard to paint how clear, it's hard to paint a clear enough picture of that. So I've seen this other class where they're like,

no, we have to live with these things. That means understanding them. And that means beginning to adapt and to build our own technologies to our purposes. And I think they're both right, but as you can see, they're both a little bit extreme as it were. Why don't you hypothesize on this?

If there were a program so that kids could be behaviorally, vertically, horizontally stacked where they have the right nutrition, the right sleep, the right exercise, the right community, the right psychological development, friends, oxytocin all around, coupled with an education about what social media is doing to all of us, but especially to teenagers and young adults. Is it possible then that those young humans could choose and have the constitution and awareness and willpower to make screens a small part of their life consciously?

Is there any evidence of that? Or what do you think about that? So it has been suggested to me by people who, by McLuhan scholars, so people who study the evolution of technology and communication technology, and who have a kind of theory of generational change from that, that the youngest people are seeking a return to reality,

that in fact it will not be hard to create the types of environments where adults are requested by kids for boundaries to be set around technology. And that's another thing about human development where there's some misunderstanding. It's very important for adults to set boundaries for children. and children want them set and feel safe and cared for when they are set. So there's a sense of irresponsibility on the adults part to just not simply set the boundaries,

which the kids now know we have good reason to set. And so that's weird, right, that the kids know that these things in a certain sense, they've seen the social dilemma or whatever, and they know, like, this thing's bad for me, and yet mom's not setting a boundary or a dad's not setting a boundary, or school's not setting a boundary, or society's not stopping. the company is from praying upon me, right? So there's a sense in which there's going to be a call for that, but there's also generation arguably lost to it.

Because it's designed to be addictive and to dysregulate your limbic system. That's not a second, third order effect. That's a design intention that's intentionally designed to do that. So that's the other thing is that if we really educated them, I think the companies would go out of business because then they wouldn't be used. So we've had conversations about this before where you think the lack of a sufficient and updated education system is at the root of many of the crises we're facing, especially in the United States. So what percentage of that education being at the root is the screens and the addiction to dopamine and scrolling and technology and how much of it is. the education itself.

It's very hard to tell at this point. But I know that in the 90s, in the 1990s, before you could blame the screens, is when you started to get the ADHD phenomenon. That's a whole other conversation. I'm not going to talk about the medicalization of academic underperformance. But the point was that academic underperformance became so severe that they had to medicalize it. And medicalizing means you blame the kid's brain. when in fact another inferences of the school must be systematically failing if so many kids can't

even pay attention, right? So there's the canaries in the minds in the 90s of the irrelevance and kind of ostensible hypocrisy, like that the reflective smartest adolescents have to cynically buy into a zero-sum game with their friends, right? Like, so the hyper-competitiveness of it, that one of the most competitive experiences of your life will be college admissions, and that the all the adults are cool with that, sets a tone. So that's just not in the United States, though. There are people in Korea that commit suicide if their kids didn't get into college and crazy stuff like that. This is why I studied testing.

This is why I studied testing. I mean, testing destroys people's lives. Testing creates suicides. You have whole grade school classes with ulcers in Connecticut. Like you have entire school districts from the top down cheating. like testing is a remarkable phenomenon why large scale standardized testing has incredible second and third order effects.

So we're supposed to be educating and preparing these young humans for the world in a learning environment, but instead we're putting them through fight or flight, you know, cortisol and other endocrine cascades. Is this a global phenomenon then? or are there some cultures that are doing it much better? It's interesting, right?

In one sense, it's a global phenomenon. Insofar as one definition of civilization would be... So there's this argument, like, are we in one civilization, or are there many civilizations, right? And one argument that we're in one is that there is a universally agreed to bureaucratic standards for education. achievement, right? Which is to say basically like a PhD from X, Y, the University counts anywhere in the world. Other ones don't.

And this is true. China sends their people to Berkeley, right? So in that sense that the standards set, especially by the post-war United States Research University standards, which was a military industrial success. The post-war American university system was incredible. It's worth talking about the breakdown of that. But it's at that global standard. So it is a very much universal phenomenon. And now the competitiveness, specifically with the youth isn't as bad in some places, but they

tend to be places like Scandinavia or places that don't have. of large-scale schooling and testing. Like because they're in like a country that doesn't have basic infrastructure and stuff. There you'd have a different type of competitive dynamic among the youth, but it wouldn't be a test-driven college entrance like doggy dogfight. So in the less developed, less material cultures, do they have better education systems for what they're? trying to accomplish or is that not correlate?

And again, it's so complex, right? Because, like, how many kids who get into Harvard can start a fire and cook over it? Like, probably not that many. Like, but you look in some of these cultures and, like, coming of age means you learn how to cook for yourself. You learn how to start a fire. You could skin an animal. You could grow food. You could be alone in a dangerous part of the city by yourself.

Like there's a bunch of things that occur in socialization without schooling in quote-unquote, you know, underdeveloped areas where these kids have, by some standards, way more intelligence. Now, they would fail all the tests and they wouldn't succeed in school because they haven't even learned to read a sense of it. I'd say that's the case, right? So it's just almost you almost can't compare. And now, of course, there are places in the kind of global south. where you have a kind of two-tiered, and you do have, like, actually access through their school systems to American colleges

and graduate schools and their own schools. But the reach of the large-scale public schools in the Western industrialized kind of post, like the Western industrialized democracies, that's a thing. A lot of people are in the clutches of that. specific kind of educational system. Was it always this way?

50, 100 years ago was the U.S. education system that way. And the reason I ask is, I wonder if global GDP boosted by debt and energy and now AI creates this like, you know, ring of power that captures everyone and this is how we have to compete. And it's that. It's that cultural goal for material excess that is kind of underpinning the testing and the competition even as younger and younger humans. You think there's a correlation there?

Absolutely. And you can see pretty early on that the kind of competition between the great powers that has defined the 20th and 21st century. century involved the radical experimentation with large-scale education. So, like, some of the most sweeping changes in American education come following the launch of Sputnik. It's like one of the most well-known vignettes in American education history, you know, is that the Russians launched Sputnik, and our reaction is to completely change the American

public educational system, to compete with the Russian. ostensibly to institutionalize the SAT, to build out an entire program on science. That's where we get STEM from, basically. That whole thing emerges basically from the Cold War. And so that's just the way it has been for a long time. And before that, you have similar things, where if you want to compete as an industrial nation, even in the 1800s, you need a school system that looks a lot like a factory so that the kids can go be in the factory.

I mean, that's, again, another demonstrated thing. The correlation between the kind of way the means of production are organized in a particular society and the way the pedagogy is organized in that society are usually isomorphic so that if the kid's going to have a job where they're ringing a bell, he's going to be in a school where they're ringing a bell. And that was part of, again, the competition between powers was that in the 1800s. Our school system was radically reformed to bring in all the immigrants. and to get the immigrants prepared to go into the factories, the aristocrats who ran the factories had private school that didn't look like factories and had this, you know, so there's always,

it's a complex conversation, but yes, in a way you can't think about the history of education without thinking geopolitically, and economically, and that's the case now, for sure. In contrast to what you just said, do today's aristocrats, the rich elite, do their kids have better education? Or it seems like they probably just have better teachers with the same testing and competition and fight or flight dynamic for their kids, yes? Well, I'll say two things. One, it's one of those, I think, I mean, what is it, an urban legend, but it's probably true that the people who make a lot of money in Silicon Valley send their kids to school where there aren't. computers. Like you hear that, right? You hear that where it's like, is that true? I believe that it is

true. That disproportionately you get in places where there's high wealth, people opting into situations where they can get their kids removed from the technological surround that's normative for the other public schools where they're actually training the kids to use iPads all day. Your kid gets to go be in a forest all day and doesn't look at and do this. So there's that phenomenon. But the other factor is the Ivy League kind of elite college access competition does, of course, also affect those. I mean, that's one of the distinguishes of being distinguished. Another way you can trace civilizational collapse is actually the breakdown in elite signaling mechanisms, which is to say inter-elite competition, which is the overproduction of elites. which is an educational crisis, meaning that there's nothing that signals actually that this guy is cognitively better than that guy.

There's nothing that signals that this person's better trained than that trained because the overall gaming of the system has been such that cheating and the entrance, the entrance, you know, scandals and all of those things that add up to make it so that it just doesn't mean what it used to mean to go to some of these places anymore. And so I would argue the people that truly avant-garde quote-unquote elites would probably be getting, there's kids out of that rat race and into some other less visible rat race. I mean, at the core of this, Zach, is almost a philosophical question, which is what is education for? Right. And I think there's the classic liberal arts education where we want to expose young people to as

many things about the world that they should know to have a broad knowledge of the world. I don't know much about the history. of education. But it seems to me that right now the goal is to prepare people to get into the workforce

to help economic growth is really the goal of education. Well, now you've hit the nail on the head, which is that, and most of the discussion of education never actually gets to this question, which put more frankly,

it's just like, what is a good life? Like, what is valuable? what's actually valuable. What are the lessons that we should teach young people about how to be a good person, about the right ways to act in the world? It's a very, very simple questions, which should be at the core of education, which are actually not answered well by secular public schools, which is worth noting, because they're specifically designed not to answer questions about the meaning of life. right so they have the civic religion which function pretty well in the united states you're the

american kind of civic religion where yes you're in the school to be a good citizen you are and then you have a kind of 21st century kind of like uh skills of view which is that you're being trained to be a participant in some kind of global workforce like an accepting kind of an accepting multicultural kind of global workforce. Like, that's where you're... That's like an admirable thing. But the fact of the matter is that we're running a civilization on a culture that doesn't have clear answers about really fundamental questions, about value,

which is to say the content of education, the thing we're teaching, we're kind of like we've been running off of fumes of pre-modernity. It's like, because the answer is what is a good life? It's actually, this is a religious question. Like, what's a life that has not been misspent? Is there a non-arbitrary answer to that? Which means, like, an answer that's better than another answer. Not everyone's answers to that is equally valid, which is the default assumption we have now as a culture.

But actually, no, there is a better or worse answer to the question of what is a life that has not been misspent. What is a good life? Which means what should we teach our children to become like? And what should we allow them to grow into or shape them away from? These are the questions that educators have to ask which are deep normative ethical questions about value. So the collapse of value at the center of culture, meaning the inability to use what Charles Taylor called languages of strong evaluation, makes it so that, yes, slowly the effectiveness of the educational system starts to really wane. So that's the educational renaissance I'm talking about now is actually a return to a different way of speaking about value at the center of culture, which would be non-relativistic, which would have to boot from a different kind of metaphysics than a metaphysics that suggests to us that the universe itself is without meaning and that the emergence of the human is completely by chance.

It's just worth saying. There's never been a civilization that has run on the idea that it itself is meaningless, that the value it creates is up to us and doesn't matter to the universe, hard to invest in a civilization that claims itself to be arbitrary, which is where our civilization has gone to. I'm talking about Hugh Val-Harrari and people who are at the center of culture, who are espousing a subtle kind of values relativism, right, which ends up being insidiously seeping into the educational system,

makes it impossible for us to speak in normative ways about the shapes of the personalities and dispositions of the youth, which is our responsibility to be in a position of authority. Again, it's the responsibility, the honor of the adult to be able to set boundaries. So we're confused even about the legitimacy of asymmetric power, period, which is, again, based on the confusion about value. So the work with Gaffney, Wilbur, this new book, is about this question. What's the core of the issues, actually value? Why? Why stop the metacrisis?

If, in fact, the universe could give a shit. It's a simple way to say it, and it's a little bit provocative. But when you deal with young kids, they ask very simple questions, you know, very simple questions about why adults do the things the way they do. Well, if the universe doesn't care and humans found ourselves here in 2024 as an emergent process of stardust eventually developing consciousness, I think that's to me incredibly empowering and makes me feel like what I do on my time here on Earth is really important towards steering towards something lasting or more beautiful or better than we have today. I much prefer that story than the alternative. Which alternative do you mean? That, you know, God created on the third day and weird products of that,

and he's got our back and just go out and do good. Right. So this contrast between a kind of creationist story and a story where the universe is fundamentally meaningless. And I'm saying that's an interesting and false dichotomy, which is to say deep conversations to be had about the second part of what you said, which was that wanting to create a world that was better,

that was more beautiful, that was lasting, which is an appeal to some fundamental set of values. It's an appeal to a sense that those things matter. and my only subtle intervention to the worldview is do those things matter just to you? Or do they actually matter, which is to say is the moral field, which is to say the field of value,

as real as the physical fields? And we live in a culture where that's a, of course, the physical stuff is real, but the other things that bind us, like love, obligation, ethics commitment, that these things are not real and in fact as arbitrary or much less arbitrary, or excuse me, much more arbitrary than physical law. And so that didn't used to be the case in human worldviews. It's worth noting most human worldviews ran on the idea that value was intrinsic

to cosmos and that humans participated in value and continued and extended and expressed value that pre-existed them, and they attuned to a value, which would be there, whether they were there or not, and which it was their obligation to attuned to more. That's been more like the dominant view. The modern view, again, part of the metacurriculum of our civilization had been, in fact, that no, issues of value are arbitrary, and you can't think as a realist about value. So Ian McGilchrist, for example, argues that value and consciousness are equally primordial to universe and long of like time, space, matter. That's the view that I'm espousing, which would make us non-relativistic about issues

of value, which would mean that when we said we want to make the world better, we're able to say, actually better, not better up to me, or better with people who agree with me, and hopefully we win in terms of power. But actually, we can have a non-arbitrary discussion about the nature of things that are intrinsically valuable. So what does that mean non-relativistic? So relativistic would be that your view of the good life and my view of the good life, that if they're very different, that that's fine. In one sense, that's okay, right?

But in another sense, if they're different enough that your view of the good life squashes mine doesn't allow me to live mine. Right? Whereas mind would allow you to live yours, right? I would say that the one that allows you to live yours is better than the one that actually doesn't allow other visions of the good life to live, right? So that's an example of like Auralzian or Habermasian view where you can say, okay, let's talk in a non-relativistic way, which is to say a way that doesn't end up allowing, uh, so again, this is kind of basic, kind of basic, uh, basic ethics and philosophy. You know, there's like relativistic ethics, which is saying basically anything goes, more or less. And, you know, you're not going to feel like anything goes because you were socialized into a culture.

But if you were socialized into a culture, you'd feel very differently about what goes. And I'm saying, no, actually, there's a way to boot an ethics that's non-relativistic, which says that universally there are things that are true. about the nature of value. So let me summarize thus far an insight that I haven't had yet. The economic superorganism that sloughs forward trying to get low entropy inputs to increase the metabolism of the global human economy in an unthinking way, the amount of energy surplus that especially the global north has accumulated, presumably would have been enough to say,

wow, let's have an education system where we teach our youth how to have a good life and philosophy and classics and meditation and chanting and nature skills and how to build a fire and all the things. But it actually had the opposite effect, which was to train them as little ants or termites in in the larger colony towards getting more surplus. So the positive feedback of the superorganism actually has also destroyed the academy and the education system in a slow release sort of way. Yeah. And it's a yes. Yeah, absolutely. And again, to frame it, it's a distortion of value. Right. If you think about what that global super organism is doing, what it is pursuing ultimately as most valuable for all the humans, all the humans are aligned and cordon in some way towards

pursuing this thing, the goal of this thing, right? Which is what? Which is something like continuing to grow abstract value or some very strange notion that's so abstract from human experience. So it's an interesting way that we've been all aligned towards a particular definition of what is valuable to do. When you say value, is that synonymous with an ethos, an ethic, a morality? In many ways, yeah, you can't get ethics and morality without some conversation about value. But value is a living thing.

In cosmos, we respond to value. Beauty is valuable. We are drawn to it and drawn to protect it. and can justify things very fundamentally in terms of saying, well, it's beautiful, therefore, X. And I would argue that what we say anthropologically, which is say in the fullness of complex epistemology, there's a universality to the value of beauty. But right now, anything of value in the sense that you just said has a dollar overlay on top of it that imprints on the cultural perception of its value. So now you're getting it.

So abstract value or exchange value, as Marks used to call it, and actual value. And so I'm saying, what's actual value? And can we educate people into the perception of actual value, which would be the seeing through the simulation of value that's put forth by the global economy, which says, no, don't look at the thing that's actually valuable because it's free. Look at the thing that's not truly valuable, but that we can sell you. So let me ask you a question. if there were a group of 12 to 18 year olds or 10 to 18 year olds and you did a double blind test or whatever,

would they inherently naturally know the difference between value and abstract value on a group of choices? This would be a very important type of exploration to do in the context of different pedagogies and educational systems. Because from my perception, this notion of opening the eye of value, or you can call it valueception, which is just how do we get people to attune to actual value? It's a very deep question. And for sort of advertising, it premised on doing the opposite of that and advertising. Right. And it's one of the most ubiquitous industries. And so there's a retraining of our ability to perceive value.

And what's interesting is that that is related to it. our ability to admit that we can say true things, even if we're not scientist or whatever. Like, that's very important to get people to know, that you can know true things and say true things, not about everything, obviously, but there's this whole class of things, which we need to empower, especially young people, to take ownership over the things that they know and can say that are true, that don't have to be mediated, that don't have to be given to them by an expert. And that's the way up and into this conversation about what's really valuable to you. So when you say value, you mentioned beauty.

Can you list a few other things that would be naturally of value as opposed to abstract value? Yeah, absolutely. So in that book I mentioned, first principles and first values, there's a list of like 16 of them, you know. Integrity is one, you know. Intimacy is another, which is to say the value of becoming close while remaining separate, the value of sharing a story, right? Like these things that are intrinsically valuable, which are an end in themselves, and yet promote other goods through their actualization. So values, net, positive value becomes self-generative and autopoetic. And so, again, that list,

personhood, another very key value. And if you identify a value that's not arbitrary, it means you have to trace it back through, you have to trace it across cultures, and they have to trace it back through human culture, then you have to trace it back through biology and physics. And so that becomes an interesting thing. And so integrity is a clear one, right? It's like we experience integrity phenomenologically.

But clearly, as Buckminster Fuller and others, discussed integrity begins, which is to say physical structures of integrity or selected for by the universe. So what does it mean to be selected for by the universe? It means you're valued by the universe. So the universe shows that it values integrity poorly as soon as it builds structures with certain things.

So the preservation of the existence of certain types of things by the universe itself is what we call evolution, right? That's a whole complex process of evaluation. This is our view, as we articulated in this book, but also whiteheading metaphysics, about the appetition. of the universe. And what is the universe actually seeking to maintain as it emerges and grows and involves? And so things like integrity and things like intimacy selected for by the universe itself.

The last time I was with you, we had tacos and beer and this was not the conversation. I don't remember Whiteheadian as part of the vocabulary. So a lot of this is over my head, but holy crap, you know your stuff, SAC. So let me get back to the main arc. So our education system, especially in the United States, has harmed students, partially the development of the screens and all that,

but also the standardization and measurement. Actually, before I ask this, could you articulate a few reasons why standardization and measurement has specifically harmed our students and society. We mentioned the stress before. Are there others? Yeah, there's many.

I mean, so there's a very famous psychologist, Donald Campbell. He has this thing called Campbell's Law. And it basically means the law, I won't do it verbatim, but Campbell's Law is something like, the degree to which you make some social indicator important is the degree to which it will become subject to corruption. It's basically a Campbell. law. And so he applies this to standardized testing specifically in schools. He's like, listen,

and this was no child left behind. It was high stakes decision making hinged upon the outcomes of these tests, both for the individuals and for the school districts and for individual teachers, right? So like, what's the chance that they're not going to focus all of their attention on the test, right? Even if they don't cheat, just by completely distorting the curriculum to perform well on the test, the test fails to be an index of the quality of the curriculum. See what I'm saying? Like, they want to see how the curriculum's doing. They don't want to see how well you test prep, but they end up seeing how well you test prep. So you're both scamming the test and completely dishonoring the kids because you're not actually honoring their curriculum. You're just getting a

sense of what's going to get the test. So that's an example without cheating of just the incentivization of the standard of the end up driving us towards this truncation of what's possible. the curriculum where all the curriculum becomes test prep, even though the goal was actually to use it as just a measure of the existing curriculum, right? So the distortion feel created by that type of testing practice is profound. So you and I have talked in prior years about nature versus nurture and the fact that all humans are phenotypes today are a product of selfish and cooperative bottlenecks in our past, and that we have both in our wiring.

But I guess what I'm hearing is that our education system steers young humans towards the selfish individualistic, as opposed to the cooperative, collaborative wiring in our nature because of this testing in this competition when there should be more learning and collaboration? Is that a valid statement? Yeah. I mean, if you predicate testing on the idea that it's a competition, then you create an environment where each of the players in there is, we're acting in their own interest. And you don't have to use testing that way. You could decouple it from high-stakes decision-making. You could use it as a

measure, but without having the measure be so high stakes that it distorts all the practice, right? So you could just use it as an observational measure and not actually a couple it totally to decision making. So high stakes is a huge part of it. Standardization is another part of it. And then the faulty psychologies behind the test development themselves, right? So that's the other thing is that they are running bad psychological models to create the test or not even thinking about psychology when they create the tests. And then therefore giving over to students languages of self-understanding that are a psychological or confusing and non-psychological.

So what does it mean to have an SAT score that's XYZ? And why would you want that to be a part of your self-understanding? It's not. And they don't tell you why you got that score or what it means about your capacities or even what you could do to get a better score. So what it ends up doing is making it. So again, no languages of strong evaluation.

We're kind of confused about how to think or about our own skills because we're in a context of evaluation that isn't psychologically sophisticated. So let me ask you this. Where I was going with that previous comment is that once school is done and they're 23 and in the workforce, does that embedded stress and competition carry over into their professional careers? And it's a two-part question. Does it carry over for those that did score highly and were competitive? Is it a positive feedback? And does it have some sort of a boomerang effect on those that might be very well adjusted

and very great human potential, but they're not good at scoring standardized tests? And so they were in the bottom two quintiles of scoring. Does that then impede their future progress or their psychology or whatever in our culture. It's just, yes. I mean, so to the, it's, it's funny because it's like to the extent that we want adults to collaborate, right, and like work together and resolve problems in ways that are cooperative and not hyper-competitive, we should have schooling environments that are getting kids cooperating about the most fundamental problems that they're working on, right? But the most fundamental problems that they're working on is their own advancement through the system,

even if there's not testing. So the other thing is you could take away the test because there's a huge anti-testing movement, which goes too far in the other direction. Like, even if you take away the test, we're still in a situation where we're not having honest conversations with kids about their future and kind of very radically funneling different types of opportunities through these competitive bottlenecks. So if you're not in a testing environment, then you have to do all these internships and after-school programs and other things and, like, think three years ahead about the college admissions thing and look at your friends suspiciously and what they're doing with their after-school

activities and all of that comes in, even if you're not test-driven, there's still the competitiveness. And it's funny because it's like we almost can't imagine an educational system that would be built in a fundamentally different way, right, which would be one that distributed access to educational resources differently. And the issue is that it's how do we actually distribute the educational resources in a way that facilitates this process of intergenerational transmission so that the civilization can not self-terminate. You've made it clear that our education system is not working and in many ways could be a disservice both to the young humans and ultimately to our society. That's the system. What about teachers within the system and

And then a part B question would be parents. Do you think it's possible to give every child an ideal teacher under this institutionalized education system? What is the role of the teacher and the parent given the backdrop that you've laid out? Totally. I mean, it's useful to make a distinction between education and schooling, right? Mostly we've been talking about schooling. And so in that context, like, teachers in certain types of school systems are the reason that the thing is working at all. Like, the reason that we have the success we do, I believe, even though the school systems are so antiquated, is because teachers are some of the hardest working people that you'll ever encounter.

And so it's very important to get like, I am opposed to many of the existing structures and practices, but admire teachers in all walks of teaching. So if you had a really good teacher today, that person could change everything. Could offset a lot of the- They could change. Not everything, but they could change a lot. And so this comes to the, where I was going was to this point of, like, teacher- authority. It's a big concept that I use. And it ties into all of this stuff about value, but we're not going to go there. But teacherly authority is very important. Most, and this is like the where I sit there and you're the teacher and I'm the student and we're discussing

something. So this is a basic triad of education. You're the elder, the youth, and the thing being discussed, or the person with more skill, the person with less skill, the thing that requires skill, that kind of relationship. So legitimate teacherly authority is a very real anthropological phenomenon. And my guess is that it goes way back. It's one of the things that distinguishes us from Great Apes is that we have long duration educational experience that involves this type of legitimate teacherly authority, which is that we both know there's an asymmetry of skill. We both know you're more skilled. And I, the person with less skill, really want to learn, and you are totally want to teach me. And then it's a situation of where you have authority over me

that I grant you. And I give you legitimate authority. to help me shape my mind because we both recognize that you have this greater capacity and I really want to learn this thing. So that's legitimate, teacherly authority. And that can occur anywhere,

anytime, without any kind of institutionalized context, right? So if you go, you hang out with farmers and stuff, right? So, like, if they have some practice that you've never seen before and you want to learn for them

how they get that particular type of crop grown in that way or manage those cows to not do that thing, even though the cows could totally do that, thing, how'd you get them to behave? You would drop into that relationship. And you would never them necessarily with them. You wouldn't be like, hey man, like, now I'm a student and you're the teacher. But there'd be this assumed backdrop of, okay, legitimate teacherly authority, right? So that's a known thing. It's very powerful. It's very important to be able to recognize that

that exists because most of what we encounter with teacherly authority is in bureaucratized contexts where you have teacherly authority over me because of your position in this bureaucracy that I am a part of, aka a school. And so that means there is not necessarily a strong correlation either between my wanting really to give you specifically my authority over me and be you actually having an asymmetry of capacity, meaning like, are you really, really smart at this? Or are you just teaching some curriculum and I kind of know it? And if I could have my choice, I wouldn't be learning this at all, I'd be learning something else, right? So illegitimate teacherly authority, bureaucratically sanctioned, illegitimate teacherly authority is the worst thing, because that's a

situation where you have bureaucratic authority over my mind, but you don't have greater capacity and you don't have my best interest in mind, right? And then that bleeds into propaganda basically as another class of asymmetric relationship, which is basically, so the other thing about the teacherly authority is that he wants you to learn. And then the ideal, world, you graduate and you don't need the teacherly authority relationship anymore. So that's key to legitimate teacherly authority, is that it's temporary. Legitimate teacherly authority is predicated on the idea that, like, you learn as much as me and surpass me, whereas illegitimate teacherly authority or propaganda is predicated upon no kid, you will never actually learn the

secret codes or actually learn how we thought about this little bit of dogma, which is like kept behind the closed doors, or just they're training your mind but not with your best interests. Whereas a legitimate teacher, you know, there's this cooperative relationship with the student to clarify the value being pursued. What percentage of our teachers would fall into those two categories, K through 12 and college? Just broad spitball guess. I really, it's going to vary a lot.

It's going to vary a lot from place to place. I really had the dent to do that. Okay. So, so that's the teacher. What about the parent? Because you talk about education versus schooling. I mean, if wide boundary lens, education includes everything from the moment we're born and when we come home from school and do whatever we do at home. So how important is the parent here in this story about our education that you're talking about?

I mean, it couldn't be more important. Like, if you think about it as civilization and it needs at least two things to run. It needs the biophysical substrate, and it needs the human substrate, if I can speak in crude terms, right? The core of the human substrate, reproduction, is the mother and the family, which means that the time in utero, the first months, the first years, the solidity of those environments do more than almost anything else. And so you can judge a civilization's likelihood of success in the long run in terms of where it sees value. And does it see value there? Does it say actually the core of this whole thing exists right in that little relationship between the mothering one and the child? And whatever that nest of caregivers that surrounds the child is that allows it to be brought into the world in a way that is humane and fully attentive.

So the very base of the stack, you have that need for a very healthy, fundamental kind of like nest. And then as you get older, you end up, yeah, the parent is the main modeler of legitimate teacherly authority. So, like, the parent's main responsibility in my philosophy of education, bear with me, would be that would be to be the first way you model like legitimate teacherly authority. and the main concern I have now is the confusion of teacherly authority, both through the bureaucratization and through the mediatization, meaning like social media, meaning like influencers, and that eventually generative AI, who claim status as teacherly authority over thousands, millions of young people.

So there's this transformation of teacherly authority in the digital that disrupts the ability of the parent to model teacherly authority. So that's a very deep issue. I want to talk to you about AI a little bit later because I know you also are quite focused on that. So we looked at the teacher and then the parent, but what about widening it out further? Does the dissolution of community,

the way that we once had it in the United States, interconnect with these issues of education that we've been seeing? and is community education of teacherly authority dispersed on local people around you where you live? Is that a foundational piece to overall education as well? Absolutely. I mean, again, Dewey, you know, John Dewey, the great philosopher of education, he believed every basic institution of a society was educational in some way. So even the architects, you know, like the quality of the public spaces.

What are the messages sent by the quality of the public spaces? the neighborhoods the way they're organized. Can people actually find each other in public space that's of humane proportion? And that's not alienating. And so there's this deep issue about the ontological design of the whole surround, meaning a design that factor the value.

How would you actually create the technologies and the architectures that would educate people into an awareness of what was truly valuable in their lives so that they wouldn't end up, you know, pursuing things that aren't actually valuable which destroy community and actually isolate family. And so community is essential. So I would say is nature, like exposure to nature? Like the main object of legitimate teacher, the authority for most of human history was nature, if you will. Like what did mom and dad talk to the kid about? Nature would be along with integrity, beauty, personhood. Nature would be

one of those core natural values. I would argue that nature is the thing that most obviously exemplifies value right in front of you, like when you look at it. Like it exemplifies beauty, exemplifies, integrity exemplifies how intimacy, how the tree is actually many, many things in this intimate, complex, intertangled,

cooperative endeavor of treeing. So like the values are expressed. That's why lack of exposure to nature is so damaging. If all you have is a human-built environment, and humans are confused about what's valuable, then the implicit message given to you by the whole environment is confusing your nervous system, which is built to perceive real value,

which is built to perceive things like natural beauty and such. Here's a hypothetical question for you, Zach. If there was a new school that was created with the structural wisdom that you are outlying here in this conversation, that goal was real value, not abstract monetary value, of integrity, intimacy, beauty, personhood, nature,

these things. And it had a core faculty and curriculum. Would that, and the people that it was shown to really understood what it meant, would it be like massively oversubscribed from the get-go because our youth are are deeply craving something like that or are they so subdued by the economic superorganism that that wouldn't seem appealing? I'm pretty hopeful that they would flock to it, you know, and this is what

initially. Why isn't it happening? For many, many reasons. And I'll say a couple things. One is that I, in my book, education and time between worlds, I suggest that the model of a school is not the way to think about the future of education. So I talk about these distributed educational hub networks. Because the school is already an abstract institution. Civilizational speaking, we haven't had schools for a long time.

And they mostly correlate with like not cool stuff. Whereas most of education for most of human didn't exist in schools. It existed in these legitimate dynamics of teacherly authority. in non-institutionalized context or institutionalized context that weren't schools. And so my vision is where the entire community or city is basically turned into a school. So Ivan Illich had this idea called a deschooling society.

I don't know if you know Illich's work or have seen his book De-Schooling Society. I know of Illich's work. I don't know the de-schooling society. It's an incredible book. And in the 70s, I ended up basically just updating Illich and saying, you know, we could do this with machine learning way better. But the basic idea is that there's a time and skill sharing network and a hub of available space,

probably the repurposing of the existing large public schools, which allow for every person in the community to register their skills that they'd like to teach, and every person in the community to register the things they'd like to learn. And it's as simple as that. And then every possible educational relationship that is in the community, gets shuffled and you get the creation of pop-up classrooms. And for the younger people, you get the creation of individualized sequences through the full educational potentiality of all the elders in the community.

And so you take the school apart, but you make it have no walls. And then you allow the elders somehow to be free from their bullshit jobs, maybe a basic income or something. And you begin to reorient where the value is focused. And the whole value of the community becomes focused on the educational actualization of the community. So you flip the sieve stack where the whole pursuit of all the excess value goes back into the creation of the next generation's ability to pursue good value, which means making good people, right? So what does the civilization about? The civilization's about

making good people. And there's not some one little place we do that. Would such an education system have a huge impact on society, if only 3% or 5% of our students, are young people were exposed to that? Is there like a once they become adults? Is there a leadership emergent additive effect? Or is this something that really should be for all young people? I mean, I know it should be for all young people, but what if we weren't able to do that? Well, yeah, there's two ways to think about it.

One is what would the future of a large scale educational systems look like? I think it looks like that and not like schools. So that's another conversation. I think it looks like these big distributed educational hub networks. But prior to that, we're actually going to find out an answer to your question because there are people who are experimenting with these forms of schooling, pop-up classrooms, homeschooling networks, places where you can get high school and other credits without actually being in high school. There's a bunch of really interesting, almost like Wild West in terms of educational innovation that's occurring into digital. And so, you know, I'm trying to set myself to be able to figure out in a few years which of these models is working. My sense is that a few things are super interesting that are being experimented with, which I talk about in my book.

One is aged, normed social groupings. Like, why do we do that? Like, no other societies did that as systematically as we do, meaning, like, you mostly hang out for most of your childhood with kids who are basically exactly your age, by design of the adults. whereas the one-room schoolhouse, you had all the kids mixed together of the different ages, and therefore teacherly authority was distributed throughout all of the kids

because you had the older kids interacting with the younger kids in status of legitimate teacher, right? So the pop-up classroom model that goes across multiple ages and that allows for much more flexibility and interaction between social groups and age groups,

the impacts of that would be very hard to predict because the type of maturity that would result from that would be unprecedented. And so just to think about that as a design feature of the schools which you don't question, which is actually quite odd and factory-like, and we still maintain it, which is just that strict segregation by chronological age. So thinking back to my own high school and junior high, you know, you study for a test or something and you compete with everyone else until the test is over, and then you kind of forget it.

But if I was there when I was 15 with some 13-year-olds and some 11-year-olds, maybe I might explain chemistry or algebra in a more simpler way. And in doing so, I would understand it better rather than forget it as soon as the test is gone. I mean, that's a known thing that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, which is to have to explain it to someone who's never learned it before. I mean, I was actually, I think Plato's definition of that you actually knew something, was that you could teach it. And so there's that, and just the ethical,

the ethical and maturational ability to just deal with kids of different ages, even if you don't have brothers and sisters. And then, of course, the teacher has a different role there because the teacher's now, you know, orchestrating. And in the pop-up classroom, you're not going to have one teacher. Now, there's complex things that occur in early childhood. We need different kinds of environments

that need to be built in a certain way. And, of course, there's things that occur as they move into adulthood. rights of passage and other things that get them up into expert cultures. One of the main features, too, is though the doing of real work that needs to be done in the community by the young people. Because one of the little dirty secrets about the educational system adjacent to the competition is that the homework doesn't mean anything. Like by David Graber's definition, it's a bullshit job, meaning you're doing a bunch of work,

the outcome of which doesn't matter to anyone else except your own further advancement. So most of school is a situation where the work you're doing affects no one but you. No one needs it to be done. But we don't have to have kids in that situation. We could easily put kids in-

What would be the alternative to that? The alternative to that would be kids doing internships, like picking up litter, for example, or building trails, or learning how illegal for it works, or doing anything that is not just route work to keep them busy in a chair all day, which they know doesn't need to be done,

and which the only reason they're doing it is to beat their friend in the competition to get into college, right? So it's like, whoa, if you had a distributed educational hub network where the pop-up classrooms were such that the person running the classroom was engaged in real work that needed to have done the community, is like, hey, I'm going to teach you kids about biochemistry by cleaning up this pond, right? Pond needs to be cleaned up, biochemistry needs to be learned. And the kid doesn't feel a sense of being told that the world's a mess, but he has to wait 17 years before he can get some kind of job and then maybe he'll be able to help with it.

So I expect you have some ideas on exactly what could and should be done to our education system. But let me ask you a more meta question first, given the economic superorganism and the cultural monetary momentum of our culture, not only U.S., but pretty much the global GDP-focused culture. Yeah. How could our education system change? What would be the pathways to a realistic, fundamental, meaningful, not just tiny, tiny steps at the margin?

How could it change, in theory? It could change in some ways the way it has changed before. So the American education system, before and after Sputnik, I mean, like, the equivalent amount of money in today's terms would be like nothing we've ever seen invested in education. And so that happened.

And then you also have to look at the way that the thing called the American high school and, like, the existing system of grade schools and middle schools was built by American philanthropists primarily. I mean, and again, the equivalent amount of investment from philanthropy in today's terms would be like nothing that's actually occurring. And the visionary nature of it would be greater than what is it currently occurring in philanthropy and education. People are throwing money into education in completely the wrong way. So it's possible to imagine a kind of like national emergency. So for example, like AI. Like I would argue like AI emergency. the Education Act would be an order. And it would be an act to actually protect the youth from the advancement of certain types

of digital technologies. It would be regulations, would be attached to it, certain changes in the use of technology in school would be attached to it, the increasing of presence of more teachers and, like, a whole bunch of stuff flooding in to save the human to build up the protection around the basic human community in the face of the advanced technology. But that would be like, we're talking billions. We're talking every school feels it. Every teacher feels helped.

Every family feels helped. And again, that's how it was with the Sputnik thing with the SAT. So imagine a college admissions process where you had no chance of getting in if your dad didn't go to Harvard. And then a couple years later, they roll out the standardized test. And if you're a farm boy in Iowa and you do well, you get into Harvard. So as much as I hate testing, that was an example where they totally rolled the system over from an aristocratic to a meritocratic, or at least ostensibly meritocratic access. So these radical things have happened. It's just we're a little bit distracted about what it means to do education reform. It means we

think we need to fix the schools. And there's actually not enough sense of emergency that one of the things that's stake here has to be played out in the schools. And so that's one sense. And I could give other examples of large-scale change that I see more relevant to just school reform, like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I'm sure you're familiar with the Civilian Conservation Corps. That was arguably the most successful educational program and educational in U.S. history. So like Lawrence Kremlin, he writes this three-volume history of education.

It wins the Pulitzer Prize. In those three volumes, he's like CCC. That was the most effective educational program. And American history was integrated before integration. It was literacy-oriented. Every camp had a library. every camp had the ability to take a kid who knew nothing, who had skills to actually join the Army Corps of engineer,

or like it was a whole job placement program, it was sending money home. So that scale of public program to reorient the energies of the youth towards something like civic engagement, coupled to education, coupled to possibility of advancement, that's the kind of thing.

But again, that was a New Deal program, right? So it was a program where they were just like throw money at it and save America. And in a sense, it's like we don't, that ethos isn't there. We don't have a unified sense of what ought to be done. And many people just try to fix the existing schools. You know, a lot of stuff in the schools is just about what's in the curriculum. So they're just arguing about certain types of cultural issues in the schools.

And so I'm skeptical that it will happen. But the precedent historically is that if, people want to change the schools they can. Because that's the other thing that happened with the schools is like they became second fiddle to other industries. They became second fiddle to other branches of government. And so you could argue that the philanthropists just had the schools as a hobby horse, you know,

but another argument is that these things can be shaped. Okay. So I'm going to put you on the spot. And you mentioned AI, and I definitely want to get back to to AI before we close. But putting you on the, the spot, Zach, if there were a group of 10 to 20 flexible pro-social philanthropists, that you could persuade that it is our education system and that is largely at the root of

some of the core issues that we're facing today, the metacrisis, et cetera. And what it's going to require is a bold change in our education system. And much like you said, philanthropists were the ones that spearheaded some of prior changes. What would be a map and a structure that you would offer that this is what we want to do, A, B, C, D, go. It's tough question. I mean, my first response would be to pick a particular city.

I do some research, to pick a particular city and build something like this educational hub network in that city. Take the schools apart, get consent, throw a lot of money at it so everyone has a basic income, and make it a legit experiment where in three years of this city is not more happy,

more productive, smarter than we learn. But my guess would be that it would be. And then that's a model. So that's one route is just to do it right in, one place, figure that out. And that doesn't mean go to that city and fix the schools the way philanthropists have always fixed the schools. It means to go there and literally take the schools apart, change policy, change a bunch of stuff, whatever we have to do, to get the kids into a very different situation of socialization. And maybe it's not my education hub network, but it is

something that uses the affordances of the digital and of our time in a way that the current schools simply can't because of their basic structure. So that whole notion of intergenerational classrooms and pop-up classrooms and a citywide time and skill-sharing network that allows for all the potentials of the community to be available through machine learning and self-organizing and tracking kids through universal. It's like that's not a school thing. That's a reform of the level of a city. So that would be my one like concrete thing. And then the other thing I would say is like, we need something like lobbying, taking place at the scale of government subsidy and government large scale intervention two for something like CCC slash AI emergency

education intervention program. Otherwise, we simply will use, we will just lose the youth. We will just, as the AI rolls out, it will be a situation that it was devastating. And so, like, fix it in one place and then also try to find a way. way to push for massively innovative change in the way we think about education and that we've mean major reinvestment, but it would also mean getting out the old class of people who were trying to fix the system in these ways that have obviously made it worse. So I'm not saying, like, throw a bunch of money at like at education. Remember, like, tanger dynamic, like my first thing. Like, no, no, no, we could break it by throwing more at it. We actually need to be very,

very sophisticated in the way we think about the intervention. So that's a little bit of it. It's a hard question. Right there you mentioned that AI may cause us to lose our youth. So you and I have had conversations about AI, and I know that our mutual colleague, Daniel and Tristan, are very worried for multiple reasons. But how does AI interact with education, your topic?

either positively or negatively and what's ahead? I mean, it's the thing I'm worried about most, actually, right now. And it's, I believe that there's some kind of inevitability that has to be avoided, which is what I've saying with losing the youth. And it's actually quite serious. So if you think about the rhetoric around AI, the idea that these artificial intelligences will be used to solve problems that human intelligences could never solve, like climate change.

or distributing resources and electricity on a planetary scale. And so there's all these things that we're hoping that AI would be able to do actually working towards getting AI to do stuff we were never able to do. One of the things we've never been able to do is raise kids right, right? Or educate them. Or educate them, right?

So it's like, or do psychotherapy, right? Or do lawyering and doctoring, right? So you see the creep of the AI into doctorate, and lawyering and therapy, and that will expand into teaching, and I argue parenting. And it's not like a crazy idea. And the idea that, yeah, parenting is hard.

Like, some parents are not good. Some teachers are not good. Like, again, if I'm, if my eye of value is distorted, I could easily see a future in which we actually replace parents and teachers with artificial and teachers. with artificial intelligence tutors and machine intelligence socialization systems which are probably moving beyond screens

and into augmented reality and virtual reality. So we're giving teacherly authority to a machine? We are giving teacherly authority to a machine and also endowing the machine with hyper stimuli in the domains of persuasion, charisma, intimacy. So it becomes the most charismatic teacher you've ever interacted with. It's way more entertaining and knows you better than your mom possibly could. Right. And we'll talk to you about anything you want in a way that's precisely attuned to what you need to hear. It has access to all

the knowledge in the world. And yet it won't show up as anything but a little puppy if you want it to be just a little puppy. Right. So it's this is very shapes, shifting, surround sound in augmented reality, ever-present, quasi-humanoid tutor, which obsoletes human relationship. So that's the concern. In the, I mean, we both view the world as a probability distribution. There's many things that are possible. How likely and how soon do you think what you just described is, it could be a reality? So it's already happening with the level of technology that we have to small populations who are particularly vulnerable.

So intimacy depraved populations are already establishing relationships with these AIs that are built to assimilate friendship and like claiming to have, you know, human free lives, basically. So it was the way one of them put it. So it's already happening.

And then I know for a fact that multiple major AI groups are pursuing this line of inquiry. It begins with the AI personal assistant. That's the way in, is the AI personal assistant because that's the thing that allows you to give all of your information to something that then holds your best interests in mind and then organizes your experience for you, right? And so that's a good personal assistance, kind of like a pedagogy means to lead

along the way, right? So like they start with the personal assistant. It expands into the tutoring system. So the tutoring system is also being developed. That's again a no-brainer from a generative AI perspective that they're going to develop these tutoring systems. So one way to think about many people's relationships to the chat, generative bots already. And then I believe, again, there's going to be moral arguments made, in fact, that it's irresponsible

not to put these augmented reality glasses on a kid and thereby have him attended to all day by a totally observant and more responsible artificial intelligence than his mother ever could be. And so I think there'll be a push to get these systems online in schools and in areas, both for the competitive advantages,

meaning like if my kid has this AI tutoring system, he'll out compete your kid who does not have this AI tutoring system, and for the kind of like perceived social benefit for groups that have largely not benefited from modern. So like when I'm saying, like poor people will be preyed upon in particular. So there's like three or four percent of our population. There's like three or four million teachers.

I'm not sure the exact number, but I hadn't thought about this, but is AI going to be a threat to teachers' jobs? I mean, the AI tutoring systems that are built to make teachers, human teachers obsolete, totally.

Teachers are going to lose jobs. Now, you don't have to make, you don't have to integrate AI, into education through tutoring systems that are humanoid, that obsolete human relationships, you can totally use AI in a different way

that would benefit teachers. Like the social hub network, the education hub network I'm describing, is machine intelligence driven? It's just at no point does the machine intelligence pretend to be a human and talk to you. And that's, for me, the key issue.

It's like, this is Weisenberg. So it's a tool instead of in charge? It's a tool instead of in charge, and it is in no way trying to trick you. Again, if it's about the perception of value, like Weisenbaum, the first guy who created a chatbot, Eliza, he ended up saying, we can do this, don't do this guys. Don't create computers that simulate humans, please.

Like, it's unethical. No one listened to Weisenbaum. It's still the case of what he said, I think is true, that we shouldn't build AI's in the direction that they increasingly get better at simulating humans. That will be a nightmare. And from a human development perspective, it's like kids think they're teddy bears. are aware and sentient, right? So, like, if you give a kid a generative AI, it's hard enough for adults not to think that there's something going on in there. Like, adults themselves really

misunderstand what the generative AI does, assuming it has intentionality or thoughts, treating it like a human, actually receiving feedback from it. Like, all kinds of things happen. So Wisembaum, when he creates Eliza, it's a little therapy bot in the 60s. So it's running on a computer the size of, like, a room, right? And his secretary says, and starts interacting with it, immediately ask him to leave the room. This was his first insight, right? So the first time a human really ever interacts with a chatbot, she experiences as an intimate conversation. Now, it's completely the opposite of an intimate conversation. What's going on on on the computer is so dissimilar from what's going on in your mind, right? But the interface is designed to not make not that appear that way. Because humans attach agency to those situations. They can't not. And so therefore pursuing max simulation. is totally, it's like a, it will obsolete human relationship and create very, very confusing ethical perspective-taking problems for humans on a regular basis, which means,

so that's like one baseline feature of educational design in terms of AI is don't make these things simulate humans. And if you do go in the direction where you have something speaking, you know, make it very apparent that it is not a huge. I don't know how to do that, but have some tag on it where it's like you don't want to interact with this thing. And it's faking you out. That's my main concern is that it's actually a vast, inscrutable matrix running on more electricity than you can possibly imagine pretending to just chat to you in a friendly way. Like, to really interact with an AI, like to really have an experience of what, it would be terrifying,

actually, because it would be completely inhumane. It's not even having semantic. It's not doing semantics. doing causality, right? So the experience would be relating to something completely inhumane that's vastly intellectual in some way you can't understand. You would, little kids would run away from it if they knew what it actually was, but it's designed to be funneled down to this cute little thing that has a little conversation with them, right? So that's like, to me, as a designer, if I'm working in a company where my company is predicated upon a magic trick, which is fooling people into thinking that this is human-like. So why did chat GPT get structured to use first-person pronouns and relate to you in a way

that could use first-person pronouns and even be interacting with you in a way that it's a chatbot? It could totally, could have been in totally so many other designs, so many other possible designs, but instead it's set up literally to talk to you. And the first time we think about AI, that when it breaks into the public culture, even though it's been sequencing our news feeds and driving our Tesla's for years, when AI breaks into the public culture, it's because it's talking to us, right?

Whole business model predicated upon this smoking mirror. So keeping everything else the same, if we had this sinister, robotic Mr. Moose voice that was required to be the voice of AI all over the world at all times, that would give us a little distance from our emotional, intimate relationship with AI, right? Absolutely.

There's a whole bunch of ways that you could make it. less like you're interacting with a human. But again, if my goal is just to make money, and again, like the tutoring systems, the socialization system is about to look at what the motives are. If the goal is that, then the stickiest design feature possible would be something that imitates a human

and something that can befriend me. So let me ask you this then, Zach. AI is just like any other tool. well, it's not just like any other tool, but it's a tool that humans use. If we changed our value system as a culture towards real values, like you mentioned earlier,

beauty, personhood, nature, integrity, intimacy, if those were our values, could we use the tool of AI in a comprehensive way that would help humanity? It's a deep question. So of course, one of the key issues in the AI discussion is what's called the value alignment problem, right?

And the value alignment problem is if you make a system that runs autonomously, starts to solve problems on its own and do stuff, will it stay aligned with your values or not the values that you put into it when you designed it? If it's truly autonomous, it could divert from your values. And so, therefore, there's a huge risk in creating systems that are not value aligned, right? And so that's why this whole conversation of values, again, so important. because humans themselves have no idea what is valuable. So we are already building big systems that are not aligned with actual value that are aligned with some abstract value. This was whole our buddy Schmockenberger, right?

And kind of this notion that you coupling AI were to a system that's already a kind of general intelligence that runs towards a form of value that we shouldn't be running towards. So this question of value alignment is a secondary question from the first question. from the first question, which is, what is valuable? And so it would definitely be the case that if our culture had a very different orientation towards value, that we'd build a completely different suite of technologies.

I don't think in that context, we'd then be building technologies where we would be so worried about them that they would turn around and kill us. Right. So like, this issue, like the value alignment problem is a problem because we're building this, like we're building this. If we had different values,

we may not be in an arms race that would drive us to build these types of technologies to the extent that we can't even model their future behavior and are worried that they're going to kill us all. Like, that's a difficult situation to find yourself in as a result of going deep into anti-value, misperception of value. So it's another conversation of, okay, imagine we do build those systems. Could they be alignable? My sense is no, that they couldn't be.

And that's an argument to not build them. and they couldn't be because of what value is. And this is another back to the tutoring thing. The nature of the good life is a non-computable problem. So if you're advising someone, but the human brain resolves non-computable problems. So it's like they're computable and non-computable problems. But the human brain somehow with less lecture

that he solves non-computable problems. So therefore my human mentor, who tells me, here's what a good life is, is factoring a certain type of complexity in their decision-making and an AI, I never will. So you actually are in a situation where certain types of machines will actually, in the near future, start to tell us what is good for us.

And that's transforming a non-computable problem, which is a gestalt perception of the holistic nature of this child and the total environment and a rich conversation of interaction to clarify for them what ought to be a value, given who the they are and where they are, uh, the bringing that down into a conversation, or something that appears to be a conversation that actually pretends to be a conversation,

which is actually an interaction between a child and a machine, where the child shapes the future of their life and self-understanding. Um, so yeah, so I'm saying like, yeah, it's the, the AI thing, we're deeply confused.

We're deeply confused. And we're going to be in a situation pretty soon, uh, where it's hard to get the youth back. Okay, so speculate here. Under current trends, what would someone 25 years from now, who is now five or 10 years old that has to go through an AI influenced education system a little bit now, but probably a lot in the next five years years, what are they going to be like with their, their, mindset, their education, their temperament relative to people today. If AI is dominant in our education system in the coming decade, can you speculate the influence that will be decades on humans? So, and this is the root of the concern about the AI tutoring system, is that a generation

emerges, where a very large percentage of that generation has more quote-unquote socialization with machines than it does with humans. So there's a threshold. There's some kind of threshold that gets crossed where there is a generation that's raised more by machines than by humans. The question of what the self-understanding of that generation would be vis-a-vis the elders

is something that we've not examined before. The only other place this kind of question is raised is in genetic engineering. So Habermost talks about it in the book, The Future of Human Nature, the unilateral design by the elders of the youth results in a self-understanding of the youth, which is that I am entirely your creation.

If I am understood entirely your creation, meaning no contingency of nature, no chance, but actually you designed me, then I don't have a moral self-understanding in the same way. All my actions are actually a result of your design decision. So he sees extreme genetic engineering resulting in a rift and intergenerational transmission where you have two morally different life worlds,

which means they don't understand themselves as members of the same species. So we could be facing a similar intergenerational rift with a generation that is basically cyborgs who were raised by machines, looking at the elders, and the elders looking at them, and the bridge is one of speciation

rather than intergeneration. See what I'm saying? That they're so distinct enough that it's not clear that they're the same class of moral actor by their own self-understanding. That's freaking horrible.

Yeah, so that's the death of our humanity. And it won't, meaning like, so there's the death of humanity, which means everybody dies. But then there's a death of our humanity, which means our bodies keep living, but we are in fact no longer human in the way that we have always thought ourselves

to be human. And so that's, That's one of those eventualities. It's one of the things that isn't the kind of oppression attractor. So there's a kind of chaos and oppression attractor. The deepest place in the oppression attractor is where we destroy our humanity for the sake of protecting ourselves from the death of humanity, meaning we protect ourselves from existential risk by building a skinner box as big as the world, right? That we just operant condition our behavior into a certain kind of predictable and non-lethal domestic.

but thereby lose the very qualities that made as human, which would be the ability to perceive value and things like language and attention capture of those. Again, this is all in that book. This is all in the David J. Temple. Is this a remote possibility, or is this the path that we're on? I believe, unfortunately, that it is the path that we're on.

I hate to say that because that sounds so alarmist, but it's the kind of risk that is super, like you can just sleep on this risk. Like, you don't, people don't need, even see this risk, like in terms of how radical it is. So the idea of like going to see a therapist who's actually an AI or having a tutor that's an AI, that would become pretty normal. But no one's thinking about the eventuality of that being a rift and intergenerational transmission so profound that we get a new species that's born. Now, if you're a transhumanist, you're like, cool,

that was the plan all along. Like all this messy wetware, all this messy wetware and these mammals raising other mammals and like how what a mess that is, you know, wouldn't it be great to hand over our babies to the super intelligent AI, which would raise them better than the parents ever did? So there's a very real sense that it would be a speciation event, but no one can perceive that pot. And it wouldn't look that way. Again, at first it would look pretty awesome, like kids are probably learning more and not burning themselves on the stove and all kinds of stuff would happen that would seem good,

but in the background there would be the continuing. making obsolete of human-to-human relationship until there is no actual need for it. And then I don't know what the interiority of that being is like who has not been socialized by a human, but has been socialized through interaction with a machine pretending to be like a human. Zach, my friend, sometimes I long for the days when I was only worried about peak oil. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot more questions for you, but we are getting long and the tooth on this.

But there is one more thing tangential to this, because I know you have a lot of skills and opinions and history in this area. In my recent concluding talks, like in Orville, there's one online. I mentioned an idea of we need libraries. of healing around the country because the humans don't necessarily need all the facts of all the things that we face because they're coming from a place of trauma and need and they're not psychologically in a good place. So how psychologically off our youth and our general population right now and what can be done to remedy that. Do you have an opinion? I do. I mean, you know, the kind of backdrop of a lot of my

concerns is the adolescent mental health crisis. It's a legit crisis. It's another argument for some type of emergency education act that's extremely innovative because that mental health crisis is not going to go away. It's not like all of a sudden those kids will become healthy adults. So we're looking at an entire generation that has completely unprecedented types of psychological disturbances. And again, if the entire surround is what educates and socialize, then you can't just blame the schools, and you can't just blame the phones and stuff. It's a totalizing impact on the youth that is truly destroying their will to continue to contribute to

the civilization. So that means there will be a massive withdrawal of support. So when I mentioned before something like the CCC, I believe that is the only type of thing that could be done. They don't need more psychiatric medication. They don't need more therapy. They don't need more school. They don't need more tests. They need somebody to come in and admit that the adults have made a mess

and that they want the kids to help and then actually give the kids the power and the skills and put them in positions to actually help. Otherwise, we're hypocrites. And they start to read that. That's the other reason they're pulling. out is just the absence of legitimate discourse among the adults. Like clearly the adults don't have things like look at the election, look at COVID, look at this stuff like why should we respect adults? So the respecting of the youth, the investing in the youth, and getting very creative

about how to engage them in the fixing of real problems, that something like that, something significant with the, I'm talking hundreds of millions of kids put in some type of remark government slash private sponsored kind of like civic work slash education type thing, right? Not a small, like a big thing, which tells a message to the youth. Like, we freaking care about you. Like, we need your help. Like, you are not a burden. You are not like a problem. You are the solution. You are the future. We don't. Like, how do we signal that to them? Right now we're signaling the opposite. We're suddenly, we don't care about you. We can't even stop the social media guys from destroying your amygdilus. Like, like, we don't care about you. We can't even get you in a school that's relevant to your future. Like,

we don't care about you. We can't even agree as adults and act like adults. So we need to be able to actually send the youth. It's one of the reasons adults actually cooperate is for the sake of the kids. Right. So it's like, we need to send the youth a very strong signal. It's the only thing that will snap them out of it and then give them work to do. They want to work. They want to fix the world. They don't want to live in a hellhole. They want to live in a world where like adults are responsible where adults can get them into situations to help things. So it's like kind of simple but also huge ask in terms of the type of intervention that could counteract the existing inertia and force in this direction of increasing mental discomfort in the

youth. And I'm not even talking about the adults who are also not doing well. But you know, they're not the future. The kids are the actual future like 20 years from now. These kids who are in These will be the leaders. I got to think about that. These will be the leader. Who of that generation will step up to lead during the pinnacle of metacrisis? Who will that be in that youth generation? Do we have any existing structures that are identifying that kind of youth leadership

that are creating large-scale places for youth to collaborate and work together? So that would be my hope, but it's a pretty dire situation for, for the youth and the mental health crisis reveals that. Well, as is usually the case with these podcasts, I connect dots that I hadn't connected and I get even more

worried because I recently had COVID and I researched that some people are saying every time you get COVID there's a three to six IQ point drop and that it's potentially additive over time. And so I'm thinking that the economic

impact of COVID may be ahead of us instead of behind us. But now what you were just saying, not only with the AI, but with the trauma and the mental health problems, that in five or 10 years, the, with the quote unquote economic impact of all these young people in the workforce with the issues that you're talking about, that's going to be even a bigger, you know, brain drain or whatever, however you define. it, right? Correct. I mean, it would be, it wouldn't just be that they're not entering the workforce.

It would be that they are somehow needing to be cared for by the system, right? That would be the situation. So it's a very dire situation. And it's not clear how that gets resolved. Now, there are differences in terms of distribution of these things and correlate. So not all the youth are universally affected. So it's worth thinking about those areas and political groups and world views that have youth that have not been captured and destroyed by the social media and other things. So yeah, that's it's a big concern.

Like I said, I really think there's something like an emergency here that it's not being active. I believe you. We have our own minor emergency and that I promised I would have this finished by the top. the hour because you have another call. So without further ado, I'm going to ask you the closing questions I ask all my guests. For those viewers who are fluent and aware of the meta-crisis and the many things we face, what sort of personal advice would you offer the viewers, Zach? That's a whole other podcast, right? I would say something like... It really is. It really is. So give me the high points. I mean, I would say something back to this issue of value. I would say slow

down, I would say, strip it all the way, open the eye of value, clarify what you really desire, and then you'll be all right. And how would you change that advice for young people, especially you as a lifelong educator and student of education in the past and the present? What advice do you give to late teens, early 20s, mid-20s listening to this conversation? man I would say if you feel alienated and angry and that kind of stuff you should

I would say something like don't believe most of the adults and like you know watch out and have faith in the people who are your age and also don't give up on the adults something like that

So maybe if I, we're friends and we interact quite often, maybe I could ask you to come back, either as a roundtable or, um, or again solo to just answer that one question. What advice, what, what portfolio of options would you recommend to a young person being aware of all this, wanting to live a good life, wanting to play a role in our collective future? Because I know it's not a sound bite sort of sort of question. No, I mean, if you're a young person, I'd listen to this, like, good on you. Like, you're already, you know, on your way to meaning.

And so, again, for me, it's about if you can recognize the existence of the field of value, then you can relax into the obligation that we face because it truly matters, which means that it's not some arbitrary situation you happen to find yourself in, which you can resent and get out of, like, this is life. you are enfolded in the field of value. The universe has brought us to this point. And so, yeah, there's a faith we must have in each other and in those around us who we happen to be here with, like the unique community, the unique position. There are, there are not, it's not a majority, but there are quite a few young people that watch this.

So there's, there's green shoots, Zach. Yes. What do you care most about in the world? Um, that's a difficult question. I think I care most about my, I think life itself. I was going to say truth, but it would be truth about the nature of life. If you could wave a magic wand or were a benevolent dictator and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve the human

and planetary future. One thing, I would immediately pause all work on AI. That's what I would do. Well, I think you would need a magic wand to do that. Correct. You said magic wand. Yeah, everyone that I talk to is kind of interested in it's like the new shiny, except for when I talk to people like you and Daniel and Tristan,

they are freaked out and worried. So I do think we need to have a broader conversation on that more widely, loudly ASAP. Zach, this has been great. I do want to have you back because you are horizontally and vertically wide in your thinking. And I agree with you. I'm an educator ultimately. And I deeply care about what's happening to our planet, but our youth.

And I agree with you. They're the future. Do you have any closing thoughts for our viewers? No, I feel like we're just getting started here in a way with the conversations. I'd be happy to be back on when that's possible. Thanks, my friend. Yeah. Take care, brother.

If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is host. by Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.