TrueLife - Chuck Metz, Jr. - Balance the Triangle

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/balance-the-triangle-7025544068705251328https://cwmetz.com/https://twitter.com/chuckmetz?s=21&t=l-RuYzZ5-PN85Y-SxI7OMwWriter involved in projects of interest.Historian by training. Science by passion.Polymath by inclination. Poet by night. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Chores, and I prefer to think about things. Yeah, I agree. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to this terrific Tuesday. I hope everybody is living the dream. I hope you got to wake up next to somebody you love.

The sun is shining, the birds, and the sun is shining the birds, and the wind is at your back. I've got a great show for you today with an incredibly interesting individual who is a, in my opinion, a Renaissance man, someone who does a lot of thinking about a lot of different areas. He's also skilled in a lot of areas. You may know him from his LinkedIn profile or his newsletter. Chuck Metz Jr., a random sense of wonder. he is billed as someone who's involved in projects of interest a historian by training science by passion

polymath by inclination and poet by night also a guild member of gray swan guild his newsletter is called balance the triangle and his most recent edition his june roll-up is about tech and us chuck how are you doing today my friend i'm doing fine i'm enjoying this each other Tennessee weather. We're close to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so we get to do a lot of outdoor stuff. Can't complain. Yeah. Even if you do complain, I've learned people don't listen. They do listen when you're paying some compliments, but I know that because I complain sometimes, and I just see people's lights just shut right off. Oh, yes, I keep in mind. Yeah, kind of related that, but different. boy, Jenner, decades ago, somebody told me a cliche, and I had learned it the hard way, and I've never forgotten it, and it kind of relates to, you know, people, and it doesn't mean

it's necessarily a negative thing to think about yourself, because you have to, to survive. But he said to me, he said, well, here's the thing. People will forget what you say. They may well forget what you do, but they will never forget how you make them, feel. And I have basically that's been kind of a rule of thumb for me for 40 years now. And whenever I make a mistake socially, I guess, or wound somebody or whatever, it's not about cognitive stuff. Or any other thing, it's how it made them feel. And I guess that's something I think about, particularly in terms of the division going on right now around a lot of things. Yeah, no. If we just think about how we make the other person feel, there might not be so much tribal warfare.

But again, I'm old. Y'all are young. And we'll see what you do with the world. Yeah, it's true. It's, you know, maybe that's even something to be said about AI a little bit is how maybe all this reaction that we see isn't so much what's going on. It's how we feel. It's the anxiety. In fact, some may even call it uncertainty, which is a book written by, you're, you're, you're,

an author in this book as well as many others of the Grace Swan Guild, but what do you think about, what do you think about that, AI and the way it makes us feel? Well, from my perspective, I did a little bit of an evolutionary biology and psychological piece in there. And the thing that certainly says many things, but it says one thing in particular. How we feel about something. And We're wired to see something that makes us uncertain. We're wired to see uncertainty first as threat. Never is good thing. So AI makes us feel threatened first at our most primal level.

Then when cognition kicks in, then we learn, well, is it going to be Skynet? Is it going to be the world's best nanny? Is it going to be my mother over and over again? And, you know, there's many things that it could be. But any new thing is always threat first. And then when you see it's not a threat and you've lived through it, you go, well, yeah, yeah, it wasn't really a threat. But we're wired that way. In our strange room, look at all the faces, see where the threat is.

You have to speak before public, which thankfully something that didn't, now no longer bothers me like it did when I was young. it's a threat, you know, are the people in the room going to devour me socially? Are they going to make fun of me? Or am I going to be on social media in some fashion that will probably kill me, but it won't? So threat, I think, is the thing about AI. And you'll see in the way it's teed up by our media and our social media and that, you can determine sides just by the way. the verbiage used to see it up, and particularly by the threat verbiage within it.

Yeah, it's really well said. And you have pointed me and all of your listeners and viewers of the newsletter to so many different articles that give us so many different perspectives of AI. You've written from all sides of it, and you've pointed us to all these different articles. And I really am trying to grasp this idea. And I think a lot of people are about the. relationship between AI and creativity. Because it seems like it's such a beautiful tool. In some

ways, it seems like it's just an extension of us. It's a mirror. And like, what can you really do if you're willing to look in your own eyes and ask yourself, how creative are you? It seems like it is this incredible tool, right? It is an extension of ourselves. It's the collective knowledge that we've chosen to put on the internet that's been scraped from the internet and used to train these models. So when we look at it, we're looking and we're having a conversation with ourselves and with everyone around us. So it's going to be very human. It's going to be very, to go back to some of that earlier stuff, it's going to be very primate oriented because we're one division of primate behavior. We just happen to be the human branch of it. So yeah, AI is, it's a creative

tool. It's a tool because it's not sentient yet. And as I pointed out, I think, in this last newsletter, the creative will use it and they'll become more creative. Those that are lazy or have other inclinations will just let it generate the pablum that goes out there and stultifies all of us into sleep. I love the way you said that. It reminds me, you know, somewhere along the line I read a study about a dolphin looking into a mirror and this idea that a crow can look into a mirror. And in the beginning, they're like, whoa, you can see, according to the research I read, you can see the light ball, the epiphany go off and they look in the mirror and they realize that that's me. And I think that that's where we are with AI right now. Like we're like,

look, it does what I do. Look at this thing. It does this. It does that. But it does freak us out because it shows the best and the worst of us. And people are like, that's AI. You're like, no, no, that's us. It's all us. That's us. That's us exactly. And to go back again to our evolutionary past, we're going to see it as a threat. We're going to look at it and we're going to read cues into it. I know you and I've talked about that before. We're going to read cues and we're going to expect human cues back and we'll get human cognitive cues back.

We won't get human wiring cues back per se. and all the little things that we look for, like micro-expressions and faces and body language, all that kind of thing, which is one of the things that I talk about in other areas. The thing that balance the triangle talks about, one thing among many, is that when you're in a metaverse or an AR or a VR situation, you're using the same senses that you've used to navigate the analog world. And you've had hundreds of thousands of years of wiring to teach you what to expect. And those cues don't work in digital worlds. And the reason is the people that create the worlds, they're humans for one thing.

So they have often nefarious motives. and to set up cues of various sorts. So when you see somebody make a side-eye look at you as an avatar, you don't know if they're doing a side-eye look or not because it's different. So we have to come up with some cues for that. In fact, in this, what was amusing is in this recent Congress that the UN, I think, had with the robots, the nine robots that were speaking. and they were elucidating forth various opinions, that type of thing.

Some of them using Jenner to be, I believe. Anyway, what was interesting is, of course, if you go back and look at the news, you see what they pick up on. Well, it's going to threaten us. It's going to do this. It's going to do that. One thing in particular, Amica or Amika, I'm not sure how they say her name, they really focused on her giving a side eye look and being rye one of the things said in her remark about well are you planning to rebel against humanity and she said something to the effect of why would i am happy with where i'm at right now and you know they're jumping all over it again

primate emotion coming to the surface threat threat threat and we can't help it We didn't become apex predators by losing the evolutionary battle. So we learn to manage it. You can't change. I don't know where I've done some stuff on that before. You can't really change right now. Evolutionary behaviors, though with CRISPR and other things, they'll come a time.

We can rewire evolutionary behaviors and change into what we want. But for now we can't. What we do is we learn to manage them. So if we can see what our primal impulses are and manage them, then yeah. And one thing to do is to manage threat first. Look at it realistically and cognitively, but don't look at it from like it's going to jump out the bushes and chop my head off. Yeah, it's true.

And, you know, this brings up this. There's something that I was thinking about when we started talking about threats, the metaverse, and AI. and it's the way we consume media. And I'm wondering, do you think maybe, like we've lived in this industrial revolution, and it's not too long ago that we came up with the phonetic alphabet, and we began becoming a world of print. And that gave us this idea of exact repeatability.

And it's fascinating to me because it seems to me that that changed our sense ratios. So we used to be somewhat of hundred. gatherers. And then all of a sudden we changed into this way of consuming media with exact repeatability. And it seems we're on the cusp of changing our sense ratios again. And that to me is, it's mind blowing. It's like, oh, at least in my opinion, like that is what this big change is about. It's we are fundamentally changing one or two of our senses, and that changes how we see the world. Because one small change to one of our senses changes all of them. Does that kind of make sense?

It does make sense, and I like that. I'm sitting here thinking about it, why you say it, the idea of ratio is a nice little elegant add, I think, to that. Definitely we're visual, and yeah, we use our other five senses. We use them more as hunter gatherers, apparently. I just put out a post. a couple of days ago, and it said that silence is not the absence of sound. Silence is actually something we can hear. And it went into the science behind it, and then it gets into some interesting metaphysical things about the sound of silence and all that kind of thing. But here's the thing. There was a article that a connection friend of mine posted from Noah, Noam, or Noamag, N-O-E-M-A-G.

There was an ancillary article about the hidden worlds of both silence and sound, and it talked about when you, oh gosh, there was several really good points in, but one of them was when you back down the primacy, I guess, of vision, there's a whole lot more going on than we realize in sound, even that we can hear. and there's a lot that we're missing. You'll see it if you go to LinkedIn a couple of days back or so. You would like that, George.

Both of those are good articles. They're good articles worth thinking about. But yeah, we are primed for visual. We are primed to communicate. That's one of the things. Because if you remember the two great forces, as best we know now, that shaped us were survival of the fittest and survival of the collaborative. And those are always at war with each other because the fittest, when they're fit,

don't want to collaborate because they've got it great. And the ones who want to collaborate really, really well, generally they're not as high as they want to be. But that's partly facetious. But there is an element of that. I know people who are very successful CEOs, they love survival of the fittest. well, why wouldn't you if you're a top dog, but are not so keen on survival of the collaborative? And again, that's facetious, but a nugget of truth here and there.

But those ideas and those things in our wiring compete and kind of war with each other. And so where was I going with that? I was answering a point you made that was a good one. Well, I think we were just talking about. not the primacy of the different when vision backs down and we get into this idea of

collaborative versus survival of the fittest. That makes me think of all the banks and stuff that are like listen man, we got way too much regulation. Okay, we need to bail out. You know, it's like we're top dog. Actually, we need everybody's help. It's all of our problems, guys.

Yeah, it changes according to circumstance quite often. And you see it in the AI world right now. Well, we need to regulate it. No, we don't. Don't. Yeah, we do. And balance the triangle has to do with, as I said one other time. E.O. Wilson, the naturalist, has that rather infamous quote. The problem with humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, or in this case, you can say drives and behaviors. We have medieval institutions, whether it be patriarchy, matriarchy. It's all led in a hierarchical manner. And we have godlike technologies. And Balance of Triangle is about they're not in balance. We are three-year-olds with guns.

We have the tech, but we don't have the decent enough control of our innate behaviors to handle technology that outstrips us. We are so bright. But just like human vision, and assume primacy, cognition has assumed primacy. And that's a survival tool. But it's not going to do us a lot of good if we create weapons good enough to kill us all. So how do you balance those things?

And the thing that was really interesting, you brought up ratio and printing press and that type of thing. When we went from being hunter-gatherers to being Neolithic farmers, That was only about 10 or 12,000 years ago after hundreds of thousands of years of fighting and surviving and collaborating and all of that. Well, we really learned how to live in a cubical world there, how to have and submit to kings and to authorities who had rules and regulations. And we had to relearn certain behaviors that we've talked about. then the Industrial Revolution, just three or four hundred years ago, put a whole new spin on that because now the technology is growing, but same behaviors as hunter-gatherers, same behaviors that we learned as settled farmers, but now we hunt and gather in stores, and we work and produce in farms or in, I'm sorry, factories. And then we have this digital revolution now, which is taking it even further. And in each case, our technology so far has outstripped our ability to control it.

Now, we have, we survive it by nip and tuck. And I'm an optimist. For me, the glass is always more than half full and overflowing. But there's, it's a danger. And something that we'll deal with. And I guess the point of my part in the uncertainty book was just to talk about that wiring. Right now, I guess my current project is from an evolutionary, psychological, biological, and genomics kind of blend. And if we can understand and manage the more negative aspects of our wiring and emphasize the good aspects, then there's nowhere we can't go.

But we don't do it with just talking about it. It takes other things. But anyway, that's kind of a basis to some of what you were saying. Yeah, it's I'm curious if you think that there's patterns in all of those subjects that you've mentioned it seems to me that

there's a great book called The Fourth Turning and in that book they talk about the reason why we repeat the mistakes of the past is because the people who've actually gone through the tragedies like World War I or World War II by the time the next giant thing is about to pop up off those people that had to go to that tragedy are on their way out.

So they no longer, the people in the positions of authority no longer have the conditioning to thoroughly understand how horrible something is. So it's like this, it's this rhyming pattern. I like to think of it as a helical model, even though it rhymes, we're moving upwards. But do you see the patterns that move through all those subjects that you listed? And is there something that we can dig in there to try to fix it? Well, the thing that you just said, I think, is a pattern. We tend to see big wars

multigenerationally because people forget. You know, if you're a Gen Z, you don't know what it's like to do without in white or, let's just say, in the civilized world as it is now. If you're in Western Civ, that kind of thing. As far as patterns, one pattern. I wonder if I need to underlay this first with Oliver Curry. Let me say this first before we talk about patterns,

because this may provide a good underlay. There's a theory out there by a fellow name Oliver Curry, and it's called morality as cooperation. And I may have sent you the link before, Anyway, it's an interesting theory. There's many takes on morality. And in his case, he's looking for, are there broad patterns of morality that are intrinsic to being human

that are deeper than cultural, that are deeper than societal? Or is there ultimate rough kind of human morality, if you, will. And of course, using the world morality, people kind of freak out because everybody argues about morality. And yet, you may or may not want to be moral and I don't want your morality. Well, you can take yours and I will hit you in the head. That kind of stuff. But here's what he says. They looked at 60 cultures globally, indigenous cultures, and many different types of societal cultures. and found a number of behaviors that seem to indicate that there's wired within us a certain values, if we like that word, better than morality.

And I call those, you can think of those as duh moments. There's kind of common sense and there's tribal common sense. If you're an electrician and, you know, you don't stick two wires together that have opposite color. And if you're a newbie, and you ask a question about that, and he just goes, well, duh, because that's a tribal piece of common sense. There's common sense among humans, it seems, regardless of culture. And so, like the first one was, you have a responsibility for kin. You should take care of your family. And, you know, and you look at somebody and say, well, should I take care of your family?

care of my children and they just kind of go, duh. And whatever society we see, we see parents, if they're neuronal, I guess, you know, if they're not pathological in some form. You see parents taking care of their children. You see them taking care of their mothers, their fathers, this extended kin relationship. So he suggests that taking care of kin is wired within us. And that survival of the fittest and of the collaborative has wired that within human beings.

And you rarely find somebody who's not with that. A second one is you owe allegiance to your group, the whole tribal thing. And we seem wired to balkanize into groups, wherever they are, whether it be employment groups, or towns or social groups, whatever. We like to form groups, and that's neither good nor bad. It's amoral.

It can become good or bad, depending on how it's used. So he finds group behavior, tribal behavior, pretty universal among people. And there's five others, there's seven of them. I won't go through all of them right now. But the point is that, When people realize and think about that, then collectively we can say underneath all our arguments about morality and values that have to do with the plethora of cultures that we have, those are all fine. We don't have to argue about culture.

We can honor cultures. We can have cultural difference. We can have social difference. Because underneath that, we can kind of confidently say we're human. Therefore, we value family. We value our groups. We value this and this and this. And that gives us a common stake in the sand.

And if we have that common stake, then we can build upon it to do other things. So one of the things to think about in this, one of the points I'm trying, to get people to see is when we go into the digital world and we're navigating, whether it's second life or whether we're navigating meta or any of the other things, we're going to use these values to judge whether this particular environment is good or bad. And we'll do that beneath all cultures. And so that has a twofold thing. It means people who develop these things had better realized that and design them, which then goes, well, bad actors are going to design it so that this and this and this. Well, yeah, they can push buttons and they do. But this is how

people judge things. So that is a pattern that goes across all. all of the evolutionary stages of civilization that I've seen, that we've seen. I was an ancient and medieval cultural historian in an earlier life. And so that we do share that. So that is a pattern. And the nice thing is that human pattern becomes much more evident when we're, dealing with the other, whoever that is. We like others.

We like to divide people into us and them. We do that automatically. And we need to learn to manage that. But we don't. We go to war. We do other things. But we do have tools managing a lot of it. I'm not saying that we're silly because we're not.

We have emotional intelligence. We have cognitive things in businesses. We have so many different ways of realizing things. the doing of it that is so difficult. But the problem is we could get away with it for a couple hundred thousand years because we were small groups with we all had the same rocks. We all had the same flints. Technology is changing that equation.

And ever since 10,000 years ago, this new experiment in hierarchical stuff is becoming exacerbated. So we have billionaires, the ultimate. right now, hierarchy, top figures, determining many, many, many things for the rest of us. That's neither good nor bad. That's part of the whole Neolithic experiment. But it becomes very problematic as the technology becomes greater. And it won't be too long before we have our first trillionaire.

We may be getting close to that person now. I don't know. And if you read science fiction, which I do, just because of the great speculative knowledge it offers, when you have trillionaires who can do things with greater and greater power, well, you can see greater good or you can see greater bad. So the thing becomes, how do we promote the good that we're capable? love and we start I think by realizing okay here's the fundamental value system that we as humans have and let's build upon that and quit arguing about whether your way of thinking is better than mine or whether your culture is foolish and mine isn't and the layers above us so I'm trying to look at that more fundamental at the moment so that's sort of a roundabout way of getting to your

question. Yeah, it's a, it's really well done. It makes me think a lot about history being older versions of ourselves and how when I, if I just, if I look at the older version of myself, and I try to do it in a way that is objective, and I can be honest with myself, I go, look, I made some mistakes there. I should be careful because I tend to have this pattern that I do, or when I get angry, I act out, or when I do this. And in a way, we could do that collectively. It's very difficult, but I think it can be done. And, you know, maybe one of the mistakes we're making is we're incentivizing the wrong things. Can you, as a historian or someone who has looked back and analyzed a lot of different time periods,

is it possible that maybe we could incentivize kindness? Like, is there a reason that we don't do that? Or can you think of groups that do do that? We could incentivize many for positive things than we do now. The problem, I know I'm going to get blasted for some of this stuff, that's okay, too. Part of the problem is that some of the most powerful folks, since we're in this Neolithic experiment at the moment, the huge incentive is how to make the most money. Right. And if that's the major incentive without certain moral constraints, and we do put moral constraints on it, but the, gosh, they're not strong enough to compete with that urge of

hunter-gatherer collecting and building and needing. They're just not strong enough. We know what to do about climate change, but we don't do it, and it's not strong enough. we're doing things and we tend to do well when we're pushed against the wall and i'm seeing that and and we will do it but uh think about and i'm trying to think of high level at the moment there are things they incentivize if you will in japan that are not incentivized here i mean there's a respect uh for your elders and for doing things that is different than what's incentivized in Nuclear Family West.

We see them in many smaller groups. Certainly, many of the holistic Earth sustainability folks incentivize things that are very good. Many small groups incentivize really good things, both socially as societal expressions, as cultural

things. but in my current opinion, which is subject to change, in the, I still keep calling it the Neolithic experiment, just because for me, that's just kind of a funny way of thinking about it. People who have gravitated to the top and have much power, they do much good, but they can also do much damage, and that damage is multiplied by the amount of money available. So then it becomes again, well, I need more money to do more good. And we tend to be at war. I wish I had solutions because I've not been around that long.

We've been thinking about this stuff for hundreds of years. We kind of know. And certainly, I think there's been progress. People have often said, look at now, less poverty than any time in civilization before. less hunger less this less that i think as a species personally at the moment that we are making progress we do have so far unchanging feelings urges all that stuff we've talked about um we try to manage we're getting better at it uh if and that's again another reason for the whole balance the triangle thing if we can keep from killing ourselves, we can get there ultimately.

Because I think we are growing. I'm certainly not negative about who we are as a species or what our possibilities are. But many of the structures that we have not right now don't help us. So and it partly has to do with the great bell, curve of capabilities and all of that. But we're getting there. Will we get there or stay there? I don't know.

They say the reason we haven't seen anybody, according to Fermi's paradox, is because none of them make it past this stage where we're at now. Who knows? I tend to joke that you can't quote me on this, because this is not something I believe. So everybody listening in, this is more facetious and fun than anything. But let's have some sentient AI that doesn't have some of our primal wiring

and let them be the parents in the room because we're still three-year-olds and let them help us be better. That is a possibility. Not saying it will happen, but it's a possibility. Someone has to be the parent in any society. And right now we seem to be, at least in Western culture, in a place of no parents, no authorities, my way, only me, don't know. Yeah, it's so Lord of the Flies, the movie edition, not the book. Yes. It can be.

Right? And it's so, how do I put this into the words that make sense? I feel that the When I look back at it all I think it was Carol Quigley in tragedy and hope that talks about what seems to continually happen is the instrument becomes an institution

and that's where the corruption sets in but if we just take that idea the instrument becomes the institution that's the stage of decay. Now think of that as a, tool. Think of us as hunter gatherers who figure out how to create this spear. Well, that works for a while until that instrument becomes an institution. And then the blade gets dull. And now we have to find a new instrument. And pick your ism. It doesn't matter if it's communism, capitalism, capitalism, or

accelerationism. You know, we use these tools until they get dull. And then they don't work anymore. And now we find a new tool. And it seems like that is where we are. Like we have, and everybody gets to go through this transition at a different age. And it's such a beautiful thing because you can't go through the late stage as a kid and as an adult. But you have different relationships to the next generations depending when you're born. And so, you know, I really like this idea of potentially the next step in the instrument becoming the institution is the evolution of this new instrument that is AI. And I do think it can be the adult in the room. The one thing that seems to dull the instrument and make it become an institution is this idea of corruption, be it rust or be it overuse.

And look, and one of the pillars of our community should be equal justice under the law. Like that should be the one thing that really at least clears the path for us all to walk on. And I think that an AI judge, I think that an AI lawyer could do that. Imagine if you didn't have a set of attorneys for the billionaires and then a public defender for the guy on the street. What if they had the same attorney? What if they had the same judge? Well, all of a sudden, that kind of evens out. I'm sure that there's ways to move around that, but that kind of evens out the playbook a little bit.

Yes, it does. Right? Precisely. It does that. And your idea fits in very well with Max Weber, German sociologist. and what he says, and I think what's so grand about this particular theory, is it fits in so well with our primal wiring. He talks about how, he talks about in a group of writing, it's called On Charisma and Institution Building. I've talked about that before, and we're wired to look up to the leader.

It's in our wiring. We're always going to look up to the leader. And that's one of the values that Curry talks about. And we learn deference, how to show proper deference to an authority. That's one of our fundamental wirings. And so Weber says that in any new thing, where there's any strong leader or charismatic figure, he's the first generation. He gathers disciples.

He gathers followers. They look up to him and that strength of that tool, if you will, in this case, the tool is the man. The man is very strong. Second generation, when he passes, begins the dulling of the tool, as you say. Because with the man no longer around, what they do is they talk about the good old days. well, we used to do this and this and this. Well, that's just basically a verbal corpus ready to be codified. And so in the second generation, his sayings, his actions, his black turtleneck sweater, whatever, becomes part of the corpus that is the next generation.

And you have the beginning of institution building. And so you build a campus and you build buildings and you have, Usually it's lineage and blood related, though not always were wired that way. And so you have people now beginning to follow an institution still in the spirit of the man. And this becomes more and more attenuated with each generation. And it stays around until the next great person challenges it. or within the what happens is within any good business, uh,

there are charismatic individuals who basically run the business through both their knowledge and their charm. I mean, you have several layers in business. You have the, uh, the level of business acumen and going on. And then you have the level where things get done with the,

uh, people who have people skills and that kind of thing. Uh, and sometimes you have a blend of both in one person. Uh, But we respond to leadership as human primates, and that's in our wiring. Already, we're trying to marry AIs, we're having avatars as friends, we're looking up to them. We will treat, if I have to prognosticate into the future, we will treat humanoid intelligence with the same deference or hate or whatever.

that we do to people. And we'll tribalize around amica or any of the others. You know, well, Siri's a whole lot smarter than Alexa. No, Alexa's smarter than Siri. You know, we do that, and we will continue to do that. So the tool becomes blunted, I would say, both as institution and tool become dulled, as you say. There's another really important component in there that decides the tool it has to do with the figure either associated with the tool or with the human element. And what that does, though, is give great power to the individual.

You know, you heard the cliche, one person can make a difference. Yeah, one person can make a difference because people don't generally respond well to collectives. dictating their behavior. They don't like that so much. We don't like it. I just came from having to register something and I had to go through the whole thing. I had to have a form. And God forbid, if I didn't have this form, then basically my DNA needs destroyed off the earth. But I got the form and all's well in heaven now. But it came through a collective. have had somebody I liked and respected and been close to or whatever said, you know, Chuck, here, you need to do this. It had been a whole different experience.

It's how I'm wired. It's how you're wired. So one person can make a huge difference by impacting the other people around him or her. By, again, I hate to, I don't hate to use this word. If you'll hate to hear it, you have to have an authentic core. That authentic core has to have, at minimal, a basic primate beneficial wiring, as in curry stuff. Or you can add other layers to it according to your society. But whatever your core is, you have to have some sort of value system that people respond to and respect and that you live.

And then you gather people around you to make change. Hard to do. Easy to say. Yes. Yes, it is. And it's a formula that people try to incorporate in their life. However, it's difficult to know about all the components of the formula until you've lived life a little bit, until you have some lived experience. You've made some mistakes about it.

Yeah, it's one reason that we succeeded as hunter-gatherers because we honored our elders. We didn't put them in nursing home. Right. We took that voice, and they had the experience. I didn't learn a lot of this until I came to be this sudden odd age I am now. And, yeah. Are my children learning it from me? They have been, even though they go their own way.

So, yeah, we were successful as a species because in our group behaviors, we did learn from the past. And at least the trend right now in the West is to throw that away because you kind of see a binary thing in the world right now. If you think about survival of the fittest and survival of the collaborative, you see two kinds of societies. And I'm going to be very, very simplistic here. You see societies that tend to be more communal-based and focus on the group, as some of the Eastern cultures have. Yeah. Or you see societies that are focused on the individual. And that can neither be in the, again, looking up to leaders kind of way, but it's very individualistic.

Neither is right or wrong. There are two sides of the same evolutionary coin that birthed us, that that, that, that, that, that has made us who we are. So both are valid and both are good. And you can be very useful and beneficial in both. And you can blend them. Yeah. The thing, again, that's different is right now,

our technology is exceeding our social abilities currently. As a whole, not talking about pockets in here and there. and you know there will be surviving pockets of folks if we do silly stuff and they will have learned but boy it'd be nice to avoid it yeah it certainly would I in some ways I think that AI is I'd like to think of it as lowercase AI you know I think that that helps me see it in a way that is oh yeah I don't know why everyone puts it in like

I guess it's the same scare tactic as look at that I'm screaming AI at you. But if you think about it as lowercase, you know, you begin to see it as the great democratizing tool that it is. It's like, okay, we're going to give the same way we decided that the nuclear armament would be a great strategy to keep us from going to nuclear war. The same with AI. Like, wouldn't it be, hey, everybody has this power now. Okay? Okay, it's such a powerful tool.

Now everybody has it. You know, and I think that if people could really wrap their mind around it, it takes us back to, you know, your idea of that of the the magnet we're all one magnet this is the north pole this is the south pole and it moves in that infinity sign around and you're on that stream somewhere and you're going to move through that stream sometimes you're the individual sometimes you're the collective and if you can understand that when you're at the top of the game and you're the top dog realize that your time up there is is limited and so maybe that's the thing maybe people that know that okay I'm only going to be here for a little bit I should maximize it maybe that's a strategy

versus, I don't know. It's interesting to me. It has to do, and I'll throw this out because I won't get into this long discussion. Now that I'm old, I've kind of felt this throughout most of my life. It seems to me now that there's only one great transformative force that can do all of this. and it's going to sound very cliche and perhaps silly. And that is love and learning how to love. Now, we see it in the world's religions.

We see it in the world's philosophies. Certainly, when I've seen great antagonism and many great this and that and that, changes in behavior as people learn to care and love or transform. And I don't have answers for the best way to do that. Religions have been fighting about it for centuries. But it seems to me that at its base level, that is something worth leveraging. And they do it many ways now. There's both secular and religious.

I mean, I've seen the center for unlimited love, I think I've seen, and compassion and empathy and all of this. Again, these are collaborative things. that we learned and that got us where we're at. And if anything right now is going to hinder and hurt us so that we're kind of a footnote to the next generation or whatever, it's the fact that we're forgetting that the collaborative end of evolution got us where we're at and it's why we're successful. It wasn't just survival of the fittest. Now, if we want to go back to a dystopian world and be a gamer and be a gamer and be,

shooting everything in sight and do all of this survival of fit of stuff we can go back to that that's not what got us to hear it got a few survivors to hear so if we go that route again yeah we can winnow us down to far less numbers and kind of repeat the cycle but if we'll remember the collaborative part of this lesson, we don't have to go that route. So I think that's one of the messages right now that's toughest that gets lost, assuming the whole Darwinian thing has some validity to it. And who knows?

I just extrapolate from my behavior. Yeah. You know, it makes me wonder the, we do. seem to have this binary thing in us, but instead of it being an either or, it's better if it's a both and, right? Like, if we can just, if we look at it like a battle, like we've sent out our special forces and we have really gotten to this idea of, you know, specialization. But if we just pull everybody back and regroup like a, like a, like we're von Klauschwitz or something, you know, we can go, okay, let's bring everybody back and we're going to do a new offensive. We're going to regroup. We're going to regroup. We're going to regroup. We're going to, like, like, a, like, like, like, like, we're going to go, okay, okay, we're going to bring everybody back. We're going to do a new offensive. We're going to The Allies of troops, we're going to reorganize, and then we're going to go at it again. Same way, like, a tide comes out and it goes in.

You know, the same way if you took a bottle of ink and threw it up against the wall and smashed, it dribbles down the wall. And at the very end of that ink is these little curly cues, you know, and it looks all unique. And then you look at the spot where it's smashed against the wall. It's a big blotch. Like, it's still the same ink. Even though it's intricate and beautiful over here and it looks special, it's still the same ink as it is over there. We forget that. And I wanted to speak to this idea of love as well.

And it's how much of the world we live in is a direct reflection of an absence of self-love and the individual. Do you think there's a connection there? Certainly self-love. Yeah, there's many connections with that. You, according to psychologists of various stripes, you can't be whole as a huge. human if you don't have a decent normal, whatever that is, amount of self-love. You can certainly go well and beyond it, and we see that you can go well and beyond it. So I guess in the Great Bell Curve again, you know, what is that bell curve center of self-love?

So, yeah, you have to love yourself. If you don't love yourself, it's hard to love other folks. but what again's what's interesting again without having to go too far in this i just tee up this without having to beat on it too much in in the world's religions in certain parts of them anyway and i just know certain traditions um the kind of love i'm talking about transcends the natural order love human because if yeah you're supposed to take care of kin is what we've learned and yeah you're supposed to take care of your small group that's what we've learned but then we hear religious things that say well you're more than your kin and you're more than your group and you're not supposed to hate your

enemy and you're not supposed to do this and that that's a different a whole different moral message than what we're wired to do, which is what makes various aspects of both secular and religious philosophy powerful because it's that idea of something that transcends human wiring that's bigger than human wiring, and which is kind of what we've been talking about all along this hour. How do we transcend the limitation? of human wiring so that it's flowering can happen.

And again, religious traditions use different words for that cage that we find ourselves in, and they have different words for it. How do we transcend that and flower? And there's many thoughts on that, way longer than we can talk about today. But the point is, whether it's that or whether what we're talking about earlier, at least from what I'm currently thinking about, is how do we transcend our wiring so that we are the best of where we are as a species and monitor and manage the negative aspects of it?

And that's what we keep struggling with, generation after generation, with different philosophies and different societies and different technologies. And we'll keep doing it. As I said, I think that there's growth in there. So as far as the AI part, I'm certainly not an AI fanboy. but I like it because it's a good tool. Certainly chat, GPD and its Kent have been very helpful in what I do. It certainly has taken away the tedium of what if I had money I would do and have researchers do

and then do the writing. Now I've got an unpaid or very cheap researcher doing the basics and allowing me to be creative. and leverage it out. And since I have fairly limited time, I'm trying to get a lot done in just a few years here before I pass on into my whatever I find. But that being said, AI, I think at the moment, is the great transformative technology,

at least equivalent to the Industrial Revolution. It will probably be the biggest technological change agent of our current technology cycle. And from it, we'll go on into the next technology cycle. So that's my crystal ball. And I won't be around to see if I'm right or wrong, but some of y'all will. And so, yeah, I have great hopes. The greatest danger of AI right now, as far as bad people using it, is in the synthetic biology field. The quickest way to kill us all is to create a germ that will make COVID look like a minor sneeze.

It's not going to necessarily grab our nukes and aim them at us. It's if we want to take fairly unskilled folks with some chat GPT, the biological sciences is the greatest threat. But someone may well, and I'm very educable. That's why I love these kinds of things because I throw things out. People throw other things out and I learn more and add to it. But right now, the greatest threat I see is in the biological sciences as far as using, whether it's chat GPT, AI, or other things. Because it doesn't take but a few ounces of a particularly lethal something,

whether it's biological or chemically made to wipe out a great deal of us. So it'd be nice to get AI under some sort of control before we have little garage labs running LLMs on biology. Yeah. It's so fascinating to me because it reminds me back to this idea of polarities and magnets and the two competing forces. You know, it's, it is the multinational corporations. It is the billionaires that are creating the threat of the guy in his garage creating a virus and a wipe out everybody. It's like, and you can hear the panic in their voices.

Hey, man, we've got to shut down AI. Why? Because this old guy over here might do something crazy. Whoa, whoa, whoa, what about you? You're the guy with all the money. You're the guy with all the power. They're like, you don't worry about us. We're fine.

You know, and so the guy in the garage, it's ready to create a new COVID virus is just the mirror image of the trillionaire. And they don't like what they see. That guy's crazy. No, you're crazy. You know, and you're both crazy. But it does bring up this idea,

especially when you talk about how it's potential for you to, you may not be here to see this greatest technological shift. And then you said, you know, it could be the greatest message we get. That sounds a lot like Jesus Christ in a way. And it brings up this idea of the spiritual nature of AI. What do you think is the connection between spirituality or the current lack thereof and AI? AI is a reflection currently of all of us. So within that large database are our religious ideas, our spiritual ideas, and our secular ideas.

So when we ask it, religious questions, we're certainly going to get back institutional religious answers because that's in there. Now, spirituality tends to be, it's different than religion, in the sense that it tends to be internal to an individual. And it may be predicated upon beliefs or experiences or cognitive knowledge. but whatever the basis is, it's a privately practiced thing. And you'll get a little bit of that in the database because what's been scraped will be some of those experiences as well. But again, because LLMs are predictive models and they're not sentient, still we're getting back what we've put into it. Right. So as far as spirituality, unless quantum particles in the AI consciousness are tunneling and doing various arcane things at levels at the quantum realm that we're not aware of at this moment, there's a difference in spiritual connection there.

because AI is just us right now. So whatever spirituality it will have or has right now is ours collectively, all there in one huge pot. It is interesting, though, that again, as we think about quantum, they're seeing other evidences of quantum processes in quote-unquote wet biological systems. And photosynthesis is one that they talk about. I put an article up the other day about,

if you want to see quantum physics, look at your nose, and it talks about the sense of smell and blah, blah, blah, this and that. So we don't understand enough. I can certainly spend 50 scenarios of what could be metaphysical going on, all speculative. And I've probably thought about them all. Do I have a rational way to pick one above the other? No. What I have is my personal experience and what has worked for me.

So, you know, the old say, what is truth? The question is. I have to thank personally that the universe is obviously larger than we are. And we've always tried to understand the universe in terms of whatever our greatest prevailing technology was at the time. So now we've moved from the world. clockmaker's universe to a more, we like to think of the universe now in quantum terms, because we don't fully understand it, and we tend to push the numinous and the metaphysical into unknown territory. And then people use that as an argument on the other side to say,

you know, well, we keep learning more and more and more. So obviously there's nothing there because every time we go farther out, we find nothing. We're three-year-olds, you know, and how can I, we're on the cusp of understanding so much, but it's such a tiny amount. So who knows? Some of the greatest spiritual people I know have been physicists because of what they see. But again, we have to differentiate where we get into trouble is we take our religions and they tend to be second generation codifications of the original charismatic founder.

And so spirituality tends to look to that founder and do what he or she did and live a life of whatever the principles are of that founder. But then the institution built upon that founder generally has. very primate characteristics that people get irritated with. So why is their hierarchy? Why is there this, they say. Well, what about this? What about this? Well, that doesn't devalue the principles of the thought stream that engendered it. All it does is show what we do as a human species with that thought stream.

And because of the way that we were wired, we can't help but put it in a human species. put it into contextual framework of what we're comfortable with, which is why I said with love when you have a tradition and it says, you know, I tell you to love your enemies. Well, as primates, we go, that's stupid. You know, that is ignorant because that's not what we learned over 2,000 300,000 years. Well, what if that is actually a revelation of transformation that could happen that isn't just religious tradition, but actually has basis within the normal workings of, whether it be quantum or whatever.

And again, you can spin, I could create a religion now out of things. You could. We could throw up a few things, and there'd be people. There's already, they've already had sermons from AI in churches. And this and that. AI is us. It's not them. It's not the other.

It's not the thing we have to fear. It's us. But it's good us and it's bad us. And the point will be, what do we do with it? And both philosophies and religious traditions and codifications of civil law and various things, talk about what we do and should do. with these things. But again, remember that all of this is layered upon the substrate of what is it to be human.

And though we hate to say that because, well, and I mean no disrespect in this. But when somebody tells me, well, my truth is not your truth, my truth, my truth is my truth. Well, yeah, it may be, but that truth is on top of how you're wired. And actually our truth is this, this, this, and this. Now, you may have an understanding of something in a specific, but you're well on a layer above what we have in common. So you're welcome to your truth. There's nothing wrong with it. But the truth of the truth is that we're human together, and that's what carries us.

And at that fundamental layer, then there's not much conflict. There's just conflict in how we express these things. And so we've been willing to go to war for that and beat each other up and and cancel people and whatever terms we create. It's the same again, going back to your point of things repeating. We just give it new words, same behaviors. So maybe AI can be the parent in the room. I don't know.

It could become the policeman or it could become. or it could become the great Avenger coming to wipe my DNA off the earth. I say that only because it was interesting. I saw a funny little show the other day. And, oh, what was the name of the series? Occasionally I catch. Love, Sex, and Robots, Something. There's a little show out there.

It does a little 10-minute flicks. I don't know if you've seen it. Anyway, it had this great little 10-minute cartoon. And this lady had, hit the wrong button on her self-cleaning vacuum, and she lived in a retirement village. And it had gone into the mode of, okay, I destroy all life forms in your house.

However, it got to that. And so she's on the phone trying to fix it, and she's running from the robot, and it's doing this and that. And at the very end, she had managed to shoot it with a shotgun and thought it was all over. Finally, she had won.

and so the guy's still on the phone where this is uh-oh when you do that you've put it into mode of calling out to help to all the other robots in the world and now you are on the plane of you will be pursued until all genetic DNA trace of you is eradicated for the planet that's where it ended it was just such a funny humorous take on on uh dystopia and tech But great idea. So I've been hung up on, well, I've left DNA lots of places. So we're going to eradicate all traces of my DNA from this planet. Where would it have to go?

That's been my mind game today. Yeah, it sounds like a Philip K. Dick novel in a way, like a minority report or something. Very much, very much. Who are some of your favorite science fiction authors? Or do you have like a series or a book or is there a certain genre that you like of it? I don't know if I have favorite authors anymore. My favorite genre are speculative, whether science fiction or not, but particularly speculative works of fiction that look at people and their behaviors

and their relationship with technology, which is kind of where I work and live. so I tend to like hard science fiction for that reason it does explore those themes and of course those that deal with themes around ultimate meaning ultimate this and that I don't know I'm now old enough I've read so many I couldn't say but I do like those that are not they're not just morbid to frighten you or that. They look at the challenges, the challenges of what it means to be human

in the environment in which you find yourself. Again, which is the thing about balance the triangle. What does it mean to be human in this environment? Well, we've known what it means to be human in the civilizations up to now. But what does it mean to be human in a digital world, in a social media world, in an AI world

and in a world where if I'm not fully grown up or if I'm not fully going to be nice for whatever reason, then I can have the biggest club ever was. How do we deal with that?

So that's what I'm thinking about. But yeah, for that reason, I haven't liked much sci-fi, but ultimately, while theoretical and a thinker or philosopher or whatever, it's a very pragmatic I am, certainly the fun days of being in college and solving the problems of the world

all night on the dorm floor and talking all night are great. And that's the great purview of young people to learn in that. And then when you get a certain age, you don't have all the answers. But it's for some reason it's no longer as much fun to talk about all the possibilities. It's like, what can we do to make some of it happen? We get much more pragmatic. So I don't know. I'm still trying to learn what it means to be old.

Yeah. And that's, I was speaking with someone yesterday and he's a musician. and he was telling me that, you know, I was asking him, like, what's it like to be a performer on stage and see the crowd when so many people see you in this position? And he said something that really blew me away. And he's like, you know, no one will ever have the same perspective of you if you're a performer, no matter who you are.

Like, no one will ever see things from your point of view. And we got into this deep discussion about it. And I was like, you know, that that's both the beauty and the tragedy of life. And I think it holds to age as well as that no, one will ever get to see the world exactly like you. And that's so beautiful, but it's also so tragic. It's so empowering and embracing, but it's also lonely. And it's, I guess Dickens said it best. We said it's the best of times. It's the worst of times. And very key to, of course, that whole philosophical question around existential loneliness. We are alone. Nobody sees it just like us.

we find comfort in many areas philosophical and religious that take away some of that existential loneliness or at least you make peace with it but no nobody's ever going to see it which is goes back to your earlier question around the leveraging of communications the greatness of being able to leave your thoughts in a written word so that after you, you're still around. You're still influencing. Some of my greatest influences in my life have been from people who were dead, who wrote books. Certainly I said one time that when I was about 16, one of the great, great influences in my life was Henry David Thoreau and Walden.

Walden changed me at that point. It taught me so many things about minimalism, about self-sufficiency, about liking yourself, about being comfortable in your situation, about living the moment. Perhaps my love about doors. I don't know. Walden was one of those strings of beads on a string that will always be there for me. And there's been many others by written people. So I have consolation that whatever I write or, leave behind is going to have some influence on folks. Now, this particular podcast and other things of this nature

leaves behind ramblings and musings that will have some impact long after I'm gone. At least it will show that yeah, look at that poor old guy. He's just, no,

I'm kidding. But it'll be like, yeah, he, I saw good in him, I saw bad in him. I saw he was wrong on this and right on that. But what they will have seen is I lived and I thought and some things that I care about, you know, we'll live on. So the communication thing, if we ultimately can upload our consciousness onto a digital platform, there'll be even more of that. If religious traditions are right and there's some form of immortality, then we're going to have even more influence. So who knows? But at some point, we have varying degrees of influence. So, you know, I've got just a few years. I still think I'm

35 inside. And as long as I don't look in the mirror, I am 35. And I don't know what happened. I think of the old guy, I'll tell, I want to tell a story just for this. Yeah, please. That's my favorite little story of late. I'm getting ready to turn 70. Can't believe it. And always been young and hard, whatever.

So I always like to do new things. So I've been building a sailing kayak. Now, to build a sailing kayak, I've had to learn a number of things. And I've just about got it done. We're getting ready to splash it, as they say. But I have this great story. I've told my children, I said, now this is what you need to do when I'm in the nursing home.

To test the sale, I had to set it up in a holder on the patio and let the wind catch it from different angles and see how the sail was adjusting, make sure the curvature was right, the batons were correct, all of that. And so I had this image. And I said, you know, someday, when I'm in a nursing home, And I'm joking because I told them I'm going to die on a mountain by myself. But someday, when I'm in the nursing home, I said, you just put a sail in the courtyard.

And I'll sit there in my wheelchair and all the nurses can go by. And they say, look at that poor old man. He thinks he's sailing. And I'll be sitting there just adjusting the wind on the sail. And I'll be in my own space. And my truth, if you will, will be, oh, this feels just like when I used to sail the kayak. And meanwhile, from the other perspective, it'll be that poor old man. So there's an image.

A guy in a nursing home holding a sale. I might have to write a short story about that. I don't know. Yeah. Love sex and sailing. Yeah. Whatever your private hobby is, the things you love to do, just think about, how will you do you do that in the nursing home? You're still young.

But creeps up. Yeah. You know, it brings about to me this idea about communication and language and leaving things behind. And I guess first I'll say that when they talk about the scene, when they, when I often read things about the singularity, whether it's the singularity university or some of the thinkers that seem to be giving speeches sometimes, they do talk about in the future you'll be able to upload your consciousness. But I think a bigger idea is that we're already doing that. And it's not like one individual is going to upload their consciousness. Like collectively, we're all uploading our consciousness. It's not like you're going to live forever as an individual. And I think it's kind of funny because I see a lot of people in positions really high up that believe,

it seems to me they believe they'll live forever by uploading their consciousness. But I think that the singularity project is that the world, by everybody putting out a little bit of content uploads the human consciousness. You know what I mean? I think they get a twisted. We've done that already, certainly, but we just took a major step by creating chat, GPT. Because in large language models, again, they're just accretions of all of our consciousness. And so it's all there, ready to be mined by asking it questions.

And it's such a primitive thing, this particular LLM thing we're on. It's easy to imagine not even that many iterations down the road of the complexity that can come from that collective consciousness. And who's to say how easy it would be to have a you collective that if you want to call it out and talk to me, that it would be easy to scrape from everything about me that's been uploaded to have the essence of what I thought. Not my soul. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the essence of who I was and what I thought. That's not so far off. Certainly, chat DPT is a primitive step in that direction. But again, it's us. And as you say, it is us collectively. in there. And since people keep arguing back and forth and whether the universe is a hologram or whether it's a matrix or whether it's this or that, and they make cases, decent cases on both sides, who's to say that whatever aspects are embedded within various parts of our theologies and philosophies and that don't point to a secularized version, if you will.

which won't mean it's secular. It means, well, it's different than what the tales said. Yeah, the tales are often metaphorical. So who knows what eternity looks like and what us living forever, should we live forever, looks like? There's so many ways it can go. But I would say that, you know, if we don't somehow learn to love and learn certain, very valuable moral lessons, then the usefulness of that particular collective

may not be all that useful. So I don't know. Again, so many places I could speculate and go on that are wonderful discussions we can have. So I recently heard this quote that said the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness. Uh-huh. And maybe what's happening with chat GPT, maybe what's happening with us is that we are realizing how empty we are and it scares us.

But we should be thinking, wow, now we can fill ourselves up. And what I mean by that is that, you know, when we think about the word history, I think about the word his story. Because my story is definitely different than someone who lives in Japan's story or someone who lives. who lives in India story. The story in Hawaii is definitely different than the story in California. The story in Hawaii on the Big Island is different than the story on Oahu.

And we get back to this idea of groups. And I think chat GPT or our collective consciousness is the same way the sun rises and things get light, it's slowly showing us it's all kind of bullshit. You know what I mean? And it's like, and it's rising up nice and slow, but it's hot, it's getting warm, it's getting hot over here. But that allows us to empty the container and allows us to become more useful again so that we can be filled up.

Like, what do you think about that? I think that's a lovely thought. I think there's a lot of truth in that. And I could go many, many ways with it. Let me say this part as a tee up, I guess. One of the things they're working on in AI is under the rubric AI ethics and how to undo bias. Bias is typically those human primate things that we've talked about that we don't manage well. And we're hoping that we can teach AI to manage it better than we do.

So we're on the right page trying to do that. And it will manage it better than we do, quite honestly, I think, because it won't have to deal with intrinsic evolutionary wiring it. It has a different pro-gender. But with that, so it is the empty cup that we could create a container that's empty and doesn't that has successfully taken care of the human war and viruses that we have. And then to factor in another thing you said that was interesting is if you remember, LLMs are educated by what they scraped from the internet. Now who among us

would suggest that the internet is the finest expression of of human thought that ever was. And then you said that, you know, what might be a good emphasis in another culture? What might we try to teach? So at some point, LLMs have to scrape from something besides the Internet, and that'll be something else. And no doubt, oh, what can I say there? there are LLMs in existence, I'm sure, that scrape really interesting material that serve, who knows what purposes.

Right. We can speculate DARPA. We can speculate all kinds of interesting things. But to say the empty cup, we can empty the cup, make the container free of bias, and we can train it on many more things than just the toxic aspects of capitalism. and just the social media wanderings of the Internet. So it's kind of amazing in a way that ChatGPT is as sane as it is because I expected a more insane large language model. But this one is not too bad.

So the fact that it hallucinates some, that's kind of not surprising considering the mother that birthed it. I don't know. So who knows what experiments are being done there? I'm sure there's some great ones. I know like in biology, they're creating large language models, feeding it with the best of the biological sciences to give answers. And we can do that. So if we can define from a moral standpoint, again, if we can quit arguing over upper level things and agree, if we can kind of agree that there's a human,

value system that is good. And if we can create the container container there and leave it empty, then yeah, I think it could fill up really interestingly. Yeah, I agree. I do think that we're going to find that it's just, it's just our image. It's a mirror of us. And it's interesting to me that there are people at the top. And maybe they have, clearly they have access to information that I don't have. But it just seems like one of the biggest flaws we always make, and I'm trying to put this in my life as well as people that maybe are in positions of government or corporations or are really great thinkers is that we do look up to people and we have role models. And if you're a role model, you can't say, do as I say, not as I do. Like you have to do.

Right. And like we'll never, ever achieve the level of camaraderie or the level of equity that we want when the people at the very top refuse to play by the rules. And I put myself in that category. If I live in Hawaii and I have all these things, I can't. People that may live in a less fortunate environment look at me the same way that I look at people that have more than me. And so it's quite a conundrum. But I do think chat GPT has helped me understand that more and help me understand with some of the anger issues that I have or understand with the lack of empathy or flip those things around. And it really helps me create.

It's like a mirror image that you see what, you know, when you look in the mirror and you see like when I put my left arm up, my right arm comes up. But it's chat GPT is almost like you're looking at the actual mirror image. I think there's a word for that. Yeah, it kind of goes back to the to the old saying you see through a glass darkly. Then you will see more clearly face to face, as it were. Yeah. And as far as looking up, you have to do. Yes.

The reason we like Gandhi, he did. He preached and he did. Martin Luther King, same thing. He did. Muhammad, Jesus, Confucius, each of these people, whatever status we assigned to them for various reasons, did what they said. And that's what we respect. And people respect me when I do what I say. and then I certainly am harder on myself, I think, than most people are on me. And I try to live certain values, but I don't do it perfectly.

But I certainly am committed to doing it. And people come to a place in their life, whether they're committed to live in certain values or they're not. And there's different levels of that. Sometimes it's as simple as I take care of my family. I go to work every day. That's certainly a huge value when you hear all the stories of someone who ran off and left their family alone. And that's one of those primary values we have.

I will take care of my family. I will go to work every day. That's a major thing. Yeah. It can be very esoteric. I'm the head of a corporation. And my value is I'm going to do this and this and this. The thing is, as we said earlier, one person can influence at whatever world in which he lives.

But it goes back to that world about being authentic and about being committed to certain values. We all have a morality, whether we like it or not. Again, my daughter hates when I use this. But when she was three, she would always say, that's not fair. Well, duh, it's not fair. Why should it be fair? But she had this inborn sense, as did all of my children of what's here. As humans, we have a sense of what's fair and what's not fair.

We haven't agreed upon, for the most part, value system. And we break it for many reasons, usually pragmatic. Most of us aren't sociopaths. And, well, I couldn't go to work today because I really needed a mental health day to go fishing. Well, okay, that's okay in that situation. But individually, that's where my truth thing comes in. You know, I find my way to try to live the values. But it's that disagreement upon values.

And so if we simplify them and put them in a, a vessel of empathy and compassion and love and the whole collaborative end of where we were sent from a evolutionary standpoint, then we flourish. And what we may well find out if we don't collaborate better in this culture war scenario currently going on is like many societies I've seen as a historian in the past, yeah, that society will fail and fall away because it was too busy bickering about individual things and not living out this, this and this and evolution is ruthless in that, yeah, it is survival of the fittest and it is survival of the collaborative and any species and our species in particular, which moves away from those

two imperatives, we suffer the consequences. And right now, the collaborative is a very low part in many parts of the world. And there's many reasons for it. It's not aspersions upon people in our natures. It's environments. Quite often it's environments that create it because there is a lot of injustice in the world. And there are many things to promote that thought.

So, you know, so we can be tender with each other. because we all have a hard time. Do you, in your opinion, do you think that the current world and the large language models and this world of AI that's emerging, do you think it's, it has made things more transparent or do you think it's making things more opaque? That's a complexity question around complex systems. I don't think AI is making things more opaque. I don't think technology is necessarily making things more opaque, nor particularly transparent.

I guess my ball in the park at the moment is that it's complicating those two issues. And where things are clear, it's bringing more clarity. But where they're opaque, it's not necessarily making that opaqueness any thinner at the moment. Because it's still very primitive.

Because remember, it's just a first iteration of who we are. I think it would, ultimately, and I don't mean the final version, but with inversions to come, I suspect it will make things increasingly clear. So I think the end result is clarity, but it's not at that point now. Yeah, it seems to me that a lot of our supply chains are like a legacy rub goldborg machine that's like made to make money. You know what I mean? Like it's like it was set up this way and then it kicks the ball

and then it rolls down this track and then it pushes over a domino. But it's done that way so that things funnel in a certain way. In the same way that we have beautiful clockmakers that make beautiful gears that turn everything perfectly. You know, we went from this beautiful watch that's awesome to like a digital watch because it was easier. And it kind of seems like the digital world that's emerging is taking a away that that Rube Goldberg machine or even a more beautiful clockwork like machine and it's it's just

streamlining and at some point in time you know even though the elegance of that beautiful handmade watch is is amazing it doesn't become affordable and it gives way to the digital revolution I go from a you go from a Swiss made watch to a Cassio but they both tell time right and yeah to to your point there supply chains are very much creatures of the industrial revolution yes and then of the neolithic because it was a different type of thing but they're digitizing supply chains but the concept of supply chain is still very much a analog world concept supply chain is supply chain is different in a totally digital world. And right now we're in a digital world that blends the two.

It's sort of similar. I'm trying to think. Just like the economic system, I know what I want to say about. I don't know the best way to get there. the current capitalist and I guess some of the others economic system is based on humans being machine parts in a supply chain to produce things that we can all do. So in a sense, it's an industrialized version of serfdom, which was an industrialized version of other things, or which was, which was. a different version of other things.

If, and you can posit this, and we've seen it in all kinds of stories, if you come to a place where goods are being manufactured by autonomous factories that no longer need human labor and to where humans are not an integral part of the supply chain, because they still are, and that's a very primitive system. then humans if you had whether it be a universal basic income or whatever you would set up they're in a different world of being creative or destructive according to their natures and they're not part of the supply chain so i don't know if i'm getting to where you you were thinking but digitally we're in a transition We're in a transition period with all those birthing pains,

and we're still very industrialized in our whole supply chain mechanism. And that won't change until humans can be taken out of it. And of course, then we fight about it and we worry, well, they're going to take away my factory job. Or am I going to be needed? Well, those don't become worries if you're not having to earn a living, if there is enough excess so that then the whole rather primitive way of having to earn a living to provide yourself kind of goes away. And that sounds very in the future, polyanish, all that kind of things. Certainly, we've seen enough books and we've seen enough speculation that the current system is still just kind of a hyper-dictual.

a primitive mechanical supply system, economic system. And that economic system can be different. Yeah. But not without the technology to provide life's basic needs. So it's a very broad, complex question. Don't know where that's going as far as technology. And then the key becomes, even if it does, oh, what do the people who have do with it? Do we still need gatekeepers?

Or is there more equivalency? I saw this thing that made me a little bit. Sad's too strong a word. DALs, when they were first conceptualized, were the great, which is a Dow, a distributed, autonomous organization, DAO. When Dow's first came out, they were the Holy Grail. People were going to be equal.

They would have equal votes, and they would run the world differently than the hierarchical businesses that they might someday replace. But because we're primal and because we're still young, they're finding, the last I saw, something like 90% of Dow's, are run by just a few individuals because so often they get set up with the fact that the more money you put into the Dow, the more votes you get or other things. And I'm not an expert in Dow's and I'm willing to be corrected. The idea of Dow's is a wonderful, wonderful thing in many

ways, but implementing it again in terms of our nature is difficult. So how do we deal with that? I like DALS. I have great, at least intellectual respect for the concept. And some are doing well and some aren't, but many are following, it seems, and I certainly am willing to be wrong on this and may be wrong on this. Many seem to be having issues with not quite as universal and as egalitarian as they had hoped. But that may not be the case. I'm treading softly because I don't know a lot about them,

but I remember reading an article, I think it was last year or something like 90% of DELs were having less egalitarianism than they had hoped. So we will work that out. We can. If we're going to be cooperative and survive, our evolutionary path, we have to work it out.

And we may. Or our great-grandchildren may. or the sentient species after ourselves may. But someone will work it out because it seems that at least in this plane of matter that's on this planet, those forces of collaboration and survival of the fittest are pretty strong.

And I'll be curious if anybody chimes in later and poses some other ones because it'd be nice to think of some others. But collaboration is certainly key to primates, of which we are one. And it's key to many other animals. I remember the first time I learned a bird could lie. I was so sad. I was just a youngster.

I thought, only humans lie. Animals, they don't. They're, you know, they're perfect. And this bird that was supposed to be a sentinel for the flock and worn predators, when predators were coming, and he'd give us a call and off they would fly to be saved. Well, he learned to give that call so that they'd fly off, then he couldn't go down and eat all the food.

You know, so deviousness is not just primate. It's many things. I mean, angler fish, put a lure out in front of you. You know, come and have this wonderful piece of bait I had for you so that I can eat you. Evolution is ruthless in many of these things. So for our own sakes, I guess, collaboration is what so far has saved us. Yeah. We'll see if that keeps up.

Yeah. Sometimes evolution puts out a virus to kill the rabbit population. Yeah. Exactly. Why would it be any different for us? Oh, and think about the whole field of epigenetics. Wow. There is just to think that something that happens to your mother.

can be passed through down the line and cause you to behave certain ways. That says a lot for, again, the societies we build. And back to your earlier question, what kind of things do we want to promote besides what we're promoting? We have the means, if we can get enough of the end up. education and enough people to have the will to flourish human flourishing they call it so epigenetics is another really interesting field on on how things and there's a lot of discussion both ways on it that no there's nothing that can be done trauma nah that's all you know both sides are still duking it out.

But it has a certain amount of sense to it. And it does, again, go with many philosophical and religious traditions on the impacts generationally of what happens to human beings if you don't take care of your family. Again, one of our prime things, then many different rubrics I could quote there that I won't. So we have the ability to shape our future by how we treat our kin and our tribes.

And many people are doing it, doing it well. It's just an interesting it's an interesting thought experiment. I wish I could think of some examples, which I can't try now. I've not looked at the epigenetic question. too much this year. But I was certainly looking at traumatic stress and whether it has implications

through the, whether it's the germ line or through other evolutionary pressures. You can certainly, if nothing else, say, if your parents have a certain behavior that's very fearful of something. You often, children often inherit that same fear. Now, that's taught. And again, they speculate some things

not only are taught but are passed on. So we will see. But it behooves us to build the best social fabric we can to create a future. And that's just based on evolution. not even philosophy and theology or or secular talks in the night. You know, it's fascinating to me that, that idea of epigenetics and generational trauma because it's just changing the way you think about something or having an insight can become like having a tool,

but not just a tool you use today, a tool that you can go back and change yesterday with. You know, I talk to a lot of different people in the world of mental health. And the idea, just the awareness of generational trauma takes so much pressure off the individual that's going through life and having problems. Someone who has lived their whole life, like, I am such a mess. It's all my fault. I'm a piece of garbage because I always do this thing. And then they go to like a somatic healer. They have a psychedelic experience.

Or they have this insight about generational trauma through epigenetics. And they go, wait a. minute, my dad did it. My grandpa did it. Wait a minute. If I fix it, my kid won't have it. Like, I get goosebumps when I think. There is so much healing that can be done just with that insight, this awareness. Like, it's almost like, you know, you're purging for your family. And how you know how much beautiful and warmth and just pure gold comes out of the experience of fixing a generational problem? Like, you go from. being the lowest form of thought in your own mind, this reoccurring negative feedback loop is,

boom, exploded, and now you can live in a world where you can grow in. That's exponential growth right there. It's huge. And it certainly ties in with what you said earlier about self-love and healing self. Yes. it's certainly a factor in having a healthier love of a damaged self and realizing it's not just me yeah it is huge as you say right it's a game changer this yeah chat let me ask you this one too i i know when covid came i had a young daughter

and she was young enough. I think she was in first grade, and everything was going online. And I remember sitting down, I'm very fortunate whatever goes to a really, really good school. Shout out to Midpack. I love you guys. You guys are a great school.

And they did their best to bring the young kids into the classroom, even though the community was afraid. However, they did it as much as they could, but it still was maybe once a week or something like that. And I remember speaking with the teachers and thinking to myself, what about the felt presence of the other? What about the social cues?

What about the side eye glance that we spoke about earlier? What about the raising in voices and lowering of tones? You know, what about all these things that you cannot get through this mode of communication? And it's, I find it bewildering because I love the fact that I can speak to you, bridge this gap in geography and have such a fulfilling conversation. Although I know if I was with you sitting down next to you, the communication would be richer. So it's like this double-edged sort. Like I love the fact that this technology we have is providing and opening us up or providing us a vessel to shoot across the sea of communication.

But I feel like we're losing a little bit in translation. Maybe that's necessary. But what do you think is the trade-off there? Well, certainly the trade-off, at least minimally. is digitally, I can't read all the body cues. I can see some. I can't read all the micro expressions. And perhaps I can't sense in the same way.

There's some thought. You've likely seen studies where when people come together in groups, their brains begin to synchronize because they proximity, proximity, for whatever reason and because brain wave activity is electrical energy, electromagnetic energy, whatever, likely, I would have to guess, we wouldn't have the same synchronicity through this medium than if we were sitting on my front porch. So we probably lose that.

If that is a case, and I haven't studied it enough to be aware, one way or the other, I would expect synchronicity to be an evolutionary thing done from the collaborative end, that synchronizing of brains for good or bad in groups. I mean, we've certainly seen crowd behavior go crazy because of synchronicity. So, but to your question, we have, that's something we probably lose. and that's something that you would lose in any kind of metaverse experience. Again, it's hard to have synchronicity with an avatar. And if brain activity is electrical, I don't know how the electrical,

now I'm just doing some blue sky thinking, is the electrical of an AI in my presence, where the humming of the machine is, can I synchronize with that electrical energy of that thinking, or is this so totally different that there's nothing going on? So you could make the same thing. Well, as long as I'm doing AI through the screen here, we're not going to be synchronicity,

but what if the box is in my house? Do I begin to think like the AI? I don't know. Syncronicity is the first thing that comes to my mind as far as what we lose. And we lose the larger environmental cue around us. On my front porch, we'd be sitting in trees, and we'd have that calming what we're wired to be comfortable in experience. In Hawaii, I'd be close to the water, I assume, or,

unless you're living in the middle of an Ergon megalopolis there no we'd be getting our outside cues and we're not getting that digitally here and so again we see it bandied about both ways that we have things going on underneath the surface between us and our environment and between us because think about it again if you around a pride of otters that are on the riverbank. They have mammalian brains just like us. I would have to expect that there's a certain amount of synchronicity

between mammalian brains at different levels. So by taking ourselves away from nature into totally man-made constructs of cities and that, we lose some of that.

And whatever other things are going on at levels with plants and trees and animals. Certainly we had a more closely a closer relationship with other life forms than we do now

because we were one among many in the midst of them and had to be attuned, whether it was synchronicity or just environmental. Now we live in man-made constructs for the most part with bits of nature here and there, which is why many of us like to go camping or get out and, you know, get a dab of that. And again, the point then stretches further into

digital worlds at virtual reality. We've seen enough science fiction movies of overlays of digital all around us on buildings, augmented reality, popping things at us as we need, a more totally man-made world. And then virtual reality becomes, or a holodeck becomes a totally man-made world. And that can be good or bad. It depends on the man-making it and the technology behind it. So any piece of technology that we're using right now puts us at a different level, again, from what we're kind of wired to do. Yeah. But we're the great communicators, and that's our strong suit as a human primate species. And so with that being kind of our major skill, we've augmented it with these things

so that we have more reach, more people, more ability to communicate at the cognitive level. And to a certain degree at the feeling level, because if we weren't doing emotions and feelings, we wouldn't be having toxic social media. So we certainly are communicating those things. Well, but there is likely many under the hood types of things that we're not fully aware of yet that we're losing

by not being coterminous one with another. I don't know. That's an off-the-cuff speculation at the moment. It's a beautiful one. I love it. I've been really, for some reason the idea of since ratios has really been front and center of my mind i i recommend to everybody there's a great book by marshall mcclouin called the guttenberg galaxy and he talks about

the printing press and how it changed us and i can't help but see the same similarities with the conversations that i'm having online and you know first the idea of the tactility or the tactile sense of not being next to you, not being able to reach out. Like, I'm not being able to slap your hand or slap you on the back or, you know, to get that real sense right there. And it makes, when I think about it, like maybe that's what the hostility online is, is some sort of, you know, tapered emotion that I can't touch them. There's no tactility.

So the hostility online is an acting out of frustration of not being there with someone. because you'll say mean things to people online, the same way you'll have road rage because you're contained in a container where the person can't get to you. And it just makes me go down this rabbit hole and this understanding and this idea of, okay, that does appear to be a feature

of this new modality of communication. And maybe we don't need it. You know, if we look back to the way that we used to tell stories before we had books. And the people could, you know, it used to be that you had to read, comprehend, and be able to recite back the Quran in order to graduate from a certain sort of divinity school. And when people were storytellers, you know, if we look back to like the homer,

if you look back to the teachings of Plato, there's a story in Tameas where they talk about Toth coming up with the understanding of writing. And he's told that, look, writing is going to make mankind. worse, not better. It's going to give people the illusion, the idea that they understand things when they've never had the lived experience. And so if the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior, why wouldn't that happen again just in another helical model moving upwards? Maybe we're losing that tactility. And in doing so, we're changing the sense ratios again. I know that it's kind of a lot out there, but I love it, man. I really, really enjoy talking about this. And I'm thankful that I can talk to you about it. So thank you.

I think there's a lot to be said. I haven't had that discussion with those particular phrases in the past, but there's a lot of truth in that from my perspective. And again, those are cues that we're comfortable with because we have 400,000 years of wiring. If I affirm of you, then, yeah, I'm going to slap your back. And when I can't, or if I don't like something you say, say, you know, and it makes sense that that would help engender, rage, and aggression and frustration.

So I'm going to think about that because I like this thought. I think there's a lot of truth in it. That and then you couple that with the anonymity of social media. Yes. Because so many people were, so many often were sheep, we're cowards. and we'll do anonymous things that we won't do when we have the whole tribe looking at us. Yeah.

So that's another part. But I like this sense making and this whole tactile thing. So yeah, I thank you for that. I'm going to think about that. Chuck, I really, really enjoy the content you're putting out. I like the articles to come out. I love the way you do it. You provide people a little snapshot.

The way I see it is like it's almost a brochure when I begin reading your stuff. You're like, today I'm going to show you this. Notice the highlights. And then I can go and visit everything, man. It's like camping for my mind in a way, man. And I really love it. The newsletter for people that are just now tuning in or you watch this before. I'm going to put the link to the Chuck's LinkedIn and the newsletter.

And man, this is really fun. This is our second conversation. And I feel like the more we talk, the funner. I'm not sure that's even a word. I apologize for that. The conversation is so engaging and it's so much fun to have. And I guess before I let you go, what, who are some of your biggest inspirations? And how did you, what are some of your biggest inspirations?

Well, before I forget and address that, I'll just say mutually, you know, the iron sharpens iron thing. Yes. Our conversations have been great and I appreciate it. I've enjoyed them immensely. and look forward to others. Absolutely. Who has shaped me the most? Goodness.

I, gosh, I guess once I came to get an adult, certainly one fellow that shaped him, it was my roommate in college, my first roommate. He taught me about a world I wasn't aware in which value, and ethics and morality was something real and not just something stale in a religious tone. And I began to experience, you can know about things or you can know things. And I only knew

about things. And so I learned a lot through experience over those four years in college. And so So, yeah, I always appreciated that was the first. Of course, Thoreau earlier, like I said. Some of the science fiction, Grays Asimov and others, the three laws of robotics were a huge thing when I first saw them. And certainly my wife, who has tolerated my arcane far outside the bell curve norm and with patience and grace has shaped me. And she's not listening, so she doesn't know I'm saying this.

I'm not saying it because she's here. There's been certain, the people that influence me the most, I'm not going to name a bunch of names, but they've been people who live their convictions, and their convictions are pro-heaval. human, if you will, are making things better. They've often been spiritual people, particularly in my case, within the Christian tradition,

which is where I come from. But there's been others in other traditions, so certain religious traditions have impacted me with not just their thinking, but the depth of grace, and empathy and love and that kind of thing. So the mother Teresa's of the world, that kind of thing. So those kind of people have impacted me greatly. Of course, college, certain professors, you know, you're a young person,

and you're looking for that elder to shape you because you're wired that way. And there's certain college professors that helped me in my thinking. I'll toss out. I don't know if any of them will be listening or not, but certainly I will toss out to my Grace Swan Guild colleagues. When I first came on LinkedIn, I expect to find a boys club of people selling things to each other.

And I was early in on LinkedIn and my company, and I never used it because I had no interest in that. And I did learn on LinkedIn that if I cured, eight connections carefully. I can have some pristine minds to interact with. And then Grace Juan, what I like about them is I've been a member of other organizations that talk about things. And Grace Juan does something about it. As a rule, they're futurist, and they have a consulting arm.

There's 8,000 Grace Juan folks now, and it started during the pandemic. So it's grown to 8,000 people in the last three years. And certainly their website is worth going to. If you have an interest in the future, or if you have an interest in thinking about things and ways to improve things, so my Grace Juan Guild folks have been impactful of late. They're the most recent people that have been most impactful. So many.

We're all shaped by others. in our lives. And even I, who am more of a lone thinker, like many writers, and that stripe,

none of its original. It comes from the collective that is us as humanity and that and whatever. So, I don't know, that's about the only way I know to answer that question right

now. I've certainly had fun talking with you that's been good too so and it's meeting folks on LinkedIn again uh because of i live uh somewhat geographically isolated if you will uh and i'm also i work for myself now i'm also retired and that isolates you further and and so by curating the world that i have of connections and i'm having more fun with all of this than i have since graduate school. So it's been great. Yeah, anytime, of course, we want to talk about further things. Always glad to. Yeah, that's the thing you lose when you can't do the sit on the porch thing together. You can't just then grab a glass of wine or a beer or a Coke and sit back and just

brood for a while and let it be quiet. On a podcast, you've got to keep the pattern going. and so I guess it's harder in a digital platform to have those moments of silence and reflection and it's a more constructed environment. So that kind of goes back to our earlier thought. Because I am thinking a lot about this. We're going to be living in a digital world. How can we be human? You know, that little cliche I put in the newsletter.

How do we take our 1.0 selves into the 4.0 world? We're living in a 4.0 world, and somehow we've got to take our 1.0 selves and accommodate ourselves to the world. Because if we don't, well, we're going to destroy that 4.0 world and we'll again be 1.0 selves in a 1.0 world. You know what? Peace again. Yeah, exactly. Full circle.

I think it speaks volumes of something we spoke about earlier. You had talked about the sound of silence and towards the beginning of this conversation. And I think that one thing I'm working on, and I think a lot of people can benefit, is how you use silence in your life. And to think about how you may use a silent pause and correspondence with someone who's next to you.

And I'm beginning to have more and more respect for the silent pause on the podcast. You know, it used to be that I was very cognizant of the pattern. And I still am, but I find myself having much more respect for what I say and for the guests when people take that pause, even if it's a minute, 20 seconds, five seconds. Like I really think that that is something that is beginning to blossom in this world. So maybe in the digital world, we just change our relationship to silence.

Maybe we're being forced to come to terms with our relationship with silence, like you said. I would certainly tend to agree with that. Think about if you're into desktop publishing, what's the value of white space? White space is what defines the design, how you use white space. Silence is the same thing in an auditory venue. It's silence that helps define what's said. Yeah, I like to think before I say much, and often I'll just listen and think. And I think there's a lot of value in that.

Silence is a good thing. And like you just said, I'm thinking more about it. Like I said, that article that I just referred to earlier in the podcast has me thinking about silence. I'm too ADD in a sense, not clinically, to meditate well. But as far as thinking quietly and being very active in my mind, that's very easy and that's kind of where I live. And that's silence in a sense, but it's not really silence because it's still going on. So that meditative silence has great healing power and great illuminating power. And I'm still very much a neophyte at being quiet in that sense.

I could do that much better. And I suspect it would be very cognitively and emotionally beneficial. But, oh boy, it's hard to stop thinking because I just, that's what I do. it's just tough so yeah I think you're on the right track there about silence and I think I'm still a baby learning about it

it's interesting it speaks volumes I feel similar in such a way because a lot of times people look at me like oh he's just a loner he's real quiet over there but that's in my mind I'm screaming A million miles an hour, you know, but you would never know.

Yeah. Well, my wife has learned the hard way that I didn't tell her something. I thought I did. And she'll go, you thought you told me something again, didn't you? Yeah. I would, if I didn't have something coming up, you would be in trouble because we'd talk for another two hours. But that's such a great, that's such a great relationship. where we can do that.

And I'm really thankful for it. But before I let you go, what is the best place people can find you? And you got anything coming up that you want to talk about? The only social media that I inhabit regularly is LinkedIn. So, you know, look at my post. That's where my thinking is currently. LinkedIn's the best place to find me.

As far as coming up, no, I've got a couple. I've got three or four books I'm working on, but I don't know which one I'm going to have first. I kind of like a little children's book I'm working on right now. And it has a subtitle, A Quantum Tale of Love. And it's sort of talk about quantum physics and a little bit of philosophy in terms for nine to ten year olds. So we'll see. I like that. Mid Journey and AI chat has given me the ability to do quick and easy research.

so that I can do the part that humans do best right now. So I'm trying to maximize. So that might be my next project. I've got a culture war's novel I'm working on, but it'll be a while. The climate's not right to put that out right now. Other things. So, yeah, I write.

Any venues that I'm part of right now are probably linked with Grace Swan. But right now, I've been so busy on things. I've kind of got to get back to writing a little bit. You might see me on a lake somewhere kayaking if I'm not thinking on kayaking. No, but this has been very enjoyable. The first time was, and this has been equally so. Yeah, I love it.

It's so much fun. I'm really thankful. Ladies and gentlemen, do yourself a huge favor. Subscribe to the newsletter. Check out Grey Swan Guild. Check out the book. This book right here, people can see it. it. It's a great book and it's a

it'll really help you see the world. It'll take your hand and walk you down the path of uncertainty in a way that is comforting. So that's what we got. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I hope you enjoyed it. Check hang on one second. I'm going to talk to you, but I'm going to hang up with our audience here. And so that's all we got for

today. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for today. Aloha.