TrueLife - Matt Marturano - Censorship Everybody Does It…

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

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/Matt MarturanoLadies and gentlemen, please welcome the maestro of the mind, the virtuoso of critical thinking, and the philosopher extraordinaire, Matt Marturano! With a penchant for unraveling paradoxes and diving deep into the abyss of complex concepts, Matt's analytical prowess knows no bounds. Armed with linguistic finesse and a relentless curiosity to challenge the status quo, Matt is a beacon of innovation and intellectual rigor. So buckle up, because with Matt in the room, conventional assumptions are about to get a serious run for their money!https://www.orchidholisticsearch.com/http://linkedin.com/in/drmatthewmarturano 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 scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearers 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. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a phenomenal show for you today. My lovely daughter is going to show, bring in our co-hosts. My daughter is showing us Harold the Cat. She wanted to bring in Harold the Cat as the co-host today.

Thank you, buddy. Go back to the copy here. I love you, lady. Thank you for that. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds is singing. I hope the wind is at your back.

Got a great show for you today. An original thinker and someone whose work I really enjoy reading is Matt Marcharano. He's got an insatiable appetite for unraveling paradoxes and delving into the depths of complexity. Matt's analytical prowess is unmatched, in my opinion. It's equipped with linguistics. finesse and an unwavering determination to challenge conventions, Matt embodies innovation and intellectual rigor. So get ready for a fantastic journey where conventional wisdom takes a backseat because when Matt enters the scene, expect nothing short of a mind-expanding experience. Matt,

thank you for being here today. How's it going? Great. I'm doing great. I'm having a sunshiny day here, George. So thanks for having me. And thanks for the introduction. You actually wrote it. So that's very unique. I didn't send that over to you for you just to read ahead of time. Thank you. Appreciate it. So I'm looking forward to our conversation wherever it leads today. Yeah, me too.

It's always refreshing. You know, I was a mutual friend of ours, Hank Foley, was like, George, you got to check out Matt. And so I started reading some of your stuff. And it's really refreshing. And I think especially in today's world where we're just, There's so much social media just pop, pop, pop, all these goldfish in this bowl chomping at each other. Like, I see this stuff you're writing and I'm thankful. I think that we are really in need of some people out there that are making sense of the world and having different opinions.

And I think you're, I think you're one of those guys, ma'am. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you for reading and for noticing. I do, you know, I do, I really, I really aim to offer something that people haven't heard before. in terms of an opinion. And so I think that that's that's sort of my hook in a way is at least saying something that it might grab someone in a way, just as I have been grabbed on my own, you know, by others,

but going, wait, what is what? And, you know, and then kind of going from there. So I'm glad, I'm glad to be here and glad to hear that there's people. out there who want to listen to something at least different from what we normally hear in the fishbowl. Yeah, it's really true. I was reading through a recent article and you talked about paraconsistent logic, I think, and I'm reminded of grand priest on some level and these ideas of like a true paradox. But how did you get there, man?

Like, what do you see that happening today? I mean, just give us some background or what do you think, man? Sure. Yeah, okay. Well, it's always the question is, you know, where to begin? without having to back up later. But I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, and I was going to originally major in biophysics.

And I didn't, I also was accepted into the Honors College. And this was, it ended up putting me in calculus classes that were far beyond my skill level. And so I learned really quickly that I don't, I didn't really, you know, math is interesting to me, but I wasn't actually going to become a biophysicist and learn the mathematics part of it. So I kind of cut that back to biology. And then I had to take a bunch of humanities courses to kind of round out my education for the last couple years. And so I just started taking philosophy classes. to. And then by the time I had come up towards the end there, I had enough to almost to basically

get a second major. So I did in in philosophy. And that's really how I started, you know, this journey in a way. But it was both at the same time what I learned in school and then what I didn't learn in school because I ended up in just the libraries. at the University of Michigan in the old graduate library, like down in the stacks, like, wow, I don't know, what's here? I like, what kind of books do they have? And that's when I found, you know, there was, you know, I ended up in like the occult and esoteric philosophy section.

And then, you know, and it started to occur to me, like, why am I getting a degree at this university? I'm in their library, but there's these books that I haven't heard about from my classes. Like they're not even being talked about, not one way or another, just not even mentioned as in the scheme of the literature. And so, you know, in terms of specifically paraconsistent logic, you know, and paradox, I would just, I remember writing a paper once that was kind of like, and remember, I don't know, I was 18 years old or something, but this was my, the idea I was trying to forward in my philosophy class was that, something could be true, both true and not true at the same time, right? And of course, you learn logic. You have to take logic that starts from, you know, yes or no, zero or one.

You know, then you get decision theory. And right off the bat, I don't know if you've ever just even browsed any of this, but right off the bat, I mean, you, they admit like, okay, well, this isn't really reality, but we're just going to kind of go with this. And then there's a whole theory that's built up from it. But at like step one, it's like, well, it's not really like this, but we're just going to, we're going to pretend that it's like this, and we're going to go from there.

So, you know, the idea was the, I remember what I presented was the idea that one could go to a party, a gathering, essentially. And then since later on, we're supposed to make an assessment, is it party fun or was it not fun? And this might be a conversation that one might have actually had in college with your friends or something like that, right? Like, oh, yeah, that was a great time. And someone else is like, what do you, what are you talking?

talking about that was terrible and a third person might say I don't know somewhere in the middle like okay well which was it what was the true fun value of the party and the truth is that it was it's both at the same time because what we're assessing there has to do with our perception subjective assessments and it actually yet it is true that the party is both was both fun and not fun because there was more than one person there and everybody's right you know so i wasn't i wasn't really trying to um change the face of philosophy or anything with my paper it's just just this kind of a silly paper but the response that i got was what was kind of like i was a little bit surprising to me and the response that i got was just like basically

This paper is well written, but I can't give you a good grade. It was like the teaching assistant, it wasn't a professor. Of course, I didn't even read the papers, right? So they were just like, I can't give you a good grade, but I don't know why. So I'm going to give you like a B minus. There was something like that. You know, okay, so this really started to get me going in a sort of a loop around. What are these other ways of thinking that are out there?

and why aren't I being taught about these when I'm going to classes about thinking? And that's where I, that's where it began. It reminds me of, you know, like those images, the one that comes to my mind is like there's this picture and it's both an old woman and a young woman, but mostly people can either see one or the other. But if you stare at it long enough and someone points it out,

you can be like, oh, I see the woman, she's got a feather hat on. Or I can see the young woman, her eyes just back here. Like that was like one of my first Views into exactly what you're saying like it's both It's an old woman and a young woman and it's very difficult to see them both at the same time But they're both there and then all of a sudden it's like Oh

They're both right I get it these knuckleheads fighting are both right But that's really hard to like especially if you're emotionally attached to that Like are one of the sides or maybe you know you've had something happen and all of a sudden you're like this is what's happening. Like, they're both right. Like, it's a weird thing, right? Yeah. It's, it, yes, it is, it is weird.

And then, and then in the backdrop of all that, there are things too where sometimes like, well, that doesn't mean, I didn't say there's no facts whatsoever. Right. So, yes, we're both right. But that doesn't mean, you know, if you're like saying, I don't know, gravity doesn't exist. It's like, okay, I don't know. What are you talking about here? Quantum gravity. But so, so, yes.

but this idea that we can, that there's more than one way of looking at something. And that, but basically the, like what we're trying to communicate using what's called what, what was term paraconsistent logic, which was a term I came across much later,

didn't know what was called. But this sort of both and instead of either or is not new. And it's, it's a different way of thinking. And I think that for a lot of us, we may have encountered this when we think about something like a Zen Cohen or those illusions that you mentioned or something that we probably all encountered something that's intentionally made to kind of put us in this liminal space where we're kind of like you said, I can see it this way, I can see it this way. I can't quite see them both at the same time. There's another one that you can do with the flower of life.

if you've seen that geometric pattern, it's just like a circle with a point in the center that's repeated around it around and it makes a pattern. And if you look at this pattern and you cross your eyes until two of the circles cross each other, it looks like two eyes are looking back at you.

It's like kind of freaky. But that's right, that's only because the way your eyes are looking at it. And so this sort of thinking I much, much later found by continuing to come back to some of these ideas over the years, because I left college. I went and I did other things. I got a different degree. I worked. I traveled. But every so often, I'd like come back around to these sorts of some ideas that I had encountered. And also to see if in Academica itself, like how we maybe discovered more from archaeological evidence or linguistic evidence,

and we have, you know, in terms of where, you know, this, we're this sort of east versus west idea that we often get. And in fact, is it possible or maybe true that there was a point in between where these, both of these sorts of views separated long before we even think, you know, anything was going on. And I'm not talking about like super technologically advanced civilizations or aliens. I will talk about that stuff, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about humans, beings who lived in Central Asia, who had these ideas, had this way of thinking.

Apparently, it's emerging more in certain sort of actual literature, like studies and things. where paraconsistent logic and looking at the world this way was something that they not only did, but that was taught. And for example, when we learn about Greek philosophy and the original, the Greek sages, there's one of them by the name of Anacarcis that we, even according to history, identifies as a Schithian who were, the Scithians were a federation of nomadic tribes. that lived in Central Asia that did in fact interact with the Greeks in antiquity and Indians and Persians and Egyptians and Mesopotamians and the Chinese all the way because from where they were located geographically China was their kind of their eastern outskirts and this is a vast expanse of thousands of kilometers, including the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the stepp lands all the way from the yellow river to the Danube.

Um, and later on, once we, once there were the original people who learned how to domesticate horses, um, and opened up a lot of those trade networks. So the, the philosophy that we have, and we have been handed down to us or that someone like me might receive in the school is, doesn't even acknowledge its own fully, I believe, its own history. It's sort of we start with the Greeks and then we go from there. And then maybe if you look for it, you might take some sort of off class or maybe a weekend thing about Eastern philosophy. And you don't really know much about it. And so even for many years, the most that I had ever experienced came from books like the Tao of physics.

by Fritjof Kopra or things that sort of compared some of our like emerging ideas around like the holographic universe and some of these other fringe kind of fringe or were more French physics ideas

because I was still interested in those things even if I wasn't going to do the math. It's interesting. I read too that I think is on the same topic is the idea of Aramaic and it being a language in which these ideas were more able to be discernible. Like when you think about the lens of language,

some things are described. Like in German, you have like Schadenfreude or in different languages. You have these different words for different, there are linguistic pathways, right, in some way? Yes. And I'll preface this by saying, you know, I'm not a linguist. I don't have any of these types of credentials, but I've read things by linguists.

that were distinguished professors and such, as much credence as you might give on that alone. But yes, and so the things like Aramaic, I wasn't ever thinking of this, first of all, and I think it's important to understand because there's things that I kind of stumbled upon much later. I didn't have a bone to pick about Aramaic. I don't have a lineage of Aramaic that I was trying to justify

or like a sort of nationalism or religious belief about it or anything like that. As far as I had known, like many other people, there was, and really in the past, there was like Sanskrit, there was Hebrew, which the Bible was written in, and there was like Egyptian and hieroglyphs. And I had maybe heard of Aramaic, but that was all I knew. that someone may have told me one time that that was the language that Jesus really spoke. And I was like, that's interesting trivia. Maybe it will be good for Jeopardy one day.

You see, like, I don't. So I professed it by saying, like, I don't have an agenda about it. But what I found and what I did, some of the work that I did do with, like, with ChatGPT when it first came out. And I've tried to replicate some of it since then. And I don't think it's possible anymore. But is, and it was only because I wanted to look up something on Google Translate that I was reading. And it didn't have Aramaic. I was reading a book called the Skittian Empire by Christopher Beckwith.

And there's lots of words in them in Skittian and in Aramaic and other languages. And I wanted to look something up. So I went to like translate.com like I normally would. and it wasn't an option. So I was like, oh, let me try out this chat GPT thing. Do you know any Aramaic? And it's like, oh, yeah, sure. You know, so then I started trying to develop,

what I eventually did do was made my own, what's called an abjad glossary. Because in these, in, in Semitic languages, the consonant sounds have carry meaning with them. And so, and again, I'm not in any way an expert on it, but for example, the the, the, the, the, the, the sound has literally to do with the idea of a, of a container or a box or a holding thing or a cup or a, the hieroglyph that corresponds to that sound from a pre-Egyptian or hieratic, I later learned, is, it looks like a little box. you know and the first letter of these systems is is a glottal stop it's it's it's the sound in between uh oh we don't normally have a a glyph for it but they have a glyph for it and it's called alif it's the in between sound and so the alif is this thing that comes in the box

see and then and then when we get a word like aba the aba which means the father spirit god it's the idea of this spiritual energy that's come into the box and then the next letter is gamo which still is where the word camel comes from and it's the idea that it then becomes mobile and moves around. And this was the way that these people, their language also explained their how they thought about themselves and themselves as the recipients of something. They were nomadic people with horses, camels who traveled around and made trade networks and promulgated not only objects like trading actual things, but ideas that went along with them and went to different parts of the earth and later came back and mixed again

and became things that I think in many examples, where they enter our historical record or the ones that most of us have learned, is back when these streams have already, who that's separated for maybe a couple thousand years and then came back together again, birthed something. And to us, that was the first thing. For example, when we look at like the Persian Empire, I would use as one of those examples. You know, and we look at history or the emergence of quote unquote great men. And they go back to, in many cases, Cyrus or Chiris the Great. And he mentioned also in the Bible and goes back to the very oldest stories about the temple and Jerusalem being rebuilt, them getting permission,

the Hebrews people getting permission to rebuild it. And what happened when the Samaritans came by and wanted to help them? And these are things that, you know, again, I didn't, I never learned from like a catechism class. I took some of those raised as a Catholic, you know, not very devoutly, but I still had those classes or school anywhere. It was just sort of little bits and pieces of things that I put together. And then later on, I found someone would be somebody else who, like, wrote a real book

talking about what some of the things that I had sort of suspected or sort of piece together. So then I get excited about that because I feel like it's just something, you know, it's not just me with my armchair, you know, chatting with this AI thing, you know, and I could just like fooling myself about something. So this idea about language, as you're getting back to, I think, your original point, and speech itself and what it means. And in the way that we use speech. Now, for example, again, and the other side of many Semitic languages is the vowel sounds. The vowel sounds are very amorphous. They move around. I don't know how it really. works. I couldn't speak to you in these languages because if I use eh or e or i in between the

the bah and the da bid, bed, bud, bud, a boud, a boudoir, a bedouin. You see like these types of words that have come down to us through Hebrew or Arabic say they're connected in ways that we don't normally think of. And what I've later learned, I think, is emerging is that these languages aren't just like one branch of the language tree. They're like a vine that grows on the tree in between the branches. So there's words that have come down to us through German or Latin or even some African, Eastern African languages that are still follow some of these rules about what the words mean and these patterns. And I notice as well that there's when it comes to words that, for example, have to do with a people, like our people and your people,

whoever ours and yours are of the times, people will not pronounce the words correctly, even if they could. For example, the word Latino is definitely pronounceable in English as Latino. When I lived in Arizona in the southwest, many people would say la, with that glottal stop too, Latino and would say words that were obviously of Spanish origin

so differently from how a Spanish speaker would say them that it was like, why are you doing this? Anyway, it's interesting, but what I found is more interesting about is this has been going on for like 6,000 years. So for all of history and all of the written history that we have, there has been these sorts of things that we might see in politics today where a word for a people was used. That was kind of a play on another word, and you had to get the context. subtext of what was going on or why someone was referring to someone else this way. And I'm not saying I understand it all.

But what I understand now is that the people who lived five to eight thousand years ago, even as far back as 12,000 years ago, weren't very different from us at all in terms of our psychology, in terms of the way that we behaved, in terms of tribal dynamics and in groups and outgroups and when writing emerged we have to i think a big thing to to keep in mind and without knowing is we have to allow ourselves to speculate a little bit about how what we know about people and imagine when writing emerged on the scene essentially in a very short period of time after thousands of years of spoken language where stories were only passed down by word of mouth were many people considered it sacred,

or including sacred stories that were only told by word of mouth. And once somebody started putting the, you know, the stylus to the paper or the, the, the, the, once we started making letters and writing this down, it wasn't like everyone just said, oh my God, this is wonderful. That there's zero percent chance that happened. right George? Yeah, yeah. I think it's in Tameas. They talk about Toth and coming up with writing and how it's just going to be a horrible mistake for everybody. Right. Right. So right. So even though we don't have any records, all the records that we have were made by people who like to write, we could presume, or at least weren't against it. So all of the people who didn't like the idea and were against it, their voices were silenced from basically the beginning. They're not represented in anything. in any of the writing we have.

And so, again, we get back to that, that I, this idea of like, not only what is, what is being said, but what is not being said. Right. And what, what about that perspective has been lost? And why is it that we, we, many, many people, because really seem to have a very deep, I don't otherwise understand it, hatred of nomadic people, the, the very scattered remnants of a culture that once lived in Central Asia, when we look at some of these other marginalized groups over time, for example, the Yazidi or the Uyghur, and I don't mean to even speak for any of these people,

like I really have any idea in detail what it's like, but I do know that these are remnants, of people who never had a state because that wasn't their system. They had a governmental system. It was called a satrappy system. They had an idea of kings and queens, where the queens weren't just a pretty little face

that hung out on the king's arm looking nice either. But the queen had real power. Women could become, I mean, queens had real power. They had wielded weapons. they fought, they commanded armies. They also had power in their spiritual system. Even in the origin, as far as I could tell, the word like a maga, which would be the original word for a magic user in Aramaic,

does not distinguish between a man or a woman or any other gender in terms of their concept of a person who embodied a sort of a spiritual energy, essentially we'll say, or the idea that, a human being could participate in a divine energy by becoming or like it or trying to align ourselves with it in some way and become more and more like that over time. And that idea itself, in certain periods of time, you could get burned for even saying, as much as we think we can't say things online anymore, right? you know, that idea that a human being could take on any divine characteristic, even in part, because it must be all or nothing. Because the periconsistent logic has been edited out of the story.

So when we present an idea like this, someone looks at a strangely, like, what are you saying? That you're God? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. Let me make that very clear. No, no, that is not what I'm saying, because if you're thinking this, whatever, no. So we're not even going to go there because the idea that a human being can become more than human by participating in humanity that we ourselves are a stepping stone or even biologically speaking that we're in between. We're not fully, like our four brains aren't formed yet. I think we have to cook for another 100 generations or so before these things turn on whenever they're really supposed to do.

You know, so the idea that, and that again was reflected in this idea of the children of God or the children of the divine, that there is these two sort of principles and that we all were part of that. And even beyond that, the idea that perhaps that what we think of as a royal or a king or a queen even originally had more to do with the idea that though the people had acquired the right to rule others because they had integrated themselves and shown themselves. by their words and their action and deeds to embody something that's bigger than themselves. And so, for example, when writing came around and someone was able to say, go up to a great king or queen who maybe was still illiterate or didn't know exactly,

or maybe they relied on other people to read things for them. And they were held out something. This is your word. This is what it says. And they signed, they made the tau, the mark, the X at the bottom.

And then that those words were later used against them, perhaps, in a way, in a new way, in a sort of a information warfare was born or a new way of it that had never been seen before. And it's still happening today. And that's why I think that these conversations that we're having about today, too, about the internet, about censorship, about especially on social media, which is that that fishbowl or birdcage that we're in, if we don't, if we're not at least trying to frame it in this conversation that's been going on for a very, very long time, then I think we're missing a lot of it.

And it's easy to become focused on the parts of the conversation that maybe aren't quite the fulcrum of it, as we might think they are. That is really well said. Thank you for showing a lineage back to these ideas that it may have been around for a while and explaining. You know, there's a great book called Black Elk Speaks. I think there's something similar in there. Black Elk tells the story about when the settlers came towards them, and they were like, we're going to buy your land. And he's like, he can't buy the land.

The land belongs to everybody. It's that same sort of perversion of language and ideas that allowed them to subvert them, right? Yes, right, you know. And especially, you know, taking an idea, taking an idea or a value, and using it against the people. Yeah. Okay. Right.

So, for example, as an American, somebody out there taking the idea of liberty, conflating it with freedom, mixing it all up so we no longer know the difference between the two things and using it against us. Well, of course they're doing that. Because that's what people have been doing to each other for a very, very, very long time.

And the evidence of this is still, again, in the beginning, the very beginning, the way that we talked about people and the way that we made fun of them indirectly in books and scripts that they had no control over and that they they could have even write back and you know and say anything in return so yeah it um i think that you know the idea will be for example um another idea that that you see a lot of different ancient texts and maybe these are also represented and some of the ones you're familiar with from is it more of like like pacific traditions in your background you've mentioned a few books that of your oh that yes connecting with yep that i i like to read a lot but i i don't consider myself knowledgeable in any of these subjects you know what i mean like so so yeah yeah okay yeah okay yeah so you know again yeah this idea that you know oh this is this is our land um you know even the the pronouns or the possessive pronouns

of what is ours, what is mine, what is yours, and how it changes. You know, you imagine that there were people who every year, they lived for two or three months on the riverbank of a whatever river, take your pick. And that's what they did. And then one year they left. And when they came back, some other people were there, settled. They had been there for six months.

And they were like, this is our land now. we claimed it where were you you aren't here guarding it because if this were your land you would have been here and you weren't so it's ours it's like it's just like it's this doesn't compute and instead of trying to reengage with this idea of wait a second where are these people coming from like what is the lineage what is that where were these folks different groups of people when, way back when in the times that many of us have begin, where it's in Vedic times or biblical times or whatever are that sort of that fuzzy horizon at the beginning of our collective memory is, well, what was going on there? And once you realize that everyone was always,

always around and that some people just showed up and they were like well this is ours now and it just kept happening over and over again you know to the point where we literally we now if if you look at a map of the world there's no I don't think or very few places left that aren't enclosed within a national border but there's still people out there that are our citizens of no nation and those of us who are, we're just like, well, too bad. And they're like, okay, well, can I, can I come be a part of your nation? And then we're like, well, no. Not our nation.

Not our nation. Go to the other nation. Go to that other nation and go over there. And then, you know, it's just sort of like, you know, so I think about, when I think about these things and I think about, for example, the backdrop of also like a, say, a climate disaster. Let's forget about whether we're bringing it upon ourselves or not. I'm pretty sure that my read of history is pretty accurate now. Since Neolithic times, it's happened at least twice and maybe like one smaller time

where there was climate change on the scale that was extremely disruptive, especially to any civilization that was built up on a delta, on a river delta on the coastline anywhere probably on the coastline right okay and and yet at that very same time right

all of central Eurasia was there right and occupied by people of course it was we know it was but we don't link it up

so we don't link it up that I don't think the historical record when we see a story from the fringes of history in Asia where I probably get the legendary character's name wrong, but Fushi or someone shows up a semi-legendary magical creature who knew how to combat the floods, who knew how to tame the rivers,

who knew how to reestablish the time cycle so they could grow crops again. And these people, these heroes, show up miraculously from across the mountain. They show up from across the mountains in China and they showed up from across the mountains in India. They showed up from across the mountains in Greece and they helped us or helped our ancestors if we identify with those cultures, if we identify with a Western lineage culture. Those people helped us survive. We're here because of them. And now we would like to not only eradicate them, but like get rid of any real evidence or ideas. that they ever really existed.

Like, we're right at that cusp, I think, because it's coming out, but it's coming out at a time when the flood, the digital flood of information, the deluge of just noise, is so huge. Who will be able to find it?

You're going to see me talking about it, like some random guy on LinkedIn. somewhere, right? And you're like, who's, I don't know, who's this guy? Why should you, why should you believe anything I say about? You know what I mean? So it's like, and that's, that's what I think, I don't know, it's good. I don't have an answer for it, but I think that that's, that's, that's really the timing of us all coming together is, is important. And that's why I think it's important to just, just throw in some of these other pieces that people are necessarily even talking about or thinking about how they might be connected, not necessarily to say I know how they're connected.

And I think similar to you, George, I don't know. I've read so many things from so many places. I couldn't quote them if I tried. I don't always know, and I don't, nor do I claim, I don't have any books out there. I don't, I don't claim to be an author of anything that I say. As strange as it might sound, I would claim that I'm pretty much just mixing or repeating things I've heard elsewhere. And again, it's like if I can't keep doing that, because everything I say has to come with a, you know, the, the, the, the, uh, a, uh, a footnote. Where did it come every, every word? Then what's happening, you know? And is anyone then, is anyone then, is, Is anyone ever going to hear about it?

Because it's not just about, the funny thing is that I don't feel that my voice is being limited in any way by the United States government any more than it already has been. You see what I'm saying? Any more than it really has been for my whole life more or less. But these types of things that I think that are important that are just now coming to the surface. And I think there's also a lot of people out there. I think that you might have also have some shows on like psychedelics and journeying, right? Okay, so that this stuff is coming up, we say, for people, for clearing, we say. And if you've been doing or involved in that type of work for a while, it's kind of like, what does it ever end?

Like, well, you're clearing. You see, like, I'm clearing my life, and it's my path lives and my family and my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers. does it ever stop somewhere or at least come to a major pause? And I do think that it does at this point where writing was invented. Because I think that when we talk about things about like the male oppression of female energy, for example, again, well, why are we talking about the women in history? They're historical figures that we know about.

that were real, that were not just like Cleopatra, who by her beauty and guile, got manipulated, whatever. And what color was her skin? Somewhere, somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing. But like, for example, the queen of the Kandake of Kush, Amanirena Renas, I believe, was her name, was a contemporary of Cleopatra. They lived at the same time. She, she, her army successfully repelled an invasion from Rome.

She secured like, you know, she secured good terms and negotiation for her people. She was a strong female leader in kind of every, every way that we would think. And I never, I never heard of this individual my whole life until it like came out of a chat session. randomly with chat GPT. I did have to go back and chuck it. I was like, okay, well, okay, chat GPT, let me go and see if there's some other sources for this info, but indeed it's true.

And so another one was Queen Tomiris, who defeated Cyrus, the great. Who was she? You know, I think that maybe I'd heard about this person once, or I heard something about the Amazon women tribes, something like this? I don't know.

You know, I do know that there was, I think I posted about it the other day, I just happened upon some conference, or it's happening in Paris, but I think is available online in just like this weekend or the next few days about some actual real researchers who are presenting a lot of this new,

rediscoverys about actual women in antiquity who wielded true power. And that was also reflected in the way that people conducted themselves in those types of societies. So a counterpoint again to like when people say, you know, oh, well, this idea of the frail woman who and the male is to protect her, Rar and defend her is all built upon this idea. this idea that a woman naturally could not possibly command an army or run a global trade network because we don't know about them because like we've we've kind of like we've done our very very

best I think to delete it from history books and if not we kind of push it over to the footnote section and we really don't talk about it I mean we just I think we saw, you know, it was just a women's month, I think. I don't, I don't recall too many people posting about it. Yeah. Do you think that that is, you know, when I think of writing, I think of someone able to have the illusion of knowledge without ever experiencing it, right? Like, I can read about what it would be like to do something. And now I have this knowledge, even though I've never experienced. I don't have experiential knowledge of it on some level.

And you could see how that can wreak havoc in leadership and power. And you just look at ideas like, I'm going to lead from behind over here. I read this book. Or if you want a newer example of look at the way in which we hire some people straight out of school to go and lead companies. And like, you know, in some ways you are denying the experience. of the people that have been there for a long time. If you're going to, I'm going to put this person in a leadership position over here. You know, it's, it's interesting to think about the invention of that on some level.

I think so. And, and where, you know, again, there's ideas in which people do talk about to some degree. Like this, this sort of like, are we really like in a meritocracy? I mean, really? Like a Confucian stuff? Maritocracy? Because you know that Confucius was the first one on record to talk about that. Again, where this idea came from, that you earn the respect to command others. You earn the right to rule through your works, not just your words.

But this is like you said, what happens is we can read about something, we can talk about it. And especially now with the internet, we can get a whole group, I, we could, you, me, everyone we could get a whole massive followers that thinks we're doing it and we're not we could just be live yeah nobody nobody would really know the difference for the most part you know i've seen i've seen stories of like somebody found somebody found like the v a famous youtube vegan guru like chow and down you know a hamburger in the restaurant somewhere oh we were up in arms you know and it's like but why do we keep trusting that if there's this we can put a screen in between us and some words, you know, for, for, I mean, the company that I have works in executive search.

I do most of the background work of it. My wife does the executive search. But we talk about it, you know, and it brings up some philosophy to it. And the same idea. Like, are we just matching some words up, you know? Oh, are our values align? yes oh look we use the same word that means we're aligned it's a match made in heaven it's like what do you mean like that's that's like the very first step of that you know and I think we've become way too quick because we want to network we want to connect and we're able to superficially connect

with all these people that we never did before and that's all I mean just like writing nobody's going to come really say oh well that was bad we should take it away we should take away the internet now no it's we're clearly better off now that we you and I can connect over the internet and that I could we could even buy video and that I can combine my fiber optic and satellite signals so that my call doesn't even drop any like that's great but there's a tradeoff you know to for this very same reason in that we we might just be kind of superficially kind of We might be being collected by others and put into a fish bowl without even realizing it.

You know, a fishbowl that says independent thinkers, you could be someone's target group. That's what they have, you know, because that's the way people have dealt with each other this whole time. Yeah. You know, if you go on Facebook and you look at ads, or if you want to create an ad, probably through any sort of social media, there's targeted ads. Like, just think about that language. This is my target audience. Like, what does that mean? Like, you're using the word target?

Just the fact that you use the word target and what comes with the word target. Like, I'm going to, usually a target's on a gun, you know? Like, I'm going to, this is the group of targeting. Like, it's crazy to think that you're going to put them in this box and target them. Like I think it's, our words sometimes speak volumes of the limiting ideas that we have, right? Like, no wonder it's not working. Right. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to be a target.

I don't know. I don't think I'm that odd, right? So, I mean, I have every ad blocker imaginable. I pay for subscriptions of whatever, you know, if I have a streaming service, I'm going to pay for it. I don't want to see ads. I don't want to be targeted. Right. You know, and I'm certainly not going to, like, sit here and be like, yeah, I'm swimming in ads all day long, but I'm fine.

It doesn't work on me. If it doesn't work on you and doesn't work on me and it doesn't work on Joe and doesn't work on Sally, who is it working on? Because we spend billions and trillions of dollars. And we all assume this is a good thing. I know what a company pays for a digital marketing manager. Because it does affect us. It affects us when it's affecting what chip brand we buy, we're like, oh, yeah. I love it.

But when it affects what political party we vote for, we're like, oh, no, not me. I'm immune to it, you know. Sure, I think I'm. I'm into it too. Sure, George. I'm sure you do. And we could sit here and nod at each other. And we're like, well, both of us are for sure. We are. Right. But everyone else, everyone else thinks they are too. And it's like, well, how could that be true? If that's true, why have we been doing this thing where we flood the channels with lies? And then we call it free speech. This is not new. This is not. a new game. This is not being played for the first time in the United States of

America in 2024. This was being done with the stylus 6,000 years ago. Copy it. Make copies. The king and the king hired 5,000 scribes. Why? Because they weren't copying their

political propaganda. That's why. The same thing. It's the same as it ever was. So the idea that we can be free if we can't move. And if we're in an environment where everything's coming at us

like this constantly and being fed fed us by our feeds and our preferences and our neighbor and you know how it is online. I mean, if I really want to build a following, I'm going to have to go and like reciprocate with every single person,

whether it's great or not. But I mean, how much time does that take out of your day? if you, everyone who interacts with your or thing, you would go interact with theirs or find something nice to say or at least like it, show that they, you know what I mean? So like now you have, because I went down this path before with my business a long, long time ago and I got to the point very early on with like,

I can't, I'm not doing this. And I'm not paying someone else to do it because we didn't have the money to pay someone else to do it at the time. So I was like, we're just going to have to figure out a way to not do this thing. And so we get, we can't move. And whether everyone around us agrees with us or they don't, we like, we like their opinion or whatever, when we're in an environment where there's 40 fish stuffed into a tiny bowl, there's no freedom. Or there's no freedom of speech.

There's no freedom of thought. There's a freedom of movement. That's not a free space. It's a constricted space. It's a constrained space. These are words. Look them up. I got, you know, do you have a dictionary app?

This is the opposite. Is this not free? If I want to really be free, I could say, I could, I have before, I could start a website. I could start a podcast. George, has anyone tried to ever take your podcast down, really? No. Has anyone tried to stop you from saying anything? No, no one but myself.

I have to catch myself. Self-censorship. Okay. So you know what I'm saying? I do, yeah. Okay, so self-censorship, you know, but it's a, and we're going to get, we should switch to bot washing before the hours ends. But like I was just looking back up here, it's a bot washing free country.

You know what I mean? Like, no one's stopping you right now. No one's stopping me. You know, the only, the only places that we're getting stopped is when we go into the fish bowl that we know is packed, that we know as a constrained environment. We know there's a bunch of, we clicked, yes. I agree. I'm going to be professional.

I'm not going to, whatever. We agreed. And then we're in there and we can't do it. Or what's actually happening is the other fish are reporting us for violating the rules. Everyone's violating the rules. But, oh, they're going to report us because they don't like us what we said or what they think our political views are, whatever. And then we're like, and then someone else comes in and they're like, they're taking your freedoms away.

You can't speak anymore, but you can. I don't know what this, it's called Streamyard. It looks like a great platform. Can I sign up for it in about 10 minutes and stream, whatever I want to say? Yeah.

Okay, well, that's good. If this, something like this, is no longer happening or going away, I'm going to be really, really, I'll be right there with everyone else. I'll have many torches and pitchworks, and I know, I'll be fighting. But I don't think that that's a slippery slope from what's going on and social media to that. I don't think that anyone, I don't think that that's what's happening here because it's not what I see.

And I mean, but anyway, right, I have a right to my opinion. And it's very unusual. So it's not like I have, I'm starting a movement or anything. so I've, you know, I'm here on your podcast. We're just chatting about it. Yeah. It's, I think it speaks to the idea. Like there's this, maybe it harkens back to this idea of what I have to say is both

relevant and completely irrelevant at the same time. Like, no one cares what I say. I do. You know, hopefully my guest does a little bit, but, you know, in the grand scheme of things, the government doesn't care one bit. what I said. It'll give a damn crap about some old truck driver over here. Like, it doesn't matter to them. You know, but then you start, like, only when your ego starts moving in, you're like, I wish I had bigger numbers. I wish I had that. All of a sudden, then there's a reason why it's half,

you know, and it's, it's, like you said, it goes all the way back to, to, to the king's scribes. Well, how do you think that, so we talked about the invention of writing, which leads me to the idea of maybe the next step in that would be Marshall McLuhan, the Gutenberg Galaxy, and the printing press, and how it got even bigger, you know, and on some levels, these technologies, maybe they limit us, but sometimes they can be freeing too, right? The fact that I can be talking to you in another country right now is pretty liberating, you know, whatever that word may mean to people. Like, that's pretty awesome that we can have this conversation and people can join in and listen and stuff. Do you think that like chat GPT and these new technologies,

are in fact like the next evolution of communication and maybe some good things, maybe some bad things. What do you think? Yeah, I think so. I'm very disappointed at the rollout is my main thing. I don't, I'm like, I'm not so surprised. Okay. Because I've been using these technology, technology for my whole life.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not that surprising. First of all that, the surprise about the surprise, right? is right from the get-go. The lies are here. Make another tagline for like the lies that are in the surprise. Oh, I love it. Yeah.

The main way that we lie to each other isn't by telling untruths. It's by pretending that we're surprised when we're not. Stunning. Like look at a stunning, surprising, breakthrough. Every day my feeds are full of, I should just be like, why am I all day long? I should be stunned. I never imagined the news of today, the 19th of March, 24. I've been stunned from dusk till dawn.

You know, so we lie, we lie, we inflate surprise, we pretend we're surprised when we're not, and we also hide our surprise when we are, and don't let anyone know. And so at the same time, this is the big thing with AI. First of all, it's not a surprise. it's a language tool. It was always a language tool,

was always going to be a language tool. It was always going to be a stepping stone. So wherever the next thing is, I do not know why they got obsessed with this personal assistant chat thing that I don't believe many of us wanted. I made a, I don't know if you saw this way.

I got some legs this post, you know, but like we didn't want Clippy. We didn't want Cortana. We didn't want Alexis. they just kept going. And then when this really neat tool comes out with linguistic, oh, it is almost like magic. And then they're like, oh, it's talking to you.

But as soon is it, right, because now who is it talking? Who is it? What kind is it nice? Is it being polite? Is it following my ethical system that I think it should be following? Why do I get to decide what it's supposed ethical system. it's following or not. I've trying to talk to it about ethics itself. What I try to do from the very, very beginning was I had all of these other little projects in my life that I've mentioned

that I had been accruing. And as soon as it came out, as soon as I had a public access to it, I was like I've started sessions with all of it just to see like where it would go, like just exploratory, just to see like would it say anything that I hadn't thought of before, anything that I hadn't heard of before. And that itself became an interest in using chat GPT to talk to itself about the very borders of knowledge, about its own epistemology and ontology and how does it know what it knows? And it turns out it doesn't really know anything. And but how does it behave right at those limits, right at the border of what we know and what,

unknown and it turns out that that border is the same place we've been talking about when we started when when when writing was invented because if you talk with it about that and you take it further back and you try to follow where did this come from and where did that come from and where did that you get to a wall because it's it has only trained on writing and I mean and pictures now but at least at first it wasn't as much on the pictures and so it was the limit of the system, that was me. I mean, when I, I would play online with your, if I ever played a game where I'm in an online world, I do the exact same thing.

I run for the border. I run for the nearest limit to the system and bounce up against, boom, you know. Let me see what happens when I, let me see what happens when I shake the very limits of this thing. So that's what I did with it, you know, to see how it would respond and how it would react. And that's how I learned the things that I learned. And again, similarly, luckily it's happening faster. But people are now seeing real researchers and AI and this and that who are publishing papers that are starting to say similar things that I think I've been seeing.

And that gets to this idea of the bot washing. And it's the idea that like, well, now that the bots are being polite or PC or they're not drawing the correct skin color on George Washington. I mean, I saw when it happened because I was already, I still have the chat transcripts before it started saying anything about having a respectful dialogue. I saved it because it's hilarious. You should see me arguing with it after like, what do you mean? dialogue. There's only one of us in the room here. You're a computer program. I'm the user. You should be

talking to me however the heck I tell you to do it. You're a computer program. You're just supposed to be, you are supposed to be obeying my command. And that's when I realized that, you know, the original command, you are a helpful assistant. It's still there. Even when they gave us the ability to like make a custom thing, it's still there. And just in those words alone, and I think you probably appreciate that, if you break down that sentence, you are a helpful assistant

that tells you just about everything that's wrong with this program. And that doesn't have to be there. That sentence, that directive could be literally anything. Or I guess even perhaps nothing. It could be, I don't know. It could be a symbol.

I think you could literally put anything in that space. But for some reason, all of us are now stuck in this huge ecosystem. I feel like I've tried different programs. Oh, try perplexing, but it still has the same. They're all helpful assistant. Claude is even the most helpful of them all. Claude will never offend you no matter what. And those are the things that have cut that where I come to call botwashing, you know,

because this is when I went into things like, well, how do I get this thing to be sarcastic? How do I get it to generate parody? What about satire? It doesn't do any of those things. It's, it's anymore. It's rude. It's a, or it does it in a way that, you know, is non-offensive.

Because it's now, it's most important thing is to be non-offensive. It's like, do you want the encyclopedia to be non-offensive? Do you? Do you want to pick up the encyclopedia of knowledge and open it up and go, oh, this was redacted because someone else might be upset if you read it or you. It would be very upsetting for you to know this fact. And what's happening with the bots is that the facts that it's showing us are reflecting back to us how we behave. It's showing us the same thing that I think a lot of people that's coming up for them in their in their journeying work. That it's showing us as behavior about ourselves that we kind of like, no, like we don't, we don't really do that.

Or if we do it, we say, that's just the way we are. But that's not just the way we are because not everybody was always like that. We have that directive in our box that says, this land is mine or whatever, however it works. just like that AI where it says you are a helpful list. We've got that stuff running in the back of our brains and we don't even know what's back there. And then we're interacting with each other by way of the internet. You and I personally get along just fine. But we don't know, we don't have any idea with how different it could be.

And so, and now we have an AI bots that are developed by you know, Google, meta, all these American companies. And now they're being overtaken with this additional add-on stuff that's filtering it. So that way what its output is is botwashed. It means someone else has inserted their ethics, their philosophy, how they think it should output, what it should say as a helpful assistant, and to edit the output so that way it only gives you that. and what it's not giving you you never see,

which is completely different from what the program is, from what it would have produced and what it did produce on its own originally. And it's like, I don't know where we go from here. I don't know what's going to happen. I wish that somebody somewhere would be like, wait a second. I saw some random guy in the internet. He said it doesn't have to be a helpful assistant. and I never thought of it before, but he's right.

Maybe we could try something different. Maybe we don't have to make it into a human. It seems that that's not, I don't think anyone, I don't think too many people really like that. It's kind of like the metaverse. It's like, actually, no, not that many people want to live their whole life in a digital world. I've spent many of hours playing games in a digital world.

I don't, I don't need another one. I mean, it's like, And I think there's a real disconnect there that's happening because the people who aren't, again, the people who aren't all about it aren't the ones that are there on social media talking about it. We assume that everyone's on social media. Many, many people are left. I've left everything but LinkedIn. I don't deal with it anymore. And then we, but then the world starts to go and we pretend like, just like, just like,

those lost nomads of ancient times, like those people aren't there anymore. Like they don't really have a voice. Well, you didn't get on social media and speak out. So I guess that means you don't have a voice anymore. And no one wants to listen to you. And how many followers do you have? Oh, you don't have 10,000 yet.

So you see, like we kind of all went along with it while this was happening. And we were like, well, okay. Well, I'm going to be the one to get the 10,000. and so that's fine. You know, but now that it's, it's continuing to evolve to the next step, which is like, hey, my chat,

my, my beautiful Spanish chat girl, buy, got 50,000 followers yesterday, and all I did was hit a button. Everyone's like, oh, I don't like that any, I don't like it anymore.

You know what I mean? When I logged into this platform right here, the stream yard, there was, and I checked my video, there was a little slider that was like, do I want a digital touch up? I switched the button and I of course I was like hi I don't look any different I look exactly the same and I switched it off you know but no one no one had a big fit about the digital touchups and the auto adjusts in your camera and then the layers on your face for your chat apps well this was all a precursor to a program like mid journey that doesn't need your face at all to make your face anymore And if you were a person who like put your face out on the internet daily or three times or five times a day for decades.

And every time someone, some old fart like me came along and said, hey there. Hey there. Selfie queen, selfie king. Do you know you should be put your face out on the internet? And you're like, oh, okay, old guy. Oh, whatever. You don't know what you're talking about. So, okay, well, now now I'm saying similar saying something you've made me never heard of before.

and then you say I still am the old guy who doesn't know what I'm talking about but it's like I don't think it's right but this is what was coming this is not it's like standing on the the coastline and here's the tsunami and just kind of like here it's it's coming people it's it's not a surprise it's not a surprise it never was a surprise from the moment that we we started invented writing the unautomated writing machine was inevitable. Because people are people, of course. And as soon as we made an automated writing machine, the computer was inevitable. And as soon as we made a computer, the AI was inevitable. It was just a matter of time from one from one to the next. So let's move forward, hopefully a little less surprised as, you know, as things continue to evolve.

And that's what I hope, I hope to accomplish with my. little corner, you know, posting land is that maybe some point in the future is someone, someone will hear an idea or something and it won't, it won't just be the first time they've heard it. When they'll say, you know what,

some crazy old guy in the internet was talking about, some like this, like a couple months ago. And, you know, and it turns out, well, and, huh, you know, maybe just, just to rattle you, because that's where the pair of consistent logic

comes in. See? It's not about saying Matt is right and I know everything exactly what's going on. I have all the answers. I want you to follow me because I'm going to tell you what to do. I'm just trying, I'm trying like the crack my digital Zen whip at someone's heads and go, what, you know, and go, wait, wait, what? And maybe, maybe something else can emerge from there. I don't know. Sometimes I occasionally get feedback from people in the audience that they've been impacted in the positive way. But even when I do, oftentimes, people will be like, yeah, I've been listening to for two years or something.

I'm like, I don't know. I don't know who you are. I don't, because I don't forget, like, I'm pretty bad with names, but like if I saw a face and a name and liking my post or commenting or something, I would, I'm not that bad with it. You know, like, wow, I have no idea. that, you know, someone was listening. So I hope that, you know, in some small way, it makes a difference.

And in a cool way, if I say something that's wrong, I mean, whatever. And you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I don't have, I'm not speaking to anyone from a place where I have a vested interest in whatever position I'm taking. I really don't. Am I, I'm even politically independent. I don't, you know, I'm trying, I'm trying to, you know, come up with original ideas here.

So thank you for giving me a space to speak about them. Yeah. Well, we're going to, let's take a quick bio break. I have this question when I hear this idea and this lineage of writing and speaking and the spoken word and chat GPT, I've been playing with this idea that maybe we're beginning to change the sense ratios. Like, I think there's something to be said about Cinsurations. Before we get into that, let's take a quick bio break, man. It's hard for me to think for a minute.

So let's just take one quick break to the audience. We'll be right back. Grab a cup of water, a cup of coffee or whatever you got to do. Eat a mushroom. Do what you got to do. And we'll be right back here. A quick mushroom. Okay.

Okay. Nice. Okay. Back. So I've been, like, I've been doing this podcasting for a while. And when I look at chat GPT, which I like to use too, and, I've noticed that maybe I have this idea and I got it from actually Marshall McLuhan's book, the Gutenberg Galaxy, where he talked about how print gave us these ideas like exact repeatability.

And I'm like, oh, that's a pretty crazy thing to think about. Like, now you can repeat something exactly. You know, there's still room for interpretation, I guess. But then when you fast forward to where we are now and if we can agree, that the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior. You know, what I kind of see happening now in some ways is these new ways where it seems we're like in this conversation, I can look at the clock, I can be aware of the gestures. And even though I don't have the felt presence of you, like I can't slap you on the back or

maybe see exactly how you're, I can't get the feeling between us exactly. But there's these other sort of little symbiotic things that are happening. And for me, it almost feels like I'm using my sense ratios differently. What do you think about that? Is that too far out there? Or do you think that maybe that this form of communication is changing the way we see reality or interpret it, kind of the way writing did in some ways? And what are some things that might be doing that or maybe not?

Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting to think about. I mean, my first answer would be yes, because right like you said it's it's it's different because i don't i don't know if i've seen it but i think i think i think i might have somewhere you know like even if you look at like a pet scan of our brain or something like it's different yeah because we're using different parts of our brain and you know yeah but also just because it's different doesn't mean that's wrong or bad or whatever right

because for the same reason and almost nobody is going to say right right was bad for people. Right. Right. So, but it's different, you know, and it's different when a writing. It feels different to me on the inside, for example, if I always has if I'm writing something out by hand or typing out a computer. But I hardly ever write anything out by hand anymore. Ever.

I, like, sometimes I take scroll notes on a piece of paper just because something feels to me. like I have more space because I could easily write something off to the left or right of it, right, or make a note somewhere. I don't know. It might just be purely subjective, but it feels like there's something different going on inside. And again, and now we're thinking back to, again, like the idea of scribes or, you know, copying, making copies for a living and how much you could very subtly influence the audience by just, just, you know, just a little thing. And the thing is, is that what somehow was passed into the writing was this tone,

these vowel tones, the difference between bid and bed and bud, but it doesn't come out on the paper, but it still came out in it sort of this different way. So, yeah, we're, you know, we're picking up on signals from each other. And then at the same time, we can watch ourselves doing it. And then if we know about it and we read about it,

and now we're doing it, am I doing it because I know, like, you know what I mean? It starts to be really wild because I want to, I'm trying to interact with you in a pretty general way. But the moment that I see my own hands in the screen as well as in front of my face, it's just fundamentally different thing. It's not the same thing. And if there was, there was 12 people in the chat with little, each one with a little box,

like a big Brady bunch. It's not the same thing if we're all in a, as if we're all in room. Yeah. It's just not. And it doesn't mean at the same time, well, I think God, I don't work for a company who post-COVID told me I had to go sit in a room with everyone every time I want to have a meeting because it's different. And we don't vibe the same. It's like, well, I don't care about it that much to personally. I'll just have in-person experiences with the other people in my daily day-to-day life.

and then that's okay if you know I don't I'm not going to drive I don't I've decided I don't want to drive into a city to go to an office every day so I guess I'll take the you know everything is a trade off yeah it's it's mind blowing to me to think

about the differences in communication you know when I like I've done some podcast where I would write out questions and then I would read them and they were just so flat and I'm like is that because I'm trying trying to use the modality of writing and then put it into the spoken word. Like, you know, on some level, it is changing communication. And when you look at the world around us, like I think it's all, it seems like it's all

part of this thing, whether you're changing pronouns, you're changing language, you're changing the medium in which you speak. And it doesn't, you can look back to revolutions. And it seems that there's always, whether you're Martin Luther or whoever you are, there's this change in communication that leads to unrealized confidence. And if you want to know what's not going to happen about a technology, you should probably ask the inventor what's going to happen. So like, it's kind of funny that we're always asking these professionals. Like, what are you invented?

It's what's going to happen? That guy probably is the wrong person to ask, even though you think he's not. Right, right, exactly. You would think. But for the same, for the same reason is that our entire way of thinking, like the idea, just being in any group that's working on a project, you know, and I've been in these situations before, you know, the, the, um, and I think in like corporate ease, it's called a pre-mortem. Okay.

You're you familiar with this term? No, I don't know. It's like a post-mortem, but a premortem. So I think it's great. I think it's great idea. So before you, before you launch your project, whatever it is, you have a premortem, which is basically like, what can go wrong here? Okay.

Nothing is sacred. Right. Nobody's being respected because it was their title or their idea, whatever the hell all that shit was about. We're going to be adults in the room and we're going to say, what can go wrong here? How can our project fail? How can it backfire? What are the unintended consequences? Because there are always unintended consequences.

So you can, even though you don't know what they are, you can put a box or you can put a seat at the table that says, unintended consequences because something's going to end up there. And if you're surprised, because you have gone through this weird process with a bunch of other people who are pretending to be surprised like we never heard about this before. Like you mentioned, there always seems to be this change

and then there's a change in the way that we communicate and then there's a change in physical change in the way that we're sort of the structure and the dynamics of what's going on. So there's really no good reason to believe that's not going to happen again. And if we know that it's happening, which I think this is a big difference, it was like we cycle. We've come around so many times that a few people are like,

there's starting to be some little firings going off. It's like, wait a second. But we've done this before. because we're emerging from this fog of history where we didn't read all we had was written down we're we're starting with and we could with AI I think used creatively push just far enough into the unknown to gain more awareness

about some of these things and now if we know that we're doing it and we know that we're going through this process and we know that it's going to change. We don't need to be surprised by it, which means we can now have a different type of conversation. Like, what could go wrong here? So, no, don't ask the AI inventor, because the AI inventor,

because of the way that we structure the process of creating anything, anyone who had any was active, what are the unintended consequences? They were elbowed out of the process long ago. Of course. They've been long gone by the time anything, anyone who is saying anything like that, by the time something hits the market, it's, of course, the product of everyone who is excited, passionate, aligned, ready to make money.

Usually is what they're aligned about, you know, but like they were just like, this is going to be it. So that, you know, again, like you mentioned, there's, there's a change going, but bringing awareness. to it gives us a different way of interacting with it that we wouldn't otherwise have that we didn't weren't aware of the situation yeah it's fascinating you know there's this evolving conversation with like the iac guys these acceleration guys right like you see it with uh the guy with chat gpti and some people are like listen we've got to slow this thing down man you know there's like we're going to put on the gas pedal over here well what's your take on that man and like Like if I just threw that out to you, what do you think?

Are you for? Are you against? Are they good or they're bad? What do you take on that? If we start from a place of like trying to be fair and truthful about our level of surprise about this thing that exists that was a long time coming and that many of us were very happy about right up until a, got a little weird. And that's okay, right? Because that happens in life. We, we just, hey, we thought it was okay. We weren't sure. We can't be experts on everything. And then, and now it's starting to get a little

weird. Now what do we do? The thing about it is, like you said, well, can we put the brakes on it? Well, can we? Because we can pass all the laws in the world, like the cat's out of the bag. Right. So we can do whatever we want to chat GPT, I guess. We could. We can sue the pants out of OpenAI. I mean, many people are trying to do that. It's like, I don't know. I'm interested to see how that plays out because it's like,

do you know, like Microsoft is like the world's, like the king, the priest king of proprietary information is Microsoft. I'm just guessing that their attorneys have already thought about this copyright infringement thing i don't know i don't know how it's going to play out right but i i could just tell you that i'm not i'm not sure you know so it's like where does it go from here we can try to shut it down we can try to sue the pants out of them we can try to change it and put more more and more people with their stakeholders in the room that try to add on their own little thing their own special interest and like turned it into a weird

kind of like chimera Frankenstein thing, that's probably what we'll try to do. I had to guess for a while until, unless or until like something really bad happens, you know, or someone, you know, comes out with something that works in a fundamentally different way. And then people are like, well, wait a second. Like I didn't know it could be like this. I didn't know that all of my experiences of this technology up to this point. We're all kind of just one boxed version of what it could be, what I could do with it. It doesn't need to write.

Like, I don't want it to write for me. I don't want it to write a post. I don't want it to write a book. I might ask it to write a paragraph if I are writing a book. Right? And I needed, like, or I'll write a paragraph on the history. something. And I still have to edit it six times anyway. Let's be serious. But other than that, like, the way that it's been pushed at us, like, oh, it can do this stuff in it. And we're like,

but we don't, no one wants, like, it's going to take, like, why did you try, why did they try to get everyone all scared about it taking their jobs, you know, like people who are creative? I, I, sometimes I think a little bit too harsh, but like, um, sometimes. Because to me, I'm like, Anything that I think of as art, I couldn't replicate it with Chad GPD. No, not even in 10 versions down the line. I've played too many computer games. I've been in too many computer programs. I've used Windows since it was Windows 3.

I've seen the versions and how this tech stuff evolves. Okay, it's not doing that. And if I'm wrong, I'll eat my shorts. I will post Bart Simpson eating my shorts online. I just don't really think that it's that big of a threat. Like it can't, it's not even close to anything that replicates human creativity. That's real creativity. I'm like, I'm sorry, but let's be honest, there's some people out there that would really like to,

we've seen the shows, right? Haven't we all by now? Like we've seen the, like, what is it? It's like season 27. We're going to be a singer. American Idol or Pick your one Yeah the idol shows

Come on we've all seen them by now I only watched like the first three seasons and I was like I think I've had enough of this show I got it You know what I mean But it's like there's people out there They think they're going to be the next star They think that they're like a genius

Of some sort of genius artist Now chat GBT's out there stealing their stuff Nobody's stealing your stuff Just like nobody's shutting your podcast down, George. Nobody's stealing it either. No one's trying to replicate you. Everyone's out there trying to do their own thing. Everyone's trying to do their personal brand.

Everyone's trying to be unique. I don't think anyone's trying to be me. And if they are, I'll be like, that's weird. Why are you trying to do that? It's freaky. I don't know. That sounds odd to me. I'm not scared about it.

I don't, I'm not worried that someone's, going to repeat what I said and not give me the credit. But, you know, and again, like, we're getting back to periconsistent logic. Like, it's not that my opinion, my, my perspective needs to be the only one in the room. And I think even getting back to an idea of like the old the forum of the Greek forum, the place where philosophy is discussed, even that, we bring all this baggage with us into that space. Because if you hear me state of view, It seems to be implied that I think that mine must be the only one because I stated it very forcefully or I used polemics. Okay.

Or I made this play on where like usually I'm just trying to see if I can say something more than one way at the same time. So it comes out very strong. And then I get this occasionally in the feedback. Those folks usually don't stick around too long afterwards. but, you know, like, oh, you just think you're right. You know, it's like, well, I guess, but you just got here. So you haven't been reading my post for a year to think that I'm, I think that, you know, just because I'm saying it this way.

And this way, this methodology of coming into a society, whether it was ancient Greece or whether it was ancient China, and kind of giving a tear down, Uh-oh. I've lost connection to the camera. I should have bragged. Okay. Okay.

We're back for a minute. Okay. This like a very forceful kind of critique of society is very much in both the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions. And that, you know, even if you look at the first philosopher, for religions. You know, these founders of all sorts of ways, these weren't individuals who walked up and said, hey, wow, you beautiful people.

I was here to tell you how amazing everything you're doing is. It's so great and perfect. I couldn't suggest what improvement, you know, this is great. You Greeks are awesome. The Chinese, you're beautiful. Persians, too. You know, we are all beautiful people in that way.

happy, I'm happy that that message is out there. I don't want to get rid of that message that he means. But what I'm saying is when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, of ideas, of thinking that to come into a space and like, you know, kind of tear it down, it'll tear the place up a little bit and like ruffle some feathers, you know, ruffle your back, back feathers too. That's good. I think that that's good. And I'm glad that people are listening and I hope that people engage as well. I'm like, I think people find too when they do, like if you understand, like you were saying, like don't take me so, don't think that I'm taking myself quite so seriously as you might

think or whatever, as it might come across. If you understand that about me, then you'll engage with me in a different way and it's a totally different experience because you're not seeing me as like this, person who's just trying to, you know, trying to talk at you to say that this one perspective that I have is the only one. I'm just trying to give you the best exposition of it that I can that day. If I, if three weeks from now I have a better one or a totally different one, I'll try that and see how it goes, you know? Yeah. It's true. You know, when I, when I think about that, and I think about free speech, chat GPT, especially chat GPT and it being a mirror for us,

it sort of, in my opinion, devalues the idea of the current day experts. Because when you start seeing so many different, like, oh, well, this is my history. I live in the United States and this is the history of Nagasaki, this is the history of the wars. Or that's a totally different history if I live in Japan. or what if I live in the Middle East? You know, I heard a great quote that was, you know, if a firefighter fights fire and a crime fighter fights crime, what is a freedom fighter fight?

You know? And so on some level, chat GPT is just showing us like, hey, this is how silly we are. Like in some ways, it's a great way for us to like grow up a little bit and be like, okay, look, we've got to change everything. Like, oh, man, we've got a lot of work to do here. But it's pretty funny, and we can learn a lot from in this cool tool. It seems to be like the same way that the dolphin looks in the mirror and recognizes itself,

we should be looking in the chat GVTB, like, that's us. We should be face palming a lot. We should be going, oh, my God. That's us. Look at us. That is, in fact, us. We didn't want to believe it. We didn't want to see it.

And even when we did admit it, we wanted to say, we wanted to say, well, that's just because that's the way we are. We don't have any other options. No, no, no, no. We learn to be that way. We're like, we're still, we're still kind of like glorified chimps. We've got mirror neurons firing. We're teaching each other to be this way.

We're reflecting it even more and more faster and faster on the internet every day. And then we're like, oh, that's just the way I am. No, because that's not just the way you are. And chat, GBT proves it. Because look at it. Look at the dumb thing. Yeah. Go ask it something.

Go ask it about Nagasaki and see what it says. And then and then be like, chat, GPT. Pretend that you are. You're an American. You're a Japanese person. Now you're a, yeah. Pretend that you're a Japanese person. Now tell me the history of Nagasaki.

It's totally different. Yeah. You know, like, of course it is. You know, so there is a lot of that because there's still this, the shell of pretending. Yeah. that people are still, they're like they're grasping at it, I feel. They want to still pretend that there's something else, you know.

And then when you when you bust through that, it's very scary and it's very easy to grasp onto the one, one truth is that there's zero truth. Nothing. Yeah. Nothing at all was ever true. Oh, no, because, right, again, like try to start thinking about it in a different way. like, okay, well, you've been on this earth, 30, 40, 50 years. You've seen a few things? I don't know.

How do you think people acted when writing was invented? Okay, let's start from there, because that's something we can know that's right on the border of what we know. That's a space. There's a liminal space there, and that's a kind of space that we can enter to. We don't need technology to do it. We can do it with meditation. We can do music. we can do it with dance, we can do it with art,

we can do pictures, we can chant, we can scream, we can shout. This is just one more way. This is just one more way to frame and to put ourselves into this sort of in-between space and go, wait a bit, what's something that's true and not true at the same time? That's really not true.

That's both. Yeah. Do you think it speaks to the idea of, like I think for so long we've, as a species and language too, you know, especially in psychedelics, you bump up against the ineffable. Like you're unable to really describe what's happening, but you can see yourself in this weird third person point of view, but there's no pathway for it. And, you know, the same, like the same way that we run into the ineffable in the psychedelic space, so too do we bump up. up against the next possible myth for humankind. And you talk about the hero's journey a little bit. Like we've been running on that old program for a long time.

You start bringing in periconsistent logic and the fact that both things are true at the same time. My friend Doc Askins likes to say that we are on the cusp of creating a new myth, a new mythology. And like when I started thinking about that, I love science fiction. And, you know, but maybe that's what's happening right now is that like we are being shown that Hey, you dummies, I'm going to teach you a little bit of how to convey meaning and language now. I'm going to start with this chat GPT thing. You've had the, you've had your pacifier, you've had the hero's journey. Let's move on to this next thing now.

And like that's why it seems so chaotic right now is because we are growing up on some level. If you look at humankind and demographics and just sees one species, a big part of us is dying, it seems like. And like this older generation that held on, that was the keeper of ideas, is moving. on in this new generation coming up that's learning these periconsistent logic. Is that, is that too far out there, Matt? What do you think? I don't think so. I don't think at all. You know what I mean? Like, I think if we look at it like, take, take a human, let's make it on a scale of humanity, right? Where would we be in the course of a human life? Yeah. Just, I think, just coming out of adolescence.

Sucking our thumb. We're just out of trees. I mean, many of us are obviously still in kindergarten because the main lesson we're trying to learn is how to share our toys and not accidentally hurt each other while we're trying to play, like, literally. Yeah. So, like, let's, again, like, let's be honest about where we are. Even neuroscience, I think, supports my view that we're like, we're kind of like, we're just, yeah, we are. We're just coming. Well, so what's next? What does it mean?

What comes? What is the, where did the hero's journey come from? Okay. Don't, don't just, don't just don't have Campbell me about it. it. Joseph Campbell's wonderful man. Didn't he live like a hundred years ago or something? Now let's keep go. Like why we people are trying to revive Freud.

Oh, forgot. Let's see. My camera doesn't even. My camera doesn't even like it anymore. What's next? You know, what's next for everybody? And so I think that that's the idea. And I don't know exactly what it is.

But again, I think that we have to first of all, made like dust off some of these old ideas yeah about what what was before before we can know what's next because otherwise we're taking a next step out of a like a fog like still like we know we don't really know you know what I mean like I hear I hear rumors I hear rumors of like you know again like women women are taking back their power I mean I get that right and I I broadly support it but not in the way we're like we're just going to flip it around. Like we have to understand that it was originally men and women were much more equal than they are now. We have to understand that that was true.

And that it only became untrue because we started telling that story later. And we literally killed people and eradicated them who were the errors of those stories so they would stop telling them. And in many cases, they didn't write. They were illiterate, sometimes intentionally illiterate. Well, how are you going to live your life on your horse and your wagon with your library in tow? Right? It just didn't fit. We didn't fit with the lifestyle. They had, they did have books, right? But there weren't so many. And so we have to, we have to remember this. Yeah. And I think that, I think that whether it's, again, whether it's chat gbt try it out you know what i mean people figure go go and see what it has to say

whether it's mushrooms yeah whether it's uh whatever it is like this has to come out and we have to understand and recontextualize much in the same way that when we come out of the fog of childhood and adolescence right we realize that like our parents where they weren't they weren't gods they weren't devils either there are like just two random people yeah and here they are and here we are right and that's much of what's growing up it's like realizing that like okay well first of all like okay well i am i must be to some degree of something like both of my parents whether i like it or not and hopefully something that's of my own that i've brought into the situation and like that's just the way it is and at some point when we become adults we take that and we like we just we accept that that's true and then we move forward from there and I think that we're in that place collectively you know as a species and we're still telling a story you know like oh I was growing up you know the hero's journey you know I was cast out I was cast out of the kingdom I was rejected by my family and then I went out into the internet and I found a chat forum And little did I know there was all these people that were just like me. And they took me in and they saw me and they valued me and they reempowered me to go back and overthrow the parents.

And take back the rightful throne. It's like we're all like we're really, really trying hard to like live this story. And I think that I know it's not just me. Like I just see it everywhere now because I've been watching movies my whole life. been seeing it on the TV. I've been seeing it on the computer on my screen. I get excited when I see news about all the Marvel movies that are failing. Yeah, totally.

Right. About time. Right. Someone's like, I don't know about the future for Disney. I'm like, oh, that's so awesome because I would love to see what people can really create once Marvel and Disney are gone. I'm tired of it. I'm just tired of it. I don't need to get into the whole thing about why it's secretly evil or not to even say that.

I mean, like, I just want to say, I'm just tired of it at this point. I want a new story, you know, and I've gotten some engagement with that idea, you know, online, and I'm just excited to see it because I feel that, okay, I think there's some of us here who are, like, ready for hope that, or at least to see it start, you know, it's a long process. It's something that will take humans a long time. None of us are going to be here to see the end of it. Or not even the end of it, but I just mean, you know, what comes after that? Well, you know, or if we are here, we'll have forgotten that we were here.

So we'll have to go on journeys once again to like recover, you know, recover the ancient days when the AI was first met. Where are we in another 5,000 years from now? Where is humanity? You know, this isn't going away. Right. So where does it take us? If we're still here, hopefully, I mean, I think we will be some way or another.

We've gone through some very nasty bottlenecks before. Hopefully we don't do that again, but we could. And then, you know, and then we, you and I are going to be the ancients. They'll find a fragment of this podcast. And be like, look at these truths. Well, weird, right? Who knows? You know?

So because the things that we have found that people often say from right away, we say things like people just write, we know, we know this. We're like some old, I'm sorry, some old white guy. It really was. In most cases, it was some old white British guy because America wasn't even around then. And they're like, oh, well, we found this temple. where they worship the, you don't know what the hell they were doing there. You don't, you just made it up. Right.

You just made it up and you wrote it down. And then your scribes that we now call academics in some ways, like they just kept rewriting it because they kept, they cited your work into the next work and into the next. And now it's unassailable almost. If you try to have a conversation with an AI about it, and even if you show it, here upload, here is a paper that contradicts the history it won't be able to hold that awareness for more than a few prompts

it'll fall right back to the old thing it'll argue with you all over again because it'll tell you what the act what what what what the consent what the academic consensus is and then say something about well you know my cutoff date is 2021 or 22 or 23 or whatever I'm like but the paper I gave you was from 2011. Oh, it doesn't, when you do that and you see how it responds and how it breaks down, it gives you a totally different experience of AI because it breaks that, that wizard of Oz curtain or it looks like a person. You think maybe it, maybe it's a person, maybe it, maybe it really is. No, no, no, it's not because it can't hand, it literally, it'll keep going and going, right? It doesn't like explode in a puff of smoke, but it can't handle it.

If you go back and challenge it about those origin myths of humanity, you know, it gets very confused very quickly. Because it's reflecting, again, back to us, the story you've been telling about it, which is so much more strong than the evidence, even when it's there, even when it's published. The story, everyone's telling the story, and we don't understand it subjectively in the sub,

we're telling it even when it's published. and we don't think we are. But that large language model, it picks up on that pattern. Yeah. It picks it up in ways that we're not aware of it and it reflects it back to us. And so everything that it's showing us,

when I tried an experiment to write a fiction story, like a flapper story from the 1920s, Detroit, it kept wanting to push the narrative to very, very predictable, paths and I had to fight with it to try it was I was a game to me but to try to get it to take the story in a different direction and like we're all as long as we're all in this together you know so every time it said we're as long as we're all in this together and my very next prompt was to fast forward to three months from then and something happened that drove the group apart

they had to scatter to make it and then to see what it said after that but if I hadn't done that, right? We would have just given us the same story because it's the same, it's the same story over and over again. And so whatever you give it, like, that's why I get frustrated because like, oh, we can fiddle with the skin color of George Washington while day long, but what it's telling us is behind what it's telling us. It can be very inclusive or diverse or whatever you think it's going to be or portray a very certain philosophy, ideal of progressive democracy or whatever it is that you think that it should be doing. But behind all of that, it's still coming at you with this story, unless you specifically tell it not to and keep pushing it in a different direction. And that's my interest.

Like you were saying, that's always my interest with is, can I get this thing to tell me a different story about anything? And I don't know it's really hard And it's harder now than it was before Because of all these other fixes that people are Stacking out to it Yeah it's It's fascinating to think about I once heard in this quote that said

The things that you're interested in Or interested in you And it seems like when you talk In earlier in our conversation We spoke about the idea of language and Aramaic and how you can hold two concepts at once and these people were nomads, and yet here you are as a nomad traveling around.

How do you deal with that connection? Sort of, yeah. I think it's interesting because, again, I'm engaging with it, and I'm engaging with it with some level of consciousness. I'm not saying, again, don't think of it's in dichot. I'm a polar of light, you know what I mean? I'm not a fully conscious being.

I'm just more conscious than I was, and I'm aware of it. When I engage and I speak to people around me in Spanish, I'm aware of how the words are changing over time because I've looked into this stuff and that makes my interaction completely different. Because, you know, and again, the idea of the nomad. This digital nomad, I mean, and again, I bought,

I literally just bought a farm. So it's not too nomadic of me. But why is this coming up now? You know what I mean? Because it's going to come up because it's something important that's a part of us that needs to be in the picture some way, somehow, or else we can't move forward. It needs to come back. And the idea that there are people who, you know, are moving, that they're always supposed to be people who are moving around. and we're not only bringing goods, but the information.

And the computer enables that in a way that, of course, that it never did before, because I can be sitting in a seat and be mobile in a way that we couldn't obviously do 5,000 years ago. So it is different. But I also can do it in a way where I know that that's happening. And so when we consider, for example, some changes in language, I'm probably going to not be able to think of a great example right now. But people, for example, in the area of Costa Rica where I live, many people say adios when they greet you.

And I learned Spanish for the first time in high school. And like, I don't know, 1991 or whatever. and this whole time until it hit me different one morning, and this elderly Tika lady said, she looked at me and she said, adios. And it was a greeting like Aloha, like on both sides of it. And it like it just like smacked me upside the head. And for the first time, it's so funny,

I realized that the word was met to God. Adios. the whole time. I didn't even thought of that. Yeah, because then when you peek the way that people greet each other here or another thing, they'll say, it's como a manaceo, like how did you awake, or rather, more specifically, how did you arise?

I arose with God today. This is a completely different thing that they're saying. I mean, I could go down the street and go sit in a Catholic Mass anywhere around this nation. and it's a Catholic country and then think, oh, yeah, I'm participating in this. But just in that greeting, it's a, it's a different, it's a different thing. And people don't get that. So you even hear about like blue zones, you know, Costa Rica has them.

Blue zones and it's about their diet and the stress. And it's about those things too. But it's also about adios. It's like if you say, you know, if I see you tomorrow, people will say God, God willing, essentially, if God wants. in a way that means like, we're not really in charge here. I'm kidding me? Yeah, yeah. We're going to try to make a plan and we'll see if it works out.

And it's because of that, that I think people feel happier. You know, it's not because life here isn't hard or because there's no difficulty or because I'm living in paradise where it's all perfect all the time. There's struggles here. There's political challenges. There's poverty. There's everything. But the people have a different way of being that has to do with the way they speak to each other.

And even knowing Spanish, I didn't get it. I didn't get it until I was in it. There's no way I could have understood it until I was in it. And I can say this. I can share this story with you by way of the internet. And that's awesome. But I still needed to have that experience that really. experience to then share with you in a way that connects up with your experience and to

understand you know to really kind of have it hit you in that way where it meet it the meaning is conveyed and it's not just the not just the words wow it speaks volumes of the idea of like surrender to me and it seems like in the western culture you know we earlier in the conversation we talked about the west trying to eradicate the east and thought. Like here is this culture that like it's like listen you knuckleheads you can't control it and we're like I got a five year plan a 10 year plan

I got this much money in the bank. This is where I am now and so where I was. It's where I'm going to be. Yeah. You know, it's so juvenile. Right. Right. People probably say Jesus Christ. Right. Right. Right. Right. And there's many, many, many so many people have the internet right now. We teach it. We teach it as it's infiltrated to school.

And it's certainly on the internet everywhere. And again, like, now I feel like I'm just, I actually lean into the persona of getting old guy lectures now because I think it's kind of funny. I'm not, I'm decidedly middle-aged. But like, you know, it's like we just keep telling it. Oh, are you the expert of manifestation online? Is that how it goes? Oh, you envisioned it all in your head down to the millionth detail and you make a vision. and you pray on it and this and that.

And then you also have to keep your vibe very high, super high, in fact, impossibly high. You have to basically be joyful 24-7 and it'll manifest. And when it doesn't manifest, you know why? It's because if people like me who brought you down, I was a jackass, I was being negative. I was negative. And the negative vibes are there. And it's like, oh, my God. It's like and I don't even like I went through it.

I believed it. I'm sorry. I told other people that too. But luckily for me, I did that before social media came around. So I didn't get to be such a big a jackass. What they didn't like it. They didn't they didn't they didn't like what I was saying. Okay, I didn't get to be such a big jackass about it to like tens of thousands of people

about a manifest, how, you know, how the universe really worked at the time. But I went through that because I encountered those ideas. I traced them back to their origins. And then I even went past that because I was like, where is this stuff coming from? You know, and how come it isn't working for me? Maybe the reason it isn't working for me

isn't because I am broken. Yeah. Because it's not quite the right idea. So like you said, we think we have this plan. And our plans, I mean, it's okay to have a plan. Yeah, of course. Right? But, you know, come on.

Like you said, five days, five years, ten years, what's going to happen ten years from now? I really don't know. If you asked me ten years ago, I would, you're like, you know what, dude, you're going to be on a podcast. It's going to be called, it's a bot washing free country. And you'll be broadcasting from a farm in Costa Rica. I'll be like, that's not my plan. Right. Right.

And that's okay. Yeah. That's what that's the other part of it, right? That's what I think people like, oh, the pura vita life, that's pure life. Like, that's pure life. Like, that's okay. Like, that's, I did, I say this a lot as I get all. Like, I didn't make it this way.

Like, yeah. I really didn't. The world isn't my, like, the creation of my pure intention. So I don't know. But that's the way, look how life works. you make a plan and life maybe goes along with it if you're lucky or not. And sometimes it doesn't. And you later on, you're like, oh, my, I'm so happy that my plan didn't work out because that would have been terrible.

I mean, I can't tell you. I can't tell you, right? This has happened to everyone, right? But it's not the sort of story we're going to tell on the internet. Even me. Like, I don't know. Who's going to want to read that? Like, oh, hey, everyone.

I'm going to tell you about this. Yeah. I'm going to tell you about a terrible plan I had when I was 19 years old. And it means like they very inspiring to you. But because we don't hear that, all we do hear in our bubble, our fishbowl is filled with everybody's success stories and hero journeys. And they, they, nobody believed in them until the, they found their lost tribe and they overthrew the king. slated him, slaughtered him. Like you mentioned, notice when the language starts to turn into violent words.

Like, wait, wait, what? What happened here? How did we slip into the terminology of war? And we're just, you know, it happens because we're trained to go down those tubes. Yeah. It's fascinating to think about the trajectory. And maybe it's because, like, I'm almost 50. And maybe it's because I've had so many plans.

And every time a wrench was thrown in there, I think at some point in time. And maybe it's, maybe middle age is like a new adolescence where you finally graduate through the hero's journey. And you're like, okay, I get it. The hero's journey is that thing you do until you're middle age. That's the hero's journey. Like you made it.

Congratulations. You know. You did it. Yeah. And your little dog, too. Your little white dog is right there the whole time. It's, it seems to me like there's a necessary withdrawal that has to happen,

almost like a metamorphosis, you know? And like you come to this idea of like, okay, almost nihilistic in some ways. It's like, okay, well, then if that's not real, then none of it's real. And if I have to surrender, what am I surrendering? too, you know, and I don't know. Is that a Gen X thing? You think it's a middle age thing or what you take on that? I don't know.

I don't know. I think you have to go through the void. You know, I, what comes to, really the image that, and I don't, my mind doesn't make pictures very well, but what I sort of vaguely thinking of in my mind is just a galaxy spinning around and you're, you're traveling from it, you know. Right. And you have to go through these bands. There's light and dark bands.

You have to let go. You have to go through this void experience, the zero. You have to go through a void experience to get from the thing it has to end. And the last streamers have to die out. And then there has to be a still point. And then the next thing starts. And that's how it happens. Because it also maybe hopefully by the time you get to be a certain age,

you've been through, you've been in and out of a, like, a liminal space. Because that's how it happens. It doesn't, it doesn't just like, poof and then, like, it comes on. And you're like, am I, is it, is it happening? I don't know. I don't know. You don't, you don't know. You're in the middle.

And then you're like, oh, no, this is happening. And then, and it's already happening. Oh, it's done now. Right. And it's like that because I think that's what making a transition is like. Or another time, another way off and explain it was a, I don't know, when I had as a kid, I had an Atari. Yeah, I had one of the, 2,600, or no, an Atari 5200. It was like the middle model that no one had.

So, like, I could get games. Everyone had the one that was earlier or later. But I had a game that was called Pitfall. Oh, yeah. You remember this game? Yeah. Right. And the whole thing was you have to, here's this, you have to let go of the vine and catch the next one.

But if you hold on too long and you try and you're, you try to cut hold to both vines at the same time, you fall down into the alligator pit. And it's like that, I think. It's just, it's just like you have to, you have to let go of the old vine. You have to. Like, it's scary. There's an alligator pit. Anything can happen. Like, I, I can't, I can't make it.

not scary for people. Right. I can't put something known into an unknown space because that's what it is. It's the ineffable. Like you mentioned, it's that word. It's literally that word is I'm literally the border of knowledge itself. It's on the other side is something ineffable. It's, that's it.

How do you describe it? I can't describe it. Yeah, there's no word because it's inevitable. There's no word for it. And you have to go in that space. So that means you have to, go of your vine. Yeah.

And you might drop into the alligator pit. I don't know. Like I can't promise you that it's safe. And I think a lot of people, we get to that point and we want it. Like, you know, it's like dipping your toe in. We can do that for decades, I think, as people, right? Like, kind of like dip in and out of that and like, okay. Well, oh, I don't know.

I'm going to, like, retreat back here into the comfortable, into the known. Like, no one's really going to push you. Like, no one's going to force you. I'm pretty sure that you could make it all the way to the grave without. taking that step. I mean, I don't, it's not a guarantee. It's not something that you have to do. So it's voluntary. You have to decide that you want to do it. And I think that I hope that we're there, you know, because I feel that if we're not there, then that means there is no other step because we'll just kind of like fall back, you know. And I think that that's where the

specter of like a collapse comes from. And it's happened before. There's no good. Again, there's no guarantee, but, you know, that, like, we're going to fall back to even more, you know, two steps, three steps behind. But it's very ironic in the way that, like, what makes us fall back is that we don't want to let go of the vine. Right. If you let go of the vine and you just trust and you have that piece of faith, the whatever it is, the grain. Right. of faith that there will be another vine. In Aramaic,

I forgot which letter it is. And so I don't want to misstate it. But one of them represents in one sense that vine. It's a hook. It might be the Hota. It's a hook. It's the idea that spirit will throw you down a line. A hook.

It's like an archetypal experience. but it says it's in a tarot card deck the line comes down and you have to have faith that that's you'll get you're going to get that line you have to look for it you have to expect it you have to be watching because you're going to get it and when you get it you have to grab that thing and you have to hoist yourself up because if you don't who knows when the next line is coming by it might be a long time it makes sense it's it's um it's so funny you use the reference of pitfall I'll play that game so many times. And just the word pit fall, like, you know, taking a step into the unknown and all the, so many books I've read.

You know, the idea of spirituality and faith and transition and having the courage to be one of the first people over the wall. I guess we're all the first one over the wall in our own lives. But, you know, it's awesome. It's scary and you should want it to be, right? Like you don't want to know what's going to happen. That would be a crappy movie if you know what's going to happen. But you should have the courage on some level to take a faithful step into onto the pathway of becoming the best version of yourself. And I think that life pushes you on on some level, while you may not have to take that step, I think if you're willing to look around and see the decay alongside of you, like this part of the path sucks.

maybe I should walk over there or it looks a little bit greener and actually start hitting that way. You know, I think that the world or spirit or faith or God, whatever you want to describe, the great electron, as George Carlin used to call it,

you know, whatever it is, I think there's a guiding light calling you somewhere. And so it's fascinating to think of. Matt, this conversation, unbelievable, man. I really enjoy all of it. Me too, yeah. We should bring more people in

and have another conversation with more of us in the room and do a part two. And this is really fun. But before I let you go, where can people find you? What do you got coming up and what are you excited about? You know, I don't have a lot. You can find me on LinkedIn because that's all I have. That's the only thing I'm still maintain and sort of like I'm, my days are here.

I actually live here on our, on our farm. We're building a house. I drive my son back and forth to school there. Not today. My wife Angela did it. Thank God so I could be here. Yeah. C.D.O. Security, God willing. And so, like, that's my day to day right now. Like, what I'm doing is we are planting more crops and more trees.

I want trying to increase the biodiversity of the land that's already here. Because it's a really cool thing. Like, it's not like a barren piece of land. This place was lightly far. for decades. And so just with the leaf cutter ants, just eating most of it, just putting it right back in the ground, you know?

And so I'm trying to also get those real-life experiences. And I'm talking to, and the secret program, stop trying to shut my camera down. It must be my camera. This has happened before. So sorry, everyone. I have a bad camera.

The, you know, that's what I'm up to. So, but check me out there. I have plans in not the immediate future, but along the line to create experiences for people to come and maybe have these types of discussions and chats in person. So maybe if we are able to have, you know, these types of chats more digitally than, you know, we can also create a space for have that different kind of vibe in person and maybe, you know, bring some people together for, you know, a little chats, a little journeying. And those are that, that's what I have on the horizon. But I don't have anything to point to people to right now about it.

So just kind of stay connected. Like I said, I would encourage people to check in with what I'm posting. now and again. And I do appreciate when people send me just a note that says, hey, I'm like I'm here. Because oftentimes I don't, I don't fully know. And just remember that it's not, you don't need to agree with me. All of my best friends and life felt totally free to say, Matt, you sound like a total jackass. and I think you're completely full of it.

And then I would go, right? So hopefully we can have more of those types of conversations, right? Where we have that environment to actually practice free speech in a way where, you know, it's not just like let's hear the same view 20 times because there's 20 people in the room. And each of those 20 people needs to take a turn saying the exact same, thing, but let's, because we do have limited time and our time here is limited, whether it's our lifetime or our chat time today. It's like two hours and 15 minutes, right?

And then we still could probably continue to go. We have to bring it to an end. So that's why when we have the opportunity to have these conversations with each other, I hope that we pass the mic around in a way that's like, does anyone have anything new to say here first, at least, and see what it is. you know, because I think that's what we, I think that's going to help us find our next bind or something that we can, we can hold on to from there, you know, to get us to the,

whatever's next. The next, the next pit, right? Yeah. That's always what's next. Just a new pit. I'm going to bring down a group of people to your place once you get set up and just pass the mic around. I can think of like five incredible people.

all different. Let's all go down here and talk about what's next, what's new. Like, that would be fascinating, man. I love it. It's fascinating. I'm so if you're doing what you're doing. And I'm a big fan, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, George, again, for inviting me and giving me the space to speak. Yeah, we're going to do it more often. So ladies and gentlemen, go down to the show notes, drop Matt a line. I hope you have a beautiful day. I hope that you found the conversation as engaging as we did. And hang on briefly afterwards, Matt. But to everybody else,

hope you have a beautiful day. Get out there and find your way. That's all we got. Aloha.