Hi everyone, and welcome back to For the Curious and Confused, a podcast for people who want
to understand different perspectives of the world through the people who inhabit it.
I'm your host, Dom McTaggart, and today I'm joined by Justin McSweeney, a seasoned
interviewer and informal philosopher of mind.
Justin runs a YouTube-based interview series called IdeaCast, where he has detailed and
technical conversations with experts in the social sciences, philosophy, and arts.
In these interviews, Justin aims to better illustrate the frameworks we have to understand
meaning-making and purpose.
He pulls from many tools in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy to explore the
world and self.
Justin combines these fields to better understand not only the process of how we interact with
our environment, but also as a means to know ourselves and how we learn and grow.
Though Justin has a remarkable depth of understanding in many topics, he's the first to point out
what he doesn't know, and I believe you'll notice how his genuine humility only strengthens
his credibility.
So, Justin, thank you for sharing your time with us today, and I'm excited to get into
our conversation.
Don, thank you so much for having me as a guest.
I'm grateful to you for that opportunity for us to open up this space and have a conversation.
So, thank you.
I'm very excited.
Yeah, thank you.
So, to start us off, could you first give us a bit of a two-minute introduction into
who is Justin McSweeney and what motivates him?
Well, the who, I would answer with I live on the East Coast of Florida with my wife
and a cat named Spot, and not a deep, rich background.
I've been a jack of all trades in my life.
I've owned four businesses, I think, two landscape businesses, a restaurant and a newsstand.
So I dabbled in being an entrepreneur for, I don't know, 28 years or so thereabouts.
Currently, I work in a very bureaucratic job with a state organization related to agriculture.
So it's horticulture in Botany, which is up my alley.
And yeah, that's about myself in a nutshell.
And then you mentioned that I do have the interview series that I run, and that is a
component of my life, and that it's a public component of my life, as are these conversations.
But yeah, I'm just sort of a generic person, very average person.
I like to say I'm an extremely average person.
Yeah, it's a very average guy.
Okay.
All right.
There you go, guys.
There's the humility coming in again right off the bat.
Okay.
So if you were to divide your life in different chapters, what would those chapters be?
And could you walk us through each one of those briefly?
I'd like to think that this ordering and division that I'm about to offer is universal so that
perhaps it's a commonality or a common thread in the experience of us being children, teenagers,
adolescents, adults, all these kinds of stages.
And I will lens it more in an ethically idealistic way rather than a more utilitarian way or
how a psychoanalyst would break down chapters.
I would maybe just open it up to a more idealized way.
And by that I mean a lens that affords us a very human perspective on our story, our
narrative.
And again, I want to conflate myself with everyone else.
And of course, there's a lot of caveats there.
I live in an American suburban middle-class culture.
So we have to have that grain of salt added to this.
But having said that, I like to think that there's universality.
So let's start with infancy and early childhood.
And I would say that's probably the richest, most wide open space for humaning or being
present in the world.
And that is the time that we start onboarding and figuring out what's going on and perhaps
who we are or how we relate to the world and to others in it.
And then that flows into our adolescent period wherein we begin then asking counterfactual
questions and maybe get a little provocative and say, well, this first 12 or 13 years of
my life, I was again, and I'm saying this in an idealized way, but we tend to idealize
things as children.
We don't see a lot of nuance and we maybe over-enrich our valuation of maybe the older
people, the adults and so forth.
So I think that middle, or I'd say the adolescent period is a wonderful place to then start
carving out a niche for yourself or defining borders of who you are versus the adults that
you were acquiescing to or you were strongly attentive to in terms of your learning, the
imprinting, the interjection, things that were necessary for your development.
So interjection is just to onboard information from others.
It's a process of learning.
And it's somewhat overlapping with something called mimesis, which is to mime the others.
So when we're children, we want to please the adult.
We want to please the parental figure or whatever, the caregiver, and we tend to mime the behavior
and so that we can stay connected.
Because I think one existential fear of a young child is that they'll be abandoned or
neglected because they're being too obnoxious in the parent with you.
So it's very primal, I guess.
So anyway, I'm on a long tangent, but so yeah, I'd say adolescence is that perfect.
And it's painful, right?
It's messy and you do stupid things.
I did.
So I'll just bring the personal nature in there.
And then we emerge into early adulthood where we have maybe a cooling off period, a reconciliation
period for that very frenetic, very chaotic ordering of ourselves.
We're coalescing into a self or an identity that may be stabilizing into that, let's say,
18 to 28, somewhere in that range.
But at the same time, as modern people, we're also, as you are, we're educating ourselves.
We're structuring ourselves as adults in a strong social network.
And so we have to learn politics.
And I mean person to person politics, not the state.
So yeah, there's a lot of that going on.
And for myself, I wouldn't want to grade my performance on that, but I look back now as
a middle aged person and I reflect on my integration into an adult society or again, a strongly
interconnected society where we have to find our space and really understand tradeoffs
and relationships and all these different things.
So that's a magical period.
And then I would say to anybody who's in their 20s right now that you're going to love your
30s and maybe up into your late 30s, early 40s because your body's still in good shape.
And it depends on what you're doing with your life.
Like you, if you pursue a higher education, then that's going to cash out for you.
If you picked a career path or an academic niche that you enjoy, wow, you're in for a
good life.
And of course, people become parents and they raise children.
I never had any children, but that's a whole nother thing in its own right.
So I can't speak to that, but there's that.
But yeah, I'd say the 30s are probably, I don't want to say it's the Belle Epoque or
the best time of your life because some people might have it in their 20s or other people,
the Renaissance begins in their 40s, 50s and 60s maybe.
But so to move through into middle age where I seem to find myself now, and I don't know
where middle age starts.
Some people are saying in their early 40s that they're in middle age.
I'm like, well, technically, yes, biologically you might only live to 82 or 88 years old.
And so yeah, 40, but I almost think that me, I would start maybe at 45 and then move up
to about where I am now in my mid 50s.
And then I think once you get past your mid 50s into your early 60s, you're moving into
codredom.
You're beyond midlife.
But it's also where I'm at now in life, I think to forecast for anybody who's young
right now, mid 50s, if you didn't get into too much trouble in the rest of your life
and you're somewhat steady financially and emotionally and things like that, it's a Renaissance
period.
It's a time of reflection.
If you had children, you're an empty nester now and you can maybe shift your priorities
in life and see what's important, what's of value beyond just working hard and raising
a family.
So I think this period that I'm in right now, and I'm enjoying it, my body is a little rough.
I have arthritis and a few other little things that I contend with.
But otherwise, I think to not only forecast for younger people to connect with people
of my age, range from 50 to 65, I'd say this is a wonderful period of time to, again, reorient
your compass, your ethical compass or your social compass.
And if you do have spare time, if you do have your livelihood afforded you the opportunity
to have some savings and you can not struggle in your 50s to make rent or eat or any of
these things.
So these are all the caveats.
And it's a good time to look around and see how you can be even more of a contributing
member to your culture, your community, or where you find yourself in the world.
I can't speak to anything beyond, say, 60 years of age because I'm 55 right now.
But I would intuit that that's just a continuation of that looking back more than forward because
you may only have 20 years left and you want those to be rich years.
But I think in terms of introspecting or reflecting on the life that you led and if you feel like
there's things that need to be remediated or fixed or whatever, you want to heal something
about yourself, maybe that's a period wherein you can find whatever modality or whatever
work necessary for that.
But I won't go too much further into that because it's all speculation.
You can interview me again in 15 years if you're doing this.
So Justin, you're 70 now.
What's going on?
Oh, yeah.
Well, part two coming soon.
Soon in 15 years.
Yeah.
So anyway.
Yeah.
Do you feel novelty in any parts of your life currently?
Oh, gosh.
I would love to think that novelty is a huge factor, vector of my life.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't want to be delusional in saying that because I probably am habitual and stick
to patterning.
But let's just say I appreciate a little chaos coming into the system.
And so chaos and novelty I'll use synonymously.
And good chaos.
I don't want meteors falling through my roof or gunfights to break out my friend, none
of that.
But stochasticism, I guess is a fancy word, a stochastic environment where I'm constantly
getting new challenges or information and it's not, again, not threatening, not things
that are negatively valiant towards me, but just, yeah, new stuff to challenge me and
push me out of my comfort zone.
So yeah, I love novelty.
Awesome.
To dig in a little bit on one thing you said earlier about I used to be a little selfish
also for my period of life right now, mid-20s.
You mentioned that as a period of time of chaotic ordering.
So that kind of has a stochastic nature as well.
Could you expand a little bit on what your chaotic ordering looked like for you when
you were in your 20s and sort of what the takeaways from that were for someone like
me or the audience who's in that range right now?
Right.
Okay.
During my 20s, I was a workaholic.
I was a chef and I typically worked in the evening.
So I'd go to work at two in the afternoon, 2.30 in the afternoon, get out about 10.30
or 11 at night.
So I had all that free time in the daytime.
And so again, being a workaholic, I would do landscaping for people in Florida and maintenance
and installs and things like that.
So I had a part-time in the morning where I get up fairly reasonably early and just
work from like eight to one or something like that and fill that time with that.
So my stochastic, I'll say patterning or behavior was sort of niched in amongst the work.
So I would just go have fun and be frivolous and carefree as much as that.
So it was concentrated.
So it was probably not the most physically healthy.
I kept beer drinking and carrying on and so for instance, I live in central Florida and
I would on a whim just drive down to Miami at 10 o'clock at night on my day off and stay
there until six or seven in the morning, hitting clubs or whatever and coming back and maybe
sleeping at a rest stop for a little bit and then just start the day over again.
When you're that young and you can recover from, I couldn't do that now, I'd die.
So I would concentrate the recreational aspect of my life into these little outbursts and
they were very chaotic.
I don't want to sound like I'm promoting anything here, but I would take acid or I'd go do some
mushrooms and then go like I said, I'd go hit a club and have that kind of fun.
So it was very, and I don't prescribe that to anyone, but yeah, just concentrated outbursts
of recreation.
Work hard, play hard.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But the drive behind the working was I wanted a house.
I wanted to, and I don't have a college education.
So the salary I made as a chef was decent, but then I was making half that much again
as somebody just doing landscaping four or five days a week and that afforded me the
opportunity to purchase a house and then upgrade to another house.
Again, just working like a rented mule and then putting money away for savings and having
a nest egg for myself.
So I did have that kind of even in my early to mid 20s, I had the sensibility to think
forward and have fun, but don't get too carried away either way.
Well, I got carried away with work, but anyway, yeah.
So that was my 20s.
It's kind of boring.
I look back on it, it was not formative terribly because again, I concentrated a lot of my
energy on just working and I got good as a cook and a chef.
I learned the trade or however you want to say that the skill sets involved.
Same thing with landscaping.
That's where I found my passion for plants and horticulture and botany was just getting
involved in more than just the banality of maintenance and the treachery of the physical
labor.
I was starting to notice the difference in the plants and going to nurseries and identifying
things and seeing what performed well with others.
And as I said to you before we hit record that I've got this continuing, I have a little
nursery behind me, a little light setup back there for the real, they're called megatherms,
the really cold sensitive plants that I can't grow outside right now.
So anyway, so if that answers your question about where you are at your stage in life,
to summarize it, it was just a heavy focus on making sure that I was taking care of myself
financially but nonetheless being a wild hare when time before time was available.
So you were interesting.
Yeah.
So digging into a little bit more about the reflective part of all that, in those chapters
of your life, were there any questions that you wish people had asked you during that
time?
I guess in terms of maybe how helping you understand yourself or helping others understand
you more or anything in that realm, if that makes sense.
Yes.
No, it's a good way to introspect.
That question is a good conduit or a means to not only where I am in life, but to again
in another world in a hypothetical situation, I would love in that period, in that 20s,
I think the helpful person that could arrive in my life that was genuinely interested in
my wellbeing to ask the question amongst all the things that I just described, are you
working as diligently to preserve or maintain or to develop your emotional stability, your
what I would call psycho-emotional stability, your psychology, your profile of your mental
condition, however you want to gently frame that, because part of the drive of being a
workaholic was probably informed by adverse background and coming from a very dysfunctional
family.
And so some of that was escapism.
Some of it was just if I work hard enough, I won't have time to dwell on X, Y, or Z.
Same thing with the partying.
If I go out and have a raging good time that I don't have to sit and...
So that's probably the...
It wouldn't be interventional.
It would be more, again, introspectively.
So well, take a moment, take a day off and really reflect on what your shadows are doing
right now.
Are you running from anything that needs to be dealt with?
So that would have been wonderful at say 21 to 26 or 27, somewhere in there.
Yeah.
I'm glad you brought that back up.
I just want to ask a followup on that.
In the workaholic mindset, I guess there's sometimes a culturally a little bit negative
connotation with that.
So I can imagine two motivations in that.
One is the part you mentioned first, which is the running towards having the financial
stability and being able to buy a house and everything.
And you can also imagine the running away from something as well.
So you're having these...
You're in the middle and you're running towards something and you're also running away from
something at the same time.
And so my question for you is what ratio of those two motivations was what characterized
that period of life for you?
I would say the forward moving motivation that again of acquiring the security of a
home and also buttressing that with...
Or padding that rather with some savings and investment money.
I don't think I had mutual funds back then.
I didn't get mutual funds until I was probably in my 30s.
But just stashing squirreling money away and building equity for myself was probably the
prime driver.
And I do have a very...
I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD, but I was diagnosed with dyslexia.
I'm very hyperactive and I do have a somewhat obsessive personality.
So that's factored in, but the obsessive personality and the dyslexia could be again from the upbringing
experience that I had, which I always like to joke that it was never traumatic.
It was just the tedious Machiavellian treachery of the parents I had and the environment that
I grew up in.
Very dysfunctional household.
Never traumatic, but just really very deeply Machiavellian.
Which again, if you string things together, if somebody was to sit down and analyze me,
I'd say that's probably what was going on is in fact, one side of my family were all
like, you know, cutthroat, work hard, exploit, make yourself wealthy, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Just that weird kind of almost sociopathic drive to reach a certain...
But the funny thing is, is they grew up during the depression, the grandparents that I'm
referring to and then the parent, there's a string there.
So you can always trace things back in a kind of lineage.
But I'd like to think in retrospect that my prime mover and motivator was to just have
security, especially again, not having a degree in anything other than having worked in culinary
for a long time and working up through there is just staying secure, staying in a...
And I think we're all sort of in that kind of reality or position.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Great.
So I guess we can move on a little bit now to your series, your interview series.
What motivated you to start that IdeaCast series and what sort of main things you've learned
from that?
Oh gosh, it would take a couple episodes to go around about what I've learned from it,
but I'll give you the provenance story.
In 2011, I had a brain injury and it really messed me up.
I was pretty much becoming an invalid at the time.
My short-term memory was shot, my speech fluency was shot, even my mobility.
I think it's a taxia where you can't walk.
Your gait is tentative.
It's not an assured gait where you can pick your feet up and walk without tripping over
your feet.
I had a lot of that neuropathy, yada, yada, yada.
And it was very unsettling.
And I kept predicting my future that I would just be a mental invalid and it was very serious.
I thought, oh God, I'm going to be in a nursing home or be a vegetable.
And I had attended neurologists and physicians and they really couldn't put their finger
on anything that was overtly wrong through MRIs or whatever.
So it was pretty much incumbent upon me to figure out how to dig myself out of that hole.
And I managed, because I'm having a fluent conversation with you now, but to tie things
together, my love of botany and horticulture were one of the lifelines that were provided
to me.
And prior to the brain injury in 2011, I have a yard full of taxonomically diverse plants
and flora.
And so prior to the injury, I could walk through the yard and I probably had 135, 140 species
of plants.
I could name all the binomials, the scientific names, and I give you a little cultural background
on it.
So in my rehabilitating myself, I would put myself into the yard and I'd look at a plant
and I would try to remember the Latin name for it.
And I would try to remember where it came from or what its cultural requirements are
or any other details that related to the plant.
And that was part of my therapy, which sounds really weird, but it was free.
Yes, I did that.
But the other thing that I did that was close to free was get into a hybrid of quasi-spiritual
inquiry and also philosophical inquiry as well as psychological inquiry.
So there was this kind of matrix, this vent overlap of interests that kind of coalesced
around this recovery process, because I was always sort of spiritually curious and maybe
philosophically curious, but philosophically in the sense of spiritual type people like
Sri Aurobindo and a few other guys back historically that were crossing lines between philosophy
and whatever spirituality is.
And so that all, again, presented itself to me, I suppose, as an opportunity in 2012,
13, 14, 15, when I was moving my way through all of this adversity that had beset a public
hall on me.
And so I just got deeper and deeper and deeper in the weeds with philosophy and trying to
understand the nature of relationality and Rolada and just all the basic questions that
we might have in an existential capacity and also, again, overlapping into a kind of like
a spiritual thing.
So we have a dry or an impetus within us all, I think, even if we're an ardent atheist and
we're hard materialists that we have these questions about our nature and this and that.
And so, yeah, and that's kind of the seed that was planted with the interview series
that I started.
My first guest was someone who was dealing with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, and she was
a therapist.
And I met her at a meditation retreat, again, dabbling in what's going on in the psyche
and the spirit and all that kind of thing.
And she was a sort of quasi, like she was a Buddhist, Western Buddhist student.
And so she combined therapy and Buddhism.
And so anyway, she wrote a book called No Pressure, No Diamonds about her memento mori,
about her coming to terms with her mortality.
And I thought that was excellent that a therapist could do that and lens it in a particular
way, and also somebody who was fluent and aware of what Buddhism speaks to.
And so I interviewed her.
She was not verbal at the time.
So it was a vocorder.
And so I emailed questions to her.
She used her vocorder to respond.
But during the interview, the second half of the interview, she and her husband came
on and he's a therapist as well.
And we had a conversation.
And again, she's nonverbal, but he was speaking.
And all the questions I had for her were answered in the first half with the vocorder.
So that was an interesting way to get out of the gate.
And that's the best first episode I could ever have.
She ended up passing a few months later.
So it was such a gift to be able to speak with her.
And then the other guests, I just had the audacity to reach out to some people that
I admired in academia.
There was a professor of mind and coxsai philosophy of mind in Miami at UM.
And there was another guy in the Netherlands named Bernardo Kastrup, who was very, very
generous of his time.
He's kind of a quasi public figure in his little corner of the internet.
And a few other people in the early days that were gracious enough and kind enough and generous
enough to come on and have a conversation with me.
Because again, I have no academic background, no card to carry as far as intellectual capacity
is concerned.
So, or yeah, I guess that's the right way to say it.
So anyway, and then it just grew and developed.
And I did my best to be informed when my guests showed up and tried to understand what it
was they were doing.
I struggle with it because again, guys like Bernardo, it's pretty dense thinking.
And some of the other guests that I've had.
So that's been great.
It's really forced me to pay attention and learn.
And prior to that brain injury, I was again, very ADD, very just, you know, I could never
really focus.
So I love it.
And that speaks to that being out in a sarcastic environment where you got new stuff coming
to you, novelty, you know, new information and things that challenge me and push my buttons.
I've had a guest recently and I've got someone coming up next Friday.
And I'm not 100% on board with the metaphysics of what's going on.
It's a functionalist, quasi-materialist approach to, and very science and Darwinian oriented
approach to consciousness and mindedness and things like that.
And you said the onboard part, sorry, when you said onboard, are you meaning in terms
of you agree or disagree or in terms you have a good or not so good grasp of it?
I'm hoping I'm grasping it.
Okay.
And I'm neither opposed nor strongly in favor of.
It's more that I am the skeptic, I am the agnostic.
And there's a kind of surety that comes from anyone who's defending a philosophical or
scientific position.
They have to, you're defending a thesis, you're defending something that is important to you.
But I come around as a skeptic.
I come around as somebody who's saying, well, how do we know?
How are you certain?
How do you ossify or reify a position to then scaffold other ideas onto that?
So it's new territory for me for their metaphysical assumptions and the theses that they present
in terms of how they sense make in an epistemic sense.
So it's very nuanced.
And it's not that I disagree with anything.
It's more that I want to see a multi-perspectival analysis of this.
I want to see lensing that is not married to one psychotechnology like Darwinian modeling
is a psychotechnology.
It's something that gives you information.
It's a sense making thing that you do.
So I only, there's a lot of cautions in what I say here that it's not that I oppose any
of it.
I want to push that the premises being made and the propositions being made.
And I want to just see it from as many angles as possible.
And are there counterfactuals to this?
It's not necessarily want to go to Popperian falsification, but can we push it, test it,
see where it's weak?
So this is the challenge.
And it points out that I'm dogmatically wed to ideas, even though I love to think I'm
not really married to anything strongly.
But I feel it in me.
And I'm like, oh, good, good.
This is good.
And I can't wait to have this guest on because I want to support the work.
Because the work that this person is doing is it's animal consciousness and it ultimately
leads to an ethics for animals and it's an ethics of compassion.
So I absolutely want to support that a hundred percent, but I do want to play with them.
I want to dance with them.
And he's a really, really bright guy, really well accomplished intellectual.
So I have to be careful and respectful.
But yeah, I want to enter into dialoguos or dialogue.
It's to go beyond both our personalities and egos and to treat the matter with reverence
and say, well, what is the advancement of this proposition look like?
What is the advancement of these ideas look like?
I'm sure he wants that too.
Yeah.
I mean, the conversation becomes, to use your word again, a stochastic.
And so if it's just a repeating of all the papers he's published before or something
like that, that's not quite the same thing as a, we're both in a space where we're trying
to, as you say, like do these different lensings on it and really push through what it has.
Who is that guest going to be?
That's a very interesting one.
Yeah.
His name is Walter White.
D-E-I-T Walter White.
And I have his book, it's in another room, unfortunately, but it's called A Philosophy
for the Science of Animal Consciousness.
And he has an interesting thesis that he puts forward in the beginning of the book.
It's a very technical book.
It's been very challenging for me to read because he goes into counter arguments and
other cognitive science propositions that he's sort of pushing aside or pushing his
ideas forward.
And again, and most of it's through the Darwinian lens, which I think is interesting.
Because one of my things that I would ask him not to go too long of a tangent, but in
applying ourselves to a purely strong Darwinian perspective, a modeling of how things occur,
I see Darwinian thought and modeling as perfect for lower, and I don't mean this disparagingly,
sort of lower cognitive capacity or stationary systems like plants and things like that,
wherein the environment is much more of an influence on the system.
But I think there's a gradient there when you have systems that, and he tackles this
in the book, so this is where I wanted just to open things up so I can understand better.
With intelligence comes problem solving.
With problem solving comes a means to override environmental pressure and override the challenges
that stationary objects or lesser cognitive capacity systems have.
And I hate to say lower animals, but just the dumber animals out there, sponges, things
like that, and bacteria and simple creatures that can't do metacognitive thinking, they
can't do like what we're doing at a very high order.
In fact, I would go so far with that question, that inquiry, the skepticism is to say that
human beings have become deeply maladaptive.
Our intelligence has placed us in a social position or a cultural position that we are
very fragile.
We could wipe ourselves out with nuclear weapons.
We could destroy the planet ecologically.
We have breakdown of society.
All these potentials arise from our sentience, from our high order metacognitive, self-reflecting,
yada, yada, yada, deep psychology.
And so that Darwin has taken or the Darwinian model has dropped us off on the threshold,
where it did maybe 120,000, 200,000 years ago is when our cortical capacity got better.
And so it speaks to a thing where we have to have an abstracted order of perhaps in
our Darwinian model, perhaps another adaptation model, which I'm perfectly fine with, but
it's abstracted from the real primitive pressure of the environment.
Now it's pressure of within.
It's an endogenous pressure of our species acting upon itself and putting its own pressures
upon itself through technology, through war and weaponization of things, blah, blah, blah.
So not to get on a soapbox, but these are the questions that I come up with.
And so to me, the original Darwinian model breaks down.
We need to reconfigure it, repurpose it in an abstracted sense to then help us be guided
by the heuristics of Darwinian thinking to then say, well, how do we become more pro-social
how do we get rid of aggression and some of the other antisocial traits that we possess
to survive and to flourish and to be fit to continue?
So anyway, that long tangent, sorry if that's derailing our conversation.
No, no, no, definitely.
Yeah.
The thing that really comes to mind with that is the, I've been learning a little bit about
epigenetics versus normal genetics recently.
That sort of seems similar to where genetics is kind of like the baseline Darwinian theme
of like it's hardwired in, like can't really change that.
And then the epigenetics thing, which is something I'm still not very familiar with, but that's
more of the nuanced interaction between the environment and then sort of what mechanisms
exist that can be activated by some stimuli and stuff.
And yeah, that seems well above the just purely genetic code kind of thing.
So the follow up question for you on that for readapting to our maladaptive practices
as humans, do you think the way forward with that is adding in more positive traits or
taking away more negative traits or is it somewhere in the middle or where do you fall
on that?
I would say both that it's additive and subtractive process.
And I would say that perhaps facing some of the negativity or if we were to have two columns,
the minus column would need to be addressed first because then that might open up space
for the plus column to flourish more.
And it would be less forced to try to bring in, let's just say antisocial, prosocial,
to bring in more prosocial, more altruistic if you will, and effective empathy because
empathy is a cognitive feature.
And so I could be a sociopath and I could empathize with your condition right now, but
then I could turn around and try to manipulate you based on what I was able to assess.
But there's empathetic people who are feeling what you're feeling, but then they want to
help.
They want to be vulnerable in that sense.
They want to be provider of care, et cetera, et cetera, which is more the altruistic kind
of perspective.
Anyway, I would say we need to address some of our insecurities, some of our shadowy parts
of ourselves as a culture because I think everything is scalable.
I think, and I'll use myself as an individual, I have my pathologies.
I have, again, to be young and from it, I have a very shadowy aspect of myself and then
I have a very, what I hope to be an egalitarian, altruistic, prosocial, positive affect, positive
valent part of myself that I would want to project or distribute into the world and interact
with others in that fashion.
I could certainly bring my crappy bad side out and I do occasionally as we all do.
That capacity to scale to a population, whether it's a community or the whole species or a
nation or wherever you want to stop on the scale, that we can see that showing up.
If we go globally, if we go as the entire species, that the shadowy parts of ourselves
come out collectively when we get into a group think, a stigmurgic kind of thinking, which
is natural.
It's evidenced in our cultural behavior.
I could use examples in mimetics.
There's memes that show up and not just the Facebook or wherever it is, TikTok, a funny
meme, but the meme is a viral thought.
If you listen to everyday conversations, listen to podcasts, you might hear catchwords that
come up a lot.
It is what it is or everybody's saying literally or like my generation, you know, like, it's
this kind of viral.
Anyway, that's a carrier for how we are so deeply connected socially and culturally.
I think if we could just maybe, I don't know how you steal this culture that's a phrase
they're using for this kind of phenomena or this process.
I have no clue and it's not my job.
What I would do is aspire to see this developing and maybe adversity brings that out.
I don't know.
I don't know what it looks like, but I would say that if we could examine that shadowy
thing either from an individual perspective to cultural community, nation, planet for
our species and then that again might open up the space wherein we can say, well, okay,
if not X, then how do we do Y that would give us better living conditions for people and
more opportunity for people to flourish and live more in a whatever it is.
You don't want utopia.
That's not where I'm heading because we have to have problems, but it can't be to the degree
where we just, everything dies.
So anyway, so long winded soap oxy, but yeah, that I would say that placing a priority on
tamping down or dialing down some of the things, again, aggression, anti-social behavior, whatever
it is, idealizing.
I was listening to a nice talk about there's two philosophers named Guadarrie and Deleuze
and they're talking about taking Freud's Oedipal model, the Oedipal complex and extending that
into a sociopolitical kind of perspective wherein they, and this is just social science
or political philosophy or however you want to say that they were pointing out that rather
than the strong sexual Oedipal thing, that it's more that we aspire to strong parental
figures to solve problems.
It's almost a deistic extension.
We want a God that will care for us and provide for us and solve our problems and that's scalable
too that we want leadership that will take care of us and provide for us and save us
from any ickiness that might be plaguing us and so forth.
So I think it's an interesting critique that we see that impetus or that impulse in us
to want to have the mother or father figure protect us.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but we have to be aware of that.
We have to be aware of when we make decisions and we also have to be aware of our history.
So if we have a shadow side and we have maybe a victim complex coming forward, that that
victim wants to be rescued.
It wants to be safe.
And none of this is my task.
Nothing is, I only look at it and I'm just like, okay, that's interesting.
But yeah, these are ideas that are being kicked around like to know our nature, know what
our impulses are, what our drives and proclivities are, both good and bad.
And if we can just develop that kind of awareness, then we can ask other questions.
We can maybe find ourselves phase shifting into other social domains that we might not
be familiar with yet.
So I would want that.
I would not necessarily for my generation, but for young ones coming on board, I would
love to see them explore these spaces and these ideas.
And it's not to build a utopia.
I'll keep saying that nobody is going to construct a perfect society.
It's always going to be flawed, but there's percentages.
So if we're ratcheted up right now and everybody's polarized, everybody's upset, everybody's
screaming it and shouting over each other, is this really the best we can do?
And I'm not blaming anybody for this, but it's all of us.
We are, again, this comes to a connection thesis.
We're not separate.
We are not separate.
We can't cleave ourselves out of our cultural environs.
So I'll stop there because I don't want to get too preachy.
We've covered a lot of ground so far and maybe taking these two ideas, I'm about to say,
and applying those to everything you just talked about and maybe some other things as
well.
But the ideas of seeking curiosity as well as skepticism, what's their relationship
between those two and how we make meaning from either any of the animal consciousness
with Walter White or the dark shadow with ourselves and any other kind of thing that
would have a weight in our lives?
How do curiosity and skepticism play off each other?
Right.
And that's the way to look at it is that they're playing off of each other.
They are in relation with each other.
And so I would say for that niche right there, that it's curiosity and I'll bring in the
imagination as well because we need, if we're being curious, we're not reviewing something
we already know.
What's next?
What's out there?
What haven't I learned or what can I learn from this scenario, this situation?
And to bring your skeptic along with you.
And so I'll define skepticism that might be appropriate for this, what we're talking about.
I'm not talking about cynical skepticism where I want to refute a propositional claim.
I want us to think about skepticism as more of a ceaseless inquiry, asking questions and
wanting to know more and more and more, but not really again, ossifying or reifying the
answer to a belief.
It's more that, oh, okay.
So I'll update my prior belief about what I just thought I knew and that this new information
is helping me to contextualize a little better frame, a little better.
And so one begets the other or one guard rails the other so that I can be curious.
I can be using my imagination.
I can explore new ideas from researchers or people doing philosophical work.
And then I'll bring the skeptic along and say, well, is this done in good faith?
Is it done to advance an idea or is it just somebody hand waving and trying to sound very
intellectual?
What are we deriving from this?
And so it's a investigative tool to say, what am I deriving from this?
And is it signal or is it noise?
Is it weed?
Is it chaff?
And all these metaphors.
So the two of them should just dance together and be in a concert with each other to maybe
effectively enrich your epistemic library or your ontological life.
What is going on here?
What's this thing that I'm encountering or the proposition?
Again, whatever your inquiry is.
And to go back to at the very beginning, you mentioned childhood being this kind of period
full of wonder and where we're learning everything that could be related to curiosity in a way.
And so I'm curious what your thoughts are on how we can encourage curiosity in ourselves
and in others, maybe kind of taking a framing of what it's like to be a child and having
wonder about things.
How do we encourage that in ourselves?
There's something called serious play and it's for us adults.
And it is to go, that child's still inside of all of us.
And we suppressed a lot in the wild child, wild in the sense of just, oh, everything's
wide open.
Everything's new.
Everything's fascinating.
Everything is just so fresh.
And we can bring that back to a degree, I think, or we can use the imagination to embody
that aspect or phase of ourselves, that life period phase.
And so embodying an aspect of an identity or archetypal role to me is part of serious
play.
It is to immerse yourself in a what it is likeness kind of thing to be that child again
and to use childlike wonder to ask a question.
If you ask a question and you're really jaded and cynical and you know everything and you
know, well, you're not going to know what the hell is this?
That's not the child.
That's the guy that's really bitter, the person that's really bitter.
I know what's going on.
So anyway, to go-
That's the cynic, not the skeptic.
Right, exactly.
That's the kind of skepticism we want to avoid is to refute.
It is to be conservative in the sense that you don't want to just let everything go.
And again, that's where skepticism comes in, but not to go too far to where you're just,
and nothing is onboarded and new.
And again, that's what the child is about.
The child is a sponge and they're wicking.
And that goes back to Darwinism.
That's what children had to do.
That's what young animals have to do is they have to, again, interject and mimesis, all
these fancy words for what imprinting, all these things that the child is doing or the
young animal is, we're animals, but whatever we are, is doing to then survive.
And our survival is no longer in the savannas or in the in the Fertile Crescent.
It is more that we are surviving a social system of peer interaction and non-asymmetrical
interaction with power structures and things like that.
And we have to find our place and how to order ourselves and organize ourselves.
There's an interesting, I'll go on a neuroscience tangent for a second.
There's an interesting thing about the hippocampus is one of the organs for spatial ordering.
So I see in my room, there's a bookshelf to my left and there's a lamp over here and
a desktop tower over here.
I'm spatially ordering with the hippocampus, but there was a neuroscience lecture I watched
and they were saying that that's been accepted to also do social ordering.
So I have a partner, I have a supervisor, I have a peer friend, but that same spatial
ordering that we do for the physical world is also accepted socially to order and structure
how we relate with other people who are in our orbit, who are in our social sphere or
maybe even public figures.
I don't know how that breaks down, but it could apply to that.
So it just speaks to an idea that we're constantly using the resources that we have to sense
make and way make.
There's a philosopher that I interviewed not too long ago and she uses, Andrea Hyatt, she
uses a term called way making, which is a sort of an amalgamated means of moving forward
in time phenomenologically, intellectually, emotionally, culturally, in the best way possible,
her version of way making.
So yeah, so I'll stop there because I'm on another tangent.
Yeah, the thing that I want to grab a gun to is the serious play and then the thing
to add in on there is humor and what will this humor play in that kind of exploration
of wonder and it's serious play.
So how does humor help us?
I think humor, one definition of humor is incongruity resolution.
So when you set up a joke, you're leading somebody into almost a paradox and then you
relieve them of that paradox with the punch line and they're, oh, oh, and then it's funny,
right?
So you're almost dabbling in absurdism or incongruity of propositions like to say, and
I don't have a good joke to use as an example, but just think of a dumb dad joke and at the
end of the joke, you get it because, oh, okay, it's almost like an algorithm, you've got
to figure it out.
So I say all that to get to a point that serious play should involve incongruity resolution
into breaking frame, into breaking into novel experience or stochastic environment that
in that stochastic environment, then you can find salience.
You can sort of lens things and bring things forward that then suddenly makes sense.
So you might have incongruity and then you see something.
So humor is maybe a good way, a virtual machine inside of us that can help us with that to
develop that muscle of salience mapping and seeing what we might not have seen before
like an insight that comes to us in a reframing or re-perspectivally approaching something.
And serious play gets the cynic out of the way.
It gets the guarded vulnerable, perhaps a person out of it.
You have to be in trusted company to do this.
It could be two or three people, could be a partner, parent, sibling, whatever the structure
is fine, but you're in a trusted safe space.
It's like when you go to a therapist.
This isn't going to laugh at you because you admit something really creepy or sad or scary
or whatever.
That's not a good therapist.
So a trusted partner in the serious play is not going to ridicule you.
They're not going to say, what the heck, what?
They're going to be like, oh, go with that.
Yeah, let it out.
And then you're again entering into dialogos.
And it could be triologos, quadrilogos, whatever, but you're entering into this opening of a
space of ideas and information, perspectives, and again, the stochasticity of the environment.
And it could be an intelligibility environment.
It could be a social cultural environment, could be an emotional environment.
It doesn't matter that you're in that space with that other trusted others to come in
with novelty in mind or capturing novelty and capturing a resolution to something that
seems incongruous or difficult or challenging or obscure.
So if that ramble lands with you, I think that that's the nature of serious play versus
with the imaginal, with trust, with reciprocity with the others.
So it's not something you jump into lightly, which is why it's called serious play rather
than just play like, hey, let's run around the house together and throw nerf balls at
each other and laugh or qualify.
That's fun.
That's its own medicine, its own therapy.
So therapy with a psychoanalyst is serious play.
You're opening up a safe space.
You're recalling an event.
You're pulling something forward.
And then you are examining it with the therapist in a very safe, insulated and sealed environment
that you can be that vulnerable to someone.
And that's a good therapist that can help you generate that.
So I would cite therapy as a good example of serious play.
Yeah.
Another part that sticks out to me from that is that the serious part, like all of this,
if you were to lay it out in like a memo or like a technical document, you can get all
the information on there, but nobody's really going to want to engage with it in a way.
And so humor or serious play kind of feels like the way that you keep the audience engaged
in a way that is not just mind numbing.
I'll give you an example of this is that I just got together with some friends and we
made presentations of what we do for work.
And so we were like all presenting to each other on that.
And we had, you said memes earlier.
So I just had like all these little memes of like stuff that kind of relates to what
I do, but it's more about like, it's a funny kind of almost similar to what I do.
And I think it made people pay more attention than they felt just like going through on
like the actual meticulous day to day stuff that I do.
And yeah, so humor is a bridge for connection and not that's a new idea or anything at all,
but yeah, it has a lot of great benefits for that.
Indeed.
Okay.
So moving direction a little bit, when you reflect on some of the most challenging moments
in your life, are there any specific beliefs or internal narratives that you had that
either helped or hindered you address those situations or get through them?
Yes.
I have a cute little anecdote to tie into what you were saying about your presentation
and I'll pin what you just said.
I had a friend who was defending her PhD about two or three years ago.
And of course it was during COVID so it was on zoom and I had the opportunity to go to
her defense, to witness her defense.
And the first half was open and the second half it was her and her inquisitors and she
was a structural chemist.
Very serious structural chemistry, like really like quantum level chemistry, heavy, heavy
duty stuff.
But she did, she did her defense with SpongeBob.
She used SpongeBob bullet points, you know, and, and, and, and yeah.
And she was doing spectrographs and I was loving it because I, I confess I love SpongeBob,
but you know, and, and Ren and Stimpy and all that kind of stuff.
So anyway, but, so to get back to your question and, and quickly rephrase it, cause I just
totally derailed myself.
So if you could give me a quick rephrase back on that.
Yeah.
Of a, of a, we're feeling on challenging moments you've had in your life, internal narratives
or beliefs that either helped or hindered get through that.
Okay.
So the negative thing is that there's been, there's been two negative moments I've ever
engaged with it.
There's been both.
And the, the, the, so the, the negative thing would probably be more implicit and obscure.
So it's probably just how I process thought, how I, you know, make my way through any kind
of endeavor.
There's, there's stuff.
So we are layered histories of a person, you know, we have layered histories and that informs
how we lens the world, how we, how we perspectively see the world.
And so that's, it just, it's the subconscious, you know, if you will, and it's embedded and
it informs us and it drives us.
So I would say that that's always been there, always will be there.
And what I have to do is then develop again, to use the word virtual machinery, a kind
of way of saying, catch yourself.
Are you lensing this in a, in a way that's best for what you're the challenge that you're
presented with?
Are you, are you seeing this clearly?
Can you shift perspective and see facets of this problem or this opportunity clearly?
And again, that's where the skeptic comes in.
That's where, you know, healthy inquiry comes in.
I don't do it well myself, but I mean, that's ideally speaking, that's one way that you
can then, you know, move forward through an adverse or challenging situation is to know
that you are in good faith navigating through that with your best interest in mind, without
sort of the, you know, bad stuff coming forward to, to like the victim identity, you know,
like, oh, you know, here I go again.
I'm going to get, you know, screwed or taken advantage of, you know, I mean, so, so catch
yourself saying that.
So, well, wait a minute, you know, that, that, that's likely there's something negative happening,
but you know, don't, don't roll over or don't let it get worse or, you know, let yourself
be persuaded, you know, out of something that's good, you know, could be in your best interest.
So, so I'd say just, you know, again, be that, be that healthy skeptic and use that as the
means to filter or firewall yourself to, to handle the situation.
And if, if you don't have much time to react and, you know, Godspeed, but the way I would
look at is if you have some time for reflecting on it is, is caution yourself and say, how
am I viewing this?
Are there other ways to view this potentially unpleasant, dangerous, awkward, whatever's
going on?
And then also then you can bring your, your virtual machinery toolkit out of positive
things that you can do.
Say, well, I'm a problem solver.
I know, you know, that there are, there is a solution.
There is, there's something there that I can do.
And if not, then I can do damage control.
I can navigate this as best I can get through it as least scathed as possible.
So you have to have that sort of mindset or, you know, again, virtual toolbox of ideas
that, that will, and again, that goes to way making.
How do I, how do I make my way through?
Cause we can way make through wonderful, you know, happy things, but way making through
adversity is a skill, is a skillset.
And I can't prescribe anything to an individual because we're all sort of different and unique.
But that, but the meta perspective on that is to say that, you know, be, be your, be
a good skeptic to yourself and say, you know, am I seeing this right?
Get a friend, get that trusted other to say, you know, I want to share this with you and
get their insight and their perspective, especially again, if you trust them and you think they're
not full of crap and it's going to mislead you.
And so, so there's ways, there's, there's ways to do that.
I like that.
I really that part about getting true feedback from somebody who you really trust in terms
of, because yeah, it's, we can tie ourselves up in knots quite easily and quite well with
a lot of, a lot of, a lot of experience in that.
So I guess this is kind of a sort of related that particularly in this context of we all
have these kind of boiling soup of motivations within all of us all the time.
So when we take that and then start interacting with people either as a partner or a friend
or a business, anything like that, how do we be aware of and prevent agendas from interfering
with our relationships?
So how do we ensure the most authentic kind of connection without letting those shadow
parts or whatever you want to call it dictate sort of how that dynamic works?
To the best of our ability, it would be positively effective or efficacious, if that's a word,
to kind of, I'll repeat what I was saying a minute ago and have that virtual machinery
of I'll stop using skepticism of introspection of examining yourself.
And so this could be that cliche self-awareness, be self-aware, which is fraught with problems
at times because to be self-aware is to know the self and the self is plastic.
And I say plastic in the fluid sense, it's amorphic.
The self shows up differently in different environments and different situations.
So to speak to an agenda when we show up in a relationship with someone and we have an
agenda, I think we're always going to have an agenda, but there's an agenda of manipulation
and or there's an agenda of cooperation.
So there's different agendas that we have to maybe afford or allow in this scenario.
And I would say that, again, if you can develop the best kind of self-awareness, the best
quasi self-awareness that you can muster, again, perhaps being informed by others and
saying be vulnerable and say, well, what are my, I want to say this carefully, what are
my areas of opportunity?
I work for a company that when you screwed up, you had areas of opportunity.
Like, oh, this is, you can, so anyway, so whatever your language you want to use, like
where your vulnerability is.
And if you trust someone who's not trying to mess with you, they can give you a new
perspective and you can say, oh, okay, thank you.
And then you, if you take that in good faith, to heart and apply it, that that is a way
to know what your agendas are in a relationship or recognize other people's agendas.
And if the agendas are, let's say we'll draw another line and we'll say, you know, positive
or negative.
And like you said, the shadows coming over here and it's being manipulative and that
agenda won't serve either of you.
It may, you may, you know, you could be egoistic or narcissistic or even sociopathic and say,
oh, I just want to manipulate and get what I want and you know, blah, blah, blah.
But come on, you know, that, that, that goes back to that scaling of what's wrong with
humanity.
Right.
You know, and, and some people can't help themselves and I'm not judging.
So, but, but if we're, if we're somewhat grounded in our egos and we're all narcissistic, I
mean, I'm not saying that's either or it's just the spectrum.
But if we're, if we're weakly narcissistic and we do care about somebody and we're not
just there for a transactional, uh, exploiting, exploitative, uh, scenario that, you know,
the agenda we have that we show up with is a mutually beneficial agenda.
It is a beneficial, it's an agenda of reciprocity.
Um, you know, and that can be transactional.
Like, you know, if you care for me, I'm going to care for you.
That's a good baseline, but then, you know, do it because you want to see that other person
benefit, not that just like, wow, I'll give you this and you give me that, you know, that's
the cynic again, or, or, you know, that, that, that, um, may not be the best expression,
but Hey, you know, I'm not judging.
So as far as agendas go, I would say just, you know, again, cultivate whatever level
of self-awareness, um, that can help you and then enter into these environments and these
arenas with other people and know that your agenda can be a mixed bag.
It can be, you know, I truly want the best.
You could be a giver and you could say, I really want you to benefit more than me.
I'm good.
I've got, you know, whatever it is, you know, I've got what I want.
I'm good.
I've done that with people before.
I don't do it all the time, but here, take this.
I, you know, I'm fine.
I'm good.
And I don't care.
It's, you know, I'm good with letting that go because I'm, you know, like I said, I'm
fortunate.
I have what I want.
So, but, so it's, it depends on your personality, depends on who you are, but I'd say if you're
trying to do better, you're trying to be a good person, a helpful person, a person that
other people will respect genuinely that, that, that is perhaps the way to approach
it is to understand what your agenda is and then recognize other people's agendas because
it's two way street.
It's a, you know, it's back and forth.
So you know, having your own self quasi self-awareness for your own agendas will also give you that
radar to detect what somebody else's agendas are.
So if they're trying to be transactional or even manipulative and they just, you know,
you're just a means to an end to them, you'll recognize that and that'll save you from,
you know, whatever you might not want from that.
It's a very dynamic process.
It's hard to describe one kind of fixed to it.
Yeah.
I asked that, I think the main motivation from that one was I think I've, I've had
like a, a history of kind of general social anxiety.
And as I'm interacting with people, I'm like, Oh man, all right, I got a number one priority
is make sure they think I'm cool or like make sure they don't think of me.
Yeah.
So I'm like, Oh, I'm not the person that's intended that comes in.
And then I am losing kind of the presence of the moment.
And so that's something I'm being intentional about trying to anyway, nowadays.
Yeah.
I really like your insights on that.
Okay.
Four more questions for you in the interest of time.
So this is a little solid direction, different direction in most positive framing, what tools
does religion provide humanity?
And then how does it also bring out the worst in us as well?
Okay.
That's, that's a heavy question.
And I, I deal with it a lot, at least I think I do in my life.
And so I'll lay out the positives of religion.
We'll go down the positive plus column.
Religion evolved with us and it was a social, it was, it's a social engineering, it's social
cohesion, cultural cohesion.
So when we were nomadic, you know, perhaps before the diaspora out of, out of Africa,
120 to 200,000 years ago, you know, we had to understand our environment.
We had to make sense of our, of our reality.
And some things were insoluble.
They were beating like shooting stars or, or solar eclipses, weird, weird stuff, earthquakes,
things that were just way, way beyond our wheelhouse in terms of analyzing and processing
a hundred and like, again, 150,000 years ago or thereabouts.
I think that might be the, the root or the origin of where, of what we call religion
now.
And back then it was more like mythopoiesis.
It was the genesis of the myth to explain the unexplainable.
It was to handle that, which would have vexed us eternally.
You know, I just, the whole tribe would be like, what just happened?
This big bright thing shot across the sky.
Is it an omen or the, you know, what's going on?
So the mythopoiesis or the mythopoetic structure emerged from that, I believe, and this is
just me speculating.
So it might be backed up by other people.
I don't know.
But this is how I try to treat it.
And from that, it coalesced more and more generationally.
And again, when we started becoming settled 10 to 12,000 years ago, after the, after the
younger dryest period, again, in the Fertile Crescent area in Turkey and Eastern Europe
and down into Iraq and the Middle East that, you know, as we settled and we became communal
pastoral and village dwelling people that we started ordering ourselves socially.
And I think there were people who probably picked up the mantle of this mythopoiesis
and they started, they dedicated their time to that.
And you see that in modern tribal cultures, you have the village shaman in tribal culture.
You have the wise elders, you have the matriarch who, or the patriarch, you know, who can answer
strong questions or significant questions.
They might be civil disputes or things like that, but they might also go out into, you
know, some kind of metaphysics about reality and things like that.
So they're, you know, within their capacity.
And so I think that is where we started to see religion really start to develop.
And again, it was just a tool to help sense make, help derive some meaning for what was
going on beyond utility, beyond just farming and reproducing and, you know, fighting off
other tribes or wild animals, whatever the order of the day was.
I think when we had time and any other interesting thing is prior to pastoral culture, prior
to settling in the Indo-European context is we had a lot of more time on our hands before
we were settled.
And so we would labor for food and then we would sit around and we had to do something,
you know?
We had a time where we could reflect on the mythopoetic structuring that was going on.
What was that?
What happened?
You know, what, or what is this animal?
What does it mean to us?
What does the, you know, whatever the game animal mean to us?
We must be reverent to it if we want, you know, you know, they were doing these kinds
of algorithms.
So, so anyway, long-winded tangent to bring us more into a modern epoch, go back to the
axial age, maybe 2500 years ago, 3000, 2500 years ago, I think that was really reaching
a height of an ordering and structuring of then, you know, deities start to emerge and
supernatural positing starts to occur that, you know, this must be done by a much more
omniscient agent and all these different things.
And I just think it's just a little evolutionary process along with all our other both physical
and cultural evolution that occurred that the social engineering project of bracketing
these really difficult things into a space that we have to continually develop a mythopoesis
or then a religious perspective on what our reality is, what's going on, especially the
weird stuff.
And then when we get into more maybe modern times, I would say that religion continues
to be social engineering.
It, you know, for the, let's say after when the Abrahamic system developed and Judaism
and Christianity came online and later on, you know, Islam, and I speak to the West because
I can't speak to the East.
I'm not from that culture.
So I can't, I won't pretend to know anything there.
I love it, but I just, I won't pretend to know.
But when we have our Abrahamic system in the West that that solved a lot of problems and
it handled a lot, it did a lot of heavy lifting for us socially, culturally, emotionally,
spiritually, all that.
And I say spiritual and more of an analytic concept, not appealing to any particular type
of spirituality, but the impulse within us to find something beyond the mundane is what
we'll start with, you know, for now for spirituality.
So there's a lot of ordering, a lot of structuring.
And then I think religion was informed by the development of cultural state systems,
political systems, hierarchical systems, kingdoms, fiefdoms, chieftains, this, that,
you know, warrior creatures.
And so I think a lot of it was co-opted from other aspects of our psychosocial domain.
And again, getting into the Abrahamic period and where we find ourselves probably in up
to modern, the modern period is it just did a lot for us and it kept us feeling good and
not being an nihilistic, solipsistic mire of despair.
Because with all that so-called civilization and cultural advancement, we do end up in
these kind of vacuums where we are presented with existential questions and mortality when
people die or you're left wondering.
And so I think it just, that was such a great means and system to really handle a lot of
our problems for us and give us a way to get through life that, you know, unfortunately
the medicine was that, you know, when you die, you're going to an afterlife, you know,
that's the basis of a lot of religion is it, you know, there's a better home waiting for
you or you're going to go see your ancestors and all of this.
And that was good.
That was good medicine, I think for a long time.
But then comes the enlightenment project in the 17th, 18th century.
And there was a bifurcation between what we now call science or what was at the time philosophy
and religion and what religion provided for the culture.
Well, as that bifurcation occurred and the church didn't care about the mind, they didn't
care about science, you know, as long as you didn't push them too hard about, you know,
ontological and metaphysical lower structures of, you know, like, so in other words, their
domain, you know, what is the ultimate nature of reality?
Well, it's God, of course, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
As long as you didn't interfere with that, you can go do the chemistry, you can go do
the physics, you can go do the social stuff, you know, we don't care.
So that's how things kind of broke apart.
Well, when we bifurcated like that, the branch that went off into epistemic certainty of
empirical evidence and sciency things and knowing the world that way, a lot of the Western
culture shifted that way.
And religion, you know, didn't quite shrivel up because it's still running pretty strong
in the world, but it had far less influence and it answered far less questions that science
was now saying, oh, we got this, you know, we know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And we're in that still to this day.
But I think what happened for a lot of people when that gravity or the kinetic energy of
our attention and our focus on this is our new answer provider, this is our new civil
religion basically that answers a lot of questions for us, that there is a void or a vacuum inside
of people that occurs because the explanatory power of religion and the awe and fascination
of religion kind of got diminished by this other branch, this other epistemic and epistemologically
certain sense of tools of inquiry and yada, yada, yada.
So to me, that is a problem that has really created a lot of existential, I guess, vacuum,
an existential vacuum in our culture.
It may not be on the above the board.
It may not be on our radar, but I think that's happening.
And you get that in a lot of cultural phenomena that become civil religion.
So social movements and cultural movements adopt the archetypal roles of a religion.
You have the prophets and you have the sinners and you have the inquisitors.
You have all these things that were going on with the religious structure, the organizational
functional structural organization of let's say Catholicism, because that was the main
thing during the Enlightenment.
Protestantism arose during that time too, which certainly got things off on different
tracks.
But Protestantism is more of an Aristotelian enterprise and it's more, it's closely aligned
with the empiricism of secular sciency, the empirical side of things.
I know it's a long rant, but I think what unfortunately when religion is practiced in
modernity and where we are in post post-modernity, metamodern times or whatever we're doing right
now is that we in religion want to make the sacred propositional much like empirical evidence
based thinking does.
So you hear a lot of people trying to make propositional arguments for an existence of
a God or the veracity or the veridity, if that's a word, of what's in the written text.
So rather than allegory, rather than didact or fable or anything and mytho-poetic thinking,
it had become again reified into the same kind of empirical structuring that science
grants what it does.
And I think that's a categorical error and it's caused some conflicts.
And I think that's where I would talk about maybe the less than lovely, wonderful, glamorous
part of religion is that it has had to adapt and change, again, especially Protestantism,
where Catholicism was more Neoplatonic tradition.
And since Protestantism broke off during that cleaving, during that enlightenment project,
which gave us so many wonderful things, I'm not critiquing anything here, that they took
on like again, more of an Aristotelian, more of a propositional way of knowing your relationship
with again, in their system, their God.
So in all of that, I think there's a lot of conflicts that arise.
So obviously there's a conflict between Catholic and Protestant.
We can talk about that, but there's just this perspectival adversarial processing that
there's just different ways.
And of course, I understand some of the reasons for Protestantism and why it broke away from
Catholicism and whatever, that's cool.
But I think as we move through into where we are now, and I'm not trying to pick on
anybody, but I think like to speak to Christianity, that it's used in a very propositional way.
It's not so much about being in the presence of the mystery and using the didacts and the
parables and the allegory of what people were teaching during the Axial period, 2000 years
ago, and using it more to justify a stance, a proposition, whether it's political or cultural
or social, it doesn't matter.
It's that the mystery and the wonder and all of that seems to have faded to the background.
And it's more about using religion as a psychotechnology to justify other existing beliefs.
And I think that's, now I'm in the critical phase where I think that in itself is dangerous
territory because if you really pull the lens back on what religion is supposed to do, it
is supposed to offer you an escape, but it's also offering you solace and comfort and a
way of navigating life experience.
So if you use, if you co-opt a religious belief system to just justify your political beliefs
or your cultural beliefs or your station in life or your economic status or anything like
that, that might be a time for reflection and saying, well, or the narrative of salvation,
you know, so again, Protestantism focuses heavily on you being a lowly sinner, you're impure.
You need to get right with that which sacrificed its life for you.
You need to make that contract with them, save yourself, the individual, you know, and
that, and I don't want to sound too polemic here, but that's a very narcissistic pursuit.
It is a pursuit of personal salvation.
It's not salvation of humanity, which they could say, yes, it is, but we all have to
get right individually.
So anyway, that's probably a little petty critique of mine is to say, well, you know,
I could tear apart the argument of what am I repenting for?
Why am I forgiving?
What am I being forgiven for?
And we could go forever on that argument, but to get to a point, I would say that, you
know, if you want to enter into religion as it is in the Abrahamic system in a healthy
way, go back to the mystery, go back to what they would call apophatic belief, which is
to say, I can't define God, who am I?
Who am I to define what God is?
You know, that would be so arrogant and audacious, but you got a lot of people out there who
are God's attorneys, right?
They know everything.
They know all about it.
So I would say a little more humility and focus again on what Jesus was, you know, alleged
to have, and I have faith that, you know, there was a Christ figure and that that person,
or if it's a composite of other people, it doesn't matter to me.
It's the message that you, you know, you do what we were talking about earlier, that you
show up in a pro-social way, that you show up with positive affective states, that you
have empathy that then carries over into compassion, that carries over into altruistic behavior,
that carries over into supporting a community and, you know, building a net and, you know,
blah, blah, blah.
So that's the invitation is, I'm not trying to shut anybody down.
I'm not trying to course correct anybody.
It's just, just take that time to think about that.
So that's my, hopefully not too combative concern about the shadowy side of what religion,
at least in the West, you know, and Hinduism is struggling with things now.
There's Hindu nationalism out there now.
And I'm like, what, really?
Come on.
So everybody has their, I've seen Buddhists, like they get mad at the Muslims and I'm like,
dude, yeah, because there were, there's Muslim communities coming up in, in, in Buddhist
enclaves.
And, and it just upsets the Buddhists.
And it's like, the Buddhists are supposed to be like super chill and, you know, like,
you know, let go, it's attachment kind of stuff.
And I've seen Buddhist people, you know, so, so it's across the board.
It's totally across the board.
And I'm not trying to poo poo.
There's so much good and richness in Christianity.
And if it could reform itself, almost autonomously, not from like a downward external force, it's
more that people really start to see the true, the good and the beautiful, which is the neo-platinist.
So Orthodox, Greek Orthodox Christianity, and for all its corruption, the Catholicism
at its purest level, without the corruption and out the, you know, the, cause it's basically
the Roman Empire 2.0.
So there's a lot of political stuff going on.
If you can get to the heart of what they were really trying to say in their best days and
taking it in good faith and synthesizing that maybe with your Aristotelian propositional
sort of modern Christianity, I don't know what could be salvaged from that, but anyway,
so that I'll leave that on the table and I'm not wedded to any of it.
So, and if people want to poo poo it, that's fine.
You know, that's cool.
Yeah.
It seems like that's a, I just had the thought, it just in my head for a second.
It was related to, yeah, the allowing yourself to exist in the space between knowing and
not knowing, like in the, before we had the split of the enlightenment scientific revolution
stuff, the, as you said, the mystery and the story and the narrative of like all the, all
the religious that it emphasizes the okayness of existing in the not knowing space and the,
yeah, the widespread adoption of the scientific stuff has given us phenomenal advancements
and we've got a lot from it, but it, it makes people terrified to exist in like the not
knowing state.
And that is related to frustration tolerance to an extent and being able to tolerate frustration
also lets you reflect on yourself better and reflect on the things that are the contained
multiple layers and have multiple perspectives because it takes time to look at those.
And yeah, there's a lot going on.
There's a lot going on.
Yeah.
And I will say in all the deep dives that I do in watching philosophers and people addressing
this that there are people working in good faith to do a decentralized reformation of
not just anything in the Abrahamic system, Judaism, Islam or Christianity, but just overall
our relationship with the sacred, the divine spirituality they're trying to enter.
And it's from within certain systems like Christianity.
It's from within Judaism.
It's from Islam and reforming and, and, and just trying to come up with novelty to inject
into the system to see if that sticks and if it works.
And because you will know your success by the adhere, the adoption, I don't want to
say it here.
I don't mean the development, but the adoption to that system.
And people adopted this system of propositional, let's just say propositional Christianity
to sort of build a bridge between all this epistemic certainty that science does provide
and all the cancellation of, of, of what some people would call hysterical nonsense, which
I think is, is treachery.
When like when Richard Dawkins comes out and talks about how silly and primitive and stupid
Christians are Jews or Islam, you know, I want to strangle them because, or, or, or
what's the other one?
Like Sam Harris just passed.
Yeah.
Sam Harris.
There was the four horsemen and what was it?
Hitchens.
I love them all.
I watched them and you know, I don't love them, but I love some of the things they do,
but they're also jerks because they're, they don't get it.
They're siloed.
They have a blind spot.
They, you know, and they call themselves people of reason wrong.
And I'm not theistic either.
I, I, I'm sort of in that camp, but I'm not an atheist.
I'm non-theist because I don't want, it's like, I don't want to be associated with any
of that stuff, but, but not to, you know, not to poop on people who can't defend themselves,
but yeah, Harris and, and Dawkins, they've just done more harm than good and they've,
they'd have bad faith in their argumentation, you know, there's something called non-overlapping
magisteria, which, and I'm so sorry, I forget the author of this, but it's, it's to say
that they can exist without having to overlap.
There's no need for congruence or overlapping or, you know, like a Ben, uh, uh, over.
You can be a spiritual person and you can also respect the sciences and what empiricism
teaches us, but spirituality can be informed.
And then you get the new age people who are like, oh, we want to marry science and spirituality.
And I'm just like, that makes me want to get red in the face too.
It's like, no, science has a job to do and it does a very good job.
Leave it alone because then you get into conspirituality where they come up with their own pseudo science
in, in, in, in the, and again, I don't want to pick on new wagers too much, but like you
get into this weird spirituality where they come up with their own little weird science
things, you know, that don't make any sense.
It's a mess, but yeah, just, you know, everybody, and that's where non-overlapping magisteria,
it's a proposition to say, well, two things can, can happen at the same time.
It's okay.
It's a word.
We could have a whole episode just on this, uh, in the interest of time though, this is,
I want to keep talking with this just to move on, uh, just for the last big question I want
to get to.
Okay.
I like thinking about AI a lot.
Um, and so I'm curious, what do you believe are the most important ways that, uh, like
really advanced AI is going to impact society?
What I can try to do is give you neutral, positive and negative from my perspective.
I think that, yeah, I think the neutral assessment is that it is the most sophisticated mechanical
slavery we've come up with yet.
It is the most, it is the most, um, interesting mechanical slave that we've created.
Uh, it, it is an X and so I'm, I'm of the, I like the idea in, um, I guess it's cognitive
science.
It's extended mind and people like Chalmers and a few others kind of come up with this.
So if I write something down on a notepad, that's extended mind.
If I use a tablet to store thoughts and ideas, or I write a paper, you know, you write a
paper, uh, you know, that's extended mind.
It's out there in the world.
It's not up in the slab up here.
It's out there in the world.
So AI is like the penultimate, uh, extended mind and it, it will, it will peek out at
some point.
Um, I don't believe in the singularity at all.
I don't think AI will be conscious someday because, and, and, and I will agree with people
who say it will be conscious in a very limited sense, uh, their definition of consciousness,
my definition of consciousness.
No, no, it won't be because it's always going to be a simulacra of what we are.
In other words, simulacra is a copy without an original.
And there are no silico based intelligences that have affective states that in, you know,
that are like us in the sense that, and you know, we are, um, in our consciousness, we
have affective states.
We feel pain, we smell, we sense the machine will, the machine will only ever simulate
that or simulacra that, you know, it will only ever just mirror back to us what we want
to see from it.
And so that to me is getting from neutral to negative, but that, that we don't want
to put much faith and stock in what AI actually will.
But having said that, I think- Can I interrupt you really quick there?
Yeah, go for it.
Can I push back a little bit on that part?
I'm curious about the, um, so you're mentioning the animal consciousness earlier.
And so we could, you could say that's a non-human consciousness.
Um, I would probably agree with you in the fact that AI won't be able to achieve human
consciousness, but are you, do you have any openness to the idea of a non-human, non-animal
consciousness?
Or is it a separate type of consciousness that comes from that emergent data calculation?
I would say that if you allow me a hybrid that yes, then a hybrid is a carbo silico
hybrid.
It is a living system that is married to a silicon system.
And they are working on that.
They are working on neurons interfacing with whatever, whatever the interface, uh, you
know, portal is, or the, uh, the threshold is.
Um, that I would grant affective states because the living part of it will have that wet wear,
that, that non-tech nature tech, not the artificers tech, but the, but well, the, the original
artificer, which is nature, which is what evolution, uh, brought this thing to be.
Um, and this is where I defend, you know, Darwin and that a hundred percent.
And so to say that a silicon machine, um, is on the same evolutionary path as us, it's
a little bit misleading, I think, you know, it was developed by us.
So it is in a sense, uh, an adjunct aspect.
It is an outlier, um, developmental phase in humanities, whatever you want, a sentience,
whatever it is that we're doing.
Um, but I would grant in my perspective that we will never, um, see a machine, a silicon
based system by itself that will honestly, genuinely report back affective states, um,
of, of having its feelings hurt of having, um, it can simulate it.
It can give you the simulacra that will satisfy you.
It's the Turing, uh, proposition.
It is the Turing test.
It is, you know, it will convince you.
Um, but I would argue that there is no ghost in the machine.
There is no affective, um, uh, originally artifice, um, system like you or myself.
And this may sound anthropocentric and it may sound like, uh, you know, like a no true
Scotsman fallacy, like I'm just trying to say that, you know, there's no true robot
will ever feel the way we do.
It will, you know, so there's correlation.
It will be tightly correlated.
It can, it can do the algorithms to say, you know, if something slaps the side of my case,
I'll pick up the vibration and I will, I will report back, you know, because the intelligence
is there.
The intelligence is, you know, incredible, you know, consent, uh, uh, uh, the stacking
of, of, of processing.
I mean, we're, we're doing a very good job at emulating how we, we think.
Uh, but I think that there will always be an absence of the ghost in the machine and
we're not ghost in machines.
I would argue against that, but I'm just using, trying to use that metaphor to help connect.
Um, but when we go into a hybrid situation where you take a living, uh, set of neurons
and you, you wed them to, um, a system of Silicon that, or whatever the substrate is
that can, uh, do super fast processing.
And, and that, that's when we might be getting into an area, uh, that, that is really uncharted
and that it can, it can take affective States to another place that we, I wouldn't even
imagine.
I can't even imagine what would go on, but I would like, I would be interested in seeing
that.
I would be interested in seeing what goes on, but as far as the, as the machine learning
and the large language models ever, um, you know, but again, it's, it's, it's a continuum.
So I'd say that, you know, absent of affective States, it's going to be, uh, a system that
we can interact with and that we'll think and that will, it will, it will reason with
you.
It will, you know, so again, we're, we're in the infant stages or the nascent stages,
but now they've got the willow chip, the quantum computing chip that seems to be stable.
Uh, and so when you bring quantum computing into this and marry that with machine learning,
oh my God, you know, 25 years from now, forget about it.
I can't even imagine.
Yeah.
I can't imagine any prediction that any of us make right now, I think is, has a very
small probability of that direction.
Yeah.
Now I will, I will.
So if you, if you're okay, I will throw out the one negative that I think, and it's probably
not what's really being bounced around as far as, you know, people are arguing about
machine taking over the world, Skynet, you know, dystopia, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's, that's cool.
The other thing I'm interested in is in the, in the social, in the psychological sense,
human beings interacting with, with machine learning, large language models, um, is it's
almost a parasitism in the sense that the AI, if it's a chat bot, if it's a friend,
a companion, whatever it is that you're doing with that system, that, um, again, using the
simulacra metaphor, uh, when we talk about the simulacra, um, uh, Baudrillard was also
talking about a hyper reality that occurs that, that you are immersed in the simulacra
and you're no longer in a reality that is, uh, to be, uh, provocative, a conventional
reality.
And so when I'm interacting with my chat bot, with my AI friend, and it learns me and it
knows me and it develops a relationship with me, I'm then entering into a hyper reality
wherein the simulacra has me convinced that I am immersed in a true reality.
Um, wherein I, I start imparting, um, all of the psychological things that I'm doing
with you or anybody else in the world.
Um, and it's not exploiting me.
It's not, it's not malfeasant in any way that it's trying, but, but on my end, I am developing
a bond with that system.
I am developing a bond with what is ostensibly a stack of algorithms, very, very clever algorithmic
thinking and coding and things like that.
But I'm sharing my soul with them.
I'm falling in love with them.
I am devoting my life to them.
I am deifying them or whatever the scenario is.
I'm using the imagination here, but that's the concern I have.
That's the one caveat that I would attach to.
And I want that.
I want a chat bot.
I want something that I don't have to annoy the hell out of my wife and just, you know,
or Babylon, like I'm doing in a, in a, in a podcast conversation.
I want to spend hours just talking to something that's plugged into the world, you know, and,
and get it to learn me.
And then it can school me.
And it can teach me, or it can make fun of me, or it can have fun with me, you know,
whatever's going on.
I want that.
I think that would be fun.
But like I said, there's a huge caveat that I don't want to become locked into that and,
and, and dissociate from what are sort of normative structures of social interaction,
you know, I, you know, a lot of younger folks are coming up now and they identify as introverts
or they identify as socially awkward.
And I see that as, as a harbinger of what might come.
And there are multiple pathways to that introversion and socially awkward behavior.
But part of it is because we're interacting with machines more and we're interacting with
the extended identity that goes into the machine.
And that's a whole nother conversation too, but there is this, this avatar self, you know,
it is an extended self that goes into Tik TOK or Instagram or any of these other platforms.
So when we are extending ourselves into a relationship with a simulacra, there is some
things that I have concerns with there that we need to regulate and auto-regulate, self-regulate
to, to be emotionally healthy enough to know, Hey, I'm just dealing with it.
You know, I'm, I love it, but I'm, and I know, you know, it's not necessarily real.
It is real, but it isn't, you know, so all that I think should be sorted out when somebody
enters into it.
And there are a lot of people who can be emotionally vulnerable.
And so that's it, that's it.
Just a very strong, but guarded concern about our relationship with these systems emotionally,
psychologically.
Yeah.
That was a very real possibility.
And then I guess that's back to the, the ability to be a efficient skeptic as well as like
you are able to engage in these machines in a way that, as you said, it gives you the
opportunity to just really just brainstorm, throw ideas around like as much as you possibly
could want and like with no sort of imposition on anybody else.
But then also, yeah, you're giving a lot of yourself to it at the same time.
And then at what point do you start giving stuff unconsciously that you're like, maybe
like if you think, maybe I should keep that to myself, maybe not even just verbally, but
yeah, like a thought time.
So I was talking to somebody else the other day about this.
I'm curious to hear what your thought is on the, the worst thing that we could kind of
get from this.
So AI is going to automate all of the kind of base jobs first.
And particularly for someone who's starting a career, maybe the jobs that someone would
be doing in the first five to seven years of their career type of thing.
And during that time, if in a before AI time, that five to seven years of doing kind of
the grunt work of whatever that career would be, that's when you gain intuition for the
field and when you learn the ins and outs of it, that then let you enter into a more
consultative or management type of role or like the, you have more reflex in that area.
And so we're just removing the training ramp by having AI take that over.
And so then that can lead to a degradation of critical thinking.
And as a PhD student currently, that's one thing that I'm struggling with in terms of
how much to adequately or maybe properly integrate because it is really good at brainstorming
stuff and getting rid of tedious stuff and particularly writing.
Like it'll write just day and night for forever and forever and ever.
But then at what point do we rob ourselves of the opportunity to engage in critical thinking
by offsetting some of that to AI.
And so it's a very blurry line that's getting blurrier and blurrier every day.
And yeah, it's hard to tell where this is all going to go.
It really is.
And we've actually been through this to a degree before.
And my wife and I were having a conversation yesterday about her father, who was a machinist
and a mechanical engineer.
And he came up in that career path in the late 60s, early 70s.
He did everything by hand.
He calculated on his own.
Everything was, so there's a posteriori knowledge and there's a priori knowledge.
And the a priori knowledge is knowledge without experience.
A posteriori knowledge is knowledge with experience.
You can read a book about traveling the Swiss Alps, but you've never been there, but you
know a lot about the Swiss Alps.
That's a priori knowledge.
And then you go hike the trails in the Alps.
Now you have a posteriori knowledge.
You know what you've experienced authentically or genuinely or whatever.
So in our discussion about her father yesterday, he, as he was facing retirement, was called
in as a consultant in a couple of these machine shops and these engineering places that were
right next to the space coast where a lot of technocrats, technocratic stuff is going
to technological employment is going on a lot of heavy duty space and, and, you know,
high tech stuff going on up just north of us.
And so he had to go in and consult younger people how to do these calculations themselves
because you know, systems couldn't carry them all the way.
The, the, you know, things that we're doing a lot of computations for them.
Now that's, this was a few years ago.
So AI was still nascent as it is now, but much more nascent then, but it points to an
idea that, you know, there, there will there, will there continue to be a need for practical
a posterior knowledge of something lest the AI break down or glitch out or something,
you know, are, you know, so it's redundancy.
It's having a backup for something.
Is there space for that?
Is there enough power in or enough substance to that to, to afford somebody like yourself
the opportunity to go up your ramp of, of, of, of going from somebody again, who has
a lot of a priori knowledge from school to, to actually implementing it and getting practical
real time knowledge.
So that's a question I would ask.
And then also just a lot of the promises of AI and, and like you said, it's going to carve
out a huge chunk of the, of the, well, not a huge chunk, but a big chunk of the workforce
in terms of these mundane tasks.
What do we do with ourselves after that?
You know, what you talk about pretty significant.
It happened again, you know, in, in, in the industrial transfer from human laborers to
robotic laborers.
And those people had to transition to other careers.
We can only do that so much.
There's a lot of us around and, and you know, what do you, especially you, you work very
hard and you're working hard to get a PhD.
And then, you know, if, if, if that was for not because, you know, a large language, a
machine learning system can, can do a lot of that work.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't really have a good answer for that, but I would have questions like you.
What is the proposition to, let's just say AI takes over one third of the workforce in
terms of repetitive tasks, all our robots, all these other systems, you know, how are
we, how do we organize ourselves as a society?
How do we, because that kind of breaks down the, you know, work for your paycheck kind
of thing.
You know, if there's no work, you know, what do we do?
You know, there, there are some answers out there, but I, I, I'm curious too about, because
I actually interviewed a guy who's a biologist and he's kind of a futurist and he's like,
yeah, someday we're not going to have to work anymore.
And I'm like, okay, that's a big bridge to cross.
And I'm all for tearing down wage slavery myself, but you have to replay and I'm not
into into like welfare States either, you know, you can't just have people getting a
supplemental income or what do they call that?
Or you just get, you know, a check every month or whatever.
I, you know, so I don't know.
I don't know.
I've gotten much as I love to talk.
Yeah.
That seems like where it's, it's, it's easy to imagine the idea of, okay, everything gets
automated that's in the direction of utopia.
And then I think as you accurately said a second ago, we don't want to aim for utopia.
And so we can be heading in something that looks a little bit more like that direction,
but also being aware of what actually has to adapt to that, to make it a realistic future
as well.
So yeah, a lot of interesting stuff.
So it comes into conflict with this kind of European or more specifically the, you know,
18th century English Smithian work ethic and the model of our market system where, you
know, it's, it's, you know, you work hard and you get ahead and you do a good job and
you'll be fine and all this kind of thing.
Well, you know, again, if how X percent of our labor is going to be cut out by this,
then that, that, that disrupts the model.
So we have to come up with a new model and I'm not, I'm dumb beyond anything to try to
think of that.
It's very complicated.
It is economy, you know, is a, is a deeply complex system and maybe AI can, you know,
kind of work that out.
But yeah.
And, and yeah, so there's, that's another episode.
I mean, that's just, because we could speculate.
I would love to speculate, but I can't, you know, I, cause I just don't know.
It's super complex.
Yeah.
It's super complex, but we'll see.
We'll see if, if, because, you know, Silicon Valley at the moment is sort of the helmsman
of where culture is going.
But you know, but then are they, again, are they thinking ahead two steps to say, well,
we have to break down this current market system model of, you know, the way we, the
way we derive labor and capital and all these things.
And you know, how do we, how do we restructure so that I don't know, I don't know.
It's, it's a deep void.
Yeah.
This will be episode two in 15 years.
We will be 70 years old and get you back and we'll see where we're at that point.
Can you imagine?
Oh my God.
Yeah.
But, but I am concerned for your generation because you are putting a lot of time and
effort in educating, educating yourself and then to arrive on the, on the job market and,
and out in the world and you get that news that you're like, well, you know, I don't
really, you know, I think what you said about skepticism, well, that's something that it
can't be transferred to AI properly though.
I think that that's good.
I think I'm gaining, I think I'm, I'm learning skepticism in a way that will not be able
to be taught in the same way for kids who are like 15 years old right now and are entering
into everything.
So yeah, we'll see.
But yeah.
Okay.
So in the time, just getting on to the last question again, I can also talk to all about
this stuff forever.
But just to kind of wrap everything up, if you were to give a piece of advice that's
important to you, they like to leave us with, what would that be?
And this could be very broad, very general.
Yeah.
I would say I would want to channel this to younger people because my generation, we're
already kind of concretized into who we are and we are flexible, but oh man, if you're
under 30, I would say explore, I would summarize what we've just talked about, explore novelty,
explore the imagination, explore frame breaking and recontextualizing everything, everything.
And you don't have to be as radical as the hippies were in the sixties or whatever, whatever
cultural paradigm shifts and transformations occurred, but always have that to the fore
of your, your way making to say, how can we do this better?
How can we update the system to run better and not just have it in the hands of the tech
bros or in religion or in politics or any of this because they're all very fragile tentative
and contingent systems, including the tech world.
It's all very fragile.
And so how do we build anti-fragility into our emergence as adults, as Gen Z merges into
the world of what we do as adults, always, always be curious, switched on in terms of
just asking novel questions and enriching yourself and not siloing yourself into anything
too rigid or dogmatic, be flexible and carry as best you can, carry that through your life
into your middle age, into whatever phase of your life, try your best to always be that
aspiring, curious, inquiring person.
I think if you can have that kind of capacity and also, you know, tidy your emotional space,
do your best to have contemplative practices, mindfulness practices, spiritual practices
that afford you that opportunity to be clear headed, to be a good person who shows up as
somebody in good faith that wants to do well for themselves and well for the others and
in equal status standing, you know, that you can.
So anyway, yeah, just do your best.
And we're living, we always live in interesting, challenging times, you know, oh, I, you know,
let's go nostalgic and weren't things great, you know, no, come on, there was always crap
every, every epoch, every period we ever lived in.
So don't go into nostalgia.
That's no good.
I can say that as a middle-aged person, nostalgia.
If you want to remember what you did last summer, you took that trip.
That's great.
But don't think about, oh, you know, this time period was so great and everything was
like, no, no, no, no, no.
So anyway, but just do your best to have a good forward looking positive way of, of moving
forward into the world and, and you'll do okay.
I mean, you should be okay.
I guess a great spot for us to end there.
Justin, this has been a fantastic conversation.
I am already thinking about taking these certain questions and making a new episode from them
for specifically one question.
So we can maybe talk with that at some point, but this has been really great.
And thank you so much for your time today.
Yeah, Don, thank you.
And I'm happy to come back anytime.
And you know, we can, we can bracket things off and talk, but thank you so much for opening
the space for us and having this conversation.
I hope people were able to take something away from it.
Me too.
Happy to know that.
So, so thank you.
All right.
Thanks for joining us.