Playing the (Mind) Jazz (Ep. 246)
My conversation with Michael Garfield
My guest today is
, a paleontologist, futurist, writer, podcast host and strategic advisor whose “mind-jazz” performances — essays, music and fine art — bridge the worlds of art, science and philosophy.This year, Michael received a $10k O’Shaughnessy Grant for his “Humans On the Loop” discussion series, which explores the nature of agency, power, responsibility and wisdom in the age of automation.
This whirlwind discussion is impossible to sum up in a couple of sentences (see the number of books & articles listed below!) Ultimately, it is a conversation about a subject I think about every day: how we can live curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Highlights
Weirdness is a Perk
“If Instagram seems like it's selling you the wrong ads, then that means that you might be doing something right in that you might be especially singular or strange in a way that over the long term is going to allow us to continue to maintain wild spaces in human cultural diversity or psychological diversity. I think being weird in an age, as weird as ours is actually a perk because highly specialized, extremely efficient ecologies do not do so well when there's a huge disease or a meteor impact or whatever, and it's the weird generalists that get out and repopulate everything.”
Optimize for Leisure
“If we're going to optimize for anything, maybe we should optimize for a world in which we are capable of allocating resources to idle thinking and boredom and curiosity and these things. Like when Emmett Shear asked X the other day, ‘How you would measure flourishing in society,’ a lot of the people that wrote back said something to the effect of, ‘How much free time do people have?’ If you're generating all these productivity enhancements, but it's not leading to leisure, then you're not actually the master. You're the slave of this system.”
Well-Designed Institutions Should be Intergenerational
“High turnover organizations are not enough. You can have a huge flow of talent through a building and you can put people in that building, and they can keep having amazing ideas that somebody had last year. And again, you have to think on multiple different timescales. And so, part of the interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity of a well-designed institution, has to be intergenerational, and there has to be a gradient between people with high context and low context on a problem. And those are not necessarily the same axis.”
‘What World Do I Want?’
“We all assume that, ‘I'll just be happy if I get this, and so how do I get that?’ And that kind of thinking tends to promote suffering of yourself and of others. If you start by being like, ‘What world do I want? Because I can assume that I will make it closer to that world if I start in a clear vision of that thing,’ I think that that's a really useful... It's a protocol, rather than the inception of an ideology. It's like I'm not trying to get everyone to think exactly the way I do, but I do think that learning how to get better at reallocating our attention, and at telling stories that excite ourselves and excite other people, is a far better way to engage with the daunting complexity of the world that we have made for ourselves.”
Books, Articles & Podcasts Mentioned
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves; by W. Brian Arthur
Pharmako-AI; by K Allado-McDowell
The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century; by Howard Bloom
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; by Howard Bloom
One Summer: America, 1927; by Bill Bryson
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There; by Lewis Carroll
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World; by David Deutsch
Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry; by Joshua DiCaglio
Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering; by Malcolm Gladwell
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous; by Joseph Henrich
Do Conversation: There's No Such Thing as Small Talk; by Robert Poynton
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; by David Shields
The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture; by William Irwin Thompson
The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science; by Robert Anton Wilson
Designing Neural Media; by K Allado-McDowell
Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning; by Steward Brand
Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots; by Bonnie Docherty
What happens with digital rights management in the real world?; by Cory Doctorow
The Evolution of Surveillance Part 1: Burgess Shale to Google Glass; by Michael Garfield
An Introduction to Extitutional Theory; by Jessy Kate Schingler
175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art; Future Fossils with Michael Garfield
🎶⚔️👏🏼 205 - Greg Thomas & Stephanie Lepp on Jazz Leadership & Antagonistic Cooperation; Future Fossils with Michael Garfield
🌏🚜🫀212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere; Future Fossils with Michael Garfield
Transcript & Links
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. I've already conducted, I don't know, 20 minutes of the podcast with my guest already. That's how excited I am about having Michael Garfield as a guest finally, on Infinite Loops.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Michael, I don't even know how to summarize your career. And as I was going through it, I'm like, maybe we should lead in with a joke, a paleontologist futurist, an ex-Wall Street guy, go into a bar and begin to discuss what you are attempting to do in navigating our accelerating weirdness and cultivate curiosity and playfulness that we will absolutely need to navigate it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Again, just a couple of things. You're the former host of the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast. Your current podcast is Future Fossils. Michael, you have done so much, but my opening question is going to be about a term that you use that I love, and I want you to explain it to our audience. What is mind jazz?
Micheal Garfield:
So one of my great inspirations in my work is the late historian William Rowan Thompson, who famously rage-quit his academic career at MIT in I think 1972 because he said he felt like an atheist at the Vatican. He was a scholar of the history of consciousness and committed to transdisciplinary thinking and he felt that his work with history was basically being expropriated at MIT to forward a specific agenda.
Micheal Garfield:
So he left and started this group called the Lindisfarne Association, which is a masterwork of social gardening that includes... If you look at the list of people that were involved with Lindisfarne and it's like a who's who of latter 20th century systems thinkers. You've got Lynn Margulis and Stewart Brand, and Brian Arthur and Joan Halifax and Paolo Soleri and Stuart Kaufman, and it's bonkers.
Micheal Garfield:
It was never really a formal thing, although it had a physical locations in New York and Crestone. But the point is that he saw the work of minds in an age of complex and chaotic systems, an era defined by networked media to be different from the way that information was presented at the origin of the university, the modern university in print culture and an academic lecturer standing up in front of people and this one to many communication and linear chains of reasoning.
Micheal Garfield:
And he said that what we need instead is what he called Wissenskunst, which, knowledge art, and that what we are doing is we're moving through networks of ideas. And so what we are doing instead is you brought up the curiosity and play piece that we are invoking a more exploratory attitude rather than an exploitative attitude.
Micheal Garfield:
A book is a great way to crystallize an idea and present it in a linearized serial fashion and make your argument as concisely as you can. But until very recently, books have not been a medium that can listen and adapt and play off of the world around it.
Micheal Garfield:
The same is true for the academic journal paper, and this stuff is changing now, thanks to digital media. But I'm really interested in this approach to knowledge work that is more like jazz than orchestral and symphonic music where everyone is following a conductor and listening to a score.
Micheal Garfield:
Actually, I'm reading, where is it? My very good friend Robert Poynton, and I'm reading his book, Do Conversation right now, and I'll be interviewing him shortly about this. He teaches improvisation to business leaders at the site business school at Oxford.
Micheal Garfield:
And he makes this point that he got into that through theatrical improv because the things that you learn improvising on stage are precisely the kind of things that give you the toolkit for having a really interesting generative conversation.
Micheal Garfield:
And so the act of listening, the act of play, the act of using whatever you find, this is all also part of what... I come out of a tradition as an improvisational musician in these festival spaces and leading large group long-form ensemble improv, and I love it.
Micheal Garfield:
Sometimes it's messy and weird, but the fact that it generates a lot of noise, the fact that it doesn't behave in the way that you expect it to is the feature. It's not the bug. Because when we're in an environment where the scripts that we carry into it do not work, we're institutional legitimacy crisis and what Doug Rushkoff calls narrative collapse define our era. And so we have to improvise.
Micheal Garfield:
So the way that anyone can improvise Poynton makes the case that you think you don't know how to do this, but you do because all of us are having conversations all the time. So it's basically about having a conversation with knowledge, with minds exploring high-dimensional spaces together.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So much to unpack there. It reminds me of Emerson's idea for a panharmonicon where everything is admissible, right? Philosophy, ethics, divinity, poetry, jokes, the highest and the lowest, everything should be part of it. The idea behind generative books, as I was preparing for my chat with you, I'm like, I'm God damn it, he's revealing OSV's entire playbook, our entire thesis, because infinite books, we're going to experiment with generative books where the reader can interact with the book itself.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Now, obviously, we're not going to be able to do that in the hardcover and the paperback, but we are going to be able to do it in the audiobook. We're going to be able to do it in the electronic version of the books and I'm fascinated by the idea. I was telling somebody this idea and they're like, "Well that's like fan fiction, right?" And I said, "Well, yeah, one part of it is,” but the idea to be able to contribute… you've made the point, we've gone from a time of one to many communication in almost everything that we do. If you read America One Summer that looks at the 1920s, Bill Bryson makes the case, that for the first time in history, the guy on the radio announcing Lindbergh's return was speaking to more humans than any other human in history ever had. And it fascinates me to build on all of this stuff as opposed to try to freeze ... I think one of my big problems with people who are like, "That isn't the way it used to be, and we should do it this way, this way, and this way." Is that, that leads to stasis, which in my opinion is death.
Micheal Garfield:
And we need to improv, I love improv. So another one of my handicaps in becoming unemployable is, I cannot read a script from a teleprompter. I did some sub management when I was in asset management for some big companies, and the most comedic element was me trying to ... Because they had lawyers everywhere and they're like, "He can't say that." And they were literally there at the filming. And so they have the teleprompter, with me trying to read it, and I just fucked it up so badly, that even the lawyers were like, "All right, let him do it the way he wants to do it. We'll just take out what we think is not going to be kosher." But in my experience, that's how you learn. You learn by interacting, by pivoting, by being agile and active listening, as opposed to listening to respond.
Micheal Garfield:
With classic debates, you're often listening not to get the point, not to learn something new, but to respond. And here's my point of view, and goddammit, I'm going to defend it. It's like the social media. This is the hill I'll die on. And I always say, I embrace the George Patton version of that, and I prefer to make the other poor dumb bastard die on his hill, rather than hold to an opinion like that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
One of the things that attracted our entire team to your grant proposal, was the idea of humans on the loop. Let's talk about that a bit and let's also talk specifically, most people say, "Humans in the loop." And you say, "Humans on the loop." And I think that, that is important. And explain to our audience why that is so
Micheal Garfield:
Yeah, again, this is my thinking heavily shaped by spending five years full-time translation of a whole international community of complex system scientists, but also just personal life experience as an artist and independent scholar, and my encounters with various philosophical traditions. That when we talk about being in control, cue Alan Watts, that you're never actually really in control, or the way that Terrence McKenna used to talk about walking past the House of Parliament and the lights are on at 2:00 A.M. and it's like, it's because they don't know how to deal with ... They have lost the wheel. There's nobody there. And so it's funny because the whole framework of cybernetics that metastasized into technocratic globalism, and became the thing that the church that William Irwin Thompson felt that he didn't belong in at MIT, started from a very humble realization. It was the idea that we are in feedback loops, we're made out of feedback loops, that we have some capacity to make decisions. But it became this thing of a way to fulfill the project of modernity, to understand and therefore control all of these different variables.
Micheal Garfield:
And I think the more deeply I have sat with the ecology and the physics and the Zen Buddhism and all of this stuff, distinct fields that are all converging on the claim, that actually very little of what you are, or very little of what you do, is something that you're doing deliberately. And that actually rational thought, the ability to analyze, to derive causal frameworks, to think about mechanism and narrative, that all of that is a post-hoc exercise about a decision that had to be made in the heat of the moment, on the basis of a very imperfect model, built on very limited information. And so this is the frame that I bring in with me when I'm thinking about this taxonomy that Bonnie Docherty presented to the UN in 2012 about automated weapons. She said, "There's humans in the loop, humans on the loop, and humans out of the loop."
Micheal Garfield:
And I had not really heard about this whole framework. I had only ever heard about in the loop or out of the loop. The idea that you are the one telling a drone to fire on the target that it has suggested, or that it's just like Terminator out there. And the reality is that this is a framework that assumes that decision making is only being made at one level, at one spatiotemporal scale at a time. Even in evolutionary biology, selection is not happening purely on the level of the organism, or on the level of the gene, or on the level of the population. It's all of these things all at once, and moving at different frequencies, or like Stewart Brand's Pace Layers.
Micheal Garfield:
So if you are thinking in a scalar fashion, then there's this thing that happens where it's like, "Oh, well, I am somehow a cluster of subatomic particles. I am a community of cells. I am a society of organs. I am a person, that mesoscopic human layer. I am also a module, or a subunit, or a constituent of these larger intelligent systems." And somehow we have to be able to reconcile all of that and speak more rigorously about what it means to exert agency, what it means to have choice in a world where there isn't just one loop. There are many, many loops that are all moving at different speeds. And so this is specifically to name this project, Humans On the Loop, was to try to find a middle ground between the folks who are responding, navigating the world in a way that they've been alienated, disenfranchised by this immense opaque technological infrastructure, and the occult machinations of statecraft. And feel like they have been cut completely out of the decision-making at the scale of society, or of ecology.
Micheal Garfield:
And on the other side, you have people who ... You look at the barons of technological industry now, and arguably these are the most powerful organisms that have ever existed on the planet. The Anthropocene is largely determined by the decisions made by a few dozen people, or a handful of organizations. But the thing is that those people, I'm hoping to reveal that seeing them, the way that everyone's always trying to change Elon Musk's mind, it's like, "Well, that's ridiculous, because Elon Musk exists within an incentive landscape, that his decisions are in an absolute philosophical sense, every bit as constrained as anyone else's." And so none of us are just changing our minds in a vacuum. We exist in the ... Complexity economics talks a lot about bounded rationality, and how if someone else's decisions don't seem rational to you, well, it's because you're not inhabiting their life world. You don't share an umwelt, the virtual reality that we construct out of our interactions.
Micheal Garfield:
And so yeah, this project is basically trying to, in part ... I've found a number of different goals that I'm working toward here. But one of those goals is, like you said, to encourage mind jazz. And mind jazz gets us to the point where we can combine different perspectives stereoscopically. Actually, I'm about to interview another one, my buddy, Joshua DiCaglio, who is a PhD student of my mentor, Richard Doyle at Penn State. And Josh wrote this great book, Scale Theory, in which he just says ... I just read this last night, this was gorgeous. “Quoting Greg Bateson, ‘It takes at least two somethings to create a difference.’ He argues that overlaying two perspectives forms a logical typing, which produces new information about information. When we arrive at a new scale, just such an operation occurs. With scale, we find something new, an extension beyond the system of perception that is about the system. It provides new depth, but a depth that has to be integrated, properly understood, and adequately assimilated into our approach to the cosmos."
Micheal Garfield:
So what he's saying, is that in scalar thinking, which is a subset of this category of multi-perspectival thinking, is necessary in order to redefine the self that is making decisions. And so I was just talking with Keoladeo McDowell, who co-directs and launched the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and wrote the first ever book that was a collaboration between a person and GPT-III, Pharmako-AI. And we were talking about how the self ... You were saying about the self that emerges in the era of broadcast media. Ke just wrote this piece for Gropius Bau, on how we're now living in an age of neural media. And so it's like we're networks that are communicating with networks, through the shared medium of language. And the media, you don't just see it, it sees you. And so this completely reconfigures who we think we are designing for when we create technology.
Micheal Garfield:
And that's the buck stop on that one, is just that if we are still thinking about designing this for an individual person, instead of this as part of what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject. Like the, you plus technology, that extends all around the world and through which you are connected to other beings, human and non-human, as some sort of colonial organism engaged in collective computation, then we're really not going to do a good job of designing the next technologies. We're going to be designing technologies from the perspective of print media, or television, or whatever, and we're not going to be able to do things as wondrous or innovative.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I think we could not really be more simpatico, because I was interested in this. I've kept journals for 45 years and so I'm going through them, because we're creating SimJim on our on-prem AI. And I happened to have a lovely data source of 45 years of crazy ideas for myself. And in the early '80s, I was like the biggest tech enthusiasts in the world. And I used a phrase called The Extended Self. And I had to wait 40 years for that to actually start to materialize. That's why I'm so incredibly excited and optimistic actually, about where we're heading. Very aware of all the problems. You just named a few. As you were going through the books, have you read Robert Anton Wilson's, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science?
Micheal Garfield:
No, but hit me, because I feel like I've steeped in a lot of Bob Wilson. I know people that knew him and so on, but I don't have a very deep-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, so what he does is, it's a brilliant book I highly recommend it. I think you'd love it. He makes the case that science itself ... And what jogged the book in my mind was your comment about the guy thought that he was at the Vatican, and that's Bob's central thesis in this book. I had Rupert Sheldrake on who's a…
Micheal Garfield:
Loved that episode.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so the idea from the editor of Nature at the time, his seminal first book came out, questioning all of the Citadel of Science. The guy is on BBC News, literally using as an example, the Pope correcting Galileo, and he as his position as editor in chief of editor, had the same right to correct this errant scientist, Professor Sheldrake. And Bob was way ahead of all this. And he's like, "Watch what's happening. What's happening is, they're trying to take one form of thought, pure rationality. They've taken it to the point where they themselves have become so irrational, because they will not explore any new topic, any new idea about how some of our views are incredibly antiquated." And then Howard Bloom's book, the Global Brain, I think you'd also enjoy that, because-
Micheal Garfield:
Yeah, I did read that one. That's awesome.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay. Yeah, and it leads me ... And about it rationality, Bloom has another book on reinventing and reinvigorating capitalism, The Beauty of The Beast, I think is the title. I'm getting that wrong. I don't have it right in front of me, but the idea that the old models, that is what my degree ostensibly worthless is in economics, quantitative economics. And I sit in class just thinking, "Have any of you ever talked to an actual human in a marketplace?" Because it's the old joke about the economist, right? There's an engineer and an economist. I'll just make it those two. They're on a desert island, and they find a big crate that's boxed up and it says, "Food." And so the economist goes, "Well, this will be easy. All we have to do is assume we have a can opener." Whereas the engineer actually wants to work on the simple engineering techniques that you could use to get that food open.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You've talked also about a hypothesis that I'm fascinated by, the Red Queen hypothesis. And that's because I love Lewis Carroll and I love that name. And it comes from the quote, the Red Queen in Through The Looking Glass to Alice, and she says, "Now here you see, it takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place." And predator and prey are good examples of this, right? I've spent time in Africa, and if you haven't, if get a chance, I highly recommend doing it. Because literally you are watching it unfold. Predators, our eyes are in the front, prey, the eyes are on the side for very, very good reasons. And yet, I am really interested in your take on the idea that there also exists in my opinion, and it's a theory that The WEIRDest People in the World advances, the book, The WEIRDest People in the World, that we are right now really seeing massive advances from cumulative cultural evolution. How do you think those two go together?
Micheal Garfield:
Okay, so I'm going to try and bridge this question to the question of our shared unemployability, or HR eligibility. Yeah, so the writing you're referencing is an essay I wrote on my experience with beta testing Google Glass, which the evolution of surveillance is ... I'm framing this in terms of the coevolution of humans and technology as a unique instance of a more general thing that's happening, the evolution of symbiotic relationships and of predator prey arms races, going back at least half a billion years. And I wish at the time that I had been writing this that I had known about Iain McGilchrist, who I know you've spoken about on this show,. And his notion that the hemispheric lateralization of attentional modes in the brain, where the left is concerned with what Alison Gopnik calls exploit, and the right more about what she calls explorer, that the right is more holistic pattern detection, and errs on the side of assigning agency or subjectivity to its experience. The world is alive and meaningful. And then the left brain, the world is a dead object to be used. It's an instrumental versus intrinsic. And that these two ways of seeing are because from the beginning of the complex brain, we were engaged in ... The evolution of the eye figures in, and the ability to sense at distance rather than across a chemical gradient, and then therefore to surveil and to prey on from above. And so suddenly a trilobite has to both think about where it wants to go and where it wants to not be, in order to get eaten by Anomalocaris, or these other weird Cambrian super predators. And so that whole thing, these two ways of knowing the evolutionary arms race is in effect a Red Queen race in humans and technology, is a race of innovation for enhanced leverage. I just actually wrote a piece about this that's in edit right now on Aeon Magazine. I'm really hyped about that.
Micheal Garfield:
That we can think about the way that technology is, we can see technology through the frame of enhancing our leverage of giving us some sort of competitive advantage. And that the more we do that, the more we become subject to the Cartesian effort to render the distinct, and singular, and unique, and living into a quantitative framework that allows us to make useful abstractions. And you can think about how at a very base layer, money, in the sense that everyone is using a common medium of exchange, makes one person's goods and services comparable to someone else's, without having to get into the idiosyncrasies of what I think it's worth in a barter system, versus what it might be worth to you. And that has enormous benefit. But in the same way that, for example, industrialized farming or any kind of massive standardization approach, yields enormous productivity gains, but we have to be careful that we don't ...
Micheal Garfield:
Like we were saying at the top of this call, that if you think about maintaining reservoirs of novelty, or adaptive reservoirs of features that do not seem currently useful, if we collapse into a perfectly optimized framework in which all inefficiencies have been shed and fed back into a process of capitalization, then when that system inevitably generates enough novelty to disrupt itself, then it has sown the seeds of its own demise.
Micheal Garfield:
And this is the work of Geoffrey West and Manfred Laubichler, who I spoke with on Future Fossils, episode 212, about Geoff West's scaling laws in biological ... biophysical scaling laws in various systems, including tech innovation and so on. And Geoff draws this staggered curve. The finite time singularity, is that every innovation cycle leads to some sort of endogenously generated crisis or collapse, that beckons a new round of innovation to address it even faster, and so on. Until the problems that we are creating through the exact approach of Brian Arthur's Nature of Technology, where every technology is a combination of prior technologies. And so as we invent new things, the combination space gets larger and larger and larger, until it becomes mysterious to us again, and we can't understand it, and we can't adapt to it because there are billions of people jail breaking ChatGPT at the same time. You cannot design a perfect response to this. Yeah, the issue of cumulative culture is that it hopefully, brings us to a place where we start to appreciate a kind of more polycentric or multivariate value system for innovation and for currency and for number, all of the different ways that we measure and track and assign value to the world. It's becoming more and more obvious that this stuff cannot be squeezed into a single unifying framework unless you are designing this thing to terminate itself inevitably. That this is the problem with these hugely ambitious theory of everything efforts, and the science is that they actually do a really good job and generating the anomalous evidence that undermines them and beckons a new approach.
Micheal Garfield:
Yeah, I think when it comes to the issue to fold that all into being illegible, there are actually perks to being illegible to whatever system, to the ... If Instagram seems like it's selling you the wrong ads, then that means that you might be doing something right in that you might be especially singular or strange in a way that over the long term is going to allow us to continue to maintain wild spaces in human cultural diversity or psychological diversity. I think being weird in an age, as weird as ours is actually a perk because highly specialized, extremely efficient ecologies do not do so well when there's a huge disease or a meteor impact or whatever, and it's the weird generalists that get out and repopulate everything.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Wow. My friend and legendary photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, when we were visiting once, he goes, "I got to tell you, Jim, your Instagram account is my most favorite one," and I'm like, "What? You crazy? I mean, I'm horrible at taking pictures." He goes, "No, no, no. That's the point. That's why I love it." He goes, "I was talking to my wife and I was taking her through it and see here, he posts his grandchildren then something completely unrelated and then this weird thing." He goes, "I just love it because it's so completely unpredictable," and so I get wrong ads on Instagram all the time.
Micheal Garfield:
Well, I mean, it's really, again, to go back to Bates, and information is the difference that makes a difference. It's like how long can you stay interested in a relationship if the person that you're in relationship with never surprises you?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly, and also, that brings up Claude Shannon's, what is information? It is that which surprises you just not using his exact terms, but it surprises you. One of the pieces that I was writing in or reading rather in conjunction with Shannon's information theory was a guy saying, "Hey, political speech, zero information, zero. Poetry, boom, all sorts of information in poetry." I think that the idea, and it's always often, people always try to get everything down to a dichotomy. The left brain, the right brain, Plato, Aristotle, Sparta, Athens. Right? I've been advocating for a long time. No, no, no, no, no. We need all of that. We need all of it. Yet then I find myself making the argument for why we need to thrive in the new world. We need to move from deterministic thinking to probabilistic thinking. It seems like those types of yes, no, zero, 100, I mean, bits and bytes have so taken hold of our minds that we always kind of look for the easier dichotomy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love your work because you make it quite plain that that is really surface area stuff. It is like your thing, you were talking about optimization earlier and you say you do not want to optimize your life and why? Well, you're optimizing your life for something for a snapshot in time. You're living a movie. I always kind of think of David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity where he's like, "The thing that people just can't understand is they think we know everything there is to know," and he has a great piece and it's like, "Hey, what were people in 1900 talking about? What were their opinions about the internet and quantum physics? They didn't have opinions about the internet and quantum physics because they hadn't been discovered yet." What do you think ... I was looking at, I love the Oppenheimer quote where everyone's like, "This is the solution, here is our solution and this will work."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Then I always think of this Oppenheimer quote where he says, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt it from doing so to stop it from doing so." That your idea about optimized life really resonated with me because many of my friends were like, "Jim, why aren't you wearing the Oura ring? Why aren't you sleeping on the bed? That tells you how ..." I'm like, "Because you're a quant, man. You're supposed to love this stuff." I'm like, "No, no, no, because I don't want to wake up in the morning feeling, 'God, I feel good, man, that was a great night's sleep,' and then look at the empirical bed data and find that it says that I had a shitty night's sleep, and then that will make me feel shitty for the rest of the day," right?
Micheal Garfield:
Well, there's a line between that and the literature on spontaneous remission and the no SIBO. If somebody didn't have cancer and got the wrong X rays and then promptly died obediently after six weeks because the doctor read them the wrong stats. I do think that's a really good point about having to be more careful and deliberate about the ways that we reflect on ourselves. I mean, I really like K Allado-McDowell's point that neural media senses back. We are a lot of my thinking on what I've been calling the glass age, which is that our era, like Bronze age or Steel age, whatever, actually I think Steel age falls within an age that's defined by the material agency of silica, right? We've got test tubes, we've got lenses, microscopes, telescopes, fiber optic cables, screens. This is the substrate for our entire experience as moderns.
Micheal Garfield:
That it prompts this question about the mirror. I've been glad to see a lot more people lately talking about how "the right way" to see language models, or at least a very useful way to see AI broadly is as a mirror that doesn't just show you you at your human scale now, but allows you to see yourself as you are, like I was saying earlier, as a cluster of like the digital twin of your liver or as as a data point in the Peter Turchin's work on quantitative history and social revolt, these kinds of things. We can start to curate that. We can tune our mirrors in really interesting ways, but there's the other part which I just love cus I’m morbid, which is that the mirror has always had a kind of frightening occult quality to it that there are people who refuse to have mirrors in their home still, because they feel that like the camera with the lens and the silver image. It's a kind of miniaturization of the mirror and the way that people were worried that the mirror would steal their souls or that they would become narcissistically obsessed.
Micheal Garfield:
I think that there's a lot, there's a rich seam of myth and metaphor from antiquity and the way that we have thought through technologies that allow us to see ourselves in new ways in the past that gives us a real handle on the situation as it is now. I'll add to that future Fossils 175, I interviewed CT Nguyen, who's a University of Utah philosophy professor and has written a lot about gamification and games and agency. If you haven't interviewed him, highly recommended, very eloquent and dynamic guests who I also, interviewed him for Complexity with Paul Smaldino. We talked about the problems of trying to quantify everything. I want to, just for a second, place some sympathy to the devil here for your note on false dichotomies. Because, again, the question of whether we have time to reflect on and think, advance reason into our decision-making, or whether you've been hit on the knee by a hammer and your leg is going to make the decision for you before you do.
Micheal Garfield:
I think that there are all of these different conditions, the urgency of different conditions that shape wherein a multi-layer system of decision is being made. I think that the fact that we continue to see these persistent binaries in decision making suggests a Chesterton's fence thing. Let's not get rid of this. I love Forrest Landry and the work on the triad. I love pushing people out of binary thinking, but at the same time, that takes time. It takes effort. Ultimately, when I spoke to Rajeev Sethi for Complexity podcast years back on police stereotyping and police violence due to the sort of wicked tangle of issues with the training and just cultural problems and police social relationships with the police and racism and all this stuff, we got into this thing about the way that you can get probabilistic about everything that you do in your life.
Micheal Garfield:
You can get probabilistic and say, "I have to derive from first principles that this chair is actually a chair before I'm willing to take the risk of putting myself in it," but in reality, there are some things that are stable enough that under most circumstances we can be like, "Okay, this is a chair." I think that this question of when are the profoundly inaccurate oversimplifications still good enough, the George Box, all the models are wrong, some are useful thing is like, well, I love both sides of this argument to the extent that there are just two sides, that for me, it really does get back to, again, a complex systems permissioning of some situations being where it's like, "Well, we don't have time to sit there and talk about how this two category system isn't good enough." The other way of thinking about it is that the more we apply probabilistic thinking, simulation, and other computational approaches to the world in an effort to understand and thereby, control it, we're back to what we were talking about earlier where the resources required for those sort of world simulations are so vast that they are changing the world.
Micheal Garfield:
That this is the fundamental thing about complexity economics, is that everybody's model of what everyone else is doing in the economy is altering their behavior. You can never actually create a perfect universal model of everything without creating, without basically drawing on resources greater than the system itself. If we really want to control the world as a giant manicured Italian garden, then we're, I feel weird saying this, we're going to have to mine asteroids. We're going to have to do all of this stuff so that we are not just raking up all available resources to turn the planet into matter optimized for computation in order to understand itself and then swallow the spider to eat the fly. Yeah, so I too really too believe that the question of where do you stop asking questions about how much information is too much? Did you really need the 4K TV?
Micheal Garfield:
Did you need to see the pores on the face of your soap stars? That has actually changed the way that those people do television. It's changed the way people record TV because suddenly you've got this like, "Oh, I've got to blemish, we can't record today." Yeah, the question is are you misattributing the value of the data that you're getting? Are you just chasing data for the sake of data, or are you chasing leverage for the sake of leverage? The last thing I'll say about this is that within the framework of humans on the loop, the question of why we are using any given technology gets back to a really fundamental LinkedIn language problem, which is that most of the time when I hear people talking about tools, they're not asking why they had to adopt them in the first place unless it's been papered over with the story of it increases productivity.
Micheal Garfield:
An enormous number of people have adopted AI in the last few years into their workplace with no knowledge of what they're actually going to do with it or why they're going to do it. When this kind of thing happens when we are basically allowing ourselves to be the vectors of someone else's story, then you get enormous footprints in the world of the externalities created by all of the people that just thought it was cool, and so they built an AI, I mean, they bought themselves smart home devices and have now created this enormous cybersecurity risk that's going to beckon a whole new paradigm of immunologically inspired cybersecurity.
Micheal Garfield:
It's like it could have been a whole lot simpler. It's like the question of why ask… if you have the time, this is always the thing. It's like not everyone has the privilege of the time to sit and think about these decisions, but maybe we should… if we're going to optimize for anything, maybe we should optimize for a world in which we are capable of allocating resources to idle thinking and boredom and curiosity and these things. Like when Emmett Shear asked X the other day, ‘How you would measure flourishing in society,’ a lot of the people that wrote back said something to the effect of, ‘How much free time do people have?’ If you're generating all these productivity enhancements, but it's not leading to leisure, then you're not actually the master. You're the slave of this system.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I love that. No, no, no. I love that last part because that's kind of the way I look at it. I'm a huge fan of incorporating the data from a huge variety of sources in decision-making. Your last statement there, I think, is what I rebel against. I don't want to be a vector in somebody else's system and would knowing things about what the mattress thought I slept versus how I felt. To me, that was not going to add anything to my life. In fact, it was going to subtract things from my life. As far as the idea of sitting and considering the probability is this a chair? I separate them between possibilities and probabilities. Possibilities, I don't spend a lot of time with when unless I'm trying to generate something that in the future could become a probability.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Possibilities are endless, but I don't go around saying, "You know what? The sun is going to come up tomorrow, and I'm going to give you a 90-minute lecture as to why that is so," because if the sun doesn't come up tomorrow, I'm fucked anyway, and why put any of my time, effort, or cognitive ... Cognitive is very expensive. Thinking is very expensive. When you direct your attention, when you direct your thinking to something that in my opinion is just mental masturbation, you're eating up those calories nevertheless. We all have a limit to how long and how deeply we can think about things. That kind of brings us to, you have great views on curation and the problems that it faced too. Have you read the book Reality Hunger by David Shields?
Micheal Garfield:
No, I'll write it down.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It's really interesting because he basically makes the case that before Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local. I always bang on about how this new era is so cool, in my opinion, because we have, because time, space, geography have collapsed, but in the past, they were distance-separated people. Distance, physical distance, separated culture. It separated people from exchanging ideas. When did mass flourishing really start? Well, one part of it was we learned how to sail. We learned how to go and find other cultures. We learned how to have exchanges with them. Some of them were very bloody, right, because we brought our ideas that can conflicted with theirs. Now, I believe, our thesis at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, if you look at everything we're doing is very consistent with what Shield says in his book, "We've moved from mass production to mass customization, and the world has become a bit atomized."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
One of the reasons, in my opinion, you're seeing all of these conspiracy theories, et cetera, because people haven't had to deal with this level of uncertainty in their own daily life really ever before in history of this magnitude. Then you look at the world that we came from, and I happen to exist in both of those worlds, right? I'm 64 years old, so when I was growing up, there was literally an American monoculture, and the monoculture was determined by the three networks and by two newspapers, right? The three networks, we all know, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, those were, you could direct 80% of what people believed to be true if you had control of back to Bob Wilson of the means of communication, the nervous systems of people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, which it has a very good chapter about how we came to understand the Holocaust. I would recommend it just for that chapter alone. I'm not giving it a general recommendation because he's got some weak parts in it too, but he makes a really interesting point, and the point he makes is one that I've always kind of obsessed about. The idea in the past, everybody watched the same thing on TV, and he makes the point by looking at what happened to TV. He looks at the show, The Big Bang Theory, and it was one of the most popular comedies in the 2010s, and 18 million people watched the grand finale. Then he says, "MASH," which was a favorite of my mom and me until they got all preachy and political towards the last ends of the season, "was watched by 106 million people."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
The point Gladwell makes, I think folds in nicely to the point Shields is making, which is, "Can you imagine that?" I always think of it as the board, you will be assimilated, and we no longer are assimilating. We've gone from a log normal distribution, a normal, a Brownian distribution, to a Mandelbrot, a fractal distribution, which is very peaky in the middle and has very long tails. Now, I personally think there's gold in them there tails if you're a capitalist or there's really interesting shit in them there tails, if you're curious. I'm pretty cool with life speeding up, but you make really, really good points about the things that we really need to consider in this environment that we now find ourselves living in.
Micheal Garfield:
Thank you. Yeah, there is a lot there. Again, I want to see if I can grab all of that and weave it into some cool shape. Thinking is expensive. That said, not thinking is also, expensive just at a different time scale. I think that we've been touching on this at different parts of the conversation that it's like, well, it is easy to follow a heuristic until the heuristic doesn't apply, or I think I've been having a lot of conversations lately about this specific thing about mass customization in the age of a lot of McDowell's neural media. The replica AI. All these AI companion, AI lover services that are cropping up, that are in one sense, an obvious address to an epidemic of loneliness, also an epistemic of loneliness, that emerges out of the way that society has been fragmented in part because can work remotely, you don't depend on your village, your hometown for economic success. You know? The "Go west, young man," thing. But in doing that, we have broken intergenerational transmission of tacit knowledge, we have disrupted ecosystems, and we've given ourselves, I think, a bit of an illusion that this idea of lifestyle consumerism and mass customization... It's like, well, you are free to choose what kind of shoe... You can design your own shoe on Nike, but on a deeper level, all of us are online. All of us are subject to the design constraints and the opaque decision-making boundaries on what went into the design, for instance, of PCs and the internet.
Micheal Garfield:
I look back, I think a lot of my work actually came out of a three-month stint doing innovation research for a Mozilla spin-out last year. I spent some time with them afterwards, as a communications and research person. And they were working on the next layer of AI and computing. If you think about how mainframe computing remotely accessed through time-shared terminals at major academic and governmental institutions became the PC and the internet through the work of ARPA and et cetera, that Xerox Parc and all these groups... The vision that they had, the people like Alan K, JCR Licklider, Bob Taylor, Doug Engelbart. All of the folks that were initially figured in this. Their vision for the tools that we use now, was superficially similar but profoundly different, in the way that they were hoping that two things would happen.
Micheal Garfield:
One would be that people would be writing their own code, like object-oriented programming, is about putting the function of the computer in the hands of the user, rather than, like, I'm sitting here on a Mac and Cory Doctorow has written excellent copious material on the way that the universal computing machine has been neutered by digital rights management and all this other stuff. And that really the tools that we have, are so much more vastly powerful as hardware than they are allowed to be. And that is true for us as well as the users of those tools. And then the other piece is about machine translation and the idea that the computer network would not just allow us to communicate over great distances, but would allow us to communicate ideas from one sort of conceptual framework into another. And we don't have that hardly at all right now. What we have are massive problems about the scale of communication, because everything has been ripped out of its context.
Micheal Garfield:
And so people think they're speaking the same language when they're not. And this is a huge piece of the Moloch or the coordination problems at scale. So this question of what was considered expensive at the time that PCs and the internet were rolled out, is now looking like maybe we should have paid more attention to it at the time, so as to prevent all of these downstream problems with the fact, that now we cannot even agree on who's an expert or what English is. And so I just want to... This again, like, thinking is expensive. Where this connects to the frictionless relationships with highly customized AI services that are based on you as an individual specifically, and also change over time. So it's not just a snapshot of you, but it's like back when they had the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016 and everyone was saying Facebook knew you better than your spouse.
Micheal Garfield:
It gets back to that question of not sleeping in the smart bed. How do you make room in your own life, how do you find an aesthetic, that is not just tolerant of but embraces friction in relationships? And you've written about this somewhat on the way that you do social media. Greg Thomas and Stephanie Lapp, who I had on Future Fossils 205 to talk about jazz leadership and antagonistic cooperation. That's like, if we can meet in good faith, if we can agree that we share some sort of common value, then we can disagree all we like, as a process of collective intelligence, as a way of searching for better understanding and answers together. And you're not going to get that, interacting with the mirror. Like hell is other people, but hey, it turns out that hell is actually really great, if the goal is to learn anything about the world and about yourself.
Micheal Garfield:
And so yeah, I do think in one sense we are not assimilated in the way that someone with long hair and tattoos couldn't get a job in my dad's generation. But we are assimilated in ways that are even more sort of pernicious, and subtle, and difficult to root out. Because the world looks like... like many of us in the privileged world, get the experience that we want. And so how do we convince ourselves to step out the VR pod, and into the messy, difficult fact of the body, and of the externalities that trying to refrigerate ourselves in convenience is all creating?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That's a great point. And actually it was one of the goals that I had in mind when we created the fellowships and the grant program. What I was hoping for, speaking to the whole idea of new networks and network kind of being your filter, was, could we build a network of minds that were so cognitively diverse that when they came together in discussion, beautiful and unexpected and brilliant things would emerge? And literally I thought it would take five years, and we just had an off-site that included the fellows only. Were going to do one for grantees as well at another time, and then hopefully put them all together. But they're all together already in discussion groups on WhatsApp, you're in there. And what we found in physical presence space really speaks to your point. Yeah, other humans are messy and all that. But the things that result from putting brilliant cognitively different people together in the same physical space., I actually witnessed last week.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it was so cool. I thought it would take so much longer, but out of that friction that "Wow, I'm trying to develop a scientific way for people to analyze their kids' poop at home," meets the editor-in-chief of Infinite Books who says, "Yeah, how are you going to market that?" And the scientist, she looks at him and say, "I have no idea." And literally an hour and a half later she came up to me and she goes, "Jimmy just created an entire marketing plan for me. I hadn't even thought about it that way." But then the money shot as it were, was that makes me think of all the different ways I'm going to change the way I'm doing the research. So it was again, a beautifully generative discussion. And so back to one of the reasons I think you'll like Shield's book, is one of the things he says in reality, hunger is... Copies held sway. They owned the world for a long, long time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You got Gutenberg, gives you the ability to time-bind your ideas, send them into the future. And then we got all the copyright laws because artists should be able to get remuneration for their work. And then his point is, copies have been dethroned. And if you look at it, what did the powers that were, the IP and copyright holders do when Napster came along, when DHS came along? They fought like hell to shut them down. They're fighting like hell to shut down... Now it's AI training data, right? And he goes on a pretty long rant about how the future is relationships, it's links, it's networks, it's connections, it's sharing. And then he's got this great end quote, which is "Reality can't be copyrighted."
Micheal Garfield:
Yeah. Although Monsanto will try.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I know. I had the same thought when I read that.
Micheal Garfield:
One of the folks that I want to get involved in Humans on the Loop is Primavera De Filippi, Harvard, Berkman Klein, who has done this work on the extitution, right? Which I see as a natural extension of the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that led to my former parent institution, the Santa Fe Institute, or the kind of interdepartmental experiments that went on in Mozilla groups, and so on. And I know I've talked with you and a couple of people on the OSV team about Anna Gat's work with salons, and how we could bring all of this.... Like, we've just got great people, let's bring them into conversation and design for the facilitation of emergence. Because you can have an amazing cohort of fellows and grantees, and the WhatsApp group only does so much.
Micheal Garfield:
How do we structure conversation so that people are talking more in a way that actually stimulates stuff? I'm working out an advisory relationship with a new AI wisdom company called River, that is working with George Poor, who is a pioneer in online social networking. And we're kind of trying to answer some of these questions in the workplace. How can we use the machine to help invite people into good, fruitful, generative conversation spaces, the way that James Evans at University of Chicago or the folks at the Astera Institute are trying to use AI to map the blind spots in interdisciplinary research? And it's like having been that AI in the work I used to do in Sycom, the thing that I keep thinking about again is that if you don't do this, the risk is that... Like, when people try to pursue innovation as an end unto itself, that we are kind of back to the question of accidentally eating something to pursue that you needed.
Micheal Garfield:
So high turnover organizations are not enough. You can have a huge flow of talent through a building and you can put people in that building, and they can keep having amazing ideas that somebody had last year. And again, you have to think on multiple different timescales. And so, part of the interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity of a well-designed institution, has to be intergenerational, and there has to be a gradient between people with high context and low context on a problem. And those are not necessarily the same axis. And this is all stuff I'm really eager to explore in different environments with this grantee cohort, and also with the people that are... Humans on the loop is not an end unto itself.
Micheal Garfield:
It's what my friend Christina Bowen turned me onto this mycopunk principles. It's like it's a mycopunk project, in that you can't have an organization without the culture, the conversation that surrounds it. You can't have a product and sell it. When you're talking to Rory Sutherland about all of the engineering that goes into marketing something that's ultimately an aesthetic decision, because people understand, they have a value of that. They can understand what you are trying to sell them. So this sort of weaving social fabric for what our fundamentally collective intelligence problems, is what I hope my work contributes, and I appreciate your help with that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, we appreciate your work maybe even more. I kind of think, to Rory's value point, that in bringing in again what we've been talking about with reality hunger and those various topics, that value is going to be established in a very different way in the future. And it's going to have to do with collaboration, generative collaboration. You know? Explore, exploit. I think obviously we'll do both. And as value... I think some of the new watchwords for creation of value are going to be these relationships, these links, these networks. How easy are people to recall that, "Oh yeah, they're doing that over there"? How easy can they manipulate what work you've done, and your collective or network has done? How can they annotate it, how can they share it, how can they synthesize it? I think that that becomes very important in the age that we are in now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right? And one of the things that I still kind of shake my head at is... You know? Bob Wilson again. All the old institutions are collapsing. He wrote that in, I think 1991, right? Talk about a guy who was way ahead of his time. And it's like, Wittgenstein said, I think something along the lines of, "Don't look for meaning, look for use." And depending on what you're trying to achieve, your model should have some predictive accuracy. And if you're using back to box, all models are wrong, some are useful, well, some are useful, and then stop being useful.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so I've always tried to orient my thinking toward figuring out that point where, oh, that used to work really, really well, and that doesn't work anymore, so I'm not going to do it that way anymore. I am amazed by the amount of people all the way up to large institutions, who are like, "Yeah, this is the model. We're sticking with it." But the model isn't working anymore and it hasn't worked for a long time. "Well, with patience and persistence." Well, in certain environments, patience and persistence do pay off. But to attach patient and persistent to an antiquated model, rather than to yourself, right? Please. I got to [inaudible 01:32:55] for our people who are just listening.
Micheal Garfield:
Yeah, I mean, this is the consummation of everything we've been talking about. We live in a very fast and uncertain world, and therefore must get better at being... Well, at learning ourselves as individuals, and as learning together as a society, and as organizations. And I've learned a lot about what does and does not work as a learning organization. You have to listen. Listening can be fun. It doesn't have to be a chore, right? So I mean, to the extent that someone is hearing this and they're like... Like, my cousin used to work at BMW as a consultant in Germany, and her advertising firm did work with them on the transition from seeing the company as primarily an automotive manufacturer, to seeing it as a provisioner of mobility platforms.
Micheal Garfield:
And she said that they figured that out because they had a department of internal disruption. And I was like, I just found that... Like, that's how I'm legible. If you're going to hire me for anything else, I'm going to be a pain in your ass. But I want to help people figure out who are the rebels at their organization, and how to empower those people. How do you channel that nuclear energy into helping your collective learn better, and navigate the complexity better, is I think, a very noble way to make use of the fact that I'm such a difficult employee.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, Michael, I'm getting the hook here from our producers who give me a little light. But first off, you are probably going to be in the running for vying with Alex Danco for a number of times on this podcast, because we've just touched the surface of what fascinates both of us. So thank you for that.
Micheal Garfield:
Thank you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Secondly, you probably remember from listening to the other podcasts, that the final question always is, we're going to wave that wand, we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but you can incept them. We're going to give you a magical microphone and you're going to speak to whatever you want to put into it. And it's going to in accept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning happens to be, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, "You know what? Unlike all of the other times where I didn't act on these wonderful ideas when I wake up, I'm going to actually begin to act on these two things today, and I hope they're going to really make my life or the world a better place." Are going to incept?
Micheal Garfield:
I think what I'm trying to incept with humans on the loop, is that we have a thought experiment that we can play now, that technology has gotten so sophisticated, that just in passing... The wrong way to think about how to engage with AI and bioengineering and all this stuff, is how do we prevent the horrors? It's like, no, no. We are standing in receipt of thousands and thousands of years of the striving of our ancestors to improve their condition and the condition of their descendants. And if we start by being grateful for everything that they've done, and ask ourselves, now that we have finally made it as a species to the point where with an asterisk, you can do pretty much anything you want with technology, right? That's not absolutely true, but let's assume it is. And then the question I think shifts from, "How do I get this thing done?"
Micheal Garfield:
We all assume that, "I'll just be happy if I get this, and so how do I get that?" And that kind of thinking tends to promote suffering of yourself and of others. If you start by being like, "What world do I want? Because I can assume that I will make it closer to that world if I start in a clear vision of that thing," I think that that's a really useful... It's a protocol, rather than the inception of an ideology. It's like I'm not trying to get everyone to think exactly the way I do, but I do think that learning how to get better at reallocating our attention, and at telling stories that excite ourselves and excite other people, is a far better way to engage with the daunting complexity of the world that we have made for ourselves. And that's my answer.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Love it. As I've often said, I try to find things to root for rather than against.
Micheal Garfield:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It's really, really easy to root against things, and I think it's far more productive to find things to root for. So I love that. I guess, maybe we will call this episode, Michael Garfield, Part One.
Micheal Garfield:
Sure. And then I'm having you on Humans on the Loop next week.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, no, I know. It'll be great, it'll be great.
Micheal Garfield:
Folks will have to wait a while. But, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Thank you so much, and until next time.
Micheal Garfield:
Thank you, Jim.