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The Evolution of Civilization: Technology, Culture, and AI | A Noble Conversation with Jordan Hall
Can civilization evolve to a new stage beyond the city? Join us in our thought-provoking conversation with Jordan Hall, the founder of the Civium Project, as we explore the concept of civium, the future of communication and collaboration, and the potential for a human-scale civilization. Discover how Jordan's diverse background in technology companies, law, and theology led him to tackle some of the most pressing questions facing our world today.
We dive into the fascinating work of biologist Geoffrey West, who uncovered the super linear scaling factor in cities that can be used as an engine to attract people and boost innovation. Learn how this concept relates to the extended body of civilization and the role technology plays in our urbanization and development. Plus, we discuss the implications of increased virtual communication, and the consequences of decoupling the network from the city, as seen in Amazon's recent decision to no longer allow remote work.
To wrap up, we explore the importance of consciously designing our cities and environments around human relationships, cultural dynamics, and rituals to help us thrive and have a lower negative impact on the environment. Furthermore, Jordan and I discuss the concept of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, and how emerging technologies could lead to a new round of disruption on the same scale as the personal computer or language, ultimately reshaping our mentality of scarcity and abundance. Don't miss this enlightening and engaging episode with Jordan Hall!
Alright, so our guest today is Jordan Hall. Jordan is the founder of the Sivian project, a project focused on cities to increase the quality of relationships as a way to advance civilization instead of just growing the number of people in cities, and we'll go a little bit deeper into that in the episode and what that means practically. He's also co-founder of the New York Hacker Collective, which is focused on cognitive enhancement through supplements to upgrade the hardware our consciousness is built on in order to improve human productivity, creativity, reduce anxiety that's huge and enhance empathy, essentially leading to human optimization. Who doesn't want to perform at their best? Jordan has also been an angel investor in various companies and participated in a couple of think tanks. He's also co-founder and CEO of DivX in the early 2000s, a brand of video products that compresses lengthy videos into small sizes while maintaining high video quality. Throughout his time there, he raised $150 million in capital and led the company to a $600 million IPO. Prior to that, he went to Harvard Law School and practiced law for a little bit after his time as an undergraduate student at Texas A&M. Jordan also has a YouTube channel under his name, jordan Hall, where he discusses his work, and he's also been a guest on multiple channels, including Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom. Today we'll be talking with him about the future of civilization, the work he's done with Savium Project and New York Hacker Collective and how that ties into the future of civilization.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, jordan Hall, thanks for coming on the podcast. I think I first started talking to you and was it 20 last year? It was last year. Yeah, i think we had our first phone call last year. I know we started out by me asking questions about career advice and all that, and then I got deeper into your work, started reading or watching some of the YouTube videos that you put out there And I thought they were super interesting. And so thanks for coming on the podcast. Usually we start out with one question. It used to be three, but we kind of narrowed it down to one, and so that one question is what is something you've been thinking about this week or something that's been on your mind this week that you wanted to share with someone?
Speaker 2:Well, as it turns out, oddly enough, i actually started writing for the first time in a long time this week. I haven't really written anything in years, as far as I can recall. I think I wrote one thing around COVID, maybe one thing after that, and then pretty silent for a year before that. The topic here is a concept that I've called civium, and we could just use that as a placeholder for the notion of what's going to be happening to civilization. So the topic you picked for today actually happens to be the thing that I've been writing about and thinking about this week. Perfect.
Speaker 1:Perfect timing, okay. So the concept of civium and what civilization is going to look like? Yep, okay, okay, definitely Yeah, so we'll get into all that. Who is Jordan? When you think of yourself, what comes to mind?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a rough question to answer properly. What I'd say is something like what's the phrase from, i think, whitman, i contain multitudes, i contain multitudes. There's no simplicity, or even I don't even have a particular orientation towards being significantly coherent with myself throughout time. So I've evolved a lot, multiple different stages, you'd say. For example, when I was relatively young, i had a real orientation towards the life of fantasy, role-playing games and computer games and living in fiction. Not too long after that, though, i got very interested in history, which in some sense is kind of the same thing. I get the official made up stories that we live by and consume those quite substantially.
Speaker 2:Then I started turning my attention towards philosophy, and artificial intelligence. At the time was actually just beginning to be a. It was in a second major phase. Then I turned into a relatively long period orienting towards entrepreneurship and started or was involved in starting three different, relatively significant technology companies, which was a piece of my identity at that time. Then I shifted more in the direction of something like the think tank, slash, philanthropic universe, the thinking about the bigger questions and the world as a whole. That really refined.
Speaker 2:Now we're getting into late 30s, early 40s. This is the part where I started thinking quite deeply about the nature of civilization and where we were and where we were likely to be going. Then, by the time I get into the mid-40s, being more practical, how do we actually steer that ship? as opposed to have a sense of a map, is there a way for us to start choosing destinations? Anyway, enough, i'd say. In the past little bit, maybe the past couple of months, i've entered into a real theological mode where I've become quite interested in going deep into the Western theology, which has not been a topic of interest to me up until recently. I wandered all over the place. Probably the easiest is that I'm a pretty ordinary. I would say I'm just a pretty ordinary man who was born in Texas in the 70s and grew up in the era of the latter part of the 20th century.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, started out with interest in fiction, fantasy and history, philosophy, then the entrepreneurship space and then think tanks and trying to understand civilization and where we're heading With the civilization aspect. What got you interested in thinking about that? What got you interested in civilization as?
Speaker 2:a whole, practically speaking, except in the parts I just mentioned. So I guess as far back as I go, and even just in my household, conversations around questions of history or philosophy were part of the conversation. It's just inherited, i guess, in some sense, practically speaking. I got most interested in this current year of questioning in the 2008 financial crisis. The reality of that crisis was that it impacted my personal net worth in a fashion that was measurable. I noticed it. I was interested in noticing a. What I particularly noticed was that there was a tremendously significant difference between the official narrative that you could see, for example, on NBC or MSNBC.
Speaker 2:People who were in the know were saying, at places that I happened to have access to, i was interacting with Nobel Prize-winning economists and notable finance seers and billionaires. Just because I just happened to be in that place, i noticed the stories were different. Otherwise, i began to pull on what's really happening, literally what's really happening. In the context of the 2008 financial crisis, i found myself exploring more and more deeply questions of okay, well, what is money at all? Well, what is governance at all Interesting? Now, not too far after that, you get to what is civilization at all and you start thinking about the history of civilization. If you just keep pulling on that thread, you're going to get there. That's what led me here.
Speaker 1:Okay, So 2008 financial crisis and having questions about what money is and that led you to what civilization, or asking those questions about what civilization is Okay. And so with the Savium Project, could you talk to on that a little bit and how that ties into civilization?
Speaker 2:Sure, this is going to take a little bit longer, it's going to be a little bit more challenging, so let me know if I need to slow down or change some words. You got it, okay. So the question to get to the question, the first thing I have to do is propose a description of what civilization is, and I have, i think, a reasonably unusual answer to that proposition, which is to say that, from my point of view, civilization is actually the extended body of just the city. So city is the primary element, which I'll explain in a moment, where I even mean by city, and then civilization is an extended body that does things like feeds the city and provides the city with material the city needs to build itself. The easiest example is to think about the notion of, like the Roman Empire, which, at least in the West, we have a pretty good model of, that, the phrase all roads lead to Rome, and if you were to look at any point in the Roman Empire, i would argue what you're actually seeing is something that its meaning is fundamentally defined by its relationship with the capital, the Rome itself, and that, whether you're providing water, because your city, your town, happens to be connected to an aqueduct, or you're exporting wheat, it doesn't matter. That's sort of the repartitioning of the meaning of a place. Now, to drill down on that, though, the notion of the city is a question like what do we mean by city?
Speaker 2:And here I actually specifically have to point to a moment in history, in my personal history, where I happen to be present to a presentation given by a theoretical physicist, turn complex systems biologist, named Jeffrey West, who then ultimately wrote a book called Scale. So we can speak to his book. And what he was doing is he and his team were investigating certain kinds of relationships in nature, what are called scaling laws. So it has to do with, as you scale one aspect of a relationship, for example, as you increase the mass of an organism, what happens to other characteristics of, say, that same organism. So, if I scale the mass of a mammal, what happens to its metabolic rate? Does it? if I double the mass, does the metabolic rate double? Does it not increase at all? Does it increase randomly? Like there's no relationship between? is there anything there? And what they discovered was that there was a very unusual, quite consistent scaling factor, which is roughly a seven. When you double one variable, the other variable increases by 70%. So instead of increasing by 100%, instead of doubling, it increases, but it increases at a slower rate. So what that means is that if I double the mass of, let's say, i have a one pound mammal and its metabolic rate is just one, i'll just make it very a variable to represent its metabolic rate And then I double from one to two in mass, the metabolic rate goes from one to 1.7.
Speaker 2:And then if I double again from two to four, it goes from 1.7 to like I guess that would be 2.3 or something like that. So four to 2.3. So what you get is you get this curve which is called sublinear scaling. Linear is going to the line, is perfectly like that. It scales like this which, by the way you might notice, has an asymptote somewhere in it. And so what this means, for example, is that when you get up to the mass of an elephant, the mass of the elephant is much larger than the mass of, say, a mouse, but the metabolic rate of the elephant is actually not anywhere near as much larger. It's larger, but nowhere near as much larger. And there's something going on, something very fundamental.
Speaker 2:Now this doesn't sound at all like cities, but the point is they were investigating all kinds of things. So they export cells, they export animals, they export plants And they're like huh, what if we look at things that are not specific organisms, like, say, a forest or an entire ecosystem? And they said that these actually had the same scaling laws. You double the size of the forest, you increase the metabolism of the forest, writ large, by only 70%. Hmm, what about cities? So then, when they looked at cities, at first they found the same kind of thing. You double the population of a city and you increase, say, for example, the amount of the length of the total amount of roads by only 70%. Huh, interesting. So even cities have the same scaling factor.
Speaker 2:But then they discovered something new, something they didn't see anywhere else in nature, and this was a characteristic instead of having a sublinear scaling factor, had a super linear scaling factor, and that was when you double the population of a city. You would get a super linear scaling of things like wealth and rate of innovation, productivity, wages, some other things too, by the way, like crime and disease, but I'll ignore those for the moment. And this is very interesting because what this means is that if you double the population of a city, the wealth per capita of the city, or the wealth of the city will actually go up by 115%, so it'll increase more, which means the wealth per capita will go up by 15%. And so if you take a tiny village, let's say a village of like 100 people, and you double it to 200, 400, 800, 1600, you're actually starting to get a quite significant difference in the wealth per capita of the inhabitants of this new larger population, just because you've doubled the population. And they went and they said it all over the place that they looked at. They looked at Asia and Africa, north America, south America, they looked at like 800 and 1500 and 1900. They looked at all kinds of different populations and they more or less found the same thing, that there's something That doesn't seem to do have to do with geography or culture or point of or rate of technology. Something very specific seems to be happening where, when you double the population Of an urban environment, of the city, your increasing significant, very particular and very important variables like wealth and innovation, super linear. Okay, we've got all that background.
Speaker 2:So now what I? what I look at is? I see that it's a kind of an engine. It's an engine that has a centrifugal force trying to pull people in, which is, of course, the fact that the more people you can get in, the more you get to take advantage of that super linear scale. So if I can double the population and double it again, and double it again, and double again, everybody's getting wealthier and innovation is increasing, which the nurse to a lot of benefits. Notably becomes more attractive to live there and move from my small town into the big city and sort of automatically participate in increased wealth and innovation. Maybe I will. That is highly attractive. It also means that I can defend myself and compete against people who are near me, or call them, if that's what I see fit to do, because I have more wealth and innovation, which to say I have more power.
Speaker 2:So you get, this engine is pulling people into cities. So one half of the dynamic is essentially something like an attractor or black hole which, left to its own devices, would pull everybody into a single giant mega city and that would get the maximum super linear scaling. But then you have a centrifugal force which is pulling people, are, making it hard for people to get into the city and that has to do with the fact that we have bodies and, if you want to put more people into the same urban area, you have to deal with the fact that they have to be fed, they have to get access to clean water, you have to be able to take waste and move it out of the city, you have to be able to deal with how you where they go going to live, like where they going to be housed, how you're going to move resources around, and so you have this sort of spatial constraints of the fact that putting human bodies into a urban area creates new challenges around embodying, around the physical. Hence I turned this back down to this, to the story of civilization. And so we get this rotation of this, these cycles where people concentrate into some concentrated group, perhaps, by the way, temporarily, maybe just gather together for a big festival, but the super linear scaling starts to take off when they concentrate. Is that creates an attractor? hey, let's concentrate more often. Or more people within. They run in trouble because it's safe. For example, ordinary indigenous hunter gathering Can't handle more than a couple thousand people in the same location for very long. Well, okay, how about we invent agriculture? we can reliably deliver food to this location. So we start converting certain parts of the land into places where food is growing, as opposed to just sort of living within and among the land. And we're also going to start having to organize certain parts of the land into places where people live, so urbanity. And, by the way, when we do that, we're gonna have to deal with the fact that we have to start dealing with waste. So we start creating locations where waste is hosted, we start partitioning the territory into functionally defined units that are increasingly optimized to deal with the constraints of packing, but more and more bodies in the same location.
Speaker 2:And at certain stages of technological development there are limitations. So if you don't have the wheel, everybody has to walk. Well, okay, walking means only a certain amount of distance that can be covered in a certain amount of time with a certain amount of calories, and so that limits the kinds of the sort of, the kinds of urban technical solutions you can develop, and that gives a limitation to the kinds of cities and civilizations you produce. Develop the wheel, being able to connect animals to pull with wagons, you significantly increase the distance over which food can be imported, for example, which means further away land Can be turned into agricultural land, which increases the amount of local land that can be turned into urban land, um, etc. Etc. Right. You should get these cycles, and so the dynamic of the city and this relationship between the constraints of embodiment and the ability to deploy wealth and innovation to overcome those constraints, and the partitioning of territory into functional locations that are optimized to deal with certain functions of the problematic of embodiment.
Speaker 2:To me, this is the way I'm, this is the theory that I'm putting together have been the generator and the driver of civilization from the very beginning, all the way back. But now this is sort of the key point. We may be entering into a new, like a deeply new, stage. We're literally potentially entering into something that is different than civilization, something is different than the city. Okay, now, why? why would that be? what's happening? well, when I look at this question of the super linear scaling right, i had something like more people. But when I look at super linear scaling and I look at the kinds of things that are going on, when it calls it to mine for me is another dynamic that shows similar kinds of scaling, which is sometimes known as network effects or Metcalf's law. And so when I look at it as saying, hmm, maybe this has actually nothing to do with how many people, but the population of the city is per se, but actually has to do with the fact that you're bringing people into communication and collaboration. You're creating a network. So that, i see, is a network. It's two things going on simultaneously. The super linear scaling part of it is a network.
Speaker 2:But because up until relatively recently, almost all of our communication and collaboration had to happen by means of our bodies, we also had to deal with it was a concentration of bodies which starts to look a little bit more like a forest, so it's both superimposed on each other. So when I start thinking, okay, what happens if we try to just take the collaboration and communication piece, and can we separate that from embodiment? like, okay, that makes sense. We've been doing this for a long time. There's roughly two ways we can do that. We can either move the bodies, so by means of transportation technology.
Speaker 2:So instead of me living in the density packed city, maybe I live in the suburbs and I take the train in, so the network has access to me in some sense. Right, it's not the same as if I just live in the city, but it's more than nothing by virtue of being able to move my body, and that's a different kind of problem. Now you're kind of feeding me and dealing with my waste in housing further away in space, so you're not dealing with the same kind of problem. You get less access to the possibility of communication because I'm not available for all possible communications. I'm kind of going in through space, but it's something. You change that from the train to a road, so now I can meet with people quite much more randomly or more stochastically than on a train. Or you add the airplane and now I can actually meet with people across the country or even around the world. So you're expanding the scope of incentive of who's attached to the network, the embodied network, by means of physical transportation.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's a thing. That's definitely been a big thing, like we might even say this is a part of what the extended body of civilization is vis-a-vis the city. So in some sense everybody in the Roman Empire was simultaneously part of the functional division of labor to support Rome, but to the degree to which they could travel, or even just we'll get to the second part in a second They were community. They're part of Rome with some degree of ephemerality, not always, but occasionally. And then we had the last piece, which is the key pieces like this, is where the rubber hits the road.
Speaker 2:I can either transport the bodies or I can transport or transmit the communication. So, for example, you and I might talk face to face, or I might give a message to somebody and they deliver the message to you, and so the message is now separated from my body, it's taking it sort of an embodiment of its own. Okay, that's also a thing, right? we did that for a long time send a message to somebody, and we got better, like letters and all that. Right, write it down. You write it down in a letter and instead of having to deal with somebody's memory, i could just make sure that it was actually the word that I said. And then more people can become literate. We build printing presses so that's a function of communication Expans more letters or more books and more people can access them.
Speaker 2:And then we get telegraphs and we get telephone television, and then we get the internet, and so we have this dramatic expansion in the ephemeralization of communication along the vector Of transmitting the message. And that has a different characteristic, because now the location of my body isn't isn't the constraint. My body in some sense could be anywhere. In fact, in point effect, i'm in black matter, north Carolina, and you're not your Call station, right, yeah, but we have some other challenges. There's only so much communication.
Speaker 2:Collaboration is actually called bandwidth. That is available in a letter. It can only move at a certain speed, can only contain so many characters, your ability to write back as constrained and so we actually have a serious bandwidth constraint. We're using letters with a huge advantage in body. Now I can live literally anywhere and send it to you with a huge constraint bandwidth. Okay, so go to the telegraph. Now it's almost real time. That's effectively real time. It's really very fast, but a very, very limited.
Speaker 2:Did you, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it did tiny, tiny bandwidth. So we grow the bandwidth. We brought the brand for bandwidth both in terms of rate or latency, and I'm out back in the day when I first started using modems to connect to the thing that became the internet at a 300 Bod modem. What a 300 Bod modem was more like a telegraph than anything else. Like you would actually see the letters form to read something, you have to wait If you want to watch an image. Remember, you may be too young for this news back. I don't remember They would like they would load like line by line, like a pixel, like a row of pixels. So for a while you only you could even tell what the image was. You might take minutes, 10 minutes, for a single image, like a single gif, to show up.
Speaker 2:So you have to increase the bandwidth, increase the amount of information that can flow across the communication channel and, of course, we also changed it modally, so we went from just text to images and then to audio and then to video and then to what we're doing right now, which is by directional streaming In real time. And as we're increasing that bandwidth, we're increasing the relationality or the total dimensionality of the communication is possible through this ephemeralized communication channel. Now to the point where now this is not that different than if we were talking face to face in the same room and it's doesn't have all the dimensionality of it is a lot of things we still can't do, but it's not that different. And Here's the, here's the premise, here's the proposition that I have to make that we either relatively recently, like maybe in the past few years, maybe 2020 or relatively soon, particularly with things like you saw, those new apple goggles- Yeah, those just came out.
Speaker 1:Like what? two days ago, three days ago?
Speaker 2:yeah, they're calling it XR, so extended reality. It's kind of a combination of virtual reality which we should be called a are alter augmented reality augmented, yeah.
Speaker 2:And in it they have the notion of spatial computing and the idea of being able to do face time, where I could have like a super high fidelity image of you just sitting in, like in principle, in this chair next to me, even though we're not in this physical same space. And that's just part of the progress of this increasingly high bandwidth, increasingly multimodal, increasingly rich, highly ephemeralized communication. What's that? do Remember? earlier I said the basic thing of the city was that is a network super imposed on top of a community, and what I think this enables us to do for the very first time in history is actually separate those two for real, i think, and do that and notice that changes everything actually. Because once you remove the network from the city, once your communication is no longer governed by the people you happen to be living near, there's no particular reason to be living near them anymore. You're not looking for the bandwidth of relational collaboration, which is why people were congregating together in the same place, the first place.
Speaker 2:That attractor, the engine that described earlier The centrifugal forces, that attractor is broken today. I don't, it's not a driver. People are increasingly we notice this, and certainly your generation are actually spending more time in their virtual relationships. They are their physical relationships. So the constraint of city, that the thing that was pulling people into the city, is now moving into the virtual and that generativity of the super linear scale is moving into the virtual, into the virtual network and as the, i think that go ahead.
Speaker 1:Do you think that I mean cuz I know, like some people you know, see it as a good thing, right, but some people may also say, oh well, like that is making it less likely that people interact in person and the different benefits of interacting in person. So how do you, how do you view that, as we're making that, that shift. So let's see what.
Speaker 2:I would say is that there's a few good things in a few bad things, and they're all part of the thing. So it's more of me. Can we steer it in the direction of the good and away from the bad? So let's talk about. So the first good is the one I was just mentioning is that for the first time in 10,000 years were no longer captured in the vortex of the city attractor. That vortex is effectively broken, or will be broken soon, and some new dynamic is taking place. And that means, by the way, the vortex of civilization, the whole thing, which comes with lots of characteristics that I think, many of which are ones that we don't want, like treating territory as a function that we isolate and optimize. There's a whole Whole, the thing called the complex and the complicated, that you have to get to understand why that's an important thing. But let me just sort of wave my hand and say that's an important thing and it's a good thing that we're moving away from that. Okay, so that's good, or at least lots of potential and mostly good. Let's take two bads. One bad is we only know how to live in civilization sits. It's been encoded in this for a thousand generations, maybe more. It's all the technologies that we know how to use to live like democracy and justice justice in the legal sense were all developed in that context, in fact, by that context. So how do we deal with this new? It's a big new and it'll have very specific, simple, concrete, profound consequences.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a funny example. I was talking to somebody about what was Amazon doing. Oh, amazon said no more remote work. We have to actually have all of our employees have to come back and work out you know Amazon HQ and the person actually really, really good theory for why that's the case. Find out. This is really funny, yeah, yeah, let's, let's find out. It had nothing to do. This. Is this a person's theory, but I like it, so I'll present it as being mine and true, and nothing with Amazon being against remote work. In fact, amazon is kind of like okay with remote work it worked in, the employees were happier.
Speaker 2:Here's the problem if people aren't Going to work in the office, that they don't need to live in the places that are close to the office and the real estate markets in cities start to collapse. And it's a lot of rules. It's about what's about the real estate. Take one more step. What is Amazon care about real estate? Amazon doesn't care about real estate. Amazon cares about people buying stuff, and if the real estate market collapses, the economy collapses. The economy collapses, amazon. People can buy stuff, yeah, and by stuff.
Speaker 2:So we live in an economy which, for example, is premised on where people live and people building stuff to live in, the way place they live buses and trains and cars and grocery stores, like everything.
Speaker 2:The entire economy is premised on a certain Urban assumption. Now we've gone through urban transitions in the past, right back in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century had the great urbanization at the movement of people, starting in the west and spreading throughout the world, moving from farms and rural environments into into towns and cities, and that was a huge shift and we went through what was actually a quite significant dislocation in economy. Sure, bunch of economy, of economic models with bankrupt, bunch of new ones were created and sort of like out of an airplane we're pulling the. It's like a wily coyote when he realizes that he's standing on air. Yeah, entire basis of the thing of civilization we've been standing on top of for 10,000 years is suddenly gone, cut off at its root, and we're going to be this really significant adjustment. It's going to have Radical shifts to all phases of how we live our lives and that's scary and dangerous, like that's going to be a big, a big shift in. Big shifts are rough, so that's a bad thing.
Speaker 1:Going back to the Amazon thing. So I mean, amazon is just like one company, right, you know, and so it would have. It would take multiple companies, you know, letting the employees to work remotely, you know, before people stop buying stuff, right, essentially right. So I'm guessing is was this just like other other companies that are taking the same approach, or at least have this, this mindset, that Amazon does what?
Speaker 2:happened with covid. So there was a sort of a line going like this in the direction of remote work, and it was kind of moving along at a pace as technology got stronger. Some companies are playing with it. Covid was just like a rank all at once for a year, year and a half, two years, many companies in some sense, most to all, had to shift to remote work if they wanted to continue. Right, all if they could, right if they, if they were an essential workers, which meant that if you could do it virtually, then you did. Another question is so then what happened? it was I had a real impact on cities, on the real estate inside, inside urban environments, significant, like catastrophic potentially. And so the reverse is actually going on is, hey, wait a minute, some companies Actually affirmatively wanted to have people working together, are working in physical space, because I thought that was better.
Speaker 2:Some companies look at it and said, oh wow, this actually is got systemic consequences. Let's start making it set the tone. We reversed this trend. We can't let the trend go towards more and more remote work. So is, in some sense, it's a A reactionary impulse that was set by the, the massive disruption of covid and then the recognition of whoa. This is actually gonna have significant cascade effects. We did consciously pull back on that. That be the hypothesis, but, by the way, i'm using that As an example to illustrate the dislocation.
Speaker 2:If my argument is correct, the movement towards remote work is locked, is baked in like it ain't going back, and that may just be. Certain companies are just gonna die because, and as people increasingly collaborate virtually, they just won't ever have been living in the same place, like more and more and more, new companies will just be distributed in a meaningful fashion and old companies will just pass away which they do. Right, companies die. Maybe a different approach. So let's look at the next bad is the bad that you brought up, and The way I would describe this is something like the virtual is very novel and we we we've been embodied humans relating with each other in physical proximity for like a million years.
Speaker 2:That's something we're naturally well supported at being good at. This thing right here, and in particular stuff like the text or twitter. We don't actually have an involved complex set of habits or cultural dynamics or physiological Assumptions on how to navigate that. It's just, it's rough, it's novel, it's new. Big pieces of it are the term called super salience, meaning it's it's too much of what we normally perceive Like candy is super, is like a, those things called Jolly Rancher. You get a Jolly Rancher it's called the self-cherry. You taste a cherry to Jolly Rancher and what you notice is it's like substantially more cherry than any cherry you've ever eaten. The flavor cherry, if it's ordinary salience, is something that humans have evolved more or less in relationship with that, so you can eat a cherry. It's more intense. Yeah, it's more intense, exactly, and it's more intense in a very particular dimension And the dimension that our system has been oriented towards to use to make decisions. So it's like it jacks our decision-making system Like, oh my God, that is like hyper-delicious. Give me more of that.
Speaker 2:You know, back in the day the rule was if something tasted sweet, you should eat it. Why? Well, sweet meant calories. Calories are hard to come by when you're just walking around trying to gather food. So if you can't eat more calories, eat more calories. Very good, basic choice. So our system is designed eat sweet stuff. That's why sweet stuff tastes good. It tastes good because that literally just means eat more of it.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, in our third environment, we have two problems. One is we can make things super salient, like a Coca-Cola which is sweeter than is possible at any natural environment, and we can get as much of it as we want. Like an arbitrarily large amount, we can drink 128. We could drink as much Coke as we can afford before we dive a diabetic cope Right. Well, that's something that we did not adapt to, so we haven't got any in a toxinous indigenous basic habits And our biological systems were actually poorly designed to navigate it.
Speaker 2:And this is basically. This is a problem of technological civilization in general. It's a problem of the virtual, like imperfection And so all kinds of things. People will go psychotic. People will completely unplug from the physical environment and not relate to people physically. People will completely live in fantasy, which is kind of a variation on psychotic. They'll just sort of be unable to navigate reality, like even to the degree which they are in reality. They will see reality is like the virtual world instead of the other way around. They'll flip. Okay, that's a major risk, that's a real, serious, major risk.
Speaker 2:So this then comes to my proposition of the civium. The civium is in some sense an articulation of what's the good direction, like how do we take advantage of this new possibility in a good way, which, among other things, means how do we preemptively notice what the major risk factors are and design around them? So, for example, okay, so we no longer have to do this unnatural thing and congregate in a way that is minimally satisfying the needs of our bodies? What might be a new design principle for where and how we live? Okay, well, maybe the answer is what's the healthiest possible way for human beings to live in relationship with other human beings and relationship with the physical environment? Let's just use that as a design constraint. Let's just design that way. So it turns out, for example, that human beings are healthiest when they're living in relatively intimate groups of real community.
Speaker 2:You know, we've heard of thing called the Dunbar number Roughly a hundred I have And could you explain like what that is to Dunbar? Okay, so there's a I think there's an anthropologist, robin Dunbar. He subsequently wrote and written a book called Friends where he discusses some detail. But what he noticed was that across a wide variety of human activities and in particular indigenous human groups, people tended to organize themselves into groups of roughly the same number. So the largest groups were about 150 people And, by the way, we also tend to organize ourselves in groups of around 12 and groups of around 40 to 80 and then 150. And then we actually have larger gatherings that are a combination of that, so up to like 1500, maybe even larger in some cases. But there's almost like these very specific Dunbar numbers and number one, two, three, four, five, and there seems to be really something hardwired about that, something very fundamental. You see it showing up all over the place, like you know, in Oxford, at the way clubs gather And, by the way, how supporting teams and military groups and disciples gather in twelves, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So if we use something like that and say, hey, what if we were to redesign our living environment around, say, dunbar numbers, where human beings have your, you more or less have groups of 150 that are your primary kind of village scale group that you live with. You know really really well like you know all the kids in that group, you know all the grandparents in that group, you know everybody. And those villages are coordinated in groups of let's call them a network of villages or town. But now it's not a single town, is a network of villages, which is, say, 1500 people. Well, now you get into a large enough group where you're not going to know everybody very well. You probably have met. If you live to be an adult, like you're in your 40s, you probably seen 95% of people a couple of times, but you probably don't remember everybody's name, which means that you actually have random encounters, stochastic encounters, the ability to meet new people, to be able to reorganize If it turns out that, like for whatever reason, your needs are uniquely not satisfied by the village you're in, there's other places you can move to find a better location And those networks of villages which I'm calling town can be coordinated into networks of towns, right.
Speaker 2:But the whole point is you're keeping the geometry with continuity across. So it's grounded in in human relationships. Everything's built at human scale, directional, and you can build a human scale in terms of buildings and nature, right. Everything is in walking and talking and people have stewardship and people actually have a sense of lineage, a connection to a place over a long period of time. So you feel responsible for the quality of the land and the water. We can very much rethink the way that we have divided territory into functional elements like, rethink the premise of agriculture and reorient ourselves around just how to cause human bodies to thrive and the, the embodied cognition, to thrive. Okay, that's one dimension. There's a lot of good stuff that comes out of that dimension, like we actually can have a vastly lower, mad vastly lower negative impact on the, on the environment when we're operating in that fashion, and it's much healthier for human psychology and it creates the substrate for meaning in a very potent way.
Speaker 1:So as we're moving towards human, or as we're moving towards the connection of minds through, you know, technology and all that, the CVM is essentially also making sure that the connection of bodies is still happening in, in a very high level, fundament, and of course, minds are connected then too, but they're connecting around conviviality, not necessarily around the highest order collaboration and generative collaboration.
Speaker 2:So then let's flip to the virtual side, and here I would apply religion, and specifically notions of sacred and profane, or sacred and taboo. And we, what I would propose, is that we need to take advantage of and use those registers that are clearly part of human nature, like what's the phrase? like humans are designed to worship. So you're going to worship something and you don't want to worship something that's not worshipful. Well, in this case I'm specifically focusing on we should recognize that these technologies are powerful, extremely powerful, and very novel. So we should treat them in the same way that we would treat something that is, let's say, magic or sacred, like in the sense of the way that a, an ayahuasca shaman, treats the medicine of ayahuasca. And then it's not Coca-Cola, it's different, it's a very potency, and we should, we'd, include things like rituals, like before you go on a zoom call, you should, you should meditate or pray for for three minutes. After you come out of the zoom call, you should go walk around in nature for an hour, right? So you're actually really being thoughtful about the fact that things are happening here that are really impacting your body or psychology, the way you perceive the world, your neurotransmitters, like all kinds of things are going on, and we should be very thoughtful about designing rituals to structures and cultural dynamics around this that hold us in proper relationship with this potent and novel technology, so that it's able to serve us as opposed to just batter us around willy nilly. So those are two elements to like, two design principles around this notion of civian, which you could say at the highest level, like the most fundamental, is conscious, consciously designing.
Speaker 2:So city, way back when, was an unconscious vortex that we got pulled into, and every time you ran into a trouble we just sort of tried to work our way out of it, using our our best ability to make some new idea come up. Oh, we have got too many people, all right, how about stairs? Okay, now we can go through the stories. Oh, we could fit more people in there. Oh, now we have more people. We have too much waste? Oh, okay, how about sewers? Or that kind of a thing like a continuous, uh, clenching solutions being pulled along unconsciously. The premise of something like civium is no, we're going to be doing this consciously. The problem space is now in our awareness, we get it, and now we're going to think preemptively. How do we design thought? We're not going to get it right perfectly, but at least we're going to be trying to get ahead of the curve, as opposed to be dragged along by something that's outside of our, our awareness and therefore our ability to be in relationship with it.
Speaker 1:Okay, Okay, and so with civium, because you you earlier in the episode you talked about, you know the being in your 40s and looking at the practical side, so is this more like an educational, like endeavor, like what does this look like, you know, in terms of including, like, the general population?
Speaker 2:Well, you can say that it rolls out in in almost like the, in an orderly, natural way. So first, it's almost like a notice thing. Hey, guess what? This might be a thing, yeah, yeah, in some sense even even more fundamental than education. Like, if you think I'm just like to, to bring you to the point of this conversation, the first thing I had to do is I had to notice it. Then I have to propose to you that maybe it's a thing worth attending to, maybe it's not. What I'm saying is just, you know, wrong Words are tricky, thinking is hard.
Speaker 2:It may be that I see something that looks interesting, but it's not right. Fair enough. First step Notice it, okay. Second step is something like, as you say, education, but it's more like learning. So it's okay, now that you've been made aware of this as a possibility, how do we think about it better together? So it's kind of like education, but it's not like I've got a body of knowledge I'm conveying to you as the primary. It's more like we're learning about it together, as we're beginning this kind of this thing And then experiment.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what would it look like for us to start orienting or organizing our lives more in this direction. Okay, well, we have a couple principles. Can we think about? what would it look like for us to prototype something like a variation on civian, what would require roughly three elements. One would have to make our economics be something like remote work, so we're no longer attached to the cultural logic of city and civilization And we're able to start making our choices on the basis of a new, a new attractor, a new driver. And we would have to think about okay, well, where are we going to live? Let's see if we can orient, put our bodies into place on the basis of, say, conviviality, on the basis of what's the healthiest place for us to live And what are the values? Like, do you think about? do you prioritize? It's the weirdest thing.
Speaker 2:I remember this. If I were to go to a group of people and say I want you to move from where you currently live to where I want you to live, like, i want to move you to San Diego, california, and I said, on the one hand, here's my value proposition. It's going to be healthier for your body and life and more meaningful. Your kids will be happier, your marriage will be healthier. That's why I want you to move to San Diego, you know, i might get one or two people to be like, ah, sounds cool, i'm in, but it's going to be a low hit rate. By contrast, if I said I'm going to pay you more money, i'm going to give you a better job. So you're currently making what's a good salary these days for you? Maybe a hundred thousand.
Speaker 1:A hundred A hundred thousand.
Speaker 2:You're currently making a hundred. I'm going to pay you 150 and I'm going to give you a better benefit. I'm going to get like an eight out of 10 hit rate And to get it to 10 out of 10, or nine out of 10 is just a number, okay, maybe it's two or one At a certain point the offer is going to go. Now, what that means is you're willing to decontextualize yourself from the life that you're living. You're going to leave, maybe, your family. You're going to leave the neighborhoods that you know, you're going to leave the climate that your body is physiologically adapted to and the foods that you're familiar with and move to some fucking other place. Why? Because a number is bigger than an animal, right, and so that's interesting. That's the cultural logic and civilization right there. Alright. So the proposition would be what would happen if you started thinking about a different set of values and you started orienting your embodied life on the basis of that new set of values. Where am I thriving physically? Where are my relationships most meaningful and richest? Where are the people that I'm in relationship with thriving the most, which might mean those who are closest to me? Where can I take the highest degree of responsibility for my complete context, where I actually feel like I care about the place I live. I care about the buildings, i care about the trees, i care about the quality of the air And I don't just care. I actually feel like I have an investment, like I can be, i can take positive, proactive action and it will work over the long term. That's one set of. That's the second cluster, and so the first cluster is consciously decouple yourself from the cultural logic of economics, being able to live anywhere. Second is make the decision on where you're going to plant your body on the basis of a new field of values. Then the third is basically beginning to build something like a religious construct around this virtual. Can you think about this as something that is a real, true, potent and potentially quite dangerous new thing that we don't know how to deal with and begin to behave properly? Can we build an ethos of behavior? This cuts across the whole category.
Speaker 2:How do I communicate? I don't know if you've noticed, but people are kind of like assholes online. They don't behave like this. Many people have said this because you can't get punched in the nose when you behave like an asshole on Twitter. Well, that's real. Actually There's a bit of this. You don't have an ordinary human feedback is not there, and so you know people are exploring what works And if being an asshole on Twitter, you know, works, at least in some way people will go in that direction. Alright well, social norms, personal behavior, rights, medium, even something like that. Sometimes I'll see I'll laugh when I'm hammering on Twitter because I use it too much and a lot of people are on it, but I laugh.
Speaker 2:Sometimes get into these like long, hard conversations on Twitter. They're sending what is, in fact, a massively complex thing through a 220-character, 250-character tweet And they're receiving a 150-character tweet. It's kind of like trying to do a resolving a major conflict with your wife via telegram. It shouldn't get a long media. Yeah right, yeah, no way. Noticing what the right media are and being able to actually use that skillfully and say, hey, this is actually we're going to have to jump on a Zoom call Or we're going to have to actually get our bodies into places. This needs that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Conflict, by the way, is best resolved in person. If you can't resolve it in person, face-to-face, where you can see facial expressions in here tone. If you can't do it that way, maybe community right, which is a kind of a medium in that sense. So those would be just kind of like three basic. That's the design, right? I just designed a design spec that has three elements And the three elements have certain characteristics that tell you what right behavior is in those elements. And then we can begin experimenting in those And we can notice on here are there or elements, maybe it's actually five or seven or 50. Maybe those three are properly designed, maybe there's more elements in those three than we're talking about. And then, of course, you're going to start building a body of knowledge on top of that.
Speaker 2:Here are the answers. Here's it makes it easier and easier for people to be like oh, and of course then you have not just embody of knowledge, you have embodiment. It'd be like hey, i would actually like to join a community that has this set of values and is already existing. Oh, cool, there's actually one growing in this area near Fredericksburg, texas, and my values match with their values in a very clean way. And they have a methodology where I can sort of drop in and live with them for some period of time. I'll do that And basically physical civium of some prototype is happening. You can drop in an experiment and maybe it works, and then you just sort of cool, i'm in here, i'm not sort of joining this permanently And this is what it looks like for me to live here, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so quick question. So we're coming up on time here. There are a couple more things I wanted to explore. I don't know how much more time you have.
Speaker 2:Let's see, i've got at least 15. Let's just you know, okay, okay okay.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious because I know you also do some work with like the Neurohacker Collective, and I'm curious if any of that ties into the future of civilization in any way.
Speaker 2:Sure, it works in two directions. One was something like ameliorative or healing. So the environment we live in is highly toxic to everything And in particular to our sort of neurocognitive well-being, and so part of the Neurohacker Collective was is there a relatively simple, relatively inexpensive way to help some large portion of the population to address the negative consequences of the toxic environment we live in? So this would be things like if you have a, you know your dopamine system has been thrown out of whack by living too much on TikTok, we have a formulation that will help. You know, if you've got, if you have trouble with focus and attention, if you have trouble with you know, etc. Etc. So there's one side of it is kind of ameliorative and healing, and then the second side of it is for us to actually navigate this very large set of very large complex problems that are coming down at us as a result of this tremendous shift from civilization to something post civilization.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, i hit like one piece, like a very specific piece. There's lots of other pieces like you could fill in your blanks. So the the, the meta situation of we're moving from something that has been going on for 10,000 or so years and we're going to have to move into something quite new. That's a fundamental proposition I'd make in general, and there's lots of different things around that. Well, that's going to be hard And that's going to require you to be smarter and also and also, not just IQ, but EQ I use smarter and EQ, smarter and to have more ability to sustain attention and more ability to to navigate and deal with adversity.
Speaker 2:So that was the other side, so at a healing side and a enhancing side, and the and the answer was, in a portfolio of many other things that are going on, this was a particular activity where, yeah, we have the capability of doing it. It seems like it's it'll be self perpetuating, meaning once we get started, it'll just run on its own and take care of its mission on its own And net, net, it should be, it's worth doing, like it'll be good in a net benefit for us and for the world, like it's worth our time And it's a good thing for the world. But that's why.
Speaker 1:That's why we did it Like, hey, civilization to have that Okay, and so it's a group of like academic scholars that you know.
Speaker 2:Get together We how would you define it? I would I would definitely not say academic scholars. There's a whole problem with the notion of academic and the problem of scholar, but it was people who understood a lot of different things around neurology, neurochemistry So disciplines of science, you could say, but not most of them have degrees of some sort, but not academic scholars, which is a category that I actually don't have a lot of. I don't have a lot of faith in that category, but I would say that there's a lot of different ways that you know, the way that you can get started, and that's what's gonna be a big part of that.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that I'm interested in you know, just like to hear your thoughts on briefly is like AI. Right, you talked about AI a couple of minutes ago, but what role will that play in the future of civilization? I mean, you have chat, gpt and you know all these things like. What role do you see that playing?
Speaker 2:And I just kind of give you a meta model. So the first thing is the category of AGI, and the gentleman named Ben Gerbsel coined that term And it's I think it's right artificial general intelligence, because simple, narrow intelligence is actually pretty easy, like a service stat in some sense, is like a very, very simple artificial intelligence. It knows when to turn the service out. So general intelligence is a different problem. So artificial general intelligence, so chat, gpt. The point of the meta model is something like I've got a big, it's like a dark room, a very, very big dark room, and and it's called AGI. I'm walking around in that dark room with a flashlight that doesn't cover much of the room And I can only see some part of it And I don't know how big it is And I don't know where the stuff I'm looking for happens to be. So it's a search, i'm searching for stuff, or just this is, by the way, how technological innovation works. And when, something, when we enter into a new possibility, let's say the internet, like oh, e-commerce is over there and social media is over there, and like search is over there, and we didn't, we didn't know that when we first started, we're like we don't know where things are or even what is in here. We're just going to have to search it. Everybody starts kind of staking out territory, looking Okay. So AGI has been an area of some interest for a while, but the amount of search has actually been pretty limited. I mean the number of people with flashlights not that much. I'm a good amount, but not that much. Now it's gone up a lot.
Speaker 2:Where chat GPT came through, the real impact of chat GPT isn't so much large language models, it's the unbelievably large amount of attention that is now focused on this area. So it's basically like we had, you know, 15 people with pen lights and now we've got 10,000 people driving around trucks with giant racks of spotlights. So we're going to start finding a lot more stuff. That's important to keep in mind, right? People who look at it and say, well, large language models, like they definitely move things forward, but they're kind of limited. Yeah, they're cool, they're going to do a lot of interesting. Cool, they're big, they're going to do a lot of interesting things. They're actually going to be meaningful in terms of their impact. But they're only like a 12th or a 30th of the whole story.
Speaker 2:As we discover more pieces, we're going to start putting these pieces together and we're going to start getting more. And of course, if, like, say, in the next two years, something comes along that is sort of three times as smart as chat, gpt because they glued more pieces together, that's going to create another like oh shit, moment and expand the amount of resources and energy that's pointed to this category and you start getting a feedback loop. So we're going to explore this territory very quickly. So there's a couple of corollaries to that, one sort of generically every time a new major technology comes through, it shakes shit up or disruption. Well, this is going to be a big one, and I mean saying, you know, llm, chat, gpt and then the larger category of HCI they were now exploring much more rapidly. It's going to be at least as big a disruption as everything from the personal computer, up until now at least, and maybe much, much larger, maybe as big as language or maybe bigger than language. And it's gonna happen fast, like in a span of less than a decade, maybe less than five years, like just gonna go fast with big change, fast as disruption. So remember that thing I was telling you about how this thing called civilization that we've been sitting on for a long time is Wobbly. Well, it's gonna be a great wobbler, like all kinds of things We talked about, how remote work or the ephemeralization of embodiment which, by the way, now with apples thing, we're starting to get that vector started to accelerate to.
Speaker 2:If you take What's that called vision, apple vision pro, take that and that's true AI vector and say you're basically handling the two major vectors of the ephemeralization of collaboration in one direction, i'm able to have in the vision pro near perfect embodiment or virtual embodiment, and so my mind can be in relationship with any other mind anywhere in the world, almost exactly the same as being there in person, and with more enhancements on top of it. And then with AI, what I have is purely ephemeralized intelligence. I doesn't even have a body. It is intelligence. So You fill in the blank all the various things that are at cannot. Our economy is Fundamentally based on it. Actually, just put it, put together a construct for you. This is a whole other vertical stack. So we do the, the notion of Jeffrey West's work and Super linear scaling and sublinear scaling. That's like that's all one giant vertical stack and I kind of built that up for you. I'm gonna do another.
Speaker 2:It's scarcity and abundance as a mentality. So the scarcity mentality is premised on a physical experience that Sometimes we're not all gonna be able to get what we need. So our fundamental needs, what we need, sometimes aren't going to be met and for some of us They may in fact not be met very well. We should just say that some people are gonna go hungry, and It may be. They will maybe go years of not having that happen, but sometimes we have a drought and everybody dies, right. So there's like a profound, felt experience of the presence of real, always lurking scarcity. And then there's a mindset, a mentality and a culture that is built on that fundamental, which is that we, we have to be, we have to be.
Speaker 2:Think about that. Hey, it's all well and good, they should hit the fan. We're on one team and fuck him, right. That's a very important. You don't have that in mind. Guess who, what? you're gonna be the one on the outside of that circle and shit will hit the fan. And okay, my tribe versus your tribe. I'm gonna build a culture where part of the thing I'm gonna use with scaling wealth and innovation, i'm gonna build big-ass walls and an army that's strong, so that if and when scarcity becomes an issue, i'm gonna I'm gonna take yours and not the other way around. That's a whole thing.
Speaker 2:Now, what we've been doing over the past, as civilization has been expanding, is we've been building more and more. I'm gonna call it plenty as a make a distinction scarcity and plenty plenty is is the absence of scarcity or the holding back of scarcity. So as I increase the amount of food, i still am operating in a fundamental scarcity mindset. I'm still operating in a culture premised on scarcity, but I'm holding it back. I'm keeping it at bay. But if you think about the way that our economy, for example, works, is it's premised on on scarcity as a basic model.
Speaker 2:I, we compete for jobs and if you don't have a job, then we may. We may give you welfare, like that was an innovation in the 19th century, like we're gonna start giving people welfare. But that's very contingent, right, that's very risky. You might not either. Maybe some real trouble there. And if I take your job, that feels very sad and angry like you're, we're fighting it. That way we lose conflict. So if AI takes your job and you're operating in a scarcity mindset, you've just been jettisoned from your plenty back into scarcity and this creates all the okay, you know, now we're back into tribal conflict, just like I did earlier, and there's a whole new thing coming on on the other side of scarcity, which is not plenty And, by the way, i'm just using these terms to define them abundance, abundance in slavery.
Speaker 2:And abundance is where your Mindset is no longer dominated by the risk of scarcity, your culture is no longer premised on solving the problems of scarcity. It's a more fundamental, it's a different basis. Noticing, by the way, there's actual real correlated here to what was going on in the New Testament of the shift from the law to, i guess, grace or faith. We're talking about a ship from qualitative way of being in relationship with world scarcity to a new qualitative way of bringing relationship with the world abundance. Now, in abundance, ai is not taking away your job. Ai is liberating you from the mundane bullshit that you didn't really kind of want to do anyway. Well, why is that? well, because you're actually living in a context where you never needed you wasn't, you didn't need that or you weren't dependent on that, and so now you're Motivated to collaborate with these tools to liberate you from the mundane so that you can actually be moved into The more more meaningful now. Of course, the premise here is that there is, in fact, an orientation towards the meaningful. Notice how those values go like. That field of that shit, instead of a field of values, is orienting you towards the competitive, the productive, the moted at the defensible. You're now a field of values orienting you towards the meaningful, towards the collaborative. It's a different set of values.
Speaker 2:Now, to the degree to which we're still living very much almost entirely in a world premised on scarcity, ai is going to be coming as a threat to most and a tremendous victory, a Win to some. It will be a win-lose game. Some will win tremendously, some will lose tremendously. To the degree to which we're beginning to migrate towards an abundance environment that it becomes a win-win game. Everybody wins and you can't, by the way, be a win-win game there. That's the kind of. The good news of reality is that it can be a win-win game. It's less strictly necessary that we live in a zero-sum universe. We don't live in a zero-sum universe And so it's not necessarily we act that way.
Speaker 2:So I can go, i can go into like detail, so can talk about how you know AI is gonna have this weird thing that for the next sort of major wave is actually gonna be hitting the category of the laptop class in a way that Covitt didn't my cove it had this effect over.
Speaker 2:The laptop class was largely unaffected because remote work was quite Still available, whereas people who required Physical jobs and being in place and working with each other in physical spaces were negatively impacted. Ai is not gonna affect a plumber, but it's gonna recap and I'm not the exact or copy that Alright, so that's a thing that will have political ramifications. We can get in the weeds like crazy. There's a lot of details we can get into the weeds on, but at the top level, like you really want to understand it, it's gonna be a kill shot to everything that is built on the premise of scarcity, and Either you're gonna be part of a collapse, as that kill shot just plays out in all kinds of ways, or We'll actually migrate across into this new Fundamental basis, in which case there's actual alignment top to bottom. Sorry, that's a big picture, but I just want to let you know like that's the end of the story. You just, i just flipped.
Speaker 1:You know you can skip the middle If you want yeah, i like what you said about, you know, like scarcity and abundance, and you know I mean if we have that scarcity mindset then it's gonna be a win-lose thing. But the abundance mindset is like you know, hey, like AI is here to help us do the mundane right and free us up to do other things, and so if everyone could have that, that mindset, i think the world would be a better place. But Thanks so much, jordan. How can I work? Where can our audience and listeners find you?
Speaker 2:Well, no, i mean, i don't have, i don't do. This is like a career. I'm particularly passionate about it. I Engine asked me, like he used to ask me. I said, okay, you seem to look in. This guy was chat And sometimes it gets recorded. So there's a YouTube channel. I think You may put a link to it. I actually don't even know how to get there, but if you search my name you can usually find it. I used to have a medium thing and then they did some stuff I didn't like so I moved to sub stack, but I don't really publish that much anymore. You can probably find me on Twitter. I'm on there too often. I don't tweet that much, but you know people contact me. I don't really have much of a public presence, but I have some okay, okay, awesome.
Speaker 1:I'll go ahead and link your into your YouTube, because I did watch some of your YouTube videos, but I'll go ahead and link it in the in the description so our audience could find you. That's probably the best place. Okay, okay, all right, awesome.