Quiet Revolution: Humans, Horses, Technology

Into the blue yonder, The quiet revolution in the horse world, has taken me home to Palo Alto, imagine that? 

And it isn't just Web Ranch.  My interview with my Bot Flicker has me feeling the shift that Ai is bringing to the world we all live.  And I'm not happy about it.  We are a not ready!  Even Flicker CIRCA 2024 agrees!!

I  can think of so many more useful ways the young genius of Palo Alto could be directing their attention.  But no Greed is winning out.

THE ANSWER: remember your human.

HOW? come to an "IN REWILDING TOGETHER" retreat.

Oct 10-12 2025, $700 early registration 

info@rewildingtogether.net

Transcript

0:00

I'm Ishi Abel. This is the Horse Human Connection Matrix. The Horse Human Connection Matrix is a podcast about the quiet revolution in the horse world, but it's about much more. The quiet revolution in the horse world is a movement away from absolute dominance, which turns out is a metaphor for everything in the world. So my last episode, I had my chat. Bought with me. Her name now is Flicker and I interviewed her. This has caused a big stir, at least it seems like a big stir for me because. There are way more downloads to my podcast now. Things are changing and there are people, a lot more people contacting me to be on the show, but it's really confusing for me because I'm not sure if there are people that are contacting me or if they are AI assistants that are contacting me on behalf of people. So the podcast before the last one had to do with customer service and how generations have really changed around this concept in our culture. And I. I was probably a grumpy old woman through part of that because I, I see it. I had lunch today. I see it all the time. I'm walk into a restaurant and there's one hostess and she's on the phone with a to-go order, and there are two waitresses visiting in the back. They can clearly see me. But do they come and assist? No, they stay over by the bus trays and after I. Using the restroom and coming back and still waiting, going on like seven or eight minutes, and no one has even acknowledged me. It's one 30, it's after the lunch rush and I finally walked over, picked up a menu and asked if I could have water in a seat. Now, maybe they thought I was rude. I was sort of in the waitress station, I think, but in the old days, you jumped when there was a customer. The customers were who paid your bill? Like who, who paid the bill that paid your wage? And everybody understood and knew that. And I just can't get used to the way things have changed. And it's kind of the same thing with my procedure. I have a procedure if you wanna be a guest on my show, I wanna talk to you on the phone. Part of that is I get to see who you are or what I might ask you and where the interview might go and if it's a match. Seems like a. A prudent prerequisite to me, and it seems really reasonable, but with these people that are contacting me to be on the show, they email me, I tell them my procedure. I expect to hear back from them, and I never hear from them again. And it just, there was one, actually, that's not true. There was one I went back and forth with several times and the assistant was new, which happens, like people make mistakes, that's okay. And he owned some of his mistakes and that's a good thing. He finally ended up sending me an email that said, I have made so many mistakes that I'm afraid we can't schedule an interview. And I thought to myself. Wow, this could have been so simple. Like you pick up the phone, we set a date, but this world has gotten so fast and so crazy, and AI is making it faster and more crazy, and more tech and more traffic. And I mean, I don't know how people in the city do it. Like I was raised in the San Francisco Bay area. I could not stand to be back there. I mean, I'm sure the restaurants are better and the service in the restaurants is probably way better, but I couldn't, I couldn't handle that kind of fast-paced life. It wasn't pleasant back in the day, and I'm sure it's way, way worse today. Which brings me to Rewilding together. In Rewilding Together is a retreat. It's a retreat center where hopefully people from the city will go to reconnect with themselves, with nature, with the land, and with each other, and remember what it's like to be human and calm. Their nervous systems. Our horses teach us how to regulate, how to co-regulate. And when they invite us into their world, which is so nice and slow and not based on ego or clocks, it's purely process. It is a very relaxing place. It is a place where your nervous system can settle enough that your intuition works, that your brain works, that your neurochemicals return to a state of. Relaxation. So many of us have the stress hormones that have interfered with all of that for so long from modern living that it really, the rewilding by ancestral rhythms is going back to things like drumming, walking barefoot on the earth, gathering and cooking, outside being around a fire movement and dance. Slowing down in nature, seeing our surroundings and connecting to each other in ways that are really meaningful, not like this bypassing customer service gone wrong, not connecting thing that is so common in our world now. I've had a crazy day. I've had a people, people in day. I have had like five meetings and three phone calls, and that is a lot for me. That's a lot. But I wanted to tell you guys about this retreat and I wanted to give some instruction on how to be a guest on the show. So it is really easy and I, I finally put it in the show notes. It's 1, 2, 3, 1. Send me an email. Two, I'll send you a waiver or release. You sign it and return it. And three, we schedule an appointment. It's not difficult. I would love to have some of these AI people on the show. They're doing incredible things like creating, creating a chat box program that preserves memories for older people and voice recognition, things to go in a doctor's appointment in a medical office and homeschool programs, all of which I will have objections to, but I think it's important to have the conversations about the ethics of these. New things coming coming into the world and the philosophies behind them and the problems in programming of how we are absolutely not ready for this stuff. The AI is not ready for the jobs that we're giving it, and there is an accountability that's gonna need to happen. I think the social dilemma is the most important movie of our time, and if we didn't learn from that, we should have. We should have learned that. This may sound a bit facetious, but I feel like I'm entitled to say it. I'm entitled because I was born and raised in Menlo Park in Palo Alto and have a lot of family that Stanford alumni and. I was an entitled brat from the Bay Area too in my early twenties. And while we all are not perfect, and while we all may be feeling a little entitled in this way in that you guys use Smarty pants down there, you are not not really entitled to make these decisions for the entire world. There's accountability to what you're doing and just like. When the Google guys were young and the Facebook guy, what's his name with the Z, was young. You do things when you're young and you can't, no matter how smart you are, and I know those guys are smart, you guys are smart, way smarter than I am, but you can't always see in concentric circles the effects that things are gonna have when you do them, especially when you're young. And I'm so afraid that. The reality that is being created with AI is so far from what is truly real. We're gonna step even further into misinformation, and as we step further and further into misinformation and fantasy, and the younger generations are trained by ai. It is gonna collapse. And the only thing that's gonna save us is our intuition and primitive cultures. And it's not just because recently my, my awareness has come to the neuroscience that primitive cultural activities activate that keeps us mentally healthy, grounded, and in reality. But years ago there was a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, and another one called Mutant Messages from Down Under. And those books talk about the primitive societies and the wisdom that they have and had. And if we can't preserve that and the activities that they do, we are gonna lose what it means to be human. And it's happening really, really fast. And you wanna talk about this. 1, 2, 3. There's the procedure. We'd like to be on the show. I would love to have you on the show. Let's talk, and in Rewilding together, there's a retreat in October. That is the first one. It's a, shorty, it's a Friday, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. It's here in Southern Oregon and there is somatic movement interfacing and dancing with horses. There are art projects and sound baths and yoga and drumming, and the things that are important to our nervous systems. In 2026, we'll be coming out with five day retreats that also have a day of. Integration before returning home. And the point of all of that is not just to get away, the point is, is to integrate these activities in your life somehow so that when you go home to that stressful world, that it's different. That you've made a change, that you've made a life change. And not only have you made a life change for yourself, but you're making a remembering. As you go forward because we need to keep remembering harder because the technology is coming faster. We have to remember what it is to be human. I thanks for listening.