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Journey on Magic lies within the trails we ride. You're listening to the Journey on podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warrick is a horseman trainer, international clinician and author who helps empower horse people from all over the world with the skills, knowledge and mindsets needed to create trusting partnerships with their horses. Warrick offers a free seven day trial to his comprehensive online video library that includes hundreds of full length training videos and several home Study courses@videos.warwickshiller.com
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G' day everyone. Welcome back to the Journey On Podcast. I'm your host, Warwick Schiller and I have a very interesting and special guest on the podcast today. This guy's name's Nicholas Paul and I met him at a. The thing I'm a part of up in San Francisco. But Nicholas, Nicholas thinks about thinking. He's the founder and principal of Still Thinking, which is a new firm advancing a new field of practice for thinking near the technological frontier. So Nick's very, very into the whole tech thing. He was a central figure at the Long now foundation for nearly a decade and, and the Long now foundation is something that is looking at the future in the context of the next 10,000 years, the past 10,000 years and the next 10,000 years. So these guys are a bunch of deep thinkers. So Nick is, he holds a number of key leadership positions including Director of Strategy and Director of Development at the Long Now Foundation. He's not there anymore. He's one of the first board member board directors at Invisible, which is an AI startup now valued at over $2 billion, and is currently on the founding board the Eternity foundation, which is a new nonprofit reviving ancient wisdom with frontier technology. And that, that we'll get into that later on. But they are basically using AI to decipher ancient texts that have never been deciphered before. So, you know, using current technology to decipher absolutely ancient wisdom that no one's ever heard before, which is, which is fascinating. He's a fellow at lit, which is a leadership accelerator building the Interpersonal Dynamic coursework at Stanford University. He's also an inaugural member of the Balkans Collective for Creative Technologies, whatever that is. And he's currently a fellow at the Institute, a think tank in San Francisco, which is, I'm a fellow of that too. And that's how I, that's how I met Nicholas Paul. You know, this great conversation. I. Some of the stuff that Nick told me in this conversation, I didn't understand. Maybe you guys are much more educated than I am and you get some of it. But anyway, that being said, I had a great time chatting with Nick, not only on the podcast, but when I've met him a couple of times up there at the institute. So I hope you guys enjoy this conversation with Nicholas Paul as much as I did. Nicholas Paul, welcome to the Journey on podcast.
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Thanks for having Mark.
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B
Hey, it's good to see you again.
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A
It's good to see you, too.
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B
So we met last year, I believe it was, in San Francisco at a thing we're involved in up there. And when I met you, I thought, this dude's fascinating. I'd love to get him in the podcast because you, you're involved in some things that are totally off the radar from, at least from me and from a lot of people. So why don't you share with us what you're currently up to and then we can unravel how the hell you got there.
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A
Well, yeah. Well, thanks again for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity to come talk to you. How, you know, I guess where to begin? We can start with the institute that you and I are both a part of, which is kind of an interesting think, do take model looking, you know, at folks that are taking unique approaches to making the world a better place, whether that's through filmmaking. There's some people doing scientific research, medical research, there's some choreographers, there are some painters, there are some philosophers and poets and a lot of different kinds of artists and thinkers of all stripes. And so it's a very interesting and eclectic organization. I'm so glad that you're a part of it as well. I really enjoyed getting a chance to meet and talk to you last year there as well. And what I like about something that eclectic is that you don't need to seek agreement or have some kind of a goal. A lot of the times when people, especially in America, think about think tanks, they think about, like, Washington, D.C. beltway think tanks that have some kind of an agenda. They've got something they're trying to do very specifically. And so you get a lot of synoptic views on something, whether it's a political thing or a philosophical angle on something. And yeah, I've always really enjoyed unusual collections of people because most of the ideas that are interesting to me can't be, aren't really well accessed just through one discipline or through one lens. But it's actually maybe a couple of lenses stacked on top of each other kind of gets things to look really cool. And so I like working with a lot of researchers from a lot of different backgrounds. Lately, I'VE spent a lot of time working with frontier mathematics researchers, which is really interesting. My background is in mathematics, it's in engineering and something like philosophy. Although we can talk about why I don't love the term philosophy and why I don't really think that's what I'm doing, but it's about as close as we're going to get in a single word. But like mathematics researchers, it's fascinating to talk to folks who are thinking really deeply about what the future of mathematics looks like, especially in an age of AI and just increasing computational power behind some of this thinking. So talking to them about what they see, what they say in the future for their discipline, and then what becomes possible when these machines are unlocking different things that people have known might have been possible in theory, but certainly weren't possible in practice. And now these things are possible in practice again. You know, there's these, you know, math journals from the 80s and the 90s and stuff that have these things laid out, you know, and somewhere in the paper is some kind of reference like, well, you know, of course we're never going to have that much compute, but you could imagine if we did, this would be really interesting. And now, you know, we're living through a world where a lot of that stuff is possible because we do have a lot of that compute. So talking with folks, you know, in mathematics or in, you know, computer engineering, folks that are thinking about AI and those kinds of things, things I find that fascinating as a complement to things like poetry, philosophy, literature, a lot more of the lettered stuff that I'm mostly interested in, but coming at it from the perspective of somebody who was trained in engineering and systems. Systems thinking. And so I like these eclectic collections of humans. Why? I really like the idea of us talking today about, well, about whatever we're going to talk about on this podcast.
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B
Yeah, well, we're going to talk about. Well, let's start with what you're main thing you're currently doing. Still thinking. Tell us about still thinking.
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A
Yeah, still thinking is kind of. It's this firm that I'm running that's helping folks working on frontier technology to think about it a little bit differently. And when I say think about it, I don't so much mean something exactly like strategy, but it's close. And I'm not thinking something exactly like philosophy, but it's close, but there's. There's a need for a particular, kind of like a particular mode of being up at the technological frontier that I've noticed, which is there's just, you know, there's certain kinds of people you don't see around the tech frontier. And one of those kinds of people are people that are, I think, well practiced in contemplative traditions. Like what does it mean to just sit in the space of not having an answer for something or sitting in confrontation with a mystery and just letting it be a mystery, not necessarily needing to solve it to move forward? What does that do? What does that do to the nature of the tech frontier when you have people like that around? And so that's a question I've been pulling on and working with folks in lots of different organizations, but still, thinking is kind of the landing place for a lot of that work for me. And so, like I said right now, been talking to and thinking with a lot of mathematics folks, a lot of computer folks, but over the years, it's been a lot of different things. Science funders, philanthropic organizations, as I think we were talking about just a moment ago. I spent a good portion of my career in the last decade helping run the Long now foundation, which is a nonprofit in San Francisco. It's focused on 10,000 year timescale. So again, it's a novel way of thinking about things. And I think, I think we use the word think in a lot of different ways, and it's almost unavoidable to trip all over it. But I have, I have a belief
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B
that,
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that the way we think about things that really matter matters. And so thinking about thinking is kind of the most concise way I can put that to people when they're trying to ask what. What I care about. And specifically, when you think about the frontier of technology, how do we think about technology? What do we think technology actually is? What do we think it's doing? There's a certain sense in which this is a stupid question, like what is technology? Everyone knows what technology is. Kindergarteners know what technology is. But I've got a sneaking suspicion we don't actually understand what it is. And if we don't understand what it is, then that's an interesting invitation to contemplation, to meditation, to thinking more deeply about what we're doing, what it is, what our role in that is. And again, it's not that people on the frontier aren't doing that themselves, but there's particular approaches to it and different ways of relating to the unknown that I think are underrepresented on the frontier. And so I work on a lot on that.
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B
The word think was mentioned there a lot. Have you ever watched you Ever watch Peaky Blinders?
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A
No, I haven't.
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B
You know, it's amazing show, but in that at one point in time, this guy, you know, he was running a criminal organization, but then he. He kind of steps away from that, and he's in his big mansion doing nothing. And one day the maid says, dream. What are you doing? And he looks up at her and he says, I'm sick of sitting here thinking about me, thinking about my thinking. He was really in his head about stuff. But, yeah, he was sick of thinking about him thinking about his thinking. And, you know, you're still thinking is about thinking about thinking. The Long now foundation, you mentioned that. And that could probably be a big old long conversation, but tell us more about that. So they're. They're looking at the future in the next 10,000 years, is that right?
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That ostensibly, that's what the organization does, or part of it. It's one of the ways people understand it, I think. I think as a nonprofit, it gets involved in a lot of different things. So everything from the de Extinction of the woolly mammoth project that spun out as Revive and Restore. It's an organization that runs a cocktail bar. It's an organization that's famously known for being involved with a clock owned by Jeff Bezos. And so there's a lot of different kinds of projects that the organization gets involved in. I'm no longer with the organization myself, but it was an organization that I spent a lot of time working with and bringing people in into over the course of better part of a decade.
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B
I'm a bit of a, you know, animal nature sort of a guy more than a technophobe. D. Extinction of the woolly mammoth. What is that?
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A
Well, again, I'm not at liberty to speak for the organizations, the projects themselves. My understanding of it is that you can take the closest related animal to the woolly mammoth, which I think last time I checked was the East Asian elephant, and you can sequence its DNA and then you can think about what kind of. What kind of things make a woolly mammoth different than an East Asian elephant. So maybe it's got more subcutaneous fat, maybe it's got. It's got fur, of course, famously the woolly part of the woolly mammoth. And so you look at these things and you can get some of this stuff from ancient DNA. My understanding is they're actually sequencing also what they can from woolly mammoth DNA, which is patchy. And so you're not. I think in a technical sense, what they're aiming for wasn't so much reconstructing the woolly mammoth from just directly from the woolly mammoth DNA, but creating some kind of a chimera with a kind of a blended genetic heritage partially from the locally related cousins and then partially from the ancient DNA. And that project's also now been taken up by a for profit company called Colossal. I have no idea what the status is for that, but it's an interesting thing because it, it introduces an opportunity to think about our role in preserving and caring for ecosystems. And you know, for something like the Siberian tundra, the woolly mammoth was a kind of a keystone species for keeping the permafrost permanently frosty. Since we don't have any like megafauna up there anymore. The Siberian tundra itself is mostly, it's dark green, all these trees are growing out and so it's capturing more solar energy. When the woolly mammoths were around stomping everything down and you know, deracinating everything with their tusks. If you would have looked at the Siberian tundra from space, it would have been white and snowy and therefore would have reflected a lot of solar energy off the planet. So some people think the woolly mammoth de extinction project could be a clever way of stabilizing the climate, which is super interesting. But again like these are things, they're very far out things to think about. I enjoy. Also introduces questions about our responsibility. Kind of get the all the Jurassic park questions of just because we can do it, should we do it? What is our responsibility? What is the horizon of our responsibility? And then what do we use to guide our sense of what we want to do? Like Williams, I'm sure are great, but in so many ways. But I don't think they'd, I don't know, I, I don't think, I think these things are very ethically and aesthetically complex and wrestling with them I think is effortful and valuable. I think there's, there's effort, there's like valuable effort in thinking about these things more seriously. So when projects like Colossal or Revive and Restore or Long now introduce these, you know, project artifacts into the world for discussion, you do get. I mean at least I've, I've enjoyed the conversations it's thrown me into, including this one with you. And I think it's a good invitation to think about things not just in this peaky bl. Reminders rumination sense where you're just thinking about your own thinking. And of course that's not, you know, rumination is not really my, my interest. Mine is more Of a kind of a metacognitive, taking a look at the way in which we think about things and analyzing. Analyzing what you see, like what. How do we think about stuff? And very often these conversations are abstract. They happen in philosophy departments or something, or like bioethics departments. And actually having a company out there that's advancing, you know, the de extinction of woolly mammoth changes that conversation a
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little bit, I think.
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A
Different have that conversation and they have it with a different sense of urgency and seriousness than you might just, you know, over a couple of beers.
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B
Right. Wow. And the, the long foundation you mentioned, they're kind of famous for a clock that Jeff Bezos owns. What is that clock?
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A
So in the kind of early to mid-90s, some folks had the idea that, you know, what kind of, how do you build a monument to the future that operates the same way the pyramids of Giza operate as a monument to the past? How do you connect? If you go to the pyramids of Giza in Egypt and you feel somehow connected to people that existed here on the planet thousands of years ago, like 6,000 years ago, is there some way of connecting yourself to the human beings that might be here 6,000 years in the future? Maybe not even human beings, but other sentient life forms or whatever. However you want to think about it. Again, it's an invitation to thinking about the stuff that I think we don't normally think about with any kind of seriousness. And they landed on the idea of a clock, which is, when you think about it, a clock. Clock. Clock is interesting because it's a physical artifact whose future states in some sense are latent within it. And you know, it kind of unfolds across time. You know, you see, you see the hand of a clock kind of rotates around and the day goes by in this unfolding motion. And so you can imagine if you can create a mechanism like a clock, a clock like mechanism that keeps good time for thousands of years, which, you know, there's not too many examples of long lasting clocks. I mean, you've got some that are certainly hundreds of years old. And depending on how loose your definition of a clock is, you know, you can think about all kinds of things as clocks. People think of trees as clocks or rivers as clocks. I mean, you can really. The clock thing can be pressed pretty far. But you know, if you're thinking about mechanical like device type things, what most of us think of as clocks, there's not too many examples. There are any that I'm aware of that are actually like fully Functional thousands of years in the the future. So that's an interesting thought. How would you build that? Who would even go about building that? Where would you put it? What materials would you make it out of? How would you design people's interactions with it? Would you design people's interactions with it? Again, for me, the interesting thing is so has so little to do with the clock. The clock itself isn't that interesting at all. I think what's interesting is what the clock invites people to step forward with in a conversation. You find out all kinds of weird things with people. I think I have to imagine the analog for you might be something like with horses, which is like, okay, there's one level of interest in horses, which is the horse level of interest. But then there's so much more that comes out of these conversations and these interactions, and it ends up being less about the thing and more about how the thing functions as a portal to other more interesting things. And for me, that's always been the interest of these projects. And there's so many organizations doing great work on things like this that are just. They're provocative and. But then they also grant you some permission to not. You know, it's not. You're the guy sounding like a crazy stone philosopher in a bar somewhere with this idea about 10,000 years. It's like, oh, there's other people out there that are legitimating it by putting it out there as the physical artifact. And, you know, and you read an article about it somewhere, and all of a sudden you have permission to have a conversation with people about some things that maybe you never otherwise would have had that conversation. So it can be very illuminating sometimes.
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So is that clock an actual physical thing? It is actually made. I don't know much.
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That's my understanding. Yeah.
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Yeah.
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There's some artifacts of it in San Francisco, and there's the actual. The actual clock itself is somewhere buried inside of a mountain in West Texas.
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B
There's mountains in west Texas? I thought it was flat, but really it's buried already?
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It's my understanding, yeah.
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And is it an undisclosed location?
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I think it's actually been disclosed in the last couple of years. But again, I haven't been involved with the Longmont foundation in some time, so things may have changed.
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B
So how. I mean, you spent almost a decade there. How did you get involved in that? Well, actually, let's back up. Where'd you grow up?
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I grew up a safe and affordable distance west of Chicago, Illinois, middle of the country, pretty much where the parking lots Ran into the corn fields.
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Yeah.
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And it was, it was a great way to, great place to be from without there for most of my childhood. And then, and then left for school, left for school to go study engineering.
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B
So do you have, do you have a degree in philosophy as well as engineering?
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I do not have a degree in philosophy at all.
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B
Oh, you don't? Oh, okay.
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No, I came out, I came out of my engineering program. It's a four year program for a big R1 state school like a, and specifically around like systems engineering, genetic algorithms, operations research. So pretty, pretty philosophically laden field of engineering where you're really thinking about what does it mean to create systems at scale that are robust under real world conditions. So you get involved in a lot of philosophical questions and so it naturally opened up a lot of space for these kinds of discussions. But the program itself is super lopsided in this regard because It's a big R1 state school and they're mostly pressing you with a lot of science, a lot of math, a lot of STEM type stuff. Stuff.
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Right.
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And the STEM world is at least, you know, when I was in school, which was like, you know, early aughts was kind of seemed to be the panacea for everything. Like there was nobody getting fired for wanting to send more support towards STEM anything. So STEM was just, you know, it's kind of a rah rah amen corner of the university where all this money, all this attention was going in that direction and it just kind of created, you know, kind of like you ever see like a world class tennis champions have like crazy overdeveloped like dominant arms, like their, their serving arm is just huge like a, like a crab. And the other one's kind of half withered away. I think the engineering program I was a part of was kind of spit me out in that condition. I had a really developed STEM worldview. I really understood the, the lens that sees the world as, as resources, as standing reserve, as things that are ready to be utilized for certain ends programmatically. So again, this is a dominant worldview of investing, very often of philanthropy, certainly of a lot of the computer science world. And a lot of what people are talking about when they talk about AI or technology, it's this worldview. And a lot of these programs, at least in my experience, they kind of spit you out, being really well versed in this kind of canon of arguments for seeing the world this way. Now there are other arguments, there are other ways to see the world, and I think a lot of these other Perspectives, for lack of a better word, have a lot to have a lot going for them, especially in a moment like this moment. And so really quickly after I got out of school, I realized something was amiss. I mean, I had always been interested in philosophy and art, and these kinds of things aren't amenable to the STEM worldview. You know, it's like if you and I wanted to make a movie and we asked ourselves, like, well, what's the best movie out there? If we want to be good filmmakers, we should probably model ourselves after the best movie. And so we. Let's say we decided to. Let's say we decided Citizen Kane, and we figure out that Citizen Kane is 2 hours and 12 minutes long. It's like, well, then we should try to make a movie that's 2 hours and 12 minutes long, Mark. Like, that's what we should do. And of course, that's not the way any thinking, thoughtful filmmaker would think about it, at least. Well, historically, you wouldn't think about this as the way to go about doing filmmaking. So there's definitely a shift in worldview between kind of the STEM perspective and other perspectives. And so I really, just after school, went hard into studying all this other material. Thankfully, we live in a world where, you know, between. Between the Internet and all of the bookstores being online libraries and all the digital apps, you know, artifacts of all this stuff, you can. You can learn a lot if you're committed to putting the time in. And so I just really did. I really put in a lot of reps for many, many years until I felt versed enough in the material to be useful, to be of some kind of help or some kind of service to people. And that's ultimately what led me to the front door of the. The Longmow foundation in San Francisco. What else do you do when you know a lot about engineering and you know a decent amount about people and a decent amount about kind of. Oh, thinking about thinking. What do you do with that? One of the answers I came up with was, well, I'll help these guys out for a little bit. See. See if we can't advance this conversation here about, you know, the future and the past and that sense of now that's just much bigger than the now of this podcast. You know, what.
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B
What led you to them? Like, how'd you find them?
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It's a really good question. Something, some element of kismet was involved in it, basically. Weirdly enough, there were, like, some Twitter conversations that had led me to check out some people involved with the organization people I hadn't, like, thought about in ages. I wasn't even sure if they were alive or if they were still doing stuff and if Long now was still a thing. I think I remember hearing about it back in college because the clock thing or something and, you know, one thing led to another and, you know, they did have a website and like, if dust could blow off a website, it definitely did. It was like, okay, I think this might be an organization still. And. And then I went over to their. Their jobs page and they had a. They had a listing for a directorial position that was really eerily Nick shaped. And so I just sent him an email and said, hey, you know, got no business running a nonprofit like yours, but to the extent that you really are looking for this, I think I'm your guy. And we ended up having a chat and, you know, the rest is history. So it was. It was pure. Pure coincidence mixed with, like, just a little kismet. Yeah, it was just like very good fortune
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B
if that hadn't come along. What did you think you were going to be doing? What were you thinking?
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A couple of things. I had considered going back to school. I'd considered going to get a degree in philosophy. Thing is, is you can. You can do a lot of good work in philosophy without a degree. That's not true of, say, medicine, as far as I'm aware. You know, maybe you pull a splinter out of somebody in the wilderness, but other than that, they really. They really want you to have a medical degree before you're opening people up.
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B
Well, I think I want you to have a medal degree, A medical degree before you chop it into me too, so.
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A
Yeah, exactly. So there's, you know, there's a lot of disciplines that, if you're interested in them, there's really only one way to go about it. And then philosophy and the humanities more broadly, they're interesting. There's a lot of different ways to contribute to those worlds that don't necessarily require licensure. You know, you don't need a license to write a book or to.
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B
To.
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To dabble in poetry or something like that. So. So I'd considered going back to school a couple of times, sometimes for philosophy, sometimes for psychotherapy. I was kind of committed for about a year to going back for a PsyD, which is like a kind of blended medical research psychology degree, which is like. I was thinking that there was. There was just so much. There's a lot of human suffering that can be alleviated through human relationships. That doesn't Seem like a controversial claim to me. And psychotherapy is like clinical psychotherapy is like one way of creating a holding container for transformation where the relationship kind of creates a space of trust and safety for transformation to take place, healthful transformation. And so therapy is one of these things. I don't think it's the only one. But again, talk about things you need licensure for. It's like if you want to practice clinical therapy, yeah, you need to go back to school. So consider that for about a year, went back for some classes. And so there's another world in which that's what I would have done and I probably would ended up in a mostly similar place where you're having conversations with folks and you're helping them understand the way that they're looking at things as one of many options. This idea that you have a lot of choices in your way of reading things, and the idea that there's a single way of looking at the world where things are successes or failures or things are black and white, that doesn't. That's not a very robust way of looking at the world. And it's not going to hold up to, you know, real, real like contestations with other people or with other events in the world at large. And so having a place where you can go with that and kind of rethink your thinking is really helpful. And you know, again, there's so many different modalities of creating space for that kind of a relationship and trust and conversation. But, you know, one of them is like strategy consulting. You know what I mean?
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B
It's.
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A
If you're really thinking with people about how to build a business or build a non profit, for example, and you know, and put it into a good position for the future. A lot of times you're having to surface how people think about their work and what it means to do the work that they're doing, why they're doing the work they're doing. Kind of the same thing you're probably doing here by hosting a podcast where you're getting to know people and where they come from, what angles they're coming at these issues on. And then once you've surfaced that out, then you can say, okay, well, you know, would you ever consider taking a look at it like this? Or do you think, does that feel good if we do that, does that feel good? Like, can you check in? And then, you know, you go, okay, cool, so this is what we're going to do. This seems like a thing that makes everybody feel pretty good. There you Go. And so, you know, some of the strategy consulting, you can imagine this also happening in the realm of. I mean, I don't know about you. I've been. I've been so healed in my thinking so many times from really excellent literature and books. Very often people that have died long before I even showed up on the planet have had something to say, put it down in writing. And encountering that writing has really shifted things in me in ways that were helpful and allowed me to show up and be more helpful and supportive, capacitative for the people in my life. So that's also, I think, another one of these modalities. But again, these have nothing to do with the STEM priorities, which is a little bit about knowing exact, you know, these kinds of common sense things like, of course we'd want more of this and less of this other thing. And it's just so obvious, it's such a consensus position that pushing against it really does require, like, a certain skillfulness in language and articulation. How do you talk about these things? But then also the ability to perceive it and perceive it from different angles, perceive these perspectives and arguments. So some of that sits somewhere around philosophy, some of it sits somewhere around therapy. You know, I think maybe in another one of these timelines, I might have ended up as a lawyer or something. You know, it's like there's so many different ways to bring, you know, yourself to bear in the world in ways that are helpful. Helpfulness is important to me. So I think whatever I would have ended up doing, I would have wanted to at least be telling myself a story about how I was being. Being helpful. But that's pretty much the only sense of limit I have otherwise. Inside of that, there's like 50 billion things I could probably have done.
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B
You're reading your, you know, like, your bio, like you're a board director Invisible, which is an AI startup. You're a fellow at the. What is it? Lit. It's a leadership accelerator.
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A
Leaders in tech.
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B
Yeah, Leaders in tech. Yeah. And then there's the something collective. I don't even know how to pronounce it.
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A
Balcony's collective.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of different things. And it seems like you are like, I. I feel for me personally at least, the secret to the universe is doing things for the good of others or for good of the collective and not so much for yourself. And I feel like when you do things from that perspective, like, all sorts of amazing things happen to you, and you seem like everything you're doing, it's about helping out. But I do want to back up again back to. As a kid, what did you think you were going to do in life?
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A
Oh, 100%. I thought I was going to be a rock star. I was really obsessed with rock music and spent all of my time as a kid like playing in rock bands and eventually went and did that and toured and did the whole enchilada in the music industry. Had a lot of fun with it. But I think the music industry is a very cool way to spend your 20s and it's a very unusual way to spend your 50s as, as I saw it, experienced it through other people who'd had both of those rides. And so I kind of knew really quickly I wanted to get out and pivot out of that thing. So I kind of got into the music industry and then kind of just about the same time I was like, you know, waning in my interest and relevance for the music industry. I was waxing into the philosophy world, for lack of a better word for
- [31:46]
B
my son is still in the think I'm going to be a rock star stage. You know, they've just started doing, they've started touring a couple of years ago and they were, you know, they were support acts and then they've done a headline tour and you know, it's not going anywhere yet but you know, the, the dream is still there. How so, how far, how far did you get into the whole music scene?
- [32:12]
A
How far, how far, how does one measure how far one gets?
- [32:15]
B
I mean it was no, you know, was it a commercial success or not really.
- [32:20]
A
So if you do the math on my career in the music industry, I kind of had my bands coming up right at the same time that selling plastic circles for a middle class living was going down. You know, it used to be 20 bucks at Best Buy would get you a CD in there. There was a real middle class or something more like a middle class to the music industry right before I showed up on the scene. By the time I had shown up, selling CDs was, was no longer the thing really. It wasn't happening. Piracy was huge. People were mostly just giving away a lot of their stuff. I mean you could think about, you know, I think groups like Radiohead did a pay what you pay what you want model, which is your Radiohead. That's totally fine, you can kind of self fund. I ended up doing a pay what you want model for one of my albums. And it was the most like, like commercially successful record that I had. Just because I gave people the chance to Give me what they thought it was worth. And you'd be amazed what people think an album from a local band is worth. And so that was really a great experiment, but it was a time of real experimentation. And if you weren't self funding through family resources or something else, if you, you know, if you didn't have like a, I don't know, if you didn't have a commercial record making music for McDonald's as a side hustle or something, or more likely as like the main hustle, then a lot of the folks in the music industry kind of flesh out or they just kind of like, they kind of just spun out. And the ones that were good and creative and thoughtful, they landed on their feet in all kinds of weird places. And I've collided with some of these people in really strange parts of the universe, actually. Baukunt Collective I ended up meeting the guy that picked me and my band up from LAX in Los Angeles in like 2009 and drove us to the soundstage for this talk show we were supposed to be on. So we were performing in this talk show. And the guy who picked us up and drove us to the thing, he was the architect of this brand thing, this whole contest that we were a part of. And I ended up running into him in the context of a venture capital event in San Francisco last year. And, you know, now him and I have done a couple of things together for the music industry to give back. As well. So, you know, it's like you see people in weird places and when they're, you know, good people always kind of like land butter side up. And so I did see a lot of that, but I also saw a lot of people really get. Get screwed by the economic incentives of that dark time. Now on the other side of that dark time was streaming and Instagram and kind of the, the mega super popularity contest that we see today with like what we're calling influencers or whatever. But before social media had taken over, piracy was still around. And you could try to go door to door and sell your. Sell your MP3s for 10 bucks, but good freaking luck. And so it was tough. So from a commercial success standpoint, the answer is it wasn't enough of a commercial success for me to keep doing it when I was very, very. It was easy to bend my arm with other opportunities elsewhere. And so that's what I ended up doing. But, you know, I had enough fun. I. I got to tick a lot of the boxes that mattered to me. Like, there was like, there are historic venues in every city that a kid grows up in and Chicago, one of them is the Metro. And so playing the Metro the first time is really cool. And then playing the Metro multiple times down the road when you're selling it out and headlining, it is, like, okay for a certain version of myself as a kid, like, what else do you do? Like, you know, I'm kind of done. That was. That was all I really did this for. You know, it's like, you want to do that. You want to impress, like, two girls, you know, in your classroom, and like, beyond that, you know, it's all just crazy. And so I, you know, I did get to do a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do with music, which was awesome. And I think it's also partially why I was able to delaminate myself from that world and start something else, was just because I had had, like.
- [35:54]
B
Like this.
- [35:55]
A
That wonderful gift of, like, low ambitions for that particular venture. It was like, okay, I didn't. I didn't need to become, you know, Michael Jackson or something. You know, I didn't need to become the King of Pop. That was never even, like, of interest to me. And so. So I think, yeah, I got very lucky by being that right amount of talented enough to do the things I wanted to do, but not so talented that I got, like, stuck in the no man's land of the weird economics of the music industry in, like, the early 2000s. You know, that. That would have been tough. And I've seen some people who did get stuck there and have had a very different ride of it, and I think I really got lucky. I'm very, very grateful.
- [36:37]
B
So you had a band. Well, what was it? Nicholas Paul and the Thinkers.
- [36:41]
A
Right. Wouldn't that have been. Wouldn't that have been the name? I had a bunch of bands. You know, the last band that I had was a band called. Called Sun Cellar, Like. Like Wine Cellar. Sun Cellar. Oh, some friends in Chicago. And that was just a ton of fun. It was really great to do music that was trying to be really accessible while at the same time esoterically being really complicated. Musicians have, you know, musicians that are in the top of their game, learn a lot of things about music that the average person never knows. And so they'll hear something even like a. You know, they'll hear a Madonna song or something, and they'll hear something in the song or in the production that's, like, really interesting as a musician to musicians. And if you have any musicians in your life, it sounds like you got at Least one. They'll. They'll wonder. They'll be very happy to tell you about these things. When these songs come on radio, My
- [37:30]
B
son does it all the time. Like, do you hear that? Hear that, what he did? Right, Listen. Listen to it again. Like that bit right there. I bet he did, you know? Yeah, I get that all the time. Yeah. Yeah.
- [37:39]
A
It's such a gift. I mean, it's. It's like being able to see, like, infrared or something. And so one of the fun things for me was getting good enough at my instrument and at the craft to be able to craft these cool infrared things that only other musicians who could see in the infrared or hear in the infrared, whatever. However, we're pressing this metaphor, but only some people would pay attention to. And could you tuck those into something that most other people would just hear is like a very accessible pop rock song. And that's kind of a fun thing to try and do because you're basically trying to balance two elements that are kind of at odds with each other, because you're doing a bunch of stuff that. That really only musicians give a shit about, but then you're trying to do it in a way that other people are. Like, this song's really great.
- [38:20]
B
And if you almost like making a Disney movie to where the kids can watch it and get it at one level and. But there's some innuendos in there that the parents get kind of. Sexual innuendos hidden. Yes, it's a bit like that.
- [38:32]
A
It's very much like that. And I think. I think the best art operates on multiple levels for different people. And so I also just really enjoy that as, like, a practice. Again, I think you can do this in other dimensions, like philosophy, where it's like, philosophy doesn't have to always be thought of in terms of published papers or like, philosophical tomes, but conversations, when they're done right, can be deeply philosophical and make references to things that philosophically oriented people care about and track on, but then also aren't rubbing people's noses in the fact that they aren't erudite about philosophy.
- [39:07]
B
Right.
- [39:07]
A
Like, they can't get it. It's like there's so much philosophy, I think, that that's oriented towards just talking to other philosophers. Right. I would say actually the entirety of academic philosophy, like, that I'm familiar with is. Is pretty much pointed in that direction. It's people writing for other people just like them, and that's important. So I don't want to, like, downplay it. You got to do that Especially if you're working, like, at the bleeding edge of your craft, you want to talk to the other people who are also at the bleeding edge of their craft. But then there's something about the need for this stuff out in the world more broadly, where another challenge is to go the other direction, where you're just kind of talking to folks and, you know, there's all the air support philosophy books out there that'll tell you how to make your life better in five or six different ways, according to five or six different philosophers. And sure, okay, that's another approach you can take. But I think kind of, again, kind of steering a. A course between the Scylla and Charybdis of, like, esoteric stuff and exoteric stuff is. Is the interesting balance point. There's a dynamic there because you can't always just hold still. You know, it's kind of always moving. You're moving a little bit towards words, professional sometimes for certain arguments, and you're moving a little bit more towards an appeal to common sense, the kind of things, you know, our grandmas could agree about in other parts of the argument. So kind of steering a course between these polls, again, is. It's kind of the thing I find really interesting, and it was interesting when I was doing it with music. It's interesting doing it now with thinking philosophy, the arts, whatever you want to call all of this stuff here. And so, yeah, yeah, there's something there, there.
- [40:37]
B
One of my podcast guests one time said, there is no balance. There is only balancing.
- [40:44]
A
Oh, I like that. I like that. The engineer in me wants to point out that there's a thing called a. Called an inverted pendulum. Do you know what this is? You heard about this thing? Any other. Any engineers listening will know exactly where I'm going with this. But an inverted pendulum is this idea where you can have something like this pen. This pen's not long enough. But imagine I had a broomstick here, right? A broomstick could probably stand up for a second, and I could constantly move my hand underneath the broomstick in the direction that it's falling. So it's constantly falling to your point, there's just balancing. You're just balancing the broomstick on your hand. But technically, the broomstick itself is never holding still. It's always just falling, but you're constantly catching it. So you have this kind of stability in instability. And I think that's. I think it's a good metaphor for so many things in Life, including big 10,000 year civilizational things. You know, it's the way I think about everything from, you know, physical buildings, like the building I'm in right now in New York, or you think about bridges or anything else. Anything else else for civilizations, like even, you know, I think about water, sanitation, or all these things that we depend on invisibly for just going about our days. All of these things are kind of in a state of just total disassembly. But there's always people showing up and people being born that are interested in bridges and water, sanitation and construction, and they're just like constantly keeping this whole thing from completely just going to pieces. And they're. They're the invisible heroes of the world, for sure.
- [42:06]
B
So you. You mentioned your, Your. Your small music career. Were you in college at the time? Was that prior to college? When was it?
- [42:16]
A
I mean, it was overlapping with everything in my life. I was doing music stuff when I was in grade school, in high school and college and after college. And so I was even doing music stuff as recently as a couple of years ago with a friend of mine in San Francisco. And so the music thing's still part of my life in a lot of ways. It's just not the part. It's not the sizable part of my life that was for a good portion of my teens and twenties. And then, yeah, I think by the time I was 30, I was. I was much more interested in the books that I wanted to read than the albums I wanted to try to understand.
- [42:48]
B
Right. You mentioned you mastered your instrument. What did you play?
- [42:52]
A
I don't know if I would say that I truly mastered my instrument because I think that's like a infinitely receding horizon, as anyone will tell you. I played guitar, I sang, did some other stuff with some other instruments, but really guitar was my access point, point to thinking about things. Even for singing, the guitar was kind of where I would start and finish all my work there. So it was great. I had the. The unique fortune of being in a couple of bands. One specific with a guitarist that was just absolutely leaps and bounds better than I was. And if you ever. Any musicians out there listening, if you ever get an opportunity to be in a band with somebody who's just a lot better than you and they're willing to be in a band with you. Absolutely. Take that on, because you'll just learn a ton of very, very quickly, if only because the tension in the relationship requires you to try and catch up as fast as you can because they're just smoking you on a regular basis. One of the nice things about music, which I think is also true of philosophy, but I don't know if I'm prepared to make that argument. But one of the things that's true about music is that in an ensemble environment where you have, like, let's say, four musicians, the weakest members of that ensemble will invariably, over time, kind of rise in their ability towards the direction of the best musicians. And in. In folks that would chime in here and say, oh, well, who's to say what a good musician is or what a bad musician is?
- [44:09]
B
They.
- [44:09]
A
They clearly have never been in a real band because real musicians absolutely know there's such a thing as a good musician and a bad musician. And the ones that are striving to be good will always value being included in an ensemble with folks who are better than them. So I don't. I definitely didn't master my instrument. And I could say that just because I. I can literally imagine this other guy who had certainly mastered it relative to me, and then he was constantly thinking that other guys were smoking him. And so there's something about the. The infinitely approachable attractor of mastery in music that's just really beautiful. Like, you can just. I'd imagine you could spend 40 years of your life playing an instrument, and you're still going to spend that 41st trying to do something you're not sure if you can do. And that's. That's what I think is one of the many things that makes the arts very, very beautiful is you can keep going forever, but eventually, you know, you need to get a job or you have a kid or something, you know, something happens, and all of a sudden spending nine hours a day on your guitar is not viable.
- [45:06]
B
Not viable anymore. Yeah. Did you. Were you an only child or did you have brothers and sisters?
- [45:12]
A
No, I'm the oldest of five.
- [45:13]
B
Oh, really?
- [45:14]
A
Two brothers and two sisters?
- [45:15]
B
Yeah.
- [45:16]
A
Scattered all over the US And North America generally.
- [45:19]
B
So I was wondering, because sometimes people that end up being really good at guitar spend a lot of time alone in their bedroom. Like maybe they're an only child or whatever, you know.
- [45:29]
A
Well, I mean, if you're an oldest child and your next child in line is not also into the guitar, like, you do have a lot of those same lonelinesses of, you know, being an only child. I spent a lot of time with a guitar in my hands as a kid. One of the big hacks. Your kid's probably too old for this hack, but one of the great grade school guitar hacks is just. I would just watch TV with a guitar in my Hands. Like, I didn't care that the Simpsons were on, but I would just be playing guitar the entire time. And each one of those Simpsons episodes is a half an hour more guitar practice, and you can just do that. I think most guitarists that got really good at, like, their. You know, by high school age, they definitely learned how to multitask with guitar even. Right now, I have a pedal, like a foot pedal under my laptop that I can play guitar while I'm reading on the computer. And I can just press my pedal toe and then have the text move up so I can just get a lot of, like, background practice in. Because so much of it's just muscle memory. You don't need to be fully present for the practicing part. Eventually you do want to check in and be present, but sometimes you're just on autopilot and you can catch up on your email or read a book or something, get a little more extra practice.
- [46:37]
B
You know, years ago, when my son was getting better many years ago, and I said, do you ever get to where you don't have to think about what you fingers are doing and it just comes out of you? And he kind of leans forward, he goes, dad, that's why you play. I'm like, oh, okay. You just get into this. Get into this state.
- [47:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had moments. Actually, one of the. One of the key moments when I wanted to leave the music industry was when I realized I was, like, thinking about where I was going to go to lunch the next day, like, while I was on stage, like, doing this song thing. I'm, like, trying to be as present as I can be, but for some reason, I'm just not. Like, I want to be somewhere else. And it's like, that's usually a pretty good sign that you're probably doing something other than what you should be doing. You know, I don't know about you. I like to be in a state of flow. I like to be engrossed. I like to be present with what I'm doing. And, you know, as soon as I find myself checking out to that level. And again, with muscle memory, you can check out to a certain extent. You know, I have to imagine the people that are doing, you know, like, regular Vegas shows where it's the same show every night, or I've had friends that are working on, like, Broadway plays and stuff, and it's like, you know, it's like you're doing seven, eight shows a week. Some point, you know, you're. You're also using that time to kind of think about other things. Do other things, like advance other parts of your, your experience. Not just, you know, performing the same hit song over and over and over again. Like, think about a, you know, I don't know, pick a, pick a famous singer. I mean, I mentioned Madonna earlier. It's like, how many times does she sing Vogue and like just, you know, know, is it, is it, is it really new every single time or, you know, does she kind of start to check out after a while? I think keeping it fresh is, is, is a real challenge.
- [48:14]
B
Yeah. I saw a video, a clip recently of someone who's got a, a residency in Las Vegas. Count him was. And she was standing there and it was like she was just done, like she was singing the song, but she was, there was no energy at all. And yeah, she just looked like she was completely. I forget who it was, but it was very obvious. You were talking about the, the least, maybe the, the least talented or maybe the least good or experienced member of the band. When you're with others who are really good and eventually, you know, you, you, you kind of rise to their level sort of thing. It's kind of like the, the thing about if you put all those grandfather clocks in a room and they're all tick tocking at different things and that resonance happens to where they just will blend in together. And I've been thinking about, my thinking while you've been talking here and it, and it made me think about Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance. And then I remember when we first met. Do you know Rupert Sheldrake or Merlin or did you have something, did you tell me you had something to do with those guys?
- [49:31]
A
I know of both of the Sheldricks, but I don't know either of them personally.
- [49:34]
B
Oh, okay. Now I thought for some reason you. Or maybe they lived. Maybe one of them lived in Sausalito.
- [49:41]
A
I was living with some folks in Sausalito, I think maybe while we met, who were really good friends with them and would go on vacation with them. And so.
- [49:48]
B
Yeah, okay, okay, that's, that's, that's what that connection was. Okay, so you've, you've gone to San Francisco and you, you're at the Long. The, the Long Now Foundation. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that was like? You know, what, what they're up to? It's just something I'm not, I'm not aware of much about it and imagine a lot of folks aren't either. So I think I read Something that's thinking about what we did 10,000 years ago and 10,000 years into the future. Maybe, maybe the question I have here, because you, you want to board Directed Invisible, which is an AI startup, maybe I can ask you, where do you think AI is going?
- [50:36]
A
Oh man. Okay. Well, you just threw a bunch of things at me here.
- [50:39]
B
Sorry.
- [50:40]
A
I guess, I guess what I'll say, you know, in brief, is that I'm probably not the best person to talk to about what the Long Now Foundation's up to these days. I wouldn't really know what, what they're working on or how they envision the project. And there's so many ways of thinking about what it means to do 10,000 year thinking or 20,000 year. And I think there's about as many ways of doing that as there are people on the planet, probably. And so which of those are priorities for the organization today, I couldn't tell you. But I think part of the interest of these kinds of things is that there's so many different ways to look at it. As far as how I got involved in an AI startup that was through just a friend of mine, somebody who I bonded with over an appreciation of classical texts, you know, from like ancient Greece. And we were just talking about him and I would always talk about philosophy. We would find fenced, go fencing together, just a good friend of mine and he started a company and that company began, began as like a kind of a digital assistant company. And then that kind of, as happens with startup companies, you, you shift and you pivot towards things that are working and away from things that aren't working based on whatever rubric is relevant for that phase of your company. And they kind of, you know, they, they wiggled in this direction, they wiggled in that direction. And next thing you know, the AI thing had really happened post Covid and really become well positioned for helping AI companies as a vendor for a lot of different things that AI companies need people for all over the world. And so Invisible has set up a lot of just a huge network around the globe where it could respond really agilely to these requests as, you know, as the nature of what it means to do technology was changing, they were perfectly positioned. So it's a really interesting company. I'm no longer on the board over there anymore, but I'm still good friends with lots of those folks and they've just been on an absolute tear. So I'm really proud of everything that they've built. Can't take any credit for it, but if they screwed anything up you know, I think I can take credit for that. But it was, it was a, it was a great experience. Like for me, it was the, it was the first company I was ever on the board of. And so I learned a lot about board dynamics in the technology industry from just watching some really fantastic board members do their work. And you know, it's like again, it's like an ensemble thing, like bands, like if you get a couple of really talented people on a board board, you know, the people that are performing at the lowest level, which is probably me, of course, I was brand new to it, kind of end up rising in the direction of those really talented folks. And we had some really talented other folks on the board. So I learned a ton from people who had been on a gazillion boards. And just in generally like really it was, it was a spectacular education in how organizations like this make decisions, hard decisions, easy decisions, fund decisions, and how the company itself adapt to a changing environment. It was just, it was a fantastic experience. And so still, still close with a lot of people over there and still work with a lot of them on their other projects. So yeah, that, that organization itself still around. I'm just not on the board of it, but I actually still help the CEO, the original founding CEO of Invisible, he has also launched a non profit called Eternity, which I'm on the board of now. And so Eternity foundation is looking to use. Use AI to translate ancient wisdom texts to basically create more. Create. Create the ability for more people to access what historically have been almost impossible to access text for most people.
- [54:01]
B
That, that's the thing I wanted to ask you about. I must have heard about that when we were at the institute. I can't remember, but the, the AI translating ancient texts, that just dawned on me now like that was the thing that fascinated me. Tell us about that. What sort of texts are they translating?
- [54:22]
A
So specifically Eternity Foundations focused on the tenure which are these books that were translated into Tibetan from Sanskrit in the 11th century when the library of Nalanda, which is basically like, you know, a lot of people know about the Library of Alexandria, but there was another Library of Alexandria, basically a site of learning in the older world that existed in India and it ended up getting burned down in like the 11th or the 12th century. And so monks were able to really quickly grab and preserve and translate some stuff into. I think it was Tibetan. And so these texts exist, but no one's really translated them. There's not, you know, it's not easy to get access to a lot of them. And so there's a project there and that project is underway right now at Eternity, so they're working on it. But then there's a lot of other stuff out there, out there in the world of like, for lack of a better word, like sacred or ancient texts where, you know, as AI develops, there's just a new intersection there where it's like, how do we think about how this new paradigm of using computers, how do we, how do we think about how we're using those things to preserve and disseminate these of kinds texts and these ancient learnings? And could these, could there be a lot of relevance in these old texts for us in this moment? And I think the gambit is, yeah, I think, you know, I definitely think so, but it'd be really interesting to find out what it is. But one of the ways you got to get there is you actually have to do this work of translating and preserving all these texts. So there's a lot of work there. But right now the focus is on this project around the Nalanda Library. So they're not translated yet, my understanding they're not exhaustively translated. There's a lot of translation work still to be done there. And that AI actually, actually speeds a
- [56:04]
B
lot of that up. Wow. Because, I mean, that's fascinating. You talked about music before and saying, you know, when you, when you get far enough into it, it's, it's, it's more than just music or whatever, you know. And for me, the horse, the horses is the same thing. People start out to interested in horses, interesting riding horse or whatever, and it ends up being a like very spiritual thing and it ends up being like, the more you learn about horses, the more you're actually learning about ancient wisdom. You know, it just comes to you through the horses. And I'm just, I'd just be fascinated, like what is in these texts that we could learn from?
- [56:45]
A
Yeah, I want, you know, I wonder too. I think there's people in the future that hopefully will be having act, will find themselves having access to things they wouldn't otherwise without this project. And then they'll get something out of it. I mean, I get, get. I get things out of text all the time. I don't know about you. I read, I read stuff all the time that other people couldn't care for. They just, they don't get anything. They read it and they're like, book, okay. And I'm having my life changed. I'm having whole worlds opened up for my thinking. And so I think texts find you in Weird ways. It's like a weird relationship. It's like how you can spark with certain people or with certain projects, certain work, certain places where you want to live, certain cities when you travel and you're like, oh, I really love this place. I, you know, it's hard to predict who's going to fall in love. Love with these things. But you do it because, you know there's going to be lots of people who fall in love with them, and somebody's going to get something really, really decisive and vital out of this stuff. In the ways that I've gotten decisive, vital things from a lot of, like, I think what qualifies as ancient texts? You know, it's like there's a certain canon of things that have just done. They've been really well cared for by various traditions across centuries and millennia. And so you have access to it. So something like a Thucydides, it's like, okay, there's been so much care and thought put into Thucydides in like the 2500 years since that was written. So it's like a really great text. Like, but it's not going to blow your mind to have access to Thucydides. You could probably get one for like 20 bucks on Amazon. But, you know, there are things, I mean, there's so much text out there. There are things out there where. No, doesn't matter that Amazon's not going to be able to ship you a copy of this thing. It's just not there yet. You know, the, the, the work that it takes to preserve and disseminate this stuff hasn't showed up yet. And so there are underinvested corners of the ancient text world, the sacred text world, that it'll be cool to see just what happens when people fall in love with it, what they do with it. Because in order to kind of earn your. In order to kind of earn your place in the future as a book, you have to be continually giving people something. You know, Thucydides wasn't giving each generation something new to think about or a new perspective on their world. We would have stopped all the work of, like, preserving and translating Thucydides. You know, at some point in the last, like two and a half millennia, we would have just been like, okay, whatever. And a lot of stuff probably has fallen by the wayside just because it wasn't. Wasn't paying dividends as it were. But, but you also, you never know in advance what's going to, what people are going to find valuable and what's going to matter. So there's something about making sure that, you know, in a certain sense, the digital world has certain abundances that are counterintuitive for the real world.
- [59:14]
B
Right.
- [59:15]
A
At some point I can only hold so many books in my house. But this isn't true for, you know, the digital worlds. Like, oh man, I can, I can, I can just get a big enough server and I can probably have just about every book that's ever been written on the planet. And it's like, so that kind of, that affordance for real abundance is out there. And so doing things with that, like, what do you do with that? Okay, so we could, it's like, okay, it turns out, yeah, we can use the AI to translate this thing into just about every language spoken on the planet. That might be really interesting. Who knows, who knows who's going to find something in this? But to the extent that you can preserve it and disseminate it, you at least create the preconditions for that kind of moment to occur.
- [59:54]
B
What do you think about the fact that that will be translated? I think, without a political agenda? Like, think about how much stuff that's been translated and oh, we got to leave that, you know, the powers to be at the time, like, oh, we can't leave that in there because we can't control the masses with that or whatever you think. Do you think with AI translating this thing in this day and age that we might have our minds blown about some things?
- [60:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, this is part of the challenge of translation period. Right. So I can read like a Dovsky novel, like Brothers Karamazov, but I don't speak Russian. Right. So I'm going to read someone's translation into English. And translators are constantly making choices between, well, does that word mean this or does it mean that, that, you know, what is the kind of trade offs here in these two options? And is there a third option we can think about? Oh, okay, maybe throw that in the mix. Translators are constantly engaged in practice of discernment so they can decide what they're going to put in their translation. And it's like a lot of creative choices, like what notes do you put in a song? Or what's the language you use to respond to a question. So there's, you know, we're always making these choices. Are they political? That's interesting. I mean, I think I, I imagine the question you're asking is like, are they overtly political is just like obvious political programs that want to eliminate some kind of thing or, you know, some kind of awareness from their populace and therefore don't translate or don't, you know, it's kind of the banned book things, but at a word level. And so, you know, maybe there's some of that going on somewhere in the world with translators. You know, I think translators have always had that challenge of, like, how do you.
- [61:36]
B
You.
- [61:37]
A
But so have artists and creatives. You know, I think, how do you create subversive work in a environment of political oppression? Like, can you do it? Well, it's been done. People have done it. You know, sometimes they do it by, like, hiding their messages or, you see, you know, sometimes it happens with, like, parody or satire. You get these other ways of grappling with that. And so translation is a aesthetic discipline, it's a creative discipline. And they're engaged in the same kinds of questions. Are there going to be, like. I think one of the concerns people around AI have is that if a. If a powerful enough AI model is out there in the world and is shaped by people's worldviews, who created the model, then is that model then going to further shape the worldviews of the people that are downstream of that model? And then is that, you know, that's one of the lines of argumentation for why you'd like to have lots of AI companies and lots of different approaches to this. Because then you, at least as a. As a consumer of this thing, you can then have choices. There's that preservation of multipolarity. And so that's one of the concerns people have. I mean, another question is just like, to what extent is there a universal language underneath all language? Like, what is the thing underneath all of our languages other than, like, reality?
- [62:54]
B
Right?
- [62:55]
A
So it's like, you know, every language is going to have some way of talking about, like, water or fire, for example, Right? Because water and fire, real things. But, you know, the way they talk about it's going to differ quite a bit. And there might be affordances in this language that don't exist in that language, but, like, underneath all of it is reality. And so, like, you know, when you're translating reality, you're also doing this thing that artists do where you're making choices, like, how many different things can we say about fire? Well, someone writing a poem about fire is going to say, like, six of them, but they're going to leave out an infinite number of other things you could also say about fire. So I think, again, like, there's a limitation to being a human being, and there's an infinitude to reality or whatever's lying underneath language and negotiating that boundary between the infinitude of reality and the limitations of language. Like in English, like I'm using, you know, there's only so many words. I think I've got a pretty good vocabulary, but, you know, it's limited. There's a. There's a countable number of words I have access to to describe to you what's going on. And of course, I'm combining them in interesting ways that makes it effectively infinite, but at the same time, it's never going to be so infinite that I catch up to that horizon of reality. And so I do think, you know, whether it's being shaped by political things that are over overt. That's one concern for sure. Across time, you know, how many times is Thucydides passed into the hands of somebody who's been censorious and is only presenting the next generation with some other version of Thucydides? You don't know. Again, people try to be, as translators, in my experience, good ones try to be as transparent as they can about why they've made certain choices in the way they made them. And at the same time, there's no avoiding the reality of like, doing violence, doing violence to reality by bringing it in the language. Like, you just can't do it. No matter how well I describe a sunset to you, my friend, I will never do the justice of the actual sunset. You have to just kind of be here and see it with me. And it's probably something similar is true about the books in the Noland Library and probably similar for these fiddies.
- [64:52]
B
You said something interesting there about AI and about having it a. You know, it having kind of like a political bent based on who designed the whole thing. Is, is that a thing? Is there like, is there going to be like a left wing AI and a right wing AI? Like, is there. Is that a thing?
- [65:13]
A
Well, again, like, I think everything in language is making a finite number of choices from an infinite number of options.
- [65:20]
B
Right?
- [65:21]
A
And so what are the finite ones? You know, how do you say it? Like, how do we talk about. About, like, like someone's probably going to pop this podcast conversation into an AI and say, well, give it to me in 500 words. What were they talking about? Okay, is that really going to capture everything we talked about? Well, of course it's not. It's going to. It's going to do violence to the actual conversation that we had, but it's going to. It's going to, you know, present the conversation under a certain aspect or like, from a particular perspective, is it going to be politically informed, formed? It depends on, you know, to the extent to which we're. What we're talking about becomes political. I do think, like. And again, it's. It also depends on what you think of as the boundaries of the political. You know, I think a lot of times art, for example, can come into contact with censors who are challenging the content of the art. You know, you hear about books getting banned in the 60s by like, Arthur Miller or something because they were like, too sexy or they portrayed something in them. You know, it's like, like, like Lolita or something. You know, they're portraying things in there that the. That people don'. People to be able to buy off the street for 10 bucks from a bookstore. And so there were political reasons why certain bits of art kind of ran around of this. We live in an extremely open period of time, or at least I feel like we do based on the reports from other time periods that I've read about. I've only ever lived here, you know, but to the extent that I've been told about this, like, it seems like I've got access to all kinds of crazy crap and, and okay, that's cool. Is there a possibility that not all of the crazy crap is going to be accessible to people in the future because of systems that are technologically mediated? I mean, on some level, it's probably almost for sure going to happen somewhere at some point in the future. But then also, you'd like to think that we're the better angels are going to get their way and that will shape these things in a way that isn't censorious. But the problem with this is in a technical sense, there's no way of doing. Doing stuff in language that isn't like. I keep using the word violent, but like, that isn't like taking the complexity of something and reducing its complexity. Like, it's really hard to do that because again, like, can you write a whole book about, you know, like a blast of water? You could probably try. I'm sure it'd be interesting to see someone try. But it's like, how many words could I use to just describe this, this water glass with this motion right now? It's like, well, any amount of words, 600 words, 6,000 words, 60,000 words, isn't gonna quite capture the thing, you know. And it's a strong claim, but I think it's pretty true. And at some point, what you do decide to include and what you decide to leave out could be seen to be political. I bet you if fish were in charge of the world, they'd have a lot more to say about the water in this country glass in fish language than I would have. You know, the same way you get, you know, snow clones and people that have, like, lots of words. You know, the. Famously, the Inuits have, you know, more words for snow than the rest of us or something. Although I think that's kind of apocryphal. But either way, you know, there's. I think, like, have you ever been. You ever been on a walk through the woods with, like, a botanist or, like an. Like an, like somebody who cares about trees? Like, you'll have your mind blown with the stuff that you just walk, right, paps. And they're like, oh, they're just seeing things you're not seeing. One can imagine that inherent to the AI thing is this lensing effect where you're gonna. Hopefully, AI is gonna give you more to think about the water glass than you ever would have thought of by yourself. But there's no way to know for sure because it's gonna be making some choices. It's gonna have to or it's not. It's not gonna make some choices. The system itself is going to draw a line between what's included and what's not included, included. So it's an extremely. There's a whole podcast to have work just on that conversation about kind of what. What AIs make invisible and what they make visible.
- [69:16]
B
And what do you think? I know. Well, I don't know. But, you know, you're probably not the world's leading expert on it, but you probably know more about it than the average person. What do you think about the future of AI? AI?
- [69:31]
A
Well, I'm not really convinced AI is a thing. Like, I know that sounds silly. I'm supposed to, like, believe this is a real thing that's going on. But when I ask people what they mean by AI, they usually tell me something like artificial intelligence. That's the first thing they say, which, of course, I know what it stands for. But then when I start talking to folks who are working at these frontier labs, very often a lot of the conversation revolves around the fact that artificial intelligence isn't actually artificial, that it's actually just intelligent intelligence, and that the artificial isn't doing any lifting there. And so we should call these intelligence companies, I guess, on some level. But then also, when I try to get the definition of intelligence out of folks, it usually runs the ground of some kind of competitive comparative element where intelligence ultimately ends up meaning the thing that wins. You know, can you intelligently drive your car off cliff? Can you intelligently, you know, like, I don't know, can you intelligently lose all your money? You know, these kinds of questions. And it's like, oh, on some level, people are. Seem prepared to argue that intelligence, no, intelligence, has to be connected to some kind of winning strength, kind of a comparative strength contest. Like, when you press two things against each other, one of them is going to come out ahead, and that's the thing that we're going to call more intelligent. So it's almost like a definition that feels like it's coming off of just this, like, intuition for contestation. And so, like, when I think about the future of AI, on some level, it's like, really, to the extent that it's interesting to me at all, it's interesting as a future of techno mediation. Like, what does it mean to live in a world where we do have technology and that technology mediates our access to the world? In the way that I'm staring, technically, I'm staring at a screen on my couch. You know, I'm acting like I'm hanging out with my friend War. But it, like, that's just, that's not what's happening. But I'm, I'm willing to pretend and you're willing to pretend, and the people at home are willing to pretend. And so there's a certain amount of mediation that we're okay with, mediated by a screen. All right, fine. But, like, you and I both know that there's something that is irreplaceable in immediacy. We actually do want to be in the same room together. Like, when you and I met, it was because you got on a plane and traveled, you know, and we actually, we made an effort, a lot of us made an effort to be in the same room for four hours, but it was a meaningful thing for all of us to do. Now, why, why is so much cheaper? The carbon footprint is lower, you know, in a lot of ways, I can hear you better with these things in my ears than I can at a loud dinner party. And so there's an intimacy that's available here that I can't even have access to if we're getting together with 40 other people. So to the extent that I'm interested in the future of AI, I'm interested in the extent to which we continue to accept these mediators and where we accept mediations, like you said, do I Accept that the AI is telling me the truth, or do I suspect that maybe it's a left wing AI or it's a right wing AI and it's trying to get me to see things under a particular aspect? You know, I don't, I don't know. Like, for all I know, you know, there's, you think about the further mediations of video calls when you have like filters on people's faces. You know, you've seen this stuff where people just look like really good looking, like what's going on there? You know, you must have one of those on right, right now, you know, but it's like there's a certain sense in which, like to what extent are we comfortable with mediation through technology? And I think we're gonna, we're gonna navigate that. But there's. I have reasons to hope and I think part of that reason for hope is that it seems like not just a common sense appeal, but one that like is also can be more sophisticated there. People will spend time with each other in person. They're not totally just walked into something staring at screens when they have an option. So, you know, there's, there's lots of conversations about to what extent is even having an alternative to talking to a friend on a screen considered something that's like only uniquely available to a small subset of humans? You know, so where are our responsibilities for immediacy? Like, are the people out there picketing for more immediate relationships to the world? That'd be an interesting world in which that was kind of the horizon of our political ambitions was the know we want more equity in our immediacies with the world. And it's like, you know, for a lot of us, we have the option to go sit on a meditation cushion. We have the option to go take a walk without listening to music or an audiobook. We have the option to ride a horse. We have the option to like be in the world in an immediate relationship with things. And we still don't do it as often as we might otherwise do it. And so I think to the extent that I'm thinking about the future of it, AI, the main thing that sticks out for me in thinking about that question is is this other question of, of immediacy and in intermediation. But I'm optimistic, in case that wasn't clear. Like, I'm optimistic. I think, I think reality has a strange way of asserting itself over and over and over again. So,
- [74:21]
B
yeah, no kidding. You mentioned, mentioned, you've mentioned meditation several times. Do you have a meditation Practice.
- [74:28]
A
I do.
- [74:28]
B
I do.
- [74:29]
A
Never, never enough, right? But I do. I've done a number of different practices over the years. I got started in like a Korean Zen tradition in Chicago. There was a temple near my house. I have studied some Zen, studied a decent amount of like Indian yogi, yogic kind of meditation. I've done a vipassana retreat. And so I've tried a bunch of different things. I mean, I've also tried all the, the, the new agey meditation techniques too. And, and then there's like things that are kind of more in vogue now. You get like insight meditation. Like, like there's a lot of, like, Robert Bia is somebody who's very popular in the Bay Area with meditators. And so you see a lot of that stuff. Dan Brown. There's, there's a lot of. There's a lot of really influential meditation people. There's obviously transcendental meditation. It's very popular with people. So I've tried. I poked my nose into a lot of different things. Things I mostly, when I reference meditation, I. I reference it in the, the general sense of really just like it's almost defined by all the things you're not doing. You know, you're not thinking about work and you're not moving furniture and you're not writing and you're not reading and you're not watching a movie and you're not listening to music and you're just kind of being. And that kind of a practice, if we're willing to call that a meditation practice, is like really important to me and helps me at least understand where ground is. Otherwise I can never tell how intermediated things are getting. To what extent am I living my whole life with this layer between me and reality? And it's like something about sitting on a meditation cushion. Especially once the, the mind calms down and I kind of stop thinking about, you know, relationships in my life that I'm thinking about or ruminating about or like ideas that I've heard about or like the song that's stuck in my head that I heard earlier that day. As soon as that stuff kind of comes down, then I'm having like some real contact with reality. And at least then I know where that's at and I know how that's feeling. And I can then measure some other things in comparison to that. So that's really important to me.
- [76:25]
B
Yeah, I thought it was interesting that the thinking about thinking guy was talking about meditation.
- [76:30]
A
It's like, yeah, well, again, I think so. Thinking. Thinking's weird. And I'll say this, I probably should have said this at the beginning of the podcast to really quickly clarify a couple things, but when I talk about thinking, I'm not engaging in, like, we use the word thinking for all kinds of stuff. So if I said, like, what's 128 times 64? You gotta think about it for a second, right? But. Yeah, but, but, but that's actually not. We have a better word in English for that, which is calculating. You're calculating or you're reckoning with those numbers. Okay? And so that's, that's one kind of thing. But that's not what I'm talking about. If I said something like, I think healthcare is easy human, right. Well, that's more of like a belief. Right? So we have a word for that that's belief or like conviction. You know, I have a sense of, of justice around that or something. But, you know, we use the word thinking. I, I think, I think that if I said think about a green elephant, you know, give me a second. Think about that one. But really, imaginations, the concept that we're pulling on there. So what's, what's actually, what is thinking for. And it looks like thinking. You know, if you go back into the arrival of thinking etymologically and like language, it's branching off of the concept of thanking, being thankful. Like, hey, thank you for inviting me on your podcast. And it turns out if you're ever in that headspace where you are thankful for the opportunity to be thankful, you ever been just thankful to be thankful? Like, wow, I'm so lucky I get to sit here in a space of gratitude. You know, maybe, you know, again, these moments you're looking at a sunset or you're riding a horse, or you're taking a walk, or you're just like breathing somewhere, you know, hopefully everyone listening to this has had a moment in their life where they've just been grateful to be grateful. And that second order gratitude is why we have the word thinking. Thinking is being thankful to be thankful. And so in that headspace where you're just thankful to be thankful, things occur to you, stuff hits you. And a lot of us know what that's like. To have like an aha moment is like one of the ways people call it, or a eureka moment, or you, you know, you have, you know, it's like we use the metaphor of getting hit by a bolt of lightning or like, like an insight, some kind of, some kind of realization occurred. And that is what I am interested in from a Thinking standpoint, like what I'm interested in is in a world that's techno mediated, what does it mean to continue to engage in a practice of being receptive to ideas rather than constructing ideas the way we maybe construct like a Lego set where we're building this on this, on this. And so now I think this, like, well, you actually kind of calculated that you started here and then you added things and you got here. But I think, well, see there I do it again. I believe the kind of thinking that really is under explored, under discussed, under invested in, underappreciated and undervalued is this other one that's like passive, receptive kind of thinking that's much more proximal to meditation or to contemplation is another thing.
- [79:29]
B
Is it more like a down download type thing? You know, there's a practice where people will be instructed to like go out in nature somewhere and have a question that you want an answer to and just sit in nature for half an hour and just sit. Don't try, try not to dwell on or whatever. Just have the intention of having that question answered. And they say in half an hour it'll, it'll, it'll come to you, you. But it's not calculating like you, I love you. I love, I love how you broke that down. And if you're thinking about this, that's not thinking, that's calculating. And if you're doing this, it's.
- [80:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, there's so many ways of responding to the question. The natural question of like, well, where did the idea come from? If you're getting hit with insight, where did it come from? And I think there are a lot of different people who can make a lot of different commitments about that. I think there's people who make reference to something called the unconscious conscious. And that you're unconscious is doing work over there. And when you stop blabbing, blabbing, blabbing, and you go out into nature, all of a sudden you answer the question yourself, you're unconscious. Knew it, knew what you had to do. You had a decision to make it, knows how to make the decision. You come out of the woods, you make the decision, your life, you're off on the rainbow road, okay? There's also people that make reference to the collective unconscious, that there's something else that's kind of moving between all of us that can also guide us and help us and, and also is like shaping the way we make decisions when we reflect, receive insight. Okay, so there's an Answer. There's people that have religious commitments about, you know, having the download come from a godhead, having the download come from some kind of angelic being or demonic being. Right. Like, people think that you can get ideas from all kinds of places. I think I don't have a claim on any of those. Or, you know, I don't have. I don't think that's the interesting part. To me, I think I stop with the phenomenology that we all know what this is like, right? Okay, cool. Well, we also know how to, like, basically we know how to engage this. And my normative argument would be we should probably all be spending more time engaging that because that's putting us into contact with reality. Now, if that reality includes angels and demons and godheads and the collective unconscious, in my personal unconscious, sure, okay. It probably includes all of it, for all I know. But this idea that we're living in a closed environment that isn't permeable from the outside, that we ourselves are kind of hermetically sealed inside of ourselves. In our culture, we think of that as inside of our head. But you can also think of it as inside of your heart. Some cultures also think it's inside of your gut. So you have people who trust their gut, you have people who follow their heart, and you have people who think about things. And I think all of those different centers are all referencing some part of me that's mine and it's here. But now imagine that I'm a permeable open system and that things come in, go out of that system. System that I'm not really in control of. And so, of course, when I'm thinking, if I hear a song come on in the grocery store, and it's really catchy, now all of a sudden I'm thinking about the time I'm definitely permeable from the outside in my thinking, in my heart. We talk about heart. Hearts are uniquely unpermeable. You know what I mean? But every now and then, something touches our heart. You know, the Grinch's heart grows two sizes too big or whatever. You know, you do get to these places where your heart is touched. And that's an intimate moment of finding yourself to be much more permeable than you thought you were. And ditto for your gut. We all know what it's like for something to taste off and to feel off for ourselves. And it just kind of upsets us a little bit. And so there's something also about permeable about all of these different centers. And my Claims are really up to that limit of just like, hey, consider that you're more permeable than you think you are, and occasionally go put yourself in a position to be permeable, because having all of these things be mediated instead of being immediate eventually could. It would delaminate you from reality. If reality is unchanging and mediation gets steered, like you were saying, political. Right. Like if things get tilted just a little bit through this system, and then that system is the input to another system, and that system is an input to eventually, you know, seven or eight degrees off of this thing. You're all the way over here and reality's here. What are you going to do about this? You got a real problem here. You're no longer engaging with reality. And if you're occasionally coming back and instead of asking the AI or the Google browser every single question on your mind, you go take that question out into the world, Woods. You get an answer from, you know what, the closest, most immediate relationship you can have. That's probably a good way of keeping yourself as tethered to what we're calling reality as I've ever discovered. And it works for me, or at least it. It helps me feel like I'm doing something that works, you know, who knows, right?
- [83:54]
B
You mentioned before, I took a note here. You mentioned before very casually, that you knew, you went fencing with this guy. And imagine you're not putting up a boundary between you and your neighbor. Neighbors type fencing. You're talking about fencing with a. Yeah, with an epic.
- [84:09]
A
Yeah, with an epic. A metal sword.
- [84:11]
B
I've heard that is a very meditative type activity.
- [84:18]
A
Yeah, it's very. I mean, I think for me it was very akin to like a dance or a dancing, but then also striking and parrying in language and in conversation. This friend of mine, we would just argue about stuff because we don't see the world the same way. Actually, he's a dear friend of mine, but we. We have different views on certain things. But he's extremely smart, he's very well read, and he's very thoughtful. And so he's a very fun guy to disagree with. And so, you know, we would just disagree about anything and sometimes we'd find out we agree and then there's like real beautiful movement between two people who are agreeing too. But we would just kind of. Yeah, the fencing bit was really just this other way of engaging. And you talk while you do it. It wasn't competitive fencing. We weren't trying to hurt each other. We weren't even wearing face Masks. But we, but we, but we had a regular. We had a regular rendezvous for a while. And part of the rendezvous was the episode would come out and there'd be some fencing. And it was really a wonderful. A wonderful moment of doing something different with somebody. A way of developing intimacy that certainly I have never really done before. I never really grew up fencing or anything, but I always thought it looked kind of cool.
- [85:18]
B
Yeah, it does look cool. And then you mentioned you went to have a passing retreat. What was that like? Because I've heard different man people's experiences for them and sometimes they're pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah. How long was.
- [85:31]
A
What? 10 days.
- [85:33]
B
10 days.
- [85:34]
A
10 days. About 10, 11 hours a day. It's. It's hard to say anything useful about it. It's. It's one of those real things. It's. It's 10 days of unmediated contact with reality.
- [85:53]
B
And
- [85:56]
A
that's a lot. It was a lot for me. I was extremely grateful for it. It was, it was a gift in so many ways. But it's also, hands down, one of the most difficult things I've ever done. It's not something I go around casually recommending to people because I think it's just really. It's like casually recommending that people run an ultramarathon or something.
- [86:14]
B
Right.
- [86:14]
A
There's definitely an endurance, Endurance element to it and like a physicality to it. It's quite strenuous, quite extreme. And I, Yeah, I. I know people who've had extreme experiences. I mean, I think I had a lot of extreme experiences like you. You'd be amazed. I mean, think about, think about it. For most of us modern people alive right now, most of us will go our entire life without ever spending 10 days of in unmediation contact with reality, the reality of ourselves, the reality of our minds at the very least, right? Because you're not moving. You're not really doing a whole lot. You're just sitting in one spot, hour at a time, hour after hour after hour. 11 hours a day. 10 days in a row. That's an insane, insanely unusual experience. Like there's just, it's, it's artificial at this point. Like there's no way you're going to casually find yourself with 10 days of 11 hours of unmediated access to your own mind. So that's so unusual. I mean, I, I bet you most people probably spend their entire lives without ever spending a single day like that, let alone 10 of those in a row.
- [87:24]
B
So.
- [87:25]
A
So is that something people should do? Is a Question I really try not to answer because it's. I. I don't know, man. I don't know if. I don't know if you can handle it, frankly. It's like, I don't like, just in the same way that I don't know if I could swim across San Francisco but obey, you know what I mean? Maybe I hats off to the people that do it, but I'll be honest, I don't know if I'm. I'm eager to jump in the water because I don't know if I'd make it to the other side. And I think for a lot of people, that amount of. That amount of, that, whatever that is, is a lot. And it's intense. I have real sympathies with folks who. Who don't do it. I've got a lot of respect and admiration for the people that have done it, but I've got a lot of respect and admiration for people that don't do it. It too. You know, I don't think it's a. I don't think it's a thing that can be like, universally prescribed. I think it's really unique. I was in a super unique moment in my life where I was able to get away with it. I basically. I needed a break, man, from just the craziness of modern life and opportunity to go do a meditation retreat like this was there. I think I. Had I known what I was getting myself into, I don't think I ever would have said. Said yes.
- [88:28]
B
Really?
- [88:29]
A
Yeah. Because I don't think that's what I was looking for. I think I needed a break. I needed to relax. I needed to get away from the chaos. I did do that, but it wasn't like relaxing. I wouldn't say I spent a lot of time in those 10 days relaxed. So I almost felt. Left the retreat feeling like I needed another retreat. You know, one was like, maybe like fruit drinks or something.
- [88:49]
B
Did you get. Was there a point in it where you're like, I can't do this?
- [88:54]
A
Oh, yeah, Many, many, many times. Many times, Many times. Even within the first day or two. But then over the course of the week, like, you know, it's like you. You walk right up to the edge of just packing up your stuff and leaving. Or at least I did so many times. And I was lucky to be able to, you know, keep my ass on the meditation cushion. But I wouldn't even give myself full credit for that. You know, I think I just got really lucky in some ways of being able to Navigate. Navigate the. The 10 days. And then I met people who go, like, every year, and they've been going for 20 years. And, like, man, what is. And I've talked to people, and they've had a completely different experience than I've had. So I think some people also just have, like, raucously different experiences. So it's like one of those things. It's like, oh, it's not like going to see a movie or going to read Brothers Karamazov. Like, I can recommend everyone who's listening to this should read Brothers Karamazov. That's easy. It's a great book. It's a classic, you know, don't die before you've read. So that's easy. I can recommend that one. The Pasta Meditation. Oh, man. I mean, I don't really. I. I don't know if it seems like. If you feel like this is your invitation, maybe, Maybe it is. But I just needed to get to a place where I felt like, the right time. You know, it's like so many things in life, it was the right time, right place, and I'm really grateful for it. But, yeah, I've always wondered, like, am I going to go back and do it again? You know, would I do it again? Oh, man. Man, a lot. So mad respect. I think it's one of the coolest things I've ever done. But it's also, you know, not to beat around the bush. It's. It's real.
- [90:23]
B
I met a guy one time who had done one, but he only did five days of it. He left after five days. He said I left after five days. But after five days, I could look at a leaf and I could see the spaces between the atoms.
- [90:37]
A
Oh, yeah, man. My. My. My version of that was. There were. There were almond trees blossoming and manzanita trees blossoming, like, all over this hillside where the retreat was. And I'd walk past them on my, like, one hour walk around lunchtime. And there's bees, like, tons of bees, just going to work, doing bee things, you know, pollinating the whole thing. And I remember feeling like I was just like, maybe one more meditation session away from understanding bee language. Like, it just made sense, you know, I could just hear it, and it sounded like a kind of sound like walking past a construction site in New York where you just got a bunch of people just shouting at each other. But, you know, it's like, oh, I kind of understand. Like, they're just busy. They're busy bees. They're at work. It was A very cool. Yeah, you definitely have. You see the world with a very different set of eyes. That is definitely one of the coolest things. Also, props to your friend for doing five days. Five days is not nothing. That's incredible, you know.
- [91:28]
B
Right. Yeah. So when. When I asked you about it, it wasn't like, do you suggest somebody does it? It was like, you know, what was. What was your space between the atoms of the leaves moment?
- [91:38]
A
Yeah, it was that. I mean, I don't know about you. I. I generally, like, you know, to the extent that I ever have the opportunity to stare at a tree for a while, I'll take. I'll take the opportunity. So I didn't really need the vipassana to, like, get me to slow down and smell the flowers, but the world starts to make a lot of sense. Like. And I. I guess that's probably maybe my way of describing what that experience was. Like, like, you just start looking, looking at stuff. You know, like, you have, like, animal trackers, really interesting human beings, right? They can just walk into a field and go, oh, yeah, there's two coyotes here. There's a bobcat, there's like a couple of hawks. And, like, I think there's an owl somewhere around here. Like, how the hell did you just read that? Like, reading it off a page of a book, you know, but, you know, they're experts in what they do, and they. They can kind of, you know, they glaze their attention. They know what to look for and they see signs, and those signs are sensible to them that aren't sensible, maybe to you or me. You know, I would say that my version of that experience your friend had was you just start looking around at everything and it all just makes sense. They're sensible signs. Like, you know, again, like, the bees and the blossoming, like, it just. It just makes sense. They go together really well there. That makes all kinds of sense. The times of day that the bees are active, it all makes sense. You know, you hear the frogs chirping in a chorus. You know, it all makes sense. And so there's something about, you know, even just looking at the ground and the gravel and seeing people, footprints, and it all just makes sense. And so there's something really beautiful about feeling like you're in a world that makes sense to you. Like, that's a really unique and good feeling. And I think so many of us, because we live such mediated lives, so many of us are concerned with the possibility that maybe the world doesn't make sense anymore, because it certainly doesn't make sense to us or we don't feel like it makes sense. And I would say extended meditation retreats for me have a way of reminding me that I'm in an environment that essentially does make sense to me to the extent that I'm willing to return to it as opposed to continuing to mediate it day in, day out for years and decades and our entire, ultimately our entire lives, you know, so no time like the present to sit on a meditation cushion.
- [93:44]
B
No kidding. You mentioned a book before. So sometimes what I'll do with the podcast guest is send them a list of 20 questions questions to choose some from before the podcast. I didn't do that with you. And most of the questions actually stole from Tim Ferriss tribe of mentors book. Oh, nice shout out to Tim Ferriss. But one of the questions is, what book? Do you have a favorite book, not necessarily your favorite to read, but one that you recommend to other people the absolute most?
- [94:15]
A
Oh, man. Yeah, it's a great question. Easy answer for me this week is Lonesome Dove. You ever read lonesome dove?
- [94:22]
B
Larry McMurtry?
- [94:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Spectacular book. 900 pages. It's, it's, it's, it's intimidating. It's a, it's a doorstopper. But especially for anybody who's into horses and, you know, a world that was, you know, horse mediated, like in a serious way, you lose your horse, you lose your life out in the Wild west. And there's a lot of situations there where that's kind of becomes relevant. So I thought Lonesome was a gorgeous book. And what's great about it is you can dip it in, dip in and out of it, 5 minutes, 10 minutes at a time. The chapters are short and tight. And it's written, it was originally written as a screenplay. He wanted to make it a movie from the get go. McMurtry did. And so it reads like a movie. So I read a lot of really dense, you know, kind of annoyingly dense esoteric philosophy, and that's just become normal to me. And picking up Lonesome Dove last year, last month, was like eating ice cream by the fistful, just like straight into my mouth. It was such an indulgent pleasure to just read a story that was rich and deep and philosophical and really, really thought provoking, but not at the level of anyone trying to impress you with how thoughtful they were. It was just a beautiful story. But, you know, you get into it and I don't know, BY like page 100, I was like, committed. I was like, I know, I'M Gonna finish all 900 pages stages of this thing. So.
- [95:42]
B
So cool. So you only just picked it up last month. That's not, like, a book you've been talking about for years?
- [95:47]
A
No, no, it was. It wasn't even on my radar. Yeah, it wasn't even on my radar. Some special humans in my life threw it on my radar, and I was like, okay. I figured now is the time to check it out. And then one day I just sat down and there was a copy of Lonesome Dove just staring right at me from across the room. So I grabbed it to see what it was all about. And like I said, within a few pages, I was like, oh, this is spectacular,
- [96:10]
B
huh? You know what? I might whip through some of these questions here, and if it doesn't apply, just say, pass. If you could spread a message across the world, one that people would listen to, what would that message say? Or your favorite quote?
- [96:27]
A
Man, I. I really like quotes, so I have way too many quotes to pick a favorite. I would say if I had to spread. If I had to spread a message. Message like a gunpoint. Because I don't really think there's any message I'd want to spread all across the planet. I like. I like the uniqueness of people's other messages too much, but if I had to, I think it would be something related to what we've been talking about, about making, like, preserving your relationship. Something about the importance of preserving your relationship to whatever reality means to you. To the extent that I think. Think more and more of our life is disconnected from that immediate experience. Getting some immediacy and is good.
- [97:11]
B
Do you have an unusual habit or something out of the ordinary that you really love?
- [97:18]
A
Trying to think if there's anything ordinary that I love. Here you go. Here you go. Here's the weird habit is when I read a book, I read it a book bunch of times. I don't ever really read a book once. What I end up doing is finding excerpts from the book that really speak to me, and then I'll retype them, like, in my. Under a keyboard to get, like, a feel. There's a different way of reading when you're like. Like typing out someone's work and you get a sense for their voice, like, in your fingers. You get kind of like an embodied sense for their voice. And it's always an enlightening experience. Like, I read things totally differently once. I have to slow down and type them up, and then I can review all the typed excerpts I've got multiple times and so that keeps me in contact with a lot of books that I might have read, you know, 10 years ago. I might have seen sections of that book just last month, so.
- [98:09]
B
Oh, wow. Have you, that's kind of unusual. This book could be right up your rail. Have you ever read Shantaram?
- [98:14]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, it's about the, the dude who's running from the law in India, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's an Australian guy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I, There was a, I think there was like a film series that came out on it a while ago.
- [98:27]
B
Apple, Apple TV did a, A, a series on it. Except the guy that played the protagonist in it actually looks a lot, you look a lot like him.
- [98:38]
A
Is that right?
- [98:39]
B
He, he screwed up the Australian accent as bad as I've ever seen it screwed up in a film. So it, it really, I had, I had a hard time with it just because of the, he messed up the accent. But it's, I always love watching something like that that I've read a book of, so it gives you the imagery. I remember when I watched Memoirs of a Geisha, I'd read Memoirs of a Geisha, but then to see all the temples and all the costumes and stuff, it just, I don't know, just added a bit, added a bit more to the book. But yeah, I was thinking, I didn't know if you'd read Shantaram or there's a follow up to it called Mountain Shadow where he actually gets a, he has a guru up in the mountains and they say spend lots of time talking about philosophy. So I thought that'd be right up your alley.
- [99:21]
A
You know, this might be my sign to pick it up. I, I, I started on it and I never finished on it. And then the series came out and I was like, you know, it just kind of faded, but maybe I got to revisit it.
- [99:30]
B
Oh, no, he, he's got some, I mean, you retype passages, but he's got so much stare at the world stuff in that book. Like you'd be, I'll be reading it and I'll just have to stop and like. Yeah, take a breath. And it's, it's like Lonesome Dove. It's a big fat book. It's. I don't know how many pages it is, but so a long time to read because half the reading time is actually looking at the wall or staring at your navel. One of the other.
- [99:56]
A
That's the mark of a good book.
- [99:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, and especially the second one too Mountain Shadow, when he. Him and him and his guru guy talking about philosophy, what advice would you give to someone about to enter your occupation? And then in this question that says in parentheses, this one may be difficult, as many of us have occupations who are far from normal.
- [100:16]
A
Yeah, well, that definitely. That disclaimer definitely applies to me, I think. So to the extent that you could describe what I do as something in the realm of philosophy, I think a lot of philosophy these days is really properly understood as philosophy appreciation. And as an appreciator of philosophy, I don't want to. I don't want to be down on it, because I think it's important to get people to appreciate philosophy. So those people are doing the Lord's work by, you know, you know, teaching a course on Descartes or teaching a course on Kant. That's important. But to the extent that you actually engage in the world on something real with folks that are doing real stuff, the advice I would give is not to fall into the trap of relying on what other people have thought or other people have said in the past. And I think a lot of academic tendencies can be to reach for, oh, well, you know, Nietzsche said this, and Kant said this, and, you know, Sartre said this, and, like, here you go. And I'm always, you know, on some level, in a collective sense, that's kind of what the person is saying to you is like, oh, I'm gonna reach for these things. But there's something about having the strength of character, I think, or even just, like, the. The trust in your own capabilities to think about the thing that you're being asked to think about, where it's like, you can actually. I think you could. You could do worse than to trust yourself a little more. If you're actually engaged in thinking work that has stakes, like, because just leading on what this other guy said or what this person said leaves you out of the picture. You know, you just kind of become this, like, reference machine where you're just referring to things for people. And I think that's a big danger for folks that are thinking about, let's say, like, the future of technology. You know, it's like, oh, Well, I know McLuhan said this, and, you know, I know that, you know, Jonas did this. And, like, I. Here's. Here's what Heidegger said. Like, you can kind of sew together a quilt of thoughts from other people's thoughts, and on some level, that's what we're all doing anyways. But this constant deferral to the Authority of these big names, I think is a real trap for folks doing thought work.
- [102:35]
B
Hmm. Yeah, Great advice. One of these questions, and you've probably covered this because we just talked about the Vipassana meditation, but one of the questions says, what do you do? Where do you go to relieve stress or recharge your batteries?
- [102:52]
A
I'm a bathhouse guy. I really like saunas, cold plunges, contrast therapy. I'm so glad it's, like very in vogue. Out of all the things that become voguish, I'm so glad this is one of them. Them, because it's so. I feel great in a sauna and a cold punch. If I got both of those things, I can. I can chill out all day. And so New York in particular has like, I read like a New York, New York Times article about the sauna wars. There's like, there's like just an abundance of new saunas coming on the scene and they're all kind of eyeing each other's clientele. And it's, you know, what a wonderful. It's, it's wonderful to be competed over by a number of suitors in the sauna world here in New York. And so I've got lots of options. It's great, great. That's kind of. For me, the easiest way to chill out is just to cook myself.
- [103:39]
B
What, so what's your practice with the sauna to ice bath, to sauna, to ice. But, you know, the contrast. Do you finish on the ice bath?
- [103:49]
A
Yeah, I finish on the ice bath for sure, because otherwise I'm, like, sweating all day. I finish on the ice bath and I just take like a warmish shower and then call it a day. But I try to get at least. I mean, I'll do about 20ish minutes in a sauna if it's, you know, again, depending on how hot it is. But I'll. I'll basically go until I feel like I should get out, and then I'll try to stay for like 10 more breaths. So what's that in, like, another. Another minute? And so, like, I try to push myself a minute past where I probably first had the thought I should leave. And then ditto for the cold plunge. I stay in there and then at some point my body's like, get me out of here. And then I.
- [104:22]
B
How long do you stay in the cold plunge? Do you have a. Do you time it?
- [104:25]
A
I don't time it, like, as a practice, no. You know, because I think it's. There's different days and different kind of stressors in my life. Life that kind of change how much of these extreme conditions I can sit for. So I think what I mostly try to do is I try to, like, get myself fully into that liminal zone. So I try not to, like, you know, obviously I don't want to pass out for safety reasons in either of those places, but I definitely don't want to respond to the little voice that says, get out of here. It's no good. So once the little voice starts chiming up, I let it kind of scream for like a minute, and then I, and then I pop out. So sometimes that's five minutes in the cold plunge. Sometimes that's two. Yeah, that's, Sometimes that's two. It depends on the cold plunge. Depends on how cold it is.
- [105:06]
B
What, What? Yeah. What temperature do you cold plunge at?
- [105:09]
A
It's a good qu. I mean, again, it depends on the sauna. Depends on the different places, and some of them don't stay cold when there's a lot of people around and everyone's kind of dunking in the thing. So it really depends. Again, I'm not like, I'm not really scientific about it at all.
- [105:24]
B
The, is the, I find that the, the cold plunge every day is different, even if the temperature's the same. It's like, it's such a metaphor for life, like how you handle that thing every time you get in there. Sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's like, absolutely sucks. Yeah.
- [105:42]
A
Is this a practice for you? Do you get a daily cold plunge?
- [105:45]
B
I did for several years, every day. And then my wife got into it. I, I had a, a chest freezer that I'd sealed up, and I would, you know, plug it and unplug it according to where I wanted the temperature. But then my wife got into it, so she bought a commercial one. And we've been actually through several commercial ones now, but we have a wellness center here on our, on our ranch. We have a commercial ice bath over there. And I've just started back here a little while ago, and I'm like, oh, why do I ever stop this? Because it's. You just feel so good afterwards.
- [106:14]
A
Totally. Yeah. It's great. I, I, I hope they never publish an article saying that there's something bad about it. I hope it's one of those things I can just indulge and guilt.
- [106:23]
B
Well, you know what? They did publish something recently about it's not good first thing in the morning for your heart. And I have, I have atrial fibrillation from time to time, so and starting your day out with a nice bath is amazing. But now I don't want to do it in the morning because there's been, there's some statistics on, on heart attacks and stuff from people to doing it, shocking your body like that first thing in the morning.
- [106:51]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. You know, they always say like the cortisol spikes in the morning or something. And I keep getting, you know, I drink coffee first thing in the morning, but apparently you're not supposed to, you're supposed to drink water, give it like 90 minutes and then do your coffee. But there's no way that's going to happen, so.
- [107:04]
B
Oh, I didn't read that one. I read 20 minutes. So I get up in the morning and I, I get 16 ounces of water and I go and sit outside on the porch and I watch the day go by. It's like 20 minutes. Time for the coffee.
- [107:15]
A
Nice. Good for you, man. I mean, that's good. Yeah, it's good to be in accordance with the best science.
- [107:20]
B
I didn't, I didn't read the, I think the 90 minute one. I think that's wrong. I remember years ago we, we. My naturopath had us do a like an allergy thing, like foods you're allergic to. And you know, it's got this graph and it's got these bars. This one you shouldn't have much. And then I just colored in him. I just colored in the ones I didn't like, like kale. I colored it in all the way to the end. Yeah, I just rearranged the signs to suit myself.
- [107:48]
A
There you go. You know, sometimes you got to do that, you know, things we do to preserve ourselves.
- [107:53]
B
Yeah, exactly. Well, Nicholas, it's been an amazing time catching up with you again. Thanks so much for joining me.
- [108:01]
A
Likewise. Thank you so much for inviting me, Warwick. This is really a pleasure.
- [108:04]
B
Yeah, it's been good chatting and yeah, love what you're doing out there in the world. World. It's, yeah, it's so interesting to see what, what people like you guys are up to and yeah, I commend you guys for doing it.
- [108:16]
A
Thanks man. Hope we get to hang out in immediate context soon.
- [108:20]
B
Yes, probably up on the 59th floor, hopefully.
- [108:23]
A
Here, here.
- [108:24]
B
Okay. For you guys at home. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Journey on Podcast.
- [108:33]
A
Thanks for being a part of the Journey on Podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warwick has over 850 full length training videos on his online video library@videos.warickschiller.com Be sure to follow Warrick on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to see his latest training, advice and insights.