#48 - Jim Rutt - Why Capitalism Is Now A Game of Mind Control

31:17In fact, just having a TV just before my time was a big status symbol. I was born in 53, and I sort of don't remember the world much before, say, 56. But say in the early 50s, just having a TV was a status symbol. And the kind of TV you had was probably a status symbol up till the double aughts, but now it isn't i'm trying to think if i was like i don't know i'm not a teenager anymore but we used to care about who had sadly we used to care about who had what phone but i i would imagine that it's less about what's the phones are physically and it's more about what apps do you have who's you know this it feels like the status games have fully switched into the digital realm i would i would again claim that uh according to this i would expect it to be um more useful and better for the that the market would provide better phones because the user can just very quickly evaluate the value to that right so like there is uh it's very hard to play a strong advertisement status games when it's abundant as well so like probably it also yeah when they're rare you can play the game that's the fault scared in case the game you know if i you know if i were the dictator of the world for a week which would be a good idea uh you know I would get rid of the whole luxury goods industry.

32:29Is there anything more revolting than people spending$1 ,000 on a purse or$250 on a scarf because it's got a brand on it? But it's interesting about the phones because the watches is probably the most disgusting of all these luxury games, the$20 ,000 watch. And it's interesting, and I've mentioned this before with people, why isn't there a Rolex of phones? uh it's interesting because you can ascertain the uh value of a watch uh just fine it's actually easier to understand than a smartphone and yet there's the status game of watches for a long time on principle i wore a timex for 23 you know i had a the indigo timex had a little light on it you go like that right and uh now i have to wear an apple watch because i can monitor heart rate and stuff like that but i certainly would never be sucked into the game of paying twenty thousand dollars for a watch and yet that is a huge industry and so uh i'm not quite sure how we square that circle that there is no rolex of phones which is odd in some ways but there is the rolex of watches i mean maybe just because uh it's there could be but uh watches came before phones when the status game around them was uh just one of the games that you could play right There weren't many options, basically.

33:52Especially for a man to show anything. It's kind of restricted, because men don't have handbags. It's restricted to watches and glasses, usually. You can have very fancy glasses. You can have very fancy watches. And shoes. And shoes. But otherwise clothes, men don't play those games very much. I think the watch market is very man-heavy. There are fancy lady watches, too. It is, but usually... Girls do handbags. Yeah, yeah. Handbags and shoes. And, of course, the whole clothes thing. And jewelry. Men don't do jewelry much. Men usually do watches. It's the jewelry of the man. So that's why I wonder, okay, they could have now moved two phones, but now you're starting a whole new thing, whereas it's much easier to maintain a pre-existing system.

34:34It may have been a founder effect, too. People like Jobs, despite the fact that he was a sociopath, was also a pretty strong egalitarian. He thought that what he was doing was bringing power tools to everybody. and so he may have forbidden you know playing the status game with Apple because there was certainly a period when the iPhone was a status symbol itself compared to what were those little thingies the Blackberries right that you know you look at people with Blackberries you know right teenage girls would do that right and then there was a bit less of that but still some but the early Androids, which were pretty cruddy, actually, and may have been that jobs forbid playing the status game with iPhones.

35:22Also, it's actually been embraced by, I think, just by the people that the idea that Bill Gates has the same phone as you is a thing that has been mentioned more often. And it's kind of like celebrated as a good thing about what we have. But I'll bet Bill Gates doesn't wear the same watch. that the dude in the Walmart shopping center, shopping parking lot is wearing. So it's just interesting. No obvious reason. And if anything, the phone is more flashy, right? You're pulling it out all the time. If I was going to think a priori about what would be a wonderful status symbol, the phone would be it.

36:00And yet, for whatever reason, it didn't happen. Well, I think it's partly because the status games have switched into how many numbers you have on social media. They've become fully digital. We should keep in mind that while we're all very online, that's only 1 % of people that give a shit about the number of likes and followers and all that sort of crap. Oh, I completely disagree. You think? Completely. 1 %? No way. Maybe it's 1 % of boomers. Yeah. Maybe of your generation. Yes. Because when I talk to some of my friends, they go, what's Twitter? Right. No, the generational gap. Whereas in Gen Z...

36:37like 3 % of the world are following Mr. Beast. Exactly. In Gen Z, it's almost entirely about that. It's the number one job. It's number two after medical doctor. Really? Medical doctor is one and influencer is number two, I believe. Ah, I would bet against that. I'm not going to bet against you. Do I look like a fool? As I remember, your generation as a child wanted to be number one, an astronaut. And nowadays it's unfortunately very much. Astronaut number one, fireman number two, and policeman number three. Which is also funny because it's actually the time when you can become an astronaut. It's actually feasible.

37:18We're getting there. Okay, so. If I'm talking to Liv here, I've got to have a wager, right? So I'll wager you a dinner that the most recent polling will show that it is medical doctor or that it is not influencer. Okay, but which demographic and where? Which location? We're only looking at Gen Z or Gen Alpha. Is it in America? Let's say American 18-year-olds. American 18-year-olds. 16 to 18-year-olds. Number one job. Okay. And we'll take the average of three polls that we see as the top results. That'll be fine. What are we wagering? A dinner. Dinner, fine. Deal. Gambling with Liv ain't going higher than that.

37:59No, I mean, I'm not that. I'm like 60%. No, that's good. It makes it a fair bet. I'm probably about 50-50, 51-49. Exactly, so it's reasonable. I don't have any big insider knowledge. Liv and I usually, instead of wagering money, we wager units of personal assistant time against each other. So then you have to do labor for the other, which works really well. You owe us me about five hours. It's great. I've put in quite a bit of work for you, actually. She's whooping your ass. Unfortunately, I've put in work willingly rather than sometimes Just every time tracking it and reducing. That's because you're not a game A motherfucker.

38:36And this is important. Families have always been game B, right? Yeah. Well, okay, so before we go any further, can you give your definition of game A versus game B? Yeah, let's say game A is the status quo. It's the game that when you walk outside your house, you are playing. It's what we call late-stage modernism. It includes market economies, particularly highly financialized market economies, typically democracy, certainly strong technological base, and all driven by this inner loop of money-on-money return that we talked about, with some adverse effects such as multipolar traps, which we sometimes call Moloch, being driven by money, including at the personal level, which we call mammon, and the belief of things that were manufactured for us to believe, which we call hypnosis.

39:30Hypnosis. How do I pronounce it? And game B is a proposed, very rough sketch of an alternative social operating system for the human race. So very modest proposal here, right, that would literally rethink how we relate to each other at every scale and apply some of the same kinds of ways we deal with each other in the family and the way we deal with each other with our friendships and the way humans live for 290 ,000 years as foragers, but updated and modernized to take advantage of the most cutting-edge technology and actually drive technology further so that we're not caught in win-lose type situations.

40:14We're not caught in multipolar traps where we'd all like to not do X, but we're forced to do X, often by one bad actor, sometimes by no bad actors, by random fluctuations. You know, the stupid story I give, I don't even know if the underlying premise is true, but let's imagine it's 1975, there's five soft drink companies, right? They're all using cane sugar to sweeten their soft drink. But one of the guys decides, aha, there's money to be made by replacing the cane sugar with corn syrup, right? And so he does. And, oh, guess what? The consumers can't tell the difference. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Evil genius, right?

40:49And the other guys go, that's kind of a shitty thing to do, you know? Corn syrup's worse for you. I don't know if it is or isn't, but people think it is. And guess what? Because the other guy's profit margin goes up, his stock price goes up, his market share starts to go up because he can undercut the other guys in price, everybody else has to get rid of cane sugar and replace it with corn syrup, even though they didn't want to. In the Game B world, the soda people would have what we call an accord, which we all agree, quality soda is made with sugar cane. And yes, innovation can occur, but we're not going to adopt innovations until we all agree that they're good, omniconsiderate, and not just for us and not just for the industry, but for our customer and for society at large.

41:30And that's just a very small, homey example. But apply that from the bottom up to the whole world, and that is game B. Other aspect of differentiation we talked about earlier, game A is completely dominated by this inner loop of money-on-money return. And let me say, we're not saying we should get rid of the market, But the big problem with it, it's a single dimension. And it's only a signal on a single dimension. And most of the world's interesting problems are high dimensional. A nice simple example. Should I give it? One of the ones I like a lot because it's highly tangible. Imagine bluefish, which is the kind of fish that is common where I live, in the ocean and the bays and stuff.

42:14People like it. Some people like it. Some people don't, which is important, actually. and there's a biologically sustainable number of bluefish that can be harvested each year and maintain a healthy population. Today it has to be enforced, if it's enforced at all, by complicated and onerous government regulations and all this sort of stuff. People cheat and this kind of thing. In the Game B world, we would add a second dimension called the bluefish coin. The people that live in the area where bluefish are harvested would hire a biologist or a couple biologists ascertain the sustainable limit. Let's say it's 40 million pounds of bluefish per year, probably using a blockchain.

42:49We'd mint 40 million bluefish coins, and we'd then distribute them per capita to the inhabitants of that bioregion, right? Turns out a lot of them don't like bluefish. It's a strong, oily fish. I happen to like it. A lot of people don't. So there'll be automated trading agents, which would then, you just put a check mark on your inventory, said, no, I don't want I was thinking bluefish, right? Just liquidate them for maybe money or at least some other intermediate good. And the automated trading agent would basically get rid of the things you don't want, buy the things you do want. And we then have a closed system, a closure on the system so that the only 40 million pounds of bluefish could be transacted.

43:26So when I buy a pound of bluefish, not only do I have to bring the dollar price, I also have to bring one pound worth of bluefish coins. And so you increase that to a thousand different things, you know, various woods, oil, you know, CO2. And you have many dimensions that are controlling the transactions, not just one. Then you can shape a world that doesn't just run crazily in destroying the world. This is a way of like managing common public goods, essentially. That's one piece of it. Well, it also sounds like the thing that it relies on very heavily in this world, in this case, is what is the assumption of the experts, biologists that you brought on that about how many bluefish can be sustainably farmed, right?

44:14And that would then also exist within how much oil can we extract per year, etc. It's, I mean, those are definitely interesting questions, right? and there is a question of like how to um imbue this information into just the transaction into into the transaction regulation you know but but the but there is the issue for example with something like energy it does strongly depend on uh what can you do with it on the other side right like it's a it's not like it's a zero one issue where we can extract easily this many barrels of oil and then if we do even one barrel more now the whole thing we're on a bad path so it's kind of like a gradual trade-off rather and there needs to be something on the other side that argues for a little bit more oil will actually do us mighty good because this will ensure national security for whatever reason or something how does that interact with it yeah that's a good question i'd call it the top level governance issue not entirely clear yet uh and it is important to note that game b is a work in progress and we probably have better thinking about things up to the bioregional level, rather than particularly say that's a very good question, but we do believe it has to be addressed at the global level, right?

45:28Whatever energy policy or more specifically using the atmosphere as a dump, we don't care about energy, right? Use all the energy you want, right? So long as it isn't, you know, raising the climate, polluting the atmosphere. So fusion power, you know, more power to you, right? Fission power, more power to you, though there will presumably be some form of market-driven cost to disposing of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. That would be explicit in another token, most likely. So this is kind of what I'd call the transactional monetary signaling part, but there's another even more important part of game B.

46:05And it turns out that it applies to game A as well. And that is any civilization, it has two things going on, lots more than two things, but two key things. One is what are the capacity of the people, the citizens, and the other are what are the institutions at any given time? And then, this is more important, what are the trajectories of the capacities of the humans and the nature of the institutions? And our analysis says that for a while, maybe since Bernays, but certainly since 1975, the institutions in game A have actually been degrading the quality of the humans, right? Think about our politics.

46:51I point this out regularly. In 1964, first time I paid the interest in politics, the less than 50 % of Americans above 25 were high school graduates, 9 % had four-year college degrees. And yet our politics was pretty sane. Got things done, put men on the moon, you know, we did some stupid shit like Vietnam War. Oh, well, we recovered from that pretty quickly, built the interstate highway system. You know, our governance actually worked pretty well with people without much education. Today, 92 % have high school degrees, 36 % have four-year college degrees, and we have an insane shit show for politics, right?

47:29So we have actually degraded the capacity of our humans for collective sensemaking, because our institutions have also devolved. And further, it's a spiral. As the human capacity goes down, the quality of the institutions that you can build goes down, and those institutions will probably make the people worse. And so you get a downward spiral, and we'd say late stage game A, at least since 75, and probably since 25, has been on a downward spiral of institutions and human capacity. so the core way that uh it's what calls the designed value for designing the game a pieces is we have to reverse that spiral we have to increase human capacity and this is something i've learned by dealing with the hippy dippy community you know the fair amount of people in and around game b the hippy dippy meditators all that shit right uh i don't do that stuff you know i'm a good old redneck basically you know uh and a retired game a motherfucker so you don't do that stuff.

48:33But anyway, a lot of them do. And, uh, but I, I see them go out for a 42 day retreat or something, right. And they come back and they're all very serene and nice and all's well. And then six months later, they're still doing, they're doing all the bad shit again. And I actually watched that and thought about it a fair bit. And it makes perfect sense because you come back into institutions that are not scaffolding the change. That's the words we now use. And if If we had a world where your institution scaffolded the good change that you made to yourself, then they're more likely to stick. And oh, by the way, if you have a community of people who've all undergone some sensible, well thought out, not too woo woo transformation and have more human capacity, essentially, we can now build new institutions for ourselves that will scaffold us and even elevate us to the next level or provide a reasonable path to the next level that's worth doing because it'll be scaffolding.

49:27it. So this is utterly core to the idea of game B. So now you say, wait a minute, isn't that a crazy dream? How the hell are you going to have that happen on a worldwide scale tomorrow afternoon? The answer is you can't. And so game B has also realized, and I will say this from the beginning, that it has to start tiny and local. And language we now use is membranes. We build membranes, and a membrane's biological term, one of the uses things like the cell walls, a classic example. And the key thing about a membrane is it's semi-permeable. Some things come through, some things go out. Some things are ejected.

50:02You know, the cell ejects the toxins, right? The cell could eject the sociopaths, you know, for instance. It makes some things internally. It brings things in from the outside. And so we think of a game B, the actual game of game B, once it starts being played, it's being played initially as membranes that are curated by people who want to live a certain way, who scaffold themselves, who choose the kind of personal change that they want to make with each other, non-coercively, and build the institutions and the personal change up and up and up. And then the membranes communicate to each other with protocols, and some membranes are contained within other membranes.

50:40In fact, eventually all membranes are contained within the master membrane. And this is a way that game B could actually be played at relatively strong sauce, as our friend Jordan Hall says, and yet be embedded in the belly of the beast. I think before we justify the specific structure of Game B much more, let's bring it back a bit to Game A because you were the chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, so you know your complex system science. And I think it's also the complex adaptive system lens that is used quite a lot in these evaluations of the different systems. right and i think it's a great lens that it's worth discussing even though one comment is i think the game a and b moniker i'm not a fan of the term and in part also because it it invokes kind of the as if a was the first game that is being played it's actually not right like the beforehand there was uh proto a and proto proto a etc and actually game a was already an improvement on proto a in part so we're actually in a chain of like continuing improving and civilization finding new games and forking yeah and we had a different game and then french revolution came they wanted a different game etc right and like you're kind of suggesting um let's have another because maybe this current version is coming to a point where it needs changing or else it will potentially self-destruct so i want to talk more to the point of or hear you rather talk to the point of why is it that not just that can be found like just a few points of change within game a such that it does not self-destruct there are some people in around or who have previously been part of the game a world who do think that the top-down method of a few changes will save the day i don't believe it I believe that the game A is a highly evolved beast that runs on the money on money loop and now has been ramified via advanced finance.

52:55And, you know, an example, the debt crisis may be one of the ways that crashes the system. There's just so many ways that the system is wrongly constructed and self-reinforcing. You know, consider climate, right? We all know that's one of the boundary conditions. Where it is is arguable. Some of the climate activists are over-claiming the levels of risk, but it's definitely real. As a science person, I can show you the physical chemistry that will show you that you add a certain amount of CO2 to the atmosphere, the retained heat will continue to go up. Now, how much damage that will do, that's also arguable.

53:33But it is certainly a dangerous thing to do, to do essentially. We just elected somebody who believes that climate change is a hoax right uh are he was a little bit amenable actually on in one conversation by hearing that if you increase the co2 in a room to a certain level plants will grow better well but also no cognitive abilities that cognitive abilities go down you get a headache it's unpleasant that he didn't like okay here we are a collective sense making in the uh most powerful country in the history of the world that has the best universities in the world, that invented the internet, that has written most of the software of the world, and our collective sense-making elected someone who declares climate change a hoax.

54:18How the hell are you going to change that system? Well, I mean, one part is, and we can touch on that later around liquid or representative democracies, but it's a problem of representative democracy, right? Where you just buy a basket of policy positions versus another basket of policy positions. and other aspects of the basket of Trump were just really favorable to people. Compared to the alternative. Compared to the alternative. For some people. For some people. Well, for the majority of people, actually, in this case. Well, not quite, just less than a majority. 49.9%, something like that. But of people who turned out to vote.

54:51In any case, I agree that that position I'm also not. But that would be actually a great example where, okay, here would be the counter by a try, let's keep Game A around for this. is can't we add something like a carbon tax or can we not just find out more information about how we can, like how much CO2 we can raise, where we are, innovate on more, allow more fission, innovate on fusion, all of those things, you know? All those things are worth doing. And I advocate for them within the context of game A. You know, I take off my game B hat fairly often and go play game A politics, right? In 2016, I actually worked for the Bernie campaign, for instance, right?

55:33And I believed in the Bernie campaign. It wasn't perfect, but it would have been a substantial step of amelioration on game A. Unfortunately, by 2020, Bernie had gone nuts. So I did not work for the Bernie campaign in 2020. But with my, let's talk about game both hats. Let's talk the game A hat first. There is a proposal that's been floating around since 2015 around carbon tax. It was signed by 300 academic economists right and left that this is the right way to do it, which is the following, which is a carbon tax which starts at a moderate level and is stipulated to increase at a uniform rate for 20 years and then stay at that rate until we've stabilized carbon and then it will go down.

56:27And this is the key part, the carbon tax will be 100 % refunded per capita to the citizens. So it's not giving yet more money to the government to do God knows what. So it's not even to develop direct air capture or anything like that. It's just straight up. I would add to it that you should, and I think that actually they did have in the fine print of their system, that if you can do capture, you will be paid, right? You'll be paid the inverse of the tax, right? So it sets very interesting, very simple, and very playable rules for a game. So obvious that this is within 10 % of the right answer that I've thought long and hard about couldn't come up with a better one within the GameCake context.

57:07Not a single political entity in the world has even considered this, right? So why is that? Because the power of the business sectors that do not want to have to pay the tax is so strong that it corrupts the politics of every country on earth. And not just the U.S., which is relatively easy to corrupt politicians in the U.S. Europe's a little harder, but not that hard. And so even Europe with their cap and trades all bogus, you know, that hasn't worked at all. Anybody could have predicted it. That's extraordinarily simple, that uses the power of the market to send signals that are stable and predictable over a long period of time, which would, I'm quite confident, turn the curve on the climate change problem in time, would come close to the optimal minimization of total cost.

58:00Doesn't even get a hearing on any major country on Earth. If something as simple as that, as easy as that to explain, which, oh, by the way, we'll give you a dividend check every month. And for most people, the dividend check will be bigger than the tax that was imputed in their purchases. Why? Because consumption of energy is highly asymmetric. Rich fucks consume many times the energy of the median person, which means probably 70 % of people will get a net economic benefit from this thing. But it even improves the Gini coefficient. Right, exactly. Exactly. So that's why you're going on about money on money returns, because in this case, the companies actually have, I mean, as Daniel Schmahnberg put it, the CEO and the board, they act as obligate sociopaths, right?

58:47They have to buy law. In the United States. They have to buy law, fiduciary duty, optimize for the relatively short-term profit. You can have like a public benefit corporation, but very few are. And you can actually modify your bylaws. I have pointed this out when the B Corp came around. So you don't actually have to do that. You couldn't modify your bylaws, but nobody does. Yeah, nobody does. And the investors will go to the one which doesn't infer. And this is the multipolar trap. Yes. We haven't talked about it as much as we should, actually. But the capital investment structure of MOLOC is also hugely powerful, right?

59:21Because everything is financed by pension funds and big mutual funds, etc. And they are second-order obligate sociopaths, right? And it's way easier to measure their returns because you can look at their financial returns to the hundredth of a percent, right? And people will move their money, particularly big pension funds, will move from one money manager to the other for relatively small amounts. So that game is even more intensely Moloch than the corporate world is because it's utterly fungible. So then the question on that would be, wouldn't it still be a game, a game to say, hey, we now require, I suppose that's what some of these campaigns try to do when they do, what was it, the big reporting where you had to do sustainability?

1:00:07Oh, ER, ESG. ESG. ESG is obviously bullshit. It's just a bunch of forms that you have to fill out. And the better you fill out forms, the more you win. In richest consultants. ESG was a terrible game, obviously, but what is the very good version of it? I suppose we're maybe just coming to game B, but what I'm saying is if I added another system of care, basically outside of just a direct money incentive, there is also a long-term viability incentive or something. How do you destructure that? So you'll need additional signals, hence the bluefish coin, hence the oak coin. That's the problem. Basically, anything where you're trying to compress all this information down into singular metrics, which is what ESG did, it's like a different score, it's insufficient.

1:00:51So you need high dimensionality. Exactly, which is what you're basically advocating for. Everything has a coin, which is where actually crypto is so useful. But every common resource, every common good, etc., where it's hard to exclude people from, but it's a scarce resource. you need some kind of tokenization to measure it and allocate it but people can you still maintain market dynamics by allowing for trading yeah and markets are very important one of the beauties of markets is they're free right i don't like bluefish i don't have to eat bluefish in the soviet union everybody get their chunk of bluefish eat it or starve right and uh in game b we would never do that we would just say that that the people who are responsible for managing this biosystem, which is the people who live along the literal, have decided this is what this area can tolerate in terms of use of bluefish, and it will diffuse out to the whole world by using markets.

1:01:47Markets are one of humanity's greatest inventions, so we certainly don't want to throw them away. Let me get also back to, as you were going down the list, oh yeah, you make Rutt dictator for a week, maybe we could fix game A, right? Your words, not mine, but I'm done. That's a great idea. But let's go to the one that actually go all the way, run the clock back to 1994 when I first awoke, right? My first proposal was to eliminate all advertising from all electronic media, TV, radio. This was the very early days of the internet, et cetera. So I think I actually argued for linear media like TV and radio to limit advertising to two minutes an hour and to ban it entirely from random access media like the internet.

1:02:33because that gets back to this Bernays problem, the epoch of Bernays, where we can manufacture the status games that people feel obligate to play. In fact, let's connect two things here. This is always fun when we can do this. Slot machines and advertising, right?

1:02:50Folks at high enough level of hierarchical complexity can choose not to play the advertising driven game. right? I can easily afford to buy all the Land Rovers I want and I drive a beat up eight-year-old Jeep, just cause, right? Because I don't give a fuck. In the same way that none of us are going to become victims of slot machine addiction, I think, at a very high level of probability. So hence, the same argument why slot machines are probably too dangerous for most people says that advertising is too dangerous for most people because it forms money-on-money return-only driven status schemes that inevitably lead to increased consumption and pressure on the world, in addition to sucking brainpower out of us that could be used for something else.

1:03:41Instead of working the extra hours to make the payments on your Land Rover, maybe you do a painting, or maybe you spend times with your grandkids, et cetera. It's sort of an evil attractor. And the only reason it exists is because it can be engineered to be profitable in monetary terms. So again, to get rid of advertising, you're still in game A. Right, but yet we still allow slot machines. We don't want to ban them, right? I imagine game B doesn't suggest banning such a thing. It's a very voluntary situation. That's interesting. Actually, game B is curious because it doesn't specify things like that, but it allows the banning and allows the non-banning through a concept.

1:04:24In different membranes. Different membranes. We call it coherent pluralism. Everyone agrees to six or seven top-level accords. And then as you go down the stack of embedded membranes, we also use the idea of subsidiarity. So you push decisions down as low in the stack as you possibly can. So let's take the example of advertising. A membrane may ban advertising, may ban advertising-supported media from coming through its walls. I don't know how it would do that, but let's say it could. Another one could say, oh, yeah, well, we don't mind advertising. We're going to educate our people with ninja mind tricks to be able to ignore advertising, which you may be able to do.

1:05:04And that's one of the things we think is central to Game B is that it's a high-dimensional search for human well-being rather than a diktat for human well-being. So let some membranes allow slot machines and others to ban them, and then they'll communicate with each other on a horizontal information bus, and over time some consensus will arise on whether everybody should ban them or nobody should ban them, or some people should and some people shouldn't. So what would be the methods of... I mean, it sounds like it really rests upon these nested structures that have almost perfect information sharing with one another.

1:05:40Well, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have some. Okay, a sufficient amount. More the better. More the better. High quality. Right. Good faith. Non-corrupted. Have you done any practical experiments whereby these types of structures have successfully, you know, where you've had, have you tried living in a membrane? Or do you know anyone that has? I do know some people that have, and most of them have failed. and pretty sure we know why, is that they didn't realize they were living in a membrane. Think of your classic hippie communes, right? Or the eco-village today, right? What they haven't done is stopped before they started and said, wait a minute, I'm in a membrane.

1:06:25It's semi-permeable. Stuff has to go in, has to go out, but also stuff has to come in. And so what's the economics of my membrane? What engine is the equivalent of the mitochondria in my membrane so that my membrane works? The word I use is membranes have to work. And holding hands and saying kumbaya is not enough to make the membrane work. So what does your internal economy look like, i.e., what can you provide to each other? Okay, we'll apply babysitting to each other, maybe homeschooling, and maybe we'll grow some percentage of our food, but we still need to buy a lot of stuff too. what could we do for game A that will make us allow us to make enough game A tokens to buy the things we need from outside to bring through the membrane and I can tell you that most of the folks that have set up these experiments in the past did not think in that mercantilist way and once we lay this all out I would hope that anyone who labels themselves game B before they launch will actually give serious consideration the same way you would in a startup to make sure that it works look look into failure modes and and specifically think through what is the fuel that your thing needs from game a and what are you going to do for game a to earn that fuel right because that's my next question is like you're technically trying to out compete yes game a while at the same time there is space for competition within game b yes is that correct but right though it has to be mediated and uh via a cord so you don't fall into the malik traps Right.

1:07:57You have to be consciously aware of externalities at all times. Up and down the stack. Horizontally with your peers that you're in competition with, so you're competing fairly. Up the stack so you're not caught in traps by your investors. And then below the impact you have on people. So what Daniel Schmachtenberger would call omni-consideration, which is a core Game B term. Right. You want the impact on all involved stakeholders to be essentially measured and tracked? We can't measure. This is where I have grown, he says, not just my waistline, which is, if you had asked me in 1994, yeah, we can measure it all.

1:08:36No, you can't. At the end of the day, we have to rely on our human intuitions and our collective sense-making abilities, which are not formally logical. And we have to, in good faith, communicate with each other however we choose to communicate through a governance mechanism of some sort at every scale. and use our human ability to feel our way towards solutions that are going to be imperfect and partial, but are not corrupted by the things we know we don't want to be corrupted by. And the other part about it, which again differs, like Gameby differs a lot from many other of these kinds of revolutionary ideas, is we don't think that the first set of answers are the right answers.

1:09:21You know, it's a process. It's an ongoing search for what works. And it's a sorting out of what works and what doesn't work and what sort of works. And what I like about that is that it sounds like you're not presupposing that there is a certain set of rules that would ever apply continuously, right? Like the many of the past kind of philosophies, like even if you take the three big ones of utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics, like they all kind of try to have a certain set of optimizations that they have and then a certain set of rules underneath. But actually, if you take each of them and become an ardent follower of exactly that, you always get in each of them two very absurd outcomes and cases.

1:10:06that's why when people make the claim that oh then the ends fully justified means you can do this it's like yes that's why you never go full and justify the means actually you end up as an ea person or something well even worse you end up as sbf actually right yes but yes same applies to deontology it's like if you go full deontologician then uh you end up letting the ax murderer and you tell where and frank is in your house etc right like you just do these type of actions anyway my point is i think that i like is that you emphasize that you kind of have to trust human intuition a bit and you have to improve your intuition by just um probably learning a bit more etc and i think this is where understanding that there is no fixed set of rules that can sufficiently describe the complexity of reality and in fact rules themselves are ephemeral even the top level rules will be evolved by some process not yet defined and uh i think this is another very important game b thing is any set of accords are only the current snapshot of a dynamic process that will be undergoing some trajectory and that trajectory will be both endogenous and exogenous endogenous meaning the people inside the membrane are learning right we had the rule no gum no bubble gum because we didn't want bubble gum on the streets and we go well i think we've met we're now mature enough that we're smart enough to put the gum in the trash right so let's change the rule uh and so we should always be thinking about any set of accords as a snapshot on a trajectory of the growth of this institutional personal spiral upward and that is also hugely important when we think about how this is going to be done so maybe one rule you do have is that there are no fixed rules okay mr goidel that's the only rule um so it sounds like um i mean obviously does it it's it's a very decentralized sense making it also has um a lot of network thinking so and there are two movements in this direction currently right like there are a lot of people pro decentralization it's the it's the crypto people it's the eox actually as well and then in the network state they're like the Balaji etc.

1:12:16How have all of them I imagine you've had some conversations with some of these people. Quite hilariously Game B is actually listed as a network state example. Yeah that makes sense. And they've asked us to be you know part of their meetings and stuff and we've we just said we're not opposed to what you're doing but and what we're doing is sort of compatible but it's not quite the same thing. Yeah. You know they're you know so fiercely financially libertarian that they don't understand, at least I don't think they understand, the high dimensionality of the nature of the problem. Right. They're a very simplistic solution.

1:12:53But some of their ideas are good. But one of their ideas is fundamentally bad, which is that you can do all this on the network and at least for a long time not have control of the ground. There has to be a base level to get the highest fidelity form of living. Because while we all live in the networks to some degree, most people get most of what they get out of the world from their actual neighbors on the ground, their community, their caregivers, taking care of their parents, taking care of their neighbors, etc. et cetera. And I think that these very left brain to use the cliche, but let's use it in the intelligent Ian McGilchrist fashion, very left.

1:13:39You should have him on your show, by the way. I know him pretty well. I can hook you up with him. The left brain folks think they could live in a network world. Maybe they could if their ass be enough, right? But for normies, the ground is important and uh we don't not every game be a membrane will have ground initially probably most what do you mean by ground earth okay so in other words a community on the ground with a fence around it i see like actual physical physical location yeah okay touching the grass yeah touching the grass or touching the asphalt even right uh because it could be in town uh and it could be uh let's say for instance uh 10 people move to the same neighborhood in uh you know south austin and even though their properties don't touch each of them is part of the same membrane right declare this to be a game b membrane when you walk into their house you play by game b rules uh when you're outside the house you're back to uh game a motherfucker rules so it sounds like probably the thing i would imagine where they have a disagreement with game b yeah there is significant overlap similar with the eax but i think both is ex so oh eax is uh Effective accelerationism.

1:14:49Oh, those fuckers? Yeah, exactly. No. No, no. But actually, they have some right ideas, by the way. I think that on net, they're unfortunately making everything worse. Exactly. But I think that they have touched on and emphasized certain points that others haven't sufficiently emphasized. So, for example, that safety is being used as a veneer for control, et cetera. Which is true. It's true. Or that just beware of over-centralization. It's also true. That's also true. They are much more in favor of decentralization than many other communities that have tried all of these government-backed solutions while the government is still as faulty as it is currently.

1:15:25And I genuinely appreciate their work. I agree with those things. They just don't realize or they insufficiently don't take into account that by just blindly saying, just go faster, you're also accelerating the centralization problem. So that's exactly. The Chinese love that. I know. They're thrilled with what EACs are doing. They're like, yep, great. If we again take the complex adaptive system lens, the point that the both of these communities make is kind of just, hey, capitalism is great. Libertarianism is great. Just trust it. It's going to be great. You can't predict the future anyway. Especially the founder of EAC likes to say that in quantum mechanics, there is this Lyapunov exponent, which describes like your kind of like fuzz or uncertainty in the system.

1:16:13and as the system progresses over time, it gets bigger and bigger. In a chaotic system, it becomes bigger and bigger and you can predict less and less, which is only part of the story because the other part of the story is that after even more time, some things become easier to predict, actually. I don't know whether the stock market is going to go up or down tomorrow, but I can bet with 90 % certainty that in 10 years, it's going to be higher than it is today. That's why I call this the ensemble of trajectories, right? This is a complexity science idea. Yeah, there are attractor states. Yeah, you can say that there's an ensemble of trajectories that we will probably be in.

1:16:48And the stock market's a perfect example that on average, 10 years from now, the trajectory we actually walk, which I cannot predict, will be one that ends up at a positive return above 7 % or whatever the hell it is. But you can't predict what trajectory it'll be. And this is another game beat concept we call epistemic humility. that applying formal complexity theory and diffusion, et cetera, we can't see that far ahead. But what we can do is get better tools to see further ahead. For instance, agent-based modeling is probably better than traditional differential equation-based economics for trying to understand these trajectories.

1:17:29But it's not going to be perfect for the very simple reason of deterministic chaos. It was shown with the Lorentz equation. that even a very simple set of equations, initial conditions, can produce utterly chaotic systems that go out very far you can't predict. So it's a combination of honoring epistemic humility, but at the same time trying to build binoculars that will let us see another 25 feet ahead on the road. I'd love to hear you also talk about why you think that Game A is self-terminating, but specifically from a complex adaptive system lens. Yeah, I would say a complex adaptive system lens broadly construed to also include broader system science.

1:18:17Because we often talk about trajectories and predictability or lack thereof, epistemic humility, etc. But what people forget is that real world systems also have boundary conditions. For instance, if you make the assumption that we can grow infinitely, then exponential growth as driven by late-stage financialized capitalism could work. But the reality is we have a finite planet with finite carrying capacity. Let me give a historical example. I arbitrarily define that Game A started on February 24th, 1694, just for fun, the day the Bank of England was founded. And it was one of the three pieces of Game A, which is financialized capitalism.

1:19:02We always have had capitalism. Financialized capitalism started with the Bank of Amsterdam, Bank of England. Democracy, which started right about the same time in England with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. And then the scientific revolutions of the 17th century, you know, Newton and Boyle and those guys and the equivalents on the continent. So roughly speaking, I say, other people say it started 5 ,000 years ago. But for whatever, it doesn't really matter. But let's say Game A started in 1700. The population of the earth in 1700 was only 650 million people, about a twelfth of what it is today.

1:19:41Each of those was consuming about a tenth per capita of the resources of the world, times of wood and energy and metals and things of that sort. So you multiply a tenth times a twelfth. And the human race as a whole was 120th, less than 1 % of the impact on the planet that we as humanity are today. It was not worth worrying about at that time. It seemed like nature was way bigger than humanity. And just going for it was a good thing. Because in 1700, most people lived in huts with dirt floors. 50 % of kids were dead by the time they were five. We didn't know dick about medicine. You know, that was pretty horrible, unless you're a rare nobility.

1:20:28And so game A was a wonderful thing. Those three things that came together, democracy, technology, and finance, caused an explosion that we're still in today. But it's an exponential explosion. And in fact, the exponential component is cooked in by the financial part. the way that finance works with respect to bonds, it's easier to understand with respect to bonds and also the money supply, is you're stuck on an exponential growth curve, period, or you'll die. It's like a shark. If you stop swimming, you'll sink and die. So the three together are hooked by the money-on-money return machine into a perpetual exponential growth.

1:21:04And so think about a world that's big, but we are humans are small in 1700, and we've been growing exponentially now for 300 and some 325 years, we are close to the wall. In fact, some people think we're past the wall. The nine planetary boundaries supposedly were over four or five of them and approaching the rest of them. Of course, people choose those things. They choose them for sometimes political reasons. But whatever it is, we're getting closer, closer to the wall. It's just very simple. You don't even need any fancy network theory. when an exponential is reaching its boundary condition, it's going to crash, period.

1:21:45What happens in overpopulation, the famous hares and lynxes things where the rabbits go crazy and then the lynxes go crazy and then they both die off. Malthusian trapezy. It's not exactly Malthusian, but Malthusian is one variant of it. So it's just relatively obvious that when you start small and you grow exponentially for 325 years, you eventually fill up the space. And so that alone does it. Of course, there's many other self-terminating ways. For instance, the invention of advanced and low-cost biotechnologies, right? How far are we away from a misanthropic incel in their basement using home CRISPR to splice some Ebola into the common cold, right?

1:22:34That could be a failure mode. Okay, but I think the reasonable pushback that most people have to this statement of, okay, we're approaching boundary conditions is, yes, but we've always innovated and expanded the boundary. So why is this different? Because at this point, the one boundary that we've never been able to expand is Earth itself, right? And yes, we could go to Mars, but that's an idiot idea. We should go to the asteroids, actually. Elon, asteroids first, not Mars. But the amount of humans and the amount of our work that's going to be put into space anytime soon is absolutely de minimis.

1:23:13Now, over tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, it can be very significant, but not in time to save us from crushing ourselves as we hit the wall with respect to the carrying capacity of the Earth. Now, I mean, what specific carrying capacity? Like you're saying, is it just like arable land, the ability to? Top soil, arable lands, water we can actually solve by brute force using desalinization. That one's solvable, it turns out. Can't we innovate our way through reinvigorating the soils? We haven't found a way to do that yet. Vertical, regenerative farming. Charles Eisenstein has a very interesting way of putting this, which is even to the degree we can, do we want to?

1:23:53He says, oh yeah, we could probably have a population of three times the one we have today, but it would be a world of concrete and shit. Right. I kind of want to push back on that because so there's, who is it, Matthew Iglesias wrote this book, One Billion Americans. Yes, I read the book. Yeah. And he points out if the U.S. went up to a billion, it would be the population density of France. Exactly. U.S. can do it. But we're not talking about the U.S., we're talking about the world. But we also have a lot of lower density than the U.S. places, right? It wouldn't be, I mean, things would still concentrate.

1:24:26You would still have Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc. Maybe not. Just become massive. Maybe not. Maybe not. Or you would have more of them. Game B would say probably they gradually evaporate because they have outlived their useful purpose. Now, this is a good complexity science term. The work by Jeffrey West and Luis Betancourt and some others, the Santa Fe Institute, University of Chicago, I think Luis is at these days, have discovered that animals have scaling laws. You know, they get bigger, but their metabolism slows down relatively. Otherwise, they would explode, basically. But cities have the opposite.

1:25:06As they get bigger, they scale positively. The per capita income goes up, but crime goes up. Patents go up, musical compositions go up at approximately 15 % for each doubling. So if you take a city at a million and it grows to 2 million, not only will it do twice as many patents, it'll do 20 plus 15 % more patents. So it's an increasing returns scale, but it applies to both the good and the bad, you know, mental health, disease, crime, et cetera. And this is where technology actually is important. Jordan Hall has come up with this concept he calls the civium, which I think encapsulates this in an easily understood fashion, which is by the good use of networks and network protocols, we ought to be able to capture the positive returns of scale by a global set of fractal networks that can work together at any scale.

1:26:05Because, by the way, Game B does not want to give up on going to the stars. We don't want to give up on being able to build things like the Gravity Observatory, which took 30 years across the whole world, basically, to build. But we don't need to live in cities to do it. You know, cities are, as I say, they have a negative scaling law. Every time I come into a big city, it gives me the heebie-jeebies. You know, Austin's sort of barely tolerable. Anything bigger than Austin is like, Jesus, get me the hell out of here. And as people become more self-aware and are higher in capacity, it's our conjecture at least, that if they could, if there were a way to make a good living, people would prefer not to live in big cities, especially if they could capture those innovation and economic scaling laws.

1:26:51So my hypothesis would be that big cities gradually evaporate over some period of time. And there are some people who just like big cities. I think it's a function of age. I liked a big city when I was under the age of 25. I loved it. I was for it. I grew up in the country and I was interminably bored all the time and I was just looking for because you're trying to expand your network and learn about the world and you just want to maximize the number of interactions you have and so big cities are naturally attractive. And it's thought that that is actually what drives this increasing return to scale is it's that interactions are cheaper in a big city.

1:27:26Right, right. And that's also in part why cities that have actually survived or rather the big cities have survived longer than the big empires, in many cases. Much longer. Damascus is still around. It's gone through 8 ,000 years of history. Many, many, many empires are come and went. Damascus is still there. Now, I mean, as populations age, I could see that being another forcing function of why big cities will cool off. I suspect that we'll see at least one game B hypothesis. You're absolutely right about the life cycle. Young people need to go out and explore. And so we would expect that people in early, and frankly, I hope they start doing it at like age 16.

1:28:06This idea that you have to be 22 or 23 to be an adult is kind of nutty, right? You should actually get out in the world when you're 15 or 16 and travel from one community to another. And communities will be clustered, so there'll be numerous of them close together. There may be units that are maybe the equivalent of a small city that are within a few miles of each other. And go out and try various communities and see what you like and interact with various people, track down the thought figures that you want to interact with them and their communities. So I do believe there's still going to be a need for young people to mix and to interact and to get exposed to new things.

1:28:43But do we need the big cities to do that? I don't know. Time will tell. And again, Game B doesn't say we need to abolish the big cities. We're not Pol Pot going to march everybody off into the countryside. But it's our hypothesis that as the if that the if the the only way to get increasing returns is no longer the way to get increasing returns is no longer the city the non-city way of getting uh increasing returns to scale will on net be more attractive over time so it'll be movement of people from the city to the non-city what about um again coming back to planetary boundaries populations are already declining in many nations most most western nations actually and it's projections are always updating but it seems like we're gonna as a global population taper off around 11 billion 10 or 11 10 or 11 yeah it was 11 it's already probably been down weighted to to 10 or so um within the next five ten years and then things are going to start declining the peak will be at the end of the century approximately yeah it's a little later when you reach 10 billion but in any case okay yeah no you're right i'm not my number's irrelevant relevant to the point.

1:29:51Yeah, but the point is, like, we're reaching a global maximum, likely, of population, and then things are going to decline anyway. So again, isn't that going to take pressure off planetary systems? That takes pressure, but where the real pressure is coming from, and keep in mind, we won't reach the peak till around 2100, right? So there's a lot of momentum built into population systems. What's actually crunching the world right now, because population growth has slowed considerably is the rising GDP per capita, right? If everybody on earth had an American level standard of living, we would be deeply, deeply in the shit.

1:30:29And how can you morally say that those people shouldn't have the same standard of living that we have? And they all aspire to. And one of the things I use as a very rough rule of thumb is what is the energetic intensity of a civilization and just calculate simply as a continuous watt power of a society. How many watts are you consuming 24 hours a day? It turns out for the U.S., Australia, and Canada, who are the big countries, are the three big offenders, it's about 11 ,000 watts continuous. So you have 110, 100-watt bulbs burning all the time, including everything you do, including all the products you consume.

1:31:10Sub-Sahara Africa, less than 500. Nepal, a little bit more, 600. India, about 1 ,000. China, about 4 ,000. And what I find very interesting is Portugal, which is a pretty good place to live, about 4 ,000. So it is probably possible that even before we can get rid of fossil fuels entirely, we could steer our society to something like a 4 ,000-watt society. And we could bring the people that are below 4 ,000 watts up, and we can allow the people that are above 4 ,000 watts to slowly, over two or three generations, settle back down to around 4 ,000 watts. And we can all have approximately the same material existence.

1:31:50Now, it'll be qualitatively very different. People will choose to spend their energy differently. And probably we can get to zero carbon by 2070 or so and provide 4 ,000 watts continuous to everybody on earth and do it just barely in time and in a way that's uh that has a very substantial amount of justice built into it but again this is the assumption is based upon sort of current energy production paradigms including presumably you know the continuous decoupling between carbon and energy usage which is progressively happening we're assuming growth so-called learning curves on all the technologies as well not that oh i see so that's baked in That's a key part of the Santa Fe Institute work on alternative energy is the team there that did that work has been following things like heat engines, steam engine, gas engines, gas turbines, jet engines, rockets.

1:32:50And they have a predictable learning curve to them over 250 years, which is amazing. Now, it's a series of S-curves that one starts and the next one starts. Same has been true for electrical generation. Same has been true for petroleum refining. And they've created these curves for the alternative energy things as well. And so I come up with the back of the envelope, 4 ,000 number, assuming the reasonable set of innovations and learning curves. But, and I also always acknowledge this, no fundamental breakthrough, right? Like, for instance. AI. Like something created by. Cold desktop cold fusion or something, right?

1:33:30Zero point energy, right? But probably fusion could have some impact at the margin within our planning horizon. But there could be a technological breakthrough that could make that happen earlier. But probably isn't going to be significant enough to save the day by sort of 2060, 2070 where things start to get pretty sticky. Can scaling solar or fission get us there as well? Like if we removed regulation and just. And we should do all those things. Yeah. And they will help. But just talk to Nate Higgins. He and his folks have done, they come up with 2 ,000 watt society is the best we can do. It's just when most people hear 4 ,000 watt society or 2 ,000 watt society, it sounds very unexciting to be in a kind of like level wattage use among all people.

1:34:26It sounds dystopian to most people. It sounds kind of dystopian. It sounds degrowthy. This is hugely important. It sounds very kind of like, I know that it's not, but it sounds very equity and degrowth coded. I hate the word degrowth, right? Because it confuses two different things, right? Look at an iPhone. Ain't much in it except sand and a little bit of metal. And yet there's a huge amount of captured intellectual property in it. So that is a good kind of growth from the perspective of the planet. You're not doing much harm to the planet when you buy an iPhone. You're doing a little bit, but not if you went and spent$1 ,000 on aluminum.

1:35:09You buy a lot of aluminum for$1 ,000. Coal. Two by fours. Coal. Corn, right? Corn's renewable. So copper, copper bars, right? You're doing way more harm to the environment than$1 ,000 for an iPhone. And so we have to distinguish between enrichening things versus just more bulk stuff. A simple example I give is clothes, this current fast fashion fad of, we'll wear clothes for six weeks, throw them out, order some more on Team U, off we go. Definitely not good for the environment. How about instead we bought clothes that were long-lasting and well-made, And let's say in just a particular Game B membrane, one of the crafts that is practiced there and is a compensated role is we embroider each other's clothes to tell our lives' stories, right?

1:36:04And so your clothes get to be embroidered by the embroidery people. And each week, each month, a little bit more of your life story is embossed in your clothing. But your clothing is designed to last for 20 years, right, or 10 years. And so instead of having cycling through new clothes every six weeks, you basically cycle through your clothes every five or ten years. You don't have as many, but they're much, much better made. And they tell your own story in an artful form. As an example of clothing growth in the microsphere, which is this beautiful embroidery and the telling of your life story, but de-grothing, not growing in the macrosphere of throwing shit away constantly and just churning for churning sake.

1:36:48Right, so you're substituting materialism for meaning. Quality and meaning and intricacy. And actually, Feynman, Richard Feynman said this a long time ago. He was such a brilliant guy. He foresaw, even though he didn't know the mechanisms, for nanotechnology, he said there's a lot of room at the bottom. There's a lot of ways to do chips, computer chips, of course, a perfect example of that. 50 billion transistor gates that's basically a piece of sand about this big. And yet a huge amount of stack of value chain goes into creating that thing. And that's kind of good growth as opposed to gross growth.

1:37:29So it's growth into the microscopic, essentially, or into smaller scales. And in reality... You're getting more efficiency out of like a small volume of material, basically. A smaller amount of material, basically. Physical material. Essentially, it's freezing information and knowledge, right? Right. Because the chip has to be designed. But the beauty of information, Stuart Brand made the famous statement, information wants to be free. Or was it Kevin Kelly? It was one of the two of them. It doesn't really matter. They're both closely related to each other in their business careers. The reason that information is so cool and things like computer chips are so cool is it costs hundreds of millions or billions to design a state-of-the-art chip.

1:38:11It costs way less to stamp them out, right? And so the marginal cost is way lower. And so if we start to think about a non-rivalrous economics, where people can have things at more or less their marginal cost plus enough addition to incentivize people to invent more rather than playing rent-seeking games, then everybody could be way richer in captured intricacy, shall we say, or art, et cetera. And we think this is a way that there's no reason to be dystopian. I would also add the following. More, more, more is just tiring, right? You know, you get up in the morning, I want to get a promotion at work so I can buy a bigger boat with a 200-horsepower motor as I have 125 horsepower motor.

1:38:59Why? No good reason. other than that you're trapped in a Bernays Epoch status game loop. Why should you be investing your life energy in doing that? Instead, you can play the game with a different set of rules. The rules is, what kind of cool life can I have for 4 ,000 watts, right? Any game can be played. And there are plenty of moves in the 4 ,000-watt world where you can have a much better world or a much worse world depending on the discernment you have on how to play that game. I agree. it just seems knowing all the people i know even even you know the more like game b kind of favorable type thinkers right is that we have become so accustomed to just more more more filling the the the holes in our souls with with shit with more yeah entertainment or experiences etc um it doesn't have to be material but it's just experiences which are typically you know still high consumption yeah flying around in a jet go exactly they have a lot of externalities yeah um i don't know how or see how particularly as we're trapped in the sort of status games of social media which is all about showing off what you did today you know instagram it's like look where i'm visiting well you know the whatever new cool thing i have like how it needs you yes you have the system you can redesign systems and like incentives but it feels like you also need this like internal shift that's the personal change part right you need to have gone somehow through some change or just be a contrary fuck like me uh to say i'm beyond all that i no longer need to do that and then but the key part is i now have to be scaffolded in a micro society that rewards that that says that that hey uh hey liv that's a great that you have nine dresses and they're beautifully embroidered, right?

1:40:58And that you've got the coolest bike anybody's ever seen, right? That's been tuned and adjusted until it's fairly well, until this is the greatest bicycle in the valley, rather than all the macro status games that we have played. And that's my point earlier, that if you go through some modest personal change and then you're thrown back into the rat race, The rat race will capture you 98 times out of 100. So you've got to do both. You've got to have the micro society and the personal change, and both are indispensable. You take a rando off the street, take a stockbroker, and toss him into a Game V village, ain't going to work.

1:41:39No. They're going to go nuts. Or we'll have to kill him, right? This is the Chris Boehm, one of the most important books ever written, people. Go read it. It's now free. It's on a PDF. What's it called? is called Hierarchy in the Forest, and it's the forager operating system that defeated the big man. Chris goes through, he was a Santa Fe-affiliated anthropologist, and he goes through the historical, the biological ancestry of humanity, and it says based on that, you should predict that humans would be very hierarchical and dictatorial, right? Like apes are basically, like chimps in particular.

1:42:17And bonobos in a different way, but they still play that same kind of very top-down status game. Humans figured out a way to defuse that game, and he even gives a hypothesis on what allowed them, what was the technological affordance that allowed them to do that. And he claims for most of our society, at times as humans, the forager operating system was highly tuned to suppress big men, people who claimed general authority. and I'll stop here, we'll sidebar this. Turns out Game B had come up with a similar idea before we knew about Chris, which we talk about role-based leadership versus position-based leadership, right?

1:43:02And in Chris's book, he'll say, the young guy who really knows how to capture rabbits leads the rabbit hut. The old tracker knows how to lead the group on to the next camp spot without getting ambushed. The granny knows how to find the tubers, and those are the leaders for each activity. And when somebody else becomes better at that, they just naturally accede to it. While position-based leadership is, I'm the chief, I'm the boss, you do what I tell you. I can say everything, yeah. It's general, I'm in the box, therefore I have all the powers in the box, even if I'm not competent. And so the hierarchy of forest lays out that humans developed distinct distaste for big men.

1:43:47They honored their autonomy and their capacity to be their own selves very, very highly. And they had a hierarchy of ways or a process of dealing with big men. First, they ignored them. Let's say you're the big man, and they could be a woman, probably not very often. 99 % of the time, they're probably men. but they you just ignore them. Let them run their mouth and eventually they'll get the hint and nobody gives a shit. But let's say they're big and tough and they go around and grab people and say, I want you to do this. Then you basically laugh at them. There are a few things that are more subversive to people trying to establish puffed up power than laughing at them.

1:44:34And then if they get more obnoxious than that round out a couple of their buddies or something, try to more or less suppress us, then you exile them. And if they come back, you kill them. That's just the way it is. And I do think that... And which societies lived like that? According to Boehm, it was an overgeneralization as Graeber and who's the other guy? They wrote that very cool book right before Graeber died. It's a... Doesn't matter. Winslow, I don't know what I'm talking about. His claim is that all forager people basically lived this way for 290 ,000 years, first 290 ,000 years of human existence.

1:45:19So basically pre the agricultural revolution, the average hunter-gatherer society, that's how they would keep power maximizers in check. Yes. Like the alpha male, the classic alpha male. Yeah, the big man, right? There's probably a genetic tendency to produce a percent or two of big men in any society. Right. And we just got to say, okay, that kind of personality type might be great to be a Marine or something. A corporal, no higher rank than a corporal. You should not have power over other people, but that kind of forceful personality can be good to go kill the enemy when necessary. But never, never, never give big men control of the levers.

1:45:56Unfortunately, our system is designed to call to the big men. Here are the levers, big men. Come and get them. Part of it is efficient. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the hierarchy in the forest that you described. On the previous point, though, where it requires personal change as well to move there. And we talked about that someone goes on a 42-day retreat, you said, and then they come back and then they get thrown back into the scaffolding and it changes. But at the same time, frankly, if the world consisted of 70 % or whatever percent of people who are of the type, how the ones that just came back from a 42-day retreat, it sounds pretty boring to me.

1:46:39It doesn't sound very appealing. It sounds like a lot of kumbaya and woodworking and kind of like an Amish-style society. Like it's where everybody's equal and it doesn't sound like... Game B also emphasizes anti-fragility, right? If you have anti-fragility, then like, oh, you can actually hit it and try to break it, explode stuff. And lots of variety, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, let something happen. Coherent pluralism is, you know, very cool. I mean, there could be people who spend all their time playing warrior games, right? And, you know, they pick up, you know, Kendo or something. You know, it doesn't, I personally have no interest at all in, you know, kumbaya sitting around the campfire all the time.

1:47:20But I would like to do it every Friday night. You know, Jamie Wheel, I actually asked him to design. It shouldn't be the only activity. No, no, by any means, right? And, you know, those kind of people drive me nuts. You know, one's the one to meditate all the time and all that horse shit. You know, I meditated for 20 minutes a day for 40 days before I did my John Verveke podcast. And I said, you know, this is kind of boring as shit, you know. And it just didn't do anything for me. But give me a nice single ball, but much better. But for some people, that's the right thing to do. And, again, coherent pluralism.

1:47:53There want to be whole communities of kumbaya people. Let's see how they make it in the world, right? And there are other people who are constantly thinking about what cool thing can we do as humans with the affordances we have, right? How do we get to the stars? How do we create the ASI? How do we figure out how to increase human longevity to 1 ,000 years? There will still be lots and lots of people that want to do those things, and Game B is not at all opposed to them doing it. So long as you do it in an omni-considerate way and within the constraints of our planetary limits. Well, I mean, when you mentioned ASI, that might be one that is very, very hard to get consensus on on whether that can be constrained because by definition you are building something that cannot be.

1:48:33Not by definition, but it is a strong inference that may well be the case that we can't control it. Hope it's not by definition unconstrained. No, you're right. It's not by definition. To me it feels like it is, I have to say. And Eliezer Yudkowsky believes that by definition it's uncontrollable. I argued with him about that, and I do think it is potentially controlled. But we could fuck up. There's a lot of ways we could fuck up. ASI, nanotech, biotech. We may have already fucked up with the forever chemicals, right? Right. And then the one that we haven't talked about yet, but it's the one that's nearest to the current event horizon, is our collective sense-making.

1:49:14It just breaks down, and it seems like it is almost there. Yeah, you talked about like the need for a trillion dollar idea that you're putting out there. You want someone to work on this. You basically a system of antibodies for mis - and mal-information combined with a system for positive collective sense making. So put that into English for me. Well, it wasn't English. Better English. Okay, so I've been working on building what we call the internet for 44 years. I started, my first job in tech was with a company called The Source, which was the world's first consumer online service. I personally designed our second generation forum system.

1:49:57I personally designed our email system. I personally designed the precursor to blogs, you know. So I've been doing this shit for a long time. And I love that stuff back in the good old days. And for the longest time, I would say that the nets were great positive value to humanity. And they're still of great positive value to humanity. The question is, are they of great net positive value to humanity? And I'd say at this point, it's a mighty close call, and it's getting bad rapidly. And so the trillion dollar opportunity is how do we use technology to build for ourselves personal agents that let in what we want to let in and including some stuff that we don't specify because we do want serendipity, right?

1:50:48And you set your serendipity setting. I want 8 % really crazy shit, right? And then also lets us go outbound very easily. I mean, having just, I don't travel a lot by design, but I recently did a fairly complicated bit of travel here. That's why I'm here in Austin. Jesus Christ, is it difficult to use these travel systems today? Why can't I just think the thought, you know, plan my trip for me? And of course, we could actually do that today, almost. It's very close. And so the info agents use the affordances that we already have wired in, plus AI, plus filtering, plus some human curation. You know, I do think there's a human curation component in there, and part of the trillion-dollar opportunity are curation workstations for people to be able to be compensated for being curators to feed into the networks.

1:51:35And then to the last part of what you read, that was one of my rants on Facebook, I think, wasn't it? I don't know. I don't know where you got it from. Oh, the trillion-dollar. No, you tweeted it recently. Oh, okay. The other key part of it, which makes it go from the billion-dollar opportunity to the trillion-dollar opportunity, is that each of our info agents develops negotiated sense-making with other info agents, right? So your info agent and my info agent, I say, keep an eye on Liv, see if she says anything intelligent, right? And then you say the same thing about me, or maybe you don't say it about me, but it's via somebody else who listens to me.

1:52:12And eventually that pattern of collective sense-making is almost automatically curated so that, And of course, it'll never be perfect, right? But in general, you'll get what you want and what you should have at any given point in time. And almost all the shit will be filtered out. And if we could do that, the shit businesses will eventually just go away. And instead, we'll actually have, or it is possible, we'll have a bifurcation. Because at least initially, you'll have to pay money to have the info agent. and maybe a fair bit of money initially. It could be as much as$100 or$200 a month. And one of the, of course, key rules of at least the Rutzian info agent, no fucking advertising, god damn it, or almost, I do like the idea of being able to personally set a price for an ad.

1:53:09If you want to send me an ad, it costs you$10. I also think that my wife will report this to be the case. Every time you go to the doctor and they send you, take this survey, right? My law is I'm not going to do a goddamn thing unless you pay me$10, right? And each person should be able to set their price. And the guys on the other side will say, all right, it's going to cost me$10 to send a survey to Jim. He may or may not open it. But the statistic will also be published on how often I open them. So, okay, if you pay me the$10, I've taken your survey 83 % of the time. So it's probably worth your while to do it.

1:53:45Wouldn't your info agent just fill it out or you don't want to use the cycles? Well, I may or may not, right? It may be. There could be qualitative questions like, you know, how was the experience of the docs? The info agent can't deal with that. So, well, or could it? So, like, just to make it a bit more specific about what you mean. So what's currently being designed is more that you're kind of coming into and talking to this AI or you're going to this other AI to get some, like, products and services maybe made up. and it's going to have an agent that's going to use, but you're more describing that each person has their personalized and adjustable, et cetera, agent that they develop a trust relationship with.

1:54:28I was recently thinking it would be great if I can, and I actually wanted to do it this weekend, but just like fine tune a model on the basis of all of the books that I would like myself to have read, but don't get around to that my friends, the people that I trust constantly recommend. And that's like 500 books a year. I will just not read that. But I could feed it into a fine-tuned model. Or even better, why should you do the work when somebody has created that curation and you subscribe to two or three curations, right? So you don't have to do all the work. So if someone's, say you're interested in five areas, you can just subscribe to the five people that have built those sets.

1:55:06Because maybe then it becomes kind of closer to the thing that is also problematic with representative democracy, where now it's a basket of things. Basically, the question is, how much time can I personally put in to do the selection versus what's the benefit of it? I'll give you an example, because I'm so interested in this trillion-dollar opportunity, I've actually built little bits of it for myself. And by the way, I am not going to do it, people out there. I am too old, I'm too rich, and I'm too lazy. If I was 45, this is exactly what I would be doing. right so team of 45 year olds and younger do this if you want some advice from the old warlord give me a call right this needs to be done i want it but i'm not gonna do it so i'm just giving this one to the world have at it people right uh and that's the way it is i'll give an example a little teeny i've done a couple of these little teeny corners of the uh trillion dollar opportunity just because i want them i subscribe to this is embarrassing to admit 117 sub stacks right Bloody hell.

1:56:04I only pay for like 18 of them, but I get 117 of them. What fraction do you read? I don't know. That's a good question. But to deal with the problem, I created an AI agent that sucks them all in out of my email box. And I trained basically an OpenAI GPT. Well, it was not quite a GPT. I liked a GPT, but using some of my own technology and calls into the OpenAI API, et cetera. And I was able to cheat because I used the transcripts of all the Jim Rutt show as the source material to train this thing on. So it now reads on an average 75 sub stacks a day and ranks them for me in the probability that I would like to read them.

1:56:53Oh, right. Creates summaries at two levels, a one paragraph and a six paragraph summary. And just because I could, it also creates an evocative illustration. and and so uh when i'm when i'm running this thing i just come in in the morning and it's got already there all the substacks that have come in so far today ranked in order by its best guess of my level of interest a one paragraph summary and if i want to click on that a seven paragraph summary and if i click on that uh the whole thing and oh by the way i don't even have to wait for network latency because it's already downloaded the whole thing and has it in memory so this stuff operating at local CPU speed, not network speed.

1:57:33You know how long that took me to develop? About 20 hours. Can I have it for myself? It sounds amazing. You need to put out your own podcast and transcribe as well because it's, right, like it's... Well, I can do that. I've got a podcast. I just need the transcripts. It's now trivial. WhisperX will make an almost perfect transcript of your audio. The one that my producer uses for my podcast is even better because it'll put the names of the people on it. WhisperX will basically just say voice one, voice two, et cetera. But yeah, it wouldn't cost much to do a podcast. And it's interesting, I do almost perfect transcripts, high-a-dollar transcripts for my podcast and have from the very beginning, long before LLMs existed, because I hate podcasts.

1:58:20I hate listening to them. I hardly ever listen to podcasts. And even when guests that I have on have had most of their recent exposure in podcasts. I get those podcasts transcribed, right? I'm a reader. Reading is my thing. Not everybody is that way. Everybody has a different modality. And so I fortiori had these great transcripts. And all the LLMs know a shitload about me and Game B and all the crazy shit I'm interested in. It's scary how much they know. Oh, I'm well aware. I used one for researching this. It was very helpful. I'm pretty sure that the reason they know all this is because of those transcripts.

1:58:57Right. Yeah, Tyler Cowen pointed out that his new book he's writing for the AIs rather than for humans. That's a very interesting book. Because if you want to have distribution in the future, it will probably be as more and more communication happens as human talking to AI, you actually want to be part of the essence that the AI carries in itself as it talks to you. That's a damn interesting idea. I'm going to have to have him on, so that's a good excuse to reach out. Also, Andrej Karpathy made this other separate point which relates to it, which is that, again, same consideration leads to probably you want to make your websites over time become more and more AI readable, which has different preferences, right?

1:59:38It doesn't need images of high megabytes. You actually would rather have text files and various other things there that are very easily extractable for the AI. speaks into some kind of dead internet theory as well although it's not dead internet theory it's just like it's like ai internet theory it's it's just i think potentially it's yeah exactly it's it's more just changing what the interface of the engagement is like is the human community like just like interfacing with just dead text or are you just have this other method of and i i you'll just have different layers you'll have you have your ai readable layer of your website and then your human interface you want to be able to come back to the to the base truth but especially while you have often this false information that is otherwise told to you.

2:00:23But for many use cases, this is great to be able to combine it in this way, I believe. So a topic that is, I think, fortunately coming up now more in people's minds, and Anthropic recently published a podcast about it, and David Chalmers is now working on it, Rob Long, some of the great philosophers of our time, actually, is the topic of AI consciousness, which many people initially have kind of like a reaction that is just like super strong against how dare you even ask the question. Right. But you've also looked into this. A lot. Yeah. It's one of my core interests since 2014. Do you want to make quickly the case why it's an important question that we do need to wrestle with?

2:01:07There's a whole bunch of reasons. I said, oh, by the way, we can now announce, I've been advising an institute called the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. That's been under wraps for a couple of years. It's now come out of the closet and check out their website. I don't remember what, I think it's CIMC.ai probably. But Yoshua Bach is the chief scientist and executive director, who's a brilliant, brilliant dude. He's been on my podcast a few times. So anyway, this is something I'm obsessed on. I'm an official advisor to them, and I might even get more involved in that. My interest in machine consciousness in particular basically has two parts.

2:01:52One, a scientific study of consciousness is famously difficult, right? It's really hard to understand what's going on inside your head, right? And self-reports can help to some degree. We can get secondary evidence like EEGs, et cetera. but there's a limit to what we can do so fast and the imaging technologies are getting better but not that rapidly understanding the dynamic we haven't even mapped the networks yet let alone their full dynamics so there's a long way to go on being able to understand animal consciousness in a skull basically well but also because not all theories would even presuppose that you would find the core of consciousness by looking at it through imaging, right?

2:02:39We don't have an agreed-up expert consensus theory of what is the best theory of consciousness. Even in the materialistic realm where we say that it is certainly an emergent phenomena of neurons, exactly how that happens we don't know, and we don't even know how much electrical fields are involved. So much shit we don't know, right? And you can't do fine-grained experiments on living animals, et cetera. So my initial interest was, I've always been interested in the science of consciousness and I've read everything. I've had most of the leading people on my podcast. I've read most of their books, hundreds of papers.

2:03:16It's a domain that I've gone extremely deep in. But I can see that our progress is gated by this difficulty that the interesting stuff is almost impossible to tweeze apart. If you could create a machine consciousness, then you'd have no problem metering the hell out of it, right? Okay, how did it do its consciousness thing, right? And let's make this change. Let's put this Bernays propaganda into its head and see what happens, right? What is the actual bit rate between perception and consciousness? There's a lot of controversy about that. Our perception rates in the millions, tens of millions of bits per second, it's thought that the rate of change in our consciousness is on the order of 50 bits per second.

2:03:55By the way, it sounds like you're potentially pointing at a different thing than what David Chalmers would describe as the hard problem of consciousness. Ah, well, of course. This is one of the key questions. And the Ruttian position is that there probably isn't a hard problem of consciousness. That's my position as well. Wow, you found a friend finally on this. No, no, no. There are quite a few. There are lots of you. Daniel Dennett is the front right of it. Daniel Dennett, Anil Seth is another. Yeah. There are plenty of people who have sensible views on consciousness. All the rest of them are morons.

2:04:26Not true, not true. Especially Chalmers is quite a genius. Just quickly, for anyone who doesn't know it, can someone define the hard problem quickly? Well, you go ahead. The hard problem of consciousness is that... Let's call it the ineffable aspect of experience. You know, the classic example is the blue of that sofa over there, the actual feeling and the sense. Is it purple? I'm a guy, right? We only got three colors, right? Blue, green, and yellow. So it's blue or purple or whatever it is it is. But there's something in my brain that feels, it has all kinds of side effects, you know. This reminds me of a French gay whorehouse or something, right?

2:05:10and all those things are all coexisting with the actual feeling of the blueness that's called qualia and so what is the nature of qualia is fundamentally the hard problem of consciousness which is on the other side basically the easy problem of consciousness is how do you see blue in the first place like what happens in your brain which is also interesting and that's what you definitely find out with imaging that's why it's the easy problem it's a little bit but then it's like what its likeness some would say okay the famous book uh paper that was started from nagel uh what's it's like to be a bat or something what's it like to be a bat which is a very brilliant insight that bats have echolocation we don't so the consciousness of a bat the qualia of the bat must be very different must be just like we can't even imagine what it's like right So you guys claim that it doesn't exist?

2:06:06No. As a problem? As a problem. I think it's a question. So I have a bad explanation of why. But as science progresses, you sometimes notice that phrenology was stupid. And you just like discard it and it's explained by other means, right? Ilan Vittal is the other example. The idea that life was some magical thing. Vital essence. So it's a question that many ask themselves and I ask myself, it's like, what are the today's sciences that we will in 50, 100 years look back on and say that has been better explained by something else? A candidate for that is something that involves the best explanation of what the hard problem is, it's like what its likeness.

2:06:48It's like, that sounds a little like we might be talking about some BS. Maybe there is a better functionalist theory that would describe the specific dynamic that leads to the perception of their being and what its likeness. I go one step further than that, which is the machinery, once we understand it, it will become obvious that a machine, it's not actually a machine, but a device that operates in this fashion will produce the effect of that. And here's my stupid example. As kids, we used to have these flip books. They were like cartoons. Right, you flip through them and you see an animation.

2:07:22I still remember the first one I saw was in second grade. It was a guy rowing a rowboat across a lake. And so this isn't a perfect analogy, but it's fairly close, is that we're going to discover that we're the guy riding the rowboat and we're riding the book at the same time. And that's just the way it is. That's how ma nature happened to evolve the machining of our brain. It turns out consciousness is quite expensive, both energetically and in genetic information. So it's certainly paying its bills, right? Ma nature would not have had consciousness for probably 200 million years at least if it didn't have a payoff in terms of inclusive fitness.

2:07:57But one point about it is also why it's also good to mention the Nagel, what it's like to be a bad is, like, we are both very close, it seems, to, like, the functionalist theories more than some of the other ones. That said, it's still not settled, right? Like, I would only be significantly but not extremely surprised if it turned out to be completely different. Exactly. And that's what the beauty of science is. I think the way to look at machine consciousness is asking oneself the question, given this theory of consciousness, can it be, given this theory of consciousness, could there be machine consciousness?

2:08:30And it's not clear. And that's why we need to try to build one. Because if we can, based on premise A, then that indicates that premise A is at least somewhat representational of consciousness. Here's the other very important move, and most people are so confused about this, I'm going to try to say it slowly. This is from John Searle, the Berkeley philosopher of consciousness and also other things. He likes to say that consciousness is like digestion. There is no, you can't put a finger, oh, that's your digestion, right? It's an ensemble of things going on, your throat, your tongue, your teeth, your esophagus, the appendix, the small intestine, and then the rut coral areas, and it comes out the end, same as your consciousness.

2:09:13Shit, right? And then he goes further, and I've just stole this and run with it. In the chemical, pharmaceutical, and food industries, they have devices called digesters. And basically, you put in rough raw materials and bacteria or yeast and acid, and reactions occur, and more valuable chemicals come out the other end. And they're called digesters, but they're not at all functionally like human digestion, but they produce an analogous result by roughly analogous means. Rough chemistry, acid, microorganisms, heat, time equals more valuable product. And so I have to keep reminding people that when we create the early machine consciousness, they're not going to be just like Shakespeare, right?

2:10:06They're going to be analogous. The machine consciousnesses will be as analogous to Shakespeare as the digesters in the pharmaceutical industry are to your digestion. And so don't expect them to be exactly like us. They won't be. In fact, that's actually the fun part. Because the design space of consciousness is probably gigantic or things that we could normally, could reasonably call consciousness. and ours just happens to be one particular kind of constrained definition that could pay its bills to Mother Nature over evolutionary time. I think that's a really important point because the thing that I've been throwing back at people sometimes is that say, oh, when you claim that machines can have consciousness, I'm not saying that the current ones do, but if you say that they might, you're just anthropomorphizing your kind of assumptions onto them.

2:10:55It's like, I think it's actually the inverse. you're anthropomorphizing the concept of, not you personally, but others are anthropomorphizing the concept of consciousness. There are many other consciousnesses to be had outside of the human one. And oh, by the way, like the bat, for example. And there's one even more radical on earth, probably. The large cephalopods, the big squids and octopi, they developed what appears to be something like consciousness, but very radically different because they have eight brains or 10 brains rather than one, but those brains talk to each other and they are unrelated.

2:11:28The neural systems are unrelated. And so we may have a very alien consciousness here on earth and machine consciousnesses will be more alien than that. And that's okay. So that's number one. I want to be able to have substrates to work on theories of what actually is the man in the rowboat in the flip book. How does that actually work to produce something that people would recognize as consciousness. But the other one, this comes from, frankly, my Game B work, a lot of people in and around these Game B adjacent communities full of more blathering bullshit about consciousness than about any other topic, right?

2:12:03And, you know, the cosmic consciousness, you know, all this horseshit, right? And so I think that at least as important as advancing the science of consciousness is de-blathering the discourse of consciousness. And the more we can actually say in firm ways that we can demonstrate and not just talk about that this is what we know about consciousness right now. And go interact with this thing. You tell me what you think if it's consciousness or not, right? Here's voluminous experiments have been done on this thing. And oh, by the way, this is exactly how it works. Here's the source code, right? And when people see that, they're going to realize, I think, I mean, could be wrong on this.

2:12:45Again, as you said, this is an area where we could all be wrong. Maybe there is a cosmic consciousness. Maybe Santa Claus exists. Who the fuck knows? But de-blatherizing the insane discourse of consciousness that's very large in our liminal communities itself is hugely important and valuable. I like that as a take of why it's important to figure out these questions. I thought we're going to go down to what you've said before, which I like a lot. Well, yeah, I mean, to me, the value is, is like we're building these these new, whether you call them technologies or life forms or whatever, but potentially by the trillions, these these these digital potential sentiences.

2:13:23And either we don't give them sufficient moral valence when they have it, which would be devastating. So we're like, it's like replicate all the horrors we've got of factory farming currently, but then like scaled up massively on, you know, many orders of magnitude larger and potentially even more suffering capabilities. Or we do falsely give them moral valence at our own personal cost. You know, we cede our rights to the machines because there's many more of them or they have stronger preferences and they're smarter and blah, blah, blah. And when they don't deserve it and in either direction, it's a huge thing to fuck up.

2:13:58it so it's unbelievably high stakes um but that that is a very funny additional point that also it would be nice because you know you're right the term consciousness is used as this like term of convenience almost to just like fit into people's own moral views i actually happen to be someone who believes that there are like i do think that ecosystems have a form of consciousness for example like i do think that shit's going on in the amazon rainforest like i think that i would be i wouldn't be surprised if there's a form of consciousness we need to figure out the this answer quicker so that she can stop talking.

2:14:30I see your eyes glazing over. I'm going to make a very important point on this. I'll be sure to hear your reaction to it. This is, again, one of the great confusions of the discourse around consciousness. People get consciousness and intelligence confused all the time. Sure. A bacteria is intelligent, right? A bacteria will steer towards sugar and away from acid or hot water, right? The Amazon is certainly intelligent, right? It's a very complex adaptive system that confronts collective problems and through the, what the hell is the name of the fungal networks? Mycelium networks. Mycelium networks and other methods, and also through evolutionary time, et cetera, solves problems.

2:15:11It's intelligent. But at least the John Searle model that consciousness is a specific architecture that produces a specific class, wide class, because it can include tadpoles and bats. but it doesn't include rocks and two-by-fours, would say that if you use that version of the definition of consciousness, the Amazon is intelligent but not consciousness, not conscious. Sure, but you've referenced the concept of egregores earlier in the conversation, right? And they're not conscious. It's very important. They're not? They're absolutely not. In fact, this is one of the very first times I was exposed to the idea.

2:15:49Brett Weinstein was one of the first founders of Game B, right? and he introduced a concept he called Goliath, which was sort of the game A egregore. And he presented it as if it was conscious. We had like a three-hour group discussion where at the end of it he stood down and said, you're right, they're not conscious. And this is very interesting and important that we can have complex adaptive systems that seem to have trajectories without any consciousness. So they're kind of like zombies. They're essentially zombies. Right, which would imply that it does. And then by that extension, are you saying that that, therefore, it doesn't have any moral value?

2:16:26It has implicit moral value. Because it impacts other conscious agents? But only to what other conscious agents read. It doesn't wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to be a game-game motherfucker. It just is a game-game motherfucker. But again, do you know that? How do you differentiate an egregore or an ecosystem that is intelligent, that it is adapting? it has like these hyperdimensional sort of things that it can be affected by and respond to again like that's why why the confidence that that is not conscious well that's how you define consciousness and in a very simplistic way i would describe at least that the tetrapod branch of consciousness that's the one that comes up through reptiles amphibians and eventually us and birds, is organized around a unification of the senses in a coherent, smooth scene.

2:17:22The fact that you're looking at us, we're experiencing this, you're feeling a rumble in your belly, you feel your toe is a little bad, you hear that slight buzz over there from the air conditioning unit, that is your conscious scene. That requires a shitload of neural support to create that thing. It's very expensive. And if you don't have that, it ain't consciousness of the tetrapodal variety. And I will guarantee you a tree doesn't have that kind of thing because it doesn't have the right kind of network architecture. I guarantee you the Amazon doesn't have a thing like that, doesn't have the right network architecture.

2:17:53So I can say quite firmly that it doesn't have consciousness as we apply it to the animals that we know. But it has intelligence. And people get so confused by the difference because that thing is so intelligent, How could it not be conscious? And this is important to know about AIs also. They're a great example of that. The conversation Josia and I, some other people had, started in 2014, is consciousness a shortcut to AGI? And we're not sure. And one of the reasons that the California Institute of Machine Consciousness is going to work on these problems is maybe it is a shortcut to AGI. I'm not sure.

2:18:39I don't even have a strong opinion about it one way or the other, but I am reasonably sure that we can create AGI's without consciousness. And we can probably even create ASI's without consciousness, and maybe we should. it. I think part of the also why there is a natural impulse to ascribe consciousness to these like big systems is that in some way in living things at least there is a at least a correlation but certainly not a causation of how complex and how many neurons there are in a brain with how likely one would be to find consciousness within it there's certainly a correlation because it just if at least like according to like various functional theories and like the question that you post or the point that it is expensive to develop it so evolution wouldn't have done it initially it would have done at the point when you can afford it and you already have satisfied various other and you're getting a win in every generation so you don't expect like um like muscles to have consciousness for example they are just like their neurons are just too few to they're not organized the right way and they're not organized like that yeah so um but yeah there is basically but we do assume that at the point of some neocortex and like just like various complex systems that a brain has you can expect there may be an organization that satisfies the thing that we at least would describe as consciousness which is related very closely to attention or perception or something like that well in fact the way i use it is that this animal consciousness of the sort that involves a conscious scene, the actual consciousness is attention, is the cursor of consciousness, that we're seeing a new conscious scene about every 25 milliseconds, 40 times a second, plus or minus, of course, graining.

2:20:27You can switch attention at about once every six frames. Most people don't, and the brain says switch attention or don't switch attention about once every 250 milliseconds. and the creation of the frame and then us walking through what object has attention is actually what consciousness is. Which one do you ascribe most to? It sounds like close to attention schema theory as well. I'm not sure I know what attention schema theory is. It is that. That's what he described is almost exactly that. Let's not get into that. I'm going to read up on that. You'll love it. It's Michael Graziano. Have you heard that?

2:21:05I certainly don't. It's almost exactly what you described. But in any case, it's probably worth saying, even though Jim and I speak to it with kind of like, oh, it's definitely not that. And we feel like it's this. It is still the case that we don't currently know. And we don't know with AIs. And you've said, well, why I think it matters. And I think the thing that we would find insufficient is if the argument of why AIs don't have consciousness was simply because they are on a different substrate. Because they're carbon based. uh silicon-based whereas we're more carbon-based um i i don't like that as an argument yeah i think searle kind of demolishes that right so long as you understand we're talking about uh comparison machine consciousness by analogy and not by congruence right in the same way that digesters in the food industry they do different things they're made out of different materials made out of aluminum typically and and they have different they use yeast instead of bacteria but it's still digestion right and as long as we understand that that's what we're talking about with uh computer or machine consciousness then it starts to boggle credulity to say that you couldn't do it just because it's silicon unless we're all wrong and there is a cosmic consciousness that permeates the universe that only biology can tune into and it's you know it's possible i would bet large amounts against it but at this stage of our knowledge it's a hell of a lot more than it was 40 years ago but it's still very incomplete so i think we'll invite a guest on like charmers also to discuss that uh further because we have to wrap up but like i want to just extend on your point that you said before that even it's actually even more important that people think about it because i think undoubtedly over the next years more and more people will actually ascribe consciousness and moral relevance to ai models like people already did that you had lemoine etc And children have a high propensity to just do it with dolls and everything.

2:23:09Very dangerous. Very dangerous. And this could just be really, really bad. And I think we should have a confident-ish, at least, answer to, no, this is wrong or it is there. Daniel Dennett laid out an essay, I think it may have been even in the New York Times, a very high profile, where he suggested that it should be a felony for anyone to create an AI that was able to convince, that convinced people that it was human and that should actually be a very serious criminal violation, not quite up to the level of the butlerian jihad, but close. It feels crime against humanity adjacent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:23:46It really does. Yeah, I completely agree. I would be okay with that. So in other words, think about operationalizing it. You could require a chat bot every 90 seconds to say, I'm not a human. I'm not a human. I'm a machine. Just a reminder, I'm not a human. I am a machine. Exactly. You don't know. I was designed probably by an evil game-y motherfucker. You don't need to be mean to me. Probably an evil game-y motherfucker designed me to extract the nickels out of your pocket, right? That's what I would require it to say. I probably won't say that. But that's a very, very important point. Because without some discernment about these things, we could be really sucked into a bad place.

2:24:22I mean, Eliza, the famous AI therapist, it was like a thousand lines of code or something. Graduate students became addicted to it in the late 60s. You know, they emulated a Rogerian therapist. And I don't think they described consciousness to it, but they reacted to it as if it were a person. Yeah. No, I mean, you're seeing, I mean, and even worse, they're now hijacking, you know, the male sex drive, which is like, good luck. Any young man resisting the temptation of like these, you've already got the OnlyFans model, which is, again, bringing us back full circle. It's all about dopamine hijacking.

2:24:59But it's AI. It's not even real humans at this point. It's not AI tech. It's not a human writing the text. The images of these girls are increasingly just going to become AI generated. They're not even real women that they're looking at. And these companies are making, you know, they set up so easily for men to just donate. Just, oh, take your top off, take your this off, whatever. Do this, do this, do this. Rats hitting the bar for more cocaine. It's the ultimate rat heroin thing. So if they had to constantly keep saying, you know, if we make it a crime to have a misleading, you are not speaking to a real human being right now.

2:25:35That it might be like the last assemblage of keeping a human in the loop. Something like that. Yeah. Something like that. There's something about those AI girlfriends that creep me out at like an extremely high level of creeped out in this. Yeah. I mean, there's something to, again, like if you've got the sort of, as you said, you know, the deepest, darkest incel who can't go out and find any companionship anywhere anyway. sure if that gives someone some meaning and a sense of companionship i'm all for it but it's more like again it's it's the it's not like it's just going to be them that get sucked into this as these become more and more effective and we forget what it was once like to actually really interface with real humans and especially across generations we're just going to get more and more detached from like what even no no one will know how to interface with humans anymore So, yeah, it's quite the slippery slope.

2:26:25Let's not do that. No, let's not do that. But we will, unless we don't. Unless we consciously choose not to. Okay, so to finish up, we'd like to do this with our guests. Okay. A series of rapid-fire predictions. I want you to be as system one here as possible. So, like, just whatever your intuition is. Okay. And you're going to ask me questions, and I'm going to fly off. Yeah, exactly. And just give you a numerical, your probability. Okay. Okay. Okay, probability that you go back to using a flip phone in the next two years. 30%. Probability that the concept of cognitive sovereignty becomes a mainstream topic of public discourse similar to the concept of privacy today by 2030.

2:27:0520%. Probability that you break your social media six-month sabbatical this year. 20%. Uh, probability that the dominant global economic model shifts significantly away from GDP growth as the primary measure of national success by 2050. 50-50. Uh, that's confident. I like it. Uh, probability that Gameby adjacent design principles are explicitly referenced in governance documents of at least 100 significant DAOs or intentional communities by 2030. 30%. probability that a game B proto community of a thousand people exists by 2030 80 percent oh I'm confident uh probability that game game B proto community of one million people exist by 2040 on the map uh a million 30 percent also okay um probability that you personally will live full time in a proto game b community for at least one year by 2035 50 50 um probability that current the leading current ai models are conscious zero probability that uh one of the functionalist ish materialist theories is as an accurate is accurate about as a description of consciousness 80 80%.

2:28:33Probability of AGI by 2030?

2:28:3940%. And by 2040? 98%. Okay. Probability that the hard problem turns out to be false? 80%. Awesome. Thank you. Just to finish up, what's the most win-win-y thing that you can point our audience towards as a takeaway from this conversation that you would like them to go and do. To actually do? When you take, oh, there's a simple one. When you think about liking or retweeting or sharing something, stop and think, is this good? Take an omniconsiderate view. Is this good for all the above, yourself, the people who will receive this signal and the human race and if the answer isn't yes to all three of them don't do it love it where can people find you where do you want to steer them to especially while you're on your social media sabbatical uh you can get me at uh you can send me dms on facebook or twitter i do log in once a week when i'm on sabbatical to uh collect my messages you can also hit me at jimrutshow.com i highly recommend it it's a great show and if people want to get involved in game b uh go to the facebook group on the game b facebook group awesome if you want to do some reading go to game b.wiki and you can read some somewhat older materials but still some fascinating stuff i'll include a bunch of these links in the show notes as well uh jim thank you so much for coming on this has been amazingly good time well spent lots of fun giving me a few things to think about thank you well thank you for coming to win-win that's the that's the goal that was great thanks jim i think it was the best podcast appearance i've ever done