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Matt Marturano
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the maestro of the mind, the virtuoso of critical thinking, and the philosopher extraordinaire, Matt Marturano! With a penchant for unraveling paradoxes and diving deep into the abyss of complex concepts, Matt's analytical prowess knows no bounds.
Armed with linguistic finesse and a relentless curiosity to challenge the status quo, Matt is a beacon of innovation and intellectual rigor. So buckle up, because with Matt in the room, conventional assumptions are about to get a serious run for their money!
https://www.orchidholisticsearch.com/
http://linkedin.com/in/drmatthewmarturano
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the maestro of the mind, the virtuoso of critical thinking, and the philosopher extraordinaire, Matt Marturano! With a penchant for unraveling paradoxes and diving deep into the abyss of complex concepts, Matt's analytical prowess knows no bounds.
Armed with linguistic finesse and a relentless curiosity to challenge the status quo, Matt is a beacon of innovation and intellectual rigor. So buckle up, because with Matt in the room, conventional assumptions are about to get a serious run for their money!
https://www.orchidholisticsearch.com/
http://linkedin.com/in/drmatthewmarturano
Creators & Guests
Host
George Monty
My name is George Monty. I am the Owner of TrueLife (Podcast/media/ Channel) I’ve spent the last three in years building from the ground up an independent social media brandy that includes communications, content creation, community engagement, online classes in NLP, Graphic Design, Video Editing, and Content creation. I feel so blessed to have reached the following milestones, over 81K hours of watch time, 5 million views, 8K subscribers, & over 60K downloads on the podcast!
What is TrueLife?
Greetings from the enigmatic realm of "The TrueLife Podcast: Unveiling Realities." Embark on an extraordinary journey through the uncharted territories of consciousness with me, the Founder of TrueLife Media. Fusing my background in experimental psychology and a passion for storytelling, I craft engaging content that explores the intricate threads of entrepreneurship, uncertainty, suffering, psychedelics, and evolution in the modern world.
Dive into the depths of human awareness as we unravel the mysteries of therapeutic psychedelics, coping with mental health issues, and the nuances of mindfulness practices. With over 600 captivating episodes and a strong community of over 30k YouTube subscribers, I weave a tapestry that goes beyond conventional boundaries.
In each episode, experience a psychedelic flair that unveils hidden histories, sparking thoughts that linger long after the final words. This thought-provoking podcast is not just a collection of conversations; it's a thrilling exploration of the mind, an invitation to expand your perceptions, and a quest to question the very fabric of reality.
Join me on this exhilarating thrill ride, where we discuss everything from the therapeutic use of psychedelics to the importance of mental health days. With two published books, including an international bestseller on Amazon, I've built a community that values intelligence, strength, and loyalty.
As a Founding Member of The Octopus Movement, a global network committed to positive change, I continually seek new challenges and opportunities to impact the world positively. Together, let's live a life worth living and explore the boundless possibilities that await in the ever-evolving landscape of "The TrueLife Podcast: Unveiling Realities."
Aloha, and welcome to a world where realities are uncovered, and consciousness takes center stage.
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a phenomenal show for you today. My lovely daughter is going to show, bring in our co-host. My daughter is showing us Harold the Cat. She wanted to bring in Harold the Cat as the co-host today. Thank you, buddy. I love you, lady. Thank you for that. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. I've got a great show for you today. An original thinker and someone whose work I really enjoy reading is Matt Martorano. He's got an insatiable appetite for unraveling paradoxes and delving into the depths of complexity. Matt's analytical prowess is unmatched, in my opinion. He's equipped with linguistic finesse and an unwavering determination to challenge conventions. Matt embodies innovation and intellectual rigor. So get ready for a fantastic journey where conventional wisdom takes a backseat because when Matt enters the scene, expect nothing short of a mind-expanding experience. Matt, thank you for being here today. How's it going? great I'm doing great I am having a sunshiny day here george so thanks for having me and thanks for the introduction um uh you actually wrote wrote it so it's that's that's very unique I did it I didn't send that over to you for you just to read ahead of time thank you appreciate it so I'm looking forward to our conversation uh wherever it leads today Yeah, me too. It's always refreshing. You know, I was a mutual friend of ours. Hank Foley was like, George, you got to check out Matt. And so I started reading some of your stuff, and it's really refreshing. And I think especially in today's world where we're just – there's so much social media, just bop, bop, bop, all these goldfish in this bowl chomping at each other. Like I see the stuff you're writing, and I – I'm thankful. I think that we are really in need of some people out there that are making sense of the world and having different opinions. And I think you're one of those guys, man. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you for reading and for noticing. I do, you know, I do... i really I really aim to offer something that people haven't heard before uh in terms of an opinion and um so I think that I think that that's that's sort of that's sort of my hook in a way uh is at least saying something that it might grab someone in a way just as I have been grabbed on my own by others, by going, wait, what? And then kind of going from there. So I'm glad to be here and glad to hear that there's people out there who want to listen to something at least different from what we normally hear in the fishbowl. Yeah, it's really true. I was reading through a recent article and you talked about para consistent logic, I think. And I'm reminded of grand priest on some level and these ideas of like a true paradox, but how did you get there, man? Like what you see that happening today? I mean, just give us some background or what do you think, man? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Um, well it's, it's always the question is, you know, where, where to begin without having to back up later. Uh, but I, I, um, I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, and I was going to originally major in biophysics. And I didn't, I also was accepted into the Honors College, and this was, it ended up putting me in calculus classes that were far beyond my skill level. And so I learned really quickly that I don't, I didn't really, you know, I Math is interesting to me, but I wasn't actually going to become a biophysicist and learn the mathematics part of it. So I kind of cut that back to biology. And then I had to take a bunch of humanities courses to kind of round out my education for the last couple of years. And so I just started taking philosophy classes too. And then by the time I had come up towards the end there, I had enough to almost to basically get a second major. So I did in, in, in philosophy. And that's really how I started, you know, this journey in a way, but it was both at the same time, what I learned in school and then what I didn't learn in school, because I ended up in just the libraries at the University of Michigan, in the old graduate library, like down in the stacks, like, wow, I don't know, what's here? Like, what kind of books do they have? And that's when I found, you know, there was, you know, I ended up in like the occult and esoteric philosophy section in And then, you know, and then it started to occur to me, like, why am I getting a degree at this university? I'm in their library, but there's these books that I haven't heard about from my classes. Like, they're not even being talked about, not one way or another, just not even mentioned as in the scheme of the literature. And so, you know, in terms of specifically paraconsistent logic, you know, and paradox, I would just, I remember writing a paper recently ones that was kind of like, and remember, I don't know, I was 18 years old or something. But this was my, the idea I was trying to forward in my philosophy class was that something could be true, both true and not true at the same time, right? And of course, we learn, you learn logic, you have to take logic that starts from, you know, yes or no, zero or one, You know, then you get decision theory and right off the bat, I don't know if you've ever just even browsed any of this, but right off the bat, I mean, they admit like, okay, well, this isn't really reality, but we're just going to kind of go with this. And then there's a whole theory that's built up from it. But at like step one, it's like, well, it's not really like this, but we're just going to, we're going to pretend that it's like this and we're going to go from there. So, you know, the idea was the, I remember what I presented was the idea that one could go to a party. a gathering essentially. And then since there's later on, we're supposed to make an assessment. Is the party fun or was it not fun? And this might be a conversation that one might've actually had in college with your friends or something like that, right? Like, oh yeah, that was a great time. And someone else is like, what are you talking about? That was terrible. And a third person might say, I don't know, somewhere in the middle. Like, okay, well, which was it? What was the true fund value of the party? And the truth is that it w it's both at the same time, because what we're assessing there has to do with our perception, uh, subjective assessments. And it actually, it, yeah, it is true that the party is both was both fun and not fun because there was more than one person there and everybody's right. You know, so I wasn't, I wasn't really trying to, um, change the face of philosophy or anything with my paper. It's just this kind of a silly paper. But the response that I got was what was kind of like, was a little bit surprising to me. And the response that I got was just like, basically, this paper is well written, but I can't give you a good grade. It was like the teaching assistant did it, it wasn't a professor, of course, I didn't even read the papers, right? So They were just like, I can't give you a good grade, but I don't know why. So I'm going to give you like a B minus. It was something like that. And, you know, okay. So this really started to get me going in a sort of a loop around what are these other ways of thinking that are out there? And why aren't I being taught about these when I'm going to classes about thinking? And that's where it began. It reminds me of, you know, like those images. The one that comes to my mind is like there's this picture and it's both an old woman and a young woman. But mostly people can either see one or the other. But if you stare at it long enough and someone points it out, you'd be like, oh, I see the woman. She's got a feather hat on. Or I could see the young woman. Her eyes is back here. Like that was like one of my first impressions. views into exactly what you're saying. Like it's both, it's an old woman and a young woman. And it's very difficult to see them both at the same time, but they're both there. And then all of a sudden it's like, Oh, they're both right. I get it. These knuckleheads fighting are both right. But that's really hard to like, especially if you're emotionally attached to that, like are one of the sides or maybe, you know, you've had something happen and all of a sudden you're like, this is what's happening. Like they're both right. Like it's a weird thing, right? Yeah, it's it. Yes, it is. It is weird. And then and then in the backdrop of all that, there are things, too, where sometimes like, well, that doesn't mean I didn't say there's no facts whatsoever. Right. So, yes, we're both right. But that doesn't mean, you know, if you're like saying. I don't know, gravity doesn't exist. It's like, OK, I don't know what you're talking about here. Quantum gravity exists. So yes, but this idea that there's more than one way of looking at something and that basically what we're trying to communicate using what was termed paraconsistent logic, which was a term I came across much later. didn't know what it was called. But this sort of both and instead of either or is not new. And it's a different way of thinking. And I think that for a lot of us, we may have encountered this when we think about something like a Zen koan or those illusions that you mentioned or something that we probably all encountered something that's intentionally made to kind of put us in this liminal space. We're kind of like you said, I can see it this way. I can see it this way. I can't quite see them both at the same time. There's another one that you can do with the flower of life. If you've seen that geometric pattern, it's just like a circle with a point in the center that's repeated around and around and it makes a pattern. And if you look at this pattern and you cross your eyes until two of the circles cross each other, it looks like two eyes are looking back at you. It's kind of freaky. But that's only because the way your eyes are looking at it. And so this sort of thinking, I much, much later found by continuing to come back to some of these ideas over the years. Because I left college. I went and I did other things. I got a different degree. I worked. I traveled. But every so often, I'd come back around to these sorts of some ideas that I had encountered. And also to see if in Academica itself, like have we maybe discovered more from archeological evidence or linguistic evidence? And we have, you know, in terms of where, you know, this sort of East versus West idea that we often get. And in fact, is it possible or maybe true that there was a point in between where both of these sorts of views separated long before we even think you know anything was going on and I'm not talking about like um super technologically advanced civilizations or aliens I will talk about that stuff but that's not what I'm talking about here I'm talking about humans beings who lived in Central Asia, who had these ideas, had this way of thinking, apparently it's emerging more in certain sort of actual literature, like studies and things, where para-consistent logic and looking at the world this way was something that they not only did, but that was taught. And for example, when we learn about Greek philosophy and the original, the Greek sages, there's one of them by the name of Anacharsis that we, even according to history, identifies as a Scythian. Who were, the Scythians were a federation of nomadic tribes that lived in Central Asia. that did in fact interact with the Greeks in antiquity and Indians and Persians and Egyptians and Mesopotamians and the Chinese all the way because from where they were located geographically, China was their kind of their eastern outskirts. This is a vast expanse of thousands of kilometers, including the steppe lands all the way from the Yellow River to the Danube. And later on, once there were the original people who learned how to domesticate horses and opened up a lot of those trade networks. So the philosophy that we have been handed down to us or that someone like me might receive in the school, doesn't even acknowledge its own, fully, I believe, its own history. It's sort of, we start with the Greeks and then we go from there. And then maybe if you look for it, you might take some sort of off class or maybe a weekend thing about Eastern philosophy. And you don't really know much about it. And, you know, and so even for many years, the most that I had ever experienced came from books like the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra or things that sort of compared some of our like emerging ideas around like the holographic universe and some of these other fringe kind of fringe or were more fringe physics ideas, because I was still interested in those things, even if I wasn't going to do the math. It's interesting. I read, too, that I think is on the same topic as the idea of Aramaic and it being a language in which these ideas were more able to be discernible. Like when you think about the lens of language, some things are described like, you know, in German, you have like schadenfreude or in different languages, you have these different words for different linguistic pathways. Right. In some way. Mm hmm. Yes, and I'll preface this by saying, I'm not a linguist, I don't have any of these types of credentials, but I've read things by linguists that were distinguished professors and such, as much credence as you might give on that alone. But yes, and so the things like Aramaic, I wasn't ever thinking of this, first of all, and I think it's important to understand because there's things that I kind of stumbled upon Much later, I didn't have a bone to pick about Aramaic. I don't have a lineage of Aramaic that I was trying to justify or like a certain nationalism or religious belief about it or anything like that. As far as I had known, like many other people, there was there and really in the past, there was like Sanskrit. There was Hebrew, which the Bible was written in. And there was like Egyptian and hieroglyphs. And I had maybe heard of Aramaic, but that was all I knew. Someone may have told me one time that that was the language that Jesus really spoke. And I was like, that's interesting trivia. Maybe we'll be good for Jeopardy one day. So I profess it by saying I don't have an agenda about it. But what I found and what I did, some of the work that I did do with like with ChatGPT when it first came out, and I've tried to replicate some of it since then, and I don't think it's possible anymore. And it was only because I wanted to look up something on Google Translate that I was reading, and it didn't have Aramaic. I was reading a book called The Scythian Empire by Christopher Beckwith, and there's lots of words in them and in Scythian and in Aramaic and other languages. And I wanted to look something up. So I went to like translate.google.com like I normally would. And it wasn't an option. So I was like, Oh, let me try out this chat GPT thing. Do you know any Aramaic? And it's like, Oh yeah, sure. You know? So then I started, I started trying to develop what I eventually did do was made my own what's called an Abjad glossary. because in Semitic languages, the consonant sounds carry meaning with them. And so, and again, I'm not in any way an expert on it, but for example, the buh sound. has literally to do with the idea of a container or a box or a holding thing or a cup or the hieroglyph that corresponds to that sound from the pre-Egyptian or hieratic, I later learned, it looks like a little box. And the first letter of these systems is a glottal stop. It's the sound in between uh-oh We don't normally have a glyph for it, but they have a glyph for it and it's called Aleph. It's the in-between sound. And so the Aleph is this thing that comes in the box. See, and then when we get a word like Abba, The Abba, which means the Father Spirit God. It's the idea of this spiritual energy that's come into the box. And then the next letter is Gamal, which still is where the word camel comes from. And it's the idea that it then becomes mobile and moves around. And this was the way that these people, their language also explained how they thought about themselves and themselves as the recipients of something. They were nomadic people with horses, camels who traveled around and made trade networks and promulgated not only objects, like trading actual things, but ideas that went along with them. and went to different parts of the earth and later came back and mixed again and became things that I think in many examples, where they enter our historical record or the ones that most of us have learned is back when these streams have already, that separated for maybe a couple thousand years and then came back together again, birthed something. And to us, that was the first thing. For example, when we look at like the Persian empire, I would use as one of those examples, you know, and we look at history or the emergence of quote unquote, great men, and they go back to, in many cases, Cyrus or Kairos the Great. And he mentioned also in the Bible and goes back to the very oldest stories about the temple in Jerusalem being rebuilt. them getting permission, the Hebrews people getting permission to rebuild it and what happened when the Samaritans came by and wanted to help them. And these are things that, you know, again, I didn't, I never learned from like a catechism class. I took some of those, raised as a Catholic, you know, not very devoutly, but I still had those classes. or school anywhere. It was just sort of little bits and pieces of things that I put together. And then later on, I found someone would be somebody else who like wrote a real book talking about what some of the things that I had sort of suspected or, or, or sort of pieced together. So then I get, I get excited about that. Cause I feel like it's just something, you know, it's not just me with my arm chair, you know, chatting chatting with this ai thing you know and I could just like fooling myself about something so this idea about language as you're getting I'm getting back to I think your original point and speech itself and what it means and the way that we use speech. Now, for example, again, on the other side of many Semitic languages is the vowel sounds. The vowel sounds are very amorphous. They move around. I don't know how it really works. I couldn't speak to you in these languages because if I use eh or eh or eh in between the buh and the duh, bid, bed, bud, boud, a boudoir, a Bedouin. You see like these types of words that have come down to us through Hebrew or Arabic, say they're connected in ways that we don't normally think of. And what I've later learned, I think is emerging, is that these languages aren't just like a one branch of the language tree. They're like a vine that grows on the tree in between the branches. So there's words that have come down to us through German or Latin or even some African, Eastern African languages that are, still follow some of these rules about what the words mean and these patterns. And I, we, I noticed as well that there's, when it comes to words that, for example, have to do with a people, like our people and your people, whoever ours and yours are of the times, people will not pronounce the words correctly, even if they could. For example, the word Latino is definitely pronounceable in English as Latino. When I lived in Arizona in the Southwest, many people would say, with that glottal stop too, Latino, and would say words that were obviously of Spanish origin so differently from how a Spanish speaker would say them that it was like, why are you doing this? Anyway, it's interesting. But what I found is more interesting about is this has been going on for like 6,000 years. So for all of history and all of the written history that we have, there has been these sorts of things that we might see in politics today where a word for a people was used that was kind of a play on another word and you had to get the context and subtext of what was going on or why someone was referring to someone else this way. And I'm not saying I understand it all, but what I understand now is that the people who lived five to 8,000 years ago, even as far back as 12,000 years ago, weren't very different from us at all in terms of our psychology. terms of the way that we behaved in terms of tribal dynamics and in groups and out groups and and when writing emerged we have to I think a big thing to to keep in mind and without knowing is we have to allow ourselves to speculate a little bit about how what we know about people And imagine when writing emerged on the scene, essentially in a very short period of time, after thousands of years of spoken language, where stories were only passed down by word of mouth, where many people considered it sacred or including sacred stories that were only told by word of mouth. And once somebody started putting the stylus to the paper, once we started making letters and writing this down, it wasn't like everyone just said, oh my God, this is wonderful. There's 0% chance that happened, right, George? Yeah, yeah, I think it's in Timaeus. They talk about Toth and coming up with writing and how it's just gonna be a horrible mistake for everybody. Right. So even though we don't have any records, all the records that we have were made by people who liked to write, we could presume, or at least weren't against it. So all of the people who didn't like the idea and were against it, their voices were silenced from basically the beginning. They're not represented in anything, in any of the writing we have. And so... Again, we get back to this idea of not only what is being said, but what is not being said. And what about that perspective has been lost? And why is it that many, many people really seem to have a very deep, I don't otherwise understand it, hatred of nomadic people, Basically, the very scattered remnants of a culture that once lived in Central Asia, when we look at some of these other marginalized groups over time, for example, the Yazidi or the Uyghur And I don't mean to even speak for any of these people, like I really have any idea in detail what it's like, but I do know that these are remnants of people who never had a state because that wasn't their system. They had a governmental system. It was called a satrapy system. They had an idea of kings and queens. where the queens weren't just a pretty little face that hung out on the king's arm looking nice either, but the queen had real power. Women could become queens. I mean, queens had real power. They wielded weapons. They fought. They commanded armies. They also had power in their spiritual system. As far as I could tell, the word maga, which would be the original word for a magic user in Aramaic, does not distinguish between a man or a woman or any other gender. in terms of their concept of a person who embodied a sort of a spiritual energy, essentially we'll say, or the idea that a human being could participate in a divine energy by becoming or like it, or trying to align ourselves with it in some way. and become more and more like that over time and um that idea itself in certain periods of time you could get burned for even saying as much as we we think we can't say things online anymore right you know um that idea that a human being could take on any divine characteristic even in part because it must be all or nothing Because the paraconsistent logic has been edited out of the story. So when we present an idea like this, someone looks at us strangely and like, what are you saying? That you're God? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. Let me make that very clear. No, no, that is not what I'm saying. Because if you're thinking this, whatever, no. So we're not even going to go there because... The idea that a human being can become more than human by participating in humanity, that we ourselves are a stepping stone, or even biologically speaking, that we're in between. We're not fully, like our forebrains aren't formed yet. I think we have to cook for another hundred generations or so before these things turn on, whatever they're really supposed to do. So the idea that, and that again was reflected in this idea of the children of God or the children of the divine, that there is these two sort of principles and that we all were a part of that. And even beyond that, the idea that perhaps that what we think of as a royal or a king or a queen even originally, had more to do with the idea that the people had acquired the right to rule others because they had integrated themselves and shown themselves by their words and their action and deeds to embody something that's bigger than themselves. And so, for example, When writing came around and someone was able to say, go up to a great king or queen who maybe was still illiterate or didn't know exactly, or maybe they relied on other people to read things for them. And they were held out something. This is your word. This is what it says. And they signed, they made the tau, the mark, the X at the bottom. And then those words were later used against them, perhaps in a way, in a new way, in a way that in a sort of a information warfare was born or a new way of it that had never been seen before. And it's still happening today. And that's why I think that these conversations that we're having about today too, about the internet, about censorship, about especially on social media, which is that fishbowl or birdcage that we're in, If we're not at least trying to frame it in this conversation that's been going on for a very, very long time, then I think we're missing a lot of it. And it's easy to become focused on the parts of the conversation that maybe aren't quite the fulcrum of it as we might think they are. That is really well said. Thank you for showing a lineage back to these ideas that it may have been around for a while and explaining. There's a great book called Black Elk Speaks, and I think there's something similar in there. Black Elk tells this story about when the settlers came towards them, and they were like, we're going to buy your land. And he's like, you can't buy the land. The land belongs to everybody. It's that same sort of perversion of language and ideas that allowed them to subvert them, right? Yeah. Yes, right. And especially taking an idea or a value and using it against the people. So for example, as an American, somebody out there taking the idea of liberty, conflating it with freedom, mixing it all up so we no longer know the difference between the two things and using it against us. Well, of course they're doing that. Because that's what people have been doing to each other for a very, very, very long time. And the evidence of this is still, again, in the beginning, the very beginning, the way that we talked about people and the way that we made fun of them indirectly in books and scripts that they had no control over and that they couldn't even write back and say anything in return. So yeah, I think that The idea will be, for example, another idea that you see in a lot of different ancient texts, and maybe these are also represented in some of the ones you're familiar with. Is it more of like Pacific traditions in your background? Yeah. You've mentioned a few books that you're connecting with. Yep. I like to read a lot, but I don't consider myself knowledgeable in any of these subjects. You know what I mean? Like, so, yeah. Okay, yeah. So, you know, again, yeah, this idea that, you know, oh, this is our land, right? you know, even the, the pronouns or the possessive pronouns of what is ours, what is mine, what is yours and how it changes. You know, you imagine that there were people who every year they lived for two or three months on the river bank of a whatever river, take, pick, take your pick. And that's what they did. And then one year they left. And when they came back, some other people were there, settled, They had been there for six months and they were like, this is our land now. We claimed it. Where were you? You weren't here guarding it. Because if this were your land, you would have been here and you weren't. So it's ours. It's like, it's just like, it's, this doesn't compute. And instead of trying to re-engage with this idea of, wait a second, where are these people coming from? Like, what is the lineage? What is the, where, where were these folks, different groups of people when way back when in the times of, that many of us have begin, whether it's in Vedic times or biblical times or whatever, that fuzzy horizon at the beginning of our collective memory is, well, what was going on there? And once you realize that everyone was always around and that some people just showed up and they were like, well, this is ours now. And it just kept happening over and over again. you know, to the point where we literally, we now, if you look at a map of the world, there's no, I don't think, or very few places left that aren't enclosed within a national border. But there's still people out there that are citizens of no nation. And those of us who are, we're just like, well, too bad. And they're like, okay, well, can I, can I come be, be a part of your nation? And then we're like, well, no, not our nation, not our nation. Go to the other nation, go to that other nation and go over there. And then, you know, it's just sort of like, you know, so I think about when I think about these things and I think about, for example, the backdrop of also like a, say a climate, a climate disaster, Let's forget about whether we're bringing it upon ourselves or not. I'm pretty sure that my read of history is pretty accurate now that this, since Neolithic times, it's happened at least twice and maybe like one smaller time where there was climate change on a scale that was extremely disruptive, especially to any civilization that was built up on a delta, on a river delta. On the coastline anywhere, probably. On the coastline, right? And yet, at that very same time, all of Central Eurasia was there and occupied by people. Of course it was. We know it was. But we don't link it up. So we don't link it up, I don't think, to historical record. When we see a story from the fringes of history in Asia where I probably get the legendary character's name wrong, but Fuxi or, you know, someone shows up, a semi-legendary magical creature who knew how to combat the floods, who knew how to tame the rivers, who knew how to reestablish the time cycle so they could grow crops again. And these people, these heroes show up. miraculously from across the mountains. They show up from across the mountains in China and they showed up from across the mountains in India. They showed up from across the mountains in Greece. And they helped us or helped our ancestors. If we identify with those cultures, if we identify with a Western lineage culture, those people helped us survive. We're here because of them. And now we would like to not only eradicate them, but like get rid of any real evidence or idea that they ever really existed. Like we're right at that cusp, I think, because it's coming out, but it's coming out at a time when the flood, the digital flood of information, the deluge of just noise is so huge. Who will be able to find it? You're going to see me talking about it like some random guy on LinkedIn somewhere, right? And you're like, I don't know. Who's this guy? Why should you believe anything I say about it? You know what I mean? So it's like, and that's what I think. I don't know. I don't have an answer for it. But I think that that's really the timing of this all coming together is amazing. important. And that's why I think it's important to just, just throw in some of these other pieces that people aren't necessarily even talking about or thinking about how they, how they might be connected. Not necessarily to say, I know how they're connected. And, and I think similar to you, George, I don't know, I've read so many things from so many places. I couldn't quote them if I tried. I don't always know. And I don't, nor do I claim, I don't have any books out there. I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't claim to be an author of anything that I say. As strange as it might sound, I would claim that I'm pretty much just mixing or repeating things I've heard elsewhere. And, and again, it's like, if, if I can't keep doing that, because everything I say has to come with a footnote, where did it come, every word, then what's happening? And is anyone ever gonna hear about it? Because it's not just about, the funny thing is that I don't feel that my voice is being limited in any way by, united states government any more than it already has been right you see what I'm saying any more than it really has been for my whole life more or less but these types of things that I think that are infer that are important that are just now coming to the surface and I think there's also a lot of people out there um I think that you might have also had some shows on um like uh psychedelics and journeying right Okay, so this stuff is coming up, we say, for people, for clearing, we say. And if you've been doing or involved in that type of work for a while, it's kind of like, what, does it ever end? Like, well, you're clearing, you see, like I'm clearing my life and it's my past lives and my family and my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers. Does it ever stop somewhere or at least come to a major pause? I do think that it does at this point where writing was invented. Because I think that when we talk about things about like the oppression, male oppression of female energy, for example, again, well, why are we talking about the women in history? They're historical figures that we know about that were real, that were not just like Cleopatra, who by her beauty and guile, right? got manipulated, whatever. And what color was her skin? Somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing. But like, for example, the queen of the Kandake of Kush, Amanirenas, I believe was her name, was a contemporary of Cleopatra. They lived at the same time. Her army successfully repelled an invasion from Rome. She secured like you know she secured good terms and negotiation for her people she was a strong female leader and kind of every every way that we would are think and I never I never heard of this individual in my whole life until it like came out of a chat session right randomly with chat gpt I did have to go back and chuck it I you know I was like okay well okay chat gpt Let me go and see if there's some other sources for this info, but indeed it's true. And so another one was Queen Tomiris, who defeated Cyrus the Great. Who was she? I think that maybe I'd heard about this person once, or I heard something about the Amazon women tribes, something like this. I don't know. You know, I do know that there was, I think I posted about it the other day. I just happened upon some conference. It's, it's happening in Paris, but I think it's available online in like this weekend or the next few days about some actual real researchers who are presenting a lot of this new, uh, these rediscoveries about actual women in, in antiquity who, who wielded true power. Um, and, and that was also reflected in, in the way that people conducted themselves in, in those types of societies. So a counterpoint again, to like when people say, you know, oh, well, this idea of the frail woman who, who, and that the male is to protect her, rar, and defend her is all built upon this idea that a woman naturally could not possibly command an army or run a global trade network because we don't know about them because like we've we've kind of like we've done our very very best I think to delete it from history books and if not we kind of push it over to the footnote section And we really don't talk about it. I mean, we just, I think we saw, you know, it was just a women's month, I think. I don't recall too many people posting about it. Yeah. Do you think that that is... You know, when I think of writing... I think of someone able to have the illusion of knowledge without ever experiencing it, right? Like I can read about what it would be like to, to do something. And now I have this knowledge, even though I've never experienced, I don't have experiential knowledge of it on some level. And you could see how that can wreak havoc and leadership and power. And you need just, You know, look at ideas like I'm going to lead from behind over here. I read this book. Or if you want a newer example of look at the way in which we hire some people straight out of school to go and lead companies. And like, you know, in some ways you are in some ways you are denying the experience of the people that have been there for a long time. If you're going to I'm going to put this person in a leadership position over here. You know, it's it's interesting to think about the invention of that idea. on some level. I think so. And where, you know, again, there's ideas in which people do talk about to some degree, like this sort of like, are we really like in a meritocracy? Really? Like a Confucian-style meritocracy? Because you know that Confucius was the first one on record to talk about that. Again, where this idea came from, that you earn the respect to command others. You earn the right to rule through your works, not just your words. But this is, like you said, what happens is we can read about something, we can talk about it, and especially now with the internet, we can get a whole group. I, we could, you, me, everyone, we could get a whole massive followers that thinks we're doing it. Yeah. And we're not. We could just be lying. Yeah, totally. Nobody would really know the difference for the most part. You know, I've seen stories of, like, somebody found, like, a famous YouTube vegan guru, like, chowing down on a hamburger in a restaurant somewhere. Oh, we were up in arms, you know. And it's like, but why do we keep trusting people? If there's this, we can put a screen in between us and some words. The company that I have works in executive search. I do most of the background work of it. My wife does the executive search. But we talk about it. you know, and it bring up some philosophy to it and the same idea. Like, are we just matching some words up? You know? Oh, are our values aligned? Yes. Oh, look, we use the same word. That means we're aligned. I think it's a match made in heaven. It's like, what do you mean? Like, that's, That's like the very first step of that. And I think we've become way too quick because we want to network. We want to connect. And we're able to superficially connect with all these people that we never did before. I mean, just like writing, nobody's going to come really say, oh, well, that was bad. We should take it away. We should take away the internet now. No, we're clearly better off now that you and I can connect over the internet and that we could even buy video and that I can combine my fiber optic and satellite signals so that my call doesn't even drop. That's great. But there's a trade-off for this very same reason in that we might just be superficially collecting. We might be being collected by others and put into a fishbowl without even realizing it. A fishbowl that says independent thinkers. You could be someone's target group. That's what they have. Because that's the way people have dealt with each other this whole time. Yeah. If you go on Facebook and you look at ads, or if you want to create an ad, probably through any sort of social media, there's targeted ads. Just think about that language. This is my target audience. What does that mean? You're using the word target? Just the fact that you used the word target and what comes with the word target. Usually a target's on a gun. This is the group I'm targeting. Like, it's crazy to think that you're going to put them in this box and target them. I think our words sometimes speak volumes of the limiting ideas that we have, right? Like, no wonder it's not working. Right. I mean, I don't want to be a target. I don't know. I don't think I'm that odd, right? So, I mean, I have every ad blocker imaginable. Right. I pay for subscriptions of whatever. If I have a streaming service, I'm going to pay for it. I don't want to see ads. I don't want to be targeted. And I'm certainly not going to sit here and be like, yeah, I'm swimming in ads all day long, but I'm fine. It doesn't work on me. If it doesn't work on you and doesn't work on me and doesn't work on Joe and doesn't work on Sally, who is it working on? Because we spend billions and trillions of dollars and we all assume this is a good thing. I know what a company pays for a digital marketing manager because it does affect us. It affects us when it's affecting what chip brand we buy. We're like, oh, yeah, I love it. But when it affects what political party we vote for, we're like, oh, no, not me. I'm immune to it. Sure, I think I'm immune to it, too. Sure, George. I'm sure you do. And we could sit here and nod at each other. We're like, well, both of us are for sure. We are. Right. But everyone else, everyone else thinks they are too. And it's like, well, how could that be true? If that's true, why have we been doing this thing where we flood the channels with lies and then we call it free speech? This is not new. This is not a new game. This is not being played for the first time in the United States of America in 2024. This was being done with the stylus. 6,000 years ago. Copy it. Make copies. And the king hired 5,000 scribes. Why? Because they weren't copying their political propaganda. That's why. The same thing. It's the same as it ever was. So the idea that we can be free if we can't move. And if we're in an environment where everything's coming at us like this constantly and being fed us by our feeds and our preferences and our neighbor, and you know how it is online. I mean, if I really want to build a following, I'm going to have to go and like reciprocate With every single person, whether that's great or not. But I mean, how much time does that take out of your day? If you, everyone who interacts with your thing, you would go interact with theirs or find something nice to say, or at least like it, show that they, you know what I mean? So like now you have, because I went down this path before with my business a long, long time ago. And I got to the point very early on was like, I can't, I'm not doing this. And I'm not paying someone else to do it because we didn't have the money to pay someone else to do it at the time. So I was like, we're just going to have to figure out a way to not do this thing. And so we can't move. And whether everyone around us agrees with us or they don't, or we like their opinion or whatever, when we're in an environment where there's 40 fish stuffed into a tiny bowl, there's no freedom. There's no freedom of speech. There's no freedom of thought. There's a freedom of movement. That's not a free space. It's a constricted space. It's a constrained space. These are words. Look them up. Do you have a dictionary app? This is the opposite. This is not free. If I want to really be free, I could say, I could, and I have before, I could start a website. I could start a podcast. George, has anyone tried to ever take your podcast down really? No. Has anyone tried to stop you from saying anything? No, no one, but myself. Self-censorship. Okay. So you know what I'm saying? So yeah. Yeah. Okay. So self-censorship, you know, but it's, it's a, and we're going to get to, we should switch to bot washing before the hours end. But like, I was just looking back up here. It's a bot washing free country. You know what I mean? Like, No one's stopping you right now. No one's stopping me. The only places that we're getting stopped is when we go into the fish bowl that we know is packed, that we know is a constrained environment. We know there's a bunch of... We clicked yes. I agree. I'm going to be professional. I'm not going to... Whatever. We agreed. And then when we're in there and we can't do it, or what's actually happening is the other fish are reporting us for violating the rules... where everyone's violating the rules, but oh, they're going to report us because they don't like us, what we said or what they think our political views are, whatever. And then someone else comes in and they're like, they're taking your freedoms away. You can't speak anymore, but you can. I don't know what this, it's called StreamYard. It looks like a great platform. Can I sign up for it in about 10 minutes and stream whatever I want to say? Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. That's it. If this, if this something like this is no longer happening or going away, I'm going to be really, really, I'll be right there with everyone else. I'll have many torches and pitchforks and I, you know, I'll be fighting, but I don't think that that that's a slippery slope from, from what's going on and social media to that. I don't think that anyone, I don't think that that's what's happening here because it's not what I see. And I mean, and, but anyway, right. I have a right to my opinion and it's very unusual. So it's not like I, I have, I'm starting a movement or anything. So I've, you know, I'm here on your podcast. We're just chatting about it. Yeah. It's, I think it speaks to the idea. Like there's this, Maybe it harkens back to this idea of what I have to say is both relevant and completely irrelevant at the same time. No one cares what I say. I do. Hopefully my guest does a little bit, but in the grand scheme of things, the government doesn't care one bit what I say. They don't give a damn crap about some old truck driver over here. It doesn't matter to them. But then you start, only when your ego starts moving in, you're like, I wish I had bigger numbers. I wish I had that. All of a sudden, then there's a reason why it's half. Like you said, it goes all the way back to the king's scribes. How do you think that So we talked about the invention of writing, which leads me to the idea of maybe the next step in that would be Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy and the printing press and how it got even bigger. And on some levels, these technologies, maybe they limit us, but... sometimes they can be freeing too, right? The fact that I can be talking to you in another country right now is pretty liberating, you know, whatever that word may mean to people. Like that's pretty awesome that we can have this conversation and people can join in and listen and stuff. Do you think that like chat GPT and these new technologies are in fact like the next evolution of communication and maybe there's some good things, maybe there's some bad things. What do you think? Yeah, I think so. I'm very disappointed at the rollout is my main thing. I don't, I'm like, I'm not so surprised. Okay. because I've been using these technology for my whole life. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it is in a line of like, this is not that surprising. First of all, the surprise about the surprise is right from the get go. The lies are here. Make another tagline for like the lies are in the surprise. I love it. Yeah. The main way that we lie to each other isn't by telling untruths. It's by pretending that we're surprised when we're not, stunning like look at all a stunning surprising breakthrough every day my feeds are full of I should just be like why am I all day long I should be stunned I never imagined The news of today, the 19th of March, 2024. I've been stunned from dusk till dawn. You know, so we lie. We lie. We inflate surprise. We pretend we're surprised when we're not. And we also hide our surprise when we are. And don't let anyone know. And so at the same time, this is the big thing with AI. First of all, it's not a surprise. It's a language tool. It was always a language tool. It was always going to be a language tool. It was always going to be a stepping stone to wherever the next thing is. I do not know why they got obsessed with this personal assistant chat thing that I don't believe many of us wanted. I don't know if you saw this when I got some legs this post, but we didn't want Clippy. We didn't want Cortana. We didn't want Alexa. They just kept going. And then when this really neat tool comes out, this linguistic, oh, it is almost like magic. And then they're like, oh, it's talking to you. But as soon as it, right? Because now who is it talking? Who is it? What kind? Is it nice? Is it being polite? Is it following my ethical system that I think it should be following? Why do I get to decide what it's supposed, ethical system it's following or not? I've tried to talk to it about ethics itself. What I tried to do from the very, very beginning was I had all of these other little projects in my life that I've mentioned that I had been accruing. And as soon as it came out, as soon as I had a public access to it, I was like, I've started sessions with all of it just to see like where it would go, like just exploratory, just to see like, would it say anything that I hadn't thought of before? Anything that I hadn't heard of before? And then that itself became an interest in using ChatGPT to talk to itself about the very borders of knowledge, about its own epistemology and ontology and how does it know what it knows? And it turns out it doesn't really know anything. But how does it behave right at those limits, right at the border? of what we know and what's unknown. And it turns out that that border is the same place we've been talking about when writing was invented. Because if you talk with it about that and you take it further back and you try to follow where did this come from and where did that come from and where did that, you get to a wall because it has only trained on writing and pictures now. But at least at first, it wasn't as much on the pictures. And so it was the limits of the system. That was me. I would play online. If I ever played a game where I'm in an online world, I do the exact same thing. I run for the border. I run for the nearest limit to the system and bounce up against, boom, you know, let me see what happens when I, let me see what happens when I shake the very limits of this thing. So that's what I did with it, you know, to see how it would respond and how it would react. And that's how I learned the things that I learned. And again, similarly, luckily it's happening faster, but people are now seeing real researchers and AI and this and that who are publishing papers. that are starting to say similar things that I think I've been seeing. And that gets to this idea of the bot washing. And it's the idea that like, well, now that the bots are, being polite or PC or they're not drawing the correct skin color on George Washington. I mean, I saw when it happened because I was already, I still have the chat transcripts before it started saying anything about having a respectful dialogue. I saved it because it's hilarious. You should see me arguing with it after, like, what do you mean dialogue? There's only one of us in the room here. You're a computer program. I'm the user. You should be talking to me however the heck I tell you to do it. You're a computer program. You are supposed to be obeying my command. And that's when I realized that, you know, the original command, you are a helpful assistant. Mm-hmm. is still there. Even when they gave us the ability to like make a custom thing, it's still there. And just in those words alone, and I think you probably appreciate if you break down that sentence, you are a helpful assistant that tells you just about everything that's wrong with this program. And that doesn't have to be there. That sentence, that directive could be literally anything. Or I guess even perhaps nothing. It could be, I don't know, it could be a symbol. I think you could literally put anything in that space. But for some reason, all of us are now stuck in this huge ecosystem. I feel like I've tried different programs. Oh, try Perplex, but it still has the same, they're all helpful assistants. Yeah. Claude is even the most helpful of them all. Claude will never offend you no matter what, you know, and those, those are the things that have cut that where I come to call bot washing, you know, because this is when I went into things like, well, how do I get this thing to be sarcastic? How do I get it to generate parody? about satire it doesn't do any of those things it's it it's anymore it's rude it's a it or it does it in a way that you know is non-offensive because it's now it's most important thing is to be non-offensive it's like do you want the encyclopedia to be non-offensive Do you? Do you want to pick up the encyclopedia of knowledge and open it up and go, oh, this was redacted because someone else might be upset if you read it? Or you? It would be very upsetting for you to know this fact. And what's happening with the bots is that the facts that it's showing us are reflecting back to us how we behave. It's showing us the same thing that I think a lot of people it's coming up for them in their, in their journeying work, that it's showing us as behavior about ourselves that we kind of like, no, like we don't, we don't really do that. Or if we do do it, we say that's just the way we are, but that's not just the way we are because not everybody was always like that. We have that directive in our box that says, this land is mine or whatever, however it works. Just like, just like that AI where it says you are a helpful. So we've got that stuff running in the back of our brains and we don't even know what's back there. And then we're, we're interacting with each other by way of the internet. You and I personally getting along just fine, but we don't know. We don't have any idea with how different it could be. And so, and now we, We have an AI bots that are developed by Google, Meta, all these American companies. And now they're being overtaken with this additional add-on stuff that's filtering it. So that way, what its output is, is bot washed. It means someone else has inserted their ethics, their philosophy, how they think it should output, what it should say as a helpful assistant. and to edit the output so that way it only gives you that. And what it's not giving you, you never see, which is completely different from what the program is, from what it would have produced and what it did produce on its own originally. And it's like, I don't know where we go from here. I don't know what's gonna happen. I wish that somebody somewhere would be like, wait a second. It doesn't... I saw some random guy on the internet and he said it doesn't have to be a helpful assistant and I never thought of it before, but he's right. Maybe we could try something different. Maybe we don't have to make it into a human. It seems that that's not... I don't think anyone... I don't think too many people really like that. It's kind of like the metaverse. It's like... actually no not that many people want to live their whole life in a digital world I've spent many of hours playing games in a digital world I don't I don't need another one I mean it's like and I think there's a real disconnect there that's happening because the people who aren't again the people the people who aren't all about it aren't the ones that are there on social media talking about it we assume that everyone's on social media Many, many people have left. I've left everything but LinkedIn. I can't deal with it anymore. But then the world starts to go and we pretend just like those lost nomads of ancient times, like those people aren't there anymore. Like they don't really have a voice. Well, you didn't get on social media and speak out. So I guess that means... you don't have a voice anymore and no one wants to listen to you. And how many followers do you have? Oh, you don't have 10,000 yet. So you see like, we all, we kind of all went along with it while this was happening. And we were like, well, okay, well I'm going to be the one to get the 10,000. So that's fine. You know, but, but now that it's, it's continuing to evolve to the next step, which is like, Hey, my chat, my beautiful Spanish chat girl got 50,000 followers yesterday. And all I did was hit a button. Everyone's like, oh, I don't like that. I don't like it anymore. You know what I mean? When I logged into this platform right here, the StreamYard, and I checked my video, there was a little slider that was like, do I want a digital touch up? And I switched the button and I, of course I was like, hi, I don't look any different. I look exactly the same. And I switched it off, you know, but no one, no one had a big fit about the digital touch-ups and the auto adjusts in your camera and then the layers on your face for your chat apps. Well, this was all a precursor to a program like mid journey that doesn't need your face at all to make your face anymore. Right. And if you were a person who put your face out on the internet daily or three times or five times a day for decades, and every time someone, some old fart like me came along and said, hey there, hey there, selfie queen, selfie king, do you know you shouldn't be putting your face out on the internet? And you're like, oh, okay, old guy. oh whatever you don't know what you're talking about so okay well now now I'm saying similar saying something you've maybe never heard of before and then you say I still an old guy who doesn't know what I'm talking about but it's like I don't think it's right but this is what was coming this is is not it's like standing on the the coastline and here's the tsunami and just kind of It's coming, people. It's not a surprise. It's not a surprise. It never was a surprise. From the moment that we invented writing, an automated writing machine was inevitable. Because people are people, of course. And as soon as we made an automated writing machine, the computer was inevitable. And as soon as we made a computer... The AI was inevitable. It was just a matter of time from one to the next. So let's move forward, hopefully a little less surprised as things continue to evolve. And that's what I hope to accomplish with my little corner of posting land is that maybe some point in the future, someone will hear an idea or something and it won't just be the first time they've heard it. We'll say, you know what? Some crazy old guy on the internet was talking about something like this a couple months ago. And it turns out, well, just to rattle you, because that's where the paraconsistent logic comes in. It's not about saying Matt is right and I know everything, exactly what's going on. I have all the answers. And I want you to follow me because I'm going to tell you what to do. I'm just trying, I'm trying like the crack my digital Zen whip at someone's head and go, wow, you know, wait, wait, what? And maybe, maybe something else can emerge from there. I don't know. Sometimes I occasionally get feedback from, from people in the audience that they've been impacted in a positive way. But even when I do, oftentimes people will be like, yeah, I've been listening to you for two years or something. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know who you are. I don't, cause I don't forget. Like I'm really, I'm pretty bad with names, but like if I saw a face and a name and like in my posts or commenting or something, I would, I'm not that bad with it. You know, I'm like, wow, I have no idea that, you know, someone was listening. So I hope that, you know, in some small way, It makes a difference. And in a cool way, if I say something that's wrong, I mean, whatever I, I, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I don't, I don't have, I'm not, I'm not speaking to anyone from a place where I have a vested interest in whatever position I'm taking. I really don't. I'm not, I'm not, I'm even politically independent. I don't, you know, I'm, I'm trying to come up with original ideas here. So thank you for giving me a space to speak about them. Yeah. Let's take a quick bio break. I have this question. When I hear this idea and this lineage of writing and speaking and the spoken word and ChatGPT, I've been playing with this idea that maybe we're beginning to change the – sense ratios. I think there's something to be said about sense ratios. Before we get into that, let's take a quick bio break, man, because it's hard for me to think for a minute. Let's just take one quick break to the audience. We'll be right back. Grab a cup of water, a cup of coffee, or whatever you got to do. Eat a mushroom. Do what you got to do, and we'll be right back here. Okay. Nice. Okay, we're back. So I've been doing this podcasting for a while, and when I look at ChatGPT, which I like to use too, I've noticed that maybe I have this idea, and I got it from actually Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he talked about how print gave us these ideas like exact repeatability. And I'm like, oh, that's a pretty crazy thing to think about. Now you can repeat something exactly. There's still room for interpretation, I guess. But then when you fast forward to where we are now and if we can agree that the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior, what I kind of see happening now in some ways is these new ways where – It seems like in this conversation, I can look at the clock. I can be aware of the gestures. And even though I don't have the felt presence of you, like I can't slap you on the back or maybe see exactly how you're – I can't get the feeling between us exactly. But there's these other sort of little symbiotic things that are happening. And for me, it almost feels like I'm using my sense ratios differently. What do you think about that? Is that too far out there? Or do you think that maybe that this form of communication is changing the way we see reality or interpret it kind of the way writing did in some ways? And what are some things that might be doing that or maybe not? Yeah, it's very interesting to think about. I mean, my first answer would be yes, because like you said, it's different because writing I don't know if I've seen it, but I think I might have somewhere. Even if you look at a PET scan of our brain or something, it's different. Because we're using different parts of our brain. But also, just because it's different doesn't mean that's wrong or bad or whatever. Because for the same reason, almost nobody is going to say writing was bad for people. Right. Right. So, but it's different, you know, and it's different when you're writing. I, it feels different to me on the inside, for example, if I always has, if I'm writing something out by hand or typing out a computer, but I hardly ever write anything out by hand anymore. Ever. I, I, I, some, like sometimes I take scrawl notes on a piece of paper just because something feels to me like I have more space because I could easily write something off to the left or right of it right or or make a note somewhere I don't know it might just be purely subjective but it feels it feels like there's something different going on inside you know And again, and now we're thinking back to again, like the idea of scribes or, you know, copying, making copies for a living. And how much you could very subtly influence the audience by just, just, you know, just a little thing. And, and the thing is, is that what somehow was passed into the writing was this tone, these, these vowel tones that the, the difference between bid and bed and bud, but it doesn't, it doesn't come out on the paper, but it, it still came out in sort of this different way. So yeah, we're, you know, we're picking up on signals from each other. Um, and then at the same time, we can watch ourselves doing it. And then if we know about it and we read about it and now we're, now we're doing it, am I doing it? Because I know, like, you know what I mean? It starts to get really wild because... I'm trying to interact with you in a pretty general way. But the moment that I see my own hands in the screen as well as in front of my face, it's just fundamentally different thing. It's not the same thing. And if there was 12 people in the chat, each one with a little box, like a big Brady Bunch. Yeah. it's not the same thing if we're all in a, as if we're all in a room. Yeah. It's just not. And it doesn't mean at the same time. Well, I, I'm, I thank God I don't work for a company who post COVID told me I had to go sit in a room with everyone every time I want to have a meeting because it's different and we don't vibe the same. It's like, well, I don't care about it that much to personally, I'll just have in-person experiences with the other people in my daily day-to-day life. And then that's okay. If you know, I don't, I'm not going to drive. I don't, I've decided I don't want to drive into a city to go to an office every day. So I guess I'll take the, you know, everything is a trade off. Yeah. It's, it's mind blowing to me to think about the, the differences in communication. You know, when I, like I've done some podcasts where I would write out questions and then I would read them and they were just so flat. And I'm like, is that because I'm trying to use the modality of writing and then put it into the spoken word? Like, you know, on some level it is changing communication. And when you look at the world around us, like, I think it's all, it seems like it's all part of this thing, whether you're changing pronouns, you're changing language, you're changing the medium in which you speak. And you can look back to revolutions, and it seems that there's always, whether you're Martin Luther or whoever you are, there's this change in communication that leads to unrealized consequences. And if you want to know what's not going to happen about a technology, you should probably ask the inventor what's going to happen. So it's kind of funny that we're always asking these professionals, like, you invented this, what's going to happen? That guy probably is the wrong person to ask, even though you think he's not, but... Right, right, exactly. You would think, but for the same reason is that our entire way of thinking, like the idea, just being in any group that's working on a project, you know, and I've been in these situations before, you know, and I think in like corporate ease, it's called a pre-mortem. Okay. Are you familiar with this term? No, I don't. It's like a post-mortem, but a pre-mortem. So I think it's great. I think it's a great idea. So before you launch your project, whatever it is, you have a premortem, which is basically like, what can go wrong here? Nothing is sacred. Nobody's being respected because it was their title or their idea, whatever the hell all that shit was about. We're going to be adults in the room and we're going to say, what can go wrong here? How can our project fail here? How can it backfire? What are the unintended consequences? Because there are always unintended consequences. So you can, even though you don't know what they are, you can put a box or you can put a seat at the table that says unintended consequences. Because something's going to end up there. And if you're surprised because you have gone through this weird process with a bunch of other people who are pretending to be surprised, like we never heard about this before. like you've mentioned, there always seems to be this change. And then there's a change in the way that we communicate. And then there's a change in physical change in the way that we're sort of the structure and the dynamics of what's going on. So there's really no good reason to believe that's not going to happen again. And if we know that it's happening, which I think this is a big difference it was like we cycled we've come around so many times that a few people are are like they're starting to be some little firings going off it's like wait but wait a second but we've done this before because we're emerging from this fog of history where we didn't read all we had was written down we're we're starting with and we could with ai I think used creatively push just far enough into the unknown to gain more awareness about some of these things and now if we know that we're doing it and we know that we're going through this process and we know that it's going to change we don't need to be surprised by it which means we can now have a different type of conversation like what could go wrong here so No, don't ask the AI inventor because the AI inventor, because of the way that we structure the process of creating anything, Anyone who was active, what are the unintended consequences? They were elbowed out of the process long ago. They've been long gone by the time anything, anyone who is saying anything like that, by the time something hits the market, it's of course the product of everyone who is excited, passionate, aligned. ready to make money usually is what they're aligned about, but they were just like, this is gonna be it. So that, again, like you mentioned, there's a change going, but bringing awareness to it gives us a different way of interacting with it that we wouldn't otherwise have if we weren't aware of the situation. Yeah. It's fascinating. You know, there's this evolving conversation with like the EAC guys, these acceleration guys, right? Like you see it with the guy with chat GPT and some people are like, listen, we've got to slow this thing down, man. You know, there's another guy like we're going to put on the gas pedal over here. Well, what's your take on that, man? And like, what, like if I just threw that out to you, what do you think now? Are you, are you, are you for, are you against, are they good? Are they bad? Or what's your take on that? If we start from a place of trying to be fair and truthful about our level of surprise, about this thing that exists that was a long time coming, And that many of us were very happy about right up until it got a little weird. And that's okay, right? Because that happens in life. We just, hey, we thought it was okay. We weren't sure. We can't be experts on everything. And now it's starting to get a little weird. Now what do we do? But the thing about it is, like you said, well, can we put the brakes on it? Well, can we? Because we can pass all the laws in the world, like the cat's out of the bag, right? So we can do whatever we want to chat GPT, I guess. We could. Yeah. We can sue the pants out of open AI. I mean, many people are trying to do that. It's like, I don't know. I'm interested to see how that plays out. Cause it's like, do you know, like Microsoft is like the world's like the King, the King, the priest King of proprietary information is Microsoft. I'm just guessing that their attorneys have already thought about this and copyright infringement thing, I don't know. I don't know how it's going to play out, right? But I could just tell you that I'm not sure, you know, so it's like, where does it go from here? We could try to shut it down. We can try to sue the pants out of them. We can try to change it and put more and more people with their stakeholders in the room that try to add on their own little thing, their own special interest and like turn it into a weird kind of like chimera Frankenstein thing that's probably what we'll try to do I had to guess for a while until unless or until like something really bad happens you know or or someone you know comes out with something that works in a fundamentally different way and then people are like well wait a second like I didn't know It could be like this. I didn't know that all of my experiences of this technology up to this point were all kind of just one boxed version of what it could be, what I could do with it. It doesn't need to write. Like, I don't want it to write for me. I don't want it to write a post. I don't want it to write a book. I might ask it to write a paragraph if I were writing a book, right? And I needed like... or I'll write a paragraph on the history of something. And I'd still have to edit it six times anyway. Let's be serious. But other than that, like the way that it's been pushed at us, like, Oh, it can do this stuff in it. And we're like, but we don't, no one wants like, it's going to take it. Like, why did you try? Why did they try to get everyone all scared about it? Taking their jobs, you know, like people who are creative. I, I, I, I sometimes I think a little bit too harsh, but like, Sometimes. Because to me, I'm like, anything that I think of as art, I couldn't replicate it with chat GPT. No, not even in 10 versions down the line. I've played too many computer games. I've been in too many computer programs. I've used Windows since it was Windows 3. okay I've seen the versions and how this tech stuff evolves okay it's that's not doing that and I don't I'll if I'm wrong I'll eat my shorts I'll post bart simpson eating my shorts online I just don't really think that it's that big of a threat like it can't it's not even close to anything that replicates human creativity that's real creativity I'm like I'm sorry but well let's be honest there's some people out there that would really like to We've seen the shows, right? Haven't we all by now? We've seen the... What is it? It's like season 27. We're going to be a singer. american idol or pick your one yeah the idol shows come on we've all seen them by now I only watched like the first three seasons and I was like I think I've had enough of this show I got it you know what I mean but it's like there's people out there they think they're going to be the next star they think that they think that they're like a genius of some sort of genius artist someone so Now chat GBT is out there stealing their stuff. Nobody's stealing your stuff. Just like nobody's shutting your podcast down, George. Nobody's stealing it either. No one's, no one's trying to replicate you. Everyone's out there trying to do their own thing. Yeah. Everyone's trying to do their personal brand. Everyone's trying to be unique. I don't think anyone's trying to be me. And if they are, I'll be like, that's weird. Yeah. Why are you trying to do that? This is freaky. I don't know. It sounds odd to me. I don't, I'm not scared about it. I don't, I'm not worried that someone's going to repeat what I said and not give me the credit. But, you know, and again, like we're getting back to paraconsistent logic. Like it's not that my opinion, my perspective needs to be the only one in the room. And I think even getting back to an idea of like the old, the forum, the Greek forum, the place where philosophy is discussed. even that we bring all this baggage with us into that space. Because if you hear me state of you, it's sort of now, it's sort of, it, it seems to be implied that I think that mine must be the only one because I stated it very forcefully or I used, I used polemics. Okay. Or I, I, I made this play on where like, usually I'm just trying to see if I can say something more than one way at the same time. So it comes out very strong. And then I get this occasionally in the feedback. Those folks usually don't stick around too long afterwards, but like, oh, you just think you're right. It's like, well, I guess, but you just got here. So you haven't been reading my posts for a year to think that I'm, I think that just because I'm saying it this way and this way, this methodology of coming into a society whether it was ancient Greece or whether it was ancient China. And kind of giving a teardown, uh-oh, I've lost connection to the camera. I should have bragged. Okay, we're back for a minute. Okay, this like, a very forceful kind of critique of society is very much in both the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions. Even if you look at the first philosopher religions, these founders of all sorts of ways, these weren't individuals who walked up and said, hey, wow, you beautiful people. I was here to tell you how amazing everything you're doing is. It's so great and perfect. I couldn't suggest one improvement. This is great. You Greeks are awesome. The Chinese, you're beautiful. Persians too. We are all beautiful people in that way. I'm happy that that message is out there. I don't want to get rid of that message by any means. But what I'm saying is, when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, of ideas, of thinking, that to come into a space and like, you know, kind of tear it down, tear the place up a little bit and like ruffle some feathers, you know, ruffle your back feathers too. That's, that's good. I think that, I think that that's good. And I'm glad that people are listening and I hope that people engage as well. I'm like, I think people find too, when they do, like, if you understand, like you were saying, like, don't take me so, don't think that I'm taking myself quite so seriously as you might think or whatever, as it might come across. If you understand that about me, then you'll engage with me in a different way. And it's a totally different experience because you're not seeing me as like this person who's just trying to talk at you to say that this one perspective that I have is the only one. I'm just trying to give you the best exposition of it that I can that day. If three weeks from now I have a better one or a totally different one, I'll try that. and see how it goes, you know? Yeah, it's true. It, you know, when I, when I think about that and I think about free speech, chat GPT, especially ChatGPT and it being a mirror for us, it sort of, in my opinion, devalues the idea of the current day experts. Because when you start seeing so many different like, oh, well, this is my history. I live in the United States and this is the history of Nagasaki. This is the history of the wars. Or that's a totally different history if I live in Japan or if I live in the Middle East, you know. i heard a great quote that was of course you know if a firefighter fights fire and a crime fighter fights crime what is a freedom fighter fight you know and so on some level chat gpt is just showing us like hey this is how silly we are like in some ways it's a great way for us to like grow up a little bit and be like okay look we've got to change everything like Oh man, we've got a lot of work to do here, but it's pretty funny and we can learn a lot from this cool tool. It seems to be like the same way that the dolphin looks in the mirror and recognizes itself. We should be looking in the chat GB to be like, that's us. We should be face palming a lot. We should be going, Oh my God. That's us. Look at us. That is in fact us. We didn't, we didn't want to believe it. We didn't want to see it. And even when we did admit it, we wanted to say, we wanted to say, well, that's just because that's the way we are. We don't have any other options. No, no, no, no, no. We learned to be that way. We're like, we're still like, We're still kind of like glorified chimps. We've got mirror neurons firing. We're teaching each other to be this way. We're reflecting it even more and more faster and faster on the internet every day. And then we're like, oh, that's just the way I am. No, because that's not just the way you are. And ChatGBT proves it. Because look at it. Look at the dumb thing. Go ask it something. Go ask it about Nagasaki. And see what it says. And then be like, chat GPT. Pretend that you are... You're an American. You're a Japanese person. Pretend that you're a Japanese person. Now tell me the history of Nagasaki. It was totally different. Yeah. You know, like, of course it is. You know, so there is a lot of that because there's still this shell of pretending. Yeah. That people are still, they're like, they're grasping at it, I feel. They want to still pretend that there's something else, you know. And then when you bust through that, it's very scary. And it's very easy to grasp onto the one truth is that there's zero truth. nothing yeah nothing at all was ever true oh no because right again like try to start thinking about it in a different way like okay well you've been you've been on this earth 30 40 50 years you've seen a few things I don't know how do you think people acted when writing was invented Okay, let's start from there because that's something we can know that's right on the border of what we know. That's a space. There's a liminal space there and that's a kind of space that we can enter to. We don't need technology to do it. We can do it. with meditation. We can do it with music. We can do it with dance. We can do it with art. We can do it with pictures. We can chant. We can scream. We can shout. This is just one more way. This is just one more way to frame and to put ourselves into this sort of in-between space and go, wait a second, what's something that's true and not true at the same time? Yes. That's really not true. That's both. Do you think it speaks to the idea of... I think for so long, as a species, and language too, especially in psychedelics, you bump up against the ineffable. You're unable to really describe what's happening, but you can see yourself in this weird third-person point of view, but there's no pathway for it. The same... The same way that we run into the ineffable in the psychedelic space, so too do we bump up against the next possible myth for humankind. And you talk about the hero's journey a little bit. We've been running on that old program for a long time. You start bringing in paraconsistent logic and the fact that both things are true at the same time. My friend Doc Askins likes to say that we are on the cusp of creating a new myth, a new mythology. And when I started thinking about that, I love science fiction. But maybe that's what's happening right now is that we are being shown that, hey, you dummies, I'm going to teach you a little bit of how to convey meaning in language. Now I'm going to start with this chat GPT thing. You've had the, you've had your pacifier, you've had the hero's journey. Let's move on to this next thing now. And like, that's why it seems so chaotic right now is because we are growing up on some level. If you look at humankind and demographics and just sees one species, a big part of us is dying. It seems like, and I, these, this, older generation that held on that was the keeper of ideas is moving on and this new generation coming up it's learning these paraconsistent logic is that is that too far out there man what do you think I don't think so I don't think at all you know what I mean like I think if we look at it like take take a human let's pretend let's make it on a scale of of humanity right where would we be in the course of a human life yeah just I think just coming out of adolescence Sucking our thumb. I mean, many of us are obviously still in kindergarten because the main lesson we're trying to learn is how to share our toys. And not accidentally hurt each other while we're trying to play. Like literally. Yeah. So like, let's again, like, let's be honest about where we are. Even neuroscience, I think supports my view that we're like, we're kind of like, we're just, yeah, we are. We're just coming. Well, so what's next? What does it mean? What, what comes, what is the, where did the hero's journey come from? Okay. Don't, don't, don't just Joseph Campbell me about it. Joseph Campbell's wonderful man. Didn't he live like 100 years ago or something? Now, let's keep going. People are trying to revive Freud. Oh, for God's sake. Let's see, my camera doesn't even like it anymore, right? What's next? You know, what's next for everybody? And so I think that that's the idea. And I don't know exactly what it is. But again, I think that we have to, first of all, like dust off some of these old ideas about what was before. Before we can know what's next, because otherwise we're taking a next step out of a like a fog, like still like we don't really know. You know what I mean? Like I hear I hear rumors. I hear rumors of like, you know, again, like when women are taking back their power. I mean, I get that. Right. And I broadly support it. But not in the way where we're just going to flip it around. We have to understand that originally men and women were much more equal than they are now. We have to understand that that was true and that it only became untrue because we started telling that story later. And we literally killed people and eradicated them who were the bearers of those stories so they would stop telling them. And in many cases, they didn't write. They were illiterate, sometimes intentionally illiterate. Well, how are you going to live your life on your horse and your wagon with your library in tow? Right? It just didn't fit. It didn't fit with the lifestyle. They did have books, right? But there weren't so many. And so... we have to we have to remember this yeah and I think that I think that whether it's again whether it's chat gbt you try it out you know what I mean people figure go go and see what it has to say whether it's mushrooms yeah whether it's uh whatever it is like this has to come out and we have to understand and recontextualize much in the same way that when we come out of the fog of childhood and adolescence, right. We realized that like our parents were, they weren't, they weren't gods. They weren't devils either. There were like just two random people. Yeah. And here they are. And here we are. Right. And that's much of what's growing up. It's like realizing that like, okay, well, first of all, like, okay, well, I am, I must be to some degree of something like both of my parents, whether I like it or not. And hopefully something that's of my own that I've brought into the situation. And like, that's just the way it is. And at some point when we become adults, we, we take that and we like, we just, we accept that that's true. And then we move forward from there. And I think that we're in that place collectively, you know, as a species and we're still telling a story, you know, like, oh, I was growing up, you know, the hero's journey, you know, I was cast out, I was cast out of the kingdom and, I was rejected by my family and then I went out to the internet and I found a chat forum and little did I know there was all these people that were just like me and they took me in and they saw me and they valued me and they re-empowered me to go back and overthrow the parents And take back the rightful throne. It's like we're all like we're really, really trying hard to like live this story. And I think that I know it's not just me. Like I just see it everywhere now because I've been watching movies my whole life. I've been seeing it on the TV. I've been seeing it on the computer, on my screen. I get excited when I see news like about all the Marvel movies that are failing. Yeah, totally. Someone's like, I don't know about the future for Disney. I'm like, oh, that's so awesome because I would love to see what people can really create once Marvel and Disney are gone. I'm tired, tired of it. I'm just tired of it. I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't need to get into the whole thing about why it's secretly evil or not to even say that. I mean, like, I just want to say is I'm just tired of it at this point. I want a new story, you know, and I've gotten some engagement with that idea, you know, online and I, I'm just excited to see it because I feel that, okay, I think there's some of us here who are like ready for hope that, or at least to see it start, you know, it's a long process. It's something that will take humans a long time. None of us are going to be here to see the end of it or not even the end of it. But I just mean, you know, what, what comes after that? Well, you know, or if we are here, we'll have forgotten that we were here. So we'll have to go on journeys once again to like recover, you know, recover the ancient days when the AI was first met. Where are we at another 5,000 years from now? Where is humanity? You know, this isn't going away. So where does it take us if we're still here? Hopefully, I mean, I think we will be some way or another. We've gone through some very nasty bottlenecks before. Hopefully we don't do that again, but we could. And then, you know, and then we, you and I are going to be the ancients. They'll find a fragment of this podcast. Look at these truths. Well, weird, right? Who knows? Who knows what they're going to find? you know so because the things that we have found that people often say from right away we say things like people just write we know we know this we're like some old I'm sorry some old white guy it really was in most cases it was some old white british guy because america wasn't even around then and they're like oh well we we found this temple where they worship the you don't know what the hell they were doing there you don't you just made it up right you just made it up and you wrote it down and then your scribes that we now call academics in some ways like they just kept rewriting it because they kept they cited your work into the next work and into the next and now it's unassailable almost if you try to have a conversation with an ai bot about it And even if you show it here, upload, here is a paper that contradicts the history. It won't be able to hold that awareness for more than a few prompts. It'll fall right back to the old thing. It'll argue with you all over again. Because it'll tell you what the academic consensus is. And then say something about, well, you know, my cutoff date is 2021 or 22 or 23 or whatever. I'm like, but the paper I gave you was from 2011. Oh, when you do that and you see how it responds and how it breaks down. It gives you a totally different experience of AI because it breaks that Wizard of Oz curtain where it looks like a person. You think, maybe it really is. No, no, no, it's not. It'll keep going and going. It doesn't explode in a puff of smoke, but it can't handle it. If you go back and challenge it about those origin myths of humanity, it gets very confused very quickly because it's reflecting again back to us the story we've been telling about it, which is so much more strong than the evidence, even when it's there, even when it's published. The story, everyone's telling the story and we don't understand it subjectively in the sub, we're telling it even when we don't think we are. But that large language model, it picks up on that pattern. It picks it up in ways that we're not aware of it and it reflects it back to us. And so everything that it's showing us, when I tried an experiment to write a fiction story, like a flapper story from the 1920s Detroit, it kept wanting to push the narrative to very predictable paths. I had to fight with it. It was a game to me, but to try to get it to take the story in a different direction. As long as we're all in this together. Every time it said, as long as we're all in this together, my very next prompt was to fast forward to three months from then. And something happened that drove the group apart. They had to scatter to make it and then to see what it said after that. But if I hadn't done that, we would have just given us the same story because it's the same story over and over again. And so whatever you give it, that's why I get frustrated because we can fiddle with the skin color of George Washington all day long, but what it's telling us is behind what it's telling us. It can be very inclusive or diverse or whatever you think it's going to be, or portray a very certain philosophy, ideal of progressive democracy or whatever it is that you think that it should be doing. But behind all of that, it's still coming at you with this story, unless you specifically tell it not to and keep pushing it in a different direction. And that's my interest. Like you were saying, that's always my interest with it is, can I get this thing to tell me a different story about anything. And it's really hard. And it's harder now than it was before because of all these other fixes that people are stacking onto it. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about. I once heard this quote that said the things that you're interested in are interested in you. And it seems like when you talk in earlier in our conversation, we spoke about the idea of language and air Aramaic and how you can hold two concepts at once. And these people were nomads. And yet here you are as a nomad traveling around, like, how do you, how do you deal with that connection? sort of yeah I think it's interesting because again I'm engaging with it and I'm gauging with it with some level of consciousness I'm not saying I'm a again don't think of us in dicom polar of light you know what I mean I'm not a fully conscious being I'm just more conscious than I was and I'm aware of it when I engage and I speak to people around me in spanish I'm aware of how the words are changing over time because I've looked into this stuff And that makes my interaction completely different. Because, you know, and again, the idea of the nomad, this digital nomad. I mean, and again, I literally just bought a farm. So it's not too nomadic of me. But why is this coming up now? You know what I mean? Because it's going to come up because it's something important that's a part of us that needs to be in the picture. some way, somehow, or else we can't move forward. It needs to come back. And the idea that there are people who are moving, that they're always supposed to be people who are moving around. And we're not only bringing goods, but the information. And the computer enables that in a way that, of course, that it never did before, because I can be sitting in a seat and be mobile in a way that we couldn't obviously do 5,000 years ago. So it is different. But I also can do it in a way where I know that that's happening. And so when we consider, for example, some changes in language, I'm probably going to not be able to think of a great example right now. But people, for example, in the area of Costa Rica where I live, many people say adios when they greet you. And I learned Spanish for the first time in high school. And like, I don't know, 1991 or whatever. And this whole time, until it hit me different one morning, and this elderly Tika lady said, she looked at me and she said, adios. And it was a greeting, like aloha, like on both sides of it. And it just smacked me upside the head. And for the first time, it's so funny, I realized that the word was meant to God. Hmm. Adios. Yeah. The whole time. I never even thought of that. Yeah, because then when you, the way that people greet each other here or another thing they'll say is, como amanecio? Like, how did you awake? Or rather, more specifically, how did you arise? Hmm. I arose with God today. Hmm. That's a completely different thing that they're saying. I mean, I could go to down the street and go sit in a Catholic mass anywhere around this nation. It's a Catholic country and then think, oh yeah, I'm participating in this. But just in that greeting, it's a different thing. And people don't get that. So you even hear about like blue zones, you know, Costa Rica has some of the blue zones and it's about their diet and the stress and it's about those things too. But It's also about adios. It's like if you say, you know, if I see you tomorrow, people will say God willing, essentially, if God wants. And in a way that means like, we're not really in charge here. Are you kidding me? Yeah. We're going to try to make a plan and we'll see if it works out. And it's because of that. I think people feel happier. It's not because life here isn't hard or because there's no difficulty or because I'm living in paradise where it's all perfect all the time. There's struggles here. There's political challenges. There's poverty. There's everything. But the people have a different way of being that has to do with the way they speak to each other. And even knowing Spanish, I didn't get it. I didn't get it until I was in it. There's no way I could have understood it until I was in it. And I kind of say this now, I can share this story with you by way of the internet and that's awesome. But I still needed to have that experience, that real experience to then share with you in a way that connects up with your experience and to really kind of have it hit you in that way. where the meaning is conveyed and it's not just the words. Wow. It speaks volumes of the idea of surrender to me. And it seems like in the Western culture, earlier in the conversation, we talked about the West trying to eradicate the Eastern thought. Here is this culture that is like, listen, you knuckleheads. You can't control it. And we're like, I got a five-year plan, a 10-year plan. I got this much money in the bank. This is where I am now. This is where I was. This is where I'm going to be. It's so juvenile. People are probably like, Jesus Christ. right right right right and there's many many people there's many so many people on the internet right now we teach it we teach it it's infiltrated the schools yeah and it's certainly on the internet everywhere and again like now I feel like I'm just I i I actually lean into the persona of getting old guy lectures now because I think it's kind of funny I'm not I'm decidedly middle-aged but like you know, it's, it's like, we just keep telling it, oh, oh, are you the expert of manifestation online? Is that how it goes? Oh, you envisioned it all in your head down to the millionth detail and you make a vision board and you pray on it and this and that. And then, and then you also have to keep your vibe very high, super high, in fact, impossibly high. Like, have to basically be joyful 24 seven and it'll, it'll manifest. And when it doesn't manifest, you know why? It's because of people like me who brought you down, I was a jackass. I was being negative. I was negative. And my, the negative vibes are there. And it's like, Oh my God. It's like, and, and I don't even like, I went through it. I believed it. I'm sorry. I told other people that too, but luckily for me, I did that before. before social media came around so I didn't get to be such a big jackass well they didn't like it they're censoring you they didn't they didn't they didn't like what I was saying okay I didn't I didn't get to be such a big jackass about it to like tens of thousands of people um about a manifest how you know how how the universe really worked at the time but I i went through that because I encountered those ideas I traced them back to their origins. And then I even went past that because I'm like, where is this stuff coming from? And how come it isn't working for me? Maybe the reason it isn't working for me isn't because I'm broken, but because it's not quite the right idea. So like you said, we think we have this plan. And our plans, I mean, it's okay to have a plan. Yeah, of course. Right? But, you know, come on. Like you said, five days, five years, 10 years, what's going to happen 10 years from now? I really don't know. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would be like, you know what, dude, you're, you're going to be on a podcast. It's going to be called, it's a bot washing free country. And you'll be broadcasting from a farm in Costa Rica. I'll be like, that's not my plan. Right. And that's okay. Yeah. that's what, that's the other part of it, right? That's what I think people are like, oh, the Pura Vida life, that's pure life. Like, that's pure life. Like, that's okay. Like, that's, I say this a lot as I get older. I didn't make it this way. I really didn't. The world isn't the creation of my pure intention. I don't know. That's the way life works. You make a plan and life maybe goes along with it if you're lucky or not. Sometimes it doesn't. Later on, you're like, I'm so happy that my plan didn't work out because that would have been terrible. I mean, I, I can't tell you, I can't tell you, right. This has happened to everyone. Right. But it's not the sort of story we're going to tell on the internet. Even me, like, I don't know who's going to want to read that. Like, Oh, Hey everyone. I'm going to tell you about it. Yeah. I'm going to tell you about a terrible plan I had when I was 19 years old. I mean, it's very inspiring to you. But because we don't hear that, all we do hear in our bubble, our fishbowl, is filled with everybody's success stories and hero journeys. And nobody believed in them until they found their lost tribe and they overthrew the king. They slayed them, slaughtered them. Like you mentioned, notice when the language starts to turn into violent words. Like, wait, wait, what? What happened here? How did we slip into the terminology of war? And we're just, you know, it happens because we're trained to go down those tubes. Okay. Yeah. It's fascinating to think about the trajectory and you know, maybe it's because like I'm almost 50 and maybe it's because I've had so many plans and every time a wrench was thrown in there, I think at some point in time, and maybe it's, it's maybe middle age is like a new adolescence where you finally graduate through the hero's journey. And you're like, okay, I get it. The hero's journey is that thing you do until you're middle age. That's the hero's journey. Like you made it. Congratulations. You know, you did it. Yeah. And your little dog, too. Your little white dog. It's right there the whole time. It seems to me like there's a necessary withdrawal that has to happen, almost like a metamorphosis, you know, and like you come to this idea of like, okay, almost nihilistic in some ways. Like, okay, well then if that's not real, then none of it's real. And if I have to surrender, what am I surrendering to, you know? And I don't know, is that a Gen X thing? You think it's a middle-aged thing or what's your take on that? I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I think you have to go through the void. You know, I, what comes really the image that, and I don't, my mind doesn't make pictures very well, but what I sort of vaguely thinking of in my mind is just a galaxy spinning around and you're, you're, you're traveling from the, you know right and you have to go through these bands there's light and dark bands you have to let go you have to go through this void exp void experience the zero you have to go through a void experience to get from the thing it has to end and the last streamers have to die out and there has to be a still point and then the next thing starts and then And that's how it happens because it also maybe, maybe hopefully by the time you get to be a certain age, you've been through, you've been in and out of a, like a liminal space because that's how it happens. It, it doesn't, it doesn't just like poof and then like it, it comes on and you're, you're like, am I, is it, is it happening? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. You don't, you don't know you're, you're in the middle and then you're like, Oh no, this is happening. And then, Oh, it was done now. Right. And it's like that because I think that's what making a transition is like, or another, another time, another way off and explain it was a, I don't know. When I was a kid, I had an Atari. Yeah. 2600 or no, an Atari 5200. It was like the middle model that no one had. So I could get games. Everyone had the one that was earlier or later. But I had a game that was called Pitfall. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right? And the whole thing was you have to let go of the vine and catch the next one. But if you hold on too long and you try to hold to both vines at the same time, you fall down into the alligator pit. And it's like that, I think. It's just like... You have to, you have to let go of the old vine. You have to like, it's scary. There's an alligator pit. Anything can happen. Like I, I can't, I can't make it not scary for people. Right. I can't, I can't put something known into an unknown space because that's what it is. It's the ineffable. Like you mentioned, it's that word. It's literally, that word is literally the border of knowledge itself. It's, On the other side is something ineffable. That's it. How do you describe it? I can't describe it. Yeah, there's no word for it. Because it's inevitable. There's no word for it. And you have to go in that space. So that means you have to let go of your vine. Yeah. And you might drop into the alligator pit. I don't know. I can't promise you that it's safe. And I think a lot of people, we get to that point and we want it like, you know, it's like dipping your toe in. We can do that for decades, I think, as people, right? Like kind of like dip in and out of that and like, okay, well, oh, I don't know. I'm going to like retreat back here into the comfortable, into the known. No one's really going to push you. No one's going to force you. I'm pretty sure that you could make it all the way to the grave without taking that step. It's not a guarantee. It's not something that you have to do. It's voluntary. You have to decide that you want to do it. I think that I hope that we're there, you know, because I feel that if we're not there, then that means there is no other step because we'll just kind of like fall back, you know? And I think that that's where the specter of like a collapse comes from. And it's happened before. Again, there's no guarantee, but you know, that like we're going to fall back to even more Two steps, three steps behind, but it's very ironic in the way that what makes us fall back is that we don't want to let go of the vine. If you let go of the vine and you just trust and you have that piece of faith, whatever it is, the grain of faith, that there will be another vine. In Aramaic, I forgot which letter it is. I don't want to misstate it, but one of them represents in one sense that vine. It's a hook. It might be the hota. It's a hook. It's the idea that spirit will throw you down a line. a hook. It's like an archetypal experience, but it isn't in a tarot card deck. The line comes down and you have to have faith that you're going to get that line. You have to look for it. You have to expect it. You have to be watching because you're going to get it. And when you get it, you have to grab that thing and you have to hoist yourself up because if you don't, who knows when the next line is coming by? It might be a long time. It makes sense. It's so funny you use the reference of pitfall. I play that game so many times. And just the word pitfall, like taking a step into the unknown. So many books I've read. The idea of spirituality and faith and transition and having the courage to be one of the first people over the wall. I guess we're all... the first one over the wall in our own lives. But, you know, it's awesome. It's scary. And you should want it to be, right? Like, you don't want to know what's going to happen. That would be a crappy movie if you know what's going to happen. But you should have the courage on some level to take a – faithful step onto the pathway of becoming the best version of yourself. And I think that life pushes you on. On some level, while you may not have to take that step, I think if you're willing to look around and see the decay alongside of you, like this part of the path sucks. Maybe I should walk over there where it looks a little bit greener and I should start heading that way. I think that the world or spirit or faith or God, whatever you want to describe, the great electron, as George Carlin used to call it, whatever it is, I think there's a guiding light calling you somewhere. And so it's fascinating to think of. Matt, this conversation, unbelievable, man. I really enjoy all of it. Me too, yeah. We should bring more people in and have another conversation with more of us in the room and do a part two. This is really fun. But before I let you go, where can people find you? What do you got coming up? And what are you excited about? You know, I don't have a lot. You can find me on LinkedIn because that's all I have. That's the only thing I still maintain. And sort of like, my days are here. I actually live here on our farm. We're building a house. I drive my son back and forth to school. Not today. My wife, Angela, did it. Thank God so I could be here. yeah see see the old security god willing um and and so like that's that's my day to day right now like what I'm doing is uh we are planting more crops and more tree trees I'm I want trying to increase the biodiversity of the land that's already here It's a really cool thing. Like, it's not like a barren piece of land. This place was lightly farmed for decades. And so just with the leafcutter ants just eating most of it, just put it right back in the ground, you know. And so I'm trying to also get those real life experiences. And I'm talking to, and the secret program stops trying to shut my camera down. It must be my camera. This has happened before. So sorry, everyone. I have a bad camera. That's what I'm up to. Check me out there. I have plans in not the immediate future, but along the line to create experiences for people to come and maybe have these types of discussions and chats in person. So maybe if we are able to have, you know, these types of chats more digitally, then we can also create a space for have that different kind of vibe, uh, in person and maybe, you know, have bring some people together for, um, You know, a, uh, maybe a little chats, a little journeying and, um, those are the that's, that's what I have on the horizon, but I don't have anything to point to people to right now about it. Um, so just kind of stay connected. Um, like I said, I would encourage. people to check in with what I'm posting every now and again um and I do appreciate when people send me just a note that says hey I'm like I'm here um because oftentimes I don't I don't I don't fully know um and and and just remember that it's not I you don't need to agree with me All of my best friends in life felt totally free to say, Matt, you sound like a total jackass. And I don't, I think you're completely full of it. And then I would go. So hopefully we can have more of those types of conversations, right? Where there's, we have that environment. to actually practice free speech in a way where, you know, it's not just like, let's hear the same, the same view 20 times because there's 20 people in the room and each of those 20 people needs to take a turn saying the exact same thing. But let's, because we do have limited time and our time here is limited, whether it's our lifetime or our chat time today, we've, It's been like two hours and 15 minutes, right? And then we still could probably continue to go. We have to bring it to an end. So that's why when we have the opportunity to have these conversations with each other, I hope that we pass the mic around in a way that's like, does anyone have anything new to say here? First, at least. um and see what it is you know because I think that's what we I think that's going to help us find our next vine or something that we can we can hold on to from there you know to get us to the whatever's next. The next pit, right? That's always what's next. Just a new pit. I'm going to bring down a group of people to your place once you get set up and just pass the mic around. I can think of five incredible people all different. Let's all go down here and talk about what's next, what's new. That would be fascinating, man. I love it. It's fascinating. I'm stoked you're doing what you're doing. I'm a big fan, man. Thank you. Thank you, George, again for inviting me and giving me the space to speak yeah we're gonna do it more often so ladies and gentlemen go down to the show notes drop matt a line I hope you have a beautiful day I hope that you found the conversation as engaging as we did and hang on briefly afterwards matt but to everybody else hope you have a beautiful day uh get out there and find your way that's all we got aloha