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Cyberpunk Utopia offers a fresh take on our technological future. While "cyberpunk" traditionally paints a dark picture of corporate-controlled tech (think Blade Runner), hosts Teresa and Paul flip the script by exploring how we can use these same powerful tools to build something better.
Through their unique synergy, Teresa (an intuitive explorer) and Paul (a systems thinker) explore how emerging AI technologies can augment human potential by weaving together philosophical inquiry and real-world experiments in building what they term a 'meaning-centered economy.'
Central to their approach is the Japanese concept of ikigai—finding harmony between passion, capability, societal need, and economic viability. This framework guides their exploration of how individuals and communities can maintain agency and discover meaning in an AI-augmented world.
Welcome to Cyberpunk Utopia, powered by Chatty Tuesdays. I'm Paul. And I'm Teresa, and this is the first edition of Cyberpunk Utopia. Paul thought I was going to do it wrong, but I did it right. Powered by Chatty Tuesdays, where we're here to help the world, the universe, as guides, to find agency and meaning in an AI-aggregated world. That's a big idea. so Teresa how did we get to Chatty Tuesday yeah you know Chatty Tuesdays was like this emergence when you and I started at a little startup here in Amsterdam in education tech right and I think for me it started after COVID when our boss said that we needed to go back in and I did not want to leave my house but if I was going to leave my house the only thing I wanted to do was connect with people. And so that was my modus, and I was pretty honest with our boss, Daniel, at the time. And then it just kind of evolved from there, right? Absolutely, yeah. So it just kind of started with the simple coffee breaks. I normally ask you, like, what are you reading, Teresa? And then one question would spark these amazing conversations that would last until about 4 or 5 p.m., and we would completely lose track of time. And be exhausted. yeah yeah we need a nap yeah i need a nap definitely yeah i mean i think back to those times um for me i was just reading so many ideas because i had a lot of time i think for for introverts covid sure made the whole world feel like we feel which is hey you got to stay inside and discover who the f you are yeah um and i do i remember reading things um and then you would come in and ask what we were doing and and later on i would learn that you know we're both in intuitive on the Myers-Briggs scale. But yeah, we would just use all those sorts of frameworks to kind of figure out whatever was going on in my head. Absolutely. Yeah, what was fascinating is how our different thinking styles created this perfect store of ideas. So I think, you know, me with my sort of probability-based systems thinking and you with your more sort of possibility-based intuitive leaps, which, by the way, I've learned to reverse engineer. Three hops, right? You're a goddamn genie master about this shit. So just to kind of bring a little more into that, I'm all over the place as a dyslexic thinker. And I think our conversations really helped me. Well, I always struggled because I knew I was best when I was allowed to go, the freedom to go all over the place. And I think Chatty Tuesdays, you really gave me a safe space. But you also started giving me ideas on how to put structure in because I know you're more a system thinker and if I were if I was actually going to get something really done in this world I have to be able to to go from the possibility to the probability and I always remember talking to you and it's like well that's not probable I'm like god damn why can't it be yeah I used to give you a hard time sometimes yeah you did but but um the three hops kind of what you just brought up I think that that's something that I've learned from from you from from my my current boss which is like what are the first three steps that you see towards that probability right if all avenues of possibility are available to you there's got to be three steps in reality that can make this thing actually happen so absolutely that's what the magic is that where chatty tuesdays came from and now we powering cyberpunk utopia yeah so I gotta ask you the Cyberpunk Utopia because I was sold on Chatty Tuesdays but you really wanted Cyberpunk Utopia Yeah, so it's kind of evolved. That's a bit of a concept of, you know, how can we kind of guide the world towards a Cyberpunk Utopia? And we're going to talk a lot about AI as a creative catalyst, including some of our own experiments with AI tools and content creation, how we start recording our conversations and getting AI to reflect our ideas back to us. And we'll explore what we call the AI Lego kits, so these amazing emerging tools that are democratizing creativity and innovation. Well, how do we feel like they're going to democratize creativity and creation? Well, think of them like building blocks. You've got tools for writing, tools for visual arts, tools for music, tools for building software applications. So the magic is in the tools themselves. Humans have always been great at leveraging tools, and the tools have evolved over the years. It's really about how we combine them to be able to really get from the idea to a reality. Some of these new tools are available in a digital form. They're very cheap and available, so that kind of democratizes that creativity. Paul's being really humble. So he's, in fact, helped me along immensely in my process, which is starting to create what he's talking about is his AI Lego kit. Like, I've had fascinating ideas and started with Chatty Tuesdays. And I said, well, how can we start to realize these in the world? And I think we came to the conclusion, well, we need to start talking about it and sharing our experience. And so what Paul's helped me build here, and this is like our second, third round of this, is agents to help with this podcast, to help us put more structure, better hooks, make it more interesting for people. Absolutely. So it's kind of the podcast is going to be a very organic proof of concept. We're full-time product managers. We're kind of doing this in our free time. So we don't have a big production staff and necessarily a lot of expertise. So we're kind of learning to use these new tools to be able to create content and take our ideas and put them out there. And one of the important themes that we always talk about, which is pretty critical because, you know, there's also risks and ethical concerns here is also new. But the key thing is, you know, how do we bring the human into the loop? Why is the human in the loop important? well we um we need to be able to guide the ai to make sure it's used ethically and responsibly particularly as the tools you know start off not being very mature and sometimes we sort of you know use them a little bit too much i think you've had some experience with that i've had that so we've got to kind of um understand how we can at any given point in time include you know our own agency to guide the tools in the right way we can give some some concrete examples of our own podcast production so um yeah last sunday we we were in the chatty tuesday studio recorded a dry run our first session that was our first session i was i was really proud of that you know that was really good it was rough it was a little bit rough around the edges and we were saying well you know when is it good enough to put it out so we thought okay we're gonna practice what we preach we're going to use some of these tools. So we actually fed the transcript of the dry run into a new kind of Google research tool called Notebook LM. And what it allows you to do is you can just upload some text and it will generate a podcast based on the text And in the podcast to AI hosts we asked them to actually critique the show and give us feedback and we got like 20 minutes of amazing actionable feedback on the show that really helped us structure this first episode while still maintaining our own authentic voice because it's all grounded in our own content our own ideas and yeah we'll include a link in the show notes to that yeah and I think for me that that feedback was fascinating for two reasons one some of the stuff it said actually about itself, which I thought was amazing, which is, and I've noticed this, it's like you can't become lazy. You actually have to feel as a human being when you're using these sorts of tools, like I am the judge of what feedback that I want to incorporate. And one thing it said, it gave me the license to be free, right? But it also said that, Paul, you would be a great job to kind of be more of the structure and the narrator with your system thinking uh so in this process i'm like great i can let that control go paul's going to be better at this than i am and then i can focus on what i bring into the table um which is my possibility thinking um and the other piece that came back from that feedback that i also but this was actually more from what you and i were talking earlier on when we were first looking putting AI actually in our product, you said you have to think about where we automate things. And so I thought that was pretty powerful, especially as we started thinking, even as we're using your Lego kit here to help us create this content for the world, what is it and where do we want to use the automation and how do we incorporate those sorts of tools? So yeah, I would highly recommend that people listen to this. It was fascinating um and yeah i think also as we move forward in this process we're going to get better at this like this is our first episode exactly i'm not my expectations are not high but two dry runs in i'm already feeling more confident this is gonna be more interesting totally at least to me there's something that's interesting that said a lot about ahl people they say well this is the worst it's going to be and that's true of the show right this it's only up for a year it's only up from here yeah yeah i was fucking excited absolutely yeah but that being said um we're trying to cover a lot today and and i think that was feedback that we got um so we're not go too deep but to give the audience a really good sense of all the things that we want to cover in this podcast um and you mentioned something about the the meaning economy and i think it's such an important topic that we should at least cover it a little bit in this episode because i think it's really at the heart of providing agency and looking forward. Sure, so think about it this way, you know, as AI automates more and more tasks, what becomes economically valuable isn't just about selling our labor, but actually meaning and creativity. So, you know, here in Amsterdam, we're already seeing examples of that with the circular economy. yeah so i'm all in on this boat in fact one thing that i got from your ai guy which is how do we encourage more small teams to come up with independent sources of income right that's kind of what you are and i are doing and i think this is this is meaningful content to get out to the world i think you and i have a very unique perspective especially sitting four or five years in education tech. I've spent a lot of time researching that and getting more involved locally especially with some of the changes the crazy changes that are happening in this world for me that meaning economy and I know we probably go more into what that definition is but for me, it's small, it's local, it's things, teams focused on, I think, some of the biggest problems we're going to face in the next 10 years, and really helping the world frame those, because we're going to need to think very differently, and that's where I come in. Absolutely, yeah, A different feature onto the thinking. We're going to be your guides. And I think being based here in Amsterdam, it's a perfect incubator for those kind of ideas because people are pretty open to new things. It's kind of a small ecosystem. So we're definitely going to try and leverage that more, maybe get some collaborations going with some local initiatives and share some of that. Wholeheartedly, in fact, this evening, I am starting into getting involved, not just preaching. Like, that was one of the great advice that the AI said, show, don't tell. And as Paul was saying, I'm going to get involved here. I've started with my street. They have this program to clean the streets because we have a big trash problem here in Amsterdam. And really, it's not about cleaning the streets. It's about getting out and connecting with people. And so I'm going to the Beertaus, the community center, and I volunteered as an IT person. I don't think they realize that I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to show up anyway. And that to me and this podcast are the first two steps towards what I feel like is me engaging in a meaning economy. Exactly. You know, I always love that Japanese concept of ikigai, which is, you know, finding a sweet spot between what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. So that's also a very strong theme for me. Yes. That I think we can apply. So speaking of paid for, we will make this a Patreon project. So if we do find an audience. Indeed. Stay tuned. Keep us doing this. Okay, great. I think that pretty much brings us to kind of the close of this first episode. And I'm excited. I'm excited because I've got my good friend Paul over here. We've been working for the last four years, I think, kind of germinating. He and I have been having these Chatty Tuesday conversations. And honestly, I think I needed that time to really get my head around what I thought the future looked like or what could look like. and I'm really excited to bring this perspective out to the world through the cyberpunk utopia right yeah do you have some closing thoughts? Yeah I mean I'm definitely excited to I'll be bringing some of my technical expertise and systems thinking well I think you Teresa are going to add this deeply humanistic value orientated perspective and I think that combination is really what Chetty Tuesday is all about so we're building a road map to that cyberpunk utopia, one honest conversation at a time. Yeah, we did not get that off an AI script. No. No. But here's the thing. I love that line so much. You're right, we don't know the answers, but I think through a two-way dialogue, because that's actually part of what we're intending to do here, which is open this up with our AI chat partner, but also win the community, and when we are able to build a community, how do we incorporate that feedback so that we continue growing? But also, I think that the challenge for you and me will be staying authentic to our intuition and what we think is valuable for the world to hear as well. Absolutely. Fuck yeah, we did it, mom. Absolutely. All right, I'm going to break us out.