 All right, welcome everybody. I am just sending out a an announcement tweet here. Let's see. There we go. All right, well, welcome to again, the second annual Future Fossils podcast with Complexity Weekend. I don't know three of you on this call. And I do know Tim Clancy. So I'm going to try and not lean too hard on you and call you out too often, Tim. But so for folks who aren't familiar with Future Fossils, the show has two main themes. One is about identifying our place in deep time. And the other is interrogating our models of time and subjectivity and generally playing footloose with constructed categories such as self and other nature and culture. For the sake of facilitating the epistemic shift that seems necessary to navigate this turbulent century. So that's the tone I'm going to be keeping as the host and moderator for this discussion. And otherwise, my my plan for this call over the next hour is just to to elicit the collective intelligence of these participants as best I can. And we've got some really lovely people involved. So why don't we start by having folks introduce themselves? I mean, maybe we can just go like out of a hat randomly. Meredith, McKayla, Tim and Andrea, in that order, if you care to just tell folks to jump in. Yes, tell folks a little bit about yourself. You're, you're, you know, the areas where you focus on in your work, and how how your experience has been this weekend, what's been going on for you, what's come up for you? Yeah. Well, my name is Meredith Trumbull. And I'm a visual artist, and a writer about visual art, which became necessary in order to try to talk about things that at the time that I started weren't being talked about as much in art criticism and writing. And I've been interested in absurdity, complexity, things that don't quite match up for as long as I can remember. And contemporary art is a really great place to explore all those things. It led me into a residency at the Complexity Sciences Center at UC Davis, which has been home to a long running project of my own. And I also like to think about the history of art and technology. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you all. I think I said, Michaela, if you don't mind introducing yourself next. Oh, sure. So I'm Michaela. I'm a communication specialist based in Switzerland. Calling from the Swiss Alps, where there's still snow. I've been involved in communication since 20 years, with a background in international relations. And last year, I discovered biomimicry. And I finally found my home turf and my discipline. And which is a discipline that can bridge disciplines. And hence my presence here at Complexity Weekend. I became a complexity enthusiast since the few months that I discovered this additional discipline, and they just keep piling up, you know, so that puts me into a awe that the more you know, the less you know. And I'm really fascinated by all the great minds, great souls, fascinating people that have been around here for the weekend. And also the amount of respect and bridges that I think we can build. And I'm now a complexity enthusiast. And I think I'll stay in this community. I like it. Thank you, Tim. Great. Thanks, Michael. My name's Timothy Clancy. I'm a specialist in violence and instability looking at it in the perspective of complex systems. We use computer simulations to create simulations of everything from individual violence all the way up to conventional conflict insurgencies, things like that. And I've been deeply involved and appreciative of Michael's numerous forays and mechanisms of getting conversations and complexity going from the Santa Fe explorers to the fossil fuels. And it was through that I got invited to come over to complexity weekend. This is my first year. So it's been a great first year. It's kind of like really fun to see how it all comes together. And you've got a virtual space that's virtual digital, but you also have the virtual space with all these overlapping concepts coming together and melding and seeing the enthusiasm and the interest both from experts and new folks alike who this is their first introduction and forming teams and building things. So I've been doing what I can to help with system structure and concepts and complex systems and just helping where I can. So I'm looking forward to the conversation today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. Andrea. Hi, Michael. Hi, everyone. Super thankful for being here and very impressed with the movement that complexity we can promote and to what it means in terms of plurality and I was I've been around and very impressed by the the amazing perspectives that gather in our meetings. So I'm really, really glad to be here with you. I am a psychoanalyst and a lawyer. And I came to work with complexity. In fact, because of the specific theme of randomness, which is complexity without redundancies. And I'll tell you what what I'm facing in this aspect. I'm studying the relationship between justice and randomness. That's what my PhD is about. And I realized that we could use algorithmic complexity to work on the team in a very innovative way in the sense that we can finally probably give reference use use complexity and randomness to indicate a path in which technology can be ethical and responsible. So I might need to explain that a little bit more. Randomness is the sign of the presence of a human being in a system. Machines don't produce randomness. So it either as the fundamental of a structure or inputting additional information in machine learning or anything else. We have we always have human beings represented by random information in systems. And and that's where we need to look for justice. So is everyone contributing equally? Is everyone having the opportunity of participating? How much freedom we have on systems? I have a partner in this research, Felipe Brown. He's my co facilitator on complexity weekend. And he has taught me about algorithmic information theory. That's what we're using for this project. So we are concerned about justice. We are concerned about democracy. We are concerned about preservation of freedom in technology. And I'm learning with all of you, because my background is is law is human sciences, humanities, and it's a very rich environment here for me. Thank you. Thank you. So you know, something that comes up for me in listening to all of you introduce yourselves is that each of you work in some in one form or another in an area or, you know, discipline, where I think like, like you just said, Andrea, where something incompressible enters the picture, you know, that the human element of, you know, randomness, I tend to think about this in terms of the, like the way that socio physics equations, model mobs and, and like, you know, marathons and other large, you know, collective human activities using like turbulent fluid dynamics equations, like you zoom out far enough, and decisions kind of disappear into this boil of probability. And I remember, you know, at in the first episode of complexity podcast, SFI's president David crack hour said that science is about finding the efficient encodings of regular phenomena, but art is about expressing the incompressible. And I'm curious where each of you, you know, given, I mean, like Tim, you know, your work is on trying to predict behavior that is at least conventionally thought of as, you know, profoundly unpredictable. You know, Meredith, you know, you work as an artist. And, you know, I also identify as an artist and worked self employed as an artist for over a decade. And, and, you know, and, Michaela, in communication, there's something about, you know, not just being a megaphone, right, not just blasting one message to every possible listener, but knowing who you're speaking to. And that that requires a different way of thinking that's, you know, in part, you know, it's like easy to fit that into complex systems thinking, because you're looking at, you know, context dependencies. But in another way, it's, you know, it call it is a form of art, you know, science communication does require one to make some kind of incompressible Hail Mary passes as a communicator. So I'm just curious, you know, where each of you sit with this tension between, I mean, when we, you know, we say that randomness is the human, but it's also, you know, it's on display at any scale that we that we look as long as we're coarse graining at, you know, at some, you know, it seems almost more like a, an artifact of the resolution at which we are able to explore a given phenomenon. And I'm just, I'm curious how each of you digest these ideas or or or use them in your work or that kind of thing. And I'm not going to, I'm going to let whoever wants to speak up, speak up here. I can say something really quickly, which is I love this word incompressibility that you used, which it seems to me as if it might be like the way that I've been used to thinking about art, which is that it's about the questions that don't have answers. Really, that if we are going to divide things into categories of art and science, and the things to which an answer might potentially be found, would fall more on the science and, and art is about the questions like what is love, you know, what is death and all kinds of things but things that don't really have one answer. And so I don't know if that's exactly what you mean by incompressibility, but I'll throw that out there. Any other brave souls? Go ahead, Makilla. It's interesting, because what Meredith was saying is also valid in communication, because you don't communicate without purpose, or you never communicate without a purpose. And when we don't communicate, we do communicate, not communicating is also a way of communicating. And so at every point in communication, you see the purpose of the person expressed. And each person has its individuality, its culture, its past, its future, and its dreams. And so maybe communication is the art of trying to put people into into links, to link people to create new clusters of thought, and, and to further that into, you know, common schools of thought, and common communities, and communities that bridge across communities. So we need art for that, the art of the imprevisible. And I think that's also why we communicators really dream of bridging science and the wider public, different disciplines in sciences, of course, cultures are very important for me, intercultural, interlinguistic communication. And also, of course, with biomimicry, the link to nature, the reconnection to, to the whole. And so I can resonate with Meredith and that. And just to touch back on this concept of randomness, I'll throw it out there that I don't think there's actually as much randomness as we tend to think there is, as much as there might be this term we've talked about before that is the compounded chaos or the appearance of chaos, and dealing with violence, which often like a term that aggravates me is when you hear something like random violence. And studying this very little violence is random. There are people take actions well in advance, which will lead them down the path to being violent. There are conditions that give rise to predispositions and, and effects. And it seems random to us as a bystander. And I think this gets into the question of the incomprehensibility and the importance of art and communication, because I think a lot of what you know, if you look back at before germ theory disease looked random, perhaps, who was infected, how are they infected? What I see system, system science, complexity science, whatever you want to describe is a way of diving into to make this seemingly random bounded chaos, make sense in a structure, but then also recognize with humility, we can never really understand even with that structure, what's necessarily going to happen next. And that's the part that I think ties it back to the appearance of randomness is that we can understand why things are happened, but there's so much going on. And it's so varied. And then to explain that in a way that helps people understand not just from education, but make informed policy choices and understand options is really goes from science back to art. And I have nothing but respect for these memes I see on web pages that try and describe very complicated complex systems concepts in a simple cartoon, and can do more in an image than I can do in a 10,000 word post. So I think there is, as complex systems gets more advanced, it's getting the point where it can only be communicated in an artful way, unless someone wants to go into all the equations and details like that, which then starts to lose people and you lose the utility of the effort in the first place. So I just see these connections coming together. Andrea, did you have any thoughts on that? Yes, yes, but I was helped by all of them because they prepared for something very special that I I'll try to convey. As I hear Meredith and Michaela explaining the the most beautiful, I think human aspects of information that we produce and that is random because we add something creatively. This is the most important mark of human being. And when Tim comes concerned with violence and he gives me a gift, as soon as you started and Michaela proposed the theme, I remember a quote that my advisor on the PhD, he has sent me at some point of my research. He knew that I was researching the relationship between justice and randomness. But I didn't know if he had a deeper relationship with what I was trying to defend. Until the moment he has sent me a quote that I don't know. I don't know the author, but it said if the world was really random, there wouldn't be so much injustice. Because injustice is regularity. And I agree with Tim strongly that everything everything we suffer from is regular. Medicine was born from the pathology, the exams by pathologists, post mortem exams of bodies. We know what we die of. We know what we suffer off. That's regular. We all we learn how we we we ache and burn. We what we but we are enchanted by what comes as random. So I don't think we suffer from randomness. People are and this is a kind of a changing perspective. Because we're usually saying, no, I'm safe with what I know. And I'm safe if the word remains as it is for me. And I have my my perspective on things. I can defend myself if things go this way or that way, because things are regular. But I think it's exactly the opposite. Human beings are more comfortable with randomness than with regularity. Regularity is what traps us was what makes life repetitive. What what will will not allow us to listen to someone else. When we are deeply listening to someone, we are listening to random information. When every information that is added to a dialogue is random. If it's not random, it's not added. So I'm completely with you, Tim, with this. And I would love to to learn more about your work. Because I think we when you have an artist will have a communicator, you have someone who is concerned about violence, we're all pro randomness. And it is a change of perspective. So what I would like to emphasize is just the difference between unpredictability and randomness as we're speaking about. It's a reducibility. Because unpredictability is if you allow me philosophical word is on is ontological. It's about things in the world. And sciences theories have unpredictability. But that's just that's just a spot on a theory. And some theories allow for unpredictability. And some theories are uncomfortable with that. And always trying to cover it. But there are physics that classical physics quantum physics one is okay with with randomness in the sense in the ontological sense in the physical sense. The other is uncomfortable and always trying to cover predictability. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about novelty in language. That's randomness in relation to complexity, at least that shatings and and Komogorov's complexity. I think it's maybe one of the references for us. So this is incredibly important and open culturally. It's something different. I'm really glad you you brought up Komogorov complexity or you know, like it's also known, I guess, or equated with algorithmic complexity. You know, the length of code required to produce a given phenomenon, which for folks unfamiliar with this, although I'm sure everyone listening live is. This is the hack that gets us around the supposedly irreducible complexity of living systems. You know, how does how does a person give birth to another person? You know, this this kind of question. And and it's in that invocation of the algorithm that you led me right into the next question I had for people, which was inspired in me by reading a recent preprint by W. Brain Arthur at Park, an SFI on economics and nouns and verbs, where he was saying it's time for the science, the scientific study of economics to embrace the description of economic systems with algorithms, because there are things that usefully peer through that mode of inquiry that do not appear when you're using algebraic equations. Because algebraic equations, he argues, describe the world as nouns, as static objects with perhaps, you know, dynamic relationships, but they're not adaptive relationships. They're not relationships that generate endogenous novelty. And you only get that with an algorithm, which, you know, reaches deep into this sort of the philosophy of complex systems science generally, which is the use of simulations, you know, and agent based models and these kinds of things to explore situations that cannot be predicted by just plugging in variables. You know, Arthur says that the, you know, among many different critiques of this that the issue is that we know that, you know, new properties emerge in a system composed of adaptive agents. And so how do we get our, you know, the way that we're talking and thinking about human activity in this sphere and really economics is in some sense a subdiscipline of ecology. When you start looking at it, it's like non equilibrium thermodynamics, you know, that this, that you look at the woods, you know, I had a great conversation on future fossils earlier this year with mycologist Toby Cures and Bitcoin evangelist Brandon Quittum about fungal mycelial networks in the woods and how they function in in economic ways, you know, price fixing and this kind of thing going on, you know, underground. It's fascinating. But at any rate, what happens here? And this is this is the question for everyone. To the extent that we, you know, through, you know, the the multi scale thinking that, you know, this system sciences afford us understand institutions as a kind of entity under themselves, understand them as having their own agency, their own kind of like emergent telos. And that we, you know, that we understand that there's a there's a in some sense of conflict of interest between the cells of an organism and the organism itself. This is why cancer exists. You know, this is why the communication signaling inside the body is so costly to generate the molecules required to solicit resources from the body so that are making it as hard as possible for cancer to happen. And it's impossible for me not to see this in the relationship between humans and our institutions where like the more, in some sense, the more robust an institution, the more expendable components have to be. I mean, you see this like military hierarchies, you know, military is wronged by making each soldier in some sense kind of expendable. So, you know, then we are when I see business and the organizational and institutional work today, the thing that's largely still being governed by equation thinking rather than algorithm thinking people come in with God destruction, right? And yet every single one of you and every everyone else speaking at this event over the weekend has like five different things that they're doing, you know, there's like they're an n dimensional then diagram. And and at those intersections, awesome new things pop out. So like I don't know if this is the kind of thing that troubles you the way that troubles me. But it seems to me like there's a lot of injustice happening at the, you know, like at the sort of point of friction between the incompressibility of the human being and the demands on the compressibility of the human being that are put on us by these institutions that are only capable of measuring us and seeing us in certain ways. And I'm just curious how how each of you sort of make sense of this conflict and what you know, what what if any paths forward you might recognize in it. That was a big one. So I apologize. And I really look forward to hearing what you all have to say. One word responses only. Yeah. Or in your case, you know, a dirty limerick or a cocoon. So I would be remiss at the the opportunity when describing economics, not to point out that my advisors are all economists by training and system dynamics. And there's a long running tension between what's called the rational expectation of economics, the rat pack and the bathtub club of system dynamics, precisely because of this difference between algebra, putting in variables, plugging in and dynamic rates of change. And what is the dynamic nature of behavior over time and the structures that emerge that? So I appreciate the opportunity to jump into that. But I think to your question of this tension of institutions, I'm going to again go out on a limb and say what we think of as entity institutions don't really exist. And it gets to something we've talked about before. The humans have this need for hierarchy and entities at many different levels going from atoms to compounds to or atoms to elements to compounds to organs to organelles to humans to groups to institutions to societies to countries to cultures. It's really just terms we use for convenience at certain levels of emergent abstraction. And I think the best definition I've heard is that all of these things are just information moving forward over time. That's what an entity is. And I think it comes from your colleagues at Santa Fe. And so an institution that has is an information stored over time. You talk about the US military, the US army has exists because it is information carrying forward over time, but it is not incompatible that that institution has within it different entities. And you could call a major commands, the branches of the army, things like that, even before we get down to units each of which itself is a preserved information over time. And all of these you could describe as having attributes and characteristics with the opportunity to create the friction that creates the injustice that I think is what Andrea is talking about. Because of the disconnect of what you call them incentives and pressures or alignments or why what is this information trying to accomplish and the misalignment between the individual who ultimately, regardless of philosophical abstraction, we tend to think of okay, what is the injustice on the individual exists within all of these different entities simultaneously working, some of which are still holding on to information that was anchored centuries ago, but has a long tail of receding. And I think a lot of, you know, I use we go back to randomness, the example of I and I've talked about this before, homicides in Chicago are not random. They're an accumulation of effects that we put into Chicago as suppression of the populations during the 20th century, redlining, yellow lining, destruction of neighborhoods with freeway, restrictive covenants, these intentional actions decades ago and long before many of the people who live there now put in place environmental conditions no different than you talk about ecology that create the conditions which lead to violence. And it is I have shown by diagrams that the hottest areas of homicide overlap with the areas that were marked with red and yellow lines where no loans were given for business because it was a racial segregation and through the areas the freeways were put to demolish the neighborhood. So the structure reveals the injustice, it reveals the structure of injustice, but the hard part is seeing it as it happens to keep it from perpetuating or happening again. Well, that was potent. Thank you. I don't know that I don't know that anyone's going to beat, you know, America's Iran in terms of, you know, like, intensity to answer this question. But like there are other places where this, you know, this this kind of thing comes up. And I mean, to maybe bring this down to earth a little bit, and to single someone out Meredith, I'm really curious, being an artist in residency at UC Davis is complex, good complexity sciences center. I'm curious how this feels for you, because there is specifically and selfishly I want to I want to know whether, again, I'm sorry for putting you on the spot here, whether, you know, so many times, it seems like art science collaborations are in some way, like a, like William Erwin Thompson used to talk about banks buying art and putting art up in the bank, you know, that this is really, this is really just glorifying the cathedral of one, you know, and sort of you're being kind of like appropriated, or, you know, you're seen in a particular way because people trained in the sciences tend to see things in a particular, you know, quantify them and so on. And I'm curious whether you feel that there is a sort of ontological reciprocity there, or whether you feel that your engagement with scientists, and this would be true, this is this is a true question for anyone here, you know, to make this a little bit more, you know, specific to interdisciplinary collaboration with scientists as a communicator, as an ethicist, as an artist. Do you feel that you get to speak on your own terms, or do you feel that you have to appear in a particular way? And that that, you know, you're always playing in a way game. And if so, like, what is there, what can be done about that to sort of allow even perhaps sort of like the imposition on identity enforced by different institutional norms to coexist? You know, I think that question could only really come from another artist, Michael. I mean, just that sensitivity to what you didn't catch the exact phrase in memory, but the ontology of being an artist in a science environment. And I feel incredibly fortunate in that to work with a geobiologist on Sumner and physicist Jim Crutchfield, who really are very sophisticated in their engagement with and understanding of contemporary art in particular. So I actually viewed myself more in terms of, you know, Maxwell's demon, like this little entity that like moves the molecules from one side to another in a lot of explanations of thermodynamics. I actually viewed myself a little bit more like that as something that didn't exactly really exist. But like just by being in this context over time. And I fabricated an art project which involved talking to people talking to the scientists about their dreams and then forming this kind of imagery of a group. Thank you. If you will, like a dynamic group psyche. So on different levels. I was just being there and maybe bringing the idea of the strangeness of art into that context in a very gentle way. And I think that that's actually that the kind of relationship between artists and scientists that you speak of, which I think is probably more than norm in these kinds of encounters. But it's also a kind of linear relationship where there's a look for some kind of causal outcome, like to tell people about the science or to, you know, do this or that. And I really wasn't there to do anything. Exactly. If that makes sense. So it's tactic way of pursuing questions about the world. All right, thanks. Michaela, do you have thoughts on this as a science communicator? I know that I mean, it's certainly certainly the concerns, the optimization problem of being like in journalism or related disciplines is considerably different from the optimization problem of being a researcher. Yeah, definitely. I'm I'm always very surprised by the difficulty that scientists have to put what they have taken years to achieve so so difficultly into words or into into representations that can be understood by the wider public. It's quite amazing. I mean, people work on their PhDs and gather data and and, you know, they put their heart and soul into it and sacrifice their families sometimes to to to to arrive to this conclusion that they want to put out to the world and are incapable of putting out to the world because it's just obscure, obscure, un incomprehensible, not linked to the right people. That's where the power of metaphors is so great. And the science of metaphors, the discipline of metaphors will not call you the science. Let's be very careful with the method of biomimicry really helps to get the meme out to the greater public with analogies, with narratives, with words. I was very interested when you were talking about this dichotomy between verbs and adjective verbs and nouns in my teaching of nonviolent communication. I also put emphasis on verbs because as soon as you use a verb, you are an actor. You're not a bystander. And I think scientists should really use more verbs and more simple verbs and have a purpose. And they're making sense of something that is important. Why cannot can't they explain it in simple words? Like I always run things by by my mother, who is who is a great person. But if my mother doesn't understand it, the wider public will not. Journals will not pick it up, except in very dedicated publications, peer reviewed, if possible, because, you know, we're in common language. So basically, my role is to translate complex things into simple things. I mean, break it down for people who are not like everyone that's here this weekend. I mean, it's just amazing, the level of complexity you can talk about anything with anyone here. And I always try to put it down in words that everybody understands. And in doing so, create common ground across disciplines and across the scientific world and the world that's outside. We had a great talk just before I came here about, you know, religion and science. That does does the fact of being a practitioner religious people and inhibit you from creating good science. And we had 40 minutes discussion on that. And we did not even need to use jargon. It is possible. Believe in yourself, scientists, you can talk like anyone else. And if not, I'm here to help. There are optimal encodings, right? Yeah, I will ask all the silly questions until I understand. What about you, Andrea? I'm sure that, you know, working in ethics, political philosophy and psychoanalysis, you know, stuff comes must come up a lot for you in one form or another. Well, it does actually. If you think about psychoanalysis specifically, it has various sophisticated theoretical discussions, especially if you go on on the same line that I that I did in my background, I was studying language with a Lacanian from a Lacanian perspective. So there's nothing that I know about psychoanalysis that I at least initially that I should communicate to a patient, for instance, I don't I talk to people about psychoanalysis all the time, and it's never in the jargon. It's never in the theoretical language. And I think we have to do that. The language that we speak is the it is the language of the other. And you see my effort here to speak English. And we we should try to speak the language of the other. There's a lot of learning on that. And this is very important. And then the the hard thing is we communicate by what is common among us. And we need to communicate what is uncommon about us, what is random. So that's the challenge. As you asked about institutions, I recall when you were developing your question, I recall Cathy, your news perception that people who are worse off in society would be treated by algorithms. People who are in highest positions will be treated personally in the future. She she analyzed that and I think she's right. It happens already on when you're you get in contact with a bank depending on your level of investment and your account, you have a different treatment. And we all know that happens and lower ground will be algorithmic and algorithmic treatment in the in the bad sense. So we should try to we need to to have this fine tune on what is common and what has to be introduced. And I think an artist knows that very well. You will use a frame. You use something that someone already did. I have a friend here who studies art. He teaches a creative process in art and painting and he used to emphasize that art has only five or six themes throughout history. It's death, love, the sacred sex or nature. And it's always that. And but it is reedited and we touch that again and again. But we need to touch that in a irreducible way in a way that was not there before. Even though we always. And this is what I learned from people in algorithmic information theory. You can always find some regularity in what you have. The particular experience has something peculiar, has something random, and we need to preserve that. So there's this beautiful capacity that we have to have between being common so that we can share an experience and have common emotions and participate and giving something new. It's it's I think our challenge every time we open our mouths, our mouths. So to that point, you know, in speaking with social scientists using complex systems methods to explore the way people form and change their beliefs. One of the things that comes up again and again is that we, for the sake of expediency, prefer to talk to people like us, you know, that that it's it's easier because there's a shorter inferential gap. You know, it's you don't have to spend as much time communicating, which is, you know, Mikaela, to your to your point, is that it takes a lot of work. I actually, you know, the longer I've worked in science communication, the more sympathy I have for the the the scientists and, you know, the demands made upon their time and attention in order to stay productive within a specific system of of institutional incentives and the way that that sort of forecloses on many of them from becoming effective communicators to a general public. And likewise, in society, we see all of this polarization, you know, as you know, it's it's augmented by our filter bubbles, but it's something that has been present with us from the very beginning of our humanity. And yet we know now unequivocally that it make that it pays to make an effort to step across the aisle that, you know, that if you if you look at the short term incentives, the short term incentives are just hang out with the people who think like you. The long term incentive is towards a much more diverse and therefore resilient social ecosystem. And yet in order to make sense, you know, there are so many constraints on our our attention and our energies. And again, like, you know, that the case of the science and science communication problem is just one tiny corner of this much larger problem, which is that as society scales and the complexity that we have generated in civilization scales that, you know, something like future shock happens, you know, people want, you know, people need to retreat into manageably simple explanations that account for their local context, however biased it may be. It makes more sense to, in many cases, just toe the line and get along with the people you depend on than it does to argue with them over objective reality. And so, you know, there's there's a kind of, you know, things seem like they're pulling apart at the seams right now. And I'm curious where, you know, to as we sort of bring this thing into its sort of consummating meta that I have wanted from the beginning of this call. I'm curious where each of you sees us as a civilization right now in terms of the new processes of navigating this world across disciplines or beyond disciplines. How how the sense of, I mean, somebody in the YouTube. A comment pointed out that we're not even all necessarily even using the same definition of randomness here. You know, and it seems that that everywhere I look that interdisciplinarity itself means very different things to different people. And so, where do you all sit on, you know, finding the sweet spot here in terms of like, how much noise do we admit to the models that we've made of reality that are useful to us, but perhaps only up to a point? And then, like, you know, where do you what do you see as the implications or the the future evolution of society as a way of sort of managing the crises that we've created for ourselves in this regard? And yeah, maybe that's the last one we'll have question that we'll have time for on this call. I just want to quickly jump in here and say that my immediate response that is to turn to something that Michael have brought up, which is nonviolent communication, which I think is a really important concept that is at an personal and individual level. There are certainly things that we can advocate for on a system level, each as we see them, but as a way of moving through the world and working on nonviolence and communication seems like it would go a long ways towards letting something, a future emerge that we could all actually live in. So I would love to hear from Michael of what she thinks about that. I think it's even worse than that. It's even more simplistic. I think it's about kindness. Nonviolent communication is about kindness to oneself, to others, to society, to our communities, to the otherness, to nature, to the globe, to our planet. I mean, it's all about if you can be anything in the world, be kind. I think all the people that I've met this weekend are kind and respectful. And in kindness, I don't mean just going, hugging trees and wondering about cats on the internet, but be deeply kind to one another. Be also kind to yourself. Not every day is gonna be your best day and not every thesis you're gonna write is gonna be your best thesis if you're do more than one. Be kind, ask for help. People are here to help you. There's lots of kind people around and I think I'm seeing our friend, sorry, what's your name again? Tom, Timothy, who works with violence, not shaking his head, but looking like he's going deep into himself because I think that that's the only solution. Be kind to nature, be kind to yourself, connect with people that are different. It is work. Being kind is lots of work. It's an interesting challenge with the kindness because I think too of how when you were starting that, how many religions, if you strip away all the orthodoxy and the institution and all that, how many religions and movements are simply founded on, hey, be kind to one another, right? Do that. I think, however, the challenges with that is the obligation of awareness of areas you may need to be kind for that you are not aware of because a lot of what I see is people can be enormously kind on the grievances they see and recognize, but if they don't understand the grievance of someone else and the grievance, the upbringing, the water that feeds the grass, I liken grievance to carrying capacity of a system. The grievance in a system is often manifested in the violence of that system. And if we don't understand where that grievance is coming from, then it's very hard to be kind. And as we begin getting into these, what Michael was talking about these, we self-selected algorithmically selected echo chambers and things like that, the knowledge of the grievance that one another has dissolves into the manifestation of I see the outcome of the grievance and I really only see, as humans, we sort of evolutionary, we look for threats. So one of the challenges and one of the reasons I focus on violence is violence draws the eye and you can have 10,000 people being kind to one another, but one violent act will create a ripple effect of side choosing where now they say, well, and this goes back to a little bit of a gentle rebuttal on Mike about, hey, reach across the aisle. The invest, asking someone to risk harassment, physical danger for payoff of society 30 years down the road is a tough ask. I mean, and that's, I think that's the trade-off that sometimes we get when we say, well, if we just all be a little more bipartisan, people react to risk and they're asked to fear and threat. And so I think that the, yes, be kind, but also be aware. And then also the challenge is understand that not everyone is going to be in a safe place to engage in that. And how do we create channels for that? And how do we protect people so that they can do that is probably goes side saddle along with this concept. Definitely. Yeah, I just wanted to maybe add something. Kindness in the sense that, of course, you do empathy as well, you know, and you listen and you really do listen and you really ask and you ask questions that people can answer. Totally agree with you there. Most people don't know what they want. So, you know, figure out what they want and what they need. And from there, be kind to that, not just be kind and, you know, hug everyone, you know, free hugs are good. I have nothing against free hugs, especially in times of COVID, but, you know, be kind and listen deeply to people and understand where they're coming from and try to join on commonalities rather than on what divides us. If you allow me a little comment here, what I would like to emphasize is that when we open to others and to this kind of kindness, what will come is necessarily noise and misunderstanding and some other information, therefore. And we shouldn't be, so I don't think we need to try to control our speeches that much or the understanding of what we give to the world that much as the, that's the experience of an artist like Meredith can say that, but of communicators, although you develop a competency of transmitting, conveying your ideas or someone else's idea, sometimes better than the original, we should understand whatever happens to this communication when it gets to people and the feedback that we get as something rich and interesting because when it goes one way and it just moves forward and you just win people and you have applause, something's wrong, something's really wrong. We should, I think, consider that. I may tell you that as soon as I finished my PhD, it was like, not 20 days ago, it was the 7th of May. I started a course on a story, it's screenwriting just the constitution of the idea, I'm not getting to a real script, but just understanding how movie makers think about just what is emotional about what I had to say, how to tell the story, should I have a character that for people to be concerned with and this is what I'm trying to learn so to touch more people, hopefully. So happy to see this effort. Thank you. Yeah, that's just to put a pin in it for later. Should we get the opportunity to speak again that that is something I've become very interested in. I would jump up out of my chair if I weren't connected with wired headphones to this computer and show you there's a springer collection on narrative complexity. People in storytelling taking a perspective on the complex systems of narrative and complex system scientists applying their techniques to the study of storytelling. And this gets back to Tim, what you were saying earlier about cartoonists being able to just nail it. Because in some sense, for the reason that forest bathing seems to be such a healing phenomenon, there's something about the way that our nervous systems have learned to encode environmental information that we either get right or we get wrong in our attempts to communicate with one another. And I hope that we got it right this time that we took the appropriately nonlinear if not totally random walk through the woods of this chat. And I just want to thank each of you for being here. I hope that we have time just to go a couple of minutes over because we started a couple minutes late and just give each of you a chance to say your piece. If you have any closing thoughts, reflections on this weekend, places you want to send to people after listening to this conversation to go deeper into your work or a message in a bottle to the unborn digital archeologists that will be hopefully digging this out of an ocean submerged server in a few thousand years. Yeah, how would you like to end this conversation? I just did mine. So have at it. By the time they pull it out of the servers what we learned from complexity science would be distilled to a parable. We'll finally have gotten the communication right after a few thousand years. That's how long it will take. It's not rigorous enough, Tim. Talk to my dissertation committee. I think that everybody needs art and put back art into your life and stories and words and marveling at things and marveling at other people's work and other people's words, other people's art. That's my closing. Andrea, you've gotten the last word a few times already. I think we'll give it to Meredith on this one. Yes. Well, I'm just so thankful for being here with you and learning about your perspectives. I said a lot, I think I'm just... I don't know what to say now. I'm just happy to be among you and so thankful for meeting you all. That's it. So it's about play. It's about curiosity and gratitude for this wonderful conversation. Thank you, Michael, for... And thank you, Daniel, behind the scenes and all the people who've made this gathering happen. Indeed, a big thanks to everybody at Complexity Weekend for inviting me back to do this. You can find last year's conversation, which was also super fun on my YouTube channel. Future Fossils is available as a bi-weekly podcast anywhere you go for listening to podcasts. I host a book club that we do on Patreon for people that want to participate deeply in conversations such as this. And each of you find people who join me for this call. I really hope that we continue to talk to one another because you'll find each of your work fascinating for different reasons. And I'm glad that we had this time today. So folks, there's gonna be an office hours session I'll be available for a little later this afternoon. If anything came up in this call that you want to address. And I hope to see you there. And I hope that the rest of you had and continue to have an excellent weekend with these people. So thanks and take care. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. We keep you safe.