 still we have this idea like before the Big Bang that there was nothing but I actually think it was the other way around I think it was everything and then the Big Bang is the beginning of very particular things. I think the purpose of this whole thing is surprise. It's sort of like a being that could make anything decides well it would be cool if I could make something that could make something then surprise me. I think it's likely that we will speciate. I think it's for certain that we're gonna make and then thousands of different species of AIs. You know whether this kind of walking barefoot in the woods and being knowing how to plant a seed and have a turning to a plant is that one of those qualities that we absolutely don't ever want to let go of I don't know maybe maybe not. Wow we have a moral obligation to make new technologies to make new opportunities so that every person born would have at least the chance to have their genes shine and shared. Well how did you wake up? Many different paths and I think that's the answer. I know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. We are on site in the beautiful Pacifica, California. We are now going to be talking about what's next and much more. We have Kevin Kelly joining us on the show. Hi Kevin. It was great to have you here. Thanks so much for coming on the program. What a beautiful day. It is and you have quite the background that is paragraphs long so I'll give the short clip of it. Kevin Kelly is an expert on macro trends of civilization and technology. He co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993, has written multiple New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling books, is on the board at the Long Now Foundation and much much more. You can find the links in the bio below KK.org. Also his Twitter profile, find all his books as well. Kevin, we have been spending a lot of time on trying to understand the ultimate nature of reality and I would like to hear what your thoughts are about that. So we're going to start big and then get bigger. We'll start with the small stuff and then work up. The nature of reality, well the honest truth is that I and the rest of humans have no idea. I mean really, we have no idea. We have theories. We have metaphors that we use but we just don't know and it's very clear even from the terminology where we have what we know, what we know says that 95% of physical stuff is unknown. It's dark matter and 97% of all the other intangibles is dark energy which means that we have no idea about really what the basis is. But nonetheless we have theories. We have suspicions. We have hunches. We have metaphors mostly and I think for me one of the most promising metaphors and one of the promising frameworks to try to understand things is to assume that the fundamental reality of anything physical, things that would hurt our toe if we dropped it, are going to be very intangible, very much dematerialized, very informational if not spiritual. So there's a famous physicist, Wheeler who says it's our bits. Anything that's an it is actually made of bits and so I think the next big step in us trying to understand the basis of reality will be coming to kind of an informational based view of both like things like physics and the rest of the world that we will kind of come to interpret through this notion that everything real is really made up of nothing, made up of bits, made up of some kind of immaterial thing. And that's a suspicion more than I could roll out evidence for but you know if we look at the sub-particles and the sub-particles and the sub-particles and at some point it seems likely to me that there's going to be something intangible at the bottom that'll be close to our ideas of what we think about information. So I am biased to the idea that the underlying basis of reality is informational but I would be able to prove that and I think the evidence for it is very circumstantial but that's my hunch. Does it feel like we are all one? Well so the answer to the question in the sure hands yes it does and in a very logical sense there is only one life on this planet. I mean there literally is only one life. There is a the first cell the very first cell divided into two cells with the same life in it and those two cells divided in two and we are all just descendants of that same dividing cell that unbroken line of I mean literally a literally unbroken life of that division there is not a single gap between us and that original one okay and so we are descendants and so yes at one level in a very real sense we there's only one life. When humans say that we sometimes talk about kind of you know something high or not just life but other levels of consciousness and even that that's remains to be seen. I think that I think that the again reflecting kind of what we know about physics I think the amount of what we know is growing exponentially but the amount of what we don't know is even growing faster and that's because in in in science most of what you get in science is answers but you get two new questions for every answer so so ignorance is actually expanding faster than our knowledge and so you could say in a certain sense the main product of science is an expansion of ignorance and as you know with two exponential curves the difference is exponential so we are actually increasing ignorance exponentially and so having said that it's true that we're that our knowledge is expanding tremendously fast but there is so much that we don't know that you have to be I don't know so much some level of vanity to kind of state anything with certainty I believe I think you know the the whole point of science is that it's provisional truth and when we don't know so much of the fundamental nature of the universe that it's hard to rely on something that you're worth dying for in any any aspect and you know we in our own lives are busy and we informed and educated I'm a science groupie geeky guy but even I have to have a kind of a belief in atoms I believe in atoms mostly because people who know a lot more about it have told me that they really exist right I mean it's like I when I could do some kind of experiments that might kind of suggest strongly they exist but I don't understand them as an atom you know there's an atom oxygen atom right here and it has these that is for me really something that I have taken on because other people who know a lot more about it have convinced me enough of them and that that idea fits into everything else we know and so so for me science is really this web it's a constructed web of consensus and that for something to be added to it it has to be added to that's to make sense when all the parts already exist so when you add something new to science it has to not only kind of match that adjacent area it has to match everything that we already know it's a big it's a big step and that's why sometimes we're slow to kind of bring something into the arena of what we know as science because it actually has to kind of match everything we know and one of the reasons why you can have these islands of knowledge like semantic knowledge well there's there's a thing about their semantic knowledge and some other ways of knowing things they can actually be consistent among themselves and within that body of knowledge but the problem is that it's not intersecting with all the other things that we know and so it doesn't mean that they're wrong it just means that we cannot bring them into science because they just don't match with everything else that we know and I like to think about you know there's a kind of a there's a statement that's not true when we talk about the discovery of the gorilla happening in you know 1800s or something because it's very clear the humans knew about gorillas way before them but there was something true about the fact that even though there was rumors of gorillas and these monster men and stuff in the 1800s the gorilla knowledge was brought into science it was fitted that knowledge which had been local and very parochal was brought into the whole scientific world and it was connected to everything else we knew about animals and the natural world and so in that sense it was discovered but was just being discovered by science meaning that it had to fit in to everything else that we already knew and so so you know are we one I think is a question that we're going to be asking for a long time and I think there are going to be you know there's many ways to answer it but I but I think the answer fundamentally is this one of those things that we don't know and will take a long time I suspect the that the other way to answer that is that we're going to also have this decision ahead of us is not just like are we like of one mind of one thing but we're going to have a real decision as a society is whether we want to remain as one species or not okay so so so so so as we go forward we're taking on we're we're going to self direct our own evolution our own genetics and there will be plenty of pressure plenty of interest in modifying ourselves and there will also be plenty of people and I know some of them who will say neither I nor any of my descendants will ever manipulate intentionally manipulate our genes even for the so-called better and that would lead to some very good prospect that there might be a forking and once you do one fork schisms are just in the cards and so and so the prospect is is that we you know unless there is also a just a general consensus that there shall not be that division that we won't allow it which means basically that we're going to prohibit the engineering but outside of that this very likely that we would begin to see multiple varieties of our being and at the same time maybe even in our minds how we how we think so I make up a little four by four quadrant of possible futures and the question is is um are we of one species or many species and one mind or many minds and so you can imagine a world in which we remain one common species with many minds that's sort of what we have right now we have one species with many individual minds it could be many species with many individual minds but as we look forward we could also be one species where all our minds are joined in a kind of telepathic super organism kind of we're all being connected so we have one species and one mind or we could even have many kind of species and one mind where we're connected to all the machines and everything else and that so we have various and we all have one mind so I'll hit the ball back now yeah I love the breadth I love the polymathic worldview generalist worldview I'm so deeply that lights a fire under my spirit deeply so to hit the ball back here you're ending on something that many call collective consciousness this this oneness right so within this many times we'll get to this part of the in the conversation as well where we talk about this this edge of civilization's knowledge being pushed yet it's also so interesting that this idea of the ultimate nature of reality can also be right here as we look here I mean like right here as we look in each other's eyes and deeply feel and if we practice that over and over and over yeah right something so profound that's beyond words right occurs sure and so it's here sure this nature of reality is equally here as it is where it's pushing the edge of civilization's knowledge where you gave this idea of we push an edge in one of these fields and then immediately we learn our ignorance is so much greater and also another aspect of what you were mentioning is going back in this evolutionary process to the beginnings of life the genesis of life on this planet we can go back even further to the genesis of what is postulated as a big bang or what many call creation or source or all that is or god or whatever people want to call it that that is one and we are all descendants of that right yes yes yes and so then is it then that our ignorance of that our feelings of separation from that oneness from that deep interconnectedness with this oxygen that we inhale that comes from phytoplankton and trees there's scientific ways to discuss the interconnectedness as well is that the most root the most upstream issue is the lack of understanding of that interconnectedness of that unity of feelings of separation um I would agree with everything you said the question you were saying is it the most important upstream issue that I don't know what would what could be up there as well then upstream issue do you mean sort of what is blocking us from progress or is that what you mean or I'm not sure even maybe what you mean by upstream issue what do you mean by that so we mentioned this a little bit ago as well that when we look deeply sure and we feel that the nature of reality seems to also arise even simply here okay so then there is something here that is not practiced enough by us enough for what enough for feelings of understanding the nature of reality and so again it's feelings of understanding the nature of interconnectedness of oneness is that the most upstream issue that we're not embedded I don't know what you mean by upstream issue this is what I'm saying what do you mean by upstream issue meaning that as a collective to hone our attention on that could be the most impactful for cascading the greatest symbiosis and flourishing moving forward it's a good question I maybe have my my tendency is not to believe that there's a single roadblock or a particularly large problem that is sort of if we solve that problem we're I think we have a network a whole's collection of problems that are all intertwined and that's certainly part of it and I think being able to overcome that would help but I don't think that is sort of like something that stands alone by itself my map of reality is that these things are all deeply interconnected and that that issue of understanding deeply the interconnected oneness or unity of the world and people while essential and important is not alone it's what are the other ones up there as root or upstream issues for you um yeah so it's you know it's like all these things that have to happen at once um I was just reading about the axial age and whether that was actually the idea of the actual age was about a thousand bc there was around the globe all these societies who kind of at the same time in history decided to under to position to see themselves um as and to think about the transcendent and to kind of invent these modern religions of one of the six religions or even kind of the buddhist where you had you you kind of had this transcendence and that and I think it's no coincidence that that came along with the you know the invention of civilization and it was per and it was it was because we had a certain level of prosperity that allowed us to think about those kinds of things all right and so and so what what what one of the things that that is necessary for us to continue progress in in the development of our humanity and making us better humans is you know the the basic um having enough food shelter water for everybody in the world I mean it's it's it's very hard to it's very hard to progress in enlightenment when you are hungry and I think the idea that that somehow starving people are more spiritual is this completely wrong I mean there is there is a sense of of um what's the word I want fasting and asceticism can commune you with the divine when it's voluntary yes yes when you elect when you have enough resources to do that deliberately yes but when you are dragged into it when it's not your choice when it is something that is done in desperation there is a sense at which you are kind of closer to the present but only in the animal way okay and people have moments of transcendence you know as they're dying or whatever but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about how to make us better at our best and I think it requires a certain amount of um we'll call it leisure or a certain amount of um of progress or a certain amount of liberty a certain amount of things basic needs being met exactly for us to be the best we are and so part of this gateway is not just the and so you know we want to we want to have those opportunities spread around the world and we want to have more people who are not hungry every day would you say to unleash the full inner artist absolutely right and so um now the question is well what's blocking that and yeah I mean at some point the the the understanding that you know war is stupid and um you know fighting but all those things are actually propelled by the lack of resources the lack of opportunity and so so it's a the these issues are tightly wound to each other and that's why I don't really want to separate them and say the well if we just had understanding about the oneness of our own life we can go on that does help but that's not the only thing so you ask what other ones that so I think these issues of of opportunity basic basic progress um things like literacy the other kind of literacies we're just talking about scientific literacy numeracy um um issues of uh you know the spread of of opportunity and the um of true opportunity around the world in that diverse way right so the liberation of women half of the sky you know being brought into this those things I think are part of that answer and so um you know in this campaign in our quest to become better however we want to define it and that's an interesting question um I think it's a multi-front effort and and and yeah I think there's there's many things and third list and we kind of have to do them all at once that's the weird thing I like the ones that you picked uh around literacy around um spiritual scientific literacy also around the basic needs being met for everyone to unleash their full inner artist right I really love those right so you know I have a little rant which I which I will do right now talking about the role of technology in this and so um um I like to have this thought experiment where we could imagine um a genius artist let's take Mozart being born 2000 years before he was same person same genes everything being born 2000 years before he was and he would have been you know maybe a farmer maybe a herder and his genius would have gone completely wasted because there was no symphony there was no piano for his genius just walking around being a herder maybe played a flute you know nicely but and so he would have died and and and that moment would have gone but we we invented the technologies of the piano and this and the symphony and so he was born into and so his genius could just flourish his artistry was just and he could share and it was great for the world and great for him well you know you can imagine um Lucas um you know Hitchcock being born before the technologies of cinema and what a waste that would have been if they had been born before those technologies and so Shakespeare being born after writing was invented um so I say that there is a Shakespeare in Mozart born somewhere in the world today and she's waiting for us to invent the technology for her genius that she could be shared and that therefore we have a moral obligation to expand those possibilities to increase new technologies and to make sure that the basic other necessities of food and clean water is available to all those on the planet and those unborn and so we have a moral obligation to make new technologies to make new opportunities so that every person born would have at least the chance to have their genius shine and shared yes I will enjoy speaking with you hopefully in a little bit about the actual design of that social fabric that enables the inner artists to be fully unleashed around the world I would like to also ask does it feel like this reality is perfect this when you say this you mean the one that we're in right now or the one that I'm talking about does it feel that everything is perfect no it's perfect I don't believe in perfect I'm not a utopian by any means I think perfect is way overrated why because it's dead one of my definitions of God is sort of like you know perfection that keeps getting better which is sort of you know it's like what what that's a weird thing so I think most you know perfect means that it can't get any better well then it's like dead it's it's dorm it's static is this reality a perfect balance of good and evil a perfect ascension that we're all experiencing through consciousness I doubt it I doubt it now you know it's sort of like it might be I mean I think like if you take this idea in your question is this idea that they're alternative universes with different arrangements of things I think every one of those if there if that is if there is a small diverse with many different arrangements every one of them will have a different trade-off you know and a different character and a different thing and so there may be some universes where things are really keen but there can't be any mangoes that can't be so it's like who wants to go there is the sum of all of the multiverse is that perfect I doubt it I have another question what would be the purpose of this reality being made this I mean again this what we're in right now our our reality of everything of all that is why is this yeah yeah yeah well you know that's been the $64,000 question from the very beginning people ask you know why something versus nothing and again what's the T los sure sure sure the the the general the the general kind of intuition particularly when we look at the scientific view of the Big Bang is that the origin of all this stuff this something if it goes back and back to this moment that kind of before the moment even though there is no before the for because time is there's no time so we can't really talk about before the Big Bang because there was no there was no before the before but still we have this idea like before the Big Bang that there was nothing but I actually think it was the other way around I think it was everything and then the Big Bang is the beginning of of very particular things of nothing including nothing that there was there was kind of nothing space and then there was these very particular things taking out all the possible everything everything meaning literally literally all possible possibilities and so I think the purpose of this whole thing is surprise I think the I think there's a being that was self-made a self-made being and the purpose of this embodiment of that per that self-made meaning is surprise so it's like to make something that this omniscient self-created thing could do that was going to surprise itself and we're here to surprise God and so you know it's sort of like a being that could make anything decides well it would be cool if I could make something that could make something then surprise me okay we get that that's what we're going to be doing ourselves we're going to be making robots and stuff and they're going to we're going to give them creativity and they're going to surprise us yes yes this one's a fun one that this being made in for the process of becoming more alive understanding itself better but being creative this symphony but expressing itself artistically it's one of the favorites that we love discussing mm-hmm all right I would like to ask another theme and this is one that leads us somewhat into the architecting of the social fabric to maximize the artistic expressions it also leads us into the projects some of the projects that even the long now foundation is doing with the Rosetta project there is an ethnographic condensation that is happening on the planet out of the seven thousand languages about half of them are not being taught so we're very quickly most people learning English Mandarin we have Arabic we have Hindi we have Spanish we have these languages most the most common ones and then we have these principles of what feels like in many ways of many of these languages that are not being passed on that have a deep sense of interconnectedness with one another and with their environment symbiotically in let's take the best case scenario of an immediate return hunter-gatherer style is it principles like that that our that are in the sense missing in modernity in these massive metropolises and the that the what are the principles like principles like which which which ones and repeat that last question yes yes principles like deep interconnectedness with each other and with the environment okay things like the children being able to actually see mm-hmm the galaxy in the universe mm-hmm things like the apple not just being a sheet of paper for the apple but rather actually observing the process of the seed the tree right that process right right and and the question is is like are we losing something vital if we lose those in the kind of modernity and may we potentially design architect our social fabric of that future that takes some of these principles and really challenges modernity with wanting to architect include inclusively of those principles yeah um so so so i i think my guess is that the more rounded a person is that better that person will be a human and there is certainly um there's certainly going to i don't think human nature is static or sacred i think it is very malleable and part of what we're going to be doing is changing our very nature we're not the same people that walked out of africa million years ago we have we have changed so there there are there are things that we have already left behind and that is in the nature of evolution um at the same time since we don't know where we're going we want to retain as many different varieties and approaches and understandings as we can because who knows what we're going to need and we don't even know what is actually vital so i think um i think just i think it's it's we can be conservative by conserving some things as we go along other things i think we can give up and and we don't know what those are and i think um we should pay attention to that and we should be very deliberate about it but i'm not i'm not going to be sorry if we leave some things behind some some choices that's that is in the nature of evolution is you can't hold on to all the options you have to surrender some of them you want to maximize when you want to keep as many as going as possible you always want to be able to don't want to burn your bridges but you're going to have to at some point leave something behind and so um so i think we should do that kind of deliberately if with care with awareness with constant testing to make sure that whatever original human instincts or that we are going to you know jettison that we're pretty sure about that um and so you know whenever you a person in their life they make a decision you know you always want to kind of keep those options open but if you move away and go there you are going to leave some things behind and that's the nature of growth that's the nature of loving you can't hold on to all of them so yes whether you know whether this kind of walking barefoot in the woods and being knowing how to plant a seed and have it turning to a plant um is that one of those qualities that we absolutely don't ever want to let go of i don't know maybe maybe not um wow it's wow it's certainly i think you know i think the person who is the roundest who is the most who can access the most um um number or variety of understandings is probably the better person but there's just going to be a limit to what one person can do the more world views and states of consciousness that one person can abstractly reason simultaneously uh or have in their catalog right then that is what was this roundedness right it's gorgeous when it's uh there's right yeah so so we will i mean again you know i'm not talking about my lifetime but you know if we take the really long view and view a thousand years into the future there may be humans who literally spend no time of their life in nature that i can imagine that that seems that seems very possible to me there's already that happening inside of the boxes in the high rises and to tell me instead yes and so um uh there may be other ways for us even to to um um meet some of those human desires and that and this is my prediction it's because i think the technology that we are producing will become so complicated at some point that it will resemble resemble natural organic life in its complexity and that's you know we might have we might have um self-replicating devices in a thousand years we might have self-replicating devices that are on their own gathering energy from the sun and replicating and spreading and that that complexity of the technium at that point may resemble the complexity of the organic world and so there are people who will be attuned to that technium and they may get some of their they may have no contact a very little contact with the biological world but they may have a lot of contact with this complicated technium and that may may feed some of their desire for complexity so um um i so i don't i don't i think we are malleable enough that um we are going to change what we consider human nature and yeah for some people that's very very scary um because it is kind of like playing god um and and for others it's scary just simply because they they revere this mix of qualities that we have right now um even though they're not perfect and you know in others um it scares them simply because they don't trust ourselves to to do this well and that's that's a fair thing to be worried about but um uh because it could backfire you could make some choices that you can't really you know can't fix so um but i'm i'm i'm a little bit more optimistic um in part because i think that this is going to happen a lot slower than you know the Ray Kurzweil's of the world believe i i'm very dismissive of the singularity idea that this is all gonna take place very rapidly i think this is a very very slow thing and that if we are open-minded and if we really test and examine ourselves we will have time to evaluate to to to you know the first people who will live without nature to look at their lives and see if they're being better humans um and so we will have we will have time to experiment on ourselves leave it to Kevin Kelly to take something like the principle of planting a seed and having harvesting the apple from the tree to be like in the technium there will probably be people that don't know that are which even today we have people that live in metropolises that don't know that so very very interesting and then another point to continue on this as we go through this process of getting into a technium that we will be architects of the social fabric that enables the full unleashing of the artists in the symphony yes yes and so in terms of the design of that fabric there are many things at play right now you spoke earlier of the speciation of humans and we've been speaking about this quite a bit these in many ways there you could view it as a bifurcation already or a trifurcation in some ways there are approximately this number half of the people that make less than three dollars a day us dollars a day on the planet yeah which is less than a cup of coffee at your coffee shop and then there's people that are struggling to cover their you know the roof over their head um so and there's those people in the middle that have water and that have food and have electricity but struggle with rent and a car payment or whatever right so there's like the middle grounders and then there's the extremers with the private jets the yachts the tons of cars buying up real estate like a game of monopoly in the metropolises shopping for 20th designer clothes per pieces of clothing meanwhile walking past the people that are suffering that's not one those are not my brothers and sisters so there are these already speciations that are already already in the fabric and then we see certain things like we we look at trees and we look at the way they sequester carbon and the way that they distribute the excess carbon the large ones to the seedlings and the smaller ones that don't get so much through the roots and fungal networks and do we see that right now with our these bifurcation trifurcation of inequality that's occurring uh we don't really see too much of that and uh the architecting of the social fabric towards um a similar maybe biomimicked process uh could include something like a an inclusive stakeholder an inclusive fitness between that oneness where it is in our best interest to help unleash the inner artists um and that we earn stakes in that process uh and that it's already happening everywhere around us where we use all of these products and services um and fuel the shareholder wealth of those organizations without ever owning any sort of tokens in that in that process yeah how do you see that social fabric given all of those variables just described being able to be architected to handle such a technium um yeah i i think um i think we're in the early days of of um architecting you know our society i i i you know the amnesia about the past yeah is really shocking um um we you know my you know the the journey from the days of say my grandfather growing up without electricity and and you know running water or anything to to my life was that's that's just an amazing jump okay and that's that's almost within touching distance and um even even my own i mean i have some have troubles conveying to my own children the parochial nature of you're growing up in the fifties in in in america how how really different it was and non-cosmopolitan and and very very isolated and there's just so many things and like you know again this desert of information about how to do anything which we it's really hard for them to to understand like i was telling my son that um you know we didn't have computers growing up and he's he was thinking but but how did you how did you get to the internet if you didn't have computers you know it's like that's a really good question you know it's like um and so what i'm trying to say about that is is is that um we are right now i mean the until now people's conception of who they were what this is all about what they're doing with the purpose of life and was not really about engineering society i mean that was there was um um there was none on the agenda there might be a couple people who were thinking about a few people who may have thought about that but but but this this idea that we that we have some individual responsibility to be working on this that this is the grand work ahead of us that that we are in some ways not just concerned about this person in our town but this person who lives in Ethiopia and this person that we don't know if he was walking on the street university that we are that we have any duty or obligation or anything to do with that that this is new and so um i think the the great frontier ahead of us is us developing tools of collaboration of being able to work together at the scale that we never been done before to scale the planet we have had no planetary awareness no no no global framework before this moment this is i mean the the best someone might have done to become a nationalist all right um if they were thinking big but we're we're now required to think globally and and and it's very hard because we don't even have the information globally and so um and so we are in the process of becoming aware that this is something we have to do making the society and then developing the tools that will allow us to collaborate at distance in real time to do these things to spread this these opportunities to manage all the innumerable incredible problems that it will create because we are going to create whole new global problems as we try to do this all right i mean i'm i'm not a utopian each of these new steps is going to create new problems that we have not foreseen and can't even comprehend and so um and they're going to seem impossible and people are going to ring your hands and say stop stop stop because of these problems but no no we're just going to solve those problems with other new technologies and new opportunities and so and so i i think i don't think we know how we're going to construct that society that will allow the unleashing of all the inner artists everybody but that is what we can work on and we can work on the tools we can work on the social technology like how do we vote better i mean literally the little act of voting can be improved um you know there's this idea is a quadratic voting and there's this there's just we're just at the beginning of how we do this and um we haven't made much progress because simply has not been on the agenda and um now a sort of forefront it's like well you know um when we're connected to everybody else that's really good we wanted that we need that but then there's all these problems that happens when you were connected to one another and so all the time and so how do we solve that i don't know but we're gonna that they are solvable and when we solve them that solution will create a whole bunch of new problems and then the answer to that is not to stop that but to solve those problems with new technologies will make new problems and so um that's protopia that's not utopia it's protopia that's progress it's incremental slow by slow we'll make this out it'll be a little bit better not by much but a little bit better and that creep that incremental improvement is what evolution does it's what civilization does is interesting hearing you mention that this phenomenon of global or planetary architecting is recent in maybe a couple centuries and that well it's i would say it's recent even within the last fifty years a couple decades so it was it was not possible to be for it was simply you know even the the picture of the whole earth came from stewart brand and his campaign you know an apollo it was like until then the image of it was it was even hard to this to have it but once that image of this sort of thing floating in the middle of space it was like ah there's no outside there's nothing it's all we're all one and um that that's sort of where you could begin to even just to have that framework of like well we've got it you know and and all the climate change stuff it's just a global system it has to be treated globally and there's no you can't have a national solution to it and so um it's a very very recent um awareness and within what you were describing around this all of these new technologies that are being developed for the ability to manage that architecting which is the numbers are always staggering around 90% of all new data being made in just the last two years and then at least now we're going to have the augmented reality technology solutions to do that real time process right you speak a lot about also the digital twins which are very interesting making a digital twin of Kevin Kelly's body deploying some sort of a of a solution meanwhile monitoring his biometric state and then trying to see if that solution was actually conducive to longevity but then also digital to the whole planet right there's all of these very interesting we haven't even mentioned quantum computing or genetic engineering or neural interfacing there is all of these other what uh what what cryptocurrency is uh has been doing to money um so there's all of these different things that are happening and there's going to be new tools that as this edge gets pushed and there's more questions that come up there's new technologies that are made there's more opportunities and you talk about this and I love this point just you us knowing how to learn being a meta learner yeah knowing how to learn so we can keep learning new things as we keep pushing that edge right right is that the one of the most important most first principled things certain yes I think at two levels I mean I think part of what um part of what we are innovating when engineering evolving as collectively is our ability to learn collectively and I would say at this point in 2019 2020 one of the most underrated um accelerants of that learning is YouTube mm-hmm it's just phenomenally accelerating how fast things learn I was just I mean I'm not just talking about like makeup videos and tutorials I'm talking about doctors going to YouTube to see how our surgery is done I'm talking about scientists going to YouTube to watch someone give a tech talk on a paper that they wrote so they can understand it better we're on this channel someone watching you say something and then getting inspired in their country across the planet to take initiative in starting a community around that absolutely so that's just but that's just one tiny aspect that's YouTube that's just YouTube of what we're trying to what what's happening which is that we're collectively accelerating the rate in which we learn things and the chief way that we learn as a species is through the scientific method method and I wrote one of the first histories of the scientific method itself and my point writing it was that in the next 50 years the scientific method is going to change more than it has the last 500 years that the scientific method itself is evolving and accumulating new techniques and that science the very method the science itself not just the stuff that science discovers but the process of science is also changing which is so exciting it is because collectively we are learning how to learn in more ways and faster and deeper and the consensus mechanisms are absolutely and you know foremost among all the changes that are coming in the scientific method is going to be a ice artificial intelligences always say plural because there's many different varieties of them and they are going to be instrumental in helping us because our human minds are not general purpose intelligences that's complete myth there is no general purpose intelligence we have very very specific weird combinations of cognition that were evolved for our planet and they're going to they're probably insufficient to understand dark matter and dark energy or to you know to discover how they work and we're going to need to do a two-step process we're going to invent other kinds of minds that think differently than we do that work with us together collectively to figure these out so so that's sort of what's in store for it my only point about that is there is a collective meta-learning that we're doing but there's also the individual assignment that we have as as individuals to meta-learn and that's in my opinion much further behind in the sense that we're not even aware of the issues we're not aware that this is our job that we need to learn how we learn ourselves or to optimize our own learning and there's no curriculum that I've seen anywhere in the world that teaches you or me how to optimize and understand our own learning because each of us learn a little differently for different things and what we want to be able to arrive at is to know fully well how we would best learn a new language how we would best learn a new physical skill how we would best learn a new discipline how many hours of rest we need between this how much we have to devote to the practice we don't know we have no idea and this is what I think schools should really be teaching that when you graduate what you're graduating with is a degree a degree in self-learning a degree in how to optimize your own learning so that you know yourself the best patterns and techniques the best way to learn all the different things and ways that need to be learned and you know what they are and you've been practicing you've been tested and you've been helped by teachers to optimize your own learning that is what high school and college should be there's that inner artist to be unleashed and there are all of these even from such ancient days of things like bloom to sigma just get one on one mentorship and that accelerates you tremendously all the way up to today's artificial intelligence is acting as coaches that have a psychometric profile an ancestral profile they you've you've discussed back and forth about what this uh this artistic expression is of yours and there's a tailored daily learning process of like you said patterns and techniques around that actualizing that fullest potential right and actualizing means they're conveying to you so that you understand what it is and you can repeat that and do it again so so it isn't that you kind of arrive at doing something creative that's just the first order thing what we want to do is you want to know what that process was so that you could do it again even better than you and more importantly that you can actually evolve or optimize that process that you there's enough self-awareness about this that you can get better at it and that's what the true artist you know the Picasso somebody is that they they sort of um there's a great documentary that does a time lapse of a Picasso working on one picture as he paints and repaints and repaints and he painted the same painting over over and as like you say well that you say well that's fantastic and then he no no no he's changing he said well that's fantastic and he's changing it again it's like it's like he's looking for something he's doing something what is he doing and what it was was he was aware of what it was that he did and he's he was trying to surprise himself he was trying to get to something that he hadn't seen before he he famously said he wasn't interested in beauty and prettiness and all the places that we would want to stop were things that looked pretty or beautiful or cool and he was not interested in that he was interested in something that shocked him it was surprising it was different and so he he was aware enough of how he learned and how he did that that he could just produce these and so it's not just like we want to have a mentor to help us make creative things no no no we want to have a mentor that that teaches us what that process is so that we can evolve it and make it even better yes and that is that's a high bar it's a very very high bar I don't know how to do that um and and maybe it requires AI to help us do this but I mean I think even using human teachers we could go a lot further and that if that was the course and the course is you graduate understanding how to optimize your own learning and so that would be fantastic yeah that brings feels me with joy it fills me with knowing that that is our highest potential and that it is so exciting to feel what it feels like when every single one of us is unleashing the fullest inner artist right yeah um and you know I like you you're used to the artist because in my framework how artists go about the world and scientists go about are very very similar they're they're parallel it's the same topologically it's the same process and in when you have a space I'm using space as a in the mathematical sense of a high dimensional space when you have a space with as many dimensions as reality has meaning that there's you know thousands if not millions of different variables that are being mapped in that space when you have a space that's a really high variable and you're trying to navigate through that you're trying to search through the space which is what computer scientists would use as a way of discovery that when you're discovering something you're kind of going through the space looking for some peak of optimal adaption so they would they would make a map of success whatever it is and they would say when you reach the peak you're at peak and in the life and and the search is looking for the optimal you're searching a path up to the optimal position and that search that discovery is exactly the same process when you're inventing something so when you're inventing you're doing the same thing you're doing the same search it looks exactly the same if you're looking at someone searching you couldn't tell whether they are inventing something or discovering something and that's why I would say you know it's like did Ben Franklin invent electricity or discover electricity you know did someone invent prime numbers or discovered prime numbers um was the like was like fire language was a light bulb discovered or invented the wheel they're the same thing it's the same process and the artist is the artist discovering the painting or inventing the painting creating it or discovering it's exactly the same process those those processes are basically identical it's really the same process so an artist who is coming up with something is often coming up with it in a very similar process that a scientist would come up with a new idea I loved how you also mentioned the not only with this way of viewing discovery I love that and also the the way of viewing the rapidly accelerating mechanisms that are changing of the scientific method that's very important as we consensus figure out what is civilization's collective some knowledge and how do we find these question marks at the edge how do we efficiently galvanize resources there have been some big pops recently whatever Satoshi Nakamoto and blockchain is was a massive pop in the last 10 years now has just been pushing a very interesting edge when you're mentioning earlier this lineage and we are descendants of that lineage in many ways that itself is a biological blockchain is there's a very interesting ways of viewing it with many orphan chains that have died out along the way and many again bifurcations forks like you said earlier too so the process of us figuring out how to what is your inner artist is your inner artist in the seeing the overlap between biology and the distributed ledger technologies is your overlap between brain computer interfaces and and geopolitics I mean like there's so many ways to figure out what's actually at the edge how to make unique connections at the edge leveraging artificial intelligence is to run quadrillions of permutations of all of these edge pushes to figure out where we should go how do humans some have a symbiosis with that process because is humanity a biological bootloader for a digital superintelligence you gave us this technium a thousand years from now what role will we have will we be a will we be consciousness in the digital superintelligence and that is what will exist how do you feel about that well you have too many questions here and and I guess maybe just addressing the last one yeah um uh I I think the general trends in both evolution and the technium is towards more diversity more mutualism more specialization so um I think it's likely that we will speciate I think is for certain that we're going to make in event thousands of different species of AIs and all the things that we talk about that work from life consciousness intelligence you know self-awareness all those things are none of those are binary and all of them are gradations and various so there's you can have different levels of life you know a virus has a certain level of life for material and more we have a lot of life we're very living because we have so many different systems life is not binary it's not like it's there or not there there's segregation and there's various kinds of it same thing with intelligence and consciousness consciousness is not binary it's not like it's there it's not there there's many levels a gorilla has a very interesting combination of different kind of consciousness we'll put consciousness in machines of various types so there'll be lots of consciousness around more than we have now um and intelligence is absolutely the same with with many varieties many degrees many continuance and gradations of it so we're going to be surrounded by by multiple varieties of consciousness and intelligences and life artificial lives and what's our role is the question that we're always going to ask and so next year and the year after for a hundred years or a thousand years we'll still be asking this question which is where do we fit in what's what's our role why are we here what are we good for what can we do that these other things can't um I think the short term my suspicion is pretty clear that we are that the machines and intelligences we make are much more aimed towards efficiency productivity answering things narrow intelligences humans are much more about asking questions about open-ended stuff we're very inefficient we'd like to do inefficient things like art and science those are incredibly inefficient the only way you can be a good scientist is if you're wasting time basically asking questions getting wrong answers having failures you can't be innovative unless you're going down a dead end you can't discover things unless you have a detour you can't make art efficiently so we are going to gravitate to the inefficiencies at least in the short term machines if it's if it's concerned with productivity efficiency it goes you know goes productivity is for robots right you just give it to the ai's and they're going to be really good at that if you want to answer to something you ask a machine if you want to question you hire a human that's in the beginning but over the long term you know we'll make machines ask questions and we'll have to re-evaluate what it is and again if you believe that humans have to serve general purpose intelligence then we're kind of like they were done but I don't think we have a general we have a very peculiar kind of intelligence and our value will be because we think differently than the ai's and the ai's are valued because they think differently than us and so the one thing that humans do really well is that we humans crave the company of other humans and it's just really really hard to kind of fake it's hard and expensive to fake another human and it's also usually not needed because we can make humans so easily that we are you know we're going to seek out our company and the the company of a human is going to become very very valuable because we can get all kind of a company we can make virtual telepresence we can do all kinds of things very cheaply but to sit like this is going to be one of the most cherished expensive valuable things that we have and you know someone will take a plane across the country and come there and that's that's costly that's expensive much much it would be cheap to come over an avatar and we'll do that all the time but we'll come to value that sitting there because you can't fake that there's you can fake so many things they're always but we're really tuned to that reality we you know we'll always we'll we'll have some value of that and so it may be that you know our jobs in the future may be just to keep each other company to entertain and to enjoy that company because it's because we love it yeah the the neuro physiological effect of the technologies that we're talking about when I do see an indistinguishable Kevin Kelly that's sitting next to me here and I can't tell you will you will be able to tell because we took millions of years of understanding that telling process and so in a thousand years though that's a you know this is some sure sure sure much different than right 10 or 50 years from now so there's that and then there's also that I'm very curious as to the really the process of self-work the process of healing the process of integrating trauma the process of marrying science and spirituality marrying Hollywood and Silicon Valley marrying the USA and China there's so many of these harmonizations that that we would love to happen that are part of that architecting process that you know you listed earlier thousands of artificial intelligences well how do we make sure that we have a deep amount of moral and ethical and spiritual evolution philosophical wisdom before we choose to partake in such potentially we didn't think that we would unlock the power of the atom and then have oops nuclear bombs and so where was our where was our spiritual evolution there where was our where was the wisdom there to to hold back on something like that so this is still a big mixing pot of all of those variables that right yeah well I mean I don't know I always hit the optimistic thing that my optimism likewise my optimism is that yeah we use it twice for a bomb and we albeit stockpiles still well yeah but we haven't set them off so so albeit eight hundred billion dollar per year yeah no it's a complete USA right it's industrial complex right it's stupid at a level of stupidity but it's the same time so far we learned something so how do we wake up how do we wake up fully to the this we were at the very beginning sure sure sure yeah um so that way we ensure that beautiful world that our hearts know is possible right um yeah how do we well how did you wake up I mean what was the process many different paths and I think that's the answer yeah I mean without trying to be live I think the answer is is I don't think there's a one thing I think it's everything it's many different paths it's it's we have to do everything at once that's always the problem we gotta do all these things at the same time it's not just like a one thing and so um yeah we want to do all the things we know we have to do making sure that there's opportunity spread throughout the world that you know there's clean water and energy and clothing education and we want to have transparencies and we want to connect everybody and we want to I mean we have these issues about you know not everybody is the greatest parent what do we do about that that's really tough thing to say how about your path yeah yeah uh you know I was very very fortunate very blessed very lucky lucky beyond belief I think luck is not acknowledged often enough I mean basically I am lucky where I am in my view is because I had a lot of luck from my parents to where I was born to when I was born I was lucky what we want to do is we want to kind of spread the surface area of luck so it touches more people to get them ready to prepare them for luck when it comes to um you know basically expand the the touch of luck so um and that's what I think civilization is in some ways is a way in which you kind of are expanding the surface area of luck so that luck has the potential to touch more people that they can be ready for it um and uh you know so that's so we have that's another thing that we have to work on doing at the same time um trying to um empower people luck can also be viewed as gifts it can be viewed as synchronicity is absolute gift basic needs that come up as mirrors in a sense in the oneness where it does come up that once uh I do a deeper amount of self work myself that all of a sudden my relationship with my family changes drastically with my friends with my inner artist just right changes drastically and so it we create mirrors as we awaken more and more and right now the internet and especially social media is a big mirror and yeah and there's a lot of very crazy reflection that's happening right now of our subconscious of our both our our our greatest drive for finding the most signal in the nature of reality and also the most noise that we've ever inundated ourselves with right so it's such a that's why when I mentioned perfection earlier I wonder if literally nothing is impossible except to make something as beautiful as this yeah I I think perfection is such as this and possible I think it's well it's unattainable but it's also undesirable so um use protopia earlier I use protopia this is idea of progressive progress movement towards something um just like I'm I'm not a I don't there's lots of things that I think are correct about this kind of news sphere chardon's idea of the of the news sphere but what I don't agree with is idea that there's a convergence of this omega point that we're coming to a point that there's some destination that is teologically predetermined that we're headed to some end state I I think that's totally wrong what if we learn the source code of this and then make another one yeah I think what is I think there is a I think there are directions I don't think where's the destiny and humanity is not about destiny it's about a direction so we're kind of moving outward we evolution self organized systems are radiating outward from the big bang the original thing with increasing numbers of diverse solutions diverse specifics individuals diverse opportunities and there's so there's a direction of a radio outward but there's not some convergence onto an endpoint so we have the evolution the world technium is moving with directions there's direction to evolution but there's not a destiny what is the directional arrow going towards outward a life is going to exploring towards increasing varieties whatever we have today there will be more varieties tomorrow and thousand years or even more varieties is increasing specialization so the first cell was a general purpose and over time we made more and more specialized cells and we made a general purpose organism with more and more specialized in organisms the first little bit of intelligence was general purpose and we have more and more specific specialized so it goes from the general to the specific we have a movement from the simple to the complex we have a movement from things that are inert to more mutualistically dependent so more and more of life depends on other lives more and more of our own social interactions are dependent on other people more and more machines will depend on other machines so we have increasing towards mutualism we have an increasing movement towards a sentience mindful acceleration of the degrees in which we can adapt and learn that's called thinking so there's more and more a general trend towards increasing levels of learning and adaption or mindfulness so that those those are the general trends and directions yeah beautifully synthesized I want to also make sure to mention this because it's a story that that I think will help unleash the inner artist out of so many that are in the process of contemplating beginning or still in their own process of discovery or maybe they are already on their path but they're still struggling somewhat along the way that the story about putting in these literally tens of thousands of hours of time into being your inner artist in order to become the true best inner artist you can possibly be with the the pop the pottery professor story is yeah yeah it's so incredible yeah yeah you you can have the option to submit just one or two of your best pottery creations in for your for your final score or you literally the professor will take your collective weight of the pottery that you have made throughout the year and it's and the best examples of pottery come from the ones that have literally been doing the most weight of it and so this process of becoming your best inner artist is so deeply about these tens of thousands of hours but it's also about having these really strong meta learning right because that hacks it hacks faster right the fact that i'm here right now with you and you are augmenting my world view significantly at the age of 27 plus all these viewers around the world that are also having the world you augmented by it's a hack for all of us because we made this happen right and because you were gracious enough to also catalyze it happening versus if this didn't happen we then i wouldn't have gotten this we wouldn't have gotten this kind of hack or upgrade which might shave a couple of those maybe dozens of hours right yeah yeah it's it's um it is kind of remarkable to me too that um volume numbers actually make a difference in the complexity where we talk about more is different there is actually something qualitatively different that happens when you have more and in the world of art and innovation the the problem is is that most variations fail right yeah and so the solution is really literally you just make enough of them that eventually you have one that works okay i mean and that's that's what evolution does it's sort of stupid it's a stupidest way in a world of doing it you just do it 10 000 times and you'll get it and you'll do it better and so um uh and that's sort of where we are we we have to operate in the real world and so the the benefit from drawing every day is that you do it again and again and you start to and you will do something a little differently that you just couldn't get to by by yourself i mean just deliberately doing it and that moment will take you to the next step and you do your interviews again and again and again and that core repetition so to speak is like a science project where you do an experiment over and over again and so um that and that um uh solution to um innovating and getting somewhere new and somewhere different and somewhere better um comes down to you know numbers like like you just you do it a lot you do it as a practice you do it as a discipline you do it every day because you must and so um that's one of the benefits that we have of being in this reality this you know what i think of us our ride right yeah the ultimate simulation to your to your name we have an ultimate simulation which is like the the the subsidy the the the the quality of this brief ride that we have is this unbelievable um and we tend to squander it right we that's the fear the fear is that we'll have this once in a lifetime opportunity to kind of be immersed in this thing where and here's here's the crucial difference you're asking before about reality the thing about this simulation that we're in this view this avatar is that we actually in this arrangement of things we have the ability to have an impact on others and we have this very very complicated system where i actually can do something i could affect somebody way far away who doesn't know me i mean i can do things you can have it could affect millions of people i can do things that can affect people for good i have this power to impact by being in this body that has physical restraints and all kinds of things and senses but that body this presence this this reality is one that's sort of built to kind of optimize our ability to have impact on each other we can imagine lots of other realities and we'll make many of them the ar world and vr and and we can do amazing things in them we'll be able to do certain things we'll have some impact we'll be able to have some senses but we're not going to have the the built in leverage that we have in this world here and so you know the the lament from christmas story charles dickens story the lament of of the scrooge is that he realized that he wasn't using that life for impact when he had the chance and it wasn't that it wasn't so much that you're gonna miss the fresh mangoes and the hair blowing through your in all these other sense yes that's part of it but the thing was is that he realized that he could have actually influenced people's lives back then but he missed that opportunity and so we have in this situation here been set up in some weird way to optimize our potential ability to impact each other that we aren't going to be able to replicate for a very long time we can we can replicate lots of aspects of reality but this one of being able to actually have the impact in so many different dimensions is missing and will be missing for a long time wow there are still so many ways to to go um one of the things that i i do want to um bring up is that there is a popular video right now on the web and it's at least several years old you showed it during your talk i think it was i believe it was the uh the japanese art oh the hyper reality the hyper reality where we are we are wearing our augmented reality technologies and the entire world has um added there's a digital layer that's added on to our world that is um that has you know very much so like lots of good lots of bad all there and so one of the things about hyper realities that i'm interested to to ask you about is that there seems to be a way of viewing um hyper realities like something as fundamental as like a santa claus that is uh some sort of a something that's not true that we tell children and then they believe it's true and that makes a hyper reality where they believe something's true okay when it's not well yeah so so a lot of our fictional characters are like that like superman has a certain level of reality as a concept i mean it's like that that archetype that hypothetical mythical it's a mythical character has some level of reality in our minds because it we can share we can share there's something we can share there's certain attributes that we would agree on there's you know it's as a concept it has some reality even though it may not real may not be real and physical realm it has other levels or spheres of reality um ideas are real so so santa claus is like that it's a mythical character that has some level of reality and and that's a very basic level point though in the grand thing which was that you mentioned this at the beginning as well with this whole idea of the atom and us buying into that right right the atoms are all here and that the cells look and function a very specific way and that uh that the the galaxy and the universe function in a very specific way and so then when i look at a molecule of water and you look at that molecule of water can we collectively agree that the molecule of water looks the same because yeah well yeah it these are the ways that maybe the scientific consensus mechanism could hopefully um upgrade itself in a sense where um there there could be something that is uh like a sort of uh base camp or catalog of what we collectively believe is objective yeah yeah yes yes so so again i i think science is operating with that you know it's still very it's it's a contingent it's a it's you know it's a contingent consensus but i i i think we're on a process now we're kind of googling some of the ai so actually generate a corpus of statements or knowledge that is graft that is connected together that we would come to accept in the consensus way that was true so we'd have a statement saying that you know london's the capital of england and most everything else in that corpus would agree with that therefore there has you know 99.9 agreement and therefore we can say well that's true so there is a consensus and consensus works um i'm not sure you know we were thinking about this this idea of virtual realities and alternative versions of things the hyper reality is where that can be a slight issue when we have right a planet that is spherical that still people say is computer generated imagery right when the space photos are released and so there's a hyper reality happening where it's uh there's a there's a scientific consensus that is aiming to be made around uh spherical planet orbiting spherical stars moon orbiting that and then there's a body of people that say that no flat earth or no cgi and so we have in a sense a sense making mechanism right that is uh deeply uh a part of this push that we've been talking about through the conversation that um will will may that may need these first principles like you are describing where there are these statements that hopefully uh you know children being born into the world can can enjoy the a statement like the planet orbits the star and that the breath i take in comes from phytoplankton and and trees yeah yeah i um i i think that's mostly there i mean i think you know i'm not there's lots of issues with this kind of fake news and conspiracy stuff i'm not as concerned about the flat earth people that's just almost to me almost like a performance art i don't really take it very seriously but i there are other issues like climate change where where um arriving at a consensus is much more important and much in certain sense more difficult and i think you know as we go forward we can enter into certain things like race and genetics where there is going to be a lot of contention about what is the consensus and what is actually true and in part because a we don't know and to the process of finding out is uncomfortable yes and so and so i and i can imagine other things as we go forward um where um uh we might have difficulty arriving at consensus and there may be kind of differences of program ethics into artificial intelligences or into genetic engineering right right or like whether you know whether if if an ai should at one time say i have a soul and then there'll be questions about whether to accept that or not do you believe that or not what's the evidence and so you know the whole the whole the whole issues around consciousness and how we would define it or even um verify it so i think i so i think there will be issues that we may not even know where we stand on right now that we're going to come in the future um but i do but i think in general um we are moving to a place and again the thing about the thing about these truth things is that um they're brought in only if they can be connected to everything else um and then they become useful and the problem with a lot of things that aren't true is they're not useful i mean one of the things about evolution in terms like the evolution debate with the creationist is that the thing about evolution is is incredibly useful it's with evolution the old earth the idea of geology and layers that's how you find oil right i mean that that knowledge is used to determine where we find oil is there's a use to it creation science is completely useless it tells you nothing there's no predictions there's it's it's you know it's by its nature the utilitarianism right of truth is so powerful yeah okay and so um uh when you can bring it in and connect it to everything else it increases its values so like other things things have values by how much they're connected data alone is never valuable data only becomes valuable when it's connected to other data the structuring of it right and so and so that's the so the problem not the problem it's like a to me it's a self terminating self limiting problem about these untruthfulness because ultimately they were just proven not to be useful they can be distracting and causing problems but they're going to disappear eventually because they simply aren't useful enough in the long term yes in the short term they can cause a lot of problems yes and there you've used this and we use it several times species amnesia is a big thing where we don't yet know so much maybe even as high as 99 percent of all the archaeological excavations have yet to still be found around the planet and here we sit with this clock ticking of them disappearing and so in order for us to understand that or in order for us to understand something as where one person may use this word conspiracy people still want to investigate into something as recent as under 20 years ago the 9-11 people still want to investigate in and understand what is really the truth of that or even as recent as just a couple months ago with Jeffrey Epstein right right similar thing people want to know what is the truth right who if any are real true puppeteers sure are moving knobs right because when we had Cambridge analytic people want to know the truth behind it what who is behind it and and so so that that that that interest is not just on the right it's on the left as well it's everywhere people understand that there are big dynamic systems that the elites the powerful have motive have motives to shape the world so it's a very natural question I think the it's a natural question to ask but the difference would be what do you accept as as evidence of proof what's what's your criteria and here's the thing in this new world that we're in and that is is that it's almost impossible in today's media to ascertain the truth of anything in real time by the evidence of itself and so if you look at a photograph or text you can't tell whether that's been altered if someone sends you a message he said this well anybody could change those letters and you could just make up something how would I know they really said that here's a photograph do I believe it well anybody can photoshop it and here's a video well anybody can make a deep fake these days I can't believe that the only thing you can believe is the source and the source is only believable in terms of their history of how reliable they've been in the past or if they have an umbrella or if they've been vetted by someone else's reliable like a newspaper or something and so we're coming down to basically the point where you can't tell right away in real time whether something believable but all you can believe is their source and so that's sort of where we are and part of what we want to do is make a system where the sources of things are embedded into the things so they can't be taken apart so that you can always so you'll be able to just say well where did this come from because that's really the only thing that we can ascertain in real time eventually we'll figure out but in real time we can only evaluate by the source full circle because the same thing applies to this reality it all goes back to source right it's so beautiful right very last question sure what is most beautiful what is most beautiful oh boy I think for me I think the most beautiful things are acts of selflessness of in some ways a generous surrendering of one's own interest for the benefit of others that kind of a kind of almost unreasonable help to me it's just the most beautiful thing in the world someone who you know by every logic should not um diminish their opportunities for the benefit someone else that's to me is beautiful it speaks to that inefficiencies right exactly right it's it's you know it's not rational it's not efficient and it's extravagant it's generous it's surprising its art is beautiful yes which in the long run may actually end up being part of efficiency potential um no it's it's it's part of opportunity the expansion of choices it's which itself I mean so the thing about it is that the universe part of the whole the universe is totally inefficient right it's it's the universe is the most extravagant irrational paradoxical say the same thing and call it inefficient symphony though right it's it's it's it's just uh it's non-mechanical it's it's irrational it's it's the most beautiful thing because it is an act of it's a gift it's an act of selflessness right I mean the the universe as a whole I mean because there's because there's really no reason for it in the sense of um accomplishing um inefficiency inefficiency right versus a symphonic expression right as a gift as a gift right yeah so so so you can almost reduce my my my response to saying is a gift is the most beautiful thing wow wow Kevin thank you thank you thank you you're very welcome and enjoy the conversation it was surprising and a gift to me this has been a huge gift to us thank you for coming on the program thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below in the episode let us know what you're thinking about all of these topics that Kevin was talking about on the program we'd love to hear your thoughts have more conversations with your friends families co-workers people online about these subjects that were 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