 I'm using of hemp and you know so many of the things that we're here at this conference where hemp is a revolutionary material. It can be of course made into clothing, it can be used to make you know biofuel, it actually pulls a tremendous amount of carbon out of the air. So there's certain things where you're like oh wow if we just realigned a lot of the materials and resources around us you know that's a good one I like that. I mean okay let's let's get meta because I have a feeling you're an ideas person. So your average person right now is bombarded with so many things we're looking at students being bombarded with debt for example we're looking at the economy is in the middle of a hidden recession in fact it's heartbreaking in New York we now have as many homeless people as during the height of the Great Depression and so that's a critical sign I mean something's really wrong mental health economic consistency you know the living wage. So that's going to get deeper and weirder as more and more electronic media and other forms of artificial intelligence and other things kick in people are going to be radically displaced from the economy the fact they already are. In New York as you walk down any street you're going to notice a lot of empty storefronts as well because the landlords won't adjust their rental rates and they'd rather sit on an empty space and then have a chain store come in and get rid of the mom and pop businesses the small businesses stuff like that. So the nickname right now in New York they're saying it's retail apocalypse. San Francisco you're probably facing a similar crisis because of the tech sector and the housing you know kind of issues and the homeless I just walked around this morning the homeless thing here is pretty deep too. It is. So those are just. Retail apocalypse is also pretty real across the middle of the United States it's been for a while yeah. So everyone is getting all their critical information financial information from the internet. So the whole economy now is now people are being conditioned to consume far more than they need and things like that like hyper advertising hyper consumerism. So these are things that. Versus creation. Right and creating it's like it's meaningful right and gives people like you said the dignity of work the dignity of a sense of engagement. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Allen. 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 Sockian. We are on site at the beautiful New West Summit. Number five the Cannabis Tech Conference. We are now going to be talking to Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. What's up. Yeah what's up how you doing. Thank you so much for coming on the show really appreciate it. Yeah I just got off a flight from New York and as always the weather here in San Francisco is gorgeous. I love California you guys don't even know man so it's so nice out here. We don't got the six months of freezing cold New York temperatures. That's right. That's right. Paul's background is so interesting musician futurist a Google artist in residence. So teach us about what you've been up to with composing multimedia art writing. Tell us about what you were passionate about. OK so just for those out there in the world who are you know just new comers to my vibe. So my name is Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. I'm a writer artist and musician composer. Basically I live in New York but I travel all the time. So a lot of my work it looks at the connection between technology art and music simple three things. But the the glue that holds together is a kind of a passion for social justice and environmental justice. And many of those issues come out of I think you know both my parents are professors when I was a kid. My father was dean of Howard University's law school and my mother was a historian of design. So I kind of just grew up in a household of valued and respected information a lot. But here we are in this sort of I am so hesitant to say the Trump era but the A.I. era could be another way to put it. Yeah. And so information and technology meanwhile are far outstripping many of the social dynamics of our time. So if you look at what's going on with politics versus the the arts or the arts are far more engaged with technological evolution at the moment. This is for my own opinion and meanwhile a lot of the policies that are being engendered especially with this current administration and so on. So tech is evolving but art is not keeping up as fast as tech. No in fact art is moving just as fast and in tandem with technology. But I feel politically speaking a lot of the policies that we're seeing just are hamstringing people and like not necessarily. Enabling creative flourishing. Yeah that's a good way to put it. Yeah yeah. Tell us about how you see tech art and music collaborating for social justice and environmental justice. Right I mean half the battle right now is critical thinking like getting people just to be aware of how many variables are at you know in play. And so for me at least again like we're here at a cannabis conference and you know I barely even smoke but I'm very respectful of the whole issue of the innovation. So I'll give you a funny example is like the decriminalization of all of this stuff that we're here at this conference you know sparked an entire new economy. And that has helped so many people but at the same time it could be more dynamic and more I'm a big fan of like once you get like the innovation going to create more and more feedback loops you can create a much more robust situation. So Canada for example took a similar approach but then blew the door open because they were far more dynamic with their policies at a governmental level. Your average American entrepreneur is burdened with a tremendous amount of ambiguity. I mean Jeff Sessons the guy who was the former attorney general created a nightmare because he personally just I don't know what his again these people are they're crazy you just crazy. So old ethos old code. Yeah evil and stupid. That's you know just a yes. But at the end of the day a lot of the way that when you say old code versus new code that's that's a much more polite way of saying it. But I do my best to respect the humanity no matter what. That's a good one. I mean I'm working on that at the moment man. It's just like here we are. You wake up any you know any human being who's corrupt to brain cells together and you see climate change you know fires floods crazy migrations of insects there being a growing extinct like bees butterflies also at the edge of extinction all sorts of stuff that's happening. And it's like people just how do you incentivize them to care you know. So do you feel like your push into tech music and art co-in collaborating can then entice that and catalyze that big change that we need for social justice and environmental change and how would you see it also doing that. I mean it's been a powerful couple of weeks I was just in New York for climate week and I had a big event with Bill McKibben who is you know a friend and just a really for lack of a word serious catalyst for rethinking climate change and it was amazing to see Greta Thunberg was this younger woman who was like 16. She did a talk Battery Park like I don't even know like 200,000 people. People have reached a tipping point all puns intended you know whether the awareness is there. But policy I'm using of hemp and you know so many of the things that were here this conference for hemp is a revolutionary material. It can be of course made into clothing it can be used to make you know biofuel it actually pulls a tremendous amount of carbon out of the air. So there's certain things where you're like oh wow if we just realigned a lot of the materials and resources around us we're using stuff and you're talking about old code we're using stuff badly like our buildings are old building code you like I hate air conditioning for example in New York the summer this summer in 2019 the electricity went out because everyone turned on their air conditioner so the next person turned on their air conditioner and then everyone turned on their air conditioner and it overloaded the system I'm just giving you one example whereas if everyone had turned off their air conditioners and let the breeze we're right in the middle of a river you could just let the you know there's a nice breeze coming in but instead everyone wants that air conditioning I'm just giving you one example but there's zillions of others and so half the battle is just getting people to think more critically about the world around them and the materials and things that we can we can do better. So tell us about your process then with tech art and music and how you then find specific things like cannabis how do you embed that within your framework that you use and then how do you distribute that content across platforms to catalyze the change that we want to see. Well at the moment you catch me right when I'm finishing a whole bunch of projects so if you ask me the same question 2020 I'll have a lot more concrete specifics so I have a new album that I'm almost done with called the invisible hand and that's with the guys from the band the police which is for millennials out there I have to say there was a band called the police and not NWA after police but the police. So Stuart Copeland is the drummer he's a legendary figure he lives out here in California that project is looking at cryptocurrency and we're turning the whole album into a kind of a cryptocurrency approach to music and like smart contracts publishing then let's see I'm finishing a book called digital fictions the future of storytelling where I sort of dig into how stories shape perception so narrative is critical especially in this time where we're looking at what you call computational propaganda we're looking at algorithmic narrative like I'll give you example again like collaborative filtering on stuff like Twitter Facebook and so on if you click on the like or whatever the smart or what you call neural networks deep learning actually begins to shape and mold all the things that you see around you so you live in a bubble and you actually won't be able to get any information outside of what you've already clicked and like because you keep getting these small reference points I'm just giving you that as a civilian there's it gets deep but so you're hitting all of these different fields you're hitting you know copy computational propaganda algorithmic bias filter bubbles but you're also bridging into into social justice and environmental justice interesting so then how would you then see something like your books you know your book sounds really interesting this is a digital thing yeah digital fictions the future of the future of storytelling that's the full time the future story so interesting because then from someone that's literally focused on how the different methodologies for storytelling are going to be exploding around our world you see yourself both recording albums and distributing albums with partners like the police and then you also see yourself writing books distributing other content across your platforms okay so you're really going broad multimedia and also multi-field multi-disciplines yeah interesting and then does it does it feel like music or does it feel like I'm writing does it feel like one of these is landing in in the hearts at a deeper level music has this ability like bypass the gatekeeper you know that's a good one I like that I mean okay let's let's get meta because I have a feeling you you're an ideas person so your average person right now is bombarded with so many things we're looking at students being bombarded with debt for example we're looking at the economy is in the middle of a hidden recession in fact it's hard heartbreaking in New York we now have as many homeless people as during the height of the Great Depression and so that's a critical sign I mean some things really wrong mental health economic consistency you know the living wage so that's going to get deeper and weirder as more and more electronic media and other forms of artificial intelligence other things kick in people are going to be radically displaced from the economy the fact they already are in New York as you walk down any street you're going to notice a lot of empty store fronts as well because the landlords won't adjust their rental rates and they'd rather sit on an empty space and then have a chain store come in and get rid of the mom-and-pop businesses the small businesses stuff like that so it's a the nickname right now in New York they're saying it's retail apocalypse San Francisco you're probably facing a similar crisis because of the tech sector and the housing you know kind of issues and the homeless I just walked around this morning the homeless thing here is pretty deep too it is so those are just a little apocalypse is also pretty real across the middle of the United States it's been for a while yeah so everyone is getting all their critical information financial information from the internet so that means just quickly also this is also similar for other countries around the world where Alibaba is doing the distribution to write so this is happening all over the place so there's people that will need to find some sort of dignity and humanity and meaning in life when their work is displaced by the artificial right and so that's almost almost a foretold conclusion I mean I think we are looking at a radical shift of the economy and so my book digital fictions I usually publish with MIT so for those out there Massachusetts Institute of Technology it's one of the best tech schools in the country but this one I'm doing with Duke University Press and again I'm not finished with it yet because this landscape keeps changing every couple weeks there's new developments and evolution like the other day I was there's a really I'm not I'm going to pivot back to what we're just talking about but so when you look at the economics of like the last couple centuries it's been the basic production of physical goods and the idea of scarcity but if we circle back to the 21st century we're now moving more and more into an attention economy and so influencers all sorts of people are making millions of dollars off of clicks and likes in fact billions I mean you know so yeah the eerie thing about physical goods versus perceptual goods I mean literally economists call it perceptual goods like how many clicks likes and so on you know if you look at Facebook if you look at all the major the furious five as we call it you know in hip hop it's a I use the term the furious five because it's grandmaster flash and furious five but fang is another one right so you got Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple etc. Google so so all of that is not necessary that's a deep concentration of wealth and so we're now I think just facing the notion of a critical transition part of that has to do with the creative economy which means this is a narrative storytelling new methods of you know podcasts are huge right now everything so all of those are people coming into a better sense of consciousness that's my own take you know and I'm writing a book about this I'm doing all this research on the other end of the spectrum you have the political system that thrives on ignorance and so because of that like Trump is a perfect example you know they've they've thrown up this huge radioactive smoke screen around Trump policies like hemp should have been legalized decades ago realistically and it's a great material or never illegal yeah never right always used as a tool for spiritual ascension yeah across all different and even the first American flags are made from him I mean if you want to go back to deep old school if you look at any of the first you know flags of 13 colonies they were made from him so I chuckle about that because here we are in the 21st century so we're facing a crisis of climate because we're going to be seeing much more climate refugees if you look at the Mediterranean if you look at what's going on the south of America right now all those states are going to be hammered with storms like a lot more and then of course global warming with the ice sheets and article all this has to turn to how people tell themselves a story when they wake up in the morning yeah so amusingly enough people are calling this era the Anthropocene era yes so the human impact on our planet is unquestively changing things climate change is man-made by far humans are the greatest impact factor the greatest variable on the trajectory of the planet now right so the Anthropocene era means it's about people so I'm just kind of riffing on that with you for a second because I'm fascinated with we can all change I mean we can wake up tomorrow and there's a very famous phrase from Adam Smith who's generally considered to be the godfather of liberal economic theory where he says all money is an illusion and so he takes it even further says all money is a matter of belief like you believe in a currency or you don't yeah and if you know like if you look at market forces if you perceive something going down amusing enough everyone else will start selling and the market crashes or if everyone starts seeing something going off everyone starts it's amazing because you can actually quantify that and like I'm a regular runner for example oh give me just a moment to everyone hold on let me get that sensor back on there we go all right I like the fact that you just have to do a little choreography a little yeah we gotta do the little dance and then with the dancing about architecture you're kind of moving there so yeah I mean these are all things that can change I firmly believe that the human psyche the human spirit sways towards the good the problem is it's levels of awareness levels of ignorance and manipulation you know it's like so the whole economy now is now people are being conditioned to consume far more than they need and things like that like hyper advertising hyper consumerism so these are things that versus creation right and creating it's like it's meaningful right and gives people like you said the dignity of work the dignity of a sense of engagement so as we move further into the 21st century these are things that's on my mind right now and as we're at a canvas convention it's kind of cool to see a lot of people innovating and trying to come up with new approaches so I've been walking around a little bit and just get a sense of what's happening it sounds like the if maybe correct me if I'm wrong this biggest principle to take away is a fire in the morning every morning that can bring great value to yourself to your family to your community to the world and by having that and by that sort of a meaning and drive having that fire is could be some of the biggest solutions to social justice to environmental issues to the artificial intelligence future that we're moving into yeah and amusing enough man it takes more money to put somebody in jail than to send it to Harvard I mean it's like there were some really funny articles of not funny well funny bad not funny good and so maybe some social scientists and other people would argue that it's just it's it's it's we are all born with different cognitive capacities and so in order to be able to to help get someone excited about learning and to put their trajectory towards finding a North Star rather than becoming incarcerated is the big thing there to figure out right I mean so when you talk about finding your North Star I love that phrase because North for African American culture during the slave time was where you had to get for freedom so people would literally follow the North Star and there was an underground railroad all sorts of stuff that would give you a narrative of again a narrative where people are saying follow the star follow the solace so it was still a story and it was still a kind of if you look at all the earlier African American hymns which of course then became blues or then became hip-hop and so on amusing of the DNA was always about liberation and obtaining freedom the song after song story after story so I'm a big fan of that right now what we need is better narratives of better stories to give people a sense of being a stakeholder and change yes yes and I don't even some people are like oh we need revolution we gotta wipe out everything I actually think the better solution is is giving one or two generations of people better critical thought tools and you could see the whole world change that's a big one and also like you said inclusive stakeholder incentive structures as well around that two quick questions that we like asking our guests on the way out the first one is do you think we're in a simulation okay there's a gentleman named Gates G-A-T-E-S I was blankling his first name is it Sylvester Gates let me look that up really quick let's look at he's an african-american quantum physicist who's doing some really cool stuff Sylvester Gates and he has a big ass yeah right here yeah yeah this is him Sylvester Gates if you google him and look up Sylvester Gates he had a great bit on with Neil deGrasse Tyson on star talk right Neil deGrasse Tyson and him got pretty deep into this whole simulation theory it's kind of multiple choice question slash multiple choice reality and there's a lot of quantum physics that's built into human perception so if you perceive something you change it and there's a lot of theories around what you call Schrodinger's paradox or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle again my music of both parents and both sides are professors and my grandfather taught a little bit of quantum physics and quantum chemistry and other stuff so we had these kind of dinner table conversation but so I'm not a specialist but family and other people around me and I have a lot of friends who are serious quantum physics people so my take on it is that we live in a universe that is an optimization of the realities that were possible so if you look at Brian Green who wrote a great book called The Elegant Universe he's a friend of mine he wrote the introduction to two books of mine ago he has a theory that there's multiple universes and the ones that we inhabit are infinite but the fact that we perceive them has withdrawn them out of probability into manifesting our current situation so the infinite possibility at every thought which is kind of like mind-boggling and he's written whole series of books he's at Columbia University look him up Brian Green great guy but that also aligns with amusing enough more ancient traditions of mathematics and thinking mainly what happened in India and the idea of infinite universes as well India mathematics in India really took a different turn and Europe didn't have the concept of zero until Fibonacci so amusing enough if all the numbers we use like one, two, three when you draw them they're actually Sanskrit they're called Arabic numerals but actually the Arabs took them from the Hindus so amusingly enough all of our mathematics and most of the things they were thinking about still goes back to some of the very ancient thoughts about infinite universes and potential and so I actually am a big fan of saying that it's all about research and reading and I just want to show you a quick this is one of my favorite photos this is Einstein with Rabindra Tagore who is one of India's most famous poets and Einstein when he was working on the general theory of relativity it's all in line to you and just Google Einstein Indian poet Rabindra Tagore Wow that's so cool I appreciate you showing me that yeah that bit was so good the very last question as we wrap here can you go intro that next panel what is the most beautiful thing in the world? Wow that's a deep one okay what is the most beautiful thing in the world? I think the most beautiful thing in the world is your contemplating of the idea of beauty of getting people to really think about all the potentials around you so when you say thing I'm more into the idea of the thing so sorry I love it I love it Paul this has been so fun did you speak? Thank you so much for coming on the show really appreciate it thanks everyone for tuning in we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below check out the links in the bio below to DJ Spooky go and follow him and go and check out all of his incredible work and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world and continue building incredible things with organizations like the New West Summit and the other great partners in your community support them as well thank you very much and we'll see you guys soon peace