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Yeah Yes in the chats you tell me we are five by five ready to go so Let us begin this show in My move my screen around a little bit in three two This is Twists this week in science episode number 965 recorded Wednesday March 27th 2024 science for our future fossils Hey everyone, I'm dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we're going to fill your heads with memories machine learning and stinky teens, but first Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer The future it is a place of dreams and expectations a realm of imagination That we create through our choices every day the future it's a place of probability and possibility not a promise Nothing certain to gain if we just wait it will come Just like this week in science Coming up next Every day of the week, there's only one place to go to find the knowledge Good science everyone and welcome to another episode of this week in science We have a great show ahead that I do hope that you fully enjoy on this week's show I am joined by paleontologist futurist and host of the future fossils podcast Michael Garfield and If you've been a twist fan going back a while you might also recognize Michael's name from One of the past twist science music compilations. So he's also a musician and has been a twist Contributor for a long time. What was that? 2007 Thank you for joining us tonight It's a blast. I've been a fan of your show for 19 years. That's the longest Like I have friends that are younger than my appreciation for you and We are finally connecting on this episode. I mean we've we have connected in real life Previously, but it's really great to have you on the show to actually talk about some of the things that You're interested where our interests kind of combine and are you know Collide and so I'm really looking forward to this conversation Yeah, how I mean Way to make me feel old, but anyway instead I'm going to take it as the good gracious We are a resilient show and we are just Continuing to bring you science every single week and as we jump into the show here everyone I want to remind you that Subscribing to the twist podcast is going to get you the podcast edited and wonderful in your ears Every single week on whatever platform if you look for this week in science or twist We're also on YouTube Facebook and Twitch and we live stream weekly 8 p.m. Pacific time We've got what is it Wednesdays? That's right. It's a Wednesday Let's forget everything time It's relative All the places look for this week in science. We're also on social media So I do hope that you look for us there if you have questions, please head over to our website twist dot org I have lots of stories about brains and machine learning and stinky teens. So, uh, michael, are you ready to go? Always Especially now. Yes Especially now let us begin and Let's start with the formation of memories and honestly to you all out there If this story becomes something that you remember, it's because I broke your brain or uh more Scientifically based on the research that has currently been published in the open access nature Journal actually just just today uh Formation of memory assemblies through the dna sensing t l r 9 pathway Now that sounds like a bunch of like bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop T l r proteins and genes are toll-like receptors and there are a number of them and they are involved in all sorts of processes And they are very important for interacting with the immune system And kind of creating processes that uh that fix six and in this particular study for the first time researchers Actively showed that in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain in humans It's like kind of you're right between your ears in the brainstem area In birds, which is what I studied. It's like right on top. They like it up on top, but uh The hippocampus we know is very important for the formation of memories also for navigation and other things so The hippocampal neurons We know they respond And they activate certain protein synthesis pathways When things are happening that need to be remembered But what actually creates the network of neurons? That work together to make a memory a memory the hippocampus is like the The the bus stop where a memory, you know information comes in A memory is kind of put together and packaged and then it goes out to the rest of the brain for the brain The rest of the brain to store In this process though What these researchers have found is that in an area of the hippocampus called ca1 the neurons that get Stimulated during an event Actually have double-stranded dna breaks So their dna is damaged and these little tiny pieces of double-stranded dna like rupture and leave The the the nucleus of the cell and so There's an inflammatory response and in this inflammatory response TLR 9 tolite receptor 9 gets act gets activated and A bunch of dna repair processes get started And in this study, they looked at mice. It's not humans, of course They weren't looking at at people and you know chopping up dna and people brains, but In this study, they were able to determine that When they shut off the tolite receptor 9 in mouse brains the mice didn't remember things And when they upgraded the elated stuff Then it worked a little bit better. So uh in this situation what we're looking at is The immune system, which isn't really Historically been Considered very much with respect to the brain and it's getting a lot more attention more recently But what we're seeing is A gene and then a protein that also Decreases in its abundance as you get older Decreases in its abundance specifically in people who have um, all-time all-timers disease um, this gene Is specifically involved in the cell population that create a network For a specific event for a memory And so this is a piece very early in that process Of creating the network of neurons that go on to create to like hold a memory an association Within the brain And I love stuff like this. I know it's like very like nitty-gritty. There's a little piece of the puzzle But there's always been this general question of where are memories stored? How do we remember things? What how does that even start and people talk about networks of neurons and this and that but Suddenly we have A piece of the puzzle and it has to do with damage Something occurs to damage the dna in neurons because neurons don't Copy themselves right the neurons are just there But there's breakage and because of the breakage The immune system gets gets involved and the immune system then is part of the process Creating a network of neurons That hold a memory I don't know What do you think michael? Well, I mean this is I I haven't followed up on this particular strand But I remember about a decade ago. I read a piece on The what they called the intense world syndrome for autism spectrum Uh, they were there was a hypothesis that suggested that they're You know certain individuals fall on one end of a distribution of sensitivity to what most people would consider normal childhood stimuli And that uh, those people have You know, they're like there's a kind of a bouquet of symptoms in autism and aspergers that they were saying were People's memories were unusually strong Because it was like they were being traumatized by normal levels of experience And that this was this was related to the differences in the development of You know, there's like Effective empathy, but then there's also an empathy that's more like based on theory of mind due to personal relationships And that it was the the avoidance of interpersonal contact because of the intensity of Relationship that was leading to Underdeveloped theory of mind in in certain people, but it could be you know, if those people were Raised in an environment where things could be kind of Stimulite could be down-regulated in their intensity that they could develop a theory of mind that it wasn't like uh, it wasn't You know part of anyway, like that this is just like another when i'm listening to this story It just kind of makes me think about you know another thing that They talk about you know the relationship between trauma and memory and in the brain And the relationship between You know trauma and inflammatory response and yes stress and the inflammatory response and so PTSD and why does certain memories become Held so much more strongly in our memory than others so yeah, I yeah, I think you're I think you're on to something there and uh Patrick in the youtube chat is saying so anti-inflammatories are bad for memory great and actually The authors of this study are concerned about some of the treatments for covet 19 because the Some of these treatments do impact the tl r9 Pathways so there are questions as to you know I guess the cost benefit to What we use as anti-inflammatories How we stimulate or downregulate the the immune system? Um and tl r9 these whole leg receptors. There's no this is number nine, but there's lots of them. So Uh, it's not like this is the only one. They're all specifically involved in different Functions um But it's Yeah, I think it's I think it's a very interesting point as to you know how Individual immune systems are tuned or attuned to certain stimuli and how they respond and specifically what's going on here, so Anyway, you a question as far as oh always sure so um Back when I was still host of complexity podcast. I interviewed peter sherryd and dodds at the university of vermont who does time series analytics or did anyway time series analytics on twitter data And found that something happened in 2020 where Yes, yes, the people were people uh, basically people were core like the sort of Formation of linear like serial episodic Memory was disrupted in that year And so people in august were remembering the second wave of kovat as being kind of closer Uh to the first wave of kovat Then in march then they were to the george floyd and brianna parker protests in june And so there was this you know, there was something like you know There was a question about you know what uh, maybe remote work had done because you know the way that we move through space has a lot to do with the way that we that we Form and deposit memory. So when people are no longer moving and they're stuck in front of a computer all the time Then the the the proximity of different Experiences in time Changes and becomes more about you know other other ways of traversing a network You know, uh, it becomes more like kind of poetic or associative But anyway, it's just funny because now you know the whole time I was thinking Oh, it's just because everybody spends all their time on the computers now that we're not that we're remembering things differently But it's like, oh, but I also got the jab that year. So who knows how would you How would you as an As an experimental design, how would you begin to try and like tease apart those possible? Like causal factors Like how could you even do that? I guess you'd have to do it in mice and it wouldn't be Well, there's been a lot of work in mice already because mice spend a lot of their time in A single environment, right their lab cage or crate or wherever they are And there's been a lot of what research into what are called place cells And so in the hippocampus we have these particular cells that are called place cells that recognize or are stimulated By particular places or when place changes. So there are You know, like There are certain cells that the media popped into for pop psychology that are like, oh Face cells is the the celebrity cells, you know, where your visual system goes. Hey, I know that person there Queen Elizabeth or whatever In the hippocampus as a navigational Organ within our brain this population of neurons are stimulated by our changes in location and very specific locations And so there are certain cells that respond to i'm in my studio still still Still, you know and the habituation takes place and so habituation of neurons is a very big deal because When neurons habituate They pretty much stop firing and so You don't have responses in the same way There has been some literature to the effect that when We change rooms like go through a doorway Or make a particular movement and these place cells Particular ones become active and it is then like a like a new chapter in a book Because they mark A time and a place and there is also there are timekeeping cells That are based on our circadian rhythm and are specifically like frequency based and they fire very regularly And so they fire in a particular way that synchronizes then with the place cell so you have your brain then completely Marking a spot. It's like when uh You're doing a uh an audio recording or a video recording and you want to mark the Audio and video at the same time and you tell the person who's on camera to clap Or you have the the little click clap board. Um, so our brain does this automatically and We know this because of work that we've done in mice and other other animals. We expect that people have place cells and It's only going to be through the use of I think um like video games and um fmri where we can Image the brain as people are doing particular behaviors Maybe some of the more portable brain recording devices will be able to get It's just the the resolution is not high enough at this point in time, but uh Yeah, that's kind of where we want to be is you know Starting to look at experiments that can measure The brain's activity when you're in place Versus the brain's activity when you're moving Versus the brain's activity when you know where you're expected to go Versus the brain's activity when you find uh when you turn a corner and find a surprise You know you where you are lost perhaps I don't know. I always thought so Burning man person to burning man person I always thought that it would be fun to take an fmri machine out to burning man and Measure people before the city was built while the city was built and then after the city was like when the city was being torn down and Figure out a way to determine How their brain responded to the change in locational cues Yeah, I'd also Friday night when they tear down all the street signs as a joke Exactly the street signs come down the man comes down. There's no the navigation Is then your your your points of reference are completely lost so anyway That's kind of I've had this I've I've had this idea for a long time but getting an fmri machine out to burning man isn't necessarily going to be feasible so Work something out Give it five years. Maybe you wouldn't thought that you know bringing 2000 drones out to burning man would have been feasible either But there you go There you go Yeah Okay, moving on still brainy for the beginning of the show. Uh, this is another big exciting study out of dresden university of technology published in embo journal and this study Used two things that I absolutely love Looking at the brain and organoids. So brain organoids are these mix of cell types that are cultured within the lab to Allow the cells to develop in a way that is naturally mimicking development of the human brain and so Uh, there's this question, you know, what is it? That allows us to be human everybody thinks it's our neocortex, right? We have our ancient brain our ancestral brain primitive brain that is emotional, but then all of our logic in the The all of the things that are more reason-based take place in the cortex or the what's called the neocortex In this area of the brain has lots of neurons. It lets you be creative It allows us to talk to each other neocortex is very It's part of the brain that Grows and becomes unfolded and we have all the foldy ridges in the primate brain whereas mice And bird brains are totally smooth So why is that? and these researchers Used organoids to try and figure out what might be responsible and In their study, they looked at genetic factors that might be involved in brain expansion and allowing the stem cells or those precursors to the neocortex the cells that grow into those neurons to grow more in primates and grow less in mice and They used a this organoid technology and in what they Developed they found that there is a particular growth factor called epiregulant an epiregulant is essential to primate and human neocortical Stem cell growth So again, they looked at the mouse brain and in their cultures They were like, oh look if we give them epiregulant Their brain neocortex grows a little bit more and then they were like, but wait, what about human cells?  Let's look at gorillas, of course and so they looked at gorillas and they determined that when gorillas Which normally have less epiregulant than humans were given more epiregulant They added more growth in their neocortex So epiregulant There's kind of like a limit and it seems like humans Are at that limit where we don't need anymore, but other primates could potentially have more epiregulant and Their neocortex could grow further so neocortex Very important according to our hypotheses of human creativity ability to interact all these things And this one factor this growth factor in this particular study Suggests that It is a limiting factor to the brain the neocortex And those abilities in other primates But not in humans We've got enough apparently Do you have enough? I never feel like I have enough Like okay, so this this provokes two questions, right one one at least two it provokes two at least the brain with that as many folds as I have one one of which is So like if you And maybe I'm making a kind of foolish assumption here, but like if you think about you know the Like fractal networks and the scaling of fractal networks And you know like a koala's brain is very smooth the koala's life is very simple if you think about intelligence as You know a response to environmental complexity and at least in you know the organisms that manage to survive you know By internalizing and being able to model the complexity of their environment so You get you know the human evolution is full of these interesting feedbacks and kind of chicken egg stories between Our intensely social existence and our language and the complexity of our language And our individual intelligence and the complexity of our culture And so you know, it's just curious. It's like okay, so we have more epiregulin than a gorilla But the epiregulin came from somewhere Uh, so what was nice have it so yeah, it is something that is a growth factor that is conserved it is involved in the the development of certain neurons and certain parts of The neocortex in mammals generally Yeah, so why did it why did its levels change? What happened? Well, what more even more than that like Often these features You know some trait is Exapted like it evolved somewhere else first And then it gets repurposed and so just idle question would be Where do we actually see epiregulin emerge? On the tree of life and is it being used for this where it first appears? Or was it used for something else and then the next question is kind of like well if we are at Our limit, how much does the fact that we've kind of hit the the You know the asymptote of what Epiregulin can do for us. What does that have to do with the? kind of Like I like the fact that we outboard so much of our our individual cognition into uh, you know diverse niches within a complex society and out like writing and like, you know All these other ways that we extend cognition into our environments you know but that's an ability that is allowed because of Our sensory system and our neocortex and yeah, and we'll talk about a body embodiment and how that all works and a little bit We're going to get back to that topic because this is I like this topic embodiment is very important to me uh, but yeah, I think it is your questions, I think are right on track because What is the What are species differences? in this particular uh growth factor the gene expression and When and where does it? Does it exist and how is it? How is it expressed and why so? Yeah, what are what are we going to do with this information? If humans can't use it Are we going to go like um, what is it the uh uplift series? Sundiver give it Give it to the dolphins. Give um, what are we doing? Or maybe it's Douglas Adams and you know, the mice will rule everything eventually, but yes Yeah, george devorsky of i09 talks about animal uplift a lot and yeah It's like maybe we're at that point where like interspecies internet initiative, you know interspecies.io They're trying to do the machine learning to communicate with non-humans. It's like well, you know, maybe A dolphin or maybe not a dolphin, but yeah, maybe maybe uh a gorilla or a raven ends up Up regulating This uh growth factor in order to adapt to a more complex technological environment. We just start seeing it happen Yeah Or maybe we do it or maybe we do it. Maybe we force it through. I don't know but humans We we change our environment all the time. We like to fix things and and make lots of changes Which is why researchers want to make beer better Of course There's always improvements in beer that can be made. I guess Uh researchers again publishing in nature communications open open access their study using machine learning Uh creating a model to that they uh, they have an algorithm that was their best performing algorithm called gradient boosting that Was able to take the information from 180 000 consumer reviews to be trained and also have 200 over 200 chemical properties quantitative descriptive sensory information and outperform some of like the the leading Ways of deciding how beer Should be made and should taste so In this study They say Ta-da our study reveals how big data and machine learning uncover complex links between food chemistry flavor and consumer perception And lays the foundation to develop novel tailored foods with superior flavor Is ai going to make beer better? Is this Is this is this where we're going now? Yes Yes, I love talking with like the microbiologists who are like I'm gonna work with all of the yeast strains and make new yeast strains and do this I'll we'll fix all of the all of the stuff but Perhaps this is now going to be the way that these microbiologists work With artificial intelligence to be able to change aspects of the yeast and the fermentation process and the other ingredients That make it will be a Spotify algorithm for beer. Oh, your playlist tailored to your genome Oh, no Check it out. You're just gonna end up like again.  You'll never taste anything new I mean, although I did I don't like beer that has a banana flavor. It's not really my thing, but That's just me, but I wouldn't know that if I hadn't tried it. So All the algorithms I don't know we can get to that later. Yeah We can get to it later So much putting off until later Yes, the but the the big question here though is you know, or the The reality is This is harnessing machine learning taking human sensory data and opinion You know, it's not objective, right? It's subjective and it's putting it together in large databases along with um other chemical information that can be Cross-correlated Because of the algorithms that they're using Not all and also as this show they use 10 different algorithms to test Only one was the best What this doesn't screwed is a kind of evolutionary game theoretical component because like if if we were to instrumentalize this in some sort of You know consumer optimization implementation Uh people would adapt to it You know, you'd get you'd get this sort of economic You know people would start They would become hipsters that are actively rejecting the algorithmically designed here They would demand human beer, you know, and so you'd get this you'd get some sort of uh arms race resulting in an equilibrium where You know, like there there's a A sufficiently large population Of people that are deliberately drinking bad beer It's like Portland Yeah, everything's artisanal here Yes, you only come here because you love the artistry Oh my goodness. Okay, moving forward in this.  Yes Michael I don't have teenagers yet. So I'm lucky that my house still smells. Well, I don't know. They got diapers. It's it's it's only Babies better. This is this is this is the story, right babies. They smell nice and teenagers they start to smell smelly and Less nice. So there's a there's a point between babyhood around three years old or so and that early preteen teenage arenas and There's a change in how the offspring smell um, and as a parent of a 13 year old boy child um, I can attest to the fact that he's wonderful, but boy child 13 is different um It doesn't smell like the baby anymore Researchers just published in communications chemistry. They're study looking at body odor samples. They took little pad things and stuck them in the armpits of babies up to three years old and also Teenagers up to about 18 years of age 14 to 18 And then these cotton pads were collected analyzed with mass spectroscopy uh gas chromatography they identified chemical compounds and then they also had The peoples sniffing the odors and assessing what was happening And this is my favorite part of this particular study Is that not we know body odors change uh number one You are not responsible for your body odor the microbes on your body are responsible for your body odor So this is indicative of the fact that the exterior microbiome of a human being is changing during development as a result of Certain factors that affect from the interior to the exterior might just be that you know teenagers don't Shower as much. I don't I don't know. Um but I love this where they they determined that The little the babies had certain things in common certain chemicals in common, but there were uh Certain compounds that were specifically found in post pubert pubertal children post puberty squalene specifically is one of the chemicals that uh has been characterized in this particular study and um adults telling Telling the researchers what what they they thought they smelled um, they refer to uh teenagers as musty musky cheesy goat-like In odor Whereas babies are sweet like candy I mean, this is this is to the you know the kind of a trope in ecology that a lot of populations are age partitioned You know that there's I don't know if that's actually what's going on here But you know, you could argue that there's resource competition and you know, there's this whole thing about The adults I love that teenagers out of the house You know and and so maybe I mean, but it's that quite you like teenagers smell good. Do each other Of course, right?  It's like well, you know go pay for your own lunch And I think that is one of the very interesting Uh items that the researchers Are thinking about is You know, what is this Change in odor have to do with kind of that external manipulation of Parents and caregivers And so it's it's possible that they're they want to do work Further to understand the impact of these odors The goat like odors I think it concerns me about studies like this. They're talking about it in the chat here The thing that concerns me is like, you know, this question of why If if Justin were here, he would be like, why did they do this study? We know teen smell Uh, and the answer is probably right that they I mean it even says so in the in the fizzborg report You know that they're uh, we might be able to it might prove fruitful for makers of odor control product So of course this is like, you know paid for by the deodorant industry But then you get into these questions with with artificial fragrances, which is like like with artificial hormones It's like, well, this is this is disrupting an important channel of communication That we're taking that, you know, like this is this is doing something, you know, like chesterton's fence You know, maybe you shouldn't get rid of the fence until you know why it's there You know, maybe we should have the teenagers around maybe there's maybe we're supposed to kick them out of the house That's the whole thing individuation and that separation from the parents That is something that takes place during those teen years and it is you know, not necessarily just behavioral it could also be metabolic and physiological as well Yes Oh The smells we smell the things it could be a dr. Seuss book Um two more studies for the first part of the show to go um researchers have been looking at the ability of tardigrades to survive Harsh stresses environmental stresses like outer space um, and just Very drying out, you know during drought periods Tardigrades have genes that allow their bodies to survive all sorts of things and previously researchers have shown that they have these these proteins that can create kind of like a hydrogel or They they create like a matrix within the tardigrades that changes the tardigrade metabolism And allows them to go into that what's called their ton state or like a biostasis and they That is a place they can stay almost indefinitely until the conditions allow them to be revived these researchers who Just published in a the journal protein science From the university of wyoming. They took human embryonic kidney cells and they put this tardigrade protein Into the human kidney cells And we're able to show that these human kidney cells Um The protein so when they were the human cells were exposed to the stresses The tardigrade protein created the matrix in the hydrogel. They created the fibers inside of the cell um, and it also slowed metabolism within the cell and then those human cells It could be reversed And the cells could be revived So I'm obviously thinking like oh my gosh. This is like cryostasis like this is this is our you know century You know century ships and other other things. We're going to use tardigrade science To genetically modify ourselves So that our bodies can go into a biostasis and then be restored at the end of this this point in time right now, of course, this is In vitro What is it in vitro anyway, it's in the cells in a dish. It's not in vivo in living organisms But the cells that have the proteins They go into biostasis. They're resistant to stress And the cells can return to normal metabolism afterwards So anyway tardigrades solving humans space cryostasis problems maybe Are you familiar with the science fiction of of peter watz? He was uh, one of these these great guys, you know trained as a biologist and then went on to write some of the most like Insane sci-fi and he starts his book blind sight with exactly this kind of passage He says, you know You wake he's talking about, you know, somebody who's been on a long space mission You wake in an agony of resurrection gasping after a record shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning 140 days You can feel your blood syrupy with dobutamine and Luca, uh, excuse me. Lou and keffelin Forcing its way through artery shrivel shriveled by months on standby Yeah, he's like he's right there with you like let's Let's realize this so in this case it's uh A compound that's called cahsd and that is uh these tardigrades Intrinsic intrinsically disordered proteins so cahs proteins They can form these hydrogels But yeah, this is the d form Specifically from the tardigrade seems to be similar to the the compound that watz was describing in that science fiction intro Yeah, you probably you probably wouldn't feel great to revive after something like this I mean, that's why you know, he loves this horror. It's horror. It's a horror story Yeah, so cahs is cytoplasmic abundant heat soluble proteins So they're heat soluble able to survive desiccation Uh and can also precondition cells to survive drying and in this particular state water loss would be very important So I would imagine that I don't think People would enjoy it very much, but I don't know. Maybe there's this is first not century ships and go into space But maybe preservation of organs So that we can deal with some of the issues of organ transplantation Maybe there's a way that we can allow organs to survive longer before they're able they're able to get to people who need them Maybe this is uh, there are a lot of potential aspects for understanding What exactly this is going to lead to but I don't know. I love tardigrades They're they survive all sorts of stuff. We're puny humans We're also not half a millimeter long so they can get away with all kinds of stuff that we can't just because of the size You know, there's that that great quote about you know, if you throw a rat down the well it bounces If you throw a human he breaks and if you throw a horse it splashes you Thanks for that. Yeah, we were we were kind of already there, but yeah, auditory visuals Oh my goodness So I had I said two more stories, but that was it for my stories for the start of the show Unless you want to keep going on our tardigrade human future All right, everyone. This is this week in science. Thank you so much for joining us. We're gonna get into A deep dive in just a moment here, but I do want to remind all of you that if you're enjoying the show, please Share the show with people you think might like it share it with a friend today The link's right there send it out copy paste send It's easy also subscribe if you haven't click the notifications and the uh, the little bell buttons. Make sure you're subscribed um And if you're already there The other place you can go is twist.org Click on the patreon link to support us through our patreon 10 dollars per month and more We'll get you, uh thanked at the end of the show by name. I read a long list of names It's a really it's a thing. 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Let's keep going Thank you for your support really cannot do this without you Okay, we're going to come back right now for more this weekend science and I do want to reintroduce our guest tonight for this episode Michael Garfield is a paleontologist futurist host of the future fossils podcast a writer a musician visual artist public speaker And oh my goodness so much more His mind is a whirlwind of chaotic connections envisioning the future from the knowledge of today And as his about page states following will lead to a Kaleidoscopic avalanche of explorations into human technology co-evolution the pre and post history of creativity and communication And other soulful and submersive Subversive I like subversive Subversive futurism Michael thank you so much for being here tonight Thank you. I I you know, this was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to back when I was drawing frogs for four hours a day In the herpatology wing of the University of Kansas natural history museum the best job I ever had Sibling frogs and listening to you Oh Sounds like a great combination I mean, I love frogs Blair loves frogs as well. So That would be wonderful, but you've moved on from drawing frogs And you're not only a podcast host and as the uh intro here That I've just made states like you you are very multi talented and into all sorts of things but um What I've seen from you and your posts on social media and your the podcasts that you've hosted is that you are really constantly On the edge the bleeding edge of philosophical exploration um I think that would be really challenging for a lot of people psychologically and I just would love to know what drew you to this intersection of humanity technology in the future well, I mean the Uh profusion of hyphens in that description. I think It ought to be just like a flag basically stating that I'm kind of a textbook schizo typo Weirdo high noise brain, you know, you said it yourself, you know chaotic brain David Krakauer the president of the Santa Fe Institute But when I still worked there called me a high temperature in the sense of like simulated annealing You know, I love there's there's a high temperature Yeah, I think that like you know that like I've been thinking a lot about this because I'm very fascinated about the anthropology science, you know, like what kinds of people get into A given discipline Uh, and there's always a split. I mean, this isn't just true of science this is true of really any kind of human pursuit And the the precise balance probably varies like if you're an accountant, you probably are more likely to have Uh, you know a more conservative neurophysiology, but uh in you know in the sciences, uh there are people that are Drawn to parsimonious explanatory Heuristics like these are the people that want the equation on a t-shirt and then there are people that are drawn Yeah, conciliants. They want the the conspiracy theory wall with all of the connections between everything And I think that you know Generally speaking every human society Is a is some kind of distribution of these two different neuro types and that they uh that depending on the num, like the the stability of the environment like the the environmentally regular features uh The the pace at which the environment changes that Uh, you either end up with more of one or the other and so you always have like a Reservoir a variation in the population so that when things are crazy like they are now historically Uh, things swing somewhat back in the direction of generalists and you you see a movement in the sciences uh from uh, you know, like the most of the last 350 years was uh, you know more about Predictive kind of thinking and and and now You know, we've we've moved out of like a Newtonian regime and into a regime where a lot more science is being done and more all the time in uh simulations and in evolutionary models and You know, so these are like we've we've gotten to a point where a huge area of science is about systems that are are complex and and adaptive And their behaviors are emergent and they can't be you know, they can't be predicted from you know, a Linear dynamical model and I think this you know, this is this is kind of this is the kind of science that attracts me This is the kind of topic that I find fascinating and this is why I think yeah I mean it is like we were talking about earlier about like stress in the brain and learning You know, I am a lifelong learner. I think lifelong learning is favored by the conditions of our Rapidly changing world in a way that it might not have been 300 years ago and you know, maybe 300 years ago. I would have ended up in a mental asylum And and now I'm a podcaster. So, you know I don't think that I don't think that's true. But yeah, I think I mean our Anyway length of life evolution all that stuff is a completely different conversation as to how our brains and everything are set up to develop but um, you know anyone who was not ready to be a lifelong learner Evolutionarily was set up to die from not learning from their mistakes. So and not able if they're not able to learn from your environment and ask More questions and adapt to new situations That's not Survive you're not you're not on a survival trajectory there.   No, it's We don't have that capability at this point in time and Do you think the modeling Is enough and just having the ideas to push forward and keep pushing the questions Is what keeps you going uh, I mean in my case I You know, I basically what happened was I went to school for evolutionary biology as A means of getting into vertebrate paleontology and doing paleontological field work and you know, that is a very Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very grounded like literally grounded earthy not cheesy musty, but you know Kind of a goat, you know That is you know, that's a very tactile and Tangible science or at least it was interestingly paleontology is one of these domains That's actually gone more and more into, you know Biophysical simulations and you know computer modeling in terms of you know understanding the physiology and Ecology of extinct organisms, but at any rate That's just what's hot right now, right? Let's the beer ai But I think the what happened to me was that I read a series of papers in my final year of undergraduate study That got me thinking about much deeper questions In particular papers about the evolution of syntactic language and about the You know evolutionarily sustainable or stable strategies rather so like Yes, man Yeah that lying persists in a population Yeah, because you know, there's a threshold Below which the frequency of lying doesn't overwhelm the You know the uh It doesn't create so much noise that the the signal flips and people you know like people The recipients start interpreting it differently. So like I started thinking about uh, I started seeing these You know what I came later to understand were papers about error thresholds and criticality and phase transitions and I was like my god This is not something that I can study by digging up bones And I started asking my graduate Like the people that would have been my graduate advisors had I gone on at that time Uh, how I can start asking these big questions about the evolution of intelligence and its relationship to the evolution of language And they've strongly discouraged me from going into grad school Making it like out of the closet with this stuff. This was 2005. They were saying Don't do this Because your graduate advisor is going to want you to bite off a very small manageable question and this kind of You know highly conciliant synthetic kind of thing is the thing that Then more so than now, but it's still uh, I think still on average the case That uh, this is the kind of thing that's reserved for people that are later in their careers Yes, bigger questions. Exactly. You can you can do the bigger studies after your emeritus But when you're a graduate student, just do the nitty gritty answer the little questions get your dissertation done move on to a postdoc learn how it all works and Just make it happen Right. So I was so yeah do what your pi says Yeah, and that that broke my heart actually is what happened. It broke my heart So profoundly That I left academia after 22 years of having no other plan for myself than to become a paleontology professor and I I ended up Just sort of roving around there's I mean there's there are uh, you know, there's the ronin, right? Like there are It's interesting, you know You're going into Well, you know, like there's more room in in the intellectual World now for this kind of thing, you know for unaffiliated independent scholars Or you know for people that exist kind of in between Academia and private research, you know, like the the ecosystem has become more diverse And I think in part because like we're talking about about brain complexity a little earlier Um, you know, the whole system is more complex than it was 20 years ago. And so more Diversity more niches, you know more opportunities have opened up and but at the time I just ended up, uh, basically living this question, which is now what do I do? Who am I? What am I if not a dinosaur scientist? Oh my gosh, you're like telling me about my life right now Right, you're in a very similar position Yeah, so living the question I want to you know, I'm a big fan of The uh technologist and author Kevin Kelly and he has a book about trends and in technology called the inevitable and one of those one of the 12 trends that he Discusses in that book. I've had him on future fossils three times and we talk about this is that, you know, he says that in an age of cheap compute and Easily accessible search That answers are cheap You know that that we have this Extraordinary trove of network knowledge now the hard part is learning to navigate that overwhelming surfeit of information And so what has actually what has what has turned out is that as information Herbert Simon actually talked about this in the 1970s. He said What does information consume it? It consumes attention And so when we have a lot of information We have a poverty of attention and that proved to be incredibly prophetic And so what we have now is a situation where answers are cheap and questions are valuable And so like this is why this is why I am the way I am and I think the why probably the way you are Is something to do with this. It's like both of us are and I imagine a lot of people listening recognize that uh And I actually I have a pinned post on my twitter account depending on when you listen to this about this exact thing It's like if you want to read a book a book will give you an extraordinarily uh distilled answer most books are at A phase in the life cycle of knowledge production where an enormous amount of work has gone into Uh bringing something to a general audience and making something ready for book publishing, you know for market Dynamics and it's it's shaped in a particular way that makes the the knowledge as accessible as possible So it's kind of like pre digestion You know and then uh, you know if you think about like knowledge production as a as a social metabolism of information management That the podcast exists at a kind of on the the opposite pole of this process it's uh, it's bringing listeners into The the moment that ideas are formed the moment that hypotheses are proposed, you know in conversation Uh, we have this much larger surface area of you know recombinant noisy possibility and exploration And so I I don't think it's a surprise that you and I find ourselves Living the question and find and discovering that in living the question We uh, we're drawn to conversation as a professional pursuit Yeah, I I find this yeah, I I'm I hate the word resonating, but I am I'm I'm I am Resonating with what you're saying right now But a few things that you that you brought up just in the last couple of minutes Study two weeks ago out of a nature human behavior researchers Actually calling information overload A danger to humanity the same way that air pollution and other Water pollution and other Pollutions In our environment are and there was a study just this this week that I didn't bring up related to our Our society's divergence to its two poles and it's not just the political aspect of where we've ended up because of um How we've been pushed certain ways and manipulated certain ways It's also the fact that in our human psyche. We want to find information that Agrees with what we already believe and that is what is already our identity And so when people provide that that becomes a point of divergence and so here we have You know social media podcasting videos all the things People now with this overload of information Can choose their own adventure yet the adventure they're choosing is the adventure that they already want To be in So yeah, actually it's funny because I I I just recently saved This because I thought it was so beautiful. I saved a screenshot of pearl rose I don't know pearl rose from anyone, but this this my friend shared this tweet. She said what we really need now are content destroyers You think about uh, you know, uh, this sort of uh cognition aspect and we're all of these trade-offs in You know neurophysiology About how much information the you know, the brain is actually a letting into conscious awareness Right, we're all these supposed to have certain certain Certain number of neurons certain amount of stimulus per stimuli per moment Uh, we can only have 150 people that we know, but we know so many more You know, there's all this stuff about what we can handle psychologically yet we Are beyond that I don't want yeah, I don't want to be a disrupter like silicon valley Like everybody wants to be a disrupter. I'm gonna disrupt this. Blah blah blah you disrupt an ecosystem and everything freaking dies Okay, stop it But I like I want to be like, uh, a fungus I want to be a content fungus and my mycelium is going to go through and digest stuff and make it Better for things to grow That's exactly it. Actually, I mean this what you're touching on now is probably the principal Exploration or inquiry for future fossils podcast because it's where like all of my curiosity has has uh pooled Is into this question of you know, what does it mean? to Live through an event like this You know a crisis of information scaling the closest analogy that anyone I know can come up with is the printing press Although that was a that was an event that had at the you know, uh a a slower and kind of more geographically radio Thank you. Yeah, but I mean the telephone where suddenly radio was Radio was was uh regulated a whole lot more effectively Than the telephone was Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm just bringing things up right now. Right. I feel like you know television the radio Yes, regulated, but people used to have like party lines where you know, the the telephones We're all connected and it was like a chat room and people could pick up the phone Everybody could talk together from their different houses About what they what they were watching on tv or listening to on the radio like Yeah, that that particular example is really good because we you know We it didn't take long for people to figure out that that's not a sustainable model for communication That that's entirely too noisy And it reminds me of the story that uh, uh, science fiction author annally knew it's who you know Also has written a number of really excellent. I love annally nonfiction books. I love annally talks about this Uh on dug rush coughs team human podcast brings up the early days of cafe culture in Europe and how people had to learn how to Have conversations with one another While in the room with other people that were having conversations with one another that it was it was unmanageable by people that were that were Upon whom cafe culture had been thrust by history And we're in a kind of a similar thing now Although I think kind of like the upper regular thing. It's like we may you know, we have definitely reached our limit as organisms and now the question is how do we Adapt design the built environment or do we have to make intentional modifications to the human organism and I think you know, like I'm I'm fairly conservative as far as my Transhumanism is concerned. You know, like I I don't like tampering with things. I don't understand You know, I was actually, uh, you know, Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park Was ostensibly a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute and I spent five years there and I work I wear all black You know, I grew up loving that book And I I very much feel like I started out wanting to be ellen grant and ended up Ian Malcolm and and now I'm sitting here writing another book now on Uh, you know, how do we how do we adapt to a situation where? You know, people love to say the genie is out of the bottle But I think the raptors are out of the park You know and and so now the question that we have with these concerns about human technology co-evolution are akin to the question that was processed for us In a pop cultural frame When you know the over the six Jurassic world movies You see raptors go from a monster to a kind of an uh an ally or comrade or collaborator You know, so what does it mean? They're birds. Come on They're very smart like, you know blue the block drafter In a relationship of respect and coordination with Owen Grady the trainer. I don't really care for those Most recent movies, but I do like the way that they trace A uh a kind of a dialectical arc That is useful for us as a as a as an analogy for the way that it might benefit us to start thinking about technology as as uh As a horse and rider or hawk and trainer rather than, you know, human versus t-rex rampaging through san diego Yeah, so side note, uh other study that came out this week super cool japanese tits. Um, they flutter their wings And kind of it's like a behavioral Body language communication so speaking of like your interest in communication and other animals animals and how that has adapted Flutter say hey, babe you go first That's okay. I make way for you. So these japanese little birds They communicate using body language by fluttering their wings and talk to each other without using their voices So body language has been important It is important ongoing. So I think this Going back to the raptors in the of the the pre pre bird right pre avian ancestry Also gets into this this question of where are we on the scale of Our future and our interaction with where our future is going to go obviously we're a part of Our environment and creating it Co-creating it a lot of organisms aren't necessarily that we know of aware of their part in creating the environment that they live in We are at a point Where we're looking around going dude. This is messed up um And we can also look at a lot of uh the technology that we are taking part in Social media a whole bunch of things and going It's not working right. It was kind of going but now is Why isn't the internet doing what we wanted it to do and every I feel like we're getting Tech company and marketed down into funnels To act certain ways and do certain things and people's agency is being taken away from them So we're like I don't know. I don't know what my question is here other than How do you feel about this co-creation Of the technology that is going to impact our lives and our future generations Well, I mean first of all, let me just say that if this is a question that interests people, please do Go into the back catalog of future fossils because I've spent the last eight years prosecuting this particular thing And and again, like you know, like I write about it a sub stack and I've written an enormous amount about this I love it. I love your sub your sub stack. It's so great.  I was very excited by your sub stack And oh my god, the person who did your ask a few future fossils thing I have been I asked I want to do this for twists I have Years of whatever this is after show. I absolutely do this. Well, I mean, this is this is this is actually a Perfect example of what I'm talking about here which is that a wonderful listener a future fossils van bethauer wrote A conversational interface for the corpus the training he trained a machine learning model on over 200 episodes of my show and then you can ask it a question and You know, people are concerned about the quality of the information that they get if you for instance ask chat gpt a science question, right like you and you should be concerned because what A lot of these generative AI Systems are doing is is creating something whole cloth Based on probabilistic associations and the training data and giving you something that's that's made from noise and it's It is carrying Biases through and you have no way of auditing The the model to understand how it's forming these statistical correlations and right You know, I think that's a huge point to to make is they're not generative. They're probabilistic Right, that's the distinction. But anyway, so it's funny because I think you know in a way. It's a good thing uh that society right now is is having a real like Rubber hits the road encounter with statistics at scale right now that like people are realizing that You know what it means That correlation does not necessarily equal causation But there is a whole class of language models Retrieval augmented generative models actually will Still link to the primary sources that they were trained from and so you can get Answers when you go to ask future fossils.com You can get an answer that speaks the way that I speak By the way that you speak right? It was like we you know, we've been trained through years of science communication to link our sources And so, you know, you may think that the the source material is biased. I mean, I certainly am biased like everyone Um by my interest by like all the where you came from all sorts of things What the model is doing is is giving you uh a reasonable approximation not only of What the the eight years of this show Can tell you about a particular topic But it's also pointing you back to the specific 25 second time stamp That he broke he did a you know, he's like this is all like modeled in chunks And so you can you know, he when you ask it a question it will give you The code and and this is such a big deal like I just got an email today That was advertising You know build a full stack web application that uses retrieval augmented generation to chat with your data And this is you know, this is to your question that you asked A few minutes ago like this is I think This is an important way that human beings are going to be able to adapt to the profusion of of new information Is because obviously like when I'm talking to somebody on social media and they answer one of my questions by linking to a four hour podcast I'm kind of like well, thanks, buddy Like tell me tell me which 30 seconds I need to listen to because we're all impoverished for time and attention It's not fair. Don't do that to me. Come on. I want everybody to be here for the whole hour and a half Two hours three hours however long it takes come on. No, right. I mean when I found out that people were listening to I My podcast for sfi on 2x I was like but actually most of them were telling me that they couldn't because we talked too fast And we linked to too many interesting sources. Anyway, like the the thing the thing is that You know, I think my mind works in in the way that late Former mit historian William Irwin Thompson who's one of my great inspirations As a thinker and as a knowledge artist he called, you know, he talked about his rhetorical technique He called it vissen kunst vissen's kunst, which is you know, german for knowledge art as opposed to vissen schaft, which is Uh, you know their word for science, you know knowledge knowledge craft and knowledge art he said was Was his replacement for the linear A path traversed through information that is characteristic of a traditional university lecture He said we live in a networked age. We live in an age defined by chaotic and complexity dynamics And therefore the way that we encode salient features of this age Is by speaking in a way that performs the complexity and the network's nature of our knowledge And so this is what this is what the the future fossils AI is is doing and is what I've made a point of doing in the show that since we started and I think it's why the the AI does such a good job of of Answering questions in a way that I can approve of You know, I think you have to approve of it before you get it out in the wild And we haven't really stress tested it I haven't I haven't asked it if my grandma if it can tell my grandma how to make a bomb But like you know this I mean that's what you know people now somebody will we'll we'll put a link to it But I don't have information in the show Yeah, I didn't scrape the entire internet for this and I think that that's a huge piece of this. It's like You know, this is its own database. It is its own little its world that is right the conversations with specific individuals and the resources and the references That it goes back to the things that you've written as well. So it's all content you've created um I mean, this is we can create this is a content destroyer Yes, this this this trims It's it's a it's an elegant UI that prunes Information back down to the human scale Well, I have a conversation with something rather than sit there five years listening to everything Right, you can follow a particular thread if you're interested Say for this week in science if we were to create this kind of thing You could follow all of the synthetic biology stories that we've covered for the last 20 more plus years, you know, all of the you know, or Whatever what does Justin think about this kind of thing? What does Blair think about pandas? You know, like we could answer these Yeah, I could very specifically lead to Answers and then references within our content blocks that could answer these questions for people But I like this as the co-creation and this the you know, like the content destruction Or the ability we're creating the content Which might be long in terms of a podcast and some people Take the time because of their commute or their Work habits or whatever it is To sit and watch and listen and take advantage of that time other people listen to it at 1.5 Two times so they can get through it faster, but they want the whole thing other people Want the small answers? They want the clips and so being able to use AI to be able to Represent Ourselves In an in an accurate way authentic way, I think is going to be very important I do worry though about the ethics of AI moving forward generally and just how we talk about it like The majority of people have taken on the idea of just AI and we've said it AI AI AI AI AI AI What the artificial intelligence AI that means nothing like honestly has become a meaningless term and What is your feeling about how and whether as science communicators we need to be more specific when we talk about things as Not artificial intelligence like oh Elon Musk says because he's pushing grok and blah blah blah By the end of this year, we're going to have a human-level intelligent AI well machine learning large language model, you know, whatever like Do you think we should be using more specific terminology for the specific uses I mean I I am a lifelong proponent of using the most specific language one possibly can and Within the constraints of the conversation That you have to have right like I had a University of Utah philosophy professor T Nguyen on future fossils for episode 175 and One of the things that he and I talk about is how Actually, you know, it's it's funny Doug Engelbart in one of his The founding papers on on modern communication Actually, no, sorry. It was it was a jcr lick letter and bob taylor Talk about look at you remembering names and referencing things jcr and lick letter and and and bob taylor Who helped found personal computing and the internet if you go back and read mitch wall drips history the dream machine really interesting Story about the world you're living in mitch is great. I love mitch. I know him.  Anyway, yes the Lick letter and taylor talk about how scaling destroys communication and when I had T Nguyen on the show You know, we talked about how this creates a problem in science communication a very fundamental problem in science communication because experts And non-experts Basically, it's the expert identification problem. You don't know how to identify an expert There it is And if you're not yourself an expert And so this is not just about climate science. This is not just about epidemiology. This is about, you know, uh Bob, you know, joe bob down the street and his cow and you're not an expert in his cow There's like this is an n-dimensional problem It has to do with local information sampling and local bias and and the fact that everyone's forming unique models based on their You know their experience and so uh when it comes to communication Uh, I think that what happens is when you again, this is to the point of like why it's useful to have Uh language models that are or any you know, AI models generally They don't have to be based on text Uh are it's important to have access to systems that can That allow you to train models on limited data sets because what you have with chat gpt is uh something that's spitting out statistical averages In the same way that when you listen to pop radio like top 40 pop music Is just the lowest common denominator of what everybody Likes and and again The the late 80s night like kc ksums top 40. Oh my god. And then No, I mean solid gold. Oh my gosh. I I mean there are problems about spotify. Just giving you what you want to hear Uh, but it's a different it's a it's a different order of problem than Being forced to listen to the same five songs as everyone else all day every day And and so when it comes to when it comes to communication your question about like, uh, how granular Should we be in the language depends a lot on uh the scale at which we're attempting to communicate Uh, you know, so it's like if I'm if I'm talking to you right like right now I'm painfully aware that I'm I'm talking to a lot of people. I don't know I'm probably saying talking to me Right and this is a huge issue with With this was the issue that lick letter and taylor were pointing to in communication in their you know in in their work on on uh, computer-assisted communication because what they were saying was the uh, they weren't using the term ai at the time but their vision for the future of computing Was that uh, computing computers will one day help us translate our mental models in ways that are Uh, that are instantly legible to people with very different sets of life experience So like google translate is just the very beginning of what we're going to see. We don't have this right now Okay, so of being able to have this where you know as uh, where we will be able to Use metaphors That go through some kind of conversion pipeline So like if like you were saying a moment ago like if somebody wants this podcast to be a book It'll be a book because that's the way that they absorb information best You know, if I use an analogy that doesn't make sense to somebody My personal ai diamond Will adjust that in converse in a handshake You know an encrypted handshake with that person's ai diamond You are like the the bird fluttering its feathers To say no you go first You'll understand that because the algorithm will understand the feather fluttering Exactly, and that might be an often communicating with ultimate babble fish. Yeah Exactly. It actually is funny because you know bringing up peter watz watz makes uh a very similar case in his follow-up to blind site The book called ecopraxia where he you know, he's got a spaceship full of scientists And he says every one of them speaks a language with a speaking population of one Yes, and in a weird, you know, it's like a kind of a scary future But it is the reality right now. It is the logical conclusion of this of this process because evolution Is uh, you know is a a process whereby Through the the exploitation of every available niche and the the recombinant production of new niches We end up in uh, you know, we're following Reserving maximal entropy production. That's what it means to order the internal Components of a system is it's exporting disorder. So what do you get you get this you get a fractal distribution Where at the edges of you know, like like in an extremely complex social environment like new york city You have orders of magnitude more jobs more more, you know more occupational niches And so, you know as human society becomes larger and larger Um and our technological infrastructure becomes deeper and deeper We're going to end up in situations where we're capable of being a speaking population of one And and and not being able to communicate with anybody else because your language is so specific and When you look at the idea of you know, what words people share, you know the the sixth grade lexicon is you know A thousand few thousand words right you get to end of high school.  It's niche niche niche niche everybody specialized specialized specialized But you have to have people who are interdisciplinary because when you end up on a spaceship Of you know, 10 people You have to be an engineer and a scientist and a you know, uh, you know, also somebody who can do language and pilot a ship all at the same time, which is, you know, similar to our current astronauts cosmonauts whomever but I don't know I I think this is fascinating because what you're talking about is that With artificial intelligence, it will allow humanity to follow And those individuals who want to follow their goals of Certain specific instances to their as far as they can take them It'll allow that to be more possible as opposed to Or because the AI will be able to communicate those Specific things to other groups of people in a in a better way based on context Once constant context is understood and right now within the entire science communication like academic community and professional community people are like Dude, oh my god We got to worry about like how to talk to different people in different ways And so now like, you know, if you're people who are training scientists how to talk about their work They're like, no, you cannot just say the same thing all the time People aren't gonna understand it Yeah I was my purgatory for four and a half years at the Santa Fe Institute as you know I mean I was I was so it's funny again.  It's a great character You follow in that book is siri keaton siri like the you know, the apple ai assistant Or rather just assistant, but at any rate siri keaton is basically The science communicator for the scientific first contact mission And is stuck in a position of having to To translate between scientists with radically different transhuman brain anatomies And so he's making a kind of caricature of our situation, but it's a very plausible caricature And of course all of the scientists Think that he might be a spy and he's he's you know, you get into exactly the same kind of problem that we're talking about You can talk to too many yeah, you can talk to too many people you've got to be a spy Right, right. It's funny because you know something I think about a lot with respect to the kind of Translational work that you and I do is Brian eno because like I I love I make Ambient electroacoustic guitar music for fun. Yes. Thank you Music for airports Yeah, you know is a huge inspiration and you know said back in the 90s You know, you know and Kelly and A couple others that have come up in the course of this We're members of the long now foundation where I worked for a while You know thinking about long-term thinking long time cycles. Anyway, um, you know Who coined the term the long now and the big here? You know as as prompts to get people to think on a larger scale Set in 1995 in an interview with Kelly for wired magazine that The in the 21st century of the dominant art form would become curation because as network technologies take over Each of us finds Ourselves in this position of intermediation. We find ourselves as the node on some path across the network and every one of us is responsible for A translation to some degree in our lives, you know, the network doesn't really have an edge You know, we've we have closed the frontier of geographic exploration around the world Some of us as my my friend Stephen Phipps in college said no man is an island, but some of us are very long peninsulas You're the edge of statistical distribution, you know, you study worm sacks or whatever, but like Nonetheless, uh, all of us are living in the network And so yeah, I mean that's not the answer to your question The answer to your question is is ai uselessly vague And I think that it is jaren lannier said as much, you know, he said that using the word ai Makes conversation about this more of a religion than anything else It makes it easier for people like the head of Open ai to like do his marketing speak like i've seen so many things If i'm blanking on his name because i've purposely been trying to forget it. Um, but What's his name? Sam Altman says this is the best thing to do Sam Altman says we need nuclear fusion to be able to do the energy for the ai Sam Altman says these are the nine things you should eat to be healthy today Sam Altman says this is what you should read today I'm like this is one of those things where my mind is like i'm done Because the marketing speak is taking over and the sensationalism sensationalism of all of it is like I said, it's Um, turning it into meaningless Right, it's it doesn't mean ai. I mean it's nothing Well, you've hit the other, you know, you've you've it's carrying capacity, right? And that's the thing is like I've as as a quote-unquote paleontologist futurist I've spent most of my adult life critiquing This red curts while kind of Sup exponential extrapolation into infinity, right? I was like, sorry. I took ecology 101 And I know about this thing called carrying capacity and negative feedback And natural limits and i'm not necessarily suggesting That uh, you know, I have a lot of friends that are kind of like, uh, you know de-grother Types that believe we you know that we've crossed the planet, but that's years ago that came out as a right 1971 limits to growth Yeah, but here's the thing is that um This the singletarians have it partially correct Because uh back when I was at sfi. I interviewed ming jen lu Who is studied? I love that you brought up being a rhizomal network mycorrhizae of podcast world Yes, ming jen lu studies the evolution of plant fungy symbiosis and mycorrhizal affiliation and and in the conversation that he and I had for complexity podcast episode 80 That you just have those like episodes and interviews on the top of your head Like you just yes, which is why it's always better to talk to me than it is to talk to the bot but um Okay ming jen uh, and I talked about how there was A time that you know the carboniferous period a lot of the fossil fuel deposits that we have today uh exist Uh in because of algae, but a lot of them exist because There were millions of years where the terrestrial ecosystems of earth were Uh defined were characterized by fallen logs That nothing knew how to eat There was nothing in the world No poses Right no decomposers and so what you know and you go back even further and this is this is something I've been thinking about for much longer than you know, since I you know talk to ming jen but like you know the great oxidation event of 2.2 billion years ago was uh An atmospheric industrial pollution catastrophe Yeah, so like if you know if you talk about ai like the thing that I like to do say, okay Well, this word is Let's let's give this word more meaning by deconstructing what it means to be artificial even more than we already have So artificial intelligence doesn't mean the specific thing artificial intelligence could mean The intelligence that is the result of the agency of some other kind of intelligence and Arguably therefore one might conclude that the atmosphere that we take for granted as is artificial is it was engineered however unwittingly by cyanobacteria and The the microorganisms that had to evolve an oxygen based metabolism in order to adapt to An overproduction of oxygen And so yes everything is that you are breaking my double-stranded dna and my hippocampus right now. Oh my god, but yes Everything is that kind of adaptation right there like you talked about there the phase transitions, right? There are points at which conditions change that lead to It's we can call it an opportunity, but it's also necessity If something is going to survive it is necessary not just sufficient for that organism to continue Doing something in a particular way or to adapt to a different way which leads to new speciation and the mutation and the evolution of Through complexity right that you know you have the randomness you have the complexity certain things Work in certain situations don't work in other situations, you know, but you have that multiplicity of factors that All come together to push in a particular direction. Nothing would be the way it is without the way it was right, but We call it natural now Um people on marketing stuff. They call it organic or natural quote-unquote Well, that's what Adams said that you know it was like, uh He said, uh, you know everything every new technology invented after the age of 35 is against the natural order Like anything invented when you're a kid is just like that.  It's it's what you're doing Right, right, right So, you know in that sense there is no there is no such thing as the supernatural There may be all kinds of weird stuff that we we would currently characterize as supernatural and I find that sort of, you know fringe Science I find very fascinating for that reason because it's it, you know, we have very good reason to maintain epistemic humility at a time when knowledge production is so incredibly Over the top that, you know, everyone is having a hard time keeping track of what we know Uh, but yeah, yeah, and on that I want to ask you As as someone who is asking questions and wants to cross Different intellectual field barriers Uh for creativity for philosophy for also knowledge and intellectual advancement like How do you balance The fact that there is so much Uh manipulation and misuse of information that's out there Uh with the ultimate like humanity of knowledge creation and the the fact that you have to be creative and you have to allow for Pushing barriers in the process of creating new knowledge Especially as someone who communicates science Yeah, I mean, well, I'm I'm off the hook now. I'm no longer tethered doing institution Right, right. You're here. I have I mean, I've internalized the super ego of the Santa Fe Institute now and and now future fossils is a different show than it was In 2018 when I started working there, you know, now I'm much more careful About the kind of stuff that I that I entertain Uh, and in fact, you know, if you go future fossils episode 186 is my manifesto for weird science and I You know, this is the this is where I say We You know, uh We need to be careful. I forget her name. Here's your forgetting I I I spoke a couple years ago in an sfi working group with a university of colorado philosophy professor whose name I forget and i'm sorry Um, but she said, you know, we have to be careful about premature ontological closure You know, like the more you know The better you get at convincing yourself of whatever it is that you are politically motivated to believe Stuff to blow your mind did a great episode on this about about the politics ridden mind um, and my favorite my favorite quote is from uh I always forget things. Anyway, my favorite quote, you know nothing john snow so it's just is so Specific, but also it's just a reminder that like the more you learn the less, you know and I mean, I honestly think that my phd was ultimately Important to me because that is the most important thing it taught me Hmm. There were always more things to learn. There were I think it had a different effect on you than it has a lot On a lot of phd students Because at some point you become politically motivated to believe that you're an expert and you know, murray gelman used to talk about I mean, so like michael creighton was friends with murray gelman and uh creighton coined this term the gelman amnesia Which is when you read an article in the newspaper on a topic that you are Well acquainted with and you realize the journalists don't know what they're talking about But then you turn the page and you're reading an article about a different topic And you immediately forget that what you're reading is not the canonical truth about some situation And and so I think that this is if I'm going to recommend one extremely weird piece of Reading to your listeners to help them understand where my head's at with This question of you know, how do we stay grounded in a time that is So vertiginous and and in certain ways, you know really quite scary because the bottom has fallen out of Of consensual You know of consensus reality, you know like reality redrick niches, you know talked about that, you know that when he was saying god is dead He wasn't he wasn't bragging He was pointing into the epistemic abyss of and of nihilism and the existential abyss of what does it mean now that we have We've we've crossed into the realm where there'll be tigers and dragons And we no longer have this mythic envelope, you know, the uh, the the uterus or the placenta of Of christianity to protect western science, you know, what does this mean?  I mean that's the whole thing But but there are bacteria now evolving to eat the plastics, right? So there's hope and and That's what I always say. You know close the circle Let's bring it in. But so yeah, so this the story that I want to recommend people as sort of street cred I wrote this thing in in 2017 called an oral history of the end of reality It was right after I saw adobe give the first product demo for their new voice cloning software Where you could take it at that time? It was a two minute sample of someone's voice And then create something that sounded like a reasonable approximation of that person You could type in words and come out sounding like a and now this is a retail consumer product And you only need like three seconds or something So it's it's I think it's well, it was five The the maybe shorter now, but yeah, yeah the google. Yeah, it was five as of 2020 But I mean, so this is one of these, you know, give William Gibson says the future is already here It's just distributed unevenly who can really stay on top of everything I tried for a little while staying on top of AI news and it's impossible. Yeah, so this this story Is is about the collapse of social epistemology that we are living through right now in 2024 an era of where the arms race between Our ability to synthesize convincing forgeries That that trick those of us that are used to relying on photographic Or you know videographic evidence as what york university professor Regina reany calls the epistemic backstop The last 150 years that's gone if you can see it you you can you can know it right that's right right and so And this is only going to progress and so there's this arms race now between counterfeiting and forgery And what are we left with like what is the the evolutionary game theoretical? You know equilibrium That if you run this long enough, where does it leave us? And it was interesting because like a lot of the people who read the story Wrote to me and they were just terrified You know, but a couple people who read the story realized that Where I see it taking us Is back into this acceptance that you know if you come out of like as you did if you come out of a scientific training with You know well adapted to To the scientific process rather than just you know assuming you're an expert for status primate reasons Then You become much more careful About the way that you state a claim and so you know what I what I saw is And what I think I'm starting to see with you know people Working in this space are starting to devise human computer Khmeri You know like my friend Nicholas Brigham Adams Goodly labs who he's a social scientist who leads a group of people working on human AI collective intelligence scaffolds I interviewed him on on future fossils a couple episodes ago and we talked about You know rest in peace daniel kahneman No, just thinking fast and slow system one and system two Yeah, you know so like what we have now on the internet is like reflex thinking What we need is executive function. We need a a planet scale prefrontal cortex And and so what I what I kind of imagine and what I hint at in an oral history at the end of reality Is that we develop more nuanced ways Ways that might include Uh, um, you know that make use of the the fact that the that the internet is Dynamic in its presentation You know that uh that we we're not we're not Uh, you know so much of science journalism. You're still operating in a regime where it's like you have a hammer press with fixed type You know and we're worried that you can go back and you can change What this stuff says but actually You know what we need to be able to represent knowledge in a way that is itself adaptive to the Extraordinary pace at which new knowledge is is produced And and also it's it communicates the uncertainty with it with which scientists are actually making their claims So like if you had a high if you had a high p value in your research maybe The the typeface in which this news is reported would be blurrier In the places where there's greater levels of statistical uncertainty in the results And they would come into focus as you're saying something that the researchers are more confident in saying You know and and so this is you know, there's going to be a Many many many different ways that we address this issue But I I'm I'm actually rather hopeful because as someone who has been you know, who basically Uh fell on the sword of institutional science communication I I dream I dream of better ways for us to To communicate honestly with one another Where you feel that you know something for sure and where you're hesitant to report your findings Instead of like the way that we see this stuff in you know sensationalist add revenue attention economy science journalism, which is This is the new reality And it's creating this problem that you know, which is is that people say, you know like Believe the science and it's like no no no no no that's That's a very 14th century way of talking about it. So there's two different like there's there's now like you talk about Game theory. I think uh in the internet with respect to scientific information. There's there is uh, I have an open mind I I I have an open mind. So of course, I'm still asking questions and no one knows. I don't know no one knows I still you know what versus believe the science Which is like the other side of it. So I think that there is a There is something to be addressed there in terms of the information distribution Related to science on the internet. I mean maybe just misinformation and information itself generally but I think the point also that you brought up about uncertainty Is something that we need to address more more and more often there are studies That support the idea that people need to understand that science has uncertainty And that not that most results the majority of us are not certain that there is a distribution right there we have significance and then we also have uh standards of error around that, you know That's the statistics right people don't like the broader General public they look at the headline and they go okay great got it Now I know the news program if you're if you are a coder In the audience let's talk because what I want to see are different overlays Um, you know data visualization. I want to see a heat map on a scientific article You know, you can see this now with gaze tracking in the apple vision pro and this kind of thing You can see how long someone's eyes lingered on a particular, you know the the decolletage of some swimsuit model what I want to see is uh I want to see a heat map for the the relative degrees of uncertainty of different statements made In a scientific paper. I want to see for instance I want to see scientific papers, but like the media that's going so that you know as you're looking at your Your phone browser or your computer browser if you have allowed this to be measured, you know, then This data your webcam will be measuring where your eyes are Right on the screen for a particular amount of time. What are you paying attention to? What are you looking at? And then is there a poll that you can take at the end of those articles or whatever you're looking at that determines your um Your sensory aspects or like how you feel about Whatever it is So yeah, you can do like peter shared in dodds at the university of vermont again, you know uses twitter timeline data time series data analysis to study Sentiment change over time, you know, the word I was looking for yeah He has really interesting tools online That you can you can see the frequencies of different words in a population of words on twitter And see how they change over time and see how they change relative to one another And you can you can track happiness in terms of like you can track the emotional You know thermometer of twitter over more than a decade and But even more so like and we're not happy generally Oh, no, it's actually it's it has gone precipitously down And there's a question of how much of that, you know, how what so that's where you get you know What is happiness? What does it mean for us to have like we know that these correlations are real now what? But even more so like it would take very little there's a there's a I'm really fascinated by this approach in the digital humanities called topic modeling which studies clusters of associated Concepts by taking for instance My I I've had a number of conversations of assignment today at Carnegie Mellon University about this He looks at the french parliamentary papers. He looks at the history of the proceedings of the royal society And I find his work and like the work of lauren kline who looks at She wrote a book with kathryn dignau Dignalio called Data feminism that looks at things like the abolitionary Newspapers and tracks the contributions of black and female authors Who are writing under aliases or like, you know, we've we now know Had to write under aliases. Exactly. Otherwise it would not have been accepted. Yeah We could track the ideas that were coming up with people that were not being given credit for them at the time And we can actually see where the innovations were being made in culture And I think that you could do something, you know, it would be very easy given the methods that we have now That we've had for years to do something similar with scientific publication Or, you know, and then we could we could put that into into science reporting where you can see how long Something has been a fact You know that you could see the the the patina of Of, you know, the depth of empirical validation That that is interesting that I I am interested in that and how that could be utilized For not just for scientists themselves for the direction of research that they're taking but also for communicators and how things are communicated and also to help people understand What is consensus versus a new idea versus, you know, this is just this is Quote unquote just theory If you have money and you're listening to this fund me and kiki to put together a team Of software developers who will change scientific communication for the better for Millions and millions of people We can revolutionize the way that people understand the process of knowledge construction And we can make our society a much much safer place Because people will not be arguing over As many of the wrong things anymore Oh my gosh, like Yes Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Like how can we use the tools that we have today to enhance and improve the way that we Co-create the future Right. We have the tools now. We're going to create the tools of the future, but we have to work it to make it Work better Yes, funding, please. I think that we can do this And in fact, like I said, like oh my gosh, I love it I know the people That could be building these models. It's just a matter of finding the means to hire them So, let me just talk to Rita Allen, you know, I'll see what I'll see that Rita Allen wants to do I mean, there are a lot of people that I mean, this is a this is a concern We live in the so-called post-truth era, but that was a premature diagnosis That was premature in the same way that people diagnosed post-modernism in the middle of the 20th century and we are By all accounts still quite firmly embedded in the modern era Anyway, we are not yet post-truth. We are not I know In stage capitalism possibly, uh, probably but uh Yeah, we diagnose ourselves very early, but there are ways that we can use our resources And our knowledge and collaborate for the better Michael you Have just been amazing to talk talk to and it's been a couple of hours. So, um, as much as I want to keep speaking with you about all of these things We need to bring the show to a close So you have mentioned your podcast and, um, other things, but where can people find out About things that you're working on and is there anything like specifically right now that you want to let people know about that's going to be coming up I mean, certainly I, uh, like I said, I'm Trying to find time to write a book about all of this stuff. Uh, future fossils is ongoing. I am making do with a day job for a, uh, a really interesting Uh, computing non-profit that I can't really talk about yet, but it is Oh, secrets. That's cool. It is. Yeah. Well, I mean a lot of this a lot of this stuff comes out of research that I've background research I've been doing Uh, for a team of you know, if I'm going to put my money on a horse As far as you know, what it means to have a a much healthier paradigm for for computing and for, you know, human computer symbiosis But no, I would just say look get in touch with me if you find this stuff interesting Um, I have a link tree Michael Garfield with a lot of the The stuff we've been talking about up top but yeah, I mean I'm I'm I'm co-facilitating a course on technology ethics Uh, later this spring, you know, what does it mean to to wield? These kinds of technologies in a responsible way Um, I I have an album coming out right now week by week I really thank you for right week by week. This is great Yeah, no, I mean it was I I spent 20 years on this thing, but the right way to Release it these days is apparently as a drip. That's the way you maximize attention capture surface area so you know Yeah, that's that's the the course embodied ethics in the age of AI with Co-produced by Andrew Dunn who's the the former Innovation head for the Center for Humane Technology, you know Tristan Harris's organization And we've got yeah, so I mean there's just a lot. There's a lot at any time But I I'm always looking for another interesting team to be a part of And I'm I'm happy to Speak with anyone who thinks I can help them navigate the What my my friend and mentor Eric Davis called global weirding It is it is a weird time and we find ourselves in it and if we can Work together and talk to each other as we go through it Perhaps it will not seem as lonely and maybe the weird will be the good kind of weird instead of the kind of weird that You're like, I don't know if I really like this very much I hope so I'm here to help last thing I'll say about this and this is this is me being truly weird, but Bring it. I like the weird. I'm a weird. Someone who thinks in networks about networks across networks of networks You know one of the ideas that I'm playing with that I want to explore in in this book Jurassic Worldic That I need to find a publisher for and pitch Is I'd know if there's anybody out there who wants. Yes. Are you a publisher? I need an advance yes The idea is that the The network map of the internet as it has developed over time looks rather similar to Maps of functional connectivity in the human brain under the influence of psychedelics and like what you found through studies and not like the spider webs of spiders on psychedelics Right. Well, there's that whole thing too, which is hilarious. Um, a very fascinating kind of uh, you know bedroom study on on the extended cognition But um, no, there was there's you know, the the research that's been done on psilocybin in the brain at imperial college london shows that That psychedelics relaxed the the inhibition of crosstalk between brain regions and You know in a similar way The evolution of humans tech of our, you know, communications technology infrastructure Can be kind of seen as This same kind of process with the same kind of promise and the same kind of peril and you know, so You know, if you Lean too far in one direction if you over can if you connect things too much You get cascading bank failures and the spread of zoonotic plagues And proliferation of disinfo and all of these other things That's the bad. That's a bad the bad place Right. So like to your point about like Where is the level, you know, this this question of how connected should we be? You know, how how much information should be Moving through, you know from one part of the system to another You know, this is this is a question that I find very fascinating, but you know My friends who work in the festival world, you know, we started talking about burning man My friends who work at burning man in the zendo, which is the harm reduction center where people go when they're having a bad time You know, I they have My my years long friendship with them has given me a metaphor that I find very useful to me in thinking about how to help people make sense of an age of exponential technological change Which is that we are basically living in some In some kind of way We are living through something like a planet scale psychedelic experience And the question is How can we make it a good trip? Or if we are having a bad trip, how can we help someone Integrate that experience So that at least becomes a valuable lesson Don't burn out folks. No, thank you. Okay I'm just thank you. Yes I'm gonna take that. I'm giving you claps that I love that as a As a take home message for the night. Yeah Does how can we turn it into a good trip? How can we help the people who are having a bad trip? How can we make this trip? really really that transformative experience that a psychedelic trip Can and uh, I don't know don't want to judge but should possibly be Don't doesn't necessarily necessarily have have to be ah Michael thank you so much for joining us tonight here on this weekend science and I will share your link tree. It's going to be at our twist.org Show notes it'll be on our website. It'll be shared in our social media after the fact And all the information about stuff that we talked about There's a do you have anything else that you you need us to know links anything else that we should have? No I mean that's the beautiful thing about The the web as it currently exists right is that you actually don't need the links you just Know where to find me because you just do the thing just do thing and you find that guy michael garfield the Although unfortunately There's probably other michael garfields out there and then I did get The weird twist is that there is a radio personality in houston uh michael garfield who reports on technology For eye heart radio. He's the high tech texan and for all the years that I was living in austin texas. That's not you I was like, what is this? What weird like what is this actually? You know what's in the name like how you know denises are More likely than would be expected from a random In from like a normal distribution to become dentists More are more likely than would be randomly expected to become lawyers. So what is that michael garfield says you're gonna be talking about technology I don't know It's probability man. It's all Yes, you might be an outlier Oh my goodness everybody out there Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of this week in science michael Thank you once again for joining us everybody future fossils podcast if you are interested in hearing more of michael talking with all these people that he has named and uh reference throughout the show about all these interesting topics and more He has many episodes and his Substack is really awesome. Not just the not just the podcast. There's a lot of writing and there's a lot of other stuff and it's music and So much out there. Oh my gosh michael we need to connect more because these ideas are amazing Made my brain happy our collaboration is as destined as multicellularity given the thermodynamic gradient There we go Particular things have to happen to make it work, but then all of a sudden there it goes exactly Everybody out there. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode if you I'm gonna come back again. Make sure you come back and get next week. We'll be here But right now. Oh my gosh, all of you chat rooms. Thank you for being here chatting discord youtube facebook twitch thank you for all of your comments and All of your ideas throughout the conversations that we've had tonight I would love to give shout outs also to fada for his help with social media and show notes Gord arlor others who helped keep our chat rooms really nice places to hang out. Thank you for making sure that happens Identity four. Thank you for recording the show and rachel. Thank you for your editing and of course as always I do need to thank our patreon sponsors. 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thank you for all of your support on patreon I really really cannot do all of this without you and if any of you out there are interested in helping us out by supporting on patreon head over to twist.org and click on that patreon link on next week's show i'm gonna be back again at eight p.m. pacific time woo twitch youtube facebook get ready it'll be live once again i want to listen to the podcast just look for this week in science wherever podcasts are found and if you enjoyed the show of course get your friends to subscribe to for more information links to stories etc head over to twist.org and also sign up for our newsletter which we occasionally actually send out because it's kind of me and i'm uh not good at that anyway i love your feedback if there's a topic that you want me to cover us to cover suggestion for an interview let me know on social media or send me an email but twist in the subject line however so that your email doesn't get spam filtered into an ai algorithm just turning it into a um hallucination and that doesn't really go anywhere and isn't real anyway so just just put it there in the twist subject line that's how i'll know that you're talking to me and we look forward to discussing science with you again next week because you know we're gonna be back again and if you learned anything remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in science this week in science it's the end of the world so i'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robots with a simple device i'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand and all it is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method and i'll broadcast my week in science this week in science this week in science what a song yes that song was produced by neil surely and his brother and they were have been twist fans for a very long time i don't know if neil still listens to the show even but he and his brother created the song for the show and i didn't even ask them for it and they said here you go and i it was so many aspects of the show that are fantastic and yes i might have to you might have to run now no i might no i was gonna say i do have to pee but i was like i might have to write you a song you could write me a song you already did once it was on well that was it was on a compilation years ago happened to be a song that i had it wasn't like thinking about you and writing words anyway wow i hope that um twist music is always appreciated i hope i'm not burned at the stake i don't know who listens to your show but like i think about this like damien walter who runs the science fiction podcast you know his his audience is like um this like very sort of um aspy engineers like bro like sci-fi fan kind of thing that really like he constantly struggles with his own audience because i've never been there so yeah no there is a a line that is very interesting and just speaking to everyone in the audience right now it i appreciate everybody for the time that they you spend here with us for the conversation and for the patience that you have when you know something about topics and you want us to be speaking about it more specifically than we actually are um or if you're like buy yourself in the weeds get out of the weeds some uh let me know what's important actually and that's a balance but i've had over the years so many emails from people who want this show to be more specific and detailed and not not personality talk show kind of thing um but at the same time the people who have been with the show and who like the show who who are here right now and who have been with us for years they enjoy the conversation and the fact that it's there is this information and we're curating it but like you said you know back to the curation point from earlier we're curating the information but also making it interesting in a way that potentially leads them to new different things and thoughts right so it's not just sharing information and knowledge but it's like helping it it's the conversation it's the people talking about it and it's the way we talk about it so i don't know it's um um it's a balance i could get nitty gritty but i really i i like being able to be me and not just a host yeah well i mean you know i don't even know i think when i was when i started listening to you you were still a student yes and you know i remember like the first time you're like oh i i'll figure it out i am uh you know i when when you were like i have a phd in neuroscience now i was like the fuck you know like what like right i mean and it's funny because like you and you and my friend jessica nielsen got your neuroscience phd is around the same time and i met jessica because i was i the first time i ever gave a public science talk was at burning man and i never talked science at burning man i always hide it i've always like i'm just here and people are like who are you and i'm like i'm kiki and then everybody's like okay so yeah here i'll send you and then and then i get deep and then they're like what what not that i'm recommending you listen to this exactly um but i do have all of my old burning man talks oh my gosh and so like anyway i'll you know i'll send you links so you can have a bot do whatever yeah the bot but i i get but i remember in 2009 i gave this this talk on evolution uh because that was the theme of the year was evolution and i was like i'm being called you know i have a degree and they put me on a panel with uh several or like three other evolutionary biology graduate students and i was talking about psychoneuro immunology and epigenetic adaptation and they all thought i was fucking nuts and then you weren't because right now we're just like one of my first stories today was psychoneuro immunology right and they and they all were like they were like no dude no dude evolution doesn't happen within the time scale of a single organism and i was like okay not genetic inheritance but there is still an evolutionary market and there there's a you know like i wasn't using fitness landscapes and stuff but i would have chewed them a new asshole if i had the language i have now but like oh no you were like you were like uh i was so Darwinian for so long because of like oh well this is the it happens oh and Justin was like no no wait a minute hold on what about the uh and i was like no no no and then but Justin was my foil constantly and he really respected about him he was he was right but i you know at the same time was able to you know that's the whole thing is like oh oh i had so much hubris as a grad student you know to think that i had learned all the things well i mean that was the thing was that it turned out that the work had you know when i got to sfi it turned out that the work that i didn't even realize like i was sitting there like taking notes on like self-organization of new complex structures how does this happen and then like i know steward kaufman now and like i didn't realize that there was there had been like formal rigorous work done in this domain for you know decades and that none of these grad students knew it because they were all being systematically discouraged from asking big questions and even i at the time i had been i had been i had emailed sfi in like 2006 and they were like we don't have a graduate program go away and so i forgot about them for 13 years i had i had ideas in grad school that i wanted to pursue and nobody was working in those areas and my yeah and yeah so it seemed a little unfair but i mean no but anyway it was it wasn't an immensely important opportunity and it was transformative and wonderful um i think we have these experiences right yes going back to uh burning man in 2009 my friend i met my friend jessica nielson at burning man after giving that talk because she came up to me and she said where where are you a professor where are you a professor because i'm you're like i was like i am i am she's like she was at a urvine you see urvine she's like i i am losing my mind i'm in my final year of my neuroscience phd i'm doing rat spinal research i have to kill rats for a living and and i'm being you know it's like and i have to do this work that requires uh you know that it's like it's it's about spinal regeneration and i care about this but i i can't have conversations like this you know like i'm an i'm i'm an academic i'm an intellectual and i can't do this where are you and i said oh honey like i i'm sorry but first of all i'm younger than you are second of all this is the first time i've ever spoken in public about anything this is the first time i've given a public talk i heard um i have been sleeping on my friend's couch for six months of the last year um fourth i don't believe that there is an institution that would be fully comfortable with me saying all the stuff that i was saying today including s if i and it turned out you know s if i has has had to be you know has had to reign itself inconsiderably over the last few decades because you know it has prestige and it has you know it's it's a different thing now than it was in the 90s and there's this whole you know when you're starting an organization there's the inertia of the ideas and the people you're bringing together and what you're doing and getting ah we're gonna make this happen it's a great thing but then suddenly you're an organization and then you have to have credibility and prestige and uh maintain funding and not you know there has to be a place where you're not doing things that are going to hurt other organizational reputations and you know there is this whole concept of you know reputation transfer or um yeah um developer developer yes hello i see you there we are here and you can see you in the comments um and why have we evolved to have emotions it's most likely because we are social species and emotions allow us to uh interact with other organisms and other individuals and also uh fear this is a big one anger another big one help us uh survive because we fight for survival uh love ish or lust that's going to be procreation um there's all sorts of other things objective subjective whatever what is happiness what is sadness whatever but yeah um emotions sure hello sure is the one that studies the the brain chemistry of love right yeah there's a there are a few people she's got some really interesting work well i mean yeah but she's the one with the best publicist right that's the one that gets interviewed the most like oh paul sereno the guy the dinosaur guy he's got two publicists um but yeah you know hellen fischer has some really good stuff on the you know what the the chemical differences between infatuation infatuation and like the love that a you know my wife and i experienced after being together for 20 years it's a it's a different beast there is yeah long-term love is a very different thing than that short-term lust based infatuation yeah neurochemically but also psychologically physically and we never talked about embodiment which is like this whole other thing that i actually like really wanted to write a book about like years past and then this is my whole thing i go i'm gonna this is amazing i want to write a book about it and then everybody else gets excited about it and i never i never do the thing you mean embodiment of intelligence yes embodiment of how okay speaking of ai and and machine learning artificial intelligence but if we're dealing with a synthetic computer computing based algorithm algorithmic intelligence that is going to be informed by whatever systems are coming into it but it is basically just going to be this intelligence in a box right we are an intelligence within a flesh sack that connects to all of the biological organic inorganic stuff around us through multiple ways and like you were saying we are able to take things in our environment and adapt them and use them as tools a pencil is a way that we can use a device to get our ideas out into the world stick in the sand we can do the same thing you know now we have computers we have you know there's so many ways for us to get these ideas and our our thoughts externalized or we drive a car and we are able to embody the physicality of the structure of that car if you're a decent car driver as you're driving so that you know when you should stop you know when you when you're merging or not merging and was safe and not safe and so we within our flesh sacks of sensory information the way that our nervous system is made up and that our brain computes all of that information even you know quarter of a second after you know we're conscious we're conscious of it a quarter of a second after it actually happens but the fact that we're able to use all the things in our environment in a way that we are connected to it suggests that there is no possible way that we can be human without being connected to the world or environment that we exist in because part of being human is interacting with it and manipulating it that's just me but anyway I mean totally although you know the question of like you know when I being at SFI for that long I really it really wore a groove in a conceptual frame that I already had going in and it really cemented for me which was thinking about biology not from a a chemical perspective but from an information theoretical perspective and so thinking about you know like there's a couple of my favorite papers of all time are papers written or co-written by David Krakauer and I didn't realize that he was actually the the you know like it had slipped my mind that he was a lawyer well there's a lot of crack hours but like the other big David Krakauer is a jazz clarinetist but I know this because I tracked the media alerts for five years but no the David and his brother John not the author John but the neuroscientist John but David was the co-author of the evolution of syntax stuff that I read in college by with Martin Nowak who was at Princeton at the time with David and and then I you know I came in 2018 I said to David uh oh you know this stuff on the evolution of syntax he's like I co-authored that and I was like oh my god 13 years later I am working for the guy who wrote the paper that that knocked me out of my attractor basin of vertebrate paleontology and I ended up here and is that like what is that is that the workings of the machinations of destiny or whatever but um the point is that like his stuff is he wrote this paper called information theory of individuality with uh Nehat Eye and and Jessica Flack and a couple others and um and in that paper they you know they kind of nod to Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophy saying that you define the boundaries of individuality by looking at mutual information between a system and its environment information exchange between a system and its environment in space and in time and that you get gradients you get a far more general definition of individuality that is not necessarily about life as we understand it right uh it's about uh entropy and signaling and all this stuff and uh so what you have is like nodding all the way back to Ilya Prigazine who did the work on dissipative structures and won the Nobel Prize for it in 1973 you have this your referential brain is like every time you say a name and a thing I'm like well I mean this is stuff I think about a lot I remember concepts and stuff I have to look up the names and the dates I can give you my new atropic regimen okay awesome you know I do have baby brain but I I gobble um blood flow enhancing brain vitamins so I'm into b12 I don't know the 12 is good new a pep the the rassetam group is helpful um uh Bacopa the herb Bacopa um you know ginkgo bilovich and saying other things anyway the point is that um all the mushrooms all lion's mane exactly reishi all of that stuff um it's sort of like to that it's almost like um indigenous you're like well the the one that looks like a brain and it's good for your brain you know mushrooms if you want your brain to look like micro rizy then do that um but anyway uh so this is the thing um cracker's cracker et al information theory of individuality says on the one end of this gradient you have whirlpools which have a consistent structure but only to the degree that they're scaffolded by the environment you move the rocks at the bottom of the riverbank and you get a different shape there is no genetic inheritance but there is inheritance over time it's just entirely scaffolded by the environment and on the other end of the spectrum you have purely genetic inheritance with no environmental scaffolding which is a a myth it's like this high randy and objectivist myth that you can be you know a totally you know self-authoring entity um and so again on both ends like even a whirlpool arguably on some very basement level physics kind of grain has information inheritance through time right so it's not dna but it is the like the quantum state of individual molecules being inherited over a time series and then on the other end you have this like really really intense well-developed chemical inheritance mechanisms and so like the the orthodox of biology until very recently was that only like you said there's Darwinian only genetics but there's all of these other ways in which the general evolutionary theory works on non-genetic mechanisms and in the middle of this this gradient in an information theory of individuality you have colonial organisms that have some informational inheritance from their environmental scaffolding and in some from the time series and this is the nature culture debate fundamentally this boils down to how much of who you are is determined by conversations you're having with your friends and how much of it is the dna that you inherited and these things are inter they occur across multiple levels because culture has its own sort of time time-based inheritance and it occurs across different scales because your brain is learning at one rate and your culture is learning at one rate and your genetic lineage is learning at a different rate and and so like so really it's like eigenvalues matrices and eigenvalues right right right right and actually this is the way that this is the way that their their information is actually displayed in the figures of this paper you see anyway so yeah so and they said that we set out to do this because we wanted a fundamental theory of individuality that was not dependent on and this is how all the biology conversations worked at sfi they're like we don't want to rely on the contingencies of a particular biochemistry because what's going to happen is we're going to we're going to have to eat the humble pie when we find an alien race that's based on silicon or something different yeah yeah so but but the consequence the you know the the thing that you won't see sfi psychom talking about very much uh is that the actual you know that they're they're willing to sort of entertain oh we might find an alien race that's made out of some you know whatever but what what folks were much more confident you know much more comfortable talking about in like the seminars that didn't end up on youtube was um that you know cracker was like was you know loved being like by this definition the blockchain is a living system by this definition the national constitution is actually when we call it a living document it it's alive right not alive in the way that you want to think about it but it's alive my buddy jay the idea you go to the like you know the consciousness of the internet you know the fact that we have so many interconnected nodes you know is there a life uh that actually exists beyond what we can comprehend because we have created all this interconnectedness already and we're just like these uh little silly cells underneath it right this comes up on future fossils all the time um episode 178 with Christopher Ryan who's a paleoanthropologist who wrote a fantastic book called civilized to death he actually has a popular podcast you might know tangentially speaking um but it's not really just a science show it's like whatever he wants but he wrote this book civilized to death which i love you do more of that whatever and he yeah he should um but you're gonna have to have the kiki show it's gonna be all right but uh you know and what you'll find is that a lot of people prefer you know when i left sfi a lot of people i wasn't allowed to talk about future fossils on the job and a lot of people never found out that i had the show that you switched that you had it and that it was a separate time and um because sfi was not a place where you were promoting yourself you were promoting you're working to develop sfi's presence and then so you also yeah the back and the fourth yeah and that's you know that's reasonable but um but the consequence of that is that when i when i left a lot of people were like i wish you still hosted a podcast i'm like i have been hosting a podcast since the dawn of time but uh but not as long as kirsten sanford i can't tell you the number of people when i left uh when the show moved on from the this weekend tech platform where we were for just a short while um not the entire time it was just a short while that people were just like oh you're done forever even though i said i said we're going to keep going stay subscribe years later i have people going ah wait you're still doing this show i thought it finished when you left twit and i'm like no the show was going before twit it went in during twit and it kept going after twit so it's yet but you can't blame them right because dunbar number brains living in a galaxy brain world but anyway the point is that like this this lovecraftian thing about um my jacob foster who's a dear friend of mine who uh runs the with his wife erica cartmill runs the diverse intelligence summer institute in scotland and it's amazing they're both sociology professors at iu bloomington now they were at ucla when i met him i met him through sfi um because they were out there when you're for uh a workshop and for the interplanetary festival that they used to throw that where i got to meet you that year the same year in person you and i met at ip fest 2019 yes so i met the same year i met you in person finally in justin and blare i met jacob and erica and jacob gave a talk at this sfi's uh working group a couple years ago now where he basically said you know he argued from an information theoretical uh fundamental theory of living systems we don't even call it biology right because it's like that's that that's that word has some baggage you know it's living systems um you know from this position one can argue that for instance musical genres and in particular just for the fun of it death metal is a kind of organism that in that lives on the substrate of human brains and propagates well that's going like to meme theory exactly but it provides a rigorous mathematical formalization for memetics that um that then becomes the gateway to some very for physicists to think they know something about biology well i mean actually you know it's interesting because i mean when you know because i asked i asked people at sfi like are you guys just is this all just like a physics envy thing and cracker's response which it took some while for me to actually like accept but he's like actually no this is biology infecting physics oh this is this is the other way around i kind of okay i kind of i like that actually yeah i need to talk to lori anderson yes lori anderson says language is a virus from outer space that comment is actually you can trace that back at least to william burrows who came up with this the notion of language is a mind virus and his stuff um yeah so there's this this idea has been around basically since claude shannon because as soon as you start thinking about information theory it's a very natural conclusion and it's just taken decades for the mathematics to catch up as it always does it always the artists get there first they create a conceptual aperture through which something can be cognized well enough that it can be formalized in mathematics and tested empirically and you know lots of people have written about this with the relationship between cubism and impressionism and relativity and and quantum physics you know and and and and so then the the science and engineering neary oxman has the kreb cycle of of creativity which talks about you know like yeah i've seen that yeah this kind of thing where you see the you know stuff moving around and this is kind of what i was talking about earlier about like you got you know books and scientific papers on one end you've got working groups and podcasts on the other end and there's like high and low temperature moments and knowledge formation but yeah so all of that is just to say that that um you know i have come around you know when you're talking about the super organism of the internet and the notion that you know maybe the planet is conscious i've actually you know for if you want people want to go into a rabbit hole i've been having an art debate with bobby azarian on twitter recently bobby wrote the romance of reality which is this this kind of popularization of david deutch and and the you know this all this sort of complexity thinking but bobby has a particular frame on it and i have a different frame and and where one of the areas