00:00:07 Nazish: Most of us don't lose peace in dramatic moments. We lose it in tiny ones. One more scroll, one more notification, one more tap. And slowly, our attention stops belonging to us. Today, we are not here to demonize, demonize technology. We are here to ask gentler, braver questions. What does it look like to live with our attention on purpose?

00:00:33 Nazish: Welcome to Inner Peace, better health. A space where we explore the mind body connection. The quieter choices that shapes our well-being. I am your host, Nazish, and today I am joined by Jordan Miller, a founder and system thinker working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, decentralization, and human flourishing. A topic is technology, attention, and inner peace, and what you will take from this is a simple but powerful how to relate to tech in a way that strengthens agency, supports clearer thinking, and protects your nervous system without needing to escape modern life. Welcome to the show, Jordan.

00:01:18 Jordan Miller: Oh thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:01:21 Nazish: Wonderful. So, Jordan, before we get into the framework and tools, what does it mean in your own life where you realized, my attention is getting pulled away from me and it actually mattered?

00:01:35 Jordan Miller: Oh, I feel like that's probably happened several episodes in my life. So it's just a little bit about myself. Um, I grew up in the, the nineties and the two thousand. Um, I grew up in kind of a religious household. I always felt, you know, growing up that I was an introspective person. Yet at the same time, I never felt like I was very good at really managing my attention or meditating or slowing down. Um, I seem to always be, you know, as kids typically are kind of all over the place and thinking about all different things. Um. As I do, I got to the point where I realized attention is quite helpful. It's our only resource we have. We can direct our attention and that's all we can do. We can't do anything else because it's our attention that decides what we, what behaviors we take, what thoughts we think, what we say. It's. It's. All we can really control. Um, you know, that's.

00:03:24 Nazish: Absolutely. And you know, that scattered feeling is so real. Like your mind is in five places and your body is paying the bill.

00:03:36 Jordan Miller: Yeah, yeah. That's right. I remember in about, um, in, in elementary school, I was learning perspective, as I said, and one day I started thinking about how, how I saw how it is that people think, you know, what's Bill Nye the Science guy? And I was really into like technology and science and, and I wanted to know how people figured things out. And so I started putting my attention on my own thoughts and I came to conclusions. I figured things out. For me and. That I think really makes us. I could watch the success, but I couldn't control it. It was out of my. You know, because I could still sit down a little bit and feeling that it was too complicated and too under control and two recursive. And so I couldn't I couldn't really go much further. And it led me to the conclusion that I'm really doing is watching what's going on. I don't really the ability to think on purpose. I only have the ability to watch whatever I want. And this led me to the conclusion that we don't. Really see people thinking about this in my culture. They didn't talk about it. They didn't talk about it at, um, school or, you know, in the news or whatever. My parents told. Me that this is under the rug. Nobody can know that. They're not really in control of anything, but they're attentive and they do know, but they don't know. It's not part of the attention of the culture. And it's very interesting and. Scary. Weird. You know, acknowledge this. So. I don't know what to do. You know, I mean, what do you do when you're, you know, you're having these realizations that you can't really voice, you don't know how to explain it. And now saying, oh, just automatons is due. Um, do you know? It doesn't really get to the new stuff. So anyway. I didn't think about it too much. You know, always, always there. Always remembered. You can really do is attend to my attention. And notice what I'm noticing. And that's, you know, as far as I can go. Continue this attention mechanism and how it gets guided and how it manifests. And this. Is a manifestation of attention. And funny about that is you might want to think. And you said. In the economic sphere is money. It's money. And where does money flow is what are people looking at? Because people are the ones that decide where money is. Money is. Is the one that decides what is. You know, we pay people and then they do things for them. So. And in economics is money and anything else or we'll say in the physical world is energy. So. Is it, you know, this is not this isn't something that happens in some ways. It's a, The entire universe. You know, given whatever system you're looking at, you're going to try to design or think about systems to manage that attention more appropriately. That's when I came up with the concept, this design, this idea that computers have computational resources, they have CPUs, they have memory, they have RAM, they have, um, computation. And that computation is the management of energy. It's attention. It's computer attention. It's not human attention, but it's really something. So. It manages attention, being. Able to predict the future. So. I don't know if that. Means. Anything. It needs to be in order to predict the future. Because if you can predict the future, then you know that you understand what's going on. You understand the rules because you understand how we. Can. System. And. Came in. Yes. In the economy. You know, we would see. In the system. Let's see what happens. Appropriate places to play in that. The. Idea is that we can use technology and. Humanity. And. If you want it to be and to be whatever's good for that. So anyway. It's long winded, but that's only I took to get to this point.

00:11:31 Nazish: Absolutely. And it really reframes it for our audience tonight as well. You know, I am curious, like from your lens as a system thinker, why is our attention so easy to hijack right now? Not, you know, people are weak way, but an environment is designed the way kind of truth.

00:11:55 Jordan Miller: Um, I saw this when I was working for, um, you know, various companies I signed. One of the things that I had at one point was working as an actor. And was trying to. Lots of different kinds of. And. You know, quite useful and good and some little silly games. And that. In the least amount of effort and. Attention. To connect to. The economics. Company. Enter the. Least amount of work that was done under the most amount of human attention. Even if that attention is not being put to good use, it's not. It's not helping in any way. It's just that we want to use this attention we can deliver or, you know, whatever else we need to. And that's just in the economy. And so it's not it's not designed to be different than that. It's you. Know. We. Yeah. It has some value in order to make the. Make give you something to make it. Something to you. And. You know. Something. And you have to. Think about it. Going. To pay Attention to. Attention to these areas. You know, having your attention, the political drama. It could be. Right. And so. I guess maybe that kind of goes into what you're talking about, where the whole world seems as if it's designed to manage our attention for. Me.

00:15:19 Jordan Miller: I see that people they don't necessarily know what they're going after, you know? I mean, we as humans, as humans that want to improve the world, we have to have a value hierarchy, you have to say, well, this is what matters to me. And, um, whatever that is doesn't matter. Uh, well, it does matter a little bit. I mean, but I think if you give it attention, you end up somewhere good. So you say, well, most of the time you say, this is what matters to me. I want to build this because I see this problem in the world. You know, I'm not a very religious person. Um, I kind of left the religion of my youth in my twenties, but I'm familiar with religion. I know all the symbols. And one of my favorite stories from religion is, is the story of Adam and Eve. And it's interesting to me because if you're a human on the earth and you start to wonder, what is the point of humans on the earth? Not coming from any kind of particular bent or or assumption, thinking that there's a God or not just, you know, what are we supposed to do here? We're intelligent. The rest of the animal kingdom not as intelligent, and they don't have language. And the whole world just seems to be a chaotic living thing. What are we supposed to do? And the reason I like the Adam and Eve stories, because it answers, you know, you open the Bible, you're searching for answers. The very first story you get is an answer to that question. What are you supposed to do? And the answer is very obvious. It says, well, the world can be absolute chaos or it could be complete order. And and by that I mean like completely managed. Everything is known exactly what it's supposed to do and be and everything. And, uh, that's, that's very mechanical, that's very robotic, or it could be just the absolute chaos of, um, of kind of nature, you know, nature just kind of is red in tooth and claw and just kind of destroys whatever it needs to in order to survive. And so that Bible story says, well, what you're supposed to do is build the world into a garden. It's a garden. It's, you know, Eden is a garden. You're supposed to create a world that is balanced between the two extremes where the chaos and energy of nature and, and that that attention that is all over the place. You know, that childlike, chaotic matter. You're supposed to form it, let it do its thing, but form it into a valuable, um, pleasing structure. Right? So you're, you're not supposed to dominate nature and you're not supposed to be dominated by nature. You're supposed to work with it. And so, I mean, this seems very obvious, but at the same time, we live in a world where some people think the human race is, um, a scourge on the planet and other people kind of embrace being a scourge on the planet. They say, well, it's our planet. We can do whatever we want with it. So and just this, this one story kind of tells us that we need to manage our attention better. You know, there's, there's a Jewish phrase called Tinkham. I think it's called, I don't know how to say it because I'm not Jewish, but, uh, I think it's called Tinkham Olam. Uh, and that just basically means the translation into Hebrew is, uh. Um, sorry, it's just slipping my mind right now, but it's the idea that you're supposed to repair the world. Repair of the world, perhaps, but it's the idea that you, you wake up on the planet and you see something that's wrong and that, you know, it just naturally occurs. I mean, there's lots of things that are wrong. We see all kinds of things that we don't like to see. And the idea behind this concept is that what you're supposed to be doing while you're alive is fixing the thing that you see that is wrong. So you're supposed to repair the world. It's a little broken. Go fix it. Right. And so, um, I guess the point is, is that if we paid a little bit of attention to those concepts, those understandably religious concepts, we might be able to manage our attention collectively a little bit better because we might say, okay, well, this is what I think is wrong. And, you know, I, I, I, I identify a few things. One of them I mentioned earlier, um, we don't know what the future is and we don't see things coming. Big things, Housing crisis. You know, big economic collapse. You know, we have no idea when these kind of things are going to happen. We don't see things like the pandemic coming. We just don't know the future at all. And I think we take it for granted that we we can't you know, we kind of assume, well, those things cannot be predicted. There are always going to be black swans and things that we cannot predict in the world, but we can do a lot better than we're doing. There's a lot of information available in the world, but we don't bring it into one system that understands it all. So if we did, we would have a very, uh, we would see things before they happen. We'd get warning. And I think we just wouldn't let them happen because we would then know how to behave in order to make them not occur. So or, and we would be able to optimize things that we do want to happen. So, um, this is kind of my understanding is that if we slowed down and paid attention to the wisdom that's in our cultures, we could manage our technology better and thereby manage the world better because language is an expression of our technology. Sorry. Our technology is an expression of language itself. In fact, we even call different ways to program computers different languages. So language is kind of the fire that came out of the Garden of Eden. So, um, sorry, I would just say to answer your question, If we can manage our. We can manage our language that we speak with each other and the world better if we manage our attention. By understanding what we already know. Um, but yeah, does that kind of help?

00:23:44 Nazish: It does. It helps a lot. And Jordan, that was an amazing explanation and reframe that you gave. It was grounded. And, you know, for our listeners who resonated with this approach and want to learn more about it and want to learn more from you, where can they connect with you?

00:24:02 Jordan Miller: Well, if you go to Satori net dot io, that is, um, my project's website. Um, it's not my project. It's, it's, it's the project I founded, but we have a team. We have other people working on it now. Um, it's our project. Um, there's, there's links to the discord on there. Uh, that's usually where I'm at if you want to connect with me on discord. I have a Twitter. I don't really use it very often. I'm not, I'm not really pushing a personal brand or anything. I'm just kind of, um, talking because I, I think these things are fascinating. And I also like to mention Satori, um, because I think it's something that can improve the world in the long run. So, um, yeah. Thank you.

00:25:00 Nazish: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining in today. It was an absolutely wonderful session with you and your listeners. If this episode landed for you, take one small moment. And dear listeners, if this episode landed for you, take one small moment after this ends. Just one where you let your attention rest on something simple your breath, your body, the room around you. Not as a performance. As a return. And if you want more conversation like this, grounded human and focused on real inner healing, follow inner peace. Better health. We are building a space where we mentally. Where mental wellness is treated as necessity, not as a luxury. Until next time, be gentle with yourself and loyal to your peace.