Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch, and welcome to another episode of Metaviews, recorded live at the Academy of the Impossible, where the goats are really getting comfortable with our morning walks today.

In fact, they started going where we had never gone before, which seems really minor, but in the world of goats is really quite substantial.

It gave me.

I almost kind of, on some levels, think that my goat walks are my form of spiritual practice because it's the closest I get to meditating.

And it's the kind of point where I am, you know, at that level of peace, both mentally and spiritually.

And the fact that the ghost kind of had a lot of autonomy today and a lot of courage to explore the world kind of made me think, well, that's a good sign for the day to come.

And lo and behold, I get to talk to Ted Whetstone today, which is always a pleasure, Ted.

Always nice to be able to engage your dynamic brain, your rich and deep area of interest and expertise.

But as you know, we begin every Metaviews episode with the news, partly because Metaviews does publish a daily newsletter on Substack.

Today we got a piece about the artist versus the algorithm, which was a bit of a riff on the role of the artist in the contemporary society.

But, Ted, as you know, the purpose of our news segment really is to throw to the guest and say, what news do you have for the Metaviews Network?

We really depend upon correspondents like yourself to help us make sense of the world.

So.

So what's got your attention today, Ted?

Well, you know, your thing with goats has got my attention.

It reminds me of Aesop's Fables, right, where every story had they're all animals again, and they all had a moral of the story.

So I'll be curious to hear the goat metaphor somewhere in our talk.

But of course, I'm in Los Angeles, and it would be only appropriate to bring up that we are having a confluence of civil versus military versus federal versus state versus local, and all these conversations.

So how do we navigate these conversations?

That's the news.

That's my question.

And it strikes me that there are competing conversations and competing narratives.

And because of my physical distance, both geographic but also in a different country, I've had difficulty.

On the one hand, this is a subject I would normally write about when it happens, if it happened anywhere else other than Los Angeles, I'd probably write about it.

LA is a global media center.

The level of media literacy that exists amongst Los Angeles is dramatic.

So there's a lot of citizen journalist coverage there's a lot of first person coverage.

But to your point, there's an interesting narrative I picked up on this morning between the Trump administration and California based law enforcement, where whether it was the lapd, whether it's the governor's office, whether it was very sick, they were saying, this is no big deal.

We got this.

This is the kind of disturbance, the kind of political protest that is quite common here in la, in California.

We don't need the National Guard, we don't need the Marines.

This is really modest compared to the Trump administration, which is trying to spin this into an existential crisis, is trying to spin this into something that seems to be much larger than it is.

But again, it's hard to tell.

And that's why I've been hesitant to write about it or comment, because it's difficult for me to ascertain kind of a fiction from reality.

So.

So my question to you, as someone who has both a geographic proximity, but at the same time, LA is a very diverse media environment.

I'm sure there are competing narratives and metaphors to try to explain what's going on a methodological scale.

How are you making sense?

What are you doing to kind of learn more about what's happening in your backyard, in your neck of the woods?

Yeah, it's a good point.

I, I don't know that I have the answer, but I can tell you what the answer is not.

And it's the same thing we see, which is sort of that binary thinking, my side versus your side.

Right.

The politics.

And it just, you know, should it be on a federal level, should it be a local level?

And we know that there's politics, everything involved.

I think that the mistake we all make is looking at these things uni dimensionally.

Right.

All protesters are bad or all immigrants are thugs.

Right.

And, and that's that generalization stereotyping that just gets us all in trouble and actually I think stops us from having.

I don't mean to be heady, multi dimensional, in other words.

Here are the issues I see you have a city, got it.

There's people that pay taxes and, and when there's people that cause public dis, you know, disruption, you know, for lack of a better term, that's bad, that costs money.

And so we do have to clamp down, I think, on people who are disruptive and appropriately, you know, this thing where people can go to stores now and steal stuff and everyone's told just, you know, don't, hands off.

It just encourages that kind of behavior.

If there's no Cost.

So there's obviously public safety, decency and all that stuff, and appropriate protocols.

Those, again, are civilian, you know, problems.

I get the national challenge of, you know, whether it's Trump or anyone else managing who's in the country legally, Right.

Or undocumented.

And.

And the perception that maybe cities are harboring.

Right.

And so we have to look at different scales of the problem, different dimensions of the problem.

You know, money, safety, health care.

And look at all of these together and then find the right optimization because there's no perfection.

And if we can have those conversations along those multiple dimensions.

But it's when everyone wants to, of course, hijack the right, the metaphor with a case of a bad person.

And then the audience isn't just, you know, we're not allowing ourselves the intellectual capacity to look at it multidimensionally.

And so that's my answer.

We have to look at it across all these things, decide how we feel about them, and then what's the right balance?

And that's a brilliant answer because it speaks to the process you were describing at the end is the collapse of dimensions.

Right.

And the metaphor I love, and I brought it up in the salon that we were in recently, was anatomy.

That most people look at anatomy in two dimensional representation.

And even when you look at anatomy in three dimensional representation, you can only really think of anatomy in four dimensions because time is so central to how our body works in terms of the different systems that are operating.

And the metaphor there is that the moment you cut a body open, it's a mess.

It doesn't match what's on the page, it doesn't match the images.

And that's exactly the problem with ideology, that it tries to collapse multi dimensions into a single dimension.

And the other aspect to what you describe, of course, is multi jurisdiction.

And unfortunately, a lot of people, for fair reasons, don't understand the nuance between jurisdictions.

And it strikes me that that is the overarching narrative here, that this is about the executive of the federal government trying to consolidate power on all levels.

That means taking the power of Congress.

It also means trying to take the power of states.

It also means trying to take the power of municipalities, because it's a power grab.

They're overstepping in that regard.

I will segue us to our future segment, WTF or what's the future?

Only because, Ted, our conversations tend to be multi dimensional and they tend to flow across the different segments we have here on the metaview show.

But tell me what you see on your event horizon.

Sometimes the issue with events that are happening in the present, like they are currently in Los Angeles, they tend to impact our view of the future.

They tend to cloud our perception of the future, sometimes in positive, sometimes in negative ways.

So it seems like a natural follow up to what do you see there on the event horizon?

Ted, what's, what's your sense of the future that you'd like to share with the Metaviews Network?

Well, thank you for that.

I'm an idealist, so I may look naive, but I look at this thing at the ultimate scale, right?

The planet.

Because we keep trying to look at this part of the planet or this part of the problem.

And that is the problem, right?

It's the balloon.

You push it one end and it pops out somewhere else.

We have to step back and look at the whole system and then we don't have to take it all on.

But this is a conversation.

You could say it's about democracy.

And authoritarianism is a little bit over the top, but that's the other extreme.

And look, singular control looks efficient.

And it is in the short term, just long term, it doesn't always make the best decisions.

If nature believed that that was the best way to go, then we would have very simple systems and we, we'd have two or three different animals that we quote, unquote, need.

But the heterogeneous nature of nature is part of its resilience.

And that's, I think the bigger scheme we're going to see as a breakdown is, and even in like the military doctrine with, you know, Ukraine, with very, you know, with drone technology, that is the future of warfare.

It's not singularly, but it's headed that direction more than it is another multi trillion dollar bomber platform.

I will take issue with that only at one point and I'll answer directly and give the historical analogy.

It's not the warfare of the future, it's the warfare of the present.

The same way that I remember people used to say mobile is the future.

I'd be like, no, no, no, it's the present, it's here, you're using it, right?

We like to sometimes project the present into the future because the future is so uncertain and the danger of authoritarianism is its inefficacy.

It doesn't work, it's never worked.

Its core claim and hold on power is mastery of illusion and the ability to use illusion to create the belief that there is efficiency and then to use violence to defend power, to defend that position.

But the idea that authoritarianism can deliver on its Promises has never historically been true.

To your point that if it were true, that's how the world would work, and it always worked.

Right.

You'd have that type of efficient system.

So that's where I too have, on the one hand, a cautious optimism.

But on the other hand, I do feel that we're in a golden age of conspiracy where weaving illusion is now so accessible, so easy, so powerful, that we need to create an alternative, an antidote to that before we're really out of the woods.

You did want to respond, Please.

Well, I was listening to an audio tape, this audio tape.

Listen to me.

That.

About AI and the future and whatnot.

And of course, you know, one of those technologies years ago was blockchain.

And the idea was this distributed ledger where I think they call it a trustless environment.

And the point is, it doesn't require trust in one person.

It doesn't mean that there's not trust.

Right.

That it.

It doesn't require that.

The problem is it was very technical.

It also has some bandwidth issues, etc.

But that idea of trustlessness is interesting because it takes out what happens with humans, and we are just subject to corruption.

There's the idea of the benevolent dictator.

And you could say Steve Jobs was that.

Right?

He was an iron fist, you know, to keep those engineers on point and on focus.

That works.

And I.

It's not that he.

Well, so anyway, there's.

That there's a benevolent dick.

Well, I was gonna say, I.

I'm not sure he was benevolent.

Okay, right.

Like, let's not litigate that.

But did you want to.

Was there another.

Halfway to your point there?

Because I'm already eager to respond.

You go to.

Totally to your point.

I don't perceive that he was corrupted by it in the sense of trying to take for him at the cost of others.

He definitely want to project.

Again, I disagree entirely.

Okay, got it.

And this goes into.

But this goes into how we often personalize these leaders.

When I think, especially if we're in the realm of are these systems efficient?

We have to look at them institutionally, because that is what we're evaluating.

Even though within the authoritarian model, the individual, the personality is central to the operation of it.

That's why someone like Steve Jobs is lauded, because the claim is on some level that he is better than Tim Cook, which I'm not so sure.

I think Tim Cook has certainly a lot of strengths unto himself.

But my point is, I think those are all still part of the illusion, and I think that they are all still part of the illusion in that if we were to evaluate these systems and, or these individuals on an empirical level, or even on a qualitative level, I think that authoritarianism fundamentally still falls short of its own goals, of its own promises, versus democracy, I believe, has much lower expectations and really keeps its aims much more lower.

And that's its primary fault, that in a society of the spectacle, authoritarianism will always outsell democracy because democracy cannot and will not promise some of the illusions and false ideals that come with authoritarianism.

But I also, and I am not going to inhibit or put obstacles up in our conversation, just indicate that we've now segued into the future conversation.

I fundamentally think blockchain failed because of ideological inadequacies.

And at the front of that, to throw it right back at you, I don't like the trustless idea.

And I say this because I think trust from a design perspective, from an organizational perspective, from a leadership perspective, is super fucking difficult, like really difficult, and the kind of difficult that a most organizations shy away from and really, to go to our other metaphor, reduce to a single dimension rather than embrace the multidimensionality of it, and where individual leaders, I think, are far more courageous to deal with trust and to try to deal with trust in a multidimensional manner, it's still precarious.

They're still going to lose that trust at any time.

So, I mean, you're as a professional, right, you've been in the leadership space for, I assume, a very long time.

You certainly bleed the wisdom that reflects a lot of battles you've been in, pardon the pun, and a lot of conversations to be more civil that you've participated in.

Let's talk about trust.

You're welcome to take this either in two directions.

You're welcome to double down on why you think trustless is interesting and worth exploring.

Or the other out or avenue I'm given is how have you encountered, what's your take on other people's take on trust?

I'm trying to create a meta view here.

So on the one hand, I'm giving you opportunity for you to take a TED view, but I'm also giving you the opportunity to take a meta view.

Given that, I'm sure you've experienced a lot of other people playing, talking, you know, experimenting with trust.

So I'm sure you got a lot of critical perspectives on that.

I'm rambling, please.

Well, I have not done an esoteric think experiment on the word trust.

Right.

Because I think there's a lot more to it.

Than we typically associate.

But your animals on your farm trust you.

That's probably been built over time.

Right.

And we know that, that, that.

So trust is something that occurs over time.

It doesn't mean it's empirical.

Like now I trust you necessarily because even a partner can upset us or surprise us.

Right.

So it's probably dynamic.

As with anything, it's.

We, we speak it as a noun, but it's really a continuum that's changing.

Multi dimensional.

Multi.

Yes, exactly.

And, and situationally dependent and conditional.

Right.

So it's not a static, isolated thing.

But I, I do agree with the idea of trustless is, is, I'll say, a cute idea.

Sorry to undermine the techies.

Undermine, Please.

Undermine.

I have a friend who just got stuff hacked.

He's lost control of everything.

You know, he's on the phone trying to call this company, that company.

There's no one there to answer his calls.

So when there is a challenge now, the, the individual is, you know, required to have all these authority capabilities.

And to be trustless, we would have to educate everybody to become their own authority.

And unfortunately, I don't think people want to have the capacity.

You name it.

I do agree with you.

I think leadership is important.

And then of course there's accountability.

Right.

Measures on leadership.

And this is back to the Trump thing, only because he has.

When you surround yourself with the echo chamber, sorry, the sycophants, it's actually dangerous, right, because you could just get the same messages over and over.

You know, Putin thought he could just roll over Ukraine and he's a big bully and they might have been able to, but they.

That's the echo chamber he was in still.

It was that still in.

Yeah.

And so I think back to any leader thinking that they have the answers.

Even the leader in one period may not have.

Right.

They're out of touch in an expert.

And you need those challenging voices to keep you on the long and straight.

And you have perfectly good souls who get in a position.

I'll say Biden.

I, you know, there's not a political show, but he's the guy that said, I'll run one term.

And then of course, whether it was him, whether it was his surrounding, you know, and it's the corruption of ego that unfortunately is human.

So to your point, humans can't be off.

We can't be trusted just because of our nature.

And so we have to build these constructs around us to have the efficiency of centralization, but the transparency or resilience of open accountability.

And where I don't on abstract or metaphorical level, disagree with the corruption of the ego or the role that the ego plays in corruption.

I do think institutions have their own corrupting role, their own corrupting culture, material, money, all of it.

And to double down on your political metaphor, if Bernie Sanders, by some stroke of whatever became president, he would be corrupted too, right?

Like, it would be a different kind of corruption because he has a different kind of ego and he's a different kind of person.

But power corrupts, absolute power.

Absolutely right.

That's why you would have such a thing as a term limit, right?

Because you would suggest that after a certain amount of time, any human being is going to be corrupted to that power.

So get a fresh one in who hopefully would not have the same level of graft or the same connections to uphold or reinforce.

And I say this because I am, you said, naive.

I for myself would just say delirious.

I have thoughts around how institutions could curb some of these tendencies, could create.

Well, they're difficult for us to get into in the short time period, but are just around incentives.

For example, often corruption comes because the incentives are external rather than internal.

You feel a need to perform for external interest because you're insecure in your current position.

So that's things like paying teachers more, paying police more, paying customs officials more.

So there is less temptation for external influence.

Basic shit like that.

But then also to bring it back to our authoritarianism, removing leadership away from the cult of individual.

On the one hand, you still need individual leaders, but individual leaders should not be on their own.

And you inverted it in a way that I think is hilarious.

When we are hacked in our current society, when we are hacked, there is nobody we can call.

And in that moment, we are expected to provide a kind of leadership that we've neither had training for nor have a lot of role models of.

So imagine flipping that, right?

Imagine when those situations come, when you have to be a leader, you've not only been trained for it, there's lots of other people that you can look to and like, oh, Jane, I like how Jane does it.

Or oh, look, look how Ted did it, right?

And there were other forms of leadership, other role models, training, support, so that when it was your time to be a leader, you weren't shitting bricks.

Instead, you knew what to do, you knew how to handle it.

You were confident you had been there.

That's a different culture, that's a different organizational approach.

That's a different way of thinking of capacity and leadership within organizations.

That's why I say delirious because I'm describing a world that is much different than the one that we live in, but I think possible, right?

On a cultural, psychological, organizational productivity kind of level.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Quick, quick thought because I know you like to jump topics a little bit here in a good way.

Keep it moving.

People is, look, there's leadership in families, right?

You have parents, you have children, and when children are young, they don't have those capacities, right.

And you do have to be a little bit more what I would call the difference between a manager and a leader.

Okay.

Managers, you know, do things right, leaders do the right thing, right?

There's these different distinctions even in organizations.

As you say, the lower you are down, people are more managing than they are necessarily leading.

But as you move up organizations, you are doing more what I would call leading, right, Than day to day managing.

And I define leadership is not someone that everyone follows.

That's a manager, a leader, causes leaders.

And that's a distinction, right?

So that you're helping people learn how to think.

You're giving people the tools, the capacities to believe in themselves, right?

And you distribute that leadership, not power, but competency outward.

And the small leader, of course, says, leave it to me, I'll do everything to me.

That's a small L leader.

The king, you know, King Gandhi, you name it.

Those were bigger leaders who spoke for principles that would align people around and, and, and focus on that.

So the back to the Steve Jobs, I think what you could say was he was a master of alignment.

And in that sense, that's where the iron fist was important.

Because to your point, in larger organizations, when you're now dealing with lots and lots of people outside our tribal upbringings.

But okay, here's, here's where I take issue.

On the one hand, I can't disagree with it being hard.

It's not only hard, it's complex.

And I think complexity is something that is often oppositional to control.

And one thing I felt we touched upon earlier, but I think can articulate a little more clearly now, is that control fundamentally is an illusion and it's a powerful illusion.

And it's easy to reinforce that illusion so much that it becomes real.

But we fundamentally don't want or need a master, especially to coordinate at scale.

And the Internet has demonstrated that in a number of different ways.

And you know, whether it's fandom, right.

As a concept, that you don't need to coordinate Trekkies in a centralized manner to allow them to take a world that was created by some guy decades ago and turn that into an entire motherfucking universe with full on.

And that's just one example.

There are many, many more examples.

We as a society just don't incentivize and organize in a way that harnesses that, that rewards that, that enables that.

I agree with you entirely on your definition of leadership.

I think that's very powerful.

But it is countercultural, right?

It does run counter to the world we live in today and the messages that are put out to people.

Perhaps that's part of your success, that you then tend to be the light in darkness that can reach people and touch people in a way that the rest of society does not.

But I think we do have to be honest about the narratives about the cultures that our society is currently promoting, because you and I are extremely privileged in having the critical thinking to not just defy them, but to go where, to literally be leaders and to go where we think we need to go.

Right.

And that is unfortunately rare.

Go ahead.

Yes.

The luxury of time and hopefully money to be able to have intellectual conversation.

There are people just trying to get food on the table and they don't have time or the luxury of this.

To be clear, I am struggling to get food on the table and I don't see this as a luxury.

I see them as intersectional.

But again, there's a lot of privilege that allows me to say that.

I'm not denying that.

So thank you.

I have a question for you because, you know, we all have opinions.

That's okay.

And then there's commitments.

And so we want the world to be different, you know, what are we going to do about it?

Now, I think you are bringing forth a commitment to bring these conversations out and, and share these with people.

But I'd love to ask you, you know, what drives you?

You have this interesting intersection, at least one of them, of call it technology, which I think you called with the intelligence of rural farming.

Is that a metaphor?

That being literal, like, what is it about that intersection that's important to you and reflects on some of this conversation?

Before I answer that, allow me to take a step back and say there's a third part of opinions and commitments, and to me that's positions, because I really try to distinguish a lot of people, especially Americans, really within the context of free speech, American free speech, which doesn't really exist here in Canada.

There is this notion of opinions are democratic, that opinions are what everyone has, that opinions are.

And I think the mistake a lot of Americans make is they don't distinguish between an opinion and a position.

Because, like, abortion is something people have a position on.

Right?

Guns is something that people have a position on.

It's way more than an opinion.

It's not necessarily a commitment, though.

Right.

Because ideally, a good position should not be ideologically rigid.

It should be something that, you know, changes as your information changes, but it's also not an opinion because people get really fucking passionate about their positions and they mobilize others.

They, you know, really try to advocate for their positions.

So that's where I say, I'm not sure I have any opinions.

And I say this in the sense that I've always approached language with a kind of sacredness, with a kind of power.

And I've always approached storytelling as a kind of magic and a kind of spell.

And decades ago, maybe three decades ago, I fell in love with Daoism and the philosophy of Daoism and the language of Daoism and the stories of Daoism.

And not really as a religion.

I never saw Daoism as a religion, more as a politics, as a philosophy.

So the long answer to the short answer is I just try to be as spontaneous as possible.

Well, I hear you.

And you're right about language.

You're 100 right.

I should be equally cautious.

I'm not always cautious, though.

I.

I come on a spontaneity.

Spontaneity often means, like, holy.

Please continue and be willing to admit.

Like, you know, you're right.

So just to take it back.

Yeah.

Opinion is something I want to just throw out there and not own commitment, as you know, I want to forward this agenda and it's, It's.

It's your relationship to.

And that's why I put position in the middle.

Right.

I would, I would, I would push back on you.

Please.

Because I agree with you on, on that there's a different stance there.

But I still think position is very.

God, I'm thinking nodal.

What a weird word.

You know, it's almost intransigent on something versus a perspective.

And the point is, it's a mental model, Right.

So I would rather us not have opinions or positions.

Right.

But within a framework of thinking that we come to this conclusion, that would be more reasonable.

But hold on, because you just perfectly gave us our fourth access.

Because perspective is great.

So we've got opinion, position, perspective, and commitment.

And I think that those are four important accesses, axes.

Sorry.

Because opinion is perhaps the most fleeting.

Commitment is the most solid.

Right.

Position.

Also kind of, to your point, transitional or part of a node versus perspective historically tends to be more constant, more certain.

Even though I take a very fluid sense of self to the extent that I think my perspectives are still really transient.

Not as transient as my positions, but I like positions more than I like opinions because at least they're attached to something.

They're a node in a larger network.

And I say all of this because especially the last five, 10 years, I really doubled down on the belief in intuition that my entire.

Like when I was an undergrad in university again three decades ago, I didn't take a single note.

Like in the seven years that I was an undergraduate because I was kind of working and doing part time, I didn't take a single note.

Like I just decided it was all going to be oral.

I was going to ask questions, I was going to debate, I was going to listen, I was going to take the full Socratic method.

And even when I did the master's degree, I didn't take a single note.

I didn't have a laptop.

I sat there fully analog.

I was the only student in the class who was fully analog.

Everyone else was like using all the digital tools.

So I really don't like, you know, there's a causality, to answer your question, especially the technology piece, especially the kind of intelligence piece, but it really is kind of one step at a time.

And the ontology thing kind of happened that way, where you and I just spontaneously go, yeah, ontology.

And then a couple other people go, no, it should be ontologies.

So then, boom, it became ontologies, right?

And then we had this interesting group conversation, right, that I think imprinted the participants to the extent that the vast majority will return again to talk about the nature of nature.

That to me is the path.

That's what I try to do.

I'm not able to do it all the time.

But that to me is the je ne sais quoi to what I hope was your pourquoi.

Well, I'd still love the meta views title because there really is this idea of Back to the animals and technology, your perfect metaphor.

We used to relate to ourselves, we still do as this physical thing.

And so when we talk about organizations and trust, right, we still have these very analog sort of ideas that they are things.

And of course they're just amalgamations of people and ideas and words and constructs and agreements.

I don't know if the number is, but I'm going to say the amount of us that is physical, okay, it's pretty static.

This one gets old over 50, 60 years, but it kind of Looks the same over time, my ideas and my knowledge has grown, you know, asymptotically with every conversation and new piece of information.

And now I see things differently.

So I think the realm in which technology.

You're speaking.

Right.

Even the technology of thought is another side of us that's far bigger.

Yeah.

Then this analog domain.

And it's a.

Yes and right.

It's not neither or.

And that's that meta view of seeing the whole.

It's a.

It's, you know.

Right.

It's.

It's.

It's codependencies of a dualistic, if we call it that, the physical.

And if I could take a tangent, and I'm going to mark the tangent by saying, and then I want to come back to animals, I kind of worry, and it's difficult.

I'm struggling with how to navigate this without being too simplistic.

But I kind of worry that there is this kind of, for lack of a better phrase, psyop campaign that's meant to make people think that AI is bad and they should never touch it, when instead, to your point, it is something that should be accessible, it is something that should be creative.

It is something that people should be able to experiment with and use on their own terms.

But we are promulgating these narratives that on the one hand, are naturally critical of Big Tech and the power associated with Big Tech, but they literally are like an anti literacy, a counter literacy that prevents people from even being curious in the first place.

And I don't know how to tackle that, because on the one hand, I want to validate people's humanity.

I want to validate some of the responses that they're having while at the same time kind of making your argument that we are talking about a cognitive growth potential here that is phenomenal.

And I am experiencing it firsthand, emotionally, intellectually, professionally.

And there does seem to be this kind of rhetoric out there that deliberately tries to alienate people.

You're more than welcome to take that up.

But what I wanted to say before I came back to that very quickly because I keep forgetting this.

I'm also in this moment where A.

I tend to dislike almost all contemporary ideology.

And I kind of feel one of my primary osmosis of living with animals is that all contemporary ideology dates back to when we were living with animals.

And it's our observations of these animals that we translated into ideology.

And that's part of where things are fucked up or wrong or broken again, incoherent.

But I wanted to, you know, articulate that Before I forgot or was anyone.

Which animal it's there for you to work with, Ted, Are we talking about your goats?

Are we talking about these human animals?

I'm curious.

All of the above.

So I do mean goats, but I mean domestic animals.

So if this includes goats, horses, cows, dogs, cats, sheep, birds.

And when I say domesticated, I mean there were thousands and thousands of years of co evolution between humans and these animals.

Right.

They're completely different than say, some of the more wild animals that were not domesticated.

Although my understanding is now even those we think of as wild are actually domesticated to a certain degree because humans are so active and present in their habitats and in their world worlds.

Again, we're digressing.

I, I feel we're at that metaviews point where we've got a lot of threads on the table.

Ted, please pick one and run with it.

Well, I'll, I'll round it up to this.

Fear.

Fear is what kept us alive.

And to your point of the animals and you know, what is domesticated?

When I don't have to fear for survival and, or fear food, I have, you know, almost Maslovian capacities to do other things.

And so I'm not sure the word domesticate, you know, I mean, that's our, that is what happened objectively, but in their own internal mental models and of course, safety and all the rest.

So I think the same thing applies to these humanoids who we know how to appeal to that fear, fear, mind.

And when we allow that, we get very narrowly focused.

Yeah.

And I think it's for us to recognize I'm being fear triggered.

Got it.

Someone's either trying to manipulate me or unknowingly has gotten amygdala hijacked into a mindset.

And it's for me to maintain my awareness so that I can have my executive function, which is a much later tool in our evolution.

Right.

Have a voice at the table.

And I think that's probably what all this is about here, is stepping back so that we can all sort of see what's going on both emotionally, intellectually, collectively, and come from more calm minds than sort of the irrational behaviors that we're all projecting.

And that's where I think it's a mistake to use the word objectively because you used it in a way in that particular setting of trying to say, well, you know, we could agree that domestication of animals happened, but maybe not.

Like, maybe we can be rethinking everything and anything.

And that doesn't mean we're discarding the meaning, it just means we're finding greater nuance.

And the example I give is I spent most of the vast majority of my life living in a major metropolitan city.

Right.

My frame of reference largely was urban.

My understanding of the world still to a large extent is urban.

And yet my experience with dogs, just dogs, let alone all the other animals I've been interacting with.

My experience with dogs has gotten me to completely rethink our story of domestication of wolves.

Like I now fully believe that wolves domesticated humans, that there were just some smart wolves who said, you know what?

This is a way more reliable source of food and safety and I'm going to do that.

And then co evolution brought us the dog.

Right.

It wasn't us over them.

It was a much more mutual relationship.

You're absolutely right.

Right.

And there's again, we have just created these stories that are kind of arbitrary and to your point, when we start creating a more multidimensional, a more interconnected view, our perspective might change, our position might change.

But I do have to acknowledge I did evade your use of the word commitments because I probably have.

What's that phrase?

Avoidance, abandonment complex.

Like I don't do well with commitments, which is paradoxical because I am probably a very committed person.

And so I think I need to reflect further on that.

I think that's something that the word commitment and the concept of commitment is something that I'll have to come back to you at at some future conversation only because I kind of feel we've mapped it out on this little four dimensional axis and it's a bit of a wild card, a variable for me that I need to get back at you to get back to you on.

Yeah.

But I do got a.

To your point of control.

Sorry, to your point of control.

Commitment.

If I can't control, it's an assertion, it's an intention.

Right.

There's no necessarily actualization of that.

Right.

But I can have emotional commitment to me and to causing it doesn't mean that will be the outcome.

So I hear you.

It's more directional emotional than it is necessarily outcomes defining.

That's helpful.

That's very helpful.

Now I've got a question for you before we start to wind up.

What did you think of the ontology salon?

Any reactions?

Any thoughts?

I say this because I suspect you're kind of out of the usual meta views loops in that I've declared that there is no recording that that was a once in a lifetime experience, that there will be no published media after.

So I'VE kind of decided that our conversation today, this moment right now, will be the record of the ontologies salon.

So first, I guess I want you to do a kind of metaview's affidavit where you just confirm that it happened so that I am not the only person on the record who can say that the ontology salon that you and I discussed in a previous episode did happen under the title Ontologies Plural.

And what did you think?

What were your thoughts coming out of that?

Well, two that come up to my mind and maybe there's a third one.

I credit you for bringing all these interesting, not only voices, but perspectives.

The woman who was like a librarian, right, she has a certain perspective on information knowledge and categorizing it.

We had a tech cryptographer type, we had philosophers.

And everyone's right.

The point is there's no answer.

These are different almost facets of a jewel.

And the second part that I'll just impart, which is like there's the.

You remember as a kid you played with the magnifying glass and burn ants on the sidewalk?

Allegedly.

Guilty, right?

And I love animals now.

I can't believe I did that.

But, you know, that's what you did.

It would converge the, the sun's rays into a point and, you know, make a focal point.

There's the opposite of that, which is a divergent lens which bends the rays outward.

And what you have to do is almost, you know, ex, extricate.

Boy, I can't even think the right extrapolate.

And that funny back to what's a virtual image point.

And it's sort of the same thing here.

It's almost like these facets of the jewel all give you a, you know, they're, they're the, they, they're pointing back to some common thing that you can't necessarily see.

But that's my take, is that we have to have multiple points of view.

We have to sort of see what are these all saying in common and, and synthesize that as a spectrum right into white light, not as a point, as though a singular monochromatic instance of information.

How do you like that?

Well said.

Very, very well done.

Especially given the spontaneity of it.

And interestingly enough, Sally, who is the librarian esque woman you were speaking of, she once brought me up, I met her because she brought me up to Attawapiskat, which is a very remote Cree community on James Bay in northern Ontario.

It's a fly in community.

So there's no, you cannot drive there and she was involved in bringing fiber optic Internet to that community and a bunch of other coastal Cree first nations communities up in Northern Ontario.

And it was really an incredible experience.

And the work she did kind of with those communities I think was really profound and really quite empowering.

So to your point, the Metaviews Network is quite the odd bunch of super smart, super interesting, radically diverse people.

And bringing them together, while on the one hand a little like herding cats, often does result in the kind of multi spectrum experience, psychedelic experience that I'd like to do.

Again, I thought it was interesting that we came out with the Nature of Nature as a kind of follow up.

And I did feel, correct me if you think I'm wrong, that you kind of played a role in articulating or expressing or leading us to that nature of nature.

Thoughts on the kind of poetics that you're bringing here to the Met abuse situation?

Well, I'm a dork and I.

Look, I spent some time on this, but you know, I love the word polymath.

I'm certainly not considering myself at a very low level, maybe, but you have the Leonardo da Vinci's and these people across all these disciplines, and I think that's what I'm encouraging us all to have is a polymathic mindset.

In other words, right.

There are all these pieces.

And back to your point about domestication, you know, who wouldn't be domesticated is humans who have a creative thought.

There are many that are happy just to follow, just do the job.

And that's not bad.

But there's creatives that say, no, I won't be held to that old construct.

Right.

I think we can do better.

And that has continued to, you know, propagate everything we've created, which is more good than bad.

It's just the bad has more leverage now.

But I think humans are more good than bad.

And so, yeah, long live creativity.

Long live heterogeneity and the ability to listen to multiple perspectives and think for oneself.

Having heard all this, what do I think?

And that's a really hard question if you've never done it for yourself.

Well, and I mean, you're talking advanced stuff.

When I was listening to you describe that, I was thinking, part of what we're trying to do on Metaverse is just teach people to listen, to listen.

It is remarkable how often I encounter situations where people aren't listening.

When you were describing that, I was thinking to myself, the people who I bring to these events, the people who I try to get there, what is their ultimate qualification, what is the prerequisite?

And you hit it right there.

They have the ability to listen, they do have the ability to think.

And I kind of feel that that's the easier part, that once you are listening, the thinking, and I don't mean advanced thinking, I mean basic thinking, right, that listening really is the enabler, listening is the catalyst.

Once you figure out how to do that, your thinking will get better, right?

It's the same way that I'm a big fan and don't think, do, because when you're doing, you'll also be thinking.

Yeah, I mean, so Einstein, whether he said this or not, but I believe he said something effective.

If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes about the solution.

I think that's what we fail to do.

We, we go at the iceberg, at the piece that sticks up over the water and we never look at all the mental models, the structures that keep these things in place.

And it's back to root cause analysis.

So it's not just what I think, as most people relate to as an opinion.

How do I understand what I think and how I think and then what?

What do I think?

I'll give you a quick thing I looked up recently that I just love.

I'll just spit this out, but mental model, go into chat GPT and say, what is, what the heck's a mental model?

What are the components of it?

Core beliefs.

Oh yeah, of course your beliefs are going to affect the way you see everything.

Assumptions, huh?

What are really my assumptions here?

Condition scripts, identity and self image, causal logic, values, hierarchy and norms and shoulds.

Those are the pieces of what we simply say is our mental model or perspective.

Once we can see, I'm going to go back to the color spectra, right?

In those pieces we can start to see how we're thinking and then we can actually have some agency.

Most of us don't know how we're thinking about what we're thinking.

And I think to go back to what we talk about at organizations, I think because there's a strong disincentive against that, I think there aren't incentives to learn how we think.

I think a lot of people without community support, without family support in place of that, find alienation, find depression, right?

Because it is a conformist society.

And when you start exploring how you are fundamentally unique, because each of us are fundamentally unique, it's easy to then come to the conclusion that you're alone, right?

That there's no one there for you again, unless you have strong family, unless you have strong community.

And that's where I think most people actually don't, right.

That we are stuck in an individualist society.

Now, this is the second last episode of season two of Meta Views.

I'm doing a season demarcation because I want to take an opportunity maybe to try different graphics, try different things, but also because I feel it's important to have a start and an end, to use it for purposes of iteration, use it for purposes of evolution.

I really want to say thank you, Ted, for both participating in season two, having a role in season two two.

But I'm giving you the opportunity here to not just kind of have last words, and this is before I do the shout out, but kind of last words on season two of Meta Views.

And this is where I say that the salon, the ontology salon, was going to be the season finale.

It is no longer the season finale, but you synthesized the season finale.

So no pressure.

Wrap us up here, Ted.

Well, what.

What metaphor shall we take?

I'm gonna say this.

Ready?

The.

By the way, this is a fun story.

When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, you know, it goes into this middle state called chrysalis, where turns to goo and then it just pops out a butterfly.

And it's like, how does all this caterpillar goo just turn into a butterfly?

Turns out there's things called imaginal discs from Imago Image, and there's, I think, nine of them.

They're like substructures that even though the outside morphology or structures looks different, there's.

There's a through line.

So I'm going to suggest that perhaps season one was caterpillar, season two is chrysalis, and there's a transformation I can already see.

And you, you know, but what you're following perhaps is your own imaginal disc.

And so my question might be, you know, now in the transformation metaphor, what do you see?

How do you like.

You like the way through this back?

I see a transformation.

I see you moving through something and toward something.

Do you have a sense what's next in season three?

Right on, right on.

And this is fundamentally why you get paid the big bucks, because you have an intuitive sense of narrative flow.

The answer to your question will be the next episode of Meta Views, the season finale.

That was a fantastic way, sensei, to set me up with a question to go away with.

As an aside, we are now in the shout out section, so I will be asking you to give a Shout out one shout out.

And I will give a little anecdote that will give you time to think of one.

We live in a woodlot, a forest here on our farm.

Our forest is pretty decent sized and we live largely in maple syrup country.

So these are largely sugar maples, but also some massive oaks.

And we had, I want to say five years ago, maybe four years ago, a massive invasive species event.

These were LDD moths.

So these were moths.

So they went from caterpillar into moth and the chrysalis phase.

Every single wooden surface in the entire forest just fucking covered, absolutely covered.

And what a lot of people did in the area, if they had the capacity, was they would go and scrape them off into buckets of soapy water, right, to try to prevent them from getting to the full moss stage, because they would just decimate trees like there were just millions upon millions of them.

Anyway, I digress.

Random story and memory, but giving you time for your shout out.

So what do you got for us, dad?

Well, you know, you know, with a company or a widget or anything else, but I.

I think appropriate to meta views.

This is a collective shout out to the crazies who dared to think the world could be different than it has been.

And those crazies.

It sounds like another Apple commercial and I'll throw him in there.

But were it not for the crazies, we'd be, I don't know, still, I don't know, attacking wolves ourselves or something.

Hold on a second.

Alarm's going up.

The social leaders, the technological leaders, the scientists, the futurists, right?

It's the crazies in us and the fact that you said we can feel alone.

You know what?

You're not alone.

If you got a crazy idea and if you think you're crazy, that's the wrong place.

It's the people who have been lulled into believing this is all there is, this is all that can be, and this is the way humans are and we're dead.

That is crazy.

So this is a shout out to anyone and everyone who says, I think things can be better, and I have a say and a do in that regard.

Well done.

And either you're always bringing your A game, Ted, or I need to go to the Vader in which that a game is happening.

You don't know what's in here.

I hope it's as fantastic as you make it sound.

Thank you once again.

And I will say that you'll be back in season three in theory, for the Nature of Nature salon, which I will want to be scheduling sooner rather than later so we keep the momentum going because the other participants very much said that they fucking loved it and there was a lot of FOMO people who wanted to come and didn't make it who were really upset that the recording will not be available.

So we will be doing that post haste.

But I gotta think of my butterfly through line.

That was an excellent metaphor for me to take away and head out with.

This has been another fantastic episode of Meta Views.

We will be back soon with the season finale and our hiatus won't be that long.

I am absolutely overwhelmed by farm tasks, but that's kind of why podcasting remains fun, because it allows me to take an excuse to come indoors and sit on the computer and have a very fart, fun, smart, farty conversation with friends like ted or on YouTube or on the audio podcast.

We're everywhere you might find us, including substack.

We'll see you soon.

Stay fresh, stay cool, take care.