Mark Stahlman, a former Wall Street technology strategist who took America Online public and founded the Center for the Study of Digital Life in 2015, describes the center's method as net assessment — the diagnostic step that Andy Marshall's Pentagon Office of Net Assessment placed before strategy and policy — combined with Marshall McLuhan's media theory. He argues the digital paradigm has made earlier frameworks obsolete, including integralism, complexity science and the work of Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Gebser and Ken Wilber, none of whom addressed AI or robotics. In their place he proposes faculty psychology, grounded in Aristotle's De Anima, against cognitive psychology. He outlines the center's projects: the journal Dianoetikon, Trivium University, the consultancy Exogenous, a Dia-Logos initiative aimed at religious organizations, and a geopolitical newsletter. Pinchbeck pushes back on the dismissal of Steiner and Jung.
Guest: Mark Stahlman
In brief
- Stahlman says net assessment is a diagnosis of the situation that must precede strategy, policy and deployment rather than substitute for them.
- Stahlman argues that frameworks formed under the electric paradigm, including integral theory and complexity science, cannot account for a world of AI and robots.
- Stahlman says psychology should return to being the study of the soul and its faculties, following Aristotle's De Anima, rather than cognitive psychology.
- Stahlman says the Dia-Logos project exists to bring the paradigm shift to the attention of organized religion, which he sees as resisting it.
- Stahlman is building Trivium University around the pre-modern trivium on the premise that the modern era has ended and its successor is not yet understood.
- Pinchbeck disputes the dismissal of Steiner, Jung and Gebser, arguing that thinkers using different terminologies are often describing the same phenomena.
Full text
hey everybody today I'm here with Mark stallman who is the founder and director of the center for Digital Life and has had a very long and storied career in Tech and business uh Mark do you want to introduce yourself tell us a little bit about your background uh sure Daniel thank you very much for inviting me um it's actually the center for the study of Digital Life uh that is uh easy to miss since the URL is Digital Life all one word Dot Center uh the uh the center is uh effort that I started in 2015. so uh it's now uh approaching its eighth anniversary it began as a result of work that uh I had been doing with some friends who are the pentagon's office of net assessment that assessment is a very uh unusual uh procedure in that it does not involve strategy it does not involve policy it involves a diagnosis of the situation that must precede successfully doing strategy and deployments and so forth so the man behind us is named Andy Marshall uh he is uh a giant in that world very well known uh but probably not so well known outside of that assessment the other primary influence I would say for csdl was Marshall mcloone Marshall mcluhan uh uh I'm uh I'm an old man now I turned 75 a couple days ago and uh so I was there in the 60s when Mc Clellan was publishing and I used mcluhan's work in my own career on Wall Street uh I was a technology strategist I brought America Online public I was the first analyst to support some Microsystems those were both career threatening activities but they panned out and uh so now we have a couple of projects at csdl which I hope we will talk about one of them is Trivium University URL there is trivium. university and the other uh is not yet um launched but will soon be launched as a sub stack under the name digital net assessment three spheres newsletter so that's me up to date there's also a Consulting Wing that it looked like uh yes there's there's a for-profit consulting company that brings net assessment uh into various projects called exogenous Inc and so the URL there is exogenous Inc all one word. com or we just simply call it EXO there's also another project which I should mention just for completeness purposes the name of this project is deal logos and the DIA logos project is aimed at uh organized religion um and trying to um bring to the attention of these organizations the Paradigm Shift which we are now experiencing um that paradigm shift is something that a lot of people are resisting uh understanding they would prefer to apply their various uh Frameworks um some of them dating back uh 50 years 20 years 30 years integralism uh complexity science uh it's a long list of these things and they have all um failed because they were invented to apply to a paradigm which is now obsolete so we need a new approach yeah I guess the journal is that the name of the journal also the uh Diane noeticon is the name of the centers uh Journal we've published one issue that issue was uh uh published uh actually in 21 it's dated 20 but whatever and it that that's a very important uh exploration of Faculty psychology which now needs to replace uh what has taken over as cognitive psychology that is a an approach which is uh utterly failed what is faculty psychology value psychology has shown up in a variety of ways more modern but it's a pre-modern approach and in fact Aristotle in his key text um most people would know it if they do it all by the Latin title d onama uh in English it would be on the soul so it turns out that that psychology of course is the study of the psyche psyche is a uh Greek word which corresponds to the English word soul so psychology should be a study of the soul and the faculties of the Soul and so faculty psychology is uh a critical piece of how we're going to get a grip um not necessarily a way out but at least a much better understanding of a situation we're now in um uh yeah I mean I was I think you sent me your piece from that journal on a Facebook comment and uh read your piece found it really interesting that piece I think you were talking about sort of like um kind of psychology psychological engineering social engineering a little bit um right and then there was a lot about um you know kind of Aristotle from different authors which I don't know that much about but looked really you know we're all going to have to learn our Aristotle uh Whitehead famously said of course Western philosophy is all a footnote to Plato well it turns out that Aristotle uh is far more significant for what we're doing today and uh therefore um this is quite difficult actually if you went out to try to study Aristotle today where would you go yeah nobody knows one thing that I try to do in my work a lot is sometimes um I recognize that people are talking about very similar things but maybe they're using different uh kind of terminologies and trying to make it hard for people to understand each other you know like for me like Rudolph Steiner uh and Carl Jung for instance you know we're actually talking about a lot of the very same things as was like Gene gebser but but if you don't unders if you don't take the time to figure out how this product is right so but but the commonality between all of those you just mentioned and we could add to the list we could put Ken Wilbur in there and so forth these people are all dealing with a very different Paradigm than the one we live in today not not a single one of them had a word to say about uh artificial intelligence not a single one of them had anything to say about robots uh they had not a single thing to say about the digital Paradigm in which we now lived so while all of their work is quite interesting particularly as a reflection of the previous electric paradigm Unfortunately they have very little to say about the world in which we now live yeah I don't know if I I don't know if I totally agree with that but uh it's a long discussion no I'm sure you don't uh but let's go let's go through kind of um yeah so I'm just going to say that one of the things that really intrigued me uh when I started getting into your work a little bit was this interest in uh you know the soul uh which is something I've been writing a lot about and in fact I years ago I published a really amazing book by this guy Patrick Harper called The Secret tradition of the Soul uh who talks about the soul and Western hermeticism uh and yeah just kind of like this common understanding of um of it in a way so what I'm curious sort of like um you know what what do you understand about the soul like what what is what does it mean what's its meaning for you well uh famously um uh Descartes wound up uh separating the soul uh from the body so we've been living in this material immaterial dualism uh since the print Paradigm it was the technology of print that drove the Jesuits who taught uh Descartes and uh so that's separation of the soul and the body now needs to be um fundamentally um uh set aside that that's all way behind us now and and so the uh most simple answer uh is again from Aristotle Aristotle's uh overall view was a uh monistic View uh that's to say an integral View and that uh integration is typically called hyalomorphism um where uh Hilo or highly the vowels often change when you're transliterating from Greek polymorphism uh highly is wood material and morphism is form and so uh Aristotle not Plato's but Aristotle's an entire understanding is based upon the integral and necessary relationship between matter and form the soul is the form of a living creature everything looks alive has a soul Aristotle in the book um in English uh on the soul and here I would recommend the Joe sax translation which is an excellent English translation there are lots of translations as you can imagine this but many of them uh fall down at critical points but Joe sax has gotten it right um it turns out that um there are differences uh between living creatures uh differences between their souls but it is a form it is immaterial it is not something that is um made up of atoms and uh um whatever else you might think about uh particle physics that does not describe the soul cannot describe the soul because it's immaterial it is a form and understanding forms and maybe most importantly how forms change us called formal causality so Aristotle is also the person who most uh carefully picked apart the topic of causality um as as you probably know causality is largely been discarded in scientific work replaced with statistics uh particularly for human beings um you can't experiment on them so you have to collect statistical uh correlations but correlation of course is not causality so what is saying the causality of human Affairs which ultimately is necessary for us to get a grip on the situation that we're now in that cannot be done statistically that cannot be done mathematically that needs to be done formally and so the break between Plato and Aristotle on the topic of forms uh Plato as you recall had forms in an ideal world and in fact there's a lot in Plato which you can understand since his mentor of Socrates was murdered by democracy um you can well imagine that he was a little pissed off about all of that and so he took all the forms and and elevated them moved him out of um every day Athenian life um Aristotle brought them back and Incorporated matter and form as the necessary structure of reality um if we can get back to a much more robust understanding of forms and I've had as you can imagine uh many maybe hundreds of conversations with modern very intelligent very motivated modern thinkers and it turns out that their understanding of forms is uh is largely missing we just haven't been taught this uh and and so getting back to uh an integral relationship between matter and form uh brings us to the form of living creatures their souls that then allows us to understand the human soul and uh there's a very rich uh history um in doing this of course so we have lots lots and lots of resources to call upon once we realize that the modern approach including those authors that you just cited um all of that is quite modern that is uh still important to understand and and study uh but we have in a fundamental sense moved on as a result of digital technology um and what you're talking about a little bit reminds me of Rupert sheldrake and his whole amorphic residence morphogenic Fields kind of um exploration is that along the same kind of lines for you I I have not read enough uh sheldrake I'm familiar with some of the controversies around uh around him and so forth to give you a solid answer yeah um my guess is talking about fields is an attempt to bring this into the context of modern physics uh modern physics has failed um doesn't mean that he's saying the same thing but he's attempting to talk to people who believe they understand the 20th century uh electric shift to Fields magnetic fields electrodynamic fields and so forth that whole physics ultimately brings us to quantum mechanics uh was it appropriate I'm not arguing with it it was quite appropriate for the time in which it had arisen but unfortunately it's not going to work um very well for us going forward so I'll read some more sheldrake and have a better answer I'd love to know uh but I'm I'm curious when you say modern physics has failed it's hard to understand in what sense you mean that because many people would say that you know physics is actually you know become you know incredibly powerful and robust and we have now you know Quantum Computing plus we have you know the discovery that the Universe you know is not locally real which just won the Nobel Prize in 2022. so I'm not sure what it is about it but the the answer to that question in terms of Paradigm shifts is always a matter of the practitioners in the field and it turns out the practitioners in the field of physics have in a significant measure throw their hands up and said this just isn't working so string theory is has lost uh an enormous amount of attention by the smart people who are involved with it you go through any of the other uh categories that have attracted most of the research effort Nobel of course is is always very much a lagging indicator so nobody else is going to talk about things that that were interesting Once Upon a Time but the physicists themselves much like the psychologists much like the sociologists much like the cosmologists are throwing their hands up and going this doesn't work anymore I mean quantum physics is obviously working as a predictive it's the most powerful predictive tool no it's an engineering effort there's nothing there really is there's almost no physics involved in what you're calling Quantum Computing the relation between science and engineering is not very well understood um the truth of the matter is of course that engineering precedes science winds up becoming a rationalization of successful engineering and and so to date we do not have any quantum computers um what they will be used for uh apart from the usual encryption story and so forth which drives so much of this if you've got something that can potentially uh Advance encryption of course you'll be funded and so we're back to the military uh as the driver in many of these fields which have become obsolete so the military has pumped enormous amount of money into complexity science they've pumped an enormous amount of money into Quantum they pump the enormous amount of money in uh other areas uh Santa Fe Institute to this day is supported by 10 million dollars a year from the Department of energy people who make and own the bombs and so there's a number of topics Quantum being one of them where you can get funding uh but that doesn't mean that it works it doesn't mean that it's even really being applied uh I've had conversations with a number of people who are building quantum computers and they will very quickly tell you that um what happened in the 20s and 30s with quantum mechanics has almost nothing to do with what they're doing today okay that's that's a whole tangent but I guess I I you know I understand the clue in and also by the way I was very interested to hear that you have a personal historical relationship with Norbert Weiner and cybernetics uh yeah my father uh William stallman uh who was uh he died in 75 but uh in a particularly in the 50s and 60s he was a well-known historian of science and he was a very close uh Protege of Norbert weiner um Norbert weiner was described to me when I was growing up as my godfather there's aspects of your project which are sort of related to that project like you found somebody's attention yes and in particular let me um drill down on this topic of the military involvement in all of these efforts um as it turns out Norbert weiner for those who don't know um boy Genius um uh got a Ph D at 18 from Harvard was sent off to go study with Bertrand Russell uh it's not clear to me whether he hated Bertrand Russell or he hated what Bertrand Russell was doing but uh he got together actually with T.
S Eliot of all people or Christmas dinner in in 1914 in London and said I don't want to be a philosopher I don't want to do this logical positivism I'm going to become a mathematician and uh as The apocal Story Goes T. S Eliot said uh I don't want to be he was studying philosophy as well at the time I don't want to be a philosopher either I think I'll become a poet so that that Divergence uh wound up uh in uh uh March of of 1964 as I recall uh Norbert weiner um uh died climbing the stairs to meet uh Queen um uh of Sweden to get an award reminding us that uh meeting with the queen of Sweden uh might be a dangerous uh thing to do with your life and and uh that came across the radio I was actually working with my father the historian of science on a sports car engine uh a racing engine uh that was what he did at night and came across and uh hit my father very hard um the only time I think I've ever uh heard him cry and he turned to me and he said now it's up to you I said what what's up to you me I'm 16 years old what's up he said it's up to you to carry Norbert wieners work forward and I am um I'm now almost 60 years older than that and I'm still trying to figure that out but yes a part of what we are doing or what I'm doing or motivates me uh in cybernetics and so this is the reason why um digital technology and and so I was a my career was on Wall Street I was following um technology companies I was a a programmer for many years started software companies and and so I I've spent a lot of my life trying to understand the digital world and have come to the conclusion that this has driven in much the way that mcluhan uh described uh for the printing press and for electricity this is driven a fundamental shift in our underlying grammar the rules by which we live have been forever changed um all this excitement about chat GPT and and now Atlas um being integrated into search engines and so forth all this excitement is uh just an overflowing of a subconscious recognition that we all have that the world has fundamentally changed yeah yeah go ahead I mean um I just thought it'd be useful maybe just to you know kind of people don't know mcluhan's kind of ideas around kind of these different uh revolutions and media technology and how they sort of change Consciousness right I know you talked about uh or you talked about the um obviously writing uh which Socrates resisted for instance because he felt it would destroyed memory um and then there was probably well remember we really don't have Socrates we have Plato's Socrates so what's happening in in in the phaedrus uh dialogue is fascinating so we have uh Plato who's writing everything down uh putting uh in the mouth of his now assassinated um I will emphasize again assassinated by a democracy uh uh Mentor Socrates who then puts a dialogue he goes another layer down where uh thought um is uh the Hermetic um uh deity if you will is explaining to Pharaoh that he has invented writing and Pharaoh's response of course uh as you just said oh you can't do that you can't do that that'll destroy memory memory turns out to be the faculty that is most important not imagination so I'll just remind you uh everybody in your audience probably knows this reference what was it that made Rachel special in Blade Runner why what why was she so different from all the other replicas and the answer of course as Philip K dick tells the story um and and what dick was really trying to accomplish with do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep has largely been missed as well but it's available in his uh prose writings he was worried about the humans not about the uh replicants um and human behavior but um it turns out that she was implanted with um tyrell's uh niece Lilith's memories and so it was what distinguished her from the other replicants or robots was memory and this is exactly where we are today we need to remember at a much higher intensity than we need to imagine we've been imagining for a very long time now and it has only gotten Us in more trouble very interesting I like that that's beautiful actually um okay so um so let's talk about these transitions from uh you know oral to print um you know you know written language to print and then to digit electronic and into digital well it turns out of course um and uh you know a great deal about this and and your writings about uh Aztecs and and others uh refers to a world uh uh an oral paradigm and that oral Paradigm didn't look at all like ours in particular there were not personalities and and and it's kind of a borg-like situation the reference that I would Point people to here is Julian James so Julian James probably is on one of your bookshelves here yeah the break the origin of Consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind yeah but it turns out that I was Julian Jane's Last student oh cool and that happened because I was talking with other people I knew at Princeton and asking about Julian and I was told that uh Julian was not well physically and that if I wanted to have a conversation with Julian I had to get on a train and go down to Princeton which I did multiple times then they fired him he went to his ancestral home Prince Edward Island and I spent a long weekend with him and a few months later he was dead so he had no other students around him at that point uh Julian James is only one of many who have discussed the transition from oral through scribal so we actually call the next paradigm uh scribal and that refers of course to a written language but the key to that is not so much the writing which predates this uh a long time so there's a lot of writing on Stone and so forth but the literacy so the question is having a literate audience uh Socrates was a one-on-one sort of guy or maybe a few people in the dialogue uh and memory um uh it needs to be uh established in such a way that it can be shared to a literate audience so the shift from oral uh to scribal is really the rise of a an audience capable of uh understanding something that has been written uh at a distance uh ultimately leads to um a lot of other phenomena like uh nation states and and uh all sorts of uh valorization of um of national languages but that um uh transition is pretty well documented that there's a lot of people who've written Beyond Julian James about going from an oral to a Scrabble World the transition that followed that was from uh scribal uh literacy who print and here again there's a significant literature about that transition uh Elizabeth eisenstein's um uh volume uh for instance about the effects of print is is very important um print then transitions in the 19th century and here we have figures like Nietzsche and so forth who are at that transition uh when Lisa says God is dead since Nietzsche comes from a family of Lutheran pastors and was sent to college to become another Lutheran Pastor what he's actually saying of course is the printed Bible is dead so he's announcing the end of print in that statement and then he does what needs to be done he starts trying to retrieve in his case he's retrieving uh pre-socratics um since his job was philology retrieving us is what we now need to do given from the transition that we have been in let's say since 2000 we've been in a digital Paradigm so there are five primary underlying Communications paradigms oral scribal print electric those four Marshall mcluhan talked about all of them throughout his work the transition we're now going through Mark Mc Clellan died in 1980 and didn't really understand or cared that much about it transition we're now going through to digital has I guess been our extension of mcluhan the reason why these things are important is because the underlying structure or grammar of our Communications and enormous impact on shaping our behaviors and attitudes so that's the language that mcluhan used it's not deterministic and it's largely subconscious so it seems to happen and I'm sure you have stories of your own childhood and and as do I and everybody else um the way that uh our species operates is that it it has to come to grips with the structure of the world around us in the years before puberty puberty prepares us of course for reproduction so the critical time period in sort of setting our ground rules comes in what uh uh John Piaget called the uh concrete operational stage of development and and that corresponds roughly to what used to call Grammar School uh so we learned the grammar of the world around us based on the Technologies which are dominant you're not using grammar in terms of like sentence structure you're using it more in it actually that's that's a very important question thank you it turns out that sentence structure is a very perverse way of understanding grammar yeah it is that the diagramming of sentences and so forth which uh has a number of interesting uh expansions and here I'll just bring up Noam Chomsky um so you might wonder uh or maybe not um where did no Chomsky come from um we know him of course as a political uh uh Anarchist commentator um probably the most widely cited in that political uh domain but that's not why we know him we know him because the defense department decided they were going to try to back a project to come up with a universal grammar and so you will find um throughout all of this and this goes back to the paper the inner census uh and human engineering that I think prompted this conversation it turns out that the military has been uh trying to figure out how to uh I guess uh manage or manipulate um uh humans uh and have largely come to the decision then uh some people seem to have um I'm just actually now reading the most recent book by Bruno La Tour um about metamorphosis um he pins it around 1980 when the military decided that they were not going to be able to mold human beings into what they wanted and instead would need to replace them so what we now have with AI and its public Expressions which are only obviously a small tip of very large iceberg we have a very significant military-led effort to effectively eliminate the human race the way that um uh Mrs described in Bruno latour's work uh is that the decision was actually reached that planet Earth cannot possibly keep on growing that we we don't have the resources we don't have the space for it and so therefore we're going to have to reduce the population and this comes up in a wide variety of Fashions of the way and I think you're absolutely right as you let off the discussion people are often talking about the same thing but using different words and and they do that obviously for a number of reasons most importantly the audience that they're talking to they don't want to lose the audience they don't want to piss off the audience they want to somehow uh speak in a language uh that Their audience understands as Mc Clone would put it the audience is the formal cause of any work of art uh and so people have different audiences so they talk about it differently but the the truth of the matter is here uh um we believe and and I I'm this interview is not entirely just of me I have a uh a quite significant team uh you'll see it at the website in terms of fellows and and these other projects that we're involved with We Believe that this is uh probably the largest Danger that Humanity now faces which is to say a um very well-funded uh very committed um group of uh largely military Elites who have come to the conclusion that Humanity needs uh to be uh effectively uh set aside except for a handful of people who are those Elites this turns out to have been a deep concern of Norbert weiner so just to wrap this back to the Norman weiner question um there was maybe still is a group of of kind of I guess left-wing um scientists uh a computer scientist for social responsibility uh they have for years awarded a Norbert wiener prize uh if they're still in operation for many years and that was an anti-war uh and so it it it turns out coming full circle here uh I was a kid uh college student in the uh 60s uh going to the north of Wisconsin uh in Madison for those who sort of remember their anti-war history um one of the more celebrated events was a sit-in uh at a Dow Chemical uh Recruiting Station it all seems so very long ago and and so uh mundane but um I was there in the hallway when all that happened and and so I I'm finding my my anti-war Sensibility as I study this question of digital technology and Humanity I'm finding the anti-war component of it coming much more uh to the fore ironically perhaps as I announced in the beginning introducing myself the origins of the center uh are in uh think tank at the Pentagon um I just want to like because you know um it's so common now uh for the sense of there being the sort of you know conspiratorial sense of these kind of mysterious overlords who are kind of engineering Society to bring about nefarious purposes uh but it's all often left very kind of vague and Abstract um I mean for instance well I wouldn't even say like you know Russell Brand is actually been doing extremely uh excellent uh you know kind of um kind of reporting and whatever you want to call it punditing on the world economic forum and um you know their interest in automation you know wanting to also sort of like um you know create robot armies uh robot workers uh to um to develop uh technologies that measure people's brain waves so that even their thoughts are under the control or surveillance of uh Elite I mean who who is the agency that's ultimately behind all of this I mean is it people who you know do not know what they do or they're people with actual evil intent I think the uh the key here is that none of this is hiding and um for those who get attracted uh to something like Bilderberg uh which has now been replaced by Davos um I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that's not where it happens if it's behind closed doors if it's a secret uh project if it's uh a bunch of uh people who nobody knows I will guarantee you they're not the ones um it's very easy to figure this out who is advocating that we leave planet Earth and become a multi-planetary or multi-galactic civilization Elon Musk that's not human beings Jeff Bezos steel yeah right but that human beings are not going to live on Mars we we need food we need oxygen impossible it's impossible so therefore it has to be some sort of an Android yeah has announced of course his most important invention is Optimus yeah and he's and he's doing the uh um neural link um so I I don't know Elon Musk personally uh I follow many of uh stories about him but he's the most obvious example here of somebody who is not trying to promote the uh uh the further development and uh if you will uh uh the uh well-being of the human race yeah um but it it the origin of of so much of this winds up being the battlefield so those of us who have not bought War those of us who have not um been trained to do this uh might not so easily recognize that that's the totally from the standpoint of the world's militaries it's totally ridiculous what what why would you allow a human being to go into battle and none of this is secret all this is very public information and so I you know uh I know Russell uh sort of and he's got an audience and so Russell is not really exploring what's going on here he is supporting himself through an audience that wants this to be sensationalized it's not sensational uh Eric Schmidt is the the AI Czar for the US Military no secrets everybody knows us do you know that look at the structure of all the Committees and all the things and and he got uh or that group of people got tens of billions of dollars to spend in the infrastructure bill um so the B it is largely the fact that people do not want to so let me just Riff on conspiracies for a moment here but I mean I mean I guess from their inner world and their their subjective experience they still somehow believe they're doing something humanitarian or or as a complete of course yeah no they're when addressing the question of poverty when aggressing the question of uh oppression it's very easy to convince yourself this is happening because we have too many people um easy and and very easy to convince yourself what we will wind up with yes it'll be fewer people but they will be much better people so this is kind of the modern version of eugenics which as you recall was a liberal Progressive project it was not a conservative project it was a very um very much the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century where uniformly eugenesis well that's also become this weird switch in a way because um um you know it now feels as if um kind of technocracy kind of technocratic authoritarianism you know is is now seems like a progressive project uh whereas whereas you know elements on the right seem to be more of the ones who are fighting for um you know some type of Freedom sometimes preservation of civil liberties right but I'm friends with Nadine straussen if you if you know Nadine Nadine was uh um until it went to the transition the flip the weird flip you're talking about if he was ahead of the ACLU um she has been invited to speak to Congress by Republicans not Democrats she has been deeply involved in a number of organizations some of which I'm very familiar with so she is a very classical uh 60s 70s Progressive uh left liberal who cannot get any attention in that crowd at all quite remarkable um okay but I feel like we we you know this was terrific and I'm fascinated by all of this but we were sort of uh I wanted to sort of Just Dial back a little bit we were talking about the transition to the from the uh these different media paradigms and how this reality and have something substantively new and different in this um shift to the digital right and one of the uh talks that I saw today you were talking about how um kind of the television it's about the illusory uh inner world uh and uh the fact is that if a television screen has no fixed image right so it's like a blurry massive images if you isolate a moment where whereas the digital world is um somehow I think you said about Perfect Memory so uh thanks um let's get back on track here the um it turns out that the way that deeply um driven Paradigm operates on us are sold is different from the way that the previous electric or television Paradigm operated on our soul and and mechanism involved here is not all that complicated um you can introduce uh any number of mimetic or imitation stories uh Renee Gerard any number of approaches to this but the ultimate result is the human beings um are born without language without technology um not able to uh even sustain themselves and eventually they will come to recognize the structure of the world around them based on the Technologies which are being used and so the actual technology must to be examined um television which we both grew up with and and uh and so forth that actually doesn't mean so much television as the technology of a raster scanned screen which has no permanent image um it's engineered specifically to fool our perceptual system so it turns out that the human perceptual system evolved so that it could notice changes up to a certain frequency and then as the frequency increased our system seems to believe that it's now stable it's not it's flickering even faster so around um 40 Hertz is or maybe 25 Hertz it all depends somewhere in that range is our uh flicker Fusion frequency it's the way our our visual uh perception works so if you increase the frequency higher than that and obviously movies were were a early version of this so you have a still frame that is held in in front of the light and then the next one next one next one sprocketed through that um is an illusion a deliberate illusion it's a series of still pictures in the case of a movie in the case of a wrestler sand screen there is no still picture it's constantly refreshing across the screen that um deliberate illusion television set is a illusion machine that has really screwed us up and when you dig into the details and I can talk about this as much as you'd like of the faculties of what are known as the inner senses so this this is actually quite important cognitive psychology modern psychology models human beings on computers computers have input and output they have Computing they have various things that go on but they don't have a subconscious they have a conscious and this is why there's so much interest in the hard problem of Consciousness and on and on and on so you get these courts of study of Consciousness conferences and and on an unconsciousness is only an interesting problem if you're trying to build Consciousness into a robot it is not at all an interesting topic when it comes to human beings human beings are driven subconsciously which has no Computing model so the cognitive psychologists ignore that but you and I and I presume much of your audience knows that what really goes on uh is not typically at the level of Consciousness which uh uh is important and and critical and Julian James raised that importance but um it's the what goes on underneath that the inner senses of the various inner senses of which there are four as uh Thomas Aquinas described it uh and hear the reference for those who maybe following the bouncing ball uh summa theologica book one uh question 78 article four uh the title of which is are the interior senses properly distinguished and it turns out that the two key internal senses that all human beings have as a result of their souls faculties of the Soul are actually known and have been known going all the way back to ancient Greece they've been known as imagination and memory these are the two faculties the balance between winds up driving our subconscious and therefore much of our lives in society um we have been in a uh a vicious Loop to um promote illusion um the enormous amount of of promotion for creativity and an enormous amount of uh the way imagination winds up innocently in sentences that people are using to describe things is not not their fault it's just a reflection of the world in which we live um the structure of computers has nothing to do with imagination in fact the computers that was once upon a time literally a professional computer architect all you worry about if you're architecting a computer is the memory structure you've got to get stuff into and out of the various Computing units and the overwhelming time clock time stopwatch time that every computer including the ones that we're talking uh there are hundreds of computers in this conversation right now they're all doing the same thing they're all freaking out about their memory they're all freaking out they're gonna forget something they're freaking out they're going to be errors they're going to creep in uh they're freaking out that somebody's accessing the wrong place in memory the error correction isn't employed the enormous importance of the accuracy of memory for computers is what humans are now patenting themselves up so we're no longer patterning ourselves on illusion we're increasingly patterning ourselves on memory and this shows up in some very interesting ways it's been going on for um take your pick um 20 30 50 years but this patterning has reached the level of uh Society in a very aggressive way in China so whatever else you might think about China it won't surprise you to hear from me that if you read it in the English language it's very likely wrong the difference between the way Chinese understand the Chinese and the way we understand Chinese is very fundamental but here's the critical point on memory in I I watched I watched a little bit of the uh John Altman was that his name John Alton is a Qigong master who is from our fellows yeah it was sort of an interesting oscillation between oh wow this is cool and oh no this is even more terrifying you know well uh when you start thinking about uh um Yes Energy um energy is a word invented uh in Greek by Aristotle and ajia uh but that's not quite the same thing as we think about energy today but what if the Chinese have retrieved their own memory of energy typically spelled qi and what if they have figured out how to harness Chi in a way that goes Way Beyond the implications of quantum mechanics which which looks very childish naive in comparison so that was John's reaction uh it turns out that the Chinese uh starting seven eight years ago literally the the the man who works with me now at trivia University Fred beitler um previously uh associate dean of liberal studies at University of Chicago Graham school which their adult education it turns out that when the Chinese wanted to understand their own classics they literally came to the University of Chicago and interviewed the people there who were doing great books then they went home and you will now find Departments of Chinese Classics and Departments of Western Classics scattered across the entire Chinese educational system so these are undergraduates are being taught memory of their own civilization and other civilizations I have actually met one of the men at Peking University who was given the assignment to teach the doubt a chain something which I imagine you have spent a fair amount of time with and even more importantly the hijin the the itching is uh agreed by the Chinese to be at the foundation of all of this Confucius of course said only I could live another 100 years instead of teaching the standing committee of the politburo that is to say Chinese equivalent of our cabinet has been trained in the teaching uh it turns out that among his other attributes this is a shift over the last few years over the last like last this started in Earnest about eight years ago yeah my mind until that I mean and you know I mean like you thought about like following gong for instance which seemed like an effort to kind of like kind of regather some of the knowledge of Qi and that was just completely Stamped Out by the government so it seemed they were totally against any an exploration of this type of subtle Energy Systems well I think that may still be true but as you know um falun dong was a part of a kind of um thousand flowers period and that was a thousand flowers period around the topic of chi and you don't need to do that forever you figure out who knows what and and how things will come together and then you clamp down on it and so it is John Alton's View uh because he was involved with this he studied um Qigong obviously in China and became a master uh on his own perhaps the most important in the west um uh where we don't have very many Chula Masters to be fair there's a lot of them flowing around China um uh it is uh it turns out that he experienced personally this expansion so he's a Westerner from Southern United States he's invited in and and given all of this training and then it all uh collapses um uh I don't want to um same thing as if I know it definitively but the notion that falun gong out of that whole group um may have had some other motivations well okay or let's say that the treatment the total mistreatment of Tibetan Buddhism which for me is like obviously you know if you're interested in esoteric Technologies that's the world's most significant esoteric technology you know including an understanding of you know how to navigate and the after a life realm yeah no I understand but there's no reason for either of us or anybody else to presume that the Chinese have abandoned all that what they have suppressed is the the public organizing of that against the Communist Party of China so falun is not in their current circumstance because they did qigon they're in their current circumstance because they got 10 000 people to go sit at the entrance and try to exercise uh the leadership uh and so there's obviously a foreign intelligence component going into this sort of thing Tibet is as as you know very well enormously fraught as a as a Battleground um we don't even need uh uh fascination of the of the Nazis uh with Tibet uh everybody's been fascinated with Tibet for a very long time and so the the idea that there might be something really important there I can assure you has not escaped the Chinese whether that really important stuff should therefore be publicly uh exposed uh probably not whether that uh should be allow people to organize uh groups around this and and enter into geopolitics probably not but you're saying this could be a relatively recent shift there in any case that um they're they're sort of right we have we have good yeah we have good reportage that these topics were being explored very intensely as early as the 1950s okay and the other thing obviously is uh as Altman talked about I didn't watch all of it but um you know that they have absolutely no in a way like um I mean you know ethical kind of you know like in terms of like crazy like an artificial brain or an artificial human or something I mean they seem to be very much you know enmeshed in um this efforts uh the effort around the artificial human uh well um the artificial human is inevitable there's no way around the artificial human the artificial human has to happen has already happened what do you say it has to happen well this is a very straightforward thing that Eric Schmidt once said um don't bet against the internet um these are not technologies that can be legislated out of operation these technologies that in fact need to be embraced and brought into some sort of Harmony Harmony is enormously important for the Chinese so if your readers would like to understand China and in particular Chinese philosophy better there's only one book that I can recommend the author's name is Chad Hansen title of the book is a Taoist theory of a Chinese thought uh published in 1992 so it's a 30 year old book now but it's brilliant and uh and it goes through all of this and the East West distinctions come through very loud and clear so judging China on Western standards would be inappropriate judging China on Chinese standards is fine but there is um I think absolutely no chance from what I understand and I've been studying this for a long time that China is pursuing the same direction that let's say the Pentagon or Bank of America or Amazon remember what we have now Amazon has just announced that they have got pickpack uh robots uh I know a number of people who are hiring aggressively out of Amazon these um layoffs 250 000 300 000 layoffs have happened in the tech industry that is typically being portrayed as a financial measure necessary to satisfy Wall Street and so forth well perhaps but how about the fact that the technology industry are the first ones to know that you really want to replace human beings with robots it's turned out that that Ben gertzel if you know Ben uh and many others who were sort of in the artificial general intelligence AGI world that that I follow at some distance but uh got a good idea what's going on there they have sort of given up on building artificial humans uh in the sense that we would think about it but rather artificial scientists so there's a very big push now and Ursula's is promoting this the real reason why we need these things is for science the real reason why we need these things is because these algorithms robots can discover things that humans have never discovered so there's a re-rationalization that always goes on in this but it should not be a surprise if the people who are closest to AI are firing lots of human beings yeah I saw that in your work you you sort of go into the uh you define these three spheres with the East and the west and the digital right um and um I liked kind of you're talking about almost like an alchemical urge on the other part of the sort of technorati to kind of like um yeah so um my guess is that you have read more um uh Alchemy uh that I have um I don't know if you've ever tried to practice any of this uh sort of stuff but the uh the notion that that uh the world is a um uh prison the notion that we need to somehow cultivate the Divine Spark um this of course among other things this basis of Scientology uh which is totally constructed around that notion um this is uh surprisingly widespread the notion that human beings are a um uh need to be replaced with some human being version two which is a polite way of saying it um uh the notion that human beings are are Celestial trash uh and all they can do is is uh screw up any world in which they live and and that they're impossible they cannot be reformed and they just constantly mess things up this is actually quite surprisingly widespread uh and so there isn't there is a whole intellectual world that stands behind and potentially justifies what the world's militaries are trying to do and it of course it's called Uh post-humanism and I know many of the people in it they're very well-meaning uh very smart uh and have very interesting things to say and and reject the fact that this is ultimately a academic philosophical justification for replacing humans but they're not in my conversations with them they're not entirely sure why all this stuff is happening anyway and this this is the challenge that we all face uh our estimation is that there are two day active in the world many millions of people who've given up on the preferred explanations who have found themselves asking um what the hell is going on here I've been lied to some of them fall into this conspiracy uh world I don't know if that's what Russell is doing precisely but but as you know um it's very easy um when given a collection of of dots uh um data points to start trying to draw lines between them and and start trying to somehow this is what we do with raster scan we do television all the time it's a bunch of dots there is no movie like still image there it's a bunch of we we try to make sense of the dots and as we're trying to make sense of the dots all of which are superficial they're they're on on a surface we avoid human beings in general avoid this is the basis of Gestalt psychology for instance we avoid looking at the what is underneath that the ground that stands underneath that so conspiracy theories are just people who are trying to figure things out but all they have are Gestalt figures all they have are the just the facts man they don't have the structures they don't have the grammar uh and that winds up being the uh the Big Challenge there are millions of people who have already committed themselves they've given up on the standard explanations but they have fallen into one or another of these uh um uh uh convenient but ultimately uh always incorrect ways of understanding those dots and they're going to have to get that's about they're going to have to get the ground understood to make sense and some of those um distortions are you know probably products of the military-industrial complex like the whole Q Anon thing um is probably to some extent a uh could could be could be I mean um uh apparently but it doesn't but my main thing is it doesn't need to be I mean what what the military needs to do is replace human beings on the battlefield they don't need uh to brainwash us um I don't believe um that well who knows um uh there are there are various degrees of um assignment of responsibility um my experience which is reasonably extensive is these people have a hard time organizing their way out of a wet paper bag the idea the idea is there's somebody who can secretly uh perform an operation at that sort of level um uh seems highly unlikely based on my own experience with these same people yeah Eric Schmitz and so on you're talking about uh I know Eric Schmidt very well personally and he can run a committee at the defense department and he can Lobby for billions tens of billions of dollars for research he is totally utterly incapable of putting together something like q a he's quite capable of going to Burning Man he's quite capable of of posing with a giant uh uh stuffed bear uh on an interview like this um he's uh I I know the man um he actually I gave the keynote speech at the very first Java one at his invitation so I was among other things that the analysts that followed Sun microsystem Eric's was its son so we go back to the 90s and so here's a good example he knows exactly what he's doing he does it very well but none of it rises to that sort of level and so the what sort of level the level of uh a q Anon or uh something or other which is deliberately designed uh to confuse people and and send them down rabbit holes no I would not think that he had anything to do something like Q Anon um yeah I'm I'm just not saying you don't know how to deal with it is that capable I mean it's a little bit of tangent but apparently the best the best candidate for for Q Anon right now is Michael Flynn um okay who's been talking a lot about this fifth generation Warfare uh manual um which talks about you know polarization and then getting people actually kill each other is like the next generation of warfare you know right and and so uh when you're dealing with somebody who has General in front of their name um you you have to uh hold on to your wallet you got to watch out what's going on here I do not know uh General Flynn personally I have some idea why he has risen to the prominence that he has uh and so forth but um Dia the agency that he used to run is a good candidate for thinking some of these things through but it's really not necessary it turns out that without a firm understanding of the underlying principles the ground the psychological ground of our experiences without that understanding and this is where Marshall mcluhan comes in very importantly okay um Marshall mcluhan's borrowing a figure ground from Gestalt psychology wound up being amongst the most important things that he had to say um in the South psychology human beings Neil postman's book amusing ourselves to death is is a good example of this we we tend to be distracted by bright shiny objects but it's not just this distraction it's also quite deliberate the the deliberate part of this is and here's the Marshall mcloone quote uh in a letter that he wrote in 1969 to the Catholic Theologian Jacques Martin there is a deep-seated repugnance in the human soul against understanding the processes in which we're involved okay that's kind of easy enough the second sentence that is the real kicker such understanding implies our own responsibility for these processes so human beings know they really don't have much impact on the world a lot of people try and and fail and and ultimately uh you know become Buddhist or something um uh I was actually just uh uh on a uh a call Nora Bateson you probably know Nora and the whole Bateson story um Nora uh has these uh Gatherings of the Bateson crowd and she had one um the other day about Runaways obviously this is referring to GPT to some extent it's referring to political hassles and how there doesn't seem to be any resolution but um in the background behind us is the runaway of the robots against the humans and so when my turn came I uh I said well bateson's uh schismogenesis and runaways and all this stuff dating back to the 30s and his anthropological work all very useful all very important will need to be incorporated but have you thought about how it relates to some other approaches in particular Paradigm shifts and then I said and also the the possibility that we now live not in a bipolar world but in a truly multi-polar world with three primary gravitational Setters East-West and digital so um I think I then said something about how um uh wrote a fascinating science fiction book uh remembrance of Earth's past first volume of which is called Theory body problem Chinese fiction writer I thought it was a fascinating book yeah yeah uh three books actually the the uh the middle book Dark Forest tends to be the ones that that people uh gravitate to the most because that's a uh that's a dark Forest um we all many of us think we live in a dark horse uh but uh by the way this has been made into a movie the trailer has actually been released now if you haven't seen a fascinating trailer um so I said people thought about the possibility that uh it's not not a binary not a dyad as Bateson would have described it you're dealing with a relationship it's dyadic but what if it's triadic but it's quadratic what what if it's uh and nobody on the call in the um uh public part of it had anything to say but one of the of the people there said oh you need to read uh 1999 essay by danello Meadows remember dunelm Meadows was limits to growth died in 2001. and she wrote an absolutely fascinating uh it's dated 99 probably been around for decades before that um called um uh levers of intervention in systems how do you intervene in systems so she counts down nine different ways that it uh uh I'll get the actual name for you um it's constant on nine different ways it turns out that the most important one is number two number two is the highest reason that we need to consider when we're trying to find leverage points to intervene in systems and um I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of this before but I had to ask the question and I had to get the answer in chat it turns out that she says that systems originate in paradigms so she is prioritizing paradigms as she understands it from uh Thomas Coons structure of scientific revolutions it's a very poor and and limited way of understanding paradigms but anyway and and then she says well we have to think about things somewhat different standpoint we can't we'll never solve anything if we think about it from the same Paradigm we gotta get out of the Paradigm this is the same thing that Marshall mcloone used to say is that uh I don't know who um first discovered water but it wasn't a fish that's probably something that a lot of people other than Marsh Mc Clure have said yeah he also prided himself on being Canadian because he was outside the United States and so therefore uh or he would say you need a new environment to understand the past environment these are all the same sorts of statements uh she doesn't explain how paradigms happen she doesn't explain how we might actually move into a new paradigm and then she goes to number one and I thought you might enjoy this the number one thing we need to do to find leverage points to intervene in uh systems is we need to pursue Buddhist enlightenment because that will remove us from all paradigms well well that may in some sense be true it also removes you from the world so you have lost your ability to have a leverage point in the systems if you just ignore paradigms um yeah I mean I've been looking at this philosopher young shall Han have you heard about him I this the uh remind me who he is he says Korean philosopher lives in Germany you wrote a book called psychopath yeah right Germany right the the pillow right in Germany yeah that's correct but uh he talks about sort of the Consciousness industry um I mean a lot of people are pursuing Buddhist Enlightenment I mean I I know all these wealthy people now and you know former like entrepreneurs who are now sort of making up their life but it doesn't really seem to be helping us in this paradigm shift and whether it will help them or not you you've known enough people who've gone through this sort of process and uh I've known a fraction of those that you have known and um uh rarely do they turn out to become holy people yeah really let's talk a little bit about uh I'm kind of curious I feel there's a lot more actually that we could dive into and maybe we'll have another call or something in terms of uh teasing out you know the the sort of sort of like um 50 strands of your ideas but I'm kind of curious about um thinking kind of prospectively like where we are now what do you see what do you see as The Leverage points like what can we do I mean it does sort of feel like um we are in this you know in this inevitable dystopian hellscape which is just getting more and more the screws are getting more and more tightened right um it's extremely unpleasant you know I mean I mean I don't even know like I mean I've tried to form communities in the past I'm trying to I try to do that again that seems to be one of the important leverage points but that's also so difficult because people are so kind of fragmented right now so yeah what what what what what what the do we do well um uh uh herding cats is is probably not a good idea um Pats um so I'm remembering the early days of of game B and and Rally Point Alpha and and what those folks are doing um and it's a hurting cats exercise everybody has their own uh approach they want to take and and maybe they'll split her off into a series of communes and and so forth and it will end as badly as it did last time uh the answer to your question is simple we must remember what it means to be human that's our only task we don't have to march on the streets we don't have to blow anything up we don't have to uh you know try to attract a big crowd all we have to do is remember what it means to be human and since Western Society has so thoroughly forgotten what that is we must go back in the west before print we're going to have to recover a Sensibility that is scribal and in many senses medieval now that um the key and in some sense to this is that the Chinese have already done this so um in in some sense well we can you know um spin around our own uh merry-go-rounds um it might be helpful to look elsewhere because we're we're all facing the same dilemma which is to say artificial humans just to say what the hell happens with AGI what happens with all this when um Stephen Hawking uh as as you probably remember he made this the focus of the last few years of his life he would repeatedly get up and say we are treating this this problem sorry pause uh Stephen Hawkins spent the last years of his life warning us about AI which he repeatedly said is probably the worst possible thing that Humanity has ever done um didn't need to go to AGI didn't need to go to any of this sort of stuff didn't need to go to Ben gertzel well before that he said we are treating this as if we have been notified by a vastly superior alien race that they are heading in our Direction so we got the message uh from space and our response to this is great looking forward to seeing you uh we're going to bed and we'll leave the lights on uh for when you arrive and and the way I used to respond to this was the aliens have already the little green men have already arrived and they're lime green IMAX uh we have already gone through that uh Stephen Hawking's not a um Nostradamus is not a uh uh a great uh prophet he just could see what was going on and our reaction to it now it turns out that that's happening to everybody so it's happening in Uzbekistan it's happening in at the North Pole um but the two dominant spheres east and west are now contending with a third civilization digital sphere which seeks to replace human beings um with uh something better pure rubbish but something better and the response of the West is to bring in uh people who want to um leave Earth and and go colonize the rest of the universe and giving them tons of money to accomplish that the Chinese reaction to this is very very different the way the Chinese have treated people like Jack Ma uh who was challenging on behalf of what we would call the digital sphere the digital sphere has been it appears sort of comprehended I was first invited to China in 97 that was uh obviously very early but I was actually invited there as a part of a Chinese effort to get Western experts to come in and explain what this new internet technology would be and what some of its impact would be so the Chinese have already figured out that they need to remember they need to remember what it means to be Chinese obviously uh but uh so therefore doubt a chain and um but we must do the same we must remember we must study Aristotle we must think these things through it's not it's not too late by any means there are millions of people who are uh already have already made their minds up that they have to do something so um even a few thousand of those people who who take seriously the rebalancing of our inner senses who take seriously this discarding of this imaginary illusionary world and replacing it with a really heavy dose of memory uh I'm actually quite certain that that will make an enormous difference I'm not saying that it will uh totally turn things around it will I'm not saying that that um all of the dangers which we're facing describing here if everybody decided tomorrow that uh climate is not the worst thing that's happening remember we've had overpopulation we've had a variety of things that were the crisis so it's very common now to talk about meta crisis um and uh medical crisis tends to be just a laundry list of all the other crises if people came to recognize what's happened is the structure of the world has already changed we're not forecasting something and that new structure of the world requires us to understand it and the only way we can understand it is by answering the question what does it mean to be human and the only way we can answer that question is to go back to what human beings were doing before the printing press gave us the modern world we have to recognize that that we are not modern anymore and start finding uh our way in the dark Forest uh with uh with something that is truly human this is the reason for instance why Doug rushkov uh launched his project team human um Doug has been writing about this he's a fellow at uh my center and has been very helpful with this we need a hundred more people like that who will promote Humanity by remembering what it means to be human in the face of all of this uh uh politely put nonsense um less uh politely put manipulation um she don't you don't see it as a movement that needs to be built it's more of a kind of like a switch that people have to activate for themselves well I have a lot of things to say about movements having been involved with some of them in the past um what we're now experiencing is mobilization so that million 10 million whatever the number is it's a mobilization but it's unfocused it will inevitably become a movement but that we're not at that stage yet uh we're at the herding cats stage everybody running off in their own directions everybody launching their own podcasts and and so forth the technology just keeps exacerbating that I mean like sub stack you know I started a sub stack and I was so happy because actually is working well financially or whatever but now there's like a million sub Stacks every day it's like the blogosphere all over again yeah yeah yeah yeah and I'm gonna do one uh for our newsletter and that's uh that's for a targeted audience and and so you can't expect it's going to wind up you know becoming a uh mainstream media it's it's for your own audience but um the what is missing scrambling through all of these you know newsletters which are all many of them are quite interesting but it's like overwhelming like I don't I can't yeah you're um uh you've been doing this long enough and and you're uh mature and in your experiences and you can find a lot of interesting things but uh uh you know when you when you kind of look at it more closely you'd say well not really you answer the conversation this way that's really just another version of what somebody else already said so when I was on Wall Street I was dubbed a contrarian I was dubbed a variety of things the way I described myself was as a Delta detector and so try to find something that is truly different uh in this um maelstrom becomes a challenge and so I'm I'm now in the process of starting a university um privy University and starting up geopolitical newsletter digital net assessment and uh I keep being told this is just completely different from what everybody else is doing so I don't know if there's enough Delta detectors out there to recognize that you you really need to step out of the usual um uh cloud of words start introducing words like uh like soul and net assessment and study the Trivium which is the way education was done until modern took over and you have to be comfortable with the recognition that we're no longer modern or something else and now I'm going to need to have to do some serious work to study and figure out what that is very interesting uh let's let's um let's keep talking uh but I think for today we should wrap up because that's a good hour and a half uh really enjoyed meeting you it's fun I think we had some Facebook altercations in the past I was annoyed at some of your comments I can't remember exactly what happened but now that I see what you're up to I'm super excited and inspired so great well that's fine um I'm experiencing that in a number of other places I should note for you Daniel um people with whom I uh have seem to have had controversies uh have then invited me in uh for interviews uh and so I think there's a there's a um there's a spiraling together that I sense is happening here and I'm very glad that you've reached out and uh very happy to talk to your audience okay awesome well we'll stay in touch and thank you so much for for joining tonight thank you bye
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.