Fractal Rubik’s Cubes and the Big Machine with Michael Garfield
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Michael Garfield is a futurist polymath who has worked everywhere from the KU Natural History Museum to the Sante Fe Institute to Mozilla to the Long Now. He’s currently with the AI Capabilities and Alignment Consensus Project. Oh, and he also has twenty years experience as an artist and musician. This conversation is a bit of a song exploder, looking into one of Michael’s songs (the Big Machine) through the kaleidoscope of many of his other more academic interests.
A deep, multifaceted conversation with Michael Garfield, known for his contributions to the Complexity podcast at the Santa Fe Institute, Future Fossils, and Humans on the Loop.
The discussion traverses various terrains including Michael’s journey from paleontology to music, his insights on complexity science, and the intriguing idea of the 'Fractal Rubik's Cube.'
Andrea & Michael delve into the themes behind Michael's song 'Big Machine,' tackling how love, mysticism, and science intersect in our complex world. Throughout, Michael shares his nuanced understanding of information, attention, and what it means to explore beyond traditional academic and scientific boundaries.
Michael's Substack and Foraging Video
00:00 Introduction to Michael Garfield
01:37 Exploring Michael's Multifaceted Talents
02:48 Unpacking the Song 'Big Machine'
05:19 Michael's Journey and Inspirations
06:06 The Evolution of Michael's Musical Path
10:46 Complexity Science and Personal Growth
23:24 Challenges in Academia and Complexity
54:34 The Role of Psychedelics and Language
58:14 The Importance of Communication and Curation
01:00:18 The Evolution of Social Media and Podcasts
01:02:08 The Importance of Internal Culture in Organizations
01:05:59 Navigating Modern Uncertainty and Strategic Thinking
01:07:21 The Role of Games in Understanding Complexity
01:09:33 The Intersection of AI, Podcasting, and Education
01:10:24 The Concept of Future Fossils and Precognition
01:13:06 The Philosophy of Finite and Infinite Games
01:17:17 The Age of Entanglement and Emergent Engineering
01:24:55 The Practice of Noticing and Consciousness
01:41:39 Love, Synchronicity, and the Future of Work
And here is a short talk Michael gave this summer.
Menger Sponge but nowhere near a fractal
Lyrics to the Big Machine
🎙How long can you go without looking at your phone?
How long does it take before your concentration breaks?
How sure can you be that your mind is really free?
How much would you stake that your reality's not fake?
Where do your desires arise in fields of wireless privatized
and pirated attention? In enclosed incomprehension?
How much is your agency and how much is the will of other
entities entirely?
Or is that even how to see this sea?
Doom scrolling (Like subscribe)
You're trolling (Find your tribe)
Everybody wants to be seen
By the Big Machine
Fan polling (Leave reviews)
Rage swollen (Count your views)
Everyone's volition is squeezed
by the Big Machine
Everybody wants to be pleased
by the Big Machine
How much would you spend to stay in touch with your own friends?
How relieved are you the algorithm offers the convenience
Of staying in a bubble of your spoon-fed preferences?
How much of your self is really what your heart intends?
And where do you define the line you draw between your mind
and the global operations of unconscious just-in-time
Logistics markets states and great unfolding fated intertwined
Machinic processes; you're hospiced in a matrix planet wide
Doom scrolling (Like subscribe)
You're trolling (Find your tribe)
Everybody wants to be seen
by the Big Machine
Fan polling (Leave reviews)
Rage swollen (Count your views)
Everyone's volition is squeezed
by the Big Machine
Everybody wants to be pleased
by the Big Machine
Everybody's choices are screened
by the Big Machine
Ask yourself just who you are feeding
When you play to rhe Big Machine
Now if you aspire to be free
From the Big Machine
Just how long can you go without looking at your phone?🎙
In a week full of new paths, this project is taking another intriguing turn, looking at complexity through the lens of a song called The Big Machine by Michael Garfield.
Michael embodies the intersection of fine art, mysticism, and hard science. This conversation explores not only his unique insights into complex systems but also his journey through music, creativity, and the "Big Machine’ anthem. That song serves as a linchpin for Andrea and Michael’s exploration, unraveling themes of connection, complexity, and love.
The song and the conversation stretch across dimensions of self and society, pushing us to see beyond the visible, into the interwoven fabric of existence, which is a matter of our collective experience from different positions. All this, today, is enmeshed in planetary culture and what Michael (and others) discuss as surveillance capitalism which is a kind of Rubik’s cube to be solved in today’s digitizing world.
Through his journey, he has taught many to think beyond traditional academic boundaries. His discussion with Andrea wanders through the metaphoric landscapes of finite and infinite games, systems of organization, and how one can navigate the ever-changing tide of knowledge and technology.
Michael’s been trying to do that, and help others do it, and to communicate the complexity of it. His passion for complexity science stems from a deep-seated desire to understand the evolution of intelligence and consciousness…and dinosaurs.
Today, Michael’s medium is dialogue, though he is as surprised that his life has gone into that path as any other. When he was 21, he told his grandmother he’d either be a paleontolgist or a rockstar, but by the end of the conversation, both of those seem to be part of the same dynamic of love, one he has also lived out in ways with his longterm partner who recently became his wife.
For Michael, love is not just something we feel; it’s something we create together, that third entity theme comes up again, the sense-making that shapes and defines us, the dance of co-creation.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00]
Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today is a conversation with Michael Garfield. It's a little bit like a song Exploder episode, except it's also. A fractal Rubik's cube, which is something Michael brings up here, and I think it describes this episode, and also Michael [00:01:00] in a really interesting way.
If you know Michael, you might know him from Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity podcast that he hosted there, If you've never heard of that, don't worry. Maybe you've heard of Future Fossils podcast, which is a very different podcast.
Uh, talk about holding the paradox. Michael really does it. He can talk about fine art, he can talk about music, he can talk about mysticism at the very furthest edges, and he can also talk about really hard science. that's why Michael is here, because I find him a wonderful example of holding contradictions and exploring space beyond what people think of as oppositional.
But he's also here because I really love his song called Big Machine, which you're hearing play throughout this episode a bit, and I hope you'll link and listen to it because this whole conversation is really unpacking this song. And the lyrics, but also through Michael's own journey, [00:02:00] which is a very special journey.
There really is no one like Michael Garfield. And don't worry if you don't understand half the things in this episode, because Michael's read just about every book on the planet. He's one of the people I think, who loves books most in the world We ultimately get to this place where the big machine is not about the machine at all. It's about all these connections and fractal relations that sow entrance, Michael, and that are part of the world and that are actually about love.
So we do get to that word I really think Michael brought complexity to a lot of people. He definitely turned a lot of people onto the Santa Fe Institute and they're doing amazing work there. And I hope you'll have a look at what they're up to.
You've probably heard me talk about complexity, but just a really short definition is just that it's studying the way systems interact or looking at all these things that we look at in science through the lens of systems instead of what we might've been looking at it through [00:03:00] before. More atomized, for example, or something like that.
And of course, a million people will say, that's a crazy definition because there's all different ways of thinking about it. So I'll just, uh, link to some notes and videos and things where you can discover complexity if you want to, but just for now, just think of it as the study of systems. It's, it's enough to think of before we go into this fractal Rubik's cube that we're about to enter.
I.
But if you don't care about any of that at all, you will also like this episode for example.
if you like Robert Anton Wilson, if you like Ken Wilber, if you like that side of the world, which tends to be thought of as the opposite of something like Santa Fe Institute or more hard science, you'll also like this because.
Those names come up within the first five minutes because Michael's like that. He used to be also working with Ken Wilber, so he really has worked with lots of people who might consider themselves on very different sides of whatever academic, mystic [00:04:00] scientific spectrum you might have encountered. So for that reason, it can be hard at times to take it all in with Michael and it can also be.
Wonderfully exhilarating. He's also a musician, obviously, and he's also a very big fan of William Irwin Thompson, who is someone you may have heard me discuss because he started Lindas Farn and I'm interested in Lindas Farn, but we don't really talk about that here. We mentioned. Bill Thompson a few times.
Mostly this is just a conversation about the big machine and I'll just let you listen to understand what that means and how it ends up being about love. Thanks for being here and thanks Michael for everything I.
Michael Garfield: You're living in New Mexico. It's like
Andrea Hiott: It looks like you live in New Mexico. You have all the beautiful colors that I associate with my time in New Mexico.
Michael Garfield: Yeah, I painted my closet.
Andrea Hiott: It's a good color. Two beautiful, like two of my favorite colors. That green and that blue. Anyway, hi Michael. [00:05:00] Thanks for being on Love and Philosophy.
Michael Garfield: Hi Andrea.
Andrea Hiott: I wanna talk about Big Machine. I love this song. I'm so glad I listened to it, you know, 'cause you can just kind of skip through these things in the Substack.
Actually listen to it. It's really good. It, and maybe you can tell me. What that song is, how it came to be, because you also mentioned this, uh, quote about wealth. Wealth of information, poverty of attention, and I wanna tie all that in. But first, like this song. Yeah. What is it for people who haven't heard it yet?
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Okay. So, uh, there's that scene in Saving Private Ryan where they're all, they've stormed the beach of Normandy and they're all talking about what they were before the war, you know, and Tom Hanks is like, I was the school teacher, um, before it became the job into which history swept me to talk about big ideas and help people wrap [00:06:00] their heads around the emergence of what comes after modern civilization.
I was a musician. Or at least that's, that's, I was really committed. I told my grandmother when I was like 21. I thought that I had even odds on becoming a paleontologist or a rock star, you know, and, and it, and it kind of was that way for a while. It was like I was doing, um, dinosaur work and I was, you know, playing at one point.
I think I just checked and I have, I don't have that many shows under my belt, but it's like over 500 concerts on you were playing big shows.
Andrea Hiott: The reason I laughed is because one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, did you only dream of dinosaurs when you were a kid or did you also dream of being a famous
Michael Garfield: I didn't start playing guitar until I was 14.
Um, my stepfather is an extremely capable blues guitarist who played in these like, uh, local [00:07:00] legend, like black blues bands in Kansas City. And I just thought he was hot, hot, hot stuff and, you know, at, got a guitar and asked him to teach me to play it.
But then like very quickly, uh, I realized the songs I was writing, um, it's sort of what to what we were talking about before we started rolling, which is that, uh, connected to the ideas I'm having now, which is, you know, in an age where bosses are asking you to train the ai, maybe the most valuable thing you can be to the economy is something that can't be scaled.
Something that's like singular. And you know, Stephen Johnson talks about the revenge of the humanities. And lots and lots of people are, are thinking about, you know, what it's gonna look like when, if you know, as they say, you'll have a country full of geniuses in a server farm. okay, well we, you and I have already lived through something like [00:08:00] this.
We've lived through, the superstar Hollywood effect of, being able to access anybody's art or music or ideas online. And so you're, no, no one can be a big fish in a small pond anymore. Like everyone is, everyone who is competing for attention or, you know, uh, opportunity on the internet is competing against the best people in the world.
And, and so like. That kind of thinking of like, be totally distinct, like be, you know, if somebody else is doing it, just don't, you know, find like pivot. that came to me very early as a guitarist because I was really interested in a, you know, particular kind of jazz inflicted songwriting and finger style stuff.
And then I was a freshman in college and John Mayer's first major album came out and I was like, onward, not doing that anymore. [00:09:00] Uh, and then like it kept happening. It kept being, that, that way of like, as soon as I saw someone, as soon as I was compared to someone by someone else, they're like, oh, you remind me of such and such.
I was like, I'm out. You know, like that, that has become a piece of my backstory. Now what's the next thing? What's the thing I don't see people doing? That means as, as my buddy from the dorms, uh, Steven Phipps used to say, no man is an island, but some are very long peninsulas. And so I, as I got this, you know, kind of carved out, uh, my own thing and you know, just incidentally born on the same day as David Bowie and Elvis Presley and Stephen Hawking and Kim Jong-Un,
Andrea Hiott: oh my gosh, Kelly, they were all born on the same day.
R Kelly. And that's your birthday.
Michael Garfield: That's Yeah. R Kelly and Jenny Lewis. And so you, like, you think about all of those people, what do they all have in common? It's like, well, they're all one of a kind and, um, sometimes they're, they'll [00:10:00] be the best,
Andrea Hiott: be the only, I said it before we got on the Kevin Kelly thing, but it sounds like you already had that in mind early on.
My goodness. That actually explains a lot, somehow.
Michael Garfield: So the, the song anyway, uh. You know, I, I, this, this kind of tension of reconciling the, uh, each person as a singular event, uh, and then the fact that all of us are, enmeshed in this planet spanning thing. You know, I gotta say, the first time I ever saw your show was the conversation that you had with Ian McGilchrist, and I was really touched by that conversation.
And I, you know, I, I love him, uh, generally and his thinking. And so for people listening, like, this thing about the big machine is about, well, you can see. All of this activity, the way, like the, the common way to see it now of, you know, supply chains and fifth generation [00:11:00] information warfare and the, you know, the attention economy.
And it has enmeshed with all, and it's like, I've written about this as, you know, living in the belly of the beast as you know, that the, surveillance capitalism, which I don't think is even an adequate name to describe, you know, the Tim Morton hyper object of what this, this is, it's very easy for us to see it as a machine.
Because it's made out of things that we are used to seeing as machines, at least in part. And it is, an a a time in which all of us, you know, generally speaking, society is very deeply conditioned to regard the world as, object rather than subject, you know, to, to, to see things as an it. You know, I was talking with you about how I, I used to work with Ken Wilber and like that whole notion of, well, you, you know, you can take a first person, [00:12:00] second person or third person position on anything.
You can regard anything as, you know, from the, like an individual or a collective kind of frame. And so, I put the sort of, paranoid, love crafty in part upfront in that song of, you know, like, How long can you go without looking at your phone? but it's like, at the same time, like asking this question of what maybe the only reason that we we feel miserable right now is because we know, like we know intellectually that we are all, uh, connected inside of this planet spanning post, post biological in the sense that like it's forcing us to redefine what life even is so that it can include, you know, the inorganic.
uh, you know, this, you know, the, what William Merwin Thompson called politicization or planetary culture is, you know, when [00:13:00] the, the modern distinction between industry and ecology breaks down. And so like, there's that, you know, I, I just like. Telling a, a story in a kind of a particular way where, you know, you, you, you meet people in the anxiety and the paranoia of where they are most likely to be, and then like the, the synthetic reconciliatory gesture is, but look at this.
You know? And so like I, um, I'll just say that like related to that, back in 2010, I had a, uh, trip where I felt this extraordinary shame because the last which was like two years before, I felt like I had received a message to. To, uh, take on a regular meditative practice.
It was like, you [00:14:00] know, the storm is coming, you know, the world is only getting crazier. Start learning to center yourself in, in all of that. And I had, you know, my life had been nuts and I hadn't done it. so like, coming up and like the challenges of, you know, uh, encountering a moment of, of ego death and then feeling like, you know, the, you're be, you're at the, you know, you're at the scales of judgment and you failed, you know, like you're not, you're not, you don't feel worthy of this sort of excess of cosmic love.
Because I hadn't listened, you know, like I take this stuff seriously. I, you know, it's like, oh, if, if, you receive a message, you know you should do that, but I hadn't. I, I received an image in that experience that I think speaks to the kind of, approach I've taken to philosophy and the aesthetic of, [00:15:00] uh, that's like evident in that particular song and much of my work in general, which was like, I saw this image of this fractal Rubik's cube kind of thing.
It was all black, you know, like Mecca. Um, it blows my
Andrea Hiott: mind to try to imagine a fractal Rubik's cube.
Michael Garfield: It's like, uh, each phase, I mean, there's a specific fractal that's like this where it's like, you know, they, I forget the name of it.
Andrea Hiott: like each square is a different fractal. Is that how it works?
Each
Michael Garfield: square is nine squares and then each of those is nine squares and each of those, and it was all black and is ominous. And then the whole thing rotated in the f in the fourth dimension, which rotated it in the three visible dimensions. But each face flipped. And there was a, there was a backside that was white and it was basically just showing me like a geometrical proof for the always all readiness of our redemption.
[00:16:00] That like no matter how bad things get, there is always another dimension from which. that sin or whatever is recontextualize and understood as like a perfect part of, uh, a deeper understanding. And so, you know, that's, that's the, uh, I love that moment of metanoia. Uh, you know, um, I'm, I'm in the middle of teaching this course right now, and in, at some point in the course I'm gonna whip out Ono Ali's book.
Um,
yes, angel Tech, which is about the, uh, the eight circuit model. you know, Robert Anton Wilson has this, Yeah. And at any rate, this is, this is about personal and transpersonal development and how they've got this, uh, you know, at the level [00:17:00] between the personal and the transpersonal is what they call chapel perilous, which is where you realize that everything is connected, but it terrifies you because you are still the small you, And so that's the kind of fairy man I'm trying to be with this song and with other stuff is like, getting people from the bad trip of chapel perilous to the, everything is okay,
Andrea Hiott: the redemption is always there. How did you just, you just said it in a really beautiful way. Everything's already.
Michael Garfield: yeah, it's always already, it's like the, you know, kind of a, yeah. Always already like the Buddhist language for, you know, you, you don't become enlightened, you know, you are always already. and there's a, let's see, I've got a big row of books here. I'm, That's like all the books I'm doing for my course.
Whoa. Cool, cool. That's a lot. But yeah, the other one, it just
Andrea Hiott: started last night, right?
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Yeah. How was it
Andrea Hiott: fun? It was
Michael Garfield: good. [00:18:00] Yeah. It's like the, it was too late
Andrea Hiott: for me. I signed up, but it was like two 30 in the morning or something.
Michael Garfield: Oh my God. Yeah. No, we, I was worried 'cause like something like a hundred.
Something people signed up. 'cause we had opened the session to the public, but then it ended up just being mostly the people who had paid for the course. So I was like, okay, I'm not, but yeah, so like, one of the thing, another one of the things that we're talking about and that we just held a book club for on Humans on the Loop is Federico Campanas Prophetic Culture.
Oh wow. And this is a book about this, about, you know, the, the intersection of time of time and the world. And with Infinity, or not Infinity Eternity, right. With the ineffable, transcendent real. And, you know, the, the efforts of profits to reconcile those or to bring some kind of meaningful understanding about, [00:19:00] the, you know, that which exceeds our capacity for.
Linguistic description into history. And you know, he says, I've been writing about this a lot. He, he talks about apocalypse versus APAC stasis, which I had not heard before, but it's this sort of theological distinction about the, like apocalypse is what Bill Thompson taught me to think of as misplaced concreteness.
It's like putting the moment of judgment, which is actually in a kind of, vertical dimension of, of time into history. you know, that creation and destruction and all these things are there in, as the universe recreates itself in, in every moment, but like a pocket of stasis is about everything being.
[00:20:00] Saved already that like, that, you know, that we keep postponing judgment day, because the world requires tension in order to exist. but yeah, this, this sense of like, even the devil is saved, it, it kind of, you know, liberates us from having to worry about like, uh, the Odyssey and like concerns of like, well, why does, and you know, why, why, God, why?
there's a
Andrea Hiott: difference. Yeah. There's a difference between everything already being there and redemption being there, and it actually being experienced, I guess, too, though. So that's,
Michael Garfield: yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Kind of, you know, I mean. Yeah, could be in different forms, could be all possible, could be multiple worlds.
Could be there, but you don't notice it the same way you go for a walk and there's things there you just don't notice. But I think everything you just said actually connects to what I was try, wanted to think about a little bit with you, this idea of that [00:21:00] quote. It's a Simone Hebert, Simone. I don't, I'm terrible with accents.
Quote about
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Herbert. Simon.
Andrea Hiott: Simon. There you go. See?
Michael Garfield: Yeah, he's American. I always try too hard,
Andrea Hiott: with the quote with the language. It's true. so the Herbert Simon quote, it's wealth of information. I can't remember the quote. Maybe you do, but it's like a dearth of so something and then up. It's a
Michael Garfield: very popular quote.
Um, yeah, it is it a dearth of something about is
so it's, yeah, go ahead. It's from a longer passage, he says, in an information rich world, the wealth of information means a darth of something else, a scarcity of whatever it is. That information consumes what information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients health.
He hence a wealth of information, creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. 1971,
Andrea Hiott: amazing.
Michael Garfield: You know, but
Andrea Hiott: I, I really wonder about this quote and about you [00:22:00] because you take in so much information and you have been doing for a long time, and yet you also have quite a lot of attention.
And I mean, this gets into a lot of things I'd like to actually ask you about, but. Have you, I mean, how do you think about that in your own life? I know I wanna get to the song because it's different when we start really thinking about the technology and the internet. And I think you wrote that like you were checking your phone in some grocery store, even though you knew you couldn't get signal.
I think we all know that, but just before we get to the technology part, just in general, have you always, I mean, even when you were a kid, been so such a, so, so able to take in so much information and do, you know, constantly sort of shuffle it through your yourself and your life and still be attentive?
Or did you learn that? Uh,
Michael Garfield: you know, I'm probably on the spectrum. Like I don't, I, you know, it's not, uh, something that I [00:23:00] think too much about like trying to diagnose this, but, I do care. Very much about what in the AI world they call the long context window. Right. Um, like I, I really appreciate being able to pick up a conversation precisely where we left off after weeks or, you know, like there's a, you know, like Herman Hessey's glass bead game.
You know, this, this idea that in the distant future monks are engaged in meaning making through this, you know, the formation of semantic networks between, you know, different cultural objects. Uh, you know, so I think that, yeah, I've always, I've always had a fairly acute [00:24:00] memory, you know, like I, uh. I, I remember in, it's not like I eidetic, but I remember in middle school, like scaring a girl I had a crush on because like I had accidentally seen her phone number and like knew, knew her phone number.
Um, I was like, well, I guess that, that I, oops, you know, I guess I better just nip that one in the bud. But yeah, that's
Andrea Hiott: exactly what I mean. You seem to really get the details in a way that, would seem like you would get a bandwidth problem in terms of how much you take in. But there's very few people that I've encountered who've taken in so much information.
I guess there's a difference between information and encoding. You know, you, you said your songs are like encoding mechanisms, however we wanna put it. You know, just for all the work that you've done with all the different podcasts and, and how different they are and how hard these ideas are, it just seems like so [00:25:00] much information, such a wealth of information that you should have a poverty of attention, but you don't seem to.
Michael Garfield: Well, thank you. Um, I mean, I definitely do feel the bandwidth issue. You know, I think, you know, the reason that I am so interested in this idea of like, what is it that we are living through, like what characterizes something that seems very obvious to be a major evolutionary transition. Um, you know, we, you and I were talking about my old boss David Kra hour before we got on the call, and, you know, the, the, the paper that originally got me interested in.
Uh, complexity science. Um, I, I did not know that he had actually collaborated on this work until 13 years later when I'd like, you know, wandered through the wilderness of art and m music and [00:26:00] futurism and all this stuff for a while, and then finally found myself back, uh, or like at the Santa Fe Institute, you know, working in communications for them.
And at one point I remember asking David like, Hey, have you heard of this, this paper on the evolution of syntactic language? And he is like, I co-authored that paper. I was like, oh, of course, of course. Like, I'm a babe in the woods. You know, it's like, and you get that, that feeling being around, you know, the, that's, that's actually what I love about interacting with older people is like, Hey, have you heard about Woodstock?
I was there, you know. but so he and Martin Noac and, uh, Josh Plotkin and. Vincent Jansen wrote a series of papers, um, right around the turn of the millennium on this, um, on like a bottleneck that they [00:27:00] were formalizing mathematically, and they were looking specifically at, you know, what, how might we describe going from humans speaking single word utterances to humans speak in complete sentences.
But I just remembered reading this, this paper and how they were saying that that transition must have been, um, like pressured into being by you, you can't, at some point you can't remember more words. You know, and like, as your community becomes richer and richer in its interiority, you know, as like it's, you know, the, the, the things that can be thought and that must be thought in order to keep everyone cohesive enough to survive together as a group gets big enough that you, you just can't keep [00:28:00] coming up with these enormous words.
And so, you know, you would have like sort of proto sentences where it's like you would create a new word just by sticking stuff together, but then you end up with these in enormous like German long Yeah, yeah. German. Exactly. It's like German is one of, you can see this kind of dynamic going on. but then at some point it's like, well, you know, you could, you could remember a whole lot more words if they were shorter and you could remember a whole lot more words or you could communicate a lot more things if.
You found simple rules for putting words together so that you could open up this huge recombinant possibility space. And I remember reading this paper in the senior year of my biology program at the University of Kansas in Animal communication seminar and just deciding like on the spot that this is the thing that I need to study because [00:29:00] they, uh, what they were saying about language seemed like it was also saying something really important about all of these other moments in the history of the cosmos where suddenly something is, there's a qualitative shift, like something is there that was not there.
You know, the origin of life. The, you know, the evolution of bacteria to complex cells, to multicellular organisms, et cetera. And, you know, the closure of metabolic loops where it's like, it used to be fungi and plants just living together on the ground. Like the fungi were not eating the plants or feeding them, but then like they developed a syntax that, that, you know, created, this, created forests.
Like there, there were like groups of trees, but there weren't forests until, [00:30:00] we had microrisal affiliations, you know, and so like all of this stuff started, clicking together and it was like, well, you can't study that as a paleontologist. So I was very conflicted for a while because I was going through my own, uh, information scaling crisis where it's like the identity that I had.
That I had had for my entire life was I was gonna grow up and work with it. Robert Bocker, my childhood mentor in Wyoming, I would become a professor. I would, you know, I would lecture during the year. I would do field work, you know, I would illustrate my own books the way that he did with his. Like, I knew exactly what I was doing with my life and I had never any question otherwise.
And then suddenly it's like, there is something so rich and so big and so interesting that I couldn't not think about it, but to embrace it [00:31:00] meant izing the entire person I believed myself to be. You know, it's like, well now if I were to just become a paleontologist. I would always feel like I was leaving the majority of myself on the table like that.
I couldn't live with this huge remainder.
Andrea Hiott: was that music? Sorry, but is that Oh, no, just
Michael Garfield: like the, well, no, it was like I was still doing Oh, the, the, just like dinosaur science Yeah. Know, but what, what was it that you couldn't hold everything together?
Andrea Hiott: Like what, what was the shift?
Michael Garfield: These, the, well, I mean, yeah.
You know, getting more and more into music at the same time, but that, that particular thing was, I need to understand evolution, not just like, okay, study dinosaurs. So it, so it wasn't just
Andrea Hiott: this structure of like the Jurassic Park sort of storyline. You suddenly realize there's so much more you're gonna have to take in, is that what you're saying?
Michael Garfield: Yeah. That [00:32:00] like, well, that, you know, you can't answer questions about. The deep patterns of the evolution of new levels of order and how, uh, you know, the inner worlds of living things are part of that. 'cause I was also starting to read Ken Wilbur's work at the same time and thinking about, well, there's gotta be, a way to articulate this, mutual irreducible and complementarity of interiors and exteriors.
That has to mean something for answering questions about the evolution of language and society. And, you know, like the, I was like, there, there is a theory of intelligence, you know, because it's like. Now you will [00:33:00] find more, scientists that are comfortable talking about teleology in evolution, but it's an emergent telos.
It's like the direction of evolution is not the same thing that it was when people were talking about that in the 19th century. It's not that humans are at the top of this thing, and then we're gonna create something that's, you know, like smarter than us. Like all of this, like, sort of, you know, uh, the rhetoric of like God making in, in AI is very antiquated in the sense that they are still maintaining that, you know, there's a, there's a direction toward more.
The cosmos to, to, to smarter. And it's like, well, there is. but it is [00:34:00] an, em, it's a, it's an emergent pattern. Anyway, so like the, uh, all, you know, these questions about, well, like, there's like a few ba there's a few questions. The origins of life, because if at as at the time, um, one of the prestigious, evolutionary biologists at my school was Ed Wiley, who, uh, had written this book on evolution and entropy.
And I was like, well, you know, he's thinking about, this relationship between, you know, the, like the reduction of local disorder and the production of global disorder. And, you know, he's, he's closer than anyone I know. To being able to answer some questions for me about where the order comes from and like, you know, what evolution must have looked like before we had what we think of as like cellular life.[00:35:00]
And I asked him about this and he is like, well, there couldn't be any evolution before DNA. And I was like, wait a minute. No, that can't be true. Because there's, like, I was just at the beginning of my sort of early, early efforts to get into, uh, like a transdisciplinary review of the literature. And there were people that were doing these, you know, self-organization in, uh, inorganic chemical systems and, you know, questions about, like even in quantum physics, there's a, you know, there, there are hints of like natural selection.
You know, this like question of like, well, what collapses the wave function? It's like, well, it interacts. And just as a, as an aside, um, Julian Go, who is a, a buddy I met through the O'Shaughnessy Ventures program. He has been working on it, this big idea, another musician, uh, and, and writer [00:36:00] who's working on this huge cosmic idea, building on Lee Mullen's work and about how the universe itself is, a unit of selection and that our universe has evolved.
Like the, the conditions that are suitable for life in the universe as we know it are the product of a, a selection process of, universes that create black holes, create more universes and universes that don't, don't. And so you have, even there, you have a gradient, you know, you have a direction, but it's emergent from, you know, the, the interactions of all of these properties.
I just wasn't satisfied with that anyway. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: So you weren't satisfied because, because here's how it sounds to me, this sounds like a really great example of what I was trying to get at. In your, your mind, the way that. You can open boxes and threads in [00:37:00] all directions from everything, you know. So I'm, when you were a kid, did you suddenly have a moment, or not a kid, I guess a teenager?
I don't know. Uh, did you have this moment where you, you kind of had that, you, you were talking about you had this path, you're gonna do this, this, this, and then like, did suddenly all these boxes start opening and you're like, okay, now I have to know about evolution and I have to know about the language and I have to know about all of this.
And someone told you, well, that doesn't fit in this narrative. So you had to give up the narrative, or what was the dissonance there for you?
Michael Garfield: I asked for different respected professors of mine, how am I going to take this on as a graduate student? Because I had never any doubt that I was gonna just go through the, you know, that I would, I, you know, like the PhD, that's the path.
And all of them said. I, uh, like, basically [00:38:00] like in as many words said, academia is a medieval guild system, and if you can't get your, the thing you want to research to fit in one of those boxes, then you're not gonna hack it. And it was, it was a, a very disappointed statement. I mean, the people that were telling me this were brilliant and expansive thinkers, but they were talking about their own frustrations with, you know, the disciplinary silos of the institution.
And, you know, a lot of them made it even more, Kind of blunt, you know, in telling me that it's not just that you'll have a hard time asking these questions, but that, you know, no graduate advisor will take [00:39:00] you on because they want you working on a piece of their thing, you know? And if, if, if you're working on something more ambitious than they are, then they will consider you, you know, taking you on is act actively inhibiting their plan to secure power in this incredibly competitive environment.
And then, and then they were, I mean, and I gotta say like things have changed somewhat. This was 20 years ago
Andrea Hiott: yeah, it sounds like you wanted to study complexity at a time when that wasn't possible.
Michael Garfield: I hit up SFI and I said, how do I do this?
And they said, we don't have a grad program. Sorry kid. You're on your own. And the only, and they were probably pretty
Andrea Hiott: small back then too, right? I mean com now everybody knows who they are. But I mean,
Michael Garfield: yeah,
Andrea Hiott: I, I guess what I'm saying is that wasn't exactly a time when people were coming to professors wanting to study complexity so often, or that even that word was something people [00:40:00] knew about a lot.
But you're coming at it naturally in a way
Michael Garfield: mean were hostile. They were, you know, at it's funny 'cause like I didn't, I wasn't at SFI when this was the case, but you know, for the first 30 years or so that they existed, uh, people thought it was bullshit. You know, like they. Uh, I, one of the professors I spoke to in, you know, and said, I wanna study how life becomes more complex and how that's related to the, you know, the apparent in increasing complexity of, uh, the structures of cognition and like the, the inner life world of things.
And I mean, and again, it's not that simple. Like, uh, I'm not saying like ev you know, everything gets smarter. Um, it's, it's not like that. It's that, uh, [00:41:00] new regulatory layers arise through these, uh, processes of like the reconciliation of these, uh, attentional problems in some sense. And the, uh. Within those new systems, like Jeff West said us, if I talk, you know, talks about the city and how like the bigger a city is, the more kinds of economic activity it can support, you know, which means, uh, you know, kind of, uh, it's not really a paradox, but it's like, it's easier to be, uh, it's easier to find your way and like find your scene in a, a city if you're, you know, if you're like really smart, but also easier to find your scene if you know, I mean it's like, and we shouldn't even talk about smart and dumb 'cause it's like, you know, there's the, the, uh.
I'm starting to sound like David Crack [00:42:00] hour. Um, but like the, there's a, it's like so many different kinds of intelligence, but for any given,
Andrea Hiott: definitely
Michael Garfield: distribution,
Andrea Hiott: but it's almost like you're saying you, you don't wanna be aware of so many options. Sometimes that's to your benefit in certain cases or something like that.
Michael Garfield: It's like if you happen to be like, there's, there's fewer um, kinds. There's, there are fewer like social and economic functions in a smaller group of people, which means that, like, if you are, well it's like there, there isn't, there isn't, uh, there's less noise, uh, to hide in. Like, you know, the cities are famous for like being able to just like become anonymous.
You know, and, and you know, the privacy of these spaces where it's like, uh, in a small town, if you do something really stupid, everyone knows immediately, you know? Um, and it matters more. And this is, this is like [00:43:00] an island biogeography thing. Um, beneficial or deleterious mutations in smaller populations have a much larger effect because they're happening in organisms that constitute a relatively larger fraction of those populations.
so, but like on the mainland, you, you're in a, like the British invasion, right? I always thought that this was interesting as like, you know, in music you see this, that the islands are these like reservoirs of innovation that like so many of my favorite bands have come out of. UK or Iceland or Australia, but it's like, these are, it's because like, there's, anyway, so, um, I'm on a tangent, but I asked one of the professors about, you know, wanting to study complexity and he just said, he looked at me with this like, exhaustion.
And he is just like, [00:44:00] will you just tell me what complexity even is? Like, do you know, does anyone know? You know? And I was like, well, I mean, and that was it. It was like after that I had, I was working as a scientific illustrator at the Natural History Museum, and my, my boss, the, uh, former curator of herpetology, Linda Troub, said to me, you know, I do think there's an option for you, um, which is that you could take an interdisciplinary fellowship, but it would mean putting a panel.
Of people together that all work in different domains and uh, don't understand each other and kind of actively dislike each other. And you're gonna have to be the one to communicate for them. And I was like, I'm 21, like I'm a student. Like I'm trying to, I'm trying to find people I can learn from about this, [00:45:00] not have to like, sit there dealing with the snark and backbiting of, you know, like I'm a child of divorce.
Like I don't want to be in the middle of all of that.
Andrea Hiott: But of course, yeah, I that feeling,
Michael Garfield: but that's where it is, you know, it's in the middle. But that does
Andrea Hiott: relate to this bandwidth thing and the attention and even what you were kind of bringing up about the music and the islands, because there's something about.
Having a parameterized space where you can get more complex and kind of create something new and cool out of what seems kind of limited. Um, but, so, and then also, but it sounds like the bandwidth wasn't necessarily a problem for you at that time, but it was for everyone else. Like you seemed to have a lot of things you wanted to ask about, deal with, figure out, but nobody else could really hold all those things at once.
Is that, was that the feeling you had? Was it just kind of you were like, too overwhelming or something? It was overwhelming
Michael Garfield: for me. I [00:46:00] mean, yeah. Okay. It was for you two. I mean, it was, 'cause I didn't, you know, I'm, I'm speaking now from the position of having picked up 20 years of reading and insight and conversation about this stuff.
Mm-hmm. You know, I had a very rough idea of what I thought was going on. Um, but I didn't know where to look for it. And so that, that's actually, you know, when I, we talk about, like, one of the differences now, uh, compared to then is if you don't have the language for something, how do you even look for it on the internet or back then?
Like, just literal, just like libraries. Right.
But it's like, there, this, this question of like, well, okay. So like years later, working at SFI, I realized how much of the research I was looking for had already been done [00:47:00] by them, but it was, it was, uh, buried in.
Very inscrutable papers that I would not have even thought to look for in trying to answer these questions like, you know, papers about economics or statistical physics or, you know, and it's like, how do you like the information scaling problem? There is, something that actually AI is like starting to solve right now, which is being able to recognize structural similarities between different domains and identify like, you know, AI assisted science now is so interesting because it's basically doing at scale what my pattern seeking, you know, follow your intuition kind of right brain mode ended up having to do is just like [00:48:00] notice.
you know, the coastlines of South America and Africa and ask if they ever fit together.
Andrea Hiott: yeah. but I guess for me, it's kind of fascinating that you. We're already doing complexity. And then you ended up sort of teaching complexity is how I think about it in a way.
'cause you sort of synthesize all this stuff and give it to everyone. You've basically, like, in my opinion, I think you've taught a lot of people what complexity is in a weird way. So you were trying to answer that question and then in a strange way, you've now taught a lot of people. I mean, and now it's a trending kind of thing.
I wonder how that feels for you.
Michael Garfield: I mean, I'm not, uh, I showed up very late to that game and I think, I, I appreciate you telling me that I've played some sort of role in helping popularize intuitions about the behavior of complex systems. Um, [00:49:00] at the same time, you know, it was, I was constantly reminded at SFI that I am not actually doing the research.
Like I'm not formalizing quantitative models, you know, I'm not running simulations, I'm not choosing which hypotheses to, uh, pursue. But I, I eventually did get to a point where I was like, but I can help the scientists identify hypotheses that are worth pursuing because the, the thing that I was doing as the host of their show and all of that, I think had more value in some sense to an organization that had grown over the years and was, you know, now scattered across the world.
And, you know, people that. Rarely saw each other in person and rarely [00:50:00] spoke. And so, like, SFI, I think was, you know, going through one of these, these moments of fragmented at attention and, you know, trying to clamber up the slope of the exponential production of new information. And, you know, I think this is why like Brian Eno, when in 1995, I think this was talking with Kevin, said that the 21st century would be defined by, uh, curation as an art form.
Mm-hmm. You know, because like everybody, everybody's in a network. Like everyone's in the position to translate, no one's in the middle. Like there is this idea about, you know, between the centrality in, in social networks, which is like, you know, the more connections you have, the more central you are. But, that's not true in a simple way.
you know, everyone is on the edge of an indefinite number of things. And so all of us have this to get all the way [00:51:00] back to, you know, the early comments on, you know, each of us being a singular entity with, you know, uh, totally distinct histories and so on. like the deeper you go into your unique context, the more you realize that you are the only person in the world who can broker certain kinds of relationships where you are. and that there's, there's this tension between the. The way that society has taught most of us to think about, again, like jobs, you know, like jobs are, at a layer of abstraction, you know, the even like identity, like I was saying earlier, like even thinking I know who I am is an [00:52:00] abstraction, and the more that I attend to the living context, uh, the more like, if I really want to pursue the inquiry of who I am, that, you know, it follows this same sort of structure like, One of the big, huge people in my life that I found, um, while I was, wandering the desert between academic and academic phase was Richard Doyle of Penn State and Doyle's book. He's in the stack. Is in the stack. I mean, he is got several, um, but this is the one I found for Darwin's pharmacy.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, yeah.
Ex plants and the evolution
Michael Garfield: of the Noosphere.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. I
Michael Garfield: highly recommend him for your show. He's such a, a okay. A sweet, wonderful, [00:53:00] brilliant, humorous, heartful person. Um, and he had written this book that was basically, you know, putting together the, the pattern that I saw as a student about how information theory and evolutionary biology and consciousness, uh.
And all of this stuff fit together.
Andrea Hiott: Mm. Must have felt really good to find that.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. I mean, it was, and, and it, you know, it had not occurred to me at the time that it, that that would also include psychedelics because like, that's the missing piece of the evolution of syntactic language paper was like, well, what exactly drove this sort of super production of salience in early human societies that demanded an evolution of language?
Like, [00:54:00] okay, part of it must have just been simply scaling, like more people. Um, but like at the same time, s scale, like the scaling of societies depends on greater coordination. So like, you can't actually, you know, like there these things are in, uh, a complex relationship and, and so Doyle. Makes the case that language comes out of us trying to explain the, like these experiences that people were having, you know what, whatever it was like the, you know, psychedelic mushrooms or, or very plants and you know, he said like the thing that characterizes what he calls the eco deic experience is that, uh, it makes you write about it, it makes you talk about it.
Andrea Hiott: It doesn't even, I mean, mean psychedelics, but also that kind of an [00:55:00] experience, that kind of life transformation feeling. You wanna talk about it,
Michael Garfield: share it exactly that, that, you know, you have a profound, meaningful experience of some kind.
And it's in our nature to be, you know, to try and be like, oh my God, how do I even put this into words? You know? And so, you know, he, he, um, and that's, I mean, in a way, like finding complex system science was that kind of psychedelic experience for me. It was that like, I don't have the language for this.
Like I see it. Mm-hmm. I understand it, but then like, how do I communicate it? And, and, you know, Doyle's work and, and other people, you know, uh, have convinced me that there is the unspeakable. You know, like that there are, there, there is knowledge that, uh, cannot be spoken. But at the same time, um, [00:56:00] there is this perfect correlation that, you know, I work as if.
You know, the mind and matter are two perspectives on something else for which there are not great words in English. And so you would expect a perfect, um, like rec, like reciprocal relationship where
if you can exp if you can experience something, then there is a way to describe it. Even if it's not, you know, or like you would see, or maybe it's not that you can talk about it in language, but that there is a material correlate to those experiences. You know? Or
Andrea Hiott: you can recreate the pattern in some way.
Even with music or something, you can sort of, yes, it's a pattern that you can show through a different medium or, or, or not even show, I mean, I hate all these, we [00:57:00] always talk about vision, but that another person can sense through a different medium. It's the pattern, right? You can, you can give that to someone in the song, a book.
You know, these, these things make us wanna, wanna create, I think and relate. as you're talking about all this, I'm, I'm thinking about how, because you said yeah, you weren't doing the research and, and that's important. Researchers are important. Yes. But at the same time, as you said, you were looking for all this and hungry for it for a reason, I think matters in the way that what you were just talking about matters because it's, we're we're having these experiences and we wanna share them. And that's like part of some bigger thing for life in general, but in, and you couldn't find it.
So what you did with the podcast, and I wonder, was it your idea to do podcasts or did they ask you to do the podcast? I know you had to go through all kind of vetting and stuff, but Using your kind of talent or your, I don't think anyone else would've done it that way.
Right. So maybe you weren't the only doing podcasting at that time, but you were definitely, you know, doing it in a way others wouldn't. So, you could do what I was talking about at the beginning, like take in that [00:58:00] wealth of information and still put the attention on it in a way that could communicate it and sort of, you know, create those third spaces that you were just describing for others so they could find them.
I'm not trying to put you on a pedestal. I just like, I really think that's kind of what was happening in a way that feels like important to, to note here. And I, I wonder if it relates to what you're saying at all.
Michael Garfield: Yeah, I mean, I told them in the job interview that I thought the obvious next thing for them to do was to start a show and.
Andrea Hiott: And when was that? Sorry. Because you know, now everyone does a podcast, but that was not the case. Well,
Michael Garfield: I had been running future fossils at that point already for several years a time.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Michael Garfield: And that made me something of a reputational risk, I think, because it meant I already had an audience and a brand, and that I was willing to talk about [00:59:00] things that the institution was not willing to take seriously and did not want.
Yeah, almost
Andrea Hiott: the way you were talking about your professors didn't take them seriously. I see that as a kind of a beautiful thing, that they sort of embrace that, and in so doing it flipped. I don't know.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. I mean, so, so, yeah. You know, 2018, I, I came to them and I was like,
if you're gonna hire me for social media, like one of the things about. This media environment is that it's inherently conversational, you know, like to the point that I was saying earlier about like, everyone's in the middle. Mm-hmm. You know, everyone, it's not, it's uh, you know, like that organization is literally on top of a hill, you know, um, sort of, you know, uh, trickling stuff down to the city.
But [01:00:00] they, but I was like, but that's, but that, that has changed. And, you know, social media is not a propaganda machine when it's being used in the way that, uh, really honors its affordances as distinct from that, which has come before. And. Also like podcasts are not, uh, I mean, and people, lots of people are gonna disagree with me about this, uh, because, you know, something has, you know, the, been appropriated, you know, the, the heat of the, you know, the, the, the new and possible with podcasting.
Um, you know, very quickly people like decided that it was, uh, you know, very [01:01:00] highly produced that, you know, it was going to be, um, you know, the, the narrative format. You know, like the things that people are calling a podcast now, that category is huge. Mm-hmm. And a lot of the excellent audio programming that exists in quote unquote podcast form now is actually more like, uh, audio book or documentary.
Or radio?
Andrea Hiott: Radio plays. Kind of
Michael Garfield: radio plays, you know, and these are different things, like mm-hmm. You know, so like, what I saw as really vital, um, in podcasting as a medium was the way that it takes the, like for instance, you know, SFI, uh, is sort of internally known for having tea every day mm-hmm. At 3:00 PM and everyone on site gathers in the kitchen and talk, [01:02:00] just chats each other up.
And that's when I say that like, this is, you know, that they were facing a sort of, uh, attention problem that, you know that that's not happening. Um, you know, it's like remote work is sort of like this. People don't meet around the water cooler. Mm-hmm. Uh, so how do you, how do you create this internal culture?
And, but then like the thing that, why that kind of internal culture matters. 'cause you know, after SFI, I went on to work at, uh, an AI startup at the Mozilla internet ecosystem for a while and was doing some innovation research for them. You know, looking at the structures and processes of legendary organizations like Bell Labs or Xerox Park, um, you know, the sort of Silicon Valley canon of badasses, arpa.
[01:03:00] And, uh, we threw SFI and Pixar in there also. 'cause I was like, I want, you know, we're not just doing good, that's fine. But at any rate, like, you know, Pixar actually was an interesting outlier in that. But the point of that is just that like. You know, one of the things, so you're bringing the water
Andrea Hiott: cooler, but you're making it virtual.
Is that your idea? Not the water
Michael Garfield: thing. Yeah, sort of. But like, why does the water cooler matter? Is because it's not just about connecting people. It's about there being, so like if I talk about, like, the podcast as a book versus the podcast as generative discussion, um, one of them is like the crystallization of knowledge forms and the other is the alchem of knowledge forms of like the, the high, high temperature search is what they, you know, or, [01:04:00] uh, isn't that what
Andrea Hiott: David calls you?
High temperature? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Garfield: Simulated and kneeling high temperature search, like noi, like deliberate injection of noise into. Uh, you know, and in intelligent systems in order to enhance their creativity, which incidentally is also what, you know, psychedelics are for the brain. Mm-hmm. What digital technologies are for human society.
Um, what I thought, you know, I, I, you know, SFI was for science, um, and you know, so like there are these moments where it's like, okay, we shouldn't be brainstorming. We're like about to ship. Like we're, we're like there. We've made the thing, you know, and there's like that. Now is the time for that left brain sort of instrumental optimization kind of fun function.
But we live in a [01:05:00] world where the, you know, as McGill Chris talks about, right? The, the successes of. That efficiency, like the, the, the successes of the economics of scale have given us a regime, uh, what Zigman Bauman called liquid modernity. You know, where it's like we live in a world of just like constant self-transformation where like disruption has become like how much your people believe your company is gonna disrupt things, determines how much your company is worth, you know?
And so in that space, um, it's very hard. Like the balance has shifted from like, this is a stable regime where we know the rules and just play the [01:06:00] game, you know? 'cause I think, like, I don't know if this has been your experience, but like, it has certainly been my experience and that of many people I know that, you know, when they talk to their parents or grandparents, it seemed like they were living in a different universe strategically, you know, that it was like, figure out the game and play the game.
And now we're living in a world where it's like the new, the, it's, the game changes all the time. You know, like the, something comes in, incidentally, like one of my favorite games of all time is this Game Flux. I talked about it when I was on Kevin Kelly's, uh, cool tools show. the reason I love Flux is 'cause I feel like as a card game, it's like a lesson in this.
you know, when Brian Arthur talks about Daoist philosophy and economics and crossing the river stone by stone, you know, the improv of complex systems thinking that like fluxes this game where every new card [01:07:00] you play changes the rules of the game for everyone else. You know how many cards you can play or draw or what the win conditions are.
And it's not to say that. So it's like, so you to, in order to play that game, you learn that it's not like that strategy stops mattering, it's that strategy becomes a sm like part of a larger consideration. That's like the meta strategy of flux, which is that if you wanna win the game you're playing, what is effectively like, uh.
An evolutionary algorithm of how, like what, increasing the likelihood that I will randomly be able to draw and play the cards that would guarantee my winning. Um, and so that's, it's about it's, it's a me it's like [01:08:00] metabolic, it's a poem or
Andrea Hiott: a way of holding yourself or something.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: But, but the but this winning doesn't really work anymore either, I don't think because Well, it's like luck
Michael Garfield: production
Andrea Hiott: and then there's no winning though, either.
There's no's. Well, that's
Michael Garfield: just it. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I mean, that's just being seen by the machine to go back to your song.
Michael Garfield: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Seems to be winning, but that's not winning. 'cause you need to be seen by the machine over and over and over and over and over. Right,
Michael Garfield: right, right, right.
Andrea Hiott: So there's this weird tension in what you're saying where I agree with you, like everything's become more uncertain, being able to handle the uncertainty, which might be why we all wanna be schooled in complexity is better.
I'll show that again.
Michael Garfield: So, yeah, so that's the, the finite and infinite games. And then, you know, also in, in Campania's prophetic culture, right? Yeah. Yeah. I wanna let you finish your thing, but I do have a
Andrea Hiott: response to that. Well, I'm just, I was just saying like, yeah, there's more uncertainty. So complexity helps us handle that, and that within itself has kind of become a way of doing business and strategizing, especially in particular communities.
But on the other side of that, as you were talking, I was thinking [01:09:00] about AI and the machine, the big machine, and, and that's so linear and so coding based, where you have to be everything. There's no uncertainty. You can't have uncertainty. And we're starting to give ourselves over to that kind of LLM way of thinking.
So there's a tension there that's feels very strange. you've probably seen podcasts change, but how podcasting has become almost like the medium of education for a lot of people these days. So you type something in.
And then you get educated by the podcasts that come up, and that's due to the uncertainty of the conversational, the conversation. Like let, what's gonna happen if it's not in that book form that you were describing. I think And that's a maybe the kind of podcasting you were talking about, but then you, so you have that uncertainty and then you kinda linearize it into the code so that people can have it. And that's an interesting tension that's being held too, but
Michael Garfield: yeah. Well, okay, so like, first of all, yeah, there is this weird parasocial dimension to podcasting that, that, and that was in, that was [01:10:00] like very explicit in, you know, back when I called my show Future fossils and I probably will eventually change it back.
But like, you know, the, the whole point was like, you know, this is a trace fossil of a living dialogue. Like, and by the time you hear it, yeah, right. It's already in a museum, you know, and at the same time, um, I'd never
Andrea Hiott: really gotten that. I always thought it was like, future, you know, dinosaurs of tomorrow or something.
Michael Garfield: Oh man. Well, there, there was also the, uh, you know, very, very preoccupied with this idea of sensitivity to future events, like the conversations I had with Eric Wargo and, you know, his work on precognition and what changes, even if you don't believe that such a thing is possible. Like what changes if you live in a way where you are reflecting on your [01:11:00] present.
From an imagined future. Like if you, you know, like the seven generations thinking or you know. Mm-hmm. Like the psychology is full of this support that people do better in life when they are in some sort of dialogue with their future selves, you know? Um, and, and so that was part of it too, which was like the, you know, the presence of the future in the room now is a kind of time reversed fossil.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I got that part of it. Yeah. Fossil of what will be. Yeah. Yeah. But so that, that's what's great about it.
Michael Garfield: Uh, but, but this thing about games, okay, so like flux, yeah, you can win and lose the game, but the fact that the arbitrariness of it, like, you can think you have a winning strategy and then suddenly everything changes.
And somebody wins on accident, which happens all the time.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. In that game. Well, that's this uncertainty thing too. [01:12:00]
Michael Garfield: Yeah. So it's like the, like I, the, the reason I play that game is because it is so full of surprise that it's intrinsically fun. It's like, it's not, it's not like, I mean, like I said, like there is some, uh, spread of like being able to do better, but nobody would hold flux tournaments unless it was like a, like an ironic joke.
Like, you know. And so this is where, uh, you know, like James p Cars finite and infinite games, you know, and he talks about on the back of the book, the rules of a finite game may not change. The rules of an infinite game must change. Because the point of a, an infinite game, to your point, is to keep the game going for as long as you can.
And you know that. And he says, you know, society with its, uh, [01:13:00] limited prestige resource, you know, like status is inherently limited. Poss like, probably even more fundamentally limited than attention. cause you can cultivate attention, but like you're not taking someone else's attention when you do. Um, I don't know
Andrea Hiott: about that.
I mean, I'm thinking of CT Noian and this idea of gamification. Have you ever talked to him
Michael Garfield: twice? I love it. Okay.
Andrea Hiott: I'm sure you have. Yeah. So, you know, there's that too, isn't there, this cultivating the game so as to take your attention or, or, or taking the attention is just like the point of the game.
Michael Garfield: Well there's like Twitter or something.
Yeah. The attention economy piece of it is a whole different thing. I mean like meditation, you know, like. My own, the cultivation of my own interiority, uh, I'd have to really think about it to try and come up with a way in which that takes someone [01:14:00] else's consciousness. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, because that, that's the, the
Andrea Hiott: tension I'm talking about is already kind of like abstracted, right?
but it is that machine thing that's in the song and which I feel like is becoming very blurred with, with consciousness in a, and I don't mean that machines are becoming conscious, I just mean we're kind of giving ourselves over to that linear thing. Even like you in the store when you said, I think it was kind of prompted you to write the song that you, you kept looking at your phone to, for who knows what reason even though there was no signal or whatever.
What is that to attention wise?
Michael Garfield: I mean that, yeah, I mean that's, um. You know, I take that as an invitation to notice the ways in which I'm not actually paying attention. You know, that like that. And this is the one of the major str like, uh, threads of [01:15:00] inquiry for humans on the loop, which is like, you know, when are you being a robot?
You know, it's like there isn't this clean line, you know? 'cause again, like you're talking about, no uncertainty and like fundamental uncertainty. And it's like, well, I, I see, you know, these things are like on a, like a kind of a Mobius strip where if you pursue, um, your own agency as a thesis to its utmost extreme, eventually you're gonna bump into.
Something over which you have no control. And if you try to define the deterministic behavior of the cosmos, which seems for whatever reason, to constantly be, uh, associated with trying to control that behavior, then eventually you get to the point that they, you know, they got with quantum mechanics where you're like, we're bumping up against fundamental randomness or our own epistemic limits, [01:16:00] hard limits.
Or, or like, maybe there, like quantum particles are actually choosing these things, which we can't, like I, you know, we can't accept that they're, you know, like Einstein, God doesn't roll dice, like, right, right. But so like mm-hmm. But, but, but these things do, um, turn into one another at the extremes. And so like, that was, you know.
When Zigmund Bauman was writing about liquid modernity, it was like, yeah, the modern world holds this fundamental tension between striving for total control and striving for total transformation. And you can't have both, you know, like that. And so what, what you, you get, uh, is neither, is like neither total control nor total transformation, um, because these are just ideas and you, you end up with something that, like Danny [01:17:00] Hillis and Uri Oxman, uh, at MIT both, you know, in 2016, described as the age of entanglement.
You know, where. Like I was saying earlier about Bill Thompson and, and you know, the, the remix of ecology and industry, um, you know, Kevin Kelly talked about it in out of control back in the nineties. David Krakauer has written about it as emergent engineering, you know, where you, uh, you operationalize evolution in design, you know, to, um, and like, that's how, you know, people make vaccines and, uh, all kinds of things now.
Um, yeah, it's like, but the, but, but the game, the game, right? Is that in order to do that, like in order to like tango with the age of entanglement as the age of entanglement, and, and you know, Doyle said that, [01:18:00] and, and Darwin's pharmacy that you know, that, uh. Seeing oneself as emergent from contained within and all mixed up with what you know, Darwin's Tangled Bank of of evolution, means that like who you thought you are is itself in flux and subject to change and fundamentally groundless and emerging within this larger, you know, emerging in something that exceeds the world, that the world is like, uh, an epistemic artifact.
And so, like Campana, I want to read you this really quickly 'cause I love this passage from Prophetic Culture where he's talking about the, I I ended, um, a recent essay. I posted the Substack with this. Because it's just, so,
Andrea Hiott: was it [01:19:00] the multitudes, one Multitudes and holding paradox one?
Michael Garfield: yeah. Let's see.
It's not stuttering, it's hold on. I'll find it. Yeah. Uh,
rather than promoting apathy and fatalism or Prophetic Gaze offers that reassurance against the anguish of Lawson of becoming, which is by necessity, the foundation of any meaningful action. He says, seen as one island surrounded by other spaces. The world itself turns from a serious game into a game that can be played seriously.
It has its own unbreakable inner rules, and its lure and threats can often feel overwhelming. Yet it is just a process taking place within a specific board. If one, even if one wished to end their act before its natural closure, they wouldn't have to do so with acrimony. Rather, like players gracefully abandoning the table, prophetic culture offers another room in the house beyond the games room and a place from which it is possible to intervene on the world as if always returning to [01:20:00] it.
He says it's no longer a win all lose all ordeal in a boundless desert worldly existence manifests itself as one layer in a larger event exceeding for the most part our ability to catalog it linguistically, which he says, uh, finally allows one. GA one gains the ability to act within the world. Action will no longer put at stake one's whole existence since nothing is ever lost entirely.
No failure is absolute, no life is ever wasted. Perhaps it is possible to direct and to produce historical events. Only when one's own will is sustained by an awareness of the ineffable excess, overflowing the maps of language. And then he quotes Hugo Ball. He says, it is impossible at the same time to be artists and to believe in history.
So like
Andrea Hiott: makes, well, there's so much in there, I don't even know. It reminds me of the slay slaying technology with art too, from
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Mein Thompson
Andrea Hiott: a little bit.
Michael Garfield: Technology slays the victim and resurrects it with art. Right? And that's, that's what Thompson's saying in imaginary landscape about the [01:21:00] mind. In the era of planetary culture.
You know that like all of this, you know that the information scaling crisis and its ego death, For like the individual trying to make sense of, you know, the 21st century. Um, that, you know, as with Campania camp is saying, well, the prophet is not a mystic, the prophet is not rejecting the world. The prophet is not claiming that the world is an illusion.
the world is there. It's just, also part of the eternal. And so like, the mind in, in planetary culture is slain by technology in as much as like you see, you, you know, you begin to see yourself through the lens of like algorithmic thinking or like, you begin to see the ecological relationships out of which.[01:22:00]
Humankind and you know, your own like, you know, big data, like real simple, um, like the quantified self, you know, like you start to see all of these patterns in your sleeping behavior and your blood sugar and all this stuff. Mm-hmm. And you know, you, you start to see these relationships and then you realize like, oh, the mood I was in the other day was like, you have an explanation for you, a much richer description of what's going on that, in this, in a way similar to like, uh, you know, uh, meditators describe this, like, you know, like the, the, the more, uh, rich and detailed your observation of the mind, the more the mind looks like, uh.
Just like a karmic machine. Like the more, it's just like the stuff is just happening, it's doing itself. And it is a very, you know, there's an infinitely complex [01:23:00] machine that at that point you can't separate from being alive. But it's like, there, it does have, its sort of, uh, self existing rules that, you know, and so it's like, well, okay, like it's doing itself on its own.
Andrea Hiott: I think you can separate it from the machine though. I, I mean, I see what you're saying, but I think there's a danger in thinking It's just that we, okay, so like, yeah, we start picking up on our own patterns in a way that feels a bit like. Mechanical in the sense that you just described, but there's also kind of a threshold, or for some reason I'm thinking of how you describe the web as a psychedelic experience.
You know, like there's a point where you kind of lose coherence with all the information that's coming in, and that can be a psychedelic experience or that can be a poverty of attention to go back to the thing and what's the difference there, you know, in your life, or, I [01:24:00] mean, do, do you wanna be seen by the machine?
Do you get stuck in this, craziness, crazy kind of algorithmic, wanting to be, wanting to be seen by the machine? Or do you have the psychedelic experience of it, you know, or are, are those the same for you? Or, you know, there's something really nuanced there that feels important. Yeah.
Michael Garfield: Well, fir first I wanna say like, you know, saying that like attending to the operations of one's own mind.
Reveals it as machin. there are still important distinctions between the way in which that might be described as machin and the way in which a car operates or whatever, what life, biological
Andrea Hiott: ecological, actually, yeah. At
Michael Garfield: the same time, I think like the, the essays I've been writing lately are about how impoverished and inadequate these categories of life and [01:25:00] machine really are, and how we really do need better language at this point, which is, I link to Michael Levin's piece in Noma Magazine where he makes a very similar case.
He's like, these are models. These are just, these are just ideas about the world, and the world is changing very fast. Mm-hmm. Yeah, he and I talked
Andrea Hiott: about that a lot. with Mike. Yeah. Yeah. It's so, it's an important distinction. It's one reason I brought it up, but I wonder for you, 'cause we don't have that much more time, but I, I'm really interested in like your, how you do it, you know, I know you write songs that's your encoding mechanism and so on, but you also, you, you should have showed me just a minute ago when you said you noticing that you're noticing your phone is almost like a, you, you, that seems like a positive thing.
Oh, it's kind of a look what I'm doing. And you're, you, you, you seem to have even pushed out to a different scale in terms of even the big machine or are you, are you trying to do that or Yeah. Kind of experience are you having with [01:26:00] all this? Because it also brings up what you said at the beginning about wanting to be the only, I mean, you, you, you showed me that you pushed hard against anyone telling you that you're like someone else.
I. And that theme I could explore with you for a long time, but it, I have thought of it through this conversation about how that's pushed you to be strange or weird. That's a word we could have talked about, you know, if people think you're weird, if you wanna be weird, if you're trying to be weird, um, you know, and how that fits to this big machine wanting to be seen by the machine.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Well that's just it, right? Is that like the more, uh, the more we allow ourselves to be, you know, governed by the idea whether it's our own categorical abstractions or it is the, uh, constraints on our behavior by a system that is operating [01:27:00] on us in, uh, like, you know, cybernetic. Co-evolution between what we classically think of as human and machine like that.
There is, there is, um, this question of like, how much do you want your life to be determined by abstractions? Again, like whether you think of them as yours or whether you think of them as someone else's abstractions of you. Um, and, you know, classic, like, you know, I'm a loner, Dottie a rebel, you know, I'm a yeah, I'm an outsider free thinker like everyone else.
I'm an outsider. It's like, okay. Like relative to what? Like relative to the subset of all people that think that way. You're certainly not. And, one of the, the conversations I had from my show that really trans, that I just adored, um, was with Kay Otto McDowell, who had written, uh, pharmaco ai Which was the first book coauthored with Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. Have to look for that G [01:28:00] two back in the, like, back in the day now.
Andrea Hiott: Wow. Yeah. Um,
Michael Garfield: LLM prehistory almost at this point, but, uh, and had written a really interesting piece called Neural Interpolation for Gropius Bow about how each new media environment creates different selves, you know, like the self of broadcast media.
This is based on Fred Turner's thinking about this, that the self of broadcast media is different from the self of immersive is different from the self of network media. And then, uh, Kay was saying, well, like now we live in an age of neural media where, you're not just thinking like the, the, the affordances for the.
Conceptualization of selfhood in this environment are not just like, I'm a, I'm in a network, I'm a point on a graph. Um, but that you're made out of [01:29:00] networks interacting with technologies that are made out of networks. Both of those things are evolving. They're evolving together. They're both inside of larger networks.
And so, you know, it's like we're, again, we're in a very conversational media environment that's fundamentally evolutional, uh, evolutionary. And so, like when I, years ago I wrote this piece called, uh, improvising Out of Algorithmic Isolation that, uh, I'll, I'll send you that.
Andrea Hiott: That's a great title.
Michael Garfield: Thanks.
It's like, this is the, it, my, my friend asked me to write a piece about, you know, surveillance capitalism and art and like improv and how to think about. Rick, like stealing some piece of our humanity back out of the jaws of this thing. And what I kind of get to in that piece is that how, you know, if you are co-evolving with these things, [01:30:00] there's always some bit of like, you become the enemy.
You know, it's like the machines are becoming more lifelike and we, but it's not that we're becoming purely, it's like we are starting to see the ways in which, you know, I am already on autopilot most of the time. I'm already operating on abstractions much of the time. I'm, you know, what is conscious in me, is not like you'll, you'll never be totally conscious in, in the sense of like, you know, perfect information integration across every layer of your being.
If that is possible, it's certainly not possible for you to be, I think we would
Andrea Hiott: blow up, I mean, if we were consciously human anymore,
Michael Garfield: you know? So like, yeah, I think it's just, you know, like for me it's just become like, my practice with this is, you know, try, you know, try and see where categorical thinking and the use of models [01:31:00] and abstractions, is like fit to task.
And on the other side of it, where am I doing that? Like, where am I assuming that something is real when it's just an idea and when am I assuming that ideas are just ideas, when it's better to understand them as. Real like that there's this like flat ontology where like ideas are, you know, like I was saying earlier, like they, they exist in some way.
There's a material descriptive behavioral correlate for all of these things. Whether you measure it by the influence on people's behavior, whether you were to say like, look, I've got a map of all of the people that are, you know, the people talk about the internet weighing as much as a strawberry, you know, like all the electrons in it.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm.
Michael Garfield: Um,
Andrea Hiott: you know, I, I hear you. It's like the psychedelic part of the, that was missing from the syntax paper in a way. That whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Garfield: The, the practice for me is just to [01:32:00] get, is, is to get better at noticing
full stop. Just to get better at noticing
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Michael Garfield: Just that. Yeah. And to have fun with it, because that's, that's this point, right? Right. The game, that's what these authors are saying is like, when you are able to, like, the only way that you can actually have fun playing a game is to do this, you know, otherwise it just becomes horrible.
Andrea Hiott: Does it help you be weird? because I don't know if you actually feel strange or weird or, you know, for example, like when you go to a party and someone's like, what do you do? And this kind of thing.
Michael Garfield: mm-hmm. You
Andrea Hiott: know, you can't just give, I don't know if ever in your life after you be, were a shoe salesman, that you had a.
Whatever, you know, standard answer to that. I don't know if anyone does, to be honest. I think it's a little bit of, that could be a whole other discussion, but you know what I [01:33:00] mean. It's this not fitting, which sounds like you wanted from the beginning in a sense not to fit. And I'm not trying to say you were trying to be an outsider, but there's something in you that was resisting going along with something.
And I wonder if that practice of noticing is part of like what that does or if that's changed now that you know, you're going through all these transformations yourself, that podcasting is going through, transformations that, you know, you're, you're in a flux state and is that your natural state? I don't know.
I'm asking a lot of questions at once because I'm not sure what the question is, but it has something to do with, is it helping you right now? Do you even need help right now? Yeah,
Michael Garfield: yeah. Well, yeah, this, we can try and land it here that like, I think the.
You know, this idea of being distinctive is a red herring. in as much as it is an idea of like what it means to be distinctive on the basis of, you know, what [01:34:00] you see everyone else doing, right. Um, or what you think, you know, where you think the attention is concentrated in the economy. but what really makes people singular in that kind of way is, you know, found through a process of, you know, individuation and a discovery of the core.
I mean, I won't even call it like the core, but like to the discovery of deeper, Values. And if at risk of sounding like, could it be care
Andrea Hiott: instead of core? Is it possible?
Michael Garfield: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like at risk of sounding like I'm talking, I'm telling people to find themselves, which is a very sort of, late modern consumer like lifestyle consumer capitalist thing.
Mm-hmm. It's not that. It's, it's the like, okay, it may be that for you at some point along the, the path, but it becomes this thing of like, if [01:35:00] you just practice attending to what is interesting and, you know, I'm sure you know, you've heard this, you from so many people, like the, so many interesting people talk about their careers and they're just like, I just, I just follow what.
I am deeply, passionately interested in, and sometimes it changes and you knows thing is like blis.
Andrea Hiott: That idea
Michael Garfield: what? Yeah. Well it's, it's not always blissful or it is blissful in this sort of like, you know, the scary way that like, you know, bliss, the way that it was, like Theresa Avila talks about like, it's not always fun.
Mm-hmm. Um, it's not like
Andrea Hiott: the strange and marvelous bird that shrieks at you. I, I don't know if you know that Yates point, but when one of your posts you talk about, we have to turn around and look at ai and it reminded me of that poem where they, at the end of it, it's called herd triumph. At the end of it, they turn around and look at this crazy bird that's like shrieking at them and it's sort of love, right.
And care and self in the way you're describing right now. [01:36:00]
Michael Garfield: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: This whatever, this is this turn and
Michael Garfield: face the strange, right. David Bower. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Let it shrie at you and it is you and all of that.
Michael Garfield: I mean, I, yeah, I guess, you know, in some way I, I think that the. Like, I am convinced, and this is a subject for another whole like discussion, but like I'm convinced that the future of the, of like society is one in which
jobs
don't exist, but that people actually get paid for doing what they love. And there's like, there's a dark [01:37:00] side to that too. Like I'm not just sort of, I'm not being Pollyanna-ish about this. There is a sense in which, you know, you could argue that like this, like technology slaves the victim and resurrects it as our.
Comment Thompson is making about the mind includes, you know, the sculpture of the human mind by these vast distributed systems, the, the big machine. Um, and that we end up with like, you know, brave new World. Mm-hmm.
Andrea Hiott: But like, I don't think the brave izing nature or whatever.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. I don't think Brave New World is the whole story.
And I don't think, uh, you know, the, the Kevin Kelly angle on the automation of the economy is the full story. But I do think that like, we're like, if you really care about being like in a, in a way it's like a position of faith. It's like,[01:38:00]
why are you interested in what you're interested in? You didn't really choose that. Um, maybe. It's worth experimentally trusting that this sort of, um, kind of dystopia of, you know, human AI civilization, you know, evolving the attention economy into something where you know, you want what we tell you to want.
Um, maybe it is already that way. In the same way that like, that the biosphere is already doing this in the same way that like, some people think, oh God, like becoming pregnant is like having some alien grow inside of you. And then it changes your brain. It makes you love it, you know, gross. Um, but then like [01:39:00] becoming a parent doesn't.
Feel like that for most people. You know, you're like, oh, this is this. That's kind of the point too. I mean, that's why this is, this is good. And so, you know, people like Mike Levin, my buddy Tom Morgan. Um, you know, I, I talk with a lot of people about this sort of like, just for lack of a better term, like trusting in synchronicity and trusting that, like learning to hear the call, like learning, learning to be sensitive to these, like what, whether they are or not, like nudges or winks or, you know, these kinds of things feel like, because I mean, I have no reason to doubt that, I don't stop at my body like my, you know, I don't stop at my skin. Um, or my idea of myself and I. We're all connected in [01:40:00] mysterious ways, and as my buddy Josh Delio says, uh, ontologically, inseparable, you know? Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: That, uh, it makes me think of, um, for some reason when you were talking, I was thinking of this kind of light, you know, like shining from the chest, which sounds completely nuts, but there are these things that you kind of gravitate towards, right?
It does feel like that at times. Like you just can't in the way you were with dinosaurs or the way you were with complexity even, um, the way I am with this whole dichotomy paradox theme, so you can't let it go. You said that earlier. You just can't. I just couldn't let it go. And there's really something to that that's important and not just woo kind of stuff.
And what you said also about there are these moments of rhyme rhyming, or synchronicity or even just where the world's like a little lighter and brighter and you feel it and you remember it, and it's like. We don't have to get mystical about what all that is, but it's there and everyone feels it. And it seems like part of that practice of noticing you were talking about, you start to notice that and there's [01:41:00] something to that, you know, there's something, there's something to that.
That's if, if we start doing that more than what you said about not having jobs and doing what we love becomes really interesting because, well, I mean to end, let's talk about love because is love a feeling or is it something we're making? And I would say it's something we're making. We feel it, but it's something we're making.
And if, if we practice in the way you just said, that is interesting to think of that glowing light. That sounds silly what I'm saying, but those moments where you're, you know, you're pointing towards something and you, you recognize it and you didn't choose to point towards it in a sense, or the world is brighter.
That's kind of interesting to think about doing what we love. If, if that's what's leading that, if that's what we're making the love out of. just to end, I'd like to hear what you think about all that. Or even just this word love and care. And I know you got married recently too, but
Michael Garfield: Yeah. But I mean, to my partner of 20 years.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Michael Garfield: Um, and the kids were both there, but that's even bigger actually at the wedding. [01:42:00] 20 years. And then you
Andrea Hiott: got married. I mean
Michael Garfield: our, our daughter was the flower girl and our son was the berry. That's so sweet. Um, yeah. But you know
Andrea Hiott: what I mean with this love doing what we love, love isn't passive either. It isn't.
Michael Garfield: No, I, you know, it's funny 'cause like this whole story that I'm telling you over the, over the course of this call has been at the same time, like while I was going through this, you know, shock of. Discovering deeper questions and wondering who I am and, you know, traveling all over the place and trying to figure stuff out.
That's the same period of my life where I met my wife and we were going through our, our own sort of relational version of that. And those two things can't really be separated from me. Mm-hmm. And, [01:43:00] you know, because our lives were so crazy for so long and made so little sense. Um, and it was very hard to, you know, like, it, it for many, for years.
She and I wondered like, God, it seems like the world is just conspiring against us. Like we can't, like, we can't land this for some reason. And it made me wanna, you know, like. Cut her loose and be like, I, I cannot possibly be good for you. You know, like, this is, this is an insane relationship. This is nuts.
Um, and yet I think, you know, there was something about the fact that like, no matter how hard we tried to make sense of it, we couldn't. But then no matter how hard we tried to like act on [01:44:00] this idea that the other person would be better off without us, that never worked either. And that the love in our relationship is, um,
not just an active thing that we are doing, but like. It felt like a, an active field in which we were, uh, arising. Like it was, it was making us as much as we were making it. And like it was like a tupa or something, you know, it was like an, like a, an aor it was like an entity.
Uh, our, our love was holding us together no matter what our conscious minds were doing because we were creating [01:45:00] it and therefore it needed us to survive or something. And like,
Andrea Hiott: yeah, I just had to talk about the third entity and that reminds me of, it's like a third entity that's there. Yeah.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. So like the thing that, another thing, the last thing I'll say about that is I think that the missing piece, uh, on the.
Language, like on the discourse around evolution and emergence of order and all of this stuff tends to be, um, the involution, you know, that the order doesn't just come from nowhere. It's brought into focus. It comes from something, it's like stepped down from the, in the ineffable into the world in some way.
Um, and you know, so like that, you know, like people who think that, you know, we are making [01:46:00] machine gods, it's like, not exactly like I'm more on the like, Rudolph Steiner, like it's the incarnation of reman, you know, like it is, it's not that, it's not, uh,
it's not that it's not happening. It's just that you have to be kind of oblivious to the fact that like these beings already exist and are in this sort of, uh, relational co arising with the form, the forms that they take in the sliver of reality, we actually can observe
Andrea Hiott: mm-hmm.
Michael Garfield: and that's
Andrea Hiott: that's love,
Michael Garfield: Like, love,
Andrea Hiott: love is like Being swept
Michael Garfield: up into something that challenges your ego, boundaries, you know,
Andrea Hiott: the third entity that you described with your wife, but it's a different scale of it happening [01:47:00] in terms of time and space. It's hard to think about that, but
Michael Garfield: that's the big machine.
I hope so. I hope so. The big, you know, like the big machine is actually like, no, that's you, that's you and everybody you care about
Andrea Hiott: and everybody, you dog, no wonder we wanna be seen by the big machine. Yeah. No
Michael Garfield: wonder like, it's like, yeah, it's like, look, it's a dog. The video of the dog biting its own leg, growling, snarling at its own leg, you know,
Andrea Hiott: uh, speaking of dogs, I need to walk my dog.
But I really love talking to you and, uh, I really appreciate it. I appreciate what you gave and all, all this. There's a lot to seep in there.
Michael Garfield: Yeah. Well, I would, I thank you for being so present and kind and, and curious and, um, Well, thank you.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you, Michael. I hope you have a nice day there. Good day. I'll try to remember or figure out the name of the trees [01:48:00] outside my window. 'cause now I'll send you a picture of the trees outside my window too.
All right. I'll send you mine. Okay.
[01:49:00] And now I'm going to read one of my favorite poems. Actually, I have it memorized. It's one of the first ones I ever memorized. It's called Her Triumph by William Butler, Yates. I did the dragon's will until you came because I had fancied love, a casual improvisation or a settled game that followed if I let the SEF fall.
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings and heavenly music if they gave it wit. And then you stood among the dragon rings. I mocked being crazy, but you mastered it and broke the chain and set my ankles free. St. George or Elsa, pagan Perseus. And now we stare astonished at the sea and a miraculous, strange bird shrieks at us. [01:50:00]