Transcript
Speaker: Geoffrey Moore, thank you for joining me. Or should I say Geoff, I suppose. Where does today's recording find you? Well, I am in Los Altos Hills, California, which is right behind Stanford University. As you can see, if if you have video, you can see that I am in my intergalactic headquarters, also known as my home office.
Speaker: So happy to be here. Well, again, thank you for joining me. So I know you mostly from your books. I've read several of them.
Speaker: And so whether you talk about your books or any number of other things, do you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? Sure. I mean, my business card now says author, speaker, advisor. I've been involved in business and in the tech sector since 1978. So it's been a been a great ride.
Speaker: And originally was in in marketing and sales. ah And then increasingly as a in the venture community in the 90s, and then increasingly in this ah century, working with larger companies, trying to absorb all the disruptive innovations, which started out with cloud and then mobile. And of course, today, an enormous amount of the dialogues about AI and how does AI fit into everything.
Speaker: So all of that has led me to do advisory work. The advisory work, you know, gives you ideas about things you could talk about. You write speeches about them. Eventually people say, hey, you know, that's pretty interesting. So maybe you write a book.
Speaker: When you write a book, the speaking bureaus say, well, you've got to speak some more. And so it just keeps kind of going around. There's been kind of seven books that kind of run out of that circle from 1991 about or something like that. And they were just about what's going on in the tech sector.
Speaker: The last thing I ah wrote, though, and something that kind of connected you and me, was a book called The Infinite Staircase, which is a step back. I started my career as an English professor, and I was interested very much in in literature as a way of exploring strategies for living.
Speaker: And so The Infinite Staircase is really kind of a strategy for living book about trying to answer the question, you if you say If you set aside intelligent design, you say, no, no, universe let's try the universe starting at 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang.
Speaker: How would you get from that Big Bang to Eric and Geoffrey talking today here? And how is that even possible? It turns out that's an extraordinary story, which I had to piece together because I didn't know any of it. I had to piece it together from wonderful, lots of different places. And then the question I really wanted answer is, well, if that's the story you want to believe in,
Speaker: Where did ethics come in? there's no longer a divine authority or a sacred text. So where did ethics, how does that work? So that was the thought the last third of the book was trying to work through that stuff. Given what you talked about with you know most of your career, the focus of most of your career, how did you end up coming back to your English background and and coming around to writing The Infinite Staircase as opposed to another innovation or marketing or whatever book?
Speaker: A couple of things. um At some point, you know, you you reach an age. I just had my 80th birthday. So you reach an age where you go, well, you know maybe I should do some legacy things. You know if you think you've learned something, maybe I should write that down before I leave the planet. So there's ah there was a little bit of that of that going on.
Speaker: ah But also, i' the the the thing that all my books have in common is they're all around frameworks. They all try to OK, let's take a complex situation and let's see if we can't organize it around a root metaphor or some way of understanding it.
Speaker: And so Crossing the Chasm was all about a transition that looked like Crossing the Chasm. And then there was one called Inside the Tornado because it felt like demand was just going, ah that kind of stuff. And so the staircase is the metaphor that's used in and in ah in the philosophy book.
Speaker: But um so I and I do I care about for him. So by the way, there may be another business book. I mean, you know, this stuff is this AI stuff is it's driving a whole lot of engagement. And so we'll see it see where that goes.
Speaker: I'm glad that you mentioned metaphors and frameworks and you know, you you didn't just mention crossing the chasm, the name, but also referred to sort of that, the visual, if I can call it that.
Speaker: And then inside the tornado, because As I read The Infinite Staircase, it occurred to me that one of the things that seemed to tie that book to your prior books is that I was not conscious of it, I think, when reading some of your earlier books that You use metaphors to ground it, to build a shared understanding of the situation that we're dealing with. And those metaphors, you know, often individual words like the chasm or tornado or bowling alley, gorilla, things of this nature become a shorthand for something much bigger. And.
Speaker: as i was reading the infinite staircase then i started to think about well what are the what are the trade-offs what are the positives that we get from these metaphors and the narratives that they support and what are the positives and and what are the negatives that come along with these things so you mentioned crossing the chasm you mentioned inside the tornado and One, I suppose I, once I realized this, Geoff, I was really impressed. I felt like this gives us this shared language, but also i started to see a bigger picture that I think I could understand.
Speaker: if I was in your shoes, what my motivation would be, what one of my motivations would be, i suppose, of trying to write the infinite staircase because you're taking a, it seemed to me like you were taking a bigger picture view and saying, you know, what's my perspective on life and consciousness perhaps, but also how do we understand life?
Speaker: I hope I'm not setting this or or stating this too grandly. No, I think it's interesting. So um one of the big influences on my intellectual development was a book by a guy named Stephen Pepper called World Hypotheses.
Speaker: He wrote it back in the 40s, I think. But it was um he he introduced the idea of a root metaphor. And he said, really, the coherence of any of any framework is that you have a root metaphor. So the chasm, the staircase, the tornado, whatever it is.
Speaker: And but the pluses of that, of course, is that to the degree that there's fit, but it's it's a little bit like product market fit in high tech. To the degree that there's metaphor market fit, People go, wow, and they and they stay with that.
Speaker: Like right now in AI, there's a thing called the harness. It's a metaphor about about all the stuff besides the large language model. but Well, see if it seems like that metaphor is catching on. When it does, as you said, it creates language.
Speaker: And people start using that as as a way of just... And so ken crossing the chasm is now language and tech. it's it's just It's just there. And so what it lets you do is in you it brings to mind an entire context. that the good The good news is it's very quick and it's very intuitive and people get it.
Speaker: The danger is if it's not right, it you how do how do you check it? So it's really important to to continually apply analytics against your metaphors to say, like, where's the boundary?
Speaker: Where's the efficient frontier of this metaphor? All metaphors have an efficient frontier after which, they're no longer they're no longer useful. And so I think having respect for the metaphor, both for what it can do, but also for what are its boundaries, I think that's part of the intellectual tradition that we're supposed to participate in.
Speaker: Do you deal with common situations where there's, what is the, I think there's a logical fallacy called something like the zealotry of the recently converted or something of this nature where, you know, it's a little bit like Dunning-Kruger where you know so little, you don't know what you don't know sort of thing. And the zealotry of the unconverted, hopefully I'm not misremembering the name of this, but the idea is you just,
Speaker: Geoff, I just came upon crossing the chasm and now I define everything I encounter in these terms. And so I'm guessing you've encountered that in consulting clients and people reading and so on.
Speaker: And so there's like a map versus territory challenge, but then also the more experience that you get with thinking about the world through the the viewpoint from the viewpoint of crossing the chasm, for example, then you learn where it doesn't quite fit.
Speaker: And I'm really curious, having used these metaphors, having developed them for so long and then going for something so ambitious, I believe, like the infinite staircase,
Speaker: If you've found ways to help people develop a deeper appreciation for the actual territory versus just flattening everything to it a map,
Speaker: Yeah, yeah um and I think, i look, the the worst kind of author, from my point of view, somebody who comes up with a great metaphor, but then just will not let go of it and will kind of just impose it on every every, I have a hammer, you will be a nail kind of thing, okay?
Speaker: And i don I don't come from that intellectual tradition. I i come from a ah family background and an intellectual background, which is, no, find the efficient frontier. These things are useful. And so when you're working with a client,
Speaker: Yeah, it's very charming when a client says, you know, if this is the most amazing thing I've ever heard. God bless you. Thank you. But it's like, okay, now let's get back to work. And I think part of it is if you put yourself in service to a client and you then say, well, what is your client in service to?
Speaker: And then you ask the question, in that context, is this metaphor or is this framework going to improve their ability to deliver their value to their to their clients or their their constituencies?
Speaker: then that's the game. And so ultimately, there's a kind of a – there's a this is like these three visions of truth. There's the correspondence vision of truth, which is, does this fit the facts? There's the coherence version of truth, which is, does this fit in with everything else we know?
Speaker: And then there's the pragmatic vision of truth is, does it work? Just to get you the results you want. And you kind of want to use all three at yeah know at some point in the process. um But the pragmatist one just says, yeah, I mean, if you're not getting better at results, maybe we ought to change the metaphor.
Speaker: and and and And so i think and I think as long as you put yourself in service to something other than yourself or your own ideas, that's – authors get into trouble when they put themselves in service to themselves or put themselves in service their own ideas. Yeah.
Speaker: How is it that you ensure that these metaphors help us actually develop strategy and take action in a way that's useful as opposed to misunderstanding you know the the reality and moving off in the in the wrong direction, implementing a bad strategy?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, first of all I think that the structure of strategy is twofold. The first part of the strategy is, can you describe the situation in a term that accurately represents the forces at work?
Speaker: And that's sort of the descriptive part. And then the prescriptive part is, well, if that's the situation and these are the motives, what's the right tactics to pursue? Everyone in my books has had a priest a descriptive part followed by a prescriptive part.
Speaker: And I think that's what people like about it. And as you use the prescriptions, you go, well, Actually, that didn't work the way he said it was going to work. I mean, that that's the whole point about this thing. Reality is continually evolving, emerging thing.
Speaker: But if you don't have, where frameworks matter a ton is where you really don't have enough data or experience to make it, to base it on that. So this is why high tech has been a godsend for me, because if you there's no data about what is AI going do the jobs?
Speaker: Who the hell knows? Right. I mean, we don't know, but we can't. but But we have to we have to create policies. We have to we have to invest. We have to, you know, we have to support social change, whatever it is, education.
Speaker: So you have to have something to make decisions with them. And so what a framework does is, OK, I think this reminds me of this other experience. In this other experience, we naturally found that this and this and this worked.
Speaker: This is what metaphor does. Can I take those tactics and apply them in this new field, which is still unknown? But if I pretend it's like the other field, these are the things I would do.
Speaker: the first question you ask is, does that sound crazy? If the answer is, well, does that sound crazy? Well, let's try it. but But then you it's it's always course correcting as you go along because it's never the same. I think you said roughly the last third or so of the infinite staircase. You're focused on ethics and.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a prescription. Yeah. So if you had asked me to describe it before you said that I would have said, there's a good portion of the book where you're going through a bit of history, but also in addition to history, you're talking about the development of aspects of culture and psychology and a number of things that you probably recall better than I do. And then you get into And so how do we know that we can make a decision that is for the greater good or that we can act in shared interest or something of that nature?
Speaker: So coming back, you know, talk, bringing some of what we were talking about to the infinite staircase, what are some of the things that you explore in the first, about two thirds of the book before getting to ethics and what do we do about it?
Speaker: I had sort of an epiphany. It might have been 20. So these books behind me, I actually have read some of them. so so And at one point, it was all about, he was doing marketing. It was all about Darwinism because I thought, wow, you know, Darwinian natural selection markets. I mean there's a lot of stuff going on there.
Speaker: And in the middle of that, this I ran across work from the Santa Fe Institute around emergence, which was emid and self-organizing systems, and chaos theory. All of which were brand, these were all ideas that had were not part of my, either need my university education, all new.
Speaker: But they began to sort go around in my head. so the emergence idea made me realize that that the challenge of metaphysics, the challenge of trying to explain what the hell's going on, is is people keep on trying to explain it all at one unified level.
Speaker: And what the staircase was about is saying, no, no. Reality emerges in a set of levels, starting with the Big Bang, which was only physics. There were no people. There was no chemistry. There was no biology.
Speaker: There was no there' was no there's no Geoff. There was no air. Just a big Bang. Okay. So it started with physics. And then the next thing you realize is when it cooled down enough, they could actually have chemistry. But you can't have chemistry until you have atoms.
Speaker: And for a while, it was just too hot for atoms. But then you could have atoms. And you could have electromagnetic bonds. So now got physics and chemistry. Then you get to Earth about 4 billion years ago, and all of a sudden, these chemicals figure out some way to, which is just like, are you kidding me? To self-organize, to create,
Speaker: Cells it's like And that story, I used Nick Lane's book for that story, but that story is like just i mean you could you could do like, you could spend your entire time trying to sort that one out. And then as you say, okay, but but it was just cells. For 2 billion years, life was just bacteria. That was it.
Speaker: and And then all of a sudden, the cells start hanging out with each other, and they self-organized into these communities, and all of a sudden you had multicellular organisms. So the point being, that What emergence says is at any given moment in time, at any level of organization, there's the potential to reorganize at a higher level, which will subsume all the lower levels.
Speaker: They will all impact them, but it will have properties that cannot be predicted by anything below. So you can never reduce a level to everything below it. that You can't say it's it's it's just all physics.
Speaker: No, it's not. Each level has its own reality. And so and in the staircase, i ended up having I ended up with a staircase with 11 levels. you know that Could it have been 10 or 12? Yes, it could have been. But it turned out to be, for me, 11.
Speaker: and and in each and And I've grouped them into three groups. The first group was sort of like, okay, physics, bio ah chemistry, and biology before we have physics. you know, anything very interesting. The middle was sort of like, it was like everything before a language. So it was like ah desire, consciousness, values, and culture.
Speaker: But I was trying to explore them from the point of view of an animal, not a person. So there's no language. so So what's a culture for a bird? what's a What are values for a a squirrel? You know, what is consciousness for a dog?
Speaker: that kind of stuff. And they're all motivated by desire. So desire, and it is it's that order. Desire motivates consciousness. Consciousness motivates values. And values particularly grow out of, at least the bad values that we we believe in, or they tend to be mammalian. They tend to be about mammalian life. So you nurture our young, we discipline the tribe. and but that it's reptiles. Snakes don't do this.
Speaker: So snakes would not have values in any sense that I would understand them. But the mammals do. We do. We're all mammals. And then the last third was, OK, now you bring in language. So was language, narratives, analytics, and theory.
Speaker: And that was like that. Now that was my entire education. That was everything. So so that now was sort of on on home turf. But in each case, you know, language comes into being.
Speaker: But you don't need not yet narrative. Language could just be wolf or you know hungry or, you know, you you Jane, me Tarzan. But then narratives come up and you start explaining the world in terms of narratives and stories.
Speaker: and And we do that with children. And that's how children learn about cause and effect. It's how they learn about consequences. yeah and And strategies for living can be taught through stories.
Speaker: This is how Harry Potter did it. This is how, you know, Babar did it. Or this is how, you know. Sonic the Hedgehog did it, whoever, is the whatever story you want. And then the question is, and this gets back to our first conversation about, then you apply analytics. Well, yeah, but does that story make sense?
Speaker: We have an administration right now that tells a lot of stories that frankly don't make sense. They they don't stand up to analytics. And and and i'm I'm right now in a kind of a jihad of saying, we need to up our analytics game as a culture. We're not we're not playing not playing pro ball here, people. We need to play pro ball.
Speaker: But anyway anyway, that's analytics. And the last one is theory, which is like, if you abstract all the way up, this is kind as high as we can go. as And that za that was the idea behind that. So that's how the – but this the point about the stairs was, my claim is that all the confusion in philosophy, all of the disappointment with philosophy, a lot of it can be traced to people trying to make an argument on the wrong stair.
Speaker: Like if they just put themselves on the right stair, and if they accepted the fact that this idea that there is emergence, so that each stair is allowed to have an autonomous reality at what is at the same time is implicated with all the stairs below it.
Speaker: You know, that, that's kind of, that was kind of the idea That's interesting. You reminded me of something that feels like a different issue, but still, it's a I think it's a similar outcome. And that is that I think a lot of times when people argue over for something in particular, I think you'll see this in news media, you know two talking heads on TV, or you'll see this just in your text-based social media. Very often that when people are arguing and they seem to be arguing over values,
Speaker: I find that they're typically actually arguing over language and they just never really got clear what they were talking about. And so they seem to be disagreeing, but they just don't realize that if we're talking about values of one type or another, we never really got clear on what we meant.
Speaker: And so, yeah like I said, It feels to me like a different issue, but still the same fundamental outcome that we're just really not clear. What are we dealing with here? Which stair are we on?
Speaker: yeah Yeah. And maybe it's not a stair. maybe so But the point is we're not on the same page, same stair, same. And so, you know, you talk about if you want to have bring two polarizing opinions to say, OK, come on, guys, we got we got to sort this out.
Speaker: You got to start with shared values. so So so and you have to get very I think you have to get pretty explicit about, look, what are we trying to do here? Because if I'm just trying to vent my frustration and you're just trying to vent your frustration, we're doing fine.
Speaker: We're actually winning by yelling at each other. But if we if we want to take it beyond that, then we have to find a common basis. And yeah, I think i think most of the frustration in communication is based on not finding that common platform around which – and by the way, some people don't want it. Some people want to say, no, I want you on my platform. if you're on my platform, i'm going to shoot you or beat you over the head or call you a bad name or do whatever it is.
Speaker: Okay, so in the infinite staircase, you try to explain you know what's going on at these different levels and how one, i guess, with the emergent properties that come out of each level to the subsequent level in some respects.
Speaker: And then you get to the, ah think it was the description portion, or you get the the application. Oh, there yeah, there was the, thread yeah, yeah. the the priest We went from, that was the description.
Speaker: And then I wanted to transition to prescription, but I needed to put in a joining, I had to put in one chapter to join the two, which was a chapter about being. And it was ah just not, but anyway, but he but yes, from then on it was, it was about, so being was the bridge because it was,
Speaker: And unlike all the other levels, being is is a little harder to talk about because it's hard to verify what you want to say about being, particularly if you take kind of a transcendentalist view of being, which is kind of my experience of it. So so how was I going to do that?
Speaker: But I needed it because in order to be ethical, you need spiritual energy of some kind. and and and And I looked at the staircase and... It wasn't on the staircase. And so it's like, whoa. So so i had this and the chap kind of admit this. He says, hey, guys, you know I should be totally satisfied with the staircase.
Speaker: I'm not because I still need this other component in order to be successful in an ethical behavior, in an ethical life. And so being was the thing that said, okay, the claim I made for being is, which is, which is where it's somewhat verifiable, which is if you if you connect with being, you can become more centered, you know, your better self, ah more, you know,
Speaker: just more innocent, more life-supported. and And people who do mindfulness and meditation or whatever, but there's there's this enough corroboration that's not a crazy idea.
Speaker: um Where it exists in the actual staircase, that was, because the transcendentalists would say it's it's even before the Big Bang. I mean, they would say being is like the ultimate reality. Well, that's i find that emotionally kind of an attractive idea, but it's not verifiable.
Speaker: But the other thing you could say is, well, maybe being is a moment in consciousness where your consciousness, you're just being aware ah before you before you occupy your awareness. And that's what the meditation stuff ah and the Zen stuff and the Buddhist stuff and that kind of, that's kind of where the where they have it.
Speaker: Somewhere between consciousness and values is where they experience it. And that's kind of, I felt, I said, okay, that's that's close enough. That's good enough. And then from then on, I was like, okay, well now, if there's no divine authorization, if there's no sacred text, if you're not obeying, if you're not being good because you want to obey God, now what?
Speaker: Because I mean, there's a general objection. If there's no God, why don't people just spell just do whatever they want? And so then I wanted to be able to address that. in that portion of the book, the latter portion of the book described to me some of the prescription, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah. It's interesting. I ended up saying, we just need to be better mammals because I said, look, what does a mammal do? A mammal nurtures their young. Okay.
Speaker: Why don't you be a little bit more nurtured? A mammal respects the alpha leader of the tribe. OK, why don't you learn to be a little bit more respectful? Or if you are the alpha leader, why don't you learn to you know lead in a more constructive way? Because what mammals do is when there's rogue alpha leaders,
Speaker: they um they They isolate them. They they they quarantine. they They send them out. and And as a result, in in in animal culture, it's very hard for rogue behavior to scale.
Speaker: Unfortunately, in human culture, particularly now that we're a digitally connected human culture, rogue behavior scale can scale scale faster than moral behavior.
Speaker: And that's, what i would say, the number one ethical challenge we're dealing with in my my generation, in your generation, and in my grandchildren's generation. Because We are the power of lying, the power of of narrative but without analytics, the power of bullying, the power of this is just it's it's amplified and and it's lightning a fast spreads.
Speaker: So it's like, whoa, it's like pandemic of idea kind of stuff. So it's a big, it's a big, big moral challenge. And that's I was you with the book. I'm kind of hoping, well, maybe I can give some vocabulary to start to work on that problem.
Speaker: think I had this feeling while reading it, but just to take it outside of the book a little bit. One problem that I have with things like mindfulness, and I'm a big fan of mindfulness. I practice it at least to the extent that I fail every day. you know, I'm, I'm mindful of trying to practice it. And one problem that I have is I understand how a practice like mindfulness and even, you know,
Speaker: If you are religious, something like a daily devotional or prayer whatever might accomplish something very similar, if not the same thing, depending on the individual and so on.
Speaker: One problem that I have, sorry, let me step back. Even though I understand how having, for example, a mindfulness practice could result in me being a kinder person or nurturing my young or acting ethically in the world or any number of things.
Speaker: I believe that we ask a lot of the individual if what we say is, well, get yourself to a very mindful place and then you'll just be better. and So a couple of thoughts there, because this is this is really, this is kind of a crucible moment.
Speaker: So first of all, in a religion, you get a lot more ah social reinforcement. so so And so for most people, frankly, and and by the way, if you sing, a back I went to a prep school, we had vespers every night. So you sang a hymn every night, you heard some verses from the Bible every night, then you went to dinner.
Speaker: It's basically just a place to collect kids before they go to dinner. But the point was, it it seeps in, that it does. and And if you need counseling, where if you and some people use therapists as opposed to, you know, religion, but but we're playing the same game.
Speaker: The mindfulness thing, the problem is the narrative around mindfulness is misleading. You are misled about mindfulness when you think you're not succeeding. Because at least though I did transcendental meditation. So that's that's the thing i I know how to do. But that that they make a big point in transcendental meditation.
Speaker: You know, you start to think about, okay, you're supposed to, on your breathing or on the mantra or whatever you're supposed to be doing. And all a sudden think, oh, shit, I forgot to turn off the oven. That's part of the process.
Speaker: So the way they explain it is really nice. You start to relax and all of a sudden you release stress. It's like, oh, my. I've had meditations where I just raged against the administration for like 30 minutes. But it was – I just – but the point is if you do it if you do it routinely and you understand that the meditation goes in and then the stress comes out and it's if and you want – It doesn't do any good you just to go in and hang out. You want the stress to come out.
Speaker: Then over time, your body has less and less collective stress. You bring less and less stress to the next day. And at some point, you know, they're to call it enlightenment. It's just like, it's not, you I mean, it's just like, I'm not as burdened as I used to be.
Speaker: And so ah I do think, i but but you but the point is, Meditation and mindfulness is deliberately an individualistic thing. It is not a communal thing. So if it doesn't you can have social groups that sort of kind of reinforce it, but that's not how it works. It really is a intimately personal, individualistic practice. If that works for you, great. But if you're saying, it's not working for me, then I think you'd have to play. But you have to find some source of spiritual energy.
Speaker: You can't be ethical in the world without being love in your heart. You just can't. I mean, you need you need something. I really appreciate the distinction that you made or the thing that you called out about having a faith practice, you know ah a religious history, a tradition to call on because it does bring a number of things in In particular, that cultural or community aspect. And you know culture is in one respect, a process of social learning.
Speaker: And so there's not as much of this challenge that I have with mindfulness and actually a lot of self-improvement stuff that has been popular for the last 20 or more years, probably longer, where I feel like as much as sleeping well every night or exercising every day or whatever these things are might result in you being a better person in one way or another.
Speaker: i think that I desire for a lot of these practices to help someone see the greater communal and goal or outcome, because i mean, you could pick any person in history who was by most measures, a terrible person, and they could have done all the mindfulness meditation or whatever in the world. And that would be an easy example to say, yeah, but you know,
Speaker: Had that guy just gone to church or whatever, maybe we would have had a better chance for and all those bad things not to happen. Yeah, you know, so and part of what we're invoking now is, this is back when I talk about values, because when we're talking about values, you know, the traditional thing is, well, we start with with God and he's all perfect good, and then you kind of go down to, well, if you what if you're in the middle Middle Ages, you went down through some angels and whatever, but eventually you want you the values come from above. And my claim was, no, the values come from below.
Speaker: And so when we say, for example, you were saying, I want this person to act behavior, I'm saying you are wanting him to act in a more life-supporting mammalian ways. The mammal strategy for living is to nurture the young and and protect the tribe and invest and invest in the relationships and your family family relationships. That's our strategy.
Speaker: And so when we say, and religion, I think, codifies that strategy, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, honor your father and mother. know, I'm I mean, you look at it and say, yeah, and it feels like, you know, we have Moses with the tablets coming down this way.
Speaker: And I'm saying, well, yeah, but I think actually the tablets might have been written before. they might At least the case I wanted to make with the infinite staircase is you can, if you play the infinite staircase metaphor out, they do come from below.
Speaker: You can say, I don't like metaphor, but if you do, if you play it out, they do come from below. And the reason that's important to me is that that means they're not detached from from our physical life. They're not detached.
Speaker: There isn't like the moral Geoffrey and the physical Geoffrey. that No. that And so that that was important to me because you can get one of the dangers of the religious perspective. If you get into this mind-body dualism, you get into this, you know, good angel, bad angel dualism. And it's like, careful, careful.
Speaker: You talked about desire earlier, and I feel like this is crucial for some of what you're discussing. i I would like to understand where in your eyes, we might say desire can, how it can be defined.
Speaker: You know, would you go as far back as a plant that leans toward the sun, that that is a desire, perhaps, at least in in some respect or another? Or do you go are you do you start at a higher level and it becomes about emotions or pain or something of that nature? I think desire starts with that. I introduced desire as biochemical signaling between cells.
Speaker: Okay, so there's no consciousness. And by the way, there were plant cells along but long before there were animal cells. so but that So we could start there. And that is the sunflower following the sun and the root seeking out the water. Those are all signals.
Speaker: I then said, what animals bring to the table is consciousness. And the reason they bring consciousness to the table is because they're they're moving and and they need to be able to process a much more dynamic environment.
Speaker: And so they their nerves, they develop these nodes that become a brain eventually, but they allow them to do stuff. It's consciousness and service to desire. There's still no values. This is to me, and my metaphor this is a snake.
Speaker: So I think a snake has desire and consciousness and no values that like that I could relate to. The next step then is mammals and birds. both both of whom nurture their young, both of whom operate in social groups.
Speaker: Snakes don't operate in social groups. but and probably fish do, although I've never quite understood fish. But let's just stay with with but mammals and birds. And at that point, culture develops culture develops, and the culture is the ability of the social group to pass strategies for living down through imitation and teaching as opposed to just genetically. Prior to prior to to language and culture, you can learn stuff, but you can't you can't transmit it. I mean, it doesn't...
Speaker: without a culture that it doesn't transmit. But birds teach other birds, you know chimpanzees teach each other how to fish for snakes, are so for insects out of a log with a stick.
Speaker: And birds learn how to drop shells from a distance. And otters like learn how to do it on their chest, which is really cute. um But the point is, They're learning through imitation. And so culture, which, and again, I grew up in a place where culture was absolutely from above. It was like, no, culture is taste. Culture is the museum of modern art. It's not. a lateton that My definition of culture is no.
Speaker: Culture is any socially transmitted strategy. And as long as there's a strategic value to it, and and by the way, the society tests it out and there's natural selection. So some behaviors are successful and they promulgate and more people do them and others fail and Don't try this at home.
Speaker: Are you familiar with a book called Non-Zero by Robert Wright? No, no. Tell me about it. Robert Wright has written a number of books. One of them was called why buddhism Why Buddhism is True, if I recall correctly. And Non-Zero was the first book that I read by him. He's written a number of other things that I cannot recall the moment. But Non-Zero is, at least as I would characterize it,
Speaker: is a description of throughout human history as we've developed, why is it that a lot of human interactions tend towards a non-zero outcome and non-zero-sum sort of outcome.
Speaker: One of the examples that I recall that he gives is Let's just say that there's a village of, let's go with the Dunbar number, right? You know, there's about 150 people in this village and that village is isolated.
Speaker: Well, there are only so many people that can do so many different things in that village and they only have so much information, resources, whatever else.
Speaker: As soon as you get in contact with another village, let's say it's a day's walk away. It could be 10 days walk away. It doesn't really matter. But as soon as you get in contact with them, You have the ability to trade and you're going to want to trade because you wanted food.
Speaker: You know, your family is I don't know I'm just completely making this up right now. You have a rock quarry perhaps, and people want your stones or arrowheads, whatever it is. There are only so many people in your town that can buy them.
Speaker: Turns out that in your town, people are having a really hard time producing food. You get in contact with this other town and you didn't even go there, but somebody comes back and they have information. And they say, Geoff, you got to buy this information from me.
Speaker: You know, ah fine. You're going to be willing to buy it if you have a high enough level of trust, which trust is really important to culture and all of that and the economy and so on. But you get this information and then you say, well, all of a sudden,
Speaker: They can get these stone arrowheads. We can get food and we both end up better off than we were before. If we were to just measure based on, you know, total assets or happiness, or i don't know what. And he, it's a fairly long book, but he talks through how, you know,
Speaker: Human humanity develops more and more toward these non-zero outcomes that, that the more we interact, the more we share information. And I think he goes so far as talking about like, we're getting closer to having a quote unquote global brain and those, those greater inner connections produce even more value. But basically it the reason that I ask about the book is because one of the things that causes me to have a lot of faith in humanity, it I mean, there are tons of things that we can pick on or that are wrong or, or groups that we don't like or whatever. Right. But just believing that
Speaker: all things being equal, the average person likely is going to have a non-zero sum interaction with me is that I think there's something about human nature. And it sounds like you're saying there's something about life. There's something about maybe even the universe where we develop towards how I'm going to put it, positive outcomes. And it seems like your idea and and his line up pretty well. I think so. I mean, my claim, I mean, I think at minimum I would say this is inherent in the mammalian strategy for living.
Speaker: All mammals share the values that you just discussed. You can't be a successful mammal if you do not have a non-zero value system.
Speaker: you could Well, it's interesting. We watch people who have zero-sum value systems that are mammals, they're people, But it turns out the the world self-organizes to put a kind of a case around them. And they can still, sheer energy and power, expand their horizon to some point. But at some point, the mammalian strategy does not support that.
Speaker: Well, it's interesting. there's There's a kind of a rogue leader. i mean, if you think about the Roman Empire, they conquered every country they could find. didn't trade with them. i Actually, they did trade with them, but only after they conquered them, right? So so there was a there's a bunch of stuff going on that isn't – I'm being a little bit Pollyanna-ish about what I'm saying here But it's still baked in You have to – mammalian life is a collaborative undertaking.
Speaker: I think I recall in the infinite staircase that you say at one point that something like we have to describe all of these levels, these stairs, these was about to say frameworks, but framework, we have to describe these things through language. And so there is a point at which we, yeah correct me if I'm wrong, but in some sense, we can't, we can't describe, we can't understand perhaps things below the level of language because we have to use language to describe them.
Speaker: Is that right? We can experience things and we do experiencing things below the level of language. that The problem is when we try to derive them from language. So when we try to make language the dominant level, and it's like, listen, anything above language, totally fair game.
Speaker: So narrative, yes. Analytics, yes. Theory, yes. but But culture, no. Values, no. Desire, no. Biology, no. Chemistry, no. Physics, no.
Speaker: And so but and I think we sometimes, particularly people that are very good at language and they're very good at being intellectual, try to, they you know, they try to impose it downwards. and You can't de derive, you don't derive your values from language.
Speaker: it just That's not where they come from. Now, you can explain, i mean, we're using language, obviously we're doing it right now, we you could explore your values with language, but I don't think you can Yeah. And you see people, in fact, your dissatisfaction with those self-help books, part of it is that they're they're doing that. They're saying, I have the right answer, and it's in language. And if you just follow my right answer, you'll score.
Speaker: Yeah. I agree with you a hundred percent. I think that when, so I I've done some training in coaching and I've learned over time, i think some people are naturals at this. I definitely likely am not that if you tell someone at work,
Speaker: If you tell a a ah child that you're raising, if you tell an athlete that you're coaching, we'll do it like this, then they will not necessarily understand whatever it is that you're trying to tell them to do from a very at a very visceral kind of level.
Speaker: Because if I tell you to swing a tennis racket, a golf club, ah whatever, if I tell you to do an analysis like this, then you're if you don't have some sense of what that inner feeling is like then you're just trying to use my words and decode them you know and say well i guess what he meant was this and now you use your own words and whereas if i say something to the effect of Well, what do you think in an analysis, perhaps, what do you think a client would want to see that I bring out of you the way that you understand the situation? If I say, okay, when someone serves you the ball in tennis,
Speaker: What do you think you're supposed to do next? And why do you think you're supposed to do it? Then we, while we still use language, you know, kind of like the, the metaphors we were talking about, the chasm or whatever else it becomes a, a, the, the definition you have your own slightly different definition, but we have a Venn diagram overlap that is so close. There's 99% overlap that when we say chasm,
Speaker: we are, when we say return a ball like this, we actually now understand what each other saying. And I think what you're doing, you're using an external reference. So the problem with language is if we, if we think that it's in the language that that's what doesn't get to get across. But if you create a shared experience and then say, now let's use language to decode that experience, which is that returning the Senate, the tennis ball or whatever it is,
Speaker: Yeah, you're drawing it you're drawing it out of the experience, and that's what's creating the the Venn diagram. And again, so so it's back to that thing about so books. So if if you read a book, it's like, I have the answer, read the answer, and then you can just move on.
Speaker: No. so so so And that's why it's very interesting. By the way, people don't read books as much as they used to. I don't know if you've noticed. it but but but But they want to share experiences, but it's more Instagram. it's more It's more these these other kinds of venues.
Speaker: What we're still trying to do is share experiences. and And I think culture builds, I mean, literally the thing that is true, culture is communicated through imitation. So you can say, well, let me show you how I hold the club or how I hold the racket. And why don't you try holding it like this? And you try it.
Speaker: and and And I will. and i And I'm imitating you. And this is not natural yet for me. I'm just trying to do this. And for a while, and and if you think about by Michelangelo becoming a painter, he copied Giotto. He copied Cimabue. He copied these people.
Speaker: So, you know, there's there's a role for just how did you learn the math tables? You didn't have to learn why 8 times 7 was 56. 8 times 7 is 56. Just drill it in your brain.
Speaker: that's fine. But then along came the math people saying, well, yeah, but so what? I mean, you need to understand set theory or you need to understand kind of, you know how this all fits together. But I do think it's a – There's a case for so for a certain amount of prescriptive, just just do it. Learn your catechism, you know, do whatever, just memorize it.
Speaker: But then to your point, that doesn't internalize it. And so in the coaching, what you were doing with coaching, which was so powerful, is you were finding a ah way to let them internalize it.
Speaker: You said earlier that you're on a, I think your word was jihad to, to have us be more analytical thinkers. I would call it critical thinking. Yeah.
Speaker: So tell me about that, why it is or how you see things. Yeah, i was this is I was kind of inspired by this a couple maybe maybe a year or two ago and when we're just the whole frustration with the current administration was going on. there was i have am I live in Palo Alto and there are some people on street corners holding up a sign.
Speaker: And one person held a sign that said, stop pretending this is normal. That's exactly what we're doing. We are giving this whole behavior the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker: And actually, they it needs the doubt of the benefit. And it doesn't you don't and so what that doesn't mean shouting out the alternative point of view, it means teaching. Well, means imbue it. First of all, having the courage to say, look, that's not okay as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker: But also I think that you can't change the world. It's not like anything you or I say is going to change what's going on and and in this broader context. So you have to say, well, then what can I do?
Speaker: Well, the first thing you can do is you can do it for yourself. You can also do it for your family and your friends. There's a circle. It's not 150 people. it's i don't know what number the number for that inner circle is. but it's but whatever And you can say, look, we're not going to act this way.
Speaker: and and then i and i'm but And I'm going to represent that in the world. and ah And if i there are consequences to that, I will stand up and accept those consequences because we're doing it.
Speaker: Right now, I think the problem is we have in our – it used to be that the news media was kind of the crap detector for things.
Speaker: Now they're the crap spreader, I mean, i mean and so it's like it's so it's like that's that's really scary. um And the notion that that's sort of okay. Alternative facts. No, no, they're facts or they're not.
Speaker: the the no So there's a bunch of those kinds of things. And and that the well, anyway, so but that's the the stuff that's going on. and and And the thing with, if you look at our political system,
Speaker: The way the primary system works is it plays the advantage of the extreme voices, and therefore we we end up getting more polarization, not less. yeah The people that are leaving the government right now are people who from the center, not from the right or the left. They're from the center that are leaving. me That's not a good outcome. And so I'm concerned.
Speaker: Given some of what, not just the way that we described your book, but also given some of the discussion that we just had, I think that it's, it would be easy for someone to take away that we believe that you know, mammalian life necessarily evolves toward better ethical outcomes, for example, or more ethical behavior.
Speaker: But I think that this is a good point to clarify that Things like, well, we have a choice and also that we combat that there are just developments in technology culture, whatever, wherever we want to pin it, that make it harder to make choices that align with perhaps shared values.
Speaker: And one, I suppose it it would be worthwhile if you have any clarifications to put on that caveats for you to be able to do so. And then two,
Speaker: i'm I would be really curious to hear from you, Geoff, where you think this behavior comes from if we were maybe on a better track at some point in the past?
Speaker: Well, first of all, I think we have to, we've been talking about the positive behavior. There's a huge tradition of negative behavior and it comes from thwarted desires and consciousness and service to desire.
Speaker: And they're, instead of encountering nurturing, they encountered abuse. Instead of encountering supportive behavior, they encountered exploitation. and And so they said, okay, that's how things are. i know how to play that game.
Speaker: I will join a gang. I will i will do whatever. And and and and then there are people that rise to power in those gu in those environments, and they their interest is in exploiting the pain more and more because the more they reinforce the pain, the more power they have, the more, you know, this is where you get all the loyalty stuff. You've got to be loyalty and, you the the whole mafia thing about you can't do.
Speaker: And frankly, the administration's obsession with loyalty. It's all about this power play based on using negative emotion to be powerful. and and and And by the way, I mean like super powerful. This is not this is not is not like minor power. this And so there's this sort of yin-yang thing going on between constructive social power and destructive social power.
Speaker: And there's no guarantee who's going win, but right now feels like we're not winning it as much as I would want us to be winning. That's for damn sure. But the point is there are times when things are go better and there are times when things go worse.
Speaker: um you know So so i think we but I think what we have to say is, look, we have a limited – so I like to say we're playing a limited engagement here, people.
Speaker: where he goes were We're only on the planet for X amount of time. And when we leave the planet, probably the planet's going to look very similar to when we came. mean, it's like, don't kid yourself. But what can we do while we're here?
Speaker: And I think, what you know, in and my wish is to put myself in service to life-supporting behaviors um and in success. And so that's that's how I want spend my time. I think there are a number of things that we can say, but one thing that ties back to something you said earlier in the conversation is I think I understood you to say at one point that if there is a chimpanzee tribe, for example, where the quote unquote alpha male is the, what we seem to understand, you know, the, the stereotypical understanding of the alpha male
Speaker: is that, oh, he just pushes everybody around and all this. And I think that it has been well stated in plenty of places, especially in recent years that, no, that's the popular understanding of the alpha male. But the reality is that if the alpha male just pushes everybody around and uses his size and whatever else that the, I guess there would be the beta males, whatever, you know the next tier down,
Speaker: They might not individually be as strong as the alpha male, but collectively they're much stronger. So they'll get together. They'll take that guy out. And then on average, the alpha male or female or whatever it is, the person in power, the group in power,
Speaker: tends to have to have some consideration for the people around them. You know, if you're the chief, you have to take care of the tribe and otherwise you're not going to last very long.
Speaker: And so again, I think there are a number of ways that we can go about talking about exceptions or the trade-offs or the the negative aspects that we combat. But that was one thing that occurred to me is that you you sort of referenced that earlier.
Speaker: and I think that it's important to understand that you know if we, If we don't take into account shared values, for example, shared outcomes, then we can understand the stairs on the staircase all that we want.
Speaker: The thing is that the, that last portion of the book, you know so what do you do about this does not lead to something greater than just a description of the world.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. you You want to get to, an I mean, back to your non-zero game or whatever, non-zero sum game, whatever that was called, is look, mammalian strategies for living at their best create abundance.
Speaker: that's that That's what they're good at. and they're and And by creating everybody giving a share of abundance, you still, by the way, give the biggest rewards to the most influential people. it's not like it's it's not It's not like you peanut butter rewards across the society of any of any society. It's, you know, the rich people, i mean, there are people that have billions of dollars, right?
Speaker: I'm not one of them, and i don't think you were either. so so Not yet. but but the point is But the point is, if we can create a society where there is shared abundance, and I think that's part of the concern I'm also having about where we are right now.
Speaker: But if we have shared abundance, that that that that works. And so that's the game that you're playing. It's the game I'm playing. It's not the game that everybody's playing. Some people are playing, no I'm just going to maximize my own returns and the hell with everybody else.
Speaker: and And that's, you know. And by the way, you see that in ah in business, you see this interestingly. Yeah. You get a company that that rises to power, an IBM, an Intel, a Microsoft, ah it just anybody.
Speaker: and And if you're not careful, after they rise to power, they they start um optimizing everything to improve their own profits. And at some point, the world goes, well, hang on. I mean, what about the next? And they're like, no, no, no, this is fine.
Speaker: And so what happens, the world does build these sort of carapaces around them. And they still exist. These companies still exist, but but they no longer are vital. They're no longer connected to the next generation of of shared abundance.
Speaker: And so they become increasingly marginalized. So I do think there's there's a strong case for saying, look, creating non-zero outcomes is our superpower as mammals if we choose to use it.
Speaker: You reminded me of, gosh, I wish I could remember the book where I first came upon this, but I'm sure it's on the bookshelf behind me. that There was this book that I read where this journalist explored what has happened over decades in a lot of sort of flyover country where there was there were manufacturing jobs and the plant left 10, 20, 30 ago. and not just what has happened to the economy, but also what has happened to a sense of community. And you know you have deaths of despair, any drug use, any number of things that you might want to talk about.
Speaker: And the you know one of the things that you don't even have to pick any particular book, if you just think about If you happen to live in a situation in a community or a time where it's harder to have those non-zero outcomes, then naturally, i think your desires are going to tend toward, I need to protect. you know I need to build a wall around my property. And I'll go out and I'll trade or whatever, but only when I, I have a higher level of confidence that I'm going going to get what I need.
Speaker: And in a time of abundance or a place of abundance, I'm not saying that it always works perfectly, but. You have, I think, a higher likelihood if the manufacturing jobs, for example, are still there or the venture capital money is there, who knows what the crops are there, then you just have a higher likelihood that people will drift away from protecting me and mine.
Speaker: And they'll think a little bit more about what could I do? What could I get? What's the opportunity? I think i think one of the one of the barometers of that is, do I think my children will have a better life? Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker: And if if if I believe that, then I'm going to lean in and do it. And when I disbelieve that, and I think it's going the other way, that's when I i i i do this. The position to me, i you know, Cuba's going through hell right now because like they power that we've boycotted their thing, their power grid's going down.
Speaker: But people are coming together. People are living. People in the Ukraine are doing this. people in yeah i mean, the human spirit is kind of an amazing thing. and And so it can rise to the, it doesn't need to have abundance to be to be altruistic.
Speaker: but it's a But altruism does, yeah yeah yeah you use the word trust, which I think is a really important word. At some point, it is It does depend on trust.
Speaker: Because if if you're being altruistic and and there's no trust, you're just being a chump, right? You're just being manipulated. And so I think that is important. um It's complicated. um And I do think we create our own environment to some degree, I think. So I think that's kind of our responsibility. But at some point, there's a lot of stuff that happens that wasn't, you know, you can call it karma, but, you know, come on.
Speaker: The fact that so-and-so got hit by a car, I'm i'm sorry. that's not i mean I don't want some past life that didn't say I'm baloney. So so i think you've got to be careful with those ideas. But i do think we I do think we have to take responsibility for – well, it's a strategy for living question.
Speaker: If your strategy for living is to support life-supporting outcomes in your in your community, then then you have to play the kind of game we're talking about.
Speaker: Let's talk about something that at least at the moment cannot get hit by a car, and that is AI. So AI, at least from my perspective, certainly appears capable on some of the upper stairs, things like language, narrative, analytics, and forgive me if those are not all stairs, but things of that. Yeah, yeah they are. Absolutely, they are. yeah But does not clearly possess...
Speaker: desire consciousness or values. Now that's not to say that we couldn't speculate. we there could be operant training. There could be emergent properties. and but some of those things we, we at least have to question if not tie ourselves to it's not clear, it's not there. So I'm curious about your feelings on yeah I don't know where AI plays into this consideration about intelligence or values or how we might think about it. I'm i'm not sure. What are your thoughts? I i think you kind of, i think you got it absolutely right. AI is its natural domain is language, narrative, and analytics. that's That's where it's just like off the charts.
Speaker: But, when we When you and I use those things, they're anchored in a biological system that is hormonally driven. All biological organisms have a natural desire for what they call homeostasis.
Speaker: I'm just trying to get back to my place of greatest comfort. That's all I'm trying to do. And so culture and values and and consciousness and desire, those are four things that characterize biological systems that do not characterize AI systems.
Speaker: Now, can you get an AI system to emulate desire or to emulate consciousness or to emulate values or emulate culture? Yes, I think you can. but but But they're not organically, that it's not organically emergent from those things.
Speaker: It would actually be if it but It would be the a staic it'd be pushing the stairs down the staircase, which is the claim that I said emergence only ike make the claim emergence only works up the staircase.
Speaker: which that The claim is debatable, but anyway but but that's the claim I want to make. So when I look at the AI thing, um I think if you try to drive AI down into into culture and values, and and then is it conscious, and it just it would an AI system have rights? And it's like,
Speaker: No, there's no vulnerable. Part of rights is it's part about being vulnerable. As homeostatic biological creatures, we're vulnerable all the time. You know, we need to get back to our homeostatic norm. And we're normally not there. We're normally a little bit off to left or a little bit off to the right. Sometimes we're like way off in left field.
Speaker: but but But we need to. You know, could you program a system to emulate that that sort of elastic behavior? Yeah, you you could. But it's that but but it doesn't it's not organically. I keep on using the word organically, but there's something about saying, if you want to get to the reality of what's going on, that that's not what's going on.
Speaker: and And I think we forget that you know our brain is a biochemical system. It's not not it's not a computer. It's a bunch of smells. and And there's like 100 billion neurons.
Speaker: Every one of those neurons thinks they're the only person, only thing in the whole world. i'm It's me. It's me. and I've been signaling with a thousand other neurons, and I do this, I do that, I do that. but that's all I do. so so And that's who we are. At one level of emergence, that describes us.
Speaker: ah But I think the fact that our consciousness comes out of that substrate makes it very different than a consciousness or whatever you would call it, coming out of a silicon, electro electromagnetic silicon substrate.
Speaker: Computers do not have babies. And we do. I'm glad that you brought up that particular point because it sure seems to me test a test of some aspects of the infinite staircase and also just but our understanding of consciousness.
Speaker: What might that illuminate in our understanding of the world and our understanding of ourselves? It's just, there's so many possibilities. And I think your framework helps to set some questions in place.
Speaker: yeah I think that, well, that's what frameworks, hopefully, I mean, yeah, they're not supposed to give, you know, you the the thing, you as you were saying this, I was thinking about, well, what's the current state of affairs in AI? And one of the things you you're now learning is AI is now writing programs to improve itself.
Speaker: You're going, where's the human in the loop? And the answer is, no human in the loop. So now you say, okay, now a human's on the outside. Now, would we do everything we could to contain it? Yeah, that's what all these letters to Congress are about. It's about regulations, about guardrails, whatever.
Speaker: Humans are pretty tough to get rid of. ah so so i But I do think this thing is going to create a bunch of trouble. I mean, it it has to. and And, of course, there's always malicious people who will foster that trouble and try to exploit it.
Speaker: So, I mean, we're in for, I mean, this AI ride is going to be, it's going to be unlike any other ride we've had, I think. Because that every ride we had before AI was sort of like automating jobs away. This is this is playing a different game. it just So, yeah, I have a lot of respect for the fact that we do not know what we're doing. Yeah. But but ah but i'm the reason I'm still on it is I look at health care and I look at education and I look at citizen services and I'm thinking, you know, with AI, we could do them so much better.
Speaker: And I mean, it's totally so, and and and that's what, that's, and I think, by the way, I think there's a bunch of people that want to do that and i think we will do that. So that's why I'm still, but that's why I don't want to get off the AI train.
Speaker: I think there's a way in which critical thinking that we talked about before, it i think we didn't necessarily talk about it in this way because I think we were talking a little bit about you know what's going on in society or how we communicate with one another and somewhat separate from our understanding of AI, for example. I think there's a way in which we can also state here that the critical thinking should be applied from a lot more people just to think about, you know, but but there's a lot of people are upset about data centers right now. I don't want a data center in my area or, you know, in a way that people have been upset in recent decades about petroleum pipelines or. Atomic energy.
Speaker: Exactly. And, but there a number of other things that I think are worth thinking about the applying critical thinking. And, you know, when you were, when you first stated that, you know,
Speaker: ah us being more critical thinkers early in the conversation. One thing I thought about was I forget the author, but I know have the book behind me, book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, where which was published in 1984 or something like that. It was a while ago.
Speaker: And one of the basic ideas is that we will lose control. We will lose influence because we'll be so entertained that the people in power you know media government whoever will just be able to do whatever they want and i talked to paul slater who is now with adobe's research lab and so he does a lot of research around current state of ai and where we're going use of it and so on and he had this phrase that was sleepwalking into irrelevance
Speaker: And now he was using that phrase as, you know, we were just not paying attention. And so as a worker, for example, we, and even plenty of companies, we will just become irrelevant because we're really not picking our heads up and paying attention to what's going on. And so to come back around to where, where was trying to pick up from when, when you left off, I think that i I wouldn't necessarily challenge you know the the average Joe, the average listening public to, well, pay attention to the news and write your congressman and all that as much as to say that the world is changing. and you know it there's I would argue that what we're going through is as big of a change as the Protestant Reformation was in Western Europe, where you start to question
Speaker: what do I even mean anymore? What's my value? Because the ground, my understanding of life is shifting. But if I'm busy, I'm going to flatten this down to, if I'm busy, just scrolling TikTok, you know, then, or watching the Real Housewives of, I don't know, Abu Dhabi or whatever's on right now, then i may do that sleepwalking into irrelevance, which for 80% of people that are, you know,
Speaker: economically, financially, cannot survive losing their job, that's a bad place to end up in. It is. You were saying, I love sleep walking into irrelevance. That's a great phrase. It reminded me, i mean, we were talking about people who get caught in that.
Speaker: It reminds me of Thoreau's thing about the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. That's what happens when you sleepwalk into irrelevance, because now you no longer have the power to influence what happens around you. And so, you know, I think the i think the important message is, look,
Speaker: ah So I'm really, so by the way, as a strategy guy, everything I do is about power. My job is to help my clients be more powerful. They can perform, when they perform and they make a whole lot of money, that's their job.
Speaker: My job is to get theirs pointed in the right direction with the right equipment, the right objective so they can have a maximum chance of success and have an impact on the world. So it's about power. And so when you're when you're in a situation where you're feeling like I don't, I have lost power or, you know, sometimes literally, um then i think like the strategy has always got to be, so collapse your focus.
Speaker: Initially, maybe just to yourself to get yourself in shape. But then, okay, that was my immediate family. And so i have this concentric circle sort of image in my head. that says you want to get, and that's why I said this efficient frontier is a way to say, at what circle do you you now lose power?
Speaker: other words, if you expand beyond one circle too far, you've diluted your power enough that you can no longer have impact. so and And I think what you'd like to say is, over time, I hope I can expand my circle and I can have greater and greater impact over a larger and larger and environment. That's progress, and that's, ah but periodically we have setbacks,
Speaker: What you can't do when you have a setback is try to maintain power out here where you were when you're no longer, that's just not the way it is anymore. And so I do think as people think about their lives, you know, I do want them to try to expand their power and have more impact. I want every person I deal with, I want them to be more powerful.
Speaker: at doing whatever they believe would contribute to the better betterment of humanity. um But at times it's like, yeah, but not now. or not we got we we We have to do some – we'll play a little defense before we play offense.
Speaker: Geoff, you might have just said it in one way, but if you could snap your fingers and people listening to this would wake up tomorrow and they're going to believe something different. It's not that you're trying to convince them. It's that they see the world in a different place. They think about AI in a different way or they act, whatever it is that you snap their fingers and they believe this thing now.
Speaker: It's going to cause them to act in a different way. They'll vote in a different way. They'll treat other people differently. Is there something that you would snap your fingers and have people believe tomorrow? Good question. I would ask them to answer as deeply and as honestly and as innocently as possible, which is, you know, again, we're all temporary residents of this planet. This is not forever people.
Speaker: So the time matters. So time matters. The question is, what is it most important for you to be in service to? And for me, the phrase in service to is the anchor point that connects people to the world, connects me to the world.
Speaker: And so because once you answer that question, you say, and then is your behavior consistent with being in service? it could How could you improve your behavior to be in more service?
Speaker: What behaviors are are causing you to actually lose ground? yeah and I mean, we all have behaviors that are setting us back, right? In your golf game, if nothing else. But but so ah so we all have them.
Speaker: so that But I think that's i think i think the things that i the self-help movement, what bothers me about the self-help movement is it's too self-centric. If you focus on yourself, it doesn't work.
Speaker: You've got to focus on yourself and in relationship to something beyond yourself. And so what is that? And then, and by the way, that's what religion's about. the as Just to go back to where we started, it's kind of what philosophy I think should be about.
Speaker: Geoff, if someone is interested in learning more, whether it's reading your books or learning about you, where should they go after listening to this? Well, there's there's a website, i think, amazingly called geoffreyamoore.com, I believe. so And then also, if you're on LinkedIn, i write i post typically one philosophy blog and one business blog entry.
Speaker: Try Trinity every week. So that's kind of where the content, that' where that's where I'm spending most of my writing time right now. And those would be the two places. I will link to those in the show notes. And Geoff, I really appreciate you being here. I've really thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker: I'm glad. Well, thank you.
