Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 14: John Henry Clippinger (Encore)
This blog is a transcription of the 14th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews John Henry Clippinger, from MIT media lab and Token Commons Foundation. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, I’m your host Gregory Landua.
Hey there regenerates, welcome to the planetary regeneration podcast. Got another episode for you the always amazing John Henry Clippinger with MIT media lab and Token Commons Foundation and advisor to many of the most exciting blockchain projects and technology projects more generally that I’m aware of. John and I always have this rapid fire breathless exchange, that’s really intellectually stimulating and a lot of fun. And we’re really talking in this — first we start out this episode with him dropping some really crazy, amazing things about bio computers and we bridge the whole gamut from quantum computing, biocomputing, computational storage and DNA. Also, the main central thread and the reason why I wanted to do another podcast with John right now is there’s this really important part of this podcast in which we’re trying to describe a probabilistic network verification and the scientific method behind that versus the deterministic mechanistic verification method. This really underpins region network and switch and anyone whose creating digital representations of real world outcomes, that I’m aware of that’s doing a good job of it, has this approach. I don’t know that it’s been names, I haven’t come across — ask john more, but the name of this more rigorous approach to being able to make layered attestations that add up to a threshold whereby we accept something as true, and it turns into an assest in our case and in region network, an ecosystem service credit. Anyways, there’s this section in the middle that’s really treating that, that I was really wanting to get out in the open with John and check some of my assumptions, hear his thinking, and so we go back and forth about that. Pretty excited to be able to share that with our listeners and just in general, John somehow manages to maintain this amazing integrity of swimming in the world of Ivy League institutions and [Dovos] but also having this super grounded integrity and pretty radical outsider perspective from within that. So I always really respect and enjoy being able to have that as someone whose sort of on a little bit more on the outside of that world, looking in, working on innovating and transforming our world and our economy, myself having connections with folks who are deeply imbedded and have such high integrity is just a breath of fresh air. So, really excited to be able to offer this to you the listener, and hope that you enjoy it as much as I did. There’s definitely a few times that the signal breaks up and there’s little bits missing here and there. Again, please forgive the internet hiccups. I hope that the depth of the conversation makes up for any production issues. So have a great time listening and let me know what you think if you’d like. Cheers.
Gregory: Just a flash context, John and I were in the middle of our usual multifaceted lightening more of a conversation and you and I were just jamming out and I said, “Hey, John let’s pause this and switch over and record it.” Because we’re getting into territory that feels really important to make the conversation public where we’re talking about what needs to happen at this urgent moment in the evolution of our economy from an extractive one to a regenerative one. What are the key pieces without which we can’t move forward –
John: Yes. That’s exactly the framing. So one of the things I’ve been working — I think I sent you an example of that paper I did on the reflective series organization, the LLC. So that’s evolved and people are picking up on that and the question is, “If you take that concept and you translate, how do I create a node that basically anyone can download and set up a legal entity and then start their own kind of generative economy and then have it be interoperable with others.” So, that is the — anyone can grow that network out and have it function on those principles, generate value, retain value, hit these goals, hit these ESG goals they’ve been tracked capitally on that basis. So you have 22 trillion dollars trying to find a place. It’s like taking capitalism from within, and rather than having it be extracted and value going out to third parties and [being based] on the mechanical models, base them on a biological, ecological model, we build that in. That’s what that thing is designed to do from the very beginning in it’s DNA. This may sound like a bit of digression, but I think you would say it’s not. One of the things that I found out in DLD that really blew the top of my head off –
Gregory: What’s DLD again?
John: The digital life design is a conference in Munich, but they have them around the world. And they had CEO of Merck there who’s a Chemist. He’s talking about — I didn’t realize that Merck did a lot of work in semiconductors, but he said the future of computing is chemistry, and I said, “Oh, really.” And then they had this kid come up from MIT with his startup of a company called Catalog that was doing DNA storage in computing, and I had no idea it was as far along as it was. You can store — and they’ve done it — you can store 200 [petabytes] in a gram of DNA which means –
Gregory: What do you think DNA is?
John: What?
Gregory: I mean it surprising from the technological standpoint but it’s so logical from that’s what DNA is –
John: I know that but they had a technology for doing this. So that they can actually do that and they can store all of Wikipedia in a gram and recover it. And what they also can do is parallel computing on that. And then what is the energy consumption? The energy consumption is minimums. So, it is the predicate for the evolving of a biological computing system of an economy based on those principles, my view. So, you go from 200 petabytes to zettabytes and that’s everything on the internet, and that comes out to be, at least by my calculations, like 24 pounds of DNA. So, what I’m getting is –
Gregory: How many pounds of DNA do I have?
John: Exactly, that’s what I was wondering. Here is even more interesting than that because if you — and then it say if you’re going to start storing everything at that level, every cell, then our concept of storing in computing is really off, and probably would nature — and this gets into the whole idea of Lamarckian versus Darwinian transition of information. Now we’re saying, “there’s a course at MIT on Lamarckian and acquired characteristics of evolution.” They’re now seeing Lamarckian principles –
Gregory: Well isn’t Lamarckian evolution just like epigenetics, wink, wink.
John: Exactly. But it’s more than just epigenetics. Suddenly your crashing this whole paradigm, just saying, “Woah, they’re storing a huge amount of information that maybe may not be [a tree] aware of it, but there are all these things going on and probably in evolution, probably selects for the ability to transmit it across generations.” And there’s mechanisms to do that. And there’s a wonderful paper I recommend you that’s written by Danny Hillis, I’ll send it to you, called ‘The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement.’ You will probably appreciate that. And we’re in the entanglement world, not the enlightenment, so this is an entanglement concept versus an enlightenment. Computers are the epitome of the enlightenment. Danny is one of these polymaths, he invented a company called Connection Machine, [Thinking Machines] a long time ago, pure parallelism connectionism, didn’t work but he had a company called Applied Minds. He does something called Metaknowledge base on a Google bot. He’s a very, very forward thinker on this. We are moving into this new era, so when we start thinking about these things, and when you start thinking about making this transition and making it regenerative based, then the design points should be from that design point and actually the Bitcoin world, all that is still within the old paradigm.
Gregory: Oh my god, so much so.
John: There we go. What’s interesting about these guys is that they’re scaling it up, so they not only do storage, but they can also do computation. It just all makes sense. Right? It’s not going to happen next year, but to me, it’s like a major marker.
Gregory: What are we looking at? What are were the estimations for when they could bring a pound of DNA computing online? What is that going to look like? Is that like a vat of DNA?
John: They have a little bottle, a little vial, a little capsule of “Here’s all the Wikipedia”. Right? And you keep your own data. So, you don’t have to put it out in storage and you have your own. You’re going to have it in the capsule that you control yourself.
Gregory: But that was the DNA manufactured. And I guess my other question here –
John: It’s a synthetic DNA. I’ll just send you the link. They do good videos and the company is called Catalog DNA. What they embedded was basically a transcription system that allowed you to map digital data into DNA and then recover it and back.
Gregory: That makes complete sense.
John: Oh yeah, but now we have a whole different foundation to think about how a computing organization. We think in terms that are available metaphors, hence we’re using mechanical metaphors which still stuck in that shit. Right? Now we have something that is very powerful that completes the upends of traditional notions of boundaries and how thing work. Everything communicates with everything else. Right?
Gregory: Which totally transforms the availability heresthetic the — what is possible is a function of what we see around us.
John: Yes. We cocreate it, we create it. That’s Danny’s point I’ll send you that. I’m interested in doing a podcast on this. Untangling the Entanglement, and also then looking at blind spots, things that we thing are true are not, or things we dismiss maybe we shouldn’t dismiss. And Lamarckian concepts is one of them. This is so consistent with how you guys are thinking about things. Right? In that if you have the head of Merck saying — and this seems to be a consensus out of MIT, that future of computing is chemistry. But it’s just not the particulars of that, it’s like, how do you actually create things that are based upon these design principles. It’s the design principle, it’s institutional principles, it’s all those things. Right? That blew the top of my head off when I saw.
Gregory: That’s pretty fascinating, I guess another side is before we return to the main trunk of the conversation. Did you go to Davos this year and what –
John: No I didn’t. This was something as a warm up to Davos a lot people — the DLD in Munich is like everyone gets done and then they jump in the car and they go to Davos and Sandy was in Davos a lot of people — I’m not a big fan of Davos.
Gregory: Yeah. I sort of wouldn’t think you would be.
John: No and I’ve been there and I was on one of their councils for six or eight years around [data] and stuff, and it’s sort of ritualizing acting it out. But you’re still imbedded within a system that is very owned by basically a medieval caste system that’s run by Klaus. But anyway.
Gregory: That’s always been, as and outside, that’s been my sense or my judgment. Like I’ve been invited to go a couple of times, a couple of times people have asked me to pay them to be there and a couple of times not. And I’ve always said, “Well, I mean, I don’t think so.” If you can make a really strong case –
John: There’s a lot of people there, there’s a lot. But the premise of it is the predicate of the thing that fucks it up. Actually, the more and more I find myself getting more radically divorced from that. To be truthful, even though I have issues with it, I worked on the Bernie campaign and ended up calling up people. Because I think that we’re at a point of this massive transformation and though he doesn’t have it 100% right, he’s got it more right than others. I just don’t like this privilege perspective. Anyway, do take a look at it. I’ll send you the links on those. I think it really important conversation because I think it is a new culture, it’s a new sensibility. It is like going from medieval to market to we’re in a whole other phase.
Gregory: I’m tempted to get into the progressiveness to our evolutionary philosophy there as you say that. But instead of doing that, I want to turn back to the main truck of what we’re talking about where we’re both sort of breathlessly noting the opportunities and cataloging the people who are working at this edge of how to create spatial contracts, perhaps create rights of nature based economies, create new economic mechanisms where by biodiversity or biological carbon efficiency or other things that produce a whole corollary co-benefit public good through the way. What’s missing there? There’s this stack, there’s this technology stack from network consensus and cryptographic integrity up through this identity solutions for the provision of attestations or data about things and then the mechanisms for this whole system to click together. And what’s the most important thing for the community of people to get right first, and what’s in the way of us getting it right?
John: Great question. I’ve really pondered and all that. So, it’s interesting you ask that now because I’ve organized a meeting at MIT about — there’s a whole group there, the city science group are about developing this new kind of regenerative ecosystem and one point I want to make that I think is really important is this whole idea of generative design in a biological model versus a mechanical model. And the thing is that a biological system has a boundary of what it is and so in generative design, you want to design it inherently not to create externalities. One of the things that we’ve looked at [inaudible 00:19:13]. You do something, you create a mess, and then you have the public sector clean up the mess or a nonprofit clean up the mess. And the messes are getting so big that they can’t be cleaned up and that can delegitimize the government. So, the biological model is ‘’no I have a membrane, this cell is divine, the identity of the system is to perform this way and it does not create these externalities.” That’s generative design. So, this is where a lot of stuff that’s coming out of Autodesk, I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the stuff they’ve done. And it’s also Neil Gershenfeld’s stuff about designing reality, he has Fab Lab, is the idea that you set certain constraints and then you almost biological principles and they start to generate these products that — say if a motorcycle chassis looks more like a pelvis than a motorcycle chassis. But you set outcomes that are very immeasurable. So think from the point of view of driving this whole process and making the transition, I think it very important to identify measurable, verifiable, independently verifiable, outcomes. And that you can prove that that thing — and you can replicate it. You can hand it to anybody, it doesn’t depend whose measuring it, they get the same result.
Gregory: Exactly. That’s sort of one of the key points that I wanted to thoroughly look at for our listeners, which is around the state of the art of verification that currently exists, like how does this work in corporate accounting around ESGs and what’s it look like now and what is emerging. Which I think you were pointing at what’s emerging. Which is there’s consensus about the outcome that’s being measured and there’s consensus about the methodology of measurements, and there providence and transparency around the supporting data that is supporting a claim about the outcome that’s being measured. Is that accurate?
John: That’s exactly the right thing. What I’ll add to that another part is this, is that you also have — so there’s never a perfect claim, there’s never a per say assertion. It is contingent on space and there’s points in time and so you really have certain ascertains and claims and processes that a relying party is willing to accept at some point.
Gregory: Yeah. There’s a threshold. So there’s consensus about the threshold.
John: Right. There’s a threshold. Now what you want to do is have an open system. This is why I love NFTs, is Non Fudgeable Tokens, is that you can have a number of parties compete to create different kinds of titles assertions and then to challenge that process. And you say, “Well, you know what, that one’s going to go, but I only need that. I also need this and that as well. Because I have this higher standard than someone else.” Which you don’t have a single authority, quote, dictating what those are, because then that’s –
Gregory: Sort of a polycentric [grassroots], what do you need, what do you and I need.
John: It’s not just [grassroot] you need to design this so it can’t get captured. The problem is that at every point, someone is going to try and capture — some entity, this is in nature, you find this in nature. They emerge as a subgroup is going to try and capture something and take it over. So you really have to have built in the randomization to make that not possible in order to [inaudible 00:23:01]. It doesn’t mean you won’t have some points of hierarchy but then it’s not a permanent, it can be superseded by another kind of process.
Gregory: A bit more on about that — about what gets captured and who captures it in this sort of network topology that is based on [NFTs] representing
(break in audio)
John: Whoops, I lost you here.
Gregory: — use our friend switch. Like let’s use our friends, let’s use our concrete — I’m sorry, am I back?
John: Yeah. You’re back now.
Gregory: What I was going to ask is, let’s use a concrete example, for instance Switch, and just say, “What may be captured, and how would it be captured? And give me an example around an [NFT] that represents green electrons.”
John: Right. That’s a really good question. One of the challenges is that if there’s sufficient economic value, there’s going to be an incentive for some party to intervene and spoof the system and extract some of the value.
Gregory: Counterfeit the [NFT] sort of.
John: Well counterfeit the assertion. In other words, if you’re trading me is correct and [inaudible 00:24:34] and they have lots of value on the market, and people are buying in order to get their power purchase agreements, that has real economic value. So, that’s going to incentivize some party to target that. So, you really need to have a number of independent processes that are there. For example, in monitoring the production of solar energy, it’s very important to know the location, the time of day, and the devices being measured. Beginning to verify the device, that it’s not a phony device and certify it’s a registered device so somebody hasn’t spoofed and put another device in it. You also have estimates of how that device should preform under those conditions.
Gregory: Right. So that’s the key, and this is what I want to unpack. Because just the other day in the public region that we’re telegram channel, I was having this conversation with — I’m not sure of this person’s history, but it was a conversation I’ve had many times with people who are old school bitcoin, deterministic in their world view, the only role for network consensus is deterministic computation. They’re sort of saying, “you can’t deterministically guarantee this attestation about an electron or [inaudible 00:26:02].”
John: It’s all about calculating risk. But they’re in the enlightenment model, in the entanglement model, everything’s probabilistic.
Gregory: Right. And that’s what I’m saying, and so how do you [inaudible 00:26:12]
John: [inaudible 00:26:12] those guys, if they’re thinking about [being riggered] your applying a scientific model that doesn’t apply to this.
Gregory: That’s right. So, this is a key piece, from my perspective, which is the science of verification of real world claims to the blockchain or that is to say the oracle problem, is not actually, as it’s often times characterized a problem of optimizing deterministic attestations. It’s a problem of creating multi-layered probabilistic — triangulation –
John: I mean, we know how to do that. There’s a lot of work done in computer science and how do you make a reliable network out of unreliable components. There’s a whole a lot that’s well established, is well know and so after you have to have each component itself can be unreliable, but in some it’s a robust system.
Gregory: That’s right. Let’s go back to Switch and for our listeners, because I think you and I have a shared mental model, but I want to make it explicit. Which is in switch, correct me where I have something wrong, Switch’s value proposition is to essentially verify and then certify the provision of a green electron into the grid so that –
John: Yes, but in the origin of it, the time of it. Because one of the [inaudible 00:27:47] so one of the critical things that say, “If I’m a buyer of credits and I want to manage my [inaudible 00:27:53]. The time and the location become very important.
Gregory: And that’s where consensus and time stamping comes in.
John: Well the time stamping, you can have a deterministic process, but the point is that stamps that and here’s a device and shows this time of day in this point of view. But it may be compromised, so you have to basically have multiple attestations and some of them just based upon predicted models saying, “Well, what is the expectation? Is this within the norm, or is [enough]?”
Gregory: Exactly, so there’s layers. So, first you have provenance of data is the first layer, as I was saying earlier. The second layer is coherence with an agreed upon model and the third layer is coherence with another way of knowing. For instance, I could audit Switch using publicly available satellite information saying — like they could provide all this information and then I could say, “At this geographic location, there does exist solar panels and their producing within the boundaries of what we would expect [inaudible 00:29:09]” or I could say, “no, no, no. I can tell that there is not actually the appropriate number of solar panels or whatever it is in this location from this third party and the model doesn’t fit and I would like the flag a counterclaim that I –“
John: Flag it, we will not [inaudible 00:29:31] the title, that is not a valid claim. But there’s even another level in this, because let’s assume that there’s some evil force that has satellites — that they can take over the satellite system and they co-op that and so suddenly what has been a well relied upon source has suddenly become suspect. So, you want to be able to have an open system that someone else says, “I think that, and I’m going to generate a new process and I’m going prevent that title” and I say, “ You know what? I think that guy’s right, I’m a relying party, I’m going to insist upon that as well.” So, it’s an open system, it’s not a closed system.
Gregory: That’s with a market mechanism around attestation’s claims in verification where by — that’s what keeps everybody in balance.
John: I have a hard time with the market now, and I’m very [cured]. I believe in homeostatic systems rather than market systems. So, I think that it’s not all a price mechanism, but it’s partially a price mechanism.
Gregory: Say more about that because I guess I started my career working in a, I don’t know how to characterize this, but maybe in some way anti-market. Of late, I think due to my proximity with — in the relationship that I maintain with how we’re funded and how build product and how that relates to the market. I’ve sort of drifted to be more and more in my language, I’ve noticed I’m more and more market and business oriented. So, I want to take a step back and just say, explain the different between — because I think what you’re talking about is maybe nested markets. It’s sort of not the omnipotence of the market.
John: It’s not an omnipotence of one price signal, what happens is that there’s a loss of information that goes — and this is where I believe in multi-token models and in homeostatic models. A market is a very constant of pricing signals is sort of a mechanistic system. It doesn’t self- regulate, it clears and collapses, basically. In a homeostatic system with feedback, you have multiple signals that adjust themselves because it’s a multidimensional problem. It doesn’t resolve. And what happens, and this is where I get really in my head in — is that what you have is by single market signal. It ultimately is all aggregated out to those people who control the price can then control everything is resolved to the control to single price signal. And that’s why Wall Street in concentrated and that’s why Wall Street runs Main Street. What you do not want is have everything resolved to a single price signal, this is where a real [logger] has with the libertarians. I would argue, and this is whereas an entanglement model versus a enlightenment model, because — and this is where multiple-token capture different aspects of things. The body doesn’t work, there’s not a price signal on the body, it does not have [options] in the body. These are low balancing systems that mitigate themselves in order to allow other points of complexity and regulation in order to joint outcomes rather than winner takes all outcomes. This gets into evolutionary models of multi-level selection versus individual selection and this is where you get all this religious wars about Dawkins and this sort of Libertarians say, “Well, it has to be self [initiating] it can’t be multi-level selection, but we know from Game Theory, repeated games, that the cooperative outcomes are higher. And in order to have cooperative outcomes, you have multiple dimensions. And that’s why the multi-token model, and that’s why the stuff that we’re doing at MIT and this sort of semi-homeostasis is like, you don’t optimize for one dimension. I mean everything gets optimized in prices, your just collapsing information.
Gregory: This is something back in 2012 I co-published this book called Regenerative Enterprise in which we used a framework that we had generated several years earlier called the eight forms of capital and we sort of talked about — the subtitle of the book Regenerative Enterprise was “Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance”. The whole premise is you have these multi-forms of value each of which have different rules for settlement and different rules of exchange that you have to maintain integrity. There is no single, as you said [settlement] rule, otherwise –
John: Absolutely, that’s what I’m saying and the reflexive mutual organization is the effort to create that and that was regenerative, you captured internally and it’s a homeostatic system that trying to maintain the boundary condition of what it is. It’s a living thing.
Gregory: Have you read the DISCO manifesto, slight aside, DISCO manifesto, Distributed Cooperative Organization, instead of DOW, they put together a white paper around what a distributed cooperative organization looks like that isn’t this sort of — Vitalik Buterin is a very, very smart guy, but he tends — and the work that he’s been doing with Glen Weyl on radical exchange work. I think is transforming his world view, which I’m very excited about. But I think, by in large, at least the beginning phases of Ethereum, Vitalik as a thought leader in this space is very in this Dawkins libertarian –
John: He was. You can see his mind evolving, he’s absorbing everything and this is a crux of it. You have people like [Novak] and [Wilson] and others talking about multi-level selection and they’re modeling these things out. I think that is a huge shift in how you think about a cooperative system repeat games, you have different equilibriums. This is what life is about. You’re made up of six trillion cells and microorganisms that are all working together. There are all these trade offs and bouncing acts that are going together.
Gregory: Have you been keeping track of James Lovelock’s recent work?
John: Just periodically.
Gregory: I mentioned that I just listened to the podcast with Douglas Rushkoff and James Lovelock which is totally worth listening to.
John: Is that right? That would be totally cool. He’s always entertaining. He had Rushkoff — the frustration of this is like with Rushkoff, he’s holding on to a traditionalist notion in some sense. And this idea, and this is why I’m building this kind of entanglement, because it’s suddenly refrains the reality condition of the –
Gregory: Yeah. It’s like instead of the enlightenment leading to the singularity. The entanglement with the [circularity]
John: Exactly. But they’re embedded singularities. It’s so critical to reframing our role in nature this way and again, the little trope that I’m talking about is like when you build into the generative design is a sense, your not generating externalities, the public private sector thing goes away because of public of quotes sector is the failure, and therefore, you’ve got to clean up the mess. It’s an afterthought. So, when you started thinking of benefit corporations and things like that, there’s still predicate in that old model. I say this thing is designed from the beginning to be able to create this kind of value.
Gregory: At some point, I’d love your reflections. I’ll send you a copy of ‘Regenerative Enterprise’. I wrote it years ago, there’s certain things where I read it I’m like, “Man I totally disagree with I just said there.” But, the aim was to create something that — it’s very short — it’s meant to be read in less than an hour and just a brief manifesto of what we were calling regenerative enterprise, which was right in this wheelhouse of how — and our thesis in that book was multi-capital, balancing and exchange, sort of upgrading the arithmetics of reciprocity between forms of capital. And the last thing that we were saying that I’m not sure if it’s missing or not, but it feels like it’s missing still from the discourse around the biomimicry circular economy world is that a single organization can never be regenerative on its own, there’s an ecosystem that achieves through its interactions with one another. The attribute, essentially –
John: But they’re usually changing. Again, this idea that the — the enlightenment concept is we’re all atoms and we’re in an isolated and we have subject-object relations where in the entanglement, they’re usually constructive. They neutrally construct as by their interactions, they redefine each other. There’s within certain parameters. And that’s always evolving and –
Gregory: Which is such a common sense — it’s so deeply common sense from an indigenous world view perspective.
John: Oh yeah, it [inaudible 00:40:32].
Gregory: Exactly and it engenders such a depth of respect and pause and care when you start to realize that — I mean, this has all been maybe overplayed in certain circles, but the interdependence of…
John: There’s a big “Oh shit”, and it’s like, “Oh, good lord. We’re really…” — I mean that’s the other side [inaudible 00:41:02] is actually going into those points of view that I’ve always thought were dismissed and say, “Oh, didn’t think of the [animists] were right.” It was anonymous that [inaudible 00:41:14] that’s crazy, how could that be? But the science decides, “Woah not so fast.”
Gregory: But it’s coming back. The science –
John: It’s grounded in the science. The other thing that was good about this event in DLD is a guy [Jack Henry]. I don’t know if you know Jack, but Jack is a little bit of a [phenome] himself. He’s a neuroscientist guy out of Columbia and he started [inaudible 00:41:24] was it Earth-works, I can’t remember the name. He made a lot of money, started another company, made a lot of money, and then he went to Google X or Alphabet X and he immersed himself in quantum mechanics and quantum computing, and he just came out with a very technical book on it. And Jack is hyper enthusiastic about these very concepts because –
Gregory: Well quantum computing is just my brain. Right?
John: Well, the quantum is a springer book. It is filled with equations. This guy is really going back to basic principles and all the mathematics and [inaudible 00:42:34]. It’s very rigorous.
Gregory: Is it my statement, although maybe it sounded flippant, it’s really a question which is, “Is my understanding…” — because I’m not, I’m certainly not technical, probably to make a lot of meaning out of a book like that. But I sort of have this intuitive understanding that quantum computing is a leap back towards how intelligent non-local probabilistic connecting past and future intelligence resides within my body essentially.
John: That’s what I’m getting at. But he’s saying the whole point, and he saying in time quantum computing to notions of physics, and in fact, that by doing quantum computings and doing the measurement and doing the intentions of the [inaudible 00:43:25] you’re changing the physics of things. You’re creating new realities. And whether you’re going to the [Mully] versus world or not. It unsettles what have been premises for what we consider to be scientific understanding. Then you go into the idea that — so if information’s a form of matter, information’s not about something it is something. It’s like, “Oh Fuck. What does that mean?” I just lost you here. You froze up.
Gregory: Yeah. We had a little internet blip.
John: I have a call I’ve got to get to with a guy whose name’s [Pablo Rodriguez] whose going to be working for Alphabet X and he want to do a project. He’s out of Barcelona and he ran a [telephonic] of stuff in a new lab and he’s looking for an ex-prize kind of challenge and he wants to work together on this. But my concern, and that’s with him, then the Alphabet X, everything that we’re talking is anathema to Google. I don’t want to further Google. So, it’ll be interesting to have the conversation.
Gregory: What the hell happened there? The way I make sense of it is that they started out, as many of us do, as entrepreneurs with high ideals and then I guess the easy story is that just the intrinsic misalignment of incentives in shareholder capitalism and the VC world, just contorted it all into this [world leading machine].
John: They captured the whole thing and it created its own culture. It subverted it. And I want to do the inverse of version. I want to create that — let’s see, I just have to look at a message here. Okay, there’s no problem. That’s why this idea of a node is being able to — people can be their own originators of nodes you can have all the [inaudible 00:46:01] they will naturally generate these infrastructures. This is my fantasy for dealing in this. This is very challenging world we’re in right now, with climate and Trump and everything else.
Gregory: Circling back, so using Google as perhaps a cautionary tale, what –
John: Well let me [inaudible 00:46:23] there are two things that I’m seeing. I was at Harvard early on when Facebook was [inaudible 00:46:29] and I was very much skeptical about what was happening at Facebook and challenge it and was very unpopular as a result of that. I was sort of pissing in the spring and everyone wants to build their career on bouncing off of that, and I say, “no, no, no”. And then you look at Google and those guys, where they came from, actually one of them I think is Larry Page had the same thesis advisor I did, Terry Winograd and Terry is very good guy. But, the roots of corruption are very easy. They were the “we’re going to do no evil”. There is this sort of lack of reflection in that community, and being able to easily believe your own stories, and then when they get reinforced and you’re making tons of money and everyone’s hanging all over you. I think that is easily corrupted. Zuckerberg is never, by personality, was open to self-reflection, I think. I mean his focus; his personality is such and is part of his success. But there is some part of the culture that is very shallow. And not reflective and it is a certain set of personality traits that go with that. It’s a broke culture. It’s selection for. It selects out those people that are not like that. And that’s why, I think you have to challenge the premises of that. It’s so optimized around a spectrum-based mentality, it really is. It sort of succeeds and fails on that dimension. And that’s why, you look at a San Francisco, I’m going out there on Monday. San Francisco was a wonderful funky quirky little place and now it’s just consumed by the broke culture and it’s the most mercenary, it’s more so than Wall Street. And it’s a tragedy there.
Gregory: As an entrepreneur there’s this polarity that I haven’t been able to reconcile, I don’t know that I’ve been able to find the third term that makes it into a whole. It’s still like these opposing forces, and that polarity is, on one hand, you have the corrupting and extracting force of capital and more so the culture of the people who are wielding the capital. Right? Versus, on the other hand the other polarity is the need or the desire for trillions of dollars, as you were noting. Trillions of dollars of capital to reroute, in support of a thriving ecosystem and as an entrepreneur whose building tools, infrastructure, businesses that are meant to serve the refertilization of our carbon based biodiverse beautiful atmosphere. And reintegration of that in a healthy way with the economy, how do we — and I think you probably have the same question. Or maybe you’ve solved it, maybe you haven’t. How do we create the right relationship with investment capital that aligns incentives to support the evolution of that culture into something that’s a healthier expression?
John: [inaudible 00:50:24] This is right on. I couldn’t agree with you more on this. And I struggle with this because always thought technology is a way of innovation as reinventing and creating opportunities that can fall back and deal with all those social problems. I think there are others like that, but it’s also imbedded in this very libertarian, “I can make a ton of money and no ones going to tell me what to do” culture, and people can accelerate and act very efficiently in that and so there are amazing things that have come out of that. But I think now, there’s a different culture of companies that are coming out of this. And you represented [inaudible 00:51:06]. I see this — there’s a lot of [false] signals in this. My daughter was very much involved in the social innovation at Brown and she got involved with all that. And she got really turned off about — there was this sort of notion of everyone saving the planet and the resumes got better and better and they could market themselves, but they really weren’t doing. There’s a really folk aspect to [inaudible 00:51:29].
Gregory: Yeah. It drives me nuts.
John: It’s total bullshit. And I think she got really burned on that she’s really reexamining that. But, I think now there is a new kind of culture, and you represent, the guys were raised greener that way. These guys, they’re offered money if they’re going to change their model. They say, “No, we’re not”. And they’re working their ass off getting nothing, but they know they’re doing the right thing. They absolutely know in their gut they’re doing the right thing. Therefore, your relationships with people who share that are genuine relationships rather than transactional relationships. This would hold you together. And that’s part of building the movements, the culture of this thing,
Gregory: long [regeneration].
John: But it’s true. But when they say, “do no evil”. As soon as that came out, I said, “they will do evil.” That was such a hollow signal that I said the inverse situation, it’s just a matter of time.
Gregory: So another question –
John: and I’m going to have to go in about five minutes, I’ve got another call.
Gregory: My last question, are you familiar with Eric Weinstein, Peter Thiel’s sort of fun director and he’s –
John: I did read some of that stuff. Thiel’s not one of my favorite people.
Gregory: Yeah. No doubt.
John: So, I may harshly judge him. I don’t know.
Gregory: The thing is, what I appreciate about Eric, his podcast is unique. It’s similar in a way to the Planetary Regeneration podcast where his aim is not to give listeners bullet points, but to instead just dive off the deep end into these deep conversations and he’s a physicist, and so he’s really excited about that world. He has this concept of the DISC, like the Distributed Information Suppression — whatever the ‘C’ stands for and it’s this idea that he’s sort of tuning into a [naming] around how [inaudible 00:53:53] — but corporate as well, how there’s this immune system response to actual innovation. At the same time, he’s working for Peter Thiel, so there a little bit of — I mean I can see it because Peter Thiel is so anti-university. So, there’s some marriage there that they feel that there’s a kindred spirit, but I guess I’m wondering, as someone like, I’m not an insider in that way. I sort of look at everybody and I have the dual experience of wanting to belong and wanting to get the fuck out at the same time. That’s my experience.
John: I know what you mean.
Gregory: I’m just curious, how do we navigate what I think is correctly termed the “Immune Response to Evolution and regeneration and Innovation” that both the business sector we were just talking about, the way the capital perverts things. But I also think the academic world, there is this immune response to the actual transformative innovation. And how do we navigate that?
John: Well, you absolutely do, because you’re challenging — and they want to suppress it because you’re challenging — I think that what you do, maybe it’s like any virus, that you can mutate faster and you could create, what is it? A Phoversion? I think that what you do not want to do, and this is the whole blind spot thing, you do not want to register on their radar. Part of that is not to make yourself visible to them and be typed as either antibody and they can categorize you. I just think part of this — and this is why I’m all into the execution of this rather than the explanation of this. I think if we create this self-replicating node that works with these principles and outcompetes the other ones [inaudible 00:56:30] — it’s outcompeting, it’s going to collect capital, because it better deals with risk, it suddenly is a more trusted signal and it functions better and then it will subsume the other. I just think that’s the way. These things cannot explain their emotional. I mean this is whole other conversation to which extend to which people change and their thinking — reason follows emotion, basically and so they’re locked into certain states. In order to regulate those emotional states, certain factors in the world have to be true for them, and they will hold on to that, and they can not — regardless of whether the world looks like that or not. Right? And this is where trumping universe, this is where it is.
Gregory: [inaudible 00:57:25]
John: We’re not going to change that. We both see that there is this new way, and it’s really predicated on things that are provable and a new science explaining and building things that are much more powerful. I just go with that I don’t try to explain it. Also, I think it resonates in how you resonate with certain people. There’s a certain emotional integrity some people have and other people don’t. And you can feel that. There’s good energy and there’s bad energy.
Gregory: I think that’s right. I think that’s the right invitation is like build long, long durable relationship with people who give as much as they ask.
John: Right. That’s exactly right. And if you’re in a transactional role and they see that and gets plugged into that and there’s a whole set of rhetoric and signals that go with that, fuck it. We look at Davos and that sort of embodies that. And there are a lot of things that embody that. It’s a very difficult thing to navigate, academia is full of it — and talk about suppression. Jesus Christ, the whole idea of building a reputation in academia is to suppress your competition. You’re not open. That is a system that’s predicated on that. So, that’s tough navigation of itself and it’s seen as the legitimating authority. Right? It’s tricky.
Gregory: It’s tricky, but I’m confident that as a collective, not necessarily [inaudible 00:59:15] the individual, but it’s sort of like, “I look, I see you, I see [Martin], I see the persons team, I see Switch, I see all these people that I just totally respect. [Ixo] energy foundation, the cosmos community, there’s all of these independent nodes weaving together.
John: Yeah. They’re really decent people trying to do something the right way. And I sense that and have found it really great. It’s just who they are and you find them around the world and it’s just like, “But we got to do it fast guys”
Gregory: We’ve got to do it fast.
John: I have a sense of urgency, maybe it’s because I’m old but I’m saying, “It’s for you kids too.” This is not –
Gregory: Yeah. It’s for my kids, my grandkids, my great grandkids,
John: But it’s [inaudible 01:00:07] for you. Listen, they’re going to fuck everything up in 20 years man, and the social implications of that — this is a new social order, and it’s a new cultural [sense] that we’re talking about. And you have a Trump takeover, I mean authoritarian takeover is very dangerous. I’m going to have to run, I really have a — but I enjoyed this we’re going to continue this.
Gregory: Thank you for your time. To be continued and let’s connect about maybe synchronizing [inaudible 01:00:37]
John: I’ll forward or email you. I’m so glad we were able to do this. Alright, take care friend. Bye, bye.
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