Podcast with Ari Delashmutt Transcript

Ari Delashmutt 0:22

Hello everyone, this is "Ari in the air", welcome back to the podcast. Today, we have an amazing conversation that, literally, since it happened a week-and-a-half ago or so, I have been talking about it. Because I had this talk with Malcolm ocean, and he turns out to be this incredibly thoughtful and really, really insightful person, and he and I, as you will hear, I can say that we became a superorganism, which is a really cool concept. We talk about how to hold our differences in perspective with other people in a way that makes us a superorganism, that gives us a new perspective, that adds depth to our perspective. We also talk about the idea that it takes a village to understand a village, which is a really deep concept that's been so helpful for me lately, as I try to try to grok my own village. And as always, this conversation is exactly that, it's conversation, and it's unedited and has spaciousness, and breath, and life, and I really appreciate that. So I think you're really gonna like it. I also want to do a bit of housekeeping here and let you know that I am doing an experiment that I want you to be a part of. I am experimenting with philosophical coaching, which is a type of coaching practice, where I use a deep philosophical inquiry, nonviolent communication, empathic listening as a way to suss out the shape of your life and inquire into its nooks and crannies and its meanings, and the stories that you have about yourself, and whether or not they're working and what other stories might be, and how we can bring those stories into being.

So I'm offering the next 60 days -through January- I'm offering "no financial obligation" calls, they'll be between 60 and 150 minutes in length, and will use dialogue between us, the same kind of dialogue that I bring to this podcast. It's a type of dialogue that you're actually familiar with, if you listen to the show. It's very open, honest, vulnerable, intimate. I use a lot of reflection. And this is something that I'm going to start doing professionally. And so I want to start with a safe-to-fail probe into this practice, and I want to invite you into it. So if you're listening and you would like to get on the calendar with me, you can just email me at ariintheair@gmail.com. Like always, you could also support this podcast on Patreon, that's "patreon.com/airintheair", and that helps so much. So thanks for being here, and consider being a part of this beautiful experiment with me. I would love to talk to you. And without further ado, here's some music and an amazing talk with my new friend, Malcolm Ocean. Enjoy.

Hi, man.

Malcolm Ocean 5:46

Hey, good to see you.

Ari Delashmutt 5:47

Good to see you. How are you? Nice to meet you.

Malcolm Ocean 5:50

Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 5:50

Where are you?

Malcolm Ocean 5:52

I'm in Victoria - well, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island.

Ari Delashmutt 5:58

Awesome. Beautiful place.

Malcolm Ocean 6:02

Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 6:05

So what is it you do for a living?

Malcolm Ocean 6:08

Oh, yeah... I run a software company, basically. It's actually an interesting thing. So I listened to your "Greatness" episode this morning, and when I was in high school, part of me - I was sort of becoming a musician, whatever that means, and I was like, "Okay, what do I want to do for university?" And I was sort of like, "Do I want to go try to be a musician as a career? Or do I want to go study engineering or something?" And I ended up being like, "I think I want to do music on the side. Like, I don't think I want to have a need to make music in order to live. I think that would fuck up my art."

Ari Delashmutt 6:56

That's fine. That's wise.

Malcolm Ocean 6:59

Yeah. And I feel really good about that.

Ari Delashmutt 7:05

Yeah, so the software that you make is like a group work thing, right? If I remember-

Malcolm Ocean 7:12

It's mostly a sort of "solo productivity" type tool. And there's a couple of group pieces to it. Like, you can go in co-working rooms, you can have an accountability partner. And there's like one or two other kinds of group features, but for the most part, it's just helping you center in on "What matters to me today? What do I want to work on?"

Ari Delashmutt 7:38

Cool man. And I kind of described you... this morning, my best friend asked who you are, and I described you as a game B thinker.

Malcolm Ocean 7:47

Yeah, totally. I'll accept that.

Ari Delashmutt 7:52

Yeah, so tell me where your thinking is in game B. More specifically, I suppose like, what kind of things do you find yourself ruminating on the most in that space? I've talked about game B a lot on my podcasts. So I think that most people are familiar that game B is the concept of future human civilization that is regenerative.

Malcolm Ocean 8:31

I like your question, and I'm also just taking in what it means to sort of be a "thinker".

Ari Delashmutt 8:39

Oh, that's interesting that you would ruminate on that too. Because the moment that I said it, I was kind of struck with like, gratitude. Like, what a thing it is to be a part of a community, although it's quite loose - game B as a community is pretty loose thing, but amazing to be involved with people who think about future human civilization and what it means to be a person and what it means to grow and iterate on a very large scale.

Malcolm Ocean 9:08

Mhm. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like, I think I've also held a sense of the importance of being grounded in, not exactly chopping wood and carrying water for me, but like, fixing bugs and answering support tickets, right? It's like not becoming such that all of my day is spent "thinking." So there's a way in which I'm actually, I guess, trying on something of, not exactly even an identity as a game B thinker as you're proposing it, but a role. It's like, "Oh, I know who I think of when you say game B thinker. I haven't been, myself, doing the podcast circuits that I've seen all those people do, yet. I would say yours is the first podcast that I've been on where game B has sort of been at the center of a lot of the conversations on there." Like, I brought it up on some other podcasts. And so, I'm thinking, but Jordan Hall and Jim Rutt and Nina, which were some of the 'OG' game B guys. Although, I recently heard Jordan say, somewhere, that he was sort of stepping away from game B as a main lens for what he was doing, because it had sort of become - it sort of calcified a little bit, and he was like, "Well, time to move on to post game B." You know, not post-game B as a stage of humanity, but as a lens for what's happening. So, I really value the fluidity there. I will answer your question more directly. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying sort of just like stirring in the...

Ari Delashmutt 11:06

Yeah, I hear this, like... I like that - that what I heard you say was that your day is not merely ephemeral thought after the other, but that you actually have actionable things in your day that keep you grounded, that you're actually like working on things. Because the concept of game B really is incredibly abstract. It's such a hyper object. It's like, "Oh, the world is all these ways," which is like, I've kind of described it as, "huge world, tiny head, tough to fit the whole thing in there." Right? Like, really hard to fit the whole thing in there. And often, the meta crisis... like when COVID came online, I really dove deep into this space, and that's when the podcast really took off for me. And I found myself almost unwell. Like, I had shaken my own psychological well-being by looking into the meta crisis so hard and for so long, that I was like, "Holy fuck, I need to go outside and ride my bike right now. Like, I need a bike ride." Like, okay, it's not all doom and gloom.

And so, the idea that game B is such a big concept that it can be a calcifying lens for the way that we see the world, I totally agree. I just recently listened to a podcast on the Jordan Peterson podcast with Michael Shellenberger who wrote "Apocalypse Never", which is a very interesting book about environmental change and what he refers to as apocalyptic environmental activism. And think, in some ways, and Schmachtenberger has run into this recently, that the idea of calling everything existential risk and inevitably self-terminating -or inexorably self-terminating, [which] was his term- is a pretty damning thing and a lens that might be over-certain. And so-

Malcolm Ocean 13:19

Yeah, I really liked something that I think it was Jordan Hall said on a - no sorry, Daniel Thorson said on a half-hour, kind of more casual chat that he did with, I think it was Benito Roy, shortly after his episodes with Jem Bendell. Jem Bendell had this whole paper about, you know, "collapse is inevitable", "you've got to prepare", "extinction rebellion". You know, "localism", blah, blah, blah. And so Jem Bendell has his whole thing, and he's like, "Collapse is inevitable, people just aren't accepting that." And Daniel Thorson used this brilliant phrase, sort of debriefing those episodes with somebody else, and the phrase was, "perhaps inevitable collapse".

Ari Delashmutt 14:14

Hmm.

Malcolm Ocean 14:15

And what I LOVE about that is it's got the inevitability in it. You're actually saying, "We don't know if we're in the timeline where we can do something about this." Like, we might be in a timeline where, effectively, as far as any agent that exists at present is concerned, like, in terms of the size of agents that there are, like, I'm an agent and you're an agent, but we are barely an agent, right? You and I, right now? We kind of have a tiny bit of collective agency, we can like do something by making a good conversation right now. But that's sort of the amount of collective agency we have. We can, maybe, behold the big world, two tiny heads, a little better. But, yeah, so as far as any individual agent is concerned right now, it might be effectively inevitable.

Ari Delashmutt 15:08

Uh huh.

Malcolm Ocean 15:12

But we don't know.

Ari Delashmutt 15:14

Yeah.

Malcolm Ocean 15:15

And so holding that there is, on the one hand, a potential inevitability, but also that we actually... it's actually an even more uncomfortable position than inevitable. Like, I feel personally like Jem Bendell is taking a little bit of a cop-out by just saying, "Oh, it's inevitable". Like that puts you on this lovely timeline where you get to not worry about trying to stop it, and you get to simply prepare for it to collapse, and it's weirder if you have to do both. And it's more uncomfortable and more unpleasant. So it seems he's like, "Oh, yeah, I've accepted this terrible thing," but it's actually harder, it takes more courage to not accept it but also to accept that it might be.

Ari Delashmutt 15:55

Yeah, that's a liminal space between those two things. And I think I like there being a force and line, because it collides inevitable and humility, inevitable and uncertainty. And that, like, looks at inevitable through uncertain.

Malcolm Ocean 16:20

Mm hmm.

Ari Delashmutt 16:20

Which is a weird thing. It's almost a contradiction just to say it, that you're looking at inevitable through uncertain.

Malcolm Ocean 16:28

Yeah. But I mean, it's like if you were in a... I don't know, I don't think we need to further analogy metaphor for that, but it's... yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 16:44

Yeah, I mean, this is a... it's like there's a psychological reality to how there's - it's just psychologically quite difficult to hold that... it's difficult to hold the position that it is inevitable, and it's it's scary to think that there's something impending, dooming, looming, disastrous, apocalyptic. That's a difficult thing to look at. And so I think we've seen in the last few decades - we've seen people who are so convinced that that is the case, that the science points in that direction, that the logic points in that direction, that the math points in that direction.

Malcolm Ocean 17:47

That human incentive landscapes point in that direction.

Ari Delashmutt 17:53

Yes.

Malcolm Ocean 17:54

Sometimes how it gets framed, too.

Ari Delashmutt 17:55

Yes, that our entire society, that our structure, that the patriarchy, that the whole thing, that capitalism is pointed in this direction-

Malcolm Ocean 18:06

[Inaudible 18:04]

Ari Delashmutt 18:04

In some ways, it is. It also is, likely, the reason that we have been able to see it, right? Like, that we've lowered the infant mortality rate? And made our lives abundant enough to recreate and to ruminate so much that we can be like, "Oh, wait, no. Oh, well, you know, I had some spare time so I added this up and it seems like the world is ending!" And we're like, "okay". I guess my point here, quickly, is that, and this is a big part of what Shellenberger's book "Apocalypse Never" is about, is that in the last few decades, the certainty of the inevitability of the collapse of our world, our ecology, our economy, this entire paradigm - the certainty of that inevitable collapse, has been used to permit some really radical catastrophe stories and apocalyptic narratives that are not always conducive to change. They're not conducive to helping people come into a space where they can think about the problem in a way that it doesn't just absolutely trigger their physical self-preservation, denial response or their flight response, or their fight response, or their fawn, or freeze or just like these very visceral, psychological realities, when we have something that - [when] we're staring down the barrel of something. And so that's just an interesting... that's like one side of the pendulum when we're thinking about how we can hold this. It's almost like a multiverse. It's like we have to simultaneously consider that the world won't end and that it will.

Malcolm Ocean 18:25

Mhm, yeah, yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 19:20

Because it's almost like the space between those things, we can't really actually... like, there's no way to reasonably be there. You kind of have to just do the uncertainty principle. Like, the cat is both dead and alive, the world is both ending and not ending.

Malcolm Ocean 20:59

Yeah, and, you know, our basic categories of what all of that means is so... limited? Like, there's a huge difference between collapse that looks like, "Well, the big global supply chain dance stops dancing," you know? The musical chairs stop on that one and then it's like, well, then there's a lot of very hungry people, a lot of shortages of almost everything because it's all pretty fucking global at this point. Like, transistors are only made in a couple of places in the world, so nowhere else can make laptops if the thing isn't running, or even continue manufacturing very simple gadgets like electric toothbrushes, and, you know, stuff like that. Not that electric toothbrushes are a necessary thing, but anyway, where was I going with that? Right, that's a very different scenario than - or that's a very different set of factors than a set of factors that's more like dramatically increased hurricanes, or war. Those are two very different collapses scenarios. We could get all three, you know? One could cause the other. I don't think either the war or supply chain thing would cause the hurricanes but, you know...

Ari Delashmutt 22:34

Yeah, the... failure modes, the variety of failure modes, pick your failure mode.

Malcolm Ocean 22:41

Mm hmm.

Ari Delashmutt 22:42

There's a whole buffet of them, and will we get all of them?

Malcolm Ocean 22:46

I spent a long time being concerned about AI risk, and that's part of the the context, for me, coming into conversations about existential risks and global catastrophic risks, and so on. And it's part of the context of me not agreeing with anybody who refers to climate change as an existential risk. It's like, there will still be people. We are very weirdly resilient creatures, and the Earth would have to get really, really weird before people would stop figuring out some way to live on. You know?

Ari Delashmutt 23:24

I love that perspective. I totally 1,000,000% agree with that. And the idea that humans are just gonna fucking lay down and take it is like, come on!

Malcolm Ocean 23:32

Yeah. And that's talking about existential risks. It's like, there will still be people. However, global catastrophic risk is like, sure, climate change is definitely one of those, it could take out half the population, or more. It's really like... yeah, I don't know. So that's kind of where I've... yeah, part of my context for coming into this conversation is, having been sort of concerned about existential risks, partially in the context of thinking about AI, and being connected with some of the folks who are doing AI safety research and so on.

Ari Delashmutt 24:17

Okay, I'm also... I feel like-

Malcolm Ocean 24:19

But yeah, I do want to go back to your question, though, of like, "what is it that I'm thinking about?". Because, by and large, I don't spend my day thinking about collapse. I am, in a sort of immediate project sense, hoping that some combination of luck and other people working on that is going to have there be enough time for the work that I'm doing to matter. And I don't get to know that, for sure, that is bad, there's a big uncertainty there. But, totally, from where I found my self, it's sort of been clear that that's my thing to do -what I'm working on- which is cultural stuff around what Jordan Hall calls the "metaprotocol". And so I'd be happy to dive into a bit more what that is, what it means, what my work on it has been.

Ari Delashmutt 25:25

I think, maybe, we'll come back to that. But I think that the... pivot here is, actually, as we talk about what it is like to know your role in the meta-crisis, or find it, or do it, it almost... it makes me think about... the question sounds something like, "what is the healthy way to hold the meta crisis?" "What's the healthy way to hold existential risk?" How can... because, basically, what I've seen, if I do just a slight cultural observation here, you basically have Greta Thunberg on one side, who's just total outrage and outrage culture around existential risk, whether it be social or ecological, economic. On the other side, you have denial. Basically, we have outrage and denial are the two most prevalent positions. I find that conspiracy is another really ravenous position to be able to hold this in our.... you know, this hyper object of hypothetical inevitable collapse.

So my question is almost, "what's the healthy way to hold this thing in our heads?" I find, just for a little of my own experience, to preface it, as COVID came online, I found myself kind of torn between my fear of control, governmental in particular, and the information ecology being poisoned, broken and trampled for so long, that I had just no trust of the media source or the information ecology at large. And I found myself in a really disempowered place. Like, just the feeling of that was incredibly disempowering. To not know and to have the feeling that I couldn't know, and that I also had fears around it. So... I think I'm just acknowledging that this kind of thing, trying to take this big world and cram it into our heads is a "psychological well being" hazard.

Malcolm Ocean 28:08

Yeah, it's an extreme sport.

Ari Delashmutt 28:12

[Laughter] It is super fucking extreme. So, I guess the question becomes, like, "what's the helmet look like for this sport? What do knee pads look like for this sport? Not that we're not going to play it, and not that we don't expect it to fuck us up a bit. And not that we don't expect it to fucking be able to kill us or break us entirely. But how do we kind of hedge ourselves a little bit? What are the pads here? Because there's some of us who want to play the game." Like, I came in in COVID and I took a beating and I fucking was like, "Man, I saw into the belly of the beast and I can't unsee that shit." But then I like took a bike ride and I came back I was like, alright, like, let's keep [jump in audio]

Malcolm Ocean 28:55

Now what?

Ari Delashmutt 28:56

Now what? You know?

Malcolm Ocean 28:57

Yeah. Hmm, what a question, "what does the helmet look like for the extreme sport of... how would I frame it? Something like attempting to behold and act into the present global situation?"

Yeah, it's almost like... it's a meta crisis bull rider. Like the the bull rider of the meta crisis. Anyone stupid enough to strap themselves to this fucking big ass hyper object? [Chuckles] Especially to do it publicly, like on a podcast? It's just like, "all right, now we've got a crowd of people, we're gonna put his helmet on."

Malcolm Ocean 29:49

Here's the thing, I think one of the most important metaphorical helmets here is actually other people. It's having people to make sense of things with so that you're not alone. Because, you know, at minimum, you can't be sane about what's going on without reading a lot of books. Even if you're not in a lot of live dialogue with people, being plugged into the thinking of many other people so that you're not just in your own echo chamber of your mind is vital, and then really stepping into dialogue. And I think that's part of why the game B podcast scene sort of thrives the way it does, because it is a form of thinking that wants to be in dialogue with people. I mean, all thinking does in some fundamental sense. But, I would say that people in this space are more self aware of that and more aware of the need for high quality dialogue as part of having high quality thinking.

Ari Delashmutt 30:57

That's one of the best parts of game B - that it is, in its very nature acknowledged to be a collective issue.

Yeah.

And it's an anarchic thinking system, essentially, that knowing that no one person is gonna like become the leader, that game B knows that it's not like a tyrant that we need to like enforce this thing on the world. It's like effervescent, emergent, self-organizing systems are likely the best solution.

Yeah, and I mean, that's a pretty good segue into some of the stuff that I was mentioning around talking about the meta protocol and the work that I've been doing.

Ari Delashmutt 31:35

Yeah, I would love to dive into that. I just want to note that, as you said, that the helmet for the bull rider of the meta crisis, but other people, and being plugged into the thinking of other people, is like the fucking rodeo clown. That's having a rodeo clown in the ring with you. I grew up in rural Central Oregon, so fucking rodeo is very, very familiar. And so what happens is, when you get bucked off this fucking bull of the meta crisis, the rodeo clown distracts the bull, so that you can get up and run away before the bowl Gore's you to death. That's the long story short, and that is to say that when the bucking bull of the meta crisis knocks you down, being plugged into other people's thinking, and other people's perspective, is what allows you to get back up and get on your feet again, so that the whole thing doesn't just hold you down into a depressive spiral that holds you down and keeps you from getting back up.

Malcolm Ocean 32:51

Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 32:53

Yeehaw.

Malcolm Ocean 32:55

Yeah. And also, insofar as we're talking about [a] hyper object, it's like, you would have a lot of trouble making sense of everything that's happening with just like, a tiny cluster of your neurons. You know, a human brain is kind of appropriately sized for a human life, and they sort of set of relationships that a human would have. And I'm thinking about the, "it takes a village to raise a child" phrase, but there's something sort of slightly more subtle than that, which is like, "it takes a village to make sense of a village."

Ari Delashmutt 33:50

Hmm. Like, that's the humility that, not every adult agent is even capable of understanding the complexity that even happens in the three families of the neighborhood.

Malcolm Ocean 34:07

Mm hmm. Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 34:08

It takes all of us to be in dialogue with one another, to keep our... like, even each marriage in the neighborhood, almost depends on all the other marriages and the other people to make sense of. I like that idea.

Malcolm Ocean 34:25

Yeah. And so it's like, there's definitely going to be some people who are taking way more responsibility for making sense of the whole of a given community or set of relationships or whatever, you know? If you think about, probably, a classic village or something like that, you could imagine, you know, there's the kids whose job is being kids. There's the next generation up whose job is raising the kids and making things work in the world. And then you've got the grandparents who are kind of just hanging out. And it sort of doesn't really seem like they're doing much in particular, but in fact, the community would be a completely different place if you didn't have them gossiping and making sense of everything and asking "is Jim okay?" you know? And just having the time to spend a lot of time doing that, right?

Ari Delashmutt 35:29

Yes.

Malcolm Ocean 35:30

So, you know, I think there's a place for people who are sort of full time, friends.

Ari Delashmutt 35:38

Uh huh. That's me in this neighborhood.

Nice.

Ari Delashmutt 35:41

Yeah. So I just want to reflect back what I heard in a slightly different way. And I think that it's important right now to kind of define hyper object. And I know that you and I are both-

Malcolm Ocean 35:54

Good luck!

Ari Delashmutt 35:55

Yeah.

[Chuckles]

So I typically define a hyper object as things that are so big and complex that any one person or even like collective intelligence at this point is unable to wholly grasp. This could be something like the atmosphere or the global economy, or climate change, right? These are all things so vast, complex, and interconnected that one person or even a group of people or even all people are going to have a... it's essentially an impossible task to fully understand these things. And what I heard you say, with the "it takes a village, to understand a village", is to take that idea of hyper object and the incredible interconnected complexity of the atmosphere, the climate, all of these different things. And that brings a humility of our own understanding down into our interpersonal relationships, that even three families relating to each other is essentially a hyper object. That it is even 15 people interpersonally relating with children and families and relational dynamics is so incredibly complex, that it takes all of us to be able to even grasp it. [Pause] And there are still things... because as you say it, I'm thinking of my own lived experience here - I just live in a community with multiple families, and multiple generations, and my own ship. It's just so incredibly complex. And so much of it falls through the cracks of our own understanding.

Malcolm Ocean 37:47

Mm hmm.

Ari Delashmutt 37:48

Even though we're all just like... yesterday, I just cried at the caliber of men and women that we are. Like, we're just this group that is like, so strong and amazing, and virtuous, and talented. And even then, we all put so much effort into our relationships, and our communication, and our parenting and all this stuff. And even then, there's things that just fall through the cracks. And we don't understand that. And so I don't know, that's kind of what I heard, and I really liked that idea that like, the complexity of interpersonal relationships is nearly a hyper object itself. We don't actually have to extend it all the way out to geopolitics and the global economy.

Malcolm Ocean 38:32

Yeah, I find fractals a vital concept for making sense of anything.

Ari Delashmutt 38:40

Yeah,

Malcolm Ocean 38:40

Well, not anything but like anything related to any of this. It's like, there's a self-similarity to sensemaking across so many different scales. And it's different, and I still haven't mapped out all the ways in which it's different. But... yeah, and I think it is worth here - I don't know if we need multiple words for this or what, but I'm sort of feeling into - I think the route of hyper object is in reference to the notion of some sort of shape that is more than three dimensions. Like, a hypercube is also known as a tesseract, I think. Or maybe hyper refers to not just four dimensions, but any number greater than three, and there's something called a hypersphere. And you can kind of define these mathematical objects. And the metaphor there, I guess, is pointing at how, if you've got one of these objects that are located in four dimensions, and you're trying to look at it but you're a three-dimensional creature, you're gonna have difficulty seeing all of it at once. You can see all of it, but you can't see all of it at once.

Like, you have to kind of pass it through three dimensions, and when you do that, it'll transform. You know, the hypersphere will go from looking like a very large sphere to a tiny point, and the hypercube might look like a cube, or it might look like a weird hexagonal prism or something. And that's only talking about very simple shapes in four dimensions, never mind the much more complex network structures in hundreds or thousands of dimensions. Having said that, there are times when one person might be beholding some hyper object and sort of rotating it in their head and kind of going, "Oh, I see a thing here", and then they have the difficulty of trying to convey it to others. And at any given time, the others can only see... like they can only compress that hyper object into very small chunks that they can convey to other people. And if they're lucky,..., or skilled, ideally, they can convey at least a projection of the hyper object that's an accurate projection, you know? Like an accurate shadow that hyper object casts on the wall.

Ari Delashmutt 41:08

Yes.

Malcolm Ocean 41:08

But even there, it can still be really disorienting. And this is something I've been observing recently, as I've been connecting with just a few different people that are very visionary and can see possibilities that other people can't see. And they're working towards them as they try to convey their visions to other people. And the other people see a projection, then they're like, "Oh, yeah, okay, I kind of get it." But a projection will shift and transform rapidly, compared to something that[sic] you're actually seeing the whole [of] in all of its dimensions. Because, if you take a different slice of the projection, you know? Imagine looking at an x ray of broccoli, right? Like, first it looks like a thousand tiny points. And then it's just like a dozen circles. And then it's just one circle, as the broccoli passes through the slices - like an MRI, sorry. An MRI of a broccoli or something. Anyway, so that's just something I've been thinking about. I think it's really weird, because it's like, on one level, we can be hold the whole, right? Like, you and I can just say, "Hey, that global situation, though" and you're like, "Yeah, I know", right? And that's us beholding the whole, but it's not in very high fidelity, right? We're not really-

Ari Delashmutt 42:22

Yeah, the resolution is an important-

It's not very actionable, right? You know? And we just go, "Jeez, yeah, that whole though, how's it doing?" And so, it's like being able to find actionable pieces, and this connects to that thing you were saying about the... what was it? Finding your role in the meta crisis, or something like that. It's sort of like, "from where I am, what are the leverage points that are remotely leveraging towards anything that I care about? That I have any ability to nudge at the moment or capacity to learn how to nudge?" or whatever. And, for me, by the time I started seriously thinking about these questions, I was already embedded deep in a culture change project that later recognized itself as part o this thing that could be called Game B, or as an analog of this thing that could be called Game B, but it was sort of doing its own thing, without knowing that term, for many years. And so I realized, well, you know, I've got some friends who are working on AI and AI safety, and they're really worried about the timelines there. And maybe that screws us up in the next five years before I can sort out this culture stuff.

But, where I am, it's like I need to be pouring my energy into grokking, and growing, and nurturing this collaborative culture work. And that's just what's going to be mine to do, and I hope that everybody else manages to take care of everything else, I hope that nuke doesn't drop tomorrow, you know? I've got a lot of hopes. But, like, I think that's a great example where there are there are slight leverage points for civilians on whether or not nuclear war happens. But, by and large, we mostly just have to hope it doesn't. Like, really, most people are not going to be doing anything about that. Because the forces are already just so large, that are pushing that in different directions. And, I mean, we're in a really weird phase right now, where there was a whole bunch of disarmament during the Cold War and after, but then now it's like, super multipolar. I don't know. Again, this is not what I spend most of my time thinking about. I mostly just boggle at it sometimes and go, "I don't know how to make sense of this". And, so I guess what I would say is where my intention has been at is mostly like, "How can I cultivate in myself and in other people, the capacities and understandings that lead people to be able to enter into really powerful dialogue with each other, that can be hold vast hyper objects effectively?"

Ari Delashmutt 45:17

[Pause]

I really like the analogy that you made of the hyper object as some kind of physical object in four dimensions. And what struck me, you said that you can see all of it, you just can't see all of it at any given time. Which is a really interesting observation of perspective. And I think that's just true of where each of us lives, in our sense-making space, that we have the ability to see really complex things, but we can't always see them and their complexity in one given moment. So it's an iterative perspective, it's an iterative observation, and it's changing over time. What I want to roll all the way back to, and have you double click on, is what you said about fractals, that "fractals" is an incredibly useful mental concept/lens that helps you talk about understand or perceive these really big, deep, complex things. And so I was hoping that maybe you would start with what... like, define a fractal, because people know what a fractal looks like, but they don't actually know what a fractal is. And when I learned about the Mandelbrot sequence, I fucking went way down the rabbit hole and was mind blown as to what a fractal really is. And so maybe kind of start us there, and then tell us how this mental conception is helpful in, as you say, grokking, these really big, complex hyper objects.

Malcolm Ocean 47:20

Yeah. My most recent lens on fractals comes from reading a book by Geoffrey West called Scale. He's coming out of the Santa Fe Institute and writing about research that they did there, where he was trying to answer some questions about the nature of life and death, and like, "Are there are there mathematical factors that constrain how organisms work?" basically. Because, obviously, organisms are survival of the fittest - it's sort of how they evolve, but why is there no Godzilla? Well, Godzilla is not fit, but why? Right? You can make a fake Godzilla that seems very terrifying and whatever, but it turns out that [based on] the nature of how gravity works and the nature of how oxygen works and blood and cell waste, it means that you actually just can't make a creature that big. It doesn't work. It doesn't have the right surface area to volume ratio, or muscle cross-sectional area to mass ratio. And this is why elephants' legs are so thick. And by contrast, why insects are tiny, spindly legs, and they can just like, chill out on the ceiling.

Anyway, so this gets into fractals because... I would describe fractals functionally. So, fractals show up in a couple of different places. They originated as a concept in trying to measure how long the coastline is, where they found out that the length of coastline that you get depends on how small your measuring tool is. Like, if you just measure 100 km segments of coastline, you're like, "h, yeah, it's like 600 km. Okay, cool." But if you like if you have 10 km segments of coastline, turns out there's a bunch of little inlets, and you can end up with a number like 1000 km of coastline. And then you do with one-kilometer increments, and you might think it would converge, but it actually doesn't converge, because eventually, you get all the little tiny waves. And I'm sorry, maybe it does converge, but it doesn't converge the way you think.

Ari Delashmutt 49:42

Yeah.

Malcolm Ocean 49:51

But that's an unintentional fractal. That is that is a functionless fractal. That's not sort of doing anything. Functionally though, you know? Why is it that our lungs look like trees? Well, our lungs are kind of the opposite of trees. They're both trying to maximize surface area per unit space, and in order to exchange gases, right? Like, that's why trees are shaped the way they are, and that's why lungs are shaped the way they are - to do that surface area thing. And the way to do this in an organized way, is by self-similarity where you can have... and that's sort of the core of what fractals are, it's this self-similar structure, something that's the same on multiple scales. And so, you have the basic - the first branch of the lungs, and then then they branch again, then they branch again, then they branch again, and they branch again. So, this is not unlike how a freeway with many lanes, branches off into smaller and smaller roads.

And actually, a recent thing that looks very much like a lung that I was seeing was a marina here - it has a bunch of little boats, all dock. And it's very much like a set of lungs in that you've got to somehow -it's two dimensional, rather than three- but you got to somehow have people be able to walk to the boats, and boats be able to go out to the open water. And in order to do that, you want to maximize the surface area because you don't want your Marina to just you one giant pier that goes way out into the whatever. Oh, maximize surface area, and you want to minimize the walking distance that anybody has to do or the boating distance that they have to do to get out for a given number of boats. And it turns out, if you do this, you reinvent a shape that looks like lungs. Like, you've got this one main thing that goes out, and then it branches off, and then it branches even tinier and stuff. And, yeah, so that's a sort of... fractals are this recursively self-similar thing that is pretty vital for organizing both resources and information at multiple scales, which, if you want to do anything at a big scale, you've got to also make it work at a small scale. You know, a blue whale has cells that are approximately the same size as ours.

Ari Delashmutt 52:23

Yep.

Malcolm Ocean 52:23

Like they're making things work at small scales as well as large ones. So I think about fractals, often, in the context of sense-making and perspective taking and trust dancing. Essentially, that, within a given person, you've got a bunch of different perspectives, a bunch of different ways of making sense of the world, that are necessarily diverse, because if they weren't, they would be redundant. But this sometimes means that they apparently contradict. And it's easy for people to end up compartmentalized around these different ways of seeing and kind of oscillating back and forth between them, it's like "a part of me knows," it's like, "I should quit smoking, but then I keep going back to it", and, you know, "my inner rebel won't stop eating cookies, even though I know they're bad for me," right? Like, you've got these inner battles, right? These inner struggles are structurally not that dissimilar to a struggle between a parent and a child. In fact, many of these struggles are actually an internalized parent-child relationship.

But, but yeah, so you got these, you got these battles, you've got these "Cold Wars" happening internally to people. And so, as part of being able to think together, you and I, effectively, we need to be managing effectively, also, our internal landscape of different perspectives. Like, we're bringing my perspective and your perspective here, but it's like, I actually have at least two perspectives, even with my own 'I's, because there's two of them. They actually disagree slightly on where everything's located. You know, one of them will be like, "Oh, like this is to the left of my finger. This is to the right of my finger." But it's, it's not the answer is neither, it's just everything's arranged in 3D space, with respect to the idea of left or right. 3D space is a hyper object, but we're actually optimized to perceive this 3D world, even though in some sense, our visual fields are two-dimensional. It's like the individual fields are two dimensional, but the whole produces this three-dimensional depthy world And so, similarly, you and I can bring our different perspectives together, and they can cancel each other out or end up in battle. You know, we could be in an argument right now over something. Or, instead of canceling each other out, we can find the places where the difference is actually deeply powerful for allowing us to perceive that hyper object. It's really cool, I hadn't made that connection between hyper objects [and] three-dimensional space. I've used the visual perspective-taking analogy before, but it's cool seeing that merged with the hyper object thing.

Ari Delashmutt 55:41

That's to say that the... I heard it as like, the difference between our perspectives can be insightful as to the object itself.

Malcolm Ocean 55:54

Yeah, what it is that we're perceiving. Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 55:55

Because just as my left eye and my right eye work together and average the difference to know-

Malcolm Ocean 56:02

Well, they sort of average the difference, but they they also sort of transcend the difference.

Ari Delashmutt 56:06

Yes, yes, yes. They use the difference to create the perception of depth. Right?

Malcolm Ocean 56:15

Mhm

Ari Delashmutt 56:16

Right, like depth perception is because of the difference between left and right eye. And our brains essentially triangulate, without mathematics, it essentially triangulates the difference between left eye [and] right eye to suss out distance, which is incredible. And just as our eyes can do that, we can use my perspective and your perspective, to have some kind of deeper perspective to society, based on the difference of our perspectives.

Malcolm Ocean 56:50

Exactly. Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 56:53

That's delicious. That is delicious, right there. That is... [incoherent expression]. That's actually the question that I asked earlier, "what is the helmet and the leather glove for this meta crisis bull rider?"

Malcolm Ocean 57:09

Hmm.

Ari Delashmutt 57:11

I feel like that's one of the biggest protective devices out that is the deep, deep protective device that is understanding what dialogue is. Because-

And being able to do it.

Ari Delashmutt 57:26

And being able to do it, yes. To be able to actually hold dialogue, which is not easy, especially coming from where I've grown up. I'm the middle of three boys and I have a "strong" dad, and it's like, we're much more prone to argumentation and fist fighting than a deep dialogue where we can understand the difference of our perspectives as something really insightful.

Malcolm Ocean 57:56

One way I like to analogize this is... diversity is difference, difference is potential energy. In a basic physical sense, this is true. I'm stretching this a little bit into metaphor space, but barely, really truly barely. The difference between people is not literally mechanical energy in that sense, so I want to be really clear where the metaphor stops. But it is a difference in height that makes a gravity-powered water flow system work. It is a difference in electrical potential that makes a battery or a capacitor work. Like, it is a difference that makes that difference. And Gregory Bateson has this great quote, "Information is difference that makes a difference". And so differences between people are intrinsically and necessarily a source of energy. And so if you try to build a very homogenous organization, there's going to be something sort of stilted about the energy there.

Ari Delashmutt 59:22

And boring as fuck.

Malcolm Ocean 59:23

But, simply adding diversity to your organization does not add useful energy, it just adds energy. And if you don't know how to organize it, if you don't know how to make sense of all the different perspectives that are happening, then the energy can be explosive. Like, a bomb is a release of energy, you know? And you can't contain it, you can't use it, you can't harness it into the kind of creativity that the company sort of wants to be about. And so there's I think a, for any given culture at any given time, there's a right amount of how much diversity, how much difference, the group can metabolize. And trying to go faster than that is just going to explode things. And I think it's also worth noting [that], when we talk about diversity in organizations, it's like there are topics within that, that come up a lot in the context of identity and in differences that are charged with historical-

Social justice.

Malcolm Ocean 1:00:39

Yeah, that whole space of things. But there's also diversity of personality. It's huge, and that doesn't get talked about as much, in part because it's less visible and in part because people don't see it as an axis of privilege, even though certain personality types are way more likely to be billionaires than others. You know, so there is some correspondence of that, but it's not super heritable, and it's a whole thing. But, yeah, there's something about really being able to use difference effectively.

Yeah.

Malcolm Ocean 1:01:16

And partially, that's a perspective shift. Like recognizing, "oh, difference is energy," but it's also partially "shit! Difference is energy." We don't actually want to get too much of it in one place, it might blow up. You know, we need to be able to manage it.

Ari Delashmutt 1:01:32

Yes, that's so interesting. Yeah, that brings up a lot of things for me. The first analogy, that's just... the first thing is that sexual polarity.

Malcolm Ocean 1:01:43

Mhm! Yeah! That's definitely a kind of difference in energy.

That's totally a difference in energy. Yeah. Also, just the nature of conflict, too.

Malcolm Ocean 1:01:57

Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 1:01:59

As you're saying, too much difference can bring in energy that without being able to organize handle it, it can be destructive. That is, the differing opinions getting out of control and becoming violent, say.

Malcolm Ocean 1:02:13

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 1:02:16

So it's like, there's some kind of sweet spot here of... and I feel like it is just the perspective, it's like a meta-perspective of knowing that the difference is energy, that the difference is helpful, that the difference can be illuminating to the object itself. That the difference that you have, in perspective, gives you another dimension of perspective. Because left eye-right eye gives you another dimension of perspective that is depth. And to have Malcolm left eye, Ari right eye, and to be able to see the difference in our perspectives as... it's almost like - the thing it brings up for me is it's almost like it brings you behind the difference. It like, gives you a meta-awareness of opinion, say, or of perspective that you're like - it contextualizes your-

Malcolm Ocean 1:03:21

I really think that is where it's valuable to - like, when I'm thinking about disagreements or conflicts on a - not so much exactly on the level of fighting, although there is a way in which it applies there, too. When I think of disagreements and conflicts, I really move to frame almost all of it in terms of perspective, rather than opinion. It's like because there's a way in which most of what we see is, in some sense, sort of self-evident from where we're standing. And so it's like, if you and I seem to be seeing things differently, which is a way of framing a conflict that's very different from disagreeing, or something. If you and I are seeing things differently, then it's very different for me to say, "well, that doesn't make any sense, because blah, blah, blah," but instead to say, "well, how are you seeing it? Where are you standing such that it looks like that?" And there's something really... almost kind of hilariously fundamental about this, where I think most people don't pause long enough to consider that other people actually sort of think the things they think. They may not think of them in the same ways that you do. Like maybe you have a deeply reasoned argument and they just have an intuition or something. Or maybe they have a deeply felt intuition and you just have some bullshit argument.

You know, I didn't want to reify argument as correct and intuition is wrong, but it's like you might have different types of ways of seeing that you're doing, right? But, people actually think the things that they're saying, in some sense are actually generating some sort of sense-making that's causing them to think, say things. And a lot of arguments are like people don't actually pause to go, "how would I need to be thinking in order to actually be saying what they're saying?" And this is basic perspective-taking. And so on the fractal scale, part of why this occurs is that people don't do this internally, either. They have internal disagreements where, also, part of them asserts, this is what I think, and never mind the part where I sometimes do things that contradict that, that's not me. Like, no, that's, that's also you. Just because part of you grabbed the mic and is speaking doesn't mean that that's all of you, you are your whole. And so being able to go, "Oh, well, what do I actually think, such that I'm doing this thing that part of me thinks is really weird? Like, I'm making some sort of sense of that. It's not random. I seem to have a very consistent pattern of this weird thing that I do. So there's some sense that I'm making that generates that as a as a behavior."

Yeah, I think that's one of the... it's almost that's... you just outlined what is one of the biggest pieces of the meta crisis, which is the inability to understand other people's perspectives as their perspectives, which locks you into a type of toxic discourse, [a] toxic dialogue that's not even dialogue, it's just like a toxic attempt, or just argumentation.

Fighting with words.

Ari Delashmutt 1:07:14

Yeah, it's opinion-based, very shallow, very ineffective. And it's easy to get locked into that in this society and this kind of upbringing in the world that we're in, and the idea that... you know, for me that the most recent and very relevant version of that is like, "those idiots think that the vaccine will protect them", "they won't wear the mask, because they don't think it's works. Those people are just such idiots." It's an other-ing, it's a labeling, it's an other-ing. Bad faith, bad faith. But I think this is... I really like this, we've had a really nice talk. And I think the biggest thing that I will take away from this is the idea, which is just delicious actually... If I think of you and I as an organism, you're left eye, I'm right eye and the difference between our perspective is deeply illuminating, it is unlocking, it unlocks an entire dimension. To think that the difference between our perspective unlocks an entire dimension of perception is just... God, that's a delicious concept. I love that. It just makes me think like if I had a wife, that we are this organism and I'm left eye and she's right eye, and to think of her perspective as right eye perspective of the organism that we are is so much different than her opinion.

Malcolm Ocean 1:09:15

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Ari Delashmutt 1:09:17

And how different it shapes my response, my reaction, how I hold that, how I hear it. Oh my God, that's beautiful. Definitely what I'm gonna take away from this there. And the other analogy that you made there was that the difference there is energy. And it so is, and if you can hold it right, it can fuel you, just like sexual polarity can breathe life into your life, can breathe life into your body for years and years and years.

Malcolm Ocean 1:09:46

Mm hmm.

Ari Delashmutt 1:09:49

So too, can the difference between your perspective breathe life into your perspective and be life giving. That's beautiful. We so often hold conflict and disagreement in a really wounded place. To be able to hold our disagreements, I think, is the next step. That is, like, literally where our foot meets the ground moving forward, towards a more whole thing. And that's how we acknowledge that game B is pretty good at that. Not perfect, but quite good at that.

Malcolm Ocean 1:10:24

Mm hmm. Yeah. And we're all still learning. We do not collectively know how to do this already. And we're all holding different pieces - bits and pieces of how it's gonna work. And that's why such deep listening is is necessary.

Yeah. Perspective holding. And what I just reflected on, that I like so much, that was so delicious, I also am holding, the other thing that I thought was so cool that you said, which was "it takes a village to understand a village."

Malcolm Ocean 1:10:59

Mm hmm. Yeah, it's the same thing, ultimately.

It's the same thing, but it also brings the idea of really difficult to grasp complexity down to earth.

Yeah.

Ari Delashmutt 1:11:15

Because really difficult to grasp complexity is like geopolitics and global economies, there's like, really-

Malcolm Ocean 1:11:21

People are like, "how do we solve the 'whatever' conflict?" It's like, "brah, how do you solve the conflict about the dishes getting left in the thing?"

Ari Delashmutt 1:11:29

Yes, literally.

Malcolm Ocean 1:11:31

Literally, that, you know, classic conflict, right?

Ari Delashmutt 1:11:34

Yeah, and to be able to hold it properly - to be able to hold "there's like a difference here, in how we want things done in our household", that is... energy, and it can be destructive. And I love, like, this brings up a Petersonian point for me, which is like, if you go to a person's house, and they're a couple, and their dishes or the kitchen is a mess, it kind of gives you a bit of unease, because you know that they haven't thought about this sufficiently.

Malcolm Ocean 1:12:08

Right, right. And the word sufficiently there is doing an interesting amount of work. They may have thought about this quite a lot.

I said "thought about it".

Right, right. I sort of heard that and then reparsed it. But it's like, yeah, they haven't sorted out the difference.

Yes.

You know, it hasn't-

Ari Delashmutt 1:12:34

They haven't organized the energy.

Malcolm Ocean 1:12:36

Yeah, they haven't organized the energy, it hasn't birthed the depth. It's in a state of compromise, you know? and that's, that's why I make it really clear that we're not talking about averaging perspectives here, we're not talking about halfways. If you just needed a halfway between two eyes, you would have one eye.

Ari Delashmutt 1:12:59

Yeah, you would have one eye.

Malcolm Ocean 1:13:04

These things are expensive!

Ari Delashmutt 1:13:05

Yeah, like, evolutionary, very expensive.

Malcolm Ocean 1:13:09

[Laughter]. You know, if you just needed one of them, if you just needed an average, you'd only have one.

Ari Delashmutt 1:13:19

This also brings up for me, as I acknowledge the depth that comes from the difference in two people's perspectives, I reel this back on to all my relationships in which a difference in perspective was destructive, and destroyed that I wasn't able to manage - that we weren't able to use the energy properly and that, ultimately, the relationship ended. And especially, recently, that's a very salient thread for me, because we disagreed, and we couldn't figure it out, and we couldn't get on the same page about things and that came to a destructive place. So it resonates - this concept resonates really super true for me, just how I've experienced it. So it's been a great talk, man, I'm so glad that we went through the rigmarole of aligning our schedules.

Malcolm Ocean 1:14:22

Yeah, so worth it.

Ari Delashmutt 1:14:24

We were persistent here. Yeah. So worth it. So I'm glad to talk to you and I appreciate your insights. I feel like we left eyed and right eyed really well today.

Malcolm Ocean 1:14:34

Yeah, I have a thing I'll just put out, which is that I have been working on a song and part of that song is relevant to some of what we've just been talking about. And I could sing a little bit of it right now.

Ari Delashmutt 1:14:48

I would love that.

Malcolm Ocean 1:14:49

Cool. Let me just I realized this recently, I need to change the settings on my microphone or for that to not sound awful. It's currently optimized for speech. Okay. Actually, hang on a sec. [Pause]. Okay, cool this should be better.

So this is part of the song. It's in the middle. I sang the first piece on the first podcast I did this year with Joe Lightfoot. So if you want to go try tracking down this song that's not fully released, there's one piece over there and there's another piece here and I still haven't finished the other piece so

1:14:34 - 1:17:16 - Superorganism song ♫ Part 2

Ari Delashmutt 1:17:26

That's amazing! I love that, and yes, so much of that is so relevant for what we just talked about. Thank you so much for singing that.

Yeah. It's a pleasure.

Ari Delashmutt 1:17:39

I think that's my first first guest who's sung on the podcast. I really appreciate that.

Nice.

Ari Delashmutt 1:17:56

Thanks Malcolm. Thanks for being here with me.

Malcolm Ocean 1:18:04

Hmm, thanks for having me. This has been such a pleasure. And feels cool to be stepping more into the public conversation. I'm interested in where I'll be going from here.

Ari Delashmutt 1:18:25

You and me both

Malcolm Ocean 1:18:26

Other people to talk to and why, you know? It's like why do I want to be on a podcast right? But I think I'm figuring that out by doing so.

Ari Delashmutt 1:18:40

Well, thanks so much, man.

Malcolm Ocean 1:18:42

Yeah, take care.

Ari Delashmutt 1:18:43

See you man.

Okay, you guys hope that was helpful. I hope that was helpful and enjoyable. I really super enjoyed that. And it's been so useful. I've been talking about this left eye-right eye, the difference in our perspective, how that gives us a third dimension, depth perception, I love that. If you like this show, consider sharing it and giving it an iTunes review that's helpful and support it on Patreon. It's patreon.com/ariintheair, and like I said in the intro, please consider signing up for a free "no financial" obligation you could always gift if that felt right. Philosophical coaching call with ya boy. I would love to listen to you and give you my reflections in the similar way that I reflect on my guests. So it's ariintheair@gmail.com email me and I'll send you a scheduling link. Thank you so much for being here. Peace, Love and save the whales. See you in the next episode.