Podcast with Tasshin Fogleman Transcript

Hi Malcolm, thanks for joining me today.

Yeah, it's great to be here.

So I'm really hoping to hear more from you about the Non Naive Trust Dance, which you've been talking about, whispering about, here and there. I'm curious to hear more about that and what that is, and [to] just kind of have you explain it for us and hear how you arrived at those ideas. But we'd love to just start by circling back to a couple of things that are specific to our relationship and kinda [provide] some context for this conversation.

Well, yeah.

So the first thing is... so you and I have had the good fortune of being together in physical space, I think, three or four different times. Three times, I think. And I think from the very first conversation, you asked to record that conversation and that's happened most of the times that I've been with you. And I know that this is a thing that you do, and I would love to hear from you [about] why you started recording conversations. Because I think one it's really interesting as a practice in itself, but it's also kinda like - in a weird way, the lineage of this podcast is like, "Oh, if I'm gonna have interesting conversations with people, I should record them anyway." So I would love to hear from you about that, and why you started doing it and what it's been like and all of that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I can see why that question is a good starting point. And I'm also a little bit amused that this is a starting point, as well, because there's quite a number of recordings that I have with people -particularly in the very first conversation in which we were recording or perhaps even meeting- there's a lot of conversations that I have with people, where the the first part of the conversation is about how we're recording conversations. So you know, they're like, "Sure," and then they're like, "What's the deal with that anyway?" And I'm like, "Well..." [Laughs]. So this practice emerged in the cultural incubator that I spent the better part of the last decade living at in Waterloo, which has been known by various names -Upstart Collaboratory for collaborative culture design being kind of one of the longest running names and more recently, the liminal space agency. And we started doing this in 2016. Well, prior to that, we'd been recording our meetings. Like we would have a kind of weekly meeting that was this group practicing and talking about this new culture. But as we started to take things more seriously, particularly those of us who were living there, we would begin recording pretty much all of our conversations and the 'all of them-ness' came from how often we'd get halfway through a conversation, realize something really juicy was happening and be like, "Oh, are we recording this?" And so eventually, we just started having a really strong default to just recording everything. The mere act of recording a conversation changes it. Even if you don't have doing anything with the recordings, it gives a different feel to a few different dimensions of what's present. Like, there's the sense of awareness that other people might hear what you're saying, who don't have the context that the people that are live in the conversation have. And so that can create some different kinds of like contextual awareness. But in terms of the main reason why we started, it was that we were noticing that in terms of the group coherence that we were looking for, it made a huge difference to be able to give people a full experience of conversations they weren't in. And there's kinda a few reasons why that was powerful. So one of them is... if something important happened - somebody had a major insight, or a learning, or some sort of cool exchange happened, we could share that in full fidelity with people. There was also like, the experience of like re-listening to yourself and being able to notice, like, "Oh, yeah, that was the point in the conversation when I suddenly got really angry. What was going on for me there?" You know? You could basically use them therapeutically and in the Coherence Therapy Work I've done in the last year with a therapist, we've used a kind of just memory based technique called "Rewind," where you go into the situation where you had some trigger come up or whatever, and you just try to rewind the tape until right before the trigger. And so I've had experiences of listening -already it's occurring to me- I've had experiences of listening to recordings and literally re-listening to a particular minute multiple times [and wondering] "What's going on there for me?" And like, "What do I think was going on there for this other person?" So that's really cool. And then another big piece is basically... I'm going to say something really obvious which is, you don't know what it's like when you're not there. Like, you don't know what a conversation is like when you're not in it. And this is more obviously true for somebody as loud and boisterous as I am, but even even in general, you don't you don't know what how people talk, when you're not in the room, you know. I've never been in a conversation of all women. I can't be. It wouldn't be a conversation of all women if I were. But to have the experience of being able to witness those conversations, not just among actors on TV, but among the very people that you're usually in conversation with, can be very powerful. You can notice the moments when... I mean, for me, for instance, it's very obvious when I'm listening to a recording, and there's a moment when, if I were sitting there, I almost certainly would have jumped in with some comment. But I'm not there, so I didn't and then I get to find out what happens when I don't.

So, those are a bunch of reasons. And I guess the fourth reason I would point out is, it can be a cool way for people to meet each other. This has sometimes been fraught, and I mean, we can talk more about some of the tensions that have arisen around recordings and so on, as well. But when it's been good, it's been really cool. Like, one of the people who's involved with the project now, I met him three years ago - right around the time I met you, I guess, actually... yeah, because we first hung out in the bay area when I was there. And so we recorded a chunk of our conversation where he had heard about the group I was part of and was asking about it. And I said, you know, let's record and we recorded it and sent it back to the group, and they kinda transcribed it and reflected on it. And the conversation was, in part, about how he was interested in joining the thing. And that was such a powerful introduction. Like, I didn't have to say, "Hey, guys, there's this guy who-" and try to tell them about him and try to explain why I thought he resonated with our views and stuff like that, and possibility spaces. I could just give a live demo of like, "Yeah, here's us talking and going into these different angles." So, that was really cool. And he's part of that, that project now, like he joined it over the course of the following year.

So, I had two questions for you, when I first heard about this practice of recording things, which was... I guess it was coming from a place of like, "This practice seems really cool, recording everything. But what does it actually take practically to do that?" And one of the questions was, "How many of these conversations do you find yourself going back to listening to again, transcribing, doing other things with, sharing with people, whatever it is that you might do with them? What sort of percentage did you find yourself going back to?"

Yeah. It's hard to say in terms of a percentage, because I don't have that good of a sense of the total number of hours of recording that we would generate. And we were definitely recording more when I was in Waterloo... well, in part, because there were just more people and so you could literally have a span of three hours where five hours of recordings were made, right? Because you'd have this group and that group both talking and separately recording and then sometimes, you know, they'd share with each other and so forth. And when we were there, we made a decent number of transcripts and Otter helped in terms of doing like automatic transcripts. And then, at the moment, here with Sarah, who, you know, [is] my partner, and with Eric, who was just recently on your podcast as well, we still record a substantial number of our conversations, but not not as many as were recorded in Waterloo. And we also do less re-listening to them here. I mean, I think that's partially... there's a few reasons for that. One of them is that we've been working with just like a lot more logistical stuff in terms of what our day to day attention has been on. Like, we're currently moving and so we're having a bunch of conversations about furniture and stuff. And, you know, interesting cultural tidbits can come up in that but it's way lower density, and so it's usually not not worth listening to those. But, like, Sarah and I had a conversation a couple months ago about some of her vision for the future, and I was like, "Oh, Eric, like, you've definitely got to hear this, you know, this is important for cohering our sense of vision of what we're doing." Oh, but then the other thing is like, because there's only three of us, it's somewhat less likely to get out of sync or get out of coherence without having that many recordings. So that's part of it. But I mean, it is really interesting to consider the cases where things are transcribed, I realize I'm not answering your sort of percentage question very well. I would say probably, Liminal Space Agency would make transcripts per week -in terms of like transcripts, that they actively do any editing, to not just like throwing it into Otter- on the order of like, one to five hours of conversation time worth of transcripts per week, which is a fair bit, I mean, in terms of how long it takes to edit them. And then these would get referenced and used for various things and commented on and stuff like that. And, I mean, it can also -I didn't mention this, when you're asking, like, what's the value of recording- but it can also just help to deepen your sense of what's happening, to revisit, "Oh, yeah, this is this really important meeting we had a couple days ago." Like, it's very easy to lose touch with some breakthrough that you have, and without the recordings you can almost feel a little bit crazy, like, "Did that even happen? Like, were we really on the same page?" A week ago I thought we were on the same page about something but if all you have is a bunch of people's different memories... I mean, that's the other thing that can be really cool, like, unpacking misunderstandings. You know, we once had a thing where I said something, and then somebody else reflected back what they thought they heard me say, and it was the exact opposite. And we were like, "Wait, no, I definitely said bluh," and they were like, "I definitely heard blah," and it's like, that's one of those things where you really kind of have to agree to disagree if you don't have a recording. There's a, "Well, here's what I remember meaning to say." And the other is like, well, "Here's the meaning I definitely got." And that's kind of... you're left with an a deeply unknown objective truth about what was said, in fact. But in one case, in particular, we revisited it and found that what had happened was, I had started a sentence and it had had a negation in it. It was like, "Yeah, I'm sure that I'm not gonna bla bla bla bla bla," and what I had done was I had tried to sort of cut and edit my sentence midway, but I hadn't properly indicated that what followed was supposed to not be negated by the 'not' or something. And so it made total sense, in retrospect, that I had thought that I had clearly said one thing, and somebody else had thought that clearly said the opposite. Like, when we re-listened to it, it was such a powerful experience of this sort of interpersonal parallax of seeing like, "Wow, your perspective makes sense and my perspective makes sense." Like, they both made a lot of sense, you know, and we could revisit the data in order to see that.

When I first talked to you about it, and also now, I got sort of a sense of a principle that if you record your conversations, that you can't know in advance which conversations are going to be important. But if you record it, you're just going to have it recorded and it might be extremely useful in the future to have it recorded. Does that seem fair to describe your experience of that?

Totally. Yeah. And so it's to be expected that a large fraction of them don't end up getting used. That's kinda necessary in order to get a large fraction of the ones that do need to be used, because you can't know in advance. I mean, you can sometimes know in advance that a conversation is more or less likely. And there's obviously conversations where it's sort of like, you know it's going to be historical, right? Like, in some way, you know... these people meeting for the first time or whatever. One important caveat, because people have been confused about this before, is that the culture there is not like Bridgewater. So Bridgewater is, I guess, a hedge fund or something like that. Some investment company that has itself a really interesting and weird culture, which was profiled in Robert Keegan's "An Everyone Culture" book. And they record all of their meetings. I don't think they record Hallway Conversations, which is itself interesting. But they record all of their meetings, and those recordings are, I guess, either automatically [transcribed], or maybe they even have people hired to transcribe them or whatever. And anyone who was mentioned in the meeting gets notified about that. So it's sort of in principle, there's no secrets. I think that is risky, in a certain sense. I mean, maybe fine in a sufficiently corporate context, maybe. By corporate, I don't actually mean corporate, maybe Finance is a sufficiently technical context. Because if you don't actually have the psychological safety needed to have no secrets and you try to impose no secrets, what you instead get is 'secret' secrets, right? Like you get people actually, in fact, having secrets, but sort of implying that they don't exist on a deeper level, than is ordinarily done with secrets. And that seems, I don't know, that seems stressful. And certainly, when doing the sort of collaborative culture research and development work that liminal space agency has been doing, and that I'm doing now with Eric and Sarah, you kinda need to be able to have conversations with some person without immediately sharing it with the other person. Because that's part of how you can just even make sense of what your what experience you're having. Like other people might have blind spots, or frames, that make it hard to speak to them about something that they're doing that's bothering you. I've noticed that sometimes people become kind of stupefied when they try to tell somebody about... like if one person's holding a really strong frame and the other person tries to give them feedback, they'll end up feeling dumb. And I mean dumb in both senses of the word, like unintelligent, but also mute. Like, it's just hard. Because when you're trying to tell somebody something, you're implicitly modeling, "how are they going to receive it?" and if somebody has got a blind spot about something, and then you try to point at that something, then the act of modeling how they'll receive, it makes you unable to think. And so there's something really important about being able to think outside of that context with somebody else, like, "What is this thing going on with this person and this thing they keep doing?" And like "Do you have that experience too?" It's like, "Well, I see what you're pointing at, but I see it more like this." And you can kind of triangulate what's going on and get a sense of, "Oh, I'm seeing something real here," which you wouldn't get if you tried to talk with the person themselves about it, because they'd be doing some frame thing that would make it hard to notice that you had a thing to say. And that's everybody. Like, people do it to greater and lesser degrees, but this is true of everybody - we all have blind spots, we all are hard to talk to about our blind spots, that's part of what makes them blind spots.

There's so much there that I could ask you about-

And, I mean, that starts to get into like Non Naive Trust Dance type of stuff.

Totally, totally. Maybe, just to begin, I want to make sure that I understood something correctly. You were sort of contrasting the culture of Liminal Space Agency to Bridgewater and you're saying, Bridgewater, all the meetings, at least, like the group meetings, are public by default, and people are notified if they were spoken about. But what were you saying about the contrast? The way the culture is that liminal space agency?

Right, so I'm gonna go riff on a tiny, common error that you made in speaking about the Bridgewater thing, in order to lay out a small framework that I have around... English is a very confused language with respect to one particular thing, which is that we have the word 'public' and we have the word 'private' and we don't have a word for like neither.

Hmm.

Right? And you refer to the Bridgewater recordings being public, which they obviously aren't. Within Bridgewater, they are public.

Internally public or something like that.

Yeah, internally public or something. But even internally public doesn't cover something like... some other kind of tag of a sharing concern. There's no word for it, right? But the thing that private is, is like, you don't share it, and then public is like, everybody has it. But what's the term for something that you share with discretion when it makes sense to you, given all of the context and information that you have, including, perhaps, knowledge that somebody might want something relatively not shared with certain people? And they certainly wouldn't want it to become public? There's no word for that. Which is problematic, because sometimes people have assumptions that everything that's being said, is, in some sense, private, and it's like, "Well, no, everything should definitely fall into the discretion bucket by default." Right? Because otherwise - in fact, that's how people treat it on some level. Like, you have to use your own discretion, you can't use anything else. What else would you use? Private is just a heuristic within which to strongly guide your own discretion. And the importance of respecting it and respecting it 100% is very high. And so if something is explicitly stated as private, it's like, "I'm going to strongly undermine somebody else's trust in me if I go and share that." But when things are kind of more nebulous, it's like, we need to rely on our district discretion. And at that point, the role of saying, like, "Hey, I don't want this shared," is guiding somebody else's discretion and trusting that since they do in fact, have the power to share it, that they will want to respect what you've said about not wanting it shared. Like, calling it private doesn't magically force them to not share it anyway. And so there is necessarily a trust that's being relied on there. Anyway, this is all relevant to the actual question you were asking, so it's not just -I mean, I have a little rant about this, and I'd like doing my rant- but it's not just about the sort of public/private thing. It's about, "How are the recordings managed in this kind of, yeah, culture, incubator or whatever?" And in general within the group, there's kind of a culture of "Basically, unless specifically tagged, the conversations were? Well, I guess, you know, part of the question also is, how do you manage all of this. And mostly, we've just had them in Google Drive, which is the least, worst bad option or something. Like it's really not great. One of the things that's not great about it, is that -to just put on my designer hat for a moment- the hierarchy of visibility in Google Drive is reversed. Which is to say, like, if you're shared on a folder, then you can see anything in that sub folder, right? But when it comes to groups, what you want is ever more nested subgroups, where those outside can't see things, right? Like, that's how group based privacy actually works. And it's the opposite of the Google Drive hierarchy where everything in a thing is visible to everybody who can see the top level thing. So there's had to be a bunch of folders that aren't associated with each other on Google Drive, because they capture the different membranes of who can see which recordings.

Hmm

But anyway, I would like to see a whole app that has like 'SoundCloud like' commenting features, where you can just kind of comment on the the point in the recording. But like at this point that might as well be integrated with transcript commenting features. But Otter is not really made to organize the volume of transcripts that we produce or the volume of recordings that we would produce. It's just not, like it just doesn't have the organizational features at all for anything like that. I'm also kind of like holding out for some sort of like Otter-Roam integration where you can specifically reference, in your Roam blocks, utterances from a conversation that got transcribed or something like that. That seems pretty cool.

So basically, you know, stuff will get uploaded to Google Drive. Stuff that seemed important to keep private to a smaller group, for whatever reason, would sometimes not get shared or just get shared directly, if somebody needed access to it. Then there'd be subgroups that would kind of have different folders to them, whether that was like a working team on some particular project, or whether that was. I mean, the group had a kind of tendency to - like at any given time, there would be a core of two to four people. And I think it's now up to the full six people that are living there, which is pretty cool. But a subgroup of you know, two to four people that had enough kind of group coherence to really think together effectively, and not get kind of constantly caught up on distrust or other kinds of jankinesses. And so often, that group at any given time would kind of have its own folder that stuff was going in, where they could be talking about and making sense of "What's going on with this person who's also kind of in the in the scene, but not in this core group who's having these whatever difficulties." And they would want the capacity to sort of do that sense making without immediately sharing it with the person that they're trying to make sense of. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of complex stuff to navigate there in terms of inclusion and exclusion dynamics, and all sorts of stuff. But I would say, in general, the recordings probably help with that because even if you're not in a conversation, there's a chance that like, later, you can go and hear it and comment on it even. There's one last cool thing that I'll just say about the power of recordings, which is power that you, also for the most part, get with fish bowling, which is, [like] somebody's listening to a conversation, but explicitly - like not being a speaker [or] participant in that conversation. Which is that it's generally my experience that if you're in a conversation... like, as I was talking with... there's something where, if you're in a conversation and somebody kind of says something that you see as being false, or confused, or misleading, or sort of... people talk about like a dangerous thought, and I don't mostly mean in the kind of political sense, but even just like if somebody thinks, for instance, that combining ammonia and bleach is a good idea -I think that's one of the two household chemicals that, like, if you combine them, you get a chemical reaction and can die- you know, that's a dangerous thought, right? Like a suggestion that someone could make. So if you're in a conversation, you're kind of... if somebody says something, and you don't kind of comment, like, "Hey, no, no, that's a bad idea." Or "That's not true," or "That's bullshit of some kind," there's a way in which you're kind of implicitly agreeing with the thing, or you're at least kind of saying that it's sorta a reasonable or appropriate, or fine, thing to be unquestioned, on the record. By 'on the record, 'I don't even mean the recording, I just mean, in the record of everybody who's there in the conversation. If you're fishbowling or you're listening to a recording, you didn't have the chance to interrupt. And so by not interrupting, which you didn't have the chance to do, you're not actually signing off on anything. And so that can be really powerful as well if you're dealing with people with different models or frames -when there's a recording or you know, a live fish bowling- to have the chance for people to have their experience of dissonance and maybe write it in a journal or something like that. But the conversation gets to flow without that dissonance being immediately brought in. And that can be cool. Like I've done a bunch of fish bowling, particularly like last Summer and Fall when I was differentiating myself more from the rest of the group. I did a bunch of fish bowling and this is where I noticed this. I was like, "Oh, yeah! If they were having this conversation, and I was in it, I would have to be interrupting here because I think that this is profoundly naive. But because I'm not in the conversation, I don't have to because I can't, in a certain sense, interrupt." And so I can just sit there and go, "Oh, well, how are they making sense of this?" And it allowed space for more curiosity on my part, because I wasn't having to sign off on things I didn't agree with, by implicitly being part of the conversation. There's, there's other ways you can do that, of course. And even the word 'of course', is related to that, which is, the way that things get languaged strongly affects what people feel they're signing off on by listening and sort of allowing a statement to stand. Like, if I say "I feel like tense right now", like, that doesn't mean you feel tense right now. But if I say, "Ah, the air in the room is a little tense right now," [and] you don't kind of, say anything, you're sort of just letting that stand as 'what the air in the room is like', you know? In some more kind of collective sense. So I think, it's worth practicing language that allows for a lot of space between different people's experiences and so on. And to some extent, you can do this even if somebody is phrasing something in a way that feels like it's making an objective claim, and you're like, "Well, I think that's more of a subjective thing that you're just saying about your own experience." But, it is actually also important to be able to have be [as] shared reality, what is shared reality and not reify at all as only my experience? It's like, "No, no, we're all having this experience right now; that's how I see it, right? You guys all see it like that? Yeah? Cool. All right, cool. We're on the same page." And that's like, part of where the coherence comes from. This is helpful. This is like I'm... I've said a lot of this before, but this last piece is clicking with something else I've just been recently thinking about and so it's coming into greater, greater clarity for me. [And] it's about this piece of, basically, connecting the frame dialogue thing, which has been a handle that I've been working with for dialoguing between different frames. And then this fish bowling thing, which I had also been thinking about for a while. I hadn't quite connected those before. And like, the importance of having people be able to use personal subjective language when that's appropriate. Like, if I were to say, right now, "As far as I can tell, we're talking in English," that would be a weird statement, because I kind of expect you to know that as well. And so why am I highlighting the "Only I know this"? Like, I'm only speaking for myself here, you might think "like what?!" Like, that should be common knowledge, right? So I should be saying, "Of course, we're talking in English right now, and thus, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Like, I can just state that as a premise that we should both know. And if you're like, "Wait, actually, I think we're talking in Pig Latin", or something, then, you know, you can say "Aitway, e'reway alkingtay inyay igpay atinlay." And then I'd be like, "But we weren't though, right?" [Chuckles]. So, yeah.

I remember the other question that I wanted to ask was sort of just... you know back when I first heard about this, [it] was a very practical question, because I was curious about implementing it myself. And it was sort of about how to do this technically, and you touched on, "Oh, we shared in Google Drive, and there are different folders that we use for different permissions, or groups, for different privacy settings." Did you use any other kind of conventions or best practices for organizing the files, or naming them, or anything like that?

Yeah, you know, just very in brief. We had a practice of year-month-day naming, which is the correct date structure, because it sorts. But we, early on, had a convention of two digit dates, which is from a long term archival perspective, such a terrible idea. But the reality was, in the short term, those additional two characters of content that you could see of the actual name of the recording on tiny smartphones was just worth it. It's gonna be a long time before the dates take over, and by that time, you know, manually renaming all of these recordings to have a 20 in front of them will be easy. So we kind of bit that bullet and went with the two digit date names. Then follows the kind of initials of the people in the conversation. So, that would sort of... you know, sometimes you could just put single letters, sometimes you would have to put the first couple of letters of somebody's name. So, if I were naming this recording between you and I, it might be like, you know, "21-09-06 MalTAS podcast episode Non Naive Trust Dance and Recordings."

Mhm mhm.

Yeah, and then people who would sort of be talked to a lot, or like common patterns, would get shortened a bit, so you would have just initials. But that only works when when it's unambiguous.

So it was sort of dates, and then names or initials, and then content of the recording, like what the topic or theme was?

Yeah, pretty much. And sometimes, we had a couple of different emoji that we used for things, like stars indicating just like, "This is a really important recording," or just like a checkmark to indicate a check in. Yeah,

Fascinating, fascinating.

And get we tried having a few more, but those were the main ones that sort of stuck. Like we tried having ones that would differentiate sort of the theory and the practice of the thing. Like, "Oh, we talked about really cool stuff here," versus like, "We did a bunch of great work on somebodies own issues, or mindset, or whatever."

Totally. This is so interesting, because the other kind of question I wanted to ask you about, before we dived in deeper, just to kind of connect some dots for this particular conversation is... you know, you and I have been friends for a few years, but then a few months ago, you messaged me, and were like, "Hey, I'm trying to get Eric on a podcast." And I had met Eric, briefly at Maple and talked to him, but, like, didn't get to know him very well. But I was like, "Oh, yeah, sure." Like, you kinda proposed this idea of, to me, you said "he's gonna start a podcast where he's being interviewed by different people. and we'd love it if you started it." And I've had him on twice, now, we've had really great conversations and [I] really love those conversations and connecting with him, and I would just be really curious to hear kind of the backstory there. And also what your experience of him is. And this is kind of interesting, given the context that we have of like, "Oh, we're recording a conversation, we're talking about someone else." And I think I asked him about you in the first conversation-

You did! I was just thinking that, yeah, and-

So, I kind of want to close the loop here and-

Yeah, I appreciate that. There's also this fascinating thing, I think there's something cool about this, which is that like, you know, you could now put a link in the description or even like, overlaid on the video of his video, sorta like, "Who is this Malcolm guy that they're referring to? Well, here's a conversation between Tash and Malcolm"

Yeah,

So, yeah, Eric, and I go back to 2013, when we were both hanging out in the bay area with the Center for Applied Rationality Community there. Which is also kind of very indirectly how I met you through through [inaudible 39:13], I guess.

Mhm mhm

Not that indirectly, but kind of indirectly. Yeah, and so I have an early memory of talking with Eric Chisholm late into the night at a party in early 2013. And I had shared with him, I think, the list of commitments and assumptions that the Waterloo group - which at that time wasn't actively using either of the names that I've used for it, but we'll just call it Upstart- I was showing him the commitments and assumptions from that, and he was like, "This seems really cool, this is really interesting." And I kind of made a note to follow up with him later. He's like the first person that was added to my Google Plus circles, or maybe it was just a contact group, I don't remember. Some sort of Google thing that I think somehow got linked with circles. But he was... you know, I added him to a list of people interested in this stuff. And then, he and I kind of lived this interesting sort of parallel life for a few years, where every August we would kind of travel to the Bay Area for the CFAR reunion, and, many of those years, Burning Man, and other, you know, the Effective Altruist summit and just kind of other events that were happening around that time. And so, for both of us, people thought we lived in the Bay Area, even though we didn't. And we were both Canadians, but we hadn't actually hung out in Canada until five years into our relationship. And at that point, he and a couple of other people came to visit the Upstart group in Waterloo, and that was sort of the first serious kind of cross pollination between the rationalist scene and there, which is something I've been oriented to for years. I was like, "Oh! These people who are trying to figure out how to think really well, in terms of rationality, these people are trying to figure out how to think really well in terms of like, co-thinking together, what if both..." And so that was a kind of early experience of that, and that was when I think I started to get a bit more of a taste of kind of who Eric was in terms of what he was capable of in certain senses. Like, you know, prior to that, he just sort of been like a guy I had cool conversations with. But there were a few moments in that experience, where he was like, able to kind of do some powerful facilitation of complex social scenes and stuff. [Self talk interlude]. Right, so I continued having a sense of him as somebody that I could often think with quite well over the coming months, and leading into us going to Burning Man together again, with this whole group in in 2018. And then in 2019, at the Maple bioemotive retreat, we were there, and something really funny happened in his birthday circle, where-

Which is a circle where people were focusing on him?

Right! So it wasn't his birthday, but it was, you know, it was his birthday, metaphorically. And so everybody was kind of tuning into what was going on for him, and, you know, trying to get his world, I think [that's] the sort of circling parlance for it. But we'd actually been talking just a day or two before about sort of different perspectives like first person perspective, second person perspective, and apparently, you can go all the way up to fifth, if you want to get fancy with it. So, Eric was noting that he sometimes has trouble taking his own first person perspective, which I think you two talked about in the podcast episode, right? And so that came out of that retreat, as well. And so when we were doing the circle, and people were trying to like, tune in to what was going on for him, he kept redirecting the attention back to how they were doing it and other stuff. And there was this subtle sense in which like, I just knew him well enough and knew kind of his his deal and his sort of approach to life and various other things well enough, that I felt like I totally got what he was doing. And the rest of the group could kind of tell that I got what he was doing, but they couldn't figure out it themselves. And so then he and I were kind of playing off each other in this interesting way, which we proceeded to do in a couple of subsequent conversations at Maple. And that was, in many, many ways, the seed of his podcast, it was the sort of recognition that like, Eric... so there are some people who don't talk in a conversation very much. And if you try to say, like, "Hey, I'd like to check in with Stacey, you know, she hasn't said anything in a while," she'll be like, "Oh? I don't know? I mean, I'm just, I'm good, I'm just listening. It's fine. Like, you know, like, don't worry about me." That kind of thing, right? Like, there's people who don't talk very much and if you direct the attention to them, they do that. And Eric, you know, sometimes in a conversation will be like silent for quite some time, you know, just like sitting there kind of taking everything in and making sense of it or whatever. But if you direct the attention to him, he like always has some sort of observation to make or he has his own sense of like, where the attention really needs to go that he's picked up from like, just scanning things and stuff. But part of how he's able to do certain moves in conversation or in social scenes, is because he's never like asking for or demanding attention - there's an aspect of that. And so, the podcast was basically like, "How can we scale the thing that happened in the maple scene where I was throwing the ball to him and saying, like, "Hey, Eric, what do you think?" Or "I think we should do it, Eric," you know, "Eric's best model is of the next move," or something like that. It was kind of like, "Well, I can just like, tell a bunch of people to talk to Eric, and they probably will, and they'll have a good time. And they'll like, learn a bunch about themselves and like, people will get more of a chance to meet him and stuff." And so, part of the magic of his podcast has been that I've been taking on pretty much sole responsibility for making sure that he has people on the podcast. And so he gets to just show up and have conversations in the way that he does without having to evoke ever 'guy looking for podcast interviewees', ever. Like he just doesn't ever have to do that without having an existing following, because I have enough people that I know, and so forth. So that's been really cool. It's been neat to kind of find a way to sorta scale this dimension of this particular synergy between the two of us. Because I, on the other hand, attract more attention than I know what to do with usefully. So, it's sort of realizing like, "Wait, I can like offload some of that to him, and he can use it really well." [It] was this pretty cool recognition of a win-win there.

Hmm. I love hearing that backstory, just because he's a really interesting person and I really enjoyed the conversations that I've had with him. And also, I've listened to the other ones that he's done with other folks and they're always really good. And I look forward to seeing it kind of continuance, seeing where he takes it and seeing more people kind of get a sense of the unique qualities that he has, and the kinds of conversations that are possible there.

Totally. Yeah.

So I'd love to ask you the question that I usually start with, which is just to hear about your personal story and background, hear more about you, anything that you feel like you'd like to share. We've kind of gotten a sense of some of the vignettes of your life so far, but anything that you'd like to do to give us a sense of the big picture at whatever length that you'd like?

Yeah. [Pause]. I'm kind of just feeling into how to go about answering this question, and one thing that comes to mind is, like, often, when I'm speaking something, I find myself needing to kind of back up and give a bunch of context in order to say the thing I want to say. And sometimes it's like a lot of context, to the point where people get lost. So like, "Wait, why are you telling me all this?" I'm like, "Well, it's, it's, it's important for understanding the thing I want to say, which is relevant to the thing you were just saying, but like, first, you need five minutes of backstory." So, one thing I'm asking is like, "Oh, like, what in the way of particular backstory might usefully get itself out of the way in relation to anything else I might want to say later on this podcast?" But I don't think that I can actually query it like that. Like, when I sent into it, I'm like, "Ah, yeah, I really don't know." I feel like I've definitely told some pieces of it through talking about the history with with Eric and I. [Pause]. On a totally different note, if I just asked myself, like, "What about my history does Tashan in fact, not know, and might find interesting?" There's something rich there, which is, I was just thinking about this a day or two ago... which is, well, so I just got back from this meditation retreat, kind of virtual meditation retreat that Mark Lippmann was hosting, which is very cool. He's got this global wayfinding meditation style, and he talks about this principle of redo to undo, which is sort of like you need you sometimes need to revisit past experiences of whatever kind in order to understand why they're arranged the way they are in your mental landscape and like reshuffle that. And so I was thinking like, "What were some of my earliest experiences with meditation itself?" And. initially, I think the first thing that came to mind was when I was about 15, my mom got into the Eckhart Tolle things. Oprah had a book club - my mom wasn't an Oprah person, but somehow she got made aware of this Oprah book club for Eckhart Tolle. So she was reading Eckhart Tolle and I picked up Eckhart Tolle, and got, lightly "now" pilled, and started meditating a bit. Just some sort of basic mindfulness thing. I mean, he doesn't really have instructions in, in his books that I can recall, or if he does, they're really vague. They're just like, "Notice that you're here now, and you have a breath or something like that." And so I had kind of gotten into that at the time. But then I realized, actually, no, my history of meditation goes back further, which is that when I was about 11, I used to be at like, what wouldn't even have been a high school dance by that point, but it was clearly modeled after high school dance, but it was just like a middle school dance, I guess, I don't even know. So we're there at some community center and somebody's playing Usher or something like that, and I would sit in the middle of the dance floor, and meditate. And I'm like, "What was I doing?" Like, what was that? I think it was partially trying to just be weird. Like, it's not like I couldn't dance at all. It's not like I was like, "Oh, I can't dance, but I can do this other thing". It wasn't that. There was definitely something about having trouble navigating the tensions and complexities of asking people to dance or trying to go up to pretty girls and like, be [inaudible 51:59]. And like, also we were like 11, or 12, so it's like, it hadn't even quite tipped over into that being the thing to do. But then also, it's sort of kind of clearly the thing to do. You know, people have their little crushes and their little social status politics, and there I am, sitting cross legged on the dance floor. And I'm like, I was just thinking about that literally, like this morning, or last night or something. I was like, "That was really weird". Anyway, so as, you know, somebody with with the, I don't know, context in history of meditation and so forth that you have, I thought you'd find that an interesting tidbit of my history. I would say I didn't really start attending to the Dharma as such, until more like 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. You know, like, there's sort of a very gradual starting to actually look at some of those questions. So I don't know, that's a different slice of my history. Yeah.

How did you get involved in Upstart or Liminal Space agency? And like, what were you hoping to accomplish from being there?

Yeah, so when I was in university, I used to go to a lot of seminars put on by a department called Knowledge integration, which is kind of like a really cool transdisciplinary program offered only at Waterloo. And they had these seminars every Friday, where they would just bring in a speaker, usually a professor, but from some random department. But I think, sometimes, they brought in speakers like from outside of the university. Yeah, they definitely did some at some point. And long story short, somebody was doing a presentation on VR and how it was hard to get people to forget that they were in physical space, even when they had a VR headset on. My impression is that this has improved somewhat, just in terms of the technology since when that presentation was given in 2012. Anyway, as part of trying to convey this, they did a demo of contact improv, with one person being blindfolded. And so there are these two people dancing in this sorta rolling, swirly, improvisational way and one of them's blindfolded. And she was highlighting how clearly you are in space, like you can still feel where you are in space, even when you can't see what's going on. And I was like, I need to do that. I don't know what hell that is, but I need to do that. And so I went up and talked to them afterwards, and they were like, "Yeah, we do this every Thursday, you know, down in Kitchener," and I was like, "Yes, I'm there." And so I went pretty much every week for months to that and went to some other events. And it turned out that a bunch of the contact improv folks were connected with this culture incubator scene, which at that time was, among other things, known as 'the household as ecology,' like trying to think of the house as kind of an ecosystem, like what are the ecological niches of different objects in the house? And where do they live? And how do they migrate around the house? and stuff. Which is still a lens that is used, although not kind of that name. But, anyway, so I got introduced to the folks there, and interestingly, on the topic of recordings, I had a journaling practice at the time. And the first night that I was there, I crashed in the basement, because there was an extra bed and so on, and I recorded this little audio journal to myself being like, "Oh, my God, I've met the most interesting people, they're so cool." And it was kind of funny listening to it later, because it's, on one level actually, sort of really shallow, like in the sense of like, compared to like, the level of like, depth and importance and stuff that I feel about the things now. At the time, I was mostly like, "They're having all the coolest conversations," like nothing about the meaning of any of it. But I think that was what attracted me to them, and in some sense to the rationalist community. It was just like people really thinking about stuff.

And, I guess the other thing I could say was that I've long had a fascination with interfaces. And I mean that in very abstract sense, not just like computer interfaces, and not just the interface of designed objects in general, like this handle is an interface with this mug. So, of course, is the lip of the mug, don't forget, that's a necessary interface for drinking. But interfaces between people as well, and like what kinds of interactions between people yield mutually satisfying, 'upward spiral' type dynamics? And what kinds of interactions between people lead to disappointment and despair and frustration and challenges and so forth? Well challenges, you're always going to get challenges, but difficulty in like the psychological sense, strain? And, from the get-go, it was just really clear that these folks had a model of human relating, and thus human interfacing, and that was more sophisticated than anything I'd ever seen. And remained more sophisticated than anything else I would come to see over the following eight years. You know, there's been important key pieces that we've incorporated from other places, and things that I've found, you know, like missing or like necessary elements of various things. But it remains the case that the basic framework being pointed at there is one of the best things I've ever seen in the world for pointing at different human dynamics. And it was outlining kind of, you know, "Here are the basic things that lead to the upward spiral, and here are the basic things that lead to the downward spiral." And having seen that, as clearly as I had, in terms of like, 'what was I trying to accomplish there?' In the most general sense, it's like, "Get the upward spiral going more upwardly and spirally. And, you know, bigger and with more people in it, and more consistency," and whatever else, I mean. Which is pretty general, and I think the generality is something that I've been revisiting recently and sort of feeling into, "Do I want to have more specific targets? Or is that even possible or wise given that part of the nature of things is that you don't know what's possible until you make it possible? And like, you don't want to like constrain yourself too early? And there's this kind of dynamic tension between planning and improv or other dimensions like that. [pause]. Yeah, I think part of what's interesting -in terms of like, "What was I trying to accomplish there?", and I've been reflecting more about this recently- is that in some sense... so, as you know -and it has sorta implicitly been hinted at by how I've been talking about this group versus what I'm doing now as distinct- I left Waterloo and I left that scene in late 2020. And I was reflecting to Eric, recently. We were talking about home and I said, "This feels like it could be home." And he asked, "Was Waterloo home?" And I said, "Ah, hmm." And he and he said... or maybe he asked, like "Waterloo could be home," or something like that. And I said, "No, Waterloo was home. Waterloo never was 'could be home'". And there was something really valuable about getting in touch with how the whole time I've been living in Waterloo, I'd never intended to live there indefinitely. Like, I was there as a university student, who are notoriously transient, right? Although, I mean, a substantial fraction of university students end up living, indefinitely, wherever they do University, it's one of the main things that gets people moving, and so on. But, you know, for the years that I was visiting the Bay Area, I kind of always assumed that sooner or later, I would move there. And, you know, [there were] various factors, including social dynamics and also the fires, as well as other things that led me to sort of feel less inclined to try to move to the bay. But there was something meaningful in recognizing, "Yeah, I haven't been treating Waterloo, like the place I'm intending to live for the rest of my life. Like, I'm mostly just friends with the small group doing this culture incubator thing here." And most of my other friends just measured in terms of like, number of people I know, who know me and know each other kind of thing, are in the bay. And I wasn't bothering to try to make friends in Waterloo for the most part. So, there was a way in which I kind of was recognizing, oh, yeah, I was... I feel like I'm answering one of your questions right now, but I've forgotten which one.

Yeah, you were getting at what you were doing there and what you were trying to accomplish.

What I was what I was trying to achieve, right. So in some important sense, I have achieved what I was trying to achieve in Waterloo on two fronts. One of which is that insofar as the group there is thriving right now, which I'm not that much in touch with them, but they were recently on the stoah*[1:03:08], and the EVAT*[1:03:10] and other things, I have a sense of them thriving quite a lot. I helped create that, and, like, you know, there were times when it was only three of us and if I hadn't been there, it would have been only two and probably wouldn't have had, you know, the momentum to get back up to where it is now, as well as just other things that I contributed to making that culture grow and thrive and so forth. And I feel really good about that. Like, I could have, in some sense, left a few years earlier, but if I had, it wouldn't have had the momentum and stability and so on that it has now. And that's part of, I think, why I didn't leave sooner. But the other reason I didn't leave sooner is I didn't know what I was doing. And I still don't know what I'm doing, but I have a framework for making sense of not knowing what I'm doing now. Like, I have a kind of meta framework for that, and I knew in 2016/2017/2018/2019, maybe even going back to 2015, I had some sense of like, "I want to go start a rationalist group of people who are doing this incubating collaborative Game B culture" or something. I mean, I didn't get the term "Game B" until later, but it's pointing at the same thing. And so I had a sense of wanting to do that and I knew I wasn't ready. Like, I knew that there was something about what was needed to actually create such a context, that I didn't have, that I couldn't do at that point. And it felt like last summer, with the kinda discovery of the Non Naive Trust stance, there was a shift to, "Oh, yeah, I still, in some sense, don't know how to do this because nobody does. And nobody even could, as one person, know how to do it, because it, by its nature, involves integrating everybody's different perspectives and so you can't simply know how to do it." But I do feel like I know how to go about bootstrapping a group of people to be able to do it, at least somewhat. And so that was the other thing I was really looking for in being being there was developing my own capacity to the point where I could host or create contexts of this kind of learning myself, and I feel like that feel like I've done that to enough of an extent that I feel I feel like, "Yeah, the time is ripe to move on and start working on that." And I really have tons of my own blind spots, and it's so vital to have Eric and Sarah as part of this whole thing, in different ways. Like, Eric brings his his kind of groundedness and his kinda...

He does make this facial expression. [Gestures].

Yeah, yeah, that facial expression is a vital piece, and I can't quite do it myself now. But, yeah, he has this ability to kind of be aware of a whole system in a certain way that I have some of, but he has it on some deeper or more native level or something - in part, just because I'm too busy meddling with the system to see what it's doing a bunch of the time. And, again, I also have the stability of having known each other for so long, and having had a lot of satisfying experiences of each other, and not having a lot of built up distrust or challenges between us. And then it's also really valuable to have Sarah involved with this whole thing, because she and I have gone through a lot of strain and a lot of challenge in our relationship. And so, it really puts me to the test of like doing this Non Naive Trust Dancing thing well - to to be metabolizing all of the history between her and I, like, you know, some big misunderstandings early on in our relationship that kind of metastasized and turned into these profound gaps in our mutual awareness or appreciation that had been very painful and a lot of work to integrate, and have been a great testing ground, proving ground for the Non Naive Trust Dance process.

Yeah, I really want to dive in more to that, and I just want to kind of honor the sort of precursors of the Non Naive Trust Dance that you sort of hinted at there, of saying like... well, you said, "When I was at Upstart, I learned the things that make the upward spiral go up, and the things that make the downward spiral go down." And I'm sure that's a whole a whole thing in itself, but could you share some of those things like, sorta, best practices or good principles that you did learn from Upstart that you can share at this time?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great question. I've been working on a couple of pieces of writing on those fronts that I'm trying to figure out what to do with. Some of them would make most sense as internal documents to people who were already kinda in that scene, including, you know, dozens of people who have you know, just come to one workshop that we ever hosted, but have an appreciation for the thing or whatever. But then like I also want to post something to my blog. In some ways, the core two pieces are these maps of these two different dynamics, which you could call a downward spiral and the upward spiral. And then a list of what were called commitments and assumptions for how to kinda enact the upward spiral dynamic. And where I've come to it now is that... like, I was just a couple days ago, rereading some of these pieces and models and stuff, and I still basically resonate with the description of the upper spiral and downward spiral. Basically, the downward spiral is caused by guilt and an undermining of self trust, and so when people are trying to figure out what it makes sense to do, they second guess their own internal compass, and generate behaviors that are trying to do good by some external authority or something, but are undermining some internal sense that they have. Which then generates guilt because - or sorry, no, which then generates some sort of behavior that kicks into gear to meet their own needs that they've been ignoring, because they're trying to do the right thing according to somebody else. Which then generates guilt, because they're not doing the thing that they're supposed to do according to the external authority. Which then reinforces the idea that they should force themselves to do things that they don't want to do, in order to be good. And then there's this kinda... yeah, I mean, whipping around back and forth. You can sort of see the spiral shape of that, and the reason it goes downward is because it's, it's opposed to itself in a certain fundamental sense, and there's a kind of striving to only have the good and none of the bad, [to] only have the right and none of the wrong. But the way that it's striving creates the very wrongness that it's trying to avoid, by sort of dualistically reifying the rightness of the other thing, and by being unable to kind of listen to the other half of things. So that's kind of the downward spiral dynamic, and then the upward spiral dynamic comes from deepening in self trust, and a sense that you can learn by doing and by... language is so messy here, because on the one hand, I want to say learn by doing and by making mistakes, but the whole meaning of what a mistake is kind of even changes here as well. Like, it's, there's a kind of, like, "everything's a mistake," and also "nothing's a mistake and it's all just learning." And being able to see that and really relax into it generates a different kind of possibility where the things that are in tension in the downward spiral, or rather, in isolation, can sorta become used to form some part of a larger whole that is able to more directly be in touch with what it wants because it's not denying what it wants in service of something else. And so a lot of this resonates with the kind of stuff that's been becoming more popular in in our corner of Twitter, around like non-coercion or non self coercion. It applies to other other people as well, so it's not just the non self coercion, but it's also like, "What does it mean to not coerce others?" And coercion is an interesting word, it's one that we've used to talk about the downward spiral in Upstart context. But it's a pretty uncommon word in a lot of contexts. [Pause] See, I mean, you can maybe map it onto like trying to get a system to perform a different behavior without regard for why it's already performing the behavior it's performing, and [whether] it makes sense for it to be doing what it's doing. Like, that's a way of describing what coercion is, and so self-coercion [is] somebody who's like, "Oh, I just need to get up early. I should set my alarm earlier" or something, right? There's like an element of not respecting that, "No, I don't JUST need to get up earlier, if I did, I would already be doing it. So there's some other thing going on that's making it so I'm not just doing that," and then similarly with other behavior as well.

And so there's this list of commitments and assumptions that point at... that actually come out of the experience of the founders of the Upstart scene. [They are] of this period of time when the culture kind of felt like it really clicked into place, and then they kind of wrote a list of like, "What were we doing? What were we assuming? What were we feeling? How were we relating to each other that was generating this?" And the list has things on it, like, "Everything we know, and everything everyone knows is a model of how things are" or as Monty Python put it, "it's only a model." "Not knowing is a necessary and creative state as part of understanding and action." There's elements of these assumptions that, you know, connect with stuff from the Dharma, right? Like, you know, "Being fundamentally happy is worthwhile and attainable", "Everyone wants closeness, and autonomy, and these are compatible", "Everyone wants to be accepted as they are and also to change and these are compatible", "No one is right, no one is wrong, no one is to blame for anything," was one of the assumptions that people would often take the most issue with, when sort of presented with this list of like, "What do you mean, no one is right [and] no one is wrong?" like. And there's a whole thing, you know, that we could go into now or at some other point about, like, "what's really going on with blame? Like, what is blame?" I have some, again, half written notes about this, but it seems to me that there's a sense in which blame is confused, sort of like how geocentrism is confused. It's like geocentrism makes a lot of intuitive sense, man; like, it sure looks like we're in the middle and everything else is going around. But you can find a perspective from which you're like, "Well, that's sort of true, but there's an us spinning thing more than there is a 'things going around'ness of us, except for the moon." But, where I've come to with thinking about these commitments and assumptions and so forth, is that they work great as a short term experimental thing. Like, if you're doing a weekend workshop, which is one of the things that they were originally used for. Like, you know, you get a bunch of group of people together for a weekend and say, "Hey, we're gonna try out this new culture thing. Here's the basic operating principles." I sometimes like to use the analogy of like, "there's three simple rules that you can give to some triangles moving around the screen, that will cause them to behave as flocking birds." It's like "Don't bump into each other, but otherwise try to get close to each other and face in the same direction." And if you give the triangles those rules, they form very complex flocking dynamics without any top-down control. And so, you know, the idea is, "this is a sort of flocking behavior for humans." And that works great for a weekend, but the commitments and assumptions don't actually have written into them anywhere, "what to do, if you find yourself unable to reasonably assume something," or, "what to do if you find yourself feeling conflicted about a particular commitment." And so, as far as the longer term learning process goes, I've come to recognize, like, "Well, yeah, it's valuable for people to get a taste of these by just trying to go directly to them," like [to] get a feel for what the upward spiral feels like. But then if you're trying to actually live it in an ongoing, permanent way, which is possible - I can say it's possible in the same way that someone who knew enough thermodynamics could say that flight was possible. Like it's just clearly possible. If you're trying to get there more consistently, it's like, well, you've got to actually really slow down and integrate every voice inside you that says, "But no, somebody is wrong," or "But no, I am right," or, "But no, like being close and having autonomy aren't compatible." Like, you know, we have tons of learnings like this, and the bioemotive retreat was, for me, one of the things that sort of kick started my sense of like, "Wait, I've been trying to like push away all of my voices that disagree with what I, in some sense, do accurately know are the best principles that I could have for navigating my life." Like, in some sense, I know that and it's true. And yet, in another sense, other parts of me don't know it, and arguing with them, you know, trying to just tell them "No, no, no, you don't get it, it's like this" doesn't work. It in fact, perpetuates the very downward spiral on a smaller scale by saying "This way is right, that way is wrong. What are you doing? You're confused." as opposed to "Oh, well...". Part of what's neat is like the place I've come to, instead, is actually like, "I'm so grounded in these principles being right, in the way that they're right, that I don't need to defend them," and that gives me way more space to listen to my own or others objections. It's like similarly to like, at one point, I was hanging out with somebody and we were talking about square footage of something. And they multiplied two numbers, and were off by an order of magnitude. And I was like, "No, no, no it's approximately a hundred, not approximately a thousand." And they were like, "No," and I like double checked my own math and was like, "No, it's definitely the thing I said, but I'll wait. Like, take as long as you need to do the math, I trust that you can do the math, and you will come to the same conclusion as me. And you know, if you try for a couple minutes and you're still like, 'No,' then I mean, I'll check again. But I don't need to argue with you because it's sort of self evidently true from the right vantage point". And so that's been really cool - realizing that everything everybody knows, is in one sense, only a model inside our heads and is in another sense, self evidently true from some vantage point. And so being like, "Well, my model is better than your model." It's like, "Well, maybe, but, what does your model see that mine might not see." And so this starts to get into some of the Non Naive Trust dance pieces of like, one of the most core elements of the Non Naive Trust dance is respecting all distrust that arises. Like all distrust is knowing something, and you can't build trust starting from a place of "You should already trust." And this was, in principle, something that was totally part of the ethos of Upstart the whole time, that you can't just say "You should trust me," but there were still ways in which we were kind of both internally and interpersonally demanding of people that they trust when they couldn't, on the basis, perhaps, of them having trusted at some other moment without recognizing that the compartmentalization involved meant that you're actually dealing with a different sense making process inside the person and that sense making process couldn't trust the same thing that some other sense making process inside the same person could, because it was working with different knowings.

Is it fair to describe the Non Naive Trust dance as kinda like... I'm getting a sense of it almost as like an upgraded version of the thing that Upstart was going for, that you started to notice some problems and some patterns and things and you were like, "Here's my best attempt at solving the problems that I was starting to notice"

Yeah, it it very much feels that way to me because, yeah, that's that's kind of how it emerged. And there's a profound amount of historical contingency to all of this. Like, the name 'Non Naive Trust Dance,' has a lot of rich elements to it, and it's not a coincidence that it's named that. But there's also a way in which like... and I may do things about this over the coming years, or months even, but like one of the things that's currently a little funny is that like, in some sense, Non Naive Trust Dance refers to a thing that people are always doing to greater and lesser degrees of skill and workability and effectiveness. Like, you know, any conversation that people have is them navigating, effectively or not, the trust landscape between them and building trust and building distrust, or having gaps in trust. Like, that's, that's always happening, right? And so in some sense, the Non Naive trust Dance is just a way of talking about a thing that's already happening. But it's already happening, and I didn't invent it in that sense of it, right? And that's part of why I talk about discovering the Non Naive Trust Dance, because it feels in some ways more like a discovery than like an invention. Having said that, it's a discovery that produces a set of kinda obvious implications for how one might go about trust dancing in ways that work in the same way that -and this is an analogy I use often- [in] learning thermodynamics and aerodynamics, it's like, you, you get an immediate sense of like, "Okay, yeah, you can build faster-than-light aircraft, but they need to have some way of lifting themselves," and there's sort of like, three or four-ish, I don't know, I mean, some expert in this could talk about it, but, you know, there's sort of a few ways to do that lifting thing, and, you know, pushing off against the ground can't do it, because you can't do that when you're in the air. Like, just some of these basic principles. And, you know, knowing thermodynamics, you'd also know that you can't build a perpetual motion machine. Like there's limits of entropy that prevent that from being possible. But you can build a superconductor, which is kind of cool. And so there's something where I feel like I've unlocked a very basic couple of fundamental truths about how trust building ever works, when it works. Like, it always follows these principles, but the principles themselves are really hard to put into words. They're like this sort of... I mean, in part because they sound almost tautological, like, they're just like, "you can't trust what you don't trust". But, if you really take that seriously, and you and you look for instances where you're trying to get someone to trust you when they don't, without actually changing what's available to them as information or just salient features that would allow them to trust you, instead of not trusting you, you notice that this is happening constantly with, with things that people say and do and so forth. So even though it's kind of obvious when stated that, like, "you can't trust what you don't trust," that's not actually how people operate most of the time. Anyway, I'm getting a little sidetracked from the the core thrust of your question, which was like, in what sense is the Non Naive Trust Dance an upgrade on what Upstart has been doing this whole time, right? So, in one sense, it just straightforwardly is, and, in some sense, even almost too much so, in that, as I was differentiating myself from that... from just being like, "the main way I have of understanding this collaborative culture thing is how we've been talking about it here, and, in particular, the way that Jean has been talking about it - Jean being the main founder of upstart and that whole project. As I was differentiating myself from her thinking, there was a way in which like, any difference that I had, between how she was seeing things and how I was seeing things that felt central, as opposed to just aesthetic or something got kind of put in the Non Naive Trust Dance. And in that sense, I'm not sure it's one thing. Like, it's in some ways a placeholder for Malcolm having his own thoughts about stuff, which I hadn't previously felt like I had space to do until I sort of started having this new framework. But in a different sense, it all feels really related. So I hope it's an upgrade. It is, at minimum, a critique, and I do have concerns that it's possible that I've missed one or two key pieces of the original, that Jean still understands that I don't. And that, in that sense, it might be a critique that's not actually viable in the sense that I might be missing some basic components. And it might be that I know I see things that ge doesn't see, because I've seen them and I've tested them and they do they do something. But it may be that I'm still missing some key pieces and that's part of why, over the coming years, part of what I want to do is find ways to bridge the thinking that I've developed back with Upstart's thinking which I was already starting to do while I was there - to some success. But I think it's gonna be really helpful for us to have had the space that we've already had, and the further space of me being out here. Which I'm just gonna mention for the recording, because if you're out in British Columbia, particularly on the coast or Vancouver Island area, I would be interested in talking with you, like nebulous podcast listener, people.

Yeah, I'm getting this metaphor, for how you're describing it, of, it's less like it's an upgrade on the same software and more like an attempt at doing the same thing that's inspired by another thing. Just to get technical about it, like Mac OS is built on BSDs and uses components of BSDs, but it's different than BSD. It's like still trying to create an operating system for users that uses some of the things but not other things, and it's done differently but it's in the same design space.

Right. And it's funny that you're using the metaphor too, because we've been using the operating system metaphor going all the way back. You know, from the very point that I joined, we were talking about the upward spiral as being humanity 3.0. Which is like the previous two operating systems being the kinda 'Hunter Gatherer pre Game A' one, and then the kind of various forms of much more serious hierarchy that humanity's had, that are also known as Game A. So the operating system metaphor goes deep, and we've even, you know, been reading some open source texts, like the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric S. Raymond. And we've been talking about the Non Naive Trust Dance as something of like a fork of the OS, I guess - a fork of the code of the cultural kernel that Jean has been stewarding for years. And, I mean, maybe one way to point at that a little bit there is, is NNTD the whole fork? Or is it just the changes that I've made on top of the fork, right? Like, is it just the patch? There is a way in which part of what's going on with the NNTD is very much designed to mediate between cultures and assumptions and protocols, kinda wherever they're at. And so, I think that similar patches might be able to be created from the same sort of font of inspiration that I've been drawing from, for other communities, other groups, other practices. You know, like various ways in which circling could benefit from a similar patch, or nonviolent communication or like other similar things. And that, that would make them all more able to talk with each other because of this basic assumption of like, "If something's not working for us, such that you don't trust me, then well, you can't trust me. Like that's how it is and that's the ground from which we need to start." And that needs to somehow be okay, in the sense that like, otherwise, you have to throw out the universe and get a new one.

I'm just reminded of... I had a conversation with my friend, Lindsey Harrington on the podcast a few months ago, and she talked about her experiences of doing Nonviolent Communication. And then she's been doing circling training through circling Europe and at Maple, doing the circling retreats there. And I think that was a pretty jarring shift for her to go from, like, extensive experience with NVC to doing Circling and kind of integrating the different paradigms. And, you know, she's been making the best of it and it was really fascinating to hear about her experiences of it. But these really are like, different ways of getting at the same kinds of problems that have different sort of tools or technologies or attitudes towards approaching these problems. And yeah, I mean, if you take those two, for example, NVC and Circling, there's just a lot of friction there in terms of the things that one takes for granted or assumes - or the way that they approach a situation is really, like, night and day dramatically different from at least the circling that I've seen done. And, you know, there's different styles of circling as well, [and] different styles of MVC as well, but I think a lot of different people are trying to get at some of the things you're talking about, and there are cultural gaps between them that can cause difficulty even though they're aiming at similar things.

Yeah, and the cultural gaps are overtly greater between NVC and Circling, say, than between my understanding of -from a couple of years ago- how to do collaborative culture and Jean's understanding, from a couple of years ago, [of] how to do collaborative culture, such that we were having some tension and friction between us. Like, it's more overt, the difference between circling and NVC, but the basic breakdown that occurs is kind of the same. And, in either case, it's like something about how I'm understanding everything, and something about how you're understanding everything is having trouble talking right now. And we're both bringing our best understandings of what effective communication looks like but because we have different assumptions in different aspects of how we're seeing the world, we're having trouble meeting each other. And so that's like a general description that applies to all scales. And...

Both within oneself and between groups, you're saying? Or just between different cultures or something like that? That there can be the same similarly shaped problem at different scales?

Right, so I guess it's actually two scale dimensions. So like scale dimension number one, is within a person versus between two people versus between two groups. With scale dimension number two, it's like the scale of the apparent difference in model. Are we both trying to circle and we even have the same lineage of circling, but we have some tiny basic assumption that's getting in all up in the gears and that is in our mutual blind spot? Because it's a blind spot that circling has that is the source of the problem that we're having, and so we're having trouble debugging it with the system that we have because of its blind spot? That's like, you know... no two people can have the exact same understanding of an interpersonal framework, because it's necessarily going to build on all of your life experiences and nobody has the same life experiences.

I think this whole context really gives a sense of the kinds of problems that you're looking at - not just from your own historical thing of being in Upstart and really liking what they're doing and then also seeing some other things that weren't maybe working for you so much, or problems that you saw with it and wanting to take a new approach. Can you describe? I'm at least getting a sense of how this might be generalized beyond your own experience to like a very broad set of problems. And so can you describe how the Non Naive Trust Dance approaches these problems? And what the solutions or attitudes that it takes towards resolving the mark?

Yeah. One of them... Yeah... if you have a more specific problem in mind, we could kind of look at it more directly. Whether that's like something from your personal life or just even a specific type of like, conflict you see happening. That might be juicy to kind of have something slightly more concrete. Otherwise, I'll pick something or I'll speak in general terms and no one will know what I'm saying.

Sure, right, I can play ball with this. One thing that I've noticed in recent months, that I think is a really interesting, general problem, for a lot of reasons, is... you know, I'm pretty online, I spend a lot of time on Twitter, I'm also navigating between different communities and I have a lot of different curiosities and questions and interests. I think that probably comes through if someone watches or listens to my podcasts of like, "this guy isn't just interested in one thing." And the communities of practice or culture that are engaged in the kinds of questions that I'm interested in looking at, or the curiosities that I have, are wildly different, and there's even different subcultures and stuff like this. So, yeah, that's a general milieu that I find myself in often. It's like, there's different places that I go to that have like totally different worldviews or practices or like conversation styles or things like that. So that's one thing, but there's a specific thing that I've noticed that's maybe a little bit more granular of, you know, because I'm so online and the people that I'm friends with, or connected to, are geographically distributed, they're culturally from different backgrounds, they have different interests and goals themselves. And there's also a higher scale, right? Say, you and I lived in a village however many hundred years ago, it's not just 50 or 100 or 250 or 500 people, it's like thousands and thousands of people. You know, I have, certainly more than the Dunbar number of people that I'm connected to, and consider friends. If you start to reach that scale of intimacy, online, it seems to me, almost inevitable, that some of my friends, people that I respect, enjoy, value will not value or even criticize or actively dislike or hate other people that I also value and consider, enjoy [and] respect. And this happens pretty frequently to me now that some of my friends -it's not just that they like dislike each other- are actively critical of other people that I really value and respect. And that causes me some emotional-psychic tension of like, you know, say someone was like -we'll just take a simple example, just to put someone in the playing field- say I had another friend that was like, "Oh, you're having Malcolm on the podcast? I don't trust Malcolm at all, I don't like that guy," [or] you know, whatever their complaint will be, I don't have a specific complaint. But like, that would cause me some dis ease. I'm like, "No, I like Malcolm, he's so cool, and we had a great conversation and it was really fun, and I want to have him on again. What do you mean, you don't like him?" You know? But I also like this other person and the simple thing to do socially would be sorta like, choose a battle of like, "Okay, I'm going to choose Malcolm," or "I'm going to choose this other person." It's like, "No, I really like this other person, they're great too. I had them on the podcast, and they were really fun to talk to. And I really liked talking to them about this thing and value them for these reasons." Because I don't reach for one of the easy things of just like choosing one over the other it causes emotional psychic distress and often like social interpersonal distress of like, "Oh, these people really don't like this other person or this group or whatever."

Cool. Yeah, this is something that I haven't done that much - like, applied NNTD to so far. So we're very much going to get me live on this-

Love it!

which is cool. I'm curious if you have a sense -based on what you've already heard- of... what would you expect me to say? As like step one, or something, of like, how I would go about approaching this?

Hmm. [pause]. Well, you said that you can't force trust, [that] you can't force people to trust, if there isn't trust. And that, that is really honoring and acknowledging that distrust is the basis for building trust. And so, something like, "You can't argue with someone about their distrust or force them to trust someone else. But instead maybe to be curious and investigate. And that probably that there's a there, there, you know? Like, just if there is some distrust, that there's some signal or meaning to that distrust, even if you don't have to, like totalize it or say, "Oh, this person is evil, and should never be talked to and should be shunned or something." Like, if there's distrust, then there's probably something significant there that's like worth listening to and asking questions about or something like that.

Mm hmm. Yeah, that that very much feels like... that was the first thing that kind of came to mind for me. And part part of why I put the question to you is because I feel like that's the main thing I've said about NNTD on this podcast so far is this piece, which in some ways is THE PIECE, but I mean, there's lots more that could be said. So it's like, yeah. So then there's questions like, "Well, how do you do that, though? Like, how does one actually go about respecting distrust?" And it depends a bit on how people have been already talking about whatever they're talking about. Like, you know, if somebody were to phrase it as you initially did, like, "Oh, I don't trust that Malcolm guy" or whatever, then it's like, there's something really powerful about the phrasing, "I don't trust," that lets you say, like, "I respect that you don't trust that" without actually agreeing that the thing they distrust is bad. It's one of those language pieces that is really, really firmly subjective. [Groans] I don't like the word subjective, it has implications that I don't want. But it's really clearly them speaking for themselves as opposed to speaking about, like, "What is." It's a lot harder to respond in a similar way if somebody just says, like, "Bro, Malcolm's a... bad person".... I don't know, I'm trying to think of what the actual thing would be. Like, often, when things like this come up, it's because people are sort of judging a worldview of somebody else or something. I don't know somebody could judge me for being insufficiently woke, probably, if that was a thing... if there's some important piece. So then, you know, if somebody was judging me for being insufficiently woke, but said it as "Malcolm's right wing" or something, then now we've got a whole bunch of models, because I'm not right wing, per se. I have, in fact, found a way to feel superior to both.

[Laughs]

And so it's like... well, then you'd be dealing with like... maybe, to the extent that you know that, you might be wanting to say to them, "Well, Malcolm is not really right wing," but you don't want to be saying that in a way that feels like it's denying what they are, in fact, saying, which is that I don't adhere to the some prescribed left wing set of politics, either. Leaving aside the fact that left and right have rotated what the hell they're doing two or three times in the last century, and are pretty arbitrary tags for things. But they may have some thing that's true about what they're saying, but they're expressing it in a way that contains false implications - true and false are kind of messy. And so it's hard to respond in a way that... you might say something like... you might try to dive into more of like, "What are the actual nature of of their concerns?" Right? And then to whatever extent, there's common ground between the two of you, or between, in this case, them and your model of me, right? Like, they might say, "Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," you know? And you might be like, "I'm pretty sure Malcolm's on board with that, too." And they'd be like, "Hmm, well, I don't know if I can trust that because, like, I haven't seen blah, blah," and then that's where you can start to say, "Well, yeah, that makes sense that you can't trust that, like, you don't have the experience of him that I do." Or you might say, "Here's a thing of his writing, you can read that might give you a taste of how he thinks about this." But ideally, still with a tone of, "And if that doesn't convince you, that's okay. If it doesn't convince you, it doesn't convince you. It shouldn't convince you, if it doesn't." This almost like a "of course, of course, of course not." And that's part of what it means to really shift from orienting to trust as a sort of naive thing that you would sort of ask somebody to do, even if they didn't, whatever, into a non naive thing that is, in some sense, unshakable because it's... it doesn't involve blocking your own perception of things or something. And it's worth noting that a lot of what people do that is, in some sense, non naive, is still profoundly over generalized. Like somebody who's had an experience their whole life of being treated well, because they grew up in a context where people treated each other fairly well is going to have a non naive trust based on their experience that people will treat each other well. If they overgeneralize that, too, "It is not possible for me to get mugged, or robbed, no matter how dark or crime ridden of an area of the city I walk through" or, you know, "It is not possible for this person who is, you know, sending me an email saying that they, you know, are Nigerian prince, it's not possible that this could be a scam," right? Like, if they over generalize it to that? Well, yes, that's gonna end up being naive in a certain sense. But we can only say it's naive because we know something that they don't, based on our experience of the world. And from somebody's perspective, if they've just over generalized but haven't actually negated anything that they know, they're still making an actually good bet based on their experience. I mean, everybody's always kind of making a good bet based on their experience, but usually in a much more compartmentalized way where like, the part of them that's making the decision is like doing so in the face of other parts of them that are saying, "No, no, wait, that's bad." I've, again, run a tangent, and forget what the original thing was that you asked. I mean, I guess we're just sort of exploring this peace around this, like, different friends who have different different models. Yeah, I mean, people do also have different reasons for being upset with other people, or distrusting or hating other groups of people. And I think it's worth, kinda, acknowledging that those reasons are there and that you don't necessarily know what they are, or something.

I'm getting the sense that... like your aim is... I'm trying to make what you're talking about practical and use this situation. I'm getting the sense that you, in this situation, will just be like, "Acknowledge the distrust, maybe ask questions, maybe give them away out of it. But like, you can't force something different." And probably realistically, in that situation, you're not going to... you know, say I had a friend Joe that really disliked you and distrusted you, but, probably, realistically, I'm not going to get Joe to trust you or like you. But if that is possible, it's going to be on the basis of acknowledging and inquiring and being curious about what his distrust is-

And getting him whatever information he would need in order to trust. And when I say information, I don't mean theory, per se, I mean, information in the information theoretical sense. Like, in the sense of experience, primarily. The other thing, though, that I would note is that there's sorta two points of concern here. One is, "Joe doesn't trust me". The other is, "Does Joe distrust you, because you are connected to me?"

Totally.

And that might be something that you can deal with more directly, where you might say, like... you might invite -to the extent that you feel capable along various axes of doing this- you might invite the person to share, "What impact does it have on you, and on our friendship, that I'm close with this other person?" And you might find that they have some concern about you that actually can be assuaged by something you might say, or something you might do that would cause them to feel relief around some concern that they had that was actually about you, not directly about me, but was only what was coming up in relation to me, because that caused them to question some ease that they might otherwise feel around you. Because-

They'd be worried. This person distrusts you, and they're worried that you're going to take advantage of me. And so it's not so much that they care about you as such, but they care about me in relationship to you-

They want to be able to trust that you're not going to get taken advantage of in some particular way. Right. And so that could involve coming to trust that I wouldn't try to do that, but it could also involve coming to trust that you are wise to such things, in whatever the space of things is that they're concerned about, such that you wouldn't get taken advantage of.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, in these situations, it's like I'm a different person than they are and probably like... they might have drawn a boundary with someone or the way they relate to someone that like I don't need or have the need for in the same way. And it like makes sense that they would have that boundary or that need and also that I wouldn't need that boundary or want that boundary or something like that. And just like different people are going to operate differently. I tossed out this example, which is, like an active theme that I experienced, but what's the... it's kind of a complex and complicated, high stakes, very nuanced, kind of shape-

They all are!

They all are, okay. I mean, in some sense-

Like, in part, because if you're building a framework whose role is to kind of mediate when all your other attempts fail, in a certain sense, right? Like at some point, I'm probably going to write up dimensions of trust dancing that are- or aspects of the whole trust dancing thing that are less about the specific 'how to deal with problems that occur?' you know, like breakdowns in dialog because of having different frames or assumptions or something. Probably at some point, I'll write up something that's more like, "How to go about having good first dates," right? Which is like, you're not dealing with a bunch of existing distrust, locally, you're in fact dealing with a kind of over optimism of how well things are going to go, usually. But, like, anyway, having said that, a lot of my attention has been aware other things break down. Because the reality is there's lots of other great advice that works great when it works, and so the actual thing you need to deal with is "What do you do when the best approach that you have is failing?"

Hmm.

Well, something like that.

Yeah, that that all makes sense. I wonder if we could use an example that's a little bit more relatable for people maybe, of like, I imagine that a number of people watching or listening to this will be in a close friendship, or a close romantic relationship, or something like that, that has friction of some kind, you know? Some disagreement. What is the stance, or approach, that you would take from the non naive trust dance, to like - oh, I don't know, let's say somebody's... two people are arguing over who does the dishes or something like that? That's a classic example.

That is such a classic.

Yeah. So what do?

What do? Well, one principle that I just jotted down a few minutes ago, that I was wanting to bring in any way, and I think it does apply to the dishes type thing is, if it feels like somebody is questioning something that should go without saying, SAY IT.

Hmm

It's very common for people to-

But dishes need to be clean, or something like that, to eat off.

or, or, or, or "I would like for the dishes to be clean." Somebody will be like, "And you blah blah blah blah" and you have this subtle sense of, "It sounds like they think I don't want the dishes done. What kind of idiot would think that I don't want the dishes done too? What fucking buffoon may not possibly know that I also want the dishes done? Jesus fucking Christ." And turns out, in my experience, about three quarters of the time, if you just utter the sentence, "I would also like the dishes done, that matters to me too." the person goes, "Oh shit, I hadn't noticed." Like, you're standing there being like, "This should be so obvious, I can't believe they don't know." Have you tried telling? Have you actually tried? I think that part of what's going on here is people get caught up in how misunderstood that they feel that they're not... they don't have space to feel like it. And sometimes it's because you know, you don't want to... like you think you're having a thought that's like, "This other person must be an idiot," or "must not know me at all after however many years we've been together, if they think this about me." And those are like some pretty judgmental thoughts to have, and if you don't feel like you can say the obvious thing without like, being like, "*Obvious thing*, you idiot," then that kind of makes sense. But sometimes you can just say, "Okay, look, I'm about to say a thing I heard on a podcast, and sometimes it's good to say obvious things, right? And so, I'm going to say a thing, this may be super obvious, but I'm gonna say it anyway because maybe it'll help." And then you say, "I also like clean dishes." Right? Or whatever the thing is. Or, often, this could be about like states of affairs, states of things, like, "I want the dishes to be clean". Or it could be things like, "I don't want you to feel burdened with having to do more of the dishes than you want to do." Right? That's again... the sort of thing that kinda ought to be obvious in a friendship. And yet, we read a lot into each other's behaviors. And so if you're behaving in some way, that your roommate sees, that feels connected with some other person who really, really seemed like they wanted to dump all the dishes on other people or whatever, right? Or some parental thing or whatever else, then... it can be really valuable to just explicitly state, "It seems that what I'm doing is causing some sort of problem for you." I would like you to not have that problem.

Hmmm. I'm really glad you said that, because the sentence, like, "I don't want you to be burdened with the feeling of doing more dishes than you want to," was like, really powerful for me to hear that. And I was like, "What is happening in that sentence?" What exactly? Because, I mean, it's specific to the dishes problem, which is a common - but also not the only problem that this framework would solve. But then you stated kind of the general thing of like, "It seems like you're having a problem, I don't want you to have that problem." Like, yeah, almost from a like metta, loving-kindness perspective, my heart is like melting hearing that. Like, wow, that is so sweet, and so true. Like, I believe that about people, that like people don't want other people to have problems, or be causing the problems, but these frictions are just so sticky and persistent and like, confusing and disorienting on really deep levels. Yeah.

Yeah. And, like, sometimes, there's... sometimes we do want each other to be having problems. Sometimes, like, you know... like, a lot of laws are based around causing problems for people who do things that the lawmakers deem are bad, right? And they're like, "Yeah, I want you to be having these problems." Like, the installation of like, tiny, like, blocks on like, ledges to prevent skateboarders from skateboarding -grinding on the ledges- is definitely trying to create problems for the skateboarders, right? They're like, "These are our ledges, these are not for skateboarding, go to your skate park, right?" On a deeper level, you know, they don't want the skateboarders to feel thwarted, particularly, they just want that to not be a good place to skateboard. You know, they want they want the skateboarders to have a skate park, probably. But there is a local sense in which they are actively trying to thwart somebody else's thing. But, yeah, I do think most of the time, that's not what's going on. And even when it is, there's usually a deeper level on which the person would say something like, "Well, I am kind of creating this problem for you, because I think you need to have this problem. But I think you need to have this problem, because I feel like if you don't, then you'll be creating some problems for me."

Mm hmm.

A lot of it amounts amounts to that.

Right I'm getting the sense with this that like, well, there's there's two things one is, you know, just just having this conversation with you, I'm really aware of how much depth and care there is to this framework of like, the ways that you're modeling things and seeing the problem of... the kinda general problem like, if you want to have a framework for building trust and solving trust issues at different scales -internally, between two people, at large and society- that's going to be a complex, complicated, hairy, nuanced framework, right to really address those things. And also, you know, I think you're still in kind of the early stages of explaining this thing and sharing it and distributing it. I'm wondering, just to make it sort of even more relatable for someone that's listening to this, if they've been kind of intrigued by this and what you're sharing, what's like... I have the sense with this sort of thing that, often, it helps to be attuned to these kinds of dynamics or themes in one's own life. And that [it] positions you well to receiving the instructions or model or framework if you're already attuned to the phenomena that the thing is trying to solve. And I'm wondering if there's sort of like a take home experiment, or like, homework assignment or like, challenge, or curiosity or investigation that someone could try at home from this conversation of like "Hmm, what is happening here?" Or even a thing of an intervention of what to do if there is a problem?

Yeah, great question. Um, I have one thought that I just want to append on to the previous thing that we were saying about the dishes. Which is, suppose that you say some thing that feels obvious to you, right? There's sort of a, sort of a couple things that can happen at that point. I mean, one possibility is that the person goes like, "No, duh dipshit! I know that," but like, I've yet to see that happen in a couple dozen of saying obvious things, especially if you preface it with, "this might sound obvious, but ". But, I mean, if that happens, you've got a whole other thing. But the two main things that happen are, one, the person has like an immediate softening, and is kind of like, "Oh, I hadn't really taken it in" or "I didn't know that about you",..., you know. Like, they have some sort of softening, receiving, type of energy. Another possibility is that there's the slightest bit of kind of hesitation or guardedness. And in that case, that seems like an instance where, basically, the person is... where,..., the person can't integrate the thing you've just said as simply as "Oh, I didn't know that." Because it seems to somehow not just be unlikely, given what they've experienced so far, but [to] actually contradict what they've experienced so far, on some level. So they have a bit of like, a, "But if that's true, then how..." And, and it's possible to have a, "I can believe that although I don't know how that would then fit with this other thing." Like some sometimes people can kind of hold both, but if somebody is having trouble taking in what you're saying, because something else seems to contradict it, then that's, again, a classic instance of a situation where the thing to do is respect that they can't trust you, basically. And the way that I would approach that is if they seem a bit guarded around my saying, "I don't want you to be having this problem that you seem to be having based on what I'm doing. Like, I don't want to be creating that problem for you." If they seem guarded in response to that, I might say something like. "And if you're having trouble believing what I'm saying, like that's okay. Like, I'm not going to ask you to take my words at face value, if they don't seem trustable to you, or something like that."

See, I think for me in that situation, assuming I had said "the thing," which... that's a phrase I'll be kind of mentally noting. It's not one that I've had before, so this is a counterfactual situation, but I think I would get really curious about what the reservation or hesitation was of, "What was not jiving for them about me?"

Totally. What I want to suggest is before you get curious about it, say, again, the obvious thing, hopefully obvious, that you've respected it exists. Because otherwise the getting curious can come off as a kind of interrogation of "what does this have to do with what I said?" kind of thing, as opposed to like, "Okay, you don't trust what I just said, I respect that. That's totally okay." And the language that you use for this is not important, the important piece is the meaning, like conveying to them, as best you possibly can, given the entire history of the context of everything between you [two], that in fact, it's okay that they don't trust this particular thing.

Hmm

But if they don't buy that, that's also okay. And that's the point where I would start to kind of look inwards a little bit. Like if I tried to say to somebody, "if you don't buy that I don't want you to be having this problem, that's okay." And if it seems like they don't buy that, I might say, "Hey, it seems like it seems like in general my words aren't really feeling very trustable to you right now. And like, I'm going to go inwards and just take a moment and sense into if there's something I'm hiding that you might be picking up on. And I would just kind of run a diagnostic check of like, "is there some resent that I am carrying and not not acknowledging?" or something like that. It's not necessarily about me. But like, insofar as somebody who's not trusting what I'm saying, multiple times, there's definitely some chance that I'm not as integrated in that moment, as I think I am.

Now, I'm just really aware in this moment of something like you having a lot of models at play for who humans are and how they operate and how they interact, that are really subtle that [and] might be hard to make explicit. You know, [models] of how we perceive and how we behave and interact with each other.

Well, I'm gonna try.

Yeah, yeah. Definitely, definitely. Well, and with that, coming back to this question of an experiment that someone could run at home, or something like that, to be attuned to these things, what are these dimensions about how one's mind works and interacts with other minds and other people? And what's something you can try, to be attuned to those things or interact with them differently?

So really, a really simple experiment, that's totally different than everything we've been talking about so far, is go to YouTube and pull up some video that... there's sort of two ways to do this. One is to pull up a video of somebody you don't particularly like, or some like news channel that you don't watch or something like that. But another version of this is like, pull up a video of a guy that - or some person that you genuinely think might have good things to say about relationships or something like that. Relationships are sorta a good topic for this or just like psychology, motivation - things, you have a lot of your own embodied experience of how things work, right? Like, you know what works for you and what doesn't, even if you don't know that, you know, it. That's actually probably better than the newscaster one. But you can do this with anything. So, you watch the video and try to pay attention in your own mind for phrases like, "I don't buy it," or "That's bullshit," or, "No, that doesn't because..." and then you know some model or some memory or, you know, some experience you have that suggests that the advice they're giving won't work. Or pay attention in your body to just like, moments of tension or like, you might even notice yourself shaking your head "No," a little bit. And then just pause the video, and just take a moment to respect your own distrust. And, you know, having respected your own distrust enough, which might just be a little bit or you might need a whole 10 minutes of just really like, "Wow, yeah, I really don't trust this." Having done that a little bit, you know, return your attention to the video, don't even hit play again yet, unless you've completely forgotten what he was saying. But return your attention to the video, and then go, "Yeah, okay, this person, even though I've got some distrust about the safety or relevance or validity of this advice, this person genuinely thinks this is the thing worth saying." And, if you're in a situation where the person -this is why I was saying, maybe don't do the newscaster thing, because that's a whole different, like, bullshit factory. But if you're in a situation where you're watching someone who you genuinely think has things worth saying, right? Then it's like, can you hold simultaneously, "there's something that's off about this for me," but also "they are saying it and they think there's something important and worthwhile about what they're saying,"? And can you sort of respect that those are both true at once. That can be just like really basic practice in, I mean, self trust for one, [because] as I said, you know, building self trust is one of the core pieces of the upward spiral thing. But we didn't actually talk that much about how to do it. And I would say that this is one. It's like, listen to, or watch, or whatever, people saying stuff and just notice all the moments when your inner voice for whatever reason, says, "I don't buy it". Just be like, "Great, I don't have to buy it." And just really, really, honoring that. And then you might have some other part of yourself that gets upset at the part of you that's like, "I don't buy it." "It's like, look, if you don't buy this, then we're never going to be able to solve our motivation problems." You're like, "So I don't buy that we don't buy it." It's like, "Great, great, welcome, hello, yes." And this connects on a sort of deep level with the "say the obvious thing", which is that part of why we need to say the obvious thing, sometimes,... well, there's a few reasons. I mean, one of them is just like, "what's obvious, from my perspective is not obvious from your perspective," but also "things that in a sane society would be, obviously common knowledge, are not common knowledge in our society." The history of how we were, broadly speaking, raised, you know, everything from parenting, to schooling, and so forth, has done a lot to undermine the validity of our own experience, as a basis for knowing. You know, a little kid knows that it's time for them to go to the bathroom, and the teacher is like, "No, not now Jimmy."

Mhmm

Or knows that something about what they're being taught or how they're being taught it isn't working. And it's like, "No, this is education." Right? Like, you know, people get essentially gaslit about what learning even is, and this is related to what you're saying, but models of human beings. You know, if you model human beings as being incredibly learny creatures, then and that become less so by adulthood... I mean, part of that, is neuroplasticity - a very small part of that in the grand scheme of things. But it's like, what happens to people such that they get less learning when they go through education?

Hmmm

Anyway, I have lots of rants on that available too. So that's an exercise, and that's a fun exercise, because kind of anybody can do it. You're potentially already on YouTube right now. In fact, you could even consider - you could think back over your experience of listening to this podcast. And you could be like, "Is there anything Malcolm said, that seemed kind of like bullshit, or like, kind of, you know, like, I didn't buy it, or I thought he was naive or confused or something." And like, any voice that you have in yourself, like that is like, exactly what you need to be listening to. And, you know, when I said, "On my own, like, I couldn't possibly make this whole thing happen, in part, because it's not a one person sized thing." That's partially because, yeah, lots of what I'm saying is bullshit from other people's perspectives. None of it's bullshit from my perspective or I wouldn't be saying it, but it, indeed, is naive to lots of realities of what being human and being in relationship is like. And so I need to be able to listen, which I used to think was about, like, I don't know, like humility and trying to... I don't know... I'm actually like, I'm like rethinking this as I'm saying, and I'm like, there's a sense in which it's about humility, but humility is not about humility. Like, listening is a skill, and it's mostly the skill of not losing touch with what you know, like, to the extent that you can know what you know yourself, and not lose touch with that, and to the extent that you can trust that you will not lose touch with that. In general, I think it's pretty easy for people to listen. And so if somebody is asking you to listen harder, it's like, start by listening to yourself harder...

Mm hmm. Interesting

...is sort of what I would say. And this is very related to this thing I was just saying around self trust. Like they're sort of the same thing.

Well, there's so much here that I could keep asking you about and I would love to keep talking to you about it.

Oh, multi part episode!

Yeah, multi part episode, let's do it. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how you continue to explain these things that you've sort of internalized and how you share them with the world. Hopefully, this podcast can be a venue for you to continue to do that.

Yeah, that sounds that sounds good. I think that'll be that'll be fun. And yeah, I valued your listening and your helping zoom in on some of these kind of more concrete situations. Like you brought this one from your life. And we also talked about the dishes, which, as you said, are a classic. And yeah, I mean, it'll be cool, also, if we have another episode in a few months or something like that. Like, hearing more from you about, "oh! I tried the obvious thing, the obviousness thing and like, here's what happened" and like, you know.

Totally, totally, and the respecting distrust of self or other.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time Malcolm. I'm really looking forward to having more conversations about this.

Yeah, me too.