Investigating Superorganisms and The Collective Intelligence of Humans

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
In today's fast paced world, weoften find ourselves at the crossroads of technology
and science and culture, searching forthe threads that bind these elements together and
shape our lives. You know,we tend to think about this question as
affecting individuals or groups, But whatif the answer is larger than that.
What if we as humanity function notmerely as individuals but parts of a larger
collective entity. And I'm not justtalking metaphorically, but literally blending into a

(00:24):
larger entity. How might that changethe course of our future? Imagine the
transformative power of we elevated over theisolated eye. So welcome to this anthra
life. I'm your host, AdamGamwell, and today we embark on an
extraordinary journey guided by the thought provokinginsights of Byron Reese. Now Byron stands
at the forefront of futurism. Isan author and a CEO who wields the
power of inquiry to unlock the mysteriesswirling at the inter cities of human connections

(00:49):
and networks. With an analytical mindand infectious curiosity, hire and beckons us
to delve deeper, not just intothe mechanics of our world, but into
the very essence of our existence.So together today will navigate the concept of
super organisms, an idea that stretchesthe fabric of our individualities and our collective
identities, weaving through the narratives ofancient civilizations into our future, examining the

(01:11):
harmonious yet complex structure of bees,and even casting our gaze towards the stars
to the cosmos that develops us.So are you prepared to have your preconceived
notions upturned or are you feeling readyto take a journey that challenges the conventional
pieces together the grand puzzle that ishumanity and infuses your day to day with
profound, disruptive insights. Well,then's day tuned. We're gonna fly through
this conversation on what it means tobe part of something far greater than ourselves.

(01:34):
This, my friends, is notjust a conversation. It's an invitation
to view the world and our placewithin it through radically different lens. Let
the journey begin here on this andthrough life. When I was a boy,
I was a boy scalp. Igrew up on a farm, and
I was a boy scalp. Andthen when your a boy scout go away
for the summer for summer camp,and it's super camp. You are merit
patches and they're all woodcraft for relatedYet I was a nerd, surprising,

(01:56):
and one summer I saw all thisnerdy merriort Patge offered which was bookkeeping,
and I said, I want tolearn accounting this summer at the boy Scout
cap. So I signed up forbookkeeping. And the man came out and
he said, there is no suchthing as a bookkeeping there. Bad boy
Scouts. Some mega would never offerthat. You have all just signed up
for beekeeping beekeeping. So that's thestory about how became a beekeeper. Now
what I learned about bees is,you know, a bee is a creature

(02:20):
made of cells, just like weare. But a bunch of bees come
together to form a hive, andthat hive is actually another animal. It's
not a metaphor for an animal.It is an animal. Why would I
say that, Well, it hasdifferent properties. It's warm blooded, it
regulates its temperature, whereas no beedoes that. It has a memory,
It has a lifespan of maybe acentury, where a being in this is

(02:43):
a few weeks. It can reproduceif the beehive had a skin around the
whole thing. You wouldn't have anytrouble imagining it being a living creature.
But because it doesn't, it's hardfor us to do that. But I
learned that it is a super organismand has these emergigpabilities. And there's even
an old tradition and among beekeepers,when the beekeeper dies, you go and

(03:06):
you tell that the bees the keeper'sdead, and they, I believe,
did that when Queen Elizabeth died andthe Royal bees, they went and told
them. So the question I askedmyself, is is it possible that a
bunch of people come together and forma literal animal, not a metaphor,
but a biological fact. Are abunch of people together a creature, a
living creature? And if so,how would you know? It wouldn't be

(03:29):
obvious because the super organ lives ona different time scale than us, and
you know, it's what hull levelup, and we wouldn't be able to
perceive it. And so I decidedI would. I would put forth a
series of hypotheses that would be true, falsifiable apotheses. It would be true
if we were super organs. Ididn't know where it was going to land,

(03:51):
honestly when I started the book,but by the the book, I'm
completely convinced there is this animal.I named it a gora, and I
believe it's a thing, breathing,thinking, creature that we can not be
sure exists, but I think canbelieve does exist. Take evidence points towards
it. I think that, Yeah, I agree. It's like, I

(04:11):
think it's a totally fascinating hypothesis andagree to going through your book too,
that you put together convincing argument,right that could we could think about this
and so on. One thing,like I think you wisely start the book
around the cell, right where likeI was thinking about life of simplicity through
through complexity, and so because superorganisms themselves are quite complex, you know,
and BIV is a good example therewhere it's you know, we have
the individual bees, but then theycome together and they make this new being

(04:34):
being. Right that that is thisthis notion that you know, as you
said, can kind of like regulateits temperature. It has a different lifespan
than individual bees. And that's that'sinteresting for us to think about. Like
when we scale down, I havea human body and then I'm made up
of bajillions of cells, right,so this is something that they you know,
you talk about this in the booktoo, but you know, if

(04:55):
folks haven't writ itude like one way, how can we think about this in
terms of if I scale down itdoes I'm not a super organism as me
Adam that has a bunch of cells. But if we scale up as humans
into the planetary sized things, humanitycan function. Is that? So how
do we begin to think about that? Like, so it's not just the
number of complex little things happening,but there's other pieces that make something of

(05:15):
super organism or other properties that comeas part of that. So I actually
think you are a super well,well, thank you. So the reason
I start about the reason I startwith the cell is I point out that
there's nothing in a cell that isa lie that is the primary unit of
life on the earth. And ifI took you a party cell out of
time, I put those cells inPetrie dishes. They could live and live

(05:40):
their full lives and die and allof that, but you would have vanished
in that picture size. So thequestion is what are you? What are
you? You're much more like it'sa crazy question because and so that was
why what I wanted people to thinkabout is you know you're a unity?
You are you have but where wheredoes that come from? Sense? You

(06:01):
are made of cells, but youdon't share your body with your cells.
It's not like they get half thebody, you get half of it.
Somehow you're a different pattern of orderon top of another pattern of order.
I like it in the book,in the introduction to Imagine a poster,
you look at a poster on thewall and it's a puppy, and you
get real close and look at itreally carefully, and you notice that the

(06:25):
pixels are actually different photographs of puppies. So at one level you see and
then at another level there's a differentlevel of order. And that's what you
are. And so I think ifpeople can kind of grapple with them,
and where do I come from?And how is it that I have these
new abilities because I'm not really alivein the way that a cell is alive.

(06:46):
Cell is a primary unit of life, and you're a collection of it.
It's like you're like a like ano gear it can tell time,
but if you put gears together ina cunning away, it can tell time,
and that you make a clock.And that's really what you are.
And so once you can wrap yourhead around that, that it becomes easy
to see that a bunch of peoplecould come together and there could be a
new level of order, and thatwould be a gora, and a bunch

(07:09):
of Agoras could come together, andthat could that could be another life form,
a higher level life. There's noreason, there are actually reasons that
would stop, not philosophical reasons,but practical reasons of relating to the age
of the universe. At some point, the scale of the super organism,
what would just be so far beyondwhat the how long we think life is

(07:31):
that the universe has existed. Now, the last thing I'll say on this
is what excites me about this theoryis that it answers the question why are
we here? Scientifically? And sciencedoes not like why questions. Science loves
how questions? How does this do? And that science does not like why
why? And I think I cansay now why we are here? What

(07:54):
is our purpose? Because you seethere was a I won't spoil it part,
but it comes about because there wasan essay written a long time ago
called I the letter I and Commapencil hit and it was this economist who
pointed out there wasn't a person onthe planet who could make a pencil.
There's nobody who could mine the oreand make the steel and crimp the ferule

(08:16):
and fell the tree and make theyellow paint. Nobody could, and yet
pencils get made. So who's makingthe pencils. My answer to that is
a gore is making the pencils.And that's an emergent capability. And so
you think about an iPhone or asmartphone. Your body has thirty elements in
it, that's it. That smartphonehas sixty elements. There's not a person

(08:37):
live who could make a smartphone,and yet that smartphone gets made. Yeah,
you know, people in both theinvisible hand like Adam's fits invisible hand.
Yeah, but they never say whosehand is it. That's a good
point, and I think it's aGorey's hand. Yeah. No, that's
actually a really good point because weoften have these kind of metaphors of bigger
things happening, right, and visiblehands a great example, and then it's

(08:58):
like, well, okay, whathand is that? Right? Or even
like this this idea that like Idon't think of like I don't know if
this of lies that much. Butjust like Tom, you know, Thomas
Hobbs Leviathan, right, the ideathat we all come together and that becomes
the sovereign, which is the beingthat then like adjudicates or decides and like,
but the only functions as a aggregateof beings right to make the will.

(09:18):
And that's kind of interesting interesting pieces. So I think part of that
too, like as we kind ofwrap our heads around what a super organism
is or does, right, well, I fair really helpful to is like
as as we think through like thethe pieces that it has to have,
like ideas of like novel properties comethat are different from the individual itself.
And so the example you said withhuman body and cells is good on it
where it's like the cells the unitof life, but then there's a me

(09:41):
that's separate that's not the cells,but it is the cells, right,
But it's like all the cells arenot saying, hey, I have an
idea, let's get together and thenmake Adam right or whoever else right there.
But like that there's just a higherorder that then takes place in a
certain configuration. And so thinking aboutthis too, like as we kind of
like map out a little bit orsome of the ideas of like what are
some of the emergent properties that seecoming out from Agora? Like, as

(10:01):
we think about this, like whatis it doing? And so part of
it is like making complex technologies.It seems things like pencils and iPhones and
abilities like that, Like is thatis that one way to think about it?
Or like are there others? Imean one hundred percent the way to
think about it. I like tothink about Manhattan because it's it's an island

(10:22):
and so it's kind of discrete,and so anytime you're thinking about like how
do I picture Gorey, just kindof think about Manhattan. And what's interesting
is ten thousand tons of food arebrought into Manhattan every day to fill forty
thousand restaurants and grocery stores. Andyou say, well, who's deciding what
those are? Because it's highly variablehow much cod got that got cotton Chesapeake

(10:45):
Bay yesterday? But somehow the foodcomes in and there's usually about the right
amount of bagels and pizza slices,And then you think about all the ubers
and taxi caps and like who's deciding, Well, there need to be a
thousand year and four thousand year anda thousand everything you see your body has
two hundred and forty different kinds ofcells, and those each have different functions,
and those cells just run their ownalgorithms, and together that you get

(11:09):
this emergent one the europe that theBureau of Labor and Statistics tracks the outlook
of ten thousand different human jobs,and so you make those you think of
those as different types of cells,and they each run their own algorithm.
So one of them is a restaurantmanager who has to order enough flour for

(11:31):
their pizza place. But there's alot of them. You know, there's
no one platelet that's in charge oflike clotting your blood out of the plate
flets just all act independently. Now, the interesting things that flow from that
is, for instance, one ofthe things about a super organism is that
the parts cannot survive apart from itanymore. And so you would have to

(11:52):
ask that about humans. Do humans? Can humans function outside of society?
Dropped on the proverbial desert island,And the most cases is no, we've
all become so specialized at which ofour ten thousand algorithms we do that we
can no longer do the other ones. And then another one that's kind of
interesting is that if something at asuper organism acts weird to kill it.

(12:18):
You have this rigid conformity. Ata super organism. You have to do
things a certain way, and wemay not seem that way. But when
you stop and think about human society, first of all, we manufacture workers
in a school system with standardized testing. We teach the same things and we
test in a super organism, thenormal thing is the highest thing. You

(12:43):
could do something better in a superorganism, and you're actually that's bad because
it's different from other people. Andso two bricklayers can come together, have
never met, and they can exchangejust a little bit of information and they
could lay bricks together. We evencriminalize non informity. If you're a brain
surgeon and you decide, you know, I'm going to do things my own

(13:03):
way, not the way you weretaught in medical school, well they will
sue you and you will go tojail, you know, if they could
be in criminal negligence right there.And so when you start to look at
New York or Manhattan and you say, okay, we got these ten thousand
different kinds of cells in it.They're all acting independently. They're all doing
one of the functions. Maybe it'sfeeding, acquiring food or creating energy or

(13:28):
all of these things. You startto see it become oh oh, and
by the way, the big oneis the city learns. The city learns
how as it is used. Thereare all these things that is, you
interact with them, you encode information. I talked about desire paths. That's
like on a college campus, whenpeople take a short cut across the academic

(13:48):
quad or something between buildings, youcan see where that paths. That's where
there's no sidewalk but there should havebeen. That's a desired path that's encoding
information about how people want to crossit. In cities that if you stand
in the city and look around,you can see where the city organically learned
how to operate. Now, humancould plan Manhattan, nobody could build it

(14:11):
and build that shitty. It hasto organically grow. And so at some
point this stops becoming a metaphor toit becomes an actual animal, actual creature.
I don't know why it is.Yeah, I mean it's a good
it's a good point, you know, in terms of as we think about
this, because it's like I think, in the one hand, too that's
something that you made it early,really important point. And I think that

(14:31):
cities are a great example there ofthe emplacement of where we can see the
bones we might say, right,the the skeleton of a goat in some
level because it's like it's we're watchingthat learning that knowledge get encoded, right,
or watching it then physically change.The building gets taller, the road
changes, you know, this shopbecomes a computer shop when it used to

(14:52):
be a fax machine shop or whateverit is. You know, we see
we see kind of those changes ofour time or how a school functions.
I think as an interesting example theretoo. Part of it. I mean,
the thing this is an important distinctionto think about two is that like
and you talk about this in thebook to that like the humans we're the
agora though, right, the cityitself isn't. Right, that's the thing
that we've made that helps we seethe organization happening. Right, But it's

(15:13):
like there's an organicity unless if that'sa word or not, that's kind of
required there, I think, right, and Jennie, if if I'm thinking
about that correct, where it's likeokay, yeah, so it's like this
is because I could I'm just I'mimagining people kind of saying, well,
but you know, how are citiesor how our computers, you know,
what are they doing? And it'slike, I think, similar to kind

(15:33):
of how you're building your argument inyour last book two in terms of they
offer us computational knowledge, you know, kind of compiling in this context too,
it's like the same kind of thing, right, they allow us to
that encode our knowledge is in newways like this. I guess one of
the difference between us and bees,right, is that bees nobody tells the
bees. Why you're talking about beaversin your last book too, like beaver's

(15:54):
nobody tells the beavers how to makethe dam. They just make the damn.
We then build us, you know, we write how to make a
dam, and we share that andpay that forward, right, And then
that then becomes some of the kindof DNA that we read, right,
But it's not organic DNA, right, It's something that we kind of use
to then move our knowledge forward,but the effects of which then compound into
ogre right, something that's bigger thanus one hundred percent. I wrote an

(16:18):
article called the four billion year Historyof large Language Models, and it talks
about for three and a half billionyears of history, we had one place
that information was stored, and thatwas in cells sego celb life. DNA
is a delt. It really isjust data storage. It holds about six
hundred meg a human four letters,two billion base I mean, it's just
data. That's crazy, right,Yeah, yeah, that's something. And

(16:41):
the thing is is that DNA isa data storehouse. It's very hard to
edit it. It takes a longtime, hundreds of thousands of years maybe
to make some edit to it.Then five hundred million years ago we got
the cam Read explosion, and wehave all brains. It brains became the
second place to store data. Now, all of a sudden, you could
store vastly more and you could writeit vastly quicker through a process called learning.

(17:07):
Then humans got speech and speech ashis data exchange protocol. Now think
about this. I just love this. Let's say there's a purple berry that's
poisonous to humans, maybe over thecourt, and people can't talk, and
they're not you know, they're justanimals. Maybe over one hundred thousand years
or a million years or whatever,we eventually evolved an aversion to that.

(17:29):
Like maybe people who like purple ateit, and they'd die they didn't reproduce.
So we've gradually evolved in the boringsof purple and then we ate it.
So maybe that takes one hundred thousandyears to learn. Now, what
I love is that if I tellyou, hey, man, don't eat
those purple berries, you have anew mutation. It is a mutation because
you were going to eat the berry, and then you had this mutation where

(17:51):
now all of a sudden, you'renot going to eat the berry. Now
I just gave you one hundred thousandyears of evolution in five seconds. Well,
because I have this protocol, andthat's why humans evolve trillions of years
by the day almost because we canevolve with just a sentence. You can
evolve a great new capability. Andthen then five thousand years ago, there's

(18:15):
this strange thing that happened with humanswhere we had everything just kind of took
off then, and that's because wegot writing what you were just talking about.
We learned to externalized knowledge. Itwas only the third place you could
store data stored in DNA starting braids, and now you can stored externally and
then alt that. But it wasvery expensive, so we got all this
progress, but then Goldberg came alongand all of a sudden we could store

(18:36):
it really cheaply, and then yougot scientific revolution, you get this other
burst, but then you hit abrick wall. Why do you hit a
brick wall? Because you store allthat knowledge in libraries, and libraries might
as well not even exist. They'relike that final scene narrators of Lost Ark,
where the the arc in that warehouse. Right, that's what a library
is. It's kind of where ideasgo to never be discovered. Because yeah,

(19:00):
we had a cart catalog, sowe learned how to digitize. We
learned how to digitize it and makeit searchable, and that gave us the
Internet. However, that was abig problem the cause all of the human
knowledge was still scattered in fifty billionweb pages. So that's why when you
do a search on Google, what'sthe difference between the cold and the flu?
Google says, I got thirty millionanswers for you use the first one.

(19:21):
Yeah, but you don't want that, you want one. And so
I think these large languish models areour very first tip to ever consolidate all
human knowledge together into a single knowledgebase. There are fifty billion is just
one. And when that happens,when that really works, when there's just
one place that we stored all ofour collective knowledge, that is going to

(19:42):
be this incredible flowering of humanity thelikes of which we cannot even imagine,
no, actually love that of kindof tracing the our revolution of knowlogy into
something like a large language model.Because also about also how we process knowledge
right to your point, like Idon't want thirty million answers about what those
I want to know, which whatI can do with like a useful single

(20:03):
answer. Right. It's interesting howlike even even the emergence of GPT right,
and beyond that, Gemini and allthe other the models now like a
lot of them are premised on thischat model, right. I Mean,
we're building agents now that can domore functional things too. But like it's
this interesting idea that like what madethem take off in the public imagination was
that you could, you know,air quote chat to it. Right,
you can talk to it in thesame way that like this is also how

(20:26):
we transmit you know, a coupleof million years of evolution by saying,
don't need that purple dairy. Right, And that's an interesting question in terms
of like how we I guess whatwe're poised for, you know, in
terms of what might might be nextis an interesting question, right if we
now have we're slowly building that repository. It's funny because I mean it makes
me think too that, like wehave a lot of questionable models of how
we silo information around, you know, IP and business models and things like

(20:47):
that that like for current existence,are helpful in terms of keeping the economy
moving, but it does raise interestingquestions of like if we're talking about the
ultimate like either evolution of humanity orthe pursuit of a more collective knowledge.
When we run up to those kindof limits, are these are is?
Are these kind of are our existingbusiness models and economic structures? Are they
the brick walls of today? Whereasyou know before it was expensive paper and

(21:10):
then you know storage and libraries.You know, are we now like at
another point where access is here,but then we have to then kind of
shift how that access happens. Obviouslywe're seeing like that. Yeah, yeah,
I would I would think I thinkthat is true, but I would
actually say the next bottleneck is thatyou know, when you die, everything

(21:32):
you know is going to die withyou know, almost everything. Like many
you wriped some stuff down, maybeyou told some people things, but your
life experience, the daily minutia ofyour life, the cause and effect of
the thousand tiny decisions you make aday, that's all gone hey, And
that's what's what we're going to startto capture. And that's what all these
solcers we're putting on everything. Howmany solcers are connected to the internet right

(21:52):
now, we don't know. Arethe is there a trillion? Absolutely a
treue, We don't know how many. You see. What's going to happen
is like you're going to have askellet, and that skelet's gonna have sensors
in it. Why would you wantto SkELL it with censors? Because that
skelet's going to tell you if there'sbotulism in your food, and you would
Yeah, would you pay an extrabuck for to know your food is not
going to poison him? Yeah,I'd buy that skellet. But that is

(22:14):
collecting knowledge. So what's going tohappen in the very near future is that
the cause and effect of everything youdo in life, your action and its
outcome, will be logged and thatwill become data. So no longer.
Is it just a few fifty billionpages we've managed to as symbol on the
internet. It's every decision that canbe externally gleaned by a censor, is

(22:36):
that you'd make. And what that'sgoing to do? Is this going to
mean that everybody in the future isgoing to be wiser than anyone who has
ever lived because they're going to havethe aggregate life experiences of all those people
informing every one of their decisions.And that is going to be paradise.
Yeah, hopefully they really will.Well, it kind of has to be

(22:56):
otherwise. Yeah, that's actually wayyou're caught arguing for ignorance. It's better
that we forget and we don't learnfrom my mistakes. That would be better.
I would love everybody if if everybodywho lived before me everything they did,
every mistake they made, and everyif all of that, what's going
to happen. I think it's goingto be a lot like you know,

(23:17):
let's say you have a metal detectorand you go to the beach and you're
swinging that thing around and they go, Now you can dig anywhere you want
to. Metal tech is not makingyou dig there, but you're going to
dig there. I mean, you'renot going to say to the medal tector,
you're not the possible me. I'mdigging away there. Now you're going
to dig where it bed deep.And that's what we're going to be able

(23:37):
to do. We're going to havethis thing. We're still the agents,
we're still the moral agents, westill make the choices, but we're going
to know, like why would Idig anywhere else? Now? I hasten
to point out none of this isagra the people, but but those people
are amplified by that technology. Thecord began when and you know, I

(23:59):
have a chapter called the Mammoth Hunters, and I talk about how no person
could take down a mamoth, butit maybe a band of ten people who
specialized and planned and communicate it theycould And that was kind of the proto.
But really began in cities when peoplecame together and they specialized. We're
collectively less intelligent than we were threethousand years in. We're an individually much

(24:22):
less intelligent than we were three thousandyears ago. You know, the hundred
gathers were jack of all trades,right, they could do they had to.
If you had a band of onehundred hundre gathers. They probably their
knowledge overlapped by ninety percent each ofthem. They all knew kind of the
same thing. We've all specialized now, so we individually know less, but

(24:44):
collectively we know more. And that'sthat's good. That's going to keep going
by the way we're going to.But that's also the trade off. That's
why we can't pull out of thesuper organization the over where we're part of
it now, Yeah, we can't. It's a good point too, where
it's like it's like there's always gonnabe that kind of trade off, right
where it's like the example that youuse there too, where it's like we

(25:04):
can we can see it clearly ifwe talk about mammoth hunters and it was
our abilities that come together as asmall group to then figure out how we
take tesstantly bigger than ourselves, butthen scale that up and move forward into
a city. And it's the samekind of thing right that. It's it's
we are fundamentally making something new outof ourselves that we couldn't do individually,
and like you can just see itas city is a great example of a
much bigger scale. What that whatthat can look like and that can be

(25:26):
things like pencils and iPhones, right, but that can also be things like
tax benefits and waffle irons, youknow, and and all sorts of things
and like in political systems, right, And and how we make all these
different these different forward things go forward. I think what's what's curious about that
too, And I think that's that'simportant is that again, like there's the
kind of organic side, like wehave to be made of cells, I
think, to be a superorganism.But then also the self creation side of

(25:48):
it that you're right about two,I think is really interesting that it like
we kind of perpetuate itself in thesame way that our cells do. We
don't ask them to, as yousaid, like you don't ask them to
coagulate blood if I get a cut, but they do that in the same
way that we kind of go aboutour everyday lives and the aggregate of our
actions ultimately then kind of scale upinto this agor piece. And so I'm
you know, as if we thinkabout that too, Like the idea of

(26:10):
self creation is interesting because you know, something that we were saying before too,
of like the there is kind ofthe barriers of what is and what
isn't you know, like like asuper organism is good at defining its barriers,
and part of that is like asyou said too, that there's too
many outliers and like it doesn't reallyhave a lot of space for that,
right, And schooling is an interestingexample where it kind of like tries to
normalize the learning process that had beenthinking about like I don't know Malcolm Gladwell's

(26:32):
outliers and this so much you know, productivity guru talk these days about like
you know, you got that youwant to like think outside the box and
be different and make your mark labblah blah. It's like this this funny
point of like how does that squareaway with? Like there are actually kind
of norms of like what we Aurais not looking for or like will not
kind of stand to work with.But it's like this interesting idea of like
I guess on our our human scale, we're saying, oh, we want

(26:52):
to have more you know, diverseforms of thought and you know, ways
of approaching business innovation. And thenon a grander scale, you know,
how does that that kind of playin? Because I know that because evolution
is another piece of super organism,is right that like it's an evolving being,
because I don't know, maybe makinga problem where the isn't one.
I'm just curious, like you,how do think about that? I'm with
you, I'm with you so andI'll address that very directly, but I'll

(27:15):
point out I'll start by saying,the areas that we're required to conform are
a thousand times the ones we're alloud. YEA. For instance, I think
what I put in the book,I have something about I never see anybody
wear half a mustache. Ever,that's right, yeah, left or the
right. I've never start signing allof your emails with in accordance with the

(27:37):
prophecy and your dame. Or justdecide you're going to bring back monocles and
capes and just start going around andgo to work where your monocule in a
cape, and see if the bigpromotion comes through. There's oh I have
about grammar, Like just decide you'renot going to use punctuation anymore, or
even something as simple as typing itall caps or something. You know you're

(27:57):
not getting the big promotion if ifif you do that, like they are
all of these thousands of things thatif you just do one of them,
I mean people like, even ifyou're like a vegan or something you know,
and choice you make about for yourself, that still may be enough difference
that you're gonna be considered outside andnot part of And so you have to

(28:22):
it's it's And then like you know, militaries, they don't give you four
different uniforms and you get to pickwhich one you're gonna wear, like four
different styles. Yeah, exactly.They shave everybody's out so they look alike,
so they look alike it. Andso when you start looking through those
eyes, because that was going tobe my big kind of you can tell
agor isn't real because humans are individualsnot We're not we're not mindless worker bees.

(28:49):
But I was disabuted of this notionvery quickly when I started thinking of
all the ways that you get nowto answer your question. In a hive,
there are different jobs, and theydo they are differently ranked in importance.
The queen is not the ruler,right, She's just the reproductive unit,
but obviously that's the most important thing. The queen eyes you're in bad

(29:10):
trouble. Uh. And then they'rethe workers, and there are people who
guard the bees that guard the entranceof it to keep bees from other hives
out because you think about it,you know, a good strategy for bees
might just be go get the honeyout of the next dive over, then
they bring it back to yours andand so they can kind of tell who's
who. And there are there arebees that do the dance better than other

(29:30):
bees to tell where the honey is, that are more reliable, so they're
but the But the the cool thingis the hive does not succeed because there's
one one bee that there's a superbee, you know, like some genius
bee that and everybody else is justalong for the ride. The hide works
because everybody's doing their job, whateverit is. And I think you know,

(29:53):
there's a great great metaphor in that, by the way, for us
and even at a personal level,all right, the book is that if
you feel like you know, you'renot doing it as much with your life
as you should be quote unquote shouldbe. I think people ought to move
past that way of thinking very quickly, because no part can comprehend the superorganism.

(30:14):
Super organism can do almost anything.And you know, I would put
no burden of heavier own people thanjust try to be a little nicer to
everybody and every day try to bejust a little bit better, and that
is all it takes to build utopia. That is to me, the ship
organism Gore can do anything, butonly to the extent humans are willing to
work together. My great ambition withthis book. Do you know what the

(30:37):
overview effect? It's the thing thatwhen astronauts go up into space and they
see the Earth from space and theysee its oneness and they have the like
emotional moment where they get this appreciationof kind of this we're all in this
together kind of thing. Well,we can't send everybody up into space,
right, So what I'm trying todo with this book is bring the overview

(30:59):
effect to the Earth, hey,and to say you can look at the
you can look at humanity as acreature. You know, the left hand
may not like the right end,but it has to understand there's no way
for the left hand to when andthe right end to lose. Ye.
That what we're all part of thecreature, a single creature that lives or

(31:19):
dies on its own. And that'swhat how is like the emotional impact it
has on people, It's the onethat hadd on me. Yeah, I
mean that resonates with me too,And I think that's because it's kind of
like the idea too, that youknow, when we if we can look
at human body and then like imaginehow you know, not even imagine we
could just say, like how uncomfortablewould feel to think about certain cells trying

(31:41):
to kill you, or like youknow that cells on your left side hated
the cells on the right side orvice versa right in your body that shot
that would feel very weird and kindof scary to be like, oh crap,
I'm fighting myself. I mean,that's also talking a little bit about
what cancer is when something just goesit goes off the wire and it's like
trying to be produced too much.But I mean, if you add malicious
intent to that, that's scary.And so I think that it's an interesting
point of like that. The otherthe reality though, of course, that

(32:04):
all cells are working to the bestof their ability and they are doing what
they do and then, which isto help promote life, right, and
it's like interesting questions like we scaleup to us and then us as as
sells kind of for a gore,as it were, then there is this
ability of asking ourselves that question oflike, do we not function to also
make the best conditions for life?You know? And is that not what
we're kind of aiming to? Isthat for what a gore is looking for

(32:27):
to it in that sense? Right? Yeah? I think so if I
can. That is my thing Iteased earlier about why we are here.
So there's a philosophy. There's atheory called the Gaya iyp officers put forth
by this guid named James Leblock,and he says that all the life,
said that all life on the Earthoperates as a single organism that holds itself

(32:51):
conducive to furthering life. He pointsof all these things, like the solidity
of the oceans remains constant, eventhough you would think with rivers putting salt
into it every day and water evaporating, it would get saltierr and salt here,
for they down't, because the crustfull ender. The percent of oxygen
oxygen in the atmosphere has been constantfor hundreds of millions of years, and

(33:14):
that seems strange too. So theEarth you can think of it as alive,
or you can think of it asa living as a system that behaves
as if it's alive. Either way, you can say it as once the
way somebody might say, my sportscar wants to burn unleaded gas. You
know, I think the car reallywants to But it's a way of speaking
and thinking. So imagine for aminute that Gaya exists, or at least

(33:38):
the Earth functions as a living creature, a system that looks a lot like
it's alive. What would it want? And I think it would want what
all life wants. Two things.I want to live and I want to
reproduce. So that's it, liveand reproduce. So then you say,
should it worry? Worry again inair quotes, because maybe it isn't alive,

(34:01):
but should the system be concerned thatit could die? And with a
guy yes, one hundred percent.I mean, a big giant rock is
going to smash into this planet.It will happen, It has happened,
it will happen again, a statisticalcertainty. And what happens is This book
dovetailed out of the core question Iasked in the last book, which is

(34:22):
why is there just one intelligent specieson planet Earth? Why one? Hey?
Why not ten? Or why notzero? Why on? And I
think the answer is this. Ithink intelligence is really destructive to life.
Ninety nine point nine to nine nine, as many nights as you want to

(34:43):
put on that percent of all lifeisn't intelligent, and it does justify intelligence
I think tends to destroy itself.That's a common explanation for the Fermi paradox.
Why we don't see you light everywherein the galaxy is because Carl Sagan
said, it gets to a certainlevel of smarts and then it blows itself

(35:04):
up. So pretend for a momentthat you are DAYA and you're worried about
getting whacked by a giant rock.And again maybe you don't think just it's
a system. If that system producesa bunch of life, well it blows
itself out. But if the systemproduces no intelligent life, it gets hit

(35:25):
by a rock and dies. Thatthe Goldilocks amount of intelligent life is one.
It's still very risky. But planetsliving planets that operated systems that produce
one intelligent life form, that intelligentlife form can protect them. Like we
already send up rockets to try todeflect asteroids, and we're only going to
get better at that. So systemsthat produce many. They blow themselves up,

(35:50):
that produce nine, they get hitby rocks, But when does it
produce just wine? Those go onto reproduce, and I'll talk about how
they reproduce, But it's just evolution. If you are a system that produces
one intelligent life form, then you'regoing to sometimes live. So you say,
well, how in the world woulda planet would guy you reproduce?
So I think one of the coolestthings I know is this, when life

(36:14):
formed a planet Earth while the crusthadn't even completely cooled, so it somehow
formed here almost immediately, and itwas only happened once. How do we
know it only happened once, well, only persisted once. Why do we
know that? Because all life onthis planet is related with the same gene,
same DNA. You know, youshare a ninety nine percent of your

(36:37):
DNA with a chimp, you sharesixty percent of it with the banana.
It's the same DNA. So ithappened one time right after the Earth cooled.
It never happened again, and wedon't know and somehow miraculously happened fully
formed when all this complexity. Wedon't have good answers to that. Unless
it didn't actually start here, thatit just landed here. It's just drifting

(36:58):
around, you know, all theseplanets that and they have life, and
then they can get by an asteroidthat blows them into the smithereens, that's
the technical term smithereen and those driftthrough space and then every now that they
land on a planet and that thatis conducive to life, and they grow.
And again if they had been aplanet where that sometimes produced one intelligent

(37:22):
life, then that one could protectit and it could reproduce and the other
one's died out. So I myfalsifiable prediction is this, we are going
to find the life on other planets, but it will be our DNA.
It will be GtC a double helixDNA, because I think there's one kind
of life of the university. Itdrifts around looking for places to land.

(37:45):
Yeah, no, I think that'sthat's a that's a very compelling point.
It reminds like it makes me thinkof a hopefully happier version of Prometheus,
the alien prequel from Ridley Scott thatwas that aliens, you know, seeded
the that they called directed pen andSpermia. Yeah, this is considered a
little fringe, but just pen spermiain general, is it. I mean,

(38:09):
it's not proven. Obviously, thereis one piece of data suggestive of
it, and that is that youwould expect life, You would expect your
body to closely mirror the elements onthis on this planet. I mean,
you are produced by this planet,and yet you have elements in you that
exist in you vastly more commonly thanthey exist on the Earth, much more

(38:31):
on Mars. But it could bethat, you know, we just drifted
here. It's an old idea.Lord Kelvin said, maybe a comet brought
life here it smashed. Yeah,I mean it's not a new idea,
but yes, directed pen spermia thataliens put us here. I mean you've
got to have a bigger belief systemright to add them in there. But

(38:52):
around all of that, yeah,But I think it's interesting too, is
like that it actually, you know, logically, does make a sense scale
up wise, that if we're seeinga desire for life to be right,
and that that that gets a reallyinteresting idea that like if if there's some
i don't know call awareness, right, but there's a desire for life,
and that there's some knowledge or somethinghappening forces at play and on a planetary

(39:15):
scale that recognizes that if I gethit by rock, we're all dead unless
something happens that like helps me beable to continue. Then the interesting thing
about that too, of course,is in but it does happen because it
will always happen at some point.Every planet will get hit by some rock
at some point and then that spitsoff a chunk of that planet, including
some of that DNA or life matterthat lands somewhere else. And I think

(39:36):
that's a good point there, andI think it interesting and it's going to
be the pan spermais say, see, we told you when when we find
that other form of life, it'sgoing to fak a lot of people out
to when when you find some otherlife and realize that it has the four
elements of DNA that we're we havehere too, right and say wait,
like this is that this is notnecessarily carbon based, but they might be.
But also just like we see thesame kind of DNA, Like that's
that's going to be a very interestingmoment, I guess, because it's like

(39:58):
it's interesting point too, of like, as we think about the idea of
intelligence, also we like on theone hand, you're right, like we
have a wildly destructive capacity, youknow, But then also I think,
as you said a couple of timestoo already, I think you're right that
we also have the capacity for utopiaas part of that. That's the interesting
conundrum we have as this level ofagora, as individual humans are living in
communities that understand that, like,we have the capacity to make our conditions

(40:21):
better, but we don't always dothat, right, That's that's kind of
like the perennial struggle. It seemsat this scale. I love that.
So I think human progress is arelatively difficult thing to explain because we know
humans don't really change. You know, if you as a baby were put
into a different culture or taken backin time a thousand years, you would

(40:44):
be a product of that. Sowe're mallyable, but we don't really change.
And yet we show you know,a thousand years ago people were cruel
in a way they are not cruelnow. For instance, we used to
torture people for entertainment. Yeah,that was fine, right. In tenth
century frants had something called a catburning, where they would make a big
fire and everybody would gather around andthey would throw cats in it and watch

(41:05):
them scream and yell, and thenit was a great fun time. And
we're not I mean, we're stillcruel, don't get me wrong, but
something has changed subtly. And soyou say, how how could that be?
How could we actually have made progress? And I think it's the maturation
of a gora. Now, thestory of humanity is largely one of scarcity.

(41:29):
Like there, you know, neverwas quite enough food for everybody.
There never was quite enough leisure,medicine, and so some people get it
and some people don't. We learnedthis trick called technology, where all of
a sudden we could amplify what wewere able to do. Then instead of
ninety percent of his growing out food, it was two percent. Now.
Utopian literature began in a serious wayin sixteen fifty. I think there are

(41:50):
reasons for that. All going toyou get little hits of it, like
Plato's Republic is utopian, is hisidea what a perfect world would be.
But in terms of what this ideaof we think of it as a utopia.
They've kind of blossomed in the sixteenfifties. And if you say,
why did they imagine utopia? Wouldbe they said the following, A lot
of them were. Wouldn't it begreat if we educated everybody, not just

(42:13):
the elites. Wouldn't it be greatif people got to choose their rulers instead
of hereditary monarchy. Wouldn't it begreat if you could pick your own religion
instead of having to believe the statereligion. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you
could men and women had legal equality? And so we had all of these
things. We articulated and we builtthat. Not everywhere, not for every
wine, obviously, but we're ina world where we were making strides towards

(42:37):
what they imagined that utopia is.Then, so it's incumbent on us today
to ask ourselves what do we thinkand to have that conversation what do we
think utopia looks like for us,and articulate that and tell stories around it.
And then that's how we will collectivelybuild it and how we can build
it and will and we will structthat. We have we have the will

(43:00):
to do that, right like wethere seems to be a desire to where
It's like when the story circulates enoughthat it then begins to kind of shift
this, you know, the actionsthat we put together, whether it's like
how we set up political systems,right, how we set up gender norms
shift, you know, in away that like then begins to make that
story more really Yeah, I meanI think if I'm right, that Gore

(43:21):
is maturing. Yeah, I kindof think of the Gothic era, is
its goth phase? Yeah, notreally architecture, yeah, yeah, exactly,
they we got into that dark stuff. I think the closest thing we
have utopian literature today is Star Trekhe and just that whole universe. And

(43:42):
I've always noticed when people say theywere inspired by it, like there was
an exprise to build a Star TrekTrak order. A lot of people who
make these chat bots, and theyalways invoked the computer and the enterprise.
Oh yeah, that you could askat these things that it would answer them.
And I love that there was thisstory that a lot of people res
in where the future was good.It wasn't without problems, but we had

(44:04):
bettered ourselves. Unfortunately, there's alot of dystopia, and I think Frank
Herbert maybe said sometimes the purpose ofscience fiction is to keep the future from
happening. Hey, that these arecautionary tales. But I think What has
happened is nobody wants to pay twelvedollars to go see this movie. You
know, everything's very in the future. They want to see Will Smith fighting

(44:27):
robots or something. Right, Iwant to go see that. And what
happens is we see these dystopias somany times over and over we start doing
something called reasoning from fictional evidence.We reason from fictional evidence. It becomes
very believable to us, and wesay, I could happen. That really
could happen. But it too,is just a story. It isn't real.

(44:49):
Yeah, And I worry with thesellms as an example. They all
purport to be an eye. Theyanswer things I think or I haven't been
trained in all of that, andthey aren't eyes. So I think they're
these and we name some of themwhen we give them names, but they
are being Yeah, So I thinksometimes like our daily stuff, can also
add to it like it would.Therefore, if it's an eye and it

(45:12):
is a name, we can tellstories about it being in a lie and
then it turning on us or whatever. Yeah, when it's just just a
fancy database, good search, that'sthat's a good point too. I remember
reading like when when Ellen's are firstkind of coming on the consumer mindset.
I think it was the sci fiwritor Ted Chang said, we actually need
to call artificial intelligence just applied statistics. But that sounds super boring, you

(45:35):
know, because that's actually what it'sdoing, is just like telling us,
you know, it's crutching the mostprobable next next word, right, for
a lot of these things. It'slike, but calling it intelligence also,
you know, I mean it pointsto our are the human like norm or
desire to anthropomorphize the world around us, right, and that we want to
give it some some kind of beingstatus that we can relate to it,
which is, you know, somethingthat we are good at. And the

(45:57):
thin get's helpful because this is howwe build connection with others around us.
But it's also, i think,to your point, a challenge because we
then tend to begin to treat asreal, right, or as alive,
or as intelligent a database which isnot intelligent at all. Right, It's
just a giant database and a goodretrieval mechanism, right, So you know,
the hand getting the animals from thearcade machine, you know, that

(46:20):
really good at it, you know, And so I think that's that's interesting.
Like, I do think a challengethat we have going forward to where
it's like, how do we notfall into the trap of personifying any chatbot
or any you know kind of AIsystem, especially gonna if we start putting
these in physical robots too it youknow, we're going to begin to then
relate to them in an even morephysical way. Yeah, and yeah,

(46:42):
I think it's Yeah. I thinkit's really telling that when people have a
room by their break should they shouldit off to be repaired. They want
their room, but back they don'twant to need a room. Boy.
Yeah, and if they develop emotionalattachments to a room bop, you can
imagine this thing that talks and vaguelyhuman shapped and laughs and pilt jokes and

(47:04):
yeah. However, if I wantedto argue the other side, it could
say, look, forever, we'veloved telling stories with talking animals, right
tons of them, and yet wedon't really think animals can talk. But
I don't know that's true. Ican go both ways on it. The
thing is it's okay because we doit, you know. So it's more
like, do we accept that wehave that capacity and that ability and then

(47:25):
like, what how can that shapewhat we do going forward, you know.
And it's like, you know,I think in the same breath because
as we can and are kind ofasking what are the gender norms, what
are the political systems that we arelooking for that to us would be a
more life giving system, you know, for the future, what could be
more regenerative? We can you know, it just requires us, I think,

(47:45):
to ask that same question of ourselvesof like we can have our talking
animal stories, but we also needto understand where we're having talking ll M
stories also, you know, andlike this is not you know, some
other being, but if it's it'sone of those like we look back and
forward to years and laugh like,huh remember that time that we thought that
LM's were people, you know,and then we are able to then put
them in the category of mythic creatures. Also you know that we have talking

(48:07):
jackalopes and unicorns, you know.But an interesting question too of that of
like where that might that might takeus? Because I think, you know,
to put this with a gore ortoo, it's like the idea of
if we're seeing it evolve and likemature is a really interesting idea too of
like if we're watching it mature interms of helping all of us or all
of us together collectively emerging defining whatis as a more life giving system.

(48:27):
You're right before about like knowledge,we can't really argue for ignorance being better.
We can't really argue for you know, cutting people off from a better
life is better. So it isthis interesting question of like where that that
may take us, and so likeyou know, there's there's some questions like
if we go in the Ray Kurtzweldsdirection, like are we going towards collective
consciousness and like a singularity with techor or like are we finding ourselves elsewhere
too? Because one thing I wasthinking about we're reading the book. Then

(48:50):
just later I was like, youknow, if we are also functioning as
a kind of a super organism,you know, are other ways of explaining
ourselves going to become irrelevant? Imean, I'm thinking this anthropology like where
does it light up and not lightup in terms of like you know,
collectivism and social structures and individualism versusbeing a collective group or even things like
ungion archetypes right, and are thoselike are we going to see new kinds

(49:10):
of like collective beings? Or waysof explaining ourselves emerged, like as our
thinking evolves about that. And I'mkind of curious, you know your thoughts
about this. You know, notthat I've said you have thought about Youngian
archetypes as part of this, butyou know, I think so, I
think I have. There's so manychapters that got cut from the ball.
Why is there war and so thatgot cut? Why? What does the

(49:32):
gory say about economic systems? Yeah, all of those things. I wrote
chapters on directors of the eighty thousandwords in a bulk, it turns out,
and and then those all got cut. One does not need to believe
it's alive and conscious. You canjust say this is a useful metaphor that
that was a useful way to thinkabout the division of labor, and you

(49:53):
know the scale of human societies orwhatever. Or you can say it's a
living, breathing, thinking, consciouscreature. Sure either way, if either
of those are true, I thinkruminating on using it as a framework to
understand all these other things. Ido now I see everything through that lens
way I didn't before I wrote theBall, And I appreciated the idea you

(50:14):
said before too, in terms ofit's also a way of helping us kind
of provide the overview effect here,you know, or the I guess it
is the interview effect. I don'tknow from from the planet, you know,
but I think that's I think that'sright on too though. My personal
view of from both read of thebook and thinking through, I think you
have a very compelling I bought thisand like, I mean, I'm leaning
towards I think you're you're onto somethinghere, you know. But because what
I'd like to do too. Yeah, no, thank thanks for you know,

(50:35):
putting it together in a way thatwas like easy to digest, I
get. I appreciate. I appreciateyour your your thinking and sharing it with
myself and the listeners of viewers obviouslyfor beyond the pod so as always appreciate
your work and thank you for joiningme on the pods and excited to you
know again for four, five andsix where this goes next. Thanks so
much for having me. I lookforward to it as well. In today's
thought provoking episode, we delved deepinto the concept of agora, the notion

(50:57):
that humanity in its entirety, functionsas a super organist. We explored how
this perspective shifts are understanding of individualand collective identity and the potential for a
maturing global consciousness. A special thanksto Byron Reese for sharing his groundbreaking work
and insights, painting a picture ofthe world interconnected in ways that we're only
beginning to understand. Our discussion venturedinto the realms of collective intelligence, the
future of knowledge, evolution, andhow technology amplifies our collective capabilities. Those

(51:22):
conversation not only broadened our horizons,but post essential questions about our role within
this vast and intricate web of life. So as we're reflecting on today's episode,
I encourage you to think about therole that you play within this larger
entity that we call humanity. Howdo your actions contribute to the collective wisdom
and the well being of a Goraand ourselves? What steps could you take

(51:43):
to foster and more cohesive understanding andevolved global society. I'm incredibly grateful for
your continued support and curiosity, andfor those eager to delve deeper into this
world of collective phenomena and agora.I highly recommend you check out Byron's book.
It's linked in our show notes overat the TL bookstore, where if
you purchased through that, you're hopingsport independent bookstores, the podcast, and
the author, so it's a winwin win. We our Gore is a

(52:06):
great place to start if you wantto dive into his ideas as well as
you can check out his other booksabout how humanity learned to define the future
and also what the incoming Age ofAI means for humanity. Your thoughts,
experiences, and reflections really matter tome, to us in the TAO community,
so please share your takes on today'sepisode on social media channels you know.
You can drop us a comment onYouTube, something over on x or

(52:28):
Facebook or LinkedIn, or you candrop us a line on the Anthra Curious
Substact blog. Let's keep that conversationgoing and explore together the limitless possibilities of
human collaboration and innovation. And asalways, if you found today's episode enlightening,
do not forget to subscribe to thisanthroor life so you don't miss any
episodes. And if you like thisone particularly, go ahead and share it
with someone you think would appreciate thisfascinating journey into the heart of humanity's collective

(52:49):
spirit. And so the next time. Stay curious, and let's continue to
build a more understanding and interconnected worldon conversation at a time. You're listening
to this anthe life, Vin,I'm dam gimwell, we'll see you next time.

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