Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsh, and welcome to another episode of Metaview, recorded live from the Academy of the Impossible, where it's a really foggy, muddy, rainy, snowy day. But Laura's joined us to talk about biology and media.

And of course, Laura, as you know, whether we actually talk about the thing that I put on the title slide is maybe a 50chads. The actual structure of our show ends up revolving around three pillars.

In your case, I've chosen biology, AI and politics because I think the two of us can get into quite a bit of material and discussion.

But as you know, we do tend to start every episode of Metaviews with the news, partly because Metaviews publishes a daily newsletter and today's issue is on the lies and false promises of neoliberalism. And Meta Views is kind of anti ideological. We tend to take issue with all ideologies.

In today's issue, we've been picking a lot lately on the fascists and the conservatives, so we felt it was time to call on the hypocrisies of liberalism.

With that aside, as you know, Laura, our goal of our new segment is to throw to our guest and say, is there anything that you've been paying attention to that you think our audience should know?

This could be anything from personal news to industry news to world news, and in your case, even European news, since most of our listeners unfortunately tend not to be up to speed on what's happening across the pond, as we like to say here in North America. So with that said, welcome to metiviews. Laura, glad you could make it. What do you got for us today? In terms of the news?

Yeah, in terms of the news, I was thinking a little bit about it, and I think when it comes to the news, what's on my mind right now is the EU military giant 800 billion budget. And I'm like, all my life I've been anti war. I was just like, why do we ever even have a military? Like, it's peace, war doesn't exist anymore.

And in the last, I don't know, like six, seven, eight years, I've, I've grown a little bit older. Like, I'm 29 now. I'm starting to understand that maybe, maybe having a military is a good thing after all.

And yeah, I think this is a really, really good sign. I don't know, like with, with, with Trump.

I, I usually don't really agree with Trump, but I, I have to say, I do think the EU should be a little bit more proactive in, in their military. Spending.

And I'm really happy to see that by being really messy and crazy policymaker, that the rest of the world is like, oh, we have to get our shit together real soon now because things are changing.

And to your point, this is huge news and the extent to which both Europe is rethinking its relationship to America. But let me ask you still within this subject, a quasi technical question.

Historically, and when I mean historically, really, I just mean the last few decades, European military spending, the modest amounts that they have, a lot of that's gone to America. Like they're buying American weapons, they're buying American gear.

Will this new commitment to defense spending in Europe, will it be focused on the creation of a European kind of, for lack of a better phrase, military industrial complex? Like, will there be European technology and European industry that is the beneficiary of this spending? Do you have any sense of that?

I've been watching a little bit of news. Like, I'm not super familiar with the industry, but I like to keep up to date. And we have been very dependent on American suppliers, definitely.

And what I'm hearing is that especially when it comes to like France and Germany, like they really have like the industry and the materials and even the people and, and that kind of stuff to really build their own stuff. However, for example, what I, what I saw on the news was like, we just don't have factories for, for example, artillery or maybe very little.

And it's just like, yeah, if we, if we're going to need them sooner than like in, if, if we need them in 10 years, like, that's okay, we can build those factories. But if we need them like in two years, that's. That. No, that's not happening.

So I was also seeing that definitely we're looking to spend some parts of that money on other partners. Like, I don't know where, where you get missiles. Like, I don't regularly go out to the grocery store, buy some missiles, you know, thankfully.

Yeah, yeah.

But I'm sure there are like, I don't know, producers in. I know South Korea is an important supplier. I know India is up and coming in all kinds of ways. Who knows what they're doing?

I, I believe they were working on some military industrialization as well. I don't know. I think it's, it's, it's, it's.

For me personally, it's more about the fact that we are more connected as, as European countries and more listening to each other and more like the EU is actually like at the top is really Making, you know, decisions here.

And that's something that's been criticized a lot about the eu, that they were very bureaucratic, very slow and sometimes even incredibly inefficient. And yeah, I mean, I get that.

But this has kind of woken the bureaucracy out of its slumber because it has to start taking seriously the policy landscape. Well, let me ask you one final question here. You know, just out of my own ignorance, but at the same time, suspicion.

The Netherlands has a reputation for high tech expertise, certainly in the case of asml. Right, which is.

Yeah, I live very close to that.

Right on, right on. A global leader. To what extent do you think that intellectual capacity, that engineering capacity could be repurposed towards defense technologies?

Or to your point, is it more something that is distributed throughout Europe and then sourced potentially from elsewhere in the world?

Well, that's something I know a little bit more about when it comes to like the chip industry.

Like I, I'm not in the chip industry, but I studied like sort of electrical engineering, computer science mix and I have lots of friends in the industry and stuff like that. And I read some books. And the issue here is that first of all, asml, they produce chips.

Well, they produce machines that build the chips and there are only a few companies that make those machines.

And ASML provides the machines that do like 90% if not more of all the high tech chips like Nvidia, Apple, amd, Intel, a little bit less, but also Intel, I don't know, some other, like Qualcomm, like they are entirely dependent on ASML, like 100% dependent.

And then you have a business like Zeiss, which is in Germany, which supplies the lenses for the super complicated lasers inside of the machines and stuff like that. And then you have TSMC in Taiwan, who actually puts these machines into use. You know, like they have the factories where these chips are produced.

And at the same time ASML is also very dependent on like intellectual property from America.

So if you take a look at like what's actually happening, you have some centers that are incredibly important with some incredibly deep technical expertise. And there's one here in Eindhoven in the Brainport region, as it's called.

You have one in TSMC in Taiwan, you have Silicon Valley and you have the northern part of Germany. And those are just entirely dependent on one another. Completely dependent. Like it doesn't work, you can't stop it.

Although I would argue the, the loose, the, the loose part of that connection, that matrix of centers is the intellectual property piece, because you could always disregard intellectual property and just use some of the stuff you've got there already as geopolitically controversial as it would. Because here you have on the one hand, Trump scaring Europe by saying, hey, look, you're on your own.

And of course Putin is scaring Europe because he's saying, well, given the opportunity, I don't know where my military would stop advancing.

And if I was a diabolical dictator, I'd certainly have my eyes on ASML as a key piece of, to your point, the not just economic engine of our globalized world, but you need these chips in every form of armament, every form of military technology. So while the interdependence is there, I still think the intellectual property side could get cut out if need be.

But your point about northern Germany is also quite valid and perhaps that unites Europe to defend itself. Any final thoughts before we move on to our next segment?

Well, I'd like to say just a little bit to add a little bit more nuance. ASMR provides the machines for the highest end of the chips, not necessarily for all the chips.

Lots of military chips are actually based on older process nodes and older technologies. Those aren't necessarily produced by the machines that ASML builds.

ASML provides mostly the machines that provide that power the highest end of computational stuff.

And that's mostly just the computers that we use in daily life, like laptops and the big brands like the Apple, Nvidia, intel, amd, that kind of stuff, Qualcomm, but not the far less the military stuff. But I mean, maybe that's a topic we can switch to. But AI is definitely a thing that's probably going to have a huge impact the coming years.

Like it's already doing things.

But, and, and, and we will get into AI, but, but let us shift now into our second segment, which we call WTF or what's the Future? And this is where we ask our guests same way that we asked you, but what's the news that you kind of got your eyes on these days?

When you look at the event horizon, what captures your attention? What do you think our audience should be looking at?

I mean, I remember a quote, I think it's by, it's probably attributed to like Bill Gates or something, but is that the world changes very little in like five years and changes way much than you can imagine in 20 years. And that's always the case.

Like it always takes about 20 years for a huge shift to happen in technology, media and the landscape of everything, basically.

And I don't think the short term is something I'm really interested in because the short term is just like, oh, AI is going to do things, but nobody actually knows what the hell it's going to do. Call me a pessimist. I mean, it's. It's useful, definitely, but a lot of it is just peddling. Like, hey, AI is going to be the future.

And then you ask them, like, what does it do? It's like, AI, it's AI. And I don't care, like, if you ask me about what's actually exciting me about the future, and that's the 20, 20 year HOR.

And it's something completely different. And that's. I don't know if you've heard of it, but Dynamic Land, it's. Yeah, it's super, super interesting.

We have some virtual reality. But those visions are very boring. Like, you know, it's just the everyday stuff.

And what they're doing at Dynamic Land is they're imagining communal computing, which is basically like, what if everything is a computer? And that sounds very dystopian maybe, because if you say that to me, I would be like, what the fuck, Please get out of here.

But what they're actually practically imagining is what if a piece of paper is actually like, I mean, Harry Potter maybe is a good example. Like, they have these magic moving images, right? What if computers were just pieces of paper that you put on the table?

And what if you, if you roll a dice, roll some dice and you're playing a game, then, you know, the table moves with you and you can have conversations about like, I don't know, politics or whatever, instead of like just talking to one another, which is, you know, like, this is. You also mentioned McLuhan in the newsletter. This is a conversation like, it's.

We talk, but their conversations are mediated with live computational objects. So if you have a conversation about, like, hey, I think this or that policy is a bad idea.

You can actually hold the policy and be like, hey, this is the policy. These are the numbers and these are the maps, and these are the laws.

And you have that on a table or you have that on the wall, or you have that in the bookcase.

Or even to your point, you say Marshall McLuhan and then his image appears and then you instantly pull out a quote from one of his writings, his books, and it's on the table so we can look at the quote and talk about what it means. No, I think what you're describing is a level of ubiquity, of computational ubiquity.

Yes.

And a shared, a collective user interface to that which I agree could be dystopian, but also sounds quite appealing.

Yeah, it's a completely different. I mean it's not necessarily dystopian. And how they imagine it like they Dynamic Land really imagines it as like communal spaces.

So think of like R and D labs, perhaps a room or two in a school or a library, those kind of things. Right. And for that I think it's amazing. And also like, I don't know, I'm sure it's going to happen.

Like even Nintendo will probably be getting into this kind of stuff. They already are, you know, like the XR or AR stuff where they have a game that's extended, you know, not by glasses or stuff.

And the only place I'd push back on that is there's no way that this would be limited to just one room. I think the, the double edged sword of this is it will be ubiquitous whether people want it to be or not.

Yeah, it's probably going to be dystopian anyway.

It doesn't have to be dystopian. But I think the one example that in, because like I, you know, when you said earlier you were like, I agree with you.

It gets a little cliche when people are like, AI is the future. And I remember 10, 20 years ago, everyone was like, mobile is the future.

It is.

But the thing I didn't like about that was mobile is not the future, it's the present. AI is not the future, it's the present. What you're describing does sound like the future.

And based on the present and how people use smartphones in the present, I can guarantee that the bathroom, every surface in the bathroom is going to have this capability.

Either because people want to get ready in the mirror and do so with their social media friends or while they're sitting on the toilet, they want to look at TikToks or look at Instagram. I'm not judging, I'm just saying on an anthropological level, this is already what's happening now.

And I will use that as an opportunity to segue into our feature conversation. Partly because you've already brought up AI and you've already brought up McLuhan.

Two things I definitely wanted to discuss because you and I initially made a connection over a shared appreciation of Marshall McLuhan and kind of the approach of understanding things as media.

But you took it even further in a way that I thought was really quite brilliant, which was to add the element of biology that on the one hand, Marshall McLuhan looks at media in a way that previous to him very few did.

But I think you've successfully connected that to not just looking at everything as a form of media, where the medium is the message, where the system is far more important than the content itself.

But you've connected this to a larger appreciation and understanding of biology that I'd love for you to try to unpack in a way that our audience, who may or may not know about Marshall McLuhan and I certainly have more of an intuitive understanding of biology rather than a scholarly one.

I'm not an academic, just to be clear.

Yes, nor am I, but I think that what you're getting at here, I think is really brilliant. So maybe if you could start us off by trying to get us as both high level as you can, but giving the old. Explain it to me like I'm five.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think this is something I'm really interested in. Like over the course of.

I will just give a short introduction before I even answer the question. Like over the course of my life I've always been really interested in biology and biology.

To me, maybe I'm just like a biologist kind of person or something, but makes the most sense as like the framework to which. Through which to see the world, the natural world. Like even more than religion, even more than I would even say science.

Although science is definitely an important part of biology.

I mean, biology is kind of a subset of science. It's more focused.

Yeah, it's about life and nature and ecology and that kind of stuff and sustainability and. But what McLuhan is all about is. And this is a bit difficult to understand about McLuhan because media is a word.

If you hear the word media, then you think about like the news, newspapers, like I don't know, you know, the stuff you talk about in. At work, when you're at lunch. Tick tock. That kind of stuff. But what the most means. Yeah, that.

That's what I was going to say, the most obvious forms of media. But go on, please.

Yeah, what me. What McLuhan says is basically media is anything that extends man and man as humanity. People. Right. So media is clothing.

Media is indeed the television. Media is also this chair that I'm sitting on. Media is most certainly the headphones that I'm wearing. Media is even more certainly these glasses.

You know, like, I don't know if you were young. Sorry. I will. Sorry. I will try to.

You're doing great. No, keep it up.

Yeah, no, I wanted to. I want to go in two directions at once, which doesn't work.

Well, you can. You just may lose us, but go ahead.

Yeah. No, but if I try to explain it, extensions of man basically means people have a way of being in the world.

Like, we have hands, we have our eyes, we can look at things, we can grab things. You know, like, I have a mouse, that kind of stuff. But a lot of this.

This one, like, you go 10, 000 years ago, we used it to, like, grab an apple from the tree or we go hunt a fish with a stick. Right? And that's what McLuhan basically makes a difference between. The stick is an extension of our body.

So normally we have our arm, but with a stick, our arm is longer. And not only is our arm longer, our arm is now pointy. You know, if I punch you, then I can hurt you, but if I pierce you, that will hurt a lot more.

And so we can use it for hunting. And McLuhan basically sees media more as.

I think in a conventional sense, more people would understand McLuhan's understanding of media as tools, but it's more comprehensive than that because it's not just, you know, like the hammer and the saw, it's everything that extends our basic capacity. So our capacity to connect, to communicate, to eat, to concentrate, to get distracted, to have wars, to, you know, anything that people do.

And McLuhan's main theory is basically the things that we make decide how we live. And if we want to connect that to.

Well, I was going to say, I think the way you've. And you've done a fantastic job, by the way, of describing McLuhan.

And ironically, people have spent decades trying to understand McLuhan and failing. And you've presented it, I think, in a very accessible way. So bravo.

But what I found interesting about the way you described it is it inherently evokes biology. It inherently evokes a kind of relationship between organisms that is constantly connecting and interchanging information.

Again, I'm kind of getting ahead of you, but this is me both complimenting you and sort of saying, you got me. I'm following along. Explain how you made the connection to biology.

I'M not sure. Like, I don't remember exactly what we were talking about, but I think it was about like AI or something. And, you know, and feel free to.

Use AI as an example because AI is the media of our moment. And I think people make a mistake in not seeing AI as media. Right. They see AI as technology, they see AI as tool, they see AI as marketing product.

But very few look at AI as media. So maybe you could use that as a tangible example.

Yeah, no, that was the example that we talked about as well. There's this narrative that AI is here to replace people or replace workers or that kind of stuff. And to an extent, of course it will definitely.

Especially if you look at lower ends of copywriting and just translation jobs that are like, simpler and that kind of stuff is already disappearing and some office work is already changing a little bit and. No, that's happening.

But there are some people and they're just like, hey, AI singularity, it's going to explode and then everything is going to be AI. And I'm just like. Or, you know, the AI that optimizes for paperclips and stuff like that.

And I'm just like these theories about like AI creating self replicating, hyper intelligent nanobots that communicate with high efficiency, that sounds to me like viruses. You know, I mean, to your point.

Biological metaphors are kind of unquestioningly and uncritically part of the AI hype cycle. But no one's actually questioning whether those biological metaphors make sense.

Yeah, and, and some of them make sense. Like AI is definitely artificial intelligence to an extent. Like it's artificial and it is definitely intelligent to an extent.

And we can philosophize all day about what intelligence is and all that kind of stuff, but no, it can think, it can respond, has some kind of intelligence. And to me, I think many people, when they hear AI, they have no idea what it means. They have no idea what it is. It's just computers.

It's literally just computers doing their thing, but faster. It's just computers doing their thing.

Nothing really has changed other than, yeah, traditionally we tell the computer what to do by writing in instructions, and here we tell the computer what to do by giving examples. That's the entire paradigm change of AI and that's made possible because every, you know, so every so many years we just get faster. And that's cool.

But what really, I'm not really trying to give any answers. I'm not saying like, the singularity is not gonna happen or that kind of stuff. I Mean, I think.

I don't mind saying that I think.

It'S bullshit, but it's not entirely impossible.

Sure. It's also possible that pigs will evolve to fly, but probably not within the next 20 years. It might take 20,000 for that to happen.

And that's where I also find the frame of Biolo powerful and critical when it comes to the way in which we evaluate not just media, but technology as well.

Because you mentioned something I thought was interesting, that when we talk about things like singularity, when we talk about the impact of AI, there is inherently a philosophical debate, a philosophical frame that underpins it. That philosophy might be ethics, that philosophy might be what is possible. That philosophy might be whether the culture is open to it.

But you're adding an additional lens that I think is really interesting, which is, does this meet the principles of biology? Right.

Like, biology suggests that, you know, you, for example, need biodiversity to have health and positive evolution rather than the monoculture that is contemporary artificial intelligence.

Like, if we had instead of three, four, five companies who are developing versions of AI, I'm like, that's not really enough biodiversity to launch the Singularity.

But if we had 100,000, like, so many different companies developing this and doing different attempts and different experiments, that would make me think, okay, we're getting close to something.

I find it really fascinating because I think it's like the exact opposite. Like, the Singularity, to me, sounds like some kind of dystopian nightmare.

Oh, absolutely. Go ahead.

Yeah, so, like, the example, and I believe there was a Nobel Prize winner, like a Turing Award winner or something, recently gave a presentation about this. And it was just like, AI in its current state totally has the potential to completely destroy human life as we know it. And that's Hinton.

Yeah, I think that might be. Might have been Jeffrey Hinton. Right.

And I think that's totally reasonable because just like we can use chemistry and we can use modern industrial engineering practices to make some kind of metals or some kind of whatever, weird thermal polymers or what, thermome, I think they're called. Those things are indestructible and they cannot be consumed and metabolized by normal nature yet.

I mean, hey, yes, yes, yet in terms of millions of years, maybe. But, like, we can invent a sort of a form of life or a form of thing that sustains itself.

We can totally do that in, like, 20, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Make factories that build factories that build robots that replace humans.

But the question. Yes, exactly right. The question is why? Because to go to Something you earlier said.

And this is why I keep coming back to why I think biology is an excellent critical lens for this world. We can create life today, we can create biological life, we can create synthetic life, and we can create arguably artificial life.

Although to your point about philosophy, I think that word artificial is a little contentious. But what we can't do in all those situations, and if you disagree with me, I would love to hear a different perspective. We can't control life.

That we can create life, we can't control it. And that's where to me the whole AI language falls apart, that it assumes control.

And I still think that biology teaches us that control is an illusion. Thoughts?

Yeah, yeah, no, I 100 agree with you. That's my whole.

I think that's the whole point that I'm trying to make or trying to illuminate with these metaphors that I make with biology and stuff. It's just like we can make these things and it will absolutely destroy humanity if we do that.

We can totally make these killer robots and they will get out of hand.

And I mean, if we make war machines to find people based on facial recognition and they replicate themselves, we will just make some kind of, like Jeffrey Hinton says, some kind of sociopath, indestructible army. Like, okay, great fun.

But again, why, and what, what, what I'm, what I'm seeing and what I'm really grateful for is just that's not necessarily what's happening because people know AI, people do stuff with AI and there are many companies and there are like open spaces and younger people are experimenting with it and what you're going to be seeing. And you can also see this kind of stuff on LinkedIn.

For example, a group of students, they were playing, or maybe it was a business, I'm not sure, but it was a video about some kind of an AI used to control bomb machines or whatever. And they were just like, if you talk to this BOB robot thing in a certain philosophical loophole, it will just destroy everything.

And it's so, so stupid because I can imagine a future where you're invaded by these hyper intelligent robots and all these promises about like a prosperous future and whatever. And then you just have children who are like citing Kantian ethics or like Nietzschean quotes or whatever to the AI.

And the AI is an existential crisis and it breaks down or something.

I mean, that's fantastic, right? Poet hackers as the pacifist resistance.

Yeah, no, but that's actually a thing like poet hackers is a really good term for that, that's definitely going to be a thing because these things aren't indestructible. And what you're, what really gives me, I mean, it's kind of scary.

At the same time, something that's really giving me hope is like for example, the mushrooms in Chernobyl, these radio trophic mushrooms, they eat radioactivity. They just like. Yeah, they were just like, hey you. Yeah, yeah, this, this place is awful. So this is mine now.

Yeah, kind of evolution in action.

Yeah. And then you also have this stuff, like an article that I read about the port of Antwerp.

There were all these huge metal boats and at some point they found there was a new kind of rust or some, some kind of deterioration and they found metal eating bacteria. And I'm just like, what the hell? That's a real problem. And I can guarantee, I mean, it's.

Not a problem for the bacteria.

No, no, of course not. But these things are happening and, and I can give many more examples like Ideonella sakaensis, this, this plastic eating bacteria that's been found.

And now also some, some mealworms have that in them and you can like metabolize some softer plastics with that already in waste. That stuff is keep, is going to keep happening. You can't stop evolution. Evolution I really think is like a fundamental force.

And yeah, I don't have much more to say about that.

Like it's, it's phenomenal.

But I want to shift slightly because although maybe not slightly, there was, I'm not sure if it was Wittgenstein, but there was a theorist who you were kind of connecting to what we're describing today in terms of your thoughts around biology and media. Can you remind me who that was and give us a primer the way you did with McLuhan?

Yeah, Wittgenstein, yeah. Wittgenstein is my favorite philosopher by far. Wittgenstein is basically. Well, he's, he's a crazy person, that's for sure.

Went to school, went to the same school as Hitler, which is always a fun fact. They, they probably didn't know each other.

But I was going to say hopefully he beat him up in the schoolyard. It was all W's fault.

There were a few years difference between them. They probably never really met or whatever. Maybe they saw.

Fair enough.

Yeah. But Wittgenstein is a super interesting philosopher. Because he's basically, and it's kind of what I'm doing here is just, he dismantles bullshit.

And in a way that's really accessible because he was just like, philosophers are basically a lot of the time doing things with language that don't make sense. And that's not to say that philosophy is something that doesn't work.

Like a lot of philosophy is very, very pragmatic, very useful, very life enriching perhaps, or all that kind of stuff. But Wittgenstein was really more about like the kind of philosophy that I, as an angsty teen engaged with.

You know, like I'm reading something and I'm just like, oh, AI is going to take over the world because of singularity. And it's like, no, that's just, that's just corporations trying to sell you fear, sell you the antidote to fear that they created.

And, and, and yeah, Wittgenstein is sort of just like gives you the tools to dismantle in, in very, very approachable way. Because it's just like, hey, if you have something to say, then say it. Like, that's very radical.

It's very radical if it, I mean, this is not necessarily contemporary, but there's so much bullshit. Like imagine, for example, think back to the blockchain era, like, this is going to change the world. It's like.

I wish I could agree with you that it was past tense. I think that era is still upon us, unfortunately.

Oh yeah, but it's not, it's not as bad as it was like a few years ago. It's changed.

I agree it's changed, but it's a resurgence in America that is, to your point, based on delusion. But yes, that's another excellent example. How, I mean, where did you see the connection between Wittgenstein and biology?

Or am I projecting and that that was just you kind of connecting different ideas that you were playing with?

No, Wittgenstein basically his most. This is how I personally see what Wittgenstein does is he's a language philosopher first and foremost.

And what he does is basically he says, hey, we should study language as it appears in the real world.

Like if you look at some construction workers and they're saying, hey, give me a plank, and you see someone walking up and giving them a plank or whatever, then that's language. You know, language is, has a purpose. It's situated in the world. And with people doing things and what academics are doing is.

And what earlier Wittgenstein, because he's like, he Used to be like this very academically mathematical, logical, focused person is trying to force a sort of mathematics into language, which doesn't work. And that's primarily the kind of thing that Wittgenstein was against.

And what Wittgenstein later developed is this methodology which basically says just observe language as it happens, and that's what language is. And if you want to know what meaning is, then look at how people use the words like meaning is use. And that's it.

That's basically Wittgenstein's philosophy. And there's a lot of things that, like he has a lot of. Of thoughts about this. Lots of questions and it does stuff. But.

But it's just like looking at language the way a biologist looks at animals or.

Yeah. Forests or ecosystems, because it really does evoke the. The phrase language is a virus, that it's constantly evolving, it's constantly changing.

You can't come up with mathematical rules for it. You have to watch it, you have to observe it, because it changes based on conditions. Right. A plank on a construction site is one thing.

A plank in a workout gym, in an exercise course.

Oh, yeah.

Is completely different. Right. And that's a really. A fascinating connection.

Yeah. And I have some ideas about this. That's. Like I said, I'm not an academic, but I do want to be once.

No, no, quite the opposite.

I think, I think an important distinction to note, especially here for us at Metaviews, but I think also within your own intellectual journey, is there's a difference between an academic and an intellectual. And I always believe that academia is where intellectuals go to die. It's where they go to atrophy.

It's where they go to stop thinking and start institutionalizing. And that may be different in Europe, where academia has a more nuanced culture.

Yeah. I don't know.

But here in North America, again, academia is where ideas go to die. It's where they go to basically become irrelevant and boring, which is why Silicon Valley is so powerful.

Because Silicon Valley is where ideas go to become companies. I'm not saying that that is better.

I'm just saying it explains why we have such a disconnect here in terms of academics kind of being anti intellectual, as paradoxic or oxymoronic as that might be.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. Like, I don't know enough about American academia culture and European academia culture. Like, I have some friends.

Like a good friend of mine, he was studying physics here at the University of Eindhoven of Technology Technological University. Technological University of Eindhoven. Okay. Yeah. And he completely burned out because it's bullshit.

Yes.

No, he's. He's just there because he really loves it and physics is something he really is interested in and stuff like that.

But at the same time, if I look at spaces like MIT Media Labs, if I look at Caltech, if I look at like for example, I'm going to go visit Wagening a university this week, or if ETH Zurich, for example, there's also a technology university, like some really interesting stuff is happening there. Or like.

Oh, for sure.

Like that's super cool. Or that's university in.

But I would.

That drone university with jdi, that's super cool.

But I would argue that you can access all their knowledge, access all the cool things they do without having to pay the money and without having to subject yourself to the burnout. Now, if they want to pay you money, totally cool.

And there are many institutions that will pay, especially graduate researchers, money to attend because they will benefit from your brilliance. And you are, Laura, absolutely brilliant. But it is to your friend's point.

They are fundamentally about training people to forget about work, life balance, to commit themselves entirely to work. And biologically, that's stupid. It's just not worth. Just burns you out. It does not leave you productive.

I am of a belief that in order for our brains to be their most productive, our bodies need to be healthy and.

Yeah.

And doing good things. And that's where academia still is, a industrial factory mindset that tries to unfortunately burn people out.

I am very biased in that regard, as regular metaviews listeners would know.

But yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if that's necessarily true for all universities because. And maybe it's something that's also a little bit more a symptom of our time, more than just something that's. That's, that's part of academia.

Because in the Netherlands, for instance. I don't know, I think it's also a problem in America.

But in the Netherlands, for instance, we have what some people may call an epidemic of burnout in the working industry. And that has nothing to do with academia. And in academia, I think it's the same. I think it's just. Yeah. Oh, I think, yeah, that would be an epidemic.

Right, Because a pandemic is global. But no, but yeah, it is global. It is global. It is global. Yeah. No, but I think, I think we're.

A big difference comes from, in my perspective is that I went to like, it's not a Montessori Elementary School, but it's something like that. It was called Jaina Plan. I don't know if that's something that exists outside of the Netherlands.

And I will quickly say, I think most of our listeners probably don't even know what Montessori is. I happen to know what Montessori is.

Oh, I thought that was pretty.

It was. It was. It no longer is.

You. You.

I. I was born in the early 70s and Montessori was around in maybe the 80s. I don't know. I don't think it made it to the 90s here in North America.

But it is a radical approach to early childhood education. And unfortunately, it has kind of been pushed out by the conservatives who have here in North America really attacked education as we know it.

But please continue.

Yeah, so I went to. I wouldn't even call it an alternative school.

Like, they are pretty normal here in the Netherlands, and not in the sense that, like, the most schools are like that, but they're common. You know, like one in three schools maybe are like that. I don't quote me on that at all.

Maybe I'm completely wrong, but in my experience, it's a pretty normal school to go to. And the idea is basically just like, as a child, give them homework. Just like, talk to a child. Just like, give them, I don't know, something to do.

Like, we had, for example, competitions about making airplanes. And it wasn't, you know, paper airplanes. And. And it wasn't about. It was just something that the teacher came up with at some week.

And it was just like, hey, you guys want to go make some airplanes? And we made paper airplanes and we held competitions, and then the next week we held more competitions.

And you learn so much from that because you learn origami and you learn planning, and you learn some engineering skills, and you learn some drawing skills. You learn collaboration. And we have tests, but not that many. And if you want to do homework, then go ahead, like, ask the teacher.

Or maybe the teacher will be like, hey, do you want something to do at home? Like, here's a cool book that you can read on mathematics. Or. And some other child is like, hey, that kid not the smartest. Well, that's fine.

I mean, we can teach you, like, some.

Some.

Some what? Practical skills. Like, for example, my father. My father, he's construction worker. And as a very young child, I was taught at school how to saw wood.

You know, that's the kind of stuff that they did there. And. Yeah, and we also had some tests, just like regular schools.

And we, We Also have just normal homework, not homework, but just regular lessons and all that kind of stuff.

But it's just a little bit more free and more focused on the individual, but, and, and also really focused on group work and just on developing people as people. Like how people live. Like, you know, that's regular life.

That's the polar opposite of North American education.

Where yeah, it's, it's even our many schools here in the Netherlands, it's not the average school.

Even our alternative schools are not as alternative as that, which is why you do kind of get this mentality that education exists just to train people for the workforce rather than to allow us to grow as human beings.

Now we are almost out of time and really what I would love to do with our kind of remaining few minutes is try to get you to connect your thoughts around media, around biology, around language, around technology, and apply them to politics.

Because on the one hand, you know, it's easy for us to look at contemporary politics and be like, oh, you know, it's, it's kind of ridiculous, it's kind of silly. But to your point about the 20 year window, let's fast forward. You've picked up your PhD, you spent time thinking about all this stuff.

Indulge me in a kind of scenario, in a kind of speculation on if we were to better understand biology as a frame for understanding media, for understanding politics, for understanding technology, how could we apply that to a better political system?

Personally, I have been thinking a lot about this and I'm very afraid that not much will change. Like, I think we can have pockets of change, pockets of optimism, pockets of. But like, take a look at history, for example.

There is no period in history. Take any period, any slice of 50 years in which there were no wars.

I don't think that has anything to do with, with science or biology or understanding.

I think it's something relatively fundamental to human beings that we, we fight, for example, and, and, and we, we make changes and, and we are different and I think we can better understand it and we can maybe change our own biology if in that, in that sense I think we might be able to do some things.

And sometimes when I dream of like a biology of language, when we really understand that language is proper, alive, like viruses, we have like a proper taxonomy and all that kind of stuff, maybe we can make vaccines, you know, against certain pathogenic forms of language and that kind of stuff.

And just like how prior to the invention of, well, invention, the discovery of penicillin, for example, we didn't really know how to treat severe bacterial infections. Maybe we can treat severial fascist infections with like, you know, vaccines or, or medicine in language and.

Right.

Scientifically. And that's super interesting. But at the same time, this is a point that Dawkins made.

Richard Dawkins, like, I've been reading his book, you know, the, the famous. I don't even know what it's called. But.

Anyway, go on. You've been entertaining his ideas.

Yeah, well, what he basically showed is there's like 12 species on earth that make warfare. 10 of them are ants, one is termites, and one is humans. And it has everything to do with the selfish gene.

That's the book, you know, and it has everything, everything to do with how genes work and how sociology emerges from biology. And like I said, we can make pockets of change. We can collaborate in for good, we could collaborate for bad and that kind of stuff. Yes.

But as long as we don't fundamentally alter our species to be different than our eusocial or whatever that framework is called, I believe it's eusocial species. I don't think anything is going to fundamentally change. Because imagine, hey, we make the science and we understand the language.

There will be people who will be seeing that as control and because it's a different language, like the Chinese or something, and then we're making this in Europe and we're using it to better China or whatever. Well, their culture is being erased. And that's kind. And then. So, you know, hey, you're fucking us over and you get worse. Anyways, so.

So let me. Let me entertain this, this kind of worldview that you've offered, because I think it has a lot of really interesting ingredients.

And I'll offer this by first sharing a hypothesis I have and then using the framework you've just offered me, I will then offer a response to this hypothesis I have, and then I'll get your reaction to sort of see if. Professor, I'm applying this appropriately. So I have this very strong hypothesis. This, it's not just my own.

There's a lot of science and other researchers backing it. That one of the reasons we are witnessing the rise of fascism, and in particular the strain of fascism we see, which is fueled by stupidity. Right.

In particular American stupidity, but global stupidity.

And I'm being facetious when I say this, but Covid has attacked our brains and Covid has attacked our brains and long Covid, especially to the extent that it has literally reduced our cognitive ability and connected that to an emotional dysregulation that makes Us a little bit more belligerent, a little bit more gullible, a little bit more likely to act in a way that is antisocial and is kind of dumb.

And so I think to get to my point of the solution, I've seen a lot of really interesting research around the treatment of Long Covid and the treatment of ptsd, Post traumatic stress disorder with psilocybin, that I think that if we started using psilocybin and other psychedelics to treat our current psychology and biology, that could enable a change in our evolutionary approach that was more compassionate, more connected and less combative and less divisive. Thoughts?

Yes. I mean, that might have some effects. Like. I know.

I mean, to Wittgenstein's point, we won't know until we try and observe.

But yeah, let's say we do that on a global scale. And you know, like the. There was a project to eradicate, I believe it was polio or something with vaccines.

And we basically did it, I believe, for a while. Yeah. No, I. No, that's measles.

That's no unfortunate. Polio is, is also unfortunately coming back. That's how we are right now.

Yeah. I'm not super, super well first in this, but I believe there was like something that we actually eradicated. Maybe it is polio that I'm talking about.

Yeah. I mean, it's. To your point about the metal eating bacteria. Right. Eradication only works if you maintain the environment in which it happened.

We've allowed polio to come back because of the vaccine. I digress. Go ahead.

Yeah.

And let's say we solve the PTSD and all that kind of stuff and everybody is like lovey dovey and people are working together and it's chill and then a meteorite comes, comes at our earth and like, where are the crazy authoritarian people that we need at that point?

Because I would rather have like these crazy Chinese authoritarian regimes who can like militarize their entire country and, and just operationalize, click a button and the entire country is just like, hey, we need to solve this problem yesterday.

But because, for example, their Covid response was way faster than the rest of the world and it was way too much, but it was faster and way more efficient.

But you just contradicted yourself. That is setting up my counter argument. Authoritarianism doesn't actually achieve that. That's a myth. Right? Authoritarianism. Yeah.

If you actually get into the history and empiricism of the people who've studied authoritarianism, it's a story of dysfunction, Right? No, but let Me finish this. Authoritarians love to present themselves as efficient.

They love to present themselves as capable of mobilizing resources in the face of a crisis. And historically they cannot properly empowered societies.

And this is where I say, as an aside, we have lived in most of our democratic societies are not very democratic and they don't actually empower people and they don't actually create what the environment I'm describing. But culture is what motivates people and culture is far more powerful than authoritarianism. And culture is driven by stories.

So for example, I live in a culture in which everyone used to smoke cigarettes. And the reason that everyone stopped smoking cigarettes is not because of laws, it's not because of authoritarianism.

It's because they started losing loved ones to cancer. And then people created stories that said smoking cigarettes leads to cancer.

So this is where I agree with you that if we are to respond to something like a meteor, we need a rapid response capability.

And I'm saying authoritarianism will never deliver it because to your example of COVID in China, while China was able, but no, China was not actually successful in fighting Covid. They were successful in covering up Covid.

They were successful in getting everyone to do stuff because of COVID But they didn't actually follow the science nimbly enough because they leaned too far into authoritarianism. That Covid is still there. Covid still exists in China, Covid still exists here.

We are still fighting Covid because the authoritarianism was not successful. And that's where I say you are right in desiring what you desire, which is a rapid coordinated response.

And I would argue that the Internet has a better model of coordination for that. And authoritarianism is just a lie. Cuz it lies to us that it can offer this kind of security, this.

But instead there's to your point, too many opposition, too many dissidents, too many people defying it for it to ever work. I digress. Any final words before we segue to our shout out section?

Yeah, no, I think I agree with you. Like, my point was more about like authoritarianism can act faster. But you do make a good point that they don't necessarily achieve anything.

Achieve more with that.

Yeah. This is the hare and the tortoise. The hare can go faster, but if the tortoise gets there in the end, then that is the winner.

And this is where we come to the shout out section of every meta views.

Partly because what I really love about talking to you, Laura, is you do sort of respect the idea that there is a world of ideas beyond ourselves that There is a world of research and intellectual. So if there was someone that you wanted our audience to learn more about that you want to shout out.

And it doesn't have to be anyone we've mentioned today, because you have, of course, shouted out Marshall, McLuhan and Wittgenstein. Who do you think our audience should know more about or should check out that you happen to think is pretty cool?

A few people come to mind.

Oh, and by the way, the rule is always only one.

Okay?

Otherwise we could go on and on forever. But it's meant to be the first name that intuitively pops into your stomach, pops into your brain the moment you think of it. Yeah.

No. Okay, then I would definitely, definitely say Brett, Victor. Brett. Victor. Like, and tell us more. Yeah, it's as I.

As I talked about earlier about Dynamic Land, and most of my intuitive understanding of McLuhan comes from how he communicates about technology. I really think he has a vision for the future that is genuinely exciting.

And I mean that in the most authentic and most hopeful and optimistic way possible. Like, I can be pessimistic, I can be all kinds of negative or.

Or talking about dystopias or how it will probably be hijacked by the wrong people or whatever. I genuinely think what he's envisioning and what they're actually making happen at Dynamic Land is incredibly beautiful. Cool.

Because it's technology that connects rather than disconnects. And I. Yeah, I am dedicating my personal career, or whatever you might call it, to. To.

To enable that kind of technology further and spread it, because I really, really strongly believe in it. And his presentations have inspired millions in the technology industry.

And I really think that he has such beautiful visions and he can explain it in such an accessible way to Dynamic Land is worth looking up. But all his presentations, all his articles, they're incredible.

Right on. Yeah, Very cool. Now, as we play our outro music, where can our listeners, viewers learn more about you and your work?

I'm still setting up a place where.

I can share more thoughts. I think the answer then on the interim is meta views. Because we'd love to have you back. You know, we've. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I do have a website which is more. Which is.

That's pretty easy to remember Lora fm. And you'll be adding more as your experiments in ideas, theories and software continue to advance. But we would love to have you back.

Only because we did an hour. Usually we try to limit this to much less than an hour and we've still only scratched the surface?

Oh, yeah, I think so.

So if you'd be game, we'd certainly love to hear more of your perspectives on AI, on technology, biology. But to also keep us in the loop as to what's happening in Europe and in particular Northern Europe is something that we would be grateful for.

So thank you very much. We appreciated your presence here on the show.

For those listening, you can find us on all the popular audio podcasting platforms, maybe even some of the unpopular ones, as well as YouTube. And we've got a substack. I will be back later in the week.

As you know, we are now in our quality phase of meta views and Laura has certainly stepped up and provided us with a quality episode. So thank you very much. And again, again, we'll be back soon. Stay fresh, stay radical and keep your eyes open. Thanks again. Take care.