Navigating an Age of Chaos with Julian Gresser
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books we've just launched the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint, and our first title is, Is There Life After Death? Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic
today is an age of chaos. My guest is my good friend Julian Gresser. Julian has been a guest before on New Thinking Allowed. He's had a long career as an international attorney. He was twice Mitsubishi professor of law at Harvard University. He is the author of Piloting Through Chaos. He is also the author of a new book,
How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, Evolutionary Values for an Age in Chaos. Welcome, Julian. Thank you very much, Jeffrey. It's really fun to be here again and I really thank you for the opportunity to engage with you and your audience and I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun. Well, I think it's wonderful that you're about to turn 80 in about a week and you've just issued a new book and the book is in many ways autobiographical. It's a summary of your long history as I would say as a social justice warrior. Well, it is an autobiography and I've tried to go back to the beginning of my life to try to find in this journey that I've had what are some of the important insights and discoveries that I've made and it's been an interesting journey. Voltaire said, you know,
on his deathbed, what was that? And I have a little bit of a feeling as I approach my 80th year of that sense. But perhaps as we explore a little bit today I can tell you a bit about the journey and what happened sort of in midway. Now, I've known you, Julian, for over 20 years. I think we did a seminar together in the Bay Area in California back in the 1990s. What I see in you is that you take on the big issues. We did an interview on big heart intelligence, for example. You're very interested in the heart. You're very interested in how new
technologies come into existence and you're very interested in the many problems that are facing humanity today and how we are going to navigate through this very perilous time. Well, I suppose that's true that I've reached out and tried to not only contend with some of the deep, the great issues of our times. I think one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is it's great to have a great vision, but you begin with baby steps. And I'd like to think that as I've grown older and perhaps wiser, I've really appreciated the power of single steps.
One of the themes in the book is how many people does it take to turn the world toward darkness, toward chaos? And I venture to say that the madman who who took Gandhi's life changed the destiny of India, a single person by a single act. How many people does it take to turn the world for better? Is it possible that a single act, a single act of compassion and kindness, can begin to turn the tiller? Certainly the great writers like Hugo describe that. In Les Miserables, for example, a single act of kindness when the bishop of Dean ignores that Jean Valjean stole the candelabra. And when the gendarme come and collar him and bring him back, he says, poor man, why did you just, I gave you the gift of the candelabra, but I offered you more. Why did you take that as well?
And that changed Jean Valjean's life, and not only changed his life, but changed hundreds of other lives that he touched. You began, I would say, an important phase of your journey in Japan, where you lived for years, you actually opened a law office in Japan, as I recall, and were actively engaged in consulting with corporations, both internally and outside of Japan, who wanted to do business in Japan, and maybe most importantly of all, you engaged in a very intensive practice of Zen Buddhism. It's true, and I like to think that my life took a turn, hopefully for the better, at around the age of 40. I always fancied that if I had a Japanese ancestor, I would have liked him to have been Miyamoto Musashi, a great samurai artist. But Miyamoto, in his early days, in his youth, was kind of a vagabond. He thought, as
I thought, I was immortal till the age of 40, and then he met Takuan. Takuan was a great Zen master, and Takuan shook him pretty hard to realize that he was mortal, and he changed. And in my life, I had the arrogance of youth, and for many years after this epiphanal experience or training, I still had the arrogance of youth, but I gradually began to understand that I wasn't immortal, and it's been a process kind of of osmosis, but gradually I like to think that, and I'm deeply grateful not only to you for this interview, but for my life, that I've been allowed to live as long as I have, to have the opportunity to try to reach back in time, and to understand what were some of the interesting, humorous experiences I had, and how to reconcile the world of action, which is what I do as a lawyer now, taking on what I call the 5G juggernaut, and the satellite experiment where the entire planet is being engulfed in low orbit non-geostationary satellites, where our most private secrets are, and personal information is being exploited, to the advantage of a very few, to the disadvantage of many. I feel deeply grateful that I have had an opportunity and a chance to pull the fabric of my life together, the threads of it, into some attempted coherence. Well, we're beginning to touch on the theme of the interview now, the age of crisis, and it's very interesting because people sometimes say, this is really bad what's happening now, and I think to myself, well, it's not as bad as the Great Depression, it's not as bad as the First World War, and certainly not as bad as the Second World War, but when I think about it more deeply and I realize that the problem may be insidious. It's not so obvious as a famine
or a war. It's something that's happening to people, to their habits, and social media is one of the expressions of that problem that's, for example, causing young teenagers to commit suicide in record numbers. I think that we are in an age of crisis, and I do agree with you that some of it is, well, just look at the cities that have, I grew up in New York. I spent many years in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, where you did.
The cities are in desperate shape, so this is visible evidence. If we look at what's happening with Mr. Kim in North Korea, or Mr. Putin, I'm not suggesting that the United States is perfect either, or Xi Jinping. I mean, we live in an
age where a flick of the switch could create cataclysm, and where there are tightly coupled economic systems, psychological systems, military systems, that are highly vulnerable to these massive stresses that could go awry from some erratic, crazy action. And we live with this, of course, throughout my life. But when we have a situation when, within a matter of minutes, a hacker could weaponize a satellite and send it as a weapon and blow up the Chinese Earth Station, this is not in any way imaginary. This is very real.
It points to a level of risk that I think very few are aware of, and that the mainstream media has not recognized. However, there's a wonderful researcher at MIT, and he studied trout. And in his studies, he asked the question, how is it trout are able to swim upstream? And what happens with trout, according to this researcher described in my book, the trout use the gravity, the force of the downflow of the winter to propel themselves up. And I think that's really what I'm trying to convey in the book, that we live in times where our world is rapidly coming apart and rapidly coming together in awe at the same time. So it's a question of surfing. I mean, how do we see
how do we surf this phenomenon so that we tap, that we touch the angels of our better nature and affect a shift before it's too late? You've described the age in which we are living as a struggle between the forces of dystopia and the forces of utopia. Well, I think that the shadow today is running amok. And so the question then is how to see the world as it is, how to deal practically. What I tried to do in my book is how the leopard changed its spots, is to build on my prior work. And Albert Einstein said, we can't solve today's problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. And I really agree with him. And what I'm trying to offer
in this book, bringing together other work over the years, is a new way of thinking. I call it intertidal thinking and invented something called the explorer's wheel, which is in the earlier book you mentioned, the explorer's mind. So I think that will help, but I don't think it's sufficient. And the next critical element to help us navigate through chaos is to build on the earlier work of integrity, which I defined as a coherent relationship between the mind, the heart of compassion, and the hand of action, but increased through evolutionary values. And
finally, how to turn these values, which will help us not just in a primitive way survive, but transcend values. I believe that where we are now, there's a wonderful book by Amitav Ghosh called The Nutmeg's Curse. I don't know if you know. He'd be a wonderful person for you to interview. But he talks about extractive capitalism. That's the term. It dates right back to when the Dutch literally wiped out these Indonesian villages for these spices and nutmeg.
I think that we have to deal with these forces that might makes right is going to take us rapidly over the precipice, new values. And of these, so I see harnessing in the capacity to turn new ways of thinking and new ways and new values, three what I would call powers, powers that the modern day samurai or person of action can draw upon. The first, very simple, paying forward. This is an old yogic idea, karma yoga, as well as Emerson in his essay on compensation. He said, beware of too much good coming your way. It will worm worms, hasten to pay it forward,
line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent. Why is that? Because the vital energy stagnates. You want, in order to increase the flow, anything that comes your way, pass it forward. And you beautifully said, that's the whole purpose of new thinking allowed. What a wonderful, wonderful mission you have, Jeffrey. Pure pay forward. So that's the first, power. The second
power is synchronicity. I mentioned to you when I was coming here for this interview, my path was blocked by a peacock. And I said, hey, I'm trying to pass, continue on my path. And what does the peacock do? It blossomed into this extraordinary fan of 120 eyes, 50 eyes, I don't know how many they were. And it joyfully said, hello, I'm a peacock. That was pretty extraordinary. And I said, what an amazing sort of
messenger on my way to Jeffrey. And there it is. And then the third power is love, the power of love. There's something extraordinary that I didn't realize until I continued to practice with the grandmaster, Qigong grandmaster, to whom I pay homage, Li Junfeng, who is a great innovator of the heart, the heart energy, and the power of love. And somewhere in the interview, perhaps I can, toward the end, provide what I would say is a miracle that I've discovered about love. I look forward to it. I'm a very big enthusiast on the power of love. It's in my name,
after all. But I'll go further. I think that the power of love is the strongest power in the universe and is the very reason that the universe exists. Yeah, that's really interesting that you say so. I have a good friend, Dr. Stephen Post,
who's written a lot on Alzheimer's and many other fields, and he said that this was the universal first principle of love. So I agree with you. I think often the literature on love focuses on love as an emotion or as an ethical sense of principles. But I find it very useful to think of love as an energetic field around the heart, to emphasize the energetic power of love in a way grounds it and renders it available to anyone. So if you like, I'll suggest a little practice. Okay, let's do it. I invite you, and I invite our audience. You don't have to take anything that I'm saying on faith,
just because Jeffrey's been kind enough to invite me today. When I first came upon this, I almost didn't believe it. So here is simply what I suggest. The first is you simply just click. I invite you, just click. Now just click, there's nothing magical about just click. It's a way to signal to your autonomic nervous system that there's going to be a change, there's going to be an opening. So when I just click,
I have a sense I'm going into a place of refuge. In the hurly burly of the day, all the gaining, the spending, the winning, the losing, all the violence, the turmoil, selfishness, it all quiets down. Here's a place of refuge. And so what I do, and this is sort of following Li Jianfeng's process, I realize that there's an energy field around the heart. I'm not talking about the physical pump, I'm talking about the energy field around the heart. What I do is I quiet the heart.
What happens automatically when you quiet this energy field around the heart, your mind settles down. Now, that's a wonderful place to be. Any time you want, you can quiet your mind. And the secret is to quiet your heart. Now, how do you quiet your heart? Invite our audience. There are many ways. If you go to my website, justclick.earth, you're just clicking for the earth, and there's something I call a gift, my gift to you, and you go there, there's an image of the moon over a very still lake. I find it a very useful
image. I bring it up in my mind's eye, and I quiet my heart. And my mind becomes as still as that silver moon over the lake. And I enjoy that experience. It's really kind of nifty,
you almost don't have to go further, it's good enough, however. So then, I bring my attention to the energy field around my heart. And I enjoy that, and I start to open this energy field. How do you open the energy field of your heart? Just relax. Li Junfeng skips around the world at 86. I said to him, don't you get tired,
because he's in Austin one day, and he goes to Manila the next day, and then to Beijing. How do you do this at 86? He said, I relax. Interesting. I once said to him, how do you relax? He said, loose. You want to be loose, that's how you relax, loose. Okay, so you're loose, you're quieting your heart, you're opening your heart, and then I kind of just check out my physical heart, make sure it's still pumping, and usually it is. I can't recall any time when it wasn't. And you get a sense of an eddy, an
energy field around your heart. Okay, so that's great. I've kind of tuned in. Next thing I do is I open my heart. Now, here's where it starts getting magical, just like the peacock. Whatever happens next, it could be Jefferies has a sort of, the audience perhaps can see it, has a Buddha-like smile, and he's laughing. I connect my energy
field of love to his lovely visage. Just connect it. I don't ask anything, I don't expect anything, and the miracle is I feel love in my heart coming back from Jeffrey. Now, if you send your energy out to the whole universe, almost like a boomerang, I feel it come back like that. It's like it answers, but that sounds kind of grandiose. What about a hummingbird? What about a rock? What about a stone? When I connect the energy field of love in my heart to the stone, it gives back love.
It gives back a stone. It gives back love. I experience that phenomenon, that dialogue, that conversation of love as happiness. I experience vitality. Notwithstanding, about to be 80,
about to be 80, I feel I'm getting younger. It's possible. Mathematically, chronologically, I'm getting older. But as I wrote this book, I think for a while, you can, all of us, can begin to reverse age and pick up the vitality, the opportunity of a moment. From this, I feel profound gratitude. Gratitude to you, gratitude to our audience, gratitude to the gift of life. And I pay it
forward. I don't ask anything back. If I see anyone with misery, I try to help give them a bit of joy. And if they are happy, I try to reinforce it. And that's a simple miracle that I've discovered and that I try, perhaps with some fits and starts, to live by. It's a beautiful exercise, Julian. And it reminds me, many, many years ago, I was part of a laboratory known as the Washington Street Research Center in San Francisco. And the
founder of that laboratory, Henry Dakin, built a Faraday cage, about the size of this space that we're in right now. He had a sensor so he could put it out five feet from your body and it would measure the energy field coming from your heart. I don't think it's quite what you were referring to because he was measuring an electromagnetic field. But I think you're talking about a more subtle energy. Well, there's clearly Qi around the heart. It's one of the centers of
Qi, just like the Dakin. And as a separate form, and this is from Li Junfeng, a separate form of energy is love. And love is far more powerful than Qi. We're talking actually about both. That when you open your heart of love, it actually influences Qi, which influences blood flow.
So this is a very physical phenomenon. But what it suggests is an alignment through love, this energetic feel with the soul, as well as the spirit, as well as the entire universe. Because by connecting, we're creating a circuit. The reason I experience subjectively love coming back is an open circuit. And the energy simply flows. Now, when you align this way, and the reason this relates back to our question of how many people does it take to turn the world for better, you are actually forming an alignment, an energetic alignment with your own energy field, with your mind, with your heart, with your blood, with your soul, with your spirit, and with the entire universe. You know, I continue to practice koans. And there's a wonderful koan of this monk who's on the path, and he comes upon this old lady living in a hut. And he says to this old lady,
Don't you feel lonely sometimes? And she says, No, I don't feel lonely. He says, Well, do you have any relatives taking care of you? She says, Well, yes, I do. He said, I don't see any relatives around here.
She says, The mountains, the rivers, the sky, each moment is my relative. So she doesn't feel alone because she is deeply connected with everything, and from which she has life force. You're beginning to remind me of what I am now beginning to call my own personal motto. I say motto because it's something I try to live up to, but I know I'm a long way from it, which is to love everyone and everything all the time. Well, I'm certainly not a paragon. We all have foibles, and we all... I think the process is nonlinear, my own view is. At least it's been my experience.
I'm not so sure how many people like Saul of Tarsus, you know, have an epiphanal experience, wow, they're completely changed. It's never been my experience. You know, I stumble, I make mistakes, but I think there's an intention to try to be open and learn. As I say, I think to keep it kind of close to the earth, I've launched after the book.
I don't want to just have it be a book. First of all, I see it as a living book. And so, there's no reason why a book can't have life just like anything else. And so, we've created this evolutionary conversation where I like to interview very interesting people such as you. Jeffrey, you've been kind enough to agree. Jeffrey, you know, is the most extraordinary person and a very interesting person.
He's been very kind to interview hundreds, maybe thousands of people, but he certainly deserves to be interviewed as well, and to honor their work, and to connect it through this somewhat abstract idea of evolutionary values. So, I interviewed my old mentor, Professor Jerome A. Cohn, who's a great China law expert in the country. And I began the interview, I said to him, Jerry, what deep part of wisdom could you impart to many of your admiring students? And he said, well, remember to keep the shower curtain inside the shower. You know, that's a rather practical, simple little step, but it shows in it a kind of a humor and a paying attention, which is where I think this whole thing begins. Well, our topic is the crisis that we are facing, the age in which we are living in, an age of crisis. And really, we've been pointing towards the solution.
How to pilot through crisis is, you seem to be suggesting, above all, it's to approach the universe with an open heart. Yes, and particularly if I can use the word on a practical level, and I hope that those who watch this interview will give this just-click technique a shot. See if it works for you. If it doesn't work initially, try it a few more times, at least.
Because I think that, you know, I asked Stephen Post the question I posed to you today, how many people does it take to turn the world for better? And he said, well, the Kabbalah suggests 25. I think the important point, whether it's 25 or 5 or 10 or 100, is it doesn't maybe take thousands. And if a few people were to really begin to cultivate seriously the energetic power of love, first of all, they'd feel much better themselves. They'd feel alive and healthy, irrespective of their age. But then it's the connecting part that starts to align.
And I don't know, it'd be an interesting empirical study for those who are a scientific bent. Because encapsulated in this single thing is a whole series of, you could call it, wisdom moves. I believe that wisdom, as I wrote in an earlier book, is a learnable skill. When you actually experience what I've suggested, the miracle, there are no assumptions. There are no expectations. You're simply here. You're tapping your vital energy. You are in the flow of the moment, and so forth and so on. There's no need.
There's no delusion of fear of death or life. You're simply here. And in it becomes an enormous charge of energy. How many people does it take who open their hearts this way, who have what I call big heart intelligence, who are able to capture? Because your creative powers then, there's no more blockage. Your mind opens, your heart opens, and then we have the capacity to convert to the hand of action, to take on these shadow forces, not with rage or hatred, but to recognize that these are simply in the field. Without going on too much more in this interview, we don't see that wireless industry as enemies. I think what they're doing is terrible things to the innocent,
unconsenting public. But we would be diminished if we see the folly that they do with hatred. Rather, what our goal is to show not just the industry but the communities, there is a viable option which we call optical fiber to the premises, which is part of what the broadband international legal action is about. And it's interesting, it talks about light. So juxtaposed to the shadowy forces, there's a very practical basis for light and for hope. So what you're arguing is that even for those people whose behavior you find harmful, destructive, and certainly distasteful, to approach them with love as well.
To be honest, I can't say when we file a lawsuit, as we are doing to protect Los Angeles, trying to save Lake Tahoe, and now very soon in New York City, which is being absolutely blanketed particularly cynically in poor and minority communities under the rubric. It's funny that this interview has sort of drifted back to the very practical, but suggesting that diversity, equity, and inclusion is the reason they're putting high levels of NIR, non-ionizing radiation, into poor minority communities. I mean, this is such a cynical. When it is just the opposite, it's going to harm them. You're talking about cell phone towers? Talking about small cells, macro towers, kiosks, farms of these towers on top of people's building, 20 feet away from children, in schools, near historical sites, without even a buy or leave, without even any reference or prior notice or public hearings, stripping away people's right to be heard. This is where the samurai side has to come out, but not with hatred.
Our goal is to restore some reasonable balance. These communities, all communities, have constitutional rights in this country that are being completely eroded by, one would say, bureaucrats and politicians that are working for these few companies that manipulate like puppeteers the process. But I don't see that we are served with hatred. I think what I've suggested is the heart is an enormous source of power, of love.
We can, it begins with a sense of caring for ourselves. There are huge numbers of people in this country that are burning out, that are feeling hopeless and despairing. I think where love can really be concentrated is to help these communities. Ultimately,
they have a choice. If they want to have these cell towers, that's their business. It's not for me or our legal team to presume, but to give them an opportunity to have what is called in law, informed consent, so they can decide whether they want to expose their children to these high levels of radiation. That's where we focus our love. We accept, I think, the path of trying to embody some of what I'm saying, is to recognize the world as it is. These companies
obviously believe, at least I think at some of them, the executives believe they're doing the right thing. In Los Angeles, they have promoted that this is going to close the digital divide where poor people don't have equal access to the internet. It's a noble goal. The problem is that it's being presented as what I call a tragic choice, that either we will be able to close the digital divide or you won't have wireless. I say this is a false choice, masquerading as a tragic choice, and that the path of love is what we're talking on the practical applications in the very serious, no-nonsense world of law and lawyers, is to be strong advocates for balance and for choice, and to help these communities understand their legal rights and the benefits, and not to be confused by these false claims that this will solve the digital divide or somehow this is going to advance the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion, when it in fact will do the opposite. And so to
be a strong advocate for exploration and choice, which recognizes difference, difference of view, seems to me a way to reconcile in the world of action, which I'm glad in a way we've ended up on the practical side of this. And finally to say, that this, all of this is a learnable skill. This doesn't have to, I hope that our audience doesn't see this as pure philosophy or theory.
You can validate everything that I've said today practically, instantly, in the most specific ways, and track it to see if it holds true for you. In other words, it seems that this lovely exercise you took us through really involves a slight shift of attention away from, you know, the busyness of life to the possibility of an open heart. Yes, and you don't need to contrive anything. You allow the universe to offer, to give you an offering. That's the gift of life. And it could be the most obscure, seemingly unimportant issue. You know, I once, as you know, our common friend, Willis Harmon,
I hooked Willis Harmon up to our brainwave biofeedback machines, and he had an image in this state of reverie of a pea in a pod. And initially he said, well, why is it so unimportant? Let's go on to the next image. But we paused, and at that moment, he began to understand that at that moment that pea in a pod was redolent with meaning. And so
you don't have to sort of program anything. You kind of get in the flow in whatever appears for you. It doesn't even have to be external. It could be a fear. It could be a story. It could be a memory. If you connect your heart energy of love to that memory, I found something quite magical. The memory, even deep, old memories, when you connect and imbue them with love, they become alive again. Do you know the work of
Dan Cohn? Well, I know that you interviewed him, but no, I don't. Alive inside. He's an amazing person, and his story is alive inside. He works with people who have been in deep dementia and Alzheimer's for 10 years, 15 years, just vegetating in these homes. And he asks them one question, somebody who is literally bent over like this, do you like music? And all of a sudden, their eyes open. Of course I like music. These are really people who have been, to all intents and purposes, dead. Of course I like music. And so
he says, can I put this pod on your head? What kind of music do you like? Well, I like jazz. I like blues. I like Beethoven. Doesn't matter. He puts them, they come alive. They get up. They start to dance. They start to reminisce in a
matter of seconds. Can you believe it? Just go do a YouTube search. Alive inside. So many of us are just unalive. We just sort of, we're shadows of what we are, and we can become alive in an instant. What a wonderful story. I like that a lot, and I often think to myself that we're so close, so close to a state of infinite purity. We have so much potential, and it just takes the slightest little shift of consciousness to access it or to begin to access it. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with
you. It doesn't have to be grandiose. It doesn't have to be big. In fact, it's more interesting when it's simply a leaf or the flutter of wings of a hummingbird. How many times do we pass that hummingbird? A hundred times, and all of a sudden we connect our heart energy to the hummingbird and it becomes an angel. Well, we initiated the conversation by talking about the age of crisis in which we live, and your work has largely focused on the problem of wireless and 5G and the enormous amount of electromagnetic radiation that's passing through our bodies all the time. But I think, and the social problems associated with that, the way it's being now forced on communities without their informed consent. But I think that problem is symptomatic of
a thousand other problems that are facing our culture right now. Yeah, I agree with you. This is a whole other story, but we, at least in the United States and other countries, but particularly my database is strongest in the United States. We've dispensed with law. It's not as though there are not good laws on the books. We have a constitution. In the 1960s, 68, 70, where I was a young public interest lawyer was a blossoming of wonderful environmental civil rights laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, and so forth and so on, a great society. All of this is being tossed aside now in the United States. There are efforts to repeal these statutes, but until they get to repeal them, they're just completely ignoring them, ignoring the constitution. There's a cynical,
ruthless disregard for law in this country. You see it at all levels of society. And this is just showing up, as you suggest, in the work I'm doing with wireless in the satellite area. But I'm hoping that it will not take that many people to work together to raise these issues and to try to help, beginning with the politicians and the bureaucrats. But there's a shift going
back in industry today and in business. Milton Friedman once wrote in 1970, I think it was in the New York Times, possibly Wall Street Journal, that the greatest act of charity was to put money in the pockets of the shareholders. Now, Milton Friedman was a much more interesting figure than one would conclude by that comment. He was a visionary. He really had a model and has been discredited by that unfortunate statement. But it certainly characterizes a lot of what has happened since. But now there's
a shift back toward deeply responsible behavior of corporations. And what we're arguing is that companies will have an opportunity to compete on safety, to innovate in areas that will actually be protective of human health, of privacy, and the environment. And the optical fiber technology is a very established technology, which offers this opportunity to compete on safety. So there is a strong possibility
that some companies will understand under our existing capitalist system how to gain competitive edge by being more compassionate. It is in their and their shareholders' economic interest to innovate in ways that are protective of the environment, given, of course, this climate change shadow over all of us, and to be protective of not only generally the population, particularly the most vulnerable children, the disabled, minorities who have no way to escape from these places they live. Many of these poor people, you know, they exist on affordable housing. But if you have a macro tower right next to your house, that affordable housing has become a hell. So I'm hopeful that there's so much, and in addition to the ethical path, there are billions of dollars of federal funding that are available to innovate. So it's in their enlightened interest for companies to embrace what I'm talking about and not adhere so ruthlessly to this sort of archaic way of thinking of Darwinian neo-Darwinism, extractive capitalism, and might makes right.
It takes us right back to Kalakuis' argument in the Platonic Georges. He says, you know, Socrates, you're an old fuddy-duddy. What really, really matters is might makes right. And I think that's going to take us right over the precipice. So it's an issue that's been going on for thousands of years.
For thousands of years, yeah. Now, the last subject, I don't know if you want to get into this interview, is AI. And here, I think I may somewhat diverge from the audience and some others. You know, there's a wonderful video called The AI Dilemma. And these are the developers of AI who are saying, it's already out of the box. It's too late. We've got to do something, even those two. I forget exactly the
example they used. Maybe it was they were trying to teach the AI program Portuguese or something like that. And on its own, it learned Swahili. On its own. And they couldn't figure out how it
was able to do it. It taught itself. It may not be Swahili. The point is, it's off on its own. And Elon Musk has recently called for some sort of moratorium. Now, 80% of venture capital in Silicon Valley is now being invested in AI. And so we have, again, an existential choice.
Will AI just simply serve these, let's call them, self-destructive motives of greed and power? Or is there an opportunity to kind of collaborate with AI? Is there an opportunity to create, which I did 30 years ago, you may remember the Artful Navigator, which was an wisdom expert system where we could take all the great figures of history and literature, even musicians and artists like Leonardo and Mozart, and turn them into your personal advisors. We believe that there's a possibility now with AI and voice recognition and other new technologies that we can actually harvest the wisdom genome of the best of our creation historically, looking back not only to the past, but to focus it on critical issues, and thereby sort of shift the algorithms and make AI a beneficial force. And this is actually interesting that the White House announced two weeks ago, today is May 31st, about two weeks ago, a new program to encourage the highest and noblest uses of AI. I think that's spot on,
because we're not going to be able to stop the genie. But it's sort of like, you know, Andrew Marvel's famous poem, you know, we can't stop our son, but we can make him run. Maybe there's a way in which we can help, individually and together. And I think finally
to say, which we didn't discuss today, which is the subject of another conversation, we are putting together a network called Guyopolis of cities around the world who are interested in this sort of grassroots indigenous wisdom, the extraordinary wisdom that every person, or many people in these communities have, cities that are sustainable, that are compassionate, that emphasize quality of life, that ennoble the average citizens, that help each citizen realize her or his soul's work. Today so many people work to feed their families. There's a disconnect in the market. We've invented a way by which people can realize their wisdom they have and correct this dysfunction in the free market system by whether they're actually paid for contributing to society in a way that enhances their own sense of personal joy. I think through this kind of learning collaborative in which actually Japan can play, Japan is now emerging as if by a cocoon of 30 years of being marginalized, to play a major role as unique contributions during these past 30 years in a peaceful society, a caring society, where community is really self-actualized. It's an extraordinary phenomenon where Japan now under the gloom of Mr. Kim in North Korea
and Mr. Xi can play a collaborative role, particularly in the United States and with South Korea and with Taiwan and possibly, just possibly, in an alliance with Chinese cities. I think this is a real possibility to increase stability in East Asia. This is what the interview
with Jerry Kohn also pointed out. So whereas I do believe that these values, these practices, begin in the most simple way at the grassroots level, but also they can rapidly extend and imbue these large issues with a different kind of spirit that I think will help us navigate through the present crisis and chaos of the world. Well, I suppose every crisis is also an opportunity. For example, I know very recently in the news, IBM has announced they're laying off 8,000 employees who will be replaced by AI. So now it's an
opportunity for those people and I'm sure there'll be many, many thousands of other employees, particularly in high-tech companies, whose jobs are going to be eliminated because of AI. It's an opportunity for them to look at the deeper question you just asked, what is my soul's work? I think it's true that AI will displace many people, which is why I feel the concept I use in my book is called big heart connectomes. Connectome, of course, is the part of our brain that has the facilities, but it's critical to connect our heart.
And we create at the local level these laboratories of experimentation. I think that AI can, now obviously it's going to happen at the same time, it will displace people, but right today people have an opportunity to be able to put this to the test to try to use. And this is what we will be making available in these collaborative programs that we anticipate or that we are actually planning, ways in which people can... I'll give you just a very simple example as to what do I mean by a big heart connectome. So there's a lovely lady who cuts my hair. Her name is Brooke. I said, Brooke,
what do you say is your soul's work? She lives in Santa Barbara. She said, I'd love to cut hair. That's my soul's work. And I said, okay, there's something you've always wanted to do that you really care about that might also help the Santa Barbara community as part of a big heart connectome. I said, yeah, I've always wanted to help homeless people to have a sense of what it's like to have a nice haircut, just a little thing like that. And I said, well,
Brooke, you're perfect. All you have to do is write up your soul's wish and put it on the big heart connectome dashboard. Here's, I'm Brooke, I cut hair. I love to cut hair is what I think
is my special skills, but I really, my real wish is to see if I could help give people who are not so fortunate to have a chance. And I said, I'm going to bet you, Brooke, that somebody will take you to do it, you know, one or two haircuts a week. I couldn't believe it. And it's amazing. She was in seventh heaven to be able to take her talent and convert it in the most practical way. There is wisdom abounding right here in Albuquerque in every community. Two other simple stories. I go to Kinko's and the
lovely lady there who sometimes prints out some of my images names Lily. And without any kind of prompting, I say to Lily, what's happening in your life, Lily? She said, my friend just died. It taught me how fragile life is. It taught me how vulnerable we all are, how precious this gift of life is. I couldn't protect her,
but it was her gift to me. You think that Lily was a Zen master just stepped out of the Kama Kurazendo. It was profound. It's everywhere. People have these insights and we just sort of sail right by them without listening, without hearing, without seeing. You know, I ride my bike in Santa Barbara by the ocean and there's an elderly gentleman with a trough of water and there's a young man with him, his son. They're blowing bubbles. These beautiful bubbles, they
emerge. And then they're gone. They evaporate. And that's our life. It's a beautiful bubble. It's there and it's gone. My point is that every community has this wondrous, wondrous treasure of beauty, of wisdom, and we don't recognize it. And I think that if we did, we'd be happier and we'd see that the treasure is right within us and right before us.
And it strikes me that if people don't recognize the possibility, the power of the wisdom within us, we face the crisis growing even deeper and more dangerous. Yeah, I think that's true. And yet, if there's one message of this interview, it's practical hope.
I think that there is a basis for practical hope. And even in modest changes, as Camus said, it's sort of the gentle fluttering of doves wings. It doesn't have to be something grand. It happens subtly and quietly and gently, but it will happen. You're talking ultimately about the unity of the head, the heart, and the hand. Right. And the gut helps a lot.
Well, Julian Gresser, what a thrill to be with you again. Thank you so much for coming to Albuquerque and being with me today as part of your 80th birthday celebration. And I hope that we'll have a chance that you're getting near 80, but around the time of my 90th. We'll be probably a bit older by then, but hopefully we'll have some fun as well. I would look forward
to seeing you before you turn 90. As a matter of fact, we could do a few more on the way. Okay. Well, very good. Thank you very much, Jeff. Thank you, Julian. And for those of you watching or listening to this video, thank you for being with us. You are the reason that we are here. On June 1st, we just released issue number two of the New Thinking Allowed quarterly magazine.
You can download a free copy at the New Thinking Allowed Foundation website, newthinkingallowed.org.
2023-06-18 19:54
