Boing Boing » Avi Solomon

Making the Book Talismanic: An Interview with Robert Ansell

Avi Solomon — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:00:23 +0000

Robert Ansell is the Director of Fulgur Press, which has published the work of esoteric artists for 20 years.

'We who proudly make ourself every graven image,
Shall have great copulations
And are allowed to love our Gods: Amen.'
-Austin Osman Spare, The Witches' Sabbath

Avi What led you to work at Sotheby's?

Robert: Well, my formal education was somewhat erratic, but I decided to pursue a career in fine art, starting out as a saleroom porter—in those days, this was considered an apprenticeship of sorts. I joined Sotheby's in September 1984 and within months was transferred to the Book Department, working under the tutelage of Simon Heneage. He proved to be an inspirational mentor and a lasting influence, because it was Simon who introduced me to the work of Austin Osman Spare.

Avi How did encountering Spare's work change you?

Robert: Oh profoundly, but I feel it significant that my first connection with him was through a direct experience of his art. Only subsequently did I get to know the contextual narrative of Kenneth Grant, and later still, Pete Carroll. Of course, their approaches are hugely important and influential, but personally my context for approaching Spare has always been through that feeling his work produces, what we might call the magico-aesthesis. There is actually very little written about this aspect of his work. This is because the popular approach has been through his development of sigils, but I suspect Spare's early awareness of magico-aesthesis formed the very foundation of his practice as an artist-practitioner. So perhaps—since encountering Spare's work—you could say I have developed an interest in the relationship between creativity and certain states of perception.

Austin Osman Spare: The Self's Vision of Enlightenment, 1910

Avi Can you illustrate what you mean by 'magico-aesthesis' with an example from Spare's artwork?

Robert: Yes. Let's look at one of my favorites, an early image from 1910 titled 'The Self's Vision of Enlightenment.' As a drawing it would seem to evoke a certain kind of elusive quality, a feeling of strangeness perhaps, which is typical of Spare's best work. We can see something similar in the work of the fin-de-siËcle symbolists—indeed G.F. Watts was a big influence on the young artist—but somehow Spare's approach is more personal, more intimate. And it is this juxtaposition of intimacy and strangeness that continues to fascinate so many, while deeply unsettling others. Even in the early days, George Bernard Shaw is alleged to have remarked that Spare's work was 'too strong a meat for the normal man' and over the years I've met collectors who have kept his work in cupboards, cellars, attics—even in the garage. I once asked an elderly friend of Spare why. 'Because they don't stay in the frameÖ' he said, without a trace of humor. Only years later did I begin to understand the phenomena he was talking about, but suffice to say here that Spare developed formulas for representation that evoke ambiguities within our field of perception. In my view, this is the essence of his magico-aesthesis. Take our sample image. Several elements are liminal in nature; the shading, the partially finished areas, the grotesque physiology of the central 'skull-hands'; even the draped figure takes on a more masculine appearance the longer you look. But the real punctum—to borrow an expression from Barthes—is the open eye of the face. Here we find Spare has combined several disruptive elements; the facial features are exaggerated, the figure is both asleep and awake, the right hand is raised in some kind of communicative gesture—although the meaning remains obscure, creating a sense of displaced tension—and all the while that open eye is fixed upon us, making it personal. And let's not forget, as an occult image this is somewhat radical because there are no esoteric symbols here, no obvious indicators that allow us to place the image comfortably. In some sense, it reminds us that art and the occult can both claim a power to evoke; and in terms of practice, Spare internalized both.

Avi So a deep internalization of occult doctrine can contribute tremendously to an original creative output? David Chaim Smith's work in "The Sacrificial Universe" is an example of how a "traditional" doctrine like the Kabbalah can inspire radical new perceptions and art forms provided it is truly imbibed within.

Robert: Indeed, because what we see as originality is often born from a blending—a mash-up—and deep internalization offers results with the most integrity because it provides for a very thorough mix. In this regard David's work is an excellent example, because over many years he has drawn inspiration from several spiritual sources and then fully internalized these sources through his practice. Consequently, his vision is often radical and even challenging for these traditional doctrines, although personally these are some of the qualities that I like the most about his art; that it resists closure and forces you to accept it for what it is.

Avi So for example David Chaim Smith's triple world biomorph cover illustration almost suggests a remix of driftwood art with an internalized reworking of the kabbalistic worldview.

Robert: Actually I think it suggests many things, but yes, this is the way the mind seeks closure—comparing the unknown to the known. In this way we build a map of experience, of certainties. By the time we are adults we don't see the real world at all, only the map, the maya. All that we perceive is measured by it. But you know, this comparing and checking is so automatic, so continuous, most people only become aware of it when the process is interrupted. Art has the power to do this, which is why from an esoteric perspective it offers such an important context for exploration and revelation.

David Beth, Voudon Gnosis, Medji Edition, 2010

Avi Solomon: What do you mean by a Talismanic book?

Robert Ansell: The idea of the talismanic book was something I encountered in 1986 while working at Sotheby's. I chanced upon a copy of Aleister Crowley's "Ahab, and other poems" and was immediately struck by its mesmeric qualities. It wasn't simply a matter of materials or typographic design, but somehow as a whole the book seemed resonant and vital. Later I discovered that Crowley had noted the similarities in manufacture between traditional books and the magical talismans of the Golden Dawn and had begun experimenting with merging the two methods. At the heart of this process was the notion that the book-talisman should be charged with the force that it was intended to represent. Of course, this can be interpreted in many ways—and my own take is fairly post-modern—but when I first encountered it in the mid 1980s, this approach seemed the very antithesis of commercial book production, particularly within the occult genre. Curiously, I found that inspiring.

Avi How can one make a book talismanic? Is the book's talismanic potential necessarily dependent on it's maker's intention and craft or can the reader bestow a talismanic patina on it in turn?

Robert: In terms of talismanic potential, I think we are discussing two distinct yet overlapping processes here, but what they both provide for the reader is a powerful sense of embodiment. There are several ways to express this, but since the beginning of Fulgur in '92 the approach I have developed has been to bridge the divide between book-subject and book-object. In this way, by reaching for certain transcendent qualities, it becomes possible to provide expression for what might be described as the genius libri—the spirit of the book. But candidly, for me at least, the book design process is less about conscious intent and more of a revealing.

Avi Can an e-book be talismanic?

Robert: Philosophically, that's an interesting question. Given an e-book is a disembodied text it would be easy to say no, but it's worth remembering that e-books are still in their infancy—there are not yet digital counterparts for Manutius, Baskerville or Bodoni, much less Tschichold. And as a medium, the printed word casts a long shadow. That said; I could see a time when e-books might offer certain talismanic qualities, some of which would be unique to the electronic format. I find this a fascinating area, because it confronts some of Walter Benjamin's established thinking with regard to the auratic authority of the art-object. When I left sothebys.com in 2001 I actually developed a proposal for an entirely digital publishing concept along such lines. It was wildly progressive back then, but perhaps today less so.

Avi How does running Fulgur help you pull these threads together in practice?

Robert: Today, Fulgur serves as a medium of expression for esoteric artists, primarily through publishing books and editions, but also by providing dealer representation. Running the business has been a privilege actually, because over the last twenty years I have been fortunate to work with some talented and fascinating people. In addition to the limited edition books, a few years ago I launched an esoteric journal entitled Abraxas that aims to represent the best of contemporary and historical esotericism. It is of large format, highly visual and art rich—those who love Parkett and FMR will certainly appreciate the quality—but the content is firmly devoted to serious engagements with the esoteric. I feel this important because as a genre the occult is often marginalized from a cultural perspective; Abraxas tackles that head-on. In a sense, you could say it is a more culturally mobile expression of the central idea that founded Fulgur—put simply, when a book is rendered as a talisman it also becomes a metaphor for our most spiritual of experiences; rare, mysterious and inspiring. As a publisher, my instinct has always been to share that.

Design Thinking for Social Good: An Interview with David Kelley

Avi Solomon — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:54:56 +0000

David Kelley is the founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school

David Kelley shares the IDEO Design Process

Avi Solomon: Were the seeds of your future career planted in your childhood?

David Kelley: I don't know, I feel I was just a lucky kid. So many kids are not allowed to flourish their creativity. But I was the kind of kid that would take apart the family piano. I can remember I had a perfectly good bicycle I got for Christmas and a few days later I had sandblasted it and painted it a different color. Not that my parents understood why I was always ripping things apart and redesigning them but I was certainly tolerated. So I think it did contribute in a lot of ways. I wish for a lot of other kids that they could tinker like I did.

Avi: What led you to found IDEO?

David: Well, I had just fallen in love with design at Stanford. I was a regular engineer before I got to Stanford where I got into a program that taught the human side of engineering. I really fell in love with the notion of doing something for humans rather than just doing something technologically. Silicon Valley was just starting to do really well and then it became clear that a lot of companies had the need to have somebody who was sensitive to the design, the aesthetics, the humans and the engineering stuff. That combination seemed really obviously needed in Silicon Valley. That made it easier to start IDEO.

Avi: Is that what led you also to the importance of anthropological fieldwork in design?

David: Yes, Stanford had this thing called Needfinding. I had always learned about problem solving but Stanford taught me in that it was just important to worry about figuring out the kind of human needs that were worth working on and then doing the problem-solving. It just seemed to be much more interesting when you got to figure out what was the real problem you were working on.

Avi: So Needfinding is a way of locking onto the critical problems because there are so many problems to solve.

David: You're absolutely right. The way to do it is to go out and figure out what humans actually value. Having empathy for people was so exciting. You don't usually think of engineers as people people, so to speak, but my experience has been that when engineers really feel that something would be important to people, would have meaning in people's lives, that's highly motivating and it makes them work really hard.

Avi: It also increases the engineer's chance of success.

David: For sure. The way we used to do it before was by sitting around the room and figuring out what was a cool idea and then we'd talk people into wanting it. Much better to know what people want and then use your talent to design that.

Avi: What is your definition of design?

David: What I mean by design is doing things with intention, trying to decide what's important to somebody, building a bunch of prototypes and showing them around, developing a point of view and getting it out so that it has impact in the world. So design is really a process of making impact on the world by doing this kind of creation of something new to the world and then getting it out there.

Avi: If it's a process then how do you explain Steve Jobs?

David: Steve Jobs used a design process. He just shortcut it. I worked for Steve for many, many years in the early days of Apple and he had an uncanny sense of what would be the next thing, what humans want, that they would want it or not want it. That's not so common in an individual. Usually we have teams of people that do that but he was doing the same thing, which is basically predicting what people want and painting a picture of the future and then getting it out there. He did a very good job of that. Steve was an incredible guy but it doesn't get you around the fact that you have to try things out and see if they fit into people's lives and if people value them.

Avi: What are the characteristics of a designer?

David: The characteristics of a designer that I appreciate the most are this thing about having empathy for people, that you expect to get your big ideas from talking to people and your own experiences, that you have a bias towards action, that you're not going to sit around and noodle strategy details for a long time, you're going to actually go out and build something and show it to people and iterate the feedback.

Designers are more likely to build something and then refine it, rather than think they have the big idea all in one big jump. Then there's the notion of doing things with intention. Designers I know care about every little detail, they try to really understand the experience the person's going to have.

My students recently designed the experience of taking the train to San Francisco. As in anything we do we looked at everything that's involved with the customer journey. Looking up the ad and finding out what services and planning your trip, getting to the train station, getting through the lines, waiting, boarding. Then there's the riding the train but there's also finding your way when you get out. Designers do everything with intention so they care about every little thing. That's why the out of the box experience is really important. What every little sticker looks like is really important. That's characteristic of designers.

Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course

Avi: You have been quite open about sharing your design process.

David: What we do is put out a design framework as our potential process then we expect people to modify it to meet their own needs. So it'd be foolish for me to say "This is the process. Do this step, do this step, do this step." One size doesn't fit all but it is a recipe to learn. You add your own fertilizer and water and soil and you make your own process out of it.

The first step in the process is what we call the Understand phase: if you're going to work in a certain area you really need to talk to experts. We're generalists, we're expert at process but if you really want to do something, if you're going to design a new medical device, you have to really immerse yourself in it. So in the first step you end up studying the state of the art, going and talking to experts, doing research to bring yourself up to speed. You'd be really surprised how quickly you can get up to speed, even in a highly technical area, just from doing a little research and talking to experts. They'll tell you a lot more than you can use, more than you could ever imagine.

Then there's the Observation phase. There's plenty to learn from interviewing people but we think that you learn a lot more from being there. So we jump right out, we go around the world, we go wherever there's interesting people. If we're going to design a new gas station we'll go and see how they pump gas in Japan. How do they get gasoline where there's no gas station whatsoever? We just hang out, watching over and over and seeing what the issues are. We find that if we're going to have some kind of breakthrough, a lot of times we see it by just being there. We're watching nurses and we see how nurses have trouble with the shift change, or we watch somebody using a vending machine.

I was watching people pay for parking at one of those vending machines where you take your ticket and you put it in and just seeing all the trouble that they had, they're grimacing, they're panicking. So for us this is a lead to where there's an innovation that can be done. If you see somebody having trouble using something, or that they grimace or they're unhappy or they're scared, that's a place that we could really do innovation because we can fix that.

At some point by observing these people and building empathy for them you start to have insights about them. "Oh, they really do value this. It's not obvious at first that that's what they really value. They say they really don't do something but it turns out they actually do when you observe them." Because this thing's a team sport you have all these different eyes watching. We'll have the business person and the technology person and the psychologist or anthropologist, so they see different things.

My mentor, Bob McKim used to say "A fish doesn't know it's wet," meaning it's hard for an expert in one field to see clearly. So these teams that have people with different methodologies, by definition they're kind of naive. They have what we call child's mind, so they see new things to the world. And that gives them insights about what could happen, and also enables breakthrough products and services.

The next phase we call Visualize. Okay, now I've seen some problems, I know what I want, I have some big ideas from the observations that I've done. Now I want to visualize some possible solutions. I have developed a point of view: I think that the problem with checking into a hospital is that it's just too redundant. I think the problem is is you should be able to do things in advance of getting there, right? So that's my point of view. Then I start building systems. I start making physical things out of cardboard, I start making prototypes or I start making quick and dirty videos that show the solution. If it's a service like checking into a hospital I make a video of what I think would be a really cool, efficient, better way. I'm painting the future of what it would mean in that hospital by making a video.

Then comes the Iteration phase. I start showing the prototype around. This is the big win, because I haven't fooled around or tried to cover myself or be careful, I just cranked out a few possible prototypes or videos of the future and then I start showing them to smart people. It's amazing how people will help you. These prototypes that we make are not precious, they're quick and dirty. They just get our ideas out so that we can get help from other people. So now you're using the brain power of everybody else. Anybody can do these type of prototypes, right?

So understand, observe, visualize and iterate. The trick here is that the big deal is the iteration. Rather than planning incessantly you quickly come up with something, you show it to smart people, you show it to users, and then you do it again and again. So a lot of times with my students I give the same problem over and over again because you can always get it better.

Avi: You are bringing this process to the K-12 system?

David: I've always had an interest in K-12 because I really think that's where to start. What happens with kids is that they're wildly creative when they're younger and then if you follow them around the fourth grade or so they kind of opt out. Some large percentage of them say, "Oh, I'm not creative," so that they can't be judged. So somehow they've done something, they've drawn a picture of a horse and the teacher didn't like it so they've just kind of given up. And this is the thing we're trying to solve, which is we really believe that kids, if they have creative confidence that they're a creative person they'll use kind of both sides of their brain, they'll use the analytical stuff that they learn in school and they'll be open to using their intuitive mind, and they'll trust it, and they'll make better decisions. So that's the premise behind the K-12 lab at Stanford.

So by training teachers, by having kids come through, by us going into the classroom and teaching them design thinking and just using design thinking methodology to solve some of their problems we've had great luck and we're very proud of what's going on there. I really think that's the point: if you want to make a big change, get all the kids thinking of themselves as a creative person. They're just going to have that openness that will allow them to come up with new and different ideas that they can choose. When we talk about having ideas, we talk about fluency and flexibility. Fluency means you can quickly come up with lots of ideas like in brainstorming, but flexibility means that they're different one from the next. So you have lots of ideas and they're unique ideas. That's going to help you make a better decision.

I don't care if that's about something in your personal life or whether it's your job of curing cancer, having a better variety of ideas is going to make better decisions. So we think by ingraining that in students in K12 we can make a difference.

Searching for Magic in India and Silicon Valley: An Interview with Daniel Kottke, Apple Employee #12

Avi Solomon — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:58:09 +0000

Daniel Kottke lives and works in Palo Alto, Ca. Here, he talks about the genesis of his 1974 trip to India with Steve Jobs.

Daniel Kottke was one of Apple's first employees, assembling the company's earliest kit computers with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in a California kitchen. In 1974, Jobs and Kottke backpacked across India in search of themselves; now, they are industry legends. Along the way, he debugged circuit boards, helped design the Apple III and the Mac, and became host of Palo Alto cable TV show The Next Step.

Silicon Valley

Avi Solomon: Why is Silicon Valley home to so much innovation?

Daniel Kottke: You could ask why Silicon Valley exists in the first place!

Hewlett-Packard is the obvious story. Fred Terman was the head of electrical engineering at Stanford and he was a mentor to Hewlett and Packard and the Varian brothers. Varian was a very early Silicon Valley startup. Steve Blank gave a talk called 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley'. I've been here for 30 years and I never knew this stuff. It's all about how the roots of the magic of Silicon Valley came from the war and the need to develop radar. Because I would have thought, "Oh, it's Intel and the integrated circuit".

I was just reading about the 4004, the first ever processor, born right here at Intel 40 years ago. So in World War Two the most important thing in the entire war effort was radar because the Germans had really good bombers and they also had the best radar anti-aircraft scenario. The allies couldn't effectively bomb Germany because the Germans would shoot them down. So there was this huge allied crash program to develop radar and it was based at MIT in Cambridge. Fred Terman had been there during the war, but came west to Stanford at the end of World War Two and brought a whole bunch of the radar guys. At the time radar wasn't digital it was all analog and it was radio, it was microwave.

In fact, the Varian Brothers had invented the Klystron tube, which was essential for radar.

Steve Blank: The Secret History of Silicon Valley

Then you can trace it to Shockley. Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs on the East Coast. He came west too and Shockley spawned Fairchild, the traitorous eight engineers who left Shockley because he was such an asshole. Fairchild really was developing the first integrated circuits. Intel was a spinoff of Fairchild. In a sense Apple is a spinoff of Intel because Mike Markkula was the business planner and funder for Apple, and he was an Intel engineer. That's where he made his money from.

So you can trace it all back to Shockley in that sense, on the digital side of the story. Anyway now it's 40 years later, and because there's so much money here and so much venture capital that so many people who want to be entrepreneurs tend to come here more than any other place. That's a large part of it but then there's also the availability of expertise and materials, the parts and pieces that you need. And there's long lead times. I read something recently about how London was the center of world commerce for a very long time through the 1800s but continued to be central long after trading activity had really moved to New York. There's just a long lag time.

In the same way with entrepreneurial activity - I think Bangalore is a huge center of entrepreneurial activity and so is the Boston area, but probably Silicon Valley is still the number one.

Avi: You were talking about sitting at Pete's Coffee shop in Palo Alto and interesting people walking by.

Daniel: Yes, and that's very inspiring. In the same way that the cafes of Paris were a spawning ground for the whole literature movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s now Silicon Valley's a little bit like that for high tech. I think there is a very healthy culture of innovation here that just really took off in the last couple of years. One thing that Silicon Valley has going for it since it's such a nexus is that there's a meet-up going on every single day of the week here in the Bay area, depending on whether it's biotech or whether it's neuro tech or whether it's social networking stuff.

In fact, I went to a meet-up a couple days ago at the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute. Howard Lieberman is the founder, he's a friend of mine. Howard's an old-time guy and he's actually charging $30 for people to come, so he's making money on this. But he doesn't seem to have any problem getting people to come. The meet-ups are a very important component because they bring people together. And you can trace the meetups back to the Home Brew Computer Club.

The Hacker Dojo, founded by David Weekly, which is kind of modeled after the Home Brew Computer Club, is very exciting and is sprouting up in other cities. Then there's Noisebridge and Hacker Spaces which is a generic movement. Anyway, there's so many gatherings like that. You've got the whole Quantified Self movement now, which is all about bio-monitoring tying in with health, and that's a huge growth area. That's all very exciting.

Steve Jobs

Avi: What was Steve Job's unique contribution to Apple?

Daniel: Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person. But, even to look back at the Apple ][ that was a lot about product design. That was kind of the seeds of Steve Jobs developing his design talents with the lightweight plastic case, even though it was never intended as anything portable.

The Apple I came right out of the Home Brew Computer Club. Woz wanted something he could bring to the computer club and show off to his friends, and portability was not even a factor except that they were comparing it with big machines that were not going to be portable. The previous generation depended on a big, heavy teletype to interface to the computer and there was no way any of that was portable. So that was what was fueling the excitement back in the Seventies. So then it comes to the Apple ][ and it was definitely Steve Jobs' idea. The Altairs, the Cromemcos, all of that generation were heavy metal boxes. It was brilliant of Steve to find Rod Holt to make a switching power supply, which was a lightweight power supply with no big heavy transformers, and to put the plastic case on it.

So you could actually take the Apple ][ under your arm and carry it somewhere. We never really advertised that but it was part of the appeal. And Steve never forgot that.

Rod Holt's Switching Power Supply for the Apple ][

You can trace the portability aspect into the Macintosh, which had a handle built right into it; that was pretty obvious. Steve also paid a lot of attention to and took a lot of inspiration from Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of Frog Design. The mouse for the Lisa was by Frog Design and they were mocking up Macintosh cases for us in 1982. Then Steve left Apple and Apple lost its way into a profusion of beige boxes.

If you remember the history the next big thing on the landscape was the Macintosh IIcx. That was a highly modular, highly manufacturable computer and that was a landmark. But it wasn't about portability and it wasn't about industrial design, it was about manufacturability. At the same time Compaq was a big success making the PC highly manufacturable and highly modular, and so the Mac IIcx was kind of Apple's answer to that.

But then the next wave was when Steve came back to Apple and now it was the iMac, which had the bubble-shaped plastic. And that was designed by Jonathan Ive, and how fortunate for Steve that he had Jonathan Ive. Jonathan Ive was already on the staff at Apple when Steve came to Apple. So Steve just saw a good thing and latched onto it. Steve's a self-taught guy. But Woz didn't have that kind of vision.

Woz was more about making do with parts; it's all about functionality. Steve Jobs brought the design aspect to it.

Avi: Did your trip with him to India influence his design choices?

Daniel: That's a good question. We didn't encounter any technology at all. I regret that I didn't even have a camera with me, but it's because we were kind of focused on a spiritual journey and getting away from materialism, and didn't want to carry a camera because that was kind of materialistic, right?

Nowadays I would say capturing a story is more about the essence. So whatever it takes to capture stories - video, audio.

Avi: Could you tell us a bit about that trip.

Daniel: That trip came about because Steve and I both got copies of 'Be Here Now' at the same time. 'Be Here Now' was breakthrough book, kind of like the psychedelic culture of America goes to India looking for holy men. That's what 'Be Here Now' represented. They rushed it into print, it came out quite early in 1972. It was a brand new story, and I had never seen anything like that and it just completely blew me away.

Personally I was always a voracious reader; I had never even been exposed to Eastern literature at all; I knew nothing about Buddhism, philosophy, that kind of thing.

'Be Here Now' by Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert

Avi: By Ram Dass, right?

Daniel: Yes, Richard Alpert. He was associated with Tim Leary. In fact the big book that came out recently was 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club'. That was Andrew Weil and Tim Leary and Richard Alpert.

Avi: So you both read 'Be Here Now'?

Daniel: Yes. We both got it in the book store at Reed College. It was such an amazing thing: there was lots to talk about. I can remember asking people, "Well this is very interesting; what else should I read next?" I really had no idea. The next book that showed up was 'Autobiography of a Yogi', which is a very compelling book. I had never seen anything like it, even though it was from the Fifties. That was Paramhansa Yogananada. Very readable book. And then the next one was 'Ramakrishna and his Disciples'. And now we're like in India!

This is the Indian current, right? And then it was Aurobindo and Sai Baba and Ramana Maharshi, right? So that was the genesis of my trick to India with Steve. We had read all these books. Robert Friedland was the head of the student body at Reed and he was part of the 'Be Here Now' scene. I don't even know how he got hooked up with them but he was. Robert had gone to India the previous year in 1971 just before the book came out. And there was a big scene of American hippies in India around Neem Karoli Baba. And it was Robert who told us we should go, and it was the Kumbh Mela.

Robert alone telling us that wouldn't have been quite enough for us to go; the fact that Robert gave us personal references of where to stay in New Delhi, that helped a lot. And add the fact that there was a Kumbh Mela - we were going! Yet still I didn't have any money. It was really Steve, who had now dropped out of Reed and he was earning money at Atari, he had money for a ticket. So Steve says to me, "We should go to India; Robert's fixed us up and it's the Kumbh Mela." And I said, "That sounds great. I don't have any money!"

And Steve said, "Well, I'll lend you the money for the ticket." And I said, "All right!" And that was the trip. It was thanks to Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari and gave Steve his job.

The Haidakhan Baba

Avi: So did that trip change you both in a major way or was it a disappointment or a widening experience?

Daniel: It was a widening experience, because we were 20 years old and traveling the world is an important thing to do.

So it was just in the category of general good travel experiences. In terms of actual real-life experiences there was nothing so earth-shaking. We went to ashrams. The Neem Karoli ashram was completely deserted, so that was a little bit of a disappointment. We went and found Haidakhan Baba who was like a Paul Bunyan. He's like this mythical reincarnating avatar you've probably heard of called Hariakhan Baba. And it was a young guy, and he was a little bit gay, he was wearing his pastel-colored saris and changing his clothes four times a day.

It was funny. It was slightly disappointing in the sense we didn't have a Neem Karoli Baba experience. The story in 'Be Here Now' was all about Bhagavan Das, who was like a stoner hippie from California who went to India and was smoking lots of ganja and he had long dreadlocks, but he had hooked up with Neem Karoli somehow, and there was a scene around Neem Karoli because he was such a popular holy man and Neem Karoli was a very remarkable human being, obviously. Richard Alpert was traveling around India, trying to figure out what it was that LSD did because they just didn't know.

They didn't have any Neurochemistry models for what LSD did except that it mimicked psychosis. But people had religious experiences, of course. Richard Alpert had miracle experiences with Neem Karoli Baba. And then when you got into Autobiography of a Yogi it's all about miracle experiences. And then when you got into Sai Baba and...

Avi: ...It's way exciting when you're in your twenties!

Daniel: Yes, it's very exciting because you're young and you don't know what the world holds in store. I personally was a scientist, very skeptical of psychic phenomenon, very dubious. But I had an open mind. And I thought, "Well if there's something going on here this is very interesting; let's go look at it." So I was disappointed in the sense that I didn't find anything tangible with regard to psychic abilities. You read those Sai Baba books and they're just gushing with all kinds of wild stuff. And now, of course, Sai Baba's passed and the biographies are coming out about what a fraud he was.

Avi: And how much gold he had under his pillow!

Daniel: Yes! So actually that whole era is just now coming to an end because Sai Baba was the last of that generation. You had Maharishi, Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan, Gururaji.

Avi: They all rode the wave of Westerners!

Daniel: They all rode the wave, right? Sai Baba was the last. My girlfriend at Reed, Elizabeth, who was also very good friends with Steve, and I suspect that she and Steve had a little affair going at one point - because she grew up here in California - anyway, she joined Da Free John's commune, he just died a couple years ago. And the books are coming out about him now. He had a big sex scandal in his life, and he's the one who bought the island in Fiji. He went to Fiji and he knew they would never extradite him, so he just never came back. Anyway, Elizabeth was an insider, and she was very jaded about that whole thing.

So in a sense this is kind of like the end of childhood about the miracle stories about holy men. And yet - here's a good theme: now technology, between the iPhone and the internet and wi-fi and Google, all the knowledge of the world is here in your hand anywhere you are.

That's a complete miracle. The miracle is now happening, and it's technology. If you had somehow missed the last 20 years, what someone can do with their iPhone is magic.

Psychedelics

The Shulgin Index by Alexander Shulgin

Avi: Did the availability of Psychedelics trigger this technological creativity?

Daniel: Going back to the Sixties LSD definitely had an influence on my world view and Steve Jobs has been quite outspoken about the value of LSD on the evolution of his thinking. And interestingly Woz definitely never took psychedelics; he may have never even smoked pot. But he's a very unusual case; he's a mutant in a sense. I think the effect of psychedelics on the general culture is well acknowledged. There's a whole shelf full of books: 'What the Dormouse Said', John Markoff's book, that's all about psychedelics and technology. MDMA was just the later wave of that.

MDMA was so powerful because it's not an intoxicant; it leaves you lucid but the reason why it is so valuable for PTSD as a powerful therapeutic tool is because it's not an intoxicant; it's a little bit of an upper, it's related to methamphetamine but it also has some amazing ability to promote empathy, including empathy for yourself, which is what PTSD needs.

My background is in hardware. I always thought I would have a very long, busy career building prototypes and it hasn't been the case. Why? Because the world of technology has just blown past hardware - it's relentlessly moving forward. Personally I was always more identified as a technologist, and I was always very focused on my technical career. I just started going to psychedelics conferences recently, in the last couple years. Why? Because I'm kind of giving up on my technical career. We have a limited time in our lives. I used to always be focused on technical conferences and trying to get my next job but now I go to psychedelics conferences and I find it very invigorating. The people who are interested in psychedelics are the people who are interested in consciousness, which is the most interesting topic of all. It's the biggest overarching topic, okay? Because really when you talk about technology, technology is about communication more than anything. I mean it's about getting things done, but if you look at the meaning of it, from the telegraph to the radio to the telephone to the television, that's all communication. So technology in the service of human communication, that's an immense thread of life on Earth. And it's more true now than ever. If you look at what's happening right now with social networking it's all about communication. And it's very exciting.

Avi: You find the people you want to hang out with and that's a big deal!

Daniel: Yes. It's a huge deal.

Psychedelics and Brain Imaging: Dr Robin Carhart-Harris

I did a show with James Fadiman, whose book is called 'The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide', and one of the topics that came up is that psychedelics are just now having a renaissance in the sense that the very first government-sanctioned studies are just happening now. And Neuroscience has taken so many leaps forward because now we can give psychedelics to people and map their brain second by second and you can see exactly what's going on with functional MRI. So it's just now that the promise of psychedelics from 40 years ago is now still just coming to fruition.That's tremendously exciting.

So it's almost not even about the psychedelics anymore, it's about the confluence of technology and neuroscience in conjunction with the kind of work that Alexander Shulgin does. Shulgin's just published the Shulgin Index, which is a landmark event. You know what that is? It's the first ever large-scale compendium of all psychoactive substances. And he's the man to do it. Shulgin personally synthesized like 240 to 250 new substances and took them himself and wrote about what they did in his notebook.

Avi: It's ironic that the VA is now an early adopter of psychedelics for treating PTSD.

Daniel: It was the VA, which is part of the military that was giving psychedelics to the volunteers in whatever year it was, gave it to Ken Kesey and that had a huge ripple effect on the culture. And the other big huge part of the story is that we now know to take a different tack. The war on cancer has been a huge failure. The war on drugs has been a huge failure, but the war on cancer has also been a huge failure. Even though there's been immense steps forward in medical technology cancer is at an epidemic right now. Brain cancer is now just amazingly high incidence. And many types of cancer nobody even knows.

It's a huge challenge, but what we do know is that the psychedelics are proving very valuable in end of life treatment for terminal cancer - Psilocybin's especially good for that. And Aldous Huxley started that, taking Mescaline when he was dying. Anyway that's a big quality of life issue.

There's a book called 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce Lipton which makes a very good case that everybody has cancer all the time. Everybody. We have very complex bodies and there are mutations happening all the time. We all have cancer. Your immune system does an amazingly good job dealing with it as a normal course of events. So the immune system is constantly repairing the damage. By the time your cancer shows up as a tumor it means your immune system has not been keeping up with the job.

Well, guess what? What we also know is that your immune system is very responsive to your subconscious, and when you are stressed you're shutting down your immune system because it's the fight or flight system. You're stressed and it's now, "Oh, we can't heal because we have to be fleeing," right? That's what Bruce Lipton is talking about. So psychedelics play an important part of that story because within the picture of learning to relax and promote healthy function of your immune system psychedelics have an important role to play.

The Butterflies of India: An interview with Isaac Kehimkar

Avi Solomon — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 03:25:28 +0000

Isaac Kehimkar is an avid naturalist and the author of The Book of Indian Butterflies Isaac's photostream of Indian Butterflies is at Flickr.

Avi Solomon: What early influences drew you to the study of nature?

Isaac Kehimkar: I grew up in Deonar, a suburb of Mumbai. It was a time when black and white television had just started in India with only one channel and no video games in sight. But Nature offered so many options. Deonar was still green and water in the streams was sparkling clean. The Monsoons were my season and catching fish and crabs with local Koli and Agri boys in the rice fields was my favorite pastime. That's the time I even dared (rather foolishly) to catch snakes too! With the rains gone and rice harvested, cricket pitches were soon paved in the rice fields and we played cricket till the rains came again.

The house we lived had good lot of trees and my interest in gardening grew so much that I started a plant nursery. My parents encouraged me to keep pets and allowed me to do what made me happy. I had dogs, cats, rabbits, hens, ducks and fishes. Pets taught me to take responsibilities and learn to accept loss in life.

Avi: How did you become a Naturalist?

Isaac: Weak in maths, I could not go for science, so I graduated in Political Science and Psychology from Mumbai University. However, my affinity towards nature remained strong as ever. Soon after graduating I did a brief stint in selling cosmetics with Lakme.

My father advised me that it's more difficult to get a job that will give satisfaction and happiness than those which give higher salaries - money would come eventually, but it's difficult to be happy. I had the opportunity to join the Bombay Natural History Society as a volunteer in 1978 and chose a low-paying job there as Library Assistant. My mother had warned me that no girl would marry me with this meager salary, but I knew that BNHS was the place for me. Here I grew up while lapping up as much as I could from the library and learning from people like Dr. Salim Ali and Vyankatesh Madgulkar who often visited the BNHS library. "Sanctuary" magazine offered me good opportunities to hone my writing skills and I could publish several of my natural history photos and articles. I did a story on the butterfly lifecycle and I found it so fascinating that then onwards butterflies took over my life.

My books on Indian Wildflowers and Indian Butterflies were then published by the BNHS and Oxford University Press. The book on butterflies turned out to be the bestseller among BNHS publications. I now am the General Manager of Programs for the BNHS. I did marry and my family is very supportive of my endeavors!

Avi: Do any particular flowers and butterflies have special significance for you?

Isaac: Among flowers, it's the Brahma Kamal (Saussurea obvallata), that blooms in the Himalayas at 15000 ft. This flower represents the serene beauty of the Himalayas - placid and unruffled. I always tell people to visit the Himalayas atleast once in their lifetime—it's a great humbling experience in these mighty mountains.

A Himalayan butterfly is also my favorite. It is the regal Red Apollo (Parnassius epaphus) that flies above 10,000 ft in the drier cold desert regions of the Himalayas like Ladakh.

Avi: What are the challenges of studying butterflies in India?

Isaac: I have realized that India is truly an unique and diverse country with a amazing array of landscapes, people, animals, birds, insects and flowers. To really "see" India one lifetime is not enough. I have seen most of India while chasing butterflies. Tracking butterflies in Ladakh at 16000 ft was quite a breathless exercise and the enormity of the landscape is quite intimidating. So are the dense forests of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast. The passion for these winged jewels overcomes all hurdles like blood-thirsty leeches, invisible nasty mites and angry elephants. More than these, I fear the man-made hurdles like political unrest or getting kidnapped in the northeast.

Now I am busy doing a new book on butterflies to cover 750 species out of the 1500 species of butterflies found in India. I am also keen on reaching out to lay people by popularizing the concept of butterfly gardens. I aim to use butterflies as a vehicle to achieve conservation goals by promoting butterfly farming for forests dwelling communities as an alternative and sustainable livelihood. India is one of the hot spots for butterflies in the world. England just has 47 species of butterflies and we have a rich heritage of 1500 species!

Avi: Butterflies are associated with reincarnation in Greek mythology. Did you find similar myths in India?

Isaac: Yes, in Hindu mythology there is a similar story: One day Brahma created the world—trees, waters, animals, fish, birds, plants and flowers. He loved them all, but most of all he loved the plants and the flowers that grew in it. Until, one day, to his horror he found all the plants stripped of their leaves. Brahma was very angry, and wanted to find the culprit. Finally a caterpillar confessed that he was so hungry that he could not resist the tender leaves.

Angry Brahma cursed the caterpillar saying "You shall become like a stone, with no legs to walk, no wings to fly and no jaws to eat. You will just hang there surrounded by the plants you like so much, but you will not be able to eat my plants again!" And the caterpillar hung there like a lifeless lump, with no legs and jaws for days. Unable to bear the caterpillar's fate, fellow creatures like the birds and animals requested Brahma to forgive the caterpillar. Brahma finally agreed and modified his curse to last only for a few days. The caterpillar touched Brahma's feet in gratitude.

Pleased with the caterpillar, Brahma granted him a boon that henceforth every caterpillar would go to sleep for a few days and wake up as a beautiful butterfly.

Making Shelter Simple: An Interview with Lloyd Kahn

Avi Solomon — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:07:11 +0000

Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. His latest book is Tiny Homes: Scaling Back in the 21st Century.

Avi Solomon: What do you see in your childhood that pointed you onto the path that your life took?

Lloyd Kahn: When I was a kid I had a little workbench with holes in it, and the holes were square or round or triangular. And you had to pick the right little piece of wood block and hammer it in with a little wooden hammer. And so I'd hammer with it, put the round dowel into the round hole, and hammer it through. And then maybe the most formative thing was when I was twelve - I helped my dad build a house. It had a concrete slab floor, and concrete block walls. And my job was shoveling sand and gravel and cement into the concrete mixer for quite a while. We'd go up there and work on weekends. One day we got the walls all finished, and we were putting a roof on the carport, and I got to go up on the roof. They gave me a canvas carpenter's belt, a hammer and nails, and I got to nail down the 1" sheeting. And I still remember that, kneeling on the roof nailing, the smell of wood on a sunny day. And then I worked as a carpenter when I was in college, on the docks. I just always loved doing stuff with my hands.

Lloyd Kahn Interview Audio Excerpt

I like the smell of wood, and the moment I like best when I'm building is when I get the foundation done and get the floor joists on and nail down the flooring and stand on the floor. That's just a wonderful moment: I did this myself. You have these good experiences when you grow up that carry over. So even while I was a businessman I was still leaning towards building. I like builders and I like farmers, because they have to deal with the real world. It's not like buying and selling stock options. The farmer's crops have to grow, and he has to deal with the wind and the sun, the temperature and rain. The building has to stand up. It can't fall down on people.

Avi: You made an interesting career change in 1965 from working as an insurance broker to being a carpenter.

Lloyd: Things were starting to happen then in San Francisco! The cultural revolution really started in 1963. People started moving to San Francisco and living in the Haight-Ashbury district. When I was an insurance broker, I used to go up to upper Grant Avenue which was kind of the artistic and beatnik center of the city, at a place called the Coexistence Bagel Shop. In 1965 I decided I wanted to think about what I was doing with my life, and I hitchhiked across the country, and went to New York, and went out to Cape Cod, and came back about a month later and quit my job and went to work as a carpenter. I was a lot happier working with my hands than I was wearing a suit. I was making pretty good money then, and I would have made a lot of money if I'd stayed in the business world, but it just wasn't what I was interested in doing.

Avi: What was the first day like working as a carpenter?

Lloyd: There wasn't any first day. It was just that I worked on odd jobs, and also did gardening work. As soon as I got out of the Air Force in 1960 I had started doing an extensive remodel on my house which was in Mill Valley about a half hour out of San Francisco. So I'd been building all along. I would come home from my job early and work on the house, and I'd work on weekends. So when I quit, I just kept on working on the house, and I got jobs doing gardening and carpentry. It was a welcome change.

Avi: You got into building domes and then wrote an remarkable essay called "Smart But Not Wise" .

Lloyd: I'd been building domes and after a few years of building them, started to see that there were problems with them, and with using plastics. And also seeing problems with Buckminster Fuller's ideas, that they weren't really the kind of ideas that I was in favor of. So then I went to a conference at MIT on shelter. And at that conference I saw the scientifically oriented people, architects who were working with plastics and things like that. It was somewhat of an epiphany. By that time I'd seen that there were a lot of drawbacks to using plastics, and to using mathematical formulas for making the frameworks of buildings. So I wrote "Smart But Not Wise", whose title was based on the saying of the Indian Ishi, who was the last of a tribe discovered in California probably in the late 1800s or early 1900s. He said that the white men were smart, but not wise. We had the mathematics and the plastics, and the technology, but it just didn't work out with homes. And so I wrote that essay saying hey, you know, we were wrong here. And shortly after that I stopped the printing of Domebook 2, which had sold about 160,000 copies by then.

Avi: How did your audience react?

Lloyd: Well the Dome groupies were not very happy with me. When I took the Dome book out of print, I had an audience of maybe a quarter of a million people, and Domes were the countercultural icon of building in those years. I thought well, I'd better show these people that there are lots of other ways to build. So I took off and went to Europe with cameras, and traveled across the U.S., and photographed all styles of buildings. I came back and went to a Los Angeles conference in 1967 called Habitat For Humanity, and people were expecting me to talk about Domes, but by that time I was completely off Domes. The place was packed and for my presentation there I showed slides of Irish thatched cottages. I said, you see that cottage in the field there? You see how good it looks? It just looks like it's part of the surroundings. And I said, that's because the materials all came from the area. They planted barley in the fields, and after they harvested the barley, they took what was left over, which was the straw, and they made the thatched roof out of that. And they also built the walls out of stones that came from the fields when they cleared the fields so they could plow them. And they also used the stones for the fences around the fields. Everything is harmonious, and everything looks right because the materials are local. And this is totally different with Domes, which are made out of highly manufactured materials. So people were pretty upset with me for going in that direction. It was kind of the math science guys who really wanted to use an abstract concept like icosahedrons, that appealed to people who were left-brain oriented.

Avi: So you rediscovered vernacular architecture?

Lloyd: Yes, I discovered it for myself. And building Domes for five years was good in a way, because then I went out and looked at all these other ways of building. I'd drive down a country road and see farmers' buildings and I'd think gee, that's got a vertical wall, and it's rectangular, and building materials are rectangular. And you don't have problems sealing the roof. Especially in England, I kind of went back to the roots of building from the times when people started farming. They were living in round houses and then they expanded to rectangular houses when they had to have shelter for the animals. So it was this wonderful rich world of all these different styles of building all over the world. They were not alternatives to Domes, because Domes were really pretty silly as far as homes go. And that's when we did the book "Shelter", which became a great popular favorite.

Avi: What's the strangest place that people have read "Shelter" in?

Lloyd: I don't know! I'm sure there's plenty of strange places because it sold over a quarter of a million copies, and we get feedback two or three times a week even now from the book. People saying that it changed their lives. And it wasn't me, it was all the people that we showed in the book that were inspiring to people. It was translated into French, German, and Spanish. And more recently it's been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. The thing about "Shelter" is that it captured the spirit of the times. It had primitive building in it, builders making mud huts in Africa, or thatched buildings in the South Seas. But it also had the young people from the hippies, the counterculture of the day, and what they were doing. So it was a combination that just everybody loved, and they still do almost forty years later.

Avi: Your new book "Tiny Homes" is kind of similar, but different.

Lloyd: It's similar to "Shelter" in the fact that the heart of the book was small buildings. We drew up five small buildings with different roof shapes, and showed people exactly how to make the structure. How to frame the buildings. And we wrote in the book, start out small if you're going to build a house. And if you have a piece of land, everybody isn't going to be able to have their own land to build on, but if you do, build something small and have a kitchen and bathroom back-to-back so that you can live in there, and then you can expand. But the small house was really sort of the heart of that book. So now forty years later, we do a book on very small houses. And the four building books we've done all kind of have a connection between them. And this book has a connection back to "Builders of the Pacific Coast" and then the book "Home Work", and then back to "Shelter". If you look through "Tiny Homes", you'll see all the people in there saying that they were inspired to do this by one of our books. And it's also similar in the sense that the way we do books is with a lot of photographs and interviews. It's kind of a scrapbook in a certain way, although there is an underlying order of things. Nobody really does the kinds of books that we do, and it takes us a really long time to get them done. It took around four years of work in between each of these last three building books.

Avi: You have a unique way of editing your books.

Lloyd: For years I 've used a $175 color copy machine that I could blow things up and reduce things on. So say I'm working on a section about a woman from Hornby Island in Canada who is building caravans on wheels to sell to people. I'll get out all the photos of her and I'll print them out like a contact sheet, and then I'll lay everything out on a table and I'll have a two-page spread in front of me and I'll decide what to do, and then I'll blow up or reduce the photos on my color copy machine and I'll tape them down with removable Scotch tape. Then I'll write the text if it's not written already. I'll print it out in two and three columns and I'll paste it, I'll tape it down and move things around until I get things the way I like them, and I'll maybe sketch in the headline in pencil. For the earlier books, I had a portable Adler typewriter on a table I made out of recycled wood with wheels on it. I would type stuff on that. The way I would do cut and paste was I would cut and paste! I would cut up the manuscript with scissors, and then I would tape it back together. I'd say oh, I want this paragraph up here, so I'd cut it out and tape it in. I would get these manuscripts of maybe eight feet, ten feet long flowing text. When I get things the way I want them, and if they're good enough, they go straight to Rick, our digital maven, who imports the photos into the computer and gets things ready for the printer. But maybe half or more of them go to David, our artist, who will go over them and refine them, and shift things around, and make them look better.

It's a pretty good process because I think there's a different quality you get when you're not working on the computer. I have coffee and play rock and roll, and get inspiration that way, and so I have fun when I'm doing the layouts. So it's kind of delaying the entrance into the digital world. It's not like you're going to start doing everything the old way, but it's taking another look at some of the old ways of doing things and seeing how you can blend those with the modern world. Maybe I can do a few of these things to connect with the real world, or do things the way they were done before, while I've still got my MacBook Air and InDesign and Photoshop, and am in touch with the world instantly.

Brian "Ziggy" Loloia built his cob house for less than $3,000.

Avi: "Tiny Homes" has a very interesting subtitle "Scaling Back in the 21st Century". It points to the importance of not having debt and having creative ways to get access to land.

Lloyd: One of the powerful things about the concept is not to get involved with a bank. Don't get a mortgage if you can. Tiny homes may not be for a whole lot of people. But if you're young, and you're facing either getting a mortgage, and we've all seen how that worked, or paying high rents, here's an alternative. And it doesn't have to be that you build a house on a piece of land. It can be that you build a house on wheels. You build a house on a float and have it in the water. Or you have an apartment in the city that's small. You just kind of go the opposite direction from what they call McMansions. It's a different way of approaching life. I mean, I don't live in a tiny home, but I'm in my seventies. But you can start out small. And it's an incredibly powerful movement right now. I like the idea of starting out with your core, which is your kitchen and bathroom, and your wood heat if that's what you're going to do, and your solar heated water, all in this core. Then you've got a place to sleep and cook and eat. And then you start adding on. With rectangles, they're easy to add onto, as opposed to polyhedral shapes.

Such a Long Journey - An Interview with Kevin Kelly

Avi Solomon — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:30:25 +0000

Photo: Michelle Gray

Kevin Kelly is a senior maverick for Wired magazine. Avi interviewed Kevin at his home in Pacifica.

I The Technium

Avi Solomon: Could you define the Technium?

Kevin Kelly: We all realize that we're kind of surrounded with technology: there's little device here recording us, there's tables, chairs, spoons, light bulbs. Each of these things seem pretty mechanical, pretty inert in a certain sense, not very interactive, you know, a hammer, roads. But each one of these technologies actually requires many other technologies to make and produce. So your little thing in your pocket that you use for a phone might require thousands of other technologies to create it and support it and keep it going, and each of those technologies may require hundreds of thousands of subtechnologies below it. And that network of different technologies and the co-dependency that each of those technologies have on each other forms a virtual organism, a super organism.

We can keep stepping back and realize that all these technologies are in some ways co-dependent and related and connected to each other in some way and that largest of all the networks of all these technologies together I call the Technium. What it suggests is that technologies like the spoon or light bulb are not standalone independent technologies but are part of the ecosystem of this superorganism and that superorganism, like any kind of network, exhibits behaviors that the individual technologies themselves don't.

As a whole the Technium has lifelike properties that the individual technologies do not. So your iPhone is not lifelike and the light bulb is not lifelike but the Technium itself is.

Avi: Is the Technium in conflict with the natural limits of living on a planet?

Kevin: The quick answer I would say is no, and the reasons why I would say no are several.

One is when we look at the behavior of the Technium over time we find that it obeys, in a certain sense, a lot of the same behavior or laws that evolution does, that it in fact is adaptive and evolving very much like life did, to such an extent that I would say the Technium is an extension of the same forces at work in the evolution of life and we can understand the Technium as a whole best as an extension of the life force, that it is what I would call the seventh kingdom of life, that it's a mechanism that's standing upon and built out of the thrusts of evolution through time that comes up through the primates and through our minds and is producing variation and complexity very much like life did because it is the same force.

That same force is working through the seventh kingdom of the Technium and that it means that the Technium is compatible with the natural system of life because they have the same origin, they're basically the same system. I think a demonstration of that, a kind of evidence proof of that is that so far there's been no technology that we've invented that we have not been able to invent a greener version of. So I don't think that right now the technology that we have is necessarily the most compatible with life but because we can always make the Technium more compatible it suggests that the Technium is not inherently incompatible with life, that that compatibility is there, resident; we have not yet expressed it entirely.

Avi: Is there any way an individual or a group of humans can influence the flow or the direction of the Technium?

Kevin: I would say over the long-term that humans cannot really influence the direction of technology and I would say that there are certain inevitabilities in the progression of technologies. What we can influence is the character of the technologies.

So I would say that the web, a web was inevitable, in that as long as we were producing things, that if we rewound history to the same start point, same conditions, and let it run, that you would keep getting the web at some relative point in the sequence. And that if you were to do an intergalactic survey of all the planets of the universe that had civilizations that all of them would also go through a moment when they connected everything to everything. That is inevitable. But what kind of internet, what kind of web they make is not inevitable. The character, whether it was open or closed, national or transnational, non-profit or commercial, based on this protocol or that protocol, those things are not at all inevitable, and those are political, entrepreneurial and market decisions we make. And they make a huge difference to us. So the kind of system we have is a choice that we have.

I think it's very similar actually to life in a certain sense. Where the controversy comes is that my view of evolution is that a lot of it is also ordained in a certain sense, or inevitable, that if you rewind life and do it again you're going to get a lot of the same stuff, not at the species level, not at the expression level, but at the higher levels, that it seems as if evolution wants to make minds because it's made them again and again, it seems to want to make camera-like eyeballs because it keeps inventing them throughout the different taxa. It wants to do bilateral symmetry. There's just lots of things that it invents again and again convergently. None of these are at species level, they're at much higher levels of things. When we get down to the species level of invention those are completely contingent. Those are very specific local adaptions that won't be repeated. And at that level those are not inevitable and they are different and unique in their choices. So the incandescent light bulb is pretty inevitable. Whether it was going to be AC or DC current, whether it's going to be tungsten or bamboo filament, whether it was going to be a screw, whether it was going to be a vacuum, their inert gas, those were not inevitable. And they made a huge difference in the kind of electrical system that we had.

Image courtesy of Boaz Rottem.

II Jerusalem Assignment

Avi: I just want to go back to your life history, something profound happened to you in Jerusalem.

Kevin: I had a conversion experience in Jerusalem. I was there as a photographer. I was coming from Iran indirectly to Germany. I was kicked out of Iran during the Khomeini revolution and until that moment I really loved Iran, I was learning Farsi, I just absolutely loved the country and the people. But I was thrown out and made my way back through the Mideast and I was on my way to Yemen to continue photographing, which is what I had been doing. I came to Jerusalem during Passover and Easter when they were coinciding. And for very complicated reasons that were beyond my understanding I had a religious conversion in Jerusalem and became a Christian. And I stopped traveling, basically, after that moment and went back to the U.S. I "graduated".

The circumstances in Jerusalem were very colorful because I was locked out of my Salvation Army hostel in the Old Quarter. I missed the curfew and was locked out on the Saturday evening before Easter morning. And so I had this sort of conversion on Easter morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was all very dramatic in ways that I did not consciously choreograph but that's how it all turned out. It prompted me for an assignment, so the short story was I sort of got this assignment and the assignment was I was to live as if I was going to die in six months, to prepare to die in six months, and to live accordingly, even though I was in perfect health. Rationally there was no reason to do this but that was the assignment.

So I proceeded to do that. And I was kind of surprised by my answer, which was to go back home and visit my brothers and sisters. Since they were dispersed across the country and I had no money, my way of visiting them was to ride my bicycle from San Francisco to New York, and visit them along the way and arriving there to kind of die in six months. So that's what I did. That was a three-month bicycle ride, starting on a foggy day in August. I'd never been to San Francisco and riding up the coast of California, I was utterly frozen. I had no idea, I thought in California, it's going to be warm, but it's not!

Avi: How did that exercise end?

Kevin: There was a religious angle to it that I was not aware of at the time. In Christian circles there's a belief that when you experience salvation, and my experience of this , my religious conversion, was to believe that God bound Himself into a being on Earth, in Jerusalem, who took upon himself the consequences of free will. So God gave humans free will and said, "I'm going to give you a choice to surprise me with good," which means that you're going to do harm to each other of your own choice. And God absorbs, remedies, or redeems that harm himself, takes it upon himself saying, "I take that responsibility." And He did that through coming to Earth and suffering, in some sense, and experiencing Himself that harm.

So the theological and personal belief usually in Christian circles is that when you accept that, you become reborn, you have a reborn experience. When I was in Jerusalem and I accepted this I had no feelings whatsoever. It was like, "Okay, intellectually I understand that, but I don't feel, I don't hear voices of angels, I don't feel any kind of weight taken off me." I didn't have that kind of low rock bottom experience, which often people have to get down to before they have this belief. But for me I was perfectly healthy, I was fine, I was enjoying myself and there was no sense of "Oh my gosh, I'm reborn. I have a new perspective." But I had this assignment to live as if I was going to die. And it turned out that by the end of the six months that I was riding my bicycle, I was throwing off more and more stuff I had.

I gave everything I had away, I wasn't quite naked but I owned a bicycle and that was about it. I had stripped away my future, I had literally come down to almost nothing. I had gone to bed that night before the six months were up at my parents' house, where I rode to at the end. I went to bed that night, and as much as was humanly possible, I had done with my life, written all my notes, with no regrets, I was fully prepared to die, to not wake up. And even though I said, "I know that this is like an assignment, a fantasy, but I'm going to inhabit this assignment." So when I did wake up, which I obviously did, that next morning I remember opening up my eyes and it was at that moment that actually I was reborn. It was like being born. I really had a complete sense of "Oh my gosh, I have this future before me." I wasn't just waking up to another day, I was being born. It was really literally like waking up with babes eyes and just seeing the world again. So even though I don't know how I engineered this, I had this experience of really being reborn and seeing that "Oh my gosh, I have a future before me, I have all this stuff."

I have not taken a moment of that time for granted since. I have this countdown clock where I'm really aware of the fact that I have a very limited number of days or years- days is kind of a little more compelling to think about. We think we have 20 years but you have less than 7,000 days, 7,000 days to do whatever I want to do. It's not that many days. So you really have to think about, "Today, if I keep doing this will I get done what I want to get done?"

Avi: You don't have to be a Christian to attempt to do this?

Kevin: No you don't.

Avi: And you can only understand this by doing it.

Kevin: Yes, I think it's an experiential thing. Everybody needs to have their own journey, and I'm not suggesting that anybody else needs to take this journey, but I do think we should be open to assignments and changing our mind. I think that's what I had, a change of mind. I'm a huge believer in science and scientific method; I also realize that every time that we get an answer in science it also provokes two new questions. And so in a certain curious way science is expanding our ignorance - our ignorance is expanding faster than what we know. So while I'm a huge believer in scientific method I realize that what we know is just a small, small fraction of what is going on in the world. So most of what's happening in the world we're not aware of and science will agree with that.

They talk about dark matter - 90 percent of the matter in the world is "dark". "Dark" is a code word for ignorant, so we don't have any idea what it is. So what we're saying is we have no idea about most of the matter and energy and other stuff going on in the world. So while I think the scientific method is a way to understand some of that, I think we have to be very clear that we really have no idea what's really going on.

Avi: The word "metanoia" (lit. "change of mind") was coined by Plato, and Plato is the guy who said that philosophy begins in wonder. Science can be an opening to wonder which leads to changing your mind, being open.

Kevin: Yes, I think we just have to be aware that we are probably wrong about most things. Even though we know a lot and we should really be scientific about it and kind of work with what we know as best explained. But at the same time be really open to the fact that a lot of our assumptions will turn out to be wrong. I mean as soon as you even adhere or acknowledge some of the stuff in Quantum physics it's already telling you that this is going to be a really strange trip.

III The Theology of Virtual Worlds

Avi: I was reading something you said about Jaron Lanier. There was a kind of realization for you when he was in some kind of virtual world.

Kevin: What happened there was that Jaron Lanier was inventing virtual reality, that's the technology where you put your goggles and gloves on and you see an alternative world that you can manipulate and you have this immersive experience where you're actually in this alternative world, moving around and manipulating the world, and it feels very much like you're inside this world.

That's called virtual reality, and Jaron was one of the pioneers in the technology of inventing these goggles and gloves in the Eighties. You use kind of a polygon 3-D software to make the worlds, which he was also a pretty good expert at. So I was present one evening when he was trying some new technology out and had just made a new world to explore himself. So he designed a kind of crazy imaginative abstract world. And then he put on the goggles and gloves and he crawled into his own world. And as he was crawling around, he was literally on the floor under a desk to get to these viewpoints, he was exploring his own world and he was constantly in this sort of surprised state of "Oh, wow, I had no idea about that." And so I had this vision of a God who creates a world, binding himself into kind of this technology of incarnation and appearing in the world to both experience it and then maybe to correct it.

It was for me like a religious parable of an infinite god binding itself into its own world to in some ways redeem it. And I saw similarities to religious allegories in this idea of the nature of godhood, and began to think about the varieties of godhood. So if you were there, if that was God what are the different ways you could interact with the world that you made? You could decide to intervene and make a miracle, you could do something evolutionarily and not intervene but change the initial parameters and let the thing unfold. You could intervene disguised as an individual. So I found the guys who were making the God games and stuff to be tremendously powerful metaphors for understanding religion.

I also became convinced that, as we make these worlds more and more detailed, more and more rich, more and more hyper-real in the sense of being so complex that they have some reality of their own, we're going to return to religious ideals in order to deal with them. At the point that we're in these worlds we make, beings maybe have some consciousness, then we have a whole series of questions that we have to answer about that. Who's responsible for their actions? Is there real harm? If one being harms another is that real? Does that count? How do we fix it? Where is free will? And I think we'll come back to those questions, and at that moment religion will be a little bit more relevant than it is now.

Avi: I had the thought that organized religion is a kind of ossified science fiction. At the roots of every religion there's a PKD type who has that imagination and scope. Let's say that each of us is an incarnation, this world is a simulation. We are incarnations, and we have the potential to be godlike but we have to figure it out on our own. So by being born in this world we have accepted a limitation, we have accepted this body as our way of experiencing this world, and we have to live within that world, with its choices, including the existence of people who kill other people and stuff like that.

Kevin: I do agree with your observations. I think the most active theologians today are science fiction authors, they've taken over the role of theologians in the past, and they're asking the important questions of "What if?", all these questions that I was just asking, you know, like what if a robot says, "I am a child of God" what's our response to them?

If robots make free will choices will we include them as one of us, or will they be slaves? How will be treat them? Will they be different from animals? What is the place of humans in the cosmos? And what's our relationship to things that we make? Will we be like gods? Those are the kinds of questions that not theologians are asking in any religion that I am aware of, but science fiction authors constantly are exploring that. And they're the ones who are going to have the answers for us that the theologians will have to look to. But at the same time these are fundamentally religious questions that are not being asked in that vocabulary.

There are answers to these things in the history of religion, and we'll get to see if they work. I think as we become more godlike ourselves and we begin to make these worlds and these other beings that there will be a return to the sacred texts and people looking through them for suggestions about coherent systems of thought to deal with these ethical quandaries. Right now, in a kind of curious sense we decided that we're open-ended and it doesn't really matter, and that's because we're not thinking in these systems terms.

I think as soon as we understand that we are an intermediate species and that we will be the creators of a lot of downstream beings and civilizations then we need to return to this systemic thinking about ethics and choices and responsibility. Right now we don't feel that we're responsible for anybody beyond our individual selves and I think we're completely wrong there for two reasons. One is because we're actually going to become part of this more global superthing, whatever it is, but we have our own individual parts, we have some sort of responsibility for this larger things. And two, there is another larger thing which is generational - I don't mean our children I mean generational in terms of technological generation, that there's the alternative worlds and beings that we're going to generate, we have responsibility to them.

IV Bicycling across America

Avi: Your bicycle trip across America alerted you to the importance of having a future.

Kevin: During my bicycle trip one of the things I discovered was it's very hard to live without a future. We were talking about the "Be Here Now" book and I think you can be here now for maybe a day, or maybe a couple minutes here and there, but I was trying to be here now as I was riding because I was trying to cut off my future, saying, "There's all kinds of things we do thinking that I'm going to take a picture because in the future I want to look at it."

It's like, well there is no future, so why should I even take a picture? Why should I record anything? Why should I think about it? And maybe I live in the future more than many, but I realized that sort of not having a future was inhumane in that part of what meant to be human was to have a future, was to look forward, was to in some ways be future oriented and live in the future a little bit. I think that is part of what being human means because when I didn't have a future I felt my humanity shrinking. I think that a big lesson I got from that experience was the vital importance of the future.

Afterwards I became a little bit more unabashed about emphasizing the virtues of the future and trying to think about that more because I realized how important it was to being a full person. When I say I was surprised by my reaction, it was only that I had imagined that if I had six months to live I felt that I would climb Mt. Everest or go down to the deepest part of the sea or do something kind of risky or extravagant or extreme. But what I chose was not that.

Avi: But bicycling across America takes courage.

Kevin: Well actually I didn't believe that then and I certainly don't believe it afterwards. Actually anybody could do it, it's fairly easy. It's physically not that demanding, and secondly, at least in America, you're treated as a hero. If you're walking across America you're kind of suspicious. If we find a pedestrian walking around, even with your backpack there's a little bit of distrust, you're kind of maybe a vagrant or homeless or something. If you're in a car of course you're just another schmoe who's a nobody. If you're riding a bicycle you're a hero, and everybody loves people riding bicycles across the country. So you're treated well, you're asked to come home, you're given meals and stuff.

I didn't own a car so I lived my life on a bicycle when I was living in America. It was the only way to get around. And I never really thought that it was a heroic or difficult thing to do because I knew that you can just keep pedaling and you'll get there.

Avi: So what prevents us from doing the same thing?

Kevin: I have no idea why more people don't because it's actually the best way to see this country. It's at the right speed. If you're walking you can see a lot but my gosh it'll take you forever. In a car you're just driving by it. But when you bicycle you're on the back roads, it's really a great way to see it. I've been trying to talk my son into having us do another trip across because I would have loved to have done it in high school, it would have just been really fabulous. It's just it never occurred to me then.

Avi: It's kind of a coming of age trip.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. I think it's just fantastic. You're kind of on your own and there's an amazing sense of achievement at having used your own power to cross a continent. I mean you think about the fact that basically you're a quarter horsepower. We're a 100-watt brain and we have a quarter horsepower, you're going to go across the country on a quarter horsepower. That's pretty cool.

V The Long Now

Avi: The realization about the importance of the having a future, is that what led you to the Long Now Clock?

Kevin: Not directly. I started my career writing about travel, but very early on I had an opportunity to participate in an online world and I began to write about that as a foreign country. That's where I got involved in the future by actually experiencing it online. I began to have an appetite for exploring the future through the online world and that online world also, by the way, was the place where I changed my mind a little bit about the nature of technology because previously I tended to have bought into the hippie view or hippie suspicion of technology as being sort of inhumane, big brother, this sort of machine, mechanical world that you really want to keep to a minimum and that you really want to work to offset. So I was kind of living in a very simple hippie way and really trying to opt out of that technological way.

Being online in the very beginning I saw an organic aspect to technology that I'd not detected before, partly because it had not been manifested before so much. One of the big changes that came in the world was that through this sort of communications technology, it revealed a softer, more organic side to the Technium that allowed the hippies, and I'll insert myself too, to embrace it. And it forced me to re-examine the other aspects of technology and to see the more organic, life-like human aspects of those technologies as well.

Avi: I find the Long Now Clock being built in the mountain cave quite astonishing!

Kevin: My interest in The Long Now came not originally through the clock but through my time in Asia, where societies had a respect and maybe even an obsession with the past, the long past. Which was not the milieu for California. California really has almost no past. And it's a very, very short past. So we don't think about the past very much and we don't think about the long generational things that they do in Asia.

The idea of the clock was originally by Danny Hillis, a computer scientist. I published his essay on it in Wired very early. Danny had the idea of a clock that ticked for the long term, that ticked every year, tocked every century and every thousand years a cuckoo came out, that's how he described it. He wanted to build it because he thought it would be cool. I was involved with Stewart Brand, the originator of the Whole Earth Catalog, who was beginning to think about the necessity of thinking long-term. When he heard about Danny's idea he was seized with the idea of actually trying to build it and to have an organization around it to build it. And he asked me if I was interested in that and I said I definitely was. That was the origins of The Long Now.

So when Stewart was saying, let's think about long-term responsibility, let's use the clock as the little symbol or icon for that, and let's find out what it means to think long term, we decided from the very beginning rather than try to be so abstract we'll try to make this real by constructing an actual clock. We began to plan, buy land, do all these other things about what it was. We are on a dual track now where we have property in Nevada, trying to buy a national park with bristle cone pines, one of the longest-lived organisms on Earth, but at the same Jeff Bezos is building a version of the clock in a mountain in west Texas.

Avi: And how long can the physical clock last?

Kevin: It's being engineered to tick for 10,000 years. Inasmuch as possible it will tick for 10,000 years with a minimum of maintenance. Can it go for 10,000 years with no maintenance? We don't know. It seems unlikely that if absolutely nobody pays any attention to it that it would do so for 10,000 years, but it might be able to do it with a minimum amount of attention because it's inside a cave in a mountain. So there will be water coming through, there might occasionally be earthquakes in 10,000 years and things happen. So we don't imagine that there will be no maintenance necessary but we're trying to engineer it as much as possible with some very technologically sweet solutions but nobody's tested them for 10,000 years!

Avi: What do you think the feelings of the people in 10,000 years will be upon visiting the clock?

Kevin: We don't know. The thing about long-term thinking is that we're not trying to be Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation. We're not trying to make a plan for the next 10,000 years, for two reasons: one is because it literally is impossible; we cannot know what will be there. And secondly it's irresponsible. We don't want to take away the choices of people in future generations. Long-term perspective, long-term thinking doesn't mean long-term plans, it means trying to optimize the choices for the future. It's to make sure that the future generations continue to have choices, rather than taking them away by something that we decide now. So it's sort of the opposite of planning in the way that we normally think of where there's something going to happen and it's going to follow that plan because that's what has to happen. It's more of the way that you would plant a seed now for something that will blossom and grow later and bring benefits to other generations.

Recalling the so-called Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, Professor Philip Zimbardo describes the affects of present and future orientation in children.

Avi: So by doing this I feel like you're actually showing an extraordinarily high degree of care for our present moment in a way.

Kevin: Perhaps. But there is a tradeoff of do you take the benefits now immediately or do postpone benefits, like the great psychological experiment they did with the young kids and the marshmallows. The kid's shown that he can have one marshmallow now or you can have two marshmallows later. It's very hard for the child to resist the one now and postpone it. But that's often the case that in the present right now, you take the money or the resources or whatever it is, but oftentimes you actually postpone that. And I wouldn't call it sacrifice so much because what we want to find is some way where you shift the quality of the benefits. It's not that you sacrifice but you sort of satisfy a different kind of appetite now.

Avi: It's more of a selfless appetite. It is an expression of hope like a grandfather planting a redwood seed, as a biological example, and it makes you happy by doing it.

Kevin: Right. But the time and resources you spend planting a tree you're not watching TV. You have to give up something. There is a cost, that you're not watering your grapes this year, the water has to be diverted to the redwoods. So there's no doubt that there's a cost to that and this is not just free. While you can sometimes make it sort of appear free, out of nowhere, that's not always the case.

VI The Future of Reading

Lorem Ipsum

PLAY • STOP

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP)

Avi: What's the essence of a book?

Kevin: My current definition of the book is that it's a single long argument or narrative, it's form is not as important, whether it's on paper or electronic. I think what is important is that there's a unified argument or narrative sustained at some level. I do think that the media something appears in does make a difference.

I'm McLuhanish enough to say that the medium and format does carry a message that can often transcend or is in some ways at least as important as the content. McLuhan says that in a certain sense it doesn't matter what you watch on TV, it's more important that it's on TV, that it has that effect on you, by the same sense, reading a book on paper, that alone has a power. When we read things on tablets the fact that we're reading on a tablet will affect where it comes into us and what it means to us. And because your brain works differently in each reading mode, we're not really sure yet what those qualities are, and it'll take us some time before we understand the effects that reading things on the screen will have. But we should be prepared for the fact that they will be different and they will have some upsides and downsides.

Avi: You imagined a three dimensional eink reader. It would look and feel exactly the same as a paper book but it would change as you flip through it.

Kevin: You could just hit the spine or shake it and you could have a new book.

Avi: A metabook!

Kevin: The same leather-bound, beautiful thing that maybe you could even cut and paste into. So I don't see any reason why people won't imitate the form factor. But it's like people using the cinema to imitate the stage. I'm really interested in a kind of reading called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). It's a single word displayed on the screen and the word itself gets replaced by the words behind it. It's being refreshed with the next word, and you're just looking at one spot. And it has an amazing effect.

Avi: Talk about focusing attention.

Kevin: Yes, we very well may read like that on our phones. Why have to scan when you could just have it be replaced?

Avi: That's a great app!

Kevin: Yes, exactly. I don't think yet we've finished exploring the ways to read. So why don't we read like that?

Avi: Still early days!

Kevin: We still have another 10,000 days to invent new ways of reading.

Avi: We now have eink watches being made. You could read using a RSVP app on your watch while waiting in line at the post office, and you set the speed.

Kevin: Yes, you don't have to have a big screen to read. And I think there's a beauty there. I think it may take some training to read like that. We spend four or five years teaching kids how to read! Reading is not actually that natural, so we might need to be trained in other ways of reading.

Game Design with Kids: An Interview with Charley Miller

Avi Solomon — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:09:50 +0000

Charley Miller is a game designer and producer based in New York City.

Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Charley Miller: My name is Charley, I'm from Kentucky and I'm a game designer based in New York City. I split my time between personal game projects, teaching game design, and working with clients. The client work is split between game design and helping non-gaming projects think through their user experience. I think of myself as an ambassador of games right now because so many people want to gamify their product but most are doing it wrong by just adding static incentives. I'm currently working with a team on an iPhone location and social game about spreading viruses in the real world called Outbreaker—not as scary as it sounds—that plays with the idea of what it means to go viral. I'm also hoping to release games about running for President and walking the streets of NYC this year.

Avi: How did you become interested in designing games?

Charley: I think it found me before I found it. I was making up games to entertain myself and my friends as far back as I can remember. I never thought I could make a living doing this. It was at NYU's ITP graduate school where I realized I have a knack for game design (studying under Frank Lantz who now leads the NYU Game Center). My first post-NYU job was with Kognito Interactive in 2008 where I learned instructional design—basically making simulations with learning objectives in mind. I veered off course when I started a dating website that raised money for charity in 2009 but jumped back into full-time, independent game design shortly thereafter when the New York City indie game design scene started to take off.

Avi: What is a Game for you?

Charley: Well the lines of 'what's a game' are becoming blurred these days, for better or worse. To me, a game is a game is a game. They should have clear goals, a defined game space, and meaningful choices for the players to make. Games aren't film, or novels, or even art in the general sense. Games are their own unique kingdom and they're expressive in their own way. And we're only at the beginning of realizing the possibilities of game design.

Avi: What is Game Design?

Charley: Game design is the craft and process of inventing games. It's an inherently rewarding practice that's equal parts fun and frustrating. All game designers are also players and the best perspective to design a game from is that of the player. To design a game, you must consider things like how a player will learn to play; how a player will get better; how a player will understand their game state and assess themselves; how the game systems will create emergent systems and how players will explore these areas, etc. So in essence, game design is about designing a complex space to be navigated by players. It requires a lot of testing, a lot of balancing, and a lot perseverance. But this is what games do best: rewarding a decision with another decision to make. Not badges or points or leaderboards.

Avi: Why is designing games important?

Charley: It's naive to think that game design is going to solve all of the worlds problems. But games are important because games say a lot about who we are. They are a reflection of us as individuals when we play and reflections of cultures around the world based on their design. And even when you consider folks games (games that sort of emerge on their own, like hide and seek) at some point, somewhere, someone suggested a rule that stuck. So we're all game designers in some sense if we're all players. And it's through this sort of play that we develop a common language and experiment with ideas.

I teach a lot of game design classes at General Assembly in NYC and my students are a fairly diverse set of minds, ranging from twelve year olds looking to make the next Grand Theft Auto to fifty year old product managers looking to know more about gamification. A question I get is how can one game design class serve all of these interests and the answer is that the basics of the game design process of iteration through physical prototyping and playtesting has something to teach everyone.

Avi: Why is paper still useful in designing games?

Charley: When I used to teach high school journalism, I'd explain to my students during our conversation about censorship that the first pass on censorship happens inside our mind. We literally filter our thoughts before we speak or act. But any designer, whether engineering or game designing, will keep a journal nearby to capture as many ideas as possible so that ideas can more freely pour out. This allows a designer to do the filtering later so that no good idea is canned at the moment of inspiration. Sometimes bad ideas can lead to great ideas. That's the funny thing about creativity: it's a process with emergent possibilities that are unpredictable. This is a long way of saying that for game design, you need to capture your inspiration on paper—whether the ideas is about a game mechanic, a theme, a narrative, a character, a goal, etc.—so that you can give yourself a trail. You never know where it will lead or when you might need to double back to find another route.

Once a core mechanic is set (the thing a player does in the game), then you can paper prototype to start playtesting. I break playtesting down into four steps along the game design process to answer specific questions:

1) is the core mechanic fun?
2) does the game break?
3) do the game systems need more balance?
4) how do you teach someone to play?

Paper prototyping helps you answer all of these, even if you're making a video game, and allows you to figure out what makes your game interesting.

I always ask my game design students: "Where in this game is there a moment where the player is faced with an interesting choice?". These are the moments that give a game depth because players will want to explore the possibilities of their decisions.

So long story short: this is what paper prototyping helps you design.

Mobile Quest

Avi: You have worked together with kids to design games.

Charley: Teaching game design to kids really isn't much different than teaching it to adults with two exceptions: most kids have not developed the soft skills to collaborate effectively and have a bit more trouble sitting still. Last summer I helped out at Quest to Learns' mobile summer camp where these soon-to-be sixth graders worked on the ARIS iphone platform to create location-based games on the High Line. If you know the High Line, you know that it's basically a very narrow park that runs for 20 blocks or so. The kids turned this space into a platformer game, where players will use their GPS enabled smart phones to play through a game narrative that blends the physical of the High Line with the virtual of their games. It's good to be young these days.

Avi: What surprised you the most in your work with the kids?

Charley: Kids are typically naturals when it comes to game design and it's easy to understand why: they know what's fun and all they want to do is playtest. But what might surprise adults is to know that most children these days are able to wrap their minds around complex systems. That might be thanks to the amount of gaming kids are able to enjoy these days.

Avi: What is the best place to start learning about game design?

Charley: To be a designer, you have to be a player first. Start by playing a variety of games and try to deconstruct the experiences. Start asking yourself questions about why the designer choose certain elements and thinking about how systems are working together to create the dynamics of the game. That should get anyone nice and confused but hopefully stirred to know more. At that point, you need to learn two things: what are the core elements of games and what's a process for game design. There are a few books out there covering this stuff that are decent but I recommend finding a game designer to study from. Join a playtesting group so you learn how to observe and listen. And then just start doing: all game design starts with pencil and paper. The most important lessons you'll learn from your own mistakes as a designer. Anyone in NYC should feel free to reach out to me @superfection. I love talking games.

The Grammar of Happiness: An Interview with Daniel Everett

Avi Solomon — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:25:13 +0000

Daniel L. Everett is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University. He is the author of Language: The Cultural Tool and the subject of the documentary A Grammar of Happiness.

Avi Solomon: Were there any formative experiences in your childhood that shaped your career?

Dan Everett: Well, by far the most important experience in my childhood was the death of my mother when I was eleven. She was twenty-nine. That changed my life, and it taught me that life is extremely fragile. And I knew from that point on that I was going to die and never feared dying. Because I felt that if my mother had died, I certainly didn't have any fear of dying.

Another important thing was music. I found the guitar, and played music, and wanted to be a famous musician. I had insecurities and issues that were the result of the fact that my mother had died so young, and music really helped me through all of that. And also it turned out I was pretty good at music, that if I stuck with something long enough, I could get really good at it. That encouraged me when I went to college, even though I had not been a very good student in high school, to believe that if I worked hard, I could be a good student.

So these things encouraged me and changed me, and gave me different perspectives on my life. Those were two of the most important things of my childhood.

Avi: You describe your uncle in World War II recounting how his Marine platoon got shot on the beaches, and what their last words were.

Dan: They said "Momma". He was in the Marines that were the first on the beaches, and he was eighteen years old. Most of these men were eighteen. He said the last thought everybody had was for their mother. It's a really sobering thing. I know that I'm sixty years old, and my mother has been dead for forty-nine years, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about her, and when things happen. I think every young man is close to their mother ñ that's the normal. I realize that there are dysfunctional relationships, but it is a surprisingly powerful force in male lives.

Avi Solomon: How did you come to live with the Pirahã?

Dan: I met a young woman in high school and she had been raised in Brazil, her parents were missionaries. We decided after we got engaged that we would be missionaries ourselves, so took all the training, and went off to Brazil to translate the bible and we were asked to work with the Pirahã because their language wasn't related to any other known language. I had done well in linguistic training, and so the mission thought that we might be the people to take up the challenge, because no one else had been able to figure out the language.

Avi: You went to convert them, but they kind of ended up converting you.

Dan: That's right. I went to tell them about God, and the need to be saved so that they could go to heaven and not go to hell, but what I found was a people for whom most of the things that were important to me seemed irrelevant. They couldn't understand why I thought that I had any right to tell them how to live, although they tried very hard to understand me because they treated me with respect. And they couldn't understand why I could think that someone whom I had never seen, never met, whom no one I knew had ever seen or ever met, could be the basis for teaching them how they ought to live.

Also, the quality of their lives was better in most respects than most people I knew who were religious. Just the way that they coped with the difficulties of life around them, and related to one another. This is not to say that they're a perfect people. Nobody is. But I found them extremely inspiring and challenging. And I certainly couldn't, after a while, justify to myself the idea that I knew more about how to live than they did.

Avi: During the course of your fieldwork you underwent a triple crisis, a personal, intellectual, and religious crisis.

Dan: On the personal level, it was a very hard time for me. Before I met my current wife I was all alone. There were some days of dark depression in there. And it was the end of my thirty-plus year marriage. But that wasn't by design. That happened as a result of my religious change. I would have loved to have avoided those things. Obviously the hardest thing by far for me, was to have my children not talk to me for quite some time. It's still hard on my daughters. You know, they go back and forth between talking to me and not talking to me. But I really believed and still believe that I had to tell the truth as I understood it, and take the consequences.

As far as religion, I felt that I had been a hypocrite for a long time because I didn't believe in things that I said I believed in, and I had to be honest. Professionally, I realized that to contradict the major theory that I had been working with, to say that I thought it was wrong was going to create a lot of opposition. I didn't really anticipate how much, but I knew it would cause some. But that's what I felt and that's what I had to say.

Avi: What gave you the resilience to pull through?

Dan: I feel like it was being able to look at myself in the mirror and know that I was saying what I believed, and no longer pretending things that I didn't believe. And it was meeting my current wife. She has been the greatest source of encouragement and support that I've ever had.

Avi: What is your definition of language?

Dan: My concept of language is broader than many theoreticians. To me language is far more than grammar. Grammar is simply the way that we take, for example, words and put them together in sentences. That's a simple component. But language to me includes all the things that we talk about, and the ways that we talk about them. So it includes poetry, and conversation as well as sentences, phrases and words. And each individual item, whether it's a sentence or whether it's a word, is a sign in the sense of the Swiss linguist Saussure. It has meaning, and it has form. And the meanings and the forms are largely ñ not exclusively, but largely shaped by the values of the culture that produces them. So just like some cultures have words that aren't found in other cultures. One example is Haggis, which is a food in Scotland, but a lot of cultures don't eat that food, so they don't have the name for it. By the same token, different cultures have different constraints on the shape and the meaning that's conveyed by sentences so that the very grammar is shaped by the culture.

Let me just say what I mean by culture. I mean knowledge, and ways of interacting, and I mean a set of values ranked in a certain way so that each culture not only has a set of values, but it knows which values are ranked higher than other values and have higher priority or more importance. Culture is one of the largest, most important shapers of the form and meaning of our language. And that has been overlooked and denied, in fact, by many modern theories of grammar.

Avi: How did you learn the Pirahã language?

Dan: By working daily and starting off with simple objects. I would point to an object, and say it's name in English. Like a stick, or a leaf, an animal, a part of my body. Saying the name in English, and then writing down whatever they responded, and trying to figure out whether that was the noun I was after. Then I would do things with the objects. Throw the stick. Drop the leaf. Hit myself. And try to get verbs. And by working very slowly, setting a goal of ten words a day for myself, I worked all day every day for the better part of a year. After about six or seven months I could say a lot of things. But it took me about a year of hard work before I felt like I could say pretty much what I needed.

Avi: The Pirahã language has rules of empirical evidence built into it.

Dan: That's right. Every verb ends with a suffix that tells you whether what you're saying was directly observed, or inferred, or just overheard by hearsay. So they don't talk about things that they haven't witnessed themselves, or that somebody they know hasn't witnessed. They don't have stories of the ancient past because that doesn't make any sense to them. You were never there. And they don't have stories about what's going to happen to them in the future. They speculate a little bit, but it's not an important part for them. They don't make plans for the distant future because again, you haven't seen that. You haven't been there. So they live one day at a time. It's not like they don't know that there is a past, or they don't know there is a future. They just don't talk about it because it doesn't make any sense to them to talk about it.

The interesting thing about the Pirahã language is that it's like the Basque of the Amazon. It's not related to any other known Amazonian language. That means that if it ever did come from any other Amazonian language, it's been more than 6,000 years. We can tell, for example, that German and English, and French were the same language 6,000 years ago because we can see similarities between them today. But we can't find any similarity between Pirahã and other Amazonian languages, which indicates that it's probable that it has been distinct for more than 6,000 years. The descriptions of Pirahã culture that we have from about 1784, indicate a culture very similar to the way that it is today, although more numerous. So you know, it's possible that if we went back several thousand years, it's not only possible, it's probably likely the Pirahã culture was different. Maybe the language was different. Probably it was. But we know that for the last several hundred years at least their culture has been relatively stable, and the way that they live today was the way that they were living in the 1700s.

Avi: So what is the secret of their happiness?

Dan: I believe that they're happy because they don't worry about the past, and they don't worry about the future. They feel that they're able to take care of their needs today. They don't want things that they can't provide for themselves. At least they never have in my experience. In other words, I take in things and they will ask for a few little things that I have that they don't make, such as pots and pans or matches. And if I give it to them, fine, and if I don't give it to them, fine. They're not materialistic. They value being able to travel quickly and lightly. I've never met another group, not even another Amazonian group, that is so little concerned with material objects.

Avi: The Pirahã use various ways to express themselves, especially whistling and humming.

Dan: They're not the only group in the world that does this, but it's especially important to them. They hum and whistle, and they use other kinds of speech much more than many other groups. So anything they can say using consonants and vowels and what we would consider to be normal speech, they can also say by whistling or humming. Because they use the tones of their language and they use the rhythm of their language to communicate, and that's rich enough. It's much richer in some respects than languages like English, so that they actually have enough information in the tones and rhythm of their humming and whistling to talk about anything. Women do not whistle. Men can hum like the women, but only men can whistle, and they use it almost always when they're hunting. It's a good way of communicating and sounding like birds.

Daniel Everett

Avi: They also have a special language for communicating with spirits.

Dan: Actually "spirits" is a bad translation. I started calling them "spirits" when I was a Christian missionary. And what they are to the Pirahã are jungle entities that are not humans, but look like humans. And they all talk in a falsetto voice. But they're tangible. You know, I mean if you saw them or I saw them, which I have many times, to us in our way of thinking, they're just Pirahã talking in a high falsetto voice. But to the Pirahã they are really different creatures. They'll say there's one of those "fast mouths". And I'll say "Well, that looks just like so-and-so from the village". And they'll say "Yes, they look just like Pirahã. But you can tell they're not because they talk in those high voices". I suppose that the closest thing we have to it is saying that someone is possessed. But it's not quite the same to the Pirahã. They would say that that is not a Pirahã. In fact if you find a Pirahã man that claims to be one of these jungle entities—it's always men that do this—these fast mouths, and you talk to him later, he will deny any knowledge of it. He will say "That wasn't me, I wasn't there".

It's a different concept of what's objective or subjective. It doesn't neatly fall in our dichotomy of fact versus fiction. And so for example, even when they dream, they'll tell you about dreaming and while they know that it's not the same as being awake, they consider it just as valid an experience. So the fact that I dreamed I was walking on the moon means that in some sense I did walk on the moon.

Avi: The Pirahã have an intimate knowledge of their environment.

Dan: The Pirahã can tell you what the name of every different species of tree according to the way that they classify them. They can tell you what animals live in those trees. They can tell you what kind of food those trees produce. They can tell you about the animals. They can tell you which ones can be tamed, which ones can't be tamed. Which ones are good for eating. Where they live. If you're going along the river and you see bubbles coming to the top of the water, they can tell you whether that's a fish or whether it's the rock underneath. And every Pirahã child that I've ever asked is able to give me the same information. So everyone learns about nature and their environment very early on in their lives. Each individual Pirahã is fully capable of providing for themselves. Any Pirahã child, a boy, can provide for himself from the time he's nine or ten years old.

Avi: Did your children also pick up stuff from the Pirahã children?

Dan: Yes. My daughters, when they were young, would take off with Pirahã girls during the day in a canoe, and disappear, and be gone until evening. And come back singing with them, and they would walk with them through the jungle and pick up things with them, and learn the names for those things. My son from the time he was three years old had a Pirahã bow and arrow, and would run with the Pirahã boys all around the village and sometimes into the jungle. And they would tell me all sorts of things about animals they had seen, and often come back with animals and lots of different things like berries and nuts that they'd collected in the jungle.

Avi: How can we try and emulate some of this in our own lives?

Dan: I think the main thing is being observant. You know, our children can't begin to take care of themselves when they're nine or ten years old, because they're not forced to observe and to learn about you know, the world around them. There are certainly many members of our culture who are extremely observant and knowledgeable about nature, but it's not general in our culture. The Pirahã have to survive. They don't have the concept of going to a supermarket to get their food. When I tell them about it, they find it very boring. They have to feed themselves every day. They don't store food. So each day when they wake up they're hungry. Each day they have to find food. They have to find food for their children, for themselves, for their family. And that means knowing where to find the food.

One night a Pirahã man came in to the village and told me that a bushmaster, one of the most poisonous snakes of the jungle, tried to bite him. And that he was tired, but tomorrow morning he was going to go out and kill the snake. So he left early the next morning, and he came back about 11:00 am or noon with this enormous poisonous snake with an arrow through its head, and he stuck it into a tree, and it was just hanging from the tree. He said to me "He thought he would bite me, but I bit it!". I can't imagine knowing enough about my environment to go back and find the same snake that tried to bite me the day before in the thick jungle.

Avi: So the Pirahã have made a cultural choice to live in the present and it shapes their language?

Dan: That's right. They've made a choice. So for example, everything that Pirahã say has to come with a marker for where they got the evidence. And that is why their grammar is radically different from the grammars of many other languages. Because the taboos on talking about things for which you don't have evidence for have profound impact on the actual structure of the language.

Avi: Are individuals in the Pirahã culture conscious that they're choosing to live in the present?

Dan: I wouldn't say so. If you think about some of the things that we do on a regular basis, we make decisions in our lives every day, and there are things that we don't do, but it's not conscious. It's just something that we do. To take one extreme example - my anthropology professor, the first one I ever had, asked the class to spit in their hands. And some people didn't want to do it, but others did. He said, okay, now lick it back up. Nobody wanted to do that. He said "But why? What is the problem? It just was in your mouth a couple of seconds ago, and now you don't want to lick it back up". Who knows that we don't want to do that? Do Americans tell themselves that if they expel something from their body they don't want to take it back in their bodies?

The Pirahã are not like that in some ways. I mean, a lot of things that they consider repugnant we don't, and things we consider repugnant they don't. But nobody goes around and teaches anyone that it's wrong to do this, and it's wrong to do that. These are just values that we absorb, and we internalize them through imitation. And by cultural constraints on talking in a similar way.

Say for example, in the marriage ceremony in English when you put the ring on the spouse, you say "With this ring I thee wed". Nobody talks like that today. But you do it in that ceremony, and nobody is conscious of why they do it that way. So there's all kinds of ritualistic language. So it's that cultural form that affects the language that we use, but it's not conscious to people. They can say "Oh yes, that's right, that's the way I say it". But they wouldn't be able to tell you why.

Avi: Another expression of culture shaping language is their relationship to numbers or quantities.

Dan: They don't need numbers, and they don't need quantities except in very relative amounts. So they can say a small pile of things, or a big pile of things. But they don't need any more than that, and they don't have words for any more than that. A number of people have claimed that numbers are innate and that the concept of counting is innate. It's difficult to reconcile claims like that with the fact that the Pirahã have no numbers and don't count. That's a very controversial claim, but it has now been tested and corroborated by three separate studies in major scientific journals by people who've actually been there. So factually it's quite sound and well tested to say that Pirahã don't have numbers. And the reason they don't have numbers is because they don't need numbers. There's no task in their culture for which numbers are important.

Also, having numbers requires generalization, and those generalizations go beyond the Pirahã principle that you talk about the present, and you avoid generalizations whenever possible. I mean, if the Pirahã has a word for dog ñ and they of course, do ñ any noun is a generalization. So if a Pirahã says parrot, they don't just mean one parrot. They mean all parrots. So clearly they generalize. And they generalize to the degree that all languages have to generalize. You can't have a language without being able to talk about a noun or things, and the events that they participate in. You know, so there's a thing and it does something. Or a thing and something happens to it. So they can do that. But they avoid unnecessary generalizations that go beyond the needs of their culture. And numbers are such a generalization, so they don't have them. They don't have words for colors. They can clearly see colors and describe them but don't have words for them. They don't have words that some philosophers and linguists have considered to be essential to all human languages, such as quantifiers like the word "all", or "each", or "every". They don't have words like that.

Avi: They might not have that, but there's a tradeoff with happiness.

Dan: When you talk about how complex a language is, it can be very simple in some respects and very complicated in others. The Pirahã word structure is very complicated. And a lot of things we do with complicated sentences, the Pirahã do with simple sentences, but very complicated words. However, this refusal of theirs to generalize beyond the present and their refusal to worry about the past or the future is, I believe, crucial to their happiness.

And what's the evidence for their happiness? On the one hand every visitor that I take down to the Pirahã comments that they've never seen people smile and laugh so much. That's one superficial evidence of happiness. But you also don't find Pirahã sitting around depressed and crying. You don't find chronic fatigue syndrome. You don't find suicide. The concept of suicide is foreign to them. I've never seen evidence for any of the mental disorders that we associate with depression, sadness and lack of happiness among the Pirahã. They just work, they come home, and they talk. They're happy. They sing at night. And they get up and do it again. It's just an amazing degree of satisfaction without the need for consciousness-altering drugs or states.

>Daniel Everett performs "Colors in my Life"

Avi: You described a day where the whole tribe was at the beach having a huge party.

Dan: Yes. In the rainy season there are no beaches because the river comes up more than seventy feet. Since food becomes harder to get in the rainy season because you have the same amount of fish, but in much greater volume of water, the Pirahã tend to spread out, and you find very small villages of maybe one or two families. But in the dry season when the river goes down and the beaches come out and the fish are easy to catch, they get together on the beaches in large groups. And you'll find beaches with over 100 Pirahã for a couple of months during the dry season. And in that case, they're singing and dancing every night. They could go on dancing for forty-eight hours, sometimes even for seventy-two hours. But that doesn't mean that everyone's awake for that entire period of time. It just means that you dance and dance and dance, and then when you get tired, you might step out and take a nap, and then get back up and start dancing again. But the noise and the happiness and all this stuff going on with it continues on. And if you're like me, and not able to do that all the time, and trying to sleep, it gets frustrating! They're just happy the whole time!

Avi: They also do not express recursion in their language.

Dan: That's correct. That's a cultural choice. Here's how it works. In the Pirahã language, every verb has a meaning, and that meaning includes the participants in the action. So take the verb "hit". That is ñ whatever hit means, plus the person doing the hitting, and the thing being hit. So I hit you. You're the thing being hit. I'm the person doing the hitting. Every part of that basic verb's meaning has to be warranted by a suffix on the verb that tells you where the evidence came from.

Now if I start to make it more complicated, so instead of ñ so let's say that I say John hits Bill. That's fine. John and Bill and hit are all warranted. We know whether the evidence was observed, whether it was overheard, or whether it was inferred. But the minute I say John said that Peter hit Bill, all I can tell is the evidence for John said. I can't tell about the evidence where Peter hit Bill. Each verb has to be separate, and have its own evidence expressed for it. That's a simplified explanation. And the fact that each verb and its participants have to be evidenced, warranted by these suffixes that gives the source of evidence means that there can't be any recursion in the language.

Here's another way of thinking about it. This isn't the technically correct way of thinking about it, but it does get the idea across. When we utter a simple sentence, every part of it is new information. John hit Bill. I'm telling you that something happened. If I say on the other hand the man who you saw yesterday hit Bill. The "who you saw yesterday" is old information. That's why we put it in there so we can keep track of things. And that's a recursive structure, but it violates the fact that it's not an assertion, it's not new information, there's a part of that that's old information. So as long as you say that each sentence has to carry only new information, and we have to know the source of the evidence, there can be no recursion in the language.

And that follows from the principle of immediacy of experience that I've talked about. Because that immediate experience tells us that it has to have been experienced by the person speaking, or by someone who told the person speaking. And that is reflected in the grammar by these suffixes that tell us where the evidence comes from. And those suffixes, by their very nature, prohibit recursion.

Avi: That kind of reminds me of a Yoga Sutra which talks about these three kinds of knowledge!

Dan: I've often seen a strong correlation and compatibility between the Pirahã worldview and Zen Buddhism.

Avi: Your recursion claim has aroused intense controversy.

Dan: Many claims I've made have been controversial. And every single one of them has been independently tested. Thirty years ago, I made claims about the way the rhythm of the language worked. And UCLA sent down a phonetics specialist, Peter Ladefoged, who was probably the greatest in the world at that time. Then he went with me to the tribe and tested these claims. And only after he said we had verified them did people begin to accept that. And it's the same thing. People have tested the number claim. They've tested the color claim. And they've tested the recursion claim.

At the last Linguistic Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon a paper was presented by MIT cognitive scientists who had gone through all of the Pirahã data very carefully , and they made sure to go through data that was not collected by me, but by the previous missionary. Because the feeling was if they went through data collected by me, somebody could say well, he just made up that data, or he doctored it up. But they went through stories and text collected by another missionary who was there before me, and their conclusion after going through all of these examples very carefully was that they didn't see any clear evidence for recursion in the language. In fact, they saw evidence for the contrary. That there wasn't recursion in the language. And that was a very well attended talk, and some of my critics were there as well as a lot of neutral observers. And this wasn't my research. This was somebody else's research testing my research. So I believe that the absence of recursion is far more accepted today among people who think of Pirahã than it was just a few months ago, since the studies have come in.

Avi: How hopeful are you that the Pirahã will survive their encounter with modernity?

Dan: I have to say that overall I'm not really optimistic. I don't want to underestimate them. They're a very strong and resilient people, but the history of these kinds of contexts is not good. But I do have a lot of faith in the Pirahã inner strength and if any culture can stand up to this kind of pressure, it's theirs.

Avi: And hopefully, we the colonized can learn from them.

Dan: There's tremendous amounts we can learn from them, and in fact, from all other groups and peoples who are not like ourselves. I am currently working on a book idea called "Wisdom From Strangers" about how we can learn very important valuable lessons from people who are unlike ourselves. In fact, the more unlike us they are, the more we can learn. You cannot learn what you need to learn just by staying in the library. You have to have these experiences to take you beyond the boundaries of what you know, and make you live in ways that you never knew before.

Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy Pachirat

Avi Solomon — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:18:45 +0000

Timothy Pachirat, Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and the author of Every Twelve Seconds, is not the first to see industrialized violence and political analogues in the slaughterhouse. But rather than write an exposé, he took a job at one to see how it works from the perspective of those who work there. I interviewed him about his experiences on the kill floor.

This interview was translated into Italian at Neuroneproteso.

Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Timothy Pachirat: I was born and raised in northeastern Thailand in a Thai-American family. In high school, I spent a year in the high desert of rural Oregon as an exchange student where I worked on a cattle ranch, farmed alfalfa, and--improbably--became a running back for the school's football team. Since then, I've lived in Illinois, Indiana, Connecticut, Alabama, Nebraska, and New York City working as a builder of housing trusses, a pizza deliverer, a behavioral therapist for children diagnosed with autism, a stay-at-home-dad, a graduate student, a slaughterhouse worker, and, for the past four years, as an assistant professor of politics at The New School for Social Research.

Avi: What alerted you to the importance of doing ethnographic fieldwork?

Timothy: Like many mixed-race, mixed-culture, and mixed-language kids, I developed something of an innate ethnographic sensibility by virtue of the complex cultural terrain I grew up in. Long before I'd ever heard the word 'ethnography,' for example, I spent my undergraduate fall and spring breaks sleeping alongside and getting to know unhoused men and women on Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago as a way of making some sense of the vast inequalities I perceived in American society and in the world. While pursuing a Ph.D. in political science at Yale University, it seemed natural to gravitate to a research orientation that would allow me to engage bodily--as participant and as observer--with the lived experiences of people I might not otherwise ever come into contact with. I was learning a lot of fancy theories that were thrilling on paper, and I was learning some powerful techniques of statistical analysis, but only ethnography allowed me to weigh those made-in-the-academy concepts and techniques against the situated, specific, and beautifully complex lived experiences of the actual social worlds those concepts and techniques purported to describe and explain.

Avi: Why did you choose to go undercover in a slaughterhouse?

Timothy: I wanted to understand how massive processes of violence become normalized in modern society, and I wanted to do so from the perspective of those who work in the slaughterhouse. My hunch was that close attention to how the work of industrialized killing is performed might illuminate not only how the realities of industrialized animal slaughter are made tolerable, but also the way distance and concealment operate in analogous social processes: war executed by volunteer armies; the subcontracting of organized terror to mercenaries; and the violence underlying the manufacturing of thousands of items and components we make contact with in our everyday lives. Like its more self-evidently political analogues--the prison, the hospital, the nursing home, the psychiatric ward, the refugee camp, the detention center, the interrogation room, and the execution chamber--the modern industrialized slaughterhouse is 'zone of confinement,' a 'segregated and isolated territory,' in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, 'Invisible,' and 'on the whole inaccessible to ordinary members of society.' I worked as an entry level worker on the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse in order to understand, from the perspective of those who participate directly in them, how these zones of confinement operate.

Avi: Can you tell us about the slaughterhouse you worked in?

Timothy: Because my goal was not to write an expose of a particular place, I do not name the Nebraska slaughterhouse I worked in or use real names for the people I encountered there. The slaughterhouse employs nearly eight hundred nonunionized workers, the vast majority being immigrants from Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and East Africa. It generates over $820 million annually in sales to distributors within and outside of the United States and ranks among the top handful of cattle-slaughtering facilities worldwide in volume of production. The line speed on the kill floor is approximately three hundred cattle per hour, or one every twelve seconds. In a typical workday, between twenty-two and twenty-five hundred cattle are killed there, adding up to well over ten thousand cattle killed per five-day week, or more than half a million cattle slaughtered each year.

Avi: What jobs did you end up doing there?

Timothy: My first job was as a liver hanger in the cooler. For ten hours each day, I stood in 34 degrees cold and took freshly eviscerated livers off an overhead line and hung them on carts to be chilled for packing. I was then moved to the chutes, where I drove live cattle into the knocking box where they were shot in the head with a captive bolt gun. Finally, I was promoted to a quality-control position, a job that gave me access to every part of the kill floor and made me an intermediary between the USDA federal meat inspectors and the kill floor managers.

Avi: How did you acclimatize to the work?

Timothy: Slowly and painfully. Each job came with its own set of physical, psychological, and emotional challenges. Although it was physically demanding, my main battle hanging livers in the cooler was with the unbearable monotony. Pranks, jokes, and even physical pain became ways of negotiating that monotony. Working in the chutes took me out of the sterilized environment of the cooler and forced a confrontation with the pain and fear of each individual animal as they were driven up the serpentine line into the knocking box. Working as a quality control worker forced me to master a set of technical and bureaucratic requirements even as it made me complicit in surveillance and disciplining my former coworkers on the line. Although it's been over seven years since I left the kill floor, I am still struck by the continued emotional and psychological impacts that come from direct participation in the routinized taking of life.

Every Twelve Seconds:Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight.

Avi: How did your coworkers treat you?

Timothy: I would never have lasted more than a few days in the slaughterhouse were it not for the kindness, acceptance, and, in some cases, friendship of my fellow line workers. They showed me how to do the work, bailed me out when I screwed up, and, more importantly, taught me how to survive the work. Still, there were divisions and tensions amongst the workers based on race, gender, and job responsibilities. In addition to showing the forms of solidarity amongst the workers, my book also details these tensions and how I navigated them.

Avi: Who is a "knocker"?

Timothy: The knocker is the worker who stands at the knocking box and shoots each individual animal in the head with a captive bolt steel gun. Of 121 distinct kill floor jobs that I map and describe in the book, only the knocker both sees the cattle while sentient and delivers the blow that is supposed to render them insensible. On an average day, this lone worker shoots 2,500 individual animals at a rate of one every twelve seconds.

Avi: Who else is directly involved in killing each cow?

Timothy: After the knocker shoots the cattle, they fall onto a conveyor belt where they are shackled and hoisted onto an overhead line. Hanging upside down by their hind legs, they travel through a series of ninety degree turns that take them out of the knocker's line of sight. There, a presticker and sticker sever the carotid arteries and jugular veins. The animals then bleed out as they travel further down the overhead chain to the tail ripper, who begins the process of removing their body parts and hides. Of over 800 workers on the kill floor, only four are directly involved in the killing of the cattle and less than 20 have a line of sight to the killing.

Avi: Were you able to interview any knockers?

Timothy: I was not able to directly interview the knocker, but I spoke with many other workers about their perceptions of the knocker. There is a kind of collective mythology built up around this particular worker, a mythology that allows for an implicit moral exchange in which the knocker alone performs the work of killing, while the work of the other 800 slaughterhouse workers is morally unrelated to that killing. It is a fiction, but a convincing one: of all the workers in the slaughterhouse, only the knocker delivers the blow that begins the irreversible process of transforming the live creatures into dead ones. If you listen carefully enough to the hundreds of workers performing the 120 other jobs on the kill floor, this might be the refrain you hear: 'Only the knocker.' It is simple moral math: the kill floor operates with 120+1 jobs. And as long as the 1 exists, as long as there is some plausible narrative that concentrates the heaviest weight of the dirtiest work on this 1, then the other 120 kill floor workers can say, and believe it, 'I'm not going to take part in this.'

Avi: What are the main strategies used to hide violence in the slaughterhouse?

Timothy:

The first and most obvious is that the violence of industrialized killing is hidden from society at large. Over 8.5 billion animals are killed for food each year in the United States, but this killing is carried out by a small minority of largely immigrant workers who labor behind opaque walls, most often in rural, isolated locations far from urban centers. Furthermore, laws supported by the meat and livestock industries are currently under consideration in six states that criminalize the publicizing of what happens in slaughterhouses and other animal facilities without the consent of the slaughterhouse owners. Iowa's House of Representatives, for example, forwarded a bill to the Iowa Senate last year that would make it a felony to distribute or possess video, audio, or printed material gleaned through unauthorized access to a slaughterhouse or animal facility.

Second, the slaughterhouse as a whole is divided into compartmentalized departments. The front office is isolated from the fabrication department, which is in turn isolated from the cooler, which is in turn isolated from the kill floor. It is entirely possible to spend years working in the front office, fabrication department, or cooler of an industrialized slaughterhouse that slaughters over half a million cattle per year without ever once encountering a live animal much less witnessing one being killed.

But third and most importantly, the work of killing is hidden even at the site where one might expect it to be most visible: the kill floor itself. The complex division of labor and space acts to compartmentalize and neutralize the experience of "killing work" for each of the workers on the kill floor. I've already mentioned the division of labor in which only a handful of workers, out of a total workforce of over 800, are directly involved in or even have a line of sight to the killing of the animals. To give another example, the kill floor is divided spatially into a clean side and a dirty side. The dirty side refers to everything that happens while the cattle's hides are still on them and the clean side to everything that happens after the hides have been removed. Workers from the clean side are segregated from workers on the dirty side, even during food and bathroom breaks. This translates into a kind of phenomenological compartmentalization where the minority of workers who deal with the "animals" while their hides are still on are kept separate from the majority of workers who deal with the *carcasses* after their hides have been removed. In this way, the violence of turning animal into carcass is quarantined amongst the dirty side workers, and even there it is further confined by finer divisions of labor and space.

In addition to spatial and labor divisions, the use of language is another way of concealing the violence of killing. From the moment cattle are unloaded from transport trucks into the slaughterhouse's holding pens, managers and kill floor supervisors refer to them as 'beef.' Although they are living, breathing, sentient beings, they have already linguistically been reduced to inanimate flesh, to use-objects. Similarly, there is a slew of acronyms and technical language around the food safety inspection system that reduces the quality control worker's job to a bureaucratic, technical regime rather than one that is forced to confront the truly massive taking of life. Although the quality control worker has full physical movement throughout the kill floor and sees every aspect of the killing, her interpretive frame is interdicted by the technical and bureaucratic requirements of the job. Temperatures, hydraulic pressures, acid concentrations, bacterial counts, and knife sanitization become the primary focus, rather than the massive, unceasing taking of life.

Avi: Is anyone working in the slaughterhouse consciously aware of these strategies?

Timothy: I don't think anyone sat down and said, 'Let's design a slaughtering process that creates a maximal distance between each worker and the violence of killing and allows each worker to contribute without having to confront the violence directly.' The division between clean and dirty side on the kill floor mentioned earlier, for example, is overtly motivated by a food-safety logic. The cattle come into the slaughterhouse caked in feces and vomit, and from a food-safety perspective the challenge is to remove the hides while minimizing the transfer of these contaminants to the flesh underneath. But what's fascinating is that the effects of these organizations of space and labor are not just increased 'efficiency' or increased 'food-safety' but also the distancing and concealment of violent processes even from those participating directly in them. From a political point of view, from a point of view interested in understanding how relations of violent domination and exploitation are reproduced, it is precisely these effects that matter most.

Avi: Did the death factories of Auschwitz have the same mechanisms at work?

Timothy: I recommend Zygmunt Bauman's superb book, Modernity and the Holocaust, for those interested in how parallel mechanisms of distance, concealment, and surveillance worked to neutralize the killing work taking place in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The lesson here, of course, is not that slaughterhouses and genocides are morally or functionally equivalent, but rather that large-scale, routinized, and systematic violence is entirely consistent with the kinds of bureaucratic structures and mechanisms we typically associate with modern civilization. The French sociologist Norbert Elias argues--convincingly, in my view--that it is the "concealment" and "displacement" of violence, rather than its elimination or reduction, that is the hallmark of civilization. In my view, the contemporary industrialized slaughterhouse provides an exemplary case that highlights some of the most salient features of this phenomenon.

Avi: Violence is found hidden in even the most "normal" of lives. How can we spot this pervading presence in our daily life?

Timothy: We--the 'we' of the relatively affluent and powerful--live in a time and a spatial order in which the 'normalcy' of our lives requires our active complicity in forms of exploitation and violence that we would decry and disavow were the physical, social, and linguistic distances that separate us from them ever to be collapsed. This is true of the brutal and entirely unnecessary confinement and killing of billions of animals each year for food, of the exploitation and suffering of workers in Shenzhen, China who produce our iPads and cell phones, of the 'enhanced interrogation techniques' deployed in the name of our security, and of the 'collateral damage' created by the unmanned-aerial-vehicles that our taxes fund. Our complicity lies not in a direct infliction of violence but rather in our tacit agreement to look away and not to ask some very, very simple questions: Where does this meat come from and how did it get here? Who assembled the latest gadget that just arrived in the mail? What does it mean to create categories of torturable human beings? The mechanisms of distancing and concealment inherent in our divisions of space and labor and in our unthinking use of euphemistic language make it seductively easy to avoid pursuing the complex answers to these simple questions with any sort of determination.

Months after I left the slaughterhouse, I got in an argument with a brilliant friend over who was more morally responsible for the killing of the animals: those who ate meat or the 121 workers who did the killing. She maintained, passionately and with conviction, that the people who did the killing were more responsible because they were the ones performing the physical actions that took the animal's lives. Meat eaters, she claimed, were only indirectly responsible. At the time, I took the opposite position, holding that those who benefited at a distance, delegating this terrible work to others while disclaiming responsibility for it, bore more moral responsibility, particularly in contexts like the slaughterhouse, where those with the fewest opportunities in society performed the dirty work.

I am now more inclined to think that it is the preoccupation with moral responsibility itself that serves as a deflection. In the words of philosopher John Lachs, 'The responsibility for an act can be passed on, but its experience cannot.' I'm keenly interested in asking what it might mean for those who benefit from physically and morally dirty work not only to assume some share of responsibility for it but also to directly experience it. What might it mean, in other words, to collapse some of the mechanisms of physical, social, and linguistic distances that separate our 'normal' lives from the violence and exploitation required to sustain and reproduce them? I explore some of these questions at greater length in the final chapter of my book.

Avi: Who was Cinci Freedom? What mythologizing purpose does she serve?

Timothy: I open the book with the story of a cow that escaped from a slaughterhouse up the street from the one I was working in. Omaha police chased the cow and cornered it in an alleyway that bordered my slaughterhouse. It happened to be during our ten minute afternoon break and many of the slaughterhouse workers witnessed the police opening fire on the animal with shotguns. The next day in the lunchroom, the anger, disgust, and horror at the police killing of the animal was palpable, as was the strong sense of identification with the animal's treatment at the hands of the police. And yet, at the end of lunch break, workers returned to work on a kill floor that killed 2,500 animals each day.

Cinci Freedom was another Charolais cow that escaped from a Cincinnati slaughterhouse in 2002. She was recaptured after several days only with the help of thermal imaging equipment deployed from a police helicopter. Unlike the anoymous Omaha cow that was gunned down by the police, Cinci Freedom became an instant celebrity. The mayor gave her a key to the city and she was provided passage to The Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY, where she lived until 2008.

Although at first glance the fates of the Omaha cow and of Cinci Freedom are very different, I think both responses are equally effective ways of neutralizing the threat posed by these animals. Their escapes from the slaughterhouse were not just physical escapes but also conceptual escapes, moments of rupture in an otherwise routine and normalized system of industrialized killing. Extermination and elevation to celebrity status (not unlike the ritual presidential pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey) are both ways of containing the dangers posed by these moments of conceptual rupture. They also point to the promises and limitations of rupture as a political tactic, for example the digital ruptures that occur with the release of shocking undercover footage from slaughterhouses and other zones of confinement where the work of violence is routinely carried out on our behalf.

This interview was translated into Italian at Neuroneproteso.

The Botany of Bible Lands: An Interview with Prof. Avinoam Danin

Avi Solomon — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:12:56 +0000

Avinoam Danin is Professor Emeritus of Botany in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He curates Flora of Israel Online. His latest book is Botany of the Shroud: The Story of Floral Images on the Shroud of Turin.

Avi Solomon: What first sparked your lifelong fascination with botany?

Avinoam Danin: My parents told me that when I was 3 years old I always said "Look father, I found a flower". My grandparents gave me the book "Analytical Flora of Palestine" on my 13 birthday - I checked off every plant I determined in the book's index of plant names.

Avi: How did you get to know the flora of Israel so intimately?

Avinoam: When I was a high school student, as a personal project I determined all plants growing in a 1000 square meter area and followed it by determining all plants I found on my way anywhere. Mapping the vegetation of the Negev Highlands for my graduate and doctoral theses increased the list of species I knew.

Being the plant taxonomist of a Hebrew University team during the Sinai investigations added much to my knowledge. Writing together with Prof. N. Feinbrun the Analytical Flora of Eretz Israel (1991) and later, after several botanical visits in Jordan, the 5th part of Flora Palaestina (2004) was my way to obtain intimate knowledge of the flora of the region.

Satureja nabateorum

Avi: Which is the most interesting of the new species that you have found?

Avinoam: It is very hard to say "which is the most". We botanists consider the new plants we describe as new-born children and love them all. I have now 42 such plants and it is hard to say whom I love more. A new species is Capparis ramonensis I discovered on the gypsum outcrop of Makhtesh Ramon.

It is confined to a 3.5 square km area on our planet. A plant of an even smaller area is Hormuzakia negevensis found near Dimona. I named an Origanum new to science as Origanum jordanicum to honour His Majesty King Hussein who signed a peace agreement with our prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time of the discovery. We were searching a Nabatean path from the Arava Valley to Petra and a new savory was discovered then.

It became my beloved Satureja nabateorum which has beautiful trunks when becoming old in the sandstone crevices of SW Jordan.

Portulaca oleracea seed

Avi: What makes the amazingly nutricious "weed" Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) so common all over the globe?

Avinoam: The plant which was known as Portulaca oleracea is in fact an aggregate of more than 20 entities which look like Portulaca oleracea. However, there are many forms (we regard them at present in the scientific community as "microspecies") that look like the "regular" Portulaca oleracea, but differ in the microscopic morphology of their seeds. They all share the property of need for light, moisture, and high temperatures for germination.

Many sites created by human activity are available with the necessary conditions. It may float on sea water for more than half a year and germinate when landing on non-saline soil. Hence it may be distributed independently. Producing plenty of minute seeds makes it an efficient invader.

Gall of Salvia fruticosa

Avi: What are Cretan Apples?

Avinoam: As concluded by researchers from the HaReuveni family who sought out the botanical inspirations of the Menorah, Cretan Apples are galls developing at the tips of branches of two Salvia (Sage) species--Salvia fruticosa and Salvia pommifera. Salvia fruticosa grows in several east Mediterranean countries, including Israel and Crete; Salvia pommifera grows in Crete and in Turkey. The galls look like small apples and have a sweet taste when young. The Greek name of the two sage species has the Greek name of apple (milo) in their names (fascomilo).

Avi: What led you to examine the Shroud of Turin for botanical evidence?

Avinoam: Dr. Alan and Mary Whanger had discovered images of plants on the Shroud. They came to my home in 1995 and showed me their findings. I concurred with them and visited them in Durham, NC, in 1997 and discovered additional plant images. I repeated their studies and continued my own observations.

Thorn of Rhamnus lycioides on the Shroud

Avi: What were your findings?

Avinoam: Four plant species, the images of which are found on the Shroud, indicate the geographical origin of the Shroud. Fresh stems of the plants Gundelia tournefortii, Zygophyllum dumosum, Cistus creticus and Capparis aegyptia could be placed on the dead Man's body only in a strip of land, a few kilometers wide between Jerusalem and Hebron. Nine blooming species found on good photographs of the Shroud share blooming months of March and April, thus indicating that the event of covering the man with the plants in the Shroud took place during that time of the year.

The Man of the Shroud was possibly tortured with thorns of Rhamnus lycioides, Ziziphus spina-christi and Gundelia tournefortii. A cane of Arundo donax was inserted to the Shroud covering the Man as well.

Avi: What has been the reaction from your colleagues in the scientific community?

Avinoam: Of the botanists who glanced at the plant images, there were those who objected to my interpretation of these images and others who agreed and supported this. A first dose of encouragement came from my friends, botanists themselves, Dr. Peter H. Raven and Dr. Michael G. Barbour.

They are well known American scientists and their agreement with much of what I showed them was an important component of the strength I needed to stand against potential criticizers. In June 2006, I presented my findings to the staff of an important European botanical garden. At the end of my lecture, one of the attendees declared that as a botanist who is used to seeing and identifying plants, said he does not support my findings. Later that day three botanists having a similar position in that institute arrived incognito and warmly supported my findings and interpretation.

I can mention the response of three Israeli archaeologists. One of them, a good friend of mine and my family for more than 30 years, changes the subject whenever I try to confront him with the whole subject. Another colleague opened our conversation by saying that according to his experience there were no people as tall as the image of the man of the Shroud. He therefore was not ready to talk about my findings, and I thanked him for the short conversation I had with him. However, there were several Israeli archaeologists who were ready to hear what I said with appreciation for the interesting findings.

Filmmaking in Bollywood's Shadow: An Interview with Jaideep Varma

Avi Solomon — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:00:34 +0000

Jaideep Varma is an author, filmmaker and professional cricket analyst working in India.

Avi Solomon

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Jaideep Varma

I was in advertising for 12 years as a copywriter, then gave it up in 2000 to be a full-time writer. I published a novel, Local, in 2005. I directed a feature film, Hulla, which was released in 2008, and a full-length documentary feature film called Leaving Home - the Life & Music of Indian Ocean, which was released in 2010 and won the National Film Award this year. I also, purely accidentally, invented a statistical system in cricket called Impact Index, which is what I am running and co-developing full-time currently.

Despite my aversion to return to advertising as a profession, I had the most significant insight of my life when I was in it — about the importance of idea over and above any detail. It's ironic that this observation came to me in the ad business as it has perhaps the flimsiest application of ideas in the modern world, but it is also the easiest to spot. Later, after leaving advertising, I have found the importance of a central idea sorely underestimated in all walks of life, and an excessive attention to detail, often to the detriment of the project. The attempt to have a strong idea as a foundation for all my projects has been a bit of a guiding light for me.

Out and In of a Mumbai Local Train

Avi

The Mumbai local train is an active presence in the narrative of your novel Local.

Jaideep

Local is just a story of a white collar professional who is hurting from some kind of heartbreak and he discovers that when he is motion, that pain is considerably less. So, he looks for that kind of perpetual motion — and the only place he can find it is the local trains in Mumbai — so he decides to live on the train — and has this odd double life (working in a multinational by day, living as a homeless person in the night, on the local trains). That is the only reason why the story is set in local trains; if he could get this in a taxi, he would have. Of course, the local train (which literally is the backbone of the Mumbai commute) provides a grand sweep of story-telling, in all its diversity and scope. It also provides the book with its structure — the main narrative (the novel) punctuated by short stories about people the protagonist meets (short stories) where the minor characters become the protagonists, for a short while — much like a long train journey, punctuated by various stops.

Avi

How was your novel received in Mumbai?

Jaideep

It's an Indian-published book in a country where the media entirely is constituted of Western-colonised wannabes — they look to the West for prescriptions of what to read to the extent that they are not even interested in their own stories. So, it was largely ignored by the mainstream media, which led to bookshops not really stocking the book, for too long anyway.

But, in terms of reviews, etc, the response was quite positive overall. And it appears to have made an impact on some people too, going by the responses it still receives. There has been interest to make it into a film, so maybe that will happen someday (not by me, as I lived with this story for long enough, though it would be interesting to revisit it again in the film medium as a writer/co-writer perhaps).

"Hulla" by Jaideep Varma

Avi

Your feature film "Hulla" deals with the daily tribulations of middle class Indians. How were you able to maintain artistic integrity while directing a feature film in the heart of Bollywood?

Jaideep

It was an off-Bollywood film (much like off-Broadway) in that it was very small budget, therefore coming with much less pressure of sticking to the various commercial formulae of its time. I had a great degree of (artistic) freedom to make the film, provided I stuck to a very tight budget (which, of course, came with its own set of problems — still, not a bad trade-off but sadly not one easily possible after the 2008 recession; Hulla couldn't get made and released in today's environment).

Leaving Home: The Life and Music of Indian Ocean

Avi

What led you to make a documentary about the band "Indian Ocean"?

Jaideep

Three things. One, since 2001, I believed that the 10-year-old-band Indian Ocean was India's best-kept musical secret (happily the secret was subsequently broken quite comprehensively), the biggest proof of that, for me, was that their music did not show signs of aging at all. Two, I had had a great interest in feature-length music films, and was thirsting to see one that was made in India. Three, I was a position in 2006 to make a small film; not enough to make a fiction feature, and with the freedom to not worry too much about precedent (and therefore commercial viability) — and a music film on Indian Ocean just seemed the obvious choice to me. So, everything kind of came together for this to happen, even though it was unprecedented in an Indian context (as the film went on to be India's first-ever non-fiction film to release nationally in theatres).

Avi

For someone new to the Indian cultural scene could you recommend a list of some hidden gems (music, films, novels) coming out of contemporary India?

Jaideep

I'm sticking to the last two decades only here (perhaps the classic definition of 'contemporary').

Music Albums

Kandisa by Indian Ocean (2000)
Indian Ocean is India's greatest-ever music band, and in Kandisa, they are at their best — it is as simple as that. At least 4 of their albums are all-time-classics, but this 2000 release remains their peak. Indian folk, jazz improvisation, Indian classical - all melded together through unabashed, and completely unique-sounding, rock, and make no mistake — it is rock.

Sunoh by Lucky Ali (1996)
His first 3 albums are classics, and his delicate, melody-driven personal songs still make him one of the finest singer-songwriters to come out of India. This is the first album, populated with songs he had lived with for many years — not a single filler in it.

Rabbi by Rabbi Shergill (2004)
Perhaps the most-played non-film song in over a decade, 'Bulla Ki Jana' is just one of the many classics in an album, filled with Punjabi lyrics, a Sufi temperament and robust rock and roll spirit.

Boondein by Silk Route (1998)
A Himachali folk vibe met breezy soft rock — a soulful album with songs that sound fresh to this day. Three outstanding musicians walked into unchartered territory that still lies largely unexplored. It is very sad that this band does not exist today.

Tomake Chaai by Suman Chatterjee (now Kabir Suman) (1992)
Hugely influenced by the likes of Pete Seegar and Bob Dylan, Suman Chatterjee's determination to tell his own stories, and delve into his own roots, resulted in the beginnings of a very significant cultural movement that he should rightfully get the credit for. Here are many of those early songs - sparsely backed by either a guitar or a synthesizer — the magic is in what he makes you feel, whether you know the language or not. Truly Bengali in its essence.

Feature Films

Hazaaron Khwaaishein Aisi by Sudhir Mishra (2005) Fundamentally, a triangular love story, set primarily during the tumultuous Emergency years of the mid-1970s. It has wry wit and soul — a very rare combination in contemporary Indian cinema.

Monsoon Wedding by Mira Nair (2001) An NRI-director (therefore not an 'Indian-made' film technically) went back to her Delhi roots to capture perhaps the most lively and vivid portrait of modern-day India in all its diversity and pre-occupations.

Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year by Shimit Amin (2008)
The only soulful film made in India about the corporate world, its greed and elusive integrity. The biggest achievement is that it uses elements of the popular idiom to tell this story, which it does superbly.

Lagaan by Aushutosh Gowariker (2001)
This is a film remarkable for the perfect meeting point of Bollywood expectations and international sensibilities — its greatest achievement, and perhaps impossible to recreate consciously. The Oscar nomination was not a coincidence.

Crime/gangland films annoy me immensely now, for their ubiquitousness and the copping out that working on these kind of films often suggest. But, there are two films which have the same status as the Godfather films in the Hindi cinema firmament:

Maqbool by Vishal Bharadwaj (2004)
A tantalisingly-rooted adaptation of Hamlet in the Indian underworld — notable for the presence/ performances of 5 of India's finest-ever actors — Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Irfan Khan, Pankaj Kapoor, and Tabu.

Company by Ram Gopal Varma (2002)
The triumph of a universal story (friendship and betrayal), told through a very tight screenplay, set in an unusual milieu for such a story. An ostensible fictional expose of the Mumbai underworld, it remains a classic in the Bollywood context.

Company and Rocket Singh were both written by Jaideep Sahni — who is, in my opinion, the most significant single writer or filmmaker of the last two decades in Bollywood.

Black Friday by Anurag Kashyap (2004)
A chilling and absorbing film made on the terrorists of the 1993 Mumbai bombings, in the aftermath of the incidents as they were chased down by the law.

Novels

This is the toughest category, as Indian writing has, by far, been the worst affected amongst all the art forms in India. A combination of circumstances — low attention spans and online distractions causing far fewer people to read; publishers finding it therefore difficult to make money; a colonised media, looking at the West for prescriptions of what to read — therefore rejecting indigenous writers and encouraging the kind of exotica-laden writing that the West finds meaningful from these parts. More than anything else, unimaginative, dishonest and smug publishing editors have destroyed indigenous writing in India — leaving the likes of pulp-writers like Chetan Bhagat to be seen as the only indigenous writers who are spoken of.

Through the wreckage of the last two decades or so, these 5 titles emerge, to me.

The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga (2008)
Despite many saying this was not worthy of the Man Booker, despite many having authenticity problems with some of the details the book conjures up, its subject of how the poor coexist with the rich in India, the complexities that result from that (through the head of an entrepreneurial driver) makes this the most relevant contemporary Indian novel in many, many years.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1993)
Not quite a contemporary novel, in that it is set really in the 1950s, but significant for perhaps the most clear-eyed portrayal of the Indian middle-class sensibility amongst Indian novels in English. The 1400-page novel is worth its girth in gold for the enjoyment it brings, without illumination.

Mango Coloured Fish by Kavery Nambisan (1998)
A real and thoughtful novel about self-discovery, through the eyes of a middle-class 'marriageable girl' in her twenties. Quiet, restrained, soulful and eschewing the exotica (despite the title) such material usually veers towards in Indian English novels. 'The Scent of Pepper' is more highly-rated amongst her books, but this one is my favourite.

The Sari Shop by Rupa Bajwa (2004)
Set in Amritsar, this is a poignant story about Ramchand, who works in a sari shop. Darkly funny in parts but mostly an affecting rooted story, told with a refreshing clear-eyed simplicity (and a welcome lack of irony). Evokes Anton Chekhov and Rohinton Mistry at their best (a huge compliment), though the world-view is completely, and refreshingly, Bajwa's.

Mole! by Asokamitran (translated by Kalyan Raman) (1984; transl. 2004)
Again, not strictly contemporary in terms of it being set in the early 1970s, but certainly contemporary and universal in its concerns (it became available in English only in 2004). A middle-aged writer from Chennai is in a 7-month writers' workshop in the American Midwest, amidst fellow-writers from different parts of the world, all trying to express themselves in a strange environment. Written by one of the most distinguished contemporary Tamil writers alive.

Robert Sapolsky on Stress: An Interview

Avi Solomon — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:00:17 +0000

Prof. Robert Sapolsky on Coping with Stress (Audio link) Photo Courtesy of Indiana University

Robert Sapolsky is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Neurology at Stanford University. He is the author of A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons.

Avi Solomon:

What event or person influenced your decision to study Primatology?

Robert Sapolsky:

Reading The Year of the Gorilla, by George Schaller, when I was in middle school. Schaller was the first person to do field work with gorillas (long before Dian Fossey). I had a vague sense of wanting to do primatology before that (sufficiently so to be reading the book), but that book cemented it.

Avi

What led you to research Stress?

Robert

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution. If you are in that world, evolution really feels like it is about adaptation - when there are changes in the environment, new challenges, the critical issue becomes whether there is the genetic variability in a population that will allow for survival - will there be individuals with the means to adapt to the changing environment?

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

Another reason is intellectual temperament. There is a classic study (by Tversky and Kahneman) in which people are given two scenarios. You have a population in which there are two diseases; each disease accounts for 50% of the deaths. Scenario A: you come up with something which completely cures one of the diseases, without having any effect on the other. Scenario B: you come up with something which cuts the mortality rate in half for each disease. The two are equivalent: 1 x 50% = 2 x 25%. The vast majority of people prefer Scenario A, for the sense of closure that it gives. My temperament has always been more for Scenario B. Stress, all on its own, doesn't directly kill people in the way that, say, cancer does. What it does is make lots and lots of different diseases 2% worse, 5% worse, whatever. Distributed impact. Going after that is much more to my taste as an intellectual problem (rather than, say, coming up with a vaccine or identifying a mutation that underlies a disease - those are Scenario A's).

Avi

How do you define Stress? Is Stress necessarily a bad thing?

Robert

If you are a normal mammal, a stressor is a challenge to homeostatic balance - a real physical challenge in the world - and the stress-response is the adaptation your body mobilizes to re-establish homeostasis.

For a cognitively complex species (like humans and other primates), stressor is also the ANTICIPATION that a a real physical challenge is about to happen. If there really is not the threat of a physical stressor coming, then you are setting yourself up for increased risk of stress-related disease.

Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.

Avi

Why are Baboons good human analogs for the study of Stress?

Robert

Baboons are perfect models for the ecosystem I study. They live in the Serengeti in East Africa, which is a wonderful place for a baboon to live. They're in big troops, so predators don't hassle them much. Infant mortality is low. Most importantly, it takes baboons only about 3 hours of foraging to get their day's calories. Critical implication of this - if you are spending only 3 hours in a day getting food, that means you have 9 hours of free time each day to devote to being miserable to some other baboon. Like us, they are ecologically privileged enough so that they can devote their time to generating psychological stress for each other. If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is because another baboon has worked very hard to bring that state about.

Avi

What are the most important science-based strategies for coping with Stress?

Robert

Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.

Avi

How do you use them in your own life?

Robert

As for me - I'm terrible at applying any of this. Why else would I study the subject?

Avi

How has doing regular fieldwork in Africa affected you?

Robert

It has been one of the most important things in my life. I am very very happy when I am there.

Avi

You grew up an orthodox Jew in New York. What is your opinion of God now?

Robert

What's God? For me, God died when I was around 14, and I haven't been capable of anything resembling "spirituality" since then either. I wish I could—life would be easier—but I can't.

Previously at Boing Boing

Toxoplasma (cat-poo parasite) hypnotizes rats by making them horny for cat pee
Sapolsky's outstanding Stanford lecture on "The Uniqueness of Humans"
Stanford's Sapolsky on primate sexuality: funny, fascinating, educational
Sapolsky on primate sexuality part two: required viewing for the horny
Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality
Stanford's Sapolsky and National Geo produce a documentary on stress
Mind-opening lectures on the physiology of stress

Eyal Ophir on the Science of Multitasking

Avi Solomon — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:20:45 +0000

Photo: Eyal Ophir with his daughter Sahar, courtesy of the subject.

Eyal Ophir was primary researcher on the pioneering Stanford Multitasking study. He now designs information interfaces for the browser RockMelt.

Avi Solomon

How did you get to studying multitasking at Stanford?

Eyal Ophir

While I was at Stanford, Cliff Nass (my advisor, and a global expert on human-computer interaction) introduced me to some great ethnographic work done by Ulla Foehr and Donald Roberts at the Dept. of Communication looking at media consumption among youth. They saw that young people were reporting more media-use hours than actual hours, and figured out these same young people must be consuming multiple streams of media simultaneously in order to fit it all in. This is where I was introduced to the concept of Media Multitasking. I came from a cognitive psychology background, and I was inspired by Anthony Wagner's work on memory and cognitive control (Anthony was my reference for all things cognitive, and ended up being the third author on the paper). So for me, the interesting question was simply how these kids are managing to process and control so much information all at once.

Because looking at historical data on processing multiple information streams, you wouldn't think it was possible. Research in the 1950s showed that when people listen to two different streams of audio, they focus on one, and can only do the most basic processing of the other. So if you're listening to a voice in one ear, you can tell if the speech to the other ear has changed gender, or if it calls your name. But you can't tell if it's changed language, or suddenly starts playing in reverse. More recent research suggests that humans have a cognitive bottleneck, which forces us to only really be able to engage in one decision-making process at any one instant. So you'd think, given this data, that we're serial processors. Intuitively, that certainly rang true for me. So - how are these kids watching TV, while talking on the phone, and chatting on their computer, and browsing the web, and listening to music, and doing their homework, all at once? How have their brains adapted to allow them to process so much simultaneous, disparate information?

Avi

How do you define multitasking? Is true multitasking even really possible?

Eyal

I specifically look at media multitasking. To me, that means engaging with multiple information streams simultaneously. What's interesting to me about this form of multitasking is that the media are so available, and so engaging, that they make media multitasking so easy. The media are actually so dedicated to, and so effective at, attracting our attention, and they are so omnipresent, that one actually has to work at not media multitasking.

Is it possible? The passive nature of many types of media makes it very easy to surround yourself with multiple information streams, and so in that sense, it's possible and even easy. As to how much you're actually processing these multiple media and effectively engaging with them -- that is precisely what motivated me to do this research. That's the question I tried to begin to answer.

Avi

What is the real attentional cost of task-switching and interruptions?

Eyal

Every task you take on requires a certain set of mental rules, or context. Psychologists call this the "task set" Recent research suggests that the cost of task switching is rooted in cognitive interference from the irrelevant task set: interference from all those thoughts about the task you're NOT doing. Every task you do competes for your mental resources, even once you think it's no longer relevant. The more you do, the more you increase this competition. So that momentary interruption is still fighting for some of your mental resources even when you'd like to focus back on your main task. The more competing tasks you take on, the more interference you must overcome to fully dedicate yourself to what's really important. What may be worse is that over time you may be training yourself NOT to focus. You teach yourself that something more exciting might be just around the corner - behind that notification, or the app on your mobile phone, or the email you haven't checked. If you prioritize the unknown, but potentially exciting, over what's in front of you, you'll have a hard time controlling your own focus. You may transition from a top-down model of attention allocation, where you decide what to focus on, to a bottom-up model, where any new notification or alert will dictate what you focus on. We've done some early exploratory work on this, and it does seem that heavy media multitaskers place high value on new information, and may be more impulsive and responsive to rewards.

Avi

Is multitasking addictive?

Eyal

This is certainly a hot topic, and one of the big questions that still has to be answered. I am no expert on addiction, but I think media in general, and media multitasking in particular, especially the tendency to constantly look for the next unknown, exciting tidbit, may be addictive. The relationship between media, media multitasking, and the brain's most basic pleasure and reward mechanisms is an area of very active research that may provide an answer.

Test Your Focus • Test How Fast You Juggle Tasks

Avi

What multitasking experiments did you design and test people on?

Eyal

I wanted to find out how heavy media multitaskers were processing so much information all at once. I wanted to find the secret to why they were regularly doing something that traditional research seemed to suggest was impossible. So we surveyed hundreds of students about their media use habits, and invited the heaviest and lightest media multitaskers to come to the lab. Then I ran them through what was basically a cognitive obstacle course- testing all the basic cognitive control abilities that we thought could in some way be relevant to media multitasking. We looked for those abilities that were significantly different between the heavy and light media multitaskers.

We found several significant differences. The first was that heavy media multitaskers were not as effective at ignoring irrelevant information. I asked them to perform a visual task where some of the objects they saw were clearly marked as irrelevant, and told them to ignore these objects. And yet the more of these objects were present, the worse they performed on the task. Light media multitaskers, on the other hand, performed equally well regardless of the number of irrelevant objects - they just blocked them out. I tested this result again in another, different experiment, and found the same result - heavy media multitaskers generally performed worse whenever there was irrelevant information around. They had trouble ignoring it.

I then asked them to perform a task where they had to keep information around in their head, and use it to perform a task. But at each given moment, they only had to think about a few bits of information. Heavy media multitaskers had trouble letting go of older information - it kept interfering with their task. So once again we found trouble with filtering. But this time, it was not about filtering irrelevant stimuli from the environment. Here, they had trouble filtering irrelevant information in their own mind - irrelevant memories. They had greater trouble keeping all the different pieces of information sorted in their mind, and knowing what was relevant and what was irrelevant.

Lastly, I tested their ability to switch between tasks. Here, the heavy media multitaskers were slower switching from one task to the next. This again points to trouble filtering - if you consider evidence that difficulty switching tasks is driven by interference from the irrelevant task, this result meant that heavy media multitaskers were having difficulty not thinking about the task they weren't doing. They had difficulty filtering out thoughts about the irrelevant task.

Avi

What surprised and alarmed you about your findings?

Eyal

I actually expected the media multitaskers to filter less. How can you multitask if you block everything out? But what I did not expect was the task switching result.

Humans don't really multitask - we task switch. Our brains are serial machines, so we just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we're multitasking. So when we found that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a classic test of task-switching, it was like finding out that these heavy media multitaskers were worse at multitasking.

I said those words at one of the first presentations of the findings. It became a very attractive soundbite - that "multitaskers are worse at multitasking" (even Conan O'Brien repeated it) - but that statement on its own is dangerously non-specific.

Avi

How do you explain this paradox, that heavy multitaskers were actually less effective at multitasking?

Eyal

I have to preface my answer by saying that I think that's a problematic statement. What does it mean to be "effective at multitasking"? If multitasking is being able to get through writing a paper while handling interruptions, is effectiveness the ability to sustain your focus on the paper? If multitasking is driving while talking on a mobile phone (NOT a recommended pairing), does being effective mean not focusing so heavily on the conversation that you still notice when the driver in front of you slams on the brakes?

I think heavy multitaskers are not less effective - they simply have a different goal. A different set of priorities. Where you might say traditionally we value the ability to focus through distractions, they are willing to sacrifice focus in order to make sure they don't miss an unexpected, but rewarding, surprise. As a result, they might do worse in the office scenario I described, but they might also be the first to slam on the brakes in the car/mobile phone scenario. So who is more effective?

As a researcher, I don't want to be in the business of passing judgment. I want to find counter-intuitive new facts and use them to make valuable predictions. I think heavy media multitaskers have a tendency for bottom-up attentional control: compared to light media multitaskers, they tend to be more reactive than pro-active. They seem to be less in control of their own attention, and they do this so they can be quicker to discover the unexpected.

Avi

Are there gender or generational differences?

Eyal

That certainly is a question that comes up a lot. It's not something we tried to address with our work. But shortly after I finished this research I spoke to a very prominent psychologist about the intersection of gender and multitasking. According to him, after the issue came up between him and his wife, he went and tried to find evidence of gender differences in multitasking ability. And he found none.

There is more evidence of age-related differences, especially in cognitive control ability. But the more interesting question of generational differences will probably take more time to answer. In general, our paper did not address causality. We can't say if media multitasking causes these cognitive tendencies, or if people with these cognitive tendencies gravitate to media multitasking. But there has been some fantastic research, such as the work on gaming from Daphne Bavelier's group, showing how media activity can affect change in the brain. And media multitasking seems to me to be such an extreme environment, and we subject ourselves to it so frequently and regularly, that it would surprise me if it didn't have some very dramatic effects on our minds.

Given that, I think the difference in exposure to media multitasking between generations is probably going to drive some interesting generational differences. I look forward to finding out.

Avi

Why is listening to instrumental music while performing a complex cognitive task different?

Eyal

We use different cognitive resources for processing different stimuli. For example, studies have demonstrated that it's much easier to remember words while performing a spatial task than while performing a linguistic task. I'd expect that listening to music while trying to perform a musical task would be quite difficult. But most of what we do when we measure our multitasking ability probably doesn't overlap heavily with processing music. You'd probably also see differences depending on the type of music. Instrumental music may be less disruptive than music with lyrics. Familiar music, where you're less actively processing the lyrics, or which is less likely to surprise you, might also turn out to be less disruptive.

From Ophir E, Nass CI, Wagner AD (2009) Cognitive control in media multitaskers.

Avi

What has been the impact of your landmark multitasking paper?

Eyal

I think we finally brought some data to bear on an argument that has been raging in bars, offices, and bedrooms for years. It seems both multitaskers and non-multitaskers are quite committed each to their perspective, and to the inefficiency of the other. So when the paper came out, it caught on not only in academic circles, but in popular circles - we were one of the top 10 most shared and most popular stories on Yahoo News and CNN the day we published. So the first thing the paper accomplished was to take the work of Roberts and Foehr, and the whole topic of Media Multitasking, and bring it one step closer to the public sphere. To elevate the public discussion with a bit of empirical data.

The second effect was to feed into the backlash against digital media. Statements like "Multitaskers are bad at multitasking" seemed to pit science against today's connected culture. I think that was both good and bad. I think media multitasking is an extreme request to make of our brains, and I strongly expect it has consequences. Discussing this openly, and allowing it to inform our media consumption, is a good thing. That said, I think judgment precludes possible evolution. Media multitaskers may be making what is a very sensible adaptation to an extreme environment. Do we try to reverse the trends that generated this environment? Do we adapt as they did? Or is there just too much we still need to learn before deciding on a course of action? I think we don't need to turn reactionary, but rather use this new knowledge to shape our informational environment, and maintain our individual control within it.

Avi

What do we still not understand about multitasking?

Eyal

Most of what you've asked me. This is a young phenomenon, and an even younger field of study. Causality, addiction, generational and gender differences, underlying neural systems, and of course, the best way to navigate this information environment, are all open questions. Many of them will unfortunately take more time to answer than we'd like.

Around the time our paper came out, we hosted a seminar on media multitasking, with representatives from multiple academic disciplines, as well as from education and the media and tech industries. I was most surprised by the sense of urgency in the room. There were so many pressing questions that we were just beginning to answer. Participants began playing less the role of professionals and researchers and more the role of concerned parents, wondering about how best to help their children navigate this new reality. I was inspired by the level of the discussion, but there is a ton we don't know. Though I think that's the mark of an exciting and relevant field of research.

Avi

What life-strategies can we adopt to counter distraction? Is there a fundamental prerequisite understanding that needs to sink in before adopting these strategies?

Eyal

I think we need to realize that attention is a zero-sum game. If you truly focus on two things, they can each only get part of your attention.

We also need to realize that the attractiveness of the little distractions provided by media, and our motivation to attend to them, is probably out of proportion to their actual importance to us. This of course may vary greatly based on context -sometimes, when we make bad decisions about where to focus our attention, distractions are vital (such as when texting while crossing the street, etc.). But I think there's another reason we might feel so inclined to respond to every notification.

Historically, when someone tapped on our shoulder, they were necessarily physically next to us. So they knew if we were already holding a conversation with someone else, and could adjust their behavior, or withhold their request. We, in turn, felt compelled to respond to the tap on the shoulder when it came. But now, the incoming chat message, the phone call, and the television announcer, all tap on our shoulder in a sense, trying to get our attention. They are entirely oblivious to each other, and solicit our attention as if they were the only ones. We, on the other hand, feel the same obligation to respond. It may be that our social norms and instincts are not scaling at the rate of communication channels. In this way, media may have brought about a new tragedy of the commons - by aggressively trying to grab our undivided attention, they have threatened the very notion of undivided attention.

I think the key might be control. We should start making decisions about how we allocate attention. If focus is important to us, then we should protect it. This may mean creating periods where we silence the notification channels, and make it easier for ourselves to keep our focus where we want it. Work for 30 minutes, then check your email, or your favorite websites, and get back to work (or to the dinner conversation). Get in the habit of focusing without the underlying expectation of something more exciting coming along.

I actually think there's potential here for media to play a larger role. One layer above the content, we have meta-interfaces that are situated at the junction of multiple information streams, that can help us navigate our information environment. Examples are the car, which can start thinking about when the mobile phone should ring, and when it shouldn't; your computer operating system; or your web browser. In my role as a designer for the browser RockMelt, this is a very exciting opportunity. I'm working on a browser that standardizes all my information channels - and thereby makes staying on top of that information more manageable. For example, I recently designed a 'Quiet Mode' button, to help users regain their control. So now RockMelt puts all your Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and web mail notifications in a single place, and when you're ready to focus, you just click a single button and all that noise goes away. When you're ready to see what's new, you can turn it back on. It's my attempt at putting control back in users' hands.

Avi

How has your multitasking research changed your personal behavior in relation to managing your attention?

Eyal

The funny thing is that I'm a horrible multitasker. When I think about something, I automatically block out everything else. My wife knows that if she doesn't have my full attention, I have no idea what she's saying - I probably don't even hear her.

Apart from becoming a real influence and a source of inspiration on the way I design information interfaces, these findings also impacted me personally. My daughter will soon be 3. When I'm with her, I block out the media. It's something that demands conscious effort, because that drive to quickly check the latest update has been internalized. So she hardly ever sees me with a laptop, or a mobile phone. I've also had friends that, since my research was published, have tried to take back control of their attention. So far, they've been very pleased with the results. As a creative professional, my ability to focus and create space for complex thought is important to me. As a father and husband, my ability to give my family the attention they deserve is vital. So I've become more aware of the way in which media might compete for control of my cognition, and I've made the decision that I'd rather be proactive than reactive. I want to decide what I think about. But working in media, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening out there -- more than I could ever process. So it's a work in progress.

Interview with a Stoic: William O. Stephens

Avi Solomon — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:46:23 +0000

William O. Stephens is Professor of Philosophy and of Classical & Near Eastern Studies at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He plays tennis and chess, is a vegetarian, and tries to be Stoic about being a big Chicago Cubs fan.

Avi Solomon

What drew you to studying the Stoic philosophers?

William O. Stephens

In graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, my professor, Charles Kahn, thought I would enjoy reading the lectures, 'discourses,' of the Stoic teacher Epictetus. When I did, I was hooked on Stoicism and chose to write my dissertation on Epictetus. I've been fascinated by Stoicism ever since.

Avi

Could you summarize the essence of Stoicism in one paragraph?

William

Stoics believe that the goal in life is to live in agreement with nature, which for human beings means living in agreement with reason. The perfection of reason is virtue. So Stoics believe it is reasonable to responding to every event virtuously, to do the very best you can under the circumstances, and accept the rest. A Stoic focuses on what is up to her and doesn't worry about anything that is not up to her. The Serenity Prayer expresses the essence of Stoicism: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage the change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.' Stoics believe that the only real good, the only thing that guarantees happiness, is virtue, while the only really bad thing is wickedness. Health, sickness, wealth, poverty, fame, ignominy, life, death, and all such things are neither good nor bad in themselves, because each can be used well and virtuously or badly and wickedly. How we deal with these things which are indifferent to happiness determines our happiness or misery. Our happiness, therefore, is up to us, it is not up to luck, according to the Stoics.

Avi

Stoicism is sometimes labelled a "prison philosophy". Why is this so?

William

Because people fail to understand what Stoicism really is. Stoicism equips you to deal with every circumstance in life, applying for a job, relationships with others, parenting, competing in sports, illness, everything. Stoics believe that people imprison themselves when they choose to make their happiness depend on things beyond their control, whether those things are controlled by other people, the weather, the stock market, or whatever.

Avi

Why are spiritual exercises important in Stoicism?

William

Seneca, a famous ancient Stoic, wrote that a Stoic must, at the end of each day, reflect on every decision and action he performed that day. He must scrutinize his deeds, one by one, and evaluate whether they were done well or poorly. Thus, Stoics are very serious about training themselves to apply their (Stoic) judgments about what is good (virtue), what is bad (wickedness), and what is neither (everything else) to their daily living. This intensive spiritual exercise, or introspective meditation, is vital for making progress in the art of living the good life as a Stoic. Studying the ideas, theories, and arguments in Stoicism is easy enough. Applying Stoic judgments to every single decision, action, and reaction to events around us is very difficult. It requires great discipline and years of rigorous practice to apply Stoicism to all our beliefs, value judgments, decisions, intentions, and actions.

Avi

What Stoic exercises do you find most useful in dealing with the pressures of daily life?

William

Teaching Stoicism to my students on a regular basis helps. Reminding myself about what is up to me and what is not up to me helps. It helps to remind myself that I alone am responsible for how I choose to think about what others do and what happens, and that no one has the power to make me angry, afraid, or sad. My anger results from the judgments that (1) someone tried to harm me, and that (2) I ought to retaliate. I can I freely choose to refrain from making these twin judgments. My fear results from my judging that something beyond my control is an imminent danger to me. My sadness results from the attitude I choose to have. Also, reading Epictetus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius is always a good Stoic exercise.

Avi

Why do you think Stoicism is undergoing a renewal in our time?

William

Stoicism has undergone renewals at different times in history for centuries. Whenever people judge that they are living in particularly hard times, whenever the going gets tough, the tough turn to the wisdom of Stoicism.

Photo: qwrrty

Interview with a Maker: Jack Zylkin, USB Typewriter Guy

Avi Solomon — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:56:17 +0000

Jack Zylkin created the USB Typewriter. I interviewed him about his creation, the response he's received, and why people are so interested in "the muggle magic of gears and pulleys and solenoids."

Avi Solomon

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Jack Zylkin

Originally I wanted to be a jazz musician, but an arm injury my Freshman year of music school left me unable to play guitar, so I started studying engineering instead. I had always enjoyed making my own effects pedals, so I thought maybe an EE degree would help my music career, like it did for fellow electrical engineers Herbie Hancock and Grandmaster Flash. I mean, engineering can be a rigid and dry thing to study, but if you look at it right it can also be very creative and artistically liberating. Drexel has its own sort of miniature version of MIT's media lab, where they would take apart Wii remotes and make DIY touchscreen computers and so forth, and I was really into the hacker mentality they had there.

I also got really into Make Magazine, and in fact Philadelphia used to have its own local chapter of Make readers, called Make:Philly. Even though Make:Philly had great people and sponsored really fun events, there was still no actual hackerspace in town, and meanwhile I was filling up my apartment with power tools (I had a drill press next to my sink, a power-washer attached to my shower head, and a 4-color screen printing press in my bedroom) -- it got pretty out of control. So three years ago a few folks from Make:Philly and I started Hive76, Philly's first and only hackerspace. All the work I have done and inventions I have come up since then with have been Hive76 projects.

Avi

How did you come up with the USB Typewriter idea?

Jack

Typewriters are just really beautiful and elegant machines, and it struck me as sad that they have been forgotten and neglected, especially since most computer technology today is so disposable and utilitarian. People love typewriters, and lots of people have them on their mantle or in their attic, but there is just no place for them on a modern computer desk. So, with the USB Typewriter project I am trying to rescue typewriters from garages and attics and put them to use again.

Avi

How did you go about making it a reality? Did your involvement with a Hackerspace help?

Jack

Almost everything I have made in the last 3 years has been at Hive76. Belonging to a hackerspace not only gave me the tools and space I needed to make my crazy gadgets, but it also gave me a community of other great makers to encourage and inspire me. For example, the idea to use the USB Typewriter with an iPad came from another Hive member. Also, Hive76 let me hold classes on electronics and soldering, and originally I conceived the USB Typewriter as a kit to teach basic electronics.

Avi

What has been the response so far?

Jack

The response has been great. The USB Typewriter got "BoingBoinged" about a year ago, literally the day after I posted my first "hey look what I did" youtube video, and since then I have been racing to keep up with all the people excited about my invention. The folks who bought USB Typewriter kits early on had great ideas for improving it, and its been a blast seeing other projects that people have spun off of mine. For example, one guy sent me photos of an entirely typewriter-based game of Zork he made using my circuitry. Of course, the best part so far has been going to Maker Faire -- it was so fun to have a booth there and share my crazy ideas with other mad scientists.

Avi

Does the USB Typewriter help people "single-task" and focus their attention?

Jack

Definitely. The best part of the USB Typewriter is that you can turn off your monitor, so the text is still being saved to your computer, but the paper itself is your "monitor". So, the USB Typewriter allows you to step back from the fast pace of your twitterbooks and your facefeeds and treat writing as the intimate experience it is supposed to be. Furthermore, I hope that once you have a typewriter as a permanent fixture on your desk, instead of a computer keyboard, it wont be so hard to just turn off your computer altogether and write an old fashioned letter every now and again.

Avi

Why is the combination of the mechanical ("past") and the digital ("future") so fascinating to people?

Jack

I think companies today make their technology homogenized and miniaturized to the point of being invisible to customers -- they don't want you thinking too hard about what goes into making your consumables. Take apart a cell phone (if you can) and inside it basically looks exactly like the inside of a radio or a TV or a watch any other kind of gizmo, which is to say it just looks like a bunch of computer chips. People miss the days when things were made of real stuff, because the muggle magic of gears and pulleys and solenoids fitting together in perfect harmony is in a lot of ways more magical than the flea circus that goes on inside computer chips.

The other thing is that technology today is so disposable! For example, no one thinks about passing down their iPhone3 as a family heirloom (they probably are selling them to buy iPhone4s) but the typewriters I work on have been around for about 100 years and still look and work great!

Lastly, there is also real nostalgia for the olden days of communication, where you could look forward to receiving a letter or an invitation in the mail (as opposed to a twitter or an evite). Hopefully the USB Typewriter will help reclaim some of the intimacy and specialness of the art of letter writing.

An interview with David Eagleman, neuroscientist

Avi Solomon — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:00:20 +0000

Photo: Poptech

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and author.

Avi Solomon

What fascinates you about the nature of time?

David Eagleman

We all go through life assuming that time is an external river that flows past us. But experiments in my laboratory over the past decade have shown that this is not precisely the case. Time is an active construction of the brain. We can set up simple experiments to make you believe that a flashed image lasted longer or shorter than it actually did, or that a burst of light happened before you pressed a button (even though you actually caused it with the button), or that a sound is beeping at a faster or slower rate than it actually is, and so on. Time is a rubbery thing.

David Eagleman reads his short story "Sum"

Avi

How do you account for testimonies of consciousness extending beyond cardiac arrest? What could they imply about the brain?

David

It's hard to know what to make of these claims. On the one hand, we know that the brain is easily coaxed into hallucinatory states that are taken to be reality: just think of your visually rich, bizarre-but-fully-believed nighttime dreams. On the other hand, although we know a great deal about the details of neurobiology, we have little scientific insight into the existence of private subjective experience -- that is, how cells and chemicals achieve consciousness.

So in the end, most scientists will (probably correctly) dismiss a near-death experience as a trick of the brain in a low-oxygen state. However, the vastness of the mysteries before us requires us to keep a tiny bit of room open for a continual re-visiting of the question. As my colleague Ara 13 writes, “No theory is Babe Ruth. Their numbers never get retired.”

Avi

How would you account for the testimonies of a Panoramic Life Review during near-death experiences?

David

I’ve been collecting people’s experiences about this for a while. When people find themselves in an optionless, life-threatening situation (such a sliding on ice toward an oncoming truck, or skidding toward the edge of a cliff on a motorcycle), they will commonly describe the experience of having all their memories present at once. This is not so much a cinematographic "flashing" of their life before their eyes, but instead a simultaneously present "panorama" of memories. And not necessarily big, important memories, but instead small, banal, perhaps meaningless ones. How can we understand what’s going on here?

First, in the 1950s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield stimulated the temporal lobe of patients undergoing brain surgery, and he discovered that a little buzz of electricity in the right spot in the temporal lobe could trigger a vividly experienced memory—such as standing in a parking lot speaking with someone, or listening to a particular symphony. So we know the memories are stored in there. When the brain is driven into an extraordinary situation of impending doom, it moves out of its normal operating range and somehow all these memories bubble into conscious awareness. It may well be that the brain is 'searching' for any possible solution to a very bad problem, and in its desperation pulls out all the stops. I see panoramic memory as a terrific inroad into understanding consciousness.

Avi

What do you make of the experience of Deja Vu?

David

It seems clear that people experiencing deja vu are not actually detecting the future. This is easily demonstrable: the next time a friend says she's experiencing deja vu, quickly pull out twenty dollars and offer it to give it to her if she can tell you what's going to happen next. You won't lose. Instead, your friend will merely be able to report that after something happened she feels as though she knew it was going to happen. So there appears to be nothing time-violating about it. Instead, deja vu appears to be a hiccup of the familiarity systems in the brain -- the same systems that tell you a bizarre situation in a dream is something normal, something you've seen before.

Avi

Do you have a generic method for thinking up innovative experiments?

David

The only general strategy I employ is to avoid the places where everyone else is going. The most delicious fruits in science are often found in the places where no one else is looking. Relatedly, it's an old axiom in science that the exclamation that signals a rich discovery is not "Eureka!", but more often "That's strange." So that's where I try to position myself, around the "that's strange" phenomena.

Avi

There are roughly 50 galaxies or 10 trillion stars per person in the currently known universe. Why do you think we all glibly forget this amazing fact? How can we keep wonder alive everyday?

David

Indeed, I'm often surprised that people aren't talking about these issues all the time. But the reason seems clear enough. Our brains have evolved to deal with issues at our own scales: mates, rivers, apples, rabbits, and so on. Our brains simply weren't built to understand the fabric of reality at the very small scales (quantum mechnics) or the very large (the cosmos). As Blaise Pascal put it, “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

Avi

What advice would you give to a smart kid who's now in high school?

David

Watch TED talks: smart people will distill their life’s work down to 20 minutes for you. Follow links through infinite trajectories of Wikipedia. Watch educational videos on topics that resonate with you.

There are a million ways to waste time on the net; reject those in favor of ways that teach you exactly what you want to know. Never before have we enjoyed such an opportunity for tailored, individualized education.

And be sure to get off-line often, to take digital sabbaths. As much as the net provides a platter of mankind's learning, there is a different kind of learning to be had from a hike in the woods, the climbing of a tree, an afternoon building a dam in a stream.

An interview with William Powers, author of Hamlet's Blackberry

Avi Solomon — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:00:49 +0000

Photo: Anne Ghory-Goodman

William Powers is the author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry.

Avi Solomon

First of all, I understand why you're having all these interviews because I think you've really touched on a sensitive issue for a lot of people, of being connected all the time.

William Powers

I've realized that it is sensitive, Avi, but I think we're only at the beginning of people recognizing it. People like you are the cutting edge of something and I'm not sure what it is, but there's some kind of dawning realization happening out there. It's fascinating to see it kind of blossom and I think that it's really just the start of something actually quite wonderful because I think we're going to wind up being a lot smarter about these digital tools.

William Powers reads from Hamlet's Blackberry.

Avi

I think it's practically the most important issue because being addicted to the internet you realize you're missing out on your life not just with yourself but with your family.

William

And my thesis is that you're also missing out on the internet in a way because by being an addict you're not being the best digital person you could be. You don't bring as much to that world as you could if you're there all the time. I'm not surprised to hear that you're from India or atleast from a place that has a real strong spiritual tradition because it does seem to be that people who respond most strongly to my book are people who have some kind of background of thinking about their inner life.

What I've discovered in the book coming out is not everybody is really conscious of having a spiritual life, some people are and really care and think about it every day but not everybody has even addressed that question in their life, so it's fascinating to me. I take it for granted because I grew up that way, but not everybody did.

Avi

What's your spiritual background?

William

I'm not a religious person. I wouldn't consider myself a member of any church or anything like that now but I did grow up in a pretty religious family as a Roman Catholic. After public school through eight grade I went to a Catholic boys high school in Providence, Rhode Island. So I just was always surrounded growing up by people who were thinking about the inner life and relatively spiritual people. I think even though I myself moved away from that, you know there's a difference between religion and spirituality obviously, I remained that kind of person where I was sort of keeping track of my own inner self and where it was headed, was I as fulfilled inside as my life was on the outside.

That was really part of the motivation for the book because I realized that these digital tools are often advertised and marketed as tools of fulfillment and of taking us to a better place in our lives, and the more connected I got the more I felt like they were taking something away from me and my inner life and I wanted to fix that because it shouldn't be that way. I think that our technologies should actually enrich that part of us as much as they enrich our work life and all the external things we do. I have a little passage at the beginning of the book you may remember where I talk about the inner life and I talk about it in secular terms. I use a few writers from the past like William James and actually there's a neuroscientist from today's world who calls it "the movie in the brain", it's this thing that we're constantly living in that nobody else has access to - it's just us.

I just felt that these tools were affecting it in a very profound way - some good ways but also increasingly some bad ways and I wanted to address that.

Avi

It's a very tricky thing to describe something like the soul and you do a pretty good job of getting that across.

William

Thank you. I was very aware in writing that part of the book that when you write about technology, you're going to have a lot of readers who don't even necessarily believe that there is such a thing as the soul. People who are more empirical and focused on what you can actually see and prove. So I wanted to do it in a way that kept those people on board for the rest of my argument, so I knew I has to do it in a really broad sense and not alienate people by being too abstract. So I really tried to keep it tied to everyday experience but at the same time try and acknowledge that there is this other part of us that you can't put under a microscope but that is incredibly important to everything we do.

When people are reading the book they seem to really sit up and notice when they get to that part because they realize nobody that they had come across wrote about technology combined with the spiritual, particularly suggesting that there's something to think about the devices they're using everyday.

Avi

You do mean something particular by the word "depth".

William

In writing the book I really searched and struggled for quite a while to find a word or relatively short phrase that would capture what's at stake here and I finally realized that the word "depth" did it. While it's a very broad word because it doesn't refer to something specific, this weakness is also it's strength because when you think about it, every experience we have in every dimension of our life can go deeper, can be an experience that feels like it's going to a profound place, or not. So it's not just limited to work or to relationships or to the quality of a given experience you're having as an individual - it's all those things. Everything we do in life can feel like it's deeper or more superficial depending on how you manage it and what happens to occur while you're having that experience. So I sort of felt it was a perfect word because it's very malleable and you can talk about it in many different ways. I also decided to go with "depth" because it's an accessible concept.

Everybody knows in a very informal way what it's like to say "I went to see that movie, it was really deep". That really means something to people and they know that deep is generally speaking a good thing and that life should be full of depth because that means you're really living it fully. People seem to bring it up a lot at my talks and I'm glad I didn't have to invent a new concept. There are various phrases like "digital maximalism" that I created for the book and I didn't want too have too much stuff that felt like jargon. And I still think about it all the time - I really still examine at the end of the day have I had a day where I went deep with my experiences at work, in my connections with people and so forth. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But when it feels like I had some depth in my day I count that a successful day.

Avi

Your metaphor of a glance across the room disconnects the time aspect from the depth aspect.

William

Yes, so it's not about how much time you spend on something. Once I saw that sentence about the glance across the room written on the screen in front of me I realized: that is really true. I've had some glances with other people that were full of meaning and texture. More meaning than a multi-hour conversation and therefore it's not necessarily about the time investment. There's something else happening that gets you to a deep place that's really about the extent to which you're present in that moment. Really there and giving everything you've got. And that can happen in a glance or all kinds of things we do. It can happen in a tweet, frankly, if you really bring everything you've got to what you're tweeting. But that's the trick, it's how do you do that, how do you bring as much of yourself to bear in as many of your actions, thoughts and experiences each day. And that's of course the challenge of life and I think it's something that digital tools can help us with, but to make that happen we have to be very more thoughtful about them than most of us have been so far.

Avi

You came across a TV commercial from Thailand that perfectly illustrates this point.

William

It seems to be a public service ad that was put on Thailand television by a big telecom company, interestingly. It shows people just doing everyday things: walking on the beach, hanging out with friends and family, doing all kinds of interpersonal situations. And it shows how when one person goes off to do a digital task the other people disappear from their lives and are not present with them anymore in the fullest sense, they literally disappear in the video. I think it's a very well done, moving and powerful ad and message particularly for a telecom company to send. In fact one person wrote to me that they were tearing up watching it because it reminded them of how much is at stake when we are with people and when we make a decision to be less with them than we might be because that's really what the ad is all about.

Avi

The Tibetan concept of the bardo and McLuhan's term "extra-environment" also resonate with your idea of having gaps between experiences.

William

Does bardo literally mean like "the gap between"?

Avi

Yes.

William

That's fascinating. Yes, you have to have these spaces between experiences in order to grasp the full value and meaning of the experience. It's also the concept of ecstasy which means "stepping out of yourself". Ecstasy in a sense means having the ultimate experience but it's also a greek word that literally means leaving yourself in order to have a full experience of yourself. So that's what these gaps are about really. And that very ordinary one that I talk about in the book about calling my mother from the car and then having this amazingly rich mental experience of my mother after I ended the phone call and put the phone back in the cupholder turns out to be really the moment that people ask me most about and I'm asked to read on the radio and so forth. Because it's about this value of the gap that people I think all know about intuitively. To be able to have a mundane phone call with my mother and have it turn into this memorable connection with her and have it all happen because of a digital tool really does throw into very high relief the potential of these tools to truly connect us in better ways. But again you have to keep the gaps in mind.

It's kind of a paradox: In order to get the most out of the connection it's crucial that you know how to disconnect and how to use the disconnected time.

Avi

Can paper be used as a kind of disconnection device?

William

We're seeing an aspect of print on paper that wasn't clear to us when we were less connected everyday or not connected at all electronically. When you couldn't reach out to somebody in China in a matter of seconds and hear back from them, the idea of sitting down with a printed book and just being right there focused on that one task wasn't possibly so unusual. But now that print on paper has become an exception to life in the digital world we realize - here are all these things that paper has being doing for us for all these centuries and we didn't even fully realize it, paper really is a tool of focus and paper does help us have what Nicolas Carr calls "long thoughts".

That was a really remarkable trick that paper pulled off for a long time and maybe we should think about either keeping paper around so we can continue to do that on a regular basis or rethinking and redesigning the digital tools so they do that a little better. The popularity of Moleskine and all paper notebooks seems to be growing and that's very telling.

There's something about electric communication that is a little bit unsettling to the consciousness or puts us in a state that's relatively unsettled. This has been the case for over 150 years now with the invention of the telegraph. We feel like we're speeding up and accelerating and that can be very exciting and useful in some ways but in the end it doesn't afford focus the way that non-electric modes of reading and experiencing information do. That's something we're still wrestling with. The digital age in a sense is just a new chapter in our emerging relationship with electronic communication.

Avi

And the more an ereader becomes tablet-like, the more it looses that paper quality.

William

An ereader is three dimensional but we don't access the information that's in an ereader in a way that's three dimensional because it's a screen displaying electronic information. But the way we use an old-fashioned book is completely three-dimensional. The pages of a paper book exist and move in time and space the way we do. We are embodied creatures and there's something about an embodied tool that's different from a two-dimensional tool and it's very powerful for us in ways that are almost hard to articulate. That question of embodiment is huge in a digital world.

Avi

How can one "get" your idea of having an Internet Sabbath?

William

If you're really a digital person and you have been spending your days connected and you haven't had time away from the screen for weeks or months or even years for some people, it's very hard to even grasp what it feels like to spend a couple of full days offline and how different it is. The way in which your perception and your thoughts and really your whole experience just go into a different gear. You can't do it by going offline for one day.

It isn't enough because you're still in the transition and for some people who're really addicted, you're still in the withdrawal. As I write in the book, it took my family really a couple of months to adjust to the shift that happened and to the way in which everything you do through the day feels and is different because you're experiencing it differently. When you talk to another person who's fully done it you can talk about it with that person but even then it's hard to describe. It's like talking about a piece of music and trying to capture what the music did to you. Offline time is like life having a different melody and it's very very profound but you have to do it to know the difference.

Bookbinding in the Digital Age: an interview with Michael Greer

Avi Solomon — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:10:40 +0000

Michael Greer is a Bookbinder. I interviewed him to find out more about his unusual profession and his recent creation, the binary Genesis.

Avi Solomon

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Michael Greer

I’m a guy who loves books. For years that’s meant teaching literature both here and abroad. I like getting into the heavy stuff. I work with teenagers who understand Hobbes, and when we read the Odyssey together, we read the whole thing, not just the fantasy bits. But I also like working with my hands and that’s why being a bookbinder just seems to fit. It seems like such a rarity nowadays-the possibility to work with one’s hands. Especially to create something from start to finish. And then when that something happens to be the text of a really good book, it just works.

Avi

What happened on your trip to Morocco?

Michael

By the spring of 2007 I was finishing up 4 years teaching at an American school in Casablanca. One of my colleagues had these beautiful leather bound books on his shelves at home and he told me where I could find the binder. So for a few years I would take the train up to Rabat and drop off a few books now and again.

Just before my wife and I started packing to leave, I brought one last project to the binder. I had put together a bunch of essays and travel articles that I’d written and formatted into a proper book. I made seven copies and brought them to the binder. A week or so later I went to pick them up. By this time I was an established client so he really made them nice…all kinds of beautiful marbled papers and nice leathers. It was one thing to have another author’s book rebound, but seeing your own in full leather…well, I was hooked.

School was out so I was there at an unusual time (for me) and as I was talking to the old man who owned the shop I heard a loud pounding from behind the wall. “What’s that?” I asked. “The binder,” he said. I’d always thought he was the binder, so it kind of took me by surprise. Turns out that the actual binder worked in the basement. I’d never seen him. I asked the owner if I could come watch him work one day. The next week my wife and I showed up. The binder hadn’t been told we were coming and seemed a little at a loss at first. I asked a question, my wife translated, and he would give one or two word replies. After a few of these exchanges he got up and reached behind a bunch of old rags and pulled out an old book. For the rest of the day, he showed us the way a book was made. He also told stories about the shop and it came out he would be retiring and the shop would probably close. It was hard news. The end of something special.

That afternoon as my wife and I walked to the train, I told her I wanted to learn bookbinding and that’s what happened. After the summer, I worked at the shop for free and learned by watching and then by doing. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

Avi

Could you describe the bookbinding process?

Michael

The bookbinding process can be disturbing. It’s violent at first. You literally tear the book apart. Most older books were sewn, so you cut the thread and then pull each signature or booklet off the book. Then you sew them back together again on a sewing frame which is basically a loom for books.

With so much thread in the book, it’s fatter in back than in front, so to correct for this, the spine is glued up and rounded to take up some of the swell. After that, the book is put into a press and the spine is hammered so that the signatures bend over creating little shoulders. Essentially, you’re creating an arch. The boards act as columns. The arch of the spine works to fight gravity and keep the pages from sagging too much on the shelves.

While the glue is drying you prepare the boards. Heavy carton is cut to size and lined with newspaper on the inside which makes them warp and sort of hug the text block. It looks awful. These boards get sanded and then attached to the text block with the cords. Meanwhile, the leather is cut out. In Morocco, we had a great machine that tapered off the leather so that it would fold over the edges better, but now I do all that work by hand. The leather is pasted up and then sort of molded onto the back of the book and then the front and back covers. It’s tricky getting it folded over at the top and bottom of the spine and bookbinders pride themselves on the shape they give to these “endcaps.” The pull of the leather counteracts the pull of the newsprint and the boards end up flat.

The final task is the finishing…putting on the title with gold foil. It’s the hardest part of the job and the most stressful. You’ve got a pallet full of hot letters and one chance to place them squarely onto the back of a curved spine. I usually feel pretty awful about a book until it finally gets covered in leather. They just look so bad. But then my spirits lift and once the gold lettering is on, I’m usually feeling pretty happy again. It’s like alchemy.

Avi

What's the importance of bookbinding in a digital age?

Michael

My friend who owns several bookstores often laughs at me. “We’re in a dying trade,” he says. Too often, I have to agree with him. But when I get sick of all the information beaming at me through the computer and over the radio and tv, a book made of paper can be just the thing. It’s nice to handle something that is still unplugged.

The other thing is that so much of the digital world is actually more ephemeral than the physical world. I have ten year old computer files that I can’t read. How long will a Nook last? Last night I was reading a book by Ernie Pyle about the Second World War when my wife walked into the room. It dawned on me that she was in our bedroom, but I was watching our navy transports unload soldiers on the beaches of Sicily. I was plugged in but the book wasn’t. Then it will go back onto the shelf until someone else picks it up…ten, twenty, twelve hundred years from now.

Avi

What's the most satisfying thing about being a bookbinder? What are the challenges?

Michael

Bookbinding is one of mankind’s oldest technologies and one that still can’t be beat. I like the continuity, the fact that I learned from someone who had learned from someone…and so on. In the US, hand bookbinding as a trade has been nearly dead for many years. A few of us quixotic dreamers hang on. Still, the revolution in the last decade in on-demand publishing could create a space for us. Twenty years ago, self-publishers paid a hefty sum to print maybe 250 copies of their family history. They gave away ten and the rest went into the attic. For about the same amount of money, I can print and bind ten full leather volumes and create others on demand. The difficulty is letting people know that this kind of thing exists. When I do fairs, people often approach my table full of books with a mystified smile and say, “I didn’t know anybody did this stuff anymore.” If bookbinders can get the word out, we might be able to carve out a place for our services in the growing world of digital publishing.

Avi

How did you come up with the idea of a binary Genesis?

Michael

Initially, I just wanted to see what that river of ones and zeros would look like on the page. But then it just seemed like an idea I could wrap myself around. The bible had been translated into so many languages, why not put it in binary and bind it medieval style? I liked the irony, but I also liked what it said about the longevity of a book as a repository of information. I’ve owned three or four computers and they never made it past five years. How long will my book last?

Avi

How have people responded to the binary Genesis project? What fascinates them about it?

Michael

At the Maker Faire this year, people loved it. I always encourage people to pick up and handle my books. Like me a few years ago, many of them had never seen or handled a leather bound book, so at first they’re drawn to that. The title is in binary on the cover so they really don’t know what it is. When they open it up and see all those ones and zeros they kind of laugh. But then when I tell them it is the Book of Genesis in binary, they really seem to get it.

Interview: Apollo astronaut Al Worden

Avi Solomon — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:14:42 +0000

Col. Al Worden is an Engineer and Apollo 15 CMP. His autobiography is called Falling to Earth.

Audio: Al Worden on the view from the back side of the Moon and the scale of the universe. Photo: Stuart Crawford

Avi Solomon: What were the major formative influences as you were growing up?

Col. Al Worden: There were a number of major influences on my life. My grandfather was probably as big an influence on me as anyone. He was a farmer in the upper part of the state of Michigan. He actually homesteaded the land. My granddad had a team of horses and everything was done with them. Back then it was one guy against the dirt on his farm and against mother nature trying to make a living out of owning a farm. I used to go up there and spend the summers with him on the farm and what I got from him was a sense of responsibility and a sense of perseverance and dedication to the job at hand. And then when I worked my way through school my high school principal was a great influence on me and he always told me that I could do anything I wanted to do if I just put my mind to it and worked hard at it and that's the way it worked out. He actually got me a scholarship to the University of Michigan, my first year, and during that year because of the family financial situation we were in, I applied for an appointment to West Point and received that from from one of the state senators and went to West Point. That kind of set me a path into the air Force and then back to college and then off doing work for the Air Force after that. I think that Earl Holman, my principal was probably a huge influence on my life.

Avi: That probably explains why you're so interested in childhood education.

Al: That's part of it. I was very involved with everything at my school. In fact at one point I actually took under my wing a fellow in my class who was having problems with the police and they actually paroled him to me and while he was with me he did very well. I was very interested in his education and keeping him going and that kind of translated into a real interest in motivating and getting young kids to go to school and do well.

Avi: How did you get into the Apollo program?

Al: I flew in the Air Force for a number of years and it was quite obvious to me that the next assignment would be a staff job somewhere and I decided that if I was going to be sitting at a desk I should do it for my benefit as well as the Air Force's. So I got myself an appointment to go back to the University of Michigan to graduate school. and while I was there I met a couple of guys, one was the deputy director of the USAF test pilot's school at Edwards and the other was the head of Academics there. Because of my friendship with them they interested me in applying for test pilot school which I did and I got an appointment to go to Europe to go through the Empire test pilot school in England. It's one of those things that you do the best and everything you can in the career path you've chosen and when you get all the way through that pipeline you find that other doors open. It turned out that NASA had an application program about a year after I'd graduated from test pilot school and I kind of had the stuff that they needed.

Avi: So you had the right skills at the right time?

Al: That's exactly right. I had both the academic background and the test pilot school background. As a matter of fact when I was selected into NASA I was an instructor at the Aerospace Advanced Research pilot school at Edwards, California.

Avi: What was the secret sauce to being an Apollo Astronaut?

Al: To get into the program it was a question of your background and all the requirements that you met like academics, flying time and being a test pilot and all that. Once in the program I think just dedication to learning everything you can and doing everything right and not playing office politics were the important things, as far as I was concerned. I was an engineer by training, I was a test pilot and I very quickly got into projects that required those particular values and that helped me in the program. I don't know that there's a secret sauce. The funny thing about the astronaut program is that everyone who was in the program was an individual. And there were very individualistic people. I think that's testament to their backgrounds and their dedication to getting all the training they could get before they got into the program and they had to do that on their own. So there were pretty individualistic type of people in the program and once they got assigned to a crew then they molded themselves into a crew of three people to go to the moon. But that's how they got there. Very hard-driving type people that were going to get all the training they could get. It may not have been for the space program, it could have been for other things like being a test pilot in the Air Force. But once they got all of those qualifications in their kitbag then they were acceptable to the program. Once in the program we all had to apply ourselves to all the things we had to learn about space and how to navigate and how to fly. In my particular crew we learned an awful lot of geology because we were going to explore the moon and those kinds of things. It's a dedication to the job and the ability or the willingness to work long hard hours to amass all of the knowledge you need to be able to make the flight.

Avi: Were there project management or design principles that made the program as a whole a success?

Al: Yes, I think that's absolutely true. When I was in the program back in the late sixties and early seventies there was no bureaucracy in the program. We had a goal of getting to the moon and getting back and everybody worked to that goal. I really didn't see a lot of bureaucracy. I think that crept into the program later on when the shuttle program came about. But when I was there everybody was focused on the goal and there was nobody that was trying to protect their job - they were all trying to get the job done. I think that's the thing that made the difference. And of course we had a fantastic design team in Wernher von Braun and his team that put the Saturn V launch vehicle and the Apollo spacecraft together, plus the architecture of how you go to the moon and how you land on the moon with the lunar module, that was all pretty much worked out years before we started making the flights, but that all came together very well. I think it was a lot of hard work, some excellent engineering and some very dedicated management people who were only focused on getting people to the moon safely.

Avi: How important were simulations in the Astronaut training?

Al: It's a great difference between flying an airplane and flying a spacecraft. In an airplane you can go up with an instructor and he can show you all the things that an airplane can do and he coaches you through how to fly an airplane sort of on-site - you get in an airplane and you go fly it. With a spacecraft you don't have that ability to just fly that thing around a little bit so you've got to do it in simulation. Simulation is the only way you can learn how to really fly that thing. So our simulator was absolutely perfect. It did everything that we would see in flight: all the visuals, all the noise, the mechanical part, the computer, the navigation; everything in the simulator worked exactly like it would in the flight. And that really trained us for the flight because once we in the flight it was sort of like doing the simulation all over again.

Avi: What made the Saturn V so special? Would it be easy to build it again today?

Al: That's a good question! Saturn V was obviously the largest launch vehicle ever built. It was designed from the ground up by the people at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and that's where Wernher von Braun was the director and he kind of oversaw the design and the buildup of the Saturn V. It was early in the space business and all the engines on the Saturn V were liquid fuel engines. Liquid fuel engines are more complicated than solid boosters but they have some attributes that solids don't have. In fact on some of the engines we could start and stop them in space, which you can't do with a solid. The Saturn V engines had an attribute called center line of thrust: the engines were stacked close enough together at the base of the launch vehicle so that if you lost one the others could tilt slightly to take over for that one engine. As a matter of fact on one of the flights they lost the center engine and they just kept on going, it took them a little longer to get into orbit but everything was fine. With solid boosters that's pretty tough to do because if you lose one you have to lose both. The Saturn V was an absolutely wondrous machine: Seven and a half million pounds of thrust to get it off the ground and as I said it's the largest machine that's ever been built. There are three Saturn Vs that are still around on display. Most of the parts of those three are actual flight-type vehicles. The question of whether you could resurrect the Saturn V today or not, I'm not really too qualified to answer that. I would think that it could probably be done. They could go back and get the old designs and the plans and have it rebuilt. It's not a question of having to demonstrate it or prove it, just to build it. I think it could be done but I'm just not sure that that's something that is in the cards, I'm not sure that the direction of the program is going to allow that.

Avi: So it was kind of good that the last missions were cancelled so we have the Saturn Vs on display!

Al: In a way. Of course there were a lot of us back in the day really disappointed that Apollos' 18, 19 and 20 never flew. They were flight ready vehicles - they could have gone and there were crews to fly them. But NASA around about that time back in 71 before we flew decided that the money that it would take to fly those Saturn Vs they needed to use to continue the development of the Shuttle. So that money was taken away from the Apollo program and put in the Shuttle program. There could have been other reasons too that I'm not aware of. But it would have been nice to fly 18, 19 and 20 for sure. You know, I look back upon it now Avi, and when I go to the Saturn V center at the Cape and look at that Saturn V sitting there in the building I kind of think in a way, that's not so bad. I got my flight, I made my flight to to the Moon so I'm not missing anything. But a thousand years from now, it's going to be really, really something for people to walk through that Saturn V building and see what we were able to do back in the 1960s.

Avi: I was there a few months ago and it was astonishing.

Al: That's quite a machine isn't it!

Avi: It's on the scale of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which I've visited, so I can compare.

Al: I think a lot of people compare the Apollo program to building the pyramids of Egypt and I think that's right. It took as many people! I mean there were half a million people around the country that were working on the Apollo program at the time. So a lot of people, a lot of engineering, a lot of tough decisions made and most of them were right because we had very little trouble to getting six flights to land on the moon.

Avi: You spent a lot of time circling the moon alone. Could you describe what it was like?

Al: Well, it was kind of a wonderful time for me Avi! I was trained as a single-seat fighter pilot to begin with and so I like to be in a flying machine by myself. Lot of people think it's pretty lonely up there but on my flight I was there for three days in orbit while Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the surface and during those three days I was busy like 20 hours a day doing all the experiments and the science that were called for in the flight-plan. So I was really, really busy. I enjoyed the time by myself, I enjoyed looking at the moon's surface and describing features which Dr. El-Baz and I had worked out before the flight. He was my geologist instructor. So I was very busy not only doing visual observations but mapping the surface of the moon, taking high resolution pictures of the surface and doing a lot of photography work both of the moon and other features like star-patterns and that kind of thing. So it was a good time for me, I enjoyed it. I have to admit that I wasn't really very lonely after flying with those two guys in a spacecraft about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, I was glad to get rid of them for a while, so it was very comfortable for me.

Avi: What's the view from the back of the moon?

Al: There are two things that are important: there's the back side of the moon and there's the dark side to the moon. They are two different things. The back side is the side away from the earth and the dark side is the side away from the sun. So they're not the same thing. On our flight the moon was about half lit, so there was about half a moon. So there was a little space around the back side as I was going around it where I was shadowed from both the Earth and the Sun and that was pretty amazing. I could see more stars than I could possibly imagine. It really makes you wonder about our place in the Universe and what we're all about. When you see that many stars out there you realize that those are really suns and those suns could have planets around them and all that kind of stuff. But probably the most spectacular part of going to the back side of the moon was coming around the moon and seeing the earth come up. And of course home planet is a pretty spectacular place. It is the only planet in the solar system that has all of the ingredients we need for life. It has water, it has land, it has the atmosphere and so it's a pretty gorgeous thing to look at from out there. And so no matter what I was doing, when I came around the side of the moon and the Earth was rising over the lunar surface I got to a window to watch it. That was pretty spectacular.

Avi: Like the crescent earth photo you took.

Al: Yes, it's my favorite photo. The crescent part of the earth you see is covered with clouds.

Avi: Could you see the outline of the milky way or were there just too many stars?

Al: Too many stars, Avi, yes. As you know we're part of the milky way galaxy and we look at it sideways, we look through it. When there's so many stars that you look at out there it's very hard to make out anything like a milky way or anything like that. In fact, there were so many stars I had some difficulty finding any of the 37 brighter stars that we used as navigation stars because they were so bathed in starlight from the other stars around them.

Avi: So, for example, you would try and find Sirius and...

Al: ...and it would be very difficult to find. And there were times when I had to let the computer drive the optics to the star that I wanted to use for navigation because I had difficulty finding it with all the other stars out there.

Avi: The number of galaxies, let alone stars is truly astonishing!

Al: Oh yes! People don't understand. I've developed the attitude that there's something like no beginning or end of time and there's no such thing as infinity because everything just keeps going. In the milky way galaxy there are a couple of hundred billion stars and there are a couple of hundred billion galaxies out there. So we really don't have a very good concept of the universe. I think we're getting to it with the Hubble and Kepler and a few of the other satellites that are out there now. Eventually we'll kind of figure it out but we're a long ways from understanding the universe.

Avi: There's probably like a few billion stars per person alive.

Al: Well I would think so, yes. I have never looked at it that way, but yes, my guess is that's correct.

Avi: So how do you keep this kind of wonder alive?

Al: Well, you talk about it a lot. Every time I give a talk I talk about the universe out there and the numbers of stars and how beautiful the earth is and all that. You talk about it, you write about it, you try and get people involved in what you're saying and I think that most of us are fairly successful at doing that.

Avi: The other amazing thing you saw was on your EVA. It was the first interplanetary EVA?

Al: Yes. And as a matter of fact I was further out from Earth than any of the others. I still have the record for the furthest out EVA. A little about 50,000 miles this side of the moon when I did that. It was kind of unique because as you know when the spacecraft comes back from the moon it doesn't come straight back - it loops around. It makes a big arc path to get back to the earth because of the motion of the moon and the earth and all the rest of it. So we were off the center-line of the moon and the earth and I could see the both of them at the same time. Pretty spectacular - you look at the moon and there's nothing there except craters and ancient lava flows and that kind of thing, then you look at the Earth and it's very dynamic, it's got cloud cover and all the stuff that we know about. The difference between the two is pretty dramatic. Spectacular sight, I have to say from out there, especially when you're standing in the middle of a spacesuit with a bubble helmet and you can kind of look around. Jim Irwin was standing in the hatch at the time watching me and making sure that everything was OK. The moon was behind him, in fact there's a painting at the Smithsonian that Pierre Mion did of my EVA since I wasn't allowed to take a camera out, and it shows Jim Irwin standing in the hatch with the moon behind him and I was reflected in his visor. Kind of a neat painting.

Avi: Even if you had a camera would you have been able to capture the earth and the moon together?

Al: No, I couldn't do that because they were too far apart for that but that really wasn't the purpose. I really wanted to take a camera out to photograph the outside of the service module and we found some things where photographs would have been helpful. We found that there was some scorching from the reaction control system jets. The mapping camera had stuck out and wouldn't retract. Some pictures and all of that stuff would have been useful for the engineers back in Houston. And I kind of sensed that there might be things like that I would really like to take pictures of but not the earth and the moon because I'd already done that when I was in lunar orbit. A page from "Hello Earth", Al Worden's book of poetry

Avi: So is this what inspired you to write a book of poetry? I think you're one of the only astronauts who's composed a book of poetry.

Al: You know what happened. When we got back from the flight we went into two weeks of debriefing. We were pretty exhausted from the flight and we spent all day long from early morning to early evening debriefing and when I'd get home I'd just be totally exhausted and I couldn't go to sleep. So I'd sit in my living room with a pad of paper and a pencil and just start writing things and when we looked at it later it was just kind of like poetry so I rearranged it a little bit and the poetry came out. Poetry is kind of a shorthand for the feelings and the thought processes that you're going through and that's kind of what came out on the paper so that's what ended up as the book of poetry.

Avi: It's really a very personal piece of work. You talk there about "rebirth at thirty-nine".

Al: Yes. That was on the EVA. I had the thought that it's just like being born because you're getting out of the spacecraft out into the world on your own. And that's what brought that up. I was reborn at thirty-nine because that EVA did that for me. As a matter of fact I kind of had that feeling of rebirth going outside. A whole new perspective on everything.

Avi: And it's also interesting that one of the poems ends with "God made it all".

Al: Well, that's kind of feeling that you get. And that really doesn't answer the question of what you think God is. But when you look at the universe out there and you see all those billions of stars and you see they're all formed in galaxies, and the galaxies break down into stars and some of those stars even further break down into planetary systems, you say - man, there is an organization to this universe that we just can't comprehend. There had to be something, somewhere, somehow that made this all happen. In my mind it just didn't spring out of nothing. How better do you describe it? You have to say that there's some other force, some other power whether you call it God or chairman of the board or CEO or whatever you want to call it. Something somewhere had to work to put all this together in the consistency of what we see of the universe.

Avi: That's probably why many of the Apollo astronauts had a more religious or philosophical turn in their lives after they returned from the moon?

Al: I suspect so. Several of the guys when they came back became quite religious. I think being away from earth that far and looking back at earth had a big influence on those guys too. Because we live in the only planet we know of that's habitable and something had to make that happen. In fact Jim Irwin founded High Flight foundation and he went all over the world giving testimony after the flight. I think that's great. Other guys like Ed Mitchell got into psychic phenomena because of the flight. He was already interested in it but he kind of focused his attention on it after the flight. It's interesting what happened to the guys once they made their flight. Some guys like Pete Conrad said that's just another flight and then there's guys like Jim Irwin who said he felt the presence of God on the moon. He gave testimony for christian fellowship organizations.

Avi: So now, forty years down the line, do you still have the same intensity of feeling when you remember your experiences?

Al: Not quite the same intensity. In fact I look at the moon at night and I say - hmm, that's kind of neat because I've seen it up close. I'll tell you what it's a little like. Through all the training and all the simulation you get so immersed in the project that you don't really look at anything else for the time you're in training. It's just so all consuming. And when you come back you go through two weeks of debriefing and then you're let out into the world. It's a little like going to a movie, and you get immersed in the movie and then when the movie's over you walk out on the street, cars are going by, people are walking and talking and doing their thing. And you're back in the real world again. And you say Gee, that was kind of an interesting little episode in my life, I watched that movie and got totally involved in it but here I am back in the real world. It's kind of like that after you make a lunar flight. I won't say that it's imaginary, but it's an experience that's so unlike anything you've ever had in your life that it's almost as if it's mystical in a way. And then when you come back to earth and you land and everything's OK and you do your debriefings, all of a sudden you're back out in the real world again. And now you remember what it was, but the sharp edges of the remembrances get filed off after a while. You remember some of the important things but a lot of the technical stuff I've totally forgotten. But I do remember the experience of going to the moon, being in lunar orbit for six days and coming back home - I remember all of that quite well. But some of the technical stuff like how did we do it I don't remember that.

Avi: Could you tell us a little about your autobiography?

Al: Most of the book is about where I come from, how I grew up and how I selected the career path that I did and going through school and all that. The first part of the book is about spending the days on the farm with my granddad and learning how to be responsible. You've got dumb animals out there that rely on you to do everything for them. That's a thought process that I've kept all my life. But I decided when I was a kid that I would not spend the rest of my time on a farm so that's why I pursued going to college and eventually to the Air Force. But then we get into the space program and the aftermath of our flight. As you know our flight was kind of singled out back in the day because we carried some postal covers that created quite a stir. The last part of the book is about how I sued the US Government. They had asked us to turn all of these things in while they investigated the incident, then they didn't want to return them. So I sued them back in the 80s on behalf of all the astronauts and we took that through the Department of Justice and got everything back. And what I've done since then because I've applied myself to helping charities and working with kids I think to try and get some respect back.

Avi: What skills would you advise today's high school kids to acquire?

Al: There's no question about it. I'm an engineer, Avi. My best subjects in school were math and science. There's no question that I'd go to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses and do absolutely the best I could at those because I really believe that as we go into the future we're going to need some very very innovative people to upgrade old technologies and invent new technologies. Of course that's the kind of thing that's made this country so great over the course of the last forty years is the technology. So that would be my course. And like I tell high school and college kids when I talk to them that the best thing they could do with their lives is to really apply themselves to learning everything they can because you never know what's going to come down the road and what you're going to need. Another page from "Hello Earth."

More at Boing Boing

• Latest science stories

• 4 things you didn't know about sunscreen

• Tracking the source of an E. coli outbreak

• NASA Osiris: Looking for life with the god of death

Interview: Laird Scranton

Avi Solomon — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Laird Scranton is an independent software developer from Albany, New York. He is the author of several books and articles on African and Egyptian mythology and language.

Avi Solomon: Who are the Dogon?

Laird Scranton: The Dogon are a modern-day African tribe from Mali who seem to observe many interesting ancient traditions. In fact, their culture can be seen as a kind of cross-roads for several important ancient traditions. As just a few examples, they wear skull caps and prayer shawls, circumcise their young, and celebrate a Jubilee Year like ancient Jews, they observe the same calendars and establish their villages and districts in pairs called "Upper" and "Lower" like ancient Egypt, and they preserve a detailed cosmology that bears close resemblance to Buddhism, only expressed using ancient Egyptian terms.

Dogon granaries in North Africa. Photo: Robin Taylor

Avi: What got you interested in the Dogon?

Laird: I came across references to the Dogon in a book called "Unexplained" by Jerome Clark, one of whose chapters discusses the mystery of how the Dogon - without the aid of modern telescopes - may have acquired specialized knowledge of astronomy.

Avi: How do the Dogon embody and transmit their knowledge?

Laird: The Dogon have no native written language and have apparently transmitted their knowledge from generation to generation orally, with the assistance of a complex set of mnemonic symbols and drawings, beginning with a grand mnemonic aligned ritual structure called a granary. Although the Dogon religion is a secret or esoteric tradition — meaning that only initiates to the religion are allowed to learn its innermost secrets — it is open to any person (male or female, Dogon or non-Dogon) who sincerely wishes to pursue it. A Dogon priest is required to respond truthfully to any question that is deemed appropriate to the initiate's status, and to remain silent (or lie, if necessary) in response to any question that is deemed to be "out of order."

Avi: What is the significance of Dogon cosmological myths?

Laird: The Dogon see their myths both as an instructed civilizing plan for humanity and as a coherent description of the processes of creation — both cosmological and biological. These myths begin with what are essentially fireside stories that describe in general terms how the stars and planets were formed, and include many of the archetypical themes and storylines of classical mythology, such as the Greek notion of stealing fire from the gods. However, the next level of myth and symbolism is intimately intertwined with civilizing skills such weaving, agriculture, metallurgy, and so on. Each act of daily Dogon life carries with it a degree of cosmological symbolism, and so each daily act reinforces what a Dogon tribesperson learns about the processes of creation.

Avi: How did the Dogon know that Sirius had a companion star and the exact length of it's orbit?

Laird: The contention of the Dogon priests is that they learned it from revered ancestor or teachers, who were more capable and knowledgeable than the Dogon.

Avi: Could this knowledge have been transmitted to the Dogon by westerners?

Laird: A person could argue that the Dogon learned it from westerners, however in my opinion there are some significant difficulties with that point of view. First, both Dogon cosmology and their concepts relating to Sirius are given using ancient Egyptian words. For example, the great Dogon festival of Sirius — called the Sigi — is arguably the Egyptian word skhai, meaning "to celebrate a festival." In fact, in my books I trace virtually every key cosmological term of the Dogon to likely ancient Egyptian counterparts. Moreover, these words typically carry at least two levels of meaning, both of which can be shown to have existed in similar form in ancient Egypt. So the first difficulty lies with finding a western source that could have credibly given this information to the Dogon couched in ancient Egyptian words. Moreover, many of these same words are known to exist in the languages of other African tribes, so we would then have to explain how they came to be adopted in those languages.

Avi: Did the Dogon trick Marcel Griaule? Or did Griaule make up the Dogon mythology himself?

Laird: In his day, Marcel Griaule was the pre-eminent French anthropologist. He and his team studied the Dogon over the course of three decades, from the 1930'ss to the time of Griaule's death in 1956. Griaule characterized the Dogon religion as a closely-held secret tradition. In 1975, the Dogon became controversial when Robert Temple suggested that their Sirius knowledge could represent evidence of an alien contact. In the 1980's, Belgian anthropologist Walter Van Beek conducted a much briefer re-study of the Dogon, which turned up no evidence of Griaule's tradition. Based on this, Van Beek — rather than surmising that he might have failed to successfully penetrate what Griaule described as a secret tradition — concluded that the obliging Dogon priests had invented a cosmology to satisfy Griaule's questions. Van Beek also concluded that the Dogon granary was a form known only to Griaule.

In 2007 — fifty years after Griaule's death — my daughter returned from a visit to India excited to have seen aligned ritual structures called stupas that she felt resembled my Dogon granary. I pursued the resemblance and soon discovered that the cosmological symbolism of a Buddhist stupa is a point-for-point match with the symbolism reported by Griaule for the Dogon granary. In fact, the Dogon are known to have migrated to their current location from a region of North Africa that was a known home to ancient Buddhism. In other words, for Professor Van Beek to be correct, we'd have to believe the Dogon priests capable of having casually invented Buddhism. Likewise, the granary form that Van Beek concluded was known only to Griaule, was in fact familiar to large populations all across India and Asia.

Avi: How is the Dogon granary related to the Buddhist Stupa?

Laird: Each represents the Grand Mnemonic of their associated cosmologies — a structure whose plan recreates key shapes that relate both to the processes of creation and to the acquisition of civilizing skills. Both are based on the same basic plan, evoke the same series of geometric shapes in the same sequence and assign the same symbolism to those shapes. Both are tied to detailed cosmologies that define the processes of biological and cosmological creation, defined by matching symbols and concepts.

Avi: Can you give some significant examples of connection between Dogon and Egyptian words?

Laird: Each key term of Dogon cosmology comes packaged as a kind of bundle that includes: 1) Its pronunciation. 2) At least two logically-disconnected meanings, such that you cannot reasonably guess the secondary meanings simply by knowing the first. 3) An associated cosmological drawing. 4) A relationship to a stage of creation and/or mythogical character within the cosmology.

When proposing correlations between Dogon and Egyptian words, my intent is to demonstrate likely correlations between each of the bundle's elements.

While developing these matching sets of elements, I came to realize that the most consistent matches were to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Wallis Budge, not to the German Worterbuch that is preferred by many modern Egyptologists. The consensus is that Budge's dictionary is outdated and often unreliable — some Egyptologists go so far as to say that Budge could barely read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Nonetheless, I realize that it would be unreasonable to suggest that Budge could have been grossly wrong about Egyptian words and yet still somehow in predictable agreement with the Dogon. And so I offer the body of interrelated Dogon words as new evidence to show that Budge must have been substantially correct in his understanding of Egyptian words of cosmology.

In my books I provide detail to support various Dogon/Egyptian word correlations. Examples include the name of a Dogon mythological character named Ogo, who plays the role of "light" in the Dogon creation myths, and the name of the Egyptian light god Aakhu. The Dogon counterpart to an atom is called po, while the Egyptian term for "mass, matter, substance" is pau. Components of the po are referred to using words such as sene, and sene bennu that are likely counterparts to the Egyptian words sen and sennu. The Dogon term bummo is a likely correlate to the Egyptian phrase bu maa, both the Dogon and Egyptian terms nu refer to water. The name if the Dogon creator god Amma is commonly correlated to the name Amen in the languages of various African tribes. The Dogon nummo is a likely counterpart to the Egyptian phrase nu maa.

I have attempted to correlate each key Dogon cosmological term to an Egyptian counterpart and supported those correlations with other "bundled" evidence - relationship to a common drawn shape, relationship to a matching mythological character, sharing position in the overall cosmology, and so on.

Avi: What are the Dogon parallels to Judaism?

Laird: I've mention that the Dogon wear skull caps, prayer shawls, circumcise their young, and celebrate a Jubilee year. They also have a tradition of ancestral families similar to the tribes of Judaism — one called Lebe (similar to the Levi in Judaism) and a priestly class called Hogon (similar to the Cohen in Judaism). The traditional symbolism of a Jewish altar and a Jewish chuppa are a close match for the Dogon granary and Buddhist stupa. Many of the Egyptian cosmological words are also Hebrew words — for example, a skhet is defined as a hut made of twigs and branches, similar to a sukkah. Budge often uses Hebrew words as a basis for comparison for pronunciation and meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphic words and the Dogon terms support these comparisons. Early in my studies, seemingly obvious parallels between Dogon words, symbols, concepts or rituals and those of Judaism helped convince me that the Dogon could be an important subject for study.

Avi: What wider speculations about the development of civilization can you draw from your comparative studies?

Laird: Each culture that I've studied who outwardly shares what I call "signature aspects" of this same cosmology understands it as an instructed civilizing plan, which they associate with knowledgeable teachers. Some explicitly claim that these teachers were non-human. Many - like the ancient Egyptians - state that they received their systems of writing, agricultural grains, or skills of metallurgy from "gods".

The suggestion is that there was - at some time prior to 3400 BC - a global Peace Corps - like effort to raise humanity up from the state of hunter-gatherers to a more civilized state.

From that perspective, the many striking similarities we see globally in ancient myth and symbol would be the surviving product of a shared system of instruction. Although many argue that cultures of similar capability and with access to similar environments and materials would naturally evolve similar themes and form, in my opinion these arguments beg the question of the often very complex symbolism that commonly attaches itself to those forms.

For example, the four faces of the pyramid-like Dogon granary are associated with the same four star groups as pyramids in the Americas, which were then used to regulate an agricultural cycle. Both cultures conceived of their pyramids as a woman lying on her back.

Perhaps most important is the notion, corroborated from culture to culture , that the system was instructed. One purpose of my studies has been to try to illuminate by way of comparison some of the very sensible aspects of that apparent plan.

Avi: What is the situation of the Dogon today?

Laird: The Dogon represent about 300,000 individuals today and are facing the many pressures of contact with more modern societies and technologies. Tourism has created an industry for them and provides a venue for their interesting traditional artwork. Even so, their inhospitable location in a hot, remote desert climate helps to maintain their independent identity. One can only hope that a cultural system that has proved its stability over periods of almost three thousand years in Egypt and perhaps an additional two thousand years, the Dogon will sustain itself in the midst of many modern pressures.

Interview: Erik Knutzen

Avi Solomon — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:09:52 +0000

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen grow food, keep chickens, brew, bike, bake, and plot revolution from their 1/12-acre farm in the heart of Los Angeles. They are the the authors of The Urban Homestead and Making It. Avi Solomon: How did your urban homesteading adventure begin? Erik Knutzen: I've always enjoyed making things and understanding how stuff works with many hours spent in lower level two of the LA public library - where all the howto books are shelved. Kelly has always been interested in urban survival and foraging. But our urban homesteading adventure began with the search for a decent tomato. Kelly and I were living in an apartment at the time so we started growing tomatoes in pots on our front porch. We were amazed that it worked. When we bought a house in 1998 and had some yard space to play with, we started growing more vegetables and herbs. As we went along, we kept adding things to our toolkit: composting, greywater, chickens, bees, etc.-and there's always more to do. The adventure never ends, really.Avi: What motivates you to make all this effort to help others? Erik: All of the projects we write about in our books are tangible, household level activities that everyone can do. Things like vegetable gardening, food preservation and cooking from scratch also lend themselves to community building at the neighborhood level. We can get together as neighbors and share meals, learn to bake bread or care for each others' chickens. Doing so creates bonds in an otherwise fragmented culture. The hermetic expression "as within so without" applies here. Our actions on a personal and household level ripple outwards. When we change ourselves, and our home, we change the world. When we change our neighborhood we change the world. Hopefully when we teach and write, this also helps make our inner reality our outer reality. In any case, the work we do puts us in contact with so many amazing people. Some we teach, some teach us, and most often it's a little of both. All in all, it's a deeply fulfilling way to live. Avi: How has your quality of life changed since you started to provide part of your food for yourself? Erik: I love being part of a community of people interested in growing food. Again, I can't emphasize enough how many wonderful people I've met since I started doing this. Growing food has also brought me closer to the mysteries of nature. It's amazing how much you can learn in your own back yard. There's a certain humility that comes from realizing that I'll never even begin to comprehend the complex symbiotic relationships inherent in natural systems. This very complexity, though, is what keeps both Kelly and I engaged with the process, and promises to enrich our lives for years to come. Avi: How did you get started with hens and eggs? Erik: Kelly insisted on getting laying hens because she liked eggs, but didn't like how chickens are raised in the industrial food system.This was especially true once we figured out that marketing terms like "free range" and "cage free" didn't mean the chickens were happily ranging around a sunny farm. We pretty much learned from books. Tending chickens is not at all complicated--much easier than keeping a dog, actually. With chickens it's mostly about figuring out a good housing arrangement for them: i.e. excluding predators like raccoons and keeping the chickens from running rampant in the yard. Avi: How did you get started with bees and honey? Erik: I owe all of my beekeeping knowledge to the amazing Kirk Anderson of the Backwards Beekeepers. Kirk is one of very few all natural no-treatment beekeepers in the world. Conventional beekeepers treat their bees with all kinds of toxic chemicals, use artificially inseminated queens and all kinds of other interventionist strategies. Kirk's approach is really the way we should approach all complex systems such as nature or the economy. We should admit that we don't know much about the way they work and keep our interventions to a minimum. Kirk has taught us how to capture swarms of feral honey bees that have managed to survive all the problems that have beset conventional beekeepers in recent years. In short we let the bees "keep" themselves figuring that they know better than we do how to get along. Avi: How did you get started with brewing your own beer? Erik: I took an inexpensive class at a local home brew shop. Then I did some reading. Beer making is a lot less complex than most people think. I've since met more experienced home brewers who have shared their techniques and tools with me. Avi: Who's your community? Is it primarily local or virtual or a mix? Erik: Our community is a mixture of both. Los Angeles is a great place to practice urban homesteading. There's people here from all over the world and a great climate for growing food. We've managed to meet many people here and have formed lots of face to face connections. Our blog has also been a great virtual community. In some ways I enjoy blogging more than writing books. I like the feedback we get in the form of comments. I value both our face to face and our virtual communities. Virtual affinity groups, in our case, have often led to new face to face friendships. Avi: What's the importance of being tactful with your neighbors (e.g. sharing produce like eggs and tomatoes)? Erik: It's critically important to be on good terms with your neighbors. Many ridiculous laws have accrued in municipal codes over the years like barnacles on a neglected ship. In Los Angeles, for instance, the municipal code stipulated that you could grow vegetables in your backyard and resell them, but not fruit flowers or nuts. Along with some friends and neighbors we helped get that law changed. If you feel oppressed by your local laws, change them! But all in all, we always say it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. As long as you're on good terms with your neighbors and share your backyard produce, the odds of the city coming around to enforce forgotten municipal codes drop drastically. Avi: What's the single most important piece of advice you would give to someone who hasn't done any of this before? Erik: Start small and be patient and persistent. There's a fairly high learning curve to things like growing vegetables. You'll never really master it of course - nature always throws a few curve balls - but even when you fail, it's a lot of fun to sit around with your friends, bitching about your gardens and drinking homebrew.

Interview: Dennis McKenna

Avi Solomon — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:16:01 +0000

Photo: Beth Darbyshire

Dr. Dennis McKenna has conducted research in ethnopharmacology for over 30 years. He currently teaches in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself Dennis McKenna: I'm 60 years old, born in Paonia Colorado, a small town in Western Colorado in 1950. I experienced my teenage years in the turbulent 60's, but had a fairly normal life in my early years. I shared many interests with my brother Terence, and while growing up we were both 'nerds' (though the word hadn't been invented yet), meaning that we were more interested in science and science fiction than athletics or other 'normal' teenage interests. We were butterfly and amateur rock collectors; amateur rocketeers, and that kind of thing. My dad encouraged and supported this kind of thing. So that was an early influence; curiosity about the world which our parents encouraged. Then the 60's came along and we were well-primed for it. Largely due to our early exposure to science fiction and my father's occasional purchases of Fate magazine, we were open to the idea of paranormal experiences, UFOs, the occult, other dimensions, altered states, aliens, and all of that. So when psychedelics came along, naturally we were fascinated by them, though we knew little about them at the time. And in the early to mid-60's they didn't have the social stigma attached to them that they acquired later.

So to us the idea that psychedelics could actually give access to real experiences of other dimensions, alien entities, etc. which we had only read about up to that point, meant we were naturally drawn to them. And as we learned more about them, during the ferment of the late 60's, they seemed to Terence and me to be far more interesting than anything else going on at the time; the political ferment of the Vietnam war and the protest movement; the hippy, countercultural 'revolution' which we were involved in but also aloof from in some respects. The hippies were largely anti-intellectual, and we thought of ourselves as intellectuals. Hippies were involved in psychedelics but really didn't have any kind of intellectual framework for them; they were 'recreational' and fun. We took them more seriously than most people, or so we liked to think. Then along came DMT...DMT was rarely encountered in the late 60's but Terence had access to it as a result of his contacts in Berkeley, where he was living at the time. You could occasionally find badly synthesized DMT in those circles at the time. And to us, DMT seemed like a whole different order of experience; much more profound than LSD, mescaline, any of the others around at the time. Psilocybin was unheard of, never encountered, and any mushrooms one ran into in those days were LSD sprayed onto store-bought, edible mushrooms. So when we discovered DMT we were blown away. It was not only the most interesting drug we'd ever encountered, it was the most interesting thing we'd ever encountered. (interesting in the sense of fascinating, peculiar, mysterious, frightening, astonishing...). Nearly 50 years later, I'd have to say it still is! One of the top two or three anyway. So it was really DMT that got us onto this path. To us, nothing else was so interesting as DMT and the cosmic dimensions that it seemed to rip open to exploration. For a couple of dyed-in-the-wool science fiction nuts, DMT seemed like the ultimate mystery! So it was our fascination with DMT that led us into the study of Jungian psychology, shamanism, ethnobotany, anthropology, magic, alchemy, mysticism, and all of those related topics. Each in our own way, we determined that nothing else mattered so much as the single-minded pursuit of this mystery. And in many respects it was this early interest and curiosity about DMT and other tryptamines that have guided many of the personal and professional choices I have made since that time. The decision to study ethnobotany, plant chemistry and pharmacology; the fascination with South America and travels there over many years; and the contributions I have made to science, whether directly related to psychedelics or not, have largely been the result of that early interest and passion. Avi: Give us a synopsis of you and your brother's adventures in La Chorrera Dennis: The short answer is that we had scoured the ethnobotanical literature and had learned of an orally-active form of DMT that the Witoto Indians of South America prepared from the sap of Virola species (a genus of trees in the nutmeg family). We were frustrated by the fact that the DMT experience, when smoking synthetic DMT, was overwhelming, quite intense, but very short (about 10-15 minutes). It was hard to spend enough time in that 'place' to really get a handle on what was going on. So when we stumbled across a paper by Schultes about this orally active form of DMT, we thought that maybe, in that form, the experience would last longer and we could understand it better. No one knew about ayahuasca and the fact that it is an orally activated form of DMT at that time; this was 1970, before the chemistry and pharmacology of ayahuasca had been thoroughly understood. So we decided to travel to La Chorrera, Colombia, in search of the mysterious Witoto hallucinogen, known as 'ookoohey', thinking that this was the Holy Grail we were seeking. But when we actually got to La Chorrera, in February of 1971, actually getting our hands on oo-koo-hey proved to be problematic, due to cultural restrictions among other things. Years later when we actually did find ookoohey it proved to be fairly disappointing. But at LC we decided to settle in for a while and bide our time, and hope that an opportunity to encounter ookoohey would present itself. Meantime, the pastures around the little mission village of La Chorrera had a large herd of Sabu cattle grazing there; and the dung of these cows happens to be the preferred substrate for a particularly potent form of psilocybin mushrooms, Psilocybe cubensis. So there were big, beautiful clusters of Psilocybe cubensis growing out of every cow pie in the pasture! So at first we didn't take them seriously. We knew what they were, from our literature searches, but we thought they were just fun; we didn't realize that it was the mushrooms, not ookoohey, that are the perfect orally active form of DMT (for all practical purposes; DMT and psilocybin/psilocin are close chemical cousins). And so we just started taking them recreationally, as much as a way to pass the time while we waited for the 'real' mystery to emerge. It didn't take long for the 'real mystery' to manifest itself, after a few high-dose mushroom sessions. In those sessions it quickly became clear that the mushrooms were the source of the real gnosis, and our quest for ookoohey became all but forgotten, as the mushrooms began to download a lot of what seemed like gnosis to us. In particular some extremely peculiar, 'funny ideas' as my brother put it, about biophysics, insect metamorphosis, the nature of time, and suggestions about an 'experiment' we could perform that would not only change us, but might be the key to opening up another dimension. So we performed this 'experiment', really more of a ritual than an experiment (in the scientific sense), and it had spectacular results; but not the result we had predicted. Not the collapse of the space-time continuum, but a profound and prolonged psychological transformation, which must have looked like psychosis to the casual observer, but to us (Terence & me) made perfect sense in the context of what was happening to us. Years later when I think about what happened it seems to me that it fits the model of shamanic initiation more than it does a prolonged simultaneous psychosis. All the themes were there; the notion of a cosmic journey, of transformation into something not human or more than human; and the acquisition of shamanic powers, such as telepathy, the ability to heal, knowledge of plants, access to vast archives of archetypal information. So all of these themes have been explored to some extent in my brother's book, True Hallucinations. Much of the rest of both of our lives since that event have been, in one way or another, an effort to come to terms with what happened, and make sense of it. It certainly has been a major influence on the directions our lives took following that event; and 40 years later, I still wouldn't say that we have figured it out. Avi: What kind of auditory hallucinations did you experience? Dennis: Well, one does have auditory hallucinations sometimes on DMT; often a sense of ripping or crackling cellophane. I'm not sure what that is. In our experience at La Chorrera and in subsequent mushroom experiences that I have had, one doesn't get so much an audial 'hallucination' as the sense that one is being instructed by a teacher entity of some kind. This theme was very strong at La Chorrera, we believed we were getting instructions on how to design and execute the 'experiment' from an alien, insectile (mantis-like) entity; we even called it 'the Teach'; and we wanted to 'meet the Teach', and we did. But it was in the form of gestalts of understanding that this information was imparted, not in the form of an audial hallucination per se. This kind of 'encounter' seems to be characteristic of tryptamine-based psychedelics. You commonly get this with mushrooms and DMT, the sense of an encounter or dialog with an intelligence that is different than the self. Avi: Can intense meditation practices (of any spiritual tradition) induce the same kind of visions? Dennis: Very possibly they can. I don't know if they can induce exactly the kinds of visions and and the sense of 'downloading the gnosis' that we experienced at La Chorrera. But I think the literature of mysticism shows that you can achieve very similar altered states through shamanic practices, intense drumming, breathing exercises, and that sort of thing. But in either case, you're talking about very deliberately altering one's neurochemistry, whether through shamanic practices that changes one's brain state, or through pharmacological means. I don't hold with people who say that one is more 'valid' than the other, or that psychedelic states are somehow not 'genuine' compared to similar states reached 'naturally'. I think this is just a bias. Experience itself - whether we are stoned or not - is a brain state; a state of consciousness. What we like to call 'consensus reality' or normal consciousness is really just a brain state, a hallucination if you like. Our brains take in raw data from the environment through our senses, it combines it with other information such as memories, acquired knowledge, and so on, and synthesizes it into a movie or narrative that seems to make sense to us (most of the time). And this is the state that we experience as ordinary reality, the day-to-day hallucination or movie that we inhabit that we call experience, our experience of being! Avi: Why was Schultes reticent about the internal dimensions of Ayahuasca? Dennis: It's not clear that he was. I drank ayahuasca many times before I actually 'got it'. It may simply be that he never connected with good preparations of ayahuasca. That doesn't explain his reticence about his experiences with other psychedelics, such as mushrooms, peyote, etc. I really don't know. I think Schultes was a very private person, and actually quite button-down and conservative. I think he probably had the notion that it was unseemly for a Harvard professor to talk in public about such private, unusual experiences. It wasn't consistent with his persona and so he didn't talk about it. Avi: What was your aim in turning to academic research on hallucinogens? Dennis: For me, partly it was an exercise in self-redemption. I went to La Chorrera not really knowing any science, or really knowing very much about anything (I was 20 at the time) but thinking I knew a whole lot. The experience at La Chorrera taught me that I really didn't know anything, especially anything about science. A lot of what we'd encountered at La Chorrera seemed to challenge all scientific paradigms. But rather than rejecting science outright I determined that I really should learn how to 'do' science before rejecting it. And so that's what I did. I was also interested in the nuts-and-bolts aspect of what had happened to us. I committed the error that many people who work with psychedelics do, the notion that somehow 'the trip is in the drug'. Of course it isn't in the drug, it's in the interaction between the drug and the brain/mind, and it's mostly in the latter. But in some respects I thought if I studied the drug, how it works in the brain, and so on, that I might somehow arrive at an understanding of how it could elicit such experiences. Of course studying the drug alone will not do that; but I think that many neuroscientists still approach it from that perspective, which is why the picture of what these things 'do' will remain incomplete. Another motive for me: the first time I went to S. America we went to La Chorrera and had these amazing things happen to us, but some might have said, well, we just went crazy. And especially me, I went crazy! So my pursuit of ethnobotany and more reality based studies were a way to prove to myself that I could do good work, good science, even go back to S. America and study psychedelics, without necessarily having to go crazy! In some ways the research on psychedelics and ethnobotany was a good excuse to tinker around the edges, without actually plunging again into the Screaming Abyss! Which when you think about it, is pretty scary, partly because every time there's no guarantee that you will come back. And since then I've proven that, at least to my own satisfaction. I've been to S. America many times since, taken psychedelics many times since, both in the field and out of it, and haven't gone crazy once (so far!). So although I would be the last one to claim that I'm a shaman (I'm not, and never thought I was), I guess I did learn a few things about navigating in non-ordinary realms on psychedelics. I'm actually probably one of the more down to earth, level headed people I know. Avi: How did your scientific knowledge enhance your Ayahuasca experiences? Dennis: I would say it was the other way around. My interest in exploring the 'nuts-and-bolts' of psychedelics, in understanding 'how they worked' as much as possible on the molecular, cellular level, was in part in response to these experiences. Part of the fascination of psychedelics, for me, is that they are clearly molecular probes, molecular tools that can be used to explore and perhaps understand what you might call the 'brain-mind' interface. They are small molecules; their chemical structures are usually quite simple. DMT, for example, is just two trivial enzymatic steps away from tryptophan, an amino acid that is universally found in all living things. I've always found it fascinating and remarkable that such a simple molecule, so close to a universal metabolite (and moreover, DMT and related compounds are present in hundreds if not thousands of plants, animals, and fungi) could have such a profound, disruptive effect on our perceptions. A person of more mystical inclinations (and maybe I am one!) might interpret this as a sign, a 'doctrine of signatures' if you will, a message from Nature that just under the surface there's more going on than we might think; so it's an invitation to look a little deeper. In European herbalism and in virtually every other tradition involving plant medicines, the Doctrine of Signatures is found in some form; it's the notion that a plant will 'reveal' it's medicinal or healing properties to the discerning healer by its morphology. If it has heart-shaped leaves, for example, it's good for the heart; or if parts of it are kidney-shaped, it's good for the kidneys, and so on. This is not a scientific notion, but there's enough empirical evidence to show that often, plants thought to be useful for certain ailments do have 'signatures' that might suggest specific applications, and they do turn out to be useful. I think the widespread occurrence of DMT and other tryptamines in nature is a kind of doctrine of signatures; a subtle message that, 'just behind the curtain', so to speak, nature is a much stranger and more marvelous place than we ever might suspect; and most people never will suspect it, unless they happen to ingest one of these plants or fungi, deliberately or accidentally. Then, they will get a quick, hands-on lesson in what J.B.S. Haldane famously said: "The universe is not only stranger than you suppose, it's stranger than you can suppose!" And maybe that is 'why' psychedelic substances are there, in nature; they are nature's way of reminding us of how little we know. And as a species, we tend toward arrogance; so it's good to be reminded once in a while, forcefully if necessary, that really our knowledge of reality is quite limited. Avi: How can Ayahuasca and Psilocybin help in treating psychiatric disorders? Dennis: As you know, psilocybin and potentially ayahuasca and other substances are being investigated for many possible therapeutic uses, such as how to come to terms with anxiety in the face of death, to the treatment of addictions, post-traumatic stress disorders, and so on. So although it's taken nearly 40 years since most human clinical studies with psychedelics were prohibited, much of the hysteria has faded away and serious clinicians are starting to look at this class of substances again for their potential benefits. Now we have much better experimental designs, better ways to measure and quantify the outcomes, and have learned a lot (much of it in the underground) in the last 40 years about how to control for variables of set and setting, and use these materials safely under controlled conditions. So now, finally, investigators are able to start looking again at promising uses for these substances, and this research was just basically shut down abruptly at the end of the 60s. As to how they can help, or why they may help, that's a much more complicated question. They help, I think, because they can induce catharsis; catharsis is specifically defined in psychiatry as the discharge of pent-up emotions that results in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent resolution of the condition. Other definitions I've seen state that catharsis is a profound mental or emotional experience that triggers a spiritual renewal. I think that, therapeutically, this is why psychedelics are useful; they should be called 'cathartogens' rather than 'hallucinogens'. I think they can (in the right set and setting, and in the hands of a good psychotherapist) trigger catharsis, and help people to unravel psychological 'knots' and facilitate the resolution of long-standing conditions. They don't always do that, but when they do, a good therapist (or shaman) can use that opportunity to resolve a lot of internal conflicts, and indeed, to actually cure symptoms that may be resistant to other kinds of treatment. Psychiatry does not have anything like this in its current armamentarium; we have a plethora of psychoactive drugs and indeed psychopharmaceuticals are highly over-prescribed under the current biomedical paradigm. But most of these things only mask symptoms. They numb patients into tolerating their situations by dulling their perceptions. Psychiatric medicine doesn't have, currently, anything like a cathartogen. That's why in my opinion the integration of these psychedelic agents into psychiatric practice is so important. Potentially, it will revolutionize the field, just like they thought it would back in the 50s when everyone was excited about LSD. But then all the research was shut down, not for good medical reasons but for social policy reasons, and these very promising agents could no longer be investigated. Now we're coming full circle; but it's taken 50 or 60 years, for medical use of psychedelics to even get fair consideration. We've lost a lot of time. And medicine has been impoverished by it. And most importantly, many people who could have been helped have suffered needlessly. Avi: Finally, What is the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss? Dennis: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss is tentatively, the title of the memoir I want to write about my life with Terence McKenna and the ideas and adventures that we shared. It's also the name we gave ourselves and our intrepid band of fellow travelers and seekers, when we were on our way to La Chorrera to discover the mystery of DMT. It was kind of a tongue-in-cheek moniker; Terence & I are Irish, after all. So we had a certain irreverance, and sense of humor, even in the face of confronting incredible mysteries. We knew we were on a quest; we knew we were seeking something unknown, transcendent, and possibly quite terrifying. So, we were setting out to explore the Screaming Abyss, and we became, humorously, the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. I think the genesis of it came from H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th century horror writer that Terence & I both read extensively as teenagers. Lovecraft wrote about 'the unspeakable, gibbering horror from beyond the stars', and that kind of thing. His horror novels were much more effective, much more scary, than say Poe because he never actually described what the 'horror' was; he left it to the imagination. He was a master in getting his readers to scare the bejeezus out of themselves! Hence, 'the screaming abyss'! It started out as a joke, but when we actually got out there, it proved to be closer to the mark than we ever imagined. Those who want to know more should visit my The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss Kickstarter project. We have actually reached and exceeded the initial funding goal. I'd like to offer my profound thanks and gratitude to those who have backed this project. As a result of their support, I will be able to have enough money to self-publish this book, when it's finished next spring. And, also important, I'll have enough time to take a kind of sabbatical over the next few months to write the book, and pay my bills while that is happening. Audio: Dennis McKenna's First Person Experience of Photosynthesis Recorded by Adam Bowen at a an event hosted by James Walton of Storm Brewing

Interview: Tom Hulme

Avi Solomon — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:00:46 +0000

Tom Hulme is a Design Director at IDEO

Avi: How do you define yourself?

Tom: An enthusiastic generalist. Lucky. Ultimately I hope it will be the stuff around me that defines me - startups, OpenIDEO, IDEO projects, family and friends...

Avi: What does Design mean to you?

Tom: It's thoughtful and passionate creation, in any medium. A considered approach to creating solutions that solve real human needs - as such I truly believe everyone has the capacity to be a designer... I guess I would say that as I have no formal design training!

Avi: How would you characterize IDEO?

Tom: IDEO is a function of its people - a diverse group united by a desire to have positive impact. We have developed various approaches to increase that impact: a truly human-centered approach (we centered on human needs even when working in business to business projects), diverse teams (we have learnt that this sparks creativity) and a increased emphasis on designing business models. I'm looking forward to seeing new approaches emerge too...

Avi: Does IDEO have a generic innovation process?

Tom: Many people, when they think of innovation companies, imagine anarchy and suppose that processes aren't important. But we find that having a process unlocks creativity for a few reasons. One the most important is it gives people a clear sense of where they are. It also gives people a common language around which they can discuss the projects. So we do have a process. What we don't necessarily have is a one-size-fits-all process. So we adapt it to the specific challenge that we're working on. So sometimes our challenges will be more strategic. That's happening more and more in which case we spend a larger portion of the project or the challenge actually figuring out the challenge question itself. Whereas other times we have work that's more tactical where we can move into the execution earlier.

So we change the process, but there are some commonalities across it. It's been always human-centered (anyone can try out the process for themselves by downloading the Human-Centered Design Toolkit). So even if we're working in business to business, we make sure that human needs lie at the heart of it. Secondly, wherever possible we prioritize making stuff. Building to learn is a really important part of our approach - it's the idea that we should prototype as quickly as possible to test ideas. Building stuff forces decisions, centers everyone on the idea at hand, enables valuable feedback from users. We're always where we can make stuff.

Avi: How can one use empathy to come up with new solutions?

Tom: It's a contentious topic because you have a lot of people that question the validity of empathy and point to examples like having focus groups, which I think is a mistake because focus groups are just one very small way of understanding human needs.

I think first and foremost we believe that you have to address real human needs to solve problems. If there isn't a need there, you certainly won't get traction. Empathy is about understanding the truths in those needs. So one of the things we often find in projects is that if you ask people about something, they give you a clear opinion. But then if you watch them, you'll find that the way that they behave actually contradicts the opinion they gave previously. Often we behave in ways that we're not cognizant of. It's subconscious and we don't want to admit it.

So we spend a lot of time really trying to understand the people that we're designing for and understand their nuanced way of living and design to that rather than just design what they might tell us in a focus group. One of the tools that we use to do that is to get extreme users because they give a wonderful insight as to the truth of the needs. For some reason we all love to fit humans into some sort of bell curve, and most big companies address the middle of a bell curve. Whereas the one thing you can be certain of is that the market's moving away from that towards one direction. We spend a lot of time looking at extremes because it gives us more of an indication of some of the needs.

I'll give you an example about the point around really deep empathy and understanding context. I met a lady probably a month ago who had done work in Africa around the difficulty of water access in rural Africa. So she went out there and they had to make some ideas around building pumps in villages and they realized the women in the villages were having to walk five miles each way in order to collect drinking water. And they thought great, the answer is obviously to build a pump. Sounds logical. The women won't have to travel five miles each way. Then they went out to the specific village and they asked the ladies, look we've got this idea if water is important to you. The women agreed and said obviously it's incredibly important to us. And they said we have an opportunity to build a pump so you don't have to travel anymore.And the ladies all looked horrified. And they said you don't seem to want this pump in your village? And the ladies said "No way! Those five miles each way to the water are the only time we get to get away from our husbands. Don't take that away from us!".

So you have to really understand people's truth skills. If you asked them superficially do you think immediate access to water is important they would have said yes, but not if it means that they can't have their escape.

Avi: Then there is a phase where you shift gears and come up with solutions nobody has thought of before?

Tom: Yes. I wouldn't want to say that we come up with solutions that no one has ever come up with before because I think many people have had most of the ideas that exist. What we try to do is we try to tweak those solutions and approach them holistically so that in its entirety we create something that is optimized for the human need. So we're agnostic, for example, about the way that we might address it. We're agnostic often at the start of projects about what we're going to use to address the problem. I think that's important because it keeps the playing field open so that you can create the perfect solution to address the need.

Avi: You emphasize that it's not just important to rephrase the answers, but also to reframe the question.

Tom: Historically we've lived in a world where the context wasn't changing so quickly so we could afford to come up with the question and spend a huge amount of time answering it. I think that paradigm has changed completely because now all of our circumstances are changing all the time.

So if you and I, through the course of this interview, set ourselves a big question, firstly, I think that question should be dynamic. It should change given the change in context. And secondly it should change based on our increasing knowledge. So, for example, if we ask ourselves through the course of this interview that what makes a great interview is our challenge, let's come up with a wonderful interview. Even as I start to answer questions you and I will have a slightly shifting opinion on what that means and tomorrow when we see another wonderful interview that maybe changes everyone's perception of what a good interview is. So I think the days where you could afford to draw a line around a specific question are gone.

We have to treat questions dynamically and it's because circumstances start to change, it's because answers start to change the question itself, and it's because our thoughts around what good is change as well. So when you throw those things together I think a question should be an incredibly dynamic thing.

Avi: What do you hold in mind as a baseline awareness of how to improve the quality of anything you do?

Tom: I'm motivated by positive impact. So spending time as a teacher in a school in Africa was the most formative thing I've ever done in my life, I think. It taught me that while sometimes money is an output and a result of positive impact, it doesn't need to be, so I try to hold myself accountable to that fundamental of positive impact. And I don't know that you can ever quantify it. I think it's subjective. I think it's incredibly qualitative, but I try and make decisions relatively based on whether it has a positive impact. If that sounds very flakey, I don't want it to sound flakey, but to me that's everything. I look to achieve that impact as efficiently as I can.

Avi: An impact can be changing one person's relationship to something.

Tom: Exactly. And I don't know that I'm sophisticated in making these judgment calls, but I often have a struggle whether I should have a deeper impact for an individual or a slighter impact for many and when making decisions on projects versus how to spend my time I find myself wrestling with that all the time.

I have had the most inspiring emails as a result of some of my talks. I find them unbelievably humbling. I've had them ranging from a gentleman in Kyoto in Japan who works for a Samurai armor company who are thinking of going into women's apparel ranging across to a guy who works in real estate in the US who was getting really passive in his company and it sort of triggered a change in his philosophy.

Avi: How did OpenIDEO originate?

Tom: OpenIDEO stemmed from my desire to explore extreme new approaches for IDEO. As an entrepreneur I can't help looking for disruptive approaches, a mindset which was amplified after I studied under Clayton Christensen. IDEO had taught me the importance of having diverse input to feed the creative process, this coupled with our increasing desire to participate anchored my belief that online tools could disrupt traditional innovation approaches.

In 2008 I began sketching out what was to become OpenIDEO more fully - at that time it was simply the idea of a platform to solve challenges for social good, comprising a modular process which would take the best of offline and online input and some sort of algorithm to measure and celebrate contributions. My vision for OpenIDEO was to create a platform which empowers a global community, valuing everyone's contribution. I iterated the idea over the following 12 months but the real step change in development came when we put a team behind the idea to develop it further in the Summer of 2009. I was joined by two other IDEO designers from London that had shown a real interest in the concept - Nathan Waterhouse and Haiyan Zhang. We made (and still make) a great team and launched the site in a closed Beta in the Summer of 2010.

We run OpenIDEO as a lean startup - with relatively short sprints to implement new features that are often suggested by the community. The vision we now develop together remains pretty much unchanged - we want to increase engagement to solve the challenges of our time and create positive impact - impact being the only metric that really matters.

Avi: What have you learnt from the OpenIDEO community?

Tom: We have contributors from over 200 countries on OpenIDEO. It's been great to see how supportive the community has been of one another. We designed threaded comments because we noticed the community beginning to have conversations around concepts and inspirations. An increasing number of concepts are built on others. The collaboration maps show how the concepts grow through the collision of inspirations and other concepts

Another key learning has been that those that don't participate can still be highly engaged. Traditional websites refer to those that don't contribute as 'lurkers' and see them as uninteresting and unimportant. I was reminded how engaged these people can be when we received a hand drawn Christmas Card from a user in Malaysia who had never participated - she had clearly been engaged!

It's all a good reminder that OpenIDEO is creating impact through creation of concepts that will have impact in the world (the destination) but also through the journey (building engagement around some of the challenges of our time). OpenIDEO is being used in a variety of ways we hadn't necessarily envisaged, one of the most inspiring has been seeing teachers globally ask their students to contribute to the process, from Ghana to the US. I love the fact that the site is meritocratic - it doesn't matter if you went to college or what you studied - your contributions alone define you.

Avi: But you still need people in the field to take a leap and get things done - A lot of stuff gets caught up in bureaucracy.

Tom: We're not naive to how difficult execution is. But I think there's some interesting examples out there where through the process of learning you can build demand. So Kickstarter is a phenomenally interesting version of this, where Kickstarter takes the risk out of launching a business because you get people to commit to purchase. So like we saw with American Idol as an emergent model, they're kind of de-risking an industry because instead of investing money and making a big launch, it gives the opportunity to test the market, to understand people's true needs, and therefore you have demand built into the process.

I hope that could be a facet of OpenIDEO ongoing. So we may not have the scale for that to be true as of yet, but you could imagine circumstances where you might come up with a lovely idea to solve one of the challenges and the encouragement you get from the community gives you the confidence to act and then you've got momentum on day one.

So this is one of the areas we are focusing on most at the moment, in fact right now we're designing how the 'realization phase' might look on the site. We like the idea of enabling teams to coalesce to implement ideas and to give the implementers a voice on the platform so that they can share learnings.

Avi: One thing is like money will spoil it.

Tom: I strongly agree with you. When initially thinking about it I looked at a 108 similar platforms and the one thing that became clear in all of them is as soon as you make money the motivator, kind of the ultimate extrinsic motivator, everything else collapses in the system. Then you bring in real gaming. Then you actually collapse the collaboration, the mutual support and things. So if there's one thing I can say with a level of certainty is that we won't sort of risk that by having prize based systems.

Avi: The Ghanasan urban sanitation project is a perfect study in how to facilitate realization. They did a lot of fieldwork, and they really were with the families. Then they came up with a holistic solution, including prototyping the toilet in actual use.

Tom: The team in that case spent a huge amount of time on the ground in Accra to understand the needs. One of the exciting things about OpenIDEO is it actually gives a voice to those people that we occasionally interviewed on an ongoing basis at the site. I'm excited that the people we would traditionally just have interviewed and then we'd have to fly back and find solutions can have an ongoing voice in the process and provide feedback.

So it's important to meet often physically to understand the context, but if we can keep a regular drumbeat around content and involve people more, that would be wonderful. I was approached by someone at Firefox, and he pointed me to the fact that a design university in Accra was actually inviting people to contribute to OpenIDEO as part of the course. To me it was a real eye-opener. It was wonderful the way it's a level playing field, and no matter what university you go to, you can contribute. So I hope it will be a bit more democratic in design as well.

Avi: The OpenIDEO design quotient could also be used by design schools as their screening technique.

Tom: We used it when we invited people that wanted to apply for IDEO.org fellowships to submit their OpenIDEO contributions together with their applications, so it was really exciting.

Avi: What advice would you give to a smart kid who's now in high school?

Tom: Learn inside and outside high of school, learn online and offline and combine all this learning with doing. I'm a huge fan of studying - I think we all need to build knowledge, it also stops you closing doors and acts as an indicator of willingness to learn. However, I think that education often lags the requirements of the workplace in terms of the skills that it builds. It's therefore important to develop additional skills outside of school - for example working in networks and communicating by and leveraging social media.

Most importantly, get inspired. I think that probably needs to happen outside school. I can think of a couple of events that shaped my course more than any other:

• One Summer I saw that an apple tree in our garden had a bumper crop of apples. We wouldn't have been able to eat them all so I wondered what we could do with them - my solution was sitting my sister at the end of our drive to sell them, I'm embarassed to say that she was only 4. My poor mum still is known locally as the lady whose daughter was made to sell apples - I hope it was worth it though as it gave me the entrepreneurial bug.

• I worked as a teacher in a school in Tanzania, East Africa for a year. Although poor, the people there were happy - it still serves as a reminder that material things are less important than family, friends and community.

Interview: Ran Prieur

Avi Solomon — Fri, 27 May 2011 06:00:09 +0000

Ran Prieur is a writer and permaculturist

Avi Solomon: Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Ran Prieur: I am known on the Internet as somebody who writes about dropping out of society, the critique of civilization, sustainability and the collapse. I'm a softcore doomer. I write about why this entire society is unbalanced and a large mistake and why the mistake is ending and how you can, how we can get out of it. How we can live better.

Avi: Who has influenced you the most?

Ran: I always tell people my two biggest influences are Ivan Illich and Charles Fort. Everything I write can be derived from those two guys. Ivan Illich wrote his most famous stuff in the early 70s. He was a big critic of industrialization and centralization and certain kinds of technology.

Ivan Illich was not a primitivist. He thinks that technology can be used very well and can be used to live much better than primitive people but it mostly has not yet been used that way. Ivan Illich was so smart and wrote so clearly that reading him is like looking at the sun. You just read a couple of sentences and then you're like, "Wow! I have to look away, that's too much", and you kind of process those sentences and you go back and read a little more.

I like to think maybe in 10,000 years, humans will be so smart that everything Ivan Illich wrote will seem completely obvious and self-evident. But for now, since he only wrote like 10, 20, 30 years ago, it still seems totally brilliant.

My other big influence, Charles Fort, wrote about paranormal phenomena. He was like the grandfather of paranormal researchers in the early 20th century. In the 1920s he wrote several books where he would go through old scientific journals and pick out anomalies that dominant science ignored and he'd put these anomalies together into a lot of satirical science and satirical theories.

But he also had a very serious side. The key to understanding Charles Fort is the first chapter of his first book, The Book of the Damned, where he's completely serious. After that, he's mostly joking. But what he's completely serious about is a philosophy in which it doesn't make sense to break up the universe. It's a single unified whole and if you break it up into parts and categories, it's like drawing lines on the waves of the ocean. All our systems of thought try to impose, at least our systems of rational thought, a certain kind of artificial order on this undifferentiated whole.

And Charles Fort had this concept called the "old dominant" and the "new dominant," which kind of anticipated Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts, where you use a bunch of ideas, and then you get all these anomalies at the end that are excluded because they don't fit. And then finally you get a new story, this might be going a little bit into what Kuhn said, but finally you get an adaptation. You get a new theory that includes all the anomalies and that's the new dominant.

But Fort understood that there's never a final theory. Only the universal can really exist. So no matter what kind of theory you have, you are always going to find anomalies at the edges until you get all the way out to the entire universe, which might be much bigger than we imagine.

Somehow between Ivan Illich and Charles Fort, you can derive most of what I've written.

Avi: You seem to be an underground hero of sorts.

Ran: Well, I don't know if I like to be a hero. I think it was Nietzsche who said that nobody who understands fame wants to be famous. So fame is like a mental illness in the followers of the famous people. I don't think I want to be a hero. I want everyone to try to be their own hero as best they can. I guess I like the underground part of it. It's certainly better to be an underground hero than to be a giant star.

Avi: Who's your audience?

Ran: My audience is a wide variety of people. I've got Anarchists and Libertarians, I've got Christians, I've got... my audience is mostly on the fringe though. I've had emails from people who live in vans, people who have vast amounts of wealth, more than they want to say. So my audience is people who read my website and like the way I think. It's hard to make any generalizations about them except that they're at least mentally a little bit outside the mainstream.

Avi: Why is your 'How to Drop Out' essay so popular?

Ran: That's easy. It's popular because people want to drop out of society. That's the number one way that people find my website. They go on to Google and type "how to drop out of society" and my "How to Drop Out" essay is the top hit on there.

And they come there and they read it. Then, I suppose people like it because I'm not dogmatic about it. I don't know if anybody's read the CrimethInc books. The CrimethInc books are purely motivational books. They're like "Woohoo it's so exciting and drop out and live like an anarchist in the streets and hop a freight train to Bolivia" and "Woohoo quit your job now. Drop out now". All motivational writing is lies. If you take it seriously, if you take it at face value, it's all lies. It's always harder than that. But I still admire the CrimethInc people for inspiring people. It's very inspiring if you read it to motivate yourself, so long as you don't take it too seriously. I try to give more serious answers and explain how difficult and painful it is to live outside the system.

The term "drop out" is problematic but using it for now, people think that it's a fun, easy escape. Like, "Oh we have to do all this dreary stuff in the dominant society and have this job. And if we can just suddenly drop out, it becomes easy". Then they crash and burn. They get drug addicted. They're not able to motivate themselves. It's actually much more difficult to live outside the dominant system than to live inside it. Otherwise, the system would not be so successful.

Given how everybody uses the phrase "the rat race," it's popularly understood that the dominant society is not the best way we can live. And people want to live differently and it's damn hard, that's why so few people do it.

I kind of emphasize that in my essay. One of the points I make that people really seem to resonate with is that you get depressed for a few years if you're in a highly regulated system, highly regularized from the first time we started school. From kindergarten on, we're in this rigid structure where every minute is regulated, especially with the younger kids. When I was a kid, we still had unstructured time, play time in the afternoons. And now, people have everything planned for them.

When you quit that, and you have these vast blocks of time where there's nothing you're supposed to be doing, people get depressed. Even I got depressed, and I like unstructured time. What you're doing during that time is you're learning to self motivate. And it's not easy, you have to, it takes some time and you have to kind of go through a difficult time and almost hit bottom. I don't know why you say "you hit bottom." That's not a good phrase. But yes, you get depressed for a few years when the structure is removed and you have to learn to regulate yourself and motivate yourself in a life inside yourself.

You don't have a life inside yourself because it's been crushed out of you. So over several years you have to grow that life inside of you to the point that it can motivate you to do things. If you persist, you'll get there.

Avi: What does self sufficiency mean to you?

Ran: Well, I'm a little wary of the term "self sufficiency" if you take it in a strict sense, self sufficiency is a lie. Our ancestors have no history of individual self sufficiency. We lived in cities and towns and villages and tribes. They're always, you're always dependent on other people historically. That's the way we've always lived.

There's the ideal of self sufficiency. Bill McKibben wrote a great essay, it's called "Old MacDonald Had A Farmers' Market: total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal". He starts off talking about how Thoreau was not self sufficient. He would go into town every night to his mom's house for a big dinner. He had friends come and help him out. He was not a mountain man in any way. He was interconnected to other people and people think, "Oh he's cheating. Thoreau didn't do it right. I'm going to do it without cheating." But there's really very few people in history who've been completely self sufficient.

I guess I've here defined self sufficiency differently so that it's a good thing. It just means that you're not over a barrel. It means that nobody's got you in a position where you have to do what they tell you to, or something bad will happen. Especially no faceless institution has you in that position. I suppose arguably you could be dependent on another person where you have to do what they say. I don't know. I don't think so.

I think really, in the ideal society, the ideal system, everybody has the absolute right to say no. The ideal, the root of all freedom is the freedom to say no. Before you can be free to do what you want, you first have to have the freedom to do nothing, which means, you're never in a position where you have to do what somebody says.

So, that's the root of self sufficiency. The trick is to get in that situation where you never have to do anything alone, you have to do it through connections. It's too difficult to do it through mythical mountain man self sufficiency. You have to do it through connections with other people so you have to build communities or find communities around you that will trust you and give you slack to eventually contribute.

Well, that's getting into all kinds of other subjects about community building and how people are depressed. You have to go through a period of depression to get between regulated and free. What happens if you have a whole bunch of people that are going through that period of depression at the same time, who takes care of them? These are difficult questions.

Avi: What's your take on permaculture?

Ran: I'm careful to define permaculture. People have all these definitions of permaculture as this or that. First of all I should say I am a permaculturist. I've got the permaculture certification. I've taken a design course. I went to the convergence last fall. I'm going to go to another event in Spokane, maybe even another event in Seattle. I love the permaculture movement.

But the word "permaculture", I always carefully define it as a brand. Permaculture is a brand like Nike or something. You know, Nike has the symbol. That's all they own, that wave symbol, and they use that wave symbol to subcontract the making of the shoes, and the advertising, and everything.

And of course permaculture is noncommercial, but it's still a brand in the sense that they take this word and they bring all this stuff in under the umbrella of that word. Whenever there's a word that points to something good, inevitably people kind of veer off from reality. They start using that shortcut.

They say, "Oh permaculture is good". And then, things that aren't so good can get in. We're seeing it happening right now with the word "organic" and with the word "sustainable". There's some marginal stuff. There's some dodgy stuff that's getting in there. So sustainability now means "let's continue the Western industrial lifestyle without making any sacrifices". That's a silly definition. And but that's kind of wormed its way into the definition of sustainability.

Eventually, permaculture might point to some stuff that I don't agree with but for now, I like everything that the word "permaculture" points to. I like that it's focused on rebuilding the top soil and growing perennials and growing food and transforming yards into useful spaces, making everything have multiple functions.

There's lots of permaculturists who're into lots of stuff about building. They're pioneering the rocket mass heater which is a great new technology that can greatly reduce the amount of wood we have to burn to heat a small place. So permaculture combines very ancient technologies with brand new ones.

Avi: What has being a caretaker of your land taught you?

Ran: Well, being a caretaker is not that hard. If you've got primitive land that gets decent rainfall you just have to not kill stuff. Mostly, I just let Nature go up there. That hasn't taught me that much.

But what I've learned from is trying to actively do things up there, like build a cabin and plant fruit trees. I've learned that you can't just stick a plant in the ground, unless it's a native plant. I've learned that you can't just stick a plant in the ground and expect it to thrive unless it's a native or invasive. I've planted a lot of plants up there that have died and the ones that survived, a lot of them are just squeaking by. So it's difficult to grow fruit trees and nut trees and berry bushes.

And it's very, very difficult to build a cabin. I bought it in 2004 and I thought, "Oh, I'll go up there next summer and build a cabin". And now, like more than six years later, I've built a 45 square foot cobwood hut. It's going to be maybe two or three more years before I build a cabin. It's a huge job.

So, the land has taught me that it's easy to idealize about all these things you're going to do when you get land, but a lot of these things are very difficult. Another thing it's taught me is to not idealize the whole back to the land thing so much. I go up there for a six day stay, and I go a little nutty in the head. And I'm an introvert. What would happen to an extrovert if they go up there, right? I don't really don't want to spend more than a week up there alone. I want to go back to the city and hang out with other people and get back on the Internet.

I suppose maybe if I had a community of like 50 people up there, that might be enough to keep me from going nutty. But I've given up on the whole isolated, back to the woods kind of thing. Now I'm not thinking of my land as a homestead. I use the Russian term "Dacha". Dacha is like you have a place in the city and then you have a little piece of land in the country with a little cabin on it where you grow some extra food and you can go there to stay. I'm calling it a dacha now rather than a homestead.

Avi: How do you conceive of collapse?

Ran: I call myself a softcore doomer. Maybe 10, 12 years ago I was more a hardcore doomer and I expected big, sudden, global catastrophe. And then year after year, I see people predict that and they're wrong. The system just keeps muddling along.

I had a shift in my thinking after Katrina because I thought, OK, suppose you'd asked all the doomers "What would happen if New Orleans, America's largest port city, got completely flooded and no economic activity in there at all for months?" And they said, "Oh that would be the first domino in the chain. That would knock down the whole house of cards". And then, unless you actually lived in New Orleans, it was a mild disaster. Gas prices went up a bit and life went on about the same. That was part of what turned me into a softcore doomer. Now, I do not believe there's going to be a fast, global collapse. There's going to be, there will be local hard crashes, and globally, it's just going to muddle along and decline. There are going to be some regions that do really bad, and other regions that thrive. I don't think the human population can continue to be as high, and it's going to get really ugly in a lot of places.

Hopefully I'll try to be in a place that's pretty good to go through the ongoing collapse. I call it the ongoing collapse. It's not something in the future. I like what John Michael Greer of the Archdruid Report said. He said the collapse we're now in started in the mid-70s when American oil peaked.

Ever since then we've been in like a stair step decline where things get a little bit worse, then a little bit better, then a little bit worse, then a little bit better, then over the long term, worse. But worse isn't just that the money economy is getting worse, worse is that the big systems are cracking. Every collapse is an opportunity for something else. Every time a door closes, another door opens. And the metaphor I like is grass growing through pavement.

How does pavement turn into grass? The pavement does not physically transform into grass. The pavement cracks and grass comes up through it. That's what I see happening throughout my lifetime and throughout this century.

Avi: Does history keep on repeating in cycles?

Ran: Yes. It has kept on repeating in cycles and I think we're entering towards the end of a pretty big cycle now. The cycle is driven by oil but I do not think this is the last collapse.

People always want to think they're at the end of history. Like, "this is it". That everything is coming to a head right now, and after we're through this great crisis, it's just going to be smooth forever.

Even the most pessimistic people think it's going to be smooth forever because it's all going to be extinct. And then the optimists think we're going to be in eternal utopia. But I think it's going to keep on repeating in cycles maybe forever. At least for a long time. I often say that it's going to take humans 10,000 years to figure out how to live.

I want to be careful with the word "evolution". If you use evolution to mean progress in an absolute sense, you're using it in the wrong sense, in an unscientific sense. But the correct way to use "evolution" is "adaptation."

But, adaptation doesn't necessarily mean we can't get better. There has to be something you're adapting to, and what we're adapting to, what we're not yet finished adapting to I think, is our own human intelligence.

At some point 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, we got so smart that we were able to make these huge mistakes with our intelligence. We can see all the technologies that are coming out right now. Many of them are going to turn out to be tragic mistakes.

The way that our civilizations have destroyed nature and made all these short sighted decisions, we have not yet evolved to use our own intelligence and power wisely. And I don't think we're going to do that in another 30 years if we've only come this far in 10,000 years.

We're still making many of the same mistakes that the ancient civilizations made. So, I think it's going to be a long time before we figure that out, how to use our power wisely. By then, we might have developed even new powers that we have not yet even imagined.

Avi: What advice would you give to a smart kid in high school right now?

Ran: My first advice would be: Whatever you do, don't go into debt for college. This is a point about college that some people don't understand. And that is, the main thing you learn in college is how to think and act like an educated person.

If your parents both went to college, then they raised you, then you already know how to think and act like an educated person. You don't need to go to college to learn that. If you come from a lower class family and your parents did not go to college, then college is much more beneficial to you.

People who've been to college and learn to think and act that way get a lot more respect in the dominant society. Just the way you say words, the way you carry yourself. So that's a big benefit of college. You don't necessarily have to pay tuition to do that. You could learn that by osmosis. Hanging out in a college campus.

When I was in high school, I was completely unmotivated. I did not know how to motivate myself at all. I was just going through the motions. So I went to college because college was the thing to do. It was a lot cheaper back then in the late 80's when I went to college. My parents had some money saved up so I didn't have to go on debt for college.

But, boy, I would not want to be a smart kid in high school right now because unless you're tremendously good at self motivating, it can be hard for you to quit high school and not go to college and find something to do and not just crash and burn.

Maybe I would say go to community college to get your basic stuff out of the way or hang out at a college campus. If you could get a staff job at a college campus, then you can kind of get the college experience, and even take a few classes.

I don't know. I would not want to be a kid in high school right now. The generation that is coming up now is going to have a really tough time. Be adaptable, that's the advice I'd give.

"How to Drop Out," read by Ran Prieur:

Interview: Tim Ferriss

Avi Solomon — Tue, 17 May 2011 00:30:19 +0000

Photo: Olivier Ezratty (cc)

Tim Ferriss is the author of the The 4-Hour Workweek, a Japanophile, tea drinker, tango world record holder, and language learning fanatic.

Avi Solomon: How did you get to Seneca?

Tim Ferriss: I came to Seneca by looking at military strategies. A lot of military writing is based on stoic philosophical principles. The three cited sources are Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations, which was effectively a war campaign journal. The second is Epictetus and his handbook Enchiridion, which I find difficult to read. The last is Seneca and, because Seneca was translated from Latin to English as opposed to from Greek to English and also because he was a very accomplished writer and a playwright, I find his readings to be more memorable and actionable.

So, it came to me through a number of different vehicles, the study of war and war strategy. Second was through philosophers like Thoreau and Emerson who were also fans of Seneca. Thirdly, was when I was really embracing minimalism and trying to eliminate the trivial many, both materially and otherwise. From a business standpoint, Seneca is constantly cited by people in the "less is more" camp of philosophical thought. I basically came to Seneca through several different directions.

The other was - and part of what appealed to me about Seneca - was the similarity I found between his brand of stoic thought and the brands of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism that were practiced by people like Musashi Miyamoto. He wrote The Book of Five Rings and is also the most famous Japanese swordsman in history.

Avi: Did you also read James Stockdale?

Tim: Absolutely. You said James Stockdale, right? He was in a POW camp.

Avi: Yeah, in Vietnam.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. He would be one of dozens of military leaders who have embraced Stoicism to survive and to win in combat.

Avi: Do you have a favorite letter of Seneca?

Tim: Offhand, it would be hard for me to choose a single one. The first that comes to mind is "On the Shortness of Life," which is more of an essay. I've read Letters from a Stoic at least 50 times and I tend to find different letters appropriate and helpful at different times.

Avi: There's a difference between reading and doing. How do you apply this in your daily life?

Tim: It's really, for me, the base foundation of an operating system for decision making, and I'll explain what I mean by that. I don't view philosophy as an idle form of intellectual masturbation. I really view good philosophy as a set of rules that allows you to make better decisions. What Stoicism helps you to develop is a value system that allows you to take calculated risks, which I think is very effective for entrepreneurs.

So, in very simple terms, stoicism and, by extension, Seneca teaches you to value only those things that cannot be taken away, meaning you would actively practice poverty, for example, subsisting on the meagerest of food and clothing for, let's just say, one week every two months. The way Seneca would phrase it is all the while asking yourself, "Is this the condition I so feared?"

That type of practice - and I do view it as a practice, just like you view meditation as a practice and I don't think it's entirely coincidence that Marcus Aurelius' book is called Meditations - helps you to live life offensively as opposed to defensively. So, I would say that on a daily basis I revert to some of the basic principles of stoicism to make decisions about where to invest my time, which relationships to cultivate, which relationships to sever so forth and so on.

Avi: And it's also making you comfortable with failure. The essence of entrepreneurship is being OK with failure and with having fears.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. It also helps condition you so that you don't have emotional overreactions to things that you can't control and I think that's very, very helpful. Critical even, not only for competitive advantage but for quality of life.

Avi: Do you have a generic method for hacking some advanced skill set. You seem to have hacked so many advanced topics that you must have a method to your madness!

Tim: Well, I do have a method and it's really a series of questions more than anything else. It's almost a Socratic process but I would say that, first and foremost, I have to have a very clear, measurable objective, whether that's in language acquisition or in power lifting.

The common element is measurement, so you need to know when you have succeeded and how to measure progress to that success point, whether that's a 500 pound dead lift or a 50 kilometer ultra marathon or getting to the point where you can do, let's say, a single lap in an Olympic pool with 15 or fewer strokes. These are all real examples. The number of footfalls, meaning stride rate, per minute in endurance training and how long I can sustain that for say with a goal of 20 minutes at a time. Or a 95 percent fluency in conversational German as measured through different metrics. These are all real examples.

So the first is measurement. I have a clear idea of what success looks like and how to measure it.

Secondly, I will look at the most common approaches, which are, oftentimes, the lowest common denominator but have some thread of efficacy. I will ask, "What if I did the opposite?" I'll look at the established common practices, the established dogma, and ask myself what if I did the opposite.

If it's endurance training, let's look at Iron Man training, and the average is 20-30 hours of training per week for people in the upper profile. What if I limited that to five or fewer hours per week? What would I have to do? How could I make this type of training work or perhaps be more effective if I had to focus on low volume instead of high volume? The same could be said of weight training. The same could be said of language learning.

If someone says it takes a lifetime to learn a language or it should take 10 years, what if I had to compress that into 10 weeks? And if they say that vocabulary comes first because we should learn as we did when we were a child, which I completely disagree with - it's entirely unfounded - what if you were to start with a radical structure?

So, flipping things on their heads and looking at opposites can provide some very surprising discoveries and shortcuts.

Thirdly, I look for anomalies. For any given skill, there's going to be an archetype of someone should be successful at that skill. If it's swimming, for example, it would be someone with the build of Michael Phelps. They would have a long wingspan, relatively tall, big hands, big feet and large lung capacity. So, if I can find someone who defies those anatomical proportions; someone who's 5' 5", extremely heavily muscled, like 250, who is still an effective swimmer, I want to study what the anomalies practice because attributes can compensate for poor training. I want to find someone who lacks the attributes that can allow them to compensate for poor training.

Typically, you find much more refined approaches when you look at the anomalies. That's true for any skill I have looked at, whether that's programming or otherwise. So, let's just take computer programming as an example. If the common belief is that someone should start with language A, then progress to framework B and then progress to language C, if I can find someone who skipped those first two steps and is regarded as one of the best programmers in language C, I'm going to look closely at how they developed that skill set.

Then I would say, lastly, is a set of questions related to rate of progress. So I don't just look at the best people in the world; I look at people who have improved upon their base condition in the shortest period of time possible.

Let's say I'm looking at muscular gain. I would certainly interview the person who's, let's say, 300 pounds and 7% body fat but there's a very good chance that I'll learn more from the person who's put on 50 pounds for the first time in their life in the last 12 months. So, I always try to establish the rate of progress and, when that person has plateaued at different points, for what duration. I find that exceptionally helpful also for finding non-obvious solutions to problems.

Avi: Thanks, I would call that a meta-hack! It might take a while to digest but it could drive a lot of things in many different domains.

Tim: Oh, yeah. That's the framework that I overlay on any skill I'm looking to analyze and hack.

Avi: So like in language learning, you have one critical sentence I think.

Tim: Oh right, so with language learning, each of these different skill sets will have certain domain-specific approaches but in the case of languages a big part of learning language quickly is teaching native speakers to deconstruct their own language for you and you only do that through very refined questioning, because they're not going to be able to explain to you the difference between, if you say, "What's the difference between anything and something?"

The average native English speaker's not going to give you a good answer for that, but if you know how to ask them for comparisons properly and you can simply ask them to, perhaps, provide five or six examples of various types then you can get your answer. You can essentially use a lateral approach to get your answers. So, in my particular case, it had determined that we had eight to twenty sentences of various types, if you have them translated effectively. Fortunately for native English speakers most of the world is forced to study English or chooses to study English.

If you translate those 10 to 20 sentences, you'll have a very good grasp of auxiliary verbs, sentence structure, like subject-object-verb versus subject-verb-object, how indirect objects, direct objects are treated, how personal pronouns are treated, etc., and it only takes 10-20 sentences to get all of that onto one sheet of paper. So, it's entirely possible to become fluent in almost any language. Conversationally fluent - there's a problem with definition there - so that's a longer conversation, but effectively what most people would consider conversationally fluent in 8-12 weeks.

Avi: So again, there's also the traces of Pareto's law there.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. The material you choose is oftentimes more important than the method you use, so it's important to have an understanding of high frequency versus rote memorization from a textbook that doesn't do any kind of analysis of frequency of occurrence, for example.

Avi: Food, for example, you boil it down to eggs and spinach first thing in the morning.

Tim: Oh yeah, absolutely, in behavioral change related to diet, small changes are more effective than big changes. The abandonment rate is less, so I would say give someone a very simple prescription, like 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, and that could take the form of a few hard boiled eggs and spinach, a few hard boiled eggs and lentils, it could be scrambled, certainly, or you could simply have them consume 30 grams of unflavored whey protein with cold water. So I think that in the world of behavioral change, simple works.

Avi: I remember you saying that access to rich experiences doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Can you expand on that?

Tim: The perception is...let me take a step back. Most people have a number, a fairly arbitrary number, usually influenced by their peer group, which is a financial target, typically an amount of money in liquid assets like a checking account. So that could be once I have a million dollars, I won't have to worry about anything. Once I have five million dollars, I won't have to worry about anything. Once I make 250,000 dollars a year, I won't have to worry about anything.

And that number is typically arrived at with no calculation of what their ideal lifestyle actually costs and the question I like to pose is if you had 20 million dollars, 50 million, 100 million in the bank, after the first month or two of going crazy of buying all the toys and doing all the ridiculous girls gone wild stuff, what would you actually spend your time on a daily basis, monthly, weekly, and what would you like to do and what would you like to have? And then you can sit down and cost those things out and for most people it very seldom costs more than, let's say, 150,000 dollars a year.

And what we find is even to privately charter a private airplane in Patagonia, which I did or in my particular case also in the wine county in Argentina, it cost me, I think it was, less than 300 dollars for effectively a half day and that included gasoline costs, or to live on a private island in Panama, especially a research island, to go snorkeling and scuba diving every day, that cost similarly less than 500 dollars.

And what you find is that the deferred life plan which is based on retirement and redeeming these experiences, that are most valuable in your peak physical years, is a false paradigm. It's a very Faustian bargain and bad bet. So when I say that having incredible experiences, once in a lifetime experiences, is generally less expensive than people think, it simply results from sitting down and costing those out. So if you want an Aston Martin DB9 there are definitely ways you can do that for 1500 dollars a month, even if you purchase. And to postpone all of these bucket list experiences until 50, 60, or beyond is, I think, a very bad wager.

Avi: So that kind of leads me to the other question I have, which is about college or MBAs. Is college a scam in terms of lost opportunity cost or investment? If you'd rather invest the money, like 40,000 a year, with the added advantage of not being in debt?

Tim: So I'm going to leave aside the debt question, that's a very personal question. I have different views of, let's say, a liberal arts undergraduate degree versus an MBA. I don't think the objective of a liberal arts education is to train you for a single profession. I view the value of a liberal arts education as making you a well rounded human being and to that extent I think it's a very worthwhile investment. The real world doesn't go away once you enter it, so I don't see any particular rush in jumping into income generation if you have the option of cultivating yourself through a good liberal arts program. I don't regret having gone to college at all and I would recommend it to most people who can afford it or find a way to afford it, even if that puts them into debt for limited amount of time.

When you start looking at professional programs like law school or MBAs, then I have a less favorable opinion simply because they're so specific, and they're designed to train you for a specific career path and if you're not confident that is your career path, I view it as a huge opportunity cost and financial burden. But if your goal is to reach the pinnacle of success in investment banking or investment consulting where an MBA is effectively a prerequisite to have certain job titles, than that is a good investment of your time, if that is your chosen path. It requires being very honest with yourself about your motives. So if you're going to business school, as I would say at least half of the students do, because they're on a two-year vacation, an excuse to party and decompress that looks good on the resume, that's fine but don't fool yourself into thinking that that's the best way to gain practical business experiences, which it is not.

I would much prefer to take someone who's interested in becoming a competent deal maker or business development icon and putting them into a start up of, let's say 15 to 50 people, in a position where they can work directly with the CEO or one of the top deal makers or negotiators in the company like a VP of Business Dev. or a VP of Sales, because an MBA also buffers your decision making from the consequences of the real world. It's fantastic if you can sit down in a Harvard case study and determine what the best decision is for a company that you have no vested interest in. It's quite a different story when you're sitting across the table from someone who has 20 years more experience negotiating than you do and you have millions of dollars at stake that will personally affect you and affect everyone at your company. Theoretically you might understand what to do, but you need practice in the trenches to be able to respond properly in those circumstances or you'll fuck it up.

Avi: What would be advice to a smart kid in high school today?

Tim: I would say choose your friends wisely. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose your peer group wisely and if you can't find the type of mentors that you're looking for in person, find them through books and don't be biased towards the latest and greatest. I think that you can certainly learn just as much, if not more, from Seneca and Benjamin Franklin by just reading their writings, as you can from the hot CEO of the moment.

Interview: Seth Godin

Avi Solomon — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:17:10 +0000

Seth Godin writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

Avi Solomon: You inspire millions of people. What inspires you?

Seth Godin: I would say that I'm inspired by two things. The first is the opportunity. This is the first time in human history that somebody sitting in their living room has a chance to contact more than just a couple of people at a time.

And more important than that, the revolution that's going through our world right now is opening more doors for more people than ever before. When I look at the combination of those two things, I see an opportunity, and I wake up every morning hoping I won't waste it.

The second thing is that I'm totally addicted to helping people grow and watching the power that breakthroughs have with people, when you can see somebody doing something that they used to be afraid or used to believe they couldn't do. I find that really at the core of what it means to be a successful person.

Avi: You made a post about the Kindle. What you would like the Kindle to be?

Seth: Two, actually. Yes.

Avi: Two. And I think it was read by Bezos or somebody high up there because it's really... you can see how the strategy changed right after you posted. A few months after you posted the post about the Kindle.

Seth: I'm pretty sure that anything I say right now will end up causing me grief with my friends in Amazon. So I'll just let it sit at that.

Avi: OK. More generally, you could talk a bit about how books are changing. You're one of the first people who realized that books were souvenirs?

Seth: Yes, I started writing about books as souvenirs 11 years ago, when I did a book called "Unleashing the Idea Virus." What I discovered is that when I separated the idea from the book by giving the entire text of the book away for free online, it had a transformative effect on the idea as well as on my career.

So far that book has been downloaded probably more than 4,000,000 times. It's one of the most popular eâ€‘books ever because it launched at the right time, it was easy to spread, it was easy to share, it was worth talking about. People would then say, "That's fine but how do you make a living doing that?" Well, my original answer was that I wasn't trying to make a living, I was trying to make a point. Then I discovered that if you make a point, making a living takes care of itself.

That book, when we came out with the souvenir hardcover edition which had no extra words in it at all, and cost $40, that book went to number five on the Amazon bestseller list, number four in Japan; was sold in dozens of foreign languages and I actually made more money on the book that I gave away than on the bestseller I had had before that.

I think that most people in the publishing industry show up every morning to do their job instead of showing up every morning to fulfill their mission. And their mission ought to be connecting readers and writers. And as soon as you can get rid of paper, that job becomes infinitely easier.

Avi: Yes. So now for example, can you describe your experiment now with Amazon?

Seth: Well, the new publishing company I started is run by me. It's called the Domino Project. It is powered by Amazon in that they take care of a lot of the things that publishers used to have to do.

It ensures, for example, that we are able to be reached around the world at various Amazon sites with preferential promotion and marketing and things like that. The impacts... so far the first two books has been terrific. They are both bestsellers.

The new one, which is called "Do the Work" by Steve Pressfield was the number one most popular Kindle book of any kind, fiction or nonâ€‘fiction, paid or free, last week. The ability to have a manifesto like that reach that many people just weeks after it was finished being written is unheard of in the publishing industry.

Just giving an example of how flatfooted the industry is: the New York Times refuses to measure success like this so we will not show up on their bestseller list even though our books are being read and shared by more people than traditional bestsellers.

For us, the goal is not for traditional media to apply what we're doing. The goal is to put ideas in the hands of people who can use them, and to do it in a way that helps the publishing industry see how they can grow and transform before it's too late.

Avi: It's like they refused to put Amanda Hocking on the list either. Well, she's earning a lot of money just by selfâ€‘publishing. But they ignore her, except running an article about her somewhere.

Seth: Right. It's interesting because some people have poohâ€‘poohed her for taking a multiâ€‘million dollar payment from St. Martin's to publish her next bunch of books the oldâ€‘fashioned way. And in fact, that's a symptom. Every industry, when it's dying, opens its checkbook to pay money to try to stay relevant. I can't blame Amanda for taking the cash. If I were in her shoes I would do exactly the same thing. That doesn't mean that she's on the wrong path and there's a right. What it does mean is that there are violent tremors and shifts going on in the publishing industry. And it's inconceivable to me that five years from now, paper is going to be the dominant form for books.

Avi: But paper will still be there because it's actually acquiring more value... like a treasure. You could actually choose very carefully what do you want to put on paper.

Seth: Yes. There's a scarcity when it comes with paper. I will admit that I get more pleasure knowing I sold a hardcover book than knowing I sold a Kindle book. There shouldn't be a difference, but there is. Paper feels like you have used up a scarce resource to commit to something permanent. And digital doesn't feel that way.

"Boing Boing" is a great example of that. The magic of "Boing Boing," the wonder of "Boing Boing," is in that you don't have to worry about whether every post is perfect or for the ages because it is inherently a timeâ€‘based, disposeful medium. But it turns out that that freedom that you have is what leads to some of the very best work that you do.

So I think we're going to see a shift where eâ€‘books will be... there will be ten times as many eâ€‘books as hardcover books next year and a hundred times year after that. The same way there are way more YouTube videos than there are studio films.

But that doesn't mean YouTube videos are worthless. It just means that it's more of an experimentation platform.

Avi: I find that Steven Pressfield's book and your "The Dip" book are related because they are both concerned with forging through "the dip." Explain the connections between the two. Your book is more of making a smart choice about what dip to forge through. Steven's book is more like how to get it done.

Seth: For the first time ever I was impressed by the work of Haley Barbour. He quit the presidential campaign. I thought that was a great example of "the dip." Understanding "the dip."

What he saw was that getting all the way through the end of a presidential campaign and winning is great. Quitting right after New Hampshire is stupid because you go through all the pain and the suffering and the money and the dislocation and you get nothing.

So the best time to quit the presidential campaign is before you start, which is what he did yesterday. The only other time worth quitting is if you have no choice and you've either won or you've lost. It's quitting in the middle that's so common.

So what I wrote about in "The Dip" which was a few years ago was understanding this insane cost that we pay for quitting in the middle. And pushing people instead to quit at the beginning or make the commitment to stick through the dip â€‘ because it's when you stick through it that you get all the benefit.

But doing your best and quitting in the middle is not a smart choice. I followed up with that in my Domino Project book which is called "Poke the Box," which is about the fact that our culture now, our society now, rewards people who initiate. It is about living in a projectâ€‘world instead of a factoryâ€‘world.

Steve picked up the idea that he talked about first in the "The War of Art" where he says the reason that we quit at the wrong time, the reason that we have writers' block, the reason that we don't like to initiate, is resistance.

That resistance is that voice in our head that tells us we'll be made fun of; that voice in our head that tells us to slow down; that voice in our head that says just have a whisky instead of doing that thing that you're afraid of. What he tries to do in "Do the Work" is establish once and for all, who's at fault and what to do about it.

Avi: So for example, if you're afraid of doing something, that's a good guide to actually choosing to do it because it's an indicator of something of value to you?

Seth: That's right. That's exactly right. And it goes even one step further which is that if you feel like quitting something, that's a sign that you shouldn't quit because everyone is going to quit in this moment and the one who doesn't quit is the one who's actually going to benefit. So, the messages are aligned, which is the economics of the situation makes it clear that what you ought to do is the opposite of what you feel like because that is where scarcity lies and scarcity creates value.

Avi: Once you take the initiative, the other thing you can do is you build a tribe around that initiative. It takes a lot of work. What can guide you through the initial lonely stage?

Seth: Well of course building a tribe takes a lot of work. If it didn't, everyone would do it. This idea of scarcity comes back again and again.

We don't hesitate, some of us, to go get a job in a coal mine or a factory or working for an insurance company even though we've just signed up for 10,000 hours of mindâ€‘numbing, fingerâ€‘grinding hard work with no for real upside.

And yet, we look at this prospect of building a tribe of 5,000 or 10,000 or 500,000 people who want to hear what we have to say, who want to go where we are going, who are looking for a leader, and we hesitate.

Actually, you're not hesitating because you fear the work. You're hesitating because the resistance fears failure. Getting a job, shredding tires at the factory, we don't feel that same fear because we know we're not going to fail.

My argument is that we're walking into this new culture, this new era, where tribes are so valuable and they're going to get harder and harder to build. So if you care, and it only works for people who care, then you really have no choice but to go start building your tribe.

Avi: So when you started Squidoo, was the charity part, was that built in from the first, from the get go?

Seth: In fact that's the only thing I wanted to have. The biggest mistake we probably made in starting the company was leaving in the other option. We started Squidoo.com which is now the 88th biggest website in the United States to raise money for charity.

And the idea behind it is there are plenty of ad networks in Amazon and eBay and others who will pay tiny amounts of money to people who build content online. We wanted to bundle them all up, make them easy to use, leverage them, and make it a tool available to individuals who want to build pages about things they are passionate about.

There is now more than two million pages built by more than a million people and it helps people every day to find what they're passionate about. And it also generates millions of dollars in revenue of which we send half of it to our users.

The users, the default setting, is for them to give that money to the charity of their choice. The reason I like it, is that it lets you feel like a philanthropist, even if you're not taking money out of your pocket.

Some of our best users and many of our happiest users have kept that setting on the charity setting. And everyday are sending thousands of dollars to charities they care about.

Avi: There's a whole new revolution in high school education. This guy Salman Kahn, he has the Kahn Academy. You look at his page with the listings of all the lessons he has online for free, it's actually making teachers more... taking the burden off teachers' shoulders and also making them more responsible for initiating stuff in the classroom.

Seth: Yes, I saw how he's generous and brilliant and his big insight is simple, which is we should do homework during the day and have lectures at night. And the reason is this: lectures are one way so we can find the best lecturers in the world and let them lecture and have students all over watch the same lecture.

Homework, on the other hand, requires interactivity. Homework is where we build the synapses that help us understand. And that needs handâ€‘toâ€‘hand combat. That needs the teacher to help us. So his argument, which is living, is send your students home every night, tell them which video to watch. And then the next day, give them problems and help them.

Avi: So, this is very threatening to the current system. Also, home school enrollment is gaining strength. The whole Maker movement, the Maker Faire, Make magazine and stuff like that. How relevant do you think the current curriculum is going to be, is it relevant at all? It is obviously... it's good to know, and it's good to have that qualification but theoretically you could just learn at home and then just get, do the exam at the end and actually learn a lot more.

Seth: Well, I think we need to ask a different question. School's been irrelevant for a while. The question is what do we want school to do? What do we need to create in our next generation? And I've argued we need to create two things: we need to create leaders, and we need to create people who can solve interesting problems.

Anything we do in school that doesn't help with those two things we should stop doing. So homeschooling isn't necessarily the answer, unless homeschooling is going to come up with a way to work on those two problems. My biggest problem with homeschooling is that it makes it very hard to teach leadership because you're isolated. But with the right parents, it is much better at teaching people to solve interesting problems. My argument is that every parent should homeschool at night, and then send their kids to school during the day. The homeschooling at night should consist of intelligent conversation, asking difficult questions, as opposed to watching television.

Avi: What do you think college is for?

Seth: The difference between high school and college ought to be that college is a place people go to because they want to, and it's a place where they explore something with passion, to learn how to be the best in the world at what they do.

If you don't graduate from college on the path to be the best in the world at something, then you've wasted college. You're supposed to, I think, use college to explore without risk, to understand what it is to develop mastery.

Then when you combine those two things, you would have developed the pattern that can pay off for a long time to come. When I look at one of my heroes, two of my heroes, Cory and Mark at Boing Boing, what I see are two people who explore without fear. What I see are two people who know when something is done.

This notion of being able to say, "Yup, I'm done working on this. I'm handing it off to the world" is incredibly rare and we need more of it and we need it right now.

Avi: You were obviously pissed off at the current MBA structure because you started your own MBA. Could you describe what it involved?

Seth: OK. Well, I think "disappointed" is probably a better word. Disappointed that universities are wasting this opportunity. Disappointed that they are stealing so much cash and opportunity cost from our best and brightest business people and putting them through a twoâ€‘year program that trains them to do very little other than work at Goldman Sachs or be a management consultant.

I think that it's largely wasted on most of the people who attend and certainly if you're not in one of the top ten most famous business schools â€‘ I'm not going to say best, I'll say most famous â€‘ your degree has a very hard time paying off in a postâ€‘industrial economy.

For all those reasons, I wanted to put my money where my mouth is. So for free, for a program of six months in my office, 500 or so people applied. It was a difficult application. I picked nine or 10 people and it was a magnificent experience. It was a lot of fun and an enormous amount of work. I've since done it two more times. One, for people in the nonâ€‘profit and government sector, and that one lasted a few weeks. And then, the most recent one was called the FeMBA, which was for women entrepreneurs, and that one lasted five days. My guess is that the women in that program, and 1,000 applied, the 10 women in that program, maybe 12, got more out of it than they probably would have gotten from six months of sitting in a classroom at Wharton or at Stanford or Harvard because the hard part about business today is not knowing how to do the Black Scholes option pricing model. The hard part about business today is knowing how to take a leap.

Avi: What's involved, what's the method, is it live simulations of realâ€‘life business situations or...

Seth: Well, it keeps changing. But what I've had a lot of success with is peer support, putting people on the spot, reading an enormous amount and then asking very hard questions about its true meaning, and mostly, real life case study, not reading about someone else's case study, but defending your own.

Having people start a business in front of everyone else. Having people defend their past businesses in front of everyone else. Only when you can put your soul on the line and your heart on the line are you going to be able to get over the resistance and start doing work that you're truly proud of.

Avi: Do you have any tips for being comfortable with failure and bouncing back?

Seth: I think the people who have read my work, it doesn't feel right to them, but over time you get used to it, which is failure is the point. That if you're going to say "failure is not an option" then you've just ruled out success as well. Because the only way you get to success is by learning what doesn't work.

So my goal for 20 years has been to fail more than anyone before me. And I'm succeeding that almost nobody in my industry has failed as many times as I have. If you can fail more than anyone else, then you win. Because if you fail really monstrously large, you don't get to play again.

So there's no way you're going to be able to fail more than anyone else. The goal is to fail new, to fail in an interesting way, to fail in a way that you learn from that you don't repeat, and to fail not so badly so that you get to do it again.

Avi: What advice would you give your smart kid who's in high school right now?

Seth: That's easy. Go start something. Right. There's no locks on the door. The world marketplace is right there. Go on Craigslist, go on eBay, build a blog, build a website, build a following on Twitter, start a tribe, organize things.

You will learn as you go. No one needs to know you're in high school. But the benefits that you will get from leading in that way and connecting in that way are very very hard to overstate. Don't wait for permission. Just start.

Interview: Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle

Avi Solomon — Thu, 12 May 2011 04:00:16 +0000

Richard Koch is a businessman and author of the international best seller The 80/20 Principle.

Avi Solomon: Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Richard Koch: I have a very pleasant life and spend most days in the sun, switching between my homes in Cape Town and 'Iberia' (Gibraltar, Spain, Portugal) according to the season. Most days involve a few hours writing, playing tennis, cycling, hiking, walking the dog, gym, reading, and seeing friends for dinner. I try to do only things that I'm interested in, enjoy, and may help other people. Most people would say I'm rich, but I don't spend a lot of money, I drive cars that are years old, and I hate shopping except for food, wine, and books. My sole extravagances are travel and my homes - and sometimes betting, which fascinates me. Apart from that, I lead a simple life. I adore eating out with friends but never go to expensive restaurants. I have a partner and a brown Labrador called Tocker, and I love both of them too.

Avi: Your book "The 80/20 Principle" is a huge underground bestseller. How did the book originate? Can you explain its appeal?

Richard: I had written a half page on the 80/20 principle as part of a book on business strategy. A publisher friend read that and suggested a whole book about the principle. I laughed. "I can write two paragraphs about the principle," I said, "maybe even a whole page - but there is not enough to say for a whole chapter, let alone a whole book." But then I started researching the idea. There were hundreds of articles about the principle on the Internet and clearly a lot of interest. Then I read Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto's book published in 1896-7 - the second volume published in 1897 describes the pattern of wealth which followed a regular relationship which today we call a "power law" and which corresponds to the pattern that 80% of wealth and income went to 20% of the income earners, that 50% belongs to 5% of earners, and so on. I didn't say anything very original about the principle in relation to business - though I did point out how it had always worked when I looked at the relationship between the profits and customers or products. Roughly 20% of key products or customers always accounted for a large majority of profits, which suggests firms would do well to focus on a small part of their business.

But then I started to think - could the principle apply to time? I decided that it could, that a small proportion of our time accounted for most of our valuable output, and even our happiness. That suggested to me that time management was beside the point, tinkering at the edges, and that people needed a time revolution - we all needed to change our lives to focus on the best moments and times and make those the core of our lives. Then I thought - if the principle can apply to time, why can't it apply to other aspects of our personal lives?

And that was the original part of my book. It was a reinterpretation of Pareto applied to the whole of our lives and not just to business or economics. It was this that struck a chord. I've received thousands of emails saying that the book has helped people, but very few of the people say anything about business. They talk about how the book has helped them in their careers but especially in their private lives.

The book was commissioned in America by an editor in New York who then left the publishing firm - it was an "orphaned book". But somehow it started to sell, with almost no promotion. It's sold more than three quarters of a million copies, been translated into 33 languages, and is still going strong (in a new edition) 14 years after the first edition. So yes, it is an underground hit, propelled by word of mouth. It's sold over 100,000 copies in Korea, and the same in Japan - and I've never set foot in either country to promote the book. It is just that the idea is so strong - I don't deserve the credit. That should go to the shaggy professor and the online enthusiasts who keep the idea front of mind.

Avi: Why is applying Pareto's law to one's personal life so powerful?

Richard: There are lots of self-help books that require you to believe in an idea, so it is often self-fulfilling and there is no scientific way to test whether it is the idea or the belief that delivers results. What happens if you lose your faith in the idea? But the 80/20 principle is not like that. It works whether you believe in it or not. It is really counter-intuitive - how can it be true that a small proportion of inputs nearly always lead to most of the results? For example, we all think we are short of time, but if we only make good use of a small proportion of our time, it can't be in short supply. We are actually awash with time and profligate in misusing it! When the principle is tested, when you have empirical research to look, for example, at the relationship between the number of customers and the profits they generate, there is nearly always a strong pattern - in a recent case I was involved in, 19% of customers generated 94% of profits and 104% of 'true value'. Hard-boiled business folk are always amazed at the results, but they can't fault them. There is something truly weird about the pattern, and it's baked into the way the universe works. Whether you look at the broadest possible "macro" level - at the evolution of species by natural selection over millions of years - or at the details of your own life, and you can't get more specific and "micro" than that, the same pattern applies. So - why not work with the grain of the universe instead of against it? By the way, nobody has yet explained why the principle works, though I think a lot of it relates to network effects. But it certainly does work, and if you order your life to take advantage of the principle, you really can be so much more productive, help people a great deal more, and as a by-product be much happier.

Avi: Are there other scientific laws which can help our productivity and wellbeing?

Richard: Yes, I think there are, and I explored those in my book called The Natural Laws of Business in the US. Despite the US title, the laws apply to personal lives as well as business. For example, in the 1930s G. F. Gause, a scientist in the Soviet Union, put two protozoans - tiny organisms - of the same family but different species in a glass jar with limited food. The creatures managed to share the food and both survived. Gause tried the experiment with two organisms of the same species. They fought and both died. This principle of survival by differentiation is at the heart of business and personal success. Businesses and people who make it big are always highly differentiated - they make you aware of what is unique about them. They put all their energy into areas where they are substantially different from any rival, and in some way superior to them. My book looks at a dozen different scientific laws that are useful in business and life.

Avi: How can we identify and spend more time on things that really matter?

Richard: My experience and that of the readers who've written to me confirms that for most of us, very few things really matter to any individual. I think there is a problem with the modern age and the consumer society because we have been conditioned to think that if we make a lot of money or become famous or buy expensive products, then life will have meaning. But you can't take meaning from external artifacts or even from the admiration of millions of fans. Meaning is intrinsic and personal. I know many talented and well-meaning people who are wasting their lives working away at objectives and causes they don't truly believe in. I make it a personal rule never to do anything that I don't really care about. It is surprising how much this cuts out. It sounds trite and obvious, but try it. Write down the three to five things in the world that you care most about - they could be people or causes or abstract qualities such as truth and beauty. I doubt that your car will figure on the list. Another test - if you're not enjoying something, or feeling that it is really important and useful, stop doing it. You have to stop doing things to discover what is truly important.

Avi: What are "Happiness Islands"?

Richard: I encourage people to think about the small chunks of time - this week, this year, the years during their whole lives - that have given them far more happiness than most of the rest of their time. I call these periods "happiness islands". Try it for yourself. Ask what the happiness islands have in common - why were you unusually happy then. You can do the same for your "achievement islands" - and for the opposites too, the times when you were least effective ("achievement desert islands") or happy ("happiness desert islands").

Avi: What's the importance of choosing partners carefully?

Richard: We are social animals and nothing is more important than the people we spend most time with, and the quality of our relationships with them. Yet most folks accept the choices that are made for us accidentally or by other people - we spend time with work colleagues or neighbors because they are there and we try to get on with them. That is the wrong way round. One of the great advantages of starting a business or a voluntary group or even a gang is that you get to choose who to include in it. There are thousands, millions or even billions of people out there you haven't met yet, and a very few of them, maybe just one of them, could add immense meaning to your life. People are not interchangeable. All are unique. Only a few are truly remarkable, warm, outward-looking, and ideally equipped to help make you the best person you could be.

In 1931, a Harvard professor, George K. Zipf, looked at all the marriage licences granted between people in a 20-block area in Philadelphia. He found that 70 percent of the marriages happened between people who lived within 30 percent of the distance. Later he called this "the principle of least effort" and through a variety of studies showed that 20-30% of any resource tended to account for 70-80% of results. His principle of least effort is clearly a sub-set of the 80/20 principle, and he explained the results by saying that they tended to minimize the amount of work involved. But minimizing work is not the most important criterion when choosing a partner for life, and neither is sexual attraction alone. One of the few things that matters most is obviously the person (and people) with whom you spend the most time in your life. Think of all those people in Philadelphia choosing someone because they were close neighbors. Maybe there were more suitable people a few more blocks away, or even outside Philadelphia!

Avi: What kind of connections matter?

Richard: I've come to realize that one of the greatest adventures in life is meeting the people you haven't met yet. Focus is important but that doesn't necessarily mean focusing on what you have now. In my book, Superconnect, Greg Lockwood and I look at the implications of a finding from sociology called "the strength of weak ties" (or "weak links" which is our preferred term). The turning point in so many peoples' lives - meeting their romantic partner, getting a great new job, discovering a new hobby or idea that becomes an obsession - came about through somebody they didn't know very well or see very often. In many cases they actually forgot about the person or people who linked them to the turning point. The most valuable information we get doesn't come from our family and friends, because they have pretty much the information and insights we already have, and not much more. New ideas and contacts come quite disproportionately from friendly acquaintances, who move in different worlds. Therefore - meet a lot of different kinds of people, and see old contacts from previous lives (old workmates, college acquaintances, former neighbors), and try to connect as many people as you usefully can. By doing them a favor you'll come into a stream of information and serendipity that, very occasionally, could lift your life to a more elevated level.

Avi: To be an entrepreneur you have to be comfortable with fear and failure. Can you share any tips on how to do this?

Richard: What is the worst thing that can happen to you when you're an entrepreneur? The venture goes bust and you lose some money. You won't have lost your time because you'll have learnt much more than you would doing anything else - you'll have tested yourself and discovered what customers will and won't buy. What's the best thing that can happen? You enrich the world and yourself, and can spend your time doing what you want for the rest of your life. If you fail you learn and if you succeed, well, that's okay!

So there is nothing really to fear about failure, except fear itself - the worry factor. Frankly, if the business isn't going well and it's getting you down - dump it. Failure is fantastic - it stops you wasting your energy and resources, and it teaches you things that success never will. Don't try and try again at the same venture. Try something different.

Avi: You have an effective technique for dealing with worries!

Richard: Worry is never useful. When you find yourself worrying, stop it instantly. You do this by posing a choice to yourself - either you act and don't worry; or you decide not to act and not worry.

Avi: What does progress mean to you?

Richard: Doing something that is new and enriches many lives, or doing something ten or twenty times better than what's available now. The 80/20 principle says that it is always possible to do something much better with existing resources, or with fewer resources. Progress always comes from a small number of people and teams who demonstrate that the ceiling of previous performance can become the floor for everyone. Progress flows from information about exceptional achievement and the spread of successful experiments, from breaking down vested interests, from releasing energy from the great mass of people that so far have not contributed a great deal because they don't know how or don't care enough, and from demanding that the standards enjoyed by a privileged minority should be available to everyone. Progress requires us to be completely unreasonable in our demands, from searching out the 20 percent of everything that produces the 80 percent and from demanding a multiplication of whatever it is that we value.

Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else. The greatest aspect of the 80/20 principle is that you don't need to wait for anybody else. You can start to practice it in your personal and work life. You can take your own small fragments of greatest achievement, happiness, and contribution to others and make them a much larger part of your life. Multiply your highs and cut out your lows. Identify the mass of irrelevant and low-value activity and shed it. Isolate the parts of your character, workstyle, lifestyle, and relationships that use little time and energy and provide great satisfaction - then multiply them. Become a better, more useful, and happier human being. And help others to do the same.

Avi: What advice would you give to a smart kid who's now in high school?

Richard: Discover what you are best at doing and enjoy that is different from what all your peers are doing and that requires relatively little effort from you. Then put huge effort into honing that skill, so that it becomes monstrously greater than anyone else's. Keep demanding that each year you make your peculiar talent more peculiar and much more potent. Use the skill to make the world a more interesting place. Don't care about making money. If you have a fantastically different and useful skill, everything else you want will follow.

Richard recorded the following audio to accompany the interview:

Interview: Brian "Ziggy" Liloia on How to build your own Hobbit House

Avi Solomon — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:40:48 +0000

Brian "Ziggy" Liloia is a 26 year old member of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, where he lives in his own handbuilt cob house, tends large gardens with friends, builds with natural materials, keeps bees, makes cheese and butter, blogs, and strives to live the good life. He is the author of "The Year of Mud: Building a Cob House"

Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself

Brian Liloia I grew up in the hyper-suburbs of northern New Jersey, in the shadows of New York City. In college, I learned what a huge mess civilization was making of the planet, and I realized, over the course of several years and through reading lots and lots of stuff about environmental and social issues, that I wouldn't be satisfied with a conventional kind of lifestyle. I was never excited about a mainstream career, or living in the city or suburbs, and now I had a better explanation for my lack of enthusiasm. I found out about Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage as a senior in college and immediately thought I would find myself moving there, or someplace similar, in the future. I visited less than a month after graduating, and realized that I didn't want to wait: I wanted to live a sustainable kind of life in a community setting as soon as possible. In order to learn how to live more ecologically and to provide more for myself, including my own food, shelter, and energy, I settled into Dancing Rabbit in 2007, a year after college graduation.

Avi:What prompted you to go build a house by yourself?

Brian: When I visited Dancing Rabbit, I was hugely inspired by people that were building their own homes, without professionals, and with little money. Not only that, I was taken with the style of homes that were built largely of natural and reclaimed materials. As a new resident, I spent the summer helping work on a hybrid straw bale and cob kitchen that friends were building, and I was hooked on that process of construction, and especially working with cob. It was during my second year that I started to build my own home, largely out of necessity, since Dancing Rabbit does not have homes that you can simply move into, but also out of an intense desire to learn how to provide more for myself. I was (and am) interested in self-sufficiency, and living locally, and with a small impact, and I imagine building with natural, local materials as a big piece of that puzzle.

Avi:How did you deal with the building code in your location?

Brian:Thankfully, there are no building codes or zoning laws in this very rural part of Missouri, so I did not have to finagle with local bureaucracy in order to build my home. Not all are as fortunate, I realize.

Avi:Why did you select Cob as a building material? What are the economics of building with Cob?

Brian:There is something very primal about building with cob. You take your shoes off, pile up a bunch of sand and wet clay, and stomp it together with your bare feet to make a sticky, pliable, sculptural building material. It takes no heavy machinery, and the ingredients are completely natural, local. It's been practiced all over the world (in slightly different forms) for thousands of years.

I love the sculptural qualities of cob: you are not confined to squares, and you can embellish along the way as your wall goes up. For me, the process of building a wall and seeing the progress is intensely satisfying, and addictive. In addition to all of this, cob is extremely accessible: anyone can learn how to do it in a day. I chose cob for all of these reasons, plus it's incredibly cheap. I have spent less than $4000 on building materials for my house and improvements. I spent another $1000 on labor.The walls for my 200 square foot home cost less than $500 in materials. The clay came straight from our land. Straw came from the fields of local farmers.

Really, though, cob building is just a lot of fun, especially with the help of other people.

Avi:What was the hardest thing about the project? How did it change you?

Brian:There were moments early in the process when I was designing my home that I got very hung up on "how am I going to do this"? I tried to imagine every detail of construction in advance, and I occasionally got stressed that I wouldn't be able to figure it out. I've since learned that you cannot possibly know everything in advance of building -- that the answers will come to you as you progress. This was a big relief, and I've tried to embody that idea in other aspects of my life, too. Things will unfold naturally, even though you might not know the answers right away.

Avi:How communal was the experience?

Brian:Very much so. I had the help of more than 75 people over the course of a year, including friends, family, work exchangers, visitors, and fellow Dancing Rabbit members. I was fortunate to be surrounded by many builders who I could approach with questions, and during specific parts of building, I could call upon the help of dozens of people to accomplish a big task. Over a dozen different people came out to help me get the topsoil loaded on top of my roof, for example, when I called for a work party. I am extremely fortunate to live in a community that values cooperation and helping one another out in time of need.

Avi:What would you do differently if you had to do it over again?

Brian:Well, the biggest lesson of this past winter has been that cob really isn't that appropriate for this cold Missouri climate. Cob is not an insulative material, and despite the tiny size of my home (which I thought would be more to my advantage than has actually been the case), it is not the most efficient home to heat, because the walls become very cold when they are constantly exposed to winter temperatures. Not only that, there are condensation problems when warm air comes into contact with a cold cob wall. Ideally, I would have only built cob in conjunction with insulation. In fact, my partner April and I have decided to build a second house, converting the current cob house into a three seasons dwelling, so that we can try to build a more efficient, winter-appropriate house, with highly insulative walls, that will not have the same moisture problems. I still love my house, though, despite some of these problems that have popped up.

Avi:What advice would you give to someone who wants to build their own house?

Brian:Get your hands and feet dirty. Look for people that are building their own homes in your area. The best introduction to building is building. Soak up any experience you can get. Natural building practices are spreading more and more, and many people who are constructing their own homes are often looking for help. Search for natural building work exchanges, workshops, and internships. Cob building courses are often very expensive, and if you can afford to take one, great. If not, there are plenty of ways to learn by simply trading your time and labor for the experience of building. Of course, an internet search will lead you to all sorts of places. Again, the experience is invaluable, and will prove hugely important and inspirational in your own quest to build a home.

Interview: Dr. Rick Strassman

Avi Solomon — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:39:17 +0000

Psychiatrist Dr. Rick Strassman was the first scientist to conduct U.S. government-approved human research into hallucinogens and psychedelic drugs after the so-called War on Drugs. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers and is the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule

Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself?

Dr. Rick Strassman: I was born and raised in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, and attended college on the West Coast. I grew up in a Conservative Jewish home, and went through my bar mitzvah ritual. I obtained my MD in New York City, and returned to California for psychiatry training as well as for a fellowship in clinical research. I worked at the University of New Mexico for 11 years where I performed the DMT studies. I then moved to Canada and the Pacific Northwest for 5 years before returning to New Mexico in 2000. After finishing my DMT project in 1995, I worked in clinical psychiatry until 3 years ago. I've since then been writing full-time.

Avi: What got you into studying DMT?

Rick: Attending college on the West Coast in the late 60s and early 70s introduced me to a wide range of theories and experiences relating to consciousness. Gradually, my interests in Eastern religions, brain physiology, and psychedelic drugs gelled into an interest in the biology of spiritual experience.

It seemed to me that there were significant similarities between descriptions of psychedelic drug states and the effects of Eastern meditation practices. I thought these correspondences must reflect underlying biological processes common to both states.

DMT is an endogenous psychedelic substance, found in hundreds of plants and every mammal which has been studied, including in humans. It was a logical candidate for an endogenous compound mediating spiritual experience--to the extent that DMT effects and spiritual experiences overlapped.

There are other endogenous compounds with psychoactive effects, but since DMT had a track record of prior safe use in humans, I decided to begin with it, rather than other compounds that would require a lot more preliminary toxicology work to satisfy the regulators.

Avi: What surprised you in your DMT findings?

Rick: I expected particular types of experiences, as did my volunteers. We thought that mystical unitive enlightenment-like states would predominate. Also, near-death states, since I had speculated that DMT might be released near death because of the stress involved in dying (and DMT in animals appears to rise in response to stress). Also, I had a decades-long Zen Buddhist practice which informed my method of supervising sessions as well as my theories regarding the types of effects I might see - which were the unitive, concept-less, image-less, formless types that Zen emphasizes.

Instead, these types of experiences (NDEs, unitive/mystical states) were very rare. Rather, volunteers described entering into a world of intensely saturated light, buzzing and morphing, full of "things" -- all manner of objects, and oftentimes sentient beings who were awaiting them and often interacted with them

Perhaps if I had used another compound for my studies with more unitive properties, such as 5-methoxy-DMT, my expectations would have been met more consistently. But, I studied DMT and this is what we found.

Avi: What attracted you to the biblical model of prophecy as an vehicle for understanding the DMT visionary states?

Rick: I worked through various models' methods of understanding the DMT volunteers' experiences, and found them wanting. The Buddhist psychological model didn't comport with the data - the "more real than real" element of volunteers' experiences (Buddhism proposes these phenomena are all generated by the mind, rather than "real" observations of external reality); the "this is your brain on drugs" model seemed too simplistic and did nothing to suggest a satisfactory evolutionary explanation for the presence of DMT in the human body. I rooted around some of the recent cosmological theories of dark matter and parallel universes - while these might provide a mechanism of action for volunteers' observations, it still lacked an answer for "why" the brain is so designed, and what we can learn from the content contained in those states.

I decided to emphasize the spiritual nature of these states while at the same time positing a biological route to them, and an inextricably interwoven relationship between the spiritual and physical. Nevertheless, the spiritual literature and worldview seems, now, more applicable than a scientific one. Shamanism is useful as a model since it takes into account the external, free-standing nature of the phenomena, but like Buddhism, isn't really in our blood. In addition, shamanism's ethical/moral message is difficult to extract from the version making its way into the modern West.

The Hebrew Bible's model of prophecy is appealing because it comports well with the reports of the DMT volunteers. One's sense of self is maintained, there is an external free-standing independent-of-the-observer spiritual world that all-of-a-sudden appears. One relates to the content of the experience, rather than being dissolved into it. There are concepts and images which are the "stuff" of the prophetic state rather than the "detritus" of the mystical one. One is "with" God rather than being "one with" God.

The Hebrew Bible as a spiritual text also has the advantage of being our bread and butter within Western civilization. Its impact is everywhere, conscious or not - in our economics, law, art, science, architecture, literature, theology, ethics/morality. So, we don't need to go native to delve into it.

It seems that many people are drawn to the unitive-mystical state because they either don't have to articulate its content and relevance; or they can make up whatever they wish in that regard. It can be an easy way out, since the template for the "relational spiritual experience" is highly content-laden, and one needs to address that content. That content is the nature of God and providence, moral-ethical issues, and the linear nature of history.

It's tempting to speculate that just as the latent prophetic state is embedded in the brain-consciousness matrix, so is the prophetic message. One we have the vocabulary of prophecy more in mind, we can start to explore the psychedelic experience using that lens - by doing so I believe we will be able to integrate the spiritual properties of the psychedelic drug experience in a way that neither Buddhism nor shamanism has done.

Avi: What is the role of "Angels" play in visionary states?

Rick: The medieval Jewish philosophers whom I rely upon for understanding the Hebrew Bible text and its concept of prophecy like to portray angels as God's intermediaries. That is, they perform a certain function for God. Within the context of my DMT research, I believe that the beings that the volunteers saw could be conceived of as angelic - that is, previously invisible, incorporeal spiritual forces that are engarbed or enclothed in a particular form - determined by the psychological and spiritual development of the volunteers - bringing a particular message or experience to that volunteer.

Avi: Is interactivity crucial to the visionary states accessed using DMT?

Rick: In most cases, yes. Only one volunteer had a classic mystical experience - and even in that case, he was led, helped, pulled, and pushed toward that state by what appeared to be angelic aides.

Avi: What prospects do you see for the use of DMT in mainstream healing modalities?

Rick: Smoked or injected DMT is hard to work with - it starts almost instantly, peaks in 2 minutes, and is over in about 20-30 minutes. Nevertheless, I've gotten many e-mails describing psychological benefits (disruption of addictions, and resolution of mood disorders). For most people, though, it's all they can do to hold on an remember what happens during that 15 minute period, and for some the experience is disorienting and psychologically disruptive.

Ayahuasca, which contains DMT in an orally active form, is much more manageable - effects begin in 30-45 minutes, peak at 2-3 hours, and are resolved in 4-6 hours. There are countless field reports of healing of physical, emotional, and addictive problems within the context of ayahuasca use - either in syncretic churches, medical clinics, or shamanic use. More and more literature is appearing in this regard, and more sophisticated scientific studies are now beginning to take place.

Dr. Strassman recorded a few thoughts to go with this interview, which you can listen to at archive.org or using the player below.

Ted Chiang on Writing

Avi Solomon — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Avi: Could you introduce yourself?

Ted: My name is Ted Chiang. I'm a science fiction short story writer.

Were there any formative experiences that led you to become a science fiction writer?

Probably the most formative experience was reading the Foundation Trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me. Reading Asimov and then Arthur C. Clarke when I was twelve definitely put me on the road to being a science fiction writer.

When did you actually decide to go pro?

It depends on what you mean by going pro. I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction so in that sense I'm still not a pro. Writing for publication was always my goal, but making a living writing science fiction wasn't. When I was a kid I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.

How has being a technical writer affected your fiction writing?

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers, because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. Nowadays I work as a freelance writer, so I usually do contract technical writing part of the year and then I take time off and do fiction writing the rest of the year. It's too difficult for me to do technical writing at the same time as fiction writing - they draw on the same parts of my brain. So I can't say it's a good day job in that sense, but it's a way to make money.

Could you give a walk-through of your writing process?

In general, if there's an idea I'm interested in, I usually think about that for a long time and write down my speculations or just ideas about how it could become a story, but I don't actually start writing the story itself until I know how the story ends. Typically the first part of the story that I write is the very ending, either the last paragraph of the story or a paragraph near the end. Once I have the destination in mind then I can build the rest of the story around that or build the rest of the story in such a way as to lead up to that. Usually the second thing I write is the opening of the story and then I write the rest of the story in almost random order. I just keep writing scenes until I've connected the beginning and the end. I write the key scenes or what I think of as the landmark scenes first, and then I just fill in backwards and forwards.

How do you classify your writing? I feel like it's a kind of philosophical fiction, because it's actually making people think, waking them up and making them wonder about things.

That's one of the things that science fiction is particularly good at, that's one of the reasons I like science fiction. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. When philosophers propose thought experiments as a way of analyzing certain questions, their thought experiments often sound a lot like science fiction. I think that there's a very good fit between the two.

I also think religion plays a very important role in your work.

I do think that religion is a very interesting phenomenon; obviously it affects many people very profoundly. There is a similarity between science and religion in that they're both attempts to understand the universe, and there was a time in the past when science and religion were not seen as incompatible, when it made perfect sense to be both a scientist and a religious person. Nowadays there is much more of an attitude that the two are incompatible. I think that's sort of a 20th century phenomenon.

You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?

Sure. Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there's actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding. In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science. Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it's how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.

I feel that one can look upon language as a connecting link between magic and science, so potentially a scientist could be led back to the world of magic by the very fact that he is using language. Maybe if he overuses it, or "overclocks" his language use, that might lead him to some kind of magical experience.

When you say he has a magical experience, are there effects in the external world?

No, there might be effects on his body, somatic effects, but not on the external world.

Ah, okay. It's probably worth making a distinction between subjective magic and objective magic, or between spiritual magic and practical magic.

Or between white magic and black magic.

Right. In practical magic, the goal is to affect the external world. That's the kind of magic I meant when I was talking about turning lead into gold. In spiritual magic, the only goal is to affect the internal state of the practitioner. It sounds like you're talking about spiritual magic as opposed than practical magic.

Yes, let me give you an example. So, Fred Hoyle came up with the mechanics of how stars produce heavier elements that end up in us being here. There was an Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell; I listened to one of his interviews, and he was describing an ecstatic experience he had on the way back to the Earth from the Moon. He had a very intense bodily experience of that fact, that the matter in his body was made in an older generation of stars. It was a kind of revelatory experience, and it was based on a piece of scientific knowledge.

Okay. I don't think his experience was fundamentally different from the ecstatic experiences that religious people have had for millenia, whether they achieve it through prayer, or meditation or some other type of practice, they achieve an epiphany or some kind of revelation. It sounds like you're talking about a similar type of experience that scientists might have.

Yes, he did say that when he got back to Earth, he researched the experience he had, and it matched something called savikalpa samadhi in a yogic Sanskrit text, but he didn't know about that beforehand, and his experience was based on a fact of physics. So my question is, can scientific knowledge lead to new kinds of experience, or are they just religious experiences in a different form?

I don't think that there's anything that requires that what the person was thinking about actually be true, for that person to have this experience. The fact that we're made of elements that were born in the heart of stars, that happens to be true, and that contributed to this astronaut's experience, but someone could have the exact same experience contemplating something which is not true; for instance, that we are all children of God or whatever, any religious claim you want to use. I don't think the truth of the statement is actually necessary for that ecstatic experience.

So it doesn't have any impact on the validity of the experience?

I'm not convinced that it does. For example, I recently heard this ethnobotanist, Dennis McKenna, on the radio, talking about his experience taking a powerful hallucinogen. He could see photosynthesis actually happening; he could see water molecules actually being processed in the chloroplasts of plant cells. He also felt this incredible sense of oneness, a feeling that humanity was part of this planetary organism. I'm sure this was a very profound experience for him, but I don't take it as evidence of the truth of photosynthesis. He himself admitted that he already knew how photosynthesis works, and I think the fact that he knew this contributed to his hallucinatory experience. Other people who don't know about photosynthesis have different hallucinatory experiences, and most of these experiences do not reflect scientific truth. People will have incompatible experiences, and they can't all be true. So I don't think that this powerful ecstatic or hallucinatory experience is an indicator of truth. I think it can accompany an accurate insight about the world, but it doesn't have to. It can accompany someone thinking about the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements in stars, but it could also accompany someone thinking about the need to excoriate one's flesh to make the Lord happy.

Your story 'Understand' relates to this. I think it came before the fad of going to Peru and taking Ayahuasca, but it's about a similar experience, making all these connections, perceiving things in a more intense way.

Yes, I suppose it is. I remember when some friends of mine read 'Understand', they were certain that I must have taken hallucinogens at some point, but I have not. I wasn't attempting to describe someone hallucinating, but I was attempting to describe the experience of having a revelation, an incredibly deep and profound revelation about the nature of the universe. I guess it so happens that most people's experience of that occurs when they're taking hallucinogens, but the hallucinogen aspect was not my intent.

I recently read Rick Strassman's book 'The Spirit Molecule', about the psychedelic drug DMT and the effects it's had on people, and I felt that it connected with 'Understand'. I feel like many things connect with your story, in retrospect.

I think that's one of the things that happens when you are thinking about a given idea a lot; you start seeing resonances to that idea everywhere, in the things that you read, the things that you see.

I'll give you another example. I read 'Hell is the Absence of God' while living in Jerusalem at the height of the suicide bombing campaign, so that was my association: the angel as a suicide bomber.

That's an interesting association; I hadn't really thought about that, but I can see the resemblance.

The story resonated for me because it explores the issues that many of us were forced to grapple with at that time, because we knew we could die any day. I mean that's always true, but it's more obvious when there are bombs going off.

It really makes you conscious of the fact that you could die at any moment. It probably makes you think, have you made your peace?

And how fast can you make your peace!

Which is one of the arguments that religious people make: you don't know how long you have, so you'd better make your peace now because you might die at any time. That is an argument that some characters in the story 'Hell is the Absence of God' make, citing it as one of the reasons God orders these angelic visitations: it's a way to remind people that they don't have much time, or that they don't know how much time they have.

One of the characters in your story makes his peace regardless of the fact that God has created upheavals in his life; he makes a moral choice that's not dependent upon God's actions.

I think it's a hard thing to achieve. You can describe a character achieving it, but I can't say that I have achieved that myself. Accepting all the terrible things that happen in the world, making your peace with that, trying to make sense of that is one of the fundamental problems of religion.

In your story 'Seventy-Two Letters' you draw parallels between Jewish Kabbalah, computer programming and bio-informatics. Do you see any similarities between these, given that they are all reliant on manipulating a base code? What are the differences in your view?

Well, I think one can draw metaphorical connections between them for a science-fiction story, but I don't think they have a lot to do with each other in reality. Computer programming is a rational practice while Kabbalah is a mystical practice, and DNA is different from computer code, and I wouldn't want anyone confusing one with another. At a metaphorical level, they all provide ways of thinking about the relationship between language and reality, which is a topic I find interesting. There's this old idea in magic that there's a language where the symbols have a tight relationship with what's being signified, so by manipulating those symbols, you could manipulate reality itself. That's a form of practical magic, according to the distinction we talked about earlier. And that certainly bears a resemblance to computer programming, where code is translated into actions by a computer. And in turn that bears a resemblance to DNA, where code is translated into the bodies of living organisms. So I think it's fun to imagine a connection between all three of these, so long as we're talking about fiction. I wouldn't want anyone to take this too literally.

Many of your stories play with the implications of knowing the future. What fascinates you about the nature of Time?

The question of free will. I think free will is what underlies most everything interesting about time travel. And when I say time travel, I'm including receiving information from the future, because that's essentially equivalent to someone traveling from the future. The idea that you can create a paradox assumes that you have free will; even the idea of multiple timelines assumes it, because it assumes that you can make choices. There have always been philosophical arguments about whether we have free will or not, but they're usually kind of abstract. Time travel, or knowing the future, makes the question very concrete. If you know what's going to happen, can you keep it from happening? Even when a story says that you can't, the emotional impact arises from the feeling that you should be able to.

I gather you have a large fan base in Japan. How do you account for it?

I can't; I was completely surprised when I found out. It did prompt me to think about what might make some works more suitable for translation than others. I'm sure there are stories that are very rooted in aspects of a particular culture, which require familiarity with that culture to fully appreciate, and those stories probably don't translate well. To the extent that my work is philosophical fiction, it's not enormously reliant on American culture, and that might make it a good candidate for translation. That could explain why my work got translated into Japanese, although it wouldn't explain why it's more popular there than here. I gather that Greg Egan is considered a god of science fiction in Japan, while most of his work is out of print in the United States; some people compare my work to his, which I consider a great compliment, and which would support the idea that Japanese science-fiction readers have very different tastes than American ones.

What prompted you to write your newest novella 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects'?

It's primarily a response to how Artificial Intelligence has been depicted in most science fiction. The typical science-fiction depiction of AI is this loyal, obedient butler; you simply flip a switch, turn it on and it's ready to do your bidding. I feel like there's a huge story being glossed over, having to do with the creation of that AI. I don't mean the technical details of developing software that's as smart as a human brain; most science fiction posits a miraculous technological development, and there's no need to explain it. It's just that with AI, I feel like there's a second miracle assumed, which is that someone was able to take this software as smart as a human brain and make it as useful as a butler. Current computers are still light-years away from being as capable as the brain of a newborn baby, but even after you've reached that point, you're still only halfway to having a useful butler. For example, in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010, supposedly the first thing that HAL 9000 said when he was activated is "Good morning Dr. Chandra, I'm ready for my first lesson". That is not something a newborn baby says. There is implicitly a lifetime of experience underlying that simple statement. Where did that experience come from? If it could be programmed in, HAL wouldn't need to have any lessons at all. How did he learn to speak English? How does he know what it means to be ready for a lesson? It takes years to turn a human being into a useful employee. In fact, the more useful you want the employee to be, the longer it takes to get there. You might not have to repeat the process for each and every AI you want to use; once you've got one trained, it's possible that you could just make copies of it. But someone still needs to do it for the first one, and that's going to be difficult, and really time-consuming. Most depictions of AI assume that this step is unnecessary, or that it will be easy, which I think assumes an entirely separate miracle from the technical one.

How optimistic are you about the practical realization of these two miracles of AI?

In practical terms, I'm pretty skeptical about AI. I don't think it's impossible, but I think it's so difficult that I'm not sure why anyone would bother. Right now Google is enormously useful, but it's not remotely conscious, and it's not moving in that direction. If anyone tried describing a computer as useful as Google in a science-fiction story fifty years ago, they probably depicted it as having consciousness of some sort. But it turns out that a computer doesn't need to be conscious to be useful; ordinary software serves our purposes just fine. I expect that will remain true; we will have software of ever increasing usefulness without it ever "waking up". On the other hand, there is one form of rudimentary AI software that has turned out to be surprisingly popular, and that's virtual pets. The Sims was the best-selling PC game of all time, and who would have predicted that? It turns out that having a kind of emotional relationship with software can be very appealing to people. So I tend to think that the most likely reason for us to develop conscious software would be because it's fun, rather than because it's useful. It will all depend on whether software that's actually conscious is more fun than software that simply mimics conscious organisms, like The Sims. If it is, then that might actually motivate people to put in the time needed to train an AI to be useful.

The AIs in your story have virtual bodies. How important is having a body for consciousness to come into being? Is there a difference between having a "real" physical body and a virtual body?

A lot of researchers believe that AI needs to be embodied and situated, meaning that it has to have some kind of physical body and exist within some kind of physical environment. The general idea is that we learn by doing; our understanding of the world comes from moving our body around, pushing solid objects against each other. I suppose it's possible that there are modes of cognition that could exist without these things, but I think they'd be so foreign to us as to be incomprehensible. A virtual body and a virtual environment ought to work just as well as physical ones, assuming the simulation is detailed enough. However, a program like The Sims isn't actually simulating physical bodies to any significant degree. There are other video games, like first-person shooters, that do some physics simulation when it comes to destructible environments, but they don't actually do a detailed physics simulation for the character avatars. That's why their feet often pass through objects they're walking over. You'd have to design a far more detailed physics simulation to provide a sense of embodiment for an AI, but it should certainly be possible.

Your novella made me look at my own experience raising two young kids in a fresh light, which is one of the indicators that the story served it's purpose, in my book. The sense of touch is essential for the emotional health of kids. Could you elaborate on the role of touch in the world of the AIs in your story?

The AIs enjoy being touched, but that's a deliberate decision on the part of their designers; it's a way to make them appealing to their owners. There are some autistic children who don't like being touched, and that's hard for their parents, because parents like hugging their kids. And given the choice between a pet that enjoys being touched and one that doesn't, most people would choose one that enjoys it. Touch is important to people, so if you want to encourage an emotional bond between humans and AIs, if you want people to want to spend time with them, you should make touch important to AIs too.

In 'A Primate's Memoir' Robert Sapolsky details his highly emotional connections with the troop of African baboons he studied. Did you read any primatological works while preparing your novella?

I didn't read about primates in the wild, but I did read about the chimpanzees who'd been taught sign language. They were famous for a while, but you don't usually hear about what happened to them after the language studies were over. Some were sent to medical labs for experimental use. The case I was most interested in was a chimpanzee named Lucy; the humans who'd been teaching her couldn't find a chimp sanctuary that would take her, so they decided to send her to Africa, even though she'd lived her entire life among humans and never seen the jungle before. A grad student named Janis Carter went with her to help her adjust to life in the wild. Janis Carter was supposed to stay there just a few weeks, but pretty quickly she realized that that wasn't going to be enough. She spent years teaching Lucy how to live outdoors and forage for food. Ultimately Lucy died because she wasn't able to adapt to the wild, but I was really struck by Janis Carter's commitment; here was someone who didn't even like camping, and she changed her entire life in order to help Lucy. How many people would be willing to do that for someone who isn't a human being?

Finally, are you planning on printing 'Exhalation' on copper sheets?

Ha! I suppose it could be done. That would be a very cool art object or an interesting limited edition. I don't think I'm famous enough to warrant such an expensive endeavor, but I would be thrilled if someone did it.

Thank you

You're welcome.