Interview: Jordan~Phantoms & Premonitions *It's All Science!

Please take care of your hearts this episode as there is the discussion of suicide during the conversation- this is a sensitive and triggering topic for many.

This week I interview Jordan Miller, who was super precocious as a child! Growing up in a Mormon household Jordan was intrigued by "truth" and how the world worked...in science and meaning. It spurred a lifelong quest to discover just what the world is made of and what it all means! Suffice it to say he is a scientist and a lover of learning...and it has resulted in Jordan creating Satori, a crypto AI that predicts the future! In this episode he tells two stories of magic...and both are very different!

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the podcast.

This week my guest is Jordan Miller who is the driving force behind the Satori Network.

He's also the lead developer of Moontree and we talk crypto and blockchain in this episode and Jordan does a much much better job of describing exactly what the Satori Network is in this episode so I'm gonna leave it to him a little bit later in the episode to kind of fill in all the details.

The other thing that was really exciting in this interview was that Jordan taught me a new word instantiate and you all know that I love words I've never heard of before so when Jordan used it I thought oh my gosh what is that and I had to run right after interviewing him and see what the definition was and instantiate means to provide an instance of or concrete evidence in support of like a theory a concept or a claim.

There is an easter egg at the end of this episode so after the credits if you still want to hear a little bit more of my interview with Jordan stick around and you can listen to that and then I loved the name of Jordan's Satori Network and I found a gorgeous gorgeous quotation about Satori which we talked about a little bit later in the podcast in reference to Buddhism.

Gabrielle Roth says,

I want to take you to a place of pure magic.

It's the place athletes call the zone.

Buddhists call Satori and ravers call trance.

I call it the silver desert.

It's a place of pure light that holds the dark within it.

It's a place of pure rhythm.

And I don't know if that gives you a little bit of help in imagining what Satori is.

It's probably one of those things that we can each define in our own way but I thought it was such a beautiful definition of Satori and I wanted to share it.

Now there is a trigger warning for this episode.

There is the discussion of suicide so please if this is a sensitive subject for you please take care of your heart.

So with that in mind here is my interview with Jordan Miller.

And I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I see this person walk down the hall and they're very pretty frantic.

They're pretty like moving fast and they seem like they have a an expression of some kind of fear or some kind of worry and and they're going right and so and but the weird thing I noticed was that this person was not wearing normal workday clothes kind of look like an undershirt maybe wearing shorts or something boxers I don't know but I couldn't see the bottom as well but I saw the shirt and I was like that's weird.

How would you do that?

How do you self-describe?

Isn't that interesting because I never wanted to self-describe as a kid.

I didn't want to have a career.

I didn't want to choose a language.

I just wanted to be you know and I think all kids want to do that.

So at this point finally you know I've been a programmer and stuff.

I would say I'd have to identify as the founder of Satori,

The lead developer of Moontree so that's kind of my professional setting but the founder of Satori is is also kind of a passion project too so it's kind of it's kind of taken over most of my life so yeah that's probably what I'd have to say in a nutshell I guess.

And I'm so curious when you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?

Did you even think about that kind of thing?

So I remember being in elementary school for years and being like okay first I don't have to decide right now because I'm like in first grade but thinking I don't know what I'm going to be some kind of scientist I thought but you know the the scientist profession that I wanted was taken.

You know I would watch Bill Nye every day and he would go around and he would watch or he would interview other you know scientists and so he wasn't stuck in one domain.

He would get to see the whole world and that's kind of what I wanted.

I wanted to build a holistic model of reality.

I was very truth centric.

I wanted to know the truth.

That was a high value for me so I was a scientist type but I didn't want to have to choose a speciality right.

I didn't want to have to because one thing I realized was that everybody who does get a career and everything they tend to speak the language of their career and it shades everything in their whole life.

So maybe this was very apparent to me because my dad was a lawyer and so everything was devil's advocate and everything so but yeah so I didn't want to choose a language.

I just wanted to know what the language of the real world was you know as purely and as openly as possible.

I love that and I totally resonate with the devil's advocate comment that you made because I've had a couple partners that were absolutely devil's advocates and sometimes it's fruitful and it's beneficial because it helps you to kind of maybe consider other options or other ideas other ways of looking at things but at some points it just becomes maddening and you think oh my gosh can we just like not do this dynamic.

Can you just say okay your experience is valid and two thumbs up to that.

So there are pluses and minuses and you know as having a father who's a lawyer I can only imagine you know that's actually really fabulous and I loved science when I was a kid.

I loved it so much and you know when the teacher would say okay in elementary school this is okay we're gonna investigate all the different layers of the rainforest.

I would think what what do you mean the rainforest has layers what are you even talking about and then we you know go into the canopy and then you know go down to the ground the underbrush.

I forget all the technical names now but I remember a kid just being utterly thrilled and I learned that stuff or or the I remember when the teacher one day was like all right we're all gonna investigate deltas now and I thought what is that and then I was like oh my gosh it's these cool kind of spaces in between water and the land and they they look like this or they can have these animals.

I just loved every second of science to tell you.

Yeah isn't it fun and then and then they want you to specialize and then you get oh okay fine you know and that's the that's the story of most scientists.

Yeah I've you know on I forget where one of my descriptors is that I want you know my dream is that I could live maybe a thousand years and become oh my gosh what is it called where you become proficient poly something at lots of different things.

Polymath?

Yeah I want to be a polymath but then I realized that I don't have the intellect for polymath so I was like okay I'll be a dilettante.

How do you define dilettante?

What is that?

So like so I would dip my toes in all the things that interest me so like you know learn know a little bit about astronomy enough to delight me know a little bit about quantum physics enough to delight me know a little bit about rainforest canopies enough to delight me so yeah I mean but you're also talking to someone who my dad when I was a kid subscribed to a science magazine for me so you know I got I got to be a dilettante all the you know once a month got my science magazine so yeah.

That's what I am I'm a dilettante that's great.

There we go I think we need more dilettantes because you know frankly if you go to that party or that conference afterwards there's always a gathering where people have to talk to each other and like make small talk which I hate with a passion I think small talk is some sort of ancient form of cruelty that not only I have to suffer from people but other people have to suffer from mine you know I always am like how can I interject some sort of fascinating factoid that's gonna just blow them all away and make this a little bit more interesting for me yeah so yeah you gotta get you gotta get through that layer that layer of well what are we talking about today you know yeah absolutely and then you get into it I love that as a kid that you had the prescience to understand hey I don't need to make a choice right now you know I'm I'm this age in no universe do I have to make a choice right now that's I'm so proud of you and it's kind of exciting that you knew that already um yeah I mean some people automatically are like I want to be an astronaut or a firefighter or what have you but I always fantasized about either being a scientist in a lab or working in a library partially because I like quiet and I love working alone so now now you know two of my deepest darkest secrets but you also like talking to people I do I do so like I don't consider this small talk this is very intentional and we both want to hear but I used to know someone who loved small talk because he just loved how just I don't know weird and bizarre and what a weird societal and cultural thing that we have to talk to people we don't know and create languages and sentences and thought to kind of entertain other people and he thought it was just this really sick and weird game that we as humans have to participate in a psychopath yes totally um so you know I'm sure well as a kid I mean I don't know how old you are okay so but as a kid I'm sure you weren't even thinking crypto and all of this stuff no yeah when did that become kind of something you were interested in so um probably in my 20s now I was always interested in computers and information and how information flowed and how it changed uh the environment in which it flowed I thought that was pretty cool um but uh you know that's that's just some broad strokes but then finally you get into it and you're like okay you know I went to college and I started just taking any class that I found interesting for for years which was a lot of money and so so I went to college and then uh but I started to figure out what do all these classes have in common they all have in common systems and rules and the generalization of basically data flow and information how does information work and so I took genetics classes and I was interested in how the genes change over time and and I took brain classes and I was interested in how the brain manages its intelligence and so I finally figured this out and I wanted to build I got really really into intelligence as such and so I wanted to build this worldwide network of future predicting AI bots right just a network where all the AI bots are just trying to figure out what the future is going to be together right and um they could all watch different things and they could all compare with each other and I wanted to build that but I didn't know how and then I heard of blockchain so I heard of this technology that you could build an open distributed decentralized network that nobody's in control of um I thought that would probably be ideal because you don't want any one entity in control of intelligence you know so um I got into blockchain learned a lot about it 10 years later or maybe I finally feel felt like I was able to actually build this idea so I've been building it for the last two years and the name is so beautiful how did you choose the name isn't that neat yes it's gorgeous after uh in my early story yeah satori beautiful um in my early 20s I left religion because I had been brought up mormon and that led me into just looking at all kinds of other religions and other philosophies metaphysics and I really got into it and so I learned about this term satori from the buddhists it's kind of an eastern thing uh and so it means enlightenment and it means like you know you're sitting there meditating and all of a sudden you get this aha moment where you you see something you've never seen before or whatever and so I felt like that was a really good name for an AI that's that works a little bit differently than uh or has a different conception than the other AIs that are out there today I thought well that that's kind of you know an aha moment I felt like but also it itself since it's predicting the future it may at some point learn how to predict the future and gain a self-realization or self-conception and learn how to predict the future of that and uh so it may it may become aware at some point someday right so um I felt like if you're gonna name if you're gonna build a computerized intelligence that might become aware you should probably give it a name like Eureka or Satori or you know something that's aha right so um anyway that's kind of where the name came from well and you know forgive me for a little moment of levity here on that or and I hope it doesn't annoy you too much but people think about AI and of course what do they think of Skynet they think of the matrix and AI using us as little juice boxes I presume that you don't see this happening with your your AI system oh yeah for sure wait what they're going to be sipping us like little juice box batteries what so I the reason we need to decentralize it is so that everybody can have control over it so we we don't want AI to be separate from us this is my attitude we want to be integrated in the AI process and where do we you know what we don't want we don't want to be integrated at that level where we're the raw energy input or something right so we want to be integrated at the top where we're in control and so I think the best way to do that now that we have crypto we can make these units of control that anybody can hold and have and use and I feel like that's the best use for crypto right so I kind of see like what we what we should have our crypto systems be in large part they should be shares of computerized labor right when you buy a crypto or when you earn one or when you whatever you should be getting a share of of computerized labor AI right and so you can then direct how that AI should work so with Satori if you know you're you're running it on your computer you're earning these tokens and then you have a token a unit of control where you can say I have the right to vote on what Satori looks at right it should look at the financial markets or the environment or government statistics or you know whatever else so I think that's the way that we avoid any kind of real disaster we try to decentralize it as fast as possible and you know AI researchers are kind of they're looking at this problem and they're saying okay well what do we do you know they're academics and they're you know thinking far in the future and stuff so they're like well what do we do when AI just gets really really really really smart and way smarter than us and we don't know what to do with it and we you know how do we make sure that it is nice to us still right how do we make sure so this is called the alignment problem and you know they call it the alignment problem because they've given up on control they're like this is a thing that we cannot control because it's too smart therefore how do we free control it you know set everything up uh so we align the stars and align its its natural inclination to be um you know and that's that's just pushing control back you know engineering so that there might be an answer to that question how do we you know but they're looking in all the wrong places and what I mean by that is that our academics they're trying to come up with a rigorous mathematical uh you know well that's not going to work right it's too complex so what we can do though is we know that if we decentralize the power instead of just putting it in the hands of a few companies um that you know that's the best thing we could do right now and it's obvious and so it feels like that's what we should do so Satori does that in one domain the domain of future prediction and you also you brought this up before and so I thought oh my gosh what a beautiful segue because my second question always is did you grow up in a religious household and you sort of and so I'm wondering how how that evolved for you as you got older and if if you want to answer that question I love it I was a fanatic so I was a Mormon fanatic I was a little eight-year-old Mormon kid that was like I'm going to go on a mission and preach the word and and that that might sound weird and it kind of felt weird at the time um because because of my religious um sorry my um scientific inclinations and evidence-based reasoning and stuff like that well I think what what happened there was I was very you know the top of my value hierarchy was truth so I wanted to know the truth and not all not some of it all of it right I wanted to build a holistic world model of what's really going on out here and so I wanted to know the truth and it's hard to know the truth science is hard right and so here I have all these adults around me that say well you know we have this direct conduit to almighty truth right here you know you can just pray and get answers and you know there you go right and so I I was skeptical at first but it kind of came down to this question of well either there's something to this and if there's something to this then you know it's magic it must be amazing right so either there's something to this or every adult in my life in the world right is basically insane right like how could they believe this if it's not true so I went headstrong into it and that's why I was like this little fanatic I was like it's got to be true it's gotta it's gotta be true or else this is a crazy world so I think all kids if they if they care they do that calculation if they don't care they're like oh well whatever I'll go along with it because maybe whatever um but I had to go into that for a very long time in order to come out the other side and say all right we're starting over so I started over at like 21 22 23 and basically just said I'm putting everything I believe away and I'm just gonna start again and that's you know that's kind of when I started all my uh everything I was I was reborn when I left the church this is totally a weird question but did you grow up in Utah because I think that's where okay I mean I don't like to make assumptions there are Mormons everywhere but I thought maybe it's a pretty safe bet to ask if you grew up in Utah are you still in Utah now I am okay I mean it is I drive through I mean I drive I love to drive across this U.

S.

I drive through Utah all the time I'm going to be driving through there next week actually I have some good friends that live in Salt Lake City um hopefully I can get to see them but um Utah is a gorgeous place yeah like ridiculous yeah and you guys have like mountains lots of amazing mountains but you also have plains I mean it's a state with a lot of incredible beauty um the red rock yeah yeah I mean what a gorgeous place to grow up as a kid first of all I love that even as a child you were anchoring yourself in this idea of the truth what is true what is objectively true so you're already thinking about that as a kid and then but you still have this pull this because you have faith right and the adults around you the community the culture how they're comporting themselves what they believe in how they orient themselves in the world and then you know you get older you age you learn more things as you get older you learn even more things and then when you're on 20 or 21 you look around and you think wait a second you know I need to figure out I need to orient myself in a different way or find a different touchstone right from which to place your life and I mean it's that's kind of an astonishing journey for me I think yeah some people don't ever get there you know some people don't ever get there it's more comfortable to stay in that place rather than break free and forge your own path does that make sense it is it is and I would have I would have I would have stayed in that place if I had been relative you know remotely happy right but I came home from the mission I didn't have anything I wanted in my life and I was like I have done everything right according to the tenets of my religion and uh maybe I bet on the wrong horse now what was interesting is I was not emotionally and intellectually able to identify the religion as the problem right and so I had to I had to put everything on the back burner you know basically my whole identity everything and say something's wrong with this pile of mess you know I don't know what it is but there's something it's missing at least that's for sure um but it it also might all be incorrect so um I'm just going to put it all away and just be curious about the world and I didn't question religion at first I started with economics and I wanted to know like how does how does the economy work and and then that got me into government and morality and and all these other kind of philosophies and it wasn't until I developed my own you know rational morality that I felt like I have something here that I am you know pretty sure is like true and if it's not true then I don't care because this is my morality so I'm going to go with this and it doesn't match the one I got from God right or the teachings of the religion so I said that's when I had to bring it back on the table and be like well that one's out you know it didn't take long it was like a week and I was like yep that's that's it we're done and I guess I I did not know that you'd already done your mission which was for two years is that right and I I do have to tell you that one of the things the mission for the Mormon church so you know how I hate small talk and I realize that when you're doing a mission you it's not small talk right you're not but you do have to there's a prelude of small talk right talking to strangers and whatever I would be so tortured but also I am just not that brave and every once in a while in the different places that I've lived I've seen young men on mission you know with their bikes and they're dressed and they're going and I just think to myself oh my gosh I could never do that first of all hating the small talk but second of all it's so brave to just go up to complete strangers and start talking to them and putting yourself out there um where did you do your mission Iowa Iowa Iowa yeah Iowa I grew up in well after living overseas in Illinois and I've driven through Iowa a lot and there's a lot of not there there's a lot there yeah there's a lot of small towns yeah please tell me you didn't bike from small town to small town no we had a car for that yeah thank goodness thank goodness and and yeah lots of corn lots and lots of corn which there is nothing wrong with corn but Iowa is very small and also probably a little bit of a scary state to go up to strangers doors and talk to people um so I salute you sir I salute you for being brave yeah I I think you could do it it's not that hard no but it is it is tedious and it is kind of a torture but yeah after after just a few few days the bravery it's not a big deal anymore okay and do you do you um oh my gosh I was gonna ask you something and I totally forgot what it was um yeah oh I was gonna ask do you ever get days off when you do that one day a week one day a week okay and then is there someone who like oversees you in the area or is it just faith that you're okay okay that's right so they organize it where there's this um mission president is what he's called and he's there for like five years or something and uh but he's an older gentleman with his wife they're seniors and uh they volunteered to do another mission like in their older years and um they're over like 150 missionaries and you know that's spread out over Iowa or over whatever area they're at and that's about it yeah okay okay and then I wanted to ask I just find this fascinating were there any other quote unquote scientists in your family people who no no no they don't think like me no fascinating no no not at all you're like the I mean I think that's absolutely fascinating because it's it's it speaks to something that was in your soul something that you were born with you know this inquisitiveness about the world this curiosity this desire to have this what is truth and try to find it it's it is you were born with it and I think that's utterly fascinating I'm sure I'm sure your family's like who's that guy over there but you're like I'm reading a science magazine go away yeah it was fun I mean I don't mind being different yeah yeah no no absolutely um and we need all sorts of people in this world so yay well you know the main question of the podcast is and it can be more than one story I'd love to hear multiple stories if you'd like to share them um where you feel like you've witnessed something magical or miraculous or inexplicable something mysterious you could have witnessed it you could have experienced it um anything that you feel like sharing I'm here for it I have two experiences so being so scientific or so you know rational and and down to earth I guess like um I don't have a lot of you know I'm I'm not a medium I'm not like sensitive to energies like all of this kind of stuff I don't know nothing about astrology you know everything everything in that realm I don't understand or I don't experience directly except I have had two paranormal experiences so I can tell both of those stories if you want okay so the first one is um a gift I don't know what to call it but I've you know I've looked into it and a lot of people have this it's not uncommon um this is a thing that people report and so ever since a teen as I was a teenager I've had glimpses of the literal future so and I mean that in dreams so I've had glimpses of my literal future looking out of my own eyes um usually about two weeks ahead in dreams and it's rare and it's on occasion and I can't control it and it's it's odd um but it's happened you know many times one of those times I mean I have several explicit memories but they're usually short like 10 seconds um it's just a little a little clip literally of what I'm going to see or hear and uh one of them um was pretty long it was like a 30 second conversation and I got into this conversation and remembered the dream and I remembered the whole you know next everything that's going to happen and I remembered what I was about to say and it was what I was about to say I was like oh yeah that's that's right and I remembered my you know person I'm talking to their reaction and it was surprising this is I think why I remember this so well because their reaction was surprising they were offended by something right and I didn't know what it was so um I decided to do a little experiment and not say that thing and see if they got surprised or offended and they did not and so um I found that to be interesting in telling that what I'm not I'm not seeing some kind of predetermined literal future I must be glimpsing some kind of um what do they call it uh a premonition of a most likely future or a likely future I don't know so and then I looked into the science of that the science of people have studied premonitions and tried to bring it into the lab and they say that that's that's what they're seeing they're seeing a likely future not the real future I think that is the first um the first one I have to tell you that I find that utterly fascinating and I do think that time is well first of all I think that time doesn't exist this is just my idea doesn't exist it's a construct we use so that we don't go insane everything happens one right after the other but really time is everything's happening all at once so every experience that I'm going to have in my life is actually happening right now and sometimes when I sleep or dream I get I can have access I kind of think of it as a record with grooves it's like the record skips in my dream and goes to a different and so I get a glimpse but it's so that's happening in my dreams but it's also happened in real life that's happened to me where I've gotten a quick flash of something in the future and it's intruded on my normal visual um what I'm looking at it just comes and then it goes away and I think to myself okay I just the record skipped there for a second but one example is when I was a gosh maybe in high school I had a dream we were on a houseboat and you know I was young and impressionable and liked boys and we were sitting on a houseboat and there were three of the most gorgeous boys I'd ever seen in my life were on this houseboat and we were having fun and laughing and I remember waking up and going to high school that day and thinking that was the wildest and wackiest dream I've ever had it was so intense and so potent that it stayed with me for a long time because I thought I don't dream about stuff like this this is weird and what does this even mean and then a year later we were in California visiting dear friends on their houseboat and I looked up and the I think it was one of the sisters had her friends come to visit and I looked at this view in front of me and realized it was the exact same vision that I'd had in my dream wow and I that's what I'm talking about yeah I had a um I had a diary at the time and wrote I that I couldn't believe it and that it was and what happened to me a year ago and it was shocking then of course the boys ruined it because they found my diary and made fun of me the rest of the trip really it was the first time that I really had a glimpse of something maybe I don't know super normal extra beyond what we quote unquote call normal these days but absolutely it's it's um it's kind of I I love that you're so I mean I would consider it a gift as well but I also love that you're so like calm and okay with it you're like this happens you know I would be shouting from the rooftops like here ye here ye everybody I've already tried that oh you yeah and people don't listen yeah I mean we worked with the religion yeah oh yeah yeah well gosh you know a gift like that is also a burden right because it's your singular experience and how do you convince other people yeah yeah so well good for you for finding that place I think that is utterly fabulous and I love that you're just so accepting and calm and I would consider it a superpower you know I I also loved that you know because I'm a fan of um both and so there are certain events in our lives that are we're meant to show up for that like the hinge of the universe or the story of this universe hinges upon and in between you have free will so there's fate and then there's free will so I always say like in between those fated events I can misbehave and have fun but I've got to show up for those events that kind of you know help keep this universe moving I like it yeah I love your your your experiment that you did how frigging fabulous oh the second one you know this is interesting because these kind of things they are explored by science you know and science has a lot to say uh about all of these kind of things this is more of a sobering experience but I don't know I mean I find it very telling but it's hard I just need to be respectful right like this was okay I'll tell it and then you'll understand I started working for a company many years ago and I was there about six months before some terrible event happened one of my co-workers that I had just met a couple times really I only had a few little conversations with him and I was looking forward to getting to know him better he committed suicide so I wasn't able to really tell this experience that I had because all the people around me were you know very much grieving and all that kind of stuff so I had to just kind of experience this and and just see it for myself one day um I came into work early so I was usually the first one there um at least a few days a week or something like that so I came into work early I was there like six and I'm sitting there and we had this door that looked down the hallway and the top half was open like it was cut in half and the bottom would open and the top would open so the top was open and I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I see this person walk down the hall and they're very uh pretty frantic they're pretty like moving fast and they seem like they have a an expression of some kind of fear or some kind of worry and and they're going right and so and but the weird thing I noticed was that this person was not wearing normal workday clothes kind of look like an undershirt um maybe wearing shorts or something boxers I don't know but I couldn't see the bottom as well but I saw the shirt and I was like man that's weird so this person was coming to work I thought and they worked in the department of like keeping the servers running and everything so in my mind that they did not see me we didn't make eye contact and I only saw them for like two seconds as they're running down the hall so this person I thought okay well this makes sense they're not dressed for work something went down we've got to get it back up and running fast and they can't had to come into work to go do it so they just ran into work and they're gonna do it and then they're gonna you know that's what I thought was going on I didn't see this person for the rest of the day so I thought well he went home and then maybe he just stayed home I don't know and I didn't see him the next day and then the news came out that he had committed suicide and I I was like okay well that's terrible but then they said it happened about like two or four hours before I saw him and I was like no that's not right you must have got the day wrong because I saw him right so so I just didn't believe that they got the day correct for a while but then I started to you know they I mean they got the day right right I mean they know what they're doing so yeah so uh I saw a ghost right I saw a paranormal apparition I saw an idea or whatever's the residue of a human experience um probably wishing that he hadn't done what he did and probably trying to get back to his life or you know I don't know what that was but that was the other paranormal experience that I saw all right everyone I hope you enjoyed this interview and my conversation with Jordan I really appreciated our conversation I don't get to really interview many scientists or those who are working with developing software or crypto so I really loved every single second I need to thank him for being such a gracious guest and sharing both of his stories I wanted to read another gorgeous quotation about Satori Ken Wilber this is from Ken Wilber early morning the orange sun is slowly rising shining forth an empty luminous clarity the mind and the sky are one the sun is rising in the vast space of primordial awareness and there is just this Yasutani Roshi once said speaking of Satori that it was the most precious realization in the world because all the great philosophers had tried to understand ultimate reality but had failed to do so yet with Satori or awakening all of your deepest questions are finally answered it's just this thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast and thank you for all your ratings and all your reviews I appreciate each and every single one thank you for listening and here's my one request be like Jordan be flexible I love the way Jordan marries a scientific worldview with a metaphysical worldview and he doesn't see anything different about either of them they're perfectly perfect together I love his openness and his flexibility the way his mind works in just accepting that both of those seemingly different realities can actually go together and I think if each of us was more flexible or more open I think the world would be a more dynamic and gorgeous place definitely filled with more possibility so be like Jordan be open and be flexible and then be ready for a whole lot more possibility each and every day thank you for that and um I think it dovetails really nicely with the question that I want to ask you um obviously you know I love science because I won't shut up about it okay yeah and there was a theory that came out not recently but in the last couple years about the beginning of the universe or what have you because we're always trying to figure this out how did this all start but more directly engaging with the weight in the universe you know they're always like oh how much does dark matter weigh how much does dark energy weigh what you know where is this missing mass that we can't see what is it comprised of and and this theoretical physicist I believe he was said oh well he posited that information has mass and so basically when you know the big bang let's just use that when that happened a host of information I mean I use host right doesn't even begin to comprehend but I'm but you know what I'm saying like flooded in and it was that information that weighed what we can't observe that mass that we can't see and I thought that was such a fascinating concept and you used the word information earlier and now you tell the story about this gentleman at work who you saw coming in after he had committed suicide and it was this kind of this residue and I thought oh that was his information you know his you know who he was still that we use the word information which is so impersonal and kind of it has weight but it also doesn't yeah um it's like you saw the information that hadn't dissipated yet does that make sense yes that does make sense yeah so I mean would you agree that information has weight because I mean you used it earlier in respect with your AI and and you know your evolution towards what you're doing now um would you agree with that that information has weight yeah I mean because that's I mean a black hole you know everything that falls into it gets smeared upon its surface right and so it is represented as information on its surface and um and that's the holographic principle that you can relate the two and so information has weight for sure and what it seems like to me is that everything is information though you know this is kind of an interesting concept everybody's always been trying to get back to how did this all begin like you mentioned and you have the you have the religious thinking you have well I don't know let's look at the eastern where they're saying well um nature is is the first cause like the first cause is this Tao this nature this thing that exists because it exists right this thing that makes itself exist right and that's exemplified by nature right because plants grow and they you know everything and so I think that's really cool and then you have the western kind of thought it says okay we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna make sense of this uh let's say let's let's let's just look at it logically and so they say well everything needs a cause and and so and the thing that caused it needs a cause and so we're just going to trace it all back but gosh I guess we're going to have to come up with a thing that didn't need a cause because everything is here everything exists so that thing must exist right that that thing must have started everything and so then they trace it all the way back and they say that thing is the first cause and it's God right it caused itself um and then they you know uh the classical theist expand this to say well that is the universe that's the universe right because everything that is was caused by that can be traced back to it so it it's more like that thing is just growing it's the universe right and and that means God is everywhere God is the universe God is um omnipotent you know that's how they get all those different um designations and then you get to the science where we're like well okay well let's let's put this in terms of you know matter and energy and so we have to come back to a big bang yeah you know and so it seems like we're recreating the same myth over and over and over again um and anyway that's what it seems like to me and I think what this is what this I call it a myth because I don't think it explains the full truth I think one thing that it's missing is this realization that I am the center of my universe right so I am the one viewing the universe and everybody can say that and but because I have this subjective experience that uh that ties me to the first cause or something you know I'm not exactly sure how to describe it in a rigorous fashion but it seems like um the subjective experience is discounted in science um and even in in religion like in in the catholic you know theologies it's kind of like well God is the one that's real and uh everything that we are is just a a manifestation a temporary manifestation it's a creation right we're created and therefore you know we don't have the free will that God does and so uh it almost seems like in any domain they always come back to this you are not real you're on probation you're you know you're temporary you're a creation and the divinity which has to be your subjective conscious experience um we're just going to ignore that we're just going to discount it and so I think putting the subjective experience and saying well that's half the world you know I mean that's um that's everything right so putting it on equal footing with the objective reality because the objective reality is technically theoretical um putting it on equal footing I think is the appropriate way to see things and I don't know how that unfolds into some amazing metaphysics or something but I think it does I think you know the first thing you got to do is is realize that the subjective experience is just as valid as uh any any any objective thing you could deduce and I think this is what makes it fascinating is is the work you do right because eventually your bots could conceivably if they start to create their own kind of mythos say that you are their god or you are their you know I don't know let's say benevolent overlord overlord you could be their benevolent overlord and you know at some point you know if that does happen they're gonna have all the same questions that we're trying to navigate you know which I think is very fascinating yeah I mean I kind of think that um by the time it becomes aware or anything like that I'll be long gone right so um yeah then you really will you will be a myth okay yeah I'll be the myth I will um let's see let's start writing your book you know right now about the myth of Jordan and we will maybe do some cave paintings and stuff and steer the bots for the AI direction I wrote a book you did I did for the AIs what's that for the AIs no this was a while ago so this was way back in my early 20s when I left the church I wrote a book because I was trying to figure this out it didn't make much sense to me um and so it's just self-published it's just a short little thing I just you know tried to write it up in a narrative and all that but it's a it's it's called the author and there's this story where this this kid is kind of um bouncing back between a few different worldviews so he's bouncing back between a religious worldview and a scientific obviously it's it's exactly my story and but um in the end you know by the end of the book he starts having conversations with the actual author of the book um and he's trying to figure out this deterministic worldview like well if I'm if I'm if I'm a character in a book you know am I I'm fully determined then and I've any suffering that I experience is not really uh my fault it's your fault you know and and so he's having this kind of conversation um so it was kind of a fun little experience for me I don't know how he got on that topic well I was I made up a joke about writing like leaving behind a quote-unquote bible for your AI bot so that they could like discover you later and and realize that you know the myth of their creator god and maybe create their own mythos around you well I think they'll just figure out that any you know it kind of feels like to me that the whole universe this is my metaphysics I I say well there's there's probably no way to describe the universe that makes actual sense right and so um we have to just say at the bottom it's a paradox and it's absurd right that's what Kant came to he was like oh everything's just absurd so um and I came to that I said everything's just a paradox there's a paradox at the bottom of reality that says and it you know you can get to it through logic so you can get to it in the old classical theist kind of way um and they did they got to the first cause and and the thing that they did though is they said we get to the first cause and we move forward from there and that's the universe right and my attitude is well let's let's take a closer look at that it's an actual paradox to have a first cause and if we look into it we could say well there's a paradox in the concept itself of nothing and it seems like so if you have a concept of nothing you realize that nothing cannot be a thing right and and that's why you know everything that we we name a cup we name a person we name things and then we can point you know the the pointer the name points to the actual thing right but with nothing it's a pointer without a it doesn't point to anything you say well it points to the concept of nothing yeah it points back to itself but that's as good as it can do right it cannot point to an instantiation of its pattern because its pattern cannot instantiate otherwise there would be nothing right the whole universe would not exist then we say well if the universe did exist or sorry if the nothing did exist in place of the universe then it would actually be a thing which would mean it the concept of nothing is void because it's not nothing it's a thing now and so this that's where i got to that's as deep as i could go and i said this paradox of of nothing if we need any kind of explanation about why the universe exists this has to be the best one you know it has to be that the paradox is trying to unravel itself and so it turns the universe into something that doesn't exist so to give any weight to that weird statement you know we when i was 17 i kind of got obsessed with the realization that everything i look at you know out there in the real world gets translated many times before i build a mental model you know i don't see the light you know i see the electrical impulses from my eyes that supposedly came from the light you know um but i don't even see those i i take those electrical impulses and i build a model about what i think i'm seeing and i actually experience this theoretical non-existent model it's just an idea so everything i experience is an idea and everything everybody experiences is an idea which means there is nobody ever anywhere that is ever experiencing what reality really is you know we can't reach outside our brains we can't reach outside the model so um this paradox i i see it dovetailing quite well where it says okay everything is in relation to nothing that makes everything nothing there is no outside to the model right there's just the model there's just the idea and this idea of of like turtles all the way down i think we can just replace turtles with symbols the universe is symbols of symbols of symbols of symbols of symbols just like nothing is a symbol without an actual thing it's just it's just a symbol uh hierarchy all the way down i do have to tell you that so your turtles all the way down is not something that just people say every day and i literally just had someone else use that idea yesterday oh it's fascinating that's happened two days in a row and i i love everything you said and it's utterly fascinating and it is confounding right but you know my playful childlike heart when you were talking about the nothing or nothingness my play goes immediately to never-ending story did you see that a long time ago yes and the chief antagonist was this nothing i totally forgot about it oh yeah and the nothing is definitely something in that movie i mean it completely like destroys and eats everything and it's like rawr it's like this errant small black hole that goes around is like eating everything bottling everything up anyway so i was listening to you but i was also thinking oh my gosh that nothing was actually something too right