Webcast No 4 | Michael Garfield

James Smith: Welcome everyone to the ExitStrategy.World podcast or webcast number four, I should say, with Michael Garfield.

Today we'll be discussing artificial intelligence, how it's going to impact education, and therefore how it's going to affect offshoring as it relates to [our kind of] people, parents who want to go offshore, move outside of the United States or Canada, and they want to homeschool their kids. Can AI be a tool that can help with that process? And we also, we can get into some other things as to how AI is affecting everything from hiring to podcasting to many other industries that are of interest to Michael. As we were introduced to each other, I think it was last year, wasn't it, Michael?

Introductions to the Topics of the Day—AI, Education and Elite Formation

Michael Garfield: Yeah.

James Smith: Yeah, by a mutual acquaintance who was starting an AI startup in Dubai, if I remember correctly, which I hope is doing well. I haven't heard anything from that guy in many months. But the main reason is I wanted to have you on, like I said, was because of your podcasting expertise. You are the founder of Future Fossils LLC. I believe it was your own company. You started over 20 years ago, right?

Michael Garfield: Well, Future Fossils proper was...a podcast that started in 2016 and I didn't actually incorporate until last year.

James Smith: But you've been doing podcasts for almost two decades now.

Michael Garfield: Yeah. I've been, I've been mixed up in, in podcasting as well as other forms of, you know, public discussion and interview and, you know, speaking and yeah. Talking in front of people for a very long time.

James Smith: It's what you do and you do it very well. And you've done it professionally for a number of organizations as well as a professional podcaster. I mean, with both nonprofits and for-profit corporations, correct?

Michael Garfield: Yeah. And you know, but it's in the institutional environment, it has taken some work to compel administration to understand the true value of this format lies not at least exclusively or perhaps even primarily in amplifying the brand story or that sort of first layer. So, we can...stand in this tree with a hundred other screaming birds and be heard.

What is actually going on, as far as I'm concerned, and the real value of the podcast to collective intelligence or collective sense-making is in the medium itself as an instrument for allowing people to engage in the process of intellectual discovery in real time, and then to participate in that kind of intimately, even as a, just a third party listener, you know, that there is, you know, it's different, like the average book is, you know, something that someone has thought about and polished and crystallized. And it's like a peer-reviewed scientific paper exists at one point in this, this knowledge cycle and what you know, complexity science calls hype, high temperature search, high temperature research, uh, noisy, creative thought exists over here in, uh, these, this sort of more casual formats of a podcast done really well, in my opinion is, is like a dinner table conversation.

James Smith: Right.

Michael Garfield: So that's, I don't know why I felt the need to stress that, but, uh, yeah. And you're muted.

James Smith: Sorry, could you hear me?

Michael Garfield: Nope. It looks like you were muted.

James Smith: …I was saying that I was comparing Joe Rogan not to a professor, but maybe like to a TA. His guests are the professors, maybe, some of them.

Brian Eno Wired interview from 1995 and the Future of Content Curation

Michael Garfield: Yeah, I mean, curation has become an enormous part of our lives. And to sort of jump the gun on this conversation, that's why I have stressed curation. Thinking about the function of AI models in the modern media landscape and/or the contemporary media landscape as being one that is about amplifying this curatorial function. Like the transdisciplinary artist and musician, Brian Eno, said in an interview with Kevin Kelly at Wired magazine in 1995, he said that the 21st century will be one in which curation becomes an ever more obvious and important artistic form. And that's because we all live in these networks now.

Networks generate novelty and information exponentially. So [the challenge becomes] how to sift through the superfluous, this avalanche of new information and how to bring it back down, how to compress it into something that we can understand at our level as human beings. That’s what [AI] these mechanized statistical inference machines, these processes are doing for us. It's pattern recognition at scale.

On Dune and the Novel’s Themes of Human Super Mind-Enhancing Education

James Smith: Right, right. I mean, that is what AI is. It's pattern recognition at scale. Its pattern recognition sped up to warp speed for the most advanced ones. And I like that you mentioned Brian Eno because for some reason, before we started recording, I was thinking about Dune [because Brian Eno did the soundtrack with Toto for the David Lynch film in 1984] and this whole topic [of AI].

So the second [Denis Villeneuve] Dune movie came out, and there's a lot of people that loved it. There were a lot of people that hated it, primarily because of the Chani storyline being different from the novel. They kind of made her more of a modern woman for the plot line.

But I think, one of the biggest themes of Dune as a novel [published in 1965] is education and pedagogy. The idea of training and honing human beings to a point where they can achieve almost superhuman-level things and in fact many of the characters [such as Paul and his mother Jessica or his sister Alia Atreides] are basically superhuman and that's sort of where [George Lucas] Star Wars kind of ripped that off with The Force and everything. But there's no Force magic in Dune, it's not sort of this space opera like Star Wars, but more of an epic space fantasy, if you will. And I think of it—there's been a lot of discussions on X in particular about it. I think you have the [J.R.R.] Tolkien nerds and you have kind of the [Frank Herbert] Dune nerds, and they sort of overlap on X.

Dune and the Great Houses with their Bloodlines

James Smith: But the reason I bring that up, like I said, is because it's about Great Houses [ruling planetary systems as fiefs], bloodlines, nobility, all these sort of themes that [are seen as archaic] in our, let's say – radical age of mediocrity…although radical leveling is more of a tool that elites use to suppress competition I would argue…but in this sort of age of forced egalitarianism and some would say forced mediocrity, Dune is sort of provocative because it suggests that there is a super-elite, a meritocratic elite that can take charge, that can actually drive the vast changes in human society over vast periods of time [thousands of years]. And yet there's, you know, it's a warning against the cult of the Leader as well.

James Smith: I mean, especially the second novel that's going to be made by Denis Villeneuve is a, is a tragedy Dune 3 [based on the sequel book] Dune Messiah.

Michael Garfield: Right.

The Harkonnens and the Bene Gesserit

James Smith: So like we've had the Hero's Journey and the triumph over the brutal [enemy space tribe] the Harkonnens and, you know, they didn't have heartplugs in this one, like in the David Lynch version [from 1984], but they had, they turned the Harkonnens sort of into these weird, you know, ghost people with North Korean style military parades [on their homeworld of Giedi Prime] and stuff like that. And I mean, that's obviously Villeneuve's spin on it [Frank Herbert’s story]. And, you know, he's certainly entitled to, I think, emphasize that the characters, the Fremen characters are more Arabesque or descendants of Arabs, even projecting tens of thousands of years into the future on a desert world, because that that's really doesn't differ from, I think, Herbert's vision.

But again, it's interesting that, Dune re-sparks a discussion online of where we're going as a species and also what is the role of education and what is the role of artificial intelligence? I mean, [at least] I hope the Villeneuve movies do.

James Smith: I know they've got a[n HBO Max] series [coming] out called Dune: The Sisterhood. I haven't even watched the trailer for it yet, that's set 10,000 years preceding the birth of Paul Atreides and the whole start of the Dune saga. But I'm really hoping that they'll do [a mini-series about] the Butlerian Jihad as well, because that's where I was going with this, because we were talking about artificial intelligence. I'm trying to bring it back after kind of rambling a bit, to this idea, the chief commandment of the Orange Catholic Bible that Herbert talks about as a sort of syncretic ChrIslam, if you will, set tens of thousands of years in the future. The main commandment is, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind”, right? “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.” That's like the number one commandment after the Butlerian Jihad.

Fear of an AI-Conquered Planet Hindering the Escape Artist Passport Bros

And so I'm wondering, people are afraid of how AI is going to take their jobs. People are afraid that AI is going to lead to mass redundancy [creating social unrest by the jobless] and maybe even starting with a lot of the people who are in more repetitive or lower-wage positions like, let's say, low-wage white collar work overseas. The call centers in India or call centers in Philippines. And yet some of the people overseas are way ahead of Americans when it comes to really adapting to AI stuff faster. I mean, I've definitely noticed that it seems like the British, Canadian, some of these agencies I see, they're adapting to AI faster than some of the more fat and happy agencies here on the marketing side in this country.

And also, I had a conversation many weeks ago now with an attorney in Mexico City, and even before we spoke I had quoted him [in an article] on the ExitStrategy.World Patreon. And this Mexican lawyer talked about how AI is going to basically be the tsunami that's going to wipe a lot of stuff out in the [current Latin America] offshoring space in the sense of people who are, you know, exercising geo-arbitrage. You know, passport bros who are going down to Mexico, they go down to the DR [Dominican Republic], they're doing remote work. And they’re working in some cases for these companies, their companies are trying to a force them to return to the office, to justify their office leases.

I mean the whole office industry is basically imploding, at least the part that's owned by the regional banks that's not in the Washington DC area with the federal government to prop it up. And second you've got this trend of, the AI is replacing [sales] appointment setters, which was another, let's say, overseas position people were doing. It can also replace some of the functions of a virtual assistant, of a VA, right? Or at least it can help your VA be more productive.

AI and Educating Expat Children Abroad

James Smith: So you don't maybe need two, you just need one if you've got a lot of stuff to do, you know, spreadsheets and things like that. And then three, which maybe nobody's talking about yet. And that's what I wanted to bring up on this webcast and get your take on it, because you probably there in New Mexico, you either know or have known some homeschooling parents.

So one of the biggest obstacles to going abroad, if you're, you know, a professional, particularly someone entering middle age, you've got responsibilities. You're not a young guy anymore. Just take your laptop and one suitcase and go...[the obstacle to doing that] is education, right? How are you going to educate your children?

Michael Garfield: Right.

James Smith: I mean, if you're going to Mexico and you've got Mexico City and Monterrey, the major cities, Guadalajara, you've got Catholic schools, English-language Mexican schools, but what if you want to move to, I don't know, Honduras, right? To, um, what's that island off there? I'm thinking of the special economic zone of Honduras [Prospera]. Or what if you want to go to El Salvador, right? Is there going to be an English language school?

Yeah, maybe [there is one] in San Salvador [the capital]. But if you're living in a small house near Bitcoin Beach and you're taking your kids there with you, is there going to be [that English-speaking educational resource]? Or are you going to need to find other homeschooling parents in El Salvador and get with them and pool your resources to maybe, you know, have like a rotation or a circle of tutors you can call on to help your child, not only with Spanish, but with mathematics, geography, whatever the subject may be, right?

James Smith: And then where does AI come into that picture? Could AI, you know, super empower the homeschooling parents so that they don't even have to be in the United States? I mean, if they're [the parents are] earning income from abroad, they're earning income in North America while being in Latin America, could it be a helpful tool in your opinion?

Michael Garfield: Well, there's a lot there. I feel like I tried to note in mind about half a dozen bullet points.

James Smith: Let me narrow it down for you…

Michael Garfield: Well, hold on. [What you’ve covered] it's good. It's rich. If you don't mind, let me see if I can—

James Smith: Unpack it where you please [to start analyzing], Michael.

Michael Garfield on Dune Themes and Being a Complex Systems Respecter

Michael Garfield: …find a way to hit them all.

Okay, so first of all, [regarding an] expat there’s a UK expat, Damian Walter, who I forget if he lives in Thailand or I think he lives in Bali, Indonesia. He's got some great stuff on his YouTube channel, the Science Fiction Podcast YouTube channel on Dune and on the Butlerian Jihad and on Dune's mythic structure. He does a Jungian analysis. It's great stuff.

Michael Garfield: He talks about the different...presentations of the Harkonnens and so on. Anyway, bookmark that [YouTube channel] for late night enjoyment. Then, you know, there's also this question that, you know, you're talking about in the broader questions about the economic impact of AI and the, you know, what we keep seeing, which Damien speaks to in some of his stuff in science fiction, where we've made it into this remarkably advanced, you know, spacefaring future, but we have not managed to escape, you know, the enormous monolithic authoritarian system, you know, like powerful dynasties that conquer entire planets or systems.

And, there's also this question about how many times we as humans can continue to make the same mistakes at higher and higher levels of complexity or, in what ways some of the patterns, the phenomena that the more sort of even-handed, modern, humanitarian, democratic kind of thinking tends to ignore. The meritocratic rhetoric of the modern West ignores what in complex systems science is inescapable, which are statistical distributions and the fact that power will always be distributed unevenly. And actually, there are reasons for this.

There are good reasons why not to be an apologist for abuses of power, which I am definitely not. I'm not saying this. But we can see in events like COVID-19 and the cascading bank failures of 2008 and 2009, the way that trying to make everything equivalent to everything else, trying to connect every part of the planet to every other part of the planet, creates these cascading collapses. Failures, fragility, instead of anti-fragility.

James Smith You're talking about Nicholas [Nassim Taleb].

The Question of AI Cannot Be Separated from Labor Markets

Michael Garfield: Yeah, practical sandpile collapse type failures. And in the intelligence of living systems, structural hierarchy, and like modularity and like the fractal branching of biophysical transport networks such as the circulatory system in the human body, where your capillaries are thinner by designoid process than your aorta [pumping in your heart] for a reason. And the reason is that this is the way that we address the issues of friction and other kind of energy concerns in circulating nutrients through the body.

Michael Garfield: So at any rate, it's an interesting question to start thinking about equality and equivalence, which are not the same thing, and where it is and is not appropriate to have uneven distributions of, of power or so on.

Not as, you know, not on one or other extreme of a very complex conversation, but the question of like, “Well, what are the actual design constraints within which we can arrive at like a healthy expression?” And, and this matters with the issue of AI for a number of reasons. You can't separate the question of labor markets and of technological innovation and so on. You can't separate capitalism from power, right?

How AI Will Impact Lawyers as a Political Constituency

James Smith: Right. And it's also a question of whose ox is being gored? Because there are a lot of people in political, let's say, of a certain [neoliberal or future Woke Capital] political persuasion who didn't really give a shit when it was a factory shutting down off the street, when the jobs were being shipped to Mexico [in the 1980s] and then China [in the 1990s].

But now that there's AI lawyers, or at least there's AI [legal brief generating] systems, and we're going to be interviewing somebody [about that] with an AI startup, Legalmente, who's based in San Antonio, Texas, a Latino entrepreneur in the coming weeks…just had to get that quick plug in. But when you when you're suddenly talking about AI lawyers, when AI is starting to actually hammer white collar work before, in many respects, it gets down to the blue collar work, then the class, let's say, system that we don't talk about in this country [gets shaken up].

We say we're a classless society, but we're not. This question of earning power and class, it gets shaken up in an unexpected way that, you know, a plumber is making more than, you know, a junior associate at a law firm, an [apprentice] electrician is making more than a maybe even, you know, what do you call them? The people who read the X-rays. [CT Scan Technologist]. Because that's a job that…why? Because that job, the electrician and plumber jobs cannot be outsourced, nor is the AI and robotics advanced enough to do their jobs. Whereas the medical, you know, the CT scans examiner, that task can be outsourced to somebody in The Philippines, or that could at least be accelerated, if not replaced by an AI that enhances the uh, reviewing process so that once you have a CT scan or you have an x-ray or you have some other medical imprint, you know, a 3D image of the human body that's been scanned.

On AI Accelerating the Wheel of Change and Impact on the Internationalization Industry

James Smith: So like this is, this is a fascinating to me because, you know, it's like old Bob Dylan sang, you know [in the Times They Are A’Changing] “the loser now is later to win / for the times they are a’changing.”

And I think about that in terms of the internationalization and offshoring industry, where there's kind of this stigma still [generated] that people try to attach to it, especially for single men, especially for divorced [middle aged] single men. ‘Oh, you're just a passport bro who's just trying to take advantage of your white male privilege and go to some Latin American country where there are women who are poorer than you, who will pretend that they're more feminine and they will pretend that they like you a lot.’ But that's a dark and cynical view of it.

James Smith: But the reality is, I mean, yes, there is a lot of that [sexpat tourism] going on in places like Thailand, Colombia in particular. But there's also I mean, it's a way for people especially men to genuinely reinvent themselves [going to LatAm or Southeast Asia]. It's an escape hatch [for single men and entrepreneurs], just like people used to talk about mass immigration of people from Mexico as a safety valve for Mexican society back in the 1990s and 2000s. People used to say things like, well, you know, if you didn't have millions of Mexicans going north, if they couldn't go north, like they did during the Nineties and Oughts, then Mexico would have just exploded in another revolution [like in the early 20th century of Emilio Zapata]. Like some people [even one Mexican lady colleague married to an American have] said that to me. And I'm not vouching for that [opinion].

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that viewpoint [about Mexican society and emigration].

On Gringos Going Abroad as a Safety Valve for the U.S. Boomer and Xer Retiree Surge

James Smith: On the other hand, what about the idea of offshoring and people internationalizing their lives as an escape hatch from the United States? Here we are [talking about] this 20, 30 years later? Because otherwise a hell of a lot of retirees wouldn't be able to afford to eat if they couldn't take their Social Security check and go South of the Border with it in the coming years? So that’s number one [for the growth of our industry in the coming years].

Number two, you also are changing up who's elite and who's not, because yeah, you can't afford an elite school as a parent, but you can afford to give your child, especially with the AI education tools that are coming, a heck of a better education than what would have been remotely possible in the United States because of the income [to cost of living differential], the geo-arbitrage of income in, say, Mexico City versus Los Angeles, right?

I mean, you could afford to send, as opposed to sending your kid to some crappy Los Angeles public school, you could send them to one of the best schools in Mexico City. Or even if you're not in Mexico City, if you're further out somewhere, like the Mormons in northern Mexico. You know, you've got AI tools to enhance your homeschooling team, as it were, in your community. So go ahead…

Michael Garfield: Yeah, no, there's a lot there. And I'm not sure how many. capable I will be of replying to..

The Collapse of the Middle Class and Security of a Conventional Career Path

James Smith: …well it's the idea of a revolutionary turning, like that the AI is turning the wheel it's not only turning the wheel faster of society [in general] but it's turning around the tables of who are the winners and who are the losers, turning the expectations around in a in a less familiar way than let's say what what we were expecting when you and I were going up in the late 1980s or 1990s. This conventional life/career pathway we were taught of [paraphrasing Robert Kiyosaki and other popular money authors]: go to school, get a job, get a white collar job, get a degree, get an advanced degree if you can, a Master's degree, and live happily ever after and be able to afford to own a house. And all those pieces of advice that are so broken now, all those ideas that have [completely] broken down [due to the deliberate destruction of the Middle Class and the dollar’s purchasing power].

Michael Garfield: I want to speak to that in particular, and then we can see if we can find a way to angle this back into the questions that you asked earlier. earlier about education and unschooling and so on, homeschooling.

I want to speak very generally to evolutionary dynamics as they appear in, uh, you know, much more kind of fundamental process we can call offshoring for the purposes of this conversation, which is that…in stable, mature ecosystems, competition for resources in crowded ecologies is very pitched. It's you know it's very intense…

Failures of Elite Overproduction and Failing Economic Micro-Niches

James Smith: …you’re talking about Peter Turchin’s overproduction of elites right? Especially in the late Roman Empire and that's…

Michael Garfield: Yeah although it's what I want to say is, a you have thousands of species of pollinators, each of which has found its flower. It's one thing that it lives on where it helps to pollinate. And in a city, similarly, in a modern megalopolis, you have people that have these incredibly narrowly specified economic values. You have these, you know, the “gig economy” exists because of this ongoing turning of this ratchet, whereby there are ever more, you know, narrowly specified opportunities. Opportunities like, you own, you open up a store for…there’s this physicist, Jeffrey West who gives the example of in Manhattan, there’s a store that only sells chess pieces. So like these kinds of things become possible, but...

James Smith: Doggy daycares [in Manhattan and other affluent areas]…

The Appeal of the So-Called Third World to Westerners

Michael Garfield: I think, you know, there's there's this article that you sent me the other day about, you know, what is the appeal of the so-called Third World [to Westerners]? You know, what is…

James Smith: Well I'm sorry to interrupt, I didn't want to interrupt your train of thought. But we had our first very first ESW webcast about a Dark Futura article, it was with Isaac Simpson, who owns an agency out in Los Angeles, a marketing agency. Which happens to be more for the right-of-center or the so-called Dissident Right. But it's really more, I would say, not the Dissident Right, so much as the Aesthetic Right that he [Isaac Simpson’s Will Agency] kind of appeals to…the people that are building off this, the fumes of 1970s, 1980s, 1990s Americana nostalgia almost. But that's a whole other topic.

James Smith: So you were saying, yes, I sent you the [Dark Futura] article about the appeal of the Third World. So what did you think of that article?

Michael Garfield: Yeah, well, so... the question of why people leave the security theater spectacle of hyper risk-averse, self-imprisoning kind of advanced technological states like the United States or the UK or…

James Smith: Canada.

Michael Garfield: For sure, life in these places where there is far less infrastructure, there's far less political stability in the sense that we can regard a maladaptive system [of post 9/11 national security state-ism] that's nonetheless stable in its maladaptive attractor. What it’s about this thing is being called out of comfort and into creativity and adventure, and risk and discovery and so on.

Michael Garfield on Interviewing Tom Morgan of Sapient Capital

Michael Garfield: You know I was just talking with Tom Morgan for the Future Fossils podcast. Tom has spent most of his life in in finance. But he recently left his job writing a column on thinking outside the box in investments for Sapient Capital. He left his role as a strategic director at Sapient, to go pursue his own media product and community offerings around helping what I do with Future Fossils and what a lot of people I know do with their own projects. Which are to help people make sense of the current [geoeconomic and technological] transition.

So when I talk about the mature ecosystem, in a sense you can think of these uh you know there being a sort of a high water mark where everything in that system is hyper specialized and there's a there's a sense in which hyper-specialization is equivalent to offshoring in that, you know if someone else is doing it I don't have to…so in general like this the picture you're describing is one in which, average in the sense that evolution proceeds through what Eldridge and others called punctuated equilibrium, long periods of relative stability, you know, punctuated by moments of sort of cascading or, or, you know [mass extinctions]

James Smith: …the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, for example.

Michael Garfield: Yeah. Although there was, yeah, that's often that change is generated internally and, like the bank collapses of 2009. It's not [caused by a single] leader. That's [systemic] instability, right?

Turchin's work talks about this a lot. That's instability generated by the system becoming so dependent on the conveniences created, which are preferred by economies of scale, just-in-time supply chains and so on where…if you get a ship lodged sideways in the Suez Canal, the whole global economy grinds to a halt. You know, these kinds of things where there's choke points everywhere.

On the Fremen as Disruptive Religious Fanatic Guerrillas of the Galactic Imperium

James Smith: …Yeah, I was half-jokingly on the ESW Patreon, but I wasn't really seriously comparing the Houthis to the scenes in Lynch's [1984] Dune, where they're [the Fremen led by Paul Atreides are] blowing up all the Spice production. And Paul is saying, “All eyes will have to turn to Arrakis and the Baron [Harkonnen] and the Emperor himself will have to deal with us.”

And, you know, how the Houthis, they're screwing up the Red Sea [shipping] via this drone and missile harassment of the ships. Yes, the ships can take the long way around Africa, and it's not catastrophic [for global sea trade]. But it's really bad for Egypt. I mean, you know, like to the point that it's going to lead some real hardship for people whose livelihoods depend on the Suez [Canal]. But it's not catastrophic in the sense that what…let's call them networked tribes or Global Guerrillas, I think John Robb uses the term Global Guerrillas, the network damage that they're capable of doing if they were [determined or state-sponsored] to inflict greater damage [on global shipping].

On the Russo-Ukraine War and EU/NATO Attempts to Suppress Pro-Russian Channels

James Smith: I mean, on the one hand, it's sort of comforting that you can have two states you know, bombing the hell out of each other's oil and gas infrastructure [using drones]. And yet, you know, the price of oil in Russia and Ukraine, like I guess as when Iran, Iraq did that a little bit, too, in the Eighties [stays stable]. But they [Iraqis and Iranians during their 1980s war] did it without drones, they had [highly inaccurate] SCUD missiles or something and conventional bombs dropped from planes. But I mean, it's comforting that the [oil and gas trading] system is proving to be more robust [amid war and sanctions] than people perhaps thought in certain respects [when the Russo-Ukrainian War expanded into the Russian Special Military Operation in 2022].

James Smith: But in other respects, maybe I would argue cognitively, I think people are much weaker than they were during the last Cold War.

I mean, you have people who are like, the EU is always trying to, shut down certain channels [like RT and Sputnik] and shut down what they call propaganda from the other side or whatever. And it's like, during the last Cold War, did we try to shut down Radio Moscow? Did we have jammers on our side or was it their side [the Soviet Bloc] that was jamming, you know, the Voice of America and RFA, ERL and et cetera?

Frank Herbert on Bureaucratic and Corporatist Rigidity Versus Freedom

James Smith: I mean, I didn't mean to get off on that tangent, but I mean, I think Frank Herbert talks a lot about this, too, that societies get so overgrown and overly complex [until they explode]. And the bureaucratic, you know, in his novel, to bring it back full circle to what we were talking about earlier, you have an extreme rigidity of power over the known universe.

[In the Dune universe] you have groups that have basically been in business or been operating for 10,000 years like the Bene Gesserit and you've got CHOAM and the the Spacing Guild. So basically, the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild [with the Emperor’s elite Sardaukar armies and the Great Houses of the Landsraad] they're like this sort of four-sided or even you know, polygonal power structure. And then Paul Atreides something [the early appearance of the Bene Gesserit-plotted prescient mind the Kwisatz Haderach] they didn't expect comes along and blows it all up to it to a degree.

I mean ultimately, even Paul Atreides being a super being, this Fremen messiah with a super prescient mind couldn't couldn't take down the system all by himself. It was kind of his son [the God Emperor of Dune Leto II] who ends up radically altering the imperium later on in the [in the fourth of the original Frank Herbert] novels. I'm not going to give away the plot spoilers, but it’s Paul Atreides’ son and the successors to his son, I should say the physical descendants not [of Leto II but] of the Atreides line. So not even Paul Atreides himself could take down the [polygonal power] system [of the Dune imperium]. He could only kind of alter it to a degree after, you know, billions of people die in his Fremen jihad unleashed upon the galaxy.

So, like, I think the message Herbert's trying to send there is, that we have to change. Humans can get too rigid, too enslaved and too trapped within systems, by bureaucracies, by CHOAM this galactic mega corporation that's kind of like the Amazon of 10,000 to 20,000 years in the future, that has sort of become a [galactic monopolistic] Blob that absorbs everything [alongside the Spacing Guild with its monopoly on space travel]. But we have to find a way to free ourselves without falling prey to overly charismatic leaders, without falling prey to Messianic thinking, I think is the main message of the [1965] book.

Bringing the Discussion Back to Economics and Elites

Michael Garfield: Well, far be it for me to be the one who has to depart so completely from my normal being and actually bring this discussion back down to the ground.

James Smith: Definitely! Please do.

Michael Garfield: …to keep the conversation integrated. Normally, I'm the one out there [into science fiction and metaphysical discussions]. But in order to make sure I actually do answer the questions that you asked me [at the outset of the show], I want to say, everything that you're just talking about now is part of why AI, as people are currently mostly conceiving of it, and mostly interacting with it, is not going to give people the kind of opportunities that you alluded to in your initial question bouquet.

And part of that—

James Smith: You mean AI cannot educate [the kids], to kind of super empower homeschooling, you mean?

James Smith: Well, yeah. So, I mean, that's part of it. And another part is, okay, so there's a lot [to keep unpacking here]. I mean, let me see. First of all, your point about the South Park episode in which blue-collar general contractors become the wealthy ones and all the white-collar folks are like standing around outside Home Depot trying to scrounge for work.

James Smith: Yeah. Y

Michael Garfield: Yeah. This is a transient state.

James Smith: Sure. Cause the elites are always going to reassert themselves?

Michael Garfield: Yeah. But I mean..

James Smith: …after the Communist revolutions of Russia and China, you know, like an elite abides.

Michael Garfield: Right. Well, well, yes and no. The horse and carriage world did not reassert itself after the car. But we have, you know what we are seeing is a is a very...it will be regarded in the future as a you know a canonical example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.

James Smith: Right.

On AI as an Accelerant of Shock Doctrine-Style Economics

Michael Garfield: …where you know we've what we're seeing is something akin to you know, one of these punctuations [of equilibrium] where in this case, endogenous, like internally generated novelty, by a lot of which is people who value disruption itself, disruption for disruption's sake, as a way of liberating stored calories, as a way of creating capital opportunity in a mature economy. That is, what Naomi Klein called the Shock Doctrine. Capitalism when there's no frontier, so we're blowing things up just so that we have something to rebuild.

James Smith: Right. Russia during the 1990s is the archetypal example, right?

Michael Garfield: We're in this point where the biggest opportunity, the biggest money opportunity right now is in bulk data collection, where basically the OpenAI approach of just steal and then ask for forgiveness later while you're selling people’s data back to them. But what they're doing in another more subtle way is even kind of more horrible, which is claiming to empower each of us as individuals while merely, basically turning up the heat on a rivalrous productivity arms race [to the bottom of mental and physical well-being]. You know, where it's like, okay, everyone's going to be using ChatGPT to 10x their productivity, in a system in which everyone is already time-and-attention poor. And, you know, the consequences of this are that we're seeing a moment where calculus, evolutionary calculus, math now favors generalist strategies over specialist strategies in certain, in many important cases [of business formation and success].

James Smith: You know, you can talk about this broadly as like, in times of peace, you don't really need to diversify your portfolio.

Michael Garfield: Right.

James Smith: And now you don't need gold and silver and, you know, you can just, you know, “Hey, it's the late Nineties [of the Dot Com Boom]. Your stocks are doing great, man. You know, it's, it's pre housing, you know, the Housing Bubble [implosion of 2007-2008].

Michael Garfield: Yeah. And you know, so like in these, you don't need the, you know, without comment on specific asset classes, you didn't need to think [too hard] when things were stable and now you need to think that…but it just happens that…

How AI is Reducing People to Cliches and the Lowest Common Denominator Rather Than the Promised Resurgence of AI-Aided Human Creativity

James Smith: Thinking is hard.

Michael Garfield: Thinking is hard. And the tools that are being offered to us as a way of managing this complexity to do something about it, generally are bad for this kind of thing, which is that they provide us, you know, Gemini and ChatGPT and these other modern AI tools…

James Smith: It's not even that they're woke. It's that they dumb you down, because they're dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator.

Michael Garfield: Okay, so there's the problem of automating the wrong thing, but there's another problem, which is the fact that these are trained on data sets that are so large that…the answers that they're giving you personally for your context, it's like about as useful as a photograph from space of your neighborhood. When you're trying to get around on foot and you know these [big data sets] tend towards the average. So like actually what they're doing is they’re deforming the decision-making and sense-making landscape of human interaction. They’re ragging us all down in ways that Scott Alexander and his writing Meditations on Moloch and others have noted, that this kind of thing is creating a strong incentive for a race to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator. [AI] It’s destroying all of the uh, it's erasing, actively erasing diversity around the edges, of this thing [called creativity].

Michael Garfield: So like to make it really concrete [in terms of jobs]…it may look right now, like it's a more stable thing for you to do the kind of work that robots will for sure be doing in five years.

James Smith: Yeah.

Michael Garfield: Such as building your house and this kind of thing. But rather than make concrete predictions about what kind of jobs are going to survive, I'm going to make a sort of meta-strategic prediction. Which is that until such time as this all shakes out decades from now, that it helps to remain...limber and diversified. That it helps to adopt a kind of more humble and curious and frankly noisier, more playful approach [to work and life]. And this is something I've tried to embody in my work as my own career has been repeatedly disrupted by technological innovations that are foisted upon us by one insane sociopathic, you know, multibillionaire after another. And the downstream consequences of the regulatory capture and the distortion of human social interaction and infrastructure around their [billionaire elitist] machinations, which is no matter what you think about the origin story of COVID, there's no question that COVID was because of human decisions that were made in conjunction with institutional downward institutional pressure…

James Smith: Definitely human manipulation of coronaviruses…[whether in a biolab in the USA or China].

On AI Machine Translation Improving Education Abroad

Michael Garfield: Anyway what does this all mean in terms of like homeschooling your kids on a beach in Mexico or Honduras? That's where we started. What this means is a couple things:

One well first of all it'll be easy, I mean it's already totally doable to send your kid to a school where they're not speaking the English language and expect machines to do a passable job at translating this…up to a point. Your kid's going to be at a disadvantage compared to native speakers, there's no question. But the machine [translators] are going to get you better at like actually being able to learn the [Spanish] language if you, and if you manage to stay like on the…

Nicholas Cart in The Glass Cage talks about sort of like healthy versus unhealthy forms of automation. Healthy forms are forms that allow you to develop [mental or skills] capacity. They're not machines. They're not offshoring your own cognition into an opaque, mysterious, you know, outboard machine brain that somebody else [probably a tech billionaire] owns. And so a lot of the future of AI in healthy ways that I see it is going to be about models that are trained on smaller, more local data sets, that are more pertinent to you and your life and your concerns [the idea of personalized AI copilots]. These will be able to speak to you as a singular instance of something that the world is doing, and run offline on hardware and software which you can trust, rather than increasing into these catastrophic or at least extremely fragile dependencies on a system that we're increasingly coming to understand as, you know, as the cloud dystopia Blob absorbing everything.

James Smith: Yeah.

Neither Running Away Nor Hunkering Down into Internal Exile By Itself Will Save You

Michael Garfield: Like basically, you know, there was, there was another thing I wanted to say, which was basically, AI is really not a distinct technology from the corporation. And the corporation is a material reallocation optimization function running on statistical patterns. Like you can think about buying stocks in a company as basically participating in a large transformer, that's training on behavioral data from everyone else buying stocks or buying product. And so really like what we're seeing is not different in kind from the problems we've been experiencing over the last several hundred years or like at least, you know, the past 200 years [of joint stock company capitalism].

And so to exit from this kind of a thing is, it's a nice sort of aspiration. It's also not entirely realistic.

The question, it's a highly multi-dimensional question, and people are going to be persuaded rather perniciously and ubiquitously to make decisions that place us in positions of ever more ever greater vulnerability and dependency on this system and so on. Frankly, buying gold is not going to get you away from that, just leaving the country is not going to get you away from that.

James Smith: Yeah. By itself, it certainly won't. I mean, just if, and we talk about this all the time [with my CEO V the Guerrilla Economist on his Rogue News shows], you can't, you can't expect just to buy some gold, stash it in your safe and, you know, live out in the boonies in the middle of nowhere [in Idaho] and everybody's just going to leave you alone. I mean, certainly it's [more complex than that]. Part of why we created ExitStrategy.World was we wanted to reach the people who might otherwise be tempted just to go into internal exile [in the U.S. or Canada] and just withdraw and say, no, there's an alternative to that [withdrawal into keeping your head down], which is you can join another community, just like your ancestors got on a boat in Europe and crossed it and set up a new community in a new country, on a new frontier, maybe even in a place they didn't know a lot about. And, you know, you could do something similar in the 21st century, especially because technology allows you to keep in touch with the people, you know, back home. But that being said, there is still the question of, you know, being a satellite gringo and sort of just being you know, off on your own [in a place like Mexico] and not getting to know your neighbors and not getting a lot of things going [in terms of a career path]. So, yeah.

Preview of ESW Show Part 2 With Michael Garfield

James Smith: Well, it looks like we're at time and we've got to have you back on, Michael, in probably a few weeks. And we'll definitely have a little more time, maybe an hour, a full hour and a half format, because I really appreciate you bringing things back to the concrete topics. I think this has sort of been a full circle discussion. I didn't mean to make it sort of in this too high of an arc [into sci fi], but I did want to throw a lot of ideas at the wall and see which ones stick during the hour [or less] that we had. So that we could sort of set up for the next more in-depth conversation.

Michael Garfield: Yeah, let's call it part one. Let's call it part one. That's totally reasonable. Folks, you're going to be just dissatisfied with half-baked answers to really big, complicated questions.

Hire Michael Garfield to Run Your Org’s Podcast—DMs Open for Professional Inquiries

Michael Garfield: I want to thank you for having me on and I look forward to being back. And also I would love to talk to people specifically because the last thing, the point I was trying to get to is that- Yeah, to wrap up. You want to wrap up? That human factor stuff is not going away anytime soon, those “soft skills” the ability to make sense of things that are going on for other people and for systems generally are going to remain of crucial importance. Especially as information becomes more and more challenging to navigate due to these sorts of scaling law dynamics. And that what this means in the most concrete sense is that I don't think that it's a very resilient or anti-fragile solution in the long term to let AI tutor your kids or to make the decisions for your corporation.

Michael Garfield: I think that coaches and consultants and advisors and counselors are going to continue to be of crucial importance for the foreseeable future. And I have a lot more to say, and I'm glad we get a chance to talk again soon, about the...the design space, the decision-making space within which you're, you're plunking all of these geopolitical and economic concerns [ESW covers on the shows, on X and in the Telegram group].

Michael Garfield: And I would love to talk with people about this [podcaster or researcher as a service]. And if you're listening to this, you are warmly invited to reach out to me. I am available for consulting and I have very, very deep, archives of online discussion to which I am happy to point people if you come to me with specific questions about the stuff that you're facing in your life [and business]. So let's find better questions to help you navigate the absurd super-abundance of other people's proposed answers to your problem as they see it.

James Smith: Right. Amen to that. And like I said, people, folks, Michael Garfield is, as it says on his LinkedIn profile, open to super-open to work. So please reach out to him via LinkedIn. And you can also find him on X/Twitter [@michaelgarfield] where his DMs are open for serious consulting inquiries.

If you need a professional podcaster, somebody who can be highly relatable to your audience, who's been there, done it, got the T-shirts for many companies, many nonprofits and many startups, please do reach out to Michael Garfield. We will certainly have him back on in the next several weeks. So he's got to run, go pick up his daughter, I believe from school.

So let's end there. And thank you very much for your time, Michael.

Michael Garfield: Thanks a lot, man. Take care.

James Smith: Goodbye.

[Edited for style and clarity over Memorial Day Weekend, 2024]