Kristian Rönn

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. I think right now it's decision time for life on planet Earth. Either we continue with the same way and we continue to plot that graph of dangerous weapons, and the next weapon might be the world ending weapon regardless if it's AI or engineered pandemics, or we go the route of values and put all of these pockets of as well. Today in the show, I sit down with Christian Ron, CEO and founder of normative IO, a leader in the net zero space that helps companies cut emissions through science based carbon accounting. Ron is also the author of The Darwinian Trap, the hidden evolutionary forces that explain our world and threaten our future.

We dive into his research on global catastrophic risk, the roots of today's toxic discourse, and the evolutionary forces behind societal conflict. We also explore how rethinking the structures driving division could help us build a more unified world. There's a lot to cover, so let's get to it. Kristin Ron, welcome to the puck. Thank you.

Thanks a lot for having me. So before we jump in, can you just take a moment and frame who you are in your background for our listeners? So I think the way I would describe myself is that I'm obsessed, that I've always been more or less obsessed with what what are my values and how can I live accordance to those values? And I remember from an early age, I think it was at six or seven, I decided to become a vegetarian because that was the first sort of conscious clash between my actions and my values. So we lived close to this petting zoo where you could you know, there were cute, baby goats and and sheep.

And I then came to the intellectual realization that the meat that I was eating was somewhat indirectly hurting those animals. And that clash between my actions and my values created a lot of cognitive dissonance on the inside, and that just had to be resolved. I couldn't push that under the the rug. So I had to make a decision. Either I don't value these creatures and and change my values or I change my action.

And and then I decided to become a vegetarian. And that was probably one of the most influential decisions of my life because there weren't a lot of vegetarians around. And everyone asked me, why are you a vegetarian? And that to me immediately became a question of what are my values. So I had to be better at expressing what my values were.

And and for that reason, I started to get into philosophy. So when my family first got access to the Internet, back in, I think it was 1999, I started to research, like, philosophical topics. I mean, I also played a lot of video games like any other kid, but but I also researched these topics and then came in touch with a philosophy called utilitarianism that later sort of changed my life. And the whole thesis of that philosophy is that what we ought to do in society is to maximize the well-being of all sentient beings. And that resonated a lot, with me.

And that sort of led me into a rabbit hole of, okay, but what beings? Like, clearly, some animals, clearly, people on the other side of the planet matter. But then the big insight was, what about future generations? I mean, right now, we're 8,000,000,000 people on the planet, but potentially this planet could could harbor, you know, billions of people for billions of years in the future, or we could go out like Elon Musk is is proposing, go out and be a multi planetary species. So if we destroy ourselves today, the well-being of all of those sentient beings will also be destroyed as a consequence.

So, essentially, I started to get interested in, like, global catastrophic risks and and how to to avoid them. And that has been sort of the past, I guess, thirteen years of my life, focusing on that. Everything from from risk, from climate change, I did that for a really long time. I helped, write some of the global standards for carbon emissions accounting and and measurements and, been a part of the Swedish, government delegation to to cop the big climate conference for for many years. But lately, I've been shifting my focus towards artificial intelligence because I think it's just moving incredibly fast.

And depending on what AI we build, you will have a huge influence on the future of consciousness and sentience and and the well-being of sentient beings for potentially, you know, billions of of years, in in the future. So when you talk about AI, for instance, and we we most recently are familiar with your book, the Darwinian trap, the hidden evolutionary forces that explain our world and they're in our future. What prompted you to write the book and does it tie into AI? So I think what prompted me to write the book is because we have a discourse today that is, I think, full of hate. We love to blame individuals for all of our problems.

We love to blame groups. It might be the greedy CEOs. It might be the immigrants. It might be the corrupt politicians. And we blame the individuals, point at them, tell the world that they're evil, and that just escalates into more and more tribalism.

But I don't think any individual is the enemy here. I think we need to look at what are the societal structures and and incentives that creates that type of behavior in the first place. And can we actually have sort of an evolutionary analysis of what those incentives are? So instead of hating hating the players, we can, hate the game to to quote a a famous, hip hop artist. So so is another way of saying that that don't hate the person, hate the behavior, and work with understanding our consciousness and what is underlying our motivation, and instead of shaming the individual or shaming the the institution, coming to a deeper understanding of where these evolutionary forces arise and give us the tools and the and the perspective to to not throw the baby out with the bathwater?

That's that's exactly it. Then to give you a concrete example, I mean, in the climate movement where where I, come from, you know, I've worked on a a climate startup for for the past ten years. There is sort of this almost guilt narrative where, okay, shame on you for flying. But shame on you for flying is not a particularly effective message because people will continue to fly regardless. So instead, you should ask yourself the question, like, can we design the system in a way that fewer people fly?

And it could be, okay, let's have a higher carbon tax on on flying, and that could guide people's behavior in that direction instead of blaming them. Or even better, invent more carbon efficient modes of of flying, like, let's say, biodiesel or even electric flights for shorter routes or, you know, better train lines. So that way you sort of change the incentives because whenever you sort of propose a solution that, you know, okay, Your actions are evil. You need to do less of it. It it never works because as long as the incentives are there for individuals to continue to to fly the same way they've always done, they're they're are gonna just continue to to do it.

So I think that's, like, an an example of how we need to think in terms of systems instead of blaming individuals. So let's bring this down to a place that's practical. Ezra Klein recently had an episode where he was talking about that the Democratic states, when they're compared to the red states, have a real issue in terms of solving problems that are very important to the middle class. And he uses examples like housing in California and the ability or inability to build high speed rail. So with housing, he talks about not in my backyard.

The the lack of willingness to change zoning laws to allow the millennials to buy homes that the boomers are being very selfish and not essentially changing the zoning laws to allow more housing in neighborhoods. So that's one example. And then the second one would be that other countries have been able with dictatorial, you know, abilities at some point to build high speed rail, but that for instance in California, because of all the lawsuits that have sprung up and the environmental issues that have come up, what was supposed to be a a few years multibillion dollar project has really turned into an inability to just get anything off the ground. So using practical examples like that, how would your approach help governor Newsom or or these blue states become more effective at actually solving some of the challenges of today? I think that's that's a great question.

I I agree with all of those points, And it is tragic to see how environmental regulation in many corners of the world and especially in The US actually has been bad for the environment. I mean, high speed rail is there to replace flights, but it just becomes too many rules and too many regulations. And I actually think if you think about it from sort of almost an evolutionary perspective, like, we have states and government departments and corporations. We have all of these, like, entities that are made out of groups of people. And at some point, these entities I mean, natural selection, which means survival of the fittest sort of act upon those entities just like they act upon normal, individuals.

So let's say you're, for instance, say a religion, you know, it will be adaptive for you to figure out ways in which you sort of control the behavior of your members so they don't leave the religion and maybe control them in a way that where where they recruit sort of more people into the religion. But the same concepts apply to government as well. I mean, at some point, you will have government agencies where it's, like, adaptive for them to survive by just introducing more and more rules because that's the way they survive. That's the way they legitimize their survival by just creating new, needless rules for for the sake of it. And this is actually like an area where I would fundamentally agree with, Elon Musk.

I agree I disagree with a lot of his approach to to this, but I think the fundamental analysis of the problem is that, you know, it is at some point in time adaptive for government to just introduce all of these rules for the sake of of of existence. And it is also adaptive for for government to figure out, like, better and more efficient ways of of of controlling its citizens. So the values that are adaptive for the survival of of a government is not the same as the values that are adapted for the survival, of its citizens. So how do you apply that in practice? Because you asked, if I could give some some advice to, Gavin Gavin Newsom.

And and I think it would be to to essentially just have that as an approach. And I think actually, Elon Musk is quite right about that. Whenever you introduce some new regulation, make sure that something else has to go. I mean, it has to be simpler. I think, however, that with the use of artificial intelligence, our ability to sort of handle complex rules will be simplified in and of itself.

So I think we should also think about, like, how can we write regulation in sort of an AI world where you don't need a big team of lawyers and permits, but all of that can be sort of handled, automatically. But that's maybe a a discussion for for another time. And we do try to stay away from politics and try to have what I would call a safe place to talk about both sides of the issue. In terms of how we try to make these institutions work better and to actually work on long term balanced solutions, but recognizing that there's been a lot of buildup in these institutions and there's this kind of Darwinian tendency to wanna build to survive. Right?

If you're if you're trying to get rid of old, you know, regulations, which is in a sense killing off some of the species, so to speak, you're, you know, you're you're weeding, so to speak. There's obviously an instinctual bias to to prevent that. So I guess the question then is to be effective against that. It seems to me from a from a physics perspective, you need an equal force against it. And so instead of demonizing the aggressive nature, which is I think people's tendency like you're using a hammer to the nail, can we using the Darwinian framework in which you write so eloquently about, is there some possibility that you do need a pretty aggressive initial pushback in order to build up the momentum to break out of the atmosphere?

I think that is a good point. My gut instinct tells me that it's probably the wrong approach. Because if you push at something forcefully, you tend to get a equally forceful pushback. And then you might get the system, like, completely out of equilibrium. And I think the metaphor that I sometimes use is, you know, one of entropy.

Like, if you have sort of, I don't know, like, a a a room. I mean, a room can be clean in just a couple of ways, but it can be messy in an infinite ways. So, I mean, if you are sort of a giant and you pick up your room and shake it, it's not gonna land in sort of a configuration, that is clean and and beneficial. It will most likely, land in a more messy and less clean and beneficial configuration. So applying that to Elon Musk and and Doge, I think, what I think a forceful move could be quite beneficial, but it will create this equal opposite counter reaction, and you can always sort of count on that.

And I think I'm afraid that, you know, it could turn the entire system, out of of balance. So so that would be sort of my my counterargument. But I guess time will tell. Time will be the ultimate judge over what what strategy, works and what strategy doesn't work. Well and for an institution that doesn't wanna follow the Elon Musk approach with the hammer and nail, but wants to show an alternative approach.

So again, stick with California. Right? You know, the federal government is doing this right now, but when you look at, for instance, our inability to build housing in California or our inability to build high speed rail, what would be an approach that we could use using your Darwinian model to encourage the the institutions in California to make these necessary changes, but without using a hammer to do so? Yeah. No.

I think I think some some sort of reform, and that's I think that reform needs to start with the individuals and the values of the individuals because, like, in the end of the day, I think the remedy towards the fact that some of these institutions will behave in a way that maximizes their own survival and not necessarily act in the benefit of of the individuals. I think the remedy to that is democracy, but we need a democracy that is, like, highly informed by our values, because that's a way for for us because in the end, institutions, they're just a group of people. I mean, they are us, but we need sort of efficient interfaces for us to actually push and propagate our values up to these institutions. And that's what democracy's supposed to do. And I think the democracy and I think people on both sides of of the island, The United States would agree that the democracy is broken.

I mean, the electoral college is broken. I mean, there is gerrymandering and and you have, like, politicians that, again, they go into the world because they wanna serve the public, but then they realize that in order to serve the public, I need to win. And the most efficient way of winning might be to demonize my opponent and spread information and flood the zone and and so on. So so I think it needs to start with the individuals in in some regards. And I think if we have that efficient democratic interface, then we can actually reform the institutions over time.

So we don't need that forceful shakeup, but it's it's, of course, like, easier said than done. And so when we talk about the values in the individual, how does the role of algorithms and AI influencing kind of social media and echo chambers, how does that play in, and how do you combat that on an individual basis? Yeah. That's that's, again, a great question. I think the answer is similar, but now we're talking about the different institution.

Instead of institutions of government, we're talking about the institution or of for profit social media companies. And in the end of the day, I mean, you can point fingers at, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or anyone else or, you know, Reid Hoffman for for that matter. But the fact is that, I mean, in order to survive as a social media company, you need to make a profit. And the most efficient way of, making a profit is through, advertisement pay per click model. The most efficient way that we know of to implement such a model is the so called feed.

You know? You're fed pieces of information, and turns out that you're more likely to interact with that content. If that content is outrageous, it invokes your emotions, it creates tribalism, and and all of those things. And so so therefore, I mean, if if Facebook didn't invent the feed and that business model, someone else would have eventually, and the real results would would have been the same. So I think the problem here is fundamentally the pay per click business model.

And then you can sort of think to yourself, like, okay, how how do we go about fixing that? I mean, one way to fix that would be through innovation saying that here's even a more profit generating model that is even more beneficial for humanity, and, eventually, I will compete with you and and and replace it. The the other way of approaching it is, through some sort of, you know, regulation and say, like, hey. We we we need to regulate this somehow. And I don't know, like, exactly the best way of of doing it, but I do think that we need a little bit of both.

So I would, like, encourage any entrepreneur that have ideas for making a more, you know, humane value aligned system of social media to to do so. And at the same time, I would, you know, encourage regulators to think about this thoughtfully where where we sort of regulate it in in a smart and and business and human value friendly way because I think we we all agree on both sides of of the island no matter where you fall in the political spectrum that the current political discourse that has been created by social media companies are are just awful for for anyone involved. Well, so as a young person, I mean, trying to get these this consciousness out there and and raising people's consciousness, I remember, and he's still out there, Tony Robbins. And he talks about how to get people to make sales. And one of the things he says is that people will do essentially anything for pleasure and anything to avoid pain.

And so he says, going back to your hypothesis about short term versus long term, he says if somebody, for instance, really, really wants to eat something and and the food's right in front of them, you know, pushing that's gonna give him immediate pleasure. And and and and so if he's thinking about it from a short term perspective, he's gonna eat that food. But if you raise his consciousness or her consciousness to the point of, okay, what is it you really want? Well, you wanna feel good. You wanna live a long life.

So, yes, you want pleasure, but there's immediate pleasure and then there's the long term balance pleasure that comes from recognizing that if you essentially postpone that immediate gratification, you can get what you really want, your truest desire. How how does that play into what you're talking about? Yeah. I think you're raising a very important point. I mean, it all I think every single being, and it doesn't just go for humans, We tend to follow specific pleasure pain gradients, which is like we wanna avoid everything that is painful and we wanna walk towards things that are pleasurable.

And, over time, you know, our brains has evolved so that this pech pleasure pain gradient is is is aligned with a behavior that sort of maximizes our our own survival. But now we sort of live in a society that is maladapted to that. So, I mean, we might get an immediate pleasure from eating a lot of sugary and fatty foods, because it was beneficial in the past, but now it's not beneficial anymore. So how do you sort of overcome that short term thinking in terms of pleasure and pain and and think a little bit longer? And I think the problem is that all approaches that I've encountered for that, is hard to implement.

Like, for instance, for myself, like, I do a lot of loving kindness meditation, and the whole idea is to sort of facilitate a mindset where, like, my consciousness is part of something bigger, like, my happiness is actually your happiness. And, I mean, if everyone thought that way where, you know, the happiness of the collective is is also my happiness, then all of these Darwinian demon dynamics that I talk about in my book, would would not be possible. But the problem is that, you know, doing loving kindness meditation is is hard. It's not something you sort of easily implement in the life like this, but, you know, going and watch the next TikTok video and, you know, like, eating fatty food is is sort of, easy. So so I think, Joe, we need to start from sort of the the ground up.

And I have, like, various ideas that we might get into later around how we can sort of reform the current market system to sort of incentivize that longer term thinking. But I think in in general, like, anything that can make us feel think a little bit more long term is welcomed. I think anything, where we can think a little bit more about, how is my well-being actually a part of someone else's we well-being is is is also welcome. Yeah. Well, and and you talk about Darwinian angels.

Does that, how does how does that introduce into this and play into this whole concept? Yeah. So let me first try to attempt the rigorous definition of what I mean by a Darwinian demon, and the Darwinian angel is basically the the opposite. So I think that's the easiest way for the listeners to to understand what a Darwinian angel is. Perfect.

So I define a Darwinian demon as an evolutionary selection pressure that makes it adaptive for someone to behave in a way, that is bad for anyone else, essentially. So it's almost a zero sum dynamic. So to to give an example, in nature, for instance, being a predator and predatory behavior would be like, you know, a Darwinian demon because your nourishment is at the expense of of someone else. Right? And, I mean, that's just the way nature works.

Right? It it is the way nature works, but, nonetheless, it creates a lot of suffering. And if you apply sort of the same concept in, societies, you could take, you know, yeah, something like, elections, for instance. It might it might be adaptive for a particular politician to to to spread a lot of, misinformation and polarized, language, but in the long term, it pollutes political discourse and and makes it worse, for for everyone. So the Darwinian demons is is that selection pressure that that creates that negative behavior, and the Darwinian angel is the opposite of that.

So it's essentially a selection pressure, that makes it more likely for you to cooperate in a way that is maximally beneficial for for the entire, group. So, I mean, examples of Darwinian angels would be, you know, meditate doing loving kindness meditation and realize that my happiness is your happiness. But it could also be something like, you know, regulation and say, okay. We're afraid of overfishing because if everyone is fishing as quickly as they can to make a profit as quickly as they can, there will be no fish left, and we will all go bankrupt. So then we might institute regulation like, you know, a fishing quota.

And then all of a sudden, it makes it more adaptive for the fishermen to think sustainably, about the, fishing, stock. So there is, like, various flavors of both Darwinian demons and angels. And I think the important insight here is that this is not exclusive to humans. I mean, there tends to be sort of this narrative, especially in environmental circles, that if humans just went extinct, the the world would be absolutely fantastic. But that is not true.

I mean, if you look at our evolutionary history, the same dynamic is playing out over and over and over again. But the difference is that, as humans, we actually have the predictive capabilities to think long term. We can think with values and and consciousness and, you know, bacterias or viruses or predators. You can't expect them to to somehow escape their evolutionary hardwiring. But I actually think we can, and I think we must do that, for the long term survival of our species and and all sentient life on planet Earth.

So I have I have a question relates to this issue of in a short term versus long term. You talked about meditation and and these meditations about loving kindness, for instance. And you look at the inner generations. And if you meditate for the next thirty or forty years and you have children or friends or relatives that see that your life worked really well, Right? Yeah.

And you become a role model, then I would think younger people would say, oh, even though I'm having to take an hour out of my day to meditate thirty minutes in the morning, thirty minutes in the afternoon, or otherwise, or twenty and twenty, whatever it is. Hey. You know, looking at how this worked for Christian over a long period of time, I want to do that too. Why do you think there aren't more role models out there and people out there that can say, I became a good bottle of wine. You should copy my approach.

Why why is it that the young people feel so abandoned by the boomers? I think it's all cyclical. I mean, if you look and you can actually simulate this with so called evolutionary game theory. If you look at games with, like, coop so called cooperators and and defectors, people that behave, like, prosocially, or people that defect, so you can sort of simulate that and have a situation where, okay, you have people that decide to share food with, you know, other participants and and be pro social, and then you might have those that sort of steal food. And it turns out that if you simulate it, it it becomes cyclical, meaning that there will be good role models.

And it turns out that if you share food with one another, you're more likely to survive. So you sort of have the Darwinian angels that are getting the upper hand. The problem is that when you then create that society where everyone trusts one another, there is full of good role models, then the incentives for cheating and screwing those people over is the highest because, wait, what? Everyone is trusting me? I can say whatever and they will just like give me money and stuff?

And then, the incentives for exploiting that becomes the highest. And then the trust sort of fades away until you have an extreme situation with a lot of grifters and and people that are trying to cheat the system. And I think we're sort of compared to, I don't know, the fifties and sixties. I think we're sort of at that time now, in that cyclical pattern where, you know, cheating and and scamming and spreading false information is is sort of, you know, the default then. Oh, if everyone else has to do it, I I also need to do it.

And and then, hopefully, you know, the cycle will will repeat. But I think my worry is that what what if the cycle doesn't repeat? I mean, what if this cycle is the cycle where we have so many dangerous weapons and and and nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence that, you know, this cycle might be that less lost cooperation, and and and defection, cycle. And I think that I mean, again, looking at the cycles of history, that is the fear, right, that there is there are these cycles. And if you look at it, that eventually we're gonna destroy ourselves, which means we should go to Mars like Elon Musk talks about.

I mean, then there's also that kind of biblical narrative, which is that the whole world was destroyed in the flood, but that won't happen again because light overcomes darkness and as dark as it gets, there is this force in the universe that gets us to self correct. And I I wonder I mean, when when I when I was younger, I I I had that same panic, like and when I was younger, it was over nuclear weapons. You know, we had drills where we would dive under the desk. Yeah. Today, I would I would say that things like global warming are the things that scare young people a lot or or AI, for instance.

Yeah. I'm wondering if if you look at the long view of history and you you look at the trends, it does seem to me that we are living in the very, very best time in the history of the world. And that Yeah. Yes, there are these challenges, and yes, we could blow ourselves up, and we certainly killed a lot of people during World War one and World War two, but we did self correct. And I Mike, I guess my question to you is when we think that when we frame global warming as an existential threat and people are terrified, it seems to me they're immediately gonna focus on short term solutions.

If you bring the temperature down and you speak about hope, but the necessary need to balance, then instead of panicking people, you can create this collective feeling that we can solve this instead of focusing on the negative. I think there's two things to unpack here. Like, the first question is, okay, historically, we have always made it somehow. Does that mean that we should be less worried for the future? And then the second one is the question of of hope.

And let me actually start with that one. And there is actually a lot of psychology research in that, within the field of climate psychology. I mean, it turns out that that's that's the thing. And you will not motivate the right action, by fear and panic. There needs to be hope in order for people to act.

So I think that is, like, really, really important. I mean, instead of saying, oh, let's run from this scary thing because that means that you can run-in any direction. And I mean, that direction might not necessarily be beneficial. I mean, people do a lot of stupid stuff when they're afraid whilst saying giving a message of hope, and painting a vision for the future. It means that we are all collectively going in in a more, thoughtful direction rather than just running away in any direction.

So I I definitely agree with that. I would, however, urge caution in terms of saying that just because we have been alright all previous times means that we will be alright again. And this was actually, like, something incredibly mind blowing for me when I read my my former colleague and and boss, Nick Bostrom's PhD thesis on onentropic bias. So, there is this idea of survivorship bias, and I'm gonna try to simplify it as much as possible. And, please, intervene if you still think I explained it in a too complicated way.

But essentially, like, we will always find ourselves in a part of the universe that allows for our own survival. So, I mean, there might be these cycles of, you know, destruction, but then we always build ourselves up again. And that's what we see in history. I mean, we see all of these mass extinctions from from our history with with with, you know, algae and bacteria that almost took over the world, create that massive climate change, almost suffocated all life. But we always bounce back.

Right? So there is this pattern of always bouncing back. But the thing is that we will never find ourselves on a planet where we didn't bounce back because by definition, we will be dead and we can never be born. So I think we need to be humble and realize that we only have one data point here. And whenever you only have one data point in science, you need to be suspicious.

So the only way of knowing the true answer of what is the probability of us, like, bouncing back would be to do a big cosmic and even intergalactic survey of all planets where life has originated and to see, like, how often bit did they bounce back because, there will always be a bias in terms of bouncing back because we can never be born on a planet where we where we didn't, bounce back. So I think that is, like, an important point to take in mind. But to me, that gives me hope in a weird way because we have had all of these mass extinctions in the past. And most of those mass extinctions were caused by the same Darwinian dynamic where it is adaptive for instance, for a bacteria or algae to just replicate really, really quickly and take over the seas and take over the oceans and exploit all resources. But as a result, it suffocates everyone else.

But the bacteria doesn't have foresight or empathy or anything like that. They're just victims to their evolutionary programming. But we are different. You know? We have consciousness.

We have a brain. We can make predictions. We can steer our values, in a in a direction, or we can live accordance, with with with our values, because we have them in the first place. So to me, that gives us a lot of hope and and responsibility that we can actually do this. I mean, we are smart.

We have overcome challenges in the past. So yeah. And and I love that. And it it does seem to me that from a consciousness perspective, as you said, we have the tools that these other life forms did not, but I also think that, again, looking at history, that we have always been left with faith, and what I mean by that it doesn't have to be religious faith. It it means that we don't know, right, because there isn't proof.

And so to me, in a sense, choosing life, choosing sacrifice for the long term requires a certain empathy and recognition that I'm willing to do the right thing even though I don't know it will work, but I have to choose faith and hope over despair because that from an evolutionary perspective is the way to survive. Whereas if you focus on the negative, which is possible, It is possible. But if you focus on that from an evolutionary perspective, you're ultimately gonna doom yourself. I I completely agree with that. And I think, like, faith is I mean, there is two components to faith.

I mean, there is the religious aspects, and then you can also study faith from an evolutionary perspective. And from an evolutionary perspective, I think it is clear that a lot of our success is due to faith, because through that faith, it has allowed us to coordinate in large groups and to achieve marvelous things based on that faith. But then, of course, faith can also be exploited. I mean, whenever you have a new religion, there becomes a institution at some point, and that institution only exists for its own survival, and you sort of almost exploit the the faith of the followers in order to achieve whatever power aims that particular institution has. But but I agree, like, faith has to be a part of the equation.

And I guess my leap of faith here is, and and I think that only makes the message so much more inspiring that, you know, we might live in an unstable world, but I have faith that we can make it stable because we are born with values. We are born with consciousness. We we are born with the ability to predict and and shape our future to a larger extent than than anyone else. So I think looking back at the doom and gloom of of the past, actually gives me even more reason for faith and and optimism because I think we are fundamentally different than what what anything, this world has seen before in in our evolutionary past. Well, what I think you're saying is, again, if you look at the cyclical nature of history, if you look at Yellow Labs or if you look at anemias, did did they grow without the existence of what I would call free will because they don't have the consciousness to be able to make long term sacrifices from an evolutionary planning perspective.

And I guess the question is, if there is free will, and and I know people debate whether or not it exists or not, but if there is this space between stimulus and response where we can actually plot the future, our consciousness becomes a changed evolution. We actually can influence our own evolution. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think what I am hoping for, and I call that the great bootstrap in the book, is the post Darwinian world.

Because, traditionally, the way the world has worked is that the ultimate value for evolution through natural selection is survival. And then evolution through natural selection will create a certain set of values in particular species, in order to maximize that survival. So, I mean, a lion will not feel any moral obligation towards, like, all of the species it's eating. I mean, it's encoded with values where eating others is, like, completely okay. Right?

Because it optimizes the survival, of that particular species. But to me, what I call the great bootstrap is actually flipping that on its head. So instead, the final goal is to achieve our human values. And then obviously, survival needs to be an instrumental goal to achieve that ultimate goal because, I mean, no matter what it is that we value, regardless if it's, you know, happiness or pleasure or freedom, we can't achieve it if if we're dead. But I think the difference here being that, you know, evolution through natural selection is ultimately optimizing for survival at any cost, which means that we can have horrible dictatorships.

We can have species in nature that are suffering immensely, because evolution fundamentally don't care about suffering. It's just an instrument for survival, but we can flip that on its head where our values becomes, sort of the currency, of of the new system. And I think that's what we need to do in order to survive because if we continue these Darwinian dynamics, it's only gonna go one way. And I have this graph in the book where we look at, you know, the evolution of weapons over time. I mean, if you invent a new weapon that is more powerful than your enemies, you can build an empire around that.

And it can be anything from bronze swords to to steel to British gunboats to nuclear weapons in the second world war. But that curve is only going up exponentially. Like, the next weapon needs to be even more horrible than than the first one, and that will only sort of end in doom if we continue on that path. But that's the Darwinian path. That is the path of survival at all costs.

And we can flip that around and say, let's lead with values instead. What I what I love about what you're saying is that we pass wisdom down with stories, and each generation has its own language and ability to tell stories. And I studied history with certain stories. For instance, the the notion of survival of the fittest and the Aryan race and the whole Nazi movement, and we were grew and that that that might makes right, and that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I grew up with the counterbalance to that, which was the the notion of how do you teach people the Judeo Christian values.

One, love your neighbor as yourself or the famous story of Rabbi Hillel who was asked, how do you teach all the wisdom values of the Bible, the Torah? How do you teach those Eastern Buddhist values? How do you teach those values to to the next generation? And and what what he said in a short way, and he said, don't do others what you would find hateful to yourself. And so it seems to me what I hear you saying is that there are these universal values of being kind and and recognizing that there are sentient beings.

And in fact, in the Garden of Eden story, we were vegetarian. And the whole notion of Kosher laws was it was a moral compromise, because we had to live and survive, and so we couldn't manufacture meat at that time. And so the moral compromise was be kind to animals, kill them in a humane manner, but we as human beings as we evolve need to eat. So so so the question is what I'm hearing you say is we need a new language. We need a new story of faith and hope that resonates with your generation, that's not built into these narratives that that that are, you know, Judeo Christian values were passed down by patriarchal worlds that excluded people with hate and anti gay and acting and anti women.

We we need a new story to tell people to bring them into this world of hope. I couldn't agree more. And I think, like, all of the prophets in the past, regardless if it's, you know, Jesus Christ or or or the Buddha, They started with a very similar message, which is the golden rule. Like, you should behave onto others the same way you want them to behave towards you. And at some point, you know, these higher institutions takes over because if you become like the Catholic church or, you know, whatever institution, then you need to maximize for your own survival, and that might actually go against the very values that were foundational, to begin with.

So how do we solve for that? And I think I was at a religious gathering the other day, and it was actually a mix of Muslims and and Christians and, and Jews, and we were all breaking the the fast together. I mean, I didn't fast, because I'm not not a Muslim myself, but I nonetheless wanted to participate. And there was this, lady, so she, she's an aspiring rabbi, and she told me a story that actually brought me to tears. She told me a she said that the origin story in the Torah, but a lot of other religions as well, is a story of oneness, where the divine is in one place, and we're all in that place together.

And at some point, there is a rapturing where all of the divinity is still there, but it's spread out. And it's spread out in isolated pockets. And those pockets don't know how to coordinate and, you know, there becomes war and non harmony between those dividing the the divine pockets. But the way evolution and the way the story goes is that these pockets of divinity, at some point, will find one another and we will put ourselves back together again into a divine whole. And she said it in much more beautiful poetic words than me, but I think that is the story of both science and the big bang and the story and of of a lot of religions.

And that is at least a story that moved me a lot. And and to me, that great bootstrap that I describe in the book where we all live in accordance with with our values instead of this Darwinian law of of of the jungle is that time when we all put it back together. And I hope that we will be able to put it all together within our generation because I think right now it's it's decision time for for life on planet Earth. You know? Either we continue with the same way and and we continue to plot that graph of dangerous and dangerous weapons, and and the next weapon might be the world ending weapon regardless if it's AI or engineered pandemics, or we go the route of values and put all of these pockets of divinity, back together.

And I think we can build something extremely beautiful, a light that starts here on planet Earth, but then shines out to the rest of the cosmos and and and the rest of the galaxy as well. Well, I think that that's a beautiful way to sum it up. And and by the way, I I I believe I've heard the story that you referred to, and you said you you denigrated the way you explained it. I thought you explained it beautifully. The way the way I've heard it told sometimes is this notion of that there was this oneness, and that the that there was this explosion out of of the the the Garden of Eden.

And that that the process, the cyclical nature you're talking about is is that there's this inspiration. There there is then this blowout, this this perspiration period where you're you're thrown out and then you come back together. So it's kind of like, you know, if you think about the baby in the womb and the whole notion of, you know, you have this this beautiful thought of making making life, and then you have to spend nine months having that nurtured and then you give birth to a new life, that to give birth to this new society you're talking about, there's these these sparks, these fallen sparks. And the the whole idea is to pull the sparks together that we're all unlocking these sparks and bringing them back together to create this unified whole. And and if I might again take what you said even to another level, if you think about COVID, the whole idea was that the virus, right, which would which if I'm understanding the way you explain this, would be the Darwinian demon.

Yeah. That that virus was spreading from host to host, right, in in in this negative way. But the message that you're spreading, right, with your writing, with your talking, coming on our podcast, getting this message out there, the story you're telling is one where each person can go to the next person and instead of being a Darwinian demon, they can be a Darwinian angel and spread this notion of oneness and hope in a story and in a language that people can relate to. And in the same way COVID had the possibility, right, to take over the whole world, this consciousness that you're talking about is really something that's within the control of your generation to get out there and to spread that that Darwinian angel, if I'm understanding what you're saying. I think that is a beautiful way of putting it, and I think our generation, can do it.

And I think, you are doing it too in your generation by by having this podcast and and and trying to spread, you know, good ideas, in the most possible, scalable possible way. So I I really appreciate that. I think it's, it's down to all of us together beyond the generations or or races or religions to to to put the world together. And, I have a strong feeling that we will be able to do that. Well, I do I read a book called strength to strength, and it's it's kind of like how the different generations can work together.

But, you know, you have the creativity, the new story, the energy, and and I maybe I have some miles on on on the, you know, the tire, so to speak, and and I can help promulgate that. But I really do I'm I'm inspired, and what gives me hope is your generation and and the way that you are so, you know, hopeful and creative. And so if I can, in any way, work with your generation to facilitate getting that story out, that's what that's what gets me up in the morning. I was not religious growing up, but as somebody who's become more spiritual as I've gotten older, it is so hard to talk to people because it comes across as so patriarchal and so demeaning and so black and white, and and and and your generation will have nothing of it. They they they they are critical thinkers.

They don't want the hypocrisy. And so it it's scary for me to to to go in in those waters. I, yeah, I can totally understand and relate to that. And, I mean, I I actually found out, only a couple of months ago that my grandmother was was Jewish, which means that I'm a a quarter Jewish. And, I mean, the reason why I didn't know is because, you know, at at one point, you know, her mother's mother decided that they would stop calling themselves, you know, Jewish because of of fear of persecution.

And it's, I think, like, especially now with the what we're seeing in in in in, you know, Palestine and Israel, which is just horrible, it creates so much emotion, and and it's yeah. It's very, very difficult thing to to talk about because people, yeah, people are riled up, unfortunately, for for good reasons. But yeah. I understand why people leave organized religion. I mean, as you said, these institutions have just become so corrupted, but but it it's up to your generation.

Like like, where do you and how do you promote these values and pass them down without his institutions. Right? So there is a little bit of a chicken or egg there. Yeah. Exactly.

And I think the current version of secularism doesn't work, because I think if you have just sort of secularism without, like, any values, it's it's easy to sort of just replace those values to whatever values serve the institutions. And that might be consumerism that you can sort of buy yourself to to happiness, or it could be, you know, abidance with, you know, patriotism, etcetera, etcetera. But those are those are, like, the values of the institutions. That those are not the values of of us as as humans, and I think we can only get those values back through introspection. And I think a lot of the religious leaders in the in the past actually had it right, and I think we we need to sort of learn learn from them.

And, yeah, so I couldn't I couldn't agree more. When you look at, like, the interfaith dialogue you were talking about with the Muslims and the Christians and the Jews, I mean, do you have hope and do you see a framework in which your generation can find a new home? And and and I guess the the second part of that question is, where do you find home from a community perspective in terms of those values? Oh, wow. What a great question.

I'm trying to figure that out now, actually. Like, I think a home for me has been sort of very much sort of the rationalist sort of scientists using deductive reasoning, etcetera, etcetera. But I feel like that alone has sort of left a little bit of a void in in me. I mean, I I've seen with myself, like, in the past couple of years, like, I've had my values on, like, you know, I wanna maximize the the well-being of all sentient beings, but, you know, I haven't felt an emotional connection to that those values. So, like, rationally, I've I've just had them, but but that meant that I sort of have I feel like I've almost metaphorically whipped myself and be like, you need to work harder and more, etcetera, etcetera.

But I think what I've discovered in in actually only the past year is is that spiritual component to it where my my spirit feels aligned with those values. And I think that is a little bit what what is missing, that, you know, spiritual alignment. And I think it is missing, unfortunately, a lot in in my generation as well. And, you know, I think a lot of people in my generation and even the younger generations are are, like, growing up in in a, you know, a lot of polarization. And, of course, there's a counter movement against it, but a lot of them, I I'm afraid, are growing up a little bit, like, brainwashed by by the institutions.

But yeah. When you talk about rational and meditation, bringing those together in a unified whole from an evolutionary perspective has to happen. It has to happen. And I think your generation is having that challenge, and I think we've all had that challenge, but it is a process. It's not a destination, and you're you're well into it.

Well, thank you. Thank you. So so are you. Like, apparently, like, I can I can really sense that? So so, yeah, this this was great.

This was, like, beyond what I expected. And I think you sort of said some of those magic words in the beginning that that made us converge towards this, beautiful dialogue. Well, Chris and I I enjoyed it. We'll stay in touch. I really appreciate that.

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