JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 172 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m here with my co-panelist, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Good morning! And I am here with my good friend, Artemis Starr. ARTEMIS: Thank you and I’m really excited today to be able to introduce to you Miko Matsumura. I met Miko at Gradle Summit years ago, the first Gradle Summit that ever existed. And I've this history in the Gradle community with all these amazing people on this team, in this hub. And there I met Miko who got on stage as a CMO, and we’re like, “CMO, what is that?” [Chuckles] And then that prompted me to go talk to Miko and I realized this magic of how he’d taken his past experience in neurology and software and as a spiritual being in the world, and mapped all of that over to looking at these marketing systems, these human structured systems as machines that you can design and think about. And we had this amazing conversations and I've been so excited about getting Miko on this show. And so, I'm so super glad he could join us today. Miko is a General Partner with Gumi Cryptos, a US $30M venture capital fund focused early stage blockchain startups and a Venture Partner with BitBull Capital, a cryptocurrency fund-of-funds. He has been a keynote speaker at dozens of blockchain conferences around the world. He is also cofounder of the crypto exchange Evercoin. I'm so excited to have you on the show, Miko. Thank you for joining us. MIKO: Yeah, sure. It’s a pleasure. ARTEMIS: The first question we always ask is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MIKO: I guess I would say my superpower is kind of not knowing things. I guess in a way, what’s happened over time -- culturally, I was raised as a Buddhist. In Buddhism, you’re very much reliant on observation and on your own senses. So, really you have to kind of assume that you don’t really know anything which I think helps with lots of situations. Because lots of situations require you to find out things. So, if you start from the premise that you don’t know things, then it kind of helps. I suppose you could spin it as maybe curiosity. And that’s kind of what led me down the path to neuroscience and my academic research and study because really, kind of piqued my curiosity. I was really interested to explore what was in that weird three-pound device. I guess I would say the most complicated little device that we’ve ever seen. ARTEMIS: Wow! Not knowing things. Not knowing anything. That forces you into this mode of reliance on observation on your own senses. It reminds me of the phrase “lose your mind and come to your senses”. MIKO: Oh, yeah. Coming to your senses is really big and it really kind of keeps things fresh. I think the thing that happens a lot of times is that the mind is this kind of evolutionary place. And so, we end up with this very convincing illusion of this experience that we’re having. I guess you could characterize it as being a bit like the matrix. And because of that, people can be very trapped in their thoughts and they can be very trapped in kind of thinking. And the thing that’s very interesting is how can you break out of thinking and how can you kind of get into, really I would characterize it maybe as detecting. So, detecting is kind of more like showing up for what's real and what's there, and then trying to kind of figure out what all of it means. So, that’s really, I think, it’s pretty big in venture capital as a job. It’s sort of a detective job. It’s kind of 50% detective and maybe 50% intelligence agency type of work. So, I think that’s kind of the mode of that kind of business. JESSICA: Detective like, figuring out what's going on in the industry? MIKO: It’s not even in the industry, actually. Because at some level, the industry is kind of not something that you can exert much control over. What you really want to figure out is, you want to figure out what's kind of going on in a specific entrepreneur and you kind of want to understand sort of what's motivating them and try to understand more about things, like what's real. Because the thing that’s quite fascinating about this process is that people are often not what they seem, both in favorable and dis-favorable ways. So, I think the ability to tune in to very small signals are important. One of the problems with this approach is that it’s effectively a pattern-matching approach. And I guess that’s problematic because it’s difficult to -- basically, successful entrepreneurs are pattern-breaking and successful venture capital people are pattern-matching. At some level, you're probably almost always wrong. JESSICA: So, you're looking to pattern-match on people who break the pattern? MIKO: Yes, that’s pretty meta. But that’s a very hard thing to pattern match against. But that’s sort of where the [zen aspect test] kind of come into it. So, it’s a very interesting, intriguing, and complex process. I think ultimately, it comes down to sort of this posture that you don’t really know. And it’s very important to understand the limits of what you can know and what you do know and not kind of falling for the illusion that you know something that you don’t know. An example is things like vertical industries. For example, let’s say you're trying to invest in a company that is doing work in sort of micro-lending and finance in Africa. The thing that’s very tempting is to sort of get these explanations about what they're doing and then after getting a certain amount of explanation, kind of making the assumption that you actually understand what they're doing at any significantly deep level. So, I think that’s an important thing to also understand which is the idea that it’s this very seductive notion that after -- it’s funny, like if you have a meal with someone, you kind of get this very strong impression that you know them. So, it’s like, “Oh, do you know this person?” And then after a little while, you're like, “Yes, I know that person.” But you don’t actually know the person. And so for example, it’s like, “Do you know this industry?” There’s a very similar effect that happens in the human brain where if you study something for a fairly short amount of time, you kind of get this impression that you actually know that. And I think both of those things are somewhat dangerous. The notion that you know people to the extent that you can predict their behavior over a lot of really strange upcoming circumstances. The other thing that’s kind of a big illusion is that you kind of know -- you can’t really know a lot about a lot of different industries. You can kind of know a little about the industries that you’ve had direct experience in which is why I tend to favor what I call T-shaped venture capitalists who sort of have a deep domain expertise and then they have quite a lot of horizontal capability that allows them to kind of make a lot of inferences but obviously, the danger is that they succumb to the illusion of knowing a lot of things. And I think most humans don’t know a lot of things and most humans actually really know very few things. JACOB: That’s making me think of being married. [Chuckles] I was reading recently about relationships and marriages, and how you get married and you think you know this person that you're committing your life to. But in reality, they continue to change. And even if they weren't, you're changing. And so, your understanding of that person has to change because you are changing. It was saying something about how one of the sources of dissatisfaction in marriage often stems from the fact that their partner seems to be so different after X number of years and they don’t know what to do about it. It was just making me think about that as like, you think you know somebody and you're investing so much emotional energy in saying, “I absolutely know who this person is.” And what that can cause you to do is not do the daily work of continuing to know about the person, or in your case, a subject matter or an industry. MIKO: Yeah, that’s absolutely a beautiful observation. I do think that when people do get married, they're effectively sort of marrying a person about whom they have sort of a hunch. So, it’s sort of like, “Oh, I have a hunch about this person.” But really as far as knowing the person, the thing that I think you're touching on that kind of segues into more of the Zen Buddhist mindset is this concept of impermanence. So, I think you're touching on this notion that even if you know completely the person at this moment in time, the next moment actually brings transition and change and you may not know that person. One of the things that’s really interesting is I think one of the pinnacles of Greek Philosophy is the Socratic edict of knowing thyself. But obviously, if new circumstances arise, then we find that sometimes we even surprise ourselves. And surprises can come in positive and negative forms. And so, if you can’t really even know yourself, then it becomes pretty challenging to know other people especially over long periods of time. JACOB: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. JESSICA: Miko, you mentioned that you get married to someone because you have a hunch about them because in people, we make all the really hard decisions with our feelings. MIKO: That’s interesting. And I think it’s really important to consider, which is that when you think about -- people talk about things like the gut. And when they talk about their gut, there's a lot of people that talk about things like, the enteric nervous system which is the ganglia that exists actually physically embodied inside of the gut. I think it’s even more complicated than that, because people are like, “Oh, the enteric nervous system is doing processing.” And it’s like, “Ah, kind of.” Yes and no, because the thing that happens is that it isn’t actually your gut that’s doing the processing. Your gut is kind of involved in responses that can be sensed. If for example you think about things like the interaction between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, it means that things like if you're detecting threat then sometimes your gut goes into a sympathetic nervous autonomic nervous system reaction and that’s detectable. The point is that you're not actually accessing solely the enteric nervous system that somehow has vast processing power. That’s just a false kind of model of what I think is probably happening. What's happening is that your gut is actually producing sort of sensory stimulus that you can detect but that sensory stimulus is actually kind of an aggregate computation that involves the central nervous system. An example of this is let’s say you're in a forest and you see some shapes. So maybe the shapes are pattern matching against like a tiger. So maybe what happens is that this notion of the tiger is pattern-matched at a fairly deep level in your nervous system, and your body starts shifting into the sympathetic nervous system and moving towards fight or flight. At that point, what happens is you may get this nervous tingling that you can actually now detect that’s “coming from your gut”. So, it literally is a sensory experience of what's happening, but the computation probably isn’t happening in your gut. So when people say they make gut decisions, I don’t think the enteric nervous system itself is computing the answer to the problem. I think it’s much broader than that. So, I think it really relates to, I think again, this kind of feeling of being more related to the sensory input. So, the sensory input, if you look at the gut and the experience of the gut, the entire experience of the gut is actually just sensory input. So if you really think about all of these experiences that we have, experiences of our entire embodiment are really just the data inputs that we use. And so I think when people say like, “Oh, people are making gut decisions,” people also talk about things like the heart. The heart, if the enteric nervous system doesn’t have very much processing capability for information, I’d say the heart and the intervention of the heart probably has even less computational processing power. But the reality is that for centuries at the very least since the beginning of documented literature, people have been talking about the role of the heart in terms of human emotion. And of course, emotion is inseparable from feeling. The idea that people have feelings, what are feelings? Feelings are data. Feelings are sensations. So, I think that’s important to consider when we talk about this sort of pseudo-metaphorical embodied data sources. JESSICA: The gut feeling is an expression of where we experience the results of the computation that involves our whole nervous system? MIKO: Yeah, that’s spot on. That’s exactly my way of looking at it. There's a lot of mythology around the enteric nervous system. JESSICA: What is the enteric nervous system? MIKO: The enteric nervous system are actually neurons that exist in your viscera. And that’s not particularly stunning that such neurons exist. And obviously, it’s not particularly stunning that those neurons can exhibit kind of computational properties, at least what appear to be computational properties. To me, that’s all of interest but in some ways, it’s less about kind of data coming in and data going out. It’s really that combination. It’s both sensory and it’s also kind of related to the output of the sensory system. Anyhow, that’s sort of the way I look at this stuff. To make a long story short, human decision making is definitely an embodied process and I do think that these kinds of gut aspects are pretty important. And I think that limitation of human knowledge kind of relates to the structure of the flow of venture capital which is typically venture capital is performed in partnerships. And partnerships are a way of getting more eyeballs, more brains, more guts, more heart, more of everything involved. So, you get much more parallel processing and you actually get much more sort of three-dimensional or multi multi-dimensional maps of space. I think where the magic happens is the notion that ultimately you're trying to predict the future and of course, people’s ability to do that is pretty limiting. It’s sort of very limited. It’s very interesting. I would say that there are many different ways to be successful at this role. And in fact, there are some people that have kind of almost supreme confidence in their own ability to predict the future. And that the market doesn’t necessarily penalize people who take that perspective as well. ARTEMIS: I got a question for you, Miko. MIKO: Sure. ARTEMIS: I've been listening to all this and the thing that’s on my mind is tech and abuse. I worked in the tech recruiting industry for a number of years. I was CTO and did consulting and tech recruiting and got really involved with the local community. And so, I learned a lot about the recruiting markets and shifts in hiring practices and how different economic trends and attitudes ended up affecting hiring. And at the same time, I'm working with these people that are phenomenally talented and at the same time, struggling to get jobs in various ways. And there's this dynamic of these first impressions and the systemic biasing effects such that certain people get shut out. And being frustrated by this, I’d find all these really passionate, talented folks. Everyone wants senior engineers and there's not enough of them. And so, the people that are good are getting five offers and stuff, and then we had these folks with amazing talent and struggle to get jobs. And I'm like, how hard is it to interview as a senior engineer? And so, I started mentoring people and coaching these junior folks into jobs. And what was fascinating, if I taught them how to stop and think and ask questions, gave them a checklist of questions to start thinking about in their interview process as they went through approaching a problem, those first impressions, those alignments started shifting so suddenly. These people have two years’ experience and they're hitting all the bells of the predictive things that a senior person would do. And I'm thinking about what sorts of things you’ve seen in terms of market trend with regards to tech recruiting and hiring, how you see these patterns when people are interviewing, first impressions? What kind of things do you see in your world? MIKO: What you're describing is extremely interesting and valuable because in a way, a lot of these exhibited behaviors that match patterns are potentially coachable and teachable, so you can really almost like simulate ten years of experience with ten hours of training. It turns out that that’s a really strong arbitrage. If you look at it from the perspective of the venture industry, in a way, ultimately that industry is really just doing job interviews for startup CEOs. That’s really the industry. And honestly, it’s a very inexact science and a very difficult process. The thing that I think we’re going to probably eventually have to learn is we’re going to kind of eventually have to learn how to do a better job compensating people for behavior. And I think one of the things that’s kind of a reason that’s sort of an aftermath to this sort of lifetime learning/training, on-the-job training is kind of a gig economy. It feels like we’re increasingly, we’re sort of chopping up work into projects. I think we may be moving towards a much more freelance style economy because this notion of lifetime employment is just not, how do you do that? It seems very impractical. ARTEMIS: Yeah, it seems like a fundamental sort of market shift happening in that way right now of self-organizing freelancer teams. MIKO: And I think that a lot of that is very interesting because it ultimately kind of has to do with expectation setting. I think that it’s interesting because it then becomes a much more complicated world because in a sense, if you have a paradigm of sort of lifetime employment, then you have this paradigm of mutual investment. You have this kind of paradigm of learning and process. I think this paradigm has kind of been more prevalent in Japan. The Japanese employment practices tend to skew in that direction. Although I’d say that modernity has kind of pressed in and made that a little bit less prevalent and less popular. But I would say that in the long run, it feels like the natural evolution is towards kind of almost like a freelance gig economy for everyone. ARTEMIS: I'm wondering if there's a way to balance those two things to create longevity and meaningful relationships over time, because those lifetime relationships are still very much important, but more of like artists mixing their work together and potentially doing it over a longer time period too. How would you evolve that sort of world, take that to its logical conclusion of balancing those two things? MIKO: I think that what happens is that you end up with this chaining of experiences. For example if you look at this concept of serial entrepreneurship, it becomes the idea of how a set of experiences can inform sort of a next tour of duty. I tend to be, I would call it sort of relatal transactional as someone in the venture world. It means that I prioritize the development of relationships, and the relationships can potentially transcend individual transactions, but I think that transactions including things like investment. But I would say that if you really look at it philosophically, then you can start chaining together these experiences that may go across companies. So you may have a person who worked at a company and then now you're recruiting them into a different one. Eventually what happens is the relational aspect of this becomes these kinds of social networks that transcend projects, companies, and the rest. ARTEMIS: In terms of interviews, when you think about just two people sitting across from each other at the table and first impressions that flash back and forth between these two people, what are some of the patterns that you see? MIKO: I guess for me, the thing that’s really difficult about that is that -- in a way, I struggle with the whole framework because I feel like interviewing is sort of bad at doing its job. If I were trying to hire interviewing, I would fire it from its job because interviewing is supposed to basically predict on-the-job behavior but it’s sort of exceedingly artificial. So, from my perspective, one of the things that I always kind of like to do is have as much observation time as possible. In a way, that’s one of the reasons why sort of long-lasting multi company relationships become exceedingly valuable is because you’ve had kind of a very enduring amount of time across multiple experiences to understand a person’s trajectory, behavior, values, mindset. Because I feel like the interview is sort of crazily artificial environment and it’s also kind of very subject to sort of being gamed. It’s easy to game an interview whereas it’s harder to game kind of a life in some ways. JACOB: Yeah, it’s that idea that if there's some kind of assessment system that’s used, some kind of rubric that’s used to determine to assess some kind of value, in this case as someone who’d be a good employee, there’s usually some kind of way to gain that system. MIKO: Yeah, and goodness is such an abstraction. For example, if you have kind of this meritocratic type of culture, then you can argue that goodness equals smartness. But the thing that’s potentially problematic about that is that if a person doesn’t have loyalty or if they don’t have a team spirit, there's certain dimensions of this where a person could become very unmanageable even though they're highly intelligent. Unmanageable, they could potentially be constantly looking for higher paying jobs outside of your company instead of doing their work. So to me, these types of things are kind of hard to detect using sort of the interview process. And in fact, it’s sort of in general the kind of framework of interviewing becomes this kind of framework of let’s try to understand if this person is fit to do this particular role. But the thing that it doesn’t elucidate very well is whether the person cares about doing that. And that’s kind of where more that thing kind of come into play. But again, kind of the gut is foolable especially over short periods of time. Artifice is something that is easily -- you can easily fool some people some of the time. I guess the old adage is that you can’t fool all the people all the time. That’s sort of my principle, I guess. JACOB: I think you touched on this a little bit. We had another guest several weeks ago who’s a clinical psychologist. We talked a lot about how emotionality is really just at the core of being human. And there's no such thing as any action that a human can take that doesn’t have some kind of emotional component to it because it’s sort of the core language that our brain operates on in some respect. MIKO: I think that’s very fair because if you actually kind of look at the brain and neuroanatomy itself, you can actually understand the evolutionary build out of the brain from a sort of atavistic perspective. People talk about the so-called triune brain which is sort of a prevalent model that emerged out of the era of Sigmund Freud which is the notion that there's a reptilian brain. If you model the human brain, there's actually the brain stem and the hind brain really resembles the brain of a lizard. But on top of that, there's sort of a limbic system and midbrain system that maybe resembles the brain of a monkey, and then maybe there's a forebrain and kind of neocortex that sort of looks more like a dolphin or looks more like maybe a social mammal including humans. So, if you kind of look at it from a brain architecture perspective, there really is no -- if you think about behavior, like behavior is all cascading out of either the primary nerves or from the spinal cord. So, if you really look at it from that perspective, there is no behavior that you can output that doesn’t pass through kind of the messy midbrain. And if you actually do it from a pure neuroanatomical perspective, the neocortex which people really attribute with logical thinking, is about the thickness of an average business card and it’s kind of plastered to the front part of the skull which is probably about as far away from the brain stem which triggers behaviors as you can get physiologically. So, there's certainly a lot of routing that goes through a much more messy reticulated neural structures. ARTEMIS: What I heard you say was this sort of rational thinking behavior in our neocortex is the thing that’s the thickness of a business card, did I get that right? MIKO: Yeah, it’s sort of this very thin logical structure, columnar structure that’s sort of right at the front of your skull. ARTEMIS: All right. And then we’ve got all these messier neural structures underneath that, and there is no behavior that you can output that doesn’t pass through this messy midbrain. So, it’s like our neocortex, our rational thinking, is sort of like this façade of reason on top of our messy midbrain. MIKO: I think that’s a very accurate model of the neuroanatomy. The other element that I think are important to think about too is if you think about behavior as being kind of an emergent output of a lot of different kinds of action potentials and a lot of different types of electric chemical activity in the brain. So, just the sheer lack of biomass of neurons actually kind of points the way to making us understand the brain to be, first of all, a multi-organ system rather than just an organ. And also, a set of highly specialized information processing systems that all kind of interact. Because of the interaction of these systems to perform behavior, you can really kind of start to question how logical human behavior is. I think there are so many shadows on the wall today in modern society that help us to understand that to be the case. A lot of the biggest problems that we have in the world are really a function of large masses of behavior that is really fundamentally illogical. So, I think threatening your own species with extinction is, as Mr. Spock would say, it’s highly illogical. But it’s something that we seem to be doing a bang up job of. ARTEMIS: In terms of shadows on the wall, you're referring to allegory of the cave? MIKO: Yeah, definitely. The reflection of the underlying reality on to what's observable. JESSICA: Yeah, and then that’s what we choose to observe, which as you pointed out at the beginning of the podcast, depends on what we don’t think we know. MIKO: Yeah, exactly. I guess the reason why I would characterize not knowing as a superpower is that it’s hard to find out stuff if you think you already know it. And that sort of becomes a large impediment. The impediment is, “Oh, I already know this stuff. I know this person. I know what I'm doing,” or whatever it may be. And the thing that not knowing does that I think is beneficial from a human health perspective is that if you assume you know too many things, then your thinking becomes overly mechanistic. And that actually tends to reduce freedom. JESSICA: Mechanistic, like predictable? MIKO: Yeah, predictable definitely. But more than predictable, it’s sort of reductionistic. What I mean by that is that it’s fairly easy to get depressed or it’s fairly easy to kind of get stuck. Frequently, you get more stuck if you kind of make too many assumptions about the degrees of freedom of your own kind of perceptions. The idea would be that you just construct the world as a set of if-then statements and then you try to compute outcomes based on these if-then statements. The more deterministic your reasoning is, the more you end up with these kind of problems that can’t be solved. And then obviously, that ends up making you more stuck. So to me, that kind of tendency to come to your senses is one that is sort of, I would say, not only kind of beneficial but it also can be sort of life-saving as an instinct. Because when people get into despair, a lot of times they're getting pretty desperate because of the assumptions they're making about how things are. JESSICA: You mentioned if-then statements and if people think the world is deterministic [inaudible] reductionist. I want to tie that to something you said a minute ago [inaudible] more about you described the behavior as the emergent output of a lot of action potential. There are many things that we might do. MIKO: When I used the phrase ‘action potential’, I was kind of using not the metaphorical potential for action, but I was literally talking about electrochemical spikes occurring in a neuron. When you aggregate lots of neural spiking referred to as action potential, then that aggregates into behavior. I also [call at works] as a metaphor too. Action potential being the potential for action. The reason why a neuron triggering is called an action potential is really just the beginning of neuroscience which is what happens is that the observable phenomenon is that the cell, the neuron would do this thing called depolarize. So you’d have this electric chemical spike that would travel down this long part of the neuron called the axon. So, it basically creates this electric chemical wave and it would trigger down. And the reason why this is called an action potential is that when you see the spike, it actually produces the potential for the organism to perform an action. But the thing that’s funny about the idea of potential is, is that you can also see these things spike and there can be no action. So, it’s a very funny thing that’s happening which is that the triggering of neurons creates the potential for action but it may or may not actually create the action. ARTEMIS: As I'm listening to you talk about this system, I'm imagining this visual picture in my mind where I imagine myself and I'm kind of like a fountain that’s bursting output energy. And I've got a heart component and I've got a gut component and those were like two sensors that are feeding up into my messy neural spinal cord midbrain processes. And then we’ve got this output signal that’s being generated from our fountain, this emergent potential, as you described it. And then all of that energy feeds into this little thin neocortex business card sized layer that puts rationality on top of that. And then we burst out with this expression in the world, is kind of I'm imagining this now. Does that sound about right? MIKO: Yes, that sounds great. ARTEMIS: I'm thinking about the meaning of this idea of lose your mind and come to your senses which in this context then, so if I'm losing my mind and coming to my senses, what would that mean to you? MIKO: Let me characterize it this way, which is one of the things that comes out of the culture of Zen Buddhism in particular is this concept that’s called Small Mind and Big Mind. The idea of Big Mind is really the idea of this sort of, I guess I would characterize it as almost a universal intelligence. And in order for you to access this sort of universal intelligence, you kind of need to surrender your individual intelligence. I realize it sounds a little far out but what I really mean is in the context of something as simple as an investment partnership, the idea that -- it’s sort of like the antidote to the master mind concept, which is instead of the idea that you have an individual who kind of has the correct understanding and whose purpose is to sort of intellectually dominate other people and get the other people to act inside of this other person’s mental model, it’s quite reversed. The idea is more how can you maximally access the intelligence that’s embodied in another person and how can you sort of gain all of the advantage of all of the intelligence that is outside of your brain. Look at it in the most simplistic way possible which is that if you take your brain and all of its capabilities, it’s pretty improbable to assume that your brain and its capabilities exceed the capabilities of every other brain in the world added together. And obviously, when I talk about just human brains, I'm not actually talking about kind of getting career advantages by talking to your dog. [Chuckles] What I am talking about is that the world is observable. It goes beyond tapping into kind of like the intelligences of your colleagues on your work project. It really has to do with tapping into kind of the complete experience of being a person and taking in all of the inputs. I guess I would characterize it this way, which is one of the famous ways of understanding this phenomenon is what happened with August Kekule who was the discoverer of the structure of Benzene. And so, he really was unable to elucidate the structure of Benzene in the laboratory but in thinking really, really hard about the problem, he ended up having a dream of a snake that turned around and bit its own tail. And then afterwards, he woke up to the idea that Benzene was chemically shaped like a ring. And so, this may be apocryphal. This story may not have occurred but I think that just about anyone whose job it is to think up things has had the experience of thinking up things when they wake up or think up things when they're in the shower. And so, the idea of your senses and the role that the senses play is that the senses also provide potentially randomizing input that may also contribute to the convergence of a neural network. I guess what I'm trying to say when I talk about sort of tapping into these bigger things is the role of nature for which we may have kind of an evolutionary tuning, just going to the beach or maybe having the sound and the spray and everything else kind of tune up your senses. And so, I guess what I'm really alluding to is that there may be more sort of holistic ways to tap into individual potential and group potential. ARTEMIS: I'm starting to see what you mean by not knowing anything being a superpower now. The thing that I think about with that space of not knowing is Gestalt philosophy. When we go into this place of surrender or of not knowing, you're troubleshooting a bug and there's some weird error message on your screen, you're like, “WTF! [Inaudible]” When you're in that state of puzzle, we’re forced into this place of surrendering. When we’re not in a place of puzzle of not knowing that rather than making predictions about a thing, we’re sort of like in this kind of background thread mode, like a flashlight that’s diffused across the whole thing that can cause convergence on ideas, on strategies, or things that might help us out. These moments of insight only come when we’re in that place of not knowing. And so, if we can not know across the board, if we can be uncertain about what is before as if we can kick back and orient our center around a heart, I think that’s the power in losing your mind and coming to your senses. It’s going back to those basic instincts. MIKO: That’s right. I think if we’re over-reliant on kind of pure logic and kind of this posture of kind of knowing, because one of the dangers that people who are very intelligent fall into is sort of having an over-reliance on the posture of knowing and being, for example, the one who knows and actually deriving power from knowledge, and therefore, having this kind of position of never wanting to be the person who doesn’t know. And so, I think that in a way the thing that’s really interesting about the way the world is shaking out is kind of the increase in the number of intelligences, sort of non-human intelligences. I'm specifically talking about machine intelligences. Again, not relying on the idea that your dog is going to take your job. [Inaudible] people from other countries take your jobs as Andrew Yang kind of former presidential candidates said very aptly, “The machines are taking the jobs.” The thing that I think is important to kind of conceptualize is how can humans do best what humans do? I think we’re dipping into several kind of key domains in the thinking of Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One where he talks about first of all, what would be logical for humans and machines. His mindset is humans are like one country that’s good at doing A, and machines are like another country that’s good at doing B. So, what we should do is we should set up a trade so that humans can trade what they're good at to machines and the machines can trade what they're good at back to humans, which means that it doesn’t over time necessarily pay for humans to become really at stuff that machines are already good at. Then it becomes more interesting and important for humans to become really exceptionally good at things that humans are good at. For example, I believe at the moment, one of the things that humans have a huge advantage over machines is in the depth to which humans can form relationships with other humans. I think that it’s definitely possible for humans to form relationships with machines, but I don’t think the depth of those relationships is yet comparable. So I think that’s an interesting model. The other thing that I think where Peter Thiel comes into play is he defines investors as people who don’t know. Because the idea is that if you know, then you're going to be the one who does the thing. So, the person who does the thing is the person who knows. And the response to not knowing is diversification. So, if you're diversifying your behaviors and activities, it means that you don’t know. If you knew what to do, you would just go do that exclusively. So, that’s kind of another core principle that sort of arises out of this posture. JESSICA: And once again, we come back to when you don’t know, you have more actions open to you. MIKO: Yes, absolutely. That’s kind of where things like hope come from, which is this idea of potentiality and this idea of degrees of freedom that emerge out of this state of unknowingness. Because I think that the danger that people can fall into is just this idea that everything just works a certain deterministic way. And the thing that’s very interesting about humans is that humans are capable of non-deterministic behaviors and thoughts. And that’s, at least, something that we can point to at the moment and say that’s what we believe to be the case. JESSICA: When we influence each other, we change the likelihood of action. And we influence ourselves with our intention [inaudible], we change the likelihood of our action as opposed to determining them. MIKO: And it brings us all the way back to this notion of marriage, because one of the fascinating things -- there's a guy, Dr. John Gottman, who runs a research lab called The Love Lab. JACOB: That’s where I read it from. Yeah. Keep going. MIKO: Gottman is wonderful. One of the things that he came up with is that his daughter actually came up with a definition of romance. And the definition that he came up with that he was unable to refute, and therefore ended yup adopting, is the idea that the other person might be magic. JACOB: [Laughs] MIKO: That’s basically a definition, right? It’s quite an astonishing definition. And the idea that you can hold that possibility is something that can potentially create something mysterious in the context of relationship, because if you actually look at converse, then the converse is basically this notion that you assume that the other person has no such capability and then you basically are assuming that the other person is essentially a muggle. So, I think if you kind of perform reductionism upon another person, it actually very much potentially limits the potential that you can derive from that person. And the thing that’s very interesting is if you kind of like reduce the person deterministically, then the idea becomes then that you then suddenly think that you know the person and that you kind of are now boxing that person in. Now, the thing that’s interesting is the dynamic of what happens when person A does that to person B. But the question becomes, how does person A kindle within person B this impression of themselves? And then how does person B also hold person A in the same regard and create this kind of biochemical potentiality? That’s something that I think is interesting and kind of maybe a hallmark of successful marriages and potentially successful business partnerships. Because when you think about this notion of romantic, if you kind of define it as this notion of holding the possibility that the other person could be magic -- JESSICA: To put you [inaudible]. Someone who’s going to break the pattern. MIKO: Bingo! Exactly. Very well put. The idea is, “Oh, this person is going to become a magical person,” or is already a magical person. And so, that’s absolutely this -- then there's a biochemistry that comes with that which is that if you kind of -- and obviously, there are limitations. They're always full of limitations. But this is in some ways a place from which to sort of kindle positivity and create extra ordinary potential. By the way, the thing that’s really interesting is combining that with rationality and combining that with evidence, because obviously, you can’t solely rely on this hypothetical concept of magic because the reality is that magic in its truest definitional form doesn’t appear to exist. So to me, the thing that I'm pointing to is not actually non-evidentiary belief systems and real kind of magic spelled with a CK. What I'm really pointing at is I'm pointing at the emergence of kind of extraordinary human potential if people are regarding each other positively. That’s really what I'm alluding to. JESSICA: Could it be the definition of magic is that once you figure out how it works, it’s not magic anymore. MIKO: Yeah, that’s beautiful. JESSICA: Inherently, we can’t find it because as soon as we find it, it’s not magic anymore. And yes, as we talk about several times, people aren’t [inaudible]. And we do surprise each other and that surprise is magic, because it’s everything else that we haven't already predicted. MIKO: Yes, that’s beautifully put. What it is it’s sort of a surprising expansion of the predicted filled space. So you're basically saying, “Well, I predicted this range of outcomes, and suddenly I'm surprised to see a different range of outcomes.” And so, that heretofore could not be explained except by magic. I think Arthur C. Clarke was the one who coined the phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic.” So, it’s very much pointing at what you're describing which is, and it seems what I understand the physical world as being capable of doing. JESSICA: [Inaudible] MIKO: Yeah. Like if you took a time machine and you brought someone from the past into today, and we started using our smart phones, I think most people of significant historical distance would certainly experience that as a magical phenomenon, especially with kind of weird things like video and other kinds of strange capabilities. So yeah, I agree. I'm using the term magic in a way that doesn’t require sort of non-evidentiary belief systems or any kind of voodoo or ghosts or anything like that. ARTEMIS: Because magic is the emergence of extraordinary human potential if people are regarding one another positively. MIKO: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, we all need to be held within a framework of accountability, so it certainly isn’t an unlimited capacity of anyone. But at the same time, I think that’s where we can apply this principle of kind of not knowing that we can potentially apply that towards other people. ARTEMIS: I feel like we’ve all experienced that, though, where you're in a design discussion and you’ve got really good synergy going and really good generativity going, and you experience that magic from the extraordinary human potential that blossoms in the room, that was a surprise, that you weren't expecting. We have experiences, we all have experiences where we felt that magic. MIKO: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve all kind of also had the opposite experiences, both where we’re sort of being regarded deterministically or that we’re regarding others in a more deterministic way that kind of comes out of limitation. And in many cases, we’re sort of not wrong. It is a combination of those two forces in the world. I would characterize it as sort of the limited and the unlimited. ARTEMIS: That’s awesome. We just broke down magic on the show. [Chuckles] So, we’re getting to the end of the show here, and what we usually do is all give our last reflections, takeaways for listeners at the end of the show kind of wrapping up with one final thought. And Miko, you get to go last. MIKO: Sure, sounds good. JESSICA: My favorite part of the show today is this idea that if we think we know something and we have that feeling of certainty which sometimes feels good to know what to do, that leads to despair sometimes. And the opposite of realizing that we don’t know everything is the people around us and the world around us can surprise us and that leads to hope. The feeling of certainty leading to despair and the release of that, of admitting that we really don’t know everything is a source of hope. I find that very encouraging. JACOB: What I just wrote down a minute ago was one thing I considered to be just very important in my life, both personally and professionally, is to feel like I'm known. But when you were talking about being regarded in a deterministic way, that also resonated with me because when people assume they know everything there is to know about me, I don’t like that. I don’t think anyone does, because I think it feels like you're being reduced. And so now, I'm thinking about this discussion we’ve had about magic which is that ideal state is I want to be on a team where we each feel professionally compelled by each other, not personally. Professionally, we want to know each other better and we were drawn professionally to one another to mesh, but that we never feel like we 100% understand each other because we appreciate that journey of getting to know each other even better. That’s my reflection. ARTEMIS: I was scrolling through all my notes here and one thread that we didn’t really touch on too much but seems to connect a lot of these things and since it’s Black History Month, the Bob Marley principle that you mentioned. And since I'm a big Bob Marley fan, I've been sort of thinking about the Bob Marley philosophy and Rastafarianism and how that connects with some of the ideas you’ve been talking about with all of these things. But one of the things I've been thinking about, I mentioned this idea of this visualization of each person being a fountain. And then if I've got all of these different fountains out there, all of these different intelligences outside myself, and here I am, this one I, and here’s all these other I’s in the world, and when you realize all the intelligence that’s out there, how small you are in that network of all the I’s, we’re all made of that same stuff, that same energy that courses through us from our heart, our gut, these fountains with this thin layer credit card thickness of rationality, this façade on top of everything else. And it’s so easy to make all these fast assumptions with that little bit of credit card. But if we can lose our mind and come back to our senses and really see that we’re all part of this fabric of all of the I, and it’s so easy to make those wrong impressions, but we’re not really all that different. MIKO: I appreciate you re-advoking that. What's really interesting about the quote that I was talking about “you can’t fool all the people all the time”, that’s from Get Up Stand Up. In a way the song itself is about standing up for your rights. It’s very interesting because it’s an oppositional theme and it’s one where people are actually trying to hold others accountable. So in a way, it’s kind of a way of connecting with that world of limitation and connecting with the world that’s kind of more deterministic and resistant. But the thing that’s fascinating is that if you're kind of connected to the broader themes of kind of the Rastafarian philosophy, this notion of like we’ve been talking about this concept that they think of like I and I which is the relationship between kind of what in Buddhism has taught of as the Small Mind and the Big Mind. The individual and the universal, the limited and the unlimited, the manifest and the unmanifest. I think that it’s great for you to kind of re-invoke the Bob Marley principle, just to really kind of reconnect us with kind of the larger framework which is that it’s very smart to hold people in this kind of regard. But at the same time, you also have to hold people to account. So, I think all of that’s kind of embedded within that way of looking at the world. ARTEMIS: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Miko, for joining us today. MIKO: It was a lot of fun. ARTEMIS: It’s really great having you. MIKO: Yeah, thanks so much. JESSICA: Miko, if people want to learn more about you or hear more of your thoughts, where can they go? MIKO: Very easy. You can follow me on @mikojava on Twitter. Also, my website is miko.com. And I think those are the best ones.