And so, not as if I would try to translate in modern terms of what is radical sociology.

I didn't send you a, my standard description of it, but just off my head, I would say that it's definitely not a, no, definitely not a value neutral sociology, but a pro sociology running on pro social values and a bit more than pro-social.

It is largely, my whole intellectual orientation is largely inspired by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School that included Adorno, Mark, Marcus, Eric, so what it means to me, what it boils down to, what difference it makes for people.

And the difference that I'm interested to make with my research is liberating the emancipatory potential of AI.

The emancipatory potential is basically enabling what AI can do for the type of social relations of production that is free from wage slavery, free from alienation, free from the repressive division of labor that puts people into command givers and command executors category.

So I think that radical sociology can do a lot for that, particularly nowadays with the help of AI, if we manage to liberate the potential of AI.

It's difficult to find co-conspirators, which is my biggest challenge, because this is an agenda that I cannot carry out by myself.

Can we find common ground enough to be vulnerable and or not be vulnerable, but to be willing to commit?

And and so rather than answer that question, you know, we're dating.

It's like, am I, am I going to get kissed or am I going to get fucked or disappointed?

Excuse my language, but it applies, you know, it's a good metaphor.

I find the prospecting for partners, Because it's not just whether or not the heart is in the right place, there also has to be a match of complimentary competencies that create synergy that goes somewhere.

And if it's like your friend is a painter and you're a painter, but you're really trying to write something, you need a writer rather than a painter.

So I remain, and I'll declare it again, intrigued by the possibility, even though I don't know where this will go, but feel there's something to pay attention to that is worth honoring with just honoring.

And I try and bring my openness and my, my trauma and my hurt, because I think both of these, all of these can inform the wisdom of how to then move forward more skillfully and make new mistakes instead of the old mistakes.

So so so 1 of the things that makes things actionable and makes it cleaner is of course your question about, can you bring money to, to the picture, like attract funds from the institution.

It's hard, particularly for many of us idealists, to really go to the money part or the time part, to really anchor in means of exchange so that we don't get caught in these open loops.

Otherwise we can just be doing, you know, all kinds of random things, but really have a way of kind of saying, we either know why we're willing to accept certain risks and we're gonna do it in the following way, or we're doing this, we sharpen the edges of the unknown so that we're not just lost forever.

We're just lost for a little bit and if we get something juicy, great, and if we don't, we don't.

But I say this because money has been a problem that I've either most successfully, you know, let somebody else do the contracting, I'll deliver the experiences, the courses, and the scouting for the money or opportunities can sometimes be, Well, 1 can, I am still learning to be more and more skillful?

I know how to play that game in the Washington DC area to a degree, which means that prospecting, for example, for government kind of work is something that I tend to know the rules of the game and how to play and how to speak to it.

In selling to communities, usually it has been work that is of service, non-financialized and very satisfying, but not sustainable because It's never revenue, it's not properly monetized.

And so this is 1 of the things that I'm grappling with, like how to make it as easy as possible without being exclusionary, but also without it being unsustainable for those of us involved.

So I think we both have been walking this path long enough that it's like, okay, can we find something that takes care of, as we try to serve the world, that takes care of us as well.

And those that we might invite to the party.

And so I don't know what that is at the moment.

I have some possible thoughts, but I would love to have that conversation about how might this unfold.

And I have some irons in the fire that I've been prospecting.

And there might be opportunities for synergy.

But I find myself particularly the further off we go into the radical and free from expectation.

You know, if we're wanting to talk to capitalists, we have to be careful.

And I'm not saying that we have to talk to capitalists, but often they don't think that we necessarily get it.

If we're little to lead with a heart first.

I think the heart is a neglected part of the compass, you know, it's the compass.

And that we've become so technologically, methodologically precise that we forget that the compass can be telling us you're being very efficient at cutting down, but you're cutting in the wrong direction and you keep going that way.

So incorporating the corrective aspects of adaptation, That biology doesn't, biology is not principle-based.

Biology senses and adapts and senses and adapts.

Always learning, but it is not seduced by culture the way that sometimes us humans can be.

I mean, it's informed, but it works differently.

And then 1 of the things that I have liked about evolutionary leadership, and I've only come to it in recent years, through David, was a claim that I'm still sometimes ambivalent about, but I still find that you have either on 1 side of spiritual, let's call it more like morality.

You have the, the, the selfing, you know, that they're like, just do me better, better individualism, better me, better, you know, and, and that, that let's call that the capitalist model that If I just take care of me and do me as best I know how, then that's the optimal result in the world.

There's a communitarianly minded that it's like, no, no, we attend to the we foremost.

We put the we first And that that is the way to the best results.

Better we, better share principles can be an example of that.

And that the claim that I hear in evolutionary thinking is that it's not 1 or the other path, but that it is both a balancing act between them, and that the way in which 1 plays the balancing act is different if 1 is acting within the group that 1 is in, that the role of the individual is to be better at a bias for self-expression and self-interest within groups, and then when dealing with other groups, a bias for intergrouping and mutualism.

But that it's still not 1 or the other, but always a friction of balancing those more equitably.

I don't know if that's your reasoning, but as someone who was raised first to be in service of, and I would do that inevitably.

And when I moved from Spain to the US and the idea of sufficiency, it seemed very disorienting, but there were strengths and weaknesses and finding the way to kind of balance, taking care of me, taking care of we, and walking that friction properly has been something that has been a learning game for some time.

And I think it's at the heart of the moral tension that we have to invite folks who feel differently from how we may feel, but it's like, how do you do you better by both listening to your compass, but then negotiating the mutualism, like you said, free from exploitation.

And I find that some people like to be exploited.

Some people feel that when they're in service of something, they're happier than when they're taking care of themselves and other people's.

And so there's always this kind of learning journey and you might feel at 20 1 way, and when you get to 30, you change.

And how to keep evolving as you become more and more informed about these things.

So for me, when you said the liberating potential of the emancipatory potential of AI, For 1, I would have said activating rather than liberating, because it can support better negotiation.

But there may still be a negotiation at play, and how to support the visibility.

So that Instead of being without glasses, how do we put glasses on so we can see better and we can co-regulate better?

But there's still always a tension of, am I paying attention to me or the we?

And balancing those as skillfully as possible.

So that's why you didn't use the word sustainable mutualism.

It has to be whatever we feel supports us in being in a mutualistic, sustainable, viable relationship.

Thank you for the word activating is really better than liberating.

Liberating comes from my perspective of social philosophy and activating is more appropriate for practical negotiation around it.

So, by the way, you know, I could be, I'm sorry, I love it.

So the tension that you were talking about, the me and the we, and how to negotiate that tension.

So I'm holding that in a different container.

But with the difference that what makes an egoism radical?

The way I'm using this term is about expanding the radius of the circle of my caring.

In radical egoism I expand the sense of self to include the other.

Whether the other is a person or a group or a movement, I hold the other and me in the context of the larger social field that holds both of us.

And then there is no tension in principle.

of course still room and need for negotiation because it's 1 thing how I hold space for going beyond the illusionary separate self, But that's not necessarily how my partners look at themselves and at the world.

So I wouldn't settle on this high level conceptualization because it all depends on how much I embody it.

And if I'm truly embodying this radical egoism that includes the other, then I don't talk about it at all.

Then I'm just manifesting it through love.

It manifests in the quality of my attention to the needs, particularly developmental needs, of the other person or of the organization that I'm serving.

when I'm truly looking for somebody, then.

Their interest shows up on my screen, this is what I need to pay attention to.

And so this is a practical translation of what love is.

And sometimes there is a need or no tension is there, particularly with individuals and organizations who are vetted to a much narrower world view, a much narrower perspective and value system.

But then again, there is not much chance to collaborate with them anyway.

So let me ask a question to, and I love, you have no idea how much this, well, you may have an idea of how much this is resonating.

1 of the things that I'm struggling with is the thing that has been part of the activation of my own pathway from, let's say, greater narcissism to lesser narcissism, right?

And healing and transformation and becoming a catalyst for others has been the presence of kindness and love when in through breakdowns, there was tenderness and it opened up pathways so that I would go on learning journeys that otherwise I would remain just in a reactive state.

And all of that transformational change has been mostly outside of the realm of what I would call professional action.

Instead, it's been through life learning journeys.

This is why we went and I said the most successful workshop, you know, I was doing it in the community, unfunded, da, da, da, da.

And 1 of the things that, 1 of the tensions is this idea of how to extend these bodies of knowledge, some of which are subjectively grounded or oriented, and how to bring those more skillfully and deliberately into spaces where empirical materialism has been driving everything.

How to not only honor the subjective, but also to attend to the mutualism in a way that is regenerative and mutualistic.

That it's not just what there's an existing business model around, but how do we migrate to other forms of exchange that are sustainable and regenerative and keep us going, right?

And I think this is why the question of how to be skillful about money comes up, not to make it about that, but to find what are the places that we can be...

I'll give you a strange, this is what's coming to mind.

I have been contemplating making suffering the center of the quote unquote business model.

You know, that it is more skillful suffering, more skillful co-regulation of suffering.

And whether it is in personal, in enterprise, in technology enabled endeavors, whatever.

But the co-regulation of, and suffering might not be the right word, but these frictions and tensions, to more skillfully and nimbly co-regulate together.

And the more it is in the province of peers, exchanging mutualism as we're doing on time, with our time right now, you know, it's easy enough.

The moment if we begin to say, okay, we're going to, we're gonna orient this towards, you know, let's say this was a coaching relationship and it's like, okay, you get 1 hour and it's got to be done.

And it puts upon the dynamic, a set of frames and metrics that are no longer the realm of this objective alone, but are also these constraints of measurement driven action in the world.

And there's, there are superpowers that come from empirical materialism and efficiency.

Efficiency is a word that has come about as a result of this measurement driven way of being in the world and liberation, you know, for example, or, or transformation of renewal and regeneration.

These are, these are words that are experiential.

And we can tie metrics to some of what they are.

And there are other parts of it that are not summarized by a symbolic or numeric description.

And So this question of how to be widening the healing of the world to the building of skill, the enlivening of the world.

You know, when part of the repeating trauma is that it should be financialized, it should be monetized, it should be structured in a way that keeps it growing, is something that I grapple with.

Because the path that came to me and opened up my eyes, and that I'm in several different spaces extending in other places was, you know, I had a personal collapse.

You know, I too was tripping on acid and I was smoking pot, I was drinking, you know, and at age, in my mid-20s, basically my way of kind of making it all work kind of broke down because 1 of the ways in which I was making it all work was to anesthetize myself with escapism into drinking and driving and so forth.

And in a moment of vulnerability, it wasn't somebody saying, you fucking drunk, you did it.

They were kind, they opened up, they were like, there's a path forward.

And they were loving, and there was a kind of peer coaching into renewal and transformation that I have been on ever since.

And there's something about the mutualism of this particular community that I'm like, you know, their organizational model, their business model, and their success as a global movement in practicing transformative renewal has been paying it forward to others.

You know, you wake up And then when somebody else comes along, you recognize, oh, I see where you are.

And I can look at you straight in the eye and say, there's hope.

And what is monetized about the process is the spaces where people meet and the, you know, there's a certain amount of supporting the ecosystem that is monetized, but otherwise the interaction between all the individuals is not financialized in any way, shape, or form.

Instead, it's that there has to be meeting rooms where people can meet and things to pay for the books and the materials that people use as they talk about things over time.

So it's a different way of investing, if you will, in the transformational process than the model that we classically think of in capitalized, you know, where you pay a coach or a therapist or this or that or the next.

And so I've been grappling with for some time this question of whether to work on self-organizing groups that heal each other and in a healing experience, they grow into things that then require the monetized dimensions and hope that it becomes a self-organizing movement, the same way that others' movements are kind of.

But it was the experience of mutualism care that grew into a tree.

Or whether to be focused on, no, no, gotta figure out the money parts so that those can then feed the teachers and the writers and the participants that grow this system into.

And, you know, I happen to be privileged in the sense that I have other things that help me keep going, right?

But the, If 1 doesn't have those things, then 1 can't play the healing game to the same degree.

And so it's like trying to figure out how to play a global healing game that has the experience of enlivenment, that, that, that wakes up the participants and, and, you know, that doesn't know what its business model is.

I know I'm going all over the place here, but I think you've been on this path long enough that you know exactly what I'm talking about.

For decades, maybe not for years, but for decades, I mean, in that camp that did the work for the common good, that was rarely paid for.

And when I realized that I want to work for humanity, not as a hobby, but as a full time job, then I need to create the economic foundation for that.

So I started various ventures, sometimes a little bit successful.

The heydays of my success when I had an organization, a transformation company in California, and we made $250, 000 a year.

But then I had a payroll, And more recently, since I returned to Europe, I had a couple of ventures and none of them turned out to be self-sustaining financially.

So now I am also in a fortunate situation that I have a little pension from the US and my wife is working full time and somehow we managed to sustain ourselves.

But that is clearly not sufficient to gather the resources needed beyond the survival, the resources needed for investing in the plan, investing in the project.

So my present strategy is a financial strategy, I mean.

It is based on the principle that those who work for the commons should be replenished by the commons.

And so how to find the ways of that replenishment?

That has been my question over the last couple of years.

And, you know, I was a consultant and, organization transformation, culture transformation.

And sometimes I made a good money, but, I don't, feel inspired to limit my work to work with 1 company at a time.

Not to mention that I don't have the energy anymore to run big consulting projects.

So what I am presently doing, and it's not a solution, but I just described to you what is happening, that I got a mini grant from DAO, you know, DAO's Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

I got a very small grant for supporting to writing the concept paper for my research.

And that concept paper grew into the 4 volume, for the plan, in Man for a 4 volume serialized book.

This is what I mentioned in the end of my article that you read, the machine love.

And so that's certainly not enough to carry out this research.

So my current plan is to find a home for my actual research around those 3 axes that I mentioned earlier.

And what I'm doing for finding that, I've been tracking the few but existing progressive AI-focused research organizations where I have philosophical alignment, values alignment, like the AI Objectives Institute, AOI.

That's where Joel Lehman has been working when he wrote the machine love research paper.

So that's 1 and there are 2, 3 others that I plan to approach at the right time.

And also there are a couple of AI startup companies that are ethically, morally grounded, not only for the sake of publicity, but authentically.

And so they need, in their team, they need a sociologist.

And my preference would be to work with the AI Objectives Institute or similar progressive AI research groups because what the company would want from a sociologist is very much product focus, particularly in the startup phase.

And the scope of my work is broader than that.

And a group like AOI has a broad enough mandate to embrace it.

But it's very important to choose the right time when to approach them.

And that is when I have a story, a narrative, sufficiently convincing, backed up with some prototyping, like a minimum loadable product.

And particularly because I don't have a PhD, so for me to approach a research organization, I have to show up twice as hard proofs that I have a viable, important research project.

And because I know that I cannot carry all this research by myself, So I have to think also of my co-conspirators and their financial needs.

Because as I said earlier, everybody who works for the commons should be repunished by it.

Technology should work without any compensation.

I also have a social enterprise that's a legal entity that presently don't have any other activity, just a holding space for my research.

And 1 more thing, To get to the stage with my minimum lovable project, where I would feel confident that it's time to approach a like-minded, like-hearted organization.

If I find colleagues working with me to get to that stage where we can present something, then it would take less time.

And so after you looked up the rest of my email and reflect on our conversation, where would you want to go with this?

If you would want to further explore possibilities for collaboration, I would need to know more about your passion.

Where you want to go with your work, because 1 thing that we didn't go further, when we talk When we talk about the interpersonal tension or the lack of it, how to reduce the tension reduce the tension is something that you referred to earlier in the conversation about the complementary capabilities.

So what I see as the foundation for any truly synergistic collaboration is the commonality of the vision and complementary capabilities.

So intuitively, I would think that we have at least a certain degree of commonality of our vision.

What we need to figure out is the complementary capabilities and needs.

Not right now because we are running out of time.

I did want to at least respond to that if you, and mention a couple of different possible organizations slash leads and or potential areas of possible.

Obviously, and the only way for things to arise further is to keep on co-prospecting, but I wanted to at least plant the seed and then we can go from there.

Do you have a couple more minutes or shall we?

I have something at the top of the next hour and because I'm running behind from having it away a week, I do, I'm a little compressed, but I do have some wiggle room and do feel that I would like to take this as far possible as possible without just move the needle in and demystify as much as possible.

I was copying both of those words as you were saying them into the chat, but then I also put in some possible allies, possibly for you, possibly for us, but I want to put them in there so that they're in the chat.

I suspect we may be just as well off by coming back to this end part of the conversation that that might be what I'll clip and send you.

I mean, if you want the whole file, fine, but because it's video and because some of it is just us going back and forth in 20 ways a Sunday, it might be that the next steps, key takeaways is what matters most rather than, you know, to listen to the whole thing again.

So I'll make sure that this final chunk is certainly, you know, the last 10 minutes you talked and possibly what's here to follow.

If you're okay with that, if you want the whole thing, I'll send the whole thing.

But it just makes for large, ungainly files.

And it's like the artificial intelligence editors of these are still getting better.

Otter.ai has an okay 1, but they're still not up to speed.

Anyway, so the first thing that I tried was what I heard you kind of alluding to.

I think there's more to it, but you're looking for progressive AI groups to advance the learning edges of pro-social enablement.

AI is kind of the, it might be the fashion of the day.

And so if that's where the money is flowing and what I haven't indicated is a significant activator, but it can cut both ways.

But it is 1 of the areas where we have overlap.

And the idea of the narrative that will get somebody to fund is an interesting question because every different funder has their own thing that they're willing to buy or not buy.

And so it's half the time, it's as much about who's making the offer as what it is that they're saying.

And for those of us who spend a lot of time, if we just get the perfect pitch, then they're going to come for us.

It's a, it's been a source of seemingly productive energy that turns out not to yield the fruit.

So a couple of groups that I'm involved in that might be of interest.

And oh, I do want to ask you a question before I delve into this.

The person who connected us showed up in a group that I, you know, basically consensual tech.

This is somebody who was convening a consensual tech group that, you know, I didn't know this individual, but they said about, you know, they were very concerned about open, on the text out of the house, concerned about all kinds of things and they were convening a group.

And I showed up, Peter showed up, and we both pretty much spent most of the time listening, but at the end of the meeting, Peter said some things.

And we started to have some very fruitful conversations since.

But I don't really know Peter's world that well.

But I like Peter and I was like, you know, and I hit it off with Peter.

And so this is why I'm kind of, you know, opening in this space.

And so it'd be helpful to me to understand how do you know Beter and what is that world?

Because I thought 1 of the things about that world was the co-creation of consciousness.

So, you know, that there were areas of overlap and that you might know more of the space than I do, and just trying to sharpen our shared visibility.

So let's start there and then I'll jump to some projects and activities that I'm aware of that might be.

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Mchael Lennon - George Pór, 31-July-2023