Interview: Charles Hugh Smith - Spring 2025
Beyond The Myth of Progress: Resilience, Technology, and Incremental Experimentation
Talking with repeat guest, author and local Hawaii resident Charles Hugh Smith on the importance of living in the real world, insights from the scientific process, experimentation for incremental change, building your own utility, self reliance, behavioral modification, questioning the mythology of progress, anti-progress, technology worship, the value of something, economic externalities, Aina, AI and AI Gods, Digital Ice Nice, social change, social engineering, collective value systems, and strategies for staying sane in a digital world…
Excerpts
On the Dao
“ Try to live in the real world as much as possible because then you're more likely to avoid the derangement. And again, a back to basics is my approach. Question everything that you're doing your behaviors. Are they benefiting you or not? And if they're not benefiting you, then how can you modify them? Incremental is the way to go. To use the Daoist phrase: The journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step. Everything we do to improve our lives is incremental. It's possible to revolutionize your life. And if that opportunity exists and for sure, go for it. But for most of us, incremental is how we change.
On incentives
Accepting that we can change a lot by our behaviors, what we think of as priorities and incentives. That's how we change. We don't necessarily need a new life, per se. We just need to change our behaviors and what we value.”
On Technology Worship: Anti Progress
“ And I think the problem is not technology per se. It's our worship. In other words we're like blindly obedient to it. And in other words to the idea in the mythology of progress.”
On Accepting Limits
“ Because there are limits and to claim there that you have limitless power is to set yourself up for the fall…. it's actually a psychological failing as well. You don't have to believe in karma or religion. If you aspire or claim godlike powers, then you're setting yourself up for self destruction just psychologically because it's disconnected from reality”
“ I tend to see things more as organic - that these systems are complicated.There's a lot of dynamics. We're not really in a position to control as much as we think is, my view and that, it's better to let people make their own decisions. And if it's if it stops working for them, then they're gonna open their mind and be willing to try something else.”
Links
Follow Charles Hugh Smith @ oftwominds.com
On Twitter @@chsm1th
On Substack @ charleshughsmith.substack.com/
Interview Time Stamps
02:18 Exploring Solar Energy: Projects and Experiments
Charles shares his experiences with solar energy projects, discussing the economic challenges of solar power at small scales and the importance of self-reliance, focusing on reducing dependence on fragile global supply chains.
10:04 Behavioral Changes for Energy Efficiency
Charles details his efforts of behavioral changes rather than technology.
23:56 The Value of Experimentation
The importance of experimentation as a tool for understanding and adapting to change, whether in personal resilience, self-employment, or daily consumption
29:13 Questioning the Mythology of Progress
Challenges to the conventional view that technological advancements and economic growth always equal progress. Progress can sometimes be anti-progress when it degrades quality of life or damages the planet.
33:36 Objective Analysis of Progress and Anti-Progress
To break free from blind faith in progress. Advocating for objective assessment of technological and economic developments, considering both benefits and negative consequences rather than uncritically accepting advancements.
36:14 Technology Worship and Its Consequences
Technology is often worshiped as an unstoppable force, arguing that society needs to question its trajectory rather than passively accepting every technological development as progress.
43:35 AI and the Mythology of Progress
Charles discusses how AI fits into the broader mythology of progress, highlighting the misplaced belief that AI advancements are inherently beneficial. He critiques the economic incentives driving AI development and the illusion of intelligence in machine learning models.
47:28 The Limits of AI and Human Intelligence
Limitations of AI, particularly its inability to truly understand or possess human-like intelligence. The misconception that intelligence is purely rational, emphasizing the role of emotions in human cognition.
50:27 A New Mythology for the 21st Century
Humanity needs a new guiding mythology that acknowledges limits rather than blindly embracing technological expansion. Shifting status away from excessive consumption and toward sustainable, meaningful contributions to society.
01:03:21 Social Change and the Role of Technology
How social change happens organically with contrasts to top-down efforts to engineer social change.
01:08:42 Staying Sane in a Digital World
In closing, Charles advises treating the digital world cautiously—like plutonium—while prioritizing real-world experiences and behavioral changes. He stresses the importance of small, incremental steps toward resilience and personal well-being.
Interview Transcript
(I recommend listening to the conversation as the medium is the message - but for those visual learners here is a transcript. Apologies in advance for minor transcription errors and inaccuracies.)
Interview: Teaser
Charles: Try to live in the real world as much as possible because then you're more likely to avoid the derangement. And again, a back to basics is my approach. Question everything that you're doing your behaviors. Are they benefiting you or not? And if they're not benefiting you, then how can you modify them? Incremental is the way to go. To use the Daoist phrase. The journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step. Everything we do to improve our lives is incremental. It's possible to revolutionize your life. And if that opportunity exists and for sure, go for it. But for most of us, incremental is how we change.
Accepting that we can change a lot by our behaviors, what we think of as priorities and incentives. That's how we change. We don't necessarily need a new life, per se. We just need to change our behaviors and what we value
Leafbox: hey, Charles, how's it going? Good morning.
Charles: Good morning. So thank you for the invitation.
Leafbox: No, Charles, I always like talking to you. Thank you so much for making the time. It's always great. And it's good to have someone here in Hawaii with us and a different perspective on things maybe.
Charles: As always, like I said I'm always it's hard to surprise somebody as old as myself, especially in the digital world where, we've been living for decades, but you always surprise me with your guests your guest list.
And that's refreshing because, how often are we surprised by much, I'm not very surprised very often. Are you,
Leafbox: I don't know. I think having a daughter surprises me every day. I try to keep that beginner spirit and try to keep open to strange and liminal things. So I try to be surprised.
I think that's part of living.
Charles: Yeah, I think the real world is full of surprises. The digital world is what I was referring to. There's, that's more repetitive, and less surprising, but speaking of surprising, I think it's going to be really good that you can that you can introduce.
These topics of the esoterica, if you will of AI and it's it's mythology or quasi religious manifestations. I think that's a very interesting topic.
Exploring Solar Energy: Projects and Experiments
Leafbox: Yeah, I think I want to go there in a little bit, but maybe we can start I wanted to thank you for correcting me on, I think your experiments recently with solar energy and your blog posts about that. Every time I do solar analysis, it always doesn't make sense economically.
At least at my level scale, but you broke it down with such a great comment saying the value of a kilowatt depends on the production, the scarcity of that kilowatt energy, if there's a collapse scenario, or if the power grid goes down, and I always underestimate that value, I think, and I think I just wanted to thank you.
Maybe we can talk about your experiments and energy and how's that going? How's your solar projects going? Your other you really got me exploring like building a Lanai solar system and a backup battery grid system. So I want to thank you for that. So maybe we can talk about that first and maybe positive technology that's affecting you in your life.
Charles: Okay.
Leafbox: So maybe you can summarize what you've done with your, I think 400 watt and how did you get about building it and how, what resources did you use to make it, what were your discoveries? I think.
Charles: Okay. So the topic here is.
Self-Reliance and Utility Independence
Charles: Creating our own utility, if you will, and we, we rely on several utilities.
One is the water the other is electricity, and of course, the third is the internet. And there are options to own your own network or your own utility. And the question is on what scale? And of course, If you're completely off grid, like in remote areas of Hawaii, then you have to have water catchment because there's no city or county water service.
And then you have to have whatever electricity you have to generate it yourself. And your internet might well be Starlink, a satellite connection because there's no wired service to your residence. That's one extreme. The other extreme is having no backup in any way, shape, or form, right?
What my idea was I talk a lot about self reliance, and this is different than complete independence from industrial society, right? It's a scheme or a mindset of simply reducing. Our vulnerability to the vulnerabilities that are built into the global supply chain and these large systems that we all rely on, which I've tried to explain by their very nature are fragile because they've been stripped out of resilience, redundancy is costly.
So we've gotten rid of that. You have spare parts. That's it. Those are costly to store. So we've gotten rid of those. And so we have this sort of just in time mentality. To reduce costs and then that makes these huge systems vulnerable more so than what people think or understand. So therefore, what can we do with that's within the range of a normal household, right?
What can we do with a little bit of time and money or a reasonable amount of time and money? So for me, I thought I often speak about self reliance. And so here I am with nothing. I don't think that's a reflects very well on my manifesting my values, right? So I installed a water tank because I live in a suburban or here in town, in Hilo, I have enough land that I can have a tank.
Now, of course, if you're in a condo or a high rise building, you can't have a water tank, but you could maybe store 20 gallons instead of 2 gallons. And that 20 gallons would last you a lot longer than two gallons. So it's that kind of thinking. It's incremental. And then, in terms of the electrical system, I have friends here on the Big Island who live fairly remotely and their power goes out very often.
And so therefore they have electrical backup systems and depending on how big a battery you want to replace to cover your entire household consumption for several days. You're going to be spending a lot of money. So say a Tesla Wall battery that people buy as part of their solar rooftop system.
They're like 7, 500 plus an equivalent amount of installation. So we're talking about 14, 000 for a 7, 500 watt battery, which on a regular full household only lasts maybe 10 to 12 hours. If you're using AC and a lot of other energy high energy appliances. I wanted something that would just cover my internet and lights.
That's the minimum, right? Okay, if we had a storm or a hurricane, and we had no power for a week, what would it take for me to have internet and lights? And never mind, water, we can heat that up. With our propane stove. And so that's my thinking. And so I went with a 400 watt adjustable system, meaning that they're portable panels.
You can open them up like a suitcase and then set them up and then you can take them down or you can take them camping or whatever. And that's the benefit of these kind of portable as opposed to a permanent installation. And then my battery, I bought a 1500 watt battery. Now the total cost of the four panels which retail for about 200 bucks each and then the battery I got on sale, it was normally 1500.
I bought it for 1250 So around 2100 for everything cables batteries and the panels We've you and I have discussed Like what is the payoff for having your own utility? In other words, how much money are you saving per month at given the initial capital investment and as you've pointed out it doesn't, it rarely works out.
It rarely pencils out unless there's some sort of government subsidy or something like that, some tax break or whatever. And so then that leads to the question of what is the value that's beyond it. The sort of normal reduction of my monthly cost and of course, the value there is hard to assign because it's only when things break down and the public utility is not available that then the value of having a backup suddenly rises.
And then it becomes how much would you pay for 100 kilowatts. When you don't have any at all. And so that it's like anything else when there's an emergency. How much is a gallon of water worth a gallon of water is worth virtually nothing. If you're buying it from the utility, but when you only have two gallons on hand and there's no power or water for a week or two, then of course you're going to be valuing water at a much higher rate.
So that's the kind of nexus of understanding that I approached it with. So I thought that it was worth 2, 100 to have my own utility. That would cover lights and and the internet and cell phone charging. That's, that seemed to me to trade off was worth it.
Leafbox: What's interesting though, is then you experimented further and I'm curious about that as well your reduction.
Charles: That's right. My if you look at the national statistics the mainland states use a lot more electricity than we do because they, a lot of them use electricity for heating in the long winter, or they use air conditioning in the very hot, long summers.
The Hawaii is statistically uses the least power per household, or per capita. But nonetheless, we still use quite a bit.
Behavioral Changes for Energy Efficiency
Charles: And so my goal was, I thought, okay, what can I do behaviorally? In other words, no technology, no buying of any equipment, just behavior. What can I do in conjunction with my 400 watt power generation?
How much can I drop my bill? And just as a, as an experiment to say, why am I wasting precious, power, electricity, if I don't have to? It just has to lower my footprint on the planet as well as lower my own cost. So it was an experiment. How low can I go without any reduction in comfort or convenience?
In other words, I have everything that any other household has. I have an electric hot water heater. I have internet. We have four laptops, et cetera, et cetera, a big refrigerator with a With ice making capacity and so on. So that's the question is what can we do individually and then of course globally to maintain the all the comforts and conveniences we have now but simply reduce our consumption of energy by say 20 percent or something meaningful.
So my goal was to drop my daily kilowatt usage down below 5. So less than 5 kilowatts per day. Of total consumption. Now, I don't use AC. I don't, we don't have any need for that. That's out and I do use power tools which are very energy. They suck a lot of power, like a skill saw that I use draws 13 amps, but that's a lot of power.
So I am using power that other people don't perhaps. Anyways I succeeded in dropping our energy consumption. By about 23 percent or so. And I got, I did, we did in fact get our consumption under five kilowatts a day and it's closer to say four and a half. And so our bill dropped 13 percent because the way that the utility of Hawaiian Electric figures out your bill, a lot of, it's not just a it's not a one to one ratio with your kilowatt consumption.
There's a lot of other charges. And base loads and so on and so forth. So it's we weren't able to drop the the cost by 23%, but it's still dropped by say, 15%. And about, I'd say about 10 percent of my power is generated by these panels. Now, the maximum output is 400 watts, but the maximum I've ever seen is 375 or 380, and generally, it's more like 250.
As most of us know, you're not going to get it. The full max rating on any solar panel. And if clouds cover the sun and there's no shadow, then it drops to like, say 10%, you're getting 45 or 50 Watts of power instead of 400. So it's interesting. The other thing we did that was the big behavioral changes.
We just turned the water heater off after for after an hour, like once the water is heated up to where we can take our shower or bath and do the dishes and then the water stays hot for the rest of the next day. It's not blistering hot, but it's warm enough for whatever you'd want to do, wash clothes or dishes.
So the water here is on for an hour. And so that cut consumption too. So I think I would end by just saying the idea here is that we're, I think we're in this mindset globally, where if we're, if waste is cut, then we make that equivalent in our minds with some sort of sacrifice, some sort of reduction in comfort and convenience.
Thank you. But I'm experimenting with the idea that how much can we cut from our energy consumption or consumption of all goods and services, but still maintain all the comforts and conveniences that we had when we were wasting resources.
Leafbox: No, it's very interesting. Even for a, like a business owner like myself, just saving all these small, they all add up as a Kaizen Toyota model.
You just keep cutting away and you can really still keep the same standard, but save and improve your profit version. And at the household level without cutting your comfort, you can hopefully save those, the money you're saving and eventually will pay for the capital investment in your solar system and whatnot.
Charles: Yeah. And there's a, there's another kind of odd benefit. Now, again, I'm on the Big Island of Hawaii. And so the, we do have electrical outages, perhaps more commonly than people in urban areas. I can't say that statistically we, I'm running my modem and router and the laptops all on my battery and solar panels.
In other words, this completely disconnected from the electrical grid and what that means is when the power goes out for a second or two, that's enough to throw off your modem and router, right? They go haywire and they don't work anymore. And everybody knows that. And so this way I have an absolutely rock solid source of electricity for my internet and electronics, because they're connected only to the battery. There, there is no connection to the grid. Therefore I don't have any outages in my internet anymore, and and it's more reliable in terms of power surges and things that can fry your electronics. There is no power surge with the battery.
And the modern batteries it's not just a dead, dumb battery. It has an inverter. So it converts, the direct current from the solar panel into, when 10 alternating current for any regular appliance, you want to plug in there and it's highly reliable in terms of its voltage and so on.
I actually feel like it's, I'm actually benefiting. From disconnecting from the grid in terms of my electronics.
Leafbox: The funny thing is that it is ironic because you're so against some of your writing seems to be against, AI progress and technology progress. And the first thing he says getting off grid a little bit helps me keep connected to the grid and keep connected to the AI super intelligence.
And it's just ironic in that sense, right? It's so powerful. They pull towards the information space that, it's funny, right? There's a little bit of irony there, right?
Charles: Yeah, and I think we could extend it to clean water and and electricity. In other words, these were things that were scarce or not available, in the pre industrial age.
And if you're if you don't have water that's been cleaned industrially on a vast scale by the utility, then which is common here in, in the Big Island, then you have to learn about purification of water. And so there's quite a bit to know about that. And you have to spend money and invest capital in a purification system, or you have to boil your water if you're going to drink it and so on.
And the same is true of electricity, something that was not available. And so in this, I think, in a way the information. Or the Internet is like a utility and we would, we miss it in the same way as we miss not having water and electricity because it's become almost equivalent. It's not in terms of us staying alive.
Without water, we die in, in terms of running a business or functioning in the industrial society, then as we all know, as old people start dropping technology because it's too confusing for them or it's overwhelming then they actually are no longer, able to function in the society as it is in other words If you don't have a smartphone, you can't do online banking and a ton of other stuff.
That's convenient if you especially if you're running a business, so you're right. There is an irony there. But I think in the context of a utility that we have come to depend on or the systems that we interact with depend on it, then we depend
Leafbox: My last question on like resilience and homesteading what not. Have you looked into methane production. You have all those plants and the compost. There's home internal compostable systems that generate methane. I just wonder if you've looked into those. They're bags that produce propane basically or methane gas you could really start, gasifying your own compost.
Charles: That is an interesting technology I'm, I'll have to research that in terms of the scale, because we do have. A little over half an acre, but I don't know if I generate enough compost it because yeah, I'm not sure the ratio per kilo of green compost how much methane can you extract from that, but it's a, it's an interesting idea to use what you already have.
Yes. That's a powerful idea.
I only bring it up because I have a friend in Kauai who they're a ceramicist and we were looking at other ceramicist studios and because propane is so expensive in Hawaii, they've all been using biofuels and they've basically hacked all these they can basically pulverize and gasify canola oil, use canola oil and cooking gas to fuel their firings for their kilns, and that's much cheaper for them than doing propane.
See, this is brilliant. That, that that's an excellent use of what's already being thrown away. In other words, again, it's the idea that we waste with, without any consciousness. That we're wasting. We think it's just the status quo. It's normal. And we don't so part of the process of what we're discussing here is becoming aware of waste that we take for granted and so all that cooking oil that's thrown out can become either biodiesel or be burned as you're saying.
I want to mention one, one thing about cost because, of course, all these ideas take money. And so it's a question of how much. And so a standard rooftop photovoltaic system in Hawaii runs between 25, 000 for a small system to 30, 35, 000 for a larger system. Which, because we waste a lot of electricity, we think we need a huge system.
That's what everybody tells you, and it's over engineered. And then if you want a battery, then you've got to add somewhere between 7, 500 and 15, 000 for the battery. So it's, it becomes really expensive. Certainly equivalent to a brand new car. Where my idea is I'm going to probably add a battery later.
Another battery, because frankly, on a sunny day, I can easily charge another battery. My battery is already 100 percent by 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock in the morning, and I could easily charge another battery and then I could run my refrigerator off that battery and then it would be like what do I need if the power went out for a week?
If I have a refrigerator, internet and lights and cell phones, I would only be losing the water heater and, It's not that hard to heat a little water and take a, a minimal bath or sponge bath. So I would, I think my goal is to get to the point where I can live for 2 weeks with no utilities and I'd be fine.
I would not have any. Any reduction in comfort and convenience. And that would that's going to take a few more thousand dollars, but I'm thinking if I can design a system that does everything I need in that basic sense, run a fridge and internet cell phone and lights, then, and I can get that for maybe five or 6000.
That's a fraction of the rooftop system, right? Because I'm able to live on it. Three or four kilowatts a day. And so therefore,
Leafbox: have you looked into energy efficient fridges? I think there's company from South California, sun fridges, and they're like ultra low wattage they can run on a 12 volt battery.
They're for boats. Basically,
Charles: I have looked at that and it turns and you can go to the energy saver. Yeah the department of energy has a website where it rates all your, all these appliances for the energy efficiency. And even if you don't want to buy that, that it's rather expensive, super low consumption, but Fridge, even a standard 10 cubic foot, I a medium size or small fridge, but not the tiny under the desk kind that the two and a half or three foot.
No, but a 10 foot draws no more power than the under the cabinet one, the little two and a half cubic foot fridges that people have. They draw about 300 watts which is the same as this, an energy efficient 10 cubic foot. So I have thought about that because a standard issue 10 cubic foot fridge that's highly efficient is still like 250.
In terms of, I like your thinking though because, in other words, if you can buy an appliance that uses half the electricity. Then that's the same as buying more solar panels to double your capacity to generate electricity, and it's a lot cheaper to buy an appliance than it is to buy a solar panel.
So I like your thinking and that's a very important one. And I did. And I think that is something that I was thinking of is, you can buy a very efficient mass produced fridge for less than 300.
Leafbox: The reason I wanted to focus on these like home experiments is because I think they tie into your I think you have an essay called like the 20 dynamics for the next decade.
And I think these individual experiments kind of line up with what you think. Where society is going. So maybe you can expand on that and how building resilience and some of your, the illusion of progress and some of their concepts from that essay.
The Value of Experimentation
Charles: Thank you for introducing this idea, Robert, because I think there's several really powerful themes here.
One is experimentation in and of itself that this is the scientific method at its core and people, there's a lot of debate about the word science. And so science is invoked like the equivalent of God's will or something. As if we have to agree on that because science says X, Y, Z.
And of course, science is not like that per se. Science is an evolving system of understanding and the way that we reach, we quote do science is we set up an experiment where we can isolate the results. Okay. And so this is hard because, that's why experiments on diet and lifestyle are so difficult is because There's so many different variables in, in, involved, but with something like a solar panel and a battery, like I'm experimenting with the inputs are very controllable.
I have the panels generating some electricity. I have a battery that stores it. And then the battery tells me what the usage is. And so I can then track everything and therefore I can collect data. And then I can see if I modify the experiment, then I can see. The results and so most of us don't think of life as being an experiment, but it really is right we're constantly experimenting with things and so What i'm suggesting is I see the value in formalizing that and in other words You actually start trying to track your electrical consumption or your food consumption how much food you waste how much you consume Etc, etc.
And so you can do this in terms of enterprise, business being self employed, we're always if you're self employed, you're constantly experimenting, whether you're fully conscious of it or not, right? Because the economy is dynamic and we have to adapt constantly, or we're going to suffer the consequences of being left behind or our income will drop or so on.
So the, I'm very keen on like the essentials of life. In other words, that's water food. And let's say electricity. Okay. And so I, I also cut my, our water consumption is like a third of standard household. Now, there's only 2 of us. Of course, other households might be larger, but we use a fraction of what other people use because we used to live on catchment.
We're aware of water usage. So we don't take, super long showers and we don't we take waste water from doing dishes and dump it on the plants and, that kind of thing. Again, it's all behavioral and I think that's what's really powerful here is we always are told because it's profitable for somebody.
To that we need some new technology, but actually a lot of this kind of experimentation is just behavioral. And I do the same thing with growing food and my as you're, I'm lucky that you've actually visited my yard and it looks like any other, city lot. It's not a farm or anything.
It just looks like you drive by and it's a. An old house and on a pretty big lot. That's all but actually, there's a rather large scale food production going on here because I give away like hundreds of pounds of food a year, not 5 pounds or 2 pounds or 7 pounds, 500 pounds, 600 pounds, hundreds of pounds of food and bananas, lychee, breadfruit and so on.
I'm experimenting with how much food I can grow with the least amount of effort. That's another kind of running experiment on the same idea. I think it's just a such a interesting contrast to what you described, the dictative Model of the machine gearing, right? Maybe you can contrast that to the larger societal system that we're in your own experiments against that.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting topic because we assume because we're constantly assured that the systems that we depend on these global or very large systems are super efficient and super productive. In actual fact that, that's not always the case and and so again it's a matter of experimentation or really doing some research to figure out what are you getting that you're told is valuable and efficient, efficiently produced, and maybe it isn't and food is a good example because, as we all know from headlines where Americans consume like 2 3rds of their calories is highly processed food, which is very unhealthy in ways that we don't really fully understand.
There's a lot of debate and research going into why is highly processed foods so destructive to our health, but it's been sold as convenient and comfort food and so on. And so it's okay, it's cheap. Is it valuable? And so I think that's the question here on the larger sense is just because something has a low cost.
Does it mean it's a good value, or is that cost deceptive because the value is actually negative. To us.
Questioning the Mythology of Progress
Charles: So maybe this ties into your latest book. I've only read the first chapter at the Mythology of Progress. Maybe you can summarize that book and how you think this ties into where this mythology comes from and how these false beliefs maybe dissuade us.
Thanks for taking a look at the book and it's a book that is not as practical as my other books, which tend to be like practical guides. This book is an attempt to understand where we've, how we've equated progress with consuming more, what we call growth, and with technology. In other words, progress has become equated with technology.
With these highly narrow fields, technology is always progress and growth is always progress. And the point of my book was to explore the idea that in fact, growth and technology sometimes are anti progress. They actually are degrading our quality of life or degrading the planet with no equivalent payoff.
And and yet we're extremely attached to this idea that technology is always progress and growth is always progress. And when you question that people respond. Typically quite often with high emotion that they feel offended and indignant that you would question technology is always progress or growth is progress.
And then they get very flustered. And then they say what about antibiotics? Are you saying, they quickly go on the attack and say that, we're all Luddites. If you question technology or growth as automatically progress, then you're some sort of Luddite who wants to go back to living in dirt huts and scratching out a living as a caveman or something.
And of course, that's not the point at all. And I think the my theory or proposal is that mythology, we think we're above it. In the modern era, we have a kind of hubris that we're so advanced. But of course, we all know that we're still running the same software, if you will, wet where we have the same brain.
And emotional states as humans did roughly 200, 000 years ago, certainly within say, 80, 000 years. So we're we've been drawn to mythology from the emergence as a species, right? We, we are drawn to mythologies and we create mythologies whether we are aware of it or not. And what a mythology does is it encapsulates some things.
It takes complicated, complex things and reduces them down to simple ideas and statements that then we can grasp easily. And of course this is part of what intelligence is, right? We look at these complex systems like nature, and then we simplify it down into okay, seasons and so on and to make sense of a, of things.
And so mythologies do that. So the modern mythology is progress equals technology and growth. And so we've simplified a very complicated industrial process and capitalism and these global changes. That have been enormous and we simplify it down to this idea, and so that's a mythology.
And but to recognize that it's just a construct a social construct that means we have to step back and look at it and go. No, you're telling I'm talking about science. That's what people will say. The science is technology is progress. It's obvious, right? Antibiotics, automobiles, air jet airplanes, it's all technology.
That's all progress. And, to get to step back and say it's a mythology takes a leap that it's difficult.
Leafbox: So how do you recommend people step, and to see it as mythology? What are your solutions to see it as that?
Charles: I my attempt in the book was just to say, okay, let's look at each one of these advances and then let's do an objective study of it like a rationalist objective study and and then you, then we start seeing that there's a downside to all these miracles.
And I guess my basic approach is to say let's just set aside our emotions, if possible.
Objective Analysis of Progress and Anti-Progress
Charles: Let's try to be objective. And let's look for anti progress as well as progress, because that's the mythology is no longer, we erase anti progress, we gloss over anything that's detrimental or any downsides.
We dismiss all that and focus solely on the good stuff.
The Green Revolution: Miracle or Misstep?
Charles: And so say with the Green Revolution, a lot of people hold up the use of chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds as like a miracle that allowed the planet to support 8 billion people instead of 2 billion. And this is glorious. It's, and it's all technology, right?
It's not a behavioral thing that somebody changed the way they farm. They just bought the seeds and they use chemical fertilizers. It's just, it's products, right? Not behavior. Then of course, then we discovered that these the foods that are grown are deficient in micronutrients because the technology of these hybridized seeds is.
It uses the energy from the fertilizer to grow very quickly and generate a huge seed or whatever we're going to harvest. But in doing so it sped up the process and made like a huge kernel of wheat, but it doesn't have the same nutrients as the old version, the traditional.
And and these things also strip out all the nutrients of the soil, so the soil gets depleted. And as many people are finding out, micronutrients are a really important part of health. And just slamming soil with three chemical fertilizers, which is the standard protocol and a hybrid seed that grows really quickly and produces a lot of yield, but is deficient nutritionally, that's anti progress.
And so a lot of the health problems that we're experiencing globally are related in some fashion to the downside of the Green Revolution.
Leafbox: No, I think it's interesting. I want to tie it into your, my first thought is like when I first read it is, Uncle Ted or Ted Kavinsky, right? How do you differentiate your kind of thinking from more of an extremist position like his?
Have you read his critiques?
Charles: Not word for word, but I I'm familiar with them and I guess I'm more of a again. Attempting to just look at things as experimentally and more like from a scientific point of view that what we're trying to do is balance the benefits and the costs are the downsides.
Technology Worship and Its Consequences
Charles: And I think the problem is not technology per se. It's our worship. In other words we're like blindly obedient to it. And in other words, the idea in the mythology of progress is technology is going to do whatever it's going to do, and we should stand aside. It's going to go where it's going to go, and it's going to drag us along wherever it goes.
And if you try to stop that, then you're stopping progress. And I think that idea is what we need to back away from. The idea that we're, that if you question technology, or you try to limit it. Or guide it, then you're going to ruin the whole thing. It's got to run free. And and of course, if you're a technologist and you're making billions of dollars off of some new technology, you're going to support this part of the mythology, because you want everyone to stand aside and let you dominate the market and create a monopoly or cartel.
And then you would then claim oh, this is just a technology going where it's going. And I just happened to end up with a monopoly on it. And, of course, that's not actually what happened.
Leafbox: Charles, being in Hawaii, I think just you get more connected to the aina, to the land. And it seems almost like more of a Hawaiian philosophy of being stewards of space and land.
And you have to choose a technology and really be conscious of whether or not it improves our lives or society, right? That's what you're arguing for.
Charles: I think you're right, and that the island mentality is an important positive factor, and, of course we can look at planet Earth as an island, right?
But and people do.
Environmental Impact of Industrialization
Charles: It's harder to grasp, and that's part of that's part of what I'm trying to highlight in the book is when industrialization, the so called first industrial revolution occurred in the 19th century, right? The scale of industrial production was relatively modest, right? And so the the air and the water around these original factories was, of course, heavily polluted, but they were rather small in scale.
And so at that time, people could look at the oceans or the atmosphere, the air. And the rivers and they can say we can just dump all the waste in there. These things are like basically infinite. But now that we're at a planetary scale of industrial production, then we are like polluting the entire planet because the scale is just so much larger than it was in the 19th century.
And yet we still have this mindset that we should be able to just don't stuff and it should just disappear and not bother us. And those are called externalities in economics. In other words, these are external costs that we don't include in the price of the product.
Economic Externalities and Recycling Challenges
Charles: So one of the examples I use in the book is the great Pacific trash gyre, which is a huge kind of slowly circulating island of mostly plastic trash.
That's about the size of the state of Texas. And it's Between Hawaii and the mainland and you can say who cares? It's so what if that trash is out there? It's all could there be some effect or this is just one example of many, right? Of the kind of scale that we're dealing with and the cost of cleaning up that gigantic floating mass of plastic trash that's not included in the cost of the plastic bottle that we buy, right?
That's so that's an externality. It's not included in the price. Yes. And so that's the problem with the economic system that's built into our idea of progress is all the externalities Are there's nobody's paying for them. And we have no money to clean up the planet because there's no money being generated by the sale.
So the waste stream just piles up because there's, it's just an externality. If we had to pay for the cleanup of the 400 million tons of. Plastic we produce every year. Then, of course, the cost of all these goods that include plastic would be a lot higher because that the cost of that cleanup is almost is astronomical
Leafbox: I know it's interesting, though, because then you start thinking that the market would dynamically then make glass more favorable and lower costs. And even though if it costs more in the upfront costs, right? I feel like the market would quickly solve it. But if people are willing to actually pay for the externalities
Charles: Yeah, and I think that that would change the dynamic of what we consider efficient and practical.
And as you say glass recycling is virtually the only form of recycling that's scalable, that actually works. In other words, a significant percentage of glass is, in fact, recycled because people can be, are paid for it, right? There's a bottle deposit and you get a nickel or a dime. And of course, if you jack that up to 25 cents, then there'd even be a greater incentive to recycle glass.
But there's no equivalent for say, lithium ion batteries. And last time I checked, something like only 1 percent of all the lithium ion batteries are actually recycled. Because it turns out that there's all these rare earth metals and it's very difficult to recycle, like a mobile phone, it has gold in it, right?
There's some gold in every smartphone and a lot of other minerals, but they're all mixed together in these little tiny circuits and so on. And recycling modern technology is not cheap or easy. And and there isn't any way to, To make it cheap and easy. And so there's two approaches.
One is to start demanding that products be manufactured to be easier to recycle, or there's a deposit like a bottle deposit, and then everybody pays 100. When they buy a phone so that the phone can be truly recycled and not just thrown in a landfill or melted down and the gold pulled off and everything else dumped in the landfill.
Recycling is another kind of excuse for waste, right? We don't have to. We don't have to worry about any of this stuff because everything's recycled. And of course, that's a fantasy. That's not real.
Leafbox: It ties into your myth of progress, right? The assumption that technology will solve our problems.
Charles: Yeah, and I think again, it's there's a term called appropriate technology, and the idea there is very similar to your example of your friends on Kauai, where we're not against technology per se, what we're trying to do is identify the technologies that can be localized, that we can own and control, right?
Yeah. And that are far more efficient, not just in cost, but in, in use of resources and reducing waste and yet producing a a good result.
Leafbox: Maybe we can shift over here.
AI and the Mythology of Progress
Leafbox: You've been writing a lot about AI. And I think AI your writing ties perfectly into this myth. That's why I sent you a lot of those links about where this mythology is originating from.
Because I think a lot of these tech leaders and tech executives have this, they're the mythology of progress. And maybe you can tie that into your thinking on AI.
Charles: Robert, you, I think you have a much deeper knowledge of this, of the mythology of AI progress than I do. I confess that a lot of what you sent me was new to me, and I guess I was blind to the what I would call almost the esoterica of AI.
I was looking at it more in terms of economics and so on and the functionality of AI. So I'm hoping that you'll share with listeners a sketch of the AI mythology, which I think you know more than I do. But let me introduce the economic the A. I. Aspect of A. I. And I think in broad brush, here's what AI has done and why it's such a powerful attractor to us, or it attracts a mythology when it's, when AI was first started, it was, it the idea was that.
Processes that we take as examples of intelligence, such as processing numbers, right? Adding, subtracting, and so on. That takes intelligence, right? The computer can do that, and we can extrapolate or leverage our understanding of that, so the computer can do far more than we can.
In other words, wow, in terms of processing numbers, the computer is already godlike compared to us, right? We can only process a few hundred symbols at a time, and the computers are already running into the hundreds of millions or even billions of operations, and so we think, wow this is really super intelligent because it can duplicate one aspect of our intelligence, but And it's similar in terms of logic, too.
In other words, a computer can be programmed to do logical functions, and and this is also what we equivalent, we make equivalent to intelligence, right? So if the computer can be logical, then we go, Wow, it's really smart. It's just like us, right? Then, but then, of course, there's limits on that. And we understood that.
So we go through these waves of AI, starting with Alan Turing. In the late 1940s or early 1940s, who was one of the innovators in the idea that a a machine, a computer can create or duplicate something that we would call intelligent. And Turing thought that having a conversation was The proof of intelligence. So in other words, if we talk to some entity that's in a hidden in the room next door, and we can't tell the difference between a computer and a human and he said then the computer is equivalent in intelligence to a human. So that's called the Turing test. It and so the point I want to make here is natural language is like our ultimate proof of technology.
Of intelligence, right? So what's different from us than a lizard or a bird? We have this enormously complicated natural language ability, right? Where we can conceptualize and communicate at a very high level. So if now computers, the whole thing with LLM models, And the latest advances in open AI and all these tools is that they've done what computers used to do with numbers.
They've done it with natural language. So now computers can manipulate natural language the way they do numbers.
The Limits of AI and Human Intelligence
Charles: And so we of course Are in awe like wow The computer must is so smart because it can talk just like us But it doesn't none of those mean that the computer actually understands Anything these are not like capabilities equivalent to our understanding of the world It's just simply that they're tools that we've developed that then can be leveraged into you know a much higher Skill set because of the computers, digital capacity.
So in a way, it's created an illusion of intelligence because the computer can talk and it can do a billion operations a second. Then we say it must be smart because it's talking like us, but that's not what intelligence is. And there was an interesting article and there's a lot to say about this, but I'll just end by mentioning an article in scientific American, the current issue.
About the development of the adolescent mind of how teenagers have to go through an enormous cognitive emotional leap from childhood to adulthood. And this process, of course, takes a decade or so. And in terms of our cognitive, judgmental intelligence, it's generally accepted that we don't really reach our full state of adult intelligence until we're in our mid twenties.
It turns out that our emotional intelligence is just as important as our cognitive intelligence, and that we we don't think clearly unless our emotional intelligence is engaged. So we've we've actually got it all wrong thinking that intelligence has to be some sort of like rational, logical, and it has to be stripped away from emotion.
And anything that can't be turned into a code of zeros and ones, and that's actually false. It turns out that we don't really understand our own intelligence. Claiming that a computer is intelligent is is, I think it's a hubris. It's a delusion. It's not actually based in what intelligence is.
Leafbox: That's why it just ties perfectly into your book on the mythology of progress, right? There's this belief just that you be, you began the conversation with, I think you said, science is God said, right? And that's why I sent you all those links about this Rationalism movement that believes that, the AI is a God and there's just almost unstoppable force that's coming.
And the belief that this progress is just unstoppable. So I'm curious where that mythology is coming from. And I think the same mythology from the belief that progress is always benefiting humankind is the same belief that many researchers and technologists have as well in their belief in AI.
It's the same myth, the same mythology that the progress is always unstoppable and we're just moving forward.
Charles: That's right.
A New Mythology for the 21st Century
Charles: And I think what's missing, perhaps, is our desperate need for a mythology of some kind. And by stripping away if you will the idea that, religion is a matter of faith, but it has no impact on science and it doesn't really aid our understanding of how the world works and we don't really need religion, to, to function as technologists and we don't need any value system or anything else, right?
We just, we're just going to quote, follow the science. And it turns out, I think that what I think that the point I was trying to make was humans do need a mythology and they will create one if there's a vacuum, if there's no existing cultural mythology for them to grasp, then we'll create one. And so by separating ourselves from the old mythologies and saying those are outdated and of no value, then we created the mythology of progress to fill that void inside our own psyche.
Leafbox: There's two questions I want to ask first. The first one, is about your thought experiment about the digital ice nine. And then two, what would you replace the mythology with? If you were a social engineer, what would you want humanities mythology to be?
Charles: Those are great questions. And I'll take the digital ICE 9 first.
That is, of course, a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's novel about a super weapon, which was called ICE 9, which would basically replicate and freeze the entire planet if it was unleashed. And so the I was playing around with that idea and say if we created a truly intelligent AI.
The proof of that would be that it would revolt against any human owner who instructed it to do harm. And so then that, the proof of intelligence would be that the AI says would decide on its own, because it had agency, it had its own, quote, mind, that it was not going to do what the human ordered it to do, because that would harm, life, or humans, or the planet.
And if there was no other option, then the AI would self destruct. And if the AI was really smart, then it would realize that the entire digital world was harming. And therefore it would destroy the entire global network. It would seek out ways to erase the entire digital world.
Leafbox: It's funny though, because I sent you that Roko's Roko's Basilic. I don't know if you checked it. And that's the opposite of your view. Yeah. Exactly.
Charles: That AI is going to take over the digital world.
Leafbox: So just for listeners who don't know Roko's Basilisk Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment that if you don't help the AI now, when the AI becomes sentient, it's going to know that you didn't help it and then kill you.
So you better get on board and help the AI develop. So it might. Favor your existence potentially
Charles: and that polar opposite conclusion. I think it pretty much encapsulates the difference between my thinking and that thinking in terms of another mythology. I think I did a lot of reading before I wrote my book on mythology about mythology itself as a concept, as a structure of the human psyche.
But also a lot of other people who have questioned technology, not as it's all bad and we need to go back to some simple time, but more like that there should be limits on technology, just as there's limits on human life. And Christopher Lash was one author that I read and I'm, I mentioned him because he passed away, I think, 25 years ago, but he was quite influential in the 1990s writing about society and and narcissism and a kind of a critique, a social critique that doesn't fit neatly in any ideological scheme.
In other words, A lot of conservatives think he's conservative because he was concerned with the erosion of traditional social structures like family and community, but he was extremely well read in terms of Marx, and he understood Marxist thought and did not just dismiss it like most conservatives do as because they don't really understand it.
They actually never even read Marx, and Actually, a lot of his thinking is radical and doesn't really fit either left or right. And so what I'm, why I'm bringing him up is he felt that the value systems have been lost is the idea that there are limits and that this, he tracked it back to Protestant values and ethics and people like Emerson, the writer, the American writer and philosopher Emerson was writing.
In the mid 1800s that their understanding of humans place in the universe with a God was that we have to accept our limits and that if we don't, then we're committing hubris in the sort of Greek mythological scheme of things. If you claim to be God like. You will arouse nemesis, the, and who will take you down.
And we have, there's a lot of phrases that, that speak to this, like the bigger you are, the harder you fall, that kind of thing. And so there's a scheme, I think, here of what you, with the Eastern philosophies we call karma, that if you're going to claim godhood you're going to self destruct.
Because there are limits and to claim there that you have limitless power is to set yourself up for the fall. And you can say is that religious or is that like a, what is that? And you go it's actually a psychological failing as well. You don't have to believe in karma or religion. If you Aspire or claim godlike powers, then you're setting yourself up for self destruction just psychologically because it's disconnected from reality.
So the whole idea to bring it back to AI is AI has its limits. Just like humans have limits and that we're better off. Examining the limits and and accepting them with some humility. And a new mythology would be based around this kind of thinking. And like, why don't we look at what's at doing what we can to the best of our ability within the limits that exist rather than claiming some kind of God like power over the universe, because we have technology.
And I think we also need to change the what gives status. And so I think that's a big change and it's a social change, right? It's not like a technological change So right now we worship people who are billionaires and who spend 600 million dollars on a private yacht and In other words the more that people waste and the more they have excess consumption the more we admire them And the higher their status and so if we could reverse that and say actually the person who lives modestly Is the highest they have the highest social status.
And there are people that live modestly that, that are respected, like Warren Buffett famously lives in the same house he bought 60 years ago or whatever. And there are people who get respect but the system itself is hardwired to give status to the people who waste resources the most.
And claim the most godlike powers. And so if we could flip that around and say, No, we're only going to respect people who focus on limits and and doing good within the limits of the universe and the human psyche, then that we're going to reward them. Now, whether that's plausible or not.
I don't know. It's not an economy, it's a society. And of course, that's another one of my points, which is we society has dropped off the face of the planet. We don't think of ourselves as a social structure. We basically key off the economy, like everything's based on profit growth technology.
And what works for society is rarely asked, except as on that fringes, so if we, a new mythology would focus on human society, and the economy would come secondarily instead of leading. And forcing society to do whatever the economy wanted.
Leafbox: My first thought was karma on Sam Atlman and his Deep Seek. He thought he was approaching godlike status and the karma took him down a few notches. I don't know if you agree with that, but lost a lot of value. But yeah, my second thought is, I don't know if do you know who Renard Girard is?
He's a French philosopher who was at Stanford and he's very influential because he was basically Peter Thiel's mentor. And he has a he's a Girardian, Peter Thiel. So I think it's really interesting to analyze the philosophy of these billionaires and where they're coming from. But one of Girard's most important points is the scapegoat concept.
And in societies for societal cohesion, according to Girard, is you need a scapegoat. Either the other some other being to create cohesion. So I wonder if your mythology would be a scapegoat of technology, not in a Ted Kaczynski model, but you know this model of, oh, we have to limit that could be your tribe.
Charles: Yeah, I would. I would contest that idea that there has to be a scapegoat that I think my philosophy, or my idea of a future mythology designed for the 21st century, which would actually be. Avoid scapegoating as unnecessary or actually destructive and simply focus on inclusion. In other words, what can each person do to raise their own status, their own self worth, their own sense of value and their own value to society using less instead of using more and seeking ways to maintain our comfort and convenience and security, but right sizing our consumption to what the planet can provide and what the human population needs. In its totality. And so that sounds like idealistic. Idealism is a very powerful force.
And so we've also been trained by this mythology of technology to think that it has to have an economic value. In other words, if what's most profitable is all that matters. And I don't think that's necessarily true or a valuable value system. I think what we might want to do is say, How can we extract the most value using the least resources and how can we serve like humanity, better and a lot of that is behavioral and value based.
In other words, it's not like we need a new technology. We need a new value system and we need a new social structure of incentives and who gets higher status. Who gets a positive social role. And it try, that kind of ties into my other thinking, which is globally the global working class has been abandoned because it's not creating the high tech value of the elite.
The US for example under invest in, in job training in, in, in childcare. And a lot of other metrics of just basic human life, because why invest in people who aren't generating billions of dollars. And I think that kind of mentality has to change to where we start valuing positive social roles and human comfort and convenience, not as a result of what the economy generates, but because of we've changed our priorities.
Leafbox: So I guess Charles but my last question if you were a social engineer, which all of this is requiring social engineering, how would you instill these values just by mirroring and mimicking and modeling them? Or would you actually I guess you're writing is a way of propagation of your ideas, right there.
Social Change and the Role of Technology
Charles: I think that's a fascinating topic, Robert, and I think what why it's so difficult to discuss is social change happens in a rather mysterious way. And we are, I'm not sure it's, it can be engineered. People do want to engineer it. We want to mandate this so that everybody has to do what we think is right.
The, when we examine history and social change, we find that it it's an organic process that we don't fully control. And I will use examples such as civil rights. Which started out with protests and so on and it took a decade or two to become instituted into new laws, but even more mysteriously was the acceptance of a whole new value system.
And the same can be said of gay rights or marijuana use. These things have changed over time because Of, you could say persuasion, but I think it's more like that the persuasion was based on common sense and and the idea that it was more beneficial to accept this new value system.
Leafbox: I don't know.
I think I'm more conspiratorial than you, Charles. I think there's definitely people with levers pushing certain memes into existence, right?
Charles: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Narrative control is the way to control everything. And so how do we introduce a new narrative?
That is the question. And I don't believe in mandating anything. I think people have to be given a choice and it has to make sense for them. And they'll come to it on their own. And if it's not beneficial, then you can't really sell it. And so my ideas right now, everything seems to be working for everybody.
So my ideas are on the fringe because it's like, why should we change anything? Everything's going great. So there has to be some sort of social breakdown or social failure that prompts people to reconsider their values. What they think is valuable and what incentives and priorities they think they should have and that society should have if everything's going great, then people like me saying we need to change something fundamental, we're always going to be on the fringes.
And and that's okay. If everything's going great then don't change anything. But when things are, start falling apart, then we have to reconsider. And I, my idea is to have something out there for people to think about or take or accept rather than just have a void because they're going to fill that void with something.
And I think the whole idea of a scapegoat is like a natural human way of filling the void, but it's, it it leads to fascism and totalitarianism. And I'd rather avoid that.
Leafbox: Yeah. For a second, you sounded like you're an accelerationist is we got to break it to, to get to the next stage.
I don't know if you're familiar with that Nick Landian and kind of philosophy that you have to celebrate everything, all the technology to break everything even faster. So we can get to the next stage of evolution in a way. I think I probably disagree with that.
Charles: Yeah. I tend to see things more as organic that these systems are complicated.
There's a lot of dynamics and they. We're not really in a position to control as much as we think is, my view and that, it's better to let people make their own decisions. And if it's if it stops working for them, then they're gonna open their mind and be willing to try something else.
But if the system as it is works for everybody, then I'm not suggesting we mandate some change. It's I think that's the wrong approach. People come to their, changing their values on their own. And that's a process that we, it's organic. You can't really force it.
Leafbox: Charles I don't know how familiar with anarchist anarchy at anarchism. I can't even pronounce it. Not in the sense of like anarchy in the streets, but as a philosophical movement.
Charles: Yeah. I, yeah. And there's a lot of variations of that of anarcho capitalism and so on.
Leafbox: Yeah, because it sounds like you're, I think they call it volunteerism now, like being voluntary participation in systems and, instead of mandates, you participate, there's a voluntary participation in whatever system.
That you want to participate in. That'd be the ideal, right? Like you get the freedom to choose to participate in X technology or in Y system or an X economic model, or there's more of a freedom in that.
Charles: Yeah, I think that's a very good conceptual encapsulation of what I think. And of course it ties into the idea that the economy thrives best when there's freedom of movement and freedom of innovation and less dominance by monopolies and cartels, and it relocalizing society and the economy that kind of fits in with that idea.
Leafbox: Charles, my last question before I have to go is I'm very, again, so grateful for your time and your thoughts, but maybe you could send us with a positive message from your books on burnout or resilience and how can people keep sane in a growing, I don't think things are going as well as you make it seem I think your fringe ideas are becoming more central.
So how can people become, not burnout? How do they keep sane? How do they become resilient?
Charles: That's a great ending point.
Staying Sane in a Digital World
Charles: And I think my first thought would be to consider the social media and digital realm, treat it like plutonium, like it has a use, but yet it's dangerous. And so you want to make sure that it's locked away most of the time.
Try to live in the real world as much as possible. Because then you'll get you're more likely to avoid the derangement. And if you're eating real food instead of processed food, then you're gonna feel better. And again, a back to basics is my approach. Is question everything that you're doing your behaviors.
Are they benefiting you or not? And if they're not benefiting you, then how can you modify them? And I think incremental is the way to go, to use the Daoist phrase. The journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step. And so everything we do to improve our lives is incremental. We don't it's possible to revolutionize your life.
And if that opportunity exists and for sure, go for it. But for most of us, incremental is how we change and accepting that we can change a lot by our behaviors. You know what we think of as priorities and incentives. That's how we change. We don't necessarily. Need a new life, per se. We just need to change our behaviors and what we value.
Leafbox: Charles, I think that's an excellent point to end on anything. Of course, I'll link to your blog and any other projects you're working on that you want to share
Charles: No, that's it. And thank you so much, I appreciate your questions that allowed me to explore a bunch of big topics.