Interview: Ran Prieur

Ran Prieur is a philosopher, writer, blogger, and is well known for writing on collapse, society, psychology, freedom, drugs and consciousness. We spoke about these topics and more.

Leafbox: Ran, thanks so much for taking some time. I've been a reader of your essays for many, many years... I've watched some of your documentaries, but I think I get a sense of who you are, but if you were to introduce yourself to someone new who's never read one of your works, what's your first kind of statement, usually, on who you are, what you're into.

Ran:Oh, I don't know. I've been doing a blog for about 20 years. I used to write about ... I guess I'd say I used to write about critique of civilization... Now I'm writing more about psychology and metaphysics and less about politics and society, but I'm still kind of interested in that stuff. I'm writing a novel. It's going very slowly. I just like to think about things and write about things.

Leafbox:So maybe we can start there since you're in Seattle and you're more interested in the psychology. I was watching the short documentary about you, and I think a lot of ... I wouldn't call you a ... I guess  not a prepper, but a doomer, but there's kind of a sense of a meaning of crisis in the West. And I'm curious where you think that comes from?Ran:The sense ... where does the sense of crisis come from?

Leafbox:Yeah. The meaning of crisis in the West, possibly.

Ran:The meaning of crisis, like what meaning do people get out of thinking there's a crisis? Or ... I mean, I can talk a little bit about why people might ... what sense of meaning people might get out of ... I mean, I think there is a crisis and I think there's a lot of things that are going on right now that can't keep going the way they're going. And I used to more of a doomer. I still think that there's going to be a lot of big changes. I think we're in the middle right now. We're in the middle of a slow collapse and people get a sense of meaning about ... well, I think that's part of the reason that we're in a slow collapse, is people want to be part of something.

People want to feel like they're participating in something that they feel good about. And society is not doing a very good job of giving that feeling to people.

So they get into other things and other movements, some of which might destabilize the system that we've got. People might ... I mean, it's fun to imagine that everything is going to collapse and that I have these special skills other people don't have that let me do better other people. And a lot of people think that way, I might say the intersection of meaning and collapse.

Leafbox:And where do you think ... why do you think society's failing to give meaning to Western, kind of modern people?

Ran:Why do I think it's failing? Well, you can see this and a lot of things where something starts out ... when something starts out, people are excited about it and then it just builds up all kinds of cruff, it builds up lots of stuff that's just added on and it's easy to add stuff and hard to take stuff away. There's an important book that I haven't read, but everybody talks about it, The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, and he just talks about how complexity ... societies keep adding complexity, incrementally. It's easy to add complexity incrementally and hard to remove it incrementally.

So they just tend to build up more and more complexity and then lose a bunch of complexity all of a sudden.

So, you know, you could look at how much more expensive it is now to build things than it used to be. If you want to build a tunnel or a new subway, even accounting for inflation, it's way more expensive, and nobody is sure exactly why that is, but I think it's just that society gets more complex and the more complex it gets, the more clunky it gets.

And part of that is the ability to provide meaning. I think ... I can go on a bit of a tangent. I'm optimistic about the unconditional basic income. If we get something like that, then ... what people want is they want to do things. The goal for society should be a society that builds itself upward from what people enjoy doing. And ... it's hard to do that. And a society might originally build itself upward for what people enjoy doing. And then people are just doing it to go through the motions and not really enjoying it, like in ancient Egypt, the first great pyramid was better than the second. The second was better than the third. I think it's because for the first great pyramid, people were excited about like, Oh, that's cool. We're going to build a pyramid. And then they built it, and they're like, Oh man, another pyramid. But that was all they knew how to do.

So I'm just trying to triangulate this whole idea of why society starts to feel less meaningful as it goes on longer.

Leafbox:Do you think other civilizations have the same decadence of collapse, like Asian or Russian or Middle Eastern or developing?

Ran:Yeah. I think the same dynamic happens all over the world. I don't think this is uniquely a Western problem. It is a modern problem and there's never been so much complexity as there is right now. And just so much ... so many things we have to keep track of, and not all that stuff is going to be fun. And so it's going to be tedious, but I don't think this is uniquely Western at all. I think it's just modern. It has to do with the ... humans are always going to try, humans have been trying a lot of things that we've never tried before and we tend to mess it up and try, do it the wrong way a bunch of times until we get it right. That's happening right now all over the world with the internet and social media and lots of technologies that we haven't worked out how to work them well yet we're working them in a way that's not satisfying.

Leafbox:So do you know who Balaji is? He's that South Indian American kind of venture capitalist, philosopher, writer, Bitcoin guy. And he's modeled the future based on what he considers three contemporary forces, that being what he calls the CCP model, which is the Chinese kind of authoritarian state versus what he calls the NYT model, New York times, future model, where it's kind of a progressive eco kind of authoritative state, versus the BTC model, which is the Bitcoin kind of decentralized, utopian, anarchistic model. Peter Thiel also has a similar model, but he calls it sharia law versus the CCP model, versus eco hyper kind of ... progressivism, like European, or ...

I'm curious if you're in Seattle and Washington, and you're kind of worried about collapse, what's your future image of what is going to collapse and what's the future? Is it a Mad Max image? Is it a CCP kind of China image? Sharia law image? I'm just curious what you think. Use the term "long emergency," kind of the long slow collapse, but I'm curious what you see the future as.

Ran:Well, I have to break it down into different things. I don't ... and one of those things is technology, and another one of those things is the economy. And if I could just start with those, I think economic collapse is inevitable and there's going to be ... the economy we've got is based on perpetual growth, exponential growth, and there's no way we can keep having exponential growth. I think we're probably actually already done with the age of exponential growth and they're just kind of counting things that they shouldn't count to try to argue that ... economists are trying to create the illusion that we still have exponential growth and we don't. But we're going to have to figure out a way to live without that. So there's going to be all kinds of economic troubles.

And technology, my latest thinking on that is it's not going to be monolithic or global. It's going to be different everywhere. There's going to be really advanced ... I mean, technological innovations and ventures are going to continue. There's going to be lots of cool stuff and materials, and lots of questionable stuff, and AI, I mean, it's exciting stuff, but dangerous stuff. There's going to be lots of cool technological stuff and dangerous technological stuff continue to happen all through this. But in other places it's going to totally go to hell. There might be some neighborhoods that are Mad Max-like, but it's not going to be on a global scale.

Yeah, that's all I can think of right now. I mean, I don't really know much about China at all. It's such a big subject that I haven't really looked into it, but they're going to be in trouble because their system is also based on perpetual growth, and Americans continue to buy more things than the Chinese are making and they have their own troubles with the limits of authoritarianism.

Leafbox:You ... going to limits of authoritarianism. I used to be more of a fan of the concept of UBI, but I think the whole last two years of COVID have made me very nervous about UBI, and the potential of UBI being connected to state requirements. I'm just curious if you have any kind of fears of UBI being limited to authoritarian aspects?

Ran:I don't think ... the best thing would be not to have a UBI, but just have everything necessary be free, but that's really hard to pull off in practice. So I think I see the UBI as a transition from more of more of a top-down economy to more of a bottom-up economy where people can ... if people's basic needs are taken care of, then they can work more for quality of life and less for money. But yeah, I-

Leafbox:Ran, my fear is let's say you live in Singapore, a modern technocratic state, and you get your UBI, a thousand Singaporean dollars a month, and then they start requiring you, if you didn't get the latest booster, Oh, we saw you spit on the ground once.

Ran:Oh, yeah.

Leafbox:There's a lot of carrots and sticks associated with the UBI.

Ran:Then it's not unconditional, is it? Then it's a conditional basic income and that's not good. It's got to be something everyone gets, I think.

Leafbox:So your definition is unconditional. I didn't hear that.

Ran:Yeah, that's what the "U" is, unconditional. Everybody. I mean ... and I see you're right, that's a real danger that they're going to do that and they're going to call it unconditional though really it is conditional. I mean, you're probably right. That's going to happen in some places and to some extent, so then the challenge is to try to keep it ... try to make sure that they can't take it away for things like that. For any reason, really. I mean, I think should everyone should get it.

Leafbox:Have you heard of central bank digital currencies?

Ran:Yeah, that sounds ... yeah, I don't really, that's not really something I follow, but ... yeah, I don't really know much about that.

Leafbox:It's just a way to create debt mechanisms. Instead of the central treasuries creating money and then giving it to banks, they would give it directly to the end user via an app. So the digital one in China has that.

Ran:Okay.

Leafbox:But the problem is then they can have negative inflation or turn off your cash based on whatever they do. So if you ... in China, "Oh, you said the word Tiananmen," and then they'll just turn off your cash. So something similar is happening in the US with like if you say anything wrong on PayPal, then they'll just turn off your PayPal account. Or if we saw that in ... you remember in Canada with the truckers, they got their bank accounts turned off, and things like that.

Ran:Yeah. I mean, that's a danger. They could totally do that. I mean, there's a constant struggle. It's never going to end, the struggle for people to be able to live in a way that they enjoy living and the struggle between that and the other desire that people have when they have power to leverage that power and get more power. And we're never going to be done with that struggle. We're just going to have to ... I think we're less willing, humans as a whole are less willing to see people starve and die from lack of having necessities. I think in practice as it works out like that, there's going to be the people who don't obey or whatever are going to live worse.

Leafbox:So that's interesting how you said ... do you think you have a tendency ... I believe you're kind of in the underground and kind of counterculture always, but how do you maintain that freedom? That kind of philosophy of freedom?

Ran:I'm not sure. Could you phrase that another way? I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.

Leafbox:I'm curious how do you keep free in terms of your thoughts or actions against a state or a group that might be against those freedoms?

Ran:How do I personally?

Leafbox:Yeah.

Ran:Well, I've just been lucky. I've been lucky that I have enough money that I don't have to have a job. That's how I do it. And I don't spend a lot of money. I try to live frugally so that the money I have will last the rest of my life. But in general, people just have to find some way to make it through, there's going to be ... there's a lot of niches. There's a lot of ... people just have to find a niche. And I mean, I don't know, I'm starting to veer off into trying to give advice to people who I don't know anything about, but I'll just say that yeah, for me, I've just been lucky. I bought a house in Spokane when the market was low and sold it when the market was high. And I got the money from that.

Leafbox:Ran, I was going to ask you where do you ... just maybe in terms of freedom, where do you see the counterculture now?

Ran:Where do I see the counterculture now?

Leafbox:Yeah.

Ran:In terms of freedom? I'm not sure exactly. I mean, there's always going to be cultures and countercultures and freedom is such a loaded word. But ...

before I talk about freedom, if I were to define freedom, I like to define, I like to say the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. And all other freedoms come from the freedom to do nothing. If you don't have the freedom to do nothing, you don't have the freedom to do anything. It's like the void from which everything is created. It's like, I've got nothing to do, we have nothing to do, then you can figure out what you really want to do.

So for me, that's the basis of freedom. And the word freedom gets thrown around a lot, and this is ... when people talk about freedom, sometimes they're talking about power, like, okay, you're driving your car and somebody cuts you off. That to you, it feels like power. They've exercised power over you by cutting you off. To them, it feels like freedom. They get to go wherever they want. So that's the constant trade off of freedom versus power. And a goal of a society should be to have as much freedom as we can. And as little power, people having power over other people as we can.

Leafbox:Interesting. And then Ran, right now what kind of ... maybe ... I've followed some of your zine work and I've seen the development of your novel. What kind of other things are you interested in right now? Could be anything, technology, lifestyle, baking, anything?

Ran:The ... I've been ... my latest obsession, one of my favorite motivational quotes is from the filmmaker John Waters, who said "Life is nothing if you're not obsessed." So I just like to get obsessed with little things. And I've been obsessed lately with hits of the seventies, believe it or not. I grew up in the seventies and I remember a lot of songs from then. I've just been going back and re-listening to a lot of those songs I remember from the seventies and making playlists. So that's my latest little obsession, but yeah, you mentioned baking. I'm doing ... I'm starting to make pasta now, which is surprisingly not that hard, to do homemade pasta. It takes more time than using pre-made pasta, but it's not hard and it's a lot better. So that's another little thing I'm doing.

Leafbox:Are you still interested in the occult, and pan-psychism, and some of those-

Ran:Totally. Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally ... I mean, it's been a while since I've read any books on that stuff, but I'm always interested in woo-woo stuff. Yeah. In models of reality, other than materialism, and ... just all kinds of weird stuff.

Leafbox:And then where does that interest in the woo-woo come from?

Ran:I don't know where it comes from. It's something that's always been there. I just always like ... I like to see the cracks, I like to look beyond, I like to see things that are not working the way they should and are ... it's hard to explain it. That's not quite how I say it. What is it exactly? I mean, it's just ... it's newness. It's novelty. It's the world's supposed to be this way in terms of description of reality. And then you see something that doesn't fit, and wow. What is that? Maybe let me follow this thread and see where it leads.

And there's the idea that maybe outside of this I mean it's the whole, what the movie The Matrix points to, that the reality we see is not the real reality. And the real reality is more interesting. I wonder if it comes down to a kind of boredom, I don't know. You want-go ahead.

Leafbox:I think he wonders ... you have a lot of writing about psychedelics, and I think that always opens up questioning of reality. And I'm just curious if that has an overlap there, or-

Ran:You know, I've used psychedelics. I'm actually watching that Michael Pollan TV show, How to Change Your Mind. And I read his book, and something I noticed about his show, How to Change Your Mind—they have all these psychedelic trip reports and every single trip report is better than any trip I've ever had or anyone I know has ever had. They make it seem like every time you do psychedelics, you go off in another universe and you explore all your past traumas and you come back a changed person. And I'm afraid people are going to get their hopes up too much from watching that.

But I still think ... the insights that I've got from psychedelics are not that earth shaking, but they really helped me appreciate nature more. That's my favorite thing to do. I mean, I haven't done ... actually haven't done psychedelics in quite a while. I haven't done a large dose in a while, but when I do, I always like to go out and walk in nature and I just appreciate a lot more the beauty of ... well, when I'm speaking carefully, I don't call it nature. I call it the non-human made world. And compared to the non-human made world, the human made world looks pretty clunky and ugly, but we have a lot of room to do it better.

Leafbox:What do you think about the kind of democratization of psychedelics?

Ran:Oh, yeah, I mean look, they're not ... there's some problems. They're not completely miraculous, but I think it's overall good that more and more people are using them. And I think overall that's going to be good for society. It's not automatically going to make you a better person to use psychedelics. And a lot of people are going to use too many and fry their brains. But overall I'm in favor of more and more people using psychedelics. And I think it's going to cause some interesting changes in the world. It's inevitable.

Leafbox:Going back to the occult and ... I think on one podcast I heard you were talking about, I think biblo ... I've heard the term-

Ran:Bibliomancy, yeah.

Leafbox:Are you still using that, or how is that?

Ran:I do. It's a fun thing to do. It's not ... it's kind of like a parlor trick where you don't know exactly how it works and the way ... I guess, after I wrote about it, I found out that the normal way the people use bibliomancy is to open a book, you open a book at random, you riffle the pages, you put your finger down, and the way most people do it is they're looking for a phrase or a sentence. And that's not how I do it. I like to look to pull out a single word. So I use a dictionary, or ... I recommend a thesaurus to beginners because it's more simpler answers, but I use a dictionary. I just flip it on. I might be starting to write and I'm like, Let me have an idea. I say, Give me a seed crystal for what I'm going to write about today, and our starting point. And I put my finger down and there's a word. And surprisingly often whatever word I land on either fits the question or it's helpful.

So yeah, that's something I enjoy doing. And it's something that's helpful. And I have to be careful talking about it because you can ... if people get in trouble, if you do it too much, you can really get into a bad mental state where every time you need to make a decision, you go, I mean, it could be bibliomancy, it could be tarot, it could be whatever you're doing. You could get in a pattern of relying on it too much or taking it too seriously. So I have to do all these disclaimers, but if you don't get all wide-eyed and goggle-eye about it, if you just say, Oh, I'll do this fun thing and it's going to help me, then I think it can help. I Find it helpful. Yeah.

Leafbox:Do you have any religious practices, Ran?

Ran:No. I mean, religious is a ... that's something I write about, is religious is a hard word to ... it's a tricky word to define, but I guess you could say bibliomancy is a religious practice, but I was raised Catholic and I went to Catholic church and at the time I did not like it. And I don't go to church now, but looking back, I kind of appreciate the epic spirituality of Catholicism, how it really gives a sense of a world beyond this world that's really epic and beautiful.

And I know there's ... the word religion points to a lot of things. And some of those things are harmful, and some of them are necessary. One of the things it points to is just community. It's like people being with a group of people who think the same way, and that's always going to be that. And the challenge, if you're choosing that group of people, is to make sure they're not thinking in a way that's damaging or that's veering off from reality, so-

Leafbox:Are you agnostic, or atheist, or what's your spiritual belief system?

Ran:I mean, it's pretty much what anyone who's done psychedelics says, is that mind is more fundamental than matter. There is a universal ... I mean, I don't use the word God, because it ... sometimes I use the word God cause it's a really convenient word, but I don't want to give anyone the idea that I believe in a human-shaped sky father deity. That's a silly idea, and I think it's on the way out as more people use psychedelics and as the patriarchal culture, hopefully, the patriarchal culture is going to decline. And when people think about the absolute universal, they're not going to think about some old man. They're going to think about something that's way beyond what we can understand, but we see a little sliver of the universal.

So I guess I would say ... I wouldn't say I'm a religious or a ... I wouldn't say an atheist because that kind of implies ... that implies materialism, belief that the matter's final reality. I don't like to say I'm religious cause that implies belief in a sky father deity. But I believe in a universal consciousness that we are all a part of. And there's all kinds of things about reality that we can't understand from here.

Leafbox:Do you think there are ... that universal force is only good or are there evil forces, or-

Ran:A quote I like is that, it contains ... call it the universal, call it God, whatever, "It embraces all opposites." So it includes absolutely everything. So there's good in it, there's evil in it. I think evil ... have you ever see the movie Time Bandits? It's one of my favorite movies. It's like an early Terry Gilliam film, and there's this bit in Time Bandits where they run into God, the Supreme Being, and they ask ... this little kid asks God, "Why is there evil?" And God says, "Oh, I forget. But it seems to me it has something to do with free will."

So I think ... one thing I like to imagine is ... people imagine you're going to die and you're going to go to heaven. What if we're already in heaven right now? And we don't know it because we've forgotten certain things. We've wandered off into a bad neighborhood of heaven. And if heaven is heaven, it has to include the possibility to ... oh man, there's been some smoke in the air lately. Very smokey. Wow. The air doesn't look very smokey, but I'm getting these coughs. Let me see if I can go inside and see if it helps.

I forgot what I was talking about, let's see, I was talking about the idea that if we're already in heaven.

Leafbox:Correct. Yeah, in the neighborhoods, heaven.

Ran:Yeah. This could be a bad neighborhood of heaven. And we're just trying to find our way back into a good neighborhood, or ... there's this famous question, can God make a rock so big he can't lift it? Or can God make a burrito so hot that he can't eat it? And you could say that, can the universal consciousness forget that it is the universal consciousness? And that's a common insight that people have on psychedelics, that ... that's like a cliche. Oh, we are all God. I think that's basically right, that there is a universal consciousness that divided itself up, or duplicated itself into all of us, and beyond that, it's really hard to say what's going on.

Leafbox:Where does your universal consciousness emerge from?

Ran:It's on the inside. It's not on the outside. It's like ... a metaphor I like to think of is, there's the universal consciousness just like looking through different keyholes or pinholes. And it looks through one keyhole and it sees what you see. It looks through another, it sees what I see. Not just what we see, but what we experience, our whole sense of self. So your whole sense of self or my whole sense of self is something larger that's making itself smaller and constraining its view in different ways. So where does it emerge from? It always existed. It's outside time and incomprehensible to us. But within us, it's ... go ahead.

Leafbox:No, I was going to ask just related to consciousness is, do you have any thoughts on augmented reality and relationship with consciousness?

Ran:Augmented reality ...

Leafbox:VR ... if this is ... a lot of people-

Ran:Yeah. I see what you're saying. I mean, that's a new path. I mean, augmented reality is a new thing that consciousness is doing. At the same time I wonder if we're just ... there's two directions you can go with it. You can go outward or inward. You can use it to go deeper and deeper inside of things, or ... man, having trouble putting this into words. But imagine you've got augmented reality, just trying to teach people how to do martial arts, and they go, they put on this full body suit, and they have this simulated person they're fighting. You can only go so far simulating it. Or let's say somebody's trying to figure out how to do augmented reality about how to fix a car, how to repair an engine. And you can only go so far with a simulation before you have to go back to reality. If you're trying to learn martial arts, you have to go back to the real physical world.

And it's funny because on one hand I think the physical world is not exactly real, but the physical world is where we work it all out, and you've got to get back to ... augmented reality has to remain anchored in the physical world, and if it veers off too much from it it will kind of make people insane and be less effective.

Leafbox:Ran, do you think that reality is a simulation?

Ran:I mean, I think that's a nice metaphor. I think this whole physical world, it's not that ... now one way to think about it is this whole physical world is not really real because it's all being simulated. But the way I see it is, this is the simulation. I'm a flesh avatar, of something that I can't understand, and this whole physical world is the ... it's not that it's real because it's being simulated. It's that it is a simulation that we are all in and this is what we have to work with.

It's like, this is how ... imagine you're just one mind. Let's imagine solipsism. You're just one mind floating in space and you create this entire world. Solipsism is a cool idea because you can't be falsified. It's like, you can't prove that's not true, that you alone are floating in nothingness and imagining everything. But then where it breaks down is, okay, if I'm imagining everything then where does all this stuff come from? Where does all the not me come from? Where does all this stuff come from that ... where does surprise come from? Where does all the stuff come from that is not consciously part of me?

You could say, well, it's still me, but it's my subconscious. But in that case, it's much bigger. I mean, it doesn't really make sense to say it's only me given that the part that's not me that I'm not conscious of is so much is so much bigger.

So trying to tie that back to the physical world, it's like, you're floating in space and you find someone else floating in space and you join together with them to make a world together. And then sometimes there's two of you, then there's three, then there's four. And if it's just you, you can do anything, you know, you can create anything. It's just your conscious mind floating in nothingness. You can create anything. You can create anything you want. The same was ... it's like a single player video game with good mods and good cheat codes. You can do anything. But then as soon as it gets multiplayer, you have to work it out with other people.

So when I see the physical world as just ... the physical world is what you get when you have multiple perspectives that are trying to reach agreement. And I don't know, I think in one sense, reality is a popularity contest. But then if reality's a popularity contest, who gets to vote? And I think it goes far beyond humans. There's all kinds of perspectives or beings or aspects of consciousness that are collaborating to decide what this world looks like. And maybe humans aren't all that important in the whole scheme of it.

Leafbox:Well Ran, that connects me to, have you ever done DMT?

Ran:I never have. I would like to, but I know there's ways to synthesize it from Morning Glory seeds, I'm just too lazy to do that. So I'm just kind of waiting until someone gives me some, but I would like to do DMT. Yeah, never have.

Leafbox:Have you read any of the research in DMT, like the beings, or the prolonged DMT experiences?

Ran:I have seen that people are trying to get it to make DMT that last for a longer trip. That's a cool idea. I mean, maybe something bad will happen, but I think they should try it. I think it would be fun. I mean, yeah ... I look at the psychonaut subreddit. That's basically where I look, where ... that's the only psychedelic community that I look at regularly, is the psychedelic subreddit. And they're always talking about machine elves and the various DMT entities that you run into. I've never ... and haven't ever used a big dose of any psychedelic. I always just using just regular kind of small doses, but I've never actually hallucinated. I've never seen anything that's not there. My mind has never gone off into some other world. So it would be cool to do that sometime.

Leafbox:Yeah, there's a neuroscientist out of Okinawa, Andrew Gallimore. I think he's in charge of that DMT, kind of psychoneurotic extension program. Very fascinating.

Ran:Okay, cool.

Leafbox:They're just trying to enter into that other world for longer to see what happens or what they can learn or take back or ... a lot of interesting. Have you ever ... I don't know if you've ever done, heard of the game of life computer science program? it's like-

Ran:Yeah. I think I read about that a long time ago. Can you remind me about what that is?

Leafbox:Well, every first-year computer science student basically learns the game of life, and you set up these rules and it almost looks like a checker board. You put these little bacteria on there and you set rules. If the bacteria's next to another bacteria, they mate, if next to three, they fight. And then what happens, these self-emergent civilizations emerge just from these basic rules. And a lot of people extend that then to reality, that the rules are just beyond our grasp, but those rules are defining the consciousness or the reality or ... so it's similar to what you're talking about of, it's just the fascinating neuroscience and math and information. And so the DMT people want to enter that world because they think that's a way to see the information behind this layer of reality.

Ran:Okay. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I mean, that's a cool idea. I have to wonder about the limits of the human brain to ... it's like maybe the drugs put your brain temporarily into a state where you can see this stuff, and then ... but you can't stay in that state and you have to come back to this state and then you're like, It made total sense when I was in there, and now that I'm back here, it doesn't make sense. So I wonder how that could line up with ... how that could synergize with actual trying to actually change the human brain to have a different structure. And that's getting into some real weird stuff.

I think one of the technologies that is going to come along that is going be interesting and dangerous, but also maybe, fun is brain hacking. I think there's going to be a lot of, assuming we don't get a total tech crash—when I'm talking about doom, I always have to keep the possibility open that we are going to get a total technology crash. But if we don't, if there's still people somewhere that are doing new stuff with technology, I think brain hacking is going to be big.

Whatever we can do by ... it's going to get to a level where ... or LSD will seem primitive. You take this molecule and put it inside your brain and you could actually have implants in your brain that are doing whatever. I think there's going to be a lot of action on that front in the coming decades.

Leafbox:So would you consider yourself a techno utopian, then? Kind of-

Ran:Oh, I don't I that ... man, no. I do ... I don't want to put that tag on myself. I think technology is going to do some cool stuff. There's this quote from I think Arthur C. Clarke that says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And I like a variant on that, which is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. And that's the insight I get when I'm on psychedelics is like, Wow, everything ... you know, you go out, you walk down to a river in early summer, and this is it. This is ... these creatures, these plants and animals and water and whatever, they've got a system that's robust, that's enjoyable. And humans are tinkering around trying to do our own thing just like that. And we're trying to duplicate in our creations the heavenly nature of the non-human made world.

So I do think I'm utopian in the sense that I think we can do a lot better. And I think inevitably we're going to do a lot better, humans. I think humans, it's our nature that we try to ... we're always doing crazy new things and we make a lot of mistakes and then eventually we start to get it right. I think we're still, in a lot of ways still in the mistake-making phase and we're going to get it right. And I think in a thousand years, they'll look back at us as pretty brutish and primitive. And if we were to look a thousand years ahead of them, we'd say, Oh, they're doing some cool stuff, but maybe they'd also be doing some stuff that we don't like. So in that sense, I'm a utopian.

Leafbox:Do you have any thoughts on biogenetics and some of ... what are your fears on technology, in terms of ... some of mine personally are just losing the aspect of humanity.

Ran:Yeah. I think that's the way that humans could actually go extinct. If there's one way ... if you ask me what way is most likely for humans to go extinct, is through biotech where we ... we're like, We're going to make this change to our own genomes that looks like an improvement. And because we're shortsighted, it's not an improvement and it makes things worse. And we can't go back to the way it was before. And we go extinct. That's a real possibility, that humans are going to drive ourselves into extinction through irreversible biotech.

But then when I talk to people who actually know more than I do about genetic technology, it's really hard. It's not like the DNA is like a blueprint where you go in and you're like, Oh, we're going to give people wings. It's really hard to go in there and just get whatever changes you want. You have to muck around and try different things, and then something comes out that is not what you expected.

So yeah, but we're going to do it. Humans are going to do crazy stuff with genetic technology. And then it's going to be interesting to see where it goes.

Leafbox:Talking about genetics and biotechnology and even bio warfare, do you have any thoughts on the last two years of COVID, or how has that been for you?

Ran:Oh, I mean, I enjoyed quarantine because I like to stay home anyway. And I think one good thing that came out of it was the whole working from home thing. I mean, I'm here in Seattle, the King County administration building is now empty. They've gone 100% working from home. And there's a lot of places that ... and it's better overall. And I think it's going to ... there's a lot of managers, a lot of managerial jobs that are not really necessary, and the managers want to keep people in the office because they have power over people, but people working from home and then things might work out better with fewer managers. I think that's a big benefit that's come out of COVID, is more working from home.

Of course, with the class aspect, the service workers can't work from home. And it's funny, the people who still had to work during COVID are the people who make the least money, but a lot of people did get ... are living better now because of COVID making it easier to work from home.

Leafbox:I read some of your thoughts on 9/11 on your website.

How do you feel about kind of ... I call it kind of the mind virus, or some of the ... that went on for the last two years, or three years with the pandemic. I think the West lost a lot of ability to ... free speech. The psychological operations were clear. I'm just curious what you think about just some of the responses to the virus, or the vaccine, or anything like that. The masking, the rules.

Ran:I mean, yeah, some of the rules are silly. Like, they actually said that it's not good to wear a mask, and the reason they said that was they wanted to save the masks for the medical places where they were really ... I mean, it's going to be clunky, there's going to be mistakes. But I think overall ... I mean, when COVID first appeared, my first thought was, why are we taking so many precautions against something that only has a 1% death rate? But then it makes sense when you look at hospitals because if hospitals get overwhelmed, a lot of people would die who would not otherwise die. So the way I started framing COVID was, as long as hospitals are not getting overwhelmed, we should call it a win and we should just do whatever precautions are necessary to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed, and beyond that, we should just let people get sick if they want.

I think ... I understand why people are afraid of vaccinations because here's the central authority saying you've got to put this thing in your body. But when I look at the science, it looks pretty good. I got the vax, I got the Moderna vax, and I think it helped me when I got COVID to get less sick than I would've got. I think it's a pretty interesting technology, the mRNA thing that they developed, and it might ... we might still not have it if they hadn't had to develop it really fast to try to fix COVID.

Leafbox:I was just curious, do you partake in any of the conspiracy theories or are you outside of that?

Ran:I think, I mean as far as I can figure out, it did come from a Chinese biolab. It was accidentally released. That's what I think about it, is that, it was a Chinese biolab that was tinkering with bio weapons or something, and they were sloppy with, and it accidentally got released. That's where I think it came from. And beyond that, I don't really prescribe to any of the COVID conspiracy theories.

Leafbox:What do you think about conspiracies in general? What do you think?

Ran:I mean, conspiracy's one of those words that points to a lot of things. But I think it's good for people to not take it face value, what we're told, and to try to figure things out on our own. At the same time, I mean with the internet, it's really easy to just create these groups that veer off into beliefs with, I mean, you get into echo chambers really easily. And it's easy, I mean, it's human nature to want to tell beautiful stories. I think that's where a lot of this comes from. You want to tell a story about the world that makes the world seem more exciting and more fun to live in. And the internet allows us to self filter where we get our stories from. And people can go off and find their own stories that paint a world that seems more exciting for them to live in or more meaningful. And they can find other people who back up from that.

I stopped writing about politics because I just got tired of arguing. But I'll say this about Trump, is that he's a political cold reader. He's a cold reader is someone who like, someone like a fake psychic who will say, "Oh yes, I've been thinking of a person named Jeff," and was like, "Oh yes, yes. You know my brother's named Jeff." Trump does that on a massive scale where he'll just say stuff and whatever people respond to, he says more of that stuff and that's why he became president. Because he's so talented at doing that. But that's also what the internet in general does, is if you start thinking of a certain way and you plug it in, it can reinforce that. And you can get, I mean, this AI is going to do some crazy stuff like bots that, I mean, I haven't read it a lot. And they're more and more bots on, right?

And my view of AI, which I mentioned on a blog a couple weeks ago is that, I think the way to look at it is something created by humans and AI is part of the human story, and it's going to give humans, this is going to be interesting to see what the intersection on the internet of bots feeding back what people want to believe or feeding back stories that people enjoy telling each other and how that could grow in AI space.

Leafbox:Ran, how do you avoid, or do you drop into the echo chamber?

Ran:Well, so how do I avoid dropping into an echo chamber is just to ...

Leafbox:Or, conversely, do you go further into it?

Ran:To go further into it is, I mean, I guess, I've done that a little bit in the past where you're like, you're into something and you, to go into it is, I guess it's, you can almost put in terms of, you can always define in terms of the body. Do you feel like your body's expanding or do you feel like it's contracting? Or you could just say the mind is expanding or contracting and to go, it feels good to contract, it feels good to zoom in. It feels good to look at smaller and smaller things and see more importance and value in smaller and smaller things. And I try to resist that by ...

And the nice thing about having a blog is people will tell me when I'm wrong. And readers have done that a lot over the years and it's helping me change my opinions a lot, is to have to people emailing me saying, "Hey, here's some evidence that goes against what you're saying."

So the way to avoid, the way to get out of an echo chamber is just painful expansion into stuff that you don't like hearing. And you have to be willing to endure some pain to see things that don't fit your narrative. And I'm not great at that, but I do try to practice that. And there are some people who say they intentionally go to all the whole spectrum of political sites to keep their perspective wide. I'm just not interested enough to do that. But I do try to remain open to the idea that I'm wrong and practice.

I think it's good to, for metaphysics, I've written about this in terms of, for example, solipsism. I don't actually believe in solipsism, but if I can go temporarily into that space is helpful and I can pull out of it. Or determinism, I can go temporarily, if I start to think I'm better than other people, then I go into determinism mind space and under determinism, any way that I'm better than anyone else is 100% luck. And I can't go around thinking, Oh, I'm all smart and these people are stupid, because I'm just lucky and they're unlucky. And you go into determinism and then it does its job when you go out of it. So I think that's a good mental skill is to practice going into and out of ways of thinking. And if a way of thinking is fun and compelling, then it's easier to get into it and harder to get out of it, but you have to practice that.

Leafbox:Ran, what's some of the examples of where you've changed your mind?

Ran:I guess I'd go, I guess it'd look more like, I used to think that the whole system was going to collapse. If you look back at stuff I was writing in 2003, about 20 years ago, I thought that the whole global society was a lot more delicate than it turns out to be. People use the house of cards metaphor, the whole thing is going to come down like a house of cards. Well, the moment that I changed my mind on that was Hurricane Katrina. And if you'd asked people a year before Hurricane Katrina, what would happen if America's largest port city would be shut down for months, they would say, "Oh, it would cause a cascading series of effects and we'd all be living in the ruins." But actually, no, it just, where I was, the only effect of Katrina was gas prices got a little higher. So, I changed my mind on how fragile or how robust the human society is. It really can take a lot of pretty hard hits.

At the same time, every complex society eventually falls. And I think there's going to be some event, I know I'm going off on a tangent here. There's going to be some event in the future where everyone looks back on the effect of the equivalent of the Visigoths sacking Rome. People don't know much about Rome. Ancient Rome would be, "Oh, Rome was just buzzing along fine. And then one day the Visigoths sacked it, and then it was over." When really it was weakening for hundreds of years before that event happened and continued weakening for hundreds years after. So I think we get we're going to have a Visigoths sack Rome event. It hasn't happened yet. The history will look back, dumb history will look back and say, "Oh, that's where it all collapsed," and to us it'd be like, "Oh, that's just another bad thing that happened."

So, I'm going back to the subject where I've changed my mind on, like the critique of civilization. I haven't exactly, I still think that the best primitive tribes live better than us. And if you could pick any human society that ever happened in the history of the world, if they got the best ones, they would all be nature based cultures. But at the same time, a lot of nature based cultures are terrible. So the tribal people were in the whole range from living a lot better than us to living a lot worse in terms of subjective quality of life. So I used to write a lot about civilization, and now I stopped using that word because it has too much baggage. The word civilization points to things that I'm against, like central control and empire. And it also points to stuff I'm in favor of, which is people getting nicer to each other. And those don't necessarily go together.

Leafbox:Have you heard of Dmitry Orlov?

Ran:I actually, I read his stuff, I haven't read his stuff recently, but back in the aughties, I actually emailed back and forth with him a couple times and I read his stuff. He's an interesting thinker.

Leafbox:I just wondered if he, I mean, he definitely thinks, well, he leans more to the west in his analysis. But I mean, he does have the example of Russia collapsing, and I lean to the long emergency framework, like you.

Ran:Okay, okay.

Leafbox:Collapse takes centuries. It's not like an instant thing. And some things get better, some things get worse. So it's hard to know really.

Ran:Yeah. Yeah.

Leafbox:I am concerned ...

Ran:Go ahead.

Leafbox:Just personally, I just wonder, in your writing, do you have any topics you want to write about but can't or self censorship or anything like that?

Ran:Not really. The left right now has certain things that it doesn't want people to say, but I'm not really interested in saying those things. So, I mean, the main self censorship, I don't write about, I stopped writing about politics because I'm tired of arguing. But, it's funny that some of the most hostility I get is when I'm too optimistic, when I say, like I said, something nice about Steven Pinker and his idea and his idea that humans are getting progressively nicer. People got pissed off about that and it's true, when you look at Steven Pinker, his reasons for why he thinks the people are getting nicer don't really add up. But I think that data is accurate, and I believe in something like moral progress or ethical progress.

And that's oddly one of the things that I've got the most pushback from writing about, that the people are getting nicer. I think we are, and over time, you look back thousands of years ago is all kinds of terrible stuff that's not going on now. And I think in thousands of years there'll be terrible stuff is going on now that will not be going on. At the same time, there's going to be new crazy stuff. But to go back to your question, I don't really, other than not writing about the hot button subjects anymore, I don't really do any self censorship.

Leafbox:Ran, maybe just to wind it down, how do you design or build your moral framework then?

Ran:That's an interesting question. How do I design and build my moral framework? I mean, I think, this is an idea, a phrase I got years ago from some new age book, and that is the greatest good of all life everywhere.

And my moral framework is the greatest good of all life everywhere, which is beyond my comprehension. But I can work towards that and, I mean, morality is all about being unselfish. It's all about getting out of the small view of what's good for me and the larger view of what's good for other people. And I guess that would be that's my moral framework.

It's just thinking about trying to understand better the interests of more people. And at the same time, I know what makes me happy. I don't know what directly experience what makes me happy, and I don't directly experience what makes other people happy, nor do they experience what makes me happy. So for the same time, I have to serve myself. I have to do what makes me feel good. And that's balanced against trying to figure out what other people need and not stepping on other people's toes. So that, I guess, that's my moral framework.

Leafbox:To maximize the good in the world, I guess, or even in all layers.

Ran:Yes. And it's hard to find, if you say, "Okay, the greatest good." Well, what ... It gets into hard stuff to define, but it's a challenge, it's a constant challenge to try to work out what to do. I wonder if in hundreds of years they'll look back. I wonder if I'll get canceled in hundreds of years because I eat factory farm meat. But that's something I do, and I look forward to some future world where we'll be able to eat without that. But right now, that's too much of a sacrifice for me to make, is to give up eating meat.

Leafbox:Well that's a whole world of topics. I heard the most interesting argument against vegetarianism is the moral value of all the animals alive. So, there's just so many animals, billions of animals that are obviously factory farming versus an organic, wonderful farm and a rural place. So it's just an interesting thing. You'd have to terminate all those lives in all ...

Ran:That's an interesting idea. I say that's better to not exist at all than to exist as a factory farm animal. But another argument I've seen is the vegetables, to clear farmland to grow vegetables? A lot of animals have to be killed. You have to cut down a forest to build those fields. And a lot of creatures that we're living in whatever the field is now in, have their way of life destroyed. So there's no morally pure way to eat. Although there could be, in the future. This is my utopian vision is that is genetically modified trees so that everywhere you go you can just live by eating the fruit off trees, which is totally unrealistic now, but who knows? In a thousand years maybe we'll just be able to live off eating the fruit off trees.

Leafbox:We'll see. Very complex.

Ran:Yeah.

Leafbox:Ran, is there anything else you want to discuss today? I mean, there's a hundred topics I could ask you, but I don't want to take more of your time.

Ran:My voice is getting a little tired, so I think I probably better hang it up. But, it's been nice.

Leafbox:Thanks so much,

Learn more of Ran's thoughts @ RanPrieur.com