TS Eliot - The Rock and the Philosophy of Data

Speaker 1 (00:07):

Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your hosts Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and sourced data defines the path.

Alexander McCaig (00:25):

Okay. Everybody loves a little poetry.

Jason Rigby (00:28):

Yes, Alex.

Alexander McCaig (00:28):

Actually, I don't know if people like poetry. Well, if you like rap, you like poetry.

Jason Rigby (00:32):

If you don't like poetry, then I don't know if you'll even want to listen to this podcast, Alex.

Alexander McCaig (00:38):

Yeah. I don't think you'll want to. Ralph Waldo Emerson-

Jason Rigby (00:42):

Because everything we say is just superlative.

Alexander McCaig (00:45):

All of it is so poetic. It's pathetic how poetic we are. Oh my gosh. Our rhyme and verse.

Jason Rigby (00:58):

What's the Japanese haiku?

Alexander McCaig (01:00):

Haiku.

Jason Rigby (01:01):

Yeah. That's how I speak.

Alexander McCaig (01:02):

Yeah. Talking to you is like, listen to the Art of War concepts.

Jason Rigby (01:09):

Oh, this is funny.

Alexander McCaig (01:09):

Shall we get you a Nobel Prize in speaking literature? In speaking. Nobel Prize just for talking. This is an interesting rendition that's happened here. The poem is called The Rock by T.S. Eliot. And he wrote, "Where is the life we have lost in living? Where's the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? And where's the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Alexander McCaig (01:42):

And I think this is very interesting how the sort of hierarchy of exchange from one phase to the next, in living knowledge and information, in wisdom, is akin to what's currently happened with big data and how society is using this information, but we're not becoming more intelligent, frankly. We've become more polarized? So I was wondering if you could... You had a first glance at this before you shared it to me. What was your emotional take from this before we kind of dive into the metaphor?

Jason Rigby (02:19):

I love when we philosophize data. And so I think whenever we do these episodes, I really love them and we got this thesis from a Sketch Planet. So this is where we got it from. And in the beginning of their article, you can see there's this picture and it showed like a funnel. And then in the funnel, it has a little guy at the end grabbing, like funneling down balls. I remember like Price is Right, the little thing that would...

Alexander McCaig (02:46):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (02:47):

But in this big funnel, you have all this data coming in on the top and then it kind of gets funneled down to information, then it gets funneled down even more to knowledge, and then it gets funneled down into any wisdom. And so I kind of want to break up these four things and then we can go into there's some real-life stories in here and stuff like that. But let's start with data. And I know what you mentioned, big data, but let's just talk in a philosophical way, all this amount of data. What is data? Why is there so much of it?

Alexander McCaig (03:17):

Yeah. For a majority of human history, most knowledge was passed down by word of mouth. That was it, stories. Stories and song, nothing more than that. And maybe a cave painting, right, that has some interesting metadata to it. What type of charcoal did they use? What type of animal blood to use for ink? But apart from that, we have been for a great part of humanity's evolution speaking all the time and doing things, but not really recording it. And for a more succinct part of society when society began to evolve in its earliest days, very few had access to education.

Alexander McCaig (04:05):

So as technology was lightly evolving, farming, scribes, certain monarchs, whatever it might be, they would have people that would be around them all the time recording what was being said, but that required a long period of learning, to be able to be ascribed, to have written language. And then from that, society has gotten to a place where a good majority of people do have the ability to read and write now. And then as we've continued on this information is now... We're doing a better job of recording it. And data is, but information recorded on a digital medium. And when I say digital medium, it's essentially stored on silicon. Okay?

Jason Rigby (04:44):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (04:45):

Processing chips, anything that can store electrical patterns to represent what this value of data might be. And now when we look at just the growth of that data, well, it's the growth of how much we've been accustomed to sharing as a society, how we are attuned to learning and recording all those interactions we do in our daily life. So that's why there's been such a growth in this thing of data. It's not that we're sharing more. We're just better at sharing now in a digital medium.

Jason Rigby (05:18):

Yeah. But whenever I look at data and you've mentioned this a million times and we always want it, is that on that end result is that it is a person.

Alexander McCaig (05:29):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (05:29):

And it is us living our life in the way that we choose to live the life now, is not just sharing stories, but with the advent of the internet and social media and everything that we do, IoT devices, everything that we do, we're just creating this amount of data. So we're recreating this DNA of us.

Alexander McCaig (05:50):

Yeah. We're sharing more of us.

Jason Rigby (05:52):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (05:55):

It's a real digital identity.

Jason Rigby (05:59):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (05:59):

Right? It's the true digital picture of who you are online. And when I say picture, it's the totality of you. It's just your thoughts and all your biomarkers. It's your habits and preferences just as much as me sitting here saying I prefer round tables rather than square ones.

Jason Rigby (06:15):

But I mean to say, philosophical in this, and I didn't mean to interrupt you, but Alex, I think this is very, very important. Our data is our thoughts.

Alexander McCaig (06:24):

That is precisely correct. Everything in this world is dependent on thoughts, absolutely everything. Me choosing to walk out of a room, pick up my phone, go to work, do something at work, eat food, whatever it might be, a thought has to begin first before I go out and do something. Even people will say, "Well, I subconsciously do that." Well, you had to have thoughts first to build up that subconscious so it became a repetitive thing. But really everything that happens, these material interactions that get recorded on data, it all is the sequence of thoughts, driving all of those things.

Alexander McCaig (06:59):

So this grouped consciousness that we're recording, but we're doing like a piss-poor job is what people call it, of taking these massive amount of recorded information and putting it towards in a focus that actually makes us more wise. And what we've done is that we've taken all this big data and this ability to capture, inscribe information and used it strictly in a capitalistic format. And it's debilitating us, it's debilitating our evolution. And it's also separative. And as an easy example that we have talked about is just what happens in marketing. It's like you see those biases, you put people into buckets and boxes, but you're doing it for them because you've collected this info. So you, as the scribe...

Alexander McCaig (07:45):

It reminds me of the old days. The only person that could write the history was the person that could write. So it was only from their view. But what about the view from everybody? We have the ability to do that. We've just chose not to do it. And so what benefit to our evolution in any sort of philosophical sense or what it means to think for any sort of positive benefit, are we really laying that proper groundwork?

Alexander McCaig (08:07):

And so the thing is we need to facilitate whatever that zeal is, like that point, that apex that we want to get to, that final point of evolution for us. Or what is the zeal, like a part of the big seven? We have all this data, we're collecting it. We are all our own scribes now. So we need to take that responsibility and be like, this is how I'm going to define it from my perspective. And then we look at that in the collective sense, the collective sense of all of our thoughts, because those thoughts lead to those actions, preferences, biomarkers. My biomarkers are dependent on the things I'm putting inside my body. And if there's genetic things that I can't handle, that's because of the choices of people in my past family lineage-

Jason Rigby (08:44):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (08:44):

... from their thoughts that have affected my genetics now. Absolutely everything in this world is dependent on those thoughts. So we need to take the power, the might of our thoughts and bring them together in a collective, a unifying format to focus on elevating us and our planet, because right now we've completely disregarded it.

Alexander McCaig (09:03):

So when T.S. Eliot, a phenomenal poet and author said, "Where is life? Where's the life we have lost in living?" Where is the life? We've separated away from it. We've come to a capitalistic recording, but it's all about users and numbers, but it's not actually about people and their evolution individually. It's not about a respecting of their thoughts. And then he says, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?" Wisdom is an application of experience and knowledge, pairing those things together. But we are not taking the knowledge we have and pairing it with proper experience. We're losing all that wisdom. So even though we're collecting all these things, what we assume is knowledge, it's not applied properly, so you have no wisdom.

Alexander McCaig (09:46):

And then the last part is, "Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" We've become inundated. We've now captured more and more and more of it. It's this culture, it's this capitalistic idea of, I need to hoard. And in doing so, you take three different steps of degradation. You have a lack of respect for thoughts and how it defines your world, just because you think materially more and more and more is better when really, it divides, erodes, gets rid of wisdom. Does that philosophically makes sense?

Jason Rigby (10:14):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (10:15):

I feel like I'm hammering you.

Jason Rigby (10:17):

No, no, no. I love it. I love that. And that's the first part. So data's our thoughts and I want to stay with that. And then the next part of the funnel is information. And you were getting into that here in a second. But when we look at the information and I think let's stay with that. So this consumption mentality that we have, consume, consume, consume, and then the rest of the world that may not be to the level we are, they're like, we need to consume, consume, consume to get to that level. They have this whole desire and then social media is now put out everywhere. So if we're elevating humanity for more consumption, that's a false narrative. And it's a destructive narrative.

Alexander McCaig (10:56):

T.S. Eliot would love the fact that you used the word narrative.

Jason Rigby (10:58):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (10:59):

False and destructive. But think about the word information, Jason, in-form-ation. When you think about the mind, there's plasticity to it, it's plastic. It can be molded. So it's in an internal forming of something, but we're not internally forming anything. Actually, we're creating less value for ourselves in our consciousness, in life, in our own evolution because of all this data coming in and we can't inform properly on it because it's not collected and respected properly as it should be. There's no information, there's no molding of those things that need to be molded. You need to mold and work things. And through that work you can remove errors. And after you've recognized an error and you don't commit it again, now you're evolving. But we're committing the same errors over and over and over again. There's no real informing that's happening.

Jason Rigby (11:49):

I want to get into this information because I don't want to stop you right there because this is really, really good. So whenever I have the ability to create something, I'm going to mold and make something, use that. So I want to take the analogy of, I have the ability and the power to whether I'm Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, whoever it may be, all these great inventions, George Washington Carver-

Alexander McCaig (12:14):

Nikola Tesla.

Jason Rigby (12:14):

Nikola Tesla. Yeah. I have this amazing mind to be able to create something. So I take in all this data, I take in all this information and now I have the ability. And in that choice, I have that responsibility with that information to create. And what is my intention in creating this?

Alexander McCaig (12:37):

Yeah. How do you want to mold that world? What is the intention of I've taken this information, it has no biasy to it, how am I going to filter it?

Jason Rigby (12:48):

But we have the power to mold.

Alexander McCaig (12:49):

We have the power to mold.

Jason Rigby (12:51):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (12:51):

Don't let someone mold your future for you. You need to mold it. And imagine if you have a little ball of clay and a billion other people do, and you're like, let's mold a huge statue. Well, it's going to be the biggest statue around. There's collective power in that molding. And then say, here's my little mold, right? If I want to mold a big dome of safety over me, well, one little thing is not going to do it, but if we can bring everybody together and build a huge one, then we can all sit underneath it. That's what you need to [inaudible 00:13:18]. Viktor Schauberger, just another good inventor. I just want to bring that up. But that sort of molding is important. It's one that happens with the thoughts and it's one that is molded with data into this material world.

Jason Rigby (13:28):

But when we look at great inventions or we look at things that have catapulted our destiny to where we're at now, especially in technology where we're seeing this as the new. In the Industrial Revolution, we talked about that 4.0. And we have this responsibility to take this information and create. And I want to transition this. How do we begin to understand thoughts, data, information, creating, responsibility, and bring it into knowledge in this collective knowledge that helps humanity?

Alexander McCaig (14:02):

The first thing you have to realize is that the world is changing in its ability to share information. So when you look at data, all you need to look at it is my thoughts are just being captured digitally. Everything about what I do now has an ability to be scribed down. And quite effortlessly in some facets. And so if the labor has been removed for me to record something and the ability for me to share it has become much more seamless, much more fungible, movable back and forth, then it would behoove me and all the other people that have this ability through their cellphone to share information, right, this data, these things about you as the progenitor of this to mold our future. You need to take the responsibility in doing so. No one's going to force you to do it.

Alexander McCaig (15:01):

But if you can wake up to the fact that your thoughts, your dreams, literally everything that is their conscious and subconscious and unconscious, all of those can elevate you yourself, if you're worried about you, or they can elevate the collective. So the question is, do you want to take the capturing of those thoughts and then apply it into your daily experience, in the experience of all of humanity across the globes, that we can all become wise. And just remember that the base of everything, even though it is digital, are your thoughts. That is the key driver.

Alexander McCaig (15:35):

So if there's one focus, one realization that you have to have, before you even use a system like TARTLE or anything else, is that your thoughts are driving all of it. You have to be people first, and for you, you have to be yourself first. And the only way you can do that is by knowing your thoughts. And if you can show me how well you know your thoughts, and you can capture it here digitally and share it with the world, the better you can do that, the quicker we're all going to find positive benefits.

Jason Rigby (16:04):

Yeah. And I love the analogy that they used as a skier. And I want to get into this and then we're going to get into the last of wisdom. He said, it's perhaps like a skier who's experienced the data points of snow and conditions in the mountains, most days of their life. So let's take this high-level 25, 30 year skier of that one mountain they've just known. Maybe they work there or whatever.

Alexander McCaig (16:25):

They can read it.

Jason Rigby (16:26):

They began to observe predictable patterns and then gradually instill these into knowledge of the relationships between the weather and avalanche risk. And over a lifetime of building, I like to use we're creating, and applying such knowledge, they may develop instincts and behaviors for predicting risk and living with the mountain. That may even be called wisdom.

Alexander McCaig (16:46):

Right. So remember how I said, you still think first before it becomes subconscious, and then you do it automatically. That's that process. So over so much time of distilling down truth, from their thoughts and observation, they've culminated, molded this huge ball of wisdom. And with this wisdom, they can apply it for their own health and safety. So if you consider an avalanche, something that wipes out all of humanity, it would really make sense for all of us to start to pay attention and to aggregate that information and build it into our subconscious. And at the same time, create wisdom from it. Wouldn't it? So that our habits begin to change as we begin to internally reflect on who we are by using something like TARTLE or being that skier or being a Sherpa that knows how to read the thermals that come across Everest, so you know that we shouldn't go up right now because we're definitely going to die.

Alexander McCaig (17:38):

Those are some things we need to begin to focus on, but that is a change in that consciousness. It's a change in those thoughts. And from an incentive structure of sharing your data and putting it towards those causes, you are naturally molding your thoughts and your subconscious towards a more positive evolutive future for everyone just through interacting with the TARTLE marketplace, because you're asking yourself to really interact with you, interact with your own internal values. You're checking yourself, you're in review of who you are. And then when you share that, you're like, oh, it's interesting to see what other people view me and my more truthful thoughts. It actually carries more value for them. Why wouldn't I want to be more truthful? Why wouldn't I want to show my creativity or go into deeper parts about me and my preferences? I would want to do something like that. And then availability of information gets distilled down into that knowledge, data, information, knowledge, experience, wisdom.

Jason Rigby (18:35):

So whenever we look at wisdom, and right now we see the scientific community, higher learning and we view that as wisdom, especially when we're looking at whether it be climate stability, human rights, public health, any of that. We have these certain people and they've written white papers and books and textbooks. And that is our level of wisdom and those are the gatekeepers of wisdom, like you mentioned the scribe earlier.

Alexander McCaig (19:05):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (19:06):

But in this new decentralized world that we're coming into, this Industrial Revolution of 4.0-

Alexander McCaig (19:13):

The hierarchies disappear.

Jason Rigby (19:14):

And all of this data, information and knowledge begins to flow as we're getting more and it becomes decentralized. How do we, as humanity, take this responsibility, grab onto the reins of this crazy horse and each of us begin to have wisdom with this data?

Alexander McCaig (19:37):

Yeah. I think when we realize that the world's decentralized, it's a massive connected web. So a spider, it can sense on the furthest part of its web, a little bit of a disruption, whatever that vibration might have been. It's not at the center, it's not the collective, but something small happened over here that actually had a resonant effect across everything. So with you taking those reins, it might not seem like something massive is really happening, but the amount of power you have in sharing, creating that little bit of resonance through that silk line that's been spun by the spider is going to have a monumental awakening.

Alexander McCaig (20:22):

So if like the big body of resource holders are that spider with its eight legs... I don't know if arachnids have eight legs. Yeah. Maybe six. I don't know. I'm lost. But I want you to continue to tap those lines, wake it up, tell that spider where to go and where to look, because right now it's just guessing, spinning webs everywhere, but it's really unsure of where to put its resources and its time. Help become instinctual about it. Take those reins and show that you in South Sudan, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, wherever it might be, Northern Siberia, have the ability to affect what's going on three, five, 10,000 miles away. Create a little bit of that resonance. And lucky for you we've designed the TARTLE marketplace so that it can show you that impact.

Alexander McCaig (21:12):

But the question is, are you going to elevate that impact or are you just going to watch it sit there dead, dull, dying, stagnant, and lacking evolution? See how much you can move it up a couple notches.

Jason Rigby (21:26):

So I mean to close because I want to make sure that people understand this data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and we look at... In the poem, he said, "Where is the life we have lost in living?" So I want to close on this. When we look at living, all of us have this desire to live.

Alexander McCaig (21:46):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (21:47):

Not just live, like in the sense of just have a life and do your 09:00 to 05:00. We're all seeking this ability to have comfort-

Alexander McCaig (21:54):

Purpose.

Jason Rigby (21:54):

We want to live. Yeah, purpose. And I know we've addressed these big seven and we've gone over them and everybody can, and we're going to do seven big podcasts on them. But what does living look like and that responsibility that each person must take when they're creating so much data? And I know, like you said, we need to touch the points and I get that metaphor of the spider, which is the big companies coming in and we can tell them what to do. We can eat organic food and do all those things. But our day to day life, the things that we're doing specifically, how cognizant of the data that we create, should we be?

Alexander McCaig (22:35):

You should be 1000% cognizant. You should be as cognizant as you are when you say something in public. You don't want to say anything that is separative or can get you in trouble. Right? You really shouldn't. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but everything's up to you. You've got your own free will. You don't want to walk around and just be like a vocalized racist.

Jason Rigby (22:56):

Right.

Alexander McCaig (22:56):

Do you? You need to be cognizant of those thoughts. You need to be cognizant of what you're saying and your behaviors, because it's all recorded. And even when you think it isn't being recorded, I can guarantee you it is. There's always a watching eye and it's not what you do when people are looking. It's what you do when people aren't looking. So be cognizant of that. And there's great power in the choices you begin to make when you think about when the cameras are off, because that's who you really are. And when you find those times of struggle, like we're in now, as a human race, these things we're facing, that's when we need to find out who we really are. And that's going to require some cognizant, some self-awareness. And that will trickle down to these important things, right? And data will just help you be more cognizant of what you're doing because human beings naturally forget, do we not?

Jason Rigby (23:49):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (23:49):

If we remembered everything, our brains would shut down. We're naturally designed to forget things. And it's good that that's, that way. But the things that are really important, the things that leave a real impression or impact on you, be cognizant of that, be cognizant of those major errors.

Jason Rigby (24:04):

And then you doing good and seven other billion people doing good, now we have a changed planet.

Alexander McCaig (24:12):

We do, and not changed for the sake of change, but changed for the sake of life.

Jason Rigby (24:16):

Living.

Alexander McCaig (24:17):

That's what living is. Everyone deserves and has the right to evolution. All of us. The question is, are you willing to take that thing that you were gifted, right, that's yours? But we're not doing that right now. We've been ignoring it. So we're just saying, be cognizant of what your thoughts and what you say and what you do and take the reins of your own life.

Jason Rigby (24:45):

And to end this, if you want to be a part of a collective movement and you want to live, every single person matters. So every single person needs to go to tartle.co and sign up. Okay. So now that sounds like a sales pitch. It sounds like, "Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

Alexander McCaig (25:06):

We're not selling. I think we just educated on the matter.

Jason Rigby (25:10):

So why is it so important for all of humanity to sign up for tartle.co?

Alexander McCaig (25:15):

Why is it important?

Jason Rigby (25:16):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alexander McCaig (25:17):

Because you deserve economic opportunity, you deserve a stable globe and you deserve to learn about your own self-responsibility. You deserve to take hold of the reigns of your future, which you have given over to the few. It's time for you to step up. And if you don't do so, we're going to continually get screwed. So the importance of all of us signing up means we as people, individuals, and as a collective, have the power to change our world really for the better because I want to continue to live. I want to continue to evolve. I want my children to live and evolve and their children and their children's children. That's what we need to focus on. It's not just about you anymore. Realize how interconnected everything is. Realize that it is bigger than just me here and we will try and visually show you that, but all of us signing up is important for now. And it's important for the next 1,000 years. It's to change of our habits. It's to change your future. It's to become a data champion.

Jason Rigby (26:24):

And I think we'll end on that.

Speaker 1 (26:35):

Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and the sourced data defines the path. What's your data worth?