02 How Can the West Coast Redesign Itself? With Mickey McManus
Like, what if we were a sanctuary country like nobody's ever had before? What if we said, you know, we're gonna build a new Statue Of Liberty on the West Coast, and it's gonna be for everybody. Because we know the best and brightest are scattered all over the world, and we know hybrid vigor works. And so we're gonna actually build and fill every single building that we have with people. We're gonna have 50% women entrepreneurs in this brand new country, and we're gonna do everything for that so that half the sky is not lost.
Mickey McManus:Right? Because generally, half of humanity is is female and half is male. What if we double down on those things and say, let's take those to the extremes? Let's become extremists in a different direction.
Greg Amrofell:Welcome to Pacific Time, the podcast where we ask the big what if questions about the future of the West Coast, its challenges, its opportunities, and the potential for independence. I'm your host, Greg Ammerfeld. Is there truly such a thing as independence? Or do we do better to explore how to enable the best forms of interdependence? Paying attention to biology, to system science, and to the ways innovation happens in nature offers us some great clues about how we might design a more perfect union in a world that's more connected than ever.
Greg Amrofell:The challenge is drawing in the right lessons and creating the right conditions. My guest today is Mickey McManus, someone who has thought about interdependence in many, many ways. Mickey is a visionary thinker in AI, bioengineering, and systems innovation. For my money, he's an absolute hero in American design and someone who I've been lucky to call a longtime friend and mentor. Miki was the CEO at Maya Design, the Pittsburgh based company that pioneered the ways design thinking could go far beyond making something look great on a page or on a screen.
Greg Amrofell:Now Mickey's based in the San Francisco Bay Area and continues his groundbreaking work. He's a visiting scholar at Tufts University, a strategic advisor at BCG. He's a venture catalyst with Totally on Board, and he has his own playground at t minus one ventures. Mickey has spent decades looking at the future, not just in theory, but in practice, helping leaders and organizations make sense of and create systems. He's one of those brilliant creative people who knows a lot about a lot of things and makes connections you've never considered before.
Greg Amrofell:His explanations, ideas, and questions draw on many disciplines, from the lessons of biology to the power of hybrid vigor, from the role of AI in shaping policy to the role of government funded innovation. This fun discussion is packed with insight and imagination. I started the conversation with Mickey by asking him, what if the West Coast was independent?
Mickey McManus:So what does independence mean? Because I I think I could reframe that as what if the West Coast were interdependent. Because the West Coast is made up of lots of things depending on how how far north you go and how far south you go as well. There's no reason that what we have experimented on in terms of nation states or organizing principles for large amounts of people is fixed. I I it's not like, hey.
Mickey McManus:We invented the only things that could ever be invented. Hey. The US was the last time we had this weird experiment. I think there are all sorts of other ways that this could play out. What I'd love to see is is a serious effort to say, what are the best things that we can learn from the past?
Mickey McManus:De Tocqueville wandered through America, you know, in in the early days, and he wrote this amazing kind of travelogue going through America, you know, in the in the let's say, it was the eighteen hundreds. And, and you read it, and he actually identified how things could go really wrong. And we read it during the July 4 '1 year, and, and it was actually pretty surprising. So so there are a lot of signals. And I also think it's it's easy to burn things down.
Mickey McManus:It's really hard to build things, and you can't necessarily do that. So I would say, what is the best what is the best that we can cherish and make sure we don't lose from what we maybe have all experienced as a wonderful country? And how could we bring that to to the West Coast? How could how could the Pacific Coast be a new kind of entity? Of course, independence implies that you've gotta have a way to have citizens.
Mickey McManus:You've gotta have a way to decide who is and who isn't a citizen. You know, it's interesting, secretary of state, you know, is someone who helps manage how how, let's say, the Pacific Coast deals with all the other places in the world. Right? Because it's not a global country or something. It's a place.
Mickey McManus:You have to deal with defense to protect your citizens. You have to pick up the garbage every day, and you've got to, like, help them have a livelihood. It comes out of a lot of, I think, tech technocrats or engineers who don't quite understand humans. They think, oh, you know, in the future, we won't need to work, and it'll be perfect. And I think people don't quite understand that actually work is what gives us meaning, and and and it's what fulfills us.
Mickey McManus:And it's actually a core part of it. We need to do things. We can't help ourselves, actually. We can't we can't just sit. And having goals and having a goal directedness as a new entity, an independent entity, what would those goals be for the Pacific Coast?
Mickey McManus:I I think that would be an interesting question. And how might we simulate those? Because we we've come a long way. We understand system science now more than ever, complex systems. We understand a lot more things.
Mickey McManus:How might we have a way to do what ifs so we don't have to have a civil war because, you know, version one point o of America didn't make a lot of sense or because of slavery or something? And, you know, I think of America was an interesting beta product. You know, we we had some good things. We we screwed up some things even after the civil war didn't really last, then we had to have, you know, the civil rights movement. It was it was successive approximation, right, to form a more perfect union, but it wasn't saying it was a perfect union.
Mickey McManus:And and I wonder how we might learn from that, but also learn from some amazing stuff that's happening in the Nordic countries or learn from India or learn from China or learn from Europe, learn from the different spaces or South America and say, what are some of the things that humans have just invented that are glorious that helped organize people and help provide some platform for them to learn how to grow and thrive? Because I think that's what that's what a place does. Because a place exists in space and time, and it it's a concentrator of people and ideas and all sorts of things. So so how might we come up with some of the best of the best and and also come up with a way that we could simulate that without simulating on our only our only real place? Like, could we do what if thing in a more structured, yeah, way that would be, like, a little bit of thin Pacific Coast?
Greg Amrofell:Sim Pacific Coast. I like that idea. So there are two two threads I wanna pick up on. One is this this sort of reframe as interdependence. And I think you're talking there about kind of regional interdependence, but maybe also about the West Coast dependence on the rest of The US.
Greg Amrofell:From your perspective, what does the West Coast have to be thankful for being part of The United States?
Mickey McManus:You know, people across the country actually came to help with the wildfires in LA and, and have come out for other real tough disasters. And, I also think invention. I mean, you know, we wouldn't be able to do what we do unless we you know, I think the Silicon Valley and the West Coast benefited immensely from the first investors in the most crazy ideas. And those first investors were American taxpayers. You know, if you hold up a phone, almost all of this, all the coolest, weirdest technology, the first riskiest investor was probably a taxpayer who who funded DARPA.
Mickey McManus:That got us the GPS, that got us the processors, that got us the sensors. Those all came from investments by taxpayers that were taking the riskiest bets, but they were collectively betting on something that no one corporation would would ever and certainly no VC would ever have taken the risk on. You know, the VCs are the, like, the last investors, you know, who who take the easy bet at the end. They take the the kinda obvious thing. They're not the they're not the the risk takers.
Mickey McManus:And I and I do think the what the West Coast has benefited greatly from inventiveness. Thomas Jefferson was the first head of the patent office. And, you know, he said if you light a fire or a match and it's glowing, and then I take my match and I light your match, I still have a fire and you still have a fire. And that's how ideas are. And in fact, the patent office was one of the first open source efforts because it was like, if you could document it in a way that a a person from that area could replicate what you did and you published it as this thing called a patent, and we would give you a little protection for seventeen years, you know, and only a negative protection.
Mickey McManus:We didn't give you the rights to make it. We just gave you the rights to say, hey. I invented it first. You should pay me licensing. It will go into the commons.
Mickey McManus:And, you know, Ben Franklin ran this amazing program around inventions and inventing, and we saw that coming out of Philadelphia. And then we had inventions across the country that have changed everyone's lives. So so, I mean, I think we are indebted to to that. And, also, there's a great migration of just people that bring what's called hybrid vigor. In biology, you see that any species that becomes a monoculture and is super insulated, when things change, they die.
Mickey McManus:The whole species dies because they're a monoculture, because they don't have hybrid vigor. And the glory, I think, of America when it has worked well, and I think we've all benefited from, is that it is a it is real hybrid vigor. You get the wildest combinations of people in your own family and and, new people coming in, and and we have welcomed, you know, people for a long time. And I I hope we don't lose that.
Greg Amrofell:I wanted to flip that question around, and perhaps you could put a lens on it through the events we're reading about day to day. How is all of what you just described in this great inheritance that the West Coast has from being part of The US? How is that under threat right now?
Mickey McManus:You know, I don't I don't wanna know if I wanna get into the to the gritty day to day stuff. I think there is a lot of venal, selfish, freeloading going on right now. You know, they're telling us a good story about cutting corruption and waste and things. But but managing a family or managing a company is very different than managing a country. And someone has to be, confident enough in the future that they place bets that are longer term bets.
Mickey McManus:And I think what we're doing at at this very moment is we're sort of capitalizing on forty or fifty years of amazing bets, and we're saying, never mind. We don't need that anymore. And you're right. Probably for a little while, you don't. But then things are gonna get creakier and creakier, and infrastructure is gonna fall apart.
Mickey McManus:And and cultural infrastructure, social infrastructure, it's probably gonna go first just because of, you know, Stewart Brand had that concept of pace layering. You know, fashion is at the very top, and and then you have, you know, commerce, and then you have infrastructure, and then you have culture. And those pace layers move at different rates. And I think we've invested a lot. So even investing in artists and saying art matters.
Mickey McManus:Marshall McLuhan in when the rise of television was happening, he was a media theorist, and he coined the idea. The medium is the is the message. And there was a follow on to that that was called the medium is the massage because somebody misunderstood him. But he actually said, actually, I like that, and they published another book called the medium is the massage. And the notion was, you know, the media is so powerful.
Mickey McManus:The medium, in this case, television back then, is so powerful that it's kind of like the thief who arrives at night with a giant porterhouse steak and gives it to the guard dog so they can rob your house. And and that's what, like, television was so seductive that it kind of had this impact. And the good news is Congress passed something that led to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and that led to PBS and things like that, which was about cross cutting not for corporate demands and needs and short term, you know, profiteering, but cross cutting about literacy about this new medium. And and, I think that informs me quite a lot, which is we have to pay attention to what's happening right now in the context of the medium and the media that that we're living within. But a third another thing he said that I that I always remember is he said artists are the distant early warning signals for culture.
Mickey McManus:So, now this is during the Cold War. It was the fifties. Do you know what the distant early warning stations were?
Greg Amrofell:I don't.
Mickey McManus:So they were called the dew line. And the dew line was the distant early warning line that was put along Alaska and along the North that had radar dishes and things to see if, if Russia was sending nuclear bombs across. And they were the distant early warning signal so that we would be prepared for a hot war if the cold war heated up. And he said artists are the distant early warning signals of culture. And I thought that was really interesting because, you know, artists are not doing something for the man.
Mickey McManus:The you know, they're not they're not doing something for corporate greed. They're doing something as their own reflection on whatever they're experiencing in the moment, on whatever their journey themselves is. And that richness that we have supported artists Mhmm. That we don't demand every single artist be a struggling artist. We don't demand the struggle.
Mickey McManus:We actually have a National Endowment of the Arts. We have you know, we we encourage these things. That's foundational to our culture, but not obvious because it's social infrastructure. And and so I think we could throw a lot of it out tomorrow, and a lot of it is being thrown out at the American level. But I think beware because because that means you're you're losing a chance to discover what's really happening, and you're losing a chance that enriches us in ways that other things don't.
Mickey McManus:And and I think it's part of a rich culture.
Greg Amrofell:I mean, I'm not surprised to hear you talking about DARPA, and I'm sure you would add to that. NIH is another funder of very direct kind of scientific innovation. But it's so interesting to hear you add into it the National Endowment of the Arts and and public broadcasting as, you know, part of the inheritance about creating a creative, innovative culture. So let's talk about that, Miki. You know, again, take the premise that the West Coast wants to be and should be independent.
Greg Amrofell:How would you define an innovation economy for that West Coast that builds on that American inheritance and does better?
Mickey McManus:Yeah. Well, I'm always kind of curious about almost the holographic approach. You know, how do you how do you have almost fractal or holographic layers of these things? So I don't know if I'd want a secretary of state, but I might want a secretary of states. You know, like, sort of what's my mindset today?
Mickey McManus:Do I feel like I wanna hide away, or do I feel creative? And I almost wonder if we invert some of the things that we think about today in terms of how do we help more people in the Pacific Coast find that moment, you know, in in, the Spanish language. There's a word, called duende. And duende is like when you're dancing and you suddenly have this flourish and and there's this, it's almost like you're touched by by a spirit, and you are just doing things. And, and if you're ever making something or if you're innovating or you're you're helping to build something, there's this there are these moments when you have invited Duende in, you know, and it doesn't happen.
Mickey McManus:You just it feels like you're slogging through. And then suddenly, they show up. It's the imp of the perverse, and you're like, everything's happening, and people talk about the flow state and things. And thousands of years ago, some of the early, you know, Greeks spoke about eudaimonia or I think. And it was this this kind of essence of a state of mind.
Mickey McManus:And I wonder, could the West Coast be that? Could it capture that and could it help that? Now now should it be states? You know, would there be states in the Pacific Coast? Should it be cities?
Mickey McManus:Because cities are incredibly powerful. And if you look at, there's a wonderful book called the the history of future cities, and it looks at four different cities that were totally artificially made, as future cities. And it follows up over decades of how they actually turned out. And there's some glorious things that happen because cities are these kind of they're big enough to matter. You've gotta collect the garbage.
Mickey McManus:You gotta do it. People really live there. They have real communities, but they're small enough that you can know everybody. You know, I was just talking to somebody from Phoenix, and they're like, it's a big city, but you need you need to know, like, eight people. And you know you know how to get stuff done in the city.
Mickey McManus:You know? And so it's so it's really interesting. And and and if you look over the ebb and flow of nation states and nations and things like that, there are some cities that you can find that have been around for thousands of years, and they're still around. So I wonder, you know, should it be more of a network of state of cities? And that becomes the new unit, you know, of innovation and the new unit of things.
Mickey McManus:And then it's about sort of the ebb and flow between them and and what are the ways that we can use the region we're in to have its definitive space, whatever it's kind of path dependency was so that we can double down on those. And we don't try to replicate the same, you know, the same innovation district in every single place or something, but we say, actually, no. This is uniquely shaped. One last point on this is that I've spent a lot of time, exploring what's called embodied cognition or embodied intelligence. And the next wave of AI is actually gonna be about embodied intelligence.
Mickey McManus:We're we're dabbling with large language models and agents, and that's all that's all fine. But that's not really gonna get us to where where the next wave is. And the next wave is what we find in cells, and it's what we find in cephalopods, and it's what we find in crowds, and it's what we find in communities. And it is embodied intelligence. The the embodiment matters.
Mickey McManus:So I also say if it's going to be the Pacific Coast, how do we have a deeply embodied intelligence? How do we actually take advantage of that that location? Because because place matters.
Greg Amrofell:What do you mean by embodied intelligence?
Mickey McManus:There's just wild things going on here around something called morphogenesis. You'll have to get another guest to speak about this. But if you look at an embryo, is it one embryo? Actually, no. It's a whole bunch of cells.
Mickey McManus:And all the cells are kind of trying to collaborate and convince themselves to all make one bean. But if you took, like, a a frog embryo and you took a little, knife and you just sliced a few slices like little scratches. You just you could even use a pen and scratch. You scratched it, you get six frogs. So it's not that there's one embryo there.
Mickey McManus:There's actually the potentiality for many. And so the cells all have to recruit each other through electrical patterns, through chemical patterns, through their proximity, their embodied proximity. When there's only one cell and it splits and becomes two cells, that cell next to it is sending different chemical signals than the cell got by itself. And then it becomes four, and then it becomes eight, and then it becomes you. Right?
Mickey McManus:And some of those cells agree that they should become a toe, and some of those cells agree that they should become a brain. But there's actually some wild stuff that we're discovering in biology that that cells actually, all the way up to humans, all the way up to to societies, have a huge amount of goal directed potentiality. I'll give you a very simple example. You could take a tadpole. I'll just stay on the frog thing.
Mickey McManus:You could take a tadpole, and if you look at it through an electrical, electrical phosphorescence and you look, you'll actually see these two little glows of electricity, and you can detect certain kind of chemicals. And a little while later, eyes show up on the tadpole. So something is something knows where the eye should go. So there's an embodied intelligence before there's a brain, and and it's and it's doing this stuff. Now here's the weird thing.
Mickey McManus:If you take that electrical signal and you replicate that signal in its tail and you you put a little bit of the chemical signals, the cells in the tail, these are not special pluripotent stem cells. They're not whatever. The cells in the tail grow an eye because they all get get recruited into the same collective idea of this embodiment, and they all collaborate and decide, let's create an eye. They create an eye, and they grow neurons to connect to the spinal cord, and the eye works. So so we have this belief, and that's not any genetic modification.
Mickey McManus:It's this collectivism. And so there's there are deep patterns in this. And and in fact, at the higher level communities, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in 02/2008. She studied lobster fisheries in the Northeast. She studied collectives in, you know, Holland for for for growing flowers and stuff.
Mickey McManus:And she found resilient patterns of prosocial behaviors, eight design principles that occur again and again and again that reduced freeloading, that that actually reduced, you know, trolling and all the things that happen in communities, and actually amplified prosociality over over, like, centuries in some cases. And she won a Nobel for this. But these patterns, why wouldn't we build them into our new our new nation, our new thing, whatever whatever we're gonna call it, our new potentiality?
Greg Amrofell:It strikes me that you're talking with with your discussion of embodied intelligence, you're talking both about a a concept that could be harnessed by the next waves of AI, but you you are also talking about unearthing that capacity in the formation of societies and, kind of letting letting embodied intelligence take us toward, you know, toward our potential. Is that is that a fair summary?
Mickey McManus:Yeah. I think so. And also learning some of the patterns because we are humbled before before nature. But learning some of the patterns that actually humans have figured out to create cities, to create to create societies that are that are self sustaining and growing so that we don't just take the obvious ones, but we look at the the social infrastructure that we could put in place. A real simple way to think about embodied intelligence is today's AI systems.
Mickey McManus:Like, if you were to get into one of the autonomous vehicles in here that go that go in the city. If you printed out a sticker that looks like kind of a a psychedelic toaster, and you just print it out and you stuck it on the stop sign, the autonomous vehicle will drive right past it because the autonomous vehicle doesn't have multiple modes of sensing enough and a model of what the world looks like inside of its head that's been built by embodiment. It just has this statistical calculation. It goes, wow. There's probably a big psychedelic toaster on the side of the road, and it drives right past the stop sign.
Mickey McManus:And that's called, adversarial attack. And there are lots of adversarial attacks that are fairly trivial to do. It's kinda like an optical illusion that you or I might have, where in most situations, your brain can figure out what's looking at. But, you know, if you sometimes, you know, you see that thing and it looks like it's a cube, but then when you move your head a little bit, it's actually got these weird pieces of metal, you know, floating. And that's because our brains have these shortcuts.
Mickey McManus:But all the AI today, they don't have a model that is getting better over time. You do. We call it wisdom if you live long enough. And you're constantly embodying your learning. You're building a model of the universe in your head, and then you're moving your embodiment.
Mickey McManus:You're moving to actually change and update that model. So you see an optical illusion, and then you go like this. You don't just sit there. You're like this. You move your head.
Mickey McManus:You're embodied, and suddenly you see it's an optical illusion or you listen to it or you tap it. You know? So you use a different sense, and you're updating your model. Now now the notion is how did biology in a in a universe that is entropic, that is constantly moving towards disorder, how did life pop out? And there's a theory from physics called the Friston free energy principle that says somehow life was able to find a place where free energy existed in that rise, and that comes through embodiment.
Mickey McManus:And that leads to this notion of of active inference. You've got a little baby model, whether you're a cell or whether you're a person or whether you're a society, of how the world works. And then you get surprised by something called surprisal. You you you have the surprisal emotion. I'm surprised because something happened.
Mickey McManus:And then you go out and you try something, like move your hand. And suddenly, you see the action, and then you update your model. And that's called active inference. And and, and that's as I said, that's gonna that's gonna radically change the way we do intelligence in in distributed and and AI systems. But it's also something that I think you could apply to to society, especially if we were building it now because we've learned all this stuff over the twentieth century.
Greg Amrofell:Yeah. Go with me for a sec. I mean, it strikes me Thanks for the reference to to Ostrom's work. I mean, it strikes me that American society has become less resilient, less prosocial, but it's also a reflection of a series of hacks on top of the existing operating instructions, which were laid out in the constitution and the amendments. Right?
Mickey McManus:Who could have predicted so long ago?
Greg Amrofell:Yeah. Two hundred and fifty years ago is a long that's a long run. So that that's the the question. Like, you know, is the idea of the West Coast such a crazy idea, you know, it becoming independent? Because we may need to sort of start fresh in order to build a new set of instructions that take advantage of all that we all that we understand now about how to build a a better working, better functioning society.
Mickey McManus:Yeah. I would hope we would pull in lots of threads on this and try to understand that. I would say the opposite of saying, let's make the West Coast its own new entity independent. The opposite of that is what some sort of naive tech billionaires do. You You know, here in California, a bunch of them got together, and they bought up a bunch of land out in the middle of the farm area.
Mickey McManus:And their dream and we see this in The Middle East as well, you know, building the line and building these these things that are kind of like the opposite of a thriving place to live. But they're, you know, some very wealthy chic in this case who thinks it. But we see we see this in Silicon Valley as well. They bought up a bunch of land, and they're like, we're gonna build a utopia. We're gonna it'll be, like, autonomous this, and it'll be, you know you know, special transporters with whatever and stuff.
Mickey McManus:And and what they always do is they go, yeah. And we'll do this on an island. We'll build an island, or we'll we're gonna build a thing and, you know, and we won't have to deal with pesky pesky humans. You know, we won't have to deal with, like, the people who actually pick up our garbage or the people who actually deal with this stuff. We we yeah.
Mickey McManus:We'll just start from scratch, you know, because because there are bugs in the system. And I actually think, no. If you were if you were doing the West Coast as an entity, you have to deal with the people that are there. They're actually not bugs. They're features.
Mickey McManus:They're like humans. Humans are glorious. How do we organize them? How do we help them thrive? You know, and prepare for uncertainty because that's kind of ultimately what we have to do.
Greg Amrofell:So let's in our waiting minutes here, Mickey, let's play what if. So I start with the question, what if the West Coast was independent? But what's what's another what if question you might ask down the down the line of, of where you were just going?
Mickey McManus:Yeah. Well, I think historically, the reason, you know, the reason you had nation states was because you probably had some kind of natural resource that you could exploit and some kind of, way to defend it. And those would balkanize into some kind of a form. Another what if might be, what if our ideas about even how we defend ourselves were were totally different? What if having a military, in the form that it's in now is just something we look back on and go, oh, isn't that cute?
Mickey McManus:You know, that's like they had bows and arrows. Isn't that adorable? You know, what what if security were a wildly different idea? And I don't know the answer to that. I I just think we're at this moment where there is an awful lot that could happen that it might be possible, I mean, with the rise of everything.
Greg Amrofell:I'll go further. Let's let's keep going. What if we recreated DARPA and the NIH on the West Coast?
Mickey McManus:Well and I think ARIA has tried to do that in The UK, post Brexit, and we'll see how that works. I think in some ways, what if we did the exact opposite? Like, what if we were a sanctuary country like nobody's ever had before? What if we said, you know, we're gonna build a new Statue Of Liberty on the West Coast, and it's gonna be for everybody? Because we know the best and brightest are scattered all over the world, and we know hybrid vigor works.
Mickey McManus:And so we're gonna actually build and fill every single building that we have with people. We're gonna have 50% women entrepreneurs in this brand new country, and we're gonna do everything for that so that so that half the sky is not lost. Right? Because half of, generally, half of of humanity is is female and half is male. What if we what if we double down on those things and say, let's take those to the extremes.
Mickey McManus:Let's become extremists in a different direction, which is the belief that that people are amazing.
Greg Amrofell:I'm gonna build on something else you said earlier. What if, given all the amazing AI technology and data that we have access to now, we could build a model for a West Coast society and simulate any kind of policy change before we made it, see what its effects would be and optimize any move we made.
Mickey McManus:Well, it is interesting. You know, there was a, the head, AI guy at Unity, which is a video game, you know, platform company, they were working with BMW to simulate a million years by spawning multiple Unity instances with humans and with cars and with weather so that they could basically train up autonomous vehicles in parallel across multiple things. I think we need to do that because we need to think about also what if laws weren't fixed, but they were actually algorithmic and they were dynamic. I don't know. You know?
Mickey McManus:I I think the that those are the kinds of things that you need a a simulation tool with agent based simulation. And you'd you'd have to have the AI, and you'd have to have all this stuff. But you'd also have to have good symbolic modeling of of the nouns and the verbs and the ways they work so that we end up with a real, you know, active inference model that gets better the same way cells do. Because right now, you know, we're not writing our government even as good as the way cells work in our body. And I think we could, because there's actually a deeper, weirder story about simulation.
Mickey McManus:But the whole point is it's not a good idea to do radical experiments on non redundant systems. Right. So right? So, like, less than 50 people between The UK, between London and New York did radical experiments in 02/2008 on a non redundant system called the worldwide economic system. And we ended up in a recession that was horrible and the collapse of major banks and things like that because they were just coming up with crazy creative things, and they were testing them on real on the entire worldwide economic system.
Mickey McManus:So it it's better to say, if it's a one way door, we better do lots of tests before we walk through that door.
Greg Amrofell:I love that. I mean, I think what you're saying is, what if what if we were designing government that was as intelligent and adaptive as biology Yeah. And worked on the timescales of biology where we take the time to to test out what we're gonna do? Yeah. That was an exhilarating dive into the future with Mickey McManus, one that challenged the way we think about innovation, governance, and what it means to build a society that truly thrives.
Greg Amrofell:If there's one thing to take away from this conversation, it's that the West Coast and any place looking to redefine itself has an opportunity to learn from nature, from history, and from emerging technologies to create something truly new. Mickey reminded us that the best societies don't just happen. They are designed with intention, built on adaptation, and refined through iteration. Whether it's rethinking how we simulate policy changes before we make them, doubling down on the creative energy of hybrid communities, or reimagining security and governance for a more interconnected world, the possibilities are vast. And ultimately, maybe the real question isn't just what if the West Coast were independent, but rather, what if we designed our future with as much intelligence and adaptability as life itself?
Greg Amrofell:Thank you for joining me on this episode of Pacific Time. If you enjoyed this discussion, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves to think big. Until next time, keep asking, what if and keep building toward the future we want to see.