In the latest Mindful Cyborgs Chris Dancy comes out of the Buddhist closet, we talk about the Dark Night of the Soul, the Abyss, and more. Here’s a taste:

CD: Yes, outcome attachment is probably my number one suffering point. The scariest things that I found at the conference was that over the 3, almost 4, years that I’ve been practicing awareness or contemplative practices or being in a beginners mind or meditation, impermanence, love and kindness. All these things, I’ve had periods where I’ve just felt really disconnected from the people around me and these are highly intelligent people or very, very tense people, much like myself. You kind of hang around people you are. So much so that at times I’ve felt profoundly sad, just profoundly depressed.

It comes during after periods of great meditation or just prolonged periods of awareness and I found that there’s something called dark night of the soul, which is a state and there’s actual terminology for this, which is a meditative psychosis. But it’s where people actually become unhinged or removed from the world that they perceive because they get so in touch with being aware that they physically feel disconnected to actually have a soul collapsing experience. Which I thought I was really along but when you get in a roomful of Buddhists and they start talking about their journey you’re just like, wow, I just thought it was me and I never would have admitted so loudly and now it’s actually pretty common.

KF: Yes, I had a similar experience when I was much younger, around 20, and I didn’t know what was going on with me for about a couple of years. I ended up hearing about a similar concept called the abyss. It’s part of cabalistic and part of western occult, a tradition as of western esotericism. But it’s a very similar idea of just becoming- I think they describe it as knowledge without understanding.

The situation where you start to understand and kind of go back to sort of Buddhist terminology, like you start to not to understand but to be aware of impermanence and to be aware of the malleability of certain aspects of reality but you haven’t really come to terms with it yet. You haven’t truly grasped the wisdom of that yet and it leaves you fairly unhinged. At least that’s my understanding of it and there’s probably a lot of people out there that would tell me that I’m completely wrong or that I’m equating things from two very different religious or spiritual practices and everything, but I don’t know. I see them as related, very similar and related aspects.

As always, you can find it on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher, or download it directly.

Show notes and transcript are here.

  • Transhumanist Manifesto 
  • “It’s impossible to have empathy in a world where there is no suffering”
  • Digitally firing and rewiring our of our digital Neocortex
  • Does using social media make us more aware of each other?
  • People are obsessed with Hans Rosling
  • Twitter gave me global awareness
  • Facebook and social obligation
  • Network dependent relationships
  • Gartner (IT Industry Analyst Firm – What does that Mean)
  • The ANAL-CYST quote of the week
  • Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech 2013 
  • The Hype Cycle vs Reality, being in the future is paying attention YESTERDAY
  • Ambient Backscatter Networking 
  • 3D printers are the photocopiers of tomorrow
  • Friend of the Quantified Self
OPRAH MOMENT:

None

WORD OF THE WEEK:

disillusionment – a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something is not as good as one believed it to be.

TWEET OF THE WEEK:

 

From MeFi: “unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.”

— Bill Bradford (@mrbill) August 19, 2013

 

EVENTS:

  • Singularity University – Executive Program – October 5-12, 2013 San Francisco, CA http://singularityu.org/#
  • Quantified Self -Oct 10-11, 2013 San Francisco http://quantifiedself.com/conference/San-Francisco-2013/
  • Defrag – November 4-6, 2013 Broomfield, CO http://defragcon.com/2013/ (SEE KLINT AND CHRIS PRESENT)
  • SXSW  – March 7-16, 2014 Austin, TX http://sxsw.com/ (POSSIBLY SEE KLINT AND CHRIS PRESENT)
  • Buddhist Geeks – Contemplative Tech Conference, April 11-13, 2014 San Francisco
  • Cyborg Camp – MIT Media Lab – August 2014 – Boston, MA

THANK YOU / FIND US

  • AARON JASINSKI: Artist work for the mindful cyborgs  http://www.aaronjasinski.com/
  • ROSS NELSON: Brown Hound Media for mixing http://brownhoundmedia.com/
  • FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/MindfulCyborgs
  • GOOGLE PLUS: http://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/1…97482352220770025
  • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/mindfulcyborgs
  • SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/itsmweekly/sets/mindful-cyborgs-the-podcast
  • ITUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mindful-cyborgs/id641214272
  • STICHER RADIO: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/chris-dancy/mindful-cyborgs?refid=stpr

TRANSCRIPTION:

Mindful Cyborgs, Contemplative living in the age of quantification, augmentation and acceleration, with your hosts Chris Dancy and Klint Finley.
CD: Hey, welcome to Mindful Cyborgs, Episode #11. Hi, Klint.

KF: Hi, Chris.

CD: So 9 and 10, double episode with our friend Mr. Pang. I’m still reeling from that show.

KF: Me, too.

CD: We’re just going to have to follow Alex on Twitter. He doesn’t want me to constantly yell out his Twitter stream. I really want to get him and Nathan Jurgenson in a room. So yes, just us today. We don’t have any guests, but we do have some fun things to cover. I just got back from Buddhist Geeks and I thought we would just kind of kick off with that, you know? We had questions about am I a Buddhist.

KF: Yes, how Buddhist Geeks go and are you a Buddhist?

CD: Yes, so one of the most interesting things that was told to me while I was at Buddhist Geeks is that most Buddhists practice Buddhists because they need to which I thought was kind of interesting and didn’t understand, but at the end of the conference I came to understand for some people Buddhism is like the only way they can cope with life. I mean, they’re so distracted and lacking in mindfulness that they actually need it. Whereas I expected I would just go and find contemplative peaceful people, and I found people across the spectrum. It really kind of hit home when the photographer for the event said, “No, no you don’t understand some of these people need it.” I said, “Okay, I get you.” So they’re kind of on that edge of excitement, which I wasn’t really expecting. I don’t know, I figured everyone would be kind of monkey. Not monkey but-

KF: I know what you mean, there’s this sort of expectation of what you imagine Buddhist to be like, or kind of calm and collected people, but once you actually start to meet some you find that there are a lot who are more loud and excitable types of people and yes they’re definitely drawn to it because they need a means to control their temper certain aspects of their personality.

CD: The other, there are a few takeaways that I had. I would say yes after going to the conference and going to the sessions I think that I could safely say that all though I don’t have the nomenclature, I’m safely a Buddhist. I’m going to come out of my Buddhist closet.

Some other things that I thought were just really important for me to observe and hear was the idea of suffering and how it was tied to these great traditions of Buddhism. The being to eliminate suffering. When we dug into that a little deeper in the different sessions that I went to, I found this common theme of suffering coming from an attachment and that attachment being an idea, a person, a thing or probably most profound for me, an outcome.

After I attained that knowledge, I looked at that when I’m not practicing any version of [00:03:41] mindfulness – they’re very hard on the mindful movement right now, and not practicing mindfulness. Yes, when I’m struggling or suffering I’m attached and usually it is some to sort of outcome. I had no idea until I looked at that. Now, when I start to struggle or feel some strife, it’s very easy for me to go, what am I attached to? So that was a very interesting kind of goal of Buddhism to alleviate the human suffering and then to kind of look at it from an attachment standpoint.

KF: Yes, that’s a good tip I think. I need to do that more often myself.

CD: Yes, dude, you’re pretty attached. Not in a bad way. You’re one of the most communicative people I know.

KF: Yes, I definitely get attached to outcomes of wanting things to be a certain way.

CD: Yes, outcome attachment is probably my number one suffering point. The scariest things that I found at the conference was that over the 3, almost 4, years that I’ve been practicing awareness or contemplative practices or being in a beginners mind or meditation, impermanence, love and kindness. All these things, I’ve had periods where I’ve just felt really disconnected from the people around me and these are highly intelligent people or very, very tense people, much like myself. You kind of hang around people you are. So much so that at times I’ve felt profoundly sad, just profoundly depressed.

It comes during after periods of great meditation or just prolonged periods of awareness and I found that there’s something called dark night of the soul, which is a state and there’s actual terminology for this, which is a meditative psychosis. But it’s where people actually become unhinged or removed from the world that they perceive because they get so in touch with being aware that they physically feel disconnected to actually have a soul collapsing experience. Which I thought I was really along but when you get in a roomful of Buddhists and they start talking about their journey you’re just like, wow, I just thought it was me and I never would have admitted so loudly and now it’s actually pretty common.

KF: Yes, I had a similar experience when I was much younger, around 20, and I didn’t know what was going on with me for about a couple of years. I ended up hearing about a similar concept called the abyss. It’s part of cabalistic and part of western occult, a tradition as of western esotericism. But it’s a very similar idea of just becoming- I think they describe it as knowledge without understanding.

The situation where you start to understand and kind of go back to sort of Buddhist terminology, like you start to not to understand but to be aware of impermanence and to be aware of the malleability of certain aspects of reality but you haven’t really come to terms with it yet. You haven’t truly grasped the wisdom of that yet and it leaves you fairly unhinged. At least that’s my understanding of it and there’s probably a lot of people out there that would tell me that I’m completely wrong or that I’m equating things from two very different religious or spiritual practices and everything, but I don’t know. I see them as related, very similar and related aspects.

CD: It makes me think that we should get an actual Buddhist teacher on the show.

KF: Yes.

CD: I mean Vincent is a teacher, he’s amazing, but I’ve met some pretty important people who you walk up to them and you get that feeling like you’re speaking to Yoda. I mean it was really wonderful. And then to be around 300 people all on some type of contemplative journey. I mean the conference was nice. I said in one of my tweets it’s the only conference I’ve ever been to where every single person that I spoke to could have been a keynote which was pretty cool for me. Next up on the big agenda that I’ve outed myself as depressive.

KF: Outed yourself as a depressive Buddhist.

CD: Yes, depressed Buddhist which is all things considered a happy catholic would be the flipside of this. So, saw this site flying around the interweb this week called JustDeleteMe. You’ve seen this JustDeleteMe site?

KF: I saw links to it but I never clicked through to it. So I have never found out what it was.

CD: So it’s kind of interesting. You go to JustDeleteMe.com. We’ll put it in the ShowNotes. It’s big web page with a bunch of buttons that say Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Google. It’s a one button remove yourself from that social network. So kind of like the cyanide pill for social media via API call.

KF: Yes, interesting.

CD: Yes, people are sharing it like crazy which reminds me of Episode 3 or 4 we talked about this social roulette site I had found where basically you’ve got a one in six chance of having it delete your account and each time you pressed it, it was like pulling the revolver again which all speaks to this fantastic pathology that we have around Nathan Jurgenson’s concepts of digital duality. Klint, would you make it all go away with one button or take a chance on it?

KF: No, I wouldn’t. Maybe Facebook, actually, because I’ve thought about going away from there but there’s so many social obligations now bound up within real world to be digitally dualist about it. Real world obligations that are now tied into Facebook in such a way that I don’t feel like I can extricate myself from that network anymore. What I’ve actually been and I haven’t really looked very deeply into this is that I’ve been finding myself more tempted to delete some dimension entirely of my presence in different places. Like, it would be nice to go into Facebook and to delete all the photos I’ve ever uploaded there and just start from scratch or, I’ve mentioned it before, just unfollow everyone on Twitter and start over again and just be a little bit more mindful about who I follow and don’t follow.

CD: I know two people personally who saw that tweet of yours and actually did it.

KF: Oh, wow.

CD: So you need to be careful about what you tweet.

KF: No, I hope that worked out for them. I don’t know. One of the reasons I haven’t done it is it seems a little bit unfair insofar as part of why I want to do it is I don’t want to lose my followers by deleting my account and starting over but, at the same time, I want to follow fewer people so it’s kind of a selfish one dimensional element that-

CD: It would be different if they made it easy for you to unfollow people but they really don’t once you follow a bunch of people.

KF: Yes, I’ve just been trying to slowly wean myself away from some accounts and just really think about, is this person ever going to notice that I’m not following them anymore?

CD: They will.

KF: Or do I really need to follow this person anymore because other people are going to retweet anything this person tweets because it’s important so do I really need to continue following this account and that sort of thing.

CD: It’s good stuff. I don’t want to call it fan mail, but its people that’s reached out and contacted us, but we get a bunch of that and I’m really bad at mentioning them, but a few people who’ve shared stuff with us recently I just want to just give a little shoutout to. Jerry Ray over on our Facebook page sent us some Mindful Cyborg art he created. So I’m going to go ahead and post a link to that today. He sent it to me privately. Really nice stuff and thank you Jerry for doing that. A little shout out to Ronya Banks who won our Buddhist Geeks Conference getaway where we send someone travel and tickets to go to Buddhist Geeks.

Probably the last thing to kind of segue into this is another piece of interaction we had with someone. This person’s name I’m probably not going to pronounce correctly. Mamading Ceesay sent us a link over on Google+ just recently saying giving the transhumanist manifesto and I’ll try to put a link to that on the shownotes that just came out about emotional intelligence and compassion and thought he’d share a video with me about a gentleman named Jeremy Rifkin and I’ll put a link to the video in here.

Great video, basically suggests the question, are we evolving to be a species of mindful cyborgs? In the video, it’s only about ten minutes, he makes the case that human evolution evolved into a very empathetic race of people with that came from being a race of people who were empathetic around things like nation and culture. Before that a group of people who were empathetic around religion and before that a group of people empathetic around tribes and before that around blood lines.

We keep becoming more and more aware of ourselves. Because of that is this person Jeremy Rifkin’s belief that we are homoeopathists and we’re going to evolve into a more aware of each other’s species. But one of the things that I took away from the video that I wanted to run by you was that it’s his belief that in heaven or even Utopia, he uses both terms interchangeably, that because there is no suffering, going back to our Buddhist conversation from earlier, that it’s impossible to have empathy. That you can’t have empathy in a world where someone else is not suffering. What do you think about that?

KF: I don’t know, I guess it’s technically true. Well, I’m trying to remember the exact definition of empathy because it means dealing with someone else’s feeling. So I don’t know if that’s true or not because you can feel empathy with someone who isn’t suffering, can’t you? You can feel somebody’s joy. So I guess it becomes more of a question of whether you can experience joy without suffering which is an age old philosophical question of, without contrast I guess that would be the issue. If you don’t have sadness to contrast to happiness how do you know that you’re happy? How does happiness even exist and I’m not wise enough to have an answer to that.

CD: But you’re answers are always so good. But it got me thinking that we are possibly seeing the rise of mindful cyborgs. Loosely after I watched the video I’m stirring a couple concepts in my head together. One, just awareness of the data, data exhaust that we create, we’re seeing more and more awareness of that. Two, awareness of each other’s data and data exhaust so in some ways if you move beyond nation state you can start to say they video the instance in Haiti and within three minutes people were tweeting and sharing videos and how quickly we were sending empathy via technological awareness.

I then took the concept from I’ve been seeing a lot on neuroscience at a conference lately. I don’t know what that means of the conference I’ve been going to but every single conference I’ve been to in the past year whether it be GF2045 or theorizing the web, quantified self, Buddhist Geeks, they always have 3 or 4 neurosciences. Either we’re going to the wrong conferences or I don’t know what’s happening. But the one consistent thing that I’m seeing that they’re doing with everything from neural dust to functional MRIs is this concept that neurons that fire together, wire together.

So you take this concept to people becoming more aware of each other digitally, whatever that looks like, whether it’s the actual data or seeing someone’s Facebook photos and you start to infuse as Ray Kurzweil would call it an external digital neocortex. Are we observing and firing in them for rewiring this external data exhaust and or digital neural cortex. Thoughts?

KF: I guess one of the big questions is whether we’re actually becoming more aware of each other through these media or if we’re not. I mean we’re seeing people’s Facebook photos but does that actually make us more aware of them as people? I’m not sure the answer is yes. I wouldn’t necessarily certainly go the other way in terms of that we were knowing each other less well, but hey I certainly wouldn’t make the argument that just because we’re on Twitter together that we know each other more than we would otherwise.

CD: And I would feel comfortable going out on a limb and saying that we are.

KF: Okay.

CD: I think it doesn’t work like what we’re used to but, again, because I work through these things and sometimes I wonder whether people listen to the show [00:17:33] but I’m like now I get to talk to Klint uninterrupted for an extended period of time. I’m not going to prepare, I’m just going to roll with it. Two things come to mind. People are obsessed with Hans Rosling. You know this guy, pronouncing his name right. He’s the data scientist that always does the TED talks where he moves around data and he talks about people getting richer or life expectancy. People are just obsessed with this Hans Rosling guy, but it’s really weird. It reminds me of three episodes ago when we talked about quantified keynote and people responding to my body and not my physical presence, so I do in some way feel that we are kind of heading to this new type of empathy or this new type of compassion but I’m not quite sure what it means or if I really need to think about it.

KF: But thinking about it a little bit more, there are definitely people who have come to know because if we’re calling social media for making it very broad like including instant messaging and email and just going all the way back to all the digital communication tools and there’s definitely people I’ve gotten to know better because of some form of social media but at the same time I wouldn’t say it overall makes me more aware empathetic with other people in general.

CD: Do you think that’s the quantity or quality of the data that you’re getting of other people?

KF: It’s probably a little bit of both and now I’m getting a lot more data from people than ever before and the quality I think also goes down when you’re just getting the weak signals that are coming in, pouring in, in the form of status updates, photos, and the sort of self-censorship that comes along with being a part of a big general purpose social network. I think actually in some ways I was thinking back to instant messaging and being on purpose-driven chat rooms as a teenager where there was no expectation, being in a chat room that was on a certain topic, a certain band, a certain subculture and talking to people, finding people that shared that common interest and not worrying about whether bosses were going to see it, or teachers were going to see it or anything else like that, whereas with Facebook there’s some privacy filter systems that I’m not sure anyone fully understands but it seems we create these personas on Facebook that I guess you can say they’re not real manifestations of yourself but they’re not necessarily complete representations of people.

CD: They’re not complete. They’re definitely segmented but I think that’s why some people have multiple Twitter accounts or I think in some ways Google tried to do it with circles. I think if there’s any type of future of enterprise portable identity it’s really not the systems we log into or what we represent but it’s the exhaust we create from those systems that can be determined as a complex password. I’ll leave that one alone, I don’t know where that came from. It just flew out of my mouth.

Back to this empathy concept, I think I first noticed myself becoming more, I don’t know that I’d say empathetic, but I’d say aware. About four years ago as I would travel and I would wake up and I would wake up and check Twitter or see what news had happened and I just become literally aware of what time it was at any point in the world because of who I had followed in different parts of the world. I remember tweeting a few years ago it’s really neat to watch the world through Twitter because you see Oceana go to sleep, you see Europe wake up, especially if you’re in Europe and you’re in Twitter you dread lunch time because America starts coming online and it’s like ugh.

KF: Explosion of stuff, yes.

CD: Yes.

KF: There’s definitely experiences that I have that I wouldn’t otherwise have that same experience of seeing the world sort of wake up much later in the day and people who are in Europe who are having their evening beer around the time I’m having my morning coffee and that sort of thing. That’s really enjoyable and I wouldn’t want to trade that in necessarily. But at the same time there’s this presentation of people put on through these more public facing media and Twitter, in particular, feels like it’s become more professionalized for people more and more wanting to- and it could just be my own personal experience but I actually read an article recently of something about Twitter the global network conversation or something and it seems like I’m not the only one that has been seeing this idea of Twitter becoming more of a place for people to talk about their professional interests and kind of self-promote network and that sort of thing and less of a general pub where you would go and talk about whatever is on your mind.

Facebook has become more like a family reunion meets, I don’t know, like a baby shower. It’s just like all these people who you have very different relationships with, your cousin, your friends’ cousin, your ex-coworkers, just such a big mishmash of people that everyone’s kind of walking on eggshells except for the people who just don’t give a fuck about offending someone else. Just these weird awkward conversations.

CD: No, I had a friend, I don’t want to say a friend, an acquaintance from high school, who reached out to me last year and he was talking to me about why wouldn’t I accept his friendship on Facebook. I was like, “Listen, I have subscribers, I do subscribers and I’ve got like 30 friends.” I treat Facebook like I treat Twitter and even with Facebook I’ve got a list of only five people can see those updates. It’s literally one of the places I’m completely safe which is more to do with my own hang-ups than anything else. But he said something to me that just blew me away. He said, “I love it, I love to friend everybody that we went to school with because I like to see things that would make them upset so I can get in fights with them over political issues.” I just thought to myself you just confirmed for me my worst fears about Facebook.

KF: Yes, and there’s people I really like basically trolling on Facebook. I don’t feel that Facebook is a place where I can do what you do, just drawing a really tightening down the hatches because it does feel like there’s a certain amount of social obligation that happens in and around Facebook now that I can’t extricate myself from. Twitter is a little bit of a different story. The way that I participate on Facebook is much more of a minimal. I use it more as just a way, because I know there are people who I have relationships with and they share the important parts of their lives, when they’re moving to another city or something like that, exclusively on Facebook. It’s the only way I can really find out certain things about certain people.

CD: Well, it’s strange because I won’t be friends with some people on Facebook but I’ll link up with them on other networks. So I totally enjoy some people by Instagram. There are some people that I will only be connected to via foursquare who I could care less about by Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. But they go to interesting places and they share interesting things but they don’t share that via the other networks.

KF: Yes, most of the people I’m talking about wouldn’t be on other networks besides Facebook.

CD: Okay, I’m going to wrap up with some kind of official, unofficial. I don’t know what you consider this. Are you familiar with this company Gartner? You ever heard of these people?

KF: Oh, yes. The IT industry analyst firm.

CD: I’m messing with you.

KF: If you’re not in IT, that doesn’t even mean anything. IT industry analyst firm, what does that mean?

CD: Exactly. Well, it’s funny because when I started my old podcast five years ago I didn’t really care about what anybody thought and then I cared and then I stopped caring. I used to have this thing every week where I would take some statement Gartner and we had this segment on this show called the Anal Cyst Quote of the Week. Because you would have to be an ass to believe it or read it, but they have this Hype Cycle. It’s something they do every year. It’s basically broken out into timeframes of 0 to beyond ten years and then from very new which is an innovation trigger all the way through something called Inflated Expectations, the Trough of Disillusionment, the Slope of Enlightenment, Plateau of Productivity, I’ll put it in the shownotes. If you’ve never seen the Gartner Hype Cycle, it’s interesting to look at just from a sheared data thing. But what I found interesting was some of the things that they put on the Hype Cycle for 2013 2014, thought I’d hit three or four of these with you. Is that alright?

KF: Yes, let’s do it.

CD: They’re saying that cloud computing is now in what they call the trough of disillusionment which means, okay, we’re over it. Most people got it, they understand it, they’re working through it. They haven’t quite figured out how to best get the most out of it but it’s not hyped up anymore. Right? It’s not just over the top with expectations. They’re saying it’s about 2-5 years full maturity. This is cloud computing. Thoughts?

KF: I guess that sounds right. I like you feel like I’m always living a few years into the future and so when I hear something like, oh cloud computing is just now in the trough disillusionment it seems silly to me but I know that’s not the case for most people. I see that big data is not the top of the hype to me where to me big data was at the top of the hype cycle probably a year and a half ago in my world.

CD: Not only is it at the top of the hype cycle but they’re saying plateau between 5-10 years. So they’re saying 2021 before big data is actually doing something for us.

KF: Yes, so it’s funny like in my world big data is in the trough of disillusionment already and cloud computing is already on the slope of enlightenment but-

CD: We need perspective-based emerging hype cycles.

KF: Yes.

CD: Some of the other ones I thought were really interesting, they’ve listed quantified self for the first time down in the innovation trigger section and they’re wrapping it much faster than big data or cloud computing. Remember those are out in the 2020’s. They’re saying quantified self reaches plateau within 2-5 years which I thought was really aggressive and interesting all things considered.

KF: I think for quantified self like if you look at it in terms of what benefits aging, aging people can get out of monitoring their health, then yes 5-10 years even is probably kind of long term or maybe even a little bit slow. I think for what Ernesto had called the worried well. I mean, for people, I guess I would be in that category, people like us that worried well, it’s probably a much longer term before we can truly get much benefit out of it like, oh it’s really interesting to know these things about myself, but from people who actually have diabetes already or who have heart problems, these things are already killer apps or hopefully unkiller apps rather.

CD: Smartdust, so they’ve introduced that as a brand new innovation trigger way over on the innovation trigger more than 10 years out for any type of plateau. Mesh networks, so sensor based networks, just saw some really great three-minute video on backscatter connectivity and powerless networks which was pretty unique but just some simple business ones that really jumped out at me. They’re saying gamification is at the peak of inflated expectation which just means we haven’t entered the trough of dissolution yet.

Interesting enough, they’re saying consumer 3d printing is also at that peak, but enterprise are you ready for this, enterprise 3d computing is actually in the slope of enlightenment with a 2-5 years to peak, whereas consumer 3d printing is at the peak meaning it’s about as hyped up as you can get with at least 5-10 before we actually get something out of it. So I thought that juxtaposition of the enterprise 3d printing being so mature in the cycle, so 2-5 years out to plateau so radically different than the 5-10 years at the hype of the consumer 3d level. Any thoughts on why? I can’t even get my head around why they would even place it like this.

KF: It’s an interesting distinction. I’ve never seen the distinction made before but I guess it makes some sense. I’m sort of surprised to see them say that enterprise 3d printing is so mature, but there are 3d printed parts in space right now that 3d printing is being used for quite a bit in industry already. It’s being used a lot for prototyping and by design companies and what have you. I guess it’s not that surprising to see that but anything for home hobbyist 3d printing, that’s still make or shed stuff where people are still tinkering and dabbling and it’s pretty far away it seems from being main stream. They’re hard to build.

I do have one friend that bought one and put it together in his house just because he wanted to have one and wanted to tinker with that sort of thing but otherwise they seem to be things you’d have to go to a hacker lab type place to even have access to one.

I think it was Bruce Sterling that said that 3d printers are going to end up more like photocopiers where every big business might have one but if you wanted to make a photocopy of something you have to go to a shop as opposed to a normal desk top printer where maybe everyone that has a computer has some sort of laser inkjet, but you wouldn’t have a laser jet printer in your house probably because they’re so much more expensive. It seems like the idea of a 3d printer is going to be a lot closer to a photocopier or laser printer but it’s just not something people are going to have in the home.

CD: I’ve never heard anyone say that it’s going to be a photocopier that makes a lot of sense. In ‘88 I was in Tokyo spending 6 months there, I went to see Michael Jackson, don’t ask, and one of the things that I did was a newsletter for my friend and I went to get it printed and I think it was a printer electronic, I don’t remember, we’re going back 30 years. I had to go to a specialty store where they just printed. It was really weird, today you have this in your house, but it was high-end photo printers. Makes you wonder about your friend who talked about that.

Our events coming up again Singularity University. We’ll have a lot to talk about after that. That’s October 10-12th at Silicon Valley, NASA Ames Research. DEFRAG, we’ve got a couple of our friends speaking there. We’re going to see if we can maybe record Mindful Cyborgs from DEFRAG, we’re not sure, but I know Amber Case is speaking there. A bunch of people I follow on Twitter is speaking there. That’s November 4-6 in Broomfield. Quantified Self Conference, which by the time this show comes out we will be an official friend of the quantified self and that’s October 10-11th in San Francisco.

If you haven’t had a chance, Klint and I are trying to get into South By Southwest to bring some Mindful Cyborgs there, March 7-16th, and just announced that the Buddhist Geeks Conference, they’re having a contemplative technology conference, so focusing just on contemplative technology April 11-13th in San Francisco.

Kind of behind the scenes, I know Amber said that Cyborg Camp 2014 is in Boston this year and I’ve seen Nathan Jurgenson talking about theorizing the web. Any tweets or any quotes or anything good for me this week, this day, this moment?

KF: Nope, but I did want to mention that I will be at TechFestNW here in Portland. I’m not speaking or moderating or anything like that. I should be around. That is in September 6-8. TechFestNW in Portland, Oregon.

CD: Nice. I’ll go ahead and put that on our shownotes. I saw a tweet that I thought was pretty good. @MrBill. “Unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.” So, love that.

We’d like to thank listeners. Thanks so many of you who do reach out to Klint and I and especially our Facebook community. It’s pretty robust. Aaron Jasinski, who created the art for Mindful cyborgs. Ross Nelson, Brown Hound Media, for our mixing. Get us everywhere, Facebook, Google, Twitter, SoundCloud. Now on Stitcher Radio and iTunes. As always, it’s been Klinteresting and I look forward to talking to you soon, Klint.

KF: Thanks a lot and I’ll see you next time.