Ep 012: Katherine Collins
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Caitlin McShea
Hello everyone. And welcome back to Alien Crash Site. For any new listeners tuning in, I'd like to take a few seconds to describe what our mission is here. This interview series is an aspect of the Santa Fe Institute’s Interplanetary Project. The goal is to celebrate the mutual influence of science and science fiction, especially as we imagine the future of human civilization on earth and off planet in new settlements across space. So we invite friends from our community, friends of all sorts to come to talk to us about their work and their ideas and how those ideas might map onto this interplanetary imagination exercise. And then we ask them to describe an extra-terrestrial artifact that they would like to uncover from an alien crash site.
Now, the alien object bit of this discussion is inspired by Roadside Picnic, which is a lovely Soviet science fiction novel from the seventies, which was written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. This work was later adapted by Andre Tarkovsky into a film called Stalker. We'll discuss both the book and the film in this conversation and usually across all of these interviews. So if you haven't read the book or if you haven't watched the movie, I would highly recommend you do both because they are fabulous. They are fantastic forays into life after visitation. So what happens in the book is that 13 years ago, alien stopped on earth in multiple areas across the planet, including this fictional town in Russia, where the story is set and these landing sites, they're called zones.
They behave very strangely. They almost seem to defy the laws of physics and they are proven to be very, very harmful to the humans who enter them. Lots of mutations, lots of lost limbs, lots of death, but they contain a bunch of totally odd objects within them and those objects while mysterious and are hard to sort of figure out quite often, turn out to be very sophisticated and advanced technologies that impact human society in myriad, usually beneficial ways. And so people continue to assume the risks of the zone in order to acquire these items. This week, our guest stalker is Katherine Collins. Katherine is the head of sustainable investment for Putnam Investments.
She's also the founder of Honeybee Capital and she happens to serve on the Santa Fe Institute Board of Trustees. Actually, she was just elected the Chair of our Board of Trustees. So we are all very thrilled for her and thrilled for us to have her. And therefore I was more than excited to invite her onto the show. We spend some time talking about sustainable investing, how to approach decisions around sustainability. We talk about expanding timescales, the difference between wisdom and intelligence, and of course we discuss her chosen object. Let me also go ahead and acknowledge that I had some connection issues this week as I recorded remotely. And so there are a couple of pops and a couple of dropouts in the audio. I did have a lot of help from Richard Evers to clean it up.
So I apologize for those annoying bits, but I promise the content is worthwhile. So with all that laid out, I think we are ready to venture into the zone. I am Caitlyn McShea. This is Alien Crash Site and in the landscape as dangerous and uncertain as this crash site, it's important to approach with caution to move carefully and to take it one small step.
Katherine Collins
Caitlin. I love your bees.That's so awesome. Let me get my video going. Sorry. I'm good. I'm good. Good. As can be. How about you?
Caitlin McShea
I'm feeling really good about the way the year is looking and I'm so grateful for you to spend your Saturday with me.
Katherine Collins
Oh God. I'm so excited. You know, I have to thank you. I've been in a very dense period at work and you're reaching out on this topic. It allowed me to just plunge into like this whole other universe for a little bit. It was very, very needed. So thank you.
Caitlin McShea
You're welcome. I subscribed to your Sunday best. So I know for a fact that you did your homework, so I'm going to have to ask you about the book, which is very exciting. I love talking about yeah, that's great. Awesome. Like it or not. I do have to talk to you a little bit about your work. Is that okay?
Katherine Collins
Yeah, sure, sure.
Caitlin McShea
So let me introduce you to our audience. For those who don't know who Katherine Collins is. Katherine is the head of Sustainable Investments at Putnam and the founder of Honeybee Capital. And she has been serving on the Santa Fe Institute board since 2013. But as of Sunday, she is now the Chair of our Board, the most exciting news. I'm very, very thrilled. And congratulations.
I'm curious to see how it's handled, what direction you kind of put it because you have a very interesting trajectory in terms of sort of the path you've taken in your life. It's like classical finance, theology, biomimicry, and now sustainability. It's wild. I guess I want to talk to you a little bit about that. If I think about what the Interplanetary Project is trying to imagine, which is a sort of deep future human civilization. Sustainability seems at the heart of that. And I wonder how decisions made in the realm of sustainable investments now might impact the trajectory of human civilization. What sort of motivates the type of work that you do?
Katherine Collins
Well, I'm so happy that that's the frame you put around this work because we are at a really interesting juncture to our folks who have been working in sustainability and especially in sustainable finance for a long time for decades, we've dreamed about having like more people come to the party and now it's a big party, which is great. But as soon as that happens in finance, we have a real tendency to want to standardize everything and sort of automate a lot of things and mechanize things. And it's not a bad tendency, but if you skip too quickly to those steps and you don't have them in this bigger context, you end up with something so much lesser than it could have been. And so in the grand scheme, sustainable investing right here now today has an aim of making decisions with a more complete understanding of both the proximate decision and also the long-term implication.
Katherine Collins
So it's all with this poll of like widening circles. I live my life and widening circles. I referenced that a lot in our work. Like that's the goal is to, is to know more and therefore to make better decisions with better implications, but both financial and otherwise for the long-term. I'm pretty excited about that. One thing that is starting to emerge a little bit more frequently in the realm of sustainable finances, the term regenerative. To be fair, it can be used in a, to offhand of a way, but when it's used seriously, this is a very exciting thing. Like the idea that you're not just aiming for sort of a shorter-term optimization on a couple of different factors, but you're aiming for like true net positive kind of implications over time.
Katherine Collins
What could be better than that? And you've lived through the industrial area as most of us have. That's not the premise of what we've had the last century or so, which is not necessarily good or bad kind of judgment statement. It's just, that's where we've been. And now we need to be moving towards this different set of objectives. So that's the container in which all the more tactical day-to-day work since.
Caitlin McShea
And it seems like you have to, based on his proximity thing you bring up, it's like you have to make sort of local decisions in order to have the, the manifest impact globally. And so I guess that's a term that's thrown around quite a bit is like impact investing. Do these overlap? Is this the idea that there's some sort of not intangible, but not necessarily a capital metric for success? Or can there be both?
Katherine Collins
Yeah, it's a good question. There's, there's kind of the Sierra answer and then the more kind of wonky practitioner answer. So from a practitioner's point of view, the impact investing is a very specific term from to investing where there are explicit a priori goals for social or environmental impact alongside financial impact. So it's not just that the three happened to come along together as things developed and have a plan upfront for all of those things. Your plan may or may not pan out by the way, but it's the idea that the process itself includes those things from the beginning. And so there's a very specific term that's used in terms of the regular practice. What I think is a little bit dangerous about calling that out as a whole separate field, is it sort of distracts from the fact that investing has impact. You invest your time, invest your energy, you invest your money.
Katherine Collins
Like all of those things have implications. And so it's a well-established term. There's nothing I'm going to do to change it at this point. But I do like when I have the chance to remind folks that, you know, it's not only in this one sliver of investing that there's actually impact on the world. In fact, it's perhaps much more interesting to look at the other 99.9% of investing and think about the impact there.
Caitlin McShea
That's great. I guess I want to maybe touch on something that I've heard you say in the past, which I think is really important when we think about re incentivizing individuals to make these future impactful decisions. I think you hear sustainability and you hear something like finance and you think that they can't couple, but actually it seems that quite a bit of sustainable investing does churn the, the actual games that you expect. And so could you talk a little bit about how they sort of benefit each other in maybe an unexpected way?
Katherine Collins
I'm so glad you recognize that. For anyone who is trained in sort of mid 20th century finance, there's a really strong premise of, of a zero sum game. And so anytime you talk about two different objectives, there's sort of a seesaw, but it comes to mind for anyone who has that as sort of their academic framework for things. But you look at how the world works and it's not just seesaws. You know, this is one reason I love the work of SFI is it's constantly reminding us it's this loop deloop crazy men have all kinds of iterations and interactions. So again, the, the tools of finance don't match the world. We live in all that well. Like they work in a little box unto themselves. And so one of the premises that I think is really important and we put this really at the heart of our work at Putnam, we're active managers, so we can choose what we want to invest in all day, every day from a big long menu of choices.
Katherine Collins
And so instead of fighting that theoretical fight about zero sum math as an active manager, I get to say, you know what, I'm going to look for situations where excellence in sustainability is fueling excellence in long-term business strategy and financial returns as well. That doesn't automatically happen. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's really powerful. And what's kind of neat and I think under-recognized still, is that the more important sustainability issues become in the world, the more often you're going to see that kind of connected loop where one is fueling the other, not, not this seesaw effect.
Caitlin McShea
Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to be competitive. It's mutually beneficial in a really good way. I hope that you have as many platforms as you can do share that information, because I think that there's a really awesome way to reinvite people, to think about these bigger problems in a way that is sustainable financially for themselves. This Putnam sort of practice, what it preaches is, is there an organizational sort of sustainability practice that goes along with the actual investments made? I hope that that happens kind of across industry, but is that something that you can talk about?
Katherine Collins
Yeah, there's an important loop here too. So a couple of things that are really pretty unique at patent, and they're the things that drew me to take this role in and kind of lead this work forward at the firm in the first place. One is that before I even arrived, they had made the determination if they were going to go ahead with this, they wanted our sustainable investment function to be exactly that, a core investment in the function that sat in the middle of the investment team. And that might sound sort of obvious, but for a lot of firms, even now, both financial and otherwise the sustainability function sits, you know, down the hall or in another building, or, you know, they're sort of the assistant to the assistant, to the assistant, to someone who has a fancy title. It's really important. If you are an investment firm, I think Putnam sort of rooted this work in the right place, which is in the investment function.
Katherine Collins
Like that is the heart of what we're doing as a firm with those strong roots now. It connects to our own operations, which are already doing some really fantastic work, but like many firms, maybe a little bit more fragmented and not sort of connected as a whole complete, sustainability strategy. So all kinds of amazing things that were happening within our human development functions and within our building management functions. And now we have the chance, like a lot of organizations to kind of look at that in a more complete way and kind of see the whole picture and to be fair it should raise new questions about what might be possible, what might be better. So again, like lots of the companies that we're investing in we're on that same path ourselves.
Caitlin McShea
And it's really inspirational to see that it's sort of centered as opposed to, as you say, like quite often could be adjacent or it has been for so long. So that's really cool. I wonder what generates from that, that sort of recentering and focus. It's kind of an exciting thing to witness because it feels like restorative at the beginning of something, I know that sustainable investing has happened for a while, but it really feels like we're at this precipice of something fantastic and new. And so I'm curious to see what that looks like. Are there any particular ventures that you're very excited about any space industry?
Katherine Collins
It's funny and maybe somewhat ironic given our discussion today, I really liked the earth. And so I'm not nearly as excited as, as some of my fellow investors about space travel space mining. One of the first presentations I ever heard on this topic was many years ago. I mean, more than 10 years ago, it was about what would be required to inhabit Mars. And the first thing he said, like literally the first sentence of the presentation was, “well, first we have to warm it up.” And I was like, “Oh God, we ruin another planet.” So I know that's not the ethos, those going into so much of the innovation on the space side of things.
Katherine Collins
And they do kind of link together. A lot of the advances that you find scientifically, if you're doing something very bold, like space-oriented exploration comes back and can really accelerate progress here on earth. So I don't want to be dismissive about that part of things, but I'm much more excited about a couple of things that we're seeing within more conventional businesses here on earth. So one is the notion of circular economy has really started to accelerate for good reason. I mean, for anyone who's even casually studied like sixth grade biology, this is a familiar loop. Like the idea that the waste products from one system become the inputs to the other system. And this is how the whole natural world functions. Isn't it awesome?
Katherine Collins
We sort of set that aside again through this whole industrial era and it's coming back now. So it's coming back for product oriented companies. In some cases, whole business models are being restructured along these lines, tremendous advances in material science. So we had this huge wave, the last, what, 40 years now of software development, some of which has been terrific and in terms of improving access to information and efficiency, but we're seeing now the longer duration development in hard businesses. Like, hard assets materials of all sorts and management of those through a longer-term life cycle. So those things take longer to develop than writing code. Typically, I think because of that, a lot of folks in the sustainability realm just avoid asset intensive industries altogether.
Katherine Collins
It's nice to pretend that they don't exist or they're not needed, but that's pretty lame if you're sincere about the effort to kind of have this more regenerative system more broadly. So I'm really excited about what we're seeing on the material side of things and, and the links it has to this circular economy theme.
Caitlin McShea
That seems a good opportunity for us to switch to how it is that nature has inspired so much of the work that you do because of course, as you say, it's like when we think about in our recent human history, the way that we look at finance, it is over and against this waste products as fuel in this sort of like mutualism that is nature. And you take a lot of inspiration from biomimicry. I think that's what Honeybee is all about. I've seen you give presentations at SFI before, and we've talked about this when you came for the complexity of economics panel, we talked a little over dinner, but what are some of your favorite like inspirational natural heroes?
Katherine Collins
Well, certainly these for sure. And in fact, the bees are one thing that really cemented my affinity for SFI many years ago. SFI featured the work of Tom Seeley, Honeybee researcher at Cornell. And Tom has amazing work. You know, some of it very deep science on actual bees and then some of it much more translatable to other systems. And one strand of his research has been on how bees make collective decisions, which is pretty fascinating and increasingly relevant question, I think for humans. And he found some just amazing characteristics that I really took to heart. One is that there's sort of a sincere non-agenda oriented exploration process. And then there's a wide-open public dissemination of that information.
Katherine Collins
And then there's this true democratic process. He has a book on honeybee democracy where the bees actually vote on major decisions. I don't want to carry anthropomorphasizing too far, but that's the kind of thing that I think, you know, as, as humans, we can kind of pause and say like, “Oh, there are lots of ways to do this effectively.” And we hardly ever look outside of our little human window to do it. I just started reading Suzanne Simard’s new book on mycelium networks in the forest and the same thing there, like, Ooh, how is information translated? How are resources moved around in a system where the needs and the supply really varied? Like we've invented some great stuff as humans, but we're such a tiny portion of the wisdom of the world.
Katherine Collins
So that's sort of the brainy answer of why I love looking to nature. I really do think it's this vast library that is mostly untapped, at least in the financial and business world. We tend to look at nature as like a storehouse where we go to take stuff as opposed to a library. So that's one big element, but the other element I don't want to skip is I think there's also a really deep spiritual element to just reconnecting with the actual planet we inhabit even if I don't come back from a long hike in the woods with some kind of intellectual epiphany, I don't think we should discount that. You know, there's something really powerful there.
Caitlin McShea
So glad that you brought that up because I do want to pivot a little bit, I'd like to know what it was that inspired your temporary departure from finance towards theology and divinity school because my background, I came to SFI via like classic philosophy and art. And so I have this kind of strange liberal artsy approach to connection, how systems are connected. And it seems to me, the connection means a lot to you as well. And so I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your decision to do that and what you gained.
Katherine Collins
I had been working towards sustainable finance work for quite some time by the time I decided to go to divinity school and a couple of things were apparent to me, and this was a number of years ago now, but I think some of this is still true. I found myself in so many settings where everyone was assembling with really good enthusiastic intentions, but the finance folks literally would sit on one side of the table and then the more mission oriented folks would literally sit on the other side of the table and for all our tri it was not going so well. I mean, we were literally speaking different languages in many cases. And I thought, you know, there's a lot of tactics about sustainability that are being layered on top of different operational functions now.
Katherine Collins
And they're not so mysterious. I mean, they're very important, but I was worried that even for my own understanding, I hadn't gotten close enough to the root of why is this important in the first place? And what can I learn from the centuries and centuries that people have spent thinking about things like long-term impact and collective good versus individual good. I mean, it's not like we have nothing to draw upon here. And so that was my intention in going into divinity school was to really strengthen my roots on that side of the equation too, to go with my finance roots. But a funny thing happened, I've talked about this a fair amount. When I decided to go, my friends in finance all said, “we're so glad you found your calling,” which sounds really nice, but it really means like goodbye forever.
Katherine Collins
And so that was intriguing. There was sort of a variation of that, that I got from my friends at divinity school. They kept saying, “We’re so glad you’ve seen the light.” That sounds, that's one of the statements. It sounds nice on the surface, but it's really very insulting. Like, you know, you've been somewhere evil and now you're coming to join us, but good guys. So it occurred to me, both of these communities for all that we wanted to be working more together in a certain setting. We're actually pretty happy that we were separated at the core. And so one thing that really became clear to me through my studies and then all the work that has followed is that, my whole goal is for this to be one conversation with like fluency across all the different dimensions.
Caitlin McShea
And I think it's something like that exchange that will sort of galvanize humanity and in the way that we need to be galvanized to earth first prepare ourselves for the future. Obviously I represented a planetary and that seems very spacey, but I too am very much an earth fan. And the idea of interplanetary is to like return to and begin to more seriously, think about how to make earth last as long as possible for humanity. For me, it seems, there's the science and the art side that I'm always thinking about, but same, I think this actual, tangible metric for the future, that's tethered in a sort of like rooted spiritual anchor to the earth itself. I think that's really wonderful.
And I think that's why you're so successful at the things that you do because you think about things so broadly. So thank you for sharing that. And with that, I'd like to know what certain elements you took as inspiring or interesting from your recent read of Roadside Picnic. Because I find that when I talk to everyone teaches that something different, maybe it's family, maybe it's fear, but I'd like to know what you were most compelled by.
Katherine Collins
Few different layers. And then I did watch the movie as well, which was way more different than I expected. So it was almost like two completely separate experiences in many ways. From the book, a couple of things have just kind of stuck with me and I can sort of feel them like they're just in the back of my head and they're still, I don't know, percolating somehow. We'll see what comes of it. One element that really intrigued me was this idea of how do you navigate in a very potentially dangerous and new terrain? The simple image of like throwing the nuts and bolts ahead of you to see like the unseeable dangerous was such an interesting one for me.
Katherine Collins
And so it's for this question in my mind, like a lot of my work is in areas where if we're held back, it's for a similar reason. I don't know what's in there. It's just not comfortable. I'm not sure how to proceed. Maybe I just won't proceed. And so there's a parallel question in some of my work, like what is the thing we can throw out ahead to know that this is the next step and then we'll do it again and we'll know what the next step is from there. So that just image of navigate, I thought was fascinating. And then two other things really struck me. One was the construct of having the official administrative sciency exploration and then this like renegade, you know, local maverick kind of exploration.
Katherine Collins
And I will say it caused me to reflect quite a bit. I am not sure if I'm sad to say this or not, but I definitely would have been in the bureaucratic administraive building. And I think I would have been a lead within that building. Like trying to somehow bridge these worlds. But that's just something interesting personally to reflect on. And that links maybe to the third thing, which was the links between the community and the land in this place were just so fascinating. And they were not really overtly explored. Like they were just there. So you'd get these little tiny glimpses. And so what the influence of this incredible event and all of the complications that it brought had been. That's going to stick with me for a long time.
Katherine Collins
Just the idea that, you know, if, if you were living at a distance, it would be easy to say, “Oh yeah, that thing happened over there long ago.” And yet if you're in the community, like it's, it's not gone. It's still now that element of linking sort of time and space and people was really intriguing to me.
Caitlin McShea
That makes sense. It's funny. I never thought about it until you answered this question, but if you think about what the people in the town do, it's like they either work at the Institute or they're criminal, you know, stalkers, and there doesn't seem to be any other economic engagement in the land. Like the entire mood of the city is dependent on the fact that there was this visitation, which is really odd. And it doesn't seem like a thriving place either.
Katherine Collins
No, not at all. I'll show my own prejudice. Like I grew up during the Soviet era. So at first I was like, “Oh, this is a reflection on the Soviet system where like the corn was grown over here. And then the smart people lived over here and got over overeducated. And then the missile site was over here.” That's not any different than the U S economy at all. It's really fragmented. There are very few places that are full-fledged driving academies. We have university towns, we have manufacturing towns. There aren't that many places that have five or six really thriving dimensions in terms of the economy. And then around that, a really thriving kind of multifaceted community. So that's a big thing to think through.
Caitlin McShea
And you're so right though, it's usually, I mean, I don't want to say environment driven, but it's almost like space driven where there's a thriving farm economy where the crops are able to be grown in the same way that there's this Institute of extra-terrestrial culture, because there was a visitation at this place. It's the thing to do here. So that's really think about, and obviously it makes sense. I should have foreseen this, but it seems to me that you work and think through uncertainty quite often. So of course the nuts and bolts and ribbons makes perfect sense in terms of like something that struck you, because you have to figure out how to navigate like high risk situations with a lot of uncertainty and just like little tests here and there are effective in that endeavor.
Katherine Collins
Yeah, absolutely. We just, we've been working on some just newer and more challenging research projects and even that, which, I mean, we're not going to die if we touched the wrong thing, like in this place we’re talking about. But even that, there's a real fear of saying something wrong or being thought unworthy of the topic or heading in a direction that turns out to not be fruitful. And so we really have taken a very similar premise, like, okay, look, here's a big thing that we know is really vital. We're not sure how to progress, but we're going to try something and it might be something small, then we'll try something else and we'll move along.
Katherine Collins
Like the idea of we're just going to skip the fit is, is increasingly not an option, which I'm glad of.
Caitlin McShea
You can’t wait until an answer emerges. It might be too late. You have to take a step into the zone risky as it may be, but you have data, you have the nuts and the bolts as your data. I'm sure that a lot of the work that you do is of course. Yes. And it seems like a fun parallel, so that's great. So, well with that in mind, let's venture into the zone. Katherine, what object would you hope to discover was zone at the risk of imprisonment at the risk of great personal injury and even death?
Katherine Collins
You do make it sound daunting, but it certainly, so I have a visual and it won't surprise you at all, given what we just said, but this is my visual aid. And I like to think it would actually look, it would actually be a beautiful thing. I know I'm in some of the conversations to date on this topic. There's the idea that like, Oh, it's a really clunky, mysterious metal thing. I would really love to believe that if aliens came from afar, they might leave things that are dangerous, but they should be beautiful and dangerous at least. I'm not going to risk my life for a big chunk of metal that might cut me and not do anything good.
Katherine Collins
So I liked the idea of this kind of beautiful golden spiral element. And in terms of the utility, I've been thinking a lot about this, like a big line in a lot of fiction and maybe especially in sort of the science fiction and the things is what have you had sort of superhuman ability, strength or ability to read someone's mind or look into the future. And some of those sit kind of wrong with me and I can't quite put my finger on why, and yet I'm a very curious person. I was trying to kind of connect the dots. The whole reason I spent so much time at SFI is again, it's like widening the circle. Like, “Ooh, I never would have seen that.”
Katherine Collins
I never would have the training in deep mathematics or physics or biology to see the thing that you just saw, when we're looking at this big, interesting question. And so I was thinking how, what might be the parallel to that? And it was connecting it with, with my studies and biomimicry and parts of the conversation we just had. What I would love is for the secret sort of Dakota ring, give you all the wisdom, not just like the knowledge and not this sort of voyeuristic I can read your thoughts kind of thing, but the wisdom of everything around you. So not just the people that like the trees and the river and the land and the insects and the crows.
Katherine Collins
I mean, like all of it, if you could just bring in all of that accumulated wisdom, that would be worth risking something for.
Caitlin McShea
I think that sounds beautiful. And I liked that the actual visual that you have, your seashell is this kind of spiral. It's this growing circulate. It is a widening circle. That makes me feel good because I think that I had a sense of this idea of connection. I think that I was right to say that it's important to you because it does seem like this Dakota ring would allow you to occupy the actual waves that systems overlap and not just the stuff of the systems that you observe. And that's a really hard thing. And does that suggest that the, this alien species is perhaps better at it than we are.
Katherine Collins
Maybe better at it, maybe just different at it. Maybe there's stuff we're great at that we don't even know. because we can't see it from someone else's point of view. I'd like to think that, that part's true too.
Caitlin McShea
If this were an object that were widely distributed, quite often the stalkers come back with many of like jars of clay or what have you, let's say there are a bunch in it all over the world. What benefits do you think that we would see from the distributed use of something like this? What would actually be the emergent phenomenon of this wisdom, this accumulated wisdom?
Katherine Collins
It makes me so happy just thinking about it. It would automatically widen that aperture whenever a question arose and especially kind of a big, important systemic question. And it would just give us more to work with and not more to work with in terms of stuff or cleverness, but more to work with in more essential sense. I feel like in some of my business endeavors day to day, we actually use this distinction a fair amount. I mean, a team like that. We see a lot of clever things, someone who's taking something very recently developed, making it a little bit better, possibly very profitable. And you know, that's often fine and sometimes a great business to invest in, but it's very rare that we see something wise like foundationally new and different in a way that is obviously better.
Katherine Collins
And boy, when you see that, like that's a big deal. It's much harder. Again, if you were setting up a business, you'd probably do the first model of just like tiny iterations, which has needed a little bit better each time. But what I like about the idea of everyone having this decoder ring is that instead of us getting locked into a very narrow track, when we're thinking about potential solutions, it would automatically give us more to go by. And I think it would extend our time horizon as well, which is another key challenge.
Caitlin McShea
Could you expand on that a little bit because obviously SFI thinks a lot about complex time and varying timescales. So how does something like this wisdom, this global system wisdom, how would that impact our time horizon? You mean the way that we'll look at it?
Katherine Collins:
I think it would make the experience of time beyond ourselves more accessible and more tangible. Like I was thinking during the start of the pandemic of this past year, it was a quirky thing to share, but it came to mind. And so I'll tell you, we weren't even really supposed to be out very often in the city, those, those first very intense stretch. And so once a day went out for a walk and I happened to live near one of the big public parks here in Boston. And so there's some really big old trees, 200 plus years old, you know, that were planted at the start of the city. I got into this habit, totally unconsciously. I would go to the oldest tree in the park near my house and I would just lean against it.
Katherine Collins
I would just stay there for a few minutes. I can't say I soaked up all the wisdom of the tree, but boy, if I could, that would have been great, but it was sort of an antidote to this very anxious minute by minute feeling that I think we all were having at that time. I just thought, well, this tree has seen a lot of stuff. You know, this tree was here through multiple world wars. Mystery has seen protests in this park. This tree has seen celebrations in this park. This tree has seen a million different winters come and go. What could I learn from that? If I had that experience, what would this look like this moment in time? It's still might look pretty unusual, but I'd have a lot more to work with to kind of process it.
Katherine Collins
So that the kind of thing I'm thinking it would come with this.
Caitlin McShea
That would be obviously so beneficial. I mean, we can't help it. We are individuals. We need to survive. And especially in times of pandemic, we're very conscious of that effort and necessity, but therefore quite often we do bind ourselves and our own mortality and that makes it very hard to solve the very big problems that we have to. And so this broadened time horizon that the tree has, would give you a lot more to work with I think.
Katherine Collins
For sure. I mean, Dan Shrag talks about this all the time. I was one of the central issues with the climate crisis is we're almost incapable of thinking on the relevant timescale. It's not that we're stupid. It's not that we don't care. Like it's sincerely difficult to do. And so anything I think that would give us more capacity in that direction will be a good thing.
Caitlin McShea
Well, obviously I think quite a bit in symbols and in aesthetics. And I like the fact that for you, this tree does this thing because of course, as the tree increases in age and wisdom, it literally is widening circles that we measure by their rings. It's just kind of like a lovely synergy, but connects to your spiraling ring. So that's beautiful. Okay, cool. And so do you think that something like this decoder ring, this accumulated wisdom ring, could it translate beyond biology? Would it incorporate something like our smart machines, our attempt to innovate ourselves into the future? My artificial wisdom come about.
Katherine Collins
That's a neat question. I think yes, for sure. I mean, we're making it up, so, yes. It was the ultra-vision that is even more exciting than the accumulated wisdom of natural systems is if you combine all of that with the accumulated wisdom of these newer systems or different systems that are under development right now. That would be something. And I think it's a case where one plus one would equal way more than two. One challenge again with some of the more clever developments in recent years is I don't think we have really been able to test this longer term time horizon.
Katherine Collins
And in many cases it's sort of like the stock market. There's a way to look at the stock market that is totally completely connected with the world we live in and you can see the back and forth between the two. And then there's a way to look at the market just as market unto itself, like its own little world. And I get the intellectual interest of that second version, but it's incomplete and it's potentially disastrous if you take it too far. And I do think some of our newer data driven technologies have that same element to them. Like the data is not disconnected from our actual lives. That it's easy to treat it as if it is.
Caitlin McShea
And if you think it's almost this inevitable problem with technological development is that it moves so quickly. Therefore this time horizon is even more condensed when we begin to build machines and service to ourselves. And hopefully also in service to the planet, it seems that this expanded time horizon that you're decoder ring presents to human beings and the systems that we occupy, it could almost inform the way that we build these machines going forward to the ethics of the lifetime of these intelligence systems. And that's not something that we are doing right now, right now more broadly.
Katherine Collins
Geoffrey was presents his donation curve very causes me great anxiety to see that chart. Even those, some of those innovations have been so magnificent. I think you identified something really important, Caitlyn, if we had confidence that those increasingly quick iterations were sitting on a stronger deeper foundation, I think it's different, and then thinking of each of them as like an independent, quicker and quicker, bigger and bigger thing, which is inherently a little more volatile.
Caitlin McShea
I’m going to share one of these lives in our show notes, because I do think that our audience should see exactly what you're talking about. It's a high-pressure slide, right? It's like, we're about to innovate ourselves out of this problem we've created, but that's the path that we've sort of built ourselves by not really existing within the systems holistically. So it also seems that maybe this ring will resolve that issue.
Katherine Collins
It would help for sure. And again, some of those innovations are great. It's the risk and also the opportunity, which is sort of the world I lived in. So if you do it well, it could be fantastic. But if you do it poorly, it gets more and more tippy as you go.
Caitlin McShea
I don't mean to make the case that technological innovation is a bad thing. I really don't think that it is. I think it's kind of an incredible thing that humans have contributed to the universe in terms of creativity and utility and resolution. So I think about the printing press, I mean, how amazing information broadly distributed. So I'm certainly not making this case that for the future of civilization, we should not innovate technologically. I just think that it would be much more effective if we could employ your time horizon expanding ring to the design of those systems.
So I have a new question I'm introducing, which is again, an opportunity to bring in a different sort of orthogonal view to this scary zone thing. And I think it tells us a lot about our guests If you'd be willing to play. I wonder what song you were playing in your, your buds as you enter into the zone to ensure that you're focused and to ensure that you're safe, but also to like pump you up because it's high throttle situation, but you have to be very laser focused and you're intense.
Katherine Collins
My like sort of calm steely focus song, which is also my song. I plan red eye flights. When I used to take them is I Dream a Highwayby Gillian Welch. It's 15 minutes long because I'm not on, it's the same cadence all throughout. It's full of like layers and layers and layers of references and meaning. But the audio impact is a very like meditative focused kind of feeling. So that's what I would play if I was walking in, but then my will locking out song for almost any situation is Ode to Joy.
Katherine Collins
And so I have to tell you, I just finished the movie and this is what's playing in the last couple of minutes of the movie and the scratchy radio. And so now I'm all wigged out and I'm not sure I want to say that anymore. When the girl is moving the glasses at the very end and you hear that scratching music in the background, that's what it is. But it's not joyful. So I think it's like, I don't know what to make of it at all. That's another thing that's going to stick with me.
Caitlin McShea
No, I wonder if it is joyful, you know, the stalker makes it safely and he's rehabbed his family and now they have a dog. I love that they suddenly have a pet it's very important. Now monkey's moving glasses around. Maybe she's very pleased but who's to say,
Katherine Collins
No, that's, that is a really, I like that reading of it, but I thought that last 10 minutes was utterly captivating. I wasn't honestly, in the middle, I wasn't sure I was going to get through the whole movie. I know it's widely praised, but it was not for me.
Caitlin McShea
I argue about it with David quite often where it's just like, he's obviously a huge Tarkovsky fan and I don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful film. Oh, I might turn off a lot of my listeners, but I feel like Tarkovsky takes three hours to tell a story that needs 12 minutes, but he makes it feel like 10 hours.
Katherine Collins
I think that's probably the point. And so I didn't want to short change any of that. Like, I really did try to soak it all in, but I think that's the challenge, if it's well done a film like that really makes you feel like you've been part of the experience as is the point of the whole story. Like this is not a pleasant lighthearted skip through the park experience. And so, wow. It was not a refreshing film for sure. But then the last 10 minutes when he goes back and his partner and his child are there, like that will just live with me forever when she's talking straight to the camera about like what it means to live in this situation. And then like kid is moving stuff and the music's playing like, Ooh, that to me just widened out the whole thing in such a important way. Yeah
Caitlin McShea
I really love both the book and the film, but the film is specially or kind of bookmarked by this human connection. So it's the beginning of the film is them in their bedroom, all sharing a bed. And it's just like the horrors of the zone. And of course it needs to feel long and exhausting because the zone is a dangerous place. So, the time stretches of necessity, but the film it's in service to the story. So I'm sure very important. And then as you say, it ends again with this kind of reunion, this expression of how difficult but necessary it is to kind of do this together. And so I do like the framing. I also really liked that your steely focused song is 15 minutes long because once it's finished, you know, you got to kind of get out of there.
Katherine Collins
Yeah, that's totally true. Although to be fair, I played on a loop pretty frequently and it'll take you as far as you need, need to go. It's a magical song.
Caitlin McShea
That's wonderful. I'll link to it. I look forward to, to hearing it. I am not surprised at all though, that your exit song is Ode to Joybecause you seem like a very grateful person. It seems that seriously, it seems that you walk through the world sort of intent on experiencing pleasure and joy. And I wish more people did that.
Katherine Collins
Oh, thank you. Yeah. I'm lucky to be sunny.
Caitlin McShea
Life is rare and special and great. And so why be bogged down in the zone for more than 15 minutes when you could be at home with your family and your dog? Yeah, I think that's great. Well, thank you so much, Katherine, for taking this hour of your Saturday to think through these objects.
Katherine Collins
Absolutely. What a total. It was a joy and again, just the honor of having the book and the film to just take me somewhere. So, so different. Especially in this past year where we have been going places to very different, like if it really did feel like I had been far, far away, which was a really welcome and, and fascinating journey. So thank you for that.
Caitlin McShea
Oh, I'm so happy. Any kind of escape hatch this year is a wonderful thing to possess and congratulations again on your election as the board chair.
Katherine Collins
A huge, huge honor. And I'm really just so, so delighted to be in service in any way to this amazing organization.
Caitlin McShea
Well, thank you. And I really look forward to seeing you in person soon. Maybe we'll see. But very soon it feels like it's all coming back and that's something to be joyful about too.
Katherine Collins
I bet. Yeah. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much. You too. Bye bye.