Decoding the Gurus - Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal & Jordan Hall: Making Sense about Making Sense of Sensemaking

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

It's finally here! In what has to be our most meta episode to date, Matt and Chris tackle the meta-philosophy / meta-spirituality / meta-science that is Sensemaking. You might say sensemaking is sense to the power of 2. But what is sensemaking, really? Well, that's a tricky question because as Jordan Hall says; no one can simply be told what sensemaking is. It is the escape hatch out of The Matrix, it is the finger pointing at the moon, it is a possibility space in an nth dimensional cube.... whatever the hell it is, some people are pretty sure it's the solution to all of humanity's problems. Exciting!So, since defining sensemaking is like trying to staple a jellyfish to a wall, it is very understandable that Jordan Hall, Jamie Wheal, and Daniel Schmachtenberger would take 2 hours and 40 minutes out of their busy schedule, and have a meta-conversation about this meta-topic, where they try to decipher exactly what this strange beast is and do some sensemaking about sensemaking. And it's even MORE understandable that Chris Kavanagh and Matthew Browne would take even longer out of their own schedules to try to analyse THAT discourse: sensemaking about sensemaking about sensemaking. Shifting to power notation for brevity, this episode is sensemaking cubed, which equals sense to the power of 4. How did we go? Well, sensemaking is like an elephant and everybody's got a piece of it. Chris is tweaking the tail, Matt's busy fondling the trunk, Daniel's inspecting the ears, and Jordan Hall is riding that bad boy, trampling poor Jamie Wheal and scaring all the monkeys. But we get there, we get there... So join us as we operate in 75 simultaneous paradigms, make not just sense but anti-nonsense, and discover what the difference really is between a puzzle and a photograph.LinksRebel Wisdom: Making Sense of Sensemaking: Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, Jordan HallAlexandros Marinos & Eric's Twitter BrouhahaJonathan Pageau's angry thread on the 'arrogant secularists' at DTG and how little we know about demonologyMatt's epic tweet-a-long thread

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown. With me is Chris Kavanagh. This is the Decoding Zone, where decoding is done. Are you wearing your decoding pants, Chris? Are you ready to decode? My decoding pants are commando. That's a high eye roll. And I have to say, mate, you're sounding melodious and mellifluous. I don't know, something's changed.

It's like there's a warmth to your voice that I haven't detected before. Thank you. Thank you for helping me figure out my microphone settings chris that's what you wanted to hear isn't it yeah wow what kind of you to say no no no that's just it's nothing to do with that just noting what a wonderful voice you have it's you know we have new listeners every episode probably matt and they they're just wondering what a beautiful voice he has and now they're glad that i as their their surrogate, have voiced those feelings. So you're welcome, audience.

You're welcome. You just want the whole world to know that I don't know my way around the Microsoft Windows sound settings system panel thingamabob thing. See, the thing is, I also don't know my way around that. I'm a Mac man. I'm a Mac man now. I'm fully converted for probably over a decade but what i do know my way around is this little thing called google i'm quite an expert at it so i i

find the answer to the questions with you know surprising ease i'm not saying anything negative i'm just talking about my ease with that technology that's all okay well i have you that's the main thing you you're sort of exact for me like i do for my mom this is the circle of life chris i solved my mother's computer problems you solve mine and one day some young child somewhere will be solving yours uh yes uh yes i'll i'd say i look forward to that day, but I'm still too hip. I'm with it for now. They can teach me nothing. So, Matt, we dropped a segment which used to be, I can't remember what we called it. It was something like, you know, checking in on the guru sphere. Oh, I think it was called Weinstein Watch.

But, you know, there's too much goings on. There's goings on in in the gurusphere. Maybe that's a good name for it. Have you noticed any of these? Which one has been dangling a shiny ball in front of you? Jangling keys. Oh, so much going on. So much going on.

The Weinsteins never fail to disappoint, do they? They're never quiet for long. There's always something going on. And this is even better because it's got everyone's involved. Eric Weinstein is involved. Brett Weinstein is tangentially. And Alexandros Marinos, our favorite person in the world, is a key player. For those who don't know Matt, Alexandros Marinos is a Brettinstein super fan he uh kind of emerged from that ecosystem he's

a ceo of a tech company and there is no man on earth that that likes brett more than alexandrus likes him and he's he's kind of spun out a little niche for himself a a minor guru-dom, if you will, which is making insanely long threads to basically defend Brett or whatever asinine heterodox take he has for the day. And a lot of it revolves around promoting ivermectin, hinting at vaccine dangers, hidden unacknowledged dangers he's a minor sycophant of robert malone as well so uh we did cover him previously on the episode with david pizarro when we talked about the better skeptics project so but anyway that's the introducing introduction to our cast of characters so well sam harris is also involved because it started off with eric weinstein basically inserting himself into this thing between brett and sam now what was inserting himself into this thing between Brett and Sam.

Now, what was it? What was this thing between Brett and Sam? Eric Weinstein tweeted something about, you know, you don't throw your friends and family under the bus, personal relationships, all that stuff. I love everybody involved. Can't we just be kind and civil to each other? So, nice sentiments. But what was the beef, Chris, with Brett and Sam? Brett and Sam are beefing over vaccines. And sam is currently coming out of now the maelstrom of attention around his comments over hunter biden's laptop and his he's released a podcast actually just today at the time of recording clarifying his statements on the trigonometry pod so that's what put sam harris into the news cycle and what led to eric issuing a tweet reminding everyone that sam had went to dinner with dave rupert

and he posted a picture of them together and and basically declaring that he thought sam was pretty much wrong about almost everything but that eric would never he is far too principled a man to ever even conscience throwing a dear friend to the howling world. But he will, you know, acknowledge that all the criticisms that people raise, they're basically valid, and Sam has a lot of problems in the way they look. But Eric would never, he would never stoop so low to not have a friend's back.

Thank you, Chris. So that's the setup. That's the setup. So Alexandros Marinos, being the Brett superfan that he is, dunks on Eric Weinstein, quoting him, saying, what Brett is doing concerns me because Eric Weinstein did not go along all the way with Brett's descent into anti-vaxxerism. And Alexandros remembers this. He remembers. That bridge farm remembers, Chris. And that's what he said.

You can say whatever you want now, but we remember. So that's a bold move, really, to be such a super fan of Brett Weinstein, to dunk on Eric Weinstein for not supporting his brother strongly enough, in Alexandros' view, in his anti-vaxxer takes. So, like, Eric made a tweet which was suggesting why can't we all get along i love brett and sam and so on let's not descend into barbary right there like throwing our friends under the bus and alexandros links to a video where Eric on Rebel Wisdom made some slightly disparaging comments about Brett. But essentially, he was doing that Eric thing

of both sides in everything. He was saying, no, I don't know how Brett can be so certain about ivermectin. But I do think people are wrong to focus on Brett because he's just responding to the information ecosphere and that kind of thing. So it was a relatively mild criticism from Eric of Brett's position. Yeah, that's right.

That's the funny thing about it. Alexandros doesn't appreciate it, it seems. This is Eric's normal modus operandi, like both sides. It's all very complicated not to plant his flag too strongly anywhere, really, least of all on something like this, which is quite clever of Eric, really. Before you go on to that thread, may I suggest that we do a dramatic reading? I'll play the part of Alexandros

and you can be Eric for this Twitter exchange. I think it would help if we were to dramatize it for people. Agreed, agreed. Okay, so just channel Eric, you know know what would eric how would eric say that and i'll i'll do the same for alexandra so so here we go you can say whatever you want now but we remember pardon me but who are you and nobody me too nobody to, a word to the wise. Maybe stop trying to stir the pot in your neighbor's family. I don't remember you at our family dinner table growing up. Find another hobby. Be well. If you wanted this to be read only by the people in your family's dinner table,

consider sending them a private message. Are having a reading problem try reading the lines first and then in between them good day period full stop sir another full stop yeah i i feel that richard dawkins got done up there slightly It's actually more than Eric. That's my generic non-local specific pretentious ponderous voice. It happens to be Richard Dawkins. That's pompous English, man. It is. I do like somebody pointed out that it isn't good day, sir. Like, as you noted, it's good day, sir.

Now, Chris, I've been good day, sir now chris i've been good day sir and i've been and i've been asked this question who are you who are you this is this is eric no but eric you were not asked that by eric no it was brett wasn't it was brett you were asked who you were and uh well were you told to be well so yeah i think i probably was but curious this is the thing this is why look there's there's a method to my madness this is why i was doing in a pompous english voice is because that's eric and brett's image of the sort of stip up a lippish offended dignity taking the ultimate ultimate higher ground and putting someone in their place. And they imagine somebody from the 1800s wearing a cravat when they do this.

It's very funny. Yeah, well, I'm not sure that exact image crops into the vibe, but I do believe they're channeling that energy. And, you know, we often invoke this concept of civility porn. And I think that's exactly an illustration of what it is. But I wrote on a tweet, I say, good, sir, I do judge you may have accidentally promulgated anti-inoculation missives. Perchance, may we discuss this like civilized gentlemen. I know you to be of highly esteemed character and superb critical faculties. It would bring me such joy to resolve this minor trifle.

So I think that captures, I wrote that actually when I was listening to some podcast, some heterodox podcast where they were waxing lyrical about their ability to have these kinds of conversations. And of course it was a conversation which was extremely indulgent where they all basically agree on everything that they're saying but they still cannot help backpacking each other for having it so so yeah yeah matt that's a

that's a frustrating thing isn't it about the heterodox sphere it is it is but it brings us joy it brings us joy it does it does spark joy that's right and the other thing to mention and we won't dwell on this we're not possessed by the demon of anger but our little segment our little minor decoding of john ferracchi and jonathan pageau finally reached the lofty airs of pageau's attention space and he tweeted about it and he basically, you know, rather unsurprisingly found it... Wanting. What's that word?

Sophomoric and wanting, yes. And that we, us silly materialists, we didn't understand the complexity of the thing that he was discussing. And we don't understand these complexities about demons and what he actually meant. We trying to invoke silly low understandings of demons yeah so that's a shame but it was inevitable um yeah so jonathan's rejoined to us is that he says demons are real beings atheists just don't know what a real being is and if something cannot be physically

circumscribed in space they for some reason cannot see it as a real being, which is completely ridiculous. Yeah, you know, non-physical but real beings, yes. Middle Ages to see people being persecuted for being witches or demons. And that symbolic interpretivist stance that they go into, which we covered, tends to be something that is a favoured pastime of the theologians and intellectual set of religious traditions, but it kind of glosses over a lot of the prevalent interpretations. And the interesting thing is that he referred to those as the lowest folk interpretation of demons. But the interesting thing for me is like Pajot's audience, because he's cultivated an audience of religious people

and reactionaries and so on, their defense and their kind of riffing on it reveals the game quite clearly because you had people coming in and making various comments about the nature of demons and that if you just don't understand what spiritual energy is and all this kind of things but but somebody also took not took offense but they responded asking him to expand about this uh notion of low folk interpretation and said that you know we're not lacking for evidence of demons physically interacting in the world and that christians do grant the presence of a material physical energy evil entities can be so basically they

made the point that um agentic transpersonal intelligence that can embody themselves by parasitic possession is the same thing basically saying intelligent evil evil beings right and uh yeah i i do like that a lot of the defenders were either invoking the literal demons that he doesn't want to directly invoke, or they were just casting out very straightforward appeals to supernaturalism. So yeah, that's the funny thing. Peugeot, for all his manifest intellectual deficiencies, is quite good at obfuscation and deflection, but his fans are not necessarily. And even though Pajot can walk that tightrope between metaphor and reality forever and ever, they keep falling off. They don't quite get it.

But there's a beautiful exchange that I just saw. So Pajot quotes someone who's saying, angels and demons are pure spirit. How hard is this to grasp? And he responds, it is hard to grasp if you're a materialist who thinks that spirit is just a kind of invisible matter like in Ghostbusters,

rather than a causal pattern which manifests in phenomena. That's pretty good. That's pretty good in itself. But somebody underneath responds, I'm going to be honest, in phenomena right that's pretty good that's really good in itself like so um but somebody underneath responds i'm going to be honest i'm pretty sure that i agree with you on this one but i have no clue what the phrase causal pattern which manifests in phenomena means i understand and agree with the pure spirit part vote can someone explain and jonathan responds

for goodness sakes a law is a causal pattern which manifests in phenomena if you ask your buddy for a beer that is a causal pattern which manifests in phenomena so there you have it demons are just it's just the same as asking someone for a beer same thing same thing where's the confusion that's us told we will retract that episode in due course obviously but uh the demon discourse promises to continue to deliver gems it's going to be great yeah yeah it is it's uh i i'm all in on demon discourse and i just can't wait until we get egregores demons and leprechauns that's what i'm really into that's demons are old news we all know what they are they're patterns of meaning like asking your buddy for a beer well if pejor keeps this up i'm gonna pin him down i look demons are old hat

let's talk turkey what about the easter bunny i want to know about the easter bunny what's the deal with him that's a causal pattern that manifests itself in phenomena you're just being a a a new year for your bro night matt i'm sorry go get back to your 90s internet leave them alone it's a cheap shot huh sorry sorry the easter bunny's off out of bounds okay yeah that guy works hard, yeah, this is probably a fitting introduction, apart from the fact that I'm very sorry for all the people that, you know, this is basically Twitter minutiae. But it is the sense-making. This is all we've got.

Well, that's true. But it's also the case that for all those people who like to think of Twitter as a completely self-contained little universe onto itself, which never interacts with the actual world, I have news for you. Twitter just gives you the means to see people writing down what they are otherwise saying in long-form podcasts or on their TV shows or that kind of thing. that we see in those tweets is also evident in the podcast that we cover and all of the other content that you see all over the space and we're going to look at some of that this week as we get into the long threatened long overdue triple sense making death threat video that you've been dying to dive into is that fair to say i have been chafing at the bit absolutely sense making about sense making is the name of the video and we are going to be

sense making about sense making about sense making or sense making cubed for short you know it's an extremely meta move from us we are going to sense make about their sense making about sense making that's right and if that's too meta for you then just stop listening now the water's too spicy get out of it and stop eating the chili we uh no what's gonna happen just to mention that is that you might notice an overabundance of metaphors that are bad in this episode from us, from us primarily. And it's inevitable because it's so infectious. This, Richard Dawkins referred to Jordan Peterson in an interview as being addicted to or drunk on metaphors and symbols.

And this is a very apt description. These guys, there is no metaphor that they have ever met that they dislike. They're intoxicated by metaphors. And sometimes you have to dive into metaphors within metaphors to understand what they're talking about. It's inception level stuff. You have to go deeper to get out.

That's the only way. On the spectrum of shape rotator to a word cell, they break the needle, totally break it off. They've got all the way around in the sense that they are word cells right word cells not shaper teeth they're not shaper they're word cells they're clearly word cells yes that's right that's all right i wonder you see your metaphor confused me but it's already it's infected our discourse. But so what this is, as we've said, Making Sense of Sensemaking featuring Daniel Schmachtenberger,

Jimmy Wheal and Jordan Hall. And Matt, we have a theme that we are supposed to be like loosely sticking to the past while, which is sensemaking about the technosphere, the season of tech? The season of tech, yeah. I think that's what we called it. That's what we called it.

Yeah, so when that happens, Matt, you sometimes hear a little something, something a bit like this. It's the Code in the News. Tech season. Tech season. Tech, tech, tech season tech tech tech tech tech season it's the golden badurus tech tech tech tech tech season it is still the tech season you might have thought it finished but here's my case for why this is a fitting episode for our tech season it is that daniel schmachtenberger has been doing the rounds with tristan harris he appeared on joe rogan he's somebody that talks about the dangers

of social media and technology run rampant he's a a bit like Jerome Larnier in this regard. Jordan Hall is somebody who made his money from investing in, I think it was Winamp, or one of those early codec-y internet audio things. So he has a foot or had a foot in the tech sector and has metaphors that derive from that experience. And Jimmy Weal is, I think, a kind of spiritual guru type for the techno ratty. He's somebody that I can see leading workshops on how to get into your primal groove for the CEOs of tech companies. So this is why I think the sensemakers,

they are a little bit connected to the technospheres because I think these people, they are the kind of people that operate as potential gurus for people in tech spheres who might be more wary of your Christian or explicitly alternative health-coded gurus. That's my pitch. What do you think? Yeah, that'll do. That'll do. As we'll hear, there's an awful lot of sort of corporate tech speak.

And a lot of these concepts like Game B and coherence and stuff is kind of a tech utopian thing. So it's got that flavor to it. It's also got a lot of other bits to it too. But look, I'll allow it. I'll allow it i'll allow it as they say but before we get into it chris i just wanted to let listeners know about my personal journey and embarking on this material because it's two hours and 40 minutes of sense making and it is pretty meta and the subjective experience so what's this auto ethnography the subjective experience of engaging put away. I don't need to see that.

It's something. It's really something. I encourage everyone to give it a go. Most people last about 10 or 20 minutes and then their brains just float away and mine certainly did too. And what I had to do just as a discipline, I needed to sit down and force myself to take notes. And when I noticed that my brain was just disappearing off with the fairies, I stopped and I rewinded it and I tried to pick up the thread. And it was a gargantuan enterprise. I'm very proud of myself. I made it all the way to the end and we'll link to my mega thread,

which is just a straight up summary of everything they said. But I just want people to acknowledge that I suffered. The effort you put in. Well, the thing that I think is an important key to that thread, because I didn't get this the first time I read it, this was you actually engaging in sense-making. You were trying to extract what the kind of main point of the discussion was, right?

Like, yes, you took a couple of digs and stuff, but you were actually trying to summarize the arguments that was happening. So it is not a thread that is purely poking fun. It's more like trying to say, what the hell are they saying? I may have been the first person in history to use Twitter in good faith. I just, I didn't dunk. I just, I just tried to summarize.

You did dunk. You did dunk on occasion. That's understandable. And, you know, while we are doing this confessional session about our experience with the Sensemakers, I will also say that from all the content we've covered, and we've covered terrible people, we've covered Scott Adams, we have J.P. Sears, we've had a four-hour indulgent conversation

between Douglas Murray and Eric Weinstein. We have been put through the ringer. But this content, I had the same experience. It's almost like a kind of Douglas Adams science fiction object where your mind can only concentrate on it for 20 minutes and then slips off. It's so dense, the thought that's contained within it, that your brain can only focus on it for 20 minutes. And I find on multiple occasions, I was kind of listening and I was following the script, making notes and stuff. And then I was listening for about 20, 30 minutes. And I found on multiple occasions, I was kind of listening and I was following the script, making notes and stuff. And then I was listening for about 20, 30 minutes. And I realized

I've been listening an hour and I had took nothing in for the past 40 minutes. And they were still talking about the same thing that I previously remembered them talking about. And that was weird. It happened a couple of times and I'm listening to everything at times two speed at minimum. And even still, it was very hard to get through. And at first, I resented them for this. I resented them for what they'd put into the world and how many words they were using to say such very simple concepts. But I had a whole journey with this content because after a while I came to appreciate it as a kind of performance art.

Like I appreciated the artistry of sensemaking about this love of metaphors and yes anding each other. There's a kind of appreciating it as a craft. And then I liked it. And then I took a gap and then i and i liked it and then i took a gap then i came back to it and i i listened to some other content of the people talking to other people and then i got annoyed again and i came back and i was like i'd lost the love of the metaphors and kind of understood where their deeper project often took them into and it just made me again return to my original thing that we can enjoy it

but there's there's some things that this stuff connects to which is not so great and uh yeah so anyway that was my journey with the content it's a fascinating thing the journey i mean bad stats has also described it as being impressive performance art. And it is. It's like watching multiple Samuel Beckett absurdist plays one after the other. You know, where there's people sitting in pots and there's lights going on and off and they're saying incomprehensible things. It's completely meaningless, but it's about nothing,

like a Seinfeld episode. But there's so much about nothing. And there's something impressive about building something, but it's a bit like the Matrix, Chris. Nobody can be told what it is. You have to be shown it. And listeners, buckle up, buckle up. We are going to take you on a ride.

We are. We're going to take you on a ride with the clips now, and there will be a fair amount of them so so be prepared but the last framing note i'll make about this is that for those who aren't going to watch and don't have the visual component they're in a quite nice room sitting on an elongated couch three guys middle-aged guys sitting and and there's a brown table in front of them with various esoteric instruments thrown around it. I think those are esoteric Buddhist

implements and I'm kind of wondering if they were specifically chosen for some symbolic purposes or whether they are there purely because that's in that person's house. They have some, you know, Buddhist paraphernalia lying around on their desk.

But it's everything in the video and everything about the way they interact with each other creates the impression that something of profound importance and complexity is being communicated. There are deep thoughts. This is a deep conversation about an important topic. Everything gives the signal that that is there. And we often talk about how the gurus are better than academics,

better than politicians at presenting this appearance of wisdom. And this definitely has it. All of my internal signals were saying something important is being communicated here. So it's just to illustrate that the form is very important to the sense-making enterprise, I think. Yeah, the visual component is important. At times, Jordan Hall, it appears like he's meditating. He's got his eyes closed and he's ruminating, kicking in every... He doesn't want the senses to interrupt the consumption of the

information. And there's Jordan Hall on one side and Daniel Schmachtenberger on the other, and Jimmy Wheal is in the middle. And Jimmy Wheal, they're all nice looking guys, all look relatively healthy and well-kept. But Jimmy Wheal's got these massive bags under his eyes. And he's the kind of slightly shamanistic guy. So I'm just wondering, like, was he on a hard sense making bender the night before? And he had to get up early for this session or, you know, maybe suffers from insomnia like I do. But he's got tremendously impressive bags under his eyes. And I say this as somebody who often has bags under their eyes. So just fighting that up, Matt. Okay. All right. Look at the visual image. impressive bags under his eyes and i say this as somebody who often has bags under their eyes so

just just fighting that up map okay all right look at the visual image um let's get started yeah your mind palace is ready now let's start filling up those rooms so let's start with the obvious question um we've got two of them answering this so what is sense making let's go with daniel schmachtenberger first what is sense Honestly, I'm kind of interested in hearing your narrative. On why sense-making is important? Why this question, and I'm not actually going to name the question yet, whatever the question is, why it is not just important, but central. What I think the strange attractor that draws us all here together is sense-making is about

the exploration into what is real and what is meaningful is bound to what's real. And we find that we have the, at least have the experience of having choice and we're trying to find out how to orient our choice. And so, sense-making to inform choice-making is what is reality? What is my relationship with reality? What is fundamentally meaningful as a basis for how I can make choices that are more aligned with what I find meaningful. Nice. Nice.

That was nice. That was pretty nice. Daniel Schmachtenberger has an interesting way of talking, right? Because he kind of creates these quite intricate, in right because it kind of creates these quite intricate compound sentences where every word is kind of like layered with significance but they're they're basically said sense making about what is real and our relationship to find out what is real yeah like the scope is ambitious shall we say it's about figuring out what is real and what is meaningful and then how to make choices based on that so it's everything basically everything what what's real what exists how to understand it everything what what does it what does it all mean the answer is 42 probably but it's life

the universe and everything right it's sense making is is understanding everything yes well or or or sense making something else let's see here's jimmy wheels answer to the question which is which shall not be named yeah i mean i think mine's probably many layers of abstraction below these framings, although I totally, you know, track and appreciate what you guys are also saying. My basic gut sense is, hey, back to complicated versus complex. We're probably not going to solve the complex, wicked existential problems we face with individual horsepower playing rivalrous games. We're probably going to need to get together and be able to create a higher form of collective intelligence and sense making.

And what I've been seeing lately, paying attention to this space, is it's starting to bubble up but it feels like a wildly unstable element. I've been seeing lately, paying attention to this space, is it's starting to bubble up, but it feels like a wildly unstable element. And it's breaking my heart slash freaking me out slash concerning me that we, our efforts to create group coherence seem to be going so badly so far. And so I'm deeply committed to figuring out what are the rate limiters slash Achilles heels, missing links that can help us at least start, you know,

failing forward, making new, better, different mistakes. So that's clearer. Yeah. You got it. I like the individualist power playing rivalrous games.

Was that what he said? Something along those lines. Yeah. So Jamie's referring there to Game A. Game A. Oh, Game A. You already want to get on the Game A, mate. Are you ready?

I know. We don't want to get into Game A. No, we're not going to get into Game A yet. But we have to sort of – there's so much jargon being used there. You have to refer to a kind of a sense-making dictionary to figure out what they're referring to. So, cohesion is good. They want more cohesion. Collective intelligence is good. A higher form of collective intelligence. Yeah. Playing those rivalrous games, that's kind of game A, which is kind of everything that's happening now. Everything, all the organizations, the universities, the linear thinking, the capitalism, everything, everything, everything that's been gone on perhaps since some deep shamanistic past. So, sensemaking is not that. It's something better i think so there's also you seen at the very start of that clip this kind of feature which will come up again and again and maybe this is a good thing that we start with highlighting this explicit thing rule omega but you noticed at the start that jamie kind of said well my you know my take is not going to be as complex as your guys but like i completely agree

with your guys take which is great so here's my trifling take and that's interesting because actually the dynamic that we'll see in this conversation is a little bit like i think i like jimmy the best out of them because he does have a slightly self-deprecating quality to himself a lot more than the force of nature that is jordan hall the the ego monster that you'll see rearing up throughout the conversation we've already covered jordan hall in another episode you can go back and enjoy and he comes across as like quite domineering and a little bit arrogant in various spaces and daniel schmachtenberger on the other hand is sort of like a yoda figure on theelines who, you know, eventually comes in to offer wisdom.

But he's a bit more ponderous than Jimmy and Jordan. So it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. And that little back and forth there where they don't disagree with each other or they don't really have different definitions. Rather, they are elaborating on what the other person said or providing a different viewpoint. And this is very much in line with the sense-making modus operandi, which is just that, you know, it's like different people feeling the elephant.

I think they actually use this analogy. And there's a lot of different ways of talking about it, but we might say that it is... Actually, it's interesting. It seems like you actually have to talk about it in many different ways because it is the kind of thing that cannot be conveyed effectively in language it's the matrix unfortunately no one can be told what coherence is but we can't actually tell a lot of different stories. It's become the blind man with the elephant.

And after a little while, we might be able to in ourselves grasp perhaps what is being pointed out. You know, someone's touching the trunk, someone else is fondling the legs, that kind of thing. And they're all different viewpoints. And there's like an infinitude or a multiplicity of different ways to describe something and understand something, and you keep elaborating and riffing on those understandings to get sensemaking happening. What you're invoking there, Matt, is the omega principle or the omega rule. So,

let's let the sensemakers take it away with what that is. I don't know if you've ever even expressed rule omega to Jamie, but he's just doing it. Yeah. And he's kind of openly inquiring into the questions that are really alive and it's a little bit easier for us to riff off what each other is saying because we've got some recently shared language on these things. But the rule omega is actually a really simple practical thing that I, towards coherence, that I would like everybody here to get is if Jordan and I are talking, or if you and I are talking, like we have this and I think we naturally have it but it's worth making explicit, is if you say something that sounds ridiculous to me, or batshit crazy or wrong, I actually give the benefit of the doubt that you might have a reason that I didn't understand

first. So rather than just default into you're probably wrong, I'll ask more questions. rather than just default into you're probably wrong, I'll ask more questions. And that, giving the benefit of the doubt that you actually might have something useful to say, increases my making sure that I understand you before I'm responding. And that actually, and the disagreeing with something that you weren't even saying

because I didn't seek to understand well enough, creates very turbulent flow rather than laminar flow, breaks down coherence, right? If people could just do that towards coherence, if they could just give the benefit of the doubt that each other, that everyone has some signal. So, Matt, a lot to say there, but I'm interested to get your thoughts on rule omega but i i do want to just note the dynamic there that jamie doesn't know you know maybe he's never had it explicitly explained to him whereas jordan and daniel are familiar with this so the you know they're going to name this principle so that's again just a little bit of the dynamic about Jamie being the junior member of this trio in terms of sense making.

But yeah, aside from that, what about the rule omega? Do you think that's a good rule, Matt? Oh, well, I don't want to, you know, I'm not going to judge. I'm not going to say whether it's good or bad. That would be... Yeah, that would be very anti-rule omega. Yeah, that's right. don't lay that trap for me chris no i mean look i'm happy for now just to describe it i'm just absorbing it i'm taking it all in i'm letting it percolate and swirl around but yeah this is this is the thing um rule amiga it's i'm okay you're okay

it's not a competition it's not about saying some ideas are wrong or some ideas are right every perspective is valid and has value and you you need to try harder to find those nuggets of truthiness inside stuff even if it seems ridiculous on the face of it yes and i have jordan outlining this in kind of more emphatic fashion. So here's, here's a little bit more about rule Omega. I'm not interested in having conversations that aren't actually trying to break me ground. So, okay, do it, dude. So you're expressing something hard and in the expression, 98% is noise and 2% is signal like the jazz riff. But what happens is that my job is to

actually do two things one hold all of it not just say fuck it that was that wasn't 100 right so i'm just going to nuke it hold all of it then in my self discernment to what degree can i express something back that gets rid of the 50 50 that is noise so now i've got six percent signal express it back and of course if he can then do that and now you three is even better a more profound instrument because you're going to be bringing a different perspective perhaps you can take it and actually zoom in on it down to the point where actually 50 signal that's the idea right and so one it's an invitation say hey we're trying to do something's hard let's all try to do something that's hard to be willing to take the risk of not speaking elegantly and on the premise that everyone else is doing their absolute fucking level best to hear that which is

trying to speak itself through you and listening into themselves like oh there it is tone got it there's something beautiful and clear there here's what i heard and that's rule omega that's rule omega yeah so it is meta it is meta sense making sense making about sense making how are we going to fix the world as a society we have these massive big problems these massive challenges they're too big for any one person to understand or to fix by themselves. So we need to cooperate cohesively in order to solve these tricky problems. And they love splitting definitions. And there's a big difference between complex problems and complicated problems. I mean, we probably shouldn't even get into that. But I think they believe that getting the style of conversation just exactly right and creating this new norm of how you talk about things in this elaboration, toss the ball backwards and forwards and sort of mine and refine meaning out of the things that each other is saying,

that's going to be key to solve the problems of the modern world. Yeah, and so to me, one of the issues here is like, it's incredibly indulgent, right? Yes, like, you know, for conversations to work, yes, there has to be a degree of good faith and tolerance, and you have to let people finish the point that they're making, right? And you have to accept people can misstate a point and still have validity. Or maybe the person is wrong, but they actually make a valid point when they're saying something and so on.

And if you just pull up people constantly on every little mistake they make or where they speak unclearly, it can damage conversations. They're right about that. where they speak unclearly, it can damage conversations. They're right about that. But their rule is more like take everything as the baseline to be valid. And don't be mean, right? Don't be critical. And that's just, that's fine for like,

they compare the conversation to jazz on various occasions, right? And when you're trying to play at some jazz session, the point is to make music together. But the sense makers are claiming to do something else. The cue is in the name, right? They're talking about giving actual answers. So actually, there are wrong approaches, and there are wrong answers. And if you simply say that, well, let's focus on what everything gets right, you might miss that actually people are wrong, and their approaches can be harmful. And this is a little bit why, like when Jonathan Pagio, where people say, Alex Jones has a crazy wisdom or this kind of tendency to present it as a virtue that you can look at the most unhinged partisan polemicists and say, well, they've got some value

to what they're saying. And it's like, yeah, but you have to ignore what they're actually doing, what the majority of their output is to focus on that. And actually, it gives the wrong impression because people end up saying, no, Alex Jones is mostly right. And as we've covered multiple times, he is not mostly right.

So yeah, I just think there's a fundamental flaw there. There's also the amusing thing that the Omega Principle is the thing which Brett invokes in his Hunter Gallagher's Guide to the 21st Century, and which says that

any behavior which sticks around and is costly is likely an adaptation. So they make a principle and they make a rule. Are both bad heuristics to apply to reasoning. Yeah, I'd agree with that. We're going to hear lots more examples of them putting rule omega into practice, and we'll see where it leads, like the kinds of mind castles it tends to create. But I think a good analogy here in terms of framing your criticism is another metaphor, but the psychological trait, personality trait, openness

to experience. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is this need for variety, aesthetic sensitivity, tolerance of ambiguity, tends to be greater absorption, unconventionality, intellectual curiosity, intuitional type stuff, right? Now, it's perceived by many, not unreasonably, as a pretty good thing to be high in openness to experience. But it's a little bit like how, like being charitable and being good faith or being civil or whatever. Like these are all good things, but you can take any of these things like openness to experience too far. And if you do, then you basically get lost in this intellectual wilderness or something. Like there is no discernment.

They talk about discernment that there's no critical thinking. There is an inability to tell the difference between something that's real and something that isn't real, something that makes sense and something that doesn't make sense. So yeah, I would disagree with them about their approach. There's another feature which we'll hear in a lot of the clips to come, where something mundane is presented as something profound, right? This is one of the things that I want to recommend people bear in mind, like, for everything that's being said, what is actually being communicated? What is the principle that's being communicated? And did it need such dramatic delivery and profound pauses and metaphors?

And just an early example is Jordan Hall talking about, you know, why he's able to bestow wisdom. My path here is through a very, very large number of distinct personal failures. Like just running into a wall and going, okay, well, that's wrong. Turning a little bit, running into another wall. That's wrong. Turning a little bit, running into another wall. That's wrong. Turn a little bit, running into another wall. Like the number of times that I have fucked up is insane. Like I came in like thousands, if not tens of thousands, it's crazy. And, um, in the process of that, for example, this is like a case study. One of the things I ended up getting a hold of was the notion that you could actually do things where you could imagine

What the consequences of your actions might be quite a distance down the road And you could actually really really good at that to the point You could actually sit there and hear somebody to describe a plan to you and you could listen to the plan and go that won't work Right and be very confident that in fact that plans not a good plan I mean, an example might be, I'm going to walk up to the fireplace and point my hands at it and say light. I'll say, well, you know, that's not going to work. I've got a good model of how reality works. I've done this sort of thing before. Bad plan. All right. So what I'd found though, was that as I absorbed

more and more life experience and more and more knowledge, I began to be noticed that more and more often, more and more people's plans were of that sort. And I was like, well, that's interesting. So, I took that as an object of inquiry. He goes on. This continues. That is an excellent example, Chris. Jordan there is referring to something entirely mundane, which is learning from experience experience understanding that to light a fire you need to not just point at it and yell fire i mean yes that is true right every everybody needs to learn things in their lives people make mistakes and people do things like plan and imagine future scenarios i mean it's at once so mundane but so abstract in general

there's nothing in it but it's treated it's presented as this is this journey he's gone on and he's discovered that you know you need to understand how the world works you need to make plans like you could also be under the mystique in impression that that is a signal of humility but if you were to listen carefully the argument is jordan has made so many mistakes that he now currently is able to perceive how everyone else is making mistakes and their plans will fail so yeah he's he's went through the fire and is now capable to point out where everybody else is going wrong. So that's not really humility.

Well, yeah, that's right. So from their point of view, everyone else is, we're all mired in game A. So all of the bad things that are going on, dealing with climate change, et cetera, is game A. Game A, Matt, you've invoked that magic word again. Let's take a while to get clear what Game A is and what a possible alternative to Game A might be.

But here's some of the issues with Game A thinking that you and I are mired in. Now, of course, we have the whole story of Game A playing out over time. The solution that Game A comes up with is this entire story. There's society, mind, paradigms. Think of it as like a most computational actuation that simplifies human relationships

and puts them in very simple relationships that have inputs and outputs, formal structures, money, law, anything that can fit in a semantic narrative that actually can be really held by a person in teaching. You can write that in a book and repeat it over and over again and simplify it. There's a lot to it, but I mean, we don't have forever. So then we fast forward and say, okay, Game A has a whole bunch of things inside its possibility space. So it can deliver on the Ming Dynasty and Rome and the Prussians and 21st century US,

right? Those are all inside the thing that Game A can be, but they're all variations on that theme. We come to where we are now, the problems that we're facing are a different set of problems, right? And the problems we run into now is that Game A, in and of itself, can't ultimately deal with complexity, both complexity in terms of actually being able to take full, closed-loop responsibility for the

for the natural environment yeah yeah what's game a game a is everything gesticulating wildly at all of this it is literally everything like if you can describe it if it's a human system that can be written down and comprehended by people. If it involves some kind of rules or some kind of structure or some kind of roles, then it's game A. It is everything, from the Ming Dynasty to... But notice, people might have mistook there that game A is all of those societies, but that was just described as a bunch of things

inside the possibility spheres of GMA. So everything up to 21st century society from the classical period of Rome, that's GMA. We've been all on the same game, but something has fundamentally changed with the internet, with the modern era, and we can no longer play this GMA that's been keeping us okay for all this time, but it's time to discard it. It cannot deal with the global problems of today, Matt. Yep, we need a paradigm shift. Do you have a quote that can give us a little description of

game B? Game B. Do you actually describe it as anything other than not? It's not game A. We cannot emphasize that enough. Game B. Game B, you say. Because it is so effective at power and an underlying premise of win-lose dynamics. I mean, remember it was invented for the purposes of competing with other people in a context of scarcity, as it actually has become extremely powerful, this is the problem of becoming godlike at the level of power, but not at the level of wisdom, right? So game A runs to the limits of its boundary conditions. It can't solve those three fundamental problems in and of

itself. So something new has to be developed. So we okay well that's game b just literally we're just defining a place it's a pointer to something over here so like what is that so so we've we've defined a space in which game b may enter game b is a concept now which has floated into our intellectual vocabulary we're not, Matt. We've just pointed at what game B is not, right? And where it may emerge from. But let's see. Maybe we can talk a little bit about what game B is. That whole box is different, that order of magnitude.

And it has characteristics that allow it to actually actually address these three questions anthropocomplexity natural complexity and the problematic of exponential technology that comes from learning it's okay what does that look like what are some characteristics of that and that's some of the things we've been talking about today at the center of it for me at least as i've gone through the questioning of this over and over and over again and recognize for example that you have to change the mind otherwise you just recapitulate the society um is this thing that we've been calling coherent collective intelligence and coherence specifically is at the very center of it um but in many ways game b we even talked about has a bit of that daoist sense to it as you're naming it in the context of game a quite often you're actually importing game a into it so

you have to actually treat it very very carefully it's less about being able to describe it than it is in fact just being able to do it it is the kind of thing that you do, not the kind of thing you talk about. You can talk about how you can become capable of it, but designing it, talking about it, is generally a full fundamental error. Does that make sense what I'm saying there? So yeah, game A can't really be described in... Sorry, game A can be described. Oh, sorry. Did I say game A? I meant to say game B. Get your games right, Matt.

Sorry, my games, my games. Yeah, so it's worth recapping, though. It's worth recapping. So Jordan Hall has fucked up hundreds of thousands of times in his life. Make that clear. Good to reiterate that. Yeah. And he's discovered that in order to not continue fucking up,

you need to actually have a plan and actually understand how the world works, whether it's lighting a fireplace or something else. And this is putting him in a good position to understand how to solve problems like climate change or war and so on. He's heard all of the game A solutions to these kinds of things and it's obvious that they're not going to work. They don't work.

So what we need to do is we need to come together in a state of coherence, which is the process we need to follow in order to solve these problems. And everything that's happened up till now, so everything since the Paleolithic, as soon as people started to communicate with each other and organize themselves in any kind of group, we were playing like a scarcity game, right?

We were like trying to survive and get resources and compete with each other. And that's all game A. And that progressed. You had the Ming Dynasty and the Roman Empire and atomic bombs and everything that has happened up till now. But it's bad because that kind of thinking leads to depletion of resources. and atomic bombs and everything that has happened up till now. But it's bad because that kind of thinking leads to depletion of resources and people are concerned with power and prestige

and leads to aggressive and competitive relations. So game B is like a paradigm shift in our cultural evolution towards coherent collective intelligence.'s that my god matt you they should invite you for these conversations just to summarize what they've said uh i think that was very good by the way it was a nice encapsulation of where we are so far but i i'll also note that jordan hall invoked the Tao, right? That it's a kind of Taoist thing about it shan't be named. You kind of need to go with the flow.

We'll get the flow and we'll get the coherence and all that. But just to note, Jordan Hall is the person that invoked that it's a bit like Taoism. So now it's the next clip. And this is Jimmy Wheal picking up what Jordan's talking about. You could talk about how you can become capable of it, but designing it, talking about it, is generally a full fundamental error. Does that make sense what I'm saying there?

I mean, I think it just depends on how Taoist we imagine game B to be. Well, that's very odd, because it can't actually be Taoist, interestingly enough, but it can actually be, it's more like the Taoist insight that points to the Tao. But I can say it very clearly. If I could articulate it, by definition, it's complicated. It's not complicated. Game B is not complicated. Game B must be intrinsically complex.

So I cannot define it in any finite set of statements because any finite set of statements is complicated. So it's not that kind of thing. So if I'm explaining, if I'm describing it, I have to be doing it in something which is essentially poetic, not a specification. Or as Daniel said, I'm pointing towards the generator functions that give rise to something that is more than the thing that is said. You get that, Chris? Well, that music wasn't just in your mind. That's the sound of my mind floating away. that's the noise it makes when it departs from

my body yeah that was actually the clip that they chose to introduce you know the kind of selling the episode but like there's so much there but i'm a fan of the petty interpersonal elements in these conversations and i'll just notice that as i said jordan introduced the taoist metaphor jamie tries to riff on it by saying you know how taoist is it and he's like well it's not actually what a low resolution comment jamie it's about the thing in the tao pointing to the tao as any good sense speaker would know and and then they go into the thing in the Tao pointing to the Tao, as any good sense speaker would know. And then they go into the thing that game B cannot be named. And that beautiful phrase, Matt, game B is not complicated.

It's intrinsically complex. Jordan Hall loves doing that. He always likes that. It's wonderful. Game B must be intrinsically complex, so it cannot be defined in any finite set of statements. So it's a riddle wrapped in a mystery, put into a coconut and set adrift on the ocean. You can kind of grok it like a tree falling in the forest.

Not only if you don't look it in the eye. It's like, you know, it's a grumpy cat. You want to pet it, you got to do it like you're not interested in it. Just flirt with Game B. Tell it you don't like it. You got to sort of sidle up to Game B. If you come at it straight, it'll run away like a startled deer. Game B is not that easy. It likes people that play a bit, you know.

Come on, Jamie. Come on, Jamie. Keep up. Keep up. He's not tracking. He's not that easy. It likes people that play a bit. Come on, Jamie. Come on, Jamie. Keep up. He's not tracking. And also, that last bit where he's, you know, what it is like is pointing towards the generator function that gives rise to something that is more than the thing that it has said.

It's just like, okay, so, you know, maybe I've been a bit wordy and obfuscatory. So, this extremely wordy and obfuscatory metaphor will suffice as an explanation. So, giambima. Yeah, giambi. I mean, the other little thing to notice about the language there is that it is an interesting melange of concepts from different places. So, they're referencing Daoism. That's actually a notion of God, right? That, you know, theologians made a big deal about God

not being very complex but complicated because God is like an indivisible whole but is yet... Anyway, so it's referencing that. But also, this tech talk of generator functions and there's heaps of tech talk all throughout. So it's pretty fascinating, just the language. It's like, it's so buzzwordy and full of neologisms, but it's effective in a dark kind of way. Oh, there's so many metaphors, Matt.

Like, I feel it will be bad if I just put them all together because I've got a folder that's metaphors, right? And they're just metaphors and everything. But as you said, references come from like religion and anthropology and, you know, spiritual traditions, as well as technology terms and computers and so on. But here's Jordan Hall showing the breadth of his references. But as in, why does it always break down? Why every time we try to discover does it break down? One of the reasons is because

as our friend Lao Tzu discovered, and by the way also our friend Buddha discovered, and our friend Jesus discovered, every time the storytelling monkeys try to turn to a story to tell, they fuck it up. So, let's be mindful of that and recognize that the

storytelling piece of it definitely isn't the answer. Okay, so Sherlock Holmes style. We've now carved that out of the available portfolio of things that we can do. How do we go about doing anything at all that doesn't involve being a storytelling monkey? Yeah, so we got the religious figures we got zen we've got sherlock that was that was primarily references not not metaphors but i just appreciate that kind of flow across religious and fictional characters and yeah well i think in that period they describe it as it's like flow but unconstrained to any one domain but the recurrent theme that chris the point that they're making endlessly it takes them a long time to make it that it's ineffable the thing that is good the thing that is coherence that is game b that is

whatever cannot be described it can't be understood analytically can't be put down. You can maybe sometimes experience it in a transitory kind of way, but you have to have it revealed to you like Zen enlightenment or the matrix or something. Yeah, you're right about that, Matt. And I think this next summary about, we're still trying to get game B, game A sense-making, and this might tie a couple of things together for you. There's many different technologies for maintaining that particular style of collective intelligence, which, of course, I just call game A, like a whole way of solving that problem. Yeah, basically game A and scaling coordination are pretty synonymous.

Scaling coordination beyond the Dunbar number. Huh. Meaning all the other additional bells and whistles of Game A, you would assert basically are kind of follow-ons for how do you control and coordinate resources and humans beyond 100 to 150? Yeah. Yeah, money, formal hierarchy, the notion of formality in general,

the idea that there's a role that somebody fills as opposed to humans or just humans. And sometimes from formal subordination to dynamic subordination, that shift. Law, policing. Each one of these are just tools in the gaming toolkit that are all endeavoring to solve that problem. Shared in-group identity.

Quite a lot in the Game Aid toolbox. It's quite a lot. When they talk about Game Aid, they focus on hierarchies and formalized things, power relations, that kind of thing. But they do emphasize that Game A is kind of everything. Everything that's going on right now, everything that's involved in how people organize themselves and interact with each other, and everything about how society works, it's not good, basically, and we need to shift to game B. And if you want to see what game A is infecting and how badly it's messing everything up just just listen to this so i'm noticing now if we switch this domain i'm thinking about the folks on the other side

of the camera so let's take this and make this practical in the context of sense making in the world that we live in right now um almost everything that we're talking about if you apply it one of the things that you notice course, is that all the stuff that typically goes under the heading of sense-making is worse than useless. So any newspaper, any news program, pretty much every scientific paper, to be perfectly frank, we've done that analysis and taken a look at how few of them are replicable

and how much of an incentive structure there is for actually lying to be able to generate local selective advantage. At least misinterpreting. At least misinterpreting, yeah, or overstating or whatever. She hacking for funding and grabs. Yeah, it's a mess. So game A, as a sense-making architecture,

broadly speaking, waste of time. I know. So fucking game A is science. It's police structures. It's everything that we've done for thousands of years. And because of the replication crisis, Matt, you see those little, somebody should never have thought the sense-makers

of words like p-hacking and stuff. They just are like, so obviously throw that all out, right? We can't trust every scientific paper is basically, even if it's right, it's like only partially correct because they haven't done proper sensemaking about it. So, oh, it's so arrogant. It's so arrogant. It is amazing, isn't it? oh it's so arrogant it's so arrogant it is amazing isn't it and it is like a self-sealing mindset because what we're doing right now they would say is being uncharitable deliberately misinterpreting taking a low resolution understanding of what they're saying when

we're probably doing it to build cachet in our in-group and for competitive sort of purposes the same kind of bad motivations that are driving scientists or to defend the blue citadel from the barbarians at the gate right we're we're keeping out the interlopers by by smacking down their sense making so it is invalid what we're doing on rule Omega slash game B principles. So that's convenient, I think, if things can't really be... It feels like a slight double standard. The area is certainly being dismissive and critical of vast arenas of knowledge and history. It cannot be emphasized enough that Game A is everything.

It's Rome, it's science, it's the police, it's the Ming Dynasty. Literally everything is a waste of time. Yeah, and so Matt, you might, after all of this, been wondering, so we've got the problem. We understand what's wrong with Game A, all those limitations. We understand how metaphysical and transformative game

B is. But what's the brass tacks? How do we put game B in real life, into practice? What is the advice here? What should we do? At least what I'm saying, what I'm articulating is that to do this thing, to come

into coherence, to play game B, there's a lot of work that has to be done in the individual, in yourself. And then the way to learn how to do coherence is always going to be with people with whom you actually have real relationships. Not us, not the three of us, your wife, your husband, your kids, your parents, or at least other human bodies with whom you can actually be in real physical proximity for a meaningful amount of time.

So that's definitely going to be the fabric out of which this thing gets woven. It takes time, for sure. And it takes doing the hard human stuff so you actually have an embodied experience of what it feels like to actually do the hard human stuff as opposed to book learning on that direction and good instincts and good habits built through long practice

and the notion is to say let's connect the dots yeah did that did that make it clear it's about it's about connections think global act local right yeah it's about connections it's about having real authentic relationships with your spouse and children and friends which is hey i don't that's good yeah i'm done with that i'm done with that but is it an alternative to like everything like like i'm not quite i i think i have to consult my notes but i don't think they actually really come up with any prescriptive or suggestion alternatives to the current thing which is very bad except to say that it's going to be hard and it's going to be like a lived experience thing where you have to practice it i don't think it gets much more concrete than that does it no and this kind of fetishizing of

direct relationships this is key to the sense-making ecosystem, right? It's part of the reason why Brett Weinstein, a big fan of Game B, can argue that because he puts his ideas past Heller and she gives him the green light, that that's a better peer review than a body of relevant experts in a field. And it's more true because she actually cares about him. So she wouldn't want him to get things wrong, right? It's complete misunderstanding or kind of conflation of the personal with the technical critique that you do get from your friends and family.

It's like me submitting a paper for peer review and it's going to be evaluated unsympathetically by a complete stranger who doesn't understand the full context of where i'm coming from and and isn't asking for a clarification they're just saying but i don't understand this you haven't made this clear this doesn't follow from what you've said you haven't reported such and such that kind of low resolution negative energy there's no there's no place for that um the omega rule matt the omega rule apply it if you want to see some sense making ref on this kind of approach here's jimmy wheel so that feels like hero's journey 101 or Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, right? Well, you're saying, hey, the way forward into Game B and emergent coherence is to actually reanimate and fully live into the basics of good old-fashioned humanity i actually have to have gone on some initiatory transformative journey

in order to remember in fact that fucking cow town in kansas is the best place ever and there's no place like home nice so you just join i get it so we're adding those two together it comes clear beautiful yeah that's very nice it's very it's actually odd how simple and like plain things are. And of course, what's interesting is that once you grasp that, once it lands, you begin to see how the bigger challenges begin to self-resolve. Make an analogy to the Wizard of Oz and you can solve climate change. Yeah. You just need to go on a journey. And just remember, this is a journey, I think, into game A. So you can come back to the homestead and the personal relationships

that's game B, and then you find out that those big things like climate change and stuff were actually pretty simple all along. I do love the kind of enthusiasm with which they reach for references or metaphors. And there's another one that comes immediately after, which I thought was pretty good. So we had The Wizard of Oz. Now we're going to go into slightly more recent fictional territory. I'm trying to solve the game theoretic problem with complete strangers. By telling the truth, anybody who understands how to do game

theories can say, oh, you're the one who's actually the dupe. We found this out. Don't be Ned Stark. Don't be Ned Stark, unless you're actually in Winterfell with your family. Then be Ned Stark. That's the idea, right? The key is don't go to King's Landing. Full stop. That's the key. So to your point, though, if you're saying, hey, you know, honor information ecology for the enhanced sensemaking of all, minus the folks who will do the multipolar trap, grab the ring, capture the flag. But in a realm of infinitely distributable digital information, aren't we always simultaneously playing both of those games at once without even clear understanding of the which and the when? So it's funny, isn't it? Those metaphors. You got the Dorothy. You go away.

You realize there's no place like home. You're Ned Stark. Stay in Winterfell. Don't go down to King's Landing. If you do go to King's Landing, keep your wits about you. Don't practice going B down there. Practice it at home with your family. You're getting there, man.

Is this the lesson we're meant to be? You've almost got it. Maybe one more metaphor will help you. Let's see if this one will do it. So, discernment is the sort of thing that is somehow not just uncapturable, it's anti-capturable. To the degree to which somebody actually goes through the process of building their discernment, they are in fact more likely to become an ally than they would otherwise have been, for example. And so the Rebel Alliance shouldn't be building or open sourcing plans and building Death Stars. They should be building and open sourcing plans on how to build a Rebel Alliance.

So that if the Empire, what about lightsabers? Hold on. So if the Empire gets a hold of the plans, all that happens is the Empire becomes more Rebel Alliance and less Empire. So not lightsabers. Not lightsabers. so not lightsabers not lightsabers it's it's so good the way they get into the metaphor right like the lightsaber point is important to clarify like so so should they be outsourcing the plants for lightsaber no no no no no oh okay okay i get it I get it. And not the plans for the Death Star, because then the Empire will fix the vulnerability.

Well, no, then people will all be building Death Stars all over the place. Oh, yeah, right. What you want them to be building is Rebel Alliances. So you make the plans for the Rebel Alliance open source, and then people will just make Rebel Alliances everywhere. You get caught up in the metaphors, and you can't remember what it is the metaphor was for. Like here, the metaphor is for open sourcing discernment, which is anti-capturable.

The discernment, whatever the hell that is, that's the plans for the... I know. It turns your brain into a pretzel. It turns your brain into a pretzel. Yeah. So I could literally just spend all day going for different metaphors that they reference in order to explain this conversation. There's nothing wrong with metaphors, but it's like the importance which they attribute to them and the readiness with which they reach for them, which is part of the problem.

But Chris, in fairness to them, they're at least being consistent in that they truly believe that the things they're talking about cannot be described except in poetry and allegory and metaphor, right? That's right. So in that sense, it is consistent. As they said, it's like a poetic understanding. So the fact that you would trade in analogies about the Death Star and Ned Stark and the Arctic explorers is another one that comes up or cells in a body and so on and so forth.

It's the notion of, you know, James Bond defusing the bomb. The clock is ticking. He has to actually be acting as nonchalant as if he's in the process of, you know, swirling his martini. Because even the least bit of feeling urgency guarantees failure.

It's the mountaineering goes slow to go fast. Right, exactly. So that's another key, right? And this happens all the time. You get it and now you can see it happen. I've seen that happen many times in myself. Like, it is that, right? And kind of the more

that your metaphor can be densely packed, and the more that you can, like, draw parallels to the current situation, the more that they like it. You know, there was one point when the Wizard of Oz metaphor was brought up when they were basically applauding, like, that's great! You know, go back to Kansas. You're right. That's what it's all about. Yeah. But the thing that gets lost is what is the metaphor for? Do you remember? Can you remember,

what's the metaphor of Dorothy realizing there's no place like home? What is the metaphor in service of? Because often the point of the metaphors get lost. I think the metaphor was for game B, right? That you had to go out there in the Game A world and realize that it was all pretty bad, and that way you would come home to Game B. That was the metaphor. But you can't just appreciate Game B.

You have to go out and do Game A for a while, figure out it's really bad, come back. Metaphors have multiple interpretations, Mark. And if you also detected a kind of theme in the things that are being referenced, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, the Borg come out at another part. I thought this one was particularly good, a very rich metaphor to mine, so to speak. And at the same time, we have that dynamic subordination or not game theory capture. We play well with each other.

No one fucking grabs the ring. And we all create the council of Elrond. So you just set up hyper individualism and some kind of oneness or collectivism as a thesis, antithesis. And you're asking about synthesis. It's one way of framing it. And so far in the conversation, for whatever reason, you've been doing a beautiful job of asking questions, but I kind of want to ask back, since I know this is exactly the center of what you're focused on, how do you see that synthesis emerging? Beats me, man. I mean, I feel like, to your point, a little bit like we have to train

and we have to practice you know you said everyone's going to become hussein bolt but like you can't make a soccer team with hussein bolt he's only one of those sons of bitches and he's faster than everybody else so we got we got lord of eggs the council of elrod then we had team bolt and the soccer team and i also like that little bit of meta commentary by Daniel, right? That like, you've been good at posing questions, Jimmy. Why don't you try and answer one of them? So that was like sense making jazz in its purest form. You know, it's the interest in diving into the metaphor,

like setting up a dichotomy between collectivism and individualism. And then let's start talking about what the synergy looks like. What would that look like? You lose the thread of what it is they're actually talking about. I think they're talking about how to make Game B happen, the strategizing, how to inculcate Game B into the society. You know, it is. And I will say that, you know, like I jumped around a little bit there. So that was a little bit mean of me to not follow the structure. But like we said at the beginning, this is why it's kind of hard to focus on because, you know, you can be listening and they'll just get lost in the metaphor and walk down

this little cul-de-sac and you kind of lose the thread of what they're talking about. And the style of talking, and we are very familiar with this dynamic because we run a podcast, right? And we have to edit audio files. But the sense-making sphere has this particular thing of treating monologues basically like there's big blocks of somebody giving this extended metaphor and riff,

and then it's the next person's turn, right? Or they might ask a clarifying question and then it's the next person's turn right or they might ask a clarifying question and let the other person riff but these guys are really comfortable with extended monologues in a conversation in a way that is frankly probably not natural in a normal conversation where i kind of appreciate them in a way is that they are describing what a lot of these guru types do. You know, like their rule omega thing. They explicitly say how you have to talk about this stuff in poetry and metaphor and so on. It's kind of nice in a way because they're actually being explicit about what people like Jordan Peterson and a lot of others do.

They're saying this is how we talk. This is how we are going to communicate. They're reflecting on their own what they do, and they're quite accurate in describing what they do. Yeah, and they do have this, like, for example, Matt, this is them reflecting towards the end of the conversation on what they've just done. I think the beauty of what's happening there

is that it's so unlikely that anybody's actually going to watch this video because it's so incomprehensible and hard to follow that it's actually not a problem. What's interesting, I was just kind of thinking about that in terms of the meta, is to the degree to which this is actually interesting at all, what I would say is that this is genuinely just a conversation.

This is, I mean, for those who happen to be watching, this is straight up just exactly what a conversation, as fucked up as that is, what we talk about. And this is no different, as far as I can tell, and I've had conversations with both of you and some conversations, the three of us together, maybe a little bit more formal, but not a lot.

For me, the thing there is that they're stating that this is the way that they talk to each other, which I don't doubt. Jordan Hall there has a perhaps uncharacteristic moment of recognizing that this has been an indulgent conversation that people might have a hard time getting through so he's correct but he's also wrong that nobody will ever listen to it because here we are and many many people are listening to

it so yeah and it was it was a popular thing you know if you read the comments under it people they are clear that it's kind of hard to follow everything that's been said, but they're also clear that something important is going on. And it's nice for them to be invited to the table. The universal theme in the comments is that this is a profound and deep conversation that's going on. And what they're doing is sketching out this architecture of a world that doesn't exist yet. They're trying to put words to the inexpressible. And all of these metaphors and allegories and so on are a way of hinting at this fantastic Age of Aquarius gay bee thing that's going to be far, far better than all of this stuff

that's gone before. And it's going to happen by coming together. And it's all buzzwordy, you know, coming together in a state of collective coherence blah blah blah but it's going to happen by doing what they're doing like their process this riffing these metaphors that's the key chris that's going to solve the problems of the world yes it will and there are various points in the conversation where they do have this kind of meta commentary on the nature of the conversation, right? They're sense makers. So this is one of their preoccupations is like, how is the conversation flowing and what's happening? And there's one

point where they flag that they're going to do this. And I think you quite enjoyed this. So let's hear that. I'd like to have a proposed meta and a meta meta move okay the meta move wasn't this already i'm noticing that the conversation has a particular topology to it and i'm curious why that's the case so it's meta because i presume that the answer to that curiosity will have something to do with either homos, we are in fact primates, or something about our developmental environment that has caused this topology to spontaneously emerge, which is to say that the conversation is a V. Daniel's talking to you, I'm talking to you, Daniel and I are now talking to each other, and there is no third. Third means like something.

Right there, yeah. So that's one. That's the meta move. Why? Why did that topology settle in the way that it settled in? Then the meta meta move, unfortunately, oh, the meta meta move is, of course, in the act of actually contemplating the meta, we can in fact endeavor to be doing it rather than talking about it.

And we can notice how the doing it informs the talking about it in a fashion that resolves the question. It's beautiful. That is all to say, me and Jamie have been talking to each other quite a lot. And Daniel, you haven't't said much and why do you think that is is it the topology is it because we're homos we're all homos here you're a homo man i'm a homo we're homo sapiens that's just the normal way to say that or is it something more mystical and what about this third the invoked third yeah yeah the third is this entity that arises out of the conversation or something. An egregore, maybe. Yeah, you just cannot overstate how indulgent the conversation is and how much they complicate everything. And I'll just describe yet another example.

They get right into these things they create. They'll just define a thing between collectivism versus individualism then they'll start talking about how breaking down an individual sense of self is going to help enhance collective coherence which is a good thing but then they sort of worry that that's going to diminish individual sovereignty which is a good thing and it's very important that nobody is subordinate so it's got to be a higher synthesis and then they talk about heterogeneous coherence and again reference a jazz band where people are not a cohering in harmony but they're not conforming but rather expressing their individuality within a harmonious whole and it goes on it's this amazing profuse intellectual

generative thing where they set up words and they set up ideas and then they relate them to each other and then they define problems from the words they've just created and then define this mind palace and they sort of just go for a little walk in it and build the like a dream they build the scaffolding as they go it is a sight to behold it is wild oh there's there's good examples of this but i want to like so i i have to take probably one of the paradigmatic examples of what you're just describing but before that i just want to tie that, like, as I said, with this kind of lofty talk, it's often tied to like what is just a very fundamentally mundane thing. Like you haven't said very much, Daniel. Right. And you can see that that is what it's tied to because of stuff like this.

Yes. What I'm noticing is that I'm noticing a feeling that they're not being something coming from Daniel that actually creates the right kind of symmetry in the conversation. So I'm interested in getting your perspective in a fashion that is not responsive, but is in fact direct, like coming from the inside out. The thing that I was feeling to share, I just didn't hear a spot where it was in it was relevant daniel speckleberger can take a pause he sure can take a pause but back to good old jordan hall i mean you saw an example there of can you imagine a more pretentious and needlessly complicated way to refer to something pretty mundane which is hey i haven't said much you haven't said much what do you think give us your opinion it's impressive i don't mind you know the point you made about the

intricate mind policies being conjured up and the the metaphors and jordan in particular is like sort of precious with how people interact with his metaphors and there's one where he's talking about a metaphorical cube and Jamie is usually the person that gets kind of smacked down for interacting badly with the metaphors or in a way that they're not supposed to so here is a clip which I know that you're particularly fond of. So here is a clip which I know that you're particularly fond of. Well, if we do the anthropology and we take a look back and say, okay, well, how long did it take to pull that shit together?

Finding, remember I had that spot in possibility space. So imagine a cube. And in that cube, let's make the cube 1 million by 1 million by 1 million. So it's a big cube. Okay. And all over there are different kinds of phenotypes. Hominids happen to be a sphere about a thousand by a thousand by a thousand in that cube. Mollusks are down here. All right. Inside the sphere of hominid, there's an even smaller sphere, which is homo sapiens, which is maybe five by five by five In terms of the possibility space and you're doing sentient biomass. What's your what's your million cube? My cube is the well, it's actually an n-dimensional space by reducing it to three to make it work

So don't put indexes on otherwise, it's don't talk. Don down to metaphor exam doesn't exam doesn't doesn't there's a hole this poor jamie don't talk to me jamie didn't understand that it was an n-dimensional cube this is this metaphorical cube was at an infinite number of dimensions chris obviously how could he have not got that there was a a rare moment of direct sense maker anger present there. But that cube and that, Jimmy made the mistake of asking about open site. It also- He also made the mistake of asking, hang on, what is the cube? Like, it's a possibility space, but of what exactly?

You know, like, you don't do that, right? It's everything. It's a vibe. It's a thing. It's a metaphor. It's poetry. Don't try to unweave the rainbow, Jamie. He got what was coming to him, Chris. Yeah. So to take an example of where this all ends up, the riffing upon riffing upon riffing that you're discussing, let me play a clip or two from towards the end of the discussion, just to see where this kind of thing eventually ends up. It has to be alive and real and rediscovered for everyone. Right. And that's a different process than memetic transmission.

Exactly. Memetic transmission. Well, what about a catalytic memetic? Because that has to be probably a lot of good syllables. Doesn't it sound like? No, truly. I mean, what about a catalytic memetic? Because that has to be propagated. I know, it's a lot of good syllables. Doesn't it sound like it? No, truly. I mean, to your point about you're giving, you're disclosing the protocols for self-disclosure, that that could

arguably be a catalytic memetic. Principles more than protocols? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go more. I'm interested.'d like or even a mythopoetic catalytic memetic so what is the story of how we begin to remember so there's a lot to unpack there a mythic poetic mythic poetic memetic catalytic memetic i think you could start untangling that by the little hint they gave which is how to go back when they're talking about coherence which is this really great thing

it's unclear what that is but it is clear that that is something that human beings had when we lived in smaller groups in a hunter-gatherer society in their minds we would sort of function together as this coherent synergetic poetic mimetic whatever something cool so we need to go back to that but how do we get here we need to go back a few steps chris we do so this concept of coherence is quite key to this whole discussion you'd be forgiven for like zoning out and thinking that's all the discussion is about because it takes up about an hour of the conversation but um as you would imagine it's a complicated topic and so let's start with Jordan Hall defining what coherence is about and there's a lot of different ways of talking about it but we might say that it is

actually it's interesting it seems like you actually have to talk about it in many different ways because it is the kind of thing that cannot be conveyed effectively in language. You know, it's the matrix. Unfortunately, no one can be told what coherence is, but we can actually tell a lot of different stories. It's become the blind man with the elephant. And after a little while we might be able to in ourselves grasp perhaps what is being pointed at. So one way of describing it is it is a it's a form of collective intelligence

that has as a characteristic a high degree of capacity in the space of novelty and a intrinsic anti-fragility in both human anthropocomplexity and nature complexity. Another way of saying that is, if you work backwards in taking a look at all the different challenges and problems that we are currently facing, backwards in taking a look at all the different challenges and problems that we are currently facing, we meaning humanity, is the answer to the set that contains those problems.

Well, that was clear. Care to paraphrase that, Chris? Are you able to? There does seem to be something of a reliance on this concept that things cannot be talked about directly. We've already mentioned this, but it's notable that it's almost every concept that they want to discuss cannot be discussed directly. It has to be only hinted at. And again,

like game B and game A, coherence, in some sense, it's the magic key that's going to allow us to solve all of the problems but of course reducing it to that would be mistaking the path for the destination or you know whichever way you want to go so it's the kind of collective intelligence that has a characteristic of anti-fragility that will allow us to solve all the problems that DNA-type thinking cannot solve.

Yeah, it's good for what ails you. It's difficult because it can't really be talked about. It's just a good thing, isn't it? It's a thing that is good, that solves problems, that is somehow connected to ancient humans. You mentioned ancient humans. That's Jimmy's area of expertise. So let's him riff a little bit on this topic of collective intelligence.

I don't know where this comes from, but I think it might be Jungian analysis, perhaps, but the notion of the third. They talk about it in like dyadic relationships, and sometimes they'll even do couples therapy where it's almost like, you know, opening a plate for Elijah or, you know, like a seat for Elvis. It's like, there's the third, and the third is the intelligence of the relationship. And is the third, you know, a working place? The idea that there is between and among us, but not specific to any of us, an additional intelligence that can emerge.

And that is that that is that the differentiator between what you were describing as coherence and simply maybe collective intelligence or coordination or coordination. collective intelligence or problem solving or coordination so sorry just to just to be clear my i i may have been reductive in reducing it to collective intelligence it's this very specific type of collective intelligence uh is coherence it's the third it's the third well i thought that actually helped he makes a little bit more explicit that what they believe is that when coherence is happening, then something emerges from a group of people that is greater than the sum of the parts. And this powerful thing is a form of creativity and intelligence on its own. And that's the key thing that is needed to solve these tricky problems that humanity is confronted with. Yeah, but you know, this, the mystical third that emerges, I'm just getting echoes of Jordan Hall's fetishization of the conversation as like key thing he's concerned with creating in conversations, right? Part of that is me. Part of that is him.

Part of that is things beyond both of us, right? It's the whole complex, the whole warm data milieu. I may be able to come into something like an integrous relationship with aspects of Brandon, right? Aspects of me can come into integrous relationship with aspects of him. And for the moment, it forms a new being, which is those aspects coming into relationship and exchanging perspectives and possibilities and tensions, and then perhaps coming back into relationship with the complex relationality that is me. The conversation partners particular

ideology almost as incidental to the experience of having a conversation and the mystical entwining this creates of intelligence and spirits. I think it's important to remember that this is later used to sort of say that they're not creating a third because Daniel isn't contributing enough to the conversation. So the third is at once this mystical egregore type daemon creature that emerges from conversations and it cannot be conjured if somebody isn't speaking enough in a three-person conversation. It reminds me also of how with these kinds of philosophies, the process is the content. I encountered this myself in some of the wackier psychology training I took and I hated it at the time but

there is this love of making the conversation or making the way the group functions or whatever putting like a mirror up against the process of that and making some sort of exploration of that the actual work so it creates this infinite loop and it it's very helpful also, I think, for the kind of social bonds that these, well, we shouldn't call them cults, should we? These groups, these organizations tend to have in terms of recruiting new members and getting people involved. I see that there's sense-making therapy that you can do to learn better coherence. And just like with organizations like the Scientologists, this kind of, well, we shouldn't say indoctrination, inculcation, the sessions, whether you call it therapy or sort of spiritual training, flexing those game B muscles,

involves a lot of this back and forth. So that stuff that you mentioned that's the kind of thing you see in those really intense group sessions and people emerge from those often with a feeling euphoria yeah euphoria exactly like this kind of thing if you stare intensely at someone for like an hour people break down and cry during those sessions and stuff because there is a power. We're social primates. So doing intense social activities or creating conflict and that kind of thing, you know, it can have an impact. But in a lot of it, it's short-lived.

And when you keep that in mind, the fact that the content is kind of non-existent, it's so abstract and intangible that you can't really get a grip on it. That's actually important, isn't it? Because that creates the sense of pressure or tension that gets that social bonding happening. Yeah, so there's a nice little tangent that comes from this. So one thing about coherence is, you know, this kind of thing that there is an essence of purity to humanity

that is lost in civilization, but it can be recaptured. Here's Jordan riffing on this concept a little bit. The real answer is that these lineage traditions indicate to us that the human instrument has a particular ambient capacity to achieve this thing, coherence. Okay, our job is to get really, really good at that, to take that particular ambient capacity and hone it to a level that is the equivalent of a contemporary marathon runner

or a contemporary sprinter honing the instrument of running in a way that a Stone Age human can't. Become the Usain Bolt of coherence is the answer to the question. It's there. It's clearly possible. You only have to become the Usain Bolt, though. Remember once the five minute mile, was it the five minute mile or the three minute mile? Four minute mile. Once the four minute mile was broken, which was considered to be impossible, now you've got high school students who can do it. And so it's one of those things where once you actually get to a particular node,

there's a location in the possibility space of Homo sapiens sapiens that can actually achieve that particular point. Get there, and then build the techne of that and bring other people into that place and use that to discover how to actually scale it. So it's kind of surpassing our natural limitations. There's an inherent inclination towards coherence, but it was never that good.

But now we're in the position to do coherence on steroids yeah yeah we can we're in a good position to open the third eye right so again i mean like you see this and in so many belief systems but i'm reminded of scientology which also has this this notion of cultivating mental powers and also optimizing your emotional tone or something and getting yourself in these different theater levels and so on and and there are people who are you know repressive people people people like you and me chris that refuse to get on board and you know if one of those people turns up in one of your group sessions you have the tools with which to correct them shall we say and help them get on board with the process sounds very sinister so one of the things is you know and this connects to the whole game a game b

thing is that we're facing unprecedented threats to our civilization in our current stage and coherence is as a a result, hugely important. And Daniel Schmachtenberger is particularly good at positing the techno-dystopias that are lurking and need to be addressed. So when you talk about how would we have a kind of coherence of collective sense-making and collective choice-making at scale, well, we've never had it at scale, right?

As you're mentioning, there was a certain level that some tribes were able to develop. It was part of how tribal life happened. And we know that below Dunbar number and above Dunbar number, there's really fundamental differences. And Dunbar number is not a number. It's a range based on the level of coherence of the type of people. More coherence, better communication protocols, slightly bigger number. But one way of thinking about the Dunbar number is a level at which the communication protocols that mediate the coherence breakdown,

which is why you're asking a scale question. Okay, so does everyone know what the Dunbar number is? I know, I was taught by Robin Dunbar at Oxford, so I'm very familiar with his number. Look at you, Chris. Look at you. Yeah, personal intuition in the Dunbar number. I was setting that up for the benefit of our audience. So you can tell us.

Go ahead. Yeah, so actually it's based on kind of regression analysis of the relative size of i think prefrontal cortexes or neocortexes or anyway some part of the primate brains and their group size and when you plot humans on the graph from all other primates you arrive at somewhere around 150 with error bars stretching upwards and downwards of around 100. And various people have taken to imply that our natural group size, like the social networks that we can track is around 150. And beyond that, you need technologies in order to keep track of things and actually our close

friends are much smaller than that right it's like 150 is a network of relationships yeah but you know as he said as daniel correctly said it is more of a range and i think one of the criticisms which i think is valid about the thumb power numbers there's a little bit of numerology that goes on where people hunt for figures around 150 throughout human history and use that as proof of well look at that legions had 200 deep and this like subgroup of a tribal affiliation was 100 and and so on and so forth but yeah but overall i think it's a you know it's a reasonable concept yeah i mean it makes sense how big your prefrontal cortex is is going to determine how many individuals you can track basically so it kind of makes sense but uh what also makes sense is that they're hearkening back to to those sorts of group sizes in which coherence can occur in the wild, shall we say, pertains to

their recipe or their advice, which there was very little of in this, in terms of how to achieve game B. But one of the things they emphasize is that we should be looking to our families, looking to the people immediately around us and cultivating these very good coherent relationships with our natural circle of friends and family yeah they are pointing out that we need to take the wisdom of those interpersonal connections the kind of tribal psychologies and the genuine connections that they instill and we need to somehow ramp them up to a global level which has never been done and i i do want to take a little side detour here but because jordan hall

starts to talk about one of the ways that he thinks you can improve coherence it's to do with developmental issues that's actually a very tricky question because to think about it involves invoking the mind that is not to be to get rid of itself. So the answer is first, slow way the fuck down. Think developmental. We're going to actually have to go all the way down to conception in the developmental pathway and only do that, which is in fact actually within the coherence that we have in fact actually have achieved. This is why I said, you actually have to go to that center in the build out. So let's say you want to say, okay, we've achieved coherence. Now let's build a, I don't

know, an organization. That's like saying I'm a three month old. I'm going to go drive a race car. Nope. Sorry. What can you do? Maybe you can kind of have a conversation that isn't going into game a maybe sadly, but development has a really cool thing. You can get better at it. isn't going into game A. Maybe. Sadly. But development has a really cool thing. You can get better at it. So the first is to actually really recognize the absolute irreducible necessity of comprehensively rebooting mind.

All the way down. What do you say? All the way down? Down say all the way down down what down to childhood and infancy like early childhood development i have to do with conception the mind the conception free birth free birth levels matt to get coherence functioning properly that's a bold statement yeah he was oddly specific about conception there and seemed to be talking about like literally human development like you have to intervene with someone at conception i don't know play the music or something in the womb game b music in the womb to turn them into someone who can do this but then it seems like i thought it was a metaphor for a while that, you know, we have

to walk, not run because, you know, it's really, really hard to have these coherent things. So the best we can do at the moment, we can't build an organization. The most we can do is have conversations and practice at having really good conversations. But that's very different from interviewing with babies before they're born, isn't it? But that's very different from interfering with babies before they're born, isn't it? See, Matt, this is an example of the metaphor, I think, getting slightly mixed in with the actual discussion. And just to highlight, it continues. So maybe this can add some clarity. way down it's like to the level of do i identify as a separate self in my own experience that can that is in game theoretic relationship to you and identify you as other do i experience that

or do i experience some kind of deeper connectivity in which synergy is the only thing that makes sense okay so now we're into an interesting neck of the woods right by the way just practically in which synergy is the only thing that makes sense. Okay, so now we're into an interesting neck of the woods. By the way, just practically speaking though, somewhere around 11, 10-11, is a good place at the level of mind. From like concrete operational on up. Noting that you have to also deal with all the stuff that's going on in the body in that pre-period.

So if you haven't resolved childhood trauma or anything that's going on in terms of even simple things like bilateral integration due to not the right kind of developmental environment, you're going to have challenges. So not conception, but slightly different. Now we're at ages 10 or 11 of development. That's where you want, that's the key swap. Presumably you have to deal with childhood trauma and stuff like that, you know, integrate it. But it's 10 or 11.

And as well as that, before that, Schmachtenberger was clearly talking about it being a kind of a metaphor for, you know, abandoning yourself and only being aware of the synergy that exists between you and others. But they're clearly talking across purposes because Jamie's really talking about kids. Jamie or Jordan? Jordan, sorry.

Jordan is talking about kids. Well, Matt, you know, come on. Maybe you're just getting lost in the metaphor. I've got one last clip. This will clear it all up. This will clear it all up. And then, of course, when you get to that childhood, adolescence phase, that's where a lot of the paradigmatic stuff starts to begin to layer in.

And, of course, everything that you learn from 17, 18 on, you should go ahead and shelve most of that. Shelve it in what way? Don't allow it to make sense of reality. From the, that's the indoctrination into game A, formatting? Information, semantic, yes, it's the code. All the code that you've been running that partitions reality into prefabricated true and good. Bits and bits?

Yes. When you said we're getting somewhere interesting, I wanted to know where you wanted to go. Yeah, it was specifically what you were describing as far as, you know, the apocryphal indigenous traditions, right? So, Matt, let me get this clear for you, all right? You were obviously getting confused. There's a metaphor, is it, you know, about actual developmental pathways. So you need to reboot your mind to conception, right? That's taking you to game B. That's the radical thing that I'm proposing. But of course, conception, it's a wide definition of conception up to the age of 10 or 11. Some people extend it that far. And that's the kind of hotspot you know when you've dealt with childhood trauma and you're starting to process 17 or 18 wait a minute that's when gma programming coding has come in

you've started dichotomizing the world good and bad gotta throw that all out anything you learned at university anything as a young adult get rid of Conception, up to ages 10 or 11. Fear? Yep, be like a child absorbing the wonder of the universe. Well, you know, I get the vibe, Chris. Logically, not so much, but I've definitely gotten the vibe and it's, you know, shades of Freudianism,

shades of, I'm sorry guys, but Scientology with the kind of unlearning childhood trauma and unlearning all of the terrible polluted stuff that the evil modern world is feeding into us and winding things right back. Yes. So we had Jordan Hall there tying coherence to developmental pathways and Daniel Schmachtenberger

wants to take it in a slightly different direction. There's another metaphor that perhaps can better help us to understand what we need to do to achieve coherence or what coherence is actually about. So let's see this part of the elephant, maybe this part of the elephant will help. They're actually, the optical cortex is putting the information together in a way where if there's actually an error in this one, it's corrected by what this one's doing. So they error correct each other. And then because I can compute the hypotenuse of the triangle, I actually get depth perception and periphery. So the two eyes together give things that neither of them did separately plus error correction.

So I want them to have some shared reality, and I want them to find their shared reality, but I also want them to have difference, and then I want them to relate in a deep way. And then I wouldn't want my ears to be more eyes. Right? Like, there's a deeper kind of parallax between ears and eyes where eyes are giving me location of things, and ears are giving me a different kind of location of things.

So the ears with each other give me echolocation, and the ears and the eyes together give me a different kind of sense-making in three-space. So we are Mr. Potato Head. So I liked Jerry's summary coming in at the end. But you know, this is another thing, right? Because this is taking the analogy of the senses, the body, and the inputs of the body. And any individual sense in itself is not giving you a true picture.

So you need to integrate these complementary, sometimes contradictory senses to create like an actual model of the world. It's another quite poetic description, and Mr. Potato Head just helped that along. I mean, these kinds of science-y references play an important role in what they're doing, but ultimately it's fulfilling the same role as the analogy of different people feeling different parts of the elephant. Each person is feeling something different, but they're getting, you know, a legitimate sense of the whole. And if you can get all those people to talk to each other and then you'll actually be able to see the whole elephant it's not really doing anything more than that the elephant metaphor did it at the start and like this is part of the thing that i think we cannot emphasize enough how many times have you heard in

this episode there are different layers of looking at things people bring different perspectives and when you put them together it's beneficial right. That's done in like under 20 seconds, right? And just to emphasize how much mileage you can get out of that concept. So remember, you know, we've switched from developmental. Now we're doing the body metaphor. Here's a little bit more of a riffing on the senses and how they come together and linking in that mystical third. So if you think about like every, imagine if the ears and eyes were just fighting over which was right and the other one was, one was comprehensively right and a complete description

of reality and the other was comprehensively wrong, that would be ridiculous. We would dissolve into gibberish, right? There's a place where they all have accurate information about reality and it's all partial. This speaks to then that notion of like the third that you mentioned. So in the context, in the relationship between the eyes and the ears, there's a third. We know that third. That's our experience. Our own bill. Yeah. Right. So then the question is, okay, you be eyes, I'll be ears. Where's our third? And what's neat about that is that then you get some very interesting things where on the one hand, you have, both of us actually, have a clear awareness in ourselves that we are here to, with fidelity, report what we perceive of reality. We are deeply cognizant of the fact that that is not reality.

we are deeply cognizant of the fact that the other is here to report reality and that somehow there is something that can happen that gives a deeper grasp of reality so you get that that's the applying the metaphor of the elephant all the eyes and the ears if you prefer to their other metaphor which was of group communication where there's like a third thing, like the conversation, which kind of emerges out of the different contributing parts. So wouldn't Jordan be the mouth? I would put him as the mouth. Daniel would be the brain and and Jimmy the hands yeah and I'm not saying that to disparage Jimmy

the hands are a very important element of sensory perception that's how you touch things so there you go Matt my own sense making the most charitable way to interpret this is that if you get a couple of people together and if two of them have a different set of skills, different set of knowledge, who knows, it could be a psychologist, an anthropologist, say, for instance, and we get our minds together, then by talking about stuff and throwing ideas backwards and forwards, we might come up with something that each of us alone wouldn't have come up with separately. It's kind of like, if you imagine Dragon Ball Z, Matt,

there were characters in Dragon Ball Z and they could perform this technique called fusion where individually they have their own strengths, but they were able to perform this dance and it was kind of ritualized. And if they did it wrong, they produced a flawed character, a kind of mistaken, misshapen character that wasn't good at fighting. But if they did it just right, they touched their fingers together, they could become something grander than the individuals.

And they were able to defeat the demons lurking in Game A's fear. So it's kind of like Dragon Ball Z. Well, that's interesting. That's interesting you should say that, Chris. But, I mean, the old way of thinking about it, the way most people think of it is that people are these discrete intelligences with a boundary, just traversing through the world, like then when we interact with each other, then we can cohere and together make a waveform that is entirely different from each of us together. And we can actually merge and blend

and there are no boundaries between ourselves. Schrodinger's cat. Schrodinger's Dragon Ball. If you will. Schrodinger. Yeah, yeah. So, look, you know, it's important, Matt. These are big ideas. But one more thing, Matt, before we get off the body analogy, they're not finished. You know, you might've thought, well, you guys really just played the clips where they're talking. That's a

bit means make it seem like they just go on and on and on and on. They weren't finished. So let me just play one more clip. So how all the sensing comes together inside of me is a coherence phenomenon. That's the binding problem in neuroscience, right? And in philosophy of mind. And in the actuator, why am I not, how do all those parts work together so well as a coherence phenomenon? So if we think about that every human on their own at the next level up is sensing, making sense, and actuating. But then when we come together, like, I want you sensing stuff differently than I am. And I trust that there is information in that that I actually really want to have access to myself, and I want the collective to have, and I want you actuating differently than I am.

But I really want to come into coherence. So in all honesty, I mean, I wasn't kind of like, that joke about Mr. Potato Head is actually kind of like, who is the third, right? If we personify, and it sounds like, so we're all different organs, bringing different perspectives. When we come together, we get dimensionality, right? Whether it's echolocation or binocular vision, we get more out of aggregating and integrating our realities.

Mr. Potato is the third. Mr. Potato Head is the third. Chris, Chris, now that's mean. Well, you know know this has been a bombshell this has been an amazing idea what they're saying is that if people talk to each other and share their different knowledge and experiences then they might actually accomplish more than if they didn't that's a turn up for the books who would what the fuck what are you talking about i'm not kidding chris i'm not kidding, Chris. I'm not kidding. This could happen if we but only tried it.

It is within our grasp. Yeah. So this, by the way, then leads to that nth dimensional cube talk, which is another metaphor. I think the nth dimensional cube metaphor is making the really difficult to explain in natural language the point that of all the things that could possibly happen game b is just one of them oh right so is that what it's about i think so i think so game b is like just one of the things that homo sapiens can do homo sapiensiens, like the chances of us being here, Chris,

in case you don't know, because evolution and everything, are standing small, right? We're just one way of arranging chemicals and things together. And the chances of all of us humans getting together and actually making game B really, you know. Infantismal. Yeah, that's right. So it's a tiny little spot in that possibility space. That's

the point. I see. Well, we're not done with coherence yet. We're not done. It kind of weaves a lot of these conversations together, but I'm going to jump forward to later in the conversation when there's a little bit more meat on the bone about the kind of details, what this might look like. So here's a little bit more about coherence. And it has this phrase that Jordan Hall uses that I love. See if you can hear it. Hey, let's just imagine that we have, with a little bit of thinking, let's say we could woodshed and you could fund, you know, whatever, 24 Rad and MacArthur level super smart folks to come together and come up with protocols for group coherence that work more often than not. Do we open source that or are we more concerned that it can also build the Borg?

Well, if I double click on the content of that that the answer is that we open source that but that's because there's no such thing underneath it there's no such thing which has protocols for group coherence there's more along the lines of remember it's we're trying to cultivate insight, not teach. So did you get the free as Matt? Which one do you think I liked? The one with the Borg? Well, the Borg, yeah, the Borg, okay. You know, the Mundian metaphor and the bevy that they provide.

But double click on that, Matt. I'm going to double click on that concept. If you want to scale as bad boy, Chris, we're going to have to double click. So what I like is that this thing that exists in their heads, that concept if you want to scale is bad boy chris we're going to have to double click so what what i like is that this this thing that exists in their heads this recipe a protocol for coherence is so earth shatteringly powerful they have to think about the dangers involved in making it publicly available because something this powerful could easily be used as a weapon to oppress people rather than liberate them i mean i'm have to say i'm reminded of eric weinstein and his reluctance to share his physics theories because it could be used by

evil chris yeah well and there is that as you know and we we get the tie back here to the open source discussion about the plans for the dev star right and that's going to emerge from this conversation but the other point is that in a kind of introspective self-contemplation buddhist enlightenment kind of idea it's that you can't teach people about coherence. You have to let people uncover their inner coherence, which they had all along themselves. And there's a clip that highlights this nicely from Jordan Hall. So it's, there's a way to generate a in individual humans the ins the embodied insight to be able to in themselves build the capacity to come into coherence

that then does actually come into coherence so if you were to be able to, again, discernment is the canonical point. Open source discernment. Great. Open source practices and techniques that work in the directionality of improving discernment at the individual level. Yeah, yeah. Chris, Chris.

Yeah? Give a man sense-making, and he'll sense-make for a day. But teach a man to sense-make, and he will be feeding himself with sense his entire life. Would you agree with that? That's right. You've nailed it.

Well, you know, actually, I think it's more point someone in the directionality of improving the discernment towards sense making. And they may sense make for their life. Yes. their life yes and it must be explained that discernment is another one of these special words that was introduced prior which wasn't really defined but it's kind of means what it says in normal language yeah it's very important it's very important part of the process of coherence yes there are those times when they take a word and say it's not about criticism it's about being critical or it's not about discerning it's about discernment right yeah yeah and it's never it's never really clear what it means but it has been spoken about for a bit and that kind of suffices and then

that word then serves as a cornerstone for more sense making to be built on top of that word and we just heard an example of that yeah and so we're getting to the end as far as coherence can take us it's going to lead us into other realms but i i want to top it off with it's's in Jimmy Wheal's highlight folder for me. What I described the clip as is Jimmy Wheal spinning hard on coherence. So let's see if that's an accurate title for this. If I notice what I'm tracking, I'm like, yeah, absolutely. That's the foundational level, the springboard from which you leap.

And obviously the higher that is, the less hops you got to have, right? To get to the level of coherence. And between, you know, smart tech, pharmaceuticals, you know, lineage practices, like there's enough out there these days that you can for sure create at least, you know, like the vomit comet, you can create moments where everybody is weightless. You can create a transient group coherence that, and there's, it's a bell curve distribution from what I can tell. 10% of the people lose their shit, don't know what to do with that space or, you know, and

maybe it's like 10, it could be more, but like to say tails say tails you got you got the people who can't hang and lose their shit and then you got the people it doesn't budge at all and those are the psychopaths and they should not have been exposed to this and then there's the velkoff in the middle who are like oh wow you know the omega principle like oh wow i'm wow. I'm an organism. I'm an ear. I'm an eye. Holy shit, we're seeing in parallax. This is joyful, wondrous, amazing, and transformative.

And so what do we do with that? Which are we, Matt? Are we the psychopaths that should never have been told that we are an ear and an eye? I suspect so. I suspect so. I think psychoactives play an important role here. I mean, that's the subtext. And they do sell nootropics jorogin was a purveyor of them well actually so there's two things one i suspect that actually taking bona fide psychedelics ayahuasca or whatever i suspect that does play a role in these transient experiences of coherence but as well as that all um perhaps three of them, I'm not sure, but certainly Schmachtenberger do promote a supplement called Qualia

for the Neurohacker Collective. Qualia, and I just have to say, Chris, I cannot think of a more pretentious name for a brain-enhancing pill than Qualia. Now, that's a good one. But yes, as you were saying some people resist we have to look we have the capacity to create these transient coherent experiences and just get a taste a teeny tiny taste of what a wondrous world it could be the age of aquarius when game b finally takes over but it's not going to work for everyone

it's not going to work for you clearly you'd be the psychopath i'd probably be in the middle range you know yeah so this gets us into the techno shaman territory but there's a building block that we left behind it comes a little bit earlier and it's on the topic of flow matt flow so let's hear a little bit about flow because this is an essential building part before we get the full techno-shaman utopia. Another way of describing it is it's something like flow, since we have that as a nice concrete frame and we can evoke that,

in an unconstrained way. I.e. we oftentimes associate with flow with flow in a domain. a rock climber is in flow when climbing rocks a jazz band is in flow when playing jazz coherence is flow absent context absent a particular application okay so flow matt you're familiar with that in the kind of psychological definition of flow well it's a pop psychology thing isn't it it's definitely um yeah it's in popular culture the flow state yeah focusing etc i think flow is relatively well empirically validated as a concept isn't it like the people become deeply absorbed in

past yeah i have no i have no problem with it it's just nothing very mystical like you can get flow from playing one of those app games where you're playing tetris or something so this is a little bit like you know when uh mickey ends like pointed out that the mindfulness measures that binge drinkers were scoring more highly than meditators because of some of the things that the measure captured. So, yes, I do take that. And I think that people do focus on flow for more productive things, right? Like exercising or playing chess rather than completing, what's that called? Fruit ninja? What's a popular one? With the fruit making them explode or whatever? Yeah, what's that called? Candy crush. Candy crush. Yeah, candy crush. But look, I think as a productive thing,

it absolutely exists. Kids that suffer from ADHD get given drugs essentially, which help them focus and get into that state. You can call it flow if you want. Just saying it kind of occupies a bigger space in the popular mind than it does in psychology. So there's a little bit where Jordan Hall riffs on people having different vocabulary sets and flow being an emergence property coming from the synergy of a conversation that's what they're talking about with flow but i just liked the way that daniel picked up on this concept so they've been talking about flow in the kind of psychological term of flow as in a task that you're absorbed in and that your individual sense of self evaporates

slightly in your concentration on the task and it's a euphoric experience and then daniel comes in with this so we're interested here in the types of coherence that can occur where there are differences right differences of, differences of perspective. And yet, like, so I'll just tie a couple other words to how the Jordan said, he said, it's kind of like flow. If we think of flow from fluid dynamics in terms of like laminar flow versus turbulent flow, there's a more flow is less entropy and actually not just less entropy, but cent centropy the movement towards holes that are greater than some of the parts and so i think that's what we're really interested in

collective sense making is how do we come together in relationship that has less friction less entropy relationally more centropy where the group of us has capacities, has emergent properties that aren't found in any of us in isolation. That coherence is that phenomena that emergent properties arise from. I feel like I got sucked into a time tunnel and went back to them talking about the same point, but this was actually a completely different part of the conversation and they're still talking about people have different perspectives and that creates an interesting yeah yeah so the reason the metaphor they went down a little whirlpool there is that they like the idea of flow right it's a psychological state they like the idea of flow as in fluid flow fluid dynamics laminar flow as he said but the problem

is that well first of all he mentions that fluid flow creates centropy and centropy is not a scientific word it's like a crunchy new age word as far as i know but you know it's kind of the idea that complexification occurs and like a fractal or something is creating extra stuff. That doesn't happen with fluid flow, right? Laminar flow. But they sort of get a bit mixed up with the metaphor because like turbulent flow, to continue the metaphor, is one that has a lot of entropy. It creates heat and slows the water down. It's a bunch of forces acting against each other but that's kind of good from

the game b dynamics because that's very creative and there's interactions happening and new things going on where laminar flow is all the water particles like moving rank and file in the same direction and so that's not game b i see they've buzzed your buttons matt by using a technical term in a way that you do not think fits. Because for me, that was just a cascade of buzzwords. And I have no idea if centropy is an actual term associated with flow or not, but I'm more than certain that they are not using the kind of technical definitions in a meaningful way. So you're giving them credit by being like, you know, they've argued this, but actually if you take the correct definition of lavender flow, that's not what they mean.

And I think the bigger point is, Matt, the one that you leaped over, is that they took a word flow, a definition of flow, and they just used a separate definition because it's the same pronunciation. But it's not okay. You cannot do that. That's taking two different concepts and saying they're the same.

Because they happen to share the same syntax. Yes, it's almost as bad as saying I would do something and would the material like there's some connection between those two because the way that they signed is similar but it's a bit different because like yes it's flow yeah it's it's analogous it's analogous but uh yeah i take your point very much so they like you can see how the reasoning works you get some insight into how the reasoning works you get some insight into how the reasoning works which is like oh flow i associate that with water flowing and then let's

work with this metaphor and you know see where that takes us um yeah it's kind of amazing that they consider this to be a useful way to talk or think, lest you think that there's just those two ways to conceptualize flow. Jimmy Wheel, flying in at the last minute with a fly kick to knock in some more conceptions of flow for you. Yeah, I mean, it seems like, if I'm hearing right, the question is just how can we get together with each other in a way that leaves us smarter, kinder, more creative, more courageous, more resilient than any of us are apart? make at least as far as terms for me flow is often a bit of a buzzword and i think a lot of people project onto it but some slightly more precise like if i'm thinking of examples and you can tell

me if i'm barking up the right tree or not but like examples i think of is victor turner's notion that university of chicago of communitas which is a it's not simply a collection. It's not just a crowd or a mob. It's a felt presence of coherence among a group. That actually, I want to highlight as well that it's not all meaningless babble because he is using communitas broadly correctly, and he does have a mild critique in there of, you know, flows of buzzword, let's get down to the brass tacks. Are we talking about Victor Turner's communitas? But, you know, in reality, we're talking about communitas, fluid dynamics flow, psychological

state flow. We're talking about everything all at once everywhere but that isolated sentiment i i kind of vibe with yeah i vibe with that too it was good to see some awareness that they were relying on a buzzwordy concept but jamie did undermine that a little bit immediately afterwards in in reeling off a bunch of those sort of desirable properties. What were they? You know, being more courageous, being more resilient, all of those things, which it should be said, those buzzwords are floating around academia

and floating around the corporate world, but they are buzzwords as well. Not really a better definition. Yeah, and one thing, Matt, is that the sense speakers, Yeah. And one thing, Matt, is that the sense because they do, you leads to jordan going into flow and all that kind of thing so he says this so he mentioned um he said it has a relationship with novelty what prompts you to put that into the mix because if i just hear the word coherence that just feels like you know from physics electronics whatever it would just be things in some form of sync with each other

but you added in novelty and anti-fragility and both of those seem interesting but they're not what i would have just expected to come from the word so can you help unpack either the why or the how you got to those? You know, you can really summarize this entire conversation as being like struggling to define something that they've just imagined. Yeah, so, you know, this thing can't be talked about, so they define it with metaphors. And then we're hearing Jamie there querying the metaphor and wondering how we can jam in emergence and creativity and robustness or resilience with this idea of coherence.

And yeah, so lots of defining going on, Chris. I think that's a very nice point to make at this part, Matt, because there's a little bit, you know, I mean, there's not a little bit, this happens multiple times, but they kind of take a step back and talk about their metaphors and how good they are communicating the message. So here's a little bit about sense-making and mapping to various different paradigms. But of course, the meta-proposition is that mapping it to a paradigm full stop at all

is the problem. So anytime you're actually trying to make sense by mapping to a paradigm, whether the paradigm is a Vishnu or the god Pan or cognitive neuroscience or whatever, you're already recapturing the discourse in a particular way of thinking that limits its capacity to be the thing

we're trying to actually do. So the answer to the question is like if the answer the question like the classic buddhist just whack you in the back of the head like that's the only real response to that kind of a question is don't go that direction sure okay so so yes and then but so if coherence is this ephemeral emergent property, best never named, never subject to reality capture, reality tunnel capture, like it's that thing, then how the hell do you scale it? Because we're storytelling monkeys. And at some point we need recipes to help the thing propagate. That just reminded me of how at an earlier point jordan said that he's running 70

to 90 distinct paradigms at any given time oh yeah yeah i have that for you you know getting trapped in paradigms you you can just be regurgitating things but maybe one of the solutions to that problem would be the quakers are doing something awesome but they're running one paradigm we have to actually say is okay let's run let's put the very minimum from both the lacoda and the quaker paradigms while we're at it i'm usually running i don't know 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time and there's many and i mean and the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm but actually to allow each one of them to have the particular piece that they're holding, just like eyes and ears. 70 distinct paradigms simultaneously. Those are rookie numbers, Mark. I'm running about 145.

Wow. Wow. I can tell by the glazed look in your eyes, Chris. That meme come to life of all the little numbers flashing around does the paradigm switch yep i pity those poor fools that are trapped in a single paradigm but i guess returning back to their point before what are they saying they're saying aren't they that it's it's kind of ineffable you can't really talk about this thing because as soon as you start talking about in a particular way a psychology way or a religion way or anything like that then you pin it down where it's really it's like a meta thing game b and coherence is this meta thing that is above and beyond anything that anything else that humans do that's why you gotta buzz in 70 paradigms at once

just dance between them like a fairy skidding the ice. That's how you stay above the water. And Matt, lest you think it's just Jordan that can keep that many paradigms juggling in his mind, here's Daniel talking about the importance of multi-perspectivism. There's a really important distinction that we're saying something that is different than the way that some people think about multi-perspectivism, which is we're saying something that is different than the way that some people think about multi perspectivism Which is we're not saying I'm not saying all Perspectives are equally valid and

I'm also not saying that there is no way to integrate them into higher-order understanding I'm saying all perspectives have some signal, generally have some noise, and that perspective is itself a reduction of information on the reality being perceived. And that's actually- From the quantum film of it all. From just the definition, actually, of observer, observing, observed, I can't take myself out of reality to observe it in a unitary way. And if I'm observing you now versus in a different state, I'm going to observe different things. Right?

Someone else at a different time. If I'm observing the west side of the house versus the east side of the house versus the aerial view versus inside the house, they all give me some signal, some truth about the nature of the house. Just to be clear, not an elephant. This is a very different point from the elephant, right? This is, if you see the house from different perspectives, they'll give you a piece of information about the house. It's not the elephant analogy, Mark. It's a very different point. Very different point. Very different point. And it's not the benefit you get from having different people around with different perspectives on the house slash elephant. It's your zipping around from paradigm to paradigm, from each of those paradigms, just seeing it from a different point of view, which I can see the benefit of

that. That's really helpful. I can see that. You keep it in the quantum format. You're just, you're skimming off the quantum phone of sensemaking, spooning it into your metacognition latte and chugging it down to open the third who's been behind you all along describing the house in binary. In binary. Yeah, they're not making the same point again and again and again throughout this massive session they're different i'm glad you're saying that's not what they're doing because they they wouldn't be doing that matt and let's take a moment to luxury it in this idea

about sense making jazz keep that in your third space. I'm noticing as you're saying that I'm trying to get to the feeling of it, which is, by the way, quite hard. But one of the places I landed was that we still have that nice example of the jazz band, fortunately. We actually have concrete examples of what these things are like to be in. And I'm noticing that as a player in the jazz band, that feeling of not being subordinated to the whole, but actually somehow being supported and achieving a higher level of individuation is felt. So the question, of course, what does that feel like? It's interesting to notice that while some people,

And of course, what does that feel like? It's interesting to notice that while some people, not many, I think, try to think about that strategically. Like, okay, how do I make sure that I am in fact protected? Most people are in fact proceeding by, do I actually feel like I am increasing my autonomy? Do I feel more agentic and more autonomous and more able to express my essence or selfness into the world? So I'm interested, like, what does that feel like to actually move into that place?

And if we can do it, like, what would it actually have felt like for the single cell going into the multi-cell? Because there's something about the quality of that that we can actually grasp at that level. There's a little bit of the Jordan Peterson experience in the DNA coming in there, like you can experience the sensation of a single cell organism becoming a multi-cell organism by being in a jazz band. Like, you know, I get the analogy, but I suspect the two processes are somewhat dissimilar in important ways. Are you saying we can't get the subjective experience of, say, the mitochondria permeating the prehistoric cell, thus paving the way for that paradigm shift in biology

from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms? Isn't that what we can experience when we're engaged in sense-making, Chris? Surely. I'm an omega rule guy, so I look for the kernels, the diamonds in the rough. So that, you know, I would never be so reductive to say that that is a silly point. I guess I'm more interested to hear more, more riffing on this metaphor about a jazz session. So it just so happens Jimmy Wheeler is willing to do that for me. So let's listen to this and let's just vibe a bit, Matt. Let's just hear the sense speaking jazz play over us. And it feels like there also needs to be a tolerance for ambiguity

and a willingness to get messy. So back to the jazz guys, I mean, consistently, the most righteous jams come out of kind of going down into the mud as a band. You know, someone's off noodling, exploring a theme,

and it's not actually danceable, it's not anything, and it's even to the point of just unspooling entirely, and then some Quicksilver starlight comes out of that, and then it all gels, and it's that patience,

to your point about timing, Jordan, it's the patience to let it all come undone in order to come back together in some new emergent form that seems almost essential and i don't know that when you were described because i mean as soon as you described organisms organs and that was like oh yeah okay so social media digital narcissism fucking scraping everybody else's jam biting people's rhymes poaching people's dharma, feels like the cancerous impulse that we're experiencing right now. But I made a mistake, I realized for one second, when he said

scraping other people's jars or jam, I was imagining like somebody stealing the jam. And then I realized, no, he means like taking their songs off the internet but i my metaphorical attunement was you know just slightly off key so i i was like imagining somebody sneaking over to your house and reaching their knife across to steal a bit of your job off your toes yeah look it is fair to say that this conversation is 70 metaphor and they really like the jazz improvisation metaphor people in harmony but improvising it's creative we're in cohesion but we're not in lockstep yeah it doesn't fit with i'm stuck on the laminar flow thing because it's not laminar it doesn't fit with that analogy what you're describing is like when jam sessions go good, but we haven't considered what happens when jam sessions go bad.

Maybe there's some ground to cover there. We have to change that. So there's like not just a new sense-making and culture and experience, but also new infrastructure and new social structures, probably beyond the scope of what we'll get to today. But even if we take the balance sheet away, there's the, like, is someone wanting to take up more space in the jam session

because of unmet identity needs? And do they actually care about the felt experience of somebody else who's seeking to express something? And do we actually feel, do we actually feel each other? And are we coming from enough wholeness that i'm not relating

out of need most of the time yeah yeah and musicians call that cutting right like if somebody deliberately outplays the other person yeah and leaves that and leaves their contribution diminished versus accretive yeah right those are cutting sessions and that's bad for it yeah yeah yeah a lot of focus on the process on what it would feel like to be aware of the truly coherent Game B stuff going on, which we must emphasize is conversations, right? Like it is people. Don't be so reductive. Don't you dare, Matt.

Don't you dare sully sense-making by reducing it to conversations if anything it is the object which emerges from conversations all right it is it is not conversations in and of themselves oh how dare you i have i know and you know what i'm reminded of a direct quote here which is i made that mistake of taking the state for the stage which is probably what i did just there probably what i did that's right yeah that sounds like the kind of thing that you you do that you know i do i do do that from time to time so yeah there's so many metaphors but particularly like the star wars ones we like the borg one that was cool um the jazz one but yeah like they talk about other ones too like changing global culture

being at like a crystalline phrase transition in a fluid and these words love discernment and anti-fragile and coherent state induction methods i'd say it's 70 metaphor and 20 jargon jogging. I think that's unfortunately probably the case. And all of this is tying into this thing which you find in these spaces, I think quite often, that when you get down to it, an elevation of the anti-modern or the intuitive the the non-gma side of things and since gma is essentially anything related to civilization then what's in game b what's in coherence and all of those things it often comes back to spiritualism and a kind of like religious or or at least ecstatic conception of things and they're careful to warn about the danger of taking like peak state taking these experiences of non-dualistic conscience from taking drugs or whatever as the goal. Like that's not what they're talking about. So, for example, where we are culturally these days is a lot of people are stumbling into these spaces via broad access to ecstatic technologies.

access to ecstatic technologies. So whether that's transformational festivals or, you know, transformational technologies or whatever it is, or psychopharmacology, you know, all these things, people are bumbling into these spaces on purpose or not. They're getting there. They're recognizing, holy shit, we're in the deep end. And, or this is rad. This is awesome. This is terrifying. This is powerful, right? Whatever it will be that that they're they know it when they're getting there even if they're not a hundred percent sure of how they got there and then the moment they're no longer in that coherent field we're back to trying to make sense of it in the prison house of language telling stories and making analogies or metaphors yeah it's easy to mistake this as tech bro stuff because they definitely do use a lot of that

jargon they use phrases like iterating this and oh what else do they say double click double click there is a bunch of them that they use but really i think at base as you say it is a spiritual thing that they are advocating for this personal growth and enhancing these vague things of personal sovereignty or wholeness or whatever so it strikes me as kind of new age and as you say they really do valorize traditional well at least their image that they have in their heads of traditional pre-modern ultra-spiritual societies yeah and you know you mentioned matt the distinction between state and stage which relates to these concepts so this is is Jordan Hall making that distinction explicit. I was thinking, okay, so state and stage. Obviously, for me, the first thing that comes up in terms of state is there's the constant recurrence of the trap of taking the state for the stage, right? So let's

carefully partition them and say, okay, they're not. And to the degree to which you've gone to Burning Man and taken drugs, you are not in fact actually anywhere. But maybe you saw a glimpse that there is somewhere else to go. That's neat. So very carefully. So the first is big red flag, state is not stage. State is not going to get you to stage by itself. Take it slow. Okay, so then what happens in state?

So the stage is not the real thing. It's the state that's the real thing. No, no. The other way, is not the real thing it's the state that's the real thing no no the other way stage is the real thing and state is the transient experience that like drugs might get you to or like some peak yoga sense or something like that right yeah and and once again we see that familiar form of they take a couple of words, familiar words, and then embark on this mission to add meanings to them and distinguish between them. And that provides them with a scaffolding from which to sense make, right? In this case, it's state and stage.

And there are others, right? So for example, I got another piece where I've taken a whole lot of drugs together with a bunch of people, so we really feel close. And we work some stuff out over ayahuasca. And then what I'm going to do is kind of like put these in the same space and pretend that by sticking them together really hard, I've actually achieved some new synthesis. In fact, what I have is I have three distinct things that aren't actually integrated. So it's the difference between a puzzle and a photograph, or even a puzzle and a real piece of reality and i think we're into this a lot it's almost like the uh the group equivalent of spiritual bypass which is that we can arbitrarily generate a simulation of each of the artifacts of coherence

yeah you get the feeling like he could meditate on the distinction between a puzzle and uh sorry what was the second thing a photograph a photograph and a puzzle he could meditate on the distinction between a puzzle and, sorry, what was the second thing? A photograph. A photograph and a puzzle. He could meditate on the distinction between those two things for hours, I feel. They called it like a generative function. And I actually think that's right. This is a thing from which they can endlessly generate more thought bubbles from any given

input. So one thing, Matt, we mentioned earlier is after talking about that, there's a bit where Jamie attempts to riff just a little bit or clarify what Jordan's saying. I think Jordan, you know, we've seen a smackdown before where he was like, no, it's not really about Taoism. And here's another example of that dynamic in play. So they have an experience and then try to turn to science. So prescriptive versus descriptive.

Both really. They mistake one. They do prescription and description because poetry is not really description. It's an octave. Figurative versus literal. Yes. Yeah.

So the trick is we have to actually be able to use language as some way of creating a resonance frequency or protocol match that generates a capacity for communication that is not itself specifically semantic. You have to admire this ability. It's amazing. It's amazing it's incredible like a resonance frequency or protocol match that generates a capacity for communication wow that that not as that is not in itself specifically semantic that last clause is important because until he added that i was confused but uh it is like it is like jazz it's you know instead of saying skidabababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababab descriptive. And Jordan is like, no, no, no. No, no, no. It's both simultaneously. As we saw that happened earlier, it also happens again later. Here's them talking about whether humans are strong or not. The fertilized egg is fragile in the context of once it goes through its developmental

arc, an extraordinarily resilient being. An adult human is kind of a kick-ass animal. Really, really good at being animal. But of course, a fertilized egg is still extremely fragile. So the question we might ask is like, well, what's our womb? Well, I'd actually push back on that. I'd say a fucking adult human is a weak, naked, hairless ape. We get his ass kicked by everybody,

but with culture, with the instruction manual, he's badass. I actually disagree. I would point out that the things that just basic humans can do, like throw shit accurately, are actually rather astounding in the context of the animal kingdom.

And the plasticity of the design parameters with human body can actually be trained to do that is not coded in the instinct of a given animal is as impressive as the flexibility at the level of idea space. That there is no Baryshnikov in the animal kingdom. And to the greatest there is to Baryshnikov, that animal cannot also then become an Aretha Franklin.

Like that's actually pretty fucking intense. So there, Jamie. Look, Chris, Chris, on the off chance, Jamie, on the off chance, the minuscule chance you listen to this, I just want to say, we feel for you, brother. It's really not fair. He's right. Humans are weak, relatively speaking, physically.

But are they? No, Jamie. We can chuck things well. We're good at throwing spheres but that's what jimmy said he said when you have culture humans are actually formidable jamie's point was pretty good especially by the standards of this conversation it's really it felt very unfair for him to be snuck down like this um anyway oh no matt there's like i'll get off this point we'll leave for jimmy's travails after this but i just want to give that even when he tries to like clarify

beforehand if his metaphor is okay it's acceptable it doesn't always go as planned does that track yes for you guys okay um now i know, analogies of humans and brains and minds to computers are obviously problematic at a whole bunch of different levels. But as far as a simple one, does this also seem to be the notion of connecting CPUs or computers and serial, such that the connected computational power and capacity is greater than any of the things in between, and that they might actually even be able to tackle problems that any individual computer would be incapable of solving. No, Matt, you might be under the misillusion that this is another metaphor to talk about things collectively, being able to outperform individual stuff but set

that aside so it was all right right this was him talking about a computer analogy saying yeah i know it's not a perfect analogy but you know parallel distributed computation it's a thing it seems to be relevant to the stuff they're talking about about you know individual component parts coming together to create something bigger than the sum but so we heard a an intake of breath what was that actually no and that goes back to the notion of coordination so that style of connection is coordination and it does have the characteristic of increasing capacity and in fact increasing capacity in a fashion that is, well, at least depending on the specific kind of problem and the physical capacity to do compute,

oftentimes a better topology for solving particular kinds of problems. Does that make sense what I just said? It does. I'm just wondering, is there a magic in the supercomputer? Yeah, poor Joby. Look, Jordan is the master of metaphor. He owns all the analogies. Nobody else gets to make analogies, Chris.

Joby's analogy, by the rules of this conversation, I always want to emphasize, was perfectly fine, right? Parallel distributed computing, got a whole bunch of little neurons in your head. They can't do much things by themselves. You connect them all together. They can do stuff collectively. There isn't, as Jordan said,

what is it, a controller or managing things? So Jamie's point was fine. Why couldn't he just let Jamie have his metaphor? And then he made him endorse his metaphor. Does that track, Jamie? Yes, it does, Joyce. Yes, yes, Jeremy. Well, look, I feel bad, dude.

If I just, you know, the dynamics of conversation, this is a meta conversation about sense, Vicky. This is what we do. And I promise we'll leave it, Jimmy, after this. We'll leave it. We like you. We feel for you. This is why we're pointing this out.

So, Jimmy is like, all right, let's just drop my metaphor. All right, it's got issues. But no, Jordan and Daniel will not allow that. They have another suggestion. I mean, if it's a problematic metaphor, we can abandon it. I'm just thinking. No, it's a very good metaphor and problematic. If we don't want to abandon it, we actually want to have it be helpful.

Double click on why. There are elements of parallel processing and elements of serial processing that are important. And then there's something that can't be fully contained in parallel and serial. Poor Jamie. They're going to have to spend the next 10 minutes like deconstructing exactly what's wrong, how limited Jamie's metaphor was. Oh, God. So, so yeah that was i mean look i know i know it's a bit mean but it's just that is a good encapsulation of the dynamics of the conversation and who has the driving power who isn't and it's you know i'm not saying that this is a reflection of their actual status in the actual world just purely in the dynamics of this conversation this is the way it plays out

and you can't help but feel sympathy for jamie and like a slight frustration that jordan and daniel well in a way chris you and I are reflecting on the dynamics, the topology, to use one of their pretentious terms, of this conversation. It's very, very game B. This is what you're supposed to do, right? You know, analyze this stuff, reflect upon it. Rule Omega, Matt. Where's Rule Omega? Well, actually, we're doing Rule Omega better because we're saying that Jimmy's better for a stunt. But they are, you know, look, they're saying it's problematic, but it's's also good and that's what makes it even better jimmy there's another angle you haven't considered so well it's good because it gives them opportunities

to split more definitions and build more sense making scaffolding of the distinctions that they're drawing yeah wow so as we said the whole discussion around coherence leads to this focus on how we can bring this collective sense-making apparatus of GIMB that cannot be spoken of directly into like a larger framework and as i said the bit that is interesting is that a lot of it seems to reflect a yearning for religion or tradition for example so it's like this she did this ripping album called amazing grace in a watts gospel church in like 1974. And then all the footage was lost and it's just come out. Like I literally wept seeing this, this fucking trailer was unreal. And she starts singing the song Amazing Grace and she just takes that A and she just does it. She goes all over the, she's like 29 years old at the time. And, but the, but the gospel choir

who's backing her up are like giving it up. Like they're feeling the shimmy shakes. They're feeling the juice. They're giving it up for it. and then they start praising and testifying and like the whole thing just goes through the roof and you're like oh my god and then there's the swaying the clapping the dancing the moving and you're like it is weeping for the humanity of our wounding it is praising you know the divinity of our possibility and it's connecting connecting, like literally, like church as a verb. And you're like, ah, shit, man, we got it. You know, we just need to dust that shit off and like create new versions. Yeah, like I was saying before, Chris, the weird thing is,

is that they use a lot of this tech bro language, failure states and checksums and iterating things and double click on stuff. And it kind of sounds like they're trying to innovate a new kind of technological social system that's going to make space travel happen or something like that. But when it comes down to it, what they're really into are these ecstatic experiences that is this sense of coherence that arises. And they hold up examples like this you know getting in the flow with the jazz these references to psychoactive substances that can help promote it there's references to buddhist enlightenment that kind of thing they're about touching the infinite yeah

and there is this touching of the infinite but in the mundane activities of daily life aspect as well. So for example, it feels to me like the piece that socially we're missing the most these days to your point about Bali and burning man and, you know, transformational culture is that people are really good at the atom bomb peak experiences these days. They can blow shit up sky high. They're shit. They're terrible at the other 360 days a year.

The simple stuff. Yeah. Eat right. Sleep right. You know, like a daily practice and even like a revival. Meditate. Collective Sabbath. Collective Sabbath.

Tone the bell. Yeah. Smash the duck. Smash the duck. So I don't know if you've got a special clip on this, but they talk about reinstigating prayer at mealtime in order to get that sense of deep gratitude and have a bit of a meditation about things. Yeah, so Jordan Hall talks about St. Greer's before meals and how that was a part of his childhood, but also the new year thing.

And then he kind of rediscovered the beauty of having a ritual where you're thanking people for a meal. And it's kind of recreating, like you say, it's not just doing what everyone else is doing when they say Greece, it's doing it better. It's not a single paradigm, Chris. It's reinvented. It's embracing multiple paradigms. So there wouldn't be so traditionalist or boring to just say, hey, we should do Christian stuff. But they're influenced by these things, ritual. Yeah. And I'm a big ritual mom myself. So, let's hear Jordan riff on that a little bit. So, I would always forget to have my gratitude practice. But when I said, you know what, I'm going to do this. Before I eat, I'm going to do my gratitude practice. I'm just going to

bind something that just has this really cool characteristic of being really hard to forget, i.e. eating, with something that's really useful. It has a little bit of cultural vector and just combine the two. And then it just began to expand from there. So this is, of course, the recreation of ritual that is also part of the story. Yep. And that's a lot of culture hacking we can do, right? I mean, grace, gratitude at dinner,

Shabbos, you know, Sabbath, a day down, a down day every week to reflect and reset. Like these are simple things that are easy to dust off and reanimate. And I really think, again, I think there's a lot that can be open-sourced. We just have to make sure that we're not open-sourcing the technology. We're open- sourcing the technology. We're open sourcing the technology

to bring into insight. So don't open source the info. Open source the things that build developmental capacity. The generative process. Open source the finger pointing at the main, not the main. The plans to the rebellion.

Not the Death Star. But in terms of what they're talking about, yes, they're keen on reinstigating these amazing concepts like Sunday or prayer at mealtimes. I think I've been influenced, it's rubbing off on me because I was thinking it's not religion, but it's not not religion. Then I thought, shit, that's just something a sense maker would say so instead i'm gonna say it's a lot like a religion chris like it gets much more explicitly spiritual towards the end there's a lot of talk of the enlightenment and dharma and the bodhisattva imperative mythopoetic understandings of the current age yeah i think it'll help to play some clips and i also think it would be helpful

to note that whenever you use Buddhist terminology, it somehow sounds less religious, more philosophical. I mean, Jordan Peterson, though, to his credit, and Jonathan Pajot do a good job of making Christian theology sound scientific and technical, but these guys are more on the Buddhist gig. So here's Daniel Schmachtenberger coming in with some discussion about dharma and dogma. And earlier you were talking about education that is not teaching info, but that is facilitating epiphany. Yeah. When someone has real epiphany and they figure out something that's useful and then they teach other people and the other people don't understand why and that happens a few generations the dharma becomes dogma right like the thing that that had real wisdom just becomes a thing to do because the authorities

told us and then liberation actually looks like rebelling against it and even if we're submitting to it we don't really get the gist and so to not have dharma become dogma and become a control system, it has to be alive and real and rediscovered for everyone. It gets pretty religious spiritual towards the end. Like for most of the time, I couldn't figure out exactly what it was that they were really talking about underneath all those layers of metaphor and definition splitting and neologisms and jargon. But, you know, towards the end, they talk about non-attachment, referencing Buddhism and practicing humility, referencing Christianity. And they emphasize that these kinds of ritual and these local relationships is like crucial for making rule Amiga and game B happen. So, it does feel like a blast from the past. It does. And you know, I said, and I'll have an example of it, that it's referencing Buddhist terminology, but they also do touch on

Christian teaching a little bit earlier. So let's first of all hear Daniel riffing on a kind of Buddhist framework for how this applies. And so we're getting exponentially larger levers on our choices, but we're not getting exponentially better choice-making. And so, we are getting the power of gods without getting the love or wisdom of gods to wield that power. That's a self-termination scenario. I don't see any scenario where we don't get the power of gods. That seems eminent and unavoidable. And so there really is this enlightenment or bust thing that I see, which is if we have catastrophic level tech,

not just isolated to state actors, but they can be radically decentralized, who gets to be totally fucked up? Nobody. Or even not be very omni-considerate that can do catastrophic stuff on accident. So this is like the existential bodhisattva? Yes, it is.

This is the bodhisattva imperative actually has to become universal for us to make it through this phase. And that wasn't true in the Bronze Age or Stone Age or Iron Age or any of the other ages because we could just kill a lot of people and we could a lot of environments and we did now it's just kill everybody in all environments do you understand the bodhisattva imperative do you know what a

bodhisattva is matt not really it's a kp it's a essentially like almost akin to a buddhist a buddhist saint but more so like an enlightened being who does not enter nirvana and instead comes back to help other beings enter nirvana beforehand. And so it's having that compassion for other beings as your core guiding force. And so we need the Bodhisattva principle to become a universal imperative so that our society can transcend its petty rivalous games of dma and and transcend to a sense-making utopia of enlightened bodhisattva ism yeah it's pretty easy to get the basic point there which is that all of this technology and science and so on gives us lots of power to blow ourselves up destroy the planet so we need to transition into this age of aquarius sorry game b to have the wisdom to use

this power wisely to use that word again now so they can't mean like they emphasize a few times that the game b hasn't been done yet even though it's super referencing traditional religions and also traditional hunter-gatherer society culture like i i'm sure they're not so ignorant as to think that a particular pre-modern band was like in harmony with the entire world and didn't have conflict and and so on i think they probably did right you're the anthropologist you tell me but i mean yes that is the same map but no the humans throughout history none of them have achieved perfect knowledge and compassion um but uh i thought so but i thought i'd check but you know who know, who am I to say? Maybe some of

them are dead. But what you're touching on, I think, is that they are kind of talking about the corruption of these ancient wise teachings. These were proto-sense-making without modern technology. So, if we could combine the insight of the bodhisattvas and Jesus with an understanding of modern technology, we can get the game B. And obviously, game A has corrupted all of those insights. and then see what Game A does within it when it becomes like how the teachings of the guy who emphasized forgiveness became the basis of the Crusades and the Inquisition is like a really great example. Like how the fuck did we figure out how to do that? And so there's still a similar thing that happens when if someone makes their living by sharing wisdom and they're able to split test optimize the nature of what wisdom people respond to the most

and what persona expressions, and they can click optimize, and they can even just allow Facebook's algorithms to click optimize the version of wisdom expression that lands the most, you get a capture of wisdom by rivalrous games. And this is the kind of shit we have to be like really honest with each other about and honest with ourselves about to create an information ecology that doesn't have disinformation and

bullshit in it. Because right now, like if true information about reality is a source of competitive advantage within rivalrous games, then I both want to withhold true information and I is a source of competitive advantage within rival risk games, then I both want to withhold true information and I want to disinform. And I want to miss signal. Slow down there. Say all that again because that last two sentences felt like important. Were they important to you, Matt, those last two sentences?

Yeah, like it's just a struggle, isn't it? You have to decipher there's like a little code book and you're continually deciphering what all of this pretentious unnecessarily elaborate language is actually saying but he's basically saying this game b stuff it's like the keys to the magic castle right it'll give us this amazing view of reality so we have to be and it's going to be so appealing to people and we have to be careful that it's not abused and not co-opted. There's also that reference to a really familiar thing, which is that the various religions have become corrupted. Now, again, you're the student of religion, Chris, but my vague perception is that that's always been a belief, hasn't it? They're amongst

pretty much all religions. So, there's always been a sense that the true message has been corrupted. We have to go back and and find the purer form of it yeah that's i mean that's at the heart of reformist and fundamentalist missions or movements all throughout history like in all sorts of different religions as return to the source or the or the true teaching that was buried underneath the cultural layers. And there's another religious motif that they hit on, a kind of introspective one, which comes up often in kind of spiritual talk. Because the other part of that conversation, of course,

was they like that phrase, rivalrous games. But they're warning about this possibility that sense-making could end up descending into guru-ism, right? Like there could be competition amongst the sense-makers and they always have to be wary of this. And there's this one solution to that, which Jordan Hall previously mentioned in his discussion with David Fuller, when he basically said he was recording and putting out the conversation, but he didn't want an audience. He never of an audience he just puts it on YouTube and if an audience comes that's good but that's not the mindset that he takes in cultivating an audience

and it relates to this point which he talks about you know maybe the correct thing to do is just stay silent it's a pain in the ass but we have to like every single time we go to like when you think about these kinds of problems you at least for me i keep coming back to the same basic place so obviously the prophylactic against this entire thing is just no broadcast right as soon as wisdom is in fact just lived relationally that's why that's why landmark is bigger than vipassana, right? I mean, they've gone, they've gone, they've diluted to lowest common denominator.

They've made no bones about putting people in exposed vulnerable states and upselling the living shit out. Yeah, it is transactional. Yeah. If, there's gonna be problems. If it's broadcast, there's gonna be problems. I just have to speak to the irony

of us talking about this on broadcast. Well, fortunately. Three white men specifically within about roughly the same age. I think we're actually the same person. I also have to speak to the irony about the perils of transactional, potentially deceptive broadcast, because I was just watching a YouTube video of Schmachtenberger promoting brain pills they all are selling brain pills right aren't they like all and non-neutral as far as i know yes

yeah so yeah that's you know there's something transactional to that but yeah like people are hypocrites we know this it's a given but it's just like the kind of constant restating of these kind of debates which always existed in spirituality communities new age seekers and techno utopians it's like it's got all of it mixed in together in this heady stew and it's presented as if they're being reflective on those issues. But it's reflective to a specific point and not on the broader nature of what they're up to. Yeah. The other funny thing, it's easy to forget that the stuff that they're reflecting on is on something that doesn't exist. Like as they emphasize many times in the video, Game B doesn't exist.

They don't even have the words to describe it. They're not really sure how to create it. And all of these reflections, like about what are we going to do with the unfathomable power? It could be abused. What about if there are rival risk games between ones of us maybe promoting Game B and getting all kinds of followers? I mean, isn't it a bit precipitate to be worrying about these things? Maybe you should start with just describing what it is

that you're talking about. Yeah. Describing what it is that you're talking about. Yeah. Well, I think Daniel Schmachtenberger's thing is a little bit worrying about the collapse of society, right, because of these technologies, world-destroying technologies that we now have. He's like Jeroen Laniere on steroids. So I think that's kind of his gig is warning that we need to do

something or it's all going to come crashing down. And the specifics of what's going to cause it could be anything, right? It could be environmental collapse. It could be self-replicating robots. It could be runaway AI, whatever it is. But whatever it is, it's very complicated, Matt, and sense-making is the solution. Well, that's right. All of these sound like terrible problems, but they can be solved by having a really good conversation. That's what it is, isn't it?

I mean, these are rules for communicating. Yeah, well, it's fortunate, really, because that's what these guys look good at. So let's turn to daniel can round things off by making this like dystopian possibility clear as it comes towards the terminal parts of the conversation we get some talk about how this has all happened before and we need to break the cycle. And then we have to be very mindful of the fact that this is what,

the 12th time we've kind of gone through this cycle? On who's counting, which we've got the Axial Age, we had the Christian Islamic era, we have a series of points where there's like, okay, guys, here's a whole new level up. Somebody has an epiphany. They have a real epiphany. It's for real.

And they're like, all right, this time it's not turning into dogma, guys. Let's get it right. The trick, of course, here is that we kind of have to. Okay, so this comes to what you were saying earlier that I wanted to comment on i'm going to say something that will sound like really inspiring or depressing or ridiculous um i'll go with ridiculous go so that's a tease matt that's a tease what is it what's the

i think this will be our final clip as well, but is it going to be inspiring, depressing, or ridiculous? What do you vote for? I think it's going to tie everything up with the bright red bow. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, so if you find sense-making frustrating, if you find all this endless metaphorizing and these rivalrous schemes, they're very tiring, then I think this will help you.

This is the master key for what this has all been about. Daniel is there like Yoda coming in from the darkness to lead us to the light. This is the being-doing dialectic. Being grounded in a being that is actually full means unattached to needing fullness from the doing, achieving a particular thing. And yet, like a way I think about it is there's a fullness of what is, but I stop thinking about reality as a noun and think about it as more verb-like.

I can have a fullness with what is and I can also recognize an evolutionary trajectory. I can recognize the beauty of life and be nourished by it and I can also know that it's mine to add to the beauty of life as best I can. And that's being, appreciating the beauty of life, doing, adding to the beauty of life, becoming, increasing our capacity to be and do at greater depth. Bravo! Bravo! That was something. I remember that quite well and I remember the music coming in and thinking, thank God it's over. It's over. I can stop now. The sense making is finished for now.

Live, love, laugh, dream. It's very inspirational quotes. Up the wazoo. Beautiful stuff. Is the sense making ever finished, Omar? Is our work actually done? I've got another couple of metaphors I can play. Please, please don't.

Everyone knows all about the metaphors by now. You've only heard about 50%. I would say that's even an overestimate of how many that we've played. There was so much. This has been a dramatic venture into sensemaking. So I'm going to turn the lens on you matt and say what's your summary what's your final takeaway i don't think we'll be back to the sense makers for a while after this so you know what what are your views on this conversation and the sense making ecosystem

more generally uh not really my cup of tea um i don't want to spoil the surprise but i have a sense that when we run this bad boy through the garometer it's going to blow the fucking doors off um yeah it feels like it's hitting pretty much all of them but it's like that quote from anchorman like i'm not even angry i'm just impressed it really is amazing stuff the way that they build something out of nothing that they create these mind palaces for themselves and then tropes through them um discovering new things and putting on new corridors and new towers to this thing on the fly it's pretty pretty impressive i mean we've heard this kind of stuff before was jordan peterson but in the end it's like a pavlova

or like you know one of these people that don't know a pavlova does anyone know what a pavlova is it's i don't know i don't know i'm one of the ones that don't it's like a meringue you know you take eggs and sugar you beat it up you bake it bake it, and it's this fluffy, insubstantial thing. Those are the white things, right? The white thing, yeah, that just melts in your mouth. Because in the end, what were they talking about? They're talking about how everything, game A, everything that's happened in the world pretty much up till now is bad. We need to do this thing. We can't really describe this thing, except it's everything that's good. We need to do this thing. We can't really describe this thing, except it's everything that's good.

And we need to get spiritual and connect with the people that we love. And hopefully the good thing will self-organize and blossom and we'll have a new age of Aquarius. Like in a nutshell, that's what they spent two and a half, three hours talking about, right? Yeah, you kind of stole my summary because I was just going to attempt to summarize in two minutes like the million takeaway points. I did it in 10 seconds, mate. And I think we've already done that, so it doesn't serve anyone for me to repeat the lessons.

And there is that feeling where you will have had it as a listener to this content of being like but was that the same clip or is that are you playing this part and no it's like that it's the same motifs repeated with new analogies calling back to old analogies the same points repeated in different metaphors over and over and over again and I don't see this as fundamentally different from Jordan Peterson or Jonathan Peugeot or any variety of other obscurantist specialists. That's what is here. And it is not to say that people cannot extract anything useful from this. They cannot enjoy it. extract anything useful from this. They cannot enjoy it. There is an enjoyment to it as a kind of jazz performance. Where it falls down is actual useful information and also an ability to deal

with the fact that people are wrong, that people are promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, that science actually does provide answers in the flawed research paradigms that are better than just random guesses. And there's a lot of the way that they talk, which I think sounds deep, sounds very well informed, and they definitely do have this rich array of references and knowledge. But when they talk about things that you know about, like the replication crisis, the way it's referenced, a lot of the stuff is relatively superficial, where their knowledge is a bit deeper, is on the spiritual, old anthropology, spirituality spirituality tech shaman kind of stuff i think they actually have a depth of knowledge but on the other stuff it feels a little bit not a little bit it feels a

lot of it is you know kind of buzzword the and riffing on things yeah i mean we don't know them they may well know heaps about floor dynamics they may. But what is incontrovertible is that in this conversation, all of those science-y analogies or flowery poetic analogies, they served a very superficial purpose. Like as we talked about, just given the idea that we're all touching a different part of the elephant. Like, yes, you can use six different metaphors to get that point across. You can compare it to fluid dynamics or distributed computing or whatever, but it doesn't really

make the point any more profound. Yeah. And part of my issue in the nuller is that the sense-making ecosystem has been particularly bad at identifying people who are promoting disinformation or who are grandiose narcissists claiming to have resolved theoretical physics. And this is why they are vulnerable to people like Brett Weinstein or to people like Jordan Peterson, because it's a facility with language, a facility with metaphor. And that's what the primary value is. What we've done on this episode is 100% not sense-making.

It's invalid, it's unfair, it's unkind, and it's the kind of thing that essentially makes you persona non grata in the sense-making ecosystem. And that's a problem. Not that we want to be in the sense-making ecosystem. And that's a problem. Not that we want to be in the sense-making ecosystem, but that they can't handle that kind of critique. Yeah. The epistemic that they're using is literally what the stuff that we played.

There's poetry, allegory, and metaphor, and playing around with words, seeing how they fit, generating ideas and riffing off them. As they kept saying, it is like jazz and I like jazz, but it's music. It's not an epistemic for understanding how the world works. And as you hinted at, the big problem they've got is they don't have any mechanism of saying that's just wrong. Demons are a poor metaphor for understanding how the world works, let alone any kind of rigorous model. It's best just not thinking about demons. Forget about that bullshit.

There's no mechanism for that. There's only ways to elaborate and complexify and abstractify the idea of demons. I think the only caveat I would add there, Matt, is like, I think it's useful to think about why people believe in demons, which is how sometimes Jonathan Pajot and John Favaki and the other sense makers would present what they're doing.

But that's not what they're doing because they kind of reify the understandings at the same time. They're not like critically dissecting those concepts at best they're extremely ambiguous about whether demons and witches and whatnot exist and what do you mean exactly by exist so um the sense makers suffer from the same pathology and it should be clear from the content we've looked at they have a fluency with language they're very deft in their handling of metaphor and illusion but that doesn't make it useful or true or helpful in any way shape or form schmachtenberger can rattle off these sentences these long paragraphs talking about being grounded and being that is actually full and unattached to meaningfulness, yada, yada, yada, yada.

Experiencing the fullness of what is and not thinking of reality as a noun, but more as a verb. And if you're in the right state of mind, if you're in the state of flow, that kind of language just kind of rolls over you. Like it does feel meaningful in the way that poetry might i mean we had the same feedback for jordan peterson if you don't think about what he's saying or expect it to connect then it can be kind of an enjoyable experience but when you stop and ask what it is actually saying then it's either nothing or it's in my mind pretty trivial yeah yep so that's enough sense making about sense makers we're done we're probably on holiday from that ecosystem for a little while at least our minds are in recovery from dealing with so

many high level ideas but while we're in recovery Matt, it's good to look at how some others have assessed us. Turn the tables. We are the ones being reviewed in our review of reviews. Yay. Good. Let's turn the mirror around, Ty. I mean, it's always us criticizing other people.

It's our turn now. We can take it. We're big boys. That's right. So last episode, we had a review that was slightly critical of me, legitimate or not. You know, who can say? It focused on me.

And your one was just a comment about RoboCop. But this week, Matt, I have a little more of a substantial pointed critique aimed your way orientated towards you in particular but it's a five-star review it's a five-star review okay okay all right well that's important context i think so all right let's hear it can't be that bad that's right and i've you know i've chosen this at random there's uh you know i just that as it happens how it falls you're not scanning for the one listener who dislikes me rather than you. You wouldn't stoop that low. No, I wouldn't stoop that low.

So the title of this is OK, and the reviewer is Diaper Lawyer. So take that for what it may be. But so a well-prepared podcast host and a barely present co-host meet to discuss the internet's greatest minds this is a podcast where the class clown takes the lead in giving out assignments and coming up with ways to organize the work just to have the surfer guy clumsily pretend to have read the material and get confused about basic things like who is giving them the most money and the origin of the show's bits the class clown tries to save the train wreck of a show but normally spazzes and spits out a half-assed explanation of a clip they

just played then the surfer says oh yeah good point mate i hadn't noticed that even though he supposedly listened to the material before the show started and listened to it again during the show continue listening as this duo inevitably comes to resent each other and the show devolves into passive aggressive jabs at each other oh and they sometimes have guests and talk about idw stuff oh my goodness me my goodness me my goodness called out okay so let's take the second part first he said that the show devolves into passive aggression and us taking jabs at each other. Now, I think he might be missing something there. I'm not taking jabs at you.

Are you taking jabs at me? I'm just joking. I like Chris. I like him. I'm just pretending I don't like him. He doesn't really protest too much. I feel like I hear a note of defensiveness creep I don't like him. He doesn't really protest too much.

I feel like I hear a note of defensiveness creep in there. Okay. You want defensiveness? I'll give you more defensiveness. I listened to the material. I've just listened to two and a half hours of sensemaking, and I kept pausing it because my brain kept floating off into the ether and then rewinding so I could pick up the thread again. And I have a thread on Twitter that documents it. I have proof. Whereas

Chris, he listens to it at like double speed and it's just sort of gliding over the top of his cortex. He doesn't suffer like me. It's so unfair. Well, look,, Matt, I think he's an infiltrator. He's there to sow the seeds of dissent. He's like worm tongue whispering in our ears. But look, the thing that I will say is what he's mistaking, Matt, is just, you know, older brains are just not as capable as younger brains of retaining information about random factoids and that. So, you know, is it that Matt doesn't work hard?

No, he listened to six hours of Rogan and on repeat. And like you said, you know, made a thread about this. And I challenge anyone to listen to this content and make a thread detailing like four takeaways that's achievement so so yeah you're just mistaking all the edge for a lack of effort don't don't you dare that's right say that about matt chris chris never gets confused he never mixes up his words or mispronounces things he's like he's always on point or like a computer yeah that's right that's right that's not passive aggressive this is happening the seeds the seeds have just seen after it's been sown we're splitting apart this is no good i've got to turn to a positive review to get us back on track screw you diaper

baby or lawyer diaper or don't try to split up the band yoko yeah what have you done what have you done oh here's a here's a purely positive one matt a purely positive one that that unites us where the vision has been sown and this is by wires and wires in uh one cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten the citadel of the intellectual dark web succumbed during the height of the apocalypse, but no army of inhuman liberals had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted mainstream news agenda had pulled down its mighty gates. The IDW was the secret refuge of the galaxy brain gurus, and no one, not even Obama, could besiege a secret it's secret

the dakotas changed everything proof shines brothers stamp out the last embers of charlatans and bad gurus please that's there's some issues with the grammar but the core we're brothers stop this internecine fighting there's nobody that puts more or less effort and we're brothers that's right brothers in arms you know clad in armor riding our white charges trotting off to lay siege to the tower of iniquity and deception probably somewhere in mordor i have a flash mark of us battling on a fiery bank next to a flowing lava and me screaming at you you were my brother i have an image of me like lying there saying i'm too i'm too tired to listen to all the clips chris i'm too tired and you're saying i'll carry you i'll carry you sir

in true sense making fashion we've we've combined star wars and Lord of the Rings metaphors this is a nice thing to end such a sense making episode on restore balance to the force if you will yes that was a nice palate cleanser I appreciated it

after that last one warm tongue get out of here so last thing Matt I appreciated it. After that last one, the last one. Warm tongue. Warm tongue. Diaper lawyer. Get out of here. Drive. So last thing, Matt, very last thing.

An episode would not be complete with our final shout outs to our lovely, lovely patrons. And if they've got to this point, they fucking deserve it for this episode, I feel.

So unless you object, I'm going gonna shout them out matt i'm gonna i'm gonna give them their jews yep give it to them chris i'm here for it do it yes and so mother of god i've got to get a more organized way to to do this okay so matt first off we have conspiracy hypothesizers we start with the lowest the the meek shall inherit the earth that's how i roll and so in in that the end yes so you might hold on matt you might be wondering who i will mention in that category and there you would have kylie hudson chris savel ian grieve max greg tough tw joseph trow Trow, Martin Wesseles, Andrew Demos, No Lips or Joints, Joe Ganteri, Ken Harrison, Cheese Mask. Yay, Cheese Mask, all of you. Thank you. Conspiracy hypothesizers, one and all. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay. So that was our conspiracy hypothesizers. Now our revolutionary geniuses, Matt. We have several. The less meek, but they still inherit some of our goods. These are great people.

These are helping us get the ring to Mordor, the ring of truth. That's right. We have Parvana Angus, Scott Rehorn, Conspiracy Impostulator. How was that for pronunciation? Christy Coates, Jordan Fernandez, Michael John, Michael Felix, Perverted Circle,

Jorgen, Hamilton Verissimo, The Policy Lass, Bill W. 2011, Conal Dunn, and tem bednall yay thank you guys and girls revolutionary geniuses one and all yes maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking what you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Okay.

And last, Matt, the least meek of our patrons, the downright forward-facing amongst the supporters. The vanguard. The galaxy brain gurus. The vanguard of the truth train yep that's right i don't know where this comes from but i think it might be a union analysis

jerry we've had enough of you that's it it's not young in analysis forget that it's it's it's galaxy brain now who we have here matt we've got sean doody jeff finch chelsea trembley muhammad reza shawari adrian camilleri margaret richard jay jones tim rossiter Jay Jones, Tim Rossiter, Go-Kart Mozart, Zed, Ryan, Subodoh Kafal, and Waki Mahmudson. Fantastic stuff. Yes. One and all.

Repeat each of their names, Matt. Repeat them all. I can't. I'll have to take some more of that qualia mind-brain supplement to be able to remember those, all the names. Until then, just accept my thank you. Yeah. You're galaxy brain guru, Jay. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.

And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. You know, we could just remake all of these clips with just this conversation. We could.

We could. We could make an infinite number of them from this conversation. Should we? Is there some point we want to update these clips? Probably so. Yeah, it takes some effort, Matt. That's the problem. conversation maybe should we is there some point we want to update these clips probably so but it's it's uh yeah it takes some effort matt that's the problem yeah i could volunteer to do it i could volunteer to do it or maybe someone listening could volunteer to do it lawyer diaper for example you free this weekend lawyer diaper

i mean i could do it but I suspect you'd do it better so get that passive aggressiveness out of here it was good feedback he was very right he called out the things which needed to be called out that's all we let it go he gave us five stars

so that's yeah one of those five stars so that's yeah yeah yeah one of those five stars so that's it we we've reached the end matt this has been mammoth it's probably going to be two episodes combined together and thank you everybody for sticking with us we'll edit things down so whatever you've heard now is just the highlights yeah just imagine imagine how we felt um yeah this has been our longest episode today by far it's uh it'll be like four hours or five hours the other time fuck that yeah it's been a juggernaut strapped to a roller coaster positioned upon a cruise liner it's been bigger than the life yeah on a turtle um yeah so screw you sense makers well we'll we'll see you again sometime maybe we'll talk to david fuller if he

wants to beat us up verbally for for all that we've done. And otherwise, you know, note the disc, accord the gin, get your free gum, do what makes you happy. Yeah, don't take too much care of mine, psychoactors, and don't start talking to machine elves. Forget about their blueprints. If we do, put them in the furnace, leave them be. All right. Bye-bye, everybody.

Adios. Bye. Bye. Bye. bye bye everybody adios bye Thank you.