Modern Wisdom - #055 - Jordan Hall - How Do You Redesign Civilisation?

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Jordan Hall is the Co Founder of Neurohacker Collective, the Co Founder of DivX and a writer. What is the game that our civilisation has been playing for the last era? And where has that brought us to? Today we take a birds' eye view of society and civilisation as a whole as we work out whether we can play a better game than this. Extra Stuff: Follow Jordan on Medium - https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall/ Jordan's Company Neurohacker Collective - https://neurohacker.com A Glitch In The Matrix Documentary - https://youtu.be/zQCTeGKHsVc Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, my guest this week is Jordan Hall. Jordan is the CEO of Neurohacker and also an incredibly clever guy. Anyone who spends most of their time thinking about how they can redesign society as a whole globally to be more effective is definitely someone not to be messed with. He is a ridiculously busy guy and it's taken a lot of work backwards and forwards to schedule him in. So you can imagine my distress when I accidentally called him by the wrong name, which is what his handle is on medium, but not actually his name. So a big old face palm moment for me with officially the worst introduction to a guest

that I've ever done. However, I think I kind of style it out. We'll see if you can notice when it happens. But other than that, we talk about some really cool stuff. Jordan's understanding of how society works at large is literally like no one else that I have ever heard. He was commandeered by the guys at Rebel Wisdom to explain the situation with Jordan Peterson

versus the mainstream media and then the intellectual dark web. So I mean, when he's the meta critic and the analyst for those situations, that gives you an idea of what you're in for. It's a mind-blower, so strap yourself in. Please welcome Jordan Hall. Jordan Green Hall, how are you today? I'm doing well.

Apparently on the other side of the pond I will be Greenhall forever. Your name is Flip Flops between the two, right? Which one are you now? I am Jordan Hall. Jordan Hall. Yeah, Jordan Hall. I was born Jordan Hall. Yep.

I changed my name when I got married to Greenhall. Yep. A man I am now back to Jordan Hall. Yeah, I changed my name when I got married to Green Hall. Yeah. And I am now back to Jordan Hall. Okay, cool. But everyone is now updated. Also, for the viewers who are watching on YouTube, you will notice that I am now in HD. Video Guideen, my video producer, forced me to get a better

webcam before it was a potato sticking out the front of there. One disadvantage is that now I, because it was so pixelated before, I could get away with not doing my hair, I could get away with like, you know, putting, wearing essentially pajamas and no pants or whatever I wanted. Whereas now I have to make a little bit more of an effort, which is good for the guests, I suppose, and also the viewers at home. So, Jordan, what have you been working on recently? So I would like to compliment you on your HDI. Notice that when I was looking at it. It's like, wow, that is very crisp.

That's some sharp imagery right now, yeah? It is. I know. Okay, so let's see. Well, if I'll assume a certain degree of familiarity with what I've been up to, because otherwise the story ends up being pretty long, but the basic premise is, for the past 20 years or so, I've been trying to get a sense of what we might say is sort of the fundamental nature of the game that we've found ourselves playing of the fundamental nature of the game that we found ourselves

playing for some significant period of time that I'll call game A. And initially really grabbing it from a bunch of different threads and just noticing that if you just kept pulling the thread, say for example, the thread of the 2008 financial crisis and then the 2010 echo in Europe, if you take that thread and you just keep following it and just keep asking the question of what's under this, what's deeper, what's deeper, what's deeper. There is a way to find yourself at a very deep level that shows that in fact, as far as I can tell, there has been a particular kind of game that we've been playing together

since the birth of agricultural civilization. There were still essentially playing out that game. And I should mention that there was a game before that that was pre-the birth of agricultural civilization and the sort of the transition between the two was a big part of the early story. And that, from my perspective, it became more and more clear of a time that that particular game, this game, this game of agricultural civilization, its most current form, has a certain trajectory to it.

It has a certain set of, call it, fundamental dynamics that lead to it failing in certain ways, and that it reboots, reforms, tries to keep searching for ways to keep going on its own, but there's a sort of a meta-terminus. There's a game to end all games. The game of Thrones actually comes to an end. And we're sort of there. We're at the end of game A. You know, maybe in the next year,

maybe in the next 20 years, but we're definitely at a point where the methodology where I wish that game is able to reboot and try to reestablish itself is coming to a terminus. And so in that context, what I've been doing most recently is what might we do in that context? How do we find a way to really step outside of the game? Because if we're in the game at all,

we're kind of in the game all the way. It's a very tricky thing. So is there a way to step outside of that game completely and to almost discover, or maybe also in some sense, remember a new game that is simultaneously something that is not going to be an extra-free self-terminating, and is really responsive to the situation that we actually find ourselves in, and is able to be born in the context

of now, while still develop on its own terms into being able to essentially take over from game A in the time that we have. So what, that's it. What briefly characterizes game A? Or is that the question that takes 20 minutes, or 20 hours should I say? If you were to...

Briefly was probably about three hours. We could do that briefly in about three hours, my guess. Understood. But the current state this quam is what you're talking about. I'm moving forward and trying to find something which doesn't have a terminus that ends up with us all being destroyed. Sure. Let me try to see if I can do it briefly.

It's always fun to do things in real time and see what lands because it forces you to actually push your edge and see if anything comes out. A way we go. So one way of thinking about it is trying to figure out how to get human beings to live together relatively peacefully using formal institutional structures. That's a nice way to summarize it. So any variation on that theme, which I would just call using formal institutional structures. That's a nice way to summarize it. So any variation on that theme, which I would just call society. So I'll define society as human beings,

being in relationship with each other, at least meaningfully mediated by formal institutional structures. Yeah, I think based on what I've read of your work, I think that's, you've managed to do it. There you go, that's three hours condensed into 30 seconds. Congratulations, man. And if that makes sense to you, then we're,

okay, cool, we actually did compress something. And are now in a place that's actually very powerful to be able to do that. And if it didn't make sense to you, the suggestion might be, you know, there's a lot behind it, and we can continue to explore that and open it up. I understand.

So you've mentioned that there is a threat of some kind, sounds quite existential, that's at the end of this particular iteration of society that we're rolling through at the moment. Why is that inevitable? through at the moment. Why is that inevitable? Okay, this is fun. Again, trying to compress something that is vast. This one's actually harder to do in a way that actually makes, I think, makes sense. But let me, let me begin, let's see if I can say this well. Let's see if I can say this well.

So you might say that GAMEA is fundamentally characterized as a rivalrous game. It's able to perceive and relate to this other thing that I've called the anti-rival risk, but it's fundamentally a rival risk game which is to say that it's fundamentally win lose. At the end, it is very, very bottom.

It addresses the question of when push comes to shove, when you're pushing me, which of us loses? All right, so it has all kinds of different solutions to how do we avoid killing each other? How do we try to actually cooperate so that things get better? But at its very center, like the fundamental code of game A is we're playing a rivalous game. And I think this is actually relatively salient now. Like many people are feeling the,

oh wait a minute, the other guys are fighting to win. How do I make sure that I, there's no more sort of playing together. How do we make sure the other guys don't win, right? And that, and it, because it is so fundamentally that way, what we notice is that through many different paths, by the way, there's at least three

that we've been able to identify, our best efforts to weave something together that actually holds us together as some larger community in peace, unravel in the fullness of time, which sometimes takes a thousand years, sometimes it takes 50 years, just depends on circumstances. So one example, and you mentioned this in the pre-Ain before we started filming, is I think very salient. People can grasp, feel this very well, which is the circumstance that we found ourselves in right at the tail end of World War II. One of the things that happens in a rivalry scheme, something that's premised on a rivalrous game is that violence ends up being the checksum.

At the end of the day, when push comes to shove, we're pushing a shove, meaning that we're in fact using violence and the one who actually wins is the one who's better at fighting. War has been always the last move in the game. And so the last big war that we had World War II was really bad. Right? Lots of bad things happened and lots of really significant kinds of violence were unleashed in the world. But what we noticed was that the very last move in that game caused everybody

to have to go, whoa, because when a atomic energy wased and used and then ever so slightly evolved. I went from the A bomb to the H bomb I went from the H bomb in just American hands to the H bomb in at least two people's hands It was suddenly entered into the collective consciousness that we were in a very different place that as bad as World War II was, up until the moment of multipolar nuclear power, we couldn't fuck it up too badly. We couldn't kill everybody. Try as we want.

With bullets and bombs, humanity was going to continue to sort of move forward. We could reboot from World War II and say, OK, wow, that sucked. Let's try a better thing. And in fact, it, but by the mid fifties, it was clear that we had now invented a way to kill everybody, or at least to so catastrophically create violence as to make the notion of there being a next after that quite questionable. I believe it was Einstein who said, I don't know how World War III is going to be fought,

but World War IV, when we fought with sticks and stones at the proposition of the depth of that reboot, reboot, is really deep. Okay, great, well that was scary. And for a long time, people were like, wow, this is, all of our history has told us that we're gonna get into fights. So, for a whole generation, even two generations,

my generation, the sense was, nuclear holocaust is inevitable and tomorrow. We had nuclear bomb drills when I was in school, an elementary school, like you would actually get into your desk, put a book over your shoulders and pretend that that would help you survive a nuclear bomb. And that weighed heavily on the zeitgeist, by by the way and a lot of what's going on right now can actually be traced back to the psychological consequences of growing up in that kind of

environment, particularly for the boomer. The hangover. Very long hangover from that. The long and deep hangover. So okay, that's that. But what we discovered when the wall came down was that in the context of nuclear war, while catastrophic and fragile, it did actually the end of the day only require that two men, two specific men in this case, Reagan and Gorbachev, not push a button, which is, okay, if either of them pushed the

button, we all die. But as long as both of them Simply manage not to push the button we're okay, and we manage to pull that off It's such when you talk about it like that It makes that well obviously the line is very very fine But you were aware just how fine it is when it's you're your two buttons button presses away The one button press the way we get on one side, yeah, you totally right. If either one pushes the button, the game's over. But we managed not to do that.

So, okay, neat. Now, we can trace that and notice that it's not just two now. Now, nuclear proliferation is right at the edge. Like we know, for example, that say Israel and South Africa are nuclear powers. There's no question. Along with the UK and France, Germany, Pakistan, India. But when I spent time, for example, with people who are the experts in nuclear proliferation, and they're sending a message saying, we're not going to be able to hold back the dam forever, that we are going to be experiencing

nuclear events over the next couple of decades, because as our technical prowess continues to advance, the distance between being nuclear and being non-nuclear gets smaller and smaller. And particularly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the proliferation of both nuclear capacity and physical material out into places like Uzbekistan, the capacity to hold back that wall became less and less. Okay, so that's challenging, but then what happens is that you you abstract, you go up a level and say okay, the challenge isn't really nuclear war, the challenge is the ability to deploy destructive power in a fashion that is fundamentally catastrophic to human civilization at all. Okay? Well, nuclear power is a first example of that capacity, but as our technical capability

increases, both by the way, in terms of our capacity to destroy and in terms of the fragility of the civilization upon which we depend, right? So now, for example, as we begin to make smart grids, as our electrical power system is dependent on computational capacity. And as our fundamental infrastructures, say our water systems are dependent upon electrical capacity, as we've moved from men going out and turning gears to robots actuating and robots actuating connected to computers. Cyberwar moves from a very silly thing that a bunch of scriptkitties might do to make your email send you funny messages to killing everyone. And that's it is continuing to be the case that we are building levels of fragility into the fabric of our civilized-sadational construct, because we need to, because we need to have

continuing use of the power that it gives us, but it also makes us more and more vulnerable, think back to the financial crisis. As we became more and more dependent on increasingly complicated instruments of finance. It generated, at least for a while, a feeling of economic expansion, but at the cost of fragility. So, on the one hand, our continuing exploration of technical sophistication and utilization of that builds a level of increased wealth and experience of quality of life, but at the cost of fragility.

And on the other hand, we keep finding really cool ways to kill everybody, like St. CRISPR. It used to be that only really the Soviet Union and the United States had the capacity to engineer meaningfully significant new biological organisms that could do danger. With the invention of CRISPR, like a single movement from one place to another, just like nuclear weapons, from pre-atomic to post-atomic, the bar has been dropped tremendously, and there's every reason to believe that we're going to kind of follow a Moore's law of destructive potential, where more and more capacity will become more and more distributed.

Now, eventually, your blender in your kitchen will be able to blow up the world. Or, you know, 10 adequately motivated smart high school kids. Yeah, maybe. Like that's a, and it's funny. Like you think really? Yeah. Like 10 adequately motivated smart high school kids right now could meaningfully disrupt the entire global financial industry right now, no question right for sure.

And in some sense already have like the hacking of Sony for example, and the hacking of experience were probably in that range, like they probably were not CIA. They may have been, but they probably weren't. They probably were just meaningfully intelligent and not... Yeah, and bored, exactly. And maybe a little bit like angst ridden.

Like, angst ridden teenagers can kill us all. Should send a chill then everyone's spine. And then what happens is, right, so now it's the last piece. Now connect the dots. So I've got a game, which at the end of the day, is fundamentally rivalrous. And in many ways, every time we've experienced a long piece, into the day is fundamentally rivalrous. And in many ways, every time we've experienced a long piece, like the ones from World War II or now,

it's largely been because, like decisive strategic advantage in military, the capacity to deploy violence, has been held by one or maybe two players. And so the stability of bipolar super power to the Soviet Union, United States, played a big role. That because everyone else was vastly inferior

to the United States and the Soviet Union, the ability to deploy violence, it really did mean that kind of two grownups could kind of keep things breathable to the peaceful and a global basis. Or we had the long piece of the British Empire, and et cetera, et cetera. But when we find ourselves in a multipolar circumstance,

which is in fact, we're clearly entering into, and even tri-polar, just the client of the American hegemony and the opening up of say the Chinese trying to establish themselves. You end up in a situation where the game-theoretic choice making of players around escalating capacity to deploy or protect from violence leads to an escalation in technical capability. Pretty straightforward, right? I mean, if this is the missile gap, the missile gap story continues to be true. it's easy to say well we need to spend a trillion dollars in american defense because the chinese are spending a

trillion dollars in defense and they're going to obsolete our aircraft carriers in two years so we have to have a response so we have to innovate a new way but of course they then look at that and say well they have to innovate a new way and so we fight we force each other to go into an innovation conflict which means that we must continue to push the curve on the capacity to innovate new and sophisticated ways to kill everybody. It's dick measuring on the grandest and most descriptive scale possible.

Right, and if you include the loopback of actually being able to, what are those things called? Penis enlargement? If penis enlargement. If penis enlargement really worked, imagine what the consequences would actually be. This is exactly the problem. It's exactly that. There's no...

I honestly think that if penis enlargement was more decentralized, that we may have greater problems than someone pushing the button. It would just be catastrophe everywhere. It would be catastrophe. It's funny, we can actually explore many of the things that are happening at the cultural level is actually that. It is posturing and dick measuring, isn't it? You tell me, right? Jordan, I think you've managed to, in the space of just under 20 minutes there,

you've managed to give a great synopsis. So we are at... There's actually deeper principles. There's more fundamental stuff, but this is a good, like, it gives you a sense. You're at least there. You can handle, you're holding one piece of the story that's like, okay, that's for sure there. There's like two or three deeper principles, but we don't need to go there.

This scene's being set. So where do we go from here? Or where do we go from there, from that point of the story moving forward? What's, and also, I'm sure you'll get into it, what can be? Right, well that's where we go. So like the first step is to recognize you have a problem. You know, hi, my name is Jordan, I play GAME. We need to get there.

We need to get there rapidly and collectively. And let's take for example what happened in 2016, in America, in the States. You guys had it a few, about a year earlier, right? We keep being handed wonderful opportunities to recognize that we have a problem. And we keep finding increasingly sophisticated ways to deny that we have a problem. We need to notice we have a problem. We need to notice we have a problem, and we need to take the time to really perceive that. And to really take it as our problem. Like not their problem, not some pick your poison, and point the finger and create the

appropriate disparagement that fits your particular perspective on these things. Nope, nope, it's in fact my problem. I'm going to take full responsibility for where we are, which means by the way, understanding create the appropriate disparagement that fits your particular perspective on these things. Nope. Nope. It's in fact my problem. I'm going to take full responsibility for where we are, which means by the way, understanding what it means to take responsibility. I can't be an activist because activism is false responsibility. It's expecting that you can do stuff you can't actually do. What can you take responsibility for?

Well, the first thing you can take responsibility for is participating at all in the kind of mind, what I call a sense maker, the kind of sense maker that is GameA. The GameA sense maker is a kind. It's not the only one that exists in potential. There are other examples. But it's the generator function. If you always find yourself trying to figure out how to solve problems from the GAMEA tool kit using the GAMEA sense maker, then all you're doing is playing GAMEA. Now that turns out to be daunting. And for a lot of people, the sort of the story stops there.

Although, to be perfectly frank, for the vast majority of people, it actually wouldn't be that hard to shift, but because of the way the human beings relate to each other, it ends up being, how do I say this right? Most people look to other people to figure out what the right way to respond to the world is. We're a mimetic creature, right?

We're a mimetic creature, right? So it's the sort, the kind of people who, for whatever, remember that, remember see that big, great photograph of like a Nuremberg style rally and there's like a hundred thousand Nazis like saluting and one dude standing there folding his arms. I'm not seeing it now. Oh it's great you should get it and like you put it up. Yep. Because the question the point is if you had 10 people folding their arms the whole rally follows apart. Because at the end day people are like signal like feeling out into their environment Okay, what is the right way to respond to what's happening?

And if they're just getting signals that are all pointing in the same direction, they're like, okay, I guess that's what it is But there are some people who for whatever reason because of their life experience because of their genotype because of secure circumstance are in a position to not respond in the self-reinforcing feedback loop of their social milieu. If there's enough of them that are signaling something different and they're signaling that something different with some coherence, meaning that it's kind of showing up as the same kind of signal, then you begin to get a shift. And it gives everybody else an

orientation towards what right action might feel like and might look like. So that's how you begin to make the move from game A to game B. Sorry to interject there. It sounds an awful lot like the manifestation of game A is just an extrapolation of the way that we naturally are. We're tribal creatures. This rivalrous game would have been played out surely in nomadic tribes. A long time ago, you're in this valley, you see someone from another valley. Therefore, there is some conflict between the two of you. It is an extrapolation of that actuated by the invention of formalized structure. Right. So there was a long time where we interacted with each other what you might call the tribal level that is actually not gay-may. It's something pre- and there may be many, many flavors about it.

It's hard for me to know. Deep anthropologists probably have insight into that. But once you add actuation by formal structure, the invention of society, the invention of law and money, and the ability to use learning to invent social abstractions that can actuate human collective intelligence. Groups of human who can coordinate in ways that make them more effective in the world, then you're playing game A. I understand.

My concern wanting to move towards something which is a more long-term strategy was that GAME was simply our genetic code, our tribal nature, manifesting itself, and that moving from that to anything, which isn't that, would be such a monumental task that it would require us to go through a new evolution. Yep, yeah. Fortunately, this evolution actually happened about 150,000 to 1.5 million years ago. Okay. This is really good news, because if that hadn't happened, I agree with you that the likelihood that we'd be able to sort of

undergo an evolution of that magnitude in real time with just hitting the fan is essentially zero. So this is what I mean when I say that. Human beings are not the same as other primates, meaningfully, like significantly, something happened. And we're obviously witnessing the consequences of that, but we can actually identify it now and dial it back in. So the story kind of goes like this. I'll try to keep it compact because we don't have infinite time. If you take a look at other primates, close primates, they say orangutans, guerrillas,

chimpanzees, etc. You notice, and humans, and in fact, in this case, all social mammals, you notice that they all have access to a particular kind of hierarchical structure, particularly among males. We can call it dominance hierarchy. This phrase has gotten a lot of traction over the past year because of the other Jordan. So that's commonplace, and we have that. So you might say our natural need to compete with each other for a certain kind of scarcity and to organize ourselves into effective competing bands

is real. That's a real part of our nature. We human beings also have, and is the thing that actually makes us human and not other kinds of primates, a different way of doing things. It's called a prestige hierarchy, which is odd because it's not really a hierarchy, but it's called a prestige dynamic. So we've got the dominance dynamic, which is a hierarchy, and the prestige dynamic. Other primates don't have the prestige dynamic. This is a incomprehensibly fundamental thing, so it's worth sort of actually slowing down. Chimpanzees do not do a very good job of learning from each other. If a particular chimpanzee is discovered something needo, it doesn't spread through the band, is discovered something neato. It doesn't spread through the band or the troop.

This is because dominance hierarchies are premised on mostly physical violence. So a dominant male is able to beat the crap out of other males and therefore is established from self-as-dominant. And he may have a small number of beta buddies who kind of like get the table scraps and support him.

But the big thing there is the way that the males relate to each other is largely a version, meaning you don't make eye contact with a dominant male because that means he's a threat he's going to kick your ass. What's really fucking hard to learn things from other people if you don't make eye contact with them. Yeah, right? Yeah. Human beings found themselves over what appears to have been a pretty darn long exploration and evolutionary space, finding a way to take advantage of the

capacity of learning. So to interject there, some of the listeners that are familiar with previous episodes will know William von Hippel, who wrote the social leap. It was an explanation of how we went from Australopithecus out onto the plains, the development of the throwing arm and all of this sort of stuff, and one of the big discoveries or one of the big claims that he made was that the anticipation of felt needs and unwanted needs was a real, a real key element here. So the fact that chimpanzee created a tool, let's say simple tool for poking at something creating some food, whatever it might be. At the end of the day, it can't anticipate the fact that it needs it again. So it just throws it away. And then the next day, it comes back, it's got to make the tool again.

Yep. However, what the one of the main archaeological finds which identified this movement towards being able to anticipate unfelt needs was that multiple tools were being found in sites where human ancestors had been. So what that meant was that not only had they made them once and then thrown them away, they'd made them and then taken them with them the next day.

So that anticipation and also communication, if you can't communicate, and especially if you can't make eye contact, but even if you've got no sophisticated language at all, you're totally right. How does the collective consciousness grow? It doesn't. It doesn't.

So there's a very large number, like 17, maybe more, distinct innovations. They're kind of, have you ever seen this like a Japanese puzzle that has a bunch of different pieces where you have to be able to actually be able to twist, pull, and slide all at once in a very smooth relationship to get it to move. Is this like just the world's hardest Rubik's cube kind of? And the thing that's interesting is that if you pull, it binds on the

twist. If you slide, it binds on the pull, right? So you have to actually get all this. So evolution of homo sapiens sapiens was kind of like that. Like you had to get, you had to get grandmothers, which is a neat thing. Like grandmothers, the notion that females live long enough that a mother has a daughter and is still alive long enough to actually co-parent her daughter's children.

It's a big deal. You had to get fatherhood, like the notion that males could have a lived selection, a fitness adaptation by virtue of putting their energy into attending to the well-being of their actual biological children. of their actual biological children is a need, is an innovation. You had to have a capacity to have anticipated needs. You had to have a capacity to enter into a relationship long enough that communication had a place to emerge. And then you had to have the development of the physiological and neurological capacity to explore the space of potential communication. Right, so all of these pieces, you have to have all of them, and they kind of slide against each other until it snaps into this new thing.

I totally get it. Totally get it. That's a really lovely analogy to use with the puzzle. I think that makes complete sense. You're wonderful. We're going to pause for one second there, mate. The only thing is it keeps on. I think it might be my internet connection. It's going to flick to another network.

I'll cut this. Let me see if this holds on. Are we back? We're back. We're back. Sweet. So we'll just go from here again, man. Right.

I just got to let you know I have 15 minutes. That's fine. And then maybe a little bit of time, depending on when the next folks show up. Totally fine. That's right from here. So what we find ourselves is that this new thing, which is in fact the difference between Homo sapiens

and all other primates, is this new kind of relationship that we call the prestige relationship. And in the prestige relationship what happens is we discover the power of learning and learning from each other. So learning is learning from each other. There's one kind where I go out in the world and I experience the world directly and I kind of figure stuff out. But when I am able to do what we're doing right now, I can take my entire lifetime of work, which is not easy, and convey to you a pretty sizable chunk of it in an hour.

That's learning, right? That is a significant shift. In fact, and so everything that's happened since then is a consequence of that shift, like the dynamic of that capacity, the ability to convert the irreducible energetic and temporal characteristic of being in the world, like the fact that it takes a whole lifetime to turn a child into an adult, compress that into a shareable moment that upgrades the quality of being in the world much faster than that

is where we are, right? That's the whole point of why humans are different, and every single moment since then is the consequence of that played out in a wide variety of different ways. So that's the good news. That evolution already happened. We, over the past 150,000 years, have just been playing out the consequences of those two dynamics in relationship with each other, right? The dominance hierarchy has been around for a real long time.

So in the beginning, humans would use learning to allow them to achieve rival risk dominance with other animals and plants in their local environment. And of course, very quickly discovered that with a little bit of learning, they could come to the peak predator anywhere, so they could move from the African savannah out into the deserts, into islands, up into the Arctic, and in a space of two or three generations, use learning using this capacity we just described to out-compete all other animals in a rival risk way, right, and become the peak predator. Well, then what happened was we expanded across the entire globe, and expanded in our

population enough that suddenly the thing that we ended up running into is not animals, but other people. Well, now we enter into the next phase of the game. We're still more or less playing out the game of dominance. Still more or less playing out the game. So deeply hardwired into our mammalian structure that is still the primary tone. But we're continually having to get better and better at playing the prestige game in order to win the dominance game. As we saw, the explosion of civilization, the explosion of Sumerians and the Egyptians, and just their expansion against the tribal model is the use of prestige

under constraints that enslave it fundamentally to dominance, to allow dominance to al-Kinpiet dominance, was and is gay-may. Now just describe gay-may in an even more fundamental way. And somewhere around maybe World War Two, I kind of really think of like the moment, the aha moment that must have happened with every single military leader during World War Two, when they discovered that sophisticated soldiers with healthy vigorous and good tactics ended up constantly getting out competed by

sort of a pencil neck geek sitting back in, blusherly park. Like, whoa, shit. The Smordy pants are now actually the decisive factor. You know, it doesn't matter how many men I throw into the field and how well trained they are, one nuke takes them out. First of all, do you have a man with a button? Well, as long as you have a man who knows how to make a better button.

My button's bigger than your button. Then you entered into the game and this is something I think the Einstein has been exploring. I think not exploring aware of this part of the story, but exploring it really deeply is the game from 1950 until now has been well, shoot, how do I make sure that I keep? How do I be in charge of the button while getting other people to build me a better button?

Oh, okay, that's kind of where we are. We're right there. We've got a whole bunch of folks who are still really fundamentally playing some variation of the dominance game, trying to figure out how to continue to stay in charge, to stay dominant over prestige. So, what we might say, that the shift that we're really talking about is actually very simple, we just need to finish the story that happened a million and a half years ago, of fulfill the shift from dominance to prestige, from game A to game B, to a game that is

cremest on the learning of learning. cremest on both the advantages that happens when we're able to actually communicate truth to each other and learn from each other and the kinds of relationships that we need to be in for that to flourish. What are the steps that you think need to be taken to go from game A to game B? I'm aware that's a grand question, but today has been a day of

Trying to get you to condense down some very complicated topics into some into some short short sentences, so Sure, I I think it's actually relatively straightforward. I think that it takes there are One two three there are four steps to this is a four step program We've been able to actually eliminate eight. We're getting more efficient. Amazing. So the first step is to recognize and acknowledge that you have a problem.

And to really let that sink all the way down into your toes, I would call this entering into an extraordinarily deep level of humility. call this entering into an extraordinarily deep level of humility. And let that just dissolve and say, okay, there's a bunch of good phrases like, sadly, I don't have the right language for this particular stage, but it is that extraordinary humility. Surrender is another big one. Allow yourself to sink into a liminal space and to not knowing. Know that the only thing you can really know is you definitely don't know.

And allow that paradox, that Cohen, which is actually just a really nice description of reality to sink in and dissolve and settle. Step one. The transition from step one to step two is choosing to then take full responsibility for how it is that you're actually going to show up in the world. I would call this reclaiming your sovereignty.

I've described sovereignty in other places, so I won't go into too much detail. But sovereignty begins here. It is in effect in you. It is your capacity to take responsibility for the choices that you make in the world. To be able to say, I and I alone and solely responsible for the choices that I make and the first choice that I'm going to make is the choice to get better at making better choices. Ended proceed from there. Okay, and as you continue to expand your what might call sphere of sovereignty, the space

of life in which you can in fact actually be responsible, you can actually make good choices in the context of what's actually happening. Then you enter into the third step. And this I might call something like right relationship, and some portion that is vocation. By the way, I, as it turns out, I actually outlined this fifth portion of that post that I talked about. So it's, this is a nice loop closed naturally. So right relationship is from a perspective,

from a place of sovereignty, how do you begin to show up in relationship in a better way? And of course, generally speaking, these will tend to be first close relationships, but you might think of this as all of all relationships. How do you enter into relationship with nature? How do you enter into relationship with money? How do you enter into relationship with time? Right?

Just all relationships. Can you use sovereignty, this developing and capacity to make better choices? And to sense what a better choice feels like without having to use knowing, without having to use some prefab schema of what the right choices is, has been handed down to you by probably somebody else's story. Do you build a capacity to begin entering into right

relationship? And I should mention by the way that starting at the center, like starting with the people who you love is a really good place to start. This by the way will uncork for anyone who's worried about a feeling of meaning. This is where the feeling of meaning is most fully revealed. And an example in my therapy is a thing that used to be called vocation or a calling. As you begin to build sovereignty, you will also be able to fill in yourself.

That is what you should in fact, your calling. What is your right relationship with doing in the world as opposed to some notion of like I ought to do something or I have a duty to do something or I can tell myself the story that makes sense that I will do something even though I hate it. Nope. What is your calling?

What is your vocation? That's an apiece of that step. And of course, you can notice that there's no really positive loop that as you enter into a more and more right relationship with more and more of the world, this gives you more capacity to build your own sovereignty. You get help from friends who will give you evolutionary feedback that helps you get more insight into where your sovereignty can perhaps improve. The domain of competence has been expanded.

Yes, that's right. And expanded from self to other. Expanded into something like a Wii, like a team, or a family, or friendship. And of course, then as your sovereignty increases, your capacity to enter into relationship increases, that's really nice, right? So then we enter into the final step. And I would call that step the step of coherence. And this is, may or may not be a calling for people

in any meaningful timeframe, but for some people it might be. So this is where you feel called your right relationship is a calling to enter into a relationship of collective sovereignty, where there is a feeling of connection to some other people or person. That's just one. Oftentimes just one, a diet, a partner. To so fully enter into relationship that you actually learn how to enter into

a level of fluidity, a level of honesty, a level of integrity together that a level of honesty, a level of integrity together that has in some sense its own kind of identity. That the synergistic relationship gives rise to a wholeness that is greater than the sum of the parts and is fully nurturing to the continuing sovereignty of the parts. And we find this, I think if we really feel about what a good partnership is like, I'm thinking here of a marriage, but it doesn't have to be. You can think, and in fact, I think it's just proper to think that there are three different entities. There is the two humans and the relationship are all real.

And that as the humans enter into their sovereignty and enter into skillfulness and relationship, the relationship itself begins to have a capacity to nurture the human beings. And this is coherence. And this is very real. And in the space of coherence, we are now playing game B fully. And we can begin to enter into larger and larger relationships of coherence. As that domain begins to expand and expand and include more people. Yep.

But it needs to be taken slowly. Why? Well, our generation is still habitually playing game A. And so it's very easy to fall into those old habits. It's very easy to strategize, for example. It's very easy to run unconscious old code in how we enter into relationship. And my dog is telling me our conversation is at an end and so that's a great. That's a fantastic way to call like This is your two-minute warning guys. We've it's we time and walk time

It's we time and walk time and so So that's the story like that's I think is it it seems very simple in compared to like we're going to engineer a decentralized economy on the right, but it is actually that simple and yet not are all easy. I understand Jordan, thank you so much for your time. I feel we could have gone on for an awful lot longer, but as everyone knows, the sovereignty of the dog and also the wee time of the dog is very important. So we need to, we need to, we need to let it go and have its weas and its poos. And can you tell the listeners where they can find you online, please? Well, up until this last post, the two places to find me were on my medium channel.

One's called Deep Code Code that it was called the Volving Culture, or sorry, Emergent Culture, and on my YouTube channel. But I'm not sure that I'm going to continue writing or creating videos. So I suppose that I imagine that I will probably put a breadcrumb of where I'll be next in those locations, but I suspect there will

fact be a new place in the next year or so. That's exciting. That sounds super, super exciting. I will be following the breadcrums, as I'm sure a lot of listeners will be with great interest. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on. My absolute pleasure. Thank you.