TRIGGERnometry - "Politics is an Addiction" - Jordan Hall

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Jordan Hall is a futurist, culture hacker and co-founder of Civium Project. Check out Jordan's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/JordanGreenhall/featured Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Now, as you know, we spend a lot of time talking about the culture war. And today we have someone who can actually take us a level above that and look at some of the bigger processes that are happening under all of that. Jordan Hall, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks. I'm interested to find out with the conversation unfolds. Well, we will. We will find out. But listen, I was saying to you before we started, we researched. interviewed David Fuller from Rebel Wisdom. That's how we came across your stuff.

And I just thought you have such a much broader conceptual frame to discuss many of the things that are happening in society, things that we've talked about on the show, whether that's the culture war, whether that's the changes that are happening in the media landscape, the politics of the last four years, which are all things that you've talked about. As I say, from a much broader perspective,

you've talked about how the changes that have occurred in the last, you know, century, let's say, in terms of technological progress, in terms of the explosion and the population, in terms of the breakdown of what you call the Blue Church, in particular the sort of down from authority communication to a group of people, in terms of mass communication, all that sort of stuff. So the question I want to start by asking you is, what the hell is going on in the world and why is it happening? Oh, okay. Well, there's, let me see, maybe do this in multiple different levels. So the first point, lots of things. That's against maybe the first insight is that if you try to reduce it down to any small number of things, you're definitely doing it a disservice, likely confusing yourself or potentially lying to other people. So lots of things are going on to the world. And they're happening in different levels. Like some things are happening at, I don't know how we say it, at a scale, a spatial scale and a temporal level. choral scale that we might call

now, like in the year. There are things that are happening that were happening in terms of how people make choices, how institutions execute cycles like that. Just think about some sort of phenomenon like, you know that really cool musical device where you can record and loop? Yeah. And then you can loop, you know, play music with yourself. I've got one loop that's going on, I don't know, maybe a year loop.

And so it has this time sequence in terms of how it, does what it does. And then I've got other loops that are moving at different temporal loops or different spatial loops and they have different propagations through the environment they're in. So, for example, one thing that's going on is homo sapiens sapiens is not yet ever really fully dealt with the fact that we're a technological species. That's been going on a long time. And that has profound implications that continue to ramify and cascade to the entire sociocultural field. And we're kind of dealing with these giant ripple effects that have been bouncing off the edges of our world for a long time, and that's coming home to roost in big ways. And it has continuously

done so over a long period of time. At a lower level of sort of scale has to do with the fact that we happen to be right at the cutting edge of one of the major waves in that bigger story. There's many different names of it. And by the way, that wave isn't one wave. It's like a dozen or 50 waves that all happen to be linking up together. So it becomes a much bigger phenomenon. Another piece of it is that the implications of that kind of a change, we tend, and particularly we modern post-enlightenment scientific physicalist rationalists, tend to focus on change happening outside as a technical, economic, physical material. Like climate change is salient. We get it. Those are changes that happen out there.

But of course, the same quantity, magnitude, and quality, kind of. of changes are also going on in our in our interior. We are produced by the environment as much as we produce the environment. But because we're not simultaneously not particularly prepared to be aware of and respond to those changes and because those changes are actually of the same level of magnitude as the ones that are going on in the exterior, that's another big upwelling that's causing all kinds of confusion and disruption. So we've got multiple different stories, multiple different waves, moving in different paces and

and in complexly interacting with each other. And so it creates a highly chaotic environment. And in that context, I guess maybe the last piece, because it refers to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, for the most part, to the degree to which we are endeavoring even consciously, like actually intentionally endeavoring to respond to the problem, the methods by which we go about making sense of what's happening, and making choices about how to respond

are themselves part of the problem. The mental image I have is like if you've got a, you're driving a car and something goes wrong with the steering column so there's a lag. So when you turn left, it actually takes longer than you're used to. And this car starts wagging out of control,

but in order to get the car to go straight, you keep turning even more abruptly. You're actually adding to the problem. That's another piece of the story. So obviously I just, through our big chunk out there, but there you go. That sounds familiar. By the way, just a reminder, we're two comedians,

so don't get too clever on us. But in terms of the responses to what's happening, we'll get to that, perhaps. Can we just get to the what's happening? What is this lag in the turning that's happening? Particularly, you know, the issue that I found very interesting is your description of how the media landscape has changed as a result of the emergence of the internet

and other types of technology. Can you just break that down for us and our viewers and listeners? Sure, sure. And then let me maybe propose to also talk about the institutional framework. Let's do both of those. Yeah, please.

And do them at the same time. Hmm. Okay, so we have a... Hmm, what's right? We're putting it. We have a way of doing things, individually, but in this case, in particular at a level of how our social technologies come together.

Actually, I'm going to put it this way. I'm going to walk us up. I'm going to create a framework and then use that framework. So when television first came into the showed up, television happens, the people who are creating television programming don't really know what they're dealing with, obviously, right? It's new. And so they do their best to do. do do TV, which for the most part means they point a camera at what effectively is a form of

Broadway play. They take something they know and understand and they add this new ingredient to it. Thus begins, though, an actual experiment, an actual learning of the nature of the underlying new thing that has a bunch of different characteristics. For example, unlike a Broadway play in television, you can have two cameras and you can cut back and forth and force the viewer to actually shift that perspective, right? You actually can control the territory the viewer's attention is focused on in a way in a play you cannot. And of course, you can do that not just in terms of visual perspective. You can do it in terms of time. I can do, I can cut back and forth in time very easily, et cetera, et cetera. There's all kinds of things that happen as we begin to explore the actual

characteristics of the novel milieu of television. By the way, the same thing is actually happening on the part of the audience. The audience is watching early, early TV hasn't yet understood what it is they're watching. So they're experiencing something. But as the audience becomes more and more sophisticated, they begin to build a storehouse of, say, for example, what TV tropes are. And it becomes a new vocabulary and new vernacular. So in a certain sense, context begins to show up. Like you hear the chords of music that is playing in the background in your body. It's like, oh, now I'm supposed to feel that it's dramatic, for example. And so it's actually a really interesting co-developmental process of understanding what the

potentials of the medium are and the relationship between creative expression and perception in that context that builds more and more capacity to actually move into this new place. Okay. So that's a framework. So we enter into a new media landscape naively and usually by treating as if it's the old one. Then we've learned how to build competencies and capacities as both perceiver and receiver in that new media landscape. And then we're sort of operating in that fashion.

Then a new one comes along. Okay. So this is true also in a broader context. If I'm looking at, for example, how governance works, one of the challenges of governance in the 20th century, actually for a very long period of time, but in the 20th century in particular, is that you're dealing with very large populations, more or less, generally over large geographic regions, oftentimes with meaningful diversity and heterogeneity of cultural assumptions. And yet, we need to find some way to get them all to more or less agree on a relatively narrow set of choices. And so we have two things going on simultaneously that tend, by the way, to reinforce each other. As television, for example, emerged in the mid-century, governance began to learn how it can use television to do

the thing that it needs to do, which is ultimately to create a what's called a cybernetic control structure. I don't mean that necessarily as a negative. The previous example of a steering wheel is a form of cybernetic control structure. It's how I can use my intelligence and agency to control, to steer some kind of underlying system. So even the concepts of, by the way, cybernetics happen to emerge in that time frame. So it's a little bit of self-referentiality there. And so, By the time you get to the 90s, at least in the United States, that I don't actually know what the specifics are in your place, we get to a place where governance had become quite TV native, meaning both the tools and techniques, the approaches, the understandings, the habits, the unconscious instincts, and also the possibilities and capacities of what actually could be effectively managed and steered through this particular modality, and an audience that had been prepared, For example, I remember very clearly, as an 8 or 10 year old, my dad would turn on the nightly news every night. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world.

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Local news. Why? It was his civic duty. He had been trained to watch the local news every night as part of a civic duty, which is to say he plugged into the cybernetic control structure mediated through television, and it was important and useful. He was connected to that system. and then the system had learned how to do things like, how do you create the right kind of messages? How do you shape the over the overton window is? Yeah. How do you shape the overton window so that it's broad enough

that people feel like they're getting a real consideration of what's happening, but also narrow enough that actually causing choices to happen within the bandwidth that we have as choice makers is also feasible, like that kind of stuff. But of course, as we enter into the 90s, we also enter into the emergence of an entirely new media landscape. this new digital media, this interactive, digital, highly decentralized or distributed landscape comes online, which has completely different characteristics than broadcast television.

Instead of being, for example, in America, three channels, it is in fact an infinite number of channels. And instead of having the characteristic of temporal flow with no memory, like, you know, right, right when I'm watching the nightly news up until the invention of like TiVo, it was just gone, right? The second, it, the moment had passed, that moment was in the past. And so memory was very much not part of the story. What was a part of the story was what gets my attention now and what leaves a felt sense of making good choices. Okay, it feels like we're doing okay. That's it. That's the only memory I've got. We can kind of vaguely refer to things that happened to the past, but hard to know, exactly. Obviously, in the digital,

environment, the internet never forgets. To the degree to which you guys choose to broadcast this video, it will then be a durable trace that 10,000 years from now, assuming somebody has the capacity to sort of do digital technology, it'll still be there. It can be rewound and

looked at second by second. And of course, highly decentralized, meaning that you guys didn't have to ask anybody's meaningful permission to begin the process of actually creating a new form of communications channel. And neither at I. I can go on YouTube. Now, of course, the evolution of the control structures in the context of the new media channel is already happening

apace. So the development and discovery of different techniques of trying to control. How do you engage in the kinds of shaping of conversation that are valid and meaningful and effective in this new milieu is happening, right? It's accelerating, actually. But from the period of 2000 and so, and particularly 2008, 2009, 2010, and this just has to do with relative rates of penetration of the amount of tension that was applied to the different media and the ages of different generations whose psychologists and underlying habits

have been developed in different environments began to create a sort of a mixture of underlying forces. It's kind of like when a river flows into the ocean. You've got kind of cool freshwater mixing with whatever the temperature of the ocean happens to be, let's go with warm salt water. It creates a very turbulent environment. in the middle. And that's a big, been a big piece of what's actually happening is that, which is a deeper thing. Now, we see lots of stuff happening at a more superficial level,

which doesn't mean, by the way, that it's not relevant. It just means that it's happening at a different level of causation and scale. But in many cases, a deeper cause is what I was just describing. We can, by the way, there's an arbitrary, we could go weeks on just that and pulling pieces of that out if we'd like. And what is the effect of this on our society, this new media, this new way of communicating, the fact that anybody can have access to an audience, anybody can have access to disseminate the information that they believe is valuable and frame it in their own way? Well, okay, there's two different categories of response to that. One has to do with an exploration of the underlying characteristics of the medium, which I'd actually like to get to

later in a moment. And the other has to do with the specifics of what I was just describing, which is to have to do with the change. So the change has one impact on our society, the change in and of itself. The second has to do with the shift, the journey to this new location. So the change shows up as things like surprise, confusion, anxiety, conflict in ways that don't necessarily make sense, because part of what's happening is pre-existing categories are finding themselves no longer applicable to the new environment. You can imagine that I've got a company, like the New York Times. The New York Times has a sense of being the New York Times. so it has almost a verticality to it.

It's like a box. There's a New York Times. There's a culture of people who are part of it. But the emergent wholeness of the New York Times has latent crosscuts of various kinds of memetic tribes that are in it. And because this new environment has a different pull, almost like a shearing strength, there's tension and pulling on the wholeness of the interior

of the New York Times, which is in many ways confusing, particularly to older people. There's a big generation gap. The more TV your mind is, for example, again, there's lots and lots of things going on, but the more TV your mind is, the more odd and weird and strange it is

that these kinds of things that are coming up from this new digital decentralized capacity that show up in the way they show up, things like pace and style that are very not. of the same sort. So disruption, surprising disruption, generalized anxiety because of the presence of simple novelty and the breakdown of old forms and habits that seem to make sense, but no obvious way of

understanding or being able to feel comfortable with what's happening. Probably a little bit like the way the animals feel before an earthquake. Like something big and momentous is happening, but I don't know what the hell it is. And so it's like almost in the body, a basic felt sense of flee or undifferentiated energy that in some sense almost randomly shows itself up. People are scrambling to find out what's a safe and or good place to be in a context where they really don't know what's happening. Okay. Now, the other side of the equation, the other piece, which has to do with the underlying nature of the new milieu, well, maybe two points. One point is we don't know.

Part of what's happening is we actually are entering into a new period of deep uncertainty and a new period of exploration and journeying and learning how to become capable of that. Like unlearning the habits of being cogs in a well-functioning machine and relearning the capacity of being explorers or journeyers or humans in a new niche. And that's actually depending on the magnitude of change, is almost like a verticality, how far down that unlearning and relearning do we have to go. But if we look at the characteristics of this new environment, there are a few, almost like, you know, islands that pop out of the ocean, high points that you can kind of point at right now from where we are. And frankly, they look a lot like what's going on in China, the social credit score.

And by the way, a French philosopher named Jude de Lois pointed this out in the mid-90s. He called it the, the, the societies of control. And this has to do with the fact that in a, in a digital environment, the ability to perceive and signal and then modulate signal at a very, very fine grain and at a very, very rapid and bespoke pace. So, for example, in the context of broadcast television, the message had to be a message that was sort of generically targeted to a large demographic. Even the context, concept of demographics was invented by marketers to make sense of how to use TV effectively. In the context of digital, what we're discovering is that, in fact, the technology enables and the appropriate mode is actually micro-targeting on the interior of your own, your individual

human psychology. So I don't want to create a message targeting, say, the three of us. I don't even want to create a message targeting you, I want to create these tiny, tiny nudges, clusters of them that are all qualitatively different that actually impact your psychological interior inside your own mechanism of maintaining the integrity of your own psychology. So as to nudge you in a fashion that you don't even perceive as happening, but as you, like as a distinct human being, as a distinct agent in the environment. So microcontrol and fluid modulation. Like, you. Like, you. instead of having it happen as a, like a Apple is an example of like actually a pretty strong TV style or broadcast style, where this buildup that's to spend a lot of time planning and have one big, significant, focused, really high quality event that hits hard,

that kind of a move. In the digital environment, as you move further and further and further down, you actually get as something that's much more like short, fluid iterations that change rapidly. and it's more like fluid dynamics if you've ever seen that, what that looks like. Like if you watch the water flow into a tidal, tide pool where there's lots of rocks

and you can see the complexity of the tide as it flows in and out. It's like that. It's much more like that. So fluid modulation. And then think about what happens at the level of the physical environment. And this is, again, think China,

where let me just do the virtual, first and I can do the concrete second. When I show up to Amazon.com, I guess you show up to Amazon.com, what I see is not what you see. We see something that has a lot of aesthetic similarity because Amazon wants to maintain the continuity of its brand. But by definition, it's bespoke. I see something that is perfectly optimized to the degree to which Amazon has information and competence to cause me to buy shit. And it's different than the kind of stuff that will cause you to buy shit.

Now, just imagine what happens in our physical environment has that same set of characteristics, where the pub, you literally just can't even go into the pub because that pub is not part of your modulated flow stream. You get into the self-driving electric replacement for the cab, and there's only a certain number of places that you can go. And there's other places that if you go there, they are vastly cheaper for you to get into, for example. Let's just use economics. There's so many different variations in the theme, because, In this new environment, the number of different control mechanisms like control currencies goes way up. So let me just come and give you an example.

You go to a pub number one, and one thing that happens is it's three times as expensive per drink. And the second thing that happens is your ability to show up as a good possible date in the new version of Tinder goes down. all right so if you go to this pub then it costs you more to drink beer and you're going to have less sexual success right if you go to sounds like London Jordan well with pub number two you go into that pub and it's cheaper and your tinder score goes up right well you're almost everybody is just going to flow to pub number two well guess what we now have very bespoke and that's just two currencies by the way too powerful ones money and sex but there's many many more right and the is that in this novel digital environment, the capacity for that exists, how exactly it shows up,

who knows? And by the way, it'll probably show up differentially depending on exactly how the design, what ends up designing or controlling the design of that control structure. The Chinese version will look very different than, say, for example, the EU version, although not as far as I can tell radically different. So that's an example, just to kind of get a gesture in the direction of the kinds of things to be looking out for in terms of principles. fluidity, micro, very bespoke, and maybe some concrete examples of how it shows up in Amazon and how it might show up in the self-driving pub of the future.

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so you can get a really accurate and precise. extreme. Excellent. To take advantage of this incredible offer, go to manscaped.com and you'll get 20% off with free shipping. Just use our code, which is of course, trigger. That's 20% off with free shipping at manscaped.com and use our code trigger. Your where was, we'll thank you. Excellent. Jordan, so basically, at the moment, we all have our own virtual reality and I'm fully aware of this. Like, I know that when I am writing a joke, let's say, as a comedian or making a tweet that I want to make a certain point, if I'm referencing something, there's quite a large portion of other people who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, because they've got their own Twitter, right?

And what you're talking about is on a physical level that will start to take shape to the point where eventually we're all going to have our own reality in every way. Well, meaning. Now, I mean, this may be my inherent pessimism coming out here, and I'm the optimistic one of the two of us. We both chose to be comedians, so this implies you're both pessimistic. Yeah. So that doesn't sound like a recipe for anything good to me. Well, I was say, if you wear shit-colored glasses, the things look like shit. So yes, what I would say is that it has three consequences.

One consequence is that it will and oftentimes in a very surprising way cut existing Gordian knots surprisingly easily. So problems that are wicked problems now are actually wicked because our underlying capacity to solve problems can't address them. But this new mode will have different ways

of addressing problems and quite often will actually end up just evaporating problems that right now feel very intractable. So for example, maybe climate change turns out to be trivially solved in this new environment. How so? Well, if I can imagine something like, if I have a currency structure, do you want me to go down there?

I can do it if you'd like. If you can do it in a brief and understandable way, that would be great. Well, I can't, I'll just say for understandable, particularly when endeavoring to do it briefly. It's something like, imagine if we had the capacity, and in fact, we kind of do. Imagine we had the capacity to identify every single externality that our current supply chains threw into the environment.

That makes sense, yeah. Imagine if we tracked it down to the granular level at every single transformation across the supply chain. And then imagine if we use that information to drive the control structure that was nudging people's behavior at a very fine-grained level. For example, I'll just use a slightly, different when than climate change. This just go with litter.

I don't know if you guys, do people smoke in England? We, I mean, some people do. Some people do. It's very retro, Jordan. Well, back when I was younger, people smoked a lot. And one of the things I noticed as a kid is you'd go to the park and sit at a park bench and there were cigarette butts everywhere. Yeah. Well, imagine if every single cigarette comes with an RFID tag attached to it. And every single purchase of cigarettes, it actually immediately identifies the individual human being who, last owned it. So that when you threw the cigarette butt away, it shows up on a database as your cigarette butt that's on the ground and negatively impacts your social currency score to the point where nobody litters anymore. For example, right? Now, just generalize that across all possible externalities. We could sort of extinguish pollution to the degree to which we have the competence to

actually track it effectively. So that would be an example. Okay. That makes sense. So that's the first type of, so it will be good for that. And also, by the way, you know, when I said it all be negative. Obviously, the ability to fulfill human desires, wishes, needs, etc. will be multiplied manyfold because you're getting a super tailored service. It's not all bad, agreed. This is the point. It opens up new opportunities and creates new problems. That's it. Right. But the reason that I was saying, there's nothing good, I didn't mean that there's nothing good. What I meant was if you are in an environment where everybody lives increasingly in their own reality, the lack of understanding of other people and the potential for tribalism that comes

out of that, to me, is quite scary. Yeah. If you sort of, I don't mean by any means to poo-poo the challenges, quite, quite the opposite. Maybe even a better way of putting it is every time we enter into a new, enter a new technology into our environment, we unlock both opportunities and risks. the more powerful the technology, the more powerful the opportunities and the more powerful the risks.

This particular set of technologies is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we've ever unlocked before and therefore the risks are several orders of magnitude larger. And in this case, there are several orders of magnitude larger because actually of the micro nature. The nuclear bomb back in the mid-century was big, dangerous, powerful, but very macro.

And it was only, for most of the time, only two countries meaningfully had the ability to use it at all. And still, I think it's something like six or seven. And highly high constraint, one event, nuclear bomb. And that's a concentrated, very salient risk. It's kind of easy to focus your attention on it. This new environment has to do with the fact that we're doing hundreds of quadrillions of things all happening in very, very narrow basis and small deviations in our design characteristics of

say the underlying machine learning that drives most of this may lead to huge shifts in human psychology and behavior. And we don't even vaguely have the capacity to predict any of that right now. So, for example, that's actually a deeper version of what you just said. But broadly speaking, something like, huh, actually, it's funny. So a radical divergence, or radical heterogeneity of worlds is simultaneously the best possible and the worst possible scenario that I can currently imagine. On the one hand, creative potential exists as the connection between heterogeneous worlds. You and I can actually have meaningful, useful, delightful, creative experiences in relationship

precisely because we inhabit different worlds. And to the degree to which we are inhabiting different worlds, are inhabiting different worlds, ability to communicate, our ability to actually connect and be in a relationship at all, the numbers of mistakes and errors and misunderstandings that we will have also goes way, way up. So it becomes harder and harder to maintain quality relationships. And a large part of what's happening right now is precisely that. We're using a toolkit of relationality, like I say on Twitter, that has an underlying assumption of shared context, when in fact that's not even vaguely true. So we're running this, you know, something that assumes shared context and

projects it on the other. And then what's really happening is the other's actually got a completely different context. By the way, not just deep context, but even moment to moment context, as you say, like I'm reading five Twitter feeds and have a certain context. You're reading five Twitter feeds. The only one that's vaguely the same as the one that we happen to be on right now. And even that is a different context. And of course, you put 128 characters into your tweet, which is a minuscule amount of context to provide to me. And I respond with a hundred twenty-eight characters, which is a minuscule amount of context to respond to you. The application, of course, being either we both have to be quite wise, like quite, quite mature and skillful at understanding the nuance

and subtlety of what happens when two beings from very different worlds with very little context are in communication, or we're going to make lots of mistakes. And Jordan, to me this is, it's a very worrying, conversation because how are you able to mitigate the worst effects of a type of technology if you don't know what the downsides and the dangers of this technology are? Aren't you just simply stumbling blind into a situation which you have no control over? I would actually go more along the lines of, I don't know, snow skiing at a breakneck speed blind through that environment with a complete and completely inebriated, something like that.

The magnitude of the risk is quite high. But part of that is say, okay, well, if that's the metaphor, stop drinking, sober the fuck up, take off the skis and walk down the goddamn mountain. What does that look like? What does that look like in this context? Ah, well, this is interesting. A big part of it actually starts with... Three things.

You know, it's almost like, you can go to AA. You know, first admit you've got a problem. You first actually recognize that this is the case. You know, you have to slow down enough to actually, whoa, oh, shit. I am speeding down a mountain at breakneck speed, totally inebriated. Maybe that's not the best place. To become conscious, to restore yourself to being a conscious agent in the world. That would be the first step.

And of course, most people find themselves careening about it. an unconscious reaction and an increasing addiction to careening about an unconscious reaction. So that's not a small step. The next step is to begin the process of carefully disconnecting yourself from the things in your context to which you are most addicted and beginning to give yourself permission to go as slowly as you need to to be able to actually make effective choices on a moment-to-moment basis. Now this is very challenging if you have anything vaguely like an ethical commitment to the well-being of other people or the world because you will be slowing down and disconnecting

while you're watching everything around you get worse and worse and potentially catastrophically so. And this is a tricky business to be able to choose to say, okay, well, shoot. I can say with some degree of confidence and clarity that the path that we're on is not going to work and that I can't solve the path. I can't get the car out of its skid by increasingly jerking back and forth on the steering wheel. The best thing to do is in fact to take my foot off the break, take my hand, stop steering, and slow down until I notice some new groove, something that shows up where, ah, effective choice just happened. This is that going down. I don't know if you guys are all familiar with something called Theory You.

No. I'm not particularly familiar with it, but it's somewhat known. It has to do with this exactly this process in the interior of the psychology. So you could say like meditation, like meditation practice is a practice of going down to the bottom of the you, disentangling your awareness from habituated emotional and cognitive responses until you get to a place where you actually are at long last free, like actually disentangled, though longer beholden to habits, of mind and habits of emotion. From which you can then go back up the other side of you and begin to

from a place of conscious choice and with some degree of some degree of effectiveness move back into the world. One metaphor that I think is actually quite saying is a little bit like from the matrix, the movie. Where first Neo had

to choose to take, I think it's the red pill, right? Yeah, unfortunately. An awfully overcoded metaphor now, but you get it. Which is to say to acknowledge you've got a problem. Then when he discovers that his ass was actually a body that doesn't even know how to walk or basically even move, entirely run in a virtual simulator. His own agency is actually effectively nil. And it gets unplugged from that entire structure. He goes to the bottom of the U, somewhat abruptly. And in his case, he has some help, right? Thank God. And he gets put on the table

and he gets plugged back up and he gets the process of relearning how to do basic things like move his fingers and blink and walk and breathe. Then of course, eventually he gets to the point where he can walk around and eat, and then he gets plugged back in and learns Kung Fu. And so the hope might be something like, that's actually a very powerful metaphor for where we are right now, because the level of lack of agency, the level of helplessness that a person will feel if they choose to unplug themselves from the matrix, which to say unplug themselves from the habits and cognitive structures and institutional frameworks of power and influence that they may or may not actually be in right now in order to be able to achieve a level of clarity

and slowness where they can actually begin to be full agents. Live players, as my friend, Samo Berger puts it, is a lot. It feels very scary. You feel very vulnerable when you make that move. You do feel very vulnerable when you make that move, Jordan. But isn't another part of the problem is that these negative behaviors that a lot of people exhibit, these technologies, social media, they're actually incentivized. You're incentivized to be outrageous. You're incentivized to present, you know, opinions without nuance because that will get maximum engagement. Therefore, realistically, how can you expect people to behave in the manner that you're saying when the reality is, if you behave in a manner which is less socially responsible,

should we say, you're going to get far more reward from it? Well, um, I've heard a story at least that somewhere in the order of 2,000 years ago, a whole crew of Iron Age pagans reached a point where they're capable of having a disposition of commitment to a particular ethos in spite of the fact that the incentive structure was rather pointed. to say that you choose to be a Christian in the early Christian communities would end up with you being tortured to death in public which is substantially more than getting a downvote in Twitter or whatever the dopamine equivalent might be.

Getting ratioed. Getting ratioed. Getting ratioed, right? Or more specifically getting cancelled. If the contemporary equivalent of being fed to the alliance is to be canceled, what I would say is that you're a rather pitiful human if you can't actually stomach that.

And I would point out that up until the relatively recent era, humans have suffered vastly greater magnitudes of pain and duress for vastly lower stakes. So that's more, I'll put the burden back on people to say, hey, you know, take more responsibility because I know you can't.

You can take a lot, lot more. Like the depth of responsibility you're actually capable of is so vastly beyond that which you currently are taking, for effectively everybody, myself, very much included. The two assume that you know what's possible even in just yourself is already a form of, what do you call it? Hmm, self-betrayal, actually.

All right, so step one is you recognize you've got a problem. Step two is you disconnect and slow down. Step three. Step three is you learn how to have kung fu. Step three is you actually begin the process of, in this, and the step three is very interesting because it has two really powerful characteristics that I think are quite attractive. One is you begin to actually adapt to the reality that you're actually living in.

So what happens is you go down to that bottom of the you as you're dropping habits and you're dropping unconscious reactive responses. What you're actually doing is you're beginning to build adaptive responses. You're actually becoming capable of being a well-fitted organism for this emergent ecosystem. So you're actually learning how to thrive in this new environment. You're making the journey from the old environment to the new environment, but you're making it from the point of view of what a human is. A human is a niche valley crossing being. We do niche transition is our primary competence. We can move from being a desert people to being Eskimos in a couple of generations.

And in a contemporary environment, maybe even faster than that. So you actually become, in principle, you are moving to the strongest position in the new environment. So it's actually better if you to do it, even though it has pain in the immediate term. The idea of valley crossing makes sense. I'm assuming we've got to talk about this a few times. So one is you're crossing the adaptive valley and net net, when valley crossing is what's up, that's the best possible choice. So that's the first piece. The second piece of this movement is that this is a little bit of a shift, but we're bringing in other stuff.

We're bringing stuff like my friend John Vervaki's The Meaning Crisis. Sponsored by Forkful. Most meal delivery services promise healthy food, but look closer, and you'll often find cheap industrial seed oils hiding in the ingredients. Forkful does things differently. Forkful delivers chef-prepared meals made with premium ingredients you'd expect at a great restaurant, from center-cut filet mignon to wild-caught lobster mac and cheese, and every meal is 100% seed oil-free.

Instead of canola or soybean oil, forkful chefs, cook with extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, and grass-fed butter, because better fats make better food. Meals arrive fresh, never frozen, with clear nutrition and ingredient transparency, so you always know exactly what you're eating. Restaurant quality meals, real ingredients, no seed oils. Discover Forkful today at Forkful Meals. one of the implications of the environment that we have been in is that it has traded authentic meaning for simulacra of meaning at a very high rate. And also, as that environment that we've been in is breaking down, we're left simultaneously with neither the authentic meaning nor the simulacra of meaning. and now we feel the pain of how deeply foregone we are with less ability to avoid it.

Again, back to the addict model. You're an addict. As long as you are on the junk, your real meaningful life can break down, but you don't quite have to own up to it because the junk can simulate the feeling of winning. But when you get off the junk, you feel simultaneously the loss of the junk

and the acute pain of the destruction of the life that you actually left behind. but as you come up the other side of the you, you are now in recovery. You're now in a process where you can actually begin to reconnect with actual meaningfulness in life as a human. And so as you begin to walk your way up on the other side of the valley, not only do you achieve a higher level of actual competence

in thriving in this new environment, you also can achieve higher levels of actual lived felt meaning in a fashion that is durable and strong. So this is all very much sort of good news on the other side of the journey. So that's what it looks like in step three. But it's slow and frustrating and you'll fall down quite a few times. I completely agree. The question I really want to ask is, do you think that this lack of meaning that we have in our society?

Do you think that's part of the reason why we had a collective meltdown over COVID? Because overnight, everything shut down. All our industries, everything that we did. judge ourselves by, everything that in the Western world gives us meanings. We were all sent back to our rooms metaphorically to think about what we've done, to quote a comedian. And all of a sudden, we realize that our lives don't have as much meaning as we once prescribed to them, hence this huge crisis that we now face. Yeah, that's definitely a big part. But can I actually hit two different go for it? Pluck two strings right there, because the word meaning has a really interesting

double meaning, right? In the sense of means to an end, how to get shit done, and in the sense of like this felt sense that I have the capacity to live my life in a thriving way, right? Both of those. And I would say on the one hand, the

extraordinary extraordinarily uniform and catastrophic bungling of the management of the COVID crisis reveals the degree to which we lack meaning in the sense of competence to respond to our environment.

So one is a, oh, shit, turns out we have, we actually are terrible. Our sociopolitical choice making infrastructure is quite terrible. We didn't know it. It wasn't, we felt it. We knew it, but we didn't have to face up to it until it really hit us in the face. That's one side of it, which has a demoralizing effect. Like, oh, shit, we actually are not in control of our own destiny. We got nothing that can possibly save us.

And in fact, every time we externalize our agency to one of these institutions, we realize with regret that it was a. bad choice. So that's one side of it. And the other side of it is exactly as you say. And we, in fact, have been profoundly addicted to a whole structure of little tiny simulacra that have been trading in for real meaningfulness. And then many of those, all at once, not all of them, got sucked out. And of course, what's interesting is that for the most part, there was a bifurcation event. Almost everybody sought as rapidly as possible to plug into a new set of addictions. In Netflix is a good example.

If you found yourself binge watching Netflix, what that meant was you needed another addiction, right? You just shifted from heroin to cocaine. And maybe the other way around. And that's another sign. So broadly speaking, yes. Jordan, it's interesting. For me, I plugged into my family, my relationship, and also the work we do here. But I was going to ask you about the work we do here because you're sort of making me question quite a bit of everything in the sense that, you know, our show is a political,

and cultural discussion show. We talk about the political events. We interview people about, as I said, the culture war, cultural things like that. And at the same time, I've had the sense for a long time that politics ruins everything, right? Yeah.

And one of the subjects that we've talked about somewhat, neither of us is religious, but neither of us can help but notice the fact that as we've killed God as a society, that's opened up a vacuum. And when you talk about meaning, I'd argue religion gave people that meaning for a period of time. Now it seems to be politics. And now not only is a politics that fills that void for many people, but also because of that,

politics is now becoming a religion. It's becoming religious. People act about their political views as if their articles of faith. And now, does that resonate with you? And what do you make of that? Yeah. So what comes up for me is that what I would say is something like, God, nature, family community and authentic self, something like that are like the five fingers of meaning.

And we have in fact alienated ourselves from all of those and rather substantially. And the one at the very end, authentic self, is the base route from which all the rest has to happen. And so that's where the bottom of the you comes. It's like, okay, shit, I am not my identity, for example. I am not my narratives and my stories. I'm also not my trauma. There's something that is more fundamental that is still, there always. Some might call it soul if you choose to use that language. And when you get back to

that place, from that place, you can begin the process of now entering into renewed relationship of meaningfulness across the other four fingers. Then you said, okay, so then what happens is, ah, this is actually this notion of bad satisfiers. This is actually from the anthropological literature, Max Neif. I'm thirsty. I drink a can of Coke. Terrible I do, but I don't have the right tools. Something in my life has given me the wrong tools. So I keep actually getting in my own way. I actually solve the problem with something that actually makes the problem worse.

So politics is actually solving the problem of religion with something that actually makes the problem worse. At least politics when adopted in this fashion. It's not necessarily intrinsically a religion replacement. It's more of a community replacement. But in any event, it definitely makes the problem worse. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name, registrar provider and web host for you.

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Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to EasyDNS.com forward slash triggered and use our promo code, which is, of course, triggered as well, and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, access of easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Jordan, you were also saying as well, and you were identified, I can't remember. So you said family, what were the four things you identified? God, nature, family, community and self. Isn't the problem that we live in a capitalist society and we can't monetize any of these?

Therefore, we don't deem them to be important. Therefore, we don't focus on them. I would actually say quite the opposite. I would say the problem is that we live in a capital society and we ruthlessly monetize all of these as much as we possibly can. I call it the strip mining of the soul. And so, for example, monetization of religion comes in the form of something like Avengers Endgame,

the mytho poetic layer, which is deeply important for us to actually have the kind of archetypal connections that allow us to govern our behavior over long, time scales and deep events, has become a resource to be stripped-mined by increasingly sort of super-saliant simulations. For example, the bar, the pub, you know, the salient environment of conviviality is a simulacrum of real community, unless it actually happens to be connected to real community. In many places in the UK, it actually is and has been for thousand years.

I'm talking about one in a place that doesn't have that characteristic, right? we replace community with the simulation of community. School, same thing, right? School, in many cases, is a replacement for family and community. So in each of these cases, by necessity, by the way, I wouldn't say that capitalism is the core. Capitalism is a piece of the entire environment. The bigger challenge is actually what I call the technologies of empire,

which has to do with the, do you want to know what the technologies of empire are, and then we can work backwards from there? Yeah. Yeah. So in relationship with literally the indigenous form of humanness, I have to go all the way back to indigenous humaning. And that's a whole capacity. So things like self and family and community and religion are at their most natural all the way back there.

Now, as I start moving through history, specifically into the zone of history, I enter into the era where the technologies of empire begin the process of building a different way of people being together. one of the technologies of empire is narrative. I'm a distinguished narrative from storytelling. Narrative has a characteristic of formality, particularly when it's written narrative, when it's written down, where there's something about the characteristic of the narrative where the narrative has a reality,

it has an authority that is strictly greater than the people who are telling the stories. That's what narrative is. And control over the narrative, things like ideology is a derivative of narrative. and to the degree to which your religion has become an ideology, it is an elision from its more natural and healthy form into an imperial form.

And of course, it's typically used for the purposes of maintaining structures of empire. Now, by the way, I would say democracy is a variation on empire. So it's important to, I'm not being narrowly focusing on, say, like the Roman Empire. I'm talking about a wide variety of structures, almost everything humans have done outside of the context of the indigenous mode.

money accounting the the enumeration and the tokenification like the abstraction of relationality in this new construct instead of actually being in a relationship of actually knowing each other with high degrees of context and providing each other what we need through that medium what money does is it enables us to radically scale by virtue of indifference which means that i can engage in transactions with strangers who i don't know at all and i can use the price function to mediate that i'm not by the way saying that either money or ideal are intrinsically terrible, although they may be, I haven't come to that conclusion, but they have particular characteristics. They have implications. The third is law. The third, again,

is this notion of taking the lived relationships of real people within the context of their actual who they are, the developmental environment, and what's actually going on, and endeavoring to reify that into an abstraction, which can be characterized with a finite set of statements, a legal code. Napoleon, of course, famously tried to enumerate it all the way down, and to the detail, right, a very detailed code. The UK, on the other hand, actually stuck with more of a common law system for the most part, which actually harkens back to an older, deeper form, a more indigenous form. Bureaucracy, the notion of formal institutional structures,

the idea that, for example, Geoffrey, King Joffrey, has the power and deference of a king, even though literally everybody knows that he is the most disgusting human. because we've actually decided to put our responsibility and agency into an abstract formal structure as opposed to into the real human relationships, right? No indigenous culture would ever do that. That's absurd beyond comprehension. It's only when we move into this new mode, into this mode of empire, where that becomes possible because we're in fact dependent upon it.

Once you've become addicted to empire, oh, shit, I can't not give Joffrey the kingdom because the implication of that is the formal implication of the destruction of the entire social operating. system that enables this widespread set of kingdoms to operate at all, right? Pulling even a little bit on that thread could pull away the whole sweater and that, my friends, is chaos. So as you move a little bit down the historical arc into the constructs that happened under the technologies of empire, you find yourself in a circumstance where one, you're highly dependent upon them. There is no alternative. And psychologically, even begin to become physically dependent upon them. Like, you just lose the capacity to navigate reality through any other modality. Right? You

learn how to do things like, you know, school, largely is a training ground to navigate society as defined by the particular instantiation of the technologies of empire that happen to be the ones that you're developing in, for example. And that's why it exists. That's what is for, is to train you to be able to pull those levers and be pushed by those buttons in the appropriate fashion and it could have become the right kind of automaton in that construct. Do you guys recall why I ended up going there? I lost the fore. You were talking about the tools of empire initially. And prior to that, it had to do with what was the... I don't recall exactly, but actually I was going to ask you a question about this, which I find really interesting anyway.

You're tying with some of you all know Harari stuff there in terms of the... Are you familiar with his work? No. I know that he exists, and I know that people seem to think it's good. I have never actually read it. Well, one of the things he talks about is the way that human beings broke out from the indigenous state, in which you could only live with about 150 other people in a small tribe. And one of the reasons homo sapiens defeated all forms of other humanoids,

or humanids, whatever you pronounce it. Hominids. Hominids, yeah. In the battle of evolutionary success was not that they were bigger, stronger, or even necessarily more intelligent necessarily, but rather that they were able to create shared myths that allowed them to band together and bands that were bigger than 150 people. And what you're talking about is essentially all the stuff we've had to do to be able to live in a society beyond our small tribe has consequences that we are now paying for, right?

Yes. That's what you're really saying? Yeah. So what the hell do we do, Jordan? Well, now we're sort of in the point where, oh, I think this was actually branched from the point of view of something like politics. Yes, exactly. The replacement of religion with politics. Right.

And the point being something like it's not really capitalism. capitalism happens to be a subset of a contemporary piece of the story of empire. And the story of empire is of the big story. And we've endeavored to escape from or to reinvent or quite often just the whole fucking thing collapses and we just reboot it. But the point is something like consciously, so now being aware of this proposition, endeavoring to consciously design a new basis that is not premised on the axiomatics empire. That would be what we have to do. And again, this is a re-retelling of that story that I said, which is that many of the most wicked problems, the problems that are even mythopoetic in nature,

like Cane and Abel, like deep, deep problems, that we've never historically been able to truly resolve by hypothesis will, in fact find themselves in somewhat surprisingly effortlessly resolved to the degree to which we are successful in this case. kind of a migration, a transition to a post-imperial modality of humaning. And whole new opportunities and whole new problems will show up as well. But just to kind of put the hypothetical, we know, or at least we have a high degree of confidence that we made that first move. And we move from the indigenous mode to the imperial mode, which means that magnitude is possible.

We can do that kind of thing. So we now sit at a threshold where the proposition is, well, we need to do something like that as well. We know we can move in one direction. Can we move in the other? That's really the question. Well, moving into the other, I don't think is actually valid. And I may be wrong.

And it's actually one of my, the people I'm beginning to collaborate with is Tyson-Yonkoporta down in Australia, who speaks quite eloquently from an indigenous Australian perspective cross-product with a very sophisticated complex system science perspective. So it's a very powerful voice. And if I think about the implications of the transition we're going on, under in the more dystopic version. If I take a more pessimistic view, the only guys left standing are his guys in the average

in Australia. Everybody else is dead. If I think about what happens if we actually go down the path of technologies of this order of power, the power that we're talking about, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we've developed before, without an adequate level of wisdom to actually govern our choices, not skiing willy-nilly drunk down the mountain, but actually if we don't figure out how to solve that problem, the end result is not like we die in unhappy life.

The end result is not that we have a slightly less pleasant, we have weeds in the yard. The end result is we end up killing almost everybody through a wide variety of terrible means, many of which we haven't even invented yet. Remember, in 1939, just look at the technology of death, destruction, and power in 1939, and compare that to 1946, how far humans could actually go in weapon, of destruction when shit got very, very real. Imagine if shit got very, very real on a truly global basis with eight billion people, all struggling to be the ones who make it through this tiny little possibility of success,

survival, or even just domination, who doesn't want to be on the wrong side of technologies of tyranny and domination of this level of control? That's a struggle that might cause people to up the ante, and as soon as you get into an arm's or so as you get into an arm's risk of that magnitude, we have no idea what's on the other side of that. So likely in that context, the only people who are left standing are, in fact, the Australian aborigines. So perhaps he has the least amount of concern. He might be like, yeah, fuck you guys.

We didn't want you to mess with this anyway, and we're going to be fine. So the other side of it is actually something like we actually have, from my point of view, we have to actually innovate something that is novel. It's not a going back. It's maybe recovering, a lot of remembering, and in many ways a going back for the purposes of going to the next place, that the going back is the right foundation. from which to go to the next place. But the opportunity and the possibility,

at least for those who want to not end up just leap in the world to the Australian Aborigines and maybe some cool kinds of cybernetic mutants, is to figure out how to get to the next thing. Now, there's a group in England, actually. I think they called RethinkX, who speak about this in a very different way than I do, and I only discovered their stuff about a year ago,

which is neat, because it's quite convergent. Now, I suspect that we actually converge on what I just said. We may not, but we converge on a lot of stuff. And one of their points is that even something as simple and prosaic as the notion of the fourth industrial revolution, if you think about the last three, and particularly the first two, and their implications for how society operated, what identity looked like, how human beings moved, things like the massive migration of the economy from like a 90% aggravation. agricultural rural to a in many modern worlds 90% urban and technical for example over a relatively brief period of time if you think about the fourth industrial revolution and you propose that it actually has an order to magnitude more implication more power and that's just another way of saying what

I just said we're just going through a shift we're going through a move we can't in some sense can't help it we've already lit the let the engine like it's it's going we're riding it the question is how do we choose to find a way to steer it or we find ourselves flung willy-nilly by wherever it happens to take us and you know we can double deep dive on that i would recommend if anybody's interested to just find their uh i think it's called rethink humanity and they talk about it in terms of humanity one humanity two and humanity three so my indigenous mode maps to humanity one and my imperial mode maps to humanity two and the hypothetical hypothesis is this thing they call humanity three. So they're speaking about that same, you know, okay, we've got three big,

you know, two big moves, apocal in nature, and we're now entering into what is actually a new epoch. So the way you navigate that, first is you acknowledge, that's what's up. You stop fucking around with things that couldn't possibly matter. It's a little bit like you're sitting there on the dock and I think it's Dover. I don't really know. Sorry, what's like, where did the Titanic take off from? It went from Belfast originally. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was built. in Belfast. The Irish started to keep it quiet. Right. So you're sitting in Belfast, getting ready to get in the Titanic. And for whatever reason, you happen to actually know with a high degree of confidence that is going to be

exactly that trip, but you're choosing to actually dick around with the cocktail napkins on your table. That's from my point of view, when I look at the notion of what's going on in terms of politics right now, that's the frame that I see. Hey guys, guess what? This ship is going to crash and almost everybody's going to die quite horribly. All we have to really do is not do that. Like, just not run into the iceberg. Can we maybe steer a little bit different or maybe not leave? There's all kinds of possibilities. It's not quite sure what it is. But what really has to happen is enough people on the ship have to stop being focusing on the trivialities that they've been trained to focus on by 19th century society. And by the way, humans developing in the context of 19th century society. And just so maybe

look collectively at the possibility that there's an iceberg out there, something like that. That's the hardest part. Well, the hardest part. Yeah, I see that. I guess the reason people, well, I agree with you. First of all, people addicted to politics. Second, it's entertainment. Third, whatever. But equally, since to a large degree, what we do with the ship depends on the decisions made by politicians, at least that's the argument. Then I've got. myself, haven't I? I've got myself, haven't I? I could see the floor in my own argument as I was making it. Okay, so, so what should we focus on? Yeah, well, it's just like, like, this is another

simple example. There's like this great memes that have these images, but, but simultaneously imagining that you are dependent upon the choices of a bunch of buffoons and or that you can rely on a bunch of buffoons to steer your life effectively is a rather foolish place to be. Now, acknowledge, For reasons of history, these particular buffoons have been handed the crown of Joffrey. All right. Well, that's a real problem. I'm not saying that that's not the case. We can't naively or stupidly, I don't know, what are these, Antifa now climbing on walls and painting on bricks, that is a naive and stupid recognition of the actual underlying reality.

They are correct in their assessment that endeavoring to either be governed by or, well, to be governed by buffoons is not going to work. Unfortunately, they are still reactively engaging in poor strategies and tactics. The right response is to actually slow down. It's the same story all the time. Acknowledge, recognize, okay, shit, Biden's not going to save us or whoever happens to be in charge of the UK right now. He's definitely not going to save us. He's definitely not going to save you. No.

Boris is anything. Yeah, no, let's not go there. Yeah, Boris is not going to save you. Right. Boris is not going to save us. No, I think that's fair to say. And, you know, again, there are things that have. have happened in history that we know. Their possibilities are real. They're real possibilities

to do things. It is not the case that we must only vote between Trump and Biden. That's not the reality of the circumstance that we find ourselves in. It's a form of addiction. It's a form of learned, helplessness, motivated by a deeper anxiety around taking that level of responsibility and being overwhelmed with it preemptively. Does that make sense what I just said? Yep. Yep. If you really can't deal with something out that, that's 10 steps down the road, but you try all at once to imagine dealing with it, you'll have a stack overflow and you will become demoralized preemptively and then you won't take the first step.

You've got to identify what is a first step that is a right step. It's a step that is actually a healthy, effective step in the right direction that you can take and then you have to take it. That's in some sense simply put, not trivial. And just being able to orient and discern the distinction between what is a random move, and what is at least a vaguely move, a vaguely positive move in the right direction. But also the courage to take that step is usually not small. It's going to be a pretty big one.

And then you've got to figure out from that new place, which is going to be a very different perspective, because now you've changed. Something about you has changed in the movement of this step. It's mostly an individual transformation is a big piece of it. Then what's the next step? And then the next step. And then the next step. And then the hope. And by the way, pure hope, right?

It's not that we are dependent upon the captain of the ship. at the end of the day, we're dependent upon everybody on the ship. If enough people on the ship say, hey, guys, we need to start dealing with the ship differently, then the captain and whatever, the crew, will ultimately say, okay, I get it. Even if it turns out we have to grab them and, like, convince them that they are no longer actually in charge of the ship.

This is the weird thing, why? This goes back to that notion of learned helplessness, learn formality. At the end of the day, it isn't the way that it is. Now, okay, next, you know, we can make lots of cool little tactical moves. Yeah, but they have the guns. Fair enough, but they aren't even real. Boris doesn't have any guns. If he does, he's not very dangerous. He ostensibly can command people who have guns, but those people are people. And they're also, by the way, many, many people.

It's not like the, it's like the army is a thing, like the army is a bunch of people. So it's like this. It's a very malleable consciousness raising, but not even consciousness raising, consciousness presencing, you know, moving from being an unconscious automaton, merely habitually reacting in some trained in amygdala hijacked way to having a conscious responsibility for the choices that you're making and then the process of progressively becoming more capable in yourself and more with other people to have broader strategic competence I actually call this Sovereignty 3 or sovereignty you know sovereignty 2 was this notion of it's not the God king it's these nation states sovereignty 3 is not something that is invoked upon you

by virtue of being, it's actually something that you build. It's an actual competence, the ability to actually take responsibility for more and more effective choices in more and more contexts. And that's it. Like we're on a journey of that shift, but let's go back.

Let's be very like, let's be hopeful. There's a breakdown. The old modes of power are very obsolete. They're big. They control everything right now, but they're also degrading rapidly. They're rather stupid. and they don't have any real clue to how to use the new modes of power well. And to a large extent, they inhibit themselves from doing so

because they know that the intrinsics of these new modes of power are antithetical to their own nature. And so they kind of don't push the ball as far as they could. So to the degree to which one choose to become competent. I remember that journey involved two things, reconnecting with meaningfulness, but also becoming that kind of organism that was most able to explore this new language,

landscape and become adaptive to the real environment. To the degree to which you adopt that, you will in fact discover new forms of potency and power that lay ambient in the potential of the new environment that have not yet even vaguely been discovered. And you can begin to leverage that. We're sitting on the threshold of a major transition. Well, by definition, that transition involves access to power that dwarfs the power before it. So all the power that you may find yourself facing and be a little bit inhibited by isn't actually the meaningful part. The meaningful part is what's the power that lives beyond the far horizon and can you become capable of actually forming the kind of collective, the kind of group, a group of people who can

trade with each other and connect with each other and communicate with each other, avoiding a lot of the problems that we were talking about earlier. So we can make it very practical. Just learn how to have real conversations on Twitter. It's possible. It can happen. Try that as just a basic rule. And the hypothesis is this.

One, there's three points here. One is you're no longer adding to the noise. That's like an ethical first do no harm. If you can just inhibit yourself from contributing evil to the world, that's a good thing. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything.

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for everybody it may involve the break right just stop or habits don't do it while you're drunk two you're also in that in the act of doing that avoiding harm to yourself. As you know, like it's actually bad for you to engage in that. But three, much more importantly, literally everybody who you find is also participating in that, every relationship

that you can have, every communication that you can have that actually is generative in the context of Twitter that is building increasing competence of how to do it. Whether it's happening just in you or in the relationship, in the people you're interacting with, or in the context of the larger story of people being able to perceive it, is building a new kind of, of collaboration. That is the discovery, the autocatalytic discovery of what a decentralized

collective intelligence that is driven by wisdom commons, that's a whole bunch of terms, actually looks like. The new form of governance that is simultaneously most adaptive

to the new environment, but it also generates the most positive use of that power without killing everybody. There's a very specific eye of the needle that you can thread, but the path that I'm describing,

the methodology that I'm proposing, I believe, is in fact the one that gets us there, individually and collectively. But that was absolutely outstanding. And hopefully, hopefully, Jordan, we're going to be able to get there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to be able to find you, where is the best place to do that online, ironically enough? Well, YouTube is where I've done most of my stuff recently

because I found that I've gotten, it'll be demoralized and lazy around writing. For a period of about three years, I wrote a number of pieces on Medium that are still there, except for the one on Q&O that they censored. And I feel like I'm probably going to begin writing again on Substack just to see how that feels. I promise I will never create a paywall. That's not the point. But that's pretty much it. Other than that, I don't really have much of an online presence.

Jordan, before we ask you our last question, I'm just curious, if you don't mind me asking, and if you're not happy to answer it, we'll just cut it out. What do you do day to day? Um, well, I'm a parent. I have a two-year-old. So, um, I engage in parenting. I spend time with my, with my wife. I, I have a new practice that I really enjoyed quite a bit as I have a, I, I'm a nice. There she is. Almost. There she goes. Um, I have a hot tub in my backyard. And I make myself an espresso or, a particular kind of beverage, this espresso based. And then I actually sit in the hot tub with my coffee and meditate. That sounds incredible. You're nailing it.

It's really good. It's amazing. And then it depends. Oftentimes I'll have one or two conversations with people, some of whom I know, some of whom are new people. Oftentimes I actually think about things like this. Like I'd say probably about three hours a day contemplating some variation on this theme, which is quite complicated.

There's a lot of stuff. Yeah. Recently I've actually been focusing on cryptocurrency in the blockchain because it's relevant now. Sometimes it's not and sometimes it is. And it's in a process right now

of gathering more potential energy. And so it will be how do I say this right? It's like a part of the journey. It's definitely not the end, but it's part of it. And particularly the part where we shift power from old structures to new structures,

it's going to be part of the new structures that have a lot of power. I expect that it will also go away in a surprisingly rapid time, but in the order of like 10 to 20 years, not like two or three. And so sensing that and being able to navigate, like, okay, where are the trim tabs that can have the most positive influence at the highest level and also at different levels would be an example of something that I'll spend time on when that kind of a what I call a kairos or an event that has lots of moment now emerges. Well, very interesting. Listen, thanks so much for coming on. And as always, we have one final question for you. Which is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

I knew you'd react like that. Yeah, that's a tricky one, particularly given how much we've just talked about. Yeah. Well, I'm wondering, and I don't really know. But the thing that I would imagine or I suspect would be something like, A phrase that popped into my head a while ago was pay more attention to the ones you love. So the question that you may not be talking about that you should be is, who do I love that I'm not paying enough attention to?

Maybe that. At the very least, if you ask that question, it's probably a very good one to ask. It is. Jordan Hall, thank you so much for coming on. All the links to Jordan's YouTube channel and all that good stuff. We'll be in the description.

Thank you for watching. maybe don't be so addicted to politics. I don't know. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant interview about politics. 7pm UK time. They all go out. Take care and see you soon. Take care, guys, and get off Twitter.

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