How Do You Redesign Civilisation? | Jordan Hall

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 - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Jordan Greenhall, how are you today?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I'm doing well. Apparently on the other side of the pond, I will be Greenhall forever.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  Your name, your name is, it flip flops between the two, right? Which, which one are you now?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I am Jordan Hall.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  Jordan Hall.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jordan Hall. I was, I was born Jordan Hall.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  I changed my name when I got married to Greenhall.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Um, and I am now back to Jordan Hall.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay, cool. Well, I mean, everyone is now updated. Also, for the viewers who are watching on YouTube, you will notice that I am now in HD. Uh, video guy Dean, my, uh, video producer forced me to get a better webcam. Before it was, uh, a potato sticking out the front of there. One disadvantage is that now I, 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, no pants or whatever I wanted. Whereas now I have to make a little bit more of a, an effort, which is good for the guests, I suppose, and also the, the viewers at home. So, uh, Jordan, what have you been working on recently?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  So I would like to compliment you on your HD. I noticed that when I was looking at it. It's like, wow, that is very crisp.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  That's some sharp imagery right now, yeah?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's see. Well, if, um, I'll, I'll assume a certain degree of familiarity with what I've been up to. Uh, because otherwise the story ends up being pretty long, but the, the basic premise is for the past 20 years or so, um, I've been trying to get a sense of what we might say is sort of the fundamental nature of the, the game that we found ourselves playing for some significant period of time that I'll call game A.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  And initially really grabbing it from a bunch of different threads and just noticing that if you just kept pulling the threads, say for example, the thread of the 2008 financial crisis and then the 2010 echo in, 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? Um, there is a, 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, that we're still essentially playing out that game. As you mentioned, that there was a game before that, that was pre the birth of agricultural

• 2:39Speaker 01

  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 over time that that particular game, this game A, this game of agricultural civilization in 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 meteterminist, 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.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  You know, maybe in the next year, maybe in the next 20 years, but we're definitely at a point where the methodology by which 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

• 4:06Speaker 01

  maybe also in some sense, remember a new game that is simultaneously something that is not going to be an extraterrestrial 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 briefly characterizes game A?

• 4:39Chris Williamson?

  Or is that the, is that the question that takes 20 minutes or 20 hours, should I say? If you were to...

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Briefly was, is probably about three hours. We could do that briefly in about three hours, my guess.

• 4:51Chris Williamson?

  Understood, but the current status quo is what you're talking about. And moving forward and trying to find something which doesn't have a, a terminus that ends up with us all being destroyed.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Sure, let me, 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.

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  For sure.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Because it forces, forces you to actually push your edge and see if anything comes out.

• 5:10Chris Williamson?

  Away we go.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  So, one way of thinking about it is

• 5:16Speaker 01

  trying to figure out how to get human beings to live together relatively peaceably using formal institutional structures.

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  That's a nice way to summarize it.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  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, three hours condensed into 30 seconds. Congratulations, congratulations, man.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  And, 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, it's, uh, it'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, there's a lot behind it and we can continue to explore that and open it up.

• 6:10Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Okay, this is fun. Um, 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,

• 6:42Speaker 01

  let me begin, let's see if I can say this well.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  So you might say that...

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Game A is fundamentally characterized as a rivalrous game. It's able to perceive and relate to this other thing that I've called the anti-rivalrous, but it's fundamentally a rivalrous game, which is to say that it's fundamentally win-lose. At the end, at its very, very bottom, it addresses the question of when push comes to shove, when you're pushing me, which of us loses? 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 rivalrous

• 7:40Speaker 01

  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 a, some larger community in peace unravel in the fullness of time, which, you know, sometimes takes a thousand years, sometimes it takes 50 years, it just depends on circumstances.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  So one example, and you mentioned this in the, in the pre, before we started filming, is, I think, very salient, like people can grasp, like 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 rivalrous game, something is premised on rivalrous games, is that violence ends up being the check sum. At the end of the day, when push comes to shove, we're pushing and shoving, 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,

• 9:11Speaker 01

  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 the very last move in that game caused everybody to have to go, whoa. Because when atomic energy was discovered and used, and then ever so slightly evolved, I went from the A-bomb to the H-bomb, and we 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,

• 9:53Speaker 01

  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, okay, wow, that sucked. Let's try a better thing. And in fact, did. But by the mid 50s, 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, we fought with sticks and stones. The proposition that the depth of that reboot reboot is really deep.

• 10:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Okay, great. Well, that was scary. And for a long time, people were like, wow, this is, you know, all of our history has told us that we're going to 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, in 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 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 an environment, particularly for the boomers.

• 11:14Chris Williamson?

  The hangover, the very long hangover from that.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  The long and deep hangover. So, okay, that's that. But what we discovered when the wall came down was that

• 11:26Speaker 01

  In the context of nuclear war, while catastrophic and fragile, it did actually, at 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 push the button, we all die. But as long as both of them simply manage not to push the button, we're okay. And we managed to pull that off.

• 11:52Chris Williamson?

  It's such, when you talk about it like that, it makes the, well, obviously, the line is very, very fine. But you're aware just how fine it is when it's, your two buttons button presses away.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  One button presses away.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, on one side, yeah. You're totally right.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  But when I spent time, for example, with people who were the experts in nuclear proliferation, and they're sending a message saying, hey, 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 visible 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 abstract. You go up a level and say, okay, the challenge isn't really nuclear war. The challenge is

• 13:19Speaker 01

  the ability to deploy destructive power in a fashion that is fundamentally catastrophic to human civilization at all.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  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 infrastructure, say, our water systems are dependent upon electrical capacity, as we've moved from, you know, men going out and turning gears to robots actuating, and robots actuating connected to computers, cyber war moves from a very silly thing that a bunch of script kiddies

• 14:16Speaker 01

  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 civilizational 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

• 15:01Speaker 01

  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, say, CRISPR. You know, 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.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  With the invention of CRISPR, like a single movement from science of from one place to another, just like nuclear weapons from pre-atomic to post-atomic, the bar has been dropped tremendously. And there's ever 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.

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  So eventually, your blender in your kitchen will be able to blow up the world.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Or, you know, 10 adequately motivated, smart high school kids.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Maybe like that's a and it's funny like you think really like, 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.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And the hacking of Experian 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.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  Bold.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and bored. Exactly. And maybe a little bit like angst ridden, like, you know, angst ridden teenagers can kill us all, should send a chill down everyone's spine.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  And then what happens is, right? So now with 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, like the one from World War II to now, it's largely been because catastrophic, like decisive strategic advantage in military capacity to deploy violence has been held by one or maybe two players. And so the stability of bipolar superpowerdom, the Soviet Union, the 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

• 17:22Speaker 01

  kind of keep things relatively peaceful on a global basis. Or we had the, you know, the long piece of the British Empire and et cetera, et cetera.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  But when we find ourselves in a multipolar circumstance, which is in fact we're clearly entering into, and even tripolar, just the decline 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, it's the missile gap. The missile gap story continues to be true. It's easy to say, well, we need to spend a trillion dollars on American defense because the Chinese are spending a trillion dollars on 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

• 18:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  It's dick measuring on the grandest and most destructive scale possible.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Right. And if you include the loopback of actually being able to, what are those things called? Penis enlargement?

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  If penis enlargement really worked, imagine what the consequences would actually be. This is exactly the problem. It's exactly that.

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  I honestly think that if penis enlargement was more decentralized, that we may have greater problems than someone pushing the button. It would be, it would just be catastrophe everywhere.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  It would be catastrophe. And it's funny, we could actually explore many of the things that are happening at the cultural level is actually that.

• 19:15Chris Williamson?

  It is posturing and dick measuring, isn't it? Yeah, you're totally 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...

• 19:27Speaker 01

  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. Like, you can handle, you're holding one, like, 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.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  The scene's been set. So where do we go from here? Or where do we go from there? From that point of the story moving forward? And also, I'm sure you'll get into it, what's game B?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that's where we go. So...

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Like the first step is to recognize you have a problem.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Hi, my name is Jordan. I play game A. 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?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  We keep being handed wonderful opportunities to recognize that we have a problem.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And we keep finding increasingly sophisticated ways to deny that we have a problem.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  We need to notice we have a problem, and we need to take the time to really perceive that.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  And really take it as our problem.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Like, not their problem, not some pick your poison. You know, point the finger and create the appropriate disparagement that fits your particular perspective on these things.

• 20:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  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. Well, 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 game A. The game A 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

• 21:30Speaker 01

  from the game A toolkit, using the game A sense maker, then all you're doing is playing game A.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Now, that turns out to be daunting, and for a lot of people, the game, the sort of the story stops there.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  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 that human beings relate to each other, it ends up being, how do I say this right?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Most people look to other people to figure out what the right way to respond to the world is.

• 22:10Chris Williamson?

  We're a memetic creature, right?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  We're a memetic creature, right? So it's the sort, the kind of people who, for whatever, remember that, remember you 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?

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  Not seen it, no.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Haven't seen it? Oh, it's great. You should get it and like, you know, put it up.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Because the question, the point is,

• 22:39Speaker 01

  if you had 10 people folding their arms, the whole rally falls apart.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Because at the end of the day, people are like, they're 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, uh, because of pure circumstance, are in a position to not respond in the self-reinforcing feedback loop of their social milieu.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  So that's how you begin to make the move from game A to game B.

• 23:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that, 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.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  It is an extrapolation of that actuated by the invention of formalized structure.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So there was a long time where we interacted with each other, what you might call the tribal level, that is actually not game A. It's something pre.

• 24:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  And there may be many, many flavors of that. It's hard for me to know. You know, deep anthropologists probably have insight into that. But once you add actuation by formal structure, the invention of society, the invention of way like law and money and the ability to use learning to invent social abstractions that can actuate human collective intelligences, groups of human who can coordinate in ways that make them more effective in the world, then you're playing game A.

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  I understand. My, my concern wanting to move towards something which is a more long-term strategy was that game A 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.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. Fortunately, this evolution actually happened about 150,000 to 1.5 million years ago.

• 25:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  This is really good news because if, 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 the shit hitting the fan is essentially zero. So this is what I mean when I say that.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Human beings are not the same as other primates.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  If you take a look at other primates, close primates, like say orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, etc., what 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. But human beings also have, and is the thing that actually

• 26:49Speaker 01

  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 an 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 has discovered something neato, it doesn't spread through the band or the troop. This is because dominance hierarchies

• 27:31Speaker 01

  are premised on mostly physical violence. So a dominant male is able to beat the crap out of other males, and therefore has established himself as dominant. And he may have a small number of beta buddies who kind of like get the table scraps and sort of support him, but the big thing there is the way that the males relate to each other is largely aversion, meaning you don't make eye contact with the dominant male because that means he's a threat, he's gonna kick your ass. Well, it's really fucking hard to learn things from other people if you don't make eye contact with them.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Right?

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Human beings found themselves over what appears to have been a pretty darn long exploration in evolutionary space, finding a way to take advantage of the capacity of learning.

• 28:19Chris Williamson?

  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 creates a tool, let's say a 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.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  And then the next day, it comes back, it's got to make the tool again.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  However, what the, one of the, 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 it was

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

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

• 29:49Speaker 01

  It doesn't. So there's a very large number, like 17, maybe more, distinct innovations that 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?

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  Is this like the just the world's hardest Rubik's Cube kind of?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  And the thing is, it's interesting is that if you pull, it binds on the twist. If you if you slide, it binds on the pull, right? So you have to actually get all it 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 is a big deal.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  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 is a neat 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 like slide

• 31:31Speaker 01

  against each other until it snaps into this new thing.

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  I totally get it.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Homo sapiens sapiens.

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  Totally get it. That's a really lovely analogy to use with the puzzle. I think that makes that makes complete sense.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Are we back?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  We're back.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  We're back. Sweet. So we'll just go from here again, man.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Right. I just gotta let you know, I have, I have 15 minutes.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  That's fine.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  And then, and then maybe a little bit of time, depending on when the next folks show up.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  Totally fine. Let's roll from here. So.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  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, that they call the prestige relationship.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  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

• 33:09Speaker 01

  irreducible, energetic and temporal characteristic of, 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

• 33:26Speaker 01

  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, 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, the dominance hierarchy has been around for a real long time. So in the beginning, humans would use learning to allow them to achieve rivalrous 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 become

• 34:11Speaker 01

  the peak predator anywhere. So they could move from the African savanna out into the deserts, into islands, up into the Arctic, and in the space of two or three generations, use learning, using this capacity that we just described, to outcompete all other animals in a rivalrous 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 was not animals, but other people.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  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 it's sort of 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, right? The explosion of civilization, the explosion of the 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 outcompete dominance, was and is game A. Now just describe game A in an even more fundamental way.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  And somewhere around, maybe World War II, I kind of really think of like the moment, the aha moment that must have happened with every single military leader during World War II, when they discovered that sophisticated soldiers with, you know, healthy, vigorous, and good tactics, ended up constantly getting outcompeted by sort of a pencil-neck geek sitting up back in Blesly Park. Like, whoa, shit. The smarty 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.

• 36:00Chris Williamson?

  For as long as you have a man with a button.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Well, as long as you have a man who knows how to make a better button.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  My button's bigger than your button.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  So then you entered into the game, and this is something I think that Eric Weinstein has been exploring, I think not exploring aware of this part of the story, but exploring it really deeply is, you know, 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.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  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 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 premised on the learning of learning, premised 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

• 37:15Speaker 01

  of relationships that we need to be in for that to flourish.

• 37:20Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Sure. I, I, I think it's actually relatively straightforward. I think that it takes, there are one, two, three, there are four steps. It is a four step program. We've been able to actually eliminate eight. We're getting more efficient.

• 37:48Chris Williamson?

  Amazing.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  So the first step is to, to recognize and acknowledge that you have a problem

• 37:57Speaker 01

  and to really let that sink all the way down into your toes. I would call this entering into a extraordinarily deep level of humility.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  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 into not knowing. Know that the only thing you can really know is you definitely don't know. And allow that paradox, that koan, 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.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  I've described sovereignty in other places, so I won't go into too much detail. But sovereignty begins here. It is 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 am 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. And to proceed from there. Okay? And as you continue to expand your, what I 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

• 39:34Speaker 01

  actually happening. Then you enter into the third step. And this I might call something like right relationship, and some portion of that is vocation. By the way, as it turns out, I actually outlined this, the fifth portion of that post that I talked about. So 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?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  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 relationships. How do you enter into a relationship with nature? How do you enter into a relationship with money? How do you enter into a relationship with time? Right, just all relationships. Can you use sovereignty, this developing 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 scheme of what the right choices is, it's 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,

• 40:51Speaker 01

  like, starting with the people who you love is a really good place to start.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  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 might there by P S, 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 which is 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, I can tell myself a 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 a piece of that step. And of course, you can notice that there's now a really positive loop that as you enter into more and more right relationship with more and more of the world,

• 41:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:53Chris Williamson?

  The domain of competence has been expanded.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And, and the, and it expanded from self to other. Expanded into, into, into something like a we, like a team, or a family, or friendship. And of course, then as your, as your sovereignty increases, your capacity to enter into a 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.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  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, perhaps just one, oftentimes just one, a dyad, a partner. To so fully enter into a relationship that you actually learn how to enter into a level of fluidity, a level of honesty, a level of integrity together that has in

• 43:10Speaker 01

  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 marriage, but it doesn't have to be, that 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 in

• 43:53Speaker 01

  relationship, the relationship itself begins to have a capacity to nurture the human beings. And this is coherence. And it's 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.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  As that domain begins to expand and expand and include more people?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yep. But it needs to be taken slowly.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  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 I think my dog is telling me our conversation is at an end.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  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 wee time and walk time.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  It's wee 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 bay, right? But it is actually that simple and, and yet not at all easy.

• 45:16Chris Williamson?

  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, and have its wheeze and its poos. And can you tell the listeners where they can find you online, please?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Well, up until this last post, the two places to find me were on my Medium channel. One's called Deep Code, that it was called Evolving 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 in fact be a new place in the next year or so.

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  That's exciting. That sounds, that sounds super, super exciting. I will be following the breadcrumbs, as I'm sure a lot of the listeners will be with, with great interest. So thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, man.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Bye bye.