How Do You Redesign Civilisation? | Jordan Hall

1. 0:00 – 1:21

   Name update, HD webcam banter, and what Jordan’s been up to

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      (wind blowing) Jordan Greenhall, how are you today?

   2. JHJordan Hall0:09

      (laughs) I'm doing well. Apparently on the other side of the pond I will be Greenhall forever. Um-

   3. CWChris Williamson0:15

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

   4. JHJordan Hall0:20

      I am Jordan Hall.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:21

      Jordan Hall?

   6. JHJordan Hall0:22

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

   7. CWChris Williamson0:25

      Yep.

   8. JHJordan Hall0:25

      I changed my name when I got married to Greenhall.

   9. CWChris Williamson0:28

      Yep.

   10. JHJordan Hall0:28

       Um, and I am now back to Jordan Hall.

   11. CWChris Williamson0:31

       Okay, cool.

   12. JHJordan Hall0:32

       But-

   13. CWChris Williamson0:32

       Well, I mean, every- everyone is now updated. Also, for the-

   14. JHJordan Hall0:35

       (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson0:36

       ... 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, put... wearing essentially pajamas and no, no pants or whatever I wanted. Whereas now, uh, I have to make a little bit more of, uh, 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?

   16. JHJordan Hall1:10

       (laughs) So I would- I'd like to compliment you on your HD. I noticed that when I was looking at it, it's like, "Wow, that is very crisp."

   17. CWChris Williamson1:18

       That's some sharp imagery right now, yeah?

   18. JHJordan Hall1:20

       It is.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:20

       Yeah, no. (laughs)

2. 1:21 – 4:36

   Following crises down to first principles: why Game A is ending

   1. JHJordan Hall1:21

      Um, 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. Um, and then initially really grabbing it from a bunch of different threads and just noticing that if you just kept pulling the thread, say, for example, the thread of the 2008 financial crisis and then the 2010 echo in, 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. Um, and I should mention that there was a game before that that was pre the birth of agricultural civilization and, 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, uh, failing in certain ways and that it reboots, reforms, tries to keep searching for ways to keep going on its own. But there's a sort of a meta terminus, there's a, 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, we're at the end of Game A. Um, you know, maybe in the next year, maybe in the next 20 years, but we're definitely at a point where the, the methodology by which that game is able to reboot and try to reestablish itself is coming to a, to a terminus. And so in that context, what I've been doing most recently is, what might we, we... what might we do in that context? How do we find a way to really step outside of the game? Like, 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. Um, so is there a way to step outside of that game completely and to almost discover or maybe also in some sense, remember a new game that is simultaneously something that we can't... that is not going to be inextricably self-terminating and is really responsive to the situation that we actually find ourselves in, um, and is able to be born in the context of now while still develop- and develop on its own terms into being able to essentially take over from Game A in the time that we have.

   2. CWChris Williamson4:35

      So-

   3. JHJordan Hall4:35

      So, that's it.

3. 4:36 – 6:26

   A compact definition of Game A: society via formal institutions

   1. CWChris Williamson4:36

      ... what, what briefly characterizes Game A?

   2. JHJordan Hall4:39

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson4:40

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

   4. JHJordan Hall4:46

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

   5. CWChris Williamson4:53

      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.

   6. JHJordan Hall5:03

      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.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:07

      For sure.

   8. JHJordan Hall5:07

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

   9. CWChris Williamson5:11

      Away we go.

   10. JHJordan Hall5:12

       So one way of thinking about it is trying to figure out how to get human beings to live together relatively peaceably using formal institutional structures.

   11. CWChris Williamson5:29

       That's a nice way to summarize it.

   12. JHJordan Hall5:30

       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.

   13. CWChris Williamson5:47

       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.

   14. JHJordan Hall5:54

       (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson5:54

       Congratulations, man.

   16. JHJordan Hall5:56

       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, that's actually very powerful to be able to do that. And if it didn't make sense to you, the suggestion might be...... you know, there's, there's a lot behind it and we could continue to explore that and open it up.

   17. CWChris Williamson6:11

       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.

   18. JHJordan Hall6:25

       Mm-hmm.

4. 6:26 – 8:21

   The inevitability claim: rivalrous (win/lose) logic at the core

   1. CWChris Williamson6:26

      Why is that inevitable?

   2. JHJordan Hall6:30

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

   3. CWChris Williamson6:48

      (laughs)

   4. JHJordan Hall6:50

      So you might say that... game A is fundamentally characterized as a rivalrous game. It's, 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 this 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 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, I, I..." where there's no more sort of playing together, "How do we make sure the other guys don't win?" Right? 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, um, our best efforts to weave something together that actually holds us together as, uh, some larger community in peace unravel in the fullness of time, which, you know, sometimes takes a

5. 8:21 – 11:18

   World War II to nuclear weapons: the first true civilizational endgame

   1. JHJordan Hall8:21

      thousand years, sometimes it takes 50 years. It just depends on circumstances. So one example, and you mentioned this in the, in the pre- before we started filming, um, is I think very salient, like people can grasp, like feel this very well, which is the, the circumstance that we found ourself in right at the tail end of World War II. Um, you know, one, one of the things that happens in a rivalrous game, something that's 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 are 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. Um, and so the last big war that we had, World War II was really bad, right? Lots of bad things happened, and lots of really significant kinds of violence were unleashed in the world. But what we noticed was that the very last move in that game caused everybody to have to go, "Whoa." Because when atomic energy was discovered and used, and then ever so slightly evolved, like we 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 com- very different place. That as bad as World War II was up until the moment of multipolar nuclear power, we couldn't fuck it up too badly. We couldn't kill everybody. Try as we want with bullets and bombs, humanity was going to continue to sort of move forward. We could reboot from World War II and say, "Okay, wow, that sucked. Let's try a better thing." And in fact did. But by the mid '50s, it was clear (clears throat) that we had now invented a way to kill everybody, or at least two so catastrophically, uh, 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, I don't know how World War III is going to be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. And the proposition that the, the depth of that reboot, reboot is really deep.

   2. CWChris Williamson10:37

      Yeah.

   3. JHJordan Hall10:38

      Okay, great. Well, that was scary. And for a long time people were like, "Wow, this is..." You know, o- all of our history has told us that we are gonna get into fights. So for a whole generation, even two generations, my generation, the sense was nuclear holocaust is inevitable, and tomorrow. Um, you know, we had nuclear bomb drills when I was in school, in elementary school. Like, you would actually get under your desk, put a book over your shoulders, and pretend that that would help you survive a nuclear bomb.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:04

      (laughs)

   5. JHJordan Hall11:06

      Um, 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.

   6. CWChris Williamson11:15

      The hangover.

   7. JHJordan Hall11:16

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson11:16

      The h- very long hangover from that.

6. 11:18 – 16:29

   From nuclear proliferation to generalized destructive capacity

   1. JHJordan Hall11:18

      The long and deep hangover. So, okay, that's that. But what we discovered when the wall came down was that in the context of nuclear war, while catastrophic and fragile, it did actually, at the end of the day, only require that two men, two in- 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, right?

   2. CWChris Williamson11:53

      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... you're a... you're two buttons, button presses away.

   3. JHJordan Hall12:05

      One button pu- press away.

   4. CWChris Williamson12:07

      Oh yeah, on one side. Yeah, you're totally right.

   5. JHJordan Hall12:09

      If either, if either one pushes the button, the game's over. (clears throat) But we managed not to do that, so, okay, neat. Um, now, we can trace that and, 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. Uh, along with the UK and France, Germany, Pakistan, India. Um, but when I spent time, for example, with people who are the experts in nuclear proliferation, they're sending a message saying, "Hey, (laughs) we're not gonna be able to hold back the dam forever," um, that we are going to be experiencing nuclear events over the next couple of decades because as our technical prowess continues to advance, um, the distance between being nuclear and being non-nuclear gets smaller and smaller. Um, in particular with the fall of the Soviet Union, the proliferation of both nuclear capacity and physical material out into places like Uzbekistan, the capacity to hold back that wall became less and less. Okay, so that's challenging. But then what happens is, is that you, you abstract. You go up a level and say, "Okay, the challenge isn't really nuclear war. The challenge is the ability to deploy destructive power in a fashion that is fundamentally catastrophic to human civilization at all." Okay? Well, nuclear power is the 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 n- now, for example, as we, uh, 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 move from, you know, men going out and turning gears to robots actuating, and robots actuating connected to computers, cyberwar moves from a very silly thing that a bunch of script kiddies might do to make your email send you funny messages to killing everyone. Um, 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. You know, w- as we became more and more dependent on increasingly complicated instruments of finance, um, it generated, at least for a while, a feeling of economic expansion, but at the cost of fragility. And so on the one hand, our continuing exploration of technical sophistication and the utilization of that builds a level of increased wealth and experience of quality of life, but at the cost of fragility. And on the other hand, we keep finding really cool ways to kill everybody, like, say, CRISPR. Um, 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. 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 every reason to believe that we're gonna k- kinda following Moore's law of destructive potential, where more and more capacity will become more and more distributed. And now you have-

   6. CWChris Williamson15:49

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

   7. JHJordan Hall15:54

      (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson15:54

      ... you'll be- (laughs)

   9. JHJordan Hall15:55

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

   10. CWChris Williamson16:01

       Yeah.

   11. JHJordan Hall16:01

       Maybe. Like that's a ... And, and, it's funny. Like, you think, "Really?" Like, yeah. Like, ten adequately motivated smart high school kids right now could meaningfully disrupt the entire global financial industry. Right now. No pro- no question, right? For sure. And in some sense, they already have. Like, the hacking of, uh, Sony, for example-

   12. CWChris Williamson16:16

       Yup. Very true.

   13. JHJordan Hall16:16

       ... and the hacking of, uh, 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-

   14. CWChris Williamson16:28

       Bored.

   15. JHJordan Hall16:28

       ... not per-

   16. CWChris Williamson16:29

       (laughs)

7. 16:29 – 19:52

   Multipolar rivalry accelerates innovation in ‘ways to kill everybody’

   1. JHJordan Hall16:29

      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. (clears throat) And then what happens is, right, so now the last piece. So 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 peace, like the ones from World War II to now, it's largely been because cata- like, s- decisive strategic advantage in military, the capacity to deploy violence, has been held by one or maybe two players. And so the stability of, of bipolar superpowerdom, the Soviet Union and the United States, played a big role, that because everyone else was vastly inferior to the United States and the Soviet Union in the ability to deploy violence, it really did mean that kind of two grownups could kind of keep things relatively peaceful on a global basis. Or we had the, the, you know, the long peace of, uh, of the, uh, British Empire, and e- et cetera, et cetera. But when we find ourselves in a multipolar circumstance, which is w- in fact, what we're clearly entering into, um, and even tripolar, you know, just the, 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 of tech- technical capability. Pretty straightforward, right? I mean, if ... It's the, it's the missile gap. The missile gap story continues to be true. I mean, 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 gonna obsolete our aircraft carriers in two years, so we have to have a response."... so we have to innovate a new way. But of course, they then look at that and say, "Well, they have to innovate a new way." And so, we fight, we, 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.

   2. CWChris Williamson18:33

      It's dick measuring on the grandest and most descript- descriptive scale possible.

   3. JHJordan Hall18:39

      Right.

   4. CWChris Williamson18:39

      (laughs)

   5. JHJordan Hall18:39

      And with, if you include the loop back of actually being able to... What are those things called? You know, uh, penis enlargement?

   6. CWChris Williamson18:47

      Yep, yep.

   7. JHJordan Hall18:48

      If, if penis enlargement really worked-

   8. CWChris Williamson18:51

      (laughs)

   9. JHJordan Hall18:52

      ... imagine what the consequences would actually be.

   10. CWChris Williamson18:55

       (laughs)

   11. JHJordan Hall18:56

       This is exactly the problem. It's exactly that. There's no- there's-

   12. CWChris Williamson18:59

       Well, I mean, I, I honestly think that if penis enlargement was more, uh, decentralized, that we may have greater problems than, uh, someone pushing the button. It would be-

   13. JHJordan Hall19:09

       Well-

   14. CWChris Williamson19:10

       ... it would just be catastrophe everywhere, wouldn't it?

   15. JHJordan Hall19:11

       It would be catastrophe.

   16. CWChris Williamson19:12

       (laughs)

   17. JHJordan Hall19:12

       And, and it's funny, we could actually explore how many of the things that are happening at the cultural level is actually that, honestly.

   18. CWChris Williamson19:17

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

   19. JHJordan Hall19:19

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson19:19

       ... totally right. Uh, uh, 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, we are at-

   21. JHJordan Hall19:28

       There's, it's actually deeper principles, there's more fundamental stuff, but this is a good... Like, it gives you a sense. You're, you're at least there.

   22. CWChris Williamson19:34

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JHJordan Hall19:34

       Like, you can handle... You're holding one, like, piece of the story that's like, "Okay, that's, that's for sure there." There's, like, two or three deeper principles, but we don't need to go there.

   24. CWChris Williamson19:42

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

8. 19:52 – 21:48

   Game B begins with ownership: humility, responsibility, and dropping ‘false responsibility’

   1. JHJordan Hall19:52

      Right. Well, that's where we go. So, like, the first step is to recognize you have a problem. You know, "Hi, my name is Jordan. I play game A." I- we need to get there. We need to get there rapidly and collectively. Um, and let's take, for example, what happened in 2016, i- in America, in the States. You guys had it a few, uh, about a year earlier, right? Um, we keep being handed wonderful opportunities to recognize that we have a problem, and we keep finding increasingly sophisticated ways to deny that we have a problem.

   2. CWChris Williamson20:28

      (laughs)

   3. JHJordan Hall20:28

      Um, we need to notice we have a problem, and we need to take the time to really perceive that and really take it as our problem. Like, not their problem, not some pick your poison-

   4. CWChris Williamson20:42

      Yeah.

   5. JHJordan Hall20:42

      ... you know, point, point the finger and create the appropriate disparagement that fits your particular perspective on these things.

   6. CWChris Williamson20:47

      Yep.

   7. JHJordan Hall20:47

      Um, 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. You know, the game A sense maker is a kind. It's not the only one that exists in potential. There are other examples. Um, but it's the generator function. I- if you always find yourself trying to figure out how to solve problems from the game A toolkit using the game A sense maker, then all you're doing is playing game A. Now, that turns out to be daunting, and for a lot of people, the game... The, the sort of the story stops there. Um,

9. 21:48 – 23:40

   Memetic dynamics and the ‘arms-folded’ minority that shifts the crowd

   1. JHJordan Hall21:48

      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? Um, most people look to other people to figure out what the right way to respond to the world is.

   2. CWChris Williamson22:11

      We're a memetic creature, right?

   3. JHJordan Hall22:13

      We're a memetic creature, right? So, it's the sort- the kind of people who, for whatever... Remember that- remember that- remember you see that big great photograph of, like, a Nuremberg-style rally, and there's, like, a- 100,000 Nazis, like, saluting, and one dude standing there folding his arms?

   4. CWChris Williamson22:31

      (laughs) I've not seen it, no.

   5. JHJordan Hall22:32

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

   6. CWChris Williamson22:35

      Yep.

   7. JHJordan Hall22:36

      Because the question- the point is, if you had 10 people folding their arms, the whole rally falls apart. Because at the end of the day, people are, like, sign- they're, like, s- 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 go, "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, um, because of secure circumstance, are in a position to not respond in the self-reinforcing feedback loop of their social milieu. If there's enough of them that are signaling something different and they're signaling that something different with some coherence, meaning that it's kind of showing up as the same kind of signal, then you begin to get a shift, and it gives everybody else an orientation towards what right action might feel like and might look like. Um, so that's how you begin to make the move from game A to game B.

10. 23:40 – 25:21

    Tribalism vs. Game A: formal structures as the accelerator

    1. CWChris Williamson23:40

       Is that-

    2. JHJordan Hall23:40

       The first step-

    3. CWChris Williamson23:41

       T- 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 with this rivalrous game that 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.

    4. JHJordan Hall24:05

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

    5. CWChris Williamson24:12

       Right. I understand.

    6. JHJordan Hall24:13

       So, there was a, 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.

    7. CWChris Williamson24:22

       Yep.

    8. JHJordan Hall24:22

       And there may be many, many flavors about it. It's hard for me to know-... um, 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 (clears throat) social abstractions that can actuate human collective intelligence, group of, groups of human who can coordinate in ways that make them more effective in the world-

    9. CWChris Williamson24:56

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JHJordan Hall24:56

        ... then you're playing game A.

    11. CWChris Williamson24:57

        I understand. My, my concern, uh, wanting to move towards something which is a, a more long-term strategy was that game A was simply our genetic code, our, uh, tribal nature, uh-

    12. JHJordan Hall25:12

        (clears throat)

    13. CWChris Williamson25:12

        ... 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.

11. 25:21 – 29:50

    Dominance vs. prestige: the evolutionary ‘good news’ about humans

    1. JHJordan Hall25:21

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

    2. CWChris Williamson25:27

       Okay.

    3. JHJordan Hall25:28

       Uh, 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 (laughs) undergo an evolution of that magnitude in real time with the shit hitting the fan is essentially zero. Um, so this is what I mean when I say that. Human beings are not the same as other primates. Meaningfully, like significantly, something happened. And we're obviously witnessing the consequences of that, but we can actually identify it now and dial it back in. So the story kind of goes like this. I'll try to keep it, uh, compact because we don't have infinite time. Um, if you take a look at other primates, close primates like, say orangutans, uh, or gorillas, chimpanzees, et cetera, what you notice... And, 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.

    4. CWChris Williamson26:25

       (laughs)

    5. JHJordan Hall26:25

       This, this phrase has gotten a lot of traction over the past year because of, uh, the other Jordan.

    6. CWChris Williamson26:30

       (laughs)

    7. JHJordan Hall26:31

       Um, 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. Like that's a real part of our nature. What human beings also have, and is the thing that actually makes us human and not other kinds of primates, a different way of doing things. It's called a prestige hierarchy, which is odd because it's not really a hierarchy, uh, but it's called a prestige dynamic. So we've got the dominance dynamic, which is a hierarchy, and the prestige dynamic. Other primates don't have the prestige dynamic. This is a incomprehensibly fundamental thing, so it's worth sort of actually slowing down. Chimpanzees do not do a very good job of learning from each other. If a particular chimpanzee has discovered something neato, it doesn't spread through the, through the band or the troop. Uh, this is because dominance hierarchies are premised on mostly physical violence. So a dominant male is able to beat the crap out of other males, and therefore 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 'cause that means he's a threat and 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.

    8. CWChris Williamson28:06

       Yep.

    9. JHJordan Hall28:06

       Right?

    10. CWChris Williamson28:07

        Yep.

    11. JHJordan Hall28:08

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

    12. CWChris Williamson28:21

        So to interject there, some of the listeners that are familiar with previous episodes will know Wilhelm von Hippel, who wrote, uh, The Social Leap.

    13. JHJordan Hall28:29

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CWChris Williamson28:30

        It was, uh, an explanation of how we went from, uh, Australopithecus, uh, out onto the plains, the development of the throwing arm and all of this sort of stuff. And one of the big, um, uh, discoveries, or one of the big claims that he made was that the anticipation of felt needs and unwanted needs was a real, uh, 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.

    15. JHJordan Hall29:04

        Hmm.

    16. CWChris Williamson29:05

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

    17. JHJordan Hall29:09

        Yep.

    18. CWChris Williamson29:09

        However, what the, uh, one of the, the main archeological 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-

    19. JHJordan Hall29:36

        Yeah.

    20. CWChris Williamson29:37

        ... (clears throat) 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.

12. 29:50 – 32:15

    The ‘Japanese puzzle’ of human evolution: multiple innovations snapping together

    1. JHJordan Hall29:50

       It doesn't. So there's a very large number, like 17, maybe more, distinct innovations. They're kind of... Have you ever seen this? Like a Japanese puzzle that has a bunch of different pieces where you have to be able to actually be able to twist, pull, and, and slide all at once in a very smooth relationship to get it to move.

    2. CWChris Williamson30:15

       Is this like the, just the world's hardest Rubik's Cube kind of? (laughs)

    3. JHJordan Hall30:19

       (laughs) Kind of. And the, and the not- the thing is that's interesting is that if you pull, it, it binds on the twist. If you, if you slide, it binds on the pull, right?

    4. CWChris Williamson30:26

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    5. JHJordan Hall30:27

       So you have to actually get all this. So evolution, uh, 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, the notion that females live long enough that a mother has a daughter and is still alive long enough to actually co-parent her daughter's children. It's a big deal.

    6. CWChris Williamson30:49

       Yeah.

    7. JHJordan Hall30:49

       You had to get fatherhood, like the notion that males could have a lived selection, a, a, a fitness adaptation by virtue of putting their energy into attending to the wellbeing of their actual biological children is a ne- is an innovation. You had to have a, 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 against each other until it snaps into this new thing-

    8. CWChris Williamson31:35

       I totally get it.

    9. JHJordan Hall31:35

       ... of Homo sapiens sapiens.

    10. CWChris Williamson31:37

        Totally get it. That's a, that's a ve-

    11. JHJordan Hall31:38

        All right.

    12. CWChris Williamson31:38

        ... a really lovely analogy to, to use with, with the puzzle. I think that makes, that makes complete sense. You just-

    13. JHJordan Hall31:44

        Wonderful. (laughs)

    14. CWChris Williamson31:46

        Um, we're gonna pause for one second there, mate. The only thing is, it keeps on... I think it might be my internet connection. It's gonna flick to another network. I'll, I'll cut this. Um, let me see if this holds on. Are we back?

    15. JHJordan Hall32:02

        We're back.

    16. CWChris Williamson32:03

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

    17. JHJordan Hall32:06

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

    18. CWChris Williamson32:08

        That's fine.

    19. JHJordan Hall32:09

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

    20. CWChris Williamson32:12

        Totally fine. Let's roll from here.

    21. JHJordan Hall32:14

        Okay.

    22. CWChris Williamson32:14

        So-

13. 32:15 – 37:36

    Game A as prestige enslaved to dominance—and the WWII ‘button’ era

    1. JHJordan Hall32:15

       So what we find ourselves is that this new thing, which is in fact the difference between Homo sapiens and all other, uh, primates, is this new kind of relationship that we ca- that they call the prestige relationship. And in the prestige relationship, what happens is we discover the power of learning and learning from each other. So learning is learning from each other. There's one kind where I go out in the world and I experience the world directly and I kind of figure stuff out. But when I am able to do what we're doing right now, I can take my entire lifetime of work, which is not easy, and convey to you a pretty sizable chunk of it in an hour. That's learning, right? That is a significant shift. In fact, and so everything that's happened since then is a consequence of that shift, like the dynamic of that capacity, the ability to convert the irreducible energetic and temporal characteristic of, of being in the world, like the fact that it takes a whole lifetime to turn a child into an adult, compress that into a shareable moment that upgrades the quality of being in the world much faster than that is where we are, right? That's the whole point of, 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 then, of course, very quickly discovered that with a little bit of learning, they could become the peak predator anywhere. So they could move from the African savanna out into the deserts, into islands, up into the Arctic, and in a space of two or three generations use learning, using this, this capacity we just described, to out-compete 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. 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 ma- 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, the explosion of, 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 out-compete dominance was and is Game A. We've now just described Game A in an even more fundamental way. Um, and somewhere around maybe World War II, I kind of really think of like the moment, the, the a-ha 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 out-competed by sort of a pencil-neck geek sitting up ba- back in Bletchley Park.

    2. CWChris Williamson35:51

       (laughs)

    3. JHJordan Hall35:52

       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. Like one-

    4. CWChris Williamson36:01

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

    5. JHJordan Hall36:04

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

    6. CWChris Williamson36:07

       (laughs) My button, my button's bigger than your button.

    7. JHJordan Hall36:10

       So then you entered into the game, and this is, uh, something I think that Eric Weinstein has been exploring. Um, 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 b- be in charge of the button while getting other people to build me a better button?"

    8. CWChris Williamson36:30

       (laughs)

    9. JHJordan Hall36:31

       Oh, okay. That's kind of where we are.

    10. CWChris Williamson36:33

        Yeah.

    11. JHJordan Hall36:33

        We're right there.

    12. CWChris Williamson36:34

        Yep.

    13. JHJordan Hall36:34

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

    14. CWChris Williamson37:21

        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...

14. 37:36 – 46:43

    A four-step program to Game B: humility → sovereignty → right relationship → coherence

    1. JHJordan Hall37:36

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

    2. CWChris Williamson37:49

       Amazing.

    3. JHJordan Hall37:51

       So, the first step is to re- uh, to recognize and acknowledge that you have a problem, and to really let that sink all the way down into your toes. I would call this entering into a extraordinarily deep level of humility. And let that just dissolve and say, "Okay, w- what's the..." 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, right? Allow yourself to sink into a liminal space, into not knowing, right? 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, a really nice description of reality, to sink in and dissolve and settle. Step one. The transition from step one to step two is choosing to then take full responsibility for how it is that you're actually going to show up in the world. I would call this reclaiming your sovereignty. I've described sovereignty in other places, so I won't go into too much detail, but sovereignty begins here. It is in effect in you. It is your capacity to take responsibility for the choices that you make in the world, to be able to say, "I and I alone 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 actually happening. Then you enter into the third step, and this I might call something like right relationship, um, a- and some portion of that is vocation, by the way, I, it turns out I actually outlined this at the fifth portion of that post that I talked about. So it's, this is a nice, a loop closed naturally. So, right relationship is, from a perspective, from a place of sovereignty, how do you begin to show up in relationship in a better way? And of course, generally speaking, these will tend to be at first close relationships, but you might think of this as all old relationships. How do you re- enter into relationship with nature? How do you enter into relationship with money? How do you enter into relationship with time, right? Just all relationships. Can you use sovereignty, this, 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 schema of what the right choices is that'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, like starting with the people who you love is a really good place to start. Um, 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, uh, revealed. An example might thereby be 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? Uh, 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 an- 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, 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. And then-

    4. CWChris Williamson41:54

       The domain of competence has been expanded.

    5. JHJordan Hall41:57

       Yes, that's right. And, and the, and expanded from self to, 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 right relationship increases. That's really nice, right? So then we enter into the final step, and I would call that step the step of coherence, and this is... may or may not be a calling for people in any meaningful timeframe, but for some people it might be. So this is where you feel called... your right relationship is a calling to enter into a relationship of collective sovereignty.... where there is a, a, 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 some sense, its own kind of identity, that the synergistic relationship gives rise to a wholeness that is greater than the sum of the parts and is fully nurturing to the continuing sovereignty of the parts. And we find this, I think, if we really feel about what a good partnership is like. I'm thinking here of marriage, but it doesn't have to be. Um, you can think, and, 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, and enter into skillfulness in relationship, the relationship itself begins to have a capacity to nurture the human beings. And this is coherence. And this is very real. And in the space of coherence, we are now playing Game B fully, and we can begin to enter into larger and larger relationships of coherence.

    6. CWChris Williamson44:17

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

    7. JHJordan Hall44:21

       Yep. But it needs to be taken slowly.

    8. CWChris Williamson44:24

       Why?

    9. JHJordan Hall44:27

       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. Um, it's very easy to run unconscious old code in how we enter into relationship. And I think my dog is telling me our, our conversation is at an end.

    10. CWChris Williamson44:51

        (laughs)

    11. JHJordan Hall44:52

        And so-

    12. CWChris Williamson44:52

        That's a great... That's a fantastic way to call, like, "You've got, you've got..."

    13. JHJordan Hall44:56

        (laughs)

    14. CWChris Williamson44:56

        "This is your two-minute warning, guys. We've, we've-"

    15. JHJordan Hall44:58

        Yep.

    16. CWChris Williamson44:58

        "It's wee time and walk time."

    17. JHJordan Hall45:00

        It's wee time and walk time.

    18. CWChris Williamson45:01

        (laughs)

    19. JHJordan Hall45:01

        And so, um, so that's the story. Like, that's, I think, is it. It seems very simple and compared to, like, we're going to engineer a decentralized economy on the... Right? But it is actually that simple and, and yet not at all easy.

    20. CWChris Williamson45:18

        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.

    21. JHJordan Hall45:29

        (laughs)

    22. CWChris Williamson45:29

        So, we need to (laughs) , we need to, we need to let it go and, and have its wees and its poos. And, um, can you tell the listeners where they can find you online, please?

    23. JHJordan Hall45:40

        Well, up until this last post, um, the two places to find me were on my Medium channel. Um, one's called DeepCode, the other one is called Evolving Culture. Um, or sorry, Emergent Culture, and on my YouTube channel. But I'm not sure that I'm going to continue writing, um, or creating videos. So, I suppose that I wo- 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.

    24. CWChris Williamson46:12

        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, uh, with great interest. So thank you very much for your time. I really appreciated you coming on.

    25. JHJordan Hall46:24

        My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

    26. CWChris Williamson46:26

        Thank you, man.

    27. JHJordan Hall46:27

        Bye-bye. (singing) Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Episode duration: 46:43