How Do You Redesign Civilisation? | Jordan Hall

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (wind blowing) Jordan Greenhall, how…

   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)

   20. 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.

   21. CWChris Williamson4:35

       So-

   22. JHJordan Hall4:35

       So, that's it.

   23. CWChris Williamson4:36

       ... what, what briefly characterizes Game A?

   24. JHJordan Hall4:39

       (laughs)

   25. 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...

   26. JHJordan Hall4:46

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

   27. 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.

   28. 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.

   29. CWChris Williamson5:07

       For sure.

   30. JHJordan Hall5:07

       Because it forces, forces you to actually push your edge and see if anything comes out.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   So eventually, eventually, your,…

   1. JHJordan Hall15:00

      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-

   2. CWChris Williamson15:49

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

   3. JHJordan Hall15:54

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson15:54

      ... you'll be- (laughs)

   5. JHJordan Hall15:55

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

   6. CWChris Williamson16:01

      Yeah.

   7. 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-

   8. CWChris Williamson16:16

      Yup. Very true.

   9. 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-

   10. CWChris Williamson16:28

       Bored.

   11. JHJordan Hall16:28

       ... not per-

   12. CWChris Williamson16:29

       (laughs)

   13. 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.

   14. CWChris Williamson18:33

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

   15. JHJordan Hall18:39

       Right.

   16. CWChris Williamson18:39

       (laughs)

   17. 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?

   18. CWChris Williamson18:47

       Yep, yep.

   19. JHJordan Hall18:48

       If, if penis enlargement really worked-

   20. CWChris Williamson18:51

       (laughs)

   21. JHJordan Hall18:52

       ... imagine what the consequences would actually be.

   22. CWChris Williamson18:55

       (laughs)

   23. JHJordan Hall18:56

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

   24. 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-

   25. JHJordan Hall19:09

       Well-

   26. CWChris Williamson19:10

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

   27. JHJordan Hall19:11

       It would be catastrophe.

   28. CWChris Williamson19:12

       (laughs)

   29. 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.

   30. CWChris Williamson19:17

       It is, it is posturing and dick measuring, isn't it? Yeah, you're-
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Is this like the,…

   1. JHJordan Hall30:01

      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-

   23. 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.

   24. CWChris Williamson35:51

       (laughs)

   25. 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-

   26. CWChris Williamson36:01

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

   27. JHJordan Hall36:04

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

   28. CWChris Williamson36:07

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

   29. 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?"

   30. CWChris Williamson36:30

       (laughs)
4. 45:00 – 46:43

   It's wee time and…

   1. CWChris Williamson45:00

   2. JHJordan Hall45:00

      It's wee time and walk time.

   3. CWChris Williamson45:01

      (laughs)

   4. 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.

   5. 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.

   6. JHJordan Hall45:29

      (laughs)

   7. 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?

   8. 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.

   9. 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.

   10. JHJordan Hall46:24

       My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

   11. CWChris Williamson46:26

       Thank you, man.

   12. JHJordan Hall46:27

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

Episode duration: 46:43