#4 - Jordan Hall: Building a better civilization

31:03So to try and summarize what I understand game A as, it's something that arises out of scarcity in that there are scarce resources that need to be extracted and utilized, whether those are resources from the earth, human resources and because of that scarcity there is therefore a greater degree of competition zero sum competition that has externalities some of which are positive depending on your time frame someone caught up in the collapse of the Bronze Age whatever the reasons they were having this terrible thing happening from their perspective war and so on probably felt pretty negative some in the moment, but of course we can zoom out and look at that from history and go, well actually, but now look at our lives, we're sitting here in these lovely purple chairs, so actually it was probably a positive something from our perspective.

31:57But the point is, there's this scarcity that leads to these externalities that is inherent of game B. Words that come to me, it's capitalistic model, sounds pretty game A.

32:15that said I feel like communism gives me game A vibes too they're both each a different side of the same coin can you explain why? if you remember the basic idea and complicated complex is a very nice framework if you can get it that both communism and capitalism are complicated reductions of the actual complexity of real life in the context of communism it's ideological and bureaucratic complicatedness. In the context of capitalism, it's the reductio that happens when you use money as a protocol for communications between individuals. So it reduces the complexity of diversity of values into a single signifier, which is quite reductive.

32:58So in both cases, you have a complicated system which is reducing the complexity of reality, and they just happen to be different ways of doing it. Which feels like then how Moloch gets in, because one of the threads I've noticed of consistency whenever Moloch gets into a system, it's whenever there's something that's reducing humans down. So like social media, it reduces the human experience down to metrics of how many likes I get, how many shares I get. That is something that feels Moloch-y to me, that gives rise to people then losing sight of the original. Their original goal was, let's say I want to become a social media influencer, and I'm doing it because I want to raise the sanity waterline and increase sense-making for people.

33:45And oh, what's a handy way for me to do that is to get more likes, get more follows. And then at some point I lose sight of what my original goal was and start optimizing more for likes and follows. That is where I feel like that's where the Moloch mindset has got me. It's gotten in and I'm now doing a Moloch-y thing. It's decoupling from my original goal and reduction of complexity of what my goal is. It relates so well to the game A description that you gave before, where you said that it's local optimization at the cost of global negative downsides, which is how you define Moloch as well, that it is the attempt at winning among one domain, which usually leads to sacrifice a bunch of your other values along the way.

34:35So then is game B simply the avoidance of that? It's a form of civilization that maximizes its complexity? Yes. Okay. That's what my definition of win-win is as well. So Moloch is the god, I call Moloch the god of unhealthy competition, building on Scott Alexander's definition of the god of multipolar traps. I like to expand it a little bit because it doesn't quite encapsulate the mindset that gets us into these multipolar traps. I want to double down on a few things that feel like they might be confusing. So to remember, we're making a very specific distinction between complexity and complicatedness.

35:19Game B is not something which maximizes its complicatedness, which as you alluded to earlier, is inexorably self-terminating. So you can maximize complicatedness for a certain period of time at the cost of increasing fragility, which means that your longevity will in fact end, it will be collapse, and it will be usually quite substantial. The more complicatedness, the larger the collapse. Complexity, as far as we know, doesn't have any problem with that. The complexity can in fact, in principle, be endurance for as long as universe. We should be quite humble about exactly how well we understand that.

35:58And has fecundity at these multiple different levels of scale. So there's nothing fragile about it. In fact, it tends to be, if there's anything that's anti-fragile, complexity would be anti-fragile. So the principle, the premise of maximizing complexity has no temporal bound. It could, in principle, continue enduringly. And it has no internal contradictions, to use the old Marxist term, that will lead it to become fragile and collapse on its own. So it has a, and by the way, this emergent characteristic, this notion of emergence is critical. Because emergence represents the concept that our contemporary minds can still accept of actual generativity, of novelty in universe.

36:39So it's an anentropic concept, Leuton principle. It represents that slot in our epistemology. If you assume there's a finite amount of reality, then emergence isn't really a possibility. It's discovery. We've uncovered something that's part of the already finite. Already in existence. But if emergence is really an ontological component, then reality is actually increasing. Something has literally become novel in world. Which do you believe it is? The latter. My premise is that the Big Bang is an ongoing process. Can you elaborate? Yes. If we imagine the Big Bang as happening at T0 and doing nothing but producing undifferentiated energy matter and the laws of physics as we currently understand them, then we get, I think, what is sort of the common story.

37:25however it gives rise to the inquiry of was it was all novel form or all form that we perceive as novel pre-wired at that point meaning the emergence of u was already pre-ordained at t0 it was just a matter of a particular path that came to this location which there are physicists who would say that's the case it's just a very large possibility space everything in that possibility space was created at t0 and the possibility space does not change and there's just finite paths. So that would be the deterministic? The deterministic, yes. And also the many worlds? Possibly. The premise that I would make is actually the, it seems a bit silly, that if creation is possible at all, it would happen exactly once and only once.

38:10It makes no sense to me why that would be a hypothesis that has any real justification. Much more likely it would be if creation is an aspect of universe then it would not go away, it would simply be present. This happens to map to the general naive experience of reality that we see creation happening constantly all over the place, but it flows in through the particulars. So it flows in at the level of every time any kind of emergence occurs in a relationship that is the location that is the equivalent of the location of the Big Bang in the originating story. So that is my theory of physics. I'm happy to have touched on that, because it's what I genuinely suspected it was, like my working theory of good and evil which are not that we should have again reducing stuff down into a dichotomy but if I had to define what is good it's like good is that which enables more emergent complexity to come along and bad is that which permanently curtails it but anyway what I'd like to understand a bit better is what is it about game A that you believe is so inherently self-terminating because I think a lot of people watching aren't convinced of that They're like, well, no, I mean, yeah, we've clearly got problems.

39:18We've got climate change. We've got arms races and some clear, you know, like environmental degradation, we've got to stop. But if we plug all those holes, then society can carry on as is. And I think your claim is that no, it cannot, because there's something about the fundamental way we actually interact with each other that is self-terminating. So can you explain that more? Okay. We talked about this notion of externalities. in the game. And we talked about the notion of bounded intelligence. Meaning, at a certain level of specialization, your capacity to understand the larger environment that you're part of is simply limited by the capacity, the intelligence that you have.

40:05Now, when some sort of activity happens in the world, let's go with the technical innovation just for a moment, because it's helpful. So let's go with the introduction of computers. This actually gives us a capacity to produce a much larger amount of activity in the world. It gives us more power. That's actually the simplest language. It gives us more power. And that more power is going to be throwing substantially more externalities in our environment than we have the capacity to perceive. oftentimes orders and orders of magnitude more. And what this does is this adds, think of it almost like turbulence in water.

40:49It adds complicatedness to our operating environment. It makes everything more complicated, harder to predict, but also higher leverage because we have more power. So we're doing two things simultaneously. We're increasing the impact of our actions because we have more power. We're also increasing the complicatedness of our operating environment because the power creates ripple effects that are outside of the field of our capacity to perceive. Now, what that requires then is we have to increase our intelligence, which is to say we have to increase the precision of our perception and the precision of our action at a level that is equivalent to or greater than.

41:25It's just a simple cybernetic argument, right? Equivalent to or greater than the magnitude of increase in power and the magnitude of increase in the complicatedness of the operating environment that we're in. Now, you can just one little step forward get to the point where you can identify that when you're using complicated techniques, you're always going to be creating more power and more complicatedness than you're creating control and perception. Let's go with, say, our most recent technocratic error in COVID. Let's shut down everything. That's a very high power, very complication, like ripples producing effect.

42:00A very classic example of, you know, technocratic has the word techno at the very beginning. A classic example of a tool. We have a tool, which is we can implement a variety of different kinds of cybernetic control mechanisms through media and law to induce some large fraction of the population to radically shift their behavior from, by the way, a relatively complex indigenous state of people just doing their own shit, to a very complicated state of people entraining their behavior to a small number of top-down control structures. And this is like a giant rock dropped into the pond of human, and by the way, biome behavior.

42:35And you can see that the ripple effect of that is an expanding wavefront of multiple different systemic and modal complication structures. But complicated, like it's making everything. It made the financial system start to become haywire. It disrupted geopolitical equilibria. People are just much less distrustful of... The ability of the existing cybernetics control structure is ameliorated across multiple different dimensions. It's like expertise in general, which is a key element of the Blue Church control structure, is now going straight down. And all of these are called unintended consequences.

43:08And the whole point is that when you're operating in a process like this, this part that you can see, am I on camera? This is not just audio. Okay. This, you're able to sort of focus on this piece. Complicatedness has this as a strength. I can make a local optimization. I can say, oh, I want to, what do you call it, hammer, reduce the number of COVID cases for a period of time that I can identify. Okay. This is everything else in the entire universe, which I am, in fact, not able to perceive clearly. It's not hard to notice that if you do a lot of this, you're going to start getting a degradation, an increase in the entropy of your operating environment, which then will lead to a, what's that called, precession in the stability of your cybernetic control system, which remember is complicated.

43:55It's fragile. It's not very, very rich. It's like an airplane. Small number of perturbations crashes an airplane. And so you get precession in your cybernetic control structure. And I should say, by the way, now I'm using sort of Tainter and Quigley to describe it. There's a lot of different really good theoretic structures that we use to build out the game A diagnosis. Joseph Tainter and Carol Quigley. Quigley, evolution of civilizations. and Tainter, the collapse of, he calls them complex societies, but I would say complicated is what he's talking about. Complexity is not finite in its epistemological character.

44:33Complicatedness is. It is strictly, therefore, less than. So I cannot use a complicated control system to control a complex environment because I have a basic cybernetics. the control system must have at least as much information as the system is trying to control. So you can imagine I've got a, let's say I have a control panel and I've got a system that has 16 potential states. My control panel has one button. No matter what I do, and of course I could try to hack it by having Morse code built into the one button, but let's say the one button has one state. I can't control a 16 state system with a one button input.

45:17I actually have to have the ability to map all the possible states of the system and potentially their process relationships to be able to actually control it. And a complicated system, ontologically, has less information than a complex system. And so you're done. At that point, it's very straightforward. Once you have that language and that structure, the fact that all complicated systems will eventually either terminate on purpose, which is the right way of doing it, or terminate not on purpose, which is what will eventually happen, is simply a fact of that relationship. So we can talk about how that happens many, many different ways, and oh, I get it.

45:59I see why that would occur that way. But that's the TLDR, that's the basis of it. An example of that also may be we are pretty good at modeling how a ball is being thrown, which is a much simpler thing. Or like an airplane flies you can model on a computer, but we have big problems so far still simulating the folding of proteins up until recently. Or other biological interactions for which we need to run studies that turn out differently than our computer simulations of them were showing beforehand. And where we now assume that maybe a big new wave of technological progress will come from if we actually manage to map these biological complex processes due to maybe a computer system that is so large in its complicatedness, massive complicated, that it can actually maybe even contain some complexity within it.

46:55That's, I suppose, a question that we haven't found an answer to yet. So here's the challenge, I'd say, sort of poetically. There's roughly three kinds of complexity. One is natural complexity. So this would be like protein folding, or actually not protein folding, that's actually not particularly complex, but the - Rainforest, maybe? Protein folding in the context of actual metabolism is complex. It has to actually be a phenomenon in a context. Rain system is - Rainforest. Rainforest is species in the context of each other in a particular bioregion. So natural complexity. Then there's anthropocomplexity.

47:30Humans. We're a different kind of thing because we can actually be aware of natural complexity and we can change our behavior on the basis of a variety of different elements. So complicatedness is what happens when you actually have anthrocomplexity relating to natural complexity, which includes, by the way, humans are part of nature. So you've got both. And then you've got technical complexity. And this is a different kind of animal. And here's a way of saying it. Technology can't solve the problem of technology. or to put it another way if I hypothesize an arbitrarily intelligent computer it's part of its own environment so it can't ever ever be cybernetically able to control its own environment because it's part of its own environment if it has the capacity to have enough if it has the capacity to have emergence then it's not able to control itself it actually is changing in a way that causes it to no longer be in cybernetic control.

48:30Therefore, the complicated system collapses of its own. If it doesn't have the capacity to have emergence, then it's finite, and it's, we call it, ontologically smaller than the space that it's in. Because the space that it's in includes it. So all of it, call it as smart as you want, is it plus the context it's in, which is larger. So you fail again. So the thing we've so far discussed is the self-termination of game A. So then game B is probably not self-terminating, which is kind of a carrot, but it's more like a non-stick rather than a carrot. So what is... I could see something like the game indigenous culture that you before described, that's maybe also not self-terminating if it was just to contain its population, let's say, and just survived long enough on Earth.

49:25But it's not enough of a carrot. That's why we're also not aiming to bring game A to game indigenous, but rather to game B instead, right? I imagine there are more things that we would value about it. So what are some of these carrots that we would look at as more closer to prosperity than we would look at as game indigenous being? The potential, the generativity in a collaboration has to do with the number of nodes, let's say people, and the gradient. Remember the diversity, the diversity of nodes. So if every single individual is exactly the same, like literally exactly the same, it's perfectly homogenous, the total potential in the collaboration is no different than a single individual.

50:11So I have to increase the diversity of individuals qualitatively and the number of qualitative singularities. Okay? Now, game A can increase the number of human beings involved in a particular collaboration well above the Dunbar limit. That's one of its primary selective advantages vis-a-vis game indigenous. But it does so in a fashion which is strictly asymptotic in the actual generativity, which is why we have to have culture wars. And we have to actually enforce some significant degree of homogeneity. In fact, past a certain small amount, the homogeneity is enormous. One of the characteristics of game B is in principle, the diversity of individuals actually has no particular limit.

50:53The amount of space contained within the sphere of a particular collaborative field is therefore arbitrarily large, i.e. orders of magnitude more generative than we currently are as a population. So it's unimaginable. it's impossible to describe the carrot because the amount of potential that we're talking about is so much larger than anything we have any frame for thinking about we have no language to describe it that's a carrot it's like a form of art beyond anything you can conceive right now so an increased potential that would touch up on art and interactions meaningfulness, quality in particular just to talk we talked maybe hinted that quantity tends to be a primary modality of game A and it thinks in terms of like heaps like a big pile of money quantity fungible units that have integer values that go up or down quality is the primary characteristic of game B and of course values are fundamentally qualitative this is the reductio of the market we were talking about.

52:05The market takes qualitative values and reduces them to a single integer. So an increase in quality, and by the way, qualities, right? Not just a given quality, but the number, how do you say it? The species, I'm actually having to use philosophy here, like the ontological points around which qualities can even be identified increases. The number of species experienced, The quality of experience itself increases beyond imagination. So you will not just have higher levels of artistry in current experience kinds, like better coffee. You'll actually have qualities of experience that we currently can't conceptualize.

52:46Does that make sense? This feels very transhumanist, but this is actually not at all transhumanist. This is just human. This is what happens if humans just do our thing properly. So what, if any, What is the starting point to try and develop this new system? Is it through conversation? Is it through coming up with better memes? I would propose that if you look at the history of history, the story that we've been in, there has been an increasing presence of Game B under the surface of Game A in every iteration of a winning strategy. So the Blue Church is closer to Game B than the Victorian to the Prussian models were.

53:26How? So if you look at the arc of technology companies in the United States, starting with, let's go with, I don't know, Ford. And you step forward, Ford, GM. I'm going to teleport a little bit to like IBM and then teleport to HP and then I'll go up to Microsoft and then I'll just go to Google for the moment. And let's go with Web3 at the end just to make things political. What you notice is that because Game B has a higher degree of generativity, and because the competitive landscape of win-lose games in game A has become Machiavellian dependent on an arms race, particularly not on the output of generativity, but now on generativity.

54:08Do you see the distinction there? For a while it was whoever had the most powerful gun won. But when the rate of innovation proceeds at a certain pace, you invent a more powerful gun, but if I can innovate faster than you, I counter your gun and get a better gun faster than you can, you're done. So there's that double level. So as game A began to accelerate into this dynamic of that kind of S-curve exponential, you started seeing a higher and higher premium being placed on the generative capacity and less and less placed on control. Control has not given up the game. They're still trying to control.

54:46But every single version of just tech company, for example, has been one where there's been more orientation towards the wholeness of the individual. The agency and autonomy of individuals to come into creative relationships with each other. A lesser and lesser and more fluid hierarchical structure, bureaucracy in which they're embedded. I also think that if humanity exists in a large scale in a thousand years, then that probably precluded some change in interactions and arms races, etc. that we currently have away from that. So as far as I understand Game B, I would imagine that, yes, I find humanity exists in a thousand years, probably a Game B type structure is actually what occurred.

55:34Which is different to, though, assuming that humans just existing by themselves will naturally gravitate towards Game B type structures or not. And the reason I wonder about that is basically the degree to which humans naturally gravitate towards it also correlates to the difficulty with which it will require to get humans towards a game B-type structure. If it's something that is kind of the incentive structures of humanity lead there anyway, then it's probably going to be just like a push that's required versus an extreme shove and change a bunch of behavior types that we currently have. Yes, I think in some sense, from my point of view, it's, like I said, the complex mind is more fundamental.

56:31It was baked in from the beginning. Homo sapiens has the potential of game B already. And so it's not a matter of creating something new or a profound shove. It's more like dialing it in. It's more like an attunement exercise. consciously being able to notice what sorts of things are moving in the right direction and what sorts of things are moving in the wrong direction so in some sense we can actually like a really i think a very nice way is to take it at the individual level like for your own personal life like you probably have a very large number of things that in your wisest moments you know are the right things to do that you don't actually do most of the time kind of like that you may have noticed in your life that when you actually do those kinds of things, when you make really good choices consistently, your quality of life goes up.

57:23So you're like, hmm, these are good choices. And your capacity to make better choices goes up too. So in some sense, it's actually very simple. Just be more wise, make better choices, iterate. And yet we notice, I certainly notice, that so far at least, my dominant life arc has been one of noticing certain points, like a little plateau of like, wow, I'm living life well, and then kind of going unconscious and finding my way back down to a much lower level. And maybe over the whole trajectory, some sort of up gradient, how do you say this, the jury's not in on that yet, but certainly not a smooth ascension.

58:06And so this is, I think, the nature for humanity as a whole. like if we collectively get our shit together and collectively become more subtle and conscious in our choices and just simply live according to wisdom on a more consistent basis take advantage of that the fact that that will increase our capacity to do so and don't slide down into a deeper trough before the clock runs out that's how we do it so it sounds like you know if you were to write up the how to get to game b rule book not rule book but you know step-by-step advice guide it sounds like it very much starts at home yes it starts with the individual don't worry about anything beyond yourself until you can learn to become a game b being yourself don't expect to see anything to be changing in the world is that reasonable yes and it starts in psychology meaning doing whatever you can to free yourself from complicated mind and restore your natural inheritance of complex mind.

59:13You were born with complex mind to a greater or lesser extent. Aspies have a slightly more basic orientation towards complicated, but we're not completely doomed. Integrate right and left hemisphere. Integrate parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. get opponent processing back into their proper relationality, become fully embodied, learn how to use the body as a completely integrated instrumentality of intelligence in world. Increasingly play that game with other human beings. Human beings are not individual bodies, they're not individual minds. It's some large collection of human beings working together that is in fact an actual identity in Homo sapiens.

59:57so practicing that fluidity practicing the re-embodiment but noticing by the way that this can't possibly be an indigenization because we're very very far away from the basic context upon which indigenization is premised and we're genetically like holy smokes the diversity of genetics embodied in all three of us certainly and the entire world with very rare exceptions culturally memetically like the amount of diversity embodied in every human being on the planet, with very rare exceptions, is off the charts and strictly different than anything that had ever been present on the planet Earth 10 ,000 years ago.

1:00:35And so we're by nature, this is the game B piece, we're reinvesting ourselves in our holistic capacities to be human beings, to be complex, and kind of dusting off and polishing up and building out our capacities to dance in the dance of complexity. By the very nature of who we happen to be, we're going to be doing so in a way that is building something new and has a vastly larger potential. There's a lot of really cool tools that are out there. I'll name two. So Benito Roy's tool called Collective Insight, which is simultaneously an embodied practice, meaning you do it, and by doing it you notice the points that are being made, which is a way of simultaneously shedding a lot of complicated mind, sort of weird reawakening complex mind, but also experiencing what complex mind actually is, which of course is extended.

1:01:33It's not just my complex mind, it's our complex mind. And insight, as she names it, is the thing that is the object of complex mind, and sort of it lives here. It doesn't live in our individual heads, and therefore is different in kind than memes. So is this what a hyper-conversation is? Yes, yes. or the hyper-conversation is that, however, also strictly nonlinear in time. and so if the three of us are having a let's just call for the moment a spatially temporally bound hyperconversation this is insight, collective insight every conversation that we participate in that is of that sort is part of the same hyperconversation the same hyperconversation and of course we're engaging right now in a recording which mediation allows other individuals to participate in this exact hyperconversation in a temporally and spatially nonlinear fashion, right?

1:02:35And by hypothesis, if we pull things off, there may be a mind a thousand years from now, perhaps in a different planet, who happens to hear this for the very first time. They are participating in this conversation at a hyper-conversation level. And if you're tuning in, if you're listening to the hyper-conversation in that fashion, you'll notice the possibility of that. Meaning there's a way for your mind to be aware of that possibility. and I don't mean this in a performative or a control fashion, game egoic structures, I mean this in terms of, how do I say it right? Well, just the same way that it actually feels like when we're just talking here, that the expression is something that is open, not closed.

1:03:14How does someone discern between whether they're having what feels like a normal flowy conversation with a friend and a game B hyper-style conversation? Well, first of all, I'm not sure if there's actually a real distinction between those two. If you're having a normal flowy conversation with a friend, that may be exactly what I'm talking about. But it has the characteristic of being a spatio-temporally local version. so the thing about the hyper conversation that I think is more particularly notable is that there's no capacity to be aware of who I'm having a hyper conversation with because they may be anybody anywhere at any future time so it's a different sensibility so is it just a case of if you record the conversation it becomes a hyper conversation virtualize it if you exchange the mediation in a fashion which is no longer ephemeral and no longer think about that as in terms of the binding, like McLuhan's point, orality.

1:04:21Marshall McLuhan, sorry. Marshall McLuhan is probably the primary theorist of the nature of technology and how it works and does, particularly media. The medium is the message was his, the meme that was taken from his work. And a very nice key point to say indigenous to game A, the way he drew a line was between oral and written. I see. And oral and written mind, but also oral and written relationality. So the first time that you're able to mediate outside of orality, and think about orality as temporal, I mean spatial, meaning people who are out there can't hear what we're talking about, happens to have a limit of the number of human beings who can reasonably be part of an oral conversation, probably around 20, and around 150 if you think about multiple different groups that can kind of overhear each other, very Dunbar-y.

1:05:10And of course temporal, meaning right now. So present and present. There's like this weird, awkward adolescent phase as we move into different kinds of mediation, still fundamentally running the software that is premised on orality and careening through the psychedelic landscape of actually a very different kind of mind until perhaps we land here. At the end point of that, with digitization, which of course is an arbitrary medium. Does that make sense? Writing is writing. Digital can be writing. It can also be audio. It can also be video. It can also be AI. And so what happens is when you get to digitization, you get to the simulation, that virtuality, at increasingly becoming what it is in its nature.

1:05:57And another way of talking about the nature of the transition is humanity becoming capable of actually operating in that mode in a truly non-psychotic fashion. Let's all actually make it very, let's get down to kind of rest text. Elon has recently, as far as I know, I don't know what he's been talking about in other zones, but he's been tweeting about collective intelligence for the first time. And in particular, vis-a-vis Twitter, right? Talking about Twitter as a new kind of collective intelligence, this giant brain. The metaphors are a little bit rough, but, you know, whatever. Okay, well, that's true.

1:06:30That's exactly what we're talking about. And the first institution is intelligence. The first game-to-institution must be a new form of collective intelligence because only a new form of collective intelligence that has a categorically qualitatively higher capacity across dimensions of total complexity, precision, and all these different characteristics of what makes an effective intelligence, has the capacity to be the instrumentality to produce the next layer of institutional structures. Does that make sense? I mean, to me it seems very straightforward, but it's sort of been difficult to land, like many, many, many people.

1:07:08almost everybody want to jump that step and start working on, let's make new kinds of schools or new kinds of farms or new kinds of tech companies or new kinds of money using legacy collective intelligences, won't work. You have to form the new kind of collective intelligence that has the minimum of viable product capacity to produce the next layer of institutions. Or even maybe be iterative, that then produces the capacities to produce the... Of course it will be. Yeah, and by the way, meta-iterative, meaning that as the new institutions begin to form, they will increase our capacity to actually grow.

1:07:46I mean, grow. Probably actually in this version, and that's the difference to Utopia, you're not talking about doing those layers three times and then that is the one final institution for all time ever, but rather this process remains being applied consistently and in the, oh, we're now in a game B world, well, let's keep applying this process probably and keep improving the institutions that allow us to increase the collective intelligence. Right. And remember, we say institution, don't import a pattern. Right. Don't think of a university. Right. Go all the way back to the most abstract thing.

1:08:22Here we're actually using the word rather than the current meaning of institution. The meaning of it, which is tricky. Do you think Twitter is a good bootloader for that? Well, that's a good question. what's the phrase? It's a shitty bootloader for it, but it may be the least shitty version that we have available. The best thing we have. It's the best thing we have. It's definitely the best thing we have right now. It's not clear to me how hard it would be in comparison to produce something better. One of the hopes that I had had, and it may still come to fruition, is that Web3, because the potential energy under the curve of Web3 is quite large, if it chose to consciously design a superior form of collective intelligence, could do so.

1:09:11Right now, of course, it's having challenges in terms of the next developmental cycle. And Web3 has chosen a very old-fashioned evolutionary strategy of proliferate, die tremendously, proliferate, die tremendously. And so it's in the die tremendously phase. And that's a strategy. I mean, it can grow. And to the degree to which it survives to the next spring, what comes out the other side will be vastly more robust in lots of different ways, not the least of which will be culture. How would you design a collective intelligence that is robust against the parasitic side of human nature? Because you will seemingly, it seems to be just an inbuilt part of human nature, there will always be a subset of people and it's not always fixed as well.

1:09:58Some people I think can jump in and out of sort of this parasitism and try to co-opt the hive mind for their own moloky ends. How to make it robust against that? Well, let's see. I'll begin with almost like heuristics. The first thing I would do is I would spend a lot of time trying to dust off and leverage the stuff we've already figured out on how to do that. And the older, the better. And so, and by the way, indigenous, even more better. So civilization, a big chunk of every civilization that just go with, say, Rome and Victorian England, is trying to solve that problem. That's an intrinsic problem.

1:10:35That's one of the three basic problems. The other two, by the way, are nature and other game-based strategies. Either another game-based strategy is better than you and eats you, you shit in your own backyard and destroy your own basis, or you're corrupted from parasites in the interior. Those are the three big ones. And so every civilization structure has tried to figure out ways to solve that problem. Think about the Chinese mandarins. the Chinese civilization has as its sort of basic assumption strong centralization and its basic opponent is that unlike in the West China never broke the lineage structure so China has always been large connected lineages that are deeply woven with each other internally to their own lineages woven together into an empire and they innovated middle management earlier than anybody else, which eventually became named the Mandarinates.

1:11:34So there was a particular role, the Mandarin, who was a bureaucratic functionary. And it's gone through, I think, like five different civilization collapses and reboots. And each time they're like, God, we've got to get the Mandarinate more robust. So first it was aristocratic families nominated them and put them in place, complete collapse. Next empire is like, okay, that didn't fucking work. Now, civic civil exam. Like, anybody can sign up, and if they pass the exam with high enough marks, they get to be a Mandarin. So you need to undermine the ability of aristocrats to game the system. Then it was, well, the civil exam was just Confucianism.

1:12:09That didn't fucking work. Now the civil exam is competence in how to actually manage things, right? So each iteration. The current iteration, by the way, is social credit. So the digital Mandarin is what is actually happening. Well, some point in that time, and I can't remember exactly where it was, one of the rules was Mandarin had to be castrated to prevent them from having children. Oh, literally castrated. Literally physically. Metaphorically, okay. The Christian church went to celibacy, which sort of had a similar basic basis. The reason why I'm bringing this up is... Oh, it's a way of curtailing power of the middle management.

1:12:41Okay, fascinating. And changing their incentive structure. Yeah. They were never going to have children, so they had no orientation towards their own progeny. Wow. So it changed the incentive landscape. Why am I bringing that up? Well, first, this orients is towards the seriousness with which every previous culture has taken this particular problem. So heuristic, probably take it very seriously. Like your question, we are the least serious civilization that has ever existed by a lot, by like maybe 12 orders of magnitude. It's really rather shocking. Okay, so take it very seriously. Two, indigenousness.

1:13:19I would focus on highly decentralized and focused on extremely rich human relationships as the fabric that you're operating on. And look at holisticness. The more you decontextualize an individual, the more likely parasitism is going to be able to come in and simulate. So if I'm just taking an individual for one aspect of what they can do in a game A style formal structure and ignore the rest, I'm basically blinding myself to psychopathy. And by the way, selecting for psychopathy. By contrast, if I take a look at the wholeness of a person, meaning, okay, how robust is their whole community? How robust is their family in the context of their community?

1:13:55How robust is their dyadic relationship in the context of their family, right? I'm taking the whole person. How beautiful is their home? How clean and pleasant is their land? Think about this from just the indigenous perspective again. From a game A perspective, this may actually sound very alarming because we suck at this. But for the indigenous people, it's like, do you care for the forest in which you live? If no, then you're broken in some fundamental way. Can you drink the water in the stream next to your house? If no, then I can't trust you with literally anything at all. Do you care for your own children well?

1:14:27Do you care for your spouse well? Do you care for your body well? Consider the whole and all the nested wholeness as a primary evaluation of where you're going to orient choice-making responsibility. And by the way, choice-making responsibility. We don't have the principle of free speech is absurd. there's the responsibility of free speech. There are no freedoms, there are only responsibilities. And they have to be held in perfect symmetry. You're given the ability to do something because you're carrying it heavily into the world. This is the game being move, again, is the reintegration of an arbitrarily diversifying singularity into a fully integrated whole.

1:15:07So the wholeness is you're carrying your particular cross, It's a cross. And it's not your sort of snowflake specialness. It's the uniqueness of your singular beingness in the world. It's something that you're responsible for carrying beautifully into the world. That notion of responsibility. So you should build your identity around responsibility for your external environment or something. Responsibility qua. Just qua. Just responsibility for your dharma. We have a nice language for that. Find your dharma and then actually do it. Is there any role for having a media structure? in its remotely conventional sense in a game B world?

1:15:46Yes, very much so. Oh, really? So part one is like the indigenous part, and that's kind of where I focused first. Part two is the structure, and the structure matters. Like we talked about the blue church evolved in a context dominated by the underlying media topology of television. And when television is the underlying media topology, you're going to get something that looks like the blue church. Speaker and listener. Speaker and listener. Exactly. Ephemerality, no memory. Right. Affect, all about producing an immediate experience. All kinds of interesting characteristics that follow from that.

1:16:23All right. So structure matters. The underlying characteristics that the media gives rise to. Not even an incentive landscape, but an ontological landscape. If you've got one button, certain kinds of behaviors won't happen. If you've got two buttons, certain kinds of behaviors will happen. It's just that design stuff is critical. So we go with media design, to use the language. Ontological design is a really good word for it. That said, as a collective intelligence, we could come up with something maybe even better later? Well, by hypothesis, the first version will be better than we are now, and it will absolutely create the second version that will be better than it is.

1:16:59So probably then the media structure would be one of the first things that we would need to design a better version of so that information can flow better in the first place. because that seems to be a pretty fundamental layer for the collective intelligence part. Yeah, I would say that we're probably between two... Honestly, it only feels like we're two steps away. I was going to say three to be careful, but okay. Between two and three steps in terms of first, second, third versions away from being able to have enough capacity to design something like, let's say, Twitter to actually be functional.

1:17:33We can't currently do it now. we probably need to have one level up and I mean like literally 20 people not huge but we still can't even get to that fucking level isn't that crazy? we literally can't get 20 people in a room or in a hyper conversation who have the nodal capacity and the conscious awareness and the acumen to be able to formulate what the next group would look like the next group is probably not about 150 something along those lines that group probably has the capacity to design something like Twitter as a substrate. And of course that substrate would tend to be, again, highly decentralized and have subsidiarity.

1:18:11So it wouldn't be like one giant glob of whatever, 300 million people. It would happen to have that, but that'd be much less relevant. It would actually be the, it would restructure the graph dynamics so the graph dynamics are actually, how do you say, low entropy. Do you see other behavior structures or something that you feel is closer to this, to how you would envision it being within a high-capacity or a game-B structure. So for example, something like meditation may be closer than further. The ones that seem to be the most particular were the ones that I mentioned earlier. So integrated mind, left, right brain, which meditation helps with.

1:18:56Meditation is a tool, it's not an end. it gets you into a different relationship between how mind works and between mind and body. You mean like logic and intuition? Sure. That's fine. Integration of mind with body, so embodiment. From that particular location, by the way, something in that order, meaning one, two, and then three. Three then is facilitated practice of relationality with other human beings who are operating in an integrated mind-body state. So noticing the difference of what happens. Things like not being triggered when people use words differently than you do. Being curious when people say things that don't make sense to you as opposed to being threatened.

1:19:38Like you'll notice. And if you notice in your body like a fight or flight response when somebody says something that is different than the way you would understand it, because you've been practicing embodiment, that's a noticing and a, oh, okay, interesting, as opposed to a breakdown in relationality. So you can kind of see how these almost become a relational bootstrap. Let's see, what are other ones? Probably similar to that has to do with the cognitive tools. So all the awareness of how cognitive bias works, all the awareness of the different kinds of blind spots. You don't have to have mastery.

1:20:09It's not sort of a medical issue, but it's useful to be able to be aware of that and be able to notice it and have a vocabulary that's shared. Level above that then starts to be the level that I think, oddly enough, where the parasites tend to play because they don't do the bottom part. There'll be access to the various concepts. Say, okay, well, Moloch. Okay, we can now use that concept. We can put it into the center, and we can all sort of like pop into that and rotate it and understand different aspects of it and then bring in another concept. How about mechanism invariant Moloch? Okay, yep, obviously.

1:20:44Every Moloch is by definition mechanism invariant. Okay, cool. What does it look like to talk about, what would it look like to talk about something that would be the anti-Moloch, given an understanding? Right. Okay, cool. Now we're having a conversation about something really interesting, but we had to go through those stages to get there. So probably then something like having open conversations with your friends or even with strangers is actually the type of thing that people currently do. Please keep doing more of. And suffering life honorably. Going through the things that really suck and endeavoring to come out of that a better person.

1:21:17It's a very simple way of describing it, but that's exactly what we're talking about. If you hold back from that, you're setting yourself and other people up to fail at some point in the future when the stakes are higher. I wonder if people need to see themselves more as part of humanity than as individuals, or if that distinction is kind of independent of Game B or not, or if it's beneficial for Game B to see yourself more as human, as part of an organism, humanity. The way that it slanted for me best was when I got the term the world, which is not the same as the earth. Right, not humanity. Yeah, let's include the rest of nature as well.

1:22:02That. Like if you can perceive that, not to perceive yourself as that, but to notice that that is actually what you are. And so it's not a trade-off. Like you're not trading up individuality versus being part of a communal, right? It's that this actually is what you are. And so to be more of what you are implies being able to understand this and express this in a very healthy fashion. Does that make sense of what I'm saying? It's like the libertarian individual, what is it called? The way they reach the sovereignty, which is an inversion of the notion of sovereignty. The atomized individual is in fact not an individual at all.

1:22:43It's a non-existence. It's that game A formal. It's a formalism. an actual human is more singular, more the essence of who they are, precisely by the degree to which they are able to fully be in relationship with a larger and larger context. The thing that keeps popping into my mind, though, is the thing that concerns me is that this feels so absurdly pie in the sky because I'm someone who's been reading about this for a long time, and I know my own self that I, you know, while I can sort of touch on moments of game B-ishness in my behavior, I spend most of my time in still a game A mode of thinking.

1:23:31And if I'm struggling with it this much, how on earth can I expect, you know, if our survival seems to depend upon our ability to create this new hive mind, and I hope you don't mind me using that term, hive mind, but that's the way I think of it, to make this beautiful, complex hive mind that has all these different nodes that are very self-actualized and integral, etc. If I'm struggling to do it myself in my daily life, how on earth can we expect to see that? Well, I guess I would say three things. First, we probably don't. Again, probabilistically, I assume the likelihood we make it is very low.

1:24:03Jeez, okay. Two, if we do, it's probably multi-generational. So your job is actually just to do a motably better job than the generation that came before you. You're not going to get all the way anywhere near the end. It may be your grandchildren. Maybe, if we're lucky. Now, what that means then, what was the phrase, the hammer and the dance? Vis-a-vis extinction. It's going to be a real serious dance between here and there. So it's going to be like swimming really hard to keep our collective species head above water while things are quite rough. You know, between 20 and 35 years, we'll probably, if we make it, will be on the other side of a hill where it'll be more downhill.

1:24:45We won't be done with it. We'll be like, okay, we're definitely in the right direction. But the next 25 or 30 years will probably be very fucking rough. And there'll be a very high likelihood of many, many people just choosing to check out and either die the easy way, i.e. take themselves out, or die the other way, which is they trade life for, or what do you call it? They trade survival for life. They're no longer living. They're merely surviving until they die because they just can't, they don't have the courage to take themselves out the hard way. And then the third. The third is a very different concept.

1:25:17This goes back to that thing I wanted to convey about the new forms of institutions being strictly nonlinear. This is really hard to convey, but the right term is something like holographic. This is a very potent concept if it lands.

1:25:36I talked a while back about the notion that the hyper-conversation, the new form of collective intelligence is the first one. And this gives a sensibility or it conveys linearity, meaning there's one and then there's others and there's others and there's others. And in some sense that's true. But in a more fundamental sense, they're all already here, just very vaguely. So I'll just structure the argument. First, the distinction between a hologram and a photograph. And if I take a hologram and a photograph of, let's say the same thing, let's go with you. So I have a hologram, Igor, and a photograph, Igor.

1:26:17And I cut the photograph in half. I had the left half in my hand. What I now have is a 100 % of exactly half of his face and 0 % of the right half. Photograph. Linear. If I take the holograph and I cut it in half, what I have now is 100 % of his face, but fuzzier. all of the information is conveyed in every piece of the holograph the more pieces I have the more fidelity I get the more intelligent we are in this new hyper conversation the more capacity we have to perceive the lower fidelity elements of the holographic institutions that are in the process of being informed the more embodied they are the more pieces we get put together the more clear they are there's a crossover point so what's happening is we are currently immersed all the way fully in the new institutions but very vaguely.

1:27:09What gives us some possibility of hope is that even in spite of the lack of our capacity, as we get even the least bit of up gradient in either direction, either we put more pieces of the holograph in place or we become more intelligent, therefore more capable of perceiving the low-fidelity representations, more of the total holograph becomes available for us to actually perceive, and that's a one-way ratchet. That goes in line with that you said that we actually have naturally that complex mind. So we actually have some ingrained, innate ability to perceive it. It's just that the rest of our institutions, our complicated mind behaviors and selves don't allow us to have fidelity on the view.

1:27:56Yeah, this is kind of a weird example, but it feels quite appropriate. like a week ago, 10 days ago. I was with my older daughters, 20 and 18, in college. Horrors, but in the event. And my daughter wanted to do axe throwing as a Christmas present. So, you know, this is Texas. I don't know if this is everywhere in the country, but certainly in Texas there's axe throwing. So we got some axes and we never thrown them. For whatever reason, I was relatively good at axe throwing. Like on throw number two, my axe was hitting the target and go forward. My 18-year-old, it took her at least an hour probably more like 90 or 70 minutes for the axe to land which was pretty fucking frustrating right she's trying all kinds of different things and it's just not landing now of course what's happening is there's a holistic complex holographic knowing that is happening inside her body that it's very like i'm you know tip take a step back you know shift your hip all that kind of complicated thing that can be conveyed in language and a little bit of what looks like progress, but it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

1:28:59Then it worked. There was a point at which it dropped. And we've all had this experience. Embodied knowledge has that kind of a thing. You nudge, you shift, you move, you don't quite know exactly what's going on. But then when you hit it, you hit it. And then you can pretty quickly actually get from the first hit to like, okay, now I can regularly get the ax to hit. Now I'm working on getting precision. And then of course you're on a different curve. And it's more like that. one thing since you mentioned since the moment you said it oh I think we're actually very unlikely to make it I'm just now wrestling with as a as someone who's trying to communicate getting more people to think about this stuff but also communicate it in a responsible manner I can imagine there's a lot of viewers right right now listening to this going what the fuck you didn't give a probability and I don't want you to give a probability but by saying very low that comes with a lot of baggage and I guess A, is it even responsible to sort of talk about it in that way?

1:29:58Because if you're giving too much of a doomerie message, I do believe that thoughts become things to an extent, right? It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we keep telling everyone we're doomed, we're doomed, we're doomed, then we're doomed. Because I think it sucks energy out of the room essentially, for many people at least. So what do you think about that in terms of is it even, should it be something we should sugarcoat more as communicators. I'm not going to for this podcast because this is where we're at and the truth is the truth and I think the audience can cope with it. And secondly, you don't seem like a depressed person.

1:30:34You don't seem like someone who has this, the level of knowledge of that, of such a do-me thing on their shoulders. You know, you seem to be quite, I don't want to say flippant, but like you're just comfortable in this and you're like, and that is that and on we go. How do you have that mental resilience? Oh, well, let me do the first one first. So John Verveke has begun talking about something he calls cathedral mind. And the point of cathedral mind is to start building a cathedral with full knowledge that you will not see its completion. What is the probability that you will see the end of the cathedral?

1:31:11Zero. Still fucking doing it. Why? Because it's the right thing to do. That flip is virtue, right? not utilitarian, and I'm not doing it because it has an end that I can perceive or value. Because it's larger than me anyway. We're talking about something that's simply larger than yourself. So you're doing it because you begin to guide your choices on the basis of what is the right thing to do, expressing virtue into the world properly. And in that case, this is an interesting little move, in that case, one, you will not be daunted by the fact that the probabilities are low, but will actually be emboldened by the fact that it is your responsibility to go directly into it even though the probabilities are against you.

1:31:57But even more importantly, too, it is only human beings who operate in that fashion that gives us any possibility at all. The probabilities are low but you can truly affect them then even a utilitarian mindset could see sufficient value in working on it. It could try. So what do you mean with, but how do you mean with, it is only that mindset that would? The utilitarian mindset is very functional at the left hand of the king, but not on the throne. Because you will experience many moments where you will lose faith in the possibility. You will see the probabilities dip below a certain threshold.

1:32:38If you don't have the resilience in your system to be making choices regardless of that, then you will lose faith and you will drop out. So in the face of insufficient intelligence, which kind of, as we previously discussed, is by definition nearly the case, you will not be able to act on simply utilitarian metrics. So you will have to go to something else. And that's what you mean with acting upon virtue in those situations. And that's a solid foundation. That's a foundation that's not going to be moved by the vicissitudes of time or context, the kind of shit that's going to get thrown at us, the challenges that you'll have as an individual, and then to the degree to which you're able to use strategic, calculating, accounting mind to be of service, great, and that's the proper role.

1:33:31Now for me, well first of all, you're only seeing me in the context of this conversation. I would say, depending on the particulars, I probably spend about 30 % of my time in a deep state of depression. but not 90 % of my time.

1:33:49It very much depends on circumstances. It's like a threshold. Mostly very personal stuff, very specific personal things that hit me below my emotional resilience that will take me below, and then everything gets very challenging. Then it's like, fuck it. Outside of coffee, what are the things that give you higher hopes where your probabilities go up?

1:34:15sex is good. But that's more, I would have assumed, that's more like a... I don't mean meaningless sex, I mean actual lovemaking is the proper terminology. And you don't mean it as a escape? Exactly, I mean the opposite. The exact opposite of escape. You mean that this deep connection between humans is possible. Yeah, exactly. Building more of the good shit. And every time you get that experience, like when we talked about the good game, like whether it's a single moment of like an emergent possibility with my four-year-old daughter. Just one, like, oh, like that. Okay, humans can do this. Any moment of transcendent beauty.

1:35:00I'm talking about, for example, the first time that my daughter learned how to tell a joke. Yeah. Right. Or where you actually do a thing where you're play acting some really emotionally challenging thing for her that she's been struggling with and she gets it and processes it like that. Like when I say emergent possibility of growth in who she is, her ability to be a being in the world. I think that's actually honestly nurturing to the soul in general. Like anytime you can be in relationship with someone and you participate in this creative, you know, the big bang, you participate in the big bang, creating more reality.

1:35:35And I noticed that this is almost like a muscle. Like if you want to, you can just experience a tree branch and notice, oh yes, I can experience this as being an example of transcendent beauty. But there are also moments of transcendent beauty where you don't have to flex the muscle very hard. Those are helpful. So it sounds like family and relationship is a very key part of it for you. And I would imagine that generalizes to most people. Yeah. And I also think that the family and relationship cuts the other way as well, which is why it's so interesting. one it's very hard that's where a lot of challenge lives but then two from an indigenous perspective it's where the highest possibility of meaningfulness lives too and so watching that like when we talk about we don't make it and we feel sad we're probably not that concerned about our car we may be probably not that concerned about our house a little bit more but like our kids that really hurts so it's like a very tight bind It's a very intense thing.

1:36:39Now, maybe too intense, which is why other things are good. One other thing that I think is quite interesting is feeling like you're part of a lineage that's been doing this. Imagine other people with cathedral mind. For me, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is an example of that. When I listen to the Ninth Symphony, I can feel Beethoven way the fuck back there, going, I'm not going to see the other end of this 0 % chance. It's going to be hundreds of years, if not more, before humanity is really able to get to the point that I'm playing in this music. But I'm feeling that point, and I'm going to express it with as much mastery as I can so any human being who listens to this is going to be reoriented in the right direction and given a little bit of extra capacity to get there.

1:37:20And so almost like plucking from history all the other fellow travelers who've been part of the story of trying to move everything in the direction of Game B simultaneously to benefit from what they've gifted, but also to feel and honor their gift is a feeling of fellowship. that I personally find potent. What role does AI play in all of this? Because some people, particularly the techno-optimists out there, particularly who are working on building AI capabilities, one of their arguments would be, well, we need a superintelligence. We essentially need to build a new god to help us get through all these interlinked crises.

1:38:07to help us figure out the better, to put the demons of our nature in a box, essentially, or to help whatever this new emergent structure is that needs to exist. You could argue that AI is perhaps an essential, it would certainly shift the probabilities more in our favor. Would you agree with that? My response is a little bit complex. I would say that AI is, in fact, sine qua non. What does that mean? Without which nothing. In other words, it is necessary. But it's one of the most problematic aspects as well. So if you're building a fire, you're playing with fire. You need the fire to cook and stay warm and keep wild animals away.

1:38:50And you're building a fucking fire, so be careful. It's more like that. I would say that the two or three biggest risks, it's funny, these are just kind of simple. I don't need to be sort of Eliezer Yudkowsky trying to detail out and give him funny names. One, obviously, is hubris. Our particular version of the species has been unbelievably, astoundingly reckless with regard to letting genies out of the bottle. I mean, it's out of control. If you really enumerate the amount of incredibly powerful, and I don't mean this positively, I mean in terms of the potency of impact, events that we've dropped into our environment, social, cultural, whatever, without really, in some sense, even the least consideration of the implications.

1:39:40What was the phrase? We don't necessarily need to let all the genies out of all the bottles all at once. Some significant increase in humility around our capacity to actually understand the consequences of our actions would be quite useful. And most of the AI folks seem to lack that in spades. The incentives are designed to let a genie out because it's like, hey, look, I found this genie here. If I don't, then the other person's going to. This is the Moloch problem. So then we're going to get to the second piece, which is the classic Moloch problem. And I'm going to loop that through because in its essence, AI is Moloch.

1:40:23At its essence, it is a finite state machine, a very large capacity that has its primary characteristics separating complexity into complicatedness. That's what it does. like more than anything else, that's what it is. It's quantitization. It's taking the continuity of the analog world, reducing it into some kind of digitized artifact, and then running some kind of finite state algorithms on top of it and producing an output of a new set of finite state data points. So then the point would be this thing that is the anti-Moloch, we just need to make sure that things are in their proper location.

1:40:56So this AI belongs at the left hand of the throne, not in the throne. Something else, the anti-mool lock, belongs in the throne. Once those are in proper relationship, absolutely. Can't get it done without this AI. We need to have something at that level of capacity to deal with the world that we're operating in. But we have to reintegrate technology, technological complexity, back into anthro complexity, back into natural complexity. And we need to actually be thinking about that seriously. I mean, the level of seriousness that we're applying to this is, what, 18 orders of magnitude below the level of seriousness that it actually needs to be.

1:41:32I'm using that as such a large number to say, I'm not even sure if it's greater than zero. And I don't mean, there's lots of people who are thinking about it, but they're not, it's weird, the lack of attention and capacity is being deployed to this particular issue. Like they think about, for example, trying to solve the alignment problem, which is to say, well, how do I make sure that I put Moloch on the throne and make him really be my friend? No. This is the question, right? What is this anti-Moloch in essence? And how do I make sure that actually is in place? And that's the thing that is then allowing us to actually bring this into relationship properly.

1:42:08There's a larger world than just humans and AI. So to finish up, what are you currently working on that is exciting you the most? Because I know you've got a lot of things concurrently going. And is there anything specific, any call to action you can give to the audience that would either be helpful in regards to making that more actualized or is just most helpful to people watching for them to be doing, to bring about more of a Game B world. Well, I suspect there may actually be something. Recently, like in the last couple of weeks, maybe the last three weeks, I've noticed a number of inbounds, people sending me things.

1:42:56that as I was interacting with them as individual things, I started getting this flash, like say intuition, that quote unquote, the hyper conversation was entering a new moment of possibility. Like something seems to be popping. There seems to be an emergence there. And my experience is that there's a cycle of consciousness, meaning we become aware of something in a very subtle way. in a very difficult-to-name way, a very vague way. And then we experiment with it, we play with it, we orient towards it, we may even have conversations about it in a difficult-to-name way, and it becomes more clear.

1:43:39And then we'll start to be able to name certain pieces of it reliably. And there's a way of embodying deep things. This is art, by the way, embodying deep things and expressing them in more shareable fashions. And my sense is that the hyper-conversation is moving into a threshold of that sort. there's more and more people that are becoming conscious, like speaking about aspects of it that I feel like just my intuition is that that's going to be a thing over the next year maybe the next 18 months Do you think there's a particular website or virtual location that is coalescing around? Again, is there somewhere that people can go?

1:44:19Oh, heavens no Maybe there should be one In fact, the exact opposite you actually want it to be strictly non-local meaning everywhere I see, you don't want it to be a website you just want more people to be thinking of the concept and for it to start springing up at home or in the pub exactly, notice when you're having a random conversation with the guy in the pub is this actually part of the hyper conversation because he may have been listening to a podcast before he came to the pub and there may be something in that podcast that's actually relevant to the thing you're thinking about right now it may have nothing to do with anything you're going to say to him but it's going to percolate in you and it's going to come back out in something that you're doing in your software design.

1:44:56That's what I'm talking about. Do you think it would be helpful for people to point that out as it occurs, as kind of like building the muscle to notice? Some people, yes. Any community where that's available, meaning it wouldn't be too thick. Oh, I mean, not only in conversation, but also maybe to oneself. Oh, to oneself, yes. Very much so. I would say, well, the two things that I'm doing, One is I'm trying to slow down my mind so that I can notice when that feeling or even some of the sensations, like a flash. Oftentimes I get images that pop into my head. I'm trying to slow down my mind enough and train myself to pay more attention to those other things and then also be able to give myself time to be curious about what that might imply or mean.

1:45:47it's almost like a creative process and like I said I'm also trying to notice when a moment emerges like a, what do you call it an example of something like Cineus but that may be a bit too much of a novel concept here a moment of emergence is the best I can do when somebody sends something to me and I look at it and I say this feels like it's connected to more, like it's evidence of a larger event that's occurring. It doesn't feel like it's isolated. And again, being curious about it, not being determinative. I don't want to give it meaning, I just want to sort of be like, what is that, and how does that kind of weave different pieces together?

1:46:33So that's what I'm doing. But the point of this is I can only represent one eight billionth of this story. And so that's a tiny, tiny piece. Everybody's particulars are going to be simultaneously their particulars, but also everybody's going to have something to add into the conversation. I suspect that there's a curiosity about what's happening, that metacognition looking at it, going, huh, that's interesting, that will lead to both more conscious and also more unconscious, more just sort of like, I don't, you get it, more conscious and more unconscious, There's experiments and events in that piece, and that's a higher level of functioning.

1:47:15We're beginning to explore the nature of this collective intelligence with more deliberation and a bit more sophistication. So one of the things I will be doing until I get depressed again is having conversations consciously, like publicly, I mean publicly like this, consciously, simultaneously participating in the hyper-conversation and articulating or discussing it. so that'll be something that's the answer to your question right, so doing the two things concurrently trying to stay present within the conversation but also having a portion of your consciousness aware of and tracking the hyper-conversation well thank you so much

1:47:58thanks for listening everyone and to Jordan and Igor for joining this episode as always lots of links in the show notes do check them out, I especially recommend Jordan's blog and also the Game B Wiki. It's a great body of work. There's a lot to dig into there. And it's also something I imagine that our win-win community might be able to contribute to. We're all essentially working on the same thing, just slightly different names. So do check it out. And yeah, thank you. Catch you next time.