00:00Jordan Hall is a, uh, a being, a person, and the ideator behind, uh, Game B and Civium. And Civium is a system that aims to solve a global scale problem. And if you're here, you're probably interested in sensemaking and global scale risk. And many people now are describing the problem space well and what's wrong with society right now, but there are far fewer people who are discussing solutions. And the series is about solutions. And Jordan Hall has the shape of a solution. So we're here to find out if it fits, because our language is not always in complete alignment.
00:39I like to start these conversations with, uh, definitions, just ground the conversation to just get an idea that we're on the shared meaning of certain words before we go off deep into using them. So I'm just going through a list of words. I want you to give a one or two sentence definition, and it's okay to pause as long as you need to summarize. That sound good? Sure. Civium. Civium is an effort and an instantiation of Game B. Therefore it involves an embodiment at the physical level, at the virtual level, and at the spiritual level of the Game B specification. Okay, implies that it is local, global, and universal. That's good, that's great, fantastic, thank you.
01:20Game B. Game B is a design specification for a post-civilization human context. It must meet or respond to the breakdown of civilization and provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for a mode of global scale human relationality that at a minimum is not self-extinguishing and ideally has evolvability. Evolvability, okay, that's very clear, thank you. Um, meaningful. So where do you use this a lot? Meaningful has to do with the degree of potential present in a relationship. Okay. And relationship. Relationship is the emergence of a new being as a consequence of the interaction between two current beings. I love that definition, that is very beautiful.
02:13Thank you. Meaning. Meaning is a reference to the potential of a relationship. Upgradient. Upgradient has to do with a vector, an increase that involves choice. Okay, fantastic. Commoning. Commoning is a word that is endeavoring to describe the form of governance that is appropriate to that which is sacred. That's that's, I love that, thank you, um. Value. Value refers to the felt sense of potential in relationship from the point of view of the subject to the other. That's good, thank you. Second order effects. Second order effects is an epistemological frame that presents the notion that the systemic consequences of some particular action can transition to domains that are exterior to the domain of the intended action.
04:18Okay, and finally sensemaking. [Music] Sensemaking is a practice of orienting self in relationship to world in a direction of an upgradient of meaningfulness. Okay, perfect, thank you. Next I'm going to have you evaluate a number of statements that I have written out based off of what I've consumed about the information you've put out into the world about Civium right. I've sort of gone through your videos multiple times and I've evaluated and tried to understand or get an idea of where your mind is regarding these things.
05:21And so when I say these, I want you to react with a score between 0 and 100, with 50 meaning you're completely uncertain about that claim, 100 meaning that is absolutely true, and 0 meaning it is absolutely false. All these statements are assumed to be neutral, not good or bad, which can, that can kind of make people change how they're evaluating these. So if you feel something is true but you would like to communicate that it's like a negative thing or a positive thing, you can also communicate on a scale of negative one to one.
05:57Negative one being this is just a very bad thing even though it might be true, one being it's a great thing, but that's optional, and it is a felt, you know, experience, and you know, if you have a process that you go through with like a Bayes theorem, you can also use that, um, but it's really just a practice of engaging and quantifying your certainty. Okay, first claim is that Civium is designed to foster meaningful mutually advantageous relationships. Uh, the word advantageous is ambiguous to me.
06:34Okay so this is a point where I want to clarify if the language is ambiguous, let that guide your numbers. If it's uncertain in your mind, feel free to go towards the center in terms of uncertainty. I have a request that you provide a little bit of preamble to the preamble to the first part with the, uh, percentages. Yeah but that in many cases my response had to do with the perception of the kind of the ambiguity latent in the frame. Yeah yeah yeah. So if somebody is listening to that, the whole point is to notice that if there's a surprise that's actually an invitation to recognizing the implicit ambiguity.
07:11Exactly. It's very difficult to, yeah, that's it, you got it. Okay that is, that is the inherent nature of the process and it's good that you have that, so I can just cut it and put it there before. Civium is designed to foster meaningful mutually advantageous relationships, point seven eight. Okay, that's actually very useful. The goal of Civium is to upgradient the wellness of those interfacing within it. 0.37. Oh that's very interesting. Uh, Civium, what's that? Uh, there's going to be a section where there'll be space for that, okay, is a place. 0.98. Oh interesting. The next question was, um, or statement is, a Civium can be a place. Um 0.99 repeating.
08:49Okay okay. I was surprised by that because in one of your videos you explicitly say it's not necessarily a place. Well you didn't say that it is only a place, you just that it is a place. Okay okay that's a good clarification, thank you. Wow I love when I come across the answers that like I did not expect, you know, it really is helpful in aligning me understanding where your mind actually is at. There's a lot of integrity in that particular question. So I had, of course, of course, that's a point. Because in the modern world most of our evaluation of information is without context, right? Right. Constantly in this practice of just saying a snippet, and we don't have good means to practice to refine our language to be precise, um, [Music] and then sort of ensure that like the right meaning has been transferred, we make a lot of assumptions that we understand.
09:20There can be multiple Civiums. 0.66. Okay. Civiums can interface, um, one. Okay good, that makes sense with your, uh, explanation of there being a membrane for interface, um. Civiums can merge, one. Okay that's great. Our institutions are straining under the burden of modern technology, 0.99 repeating. The concept of a Civium should be established via a social contract, zero. Great, um. China's social credit system is dangerous, uh, 0.5.
10:29Wow I like that, do you have, you have a practice of doing this before? Um, not as such, no. Okay, you're doing great. Most people get very confused, um. Dolphins have names for each other, 0.83. Okay. And this is finally the last, uh, present focused claim. Non-humans can participate within Civium, one. Perfect. I'm next going to move into the future for a series of predictions. In 50 years, Civium will be the dominant form of human organization, 0.5. I love that. Uh, in 50 years, something like Civium will be the dominant form of human organization, 0.62. Civium will evolve, 0.65.
11:24Okay. In 80 years, humanity will mostly store value in money and make decisions collectively through markets. I'm sorry, I forgot how to say, um, highly confident that's not true. Oh, high confidence that it's not true, so that'd be zero. Okay 0.12. Okay yeah, I'm I'm pretty aligned on that as well. I really vibe with your section on the second mode of Civium where you're talking about like hopefully, ideally more of our decision making processes go through these alternate systems and less and less through like the old token based systems, which I really want to ask you that, um.
12:16Civilization will collapse in our lifetimes, and the majority of people will consider it to have collapsed, 0.68. Okay. The, I don't know what to call this, this because there's really no name, but the sensemaking community will converge to form a new system that is significantly more functional than existing systems, point five. Okay. I don't understand what's referenced by the term sensemaking community. Yeah it's a hard one, it's a hard one. It's something that I'm observing of people emerging communicating within a certain frame of ideas. It's okay if it's unclear.
12:56The language you use to communicate about consciousness will evolve, 0.8. Okay. Humanity will enter a state of consciousness that most view to be somewhat higher than their previous waking experience, and this elevation will sustain itself over time, this is a, this throws an error. Okay I can explain that more if you'd like at some point. Sure sure. Uh, so that would, are you saying that it doesn't account to just uncertainty but it's something beyond the spectrum of reaction? Correct. Okay perfect, that's fine too. The majority of humanity will view some non-human species as people within the next 50 years, 0.93.
13:31I like that. All right so finally we're going to go into claims about the past or understanding of history or your own personal life. So first off, the unknowable one, covid was originally transmitted by an animal at a wet market, .08. Okay okay. The last four years damaged Americans' trust in institutions, 0.97. Okay. Uh, the last four years created an impetus for change, 0.9. Okay. Your experience with nootropics led to your work in systems change, zero. Okay um. Your original intended meaning of Game B has been subverted, 0.53. Okay um. The US government handled the vaccination distribution well, 0.5. Okay. The conception of Civium significantly altered your life path, one. I like that, um.
15:06In the last 10 years you have gotten better at communicating about complexity, 0.82. There's hope. [Laughter] Um, this one's abstract again. The movement to a consciousness based on a self, self in quotations, was intertwined with the development of language. Would you say that again? The movement to a consciousness based on a self was intertwined with the development of language. 0.85. I feel that way as well, okay. You did good work in your 20s. .86. Okay you did good work in your 30s, 0.78. Okay. You have done good work since your 30s, um, [Music] 0.89. Okay so that was just the short form thing, the rest out from here you can just flow as freely as you want, sound good?
17:02Okay okay. This is an important question for me. People tend to personify organizations to create relationships with them, um, but your work on Civium is very focused on interpersonal human relationships. But, um, there's always a relationship, um, between the people and the concept that holds them together. And different people put different levels of meaning into whatever concept connects them. Like there's, you know, a cult, a club, a corporation, a Congress, a city, a Civium, they're all ways for people to bind together to do some sort of work together. So the question is how does Civium take into account how people interrelate with organizations and the tendency over time for people to put too much meaning into an organization?
18:07Hmm, from the point of view of free flowing, um, what I would say is that what I'd like to do is provide a few concepts and then use that to answer the question. Okay, go ahead. So I would, I would propose that we can talk about relationship from the point of view of objective-objective, objective-subjective relationships, objective-objective relationships, okay, okay um. A sort of an objective-objective relationship might be something like the the handshake protocol in TCP. Subjective-subjective relationship might be like our conversation right now.
19:04A subjective-object relationship might be the thing that you're precisely bringing up, a relationship between, say, me and Apple, exactly, non-subject. For the most part, subjective-objective relationships are an error, they're a confusion. Objective-objective relationships are what we usually refer to as nature or natural law. As we build technology, one of the challenges that we've run into is the degree to which we are actually violating the integrity of objective-objective relationships by breaking symmetry conditions, that's one part of the situation we find ourselves in.
19:49But also as we more fundamentally create more and more objective entities that we identify as having subjective relationships, we create a breakdown of the subjective-subjective. Civium endeavors to put every one of these in their proper place. So render unto the object what is objective. You might imagine for example, more explicit if we think about this from the point of view, for example, of law, move more into the smart contract domain, which is explicitly objective-objective, thereby freeing up more to be able to be held in the subjective-subjective domain, which we might think of as being wisdom or healing or equity or commoning.
20:27I want to clarify something real quick, because you just released a video yesterday where you referred to wisdom in relation to the state. Is this a different usage of that word? No, it's exactly the same use, but it's a different use of the word state. Okay go ahead. In that particular video I called out the fact that this requires us to radically redefine the notion of the state. The effort in that particular one was to talk about the way that we can move pieces of the bundle of responsibilities that have been bound up in an improper construct which we currently call the state, and in so doing we will shift the nature of the state.
21:07So there's a whole bunch of semantic complexity in that particular video, I'm not super happy with it, but okay deciding, is that one all right? Well thank you for clarifying. Yeah, decontextualizing that one I think is, uh, too much. Okay where was I? Ah, so Civium, by enabling the movement of more objective-objective and vastly more subjective-subjective, then clears the space for whatever level of objective-subjective there actually needs to be, which will be much much less than in the contemporary environment, which frankly is characterized by a hypertrophication of objective-subjective relationships.
21:38I'll give you an example, one example would be, for example, in the context of Civium, objective entities, the kinds of things that you might enter into an objective-subject relationship, must by the terms of their objective-objective structure have brief lifetimes. Okay okay. All right which subsystems in Civium account for second order effects of actions taken by members of the Civium? And how, you can, subsystems can refer to modes. Okay, the modes you discussed, there's at least two, and I can use the previous concepts to help actually.
22:18Okay perfect. So there's one mode which is responsible for design in the context of the objective-objective. [Music] If we'd like to, we can think of that as being sort of the designers' guild, or that group of people who are oriented towards the stewardship and caretaking of the set of designs that are driving the relationships between technology and technology and technology and nature. To be more specific, the people who are watching our smart contracts and monitoring the actual consequences that are being produced by our smart contracts, of course more, but that's a good simple example.
22:58The second mode is the mode that has to do with commoning in general. So this mode is is of the the subjective-subjective and is a continuous process of actually allowing disruption, conflict, hurt, break, to be sensed, to be identified as a signal of second order effects, therefore to simultaneously present a need and an opportunity for addressing the particular. We'll call that healing, an upgradient in our wisdom commons, and a a strengthening of the coherence of the whole, and we can call this the the three holies.
23:52Quick question, do you view the staking, uh, token for proposals as the implementation of commoning within Civium, is that correct? No, mode three. Mode three is design. Okay okay so which mode would you refer to as commoning? Commoning would be, if I recall correctly, I don't remember which order I put it in, I'm with one, I believe the one that has reference to individuals interacting with each other in direct non-monetized relationships. Okay. I think I think that might have been mode three because I remember you were defining the first mode as a traditional token. I'll have to check on that.
24:41Oh then it would be mode two. Okay so the the nature of that rollout was traditional token mode one. In mode two individuals are steered by the serendipity engine towards vocational relationality relationships where that are strictly non-monetized and are oriented towards a serendipitous increase in individual and relational and therefore collective well-being and wisdom commons. Okay um, something you said connects to a later question, which is, we're adding the designers which I'm going to refer to as developers. Offloading sensemaking to any system requires incredible trust and faith in the developers of the code base of that system. How is that trust maintained?
25:39Um, so here I think again I'll refer to concepts, and in this case what I'd like to do is call out the concepts that were used by, uh, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, occur mostly on the what you call the societies of discipline, and Deleuze calls out something he calls the societies of control. And what I'd like to point to is that we have a default still, a default sense, that is the sense of the societies of discipline, which has to do with siloing, he calls them disciplinary institutions. So for example an engineering class, so that a given individual would perhaps be categorized as an engineer, and a cluster of engineers might be considered the engineering department, and then the engineering department might have a relationship with say the marketing department and the finance department, right.
26:21So you have these homogeneous groups that are composed of specialized homogeneous individuals that have relationships through group to group boundaries, disciplinary institution. In the context of of what Deleuze refers to as control, that set of basic ontological characteristics is no longer present. So a given individual is not an engineer, although a given individual might participate more than others in tasks that are of the kind engineering. Okay all right.
27:08So therefore every individual has as a primary basis physical relationality. So you have a strong amount of actual time spent in your embodied state relating with other human beings who are quite distinct from the activities that you engage in in your virtual state, and doing all sorts of very nice physical human embodied stuff like growing food and dancing and things like that, but with continuity of relationship, right, not with, um, strangers or weak bond relationships, but with strong bond relationships, what we would call a proper community.
28:38Now this creates, so this is one, there's two, that's one. This creates a much stronger basis for trust, because you will have awareness, people actually have awareness of the specifics of a given individual, the Dunbar style intimacy awareness of the specific context of an individual, where are they right now, where's their health and well-being. And the individual will have a value structure, and very much you're speaking to some assumptions around anthropology and the the evolution of how a mind works, that is grounded in these sort of an externalized sense of self, which is, will disable, downregulate, the degree to which atomized egoic choices will be dominating their choice making infrastructure. Does that make sense? Yes yes.
29:26Okay then the second mode that individuals will be spending time in are in these commoning relationships. These commoning relationships will create a continuous introspection on their own interior, which is to say taking responsibility for a greater and greater degree of capacity to make choices that are effective. And I'm here specifically referring to it in the way that Forrest Landry describes it, which involves collaborative healing, individuals supporting each other in continuously healing the aspects of themselves that inhibit their capacity to make effective choices.
30:04And an orientation towards the um, the sort of the fundamental notion of the sacred, or the wholeness that is greater than self, greater than your smaller or lesser self. This is a second mode or second style of how individuals can be made more fluid in the ways they're actually able to guide their choices, and and also a second-order way that presence of particular events that are happening in the social field will be more widely distributed, not captured inside small cabals, small groups.
30:45So now all of that sits in the context of then how is the design process actually delivered. The design process is a social activity meaning everyone participates, some might participate more than others. But everyone, in the conception that I've put forth, so it's a good concrete example, uh, everyone is provisioned with the sort of the design tokens which they use, their civic responsibility to allocate to the designs that they feel are the most valuable. The proposals is, are you referring to the proposals for, um, projects?
31:23Yes, just to recapitulate, there were uh three aspects to that, one was a proposal which identifies an objective value, yes you should do this. The second was designs which articulate specifications for how one might respond to that proposal. And the third was, was individuals raising their hands to actually have solved the problem, or proposing to. All right thank you for clarifying. And tokens can be allocated across all three. So I could allocate to simply proposals saying yes this is valuable but ambiguous, or I can allocate to a specification of design at many levels of abstraction.
32:09I, to a whole design, or to a particular piece of a design, or I can in fact choose to say yes this particular suggestion to open it, to activate the design to solve the design, is green-lit to happen. The third is not a token allocation but it's a secondary effect of token allocations. So this is a civic duty first, the expectation is that everybody has these and everybody's engaged in that to some level. And all of this of course is happening at the level of the objective-objective, which is happening in public and happening in an open transparent way, so everyone has the ability to observe what's happening.
32:49Okay so that's the answer to the question broadly speaking. So the hope, and of course we have a, uh, how do we say this, once you begin the process of actually doing something you rapidly begin to explore a very large number of things that you had no notion of before you began doing it. We can say with some some confidence that the closure of particular subsets as a consequence of complexity and as a consequence of potential speciation of paradigmatic models will likely happen.
33:29Even just the phrase that I just said is an example of itself. I used a certain amount of semantic complexity to describe something, by definition some large fraction of the human population will not have access to understanding what I just said, and it becomes a sort of a subset or a subculture who has that. Take, you know, blockchain and smart contracts is already a subculture. So we have an ability, a necessity that the resourcing of activities that are happening in the design mode is general, but in reality there will definitely be something that we might call specialization or guilding, which has to do with people who are holding particular competence, um, and what do they call them, vernaculars, that will narrow the affordability of certain large potentially large portions of the population to actually understand what's going on, um, inside the black box.
34:04Yeah, so one of the initial propositions, and interestingly enough I was actually having a conversation with a group about this exact issue yesterday, is we can imagine a number of meta propositions that come up quite quickly, um. This relates very much to the notion of meta second-order technologies. The level of meta is very important, spirituality is a meta discipline as I described in my most recent Substack article. So let's say I have a group that is working on, let's just make a simple example, um, general purpose AI.
34:40So as a, at a meta level I would have a noticing that that's super dangerous right. And so what I would need to have is a meta process that is actually able to identify specifications that are in the category of super dangerous, therefore would have a, uh, a series of mechanisms built in to ensure, quote unquote right, using the larger context of Civium, that everyone involved in this particular process, shoots sorry I was trying to figure out how to do no notifications but I haven't figured that out on a PC or a desktop, um.
35:48And so to clarify, you personally viewed a general AI as something that is likely to have second order effects, that's that's your example, correct? Yes, likely to have, um, what you call significant second order effects, okay, intensity is important, everything has second order effects but intensity is the key, oh yeah, and negative second order effects, because there can be positive cascades as well. Sure absolutely, we'd like to focus on as many of those as possible, yes, if we could only have positive cascades, society would work really well right?
36:28So you can imagine that as a very basic element of the the set of protocols associated with the design aspect, the design mode would be a sort of a meta process that evaluates the probability of negative intensity second order effects of any given effort and therefore provides a series of, um, what happened, are we okay sorry something just started playing in my background, sorry go on, uh, and therefore we would have a series of mechanisms to check in on and ensure that that particular process does not um, uh, generate those negative second-order effects.
37:08Now examples though, this is why I wanted to go back to the first part of the answer, many of those examples would go to things like how do we make sure that the people, the humans that are involved in the process, are mature enough to actually take responsibility for the magnitude of the process they're actually taking responsibility for, right. So here again I want to make use of our previous concepts. For the most part, and particularly in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, we made what I would say is a category error in how we tried to address risk, which was we tried to address risk through process.
37:47And we created epicycles after epicycles with more and more process. So for example if you look at the context of law, we try to address the risk of, say for example, bias or prejudice or racism by layering on additional levels of objective process. And there's a benefit to that, it can work, it has certain advantages, but it has a lot of disadvantages, not the least of which is, um, there's an entropic barrier that eventually purely objective process will ultimately be routed around by any subjective activity and it will ultimately fail.
38:22And the second order effect is that it also has the consequence of displacing and reducing actual embodied wisdom and maturity. So you get a whole bunch of immature individuals get sort of, what's this called, scaffolded or crutched by an objective process, and once the objective process reaches the levels of its ability to actually manage the risk, the risk flows over the dam but the people behind it no longer have the capacity to actually respond to anything. Which is a very good example, explanation for why the culture war is behaving the way that it's behaving right now.
38:58So what we would want to do is we want to actually go the opposite direction and do things like ensure that the individuals who are stepping into a particular process have the level of wisdom and the level of maturity that is adequate to the level of responsibility that is embodied or embedded in the particular design that they're acting on. And there's a whole chunk of that fortunately we can look to both guilds and to indigenous communities as examples of how this sort of thing has been done many times in the past.
39:32I, okay so, and your answer is, you mentioned civic duty, [Music] and why is the concept of a social contract where rights are declared and civic duties are declared, why is that the right framing? I've recently had conversations with people who sort of said that sort of implies a physical force to enforce the concept of rights, and there are other ways to frame ways to come together. So why is continuing with the social contract framing, even if it's altered a little, why is that the right approach to creating a new system?
40:06So maybe I'll back up, the phrase civic duty is more in the mode of vernacular, so I'm not sure if I'm actually, that whole, um, social contract language, you're just using language that already exists to try to explain ideas that are coming up, yeah, that happens right, exactly. Let's see what what, so what is what is meant and then see if I say it with more specificity if it still raises the same question. Okay yeah okay. So the notion is actually coming from the place closer to what I used as the objective-objective, and at the basis of the objective-objective.
40:49So it's more like, if you want to live you will also need to breathe and eat, characteristics of the intrinsic nature of the way the world works. And so to say that you have a responsibility is more along the lines of saying, to the degree to which, um, this is a thing human beings will undertake, this as part of how they live their lives. So it's less to do with the notion of we are entering into an agreement as humans, but rather that we are choosing as individuals to participate in reality according to reality.
41:33Let's get the clarification, thank you. All right, using a bit of the language from my most recent Substack, we might say that it is a spiritual commitment. It's interesting because I feel like you talk a lot in a way where it's like, we get into a frame of being in an experience, a conscious state which I have also experienced with people and functionally alone, um, it's like it's an embodied way to relate to people, and it is challenging to maintain, it's like it wants to break.
42:30We, I don't know, there's something about the way that people enter reality, this wants to break back down into really base level thought or monkey energy I don't know, but I love what you mean, yeah I love, you, I love the way you frame it as like sort of a lived state of being and less focus on the technology itself, even though that is so essential and so frames it so much, um. I do have a question, I asked you this before, but how does, this seem, severely disabled contribute within Civium? What does the phrase severely disabled me?
43:19It means somebody who is, perhaps physically disabled, and or unable to communicate well, um. I might begin with a simple example, uh, that we can identify, say for example a newborn as always an example of that particular kind of experience, yeah, and we say okay well how does one relate to a newborn, and we might say that that's a very similar sort of thing. So those beings who present novel capacities for relationality, um, provide novel opportunities for increasing the skillfulness of relationality, the wisdom commons, and the strength of coherence.
43:59By the way includes the choice to no longer be embodied, just clarify that, I think I know what you mean by that, the choice to no longer mean embodied, meaning like a right to choose one end of one's life, mhm. Yeah okay okay. Sure um, I would also say that I think that within any society, that those who need the most help are still have value, because they are sort of a proof of the skills or value of work of a number, another member of the society, and their capacity to actually help others find ways to live their own lives and not have to rely upon others.
44:59And the way that we have in modern civilization, a lot of it's like if somebody doesn't have resources, if they're struggling, we kind of just throw money at them and just hope they'll somehow sustain themselves with that. And then we end up with sort of a, do you know the phrase sacrifice zone? No. A sacrifice zone is just it's a place where the resources, or the resources of that place have been so dilapidated that generally like the people surrounding the area and the people within it kind of sacrifice it even though people are still living within it.
46:00Haiti is a pretty good example, and Flint is, they're improving their pipes, but it was a good example. And so this question that I always have is, okay if you have a locality, a geography, that wants to become a Civium, but really they're at a very major resource debt to even be functional, that the lack of resources in that space is so low that it's produced either more crime or just more physical dilapidation or infrastructure. So you have a community that wants to integrate into the ideas behind Civium, but the people who live within it don't feel like they have the resources to contribute.
46:43How do they become connected and integrate within the system? Ah, that feels like a different question, is it, do you feel like it was the same question? I feel like you can just flow on it. Okay so um, so just to kind of tie it back to the previous what I experienced as the previous question and then see if it flows from there. What we might say is, remember that we have this notion of commoning, yeah, and commoning has to do with the sacred, and so the ground is the sacred. So to the degree to which a given aspect of reality, so in this case we might say a person, has very very little purpose, which is to say they have very little capacity to deliver external agency out into the world.
47:24What that would mean is that they also would therefore have very high value, meaning they would have, they would show up as an example of the sacred much more than perhaps other people might. And so they would be part of the commons, which is not, you know, I hope not to be perceived as a negative thing, not to be seen as like dirt, but to be seen as an aspect of the sacred presenting itself in the world. This by the way is the experience that I often have when I'm encountering, say for example, people who have what we would consider to be disabilities in the contemporary form.
48:05So for example in relationships I've had with people who have Down syndrome, I notice a feeling of the sacred, they feel actually more connected with that aspect of reality, um, in at least the way that I feel in the relationship. So I would suggest that as being say the the thread or the clue of the directionality of how in Civium that particular question might be responded to. So now we have the second question which has to do with what I think of as being frankly very practical. So we have a a differential resource, yes, we have a differential resource a number of different ways right.
48:52We have a differential of time, people who are overburdened with working very hard to make ends meet barely have got a lot of time. They also will tend to have very little time to have done work on their capacity and skillfulness in things like communication or emotional regulation or healing relationships between each other. Yeah these are all true. So one of the primary works for Civium in the next several generations, human generations, is regenerative in general.
49:23So whether it's regenerative at the level of restoring coral reefs, or regenerative at the level of restoring um places that people live in, or regenerative at the level of restoring culture, or regenerative at the level of restoring people, like helping people to actually grow and increase their capacity. The beauty of course is that the the returns, to use the kind of language from an older form of story, are are very large. And once you have a context that actually is able to realize results or realize value as people are increasing in their well-being, as opposed to realize value when people are playing functional roles in a formal system, you therefore have a good reason to support them in increasing their well-being.
49:56Now will you be able to bootstrap a place like Flint, Michigan? To be perfectly frank, I have no idea. My guess is there are people in Flint, Michigan who care and have enough capacity to do something, you know as they begin to do something they begin to change the context of their local environment. A lot of the challenge we run into these days has to do with what I would call entropy or randomness in choice, and less to do with actual resource. Meaning most people most of the time actually waste their time and energy when they try to do things, or have negative second-order effects.
50:37Just take a look at any set of proposals in any given environment. Oftentimes there's actually a lot of resource in the local community and or pointed at the local environment, the local community. But unfortunately most of that resource is either sort of useless, it's pointed in ways that are not helpful, and quite often are ways that are actually destructive. And you know, fill in the blank, a very large number of what we call well-intentioned catastrophes litter our social environment. So simple things like local empowerment, people who are very intimately familiar with the intrinsics of the local context orienting small amounts of resources to those people who choose to step into kuleana, choose to step into responsibility for their local context.
51:16Which means first of all themselves, and upgradient being their capacity to do so, and then allowing that resource to spiral out as the local environment shows more and more capacity to hold higher responsibility, um, is actually more of a reallocation of resources that are already there than it is a need to generate new resources. And of course we get synergy value, that as any location or any individual frankly, or certainly any group of individuals begin to operate in this fashion, I have to move from coordination to coherence to use that set of terms.
51:54They generate more capacity, and that capacity then by definition becomes shared with everyone else who chooses to enter into that quality of relationship. So there's an expanding a series of nested expanding spheres. Does that make sense? Yeah yeah. Um, I want to make clear or clarify something because the first episode of this series was on localism. So would you say there's an inherent connection between Civium to localism in some way?
52:25Yeah yeah there's a, um, you know all three, there's the local, yes, yeah, repeat it because it was I was just remembering, there's the local, the local, the global and the universal, local globally and the universal. Okay um, now you mentioned the concept of well-being optimization, just just to be very clear, the local, uh, begins at the infinitesimal. Clarify on that point. The most local would be your soul. Okay okay I see what you're saying, and then it grows out from there, yes yes.
53:00And that conversation could go really, I could go really deep on that so I'm gonna hold my tongue on that. Um okay so you mentioned well-being optimization which is something that, you know, I think it's the right frame but also dangerous because it's kind of what markets are in a way, it's like well what do you want, and I conflate that with well-being. And I think there's sort of a tendency which, in market optimization, for sort of, uh, detachment from reality when you optimize just for want and don't have any, you know, bearings on like what actually is.
53:40So I want to talk about, uh, Civium in the context of well-being optimization and how it wouldn't have the effect of detaching people further and further from reality I guess. Sure, so I think you bring up exactly the right frame, which is this notion of wants. And it's funny, I actually have two distinct people, one's Joe, oh gosh, Joe Edelman, the other one is Forrest Landry, who both independently as far as I know addressed the the question of wants.
54:12So I'll probably end up using Forrest's language, but you know the way Joe described it was like people have, um, if we think about it from the want, a want is a cognizable meaning, we actually have an image of a means of satisfying something. So uh, a coke, I want a coke, or I want a glass of water. Yeah. A need is the um the coalescence of a series of of actual, I'm gonna say underlying characteristics into something that can become a want. So for example before I, I have this notion if I want a coke, I have something which is prior to that which I can say is, I need hydration, okay.
54:54And a desire, and I'm just using these words as Forrest Landry describes them, so just for for the moment just have them be defined as such. The desire is the actual underlying complexity that gives rise to the specificity of the need, right. So for example, I have an inadequate amount of hydrogen ions, you know, oxygen, water in my underlying metabolic system, and therefore I have a need for hydration and therefore I name it as a want for a coke. Notice that in that chain, the breakage of the linkage between the need and the want, I understand that a coke is not an adequate way, a good way, to hydrate, is where most of the trouble lies, other not all of it, okay.
55:37Now so when we speak about well-being we're actually speaking about something that is operating from the point of view of meta, more specifically from the point of view of, um, a second order. The way that I've defined it in the past is that you have fulfillment, and then you have well-being. Fulfillment is the degree to which the thing that you want actually meets your needs and fulfills your desires, and you accomplish it, okay. So to have fulfillment is to actually produce something which actually meets your needs, you recognize it as doing the thing, and it really does, but it actually solves the underlying characteristic in reality that is giving rise to the need.
56:19Well-being has to do with the degree to which your fulfillment provides an upgradient in your capacity to achieve fulfillment across a larger scope of possibility and over time. So then as we begin to talk about well-being we start talking about things like, um, in, in as it turns out, sort of intrinsically synergy between and among is intrinsic in well-being. So various forms of defection behavior can achieve fulfillment but they cannot achieve well-being, for example. And so there is an intrinsic, when you're orienting towards well-being which leads you towards this whole story, this kind of mode of, uh, holism and holistic, because you need to start being able to take into account second order, um, in each specific fulfillment that you are orienting towards.
57:15So did that all make sort of make some sense at least as a, as a frame, as a way of describing? Yeah you, this whole interview makes more and more sense as you go on just from the built context, um. Okay, this question is what is the most likely, oh sorry this is an example, so notice what you just said, and the degree to which, um, sort of semantic ambiguity or the the the difficulty that we have in being able to mutually perceive what is actually being or endeavoring to be communicated, the consequence of simultaneously the impoverishment of our language and the weaponization of distortion of communication, our developed environment, map that to the previous question around resource allocation.
57:56It's an interesting point and what is the message you want me to receive from that, that statement that, um, slowing down enough to actually achieve clear communication actually resolves so much. Same thing. Slowing down to increase the quality of the choices that we're making with resource allocation actually resolves so much, yeah. Even even in the process of communication with yourself, you mentioned you journal right? I don't journal. Oh I thought you mentioned, uh, some relationship to journaling, um, in our last conversation we talked about it in the context of the um, the kind of the well-being fingerprint.
58:39Yeah okay interesting. I contemplated, I contemplated, you know, journal which makes sense, I think roughly identical it just doesn't use my hand because my handwriting is illegible to myself. Yeah and it slows down, well that sort of is part of the benefit in my practice, is that the slowing down, just a slight slowing down of having to type it out and to my own personal database or data store thing, slows me down, allows me to reflect on it clearly and better understand my needs.
59:26Yes, slowing down is is key. That's what I wanted in the first section of this, to have the freedom to take a moment and breathe in the conversation. I wish that was almost standard. I was in a conversation the other day and I paused and I closed my eyes and I took a deep breath to sort of integrate in the moment, and the people around me were so confused by it, but it helped so much. We just are so awkward in terms of silence, we want to fill it.
1:00:06Okay so this question I think you could go on for a while on and I really want to hear your answer to it. Which is, other than the oral tradition, what is the most effective way to pass down intergenerational lessons, particularly from collectively shared hardships like wars, depressions and pandemics? And also in the context of, like, you have kids right, you've tried, I'm sure you've tried to teach them lessons that they refuse to listen, I'm, or maybe not, but like there are kids often, just, they're willful, they don't want to learn the lesson that you want to pass down that you've had the embodied experience of having.
1:00:57And I think people are like that, and we keep making the same mistakes over generations because we don't have good means to pass down that generation, once the last, you know, living, you know, member of a war passes away. This is, this is a very nice question, um, and I think it has to do with, we can talk about the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Okay um, because I think oftentimes when kids, and I'll refer to sort of the kid and everyone, um, constricts around an effort to convey experience of this sort, it's often because they're actually noticing, possibly unconsciously, that one is endeavoring to convey as knowledge that which in fact should be conveyed as wisdom.
1:01:42Okay, and they're very different. Oftentimes people will endeavor to convey, say for example in prose, that which can only truly be conveyed in poetry. Yeah, wisdom is a different kind of thing. Wisdom is conveyed in fable, wisdom is conveyed in story, yeah, more fundamentally wisdom is conveyed in being, become the one that has become mature as a consequence of the experience that you've had, and what will end up happening is the holistic result of that maturity will inspire the soul of the other to grow in the direction of the wisdom that you are trying to convey.
1:02:16You know, so to the degree to which you have suffered and healed, and by the way I'll also say if you've suffered not healed but we'll get there in a second, due to the wish you have suffered and healed, there's something about the way that that enables you to create space for the growth and suffering of another that orients them in the direction of what healthy growth feels like, and that's the nature of wisdom.
1:02:50Wisdom is peripheral, it comes from the outside, is from the universal, it is not, it is quite inappropriate to try to collapse wisdom into something that is a compression into a semantic, into a finite. Now of course to the degree that you have suffered and not healed, then that the thing that is not healed will also be impacting the other and will also orient them in the direction towards healing, but it puts a much higher burden on them to end up healing.
1:03:33And in some sense you are infecting them with your own lack of healing, and they will find themselves taking responsibility for some portion of that. This I think is what is often meant by the term karma, an intergenerational karma. There's a, there's a connection here between, uh, to the the needs and wants thing, and having a pad of past suffering, which is where in one mind they might define something as a need but in reality it's a want.
1:04:13And some other person may have had this lived experience where they've seen a very similar action lead to a negative outcome to some sort of suffering. And you know, they, I experience quite often that I would like to communicate to others that their action will lead to suffering, and even when I communicate that, that action is very likely to lead to suffering, they'll still take the action, the action will have the outcome that I expected, they'll experience the suffering, but they won't integrate the lesson.
1:04:58Yes, well there's two pieces there right. So one one piece, and I'll just sort of flip to this, is performative non-contradiction, in my experience simply telling your own story, and not with a notion of hey my story is like your story, but here's my story upon a time I had an experience, and just be open honest and what you would might call vulnerable about the actual story, creates a learning space where people can feel into it, and that space now becomes a map or a model, a latent potential, meaningful to use our previous definition, which will increase the possibility of learning when someone else has begun to have a higher degree of capacity to connect with the story.
1:05:40So now what happens is them going through their own experience, which ultimately has an experience of suffering, creates a context that enables them to actually have a shared context with the story that you told. That gap, that increase in oh I now I get what he was talking about, has a felt sense of oh and I own now, I now own this myself. And then the the learning that can happen by the way is now shared, it's not that you're conveying knowledge to them but rather we together are actually learning more about this crazy world that we've chosen to to be in together.
1:06:20Is that still effective in terms of addiction, especially when the market seems to produce so many products that are addictive? Yes, and it's tricky, it's dangerous right. Unfortunately in many cases, you know I might say, um, you know, you know a wise junkie, former junkie can tell a story, yeah, fortunately you know a young dumb kid might choose to to to play with junk, yeah yeah, it's tricky isn't it. Wisdom, and the cultivation of wisdom, and therefore ultimately the cultivation of maturity, which is what happens when you, your wisdom and responsibility are in relationship, um.
1:06:59And that's just, that's sort of how this thing works, you know, each individual is um navigating their world. So what we'd like to do is we'd like to find ways to collaboratively reduce the acute catastrophic experiences that people might be exposed to. And of course in many cases we have the whole concept of the inability to respond, we have, I don't allow my two-year-old to drive, I can create new contexts where what she really is seeking is available within proximity yeah.
1:07:38So part of, part of being a steward in this sense is to endeavor to create a context which reduces the acute catastrophe associated with experimentation so that learning can actually happen within a container that, so that it can survive um, you know when she crawls on the playground now I just spot her right, I no longer like my hands are further and further away, and oftentimes I'll simply allow her to fall because you know she might get a scratch or maybe even a broken toe, but it won't be catastrophe, and so her field of learning increases over and over and over.
1:08:16So this is, a there's a lot of nuance involved in this piece right. So there's a piece, one piece, which is we might call friendship, another piece we might call parenting. But here I mean parenting as a quality of relationship available between all possible sentience right. So a dolphin in the water could be my parent, or a flower to the degree which you perceive as sentient can be my parent, but certainly a person I run into that I've never met before could be my parent in this context, uh, and of course everyone can be my friend, um.
1:08:52Does that make sense those distinctions that I'm making? Okay and I wanted to clarify or I wanted to ask, do you feel like you've oriented and designed Civium to account for one addiction, rent seeking, and things like planned obsolescence which emerged through markets? Do you feel like those things are less likely to emerge within Civium's structure? Yes in all three cases. All right that's great um. The bigger challenge, which is definitely part of the intent but we'll have to see, is ameliorating the consequences of how deeply addicted we are and how deeply addictive our personality constructs are.
1:09:35So we have about 15 minutes, uh, I want to, I'm going to ask you one more question and then there's a sort of summary section. So this is, I think this is a very common question but I still want to ask it, um, which is, how do you, how does Civium scale beyond Dunbar's number? I certainly don't know. So I have a very large number of ideas but I certainly don't know. It's the big question. That's the big question.
1:10:23I should say by the way just so we're clear that, as far as we know there's there's about five Dunbar numbers. Oh okay. I have not, uh, it's been about 12 years since I've been in my psych classes so, uh, what are they? What we typically think of as the Dunbar number, like around 150 people, is I think conventionally now thought of as Dunbar level three. Okay, number level two is the kind of the band size of the 12 person group, or level 1 is the sort of the intimate size like a 2 to 5 person.
1:10:58Yeah yeah, oddly enough you can actually see that these things keep being rediscovered in organizational theory. So both at the military level and at the corporate level we're seeing things like span of control and teams right, yeah, each each one is rediscovering that as it turns out homo sapiens are functionally able to do certain kinds of things in interpersonal relationality. It used to be group size beyond the 150, we have something which looks like it's on the order of about 1500, which you might think of as being the field of second cousins, yeah, and we have something which actually looks like it's even larger, at the range of around thousands, 5,000, 15,000, which we're not quite sure exactly what that is, but we have examples from anthropology of these sort of very large gatherings that are even like extended language groups.
1:11:28And one of the characteristics that we see from the indigenous side is a very heavy focus on protocol. And it's so interesting, I think I think you and I actually spoke about this on our phone call which led to this thing being recorded, which was a real shift from protocol, like in the contemporary technical sense, we almost we almost don't even have a notion of protocol in the relational sense right now. In the technical sense, uh, protocol is strictly objective-objective, it's how do we, what are the mechanisms whereby one technical format establishes communication with another technical format, a communications protocol.
1:12:11Do you, just clarify, would you not say that the UI of social media is, in form, a protocol? Is a form of protocol, in the objective-subjective sense. Precisely precisely. So I was going to say, we have technically a lot of objective-objective protocols, then we have objective-subjective protocols, and unfortunately again because most of our society for the past 500 years has been a sort of an ingestion of the subjective-subjective into the objective-subjective, you know for example rarely does one have consent in any of these objective-subjective relationships.
1:12:52Now we have to think about how do we develop subjective-subjective protocols. So for example permission and consent are like super fundamental characteristics of every indigenous society. You know permission to come, you know who has permission to give permission, it's not trivial. If somebody wants to come into a particular place, first they have to announce communication, hey this is me, here's context, here's where I come from, here's my relationships, here's my intent. Somebody on the other side has to be able to receive that communication and communicate back, by the way I think about that from a communications protocol, I can understand your language and communicate in your language or I can't, that implies a whole different set of a fork in relationship.
1:13:31Um you know, hey I'm here, this is what I'm about, hey I'm here, I have permission to invite you into this land, come on in, or by the way go the away, or fill in the blank right. Well what are we talking about, we're talking about how do we create a context whereby peaceful communication and therefore meaningful relationship can actually grow. So the primary thing that's being exploited right now in the context of Civium is, what are, how do we rediscover the protocols of commoning within that.
1:14:01Now notice this, this is the next step and this by the way is the key insight, the hope, I would say like the deep promise, the driving thesis, is that the kind of collective intelligence, this goes back 17 years from, you know, the kind of collective intelligence that emerges in a quality of coherence that has these kinds of commoning protocols. Individuals, human beings, sovereign in the sense that I've been talking about, from the micro level right, so they're capable of showing up in relationship with other people, are aware of their own interior, are aware of how their language is working, which this stuff we're doing today are examples of interpersonal sovereignty.
1:14:38And then protocols, commoning protocols, that enable a very diverse, and of course the contemporary world is highly diverse in many ways much more than in the past, enable a gradient right, many diverse sentience to come into relationship in a fashion that increasingly is coherent in its, uh, beingness right. So to go back to the very beginning of our conversation, to form relationships right, emergent being relationships that are highly meaningful, latent with potential. It is the hypothesis that somewhere around 50 to 300 human beings in that kind of relationship will have the amount of collective intelligence, the amount of potential necessary to take us to the next level.
1:15:11You know so this is a, a recursion, recursive process. This is, this is the hard take off of AI but in the form of human coherent collective intelligence. So I can't get us, by definition can't get us past that threshold, if I could that wouldn't be the threshold, we'd have another threshold, I can get us, I can't even get us to that threshold. Already there's a need for a significant increase in the coherent collective intelligence that is gathered around the inquiry of Civium.
1:15:47Beautifully of course, or beautifully it's actually forming, it's happening, and that which is much more than me, for example, has a capacity to contemplate and respond to the set of questions that are at the adjacent possibility of the current frontier, and hopefully enables us to then expand to a larger scope and diversity and therefore complexity of coherent collective intelligence, while maintaining enough strength to hold the integrity of that coherent collective intelligence.
1:16:18That then can, it then has enough capacity to then expand the scope again, and as I said the theory is that somewhere between 50 and 300 there will be enough capacity to begin answering some of these much deeper harder questions with concretion. I should mention by the way this is both theory and practice, meaning not just the theoretical element that happens in, say, 300 people, but as you might imagine when you have 300 people you're also practically exploring particular answers to how do you scale beyond Dunbar's limit, because you're now within that sweet spot of Dunbar 3 and Dunbar 4 and you can actually play with those parameters and get a much better sense of what actually works and what breaks down.
1:16:55Okay so the final section of this, and by the way it's just so exciting to hear you talk about solutions personally from my place in the internet interwebs and how I could access information for like the last seven years, I have not really found very many people proposing solutions that I think are very cohesive and really account for most of the problems there. So it's really, it's really reassuring to hear you put forth these systems, and there are a few others out there as well increasingly, so it makes me feel like, okay we're all independently coming to similar conclusions like people inventing calculus together.
1:17:33And it's so interesting when there's overlap, and but then where it doesn't overlap, and I'm like well what what is the overlap between all of these different minds, does that mean that is the correct signal for new system is exactly where we're overlapping. It's very complex but I feel like there's actually hope now. Okay so this last section, I want you to share three beliefs in a specific context, I want you to share a prediction, a statement or a claim, same concept, or reflection which is a thought about history or your personal past, something over the past.
1:18:21But the specific context is that it's a piece of information that will have, that you believe to have a very high upgradient in future value. So would be something that you believe that not many people believe right now that you feel is important and valuable that in the future other people will also be aligned with. The simplest form of this is you know you made a prediction that you think is going to happen, other people disagree that's going to happen, and then it does come to pass, you know, and it affects a lot of people in a very negative way um.
1:19:09So or for example with a statement like, what wouldn't be useful or what wouldn't fit into this upgradient thing is, an apple is red. There's some value to that, to some specific person trying to identify an apple, but it's not going to be much more valuable in the future. But maybe something personal, like yoga is a healthy process, you know, maybe you think more people are going to believe that in the future. And with the past, it's lessons that you think should be carried on, it would not be something like, uh, Washington wore dentures, that's not a very helpful or useful lesson to carry on, um.
1:19:45But I get it. Yeah yeah okay good. Okay so, uh, so let's start with the prediction. Oh can I start with the assertion first? Yeah sure. So the assertion is that doing whatever it takes to come into a state of personal integrity is the most meaningful thing that you can do right now. That's really nice to hear because I'm very heavily in that process right now, it's very, it's very reassuring um. Reflection or prediction, whichever way you want to go.
1:20:20Okay so prediction, give me a little more clarity, is the prediction something that's at the level of the objective? It could be anything, I've embraced the idea that language is incredibly fuzzy, it can be subjective, it can be objective, it could be anything. This is a very difficult one, so let me, I mean it's going to take a little bit of time. You also don't have to be completely certain, you could say something and be like it's like 75 or something um.
1:20:56The prediction is that it will become common knowledge within five years that much of what we currently perceive as being conflict or dangerous is in fact the metabolism or the processing of the transition from one mode to another mode. I certainly hope so. That doesn't imply by the way that we will be through the transition, but that that awareness creates a huge amount of clarity on how to be in relationship with what's up.
1:21:28An example might be, what would happen if you had never experienced ever what childbirth is like, nobody that you ever knew could give you any advice, and suddenly your body is going through some serious right. The difference between that and actually knowing, oh yeah yeah this is part of the process, an unpleasant part bought a part, and I understand how it fits into a larger context which can give me a whole bunch of ways to respond to what's happening that are responsible, oh I shouldn't stop it, I actually have to continue going through it, stopping it's got problems for example.
1:22:10Okay so that's the prediction. What was the third? Uh it's a, I call it a reflection because there's not a better word, but it's just information from the past. Because our our shared history is always evolving, we can only hold on to so much history. So it's something that you think should, a lesson from the past that should be carried forward and especially if it'll be more important in the future than it is now. It could also just be something that you believe will continue to be important, a lesson that has continued to be held forward but you're looking for an upgradient. So if you can find something in your mind where you think people in the future will believe it more, lean into that.
1:22:52Yeah this one's for me, quite a long time ago maybe about seven years ago, um, but I think very relevant. And it has to do with assumptions and projections in the context of communication. And so I, I discovered that if I, if I thought I understood what somebody meant, I was generally quite wrong. And if somebody was generally sort of energetically, oftentimes energetically angrily, um, responding to things that I was conveying, yeah, it very often had to do with things that were going on for them, yeah, it was being projected on to me, yeah.
1:23:33And learning how to not take it personally, as an opportunity to have compassion, I don't mean that in the sense of, uh, like benign, I mean compassion in the Buddhist sense, was in fact a key piece of how to respond to communication. There's a book called The Four Agreements, and which holds for truth that you should hold close to yourself, and uh, two of them are don't make assumptions about other people what they're thinking, and don't take it personally if people express that anger to you. And I'm very deep in that lesson that you're communicating right now, so I agree with that as a valuable feeling to carry forward.
1:24:21So finally, finally, um the last thing I'd like you to do is to just, uh, what is something that you would like to know but don't, that you think is valuable? Jeez um, what is something so, wow hold on, something I would like to know but don't, okay. Well um, whether or not, I'm trying to decide whether I want, I'll say a little bit more ambiguously, whether or not the the particular place that I'm now deeply investigating as the the place that we, the physical geographic place that we, meaning me my wife and my daughter, will endeavor to fully instantiate the physical aspect of Civium, is the right place.
1:25:26Thank you so much for doing this, it's been so fun to dig into your mind.