How to Solve the Metacrisis--with Jordan Hall

In this episode of the Coherent Business Podcast, host Aram DiGennaro sits down with Jordan Hall, co-founder of DivX, longtime systems thinker, and a central figure behind concepts like Game B, the Neurohacker Collective, and the "metacrisis." The conversation traces Jordan's own journey: starting from the realization that humanity's collective intelligence may be inadequate to face its interlocking crises, and moving through years of work trying to design, and eventually live inside, a coherent response.

Jordan and Aram unpack the idea of the metacrisis — not a single problem but a tangle of collapsing systems (institutional trust, governance, media, geopolitics) that amplify each other, meaning solutions have to reckon with the whole tangle at once, not one crisis at a time. From there the conversation moves into surprising territory: the limits of AI and information-based solutions, the difference between a "hive mind" and genuine coherence, and why Jordan came to believe that solving problems at this scale requires going beyond modernity's mind/matter framework entirely — into questions of spirit, egregores, and collective consciousness. They also explore why corporations and universities, however sophisticated, can't produce the kind of broad, whole-human coherence the metacrisis demands, and what it might take instead.

Key Topics: the metacrisis and interlocking civilizational crises, the limits of AI/LLMs as tools for meaning-making, phenomenology vs. epistemology (East vs. West), coherence vs. hive-mind coordination, egregores and collective consciousness, why corporations and universities can't solve the metacrisis alone.

Resources: 

Jordan's Links: 
Linkedin: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordangreenhall/
Youtube: 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMzT-mdCqoyEv_-YZVtE7MQ


Aram's Links: 
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aram-digennaro/ 
Coherent Business Project Website: https://coherentbusinessproject.com/ — For leaders, thinkers, and builders who believe business can be more than just efficient — it can be whole, human, and meaningful.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We've all been touched in some way by the metacrisis. Whether the part that we feel is climate or it's democracy and public institutions or it's technology and the rapid rate of change. We all know that there's something really difficult facing our civilization. But I'd be willing to bet that none of us has gone to the lengths that Jordan Hall did to try to come up with solutions. He spent 10 years of his life, tens of millions of dollars, and explored the far reaches of the globe in order to come up with some kind of solution to the problems that we are all facing. This episode will be the first part of a very long conversation. And he'll talk about how he came to the conclusion that the system that he was operating in wasn't going to be able to solve the problem. And then he embraced liminal space, went all around the world trying to find new ways of thinking and being that might be able to address the civilizational problem that is also undermining the way that corporations function. So you'll probably run into some concepts that seem odd, especially for a business podcast, but that is the nature of liminality. If the system that we're living inside was able to solve the problem, we wouldn't need to go outside the system into a liminal space to encounter new things. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Jordan Hall. Today's guest is Jordan Hall. Jordan co-founded DivX, the video compression company that helped define how digital video moved around the early internet. And he stepped away as CEO in 2007. Since then, he's worked on a string of projects that are difficult to summarize. I hear things about NeuroHacker Collective, Game B, the Concilience Project, Cyvium. And I hear you talking about figuring out what comes after the operating system we've been running on. Lately, that's included reinventing capitalism, thinking seriously about civilizational collapse and renewal, and learning to pray. Jordan, welcome to the show. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

That is quite a pile of things.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Yeah, and we'll we'll get into more because there's a lot more. You told me a story once about assessing the challenges facing humanity and concluding that our collective intelligence was inadequate to the task. What happened next?

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Well, what happened next was actually maybe a three-step process. The first step was a, as it turns out, naive effort to look at what it would take to produce or design, or at least precipitate a form of collective intelligence that does have an adequate level of intelligence to deal with the problems that we're facing and just to kind of frame out what that might mean. It's kind of simple. I mean, if you think about something like let's say you've got a table and it weighs 500 pounds and you're trying to carry the table, you look at the design and you say, I'm not gonna be able to pull this off by myself. You might look at the shape of the table and the weight of the table and the material of the table and say, hmm, this looks like maybe a four-man job. And if I have six people, they could all fit well, and that'd make it pretty easy. So you're able to sort of look at the constraints and design a properly shaped solution, and then you solve the problem. So more or less the same thing. Can we take a look at the problem? Can we understand what its parameters are, what its constraints are, what are the affordances for different kinds of solutions? And then what would it look like to then instantiate a proper solution?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

The problem that you're talking about is all of the top problems facing humanity. Is it climate and politics and technology and like how do you even scope the table to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

First order, in fact, to begin with, is exactly that question. And so this produced the formulation that was ultimately dubbed the meta-crisis. So what we discovered was that not all, but most of the things that we currently perceive in the world as crises. And there are many, by the way. You know, everything from the demographic collapse crisis to geopolitical instability crisis to turning the frogs gay crisis, which is actually a real thing that's really happening, just not well articulated. The breakdown of trust in institutions, like all of these things, are not easily separable. In fact, they're not properly separable, they're co-creating under a larger heading, which is the metacrisis. I could go into as much detail as you want on what that is and what it implies, but that's the table. The metacrisis is the table.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

And I think most people resonate with that on some level. They might be very focused on one piece, but a lot of people can see there are a lot of interlocking crises that are hard to solve.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yeah, and we can say like a very simple example is what happened with COVID, where you go, okay, first we've got something that looks a little bit like a medical public health crisis, but we noticed very quickly that a combination of a media crisis, a complete incapacity, a proper governance crisis, and to a very meaningful extent, a credentialism and who is in fact properly in charge of what kinds of things, crisis, all of these things showed their face and made a vastly larger problem than the original crisis was. And that's important. The fact that when you have multiple interlocking systems that are themselves accelerating towards collapse means that their collateral effect on each other is the bigger problem. And it also means, by the way, that the space of possible solutions is a different space. You know, if you use our table example, if I say, okay, have a 500-pound rectangular table, it's also covered in petroleum jelly, which is also on fire, right? Suddenly your space of solutions has changed quite substantially, right? Same idea. That's a great analogy. Yeah. Well, the let me kind of add the next piece. So the next piece that became is it's the analogy doesn't fit, but the absurdity of the analogy makes the point, which is, and as it turns out, the more people you have lifting the table, the heavier and more on fire it gets. Aha. This is a reflexivity problem, which in the delving into the possible solutions to the metacrisis, what we then discovered was that most of the problems are actually not extrinsic to the way that we solve problems, but are intrinsic to the toolkits that we use to solve problems.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

The problem is inside a system, but the problem is also the system. So we can't solve the problem from inside the system that it gave rise to. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

So maybe, maybe to use the metaphor, it'd be something like okay, so the table's on fire. So the solution we have is that we're going to pour gasoline on it. You go, hmm, that is not going to work. I don't know why you keep doing that, but Brondo does not have enough electrolytes to solve your problem, though, just by inference the implications of that. So that was the problem statement and the constraints was kept kind of moving back. And of course, that produces a very challenging thing, which means that you have to not only construct or activate solutions, you have to actually and not even design institutions to construct and activate solutions. You have to actually go down to a low enough level that you are participating in a methodology that produces institutions that are not the problem, that are categorically separate from the deepest elements of what is the problem.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

That sounds like the right way to handle it. It also sounds like it's leading you to conclude that that's going to be a hard problem to solve.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

So what happens next? Well, so this kind of takes us to the threshold of the second major piece of the story. So this became known as the Deep Code Project, which was initially purely diagnostic, which is okay, can we even begin to think properly about what it is actually required to get all the way to the bottom? And there was some really good work that came out of that. Uh, I'll give you an example. The the category, the concept was called reinvention. And the idea was to you say something like journalism as we currently understand it is in crisis. Is there an orderly methodology where we can actually decouple the form of journalism as we currently understand it from the fundamental essence of what it actually is, let's say? I explain a little more detail what I mean by that. And then is there a formal methodology we can use to reinstantiate it on the basis of its proper role, but in the current context so that actually has the right characteristics? So that was the reinvention concept. And so, in the context of journalism, for example, journalism has nothing to do with journals, has nothing to do with journalists, definitely has nothing to do with NBC News or New York Times or anything like that. The formal statement is that journalism is the function of a collective intelligence to combine multiple different perspectives in the observation and orientation phase of a proper social oodaloop. Nice. I like that. And okay, neat. Once you recognize that, you have kind of the right conceptual layer, then you say, okay, now how do I construct something like that in 2027? And by the way, you have a second piece, which is then also collaterally or horizontally with, say, for example, science. Journalism needs to have science, science needs to have journalism. It's funny to say that in English, but if you understand the concepts, you can see where they fit together. And you also, by the way, journalism plugs into an entirely separate domain, which is the enforcement mechanism. In the OODA loop, when you notice, for example, situations where there are parasites that are entering into and opening up niches in the underlying system, the journalism can point to that, but if it doesn't actually connect to an effective enforcement mechanism that can police that, then you're not doing any good. And as it turns out, in the current environment, the rate of development is so high that you have to actually be able to operate both very fine-grained and very rapidly to produce something which is stable. So that was the Deep Code project. Now here's the problem. Every single thing that I've been articulating is happening at the level of mental and material functions.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Mental and material, as in your mind is made of material, or are these two separate spheres, mental and material?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Two separate spheres. The things that are legible or allowed to be talked about in, say, complex system science. I could talk about information and information processing, computation, algorithms, things like that. So mental or analytic, if you'd like, and material. I can talk about, you know, neutrons and protons and economies and material objects. And so if you could construct an appropriate response to the metacrisis out of operations that are mental and material, then huzzah. Good, good. Let's do that. This is where the big next transition came, which was oh, it turns out you can't. It turns out that the mental and the material and the premise that the mental and material are the whole of reality is in fact very deep in the stack of what the problem is.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Okay, let me see if I'm getting you right, because that's a dense statement. You're essentially trying to solve the problem with this assumption that, hey, we have mental problems, we have problems in our mindset, and we have problems that are touching the physical world. And so that we can bring this lens to the problem and then we can solve it. And then you realize that actually those two lenses are themselves arising from something else, and they themselves are part of the problem. So they're part of the people around the table trying to pick it up while also dumping gasoline on it.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

To be more precise, it's the incorrect notion that the whole of reality can be partitioned into either information or matter. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

So you're basically talking about very broadly the set of conclusions that we would call the last 500 years.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yes, that's right. Yeah, effectively the presuppositions that give rise to modernity are the problem, to put it very precisely.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

You know, that's so interesting because I came to this conclusion from a completely different path and probably much later than you, but very profoundly to that, you know, retracing our steps through how we got here and then coming to the conclusion that all of this water that we're swimming in, all of the space where we're constructing different models and trying to address different problems and creating different philosophical constructs, all of that is happening inside this basket that's, you know, forever old, but especially 500 years old, and also is what has built the world we live in is the problem.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yeah. And you know, to the degree to which it's forever old, this is true, but the contemporary version is particularly pernicious because it has, in fact, been so successful in a particular set of ways. So it carries a lot of authority. You know, if you come and say, hey, we should probably throw out this baby, people go, Yeah, but that baby's kind of like built the internet, it's produced a world that can have eight billion people in it, it's taking us to the moon. Like, what are you talking about? I'm not throwing out that baby. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Okay, so you come to this conclusion, mental and material, this split is part of the problem.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

So then you have to go deeper, right? And this is very, very far from trivial. Because, by the way, FYI, if you already have access to a tradition in which this is obvious, well, for good for you. If you didn't, right, in my case, if you happen to have been raised in a context where modernity was, let's say, the religions, to be very clear, then you have to actually leave that. But if you leave that, you don't know how to get to the next place because all the ways that you might try to endeavor to plan where to go next are already by definition constrained by the thing that you use at the most fundamental level to do things like tell left from right, up from down. So this entered into what was known as the liminal phase. So there's there's two metaphors that I've used to explain what it means because it's nice to just have the experience. One is imagine that you've gone into an office building. If you've been to one in New York City, that's a good one. And you walked onto an elevator, you've never been here before, and you go up 63 floors, and then the door is open. There's a period of time where you have no idea what you're looking at. And to make it really fun, the doors open into somebody's house. Have you ever done one of those? People who live in the penthouse in New York, the door is open, you're literally in somebody's living room, which is not mapped. You don't even have a pattern for that yet. You're like, whoa, okay. You're looking at something, but you have no idea what it is you're looking at. That's liminality. The other example that I've used is if you go surfing, and let's say you're surfing on a pretty big wave, like 10 foot and higher, and you get wiped out and you're just taken underwater, and you're taken underwater to the point where it's dark, but there's chaos because it's a huge wave, and there's bubbles going every direction. Here's the key thing: you can't actually perceive which direction is up or down. The bubbles are going in every direction, even the bubbles aren't all going in one direction, or even vaguely. That's liminality. You're in a context where your ability to orient is effectively zero.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Because you've stepped outside this system that provides not just railroads and light switches that works, but also your entire understanding of reality. So you said, My problem is this system, I need to go outside it, and what you encounter is properly called liminality.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

You got it. So that's the liminal phase, and that lasted, I guess ultimately, probably about like a solid 10 years.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

So let me ask another question, which probably a lot of people are thinking at this point, and that is all of our knowledge that we've ever written down has been put into AI. Why couldn't we just develop an AI or ask the AI how to synthesize this and get out of our problem?

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Well, that actually goes back to the first point. The AIs are capable of orienting us to locations in semantic space and constructing mathematically plausible, least, let's say I'll use the word entropy, least entropic constructions of words. And to the degree to which we're able to provide the right orienting basis to them. In other words, we actually are orienting them towards the right location in semantic space with the appropriate context, then they can give us back very clear mirrors of what we've already produced as humanity, subject to two more caveats. One is the degree to which the training that they were trained on itself does not create noise, which it does. But if you've trained on Reddit, you've got all kinds of weird Reddit stuff, which they have. And the second, of course, is the degree to which the things that we're looking for are contained within that corpus. If the solution we're looking for is not available in the kinds of things that they've been trained on, then it's not going to be in there. So those are two important caveats.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

So it's essentially just brings you back to the same problem of well, why don't we consult all the knowledge that we have? Well, all the knowledge that we have is what got us here, and it's actually just a statement of where we are.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Therefore, in principle, it may not be a path to solving your problem. Well, particularly the knowledge that's digitized, right? There's there's knowledge that has not yet been digitized.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

I'm using a very narrow definition of knowledge, like symbols that can be fed into an LLM to train it further. The training data is us. So to the extent that we're mediocre, then it will also be mediocre.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Disproportionately us in the last half of the 20th century. And so it's that's important because a lot of the underlying biases of modernity, right? You know, the last 500 years are wildly overrepresented in the training data. That doesn't mean, by the way, that an appropriately formulated prompt couldn't actually locate proper space. It could actually, because it's deeper, but that makes the burden all the higher. The important part is you definitely cannot do this just with the LLMs. You can't just sort of ask the question, the LLM will do the work, because it is ultimately only an expression of the kind of thinking that is of the first category. It is information and it is matter. That's what it is. It is literally just what happens. You take information and matter and put them together. Uh so if the solution could be found in information and matter, a sufficiently well-trained and structured AI would be able to get you to that solution. But if it's not contained within that box, you know, it's kind of like saying, I have an empty box and I have a microscope. What if I got a really good microscope? It's empty, dude. It's not in the box. That's the whole point. It doesn't matter how good your microscope is, you're not going to find it. So the second box, it's this box of what is reality really, for example, the the thing that is in the Western tradition often called spirit or the spiritual, which I should say the meaning of that very term is already simultaneously ambiguous, obfuscated, and profoundly defamed by modernity.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Because we immediately, when we say that, the frame that most people place it in is exactly the split that you gave between mind and and matter. And so we expect it to be one of those two things. And that already sets us up to not understand.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Man, it's worse than that. It's the frame that most people have is either you're talking about ghosts like poltergeist, the movie, or you're talking about spiritual people who are like bald and wear robes, or even worse, have crystal necklaces, or you're very vaguely gesturing it what is ultimately nothing. That's generally what people in late stage modernity would would perceive because there's been a long-standing effort, not entirely ill-intentioned, to capture everything into things that can be articulated in terms of information and matter. And a lot can be. Like we can take an aspect of spirit known as psychology, and we can begin to render psychology legible within forms of information and matter. We can produce various scientific disciplines, and some of them are more rigorous, like cognitive science, some of them are notably less rigorous, like a Jungian or Freudian psychoanalysis. And notice, by the way, there's a little bit of a continuum there. And notice again that the left hand of the continuum, something that you could turn into technology, like cognitive science, seems much more real. And things that are more towards the loose-goosey or the woo seem much more woo. And notice that it says, hey, everything that's valuable in the concept of spirit has already been mined out of it into useful science. Everything that's left is probably bullshit or very, very numeral and vague.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

And we also we almost have that as a tautology. By now, we've done all the work. So if there was anything real that Jung is talking about, well, then it has been codified into a sequence of steps we can take in therapy, which produces a real outcome. Yeah. We've set it up so that it's begging the question when we ask whether there's anything real that's abstracted from our model.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

But it's brutal because also you have things like you even implied it, that there's a therapeutic assumption, for example. Like, is that the appropriate way to be even looking at this? Is it ultimately therapeutic? So, anyway, there's a lot going on there. So the point is for me, the journey into spirit was a liminal journey, which involved a in the mathematics it's called a random walk, more or less, through Woo space.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Sorry to interrupt, but I'm I'm trying to understand like why did you have to do this? So, isn't there any other solution? You conclude that you're gonna have to go into liminal space in order to solve the metacrisis. And the best thing that you can come up with is woo space. And the best way to approach woo space is a random walk.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

It has to be a random walk because in liminality, that's the only thing that you can do. You can't tell which direction you have no orienting basis. So think about your person who's tossed off the wave into the deep water. Swim. Okay, which way is up? No idea. All right. Well, then I guess you're gonna be swimming randomly at the end of the day. But what you're looking for is anything that begins to create an orienting basis. That's the key thing. And when I say woo space, I literally mean what modernity has identified as everything outside of modernity.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Everything outside of modernity, by definition, from the point of view of modernity, is both marginalized and defamed as woo. I should point that out. That doesn't mean, by the way, there isn't some category of woo which we should, in fact, not participate in, but it means that modernity has done a great job of categorizing a lot, not the least of which, for example, is Christianity, is woo from the point of view of modernity. That gets us to stage three, but we'll we'll go through stage two for a while. So, you know, the first step was something like actually it was meditation for me. Okay. Meditation is right on that boundary, right? We've even seen it in our culture, the mindfulness move.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

And mindfulness-based stress reduction. So we have an acronym now that we can go into this space a little bit for like 20 minutes, maybe 10. Then we come back, but we know it's good for us within our modern mental model of how things happen.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Right. It's very much kind of like the McDonald's of woo objects. Like, what if I wrap it in yellow paper with McDonald's label on it and put ketchup on it? Kind of is that okay? That's basically what mindfulness is. It's like we're gonna take meditation out of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and we're gonna bring it into modernity, but we're gonna clothe it in language and with some specialists and credentials and some studies that make it legible to modernity, participate. And by the way, we notice that it works within a way of talking about what we count as working as you start to go there. But in my case, I sort of teleported very rapidly into actually practicing with Zen Buddhist monks to learn how to meditate the way that they meditate, and noticing as that happens, that there's a whole bunch of stuff that begins to be quite obvious as you actually move from the west to the east, because the east did not participate in modernity at all. And the east begins with a phenomenological basis, not a epistemological basis, right? So the modernity is driven by epistemology and driven by an objective third-person epistemology at the foundation.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Just can you just quickly define the phenomenological approach versus the epistemological approach?

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah, yeah. It's the the simplest version would be something like in the West, the basic mode of relationship to phenomenon is objective. So you talk about what is real is that which can be evidenced by looking at it from the outside. I'm not in the system, I'm looking at the system. What I can observe is what is real. In the East, your first person experience is the most fundamental real thing. So, for example, modern atheists really struggle with the notion of is consciousness real? Because by definition, consciousness is the kind of thing that you can't step outside of and look at. It's the thing that looks to Buddhists. They're like, that's an absurdly stupid question. It's a nonsensical question, right? That's a good separation. But for a variety of interesting reasons, Buddhism is in the adjacent possible. You can go from mindfulness to Buddhism. And still be not too ashamed of where you are in modernity. That's still a legitimate kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

That's so interesting how it's maintained. Is that because it's so recent to the Western mind? Why do you think it maintains some legitimacy, even though it really does attack the epistemology? Or is it because it's so separate that it doesn't actually attack it? It just exists in a separate space.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Well, modernity has a characteristic of cosmopolitanism baked in, right? It has an imperial cosmopolitanism. And so it has to embrace and include under its own terms everything. It can't not do that. It's very nature of it. So it will try to commoditize Buddhism, mindfulness. It will try to marginalize it. Okay, I can participate in it, but not really all the way, as long as it has included it to a minimal extent. Modernity is in many ways consumed by its necessity for novelty. So once it's consumed the interior of the domains, it's already consumed. The only way to extend more novelty is to come from the outside, which is why you get these fads. Suddenly, the whatever that guy's name was, the guy with the English accent who kind of popularized Buddhism in the West, he had a new gig, right? He was he's kind of like uh Jimi Hendrix. Hey, what the heck is that? That's new. New in modernity means good. If it's at all functional, even if it's not, it gets some Zaz. And it's got, you know, it's different enough, it's novel enough, it's distant enough that it actually maintains an ambiance of newness. So it carries a little bit more. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And what happens in that environment is I have a whole bunch of recognitions of like, okay, here's a bunch of stuff that I used to think was true, that is in fact obviously not true once I shift to a completely different frame, which by the way doesn't necessarily mean that I have to adopt that new frame as itself, the whole story. What I happen to do at that point, and there's a whole I call this uh transcendent mind, I then would say, okay, let me actually shift to a completely different frame. Let me actually drop into an indigenous frame. Like, what's it like to think like a Polynesian? Okay. Now, by the way, very bad idea to do that at a remove. You can't do it by books. Very bad idea to actually do it through some white guy who pretends to be you know thinking like a Polynesian. But if you actually find a person who actually have continuity with an indigenous way of being and is willing to share that with you in some meaningful way, honestly, you can't extract it.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Alice Dare McIntyre talks about his tradition and it's the set of values, practices, communities, and beliefs and exemplars that all sort of hang together in a way that allows it to actually exist in the real world. And then it might not make much sense to people who are completely outside it, although it does have sort of arguments by analogy, but then you really understand it by getting inside it. And when you do that, there are all these real actual things that you can participate in, and that's the proper way.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

That's the key point. So it has to be participatory, one must engage in a participatory fashion, which means at a minimum, one must be open to and ultimately be transformed by the encounter. That's what it means to participate. And so if you step out again from the third person and observe it anthropologically, I'm not participating, I'm observing it in a third person, which is to say Western sense. You might learn some things about it, but you will not be transformed fundamentally. By contrast, if you step into it directly and critically hold nothing back, if you hold anything back, that thing is the thing that is not transformed, then you will be transformed by the encounter. So I've kind of iterated through that probably about a dozen times.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Oh, like different encounters with different traditions or realities and trying to enter them and allow yourself to actually be changed by them because that's the only way you're gonna get something from liminal space that you're gonna come back as someone who can pick up the table.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

Exactly. And it in in this case for me, it required a deep commitment to the necessity of that liminality. Because it's it's very easy to try to say most but not all. It has to be the law of the excluded middle. Aristotelian logic is beyond the veil. I have to hold that as invariant and everything else is open. Well, guess what? I can tell you what world you will create from that assumption. It's not that's not helpful. And there are other kinds of logic, by the way. And of course, again, the other thing is also say, and at least by hypothesis for a while, not at least a naive just transition. Like, okay, well, it turns out it's just the Hindus. They got it figured out. That's the solution. It's plausible. All right, check it out, go on the inside, but don't just make the assumption this is an anti-Western or anti-modernity. This it's not an anti-modernity exercise. It's a recognition that modernity can't solve the problem, that modernity in many ways is part of the problem. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean that something that just happens not to be modernity by definition will be the solution. It means you still have to hold us to the same standards. All right. So everything has to survive the test.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

So it sounds like you're on an epic, like literally an epic quest, or you're doing your best to participate in one where you say, my whole civilization has a problem. And now I have to go outside of it and put myself at the mercy of not necessarily the underworld, but underworld in the sense of liminal space, that's something that I can't control, that I have to go into and immerse myself in and hopefully bring something back that's abuse.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Yeah, that's a very nice pattern. I should mention, by the way, it's let's say not always the underworld, sometimes the underworld. There were a number of encounters that would definitely be characterized as dark, a number of encounters that definitely be characterized as just straight up the underworld. But more than a few times, my wife and I would just almost like stop, like you know, suspension of disbelief, step out of the movie for a while and look at each other and go, is this real? Like, how can this actually be real? The magnitude of the people we're talking to, the things we're talking about, the events that are occurring, it's like we're in a movie. We're not living in an ordinary life at all right now.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

So you encountered things that were that were truly surprising, truly outside of the paradigms, the frameworks, the explanatory models that you grew up with. Oh yeah, massively.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

And in a circumstance where it's like, well, the intensity and the quality and the repeatability mean, oh, that's just reality. That's how reality works. Got it. Expand sense of reality, that's not part of reality.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Can you give an example just so people understand kind of what nature of experience we're talking about?

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Well, I mean, we can just use the simplest possible example, which is there is consciousness. I hate to say it, but at a certain point, there are people out there, many of whom are currently building LLMs who are not so sure. And I can assure you there is coming.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

So you went to the underworld and you visit all the countries and traditions of the world and you discovered that consciousness actually exists.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Yes. One group that I worked with, we called a coherence. So it's not just is consciousness real, but also the consciousness has ways of being that are not strictly limited to the kind of ordinary phenomenology that people just absol normally have. So, for example, you and I can achieve a state of coherence whereupon it is more proper to say that we are participating in a shared consciousness than it is to say that we are communicating with minds.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

Instead of this model where yes, someone can be conscious and someone else can be conscious, like you're saying, something that emerges is that there can be some consciousness that exists around or subsumes multiple consciousnesses.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Yes, yes, and things can occur in that that are not possible in the lower level of consciousness. For example, that would be surprising to me.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Like if I experience that, I think if most of us experience that, we would say, huh, yeah, I'm in a movie I didn't know could be made.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Yep. And and the nice part is you actually, you know, if you're rigorous, you you test it, you do a variety of different events around it, you're like, okay, that is strong enough that I can use it as a way to behave in reality. FYI, there's an entire underlying kind of ethical epistemology to produce what I just said. Like, how do you know what to base your reality on? Well, I mean, we've got a lot that are assumed. Like, I'm not going to step in front of a moving truck. Why? Well, I have a really high degree of confidence that there are things that are material and have mass, and when you encounter them, because I've experienced a bunch of times, you know, that's what you got. You've got a bunch of heuristics based upon experience, and some of them have very high consequence. And so, how confident am I in that it's true and how significant are the consequences? There's a location in there where you make choices on the basis of that. And so, once you have something that has high enough confidence and high enough ability to deploy and high enough consequence, then that's reality, or at least that's your orienting basis for how you navigate reality. That's the key thing. So that then leads me, by the way, to the third step, which was we're circling this question like a hunter. We're circling the question of where do we find this thing that can respond to the metacrisis from that was the beginning of the epic journey, was that question? And we started getting more and more material of what the right solution to the metacrisis would have to look like. So think of it as a design specification for a new thing that is post-civilizational, by the way, post-capitalist, you use these terms. And what I just mean is that it solves a lot of the things that capitalism does, but isn't exactly the same as capitalism. It solves a lot of the problems that civilization does, but isn't exactly civilization. I don't mean that loose, I mean there's very precise things that it's not and precise things that it must be, like a long list. And includes things, by the way, like coherence. That's interesting. And so we begin actually trying to build this, and this is the last step, like the last leg. We tried probably four or five different approaches to trying to build it. And what I mean is like literally gathering together groups of people to operate in a certain context with certain protocols to produce certain kinds of effects that in principle should have the capacity to do the sorts of things necessary to at least put us on the road.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

What do these gatherings or projects look like? Is it you and your wife doing shrooms together, or is it the Santa Fe Institute, or kind of everything in between?

SPEAKER_00 30:54

How about me and my wife doing shrooms at the Santa Fe Institute? How's that? No, in fact, that would be an example, to be perfectly honest. It's like, okay, what are the parameters? What's available in psychedelic space? People have been dealing with this now for three generations. They claim a variety of different things. Well, let's just test it. What happens? Are there things that can actually happen there that are real and important? And as it turns out, yes, but the additional elements of what happens when you do shrooms, for example, or LSD or you know, whatever, create too much noise. So unless you have an extremely tight protocol, right? So if you've got a team of seven Buddhist monks who have themselves been training in deep meditation for like two or three decades each, and you give them shrooms, they can actually do something that you can't do with your average, you know, man off the street. It's just how it works. However, as it turns out, one branch of research was the high individual capacity branch. This is kind of like the climb the mountain of enlightenment branch. So okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

We're talking about finding geniuses or finding advanced Buddhist monks or both. Okay, both. Okay, so find the high individual capacity and see if we can get them to lift the table.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

But put Einstein through a hyper Buddhist monk training regimen. By hyper, I don't mean just like super Buddhist. I mean like, okay, let's put him through a combination. I'm not kidding at all, by the way. Um, let's put him through buds, like Navy SEAL's buds. Yes. He already has the science and mathematics part, but if he doesn't have it, he has to have that. He also has to go through 20 years of deep Buddhist meditation, and he actually has to become extremely skillful at psychedelics, which is adjacent but not exactly the same. So he has to actually spend at least three years with indigenous shaman in the Amazon going all the way into embodying their capacities. Okay, that guy. Are we going to construct it out of that guy?

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Navy SEAL, Buddhist monk, psychedelic shaman. Maybe this guy could lift the table.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Yes. And as it turns out, not just that guy, but maybe 12 of those guys. We need 12 of those guys. Tried that. Turns out it doesn't work at all. And there's like six or seven configurations we tried. Can you say why it doesn't work? I can actually. I'm not sure if I can say it in a way that's easy to understand. We're getting pretty deep right now.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

But I think that's what that's kind of the type of solution most people would jump to. Like we could either ask AI or we could find the smartest person in the world and get them what they need, get them the resources that they need, and then maybe a few of them, the knights of the round table, they can save us. So I think that's where our minds would naturally go. And I'm not surprised that you pursue that to the nth degree, being who you are.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

But why doesn't that work? So remember this concept of coherence. So you and I enter into a quality of relationship that allows us to participate in a shared consciousness. Okay. So below coherence, what you have is communication. So right now, for the most part, you and I are communicating. So our consciousnesses are separate, and we're using words to convey information across that boundary. Okay. There's certain information theoretic limits of what can be accomplished inside the entire category of communication. The fact that you're nodding delights me because what I just said is extremely not obvious to most people, but you get it.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

It should be obvious, right? There are only so many words that can cross the English channel, right? And the famous mathematician that Bell hired to get more information through the telegraph cable. Shannon basically proved that it wasn't possible and in the process invented important parts of mathematics that were used to build computers. But this problem of informational transfer is a fundamental problem between human beings. So, yes, in the communication space, even in the same room, even where we see our facial gestures, we get a lot more bandwidth, but it's still quite there.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

There are theoretic limits to what can happen in communication space. That's like that's the point. And I should mention, by the way, that Claude Shannon is a great example of what I was talking about in the very beginning of the metacrisis in the table, which is that they had a very simple problem. They're like, dude, we got noise in our wires. We need to make these telephones not so freaking noisy. He's like, I'm actually going to have to invent an entirely new discipline called information theory in order to solve the problem of making your telephones less noisy. And they're like, wow. And he created a whole new discipline. It's super powerful. Like, and unfortunately, you can't make them less noisy. But I can prove that you can't make them less noisy.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

And so by by this time, you've essentially gotten to that step of I can prove that this set of solutions is not what we can find.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

I can prove that you can't solve that problem at the level of communication. So you have to be operating within the domain of coherence. Okay. Now, in the domain of coherence, you've got separate problems. There's three. One is forming coherence is highly non-trivial. So two geniuses, typically speaking, have a much harder time coming into coherence than two people who are not geniuses for lots of very particular reasons, not the least of which is the path-dependent developmental arc of what produces a genius in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

So basically you're in a place where you're further up your own mountain, it's actually harder to talk back and forth through that person's mountain.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

And also when you've got an IQ of 180 and an EQ of six, not at all uncommon in this world, when you've become extremely identified, your identity, your ego is very attached to the rarity, beauty, and profundity of your ideas. When your life has been a life of not actually ever truly being understood by anybody because you've been operating at a level which is six standard deviations higher than everybody you've encountered, crossing that chasm at the level of coherence is very, very difficult. So have to go into a liminal space first. We create an entire business that ultimately is called uh quality of life sciences. Originally it's called NeuroHacker, trying to figure out if there were at least biochemical ways that could be delivered at scale that would increase the coherence capability of individuals who are available to participate in these kinds of conversations.

SPEAKER_01 36:07

So create a hive mind. Is an actual hive mind possible?

SPEAKER_00 36:10

No, no, that's very important. Actually, it's not at all a hive mind. A hive mind, a hive mind is a tightly knit coordination structure. So, like traffic, cars driving around, that's a hive mind. Um, this is actually coherence. This is actually creating something where there is a a higher level of consciousness, which is not the same thing. You started a business to do this at scale and didn't solve the problem. And this is maybe the second issue. Coherence is not the kind of thing that modernity, even naming it coherence, is the wrong name. So maybe we'll be moving to the third category soon. It's not the kind of thing that modernity likes to talk about. So when we talk about consciousness, for example, we talk about something which is extremely neutral. That's like the electromagnetic field. We can imagine things that are very neutral, like just part of like physics, they're kind of part of nature. So we think of consciousness as kind of like akin to a local electromagnetic field. So we're like, okay, I I can do the electromagnetic field that allows two radios that are distant in space to tune into the same channel. Good metaphor, by the way. I turn, say, hey, turn into 99.2, and you've got your headphones on, I've got my headphones on, and guess what we're doing? We're both listening to the same music. That's very similar, metaphorically, to having a shared consciousness. So that's the way we like to think about things. But as it turns out, that's not how it actually works. And so now we have to start importing other ideas like soul and spirit in a more rich sense, right? You can't use it, it seems obvious, but you can't use modernity's laundered version of these concepts to be able to think about things because if you try to do it, you figure out it doesn't work. So if you have incompatibility at the level of the soul, you can't actually form stable coherence at the level of consciousness. And then here's the third problem. And now we really jump across the chasm. So if people have been following me for modernity, you will not be able to follow me in the next step. It turns out the spiritual realm is real, and there are, in fact, let's call them spiritual entities. It's very difficult to say that. Pageot's work on this is by far the best. But you can drop into patterns in consciousness space, let's say, that have nothing to do with you or me. They are, in fact, if you and I enter into a shared consciousness, it's not like that shared consciousness is eunus and meanness combined. It's actually like it is literally a third. And that third may have its own intention.

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Yeah. Well, I think that's there's an analogy now that could resonate with a lot of people, and that is the meme. So there is a pattern that doesn't exist in you, it doesn't exist in me, but it definitely emerges in another space. It grows, it evolves, it exerts an influence and it might disappear after a while. But if you think of a spirit as being something like a meme, it exists in the real world, even according to modern people. But now, over the last few years, we have had direct experiences with it. And so we believe in spirits in a way that we couldn't five years ago, before Pepe the Frog or whatever. But yeah, but those things, those things do exist. And this is one of the conclusions you came to.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Yeah, and by the way, this actually tracks my own trajectory. Like I was actually working in the space of what are called egregors before I was operating at the levels of powers and principalities. And an egregore is a is a is a word that was sort of exapted, it was taken out of the esoteric tradition and brought into the rationalist world to describe things like clusters of means that hang together in a coherent way. And the amount of downward causation agency they have in the world can be quite significant. And as it turns out, this is a very powerful way of describing phenomena that people encounter. But the key thing I wanted to put out there is that whether you want to call it agency or pseudoagency, and what you choose there depends on a lot of your underlying commitments, because one could argue that you don't have agency. In fact, there's a whole category of scientists who argue that you don't have agency. They act as if they have agency in the world, they have interests. At a minimum, you can say it's a very, very simple argument. Those memes that further their own repetition repeat. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Simple as that. And so the entire category of means that don't have in the self-interest of continuing to exist just don't exist. Done. Those that do do, and guess what? You're encountering things that are very good at replicating themselves.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

You could argue that it's not an actual OODA loop because OODA loop presupposes intelligence, an intelligent part of the loop, but it behaves as though it has an Oodaloop.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Right. And my point is if you read Michael Levin's work, which is, I think, is the best on this, he does a fantastic job of helping us understand how we haven't understood intelligence adequately. And once you understand intelligence adequately, that distinction just dissolves. His approach to that, I think, is categorically correct. And so as it turns out, that particular solution doesn't work. And here's another crazy piece. This is really interesting. This is about four or five years ago. It became very clear that one of the great errors is that to the degree to which humans can participate in coherence at all, it has to do with our nature as humans. And just let me give me a little bit of time to talk about this. We can produce these very artificial egregores like at a university that involve a whole bunch of high IQ 20 somethings. And we can produce those. And that's the same thing that we've been using to build modernity out of, by the way. Google is basically a university. But these particular kinds of shared consciousness have much narrower capabilities. They think of it instead of being like a sphere, it's like an oblong, right? They're very good at math, they're very good at certain kinds of science, they're very good at certain kinds of technology, but they're actually not good at all at things like solving the metacrisis.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

More importantly, is a corporation, in a sense, an attempt to create an agregor?

SPEAKER_00 41:17

A corporation is a combination of using very sophisticated coordination mechanisms to actuate the agregor and very particular kinds of memetic structures to embody or to create the consciousness of the agregor. That's what it is. So, and I by the way, in an earlier work, corporations can't solve the problem. Universities can't solve the problem for very precise reasons having to do with the coordination capacity. Remember, that was already ruled out. So as it turned out, you actually had to have the whole of human to participate to actually achieve a strong enough, broad enough coherence to respond to the problem, which meant you had to have things like old people, you had to have things like mothers, you had to have children, you actually had to have something that looks like an actual community to produce something that has the capacity to respond to the metacrisis.