Jordan Hall contrasts Game A (career, wealth, status) with Game B (purpose and meaning), arguing the real problem is integrity—being split between competing parts of yourself. He traces his own path from startup CEO with private islands to realizing external success is a simulation that leaves you empty.
Chapters
The thing that occurs to me whenever I consume your material, you know, I've read the Scale book, I just read the David Graeber book, is it feels like I'm living two different lives. So on the one hand, you know, I'm a startup CEO, financially very privileged, extremely lucky, and it feels like this gay may thing is something that's, I don't know, that I've learned to master, right? And then I watch your stuff and then I read those books and I'm like, wow, is game A even worth it? Is there even any value in mastering it? So I guess my question for you is, for someone like me, what's the best way to be a part of the solution or game B? How does one go about feeling connected to being a part of the solution as opposed to seeing, feeling like it's two different worlds?
Ah, okay. Well, the word that comes up for me there is integrity. And of course, integrity is to be integrated, right? To be whole. And if you're divided, there's a feeling of there being two different things that are pulling in different directions. And this may or may not be similar to what you're talking about. There's some, some relationship, I think. Well, gosh, let me see if I can see what comes up. Ah, okay. This is actually— this is really tricky to get just right. Let me see if I can thread the needle. It has to do with Okay, so there's a number of different responses that people can have to this tension. This is, by the way, I think, a pretty ubiquitous tension, to be perfectly frank. Like, depending on where you're coming from, it may show up in different ways. Um, what one response you might think of as a sort of, uh, the Game A side represses the Game B side, right? And so the Game B side is something that maybe was put away as childish things or as weakness or as silliness or something like that.
It feels like it's like naive and utopian.
Yeah, yeah. And that's, and that's, and that's a story that was told, that you told yourself some long time ago, right? Some point in time, it's time to grow up and be serious about life. If I don't, you know, stop looking at the daydreaming out the window and focus on what I'm doing, I won't be successful. That kind of thing, right? Right.
Right.
And there's— I get it. That makes sense. That's actually how you win game A is to actually begin to adopt that attitude. If you don't win game A, then you lose game A, right? Game A is that kind of game. And so you could be a loser, right? So to go in this direction, the energy of I don't want to be a loser, I want to be a winner, has part of that vibe to it. An alternative, which is— but so another way it shows up which I think is in some sense the same thing but it's mirror image, like it's, it's, uh, it's complement, is you try to resist or clamp down on or fight, disparage, denigrate the gayme aspect in yourself.
Yeah.
Sometimes this will show up as, uh, you know, trying to ego death, like destroy the ego altogether. Sometimes it'll show up as, you know, outwardly projecting the aspects and artifacts of Game A out in the environment, of which there are many. That's the world we live in, as the bad thing. As we have to put down the bad thing out there. And sometimes it'll actually show up as this weird thing where your own Game A energy of domination and control will sort of turn on itself, and you'll begin to try to like fight yourself into disciplining it in some way. Or you can also go in the direction of magical thinking and just kind of just let go and pretend that— and this truly is naive and utopian, right? Pretend that simply, uh, you know, hoping and wishing, the feeling itself by itself is adequate to bring something into the world. Lots of different ways of dealing with this particular tension. Um, okay, that's one. So I kind of feel like I want to tell you a little bit about my own personal story, which is maybe somewhat similar to yours.
Sure.
And different from many others, of course, but most people's. So in my case, the way my life arc went, um, the, the, the fitness landscape or the, the way that my self showed up to be successful as a human, as an adult built a very effective ego. So how they strategically— good strategic acumen, good capacity to kind of interface with other people and influence and generate, you know, get people to do the things that I prefer them to do, um, through, you know, the techniques that I was good at, some of which were logical argumentation, others of which were, you know, causing them to feel like they would benefit by doing it, whatever, whatever the ego does to be successful.
It seems like personality of like the systems thinker. And that type of personality, when you're given a game like Venture-Backed Startups, or, you know, acting, whatever that is, it learns to kind of master that domain.
Exactly. And oddly enough, the way it worked for me was that as a kid, as a— so particularly it's like from 9 or so up until my early 20s, games themselves, like actually like games were the thing. And so I built deep instincts for how to play a game, how to become very good at how to win games in general, any game, right? And so when I was faced with the prospect of the entrepreneur game— actually, it's funny, when I was faced with the prospect of the capitalism game, I kind of looked at that landscape and said, okay, here are all the different moves one can play in, you know, getting a job and paying for your life. Like, okay, these are all stupid. I can't play these. I won't oh, I could potentially— this is a good game that I could potentially win at, and let me try that. So then, okay, now adopt that game. And you might say that I, you know, I won that game. I found myself in a circumstance where, you know, check off the boxes. I had a tech company, I took it public on the NASDAQ, I had like, you know, my company's name was like on the ticker.
Yeah, that's literally all the boxes involved.
Yeah, I was flying to private islands, hanging out with famous fancy people, being— going to all the new like upgraded things. And so, so what happened in that context was I then noticed that it wasn't that awesome, you know. It's the metaphor of the Monopoly game. Like, okay, I won the game. And then imagine, you know, imagine if like you won the game, you're like, you won Monopoly, you're sitting there, you got all the Monopoly money, you got like hotels on every square, and you're like, yeah, you're just like, what's next? What's the point of that? Okay, that's cool. And then And you kind of look around, you see the other people who are around you, and you notice they don't have a feeling of wow, right? They're either striving to just kind of continue to go up and up and up on this increasingly steep and narrow pinnacle. I need to get a G5 instead of a G4 or whatever, right? My private— I need to get another private island. Like, you're in— you're like, ah, I kind of— it's not hard to kind of get to the point of realizing there's something about that that is clearly not going in the right direction. But more importantly, for myself, I just noticed a feeling. Like, I was like, literally, I was jogging in Aspen and just, I stopped at a certain point. I was just like, yeah, this ain't it. So what is it? That's the question, right? Then the question is, once, once you've, um, what's the right way of putting it? It's like you, you, you had a sense, in some sense you were told, you were definitely directed, right? You're subtly directed that there's a train and the train takes you to the destination. And if you can figure out how to get on the train, then the destination, right? So in my case, I got on the train, bought the ticket, got up to the front of the train, got to the destination. I was like, wait, this isn't the destination.
Yeah.
So then there's an interesting query.
Hmm.
Okay. Now what? Now again, in my case, and this is, by the way, I'm just— this is my story, but maybe there's something helpful here. So I spent the next, gosh, 5 years or so. Is that right? Yeah, no, 4 years. Um, kind of just sort of checked out, like, okay, I guess the way this thing works is you just— there's not much to it. Like, life has a, uh, there's really no point. And that's okay. Like, this— you just sort of, once you've reached a level of, of affluence, you stop working. Like, don't be a dumbass and just keep grinding away. What's the point of that? Just, you know, get a nice little lifestyle, have a nice family. Like I said, read comic books, smoke dope, and play video games. Like, okay, I guess that's how this thing works. And by itself, there's like a, uh, there's like a little bit of a clearly that's not quite it either. But in my case, and by the way, now for effectively everybody, we have the advantage that the world is in the process of, of like shitting us out of that, of that, uh, foolishness regardless of where you are. Like if you're on the private island or sitting on the streets, the world is in the process of saying, nope, that is definitely not going to work because the shaking started to happen. So in my case, it just happened to be the, you know, the 2008 financial crisis and the aftermath of it. I just sort of paid attention and I was in a position where I could ask people questions about it. And of course, I was in a position where I could just think about it. And I noticed kind of two things. One was everywhere I looked, almost nobody was either honest or competent. So the questions were either situations where people who were supposed to have awareness and responsibility clearly didn't know what was going on. Like, it wasn't hard to get them because things were changing so quickly. You could get reality— it was giving you feedback, like, okay, you're full of shit, next. Um, or you could tell they were actually not telling you what they really knew.
Um, I was gonna relate to that sense, by the way. It's kind of like when you're— when you're at a big company— I haven't been at big companies, but You get this feeling like, you know, there's a new VP of marketing and they get up at the all hands and you go, wow, like, damn, this dude has just got it. They've got all the answers. And then you get in a one-on-one with them and you start— you, for me, for example, if I've been around at the company for years, I start educating them. Yeah. And you monitor that situation over many months and you're like, wow, I think I may know more about this particular thing than that, than that person, and yet they're, they're meant to be leading us.
Yeah. And, and, and I don't know about— I mean, my experience of in a company was when I brought in somebody who had the right resume, it became evident relatively quickly.
Yeah.
There was an organism optimized for having the right resume.
Yeah.
All sizzle, very little steak. It was like, huh. And by contrast, actually, when I kind of found a kid out in the internet— yeah, I hadn't gone to college but just had this kind of, you know, fucked up hair and a weird attitude, but man, they had something. They were always like, that was wins. Like, always, this is a—
I've gone through this so many times. Like, when I first became a vice president, I was like, I, I need the guy from Uber, you know. I need someone who's been in a PM role for, for years. And you, you look at these resumes, you interview them, and they're, they're just amazing. And then once they, once they start, you realize that, okay, they're great at interviewing, you know, they have certain skill sets around maybe communication, they're very cooperative, but they're not actually getting to the heart of the problem. And you compare that with, let's say, a green-eyed intern, or like someone who's just coming in fresh, who's maybe a little naive but genuinely wants to, say, solve a problem or prove to him that, or her, that they can solve the problem. And they end up feeling more valuable to your, your mission as a company leader than the person you hired. And by the way, the first person, you have to like, you have to pay them to stay. Bonuses, you know, equity grants, all that stuff.
Yes. The mercenary vibe. Like they're clearly mercenaries and they're very like, it's also a mutual shopping. And it's funny. It's like the— it's one of these things where I have an image, like in a movie where you're at a cocktail party and everybody looks awesome, and then there's like this little twitch and you kind of— the illusion dispels and you see what everybody really looks like and they— it's not awesome. Yeah, it comes back on. Like when you're in that interview process, they're sensing whether or not you'll look good on their resume, right? Or you're going to pay them enough money that they can do the thing. Like there's a there's an interesting thing there, right? So that's the, the feeling of the simulation is part of the thing that will begin to peel away at your soul in the context of playing in the gaming environment, right?
Yes.
And the more you realize it's a simulation, if you don't just drink the Kool-Aid and dive into the simulation, then you start getting alienated by it, right? You start having a hard time. Like, people, you know, you go and do the things that human beings do, right? They gather, but everybody's engaging in simulation. You're, and you're like, uh, Right, and so you either just kind of surrender to it and become increasingly—
You don't have that many options. It's like you can either play that game, you can— so for me as a founder, let's say, you know, I want to be backed by Sequoia Capital, you know, the traditional hero's journey arc of a startup founder is, you know, Sequoia, Series A, B, C, maybe IPO, you know, maybe, maybe I stay for 10 years, 15 years, and that's it. That, that's, that's the game. And if I'm not playing that game, then it's like, well, what am I playing?
Yeah, and, and it's interesting because—
yeah, back to it.
So let's go with Elon Musk, right? Probably the, the, the— what I was trying to— what I was thinking about was that it's not like the all the Game A games are bullshit, but it's important to recognize that it's not the case. And in fact, there's always at least a little bit of real in any Game A game, even like this most miserable one, right? Um, the problem actually has to do with this lack of integrity, the inability to actually have the whole of yourself be fully present in the— in your being, right? Some part of you has to actually be literally, uh, kicked out, right? It has to be held back. Like, you cannot be fully integrated. Yeah, that I think is the real key to it. So you have someone like Elon Musk where, okay, he can do, you know, You know, he climbs the mountain and he's like, okay, there's a bigger mountain. I'm gonna climb a bigger mountain. Okay, I'm gonna have 9 mountains. Let's just keep adding mountains to this stack. And his capacity, his competence is huge. And he actually is so smart that he can strategically make it so that by climbing this mountain, the next mountain becomes possible. So he's playing the biggest possible version of the game.
And you keep starting them. It's like tunnels, cars, you know, space, money.
In some sense, nothing— there's no end to that ability, right? To add more. But it's a little bit like buying the next— private island in a sense, right? He's generating real change in the world, and in many cases I might even say he's generating real change that has both earnest positive intent and meaningful positive benefit, right? So he's doing good. He's actually generating real change, intending to and in fact doing good. The challenge— and this is a really interesting problem— the challenge is that what I would say is this lack of integrity, that there's aspects of himself that have to be— that aren't actually able to be acknowledged and integrated into himself for the wholeness of him, right? So this is one of these things where on his deathbed, yeah, he'll be like, huh, right? On your deathbed, you look back here and you realize that all of these great things, you know— you've heard one of my favorite poems is the poem Ozymandias by, uh, Shelley. Yeah, you know, so it's head and feet in a desert. It's like, look upon all my great works and despair, right? And you're like, ah, I get it. Like, the things that you have done in the outer world, as powerful as they are, yeah, they're not where meaningfulness really comes from. And so it's the yearning for meaningfulness, it's the meaning crisis at the— in the individual level that, that will get you. And then again, you can either be honest or dishonest. If you're dishonest, you'll try everything, everything in your power to avoid dealing with the reality of the increasingly felt gap and lack of meaningfulness and keep trying to stuff things in to fill it, you know, whether you're eating candy or taking OxyContin or, you know, starting companies, it's all the same thing, right? Different ways of trying to achieve meaningfulness through a simulation. If you're honest, then you're fucked because you'll start to realize that it's not— that's not going to work, right? You begin to have to honesty is all about, like not taking the simulation for the real thing, right? So you begin to realize, oh, it's not really a real steak, Cypher. I know it tastes like one, but it's not really a real steak. And you begin to be jarred and buffeted by what's up. Okay, so that's all that. So now the question is, how, how do you resolve the problem? How do you actually get to the other side of it? And the, the thing here I would say is vocation. This is the word that I've begun to really use to describe that. Uh, Daniel calls it dharma. Um, and it's like, okay, imagine that there's a bunch of different ways to look at it. I think it's important to look at it multiple different ways, so let's just take a few. So imagine that it was the case that you have something that you're here for. You had— there's a reason for the— you're showing up in this moment in this way. And it is by doing that thing, bringing that thing, that thing that you're here for, bring it in with real skillfulness and deftness and completeness and beauty, that you realize your purpose. And so just imagine, let's just for the moment just pretend that that's the way it works. Then of course your job is to figure out what that is and then do it, right? In some sense that becomes very simple. Um, okay, so that's one way of looking at it. And let me hold that for a little bit. So the question is, how do you, how do you do that? You know, the Japanese have that notion of— I think it's called ikigai, you know, the thing where you have both passion, skillfulness, and usefulness, and that unity. But that's— ikigai is a very nice, like, a typical Japanese way of looking at it, more of a how, like, how do you find this thing? The how is powerful. The how has to do with things like, okay, well, how do you begin the process of listening to the whole of yourself, noticing, like, as you show up in different ways? Like, let's say you show up in a marketing role and you show up in a project management role Is there something about the way that you show up that is common between them that has a certain shininess or brilliance to it that is clearly nothing— not specifically associated with the role, but is more fundamentally associated with you? Yeah. And is there a way to listen or discover or discern what that is and see if there's a way to say, okay, are there— are there roles, are there things in the world that more clearly need or want or benefit from unis, right? So the Japanese version gives you a nice kind of concrete— I don't have to pretend. It's like, okay, let's imagine that there is a, uh, 3 tensors that I'm trying to do an equilibrium on. One is what's most useful in the world, one is what am I most passionate about, and one is what am I best at, what am I most capable at achieving skillfully. Seek the point of all those 3. What I would propose is that those 2 stories are actually very closely aligned. They're very cleanly aligned because the, the thing that gets in the way often is trying to achieve the answer to the ikigai question analytically, which is to say that you're using only a small part of yourself to try to solve the problem. But of course what ends up happening is that that small part solves the problem for itself. Oh well, this aspect of myself has this ikigai, right? But the rest of yourself's like, uh, that ain't me, what are you doing? Yeah, then you got trouble, right? So the question is How do you actually learn how to first order bring the whole of yourself into the inquiry of your ikigai, right? Using all the different aspects of simulated meaning versus real meaning.
It's kind of like that, right? In, in the first version, it's like you're simulating a bubble of meaning, but that's not the whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, right. And what happens is we— it's so funny, it's very similar. Let's do a modal shift if you don't mind. I'm going to shift from ethics to epistemology. So it's very similar to the way that, that a paradigm tries to convert all perception into its form, you know. So if you know Kuhn, what happens is you have a paradigm, and your paradigm kind of tries to be monolithic, a single paradigm for all of reality, which means that every perception that comes in, first thing is your paradigm has to convert that perception to something that it that's in its terms, right? Okay, this is this kind of thing. Oh, it's a tree, it's a dog, it's a person, whatever, right? Usually in its language. And then it has to stick it in its schema. Then it can say, oh, this is what's true and what's good about it, right? So the paradigm has that characteristic of almost like this envelope that you live in that stands between you and reality, and it has to convert everything that you experience into its own thing before it can deal with it. And what happens, of course, is that some aspects of reality don't fit in your paradigm. These are called anomalies. So you get these anomalies, and your paradigm is like, well, okay, either I'm just going to ignore it and pretend like it's not real— create these weird blind spots where anomalies are flying at you, but you literally are just blind to them because your paradigm can't do anything with them— or it's going to falsify. It's going to modify the thing and kind of stick it in a box so it's kind of closed enough. How can I get enough of this? Or of course you can go through a paradigm shift. You're like, oh shit, okay, that— there's too many anomalies going on, I need to go through a change. And maybe what you do is you, you do a dot release to your paradigm and do a slight shift and change to it and add more to your capacity. Um, or you have a complete crisis and you complete— you do it, you know, do a— we call it a major release. Okay, I got a new paradigm, man, this is a whole new deal, I can take care of the world now. So that's the epistemological version. The ethical version is the same way. Right? If you have one aspect of yourself, one subset of your wholeness, takes itself to be the whole, which of course then would be the ego in that— in the traditional formulation— it begins to try to seek your ikigai or present your highest beingness in the world, and by the way, and meaningfulness, only through its own way of being in the world. And of course, any aspect of yourself that is not well met with that, it ends up sort of starving, right? So you're, hey, why don't you like cotton candy, man? I love cotton candy. Candy is great. And your, you know, your body's like, yeah, okay, it's sweet, but there's other aspects to life, man. I need more than just sweet. And you're, you know, your, your sweet tooth is going, no, no, man, sweet is it. Sweet is everything. Everything is sweet. If I could just get sweet tapped to the maximum, I'm gonna be happy.
Or in the Elon Musk example, I imagine he spends all this time thinking about the hard problems, right? Rocket engineering, Mars, the hard technology. But at some point he has to grapple with the fact that he's a CEO of a public company, and that comes with responsibilities. He's not allowed to say certain things to the world. He has to let's say, do a quarterly—
Well, I'm going to go harder. I'm going to go harder. At some point, he has to wrestle with the fact that he's on his third wife. He's got like 5 kids. And his relationships with those human beings, which clearly were rich enough to cause them to enter into the intimacy of copulation and pregnancy and childrearing. And I would say from an evolutionary perspective, as a human, are the things that have the highest potential for actually carrying and conveying meaning are things that he's actually quite far from. I don't know what his relationships with his kids are, but I can say with high confidence that they're nowhere near what they could be. And, you know, it's, it's, it is sort of commonplace. It's like almost a Hallmark card that there's never been a man on his deathbed who's yearned to say, boy, I wish I had worked harder. Right, right. It is the case that as you— it is, it is common knowledge that wisdom, as you enter into elderhood, is this: it's the human relationships that bear the highest possibility for the thing that we call meaningfulness. And if you defer those in favor of something else, um, there's, there's a point at which you're, you're losing contact with yourself. Right? And so it's the aspect of yourself that is this, that can only be developed and nutrified by virtue of deep, loving, caring, honest, high-integrity, hard, rich human relationships. That is the thing that's not, that's being left behind, right? That's actually being—
Have you seen the new Pixar movie, Soul?
No.
I would highly, highly recommend that. It's— yeah, it speaks to all of this. But if I can just draw an analogy, in that movie they have this concept of the zone. So the zone is where you go where, let's say, you're playing jazz and you're just in that moment, right? But they make the point that there are certain people who— let's say stockbrokers. If you stay for too long in the zone and you keep repeating the thing, that got you into the zone, you end up becoming a lost soul.
Wow.
They have this amazing visual of, you know, the souls are cutesy and like they're blue and bubbly and stuff, but the lost souls are these like gigantic, like horrific creatures just walking around in the zone. And so that it kind of reminded me of that where it's like, yeah, let's say Elon Musk, the zone. Wow. Like rocket company, car company, 5 kids, blah blah blah blah blah, but the soul itself is accumulating this, you know, it's turning into this gigantic blob, and it's so far away from being what it was, which is a soul.
Yeah, that's great, it's beautiful, it's amazing that Pixar— I mean, that's the art's job, right? So it's beautiful.
Apologies for the spoilers, by the way, but I think you should watch them at the end.
Spoiler alert, okay. Yeah, that's beautiful. Many people in my experience over the past several years have actually spoken, literally used the word soul to say it's the ensoulment or the recovery of the soul that is the question of the moment, that precisely in this language actually, that there's a path. And again, I don't want to say that this path is entirely without reason or meaning, And there's a path where you go into the zone, right? A path where you, you separate yourself from the wholeness of yourself. You temporarily focus on something and become a certain shape, and then you learn how to become so good at being that shape you can actually do the thing. I'm actually visually seeing like a key in the keyhole, and your natural shape is very open and fluid, but you'd be like, become the key so that you can go into the keyhole and turn it, right? But if you forget, you lose contact, uh, then you end up being just a key. And then maybe you keep looking for other keys, keyholes to open, but that's, you know, that's not the right answer. The right answer is actually reverse back and become this larger whole thing. Um, okay, so then the proposition is, if we take all of this, is that if you— I'm gonna say like with a sort of a ruthless honesty, self-honesty and external honesty um, find ways to— I'm going to use the word love— like, to love the whole of yourself, and like all of it. Like, literally, uh, if you got challenges with anger, or if you've got challenges with envy, you actually have to go into that and notice where that actually is a beautiful virtue that got turned sideways by how it showed up, how it got kind of twisted in the world. You know, anger is at first, at base— think animals, like fight or flight. At base, anger is fight. Anger is the body noticing potentially a threat and necessity to build up energy to protect something— yourself, your young, right? Um, and then of course it has. So that's, that's a valuable thing. Thank you, anger, for, for being prepared.
A reaction, a signal that then causes a certain set of events. Yeah.
And, and so, and so you get, you get these weird twists where now you're actually responding with anger to something that— where anger is not the appropriate response. Okay.
It's that feedback loop that's non-generative, or that leads you in that, that bad direction of the signal itself was, was good, but it just led you to this other, other place where it wasn't meant to.
Yeah, you've got that. If you've built bad habits on how to interpret and respond to the signals, you've got to go back through, allow the base signal to be real, and then heal the habits, which is to say, unwind, gently unwind old habits and build new habits and things like that. As you do that work, several things begin to happen. One is you begin to have better relationships because you're actually able to show up more fully and with more integrity with the human beings around you, which means that you'll stop being willing to dominate yourself in relationships. So toxic relationships become less and less acceptable, and healthy relationships become more possible, which means you actually get a better sense of what healthy relationships are actually like, which means you get a better sense of— you actually get lifted up like, oh shit, I forgot, you know, go back to the sweet, you know. Once you finally begin to eat nutritious food, you begin to realize, oh shit, that's what being, you healthy feels like. Okay, now I can begin grabbing the thread and pulling it. So then the, the threads of maturity and health and healing and integration and wholeness begin to become a little bit easier to get to.
And if I can add just two concepts that you brought up in your material that's actually, uh, deeply affected my life. So one, I think at one point you're talking about the, the relationship that you have with your with your kids, um, you, you look at it as a sacred relationship. Like when you're in that mode, you're in a sacred mode. That, that one, uh, idea just changed the way I interact with, with my daughter because the thing that I struggle with is, you know, unplugging, right? You're done with the day, your mind's looping through, through all the problems of the day. And now let's say I have to put my kid to bed, right?, right? And that should be a fun thing to do. She's animated, she's energized, she has things to tell me about her day, right? We can maybe make up games. It's a very—
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Natural human thing, except the startup CEO version of me is just having trouble unplugging from that mode and plugging into that mode. But ever since you brought up this idea of you just have to see it as a sacred thing. It's a sacred relationship, right? And the other thing you brought up was, um, when it comes to children, you have to look at it as a peer-level relationship, or a relationship in which they're teaching you as, as you're teaching them.
Yeah.
And so those concepts, I just have to point out, really impacted, uh, you know, the way I look at my, my relationship with my daughter.
Well, I'm really glad. That's, that's those— if sort of like that's on my tombstone, that feels good. That's good. That's, that's beautiful. And, um, you know, so things that were coming up for me, there were things like ritual and, uh, portals or transitions, you know. So if you think about the sacred as the sacred, and you think, okay, what are all the things that humanity has done in the past to create right relationship with the sacred, you know, like an arch, like a torii in Japan, right, or a bell, bong, or certain times, certain days, sunset, sunrise, dinner, like all these different artifacts. And, and these are all basically just scaffolding. They're psychotechnologies. They're scaffolding to help remind us and to support us in being able to move away from the zone, right, to being able to move away from the thing that pulls us in, back, and be able to then, oh yes, thank you, I remember now, now I'm, I'm here, I'm good. You know, because if you try to do it in a sloppy way, just sort of, oh, I'm just gonna, you know, do it willy-nilly.
Yeah.
Just, it's too hard. Right. You're, you're—
Or what a lot of, you know, executives do is they time box everything. And so you look at their calendar and it's like blue, blue, blue, blue, blue.
Yeah.
And I've just never been able to do that because who, who knows what I'm gonna be thinking or feeling at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday, you know?
Well, yeah, that's a— that goes to a different vibe, which is, um, the difference between the industrial and the creative. In the industrial, I can be absolutely certain that if my assembly line is running at a certain rate, that your job is just to put this widget on that thing at this pace, right? We're done. Yeah, fuck off. It's, it's, it's 10:02. You should be putting a widget on a thing.
The way they would justify it is, let's say, um, you know, CEO of Shopify says they have their systems and they would say, look, every week me and my assistant review that calendar and we notice that we've been spending 30% of my time on X, 40% on Y, and we tweak that at a zoomed-out meta level, right? And I've never been able to— I guess I see some value in that. If you, if you do have a lot of things to do that need to get done, maybe there's some value in that, but At the same time, I can't get myself around to using any system that disconnects you from the moment.
It's interesting. Um, well, what I want to do is I want to use that to go back into the notion of, uh, vocation, because it feels to me like on the one hand I can say with confidence that you and I and everyone needs to and can find and build a system that works. And on the other hand, it will be bespoke. Yeah, gonna be the one that works for you, and the one that works for you now, right?
Because you're— it'll be a complicated system on top of complex complexity, right?
Right. And so you— and then you also have to be aware of precisely that the system can't take over the you, right? Because the system will definitely become a less well fit as you change, as your context changes, right? That's the thing that complicated gets in trouble, is it holds when reality is changing.
Right.
And so, you know, it goes back to that notion like, okay, go into the zone, build your system, learn how to build a system that's effective for you. The guy over there at Shopify, he's got an approach. Cool. Learn from it. Maybe there's parts of that that work. This guy over here, another approach, you know. Some— this guy just like lights a joint and goes for a walk. Okay, whatever. Like what's the technique, right? For me, it's— I've kind of made the sacred art of espresso part of my system. You know, I wake up in the morning, I turn on my espresso machine. It's a, it's like a 15-minute process that has a bunch of steps to it. And what it does is it actually, it's almost like a samurai meditation, yoga, tai chi kind of thing. Like there's a flowingness to it. And the point for me is actually what it does is it forces me into a, a disposition of discipline but highly discerning, fully embodied discipline. Not like Germanic, Prussian clock discipline, but like I have to be in relationship with what's really happening right there. It has a tight feedback loop. Like, okay, at the end I get an output that I can taste it and I can tell whether or not I did it right. But the point is actually just to remind me, oh yeah, this thing. Then that creates a space. From that space, I move to the next thing. And by the way, in a year that may have been about, that may say, okay, that's the past. There's a new place, right? As you're getting better and better in yourself, you have to constantly renovate your external artifacts, your sort of Power Man or your Iron Man armor that you build out of yourself to support, and don't ever become the armor. And that process, that continual process of expressing skillful capacity to build your armor, and then from that place, building more interior capacity to have more discernment in self and world, and then like a snake shedding its skin, shedding it back out of that armor, then coming back into a new version, like that process, like that street 3-step process, that's the thing, right?
And what's powerful in that is that being your S-curve model, is that like a revolution?
Say again?
Um, so you have this model of the S-curve, right?
Yeah.
And I, I think you talk about, you know, when the S-curve breaks down, there's a revolution. Yeah. Is that what it is, or it's just a complete breakdown of the S-curve and there's a new S-curve at the end?
I guess I don't understand. When the S-curve gate breaks down, is that a revolution?
Yeah. So in what you're talking about right now, um, when you, when you evolve, let's say, so maybe that ritual you have changes to something else. Is that almost like one S-curve breaking down and turning into something else? Yes.
So, so the way, if you, if you're visual, do you have a visual?
Yeah. Okay.
So I've got my S-curve. Okay, and I've got two points. One point is at the, at the, at the bottom of the S that becomes straight. The other point is the top of the S when the straight begins to go to an S. And there's decision point, and there's one point in the middle, in the dead center. And each one of those are decision points in the evolution of the system dynamics. And, you know, if I get to the top of the straight, so I get to the third point without having already begun the process of migrating to my new form, then I'm going to have a crisis, right? Because I've basically gotten locked into the zones. Too much of my, my capacity and energy and attention and ways of being in the world have become addicted to my paradigm. I've become addicted to my morality, right? I've become addicted to a formal, complicated structure. And to shift requires breakdown, requires a breakdown that cracks things up and brings me to my knees and all kinds of sort of things that are normally considered to be relatively unpleasant. Um, at the bottom, at point 1, what happens is when I get to point 1, I should be getting the signal that it's time to actually— to begin to think about the next thing, while simultaneously I'm just beginning to really get the use out of the— out of the thing I just did, right? That's how you get an elegant move, right? So you almost say, okay, This is dialed in. I'm going to take advantage of the things that's dialed in, but I'm also going to put like a red team or a skunkworks group on the next one. So when I get to the middle point, I actually begin the process of consciously shifting to the new place. Yeah? If I can do that, if I can hold the integrity of that, which is kind of— now that's a metastructure, then I can actually shift and keep shifting and do so without having to undergo a complete breakdown. That's an elegant growth process. I can grow and like, okay, now I'm in a new mode. Oh, now I'm going to go into a liminal space. Now I'm going to be stepping in, but the place I'm stepping into, I could actually get out of the— I could get out of the old skin without having to crack it open. I could just slide out of it and I can be in the liminal space without being in crisis. And I've already begun the process of getting the new place so I can orient myself in that new place relatively, in a relatively healthy fashion. Um, hold on.
It's crazy how similar that is to disruption, or, um, if you read an Andy Grove book, uh, about Intel, right? It's, it's, it's basically that same idea, it seems to me.
Yeah, I think, I think that's— this is— it's, uh, I think it's— it is in fact the same idea. I think there's something about it that is not— it's like, you, you know, in complexity science, you've got these things that are mechanism invariant. That they don't really care what the mechanism is.
Right.
I think it's one of those. So it's, you see it here, you see it there, you see it there. It's all the same thing, just instantiating in different contexts.
And just in this conversation, we instantiated it at the personal level of personal systems.
Yeah.
And then you zoom out and it's like Game A, Game B.
Yeah.
Those are two S-curves essentially.
Yeah. And so what happens is, and there are two relationships to S-curve, I think that's probably the biggest piece. So if you look at Game A, and it's funny, like the most mature version of Game A, the most sophisticated version of Game A, I would characterize as the meta. So meta-modernism, perhaps. I'm not sure. I'm not super familiar with that, but meta. What I mean by that is when I'm dealing with an S-curve and it's getting to its point of disruption, what I can do, I can say, yeah, yeah, but. It's actually part of a bigger S-curve, dude. And I'm actually sitting at the bigger S-curve, so it's okay for me.
I struggle with that so much with your ideas because you're talking about these at the level of a civilization, right?
Yes.
How do we know where we are in that S-curve? 'Cause— Well, hold on, let me make this point. Yeah.
Let me make this point. I wanna make sure we're on the same page because this point's, I think, very subtle but very important. So let's say that I'm on the S-curve of the x86 architecture. It's becoming very banal. Okay. Now, if I identify with the x86 architecture and it gets to the top of its S-curve, I'll be very sad, right? I'm undergoing a crisis. My identity is falling apart. But if I go, no, no, no, Moore's Law doesn't care about the architecture. Moore's Law is actually a bigger S-curve. It's about the capacity to achieve higher levels of processing power, full stop, maybe, maybe even irrespective of transistors. It's not physically bound in any way. So what can happen is I can shift from one S-curve, I can shift from vacuum tubes to transistors, be like, I'm all good, brother. It's okay. I'm not about vacuum tubes, I'm about transistors, I'm about this more abstract thing. I can go up to a meta level. Okay, so hold that. That's the meta move. Now, I could do this. You ready for the next meta move? Yeah, I get it, but that's also an S-curve, and so it's gonna reach its terminus too. Like, ah, no worries, brother. I'm not about that, I'm about money. I'm just about dollars. I don't care if it's processor speed or it's GPUs or it's bandwidth, or it's social media, or it's food, I can go meta too. I can abstract across all physical phenomena, all possible S-curves that are instantiated, become meta to all of them in the context of money, and now be indifferent. Oh yeah, this entire economy collapsed?
That's all good.
I just move my money up into Bitcoin. No big deal. Fiat currency? No worries, brother. I just, bam., and then I can come back down from Bitcoin into whatever the S-curve of the day is. Now, that is the meta move. That's Game A at its most sophisticated. That's like the General Patton in World War II Game A. That's a serious, serious motherfucker Game A. On the Game B side, the word I'm going to use is the word the transcendent, to transcend, not to go meta, but to transcend. And this is a very— in some sense, it's super subtle, and in some sense, it's super straightforward. And the soul is the right language, right? If what I'm doing is I'm in the zone, Elon Musk, right? And I'm in the zone, what I'm doing is I'm constantly trying to find ways to stay in the zone, but move in the zone. The thing I'm not doing is I'm not in the soul, right? The soul is strictly not ever in the S-curve, right? It's that which is, by the way, vastly larger than anything that could ever be in the S-curve. And it's strictly not ever at all in the S-curve. So if I do the Game A move, I begin to lose track of this thing over here, the soul. And I start, because I'm starting to get so good at meta, I lose track of trance. I lose track of this entire other thing, which is the cards, right? The finite and the infinite game. I begin to take, I call it the Leibnizian error. Ready for this one? This is epistemological frame. So, you know, Leibniz, when he was doing the calculus, had a problem. The problem is, if I want to measure the area under a curve, a simple way to do it is I can make a bunch of rectangles of different sizes and kind of fit— best fit— and I get an approximation of the area under the curve. Well, I want to get a better approximation. We'll make more rectangles, right? Okay, cool. And then Leibniz makes this little sleight of hand. It's like, all right, now check it out. What happens if I make an infinite number of rectangles? That'd be the whole thing, right? My error would get smaller and smaller and smaller, become what he calls an infinitesimal, like a about. It'd be effectively, effectively zero, right? And so it's like, okay, the limit as x approaches infinity, the error approaches zero. So now, sleight of hand, I'm going to take it as zero, right? That's the game move. The game move is going to say, well, I'm going to take the thing that is the trans, the transcendent, the soul. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do the limit as the finite approaches the infinite I'm trying to make this meta move bigger and bigger and bigger, include more and more and more in it. And then I'm gonna make this— I'm gonna make this transposition where I pretend that those are the same thing.
I'm gonna assume that the map is the territory.
Yeah, at some point I'm gonna keep making this really fine-grained map, dude. I'm gonna get so goddamn—
Google Maps, you can go all in. You can get— you can get pretty far with Google Maps. And I'm gonna assume that that is the territory.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's funny because then when you switch to straight-up physics Imagine your physics mapmaker. Your physics mapmaker is like, here's the deal, dude. I have uncanny awareness of everything in the universe. So I'm going to make a perfect fucking map. Right? And Heisenberg's going to say, no, you're not. Nope. Because you get the most fine-grained you can do is get down to the Planck scale. Below that, absolute uncertainty. And by the way, I got bad news for you. The effort to actually perceive literally changes the thing you're perceiving and therefore creates uncertainty. So the map can never actually be like the territory. And it's a manic exercise to try to figure out how to grab the territory with the map. Now, what I mean by a manic exercise is it's what happens when you become so addicted to being in the zone that you forget that the larger part of yourself has always been sitting in this other place. The larger part of yourself is your soul. Your soul is fully able to be in this other space. It's in the territory, man.
It is.
Your soul's like, yeah, I get it. I don't need a map. Never needed a map. Maps are cool. I get it. Nice. Don't need one. I'm part of the territory. I can flow with the territory. I can actually have a sense of what's up and how to respond and how to do things without a paradigm, without a morality, right? There's a thing that is a bigger way of being in the world than this structure. And the structure's cool. Like, I can build rockets to the moon. I can build better cannons. I get it. It's a neat thing to have. And here's the more important thing. If I am better at that than the guy next to me, I get to kill him and take his shit. In an interview I did with Evolve, this language came up. I called it— I think I called it the devil's game. Yeah. It was like, here's the deal, man. Take my toolkit and you can win. What does win mean? Well, win means you get to have whatever you want. You get to have as much of it as you want, but only what you want, right? Only what you can say. You get to have the things you can say. And you get to keep it. You can protect it from anybody else. And here's the best part. And you can take anybody else's stuff. That's the nature of the game that I'm going to offer you. And if you play that game, guess what happens? Obviously, the people around you who don't play that game, they're known as losers, right? They lose the game. Because everybody's in the game. Everybody's in the devil's game. You're either a winner in the devil's game, you're a loser in the devil's game. Yeah. Now of course, here's the problem. Here's what you don't get, because of course the devil's a liar. He doesn't tell you the whole story. You don't get the stuff that you can't say. In fact, you get further and further from the stuff you can't say. The stuff that cannot be said, stuff that, that Leibniz forgets about, the stuff that is on the other side of the limit, you actually lose track of it. And that's the most valuable stuff. So you get a giant pile of shit and think you're king of the universe, but in fact you completely separated yourself from all things that are truly meaningful. And in the meantime, by the way, you've fucked off all your neighbors.
But that answers the question, which is, uh, I think you use the words mortal soul to define that, right? So that's basically what you mean by the mortal soul. It's, it's all the, all the things that you can't name, you can't get.
Yeah. And you And the real, just 'cause you can't name it doesn't mean it's not real. You know, the Silicon Valley mania, if you can't measure it, you can't, what is it? What's the language? Can't optimize it, is that what they say? Can't manage it, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
Yeah, yeah, so everything has to have a KPI.
Right.
But what about like the quality that can't be named? Things like beauty, good design.
Yeah.
We deal with this every day in product design. It's like, if you're just optimizing for KPIs like most, most social products are, um, you know, you got a really freaking engaging product, quote-unquote engaging. You don't get a beautiful product.
Yeah, we can, we can kind of lay this in one of the things that has, um, a nice kind of mythopoetic heaviness in Silicon Valley, which is the paperclip maximizer. Yeah, a paperclip maximizer is precisely and nothing other than that object which can be defined by some finite but potentially very large set of KPIs, right? It could be very large, it could be Leibnizian, it could be the limit as finite approaches infinite. But the point is, it's not the whole thing, it's not the infinite. And no matter what you do, whenever you just— if you design one of those and you give it power, you have actually destroyed the universe, you've actually destroyed the world. And you know Daniel has said capitalism is a form of a paperclip maximizer. And that's about right. It converts reality into the aspects of reality that it can measure and be able to measure with value. Like, it turns the real value into the discrete value.
The difference between a simulation and the real thing. Yeah. Ultimately, that's the exact difference. The simulation is still bounded in some way. It's just never going to be the real thing.
The map and the territory. You got it.
Yeah.
So we are in fact living in a simulation, but it's a simulation of our own production, right?
Um, I want to be mindful of your time, but there's, there's one question that I've been meaning to ask you. You talked about this in a podcast many years ago. I don't think you've talked about it since. You, you, you talked about the concept of, uh, the perfect curriculum, let's say, for an entrepreneur, but then you extrapolated that to Everyone, and you talked about 3 components. You said the self, you said the relationships, and I think you said systemics. So disruption and creation, right? And I think this was many years ago. What I wanna ask you is, has there been an evolution in that model, one, and two, how is this so new to me in that it explains so much in my mind about fucking everything, but not enough people approach education in this way. Like, why isn't anyone actually teaching this?
That's a good— well, okay, we can work backwards.
The—
oh, interesting. So my answer to the last part of your question, two things very quickly come up. Uh, the first is straight history. We actually have a historical account of how and why our particular form, and therefore content, of teaching showed up. There's a real history to it. And by the way, for most of the Western world, its origin is Prussia. And there's a lot to that, right? And by the way, the specificity maps a lot to what we were just talking about. Those countries that adopted the Prussian model achieved a more competitive military-industrial complex, and therefore were able to outcompete their neighbors in the, in the war, in the military-industrial game. And so kind of we all became Prussians in some meaningful sense, not entirely, but it's a useful way of thinking about it. And my point is, you can actually go back and look at the specificity of the history. Manuel de Landa does a great job with this in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, and you can see how that works. You can also look at it through the lens of educational reform. This is actually in many ways where I got started on this Game A, Game B. If you think about the context that in complexity science, the notion of an attractor or basin of attraction, um, you know, the meta— the metaphor for basin of attraction is literally a bowl. And I've used this metaphor many times, right? You've got a ball and it's the bottom of the bowl. If I want to get it out of the bowl, if I only push it halfway up the bowl and let go, it just drops back down, right? The natural tendency is to be at the bottom of the bowl. So if I want to get out of the bottom of the bowl, I literally have to move it all the way out of the basin of attraction. Anything less than that is ultimately, over the full time, a waste of time. Now, if you look at the way a given civilization structure operates, all the different aspects of the civilization structure, of which education is very close to the center, you know parenting, education, those kinds of things. And the relationship between those two is important. Um, they interrelate, right? So if you look at your educational system, you've got things like, you know, credentialization and jobs and economy, right? So they're tightly meshed. So if you want to modify the educational system and it, and it makes the thing that you're doing under the heading of education less competitive under the heading of employment, you find yourself rapidly selected against, right? So every effort— so it's not just The basin of attraction of education is the basin of attraction of the entire civilization structure and all of its multiple different kinds of self-reinforcing feedback loops. So once you move into this basin of attraction, you begin to find yourself more and more and more to the bottom of its natural tendencies. So the effort to get out of that basin of attraction is— let's call it non-trivial. Like, it's a big fucking deal. You literally have to pull the plug on most, if not all, of your entire civilization infrastructure because education is so close to the center. It's how do we reproduce our own culture? How do we become the people that produce our culture, who then reproduce the culture, who then produce the people, right? It's like right at the center of that, at that joint point between humans and culture. That's one side. The other side has to do with something like this previous conversation about the relationship between the zone and the soul. That there's— and, and I'll kind of put it in the language I've used in the past, but I'm just going to hit on that, you know. The Game A bargain is old, right? We've been circling around the Game A basin of attraction for 10,000 years or so, maybe longer, right? 30,000 years. And it was a big deal that got us there, right, to shift out of the indigenous basin of attraction, right, which had a long-standing deep location over the lip into the Game A basin of attraction was a crisis of significant proportions. I don't know if you're familiar with the, uh, the Neolithic bottleneck. You familiar with this?
No.
So it's, uh, it's one of these things that's like, you know, high on my list of stuff that should be more broadly known. Um, and it's nice because it's like really high-quality science. So we, uh, genetic analysis shows that at a point in the past maybe in the order of 10,000 years— obviously these error bars are a little fuzzy, but, you know, 5,000, 15, you know, somewhere in that range— there was a relatively sudden and quite severe collapse in the diversity of the Y chromosome. I.e., something like 90% of male lineages went extinct. And so there were 100 men and only 10 of them reproduced successfully. Well, if you look at that moment in time and you cross-index it against other shit that was going down, What you see is the shift into Game A. And you see there was a crisis. Some shit went down. It was bad. It was big. Lots of people died. And entirely— in giant chunks of the way that we do things shifted, like the notion of polygamy. If you've got one king and he has 5,000 wives, that means 4,999 other dudes don't have a wife. That's how you get this kind of a collapse. Well, why did that happen? Well, it happened because Once you discover the technology of Game A, which is ultimately the technology of how to— the devil's, the devil's game. How do you, how do you dominate and control in context of scarcity? How do you win when it— when push comes to shove? One of the things that you've got to do is you've got to make sure that if males want to have mates, they have to serve you, right? So if you want to have a wife, you got to be a general or you got to be a soldier. And if you have— if you're a general soldier, you get to have a mate. And the way you get to have a mate, by the way, is you go over there and fucking kill those guys and take their wives. That's a powerful combo, right? Well, shit. I, you know, and by the way, China right now has a real problem with this. They got 50 million people who don't have mates because the way their structure allocated things. Why'd I go there? Oh, so we've been playing that game for a long time. And that game has a bunch of ramifications. It creates these ripples and echoes. I think like a rock dropped into a pond. And if you just kind of keep dropping rocks randomly, the pond's chaotic, you know. So you've got things like childhood disease, you know. When we start concentrating people and husbanding, like herding animals and things like that, we suddenly invent tuberculosis and smallpox and shit that didn't exist at all, for which we have no immune system, which creates death and sickness and, you know, malnutrition. So the process of transitioning from indigenous into Game A is a process of a series of asymmetric traumas just slamming into Homo sapiens. And every time we kind of got our act together and began to move into a space of something like good, either we collapsed for one of three reasons, which I've talked about in the past as well. Either we collapsed because we fucked up nature and nature hits us in some way. And by the way, it could be famine or disease, the Four Horsemen, or water desertification, whatever. Which happens, right? Game A has that characteristic. Or we've created these micro tribes in the interior, which begin to have a breakaway from the larger group. It's a cosmopolitan— Game A is cosmopolitan. It takes tribes, indigenous groups, and overcodes them into an empire, and then squeezes them together in the imperial structure, which generates a huge amount of power, which generally shows up as these monstrous cities with giant walls around them because you gotta defend the, you know, the shit on the inside, which also, by the way, shows up as tremendous wealth, pyramids and golden cows and shit like that. Um, but in the interior, you still have these humans, right? You still have these human groups, families, uh, teams.
In your analogy of the, the devil's bargain, it's like things have names and there's things to protect and take over.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's nice. The things to protect and take over, the things to protect to get more of, right? And so just giant piles of, of, you know, golden statues and shit like that. And so what happens then is that at a certain point, the interior of your empire begins to become fractious, as, as it's actually more valuable to take from the interior than it is to take from the exterior. It's like, okay, we'll take those guys. There's no guys over there. I can't conquer those guys and take their wives. I gotta fight with guys on the inside. Then you get into your fight, and there's a collapse, a civil war of some sort, and it begins to break things down, which by the way, of course, there's a feedback loop because during civil war, infrastructure becomes more fragile and somebody fucking blows up the aqueduct, which is bringing water from the mountains over 300 miles to the city. Slap the wakaduk, the entire city now no longer has water and it goes crazy. Fragility, which is part of that first bucket, Now, the second bucket of chaos on the interior increases fragility. You get feedback loops there. And then you get the third. The third is the exterior. You've got all these guys on the outside you've kind of been pounding on for who knows how long, maybe 1,000 years, maybe 100 years, who are justifiably pissed off about that. And by the way, have been learning very carefully. And they got their own S-curve. They're not on your S-curve. So like, you're getting— you're kind of— you're up here on your S-curve. And they're like, well, tell you what, I'll take all these cool techniques that you develop, which are easy to steal. I can copy all the stuff you've invented, but I'm on my own S-curve. I'm down here on the bottom of my S-curve, but my S-curve starts with laser beams and spaceships. I didn't start with airplanes. So I'm not like running— I'm not trying to run airplane or call it spaceship tech using airplane sociopolitical technologies. I'm using spaceship tech using spaceship sociopolitical technologies. So obviously, I'm going to be better than you in this game. And of course, at a certain point, the boundary that you're able to hold against the exterior the exterior gets strong enough to break down the boundary, you get some collapse from the outside. So all three of these failure conditions are happening. So whenever we get something, you know, we get to the point of enoughness on the interior of a game, a game, it's a win-lose dynamics get in the way, but also the tensions of these kinds of things get in the way. And we have this, this sort of horrible— some sort of, you know, contraction occurs. And so education falls apart. So anytime anybody comes along with an educational revision, like try to shift to a different mode in education, either they're caught in the attractor dynamics of their own specific civilization, or they're meta-caught in the attractor dynamics of gaming in general. And they just kind of get their knees taken out. Buddhism is an example. Hey, let's do this approach. Like, that's cool. But if we're all Buddhists, we lose, or whatever. We have to create a form of Buddhism that's able to kind of also be imperial. So how do we actually make the big— how do we actually get past that? And then in some sense is the big, the big question. And what's powerful is you can feel it in your chest, right? You can feel it in your heart, like the, the real— I feel it all the time with my kids, you know, to put your child on this machine. Like, it's, it's like you can imagine what it was like for an Aztec to actually give their child to the priest to be sacrificed on the altar. Yeah, that's, that's what you're doing, dude, when you put your child into the machine of this civilization structure, you're sacrificing it on the altar, right?
And it's going to be the first thing I did, by the way, when I contemplated on your model. I, I took notes and my intention was to pass this on to my daughter because, because now my first thought is, how the fuck do I educate her on that model? And, and at what age? In what format? It's like there needs to be at some point this intervention, you know. She, she goes to, a normal American school, like, you know, standard upbringing going on there. But at some point it's like my wife and I as parents need to almost, uh, impart these ideas or this model on her. And it's like, at what age, at what format? And so you kind of feel helpless.
Oh, speaking of feeling helpless, it's time for me to spend time with my daughter.
Cool.
All right, man.
Well, thank you so much for this, Jordan. Uh, enlightening conversation for me. Beautiful.
I'm glad it was really nice. It was very nice to meet you.
You too.
I'm out. Bye-bye.
All right, thanks.
