6 - Building New Civilizations with Jordan Hall

we can and in some sense must design a completely different infrastructure for how human beings coordinate and operate hey hey what's up coordination this episode is with jordan hall who is a serial entrepreneur the founder of divx worked at mp3.com has been in technology for 30 years he's someone who i deeply admire and respect i discovered him on podcasts talking about this thing called game b which is basically paying down systemic risk for

humanity trying to find a new way to relate to each other that is more harmonious and more focused on sovereignty he's been a serial entrepreneur who has played the game for several decades and learned a lot and that has led to a lot of deeply embodied grounded insights about coordination and how web 3 can be a massive lever for creating more coordination in the world paying down systemic risk supporting public goods creating a better world jordan and i talk a lot in this episode

about game b but we also talk about traversing the design space of web 3 with consciousness and intention what is the superpower that's going to allow us to view the game board from above and to more effectively launch projects that are effective in creating more coordination for the world this episode is like rich chocolate cake once you bite into it i think that you're going to need to digest it a little bit i'm gonna spend a couple times a couple recordings of of re watching this episode in order to fully grasp

what jordan is saying and the intention behind it i think that it's a deeply impactful episode for our audience who are trying to use web 3 to create more regenerative crypto economic systems so thanks so much for tuning in coordination i give you jordan hall bank list is proud to be sponsored by unit swap unit swap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price

no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy the uniswap grants program is accepting applications for grants do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the uniswap ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswappgrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to

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allowing you to spend and save at the same time leverage your wealth without risk of liquidation take out a loan that repays itself by using yield from your deposit to pay off your balance you're only dead his time what was once inconceivable is now within your grasp hey hey everyone i'm here with jordan hall who is a serial entrepreneur and is here to talk with us today about game b

welcome jordan hi nice to see you so great to have you and thanks for agreeing to do this episode with me so be curious just to start off you're a serial entrepreneur you're at your mp3.com founded divx how did you get into crypto when i exited divex in 2007 um one of the things or two things that were happening sort of more or less simultaneously one was i was really reflecting on the experience of what it was like to start a tech company

with a very specific uh social oriented intent and the particulars of how participation in capitalism venture capitalism and in particular going public impacted the ability for example for the relationship with the community and the the way that the the kind of thing that we were trying to do evolved so i was really contemplating was this thing in particular i was comfortable in this thing money like how does money work let's call it as maybe a medium in the in the larger social environment

right and of course the financial crisis was beginning to unfold as well so i happened on my own basis noticing that we needed to think of a different way to allocate resources to productive activity than ipos and venture capital and the financial crisis was making the question of money quite uh pointed so i would deep dive and i don't you probably are aware of this it's become i think relatively common knowledge but the the official scholarship on money at least back then in particular was quite poor like the the thinking

economic profession such as it is on money was was thin gruel so i just began to sort of expand outward reading and thinking about all kinds of things and i came across the white paper i think i actually encountered the white paper before the uh the actual first blocks were produced sure are we talking about the bitcoin white paper yes the bitcoin white paper okay cool um for example i was i was interacting with the p2p guys like michelle balon's group and uh that was the first place that i came across it

and and then just sort of touched in continuously like every period of time like when when the first blocks were minted i started trying to figure out how to mine with an old laptop i think i might like uh maybe a tenth of a bitcoin with a very old laptop before it was it was obviously not gonna work and then uh very hands-on right so the point twofold one was nice a nice place to actually look at the economic theory in practice and then a group of people that were gathering in different locations reddit and uh the uh

was it called bitcoin form or something like that bitcoin talk i think yeah you're going to talk who are coming with a um how did i say it a heterodox perspective uh many very unwashed and had their own perspectives and a really beautiful opportunity to go deep on some fundamental principles and also notice how people think in general um so that's how i got involved and more or less i've been continuously involved since then although cycling up and down so you know right when the altcoin thing came i sort of bought early dogecoin and things like

that and participated in that as an experiment of what's happening here and how does this work and what are these characteristics of this kind of thing and then stepped back then of course ethereum came and that sort of thing like washing it and washing out right so i mean it seems to me like the what i heard from you is that you're kind of a deeply experienced operator in the startup space sort of understands money as a means of building a company creating a social movement and um i'm not sure if i heard some sort of like this dissatisfaction with with with

that environment or not but it seems like you're experimenting with more bleeding edge forms of digital money and peer-to-peer currency over time and there's kind of an ebb and flow between those those things uh anything to add add there and did i did i capture that right yeah maybe i'll make three little uh shifts one is more in the direction of uh strategist and operator although i did you know i was the ceo of the companies okay my skill my skill set is not actually the level of say uh operations or even frankly hr okay

but guiding and vision was just the thing the thing that i was more naturally uh qualified for to be perfectly frank and to some extent communications which is you know part of the ceo role yeah um the big picture uh is guided by actually a theory that i was working with in college and largely has still been uh of course refined over the past 30 or 40 years but continuous i would say that i am in fact deeply dissatisfied both experientially from a personal level and theoretically with

how money uh has shaped and continues to shape um how people make choices and how we actually do things in the world and so modifying money at the very at the very base level plays from my point of view a decisive uh role in shifting things it's like one of the longest leapers maybe the longest but certainly one of the longest okay maybe to pull on that uh you know what is your vision for for sort of money as a labor uh to to to make change and i guess me you

know maybe another way of asking this question is how did you come to found game b and you know what is your most recent work in exploring uh the game b type idea so maybe just even connected to the previous part there was a dive into for example the nature of money which this kept going right as you start going down you get into things like how did society work how did a civilization work what are the relationships between psychology and culture and technology and as that continued to unfold the

primary inquiry was something like um if you consider the current circumstances to be there there are things that you'd like to change um and perhaps may need to like there's a diagnostic where where are we where are we headed what is it likely to happen and what's possible um my particular kind of mind likes to think about things as fundamentally as it can so when i encounter a certain kind of problem i want to say okay what's more fun what's the more fundamental is there something more fundamental and if so

what does that look like can i get down a base layer as robust a base layer as possible right so eventually this journey in collaboration with a lot of people actually led to the formulation of the notion of game a so before you get to game b you actually get to game a right okay um and i mean it's more of a discovery to be honest it was okay it seems to be the case and i increasingly i mean over the past gosh almost decade now um no actually more than a decade 2010 was when that formulation really started to emerge

um that for example all civilizations everything that is not a strictly indigenous level of human activity are of a kind there's a certain set of conserved characteristics that are what i would call this the civilization form or the game a form okay and that they all have certain characteristics and there are and moving the deck chairs around the titanic by playing with different variations on civilization but from the point where we are now the way

i would describe it i have described it is that the the totality of the arc of civilization is in fact playing out reaching at the end of a given civilization reaching the end of civilization is an entire kind of thing which is reaching the end of game a as a kind of thing and this is important from an agenda perspective right because if you're if you're trying to resolve a certain set of problems and you notice the problems are actually driven by a more fundamental set of dynamics then you have to actually deal with those dynamics otherwise the problems will just keep coming back

right and and then the challenge is okay if that's the case what does it look like for us to actually find ourselves in a context that isn't driven by those same dynamics right so okay there's a game game a and it has a certain set of fundamental characteristics that lead to a certain set of dynamics which lead to end conditions uh here we are what's something other than that game b and then working backwards actually what might be the kinds of characteristics in

fact the necessary sufficient and compact characteristics of such a thing a game that has not had the same uh sort of end states as game a and so as many as a design exercise we can go into as much depth as you'd like on what the results of that are about roughly around 2012 right the process of the diagnosis of game a oh [ __ ] it is in fact in was inexorably self-terminating and kind of nearing the end of it was relatively complete we've done a lot of

work on that since then but that's sort of that was there and then okay what does this possible transition look like and how might we make it like there's two steps what's a destination that's a valid destination to get to to use evolutionary theory language it would be what's a a new a hill on the landscape a global optimal right there and then what's the transition like how do we move across the the valley it's called a valley crossing exercise those are the two questions got it so um some just

i think that you know what i heard was was that we sort of figured out there's a set of characteristics around how civilizations at least here on earth uh evolve and there's a worry that those characteristics might lead to self-terminating systems humanity blows itself up doesn't pass the great filter and i'm wondering if you can kind of give an example of a game a type game i know when i when i talk to like daniel schmokenberger he talks about nuclear proliferation the proliferation of crispr into many different hands will

inevitably lead to disastrous self-terminating outcomes but you know what's a tangible example for the audience of of a game a type system i'll use a different approach because history is one of my uh habits i'll actually just use history the roman empire is a very nice example okay a gaming type system and by the way empire in general like the very notion of empire so you think about what is an empire okay an empire an empire is a a particular kind of culture that has as its its sort of nature

the um ingestion and integration by means of coercion other cult and that's an empire and so case in point in our current moment the russian empire and by the way at this point not trying to do any evaluation of that but it's operating as an imperial mode right on the process of using coercion here embodied in the form of military technology there are many other forms of coercion by the way money is a perfectly valid form of coercion quite familiar um to forcibly integrate a different

culture the ukrainians into its environment so that's a one of the canonical okay one of the most fundamental gaming moves is that and um if you if you sort of play forward the the story of empire notice the intrinsic dynamics right if the story of empire gets is played by more or less anybody on the planet um everybody else in the planet is now game theoretically stuck you either become feedstock right you're somebody else's lunch or you have to

start playing a very similar game and now you have conflicts between empires and so the boundary between the american empire and the russian empire and the chinese empire now becomes the boundary of the way that the world is is uh created but think about the implication like the notion of the use coercive capacity so i've got multiple different groups that are constantly endeavoring to use coercive capacity with the with the sort of the intrinsic necessity of grabbing resources from each other so now i'm in arms in arms race like not

metaphorically an actual arms race the limit condition on that is going to be the limit condition on how far the arms race can go i might find myself in a temporary equilibrium where the expansive capacity of the various empires the auth capability of technology at the moment and the defensive technology capability of technology at the moment mean that the boundaries are relatively stable say for example yeah the implications of mutually assured destruction in the mid-century right um

but if the underlying generator function is just you wait i'm going to [ __ ] you eventually then it's a temporary equilibrium and if anything changes in the technical landscape in the uh socio-technical landscape in other words the interior capacity of one of the eight one or more of the agents uh the offensive defensive so the emergency for example of cyber war my hypothesis um or frankly what i call the war on sense making psyops offensive technologies that maybe

changes the equilibrium the nash equilibrium actually mutually sure destruction and you get another shift right and so the the end state of this dynamic is um ultimately if you kind of run the clock forward particularly given one more characteristic by the way so this is this this last piece is important in the arms race notice that the arms race has an implication of by necessity a an escalating and in fact accelerating

technological capacity right so we go from uh sticks and bones to nukes etc right it's an arrow that goes a certain direction and it may actually down cycle a little bit you know during bronze age collapse there was a a small uh decrease in uh military capacity but most of that was actually operational not not too long after the bronze age collapse um actual military capacity broadly speaking was was higher right obviously um so just it's not too hard to draw the

logical conclusions right if you've got a uh an escalating arms race on a field that is defined by escalating capacity to engage in conflict and any kind of conflict is naturally going to be throwing multiple different kinds of externalities into the environment right producing things like radiation and things like that um there's a terminal point at some point in the future that we called either the the eye of the needle or the keyhole the bottleneck or the great filter like so that's an example like that includes a

bunch of different ways of looking at it um and of course you can expand from there got it okay so what i heard was basically there's a mode of human operation game a uh that basically not only is ultimately self tamara terminating on the long term but in the short term anyone who doesn't play under the game a rules kind of is maladapted and so they get sucked into game a type operations and at the same time this is happening we have exponential

technology which is creating the capacity for self-destruction at larger and larger scales destruction to the environment so the stakes are getting higher all of the time uh as this is happening i'm trying to say back to you what you just said to me but let me know if that was a fair summary for the audience right there well yeah very nice uh i would just expand on one one notion of the notion of environment okay but there's essentially three qualities or kinds of environment um that are important to think about one as we might think of is the external

or the ecology right so the physical uh the second is the culture so the environment of the nature under which human beings are interacting with each other in some positive some way and then the third is the environment of the interior of individuals or the mind so these are three different frontiers each one of which has uh externalities thrown into it by game a conflict so a terminus of a given game a moment like an empire might be that it destroys its ecology and collapses on that basis say for

example by by at least some hypothesis the mayan empire another terminus would actually be something like civil war or a breakdown cultural uh integration and the third would actually be something like uh internal breakdown like the actual psychologies of the individuals um becoming less and less capable of operating the their own machinery and interacting with each other which creates sort of a hollowing out effect of the uh of the environment so multiple different ways for it to fail all of which are of course code they're all

they're all always in play and always in relationship with each other and of course in relationship with multiple different uh game a forces that are happening in the same uh global environment okay i see so i guess you know one of the sort of reasons why i wanted to to chat with you is that you kind of speak this like deep theoretical game um this game theory but you're also a technology entrepreneur and spending time discovering crypto and and i want to bring it back to crypto in web3 you

know i've watched a couple of your videos about olympus dow and a few other projects that you've been following how do you think crypto sort of connects to solving these problems if at all what would have to be true for web 3 to build systems that pull people into more of a game three mindset or do they connect at all well they connect very deeply i mean one of the reasons why i've been so involved in this thing is that um well let's take it two steps you you might imagine although i suppose it's possible to be otherwise that i um yeah i take my own way of thinking

seriously and i actually do believe that we are at the end of something very significant and the consequences are large and as you said i have a history of agency i have a history of creating things in the world that change things and so i actually am trying to be agent in this environment so when i think about that at a very very high level of strategy okay what are the levers that we could move on so let's just take go back to money for a moment and i want to bring out a particular point of where we are now then oh this is obvious but i think it's

very very important which is uh we're conscious of money up until relatively recently money was sort of perceived by almost everyone and even those who were involved in it at the fed federal reserve for example kind of like out there it was it was a it was a function of universe that we might participate in like the rain falling but it wasn't something that we took as being a subject of our intentional design particularly not everybody or most people

obviously if you're involved at all in the crypto universe um you're on the other side of that conception right it's obvious at this point that we humans design the money right tokenomics is a term it's actually becoming an actual discipline uh okay let's not just design it at all but this now think about how we design it skillfully i call this alchemy the conscious design of the various kinds of sociotechnical systems that guide our collective choices that's what you might say alchemy

got it here we are now this is a very important thing if you take a look at the arc of history that i've been describing in the context of game a motive is actually driven by unconscious which is there's certain kinds of landscapes right at least which is arms races for example and basic game theory that drive choices in a direction towards termination at a certain point but if we are conscious if we're actually just able to look at the underlying

landscape and and consider making choices on the landscape itself this is a qualitatively different circumstance that's the essence of game b is the being about designing our own landscape which is not right by the way so it sounds like the agency over these problems is sort of like a key inflection point for humanity is that multiple people can sense make if they're not even at the if they're not at the federal reserve then before they couldn't they had no agency over these problems but but now with open source money you can program your values into your money you can sense make about what

how to build the more game b system and you can actually begin to you've got a better starting position yeah well okay i'm gonna actually break that into two points and make them very sensitive so one is you you actually have agency you can and then the second is you can actually become aware of the possibility of thinking about how to design so those are different modes and it's actually the the first mode is obviously critical we have to actually have agency over designing our landscapes but the second mode is okay what is this thing where like how do we

go about thinking about this what does it mean to take um you know tokenomics as a field of design and you know as a whole discipline that fact of being oh we can actually now do game design no game a game b game a in many ways was a was an unconscious discovery right it was just participating in humaning of a particular set of constructs that produced results in the world and in this explosion of the imperial mode for example in cities by the way b is oh [ __ ] we can actually

engage in game design what kind of game would we like to design and that actually is a completely different set of questions it involves things like wood right the subjunctive um so let's see so web 3 is i think the defining moment is the question whether or not web3 individually and collectively steps into consciousness of what it is it's like well wait a minute what are we this question what are we doing right not unconsciously exploring the field of how do i make more tokens

by playing in the game right which is right i mean fundamentally running the essence of game a but actually stepping out big pictures say well what are we doing here and what what what would effective choices look like in in the context of what we're doing like that just in that space just sitting right there is the essence of the shift and of course the possibility so yeah let me hit on that and it's obvious for you and i think for almost everybody who might be listening but that accelerating technology field and then the fact of the capacity of

technology moving on a curve um you know if you're if you're looking at the context of uh late stage neoliberalism right which is the environment we're operating in and you say geez it's going to be really hard to fix that there's a lot a lot going on there's a lot of inertia there's a lot of power in the world right if you want to address it you need to actually have something which in principle has the capacity to have at least that much of power or more right certain metaphor if you say you know

late stage globalism right the whole neoliberal global thing coming out of the 20th century is very heavy and it has a certain weight to it then if you want to move it you need to have something which has at least that amount of power they can lift that weight and move it right well it looks like the technologies associated with blockchain have that amount of power right you've got this accelerating curve the coordination capacity that is implicit in these kinds of technologies which the current environment doesn't operate on right the current environment is

basically an analog environment that's somewhat closed into digital right they're sort of like i mean it's a fax machine bureaucracy that uses emailing that's the the operating environment of our sort of legacy regions and if you can teleport from that which is let's say operating it at one into something which is designed thoughtfully and intrinsically on the basis of what's available in a truly digital context it has a power of i don't know 10 to 100 a lot and that's enough to move things right so it's it's actually we're sitting here

going hey guys two points one you actually have the capacity to build something which could in principle completely move the entire world like all of it like literally lift all the result everything that's happening could be shifted because the power is implicit in the underlying infrastructure and you can be conscious about it you can actually thoughtfully design the things we're trying to get to with sort of purpose and values behind it so those are the two things and to the degree to which web three realizes holy [ __ ]

that the end game of this is not to make slightly more money in us that's not even vaguely the end game the end game is actually no we can and in some sense must design a completely different infrastructure for how human beings coordinate and operate that has more than enough underlying implicit power to shift as at a purely military level like to use the gaming language it is more powerful than existing empires right but if it's held in a particular quality of consciousness it can do so from a new basis the game b basis and

therefore things at a true in a qualitative level not just become the next great empire right so i mean i think that what i hear in in your voice is a lot of um potential energy in the ability to use crypto as a basis when rooted in game baby thinking with in rooted in conscious thinking to solve for systemic risks um not to just use crypto as a tool to enrich yourself but when you realize that there are deeply systemic risks to humanity

that are proliferating in the world to start to bend your entrepreneurial activities your work in the web 3 ecosystem towards creating a more game b type world which hopefully solves for those existential risks and i guess i'm just wondering is that what you see out there like let's really pressure test this like you know when you look at web3 are people actually doing that right now or is it all you know nfts like what are you observing out there and how can we bend more builders towards orienting and game b type

thinking uh if if the answer is that there's a disconnect between that potential energy and what you actually see out there well let's see um i would kind of maybe make three three points seem to light up so one not at all unexpectedly i would say the vast majority of activity is still very much operating in the unconscious mode okay which is called an evolutionary exploration of the possibility of the landscape and then like the migration to empty gox from mt gox across to coinbase

and then d5 right this is in many ways almost like feeling out the landscape by hand noticing upgrading trajectories and then and then going there right yeah very inevitable so that's uh that dominates and that doesn't isn't surprising okay um the second which i think is quite hopeful is the trajectory of the evolutionary process does actually seem to be oriented towards how did i say this right

discovering or in many cases rediscovering uh deeply fundamental characteristics that are say part of a hopeful future and then i'll maybe let me just expand on that uh let's use nfts it's a fun one um so yeah for sure and the nft space is very largely driven by a an unconscious exploration no but this concept and this is gonna i don't