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From Civilizational Breakdown to Breakthrough: How We Can Shape the Future · Deep Transformation

• 0:00
  I am delighted and honored to introduce you to Robb Smith, CEO of Integral Life and founder of the Institute of Applied Meta Theory.
• 0:08
  I have known Robb for many years.
• 0:09
  He has always been brilliant.
• 0:11
  But in this conversation you will also experience his huge and beautiful heart.
• 0:15
  In this talk we cover the essential subject of moving from the age of information into the age of transformation.
• 0:25
  Welcome to Deep Transformation.
• 0:27
  Self, Society, Spirit, Life Enhancing, Paradigm Rattling God.
• 0:32
  Conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr.
• 0:36
  Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.
• 0:41
  Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit.
• 0:45
  I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy.
• 0:48
  And both John and I are really excited today because we get a chance to dive into some really deep questions and explore some of the great issues of our time with someone who's doing incredibly creative, innovative, what should
• 1:03
  we call it?
• 1:03
  Social entrepreneurship.
• 1:05
  And that is Robb Smith.
• 1:07
  Robb is many things.
• 1:08
  He's a businessman, innovator, he's founded institutions and organizations.
• 1:14
  The Institute of Applied Meta Theory which brings big picture perspectives to the great issues of our time.
• 1:21
  He's also CEO of Integral Life, which puts out the wonderful podcast.
• 1:26
  And if you're enjoying ours, as we hope you are, you might like to check out theirs.
• 1:31
  It's called Everyone is Right and Robb is.
• 1:35
  I think of Robb primarily as a social entrepreneur.
• 1:38
  Someone who is looking for the leverage points to influence and help our society, our culture and our civilization at this time of enormous transition, transformation and, and great challenge.
• 1:54
  Robb, you have moved from, I think you, I think you graduated in finance and philosophy, so you've come a long way from, from there to taking on the great challenges of our time.
• 2:07
  Could you maybe tell us a little bit about your adventure?
• 2:12
  Well, first of all, thanks for having me guys.
• 2:14
  It's really lovely to see you as always.
• 2:17
  Yeah.
• 2:17
  My, my journey.
• 2:19
  It's funny how, how you kind of don't know totally why you're on a journey until you get to a certain part, then you can look back and kind of tell the story in a more coherent way.
• 2:27
  Oh, that's what actually was going on the whole time.
• 2:30
  A little bit.
• 2:31
  True for me too.
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  Like entrepreneurship was never the thing.
• 2:33
  It was certainly one vector of what I do.
• 2:36
  I'm creative and I have sort of an innovative sort of bent social level.
• 2:42
  Challenges and problems and systems always interested me.
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  So when I went into venture capital, when I went into, I worked on the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Nevada and I worked at the university level with their, with commercializing research and sort of all these societal level things.
• 2:58
  At that level of Scale.
• 3:00
  I didn't realize at the time that I like working on long arc, deep, structural, socially impactful kind of ecosystem configurations.
• 3:13
  And as I've gotten older I realized that it's.
• 3:16
  To me it's, there's just sort of a deeply kind of moral commitment to that.
• 3:21
  Those are the classic problems that I really care about.
• 3:24
  The things that really have the potential for significant impact on the quality of human life and the world we inhabit.
• 3:32
  So I can now tell that story in a new way, in a different way.
• 3:36
  I just, I like the thorny stuff.
• 3:37
  I like the stuff that hasn't been figured out yet.
• 3:40
  And actually that's also not true.
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  Like there's days I hate it.
• 3:45
  Like it's really brutal.
• 3:46
  It takes a huge spiritual toll on me.
• 3:49
  But yeah, I mean, I think that there's, there's just.
• 3:51
  I'm really animated by how do we help people live fuller, better lives and how do we set up the systems of society that help to do that.
• 4:03
  And so ultimately, if you take that to its logical conclusion, you kind of end up at big pictures, you end up at philosophy, you end up at our deepest systems of knowledge, you end up at our broadest levels
• 4:17
  of scope and scale, which is civilizational.
• 4:19
  And you also end up in our largest timeframes, which is century long thinking.
• 4:23
  And so that to some degree takes you into the kind of work that all of us are involved in, which is deeply philosophical, big picture.
• 4:33
  And then the way in which that shows up and conditions the possibility for society to be different.
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  Be more eudaimonistic and more socially emancipatory and personally liberatory.
• 4:48
  Yeah.
• 4:48
  Robb, when I was looking you up on the Internet to prepare for this conversation, I put Robb Smith, Integral philosopher, Bam.
• 4:56
  Nailed it.
• 4:56
  You know, that was, I mean that's how I see you, what you're doing and the work you're doing in the best, best, best sense of the word.
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  So.
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  Yeah, and I love the way you, you are holding a big picture.
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  You're really looking at acknowledging the complexity and the need for a larger perspective on the great issues of our time.
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  But you're also grounding it in real spiritual values.
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  And you're also very practical.
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  You are really looking for what are the leverage points to transform here.
• 5:29
  So there are a lot of ways into your work.
• 5:31
  But let's start with one of the concepts of yours which has really taken off, I think, at least in certain realms and I think it's getting out further.
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  And that is the idea that we are transitioning from what's commonly known as the Information age.
• 5:47
  But you point out we're actually now moving into a transformation age, so maybe we could take it from there.
• 5:54
  Yeah, yeah.
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  And we really feel it.
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  I think more and more people feel that now, the last few years.
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  But you know, we could see the arc of it even 15 years ago when I did that original TED talk, basically saying we're moving into the transformation age.
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  It was based on the idea at that time that our high speed data networks, the high speed computing capability we now literally have in our pocket, all of a sudden is going to change both the identity forming processes,
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  the knowledge generation and distribution processes, basically the whole sort of civilizational epistemic layer is going to change.
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  And as that changes, it will not only begin to, to change itself again more and more in real time, but it's going to disrupt all of these structures and features of human life that have heretofore been fairly stable.
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  At the time I didn't know about Margaret Archer's morphogenic theory of morphogenesis and morphogenic society, but she actually, the critical realist sociologist of art Archer, said basically the same thing, that we may be entering a morphogenic time.
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  And the transformation speaks to that.
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  This idea that we're going to be living amongst a increasingly period of change, but a period of change that itself is changing.
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  And of course with AI coming online with the things that we talk about in the meta crisis, which we can get to, it's pretty clear that that's going to be a, you know, a major set of factors that
• 7:24
  are driving what is transforming and why.
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  And then how do we adapt to that, how do we respond to that and how do we position ourselves personally, institutionally and then also as, you know, as political, as polities, you know, national political bodies or what have
• 7:41
  you, that's able to navigate that.
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  It really requires an up leveling of consciousness, to kind of put it crudely.
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  But then how do you actually do that?
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  How do you concretely bring a worldview into being that may be more fit for purpose for what's required in the transformation Age?
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  That's the hard work.
• 7:59
  Yeah.
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  And Robb, when you gave that your TED Talk, I think you said 2016 AI was kind of a theoretical idea that some people had heard about, most of us hadn't.
• 8:09
  And now it just seems, it's moving so fast, it seems to be taking over the world and I run into people either you're, you know, you're Luddite, you know, it's all evil, it's Going to destroy the world, or
• 8:21
  in my case, I've been using for about a year.
• 8:23
  And it's been the steepest integrative learning curve I've ever experienced, probably in my whole life.
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  It's like, holy cow.
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  And I think I'm, I'm using it for other noble, you know, reasons.
• 8:34
  And I heard the other day, or maybe I made it up.
• 8:37
  But in an age where we have vast amounts of information, good questions are priceless, you know, and that has, that's made all the difference.
• 8:47
  And I'm involved in two or three creative projects now using AI, that there was no way I'd finish them in my lifetime if, if it wasn't for this technology.
• 8:55
  It's been truly spectacular.
• 8:57
  Yeah,.
• 8:59
  Yeah.
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  And Robb, you mentioned the.
• 9:03
  Just want to emphasize, you pointed out that this acceleration of change which has been going on for some time, but it's.
• 9:11
  The acceleration is itself is accelerating.
• 9:14
  You implied where when Alvin Toffler wrote Future shock back in 1970.
• 9:18
  Well, that looks so tame.
• 9:22
  That's right.
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  It's like future shock in 1970.
• 9:27
  Right.
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  But.
• 9:29
  But there's also one, one dimension you didn't add, and I just want to toss it in for you to reflect on that is you didn't mention the psychological impact of this on people.
• 9:39
  And in some ways it feels like we can see a return to authoritarianism and among many other shifts as a response to this overwhelming information overload, et cetera, et cetera.
• 9:56
  Yeah, I mean, 100% the future is not certain.
• 9:59
  And I think if I had to describe the primary work that the theory of change or the meta theory of Change that we are embarked upon at the Institute of Applied Meta Theory, it really is about generating agency.
• 10:13
  And how do you generate agency?
• 10:17
  And that is, that's the hard part.
• 10:20
  But I also think it is the way in which, and we could again, we could situate this in the meta crisis and situated in terms of what I think we're going through in terms of the overall broader civilizational
• 10:32
  complex system and what it's doing, like where we are in its life cycle, why are we going through this at this moment?
• 10:38
  But when you go through what I've called a release, the great release I wrote about, and of course that's from, that's from anarchy theory.
• 10:46
  But, but when you go through a release phase, where you go through a breakdown phase, yes, it sucks because you are in the breakdown and it goes without saying that there are going to be things that constitute what
• 11:00
  that breakdown means.
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  So when we talk about the meaning crisis Meaning crisis is real.
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  And it also constitutes the feeling of the release.
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  It constitutes the feeling of the breakdown.
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  And you are inside of it, and you're also contributing to it.
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  When you feel alienated from your community and you feel atomized, when you feel like you are in a valueless sort of onomy cultural surround and, you know, values have broken into sort of this anarchic kind of picture.
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  When AI comes along and exponential technologies start to disrupt our socioeconomic structures, like all of these things happening, you're amidst this release, and that's like, you wouldn't wish that upon anybody in a way.
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  On the other hand, releases also have great opportunity.
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  And the reason they have great opportunity is because of what a release is responding to.
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  What a release is responding to is power consolidation.
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  What a release is responding to is power concentration inside of a ecosystem where that power concentration has destroyed its learning processes.
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  It's destroyed as capacity for integration.
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  And so what we are amidst civilizationally is that our learning process has been radically abbreviated, radically aborted, because there is too much power consolidated in too few spots.
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  And so the learning is not high enough.
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  We're not metabolizing signals.
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  So now we're going to go into our release phase.
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  But what happens as you go through that release phase is there's a huge amount of opportunity that arises.
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  And if you can leverage that and give people the tools, the knowledge, the call to identity that equips them with higher agency, you can actually generate new structures that take you through and into the reorganization phase in a
• 12:43
  powerful way.
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  That's the fundamental task that we have, I think, as a sort of an emerging worldview that would contend for the idea and philosophical platform that that reorganization could occur under.
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  So, Robb, do you think that this release, this fragmentation that seems to be going on is evolutionary, developmental necessity to get to the next integration?
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  I do, because I think we're at the end of the modern worldview's scarce resource problem.
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  So the modern worldview of the last 400 plus years, plus its entire associated epistemic architecture, its ontology of what's real, its axiology of what it values and its praxe of how to move through that, plus all of our
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  institutional apparatus that's been structured around that, has all been formed on what Gerhard Lenski says, the sociologist Gerd Lenski would say that the SCAR3 source of value production, like we've moved from a world of not having a lot
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  and not, you know, not, you know, our life conditions were not so great not too long ago.
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  All of a sudden we discover oil, we have this massive explosion of, of overall wealth in terms of the our capability to provide for our material goods.
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  We are coming to the end of value production and value optimization as being the scarce resource.
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  We're now moving into a new scarce resource problem.
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  We don't have enough resilience.
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  We don't have right relation with our enveloping ecology, which is our planet.
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  We don't have right relation with each other because we have abandoned a relational metaphysics in modernity.
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  And so there's several moves that modernity optimized for that are no longer fit for purpose.
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  The release phase is going to take us through that reorganization where those things have to get integrated out, otherwise the beatings will continue.
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  And Robb, you're.
• 14:42
  We're already into some of the great challenges of our time.
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  Maybe it would be helpful before diving into some of the hard viewer work, which is what do we do and how do we leverage our impact to step back.
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  You mentioned the metacrisis.
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  We got into a little of it.
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  Maybe you could give your take on what are the issues we're facing.
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  What is the great challenge?
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  Yeah, well, when we talk about the metacrisis, it's often talked about as this sort of co arising global set of interpenetrating crises that are technological and economic, environmental, as you talk about psychological, cultural, and the fragmentation and the
• 15:26
  sense making.
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  And then what do we do?
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  We have a massive coordination problem.
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  And that's all true, that's all true.
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  But from a critical realist point of view, it's sort of, that's all.
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  Also the level of the empirical, that's the level of the surface.
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  Like those are the surface symptoms.
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  What's actually driving it.
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  Underneath is an important set of considerations because we have to get underneath the meta crisis to look at, okay, what are the real drivers of it?
• 15:50
  I think that it is some version of what I just described, that we are coming through a worldview that has basically put us into a structural value prison.
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  It's enclosed us in a value prison where what we're allowed to value is optimized for wealth, optimized for a certain kind of exteriority.
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  And that's it.
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  If you're on a board of directors, you cannot bring love into the conversation.
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  If you're in a political process, you have a hard time bringing values realism back into the conversation because you've been captured by a political party at, you know, at every step.
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  We are enclosed in this modern worldview's institutional apparatus that has optimized for value Optimized for wealth value, I suppose you'd say, in an economic sense.
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  But in doing so, it has continued to increasingly strip us of agency at every level, whether it be algorithmically inside of our sort of meaning making processes with social media or inside of our institutions where people feel like
• 16:59
  they can't show up as a, you know, full human being or they get allergied out of the institution, institution if they don't toe the line in a particular way.
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  We don't feel like our political processes are very representative anymore.
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  All of these things are signs that the system has stopped listening.
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  The system has built up power consolidations and these things have become like gridlock in a sense where the power is now concentrated in a few areas.
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  And that means the system is no longer integrating and the system is no longer learning.
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  It can't.
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  It's irresilient, it's not listening to reality and yet reality is telling it.
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  People are unhappy.
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  We have a meaning crisis.
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  The ecology is breaking down.
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  We have existential threats, maybe from AI.
• 17:49
  We're in a geopolitical anarchy.
• 17:51
  I mean, you just go around the four quadrants and you can see all the effects.
• 17:56
  But we're not metabolizing that feedback in a sort of healthy, mature, integrated way because the power has consolidated such that the bounded rationality of those nexus power, nexus points doesn't need to.
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  So what it's going to do is it's going to take it into revolt, it's going to take it into the system's going to go into release.
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  Because you can only avoid reality for so long.
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  Ultimately the real always ends up winning.
• 18:27
  Yeah, let me just share experiences I've had in the last year.
• 18:31
  I've had experience to go to with people that, that work for us who had legal problems and their children.
• 18:39
  Anyway, I went to little parish courthouses in, in Louisiana is where I am right now and out in the country.
• 18:47
  And I got to sit in these, these courtrooms for, I don't know, several hours at a time.
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  And I just became so aware of this growing underclass in our nation that are just being left out of all the riches that I have, you know, on, on so many different levels.
• 19:07
  And I found it so humbling and found it so heartbreaking and really moving me to like, what is your life about, John?
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  What can we do?
• 19:15
  And I guess my question to you and I, and I felt it in preparing for this, you starting to move into some of the things that are, that are hopeful and you're saying, you know, redistributing money doesn't work,
• 19:26
  education doesn't work.
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  You know, it's pretty dark.
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  But creating a new commons, and the way I, you know, politically think about that is we have to create a viable middle class where people can live in dignity and feel a sense of ownership of democracy and their
• 19:42
  country.
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  And that's available to everyone.
• 19:45
  And how do we do that, Robb?
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  How do we get there?
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  Someplace that's, you know, love your neighbor as yourself.
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  You know, Jesus had two commandments.
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  Love God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor yourself.
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  He said, that's the law and the prophets do that and you're all good.
• 19:59
  You know,.
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  How do.
• 20:00
  We.
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  Do that?
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  Great question, isn't it?
• 20:02
  How do we do that?
• 20:03
  I think that, I mean, our view on that is what you need to release is you need to release a lot of innovation into the system where the institutional restructuring can occur.
• 20:15
  That meso layer of civilization is that institutional layer.
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  Innovation needs to occur there.
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  But institutions are rational bodies in the sense that they don't want to change because who they are right now is working for them in the arena they're in.
• 20:31
  I mean, that's by definition, they're not going to change for moral reasons or what have you.
• 20:36
  They change because it's a survival imperative to change.
• 20:39
  That doesn't mean that you can't innovate from within an institution.
• 20:43
  You can't innovate within a context in order to generate new possibilities, new possibilities that take overall, take you in new directions.
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  And we need to do that across a lot of different dimensions at once.
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  We need to do it educationally, we need to do it politically.
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  We need to do it in terms of our leadership and our leadership development.
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  We need to do it in terms of our consciousness training, we need to do it in terms of our sciences, we need to do it in the academy and what else?
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  And we need to do it in our money system.
• 21:12
  We need to do it with our philanthropists and our funders.
• 21:15
  So we have to do all of this and we have to do it all in a way sort of simultaneously.
• 21:20
  So how do you do that?
• 21:22
  Well, so you have to release that innovation.
• 21:26
  You have to call the social entrepreneurs of the world purpose and then hopefully give them the tools they need to sense make in a deeper and more holistic way than they're sense making now.
• 21:39
  Because a lot of them are also really bound inside of whatever context they're in and not seeing a big picture, partly because the entire narrative is, well, there are no big pictures, right?
• 21:50
  Our entire Narrative of in the sort of neosphere is, well, there's no big pictures.
• 21:57
  And any big picture you hear is BS and don't believe it and it's not credible.
• 22:00
  And the only big picture you should have is skepticism, right?
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  That's our, in some ways our unfortunate postmodern inheritance.
• 22:08
  But, and that is something that is just flat not true.
• 22:11
  We actually have really good big pictures.
• 22:14
  They're getting better and they make a lot of this stuff tractable.
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  They actually equip you to see in a new way.
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  And as you begin to see in a new way, and you are already an innovator, it allows you then to envision new possibilities for something you're already pretty good at.
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  It allows you to envision new possibilities for what you do inside of your sphere.
• 22:36
  And if we can release that sort of innovation, then I believe you start to equip not only the innovators with agency, but they build systems of agency distribution by definition.
• 22:49
  Because the very thing they're going to be attempting to do if we do this properly in an integrative way, is they're going to be building a leafic systems, systems that dissolve these demi realities, dissolve these ideological enclosures, at
• 23:03
  least to some degree.
• 23:04
  Like we'll have our own mistakes that we make for sure, but it'll be an improvement on kind of where we've been.
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  So that's it.
• 23:11
  I mean, in order to do this at scale and to do it in an Archimedean levered kind of way, we need to build, to release the innovation of a lot of Eros.
• 23:20
  Right now it's the other thing about a release.
• 23:22
  There's a.
• 23:22
  There's so much Eros built up in the system.
• 23:24
  There's so much desire for this explosion of wholeness, this explosion, explosion of spiritual energy, spiritual capital.
• 23:34
  And it doesn't have a way to get channeled because it's caught in bottlenecks either epistemically, because no one understands, there's big stories that liberate it agentically because people don't understand that there's actually a way to move into the
• 23:48
  world with power and with force and with focus, to actually do concrete things with it, or it's trapped inside of other sort of institutional systems.
• 23:58
  And our view is that.
• 23:59
  No, let's attack all of that.
• 24:00
  Well, you also talked about, well, you have a platform called I am, which is an AI platform for integrated leadership.
• 24:08
  I believe, if I'm getting that right.
• 24:09
  And you talk about how important leadership is in this period.
• 24:14
  And the question that comes up for Me.
• 24:16
  Okay, what kind of leadership are we looking for?
• 24:18
  What does that look like?
• 24:19
  And what would a leader that could take, that could stand up and take us through this time of chaos?
• 24:24
  What would they look like, you know, in the four essential lines or emotionally and spiritually and.
• 24:28
  Well, you guys know, career around them too.
• 24:31
  As, as I have.
• 24:32
  Right.
• 24:32
  It's people that have courage.
• 24:34
  That's going to be a big one.
• 24:35
  They need to have domain expertise and maturity in their domain.
• 24:38
  So you know what they're going to show up as if they're a political leader, might be different than if they're a large scale enterprise leader, might be different than they're if a social entrepreneur.
• 24:47
  That's all fine.
• 24:48
  Like each of those domains has its own sort of context that somebody's been good at.
• 24:53
  But what are they gonna have that.
• 24:54
  Who are the group of people we're really thinking are out there?
• 24:57
  We call em the four C's.
• 24:59
  They are comp.
• 25:00
  They're conscious, they're complex, they're curious and they're compassionate.
• 25:06
  So conscious.
• 25:06
  Meaning they have a pretty deep instinct, a pretty deep transpersonal instinct.
• 25:11
  They have a way in which they know that the modern story doesn't work.
• 25:15
  That we're not just kind of bumbling our way through a meaningless universe that actually meaning my only meaning of human life, but the meaning of reality is actually enchanted that and they have a consciousness about that, a transpersonal
• 25:27
  consciousness about that.
• 25:28
  We've continued to see that if we put our sort of third person sociological hat, we've continued to see that for decades in the people that show up.
• 25:36
  So there's the consciousness, there's a complexity, there is a way in which they're not necessarily looking for the simple answer because they realize that holding to tensions as productive tensions is part of what the universe does.
• 25:52
  And therefore they're willing to sit inside of that ambiguity as they innovate towards things as a journey, not a destination.
• 25:59
  And they're able to work in higher orders of ambiguity and in.
• 26:03
  In higher orders of wicked problem because of that.
• 26:07
  So there.
• 26:07
  That complexity is important.
• 26:08
  It's a complexity of mind.
• 26:10
  It's also an embodied complexity of emotion and spiritual and which go again also kind of correlates with the consciousness piece.
• 26:18
  They're curious.
• 26:19
  So there's this learning function, probably high trait openness, high intellection, but always learning.
• 26:24
  And so they're able to take in feedback and naturally integrate because they are natural integrators.
• 26:31
  They ask big picture questions and they're constantly absorbing.
• 26:34
  And so that's a big Deal.
• 26:35
  Right.
• 26:35
  Because when you're naturally integrating, you're listening to reality and what it's handing you, and finally, compassionate.
• 26:41
  There's this real bodhisattva, sort of a big heart instinct that's centered in love, centered in the second person.
• 26:49
  And I think this set of qualities.
• 26:50
  Once you take this set of qualities, and we think there's millions of these people out there, by the way, and you take this set of qualities and then you also have the person that's a great politician, naturally, and
• 26:59
  knows that game, or knows this game over here, or is a great academic or whatever, then the question is, well, what's missing?
• 27:06
  Well, one, I think is again, just to repeat what I said a few minutes ago, I think there's a.
• 27:09
  I think there's a.
• 27:10
  What's missing is this sense that there actually is a path through this.
• 27:14
  That what we're going through is both rational in some sense, like we can actually make it rationally tractable what's happening and why.
• 27:21
  And these big pictures can equip you with a new sense of tools and agency and sense making that you might not know that you are missing, actually.
• 27:32
  And second, actually, a call to identity to get on with the work.
• 27:36
  Because the problem's not going anywhere.
• 27:38
  Right.
• 27:39
  We can try to escape it with money.
• 27:40
  We can buy our nice house in Palo Alto.
• 27:42
  Sorry, your grandkids now have the problem.
• 27:45
  You can't escape it.
• 27:46
  Somewhere in your life, you're not going to be able to escape the issues that are being posed here.
• 27:54
  So if you've got this set of capabilities and you've got these skills and you have the courage, I would say that it's rational and in your own selfish way, like, you don't have a choice.
• 28:03
  You got to get to work.
• 28:06
  Yeah, I would say that's a fifth C that you talked about is courage.
• 28:11
  Need to add.
• 28:11
  That's what you started with.
• 28:13
  And I.
• 28:14
  That's something that grounds us and all our ancestors.
• 28:17
  I mean, to get this far, to have survived, we had courageous people.
• 28:20
  And it can be so overwhelming to have the moral and spiritual courage to look at these wicked problems and stay with them and prepare yourself to be as effective as you can.
• 28:29
  And talk about conservative values.
• 28:32
  I was thinking about that earlier today, and the thing that's always touched me was the motto of West Point.
• 28:37
  Duty, honor, country.
• 28:40
  It's not all about you fool.
• 28:42
  You know, it's about bigger picture.
• 28:44
  It's about duty.
• 28:46
  What is my duty to do in the world?
• 28:48
  You know, what am I being called to do?
• 28:49
  And how will I fail if I don't do that and honor, you know, am I doing something that's going to insult my.
• 28:56
  Soul?
• 28:57
  Yeah, yeah,.
• 28:58
  Right.
• 29:00
  No, I mean, I'm really attracted to my, my neighbor's wife over there, but I'm just not gonna do that.
• 29:05
  No, I mean, I really, really want to, but I'm not going to do this.
• 29:08
  It's going to damage my soul.
• 29:09
  And what about his soul and her soul, et cetera.
• 29:12
  So that kind of conservative values that I would like to see, I still feel embedded in, deeply in a part of me.
• 29:18
  Maybe it was the way I was brought up, but I think that that transfers to right now time and the bigger issues.
• 29:24
  And I think it's a real tragedy that I'll speak to the masculine because we're all men and I speak to that from my own experience.
• 29:31
  But I think it's a real tragedy that the masculine right now feels as unmoored as they do from purpose.
• 29:38
  Because the traditional world, you, structure and all the things you just said have been radically dissociated from as we went into modern and postmodern to some degree.
• 29:47
  And yet it is exactly what we need in a healthy register.
• 29:50
  It's exactly what we need.
• 29:52
  We need that samurai energy transmuted up into a higher, more complex and conscious and compassionate sort of mode.
• 30:01
  We need that samurai energy now more than ever.
• 30:04
  And that provides men and women, but to speak to the men, it provides men with radical purpose.
• 30:10
  Radical purpose.
• 30:11
  Guess what?
• 30:12
  You get to die for this.
• 30:13
  And there is nothing more honorable to a man than laying down your life for your children or your community, for your country and for your world.
• 30:22
  That's it.
• 30:23
  That's what you get to do.
• 30:24
  But to do it, you have to stop being afraid.
• 30:28
  Just reading the New York Times article this morning that got, just published, the op ed on AI and how all the people in the Valley, Silicon Valley, are just terrified of the very thing they're building because they're just
• 30:41
  terrified.
• 30:42
  What's the terror?
• 30:43
  Well, I'm not going to be provided for.
• 30:45
  I'm not going to be rich enough to be part of the overclass and they're going to be a permanent underclass.
• 30:49
  It's like you got to have courage to get past that fear and move into high quality, virtuous system building work that's going to take us through that and not in the way you're doing it, not running away from
• 31:03
  it and trying to escape.
• 31:05
  You try to escape, you reproduce the very system that we're involved in.
• 31:09
  You very you reproduce the structural value prison.
• 31:12
  That's not where the creative agency is.
• 31:14
  That's not where the creative advance into novelty to talk to about Whitehead.
• 31:18
  That's not where that lives.
• 31:19
  It lives within you.
• 31:20
  Having the courage to say, no way.
• 31:23
  I'm going to do it differently and I am going to do something different, or I'm going to do something novel here with myself and the work I put in.
• 31:31
  Yeah, and that's what you are dedicating yourself to, is laying out novel possibilities and perspectives.
• 31:39
  And the term you keep coming back to has been just mentioned in passing several times, is worldviews.
• 31:46
  I mean, which are the biggest pictures of all.
• 31:49
  And maybe it would be helpful to talk about, if you spoke about what a worldview is, since you're in the job of offering a more beneficial one.
• 32:00
  And what are the qualities and characteristics of beneficent, benevolent worldviews.
• 32:07
  Yeah, that's great.
• 32:08
  That's a great question.
• 32:09
  And you know, it's funny because for all of us who've worked a little bit in this field for years, the worldview process was actually under theorized.
• 32:19
  And so we recognized that a few years ago.
• 32:21
  We said, well, we have to go back to first principles and really do the scholarly work on worldviews.
• 32:26
  So we've done several initiatives in this area that we can get to later in terms of what the actual work is.
• 32:32
  But basically we had to go back and say, let's revindicate and explore the idea of a worldview.
• 32:39
  And so what we work with is the notion of worldview families.
• 32:43
  Five worldview families, the archaic, the traditional, the modern, the postmodern.
• 32:48
  And what is now coming online, we believe is the integrative.
• 32:51
  We think these are.
• 32:52
  We think these are distinct.
• 32:54
  We think they are real.
• 32:55
  We have the data to prove it.
• 32:57
  We've done the.
• 32:57
  We've done the studies using Fowler's data, using Armand's data, using.
• 33:03
  Using some of the hierarchical complexity literature and various pieces of other data sets to show that this worldview is information, that it is statistically distinct, and that there's a body of work that's associated with these things at the
• 33:18
  leading edge every time they come into being, which is the cultural complexity index, that we went back 10,000 years and looked at all the texts from the leading edge of each major epoch as these things were coming into
• 33:29
  being.
• 33:30
  So what is a worldview?
• 33:31
  Well, in a sense, a worldview is a completely enveloping surround that is several things depending on how you grab the elephant.
• 33:41
  It is an identity function.
• 33:43
  You know, it's who I am, it is what do I count to be real?
• 33:46
  Like what's in my metaphysical register, what's real?
• 33:49
  It's how am I seeing, how am I seeing?
• 33:52
  And what can I see, what do I value?
• 33:55
  Because of course my identity, what do I see, you know, et cetera is going to form sort of how I think about value and what my questions of ultimate concern are.
• 34:03
  My spirit, deepest spiritual questions.
• 34:06
  And then of course if you take all of that, then what do I do?
• 34:09
  How do I move through the world?
• 34:10
  This set of questions really comes down to then four things that we're all familiar with in philosophy, which is your ontology, like what is the, what is your view of reality that you see and hold?
• 34:21
  Your epistemology, how do you know it?
• 34:24
  Your axiology, how are you, how do you value and what values are real to you?
• 34:29
  And your praxeology, how do you move through the world and what do you do?
• 34:33
  So the, the kind of meta categories of worldview families fall into these four buckets and they're again they're distinct registers and levels of, of emergent complexity as these worldviews come onto the scene.
• 34:47
  And I think again going back to Lenski, there's probably good reason to think that worldviews arise in relation to the kind of specific evolutionary dynamics that we as a species are faithing at that time.
• 35:04
  What is the scarce resource?
• 35:05
  What is the core social problems we're facing?
• 35:07
  What is the technologies that we have at that time and what are its affordances?
• 35:11
  What kind of economic production we have, what kind of myths do we then need and what kind of stories do we tell ourselves?
• 35:17
  And then those become identity shaping processes.
• 35:20
  All of that is a set of co arising structures that you could go back to, you know, hunter gatherer times and then moving into the first civilization, agrarian, and then moving into the modern, and so on and so
• 35:32
  forth.
• 35:33
  So it wouldn't be surprising under that frame of reference if we said to ourselves, well you know, in the 21st century, at least at the leading edge, material abundance is largely taken care of.
• 35:44
  And as certainly within a power centers, we're talking about Western Europe, the United States, the places that already have that wealth.
• 35:52
  Those problems are showing up now like the material abundance is there, it's just radically unequally distributed.
• 35:58
  So we have a different kind of civilizational problem coming online.
• 36:01
  And it's about to get a lot worse as people are worried about AI and automation.
• 36:05
  This is precisely the point.
• 36:07
  The civilizational scarce resource is about to shift or it's actually under our feet, shifting.
• 36:12
  This is precisely what the release is, precisely what the metacrisis is telling us at an empirical level.
• 36:18
  And so then it tells us, okay, then there's also this new worldview information that's going to try to make tractable and coherent what that new set of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and praxeology.
• 36:31
  So what do we do?
• 36:32
  Who are we?
• 36:33
  You know, what's a better view of reality, a more integrated view of reality?
• 36:36
  What should we value and how do we move through it?
• 36:40
  So at an abstract level, I'd say that's, you know, that's the piece.
• 36:44
  But let me stop because, you know, obviously there's a.
• 36:46
  There's a lot to say.
• 36:47
  Yeah, and let's get into the lot to say, but a couple of things.
• 36:51
  One, one thing I didn't mention, which seems really important to acknowledge, is that as far as I can see, fundamentally our worldview is our set of presuppositions, of ground suppositions that underlie our belief systems and values and all
• 37:11
  the other dimensions you mentioned.
• 37:13
  So it feels important to acknowledge that they are presuppositions, for the most part, unexamined and unrecognized, but they dictate all the things you described, our behavior, our values, our priorities and relationships, et cetera, et cetera.
• 37:29
  And you also pointed towards, you said healthy worldviews.
• 37:33
  I want to draw you out on that.
• 37:35
  So what have you come up with as the characteristics of.
• 37:39
  To the extent we recognize that our understanding of the world and ourselves and our place in it is a.
• 37:50
  Is something we construct, it's not just given.
• 37:54
  And that in itself feels an important aspect of a healthy worldview.
• 37:58
  But to the extent we recognize that, then what are the kinds of assumptions and worldviews that are healthy to adopt?
• 38:08
  Well, so, yeah, this really gets into interesting territory because there are always both healthy and unhealthy expressions of a worldview.
• 38:19
  Family and what it's doing, obviously.
• 38:21
  And so if we go back and we say, okay, well, what was the great gifts of the archaic or tribal worldview?
• 38:27
  It's this deep sense that reality is fundamentally enchanted.
• 38:31
  Reality is fundamentally nature's fundamentally sacred.
• 38:34
  It's fundamentally relational, because relationality really mattered, then you didn't have suburbs which get to, you know, separate you from your neighbor.
• 38:42
  Like, if you weren't part of your neighbor's life in some really ontologically deep way, you die.
• 38:48
  So it's deeply relational.
• 38:52
  But as the universe differentiates and we get civilization, obviously there's a new form of order that comes into being.
• 38:59
  There's a new form of more complex now.
• 39:01
  We differentiate social roles in a particular way.
• 39:04
  We need new myths that arise.
• 39:06
  We get fixed settlements that.
• 39:07
  So we get the traditional structure as what you said comes up, Don, you get order, you get honor, you get heritage, you get a certain kind of religious superstructure to society that starts to create a relationship with a
• 39:22
  transcendental story of wholeness or transcendental being.
• 39:26
  And so again, that's a healthy version.
• 39:29
  But the moment it becomes xenophobic, the moment it becomes nationalistic, the moment it becomes persecutes the neighbor for not having the same belief, well, obviously that becomes an unhealthy version.
• 39:40
  And of course we see that for thousands of years.
• 39:42
  There's both like it doing the thing it was doing and holding order together in a certain way.
• 39:47
  And then also all kinds of unhealthy manifestations.
• 39:50
  I'm telling you guys, things you already know extremely well, obviously.
• 39:54
  But then you get the modern differentiation, you know, as.
• 39:56
  As the technology, as the argument for natural rights, as the philosophies of the subject and the philosophies of the individual come online.
• 40:04
  The modern period.
• 40:06
  Now you get the great differentiations of modernity.
• 40:08
  You get markets, you get rights, you get pluralism.
• 40:12
  And so we're kind of still living in a way in.
• 40:16
  In that world.
• 40:17
  And so there's a healthy version of that where it creates massive material abundance.
• 40:22
  It bestows the individual dignity that's the healthy pieces, at least the dignity of law in principle.
• 40:28
  But it also alienates us, it separates us from our neighbor.
• 40:32
  It kind of removes ourselves from a sense of relational fabric.
• 40:36
  It treats nature as an input in an economic process and not as something sacred and on and on, right, that there's this unhealthy version.
• 40:45
  Of course, post modernity comes along, this is information age structures.
• 40:49
  And it says that, okay, you know, that pluralism is really awesome and every perspective is sovereign.
• 40:57
  People have a great ability to be themselves within it.
• 41:00
  They are liberated.
• 41:02
  And it gives everybody kind of this, you know, it's almost the apotheosis of the modern move, this huge amount of freedom and liberation.
• 41:10
  Problem is at that point, there's really very little social, social cohesion that.
• 41:15
  That kind of holds it together.
• 41:17
  And also no big stories are allowed.
• 41:20
  Like, it's all just a stance of skepticism, as we said.
• 41:22
  So that's kind of the unhealthy version there.
• 41:24
  So.
• 41:27
  Is there.
• 41:27
  And you know, we talk about postmodern, all the things that you were just mentioning there, but then we Talk about green, you know, where all of a sudden people feel more connected again to the planet.
• 41:38
  You know, you're a tree hugger.
• 41:39
  Everybody you know, should be.
• 41:42
  Not be marginalized, should be accepted and agree.
• 41:46
  You can develop a deep pain for the world, the suffering.
• 41:49
  And you see, and everybody deserves a place.
• 41:51
  And I don't think we talk enough about that when we talk about postmodern or that level.
• 41:55
  Because it's not just this intellectual, you know, chasing our tails around saying there's a lot of perspectives and they're all the same and all this stuff.
• 42:03
  There's a deep goodness that comes online there and.
• 42:07
  But if it doesn't move to the next level, it can be almost over.
• 42:10
  Yeah, and that's.
• 42:11
  I mean, you're exactly right.
• 42:12
  There's a re enchantment that comes all back online with dream.
• 42:14
  There's a re enchantment that comes back online with postmodernism.
• 42:17
  The sense that like, okay, modernity took it too far.
• 42:20
  Like, now we're atomized, the universe doesn't care about us.
• 42:22
  It's all material and reduces to physics.
• 42:25
  I mean, all of the kind of modern worldview.
• 42:28
  No, it's actually relationality matters.
• 42:30
  You know, being is enchanted, things are valuable.
• 42:33
  I care about people.
• 42:34
  I want to be back in touch with myself spiritually.
• 42:37
  So there's all kinds of things that kind of get recaptured in the postmodern move.
• 42:41
  But the struggles with fragmentation, like, it's, as we all know, because we've all both organized events and been at the events.
• 42:47
  Like, you get one of these postmodern groups together and it's great for two days, try to organize it afterwards, it decoheres instantly and, you know, forget trying to get it back together with any kind of coherence because it
• 42:59
  doesn't like to stick inside of a broader holism of directionality for any period of time.
• 43:07
  And so it has a very hard time finding sustainable coalitions because it destroyed the real structures that would hold that.
• 43:17
  In fact, it's very.
• 43:19
  Narratives are skeptical of those real structures at a kind of a base level.
• 43:23
  So, yeah, that's.
• 43:24
  That's where it struggles.
• 43:26
  And you emphasize Robb as part of your.
• 43:28
  Again, here we're still setting up the context from which you're approaching the most strategic contributions and leverage points we can find.
• 43:38
  You emphasize that our understanding of the world and ourselves, our worldviews aren't just these.
• 43:47
  Well, they're certainly not passive things.
• 43:49
  They determine practically everything about our lives.
• 43:52
  But in addition, that there's a kind of competition between them.
• 43:56
  We know there's, we see value competition all around us, but what we don't usually appreciate, and I think what you're pointing to is that those value competitions are actually expressions of deeper sets of beliefs.
• 44:12
  Yeah, I mean 100%.
• 44:13
  And this goes to the work that you might be thinking about that I did on sociology of Big Pictures, the paper I wrote about how do we cohere something that is more.
• 44:24
  Well, we just talked about the green or postmodern coherence problem.
• 44:28
  Like how do you then organize for higher level action and cooperation and that and what have you and what kind of, what kind of context are we really in?
• 44:39
  Like, we actually really need to understand our own global context from a geohistoric point of view.
• 44:44
  So for that I used Randall Collins, great work on the sociology of philosophy, the great sociologist.
• 44:50
  And he wrote one of his magnum opus was sociology philosophies.
• 44:54
  And what he showed going back several thousand years is how in every given period of some bounded context, some geographic or historic, there is a small number of kind of competing ideational systems that will be the candidates for
• 45:13
  selection.
• 45:13
  And that's it.
• 45:14
  Like it's not going to be 20.
• 45:15
  He thinks it's four to five, four to six.
• 45:18
  So my argument was basically, and actually this was updated a little bit by something, I think it was Thomas Friedman.
• 45:25
  Friedman, Milton Friedman said with the neoliberal move in the 70s, he said, well, once you have a crisis, you know, it's the ideas lying around that will get selected for or from which people will select.
• 45:38
  And his point was to some degree, right, which is that when you go into a release phase, people, what it does, the beauty of the release phase, it breaks up the power concentrations.
• 45:48
  Because all of a sudden these habits that people are in, with no reflexivity, just sort of doing their thing, reproducing the very institutions and systems they've always done, all of a sudden as things start to break down, they
• 46:00
  look up and they go, wait a minute, there's something wrong here.
• 46:04
  What are we doing wrong?
• 46:06
  Why is this not working as a citizen?
• 46:08
  Why is this not working as a CEO?
• 46:10
  Why is this not working as a parent?
• 46:13
  And what happens is that's the territory in which the ideas lying around really matter.
• 46:18
  And so the argument I was making is that we actually have to put the notion of a new possibility of a worldview as a candidate idea system that's lying around, because if you don't, it'll never get selected for.
• 46:34
  So we need to be making that case and we need to treat it as a Competition.
• 46:39
  We need to treat it as a competition of ideas, as a competition for identity, a competition for the way in which an institution gets formed or how it thinks about its own, you know, innovations.
• 46:52
  Not a competition in an unhealthy way, but the sense that we actually have to be on the scene if we're going to take that seriously.
• 46:59
  Because as things get selected for, they certainly can't.
• 47:01
  If, if you're not, you know, putting a lot of effort behind doing that in a really kind of conscientious way.
• 47:07
  And it seems like that's the project you have taken on for you, maybe for your life.
• 47:13
  Essentially, Robb is doing what you can to put these ideas and worldviews and values out as a.
• 47:24
  And to provide the infrastructure for ensuring that they instrumental in the culture.
• 47:34
  Yeah, I'd say that's accurate.
• 47:36
  At the end of the day, it alleviates suffering.
• 47:38
  Like these things alleviate suffering.
• 47:40
  They alleviate the sense that you are, you are a bounded sort of trapped person inside of your social, cultural or other pre given surround with no capacity for moving into greater pastures of wholeness, greater senses of spiritual fulfillment
• 48:01
  and more capability to shape the future that you want in whatever way you decide.
• 48:07
  So in that sense it acts as a way of offsetting a little bit of the trauma.
• 48:13
  I think that so much, so many feel as they get trapped in these smaller enclosures, these smaller ideological containers, these demi real systems.
• 48:23
  So it's not like, you know, I'm sitting here or I know the work you guys do over your whole lives as well.
• 48:28
  I thought, like, it's not like we're sitting here going, hey, adopt us because we want you to be like us.
• 48:34
  Or this is just a fancy set of ideas for the hell of it.
• 48:38
  It's that actually we're trying to bring forward something that is really deeply powerful, that solves a lot of real problems and is extraordinarily fit for purpose for the moment that we're in to allow us to go very different
• 48:58
  directions with things in whatever way we choose.
• 49:03
  Let me ask you about something that just reflect on this.
• 49:06
  That bothers me.
• 49:07
  It seems that at the highest levels of power in our country and elsewhere, but I'm, you know, I'm closer here.
• 49:15
  There's just this moral rot that, that 20 years ago would not have been acceptable.
• 49:21
  You know, we're talking using children for one's own, you know, sexual desires without ever thinking about what is it going to do to this young person.
• 49:33
  You know, I'm at a level, elite level of, of money and influence and everybody kisses my butt all the time because I have so much money, I'm so powerful, my image is all over.
• 49:44
  And how did we lose essential goodness, you know, and corruption just out in front doing this stuff, you know, like making billions of dollars illegally and corruptly?
• 49:57
  No, and it's just like, how did that happen?
• 49:59
  And how do we get out of that hole without, you know, without just.
• 50:03
  I mean, you could look at the fall of the Roman Empire and you could say as that corruption got to the level that we're getting today, that gave rise to Christianity, which is a whole new moral way of
• 50:13
  looking at the world.
• 50:14
  Christianity in our case hasn't been very helpful, especially not Christian nationalism in our country.
• 50:20
  Although, you know, I think,.
• 50:22
  Yeah, I'm.
• 50:22
  Starting to like the Popes a little more than I did in the past.
• 50:26
  But that's what religion was supposed to do, not just justify that.
• 50:30
  Well, David did this and that and the other.
• 50:33
  So, you know, this great man can do whatever he wants.
• 50:35
  How do you get to that?
• 50:37
  How does that happen to a person who maybe started out?
• 50:40
  I don't know, how does a person get that morally rotten and it become just no accountability?
• 50:46
  I think that there's, all throughout history, there's.
• 50:49
  There has certainly been people who have had a lot of power that do very unscrupulous things.
• 50:56
  What is different now, especially over the last few hundred years, but now relative last few hundred years, is we don't, we don't select for them in the public sphere and legitimate them as the people that are going to
• 51:11
  be, you know, leading things.
• 51:13
  So, so how did it, how did it come to be the case where at a public level, at a societal, at a societal level, we stop sanctioning the idea that values had legitimacy?
• 51:27
  And that is a very deep conversation.
• 51:29
  But it is exactly what I'm saying when I'm talking about the metacrisis as a power consolidation problem and the, and the way in which a certain kind of value has supplanted our values.
• 51:43
  That's really what we're talking about.
• 51:45
  The US is the tip of the spear and kind of the, the exemplar of the metacrisis.
• 51:53
  Even though the metacrisis is global, the US Is its, is one of its main site to look at and to see how it's showing up.
• 52:02
  Because the power consolidations of the US are ruthless.
• 52:06
  And they're ruthless for particular reasons that have to do with specific changes to the system that have occurred over the course of 50 to 80 years, each of which has degraded the ability to keep power decentralized.
• 52:21
  And as the power gets decentralized, the learning and integration function of the society drops and people have less agency and the system itself is no longer able to respond to people's moral realism in any real sense.
• 52:35
  And so it puts the wrong people in power.
• 52:37
  And that of course, creates a positive feedback with the degradation itself.
• 52:42
  And that's kind of where we've been.
• 52:43
  We are.
• 52:43
  You mentioned Rome.
• 52:45
  I mean, yeah, we are late stage empire.
• 52:49
  Absolutely.
• 52:50
  Peak of our hegemonic powers.
• 52:52
  And our power has radically outstripped our wisdom, radically outstripped our social learning processes and the capability of the system to adapt to the feedback and the signal that's getting.
• 53:04
  And so, unfortunately, I think we're going to have to go the hard way.
• 53:08
  There's probably a more wise and easier way over the last 25 or 30 years we could have taken.
• 53:12
  We're not going to go that way.
• 53:13
  We're going to have to go the hard way.
• 53:15
  And reality is going to have to take that power away from us and the US is going to have to walk in the wilderness for a.
• 53:20
  While.
• 53:20
  And you're pointing to one of the great issues of our time, Robb, not just nationally, but globally.
• 53:26
  And that is the incredible imbalance between our power, particularly our technological and economic power, and psychological maturity.
• 53:39
  You mentioned wisdom, but also ethics, of course, and values.
• 53:43
  So we've kind of become like the sorcerer's apprentice with enormous power and very little wisdom.
• 53:49
  And it seems like part of the work you're doing is to provide the ideas and the infrastructure to at least get a little bit, get some development on the.
• 54:02
  In a moral, maturational wisdom side of things.
• 54:09
  Yeah, because every single time I read a headline that tells us how bad it is, I also read a headline that tells me how much motivation there is behind the change.
• 54:17
  How much reality is providing rocket fuel for what we're doing.
• 54:22
  You just have to tap it.
• 54:24
  That's the other way to read every single headline today is not as an empirical level symptom of the metacrisis, but at the level of the real.
• 54:32
  How much more motivation did that just generate inside of that system?
• 54:38
  You know, the people.
• 54:40
  The people.
• 54:40
  It's touching the.
• 54:42
  Every person that just read this article, how much more motivation is there?
• 54:45
  How much more capital is now available?
• 54:47
  How much more skill is now available?
• 54:50
  Because that one article just did the work that you couldn't have done in your lifetime if you had read a million or read you had written 50 books about it.
• 54:58
  But people weren't listening.
• 54:59
  Now they're listening.
• 55:01
  Every single headline gives you that capacity.
• 55:03
  Eros is building inside the system.
• 55:05
  It's our job, as it is other people's jobs, but it's our job to see that lethally and to put the systems in place that allow it to be uncovered, allow it to be tapped into the rocket fuel that
• 55:17
  it is.
• 55:17
  And that feels like the goal of your.
• 55:20
  The institute you created, the Institute for Applied Meta Theory.
• 55:23
  Maybe you could tell us something about the project you creating there.
• 55:29
  Yeah, well, it started off as, in a lot of ways as what we've already talked about as a social action think tank, Meaning we wanted to combine the philosophy, the big picture philosophy with the social innovation.
• 55:42
  And we've been around for about three years now, a lot of learning on both of those fronts.
• 55:47
  But our fundamental strategy plays out in kind of a pipeline.
• 55:51
  Number one, we want to do philosophy building.
• 55:53
  So how do we set a foundation for the big picture knowledge that would, which would really ground an integrative worldview in a powerful way, in a reflexive way, in a self critical way, in a way that's epistemologically humble?
• 56:10
  We know what the boundary conditions are and sets up the institutional knowledge production processes accordingly.
• 56:18
  So we've started an academic journal, we've started the Integration Society.
• 56:21
  We've done things to try to put that sort of infrastructure, that, that first ground level philosophy building infrastructure in place.
• 56:28
  And we talk more about what it is we're doing with those big picture philosophies, what we call an integrative arch philosophy framework, and what that means and why and why we're working across multiple integrated meta theories to do
• 56:42
  that.
• 56:43
  But there's this sort of philosophy building layer.
• 56:45
  Then the second layer is once you have that philosophy building foundation, then you can start to say, well, how do you enable a worldview from that?
• 56:54
  How do you enable innovation?
• 56:55
  What kind of initiatives do you run that allows you to go into education or provide a new vision for politics or what have you?
• 57:02
  So there's this worldview enablement layer and then the third layer is then you actually have to deliver specific social impact applications, specific social impact innovations.
• 57:12
  This is.
• 57:13
  Once you're at this third layer, whoever's interfacing with that social impact innovation probably never heard of us, probably knows nothing about any of the underlying philosophy.
• 57:23
  All they know is they're interacting with a solution inside of a context that maybe is just better than what they had before, or it alleviates pain and suffering in some way.
• 57:33
  But what I'm describing really is the pipeline between philosophy and knowledge generation all the way through to social impact and social transformation over the long haul.
• 57:44
  These three layers is a recapitulation of that.
• 57:47
  And so we are building the infrastructure to try to do that, you know, step by step.
• 57:52
  It's obviously, this is a huge, monumental, boil the ocean kind of thing.
• 57:56
  So in some ways it's just totally idiotic that anybody would try this.
• 58:00
  And I'm always saying that we do it to the team and publicly and like, whatever, but as I said, you just, you have.
• 58:06
  This is the moment you have to have moral ambition like this.
• 58:09
  This is, this is where we need samurai and so let's get on with it.
• 58:12
  Yeah,.
• 58:12
  The choice was choice.
• 58:14
  Could.
• 58:14
  You give maybe an example of a specific project, kind of ground this for us?
• 58:21
  Sure.
• 58:21
  I mean, we talk about a lot of things.
• 58:23
  Yesterday we released the Integrated Values Charter.
• 58:26
  This was a.
• 58:28
  An 8 commitment charter that has a.
• 58:31
  So think about fair trade or think about Creative Commons, where it is this open protocol that allows for people to use it.
• 58:39
  And it establishes in a sense, kind of an epistemic protocol of here's what we stand for and here's what we, you know, here's who I am raising my hand.
• 58:49
  It was our belief that we didn't have a similar kind of way to make this set of values legible to itself and also legible to the people within it.
• 59:02
  So we released an Integrated Values Charter.
• 59:05
  It is basically a cultural trust mark.
• 59:07
  It's a values trust mark.
• 59:09
  It is not policed.
• 59:10
  There's no enforcement function, there's no certification.
• 59:14
  It is, here it is on the website, integrated values.org and if you, you know, aspire to these values or you think that you are living into these values, grab it, use it in whatever you want, put it on
• 59:26
  your website, et cetera.
• 59:27
  So we released that yesterday and that is an example of us looking at kind of the overall.
• 59:35
  And I could, at some point, if you want to share screens, I could show you kind of the strategic map we use for how we think about these things.
• 59:43
  But we, we almost think of like an evolutionary chiropractor.
• 59:46
  Like, where is the adjustment to be made that we might be able to serve something, release some tension, create some more alic, you know, release that eros that's there, alleviate suffering, whatever it might be, that transformational folk grow
• 1:00:02
  is what we call it, where there's something to be done that can help whatever come into being in more full and healthy form.
• 1:00:10
  So that's an example.
• 1:00:11
  When I talked about the Cultural Complexity Index, that was one where the Context was, okay, we see that the academy, the academy is so powerful, right, as we know it's so powerful.
• 1:00:22
  But it also has this in itself, it has this radical meaning crisis right now because it's come to the end of what it's doing with postmodernity.
• 1:00:29
  It has this disciplinary crisis, and now it has a social crisis because people are like, well, what's the point of even getting a degree?
• 1:00:35
  You know, it's all just ideological on the one hand, or AI is going to take my jobs on the other.
• 1:00:40
  Like, the academy is going to be in an absolute release phase itself for a while yet.
• 1:00:45
  And so one of the things we believe is that it can't even get beyond that if it doesn't start to take development more seriously as an ontological fact of the world.
• 1:00:58
  So three years ago, we started the Cultural Complexity Index to show that this is measurable.
• 1:01:04
  And we wanted to put that in the conversation that, that the human knowledge processes actually follow a process of integration, differentiation, integration over the long arc.
• 1:01:14
  So it's a lot of projects like that.
• 1:01:16
  And again, each project kind of lives at these different layers depending on what we're talking about.
• 1:01:21
  The new story of wholeness, which I shared with you, John, yesterday privately, it'll be live in a few weeks.
• 1:01:26
  That's meant as more of an invitation to the four C's we talked about, or maybe five.
• 1:01:30
  Steve.
• 1:01:31
  Now the, you know, a sense that, like, here's a story you may not have heard, here's why we believe it, you know, check our math on it.
• 1:01:38
  You know, we're not asking you to, to sort of enter into any kind of ideology or anything like that.
• 1:01:43
  Just take a look at this story and if you take this seriously, if this resonates with you, if you are living in what we call the inverse complexity gap, then there are things to do about that.
• 1:01:54
  And so it's, it's a welcome mat to the integrative worldview.
• 1:01:57
  You might say,.
• 1:02:00
  What is an inverse?
• 1:02:01
  Yeah, so we're all familiar with Keegan's in over our heads, right, where he diagnosed the idea that society is that, yeah, the real complexity of society has outrun people's capability to be amidst that complexity.
• 1:02:15
  And so they're in over their heads and they're drowning from the complexity of society.
• 1:02:20
  We're all familiar with that.
• 1:02:21
  What we see with the four Cs, strangely, is a little bit the opposite, what we call the inverse complexity gap, which is what happens when you are actually more complex than the conventional institution you're working for.
• 1:02:35
  What Happens when you're more complex than the kind of conversation you're seeing in the political sphere.
• 1:02:41
  You feel illegitimate, you feel unrecognized.
• 1:02:44
  You feel like there's no place for you to express your wholeness.
• 1:02:47
  You feel like there's a place, there's nowhere for you to fit.
• 1:02:50
  You feel like you're alone.
• 1:02:52
  You.
• 1:02:52
  All of these things that we believe characterize what we call light teal, which is they've come into an integrative mode of being and thinking.
• 1:03:01
  They don't yet have the map to know that they're integrative thinkers because they've never heard that term.
• 1:03:07
  So they're doing the 4C move, but they're living in the inverse complexity gap where they're like, am I the only one?
• 1:03:13
  Because I feel nuts here, right?
• 1:03:16
  And it's actually a lonely kind of suffering place to be.
• 1:03:20
  And we believe that there's a way to say, look, you're actually not alone.
• 1:03:24
  Here's why you feel the way you do.
• 1:03:27
  Here's what's actually going on.
• 1:03:29
  And oh, by the way, like, there's a whole sort of community and there's infrastructure, there's resources, there's this whole thing emerging that's happening that you are actually part of.
• 1:03:38
  You're in the vanguard on.
• 1:03:40
  So, you know, welcome,.
• 1:03:44
  And it wouldn't hurt so bad if you didn't care so much.
• 1:03:49
  And underlying all this, you mentioned in passing it a while back, but underlying all this and adding deeply, profoundly to its value is the.
• 1:04:00
  Is the fact that you have a spiritual worldview and values underlying all these projects.
• 1:04:07
  Not necessarily overtly named, but clearly deep spiritual values here.
• 1:04:17
  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly true.
• 1:04:19
  And I know, you know, different people have different orientations to that.
• 1:04:22
  The path of progression on question of ultimate concern, the way Fowler put it, is obviously going to be for everybody.
• 1:04:30
  You know, we, we know what the path looks like in terms of its stage structure.
• 1:04:33
  But everybody is going to be on that path in, in their own way.
• 1:04:37
  For me, I've known for a long time that for whatever reason, I just felt like I made a deal with God.
• 1:04:43
  Like, I.
• 1:04:44
  I am here to honor love.
• 1:04:46
  And that is the animating force of my life.
• 1:04:50
  I don't always.
• 1:04:50
  I don't always do it to my satisfaction, and I certainly live with my own frustrations about that.
• 1:04:57
  But yeah, that's, that's the work.
• 1:04:59
  And I think that it's so easy and tempting to take the cynic's way out, to take the skeptics way out.
• 1:05:11
  It's so easy.
• 1:05:12
  And the modern world wants you to in a way because that's the thing that's reproducing the very system.
• 1:05:16
  And yet I think most people when they sit quietly, go, but that's not the way I actually feel like.
• 1:05:24
  I feel like a spiritual being.
• 1:05:27
  I feel like something actually deeply matters in things died in me that I can't quite name and maybe ineffable, but it's, it's there nonetheless.
• 1:05:37
  And having that, having that be okay and having that be a part of what we're in service to is wonderful.
• 1:05:45
  It's sustaining.
• 1:05:46
  It's sustaining.
• 1:05:48
  I'll probably be.
• 1:05:50
  I'll probably be variously kind of picky and maybe slightly unhappy with certain things about my life and my final life review on the day I die.
• 1:06:01
  But one thing I probably won't be unhappy with is that I felt really deeply called and tried to stay in integrity with that.
• 1:06:11
  With the sense that I'm here to serve love.
• 1:06:12
  And by the way, it's not me doing it.
• 1:06:14
  Like there's no Robb here doing it.
• 1:06:16
  This is just, this is just a transmission channel for whatever's coming through.
• 1:06:20
  In fact, the job is to get myself out of the way.
• 1:06:25
  Yeah, I, I really feel your heart coming through this and it makes me really trust you and what you're saying.
• 1:06:34
  I mean it's obviously brilliant intellectually, but it's coming from a very heart centered, caring, loving place.
• 1:06:40
  And that's.
• 1:06:41
  And Robb, there's this deep, these deep values and this call to service that clearly is animating your life.
• 1:06:49
  Is that powered by a particular contemplative practice of some kind?
• 1:06:58
  I mean, I have contemplative practice.
• 1:07:00
  I've been in, in sort of a vedantic self inquiry practice for a long time.
• 1:07:07
  But.
• 1:07:08
  And other, other practices.
• 1:07:10
  You know, when my wife and I go to a rave, we were at a rave a couple weeks ago.
• 1:07:14
  Like it's a.
• 1:07:17
  A rave?
• 1:07:17
  Yeah.
• 1:07:17
  Did you say a rave?
• 1:07:19
  They, they do, they do.
• 1:07:23
  When I lived in San Francisco, man, I.
• 1:07:25
  It was like 30 years ago, whatever, right.
• 1:07:28
  When it got to.
• 1:07:29
  I mean, you know, festivals are actually a big, big business.
• 1:07:33
  But like that's a spiritual practice too.
• 1:07:36
  I mean, as we know, right?
• 1:07:37
  That's, that's transcendental.
• 1:07:38
  It's getting in touch with something beyond ourselves.
• 1:07:42
  In fact, that's why 10,000 people are there with their hands up.
• 1:07:47
  And it's.
• 1:07:47
  I love what Bhaskar says in the philosophy of meta reality.
• 1:07:50
  He's like, you know, it's funny, we talk about non.
• 1:07:52
  Dualism as if it's this special thing.
• 1:07:54
  But the reality is, is that almost every moment of your life that you've ever done anything that you would say was like just a normal, everyday, worthwhile thing, you are actually in a non.
• 1:08:04
  Dual moment where you're not.
• 1:08:07
  You're not a separate self.
• 1:08:09
  You know, you're not sit there cogitating, you're not like bound up emotionally.
• 1:08:12
  You're not like thinking about something like it's just our natural way of being.
• 1:08:17
  So, Yeah, I see 10,000 people bouncing and happy and full of love.
• 1:08:21
  That transcendental thing is not a fake epiphenomena of an embodied biological creature.
• 1:08:30
  It is actually what reality tells us it does at every step.
• 1:08:35
  It.
• 1:08:35
  At every step, it transcendentally moves beyond.
• 1:08:41
  And it's now doing it with us too, in all these moments of our lives.
• 1:08:45
  So, yeah, there are.
• 1:08:46
  There are a lot of different spiritual practices, but I would say that just constantly trying to move back into love service.
• 1:08:55
  Certainly I gotta do tong lens sometimes because, you know, take arrows and those hurt when working with people or whatever.
• 1:09:02
  But yeah, I mean, it's practice as you know.
• 1:09:08
  And Robb, you know, Hamid or, ah, Almas, who we've been conversing with for a long time, he says one of the most important things on this journey is a love for the truth.
• 1:09:16
  A deep, deep love for truth.
• 1:09:18
  And I find that.
• 1:09:20
  Well, I find you're a really good example of that.
• 1:09:22
  Yeah, I agree.
• 1:09:23
  Love for the truth because.
• 1:09:24
  Yeah, that's it.
• 1:09:25
  You love the truth.
• 1:09:26
  And what about the relational side, for example?
• 1:09:30
  I'm thinking of you.
• 1:09:31
  You have created multiple institutes or institutions of various kinds of.
• 1:09:35
  You're now working deeply on this institute of Applied Meta Theory.
• 1:09:39
  Is there some way you.
• 1:09:41
  You use trying to bring a focus on relationship in as a catalyst for this kind of work?
• 1:09:52
  Yeah.
• 1:09:52
  Do you.
• 1:09:53
  Do you ask that from the standpoint of how like, relationship might influence.
• 1:09:59
  Or how we might think about relational.
• 1:10:01
  The relational space as an initiative or something that's like focused on the second person, what's going on there, or just how relationality shows up in.
• 1:10:08
  In the various things?
• 1:10:09
  I'm thinking more of the latter.
• 1:10:11
  It feels like it could, you know, this institute could be just a kind of atomistic thing of individuals doing their own dance or.
• 1:10:20
  Or it could be.
• 1:10:21
  And I'm sure it is.
• 1:10:23
  You've thought about.
• 1:10:24
  Okay, how do we synergize?
• 1:10:27
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:28
  And that's.
• 1:10:29
  That's a really interesting thing.
• 1:10:30
  So.
• 1:10:31
  Yes, absolutely.
• 1:10:32
  In fact, we just got off a retreat this last week where we hosted people and they said it was the most powerful interval experience of their lifetime.
• 1:10:41
  And that relational space is just critical.
• 1:10:44
  I mean, there's only so much you can do in zoom.
• 1:10:46
  I mean, zoom's great, but as we know, like when you're together it does something, it does something special.
• 1:10:52
  And so there is a tension there where when you're working globally, you're working with a lot of different people.
• 1:10:56
  We're 85 people at the Institute now, so it's like you're constantly interfacing with people in 19 different time zones.
• 1:11:04
  So in some ways, like the very nature of what we're doing is, is kind of pre configured and structured by the technology and there's only so much you can do there.
• 1:11:14
  But having the chance to get together in person and to create the relationality and spend time together is something you have to be explicit about and really attend to.
• 1:11:24
  And I certainly would not claim that we're like, you know, we have a long way to go and, and how that happens and in what format is all sort of, you know, open questions.
• 1:11:35
  And there's also something that happens too, I think, where again, by the very nature of the work where you're bringing in people from different sort of disciplines or different kinds of philosophical vectors, even the notion of a second
• 1:11:48
  person practice, which is very native to, to anybody coming out of the integral community and has an ilp, Integral Life practice, not nearly as native for somebody who comes out of the academy and is coming from a complexity
• 1:12:01
  science thing.
• 1:12:02
  I mean, I'm kind of picking on it, but like, you get the point.
• 1:12:05
  So, so you actually have a version of the meta crisis problem right there in the sense where you've got this diverse set of epistemologies and if we're going to bring coherence, we need to bring coherence inside first.
• 1:12:17
  And so a lot of what I have to attend to, I don't really think I do that great of a job of it, but I, we are aware of it is how do you continually bring coherence to what
• 1:12:28
  you're doing internally.
• 1:12:30
  So you're prefiguring some of the very thing you're talking about out in the world and not just replicating the problems themselves.
• 1:12:38
  And that's, that's not easy.
• 1:12:40
  Yeah.
• 1:12:41
  And Robb, I'm sure a lot of people are going to be fascinated to have more contact or connection with the, your institute, Institute of Applied Meta Theory.
• 1:12:50
  What are the ways that people can both benefit from and interact with and contribute to the Institute?
• 1:13:00
  Yeah, I Mean that's the thing is that we, it really depends on what's.
• 1:13:04
  Who somebody is and what they're called to do again in the, in the different layers.
• 1:13:07
  If it's a social impact entrepreneur then I would love to talk to them about their background, who they are, what they're called to do.
• 1:13:16
  I think ultimately the communities that we tend to come out of don't natively produce a lot of that capacity.
• 1:13:24
  They're very good spiritually, they're very good in certain ways, but probably less so in terms of building institutional innovation or social impact entrepreneurship.
• 1:13:34
  So it's our belief that we have to bring those folks from, kind of invite them in and then work with them to give them some of the sense making tools that we're talking about.
• 1:13:46
  So.
• 1:13:47
  But definitely want to be talking to folks like that.
• 1:13:49
  Our.
• 1:13:50
  We continue to build the legacy circle for donors who are interested in leaving a legacy and work at this kind of deep structural work.
• 1:13:57
  Scholars that are working in the Integration Society, there's always room to have more scholarship there.
• 1:14:04
  What else?
• 1:14:05
  I mean there's just so much to do.
• 1:14:06
  I'm.
• 1:14:07
  We're looking.
• 1:14:08
  I think we actually need a publicist or like an agency for storytelling from the integrative worldview.
• 1:14:14
  I looked in London, New York and LA this last few weeks.
• 1:14:18
  Everybody is kind of caught in that sort of green worldview, which probably is fine in one respect, but in another respect we really need some native capability here.
• 1:14:29
  So like there's just a lot to do at a lot of different levels.
• 1:14:32
  And so yeah, if anybody wants to know what we're up to, hopefully new story of wholeness will be launched soon.
• 1:14:38
  They can Obviously check out appliedmetatheory.org, which is the, which is the main website and then from there kind of route based on their interests.
• 1:14:46
  Right, okay, well I'm sure it'll.
• 1:14:50
  You got me.
• 1:14:51
  Reinspired to dive in again and look deeper.
• 1:14:54
  Robb, there's so much in what you're doing and that you are doing.
• 1:15:00
  What haven't we touched on that you'd like to make sure we get out.
• 1:15:07
  Hope.
• 1:15:07
  I just think everybody should feel hope like, like we have.
• 1:15:12
  There's a lot to be hopeful for.
• 1:15:14
  We have it within ourselves to choose to choose to source power within ourselves that's infinite and capable and can make whatever thing people want to do and can make it tractable, can make it doable, can make it functional,
• 1:15:34
  can, can improve their lives, can improve the world in a powerful way.
• 1:15:40
  And so we have a lot of reason to hope.
• 1:15:42
  Beautiful yeah, beautiful.
• 1:15:45
  Well, you're certainly putting your life on the line in order to give us more hope, and not only more hope, but more tools for actualizing that hope in effective, contributory, transformative ways.
• 1:15:58
  So it's really beautiful to hear what you're doing and.
• 1:16:03
  And how and why you're doing it, Robb, and the spirit with which you're doing it.
• 1:16:08
  So a deep thank you to you and thank you for being with us.
• 1:16:13
  Yeah, it's been really inspiring.
• 1:16:15
  I'm very touched and moved by this whole thing that you did today.
• 1:16:17
  Well,.
• 1:16:17
  I want to thank you guys because what you're doing is also just as important.
• 1:16:22
  It's incredibly important to be telling these stories, to be communicating with people, to be the gnostic intermediaries you've talked about, Roger.
• 1:16:30
  Yeah, it's like, it really, really is valuable what you're doing and my.
• 1:16:34
  My deep bow to you guys for continuing to do it, to tell the story and to, you know, offer the set of perspectives and ideas and thinking from all the great guests that you've had and that you guys
• 1:16:45
  also bring.
• 1:16:46
  I mean, you guys could just as easily flip the camera around and put you guys on this side.
• 1:16:50
  I.
• 1:16:50
  I know how illustrious and deep both of you are, so, yeah, it's my honor to be.
• 1:16:54
  Here.
• 1:16:55
  Thank you so much, Robb.
• 1:16:56
  And again, Robb Smith, the Institute for Applied Meta Theory and just Google Robb and you'll find a cornucopia of publications and ideas and talks that are just as inspirational as our dialogue has been today.
• 1:17:12
  Robb, thank you so much.
• 1:17:13
  It's been a joy and an inspiration and just a delight.
• 1:17:18
  And thank you so much.
• 1:17:19
  Thank you guys.
• 1:17:20
  Lots of love to you.
• 1:17:22
  Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.
• 1:17:25
  We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being part of it ourselves.
• 1:17:30
  We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger and myself.
• 1:17:34
  It comes out of our pockets.
• 1:17:35
  So if you would like to help us to.
• 1:17:37
  Mainly to get this podcast out to more people, because the bigger audience have.
• 1:17:41
  Which is steadily growing, but the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world.
• 1:17:47
  So we've done a couple of ways, but we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee.
• 1:17:51
  Very simple.
• 1:17:52
  And I do that with podcasts that I support and I find it's very satisfying.
• 1:17:57
  So thank you for your help, thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do.
• 1:18:02
  We love you.