How to Play 5D Chess: It's Not What You Think | Frankly 147

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. The Great Simplification Podcast is a unique platform in that we're trying to cover multiple issues relevant to the future, and we're trying to integrate them in an effort to make sense of our world in the time that we're live, but also to hone in on what are the possible best paths forward, and how we might head in that direction generally. This is not a single issue podcast, and as the host over the years, I've noticed that on pretty much every podcast, some people like it, and some people don't. This stands to reason with a large audience. This isn't a single issue site like Green Bay Packers news updates, or learning about Backyard Owls, both of which I personally subscribe to, by the way. But here's a pattern I've recognized over time, not only with this platform, but IRL, which only recently I learned stands for in real life. We see a headline or a clip or some name we half recognize as a guest on some podcast we've never heard of. And before two sentences are even finished, and before we've actually taken in what's being said, let alone the context for it, we have already decided how we feel about the person saying it and all the downhill implied associations. We all do it, including me, because it is about the most human thing there is. So I want to, today, highlight that moment in slow motion and explain why it's so important to this work. In an attempt to do this, I ask you, in this video, to imagine yourself as a single piece on a chessboard. And then throughout this video, we're going to pull the camera angle back, slowly, five times, starting small and, as usual, on this podcast, widening out.
Okay, the first lens is the piece right across from us. Down here at eye level, our brains and nervous systems are pretty much really only asking one question, friend or threat? Is this thing gonna hurt me or help me? This is the oldest software that we humans run, even older than language, and it's super fast. Meaning that our bodies feel the verdict often before we've even heard a complete sentence. And then we answer it lightning fast with proxies. Do I like them? Do they look and sound like me? Do they share my values? But sometimes, even when the person is perfectly neutral, it's actually the topic itself that trips the wire. Someone says nuclear war or collapse or any word you've got to charge around, and that threat response fires before the person herself or himself has been judged at all.
On this channel, I see this happen in different ways, in dozens of different ways. One that seems like a simple black or white answer to most of our culture is renewable energy, which has become a bit of a symbol for someone's belief in climate science generally. We often make a snap decision about someone's stance as an environmentalist or a climate denier just by their ability to give a yes or no answer to whether they're pro renewables. But of course, if we dig deeper, there are hundreds of pieces of important context that might shape that answer geography and EROI and economic ideas and resource constraints and scalability and rematerialization, impact on the global south and much, much more as long time viewers here know. But we frequently shut down the conversation and write off the person before even knowing their full thoughts and argument. Or take AI. If you're worried about it, you're a Luddite. If you're excited about it, you're a tech bro. Another example is Israel. If you don't condemn Israel, you're a Zionist, but condemn Israel and you're an anti-Semite. Two seconds in, and we've been sorted before anyone has heard the actual thoughts. That fear is real, but it's aimed at the word, not the argument. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who will be on the show in September, talks about how the brain predicts and judges before the reasoning ever catches up. Well, lots of our former guests have said that, but I mentioned her because she's just been scheduled, and I'm particularly looking forward to that conversation. So despite understanding all this and consciously intending to suppress it, this is how I react a lot of the time too. And in many ways, more recently than I used to. Somebody starts talking and a little part of me has already decided how I feel about them before they finished their first thought.
However, this instinct, which shapes our perception down at this level, creates a mental trap that matters a great deal for the more than human predicament. Because the emotional verdict lands in us so fast and with such confidence that we mistake it for any actual consideration of what the person said, let alone its context. Our evolutionary fast and frugal heuristics tell us that we have assessed to the argument when all we have actually done is assess a face or a phrase. Okay, so now let's widen out a little to the second lens. We're still looking straight ahead, but now we can see that the piece in front of us isn't alone. It's one of a whole line of pieces, all the same color, the other side. The moment we register that team's color, something shifts and the question changes from, do I trust this person, to is this person one of us or one of them? This is tribe, this is party, this is ideology. And once a piece reads as the other team, much of what it says stops landing as information, but instead we perceive it as a game move by that side. You can watch it happen in real time in just about any corner of the Internet. And from this vantage point, we still can't reason very well about the actual game because we're primarily identifying allies and enemies. Okay, now let's use a much wider vantage point. This third lens is straight above the board looking down. High enough that the good guys and the bad guys kind of disappear and can see at least in theory the game. We can still see sides, but they aren't necessarily our side or their side. What we see instead is why the pieces are where they are. Energy, debt, geopolitics, AI, supply chains and all the things. Pieces moving for physical and structural reasons. That are separate from how we feel about them.