The Big Picture Mind: What Every Elite is Missing

I recently did a live event to provide what I hope will be one of the Biggest Picture views of what’s happening in 2025 available anywhere in the world. 

Why? Because Big Pictures liberate. By seeing what’s actually happening, you have more freedom, you understand more, and you feel at home in the world no matter how chaotic it seems. 

This thread clips the video for easily digestible chunks and explains each piece along the way.

I have an explicit goal: to help everyone build a Big Picture Mind (BPM).

Especially Zoomers, who deserve this knowledge now while it can still make a huge difference in their lives. A BPM is the foundation of the best life you’ll ever lead. (I’ll speak plainly and in absolutes bc I’m older and a bit weary and won’t sugar coat profound truths that most are missing.)

So listen. Take this seriously.

You’re being misled almost universally by smaller minds who think their small pictures are a Big Picture. 

This is (mostly) unintentional, they just haven’t built a Big Picture Mind yet, which is technically called the Metasystematic stage of cognition (and then grows bigger: Paradigmatic, Cross-Paradigmatic, and Meta-cross-paradigmatic mind; I use BPM as a catchall for all four. Anyway these are the most advanced stages of cognition there are in humans).

I especially care about Zoomers, bc a BPM takes years to build, you have the opportunity to start the journey and achieve it earlier than prior generations. And the world needs you to do so if we’re to get out of the mess we’ve made. 

The world evolves into greater complexity, and right now most everyone is drowning in a complexity gap.

 
The world evolves through emergent structures in human social and cultural systems that both drive, and are driven by, growing levels of human consciousness. So consciousness and social complexity co-arise. These structures separate into stages or levels of hierarchical complexity, which we can scientifically measure (sort of).

Right now we suffer from a chasm-like “complexity gap” where the masses, and even most of our elites, are in over their heads and drowning from this gap. Their minds can’t meet the real complexity of the world; this is Einstein’s correct observation about not being able to solve problems from the same level of consciousness that created them. One of your most basic life goals should be to close this complexity gap by building a BPM, as it helps to enable all other goals. 

Almost everything you know comes from only one (of three) levels of knowledge.

Knowledge emerges in stages of complexity, with more abstract knowledge emerging from and reorganizing prior knowledge. There are three main levels of knowledge now (and a fourth emerging just in the past few years).

Disciplinary: Foundational, narrow research and knowledge about reality. Classic science and most conventional knowledge lives here.

Interdisciplinary: Narrow knowledge combines to tackle broader, multifaceted fields. eg., much AI work lives here

Transdisciplinary: Sees all prior knowledge and finds the patterns that connect to create first scientifically-credible Big Pictures of reality. Very few people know about or operate from this level.

Each of these levels emerges and reorganizes how the prior is understood. (Think of how your 18 year old self has reorganized your thinking on something versus your 8 year old self: it’s a qualitative and fundamentally novel reorganization. This is a not-unrelated metaphor for what’s going on above.)

Find Big Picture Minds and follow them.

So if you’re listening to people who are trying to see a world that is way more complex than the narrow worldview they use to explain it, you’re cooked. This isn’t to say that thousands of experts aren’t awesome in their fields of expertise, just be aware if they starting moving to worldview-level philosophizing.

Following people w BPMs is one of the most critical things you can do to put a rocket booster on your mind.

So what does a BPM see today? The rise of a new Transformation Age.

As I said, the world evolves. So does society. The Information Age ended in 2007 (in my view). We have entered what sociologists call a “Morphogenic Society”, a radically new civilizational mode where change dominates stability, which creates cultural and social variety that threatens the shared social values that are the basis for social order.

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The Challenge

Five historic, paradigm-changing tsunamis are washing over us and all coming into phase right now, starting first, ecologically, with the Anthropocene.

The first tsunami is climate change and other ecological calamities as the Holocene of the last 12,000 years ended and the Anthropocene started, a term denoting that human influence is now the formative influence on Earth geology and ecology.

Second, culturally, the rise of Hyperreality has shattered our individual and collective sense-making.

Hyperreality is a world where reality is obscured, and language and imagery create simulated faux-realities. The map is literally the territory in a world largely-indistinguishable from a simulated metaverse. Hyperreality is also fertile ground in which to grow authoritarianism.

Third, psychologically, we are in a Meaning Crisis, a deeply-felt sense of spiritual vacuity because we don’t know who we are and why.

Amidst a chaotic backdrop of adults who themselves seem totally confused—because they are—young people are faced with a choice to anchor their identity in a mythological theism, an arid modernity, or a narcissistic and nihilistic postmodernity. (There is a better, fourth choice.)

Fourth, we approach a technological Singularity.

AI presents extraordinary opportunities and a profound risk of neo-Feudalism by leveling social mobility and returning wealth inequality to historic norms.

Fifth, the US carries the world with it as it spirals into a “Great Release”, a breakdown of an 80-year long geopolitical order.

Since 1945 the US has led an internationalist liberal global order. But as elites have abused US global hegemony to strip wealth from the middle classes, it has caused a populist reactionary backlash.

This breakdown of the US as a unipolar superpower impacts almost every aspect of life on Earth, and we move now through a decades-long period of serious disruption that is, at a systems-level, trying to repair the US’s “strategic obesity” (i.e., its inability to respond to a changing world in any functional way).

These five forces combine to describe a global, deep, interpenetrating “Metacrisis” that is profoundly impacting all aspects of human life.

This will continue. These five forces:

1. Ecological
2. Cultural-Sensemaking
3. Spiritual-Meaningful,
4. Techno-Economic
5. Geopolitical

…will be the most important background context of every aspect of human life over the next several decades.

The metacrisis and its five tsunami-level forces since 2007 have and will continue to define the shape of the Transformation Age.

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The Response: Thriving in the Transformation Age

Conclusion: You Are the Transformative Force

A final paragraph of copy here, which is inspiring, makes the reader feel like they have a better grasp of the moment, and hungry to learn more in order to further align themselves with the transformative, self-organizing wisdom of the natural world, from which we have never been apart.

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Watch Robb’s full 2-hour presentation here: