[Essay] How to Play 5D Chess: It’s Not What You Think

This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on June 19th, 2026 titled, “How to Play 5D Chess: It’s Not What You Think.”

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Over the years of hosting the podcast, I’ve realized that pretty much every topic has its fans and its critics. This stands to reason with a large audience, especially since this isn’t a single-issue site that only focuses on Green Bay Packers news updates or learning about backyard owls (both of which are sites I personally subscribe to, by the way). Rather, we’re trying to cover and integrate multiple relevant issues in an effort to make sense of our world, in addition to trying to hone in on what the best possible paths forward are, and how we might generally head in that direction.

But over time, there’s also a pattern I’ve recognized in real life, disconnected from this platform. It’s the way that we see a headline, clip, or some name we half-recognize, 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 implied associations. We all participate in this way of thinking and judging, including me, because it’s one of the most human things there is.

So today I want to double-click on that moment and explain why it’s so important to this work. In an attempt to do this, I’ll use a chessboard analogy – starting with asking you, as the reader, to imagine yourself as a single piece on a chessboard and zooming out to include more and more context as a wider boundary perspective.

Lens One: Friend or Threat?

The first lens I’ll start with is us, the chess piece on the game board, staring directly at the piece right across from us. Down here at eye level, our brains and nervous systems are 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 happens lightning fast, meaning that our bodies often feel the verdict before we’ve even heard a complete sentence. We respond to it just as quickly 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 other word you’ve got a charge around, and that threat response fires before the person has been judged at all.

I see this happen in dozens of ways on this platform. One example is renewable energy, which has evolved to become a symbol for someone’s belief in climate science generally. It seems like a simple black or white answer to most of our culture. So, we often make snap decisions about someone’s stance as an environmentalist or climate denier just by their ability to give a yes or no answer to whether they’re pro-renewables. But if we dig deeper, there are hundreds of pieces of important context that might shape that answer: geography, energy return on investment (EROI), economic ideas, resource constraints, scalability, rematerialization, impact on the Global South, and much, much more. But we frequently shut down the nuanced conversation and write off the person before even knowing their full thoughts.

We can also look to AI as an example: 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. Condemn Israel, and you’re an antisemite. Two seconds in, and we’ve been sorted before anyone has heard the actual thoughts.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, who will be on the show in the fall, talks about how the brain predicts and judges before reasoning ever catches up. So despite understanding all these sorting processes and consciously attempting to suppress them, this is still how I react a lot of the time too. Somebody starts talking, and a little part of me has already decided how I feel about them before they finish their first thought.

This instinct shapes our perception and creates a mental trap that matters a great deal for the more-than-human predicament. The emotional verdict lands in us so fast and with such confidence that we often mistake it for actual consideration of what the person said. Our evolutionary fast and frugal heuristics tell us we’ve assessed the argument when all we’ve actually done is assess a face or a phrase.

Lens Two: Us Versus Them

Let’s widen out a little to the second lens, where 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 tribal thinking. This is political party identification, or ideology, or religious identity when it’s used against other people. Once a piece reads as the “other team” to us, much of what that piece says stops landing as information and instead lands as a strategic game move by that side. You can watch this happen in real time in just about any corner of the internet.

However, from this vantage point, we still can’t reason very well about the actual game. We’re still identifying allies and enemies first and foremost. So we have to zoom out a little further.

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Lens Three: Seeing the System

Those first two lenses are our ‘factory settings,’ if you will. The ones evolution (for very good reason) installed first and reinforced the hardest. This is the equipment we were all handed, and it has obviously been adaptive to this point. But we need to be able to look beyond these two adaptive lenses in order to navigate the complex, systems-wide situation we find ourselves in.

That’s why these next lenses are important. The third lens is a bird’s eye view of the game board. It’s high enough that the good guys and the bad guys kind of disappear, and we can finally (at least in theory) see the entire game.

It’s still possible to see the two sides, but they aren’t necessarily “our” side or “their” side anymore. What we see instead is why the pieces are where they are: energy, debt, geopolitics, AI, supply chains, and all the things. We see that pieces move for physical and structural reasons separate from how we feel about them.

This lens trips a lot of people up, I think. If one’s viewpoint is still from down on the game board level, someone else’s aerial-view, dispassionate description of, for example, the world’s current power structure can come across as an endorsement of it. Similarly, refusing to express moral statements about something comes across the same way – as if you’re siding with the powerful.

So when someone climbs up to this third lens and describes the forces at play, specifically without picking a team, many of us who are emotionally invested in the issue might hear the statement as a betrayal. I fully understand this because those feelings are real, but they’re assessing two distinctly different things. Describing how the pieces move is very different from cheering for where they’re headed or where they land.

If we look at the lenses we’ve covered so far, there is a hidden and quite large cost of only using the lower two lenses. Once we’ve labeled someone using the second lens, we stop being able to learn anything from them, or even being able to see them from the wider lenses. We tend to throw out the description because we don’t like the describer.

Personally, I think that some of the most useful reads of the board come from people whose conclusions we would never sign on to or agree with. I’ve learned over a long, and sometimes tortuous, slog that it’s worth letting people we don’t fully agree with finish their sentences. (I wonder what Nora Bateson would say).

Lens Four: Planetary Stakes

But wait, there’s more!

In the fourth lens, we zoom out even further to see what’s beyond the board. We keep pulling the camera angle back, and it turns out that the entire chessboard is sitting on something living: a landscape of climate, oceans, biodiversity, the other 10 million species we share this planet with, the viability of our ecosystems, and the corresponding planetary boundaries.

This is both my physical home base and where I mentally operate from, which I suspect is the same for many of you reading. The game we’ve been fighting about on the board is actually quite small from a deep time and ecological sense.

The living world around us and underneath us is the actual thing at stake.

Lens Five: The Long Repair

This fifth and final lens shows that the board and the living world around it are sitting in a landscape – on a hill or down in a valley. Out ahead of us, there is a second game board. Maybe it’s smaller and simpler economically than ours, or perhaps it’s a different game entirely. This game board represents a possible future to move toward – a restructuring of the game entirely.

In the best cases, it’s some form of broad cooperation and stewardship-based community, which I call “the Long Repair.” I’ve expanded more on this in part four of my “How to Think About the Future” series, “How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades?” From this fifth lens, we stop asking who’s the villain on the board that we’re standing on, or at least we throttle and quiet that impulse. Then we start asking how we get from this game board to that one, without flipping the whole table over on the way there.

Holding All Five Lenses

These five lenses, all with different heights and vantage points from which we can look at the same situation, are all important. We need to be able to recognize and use all these lenses to make decisions and direct our lives and community.

When a piece of information comes at us, most of the time we filter it using the first two lenses: the person and the tribe. Again, that is understandable. None of us should be considered flawed or diminished for starting at lens one or two. I personally start from these every single day.

But a core theme of this whole channel, which I will now make explicit, is that we cannot navigate the bottlenecks of the 21st century from only one or two levels. We can’t get to the destination game board by deciding which piece across from us to dislike, or which groups to write off, and then crafting our strategies and reactions around that decision.

As I’ve often repeated (and will likely repeat again), we are approaching a species-level rite of passage for humanity and the biosphere. The stakes of our time are asking us to also learn to look through the third, fourth, and fifth lenses. To see the human game board as part of the living world and to visualize that alternative game board off in the distance – the one with different rules and different players, and could possibly be played for a very long time.

We can’t drop the first two lenses. We’ll still use the face and the tribe, and we always will. The goal, I think, is to hold the wide ones at the same time.

So lenses one and two never go away, but from up high, they get put in proportion to the scale of the predicament we face. Call it “5D systems chess” if you like, but there really aren’t five dimensions out there. There are just five heights we can watch the same board from. Most of the charismatic voices in our culture primarily use one or two.

I think the real skill to be learned and practiced here is how to move your own camera – to hold all five of these heights at different times or all at once – and then to come back down and actually do something to meet the future halfway.

There’s a bookend risk here as well, because if we hold only the wide boundary view but have no agency attached to it, then that just turns into despair or dread at a higher resolution.

I’ll share something about my own challenges hosting this multi-issue platform: The really hard part of doing this work is not the content or the analysis. I actually love that part of it. The hard work is trying to show a large and diverse global audience the whole board without making any one of you feel like you’re a game piece getting pushed across it. This is not easy, and it feels quite Sisyphian most of the time. But I am trying.

I hope this was helpful. Much love to you all, wherever on this board you happen to currently stand, look from, or want to move to.

Thanks for reading.

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