Daniel Schmachtenberger | Reality, Meaning & Self-Development | Modern Wisdom Podcast 179

Daniel Schmachtenberger works in preventing global catastrophic risk. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to improve our entire civilisation - I wanted to find out where self development and maximising personal agency fits into Daniel's perspective. I really enjoyed this change of pace. The conversation is deep, insightful and considered. If you're in the right place to hear the message, this could have a profound impact on the way you see the world. Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 85% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Check out Daniel's Website - https://civilizationemerging.com/ Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #danielschmachtenberger #sensemaking #chriswilliamson - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic. You can't have a if this and that algorithm that actually equals wisdom. And if you can, then we're just a intermediate boot loader for the AIs that are better creatures than us. Right?

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  Daniel, I I'm very impressed that we finally managed to get this recording sorted. Not only between time difference challenges or me needing to rearrange or a global pandemic. We're finally here. We finally got each other on the line.

• 0:38Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, the global pandemics fuck up our schedule sometimes.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  It's very inconvenient.

• 0:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  It's incredibly inconvenient, you know? So as you're aware, we talk a lot on this podcast about self-development and you help people to make sense of the world. Sense making, preventing global catastrophic risks. So in light of the way that the world is at the moment, what are your thoughts about how people can develop themselves whilst still ensuring that we have a functioning world that isn't risky?

• 1:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  We can go like a million places with that question. And so we'll just start and see what happens.

• 1:31Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Even the topic of personal development,

• 1:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  what that means is pretty ambiguous. The idea of development means that something can progress to some stage of more refinement or more capacity.

• 1:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so we know what that means in mathematics or in playing classical piano or weightlifting, right? There's some sense of progressive development. But what does it mean for a person to develop beyond early adulthood? We also have a very clear sense that children go through developmental stages of increasing their cognitive and social and linguistic and motor and all these types of capacities. But then when does that stop? Does it have to stop? There's a development of more skills, but what does becoming a more developed human being fundamentally mean? Is a philosophic, spiritual, religious, existential question.

• 2:24Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so the question of what is a meaningful human life is underneath that.

• 2:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And then, how do I effectively develop myself aligned with what is most meaningful?

• 2:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And

• 2:43Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  when I'm asking what is a meaningful human life, there's not just my own experience, but how do I relate to the whole of life? How does the meaningfulness of life relate to both what I experience and also what I contribute to the experience of others?

• 2:59Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so, when we think about the current world situation, does the world situation we're in create a context for what kinds of human development are relevant within the general parameters of some universal truths? And it certainly does, because what the world needs if we want to really effectively serve to protect against unnecessary harm and to increase the quality of life, it needs different skills than it needed a thousand years ago. And it needs different, it actually needs totally different kinds of minds and sense-making in many ways.

• 3:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And then some aspects of it are obviously going to be the same across lots of contexts, like the refinement of our clarity and our own motivation.

• 3:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And our own emotional resilience and things like that.

• 3:51Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I think the motivation is an interesting one to start on, which is as soon as you have a concept of human development and there's some concept of more developed, and you can conceptually understand that to try and orient yourself,

• 4:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  then

• 4:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  there becomes an inherent comparison with other people of are they comprehensively more developed human than I am? And, or am I more than they are and is my thinking that I'm more than they are some sign of ego which is actually a sign of low development? Um, in some particular way? And it's easy to cognitively understand what some higher stage of development would express like? And be able to act it without it actually being real. And so as soon as there's, you know, you read David Deidre and you have the an authentic man is such and such, or embodied woman is such and such, or whatever, well, you can

• 4:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  just start acting that and having it be totally not real and having a bunch of personal development mimicking for basically status seeking. And what's underneath that, the status-seeking impulse, which is usually fundamental insecurities, is actually not healing itself, which the real personal development would be. It's actually doubling down on itself and building up a presentation package. And whether it's I'm rich, or I'm buff, or I'm enlightened, just depends on the subculture you're appealing to.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  That is a very hard red pill to swallow. And I couldn't agree more. There's a quote from Ben Bergeron, who says that character will always beat strategy. He's a CrossFit coach. And I think what he's talking about there is the virtue of doing the thing because it's the thing that you want to do from your innermost being, as opposed to doing the thing because that's what you think you should do based on what you've been told, so that you can then signal that you are a person who has these virtues. It's cart, horse, or horse, cart.

• 6:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  When you mention virtue signaling, which will obviously show up very differently in different cultures, right? I'm a good Republican versus I'm a good Democrat is going to have totally, it'll be repulsive to the people of the different tribe, or religions, or different types of aesthetics. From an evolutionary biology perspective, it's mostly just mate signaling. And so whether it's a 150-foot super yacht, or it's

• 6:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  You know, having read all the books in a particular space and presenting yourself in a way that we say, "Okay, well, where is that imperative to want people to respond to me in a particular way?" Well, it has something to do with power dynamics in a tribe and largely, basically, mate signaling is the evolutionary origin of it. It's valuable to just admit that and to just kind of reflect on it, to say, "The more I can reflect on the biological predispositions that arise, the less I'm controlled by them." And I don't want to be ashamed of or repress them or just automatically go with them, right? Because they gave rise to the capacity for abstraction, and the abstraction can give rise to higher-order interests than the base interests.

• 7:28Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So this is actually a very valuable thing in personal development is

• 7:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  just taking the time to very deeply, earnestly inquire into your motive.

• 7:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And, "Okay, I'm wanting to develop in this way. Why?" Because mostly, the whys are actually lies, right? It's, "I believe that when I'm buff, then I will..." dot, dot, dot. And it's not going to be true, right? So the thing happens, and then it's just some other set of goals.

• 8:04Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so typically, whenever someone is going about doing some project to help the world or develop themselves or whatever, they usually have mixed motives. They have like a dozen different motives driving them. And they're usually only aware of half of them. And they'll usually only admit like one or two of them.

• 8:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And, but this will affect your results and your trustworthiness because those motives will pull in different ways.

• 8:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so, let's say I'm trying to develop myself as someone who's more capable of making a difference in the world, and so I'm doing some alleviating poverty project. And the mission statement of why we're doing this is because these kids don't have shoes, and they don't have food, and we need to bring it to them, and we care. That might actually be true, like, I might actually care as one of the 12 or so motives that has me doing that. I might also need to make some money, and this nonprofit is a way that I can make some money. I also might want to

• 9:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  feel successful in a different way, and this hits a certain idea of what will make me feel successful. And then there might be a bunch of stuff that's unconscious, like insecurity from childhood and school, and still wanting to hear that I did a good job, that my parents didn't give me, or that they did, projected onto the rest of the world. The degree to which you can just really watch that, right? Just watch the things that are arising in the mind, and they'll show up when you notice who you're comparing yourself with, and where you feel jealousies, which is something that you think that you're wanting that someone else is getting socially, or whatever.

• 9:54Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And just in reflecting, then you can ask yourself the question,

• 10:04Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  so which of these seem like they're coming from wholeness, like, from the deepest, holiest version of myself I could imagine, and which of them feel like they're more coming from insecurity or woundedness? And if I imagine myself growing in my wholeness, which of these would deepen and which would lessen? And then of the ones that would lessen, you can just ask, if this wasn't there at all, how would my life be different? Like the desire that people like me, or whatever it is, if this wasn't there at all. And that doesn't mean to pathologize it, just you just get to inquire into that and notice how does it move you. In maybe some ways that it moves you are fine, but it's good to at least be clear on it.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  Are those some of the signals that people can use to identify that? Because the pernicious thing about our subconscious is that we're not conscious of it, not without doing a tremendous amount of introspective work, time in solitude and all that sort of stuff. So are there any signals that people can say, that's, that's that thing manifesting again?

• 11:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, if they just make time, kind of already know what some of the signals are. Say there's a project you want to do, and you want to do it because it actually feels intrinsically meaningful, right? There's a real intrinsic motive. And you think about someone else getting credit for it, you not getting credit for it, versus you getting credit for it. You just, or you even notice in the process of a conversation, where there is a credit-seeking impulse arise in you. And you say, oh, that impulse and the impulse to actually serve are not the same impulse. Those are two different

• 11:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  impulses that are both arising. And they, maybe they can be made to be two sled dogs pulling in the same direction, but they might be sled dogs pulling in opposite directions. Because sometimes the way I can serve the project best is to let someone else take credit, so they work harder to make the thing happen. And this is why, you know, if you read the Tao Te Ching as a book of leadership, almost, it just says that thing again and again. The best leader is the one that nobody even knows is leading, who doesn't want to lead, who other people push to lead because they trust them and really just empowers everyone else.

• 12:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So thinking about what this means for people on a broader scale, what it means for an individual to understand their motivations toward leading a good life. I think one of the key insights that I've had from spending time exposed to this sort of content is that I didn't for a long time and still mostly don't know what I want to want, truthfully.

• 13:10Chris Williamson?

  It's a very hard question to answer.

• 13:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, there's a in processes, in the process of development of becoming more self reflexively aware. So at first you're living in a particular way and you aren't even really reflecting on if that's the right way to be living, right? And then you start reflecting on it, you realize, oh, I'm actually behaving ways that go against the things that I want. And so I'm getting angry or I'm getting jealous or I'm whatever it is, it isn't who I really want to be. And this is kind of like tier one memetics in personal development. Let me see if I can work on changing that.

• 13:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And some, and people will start to realize, wow, that pattern of being angry or being habituated or whatever, being lazy was conditioned in me. Because had I grown up with the Sioux Indians or with the Manchiganga tribe or whatever, I would be different. Right? Like, there's no question that there would be a lot about me that's different. So I don't want to just be the kind of default byproduct of how I happened to grow up that I didn't even really have a say in where I chose. So can I recondition it? It's like, yeah, I can recondition it.

• 14:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Then there's some more reflection. It says, so I can recondition my behaviors to be more aligned with what I want and what I value. And they're like, fuck, what I want and what I value was conditioned also.

• 14:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because do I want to be a good Christian? Or I want to be a good Muslim? Or I want to be a good Hindu? Or a good scientist? Do I want to be a Wall Street banker? Or a good family man? Do I? That was probably also conditioned, right? All the way down to your your metaphysical framework for what reality is? And what the good life is in there? Now you've entered the heart of existentialism. Because you're asking, what is worth wanting? And then you have to say, well, what is the basis to answer that? That wasn't just conditioned? Is there some deeper than my conditioning basis? Can I pierce through the conditioning? And so what I'm trying to ask is,

• 15:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  is there anything intrinsically meaningful about the nature of reality that I can come to understand? That is beyond where I happen to have been conditioned? Where regardless of where I would have been conditioned, this is something I could come to? And it turns out that there are meaningful ways to address that.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  Tell us. That's what we're here for, Daniel. We are here to find out about that.

• 15:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  There's different ways of approaching this that have validity. So I'm not going to say what the truth of a meaningful life is. But I'll say some ways that I have found and that others I have seen have found that are meaningful. And also acknowledge, you can walk one or multiple of these paths.

• 16:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I forget the author. There's a famous quote, "The heart knows reasons that reason knows nothing of." And there is a kind of poetic, artistic answer to the question, which is, it just is.

• 16:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right? There's a deep, there's a sense of this is meaningful because it'll serve this, and then that because this, and then at a certain level, there's a sense of just prima facie, it just is. And like, life, life is fundamentally meaningful and worth serving. Why? Just it, right? There is no deeper explanation that adds more clarification than that. It is based on your own direct experience of your experience of aliveness, feeling intrinsically meaningful, and then you're sensing the depth of other people's experience of life, and seeing that that's meaningful, and your desire to serve life in that way.

• 17:10Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it just, and so the answer there is not really a deep philosophical inquiry, it's more about a felt experience.

• 17:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Uh, that's great.

• 17:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And, you know, the first verse of the Tao Te Ching is that the knowledge that is knowable is not the eternal knowledge, and the Tao that is speakable is not the eternal Tao. Which means the, to translate, the meaning or the purpose of everything that you can describe in words isn't really it. Because it's fundamentally transsemantic.

• 17:54Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Um, semantic is a symbol that has a very finite meaning that is supposed to represent a certain ground, right? Like, the word apple references apple, you know, but when I'm talking about meaningfulness of reality, there is no word that can actually hold the ground of everything. And so, there can be though, a certain kind of felt sense of connectedness with it.

• 18:22Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Now, we can also think about it more and come up with better answers. And it's actually nice when we do both of these, and there's a confluence of the deepening of our own felt connection, and the deepening of the clarity of how we understand it.

• 18:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So some people go to Landmark, and it starts with, well, I don't want to say what Landmark says. There are some systems that will say, "Reality is fundamentally meaningless." And that's empowering and beautiful because you get to create the meaning. There isn't some a priori god that said, "This is how you win the race at the end, and you either get it right or you get it wrong by some predefined definition." That can feel empowering. There's actually some kind of metaphysics smuggled in there, which is to say you get to create the meaning

• 19:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  is still actually holding some concept of meaningfulness and the value on your own creativity. Right? So it's not actually doing the deeper inquiry to say, "Well, why do I value choice? Why do I value creativity? And what is the basis for meaningfulness, my own assessment?" So again, those are just in prima facie held as meaningful. So, science is a process of trying to come to understand the objective world in a way that goes beyond my own subjective sense of what it is,

• 20:10Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  which means beyond my conditioning and my bias. Right? And so I might think that sound travels faster than light at room temperature in air. So I set up an experiment and measure it, and I find out that it just doesn't. And then I can do that 100 times or a million times, and other people can do it. We can use different apparatus. There is a... The measurability and the repeatability gives us a certain sense of the objectivity of it. Right?

• 20:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Bueno, la ciencia ha hecho un muy buen trabajo de darnos un marco para "es", "qué es", que no se basa en "qué creo que es".

• 20:49Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  No nos ha dado la misma base para "qué debería ser". Y hay esta división clásica entre ciencia y ética, o ciencia y existencialismo, llamada distinción "es- debe". La ciencia puede decir "qué es", no puede decir "qué debe ser", porque el proceso de la ciencia es un proceso de

• 21:11Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  observar y medir cosas observable, que son inherentemente objetos de tercera persona, y luego poder encontrar patrones de regularidades expresados, que puedo expresar en algo como la matemática.

• 21:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Así que pertenece al dominio de las cosas que son medibles y repetibles.

• 21:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Nuestra experiencia no es medible, es agradable, es primera persona, no tercera persona. Son categorías fundamentalmente diferentes, ¿verdad? Cuando dices, "bueno, no, tu experiencia es medible porque podemos medir ondas cerebrales", no está mediendo la experiencia, está mediendo un estado cerebral que sucede a correlación con tu experiencia sentida, pero alguien que estudia la neurociencia de EEG, que está mirando el patrón cerebral de un meditador zen, puede mirarlo y no tiene idea de cómo es la experiencia.

• 22:04Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Así que el hecho de que puede haber correlación neural a la experiencia no significa que estés mediendo la experiencia, significa que hay una correlación neural, ¿verdad? Pero ese es todavía el dominio de la tercera persona, que es fundamentalmente nunca primera persona.

• 22:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Así que la primera persona está fuera del dominio de la ciencia formalmente.

• 22:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Esto es importante porque dice que la ciencia no es un método de saber toda la realidad, es un método de saber partes de la realidad. Y hay partes de la realidad que están rigorosamente fuera de los métodos de la ciencia.

• 22:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But we want something like we had with science, which was a better process of knowing.

• 22:43Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so are there better processes of knowing about the nature of first person? And the nature of the relationship between first person and third person? Because a meaningful life is going to involve the nature of the world. It's also going to involve the nature of my experience and it's going to involve the relationship between me and the world. Right? Well, that's at least three different ontological categories. Third person, first person, and the relationship between the two, which is neither third person nor first person. So that requires a more robust philosophy that includes but transcends the philosophy of science.

• 23:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So let's say we just look at a kind of scientific story. We can frame this lots of different ways. There's a, a lot of people have

• 23:31Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  made a universe story based on a limited part of science and then kind of made a metaphysical story related to it, like they'll take the second law of thermodynamics, increasing entropy, and say, okay, so there's a lot of energy at the big bang and basically the universe is running down and will eventually turn into just a cold vacuum and die in a a big freeze, a kind of heat death. And so the metaphysics of universe is just this very slow inexorable march towards nothingness.

• 24:02Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Now, if all there was of science was the second law, you might do that, but that's obviously pretty silly.

• 24:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And there's a lot of things that aren't explained by that at all.

• 24:16Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And people will take evolutionary biology and talk about

• 24:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  make a metaphysical answer that's all about becoming apex predators and dog-eat-dog kind of stuff and whatever, right? That's actually an important one to address because it's a still very pernicious worldview.

• 24:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Nature is kind of just cruel and optimizing.

• 24:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Anyone who spent time in nature and watched predation knows that it's pretty fucking cruel. And the things that are the fittest and the fittest can involve effective cruelty, survive, and...

• 25:02Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, humans, uh...

• 25:07Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Following suit of that, being capable of understanding Darwinian kind of process, uh, should seek to be as fit as they can be, and that that's just being part of the natural order of things. And that not, you know, of every species, the weak ones dying and getting cold is actually what strengthens the genetics and drives evolution forward, so that cruelty, the predator usually taking the weak prey out more is actually what's making the prey better, uh, be... Because they're getting the weak genes out, and so then the stronger genes come. The slightly faster lion that eats the slow gazelle makes gazelle slower over long periods of time, so ultimately predatory dynamics, violence, winning, competition,

• 25:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  is what drives all good things in progress and like that. That's a very classic, very narrow, uh, idea that takes one very tiny part of science and tries to blow it up to be the meta-frame and then interpret it in a way that, uh, people wanted to interpret anyways, um, to basically justify shit that was, that they wanted to do.

• 26:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I won't say the name, but, uh...

• 26:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  A couple of people that are amongst the most powerful people in the world in terms of high finance have basically quoted almost all of this to me, verbatim in conversations, as how they see the world. And, um...

• 26:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And they said, you know, either, like, basically apex predators define the topology of the space.

• 26:49Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And, so either you're the apex predator or somebody else is, but the apex predators are gonna be the one who run shit, and if you don't like that, you just won't be one of the ones who run shit.

• 27:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  One of the guys said, pretty directly, said, "If you..."

• 27:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  All animals are either predators or prey. And predators don't feel bad when they kill prey. And if you feel bad when the prey humans die, then you just said what kind of animal you are, and that animal doesn't run the world. And the... Of the predators who don't make it to Alpha Apex, they also aren't the ones whose genes really go and run the world. And if you don't like the way that Alpha Apex are, it won't make any difference because they'll still be the ones who run the world, you just won't be part of it. And, you know, this... The same conversation went to other places about why the Holocaust was a good thing for Jews. And, um...

• 27:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because they got the State of Israel and nukes and antisemitism became a bad word and etc. Like, thinking about... You can see what that worldview does, right? The worldview makes people to think like that. Um... The conversation... Those conversations would go to much darker places, too. But...

• 28:09Chris Williamson?

  Can I ask, how did you feel hearing those sorts of concepts come from people who not only can imagine it from an armchair philosophy perspective, but actually have the power to be able to wield it in the real world as well? Was that distressing to hear, to sit down opposite somebody and hear that?

• 28:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, super distressing at first. It was something I didn't have... I didn't have a reference frame for, from how I grew up. And that also meant I didn't understand critical things about the world that are important if you actually want to be able to make a difference to things in the world. And so, one of the things that I started noticing was how much there are certain psychological dispositions that seek power more than others.

• 29:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And that are also willing to use power in ways that give them more power, including by disempowering everybody else. And those people have ended up being the people with most power most of the time.

• 29:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, they're the most effective. They're the ones that are prepared to go to the places where other people's sense of empathy or virtue or inner compass or whatever it might be would stop them before that.

• 29:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right, so effective at a specific thing. And a specific thing that ends up winning in a natural selection of violence. And so you might have a peaceful culture that is way more effective at producing happy people and producing kind people and living in harmony with the land. But Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great or whatever will come slaughter them and take their space and take their stuff. And so then the memes that go on are the memes that were effective at winning in a natural selection of warfare. It ends up being that if you, that drives an arms race, right? Because then somebody becomes better at war.

• 30:11Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So somebody else has to get those same weapons, plus the counter weapons, plus better weapons. And eventually you get an exponential curve where it turns into AI empowered drones and bioweapons and etc. And it's actually too big to use any of the weapons safely and you destroy the whole world. And that's why I work on catastrophic risk is the pattern of how we have made it through the local issues is actually what's driving the global issues currently. That kind of rival risk be the apex predator kind of thing at scale is actually destroying the capability for civilization to keep going on, period. And so this apex predator thing. We're not apex predators. It's just gibberish.

• 30:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  This is a really important thing I'd like people to understand. An orc is an apex predator, right? Killer whale.

• 31:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Top predator in their environment. Or a polar bear, or a tiger, right? There's lots of apex predators we could pick. But an orca is like the biggest one you can think of. So they're a good example. An orca can catch one fish at a time, right? It's gonna go catch one tuna and it's gonna miss most of the time, or one seal. It can't. It can't take a mile-long drift net and pull up 100,000 tuna at once, which we can now with industrialized dredge net kind of fishing. That's not the power of an apex predator, right?

• 31:47Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  A polar bear can kill one walrus at a time and it's fucking dangerous to do that and it's pretty hard to do. It can't slash and burn an acre of forest a second, right? Or be able to do mountaintop removal mining or factory farm whole species of animal and hybridize new species and extinct species. So that's not the power of apex predators. That's the power of gods, we're just shitty gods. If we say, "Do apex predators have the ability to extinct whole species quickly and destroy whole ecosystems and make new ecosystems and genetically engineer new species?"

• 32:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  No, that's not something that Darwinian process has anything to do with, right? And so you think about if a polar bear got really pissed and went on a tirade and tried to break all that it could, how much harm could it do compared to Trump or Putin? With nukes, right? Like compared to one F-15. So then you say, "Well, who has the ability to make new species and destroy species and make new environments and destroy them?" Well, we've thought of that mythopoeically as the domain of the gods or nature itself. Since we have that much power, we can destroy nature itself, right?

• 33:07Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And to not do that, we have to be safe vessels for that much power. Which means that if you have the power of gods, you have to have the love and the wisdom of gods to guide it and to hold it. And we have developed in our power through technology much, much better than we have developed in our love and wisdom to wield that power well.

• 33:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we have wielded our power to just how do I, how do we use our power to beat the other guys? And then they try to develop their power. But that process multiplied by exponential tech destroys everything. And so we are at the brink of a phase shift of either the end of civilization in the not too distant future as we know it. Or the emergence into something that is actually worthy of calling civilization, right? That is actually civil, that can be able to hold the power of AI and the internet of things and geoengineering and bioengineering and actually not fuck everything up with that much capability. There's this very deep question, say, as the power is getting stronger, it's also getting

• 34:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  more decentralized. Right? So with CRISPR gene drives, you can do the level of bioengineering with a tiny little lab that used to be a whole, you know, the cutting edge of US military not that many years ago. And the same with drone weaponry and whatever. So we have, you know, during the Cold War, we, actually this important thing to understand, until World War II, we didn't have the technological power to destroy everything quickly. As much as we would have wanted to try, we just couldn't. For the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, the most we could want to destroy would still be not that much, relative to the planet. And then with the bomb, that changed.

• 34:56Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's like, oh shit, we can actually make this place not habitable for everybody pretty quickly with just some pushes of buttons. That's the, that was the beginning of a whole new world. Right? And how, how do we deal with having created a power that we can't use or we don't exist? And so when we created that,

• 35:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The entire world system had to be recreated just to protect us from using the bomb. The Bretton Woods Convention, coming out of World War II, was basically a whole new world system where we had to have a United Nations because individual national governments clearly didn't prevent world war. And we had to have a World Bank and we had to have a totally new international monetary policy and all of those kinds of structures emerged then and we had to have mutually assured destruction, which emerged a little bit later, to make sure that neither the US or the Soviets would ever use that power, right? Now, mutually assured destruction was this kind of automated locked-on process that if anybody started to fire up their nuke silos at the other one, the other ones would automatically

• 36:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  go, so you couldn't initiate the war without killing yourself, and that's what kept everybody from doing it. Mutually assured destruction was what saved us. The system had computer glitches that started to put us into launch sequence many times and we only barely made it and largely by luck. But that's where we only had two superpowers that had that totally catastrophic capability. And those two could fully spy on each other to know if the other one was going to do something. And you only had one kind of catastrophe weapon, not lots of them. Two superpowers, one kind of catastrophe weapon. And so mutually assured destruction worked.

• 36:46Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we also wore, when we start running out of resources and then we're competing for the same resources because everybody's greed wants to get more, their own national development interests or their personal development interests expressed as monetary abundance, as if there's a fixed playing field of stuff, my more has to be your less. Okay, fuck it, war, right? So, one of the other things that happened was creating this kind of monetary system coming out of World War II where we could just make up shit tons of new money and debt-based finance and be able to create this globalism and just create so much physical abundance of wealth that we didn't have to war, right? Everybody could be getting richer simultaneously. That was the idea.

• 37:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It just happens to be that you're destroying the planet very rapidly, doing that by basically taking all of nature and turning it into trash, right? Which is taking ecosystems that took billions of years to develop and unrenewably destroying them on one side and then turning them into pollution on the other side after a very short period of use. And you just don't get to keep doing that for very long on a finite planet before you destroy the planet's ability to let you keep doing that. And also that debt-based finance thing starts to catch up with you because in order to pay back the debt, you gotta take out more debt. And, you know, so you get this embedded growth obligation, right? You have to keep growing exponentially year over year just to break even because you

• 38:16Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  get to keep up with the interest. So we get to about where we are now, and the Bretton Woods world has completely broken down. Because we can't keep just debt-based financing, rapid growth to prevent conflict because we already have more of our total GDP going to servicing the debt than is sustainable. And so we're at the end of the financial system's ability to do that, and COVID just made that worse by lowering GDP and increasing debt a lot. And it was already unsustainable. We're near the planetary boundaries on like 100 different boundaries.

• 39:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so we can't keep doing the turn nature into trash, but money briefly on the way to trash, um, process. And we have dozens of catastrophe weapons now, not just one. And nukes, there's just not that many places that have uranium, and it's very hard to enrich, and it's not like, it's not like small groups can really make nukes, they're really hard to make. But that's not true for, for weaponized drones, they're really easy to make. And for a lot of other new types of exponential tech that relatively small forces, not even state actors can make. Plus, there's lots of state actors that have nukes now, and chemical weapons and bioweapons and other things like that.

• 39:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So now you're in a world where you've got not two actors, but lots of actors, more than we can even identify, ones that we don't even know, who can have catastrophe weapons. And not one type of catastrophe weapon, but lots of them, where you don't have clear counters for them. And you're near the planetary boundaries environmentally, and you're at the end of the economic system's capability to keep doing the thing it's done. That's a transition point.

• 40:10Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And

• 40:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I don't remember exactly how we got here, but it's important in understanding this to say that the

• 40:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  the, oh, I was talking about the apex predator model. So that even before we had nukes, an apex predator couldn't

• 40:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  doesn't make something like a city. Right. Which is a completely altered environment. And we've been doing that for thousands of years. But, and we've been using that increased power destructively and driving this arms race of increasing destructive capacity. But at a certain point, it became globally catastrophic destruction. And now it's many, many different methods of globally catastrophic destruction initiatable by many, many actors.

• 41:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so this is now where we're like, oh, this is what the power of gods without the love or wisdom to guide it looks like.

• 41:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so you could ask this question as exponential tech continues and we get more power that becomes more decentralized. Oh yeah, I said all that to say nukes are pretty centralized, but the new tech is decentralized, but catastrophic.

• 41:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  How do we make a civilization that is anti-fragile?

• 41:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  With, with decentralized exponential technology?

• 41:46Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Which means if I've got lots of non-state actors that can make catastrophe weapons, and I don't even know who they are. How do we make a world that doesn't break? Given the way that humans have historically used power? How do we make a world where anybody can have the power to break everything?

• 42:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That's an interesting question.

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  It's a very interesting question. It doesn't surprise me that we are in a situation where we face challenges when we consider the intro to this discussion, which was our evolutionary predispositions, our socialized values that we consider to be worth pursuing, which are essentially repurposed versions of a genetic heritage and all this sort of stuff. It doesn't surprise me with the most shaky foundation ever, that when you start to add an awful

• 42:48Chris Williamson?

  lot of weight in the form of power, destructive power, technological power, when you start to add that on top, that the system becomes incredibly unstable. I wonder whether, because I consider myself to be a good person, I'm not perfect, but I don't, I don't plan on blowing up the world, right? I don't want to go out and hurt people. I don't want to go out and kill people. For me, I think the idealist inside of me relating to self-development thinks, well, if everybody becomes more self-aware, is able to iterate the introspection and slowly become better over time, go to bed less stupid than when they woke up, naturally

• 43:30Chris Williamson?

  out of that system, you wouldn't have any of the pathologies emerge. You wouldn't have any of the challenges emerge because every individual agent within the system would understand genuinely what is best for them, genuinely how to deploy that, and also would be using any spare capacity that they have to then help others to understand that and then further progress their movement forward. Aubrey Marcus on the show said, "You do not serve others from your cup, you serve others from the source of the overflows around your cup." And what that means is you've got to sort your shit first, and then what you have as a surplus, you use to help others sort their shit. That's how I saw that. And I

• 44:10Chris Williamson?

  wonder whether that's naivety, ignorance, probably definitely a lot of ignorance. I've never been exposed. To someone who has been able to wield the sort of power of the people that you mentioned and also have that that mindset.

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  So probably some ignorance there that I just haven't seen this firsthand. And it just sounds like a Hollywood movie to hear that happen. Right. It just sounds totally detached from you. Yeah, yeah, Daniel guy, but they don't really exist, do they? You're like, no, these are actual people.

• 44:48Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, I wonder, I wonder how much of it is.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much introspective work, self-development, working out what do you want to want? What should I want to want? What is genuinely good for me? And then how can I make what is good for me be good for others? I wonder how much of that can be the answer to some of these challenges that we face? And where the upper bound to what that can achieve is.

• 45:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The body isn't just 70 or 90 trillion healthy cells all doing their own thing.

• 45:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That would just be a pile of goo, right? That would just be bio protoplasm. The body is actually a coordination between those. It involves not just how they function individually in a Petri dish, but how they relate with each other to be able to make tissues and organs and organ systems and that whole thing. Right?

• 45:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so a cell needs to do what it needs to do to be a healthy cell, but it also needs to communicate with all the ones around it to mediate what the tissue needs to do. And what it's because it can't just be doing its own thing when the muscle needs to flex. That particular muscle cell has to be engaged in the process. Right? And let's say that it's being a good, healthy cell, but there's a cancer cell nearby. If some cells don't actually take that cancer cell out, it'll replicate and kill the whole body. And so there is a need to be a healthy cell. There's also a need to coordinate with those around you for the things that need to happen. There's also a need to have an immune function. When there are things happening that damage the health of the whole system.

• 46:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so if we're talking about how do we want to develop people? We want to develop people in all three of those ways.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  They want to be, they want to have as much capacity to do the things that they should do individually. They want to have the capacity to synergize, to have synergy with the people that are around them and that they can access, now increasingly access, I guess, with the tools that we have. The immune function, I can't explain. How does that manifest?

• 47:02Chris Williamson?

  Is that law? Is that just police? What?

• 47:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If you see harm happening, do you stop it?

• 47:10Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Do you do something to correct the, to correct the harm and correct the sources of harm? Who does, right?

• 47:16Chris Williamson?

  How does that differ from synergy? Is it because the actor is malignant as opposed to compliant or cooperative?

• 47:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, they're within a spectrum, right?

• 47:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's actually very interesting in terms of cancer, because cancer isn't some external pathogen. It's a cell that mutated in a way that stops doing synergy with the other cells around it, right? And because its genetic code is altered where it doesn't actually identify with the rest of the whole in the same way. And so it doesn't want to sacrifice its own maximum consumption of sugar and reproduction rate to synergize with everything. It's like, fuck it, I'm just going to consume and replicate as fast as I can, which not, which is like really good for it for a short while, but it ends up killing itself and it kills the host, which is what humans are doing with regard to the planet and also our relationships with each other, where you do that with someone else and it engenders enmity and war back and things like that, right?

• 48:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The bodies, there's oxidative stress and free radicals that are making cancer all the time. It's just, it's also getting addressed. So the first stage of dealing with cancer in a healthy body is just not having that much carcinogenesis to begin with, right? That the body's actually doing a good job of dealing with carcinogenic factors, radicals and oxidants and like that, so cells aren't turning cancerous that often. If there's too much carcinogenesis, and this is why we don't want to expose to carcinogenic compounds, right? If there's too much carcinogenesis, it'll overload the body's ability to deal with cancerous cells, and then you'll start to get a proliferation. So this is the preventative side. How do we have people not become cancerous cells in the first place?

• 49:01Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  How do we not deal with it on the prison or judicial side later, but on the how do we develop humans that are psychologically healthy? And if psychologically healthy also means are part of a whole, so they behave in a way that works well for them and the whole, right? Then, the next step is if a cell starts to get damaged, some oxidative damage happens to it, the rest of the body tries to heal it first. Can we actually bring antioxidants and correct that process? If that can't happen, then the body has to kill it. If that doesn't happen, then it'll replicate and usually kill the body. So when we start to think about the staging of the immune function and what that represents

• 49:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  as a basis for thinking about judicial-type process, the basis of it should be identify what makes people orient towards harming the commons, towards violence, towards sociopathy, towards greed, and also identify what conditions the best qualities in humans, and try to support all humans to have better development, right? Then, there is a protective function. If people are harming other people, how do we prevent the harm from happening? And how do we try to actually rehabilitate, which is the corrective force? And it's only if rehabilitation can't happen that some ongoing protection from that being able to continue to cause harm has to occur.

• 50:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But when you look, okay. So you...

• 50:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Don't go kill people in Nigeria to get to advance your oil interests the way a Nigerian oil lord does.

• 50:44Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But you buy gas for your car, or whatever the equivalent is, right? Which is ultimately paying the supply chain to do the thing it does, which means paying the Nigerian warlord to do wet works at some part of the supply chain. You might never do the kind of gruesome torture that happens inside of a factory farm, but you might go to a restaurant and buy something that came from a factory farm, which is paying someone to do those wet works.

• 51:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so there starts to be this deepened responsibility question of, oh, I'm affecting the world at scale in a way I'm not seeing through the supply chains I'm interacting with.

• 51:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so now there's harm that's being caused that I'm not standing up to and I'm also complicit with. And it's not the job of the police to stop that because it's granted by law that that can happen, but it's not right law. Right law wouldn't allow a factory farm, you know, or those other things to occur. So then we have to say, so do I, what is mine to do to actually see the injustices and harms and problems in the world? What is mine to actually step up and resolve? That's also an important part of the question.

• 51:59Chris Williamson?

  Very symbolic. I like the analogy to the cancer cells. I'm going back two years ago to an episode I did with Corey Allen, meditation teacher. And he had this analogy where he thinks when someone gets angry with him, as a conversation, you know, someone cuts him off in traffic or something happens or cuts in line at the checkout and then, and then you can see the itching for, to vent. And he, he treats that anger like a pathogen, like a flu virus. And what he thinks in his mind is, I wonder where that came from? Like, I wonder what the heritage of that anger is, like who passed it on to you, then

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  who passed it on to them, then who passed it on to them, then where did that emerge from? And that's the interconnectedness, right?

• 52:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah. See interconnectedness, it's a it's a basis for compassion and understanding and it's also an immune function to keep yourself from getting infected. Because if you get pissed off back at them and you understand it as a pathogen, you'll realize that you actually just lost your sovereignty and just got infected. And if you see that as, you know, I don't want to get infected, then you're like, oh, that means I'm going to relate to this differently.

• 53:14Chris Williamson?

  You can also be a, be a little bit of a bookend as well, right? If that is part of a cathartic venting procedure that allows that person to drop their anger down by X percent, but you don't then pass, you don't hold that rock and then pass it on, then through being conscious, through the mindfulness gap of being aware of the trigger that's happened,

• 53:37Chris Williamson?

  you can let that go. You can be, you can reduce the entropy in the system, I guess you could say as, is that a way to put it?

• 53:46Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a fine point of nuance here, which is not going into reaction about someone else's

• 53:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  poor behavior also doesn't mean condoning it. And doesn't mean not having boundaries.

• 54:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's actually very important to be able to say, I know that that person does that abusive behavior because they were hurt when they were a kid. I know that wasn't their fault. I actually feel a fuck ton of compassion for that kid. I know they had a head injury in war, right? And that's really fucked them up. And they still can't do that to me.

• 54:24Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so I love them. I forgive them and I won't let them do that anymore.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  It's a difficult line to balance. I had a neuroscientist on talking about the neuroscience underpinning the seven deadly sins. Very interesting, very cool rework of that guy called Jack Lewis, British guy. And everything, all of them were in moderation, but not too much. In moderation, but not too much. Seneca's virtuous mean. In moderation, but not too much. And it is so hard. We are absolutist creatures. If you put a packet of biscuits in front of me and say, I can eat none, or I can eat all of them, both of those situations are fine by me. If you say that I can only have one or like half a biscuit, torture.

• 55:16Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, and so this process of the balance of right boundaries and right compassion, there is no algorithm for it to get it right. There isn't like a general rule of thumb that is always the right answer. It's something you actually have to think about and feel into each situation, the instantiation of that situation, and you wrestle with it. There are plenty of times where someone does the tough love thing to a friend or a family member that has addiction going on, and that's what it took for the person to finally turn around. Plenty of other times where someone does the tough love thing and the person just goes and kills themselves.

• 56:01Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And that same person, had they got to support at another therapy or rehab clinic or whatever, could have turned around. And so what the right answer is, is not, like, if you have a very fast default, it's probably wrong. It's something that you have to really take the time to reflect into what is actually called for here, and then reflect into what are my biases? Am I biasing in a "I don't want to take their burden on" or biasing in a codependent, "I must take it on" direction? That's going to make me less clear.

• 56:30Chris Williamson?

  It makes me think about the is and ought distinction that you brought up, and also about what self-development is at its very core, which is trying to model an effective way to operate within the world. It's trying to make as scientific as possible the way that you behave, the way that I behave, sometimes the way that we behave. There's books about relationships and friendship and stuff like that, but mostly it tends to be personal sovereignty, upward mobility, agency, stuff like that. But as you've just identified there, in that situation, like, there is no one-size-fits-all.

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  There is no objective way to decide what the life that you should lead is, what your definition of a good life is. It's got a shaky foundation evolutionarily, it's got a very biased foundation culturally and socially. You know, that is what we're trying to achieve, what is the best way for me to operate within this world, but there is no, there is no universal answer to that. There's better and there's worse. But better by who, worse by who? You know, you can, you can run this back as far as you want.

• 57:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah. So I would say that

• 57:59Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic. You, you can't have a if this and that algorithm that actually equals wisdom. And

• 58:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  and if you can,

• 58:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  then we're just a intermediate boot loader for the AIs that are better creatures than us, right?

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I could actually go through some long derivations as to why I think consciousness is not computational, not purely computational, that there's something happening in consciousness that is fundamentally trans computational. So strong computationalism is the idea that computation is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness, mind and universe, and I believe that's false.

• 58:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So there is something to the nature of choice, and thus also good choice, ethics, that can be informed by lots of different principles and considerations, but not perfectly prescribed.

• 59:09Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And this is why

• 59:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  at lower stages of development, when people can't hold as much complexity and as much nuance, with as much awareness, sometimes they need just simple rules to not go off the rails. So you think of the Ten Commandments as rules like that, right? If you need to know, don't kill anybody and don't rape anybody and don't adulter and whatever, like, okay, we'll tell you those things. Don't do that. Like, the society will be better if people don't do those things.

• 59:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But then you notice New Testament comes along and Jesus gives a different kind of teaching, right? Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Love thy neighbor as thyself. It actually doesn't tell you what to do.

• 59:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It isn't a do something or don't do something. It's actually consider something a certain way. So try to put yourself into the shoes of whoever you're about to act and ask how you would feel, engage in empathy. So it's an ethic that guides, the guidance is consider something, but not do this or don't do that. So it's ultimately not prescriptive, but there's still wisdom that can be offered. So there's a lot of kind of general principles that we can offer that support wisdom, but it's not reducible to a prescription. Now, this is also something about personal development. If one is wanting to grow in wisdom is it doesn't look like do this thing.

• 1:00:44Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so you also can't signal it very effectively by doing a particular thing.

• 1:00:55Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I mean, someone could even try to signal aligned with what I just said, right? They could say, hmm, let me consider that as just some kind of signaling. But what I'm talking about like is a depth of earnestness of what do I actually care about? And why do I care about it? And how do I reflect on what I believe to be both true and meaningful right now? And what is right action factoring? What I understand to be true and what I understand to be meaningful? And how certain am I on what I think is true? And how biased am I on what I think is meaningful? And can I refine those as well?

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  It surprises me that we're even able to get out of bed in the morning.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, like, should I? Well, I mean, is this maybe? I don't know. I mean, do I take the covers off with my left hand? Do I take the covers off with my right hand? But this is the job of the ego, right? And this is part of, I suppose, the usefulness of the fact that we are still in some part primitive creatures, that it allows us to have sufficient momentum to overcome the inertia that a constant rolling existential crisis would stop us from, from being able to do.

• 1:02:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The rolling existential crisis, which I grew up with.

• 1:02:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Mostly comes, Joseph Campbell had some nice quote, something about that, I'm getting the quote wrong, but paraphrasing, that people wonder about the purpose of life when they aren't engaged in the experience of feeling alive.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  I love that.

• 1:02:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And that, and this is that prima facie thing that we were talking about.

• 1:02:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  In moments of full engagement with reality, right? Whether it's fascination, learning something, or awe at the beauty of something, or whatever it is, is typically not when people are in existential angst, wondering what's meaningful or not, because it is, it is, it's present, it is, it is indwelling within the experience, right? The meaningfulness is eminent. Now, if I'm disconnected from feeling the meaningfulness of life, no thought will replace that feeling.

• 1:03:22Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so then, you know, separate, I can say, "Well, what's, what's the purpose of life?" "Well, it's to learn." "Well, what's the fucking purpose of learning?" "Well, because you grow." "What's the purpose of that?" "Well, then you can do more." "What's the purpose of..." And there's no end to that, right? There's no terminal value that you get to where you don't say, "Why, why that?" And it's because what we're trying, it's actually just a ridiculous question. It's saying, "What part of reality is why all of it?"

• 1:03:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right? That's the question. If I'm trying to say the purpose of reality is its love, or its growth, or its awakening, or whatever it is, I'm trying to, I'm trying to take some little simple part I can conceptualize and make that the ordinating basis of everything, which is just actually silly, right?

• 1:04:24Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  You notice that purpose is a utilitarian concept. The purpose of X is Y. The purpose of my job is I do this function at the business. Well, if I, if, okay, I do the marketing at the business or the accounting or the whatever it is. Well, if I assume the business existing matters, I, then it makes sense why me doing that thing matters. But it's utilitarian, right? Assuming the value of Y, then I can say X relative to it. But purpose is always extrinsic relational utilitarian. So if I say, what is the purpose of all of reality? What is there outside of reality to ground that in reference to?

• 1:05:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So it's just actually an ill-formed question because purpose is a smaller concept than reality is.

• 1:05:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So yes, reality doesn't have a purpose in the sense that anything within reality does, but it's also not purposeless in the way that we think of purposelessness of things inside of reality. It's that the concept is too small to apply.

• 1:05:27Chris Williamson?

  Do you know where I have my existential crises? It's when I'm in the supermarket at 3:00 a.m. Every time, every time I get in there, if I've been at work and I've finished, I've finished at the club and there's this big state change from it being loud and full of havoc. And then I'm on my way home and I realize that I don't have X for tomorrow. And then that's when it, it strikes me when I'm in the supermarket. You're totally correct. It doesn't happen when you're sat with the people that you care about. It doesn't happen when you're on your morning walk and just considering what it feels like to have the sun on your skin. You know, those aren't the times. So does that not mean that seeking those experiences where we do feel connected and we do feel present?

• 1:06:12Chris Williamson?

  Is that, why is that not the North Star for how we should spend our lives?

• 1:06:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  First, I would love to suggest that you go to the grocery store at 3:00 a.m. a few times on purpose to have the most meaningful connection with the people who are there you possibly can. Go with that intention.

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  To transcend the, the crisis.

• 1:06:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, you have a Pavlovian conditioning now associated with that, right? You've had that experience there enough times that just going there triggers it. And you can recondition that.

• 1:06:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And you can recognize having choice and agency that in a place where you're questioning meaningfulness, you can bring it.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's beautiful.

• 1:07:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it may simply be acknowledgement to one of the people who are working there. It may be a deeper conversation, but I've had so many experiences having a conversation with the person driving Uber for me instead of being on my phone that ended up being profoundly enlightening and some of whom are friends years later.

• 1:07:31Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So it's interesting what happens when you explore that way.

• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent. I mean, this is, before we get on to, should we seek being present? This is the, probably the most meaningful, the most important, one of the most important changes I've made over the last few years. As someone who's an only child, who spends a lot of time in solitude, working, who is comfortable with my own company, overly comfortable with my own company, learning the fulfillment

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  and the pleasure that comes from connecting with other people for no reason other than they're there and that they are there and you can connect with them, has been such a huge change, like a ridiculously big change for me. And it sounds so stupid, you know, especially if you grew up with like five brothers and sisters and you all see each other every Christmas and do whatever. Maybe your worldview and mine, you can't really understand why I wouldn't think that that would be a good thing to do, but I'm telling you that I did. Telling you that it was very much a single focused, lack of, just lack of even awareness of other people, not even a consideration.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  Had I have been aware, I probably would have considered, but it was incredibly blinkers on. And, um, yeah, man, like.

• 1:09:07Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So this answers the question you were starting to ask.

• 1:09:10Chris Williamson?

  Great.

• 1:09:11Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  About pursuing a state.

• 1:09:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:09:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That can be done narcissistically.

• 1:09:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it won't produce a meaningful life.

• 1:09:20Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:09:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So.

• 1:09:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  You run a thought experiment. Everybody in the world dies and you're here by yourself. But.

• 1:09:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  You can have like a fighter jet and Lamborghinis and like whatever mansion you want. There's just nobody else here.

• 1:09:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Most people, when they take time to really run through that scenario. Try to figure out how to entertain themselves with experiences for a while. And then fundamentally can't find meaningfulness in it.

• 1:10:09Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And to the extent they can, it's because they have the idea of a God, which is still a being they're relating with, or they get really friendly with animals.

• 1:10:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But ultimately, consciousness wants to be in relationship with consciousness and is the basis of any way someone reifies meaningfulness.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that's fundamental to consciousness? Or do you think that that's embedded due to the social animals that we are and that every other animal is?

• 1:10:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Both.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Can you, can you talk me through your thinking with regards to how it's fundamental to consciousness?

• 1:10:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So we think of consciousness associated with an organism.

• 1:10:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Like a person, maybe a dog, whatever, right?

• 1:11:02Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we think of them having some kind of separate consciousness associated with that brain and that body container. And so that consciousness is just, is the emergent property of their brain or it dwells in it or something like that. This is, this is a really deeply flawed concept.

• 1:11:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because inside of my body-brain package that I call I physically, that I think my consciousness is associated with.

• 1:11:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Doesn't include all of the coral reef.

• 1:11:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And doesn't include all of the plants and doesn't include the soil microbiome. I don't think of those as I, but I wouldn't exist without all of them. So can I say that my consciousness is an emergent property of this thing without saying it's an emergent property of all of that? Because this thing is an emergent property of all of that. And so without the plants, I'm not even an idea. Right? Like, there isn't even a well-formed concept of me that exists without an atmosphere and oxygen. And without the sun, and without the other planets that keep the asteroids from hitting us, and without, it just keep going on, and we find the entire universe is configured

• 1:12:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  in a way that I'm the emergent property of a part of it. And you take away the galactic center, you take away the sun, you take away the other planets, you take away the gravitational field, or the electromagnetic field, or the bacteria, and I don't exist.

• 1:12:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So my consciousness is not an emergent property. So imagine putting me in a complete and perfect vacuum, and just imagine I didn't physically die for a moment, which I of course would. What would the sensory experience be? There'd be no sensory input. What would the contents of consciousness with no sensory input be? I think in words that were developed by other people. I think in images that were created by other people. All of the contents of my consciousness came from the world. So the idea that it's my consciousness is just kind of sloppy thinking and a misnomer.

• 1:13:38Chris Williamson?

  That's fantastic. The fact that you are the tip of the finger, which is the end of everything which came before, which permitted you to be.

• 1:13:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And still, not just before.

• 1:13:52Chris Williamson?

  And still continues to permit you to be.

• 1:13:55Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, turn the sun off.

• 1:13:57Chris Williamson?

  Bye.

• 1:13:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah?

• 1:14:01Chris Williamson?

  We were touching on...

• 1:14:05Chris Williamson?

  Being present as being the thing that you are to chase in order to discover meaning? Or why is that not purely the thing that you should seek? And I think that you mentioned about narcissism and the fact that there's an interconnectedness with other people.

• 1:14:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Whether I am

• 1:14:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  pursuing a state through racing cars, or doing cocaine, or doing the right kind of psychedelics, or meditation,

• 1:14:44Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  it's not that different.

• 1:14:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's

• 1:14:51Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  some kind of process I can find to give me some state of experience that I feel that I don't have, and that I need to arrange the world a particular way for me to have.

• 1:15:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right?

• 1:15:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So

• 1:15:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I remember this saying,

• 1:15:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  if I bring up the Bible or the Tao Te Ching, all of the various wisdom traditions were interesting to me growing up. So I'm not saying this in a way that people have to accept that book as anything other than interesting.

• 1:15:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I remember there was a

• 1:15:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  quote in Luke attributed to Jesus that really bothered me as a kid.

• 1:15:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And I came to understand the really profound wisdom in it after contemplating it for a long time. Maybe obvious for a lot of people, it said, "To those who have, more shall be given, and to those who don't have, the little they have will be taken away."

• 1:15:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it really deeply bothered because of the context of it being in the Bible and something that someone like Jesus would say that I wanted to be Robin Hood like, and say like, "No, no, no, we'll give to those who don't have."

• 1:16:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we can see where this is true, just in terms of like, if you have debt, you get compounding interest in debt, and if you have savings, you get compounding interest in savings. To those who have more is given, to those who don't have little, they have is taken away. It just ends up being something that shows up as true in lots of places.

• 1:16:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  When someone is in a state of not having around relationships, and they feel lonely and upset with people and whatever, they're not maximally attractive as a person in that state, right? When someone's in the kind of abundance of their relationships, they show up in a way that's more attractive to those who have more is given.

• 1:16:49Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Ultimately, the have and not have are states of consciousness.

• 1:16:55Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so there is a place where I feel like I don't have enough, and I'm some kind of empty needy thing that needs to get mine from the world, whatever that is. More acknowledgement, more money, more muscle, more knowledge, more something. More good state through meditation. But I'm still basically coming from some kind of lack and what's in it for me?

• 1:17:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I think, okay, so growth can happen in that place.

• 1:17:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But there's a place where that can start to shift.

• 1:17:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Where I stop thinking I need anything from the world in particular.

• 1:17:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And there is a felt sense of connection to life that has a fullness and dwelling within it. And then what do I get out of life stops being the relevant question.

• 1:18:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And how do I pursue a particular state stops becoming the relevant question? And are there other people who are suffering, who don't know how to shift it, that I can do something about? And are there things that I can create for the world starts to become a more interesting question? And I think life kind of starts there.

• 1:18:29Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I love it. It maps very closely onto the reality that I've started to see slivers of, I think principally through this project, but also through other things. I think you've given a very robust framework for people to understand the interconnectedness, the fact that you are because of everything that came before and everything which is still coming now, the fact that you have the opportunity to affect those around you in a way that allows you to make them more of them and less of the things that they don't

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  want to be. People are always going to weaponize in a rivalrous capitalist economy, people are always going to be able to weaponize meaning-seeking, wisdom-seeking, a better life, state change, whatever it might be. They're always going to be able to do that because there is going to be a reward for the people who are able to dangle that carrot and allow other people to go chasing after it. But the fact that so many of the pleasures that we have in life, genuine pleasures that

• 1:19:54Chris Williamson?

  we have in life, come from such simple things, should be a signal to people. It's a very subtle signal. It's not as loud or as brash as a Lamborghini blasting past, but it should be a signal to people of where to look, right? Like, it should be, this is where you should point your attention because hedonic adaptation, hedonic treadmill, lottery winner versus person that loses their legs, you know, pick your mental model with regards to that.

• 1:20:33Chris Williamson?

  And yet, if you consistently connected with the people that were around you and

• 1:20:42Chris Williamson?

  felt like you were contributing to something that you genuinely care about, and we're progressing and we're still satisfying that area of you that wants to feel like growth,

• 1:20:53Chris Williamson?

  like, everything else, I think, would fall into place. And

• 1:20:59Chris Williamson?

  the

• 1:21:02Chris Williamson?

  beauty of the extraordinary in the ordinary is, um, is something, hopefully, that as people develop themselves, they start to strip away the things that they think that they need, uh, and are left with, with something which is more, more simple and more pure. And I loved it at the start. I didn't, I didn't bring it up, but as you mentioned about sort of the tier one, tier two, tier three of self-development, that really struck me about, uh, His Dark Materials, which is a children's trilogy by Philip Pullman. And in it, there's a girl called Lyra Belacqua. Gets the name Lyra Silver Tongue halfway through. You can tell I listened to it and read it a lot as a kid. And, um,

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  she's given this truth-telling device. It's called an alethiometer and she's given it and the uh, nuns in the Oxford of the universe that she lives in, it's a multiverse, uh, story. The, the nuns of the, the university that she lives in, um, tell her this story about how people need to study for their entire lives. I have to study for my entire life. The people who have these devices have to study for books and books, arcane texts. They have to understand all of these different things and then they can read them. And she's, she's given one in secret. Uh, and it turns out that she can read it. She's never learned to. She can read it. So she has natural grace. She has unconscious competence.

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  And she's able to read it, which you could draw an analogy to experiencing life, the purity of experiencing life as a child. There's a Luke Coombe song which opens up at 17, you don't think that much about life, you just live it. And I think that's the same. Then she hits puberty. And as she hits puberty, she loses the ability to, to read this truth-telling device. She loses that conscious incompetence. She becomes aware. It's the fall from grace. It's,

• 1:22:58Chris Williamson?

  And then there's this like tiny little passage towards the end of the book. And she's speaking to somebody, another one of the nuns about how am I going to get the ability to tell the truth back from, from my device, from the alethiometer? And she says, my dear child, it will take you a lifetime of study.

• 1:23:17Chris Williamson?

  But the depth of your understanding will be deeper and greater than it ever, ever was before. Conscious competence. And I think that timeline maps sort of quite nicely onto what I hope personal development, self-development actually ends up being for people.

• 1:23:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, there's definitely a presence

• 1:23:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  that we see in children that can be

• 1:23:47Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  overjoyed and fulfilled with the experience of life.

• 1:23:54Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And this is the in no way except you turn and become like little children she passed into the kingdom of heaven.

• 1:24:07Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And to be able to have a connectedness with life that isn't always seeking

• 1:24:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  what stimulus is going to fulfill me next

• 1:24:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  with adult capacities that can actually show up to the world is very interesting.

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  There was a, I saw Jordan Peterson live a couple of years ago. And they were reading questions out from Twitter that had been submitted. Dave Rubin goes up on stage and asks him these questions. And one of the questions that somebody asked him was that essentially boiled down to the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. I wish that I thought less. I wish that I didn't consider things so much. It is both a blessing and a curse to feel things so very deeply.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  And Jordan's answer to that stuck with me, which was that you can try and regress back to a more animalistic, more simple time, which would be people looking at children and being envy of their innocence. Right. And thinking, look at how simple it is, or looking at their dog and thinking, look how simple it would be if I was just a dog. You know, I just lie in the sun and play with balls and stuff like that. But you don't have that option. And Jordan gave this really symbolic answer, as he often does. And he said,

• 1:25:22Chris Williamson?

  You can take more of the poison until you girdle it into a tonic that allows you to rule your own world. And I really like that. I like the idea that it's not about escaping from Dante's Inferno. It's about going through every single level, right to the very, very bottom. And that's where you then sort of break it all open. Daniel Mann, I feel like we could go on for forever. But for me, it's 11am. And for you, it's 3am. So I feel like I sadly need to let you go. It's been, dude, it's been six months since we've been planning this. And I'm so grateful for you coming on.

• 1:26:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Can I share a closing thought?

• 1:26:08Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:26:11Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Every emotion has a value.

• 1:26:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And has a place.

• 1:26:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so.

• 1:26:24Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Someone has an idea that a more developed human state never has sadness, or anger, or fear, then their idea of a more developed human state is a sociopath.

• 1:26:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because the key kind of definition in sociopathy is can't feel fear and remorse and guilt and certain negative emotions, which is why they can hurt people so easily.

• 1:26:55Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So if I'm angry, I'm angry because maybe I can process it better. And I can, right? Maybe I can, I made up some fake meanings. And I'm angry about something that didn't even really happen. I kind of took what that person said the wrong way, whatever. But in sofar as I'm, there's a real thing, and I'm responding to it, and anger is arising. It's the, there's something that I care about, or that I love, that I think somebody's harming. And I'm focused on who's harming it. Right? I'm angry about litter, because it actually, there's a care for nature and the environment that is the basis of that. Or someone's hurting an animal, or a kid, or whatever it is, and anger arises. So the basis of the anger is love.

• 1:27:38Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If there wasn't something I loved and cared about, I just wouldn't give a shit. Go ahead and hurt it.

• 1:27:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And if I'm afraid, I'm afraid that something that I care about is going to be harmed. So again, the basis of the fear is love. The same with sadness, same with all. So there are times where, based on what's going on in the world, some anger arises and I wouldn't want to feel any other way. Like there would be something wrong with me if I felt a different way. Because I'm not making up stories, I'm not reactive and I want to go hurt someone or whatever, but there is a, there is an authentic love and care for the world that also is noticing an injustice and that it expresses to that emotion.

• 1:28:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And me feeling that in that moment is actually me in wholeness and relationship with life rightly. So am I pursuing always being in a particular kind of happy state? Nope. Because that would be shutting off all of the intelligence that the various emotions that are giving me real information about reality are. There is a certain kind of wholeness where I'm not driven by,

• 1:29:04Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I can experience desire and aversion, but I'm not driven automatically by it. I don't automatically think, I don't automatically react because I'm afraid of something or have to get something I want. I can actually just access okayness, right? That's important. But yeah, I just, on this topic of should we all be seeking those states? Well, yes, sometimes. And like we were mentioning about, but you know, even in the moment where someone's feeling really angry at an injustice, they're not questioning the meaning of life. That's also an experience of aliveness.

• 1:29:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  They might be feeling meaningfulness very fucking clearly in that moment.

• 1:29:55Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so, does one want to actually have their emotional self and in addition to their cognitive self connected with reality? Yes. And so, does someone want to have some actual presence in that connection? Yes, but that looks like all the things.

• 1:30:13Chris Williamson?

  Man. What a wonderful way to start my day and to finish yours. I hope that we don't have to rearrange a million more times, but I'd absolutely love to have you back on, man, whenever we can make time.

• 1:30:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It was really, it was really fun. I enjoyed the conversation with you and if it's something that your listeners find interesting and they have more questions, then I'm happy to come back.

• 1:30:42Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much, Daniel.