Daniel Schmachtenberger - Building Better Sensemaking | Modern Wisdom Podcast 348

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project and works in preventing global catastrophic risk. Having accurate sensemaking is a superpower in the 21st century. As the volume of information we need to sort through increases, the ability to distinguish signal from noise becomes ever more important. Given this, I wanted to ask Daniel exactly how he would advise someone to become an adept sensemaker. Expect to learn the characteristics that a good sensemaking agent should have, why the relationship between sense, meaning and choice making is so crucial, whether Daniel thinks that humanity is too emotional to reach our full potential, at what stage of personal actualisation we should begin to help the world and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out The Consilience Project - https://consilienceproject.org/ Check out Daniel's Website - https://civilizationemerging.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #danielschmachtenberger #sensemaking #personalgrowth - 00:00 Intro 00:25 What is a Sensemaking Agent? 14:53 Decision-making in Politics 18:43 Becoming Better at Sensemaking 22:44 The Underlying Principles of Sensemaking 44:12 Comfort in the Unknown 45:05 The Lab-leak Hypothesis 51:15 U-Turning Politicians 55:26 Common Pitfalls in Sensemaking 1:01:30 Fixing Consequential World Problems 1:12:15 Will Human Emotions Limit Civilisation’s Potential? 1:27:47 Should We Slow Technological Growth? 1:39:40 Impact of Social Media on Humanity 1:44:46 Sensemaking in Legislation 1:51:46 Creating a Silo Community 2:00:15 Constraints of a Mars Community 2:02:11 Where to Find Daniel - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: 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: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I actually want to understand the world I live in as best I can. Because I actually hold that life is meaningful. And I hold that my life could be meaningful, which means that my choices can be meaningful. And so I want them to be informed as well as they can be.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  What I think people really liked about our first conversation was that we brought some of your work down to an individual level. So a friend referred to it as creating a narrative of resonance. And given that, I thought it would be nice to start by looking at something that you talk about a lot, which is sense-making, but from the level of the actor. So how do you define a sense-making agent?

• 0:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, I don't know what background the other people listening to your show will have on the general topic. When you're mentioning individual agents, I think you mean individual humans. Obviously, an organization can act like an agent, act like a unit of agency. But I think you mean individuals seeking to make sense of the world they live in better. We oftentimes talk about sense-making at a societal level, meaning

• 1:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  and currently it comes up a lot like, why do we have such a hard time coming to clear understanding about what the nature of climate change is, or what the nature of COVID viral origins, or vaccines, or whatever systemic racism, or how we should deal with nuclear disarmament? Or why does it seem like there are such radically divergent views? Meaning the way that we're sensing the world is leading to very different senses of the world, which of course leads to very different senses of what should happen, which makes it very hard to coordinate, which makes it very easy to have conflict. And so when we're talking about sense-making, we're usually talking about it in the context of shared sense-making as a prerequisite for shared choice-making, i.e. governance. Sense-making is not the only prerequisite.

• 2:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  When we talk about governance, and by governance, I don't mean government, which is a maybe a specific establishment that has a rule of law and monopoly of violence. But governance, meaning some process by which a bunch of people who want different things and see the world differently come to coordinate in some effective, positive, productive ways.

• 2:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So we're talking about how do we get people to have some kind of coherence or coordination between the choices they make such that it isn't making choices that we would think of as crime or something that really messes up each other's choice-making capacity and where we need to coordinate on choices, like we're not gonna all make our own roads and things like that, that we're able to coordinate effectively regarding shared resources, shared infrastructure, shared choices. It happens to be that lots of humans who don't know each other and have experienced the world differently and feel different things and want different things, coordinating on what the right choice is is a tricky thing, right? Because they have a different sense of what is and what they want and what should be. So this is why, for most of human history, the number of people that would coordinate was small.

• 3:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Tribes were small. They classically stayed beyond, you know, smaller than the Dunbar number, give or take, 150-ish, where there were no strangers. Everybody that you were coordinating with, you'd known your whole life. They had known you your whole life. Everybody had the same shared basis of experience and everybody could be in a single conversation around a campfire. And so the ability to coordinate, we could coordinate sense-making, because we were sensing the same stuff. We're living in the same place, right? We weren't even reading different books. We weren't even watching different TV shows. Like, we were, nobody had been, we weren't speaking different languages, we were exposed to the same stuff. And so you could also fact-check anybody just by looking there, right? By just having such a shared basis.

• 3:56Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it was pretty easy to unify values because the culture that had conditioned them was the same culture. So there might be little differences of weighting. And so then the ability to, you know, unify choice-making, if we have shared values and we have shared sense of the world, so both what we think is and what we want to be, it's not that hard. Once we started to get to larger scales, where now I've got to maybe make compromises for strangers. I've got, you know, we're gonna have some coordination with people who I don't have any shared sense of real fealty with, whatever, that becomes a different topic and where they really do see the world differently. And so this is where mostly the order came through some kind of imposition or oppression

• 4:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  or top-down force, which is why it was largely empires. And then that still meant a number of people smaller than Dunbar that would equal the king and a council, making the decisions and imposing it by rule of law and force on everybody, right? So shared sense-making didn't matter, because people didn't really have meaningful choices. They were gonna do the thing that they were gonna do within that context. So the idea of something like democracy, or a republic, or an open society, where some humongous number of people who don't know each other, who don't have the same experiences, are all going to not just do totally different stuff that creates chaos, but also not need somebody to kind of rule, they're gonna find an order that isn't imposed,

• 5:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  it's emergent order, that's actually a wild idea, right? Like, it's a really fucking wild idea that that would even be possible. And, you know, the modern democracies came following the Enlightenment, the cultural kind of European Enlightenment, with the idea that we could have this thing called the philosophy of science, where we could all measure the same thing and get the same result, independent of biases. Didn't matter, you know, what we thought beforehand, if we measure the speed of sound in the right way, or whatever it is, we're gonna get the same results. So there's this unifying nature to objectivity that allows us to sense-making together, which is why Karl Popper, who advanced the philosophy of science, was the guy who termed open society, right? That we could do open societies based on the ability to do shared sense-making, using

• 6:10Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  a more methodological, rather than I had divine revelation and it's true and you don't know, kind of approach. And... And then, but like we said, the idea of governance is that there's some kind of emergent choice-making or order at the level of the choices we're making. The choices are both the result of our sense-making. What do we think is actually happening? What do we think the causes of what's happening are? And if we do X, what do we think will happen? Right? That's kind of forecasting sense-making. But it's also, what do we want to happen? Which is our values, which is not sense-making. Right? Sense-making is sensing what is. The values is what ought. What do we think ought to be? What do we really care about? So we can call that values generation or meaning-making.

• 6:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So sense-making and meaning-making are the prerequisites for choice-making. The thing that we call governance in an open society is that there's some coordinated process for choice-making that doesn't have to be imposed by a king. Doesn't just turn into, there's no way we can get on the same page, so it has to be chaos. Because we can sense the world together and we can sense each other's values and find a higher-order set of values that includes everyone. So this is another part of the Enlightenment, was the idea that we could do a dialectic on values. You could say, "I really believe in doing X, whatever X proposition is." And we're like, "Why do you want to do it?" Well, because it's in service of decreasing infant mortality and the value that you have is infants.

• 7:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we're like, "Yeah, but if you do that thing, it'll be bad for this other thing because it, whatever, it'll damage the water supplies." Well, what you care about is the water supply. Well, let's not focus on the proposition for a moment. What you value is children. What you value is the water supply. Let's hold all those as legitimate values. Right? What you value is individual freedom. What you value is the responsibility of the individuals to the collective that they are benefited by. So the ability to hear each other's values and synthesize them and say, "A good solution will meet everybody's values as best as possible." So often, we get stuck with, you know, a proposition is created to meet some value before even looking at what all the values are.

• 8:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so it benefits the environment, but hurts the economy, or benefits the economy and hurts the environment, or whatever it is. So those who feel particularly connected to the thing being hurt are like, "This is terrible, we have to do everything to fight it." And those who feel connected to the thing that's being benefited are like, "This is critical, someone finally gets us." Now, those two sides have to become enemies. If the only chance they have is to vote on a pre-existing proposition that is a shitty proposition, because it was based on a theory of trade-offs between those, it was never even consciously explicated. They never even said, "Oh, this is gonna harm this thing, both these are values, is, can we take these values and find a better way forward? A better proposition that maybe could meet them both better?

• 8:59Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Maybe, rather than that bridge that is gonna harm the environment, the way that it is, but helps transportation, which will help the economy, a barge could do it without harming the environment, or we could just build better local economies on both sides, or whatever it is, right? So the dialectic process is where I want to hear the values that you care about. And so you believe everyone needs to be vaccinated, or no one should be forced to be vaccinated, or everyone should have to wear masks, or nobody should... What is the value you care about, independent of the strategy? The strategy is the way to fulfill a value. There is something legitimate in the value, even if, then the sense-making about, "Is that thing about vaccines, or about masks, or about whatever, is that true?", is separate from, "Is that value legitimate?", right?

• 9:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And, so, if, so we don't have participatory governance in the US, we don't really in the world, in any very meaningful way, we have the legacy story of it. But we don't have a population, hardly anywhere, that are really seeking to understand the world we live in, where the government is gonna make choices on stuff. And for the government to be up for it by the people that we understand enough to be able to weigh in well. And we seek to understand our own values and other people's values, and be able to have the dialectical conversations to see if we're missing some sense-making, somebody knows some stuff we don't, and we really wanna hear it, rather than have our in-group continue

• 10:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  to feel right by saying how dumb the people in the out-group are. So there isn't anything like participatory governance, which is why open societies are basically failing in doing shittily, while the authoritarian societies that aren't even claiming to do that and are just doing top-down government better are just doing better at long-term planning and infrastructure. So, you know, people will hear me talking about sense-making. Usually, it's in this context of how do we develop better capacity as a society as a whole for everyone to be doing a better job making sense of the world than just believing whatever happens to come through the Facebook feed that is algorithmically optimized to appeal to their current biases and kind of limbically hijack or maximally bother them and drive in-group dynamics

• 11:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  where people's fear of being out-grouped by believing the wrong thing and their messes with subtle, deep tribal biases. How can we do a better job with sense-making at the level of training individuals, at the level of how we change education and train people, and at the level of the quality of media we put out, at the level of how we design the information architecture so that rather than a Facebook or YouTube having an algorithm to maximize time on-site, that it does through appealing to your biases, which make you spend more time,

• 11:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  which makes people on the right more right, the left more left, anti-conspiracy theorists, more hate-conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theorists farther down that direction. And so there's this just hyper-fragmentation as a result of the financial model of the information technology, right? So how do we make better information technology? How do we make better media in fourth estate? How do we do better education? All those things so that we can actually have better sense-making about what is real, better dialogue and communication around what is meaningful or the values? So that those types of conversations can lead to what would a good proposition even be? That meets, that factors all of what's real as constraints, factors what matters as constraints,

• 12:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  and works to find the best proposition forward. So if we take as the background, that's the societal context of where we're usually coming from and talking about the needs for sense-making. That was a long preface to then say, you want to bring it to the level of the individual and say, alright, so I'm not trying to fix Facebook's algorithms for sense-making right now. I'm not trying to necessarily fix participatory governance, or democracy, or the fourth estate, or public education. I'm trying to say, how do I, as a person, do a better job of making sense of the things that I should make sense of, that affect the choices I need to make in the world? What things should I just actually not bother myself with because I really don't have a

• 13:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  choice and it's not the best use of my life energy? What things should I, or do I care to, and how do I do a good job? And how do I know if I'm doing a good job? Because almost everyone that we're sure is wrong is sure they're right. And so we are one of the everyone that they're pretty sure is wrong, right? And so we should all be pretty dubious of our own certainty. Because statistically, we're almost certainly wrong about most of the things that we're sure we're right about. And that's dangerous, right? Like, it's dangerous that I'm clear about lots of things I think other people are wrong about. And I'm clear about a lot of things I think people in the past were wrong about.

• 13:47Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And I'm clear about things that I was wrong about in my past. But I probably can't say anything that I'd say, I believe today that it's probably wrong. That's tricky, because it's probably mostly wrong. And so how do we... And now when ego gets tied up in that, right? And then when belonging gets tied up in that, if I don't say the right narrative about masks, or about vaccines, or about social justice, I'll be totally out grouped, right? Because now I'm an anti-vaxxer, or a sheeple, or whatever it is.

• 14:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So there's a lot of reasons to have everybody double down on their worst traits of unwarranted certainty and sanctimony. So if we want to ask the question...

• 14:43Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  How important is it to our own life to develop our sense making? How do we know how well we're doing with it? How do we do it? We can get into that more.

• 14:52Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. One of the things that I've got in my head there is how much more considered and slow decision making at the governance level would have to be in order to factor in all of these different values and choices. Now, expediency is something that people value. If the bridge needs to be built and people think that it's going to make their life better, but in order to factor in everybody's different values, it's going to take two years of debating and planning and all of the rest of it. And that situation of consideration and being moderate and more nuanced with your thinking, that happens at the individual level as well, right? It's far easier to just react, take something that we think is the closest approximation of correct and just move forward.

• 15:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  No, this is gibberish argument.

• 15:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So let's say we don't have clear sense making on a topic, but we have to act. Why do we have to act? Are there, are there real consequences or just made up bullshit like an election cycle or whatever that we could change the way we're doing governance? If there's real consequences, how consequential is it to get it wrong?

• 16:01Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, it might be more consequential than taking more time, right? It depends. There are times where you have to make consequential choices under uncertainty. Where not choosing fast enough is also a choice. That's a real thing. But it's that way less often than we pretend that it is. And so then what is the consequence of getting it wrong and doing something that might be much more harmful? But also, what's the, what is the time effect of moving forward with something because we just have to move forward that a huge part of the world thinks is wrong and bad and are going to actively keep fighting? Like, how efficient does that end up being? They're all going to pay lobbyists. They're all going to help pay for academics to sponsor counter narratives.

• 16:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  They're going to pay for politician candidacy processes, whatever it is. So how fast does it really end up being to try to advance something that half the world thinks is a terrible idea?

• 16:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so what you can see is, we try that. We're like, no, the, the science is settled. That's a famous bullshit line on a million things, right? Um, and you'll see it on both sides of all kinds of things. Um, the science is settled is just a nice way to say my unwarranted certainty is true. Um, but the, the science is settled. Climate change is the thing it is. We gotta move forward. And we don't have time to educate you dumb fucks anymore about it. And we're just, you know, so we're gonna carbon trade. This is the way to do it, or cap, cap and trade, carbon tax, whatever.

• 17:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Okay, well, how well does that work? When all of the groups are gonna keep lobbying against it and getting Republican candidates who will then try to undo the laws in four years that those...

• 17:46Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  You spend four years trying to do the shit, knowing that the next four years will undo all of it. And actually, you never even plan on doing something that won't have returns within those four years because it won't possibly get you elected. And all the things that need done need to have 10, 20, 30, 50 year timelines and no one will ever even look at it. And most of the time, you're actually just working on gaining political support and campaigning to get reelected. So the expediency, we just have to move forward, is usually a bullshit argument for someone in a power position, moving forward in a way that will advance their power position, with plausible deniability that it's something else. If you want to move a civilization forward, either you're moving forward in a way that everybody's getting on board with,

• 18:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  or you're deciding to use force to oppress the fact that everybody's not on board, or you're deciding to keep fighting the fact that they also have force. Like, you just have to be realistic about that.

• 18:42Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, the option of delaying a choice is also a choice. There's always a third option of being more considered. Yeah, I like that. Okay, so back down to the individual. How, how can someone become an adept sense-making agent? We're at the mercy of certain things that individually, immediately, we can't control. Therefore, making the most of the capacities that we do have is a good idea.

• 19:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I would not say the answer for this is the same for everybody based on what they feel called to, their dispositions, their their vocation and their kind of sense of what their mission to do is.

• 19:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If someone is a nurse caring for patients, if someone is a mother raising children, how much does them understanding what's really happening with the digital yuan and whether it's going to become the reserve currency of the world or whether or not the US microgrids are susceptible to EMP attacks, like, how much does their sense-making matter? How much agency do they have to do fucking anything about that? Pretty little. How much does it likely stress them out? Probably a lot. Does that make them a better nurse or mom? Probably worse. Could that same energy be applied to doing better sense-making about tuning into their children and their patients better and where they actually have some agency? So,

• 20:09Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  when we recognize that sense-making is to inform choice-making, right? Do I have choice around this thing? Like, what is the basis of why I'm wanting to do sense-making? Is it simply because I need to know which side of the narrative war I'm on because I think I have to be on one of the sides? What if I just don't? What if I say, "I don't know"? "I don't, I don't, I don't know what I think about systemic racism." "No, you have to know, but I don't." Well, you know, and people can try to do a forcing function, then, well, then you're complicit or whatever it is. Okay, well, I can put a huge amount of time and energy and then still not actually have any real agency to move this thing forward, given where I am in my life, but I can put that energy into studying better nursing

• 20:54Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  or whatever it is, right? So, I don't think that the idea that, like, everyone should be deeply informed about all of the existential risks and understand the entire effect of the tech stack and globalization and planetary boundaries and geopolitics is like a thing that everyone should have. I don't think that's true. So, the first question is like, what matters for me to make sense about based on what choices I actually have to make in my life? That's an important question. Because it's easy to get sucked into the thing for somewhat unconscious reasons.

• 21:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Now, we can talk about how to do good sense-making on geopolitical and environmental and complex scientific topics there, but the first part is make sure that the reason that you feel called to do that makes sense. And I'm, of course, not saying that if you don't have a company or an organization or you're not a politician of some way that can directly affect that thing, you shouldn't know anything about it. There is something about general informedness as a citizen that can have value, but you do want to pay attention to, like, I have finite units of life energy, and where do I want to put my attention that is also connected to my creativity?

• 22:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So I want people's sense-making to be informing their creativity, right? To be informing their agency and their choice-making and the quality of life for themselves and the people they touch and for the world at large as they can touch it. Now, how to actually do good epistemology, we can get into next, but does that part make sense?

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested to hear what the underlying principles are. Presumably, there must be a structure upon which, or some commonalities, that all sense-making agents, whether they be the nurse, the government official, the creator, the mother, are there some commonalities between all of them?

• 23:02Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Are there commonalities in how to do good sense-making in any domain, regardless of the domain? Sure, they're going to be different. There are certain places where it's like, how to get, how to really get this particular kind of backflip is not something I get from reading Wikipedia. Like, I only get it from trying to do backflips. Like, it's embodied sense-making. There's like, oh, I clicked and I got it, and there's no amount of reading Wikipedia that's going to, or watching YouTube that's ever going to give it to me. So there isn't like one type of sense-making, like, there's no amount of reading music theory that will actually get my fingers to grok how to play Chopin.

• 23:44Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So there are different kinds of creative capacities that require different kinds of, like... Because you're sensing how something works, right? Sense making is not purely cognitive. It's taking your senses and having a pattern emerge. Sense making of like, ah, I got it. We've all had that experience playing the piano or trying to do the backflip where it's like, I got it. That's sense making of a type. That's a bunch of sensory perceptions that came into a pattern where now I have it in a way that can inform my creativity. Right?

• 24:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But I'll stick in the cognitive domain for now, since that's largely what I think most people are talking about.

• 24:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Some super helpful, basic tips.

• 24:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If I'm trying to make sense of a topic that is conflicted, where the public opinion on it, or even the scientific opinion or whatever on it is highly conflicted, I should understand the conflicting views before coming to one on my own.

• 24:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That's a, that's a very helpful thing to do. So, you know, you were mentioning, how do I do better sense making of nursing? Well, let's say I'm a nurse and it's COVID time and there's like major conflict of does ivermectin work or not? And should we be doing this with people? And, you know, who do we think actually has too much contraindication for these vaccines or whatever it is? Like, those are places where a nurse would actually maybe want to do some sense making. And they might not feel that they have any time. They might not feel the agency that if they came to think something different than hospital policy, they could do anything other than get fired. But they still might care anyways because they're like, fuck, I, I signed up to this thing because of a calling and an oath and I need to know. Right?

• 25:31Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, one place there I like to start is I like to see, okay, are there two primary narratives? Or are there a few narratives? Right? Let's begin, say there's two narratives. Uh, ivermectin really works and it's awesome. It doesn't work at all and it's dangerous. Right? Typically, there's more than that. Typically, there's like five or six. Maybe it works early case, but not later. It works for these kinds of situations, or there's some indication it works, but we don't really know, or whatever. But let's take kind of primary narrative camps. Because in today's world, most people are trying to sense make between pre-existing narrative camps.

• 26:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it's kind of important to understand.

• 26:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  There is a very strong incentive for everyone to fall in narrative camps. They're basically these strange attractors. And so there are underlying forces that drive what you can think of as polarization to rather than just like, "Well, whatever is true, it's going to be..." It's much easier to believe something is true that someone with expertise says with a lot of certainty and other people agree with. Especially if there's a lot of literature and I'm unskilled or I don't have the time, how am I going to read all of it myself? And then you get a narrative, and then you get people who say that narrative has something false with it, and they do a counter-narrative that is usually an anti-narrative, that are also kind of smart. And typically based on either a different emphasis in values, "Hey, this is about personal

• 27:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  freedoms, this is about public health." "This is about my right to decide on my own body, this is about not being a grandma killer," whatever it is, right? Sometimes it's just a difference of values that affects their sense-making. Because their sense-making, the thing that seems most aligned with their own values. They're not actually paying attention to the sense-making, they're looking at the narrative of truth that fits the value that they seem to care more about, right? I don't think anyone should be comfortable with the idea of more imposition on people's personal freedoms than necessary. And I think everyone should be dubious of anyone who feels that they are in a position to say what is necessary and impose it by force.

• 27:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Like, everyone should be dubious, "Oh, you have a monopoly of violence that can impose necessary limits on everyone's freedom." And who is the authority? Like, what is the authority process that is not influenced by power, or fucked-up motives, or ego, or mistakes at all, that deserves to have that fucking power over everybody? Like, everybody should be legitimately concerned about that. That there is such a thing as adequately legitimate authority to wield monopoly of power. Simultaneously, everybody should be legitimately concerned about...

• 28:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Unnecessarily being a grandma killer, right? Like about taking a risk as a young person, that would be not that consequential for you probabilistically, that'd be way more consequential for other people. And everyone should have some sense of like, yeah, we actually have a duty to each other. We have a social responsibility, a social fealty, that insofar as we're affecting each other, we're not just automata. And if we can affect each other invisibly, but still tangibly, there's real consequence to that. Like, even as libertarian as I want to be, non-aggression, I don't have the right to come up and hit you in the face, right? Well, do I have the right to dump toxic waste in the river on my property if you live right downstream from me and that's the river that feeds your well? No, I'm aggressing on you, right?

• 29:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So if I'm sneezing and coughing in your space, and I might have an infection, like there's a real situation there regarding what is the limit of personal sovereignty and what is the limit of civic duty? And everybody's comfortable, and it's interesting, because a lot of people who really like libertarian sovereignty feel comfortable with the idea of civic duty to go die in war. Including where there's a draft, if it has to be, right? Not just even where it's voluntary. So we're like, okay, there is a relationship between the way that the individual affects the larger wholes that they're a part of and is affected by them.

• 29:56Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so how do we maximize everyone's liberty and maximize the well-being of the whole in a way that no one's liberty is unduly harming anybody else's, right? Obviously, we'd like to do that with emergent order rather than imposed. So rather than a law doing lockdown, more conscientious citizens who understand more and care more would be better, right? If you had citizens who cared more and did the research better and really came to understand it better, then they wouldn't need police, they would be self... Then you don't have to worry about who is the authority that has a monopoly of violence. There is a population that is well-educated, conscientious, communicating with each other respectfully, and self-policing in that way, right? Self-moderating.

• 30:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, um, so the point is that oftentimes that there are these values that have to live in a dialectical relationship, but we will forget that and focus on one of them. Then we'll focus on the sense-making narrative that supports that one and think, and then we'll weigh it's the scientists who believe in it as being credible. And when people quote them, we're like, this is a credible scientist. But then when someone quotes the credible scientist on the other side, we'll say, you're doing a logical fallacy of appeal to authority. And it's like, really? You just did that? Like, it's an appeal to authority when they pick their scientists, but this is a credible person when you do it. Um, and that kind of subtle bias is just all over the place, right? And it's fundamentally a kind of bad faith sense-making that people don't even realize

• 31:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  they're doing most of the time. So we call it motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is tricky. Um, and there's so many reasons for it. Sometimes I want to be certain just because I'm fucking scared to have, to say, I have no idea what's going on about super consequential stuff. There's a pandemic, are the variants gonna get worse? Or is the vaccine gonna make them worse? Is everybody gonna die? Am I ever gonna go outside again? This guy seems really certain and the story is not too scary, or whatever it is. Like, sometimes there's deep subconscious stuff, like my desire for safety and certainty seems to be a path to it. So the same place in people that get scared of the dark is just when they can't see what's going on, they project nasty stuff into it.

• 32:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Or they get scared of deep water, because when they can't see what's going on, they project nasty stuff into it. Uh, get scared of the unknown in general. Projects nasty stuff and then wants to pretend there is no unknown, so they want excessive certainty about everything. So they get scared of death, and so then they want to project certainty about what happens in the afterlife and make up religions. Um, when you recognize that how much of reality is unknown and actually unknowable, there is no way through other than actually, there's no way through well with grace that doesn't involve deep friendship with the unknown, where you don't project nastiness into the dark spaces.

• 32:59Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  You just say, I don't know, like, just a lot of things in life that have been really interesting so far, and I'm curious what happens, right? And I, rather than pretend that I know and possibly steer really wrong, I'd like to just keep my eyes open and keep paying attention.

• 33:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So I was giving one example of how motivated reasoning and values and fears and all like that can affect people's sense-making. There are other things that can affect people's sense-making and get into, but the first simple principle, you're saying, across any domain, you know, lab-leak hypothesis versus natural genetic origin, or anthropogenic climate change being terrible really soon versus not, or whatever it is, find people who seem very well-researched and earnest, who hold strong versions of the various narratives, and see if you can study their narrative and their reason for it well enough that you

• 33:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  can steelman it. You can be like, "I actually really get and can give like an essentialized version of this." Then, when you see the difference between them, see if you can come to understand why. Like, are they drawing on different data? Are they both cherry-picking their data? And it's probably something that neither of them are saying. There's a lot of data and they're each cherry-picking, they're each framing. Is one of them following much more motivated reasoning and less good empiricism than the other one? But generally, that dialectical process where, one, it'll point out to you where you're faster to start to believe in something rather than something else because of your own biases. And if you notice that, and you realize that your bias will be, it's bias, which means it misleads

• 34:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  you. Mislead, bias is, like, if I let go of the steering wheel and my car starts going left, I have to go actually get it adjusted. If I let go and it goes right, like, that's dangerous. I want to let go and it stays straight. Bias cognitively is the same thing. It means I'm going to be veering off of reality naturally, based on what appeals as more true or less true to me because of various things, right? Dramas, conditionings, partial value sets, in-group identities, the fact that the world of my childhood is not a fair representation of the whole world, but I was early imprinted that it was, so I'll take those imprints onto everything. So people should be fairly scared of their own biases.

• 35:28Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right, like they should want to seek out and find their biases and correct them. And so, anyone who gets upset when someone says, "I think you're wrong about something", is actually fucking up their own life. If you protect your biases because they're protecting some sacred thing, like your fear of uncertainty or whatever, then you won't grow in this way and your life will stay upper bound at whatever the limit of truth that those allow you to understand and whatever vulnerable things are underneath it and whatever partial values are underneath it. But if instead you're like, "Actually, I don't think I can navigate well on a busted map. It just doesn't make sense. Any place where my map's off, I want to know.

• 36:11Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  By definition, I can't see my own blind spots. That's what a blind spot is. Everybody has biases. I can see everybody else's. I'm just pretty sure I don't have any."

• 36:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The best gift somebody can give me is where they actually tell me. If they're like, "I think you're off about this." Now, they can be an asshole and just judge me and whatever, and I still want to listen. Maybe they're wrong, but I want to listen to see if there's possibly a gift in it. But if they're my friend, they'll be like, "Look, I know you're really trying. I love you. I agree with a lot of things. I think there's something you're missing here." I'm like, "Tell me." Because the worst thing I can imagine is that I harm the things I care about or serve what I care about less well because of something I can't even see and somebody saw it and didn't help me.

• 37:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, having, this is another principle of sense-making. Have friends that disagree with you on really deep things, like have different biases. If you're a liberal, have conservative friends. If you're strongly, you know, LGBTQ, etc., have traditionalist friends.

• 37:16Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Don't be so sure that your moral set is the only and superior moral set, that your sense-making set is the only one. Have friends who have different orientations and see if you can actually see the world through their eyes in a non-pejorative way. Like, "Oh, yes, I can see if I was as uneducated and traumatized and whatever is them."

• 37:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But see if you can actually be like, "Wow, yeah. I can feel the clarity and rightness of seeing it this way."

• 37:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so have friends that sees things differently and ask them their take on things and listen and ask their take on your take on things and on you. So this is one of the other things that I think is this is one of the other things very destructive with social media is the filter bubble phenomena is since Facebook is going to give me what's it's not trying, like there's not a person having an agenda, there's an algorithm that is optimizing time on site and it just happens to be when I see stuff that disorients me and I don't, I'm I'm getting less certainty when I want more certainty, I bail. But when I want more certainty and I'm getting more in-group validation and I'm only getting outrage at the out-group

• 38:31Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  that makes me feel even more like I need to double down or whatever it is, I spend more time, so it just happens to be that the appeal and I don't even know I bail, I just keep scrolling in the fast infinite scroll because it didn't capture my attention because there's so much shit in the infinite scroll that I'm only going to stop to look if the person is hot enough or if it looks like something that my brain is pre-triggered to say that's important. Pre-triggered to say that's important means appeals to an existing bias. And otherwise it just scroll, right, and just kind of don't even notice that I passed it.

• 39:02Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But what that means is that I'm going to have both content and people in the nature of that world that will be confirming my biases rather than correcting them. And so then, of course, you will get increasing polarization on everything as a nature of even just the info technology infrastructure itself. Right? If people haven't seen The Social Dilemma, they should watch it, it covers this really well.

• 39:28Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So just to even, if you keep Facebook at all or whatever social media curate it, for the most part, the more time you spend on it, the less good your sense-making will be because it is optimizing for something that is not your sense-making. But if you're going to use it, curate it. So I went and intentionally found

• 39:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Groups and public intellectuals that represented opposite sides of every topic. And I liked and followed all of them to just confuse the fuck out of the algorithm. Because it's like, who likes the Sunrise Movement and the Cato Institute at the same time? And then what, you know? And then to be careful, because I know it pays attention that if I'm going to like stuff, I want to kind of have a balanced distribution of my likes, which can confuse other people socially. But it's because I want to see a representative feed, right? And specifically, I want to pay attention to when I notice that I have a leaning on a topic. I want to find the best thinkers to disagree, and I want to read their stuff more. To see, am I missing stuff?

• 40:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right? Like, is there anything in here I'm missing? So curating your algorithm that way is helpful. Getting the fuck off Facebook and just doing better internet research than that, or just following the recommendations on YouTube, which are so sticky, they're so goddamn hard to avoid, especially because it's going to send up some hyper-normal stuff where pretty soon you're just watching MMA or bloopers or something. And you're like, where did two hours go? And you're like, oh, I was doing internet research. And so just being real about how messed up those algorithms are, you're like, okay, what is it I'm trying to get clarity on? What are the narratives? And who are good? First, let's just Google, who are the scientists, academics, thinkers, whatever, that are representing these well?

• 41:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Let me go read some articles, right? Then let me find who's critiquing those well. If I can get to the point where I can make each of the arguments as well as they can make it, and then I get a sense of why they disagree. Is it different data? Is it different values? Is it different models? Is it disingenuousness? Like, why do I think that? Then I might be able to start to say, do I see a synthesis here? Were they each cherry picking, and there is a higher-order kind of insight?

• 41:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Very often, it's, you know, it's looking at this cross-section and this cross-section of a cylinder and saying it's a circle and a rectangle and there's partial truth and they're just too low a dimensional insight. They're hyper focusing on a thing like, you know, the founding fathers were slave holders and the whole thing is illegitimate and they built all of these institutions just to fight slavery, so all of our institutions are built on supporting that, so there's institutional racism everywhere and how can you possibly like say anything good about or quote these guys? It's like, yeah, and the people who

• 42:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  want a better world than all the racism and slavery want a world that is aligned with the Declaration of Independence more than other articles of governance written. And civil rights were slow but emerged out of some of the structures that were Hippocratic as fuck that emerged and there was greatness in the nature of what happened in the country, so there was like evilness and greatness mixed together. And so I can make each of those partial narratives by themselves adamantly and talk past each other, but the reality is it's complex, right? Like, some of the individual people involved were, I have a friend Gilbert Morris, who's a professor on these topics, and he's like Benjamin, or

• 43:16Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  he's like Jefferson, was a great man and not a good man at all, and you have to hold both. Like, what does it mean to be able to hold both of those? Because I can tell each of those stories on their own and they're both bullshit partial stories. So can I start to find a higher order synthesis than either of the cherry picked or partial stories? That's the thing I want to start to look for and then not just jump to artificial certainty that now I got it, I got the whole thing, right? I got something and there's probably still lots of insights. So how do I stay oriented to continue to gain insights?

• 43:55Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So those few things of make sure that what you're being exposed to is the various different ideas, make sure you're seeking to understand them and synthesize them, curate your info environments to support that and curate your friend circles to support that. Those are a few things.

• 44:12Chris Williamson?

  There's a sentence in CrossFit that says, get comfortable being uncomfortable. I guess here it's get comfortable with the unknown would be an equivalent.

• 44:22Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And there is some, it's very easy to have uncomfort with the unknown, so they're related, right?

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And the reason CrossFit says that is because comfort and growth don't happen in the same place. And good sense making and high certainty don't happen in the same place.

• 44:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems to me that it's going to be effortful, you know, to do this, to undertake good sense making is going to require you to go through discomfort, to go through unknown, and to spend a lot more energy than just the limbic sort of reflex action. There's a quote from last year, it was in The Times, I've got this newspaper clipping. Matthew Said, I think, identified it, it's called compensatory control. He said, "When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces.

• 45:28Chris Williamson?

  This is why, for some, it makes more sense to believe that we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation of a silly little microbe." Fifteen months hence now with the lab leak hypothesis, this feels even more sort of nuanced and interesting, but yeah, that compensatory.

• 45:47Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Wait, that second quote, I want to touch on that for a minute.

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  There was something that that writing did, I don't know, I don't remember uh, hear who you said did it, so I'm saying this with no allegiance or anti allegiance. It presented a thought about, uh, it presented a position on a polarized topic. Right? That the conspiracy theories aren't true and this is just a, um, and there weren't mad scientists plotting and anything else and that this was just a, a bug. It conflated that with a high morals, almost spiritual insight that everybody would naturally agree with and feel elevated by, which was that, um, we've all had the experience of

• 46:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  feeling disorder and then seeking, or we start cleaning the house where we had procrastinated when we, our taxes come in, we don't know how to pay it and we want to feel productive in some way or whatever it is. Like, we've all experienced that thing. And so people are like, "Yeah, that's true." And then they're like, "No, it is true. We should just be able to embrace the uncertainty." So there's like a resonant true thing, there's like an aspirational thing, and then there's like a given, a conclusion on a topic that is not concluded, is there? That's a kind of narrative warfare, where it almost makes it seem like believing that belief is aligned with the high moral, almost poetic. Like, there's both a good, there's the ethical, and there's almost a beautiful aesthetic, and then the true, right? So the best narrative warfare takes the true, the good, and the beautiful, distorts them

• 47:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  all a little bit, and braids them to align with a particular position. And that's how I feel when I'm reading like, the New York Times or something, where I'm like, "If I believed anything other than this, I would just be a bad person." Like, it's so clear what moral high ground is and right side of history, and it's written so beautifully. Like, whoever wrote this is a fucking brilliant writer and, um, poetic, it's achingly beautiful, or whatever. And, and it seems so clear, because they're quoting the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard and whatever it is, and it seems like the best scientists all agree, and the peer-reviewed journal said it. It doesn't make it true. Like, it doesn't make, it doesn't mean that the morals that

• 48:01Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  are there are, like, so the lab leak hypothesis is a really great example. I have not done my research on it to have my own opinion on it adequately, so I am not going to, but I'm gonna look at it just from a narrative point of view.

• 48:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The lab leak hypothesis was up till whenever, a couple of months ago, you know, like being a flat-earther. Right? Like a flat-earther, anti-vaxxer, tinfoil hat-wearing reptilian baby blood drinkers run the world. Um, and, you know, you, you have to believe all that nonsense and it's like, but even more, it's like, anyone who's saying that it could have leaked out of a lab not only doesn't understand science and it's anti-science, but they're trying to cause a war with China. They're xenophobic, they're against Asians. They're like, like all this moral sanctimony of what a bad person you are, what the bad effects will be and how dumb you are if you think that it's reasonable, that it might have escaped

• 49:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  uh, a lab that happens to be in that area, that happens to work with those viruses. And because the science is settled, because of something that we later came to realize was not settled science. Um, and so you're like, how the, and, and so then it starts to come out that actually wasn't settled science. And we're like, how the fuck did the zeitgeist get that powerful, that quickly? That you were a dumb and horrible person for believing a thing because the science was settled and the science was never settled and everyone who believed the science was settled and everyone else is dumb and, and bad should be reflecting like, what the fuck? I got captured.

• 49:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Like, I got captured. I was certain about something and I didn't even read the article in Nature that proved that it was certainly a zoonotic hypothesis and I'm not qualified and I wouldn't have known how to do the rebuttal that came out later. But the guy in, in the New Yorker, whoever it was that wrote about it seemed really certain. And, and it appealed to my sensibilities and the institutions that agreed with it were the institutions that seem high-minded that I like to agree with.

• 50:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So I hope people take seriously right now, as an example, regardless of where the virus actually came from, that the lab leak hypothesis was not dumb. Whether it was true or not, it was not proven false and was not dumb in the way that was said in the narrative. And then like, how did that narrative get that? Like, what was the force that wanted to make it seem that certain and to push against the other narrative so strong?

• 50:49Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That should be a very interesting question for everybody. And

• 50:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  yeah, it's fascinating. In this whole situation, I have seen zeitgeist formation that is more intense and faster than I've ever seen previously. That is not based on good sense making, but other stuff.

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  Just rapid news cycle iteration. And yeah, I, one of the terms that you use a lot is talking about good faith and bad faith actors. And I guess that this ties in with sense making individuals or actors, if you want to say that, sense making agents.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  What I find, especially over the last 15 months, and the lab leak hypothesis is a good identifier, because it was so flagrant and in your face,

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  was people who had complete certainty plus powerful distribution to be able to convince others of their certainty, are able to reverse their position essentially without an apology within the space of 15 months. That it's, here was a thing that I'm certain is true. And now here's another story about a potential other truth without referring to the fact that the first truth that we made you believe was true was untrue. We saw this with Joe Biden last year, where he said that shutting down travel from China was xenophobic in February. And then by May was saying that Donald Trump had left it too late to close the borders. Like, you don't get to do that.

• 52:25Chris Williamson?

  You do not get to fucking do that. You're supposed to be the people leading the country. You're supposed to be the ones that we hold to the highest levels of good faith actor requirements.

• 52:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, that that's cute. Um, like, obviously, they do get to do that. Because people are

• 52:50Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  uh

• 52:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  easy enough to capture and move along in that way. Like, that's I that's why it happens. Um, what's interesting is each time, say, a narrative changes.

• 53:09Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  We made a mistake before, we couldn't have known, or science takes time, which sometimes is true. But now we know. Right, like, it's always, now we know. So it's a continuous justification for the authority we have.

• 53:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And um the Consilience Project, we just published an article there recently, uh called Where Arguments Come From. A team that worked on it did a really, really good job. And it basically shows, like, where do arguments in the public sphere come from? Like, in order for a lot of people to have heard it,

• 53:49Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  a lot of amplification of the message had to happen. Which meant a lot of people who have the ability to amplify a message had to care about it. Or some people that had the ability to amplify it had to do a lot of work, right, to make that happen. And so typically, there's a narrative that somebody who has some vested interest wants. Right, so they have like a a demand for a narrative.

• 54:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because it'll create a demand for a thing in the population. And so they find a source of narrative supply. They find a academic or a think tank or whatever it is that already thinks that thing or thinks something close enough. So they don't have to get somebody to lie, they just upregulate the narrative that currently wasn't like that person's been writing about that thing for thirty years, it never got any traction, now it's everywhere. Because there's now an agenda that is useful for it, that will upregulate it, where before it was swimming upstream. And so it's important to just really think about the mechanics of what allows a meme to propagate. What allows a narrative or zeitgeist to propagate? And it's not just allows it, what what propagates it, right? There is energy involved in propagation, the energy has an interest, it's seeking ROI on that energy.

• 55:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so this is why DC is filled full of think tanks that are intellectuals putting out public policy that is already predetermined in advance what the ideology is. They're doing it on every new topic that emerges, right?

• 55:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah.

• 55:20Chris Williamson?

  What do you think a good sense-making agent is not? Or what are some of the most common pitfalls that people have when trying to become one?

• 55:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I mean, we've been talking about the pitfall of excessive certainty this whole time. And epistemic certainty is, I know what is true. Excessive moral certainty is, I know what is good, also called sanctimony, right? Those are both pretty big pitfalls.

• 55:56Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  There is another one on the other side, which is, I don't know and I don't care, is nihilism.

• 56:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  What I find interesting is that most people will, or many people, will flip from certainty to nihilism in like one step.

• 56:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Where they're pretty certain of something. If they find out that that's not true, they're like, I can't make sense of anything. I'm giving up. I'm gonna go watch TV or whatever it is. And because the hard work of having to sit in, I don't know, and I'm gonna work at it, and I'm still not gonna know. I'm gonna work at it more, and I'm still not gonna know for a long time. I have a bunch of friends that get really frustrated with me because they send me a thing and say, what's your opinion on this thing, whatever it is? And it's like something about a different narrative on early human civilization and hominid origins or whatever it is. And I'm like, they're like, did you read the paper? I said, yeah, it's interesting.

• 56:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And they're like, well, what do you think? I'm like, it would take me hundreds of hours to start to have a sense of it. Like, it's an interesting topic. I don't have the hundreds of hours to put into it. I'm not nihilistic in that I don't care. It just might not make it to the top of my stack. And a lot of the things that are on the top of my stack, I also say, I don't know, but I'm working on it, right?

• 57:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So when we talk about sense-making, being good sense-making agent, like what are we really like, if we try to make it simple and grounded, what we're saying is,

• 57:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I actually want to understand the world I live in as best I can.

• 57:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because I actually hold that life is meaningful.

• 57:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And I hold that my life could be meaningful.

• 57:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Which means that my choices can be meaningful.

• 57:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so I want them to be informed as well as they can be.

• 58:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If my choices are me acting on and in and with the world, I want to understand things about me and the world and about what those actions will do as best I can. Because if my choices really matter, I don't want to believe that it's gonna go a certain way and I'm wrong. Unnecessarily, and I don't, like, I want to understand as much as possible because I act, because it matters, right? Like ultimately, because it matters and I care.

• 58:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And then the hard part is saying, well, it matters and I don't know, and I might still have choices to make, and I care.

• 58:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right? It, it, it's easier to jump to, I know, or I don't care. Because the I don't know and I care, and it's consequential and it's moving is fucking hard, right? Like, that's scary, it can be heartbreaking. But it's like, there's an epistemic humility. And an epistemic commitment at the same time. I don't know, but I can progressively come to know better. Right? Not all positions are equally good positions. Some of them have more error and some of them are more inclusive of more perspectives. So I can progressively come to know better so that my choices can be better informed, so they can be more effective and more meaningful. But in order to do that, I'm gonna have to stay the course of seeking understanding for quite some time. Which means I'm gonna have to not prematurely come to think

• 59:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I already figured it out too, too quickly.

• 59:24Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Or defer my sense-making to someone else who thinks they figured it out.

• 59:29Chris Williamson?

  Easy exits out of the discomfort. It's deciding to give up halfway through the workout. It's sandbagging it so that you don't go to your maximum heart rate. Yeah, it's dropping the weight down so that the discomfort's a little bit less. Yeah, the get uncomfortable with the unknown, I think, is a really good sort of overarching heuristic that you've got there. One of the things that was

• 59:51Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Just one more way to say that. Get, get okay with the unknown.

• 59:59Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Like, there's, there's an even more poetic and beautiful way to say it that I actually feel and think everybody feels if they drop in.

• 1:00:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Is actually connect to your love of reality.

• 1:00:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If, if you, if you didn't care about, like, if you didn't have a love for reality, you wouldn't care if it got hurt. You wouldn't care if you lost it. You wouldn't care, like, the fear of loss is because there's something meaningful you don't want to lose. The anger at anyone doing the wrong thing is because they're harming something you care about. Like, care and love are the origin of all the other emotions, because otherwise you'd just be apathetic and not give any shits. Right? So ultimately, I give shits about things because I, there's a care and love about life, my life, others' lives, reality that's real.

• 1:00:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So there is a love of reality that is at the basis of the meaningfulness of anything. And reality is mostly unknown to me. I know the tiniest fragment. So my love of reality and my love of the unknown, right? If I have a love of reality and it's mostly unknown, that means not just comfort with the unknown, but, and this is the awe at the mystery. This is the spiritual sense of faith and trust, whatever, right? It's actually extending the love of reality into the fact that most of it's unknown.

• 1:01:26Chris Williamson?

  That's nicer. We'll take that one.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I was very interested in is to try and work out at what stage of personal actualization people should start to serve the world at large. Should we sort our own shit first before trying to go and fix the world? And when do you know when you're ready, for want of a better term?

• 1:01:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, definitely total enlightenment before sweeping the kitchen.

• 1:02:02Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I joke because it shows how ludicrous it is to think that it is not both always, right?

• 1:02:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If I am seeking to help the world

• 1:02:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  and I have not learned what's going on in the world, I might be doing stuff that's totally not needed or not very useful. I'm trying to solve a problem, but I don't understand the upstream things that are causing the problem. So my actions will mostly be useless, right? So do I want to work on myself in this place just means work on my cognitive models and maps that I understand the issue well enough? I can be helpful, right? Sometimes I care about the thing I want to help. But the first thing is, do I understand the problem well enough to be able to help, right? Sometimes that doesn't matter. There's trash on the beach, I'm gonna pick it up. Did I fix the issue of trash on the beach? No, I don't know who's putting the trash there, why, what cultural effects are causing that? So, but I still picked up the trash that day. Cool.

• 1:03:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That is not a comprehensive solution to pollution. It's a meaningful activity in the moment.

• 1:03:11Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But to the degree I want a comprehensive solution to pollution, I have to start to understand the financial incentives to make throwaway plastics. I have to understand what it would take technologically to be able to make plastics that biodegrade it. I have to understand the culture of why people do that here and they don't in Japan and how we could change the culture. There might be a number of ways I can come to understand it well enough, right?

• 1:03:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So I might want to work on my understanding of the problem before trying to help it, so that I have a sense of how to really be effective.

• 1:03:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Particularly, the more complex the issue is, the more consequential it is, and the more consequential my action is going to be, right? "Oh, we're gonna do a solar

• 1:03:59Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  remittance program where we..." That's not the right word, but where we reflect 20% of the sunlight out of the earth through geoengineering.

• 1:04:09Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Should probably be pretty fucking sure,

• 1:04:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  pretty fucking sure that that's a good idea, because it's pretty consequential, right? Or, "We're gonna try and sequester CO2 using these genetically modified plants that we've never planted at scale and don't know the biological effects of the modified organisms." Like, more sense-making before choices that are really consequential.

• 1:04:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So that's one example of, "I want to work on my own cognitive maps of what is needed, what's going on, what would be effective, enough that I have a sense of what to do." But then also, there's a point at which there's no more research that will work, I need to field-test the thing, try some stuff, and be like, "Oh, it didn't work for reasons the lab would never told me. I didn't realize that the locals don't even like that thing, or they don't believe it." And so, there's a place where the application layer also ends up being part of the epistemology. It's the testing, right?

• 1:05:04Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So that's one example. There's also the example of, "Well, what if I'm working on trying to help the world, and it's not... The problem isn't a lack of cognitive development, it's a lack of certain kind of emotional healing and development, where that is affecting how I'm showing up." Well, let's say, whatever wounding issues in childhood have me have an outsized need for credit-seeking because of not having ever felt loved enough, or enough, or only having felt good enough based on performance and credit attribution, whatever. Will I possibly mess up a project to ensure that I get the credit out of it? Where I'll undermine other people, or sabotage, or whatever it is, or emphasize to me getting credit more than the effect of the project?

• 1:05:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Where me doing work on not needing that as much because of healing whatever kind of place that is in me would actually make me a much better agent for change in the world? Yeah, that's like a real thing, right? That's a real thing where that kind of stuff messes stuff up. Or where I'm trying to heal a particular issue in the world that I don't realize is unresolved wounds in me, where I see something resonant out there. And when I heal the thing in me, I have a totally different assessment of it. Right? Like, I have a totally different assessment because I really, I was trying to fix marriages in a particular way because of my trauma around my parents' divorce, or whatever it was.

• 1:06:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And so I was seeing it through a traumatized lens, and I didn't even realize that I had this whole mission in nonprofit, and whatever it is. So, there are times where our own trauma will get projected on the world. This is why Lao Tzu said, "If you want to protect your feet from rocks, better to put on shoes than try to cover the world in leather." Right? That idea of like... But that doesn't mean that any pain you feel looking at the world is just your pain. Like, I think if someone was as healed and integrated as they could be, and they see a factory farm, they would feel the empathetic pain of the pain of those animals. If they see hungry kids, they'd feel an empathetic pain. If they didn't, there would be something wrong with them. They wouldn't be enlightened, they'd be sociopaths.

• 1:07:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And this is why you see the Buddha crying, right? This is why you see the passion of the Christ is the idea of the enlightenment is not just, "Oh, I can see you suffering and doesn't do anything to me." It's like, sociopathic enlightenment is not that interesting. It's... But this is where it can be either way, right? Am I clear? And I'm really feeling the pain of the other and feeling called to help? Or is the some pain in somewhere else just triggering my pain? And then rather than face it in myself, I'm going to try to solve it in the world in a way that will always keep my sense-making and my effectiveness off? Right? So, these are examples that people will give. People understand this of like, "Do more work on yourself first." Or my own need for excessive certainty,

• 1:07:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  because of my uncomfort with the unknown that will make me do shit where I'm, I'm wrong but certain I'm right too often, right? These are... And we... I'm sure the listeners can generate 100 more examples.

• 1:08:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So should I just do a bunch of psychotherapy and a bunch of Zen meditation? And a bunch of uh study? Until I am second tier or third tier or whatever the fuck the developmental metric I want to look at is? That means I am now whole enough and integrated enough that I can work in the world? No, that's ridiculous. Um, you can't even. Like so many of the ways we learn about the problems is by engaging with them. And you couldn't only do it in study and so many of the ways we learn about our issues is by engaging in the world and seeing, oh, I really did. Try to get too much ego credit there and I'm reflecting on it and I was an asshole and like I need to work on that and I wouldn't have seen it if otherwise or.

• 1:08:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Wow, that project failed and I was so certain that's how I'm seeing my certainty issue. Right? So as I heal and learn and grow, I can show up better in the world. But as I show up in the world, I also get to see those things if I'm looking for them. If I don't look for them, I'll always blame the world. Every failure was somebody else's fault. Right? Every, but if I'm looking for it, then I can see those things and rather than just get crushed, I'm a piece of shit. That's all there is to it. I can take it as, oh, this is, this was some. Belief, trauma, pattern that created a self fulfilling prophecy or whatever, but that I could shift. Right? So I want to bring in empowerment where I will look at. What in me was off?

• 1:09:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Not to just beat myself up and hate myself, not to, or not to pretend there was nothing in me off, but to be able to see it, look at it, work on it, integrating it, growing past it.

• 1:09:51Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But similarly, uh, there's also this thing that we're showing up to the world. With things that we're passionate about, it motivates our growth.

• 1:10:01Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because. Let's say. I'm afraid of public speaking. Let's say I'm like catatonically afraid of public speaking.

• 1:10:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I can just avoid that forever and don't have to go through it. But let's say I'm somebody like Jane Goodall or whatever, and I go and I'm working with the with the primates in the wild and I watch the poaching, right? And I'm so fucking broken by that. And it matters so much more than whether the people like me or not. I get up on stage and talk about it and like, we have to stop this pushing, we have to, because something bigger than me and my fear of public speaking is actually now moving me. And if when I get up on the stage to talk, I'm still in the like, are people going to like me or not like me place, I won't get over the fear. If I'm touched by something that is so much more important than that, I can actually transcend that because it's not about me.

• 1:10:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I'm talking about the topic, I'm talking about the issue. I don't even need to talk about it. Give me the fuck off, have somebody else talk about it. I'll just talk about if there's nobody else who's doing it. So I also find that like the hardest parts of our healing are hard, right? Like we avoid those things for reasons. We don't notice them, they're in the shadow for reasons. And oftentimes, this is why like so many people only heal patterns when they have kids. We see this a lot is because there's something bigger than them for which they're willing to work because they're like, man, I'm fucking my kids up the way my parents fucked me up. I told myself I wasn't going to do this. I'm repeating the same patterns. I see they're going to get it. And that's the only thing that has them like double down on what it takes to shift that.

• 1:11:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So whether it's your kids or whether it's some other calling, there's a place where showing up to the world is actually the only thing that can make something more important than you, that can allow you to transcend the parts of self that were just too hard otherwise. So what we want is a virtuous cycle between growing as a being and having who we are show up for what we care about. And where as we show up for what we care about, it gives us insight about ourself, about the situation, and it gives us motivation. And as we grow and heal more as a person, we can show up to what we care about better.

• 1:12:14Chris Williamson?

  That's beautiful. Have you got any sense of whether you think on the whole, people tend to err more toward the side of showing up or err more toward the side of working on themselves first? If you were to give most people a little bit of a push in one direction, would you say consider the outside or consider the inside more?

• 1:12:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  They're just different groups of people. Right? You have a personal growth world and a kind of psychotherapy and healing world and the, let's call it Eastern Enlightenment world that is very focused in that direction. You have a entrepreneurial and activist and various types of action oriented that's focused in that direction, biases in both sides.

• 1:13:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you considered the potential that humans are just too at the mercy of our emotions or programming to be able to reach our civilizational potential? I was thinking about this when the most recent potential release about aliens was coming about and I had a conversation with a friend saying, "I don't think that aliens could be even 10% more emotional than us by whatever criteria you want to cause that, more emotionally reactive, because coordination would become so difficult if you were to turn it up to maybe 10 or 20% more that you'd be able to achieve shit." Like, have you considered that, that we might just be kind of bouncing off a glass ceiling?

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  That the creatures that we are are so self-limiting that no matter how much we try to transcend our own programming, that we are sort of destined to fail?

• 1:14:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, so this is, there's a common question of, that I've received many times of like, "Do I actually get human nature?" And am I thinking-

• 1:14:20Chris Williamson?

  That wasn't, I was asking whether you get human nature or not.

• 1:14:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, they're related questions.

• 1:14:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:14:28Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right? It's a related question.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:14:30Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And it usually comes in the form of, "I'm dubious of two things. I'm dubious-

• 1:14:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That people can be, or I'll say it another way. I'm concerned that people are too irrational and too rivalrous to do anything like this emergent coordination shit you're talking about. That the level of rationality and the level of anti-rivalry, right? So like wisdom and compassion, or whatever it is, that would be needed, don't seem to be well demonstrated across the population anywhere. So what kind of Aquarian nonsense is this? And so let's address that. It's a real politic critique, right? Or concern. Am I asking the same thing you're asking?

• 1:15:19Chris Williamson?

  Not far off, yes. I mean, I wasn't accusing you directly. It was more abstract, but yes, yes, you're right.

• 1:15:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, have I ever considered?

• 1:15:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So I'll tell you the first part of how I approach this. So in the same way, I'll actually use it as an example of when I was saying a good way to sense make is to do dialectic. So everything on the nature versus nurture arguments and the range of what people thought nurture could do were topics I really wanted to see what were all of the thinking and what was the basis for the thinking? And were there any kind of axioms that were unquestioned or new possibilities that could change the landscape from even those ideas?

• 1:16:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So one thing is when we look at, say, how violent versus altruistic or rational or whatever metric we want to look at and however we assess looking at across a population to get some kind of distribution. First, I would say I'm extraordinarily dubious of pretty much all social science of this type for a bunch of reasons. One is it almost all started post-industrial revolution and much more recent than that. And almost all of human history that conditioned us genetically and otherwise was in tribal environments.

• 1:16:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And those are so different. And just like we're saying, even the nature of Facebook engaging with it changes the patterns of what we think, feel, believe, react to. And there's tests that Facebook has run of like, we can make people more depressed and happier and believe different things just by putting what's in the out, changing what's in the algorithm a little bit, right? So

• 1:17:17Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  post ubiquitous capitalism and ubiquitous industrialization and ubiquitous nuclear family homes and a bunch of things, none of which were natural to the human evolutionary environment. But they're conditioning that kind of won. And so it became an ubiquitous conditioning. We do the social science then and then pretend that that's not conditioning and call it human nature because it's ubiquitous conditioning. That's silly, right? And then there's so few indigenous people left or whatever, we can just make them statistical outliers. And even though they have very, very different patterns on a lot of those things. Also, so that's one reason that I'm very dubious of the social sciences.

• 1:17:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And this is even like when they're trying to do a good job, not like, like the nonsense social science that was

• 1:18:08Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  reifying why whites were superior in the early US based on bad interpretations of Darwin and phrenology and stuff, right? But you can see from that stuff how easily bias influences something as complex as social science, complex and consequential.

• 1:18:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The other thing is that there are a lot of things about people's behavioral dispositions that change with development and development is not factored. We don't factor levels of higher stages of human development post just be becoming 18, even though they're very real things, we just put it all together and under a bell curve. But, you know, when you look at the work of Piaget and then the kind of neo-Piagetian educational philosophers that were looking at human development and childhood and it's very clear, there's neurologic development and corresponding change in fine motor skills and logic skills and verbal skills, et cetera. And we get to like 18 schools over and then development ends, right? And then that's a fully developed person. That's gibberish, right?

• 1:19:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Like, that's not a fully developed person. So what is development beyond that? So you have a bunch of people who have worked on higher stages of development and.

• 1:19:22Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Zach Stein's a good colleague of mine, worked on that very heavily and looked at the work of Kohlberg and Graves and lots of people who've worked on that, but it's like the complexity of someone's cognitive model, the development of their moral models, the development of their aesthetic, the development of their capacity to perspective take, perspective seek and perspective synthesize, those things keep developing, right, or they can keep developing, one can do things to develop them. And then at those higher developmental capacities, there are different behavioral dispositions. And this is not just typologically, they're typologically left or right or whatever, this is, but they're, so we could say if the society was supporting more development of that type,

• 1:20:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  you would have a totally different bell curve, right? And, but that's not a topic that's usually factored. So there's a bunch of things like this where I would say the social science all needs to take in some grains of salt. One thing I have looked at is on the traits that matter most to a civilization that would work well, I've looked for positive deviance, outliers of the statistical norms on the positive side, to see, is there an upper, is the, is the upper boundary that we think of really the upper boundary? Or are there places where what we think of as the upper boundary is the median? Right, like it's quite different? And so, if you, there's heaps of examples, but if you look at like,

• 1:20:51Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  through much of the last few thousand years, across lots of different cultures and different geographies, have Jewish families raised better educated kids than the people around them much of the time? Yeah, they have. And, and so is there, are there cultural dispositions that can lead to higher qualities of education and correspondingly different qualities of ways of being, right? Different types of disposition? So then you have that for a long time, the Jews, all as a diaspora, pretty much didn't defect on each other, right? And the way

• 1:21:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The Jewish law is structured, there it's kind of like a formal logical system. So they're also getting very good at how to be able to think in formal ways, which makes them good at, which is why they became good at science and finance and other things that were thinking in formal logic was relevant. It's a really important example because you could say, well, if what Jewish culture gave in terms of the development of education and rationality and non-defection on each other could happen across the whole population, would that change things? Yeah, it really would. What about the Jainists? Do you have a religion where across a long period of time, nobody hurts bugs or plants?

• 1:22:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, you do. How do, what about the violent kids in the society? What about the sociopaths? Across a huge population, the violence bell curve is completely different, right? You have extraordinarily low violence across the whole population. How can that be? Well, they're, they're developed differently. Can you have a population where almost everyone is violent? Yeah, there's a few cultures where violence is ubiquitous, right? And you can see in cultures where kids grow up as child soldiers that you don't make it to adulthood without killing people. And so it's like the Janjaweed and the Jains are both possible in human nature depending upon conditioning.

• 1:23:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So the idea that what we naturally are is the median of that is just gibberish. It's just not understanding how we create societal structures that create conditioning that support the societal structure. So what if we had something that was conditioning non-violence and compassion more like Jains or Buddhists or Quakers? And conditioning rationality more like Nordic Bildum countries or Jews? And what if we had a few of those things and we brought them together into not just an educational but a cultural developmental system? Could we have, is it within human nature? If rightly conditioned to have higher potentials. Yeah, totally, it's within human nature, rightly conditioned of higher potentials. What if, in addition, we created an economic system where we addressed perverse incentive?

• 1:23:51Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So rather than the guy who externalizes the most harm to the environment makes the most money and then gets the most checks and status and whatever, to actually all of the harms, the externalized harms are internalized to the cost. So the guy who gets the most money is the one who does the most omni-benefit and no harm anywhere. Well, now, there's no sociopathic niche to condition bad behavior and bad values in people. And doing the thing that's good for others ends up being good for you, actually is conditioning the values even from self-centeredness, right? It starts to bridge them in that way. Well, how do we make an economic system that rigorously internalizes externalities and addresses perverse incentive? That's a really deep question for changing what we would call human nature.

• 1:24:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  That isn't human nature, it's the nature of made-up human coordination systems, right? Does all property law, does all access to resource have to be at the level of individual private property? No. Can we do things that change that fundamentally? Is every good fundamentally rival risk because it's scarce? No, digital goods made it very clear that you have things that are not only not scarce, but anti-reverses. The more people that use them, the more valuable it becomes. But we still make them artificially scarce because of the artificially scarce dollars, because the artificially scarce materials economy. Can we make a materials economy that isn't artificially scarce by making it closed-loop with enough energy to run it? Yeah, we can.

• 1:25:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So the point is, do we see positive deviance of, you know, you look at a very wealthy population, old wealth families, while they still have the integrity of how-to-do dynasty, or even just the kids going to the best prep schools in the US, right? And then who go to the best Ivy League schools and have all the best tutors.

• 1:25:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Do you have the same distribution of success in life of the kids coming out of Exeter and the kids coming out of an average public school? No, they're totally different. Well, what if everybody went to Exeter and had that corresponding life since they were little? Well, it would be totally different. Well, but we can't afford to do that. Yeah, so here's the thing.

• 1:25:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The idea of the dumb masses is class propaganda. Because the upper class that has access to the things that develop them having more capacity is why they end up having more capacity, is a major part of why they have more capacity. And then the idea that some people like them need to be in positions to rule because the masses are too dumb is a self fulfilling prophecy because then we'll keep the masses dumb by not giving them better educational resources and other types of, you know, things that would create a difference there. So I, like, I actually think that the idea of the irrationality and the rivalrousness

• 1:26:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  of the masses is one of the deepest parts of like propaganda zeitgeist of ruling classes forever. Because it justifies the basis for rulership.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  Cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature in the modern world is something that I've never even thought of before. That is so interesting.

• 1:27:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at, you know, you've ran these clubs and you see all these teenagers come into the clubs and how they behave. And so you've seen patterns that are on repeat so much, you're like, I know human nature. I've seen this 100,000 times, right? But if you went to the tribes in the Western Amazon and saw how the teenagers there were engaging, who'd already been doing ayahuasca for 10 years since the time they were little, it's not the same. Like, there are some things, yes, they have a sex drive, right? Yes, there are certain aspects of paying attention to social hierarchies that everyone's going to notice. But there's more that's different, like a lot more that's different, right? That's conditioning.

• 1:27:45Chris Williamson?

  Given the fact that at the moment, the cultural conditioning appears to be making human nature into a rivalrous game, it's difficult, we have...

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Coordination problems. Not everybody is a Jane or a Jew at the moment, or some perfect amalgamation of both. With that in mind, you said something in our first conversation that was where gods were just shitty gods. And it was a comment on the difference between technological prowess and sort of wisdom or ability to deploy that technological prowess. If you could, do you think it would be optimal to curtail technological development for perhaps a couple of millennia, say, while we let our wisdom catch up? Or do we risk more by accumulating background risk and potentially losing galactic real estate by not progressing within that time? Have you got any sense of how that balances?

• 1:28:40Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's irrelevant because it's impossible.

• 1:28:44Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's impossible to slow the progress.

• 1:28:49Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Much.

• 1:28:50Chris Williamson?

  If you had a God's eye view?

• 1:28:53Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If I had a God's eye ability to slow it, would I?

• 1:28:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:28:57Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, if I had the God's ability to slow it, I would just speed up the rate of the wisdom. Because it's not an easier, like, what it takes to grow the wisdom of everyone, and what it takes to stop the progress are actually the paired thing. Because outside of the wisdom, the multipolar traps win. Anybody who says, I'm going to get there first, is going to just win the world because there's so much power. So now, they have, everyone has maximum incentive to get there as fast as they can, including lying to other people about that they're not doing it. So people aren't trying to race. And so, so, you know, you can say, God, we are not ready to be stewards of this much technological power, let alone power that we won't even be stewards of, because it'll become autopoietic and

• 1:29:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  run itself, like AGI, right? So we need to just slow this fucking thing down. Okay, so we can become a Unabomber, which that was his idea, right? Ted's idea was like, we're not ready for tech. Like, we sucked with spears. We were assholes with spears. We were assholes with guns. We were assholes with ICBMs. And now we're going to have like, drone weapons everywhere. Like, no, we got to slow that stuff down, because we have been assholes with all the weapons we've had. And all of the, we've destroyed environments with way less capacity than we have now. Okay.

• 1:30:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So you come to that idea, and you can do what? If you don't have tech, you don't have the power to affect stuff.

• 1:30:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because the tech ends up being the power. So other people disagree with you and they want the power. So if you want to stop them, you got to get more power than them, which means you got to beat them at the race to get the power to beat, to stop them.

• 1:30:35Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So the techno optimists, the naive techno optimists, who just say tech will solve all the problems, this is gibberish position. It's not just gibberish, it is super dangerous. In my opinion, it's the most dangerous worldview currently.

• 1:30:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because like a militant jihadi worldview doesn't make AI and CRISPR tech and things like that, it just doesn't make the tools that can be tools of destruction at scale. Only the worldview that supports the increased rapid development of exponential tech is the thing that increases the destruction, the fundamental destruction power, not just the application of the existing destruction power. Right? So the idea that the faster we build the stuff, the better everything will get because AI will just solve all the problems and we can't possibly solve it. And so let's just get to the AI fastest, let it solve all the problems and etc. Like, yeah, that's an extraordinarily dangerous view.

• 1:31:39Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The Luddite view, right? The techno pessimist who says, we have always been bad stewards of power. We cannot wield exponential power well.

• 1:31:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  We've used power for war, exponential war destroys everything. We've used power to extract from the environment and externalize the cost. Exponential externality destroys everything. We've used our power to create radical asymmetries of power. Exponentially asymmetries of power sounds like a shitty world for almost everybody.

• 1:32:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, so why, like, we need to stop that thing? Well, that view, while it's true, that view ensures that it will have no power to do anything.

• 1:32:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Right?

• 1:32:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, the only view that can forward is the one that embraces the tech that is where the power is. But embraces it recognizing that it's not a given that that tech is good. It could be developed in ways that are positive, but it can also, like if Facebook wasn't developed with a time onsite maximizing algorithm, it could be a very different force, right? Like the ability to, to take all of my behavioral data, make an advanced psychographic profile on me and then use AI to curate an infinite news scroll to affect my mind and behavior. That's fucking powerful tech, but if the goal is optimize my time onsite to sell me and my information to advertisers, then it's going to optimize for putting in front of

• 1:33:14Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  me the limbic hijacks and the cognitive bias and the in-group and the things that drive addiction. But if it's desire, if, if it was optimized for developmental metrics of like expose the person to the things that will actually help them see alternate views that they don't already see and help them learn and grow and perspective seeking, like it could be, techniques like that could be the most powerful tools of consciousness elevation and education that have ever been. So, it's not that the technology is definitely bad, it's a, and it's also not that the technology's value is agnostic, not values agnostic, no technology's values agnostic.

• 1:33:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I, if I make a plow, it's not values agnostic that can be used good or bad, the plow will make a lot more food for my people than just hunting and gathering. So, that means that if other people use it and I don't, I'm just gonna lose in terms of making it through famines and having stuff to trade and whatever. So, I have to use the plow as soon as it exists, pretty much, right? And the plow codes a pattern of behavior. Now I have to yoke an ox. And beat it all day long to do that. So I, before, I was animistic. When we were doing hunting and gathering, I had to kill the buffalo every once in a while, but I believed in the spirit of the buffalo.

• 1:34:36Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I can't believe in the spirit of the buffalo and beat it all day long, and after cutting its testicles off and putting something through its nose and whatever. So I have to change my whole view on the spirit of the animal, right? Was the tech values agnostic? No, it coded values into me by my using it, by the fact that I had to use it for gain theoretic advantage, right? So the idea that tech is just tech and it's not good or bad, it's how we use it, this is a misunderstanding. Yes, of course, I can use a hammer to build a house for the homeless or beat somebody's skull in and it's a positive or negative use, but it's also, the hammer will code certain patterns of behavior. Those patterns of behavior will end up coding values into me, right? And so, um,

• 1:35:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  so what it means is, if I have social tech, I can develop social tech that is in, like Facebook, right? I can develop a social technology, knowing that it will code patterns of human behavior, that will code their values and how they see the world. I can develop it intentionally, that will code patterns of behavior and values that some model of human development says is actually a more developed person versus is a more attention extracting and profit extracting person, which usually means a less developed person. So it's not that the tech is values agnostic, and it's not that it's necessarily good, as the tech optimists, things are necessarily bad.

• 1:36:04Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's that we can design it in a way where the fact that it's not values agnostic and it will be conditioning values can be good or bad, but it comes not just to how we use it, but how we design it, right? The nature of the design itself will end up affecting the use patterns, which will end up affecting the beings in the society. So in order to forward, we have to both utilize the technologies that have power. Otherwise, the stuff we're doing just won't matter. Those who are utilizing it will just win. But we have to do it in a way that is also aligned with the human development and the social values and the integrity of the planet and the commons that we want to see. So right now, the exponential technology, like it's fair to say that exponential tech

• 1:36:48Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  is in confer so much more power than all other legacy forms of power that only those who are developing and guiding exponential tech will have much say in the future. Right now, there is like two attractors for what happens. Either the exponential technologies just cause catastrophic destruction because you have exponential warfare or exponential externalities, right? Or we figure out how to avoid those by some good control systems using the tech. And now we get exponential control systems. And so we see authoritarian nation states using the tech to make better authoritarian nation states.

• 1:37:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we see some companies using the tech to make companies that are more powerful than countries, but they don't have jurisprudence of foreign by the people. Right? And so that is like more like a new kind of feudalism. So both the authoritarianism and feudalism are like technologically empowered autocratic structures. So there's basically catastrophes and dystopias are the only two things that are currently on the landscape. If we want something that is not a catastrophe and not a dystopia, then we have to utilize the tech in a way that binds the tech. So it doesn't cause the catastrophes that does it in a way that's not dystopic, meaning

• 1:38:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  that the order is emergent rather than imposed. How do we utilize these? How do we utilize AI and crypto and social and attention tech and all of these things? How do we utilize them to increase collective intelligence and collective coordination? So that we get increased effective coordination and order without it being a kind of dystopic control system? Like there's a lot of innovations we can really implement there. So the question of should we slow down the rate of progress? If I could, like, if I could slow it down and just say, hey, the guys who are getting way too close to super dangerous AI, if I could slow it down, I'd do it. Yes, yes, I would like that.

• 1:39:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Um, because right now, our growth in doing it rightly and wisdom is not good relative to our growth of getting the technology more powerful. If I could get, like, how powerful CRISPR technology is becoming as cheaply as it's becoming, to slow down so that it wasn't so easy to have very small groups have bioweapons capacity, like, yes, I would like that to slow the buck down, but it's not going to. Because there is no world authority that can stop it everywhere, and anyone that does it is advancing so that nobody really wants to stop it.

• 1:39:33Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So what we have to do is get the utilization of those technologies to a better attractor that can guide them to happen even faster.

• 1:39:41Chris Williamson?

  The consideration of what sort of a world we would be in if Facebook optimized for well-being or happiness or insight or whatever, where you think about how powerful it is and some of the changes that we've seen in human nature, which we now know might very well be cultural conditioning.

• 1:40:00Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's crazy. I just think about the sort of, think about the sort of society that we would have. If you had mult, oh, so you prefer to learn through 15 second video clips? Okay. TikTok education is TikTok mindfulness is for you and then Twitter, oh, you prefer to actually read, but you could, you get away with more pithy sort of aphoristic stuff. Okay. So Twitter enlightenment, that's your place. Like, yeah.

• 1:40:26Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And like, okay, let's take, so the type of media we give people, but then also the nature of the content to be bias challenging more than bias confirming. Um, I don't know.

• 1:40:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So, if you take a... There are some YouTube channels and Facebook groups that just document police violence. And, so you can just watch videos of cops beating the shit out of people in ways that seem unprovoked, and some of them are just cops beating up black people. And, as much as I am aware of the statistics and I'm aware of how we're affected by this, I can't watch that channel for more than a few minutes without just seeing red everywhere, right? Like, and, and that's the only issue I can care about. I can't care about anything else in that moment. And then you watch a different channel that is a Blue Lives Matter one, that basically just shows cops risking themselves to protect other people,

• 1:41:25Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  and then people attacking cops, which is why they are the way they are. Um, and maybe one that just shows black people attacking cops. And, then you're like, "Fuck, what a fucked up job that is, and how amazing they're doing, and how much self-restraint and..." And, now neither of these are giving me statistical representations, right? I just watched four videos. Now, there's a million interactions, or thousands of interactions in every city every day, right? And there's all kinds of complexity in this. Um, and I didn't even watch what happened leading up to it. But if I'm a, if I'm a black person living in some inner-city area, and I watch a few of those videos, and it profiles me, and it shows me more of those, because I spend time on site, because it fucking hurts,

• 1:42:07Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I'm just getting vicariously traumatized, right? By watching someone that looks like me, that I resonate with, get fucking killed or beat up or whatever for... And, and so what does that do? But then, the other guy who's watching it, who's watching the other one, right? The guy in Texas watching the Blue Lives Matter one, is getting more and more both patriotic, and he's getting vicariously traumatized of the way the cops are being wrongly attacked by the Black Lives Matter folks, the protesters, the whoever it is. And, that person is actually becoming more racist than they were, right? Becoming more scared or... And, so what if they got the other videos? Like, what if the algorithm was actually giving them the other content?

• 1:42:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And what if it was giving them the specific subsets of the other content that would be likely to actually touch something, and appeal to something in them? So that there was just some, so one, it wasn't just traumatizing them. And two, it might be giving them some insight how to do something other than culture war. Um, how to do something that could possibly bridge where there's trauma on different sides simultaneously. So if you start to think about, let alone the science of yay or no on ivermectin, right? Or whatever. So if you start to think about, could we curate it to have the right media forms and the right distribution of the types of content and exposure to the types of people

• 1:43:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  that would help this person be more transperspectival, more perspective seeking, more perspective taking, more holistic in their thoughts and insights. Yeah, I mean, it's, and, and even where insofar as someone is watching something and it's, they're liking it, it's being seen what they're watching, where, where insofar as like status shit is being hijacked, we use it for the right thing, where people start to have, have status conferred by the amount of stuff that they're looking at from different perspectives and it's educational in nature.

• 1:44:10Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I think it's fascinating to start to think about, and, and still people will be scared hearing this, like, who the fuck thinks that they know what human development is and what I should see and is going to socially engineer me for their good idea? And they should be dubious of that. The thing is, you're being socially engineered right now and you, and you never aren't, right? So it's not like socially engineered or not, it's bring consciousness to the fact that it can't not happen because we are all conditioned by the environments we're in and then take responsibility to say, how do we, how do we actually do that intentionally well? What does that mean?

• 1:44:46Chris Williamson?

  I mean, at the moment, I'm sure that there would be a way to make it worse, to make it more polarizing or more limbically hijacked, but it feels like there's a lot more ways to make it better than there are ways to make it worse.

• 1:45:12Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It's interesting, the ways to make it worse.

• 1:45:21Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  The search algorithm orients there better. It's like, is it possible to make food that is much worse for you than Hostess and McDonald's? Well, like, only if it's not food at all, it's just poison, right? Like, if I'm doing just pure poison. But I couldn't really make anything that could even masquerade as food much worse. Because there's not that many things that are food. And they, they split-test optimize for the most addictive ones and with the easiest palatability that drives the most addiction. It's like, maybe, maybe they'll come out with a new type of Twinkie that's even more addictive. But probably, like, they kind of already did most of that search space, right? Um, and they're making innovations like, okay, can we make porn that is even more addictive? Yeah, VR, right?

• 1:46:06Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So then we'll do, ah, shit. Um, but, so, but the thing is, like, hyper-normal stimuli that lead people to addictive behavior is just good for capitalism.

• 1:46:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  If I run a business, I want to supply something people are addicted to.

• 1:46:27Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because, because the first rule of business, if I'm, you know, I'm an MBA, the first rule is to maximize lifetime revenue of a customer.

• 1:46:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And I maximize lifetime revenue very well through addiction.

• 1:46:41Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And, but what that means is that there are lower and higher angels in my nature, and it's easier to make money off the lower angels of my nature than the higher ones. Which means the money will go into developing technologies that will drive the lower angels of people's nature.

• 1:47:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Which is why the underlying incentive system is one of the things we have to work on deeply.

• 1:47:04Chris Williamson?

  Because whilst that's still in place, there's always going to be these particular individual agents here and there that will just take advantage of other people deciding to slow down? If you can't coordinate effectively?

• 1:47:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, I mean, the reason to have rule of law is to bind the predatory aspects of market incentive.

• 1:47:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  To say, yes, I know you can make money by cutting down the national forest, but no, you're not allowed. And, and we actually do have a monopoly of violence with the police force. So if you try to take your goons in there to say, we're going to do it anyways, we'll actually come physically stop you. And yes, you can make money killing people and harvesting their organs and selling them. And no, you're not allowed to do that, right? Like, there's a bunch of things that are just bad, you shouldn't do that. And so this is why we say, no, not just total free for all free market. Because then what you end up getting is a few people who have all the money like we have. And most people have no money and the people who have most all of the money have relatively unchecked power. This kind of radical power asymmetry to impose things that might totally suck for the will of all these people.

• 1:48:15Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So these people say, we're going to pool our power into a kind of labor union of sorts called the state. And the state is going to take our collective values that will encode as rule of law, right? Our values as the basis of jurisprudence, creating rule of law with a government of people that are supposed to have no vested interest at all because it's of, for and by the people. That are bequeathed with a monopoly of violence. So the state's even more powerful than the top of the people in the market, more than the billionaires at the top of the power law distribution. So that the values of the people can check the otherwise radical asymmetries of market differences. That's the idea, right?

• 1:48:56Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  It obviously breaks down because what that means is those at the top of the market have maximum incentive to corrupt the state, to capture it, to capture the regulators. And so you see someone who works at the FDA, who used to work at Big Ag, or someone who works in the DOD, who used to work at Lockheed, or whatever it is. And you're like, oh, that seems like an incentive problem.

• 1:49:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And then you see that GDP goes up when there's war. Right? And because we spend a lot of money on military manufacturing. Um, and.

• 1:49:34Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So the regulator that is supposed to regulate the state ends up getting, I mean, the that is supposed to regulate the market ends up getting captured by the market. Because the state was supposed to be regulated by the people, right? A government of, formed by the people with high transparency, where the people saw what was going on. So that the people, so the representatives were really representing the will of the people, not representing their own private interests that were being paid for by some kind of state interest. So the state can only check the market insofar as the people are checking the state. The people obviously are not checking the state at all. The state is not trying, and nor are the market forces, trying to support the people to do that. They're trying to support the people to believe that they can do that by voting every four years or something. But having no real transparency, insight, awareness.

• 1:50:20Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But, um.

• 1:50:23Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  But yeah, so the thing about perverse incentive. Well. You have to be able to say no, that way that you can make money. And yes, you'll be able to say, hey, they want it. Right? I'm Facebook is like, we're just providing a service people want, right? And that's what the drug dealer says when they're providing the drugs to kids, they're paying for it, right? We're just providing a service they want. Yeah, you, there are weaknesses in people that you can exploit and then they'll want it and you'll fuck up their lives. We should not do that. Right? That's not like authentic voluntarism. That's like exploiting people's weaknesses and talking up their life because of bad incentives. That's the thing we should not do. We should provide goods and services that enrich the quality of people's lives and not provide the particularly predatory ones.

• 1:51:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  So that's where you need a state or you need some kinds of forces to be able to identify those and check them. We, we, and this is where we need better collective sense making to be able to identify, oh, these are perverse incentives. Oh, we should actually make different kinds of laws and regulations around that. Oh, our whole process of law and regulation is too slow for the rate that tech moves. How do we actually change the structure of, but our governance system hasn't employed any of the new tech? Why is that? China's government's employing their, the, the new tech, but for an autocratic system. We're not employing it to make better open societies. Why not? Taiwan's starting to, we could, it's working there.

• 1:51:44Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:47Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson? It's a hard sci fi book.

• 1:51:52Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:52Chris Williamson?

  So the moon explodes in the first sentence and the next two years are humanity trying to work out how they're going to survive, how they're going to get genetic progeny somewhere, right? And they decide to go for a sort of a forked strategy. They send some up to Izzy, the ISS that then gets made huge and lots of other stuff happens. They send some under the water. Given the fact that you spend a lot of time thinking about existential risk, we don't have a second community on Mars or another planet or anything. Why haven't we created a siloed community somewhere, which is that totally self sufficient, defended, air gapped from the rest of the world? So that if anything was to happen, there is a contingency already in place like that?

• 1:52:42Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, there kind of is in terms of do we have deep underground military bases for the continuity of governance or government? Yes, of course, right? Like especially after World War Two and during the Cold War, the idea if there's a nuclear attack, how do we have continuity of government? Let's make the bases do that and that they have the self sustaining resource to be able to do that. And then, of course, plenty of billionaires have their own bug out bunkers for those scenarios. Why has the world not created a its own breakaway civilization?

• 1:53:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Say something that the world has worked together to do at all, like with with coordination that isn't in the interests of those who are working on it. Like, that's the deeper question there. Because if if we could work together to make a breakaway civilization, why not just make this one much better?

• 1:53:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, the global coordination does seem to be the challenge. You are right. It's just, it's something that interested me. I'm reading this book. I'm looking at all of the challenges that occur when you have an imminent threat. But as anyone that spent a bit of time learning about existential risk, the fact that you can't see the imminence of something doesn't mean that it isn't imminent. Like, it could be. It could be around the fucking corner. You know, we didn't need much of a difference in some of the parameters of COVID to have made this a very imminent sort of danger. And Rob, I suggested it to Rob Reid last week, and he said that he could think of a way where this would almost be like conscription, in a way.

• 1:54:18Chris Williamson?

  Like, you would do your time in the humanity 2.0 bunker, or whatever. Perhaps people would cycle in and cycle out for a couple of years at a time, and it would be something that would be really prestigious, and people would be picked based on sort of genetic markers or attributes that they would want. And we would always have a siloed civilization, just there, ready in case something was to happen. To me, I'm aware that it's probably not going to be super fun, but also it kind of might be fun. There's not many things you can do that not many other people have done. It seems like, for any country to do relatively small cost, yeah, going to suck for some people, but it's a pretty small outlay for...

• 1:55:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, I mean, so the University of Arizona Biosphere 2 project was something in that direction, right? Can we make a closed, sustaining biosphere? And it's hard. And there's easier versions that are not quite ambitious that all the big countries do have, which is, if the world blows up...

• 1:55:29Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Is there somebody that still makes it? Well, all of the serious nuclear power submarines are that. And they know that, right? When they go, when they go under, you could have full-scale strategic thermonuclear war on the surface, and they're still doing their thing. And they have the ability to do that thing for a while, and they have the ability to blow up a big portion of the world from the artillery they're carrying on them. So like, they're very interesting. Like, the risk that they pose and the psychological experiment that nuclear-equipped submarines are is actually very interesting. Um, and so... But that's also a continuity of government-military capacity thing was, "Okay, well, let's say first strike happened all of a sudden. We've got these guys out there,

• 1:56:13Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  and they have the ability to respond independent of whatever else got blown up." So that's like, part, partial experiments like that have happened. I think this is how Elon describes part of his goal with Mars, is that we can take a stand somewhere else other than Earth, asteroids and whatever, and as just an inspiring enough project to motivate us to think positively about the future and do something interesting. I'll tell you what I really like about the Mars colony is... And what I like about the idea that you're saying, even if it wasn't Mars colony, but I think Mars colony is maybe the most popular version of it right now, and also a kind of well-resourced one.

• 1:56:58Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I like it as a thought experiment for how to design civilization from scratch.

• 1:57:05Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Because if I'm making a Mars colony, of course, there are some differences there and here with like microgravity and cosmic rays and microbiomes, which are pretty serious issues. But let's take those issues off and just take all the other ones that an identical Earth would have. I still have this issue of, "How do I make a civilization that does not require import? And that doesn't mess itself up?"

• 1:57:32Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  There's gonna be very limited oxygen. I can't have the inefficiencies of a bunch of unnecessary farm animals breathing the oxygen, if that's not a good way to produce nutrient and chloric density. I can't have criminals who aren't contributing anymore breathing the oxygen. So how do I create a social system that doesn't create criminals? Or that deals with criminality in a way other than putting people in prisons for a long time? I can't just assume that we can get new shit easily. Not only can I not produce waste or trash, I can't even produce micro pollution, volatile organic compounds from the epoxies or whatever in this space, in this very finite amount of air supply.

• 1:58:16Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  I have to be able to make all of our own hardware and software and mining and everything, and all of our own biotech. And if anything breaks, we have to be able to make the tools to fix it all, right in the same space. Are we gonna use the same law that is retrofitting stuff back from like the 1200s? Or are we gonna redo law from scratch? If so, are we gonna do it on a blockchain? What is the basis? Well, if we're gonna redo law, what is the jurisprudence upon which it's based? Well, what are the values upon which the whole thing's based? What is the constitution? What is the metaphysics that gives rise to how we pick the constitution? If you really wanna think about a Mars colony, you're thinking about everything. You're thinking about the full tech stack, the full suite of social technologies, how are we doing education and towards what?

• 1:59:00Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  What is a developed human being that we're trying to develop humans towards? And ultimately, what is the value system? What is the metaphysics that we are, that we're basing the constitution and the educational theory and the everything on? As we get clear on that because of that thought experiment, then it's, well, could we rebuild the world here that way? Could we build floating cities at sea that where we don't have to produce our own oxygen and deal with all of our own CO2, we can still piggyback off this biosphere.

• 1:59:37Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  And we don't have the, we just have to ship it across the ocean, not across the solar system, you know, for the import stuff that we do need.

• 1:59:45Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Could we do ground up civilizations that way? And, you know, could some nation states pick up levels of design iteration? And even if we can't do it ground up, knowing what it would look like, can we say now we know how to vector, to make a 50 year plan to vector the current system in that direction? That's something, so the, the actuality of making it on Mars actually interests me less than the thought experiment of what the thing worth making would be and then what it portends for us to get clear on that.

• 2:00:15Chris Williamson?

  So the constraints of being somewhere like Mars where inefficiencies, whether they be metaphysical, biological, technological, sociological, legal, all of these show up potential flaws within the system. And is it right to say that on Earth, because the, the externalities of getting these things wrong have sufficient slippage or they're opaque enough that we don't actually get to see when they happen, we have surplus resources, or at least we feel like we have surplus resources that can kind of chew up some of these inefficiencies. Yet, when you start to bring those constraints in, in my super siloed second world or whatever, or on Mars, that's when you actually get to see them in a harsher light.

• 2:01:01Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Yeah, it's not that Mars has more constraints. It has more and less constraints in ways that lead to more innovative design. It has more constraints in all the ways you just mentioned. It has less constraints to be an iteration of the previous things, to stay bound to being intelligible to the previous things, right? It would be very hard to try to make a really fundamentally different law and culture in.

• 2:01:28Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  In England, because there's a very, very strong tradition, there's very strong basis of law, and what would be the, to bring it into being, what would the basis of law, in current law, be to bring it into being, and does it even make that kind of thing possible? Whereas in the Mars colony, it's like, we got here first, fuck off, we're doing it, right? It's more that kind of thing. So whether they get there or not, even the thought experiment of it is less constraints about what it has to be or can be, based on our past, and where the constraints are more just physics. But those constraints are more obvious to us, because we don't have the huge buffer of pollutability and more resources.

• 2:02:07Chris Williamson?

  Daniel Schmachtenberger, ladies and gentlemen, what can people expect from you over the next few months? Where should people go to check out interesting stuff that you're doing at the moment?

• 2:02:19Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Well, the project that is still in just a very, very early beta phase, but that has most of my attention, is called the Consilience Project. I'm one of the members of that team, and so, consilienceproject.org, and it's really working on, right now, through a bunch of articles, and then the translation of those articles through podcasts, and then maybe animation, other forms of media, on helping people to understand the problem space of the world better. The types of things we're talking about, the relationship between sense-making, meaning-making, choice-making, imposed order versus chaos, and how do we have emergent order, to understand

• 2:03:03Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  some of the things well enough to be able to start to think about the innovations that would actually make a difference at a fundamental level. How do we understand the metacrisis well enough, that we can design better, we can employ the more powerful exponential physical technologies to make better social technologies, that are neither the catastrophes or the dystopias? And how do we make both the need for that, and the design criteria of what the solutions would look like? Not exactly the solutions, but the design criteria of the solutions, to be able to kind of drive innovation zeitgeist? So both existing institutions can say, wow, we need to reform ourselves, and we need to reform ourselves in these ways, and new independent groups like blockchain governance

• 2:03:47Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  imperatives and whatever can also innovate, informed by these things. So that's... That's where much of the attention is. And then every once in a while, I get invited like by yourself to do a podcast on interesting and fun and random topics. And so I have a blog that is basically just a place I put podcasts called civilizationemerging.com. People can check that out.

• 2:04:13Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. That'll be linked in the show notes below. Daniel, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 2:04:18Daniel Schmachtenberger?

  Thank you, my friend. Thank you for having me. It was good to be back with you.