Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191

the following is a conversation with daniel schmucktenberger a founding member of the consilience project that is aimed at improving public sense-making and dialogue he's interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals and as collectives at all scales quick mention of our sponsors ground news netsuite four sigmatic magic spoon and better help check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i got a chance to talk to daniel on and off the mic for a couple of days we took a long walk the day before our conversation i really enjoyed meeting him just on a basic human level we talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually contributing something of value to the colony these conversations are the reasons i love human beings our insatiable striving to lessen the suffering in the world but more than that there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time and sharing ideas becoming fast friends and creating something that is far greater than the sum of our parts i've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in austin with a few new friends and in random bars in my travels across this country where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation of this too short too beautiful life this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with daniel schmuckenberger if aliens were observing earth through the entire history just watching us and uh we're tasked with uh summarizing what happened until now what do you think they would say what do you think they would write up in that summary like it has to be pretty short less than a page like in uh hitchhiker's guide there's i think like a paragraph or a couple sentences how would you summarize how sorry how would the aliens summarize do you think uh all of human civilization my first thoughts take more than a page they'd probably distill it because if they watched well i mean first i have no idea if their senses are even attuned to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to or what the nature of their consciousness is like relative to ours and so let's assume that they're kind of like us just technologically more advanced to get here from wherever they are that's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment and then if they've watched throughout all of history they saw the burning of alexandria they saw that 2000 years ago in greece we were producing things like clocks the anti-catherine mechanism and then that technology got lost they saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress so every once in a while there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things there's a giant like uh commotion that destroys a lot of things yeah and it's usually self-induced uh they would have seen seen that and so as they're looking at us now as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the full globalization anthropocene exponential tech age still making our decisions relatively similarly to how we did um in the stone age as far as rivalry game theory type stuff i i think they would think that this is probably most likely one of the planets that is not going to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological adolescence and if we are going to we're going to need some major progress rapidly in the social technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical technologies so that we are safe vessels for the amount of power we're getting actually hitchhiker's guide has uh estimation about how how much of a risk this particular thing poses to the rest of the galaxy and i think i forget what it was i think it was medium or low so so their estimation was would be that this this species of ant-like creatures is not going to survive long there's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation the fundamental nature of their behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed they have not learned in any fundamental way how to control and properly incentivize or properly do the mechanism design of games to ensure long-term survival and then they move on to not the planet do you uh think there is in a more slightly more serious question do you think there's some number or perhaps a very very large number of uh intelligent alien civilizations out there yes would be hard to think otherwise i know i think posturum had a new article not that long ago on why that might not be the case that the drake equation might not be the kind of in story on it but when i look at the total number of kepler planets just that we're aware of just galactically and and also like when that um when those life forms were discovered in mono lake that didn't have the same six primary atoms i think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary aspects of its energy metabolism we get to think about that the building blocks might be more different so the physical constraints even the planets have to have might be more different uh it seems really unlikely not not to mention interesting things that we've observed that are still unexplained as you've had guests on your show discussing tic tac and oh oh the ones that have visited yeah well let's dive right into that what do you make sense of the rich human psychology of uh there being hundreds of thousands probably millions of witnesses of ufos of different kinds on earth most of which i presume are conjured up by the human mind through the perception system some number might be true some number might be reflective of actual physical objects whether it's uh you know drones or testing military technology that's secret or otherworldly technology we make sense of all of that because it's gained quite a bit of popularity recently there's uh some sense in which that's um that's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of otherworldly creatures as a way to escape the dreariness of our of the human condition but in another sense it could be it really could be something truly exciting that a science should turn its eye towards so what do you where do you place it speaking of turning eye towards this is one of those super fascinating actually super consequential possibly topics that i wish i had more time to study and just haven't allocated so i i don't have firm beliefs on this because i haven't got to study it as much as i want so what i'm going to say comes from a superficial assessment um while we know there are plenty of things that people thought of as ufo sightings that we can fully write off we have other better explanations for them uh what we're interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for and then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is but holding it as unidentified and being being curious and earnest i think the the tic tac one is quite interesting and made it in major media recently but i don't know if you ever saw the disclosure project a guy named steven greer organized a bunch of mostly us military and some commercial flight people who had direct observation and classified information uh disclosing it at a cnn briefing and so you saw high-ranking generals admirals fighter pilots all describing things that they saw on radar with visual uh with their own eyes or cameras and also describing some phenomena that had some consistency across different people and i find this interesting enough that i think it would be silly to just dismiss it um and specifically like we can we can ask the question how much of it is natural phenomena ball lightning or something like that and this is why i'm more interested in what uh fighter pilots and astronauts and people who are trained in being able to identify uh flying objects and um atmospheric phenomena have to say about it i think the thing then you you could say well are they more advanced military craft is it some kind of you know human craft the interesting thing that a number of them describe is something that's kind of like right angles at speed or not right angles acute angles at speed but something that looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes sense for us i don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that even in really deep uh underground black projects now one could say okay well could it be a hologram well would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it and so uh i don't know i think there's enough i mean and for that to be a massive coordinated psyop is it as interesting and ridiculous in a way as the idea that it's ufos from some extra planetary source so it's up there on the interesting topics to me there if it is at all alien technology it is the dumbest version of alien technology it's so far away it's like the old old crappy vhs tapes of alien technology these are like crappy drones that just floated or even like space to the level of like space junk because it is so close to our human technology we talk about it moves in ways that's uh that's unlike what we understand about physics but it still has very similar kind of geometric notions and something that we humans can perceive with our eyes all those kinds of things i feel like alien technology most likely would be something that we would not be able to perceive not because they're hiding but because it's so far advanced that it would be much it would be beyond the cognitive capabilities of us humans just as you were saying as per your answer for aliens summarizing earth it's uh the starting assumption is they have similar perception systems they have similar cognitive capabilities and that very well may not be the case let me ask you about staying in aliens for just a little longer because i think it's a good transition talking about governments and human societies do you think if a u.s government or any government was in possession of an alien spacecraft or of information related to alien spacecraft they would have the capacity structurally would they have the the processes would they be able to uh communicate that to the public effectively or would they keep it secret in the room and do nothing with it both of uh to try to preserve military secrets but also because of the incompetence that's inherent to bureaucracies or either we can certainly see when certain things become declassified 25 or 50 years later that there were things that the public might have wanted to know that were kept secret for a very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security um which is also a nice source of plausible deniability for um people covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic um other purposes there are there's a scientist at stanford who supposedly um got some material that was recovered from area 51 type area did analysis on it using i believe electron microscopy and a couple other methods and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy um that was something we didn't currently have the ability to do was not naturally occurring so there i've heard some things and again like i said i'm not going to stand behind any of these because i haven't done the level of study to have high confidence um i think what you said also about would it be super low-tech alien craft like would they necessarily move their atoms around in space or might they do something more interesting than that might they be able to uh have a different relationship to the concept of space or information or consciousness or um one of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate and turn in a way that looks non-inertial but also disappear so there's a question as to like the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive and it could be possible to some people run a hypothesis that they create intentional amounts of exposure as an invitation of a particular kind um who knows interesting field we tend to assume like seti that's listening out for aliens out there i've just been recently reading more and more about gravitational waves and you have orbiting black holes that orbit each other they generate ripples in space time on my uh for fun at night when i lay in bed i think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they not not the low magnitude they are as it when they reach earth but get closer to the black holes because they'll basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions including time so it's actually ripples through space time that they generate why is it that you couldn't use that it travels the speed of light travels that it's a very weird thing to say when you're when you're uh morphing space-time it's it's a comp it's it's you could argue it's faster than the speed of light so if you're able to communicate by to someone enough energy to generate black holes and to orbit the uh to force them to orbit each other why not travel as the ripples in space-time whatever the hell that means somehow combined with wormholes so if you're able to communicate through like we don't think of uh gravitational waves that's something you can communicate with because the the radio will be have to be the side a very large size and very dense but perhaps that's it you know perhaps that's one way to communicate it's a very effective way and that would explain like we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that of the physics that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale i think you just jumped up the kardashev scale so far you're not just harnessing the power of a star but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes um i i that's way above my physics pay grade to think about including even uh non-rotating black hole versions of trans warp travel um i think you know you can talk with eric more about that i think he has better ideas on it than i do my hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability to get to other habitable planets in time and even more than that in the list of possible solutions of uh how to improve human civilization uh orbiting black holes is not in the on the first page for you and not on the first page okay i bet you did not expect us to start this conversation here but i'm glad the places it went i am excited on a much smaller scale of uh mars europa or titan or venus potentially having very like bacteria like life forms just on a on a small human level it's a little bit scary but mostly really exciting that there might be life elsewhere in the volcanoes and the oceans all around us teaming having little societies and whether there's properties about that kind of life that's somehow different than ours i don't know would be more exciting if those colonies of single cell type organisms what would be more exciting if they're different or they're the same if they're the same that means through the rest of the universe there's life forms like us something like us everywhere if they're different that's also really exciting because there's life forms everywhere they're not like us that's a little bit scary i don't know what's scary actually i think both scary and exciting no matter what right the idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us to open our aperture on what life and consciousness and and self-replicating possibilities could look like the question on are they different or the same obviously there's lots of life here that is the same in some ways and different in other ways um when you take the thing that we call an invasive species is something that's still pretty the same hydrocarbon based thing but co-evolved with co-selective pressures in a certain environment we move it to another environment it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because it's just different enough that it messes up the self-stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem so the question of are they would they be different in ways where we could still figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere together or fundamentally not fundamentally the uh nature of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep question well we offline talked about mimetic theory right it seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even we can coexist on different planes uh it seems like a a good thing if we're close enough together to where we'd be competing then it's you're getting into the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things to where we would uh one of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without even even accidentally even accidentally if we just had a self-replicating single-celled kind of creature that happened to not work well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that god introduced because it either output something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated faster and mutated faster it wouldn't be a um memetic theory conflict theory kind of harm it would just be uh a von neumann machine a self-replicating machine that was fundamentally incompatible with these kinds of self-replicating systems with faster ooda loops for one final time putting your alien slash god hat on and you look at human civilization the do you think uh about the 7.8 billion people on earth as individual little creatures individual little organisms or do you think of us as uh one organism with the collective intelligence what's the proper framework through which to analyze it again as an alien so that i know where you're coming from would you have asked the question the same way before the industrial revolution before the agricultural revolution when there were half a billion people and no telecommunications connecting them i would indeed ask the question the same way but i would be less confident about uh about your conclusions um it would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time but i was nevertheless asked it the same way yes well let's go back further and smaller then rather than just a single human or the entire human species let's look at uh in a relatively isolated tribe yes in the relatively isolated probably sub dunbar number sub 150 people tribe do i look at that as one entity where evolution is selecting for based on group selection or do i think of it as 150 individuals that are interacting in some way well could those individuals exist without the group no the evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection and individual humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever uh aren't what was selected for and so i think the ore is the wrong frame i think it's individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of they're also dependent upon and being affected by the group that they're part of and so this now starts to get in deep into political theories also which is theories that orient towards the collective at different scales whether a tribal scale or an empire or nation state or something and ones that orient towards the individual liberalism and stuff like that and i think there's very obvious failure modes on both sides and so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them the relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how to have a virtuous process between those so a good social system would be one where the organism of the individual and the organism of the group of individuals is they're both synergistic to each other so what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned but there is nevertheless an individual they're not it's uh it's a matter of degrees i suppose but what is uh what defines a human more the the social network within the which they've been brought up through which they've developed their intelligence or is it their own sovereign individual self like what's your intuition of how much not just for evolutionary survival but as intellectual beings how much do we need others for our development yeah i think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of sapient history i think the vast majority of sapient history is tribal like depending upon your early human model two or three hundred thousand years of homo sapiens and little tribes where they depended upon that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was was fatal i think they and our whole evolutionary genetic history is in that environment and the amount of time we've been out of it is is relatively so tiny and then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more and the big kind of giant market complex where i can provide something to the market to get money to be able to get other things from the market where it seems like i don't need anyone it's almost like disintermediating our sense of need even though even though you're in my ability to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions of people over six continents to be able to run the supply chains it made all the stuff that we depend on but we don't notice that we depend upon them they all seem fungible um if you take a baby obviously that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom was it dependent or dependent upon each other right without two two parents at minimum and they depended upon other people but if we take that baby and we put it out in the wild it obviously dies so if we let it grow up for a little while the minimum amount of time where it starts to have some autonomy and then we put it out in the wild and if this has happened a few times it doesn't learn language and it doesn't learn the artic the small motor articulation that we learn it doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up having that is socialized so i think i think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us um is it possible that uh it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole thing the whole thing is the connection between us humans and that were we're uh no better than apes without our human connections because that that thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society and how to progress forward if the connections are fundamental i just have to object to the no better than apes because better here i think you mean a specific thing which means have capacities that are fundamentally different then i think apes also depend upon troops um yes and i i think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of um ethical sense ends up having heaps of problems we'll table that we can come back to it but we say what is unique about homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals we currently inhabit the biosphere with and i'm saying it that way because there were other early hominids that had some of these capacities we believe our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results of a certain type of capacity for abstraction and other animals will use tools but they don't evolve the tools they use they keep using the same types of tools that they basically can find so a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to and it'll even notice that a sharper rock will cut it better and experientially it'll use the sharper rock and if you even give it a knife it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the effectiveness but it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why one is sharper than the other what is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to invent a sharper thing that same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract representation which makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways so i do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection of what we are as a species i wonder if that coordination that connection is actually the thing that gives birth to consciousness that gives birth to well let's start with self awareness more like theory of mind theory of mind yeah you know i i i suppose there's experiments that show that there's other mammals that have a very crude theory of mind i'm not sure maybe dogs something like that but actually dogs probably has to do with that they co-evolved with humans see it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the way we think about it is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness i have a inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures that that doesn't come uh with this with the hardware and the software any in the beginning that's like uh that's learned as an effective uh tool for communication almost like we we think we i think we think uh that consciousness is fundamental and uh maybe it's not there's a a bunch of folks kind of criticize the idea that the illusion of consciousness is consciousness that it is just a facade we use to to uh help us construct theories of mind you almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being and that experience you want to richly experience it as an individual person so that i could empathize with your experience i find that notion compelling mostly because it allows you to then create robots that become conscious not by being quote unquote conscious but by just learning to fake it till they make it is uh creative you know present a facade of consciousness and with the with the task of uh making that facade very convincing to us humans and thereby it will become conscious have a sense ins that in some way that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing to humans is there some element of that that you uh do you find convincing this is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the aliens was um we went from aliens to consciousness this is not the trajectory i was expecting nor you but let us walk a while we we can walk a while and i don't think we will do it justice so what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self-reflective awareness what do we mean by awareness qualia theory of mind there's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly different things and um subjectivity first person i don't remember exactly the quote but i remember when reading when sam harris wrote the book free will and then dennett critiqued it and then there was some writing back and forth between the two because normally they're on the same side of kind of arguing for critical thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy of science against um supernatural ideas and here dennett believed there is something like free will he is a determinist compatibilist but no consciousness an ex a radical limitativist and sam was saying no there is consciousness but there's no free will and that's like the most fundamental kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on but neither of them could say it was because the other one didn't understand the philosophy of science or logical fallacies and and they kind of spoke past each other and at the end if i remember correctly sam said something that i thought was quite insightful which was to the effect of it seems it because they weren't making any progress in shared understanding it seems that we simply have different intuitions about this and what you could see was that what the words meant right at the level of symbol grounding might be quite different one of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that what is being referenced and then also different associations of what the words mean this is why when trying to address these things charles sanders purse said the first philosophy has to be semiotics because if you don't get semiotics right we end up importing different ideas and bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using and then it's very hard to do epistemology or ontology together uh so i'm saying this to say why i don't think we're gonna get very far is i think we would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words and fundamental concepts well and also allowing our minds to drift together for time so that our definitions of these terms align i think there's some there's a beauty that some people enjoy with sam that he is quite stubborn on his definitions of terms without often clearly revealing that definition so in his mind he can like you could sense that he can deeply understand what he means exactly by term like free will and consciousness and you're right he's very he's very specific in in fascinating ways that not only does he think that free will is an illusion he thinks he's able not thinks he says he's able to just remove himself from the experience of free will and just be like for minutes at a time hours at a time like really experience as if he has no free will like he's a leaf flowing down the river and given that he's very sure that consciousness is fundamental so here's a this conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating and yet there's no ability to control and make any decisions for its for itself it's only a um the decisions have all been made there's some aspect to which the terminology there perhaps is the problem so that's a particular kind of meditative experience and the people in the vedantic tradition and some of the buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences and somewhat similar conclusions some slightly different there are other types of phenomenal experience that uh are the phenomenal experience of pure agency and you know like the the catholic theologian but evolutionary theorist terra deshardon describes this and that rather than a creator agent god in the beginning there's a creative impulse or a creative process and he was would go into a type of meditation that identified as the pure essence of that kind of creative process and i think the types of experiences we've had and then one the types of experience we've had make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding the other thing is the types of experiences we have can't not be interpreted through our existing interpretive frames and most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown even to us some of them and so so this is a tricky this is a tricky topic um so i guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it but i want to come back to what the um impulse was that was interesting around what is consciousness and how does it relate to us as social beings and how does it relate to the possibility of consciousness with it ais right you're keeping us on track which is uh which is wonderful you're a wonderful hiking partner okay yes let's go back to the initial impulse of uh what is consciousness and how does the social impulse connected consciousness is consciousness a consequence of that social connection i'm gonna state a position and not argue it because it's honestly like it's a long hard thing to argue and we can totally do it another time if you want i don't subscribe to consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks obviously a lot of people do obviously the the philosophy of science orients um towards that in not absolutely but largely um i think of the nature of first person the universe of first person of of qualia as uh experience sensation desire emotion phenomenology the but the felt sense not the we we say emotion and we think of a neurochemical pattern or an endocrine pattern but all of the physical stuff the third person stuff has position and momentum and charge and stuff like that that is measurable repeatable i think of the nature of first person and third person as ontologically orthogonal to each other not reducible to each other they're different kinds of stuff and so i think about the evolution of third person that we're quite used to thinking about from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to on and on i think about a similar kind of and corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from the way whitehead talked about kind of prehension or proto-qualia in earlier phases of self-organization into higher orders of it and that there's correspondence but that neither like the like the idealists do we reduce third person to first person which is what idealists do or neither like the physical lists or do we reduce first person to third person obviously baum talked about uh an implicat order that was deeper then and gave rise to the explicat order of both um nagel talks about something like that i have a slightly different sense of that but again i'll just kind of not argue how that occurs for a moment and say so rather than say does consciousness emerge from i'll talk about do higher capacities of consciousness emerge in relationship with so it's not first person as a category emerging from third person but increased complexity within the nature of first person and third person co-evolving um do i think that it seems relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper phenomenology more complex where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion to social awareness to abstract cognition to self-reflexive abstract cognition yeah but i wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness i would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to increased complexity and the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal we can get into the arguments for why that often is the case so would i say that obviously the sapien brain is pretty unique and a single sapient now has that right even if it took sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain so the group made it now that brain is there now if i take the single person with that brain out of the group and try to raise them in a box they'll still not be very interesting even with the brain but the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship um can have interesting things emerge so do i think that the the human biology types of human consciousness and types of social interaction all co-emerged and co-evolved yes as a small aside as you're talking about the biology let me comment that i spent this is what i do this is what i do with my life this is why i will never accomplish anything as i spent much of the morning trying to calc trying to do research on how many computations the brain performs and how many um how much energy it uses versus the state-of-the-art cpus and gpus now arriving at uh about 20 quadrillion so that's two to the 10 to the 16 computations so synaptic firings per second that the brain does and that's about a million times faster than the uh uh the let's say the 20 thread state of the arts intel cpu the uh the 10th generation and then there's similar calculation for the for the uh for the gpu and all ended up also trying to compute that it takes 10 watts to run the brain about and then what does that mean in terms of calories per day kilocalories that's about to fit for an average uh human brain that's 250 to 300 calories a day and so it ended up being a calculation where you're doing about 20 quadrillion calculations uh that that are fueled by something like depending on your diet three bananas so three bananas results in uh in a computation that's about a million times more powerful than the current stadiak computers now let's take that one step further there's some assumptions built in there the assumption is that one what the brain is doing is just computation two the the relevant computations or synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than synaptic firings that we have to to factor so um i'm forgetting his name right now there's a very uh famous neuroscientist at stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of the pioneering work on glial cells and showed that his assessment glial cells did a huge amount of the thinking not just neurons and it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and what consciousness is you look at demacio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what we would consider consciousness or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system completely happening in endocrine process involving lots of other cells and signal communication you talk to somebody like penrose who you've had on the show and even though the penrose hammerhoff conjecture's probably not right is there something like that that might be the case where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum computation of microtubules i'm not arguing for any of those i'm arguing that we don't know how big the unknown unknown set is well at the very least this is this has become like an infomercial for the human brain at the very but wait there's more at the very least the three bananas buys you a million times that's the very last that's very impressive and then you could have uh and then the synaptic firings we're referring to is strictly the electrical signals that could be the mechanical transmission information like this chemical transmission of information there's there's all kinds of other stuff going on and then there's memory that's built in that's also all tied in not to mention which i'm learning more and more about it's not just about the uh the neurons it's also about the immune system that's somehow helping with the computation so it's the entirety and the entire body is helping with the computation so the three bananas it could buy you a lot it could buy you a lot but on the topic of sort of uh the greater degrees of complexity emerging in consciousness i think few things are as beautiful and inspiring as taking a step outside of the human brain just looking at systems where simple rules create incredible complexity uh not create incredible complexity emerges so one of the simplest things to do that with is the cellular automata and there's i don't know what it is and maybe you can speak to it we can certainly we will certainly talk about the implications of this but there's so few things that are as awe-inspiring to me as knowing the rules of a system and not being able to predict what the heck it looks like and it creates incredibly beautiful complexity that when zoomed out on looks like there's actual organisms doing things that are much uh that operate on scale much higher than the underlying mechanism so with cellular automata that's cells that are born and die born or die and they only know about each other's neighbors and there's simple rules that govern that interaction of birth and death and then they create at scale organisms that look like they take up hundreds or thousands of cells and they're moving they're moving around they're communicating they're sending signals to each other and you forget at moments at a time before you remember that the simple rules on cells is all that it took to create that that's it's sad in that we can't come up with a simple description of that system that generalizes the behavior of the large organisms we can only come up we can only hope to come up with the thing the fundamental physics or the fundamental rules of that system i suppose it's sad that we can't predict everything we know about the mathematics of those systems it seems like we can't really in a nice way like economics tries to do to predict how this whole thing will unroll but it's beautiful because how simple it is underneath it all so what do you make of the emergence of complexity from simple rules what the hell is that about yeah well we can see that something like flocking behavior the murmuration can can be computer-coded it's not a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really amazing types of complexity and the whole field of complexity science and some of the sub disciplines like stigma g are are studying how following fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal do ant colonies do this amazing thing where the what you might describe is the organizational computational capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual ants is doing i am not um anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automata as i would like unfortunately i in terms of topics that i would like to get to and haven't like et's more wolfram's a new kind of science i have only skimmed and read reviews of and not read the whole thing or his newer work since um but his idea of the four basic kind of categories of uh emergent phenomena that can come from cellular automata and that one of them is kind of interesting and looks a lot like complexity rather than just chaos or homogeneity or self-termination or whatever i think this is very interesting it does not instantly make me think that uh biology is operating on a similarly small set of rules and or the human consciousnesses i'm i'm not that reductionistly oriented and um so if you look at say santa fe institute one of the co-founders stuart kaufman um his work he should you should really get him on your show so a lot of the questions that you like one of kaufman's you know more recent books after investigations and some of the real fundamental stuff was called reinventing the sacred and it had to do with some of these exact questions uh in kind of non-reductionist approach but that is not just silly hippie-ism um and he was very interested in highly non-ergotic systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior over a small period of time and predict what the behavior of subsets over a longer period of time would do um and then going further someone who spent some time at santa fe institute and then kind of made a whole new field that you should have on dave snowden who some people call the father of anthrocomplexity or what is the complexity unique to humans uh he says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't cut it like we we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using stigma g like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors but it really doesn't work for trying to make sense of the sistine chapel and picasso and general relativity creation and stuff like that and it's because the the termites are not doing abstraction forecasting deep into the future and making choices now based on forecasts of the future not just adaptive signals in the moment an evolutionary code from history that's really different right like making choices now that can factor deep modeling of the future and with humans our uniqueness one to the next in terms of response to similar stimuli is much higher than it is with a termite um one of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely low they're basically fungible within a class right the different classes but within a class they're basically fungible and their system uses that very high numbers and lots of um loss right like that the termite feels that way don't you think we humans are deceiving ourselves about our uniqueness perhaps it doesn't just isn't there some sense in which this emerges just creates different higher and higher levels of abstraction where every at every layer each organism feels unique is that possible that we're all equally dumb but at different scales no i think uniqueness is evolving i think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other than cells of the same type are and i think that cells are more similar to each other than humans are i think that highly k k-selected species are more unique than our selected species so they're different evolutionary processes they are selected species where you have a whole a lot of death and very high birth rates you're not looking for as much individuality within or individual possible expression to cover the evolutionary search space within an individual you're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game um so yeah i would say there's probably more difference between one orca and the next than there is between one cape buffalo and the next given that it will be interesting to get your thoughts about mimetic theory where we're imitating each other in the context of this idea of uniqueness how much truth is there to that uh how compelling is this world view to you of gerardian mimetic theory of desire where maybe you can explain it from your perspective but it seems like imitating each other is the fundamental property of the behavior of human civilization well imitation is not unique to humans right monkeys imitate um so a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans humans do more of it uh it's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment um monkeys can learn new behaviors new we've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching other apes sign language um so that's a kind of mimesis right kind of learning through imitation and that needs to happen if they need to learn or develop capacities that are not just coded by their genetics right so within the same genome they're learning new things based on the environment and so based on someone else learn something first and so let's pick it up uh how much a creature is the result of just its genetic programming and how much it's learning is a very interesting question and i think this is a place where humans really show up radically different than everything else and you can see it in the in the neonate how long we're basically fetal um that a the closest ancestors to us if we look at a chimp a chimp can hold on to its mother's fur while she moves around day one and obviously we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes the fact that it takes a human a year to be walking and it takes horse 20 minutes and you say how many multiples of 20 minutes go into a year like that's a long period of helplessness that it wouldn't work for a horse right like they or anything else and and not only could we not hold on to mom in the first day it's three months before we can move our head volitionally um so it's like why why are we embryonic for so long basically that it's like like it's still fetal on the outside had to be because couldn't keep growing inside and actually ever get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright um so here's a place where there's a co-evolution of the pattern of humans specifically here are our neotony and what that pertends to learning with our being tool-making and environment modifying creatures which is because we have the abstraction to make tools we change our environments more than other creatures change their environments the next most environment modifying creature to us is like a beaver and then you we're in la you fly into lax and you look at the just orthogonal grid going on forever in all directions and you know we've recently come into the anthropocene where the surface of the earth is changing more from human activity than geological activity and then beavers and you're like okay wow we're really in a class of our own in terms of environments modifying yeah um so as soon as we started tool making we were able to change our environments much more radically we could put on clothes and go to a cold place right and this is really important because we actually went and became apex predators in every environment we functioned like apex predators the polar bear can't leave the arctic right and the lion can't leave the savannah and orca can't leave the ocean and we went became apex predators in all those environments because of our tool creation capacity we could become better predators than them adapted to the environment or at least with our tools adapted to the environment so in every aspect towards any organism in any environment we're incredibly good at becoming apex predators yes and nothing else can do that kind of thing there there is no other apex predator that you see the other apex predator is only getting better at being a predator through evolutionary process that's super slow and that super slow process creates co-selective process with their environment so as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster it eats more of the slow prey the genes of the fast prey and breed and the prey becomes faster and so there's this kind of balancing and we in because of our tool making we increased our predatory capacity faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it as a result we start outstripping the environment and extincting species following stone tools and going and becoming apex predator everywhere this is why we can't keep applying apex predator series because we're not an apex predator we're an apex predator but we're something much more than that like just for an example the top apex predator in the world in orca and orca can eat one big fish at a time like one tuna and it'll miss most of the time or one seal and we can put a mile-long drift net out on a single boat and pull up an entire school of them right we can deplete the entire oceans of them that's not an orca right like that's not an apex predator um and that's not even including that we can then genetically engineer different creatures we can extinct species we can devastate whole ecosystems we can make built worlds that have no natural things that are just human built worlds we can build new types of natural creatures synthetic life so we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now but we're still behaving as apex predators and little gods that behave as apex predators caused us a problem kind of core to my assessment of the world so what does it mean to be a predator so a predator is somebody that effectively can mine the resources from a place so for their survival or is it also just purely like higher level objectives of violence and what is can predators be predators towards the same each other towards the same species like we think are we using the word predator sort of generally which then connects to conflict and uh military conflict violent conflict in the space of human species obviously we can say that plants are mining the resources of their environment in a particular way using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and nitrogen and carbon out of the air and like that um and we can say herbivores are being able to mine and concentrate that so i wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator predator is you know uh generally being defined as mining other animals right we don't consider herbivores predators but um animal which requires some type of violence capacity because animals move plants don't move so requires some capacity to uh overtake something that can move and try to get away um we'll go back to the gerard zing and we'll come back here why are we neon this why are we embryonic for so long because are we did we just move from the savannah to the arctic and we need to learn new stuff if we came genetically programmed we would not be able to do that are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain or are we texting what is the adaptive behavior horses today in the wild and horses ten thousand years ago are doing pretty much the same stuff and so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then change our environments so quickly and other animals are largely the result of their environment but we're environment modifying so rapidly we need to come without too much programming so we can learn the environment we're in learn the language right which is uh going to be very important learn the tool making learn the um and so we have a very long period of relative helpless of helplessness because we aren't coded how to behave yet because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful to that particular time so our mimesis is not it's not unique to humans but the total amount of it is really unique and this is also where the uniqueness can go up right is because we are less just the result of the genetics and that means the kind of learning through history that they got coded in genetics and more the result of it's almost like our hardware selected for software right like if evolution is kind of doing these think of as a hardware selection i have problems with computer metaphors for biology but i'll use this one here um that we have not had hardware changes since the beginning of sapiens but our world is really really different and that's all changes in software right changes in on the same fundamental genetic substrate what we're doing with these brains and minds and bodies and social groups and like that and so um now gerard specifically was looking at when we watch other people talking so we learn language you and i would have a hard time learning mandarin today it would take a lot of work we'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff but a baby learns it instantly without anyone even really trying to teach it just through mimesis so it's a it's a powerful thing they're obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their attention is allocated that but they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of stuff through mimesis one of the things that george says is they're also learning what to want and they learn what to want they learn desire by watching what other people want and so intrinsic to this people end up wanting what other people want and if we can't have what other people have without taking it away from them then that becomes a source of conflict so the mimesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict and that then the conflict energy within a group of people will build over time this is a very very crude interpretation of the theory can we just pause on that for people who are not familiar and for me who hasn't i'm loosely familiar but i haven't internalized it but every time i think about it's a very compelling view of the world whether it's true or not it's quite it's like when you take everything freud says as truth is a very interesting way to think about the world in the same way thinking about the memetic theory of desire that everything we want is imitation of other people's wants we don't have any original wants we're constantly imitating others and so and not just others but you know others were exposed to so there's these like little local pockets however defined local of people like imitating each other and uh one that's super empowering because then you can pick which group you can join like what what do you want to imitate it's it's uh it's the old like uh you know whoever your friends are that's what your life is gonna be like that's really powerful i mean it's depressing that we're so unoriginal but it's also liberating in that if this holds true that we can choose our life by choosing the people we hang out with so okay thoughts that are very compelling that seem like they're more absolute than they actually are end up also being dangerous we want communism um i'm gonna discuss here where i think we need to amend this particular theory but specifically you just said something that everyone who's paid attention knows is true experientially which is who you're around affects who you become and as as libertarian and self-determining and sovereign as we'd like to be um everybody i think knows that if you got put in a maximum security prison aspects of your personality would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there right you would become different if you were if if you grew up in darfur versus finland you would be different with your same genetics like just there's no real question about that um and that even today if you hang out in a place with ultra marathoners as your roommates or um all people who are obese as your roommates the statistical likelihood of what happens to your fitness is pretty clear right like the behavioral science of this is pretty clear so uh the whole saying we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around i think the more self-reflective someone is the more time they spend by themselves in self-reflection the less this is true but it's still true so one of the best things someone can do to become more self-determined is be self-determined about the environments they want to put themselves in because to the degree that there is some self-determination and some determination by the environment don't be fighting an environment that is predisposing you in bad directions try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want in turn try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things for those around you or perhaps also to there there's probably interesting ways to play with this you could probably put yourself like form connections that have this perfect tension in all directions to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want because the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're free to choose whichever one so if there's enough tension as opposed to everybody align like a flock of birds yeah you i mean you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced um so if you have someone who is extremely oriented to self-empowerment and someone who's extremely oriented to kind of empathy and compassion both the dialectic of those is better than either of them on their own um if you have both of them inhabiting being inhabited better than you by the same person spending time around that person will probably do well for you i think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools which is i think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and their not just cognitive learning but their meaningful problem-solving communication and civic capacity capacity to participate as a citizen with other people and making the world better is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time and so in the hegelian sense if you have a thesis you have an antithesis so maybe we have libertarianism on one side and marxist kind of communism on the other side and one is arguing that the individual is the unit of choice and so we want to uh increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they make more agentic choices it'll produce a better hole for everybody the other side saying well the individuals are conditioned by their environment who would choose to be born into darfur rather than finland um so we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because that the environment conditions individuals so you have a thesis and an antithesis and then hegel's ideas you have a synthesis which is a kind of higher order truth that understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do and so it is actually at a higher order of complexity so the first part would be can i steal man each of these can i argue each one well enough that the proponents of it are like totally you got that and not just argue it rhetorically but can i inhabit it where i can try to see and feel the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would because once i do then i don't want to screw those people because there's truth in it right and i'm not going to go back to war with them i'm going to go to finding solutions it could actually work at a higher order if i don't go to a higher order then there's war and but then the higher order thing would be well it seems like the individual does affect the commons and the collective and other people it also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least statistically and i can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto um and pulled himself up by his bootstraps but i can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently than most people born into the hamptons and so unless you want to argue that and have you take your child from the hamptons and put them in the ghetto then like come on be realistic about this thing so how do we make we don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals right so the welfare argument but we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better we want we don't want individuals where their self-expression and agency [ __ ] the environment and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever so can we make it to where individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning other individuals can we make it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty right that would be the synthesis so the thing that i'm coming to here is if people have that as a frame and sometimes it's not just thesis and antithesis it's like eight different views right can i steal man each view this is not just can i take the perspective but am i seeking them am i actively trying to inhabit other people's perspective then can i really try to essentialize it and argue the best points of it both the sense making about reality and the values why these values actually matter then just like i want to seek those perspectives then i want to seek is there a higher order set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense making of all of them simultaneously maybe i won't get it but i want to be seeking it and i want to be seeking progressively better ones so this is perspective seeking driving perspective taking and then seeking synthesis i think that that one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing would you put a title dialectic synthesis on that process because that seems to be such a part so like this rigorous empathy like like it's not just empathy it's empathy with the rigor like you really want to understand and and embody different world views and then try to find a higher order synthesis okay so i remember last night you told me when we first met uh you said that you looked in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had suffered in some ways that they had suffered and so you could trust them shared pathos right creates a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy so empathy is actually feeling the suffering of somebody else and feeling the the depth of their sentience i don't want to [ __ ] them anymore i may not hurt them i don't want to behave and i don't want my proposition to go through when i go and inhabit the perspective of the other people if they feel that's really going to mess them up right and so the rigorous empathy it's different than just compassion which is i generally care like i have a generalized care but i don't know what it's like to be them i can never know what it's like to be them perfectly and that there's a humility you have to have which is my most rigorous attempt is still not it my most rigorous attempt mine to know what it's like to be a woman is still not it i have no question that if i was actually a woman it would be different than my best guesses i have no question if i was actually black it's be different than my best guesses so there's a humility in that which keeps me listening because i don't think that i know fully but i want to and i'm going to keep trying better to and then i want to across them and then i want to say is there a way we can forward together and not have to be in war it has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds it could reconcile the partial sense making that everyone holds and they could offer a way forward that is more agreeable than the partial perspectives at war with each other but the so the more you succeed at this empathy with humility the more you're carrying the burden of their of other people's pain essentially it just goes back to the question of do i see us as one being or 7.8 billion i think the if i'm overwhelmed with my own pain i can't empathize that much because i don't have the bandwidth i don't have the capacity if i don't feel like i can do something about a particular problem in the world it's hard to feel it because it's just too devastating and so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic because they just don't feel the agency so as i actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency i also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of and in in benefit of so this way of living seems like a way of living that would solve a lot of problems in society from a cellular automata perspective so if you have a bunch of little like little agents behaving in this way my intuition there'll be interesting complexities that emerge but my intuition is it will create a society that's very different and recognizably better than the one we have today how much um like oh wait hold that question because i want to come back to it but this brings us back to gerard which we didn't answer the conflict theory yes because about how to get past the conflict theory yes you know the robert frost poem about the two paths he never has time to return back to the other we're gonna have to do that quite a lot we're gonna be uh living that poem over and over again but yes how how to uh let's return back okay so the rest of the argument goes you learn to want what other people want therefore fundamental conflict based in our desire because we want the thing that somebody else has and then people are conf they're in conflict over trying to get the same stuff power status attention physical stuff a mate whatever it is and then we learn the conflict by watching and so then the conflict becomes medic so the and you know we become on the palestinian side of the israeli side of the communist capitalist side or the left to right politically or whatever it is and until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds up so much that some type of violence is needed to get the bad guy whoever it is that we're gonna blame and you know george talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount of violence let's blame let's blame it a sec a scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were but if we all believe it then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy it's a really interesting concept by the way i mean you went you beautifully summarized it but the idea that there's a scapegoat that there's a this kind of thing naturally leads to a conflict and then they find the other some group that's the other that's either real artificial as the cause of the conflict well it's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in gerard is the mimesis of desire itself and how do we attack that how do we attack that it's our own desire so this now gets to something more like buddha said right which was desire as the cause of suffering um gerard and buddha would kind of agree in this way so and so but that's that explains i mean again it's a compelling description of human history that we do tend to come up with the other and uh okay kind of i just i just had such a funny experience with someone critiquing gerard the other day in such a um elegant and beautiful and simple way it's a a friend who's uh grew up aboriginal australian uh as a scholar of aboriginal social technologies he's like nah man gerard just made [ __ ] up about how tribes work like we come from a tribe we've got tens of thousands of years and we didn't have increasing conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone we'd have a little bit of conflict and then we would dance and then everybody'd be fine like we'd dance around the campfire everyone would like kind of physically get the energy out we'd look in each other's eyes we'd have positive bonding and then we're fine and nobody no scapegoats and i think that's called the joe rogan theory of desire which is uh he's like all all of human problems have to do with the fact that you don't do enough hard [ __ ] in your day yeah so maybe maybe you could just dance it because he says like doing exercising running on the treadmill gets gets all the demons out maybe just dancing gets all the demons out so this is why i say we have to be careful with taking an idea that seems too explanatory and then taking it as a given and then saying well now that we're stuck with the fact that conflict is inexorable because human because memetic desire and therefore how do we deal with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence well no the whole thing might be actually gibberish meaning it's only true in certain conditions and other conditions it's not true so the deeper question is under which conditions is that true under which conditions is it not true what do those other conditions make possible and look like and in general we should stay with really compelling models of reality because there's something about about our brains that these models become sticky and we can't even think outside of them so it's not that we stay away from them it's that we know that the model of reality is never reality that's the key thing humility again it goes back to just having the humility they don't have a perfect model of reality there's an ep the model of reality could never be reality the process of modeling is inherently information reduction and i can never show that the unknown unknown set has been factored um it's back to the cellular automata you can't you can't uh put the genie back in the bottle like when you realize it's unfortunately sadly impossible to um to create a model of cellular automata even if you know the basic rules that predict to even any degree of accuracy what uh um how that system will evolve which is fascinating mathematically sorry i i think about it quite a lot it's very annoying wolfram has this rule 30 like you should be able to predict it it's so simple but you can't predict what's going to be like there's a there's a problem he defines they try to predict some aspect of the middle middle column of the system just anything about it what's going to happen in the future and you can't you can't it sucks because then we can't make sense of this world you know really in of reality in a definitive way it's always like in the striving like it we're always striving yeah i don't think this sucks that so that's a feature not a bug well that's assuming a designer um i would say i don't think it sucks i think it's not only beautiful but maybe necessary for beauty the mess so you're uh so you're you disagree jordan peterson you should clean up your room see you like the room's messy it's uh it's essential for the for beauty it's not it's not okay i take i have no idea if it was intended this way and so i'm just interpreting it a way i like the commandment about having no false idols to me the way i interpret that that is meaningful is that re reality is sacred to me i have a reverence for reality but i know my best understanding of it is never complete i know my best model of it is a model where i tried to make some kind of predictive capacity by reducing the complexity of it to a set of stuff that i could observe and then a subset of that stuff that i thought was the causal dynamics and then some set of you know mechanisms that are involved and what we find is that it can be super useful like newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic curves and all kinds of super useful stuff and then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening at the cosmological scale or at a quantum scale and at each time what we're finding is uh we excluded stuff and it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics and the other kind of fundamental laws and the so models can be useful but they're never true with a capital t meaning they're never an actual real full they're never a complete description of what's happening in real systems they can be a complete description of what's happening in an artificial system that was the result of applying a model so the model of a circuit board and the circuit board are the same thing but i would argue that the model of a cell in the cell are not the same thing and i would say this is key to what we call complexity versus the complicated which is a distinction dave snowden made well in defining the difference between simple complicated complex and chaotic systems um but one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex system it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model can you elaborate on the complex versus the complicated complicated means we can fully explicate the face space of all the things that it can do we can program it uh all human not all for the most part human-built things are complicated they don't self-organize they don't self-repair they're not self-evolving and we can make a blueprint for them we're sorry for human systems for human technologies human technologies sorry okay so that are basically the application of models right right and engineering is kind of applied science science as the modeling process and but with but humans are complex complex stuff with biological type stuff and sociological type stuff it more has generator functions and even those can't be fully explicated then it has or our explication can't prove that it has closure of what would be in the unknown unknown set where we keep finding like oh it's just the genome oh well now it's the genome in the epigenome and then a recursive change on the epigenome because of the proteome and then there's mitochondrial dna and then virus is affected and [ __ ] right so it's like we get overexcited when we think we found the thing so on facebook you know how you can list your relationship as complicated it should actually say it's it's complex that's the more accurate description you uh self-terminating is a really interesting idea that you talk about quite a bit first of all what is a self-terminating system and i think you have a sense correct me if i'm wrong that human civilization as it currently is is a self-terminating system why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of what self-terminating means okay so if we look at human societies historically human civilizations uh it's not that hard to realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't exist anymore so they had a life cycle they died for some reason so we don't still have in the early egyptian empire or inca or maya or aztec or any of those right and so they they terminated sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside in war sometimes it seems like they self-terminate when we look at easter island it was a self-termination um so uh let's go ahead and take an island situation if i have an island and we're consuming the resources on that island faster than the resources can replicate themselves and there's a finite space there that system is going to self-terminate it's not going to be able to keep doing that thing because you'll get to a place of there's no resources left and then you get uh so now if i'm utilizing the resources faster than they can replicate or fasten they can replenish and i'm actually growing our population in the process i'm even increasing the rate of the utilization of resources i might get an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse the exponential curve rather than do an s curve or some other kind of thing so self-terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing its own substrate it is debasing what it depends upon so you're right that uh if you look at empires they rise and fall throughout human history but but not this time bro where this one's gonna last forever that's i like that idea i think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed we can't ensure that and so i think it's very important to understand it well so that we can have that be a designed outcome with somewhat decent probability so we're it's sort of in terms of consuming the resources on the island we're a clever bunch and we keep coming up especially when the on the horizon there is a termination point we keep coming up with clever ways of avoiding disaster of avoiding collapse of constructing this is where technological innovation this is where growth comes in coming up with different ways to improve productivity and the way society functions such that we consume less resources or get a lot more from the resources we have so there's some sense in which there's a human ingenuity is a source for optimism about the future of this particular system that that may not be self-terminating if if there's more innovation than there is consumption so over consumption of resources just one way i think can self-terminate we're just kind of starting here but um there are reasons for optimism and pessimism then they're both worth understanding and there's failure modes on understanding either without the other as as we mentioned previously there there's what i would call naive techno optimism naive techno capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't want to live in the dark ages and tech has done all this awesome stuff and um we know the proponents of those models uh and this stuff is going to kind of keep getting better of course there are problems but human ingenuity rises to it supply and demand will solve the problems whatever would you put a red car as well on that or uh in that bucket is there some specific people you have in mind or naive optimism is truly naive to where you're essentially just have an optimism that's blind to any kind of realities of the way technology progresses i don't think that anyone is who thinks about it and writes about it is perfectly naive gotcha but there might be it's a platonic ideal there might be a bias in the nature of the assessment i would also say there's kind of naive techno pessimism and there are critics of technology i mean you read the unabomber's manifesto on why technology can't not result in our self-termination so we have to take it out before it gets any further um but also if you read a lot of the x-risk community you know bostrom and friends uh it's like our total number of existential risks and the total probability of them is going up and so i think that there are we have to hold together where our positive possibilities and our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say for the positive possibilities to be realized long term all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen any of the catastrophic risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from occurring so how do we ensure that none of them happen if we want to say let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse so again collapse theory it's worth looking at books like the collapse of complex societies by joseph tainter it does an analysis of that many of the societies fell for for internal institutional decay civilizational decay reasons beaudriard in simulation and simulacra looks at a very different way of looking at how institutional decay and the collective intelligence of a system happens and it becomes kind of more internally parasitic on itself obviously jared diamond made a more popular book called collapse um and as we were mentioning the anti-catheria mechanism has been getting attention in the news lately but it's like a 2 000 year old clock right like like metal gears and does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress um and from a society that was relatively technologically advanced um so what i'm interested in here is being able to say okay well why did previous societies fail can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that isn't just trying to solve one type of failure but solve the underlying things that generate the failures as a whole are there some underlying generator functions or patterns that would make a system self-terminating and can we solve those and have that be the kernel of a new civilizational model that is not self-terminating and can we even be able to actually look at the categories of x-rays we're aware of and see that we actually have resilience in the presence of those not just resilience but anti-fragility and i would say for the optimism to be grounded it has to actually be able to understand the risk space well and have adequate solutions for it so can we try to dig into some basic intuitions about the underlying sources of catastrophic failures of the system and over consumption that's built into self-terminating systems so both the over consumption which is like the slow death and then there's the fast death of nuclear war and all those kinds of things agi biotech bioengineering nanotechnology now my favorite nanobots okay nanobots are my favorite because it sounds so cool to me that i could just know that i would be one of the scientists that would be full steam ahead in building them without sufficiently thinking about the negative consequences i would definitely be i would be podcasting all about the negative consequences but but when i go back home i'd be i just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant of vape no offense to apes uh so i want to backtrack on my previous uh comments about uh negative comments about apes uh that i have that sense of excitement that uh would result in problems so sorry a lot of things said but what can we start to pull a thread because you've also provided kind of a beautiful general approach to this which is this dialectic synthesis or just rigorous empathy whatever whatever word we want to put to it that seems to be from the individual perspective is one way to sort of live in the world as we try to figure out how to construct non-self-terminating systems so what what are some underlying sources yeah first i have to say um i i actually really respect drexler for emphasizing grey goo and engines of creation back in the day um to make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the risks of the the nanotech um as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be um there's definitely game theoretic advantage to those who focus on the opportunities and don't focus on the risks or pretend there aren't risks um because they get to market first um and then they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is to the commons or whatever happened to have it other people are going to have to solve those but now they have the power and capital associated the person who looked at the risks and tried to do better design and go slower um is probably not going to move into positions of as much power influences quickly so this one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the the bad game theoretic dispositions in the system relative to its own um stability and the key aspect to that sorry to interrupt is the externalities generated yes what flavors of catastrophic risk are we talking about here what's your favorite flavor in terms of ice cream so mine is coconut nobody seems to like coconut ice cream so ice cream aside what's uh what are you most worried about if there's a catastrophic risk that will help us kind of um make concrete the the the discussion we're having about how to fix this whole thing yeah i think it's worth taking a historical perspective briefly to just kind of orient everyone to it we don't have to um go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all of civilization but to just recognize that for all of human history as far as we're aware there were existential risks to civilizations and they happened right like there were civilizations that were killed in war that tribes that were killed in tribal warfare or whatever so uh people faced existential risks to the group that they identified with it's just those were local phenomena right they it wasn't a fully global phenomena so an empire could fall and surrounding empires didn't fall maybe they came in and filled the space the first time that we were able to think about catastrophic risk not from like a solar flare or something that we couldn't control but from something that humans would actually create at a global level was world war ii in the bomb because it was the first time that we had tech big enough that could actually mess up everything at a global level it could mess up habitability we just weren't powerful enough to do that before it's not that we didn't behave in ways that would have done it we just only behaved in those ways at the scale we could affect and so it's important to get that there's the entire world before world war ii where we don't have the ability to make a non-habitable biosphere non-inhabitable for us and then there's world war ii and the beginning of a completely new phase where global human induced catastrophic risk is now a real thing and that was such a big deal that it changed the entire world in a really fundamental way which is you know when you study history it's amazing how big a percentage of history is studying war right in the the history of wars you said european history whatever it's generals and wars and empire expansions and and so the the major empires near each other never had really long periods of time where they weren't engaged in war or preparation for or something like that that was humans don't have a good precedent in the post tribal phase the civilization phase of being able to solve conflicts without war for very long world war ii was the first time where we could have a war that no one could win and so the superpowers couldn't fight again they couldn't do a real kinetic war they could do diplomatic wars and cold war type stuff and they could fight proxy wars through other countries that didn't have the big weapons and so mutually assured destruction and like coming out of world war ii we actually realized that nation states couldn't prevent world war and so we needed a new type of supervening government in addition to nation states which was the whole bretton woods world the united nations the world bank the imf the globalization trade type agreements mutually assured destruction that was how do we have some coordination beyond just nation states between them since we have to stop war between at least the superpowers and it was pretty successful given that we've had like 75 years of no superpower on superpower war um we've had lots of proxy wars during that time we've had you know cold war and i would say we're in a new phase now where the bretton woods solution is basically over almost over can you describe the breathless solution yeah so the bretton woods the series of agreements for how uh the nations would be able to engage with each other in a solution other than war um was these igos these intergovernmental organizations and was the idea of globalization since we could have global effects we needed to be able to think about things globally where we had trade relationships with each other where it would not be profitable to war with each other to be more profitable to actually be able to trade with each other so our own self-interest was you know going to drive our non-more interest um and so this started to look like and obviously this this couldn't have happened that much earlier either because industrialization hadn't gotten far enough to be able to do massive global industrial supply chains and ships stuff around you know quickly but like we were mentioning earlier almost all the electronics that we use today just basic cheap stuff for us is made on six continents made in many countries there's no single country in the world that could actually make many of the things that we have and from the raw material extraction to the plastics and polymers and the you know etc and so the i the idea that we made a world that could do that kind of trade and create massive gdp growth we could all work together to be able to mine natural resources and grow stuff with the rapid gdp growth there was the idea that everybody could keep having more without having to take each other's stuff and so that that was part of kind of the bretton woods post world war ii model the other was that we would be so economically interdependent that blowing each other up would never make sense that worked for a while now it also brought us up into planetary boundaries faster the unrenewable use of resource and turning those resources into pollution on the other side of the supply chain so obviously that faster gdp growth meant uh the overfishing of the oceans and the cutting down of the trees and the climate change and the uh mining toxic mining tailings going into the water and the mountaintop removal mining and all those types of things that's the over consumption side of the of the risk that we're talking about and so the answer of let's do positive gdp is the answer rapidly and exponentially obviously accelerated the planetary boundary side and that started to be that that was thought about for a long time but it started to be modeled with the club of rome and limits of growth and it but it's just very obvious to say if you have a linear materials economy where you take stuff out of the earth faster whether it's fish or trees or or ore you take or oil you take it out of the earth faster than it can replenish itself and you turn it into trash after using it for a short period of time you put the trash in the environment faster than it can process itself and there's toxicity associated with both sides of this you can't run an exponentially growing linear materials economy on a finite planet forever that's not a hard thing to figure out and it has to be exponential if there's an exponentiation in the monetary supply because of interest and then fractional reserve banking and to then be able to keep up with the growing monetary supply you have to have growth of goods and services and so that's that kind of thing that has happened um but you also see that when you get these supply chains that are so interconnected across the world you get increased fragility because a collapse or a problem in one area then affects the whole world in a much bigger area as opposed to the issues being local right so we got to see with covid and an issue that started in one part of china affecting the whole world so much more rapidly than would have happened before bretton woods right before international travel supply chains you know that whole kind of thing and with a bunch of second and third-order effects that people wouldn't have predicted okay we have to stop certain kinds of travel because of viral contaminants but the countries doing agriculture depend upon fertilizer they don't produce that is shipped into them and depend upon pesticides they don't produce so we got both crop failures and crops being eaten by locusts in scale in northern africa and iran and things like that because they couldn't get the supplies of stuff in so then you get massive starvation or future kind of hunger issues because of supply chain shutdowns so you get this increased fragility and cascade dynamics where a small problem can end up leading to cascade effects and also we went from two superpowers with one catastrophe weapon to now that same catastrophe weapon is there's more countries that have it eight or nine countries that have it and there's a lot more types of catastrophe weapons we now have catastrophe weapons with weaponized drones that can hit infrastructure targets with bio with in fact every new type of tech has created an arms race so we have not with the un or the other kind of intergovernmental organizations we haven't been able to really do nuclear de-proliferation we've actually had more countries get nukes and keep getting faster nukes the race to hypersonics and things like that and every new type of technology that has emerged has created an arms race and so you can't do mutually assured destruction with multiple agents the way you can with two agents two agents it's a much easier to create a stable nash equilibrium that's forced but the ability to monitor and say if these guys shoot who do i shoot do i shoot them do i shoot everybody do i and so you get a three body problem you get a very complex type of thing when you have multiple agents and multiple different types of catastrophe weapons including ones that can be much more easily produced than nukes are really hard to produce there's only uranium in a few areas uranium enrichment is hard icbms are hard but weaponized drones hitting smart targets is not so hard there's a lot of other things where basically the scale at being able to manufacture them is going way way down to where even non-state actors can have them and so when we talk about exponential tech and the decentralization of exponential tech what that means is decentralized catastrophe weapon capacity and especially in a world of increasing numbers of people feeling disenfranchised frantic whatever for different reasons so uh i would say where the bretton woods world doesn't prepare us to be able to deal with lots of different agents having lots of different types of catastrophe weapons you can't put mutually assured destruction on where you can't keep doing growth of materials economy in the same way because of hitting planetary boundaries and where the fragility dynamics are actually now their own source of catastrophic risk so now we're so like there was all the world until world war ii and world war ii is just from a from a civilization time scale point of view was just a second ago it seems like a long time but it is really not we get a short period of relative peace at the level of superpowers while building up the military capacity for much much much worse war the entire time and then now we're at this new phase where the things that allowed us to make it through the nuclear power are not the same systems that will let us make it through the next stage so what is this next post bretton woods how how do we become safe vessels safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology is a key question when we're thinking about x-risk okay so and i i'd like to try to answer the how if you thought a few ways but first on the mutually assured destruction do you give credit to the idea of two superpowers not blowing each other up with nuclear weapons to the simple game theoretic model of mutually shared destruction or something you've said previously this idea of inverse correlation which i tend to believe between the now if you were talking about tech but i think it's maybe broadly true the inverse correlation between competence and propensity for destruction so the better the the the bigger your weapons not because you're afraid of uh mutually assured self-destruction but because we're human beings and there's a deep moral fortitude there that's somehow aligned with competence and being good at your job that like it's very hard to be a psychopath and be good at killing at scale do you share any of that intuition kind of i think most people would say that alexander the great and genghis khan and napoleon were effective people that were good at their job that were actually maybe asymmetrically good at being able to organize people and do certain kinds of things that were pretty oriented towards certain types of destruction um or pretty willing to maybe they would say they were oriented towards empire expansion but pretty willing to commit certain acts of destruction in the name of it what what are you worried about the genghis khan or you could argue he's not a psychopath uh that are you worried about genghis khan are you worried about hitler or are you worried about a terrorist who is has a very different ethic which is not even for uh from it's not trying to preserve and build and expand my community it's more about just destruction in itself is the goal i think the thing that you're looking at that i do agree with is that there's a psychological disposition towards construction right and the psychological disposition more towards destruction obviously everybody has both and can toggle between both and oftentimes one is willing to destroy certain things we have this idea of creative destruction right willing to destroy certain things to create other things and utilitarianism and trolley problems are all about exploring that space and the idea of war is all about that i am trying to create something for our people and it requires destroying some other people um sociopathy is a funny topic because it's possible to have very high fealty to your in-group and work on perfecting the methods of torture to the out group um at the same time because you can dehumanize and then remove empathy um and i would also say that there are types so the reason the thing that gives hope about the orientation towards construction and destruction being a little different in psychologies is what it takes to build really catastrophic tech even today where it doesn't take what it took to make a new small group people could do it takes still some real technical knowledge that required having studied for a while and some been building capacity and there's a question of is that psychologically inversely correlated with the desire to damage civilization meaningfully a little bit a little bit i think um i think a lot i think it's actually i mean this is the conversation i had like with i think offline with dan carlin which is like it's pretty easy to come up with ways that any competent i can come up with a lot of ways to hurt a lot of people and it's pretty easy like i alone can do it and like there's a lot of people as smart or smarter than me at least in the creation of explosives why are we not seeing more insane mass murder i i think there's something fascinating and beautiful about this yes and it does have to do with some deeply pro-social types of characteristics in humans and um but when you're dealing with very large numbers you don't need a whole lot of a phenomena and so then you start to say well what's the probability that x won't happen this year then won't happen in the next two years three years four years and then how many people are doing destructive things with lower tech and then how many of them can get access to higher tech that they didn't have to figure out how to build so when i can get commercial tech and maybe i don't understand tech very well but i understand it well enough to utilize it not to create it and i can repurpose it when we saw that commercial drone with a homemade thermite bomb hit the ukraine ukrainian munitions factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage that's just home tech that's just simple kind of thing and so the question is not what is does it stay being a small percentage of the population the question is does can you bind that phenomena nearly completely and especially now when you as you start to get into bigger things crisper gene drive technologies and various things like that can you bind it completely long term over what period of time not perfectly though that's the thing i'm trying i'm trying to say that there is some let's call it uh let's uh a random word love that's inherent in that's core to human nature that's preventing destruction at scale and you're saying yeah but there's a lot of humans there's going to be eight plus billion and then there's a lot of seconds in the day to come up with stuff there's a lot of pain in the world that can lead to a distorted view of the world such that you want to channel that pain into the destruction all those kinds of things and it's only a matter of time that any one individual can do large damage especially as we create more and more democratized decentralized ways to deliver that damage even if you don't know how to build the initial weapon you can but the thing is it seems like it's a race between the cheapening of destructive weapons and the capacity of humans to express their love towards each other and it's a race that so far i know on twitter you it's not popular to say but love is winning okay so what is the argument that love is going to lose here against uh nuclear weapons and biotech and and ai and uh and drones okay i'm gonna come at the end of this to a how love wins so i just want you to know that that's where i'm oriented that's the end but i'm i'm going to argue against why that is a given because it because it's not a given i don't believe and i think this is a good romantic comedy so you're going to create drama right now but it will end in a happy ending well it's because it's only a happy ending if we actually understand the issues well enough and take responsibility to shift it do i believe like there's a reason why there's so much more dystopic sci-fi than topic sci-fi and the in the some pro topic sci-fi usually requires magic is because or at least magical tech right dilithium crystals and warp drives and stuff because it's very hard to imagine people like the people we have been in the history books with exponential type technology and power that don't eventually blow themselves up that make good enough choices as stewards of their environment and their comments and and each other and etc so like it's easier to think of scenarios where we blow ourselves up than it is to think of scenarios where we avoid every single scenario where we blow ourselves up and when i say blow ourselves up i also i mean the environmental versions the terrorist versions the war versions the cumulative externalities versions um can i and i'm sorry if i'm interrupting your flow of thought but why is it easier is it could be a weird psychological thing where we either was just more capable to visualize explosions and destruction and then the sicker thought which is like we kind of enjoy for some weird reason thinking about that kind of stuff even though we wouldn't actually act on it it's almost like some weird uh like i love playing shooter games you know uh first person shooters and like especially if it's like murdering zombie and doom you're shooting demons i played one of my favorite games diablo is like slashing through different monsters and the screaming and pain and the hellfire and then i go out into the real world uh to eat my coconut ice cream and i'm all about love so like i can we trust our ability to visualize how all it all goes to [ __ ] as an actual rational way of thinking i think it's a fair question to say to what degree is there just kind of perverse fantasy and morbid exploration and whatever else that happens in our imagination uh but i don't think that's the whole of it i think there is also a reality to the combinatorial possibility space and the difference in the probabilities that there's a lot of ways i could try to put the 70 trillion cells of your body together that don't make you there's not that many ways i can put them together that make you there's a lot of ways i can try to connect the organs together that make some weird kind of group of organs on a on a desk but that doesn't actually make a functioning human and and you can kill an adult human in a second but you can't get one in a second takes 20 years to grow one and a lot of things to happen right i could destroy this building in a couple minutes with demolition but it took a year or a couple years to build it there is uh there's outdone coal this is just an example it's not he doesn't mean it there's a there's a gradient where entropy is easier and there's a lot more ways to put a set of things together that don't work than the few that really do produce higher order synergies and so when we look at a history of war and then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare an arms race that drives that in all these directions and when we look at a history of environmental destruction and exponentially more powerful tech that makes exponential externalities multiplied by the total number of agents that are doing it in the cumulative effects there's a lot of ways the whole thing can break like a lot of different ways and for it to get ahead it has to have none of those happen and so there's just a probability space where it's easier to imagine that thing so what so to say how do we have a protopic future we have to say well one criteria must be that it avoids all of the catastrophic risks so can we understand can we inventory all the catastrophic risks can we inventory the patterns of human behavior that give rise to them and could we try to solve for that and could we have that be the the essence of the social technology that we're thinking about to be able to guide bind and direct a new physical technology because so far our physical technology like we were talking about the genghis khans and like that that obviously use certain kinds of physical technology and armaments um and also social technology and unconventional warfare for a particular set of purposes but we have things that don't look like warfare like rockefeller and standard oil and it looked like a constructive mindset to be able to bring this new energy resource to the world and it did and the second order effects of that are climate change and all of the oil spills that have happened and will happen and all of the wars in the middle east over the oil that have been there and the massive political [ __ ] and human life issues that are associated with it and on and on right um and so it's also not just the orientation to construct a thing can have a narrow focus on what i'm trying to construct but be affecting a lot of other things through second and third-order effects i'm not taking responsibility for and you you you often another and another tangent mentioned second third and fourth order effects and order and and skating which is really fascinating like starting with the third order plus it gets really interesting because we we don't we don't even acknowledge like the second order effects right but like thinking because those it could mat it could get bigger and bigger and bigger in ways we're not anticipating so how do we make those so it sounds like part of the part of the thing that you are thinking through in terms of a solution how to create an anti-fray agile a resilient society is to make explicit acknowledge understand the externalities the second order third order fourth order and the order effects how do we start to think about those effects yeah the war application is harm we're trying to cause or that we're aware we're causing right um the externality is harm that at least supposedly we're not aware we're causing or at minimum it's not our intention right maybe we're either totally unaware of it or we're aware of it but it is a side effect of what our intention is it's not the intention itself there are catastrophic risks from both types the direct application of increased technological power to a rivalrous intent which is going to cause harm for some out group for some in-group to win but the out group is also working on growing the tech and if they don't lose completely they reverse engineer the tac up regulator come back with more capacity so there's the exponential tech arms race side of in-group out-group rivalry using exponential tech that is one set of risks and the other set of risks is the application of exponentially more powerful tech not intentionally to try and beat an out group but to try to achieve some goal that we have but that produces second and third order effects that do have harm to the commons to other people to environment to other groups that might actually be bigger problems than the problem we were originally trying to solve with the thing we were building when facebook was building a dating app and then building a social app where people could tag pictures they weren't trying to build a democracy destroying app uh that would maximize time on site as part of its ad model through ai optimization of a news feed to the thing that made people spend most time on site which is usually them being limbically hijacked more than something else which ends up appealing to people's cognitive biases and group identities and creates no sense of shared reality they weren't trying to do that but it was a second order effect and it's a pretty [ __ ] powerful second order effect um and a pretty fast one because the rate of tech is obviously able to get distributed to much larger scale much faster and with a bigger jump in terms of total vertical capacity then that's what it means to get to the verticalizing part of an exponential curve so um just like we can see that oil had these second order environmental effects and also social and political effects war and so much of the whole like the total amount of oil used is has a proportionality to total global gdp and that's why we have this you know the petrodollar and um and so the the oil thing also had the externalities of a major aspect of what happened with military industrial complex and things like that so but we can see the same thing with with more current technologies with facebook and google and other things so i don't think we can run and the more powerful the tech is we build it for reason x whatever reason x is maybe x is three things maybe it's one thing right we we're doing the oil thing because we want to make cars because it's a better method of individual transportation we're building the facebook thing because we're going to connect people socially in a personal sphere but it it interferes with it interacts with complex systems with ecologies economies psychologies cultures and so it has effects on other than the thing we're intending some of those effects can end up being negative effects but because this technology if if we make it to solve a problem it has to overcome the problem the problem's been around for a while it's going to overcome in a short period of time so it usually has greater scale greater rate of magnitude in some way that also means that the externalities that it creates might be bigger problems and you can say well but then that's the new problem humanity will innovate its way out of that well i don't think that's paying attention to the fact that we can't keep up with exponential curves like that nor do finite spaces allow exponential externalities forever and this is why a lot of the smartest people thinking about this are thinking well no i think we're totally screwed and unless we can make a benevolent ai singleton that rules all of us um you know guys like bostrom and and others uh thinking in those directions because they're like how do humans try to do multi-polarity and make it work and i i have a different answer of what i think it looks like that does have more to do with the love but some applied social tech alignment aligned with good because i have a bunch of really dumb ideas i prefer to uh i'd like to hear i'd like to hear some of them first i think the idea i would have is uh to be a bit more rigorous in trying to measure the amount of love you add or subtract from the world in second third fourth fifth order effects it's actually i think especially in the world of tech quite doable you know you just might not like you know the the shareholders may not like that kind of metric but it's pretty easy to measure like that's not even uh i'm perhaps half joking about love but we could talk about just happiness and well-being long-term well-being it's pretty easy for facebook for youtube for all these companies to measure that they do a lot of kinds of surveys they could do i mean there's very simple solutions here that you could just survey how i mean servers are in some sense use useless because they're um a subset of the population you're just trying to get a sense it's very loose kind of understanding but integrated deeply as part of the technology most of our tech is recommender systems most of the sorry not tech uh online interactions driven by recommender systems that learn very little data about you and use that data based on mostly based on traces your previous behavior to suggest future things this is how twitter is how facebook works this is how adsense for google adsense works is how netflix youtube work and so on and and for them to just track as opposed to engagement how much you spend in a particular video a particular site is also track give you the technology to do self-report of what makes you feel good what makes you grow as a person of what makes you uh you know the best version of yourself the the the rogan uh idea of the hero of your movie and just add that little bit of information if you you have people you have this like happiness surveys of how you feel about the last five days how would you report your experience you can lay out the set of videos this is kind of fascinating i don't know if you ever look at youtube the history of videos you've looked at it's fascinating it's very embarrassing for me like it'll be like a lecture and then like a set of videos that i don't want anyone to know about which is which which will be like i don't know maybe like five videos in a row where it looks like i watched the whole thing which i probably did about like how to cook a steak even though or just like with the best chefs in the world cooking steaks and i'm just like sitting there watching it for no purpose whatsoever wasting away my life or like funny cat videos or like legit that that doesn't that's always a good one and i could look back and rate which videos made me a better person and not and i mean on a more serious note there's a bunch of conversations podcasts or lectures i've watched which made me a better person and some of it made me a worse person quite honestly not for stupid reasons like i feel dumber but because i do have a sense that that started me on a path of of not being kind to other people for example i'll give you uh for my own and i'm sorry for ranting but maybe there's some usefulness to this kind of exploration of self when i focus on creating on programming on science i become a much deeper thinker and a kinder person to others when i listen to too many a little bit as good but too many podcasts or videos about how how our world is melting down or criticizing ridiculous people the worst of the quote unquote woke for example all there's all these groups that are misbehaving in fascinating ways because they've been corrupted by power the more i want the more i watch criticism of them the worse i become and i'm aware of this but i'm also aware that for some reason it's pleasant to watch those sometimes and so for for me to be able to self-report that to the youtube algorithm to the systems around me and they ultimately try to optimize to make me the best person the best version of myself which i personally believe would make youtube a lot more money because i'd be much more willing to spend time on youtube and give youtube a lot more a lot more of my money that's a that's great for business and great for humanity because it'll make me a kinder person it'll increase the the love quotient the love metric and uh it'll make them a lot of money i feel like everything is aligned and so you should do that not just for youtube algorithm but also for our military strategy and whether to go to war or not because one externality you can think of about going to war which i think we talked about offline is we often go to war with kind of governments with a uh with not with the people you have to think about the kids of countries that see a soldier and because of what they experienced their interaction with the soldier hate is born when you're like eight years old six years old you lose your dad you lose your mom you lose a friend somebody close to you that want a really powerful externality that could be reduced to love positive and negative is uh the hate that's born when you make decisions and that's going to take fruition that that little seed is going to become a tree that then leads to the kind of destruction that we talk about so but my sense it's possible to reduce everything to a measure of how much love does this add to the world all that to say uh do you have ideas of how we practically uh build systems that that create a resilient society there are a lot of good things that you shared where there's like 15 different ways that we could enter this that are all interesting so i'm trying to see which one will probably be most useful pick the uh the one or two things that are at least ridiculous when you're mentioning if we could see some of the second order effects or externalities that we aren't used to seeing specifically the one of a kid being radicalized somewhere else which engenders enmity in them towards us which decreases our own future security even if you don't care about the kid if you care about the kids the whole other thing um yeah i mean i think when we saw this when jane fonda and others went to vietnam and took photos and videos of what was happening and you got to see the pictures of the kids with napalm on them uh that like the anti-war effort was bolstered by that in a way it couldn't have been without that there's there's a until we can see the images you can't have a mere neuron effect in the same way and when you can that starts to have a powerful effect i think there's a deep principle that you're sharing there which is that if we we can have a rivalrous intent where our in-group whatever it is maybe it's our political party wanting to win within the u.s maybe it's our nation state wanting to win in a a war or an economic war over resource or whatever it is that if we don't obliterate the other people completely they don't go away they're they're not engendered to like us more they didn't become less smart so they have more enmity towards us and whatever technologies we employ to be successful they will now reverse engineer make iterations on and come back and so you drive an arms race which is why you can see that the wars were over history employing more lethal weaponry and not just the kinetic war um the information war and the narrative war and the economic war right like it just increased capacity in all of those fronts um and so what seems like a win to us on the short term might actually really produce losses in the long term and what's even in our own best interest in the long term is probably more aligned with everyone else because we inter-affect each other and i think the thing about globalism globalization and exponential tech and the rate at which we affect each other and the rate at which we affect the biosphere that we're all affected by is that this this kind of proverbial spiritual idea that we're all interconnected and need to think about that in some way it was easy for tribes to get because everyone in the tribe so clearly saw their interconnection and dependence on each other but in terms of a global level the the speed at which we are actually interconnected the speed at which the harm happening to something in wuhan affects the rest of the world or a new technology developed somewhere affects the entire world or an environmental issue or whatever is making it to where we either actually all get not as a spiritual idea just even as physics right we all get the interconnectedness of everything and that we either all consider that and see how to make it through more effectively together or failures anywhere end up becoming decreased quality of life and failures and increased risk everywhere don't you think people are beginning to experience that at the individual level so governments are resisting it they're they're trying to make us not empathize with each other feel connected but don't you think people are beginning to feel more and more connected like isn't that exactly what the technology is enabling like social networks we tend to criticize them but isn't there a sense which were experience you know when you watch those videos that are criticizing whether it's the woke antifa side or the q anon trump supporter side does it seem like they have increased empathy for people that are outside of their ideological not at all so i may be um i may be conflating my own experience of the world and that of uh that of the populace i i tend to see those videos as feeding something that's a relic of the past they figured out that drama fuels clicks but whether i'm right or wrong i don't know but i tend to sense that that is not that hunger for drama is not fundamental to human beings that we want to actually that we want to understand antifa and we want to like empathize we want to take radical ideas and be able to empathize with them and synthesize it all okay let's look at cultural outliers in terms of violence versus compassion we can see that a lot of cultures have relatively lower in-group violence bigger out-group violence and there's some variants in them and variants at different times based on the scarcity or abundance of resource and other things but you can look at say jane's whose whole religion is around non-violence so much so that they don't even hurt plants they only take fruits that fall off them and stuff or to go to a larger population you take buddhists where for the most part with a few exceptions for the most part across three millennia and across lots of different countries and geographies and whatever you have 10 million people plus or minus who don't hurt bugs the whole spectrum of genetic variants that is happening within a culture of that many people um and head traumas and whatever and nobody hurts bugs and then you look at a group where the kids grow up as child soldiers in liberia or darfur where to make it to adulthood pretty much everybody's killed people hand-to-hand and killed people who were civilian or innocent type of people and you say okay so we were very neonos we can be conditioned by our environment and humans can be conditioned where almost all the humans show up in these two different bell curves it doesn't mean that the buddhists had no violence it doesn't mean that these people had no compassion but the they're very different gaussian distributions and so i think one of the important things that i like to do is look at the examples of the populations what buddhism shows regarding compassion or what judaism shows around education the average level of education that everybody gets because of a culture that is really working on conditioning it or various cultures what are the positive deviants outside of this statistical deviance to see what is actually possible and then say what are the conditioning factors and can we condition those across a few of them simultaneously and could we build a civilization like that becomes a very interesting question so there's this kind of real politic idea that humans are violent large groups of humans become violent they become irrational specifically those two things rivalrous and violent and irrational and so in order to minimize the total amount of violence and have some good decisions they need ruled somehow and that not getting that is some kind of naive utopianism that doesn't understand human nature yet this gets back to like mimesis of desire as an inexorable thing i think the idea of the masses is actually a kind of propaganda um that is useful for the classes that control um to popularize the idea that most people are too violent lazy undisciplined and irrational to make good choices and therefore their choices should be sublimated in some kind of way i think that if we look back at these conditioning environments we can say okay so the kids they go to a really fancy school and have a good developmental environment like exeter academy there's still a gaussian distribution of how well they do on any particular metric but on average they become senators and the worst ones become high-end lawyers or whatever and then i look at an inner city school with a totally different set of things and i see a very very differently displaced gaussian distribution but very different set of conditioning factors so then i say the masses well if all those kids who were one of the parts of the masses got to go to exeter and have that family and whatever would they still be the masses could we actually condition more social virtue more civic virtue more orientation towards dialectical synthesis more empathy more rationality widely yes would that lead to better capacity for something like participatory governance democracy or republic or some kind of participatory governance yes yes is it necessary for it actually yes and is it good for class interests not not really by the way when you say class interest this is the powerful leading over the less powerful that kind of idea anyone that benefits from asymmetries of power doesn't necessarily benefit from decreasing those asymmetries of power and kind of increasing the capacity of people more widely and um so when we talk about power we're talking about asymmetries and agency influence and control you think that hunger for power is fundamental to human nature i i think we should get that straight before we talk about other stuff so like uh this uh this this pickup line that i use at a bar off which is uh power corrupts and absolute power crops absolutely is that true or is that just a fancy thing to say in modern society there's something to be said have we changed as societies over time in terms of how much we crave power that there is an impulse towards power that is innate in people and can be conditioned one way or the other yes but you can see that buddhist society does a very different thing with it at scale that you don't end up seeing the emergence of the same types of sociopathic behavior and particularly then creating sociopathic institutions um and so it's like is eating the foods that were rare in our evolutionary environment that give us more dopamine hit because they were rare and they're not anymore salt fat sugar um is there something pleasurable about those where humans have an orientation to overeat if they can well the fact that there is that possibility doesn't mean everyone will obligately be obese and die of obesity right like it's possible to have a uh a particular impulse and to be able to understand it have other ones and be able to balance them and so to say that um power dynamics are are obligate in humans and we can't do anything about it is very similar to me to saying like we could everyone is going to be obligately obese yeah so there's some degree to which those the control those impulses has to do with the conditioning early in life yes and the culture that creates the environment to be able to do that and then the recursion on that okay so what if we were to uh just bear with me just asking for a friend if we were to kill all humans on earth and then start over is there ideas about how to build up okay we don't have to kill let's leave the humans on earth they're fine and go to mars and start a new society is there ways to construct systems of conditioning education of how we live with each other that would um that would incentivize us properly to not seek power not to not construct systems that are of asymmetry of power and to create systems that are resilient to all kinds of terrorist attacks to all kinds of destructions i believe so so is there some inklings we'll get of course you probably don't have the ant all the answers but you have insights about what that looks like i mean is it just rigorous practice of dialectic synthesis as essentially conversations with [ __ ] of various flavors until they're not [ __ ] anymore because you've become deeply apathetic with their experience okay so there's a lot of things that we would need to construct to come back to this like what is the basis of rivalry what how do you bind it how does it relate to tech if you have a culture that is doing less rivalry does it always lose in war to those who do war better and how do you make something on the enactment of how to get there from here um great great so what's rivalry why is rivalry bad or good is is so is another word for our very competition yes i think roughly yes i think bad and good are kind of silly concepts here good for some things bad for other things for some contexts and others even that um okay let me give you an example that relates back to the facebook measuring thing you were mentioning a moment ago first i think what you're saying is actually aligned with the right direction and what i want to get to in a moment um but it's not the devil is in the details here so i i enjoy praise feeds my ego i grow stronger so i appreciate that i'll make sure to include one piece every 15 minutes as we thank you so it's easier to measure there are problems with this argument but there's also utility to it so let's take it for the utility it has first it's harder to measure happiness than it is to measure comfort we can measure with technology that the shocks in a car are making the car bounce less that the bed is um softer and you know material science and those types of things and happiness is actually hard for philosophers to define because some people find that there's certain kinds of overcoming suffering that are necessary for happiness there's happiness it feels more like contentment and happiness it feels more like passion that's is passion the source of all suffering or the source of all creativity like the there's deep stuff and it's mostly first person not measurable third-person stuff even if maybe it corresponds to third-person stuff to some degree but we also see examples of some of our favorite examples is people who are in the worst environments who end up finding happiness right where the third-person stuff looks to be less conducive and there's some victor frankl nelson mandela whatever but it's pretty easy to measure comfort and it's pretty universal and i think we can see that the industrial revolution started to replace happiness with comfort quite heavily as the thing it was optimizing for and we can see that when increased comfort is given maybe because of the evolutionary disposition that expending extra calories when for the majority of our history we didn't have extra calories was not a safe thing to do who knows why when extra comfort is given it's very easy to take that path even if it's not the path that supports overall well-being long term and so we can see that you know when you when you look at the techno-optimist idea that we have better lives than egyptian pharaohs and kings and whatever what they're largely looking at is how comfortable our beds are and how comfortable the transportation systems are and things like that in which case there's massive improvement but we also see that in some of the nations where people have access to the most comfort suicide and mental illness are the highest and we also see that some of the happiest cultures are actually some of the ones that are in materially lame environments and so there's a very interesting question here and if i understand correctly you do cold showers and joe rogan was talking about how he needs to do some fairly intensive kind of struggle that is a non-comfort to actually induce being better as a person this concept of hormesis that it's actually stressing an adaptive system that increases its adaptive capacity and that there's something that the happiness of a system has something to do with its adaptive capacity its overall resilience health well-being which requires a decent bit of discomfort and yet in the in the presence of the comfort solution it's very hard to not choose it and then as you're choosing it regularly to actually down regulate your overall adaptive capacity and so when we start saying can we make tech where we're measuring for the things that it produces beyond just the measure of gdp or whatever particular measures look like the revenue generation or profit generation of my business are all the meaningful things measurable and what are the right measures and what are the externalities of optimizing for that measurement set what meaningful things aren't included in that measurement set they might have their own externalities these are some of the questions we actually have to take seriously yeah and i think they're answerable questions right progressively better not perfect right so so first of all let me throw out happiness and comfort out of the discussion those seems like useless the distinction so i because i said they're useful well-being is useful but i think i i take it back i knew uh i proposed new metrics in this brainstorm session which is uh so one is like personal growth which is intellectual growth i think we're able to make that concrete for ourselves like you're a better person than you were a week ago or a worse person than you were a week ago i think we can ourselves report that and and and understand what that means is this gray area and we try to define it but i think we humans are pretty good at that because we have a sense an idealistic sense of the person we might be able to become we we all dream of becoming a certain kind of person and i think we have a sense of getting closer and not towards that person maybe this is not a great metric fine the other one is love actually [ __ ] if you're happy or not or you're comfortable or not how much love do you have towards your fellow human beings i feel like if you try to optimize that and increasing that that's going to have that's a good metric how many times a day sorry if i can make quantify how many times a day have you thought positively of another human being just put that down as a number and increase that number i think the process of saying okay so let's not take gdp or gdp per capita as the metric we want to optimize for because gdp goes up during war and it goes up with more health care spending from sicker people and various things that we wouldn't say correlate to quality of life uh addiction drives gdp awesomely um by the way when i said growth i wasn't referred to i'm giving an example now of the primary metric we use and why it's not not equipment because we're exploring other ones so the idea of saying what would the metrics for a good civilization be if i had to pick a set of metrics what would the best ones be if i was going to optimize for those and then really try to run the thought experiment more deeply and say okay so what happens if we optimize for that try to think through the first and second and third order effects of what happens it's positive and then also say what negative things can happen from optimizing that what actually matters it is not included in that or in that way of defining it because love versus number of positive thoughts per day i could just make a long list of names and just think say positive thing about each one it's all very superficial not include animals or the rest of life have a have a very shallow total amount of it but i'm optimizing the number and if i get some credit for the number so the and this is when i said the model of reality isn't reality when you make a set of metrics they were going to optimize for this whatever reality is that is not included in those metrics can be the areas where harm occurs which is why i would say that wisdom is something like the discernment that leads to right choices beyond what metrics based optimization would offer yeah but another way to say that is wisdom is uh constantly expanding and evolving set of metrics so which means there is something in you that is recognizing a new metric that's important that isn't part of that metric set so there's a certain kind of connection discernment awareness and this is this is iterative game theory there's a girdles in completeness theorem right which is if the system if the set of things is consistent it won't be complete so we're going to keep adding to it which is why we were saying earlier i don't think it's not beautiful and especially if you were just saying one of the metrics you want to optimize for at the individual level is becoming right they were becoming more well that's zen becomes true for the civilization and our metric sets as well yeah and our definition of how to think about a meaningful life in a meaningful civilization i can tell you what some of my favorite metrics are what's that uh well love is obviously not a metric it's like you can bench yeah it's a good metric yeah i want to optimize that across the entire population starting with infants um so in the same way that love isn't metric but you could make metrics that look at certain parts of it this thing i'm about to say isn't the metric but it's a it's a consideration because i thought about this a lot i i don't think there is a metric a right one um i think that every metric by itself without this thing we talked about of the continuous improvement becomes a paperclip maximizer i think that's why what the idea of false idol means in terms of the model of reality not being reality then my sacred relationship is to reality itself which also binds me to the unknown forever to the known but also to the unknown and there's a sense of sacredness connected to the unknown that creates an epistemic humility that is always seeking not just to optimize the thing i know but to learn new stuff and to be open to perceive reality directly so my model never becomes sacred my model is useful the model can't be the false idol correct yeah and this is why the first verse of the tao te ching is the dao that is nameable is not the eternal dao the naming then can become the source of the ten thousand things that if you get too carried away with it can actually obscure you from paying attention to reality beyond in the models it sounds a lot a lot like steven wolfram but in a different language much more poetic i can imagine that no i'm referring to i'm joking but there's echoes of cellular automata which you can't name you can't construct a good model cellular automata you can only watch in awe i apologize i'm distracting your train of thought horribly and miserably making it by the way something robots aren't good at in uh dealing with the uncertainty of uneven ground you've been okay so far you've been doing wonderfully so what's your favorite metrics okay so i know you're not wrong so i haven't passed anything test so one metric and there are problems with this but one metric that i like to just as a thought experiment to consider is because you're actually asking work i mean i know you ask your guests about the meaning of life because ultimately when you're designing when you're saying what is a desirable civilization you can't answer that without answering what is a meaningful human life and to say what is a good civilization because it's going to be in relationship to that right um and then you have whatever your answer is how do you know what is the what is the epistemic basis for for postulating that um there's also a whole other reason for asking that question i don't i mean but that doesn't even apply to you whatsoever which is it's interesting how few people have been asked questions like it we we we joke about these questions is silly right it's it's funny to watch a person and if i was more of an [ __ ] i would really stick on that question right it's a silly question in some sense but like we haven't really considered what it means just a more concrete version of that question is what is what is a better world what is the kind of world we're trying to create really i think well have you really thought i'll give you some kind of simple answers to that that are meaningful to me but let me do the societal indices first because they're fun yes we should take a note of this meaningful thing because it's important to come back to are you reminding me to ask you about the meaning of life noted let me jot that down yeah so um well because i think i stopped tracking it like 25 open threads um okay let it all burn one index that i find very interesting is the inverse correlation of addiction within the society the more a society produces addiction within the people in it the less healthy i think the society is as a pretty fundamental metric and so the more the individuals feel that there are less compulsive things in compelling them to behave in ways that are destructive to their own values uh and in so far as a civilization is conditioning and influencing the individuals within it the inverse of addiction uh yeah compulsive behavior that is destructive towards things that we value yeah i think that's a very interesting one to think that's a really interesting one yeah and this is then also where comfort and addiction start to get very close and the ability to go in the other direction from addiction is the ability to be exposed to hypernormal stimuli and not go down the path of desensitizing to other stimuli and needing that hypernormal stimuli which does involve a kind of hormesis so i do think the civilization of the future has to create something like ritualized discomfort and um virtualized discomfort yeah i think that's what the sweat lodge and the vision quest and the solo journey and the ayahuasca journey and the sundance were i think it's even a big part of what yoga asana was is to make beings that are resilient and strong they have to overcome some things to make beings that can control their own mind and fear they have to face some fears but we don't want to put everybody in war or real trauma and yet we can see that the most [ __ ] up people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma but some of the most incredible people we know had childhoods have a lot of trauma whether or not they happen to make it through and overcome that or not so how do we get the benefits of the stealing of character and the resilience and the whatever that happened from the difficulty without traumatizing people a certain kind of ritualized discomfort that not only has us overcome something by ourselves but overcome it together with each other where nobody bails when it gets hard because the other people are there so it's both a resilience of the individuals and the resilience of the bonding so i think we'll keep getting more and more comfortable stuff but we have to also develop resilience in the presence of that for the anti-addiction direction and the fullness of character and the trustworthiness to others so you have to be uh consistently injecting discomfort into the system ritualize i mean this sounds like uh you have to imagine sisyphus happy you have to uh imagine sisyphus with his rock optimally resilient from a metrics perspective in society so we we want we want to constantly be throwing rocks at ourselves not constantly uh you didn't have to frequently um periodically periodically and there's different levels of intensity different periodicities now i do not think this should be imposed by states i think it should emerge from cultures and i think the cultures are developing people that understand the value of it so the people so there is both a cultural cohesion to it but there's also a voluntarism because the people value the thing that is being developed they understand it and that's what conditions is conditioning it's conditioning some of these some of these values and conditioning is a bad word because we like our idea of sovereignty but when we recognize the language that we speak and the words that we think and in the in the patterns of thought built into that language and the aesthetics that we like and so much is conditioned in us just based on where we're born you can't not condition people so all you can do is take more responsibility for what the conditioning factors are and then you have to think about this question of what is a meaningful human life because we're unlike the other animals born into environment that they're genetically adapted for we're building new environments that we were not adapted for and then we're becoming affected by those so then we have to say well what kinds of environments digital environments physical environments social environments would we want to create that would develop the healthiest happiest most moral noble meaningful people and what are even those sets of things that matter so you end up getting deep existential consideration at the heart of civilization design when you start to realize how powerful we're becoming and how much what we're building it in service towards matters before i pull it i think three threads you just laid down uh is there another metric index that you're interested i'll tell you one more that i really like there's a there's a number but one then the next one that comes to mind is i have to make a very quick model uh healthy human bonding say we were in a travel type setting my positive emotional states in your positive emotional states would most of the time be correlated your negative emotional states in mine and so you start laughing i start laughing you start crying my eyes might tear up and we would call that the compassion compersion axis i would this is a model i i find useful so compassion is when you're feeling something negative i feel some pain i feel some empathy something in relationship compersion is when you do well i'm stoked for you right like i actually feel happiness i like compersion yeah the fact that it's such a uncommon word in english is actually a problem culturally um because i feel that often and i think that's a really good feeling to feel and maximize for actually that's actually the metric i'm going to say oh wow is the compassion compersion at axis is the thing i would optimize for now there is a state where my emotional states in your emotional states are just totally decoupled and that is like sociopathy i don't want to hurt you but i don't care if i do or for you to do well or whatever but there's a worse state and it's extremely common which is where they're inversely coupled where my positive emotions correspond to your negative ones and vice versa and that is the i i would call it the jealousy sadism axis the jealousy axis is when you're doing really well i feel something bad i feel taken away from less than upset envious whatever and that's so common but i think of it as kind of a low-grade psychopathology that we've just normalized the idea that i'm actually upset at the happiness or fulfillment or success of another is like a profoundly [ __ ] up thing no we shouldn't shame it and repress it so it gets worse we should study it where does it come from and it comes from our own insecurities and stuff and but then the next part that everybody knows is really [ __ ] up is just on the same axis it's the same inverted which is so the jealousy or the envy is the i feel badly when you're doing well the sadism side is i actually feel good when you lose or when you're in pain i feel some happiness that's associated you can see when someone feels jealous sometimes they feel jealous with a partner and then they feel they want that partner to get it revenge comes up or something so sadism is really like jealousy is one step on the path to sadism from the healthy compassion conversion access so i would like to see a society that is inversely that is conditioning sadism and jealousy inversely right the lower that amount and the more the compassion conversion and if i had to summarize that very simply i'd say it would optimize for conversion which is because notice that's not just saying love for you where i might be self-sacrificing and miserable and i love people but i kill myself which i don't think anybody thinks a great idea or happiness where i might be sociopathically happy where i'm causing problems all over the place or even sadistically happy but it's a coupling right that i'm actually feeling happiness in relationship to yours and even in causal relationship where i my own agentic desire to get happier wants to support you too that's actually speaking of another pickup line uh that's quite honestly what i this is a guy who's single this is this is going to come out very ridiculous because it's like oh yeah where's your girlfriend bro but that's what i look for in a relationship because it's like it's so much it's so it's such an amazing life where you actually get joy from another person's success and they get joy from your success and then it becomes like you don't actually need to succeed much for that to have a like a a a like a cycle of just like happiness that just increases like exponentially it's weird so like just be just enjoying the the happiness of others the success of others so this this is like the uh let's call this because the first person that drilled this into my head is rogan joe rogan here's the embodiment of that because i saw somebody who was uh successful rich and non-stop truly i mean you could tell when somebody's full of [ __ ] somebody's not really genuinely enjoying the success of his friends that that was weird to me that was interesting and i mean the way you're kind of speaking to it the reason joe stood out to me is i guess i haven't witnessed genuine expression of that often in this culture of just real joy for others i mean part of that has to do there hasn't been many channels where you can watch or listen to people being their authentic cells so i'm sure there's a bunch of people who live life with compersion they probably don't seek public attention also but the that that was yeah if if there was any word that could express what what i've learned from joan white he's been a a really inspiring figure is that compersion and i wish our world was uh had a lot more of that because then it me i mean my own so sorry to go on a small tangent but like you're speaking how society should function but i feel like if you optimize for that metric in your own personal life you're going to uh live a truly fulfilling life i don't know what the right word to use but that's a really good way to live life you will also learn what gets in the way of it right and how to work with it that if you wanted to help try to build systems at scale or apply facebook or exponential technologies to do that you would have more actual depth of real knowledge of what that takes and this is you know as you mentioned that there's this virtuous cycle between when you get stoked on other people doing well and then they have a similar relationship to you and everyone is in the process of building each other up and this is what i would say the healthy version of competition is versus the unhealthy version the healthy version right the the root i believe it's a latin word that means to strive together and it's that impulse of becoming where i want to become more but i recognize that there's actually a hormesis there's a challenge that is needed for me to be able to do that but that means that yes there's an impulse where i'm trying to get ahead maybe i'm even trying to win but i actually want a good opponent and i want them to get ahead too because that is where my ongoing becoming happens and the win itself will get boring very quickly the ongoing becoming is where there's aliveness and for the ongoing becoming they need to have it too and that's the stride together the so in the healthy competition i'm stoked when they're doing really well because my becoming is supported by it now this is actually a very nice segue into a model i like about what a meaningful human life is if you want to go there let's go there well i have i have three things i'm going elsewhere with but if we were first let us take a short stroll through the park of the meaning of life daniel what is a meaningful life i think the semantics end up mattering because a lot of people will take the word meaning and the word purpose almost interchangeably and they'll talk they'll think kind of what is the meaning of my life what is the meaning of human life what is the meaning of life what's the meaning of the universe and what what is the meaning of existence rather than non-existent so there's a lot of kind of existential considerations there and i think there's some cognitive mistakes that are very easy like taking the idea of purpose which is like a goal which is a utilitarian concept the purpose of one thing is defined in relationship to other things that have assumed value um and to say what is the purpose of everything well it's a purpose is too small of a question it's fundamentally a relative question within everything what is the purpose of one thing relative to another what is the purpose of everything and there's nothing outside of it with which to say it you actually just got to the limits of the utility of the concept of purpose it doesn't mean it's purposeless in the sense of something inside of it being purposeless it means the concept is too small which is why you end up getting to you know like in taoism talking about the nature of it rather the there's a fundamental what where the why can't go deeper is the nature of it but i'm gonna try to speak to a much simpler part which is when people think about what is a meaningful human life and kind of if we were to optimize for something at the level of individual life but also how does optimizing for this at the level of the individual life lead to the best society for insofar as people living that way affects others and long-term the world as a whole and how would we then make a civilization that was trying to think about these things because you can see that there are a lot of dialectics where there's value on two sides individualism and collectivism or the ability to accept things and the ability to push harder and whatever and there's failure modes on both sides and so when you're starting to say okay individual happiness you're like wait [ __ ] sadists can be happy while hurting people it's not individual happiness it's love but wait some people can self-sacrifice out of love in a way that actually ends up just creating codependency for everybody um or okay so so how do we think about all those things together one like this kind of came to me as a a simple way that i kind of relate to it is that a meaningful life involves the mode of being the mode of doing and the mode of becoming and it involves a virtuous relationship between those three and that any of those modes on their own also have failure modes that are not a meaningful life the mode of being the way i would describe it if if we're talking about the essence of it is about taking in and appreciating the beauty of life that is now it's a mode that is in the moment and that is largely about being with what is it's fundamentally grounded in the nature of experience and the meaningfulness of experience the prima facie meaningfulness of when i'm having this experience i'm not actually asking what the meaning of life is i'm actually full of it i'm full of experiencing it the momentary experience yes so taking in the beauty of life doing is adding to the beauty of life i'm going to produce some art i'm going to produce some technology that will make life easier more beautiful for somebody else i'm going to do some science that will end up leading to better insights or others people's ability to appreciate the beauty of life more because they understand more about it or whatever it is or protect it right i'm going to protect it in some way but that's adding to or being in service of the beauty of life through our doing and becoming is getting better at both of those being able to deepen our being which is to be able to take in the beauty of life more profoundly be more moved by it touched by it and increasing our capacity with doing to add to the beauty of life more and so i hold that a meaningful life has to be all three of those and where they're not in conflict with each other ultimately it grounds in being it grounds in the intrinsic meaningfulness of experience and then my doing is ultimately something that will be able to increase the possibility of the quality of experience for others and my becoming is a deepening on those so it grounds an experience and also the evolutionary possibility of experience and the point is to [Music] oscillate between these never getting stuck on any one yeah or i suppose in parallel well you can't really attention is a thing you can only allocate attention i want moments where i am absorbed in the sunset and i'm not thinking about what to do next and then the fullness of that can make it to where my doing doesn't come from what's in it for me because i actually feel overwhelmingly full already and then it's like how can i how can i make life better for other people that don't have as much opportunities i had how can i add something wonderful how can i just be in the creative process and so i think where the doing comes from matters and if the doing comes from a fullness of being it's inherently going to be paying attention to externalities or it's more oriented to do that than if it comes from some emptiness that is trying to get full in some way that is willing to cause sacrifices other places and where a chunk of its attention is internally focused and so when buddha said desire is the cause of all suffering then later the vow of the bodhisattva which was to show up for all sentient beings and universe forever is a pretty intense thing like desire i would say there is a kind of desire if we think of desire as a basis for movement like a flow or a gradient there's a kind of desire that comes from something missing inside seeking fulfillment of that in the world that ends up being the cause of actions that perpetuate suffering but there's also not just non-desire there's a kind of desire that comes from feeling full at the beauty of life and wanting to add to it that is a flow this direction and i don't think that is the cause of suffering i think that is you know and the western traditions right the eastern traditions focused on that and kind of unconditional happiness outside of them in the moment outside of time western tradition said no actually desire is the source of creativity and we're here to be made in the image and likeness of the creator we're here to be fundamentally creative but creating from where and in service of what creating from a sense of connection to everything and wholeness in service of the well-being of all of it is very different which is back to that compassion conversion axis being doing becoming is pretty powerful also could potentially be algorithmized into a robot just saying where does um where does death come to that so being is forgetting i mean the the concept of time completely there's a there's a sense the doing and becoming that has a deadline and built in the urgency built in do you think death is fundamental to this to a meaningful life uh acknowledging or um feeling the terror of death like ernest becker or just acknowledging the uncertainty the mystery the the melancholy nature of the fact that the right ends is that part of this equation or it's not necessary okay look at how it could be related i've experienced fear of death i've also experienced times where i thought i was gonna die it felt extremely peaceful and beautiful and um it's funny because if we we can be afraid of death because we're afraid of hell or bad reincarnation or the bardo or some kind of idea of the afterlife we have where we're projecting some kind of sentient suffering but if we're afraid of just non-experience i notice that every time i stay up late enough that i'm really tired i'm longing for deep deep sleep and non-experience right like i'm actually longing for experience to stop and it's not morbid it's not a bummer it's and and i don't mind falling asleep and i sometimes when i wake up want to go back into it and then when it's done i'm happy to come out of it so um when we think about death and having finite time here and we could talk about if we live for a thousand years instead of a hundred or something like that it'd still be fine night time the one bummer with the age we die is that i generally find that people mostly start to emotionally mature just shortly before they die but there's if i get to live forever i i can just stay focused on what's in it for me forever and if life continues and consciousness and sentience and people appreciating beauty and adding to it and becoming continues my life doesn't but my life can have effects that continue well beyond it then life with a capital l starts mattering more to me than my life my life gets to be a part of an in service too and the whole thing about when old men plant trees the shade of which they'll never get to be in um i remember the first time i read this poem by hafez the sufi poet written in like the 13th century or something like that and he talked about that if you're lonely to think about him and he was kind of leaning his spirit um into yours across the distance of a millennium and would come for you with these poems and now he's thinking about people millennium from now and caring about their experience and what they'd be suffering if they'd be lonely and could he offer something that could touch them and it's just [ __ ] beautiful and so like the most beautiful parts of humans have to do with something that transcends what's in it for me and death forces you to that so not not only does death create the urgency it uh urgency of doing it you're very right it does have a sense in which it uh incentivizes the compersion and the compassion and the widening you remember einstein had that quote something to the effect of it's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things there's this one thing we call universe and uh something about us being inside of a prison of perception that can only you know see a very narrow little bit of it but this this might be just some weird disposition of mine but when i think about the future after i'm dead and i think about consciousness i think about young people falling in love for the first time in their their experience and i think about people being awed by sunsets and i think about all of it right i can't not feel connected to that do you feel some sadness to the very high likelihood that you will be forgotten completely by all of human history you daniel the name that that which cannot be named systems like to self-perpetuate egos do that the idea that i might do something meaningful that future people appreciate of course there's like a certain sweetness to that idea but i know how many people did something did things that i wouldn't be here without that my life would be less without whose names i will never know and i feel a gratitude to them i feel a closeness i feel touched by that and i think to the degree that the future people are conscious enough there is a you know a lot of traditions had this kind of are we being good ancestors and respect for the ancestors beyond the names i think that's a very healthy idea but let me return to a much less beautiful and uh much less pleasant conversation you mentioned prison back to x-risk okay and conditioning you mentioned something about the state so what role let's talk about companies governments parents all the mechanisms that can be a source of conditioning which flavor of ice cream do you like do you think the state is the right thing for the future so governments that are elected democratic systems that are representing representative democracy is there some kind of political system of governance that you find appealing is it parents meaning a very close-knit tribes of conditioning that's the most essential and then uh you and michael malus would happily agree that it's anarchy or the state should be dissolved or destroyed or burned to the ground if you're michael malus giggling holding the torch as the fire burns so which which is it is the state can the state be good or is the state bad for the conditioning of a beautiful world a or b this is like an s you like tests you like to give these uh simplified good or bad things um would i like the state that we live in currently the united states federal government to stop existing today no i would really not like that um i think that would be not quite bad for the world in a lot of ways uh do i think that it's a optimal social system and maximally uh just and humane and all those things and i wanted to continue as is no also not that um but i am much more interested in it being able to evolve to a better thing without going through um the catastrophe phase that i think it's just non-existence would give so what size a state is good in a sense like do we should we as a human society as this world becomes more globalized should we be constantly striving to reduce the set you we can we can put on a map like right now literally like the the centers of power in the world some of them are tech companies some of them are governments should we be trying to as much as possible decentralize the power to where it's very difficult to point on the map the centers of power and that means making the state however there's a bunch of different ways to make the government much smaller that could be re reducing in the united states reducing the the funding for the government all those kinds of things there's a set of responsibilities the the set of powers it could be i mean this is far out but making more nations or maybe nations not in the space that are defined by geographic location but rather in the space of ideas which is what anarchy is about so anarchy is about forming collectives based on their set of ideas and doing so dynamically not based on where you were born and so on i think we can say that the natural state of humans if we want to describe such a thing was to live in tribes that were below the dunbar number meaning that for a few hundred thousand years of human history all of the groups of humans mostly stayed under that size and whenever it would get up to that size it would end up cleaving and so it seems like there's a pretty strong but there weren't individual humans out in the wild doing really well right so we were a group animal but with groups that had a specific size so we could say in a way humans were being domesticated by those groups they were learning how to have certain rules to participate with the group without which you'd get kicked out but that that's still the wild state of people and and maybe it's useful to do as a side statement which i've recently looked at a bunch of papers around dunbar's number where the mean is actually 150. if you actually look at the original papers to range it's really a range so it's actually some somewhere under a thousand so it's a range from like two to five hundred or whatever it is but like you could argue that the uh i think it actually is exactly two uh two the range is two to five hundred and twenty something like that and this is the mean that's taken crudely it's not a very good paper the the in terms of the actual numerical numerically speaking but it'd be interesting if there's a bunch of dunbar numbers that could be computed for particular environments particular conditions so on it is very true that they're likely to be something small you know under a million but it'd be interesting if we can expand that number in interesting ways that will change the fabric of this conversation i just want to kind of throw that in there i don't know the if the 150 is baked in some hollow in the heart into the hardware we can talk about some of the things that it probably has to do with up to a certain number of people and this is going to be variable based on the social technologies that mediate it to some degree we can talk about that in a minute um [Music] up to a certain number of people everybody can know everybody else pretty intimately so let's go ahead and just take 150 as a as an average number everybody can know everyone intimately enough that if your actions made anyone else do poorly it's your extended family and you're stuck living with them and you know who they are and there's no anonymous people there's no just them and over there and that's one part of what leads to a kind of tribal process where it's good for the individual and good for the whole has a coupling also below that scale everyone is somewhat aware of what everybody else is doing there's not groups that are very siloed and as a result it's actually very hard to get away with bad behavior there's a forced kind of transparency and so you don't need kind of like the state in in that way but lying to people doesn't actually get you ahead sociopathic behavior doesn't get you ahead because it gets seen and so there's a conditioning environment where the individuals behaving in a way that is aligned with the interest of the tribe is what gets conditioned when it gets to be a much larger system it becomes easier to hide certain things from the group as a whole as well as to be less emotionally bound to a bunch of anonymous people i would say there's also a communication protocol where up to about that number of people we could all sit around a tribal council and be part of a conversation around a really big decision do we migrate do we not migrate do we you know some something like that do we get rid of this person and why why would i want to agree to be a part of a larger group where everyone can't be part of that council and so i am going to now be subject to law that i have no say in if i could be part of a smaller group that could still survive and i get a say in the law that i'm subject to so i think the cleaving and a way we can look at it beyond the dunbar number two is we can look at that a civilization has binding energy that is holding them together and has cleaving energy and if the binding energy exceeds the cleaving energy that civilization will last and so there are things that we can do to decrease the cleaving energy within the society things we can do to increase the binding energy i think naturally we saw that had certain characteristics up to a certain size kind of tribalism that ended with a few things it ended with people having migrated enough that when you started to get resource wars it you couldn't just migrate away easily and so tribal warfare became more obligated it involved the plow in the beginning of real economic surplus there were so there were a few different kind of um forcing functions but we're talking about what size should it be right what size should a society be and i think the idea like if we think about your body for a moment as a self-organizing complex system that is multi-scaled we think about bodies of wonderland our body is a wonderland yeah uh you have that's a john mayer song i apologize but yes so uh if we think about our body and the billions of cells that are in it well you don't have like think about how ridiculous it would be to try to have all the tens of trillions of cells in it with no internal organization structure right just like a sea of protoplasm your democracy and so you have cells and tissues and then you have tissues and organs and organs and organ systems and so you have these layers of organization and then obviously the individual and a tribe in a ecosystem and each of the higher layers are both based on the lower layers but also influencing them i think the future of civilization will be similar which is there's a level of governance that happens at the level of the individual my own governance of my own choice i think there's a level that happens at the level of a family we're making decisions together we're inter-influencing each other and affecting each other taking responsibility for the idea of an extended family and you can see that like for a lot of human history we had an extended family we had a local community a local church or whatever it was we had these intermediate structures whereas right now this kind of like the individual producer consumer taxpayer voter and the massive nation state global complex and not that much in the way of intermediate structures that we relate with and not that much in the way of real personal dynamics all impersonalized made fungible and so i think that we have to have global governance meaning i think we have to have governance at the scale we affect stuff and if if anybody is messing up the oceans that matters for everybody so that that can't only be national or only local everyone is scared of the idea of global governance because we think about some top-down system of imposition that now has no checks and balances on power i'm scared of that same version so i'm not talking about that kind of global governance um it's why i'm even using the word governance as a process rather than government as an imposed uh phenomena and so i think we have to have global governance but i think we also have to have local governance and there has to be relationships between them that each where there are both checks and balances in power flows of information so i think governance at the level of cities will be a bigger deal in the future than governance at the level of nation-states because i think nation-states are largely fictitious things that are defined by wars and agreements to stop wars and like that i think cities are based on real things that will keep being real we're the proximity of certain things together the physical proximity of things together gives increased value of those things so you look at like jeffrey west's work on scale and finding that companies and nation states and things that have a kind of complicated agreement structure get diminishing return of you of production per capita as the total number of people increases beyond about the tribal scale but the city actually gets increasing productivity per capita but it's not designed it's kind of this organic thing right so there should be governance at the level of cities because people can sense and actually have some agency there probably neighborhoods and smaller scales within it and also verticals and some of it won't be geographic it'll be network-based right networks of affinities so i don't think the future is one type of governance now what we can say more broadly is say when we're talking about groups of people that inter-affect each other the idea of a civilization is that we can figure out how to coordinate our choice making to not be at war with each other and hopefully increase total productive capacity that's good for everybody division of labor and specialty so we all get more better stuff and whatever but it's a it's a coordination of our choice making i think we can look at civilizations failing on the side of not having enough coordination of choice making so they fail on the side of chaos and then they cleave and an internal war comes about or whatever or they can't make smart decisions and they overuse their resources or whatever or it can fail on the side of trying to get order via imposition via force and so it fails on the side of oppression which ends up being for a while functional ish for the thing as a whole but miserable for most people in it until it fails either because of revolt or because it can't innovate enough or something like that and so there's this like toggling between order via oppression and chaos and i think the idea of democracy not the way we've implemented it but the idea of it whether we're talking about a representative democracy or a direct digital democracy liquid democracy uh republic or whatever the idea of an open society participatory governance is can we have order that is emergent rather than imposed so that we aren't stuck with chaos and infighting and inability to coordinate and we're also not stuck with oppression and what would it take to have emergent order this is the most kind of central question for me these days because if we look at what different nation states are doing around the world and we see nation states that are more authoritarian that in some ways are actually coordinating much more effectively so for instance we can see that china has built high-speed rail not just through its country but around the world and the us hasn't built any high-speed rail yet you can see that it brought 300 million people out of poverty in a time where we've had increasing economic inequality happening you can see like that if there was a single country that could make all of its own stuff if the global supply chains failed china would be the closest one to being able to start to go closed loop on fundamental things uh belt and road initiative supply chain on rare earth metals transistor manufacturing that is like oh they're actually coordinating more effectively in some important ways in the last call it 30 years and that's imposed order in post order and we can see that if in the u.s if no let's look at why real quick we know why we created term limits so that we wouldn't have forever monarchs that's the thing we were trying to get away from and that there would be checks and balances on power and that kind of thing but that also has created a negative second order effect which is nobody does long-term planning because somebody comes in who's got four years they want re-elected they don't do anything that doesn't create a return within four years they will end up getting them elected re-elected and so the 30-year industrial development to build high-speed trains or the new kind of fusion energy or whatever it is just doesn't get invested in and then if you have left versus right where whatever someone does for four years then the other guy gets in and undoes it for four years and most of the energy goes into campaigning against each other this system is just dissipating as heat right like it's just burning up as heat and the system that has no term limits and no internal friction in fighting because they got rid of those people can actually coordinate better but uh i would argue it has its own fail states eventually and dystopic properties that are not the thing we want so the goal is to accomplish to create a system that does long-term planning without the negative effects of a monarch or dictator that stays there for the long term and accomplish that through uh not doing the imposition of a single leader but through uh emergence so it doesn't that perhaps first of all the technology in itself seems to me maybe disagree allow for different possibilities here which is make primary the system not the humans so the the the basic uh the medium on which the democracy happens like like a platform or where people can make decisions do the choice making the coordination of the choice making where emerges some kind of order to where like something that applies at the scale of the family the extended family the city the the country the the continent the whole world and then does that so dynamically constantly changing based on the needs of the people sort of always evolving and uh it would all be owned by google like doesn't doesn't this is there a way to um so first of all you're optimistic that it you could basically create like technology can save us technology at creating platforms by technology i mean like software network platforms that allows humans to deliberate like make government together dynamically without the need for a leader that's on a podium screaming stuff that's one and two if you're optimistic about that are you also optimistic about the ceos of such platforms the idea that technology is values neutral values agnostic and people can use it for constructive or destructive purposes but it doesn't predispose anything it's just it's just silly and naive technology elicits patterns of human behavior because those who utilize it and get ahead end up behaving differently because of their utilization of it and then other people then they end up shaping the world or other people race to also get the power of the technology and so there's whole schools of anthropology that look at the effect on social systems and the minds of people of the change in our tooling marvin harris's work called cultural materialism looked at this deeply obviously marshall mcluhan looked specifically at the way that information technologies changed the nature of our beliefs minds values social systems i will not try to do this rigorously because there are academics we'll disagree on the subtle details but i'll do it kind of like illustratively you think about the emergence of the plow the oxtron plow in the beginning of agriculture that came with it where before that you had hunter gather and then you had horticulture kind of a digging stick but not the plow well that the world changed a lot with that right and a few of the changes that um at least some theorists believe in is when the oxtron plow started to proliferate any culture that utilized it was able to start to actually cultivate grain because just with a digging stick you couldn't get enough grain for it to matter grain was a storable caloric surplus they could make it through the famines they could grow their population so the ones that used it got so much ahead that it became obligate and everybody used it that corresponding with the use of a plow animism went away everywhere that it existed because you can't talk about the spirit of the buffalo while beating the cow all day long to pull a plow so the moment that we do animal husbandry of that kind we have to beat the cow all day you have to say it's just a dumb animal man has dominion over earth and the nature of even our religious and spiritual ideas change you went from women primarily using the digging stick to do the horticulture or gathering before that men doing the hunting stuff to now men had to use the plow because the upper body strength actually really mattered women would have miscarriages when they would do it when they were pregnant so all the caloric supply started to come from men where it had been from both before and the ratio of male female gods changed to being mostly male gods following that um obviously we went from very s that particular line of thought then also says that feminism followed the tractor and that the rise of feminism um in the west has started to follow women being able to say we can do what men can because the male upper body strength wasn't differential once the internal combustion engine was much stronger and we can drive a tractor so i don't think to try to trace complex things to one cause is a good idea so i think this is a reductionist view but it has truth in it and so the idea that technology is values agnostic is silly technology codes patterns of behavior that code rationalizing those patterns of behavior and believing in them the plow also is the beginning of the anthropocene right it was the beginning of us changing the environment radically to to clear-cut areas to just make them useful for people which also meant the change of the view of where the the web of life were just a part of it etc so all those types of things um so that's brilliantly put but by the way that was just brilliant but the question is so it's not agnostic but so we have to look at what the psychological effects of specific tech applied certain ways are and be able to say it's not just doing the first order thing you intended it's doing like the effect on patriarchy and animism and the end of tribal culture in the beginning of empire and the class systems that came with that and we can go on and on about what the plow did um the beginning of surplus was inheritance which then became the capital model and like lots of things so we have to say when we're looking at the tech how is what are the values built into the way the tech is being built that are not obvious right so you always have to consider externalities yes and the externalities are not just physical to the environment they're also to how the people are being conditioned and how the relationality between them as being conditioned question i'm asking you so i personally would rather be led by a plow and a tractor than stalin okay that's the question i'm asking you is uh in creating an emergent government or people where there's a democracy that's dynamic that makes choices that does governance at at like a very kind of liquid like uh there's a bunch of fine resolution layers of abstraction of governance happening at all scales right and doing so dynamically where no one person has power at any one time that can dominate and impose rule okay that's the stalin version i'm saying isn't there the uh alter the isn't the alternative that's emergent empowered or made possible by the plow and the tractor which is the modern version of that is like the internet the the digital space where we can the monetary system where you have the cryptocurrency and so on but you have much more importantly to me at least is just basic social interaction the mechanisms of human transacting with each other in the space of ideas isn't so yes it's not agnostic definitely not agnostic you've had a brilliant rant there the tractor has effects but isn't that the way we achieve an emergent system of uh governance yes but i wouldn't say we're on track you haven't seen anything promising yeah i haven't seen anything promising is that to be on track requires understanding and guiding some of the things differently than is currently happening and it's possible that's actually what i really care about so you couldn't have had a stalin without having certain technologies emerge he couldn't have ruled such a big area without transportation technologies without the train without the uh communication tech that made it possible so when you say you'd rather have a tractor or a plow than a stall and there's a relationship between them that is more recursive which is new physical technologies allow rulers to rule with more power over larger distances historically and um but some things are more responsible for that than others like stalin also ate stuff for breakfast but the thing he ate for breakfast is less responsible for the starvation of millions than than the train the train is more responsible for that and then the weapons of war are more responsible so some technology like let's not throw it all in the you're saying like technology has a responsibility here but some is better than others i'm saying that farm people's use of technology will change their behavior so it has behavioral dispositions built in the change of the behavior will also change the values in the society it's very complicated right it will also as a result both make people who have different kinds of predispositions with regard to rulership and different kinds of new capacities and so we have to think about these things it's kind of well understood that the printing press and then in early industrialism ended feudalism and created kind of nation states so one thing i would say as a long trend that we can look at is that whenever there is a a step function a major leap in technology physical technology the the underlying techno-industrial base with which we do stuff it ends up coding for it ends up predisposing a whole bunch of human behavioral patterns that the previous social system what had not emerged to try to solve and so it usually ends up breaking the previous social systems the way the plow broke the tribal system the way that the industrial revolution broke the feudal system and then new social systems have to emerge they can deal with that the new powers the new dispositions whatever with that tech obviously the nuke broke nation-state governance being adequate and said we can't ever have that again so then it created this in international governance apparatus world so i guess what i'm saying is that the solution is not exponential tech following the current path of what the market incentivizes exponential tech to do market being a previous social tech i would say that exponential tech if we look at different types of social tech so let's just briefly look at that democracy tried to do the emergent order thing right at least that's the story and which is and this is why if you look this important um part to build first it's kind of doing it it's just doing it poorly you're saying i mean that's it is emergent order in some sense i mean that's the hope of democracy versus other forms of government correct i mean i i said at least the story because obviously it didn't do it for women and slaves early on it doesn't die for all classes equally et cetera but the the idea of democracy is that is participatory governance and so you notice that the modern democracies emerged out of the european enlightenment and specifically because the idea that a lot of people some huge number not a tribal number huge number of anonymous people who don't know each other are not bonded to each other who believe different things who grew up in different ways can all work together to make collective decisions well that affect everybody and where some of them will make compromises and the thing that matters to them for what matters to other strangers that's actually wild like it's a wild idea that that would even be possible and it was kind of the result of this high enlightenment idea that we could all do the philosophy of science and we could all do the hegelian dialectic those ideas had emerged right and it was that we we could all so our choice making because we said a society is trying to coordinate choice making the emergent order is the order of our of the choices that we're making not just the level of the individuals but what groups of individuals corporations nations states whatever do our choices are based on our choice making is based on our sense making and our meaning making our sense making is what do we believe is happening in the world and what do we believe the effects of a particular thing would be our meaning making us what do we care about right our values generation what do we care about that we're trying to move the world in the direction of if you ultimately are trying to move the world in a direction that is really really different than the direction i'm trying to we have very different values we're gonna have a hard time and if you think the world is a very different world right if you think that systemic racism is rampant everywhere one of the worst problems and i think it's not even a thing if you think climate change is almost existential and i think it's not even a thing we're gonna have a really hard time coordinating and so we have to be able to have shared sense-making of can we come to understand just what is happening together and then can we do shared values generation okay maybe i'm emphasizing a particular value more than you but i can see how i can take your perspective and i can see how the thing that you value is worth valuing and i can see how it's affected by this thing so can we take all the values and try to come up with a proposition that benefits all of them better than the proposition i created just to benefit these ones it harms the ones that you care about which is why you're opposing my proposition we don't even try in the process of crafting a proposition currently to see and this is a reason that the proposition when we vote on it gets half the votes almost all the time it almost never gets 90 of the votes is because it benefits some things and harms other things we can say all theory of trade-offs but we didn't even try to say could we see what everybody cares about and see if there is a better solution so how do we fix that try i i wonder is it is it as simple as the social technology of education well no it's that the proposition crafting and refinement process has to be key to a democracy or participatory governance and it's not currently but it's this isn't that the humans creating that situation so so one way there's two ways to fix this one is to fix the individual humans which is the education early in life and the second is to create somehow systems that yeah both so i understand the education part but creating systems that's why that's why i mentioned the technologies is creating social networks essentially yes that's actually necessary yeah okay so let's go to the first part and then we'll come to the second part so democracy emerged as an enlightenment era idea that we could all do a dialectic and come to understand what other people valued and so that we could actually come up with a cooperative solution rather than just [ __ ] you we're gonna get our thing in war right and that we could sense make together we could all apply the philosophy of science and you weren't gonna stick to your guns on what the speed of sound is if we measured it and we found out what it was and there's a unifying element to the objectivity in that way and so this is why um i believe jefferson said if you could give me a perfect newspaper and a broken government or i'm paraphrasing or a broken government perfect newspaper i wouldn't hesitate to take the perfect newspaper because if the people understand what's going on they can make build a new government if they don't understand what's going on they can't possibly make good choices and washington i'm paraphrasing again first president said the number one aim of the federal government should be the comprehensive education of every citizen in the science of government science of government was the term of art think about what that means right science of government would be game theory coordination theory history wouldn't call game theory yet history sociology economics right all the things that lead to how we understand human coordination i think it's so profound that he didn't say the number one aim of the federal government is rule of law and he didn't say it's protecting the border from enemies because if the number one aim was to protect the border from enemies it could do that as military dictatorship quite effectively and if the goal was rule of law it could do it as a dictatorship as a police state and so if the number one goal is anything other than the comprehensive education of all the citizens and the science of government it won't stay a democracy long you can see so both education and the fourth estate the fourth estate being the so education can i make sense of the world am i trained to make sense of the world the fourth estate is what's actually going on currently the news do i have good unbiased information about it those are both considered prerequisite institutions for democracy to even be a possibility and then at the scale it was initially suggested here the town hall was the key phenomena where there wasn't a special interest group crafted a proposition and the first thing i ever saw was the proposition to know anything about and i got to vote yes or no it was in the town hall we all got to talk about it and the proposition could get crafted in real time through the conversation which is why there is that founding father statement that that voting is the death of democracy voting fundamentally is polarizing the population in some kind of sublimated war but and we'll do that as the last step but what we want to do first is to say how does the thing that you care about that seems damaged by this proposition how could that turn into a solution to make this proposition better where this proposition still tends to the thing it's trying to tend to antennas to that better can we work on this together in and in a town hall we could have that as the scale increased we lost the ability to do that now as you mentioned the internet could change that the fact that we had representatives that had to ride a horse from one town hall to the other one to see what the colony would do that we stopped having this kind of developmental um propositional development process when the town hall ended the fact that we have not used the internet to recreate this is somewhere between insane and aligned with class interests i would push back to say that the internet has those things it just says a lot of other things i feel like the internet has places where that encourage synthesis of competing ideas and sense making which is what we're talking about it's just that it's also flooded with a bunch of other systems that perhaps are out competing it under current incentives perhaps has to do with capitalism in the market linux is awesome right and wikipedia and places where you have and they have problems but places where you have open source sharing of information betting of information towards collective building is that building something like like how much has that affected our court systems or our policing systems or our military systems or first of all i think a lot but not not enough i i i think that's something i told you offline yesterday is uh perhaps that's a whole nother discussion but i i don't think we're quite quantifying the impact on the world of the positive impact of wikipedia you said the policing the i mean i just i just think the amount of um empathy that could like knowledge i think can't help but lead to empathy just knowing okay just knowing okay i'll i'll give you some pieces of information knowing how many people died in various awards that already that delta when you have millions of people have that knowledge it's like it's a little like slap in the face like oh like my boyfriend or girlfriend breaking up with me is not such a big deal when millions of people were tortured you know like just a little bit and when a lot of people know that because of wikipedia or the effect there's second order effect of wikipedia which is it's not that necessarily people read wikipedia it's like youtubers who don't really know stuff that well will thoroughly read a wikipedia article and create a compelling video describing that wikipedia article that then millions of people watch and they understand that holy [ __ ] a lot of there was such first of all there was such a thing as world war ii in world war one okay like they can at least like learn about it they can learn about this was like recent they can learn about slavery they can learn about all kinds of injustices in the world and that i think has a lot of effects to our to the way whether you're a police officer a a lawyer a judge in the jury or just a regular civilian citizen the way you approach the the uh every other communication you engage in even if the system of that communication is very much flawed so i think there's a huge positive effect on wikipedia that's my case for wikipedia so you should donate to wikipedia i i'm a huge fan but there's very few systems like it which is sad to me so i think it's it would be a useful exercise for any uh listener of the show to really try to run the dialectical synthesis process with regard to a topic like this and take the techno concern perspective with regard to information tech that folks like tristan harris take and say what are all of the things that are getting worse and what and are any of them following an exponential curve and how much worse how quickly could that be and then and do that fully without mitigating it then take the techno-optimist perspective and see what things are getting better in a way that kurzweil or diamandis or someone might do and try to take that perspective fully and say are some of those things exponential what could that portend and then try to hold all that at the same time and i think there are ways in which depending upon the metrics we're looking at things are getting worse on exponential curves and better on exponential curves for different metrics at the same time which which i hold is the destabilization of previous system and either an emergence to a better system or collapse to a lower order are both possible and so i want my optimism not to be about my assessment i want my assessment to be just as [ __ ] clear as it can be i want my optimism to be what inspires the solution process on that clear assessment so i never i never want to apply optimism in the sense making right i want to just try to be clear if anything i want to make sure that the challenges are really well understood but that's in service of an optimism that there are good potentials even if i don't know what they are that are worth seeking right there's kind of a there is a some sense of optimism that's required to even try to innovate really hard problems but then i want to take my pessimism and red team my own optimism to see is that solution not going to work does it have second order effects and then knock it not get upset by that because i then come back to how to make it better so just a relationship between optimism and pessimism and the dialectic of how they how they can work so when i of course we can say that wikipedia is a pretty awesome example of a thing we can look at the places where it has limits or has failed where on a celebrity topic or corporate interest topic you can pay wikipedia editors to edit more frequently and various things like that but you can also see where there's a lot of information that was kind of decentrally created that is good information that is more easily accessible to people than everybody buying their own encyclopedia britannica or walking down to the library and they can be updated in real time faster and i think you're very right that the business model is a big difference because wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation it is a it's tending to the information commons and it doesn't have an agenda other than tending to the information commons and i think the two masters issue is a tricky one when i'm trying to optimize for very different kinds of things um where i have to sacrifice one for the other and i can't find synergistic satisfiers which one and if i have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholder uh profit maximization and you know what what does that end up creating i think the ad model that silicon valley took um i think jaren lanier i don't know if you've had him on the show but he has interesting assessment of the nature of the ad model um silicon valley wanting to support capitalism and entrepreneurs to make things but uh also the belief that information should be free and also the network dynamics with the more people you got on you got increased value per user per capita as more people got on so you didn't want to do anything to slow the rate of adoption um some places actually you know paypal paying people money to join the network because the uh value of the network would be there'd be a metcalf-like dynamic proportional to the square of the total number of users so um the ad model made sense of how do we make it free but also be a business get everybody on but not really thinking about what it would mean to and this is now the whole idea that if you aren't paying for the product you are the product um if if they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholder maximize profit their customer is the advertiser the user who it's being built for is to do behavioral mod for them for advertisers that's a whole different thing than that same type of tech could have been if applied with a different business model or a different purpose um i think there's because facebook and google and other information and communication platforms end up harvesting data about user behavior that allows them to model who the people are in a way that gives them more sometimes specific information and behavioral information then even a therapist or a doctor or a lawyer or a priest might have in a different setting they basically are accessing privileged information there should be a fiduciary responsibility and in normal fiduciary law if there's this principal agent thing if you are a uh principal and i'm an agent on your behalf i don't have a game theoretic relationship with you right if you're sharing something with me and i'm the priest or i'm the therapist i'm never going to use that information to try to sell you a used car or whatever the thing is but facebook is gathering massive amounts of privileged information and using it to modify people's behavior for a behavior that they didn't sign up for wanting the behavior but what the corporation did so i think this is an example of the physical tech evolving in the context of the previous social tech where it's being shaped in particular ways and here unlike wikipedia that evolved for the the information commons this evolved for fulfilling particular agenda purpose most people when they're on facebook think it's just a tool that they're using they don't realize it's an agent right it is a corporation with a profit motive and um and as i'm interacting with it it has a goal for me different than my goal for myself and i might want to be on for a short period of time its goal is maximize time on site and so there is a rivalry that is take but where there should be a fiduciary contract i think that's actually a huge deal and i think if we said could we apply facebook like technology to develop people's citizenry capacity right to develop their personal health and well-being and habits as well as their um cognitive understanding the complexity with which they can process the health of their relationships that would be amazing to start to explore and this is now the thesis that we started to discuss before is every time there is a major step function in the physical tech it obsoletes the previous social tech and the new social tech has to emerge what i would say is that when we look at the nation-state level of the world today the more top-down authoritarian nation states are as the exponential text started to emerge the digital technology started to emerge they were in a position for better long-term planning and better coordination and so the authoritarian state started applying the exponential tech intentionally to make more effective authoritarian states and that's everything from like an internet of things surveillance system going into machine learning systems to the sesame credit system to all those types of things and so they're upgrading their social tech using the exponential tech otherwise within a nation state like the us but democratic open societies the sus the countries the states are not directing the technology in a way that makes a better open society meaning better emergent order they're saying well the corporations are doing that and the state is doing the relatively little thing it would do aligned with the previous corporate law that no longer is relevant because there wasn't fiduciary responsibility for things like that there wasn't anti-trust because this creates functional monopolies because of network dynamics right where youtube has more users than vimeo and every other video player together amazon has a bigger percentage of market share than all of the other markets together you get one big dog per vertical because of network effect which is a kind of organic monopoly that the previous anti-trust law didn't even have a place that wasn't a thing anti-monopoly was only something that emerged in the space of government contracts so um so what we see is the new exponential technology is being directed by authoritarian nation states to make better authoritarian nation states and by corporations to make more powerful corporations the more powerful corporations when we think about the scottish enlightenment when the idea of markets was being advanced the modern kind of ideas of markets the biggest corporation was tiny compared to what the biggest corporation today is so the asymmetry of it relative to people was tiny and the asymmetry now in terms of the total technology it employs total amount of money total amount of information processing is so many orders of magnitude and rather than there be demand for an authentic thing that creates a basis for supply as supply started to get way more coordinated and powerful and the demand wasn't coordinated because you don't have a labor union of all the customers working together but you do have a coordination on the supply side supply started to recognize that it could manufacture demand it could make people want [ __ ] that they didn't want before that maybe wouldn't increase their happiness in a meaningful way might increase addiction addiction is a very good way to manufacture demand and so as soon as manufactured demand started through this is the cool thing and you have to have it for status or whatever it is the intelligence of the market was breaking now it's no longer collective intelligence system that is up regulating real desire for things that are really meaningful you're able to hijack the lower angels of our nature rather than the higher ones the addictive patterns drive those and have people watch it that doesn't actually make them happier make the world better and so we really also have to we have to update our theory of markets because behavioral econ showed that homo economicus the rational actor is not really a thing but particularly at greater and greater scale can't really be a thing voluntarism isn't a thing where if my corp if my company doesn't want to advertise on facebook i just will lose to the companies that do because that's where all the [ __ ] attention is and so then i can say it's voluntary but it's not really if there's a functional monopoly same if i'm going to sell on amazon or things like that so what i would say is these corporations are becoming more powerful than nation states in some ways and they are also debasing the integrity of the nation states the open societies so the democracies are getting weaker as a result of exponential tech and the kind of new tech companies that are kind of a new feudalism tech feudalism because it's not a democracy inside of a tech company or the supply and demand relationship when you have manufactured demand and kind of monopoly type functions and so we have basically a new feudalism controlling exponential tech and authoritarian nation states controlling it and those attractors are both shitty and so i'm interested in the application of exponential tech to making better social tech that makes emergent order possible and where then that emergent order can bind and direct the exponential tech in fundamentally healthy not x-risk oriented directions i think the relationship of social tech and physical tech can make it i think we can actually use the physical tech to make better social tech but it's not given that we do if we don't make better social tech then i think the physical tech empowers really shitty social tech that it's not a world that we want i don't know if it's a road we want to go down but i tend to believe that the market will create exactly the thing you're talking about which i feel like there's a lot of money to be made in creating a social tech that creates a better citizen it creates a better human being the this this uh the the your description of facebook and so on which is a system that creates addiction which manufacturers demand is not obviously inherently the consequence of the markets like i feel like that's the the first stage of us like baby deer trying to figure out how to use the internet i feel like there's much more money to be made with something that creates compersion and love honestly i mean i i really from we can have this i can make the business case for it i don't know i don't think we want to really have that discussion but don't do you have some hope that that's the case and what i guess if not then how do we fix the system of markets that work so well for the united states for so long like i said every social tech worked for a while like tribalism worked well for two or three hundred thousand years i think social tech has to keep evolving the social technologies with which we organize and coordinate our behavior have to keep evolving as our physical tech does so i think the thing that we call markets of course we can try to say oh even biology runs on markets and but the thing that we call markets the underlying theory homo economicus demand driving supply that thing broke it broke with scale in particular um and a few other things so it needs updated in a really fundamental way um i think there's something even deeper than making money happening that it in some ways will obsolete money making i think capitalism is not about business so if you think about business i'm going to produce a good or a service that people want and bring it to the market so that people get access to that good or service that's the world of business but that's not capitalism capitalism is the management and allocation of capital which financial services was a tiny percentage of the total market has become a huge percentage of the total market it's a different creature so if i was in business and i was producing a good or service and i was saving up enough money that i started to be able to invest that money and gain interest or do things like that i could start realizing i'm making more money on my money than i'm making on producing the goods and services so i stop even paying attention to goods and services and start paying attention to making money on money and how do i utilize capital to create more capital and capital gives me more optionality because i can buy anything with it than a particular good or service that only some people want capitalism more capital ended up meaning more control i could put more people under my employment i could buy larger pieces of land novel access to resource mines and put more technology under my employment so it meant increased agency and also increased control i think attentionalism is even more powerful so rather than enslave people where the people kind of always want to get away and put in the least work they can there's a way in which economic servitude was just more profitable than slavery right have the people work even harder voluntarily because they want to get ahead and nobody has to be there to whip them or control them or whatever [Music] this is a a cynical take but a meaningful take um so people so capital ends up being a way to influence human behavior right and yet where people still feel free in some meaningful way they they're not feeling like uh they're going to be punished by the state if they don't do something it's like punished by the market via homelessness or something but the market is this invisible thing i can't put an agent on so it feels like free and so if if you want to affect people's behavior and still have them feel free capital ends up being a way to do that but i think affecting their attention is even deeper because if i can affect their attention i can both affect what they want and what they believe and what they feel and we statistically know this very clearly facebook has done studies that based on changing the feed it can change beliefs emotional dispositions et cetera and so i think there's a way that the the harvest and directing of attention is even a more powerful system than capitalism it is effective in capitalism to generate capital but i think it also generates influence beyond what capital can do and so do we want to have some groups utilizing that type of tech to direct other people's attention if so um towards what towards what metrics of what a good civilization and good human life would be what's the oversight process what is the transparency i can i can answer all the things you're mentioning uh i i can build i guarantee you if i i'm not such a lazy ass uh i'll be part of the many people doing this as transparency and control like to giving control to individual people okay so maybe the corporation has coordination on its goals that all of its customers or users together don't have so there's some asymmetry where it's uh asymmetry of its goals but maybe i could actually help all of the customers to coordinate almost like a labor union or whatever by informing and educating them adequately about the effects the externalities on them this is not toxic waste going into the ocean of the atmosphere it's their their minds their beings their families their relationships um such that they will in group change their behavior and um i think the idea one way of saying what you're saying i think is that you think that you can rescue homo economicus from uh the rational actor that will pursue all the goods and services and choose the best one at the best price the kind of rand one misses hayek that you can rescue that from dan ariely and behavioral econ that says that's actually not how people make choices they make it based on status hacking largely whether it's good for them or not in the long term and the large asymmetric corporation can run propaganda in narrative warfare that hits people's status buttons and their limbic hijacks and their lots of other things in ways that they can't even perceive that are happening um they're not paying attention to that this site is employing psychologists and split testing and whatever else so you're saying i think we can recover homo economics and not just through a singles like mechanism technology there's there's the uh not to keep mentioning the guy but platforms like joe rogan and so on that that make help make viral the ways that the education of negative externalities can become viral in this world so interestingly i actually agree with you that got them that we four and a half hours in that we can tech can do some good all right well see what you're talking about is the application of tech here broadcast tech where you can speak to a lot of people and that's not going to be strong enough because the different people need spoken too differently which means it has to be different voices that get amplified to those audiences more like facebook's tech but nonetheless we'll start with broadcast tech plants the first seed and then the word of mouth is a powerful thing you need to do the first broadcast shotgun and then it like lands so catapulted whatever i don't know what the right weapon is but then it just spreads to word of mouth through all kinds of tech including facebook so let's come back to the fundamental thing the fundamental thing is we want to kind of order at various scales from the conflicting parts of our self actually having more harmony than they might have to uh family extended family local all the way up to global we want emergent order where our choices have more alignment right we want that to be emergent rather than imposed or rather than we want fundamentally different things or make totally different sense of the world where warfare of some kind becomes the only solution emerging order requires us in our choice making requires us being able to have related sense making and related meaning making processes can we apply digital technologies and exponential tech in general to try to increase the capacity to do that where the technology called a town hall the social tech that we all get together and talk obviously is very scale limited and it's also oriented to geography rather than networks of aligned interest can we build new better versions of those types of things and going back to the idea that a democracy or participatory governance depends upon comprehensive education in the science of government which includes being able to understand things like asymmetric information warfare on the side of governments and how the people can organize adequately can you utilize some of the technologies now to be able to support increased comprehensive education of the people and maybe comprehensive informedness so both fixing the decay in both education and the fourth estate that have happened so the people can start self-organizing to then influence the corporations the nation states to do different things and or build new ones themselves yeah fundamentally that's the thing that has to happen we the exponential tech gives us a novel problem landscape that the world never had the nuke gave us a novel problem landscape and so that required this whole bretton woods world the exponential tech gives us novel problem landscape our existing problem-solving processes aren't doing a good job we have had more countries get nukes we haven't nuclear d proliferation we haven't achieved any of the un's sustainable development goals we haven't kept any of the new categories of tech for making arms races so our global coordination is not adequate to the problem landscape so we need fundamentally better problem solving processes a market or a state is a problem-solving process we need better ones it can do the speed and scale of the current issues right now speed is one of the other big things is that by the time we regulated ddt out of existence or cigarettes not for people under 18 they'd already killed so many people and we let the market do the thing but as elon has made the point that won't work for ai by the time we recognize afterwards that we have an autopoetic ai that's a problem you won't be able to reverse it that there's a number of things that when you're dealing with tech that is either self-replicating and disintermediates humans to keep going doesn't need humans to keep going or you have tech that just has exponentially fast effects your regulation has to come early it can't come after the effects have happened the negative effects have happened if because the negative x could be too big too quickly so we basically need new problem solving processes that do better at being able to internalize externality solve the problems on the right time scale and the right geographic scale and those new processes to not be imposed have to emerge from people wanting them and being able to participate in their development which is what i would call kind of a new cultural enlightenment or renaissance that has to happen where people start understanding the new power that exponential tech offers the way that it is actually damaging current governance structures that we care about and creating an x-risk landscape but could also be redirected towards more protopic purposes and then saying how do we rebuild new social institutions what are adequate social institutions where we can do participatory governance at scale and time and how can the people actually participate to build those things i the the solution that i see working requires a process like that and the result maximizes love so again elon musk that love is the answer let me take it back from the scale of societies to the scale that's far far more important which is the uh scale of uh family you've written a blog post about your dad we have uh various flavors of relationships with our fathers uh what have you learned about life from your dad well people can read the blog post and see a lot of individual things that i learned that i really appreciated if i was to kind of summarize at a high level um i had a really incredible dad like very very unusually uh positive set of experiences he was committed we were homeschooled and he was committed to work from home to be available and like prioritize fathering in a really deep way and you know as a super gifted super loving very unique man he also had his unique issues that were part of what crafted the unique brilliance and those things often go together and i say that because i think i had i had some unusual gifts and also some unusual difficulties and i think it's useful for everybody to know their path probably has both of those um but uh if i was to say kind of at the essence of one of the things my dad taught me across a lot of lessons was like a the intersection of self-empowerment ideas and practices that self-empower towards collective good uh towards some virtuous purpose beyond the self and he both said that a million different ways taught it in a million different ways when we were doing construction and he was teaching me how to build a house we were putting the wires to the walls before the drywall went on he made sure that the way that we put the wires through was beautiful like the the that the height of the holes was similar that we twisted the wires in a particular way that and it's like no one's ever going to see it and he's like if a job's worth doing it's worth doing well and excellence is its own reward and those types of ideas and if there was a really shitty job to do he'd say see the job do the job stay out of the misery just don't indulge any negativity do the things that need done and so there's like a there's an empowerment and a nobility together um and yeah extraordinarily fortunate is there ways you think you could have been a better son is there things you regret it's an interesting question let me first say just as a bit of a criticism that uh what kind of man do you think you are not wearing a suit and tie a real man should exactly uh i agree with your dad at that point you mentioned offline that uh he suggested a real man should wear a suit and tie but outside of that is there ways you could have been a better son maybe next time on your show i'll wear a suit and tie my dad would be happy about that um please i can answer the question later in life not early um i had just a huge amount of respect and reverence for my dad when i was young so i was asking myself that question a lot so i learned a lot of things i knew that i wasn't seeking to apply um there was a phase when i went through my kind of individuation differentiation where i had to make him excessively wrong about too many things um i don't think i had to but i did and he had a lot of kind of non-standard model beliefs about things whether early uh kind of ancient civilizations or ideas on evolutionary theory or alternate models of physics and and um and they weren't irrational but they didn't all have the standard of epistemic proof that i would need and i went through and some of them were kind of spiritual ideas as well i went through a phase in my early 20s where i kind of had the the attitude that dawkins or christopher hitchens has that can kind of be um like excessively certain and sanctimonious uh applying their reductionist philosophy of science to everything and um kind of brutally dismissive uh i'm embarrassed by that phase not to say anything about those men in their path but for myself and so during that time i was more dismissive of my dad's epistemology than i would have liked to have been i gotta correct that later apologize for it but that's the first thought that came to mind you've written the following i've had the experience countless times making love watching a sunset listening to music feeling the breeze that i would sign up for this whole life and all of its pains just to experience this exact moment this is a kind of worldless knowing it's the most important and real truth i know that experience itself is infinitely meaningful and pain is temporary and seen clearly even the suffering is filled with beauty i have experienced countless lives worth of moments worthy of life such an unreasonable fortune a few words of gratitude from you beautifully written is there some beautiful moments now you have uh experienced countless lives worth of those moments was there some things that um if you could uh in your darker moments you can go to to relive to remind yourself that the whole ride is worthwhile maybe skip the making love part we don't i know about that i mean i i feel i feel unreasonably fortunate that it is a such a humongous list because i mean i feel fortunate to have like had exposure to practices and philosophies and way of seeing things that makes me see things that way so i can take responsibility for seeing things in that way and not taking for granted really wonderful things but i can't take credit for being exposed to the philosophies that even gave me that possibility um you know it's not just with my wife it's with every person who i really love when we're talking i look at their face i in the context of a conversation feel overwhelmed by how lucky i am to get to know them and like that there's never been someone like them in all of history and there never will be again and they might be gone tomorrow i might be gone tomorrow and like i get this moment with them and when you take in the uniqueness of that fully and the beauty of it it's overwhelmingly beautiful and i remember the first time i did a big dose of mushrooms and i was looking at a tree for a long time and i was just crying with overwhelming how beautiful the tree was and it was a tree outside the front of my house that i'd walk by a million times and never looked at like this and it wasn't the dose of mushrooms where i was hallucinating like where the tree was purple yeah like the tree still looked like if i had to describe it says green it has leaves looks like this but it's way [ __ ] more beautiful like like capturing than it normally was and i'm like why is it so beautiful if i would describe it the same way and i realized i had no thoughts taking me anywhere else yeah like what it seemed like the mushrooms were doing was just actually shutting the narrative off that would have me be distracted so i could really see the tree and then i'm like [ __ ] when i get off these mushrooms i'm going to practice seeing the tree because it's always that beautiful and i just miss it and so i practice being with it and quieting the rest of the mind and then being like wow and and if it's not mushrooms like people have peak experiences where they'll see life and how incredible it is it's always there it's funny that i had this exact same experience on quite a lot of mushrooms just sitting alone and looking at a tree and exactly as you described it appreciating the undistorted beauty of it and it's funny to me that here's two humans very different with very different journeys or at some moment in time both looking at a tree like idiots for hours and just in awe and and happy to be alive in the end even just that moment alone is is worth living for but you did say humans and uh we have a moment together as two humans and you mentioned shots well i have to ask what uh what what are we looking at when i went to go get a smoothie before coming here i got you a keto smoothie that you didn't want because you're not just keto but fasting but i saw the thing with you and your dad where you did uh shots together yeah and this place happened to have shots of um ginger turmeric cayenne juice of some kind and so i was some himalayan i didn't necessarily plan it for being on the show i just brought it wow but we can we can do it that way i think we should we shall uh we shall toast like heroes daniel it's a huge host what do we toast to we toast to this moment this this this unique moment that we get to share together i'm very grateful to be here in this moment with you and uh yeah i'm grateful that you invited me here we met for the first time and i will never be the same for the good and the bad the i am that is really interesting that feels way healthier than the vodka my dad and i were drinking so i feel like a better man already daniel this is one of the best conversations i've ever had i can't wait to have many more likewise this is uh it's been an amazing experience thank you for wasting all your time today i want to say in terms of what you're mentioning about like the that you work in machine learning and the optimism that wants to look at the issues but wants to look at how this increased technological power could be applied to solving them and that even thinking about the broadcast of like can i help people understand the issues better and help organize them like fundamentally you're you're oriented like wikipedia what i see to really try to tend to the information commons without another agentic interest distorting it and for you to be able to get guys like lee smallin and roger penrose and like the the greatest thinkers of that are alive and you know have them on the show and most people would never be exposed to them and talk about it in a way that people can understand uh i think it's an incredible service i think you're doing great work so i was really happy to hear from you thank you daniel thanks for listening to this conversation with daniel schmokenberger and thank you to ground news netsuite four sigmatic magic spoon and better help check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from albert einstein i know not with what weapons world war 3 will be fought but world war 4 will be fought with sticks and stones thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 310,734

Rating: 4.8875122 out of 5

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, daniel schmachtenberger, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai

Id: hGRNUw559SE

Length: 255min 19sec (15319 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Brandt-son-of-Thora]

BRUH, I've been bugging Lex on Twitter to get Schmachtenberger on for months now. So glad it finally happened!

[u/WillzyxandOnandOn]

Great discussion

[u/CdrJackShepard]

I've only heard Daniel Schmachtenberger on Lex's podcast and on Darkhorse Podcast, but he's already one of my favorite thinkers to listen to -- great pick Lex.

[u/GroundPaprika]

Enjoyable episode.

I've seen the concept of antifragility thrown around alot lately, but always in a positive light. Any critical views on it?

[u/dainebag]

This episode resonates with me hard.

What Daniel says about thesis, antithesis and synthesis and being able to embody the other sides experience to empathise and make the best decisions for humanity, describes exactly how I feel I am.

I have this strange Hyper rationality. I ALWAYS consider the other side.

I know I’m not but I often feel alone in this way of thinking. It’s very isolating and takes a lot of energy to view everything from a non biased lens. It’s no wonder people choose to stray towards either end. It’s less lonely and requires a lot less thinking and energy.

[u/Hill_Folk]

Anyone remember the guests that Daniel recommended to Lex in the first half of the show? One was Stuart Kaufman, but I don't remember the other.

[u/noxot]

listened to this one two times, very good.

[u/semidemiurge]

Does anyone know if there is a transcript of this podcast. It is not on either of these?

https://www.happyscribe.com/public/lex-fridman-podcast-artificial-intelligence-ai

https://podcastnotes.org/?s=lex+fridman&orderby=date&order=desc

[u/Auty2k9]

Why were all the comments removed?

This guy always irked me the wrong way, wanted to know everyone else's opinons.