HomeGrown Humans - Daniel Schmachtenberger - Sensemaking - Hosted by Jamie Wheal

i kind of would think about that as like the will center the the heart thunder the mind center which is the will of saying i'm actually committed to being effective and i'm committed to learning how to be effective which means i'm committed to studying every failure i have and saying exactly strategically why and studying the like the now the study is here the will is the commitments to not become ineffective or disempowered and the heart center is the what is actually sacred to me that i'm in service to and i think the key thing here is recognizing life is sacred whatever part of life i'm focused on is connected to the rest of life and if i'm not holding the whole thing i'm probably driving an arms race where the thing that i'm okay causing harm to will end up harming the thing that i care about yeah and so how we get clear strategy devotion and will aligned like to me that's a minimum requisite for people to be effective collective insights is a voyage through topics and technologies revolutionizing human well-being groundbreaking approaches for a better world and a better life await you welcome to collective insights daniel schmachtenberger independent scholar and founder of the consilience project welcome to homegrown humans where we get to kick around end of times for stellar minds glad to have you man good to be here with you jamie this is fun yeah and and is one of the the people that i look to most often for a sort of pulse check on what's happening in the big wide world and what's the intersection of you know what might be called a sort of meta-systemic crisis where there's a lot of different things to keep keep our eyes on there's a lot of different unravelings uh braiding together i'd love to just start with what is your sense i mean you've been tracking the ecology the geopolitics the macroeconomics uh the information ecology you've been tracking a number of these things for a number of years and i'd love to just start with what have you seen in 2020 as we've been sort of experiencing a general quickening what are some of the things that are particularly catching your attention right now yeah i think that a lot of the people kind of looking at system dynamics as a whole um and looking at also kind of specifically catastrophic risk possibilities have been saying for some time that there's increasing system fragility i mean you can go back like club of rome and limits of growth outlying hey there's going to be system fragility for environmental reasons um and since then there have been more and more of those exponential tech mediated and whatever and that was that that was the think tank convened as the club at room in the early 70s is that right yeah and they coming out of that is the book limits of growth that addressed it was the first computer model the world three computer model that looked at pollution dynamics and unrenewable resource use dynamics and as a result of that violent conflicts and uh human migration and whatever and tried to model out uh ways into the future and they came to civilization will collapse roughly around 2054 um as we know it um and they weren't of course modeling adding facebook or google or exponential tech or anything it was just pretty much looking at materials economy right and the results of the nature of exponential growth of capital requiring exponentiation of a linear materials economy that runs out on a finite planet and then what happens so that's kind of like a first place um to start looking at system fragility what i would say happened in 2020 starting with kovid is that we went from people saying that catastrophic risk was likely or eminent um and that the current systems were fragile to that fragility actually started to cascade in terms of system failures and specifically like if i just kind of outline why systemic fragility uh before world war ii we didn't have a global system we had a bunch of local systems individual countries could make a lot of their own stuff depend on their own stuff so if the area failed it didn't mean everywhere failed post-world war major empires could never fight with each other as a because the weapons were too big so they needed to become so economically interdependent that it was always more profitable to just figure it out via trade rather than bomb each other and so the positive side of that was we didn't have kinetic world war three since then the negative side was we got a world system that was so interconnected that a failure anywhere could cascade to failures everywhere and we've never known how to build civilizations that don't eventually fail well and just tease about that for me the correlation and causation because you said once we had super big empires in this case likely the the us and the ussr who were too big to fight then and throw in china in the mix then we needed to figure out this highly what we needed to build this hyper-connected global trade system is what is that accurate is it was it an outcome of mutually assured destruction and since we can't bomb each other back into the stone age we better sell each other more stuff or was there a co-arising for a bunch of different drivers of course there are a bunch of different drivers we couldn't have done globalization before we had the technology to be able to do transit fast enough right and transport fast enough and where we needed to start building things that required materials that had been mined from all around the world on faster production cycles and bigger populations so um there was a trend already to the empires getting larger and larger with more kind of uh integrated capacity but no i think there was absolutely in the post-world war ii bretton woods world a recognition that the major superpowers couldn't have kinetic warfare again and there had not been a time if you look at the history of europe or whatever that the major empires didn't have kinetic warfare for for any meaningful periods of time and so we could do proxy wars and other than that we had to kind of sublimate that into economic interdependence and of course the capacity for that was already emerging but i do think and just to define some terms because you're introducing some nice ones here but so kinetic war meaning actually you know bullets and bombs and and proxy wars things like korea vietnam yeah usa and ussr can test our weapons against each other in smaller countries but we can't actually do it directly so but what we see in this situation is that a virus can start in a place that feels totally remote to us right it can start in china and then pretty soon because of the nature of how how interconnected via transport the world is it's a global virus everywhere and then as a result of that to start trying to deal with it via shutdowns you get breakdowns of supply chains which start to break down food supply chains and you see small businesses closing at scale which exacerbates wealth and equality and so like a a systemic set of cascades of decoupling the economy and the market of increasing wealth inequality of changing the way that different countries handled it creating geopolitical tensions um in the eu in eastern europe and between the u.s and other places so then of course when we see like the the racial tensions that started here been racial tensions for a long time they became more violent but of course they're going to become more violent after massive unemployment because when people's needs aren't being met by the system like fundamental survival needs then violence is much more likely and uh well let's talk about that for a sec because i mean i heard some interesting pieces that described the the riots that the the black live matters riots and george floyd protests as couldn't have been possible other than within the context of quarantine and lockdown and that it was it was a pressure valve release and that yes of course those things had been there for a long time um and were endemic in many ways but the combination of that so so let's we've been doing a very much sort of a sociopolitical analysis for a sec but let's kind of do the exact opposite and and i'd love to hear your thoughts on the role of basically collective grief in this and its relationship to rage and social protest well what do you what do you a think about that as a category to be monitoring you know as a vector of risk and also do you have any thoughts on how we can work with those energies better than we seem to be that's a great question um i i do have some thoughts on that i'm actually curious to hear your frame and thoughts on it uh because there's some i'm i'm sure you have them and went there well i mean i don't even remember what i think i might have even been watching the crown or something and somebody oh i know what it was king george died right and then in the midst of that the family was lashing out at each other and there was a sense of who's to blame and none of it made a whole lot of sense in the sense of you know was it you who took the car that day or was it was it you the one he loved the most or you know whatever it doesn't really matter when a human nervous system and psyche is overloaded with grief you know it is non-rational or irrational but it must be vented like unless you know if the person feels that it will collapse or destroy them if it's not and it feels like with the amount of lashing out and thrashing that we're experiencing even towards those that could be allies or that could be on the same side and be in common cause it feels like we're sort of all suffering micro to even now macro ptsd the sort of a hand reaching out to help is actually seen as one that's going to strike and and then that justifies my counter-attack and it just feels curious to me as to how we're gonna work our way through that uh to to find common ground again so i mean if we context set when you say ptsd it's like it's not the acute onset ptsd it's the complex ptsd of um a bunch of micro traumas from a whole set of amorphous things that lead to a ptsd like reaction from lots of things right and so the idea that the the social reality the civilizational reality right now is kind of generating complex ptsd pretty ubiquitously and lots of people's a very interesting frame and the idea that there's pretty dysregulated nervous systems and people who also didn't really learn where there wasn't a culture where people learned how to regulate their or relate with their emotions in ways that were healthy and empowered them and connected their logical strategic capacity with their will with their kind of emotional self i think there is very increased load and not a good culture that teaches people how to deal with that load and when we talk about the increased load we can talk about like you know most of news is vicarious trauma and if i'm a black guy in oakland and my news newsfeed has curated the thing that is maximizing time on site and it's maximizing time on site by you know the things that kind of scare me and piss me off and whatever are i'm gonna share and engage with more then not i might just see a huge amount of cops killing black people and then if i'm a white trump supporter in in texas i might just have a news feed of black people unprovokedly attacking white people and the most violent parts of the riots and both of the people are actually experiencing vicarious trauma that is statistically decoupled right they can't actually emotionally process the statistics of what percentage of police violence is actually a result of what and um and so then they go into trauma response and so then they aren't necessarily doing strategy of what is it i care about what is the end game how is the thing i'm going to do going to create counter response from the other side and am i doing something that will actually advance what i care about or am i largely just responding reacting to a set of traumas in a way that might be part of a kind of death spiral yeah and so so on that i mean if we just kind of stay in the culture side of things for a moment um that is something that i've noticed the most in the sort of identity politic branch of the culture wars which is the collapsing of um i suppose perspective in the sense that if you know if you if you rewind the clock for like the last i don't know what 30 40 50 years even with the advent of conscious communication ricardo flores some of the work out of that non-violent communication you know that whole neck of the woods of being more precise with our language owning and separating the difference between thoughts feelings impressions chris adris at harvard business school and his ladder of inference you know there's been a lot of work decoupling the stories we tell like how i feel emotionally from the uh the narrative that i generate and then what i presume is shared or mutually true for you as well and almost all of those schools of thought they overlap they have nuances and distinctions but i mean almost sacrosanct among them is the idea that no one can presume to tell me what my interior experience is right that was sort of rule one and in this realm of white fragility and lots of other working concepts like that um it feels like that's completely broken down and and and it's broken down on the side of the conversation that in the past and even up until quite recently would have been the champions of that very perspective i don't know that where what i'm thinking is a the right place to go with it but the thought that comes up is i think it's generally regarded across cultures that there are different right modes of being in peace time and wartime and in peace time there are kind of rules of civil society and civic engagement that includes things like presumption of innocence and due process yeah but in wartime if somebody pops up you don't like presume in a sense and you know do a proper trial and etc you might just shoot first because it's an existential situation to do and um so even though there are still rules of engagement and war they're different ones i think a lot of people are not behaving civilly because they actually don't feel like we're in civil society they feel like they're in war and that's why terms like culture war um yeah that's a great that's a great distinction i like that and so they aren't presuming innocence they aren't giving the benefit of the doubt they aren't doing due process they're doing let's attack this person in the court of public opinion without jurisprudence or due process let's go straight to a punishment right like affecting how people perceive them at scale um because we're in wartime and it feels like our side is so existentially threatened that we have to engage in that way and i see that across the board yeah and then i think we saw some of the earliest with the early phases of the metoo movement as well and i think there were even some op-eds by some fairly prominent feminists saying hey look if this if this ends up taking down a few good men uh so be it because it's been so long this is so pent up and backed up that this now needs to be expressed as it needs to be versus within the confines of something else and i think there's something parallel even with some of the black lives matter critique of martin luther king's methodology where they're saying hey actually king was potentially giving away too much rage to show up within the model the sort of you know mainstream white approved model of christian charity and forgiveness and in fact there is something more more central and more uh viscerally alive in raw anger right now in fact um tony schwartz who you probably know who wrote the art of the deal famously with trump and then kind of mia corporate is way out of it but also has a very interesting career in human development and transformation and other things uh throughout his life um he's actually close friends with a mutual friend of ours and they were in a conversation i think perhaps last week or so and and tony was challenging um this fellow to say hey there is no you can't you know the the old howard zinn thing like you can't be neutral on a moving train like to your point like this is war and seeking to understand the perspective of alt-right folks seeking to understand the perspective of people continuing this administration like that's no we're no longer there you have to pick sides and and even you know and of course whatever whatever that i forget what is that the law of men how long does it take you to mention nazis whatever that one is we're about to mention it um but that idea of you know it's no longer relevant to be seeking to understand where white supremacists are coming from so a when did we end up on wartime footing like if you could l if you can look back through the tape where do you put a pin in it first i'll say um [Music] that i see that some people and movements have embraced wartime and as a result a lot of the psychological principles and civility and democratic and republican those kinds of principles are not the ones being engaged i'm saying that i think that that's happening i'm not saying i think it's good i think it's a misassessment sure and i think it's a misassessment even for the goals of the people who are doing it um and specifically if you aren't factoring the way that the arms race will escalate you aren't doing strategy and so you know if if we were playing chess i wouldn't just think what move do i want to make because i'm upset at the thing that you did um or like that just kind of feels like the appropriate thing right now i'd be thinking about based on how i move how do you move and as good a chess player as i am is how many moves down the way am i considering and so i think if people are not factoring counter response if i'm successful with this because i develop some new way to use social media some new propaganda technique some new way to use ai and twitter bots and whatever to achieve my side of the infowar whatever how will the other side find what was successful reverse engineer it who will be polarized by this and then what happens next um and and what other kinds of consequentiality are occurring and so i i see that like even just good strategic warfare is mostly missing in people who think are are racing the warfare idea and so for instance and this is a it's a very sensitive topic for like a dozen different reasons if i think about the issue of addressing institutional racism in the us all caveats being that i by no means have real expertise in this and i'm a white guy talking about it um we have a country that was built on slavery and genocide it's very hard to be able to like when we talk about founding fathers in a positive way it's like that's a mix that's a very complex tricky thing i fully fully acknowledge that that is the case and that there isn't institutional wealth being passed down because of those previous things in a way that creates total upper hand and so i think the conversations around um how we reconcile that and reparations are like reasonable and important conversation that said i think the way i hear about the racism institutional racism argument on both the general kind of left and right don't match with the statistics as i understand them i was talking with someone who is at a university has the largest data set of police violence data and his assessment was that you can kind of cherry pick the data however you want because you can say police shootings are twice for the black population what the black population is rel 13 of the total population 25 of the shooting but if you try and do it in a crime adjusted way it's actually more likely that cops kill a white person than a black person and uh engagement and whatever so there are some signs of institutional racism that show up but it's not as crystal clear as either side would have that it's not a thing at all or it's like the central thing so when i think about like okay current state how do we deal with that then i zoom out and they say racism writ large and i'm it's very easy to say this is a boogeyman argument but i think it's important when i look at the chinese treatment of the uigar where we're talking about sterilization at the millions person scale and in internment camps and things like that uh well and tibet has not just gone away because the beastie boys and richard gere stopped talking about it exactly yeah and the anti-democratic crackdown in hong kong and so i'm like okay sterilization and internment camps are more racist than what we're doing in the us today like a whole different category of that and when part of the major geopolitical context is a shift in who guides the 21st century when the u.s bretton woods world is no longer clearly doing that and the the obvious contender is china by the us staying at odds with itself so it doesn't have the coordination capacity to really do geopolitics and china is not at odds with itself she got rid of most of the people who disagreed with him in government and instituted sesame credit and as a result in the same way that they can build high-speed trains all around the world and we can't build infrastructure they can also do geopolitical positioning are we staying so focused on the near enemy that we're actually seeding control of the world for a longer time the worst enemy on the exact same topic is it actually like the most racist thing i could do over the next century yeah well and that's what that's that was my inquiry around the grief and the lashing out because because it isn't strategic that's the whole that's the whole point but once it's once it's hijacked someone's system it simply has to be dealt with constructively or destructively before any before a next step can happen and then something you you hinted at a couple of interesting things there daniel which was the idea of you're not doing strategy if you're just thinking kind of one move ahead and you're not thinking of the counters and the counters to those counters and that sort of brings to mind brett weinstein's arguments about evolutionary biological encoding for for tribal ethnocentrism and be careful when you play identity cards because they do go deep and that's how you end up going down the road towards genocide and that's not to say the jordan peterson you know any multicultural effort anywhere is a slippery slope to stalinism it's just saying hey you know tr you know humanism is optional and tribalism is destiny um yeah conor friedadorf at the atlantic a few years ago uh wrote what i thought was a really interesting piece where he was talking about it's a little bit it was a little bit like uh gladwell's piece and outliers where he talked about honor cultures like the goat herders and sicily and the scots irish and that kind of thing we talked about sort of like an eye for an eye and like you've dishonored me but i think he teased apart honor cultures that work that way you know you you wronged me and it's up and it's now my duty to you know to write that wrong for my family for my name and then there were dignity cultures and dignity cultures didn't do that they had they sort of set aside the eye for an eye in exchange for an appeal to authority right and that's higher ideals that's those kind of things and then he then he articulated this sort of the emergence of grievance culture and the grievance culture is a sort of mutation of dignity culture so it's still an appeal to an authority but it's the it's cancelled culture it's the call out culture it's it's all of those things and what i what came to mind as you were describing all that is when people are being reactive and when we're throwing switches that we don't necessarily know all the downstream repercussions of are we being quite naive to your point about china which is a meta and global version which is we're still assuming that there's a in-charge benevolent authority figure basically a paternal figure who is going to come after we cry foul and blow the whistle versus versus actually as you said we're in a wartime footing now and who strikes first has advantage and so all the rules of the game are shifting around us and and we may actually and particularly let's say the progressive side of the fence may be still operating under the idea that there are still arbiters of authority that respond to appeal and grievance what is your sense of that i think the important thing is there are a lot of people who think they're doing strategy but they're not doing the right strategy for the moment and kind of the history of warfare is someone who was the dominant force who was doing the right doctrine getting beaten by somebody who'd come up with a new doctrine that was more fit to a changed environment that was napoleon with depressions or whatever and the people who were doing the thing that had been true who hadn't acknowledged that it wasn't true anymore completely lost but they thought they were doing strategy which was the 2016 republican debates right completely and so if i look at the left and that way right now i would say all the attacks on trump mostly made his support base coalesce stronger um the russia gates the stormy daniels the all of those things and but they just kept trying to throw more like that and they didn't stop and do an analysis of like we're neither getting more people signing up to be democrats nor are we weakening his support base there's almost an anti-fragility effect happening that we're driving let's try a different strategy it just kept trying the thing that was failing so to me that is like a death spiral that's a flailing of something that has lost the intelligence to know how to be effective and i would say i mean all the way up to uh this election cycle and who was put in place um on the side of the left not the right strategic move at all um well i mean let's let's let's just check that because it's obviously going to be up for a lot of folks as to what's happening this fall i get all the tired dumpy okay boomer time to move on fresh blood the whole bit the centrist back pocket of industry and business never had an honest or inspiring position of his own like that critique right and and feel free to add in any any others um and but then there's also a sense of is there not a functionality to him being blue-collar working-class scranton pa centrist who has a diplomatic you know several decades of relationships to go back and mend alliances and do those things and is that you know is this idealistic not at all is it potentially stabilizing and potentially able to take some folks on the bubble and bring them over because it doesn't seem so entirely other as the boogie woman of aoc or bernie might i think that's the argument that's clearly an argument and i think the idea that we don't want change that is so rapid that it might be totally wrong so let's actually reinstitute things that are more like a kind of more stable phase of establishment there's both like a good rationale for why that could be true and there's also the vested interest rationale um and how much it's each of those interesting question um [Music] i it's a very tempting rabbit hole to get down what i think has happened with the elections and the primaries and whatever but i actually think it's maybe not the most interesting place right now something i wanted to say is with regard to not doing like not considering parts of strategy effectively to go to the other side and go to the far right and accelerationism yeah i think the same mistake being made and it's not exactly the same it's a different one but the like uh it's not if there will be a civil war it's win and we're ready that whole kind of um meme complex uh and we are more prepared for it than they are so the sooner it happens the better for us so let's accelerate that thing happening and move on so i think accelerationism can make sense from the point of view of certain things we could study in military history in the past that are actually the wrong context or that military history that's being applied is not the world we live in um i think that like just a few parts of how i see that is the us hasn't been in a symmetric war in the lives of anybody alive we've we haven't had bombs hitting our soil and actually had our kind of citizenry at existential risk and we have mostly made sure that we could bring the war somewhere else into developing nations yeah and so i think that nobody actually has an embodied felt sense of what war is actually like like symmetric war is like there's a lot of kind of false ideas of it that are not grounded in real experience um yeah and dude that that's so worthwhile unpacking for a sec right because obviously the sort of the pax americana the 50 years after world war ii you know europe's in ruins and japan's is bomb to smithereens china is still hit you know limping along and then straight into their own revolutions um everybo everywhere is hurting but america and and that sense of um and then even even something like vietnam right i mean it did come home in the sense of cronkite on the nightly news and the draft so you know and something i think that most you just don't hear about a lot but i think that the the private contracting of the afghan and iraqi wars and pretty much everything else that's happened since then would what is that i don't know you probably know the ratio better than i do it might be like four to one private contractors to actually service people and you know the fact that that in itself not only has a massive economic cost because the government is often training people with inside the military they quickly get out as soon as they can and then and then they build back triple to the government for the very training the government gave them um but there's also the obviation of a draft so american citizens never had to wrestle with is the suggest war is this my war is this our war right yeah i mean the movement from uh war only by necessity that is kind of patriotically thought versus mercenary dynamics is very very different set of um motivations i i think there's a bunch of things to get into there in terms of like privatization of military contracting military-industrial complex being the one thing of all things eisenhower could have said leaving government that in his last speech he wanted to make the whole thing about that he thought was the biggest risk to the country as the great military general that he was and president i if everyone hasn't watched that speech eisenhower's farewell speech it's worth going back to watch of where he thought that it was the u.s had almost been completely strangled out of sovereignty at that time and that was before even the private militia side that was just the contracting right but there is in a supply and demand equation it's not just that there's authentic demand and then we create supply it's that supply manufactures artificial demand and that is actually one of the main things manufactured demand that broke the market meaning sort of idle hands are the devil's work and if you put ar-15s in those idle hands you have militias i mean if i'm selling something and i'm making a lot of money selling that i want more people to want it even if they don't already i want to figure out how to manufacture demand in uh in their mind so if i'm how to draw how to make a new product that nobody ever wanted they won't make them happier but drive fomo that they aren't cool and they're missing out if they don't get it or whatever it is right like marketing that came about my favorite example of that is listerine which was defined as an antiseptic in the civil war for surgery and then they had to go and invent chronic halitosis as a category to then pitch it for something else entirely so i think the supply side manipulation manufactured demand is like one of the most critical things that made market theory kind of not real anymore but of all the places where that's up military manufacturing is the worst one and you just ask the question of like if the military industrial complex is the largest or maybe one of depending on how you divide it largest blocks of the global economy and the entire global economy would fail if it wasn't there and so we built a world economic system that around managing war that requires the ongoing management of war at that scale can you have lasting peace and a very profitable for-profit military industrial complex at the same time and you see there's like there's some perverse incentives there that we would be better to not have well yeah okay so so i often think about that whether it's accelerationists well really i mean i think accelerationists of any stripe so it can be blockchain techno utopians it can be seasteaders it can be anybody who's saying this system is so corrupt or broken that we are trying to drive it off the cliff because then yay you know then we get our turn and it and it always just seems um hopelessly naive unless they've factored in who controls the banks and the tanks you know and you look at the collapse of yugoslavia and you look at you know boloshevich and you know you like who gets the leftover weaponry of the empire generally gets to has a pretty good spot on the new board who's controlling means of currency in exchange does too and and i'm just blown away by the conspicuous absence of that in most people's utopian wargaming well i mean i think you mentioned crypto that was such an obvious one during the crypto bubble like we're going to make some effective cryptocurrency that'll become the new reserve currency and obsolete the um uh central banks and as a result be able to uh completely change the nature of empire and and the conversation around like okay so so now you control the country who who who just voluntarily gives the nukes up because you tried to make some interesting client banking so what are the dudes who control the nukes do um that's a very important question yeah i mean i'm the the whiskey rebellion right right after the american revolution is always a great test case to me because it's you know it's all those appalachian farmers and they were living it was the scots irish who had fought in the war they went back home they grew their corn they wanted to turn it into sour mash and whiskey value-added goods much more compact and easier to transport back over the hills down to the markets of virginia and dc and but they didn't have to pay taxes on all the corn and then george washington rides up with the standing continental army is like i know all you you fought with me at valley forge i will hang you in the morning if you don't pay your taxes and that render unto caesar element is so pronounced in it and again if like you said you if you don't factor in state-sanctioned force and who gets to continue on with that big stick i don't think any any thoughts of radically transformative change pencil out and i think when people talk about civil war in the us in a um like at all positive light the the idea of an actual civil war meaning that the military is turned against itself right now the army and the air force are at war with each other something like that or the military of blue states versus red states there is no winning of that war that is a that's a war that just can't happen um both red states and blue states have enough nukes to kill the world to keep a heap of times over and are just you know catastrophically devastating so i i don't i don't see pretty much hardly any scenarios where that's that happens i don't see any scenarios would be a good thing but i don't see anywhere it happens because i think fortunately uh the generals are better at military theory than that um now so civil war at that ski i don't see civil conflict increasing of the groups with ar-15s uh and arson capabilities and whatever increasing that's already happening and that could increase quite a lot well and as is um decentralized but coordinated um militarized response of civil peacekeeping so you are seeing armored vehicles you are seeing spot you know extreme swat gear you're seeing uh you know the distribution of you know obviously everything from the pepper sprays to the rubber bullets to you know crowd control techniques that have generally been beyond the pale and we just started this spring right out of the gates with all of them it was like holy that did not take long to escalate right and and possibilities won't get in the way of shutting of the military figuring out ways to shut down the violence if they have to um just just explain that for folks possible taught us the rule that the us military should not be turned on its own citizens or deployed on soil against citizens that's where you end up making special branches called federal police or whatever it is that have the ability to deploy that and then of course it when the accelerationists think about civil war they it's important to be asking the question okay so when we're at civil war what is china doing what is russia doing what is iran doing uh are they just like watching and not getting engaged at all are they going to pick one side are they pretty maybe might they have incentive to support both sides to just turn the enemy against itself um now if we say before the can the conventional war of bullets and the unconventional the narrative and culture wars we're talking about do they already have an incentive to support extremist groups probably on both sides to be more extremists because it's it's a good idea to attack the guy with all the nukes it's a much better idea if you read sun tzu or the 36 stratagems or any kind of book on chinese strategy but military strategy in general is just make the enemy divided and so uh when we look at all the like chinese twitter bots and russian sock puppets and whatever uh influencing social media and influencing online chat groups and the mimetic space do i think that what people believe is already being radically manipulated in ways they don't know for for foreign purposes in addition to domestic purposes totally and yeah i mean even even the even the the the fbi debriefs on the russian interference in 2016 right i mean i mean the the way in which they where exactly they were placing their chisels in the culture war and where they were tapping showed a greater psychographic awareness of the of the the american mind than i think any pundit on mainstream american use had you know the idea of having muslim women you know you know fake sites of muslim women for hillary or something like you know like just just they were just mixing and matching um the the flammable materials and and it was it's been crazy to see and obviously in the in the last four years it's only got far more intense one this is where it's important to understand like of course narrative warfare has always been a thing and try to turn the enemy against themselves has always been a thing but the tech the exponentiation of information technology has made it a much easier and much more powerful thing and i would not say that the defenses have been able to keep up with the nature of the offenses um and so if we go back to say pre-internet we go to the pre-ubiquity of internet go to the 80s or 90s even it's pretty hard for russia or china or whatever to control what's on cnn very significantly but it's not very hard to be able to get youtubers to make content or to be able to influence a million content streams you know that are going to um go through decentralized broadcasts so that's one thing but then the other thing is once you have the kind of social media algorithm optimizing for time on site that is going and you optimize for time on site by appealing to people's current bias and limbic hijacks so the right gets more right the left gets more left the conspiratorial people get more conspiratorial the pro establishment get more intensively there everybody gets further away from each other more certain and kind of more outraged in that and that's basically the ai attacking everybody without even intending to because it's just optimizing time on site and it happens to do that by appealing to the lowest parts of our nature uh in that environment where the lowest parts of our nature are being most appealed to then just pushing people a little bit further in the direction they're already sliding becomes very easy i don't have to get people to that they don't believe i just support them believing the trajectory they're already on yeah i mean i think there was some there were some soviet propagandists who who outlined that very clearly so he's like we don't ever try and make them believe the lie is the truth we simply muddy the entire concept of truth so so thoroughly that they just they give up okay so this this is actually the culture thing that is so important to me because it's going to come back to this topic you're asking about perspective seeking versus passion um i think for the most part almost everyone in the country has become an epistemic nihilist because they have given up on the idea that they can understand what's going on um in terms of their own authentic epistemology for the most part the technical term is should or go blind you know okay um and so i think that the when i find most of the people who have extremely impassioned views on any topic they have not done the primary literature research they don't even know the counter narrative points well only straw man versions of them and yet they're totally impassioned about a thing because some authority that they or tried that they decided to agree with their defect to did and so that's not epistemology that's tribalism and so i think trying to really figure out what is actually going on with china's agenda or what's actually going on with um dc corruption or what's actually going on with anything like of course there's some people who try to figure it out by going down a pizzagate rabbit hole but then they'll accept a narrative without breaking the narrative into individual propositions and trying to verify and falsify each proposition individually as well as for a counter-narrative which means it's really not epistemology it's the illusion of epistemology hijacked into patternicity and kind of dopamine hijacks and groupthink yeah i think i saw means saying if if you say you you did your research to wake up you didn't you've just been targeted by a weaponized ai algorithm yeah yeah so if i want to do epistemology i've got to say well what are the various narratives on this thing do i understand them well can i break the narrative into individual propositions and then how do what do i use to falsify or verify each one what is the right epistemic basis for confidence where should i have a very low confidence margin am i emotionally disposed to want more confidence than i have well i mean basically what i mean if you do if you do the regression on everything you're suggesting you're basically saying we all need classical educations in an exponential age we need logic rhetoric hermeneutics yep right and none of us are going to be getting that anytime soon um so so what so and in an age that's super decentralized in its sense making and yet it's also incredibly flat and muddy so we have massive breath and very little depth and there's an antinomian sentiment of like like no one should tell me what to do and yet higher ground is called for almost essential how do we reconcile that how do we reconcile the great leveling tendencies and almost the know-nothing tendencies the anti-intellectualism that is going on across the board and the decentralized you know you can whatever we'll say let's just call it decentralized crowdsourced movements with the utter lack of quality and discernment because the natural thing would be hey either we all get rigorous classical educations that we didn't get and probably don't know how to deliver it on mass at all or we look to a hand you know people who do make better sense more often but it feels like we've got an immune reaction against that very move right now okay one thing i would say is the i don't need better sense making i have good enough sense making i need impassioned action where that's definitely not true um like i would like people to acknowledge i would like them to acknowledge the failures of their own movements more and the failures of the types of sense-making and strategies so like if we look at the sustainable development goals and how much progress they have not made and then we look back to when they were called the millennium development goals and we had to kind of rebrand them because they didn't succeed and it's like why are we not succeeding with these things they seem like universally desirable things why are we kind of uh and for climate change if any proposal for how to address climate change that that some people really agree on is fervently opposed by huge percentages of humanity can we make progress on anything in that environment um so i what i would say is that the but if it's fervently opposed because say the approach to solving climate change involves uh taxes on whoever agrees to it so if the u.s and europe agree to it it actually lowers their gdp per year and as a result if china doesn't agree to it and there's no adequate methods of enforcement their increased gdp that goes into increased military and geopolitical positioning means that in trying to address climate change we're seeding the control of the world that's where you have to better sense being say how do i think about climate change and geopolitics and economics together and come up with a solution for all that because they're interconnected enough that i can't pick my favorite topic that i'm going to benefit while externalizing harm somewhere else and not have a huge percentage of the population who doesn't want that harm externalized somewhere else focus on that thing and fight me the people who i really disagree with don't just leave the planet and stop doing stuff and whatever i do counter responses happen so how do we actually factor how do we get invested in increasing the sense making of everybody and increasing the quality of conversation that we can do participatory governance together which requires participatory sense making and conversation uh so the first thing i'm saying is if you're not doing that whatever you are trying to succeed with will fail the the inner world of this kind of complexity not trying to get asymmetric intel those strategies will just all fail i think that it didn't take that many people in kind of the european enlightenment to make a new thing that overturned the dark ages right like if you think about descartes newton and a handful of people like figuring out something that would make cannonballs hit their target better than the previous pendulum dowsing and whatever they did the increased empirical effectiveness of it is what made it take off but the increased actual sense making about reality so here's like if my map is wrong but i think it's right i'm not going to do that well i'm going to navigate wrongly if my map doesn't correspond to reality well enough so i really want a super accurate map which means i want to know where my map is not accurate so that there's actually there's actually something in in uh expeditionary like mountaineering there's there's a phrase for that called bending the map because what happens is when people are tired and lost and they really really want that little nubby thing on the map to be that rock right there there's means they get to go to sleep and eat and yeah bending the map is is a known cognitive distortion under stress and winds people up in bad positions oh yeah and in fact almost always the place where you bent the map is the place it goes from a a casual accident to a fatal accident it's irrecoverable yeah okay then we have a perfect analogy here yeah well so called classic education i'm going to call capacity to read a map and navigate a map yeah root finding root finding and navigation and and so so let's something that something just kind of popped into my head as you were describing the algorithmic drives to the extreme and the fact that it was it was almost like uh like in like a you know a semi-automatic uh yeah just algorithmically driven fracturing and and as you were describing that i thought of you know the establishment right it's the basically the same way that never trumpers and and you know the bill crystals you know of the of the world the kind of the kind of long-standing conservative uh pro-business libertarian free markets they've just been roughly elbowed to the side and i'm really staggered that they've actually haven't had more heft to do something about it and then the same critique on the left right if you know the people who have been concerned that obama got a 400k speaking fee from goldman sachs and hillary spoke there and that joe biden is in the pocket of industry and all those kind of things how where is that monolith i mean in some respects if you took the enlightenment and you followed that thread these were the folks that won and expanded their winnings and consolidated it and now they feel like they're left in the middle as the conversation has just gone much further afield than any of their businesses usual agendas would would actually think is ideal or even acceptable where are they in this mix right now is this an accident how have we disintermediated the man or have we not there's there's quite a few parts to this that come to mind um so the the creative disruption cycle that has the startup that beats the big juggernaut because it's smaller and more agile and can make faster moves get bigger and bigger until eventually it's a big jug or not that is also bureaucratic and ossified and slow moving so the new startup ends up beating and displacing it whether it's a startup or an empire that story i think there's definitely something to if you look at 2016 as trump and bernie both as insurgents and on an establishment and trump got over the hurdle bernie didn't but there was a movement to insurgency relative to establishment because the establishment had went through a institutional decay cycle and specifically like we're talking about where there was so much wealth so there was also so much regulatory capture and breakdown in the authentic integrity of the um liberal democracy system and no real war or real difficulty uh in that way like i think there's a bunch of things that led to pretty significant institutional decay that's one of the factors the other one takes us a little bit more into the people but does that start to address the question you're asking i mean yeah i mean i'm just you know i'm just baffled and fascinated that somewhere between like you know the un and dabos and the koch brothers right which is a wide spectrum but nonetheless the folks who had been playing the back and forth tennis game of the last half century none of them need seem to be particularly expressed in either of the most dynamic and volatile movements on both sides of the spectrum right now and in some respects you know i guess my my question especially back to that algorithmically driven and even you know state actor exacerbated fracturing appears to be happening beyond their direct control or influence or am i missing something whenever you have an insurgency and an establishment it'll have new economic forces behind it that were not at the top of the previous stack and couldn't have been but who wanted to so they ride an insurgency so like when i look at the fed and treasury's relationship with blackrock right now and how the covid related money has mostly gone through blackrock rather than the goldman and usual bankers of the 2008 one went through i see that as a kind of it's not that we've disintermediated the man there's just competition for who's the man and all the way at the top there's financial warfare you know at the top i see that the new tech money made a lot of new money that was not part of the old atlantic council kind of game atlantis game and so then you do start getting like not not just a somewhat stable hegemonic system you start to get a destabilized system because there's a lot of destabilizing forces which means more competition at the top i think i think actually thinking in the lens of class warfare relative to race warfare gender warfare and left right warfare is one of the important lenses and you were mentioning the example of like uh in the very beginning where people were so upset in some some tv show you were watching where they uh they had to focus on something but it kind of didn't matter what it was it was the crown and the death of king george yeah yeah so you know if you think of uh you sounded like gerard right then um that was what i was thinking because you know the the gerardian conflict idea is that the conflict energy is just going to build in the system as an actual result of people just wanting what each other have uh until it finds a scapegoat and the scapegoat doesn't really matter it's just a release of embodied tension it only matters that it kind of works and the tension gets released on it um but if i think about it from the perspective of like since kovid the like huge percentage of all small businesses shut down massive unemployment um evictions uh breakdown in the real productive economic base in employment but then the market rebounded and a handful of billionaires doubled their wealth in like almost no period of time and so you have a decoupling of the economy in the market and a much more radical decap and coupling in terms of economic inequality the people who are up here are doing pretty well kind of in the chaos no matter what happens like independent of their political agenda they're just doing pretty well because they're isolated from the whole thing by the increased capacity they have to navigate financialized markets i think that uh it is beneficial for anyone there to have the conflict energy never focused on them and so left right conflict is awesome it's kind of like the prison guards keeping the prison gangs fighting with each other so they don't fight the prison guards and i think racial conte conflict is awesome and i think gender conflict is awesome i think all of those conflicts that kind of keep people divided it's not only that would be awesome from a chinese or a russian perspective we want to rewind that and give you the opportunity to do air quotes on those those statements but yes i totally was totally following you i just don't want somebody to snip that one and you know yeah um yeah exactly so um but i i think in the same way that the people divided against themselves is better for foreign forces it's also better for anyone who is doing asymmetrically better than everyone else in that system yeah well so so that actually that comes that brings up an idea and i do not disagree with you on that that particular assessment but it kind of hints at this question of game theory right and and stan and one of the critiques that i've just sort of have heard around you know the existential risk community uh the intellectual dark web a number of folks you know that we know and and share conversations with is the idea that you know the same way that like homo economicus right the idea that there was a rational economic agent and he behaved accordingly and it was cost-benefit analysis all day long and then along came you know dubner and levitz and freakonomics and richard thaler and this whole idea of like people are quirky and they do random stuff against their own interests sometimes and behavioral economics was born there are times when it feels to me that like game theory is running a model of sort of like you know um homo machiavellius you know the cold-blooded rational calculator and when you run game theory based on the homo machiavellius you almost always end up in bleak bleak outcomes and yet somehow and i mean this is harder to say now with a straight face or at least with you know and and believe it but somehow humans manage to do the right thing sometimes and we also manage to model along so is there the equivalent update to game theory that we've seen in the field of behavioral economics is there some muddle through factor is there some but leaving space for grace is there is there something else to add into game theory so it is not always so reductively nihilistic in its conclusions okay this such a good question and the first place i go with it isn't going to address it all so like stay let's stay with this one until it's properly addressed um if everyone had exceptional game theory insights i think we would be better off because it doesn't always lead in a terribly dark direction if you have if you understand game theory well enough to understand an iterated prisoner's dilemma not just a single one but we we do that one prisoner's dilemma and then we're the other people aren't gone from the planet they're still actors they're gonna do more did we just engender a bunch of enmity in the iterated prisoner's dilemma in the single prisoner's dilemma i have the incentive to defect in the iterated one i have the incentive to not defect um because of what you know happens longer term if somebody understands that winning this near-term battle but engendering more enmity and then teaching them the weapons that won it it just drives arms races kills everybody that like you just keep getting more and more dangerous wars that including more up infowars and etc that you can't keep winning at a extraction pollution destruction misinformation game on an exponential curve in a finite space that thing self terminates that's the don't where you sleep right and so if if people actually got the long term attractive basin better there would be more motivation to actually figure out coordination games and you know that's kind of what shelling pioneered during uh the cold war and mutually assured destruction was yes we reserve the right to defect on the agreement but the game theoretically were actually both better to agree than to defect on it which was the mutually assured destruction thing um so even for our own rational self-interested purposes we can we can get that uh so that okay that's the first thing i was going to say there's another thing do you should i go there or yeah yeah i mean basically i mean the thing i'm most curious about is is is there is there an update you know to game theory comparable to the the behavioral econ update because through the cold war i mean yeah we got mutually sure destruction but both soviets and us game theoried out the opposition and blew us up you know a hundred times but somehow we're also you know on on the maps right um and somehow we're still here so what what is that leaving space for grace what is that can we what what is the progression from homo machiavellius to something something that is realistic but also um potentially leaves us a little bit more wiggle room for humanity okay so just for what it um is worth in terms of the cold war example i don't know the history in here perfectly so i'm going to say it's rough so you have the kind of there were a few nuclear theorists of how should we should deal with that con and shelling were particularly important and khan was for an idea that said we should have anti-missile missiles like really diff invest in that and underground bunkers so that we could survive a tactical nuclear war and shelling was very strong no we should actually nobody should have anti-missile missiles we should have only offensive offensive so the tactical escalates strategic so nobody does tactical and um he won that thing we end up going that direction mutual assured destruction was kind of the result and because you couldn't limit the harm nobody did it now of course there's other arguments of like when someone got the wrong message and the actual person defected on orders in the last moment or something that's something other than um than the homo game theory but uh but the game theory itself actually and i think that was the important thing when rightly understood led to don't escalate the arms race here um and so i think i it's just important to understand it's not that's not even an update on game theory it's just that most people have not understood it adequately um because yeah understanding it adequately realizes it ends in a dystopic attractor if you keep doing short-term optimization um and so you have to figure out coordination things in an iterated situation all right so so i got i've got two two final questions for you um the first goes back to that the passion and action question and and we will invoke that nazi clause one more time but i was just reading nancy coyne's book from harvard business school on uh it was on it's on lincoln frederick douglass rachel carson uh shackleton and dietrich bonhoeffer and so we're just zeroing on bonhoeffer right i mean i think he was a lutheran minister or something like that because he was a man of the cloth and seeing what was happening in the 30s and even early 40s in germany watching that progression his wheelhouse right his leverage as far as activity perspective wouldn't insight wisdom would have been to be preaching and then beseeching everyone to live a more christ-like life right 100 is wheelhouse zone of expertise the whole bit and and potentially the highest leverage most scalable thing he could do would be kingdom of heaven on earth and at some point he switched gears and said i need to take that little bastard out and that question is looming increasingly large it feels like you know the notions of silence is violence and you can't be neutral on a moving train and these kind of things are really starting to to come up and they are being asked and sometimes they're being weaponized and all of us have to be holding this but at what point i mean i'll even phrase it most specifically what in 2020 would you actually take to the streets and march for and what would it take you to do so what trigger i mean just personally as a as a kid my mom took me to uh lots of rallies like as a young kid where everybody was handcuffing themselves to old growth trees so they wouldn't get cut down um and things like that and i uh that seemed like a great thing to do if it worked it seemed like a totally reasonable kind of civil engagement so it's not so much for me like what would i take to the streets for it's because there's a lot of things that are important enough that if taken to the streets would make it better i would do that my question is does it make it better and this is now a strategic question and this is where a lot of times i think people will have a truth but it is a partial truth that is so partial it ends up actually being misguided and um so there's this question in ethics you know virtue ethics versus utilitarian ethics utilitarian ethics i'll do the thing no matter what if it achieves the right outcome because the outcome is what matters for everybody the virtue ethic is i'm going to do the right thing just in some intrinsic sense of rightness no matter what and they both fail they both there's you know reductive adam sodium arguments on both where uh if the right thing is to tell the truth and do you say yes there's jews in the house when the nazis come by no that's nonsense in that moment i want to be more utilitarian and say it's a right to lie in this moment so one has to kind of think about the relationship of virtue ethics and utilitarian ethics is what i'm doing in integrity with myself in the world as best i understand it and is it leading to the things that are actually support the quality of life for everything i care about which also ends up requiring it to support the quality of life for things that i'm not as focused on caring about but that are interconnected and so i'd like to skip just bring that to life quickly like like what what would be a dynamic where that was true if my marching i have to say what results from the march like who is going to change their mind or their behavior in which ways so if i'm marching in a way that brings an injustice to the minds of people in a way that actually sensitizes them to that injustice so people who uh didn't know about something and didn't seem to care about it now care we've actually engendered authentic care great that's actually a valuable thing if i if i bring something to the street in a way where everyone who already agrees with me just now agrees more fervently but everyone who disagrees also disagrees more fervently and a lot of people who were in the middle and who didn't really have a stance one way or the other now disagree with me because the thing that i'm doing isn't appealing to them it's scaring them or something else that might be actually damaging what i care about um long run i know look i mean i hear you i track all of that and there's still some element of that's just a very clever way to stay on my couch no because you say i'm committed to figuring out effective solutions i mean malcolm x talked about a lot of economic solutions right he wanted to actually have the black nationalism idea was he wanted black police officers black judges but starting with black business owners who were going to be the economics that influenced government um and so there were like education and economic and the and and civil engagement of increasing their own um quality of uh local communities i i think strategy of what's effective is hard and i think in the presence of not knowing what's effective it's easy to either take one of two dysfunctional approaches which is do nothing or do something dumb do something that is like strategically ineffective but i think both of those are not okay like because neither of them will actually be effective towards what i care about love can't be impotent so the way what i was going to say this was one of the things i really realized at the protests as a kid was sometimes those guys who were handcuffing themselves to the tree would keep the tree from being cut down for a minute but if the if the economy if they never changed the economics of it usually they failed eventually the thing failed and the guys ended up cutting the trees down and what i saw was that the people who were willing to take action and really cared had very low strategic insight and tools of power and the people like the military industrial complex and whatever that had very high strategic tools of power had usually pretty narrow interests that were willing to externalize or directly cause harm elsewhere and that was like the head heart divide at the level of the planet that seemed clearly existential to me and it seemed that power was pretty decoupled with virtue wisdom and goodness other than kind of the fake signaling of those things for the game of power and that that was existential that those things had to be recoupled and so i kind of would think about that as like the will center the the heart thunder the mind center which is the will of saying i'm actually committed to being effective and i'm committed to learning how to be effective which means i'm committed to studying every failure i have and saying exactly strategically why and studying the like the now the study is here the will is the commitments to not become ineffective or disempowered and the heart center is the what is actually sacred to me that i'm in service to and i think the key thing here is recognizing life is sacred whatever part of life i'm focused on is connected to the rest of life and if i'm not holding the whole thing i'm probably driving an arms race where the thing that i'm okay causing harm to will end up harming the thing that i care about and so how we get clear strategy devotion and will aligned like to me that's a minimum requisite for people to be effective and then that and the individual and then the groups of people aligning who are all in that way for collective capacity yeah i mean it feels to me like the a potential synthesis of the game theoretic dynamics as well as utilitarian and virtuous ethics is you know effectively soul force you know it's what gandhi called satyagraha and that idea of being lived by love you know that sense of because can i run all the traps yes i can can i decide which interest i'm running with with which hat with which lens at each specific instance or juncture yes i can you know or there is a surrender to the rightness of those three things that you just described and then letting us be live from there and and i and i like that's what that's the one i'm honestly like that's my last card in the deck at this point is is us somehow collectively finding our way to that and i've got half an idea here and i don't know maybe you can complete the other half but as you were describing the effectively when would i take to the streets when would i march and be counted as one of a throng right one of a number and i've i've lost all my leverage i've lost all my individuality i've lost all my unique contributions i'm marching to be whether or not there's an outcome it's sort of it's sort of like never mind you i mean yes you're hoping for utility but it is something that i can't not do i is there something that's the reverse of leave no trace ethics uh which if people have been to burning man they're familiar with that if you've spent any time in wilderness areas or in national forest service land there's a there's a there's principles on leave no trace and that's based my actions as an individual in this seemingly infinite wilderness i could kind of do anything i could walk anywhere i could leave i could bury my tb on you know my toilet paper under a rock and what difference would it make i could throw an apple core but leave no trace is saying you we commit to governing our actions based on the aggregate impact of thousands of us of tens of thousands of us and if one of us did that thing and then 10 000 of us also did that thing then there would be irreparable harm so can you get that through the looking glass and back out into global concern so is there a way for us to have an ethic of what ought i do based on the amplified model of what we all must do or can never do what would be the inversion of lnt for an ethic of care and concern um it's interesting i mean that's kind of sartre's categorical imperative right um which is a which is a another one of those valuable ethical frames that is valuable but also has failure cases you mentioned gandhi and the sacha graham movement gandhi was obviously not just doing himself something that if everyone else did it would lead somewhere he was working very strategically to ensure that that happened and learning from the things that failed to continue to be more more actually effective right both in integrity and effective um so at the individual level people realize factory farms are the that they are should they stop eating factory farmed meat even though that doesn't stop factory farms but they're like if everyone did this and i just won't be complicit yes they should do that and is that sufficient it is is that the full extent of what that individual can do to address that thing no um so i guess the like how do i live in a way that is aligned with maximum integrity myself is an individualistic question but then how do i also have increasing capacity to influence others to do that i i guess i wanted to be both of those questions together yeah well then so then my my my final question i mean it sort of seems like from leave no trace to like make a mock you know like like let us let us show up um in this instance really not just trying to live rightly but but to figure it out together so so you mentioned okay i think it's it's an there's a very dangerous ego trap that people should just watch out for um wanting to be seen as on the right side of history wanting to be seen as i did the right thing here is a very easy way if like our susceptibility to that or like ethical susceptibility to that is a way that we can be captured by some telling us this is the right side of history and this whole group of people will judge you as wrong otherwise so i actually take my own desire for group belonging my desire for group belonging and my desire for um significance hijacks me into something that i haven't necessarily understood well enough is that the right thing for me to be doing well it seems that seems like to me it's a pattern interrupt for sure what side of history do i want to be on and and you know subtext and which way does it seem like it's breaking um but it could go either way i mean it feels like what it what it can also do is decouple someone from short-term game theoretic self-interest so they're like oh like this one's going down in the history books i actually need to make the choice that i will be you know that i can look my grandchildren in the eye on but then also as you just described precisely because it's a pattern interrupt and i'm now in flux between meaning making anchors i can also be swayed into into a group think decision on which side is actually the right side yeah i think the thing that you were saying earlier that i want to come back to is you were like okay so are you saying everybody needs better quality education to be able to understand an education in the latin sense of the development of the capacity of the individual not just cognitive education but also their own ability to increase their own will and discipline so that they can continue to be more effective and their own ability to understand and work with their own emotions right like when when i say education i mean it or cultural enlightenment in that widest sense of the development of humans that have the capacities cognitive emotional social uh volitional to be able to be in service to that which they would most care about and that are most worthy of caring about because they have been deeply introspective and reflective uh i see no solutions that don't rest on that i see no solutions that don't rest on the increasing comprehensive development cognitively emotionally interpersonally volitionally of every person and then their increased capacity to work together well with each other and their commitment to do so recognizing that if you don't those people don't leave the world they go somewhere else and take a different position and do stuff any solution that isn't based on that i i bet against well i mean i think we had a pretty good run at it i mean back to the past americana right i mean that was about as good a liar the ball as we possibly could have had right in the middle of the fairway you know all we had to do was just keep whacking it and now we're in the sand trap you know around the corner with thunderstorm coming so so to go back to your your hat tip to eisenhower and his farewell address um if if he was if if he had one thing to say and he cautioned against the military-industrial complex what is the one thing that you would advise us all to keep our eye on on the road ahead what is the right basis for certainty and trust what is the right process to go through to have adequate certainty to act acknowledging the consequentiality of inaction as well and what is the right basis for trust of an authority of an in-group of your own process recognizing that everything is being weaponized the virtues can all it every physical tool can be turned into a weapon i can build a house with a hammer i can hit somebody in the head with it right because the tool is just an extension of capacity every cognitive tool and every religious tool like anything that affects and moves humans can be turned into a weapon and they all are right now so i that doesn't mean that every time something looks like a virtue it's actually a weapon but it also doesn't mean it's a virtue it means i don't know there are real virtues and there's virtue signaling and i have to the only way to know is to use my discernment right to really be present to use my discernment to not have a default kind of way of being and my own in-group is sometimes using their virtue as weapons and sometimes they don't even know it and sometimes it's authentic virtue sometimes it's an authentic virtue but missing so much it'll still be the wrong choice because there's other kind of virtues or clarity missing so it's kind of like how do i take increasing responsibility for being effective towards what i care about factoring everything just that just that that i would leave people with how do i take increasing responsibility to be effective towards what i most care about factoring everything progressively better beautiful beautiful well daniel thank you thank you for coming on homegrown humans and thank you for your work in the world trying to keep this whole thing on the tracks i want to hear your answer to eisenhower question to the eisenhower question beware the military industrial complex i mean it you know it's fun i mean it's going to seem super old school but it's it's going to be beware false messiahs and false idols yeah the one you said in the one i said actually mapped to each other quite nicely yeah yeah all right buddy well listen man thank you for making time on a weekend um yeah when you say that it just it it brought up so another biblical quote for we could pick any religion that had some wisdom in it and use them but the quote in ecclesiastes of time to kill and a time to heal and the time to sow and a time to reap and a time to every purpose under heaven if there's a time for everything so basically there was a vow shall not kill not saying there's a time to kill right so it's a it's a deeper more nuanced teaching saying that everything is medicine sometimes everything is poisoned sometimes well then how do i know what the right thing is in a particular moment well it's like presence earnestness clarity discernment is to have us to be able to sense beyond any specific formula what is actually the right thing and that's the not having a false idol because the model of this is the right thing to do has actually decoupled me from sensing the moment and sometimes very different strategies sometimes virtue ethics and sometimes utilitarian ethics sometimes uh taken to the streets and sometimes an economic strategy or a diplomatic strategy or an educational strategy and uh so when if i think about your no false idols and i say okay so what is the real idol is reality itself and i can never understand it fully so how do i be in direct relationship with reality well it's any idea that is always the right thing to do is a false idol so how do i have more presence in my connection with reality continuously authentically that's informing right action at the moment that's kind of how i relate the one that you said and the one i said of how do i take more responsibility for what i care about yeah nice alrighty brother that was awesome this episode of collective insights was hosted by jamie wheel and produced by jacqueline loera this podcast is for informational purposes only the podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment you should not use the information on the podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease or prescribing any medication or other treatment always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider before taking any medication or nutritional herbal or homeopathic supplement and with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this or any other podcast reliance on the podcast is solely at your own risk information provided on the podcast does not create a doctor-patient relationship between you and any of the health professionals affiliated with our podcast information and statements regarding dietary supplements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration and are not intended to diagnose treat care or prevent any disease opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests this podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to therein if you think you have a medical problem consult a licensed physician this podcast is owned by neurohacker collective

Channel: Qualia Life

Views: 25,456

Keywords:

Id: qd5vPs9cRYI

Length: 90min 25sec (5425 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020