All language subtitles for Daniel Schmachtenberger A Vision for Betterment

It would be better if more people understood
what is wrong with the progress narrative

and understood what authentic progress actually
entails and understood the caution and restraint

that it requires, understood the emphasis on
maintaining, understood that very often the best

way to solve a problem is to remove its reversing
some stuff rather than always create new stuff.

But the obviously market incentive is
on create new stuff. The history books

incentives on create new stuff. But as
we think about how do we actually solve

problems in a way that isn't a racket, right?
That isn't solving a problem that was caused by

the result of our previous problem solving.
And that will in turn create more of that.

Today, I am rejoined by Daniel Schmachtenberger,
who is the The director of the Consilience

Project and the co founder of
Civilization Research Institute,

where he and his colleagues have just written a
new paper called Development in Progress, which

is the topic of this long awaited Horizontally
and vertically deep conversation with Daniel.

We talk about what is progress, the history
of progress, who gets to write the progress

narrative and whether progress itself
actually means betterment for society,

for the wellbeing of the human species
and the natural world. You might not be

surprised to hear that this episode
raised more questions than answers.

And in fact, I didn't even get to my
questions because we were unpacking

his paper. Those are going to have to be
discussed in a follow up conversation. I

think we have to understand the problems,
the generator functions, the dynamics,

and start asking questions about where do we
want to go? And how do we get there from here?

And I think these conversations
with people like Daniel at least

start to define the parameters of the
conversation and where we need to go.

Please welcome Daniel Schmachtenberger. Daniel
Schmachtenberger. Welcome back. Good to see you,

my friend. Good to see you. Holy
crap. You look different. One part.

Gandalf, one part Zeus, one part surfer dude.

You didn't mention Appalachia mountain guy. Oh,
yeah. Just stopped cutting it when I moved to the

mountains out here. All right. Well, you look,
you look happy and healthy. I am happy. It's,

the sun just came out. Like just a minute
ago from where it was raining and storming.

And there's a huge rainbow over
the mountains right out my window,

right. As we're starting to talk.

Wow. Yeah. The last podcast we did,
we had a background of just bright,

verdant green outside your window.
And I know you have a new setup there,

so we can't see it. Okay. Welcome back.
We believe it or not, it was a year ago.

That we had our last podcast, which
was on artificial intelligence and

the superorganism. And, and this is kind of
the first followup to that conversation. One

of the core themes we talked about before
we got to AI itself was the delineation

between narrow boundary goals
and wide boundary and wisdom.

And, and that brought you to talk about
what you called then naive progress.

versus real progress. And you have now
written a paper which I've read on this

concept. You're now referring to it as
immature versus authentic progress. And

that is going to be the theme of today's
conversation. How would you like to start?

I played a role

in writing this paper is a our team wrote it. So
multi authored. Yeah, the relationship between

what progress actually is, how we think about
it and what our goals are and how we go about

achieving them. If we are having narrowly
defined goals, as we discussed last time,

that can be achieved while externalizing harm
in other places, and we do a lot of that,

and we look at all of the goal achieving and not
all the externalities, we can call that progress.

And for those that happen to make it through.
That process that are not the losers of the

war and not the species that go extinct
or not the animals that are in the factory

farms or the cultures that are genocided
or anything else. There's a survivorship

bias of being able to say, you know, those
narrow definitions, those narrow goals we

are the beneficiaries of the progress of
those narrow goals kind of differentially.

And so you can make a progress. Narrative,
associated with effective achieving. of narrow

goals, even if they are driving rivalry
and driving externality. And you know,

it's not a great definition of progress.
It's generously, it's a naive definition

of progress. Less generously, it's
propaganda and apologism for winners.

And The way that humans think about what is
progress, what is actual betterment of the world,

what are our lives in service to in that way is
pretty important because it's significant to how

we orient ourselves individually and collectively.
So that's why it's an interesting topic.

Well. While I was waiting for you, I
looked up progress in the dictionary,

and it has different definitions depending on the
context, but as a noun, it's described as gradual

betterment, and as a verb, as to develop
a higher, better, or more advanced stage.

So, so why don't you unpack a little bit
on why the concept of progress in our,

in our cultural goals, our aspirations,

our narratives, the stories of modern
human culture, why it's so important.

I think most everybody watching your show,
this is kind of obvious, right? They don't

think that the totality of things that are
technological advancement or that drive GDP or,

you know, other things aligned with primary
civilizational metrics that we're optimizing,

that we consider the metrics of
progress are comprehensively good.

I think that people listening to your show
know that what we consider progress by those

definitions is not necessarily good for
nature. And is something that is not good

for nature that we depend upon a good definition
of progress is not equally distributed good for

across wealth classes, across global south,
across, you know, so many things like that.

But we can just give a couple
examples. So in your definition,

it mentioned both advancement and
betterment, which are different things,

and it's kind of important to think about
that because advancement could be purely

a technological thing with no definition
of good, right? So we can say that this.

Iteration of the iPhone is more technologically
advanced, has more computer processing,

more capabilities, et cetera, than
the previous one. So it's definitely

progress from the definition of advancement.
Is the world better as a result? Better is a

question that science actually can't answer on
its own because it's a question of good, right?

Which is related to ought, not just is. And so
now we get into moral philosophy. We get into

something that is Connected to but outside of the
domains of the philosophy of science itself, which

is what is actually good. And so let's say that we
look at the graphs that are very clear about how

screen time associated with phones corresponds to
teen suicide, suicidal ideations, and self harm.

You can watch that as cell phones
started to become ubiquitous,

and as people spend more hours per day
on the cell phones, and it's easier to

spend more hours on the ones that are more
technologically advanced, because they do more

things and end up being more addictive, that body
dysmorphia and suicide and mental illness go up.

And so it's, it's more advanced. Is it better
for the people that are using it? No. In a lot of

metrics that really matter, right? And if you look
at the total supply chain effects of making those,

and you look at the conflict zones associated
with those minds and supply chains and everything,

that's all part of the story of, is the
world better as a result of doing this thing?

There's no question that the, you
know, better living through chemistry,

right? Leading up to the world that
Rachel Carlson wrote about in Silent

Spring. Like leaded gasoline
did stop engine knocking. So,

it was absolutely better from the perspective of
the efficiency of engine process, not knocking.

Now, DDT killed mosquitoes.
Yeah, very effectively. So,

from the narrow definition of kills
mosquitoes and provide some convenience,

Super effective. And it was a great act
of technological progress to be able to

figure out how to do this thing. Now, did the DDT
start kill, like, killing everything and causing

ecocide at scale and human health effects at
scale and pollinators and ecological collapse?

And did the leaded gasoline take a billion
points off of global IQ and make us something

like 4X more violent? Yes, it did that too. And
so this is the thing is to think about. And again,

everybody knows from who's listening here
that GDP goes up with war, military spending,

private contractors, you know, so if,
if, if market size is a measure of

civilizational progress, then war
is also GDP goes up with addiction.

right? Because if someone is addicted to
McDonald's, addicted to their smartphone and

purchasing, addicted to whatever, it leads to more
market activity. It goes up with diseases that are

treated through for profit processes. And so there
are a lot of ways and, you know, there are kids

who do very well at the primary metrics of school,
like SATs, but who are suicidal or sociopathic.

So from the narrow definition of did this way
of raising kids and educating them do well,

S. A. T., sure. From did we raise
healthy human beings that can also

contribute to a healthy society?
It's a very different question.

And so

the idea

that humanity has been making if
someone was trying to figure out

math from scratch on their own and
there hadn't been recorded knowledge,

they'd never get as far as Roman numerals, right?
They'd get like, maybe counting. And, but we can

learn all of this knowledge and do things with
it. So there is progress of stored knowledge.

There is progress Progress of capability of
achieving things. Are we, are the goals well

defined? You know, are they good goals is a, is a
really important question. And progress narrative,

the idea that technology in particular is
advancing rapidly and is making everything

better and better along with the
market and democracy and science.

And That this is the best time to be
alive. And that the Hobbesian view that,

you know, the state of man and nature,
their life is brutish, short, nasty,

and mean. We have civilized ourselves. Everyone is
literate. You know, et cetera. Nobody would want

to go back to the days before Novocaine. We have
so much more wealth now, et cetera, et cetera.

And we're right about to develop, you know, AI's
that will usher in a phase of so much more rapid

exponential progress that it will bring about
you know, abundance and utopia for everybody.

That

narrative really took off following
kind of what we call modernity,

the enlightenment, the scientific
revolution leading to the industrial

revolution and the rapid changes
that have happened in the world.

And that corresponds with what you
talk about of the carbon spike,

and it changed everything radically and rapidly
in a way that. You know, there was no precedent

for that much change that quickly, going from half
a billion people to 8 billion people in 200 years,

where it had taken 200, 000 years to get
to half a billion people of humans being

here.

I'm just wondering if, if the carbon pulse and
the related economic growth. Enabled people to

follow this idea of progress. And if we wouldn't
have had growth, they would have complained or

we would have thought of different ways, but as
long as it was possible for them to, to be part

of the winners then this was all accepted, but
now things are becoming too obvious to deny what's

happening to the planetary ecological situation
inequality lots of pollution, and other things.

So has there always been a critique of
progress? And it's just the last century

or so it's been diminished because
everyone could ride this wave or,

or historically, what, what
do you think about that?

Okay, so I want to come back
to how the progress narrative

kind of formalized in modernity.
But let's go back before that.

Well before

that, well before the carbon pulse.

It's a pretty simple thing to state that
history is written by the winners of wars.

The Losers of Wars don't
get to write history books.

And the history that is written by the continuous,
continuously written by the next winner of war

creates a progress narrative because the winner
typically says it was a good thing that they

won. It wasn't a bad thing that they won. And so
they will say things like, We are civilizing the

savages with our colonialism, and it's actually
a great act of benevolence that these you know,

naked barbarous savages are getting taught
English and Christianity and literacy.

They were all illiterate, you know, and so we
will gruesomely straw man their civilization

or culture, if not totally villainize it. And
then, you know, paint a story of what we did

that goes along with the power conferred
by doing it. And so the, If you one view,

kind of a realpolitik, a real view of history
is just study conquerors for a minute, right?

Just study the history of conquerors. Genghis
Khan killed roughly 50 million people in

his life.

And the estimates vary. 50 million is a
pretty standard estimate. But like this was

well before industrial technology. There were
no tanks. There was no air force, right? Like,

this was cavalry. And he and his men killed
11 percent of the entire global population.

Mind blowingly brutally, unnecessarily. And, you
know, to then also recognize this, that something

like 10 percent of the population of Asia are all
believed to be his descendants now, because in

addition to the amount of killing, the amount of
raping that happened. So, then you look at Attila

the Hun, and then you look at Alexander the Great,
you look at Caesar, you look at Ivan the Terrible,

you look at the progressive history of that, and
there were cultures that were way more peaceful,

that lived in more harmony with nature, that were
not focused on growth of empire at all costs.

If you actually look at indigenous
culture, it's a very interesting thing,

the thing we call the beginning of civilization.
It's such a funny thing, right? Like, typically

somewhere around Babylonia, Mesopotamia, early
Egypt, we call the beginning of civilization.

Maybe now we say Gobleki Tepe, but like, it's very
recent, like some, you know, 10, 000 ish years.

And it has to do with animal husbandry,
agriculture, and growing large populations

and permanent settlements and the written
word and a few things like that. But humans

have been here for a couple hundred
thousand years. Before that, they had,

they had worldviews and systems of medicine and
systems of music and art and poetry and dance.

And, you know, like a lot of things there, they
had the same genetic brains we have and wisdom

and, and they didn't live. Old people didn't live
to be 30 years old. That's just utter gibberish,

right? Like, yes, infant mortality was high. But
old people were old people throughout history.

And Um, you'll notice that there's a reason why
all those cultures stayed pretty small, right?

They stayed within one of the Dunbar numbers.
And it's not that they couldn't grow,

it's that they had very strong reasons not to.
And we discussed last time a little bit that

Pretty much any definition of wisdom that
anybody offers usually has restraint as an

embedded concept. Wisdom involves what not to
do, where you could have personal advantage,

where you could have some near term advantage,
but it's actually not the right thing to do.

And so if you think about the
Dunbar number, right, kind of the,

the first one What do you mean by first one?
Well, the original Dunbar number proposed

was roughly something about 150, 150 to
220, somewhere in there. And then other

people have done kind of progressive Dunbar
like numbers, which are different numbers

of people where different coordination
systems are possible up to that number.

And there are some that are smaller
than that and some that are larger

than that. But let's just take that one
because that was a very significant one.

Up to that number,

everybody can fit around a tribal council and all
be in a single conversation without amplification,

right? They can all hear each other
and possibly all contribute to a

really significant choice that's
going to affect everybody's life.

Everybody can know everybody. So if
I'm making sacrifices for other people,

they're not anonymous strangers that I think
are assholes. They're like people that have

saved my life. They're people that helped
raise me. They're people who I helped raise

there. And so at the scale where everybody can
know everybody, everybody can love everybody,

everybody has some connection with everyone,
and where we can all have a say in that which

our life will be bound to, there's a lot
of reason to not get bigger than that.

If it gets bigger than that and
there's a decision to make and

there's not time or capacity
to hear everyone's voice. Some

people will have to subordinate. And
now my life is subject to things I

don't

have a choice

in. So, so in some senses, there's a negative
feedback to progress and because of so much

social reciprocity potentially informs
wisdom and restraint at that scale.

Well,

it's that they had some insight that
a larger number of people was not

progress. And it was not betterment in the
definition that they were interested in,

because it meant actually less
having a say in your own life and

less intimacy with everybody that
you are in engagement with, right?

Well, but for a lot of part,
a lot of those millennia,

they were running up against limits
like They couldn't support larger

populations necessarily because of the
natural resources and food and such.

No, I think there were a lot of places
where they could. And you had multiple

tribes in the same place that ended up
creating tribal relationships with each

other. You can see this in the recent
parts that we have in writing with the

Iroquois Confederacy and like that. And
yet, rather than all make one giant city,

they actually stayed in these separate bands or
tribes and had relationships with each other.

And they actually had things about restraint that
were very. clear and actually kind of amazing. So,

for instance, when you look at the Indians of
the Pacific Northwest, where the kind of caloric

abundance was really high, right, because of the
salmon and, you know, other things like that,

when they made technological advances, like in
better fishing hooks and longer lines, there

were rules To spend less, to use that efficiency
to spend less time fishing, not catch more fish.

So it was like an embedded anti Jevons
paradox rule. Yes. And that's wisdom,

right? It, that's a way to think about what
the Sabbath is, right? We've talked about

this before. The Sabbath. Amongst other
things, I'm not reducing it to only this,

is a binding of a multipolar trap. It's a
binding of a maximum power principle, right?

Which is, if anybody works on Sunday, they
can get enough differential advantage and

get ahead that they will end up You know,
beating everybody else. So then everybody

has to work on Sunday. So now we have
a world where everybody works all the

time. Nobody enjoys it, but everyone
has to do that. And it's miserable.

No one can connect with their families,
restore, regenerate themselves,

connect with the divine or anything else.
So you just force nobody is allowed to do

that. They made it punishable by death,
right? In Leviticus. But what it meant

was it bound a multipolar trap for everybody.
It was actually using law to bind that thing.

There's wisdom in that and that came from
a wisdom tradition. And the thing about the

potlatch and let's get rid of this surplus,
let's not keep the surplus and grow our

population. Let's not keep the surplus
and have a reason for another group to

come war with us to take the stuff. Let's
actually get rid of the surplus and come

back into depending upon nature and
being in kind of that relationship.

Similarly, with the, we got better fishing
hooks, we could catch a lot more fish and

then we'll collapse the fishing, the fishing
The fish population and create problems for

our social structure and et cetera. So let's
just spend less time fishing. And now we have

more time for art and lovemaking
and meditation and other things.

Right. And so the technological advance didn't
lead to a Jevons paradox because in the same

reason, the same way that we talk about knowledge,
Jevons paradox, if you have more efficiency, that

could lead to using less only if you create law
that binds that that's what it must be. Otherwise,

it, you just get return on investments of
efficiency and maximum power principle, right?

Maybe we'll explain that briefly for anyone that
is coming in this time who hasn't come in before.

Well, maximum power principle is that
we don't necessarily need. energy,

but energy per unit time is what we're trying
to maximize and that in nature, organisms and

ecosystems self organize so as to better access
energy because energy is needed for movement for,

for anything, cellular metabolism,
digestion, all things relate to energy.

So historically those organisms and
ecosystems that had more access to

energy per unit time had an adaptive
advantage. But I have deep questions

about the relationship of authentic versus
naive progress as it pertains to maximum

power as this conversation unfolds. But
does that suffice for for your question?

The thing I want to add is the just if
anyone's hearing about Jevons paradox

for the first time and what maximum power
principle at the level of civilization means.

Well, it the more technology that
we invent, like LED light bulbs,

then they become so cheap and ubiquitous that
we actually use more lighting in the world.

So there's a rebound effect as we develop
more technology that actually uses more

energy globally. And this you see in so many
different ways. I'll just add the, for the

people who kind of understandably think.

Couldn't technological advancement
create more efficiency such that

we could use less stuff and still have,
you know economic equality in our life?

The Jevons Paradox is a really key thing to
understand, which is if you make, if you figure

out how to get copper more efficiently, Or you
figure out how to get nitrogen more efficiently or

energy more efficiently. It also means that that
the cost of that thing goes down, which also means

that now the market input to a whole bunch of
areas that weren't quite profitable open up.

And so now you get a whole bunch of
new market areas. And the net result

is that when a thing becomes more
efficient rather than using less,

you use more. Use more of that plus all the other
things that are industrially connected to it.

And as a consumer, as an individual, if I save
money on some new technology, I'm going to

spend that money at Home Depot or Walmart on, on
something else that requires energy and resources.

So if, if we had the equivalent of
the Indians in the North West that

you were mentioned before the native
Americans that we had some wisdom,

some Sabbath equivalent, some we can't fish
more hours. If we had that in our system,

then this technological innovation that we have
might not be a result in immature progress.

So let's talk about You know, I think it's pretty
clear that making the leaded gasoline and making

the DDT are definitions of progress that for
a narrow purpose are, but are like, obviously

pretty terrible. And the same is true when it
comes to advances in weaponry and making, I mean,

there's so many examples, like making food that
isn't perishable, great technological achievement.

If you consider food perishing a problem to
solve technologically as opposed to a feature

of life we're supposed to relate with that
keeps us living close to the living ecosystem

and aware of biological things break down,
which also keeps us aware of our own death,

which keeps us aware of the meaningfulness of
life and, you know, so many things like that.

So if you look at the emergence of fast food,
And convenience store foods that have much

more addictiveness and much less micronutrients
and are comprehensively bad for the population,

physiologically, psychologically,
you know, et cetera. There's

still progress. And so I think that kind
of progress everybody can probably get.

All right. There's a problem with
that. But even let's say that we're

talking about things that don't seem
to be market driven, but are even like

trying to make progress on solving global
problems. Okay. So let's look at climate

change for a minute.

So the first paper on climate change,
scientific paper was published in 1938.

UNEP was created, United Nation Environmental
Program was created in 1972 to look at major

global environmental issues and have
international coordination. Obviously,

climate change had a U. S. vice
president. Popularize. It has had

almost every kind of celebrity, you
know, NASA and NOAA and the largest

scientific databases and computational
capabilities in the world are backing it.

There's a trillion dollars in climate finance per
year, nuclear energy, hydro energy, solar energy,

etc. And the total amount of fossil fuel energy
that is used goes up every year, that entire time.

And there's a place where we just have to pause
a little bit, if we take that in, to say, wait,

wait, so everything we've done towards climate
hasn't decreased fossil fuel energy, right?

It hasn't even slowed the increase in the
amount that we use each year relative to

the year before. We're continuing to grow
the total amount we use like what? Okay.

So if you think about that for a minute, so
because we want to get off fossil fuel energy,

we're going to make a hydroelectric dam and
it's going to destroy a whole ecosystem by.

You know, flooding that whole area. It's
going to stop migratory pathways of fish

and correspondingly birds. It's going
to cause geopolitical conflict between

the countries that were involved. Maybe
it's all those problems. Maybe all that

would be worth it if it was stopping the
fossil fuels use. But if it's just like,

oh, there's another source of energy, awesome.

We'll use that energy and the fossil fuels energy
because there's still positive returns on both.

They're both profitable to continue to use. And
think about all the nuclear energy we've made,

right? Like all the risk. of nuclear
waste having to be managed forever,

all the risk of nuclear power plants being able
to be things that can be targeted in war and

become nuclear volcanoes even by non nuclear
powers, the increase in fissible material,

all that risk, and it didn't
even decrease fossil fuel use.

And so you're like, okay, well, the way
we've been trying to solve the climate

problem empirically is not working. And many of
the solutions add new harms without actually even

addressing the existing ones effectively at
all. So this is also not a good definition of

progress, right? But how much, how much of
your critique or, or the paper critique of

progress is is you know, a critique of GDP as
our cultural aspiration by a different name?

Okay, let's go back to Genghis
Khan, where we were for a moment,

and France, because we were
pre GDP at that time, right?

And we were pre carbon pulse. So

it is not true that all of the tribal populations
were as big as they could be throughout history,

limited only by scarce food. That's part of
the rewrite of history that assumes that cities

and bigger populations are better and that
progress has been linearly happening and etc.

There

is no, when I said that earlier,
I meant like 100, 000 years ago,

not, not, you know, 000 years ago, but, but go on

the, the archeology gets less
good to the further back you go,

which means it becomes more subject
to the projection of your narrative.

Because you have less data and so you
read the stuff through your narrative.

So if you have a Hobbesian narrative that says
their lives were brutish or nasty and mean,

but that same narrative is why we had Manifest
Destiny. It is the manifest destiny of us

colonialists to take over North America, to
take it away from being a vast wilderness for

squalid savages and to civilize it so
that it can hold civilization, right?

Like, was it, okay. You read quotes
from many of the chiefs of, like,

it was only considered a wilderness to them. We
filled with, like, terrible beasts and stuff.

We considered it a beautiful paradise and
we were friends with all the animals. And

it was only them that considered it full of
squalid savages because they didn't have any

interest in coming to understand the depth
and intricacy and beauty of our culture.

But it was progress because the winners wrote the
books. Yes. And so. If there was a culture that

didn't orient to its maximum size and maximum
colonialism and empire expansion and whatever,

because it wanted to not train
the kids up to go die in war,

wanted to train the kids up
to have a beautiful life.

It wanted to have not turn all of nature into
military equipment and stuff and agriculture land,

but to, you know, have some deep
appreciation of what nature was.

Those cultures usually lost in war to
the cultures that did the other thing.

Well, exactly. So what if there were
10 cultures, 10 tribes back in the day,

and nine of them were peaceful in harmony with
nature music, community, lovemaking inventions.

If there was only one tribe that was
a Genghis Khan type thing, that's who

won. Won in quotes. This is a really important
part of the story of history, in my opinion,

is

Unless the person doing the tribal warfare,
unless the other 10 all noticed it and went and

stopped them from even being able to develop
that capability, then yes, the person who

starts in the group that starts investing in
offensive tribal warfare is going to win it.

went and then what, and this played a role in
the thing that we call cities and the movement

to larger civilizations is once we're in the
age of tribal warfare, smaller numbers are

going to do much less well than larger numbers
are. And so if there is any group that is now

starting to do the offensive warfare thing, now
a couple smaller groups need to unify together.

People will have less say and they'll have
less liberty, but already more of them

will have to train and, you know, Military
than in the arts and other types of things,

because that multipolar trap is
now in place. But there's a very

important thing is we've talked about
multipolar traps here before, right?

An arms race is a multipolar trap where
everybody's racing to make faster hypersonic

weapons and multiple reentry vehicles and more
effective autonomous weapons and whatever, because

we have to. Do that. Cause what if the other
guy gets it, even though we're making a world

that is our own risk of dying at all those things
goes way up and is a comprehensively worse world.

So the arms race is a multipolar trap.
The market race. Even if what it's

doing is driving massive externalities as a
multipolar trap, the tragedy of the commons,

we have to extract the resources, even
if we destroy the ecology before the

other guy, because if we don't,
it doesn't protect the ecosystem.

The other guy is going to destroy them all first
and use that increased resource as competitive

advantage to beat us. So the multipolar trap is,
is one of the reasons why we can't do anything

about climate change very effectively right
now is nobody wants to price carbon properly

at a country level that has the rule of law
to be able to bind its own economy because

it would put them so radically behind everyone
else who wasn't doing that economically and that

economics is converted to military power and
technological innovation and everything else.

No one wants to slow down their
A. I. to try to do it safely,

slow down their synthetic biology. So it's
just kind of a Full race dynamics. Now,

we've talked about this before, but
there's something even deeper that you

just mentioned, which is

the multipolar trap is usually initiated by

a psychopath. And in our tribal past, sub dunbar
numbers, there was strong social reciprocity

that would inhibit the potential power of a
psychopath. I want to build this out a little bit

more and then I'll say

that. The, not everyone wants to go
initiate tribal war and have their

children die in war so that they
can have the glorious large empire.

That is not everybody's desire. The the,
the people who have won at doing that thing,

I can't imagine anything, Anyone not
desiring that unless they are betas

who just couldn't win at it. Because they
can't imagine anything like fulfillment

that is not oriented on conquest
or intimacy or things like that.

And so not everybody wants to do that thing,
right? But if somebody wants to do that thing,

there's something wrong with them. There's
something really deeply wrong with them. And,

but now everybody else has to do something
that can deal with that or lose by default,

right?

And yeah, this is very much like the
emergence of a cancer in the body.

Right? The, the cancer is not just another
cell having its own individual freedom to

express itself in a slightly different
way, and it should be allowed to have

its own individual expression. The other
cells, like, there's a difference between

the liver cells and the blood cells and the
kidney cells and the, they're all different,

but they all have a shared genome and they're
all working as parts of this larger whole,

and they're constrained by that, and
that's okay, because they would also die.

Like, a kidney outside of a body is not that
interesting. It doesn't sustain itself. So all

of the cells are constrained by being a part
of a body to serve the good of the body. So

they get to have individual expression, but
they also have interconnectedness and with

that an obligation. The cancer cell,
it's like, nah, fuck the obligation.

I'm going to do my thing and I'm going
to actually consume resources faster and

replicate faster. And if it does
that and metastasizes that idea,

right? Then the rest, the rest of the body,
the immune system has to kill that thing,

or that thing will kill the rest of the system,
including itself, including itself, right?

And that's the thing is that
the cancer cell is having

amazing progress at consumption
and replication. It's betterment

for, for

its own goals. Yes, it's, it's
succeeding at its goals. And then

the, there are the most number of copies of itself
right before it kills the host and kills itself.

Oh, boy. So certainly in the
deep ecology movement there are

some people that view humanity as a cancer cell.

And based on the last five minutes you're
suggesting that it's not humanity It's some

individuals that through some positive feedback
in tandem with energy surplus broke free of the,

the wisdom and restraint of small groups. And
it's, it's that multipolar trap that has created,

that has created a lot of these
negative effects on the planet.

Nobody can argue that we.

That there are a lot of cultures
that have no descendants today

because Alexander or Caesar or
Genghis Khan killed them all

and their memes and their

cultures and their genes didn't make it
through that particular selection process,

and it that there, that does not mean that
they didn't have higher qualities of life or

more sustainability with nature. It means they
weren't good at war. And they weren't good at,

even if they were good at war individually, right?

Because some people might take objection,
tribal warriors. They were not good at scaled

violence, effective scaled coordinate
violence. And we are the descendants,

unavoidably, of the people that scaled empire with
all of the ecological harm, warfare, genocide,

et cetera. We are genetically and mimetically and
culturally the descendants of those processes.

I think that's a profound insight,
but I'll, I'll push back a little and

say we're also the descendants of those
humans that killed off the Neanderthals.

Yes, there is. So, I'm going
to make some conjecture

here that I don't have the data to support.
And I would really like to get the data. Which

I, which I know you by now well enough these
past few years is something you rarely do.

But but go on.

The data for this is not available that I have

seen because it's ancient and our
archaeology has too many conflicting

things.

So Our early toolmaking, call it stone tools

and you know, then fire, right? Like very early
toolmaking. Was it a radical change? And obviously

that didn't start with sapiens, right? That
started with homo habilis or something like

that. It was a pretty radical change in
selection criteria from everything before,

and because now the selection criteria were
not the result of a genetic mutation that was

corporeally built into our body, it was the
result of us understanding how to extend what

our body does extracorporeally, where the ability
to advance those technologies was much more rapid.

Then evolution's advancement of
our body's predatory, you know,

capabilities or whatever kind of selection
capabilities. And that was the beginning of

a really significant asymmetry that did not exist
in the rest of the natural world and the rest of

natural evolution. In natural evolution, the
mutation forces that are acting on our body.

Something that produce a bunch of useless
mutations. I'm using kind of standard evolutionary

theory. They produce a bunch of useless mutations,
but a few of them are effective and they get

selected for those mutations pressures, whether
we're talking about gamma rays or oxidative stress

or whatever, or just you know, transcription
errors are operating across the entire ecosystem.

All of the beings. There's an even distribution of
kind of the mutation pressures. And then there's

also a co selection process. So the mutation that
leads to a predator getting slightly sharper teeth

or a slightly stronger jaw or slightly faster
running, it's only slightly, right? You don't

get like a massive jump like we get with
AI systems from one generation to the next.

So let's say there is a mutation that leads to a
capacity that makes them slightly more effective

at their niche. Let's say it's a predatory
niche. Simultaneously, similar types of

mutation pressures are happening on the things
that they eat that make them slightly faster,

slightly better at camouflage, have slightly
sharper senses, you know, whatever it is, right?

And so neither of them are getting a massive
asymmetrical jump relative to the other. They're

having similar kinds of very, very gradual
increases. And then let's say the predatory

Predator had one first. So it's going to start
doing slightly better at eating prey. It's

of course going to be statistically eating the
slower ones more often than the faster ones, and

as a result, the inbreeding of the faster genes
also leads to a change in selection dynamics.

So both the distribution of mutation and co
selection lead to a process where there is a

symmetry of power that is maintained across the
whole system. And it's not just in a one to one

relationship, right? It's the predator with the
prey. It's that prey animal with the plants,

right? As it gets the ability to digest
more stuff, the plants start figuring

out how to put out more volatile oils or
spread seeds faster or whatever it is.

But your point here is that it was
symmetric and it was really slow. Yes.

And as a result, you're actually not
getting power asymmetries. You're not

getting concentrations of power. You're getting
distributions of power. And the distribution

of power is what's allowing there to
be a harmony across that whole space.

And it's why you don't get that what is good for
lions as a whole is bad for gazelles as a whole,

right? Of course, this lion eating
this gazelle, that might be the case,

but lions as a whole and gazelles as a
whole are actually symbiotic species.

If the lions went away, the gazelles
would actually do less well, right?

They would have the weaker genes
and breed more often and, you know,

et cetera. If the gazelles went away, the lions
would do less well. So at the micro level,

it looks like competition and even
zero sum, but at the macro level,

they're symbiotic. But the key reason does
have to do with the symmetry of power.

In

the same way that like

fighting in your weight class is a thing,
right? If you're competing and the kind of

original definition of competing means something
like to strive together. If I'm competing with

someone where they get a little bit better and
it for like it inspires and teaches and forces

me to get a little bit better, you know,
there is some kind of co progress together.

But if I am going to fight with a guy that's just
10 times my capability and he just. kills me,

right? Like, I don't get better from that.
There, there's not a, you know, similar

kind of progress. The progress does involve
a certain kind of symmetry and the ability to

navigate the situation.

And so if you, the first question
with progress is progress for whom?

And then, then we would

say progress of what, across what metrics across
what way of assessing what is valuable. And

progress that is progress for some that is totally
bad for others, but also bad for others that that

some depends upon is a very narrow definition
of progress. And even like the cancer cell that

will eventually kill its own host, it's a
definition that does not define progress.

actually long term even viable for the,

for the interest of where the
progress seems to have been true.

So I can begin to surmise why you and your team
spent so much time and effort writing this,

this paper. This is a central chasm in
our discourse that we need to address.

Yeah. So we've talked before that the
metacrisis, you know, we have lots of

different global catastrophic risks just in
the domain of ecology we're facing, right?

We could really mess the biosphere up just
because of PFAS, just because of pesticides,

just because of mining waste, just because
of biodiversity loss, just because of damage

to oceans and dead zones and coral. Like we
have lots of different, from the extraction

side and the pollution side, catastrophic risks
that are the result of our success at progress.

And by the way, all those things you
mentioned are considered externalities

that are currently not priced in our
decisions and our success metrics at all.

And what is the cost of the Great Barrier Reef?
Like, what should the value of it be? What should

the value of healthy soil microbes be? Well,
Everything dies without soil microbiology.

But like everything dies without air and the
cost of air is nothing. And the reason the cost

of air is nothing is because everybody still has
access to it. And I can't. Patented. I can't have

differential access to it. So it's just no need
to bother putting a price on it. But that also

means that it gets damaged through industrial
process continuously, through air pollution,

through burning things where you're using
up the O2 and turning it into CO2, et

cetera.

And there is a slight decline in oxygen globally
because of the burning of fossil fuels and much

higher in the oceans. Ocean oxygen has
declined 2 percent in the last 50 years.

Obviously, the O in the CO2 is, there was carbon,

there were hydrocarbons that were getting
burned, which means oxidized, right?

So you're, of course, you're going to have those
things happen together. It's very interesting. So

not just the most important things like. The soil
microbiology and the phytoplankton and the air

that we are rapidly destroying that are the most
priceless, priceless things there could be, right?

But if you look at people's deathbed reflections
at what they said was meaningful, and I was very

fortunate when I was growing up, my mom took
me to old folks homes to spend time with them.

And I got to hear a lot of deathbed reflections
and it was very influential in my life,

the highlights of what people say was worth it.

had nothing ever to do with anything
that the market ever gave them.

And everything it had to do with was
only the things that could occur in

the time that they were not an agent of
the market, where they were not working,

producing, etc. It had to do with their time
with their family, their time with loved ones,

their time in nature, their time
in religious experience. But the

market can't supply those things very
well, so it doesn't value them at all.

And it emphasizes reward
circuits that it can monetize.

So I don't want to diverge too much from from
your paper, but if there were a billionaire,

I mean, there's, there's there's multipolar
traps, but there's also social traps. And

if there were a billionaire listening to this,
agreeing with the logic that you're laying out,

but saying I'm powerless to change my
behaviors in trying to maximize my own

Bitcoin fiat currency lead over my competitors
because everyone else is doing it this way.

So I see the world as being very messed up
and getting worse. Yet for me, in my position,

I'm doing the thing that is best for my
family, irrespective of what the future

is. How do we get beyond those, I call them the
1500 elites in the world have to recognize this,

this this trap that you're describing.

So the idea of an externality that we're building
a technology or a business or a law or a nonprofit

or a whatever to do something. We're building it
to try to usually solve some problem where we can

assess that in a narrow metric, whatever that is,
or a small handful of metrics, but that technology

and the supply chains that make it and the power
dynamics, it confers, whatever, do other stuff.

They affect other stuff other than the stuff
we intended to affect, and a lot of it ends up

being negative. We call those externalities.
There can be positive externalities too,

and that's an important thing to consider.
So. There's this story that it's impossible

to forecast externalities because the world is so
complex and you couldn't possibly know in advance.

So all we can do is, you know, make something that
is innovative and awesome. And then when we see

the problem, work to solve it. And the continuous
solving of problems is, is what humanity is here

for and part of progress. This is gibberish.
Right. This is just total gibberish, but it is

self motivated gibberish for the people who did
not want to try to anticipate the externalities

or didn't want to admit them because they were
going to privatize gains and socialize losses.

And then later say it's impossible to predict what
the externalities would be. So I think it was a

Dow that just got a 10 billion 10 billion. lawsuit
settlement for PFAS remediation that they have to

pay like 10. 3 billion, which is significant. And
it's because some of the investigative journalism

showed that not only is the, is PFAS in every drop
of rainwater in the entire world, in Antarctica,

in, you know, on all the continents, and
is it on all the water surface areas?

And is it not just affecting human health,
but it's affecting all biology down to

the soil microbes and the phytoplankton in ways
we can't. And it doesn't break down. There are

no biological processes because it was built
as an industrial product to be a thing that

doesn't break down, right? To resist corrosion
and resist all of the various types of things.

Okay,

so just

I

think it might have

actually been Minnesota, your state. Just
one state's PFAS remediation. Was estimated

at costing $20 billion if they were gonna try to
use known technological methods to get the PFAS

out. So this $10 billion from the primary producer
globally is a joke. I can send the stats, but it

was something like 16 trillion a year to do total
PFAS remediation over the course of a decade.

So the entire global GDP to remediate one class
of chemicals, it doesn't include a agricultural

chemicals and mining chemicals and everything
else. Well, that explains why we're not doing it.

Okay. So stay with me. I'm trying to construct
something and taking a circuitous route. So it

turns out that investigation showed that that
company knew PFOS was a carcinogen before it

was ever put into the environment or
put into any industrial application.

They hid the science. It had caused
cancer in the lab rats. And so there

was just like a direct coverup and the same
thing was true with leaded gas. right? We,

the people who were inventing leaded gas
were all getting sick in the laboratory.

It was known to be toxic, et cetera. And
there was just direct suppression of that.

And if that's true, and I believe you that
it is, why were those people suppressing

it? Because of short term gain for them and
the winners write the history books sort of

story? Yeah. So the short term gain is,

Hey, if I stop this engine knocking thing and
engines are the new thing, cars are everywhere.

Right? And I own the patent on this tetraethyl
lead thing, and I can add it to all gas. It's

needed by everything. We're going to make
a lot of money. And probably it's not going

to be that bad for people. It'll be in
the air. It'll be dispersed. It won't,

you know, it'll be the parts per
million will be low, whatever.

There are lots of times where we actually know the
harm something is going to cause, whoever it is,

industry, whatever, ahead of time, and do it
anyways, cover it up. That's a known thing.

There are other times where we just don't try
very hard to do an analysis of externalities,

because if we put money and resource into
looking at, is this going to harm things,

and the other competitor doesn't, they're
going to get first mover advantage.

They're going to later be able to say,
we couldn't have possibly known. I,

the money that I put into seeing those harms
might just tell me not to do the project. And

now how do I get a return on that money that I
put in? And if it does show me a safer way to

do the project, it's probably so much later
and with less margins than the other thing.

And so at minimum, there's a kind of
negligence of if we do due diligence,

we do this box checking plausible deniability
version, because we know we're going to be able

to privatize the gains and socialize the
losses. Right. The Apple's a 3 trillion

company that played a major role in
smartphones in everybody's pockets.

And the fact that teen body dysmorphia and
suicide and porn addiction and mental health

issues and everything went up, they don't have
any liability for that. And so they also have

no incentive to really limit their privatized
gains to avoid causing those externalities.

Let me interrupt you one more time, which is
en route to the, the billionaire question.

So, like you said, in the day of
unleaded gasoline they were able

to make a lot of money and they thought, Oh, well,

this will be dispersed. It won't be that big
of a deal. But now I think a lot of people that

work at corporations that are paying attention
to the metacrisis and the human predicament

and climate and oceans and PFAS and social
inequalities and addictions and everything else.

They have to be in these boardrooms
wondering this stuff is a little bit

louder. The externalities are, are more
obvious than they used to be. This is a

different question that I would love to
answer, but if I do it, I'll never get

back to

your first question. Keep
going, keep going. Remember,

it's exactly the next place to go. Okay.

One is about. dark triad traits, and sociopathy.
The other is willingness to be complicit with it,

which are basically the two types
of psychology that are conditioned

for in the system.

Whoa. Can you briefly describe dark
triad again? I've done it on a frankly,

but maybe you could describe it.

Dark triad is the three, And the
three qualities of sociopathy,

narcissism and Machiavellianism. And then
sometimes it's referred to as the dark quad,

where sadism is added as a fourth. And these
are like particularly dark aspects of human

psychology that can co occur. And so we're not
looking here at a DSM diagnosis of a narcissist,

meaning narcissistic personality disorder within
cluster B or sociopathic personality disorder.

It's sets of traits that people can
have higher, lower amounts of. And

the same person in different environments
can have higher, lower amounts of. You

put a really lovely person in a terrible
prison and they're, they better develop

these traits or they're probably going to die,
right? They're adaptive in some environments.

And

so,

You know, people can look this up more, but
narcissism is roughly kind of an inflated sense

of their own entitlement, their own importance,
their, you know you know, leadership worthiness,

that kind of thing. Sociopathy is a lack
of empathy for other people. Not really

caring to take their worldview, not really
asking, will this be progress for them?

Not feeling remorse if they end up being where
the externalities land and harm. is caused.

And Machiavellianism is the ability to think
strategically through, you know, a complex play,

right? So if that Machiavellianism is in service
to self oriented goals, self aggrandizing,

expanding goals that are not that attuned to
others, you get problems with that thing, right?

But those also make Great leadership qualities for

the multipolar trap version of
progress. And Especially in an

institutional structure where we have corporations

and things like that relative to 500
or a thousand years ago. Well, the

corporation,

I

mean, it's a great example, right? So
14th amendment was really everybody knows.

to give personhood rights to Black people
following the Emancipation Proclamation

and the end of slavery. It was for personhood
rights for things that had not been considered

persons. Black people were not considered
persons during slavery. And the loophole

in what was so obviously to give personhood
People who had been previously slaves was

then used to give personhood rights to
corporations by corporations that saw

the legal advantage of being able to have all of
the due process and everything that persons have.

And I think in the first year after
the ratification of the 14th amendment,

the Supreme Court saw like, Something
like 15 cases associated with the 14th

Amendment associated with black
people. And it's something like

350 cases associated with businesses and
corporate personhoods. And the corporate

person, the entity that is the public
corporation is an obligate sociopath.

So is a

corporation an institutional equivalent of a,
of a human dark triad trait? This is what I'm

saying. A corporation does not, a corporation is
a, you can think of it as a cybernetic entity.

Right. The, the operating agreements, the
legal agreements of what it is, plus its

whole operational machinery does not depend on any
particular person because you have an org chart.

And if you lose this assembly line worker or
this chief marketing officer, you replace them

with a kind of market equivalent all the way up
to a CEO. And so the. Entity is controlled by

the cybernetic entity kind of controls itself
aligned with these legal operating agreements,

not controlled by anybody in particular
and recognized as a corporate person.

So it protects the directors from legal
responsibility of what that corporate person does,

even though, of course, it couldn't do it
without running on the people. And then

you have a fiduciary responsibility to
maximize profit, which is a measure of

extraction. And so. And of course, that
corporate person doesn't have empathy.

It cannot. It's not a it's not a sentient
thing, right? It is a cybernetic thing,

but it's not a sentient thing. So it
doesn't have empathy. It does have planning,

i. e. Machiavellianism. It does have my own
growth should continue forever. And I should

be the market dominator. That's narcissism.
And so, yes, it is an obligate sociopath.

And it is actually legally required to maximize
It's, you know, shareholder return on profit by

the directors of the organization. So the idea
that you cannot possibly anticipate externalities

is not true, but it's a useful idea of those who
are going to benefit by causing externalities.

And the people who benefit by causing
externalities because they're privatizing

all of the gains

to write the narrative in the same way

the history was written by the winners of war
previously, like it costs a lot of money to

affect the narrative of the world. You see this
in political campaigns, you see it in marketing

campaigns, but if if an idea is spreading, who is
writing all that stuff and who's up regulating it

and who's paying for the commercials and who's
getting the data to do the personalized micro

targeted ads and who's, so the ideas that spread
are not just spreading through a kind of natural

selection of the goodness of the idea, they
are getting oftentimes amplified by the media.

Interests that want those ideas to spread. Duh,

right? We know this. This is how political
campaigns work. This is how advertising works.

This is how propaganda works. This is how, you
know, on and on. This is how religion works,

right? There's a lot of money that goes into
proselytizing and getting the ideas to spread.

So there are a lot of ideas that are marketing
and or apologism for the dominant class in

terms of power. So the dominant narrative is
usually apologism for the dominant power system.

And that's why when we were in the age of
colonialism, the narrative was that it was

generous of us to bring this colonialism
to civilize the savages. It's why we were

in the age of spreading Christendom through
all of the various processes, that bringing

Christendom to all of the non Christians was
the most charitable good act we could do.

In the same way that, like, when we talk about
externalities, when Facebook was in its early

phases, there were people like, you know, Jared
Lanier famously was saying this very publicly,

but there were people coming from the McLuhan
school and You know, coming from various,

coming from the Mumford School who were saying,
Hey, look, this technology where you're monetizing

people's attention and you're going to race
to effectively monetize their attention.

And unlike where TV commercials did
that, but it was the same for everybody,

you now get to have them interact with it
to gain personalized info to split test how

sticky you monetize their attention.
A lot of the things that are going

to engage their attention more
are going to be limbic hijacks.

They're going to be things that make the person
scared or horny or distracted or, or in group,

out group identity or whatever it is. And this is
going to be really bad for society. It's not that

no one was saying that then. It was being said,
it was being ignored. It was not being studied

and researched and pursued because, and then
later they get to say, we couldn't have possibly

known it was going to polarize society and break
democracy and decrease everyone's attention spans.

So. The, we couldn't have possibly known as
a bullshit story. If you think about does,

am I saying that you can anticipate everything? Of
course not. But am I saying you can do a million

times better than we even attempt to do now?
Yes, of course. So in the process of developing

a new technology, say, could we proceduralize
thinking through the total set of effects,

not just the intended set of effects
and the market benefits of those,

but thinking through if this technology
really takes off, And goes to its full scale.

What is the pressure of that on all the
supply chains to make it? And what is the

environmental effects of that? What
are the, you know, geopolitical and

et cetera effects? What if people use
it, is it conferring some power? If so,

what other thing is it obsoleting? How
will that change power dynamics, et cetera?

You just kind of think it through. Now
we have a process That we've developed

called yellow teaming. Red teaming is,
you know, now become pretty famous,

which is you're wanting to do something. You
want it to succeed. Red teaming is a process

you can do to see how it might fail, how
somebody could beat it or how it might fail.

Yellow teaming is if it succeeds, where might
it mess other things up? So could we yellow

team? Well, yes, you're not going to predict
everything, but you predict a lot of the things,

and then you keep watching, and when you notice
other things, you procedurally internalize

them. Now, in the same way all this was the
buildup to the billionaire question, the long

buildup, the people in a
multipolar trap who are at the

front of the race, could stop the multipolar trap,

but they don't want to because
they believe they can win.

So they use the multipolar trap as a story of
their own lack of power to do anything else as

plausible deniability. The littler guy
cannot necessarily stop the multipolar trap,

but someone who's at the leading edge of
an arms race, if they wanted to apply the

same energy and same sophistication to
agreements to pursue, because of course,

there's a situation that if my country becomes
more secure relative to other countries,

which means develops better weapons, It
automatically makes everyone else less secure.

So now they have to do the same thing. And
it just means that you have an arms race of

increasing weapons forever and increasing budgets
going to it forever, which is great for defense

contractors. It's actually great for GDP and
it's bad for everything else. Now, if we could

just say how let's make an agreement to all spend
less on weapons, we can be proportionally less.

Right. Proportionally less such that relative
security changes. Well, of course people say,

well, we can't possibly do that. We couldn't
get China. We couldn't get Russia. There's no

way to enforce it, etc. And we're saying that
right now with regard to AI. Well, even if we

wanted to stop this thing from advancing that has
That accelerates every global catastrophic risk.

We couldn't possibly because there's so many
places racing and we couldn't stop China and blah,

blah, blah. Therefore, the only possible answer is
to win the multipolar trap because losing at it is

too bad. If you look at the resources we invest
in figuring out AI, if we invested those same

resources and actually creating healthy diplomacy
where we were not assholes to our international

Neighbors and really tried to create global
coordination to bind the multipolar trap we could.

And so the

billionaire that says, well, I don't know
how to solve the problems of the world,

like I'm too small, right in the, it's a hundred
trillion dollar economy. I'm almost nothing. I'm

this little. Guy, I couldn't solve the problems
of the world, therefore me continuing to just

pick up all the game theory tokens I can
under a world of increasing uncertainty.

The optionality of that is what's best for
me and my family. Look at how much time you

spent figuring out. How to gather all those
optionality tokens, understanding markets,

understanding how to do lobbying, understanding
your industry, understanding financial markets,

et cetera. And look at how much time you spent
trying to say, if I applied all of that same

energy, time, thoughtfulness, resource to solving
some of the great problems, could I, you have

not put enough time to say that you couldn't
possibly, it's just not in your interest.

This is what Jeremy Grantham's big point
at the end of our podcast was, and I've,

I've talked to him about it subsequently. He
wants the elites, the rich people, to divert

their attention to the ecological crisis.
Not only climate, but plastics, and oceans,

and many other things, because they haven't. They,
they're unaware, it's just out there, and it's a,

it's a big drive of his, and some others, and
fingers crossed, because that's what we need.

And yet, I've encountered so many more people
who are conscious of what's happening to the

environment. But like you just said, they plan to
give away some of their money in the future, but

for now they're focused on their investments and
they want to have a little bit more so that they

can give more to good causes in the future, which
I just scratch my head when I, when I hear that.

You, you could understand someone
listening to this past hour. You've

just articulated that winner's right. The
history books. And the situation is so

bizarre and scary and complex right
now that if I don't have an answer,

I might as well just try to be a winner,
which means more optionality tokens.

Yes. And

I think there is a, I mean, that is definitely
the state of AI in development. Very centrally.

It's definitely the state of like
the posturing and geopolitics.

And just financial markets.
It's the way of that too.

Now. If you look at that path of winning
and realize it's actually self terminating,

and it's not even a win for you, that
could be the beginning of a pause.

And then if you look at that,
okay, so, you know, people

talk about like what the, the biggest Nobel Prize
you could want to win, the biggest problem to

solve for humanity, oftentimes like cure for
cancer. If you look at the graphs of incidents

of different types of cancers from 1950 till
now, you see a rise in heaps of cancers, right?

Lots of rise in endocrine
and reproductive cancers,

in different kinds of childhood cancers,
in very aggressive turbo cancers,

and that rise in those cancers, in terms of year
over year rise, maps very closely to the rise of

carcinogenic chemicals put into the atmosphere.
And so when you look at the 230 million chemicals.

In the database of the American Chemical Society,

and you look at the huge number of them that
are put into the atmosphere and environment

through the VOCs and the paint and the walls and
then the carpet to the industrial chemicals to

the agricultural chemicals. The percentage
of them that are carcinogens is very high.

The other ones are. Neurotoxins, or
endocrine disruptors, or whatever. So,

correspondingly, the increased rate of
autoimmunity, of autism, and Alzheimer's,

and neurodegenerative disease, of
infertility and reproductive failure,

follow those curves quite closely. Is that
the only factor? No. Is that a major factor?

Yes. The other factors are also the result of
the progress of this society in other ways,

like the processed foods that
follow similar curves that

mess up the microbiome and micronutrient
profiles of the body and stuff like that.

In, in your paper, you make a, a, a point
of highlighting the Haber Bosch process and,

and crop yields and food and
that's been viewed as progress,

but there's a whole lot of
stuff it doesn't include.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I want to stay with
the cancer case for a minute.

When, if you look at

all of the scientific advancements trying to cure
cancer, why don't they start with, how do we get,

how do we stop putting carcinogens in
the atmosphere and in the food supply,

you know, where there are continuous studies
by groups like the Institute for Environmental

Medicine that show there's roughly 300
carcinogens, the industrial toxins that

are carcinogenic in the breast milk of nursing
mothers in the United States and whatever.

Why don't we work on getting those out?
Because the vast majority of cancers we

have are anthropogenic. They're caused by
human activity. We don't need to try to

solve cancer in abstract. Like, let's start
with that. And Oftentimes the right problem

solving is reversing something
that was already the wrong path.

I can't patent that. I can't market that very
well. The new pharmaceutical solution that I can

patent that doesn't address the upstream causes at
all might have enough ROI to pay for the research.

But if there's a thousand of these entities
out there and 990 of them take the higher,

the high road, and why are we
putting these chemicals in there?

Let's do it a different way. It's those other 10
that decide to do it in our current institutional

corporation structure. And it's just like
Genghis Khan. Okay. So this is important.

If we build new types of energy, but we don't
create both cultural values and particularly law

that binds the use of the other energy, we'll just
use all the energy because more energy is awesome.

More energy means more GDP means more, you
know, all the things associated with what

interests of power. So creating a new thing
that is supposedly more positive in a way

is awesome. Is not actually solving the problem
if you're not binding the harmful thing, because

you will just get both and it'll end up being
market diversification and more total market size.

Similarly, like the organic food movement has been
awesome in a lot of ways. There's a lot of people

who shop at the Whole Foods and buy organics and
want there to be less pesticides and whatever.

And yet, More pesticides have been used every
single year during that entire time. So clearly,

it's not actually decreasing total pesticide
use because we're bringing in creasing amounts

of pesticides to conventional agriculture, to the
developing world and the populations, whatever.

So it just, okay, it's like, great, we will
add that organic niche market on top of the

existing market and get more total market
share. There has to be more of a focus of

actually binding the things that have
to stop. And so when you're mentioning,

if somebody does that thing, interests of everyone
else who want to, again, if there were nine,

if there were nine tribes that were really
wanted peace and wanted to be in peaceful

arrangement and trade and whatever with each
other, and they saw an early phase of another

tribe moving in another direction and they did
interfere and not let it continue in that way,

they could possibly have peace for everybody
and that actually becomes the obligation.

So, like I said, We have a, the, the
system that emerged in the context

of power competition selects for people
who are oriented to power competitions

and other people who are complicit with
it. Those are the two things it selects

for. And is that dynamic that you
just described what underpins Moloch,

Watiko, Koyaanisqatsi, the superorganism?

Yes, the generative dynamic can
be described a couple ways. One is

humans get conditioned by their environment,

right? I grew up in a tribal culture.
I grew up in a modern technological

culture. I grew up in a city in the
dark ages, whatever. I'm going to be,

I'm being conditioned by the environment I'm
in in terms of my language, my worldview,

my technological capabilities,
desires, identities, all those things.

So, so the civilization is conditioning the
minds. which means patterns of perception,

identity, value, and behavior of
the people. And those minds are,

in turn, creating more of the types of
things that they were conditioned to.

And so there is a feedback loop between
the individuals influencing the whole,

the whole influencing the individuals, and there
is a particular thing that is getting upregulated.

So let's talk about theory of hyperagents for
a minute. I think we mentioned this somewhere

before, but we'll do it again quickly. The
Genghis Khans and the Alexanders and the

Caesars were obviously different types of
people than most of the people that either

worked for them or they killed. And the you
know, kings following that and the, and the

robber barons and industrialists and whatever
that like all have that in common up to today

of that how much power they have consolidated
relative to most everyone else is extreme.

And they're. And it's not arbitrary. There
were things about their psychology that had

them pursue that and be good at it. So agency,
our own ability to achieve our goals and do

the stuff we want to do. You could say that a
hyperagent is someone whose focus is maximizing

returns on agency. They want to do the things
that make them capable of more doing, right?

They want to, and they, they want to use their

This is a great question,

right? Towards what end is You
were just mentioning it with your

billionaire friends who are like, well,
the future has a lot of uncertainty.

The money gives me the ability to
live in one place or another place,

to build this kind of tech or that kind
of tech, to employ tech or people or land.

It gives me the ability to influence
minds through media. It's a generalized

optionality token. So I'm just going to keep
working to get there. So that I always have

the maximum freedom and ability to do
what I want to do every scenario. Now,

one of the reasons is that
one of the reasons is winning.

One of the reasons is their own fear of
death and wanting to be remembered in

the history books forever, whatever, right?
Some set of reasons that are associated with,

um,

personal

expansion of power. So a hyper agent maximizes
kind of return on agency. It's important to

state that return on capital can be return
on agency, but it's not necessarily. There

are hyper investors who are really good at
applying capital to create more capital,

but are not using that to influence the world to a
vision of the world they want beyond that heavily.

Right. Like Warren Buffett was not trying to
change laws and politics and culture all around

the world. He was a hyper investor, not really
a hyper agent, whereas Kissinger had much less

money personally than Buffett ever did, but
had radically more influence on world systems

through the influence of a lot more total
money of state funds and, you know, whatever.

So Hyper agency is the more fundamental
concept, which is kind of the return on

agency. There are people who are also
motivated to do that. They're just not

good at it. And maybe they become like
a very controlling middle manager or a

gangster or something. But the people
who are good at it are good at scaling.

And that's through both the influence
of a lot of people and the employment

of technology. And that can be social technology,

like writing laws and influencing capital. which
are social technologies creating narratives like

The rise of Nazism or Mao or whatever. Right. So
like, but they're good at being able to scale.

So the kind of tier one hyperagents, the
ones that have the most influence in the

world are not just oriented to maximize
returns on agency, but they're good at

it. And If you look at the distribution of
traits that humans have in a population,

like empathy, they'll usually follow
a Gaussian distribution, right?

You'll have most people are here, they have
some level of empathy for some circle of people,

you know, kind of average. There are bodhisattvas
on one side that are, you know, hyper empathetic,

and there are sociopaths on the other side,
no empathy. And we could also take, say,

Machiavellianism, how good someone
is at, like, long gaming chess.

And there will be most people are
kind of here. You have some that

are really amazing strategists
and some that really suck at it.

There is a kind of a naive sociology that
looks at the Gaussian distribution of

human traits and tries to explain the
world by that distribution of traits,

and it doesn't work. And it's because if you look
at the distribution of power, which is what's

influencing the world, it doesn't have a Gaussian
distribution, it has a power law distribution.

The power law distribution means a few
people over here have almost all the

influence. That's true in money. It's
true in the, the stats of, you know,

the differential between the top wealthiest
and the bottom poorest people continue to

get more and more extreme. And the graphs
that look at the power law distribution

of money from 1960 to 2000 to now are
amazing how much deeper that curve gets.

I think it's something like the top
eight wealthiest people have more

money than the bottom 4 billion people currently.

But does that power law also work within the
top 1%? There's another power law within that

top 1 percent where 80 percent have, or 20 percent
have 80 percent of the wealth. Obviously 1 percent

is a lot of people.

8 people having more wealth than 4 billion people
is pretty significant. And so this is true in

terms of military power. Not that many people
can push nuclear buttons. This is true in terms

of media power. This is true in terms of, you
know, financial power. This is true in terms of

technological innovation capabilities, is that
there's these kind of power law distributions,

and so people at the top of the power
law distribution explain the shape of

civilization much more than everybody
does, and those people don't come from

the center of the bell curve of
almost any psychological trait.

And in ancestral times, we still
had the same Gaussian curves,

but we didn't have the energy
surplus and the scale because power,

you know, 10, 000 years ago with 150 people
or whatever, and power in nature, there,

there is only so much endosomatic energy that an
organism or a human pre modern human could use.

And so it's the, it's the scale of.
Size of people and the civilization

coupled with this giant dollop
of historical magic dumped in our

economy a couple hundred years ago that
allows this accordion to spread upwards.

They didn't have the same Gaussian distribution.
Okay. Why? Okay. So going back to this idea that

the people who are at the top of the power law
distributions that have the most influence are

not at the center of the bell curve of
psychological and behavioral traits.

They're usually like two standard deviations to
one side. Yep. More sociopathic, less empathetic,

more driven and motivated towards
narrow goals, better at technology and

business. Propaganda and long range strategic
thinking and whatever, right? Various things. And

just to interject there, did those
people design our structures or

did our structures self select
for those sort of Recursively

both, right?

Someone is born into structures. Someone who
wants to be at the top of the power law is a

desire. It's a particular type of desire
that really, really wants that and that

is good at it and can win enough win lose
games to ladder climb to the very top of

it. and can drive enough externalities
and rivalry and whatever to get there.

So they are, the current systems are selecting for
the people that can win at the current systems,

but then those people in turn change the systems
in a way that continues to optimize their winning,

which is just like evolution. Is the
animal created by its environment or

does it niche create to make more of
an environment that's good for it?

So we are both being shaped by the niche
and the niche creating in turn. But the

other thing is that it doesn't just
mean that they're making, so, you know,

that looks like somebody gets to a high position
in finance and law in the current system. And then

they change laws, they do, they remove Glass
Steagall, they do financial deregulation,

they interpret the 14th amendment as corporate
personhood rights, they interpret, you know,

the, the L'Oreal case or whatever as to do
fiduciary responsibility for profit maximization.

So, The people who can change the
system to continuously be better,

they decide that bailouts for the
banks that failed and too big to

fail and golden parachutes made sense.
So it's simultaneously or like someone

is good at war and then they innovate at
war, right? So it is this recursion. Now,

the people who are in those top positions are not
only changing the system to be better for them.

They also are obviously invested in that
success. So anyone else who would be

very successfully doing something
that would mess that strategy up,

they have a maximum incentive
to make sure don't succeed.

I did a, frankly, a few months ago, I forgot what
the main topic was, but I talked about dark triad

and in my research, it said that around 10 percent
of our modern population is, is dark triad,

but that that is probably an underestimate
because of someone that's Machiavellian is

not going to answer those surveys in the way
that would show that they're a dark triad.

But are you saying that, okay. 10, 000 years ago,
50, 000 years ago, 10 percent of our population

were not that combination of traits. It's,
it's something modern. Look at the story of

how the Spartans raised their kids.

The, you know, the,

they're kind of famous stories
that if, when the infant came out,

if it looked like it had any deformities
or was small or a runt kind of thing,

that it was killed right away. Infanticide
of ones that didn't look like they would be

kind of, you know. maximally dominant. And then
how early they were being trained in warfare.

And, you know, the, the process
that happened when they were six,

where they had to kill adult slaves with tools.
And if the adult slaves killed them, great,

they're dead, right? Only the ones that make
it through are the ones that have this much,

you know, kind of vicious capability.
So is that conditioning the Gauss?

If you're in a Spartan society,

is that conditioning, the Gaussian
distribution of everybody? Of course it is.

Yeah.

If, yeah. If you are in a. And this is why
looking at the kind of extreme outliers of

the things that we think of as human nature
under different conditioning is so important,

is you can have the Janes, who across
the whole population, nobody hurts bugs.

I met some Janes when I was in India. They
were just wonderful, wonderful human beings.

Yes. And so it's clearly not just a
Gaussian distribution or a genetic thing,

because you can have an entire culture
where everybody who gets raised there

doesn't hurt bugs. And then you can
have the child soldiers in Darfur,

Liberia, or whatever, where if you make
it to adulthood, you have killed people.

You've hacked people apart with machetes.

So our culture is recursively building
out the percentage of our population that

exhibit dark triad because of incentives
and self selection and other things, yes?

Yes and no. I would say that there are not,

there's not the kind of data that
I would feel was meaningful to try

to make really strong statistical
claims, but I'll say some things

about trends that I think will feel
intuitively resonant to most people.

The digital data. universe as a native universe

generationally has narcissistic
conditioning pretty built in,

meaning that if I'm in the woods, the woods
don't rearrange themselves for me. I can fall

out of a tree and get hurt. I actually learned
that there is this unforgiving nature, you know,

Eric likes to call it of reality that I have to
actually respect it and interact with it in a,

you know, a respectful way
and it doesn't conform itself.

To me, if I have a digital universe where the
newsfeed is literally conforming itself to

maximally entertain and engage me, and I have
an infinite amount of options and I can just,

all I have to do is this and the whole
universe changes. Now I'm in this universe,

now I'm in this universe, and it's maximized
for my kind of dopamine optimization.

Do I have a world in which My conditioning is
the whole world is supposed to conform itself

to what I'm interested in. And I'm supposed to
do very little and be able to get lots of reward.

So, so you're saying that we assume
is the good life and our own choice,

our own volition is actually manufactured demand
by the winners in, in our current society.

Again, if we go to the old people on their
deathbed reflecting on what was meaningful, most

of what the people spent their whole life pursuing
is what they wish in reflection that they had not

spent their whole time pursuing. And most of the
things that they called successes and progress are

not part of what is in their mind as they're dying
that they wish they had spent more time with.

Well, that begs the question, how, how,

at what point in their life could they have
realized that and made different decisions?

And we will see times where someone decides
to leave the rat race and keeping up with

the Joneses, where every time they get a
raise, they increase their cost of living,

so they have to keep working more and
paying someone else to raise their kids

and because the other person charges
less than they can make and on and on.

And where they're like, no, fuck it, I'm, I'm out.
I'm going to lower my cost of living and I'm going

to try to do something where I can spend time with
my kids. And I can spend time in nature and I can

reflect on why I exist at all before I die. And
the sense of meaningfulness and fulfillment almost

always goes up when people do that, as does the
harm footprint they cause on the world go down.

Hmm. As does the intimacy and
meaning of their meaningfulness,

of their relationships and the quality
of life of the people they touch.

And, and where do those people fall on the
behavioral Gaussian distribution or who knows?

Well, there, so, like I said, the,

the selection criteria selects for people
that lead things that end up winning at

power and other people that are willing
to follow and participate with that thing.

So um, You know, very famously in the
Nuremberg trials of Nazis after World War II,

when the Nazis were being tried for the
war crimes, and they were all asked,

did you believe that everything you were doing
was good? About 90 percent of the Nazis said,

Only at first. At first, we were, you know, we had
been in terrible poverty in the Weimar Republic.

Our kids couldn't eat and, you know, etc.
The Jews had all this wealth. And, you know,

we, we believed that we were getting
supported to be able to, you know,

do well for our people and whatever. But as
time went on, like, no, we did not feel good

about putting kids in gas chambers. And we
didn't feel good about seeing them starving.

Like we felt really bad about it.
Like 90 percent of the Nazis said,

no, I did not feel good about it. And then when
they were asked, did you try to stop it? They all

said no. And then they quoted the same German
phrase that translates to officer's orders. I

didn't have a choice. And Yet, of course, if 90
percent of them had all said that simultaneously,

which is a coordination failure here on their
part, there would have been no holocaust.

But anyone on their own is like, if I
try to defect, I'll get thrown in the

gas chamber, too. So it's best for me
and my family to just go along with it.

It's kind of a gruesome microcosm of what
we face on so many levels today. Yes.

And so the Ash conformity studies and
the Milgram studies were so important.

And I think actually under represent how
deep those principles are, right? The,

the idea that when the authority was telling
the person, the scientific authority, Hey,

you're in a study, do this thing. And
we're doing electroshock therapy, whatever,

that the person following authority
would shock the other guy to death.

Because of, I don't have a choice, the authority
is telling me. Or in the other one, in the Ash

ones, that if 10 people in the room were all
saying this line is longer than that line,

the person would defect on their own understanding
to go along with that. These are very

powerful insights. And the smoke filled room.

If there's smoke coming under the door and other
people don't notice it or don't care about it,

I don't speak up. Yeah. So we are social
creatures. Social conformity is a core driver.

So I, if there was, so imagine

that you have a 10 tribes and kind of
harmony world and, and for whatever reason,

somebody hits his head, gets traumatic
brain injury that knocks his empathy out.

And now he's an asshole and you know, wants
tribal warfare where it was not necessary

before. And, you know, Figures out how to try
to make a story that it'll be in everybody's

interest because the other tribes are really
plotting against us, even though they aren't

or whatever. You could imagine a scenario where
the other people are like, dude, you're crazy.

Like, no, we're not going to do that
thing. And you need to chill out or

you're going to get banished. And that happened,

right? That happened a lot. But If that guy
succeeds because he scares people enough,

right, let's say he's really big or whatever
it is, or kind of brutal, that nobody wants to

stand up because even though if everyone stood up
together, they could deal with him individually.

Nobody wants to stand up to him. You can
start to have a situation where everyone

else has their survival strategy. being not
like getting the goods that guy is going to

deliver. He's going to deliver safety and
he's going to deliver economic growth and

he's going to deliver whatever. And
you don't want to piss that guy off.

And so you get a kind of fealty
that Stockholm syndrome with

that kind of leadership. And and also a
recognition that if you go against it,

it's not going to go well for you and still
won't change the scenario. So then again,

you have this plausible deniability. Best for
me and my family is just go along with it.

That combination of distortion, like profound
ethical distortion and leaders and complicity.

and others. And the, and environments
that were already created in power,

conditioning those psychologies, and then
the psychologies to get to the top of the

power stack, conditioning more of
systems that continue to do that.

The recursion on all of that is the thing that
you call the recursion. Bye. And this is why

they have continued to orient in the direction
of more extraction, more technological power,

more military capability, more money, more. And
it's advancement. Technologically, is it progress

in terms of good? Well, obviously none of the
species we made extinct through doing it think so.

And obviously none of the animals in
factory farms think so. And obviously

none of the. You know, some odd 50 million
people that are in conditions of slavery

today doing forced labor to make
that system work think so. No Native

Americans in North America think that
the U. S. progress story was awesome.

American descendants of slaves don't think the
progress story was awesome. And not only that,

you know, like even the people who are
winning. So even the billionaire. His

body is being exposed to the carcinogens that the
industries have caused that the medicine cannot

solve. And

even

if you look at the quality of life there, it is
actually with decreasing actual fulfillment and

the replacement of fulfillment with mostly
addictive flashes. Right. Reward circuits

that provide kind of addictive flashes, whether
that's, you know, food, drug, or new yacht or

new position of market dominance.

Now, this is actually another part that's
so important. I want real progress. I think

it's a, it's a very important
thing to see that we can grow

and that we can add our life energy. to the world

in a meaningful way. And

this is why really

thinking about what would
constitute actual progress,

that the world is better as a result of us having
done this. Better, the world, not my tiny world,

not better in the symmetric, but the world
long term. Thinking seven generations ahead,

thinking about all the other species we
inhabit it with, thinking about all of

the different aspects of self, like does my,
did my cell phone enhance a lot of things?

Yes. Did it diminish a lot of
other things? Even for me? Yes.

So what does better mean? If I really
kind of think and feel through that

well

And so I, I, I

want us to pursue real progress. I
want us to rescue it from the kind

of bullshit progress, but also in a healthy life,

progress is not as important. It's not as
central because if life is fulfilling now,

if life is a gift now, I'm not exclusively
focused on making it better in the future.

and making it better that corresponds
to winning, usually or, and I'm not

even focused on changing it as much as I am
also maintaining it and appreciating it. So

progress gets a undue emphasis when
there is a disconnection from being,

where now is miserable, so good has to be
in the future by me doing some new thing.

And if you, if you think about the
unlikely miracle of our existence,

Right? And you think about the billions of years
of stuff that had to happen to make a biosphere

with the complexity that we could exist. And you
think about the miracle that we get to see colors,

and we get to hear birds, and we get to exist,
and that we get to love children, and we get

to, like, all the things.

Appreciating

what already is, that is so profoundly unlikely,

that took billions of years to make, and
so much activity. Like, there should be,

most of our life should actually just be an odd
appreciation at what is, and then the desire to

maintain and protect it. Because it is so unlikely
and so much work went into bringing this about.

But nobody makes the history books for maintaining
things. They make the history books for making

new stuff or destroying stuff. Or you put
the two together, creative destruction,

which is the creed of society right now. But
like 99 percent of life should actually be

maintenance. 99 percent of life is you feed the
kids and the meal that you made then is gone.

And then you make another meal and you wash
the plates and then they're dirty again. But

you're actually maintaining the sacred
thing. And then true progress is where

I can actually Add a new thing that really
is factoring everything good for the whole,

then yes, I'll add those
things and that's progress.

But it has to really be good for the whole
factoring everything that's involved. And

most of my attention is actually needed
to maintain all that's happening. So

I both want to kind of like reclaim what
progress is, which is important and sacred,

but also move it out of the center. And that
it's only in the center in the same way that,

like, when someone is more unfulfilled,
they have more addictive tendencies.

Because they're looking for a hit of
something. When someone is more fulfilled,

they have less addictive tendencies. There is
a way that when someone is in appreciation of

what is and they're in meaningful, intimate
relationships, the so much of the impulse

of progress that is actually coming from
emptiness and the desire to be somebody.

I got that Nobel Prize. I got that Nobel
Prize. Ph. D. I got that position. I won.

I whatever is a compensation for
actual like trauma and emptiness.

And it's and so it's not only that it's not
authentic progress in the world. It's that where

it's even coming from in me is not aligned with
the fullness of the world and adding fullness.

It's aligned with my own emptiness
and the desire to do something that

will fill that up. That is not the right thing.

So it's the hungry ghosts are consuming
alcohol and pizzas and building shopping

centers and getting stock options and all
that to fill a trauma and a loneliness not,

not actually to achieve something monumental
that's great for society and the future.

Yes, but it will be

sold

as that.

So is there any evidence that the people that
are in the dark triad or those people that are

you know, riding high atop Moloch and the
superorganism have a higher incidence of,

of trauma and loneliness and, and emptiness?

I

don't know

stats on like ACEs, right?

Childhood trauma associated with those positions.
There are certainly plenty of very traumatized

poor people. And it's not like, it's not like
everyone responds to trauma in the same way,

right? They're the total nuances of
how trauma ends up affecting someone

are yeah.

Not easy to put an algorithm together to predict.

So, someone is physically abused when they're
little, and they grow up to physically abused

children. Someone else is physically abused when
they're little, and they grow up to be the most

non violent person who doesn't ever want to
be like that. Maybe even to the place that,

as it's an overcompensation, they
don't stand up enough, right?

Someone else has a, the healthiest response
and actually becomes a protector of children,

right? So it is not necessarily saying
that the people who are in the highest

positions of power are most traumatized,
but they had types of trauma that oriented

themselves to to both power seeking
and types of education that oriented

themselves to good insights about
how to do power at scale effectively.

So I can tell you an N equals one uh, experience.
I was recently in India and I spent a lot of time

with 30 people every day chanting, singing,
humming, eating doing sports, doing yoga,

et cetera. And then I would go for bikes in the
forest and record sounds of birds. And I came back

and my addiction impulses were much lower because
I had six weeks living on more of a maintenance.

I'm, I'm maintaining the thing. I don't need
other things. And I was like, Oh my gosh,

this is what we need to change the culture.
But the other part was when I came back,

it was a week or two and I got sucked right
back into the vortex. of, of everything going

on in this culture. So we need both. We need the
personal discipline and change in a community,

but we also need the infrastructure and the
institutional change and, and that crucible.

Think about this. When you were

in that environment with those people in India.

The reward circuits that you were

experiencing on a day to day basis were the
type of pleasure, the type of reward that comes

from intimate communion with other people, that
comes from listening to birds, that comes from

People having authentic conversations
that don't have status climbing as part

of them focused on meaningful and
real things came from all that.

Right. And so there's a fulfillment in
that, that is not oriented with how many

likes a thing got or how much we did this
thing or, you know, whatever. It's, those

things weren't available. I
mean, I had internet there,

but there weren't all those other
distractions, except there were

parties with music. And there were musical
concerts every night of the week there.

Those were the options. Right. So,

but someone's not craving the other
thing because the reward circuits

are full. Exactly. One's actually in a
state of fulfillment and they're in a

state of fulfillment for things that make
them healthier, the relational network,

healthier, and. the, and that can
align with stewarding the world well.

Now, if you go to an environment where
there, you go to a different environment

where there's nobody around you and there's
no real intimate connections. And so again,

we're, we're social primates. This is a,
such an important evolutionary thing is that

there wasn't a lone dude with stone tools in the
Serengeti making it with the lions and the hyenas.

There were tribes of people that would
make it. And so the, the idea of Ubuntu,

I am because we are, It was this foundational
concept of human beings before the thing we

call civilization, right? I Am Because We Are
was, like, just at the most prosaic level,

nature did not select for individual sapiens.
It only selected for groups of sapiens.

Individual sapiens in evolutionary
environments were all dead. And so

what's best for me that fucks the tribe
is not a concept. That's not a thing,

right? What is best for the tribe that I
can't exist without of? I am because we are,

I would not exist. I'd be dead without
all of us. That's like the basic insight.

So

I am, because we are obviously
just starts with, I couldn't

survive without us. But then it's also deeper,
which is I think in words that I didn't invent.

that all these other people invented. And, but my
own most intimate thing, my thoughts with myself

are in a language that I didn't make. I am, my,
my thoughts were made by other people, right?

The, the, the language of my thoughts, my
understanding of the world was transmitted

to me largely by other people. The tools
that I use, the things that I benefit from,

the, all of that, that I am, almost
all the things I think of as I am,

because we are, right? Because
of things that were created. End.

Okay, now I have so many
questions, but, but keep going.

goes deeper,

because the we was never, never just meant our
tribe. It also meant nature. the extension to all

our relationships, and all our relationships was
all life, and life didn't just mean biological,

which is why they were animistic. Those cultures
were all animistic. The spirit of the sun,

the spirit of the river, the spirit of everything,
because it was a very clear understanding.

What would I be without the tribe? I'd be
dead. What would I be without the sun? I

would have never existed. What would I
be without the galactic center around

which the sun orbits? I wouldn't exist.
What would I be without the gravitational

field? What would I be without the soil
microbes? What would I be without plants?

What would I be without all
of that? I wouldn't be. So,

I, that is not the emergent property of we,
isn't even a thing. It's not even thinking.

Fast forward to today. And when I'm sitting around
by myself, lost in my thoughts, my thoughts are in

English, which is a language. of the winners
that I'm not even aware of everything that

came before that English was selected for in this
progress a story over the last few hundred years.

Is that also part of the, this story? So our

umwelt,

our, the things that are in
our awareness, the tiniest,

tiniest sliver of a fraction
of what is. And so there's,

you know, like within the progress narrative,

most people don't miss the

being able to actually understand what the animals

are saying in the way that indigenous
people have much more understanding what

the animals are saying as they're growing up in
the environment, listening to them. Right? Most

people don't miss that because they never had it
and they don't even realize they don't have it.

And they don't realize how much more
communicative and alive the forest is

to someone who knows how to listen. And so they
are impoverished, but they don't know it. And

they don't miss having a bunch of people that
they can be completely authentic with because

they've never experienced that. They've never
been completely authentic with any human being.

They are always fucking withholding
and lying. to some degree,

and always paying attention to appearance.
So they don't miss a thing they don't know

exists. And they don't miss what it feels
like to have a body that doesn't have 300

petrochemicals in it because they have never had
a body that didn't have 300 petrochemicals in it.

And what real vibrancy feels
like, they have no idea.

This has rhymes and, and analogies
to the movie, The Matrix.

Yes. And so

some people take the blue pill, right? Because
the reward circuits, you know, once they see

it. And so, one, I have, people have a hard time
imagining that there was a life that was awesome.

Full of things that they have no
experience of or even awareness that is,

was a thing. There's a cool documentary,
I think it's called Everything is Rhythm,

that shows how in African tribes, what, when the
way somebody was weaving and the way someone was

cutting something and the, were actually all
Making music and dancing together, right?

They were actually all in this experience of
nearly continuous rhythm and whatever they

were doing and part of the communication
process that was not mediated through

words and semantics. Like, what does
it feel like to be part of a culture

where everything you're doing is song and
dance in coordination with everyone and

that you feel this kind of rhythm with
each other and the rhythm of nature?

Most people have no idea that's a thing. And
you know, so many things like that. So it's

hard to value things that you don't even
know exist. And it's hard to let go of the

only hits of pleasure you've ever had. And
so, even though, when you look at the graph

of the reported amount of suicide, I mean,
the amount, the recorded amount of suicide

for teens proportional to the number of hours
per day they use their cell phone, and that as

the number of hours goes from a half hour up,
with each hour up, the rate of suicide goes up,

The team doesn't want to give up their phone,
they will completely fight to keep their phone,

and don't want to give up the pleasure
hits they get associated with the likes

they get from the beauty filter on Instagram
that is what drives their body dysmorphia.

Right there is another microcosm
of our entire GDP focused super

economic superorganism culture. Yes,
advancement is not betterment. Hmm.

And if you have, if you, if you
go back to Descartes, so I said,

I'd come back to modernity at some point.

So there has always been this story all that
I won't say always for a very long time.

There's been this histories written by
the winner and the winner usually says

them winning was a good thing. And, you
know, Genghis Khan united the disparate

Mongol tribes and Alexander the Great and
Caesar, you know, united and expanded their

great kingdom and et cetera. So, you know,
There was always that element of progress,

but it was also kind of bound with appreciation
of certain types of tradition associated with

religion and whatever associated with modernity
and kind of mostly getting like a, decreasing

the role of religion and the then kind of rapid
increase in scientific and technological progress.

The progress part became almost
the entire story and the idea of

progress through these new institutions,
science, technology, industry, market,

democracy, et cetera, became like the dominant
narrative. And if you go to Descartes and the

Separation of the objective world that
you can measure. We can all measure.

We can get repeatable measurements
and we can apply science,

the philosophy and the methodology of
science. And that's the domain of is,

right? But that science can't say anything
about the domain of ought because I can't

measure ought. Right. I can't measure. We can't
all independently measure. Is that beautiful?

Is that good? I can independently measure how
fast it is or how heavy it is or, you know,

how much kinetic energy it has or whatever.
So where does the ought come in? So, you know,

Descartes is like, well, that's the domain
of religion. And it can deal with that stuff,

but science can't. And so science
is only going to deal with the is.

Well, but the is is focused

on

being able to

reduce a domain of reality to a model
that emphasizes mechanisms that both

allows me to predict things
and then create the applied

side of science, which is technology
that can control things. And so it's

learn how it. to be able to apply levers
to build megalithic construction, right?

It's learn how genetics work to be able to do
genetic engineering. It's learn how chemistry and

thermodynamics and mechanics work to make internal
combustion engines. But if the applied side of is,

of science, is engineering, right?
What is a good technology? Well,

no, no, no, we can't do anything with that, right?

So which thing gets built is, well, where did
the money for the research come from? Somebody

that has money that is seeking ROI on that
money. And so you don't really get science,

you get the R& D arm of the market,
because the research money is going to be

pursuing something that generally has
some goal that's associated with it.

And so the profitable extractive, you
know, whatever thing And, you know,

because science can't say what ought with
its methods, because of that division of

the subject of universe and the object of
universe, which not all philosophies had,

even the Greeks didn't divide those,
right? And as far as Westerns,

and definitely the Vedic system and the Taoist
system and indigenous systems didn't divide.

Subject and object and make
object that is measurable,

repeatably real with some methods and the other
either not real or, you know, whatever. So

because when you're just focused on
the objects, there is no meaning and,

and I can't measure those things, right? I can try

to measure a neural correlate when someone
says they're in an experience of intimacy,

but that's not the experience of intimacy. So.
When von Neumann wrote Economics and Game Theory,

it's important that it was those two things in
the book, von Neumann and Morgenstern, right?

It was game theory, the formalization of
the mathematics of how to win at win lose

strategy games under uncertainty, and the
theory of the market, which was, you know,

application of that same principle. So,
What is a good choice? Science can't answer,

but game theory ended up becoming the best
closest thing to what science, a scientifically

congruent thing could say is the best answer or
a good choice is the choice that doesn't lose.

And so under uncertainty, assume the
other guy has more malicious intent,

more military, and prepare to not lose
under that scenario. And, you know,

on and on. And so, That definition of which
has nothing to do with good, right? It just

has to do with not a particular kind of bad
to me, you know, under that uncertainty.

So if you can study the world down to the level
of mechanism where you can then engineer to the

degree that you can land a rover on Mars and you
can split the nucleus of an atom and you can make

A. I. s that can beat humans at war games, And you
can scale up industrial technology to planetary

scales and, and extinct species at scale and
make new species with genetic engineering.

That level of technological power in the
domain of is applied is not bound by what

is actually good in some deeper Understanding,
where the only good is that which wins game,

theoretically, that choice making
system on that level of tech will self

terminate in the same way the cancer does,

in the same way so many earlier civilizations did.

And so the fact that we have such a powerful
system of the study of is that can lead to all

that technology, we do have implicit within us
the ability to have a comparably abstract and

deep and profound system of Ethics or wisdom
about the nature of ought to bind that other

thing. I know you've had Ian McGilchrist on and
the framework of the master and the emissary that

the goal achieving has to be bound by picking
good goals, and it is not the analytical break

all the parts into pieces come up with the
metric part that can figure out good goals.

It's the field of I am because we are. So is
this a good goal for the totality of we? Am I

perspective seeking and feeling and being engaged
with the reality for everybody? Are they all at

the table such that it could be? So if we get
incredibly powerful at goal achieving with shitty

goals, very narrow goals that are beneficial in
the increasingly narrow metrics with increasing

harm externalization as we're passing thresholds
of harm externalization capacity for the planet.

That thing terminates. So to steward that much
goal achieving power, we must meet it with

what are good goals. What is actually progress?
What is worth maintaining? What is worth for sure

protecting and maintaining? What do what should
be reversed that already harmed things where the

actual progress would come from reversing Some
of the stuff, not just making more new stuff.

So what if we had the ability to take
a hundred or a thousand billionaires,

but not just billionaires,
but the, the social power

equivalent modern day of Kissinger, as you said
earlier, and like in Clockwork Orange, like force

there's eyes open and watch this entire episode,
what, what would such a group of people and.

Beyond, be able to do from the moment
we are in 2024 and, you know, the,

the metacrisis at its current state, what could
we do to step more towards authentic progress and

the maintenance of just the good things that
make our planet and our civilization viable and,

and get rid of the, the bad
goals. So there's this quote

from General Smedley Butler.

And he called war is a racket. It's very
famous. I'll read just the beginning. It's

long and people can go check it out. And,
you know, I'm assuming people know what a

racket is. Racket is like a classic example is
a protection racket where a gang will come Rough

up a store. So the store thinks that they need
protection and the police aren't protecting them.

And then other members of that same gang
come offer them security services for

sale. And so they are protecting them from
themselves for a fee. So they are basically

manufacturing the demand and then offering
the supply. The amount, if you, if you

look at

How much of our

modern market and market government system meets
the criteria of creating a problem that's a result

of some part of market or technology that some
other part of market and technology will come

to solve, that will then simultaneously create
new problems. The whole thing being a racket is

actually a very But with that definition of a
racket, what he says here is war is a racket.

It always has been. It is possibly the
oldest, easily the most profitable,

surely the most vicious. It is the only
one international in scope. That's not

true anymore. He wrote this in like 18. 81.
Oh no, 19 something. It's the only one which

in which the profits are reckoned in
dollars and the losses are in lives.

Racket is best described, I believe, as something
that is not what it seems to the majority of the

people. Only a small inside group knows what it's
really about. It's conducted for the benefit of

the very few at the expense of the very many. Out
of war, a few people always make huge fortunes.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I mean, again, another microcosm of our situation,

but now I'm seeing war in light of this
conversation as, as a progress narrative

erasing parts of history and writing a narrative
for, for the masses that feels good. It sounds

about right but is really divorced from
what could be possible given our history.

people will say that I'm romanticizing indigenous
life and don't, I know that there was infanticide

and blah, blah, blah. I'm not romanticizing
it. I'm saying that the Hobbesian story is

the villainization of it. And that's definitely
self interested propaganda that justifies evil.

And that there was obviously a
humongous range of the way tribal

people lived over 200, 000 years in different
environments with different groups of people.

Oh, this was the unsubstantiated thing
I was going to say earlier. Now it comes

back. It's the unsubstantiated. So we
were saying that there was this kind of

symmetry of power that happens through
natural selection, that of, you know,

where the increase in power happens to this
evenly distributed mutation with co selection,

but that when we start developing
technologies that increase our,

let's say, coordinated predative capability
faster than the rest of the environment, it can

also be increasing its resilience to
it, then we can overhunt an environment.

And rather than have our population shrink,
either start farming the environment or move

on to the next population, move on to the next
environment and start overhunting it. So there is

some indication, though it does seem like the,
the jury's still a little bit out on some of this,

that the extinction of a lot of the
megafauna and the earlier hominids

was the result of sapiens success at this
strategy, meaning it was a extinctionary,

including to the other kinds of humans we
could be inhabiting the world with early on it.

So the hypothesis I have is that the early
indigenous wisdom traditions were learning

from some of those mistakes. And there are
certainly indigenous stories that indicate this,

that when we, Some of them have
stories that when they saw the

destruction that they were able
to cause with their stone tools,

they realized that they had to bind them with
wisdom and that the kind of wisdom traditions

emerge to take more careful responsibility
and that there may have been something like

one phase of a unrenewability And then lesson
that led to a more kind of sustainable phase.

So that's the thing I'm saying is I
can't substantiate across the board,

but sounds probably at least part of the truth.

You increasingly talk about indigenous cultures,

indigenous wisdom and you bring up examples that
I've never heard of. How do you learn all this?

There are.

Obviously, some books and papers studying this,
and there are increasingly indigenous people who

are becoming scholars who are also, but who speak
their native languages and are translating it.

But I've also just pursued making friends
with people of that type, particularly the

ones who are have studied their own histories
and kind of understand modern anthropology,

evolutionary theory, sociology, and can kind
of explain the parallax on those ideas. And

this is an area I would, I actually really
want to invest a lot more time and attention

because the thing that we call civilization has
been around for a very short period of time.

The thing we call industrial civilization,
an even shorter period of time, the,

it's the thing we call civilization
is fair to call the domestication,

the beginning of human domestication,
where the other thing was more sapiens

in the evolutionary environment, right?
We call it wild now. It was not, okay.

They wouldn't have called it wild. And the
domestication of humans at scale and the

domestication of livestock went together.
And this is actually really fascinating,

right? Which is the, and we've talked about
this before, that the emergence of the plow

and kind of ox drawn or, you know Donkey or
horse drawn, plow, creating grain and surplus.

You could call the beginning of the
Anthropocene where if I'm hunting and gathering,

I don't want to change the ecosystem. I want
to partake in the abundance of the ecosystem,

right? Like maybe within the trees a
little bit. But Even if I am digging

with a digging stick, like in early
horticulture, I can't do vast spaces,

so I don't need to clear cut land
to allocate it to agriculture.

Once I get, and grains aren't
useful in small amounts,

but once I can have an ox draw the plow
and I can do these vast kind of row crops,

now I can get enough grains and I can store them
better than I could store other stuff can get this

kind of vast surplus. So we can see why the,
the ox drawn plow was A massive advancement in

the ability for surplus, which meant that
you could grow a much larger population.

It meant that you could send that surplus
along war routes so that you could support

much larger wars. It meant that you
could, with that large population,

have more specialization and division of labor so
you could advance the total tech stack, you know,

means all of those things. But with the emergence
of the plow was also the end of animism because.

In the hunter gatherer life, sometimes the animal
kills me, sometimes I kill the animal, just like

in the predator prey kind of relationships,
I can pray to the spirit of the buffalo,

I can apologize for needing to take its body,
I can say when my body dies and goes into the

earth and becomes the grass that its ancestors
will eat, that we are part of this great cycle of

life and we breathe our spirit into each other,
but I can't domesticate that buffalo into an ox

and yoke it and beat it all day long and still
talk about the great spirit of the buffalo.

And so then we move to man's dominion over
kind of models. Religions that the animals,

God put us here to rule over, they're all here
for us, dominion, etc. And the domestication

of the animals where their well being
didn't matter, they were here for us,

also corresponded with the beginning of slavery.

So that's.

All those things you just mentioned are
a story that the winners are telling.

Totally. And it's why the indigenous narratives
of the early civilization are very different.

And it's that the agricultural revolution was
not an awesome thing. If the population that

does that thing will become a larger
population with more specialization,

division of labor, and then it will win
in war against the cultures who don't.

So one of the insights is that
when a new technology emerges,

there's two insights here that are important.
First is technology is not values neutral.

We've talked about this. It actually
changes human values because in using it,

like if I go walking around in a forest
with a camera, what I perceive changes.

Because of holding the camera, I'm
looking at different things. If I go

walking around with a gun, my perception
of the forest changes. If I go walking

around with an axe, my perception of the
forest changes. The affordance of that tool

attenuates my attention to the things
that that tool can do something with.

And so the process of even engaging
with the tool attenuates attention,

right? Changes the nature of attention. And
then it also makes a different behavioral

pattern. Beating an ox all day long is
very different than hunting. It's a,

so I'm going to have, agrarian mythos,
rather than hunter gatherer mythos.

I'm going to be dreaming and thinking and
feeling in those types of ways. I'm going

to be conditioning my nervous system
based on the movement patterns that

my body's going through in those
ways. I'm going to have radically

less complex total movement patterns
than I had in the other environment,

which leads to less complex and dynamic thought
and phenomenological patterns and on and on.

So, and then of course, I can't believe that
the animal is animistic. And as soon as I do

the dominion model, then And they were here for
us. Then the women are here for the men and the

lower classes are here for the upper classes and
the slaves are here for the slave owners and the,

and the, what was a forest that we had to
clear cut to turn it into ag land is all fine.

And so that model starts to develop. So
the first thing is the technology is not

values neutral. It will code our attention.
And change our behaviors and as a result,

change our psyches and societies and heaps of
ways. So the externalities of tech are not only

physical, they're psychosocial. The next thing
is that if that thing confers advantage, game

theoretic advantage, it becomes obligate because
the people who don't use it will just simply lose.

in power competitions, even if what wins at
power sucks for all kinds of metrics of what

is beautiful and good. And so the technology
is both mind altering, value altering,

attention altering, culture altering,
behavior altering, and obligate. And this

is why the Sabbath was about controlling the
use of technology and controlling productivity.

This is why wisdom around when a new technology
came out, do we build this or not? And if so,

how do we use it? How do we change those
patterns? We consider it is necessary. And

if you do not have that, then everyone becomes the
result of dominant culture, dominant technology,

because it has to. The whoever is best at
running the system of technological power.

And that was cavalrymen at the time
of Genghis Khan, and it was industrial

tech at the time of Rockefeller, and it
was computer tech at the time of Gates,

and it was the people who it is now at
the time of AI and etc. Whoever is best

at the power associated with the tech stack
will also then determine the narratives.

And they will be narratives that
support that power stack as good.

So I know you and your organization are working
on some pretty important projects yet you spent

the time these last few months to write this
paper on immature versus authentic progress,

presumably because you think it's critical.
That people understand this and think about

it and presumably because you
see some sort of a maybe thin,

but narrow, but a path forward where
we can head towards a more authentic

progress for our fellow humans alive
on the planet today and in the future.

Can, can you outline that or are
there still foundational pieces?

Yeah, so.

There are many famous authors who have contributed

to the progress narrative and of why antibiotics
and vaccines got rid of pandemics and plagues,

you know, and et cetera. And why Haber
Bosch and the Green Revolution led

to being able to feed so many more
people and why you know, on and on,

all the good things and why it's getting,
why the world's getting better and better.

And there's not no truth to this,

but it is definitely cherry picked.

It is definitely what is better for those who
were not genocided or extincted or killed in

war or are still in the positions of poverty
that the same system that is offering those

things to some is creating for others,
right? It's definitely cherry picked in

terms of who it's looking at progress for,
and it's definitely cherry picked in terms

of what value metrics it's considering and
which value metrics it's not considering.

It's definitely also framed that the types
of value that were destroyed are not even

mentioned or talked about. The types of
value that are not really real value,

they're basically like racket type value,
are overemphasized. A lot of the comparisons

are decontextualized. There'll be things like in
1815, the average American only You know, had a 1.

50 a day and now inflation adjusted. They have
10 times that or, you know, whatever it is,

like, yeah, but they grew their food in
a way that didn't take dollars and they

made their own house. And like, the idea
That dollars were mediating their life was

gibberish. That's not true. So you're
decontextualizing the fact of dollar

as how their life was mediated, which
it is now to then is not true, right?

So there's a place where that is. We wrote
another paper called How to Mislead with Facts,

and it's cherry pick the facts. Decontextualize
the facts and then kind of lake off frame the

facts and you can make specious conclusions
from true facts, right? So that's that story.

And so I'm not saying that there are no
truths in it, but like, okay, if the,

if you take the best examples that there have
been, like the, the progress stories, darlings.

You know, Haber Bosch is obviously one of them,

which is the creation of synthetic nitrogen. And
then, you know, beyond that synthetic fertilizer,

which is now, you know, MPK which did make a
lot of unarable soil, arable, and did allow

us to be able to grow a lot more total crop
through, you know, industrial agriculture.

And that did play a major role in the population
going from half a billion to eight billion in 200

years. Which is a 16x in population. And as
you state, the, in the industrialized world,

the resource consumption per capita
was not just the food, but all of the

energy for the entire system, the energy the
tractors are using and the lights, whatever.

And that's something like 100x during that
same time. And that 100x ing per capita and

16x ing the capita in a very, very short period
of time from what was already kind of a steady

state post agrarian revolution, right, which was,
had brought the numbers to way higher than they

were in that kind of hunter gatherer time, is
all using resources from the earth faster than

they can regenerate and turning them into trash
and pollution faster than they can be processed.

Even calling it resources, right? This is when you
were talking about language. The idea that a whale

is a natural resource as opposed to a sentient
being with its own life is not that different than

the idea that a person as a slave is a natural
resource rather than a sentient being. The idea

that A 3, 000 year old redwood tree is a natural
resource because I can make timber out of it.

And we, you know, in business,
we talk about human resources,

which is not beings that are, whose moms
had hopes for them and who are going and

who have children and who are going to have
deathbed reflections. They are resources that

we want to employ in a way where we get
more out of them than we put into them.

Fuck, right? Like it is such a, it's
such a psychopathological. worldview,

the instrument instrumentalizing of
everything in that kind of way. So

nature is not natural resources. Nature is
nature. Nature is all the beings that were

here for all this time before we were here
and that our life doesn't exist without.

I am because we are right. So you
look at the Haber Bosch and you

say, okay, okay, okay. Was that exclusively
good? That thing where that population grew

and the resource consumption grew deficit,
but there's a curve that looks at human

population and species extinction and
shows how closely those are correlated.

And the dead zones in the ocean are the result of
the agricultural affluent from the Haber Bosch,

right? And like, we're, it's a three quarter
water planet and we have 500 dead zones that

are the result of that mechanism. And a lot
of the health issues that people have are

because we're not putting everything that
came out of the soil back into the soil.

We're taking everything out and putting
three minerals back in. Right. A very tiny

subset. So you get micronutrient deficiency.
So you look at that darling and you're like,

this was not exclusively comprehensively good.

So we're just fixing the prices on
environmental externalities, energy,

and other non renewable inputs get us
much of the way towards real progress.

Kind

of, sorta. Because all those
negative things that you just said,

none of those are in our price system at all.

Right. Indulge me quickly on the, this one
other example I wanted to give of a darling

of the progress story, which is like the
one that is so easy to sympathize with,

of who wants to do dentistry
in the time before Novocain.

Like, fuck that. That seems
dreadful, torturous. Okay. Now,

I can't say that I know for sure how
dentistry in the time before Novocaine,

but in the indigenous world specifically.
So this is important. A lot of the dreadful

world before the progress narrative
was the already civilization system,

right? People living in cities during the Dark
Ages and whatever, where we saw the great plagues.

Do you have huge plagues that are zoonotic
when you don't have animal husbandry,

where you have, you know, close proximity
with all of the rats and the cats and all

of those types of things with the
grain stores and the animals that

are there inside of large population
density urban centers? No. Right?

Yeah, it's a very different situation. And so,
so many of those problems, like a high population

density city, high population per capita,
shitty hygiene, and animal husbandry, you know,

in the environment, yes, that's a pandemic
breeder. And, but the answer could have been to

change the city design, right? Not just, you know,
vaccines and, you know, antibiotics, et cetera.

I actually think we might. Underattribute,
how much just plumbing and hygiene went to

the benefits that occurred there. But so if
you look at the, so much of what we think

about how barbarous dentistry and medicine,
whatever, were was also again in the post,

the post Caesar Genghis Khan you know, et
cetera, era, the post civilization era.

You go back to indigenous world and Weston
Price's work, and I know there are questions

on replication and whatever on Weston Price's
work, but Weston Price's work went, you know,

was involved in founding the American Dental
Association. He was looking at the last hunter

gatherer tribes. around turn of last century,
that had not adopted grain into their diet,

not gotten into agriculture because
it's not grain in a hunter gatherer.

And he found that they had no cavities. And
they didn't have a problem was with wisdom

teeth and they didn't have major occlusion
issues. They had these amazing teeth,

right? This was a huge thing that he
documented. And he's like, we didn't

just evolve wrong where we have wisdom teeth
issues. We're eating a diet that demineralizes

our bones so that we don't actually have the
bone density to be able to get that last part.

So we have wisdom teeth. That's
also the occlusion issues. And

it's also the cavities. These people
didn't have toothpaste or toothbrush,

but they also didn't have cavities. Then
watched when Western diet was introduced,

specifically heavy grain. Diet. And they all start
getting cavities and having occlusion issues.

So again, from the racket perspective, do I
like Novocaine to get my mouth drilled on?

Yes. Is it entirely possible that a huge
amount of the dental issues were already

the result of having solved problems in
shitty ways that caused externalities

to our orthodonture and to our dentistry
itself, where then now you need that thing?

And the right answer would have been a
comprehensively different tech stack.

Right? That didn't have most of human diet come
from something that we didn't evolve to eat.

Do we even, as a culture, as a species, have the
ability to measure and govern such complexity?

Like, obviously, once Weston Price and
other people like him figured that out,

was there a vector to change what was happening?

Or was it the racket and the one person in ten

that had the dark triad traits
just swamped everything else?

The direction of more new
technology keeps increasing novel,

complicating effects that are
very hard to monitor. But like,

let's say we're, let's say we're talking
about humans in a state of nature, right?

Vast majority of human life. civilization. Do
we understand how the whole world works? No. Do

we understand everything about hydrology
and how all the convection patterns work

and how all the funguses and bacteria
and kingdoms and everything work? No,

of course not. But does it work? Yes. And did
it take billions of years of radically complex

evolution doing distributed information
processing to make that whole thing work?

And it's still doing all that. Yes.
Okay. So Things that I do that are going

to change that whole system in a way that
doesn't have any evolutionary precedence,

I should kind of go slower. I should
kind of like really think through and

do some tests and really look at
all of the effects. Now, if so,

Let's talk about the complexity for a minute.

Let's say we discuss the

movement from what we call currently conventional,
which is kind of this weird industrial

agriculture method where you turn
natural ecosystems into basically

desertified soil that you spray NPK on,
you put highly hybridized row crops in

that are designed for combines, and then you
spray cover them in pesticides, herbicides,

and fungicides that are designed
to kill the most robust creatures.

And then humans are both getting trace mineral
deficiency, super weird genetics of the plants,

dead microbiome of the soil that
modulates the genetics of it,

and covered in pesticides and herbicides.
So then we have all these diseases. So

you see disease on the rise. But
then the answer is pharmaceuticals.

And they're regulated by the same industry,
food and drug. And The NIH puts money into

drug studies and stuff, but not into dietary
studies, which is why the food pyramid is

created by the American Dairy Council and
American Grain Council. And you know, so,

so you look, there's a racket, right?
Of course, it's a fucking racket.

And whether it was designed or emerged through
shared system incentives is actually mostly

irrelevant to the point. Of course,
it's some of both. And, but if you say,

okay, Okay. How does soil work in a natural
system? Everything that comes out of it goes

back into it. There's a loop closure, right? So
the tree, when it dies, decomposes into the soil.

The leaves, when they fall, decompose into the
soil. The animals that are eating the things,

their poop goes into the soil and their bodies go
into the soil. Every, everything that comes out

goes back in. And it's actually all made of the
same atoms. Right. The same distribution of atoms,

basically like six elements that make up most
everything in the distribution of trace elements.

If I take stuff out of the soil that
involves atoms. All of the living

compounds and the complex chemistry,
the humic and fulvic acids and the,

and the amino acids being produced in the
et cetera, and all the trace minerals,

and I put back in three minerals that are enough
to make something that looks like a plant,

but has totally lower amounts of macronutrients
and different phytochemicals and et cetera.

Like it's kind of odd. Can I predict exactly
every single biochemical change? No. Can I tell

that's probably going to have problems?
Yes, that's pretty easy to tell. Do I

want to not spray things designed to be
poisonous to cockroaches that could make

it through nuclear war and designed to
be poisonous to exoskeleton creatures?

Do I want to not spray poisons like that
on the food that we eat? Yeah, that, like,

that seems pretty reasonable. And do we,
do we not want to grow food in a way that

is killing the topsoil that we depend upon,
but there should be regenerating it. So you

start to look at what are the principles, all
the stuff that comes out has to go back in.

There's going to be a balance of things
that fix nitrogen in the soil and use

nitrogen. The principle set to do it well is
amazingly simple. And what is that? This is,

this is what I'm giving an example, like
in the case of agriculture, like how do you

do agriculture properly? Put it, put back in
the soil all the things that come out of it.

Make sure that the things that are in the soil
have a distribution of the different types of

things that are kind of like you find in a
natural system. Natural system has legumes

fixing nitrogen and non legumes pulling it
out. And then it has That's it. plants that

naturally repel excessive amounts of insects
of the insects that those come to there.

You can see those patterns in nature.
So can we build off of that? You know,

the kind of permaculture approach that just
maps some of what nature is doing. And can

we tell that if the trace minerals that are in
the plants or in the animals that eat the plants

that we evolved with, Go back into the soil
and back into the plants that we're eating.

I can't predict exactly what percentage that
will lower MS over what time period relative

to all the other multifactors, but can I,
versus rheumatoid arthritis versus autism,

but can I guess that as we get the trace minerals
back in, as we get the quality of the soil up,

as we get the pesticides out, following the way
the curves of the diseases and the curves of

those things happen together, in general, the
health of the soil, the health of the plants,

health of the ecosystem and the health of
the people are all going to go up together.

Yes. And I don't need to try to optimize every,
I don't need to understand every bit of how the

soil microbiology does everything it does. I have
to just pay attention to what it needed to do that

evolutionarily and continue to support that.
I, but this is that thing again, where I have

to appreciate the thing that is already here with
its evolutionary complexity and seek to maintain

it and make sure that what I'm adding to it
is not debasing that which it depends upon.

Yeah.

So in your paper, you outline three strategies to
move towards authentic progress. And I'm going to,

I'm going to ask you to, to list those in a
second, but first I want to read a quote from

your paper, progress worth believing in progress
that is really about increasing betterment,

increasing the goodness in the world
must still be able to be considered

good once it is taken account of
all perspective and externalities.

So for such, here's my question, for such a
metric to occur, doesn't there first need to

be a culture wide change in our values? Otherwise,
why would such a thing come about? There's another

paper that we wrote on perverse asymmetries, and
the perverse asymmetries are kind of this like

entropic gradient, which is if I cut the
tree down or I kill a whale or whatever,

I didn't kill all whales, I didn't cut down all
trees, there are still forests I can access.

I can still breathe the air. So I'm not
experiencing that I'm causing the problem

at scale. And in fact, I'm not causing the
problem at scale. I'm causing some tiny

little problem at scale. Papercut towards it, and
everybody else is doing that, but the advantage

of the tree to my family as timber and selling
it on the market is, is profound and obvious.

So there is this asymmetry between how significant
the upside is to me versus how, what a tiny part I

am of the downside. But then the system dynamics
of everybody doing that absolutely ensures the

downside and ensures it to be something that will
end up affecting everyone. So there's a lot of

perverse asymmetries like that, like those who
pay more attention to the risks of a technology

up front won't win the technological race and
first mover advantage is those who pretend that

it isn't there or cover it up and make narratives
about how positive it is and scale it rapidly.

Ultimately, we have to overcome all of
those perverse asymmetries. Because we

are powerful enough that we are not small
relative to the ecosystem anymore, you know,

or small relative to our own survival, our
own species capacity. And so this is a,

with that much growth of,
like, no other species could

destroy the

ecosystems.

That they depend upon. So they did not have
to ensure that they didn't. Because we can,

we have to ensure that we don't, right? And this
is the whole, the same recursive abstraction that

leads to the ability for technological progress
and war strategy and business strategy. That same

recursive abstraction can lead to the vow of the
bodhisattva, and the recognition, the conscious

recognition, when men are not the web of life,
we are merely a strand in it, whatever we do

to the web, we do to ourselves, and extending our
compassion to all sentient beings in the universe.

We can expand our capacity for wisdom as much as
we expanded for intelligence. We can expand the

scope of our considerations of what a good goal is
as much as we expand our goal achieving. What I'm

saying is we must. Now you're asking, is there a
cultural thing that has to happen? Yes, obviously

our culture, as we already said, is being an
Shaped by our tools and by our social systems.

So our, our superstructure, our culture,
our value systems, our social structures,

our economies and governance systems and
institutions, and our infrastructure,

our tool set are all co influencing each other.
All three of them are confluence co influencing

each other. So obviously we can't, as you,
as you saw when you were in India, you change

your environment and something that no amount
of moralizing yourself to do would ever work.

It was automatic in a different
environment. And so can we achieve

cultural change by just moralizing people
that they should culturally change while

they're still in the environment that is
predisposing the culture that is here? No,

that's not going to work that well. At the
same time, where is the intervention point

is some people who already recognize that
that's not a culture they value enough.

They recognize the fail of it. They meditate on
meaningfulness enough that they actually stop

willing to be complicit with it. And not just
to remove themselves, which is a step, which

some people do, but to say, how do I dedicate
my life energy to changing those dynamics,

which should then entail a study of change
efforts that were well motivated and failed.

And or made worse problem so as to not
repeat that to try to understand why

that happens to understand what change that
would change all that could actually would

require and what it would be like now, of
course, to really change culture at scale,

we have to change the two Technology
and what it predisposes, right?

We have to change the social systems. As
long as you have an economic system where

putting the externalities are externalized
and cost, then I can't empathize and take,

want to take responsibility for all
the harm that I'm causing if I'm

competing against someone who's
not internalizing those costs,

like economically, you can't, that you're
economically incentivizing sociopathy.

Through the cost externality. So of course that
has to change. And of course as that changes,

that makes possible a different value
set. And the same way that like the

algorithm on Facebook could upregulate for
different things, it could upregulate for

exposing people to different worldviews and
different ideas and paying attention to only

upregulating the ideas that drive common
unity rather than, you know, division.

So those are places where culture's affected
by technology and social system. But how does

it start? It has to start with a
culture first recognition of the

I am because we are. The version
of progress that is good for I,

that is not for we is actually not real
progress. I, I remove myself from that thing.

I won't participate in the lie of it. And I
will dedicate myself to wanting to understand.

What is, what actually be good for the
whole and make sure my life energy is

in service to that and then progressively that

I am participating in things that have
more agency to be able to affect that?

So it starts with a change of values and
consciousness with some people and that expands

upwards and ultimately I think You're inferring
that we need a modern day equivalent of a Sabbath

superimposed onto the superorganism structure
that is leading us into a terminal phase.

I want to

speak

to imposed people with a libertarian
bent will be naturally concerned. By

some of what is being said,
and I want to speak to them.

Okay.

That was my word. I could have used
emerge or something, but go on. But we

did talk about restraint. And then we
talked about if someone wants to do

the thing that is more like a cancer cell or
more like cause tribal warfare, they're not

going to be the ones to restrain themselves
from doing it. Other people will have to.

That is something like law. Right. That is
something like imposition. And so then we

are right to consider how those systems have
went in the past. And because using force to

curtail someone's liberty has its own problems,
even if what they're wanting to do with their

liberty has problems. And that's
already in, in the zeitgeist right now.

A lot of people are worried that climate
change is such a thing that will cause

people to eat bugs and not own anything
and all kinds of authoritarian rules.

Yeah, and I think if the people who were
talking about the eating bugs are the

solution and not owning anything were
themselves not major capital owners who

were not applying those things to themselves,
people might feel a little better about it.

But like, The dude that is a hunter gatherer
and he eats a lot of crickets and grubs. And

if he says like, bugs are good, like nobody's
freaked out about that. They're freaked out

about a situation of radical wealth
inequality and class warfare and the

class warfare telling more stories of
justifying radical inequality as the,

you know, as a solution while they have
the largest carbon footprints themselves.

So like understandable, right? So
the thing that I want to say is.

The,

you, you introduced

me to her Vanessa Andrade, who you had on the
show, who I had a conversation with and thought

she was amazing and really respect it's in her
book. She said that her the chief of her tribe,

the, his definition of colonialism,
she probably said that on your show,

but I'll bring it up is that colonialism
was not about taking other people's land,

fundamentally, or about abuse of
land or abuse of people or anything,

that those were epiphenomena, that the core of
it was believing there are separable things.

And you can say even deeper than that is being
conditioned to perceive the world as a bunch

of separable things. Which is what Bohm said
was the underlying cause of all the problems,

which is what Krishnamurti said was the cause of
all the problems, which is what Einstein said.

So if I believe there's a bunch of separable
things and I'm separate from other things,

then I can optimize some things
at the expense of other things.

And then I can actually rationalize that
everything is trade offs and that's how it

is and etc. And, you know, then reify social
Darwinism and nonsense like that. So the root

One could say that the root
of the issues is if people

want things that inevitably cause harm to others.

That's the root of the problems. Either because
they know it causes harm and they want it anyway,

so it's some kind of, you know, rivalry
or sociopathy or something like that.

Or because they don't know it causes harm and
it's from, you know, ignorance and externality.

They just want what they want and
they're not thinking about what all

the cause and effect would be. Because
if you then say, great, let's let the,

let's let people pursue what they want.
And what they pursue getting causes harm

and then also creates propagating patterns
where to protect themselves against the

harm that other people have to do similar
competitive things and blah, blah, blah.

And you have a world defined by arms
races. But if the other answer is don't

let the people pursue what they want,
use some kind of enlightened law that

says that's bad and prevent it by force,
the oppression is inherently also bad.

And the asymmetry of. force tends to lead to
an increasing corruption of the power stack.

And so neither of those are good. So as long
as humans believe that they are separate from

everything else, as long as they perceive the
world separately, you were mentioning language

earlier. And I think similarly, Vanessa was
telling you that English has like 70 percent of

the words are nouns and most indigenous languages,
very small percentage of the words are nouns.

You look at Whitehead as one of the kind
of great philosophers of English. 20th

century. And the reason he came to process
philosophy is he's like, there's no things

like the things that we think of as things
are processes of interaction of other things,

right? A tree is not a static noun. It's the doing
trillions of metabolic functions every second.

It's interacting. biophysically, with the sun
and the air, it's interacting biochemically,

it's interacting biologically, doing gene
transfer with the fungus on its roots and the

soil microbes, like the tree is in a live
process. It's a verb. It's lots of verbs.

And the idea that it's a noun just makes us
think very poorly, makes us very bad thinkers.

And the fact that we're thinking in nouns all
the time and built into our language is making

us bad thinkers at scale that we don't even
realize because we don't know what it's like

to have a language that doesn't see the world
as a bunch of nouns that are all separate.

So changing how a lot more humans perceive
their relationship to others, to nature,

to the whole is kind of a necessary
prerequisite for authentic progress.

Yes, because if I,

I was I was just

giving this example to someone, I'm going to,
A little kid who's at the phase when they say,

what is that? What is that? What is that?
Right. And they're trying to understand,

they're trying to like, learn what all of the
things are, the anatomy of the universe. And that

phase usually happens right before the phase
where they say, why, why, why, why, why?

Because they're, they're trying to
learn the phase. Yeah. The mechanics,

the, the dynamics of universe. The kid
says, what is that? And they point to

a thing we call a tree. I don't say
that's a tree, or more specifically,

that's a spruce tree or whatever, because
that's going to teach the kid a bunch of things.

It's going to teach them to just
accept the default worldview and

not think for themselves. It's going
to have them confuse the ground

reality with a symbol. It's going to have them
Think in generalizations of now understand what

are trees and what are not trees, generalize
all of them and stop perceiving uniqueness.

It's going to have them, you know, like it does
all that stuff to them, right? So the kid says,

what is that? And I'm like, let's go
closer. And we go closer and I'm like,

touch it. And touch the leaves and then
touch the flowers and touch the bark and,

you know, touch all these parts.
And like, what does it feel like?

And then smell it and then notice the other
little animals in it. And and then, you know,

just have them engage in that way. And then say,

do you think the tree stops there? Do you
think, what about this moss that's growing

on it? Is that part of it? Or is that
not part of it? What about the the soil?

Is that part of it or not part
of it? And, and then I'm like,

what do you think it is to that squirrel?
What do you think it is to that little

bug? What do you think it? It is to itself.
And, you know, what do you, what do you feel

when you're with it? And eventually we'll
come to, in English, we call this a tree.

In Spanish, they call it arbole. And in
this language, they call it this and the

different kinds of things. But this particular
one, notice that if we go look at this one,

they're different. And in fact, this one, there's
not another one in the entire universe quite like

it. And it's not even the same as it was
yesterday, and it'll be different today.

So the only way to know it is to be with it fully,
more presently in this moment. And, you know,

so imagine if kids grew up that way, rather
than that's a tree, memorize its Latin name,

understand the botany associated with it, blah,
blah, blah. Like, then they're using much more of

their whole self to understand Reality in a much
more full, rich way that understands that that

same thing is different from every different
perspective and so many different contexts.

And and so if someone is perceiving if they are

supported to perceive the uniqueness of everything
and the interconnectivity of everything. That

nothing is fungible and nothing is separable.
Nothing can be standardized without actually

causing harm and nothing can be optimized at
the expense of others without causing harm.

And they get that uniqueness interconnectivity of
everything and they get I am because we are for a

we that extends to the stars. And then what
they want that comes from that first hungry

ghost desire is not the main thing that
emerges. This like awe and fulfillment

and fascination and gratitude
emerges from that connection.

And it's actually the lack of that
connection that leads to the hungry

ghost place that needs more and more
hits and progress. So the first thing is

just not that much desire emerges in the
same, the same way. And then the desires

that do emerge are in connection with.
everything else that I'm connected with.

Like, is it, will it be good for the tree? Is
it bad for the tree? What about the squirrels

in the tree? I just spent time commuting
with them. I love them. I wouldn't want,

it wouldn't be good for me if it hurt those
squirrels. Now, the desires that arise for people

who are in connectivity with their inner, who are
clear on their inner connectivity with everything,

those desires can be pursued in
a way that doesn't harm anything

because their own identity is not separate from
everything because their perception is clear.

What percent of humans alive today would have to

have such a value and consciousness change
to effectively change the superstructure,

social structure, infrastructure going
forward? I don't want to critique

too harshly, but if you look at what we said, that

since the climate movement started,
all of the work that has happened has

not been actually empirically decreased the
fact that fossil fuel use goes up every year.

And emissions go up every year. Yeah.
And the environmental movement has not

changed the fact that more tons of
pesticides are used each year than

the year before. And that species
extinction continues. Even the,

the not market seeking best motive There's clearly
something off with how we're doing stuff, right?

Like, clearly, we don't just need more of
that thing that not only is not effective,

but then makes nuclear and dams and other
things that don't get off fossil fuels

and cause other problems. So there's the
mind that was conditioned by this kind

of system can't avoid making
more of this kind of system.

It is part of an autopoietic process,

and there is a need to extract
oneself from it and then actually

deprogram the, the nature of that kind of
mind that started by a language of nouns

and perceiving everything as separable and
separate and then in rivalry and from a place

where I think my fulfillment comes from status
and getting things and just all the nonsense,

right, to where there is a mind that's That in
a being whose motive is not what's in it for me,

who actually feels a fulfillment
that they get to exist at all,

who feels in awe that they have already got to
see sunsets in color, feels a fullness in that,

whose motive is actually in service of future
beings that they get to keep experiencing it.

And their desire to protect and maintain
and serve life and that can perceive the

interconnectivity of things enough to not
overfocus on one part in a way where the

solution to that part will externalize harm
elsewhere without realizing it. So if one

wants to really not participate in causing
more harm and maybe really change something,

one does have to look at how this system
has actually conditioned their own mind.

and how they understand what problems
are and what solutions are and how to

figure those things out and how to measure
them and how to scale them and how to all,

all like that and come to say, like, how
does nature work and how do I understand

how nature works such that I can work
in a way that is aligned with that?

And yeah, there's, there's profound deconditioning
and re and new learning that has to happen.

It feels right to me because. I've experienced
it and I noticed it in you since I first met you,

even just the change in your language and,
and some of your ideas. I have 12 questions

that I had prepared after reading your
paper and we're already three hours in.

So I think we're going to have to do a part one
and part two, but, but let me ask you this and

then get your input on how you'd like to
proceed. Here's another quote from your,

your paper. Philosopher and psychologist Eric
Fromm wrote that optimism is an alienated,

alienated form of faith, pessimism,
an alienated form of despair.

If one truly responds to man and his future,
in effect, concernedly and responsibly,

one can respond only by faith or by despair.
Rational faith, as well as rational despair,

are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge
of all the factors that are relevant for the

survival of man. So with that quote, Daniel,
what, what are your goals and the organization

that you work with, with publishing papers such
as this one on immature versus authentic progress?

What are you hoping to lastly,
how can our viewers help? Yes,

this is another open loop. We were
talking about about kind of how the

progress narrative really accelerated post
modernity. That if one has that story,

that things are getting better and better
because of tech, which also includes

having written the history as and alternate
realities as, you know, worse than they were.

And someone doesn't think about all the
externalities. They think about the That's it.

The default assumption is that when new
tech emerges, it'll cause some problems

until we figure out how to use it. Then
we'll rightly regulate it. And net net,

it'll be good. Right. That's kind of the default
assumption. And so then that default assumption,

when we look at technologies that have
radically more powerful than anything,

power than anything we've ever touched,
that scale faster, that have more

complexity or more not understandable and more
unregulatable, like AI, like synthetic biology.

The default assumption will be it, it'll
probably be net positive. It'll cause

some problems. We'll figure out how to
solve those problems. And I actually

don't think a right assessment of
the history of technology warrants

that, nor do I think these technologies
currently warrant that as the right assumption.

And so in the face of exponentiating technology,
that is also exponentiating destructive capacity.

And it's not just destructive capacity
through its militarized uses. It's even

through its market uses, doing a thing
that we want that is narrow progress,

that's driving externalities more
as we pass planetary boundaries.

If it is,

I, I want more people

to have a A a wider kind of clearer
worldview through which they can look

at things that are being called progress
and promising a better future to be able

to look at the issues that are emerging
right now and have a different default

assumption. And a different, like,
where should burden of proof be?

Actually, some of these things are so harmful.
Burden of proof should have been proving lead

was safe before putting it in gasoline and
aerosolizing it to everybody, as opposed to having

irreparable harm that could never be addressed and
then regulating after the fact. Um, and so Where

there is truly existential risk portended, burden
of proof shouldn't be that it is really dangerous.

It should be, we actually have to prove
adequate safety through doing a detailed

enough analysis of what those
untoward effects will be before

we rapidly scale the stuff. So that
was the reason that we wanted to put

that paper out now is because the rate of
technological I will not call it progress.

I will call it advancement because it is
definitely increase in goal achieving with it,

with not the refining on what is a good goal
without changing the economic incentive that

leads to externalities and all like that.
But the rate of technological advancement

is definitely in the verticalizing
part of the exponential curve.

No one can actually really understand The
speed and the portent of it. The fact that

now, you know, that there was nothing like
Moore's law, right? It, it, it historically,

and it kind of ate the world. And that was
progressive doubling of compute power every

couple of years. And just the hardware on
GPU based AI will 10X in the next six months.

You know, the power will 10X in
six months, not 2X in two years,

right? And then in six months, it will
do it again in less time than that. And

the software and the parameters and the
data are also an exponential function.

100X in less than a year?
Probably. Something like that.

And if you look at, I think it's a
million X increase in the last 10 years.

And so, you

know, and if you take something like AI, where
we're developing it for increasing generality,

It is basically a general purpose
goal achieving tool. Do you want

to beat people at chess? Do you
want to beat them at Go? Do you

want to beat them at Starcraft? Do you
want to beat them at missile targeting?

Do you want to beat them at protein folding?
Do you want to beat them at comprehensive war

planning or high speed currency trading?
Great. Let's increase the ability to do

all those things. The technology will be
developed for one purpose and we'll focus

on the upside of that. But when the Cost of
the technology becomes cheap for that purpose.

And then the affordance allows everybody
to advance every kind of goal. That has

to be really thought about
as part of the externality

set. I, I, the AI is another conversation that I
want to have with you, especially with respect to,

to climate change and the environment, but on this
topic. Isn't AI being trained with the old linear

model in English and with all the perceptions
of what we just discussed of, of, of progress.

And isn't it like an exponential layer of
the same on top? Like you said, as humans,

we have to change our perception of our relation
to the whole. Isn't AI like being fed zillions

of times more the perception of the, what
we don't want? Yes, but worse than that,

it does not, you know, it has the ability
to already do goal achieving, obviously.

It does not have the ability for empathy,

which means that goal achieving without
empathy is sociopathic. I'm not saying

sadistic, it doesn't have interiority. Oh, so,
so AI is only a dark triad, not a dark quad.

The whole conversation around will AI
develop sentience or not is another

thing. More importantly is that
AI doesn't operate by itself.

It operates inside of companies and inside
of militaries with the people that are there

as part of a cybernetic system. So it
already doesn't have to be completely

general to be part of a cybernetic system
that is general. Because what the AI does,

what other types of AI is, so the whole
cybernetic system as a hybrid of cognitive

architectures, plus what it predisposes
the people to do, you know, is actually

the thing that's being selected for.

So, as we're in a

place where technological advancement is speeding
up, it is being sold as the solution to all these

problems. They're problems that our previous
technological success has caused. The harms of

these technologies are being downplayed. Everyone
is racing as we're crossing planetary boundaries.

It would be better if more people
understood what is wrong with the

progress narrative and understood what
the Authentic progress actually entails

and understood the caution and restraint
that it requires understood the emphasis on

maintaining understood that very often the best
way to solve a problem is to remove its causes,

which actually involves reversing some
stuff rather than always create new stuff.

But the obviously market incentive is
on create new stuff. The history books

incentives on create new stuff. But as
we think about how do we actually solve

problems in a way that isn't a racket, right?
That isn't solving a problem that was caused by

the result of our previous problem solving
and that will in turn create more of that.

First, we have to say, is this actually a problem?
Is it bad that food perishes? And that's a problem

to solve through artificial preservatives
and making Twinkies that can last 25 years,

as opposed to like fresh, Vegetables that
start to decay. Or is that not a problem?

It's actually a feature of reality
we should interact with and embrace.

There's that meme that shows a picture
of a rambunctious kid and it says

Ritalin easier than parenting. Is, Is our
children wanting our time and our attention

a problem that we need a technological
solution like an iPad for? Well, yes,

because we have to work because of
all the other parts of the system.

But like tribal life was the kids and the
old people spending tremendous amounts of

time together as the center of civilization with
everyone else spending time supporting that. And

so the first part of problem solving is, is this
even a problem? Or is this actually a feature of

reality that yes, it requires, like, do I want
to automate every single thing that requires

muscular engagement where then you have a society
of obese people with brittle bones and like that?

Or do you actually want that? Like, All the
dynamism of our bodies and the development

of strength in them is actually important.
It's actually required that I don't want

to automate all those things away. Do I
want to remove every kind of pain like,

Oh, your family member just
died until you feel depressed?

Here's a here's a psych med to take
your emotions away. Is it a problem

that you're feeling emotions? And the
answer is a technological solution like

a psych med. Or is in the exploration of those
emotions, the possibility that you can have a

meaningful life at all? Because you understand
that everyone you know and love is going to die.

You're going to die. What is meaningful while
you're here? Why did, what does it mean that

you loved that person? That you're in deep
question. Some of the depression is like,

I was a shithead to that person. I didn't
express my love to them as much. I was

too busy working at my job. To have a cost of
living of shit that has a bunch of stuff that

doesn't actually make me happy, but that
I think that I need and I feel sad and I

realize that maybe I'm not going to stop and
then I'm going to die and there aren't going

to be that many people who are that touched
by me and like, fuck, maybe that depression

is exactly what the fuck you need to reflect and
make a meaningful life change, not a psych med.

So the first part of problem solving is. Is this
a problem that needs a technological solution,

or is this a facet of life that I actually need
to embrace and be with? The next step is, if it

really is a problem, what caused it? Was this
always the case and it's a feature of reality,

or was this caused by other things we did
where the first step is undo the causes?

As opposed to ameliorate at the symptom level,
those causes continue to express somewhere else.

And, you know, so there are these kinds of steps
of what would it mean to engage in problem solving

in a way that does not cause more problems. And it
is possible. And it does result in the possibility

of having us have what we add to the world be
actual progress, meaning actual betterment.

But it is different in process and different,

different in process and
different in motive in almost

every

way.

Is there a third step?

There's some

papers we're going to publish on the processes
that you can walk through and they're not formal,

they're not algorithmic, they're, they're
principled kinds of reasoning. Like,

is this really a problem that needs
a technological solution? Or is this

a facet of reality to be with?
Is this, what were the causes?

Have I traced it back to the causes? Do I
understand them? Do I understand the cause

of those costs? You know, like those kinds of
things. One of them is yellow teaming. Yellow

teaming is once we decide there is a. Thing
that we want to create, whether it's a law or

a business or a technology, because there is some
thing where we've addressed the upstream causes,

et cetera, and there's still something
to develop, then I really want to think

through if this thing succeeds and solves
the narrowly defined definition of a problem,

what is the totality of the effects of it
succeeding on all the other areas and where

is it going to externalize effects because it's
going to have effects other than that one area.

And if it externalizes more positives,
awesome, that's a good sign that it's

in the right direction. for tuning in. And if
you look at like a tree, a tree does a million

positive things for a million entities over a
million timescales. Right? The tree is causing

benefit to squirrels and to butterflies and
to birds and to insects and to soil microbes.

It's stabilizing topsoil and holding
moisture in the ecosystem and causing

transpiration and keeping the river
clean and the banks of the river. So,

like, positive externalities are actually the
result of good design based on understanding

the interconnectedness of things.
Negative externalities, where you

don't understand the interconnectedness,
you optimize it for a narrow thing.

See you next time. So, the yellow teaming is the
thinking through the network of relationships

and causal dynamics such that you look at the
externalities, both physical and psychosocial,

see where there are possibly harmful ones
and say, either we don't do the thing or how

do we design such that that's not the case,
that the externalized effects are positive.

And that is actually possible. Not
perfectly, but progressively better.

It's sometimes with increasing frequency,
it seems to me that we're waking up as a

species at the exact time the clock is
running out. That's the hope. That's

the possibility. Yeah. So isn't a paper
in the public domain at a podcast about

naive versus authentic progress a
tiny sign of authentic progress?

There are signs of authentic progress
in the world. There are. There are

more people that kind of care about
deep ecology. There are more people

that are interested in thinking about long term
future as well. You know, there are more people

interested in approaches to healthcare that are
not exclusively you know, allopathic healthcare.

Currently, The rates of growth of

the things that are moving in the authentic
progress direction versus the narrow progress harm

externalizing direction are not adequate. Right.
And like I said, many of the things and everybody

that is contributing to the meta crisis thinks
that they are contributing to real progress.

Right. I'm, I'm providing a product or service
that the market wants, which means there's

demand for it, which means it's increasing.
It's solving some problem for someone that

makes their life better. And I'm employing the
tools of science and technology, which is this

awesome system that allows us to understand
the world in a unified way and improve things.

And like, that's, that's The story. So it's
like the, and that's why people can come out

in such defensive fossil fuels of look at
all the things they give us. And you know,

and of the market and, and they do, and
they give all of these externalities.

And while that has benefited some and sucked
for others, it also benefits some dimensions

of self and sucks for the dimensions of
self, even for those most being benefited.

And it is in the process of self terminating
where it will be a benefit to nobody. No one.

In which case, the, damn, I really don't want to
be complicit with that thing. Damn, I really don't

want to just, what's best for me and my family
is continue to have optionality tokens. And damn,

I don't want to try to make things better where
I end up making them worse because I am coming

from the same type of mind that engages in rivalry
and cause, does a movement in a way that creates

counter movements and that optimizes for one thing
in a way that ends up causing harm elsewhere.

So I want. That the activism, the protection
impulse in me reconnects to the source of reality

deeply enough that I know how to participate, that
I'm guided in how to participate in a way that is

actually meaningful. So I would actually like
to see a slightly slower movement into action,

a deeper movement into withdrawal, and
a deeper understanding of the history of

well intended failed actions more rigorously,
it's very painful, and a deeper being with the

emotions about the whole thing and really taking
it all in and noticing how much of our desire to

make it better is still ego, is still um,
An avoidance mechanism for not wanting to

feel it is still a problem solving mode that is
reductionistic that will end up contributing to it

and like letting that stuff
settle to get to a place

where one can engage in how to shift the system

dynamics of the world in a way
that are actually what's needed.

Here, here. Once again, you have surprised
me. I read your paper. I understood it. And

this conversation went in a different way than I
expected. What would you like from our viewers?

How would you like to wrap this
up? And what are next steps?

You mentioned 12 questions that we didn't get to
and, you know, some viewers may have questions,

thoughts. So if there are interesting
questions, then maybe we can do a session

two. Particularly if once we publish some of
these papers, people have questions on them

because we don't have where we're publishing
them, the ability to answer them there.

I think the thing that I would hope

people leave with is

deepening appreciation of it. The tremendous
amount of non human activity that it took

to make the world that you exist in, the
incredible preciousness and miracle of it,

and the desire that the thing that makes your
life and the life of everyone you love possible,

you want to have occupy more of
your attention than it does now.

And That the places where your
attention and your time and your

energy are occupied by the result of a
system that resulted from selection of

coordinated violence and like that, that
you really want to root that out of your

own self and psyche. And, and you
want to just like appreciate the,

the universe and world that gives rise to the

possibility at all, and then seek to explore
how do I, there's something like a vow, like a

Hippocratic Oath that's like, I, I'm not willing
in pursuing a narrow definition of advancement

for me or whatever, or in being complicit
to cause harm to this like miraculous world.

Not willing. And I'm going to look
really carefully at what does that.

And rather than jump so quickly to, well,
yeah, but I can't because I have to work,

whatever, try a little harder to say, do
you have any other possibilities? Like,

don't jump to your own lack of
agency so quickly. Like we said

about the billionaires that would say, Oh,
I don't have agency relative to the thing.

Well, like, how long did you spend thinking about
it? Like, how many options did you really pursue?

And

and I think the combination of

the removal of some of the energy from
this work. world system, the increasing

appreciation of the natural world, and
the commitment to both not cause harm,

the study of what does, and then
the commitment to be part of what

can actually protect against harm can
result in, like, that is the movement.

Or the set of cultural shifts
that I would really like to

see.

That's a hell of a start, my friend. For
my part, it's about a half hour away from

being dark here in Minnesota, and I'm going
to bid you goodnight, and I'm gonna go sit

by a tree. And reflect on it's not just
a tree and all the processes and parts

and relationships and just do a little bit of a
pre uh, dusk sitting that this, this was a lot.

It was beautiful and wise and has given me much
to think about. Thank you for all your work,

all your thought, and all your efforts
on behalf of our planet, the future,

and all of us striving to play a role.
Thank you, my friend. Likewise, my friend,

it was a

delight to be with you

today.

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This show is hosted by Nate Hagens, edited

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