Nate, you are truly an epic level listener. We often don’t realize that listening Evokes what the other is saying. The more deeply someone is listened to, the deeper will be their words. You co-created this talk, though you “said” far less.
@@CindyWigglesworth- yes, to know when to let it ride, and when the understanding for everyone will be furthered by your question. Very hard to discriminate; my own curiosity driving the questioning vs service to the space.
It's like you're watching a conversation about a primitive planet between two aliens from an advanced civilization. And then you realize you're on that planet and you're trapped in the ultimate stupidity of it and you want to get out but you can't.
@@ximono I do not actually physically want to leave the planet or the place I live. As Daniel said: 'I am because we are' and it doesn't help the world or humanity as a whole if I 'pollute' a vastly different, probably indigenous culture I'm totally not adapted to with my Western ass. Please leave those people be. I'd still be on the same planet, all the crisis would still be unfolding and sooner or later I'd still feel the effects anyway. Instead I want me/us to get out the stupidity.
we don't want to escape it, we want to change it, however little or large of a difference we can make, that brings meaning and fulfillment, and that changes our perspective on our lives. I talk about this on my podcast a lot, I someday hope to have Nate on! These are both brilliant, valuable minds in this world.
Listening to Daniel reduces my blood pressure. Don't quite know why that is, no hopium being offered, there is something to be said for access to the truth in our present times I guess. Thx Nate.
Reduces my blood pressure too .. I often find there’s also a welling up of deep grief and gratitude, combined. I feel so less alone knowing that what I’ve sensed for so long others have, too, and thought far more carefully about.
Yeah I have similar sentiments. I think hearing the problems so well stated has reduced the stress on the part of my brain that was trying to figure it out. Having the problem better explained has helped me think more and act more towards exploring alternatives
I love listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger... but he is naive and simplistic about native peoples. The noble savage myth that he completely wraps himself in is not truly accurate and a somewhat patronizing view of native peoples. I still get great value and enjoyment out of listening to his thought process. I just quibble with this consistent take of his.
While it's a great talk, as usual Daniel underestimates the power of optimism. Yes collective optimism especially around technology and realism is tricky, but on the individual level optimism is so powerful. Having faith, hope, and optimism about your future when you're in the valley of darkness, when you are suffering through some dark night of the soul, when life for you is very dark and horrific, optimism 9/10 times will help you persevere through all that BS. The real danger is not naive techno optimism, the real danger is naive realism and materialism instead, and that brings in unhealthy amounts of cynicism and skepticism that brings in further darkness and apathy which optimism is one of other factors that can combat dark states of mind and being.
When Nate & Daniel get together I listen twice. The first time I just listen and try to grok it. The second time I take notes & look stuff up to go deeper. Thanks Nate!
In my long life I have never heard more benign wisdom and clear-headed thinking than that of Daniel Schmachtenberger. Every time I listen to his astute observations - and then compare them to contemporary reality - I mentally curl up in to a fetal position and suck my thumb.
While it's a great talk, as usual Daniel underestimates the power of optimism. Yes collective optimism especially around technology and realism is tricky, but on the individual level optimism is so powerful. Having faith, hope, and optimism about your future when you're in the valley of darkness, when you are suffering through some dark night of the soul, when life for you is very dark and horrific, optimism 9/10 times will help you persevere through all that BS. The real danger is not naive techno optimism, the real danger is naive realism and materialism instead, and that brings in unhealthy amounts of cynicism and skepticism that brings in further darkness and apathy which optimism is one of other factors that can combat dark states of mind and being.
Wow. Yesterday I listened to the conversation with Vanessa Andreotti, referenced in this video re: separability, and loved it, all of it. Today I listened to this one. Love it also. Love the distinction between "progress" and "advancement." I especially liked the bits that confirmed my own bias as a retired Canadian physio who lived that life in a language that was too full of nouns and not enough verbs, when interaction was less encouraged and separability was more encouraged, where to acquire a livelihood I had to pass tests full of minutia about electro-so-called-therapy (which I was dismayed to learn was basically war technology that had been repurposed, framed as "therapy," then fobbed off as a money-making externality to the profession I had naively joined as an eighteen-year-old boomer girl), where connection to a living planet was never considered, and in which human suffering had been reduced to diagnoses that only encouraged more separation rather than whole-ing. After I came to realize that life is a verb, not a noun, had had some exposure to world views like those of Vanessa and Daniel, had learned some Spanish and French (and was daunted by exposure to all the verbs they express), I deconstructed, decluttered and tossed as much as I could of all the stuff I had been saddled with in my profession and came out a few decades ago as a human primate social groomer in a human anti-gravity suit. I've done as much work on myself as I had time and energy to do, wrote about the experience extensively, then retired, and now have the luxury at age 73 of sitting back and soaking up the sort of clear-eyed wide-angle view embodied and articulated by people like Nate and Daniel and Vanessa. So, take home points: 1. Life is a verb, not a noun (and English has too many nouns, not enough verbs) 2. We're all going to experience pain and we're all here to help each other get through it 3. Be an interactor not an operator, especially in a profession that is ostensibly about the physical rehabilitation of humans 4. And lastly, refuse to be used by those who would externalize their electro-equipment and suck you into supporting their world of war and the positive feedback loop that does no one any good whether you're a microbe or tree or human being in a socially regulated mindset you did not ask for but were born into. Thank you so much for being here while I am still here to applaud you all. All the best to this wonderful renovation of humanity in a process.
You have said something significant that is undermined by lack of paragraphs. You have to add to the scribbed word-processing program YT uses for comments - - Use 3-space indents (not skipping a line) to demark your paragraphs; - invent your own abbreviated forms of expression - eg, use abbreviations commonly-known like “e.g.” w/o the periods; ie, the comment reader who knows what ‘Ie’ means will not worry their pretty little heads about the missing periods :) And so on . . .
And I applaud your poetic wisdom above too. It warms my heart to know there are others like me out there in the world that are really getting this message.
His thought process and how he expresses himself so articulately is very enriching for me too. It has however the opposite effect in my case, I see how far we are from the possibility of change. Very-very far. We in our countries, workplaces, cities/towns/villages, families and so-called "communities" are stuck in vicious cycles and always reoccurring bad scenarios. It is scary and disheartening.
@@adambazso9207 That's exactly how I see our situation! But after a while I was actually surprised that Daniel's words also had a healing rather than a discouraging effect on me. My explanation so far: it is relieving to discuss the problems at the level of the problems. The calming relativisations of the type ‘It's actually better than it seems’ are now much more likely to wear on my patience, to put it mildly.
Right off the bat, I'd say he's kind of like the *real* version of the wise & long-sighted übermensch archetype that the tech industry tried to push on us, by using, of all people, Elon Musk as a vehicle for persuasion. Yes, I remember the 'Be like Elon' poster memes, and I'm also aware of the crass irony of comparing these two fundamentally different figures, in which this guest would represent some 'upscaling' in concept & marketability. And yet, I think the topic is interesting enough on a purely human level.
Seeing this dynamic play out in real time in my own professional and personal life. Its unfortunate that calling it out arouses such fear. Thanks Nate and Daniel. Y'all are doing extremely important work.
This is a profound conversation that feeds my soul. I think I'll sit by a tree, and see it not as a noun, a thing, but as a process, an us I am a part of.
The next most important step is translating this discussion into language that can be understood by the majority. Unless this message can be infered to the working class, nothing can change.
Very true! I think the art of storytelling (authors, screenwriters, …) is a great way to make ideas like this more accessible. But I don't expect Hollywood or Netflix to promote stories with messages like these.
Add swearing, & speak from the heart not from accademic silos, it takes practice {i cant do it too addicted to too many syables in respective disciplines}
I for one would appreciate a weekly interview (or at least monthly) with Daniel Schmachtenberger. They are the most intellectually stimulating interviews on this podcast. I am curious about the conclusions Daniel has come to in his own life around his closing questions. More, please!
Wonderful Socratic dialogue of more than 3 hours between two titans about philosophy, anthropology, the foundations of societies and the implications of our perceptions, this is unvaluable! I can't stop smiling looking at how well articulated and wise are the messages being shared through this video, thanks a lot for this amazing content!!😊
Once again I leave a Daniel Schmachtenberger / Nate Hagens conversation feeling both richly inspired and deeply grounded. Thank you both! While the entire breadth and depth of these talks feels essential, I look forward to when these conversations can more quickly move into the ‘meaning of life’ phase of the discussion - usually reserved for the last several minutes. I don’t think you would drive people away if you were to mention more quickly and more often such concepts as ‘sacred’ and ‘interbeing’ or talk more frequently about meditation, mindfulness etc practices that you both might be practicing. Shared Wisdom seeds. Daniel teaching to a child (us) the true meaning of a tree .. Nate’s experiences in India and anytime he mentions his dogs or ducks .. ah yes. For me this morning it was a perfect Chard leaf, and walking my confused neighbor home to safety. Peace, everyone. And heartache, shared. 🙏🏽
The main problem is this moral relativism that's snuck into these talks. It's fine to study conquers like Genghis Khan and Mongolia empire or even the Romans and their empire, especially what they did to Carthage, but that's par for the course. Some cultures just are not capable of defending themselves due to technological differences, geography, biosphere and other factors involved. For example when the Spanish conquistadors arrived with their settlers in South America, and made contact with the Aztecs, there's such a huge difference in culture, language, and way of life that in their Spanish Catholic worldview the Aztec empire and the practice of live human sacrificing was untenable to the Christians then. Unfortunately the Aztecs refused to change, and the Spanish, along with some tribes nearby that were victims of the Aztecs banded together in a coalition against the Aztec empire, which finally destroyed their empire. It's important to realize that not all European conquest and colonialism is all bad or all evil, those days the technological expansion was actually, ultimately good in the big picture of things. In those time periods empires, imperialism, civilization, colonialism, all before the idea of a nation and country mind you, all was predominantly stage blue to stage red in values. They have a wholly different outlook and worldview from modernity today, a whole order of difference then. Also, IMO it's either at that age we spread Christendom, or that Islam spreads further than Christendom, and we do have in history the massive slave trade that existed within that religion and the practice of castrating black slaves that is far more frequent in the caliphate Islam than in Christianity in comparison, so... I base my comment on the following modals: Spiral Dynamics stages of development(Don Beck), cognitive and moral developmental modals, personality types/traits(Myers Briggs modal and the Big Five Traits modal), 9 stages of ego development(Jane Loevinger), Architypes(Carl Jung), Integral Theory(Ken Wilbur), and others about ideological beliefs indoctrinated by culture/societal programming, self biases and preferences, cognitive biases, and information ecology one consumes.
@@danielnelson3136I hope others will comment on your important thoughts. They are well above my new and unfortunate post-Covid intellectual capability, but I do often wonder about our species’ ability to perceive anything objectively. Moral and cultural relativism, yes. It’s everywhere. We simply cannot not do that. It is for me another of our endearing human qualities that we think that we can. I do see this as a shared human quality. One of my favorite college professors, when we were waxing eloquent about living closer to nature and seeing the sacred in everything, warned us against holding any cultural group of humans as superior simply because they lived closer and more connected to the land. Decades later I view his comment from a different angle altogether because when I take seriously interbeing, the flow and relationship connecting us all, connecting us to all of matter, I realize just how vital the concept of tension of perceived opposites becomes. We are, all of us, and now more than ever before, living in a glorious experience of everything all at once, and we ARE everything all at once. A shared ‘soul of humanity’. Many lives lived, all of us connected in ways over space and time that we simply cannot fathom. We are all whirling spiraling ephemeral containers where perceived opposites play. We are the dynamic creations of others as much as we are our ‘own’ energetic creation. ‘ I am because we are. ‘
@@jennysteves Thanks, I mostly agree with your takes as they align with the modals and my understanding of spirituality. Speaking of spirituality, they have this term called ego mind, which is actually a very powerful force of nature as the ego can self image and self identify with virtually anything and any ideology, and turn it into beliefs and dogma as well. Even though IMO post modernism and moral relativism/cultural relativism is in fact a more advanced development in thinking, thinking less in binary and absolutes and more in multi perspectival points as Ken Wilbur also put it, even the moral relativists and post modernists are not immune to ego and selfishness. Do not underestimate how powerful selfishness can be, as the classic example of the USSR and rise of Russia's communism is a great example that illustrates both individual and collective ego fighting for it's utopia, yet most of the population were raised in harsh environments, had generations to deal with Mongolia and other dictators and other stage blue/red kingdoms vying for control and power in that region made the Russia people a harder and more ruthless and hard peoples. Yes it's a good thing that they did overthrew the Zars royal family that ruled over them, but that coup wasn't a peaceful transmission of power, and quickly Stalin took control, and well the rest is history. One additional point I wanted to make is about the liberal/conservative mind. No, not talking about American politics, albeit the origins of the left/right spectrum came from the French revolution were the revolutionists were left side, and the monarchy was the right side. I'm talking about the mind type of persons and even groups that can be liberally minded or conservatively minded, and even in science they discovered that conservative minds have a higher amygdala which makes them more susceptible to fear mongering, and liberal minds have few more modes that allow them to problem solve deeply and even broadly any problems they view. Technically you could say the Aztecs were actually quite traditional/conservative minded in that they didn't want to change their human sacrificing ritual, and relatively speaking the Spanish settlers then were quite liberal minded in that they felt human sacrifice, due to Christian worldview, is immoral to do, and they were even diplomatic enough to listen to nearby tribes and their concerns with this, and formed a coalition against the Aztec empire. So in a sense at that time the Spanish settlers were more developed, despite other parts of Spain that did the Spanish inquisition and other dark events that follow Spain. Another interesting point in history is the Apache and commanche wars, which is IMO a fascinating read, I think it deserves to be more talked about as it does highlight most of what Daniel Schmachtenberger talked about with rivalrous dynamics and conflicts over natural lands, resources, and women. Why it's interesting is that event happened prior to European settlers like the Spanish first in the south of America, later followed by other European settlers to the north and north west areas. Just very interesting series of conflicts that just snowballs just because it's an actual 3 way war and then some.
This video played while I slept. I dreamt I was present to the conversation. I woke up in the last 30 minutes and continued listening to the end. Then I started it from the beginning. These thoughts are amazingly profound.
I love Nate’s questions and vulnerability in asking for explanations and often repeating back assertions for clarity. I listen during long training runs on the trail and arrive back at my desk smarter, “fitter” and even more curious and motivated🤩 to tell these stories.
It is not just looks- You seem more relaxed, more comfortable speaking. It is wonderful to see! As always, this combination of thinkers leads to discussions that are deeply important for humans to listen to and understand. Thank you
Best podcast yet! Getting closer to defining the problem! Closer to solution! To see the world as yourself is the solution. And infact the truth. How we get people to view the world this way is the problem.
Watched this a second time after a month of letting sink in. Meanwhile I also have read the paper „Development in Progress“ (where I recommend inserting the missing footnote-package, at least to avoid criticism on that). Thanks for diving into that topic. Living in Germany, I‘m often a little frustrated about not being able to share your fantastic podcasts (and Daniel’s always inspiring evaluations) with most of my social environment, due to the requirement of good English skills. As for me, the generated subtitles are a welcome help to follow the sometimes very fast conversations (and spends humorous moments on funny mistakes).
This is my first time listening to Daniel. I’ve never heard anyone with this level of knowledge and wisdom. He is one of a kind. Thank you, Nate, for sharing this video.
Beautifully thought provoking conversation! Hearing you two for years now going at it is great - the chemistry you guys have is wonderful to see. Also, am I the only one pausing this video to try and make out which books are standing behind Daniel? :D
This conversation is filled with words of wisdom and each part of it could be a podcast in itself. Thank you for sharing both of your insights and thoughts with us, and for explaining such complex topics with so much clarity.
Daniel spoke at the end about the importance of having a commitment not to cause harm, the study of what does, and knowing what protects against harm as cultural shifts he'd like to see. This is the subject of my doctoral research!
It is always special for me when you two get together. Thanks for setting a good example and becoming more spiritual. Daniel even looks like a Guru now. It is very pleasing, and I pray the rest of the world will follow.
Very insightful, thank you both. What I find is missing is the conclusion that if our system is and has been selecting for psychopaths as leaders, which I very much believe, the suggested path of recognition of interconnectedness and thus the necessity to care about/for everything that we are a part of, is not going to be enough to get rid of those psychopaths who are not going to give up power and their psycopathic ways just like that, at the time scale necessary for our survival. There´s got to be a rebellious force that imposes restrictions for the sake of life. This is what I generally miss in this podcast.. the recognition or at least contemplation of the role of social/class struggle.
I had the same look on my face as you did when Daniel said yes to 100x in less than a year. It is really scary. I do appreciated these interviews Nate.
I've had to watch this twice to get my head around it all! While I have come across some of the individual concepts that DS talks about this is the first time I have heard a coherent view of our current situation so clearly explained and drawing on history, research and philosophical ideas to underpin this approach. It was also something of a revelation to have some of my tentative feelings about our modern world validated in this tour de force. The task now appears to be to find like minded people and develop what this would look like in practice.
I have been watching this conversation a little at a time over several days as a morning meditation. Everything that is being said is resonant with all I have experienced over a 70 year lifetime. I would share that I am currently reading Thomas Metzinger's remarkable, revelatory book "The Elephant and the Blind". He points to an awareness without an "epistemic self-model"; pure awareness right now of the web of life, spanning the whole Cosmos, from which our "epistemic self-model" emerges and to which it returns. This experience frees a being from the grips of Molok. If enough people could find this place in the awareness phenomenological state space and be there with others for most of the time, we would be able to forge a new way for humans that would arise from the rubble of our accelerating decay and collapse of the current world civilization.
The deepest, most astounding, intelligent and relevant conversation I have listened to in a long time. Along with Peter Joseph, Nate and Daniel are among the greatest thinkers of our time. Thank you for this episode!
Can't wait to watch / listen . I just went to your show notes page as well and that is amazing how you link to some of the supporting documents for each subsection - thank you. There is such a wealth of incredible information here - it's brilliant. Thank you.
It is getting very late here in Kaikoura, New Zealand. I love listening to you guys in conversation. I align with so much that you have both said, but not all, and the differences are important - deeply so. I want to challenge the notion that one cannot derive and ought from an is. I think that notion is justified from a number of gross over simplifications of the complexity actually present in living systems; and the levels of sorting that evolution over deep time has actually already done, in many of the biases and systems embodied within us at multiple levels. Science can determine, to useful degrees, why we have ideas like good, how they evolved, at multiple levels. When one looks deeply into the evolution of that notion, then it seems to be tied, at multiple levels, into the notion of the survival of populations. Science can tell us a lot about the sorts of systems and probabilities that deliver maximal survival probability over the longest time frames and across the greatest set of contexts. One of the keys, is understanding that survival is maximised by cooperation in diversity (real diversity - not any level of hegemony). I am one of those with libertarian tendencies, and I also understand that liberty requires constraints to survive. I understand that every level of complexity has sets of constraints that are required for the survival of that level of complexity. So freedom without constraint, without responsibility, necessarily self terminates; necessarily eventually destroys the sets of constraints that make it possible. Given the stacks of complexity present in what it is to be human, the levels of uncertainty present in the sets of constraints required in any particular context, are high. There is plenty of room for cheating strategies to live in that zone of uncertainty at the margins. No set of rules can remove that uncertainty. What is demanded of all of us, is responsibility, each to the best of our necessarily limited and fallible abilities. The deepest causes of problems currently is the multiple levels of pursuit of profit devoid of the entirety of the systemic impacts. When I started my software company, 38 years ago, I called it "Solution Multipliers", and that comes from the notion that all solutions have downstream consequences, and that solution stream can be simply classified into two categories, solution multipliers, that solve more problems than they create, or problem multipliers, that create more/worse problems than they solve. We need everyone to work on solution-multipliers across as many domains and on as long a timescales as they possibly can. And all complex things have uncertainties, so there is an eternal aspect of an ongoing dance with the uncertainties and the unforeseen emergent processes and complexes that really cannot be foreseen (as distinct from those than can but agents would rather have plausible deniability of the consequences). Agree - we need to own our agency, and the implicit consequences of our choices; each to the best of our necessarily limited and fallible abilities. We need to be clear, the emperor (the market) - has no clothes. It really needs to be appropriately attired.
Imagine if everyone understood the concept of refactoring code to prevent reaching a state of infinite defects in the system due to complexity creep, then ruthlessly practiced refactoring their own lifestyles accordingly.
'Solutions' - this is the grand illusion. There are no solutions to our extreme ecological #overshoot predicament There are however, better (and worse) responses for socio-ecological justice in face of inevitable collapse. #JustCollapse
wow..this talk was another beautiful layer of revelation on top of the previous 5 videos with Daniel. I am always INSPIRED by Daniel's articulation and wisdom, as well as Nate's inquiry. Daniel's closing statement was PROFOUND and GROUNDING. May we return to UBUNTU ways of living and may this english language built for commerce also return to that Ubuntu way of interacting with the whole ecology. So grateful, very excited to share this one and discuss with community, as well as read the paper when it comes out.
Дякую! Я завжди казав, що конструювання наших карт реальності, за допомогою хибної мови, створило величезні проблеми людства. "Не буває блюзу, без рабства" Але навіщо нам блюз? ;) Питання в тому, як щось не-робити, і відчувати ту ж радість та насолоду життям! В природі є "життя" та "смерть", але природа повна радості та динамічного балансу. В житті людини є "життя" і є "смерть", однак люди відкидають другу частину і ходять перелякані та фрустровані. Потрібно деконструювати наше бачення до простих визначень біології, хімії та фізики. Необхідно навчитися бачити світ *невинним* поглядом дитини *не розрізняючим* поглядом монаха, *цілісним* поглядом мудреця і світ напевно стане кращим. :)
@@TheFlyingBrain. Я ні на що не претендую :) "Тому все що створює вчений, це порядок слів, якими він пояснює свій винахід чи відкриття" Миру, смирення та любові вам!)
Thank _you_ for sharing your thoughts! You speak like a taoist :) False language only reinforces our mistaken maps of reality through generations, leading us further and further astray. To get back on the right path, we need to change our language, our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing the world.
There are between 150-200 books behind Daniel. I was naturally intrigued by some of the tiles. So here's the list of 100 books I've been able to discern 👇 tldr; These titles reflect themes of science, philosophy, ethics, consciousness, and evolutionary biology among many other topics. 1. Egyptology - Emily Sands 2. Consciousness - Susan Blackmore 3. Spaces - John Harte 4. What If - Randall Munroe 5. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology - Robin Dunbar 6. Cosmology - Sean Carroll 7. The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins 8. Theatre of the Mind - Daniel J. Siegel 9. The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker 10. The Big Picture - Sean Carroll 11. Why Evolution Is True - Jerry Coyne 12. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond 13. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins 14. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins 15. Science and Religion - Alister McGrath 16. The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins 17. Life Ascending - Nick Lane 18. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins 19. The Logic of Science - Peter Godfrey-Smith 20. Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett 21. The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene 22. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking 23. The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin 24. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman 25. The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan 26. The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris 27. Free Will - Sam Harris 28. The End of Faith - Sam Harris 29. Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky 30. How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker 31. The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker 32. Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter 33. The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene 34. The Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow 35. The Information - James Gleick 36. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate - Manjit Kumar 37. Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman 38. The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James 39. The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore 40. The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins 41. The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker 42. Collapse - Jared Diamond 43. The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker 44. The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt 45. The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt 46. Moral Tribes - Joshua Greene 47. The Ethical Brain - Michael S. Gazzaniga 48. Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom 49. Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark 50. Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark 51. From Eternity to Here - Sean Carroll 52. The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow 53. The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene 54. The Conscious Mind - David Chalmers 55. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel Dennett 56. The Expanding Circle - Peter Singer 57. Animal Liberation - Peter Singer 58. The Quest for Consciousness - Christof Koch 59. The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose 60. Good and Real - Gary L. Drescher 61. The Meaning of It All - Richard Feynman 62. The Character of Physical Law - Richard Feynman 63. Why Does the World Exist? - Jim Holt 64. Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll 65. Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell 66. The Vital Question - Nick Lane 67. The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley 68. Why Buddhism Is True - Robert Wright 69. Waking Up - Sam Harris 70. The Moral Animal - Robert Wright 71. The Red Queen - Matt Ridley 72. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari 73. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari 74. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari 75. The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch 76. How to Create a Mind - Ray Kurzweil 77. The Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins 78. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn 79. The Nature of Space and Time - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose 80. Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker 81. Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows 82. The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard Feynman 83. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Richard Feynman 84. The Demon in the Machine - Paul Davies 85. The Singularity Is Near - Ray Kurzweil 86. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely 87. The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb 88. Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb 89. The Emerging Mind - Vilayanur S. Ramachandran 90. The Philosophy of Science - Samir Okasha 91. The Ego Tunnel - Thomas Metzinger 92. The User Illusion - Tor Nørretranders 93. Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett 94. The Accidental Universe - Alan Lightman 95. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst - Robert Sapolsky 96. The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menand 97. The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan 98. I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter 99. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot 100. The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli Happy reading ✨
This was a really great conversation, its so nice hearing someone able to articulate this. I've been traveling down this path of interconectedness with nature and it has fundamentally shifted the way I see the world and human civilization.
I have listened to Daniel now for years and to Nate at least a couple of years as well. They are great thinkers and while it's somewhat meaningless to say I agree on most of what they say (since I'm barely an expert on most of what they talk about)--I absolutely love THE WAY they think and approach topics. This just as a pre-face to what follows, which may sound like criticism--but isn't really meant that way: When it comes to the question of what to do and what to pursue AS AN INDIVIDUAL in the predicament that we are in, I feel there is an elephant in the room that isn't being discussed and that makes any recommendations by Nate, Daniel, or any people with similar viewpoints and similar history, harder to fully take serious: It seems to me that the fact that they can even think about these larger issues and think about the larger implications of this "system" and way of living (that most of us are caught within) is due to the fact that FIRST they had already WON (to some extent) at playing the game of this current system. It takes time, freedom and resources to do what they do (and in fact to even be able to have the time to THINK). It seems to me that both are at a stage in "the game" where they do not have to devote the majority of their time to simply work for a salary or income. They have accumulated enough "optionality tokens" to be able to spend the rest of their lives pondering the deeper questions of life. (Yes, I assume they both are making life choices that somewhat limit their energy-footprint and therefore their cost of living, but I'd be willing to bet that their net worth is significantly above the median, even among the US population, and likely such that it allows complete retirement) Now, it is likely that when they accumulated their optionality tokens, they did so by doing things that actually stand in stark contrast to what they are now trying to achieve or wake people up to. Nate was, I believe in the Wall Street world, and Daniel in the Tech world (I know less about Daniel's history). Both, would involve the psychopathy of corporate charters--as Daniel described it--so even in the most ideal situation (if they were very conscious in their own decisions) they would have created what they now consider very destructive externalities, simply through their action of accumulating enough "optionality tokens" in the way that this system allows for. I do not blame them for it, and in fact I think it is the only way to get to become a person who can think the way they do--and we NEED those thinkers. But this brings up the problem: For the vast majority of us, who are not yet in that position, if we wanted to follow in their footsteps, it would mean we would FIRST have to gain that type of material and personal freedom for ourselves as well. But that would again mean that we would consciously hurt the very metrics that we later want to be able to improve. The other option would be to limit ourselves to activities that align completely with the ideals presented here, but that would preclude us from devoting much time to the project (as most time would need to be devoted to do work that is not highly valued in our system--and even then: would it have fewer destructive externalities or would it just shift who benefits from these externalities from us to others, who do not care about such things?) and it would also tremendously limit the power we would have to enact change or even disseminate our ideas. If we follow their example in a "do what they do" kind of way, we would therefore FIRST work on accumulating enough "optionality tokens" to be able to live and think freely. If, on the other hand it's more about "do what they say, not do as they do", then what exactly?
Really well put, and I think you’re correct. I’m 50, nowhere near as educated or intelligent as these two gentlemen but have found myself thinking on exactly the lines this discussion is taking now that I’m in a secure, relatively well paid management role and the frantic fight for some financial security is behind me. I’ve also just had to take an extended break specifically because these ideas have stirred something in me akin to guilt or regret which quickly morphed into burnout and disillusionment and finally some sort of mental breaking point. My privilege has meant I’ve been able to take this break and keep my job, but now I’m returning to it I’m thinking through how to balance what I’ve leaned with what I must do to finish off the final decade or so of my career, because as soon as I can get out of the system and spend time thinking about and hopefully acting on the topics discussed in this discussion, I most certainly will. You’re spot on, to even entertain these ideas, you need the space to dive deeply within yourself and getting that time by definition means you’ve got to negatively impact the world first, and this is why the task of implementing any of the learnings on a macro scale is going to be extremely difficult, but not impossible. We must try, but it will take such a massive shift of momentum that achieving any of it before we destroy our biosphere and each other’s mental health first seems very unlikely.
@@mattsharpey361 Yeah. I mean, the fact that both the producers & the audience of this (we're part of it) relies entirely on the big-tech sector for this podcast to even exist as a functional concept feels almost antithetical to its own purpose, and yet at the same time, it kind of doesn't.
I appreciate how Daniel is at once decisive in his thinking while also remaining open to new ideas... the discussion at the end really shows that he's internalized Iain McGilchrist's work (The Matter with Things) about needing to shift the way in which we pay attention ...and how that represents a real shift in how we exist. I find this constellation of thinkers Daniel with John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Bernardo Kastrup, Zak Stein as really pushing the envelope on how we start to move beyond our current metacrisis morass towards the "next thing." I would like to see Daniel take up a point by point commentary/critique on the work of William Ophuls.. and Nassim Taleb's work too. Would be very interesting. I've been reading Immoderate Greatness...and seems like there are convergences and divergences in perspectives ...
Hello there to you Nate and to your guest, Daniel Schmachtenberger. I am so glad and grateful to see such an episode. Again. I heard Daniel saying at some point that the viewers may also have some questions and I do for quite some time 🙂. 1. Indians vs Europeans aka Humans vs Aliens. This one has been addressed - it is a coordination problem on the shoulders of the non-beligerant to sanction and prevent the predator. However I think it could use a lot more elaboration. Let’s take for reference the Indian tribes from North America at the point of European conquest. Let’s assume that all things were mostly well and *wisely* balanced, and multipolar traps, arms race, etc halted because of this wisdom. Then the Europeans hit. Shouldn’t the Indians have insisted on warfare advancement “just in case”?. How about us today in face of an alien invasion of unknown probability? Isn't this the way of evolution: to head towards arms race because of the perpetual unknown? How can we “postulate” a stop? (Also, what happens to the argument if we also ignore the fact that if we don’t coordinate to stop growing like cancer we’ll perish before any such improbable alien invasion…) 2. True progress/ 3rd order effects: technology that is really beneficial after 3rd order effects analysis. Can you please give some examples of technologies that pass the 3rd order efect analysis? Because this requirement seems to block us in analysis paralysis or combinatoric explosion. Some examples of technologies that qualify would improve the spirits of such a hard pursuit for everybody I think. 3. Betterment of All of life. I heard this many times and it is beautiful in its simplicity but it does not seem to describe the world for me… There are always some resource limitation and conflict. Maybe some kind of softer phrasing is required, like the good of all life if possible, calculating with a greater weight on me, us, and life simbiotic to me/us. There is life in almost direct hostility to us and our “allies”, like some kind of anaerobic, methane, ammonia, acid, etc based bacteria that is ok in the current web of life only if very little of… I am confused here between a background of generalized symbiosis and one of generalized competition I guess. But **all** of life seems like an impossible claim - something got to give. Am I trapped in a zero-ish sum game? Hope this long comment makes sense and that you guys have time to address what you think is important of it. Thank you for simply being!
Ten minutes in, and it is clear that Daniel continues to bring reality into focus. I will comment again on the dualistic yet important distinction between syntropic and entropic flow - the former being the coming together of matter, energy and information into more meaningful, cooperative and complex forms (aka living things and the biosphere at large), and the latter being the breaking apart or degradation of those forms through wielding power and control (aka most of humanity's technology and consumption). This distinction is key to answering "What is progress?" because the type of progress matters. Syntropic progress is seen in individual growth and development, and in the ecosystem regeneration with succession starting from pioneer stage and ending in climax stage (the overall system develops to be more resilient, intelligent and beautiful). Advances in technology, weaponry and consumtion are forms of Entropic progress (more degradation of the overall system). Now, it is important to recognise that our planet does need entropic processes to a degree needed to recycle carbon and other nutrients. When photosynthetic algae and plants (primary producers) dominated the planet, before the Cambrian explosion in animals (who are consumers with entropic drives), CO2 in the atmosphere was depleted, repeatedly plunging the planet into catacysmic "snowball Earth" states lasting many milions of years. The planetary role of animals ("beasts") is to consume plant matter, excrete those nutrients back into the soil, and exhaling CO2 back into the air, which has stabilized the planet's atmosphere (which regulates the temperature/climate). But animals only consumed in order to stay alive, and populations were kept in check by availability of food and other feedbacks. With gradual development of our capacity for dexterity, communication and intelligence, humans gradually broke free from these limits, and into a new realm of learning, cooperation, power, control, and technology. Unfortunately, we brought the basic drives and mindset of the other animals with us, and have become consumers with no natural limits ("The Beast"). Consumption by our species has become exponential, and nearly all of it is unnecessary, excessive, and with far more entropic impacts than other animals. Not only have we doubled atmospheric CO2, warming the planet and creating a climate catastrophe, but our clever industrialists have been poisoning water toxic minerals and with novel molecules that disrupt the basic functions of living things. Some of these are called "forever chemicals" because they can't be metabolized. As Daniel points out, this unrestrained animalistic consumption (entropic progress) is at the root of the Metacrisis, and the first two of its dystopian attractors (totalitarian power and control, and societal collapse into barbarism). The Holy Grail of the blessed Third attractor will require broad human advancement in the direction of Syntropic progress. To a large extent, this will mean learning to restrain our capacity for entropic power and control. Great point about the Sabbath, which for Jews binds the use of technology and power-seeking one day a week, and the Potlatch. There will be a circumscribed role for concentrated power and control, as there is in all healthy living systems. Within greater Syntropic flows, more modest degrees of entropic flow are required, but even for these, most will occur "naturally". Syntropic advance entails material, cognitive-perceptual and spiritual shift away from industrialized civilization based on power, control, precision and consumption. There are numerous examples of individual people and whole cultures based syntropic values and awareness. As Daniel points out, most of these are cultures who have learned how to live sustainably and "harmoniously" with the syntropic flows of Nature in various regions around the planet. Generally, they have done so with remarkable degrees of liberty, health, happiness, and ethical conduct, and with little need for coercive power and control. Power and control is addictive, and is at the root of the "dopamine economy" as Nate calls it. I would suggest clarification this is the "bestial dopamine economy", meaning the release of dopamine in response to certain instinctive entropic triggers, such as consumption, luxury, competition and social dominance. But there are cognitive and social ways to modify this by expanding our awareness of, and loving connection to, all the many beautiful inhabitants of our living planet. Little of this entails trying to change what is outside of us, rather it requires learning to stop doing things and opening our awareness to all those who are already flowing around us, and chosing to relate to them with love and respect. Knowing what we know about the nature of reality on our miraculous and beautiful planet, and our place in it, the only dignified path ahead of us is to to deeply savour the joy and the pride in being true human beings for as long as we are able.
Individualism is inherently entropic, because it narrows the boundary of optimization to the smallest possible unit or agent, and externalizes everything. Conversely. Death and decay are not entropic, because their nutrient flow is the seed of rebirth and creation. Life, through birth and decay are able to overcome entropy, by concentrating energy and re-cycling it syntropically, as part of a living system. That’s why markets and economies are entropic, and feed off life parasitically, without finding a symbiosis. What i’m saying is that individualism and competition are the root of our predicament, embedded as they are in culture and law coercively enforce entropic dynamics on syntropic agents. This only became politically toxic in the 20th century, because of scale, whereby harsh attempts to curb individual competition through collectivization resulted in the dominance of competitive individualism globally. So now we scale-down, reorganize cooperatively, or face certain self-imposed terminalism.
Well said! "There will be a circumscribed role for concentrated power and control, as there is in all healthy living systems." I don't think that's right. There are eusocial hymenoptera (many ant, wasp and bee species) and mycorrhizal fungi, some of the most successful species on this planet! I think that's where we should look for inspiration. There are also human groups who practice the avoidance of concentrated power and control. The Quakers are a great example from our own culture. So it _is_ possible. The question is whether it's possible at scale. Or rather, whether scaling up what works at small scale is a good idea. I don't think it is. Those that live "harmoniously … with little need for coercive power and control" do so because they remain small. Small is beautiful! Big soon becomes monstrous. I therefore think any solution that's applied at a large scale will inevitably fail, however well intentioned, because its size alone will make it a suitable habitat for power, bringing out the worst in us. "It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." - Frank Herbert I think a better solution would be to create a healthy habitat where concentrated power cannot thrive. I think it would have to be from the ground up rather than prescribed by a mastermind (sorry, Daniel), evolutionary rather than revolutionary, cultural rather than political, distributed rather than centralized. In other words, more in tune with nature itself. Try to go against the flow of nature and you will have a hard time.
@@ximono Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree there needs to be a shift towards decentralizing, spreading, sharing and renouncing concentrated ability to control others through the use of coercive power (technology, violence). I also agree with your vision that development of a sustainable society may have to happen from the gound-up, starting small and growing gradually and "organically". This is the pattern for the emergence of nearly all multicellular life forms, starting with a single cell and gradually growing and expanding outwards based on intimate, local, neighborly connections with younger generations of cells over time. But there is one possible exception to this general pattern, the somewhat miraculous and rapid emergence of a new life form by metamorphosis. This happens with many flying insects, like when a hungry, hungry consumer caterpillar (larva) transforms into new forms with new functions, like the miraculous ability to fly, feeding on nectar, pollenating plants, mating, and reproducing. In this case, there is a re-organization of the existing organism, guided from a hungry consumer into the new "higher" form by the latent intelligence of "imaginal disc" cells. in the case of the entropic anthropocene, perhaps sources of wisdom, like Daniel and his teachers, could serve such a function. The advantage of societal metamorphosis would be potential to avoid total collapse (mass death) and then having to slowly start over from scratch. Even if such a transformative "Great Awakening" shift of humanity's collective values and awareness is possible at scale, the likelihood does seem vanishingly small these days. If anything, we seem to be going in the wrong directions. Still, what better alternative is there? I don't think societal size itself is the problem. Population size is a problem if we continue to orient ourseves to predation, consumption and comfort, but large scale can become an advantage if our collective values are re-oriented (expanded, elevated, deepened?) toward learning to nurture, cooperate and harmonize with our wonderous and sacred living planet Earth. This re-orientation in our shared values from entropic consumption to syntropic co-creation could guide the necessary reorganization in the structure and function of localized cultures and humanity at large - in other words, a metamorphosis may be possible.
@@truepatriot6388 Thank you too for sharing your thoughts! I love the idea of metamorphosis. It's one of life's most wonderful miracles. I would love to see it happen to our civilization, even humanity as a whole. But I think it's more likely to happen at the local end of the scale than the global. Just that would be a wonderful thing though. All movements start small. Regarding size, I think it's a question of perspective. A distributed* network of local communities may seem small when standing at ground level, but as you zoom out you may see that "it" inhabits a vast area, much like fungal colonies. But what is "it"? Where do you draw the boundaries? Are there any boundaries? It's all about perspective. Such a size itself may not be a problem, as long as "it" doesn't overreach. Once there's unchecked growth or the "resource extraction" mindset kicks in, there will be problems. The footprint of the organism has to remain within the natural limits, it has to be in balance with all the other species it shares the ecosystem with. (There's no "it" though, I'm using our culture's language and mental model here.) I don't believe a top-down system of control is the right answer, that's the centralized/authoritarian approach. A distributed system requires a bottom-up solution, with processes similar to those of the native people of the PNW that Daniel mentioned. Cultural, spiritual, philosophical - some form of grounding of certain "sacred" principles. These "growth inhibitors" will have to be first nature to people, innate/intrinsic/essential. There also has to be processes for preventing groups or individuals from deviating too far from those principles, whenever someone starts overreaching. This won't come about easy, but if it does, I think it's more likely to succeed than the top-down approach. I believe _something like this_ will be necessary for our long-term survival. *) I prefer distributed to decentralized. Decentralized is still "centralized", in that it has multiple designated centers, some possibly larger than others. To avoid accumulation of power, and for resiliency, I prefer distributed and federated. It may seem chaotic, but so does nature. It's incredibly adaptable and fault-tolerant.
The main problem is this moral relativism that's snuck into these talks. It's fine to study conquers like Genghis Khan and Mongolia empire or even the Romans and their empire, especially what they did to Carthage, but that's par for the course. Some cultures just are not capable of defending themselves due to technological differences, geography, biosphere and other factors involved. For example when the Spanish conquistadors arrived with their settlers in South America, and made contact with the Aztecs, there's such a huge difference in culture, language, and way of life that in their Spanish Catholic worldview the Aztec empire and the practice of live human sacrificing was untenable to the Christians then. Unfortunately the Aztecs refused to change, and the Spanish, along with some tribes nearby that were victims of the Aztecs banded together in a coalition against the Aztec empire, which finally destroyed their empire. It's important to realize that not all European conquest and colonialism is all bad or all evil, those days the technological expansion was actually, ultimately good in the big picture of things. In those time periods empires, imperialism, civilization, colonialism, all before the idea of a nation and country mind you, all was predominantly stage blue to stage red in values. They have a wholly different outlook and worldview from modernity today, a whole order of difference then. Also, IMO it's either at that age we spread Christendom, or that Islam spreads further than Christendom, and we do have in history the massive slave trade that existed within that religion and the practice of castrating black slaves that is far more frequent in the caliphate Islam than in Christianity in comparison, so... I base my comment on the following modals: Spiral Dynamics stages of development(Don Beck), cognitive and moral developmental modals, personality types/traits(Myers Briggs modal and the Big Five Traits modal), 9 stages of ego development(Jane Loevinger), Architypes(Carl Jung), Integral Theory(Ken Wilbur), and others about ideological beliefs indoctrinated by culture/societal programming, self biases and preferences, cognitive biases, and information ecology one consumes.
Thankyou both for sharing such deep wisdom. It is as if you pulled together all the scattered strands of ideas, concepts and understandings that have come to me over half a lifetime, expanded each one and collated them into a cohesive narrative structure and then reflected it all back to me clear as day. Thankyou!
First time I've heard of Daniel and first time I've listened to this podcast. What a fantastic conversation. I'm going to think further on the point raised about the use of nouns in English.
I am hearing ideas from In the Absence of the Sacred (Jerry Mander) and A Language Older than Words and The Culture of Make Believe (Derrick Jensen) in this discussion - these are great books to read on these same topics.
YES! A new Schmachtenberger/Hagens drop! Love this! AND a new paper from Consilience? Ohhhhh heeeeelllllll yeaaaaahhhhhhh!!! Thank you both so much for this. I feel like we're closing in on an emerging solution. More and more people are talking about these issues and of course I'm telling everyone I know about this stuff. Go listen to these folks! It will change you for the better! LOVE YOU BOTH!!
On the one hand it is great to know where we are and how we arrived here. On the other hand, the solution seems a thousand year change. Hopefully humanity makes it someday, but I cry for our children and grandchildren. We need to have new truths on stone tablets for future generations.
Another [new level] amazing conversation. Thank you Nate and Daniel, we're all indebted to you for such mind-opening analysis; all makes so much good sense.... now that you've said it.
I resonate so deeply with Daniel's thoughts and presentations . What a beautiful thinker he is . . Thank you both !!! I am very appreciative of these conversations
Everything he said gives me deep feelings of truthfulness and yet I’ve been a part of the problem in myriad ways about 50 times since I started watching this.
So many parallels between this conversation and Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism is True". Both take a look at how natural selection brought us to where we are (albeit from different angles) and how mindfulness can help us short-circuit our evolved wiring to bring greater wisdom and a clearer perspective back into the fold -- first on an individual level and eventually (hopefully) on a cultural one. As Daniel quotes, "I am because we are." We, all of us, not just every person, but every thing on this planet, are one. We're made of the same stuff. We must learn to see the lack of distinction between ourselves and everything else. The ancients deduced it; indigenous cultures understood it; but we, with our access to so much exosomatic energy -- and all that entails -- have forgotten.
This is a profoundly good, useful, and enlightening discussion that must be broadcast to every television in the world once day, everyday, until a key message sinks in: maintain the miracle over the illusion of progress (environmental-turned-ecological economist here). Let us stop this “progress”.
I haven't quite finished this, yet but there is a beautiful human moment at 2 hours 58 minutes in where Nate asks a series of questions to try and narrow things down and Daniel says' Yes, this is another open loop'. Nate laughs as if to say 'I knew it but was trying to create a closed loop!
What a great episode! Time for Action. And first being, we need to propagate Daniel to the masses. Increase and accumulate minds like him. Only then, can we expect some change. I am doing my part.
Excellent interview with Daniel. Everyone who can follow this intelligent discourse needs to hear this. Unfortunately that leaves out most political leaders.
Political "leaders" are often more followers - they adopt policies that will appeal to voters, in order to achieve or retain political power. In other words, they follow the crowd rather than lead it.
I listen to Daniel speak and his points seem so obvious, which leaves me wondering how we let ourselves go into self-destructive behavior without realizing the effects it was having???
I see Daniel featured here, and I'm in my seat and ready, tail wagging. These thorough, long-form, deep discussions of context are what I live for. Thx to all! 💚🌄🙏
Thank you both. The conversation has fed my soul. Knowing all I don't know makes me feel wiser. The knowledge of my truths grows, but my knowledge of myself seems limitless in its boundaries. My potential to feel is the awe relished anew, each time I find the silence within. I enjoy the intellect displayed immensely, but also know the path of a different kind of intellect and feel these two souls also know that path, connecting everything. My morphic resonance sends a hug to you both. Namaste 🙏
“Imagination is the most powerful force we have to conceive a better world. Art is the most accessible tool for actualizing that world.” - Nicole Mitchell Gantt, experimental flutist & author. As explored in this podcast, we have a crisis of imagination. We’ve never experienced & can’t even imagine what it’s like to commune fully with nature, plants & animals, feel whole inside & out, live in a community that both nurtures us & accepts us unconditionally. We’ve forgotten who we are. I find tremendous value in taking a step out of the problem and imagining a world with permanent solutions to our biggest problems. I really appreciated this podcast (especially challenging the narratives we’ve been told about pre-historic life) but was hoping for a deep dive into better world with concrete solutions🤞😇. I do, however, appreciate how hard that is since we have almost nothing to go on for what that looks like🌞🤝🌞🤝🌞
The phrase, "effective achieving" stuck out to me in regard to how the current Ai accelerationist camp is using Peter Singer's Effective Altruism as an argument for accelerating Ai. Which from my pov, is the type of naïve progress Daniel is speaking about.
Effective altruim is such a ridiculous concept. These people aren't effective at anything altruistic. They are just effective at making money and want a philosophy to keep their souls from rotting
@@Kqiros4447 they have about as much compassion for "us" as those animals condemned to entire lives of suffering in factory farms... Which is to say, NONE
What a great sane perspective on the nature of future progress, I'm definitely stealing all of that for the Pillars of Protopia project that I'm currently working on.
State of the Art! 🎭 Thanks for a wonderful lecture. Way back in the 1960s-70s when I was a teenager, Intentional communities were an option for people that were trending that way. 'Kibbutz' they are called in Israel.🌌
Daniel has incredibly deep wisdom . Thanks for setting the truth free❤ I have a perspective that I feel can add to this in a way that demonstrates simple ways to quickly transform our wayward path to one that is aligned with our true being. It starts with very simple reengineering the electoral system from bottom up rather than top down ❤
Thank you again for a beautiful conversation. It has opened many doors. A question I would like to propose is care. Both its creation and its pitfalls. Connection without ego defined. How the seemingly randomness of nature's life and death cycle equates with humanitys ability to care and whether this can be a fortifying of care rather than an end of care as if we did not have a energy that feeds back into nature's cycle. The ecology of care is in more simple terms for me and my question. Inspired, of course, by your 5 way conversation on communication. Honouring the light in us all.
I am reminded of an old Gahan Wilson cartoon : a glazed-eyed, camouflage-clad, bandoliered combatant stands atop a smoking rubble pile amidst a field of utter carnage and devastation. The caption reads "I think I won!". Nate and Daniel's conversation is all about that type of self-delusion and hubris. Humanity is foolishly and needlessly its own worst enemy.
One of the most important and enlightening videos I’ve ever watched. THIS is what the Internet should be used for!
I see a Schmachtenberger video and I click, simple as that… add to it the fact it’s in Nate’s great simplification and I’m getting out the popcorn.
I see a Nate video, I click. I see a Daniel video, I click. This one almost solves the catch-22…
@@eikegermann7469 Roger Roger
I couldn't agree more. Stimulating and enlightening :)
I'm a simple man, with simple tastes
We're all simple folk
Nate, you are truly an epic level listener. We often don’t realize that listening Evokes what the other is saying. The more deeply someone is listened to, the deeper will be their words. You co-created this talk, though you “said” far less.
truth
listening is so powerful and so rare.
I was thinking this as I was listening to the interview. It takes a really good interviewer to stay quiet for so long - between excellent questions.
@@CindyWigglesworth- yes, to know when to let it ride, and when the understanding for everyone will be furthered by your question. Very hard to discriminate; my own curiosity driving the questioning vs service to the space.
Yep, Nate gave a masterclass on effective listening.
It's like you're watching a conversation about a primitive planet between two aliens from an advanced civilization. And then you realize you're on that planet and you're trapped in the ultimate stupidity of it and you want to get out but you can't.
You can, you just have to move far far away to another culture.
@@ximono I do not actually physically want to leave the planet or the place I live. As Daniel said: 'I am because we are' and it doesn't help the world or humanity as a whole if I 'pollute' a vastly different, probably indigenous culture I'm totally not adapted to with my Western ass. Please leave those people be. I'd still be on the same planet, all the crisis would still be unfolding and sooner or later I'd still feel the effects anyway. Instead I want me/us to get out the stupidity.
@@ximono that's escapism, this is a global problem. we have to take action in whatever form we can.
we don't want to escape it, we want to change it, however little or large of a difference we can make, that brings meaning and fulfillment, and that changes our perspective on our lives.
I talk about this on my podcast a lot, I someday hope to have Nate on! These are both brilliant, valuable minds in this world.
... Ah, Thee Great Stupa/Fycation, is ALL, but complete. Aend, the winner wozzzzz ...
Listening to Daniel reduces my blood pressure. Don't quite know why that is, no hopium being offered, there is something to be said for access to the truth in our present times I guess. Thx Nate.
Reduces my blood pressure too .. I often find there’s also a welling up of deep grief and gratitude, combined. I feel so less alone knowing that what I’ve sensed for so long others have, too, and thought far more carefully about.
Yeah I have similar sentiments. I think hearing the problems so well stated has reduced the stress on the part of my brain that was trying to figure it out. Having the problem better explained has helped me think more and act more towards exploring alternatives
I love listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger... but he is naive and simplistic about native peoples. The noble savage myth that he completely wraps himself in is not truly accurate and a somewhat patronizing view of native peoples.
I still get great value and enjoyment out of listening to his thought process. I just quibble with this consistent take of his.
While it's a great talk, as usual Daniel underestimates the power of optimism. Yes collective optimism especially around technology and realism is tricky, but on the individual level optimism is so powerful. Having faith, hope, and optimism about your future when you're in the valley of darkness, when you are suffering through some dark night of the soul, when life for you is very dark and horrific, optimism 9/10 times will help you persevere through all that BS. The real danger is not naive techno optimism, the real danger is naive realism and materialism instead, and that brings in unhealthy amounts of cynicism and skepticism that brings in further darkness and apathy which optimism is one of other factors that can combat dark states of mind and being.
@@spikeontheroad2560what is he naive and simplistic on exactly? What am I missing on the “noble savage myth”? Thanks.
When Nate & Daniel get together I listen twice. The first time I just listen and try to grok it. The second time I take notes & look stuff up to go deeper. Thanks Nate!
wise move
see video: Morpheus: "You are a slave, Neo."... A Prison for Your Mind | The Matrix | [wage slavery]
In my long life I have never heard more benign wisdom and clear-headed thinking than that of Daniel Schmachtenberger. Every time I listen to his astute observations - and then compare them to contemporary reality - I mentally curl up in to a fetal position and suck my thumb.
Charles Eisenstein is good too.
You're a good frog, ya know that?
So good. Love it.
Hold meeeee
While it's a great talk, as usual Daniel underestimates the power of optimism. Yes collective optimism especially around technology and realism is tricky, but on the individual level optimism is so powerful. Having faith, hope, and optimism about your future when you're in the valley of darkness, when you are suffering through some dark night of the soul, when life for you is very dark and horrific, optimism 9/10 times will help you persevere through all that BS. The real danger is not naive techno optimism, the real danger is naive realism and materialism instead, and that brings in unhealthy amounts of cynicism and skepticism that brings in further darkness and apathy which optimism is one of other factors that can combat dark states of mind and being.
Wow.
Yesterday I listened to the conversation with Vanessa Andreotti, referenced in this video re: separability, and loved it, all of it.
Today I listened to this one. Love it also.
Love the distinction between "progress" and "advancement."
I especially liked the bits that confirmed my own bias as a retired Canadian physio who lived that life in a language that was too full of nouns and not enough verbs, when interaction was less encouraged and separability was more encouraged, where to acquire a livelihood I had to pass tests full of minutia about electro-so-called-therapy (which I was dismayed to learn was basically war technology that had been repurposed, framed as "therapy," then fobbed off as a money-making externality to the profession I had naively joined as an eighteen-year-old boomer girl), where connection to a living planet was never considered, and in which human suffering had been reduced to diagnoses that only encouraged more separation rather than whole-ing.
After I came to realize that life is a verb, not a noun, had had some exposure to world views like those of Vanessa and Daniel, had learned some Spanish and French (and was daunted by exposure to all the verbs they express), I deconstructed, decluttered and tossed as much as I could of all the stuff I had been saddled with in my profession and came out a few decades ago as a human primate social groomer in a human anti-gravity suit. I've done as much work on myself as I had time and energy to do, wrote about the experience extensively, then retired, and now have the luxury at age 73 of sitting back and soaking up the sort of clear-eyed wide-angle view embodied and articulated by people like Nate and Daniel and Vanessa.
So, take home points:
1. Life is a verb, not a noun (and English has too many nouns, not enough verbs)
2. We're all going to experience pain and we're all here to help each other get through it
3. Be an interactor not an operator, especially in a profession that is ostensibly about the physical rehabilitation of humans
4. And lastly, refuse to be used by those who would externalize their electro-equipment and suck you into supporting their world of war and the positive feedback loop that does no one any good whether you're a microbe or tree or human being in a socially regulated mindset you did not ask for but were born into.
Thank you so much for being here while I am still here to applaud you all. All the best to this wonderful renovation of humanity in a process.
Thanks for sharing!
You have said something significant that is undermined by lack of paragraphs. You have to add to the scribbed word-processing program YT uses for comments -
- Use 3-space indents (not skipping a line) to demark your paragraphs;
- invent your own abbreviated forms of expression - eg, use abbreviations commonly-known like “e.g.” w/o the periods; ie, the comment reader who knows what ‘Ie’ means will not worry their pretty little heads about the missing periods :)
And so on . . .
Thank you. 🙏
And I applaud your poetic wisdom above too. It warms my heart to know there are others like me out there in the world that are really getting this message.
testing three spaces.
This is my favourite interview from Schmacko's latest round of interviews. Listening to this guy always leaves me feeling braver and more hopeful.
His thought process and how he expresses himself so articulately is very enriching for me too. It has however the opposite effect in my case, I see how far we are from the possibility of change. Very-very far. We in our countries, workplaces, cities/towns/villages, families and so-called "communities" are stuck in vicious cycles and always reoccurring bad scenarios. It is scary and disheartening.
@@adambazso9207 Cycles is the key word.
@@adambazso9207 That's exactly how I see our situation! But after a while I was actually surprised that Daniel's words also had a healing rather than a discouraging effect on me. My explanation so far: it is relieving to discuss the problems at the level of the problems. The calming relativisations of the type ‘It's actually better than it seems’ are now much more likely to wear on my patience, to put it mildly.
I am blown away by the wisdom of this conversation, it has been a life-changing podcast experience!
Daniel's work is nothing short than genius and visionary. True leading edge in thought and philosophy
But now it can be told: every man woman & mutant on this planet shall know about De-evolution.
th-cam.com/video/hRguZr0xCOc/w-d-xo.html
Right off the bat, I'd say he's kind of like the *real* version of the wise & long-sighted übermensch archetype that the tech industry tried to push on us, by using, of all people, Elon Musk as a vehicle for persuasion. Yes, I remember the 'Be like Elon' poster memes, and I'm also aware of the crass irony of comparing these two fundamentally different figures, in which this guest would represent some 'upscaling' in concept & marketability. And yet, I think the topic is interesting enough on a purely human level.
Seeing this dynamic play out in real time in my own professional and personal life. Its unfortunate that calling it out arouses such fear. Thanks Nate and Daniel. Y'all are doing extremely important work.
This is a profound conversation that feeds my soul.
I think I'll sit by a tree, and see it not as a noun, a thing, but as a process, an us I am a part of.
Thank you for having Daniel back. What a wonderful, deep, thought provoking conversation. That's the reason I'm here.
I ALWAYS enjoy Daniel's long form discussions! Thanks Nate!
The next most important step is translating this discussion into language that can be understood by the majority. Unless this message can be infered to the working class, nothing can change.
Very true! I think the art of storytelling (authors, screenwriters, …) is a great way to make ideas like this more accessible. But I don't expect Hollywood or Netflix to promote stories with messages like these.
Add swearing, & speak from the heart not from accademic silos, it takes practice {i cant do it too addicted to too many syables in respective disciplines}
Information will not change people
@@madameblatvatsky framed as religion it can.
... Yeah, but, in/formation, is, what changed people, @@madameblatvatsky...
I for one would appreciate a weekly interview (or at least monthly) with Daniel Schmachtenberger. They are the most intellectually stimulating interviews on this podcast.
I am curious about the conclusions Daniel has come to in his own life around his closing questions. More, please!
Wonderful Socratic dialogue of more than 3 hours between two titans about philosophy, anthropology, the foundations of societies and the implications of our perceptions, this is unvaluable!
I can't stop smiling looking at how well articulated and wise are the messages being shared through this video, thanks a lot for this amazing content!!😊
Another beautiful conversation. I will come back to this many times. 👌 Thank you both.
Once again I leave a Daniel Schmachtenberger / Nate Hagens conversation feeling both richly inspired and deeply grounded. Thank you both!
While the entire breadth and depth of these talks feels essential, I look forward to when these conversations can more quickly move into the ‘meaning of life’ phase of the discussion - usually reserved for the last several minutes. I don’t think you would drive people away if you were to mention more quickly and more often such concepts as ‘sacred’ and ‘interbeing’ or talk more frequently about meditation, mindfulness etc practices that you both might be practicing. Shared Wisdom seeds.
Daniel teaching to a child (us) the true meaning of a tree .. Nate’s experiences in India and anytime he mentions his dogs or ducks .. ah yes.
For me this morning it was a perfect Chard leaf, and walking my confused neighbor home to safety.
Peace, everyone.
And heartache, shared. 🙏🏽
The main problem is this moral relativism that's snuck into these talks. It's fine to study conquers like Genghis Khan and Mongolia empire or even the Romans and their empire, especially what they did to Carthage, but that's par for the course. Some cultures just are not capable of defending themselves due to technological differences, geography, biosphere and other factors involved. For example when the Spanish conquistadors arrived with their settlers in South America, and made contact with the Aztecs, there's such a huge difference in culture, language, and way of life that in their Spanish Catholic worldview the Aztec empire and the practice of live human sacrificing was untenable to the Christians then. Unfortunately the Aztecs refused to change, and the Spanish, along with some tribes nearby that were victims of the Aztecs banded together in a coalition against the Aztec empire, which finally destroyed their empire. It's important to realize that not all European conquest and colonialism is all bad or all evil, those days the technological expansion was actually, ultimately good in the big picture of things. In those time periods empires, imperialism, civilization, colonialism, all before the idea of a nation and country mind you, all was predominantly stage blue to stage red in values. They have a wholly different outlook and worldview from modernity today, a whole order of difference then. Also, IMO it's either at that age we spread Christendom, or that Islam spreads further than Christendom, and we do have in history the massive slave trade that existed within that religion and the practice of castrating black slaves that is far more frequent in the caliphate Islam than in Christianity in comparison, so...
I base my comment on the following modals: Spiral Dynamics stages of development(Don Beck), cognitive and moral developmental modals, personality types/traits(Myers Briggs modal and the Big Five Traits modal), 9 stages of ego development(Jane Loevinger), Architypes(Carl Jung), Integral Theory(Ken Wilbur), and others about ideological beliefs indoctrinated by culture/societal programming, self biases and preferences, cognitive biases, and information ecology one consumes.
@@danielnelson3136I hope others will comment on your important thoughts. They are well above my new and unfortunate post-Covid intellectual capability, but I do often wonder about our species’ ability to perceive anything objectively. Moral and cultural relativism, yes. It’s everywhere. We simply cannot not do that. It is for me another of our endearing human qualities that we think that we can. I do see this as a shared human quality. One of my favorite college professors, when we were waxing eloquent about living closer to nature and seeing the sacred in everything, warned us against holding any cultural group of humans as superior simply because they lived closer and more connected to the land. Decades later I view his comment from a different angle altogether because when I take seriously interbeing, the flow and relationship connecting us all, connecting us to all of matter, I realize just how vital the concept of tension of perceived opposites becomes. We are, all of us, and now more than ever before, living in a glorious experience of everything all at once, and we ARE everything all at once. A shared ‘soul of humanity’. Many lives lived, all of us connected in ways over space and time that we simply cannot fathom. We are all whirling spiraling ephemeral containers where perceived opposites play. We are the dynamic creations of others as much as we are our ‘own’ energetic creation.
‘ I am because we are. ‘
@@jennysteves Thanks, I mostly agree with your takes as they align with the modals and my understanding of spirituality. Speaking of spirituality, they have this term called ego mind, which is actually a very powerful force of nature as the ego can self image and self identify with virtually anything and any ideology, and turn it into beliefs and dogma as well. Even though IMO post modernism and moral relativism/cultural relativism is in fact a more advanced development in thinking, thinking less in binary and absolutes and more in multi perspectival points as Ken Wilbur also put it, even the moral relativists and post modernists are not immune to ego and selfishness. Do not underestimate how powerful selfishness can be, as the classic example of the USSR and rise of Russia's communism is a great example that illustrates both individual and collective ego fighting for it's utopia, yet most of the population were raised in harsh environments, had generations to deal with Mongolia and other dictators and other stage blue/red kingdoms vying for control and power in that region made the Russia people a harder and more ruthless and hard peoples. Yes it's a good thing that they did overthrew the Zars royal family that ruled over them, but that coup wasn't a peaceful transmission of power, and quickly Stalin took control, and well the rest is history.
One additional point I wanted to make is about the liberal/conservative mind. No, not talking about American politics, albeit the origins of the left/right spectrum came from the French revolution were the revolutionists were left side, and the monarchy was the right side. I'm talking about the mind type of persons and even groups that can be liberally minded or conservatively minded, and even in science they discovered that conservative minds have a higher amygdala which makes them more susceptible to fear mongering, and liberal minds have few more modes that allow them to problem solve deeply and even broadly any problems they view. Technically you could say the Aztecs were actually quite traditional/conservative minded in that they didn't want to change their human sacrificing ritual, and relatively speaking the Spanish settlers then were quite liberal minded in that they felt human sacrifice, due to Christian worldview, is immoral to do, and they were even diplomatic enough to listen to nearby tribes and their concerns with this, and formed a coalition against the Aztec empire. So in a sense at that time the Spanish settlers were more developed, despite other parts of Spain that did the Spanish inquisition and other dark events that follow Spain.
Another interesting point in history is the Apache and commanche wars, which is IMO a fascinating read, I think it deserves to be more talked about as it does highlight most of what Daniel Schmachtenberger talked about with rivalrous dynamics and conflicts over natural lands, resources, and women. Why it's interesting is that event happened prior to European settlers like the Spanish first in the south of America, later followed by other European settlers to the north and north west areas. Just very interesting series of conflicts that just snowballs just because it's an actual 3 way war and then some.
This video played while I slept. I dreamt I was present to the conversation. I woke up in the last 30 minutes and continued listening to the end. Then I started it from the beginning. These thoughts are amazingly profound.
I love Nate’s questions and vulnerability in asking for explanations and often repeating back assertions for clarity. I listen during long training runs on the trail and arrive back at my desk smarter, “fitter” and even more curious and motivated🤩 to tell these stories.
Protect, preserve and maintain nature. Be in nature and appreciate it. Super interesting discussion. Thanks Nate and Daniel.
Thank you both so much for this. ❤🙏
It is not just looks- You seem more relaxed, more comfortable speaking. It is wonderful to see! As always, this combination of thinkers leads to discussions that are deeply important for humans to listen to and understand. Thank you
A profoundly important discourse. Thank you both.
Exponentially, LIKE!!!!!
We need a like hammer button. I’m glad to have been part of this conversation.
I’ve followed Nate from the ‘early’ peak oil days - his emotional & intellectual growth over that two decades is amazing.
Best podcast yet!
Getting closer to defining the problem! Closer to solution!
To see the world as yourself is the solution. And infact the truth. How we get people to view the world this way is the problem.
Watched this a second time after a month of letting sink in. Meanwhile I also have read the paper „Development in Progress“ (where I recommend inserting the missing footnote-package, at least to avoid criticism on that). Thanks for diving into that topic. Living in Germany, I‘m often a little frustrated about not being able to share your fantastic podcasts (and Daniel’s always inspiring evaluations) with most of my social environment, due to the requirement of good English skills. As for me, the generated subtitles are a welcome help to follow the sometimes very fast conversations (and spends humorous moments on funny mistakes).
I watched this podcast in 6 sitting, so many things to unpack, great one 👍
This is my first time listening to Daniel. I’ve never heard anyone with this level of knowledge and wisdom. He is one of a kind.
Thank you, Nate, for sharing this video.
Loved this beautiful conversation! Thanks to both Daniel and Nate! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Nate, Daniel...thanks for this conversation....such wisdom..
I loved it !
Beautifully thought provoking conversation! Hearing you two for years now going at it is great - the chemistry you guys have is wonderful to see.
Also, am I the only one pausing this video to try and make out which books are standing behind Daniel? :D
This conversation is filled with words of wisdom and each part of it could be a podcast in itself. Thank you for sharing both of your insights and thoughts with us, and for explaining such complex topics with so much clarity.
Daniel spoke at the end about the importance of having a commitment not to cause harm, the study of what does, and knowing what protects against harm as cultural shifts he'd like to see.
This is the subject of my doctoral research!
It is always special for me when you two get together. Thanks for setting a good example and becoming more spiritual. Daniel even looks like a Guru now. It is very pleasing, and I pray the rest of the world will follow.
Privatize the gains and socialize the losses😮 Brilliant analyses ❤
One could also say socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
This is such an old phrase even Martin Luther king jr said it.
It was something like
Socialism for the rich
Brutal individualism for the poor
Richard Wolff said it first
Very insightful, thank you both. What I find is missing is the conclusion that if our system is and has been selecting for psychopaths as leaders, which I very much believe, the suggested path of recognition of interconnectedness and thus the necessity to care about/for everything that we are a part of, is not going to be enough to get rid of those psychopaths who are not going to give up power and their psycopathic ways just like that, at the time scale necessary for our survival. There´s got to be a rebellious force that imposes restrictions for the sake of life. This is what I generally miss in this podcast.. the recognition or at least contemplation of the role of social/class struggle.
Thank you, a great conversation! I listened to the whole thing twice, Daniel's ideas really resonate with me. Wonderful.
I had the same look on my face as you did when Daniel said yes to 100x in less than a year. It is really scary. I do appreciated these interviews Nate.
Thank you Nate Hagens & Daniel Schmachtenberger for this insightful convo.
Best Daniel/Nate discussion yet. Bravo.
I listened intrigued. Occasionally something in life changes how you have perceived the world. One of the best podcasts I have listened to
I will be sharing this. Thanks, Nate and Daniel!
I've had to watch this twice to get my head around it all! While I have come across some of the individual concepts that DS talks about this is the first time I have heard a coherent view of our current situation so clearly explained and drawing on history, research and philosophical ideas to underpin this approach. It was also something of a revelation to have some of my tentative feelings about our modern world validated in this tour de force. The task now appears to be to find like minded people and develop what this would look like in practice.
There seems to be so few people of like mind which is why watching these conversations both inspire and distress me.
Daniel and his team's work is amazing
I have been watching this conversation a little at a time over several days as a morning meditation. Everything that is being said is resonant with all I have experienced over a 70 year lifetime. I would share that I am currently reading Thomas Metzinger's remarkable, revelatory book "The Elephant and the Blind". He points to an awareness without an "epistemic self-model"; pure awareness right now of the web of life, spanning the whole Cosmos, from which our "epistemic self-model" emerges and to which it returns. This experience frees a being from the grips of Molok. If enough people could find this place in the awareness phenomenological state space and be there with others for most of the time, we would be able to forge a new way for humans that would arise from the rubble of our accelerating decay and collapse of the current world civilization.
Epic conversation. Thank you to both of you.
The deepest, most astounding, intelligent and relevant conversation I have listened to in a long time.
Along with Peter Joseph, Nate and Daniel are among the greatest thinkers of our time. Thank you for this episode!
Can't wait to watch / listen . I just went to your show notes page as well and that is amazing how you link to some of the supporting documents for each subsection - thank you. There is such a wealth of incredible information here - it's brilliant. Thank you.
It is getting very late here in Kaikoura, New Zealand.
I love listening to you guys in conversation. I align with so much that you have both said, but not all, and the differences are important - deeply so.
I want to challenge the notion that one cannot derive and ought from an is.
I think that notion is justified from a number of gross over simplifications of the complexity actually present in living systems; and the levels of sorting that evolution over deep time has actually already done, in many of the biases and systems embodied within us at multiple levels.
Science can determine, to useful degrees, why we have ideas like good, how they evolved, at multiple levels.
When one looks deeply into the evolution of that notion, then it seems to be tied, at multiple levels, into the notion of the survival of populations.
Science can tell us a lot about the sorts of systems and probabilities that deliver maximal survival probability over the longest time frames and across the greatest set of contexts.
One of the keys, is understanding that survival is maximised by cooperation in diversity (real diversity - not any level of hegemony).
I am one of those with libertarian tendencies, and I also understand that liberty requires constraints to survive. I understand that every level of complexity has sets of constraints that are required for the survival of that level of complexity. So freedom without constraint, without responsibility, necessarily self terminates; necessarily eventually destroys the sets of constraints that make it possible.
Given the stacks of complexity present in what it is to be human, the levels of uncertainty present in the sets of constraints required in any particular context, are high. There is plenty of room for cheating strategies to live in that zone of uncertainty at the margins. No set of rules can remove that uncertainty.
What is demanded of all of us, is responsibility, each to the best of our necessarily limited and fallible abilities.
The deepest causes of problems currently is the multiple levels of pursuit of profit devoid of the entirety of the systemic impacts.
When I started my software company, 38 years ago, I called it "Solution Multipliers", and that comes from the notion that all solutions have downstream consequences, and that solution stream can be simply classified into two categories, solution multipliers, that solve more problems than they create, or problem multipliers, that create more/worse problems than they solve.
We need everyone to work on solution-multipliers across as many domains and on as long a timescales as they possibly can. And all complex things have uncertainties, so there is an eternal aspect of an ongoing dance with the uncertainties and the unforeseen emergent processes and complexes that really cannot be foreseen (as distinct from those than can but agents would rather have plausible deniability of the consequences).
Agree - we need to own our agency, and the implicit consequences of our choices; each to the best of our necessarily limited and fallible abilities.
We need to be clear, the emperor (the market) - has no clothes. It really needs to be appropriately attired.
Imagine if everyone understood the concept of refactoring code to prevent reaching a state of infinite defects in the system due to complexity creep, then ruthlessly practiced refactoring their own lifestyles accordingly.
'Solutions' - this is the grand illusion. There are no solutions to our extreme ecological #overshoot predicament There are however, better (and worse) responses for socio-ecological justice in face of inevitable collapse. #JustCollapse
wow..this talk was another beautiful layer of revelation on top of the previous 5 videos with Daniel. I am always INSPIRED by Daniel's articulation and wisdom, as well as Nate's inquiry. Daniel's closing statement was PROFOUND and GROUNDING. May we return to UBUNTU ways of living and may this english language built for commerce also return to that Ubuntu way of interacting with the whole ecology. So grateful, very excited to share this one and discuss with community, as well as read the paper when it comes out.
Дякую!
Я завжди казав, що конструювання наших карт реальності, за допомогою хибної мови, створило величезні проблеми людства.
"Не буває блюзу, без рабства"
Але навіщо нам блюз? ;)
Питання в тому, як щось не-робити, і відчувати ту ж радість та насолоду життям!
В природі є "життя" та "смерть", але природа повна радості та динамічного балансу. В житті людини є "життя" і є "смерть", однак люди відкидають другу частину і ходять перелякані та фрустровані.
Потрібно деконструювати наше бачення до простих визначень біології, хімії та фізики. Необхідно навчитися бачити світ *невинним* поглядом дитини *не розрізняючим* поглядом монаха, *цілісним* поглядом мудреця і світ напевно стане кращим. :)
Great comment - the method of being and understanding you describe cuts through tons of noise generated in our everyday forums.
Wonderful comment! I love your guidelines for deconstruction. I'm stealing them! (I'd actually quote you if I could. ) 💚👋💐
@@TheFlyingBrain.
Я ні на що не претендую :)
"Тому все що створює вчений, це порядок слів, якими він пояснює свій винахід чи відкриття"
Миру, смирення та любові вам!)
Thank you Google translate for giving me a way to read this post , great idea pattern & thank you to the community of seekers
Thank _you_ for sharing your thoughts! You speak like a taoist :)
False language only reinforces our mistaken maps of reality through generations, leading us further and further astray. To get back on the right path, we need to change our language, our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing the world.
There are between 150-200 books behind Daniel.
I was naturally intrigued by some of the tiles.
So here's the list of 100 books I've been able to discern 👇
tldr; These titles reflect themes of science, philosophy, ethics, consciousness, and evolutionary biology among many other topics.
1. Egyptology - Emily Sands
2. Consciousness - Susan Blackmore
3. Spaces - John Harte
4. What If - Randall Munroe
5. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology - Robin Dunbar
6. Cosmology - Sean Carroll
7. The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
8. Theatre of the Mind - Daniel J. Siegel
9. The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker
10. The Big Picture - Sean Carroll
11. Why Evolution Is True - Jerry Coyne
12. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
13. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
14. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
15. Science and Religion - Alister McGrath
16. The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
17. Life Ascending - Nick Lane
18. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
19. The Logic of Science - Peter Godfrey-Smith
20. Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett
21. The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
22. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
23. The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
24. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
25. The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
26. The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris
27. Free Will - Sam Harris
28. The End of Faith - Sam Harris
29. Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky
30. How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker
31. The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker
32. Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
33. The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
34. The Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow
35. The Information - James Gleick
36. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate - Manjit Kumar
37. Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman
38. The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
39. The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore
40. The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins
41. The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
42. Collapse - Jared Diamond
43. The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker
44. The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt
45. The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
46. Moral Tribes - Joshua Greene
47. The Ethical Brain - Michael S. Gazzaniga
48. Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom
49. Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark
50. Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark
51. From Eternity to Here - Sean Carroll
52. The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
53. The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene
54. The Conscious Mind - David Chalmers
55. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel Dennett
56. The Expanding Circle - Peter Singer
57. Animal Liberation - Peter Singer
58. The Quest for Consciousness - Christof Koch
59. The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
60. Good and Real - Gary L. Drescher
61. The Meaning of It All - Richard Feynman
62. The Character of Physical Law - Richard Feynman
63. Why Does the World Exist? - Jim Holt
64. Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll
65. Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell
66. The Vital Question - Nick Lane
67. The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley
68. Why Buddhism Is True - Robert Wright
69. Waking Up - Sam Harris
70. The Moral Animal - Robert Wright
71. The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
72. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
73. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
74. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari
75. The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch
76. How to Create a Mind - Ray Kurzweil
77. The Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins
78. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
79. The Nature of Space and Time - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose
80. Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
81. Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows
82. The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard Feynman
83. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Richard Feynman
84. The Demon in the Machine - Paul Davies
85. The Singularity Is Near - Ray Kurzweil
86. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
87. The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
88. Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
89. The Emerging Mind - Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
90. The Philosophy of Science - Samir Okasha
91. The Ego Tunnel - Thomas Metzinger
92. The User Illusion - Tor Nørretranders
93. Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
94. The Accidental Universe - Alan Lightman
95. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst - Robert Sapolsky
96. The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menand
97. The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan
98. I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter
99. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
100. The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli
Happy reading ✨
@@thejanskora wow! Herculean task. Nice job. 👍
WOW. What an ending. Thank you for the whole conversation, but I have to say I really love it when Daniel speaks so poignantly from the heart. Bravo.
3 hours of wisdom and possible path
Incredible conversation. I'm really sitting with the ideas from this. Thank you to you both (and to your larger teams! You are because they are ;)
This was a really great conversation, its so nice hearing someone able to articulate this. I've been traveling down this path of interconectedness with nature and it has fundamentally shifted the way I see the world and human civilization.
I have listened to Daniel now for years and to Nate at least a couple of years as well. They are great thinkers and while it's somewhat meaningless to say I agree on most of what they say (since I'm barely an expert on most of what they talk about)--I absolutely love THE WAY they think and approach topics.
This just as a pre-face to what follows, which may sound like criticism--but isn't really meant that way:
When it comes to the question of what to do and what to pursue AS AN INDIVIDUAL in the predicament that we are in, I feel there is an elephant in the room that isn't being discussed and that makes any recommendations by Nate, Daniel, or any people with similar viewpoints and similar history, harder to fully take serious:
It seems to me that the fact that they can even think about these larger issues and think about the larger implications of this "system" and way of living (that most of us are caught within) is due to the fact that FIRST they had already WON (to some extent) at playing the game of this current system.
It takes time, freedom and resources to do what they do (and in fact to even be able to have the time to THINK). It seems to me that both are at a stage in "the game" where they do not have to devote the majority of their time to simply work for a salary or income. They have accumulated enough "optionality tokens" to be able to spend the rest of their lives pondering the deeper questions of life.
(Yes, I assume they both are making life choices that somewhat limit their energy-footprint and therefore their cost of living, but I'd be willing to bet that their net worth is significantly above the median, even among the US population, and likely such that it allows complete retirement)
Now, it is likely that when they accumulated their optionality tokens, they did so by doing things that actually stand in stark contrast to what they are now trying to achieve or wake people up to. Nate was, I believe in the Wall Street world, and Daniel in the Tech world (I know less about Daniel's history). Both, would involve the psychopathy of corporate charters--as Daniel described it--so even in the most ideal situation (if they were very conscious in their own decisions) they would have created what they now consider very destructive externalities, simply through their action of accumulating enough "optionality tokens" in the way that this system allows for.
I do not blame them for it, and in fact I think it is the only way to get to become a person who can think the way they do--and we NEED those thinkers.
But this brings up the problem: For the vast majority of us, who are not yet in that position, if we wanted to follow in their footsteps, it would mean we would FIRST have to gain that type of material and personal freedom for ourselves as well. But that would again mean that we would consciously hurt the very metrics that we later want to be able to improve.
The other option would be to limit ourselves to activities that align completely with the ideals presented here, but that would preclude us from devoting much time to the project (as most time would need to be devoted to do work that is not highly valued in our system--and even then: would it have fewer destructive externalities or would it just shift who benefits from these externalities from us to others, who do not care about such things?) and it would also tremendously limit the power we would have to enact change or even disseminate our ideas.
If we follow their example in a "do what they do" kind of way, we would therefore FIRST work on accumulating enough "optionality tokens" to be able to live and think freely. If, on the other hand it's more about "do what they say, not do as they do", then what exactly?
Really well put, and I think you’re correct. I’m 50, nowhere near as educated or intelligent as these two gentlemen but have found myself thinking on exactly the lines this discussion is taking now that I’m in a secure, relatively well paid management role and the frantic fight for some financial security is behind me. I’ve also just had to take an extended break specifically because these ideas have stirred something in me akin to guilt or regret which quickly morphed into burnout and disillusionment and finally some sort of mental breaking point. My privilege has meant I’ve been able to take this break and keep my job, but now I’m returning to it I’m thinking through how to balance what I’ve leaned with what I must do to finish off the final decade or so of my career, because as soon as I can get out of the system and spend time thinking about and hopefully acting on the topics discussed in this discussion, I most certainly will.
You’re spot on, to even entertain these ideas, you need the space to dive deeply within yourself and getting that time by definition means you’ve got to negatively impact the world first, and this is why the task of implementing any of the learnings on a macro scale is going to be extremely difficult, but not impossible. We must try, but it will take such a massive shift of momentum that achieving any of it before we destroy our biosphere and each other’s mental health first seems very unlikely.
@@mattsharpey361 Yeah. I mean, the fact that both the producers & the audience of this (we're part of it) relies entirely on the big-tech sector for this podcast to even exist as a functional concept feels almost antithetical to its own purpose, and yet at the same time, it kind of doesn't.
I appreciate how Daniel is at once decisive in his thinking while also remaining open to new ideas... the discussion at the end really shows that he's internalized Iain McGilchrist's work (The Matter with Things) about needing to shift the way in which we pay attention ...and how that represents a real shift in how we exist. I find this constellation of thinkers Daniel with John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Bernardo Kastrup, Zak Stein as really pushing the envelope on how we start to move beyond our current metacrisis morass towards the "next thing." I would like to see Daniel take up a point by point commentary/critique on the work of William Ophuls.. and Nassim Taleb's work too. Would be very interesting. I've been reading Immoderate Greatness...and seems like there are convergences and divergences in perspectives ...
Hello there to you Nate and to your guest, Daniel Schmachtenberger. I am so glad and grateful to see such an episode. Again. I heard Daniel saying at some point that the viewers may also have some questions and I do for quite some time 🙂.
1. Indians vs Europeans aka Humans vs Aliens. This one has been addressed - it is a coordination problem on the shoulders of the non-beligerant to sanction and prevent the predator. However I think it could use a lot more elaboration. Let’s take for reference the Indian tribes from North America at the point of European conquest. Let’s assume that all things were mostly well and *wisely* balanced, and multipolar traps, arms race, etc halted because of this wisdom. Then the Europeans hit. Shouldn’t the Indians have insisted on warfare advancement “just in case”?. How about us today in face of an alien invasion of unknown probability? Isn't this the way of evolution: to head towards arms race because of the perpetual unknown? How can we “postulate” a stop? (Also, what happens to the argument if we also ignore the fact that if we don’t coordinate to stop growing like cancer we’ll perish before any such improbable alien invasion…)
2. True progress/ 3rd order effects: technology that is really beneficial after 3rd order effects analysis. Can you please give some examples of technologies that pass the 3rd order efect analysis? Because this requirement seems to block us in analysis paralysis or combinatoric explosion. Some examples of technologies that qualify would improve the spirits of such a hard pursuit for everybody I think.
3. Betterment of All of life. I heard this many times and it is beautiful in its simplicity but it does not seem to describe the world for me… There are always some resource limitation and conflict. Maybe some kind of softer phrasing is required, like the good of all life if possible, calculating with a greater weight on me, us, and life simbiotic to me/us. There is life in almost direct hostility to us and our “allies”, like some kind of anaerobic, methane, ammonia, acid, etc based bacteria that is ok in the current web of life only if very little of… I am confused here between a background of generalized symbiosis and one of generalized competition I guess. But **all** of life seems like an impossible claim - something got to give. Am I trapped in a zero-ish sum game?
Hope this long comment makes sense and that you guys have time to address what you think is important of it.
Thank you for simply being!
Ten minutes in, and it is clear that Daniel continues to bring reality into focus. I will comment again on the dualistic yet important distinction between syntropic and entropic flow - the former being the coming together of matter, energy and information into more meaningful, cooperative and complex forms (aka living things and the biosphere at large), and the latter being the breaking apart or degradation of those forms through wielding power and control (aka most of humanity's technology and consumption). This distinction is key to answering "What is progress?" because the type of progress matters. Syntropic progress is seen in individual growth and development, and in the ecosystem regeneration with succession starting from pioneer stage and ending in climax stage (the overall system develops to be more resilient, intelligent and beautiful). Advances in technology, weaponry and consumtion are forms of Entropic progress (more degradation of the overall system).
Now, it is important to recognise that our planet does need entropic processes to a degree needed to recycle carbon and other nutrients. When photosynthetic algae and plants (primary producers) dominated the planet, before the Cambrian explosion in animals (who are consumers with entropic drives), CO2 in the atmosphere was depleted, repeatedly plunging the planet into catacysmic "snowball Earth" states lasting many milions of years. The planetary role of animals ("beasts") is to consume plant matter, excrete those nutrients back into the soil, and exhaling CO2 back into the air, which has stabilized the planet's atmosphere (which regulates the temperature/climate). But animals only consumed in order to stay alive, and populations were kept in check by availability of food and other feedbacks.
With gradual development of our capacity for dexterity, communication and intelligence, humans gradually broke free from these limits, and into a new realm of learning, cooperation, power, control, and technology. Unfortunately, we brought the basic drives and mindset of the other animals with us, and have become consumers with no natural limits ("The Beast"). Consumption by our species has become exponential, and nearly all of it is unnecessary, excessive, and with far more entropic impacts than other animals. Not only have we doubled atmospheric CO2, warming the planet and creating a climate catastrophe, but our clever industrialists have been poisoning water toxic minerals and with novel molecules that disrupt the basic functions of living things. Some of these are called "forever chemicals" because they can't be metabolized.
As Daniel points out, this unrestrained animalistic consumption (entropic progress) is at the root of the Metacrisis, and the first two of its dystopian attractors (totalitarian power and control, and societal collapse into barbarism). The Holy Grail of the blessed Third attractor will require broad human advancement in the direction of Syntropic progress. To a large extent, this will mean learning to restrain our capacity for entropic power and control. Great point about the Sabbath, which for Jews binds the use of technology and power-seeking one day a week, and the Potlatch. There will be a circumscribed role for concentrated power and control, as there is in all healthy living systems. Within greater Syntropic flows, more modest degrees of entropic flow are required, but even for these, most will occur "naturally".
Syntropic advance entails material, cognitive-perceptual and spiritual shift away from industrialized civilization based on power, control, precision and consumption. There are numerous examples of individual people and whole cultures based syntropic values and awareness. As Daniel points out, most of these are cultures who have learned how to live sustainably and "harmoniously" with the syntropic flows of Nature in various regions around the planet. Generally, they have done so with remarkable degrees of liberty, health, happiness, and ethical conduct, and with little need for coercive power and control.
Power and control is addictive, and is at the root of the "dopamine economy" as Nate calls it. I would suggest clarification this is the "bestial dopamine economy", meaning the release of dopamine in response to certain instinctive entropic triggers, such as consumption, luxury, competition and social dominance. But there are cognitive and social ways to modify this by expanding our awareness of, and loving connection to, all the many beautiful inhabitants of our living planet. Little of this entails trying to change what is outside of us, rather it requires learning to stop doing things and opening our awareness to all those who are already flowing around us, and chosing to relate to them with love and respect.
Knowing what we know about the nature of reality on our miraculous and beautiful planet, and our place in it, the only dignified path ahead of us is to to deeply savour the joy and the pride in being true human beings for as long as we are able.
Individualism is inherently entropic, because it narrows the boundary of optimization to the smallest possible unit or agent, and externalizes everything. Conversely. Death and decay are not entropic, because their nutrient flow is the seed of rebirth and creation. Life, through birth and decay are able to overcome entropy, by concentrating energy and re-cycling it syntropically, as part of a living system. That’s why markets and economies are entropic, and feed off life parasitically, without finding a symbiosis. What i’m saying is that individualism and competition are the root of our predicament, embedded as they are in culture and law coercively enforce entropic dynamics on syntropic agents. This only became politically toxic in the 20th century, because of scale, whereby harsh attempts to curb individual competition through collectivization resulted in the dominance of competitive individualism globally. So now we scale-down, reorganize cooperatively, or face certain self-imposed terminalism.
Well said!
"There will be a circumscribed role for concentrated power and control, as there is in all healthy living systems."
I don't think that's right. There are eusocial hymenoptera (many ant, wasp and bee species) and mycorrhizal fungi, some of the most successful species on this planet! I think that's where we should look for inspiration. There are also human groups who practice the avoidance of concentrated power and control. The Quakers are a great example from our own culture. So it _is_ possible. The question is whether it's possible at scale. Or rather, whether scaling up what works at small scale is a good idea. I don't think it is.
Those that live "harmoniously … with little need for coercive power and control" do so because they remain small. Small is beautiful! Big soon becomes monstrous. I therefore think any solution that's applied at a large scale will inevitably fail, however well intentioned, because its size alone will make it a suitable habitat for power, bringing out the worst in us.
"It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."
- Frank Herbert
I think a better solution would be to create a healthy habitat where concentrated power cannot thrive. I think it would have to be from the ground up rather than prescribed by a mastermind (sorry, Daniel), evolutionary rather than revolutionary, cultural rather than political, distributed rather than centralized. In other words, more in tune with nature itself. Try to go against the flow of nature and you will have a hard time.
@@ximono Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree there needs to be a shift towards decentralizing, spreading, sharing and renouncing concentrated ability to control others through the use of coercive power (technology, violence). I also agree with your vision that development of a sustainable society may have to happen from the gound-up, starting small and growing gradually and "organically". This is the pattern for the emergence of nearly all multicellular life forms, starting with a single cell and gradually growing and expanding outwards based on intimate, local, neighborly connections with younger generations of cells over time. But there is one possible exception to this general pattern, the somewhat miraculous and rapid emergence of a new life form by metamorphosis. This happens with many flying insects, like when a hungry, hungry consumer caterpillar (larva) transforms into new forms with new functions, like the miraculous ability to fly, feeding on nectar, pollenating plants, mating, and reproducing. In this case, there is a re-organization of the existing organism, guided from a hungry consumer into the new "higher" form by the latent intelligence of "imaginal disc" cells. in the case of the entropic anthropocene, perhaps sources of wisdom, like Daniel and his teachers, could serve such a function. The advantage of societal metamorphosis would be potential to avoid total collapse (mass death) and then having to slowly start over from scratch. Even if such a transformative "Great Awakening" shift of humanity's collective values and awareness is possible at scale, the likelihood does seem vanishingly small these days. If anything, we seem to be going in the wrong directions. Still, what better alternative is there? I don't think societal size itself is the problem. Population size is a problem if we continue to orient ourseves to predation, consumption and comfort, but large scale can become an advantage if our collective values are re-oriented (expanded, elevated, deepened?) toward learning to nurture, cooperate and harmonize with our wonderous and sacred living planet Earth. This re-orientation in our shared values from entropic consumption to syntropic co-creation could guide the necessary reorganization in the structure and function of localized cultures and humanity at large - in other words, a metamorphosis may be possible.
@@truepatriot6388 Thank you too for sharing your thoughts!
I love the idea of metamorphosis. It's one of life's most wonderful miracles. I would love to see it happen to our civilization, even humanity as a whole. But I think it's more likely to happen at the local end of the scale than the global. Just that would be a wonderful thing though. All movements start small.
Regarding size, I think it's a question of perspective. A distributed* network of local communities may seem small when standing at ground level, but as you zoom out you may see that "it" inhabits a vast area, much like fungal colonies. But what is "it"? Where do you draw the boundaries? Are there any boundaries? It's all about perspective.
Such a size itself may not be a problem, as long as "it" doesn't overreach. Once there's unchecked growth or the "resource extraction" mindset kicks in, there will be problems. The footprint of the organism has to remain within the natural limits, it has to be in balance with all the other species it shares the ecosystem with. (There's no "it" though, I'm using our culture's language and mental model here.)
I don't believe a top-down system of control is the right answer, that's the centralized/authoritarian approach. A distributed system requires a bottom-up solution, with processes similar to those of the native people of the PNW that Daniel mentioned. Cultural, spiritual, philosophical - some form of grounding of certain "sacred" principles. These "growth inhibitors" will have to be first nature to people, innate/intrinsic/essential. There also has to be processes for preventing groups or individuals from deviating too far from those principles, whenever someone starts overreaching.
This won't come about easy, but if it does, I think it's more likely to succeed than the top-down approach. I believe _something like this_ will be necessary for our long-term survival.
*) I prefer distributed to decentralized. Decentralized is still "centralized", in that it has multiple designated centers, some possibly larger than others. To avoid accumulation of power, and for resiliency, I prefer distributed and federated. It may seem chaotic, but so does nature. It's incredibly adaptable and fault-tolerant.
The main problem is this moral relativism that's snuck into these talks. It's fine to study conquers like Genghis Khan and Mongolia empire or even the Romans and their empire, especially what they did to Carthage, but that's par for the course. Some cultures just are not capable of defending themselves due to technological differences, geography, biosphere and other factors involved. For example when the Spanish conquistadors arrived with their settlers in South America, and made contact with the Aztecs, there's such a huge difference in culture, language, and way of life that in their Spanish Catholic worldview the Aztec empire and the practice of live human sacrificing was untenable to the Christians then. Unfortunately the Aztecs refused to change, and the Spanish, along with some tribes nearby that were victims of the Aztecs banded together in a coalition against the Aztec empire, which finally destroyed their empire. It's important to realize that not all European conquest and colonialism is all bad or all evil, those days the technological expansion was actually, ultimately good in the big picture of things. In those time periods empires, imperialism, civilization, colonialism, all before the idea of a nation and country mind you, all was predominantly stage blue to stage red in values. They have a wholly different outlook and worldview from modernity today, a whole order of difference then. Also, IMO it's either at that age we spread Christendom, or that Islam spreads further than Christendom, and we do have in history the massive slave trade that existed within that religion and the practice of castrating black slaves that is far more frequent in the caliphate Islam than in Christianity in comparison, so...
I base my comment on the following modals: Spiral Dynamics stages of development(Don Beck), cognitive and moral developmental modals, personality types/traits(Myers Briggs modal and the Big Five Traits modal), 9 stages of ego development(Jane Loevinger), Architypes(Carl Jung), Integral Theory(Ken Wilbur), and others about ideological beliefs indoctrinated by culture/societal programming, self biases and preferences, cognitive biases, and information ecology one consumes.
Thankyou both for sharing such deep wisdom. It is as if you pulled together all the scattered strands of ideas, concepts and understandings that have come to me over half a lifetime, expanded each one and collated them into a cohesive narrative structure and then reflected it all back to me clear as day. Thankyou!
First time I've heard of Daniel and first time I've listened to this podcast.
What a fantastic conversation.
I'm going to think further on the point raised about the use of nouns in English.
One of the best videos you've done yet - THANK YOU. Please update us when the paper is out.
I look forward to part 2!
I am hearing ideas from In the Absence of the Sacred (Jerry Mander) and A Language Older than Words and The Culture of Make Believe (Derrick Jensen) in this discussion - these are great books to read on these same topics.
These are my favourite talks I have so much to say on these subjects. It's just great to know that some other people think like this.
YES! A new Schmachtenberger/Hagens drop! Love this! AND a new paper from Consilience? Ohhhhh heeeeelllllll yeaaaaahhhhhhh!!! Thank you both so much for this. I feel like we're closing in on an emerging solution. More and more people are talking about these issues and of course I'm telling everyone I know about this stuff. Go listen to these folks! It will change you for the better! LOVE YOU BOTH!!
On the one hand it is great to know where we are and how we arrived here. On the other hand, the solution seems a thousand year change. Hopefully humanity makes it someday, but I cry for our children and grandchildren. We need to have new truths on stone tablets for future generations.
Amen. Stone tablets, not touchscreen tablets. All this invaluable insight and wisdom may be gone in an instant when only stored in digital bits.
Another [new level] amazing conversation. Thank you Nate and Daniel, we're all indebted to you for such mind-opening analysis; all makes so much good sense.... now that you've said it.
I resonate so deeply with Daniel's thoughts and presentations .
What a beautiful thinker he is . .
Thank you both !!!
I am very appreciative of these conversations
Everything he said gives me deep feelings of truthfulness and yet I’ve been a part of the problem in myriad ways about 50 times since I started watching this.
Yet by watching it, you are also part of the solution. That's what matters.
So many parallels between this conversation and Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism is True". Both take a look at how natural selection brought us to where we are (albeit from different angles) and how mindfulness can help us short-circuit our evolved wiring to bring greater wisdom and a clearer perspective back into the fold -- first on an individual level and eventually (hopefully) on a cultural one. As Daniel quotes, "I am because we are." We, all of us, not just every person, but every thing on this planet, are one. We're made of the same stuff. We must learn to see the lack of distinction between ourselves and everything else. The ancients deduced it; indigenous cultures understood it; but we, with our access to so much exosomatic energy -- and all that entails -- have forgotten.
This is a profoundly good, useful, and enlightening discussion that must be broadcast to every television in the world once day, everyday, until a key message sinks in: maintain the miracle over the illusion of progress (environmental-turned-ecological economist here). Let us stop this “progress”.
I haven't quite finished this, yet but there is a beautiful human moment at 2 hours 58 minutes in where Nate asks a series of questions to try and narrow things down and Daniel says' Yes, this is another open loop'. Nate laughs as if to say 'I knew it but was trying to create a closed loop!
Thank you, both.
This is a treasure of multiple wisdoms. Thanks so much for making the PDF available.
Such a nuanced, balanced conversation. Really appreciate your efforts, thank you for putting this out!
This dialogue had my full attention. Thank you for addressing what i perceive to be high priority subject matter.
What a great episode!
Time for Action. And first being, we need to propagate Daniel to the masses. Increase and accumulate minds like him.
Only then, can we expect some change. I am doing my part.
Excellent interview with Daniel. Everyone who can follow this intelligent discourse needs to hear this. Unfortunately that leaves out most political leaders.
Political "leaders" are often more followers - they adopt policies that will appeal to voters, in order to achieve or retain political power. In other words, they follow the crowd rather than lead it.
Leaves out most people, unfortunately.
I listen to Daniel speak and his points seem so obvious, which leaves me wondering how we let ourselves go into self-destructive behavior without realizing the effects it was having???
I see Daniel featured here, and I'm in my seat and ready, tail wagging. These thorough, long-form, deep discussions of context are what I live for. Thx to all! 💚🌄🙏
Thank you both. The conversation has fed my soul. Knowing all I don't know makes me feel wiser. The knowledge of my truths grows, but my knowledge of myself seems limitless in its boundaries. My potential to feel is the awe relished anew, each time I find the silence within. I enjoy the intellect displayed immensely, but also know the path of a different kind of intellect and feel these two souls also know that path, connecting everything. My morphic resonance sends a hug to you both. Namaste 🙏
I Learned so much from this guy.. Nobody delves into the Meta crisis rhetoric better than Dan S.
“Imagination is the most powerful force we have to conceive a better world. Art is the most accessible tool for actualizing that world.” - Nicole Mitchell Gantt, experimental flutist & author. As explored in this podcast, we have a crisis of imagination. We’ve never experienced & can’t even imagine what it’s like to commune fully with nature, plants & animals, feel whole inside & out, live in a community that both nurtures us & accepts us unconditionally. We’ve forgotten who we are. I find tremendous value in taking a step out of the problem and imagining a world with permanent solutions to our biggest problems. I really appreciated this podcast (especially challenging the narratives we’ve been told about pre-historic life) but was hoping for a deep dive into better world with concrete solutions🤞😇. I do, however, appreciate how hard that is since we have almost nothing to go on for what that looks like🌞🤝🌞🤝🌞
Excellent content...thank you..
Always worthwhile listening to Daniel. Always.
The phrase, "effective achieving" stuck out to me in regard to how the current Ai accelerationist camp is using Peter Singer's Effective Altruism as an argument for accelerating Ai. Which from my pov, is the type of naïve progress Daniel is speaking about.
Effective altruim is such a ridiculous concept.
These people aren't effective at anything altruistic.
They are just effective at making money and want a philosophy to keep their souls from rotting
@@Kqiros4447 they have about as much compassion for "us" as those animals condemned to entire lives of suffering in factory farms...
Which is to say, NONE
What a great sane perspective on the nature of future progress, I'm definitely stealing all of that for the Pillars of Protopia project that I'm currently working on.
You got subscribed, Daniel is outstanding astonished
State of the Art! 🎭 Thanks for a wonderful lecture. Way back in the 1960s-70s when I was a teenager, Intentional communities were an option for people that were trending that way.
'Kibbutz' they are called in Israel.🌌
Daniel has incredibly deep wisdom . Thanks for setting the truth free❤
I have a perspective that I feel can add to this in a way that demonstrates simple ways to quickly transform our wayward path to one that is aligned with our true being. It starts with very simple reengineering the electoral system from bottom up rather than top down ❤
Loved his explanation of the child and the tree. Good candidate for a short.
Thank you again for a beautiful conversation. It has opened many doors. A question I would like to propose is care. Both its creation and its pitfalls. Connection without ego defined. How the seemingly randomness of nature's life and death cycle equates with humanitys ability to care and whether this can be a fortifying of care rather than an end of care as if we did not have a energy that feeds back into nature's cycle. The ecology of care is in more simple terms for me and my question. Inspired, of course, by your 5 way conversation on communication. Honouring the light in us all.
I am reminded of an old Gahan Wilson cartoon : a glazed-eyed, camouflage-clad, bandoliered combatant stands atop a smoking rubble pile amidst a field of utter carnage and devastation. The caption reads "I think I won!". Nate and Daniel's conversation is all about that type of self-delusion and hubris. Humanity is foolishly and needlessly its own worst enemy.
Excellent interview. Thanks 🙏🏽
deep
Relevant and timely insights -