Synopsis:

The first DarkHorse podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Video  Transcript:

[0:00:00] [Intro music]

[0:00:03] Bret: Hey folks. Welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast. I am very pleased today to be sitting with my good friend Daniel Schmachtenberger, who is the founder of The Consilience Project. There’s a lot more that I could say about you Daniel, but I think we will leave it at that for now. People can look up your bio if they want to do so.

[0:00:22] I should probably start by telling people that when I say that you are my good friend, I really mean that. You and I are good friends, although to be honest we haven’t spent all that much time together. This is one of those cases where you meet somebody, somebody who has started from a very different place, and you discover that you have all kinds of thought processes that have reached similar conclusions, and every discussion is fascinating. The more I learn about what you think, the more I realize I’ve got a lot to learn from you and that there is essentially infinite ground to be covered. So welcome Daniel.

[0:00:57] Daniel: Thank you, Bret. It’s really good to be here. Yeah, I feel the same way. We were introduced by our friend Jordan Hall, and we’ve never had a conversation where I didn’t learn something and where I didn’t appreciate the good faith way that you showed up when we had a disagreement to talk through, which is always fun.

[0:01:17] Bret: It is always fun, and I must say I did a little bit of poking around, seeing recent interviews you’ve done, but I deliberately did not overly study for this. My sense is that the audience will get a great deal out of hearing you and me go back and forth, and finding out what we agree on, where we disagree. And maybe most tellingly, there’s a phenomenon in which anybody who has learned to think more or less independently tends to have their own language for things, their own set of examples that they use to explain things that recur over and over again.

[0:01:53] And so in order to have high quality conversations, there is this period in which you’re effectively teaching the other person how you phrase things and seeing those things line up is great. And in the rare case where they don’t line up, it’s even better because you know there’s something to be learned one way or the other. So I’m hoping that will emerge here.

[0:02:15] Daniel: I’m looking forward to it.

[0:02:16] Bret: All right, good. So let’s start here: when I say that you and I come from different starting points, I mean to imply something in particular. You, as I understand it, were homeschooled and as you have described it, that was actually closer to what most people would probably refer to as unschooling. Somehow this did not mess up your motivational structures. Your parents were alert about what they were doing. And so you ended up pursuing what you wanted to pursue, and you did not get in your own way. And lo and behold, you end up a wickedly smart, independent, first-principles thinker.

[0:03:04] Now that is not my story at all. My story is I went to school and it didn’t work. I had something that most people would call a learning disability and it got in the way of school functioning for me, and more often than not I got dumb-tracked. And basically that complete failure of school to reach me accidentally worked like some kind of unschooling I would say. And so there are maybe many paths, I don’t know, but I’d be curious: for people who have traveled some road to the land of high-quality, independent thought, what can they expect the experience to be like when they arrive there?

[0:03:50] Daniel: The experience of high-quality, independent thought?

[0:03:54] Bret: Yes. If you imagine that, well it would be lovely to think independently and to do so well, and the world is going to be a paradise if you start doing that because of course that’s a very desirable thing to do and people will appreciate it, you’re going to be surprised. That’s not necessarily what happens when you arrive there and certain experiences show up all over the place. And without telling you what my experiences might have been, I’m curious as to what you might have encountered and whether or not those things will be similar.

[0:04:24] Daniel: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think most people will experience a higher degree of uncertainty than people that are part of any camp that has figured most things out and they can cognitively offload to whoever the authorities or the general group consensus is. And certainty is certainly comfortable in a particular way. And if you’re really thinking well about what is my basis for what I believe? what is the epistemic grounding? what’s the basis of my confidence margin? And you really think about your confidence basis clearly, as you try to find more information to deepen the topic, the known-unknowns expand faster, at least at a second order, to what the known-knowns do. And so you keep being aware of more stuff that you don’t know, that you know is relevant and pertains to the situation.

[0:05:27] So there’s a complexification of thought, there’s an increase in uncertainty, hopefully there’s an emotional development, and kind of a psychological development where there’s an increased comfort with uncertainty so that you can actually be honest and not defect on your own sensemaking into premature certainty that creates confirmation bias. And I think that’s why one of the reasons you used the term independent—there is a certain aloneness of not having a whole camp of people that think very similarly. I don’t find that to be a painful thing, but it’s a thing.

[0:06:12] Bret: It’s actually, in its own way it’s freeing because the fact is if you follow logic to natural conclusions you’ll end up saying a lot of things that are alarming or discordant with the conventional wisdom. And the world neatly divides into people who will be so enraged or thrown by what you’re saying that they disappear or maybe they become antagonists at a distance, and the people who have a similar experience and therefore aren’t thrown by the fact that you’re saying things that are out of phase. And so editing the world down to those who are comfortable with what they don’t know, who are interested in following things where they lead, irrespective of who that elevates and who it hobbles, those people are interesting people to hang out with. And so yes, the alienation may be a blessing in disguise in some ways.

[0:07:20] Daniel: There’s two other thoughts that came up as you were just talking. One is, I wouldn’t call myself an independent thinker. I’m being particular about the semantic of the word independent. I wouldn’t call anyone an independent thinker because I think in words invented by other people, I think in concepts invented and discovered by other people. I don’t necessarily have a specific school of orthodoxy from which I take an entire worldview, but almost every idea that I believe in, I did not discover.

[0:07:54] And so I think that’s a very important concept because I think the ideas we’re going to discuss today regarding democracy and open society have to do with the relationship between an individual and a collective. And I think the idea of an individual is fundamentally a misnomer. Without everybody else I wouldn’t be who I am, and I wouldn’t think the way I think, I wouldn’t think in the language I do, I wouldn’t have access to the knowledge that came from the Hubble Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider and so many things like that. So I can say that there is a certain ultimate authority of what I choose to feel that I believe in and trust that has an internal locus of control. But the information coming from without and my own internal processing of it are part of the same system.

[0:08:51] Bret: So this is a perfect example of what I was suggesting up front, where two people who do whatever we’re going to call this will have their own separate glossaries. So if I can translate what you’ve just said: I, Daniel Schmachtenberger, am not an independent thinker because such a thing is inconceivable in human form. And I totally agree with that. The fact is, not only are you interwoven with all sorts of humans who are responsible for conveying to you in one way or another conclusions that you couldn’t possibly check, these are thoughts that would be familiar to Descartes for example, but you are also building from the entirety of cumulative human culture. All of the tools with which you can think are, almost all of them are too ancient to even know where their rudiments originated.

[0:09:47] So anyway, I don’t disagree with any of that. So to me, I would say there is such a thing as an independent thinker and in your schema it has to do with whether or not they are thinking a la carte. That is to say, using that set of tools that is most effective irrespective of the fact that those tools don’t all come from one tradition. And you would say there is no independent thought because a la carte is the most you can do, or something like that.

[0:10:15] Daniel: I might say that I like a term like interdependent better because it doesn’t mean that there isn’t an individual involved, but it means that the individual without everyone else is also not a thing. And so the recognition that sovereignty and individuality is a thing, and it is conditioned by, affected by, and affecting other groups of people, are both necessary in the Hegelian synthesis to understand what is the nature of a human? Are they fundamentally individual and then groups emerge? Are they fundamentally tribal and they’re formed by the tribe? And it’s very much both, and the kind of recursive process between them.

[0:10:54] Bret: Hundred percent. In fact I once wrote something I called the Declaration of Interdependence. It was a sort of proto-Game B attempt to define what the rules of a functional society would be like. And I also frequently say that the individual is more an illusion than it is real. And what I describe is that an individual is a level of understanding that evolution has focused us on because historically it has been sort of the limit of that where we might have some useful control. Evolution might ultimately care about whether or not you are successful, your genes are still around a hundred generations from now. But your focus on a hundred generations from now is unlikely to have any useful impact whatsoever. Whereas your focus on your life and your children is likely to be useful.

[0:11:56] So we have been delivered a kind of temporal myopia in order to keep us focused on that which could be productive for an ancestor, but of course we are now living in an era in which we can have dramatic impacts on the distant future. In fact you and I are both quite focused on the strong possibility that our foolishness in the present will result in the end of our lineage. And that is something that evolution, were it capable of upgrading, would certainly have us concerned about because the hazard is very real and our tendency not to think about it is a big part of the danger.

[0:12:41] Daniel: I think temporal myopia and the collective action, collective coordination problem is a good way to describe all of the problems we face, or one of the generator functions of all the problems we face: that you have a bunch of game-theoretic situations where each agent within their own agency, pursuing the choice that makes most rational sense to them, pursues local optimums where the collective body of that drives global minimums. But if anyone tries to orient towards the longer-term global maximum, they just lose in the short term. That’s an arms race, that’s a tragedy of the commons.

[0:13:17] And so how do we reorient the game theory outside of those multi-polar traps, I would say is one of our underlying questions. That when the biggest harm we could cause was mediated by stone tools or bronze tools or iron tools or even industrial tools, we didn’t have to cause it immediately because the extent of harm was limited in scope. When it is mediated by fully globalized exponential tech running up against planetary boundaries with many different kinds of catastrophe weapons held by many different agents, we actually have to solve the problem.

[0:13:52] Bret: Yeah, I of course agree completely with this as well. That effectively, maybe it really is every single important problem is a collective action problem of one kind or another. We’ve got races to the bottom, we’ve got tragedies of the commons, we’ve got these things intermingled. But once you start to see that, on the one hand you could take from it a kind of reason for despair because these are not easy problems to solve.

[0:14:23] On the other hand, the discovery that effectively it’s not a thousand distinct problems, it’s a thousand variations on one theme, and that that theme is solvable. In fact we have for example Elinor Ostrom’s work, which points to the fact that evolution itself has solved these problems many times, that that is hopeful. So I don’t know where you are in terms of how hopeful you find yourself about humanity’s future, but I’m quite certain that you and I will align on the idea that, yes, if we could focus on the problem as it was, it’s more tractable than many people think it is.

[0:15:09] Daniel: Yeah, I mean you mention hopefulness. You mention a bunch of good things there, that rather than a bunch of separate problems you have a few problems with lots of expressions. This was a big chunk of the kind of work I engaged in, with a number of people you were part of, looking at: when we inventory across all of the catastrophic and existential risks, ones involving AI and problems with biotech and other kinds of exponential tech and environmental-mediated issues and things that escalate to large scale war, is there anything in terms of the patterns of human behavior that they have in common?

[00:15:50] And so this kind of race to the bottom, collective coordination thing is one way of looking at that. But there’s a few ways of looking at what we’d call the generator functions of catastrophic risk. And it really is simplifying if you can say, are there categorical solutions to those underlying generator functions? They’re hard, right? They’re hard.

[0:16:12] Now when you talk about hopefulness, I notice that the way that I relate to the optimism/pessimism thing is there’s an optimism which is almost like a choice. To say, I’m going to have optimism that there is a solution space worth investigating, even if I don’t know what it is, and if I’m wrong, it’s the right side to be wrong on. As opposed to, there was a solution and I didn’t look for it. And then I’m going to have pessimism about my own solutions. So I’m going to try to red team my solutions so that I can find out how they’re going to fail before finding out how they fail the hard way in the world. But then not be devastated by the fact that that solution wasn’t it and keep trying. And I think that’s kind of how the committedly inventive, innovative principle works.

[0:17:01] Bret: So again, we could do almost a one-to-one mapping of your schema onto mine. I do this in terms of prototyping rather than red teaming and discovering it’s wrong. It amounts to the same thing. When you say actually it’s hard, you and I would have to define two different kinds of hard probably. There is hard to make function, to stabilize, and there’s hard to figure out what the solution is. And those are distinct.

[0:17:31] We might find elements of both of them here, but let me just give a, maybe it’s the canonical example of a solution to a game theory problem that everyone will recognize: I divide, you choose. It’s the perfect solution to an obvious problem of choice and selfishness. If there is cake and I know that you’re going to get your choice and that you are incentivized to pick the larger piece, then I am incentivized to get the cut as even as possible. And the point is, it neutralizes the concern. So we are looking for solutions of that nature.

[0:18:15] Now I don’t think they are all that hard to understand in broad terms in general. There may be a lot of work on the discovery end but when you see them they end up being surprisingly simple. My biggest fear is that it is very rare for people to understand how much danger we’re in and why, and therefore what solution we are inherently looking for and how urgently we should be seeking it. In other words, as long as things function pretty well in the present and people get fed and housed, it is very easy for them to ignore the evidence that we are in grave danger even if we are fat and happy and enjoying a period of good luck.

[0:19:14] Daniel: One of the interesting things in the study of previous civilizations is that none of the great civilizations of the past still exist. They all failed even if they had been around for hundreds or thousands of years. And so to understand that civilizations failing is the only thing that’s ever happened, and then recognize that since World War II we have for the first time a fully globalized civilization where none of the countries can make their own stuff, that the supply chains that are necessary to make the industrial and productive base are globalized, and that we’re running up against the failure points of a globalized civilization. That’s an important thing.

[0:19:53] And what’s so interesting is that all the previous civilizations that failed had so much hubris before their fall because there had been so many generations where they had succeeded that they had forgotten that failing was a thing. It was just some ancient myth, it didn’t feel real. So we don’t have an intuition for things not working or for catastrophe because we haven’t experienced it and our parents didn’t experience it and it’s only myth. And as a result we just make bad choices. And I mean, this is where studying history and studying civilizational collapse is really helpful. And you can see that even as the system starts to fail in partial ways, to me it seems very clear that when we look at the George Floyd protests turning into riots over the summer that happened, they were following the COVID shutdowns and specifically all the unemployment from it.

[0:20:48] Whenever the unemployment goes up, whenever the homelessness goes up, when the society makes it to where people who are trying can’t meet their basic needs, then it gets a lot easier to recognize there’s something wrong with the system as a whole and go against it. But we also never had a point in human history where it was like, no matter how outraged I am all I have to do is start scrolling for a second and I’ve forgotten everything. Not to mention the fact that I’m probably on opioids and benzos. And so that makes it to where the frog can keep boiling in hot water longer.

[0:21:21] Bret: Yeah, so I often say that people are too comforted by the idea that people are always predicting the end of the world and it hasn’t happened yet. Because in fact it happens all the time, the ends of these civilizations. But it’s even worse than the analysis that you and I appear to agree on here, because many of those civilizations that have ended, in fact most of them, the civilization—the organizational structure—ended, but the people didn’t. So the Romans continued on as other things. The Maya are still with us, they are not with us as the Maya.

[0:22:00] And the point is actually in this case, the jeopardy that we are creating is to our very capacity to continue as a species, not just to our ability to continue with the structures that we have built. So not only are we all in it together this time, but we’re all in it in a way that we never have been before, or at least very rarely have been before. And that really ought to have people’s attention. But you’re right, the capacity to distract ourselves from it has never been better either.

[0:22:31] Daniel: I think something that I find particularly important when thinking about catastrophic risk now, relative to previous examples of civilization collapse, is that until World War II we couldn’t destroy everything. We just didn’t have enough technological power for catastrophe weapons. And so you could fight the biggest, bloodiest war, violate all of the rules of war, and it would still be a local phenomenon. And with the invention of the bomb, we had now the new technological power to actually destroy habitability of the planet kind of writ large, or at least enough of it that it was a major catastrophic risk. And on the timescales that you think about as an evolutionary biologist, of how long humans have been here and the proto-humans, since World War II is no time at all to have really adapted to understanding what the significance of that is.

[0:23:27] And the only reason we made it through was because we created an entire global order to make sure we never used that new piece of tech, and then all of history we always used the arms that we developed. And so we made this whole Bretton Woods world and mutually assured destruction that said, ok well let’s have so much economic growth so rapidly that nobody has to fight each other and they can all have more because the pie keeps getting bigger. But that starts running up against planetary boundaries. And interconnecting the world so much it gets so fragile that a virus in Wuhan shuts the whole world down because of interconnected supply chain issues. So that thing can’t run forever, and the mutually assured destruction was one catastrophe weapon and two superpowers, so mutually assured destruction works. The game theory of it works.

[0:24:10] Well, as soon as you start to add to that the bioweapons and the chemical weapons, the fact that bioweapons can be made very very cheaply now with CRISPR gene drives and things like that—grown weapons—we have dozens of catastrophe weapons held by many dozens of actors, including non-state actors, and that just keeps getting easier. Mutually assured destruction can’t be put on that situation. It doesn’t actually have a stable equilibria. So now we have to say, how do we deal with many many actors having many types of catastrophe weapons that can’t have a forced game-theoretic solution with a history where we always used our power destructively at a certain point? How do we deal with that? It’s novel, we have no precedent of that.

[0:24:56] Bret: Yeah, it’s absolutely novel. I mean, when I became cognizant, let’s say 1975 is where I first started having coherent thoughts about the world, that was only 25 years after the end of World War II and it seemed like World War II was a very long time ago, but of course we’ve covered that distance twice since then. So the ability for the tools with which for us to self-destruct as a result of aggression are brand new. And you’re absolutely right, the thing that prevented us from using them, that force disappeared, it no longer exists. There is no stable equilibrium here, so what’s protecting us is not well understood at best. And then add to that all of the various industrial technologies that we are now using at a scale where they imperil us.

[0:25:55] I don’t know about you, but I keep having the experience of a catastrophe happens and that’s the point that I get alerted to some process that is very dangerous to humanity that I didn’t know about until the catastrophe. This has happened with the financial collapse of 2008, it happened with the triple meltdown at Fukushima, it happened at Aliso Canyon, I believe it has now happened with COVID-19 and gain of function research. And the point is, it paints a very clear picture. We do things because we can’t see why we shouldn’t. Or this is also a game theory problem: those who can see why we shouldn’t, don’t, and a certain number of people don’t see why we shouldn’t and they do, and we all suffer the consequence of their myopia.

[0:26:42] And so on multiple fronts we are rolling the dice year after year, and the people who can think independently looking at that picture, looking at the series of accidents, looking at the hazard of something like a large-scale nuclear exchange without an equilibrium to prevent it, those people wake up. But the problem is, the mechanism to actually begin to steer the ship in a reasonable direction in light of these things doesn’t seem to exist for reasons I’ve heard you explore many places. So, what does it mean as far as you can tell?

[0:27:25] Daniel: There’s one thing that you said that I think is worth us addressing first, is that some of the things that caused the catastrophe either were unknown, or those who knew them were game-theoretically less advantaged than those who were oriented on the opportunity rather than the risk. Because those who orient towards opportunity usually end up amassing more resources that equals more ability to keep moving stuff through. There is an article in a conversation in the LessWrong community about, regarding catastrophic risk, mistake theory versus conflict theory.

[0:27:55] What percentage of the issues come from known stuff that we knew would cause a problem or at least could cause a problem and game theoretically we went ahead with it anyways, versus stuff where we just couldn’t have anticipated or really didn’t anticipate? And I think it’s fair to say these are both issues. There’s true mistake theory stuff, like we just couldn’t calculate, and then there’s true conflict theory stuff. We knew that escalating this military capacity would drive an arms race, or the other people would, that if we calculated it, there’s an exponentiation on all arms races that takes us to a very bad long-term global situation.

[0:28:33] One of the insights that I think is really interesting is that the fact that the mistake theory is a thing and everyone acknowledges it ends up being a cover, a source of plausible deniability for what’s really conflict theory. So we know there is an issue, we pretend not to know, we do a bullshit job of due diligence and risk analysis and then afterwards say it was a failure of imagination and we couldn’t have possibly known. I have actually been asked by companies and organizations to do risk analyses for them where they did not want me to actually show them the real risk. They wanted me to check a box so they could say they did risk analysis so they could pursue the opportunity, and when I started to show them the real risk, they’re like, fuck we don’t want to know about that.

[0:29:19] And so when it comes to the “could we have possibly factored that?” a classic example I like to give because it’s so obvious in retrospect is could we have known in the development of the internal combustion engine that making street cars, which seemed like a very useful upgrade of having the horse internalized to the carriage, would end up causing climate change and the petro dollar and wars over oil and oil spills en masse and ocean oil spills and whatever. It seems like that would have been hard to know a hundred years in the future that it would do all that stuff.

[0:29:58] And this is a classic example of also where we solve a problem and end up causing a worse problem down the road in the nature of how we do it, which you can’t keep doing forever. The story is oh we caused a worse problem and that’s the new market opportunity to solve that problem in the ongoing story of human innovation. But when you start running up against that the problems are actually hitting catastrophic points, you don’t get to keep doing that ongoingly. You don’t get to regulate after the fact—the way that we always have once a problem hits the world—things that are catastrophic. Could we have known? Well, yeah.

[0:30:31] In London before that, one, there were already electric motors, and two, people were already getting sick of burning coal, from lung disease from the burning of the hydrocarbons. If we had tried to do good risk analysis could we have? Yeah. But there’s so much more incentive on who pursues the opportunity first, and then there’s this multi-polar trap of, well let’s say we don’t, the other guy’s going to so it’s going to get there anyway so we might as well be the ones to do it first. And that thing ends up getting us all the time, which is why collective action again comes in.

[0:31:08] Bret: Well, it’s really interesting how much of this is again parallel. Heather and I use the example of somebody driving the first internal combustion engine and somebody chasing them down the street saying “don’t do that you’ll screw up the atmosphere!” How crazy is that person running down the street saying that, because you would have to scale it up to such a degree before that’s even a concern that that person seems like a nervous Nellie, but of course they would also have been prophetic. But the other thing I want to ask you about is, you say that we have these two categories where sometimes we could have known and we knew in fact and we went ahead anyway, and then in other cases we didn’t know and something snuck up on us, and I want to clarify what you just said.

[0:31:59] Because my understanding here is that if you dig deep enough, somebody always knew.In general there’s some mechanism whereby the person who correctly predicted what was going to happen has been silenced. Often they lose their jobs, they disappear from polite society, at the point they turn out to be right their reputations are never resurrected as far as I can tell. So am I wrong that even in the cases where people who made the decisions may plausibly have not known that the reason they didn’t know is because there’s some sort of active process that, when there’s a profit to be made, shuts down anything that could be the basis of a logical argument that we shouldn’t do it?

[0:32:47] Daniel: I don’t know that I’ll say always. I’ll certainly say most of the time. Let’s say there was a case where really nobody knew. My guess is we probably could have, had we tried harder. And then let’s say there’s going to be some unpredictable stuff. We know in complex situations there’s going to be unpredictable stuff. So you do the best job you can to forecast the risks and harms ahead of time but then you also have to be ongoingly monitoring, well what would the early indicators that there’s a problem be, and when we find there’s something we hadn’t anticipated, how do we factor that into a change of design? Well once the profit stream is going and the change of design fucks up the profit stream, how does the recognition of that there is a problem actually get implemented when those who have the choice implementation power are not the people who are paying attention to those indices?

[0:33:48] So, yes, I would say—and it’s easy to just say, hey yeah there was some wackadoodle who was saying that there was going to be some risk, but there’s always some wackadoodle saying there’s going to be risk about every new tech and if we really listened to all of them we’d have no progress. That’s the story, right? It’s a bullshit story. But there’s a collective coordination issue, because it is fair to say, so let’s take AI weapons right now. Specifically automated drone weapons. There is an arms race happening on automated drone weapons, and I think every general and military strategist knows that all of our chance of dying from AI weapons goes up—their kids, everybody’s—as we progress in that technology. It’s a bad technology. It shouldn’t exist. We should create an international moratorium that says nobody builds AI drone weapons, that we don’t want automated weapons with high intelligence out there.

[0:34:53] But we can’t make that moratorium because if one country doesn’t agree, if one non-country, some non-state actor doesn’t agree that has the technology—or let’s say everybody agrees, how do we know they’re not lying and developing it as an underground black project? So either we don’t even make the agreement, or we make the agreement knowing we’re going to lie, defect in a black project, spy on their black project and try to lie to their spies who are spying on us. And so it’s like how do you get around that thing, where if anyone does the bad thing in the near term it confers so much game-theoretic advantage that anyone who doesn’t do it loses in the long term. Why was it that the peaceful cultures all got slaughtered by the warring cultures and so what ends up making it through is those who end up being effective enough at war. That’s an underlying thing we have to shift because that has as its eventual attractor space, self-destruction in a finite space.

[0:35:47] Bret: Yeah, I totally agree, and the I think fascinating thing when you interact with the incarnate aspect of the process you just described is that the people who are telling the lies that explain why we’re doing something that we know is reckless, often don’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They actually believe their own press and instead of saying, well yes this is terrible but we don’t really have a choice, or somehow indicating that they know that, what you encounter is a true believer who thinks that this is safe. And that’s very frightening because it means that the mechanism at the point something begins to go awry to do anything about it doesn’t exist, or at least it’s not connected to the part that you can talk to.

[0:36:36] So again, not too surprised to find overlap in our map. I would say the process that you describe of by the time you discover what the hazard is that there’s a profit that has accelerated the process, I call this the senescence of civilization because it’s actually exactly a mirror for the process that causes a body to senesce. The evolution of senescence involves processes that have two aspects, one which benefits you when you’re young and another which harms you when you’re old. And because many individuals don’t live long enough to experience the harms in old age, they get away with it from evolution’s point of view and evolution favors the trait in spite of the late-life harm.

[0:37:21] So those late-life harms accumulate and that’s the reason that we grow feeble with age and die. And that’s an exact mirror for the way we’ve set up our economic and political system, where any process that is profitable in the short term at the consequence of having some dire implication for civilization later on, those processes are so ingrained by the time we discover what the harm looks like in its full form there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

[0:37:51] Daniel: Ok, so let’s use two really important current examples. So let’s take Facebook and social media, and the way they’ve affected the information commons and the epistemic commons writ large. So we know that the nature of the algorithms optimizing for time on site while being able to factor what I pay attention to, the whole Tristan Harris story, makes almost—very few people wake up and say, I’d like to spend six hours on Facebook. And so I’m going to spend more time on Facebook if I kind of leave executive function, rational brain, and get into some kind of limbically hijacked state where I forget that I don’t want to spend my whole day on Facebook. And so time on site maximization appeals to existing bias and appeals to limbic hijacks.

[0:38:42] So if I piss off and scare and elicit sexual desire and whatever of the whole population while doubling down on their bias and creating stronger ingroup identities associated with outgroup identities, the algorithms optimize. Well, it is an AI of the power that beats Kasparov at chess beating us at the nature of the control of our attention. So we can see that the right got more right, the left got more left, the conspiracy theories got wackier, the anti-conspiracy theory people became more upset at the idea that a conspiracy could ever exist. Basically everybody’s bias doubles down and they all move apart from each other faster. Well society doesn’t get to keep working, that is a democracy killer, that’s an open society killer.

[0:39:29] There’s a reason China controls its internet is if you don’t want your society to die you have to be able to have some shared basis of thought. And the story is, oh we didn’t know that was going to happen. Well you go back and look and guys like Jaron Lanier were at the very beginning of Facebook and Google whatever saying hey guys, this ad model is going to fuck everything up, you can’t do the ad model thing, you’ve got to have pay for subscription or some other kind of thing. And it was like, ugh shut up dude. Or just don’t even engage in the conversation and then get to say afterwards “failure of imagination”.

[0:40:04] But now how do you regulate it when those corporations are more powerful than countries? Because the regulation is going to be happening in a court where the lobbyists have to be paid for by somebody. So who are the lobbyists paid for by? And it has to be supported by popular attention, and those who can control everybody’s attention can also affect what is in popular attention. So this is a very real example where we know the harms were known and it actually got large enough that it killed the regulatory apparatus’ capacity.

[0:40:36] Bret: Absolutely. In fact, again, this is going to be another alignment of our maps. So what I’ve been playing with is the idea that we are incorrect in imagining that people necessarily want their expectations flattered. That people may actually like to be challenged, but that’s it’s inconsistent with the wellbeing of advertisers. That the very fact is, because advertising is only a tiny fraction informative and is mostly manipulative, you have to be in your unconscious autopilot phase in order for it to cause you to buy a car you wouldn’t have otherwise bought or buy different deodorant than you would otherwise buy.

[0:41:20] And so the point is the thing gets paid for by advertising. In order to be useful to advertisers we have to be unconscious, and the only way to keep us unconscious is not to challenge us, basically to tell us what we think we already know rather than what we need to know. And so they’re lulling us into this even though we would still be interested in the platforms if we weren’t being advertised to, but we would be interested in having more important conversations there. Which is really in some sense what the growth of heterodox podcast space is about.

[0:41:55] Daniel: Oh my goodness, ok there’s two directions I want to go at the same time. I’ll just pick one. There’s a reward circuit on exercise and there’s a reward circuit on junk food. And they both have a dopaminergic element and reward circuit but of a very different kind. And the reward circuit on exercise is that it actually feels like shit at first and is hard, but your baseline of happiness measured in whatever—dopamine, opioid access, whatever—gets better over time. And then you start actually feeling over time but not quickly. This is another place where temporal myopia ends up mattering because there’s a delayed causation on the healthy one and no delayed causation on the unhealthy one. So I start getting the reward circuit on exercise when I start seeing results, and then I want to push hard and then I’m willing to actually go against entropy and put energy into the system so the energy grows.

[0:42:51] Whereas the chocolate cake I get a reward instantly and I don’t have to apply any energy, but as I do it my baseline gets worse. And this is the addiction versus health reward circuit direction. And the same is true for scrolling Facebook compared to reading an educational book. At the end of a month of reading the educational books my life feels better, I feel more proud of myself. At the end of a month of scrolling Facebook I’m like what the fuck am I doing with my life. And yet that one will keep winning for the same reason that 70% of our population is overweight and over a third of them obese. And so, but my only hope is that not everyone who has access to too many calories is obese. There are some people who figured out, hey that’s a reward circuit I don’t want to do, and I’m going to exercise and I’m going to not eat all of the fat, sugar, salt that evolution programmed me to have a dopamine hit for because it’s a shitty direction.

[0:43:49] Now we need to get that number of people who actually have taken some sovereignty over their fitness and wellbeing in the presence of the cheaper reward circuit, we need to get that number up to everybody because right now obviously overweight is one of the main causes of death in the developed world. But we have to then apply that to the even more pernicious, hyper-normal stimuli because salt, fat, sugar are hyper-normal stimuli in the gustatory system. We have to apply that to the sentry system that’s coming in through things like social media and that means less social media, less entertainment, more study. And it doesn’t have as fast a reward circuit, it just doesn’t. But it has a much better longer-term reward circuit where your baseline goes up.

[0:44:30] And this is where enough mindfulness and enough discipline have to come in because otherwise the orientation of the system is that it’s more profitable for corporations for me to be addicted because you maximize lifetime value of a customer through addiction. And it’s an asymmetric war because they’re a billion or trillion dollar company and I’m me. So how do I win in that asymmetric war where it’s in their profit incentive whether it’s McDonald’s or Facebook or Fox for me to be maximally addicted? I have to recognize holy fuck, I actually have no sovereignty—even if I claim to live in a democracy—against these autocracies who want to control and manipulate my behavior in a way that is net negative for me holistically while having the plausible deniability that I’m choosing it because they’re coercing my choice.

[0:45:17] So I have to get afraid of that enough that I mount a rebellion, a revolutionary war in myself against those who want to drive my hyper-normal stimulus reward circuit. So the whole, “how can everybody become more immune to the shitty reward circuits and notice them and become immune to them, and how can they become more oriented to the healthy reward circuits”, that’s another way of talking about what we have to do writ large.

[0:45:42] Bret: Yeah. That’s beautiful, completely agree. In fact it dovetails with another thought that first time I thought it, I thought it was original and then having said it I discovered lots of people had said it before me, that there’s a very close relationship between wisdom and delayed gratification. That it’s the ability to bypass the short-term reward circuit in order to get to something deeper and better. That is what wisdom is about. But you didn’t include on your list what I consider to be maybe one of the most important instances of the failure that you’re talking about, which is sex. There’s a very direct comparison, at least for either males who are wired in a normal fashion for a straight guy, or women who are toying with that same programming, which I believe there are many.

[0:46:46] But the comparison between casual sex which is certainly—we are as males wired to find that a very appealing notion because it’s such a bargain if you can produce a baby where you’re not expected to contribute to its raising, that’s a huge evolutionary win. And then you have to compare that to the rewards of a deep, romantic, lasting relationship with commitment. And the problem is that the deep, lasting relationship stuff has a hard time winning out over the instant gratification thing if the instant gratification thing is at all common. And so that’s really screwing up people’s circuitry with respect to interpersonal relationships and bonding.

[0:47:35] And I have a sense that it is also, in a way that’s much harder to demonstrate, contributing to the derangement of civilization, that many fewer people have a relationship. It’s not like marriage is easy. It’s not, it’s super complex. But having somebody who you can fully trust, somebody who you’ve effectively fused your identity with to the level that they share your interests and they may be the only person who will tell you what you need to know at some points, and the fact that many people are missing that I think is deeply unhealthy.

[0:48:15] Daniel: Yeah, so I would say that market-type dynamics benefit from exploiting the shitty reward circuits across every evolved reward circuit axis. And so from an evolutionary point of view, survive and mate are the things that make your genes get through primarily. So we’ve mentioned the survive, the calorie one, earlier. So in an evolutionary environment I could get plenty of green leafy things. In many environments it was very hard to get enough fat, enough sugar and enough salt. Those were evolutionarily rare things, so more dopaminergic hits on those. So fast food ended up figuring out how to just combine fat, salt, sugar with no other nutrients with maximized ease of palatability and textures.

[0:49:09] And there’s a scientific optimization of all of the dopamine hit with none of the nutrients, so you can actually be obese and dying of starvation. And what that is to nutrition, where you should have a natural dopaminergic hit on something that has nutrients built in for adaptive purposes, is what porn and online dating is to intimate relationship, is what Facebook and Instagram is to tribal bonding, is how do we take the hyper-normal stimuli part of it out, separate it from the nutrients and make a maximally fast, addictive hit that actually has none of what requires energetic process?

[0:49:54] Bret: Yeah, I’ve called this the junkification of everything and it is directly an allusion to junk food where we can most easily see this. But the idea is you will be given a distilled—so if I can rephrase what you said in terms that are more native to me. When you are wired to seek the umami taste that tends to be very tightly correlated with meat, you will tend to get a lot of nutrients along with it in the ancestral context. In the modern context, we can figure out how to just trip the circuit that tells you to be rewarded and it’s no longer a proxy for the things that it was supposed to lead you to.

[0:50:38] And as you just said, you can now look at that across every domain where you have these dopamine rewards and understand why people are living in the world that Pinker correctly identifies we are living in, where we have just a huge abundance and yet are so darn unhealthy, certainly unsatisfied. It explains that paradox of being better off in many ways than any ancestor could have hoped to be and yet being effectively ill across every domain.

[0:51:15] Daniel: Yeah, I will say something about this that’s important. I mean, briefly, the fact that life expectancy started going down in the last five years in the U.S. and certain parts of the developed world is really important to pay attention to. But the deeper point I want to make is the Hobbesian view on the past I think is one of those mistake theory/conflict theory things. I think the dialectic of progress is such a compelling idea, and we’re oriented to the opportunity and not the risk.

[0:51:50] In the same way we don’t want to look at the risk moving forward that would have us avoid an opportunity, we don’t want to look at good things in the past. And we don’t want to look at good things of cultures that we want to obliterate. So we want to call the Native Americans savages so that we can of course emancipate them historically, and we want this Hobbesian view that people had brutish, nasty, mean, short-lived lives in the past so that we don’t have to face the fact that advanced civilizations failed and that is what our own future most likely portends. I think that is a convenient wrong belief system in a similar way.

[0:52:29] Bret: Well I hope you don’t hear me doing that, I certainly—

[0:52:32] Daniel: No, you don’t. I just had to say it.

[0:52:34] Bret: You had to say it so it’s clear to our listeners. Well I appreciate you doing that. I did want to go back to a couple things you said, and of course this happens every time you and I talk where every thread takes on multiple possible directions we could go and there’s no way to cover them all. But in any case, you pointed to survival and mating being the primary mechanisms to get your genes into the future. And I want to point out that this is one of these places where our wiring, which is biased in the direction of those places where our ancestors had agency that was meaningful, upends us. And in fact this is something I think you and I are struggling against as we try to compel people of the kind of danger we’re in and the necessity to upgrade our system before we run into a catastrophe too big to come back from.

[0:53:30] And so in any case, within your population survival and mating makes sense as an obsession. But probably the biggest factor in whether or not your genes are around a hundred generations from now is whether the population that you were a part of persists. And so my field has done a terrible job with this. We have gotten pretty good at thinking about individual level adaptation and fitness and when I say lineage people still don’t know what I’m talking about and they’re confused about why I’m focused on it. And my sense is, it’s like two components to an equation and you’re either aware of the lineage thing but you misunderstand it as group selection, or you’re not aware of the lineage thing and you think group selection is a fiction and it’s all about individuals. And both of those are ways to misunderstand the point.

[0:54:30] Daniel: I’m so happy to hear you saying this because I’m sure this is a conversation I would love to go deeper and understand the distinctions between lineage and group selection the way that you see them. But if I just even take the concept of group selection as opposed to just individual selection and take a species like sapiens, and say there was no such thing as an individual that got selected for that was not an effective part of a group of people. And the tribe, the band, was the thing that was being selected for, so there was fundamentally kinds of prosocial behavior that were requisite.

[0:55:08] But then we get bigger than the Dunbar number only like yesterday evolutionarily and the whole evolutionary dynamics break because that prosocial behavior only worked up to that scale when everybody could see everybody and knew everything. When we start looking at how do we solve collective action problems, you start realizing well, if we make some agreement field as to how nobody does the near-term-game-theoretically-advantageous-relative-to-each-other-long-term-bad-thing, there has to be transparency mechanisms to notice it. So the beginning of defecting on the whole, defecting on the law, the agreement field of morals, is the ability to hide stuff and get away with it. Well you can’t hide stuff in a tiny tribe very well.

[0:55:56] Bret: Even if you could do it once, twice, ten times, sooner or later if hide is your instinct you’ll be revealed and the cost will exceed what you’ve built up by pulling it off however many times you’ve done it.

[0:56:09] Daniel: And so there’s a forced transparency in that smallness of evolutionary scale. And when you start to get up to a large scale, and now there have to be systems where everybody isn’t seeing everyone and I’m smart enough I can figure out how to play it and fuck the whole while pretending that I’m not hiding the accounting of it and getting ahead, that’s the evolutionary niche for corruption, for parasitic behavior. So one way I would describe, and as you’ve described on here before, if there’s a niche with some energy in it, it’s going to get exploited.

[0:56:43] We have to rigorously close the evolutionary niches for human parasitic behavior, humans parasitizing other humans. And the first part of that is a kind of forced transparency that if someone were to engage in that, it has to be known. And now the question is that all the versions of that we’ve explored at scale look like dreadful surveillance states, so how do you make something that doesn’t look like a dreadful surveillance state that also doesn’t leave evolutionary niches for parasitic behavior that ends up rewarding and incenting sociopathy?

[0:57:18] Bret: Absolutely. So bunch of different threads. One, the Elinor Ostrom work is important because it does point to the fact that you can scale these mechanisms up. In fact selection has scaled up these enforcement mechanisms beyond a tiny number of people who know each other intimately. Now it hasn’t scaled them way up, but it’s proof of concept in terms of the ability to get there and it’s a model of what these systems might look like. The other thing though, your focus on corruption I think is absolutely right. And one way to just detect how stark the difference is, is the recognition of how many times in an average day you encounter bullshit. In other words, how many advertisements do you encounter in an average pre-COVID day let’s say.

[0:58:18] These are all cases where somebody you don’t know, or almost all of them are cases where somebody you don’t know is attempting to manipulate you into spending resources differently than you would otherwise spend them. So this is an overwhelmingly dishonest interaction with your world, and there would have been some dishonesty for an ancient ancestor, obviously there are creatures that attempt to look like what they are not. But in general, one could see the world as it was and the deception was the exception not the rule.

[0:58:54] And in some sense we live in a sea of bullshit, and we’re so used to it that we don’t even recognize that that’s abnormal, that it is the result of a gigantic niche that has opened up as a simple matter of scale, as you point out. And that restoring a state where you can actually trust your senses, you can by and large trust the people who you’re interacting with to inform you rather than lie to you, would be a huge step towards reasonability.

[0:59:33] Daniel: Oh I really hope that we follow all the threads here, because this is getting so close to the heart of what we have to do. As scale increases the potential for asymmetry increases, and as the asymmetry increases the asymmetric warfare gets more difficult to deal with. So let’s think about this in terms of market theory. Let’s think about an early hypothetical idealized market, like literally people just took their shoes and their cows and their sheep and their service offerings to a market and they looked at exchanging them. And then because trading cows for chickens is hard we have some kind of currency to mediate a barter of goods and services, but we’re talking about real goods and services.

[1:00:23] Maybe there’s two people, maybe there’s five people that sell shoes. There’s not five thousand of them and I can go touch the shoes myself, I can talk with them, I can see what the price is, and there is no hyper-normal stimuli of advertising, it’s like somebody yelling from his thing. So there’s a symmetry between the supply and the demand side. The supply side is a guy or a few guys selling something, and the demand side is a person or a family trying to buy something, and they can kind of tell each other’s bullshit to some degree of symmetry. Buyer beware becomes an important idea. But now when this becomes Nike and then still one person, there’s still symmetry between supply and demand in aggregate, meaning the total amount of money flowing into supply equals the total amount flowing out of demand, but this side [gesturing] is coordinated and this side [gesturing] isn’t.

[1:01:14] You don’t have something like a labor union on all purchasers. Or it’s like all Facebook users are part of some union that puts money together to counter Facebook in lobbying and regulation. You have Facebook as a close to a trillion dollar organization against me as a person, and I’m still the same size person I was in those early market examples but there wasn’t a trillion dollar organization. And now when that happens, manufactured demand kills classical market theory—which is the idea of why a market is like evolution, it’s like some evolutionary process—is that the demand is based on real people wanting things that will actually enhance the quality of their life. And so that creates an evolutionary niche for people to provide supply and then the rational actor will purchase the good or service at the best price and at the best value.

[1:02:10] But of course, as soon as we get to a situation where, and you look at Dan Ariely and all the behavioral economics saying the rat homo economicus, the rational actor, doesn’t exist. We end up making choices based on status that’s conferred with a brand based on the compellingness of the marketing, based on all kinds of things that are not the best product or service at the best price. But you also get that I want stuff that will not increase the quality of my life. I desperately want shit because the demand was manufactured into me, so it’s not an emergent authentic demand that represents collective intelligence. It’s a supply side saying I want to get them to want more of my shit, and I actually have the power to do that using applied psychology.

[1:02:57] And as soon as you get to split testing and the ability to AI split test a gazillion things, we’re talking about radically scientifically optimized psychological manipulation for the supply side to create artificial demand and then be able to fulfill it. And most of that ends up being of the type that is actually bad for the quality of the life of the people but you have the plausible deniability “they’re choosing it, hey I don’t want to be patriarchal and control what they’re doing. The people are choosing it, I’m just offering the source of supply that they’re wanting.” Bullshit. That’s like offering crack to kids and then when they come back for more of it saying hey [shaking head]. So that was one of the threads I wanted to address.

[1:03:41] Bret: Well, I love it. Back in, must have been 2013 when Game B was actually a group of people who met in a room and talked about things, one of the points that I was making in that context was this inherent asymmetry around unionization, and that the problem is unions have gotten a bad rap because of the tight association cognitively that we have with labor unions. We think of unions and labor unions as synonymous but union is actually a category. It’s potentially a very large category and effectively, management always has the benefit of it. The question is will workers have a symmetrical entity, that’s the labor case, but you can make the same case with respect to banking.

[1:04:31] Credit unions don’t work, they’re very bank-like, but if they were structured in such a way to actually unionize people who utilize the bank it could be highly effective. It could be a complete replacement for the insurance industry which doesn’t even make sense in a market context. But as a risk pool you could do a very effective job. So anyway, yes, the question is how do you scale up the collective force and especially how do you do it in light of the fact that the entities that are already effectively unionized see it coming and they disrupt it with all of their very powerful tools. And so, well anyway—

[1:05:16] Daniel: Can I—

[1:05:17] Bret: Go ahead.

[1:05:18] Daniel: I want to say the beginning of an answer to that because I think it brings us to what you’ve been largely exploring in this show of late, of the breakdown of democracy in open society and what do we do about that and how that relates to breakdown in culture and breakdown in market. We can look at those, the relationship between those three types of entities. So a way of thinking about what the architectural idea of a liberal democracy is and why the founders of this country set it up not as a pure laissez-faire market but as a state that had regulatory power and the market together, the idea is that a market will provision lots of goods and services better than a centralized government will.

[1:06:17] So let’s leave the market to do the kind of provisioning of resources and innovation that it does well, but the market will also do a couple really bad things. It will lead to increasing asymmetries of wealth inexorably. This is what Piketty’s data showed, but it’s just obvious having more money increases your capacity to have access to financial services and you make interest on debt and on compounding interest on wealth. And so you end up getting a power law distribution of wealth. So then a few people in just the market dynamic would be able to have way outsized control over everyone else against everyone else’s interests.

[1:06:55] And the market creates opportunities for things that are really bad. We all know that we want there to be a thing called crime where even though there’s a market incentive for child sex trafficking and whatever else, we say no we’re going to create some rule of law that binds that thing and not just have market drive it. So the idea is that we create a state that we actually give a monopoly of violence to, so it has even more power at the bottom of the stack of what power is than the top of the economic power law distribution. So the wealthiest people and the wealthiest corporations will still be bound by this rule of law. And the rule of law is an encoding of the collective ethics of the people. The ethics are the basis of jurisprudence, and there is some kind of democratic process of getting to say, what is it that we consider the good life and important that we want enshrined in rule of law?

[1:07:45] We give that a monopoly of violence, and really then the goal of the state is to bind the predatory aspects of market incentive while leaving the market to do the things that it does well. But pretty much every law is where someone has an incentive to do something, which is a market-type dynamic, that is bad for the whole enough that we make a law to bind it. Ok, so the purpose of a state is to bind the predatory aspects of a market. That only works as long as the people bind the state. And the people bind the state if you have a government of, for, and by the people of an educated populace who had a quality of education that were capable of understanding all the issues upon which we are governing and making law, and a Fourth Estate where the news that they are getting is of adequate quality and unbiased enough that they’re informed about what’s currently happening.

[1:08:35] If you think about that, that’s what a republic would require, and you realize that both public education and the Fourth Estate have eroded so badly for so long, it’s not that we’re close to losing our democracy, it’s dead. We don’t have a republic, we have a permanent political class and a permanent economic lobbying class, and the people who aren’t really actively engaged in government in any way at all, beyond maybe jury duty now and again if they can’t get out of it. And if the people to be engaged in government in any meaningful way had to tell the DOE what they think should be done about grid security and energy policy, or tell the DOD what should be done about nuclear first strike policy or tell the Fed and Treasury what they think about interest rates, they have no fucking idea how to have a governance of, for and by the people.

[1:09:21] They don’t have that education, they don’t have the media basis. So if the people can’t check the state, then the state will end up getting captured by the market, and so you’ll end up having the head of the FDA be someone who ran a big drug or a big Ag company and the head of the DOD being somebody who ran Lockheed or some military-industrial complex manufacturer, you’ll have just lobbying, just straightforward lobbying gets paid for by somebody. Who’s it get paid for? Those who have the money to pay for lots of lobbyists. And so then you end up getting a crony capitalist structure which is worse than just an evil market because now it has the regulatory apparatus of rule of law and monopoly of violence backing up the market-type dynamics. So then we say, well ok what do we do here?

[1:10:09] And we see that civilizations fail towards either oppression or chaos, those are the two fail states. They fail towards oppression if trying to create some coherence happens through a top-down forcing function. They fail towards chaos if not having enough top-down forcing function, everybody kind of believes whatever they want but they have no unifying basis for belief and so then they will end up going into—they’ll balkanize, they’ll tribalize, and then the tribal groups will fight against each other. Either we keep failing towards chaos, which we can see is happening in the west and in the U.S. in particular right now, and then China, which is happy to do the oppression thing—and oppression beats chaos in war because it has more ability to execute effectively, which is why China has built high speed trains all around the world when we haven’t built a single one in our country.

[1:11:05] So either we lose to China in the 21st century and oppression runs the 21st century, or we beat China at being China, meaning beat it at oppression or it’s like fuck, those are both failure modes. What is there other than oppression or chaos is order that is emergent, not imposed, which requires a culture of people who can all make sense of the world on their own and communicate effectively to have shared sensemaking as a basis for shared choicemaking. The idea of an open society is that some huge number of people can all make choices together, a huge number of people who see the world differently and are anonymous to each other, not a tribe.

[1:11:41] That was an enlightenment-era idea born out of the idea that we could all make sense of the world together, born out of the philosophy of science and the Hegelian dialectic, that we could make sense of base reality and that we could make sense of each other’s perspective, dialectic, find the synthesis and then be able to have that be the basis of governance. So what I think is, this is not an adequate long-term structure because we can talk about why tech has made nation-state democracies obsolete and it’s just not obvious yet, but it has. But as an intermediate structure, the reboot of the thing that was intended has to start at the level of the people, at culture, and that collective sensemaking and collective good faith dialogue, because without that you can’t bind state, without that you can’t bind market incentive.

[1:12:32] Bret: Ok, I love this riff of yours. I think there’s a tremendous amount that’s really important and the synthesis is super tight. I know people will have a little bit of trouble following it, but I actually would advise them to maybe go back through it and listen to it again because it’s right on the money as far as I’m concerned. There’s one place where I wonder if it doesn’t have two things inverted.

[1:12:55] Daniel: Ok.

[1:12:56] Bret: So you talk about the two characteristics that are necessary in order for—what did you call it, liberal democracy or whatev