EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Jamie Wheal: Well, welcome to the next addition of HomeGrown Humans with Neurohacker Collective. And this is a very full circle kind of conversation. Get to speak with a dear friend and colleague and fellow instigator of all things, future facing Daniel Schmachtenberger. One of the founders of The Consilience Project and organization dedicated to improving the world’s information, ecology and bettering our collective decision making so that we can forge futures that we all want to live into as well as part of the founding team of Neurohacker Collective itself and a generally all round thoughtful and good guy. So, Daniel Schmachtenberger, welcome to HomeGrown Humans.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: It’s good to see you going to be talking with you, Jamie. It is a fun, full circle thing, given that the first instantiation of this podcast ever, I was hosting five years ago or something like that. And then Heather did and then we started to grow it and yeah, it’s cool. It’s cool to be here talking with you.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD TODAY

Jamie Wheal: Absolutely. Well, listening to me, there’s an infinite number of directions that we can go. But one of the ones, when I just busted out my notebook that came to leap off my pen first was just curiosity on your sense of how the kind of quote unquote the conversation. And by that, I would say we can refine it to all things tending towards both existential risk, future studies, positive interventions at any level of the human cultural stack that we’re playing with. What’s your sense as we’re not really out of the whole COVID woods, but everyone’s just playing through at this point. So, it feels like we are somewhat on the other side of two and a half years of quarantine, and I’m just curious if you’ve got an answer or we can just explore this out loud, is what feels like it has shifted or changed.

What have you noticed from say where we were in January whatever it was, was it 2020 that we went into lockdown? Is that right? So we went in February or March, right? So what going into that would chipper of existence what’s changed or shifted? Because obviously there’s been so much and I think we’ve probably already started forgetting the layers as they’ve come in, but what are you tracking that is different now in the summer of 22 than when we were all caught on unawares with a two week lockdown in late February of 2020 within this conversation and our friends, our colleagues, and just what you’re sensing in the zeitgeist of the space.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: It’s an interesting question because the initial frame of what things are in the conversation, it actually seems like a pretty small number of people that think about existential risk and all things positive and state of the world as a whole, like as a single conversation, I would say the biggest changes that I’ve seen in terms of people’s sense of maybe what that conversation has in common is people who are thinking about humanity in the world globally, what are the major issues that we face rather than in a specific sector or by a specific nation or to a specific audience of people, but what are the things humanity faces globally?

And what are the ways of addressing those that might be adequate or meaningful and how do those global issues contextualize other things that might be meaningful? I would say COVID but even before COVID the Trump election. I noticed a lot shift in my conversation publicly, but also in my conversation with a lot of institutional heads whether academic government, big business, whatever in their sense of there are problems, but there’ve always been problems. This is kind of business as usual to the sense that, oh no, we’re actually entering a different phase where Pax Americana and the post World War II world seems to be shifting radically.

It seems like the degree of bipartisan like venom and polarization associated with the Trump election had a lot of people who had before that still been arguing their problems, but the country works fundamentally fine. It works better than any other country to like, “Oh, maybe there’s actually an existential risk to democracy itself.” Maybe social media technology really did break the fourth estate in a way that breaks democracy, but is fine for autocracy. I started noticing much more serious consideration regarding like the fundamental viability of these social systems that we’ve depended upon liberal democracy and things like that and then the so much of Australia coming on fire.

And then everybody forgetting that because of COVID when that was the biggest thing ever. And then the secondary shocks of COVID from the supply chain effects to the economic effects to that. And then I think definitely January 6th and all of the George Floyd related protests and that suite of things seems to have made the small group of people that saw that these current world systems were untenable and unwinding made that pretty popularly, if not believed at least something that a lot of people were sensitive to.

And particularly the people who have been in the running the institution’s position, that is something I find very interesting. So, what I’ve found is that I’ve had way more people asking about things like how do we fundamentally redesign our political economy? How do we build a world where democracy is viable in a post social media and pretty soon post deep, fake world and asking in even getting a little bit more future oriented, what does the future of economy and education and everything in a post technological automation world look like? Those are questions now that there are very few people in institutional positions not interested in and there were very few very interested in them before.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. That reminds me of that University of Chicago philosopher, Jonathan Lear, who wrote that book Radical Hope. And I referenced him at the end of recapture the rapture, but he said the inability of a civilization to conceive of its own demise is one of the blind spots of any culture and it does feel it’s with I’m tracking what you’re saying. You’re suggesting that 2016 through now, including both the political disruptions their Brexit, Trump Gen 6 but also the psychosocial governmental policy, everything of quarantine has just massively stretched the Overton window. Yeah. As to what quote unquote mainstream or polite opinion is willing to entertain at this point.

WHAT DOES AN ECONOMY THAT DOES NOT EXTERNALIZE COSTS LOOK LIKE?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Yeah, totally. And I know our friend Nate Hagens was just out with you. And there are some things that are still really far outside the Overton window of thinking about adequate solutions too. And so, I’ll just take his as an example, because maybe people here are familiar. One of the things that he looks at very deeply is that the GDP of the world, the total size of the global economy is pegged very tightly to the total amount of energy used, which makes sense, right? Whether you’re any good or service was going to require some energy. So it’s kind of tightly pegged. We say, “Well, what about efficiency? Shouldn’t we get more dollars per jewel of energy with efficiency?” Yeah. But at a smaller rate of changes in efficiency than the rate of increased demand of energy from the increased demand in finance and those efficiencies lead to using more energy.

Jamie Wheal: Is that Jevons paradox?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Jevons paradox anytime you get an increase in efficiency of energy, you use more energy because when energy becomes a little bit cheaper, you get new markets that open up and the energy return on energy investment needed to get us off oil means you got to use a lot of oil and coal to make those solar panels. It’s going to take them 10 years or however long to make enough energy to pay off the energy it took. It just doesn’t converge. And so then we say, “Okay, well this is like a key insight is that somewhere around 2019, we started getting very clear diminishing returns on hydrocarbon investment, meaning it takes more barrels of oil to get a new barrel of oil.” It’s not-

Jamie Wheal: Specifically like plus sands and fracking and all the diminishing returns on those original Bonanzas?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Exactly. And so, if we’re in a place where we can get more oil, but we’re getting lower energy return on energy investment which is going to continue to happen while having a need for an exponential amount more money for the financial system to keep up with its own interest and the money and the oil are correlated, that thing doesn’t get to keep going. And so, then there’s a reckoning in where the price of oil has all the externalities cost in the environment. We’re not making more hydrocarbons of that type and we’re not dealing with all the waste of which climate change is one of the waste streams, but not the only one obviously oil spills and mountaintop removal mining for coal and everything. So, if you were to say, “What would it cost to pay for oil with real costs, right? Where we could sustainably keep doing this forever.” We’re not actually net harming the environment depending upon which way you analyze it. It’s $10,000 plus per barrel of oil and that makes it.

Jamie Wheal: So wait that’s an interesting data point. So you’re just saying, if you actually priced in both cost of acquisition, restoration, distribution, pure refinement and distribution, and then all carbon offset that would be required to do this in a sustaining way then you’re at 10K a barrel.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: 10K to a million, depending upon how you factor all of the life cycle analysis.

Jamie Wheal: Okay.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: And so what that means is that the cost of my shoes and the cost of the computer we’re talking on and everything just became the entire market of everything broke.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. So, you basically buy a pair of shoes and you get them resold indefinitely, a pair of really good shoes? It changes purchasing decisions.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: And the computer we’re talking on that rather than being a two or $3,000, apple might be like a million dollar apple. If you factor the real cost of what it takes to for the supply chains to make this thing. And then you’re like, “Okay, we would actually not even do manufacturing the same way.” We only do manufacturing this way because we’ve been able to externalize all the costs to the environment. Now, we’re hitting planetary boundaries. We’re not going to be able to keep doing that. If we were going to internalize the costs, we didn’t externalize like half the costs. We internalized like four orders of magnitude, more of the costs than we internalized.

And so nobody is thinking seriously enough about what the fuck does an economy that does not externalize costs look like and how do we retool our total global infrastructure in that way? And how do we do it in the time we have factoring that we’re already in diminishing returns on hydrocarbons and everything is oriented towards growth and you have to completely change the financial system so I would say at least conversations like that there are more people listening to them and bothered by it that doesn’t mean there’s anything like a transition plan on those things that is starting to get realistic.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. One of the fellows who attended our camp was actually a really goodhearted DC policy analyst and his partner is Tibetan origin she’s working deeply in the house and the Senate as well. So, they’re way into the policy side of things. But interestingly had come that familiar with your work as well, familiar with Nate, that kind of thing. And it was just very interesting to hear their inside baseball on how the policies like [inaudible 00:12:57] if people knew that this was all just overworked, Ivy league, early 20 something, a congressional aids that are fundamentally moving this all through the system, people will be shocked and horrified, but I’ll tell you what I want there’s so much, you’ve just thought. You’ve just teed up here.

This is probably one of the main threads of the conversation, but before we jump into it, I just want to also ask you about the other side and I’ll play my card first, which is I have noticed a staggering number of people in the last two years get sucked down, conspiratorial, rabbit holes and people otherwise thought were saying and grounded are now in the tank for one particular reality tunnel, conspiracy theory or another, including otherwise fairly centrist, public thinkers, et cetera, et cetera.

So, whether that is convinced of some grand Davos led great reset conspiracy bundling in the vaccine, concerns bundling in the deep hermeneutic of suspicion, all round and therefore veering, precariously too dangerously to irresponsibly into some form of acceleration as a meaning let’s hurry up and get this thing over, let’s help start tearing it down because the big time baddies are out to get us. So, first let’s just talk about that. What have you been noticing? Because I mean, I’ve been shocked about how just divergence among friends and colleagues that I would normally even while we have a variety of different political and philosophical perspectives.

I always took them as good faith representatives of their stand. And we know some filmmakers documentarians, right? That there’s a whole swath of these folks, podcasters, what is your sense of that? Because it’s one thing to say at the bottom of the barrel of Reddit and HN, and Telegram, you’ve got some kooky folks saying some wacky ass names, but it feels like that has bubbled up and has now been capturing a staggering number of otherwise what I would’ve thought of as reliable, independent thinkers. What’s your take on that? First of all, are you experiencing it? And if so, do you have any sense of mechanism?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Yeah, there’s a lot in there and it is true. There was obviously already a trend that had been strengthening for some time since like post to Vietnam on increased, left, right polarization and also increased pro versus anti-institutional or pro standard model anti standard model orientation obviously we saw this pick up heavily with social media because of the nature of how social media works. But in this timeframe we saw it pick up a lot and I would say, “The leading up to the Trump election post and then COVID definitely, but I don’t think the way I would say it is, there’s a lot more people that are conspiratorial because that’s part of it but there’s also more interestingly blinded standard model support simultaneously.”

Jamie Wheal: So, that’s a mouthful so unpack that.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: The whole instant zeitgeist washing on it’s not a lab leak. It couldn’t have been a lab leak. The science has settled. If you think that it could have been a lab leak or engaged the hypothesis, you are doing some weird xenophobic conspiracy theory.

That was a really radical push in the zeitgeist that was not founded. The science was not settled. It was a totally reasonable hypothesis, whether it was true or not, it was [inaudible 00:16:45] something that needed to be explored because if you just have that big of an effect on the world, of course you explore all those things. And if we’re doing gain of research and synthetic biotechnology and we had an instant somewhere, we might have more of those instances. So, it should absolutely be a totally realistic conversation and the suppression on the conversation and that’s what I would call there was a standard model narrative.

And there were more smart people that bought the standard model narrative without realizing how ridiculous it was while there were simultaneously more that assumed that it was baby eating people that were running a conspiracy against it. I see those as equally concerning because I see them both as kind of conspiracy. Isn’t the essence of what I’m focused on. What I’m focused on is where people’s sense making is getting more captured by some narrative.

And so, the mechanisms that I would say are in place is one increasing complexity makes it impossible for anybody to process all the information. So they have to decide some things about who do they trust. And of course you want to trust the CDC or a trustworthy institution, but if you don’t, then you want to trust whoever seems like they’re doing the research of why you can’t trust them. And so, you get that kind of person because who the going to go through all the CDC data and then compare it with the various database data and then compare it with this investigative journalist, not to mention the IPCC and climate change and the social justice cop shooting things and to have a self informed opinion on all these things. And then to question, is the data even good or was there underlying bias in the nature of what was funded in the research?

So, all of the data’s on one part of a bell curve, unevenly distributed. And so, I would say the just sheer work and epistemological nuance, it takes to make sense of things this complex rules, almost everybody out. And then the consequentiality of it makes you want to not just sit in uncertainty, but have some sense of it. And then like the emotional in group out group polarization around and this is again, one of the social media things that anyone who’s questioning if the vaccine was the right approach for public health can get thrown into some tinfoil hat wearing antibacterial thing like that everybody’s going to die of whooping cough in smallpox because of these crazy people when some of them are that and some of them have a pretty nuanced view of like, “Hey, I think there’s more that we could have done on small molecule research.”

And there are reasons why doing that small molecule research would’ve made sense and there’s more safety analysis on vaccines. So, there’s something where it’s like, we see the craziest left pink haired, Antifa people, and we see the dumbest, most bothersome mega people as if representative of the whole groups that then makes the groups polarized against each other. And so, I think the complexity, the total number of topics, the speed, the crappiness of the underlying scientific substrate with replication issues and all of those things, the media environment that orients towards the hyper normal stimuli, which will be confirming bias and sanctimonium and in group identity and giving us the most extreme versions of the other, the extreme, and strong man never steel man versions of the other side.

I think that whole suite of things leads to this where the number of people that I knew, who I felt like were doing really a good job of sense making, say COVID related issues, whether it was lab leak or whether it was proposed small molecules like ivermectin or whether it was vaccines or I saw some people at the very beginning doing a good job of not getting captured by one side or the other. Almost all got progressively captured by one of the sides. Simply because their ability to pay attention to everything they just couldn’t and so certain choices ended up give making the newsfeed of information coming their way more oriented in a certain direction and it became very hard to not be affected by that.

I always think of almost like a World War I, no man’s land trench warfare and it feels like the trenches are getting pulled further and further apart. And I’m sure you’ve got the accurate stats, but I feel like it’s like less than 5% of all social media posters or the majority like art make 90% of the news. So, it is all the extremes and as the no man’s land gets bigger and bigger and more and more treacherous tank traps and bob wire and nerve gas, there’s no fucking way you’re going to make the sprint to the far side to jump in that foxhole, whether your potential enemy so that like no mans land’s dead.

Jamie Wheal: So there are no atheists in foxholes, right? So you got to believe something if you’re jumping in with and you’re more prone to jump back to your closest definitely affinity group than you ought to risk crossing the middle. And just seems like that is that the price of defection from my identified in group is so high at this point so for instance, you could have a whole bunch of live and let live middle Americans that are nonetheless getting pulled aggressively, right wood because the pink haired baby killing Antifa, hooligans are such that are such the caricature of the left at this point. That people are like, “I don’t know which way to go bu the moderate middle is just getting completely hollowed out.”

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  I actually don’t have these stats, Tristan and Aza were telling them to me, but it had to do with… It was really cool social science that was-

Jamie Wheal: The Center for Humane Technology folks for anybody follow, yeah.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Yeah. And it had to do with pulling people on the left about what they expected, the percentage of certain things on the right were and vice versa and seeing how badly off in a negative direction they were something like asking people on the right and I think it was more specific. It was like asking Trump supporters at a rally, what percentage of Democrats are LGBTQ themselves? And they thought it was like half or something like that. And it turns out it was less than 6%. And there were similar things that people on the left what percentage of people on the right want to cut all social services or whatever. And they estimate it to be way higher than it actually was. So you could tell that they were both dealing with caricatures of each other, that they thought were true, that like they were dealing with two standard deviations to one side of the go and distribution of what was really there thinking it was the median.

Jamie Wheal: And a Gaussian distribution is fundamentally the familiar bell curve that people understand, yeah.

HOW TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL MEDIA ARE UNDERMINING SENSE-MAKING

Daniel Schmachtenberger: So, and this is Pat Ryan’s stuff he was talking about this years ago on other quotes that you would… He was predicting that we’d have this phenomena, that things like calls would just start automatically popping up as a function of the information technology landscape. And I would say the underlying cause of this or one thing we have to factor is that of all of the singularities that occurs well talked about the info singularity is the first one, meaning the singularity, meaning the point at which things change so radically that we can’t really predict what’s going to happen or how to respond to them afterwards and where humans can’t keep up with the pace of technological change. The idea of the information singularity is it’s so much information would be published that no human could process all the relevant information about anything.

And so, there would no longer be an expert and that’s already true, right? It’s already true that you’ll have more peer reviewed journal articles within a specific domain because of how big the world is. And university’s all around the world than any expert can keep up with even in their own domain and obviously way more journalism on topics. And so obviously now we have to get into computational processing of all of that since the human can’t process it anymore, but now it’s, well, what are the algorithms? And we’re doing that computational processing and currently the answer is things like newsfeed algorithms, Facebook and other newsfeed algorithms, at least deciding of all the stuff out there, what makes it into your feet because you’re not going to see a million news articles in the day.

So, the ones that make it in are based on personalized data, harvesting about you, mostly focused on not trying to make you believe something, but what you actually interact with the most but the tricky thing is what you interact with the most is mostly based on one marshmallow stuff, right? Mostly based on like what actually makes you click with it because the title was so salacious and effective at making you click or so many of your friends already had or something like that. And so, that phenomenon means everybody doesn’t see the same thing, because there’s too much stuff everybody can’t see the same thing and so what everybody sees is the stuff that is AI split test optimized and the direction of their twitchiness, right?

I think that is a term you use it. And that usually means in the direction of their confirmation bias, because people are less likely to click on a thing that uses words. They don’t even know what they are, which means likely to expand their uncertainty set than things that are already primed to them as something bothersome. And so, this is not just a left right anymore thing it’s a algorithmic basis of cult generation and then one of the really fucked up things. I don’t know if you… Well, of course you saw, you pointed out to me, I had these deep fakes made about me, these audio deep fakes.

Jamie Wheal: Was it catabyte, was that the term?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Catamite so there’s a third one that just came up. I’m a biracial colonialist in this third one, but yeah.

Jamie Wheal: I’m large. I contain multitudes, I can have my contradictions, yeah.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: So yeah, catamite. Just to be clear, this means like a young male homosexual sex slave for older, powerful men, whatever. So there’s this thing with my voice, talking to Lex Friedman about me being a catamite and reciting a poem about it and whatever. And of course, to be clear, this is an AI generated deep fake. I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t authorize it. There’s just enough of my voice in Lexi’s voice. So you can make like this and this… So, the first step was the AI to curate all the content, which is the Facebook algorithm or the YouTube algorithm or whatever, or the Google algorithm. The next one is to say, “You don’t even want when you do a Google search to see 8,000 result pages, right? Million result pages, you want to see a customized chunk of info for you that read all of those and calibrated it to you.”

And that’s what GPT-3 can do, right? That’s what new advanced generative text AI can do is read that and say, in a thousand words, summarize X for me. And it can also do it in anybody’s voice and pretty soon anybody’s similar to it so now you imagine the auto calls were not only are they being attracted by what they’re being attracted now, which is just, who all is attracted to the same emitted twitchy thing, but where you can actually produce bespoke content from bespoke content producers in that space. So you can actually create gods of the auto calls. That’s all very weird.

Jamie Wheal: It’s super weird. And also like I’m trying to think so yeah I think it was a GPT-3, an AI generating algorithm and somebody was already starting to use, I mean, a talking about race at the bottom and whatever that law is that like any tech online will be used to make porn first. It was the equivalent of that, but it was for info marketers. So there were info marketers who were already trying to explore using AI, cutting edge AI tech to generate better info marketing sales copy.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Of course.

Jamie Wheal: Right. But like anybody who’s seen that rash of Dolly, everybody in their mother posting on their social fees. I said, “Here are my five ingredients and here’s my piece of art, right.” But like from AI generation To speak of like the auto calls and even creating the deities, right. You could not only do it in the name of like give me a summation of quantum physics and as Stephen Hawkings or Richard Feinman would say it, right? But you could even do it as Jesus, as Buddha, as Lao Tzu, right? You could actually literally give the AI the coding to give voice to our divine archetypes which to me seems super fascinating, but also wildly spooky.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Okay. So totally spooky, will get abused. There’s an important principle about tech that is related to the thing you said about it’ll be used for porn first or then internet marketing, which is any new technology enables new things, right? That’s what technology does is enable human seduce that they weren’t able to do. It will be used for all the things where there is incentive to use it and where there is more incentive and return on that incentive it’ll get used the most there. So whenever somebody’s developing tech, they might be developing it for a certain purpose that seems really lovely. But what they have to realize is it’s going to be used for every purpose that is not regulated, that there is incentive to use it for. And it will be differential used the most by the ones that have the most incentive to use it.

And so, when we’re developing new tech, we have to take that really fucking seriously when we’re dealing with tech that makes changes to the world as quickly as powerfully and that scale and as irreversibly as the new tech does. So you develop CRISPR, meaning you develop some gene editing technology where you have ethical review boards that you have to go through with lots of good scientists on them to assume this is to ensure this is a good thing to do in a bio secure laboratory, but then you publish your paper and you’re doing it for immuno-oncology, right? To figure out how to edit genes to cure cancer.

But as soon as you for that purpose, with that money and that major institution figure out, “Oh, here’s how we splice the gene to do that and you publish it.” Now, anybody with really fucking basic hardware and without ethical review boards can do that for any purpose. They have a purpose for you make AI and make it open source and you can use the AI for any purpose to optimize computational processing of lots of stuff. I won’t even talk about what they could be, but people it’s not that hard to think about. So, this I believe that we are moving into a world where and this will be a radically controversial thing to say.

Jamie Wheal: Good.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: The reason why we don’t like the term regulation is because we don’t trust this government or a lot of people don’t trust this government or any government structure. The idea that anything that is powerful enough to regulate will become corrupt. All the kind of libertarian public choice, theory, critiques. Those are all good and those are all right. I don’t trust it for the same reason, but I also don’t trust open market proliferation of exponential catastrophe tech and with no regulation where of course, if we’re talking about drones or cyber or biotech, and specifically since bio where like the ability to synthesize genomes, corresponding with the best institutions in the world, putting the pandemic grade genomes that they’re figuring out online through publishing and the same with AI, the world just doesn’t make it through that, right? The world doesn’t make it through decentralized catastrophe weapons with no oversight. And you can’t regulate after the fact the way we always have like after DDT killed so much stuff, finally, we figured out how to outlaw it.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. I mean Round Up right took 30 plus years and we’re still sorting out for every chemicals.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: And lead in gasoline and all those things, right? Lead and gasoline is estimated to have taken a billion IQ points off the world and made us 4x more violent holistically to just stop engine knocking and that was-

Jamie Wheal: 4x?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Yeah. More violent. Yeah. The real politic assessment. I’ll send you a link on it. There’s an ex incredible explainer piece somebody did on lead and gasoline, as an example of externality to fucking stop engine knocking, we take something that you have to mind that would never occur in the biosphere and figure out how to burn it and aerosolize it. So, that it’s in everybody’s breathing air that makes us both dumber and meaner. And so, then we get people doing social science and doing this real politic assessment of humans are too dumb and mean for things like democracy to work or things like nice systems to work. It’s just genetics where nasty chimps, it’s not fucking nasty chimps and genetics. It’s like shit that we did that we could do differently and if we-

Jamie Wheal: Toxins in the brain piece.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: That assessment, the four X more violent and a billion IQ points off, literally dumber and meaner, was one chemical, one chemical. We have 15 million chemicals in the chemical database of the American Journal of Chemical whatever it is.

And how many of the other ones also have negative behavioral effects, let alone on the other side of the fucked up top soil that doesn’t have the trace minerals that were needed for healthy neurotransmitters and everything else? So the whole let’s study humans under ubiquitous conditioning and then call it nature and then say, “We’re too fucked because of ubiquitous conditioning,” no. So I have massive critiques of “humans are this way” studies where we studied humans that were all conditioned by the same things and then took it as inexorable. That was a tangent.

Jamie Wheal: Well, I mean, it-

Daniel Schmachtenberger: I remember, wait, the controversial thing I was going to say. New categories of tech have to be pre-regulated.
So you can’t put lead out because the market just figured out how to add it and then only after enough people die and people figure out how to measure invisible stuff and the policy groups go against the financial vested interests that are already making billions of dollars on this, you finally regulate it in one area, but it’s hard because other areas are using it, and nobody wants to be the first one to incur the cost of the regulation. We don’t get to do that with AI.|

By the time it’s causing that much harm, we’re all dead. We don’t-

Jamie Wheal: Or any other exponential existential tech. There’s no, “Whoops,” do overs.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Correct, and you also can’t do national regulation, because all these things create global effects very quickly. It’s not like we can say, “Oh, we’re going to stop doing gain of function research in the U.S., and that’s going to matter.”

The global pandemic is because of global supply chains. Either you get everybody to do them, or it doesn’t matter that much.

Same with AI weapons. So now what I’m saying is, in the face of the amount of power of exponential tech, you can’t let it out unregulated first, because either some people want to do fucked up stuff with it, or simply the accidents that happen.

And you can’t regulate it at a national level, so you do have to have something like global regulation that does safety analysis on the tech to say, “Okay, these applications, not all applications, these applications done in this way are a safe way to put it out,” and we continue to watch and iterate to change regulation and change tech design.

I’m saying we don’t make it through if we don’t have something like that, and yet nobody has proposed any system of governance we would trust with that. That would be some centralizing power dystopia, so-

Jamie Wheal: So it would be like SALT treaties or some other nuclear non-proliferation-

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Yeah, IAEA, exactly.

Jamie Wheal: … agreements, but boom, across a whole additional swath of stuff.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: And stuff that moves way faster. Nukes move really slow, and so you don’t have to do as much because everybody can’t make nukes just when somebody publishes because the physical tech is so hard, but that’s not true for [inaudible 00:35:59], and the same with everybody becoming conspiratorial or standard model bias.

There is no way for us to make this much sense of stuff. We do have to come up with institutions that can process this that are both lots of humans and computational capacity that we trust and that we have a reason to trust, meaning the kinds of audits and transparency and everything to avoid corruption and embedded mistakes have to happen. So this, I think, is a really critical thing to realize.

THE NEED FOR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE TO SOLVE EXISTENTIAL ISSUES

Jamie Wheal: Okay, that’s one that has baffled me. I mean, I even wrote a bit on it a month or two ago, which was just what I’ve noticed is that basically, because what you’re describing is some version of a benevolent new world order. You’re saying we do need global coordination for global existential issues.
We need to have authorities that have the capacity for enforcement and policy making. And the thing that’s baffled me, again, back to what’s happened in the two years of quarantine and that kind of thing, is that this is not just ultra far right libertarian John Burgess afraid of the Council on Foreign Relations and the club of Rome and all these big time baddies and watching for these things.

It’s now on the left hand side. It’s on the spiritual psychedelic transformational cryptocurrency side.

So everybody, even nominal progressive do-gooders, are now completely freaked out about any form of coordinated transnational governance and are now seeing that as signs of the beginning of the end, the move to the Panopticon surveillance state lockdown. And so now, even people who would normally follow everything you just said and agree and be rooting for benign authority to do something on our collective behalf are actually now so suspicious and resistant to any signals of transnational coordination that they’re going to be, at minimum, passive resistance all the way to potentially violent uprising.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: But they’re right, and so this is why I talk about catastrophes and dystopias as the two things we have to simultaneously prevent and find a third attractor that’s neither, because if you try to avoid too much centralization, so you use things like markets or the separation of lots of countries or whatever, you end up getting these kind of multi-polar trap race to the bottom things.

They make the fucked up AI weapons, so we have to also make the fucked up AI weapons so we don’t lose. They produce the carbon, so we have to.

Nobody can stop climate change. So we get catastrophes from that model.

In order to avoid those catastrophes, you can’t just use incentives. You have to be able to use deterrents, because somebody will figure out how to have enough incentive to do whatever the fucked up thing is.

And if they get so much advantage out of doing it that then everybody else has to do it or lose, then you have to have a deterrent that says, “No, nobody gets to make bio weapons. If you start making bio weapons, we’re going to stop that forcibly. We’re going to do something to stop that,” whether that’s tariffs or war or whatever it is.

So then who implements that? To have enough control to prevent the decentralized catastrophe processes looks like enough control where you’re like, “Wow, to have the power to do that looks like an uncheckable power,” and the history of uncheckable powers is not pretty.

If people are concerned about excessively concentrated power, that just means they’re good students of history because there is nothing in history that tells us that’s a safe idea. And obviously, there are lots of times where a very malevolent dictator pretends to be a benevolent dictator.

That happens all the time. But even if you have a more benevolent dictator, you get the rules for rulers dynamic, which is the equivalent of a multi-polar trap on the other side.

The rules for rulers says, if there’s that much concentrated power, the more power seeking people want it, and so you’ve now centralized a point of capture of the system, even if you set it up good at first. This is why it’s like the Republicans and the Democrats, it’s a common thing that when they have their guy in, they want to increase the power of the executive branch.

And then they get really upset that they increase their power of the executive branch when the other guy gets in, because fuck, your guy doesn’t stay in, and you increase capture possibility. So anytime you have a system that has a lot of centralized power, how do you prevent capture, and how do you prevent corruption becomes the core questions.

How do you build that in, given that we’ve never had good answers to that? Because the more malevolent people are willing to do fucked up stuff to get in that position, the benevolent people can’t stay totally benevolent and adequately deal with the malevolent ones under most situations.

So they either lose and it gets captured, or they become capable of winning, which makes them less benevolent, i.e., even the good kings putting heads on stakes to make sure that people knew not to do that thing because it was better for the kingdom as a whole, population-centric wide kind of punishment strategies.

So we have to solve the catastrophes, but we have to do it where the control mechanisms are uncapturable and incorruptible. That requires new shit.

It’s not democracy as we have understood it. It’s not a market.

It’s not monarchies. It’s not communism. It’s actually some better processes of governance that the same info tech that is messing the world up enables if we do it rightly.

Jamie Wheal: Well, so now you’re getting into the post democracy question, and back to [inaudible 00:41:39] and what people [inaudible 00:41:40] can consider these days, and so you were riffing on a lot of the multipolar traps, the race to the bottom. If someone’s going to be a sociopath, if I have basically a non-zero suspicion that there is a sociopath amongst us, then I might as well do the sociopathic thing just to prevent the other person from doing it and then having us all with our pants down.

So therefore, we can get sociopathic behavior, even if all of us were actually otherwise decent people, but just not in a hundred percent trusting environment, and that sounds like the Slate Star Codex famous piece Meditations On Moloch. It was very rudimentary game theory as he went through all those things.

It’s far better for a bunch of countries to sign on to anti-pollution treaties but keep polluting, because what they want to do is actually hamstring everybody else to get an advantage, all those things. So for people that are listening along at home, the Slate Star Codex Meditation On Moloch was one of those kind of central pieces a few years ago.

This also brings up, I think, is it Mencius Goldbug? That’s his nom de plume.

He’s here in Austin now, but he’s been arguing fairly boldly and provocatively. He’s kind of one of the Peter Thiel backed disruptors, chaos agents, but he’s arguing for some form of return to monarchy, AKA Plato’s philosopher king, AKA Russo’s enlightened despot.

So given the risk assessments and the coordination challenges that you’re describing, are we at the end of a very brief, really fairly wobbly 300-year experiment in representative democracy, and are we moving towards, as Viktor Orbán and many others are starting to kind of signpost, a post-democratic much more centrally controlled forms of form of governance? And is that an innovation or an aberration from where you believe we ought to be going with this?

HOW DO WE REINVENT DEMOCRACY?

Daniel Schmachtenberger: To get into what I think the social system adequate to safely steward the power of exponential tech must be, there might be many different specific proposals, but what the criteria that must be in place to do that are and to do it in a way that are also not highly central controlled dystopias, it’s beyond the scope of what we can do right now because there’s a lot of other ways that the things fail and a lot of other criteria to make them work we’d have to build. But I’ll speak to the democracy as a very temporary thing.

There’s a lot of different smart assessments about why democracy is a short, little blip or as we understood it, and obviously that occurred because of some fairly unique things happening in the change of mostly infrastructure. Obviously, the first one that comes up in the kind of McLuhan in line of the way media tech changes stuff is the printing press enabled people to overthrow feudalism because you could start having a newspaper and textbooks, as opposed to the hand copying of information where you had to be very wealthy to have access to information.

And nobody thinks the idea of people being engaged in governance who have no idea what’s going on makes sense. So the foundation-

Jamie Wheal: That was a founding father’s kind of question, right? It was the illiterate mob [inaudible 00:45:08] dangerous.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Yeah. It’s a big part of why they chose, amongst many things, representative democracy rather than direct democracy. But the founding fathers were coming out of modernities enlightenment.

And the idea that the two prerequisite institutions for democracy to have occur were a very high quality of public education and a fourth estate or an independent news and media so everybody could be educated enough to understand all of the issues, and they could ongoingly be informed enough that they could participate in collective choice making. And of course, in 1776, the complexity of the issues was way less.

You could actually be an expert in most everything technical at the time. You could understand the issues of agriculture and infrastructure and whatever, if you were a kind of Renaissance era enlightenment person.

Jamie Wheal: The Ben Franklins and the Thomas Jeffersons of the world.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  Right, and that was why they wanted a representative democracy. They’re like, “It’s too high a burden for the average people to study all of that, but some people can, and the average people can study enough to be able to see who understands the issues better and pick them to represent them.”

Obviously, now we’re in a situation where the average people can’t actually tell good thinking from populism, and the representatives not only couldn’t be an expert in everything; mostly, they’re not experts in anything or even particularly good thinkers.

They’re people who are good at winning those types of political games. So the whole basis of that thing’s eroded, but there’s definitely the idea of… You’ve seen those things where they go around and interview Americans to show how sad it is about how dumb Americans are.

I’m sure the people who said the right answers didn’t make it into the editing of the clip, so it’s, again, trying to show us a strawman version. But do we see a lot of young people who think Africa is a country and can’t name previous presidents and all like that? Yes.

There’s a lot of that. So obviously, our public education is not doing what it would need to for something like democracy to make any sense at all, because what should the average person’s… How much do we want to factor their thoughts on international relations if they think Africa is a country?

Jamie Wheal: Well, that’s always bungled me as all these new shows have rushed to be hip and online and who’s tweeting what, and then they’ll take social media things, and they’ll be polling people on, “Do you think Syria has weapons of mass destruction?” How the fuck would you know?

Why are you polling a body politic that is absolutely has no access to the relevant information to ask what they think? And somehow, considering that up to date newsmaking is baffling.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  Okay, you’re actually saying something else really important. Not only is it clear that the people aren’t getting educated enough for base things like geography and history, not just even news and classified information. So the education’s not there.

The news and their relationship to it is not there. And as we mentioned, rather than a newspaper where everybody reads the same thing, you have a social media feed now where everybody reads a personalized to them, optimized for engagement, which is usually more limbic than good thinking modes.

So the social media thing isn’t just the end of the fourth estate; it’s an anti-fourth estate. It exactly does the opposite effect of what the fourth estate was supposed to do, which is rather than give everyone a unifying basis of information to go to a town hall on, it gives everyone certainty on stuff that is exactly opposite of what the other people have certainty on and strawman, villainized versions where the social contract is broken.

And if your greatest enemies are your other citizens of your same nation in a democracy, that’s the end of the democracy.  So the McLuhan-esque scholars say, like the guy at Center for Digital Life, that 00:49:04 democracy is a function of the written word being the dominant method of media and that actually, TV was the beginning of the end of it, and internet was completely the end of it, because when the written word was the dominant method, not only did you have everybody could have textbooks, and you had the enabling side and newspapers, but you also had people had to read long form to get any information.

And they had to know how to write. If they’re writing letters and sending them via mail, i.e., the development of all of the modern democracies we have in that time meant you had to be able to linearize your own thought.

You had to be able to hold kind of longer thoughts, read books, things that didn’t have hyper normal stimuli. It’s a very interesting assessment that democracy, as we understood it, was the result of a particular way of info processing that was mediated by a certain info processing technology, without which that thing won’t work anymore.

You can’t do short attention spans and democracy because democracy requires being able to hold many people’s opinions and lots of conflicting information, and so that’s one. There’s three others, but I can see you thinking on that one that I was going to say of what was unique to the founding time of democracy that isn’t true anymore where the way we think about it moving forward has to update itself. 00:50:20

Jamie Wheal: Well, yes, and just to give us a little bit of elbow room on that, because my sense is you’re effectively idealizing or strong-manning a sort of age of the early Republic where all citizens and voters were sort of extended Renaissance, well literate, competent thinkers and some version of Renaissance men, and at that time, just men. But I mean, being an American historian myself, I mean, those early republics, it was a fucking bare knuckles brawl.

And they would host keggers and get all the people wasted, and they’d throw barbecues and cookouts. “Now put your vote in for our buddy who just sponsored this.”

There was all kinds of thumbs on the scale. There was the Federalist papers.

There was all kinds of, quote unquote, fake news and diatribes between Madison and Mason and those guys in back and forth, so I just think it is important to understand that democracy has always been a wild, chaotic, hopelessly messy process versus some idealized origin state that we have fallen from grace and therefore can never get back to.

To me, that almost gives us more resiliency now, being like, “Oh, these are the mutations. These are variations on the theme, but there’s continuity versus a fall from grace,” as far as the narrative arc.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  I don’t think that what I’m saying is that it was that perfected thing. I’m think what I’m saying is that the narrative of how democracy should work that was being developed at that time was partly for political expediency and partly based on real political philosophy and earnest thinking.

And it’s usually always a mix of both, because memes that are just based on earnest truth with no motive usually don’t catch on that well because no one’s that motivated to push them. And so we wrote this article in [inaudible 00:52:12] Project called “Where Arguments Come From” on the kind of think tank research industrial complex of, if there’s an idea that is trending, there’s probably somebody that cares about it that is making it trend that funded all that research and did all of the ongoing publishing and that that’s not connected to what is simply the best idea anyone’s ever had in the space.

And there’s quite a few in there that we did that are relevant to these topics. The one on how to mislead with facts is another relevant one on the people who get caught into biases that are not the conspiratorial ones but the standard model ones and think that it’s all fact checked.

But so I’m just trying to take the earnest part of the philosophy of democracy that was occurring and say that was the philosophy upon which the political thinkers were saying, “This thing might work,” is we could give everyone a good quality of education. We could give them all news.

And we could at least have a representative class that was very well educated on the topics and the smallness of scale, so the printing press, the education thing, and things like public education so that that was being insured for everyone, which wasn’t a thing under most of feudalism. And-

Jamie Wheal: And tripartite government term limits. There was all sorts of these fairly ingeniously constructed checks and balances effectively to nudge towards some expression of the infinite game.

The intention isn’t definitive win and loss but to keep playing. I mean, to me, the architecture, whether or not it’s still fit for purpose, secondary question, but I mean, it does feel like the architecture was surprisingly thoughtful.

CHECKS AND BALANCES ON POWER TO PREVENT CENTRALIZED CORRUPTION

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  I think [inaudible 00:53:48] principles of the architecture that actually are still fit for purpose, so a different instantiation, a different way that they play out. So I don’t know if you’ve had Alexander Bard on.

He’s an interesting thinker in these ways, and he has an interesting analysis of the three branches of government in that most every system of governance that was stable long term had three things that were somewhat similar, structurally similar to a judicial, an executive, and a legislative branch. So I think things like separations of power are trying to get to something deeper, which is avoiding centralized failure modes, either from corruption or bias and blindness.

And that doesn’t mean we have to do it through separations of power. We could do it through something like computational methods that allowed the transparency on the information provenance through the whole system and insurance that all of the information was being processed with all of the relevant epistemologies, but that wasn’t possible then, so simply checks and balances on power was how you prevented centralized capture corruption or failure.

Jamie Wheal: Say that last sentence again.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Separating power into these various branches was ways of preventing centralized failure modes, and they didn’t just do three branches-

Jamie Wheal: Like the mad king idea, right? Just somebody going totally off the rails and having unchecked power.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Or even the emperor has no clothes situation where it’s not that they’re [inaudible 00:55:24], and they have really, really nasty, but where they are in a distortion bubble where they have a bunch of yes men in a court around them. They just can’t tell what’s true, and the thing is failing for those reasons.

So the idea of a centralized system can have bad intent at the top. It can have mistakes at the top.

It can have modes of capture at the top for others who have bad intent who aren’t currently there, so let’s just keep it from being centralized so there’s some type of stability, and the two alone can’t do that, which is why the two party system gets so fucked. It ends up just driving polarization.

So you have to be able to have something like this three body problem of having them check each other and that they do different things. It makes sense that the judicial branch is optimized for wisdom that can adjudicate where the letter and the spirit of the law are different, not optimized for everybody has a say.

The creation of new law is optimized to go slowly representing everybody, and the ability to execute really quick shit that has to be quick has limits put in place, but there’s a branch for it. All that was smart.

Jamie Wheal: But I mean, I would make the case that the thing that Trump did was he broke tripartite government. So he had an attorney general, and he just replaced attorney generals until they did his bidding, although both of his choices were more than happy to.

The legislative branch went fully in the tank, so instead of the Senate bowing up on him and being like, “You are the RINO, bro, and we are going to let you know that what this august institution will or won’t do… ” Now, this gets back into information ecology and doing an end run around public opinion via Twitter and a bunch of other things, and the judiciary, which, while people were rage tweeting about Trump’s latest inflammatory thing, he and McConnell were packing the courts top to bottom.

They posted more court appointments in three years than Obama did in eight. And now, Roe v. Wade and all these other things, including McConnell’s utterly cynical stalling tactics of appointments and this and that, now we don’t have a tripartite government, and to me, that was the most concerning thing, watching 2016 to 2019.

I was like, “Oh, shit, this is now a decades-long hangover.” This is not swapping out the guy at the top every four years, and yay, we get our guy back in or anything like that. This is now a systemic rupture of any of the checks and balances that you just laid out in the theoretical model.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  Well, so we’re saying two different things, and I think they’re both true and important. We’re saying that even if the previous system was well intact, it would be insufficient for various reasons.

And we didn’t start to lay out all those reasons, but it would be insufficient. We can say things like, we don’t have ways of ensuring that the representatives are representing the people because we don’t have everybody going to town halls and because of smallness of scale type issues, and the fact that you would regulate after the fact, because of the speed of tech being so slow, doesn’t work anymore.

So there’s a few things where it’s like, even if that system was intact, it’s no longer an adequate system, or the thing like it needed a fourth estate to actually function well, and it doesn’t. The other thing is that system isn’t even intact.

That system has eroded profoundly, and so both of those things are simultaneously true. Because it’s eroded so profoundly, we know some major changes to governance are necessary, and even if it hadn’t, it’s no longer fit for purpose in the exact way it implements itself, even if some of the principles are right, thinking about, “Well, how would we rebuild now something that is aligned with the right kind of principles that both create the kinds of regulations that are important without the kinds of centralizations of power that are really problematic?”

And I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thought for anybody to say even the most founding father staunch person doesn’t think the founding fathers would’ve built it the same way if they built it today, exactly those guys brought here. Printing press wasn’t the exciting information tech.

And given the total amount of information to process and given all of the changes, of course this current system would have a much deeper digital interface. Everybody can’t fit in a town hall anymore, but everybody can fit in the internet to be able to directly input on things.

And we can make identity as secure as we have for online banking easily. That’s already secure to be able to do a lot of things differently, so the idea that we have to and can start to restructure the thing very deeply I think is a pretty reasonable thought.

Jamie Wheal: Okay, well, there’s a lot there. And in fact, that fellow that I had just mentioned who’s in DC politics who just came to our recent event was talking about parallel democracy movements and the idea of people starting to sort of spin up alternate ways of governance. And you’ve been working with digital and direct democracy efforts.

You’ve referenced the Taiwanese expressions, which is increasingly, acutely relevant right now. I feel like you’ve been hinting at a model.

Do you want to just play this through and kind of lay out what you think would be optimal? I’m imagining there’s some version of blockchain validations and security, an anonymity underneath it, or not.

Again, banks don’t use it, so we don’t have to go that way. But what would your best take be in a quick sketch of some version of digital democracy, and then how on earth would you pry the wheel away from the entrenched and potentially corrupt or captured powers and interests that are running the old system?

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  It’s tricky. If we were to say, how do you design an ideal system from scratch? Even if you come up with a good design… obviously it’ll probably be wrong, but let’s even say we came up with a really good design… how do you do enactment? And this is where a lot of people like the people in Thiel’s circle become libertarian.

They’re like, “Your utopian ideals take so much violence to enact in the presence of all of the vested interests that don’t want them. Is it still a utopia after you committed the amount of violence needed to enact it?”

Jamie Wheal: That’s the Che Guevara paradox, right?

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  Yeah, exactly.

Jamie Wheal: I mean, he starts out as a bleeding heart do-gooder doctor on a motorcycle and ends up capping people in the jungle.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  For a reason that we can empathize with, the process that took him in that direction, but empathizing with doesn’t mean want to repeat. So the other direction is not design a perfect system and then be stuck with enactment problems.

The other way is, what is intelligible to the current system that could vector it in the right direction, and can those shifts converge to a new, adequate thing? The forward and reverse engineering approach, and I like to do both of those and have them inform each other, because I do think there are certain risks that are clear and imminent enough that they require acting and where the forcing function of them can make certain action occur.

They can also move us in a fundamentally different direction. I’m biting my tongue because it will take a lot to construct some of these things.

Let me construct one other thing first. When I was saying that at the time of the U.S. democracy and the other kind of modern European democracies were roughly in a similar-ish time, but let’s take the U.S. democracy. Obviously, the critique is also pretty clear that you can’t separate the government and the economic system.

Those things are embedded, especially when it’s something like liberal democracy that’s trying to make the market do most things. It did depend upon genocide and slavery.

There was not a political economy that worked without the most gruesome things. And then we can only kind of say slavery ended when you actually really look at the history of the peonage indentured servitude system following and like that.

But also, it was able to kind of start to end because of fossil fuel slaves because of the Industrial Revolution. And then this gets us into the Nate stuff we were talking about earlier, which was, “Oh, now rather than extract from another race, we can extract from nature radically faster than is possible to produce enough abundance that this kind of system works.”

This is another one of the ideas of why this is a short term one of w`hat Nate calls the carbon spike, a very short period of time where the abundance went way up from anything it had ever been, where you can have people happier with whatever the system is because you’re creating so much distributed abundance of certain kinds that everyone feels like, “Well, at least it keeps getting better every year,” but in a way that is fundamentally not continuous and actually self-terminating.

Jamie Wheal: Well, I mean, and that’s worth talking about because all modern political theory, economic theory, I mean, Freedman, Hayek, the Austrians, you name it, all the way to Keynes and the new economic, whatever the fuck, quantitative easing, just print more money, because Keynes was basically like, “Hey, you can’t ever print too much money, provided you can deliver on the investments,” but there was that huge key asterisk of provided you can deliver on the investment, and so-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  And no ecological consideration on that.

Jamie Wheal: But all of that was within that carbon pulse, so it was basically like we were trying to do sleep and physiology tests when everybody was given an eight ball to go home for the weekend, and you’re like, “Okay, none of this is actually- “

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Or human nature test on ubiquitous lead.

Jamie Wheal: So one of the things that Nate has said that I think is really memorable, and when you’re talking about slavery, because there is a strong argument… Yale historian Edmund Morgan made it in American Slavery, American Freedom.

He’s like, “Hey, slavery is a central prerequisite for attempting the experiment of democracy.” It happened in Greece.

It happened in Rome. It happened in the United States. It’s not until you get to the mid 19th century with the advent of coal and steam power-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:  Slavery and genocide. It wasn’t an empty land. You had to kill all the people that were here.

Jamie Wheal: And then massively extract all the crazy abundant natural resources, which were one time bonanzas also, but his point is that right now, today, we are enjoying, via the fossil fuel bump, the equivalent labor of 500 billion humans to support eight billion, or really, more realistically, to support four or five billion max, and that-

We can support four or 5 billion max. That 500 billio