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Daniel schmachenberger founding member of the consilience project moderated by necklace adelbert founder of norskin foundation [Music]
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[Applause] so I'm scared to death of public speaking so for me to dance in here on stage the Delta is a little bit wide I
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must confess amazing to have everyone here listening into these very deep complex difficult discussions my name is Nicholas and I was very lucky with my company
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kilona with the timing it's a buy now pay later for e-commerce and thanks to this timing I was part of this amazing growth journey and I was receiving Awards and front page magazines and
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recognition for for what I was doing and seven years in I reached my goal in life which was to be financially independent I could change my fake Rolex
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into a real one I mean how great isn't that but as everyone understand I mean a fake Rolex showed the same time as a real one and looks exactly the same and I could only eat five times per day and
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so once nothing's changed I thought I would reaching everyone now but I just felt complete emptiness [Music] um this made me reflect it made me reflect on what we celebrate in society and in
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my vertical of startups we celebrate unicorns the companies that reach a certain valuation a billion dollar valuation no consideration whatsoever if they destroy the planet or Society in
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doing so if we put people to debt or we create addictive mobile games which destroys people's ability to pay attention and so on all about reaching a specific valuation
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so this was the birth or idea behind North Korean Foundation instead put the spotlight and capital and networks behind impact entrepreneurs so startups that are actually tackling the
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world's greatest challenges uh and thanks to the resilience Center get a tune very uh North Vault creating the world's greenest batteries that
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we're very proud of here in Sweden Sweden today have actually 34 times as many impact startups as the world average and this have been feeling great to me I mean
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such a good like recognition and feeling and feeding my ego until Eric fanholm introduced me to this guy here and The Meta crisis
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um informing me or pointing at that this embedded growth obligation we have in society is that really compatible on a finite planet North vault
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I mean if we do produce the world's greenest batteries with green energy but meanwhile create an ecological disaster in DRC Congo or Indonesia set a sufficient solution we're coming to him
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or the Germans Paradox that we also talked about NATO's pointing to that that even though we have added so much wind and solar still were of a world record of coal consumption so this is very difficult to complex and
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it's obvious that just focusing on impact investing is maybe not sufficient so a true honor to have a discussion here with Daniel smacktenberger
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[Applause] So Daniel [Music] um where should we start so maybe if you could give us just a reflection of
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impact week or these sessions we have had here and like obvious thoughts you guys don't know that we're completely blind up here
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I can't see any faces it's such a weird experience can you hear Daniel though Reflections on impact week yesterday and today I was sitting in the audience and I was
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listening to Nate and Olivia and Kate today and um you know these are people whose work I respect deeply and who are saying some of the most important things that can be
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said and are brilliant educators and I was feeling uh I was feeling the sense of the recognition that it probably doesn't
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matter at all that most everybody will leave and probably continue working the jobs that they work doing mostly the same types of things and they will remember what happened
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like okay we're destroying the atmosphere we're boiling the oceans we're killing all the other species we're doing it at the cost of colonialism we're on the way towards Extinction
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and that will last in people's minds till they scroll for a minute until a bunch of messages come in and until the bills need paid at most and I'm thinking about
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the talks that boehm and krishnamarti gave in the 80s saying very similar things about civilization being on a self-destruct path or that Bucky gave it after World War II and the people who listened earnestly
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and everything they were saying has come to pass and those curves keep doing the same thing and I'm I was thinking about the Nuremberg trials
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where after World War II when the Nazis were being tried for war crimes uh one of the things they were asked was if they believed in everything they were doing and something like 90 percent of them
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said No at first they believed the kind of propaganda of uh the Jewish attack on their population and whatever but as it got into gassing children uh something like 90 of the people who
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were doing that said no I totally didn't believe in it and I thought it was terrible and then when they were asked did you try to stop they all said no and they quoted German phrases that translated to something like officers
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orders I didn't have a choice and I think about I think about all the things that we would consider impact like it was just normal life in Tibet before Mao invaded
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when we talk about having a civilization that has deeper consideration for other sentient beings and deeper interiority and Tibet was pretty great at that and it didn't lead
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it didn't lead to their civilization continuing when a more power-oriented civilization wanted to end it uh I think about when we're talking about the the impending catastrophes I think about
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the 100 million Native Americans that were genocided for my country to exist just a minute ago and we like to have we talk about like the values of Western Civilization but
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you know modern democracy in the United States occurred on 100 million person genocide and massive slavery as well as the destruction of the species and and that genocide was in
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this part of the exponential curve that is now verticalizing and people don't have an intuition for how fast it goes from here and I'm thinking about all of the Chinese soldiers who are going into Tibet murdering nuns and Priests and
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destroying that culture and that similarly they were mostly people who loved their kids and were moral people before being called into that situation and so I'm thinking about
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when I when I was reflecting like what does it take for any of this knowledge to matter I don't know about the other speakers I hate public speaking you were mentioning
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the fear of it like this is a miserable um experience for me I feel an obligation to have more people understand more of the situation they
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find themselves in and hopefully care more deeply one last thing and then we'll go back to your questions I was I was on a call with a friend the other day
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who has done very successful work in public health globally and it's a good guy is a good guy who is used to working on how to make the world better through institutional means the United Nations
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and things like that and he engaged on some projects that we were working on regarding artificial intelligence risks and synthetic biology risks which are not obvious on the map shared earlier the map shared earlier we're talking about largely the effective industrial
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era Tech on planetary boundaries but industrial era Tech gives rise to digital era Tech which moves radically faster right when
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you look at the speed at which GPT got used by a hundred million users or threads than in five days getting used by 100 million users compared to how quick it took the steam
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engine to be used by that many people but also the impact of it and just briefly in case people don't know because this will add something to the metichrys to the thesis of what's been
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shared so far in terms of the risk we Face the poly crisis is a term more people are familiar with which um is really good I'm very happy about the poly crisis becoming more aware so that um more common in Awareness so people
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aren't reductively focused on climate or social justice or whatever one issue they were coming from but recognizing there are many different critical issues facing the world and that they're interconnected and that there are Cascades from one to the other and they
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need considered together which is unbelievably important the we more talk about the meta crisis which is just a slight distinction in terms of the it's not just there's a lot of different
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crises and that they're moving towards Global catastrophic risks but that they have underlying dynamics that give rise to them that have to be addressed um but one of the other distinctions is a different way of taxonomizing the
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problem space and the issues of advanced technology get some more emphasis so probably I mean I know um Nick Bostrom and Andrew Sandberg and um
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uh Max tegmark our Swede so everybody here is probably actually fairly aware of AI risk more than in lots of places um but you know there was a some studies done in the U.S just in the last couple
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weeks on the relationship between the publicly deployed large language models gpt4 like things but the ones that have been jailbroken so that they don't have the same restrictions on them and pretty much everyone that has been deployed has
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either been leaked reverse engineered or jailbroken very quickly um and the relationship between those and biological development tools the ability to synthesize genomes of
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pathogens and things like that and just asking questions to Nai that can talk to you that knows all of chemistry that is published on Wikipedia and online knows all of biology knows all of
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current technology which would normally be a radically huge team needed to do that and being able to ask questions like which companies provide Gene synthesis tools that are not government
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monitored where I can buy Gene synthesis tools without triggering uh oversight and what are the most virulent pathogens and how many people could I kill for a hundred thousand
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dollars and questions like that and it answering and this is totally nuclear weapons level catastrophic capability but unlike nuclear you just have to have
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an information packet to be able to use it the knowledge of how to do that travels the speed of light on the internet radically decentralized can't be limited to G8 and so the and yet from the economic
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perspective of what um every speaker today was talking about exponential curve goes up software seems like the answer to planetary boundaries right because we get to keep getting more economic growth
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without having to use as many resources per dollar awesome we're definitely moving forward as fast as possible with AI and the US and the hope that it'll fix the stagflation and allow us to deal
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with the economic situation but it's dual use it's Omni use it's basically meaning you develop it for one purpose but it enables everybody to do every purpose that they have and the
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radical enablement of the distribution of human purposes as they exist today super problematic but the the thing that I was talking to my friend about is we were working on these issues how do we regulate that type of AI and that type
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of synthetic biology that has nuclear level catastrophic capabilities but that non-state actors can get and he was suggesting to me that uh we have to that it already made action
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on this we have to make a public-private partnership where we get all the big AI companies and all the big synthetic bio companies involved because they're the only ones who know the information and they're the only ones that can move fast enough because government moves too slow and
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um they'll be able to come up with the regulation for themselves and he's serious he was actually serious about this and I'm like are you kidding are you kidding about
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this and I like and I said we can't have any revolving doors in this the people who are regulating the tech cannot have a vested interest in the tech not getting heavily regulated and he got so frustrated at me he's like Daniel
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everything in DC is rotating doors and I'm like I know that's why we're going to go extinct and he got so frustrated he almost had to hang up because he's like you're being so unrealistic
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because this is how regulation and the world works and I'm like you're being so unrealistic you're pretending a biosphere can continue to exist and the issue is that he was grounded in the reality of human history as it has
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been so far and I was trying to ground in physics and biology because we don't get to change those in the same ways and the two aren't compatible so I have to be unrealistic to history as it has been
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so far if I want to be able to think about how to make a human technological civilization compatible with the biosphere and itself and its own continuity and I think yeah one thing like if I'm
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gonna Express what I was reacting to today is that I do believe we're at the end of History like eminently in the lifetimes of everyone in this room or at the end of History meaning we're at the end of
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a human civilization defined by the major defining characteristics that what we call written human history from early Egypt or Sumeria or whatever was defined by which is the it didn't if you had a peaceful
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civilization and Genghis Khan wanted that area or Alexander the Great one to that area your peaceful civilization was wiped out and the same is true if you have a if you want to internalize all of the cost of carbon
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your country is going to get destroyed geopolitically by whoever externalizes that cost and concentrates the profits the the thing that has been more successfully dominant extracted more grown its population more increased its
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violence capability wins and that thing with exponential Tech at planetary boundaries self-terminates so either we're at the end of our species or we're at the end of our species being
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defined by those parameters and the end of our species being defined by those parameters requires I think the last thing I'll say when I was thinking about the the Nazis and
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everyone else in those situations is the famous quote lots of people have said a quote like this that it's the complicity of the week with the wicked that allows the evils of the world to happen
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most of the Nazis were not Hitler but Hitler couldn't have done without a lot of people who obeyed most of the Mongols were not Genghis Khan most of us
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are not the people that make the choice to make up reasons for Wars that are false flag for truly economic and
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geopolitical reasons but we will still not get in the way of that thing happening the Iraq war that started all of the recent rounds of Wars because of the weapons of mass
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destruction that we knew they didn't have where are the prosecutions for that because four and a half million people were murdered as a result of that there are a small number of people who
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are motivated by power exclusively pretty exclusively and then there's most everyone else who just needs to pay the bills and not rock the boat too much and wants to feel like they will do good
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things within the confines of that so I guess I don't I don't want people to think about how to make their own life regenerative because it doesn't matter I don't want people to think about how
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to make Sweden regenerative I want people to think about what it would take to turn the entire Arc of humanity factoring what is currently driving it and that everything else that you could
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do doesn't matter at all because the end of the possibility space of all meaningful human activities is eminent if we don't do that that's what I'm reflecting on
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[Applause] wow what if we take it from here do you wanna do you think it was any like missing perspectives or anything we need
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to add to the previous models would you rather think we should go into like this is not sufficient what is the most efficient solution to you
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yeah we didn't talk about war in the previous models very much let's talk about war when we study history we study War a lot because
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history is very significantly defined by War right now we're talking about markets as the defining characteristic markets and War co-evolutionary structures they're both structures of how to grow
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and Empower populations and rival risk conflict with each other um in fact you can think about what we call War as kinetic Warfare com zero-sum type
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competition using bombs and guns and stuff and you can think about what we call economics as economic Warfare political Warfare diplomatic Warfare narrative Warfare and
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Von klausowitz's famous statement that war is politics by other means um and so I think understanding the role of conflict in the ecological crisis is
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very important I think you know like um the the best country on Kate's chart was Costa Rica they don't have a military also because they don't have extractable
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natural resources um and they don't have some critical and international thing like a Panama Canal or whatever so they they don't have to have the resources allocated to Military
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and that kind of thing but you know when we look at the history of warfare we didn't have the ability and War to destroy everything until World War II and World War II was a minute ago in
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historical terms and at the end of World War II there were about two billion people on the planet which was already a 4X jump from what there was for all of human history till the Industrial Revolution right until
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until the Industrial Revolution we didn't have the type of tech that could destroy the biosphere because you can't overfish the oceans with fishing rods right you'd have to overfish the oceans you have to have massive industrial
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fishing equipment and on and on um so all of human history only brought us to half a billion people until the Industrial Revolution and then we're like oh look how awesome the hobber Bosch mechanism is but corresponding to
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we can feed a lot more people is all of the planetary boundary issues we're hitting now just a couple hundred years later because we went from half a billion to 8 billion overnight but we went at World War II we were up to 2 billion but only
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2 billion that means we went from 2 billion to 8 billion since then and that's because part of the solution to don't use these nukes was radically grow the economy via
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globalization the globalization solution which was which was key to the post-world War II how do we have the superpowers not war because throughout all of history there have no not been long periods of Peace where the
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superpowers don't War because because the superpowers are run by power oriented people and in who want more stuff and they get more stuff by taking other people's
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stuff and so but now with nuclear bombs we have a war that nobody can win so for the superpowers to not war they'll still have proxy wars which we've had they'll still have wars on the global South they'll have wars on the environment but
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they can't have a direct kinetic ore and so the answer was let's connect the whole global system and there were some Brilliance to this through globalization so that we don't
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want to bomb each other because we're bombing our own Supply chains you have to think about this when you start thinking about localization because if you make things more local and we're not interdependent on each other we have less disincentive to bomb
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them right so that was one of the reasons for the radical globalization but it did of course create these radically complicated fragile Supply chains where if anything happens and they go down everybody's and we
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saw that in covid right we saw that to stop the travel of the pathogen fertilizers and pesticides weren't able to move and you got locusts in North Africa in the Middle East and you got crop failures in India and like that
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um but the let's radically financialize and deregulate the world so that everybody and globalize the world so that everybody can have more stuff and the
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superpowers can have more stuff without having to take each other's stuff did produce 75 years of non-kinetic war between superpowers with proxy wars the whole time
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but it also Forex the population 100x to the resource consumption per capita of you know what it was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and developed Ai and synthetic bio and cyber Technologies and extinctive 13
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species a day so when we look at that picture if we start to degrowth there are a lot of people who are like no I would rather not have less I'd rather there be less of other
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people's people and I think that we can win the war so one of the challenges to degrowth is that that has been the only thing that's prevent the the growth equation has been
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the only thing with these kinds of uh people and patterns that have prevented World War III kinetically so we have to factor that so I think the role of War violence is
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critical I think the to add to the story I think the role of advancing Tech is critical to add to the story because when we're largely looking at the results of the industrial Tech
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that have cumulative effects the exponential Tech allows us to have cumulative effects much faster but also not just cumulative effects but radically rapid catastrophic effects
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um and then we have to look at the underlying drivers why can we not stop this thing why is it that no literally no country
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no company in the world wants climate change no nobody is like climate change is the world that I want but we're orienting to it so fast and we can't stop and nobody can stop it
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because we all want stuff that requires energy that is driving that thing and nobody wants species Extinction and nobody really wants to live in a world with automated AI weapons but we're all racing to build
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them so what the is actually driving the world to a world that literally nobody wants I think there's a deeper analysis of
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that and the market is a part of it I I immediately think if should we continue to elaborate that what is actually driving that sure or do you want to continue over to the market yeah
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let's come please continue think about the scale of the market for a minute you have something like a hundred trillion dollars exchange hands every day and as has been made clear all of that involves energy that is involving
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Mining and fracking and extraction and pollution on the other side it also even the services sector depend upon products so all of it has a materials footprint
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it all requires central banks it all requires militaries nobody gets to make money in that contract hold without the military that holds the monopolies of violence and everything in place that keeps that economic system going so all
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of those dollars the taxes that they pay and whatever are supporting that whole system right so norskin is one of the probably larger impact companies around and if you have
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whatever a few hundred million dollars to invest and we're talking about a hundred trillion dollars a day of activity that is right up at planetary boundaries and at the verticalizing part of the
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exponential Tech curve uh you know how do you leverage any activity to be able to affect 100 trillion dollars a day no longer being harm externalizing that's a question we have to take really seriously
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but so that's the size of the economy today and it's obviously growing exponentially just to keep up with interest and if we didn't grow exponential you wouldn't keep up with interest the financial system as we know it would collapse so we have a financial
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system that the world the how we meet our basic needs depends upon that is so obviously incompatible with the biosphere what the we did just it was so
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ridiculous but so um what is the market think of it as money is a kind of token for Value it's a kind of token for game theoretic
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optionality where it has no intrinsic value but it has a maximum optionality to get me any type of value I want I can get militaries with it I can get media influence I can change people's minds I
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can get materials and because I don't know how the environment is going to change the speed of adaptive response is the most important thing the ooda loop the speed at which I can respond to the environment so I don't want a lot of materials that might become less useful
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I want a lot of optionality to have whatever I want right and so if you think of money as a proxy for Value but only
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value that is measurable extractable and exchangeable and all the types of value that on your deathbed you'll really care about are not measurable extractable and exchangeable we'll destroy all those
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types of value in the pursuit of these types and we have to because they are right and so now think about that as a decentralized incentive system
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that is incenting all the eight billion humans to figure out how to get it because everything else they want requires it and everything they need to exist requires it the country is relative to each other the companies relative to each other the people
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relative to each other and so it incends them to innovate and it and sends them to act on existing Innovation so search algorithms and
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optimization algorithms right and so you can think of the global market as something like an AI in an intelligent system that is running
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parallel process on human compute on human beings and you know how radically powerful parallel process in the cloud is being able to run a lot of parallel process on computers did a lot more than
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centralized supercomputers could do so this is running parallel process on 8 billion human beings and the clusters of Corporations and countries and whatever to incentivize them all to search new
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ways to make money and to optimize on existing ways and whoever gets good at that system gets more power in it and in turn lobbies and changes laws and changes cultural values of the media they create and whatever that makes a
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system better for them and anyone that opposes that system is also opposing those who are doing well at it so that there is agency to suppress that so the you can think of the global
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market as a misaligned super intelligence that is already misaligned with planetary well-being in humans that is running on all the humans while also running all the humans
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that also uses all the compute and all the other technology and that is building all of the narrow AIS in its own service we said that most of the Nazis weren't Hitler
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so the the Hitler were all in relationship to today is this thing right we can call it moloch but this kind you can call it the superorganism you can call it the mega
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machine and that thing has to die a thing has to die or the biosphere will die but it's not actually animate
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it is running on and made up of Human Action and so thinking about what would it take to it has to die and or be converted to something that it is not and the something that it is not is that
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you can't assess all types of value with a single value currency a fungible value currency where the real types of value can't be measured there and where you can destroy real values to get the
00:32:54
optionality token for Value that that thing there is no Global fungible unitary currency with its own internal Financial
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mechanisms like interest that create embedded growth obligations there's no system that has those structures that is compatible with human continuance so that thing has to change and for people in here to have a future
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where you don't live in cognitive dissonance if you if you get that then you can't operate within that thing anymore you have to say how do I change that thing I can't operate within it
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because I can't I can't be complicit with an omnicidal thing so it doesn't need to break or can we bend it there is no human future that is
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compatible with a single fungible Global Currency and interest and most of human access mediated by property private property ownership those things are fundamentally incompatible we can do the
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math on that sometime back in 2017 I wrote a series of papers called a new economic series and IT addresses a chunk of this stuff um no making the money crypto doesn't solve
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it um so first can you the money is supposed to index real value goods and services right like the
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theory of the market was people want real that will improve their lives and barter is just and there's a lot wrong with this and you can read Graber and others to see what's wrong with this
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but like very simplified kind of Market apologism uh early Market Theory all the Smith and Friends says people want real goods and services that will improve the quality
00:34:58
of their lives how many cows are worth how many shoes is really hard so we make a unit of currency that's easier to carry around where you don't have to cut up the cows each time to be able to mediate that kind of barter in exchange
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and people will buy the product or service that meets their need the best at the best price so this creates the the authentic demand creates an incentive for other people to figure out
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Supply to be creative and that it's not money as a measure of extraction but money is a measure of production we're adding value by putting pieces together in a form that wasn't there and that the
00:35:35
intelligent rational human will pick the thing that meets their need the best and the world will get better right like that's the gist of the idea and it's supposed to be then that the money is indexing the real goods and services so how much money is there has to be that
00:35:48
within that market you kind of know how much goods and services to know how much one unit of currency's worth which is why counterfeit is always illegal because if you just added a bunch more currency that wasn't indexing the goods
00:36:00
and services you'd be debasing the value of the currency but as soon as that the financial system you start to realize okay well now I have some of this money that is an optionality token for any kind of value
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and I can give some of it to someone else I can loan some of it to someone else so that they can buy the tractors or the horses or the whatever they need to do a thing or then they will grow the productivity some of that increased gain that they
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get I should get back so we call that interest rent seeking or interest and then now we have a situation where just the reality of Interest
00:36:36
requires the system to grow the monetary Supply now because the population was growing and because we were technologically innovating the system was growing but now that we're at a situation where we can't keep growing because we've hit
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planetary boundaries because there's eight billion people and 100x the resource per capita that there was before industrial Tech the monetary system still requires there to be three percent more money next year and then three percent more on that
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which is a compounding curve which goes exponential to not debase the value of that currency that means you have to exponentiate real goods and services which means rather than the money following the real economy it's driving
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it right can you that embedded growth obligation is totally incompatible with planetary boundaries so do you have to change Financial Services to not have an embedded growth obligation absolutely
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there's a lot of other structures that we can get into that have to change now can we Bend not break there is immediate work we have to do because we're so near tipping points
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we're past tipping points right like if everybody many people in here saw the article that came out about six months ago in the American Chemical Society Journal about pfos the fluorinated surfactants and
00:37:54
rainwater everywhere in the world but they are in rain water like these fluorinated surfactants which affect their endocrine disruptors and carcinogens and neurotoxins they're in every drop of rain water all around the
00:38:07
world that has been studied including snowfall in Antarctica and they're at levels that are above the EPA and EU thresholds that's not we're getting close to
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planetary boundaries that's we have crossed them and the Cascade of tragedies we don't know yet we don't know if we stop using hydrocarbons awesome but if we stop the pollution and these
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are forever chemicals what they're still there and they're not just affecting the humans they're affecting the soil microbes and the algae and everything the gene lines of those things so we're already past some planetary boundaries
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where near other ones there's immediate that has to happen we have to use markets and governments and whatever for that because that's where all the power is but we have to use them very differently than they so
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we kind of have to hijack them and so what does that look like it looks like that the most toxic forms of Agriculture that deplete all the minerals in the soil and use pesticides and herbicides
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I.E poison that was designed to kill life and spray it all over our food and spray it in the ecosystem in billions of tons of year that is subsidized by the governments of the world I.E it's not even Market competing with
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regenerative agriculture it's being subsidized to to not even allow Fair competition of the other things when it is omnisciental because it's it claims it's the only thing that
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can produce enough food to meet food security for national interests no the real reason is because they're better at lobbying than small farmers are so what's an immediate thing to do do you need lobbying do you need people who
00:39:54
know how to lobby as well as big Ag and big Pharma and big oil and big Tech who go and Lobby for opposite purposes to remove the perverse subsidies that are going to those and move them to the things that would be better that are
00:40:07
still Market viable things so that the market topology changes a small amount of lobbying money can produce a lot of State money change which can produce a
00:40:19
lot of Market change because you've changed the topology of the market these are examples of not changing the underlying Logics of the market but working with them to change the world in the timely things I call this triage
00:40:31
and that needs done in a lot of sectors there's transitional work which is to make the existing systems less pathological how do we change so how Kate's work with
00:40:46
the donut would be an example of insofar as governments start actually forcing monitoring of externalities and making it illegal so the externalities have to be internalized in the cost equation
00:41:00
that would be a good example insofar as they start to change the fiduciary responsibility from profit maximizing to things that are not ecocidal and biocidal and lifestyle in the process of
00:41:12
you know economic viability those would be transitional and then long term is totally rethinking okay we know how to split an atom now
00:41:24
wow like we go back through the high school physics of how small an atom is and the fact that we have figured out how to split an atom to actually how to
00:41:37
do Fusion right how to how to do this at the level of the nucleus of an atom and we know how to modify genomes of species and make new synthetic life that never existed before
00:41:50
and the fact that we know how to reverse engineer brains and make these massive neural networks that can do exoflops per second of calculation this is UN the fact that we are
00:42:03
the major geologic Force shaping the surface of the planet at this time in the anthropocene that's a lot of power that we have from our intelligence to Think Through
00:42:15
what would it mean for our species to be wise enough to Steward that power safely what kind of civilization what kind of economic system what kind of governance system what kind of education system what kind of religious systems of
00:42:31
conditioning the sacred and meaning are necessary to be able to Steward the power of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence and nuclear attack and globalized supply chain
00:42:44
industrial Tech to Steward that safely that's the long-term work but that we don't get time to do if we don't do these other things only have eight minutes left I guess
00:42:59
it's like a third question we can fit into that um I mean hearing all the messages of today's presentations hearing you now
00:43:16
uh as a side reflection I'm just realizing this is not only like a virtue signaling to sit here with you it's also like cognitive signaling pretending I understand everything you're saying but that's a kind of good
00:43:31
feeling I mean digesting this how how can you not become depressed if you really take this in because it's
00:43:42
quite complex it's just so dark what you're saying and what we need to do as as Society I think people can you hear me okay I think
00:43:54
people should let themselves become depressed foreign I think if they are not they're they're so schismed inside they're not it's hard
00:44:07
to even think of people as humans if you can know the reality of what's happening in factory farms and just be stoked it's not not my problem if you can know how many kids are in the
00:44:20
sex trade globally if you can know what the destruction of species looks like and you aren't depressed there's something really wrong with you but the reason you're depressed if you let yourself be the reason that you might not be is because you won't let
00:44:37
yourself be either you're actually an obligate sociopath it just can't feel or you won't let yourself because it's overwhelming and you don't know what to do with that trust that let yourself go there anyways
00:44:51
and then recognize that the reason you're depressed is not just what it means for you but because you because you love animals and the animals that are being destroyed
00:45:07
are not that different than your dog and because you love kids not just your own and the other kids that are being in totally situations in the future kids that won't have a chance at life are not that different than your kids
00:45:20
and the reason for the depression at all is because life is actually beautiful and sacred and the depression is recognizing the the destruction of the sacred but then there's like okay well I'm here
00:45:40
and I have some agency I have some capacity I can do something about it I don't know how to yet but I'm not going to let myself do anything other than figure out how
00:45:52
and then act on that and then when it's insufficient figure out how [Applause] as opposed to I'll wait till someone else figures it out or when I figure out how even though I'm not allocating time
00:46:10
to trying so yeah I I want people to feel the depressed depression and the outrage and the fear because it means that they are not just deadening themselves and fragmenting
00:46:30
inside and then I want them to not allow themselves the cognitive dissonance to forget and just care more about the messages that came in today that totally don't matter in comparison and then I want you to realize that the
00:46:46
you can't focus on the bad guy over there and and then you also can't let yourself stop or not act because you don't know how but you also can't act doing things that you know won't work so you have to
00:47:01
learn you have to try to to figure it out and talk to other people that are and and then recognize that if life was not
00:47:13
actually beautiful meaningful and sacred to you would give no shits at all that it's being destroyed and so don't act out of anger depression and fear act out of that sense of the Sacred and that you are in service to a
00:47:26
life that is beautiful to a life with a capital l a world that is beautiful and that you're at a time when there is a higher possible consequence of your action than there has ever been for humans
00:47:38
and there is an obligation in that and there is a meaningfulness in that that you don't want to waste [Applause] uh final two and a half minute any any final words that you want to share with
00:48:06
us anything that you think we have missed any like call to action for all of us yeah super highly skilled and capable and people here with
00:48:18
a lot of agency yeah I'm reminded of the the krishnamurti quote that being well adjusted to a profoundly insane Society is not a good measure of Health
00:48:30
good measure of Mental Health it will seem like I'm trying to radicalize you and I am but I'm not trying to radicalize you I'm trying to talk about the only thing I feel is sane
00:48:44
at all in a world that is completely batshit crazy and then I don't want to moralize you uselessly so you just kind of feel bad on your way to bed while continuing to do the same so the question I was
00:49:02
talking about at the beginning of how does any of this matter a practical thing I would say is that your social media feed will continue to show you the same and your bills will continue to
00:49:13
call at you and your media will continue to show you all the things that it does that are all wrong and your existing obligations will continue to push on you and that you will not be able to counter that by memory and will
00:49:26
alone you'll have to change the feed of what's coming into your awareness where this comes into your awareness every day so put Nate's podcast put the work of the other people that are awaking you up
00:49:39
or reminding you of things you know put that on your daily feed somehow because the whole we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around our Consciousness is influenced by what we're paying attention to make
00:49:52
sure that what is most the truest thing you know is what is getting your attention the most change who is around you and change the
00:50:05
information feed coming to you such that what is most true and meaningful is what you're getting reminded of the most if you can like literally tonight start thinking about who you know that reminds you of these things that you can start
00:50:18
spending more time around and send them messages what things you can delete off your phone what social apps you can just delete what new ones you can add like that's a practical thing that you are
00:50:29
that what is conditioning your Consciousness continuously is aligned with what what is most real Daniel smacktenberger thank you so much
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