Video: DANIEL SCHMACHTENBERGER FULL | GITA MASTER SERIES (DocDrop)

00:00:00

[Music] we're very happy to have here so thank you so much for making time for us here and you know I think most of us have been following your work for a long time

00:00:11

and we're really looking forward to sharing some time and discussing what we've learned and what we could take away from this now with you because we've more or less to build on the

00:00:24

conversation that I hope everybody has had a chance to look at you've had with livebury around meditations on moloch we have understood that there are

00:00:39

downward spiral negative Dynamics merging from Malik emerging from what's probably in your words very close to the reason for all of the issues we're having to deal

00:00:52

with which is our idea of money over money return of trying to optimize towards Financial profits but with all understood that

00:01:06

and but now we're faced specifically because we're coming to the end of this series with the question of okay what are we going to do with this how are we going to carry this forward into our

00:01:19

everyday lives into our realities in which we have to deal with the pressures of managing money or simply explaining to others how we think about the world

00:01:32

right this is difficult this is really difficult and so this is this one Avenue that we'd like to explore how can we maintain this for ourselves how can we deepen this how can we not let this slip

00:01:45

after we've embarked on this journey together here and maybe we can also touch on some ideas of how to put this into action in the world

00:01:58

concrete ways of putting this interaction which is difficult which is because you have to make some very clear and probably uncomfortable decisions but I don't want to give your talk Daniel so I'm gonna

00:02:10

give you some space to unfold some of your ideas around this like we exchanged earlier and and then we open a conversation and have some fun

00:02:24

Daniel do you feel something coming up that you would like to pick up on and we take it from there you said that people here had watched some part of that talk that I gave with

00:02:39

Liv Ori and obviously went through this whole Gita series and heard a lot of things and you mentioned that many of the people here are familiar with things that I say that I don't care to repeat previously so I guess I'm if this is

00:02:52

especially the last of the series and hopefully people take something meaningful way I want to share what is most useful so I guess I'm curious to hear what is top of mind for people and maybe speak into that

00:03:05

okay let's begin let's open with that if you all reflect and I see I think Patrick you might have now Patrick still music if you all reflect on what happened during this series and as some of our

00:03:22

since making conversations in between the sessions with our guests and you map that onto the rest of your life as you were going through the series

00:03:35

what's comes up for you is it something you'd like to share as a foundation for this conversation today Lucille good so maybe one thing that is

00:03:51

I think Thomas mentioned it already but to me as a person who sits on the crossroad between capital and Technology knowing what we know now and also based

00:04:04

on this series it would be very beneficial to understand not only what is our next step as individuals because I think we'll each take it to our own lives and implement it in

00:04:17

different ways but what is it that we can do individually or collectively to take a step in the direction that

00:04:28

will better us and all everyone maybe that's yeah 30 000 feet but this is really where I'm struggling to really put some concretization into it

00:04:46

you feel like and yeah conversation so far with everyone who spoke on Gita series you have a different view about what the intersection of capital and technology

00:04:58

portends for the future on the current track I feel like we have to build two parallel worlds where the current track somehow needs to be tweaked and continued but the new track needs to

00:05:12

come about and and work in parallel I don't think we can switch and it's about how we treat capital or what we think about it in terms of being a resource or whatever like anything

00:05:25

else and and what we can direct people who are technology people or people who think around the philosophy of Technology maybe of what

00:05:39

should be done in order to address these challenges that were raised here about the energy and the minerals and resources and yeah I think that's a bit what I feel like it's a parallel

00:05:50

situation which can take a long time or a short time but somehow needs to start happening or maybe it is happening already and I'm just late in the game so the big question that you're asking I

00:06:04

think is the question of this call which is what can we tangibly do individually and collectively towards all that needs done as people who are sitting in the place of investment technology what can be done that moves the current

00:06:17

system in a better Direction at minimum not in a worse Direction and is there stuff that can be done with capital that helps develop new systems that are more fundamentally adequate hopefully we'll unpack that over the course but you said

00:06:30

a couple things that were just little tangents I wanted to speak to First you mentioned what can we do with capital that is a resource like any other I this may be obvious to everybody but if

00:06:43

not it's really worth saying I would not say that capital meaning fiscal Capital the way we think of it is a resource like any other I think it is a optionality token for all forms of

00:06:57

extractable and exchangeable resource without actually being a resource itself I think it is a technology it's a social technology that is arguably the most powerful technology Humanities ever

00:07:09

created and that it is fundamentally both constructive and destructive but more importantly destructive for this phase and that's not based on how we use it

00:07:22

it's intrinsic to the nature of the technology itself no matter how we use it and it's just if this is not understood there's like nothing that can be done

00:07:33

so just indulge me a moment on it first the concept of resource I had a feature of anthropology that would have

00:07:49

been like 110 now when I was young he was very old and he had the fortune of getting to be the first Western person to contact many indigenous tribes or one of the first

00:08:02

that were still separate from Western civilization and modern civilization writ large and he was doing cultural analysis on seeing how much the current modern

00:08:14

society model had become ubiquitous conditioning in all of our studies of human nature were inside of ubiquitous conditioning so you can't really call it nature and so he wanted to see the things that hadn't been conditioned in that way and if human nature actually expressed differently

00:08:26

so he was looking at the most violent and least violent cultures and looking at what they are that's a function of and one of the key things was looking at how it was a function of language actually had a couple teachers that had looked at this deeply one of the most

00:08:39

profound insights was they said that in some of the island Polynesian cultures and some of the Amazonian cultures that were still that were extremely non-violent both in inter

00:08:51

and intra-tribe they didn't have the word mine in their language first person possessive just wasn't even a word and in other ones they had the word but it was extremely de-emphasized it was

00:09:03

like a strange word to refer to a bad idea and they had ours but even ours possession didn't mean the same thing it had the concept of stewardship built into the

00:09:16

semantic itself and mine is actually one of the first words that most kids in our culture learn and one of the things that they found was that the cultures that didn't have the

00:09:28

word mine also didn't have the word or the prevalence of the words greed selfish or jealousy because those were not just innate human emotions that are always there they were

00:09:41

actually memetic constructs if you have a shared ownership situation in a tribe but it's not ownership because you don't have massive Surplus so you don't have radical wealth inequality everybody shares stuff whoever goes fishing that's

00:09:54

for everybody whoever is picking berries is you just don't build those same constructs in in terms of I want what they have it just doesn't occur in the same way so there are so many constructs

00:10:07

that we have that we take for granted as just human nature that we have to work with that are actually at the foundation of our problems so I mentioned that because the word resource is an inherently violent word

00:10:19

the way we think of it the way we've defined it Human Resources is how do we see sentient human beings who are Somebody's Baby who are going to be on their deathbed reflecting upon their purpose in life and if they use

00:10:31

their time how do we see them as a resource for a company that has a fiduciary responsibility to profit maximize they're not human resources they're human beings and talk about natural resources is a

00:10:44

whale a natural resource because it is if you're running a whaling boat a whale's a natural resource is it any sentient animal is an ecosystem that you that we devastate a natural resource black people used to be

00:10:56

natural resources meaning part of the chattel the same way we treat cows so the word and concept resource has to go like it just fundamentally the idea man's dominion

00:11:08

over everything is here for us if we can control it and extract it it's about its utility value rather than intrinsic value for us at the heart of the ideas that has to go is that so I want to throw out the concept of

00:11:21

resource to begin with and I want to say that words like mine and resource and like they're colonized colonizer mind Concepts

00:11:32

and so just there's that now let's talk about natural resources I've got steel I've got copper I've got Lumber

00:11:46

I don't really have those things because to get that copper I had to clear cut a forest and then dig a giant hole kill all the life that was there have that mining tailings go into the water and kill all the fresh water like

00:12:00

this is why we have to not think of it as a resource it's also important to get that like the biosphere is mostly six atoms it's mostly hydrogen carbon oxygen phosphorus it's six atoms it took a billion years of geology and then

00:12:12

another billion years of single cell organisms to take all the Mercury and cadmium and like toxic and bind it in rocks way down here and build up a biosphere layer up here and that was good because a tree could

00:12:26

turn into a frog could turn into a moss could turn into a mushroom could turn into it anything right the same ingredients were recycling and so there was no waste there was no unrenewable resource extraction every dead thing was made of the same building

00:12:39

blocks until we started mining right we start Mining and we took what took billions of years to get the super toxic that was buried down here and locked up in rock we pull it up we separate it out through smelting and

00:12:52

whatever and then we put the super toxic in the biosphere that is mostly biotoxic to all life whether we're talking about lead or arsenic or Mercury or whatever and to get the copper or the steel we have to make a lot of this stuff

00:13:04

we have the municipal solid waste all of the trash that goes out from our house and from the restaurants and everything is so much the world is drowning in Municipal Solid Waste there's two billion tons per year

00:13:16

but there's two billion tons of Municipal solid waste per year there's 190 billion tons of mining waste per year Upstream from our choices to get the metals that made this laptop and

00:13:29

everything else I get to take the portion of the rock I want the portion that I don't want goes into a giant ass tailings Dam that always breaks and goes into the water and

00:13:40

so to just get like Upstream from our concept of natural resource is so much biocidal Insanity I really would just want to emphasize that okay and then the tree is Lumber it's a

00:13:54

natural resource no that's a three thousand year old Redwood that's a 500 year old whatever like okay but let's go ahead and pretend that's a reasonable concept to call those natural resources for a minute

00:14:06

money is still not like those because I cannot instantly exchange those right if I've got a bunch of lumber or I've got a bunch of metal the transport of that is difficult once

00:14:18

I have as much as I can use I get a diminishing return on the value of that thing it stops being worth having more than I can use and it starts being worth less per unit because now I just got too much of it and so it has a low liquidity value

00:14:31

but as soon and so once I've got more lumber than I can use now it just needs protected from termites and stuff I want less of it but if I can sell it on the market quickly and keep getting capital

00:14:44

and that Capital doesn't become worth less as I get more in fact I add interest it becomes worth more as I get more now I want to cut all the trees I want to mine all the stuff there's no diminishing return there's only upside

00:14:56

there's only accelerating return money has no tangible value right it's nobody you can't eat it you can't build stuff with it it's pure optionality token but that has maximum liquidity

00:15:08

maximum fungibility for Speed of optionality towards every other real type of value but not every real type of value because nothing that somebody wants on their deathbed and you actually buy with money only towards the types of value that can be extracted Quantified

00:15:21

and exchanged but what that means is that there's a lot of types of real value we will destroy in the pursuit of this optionality value so the fact that the money means that

00:15:34

now I have no diminishing return basis to not cut down ill monetize everything where on any other resource we did and the speed of optionality means that if anyone else is getting more money they'll beat me at a war political war

00:15:47

or a Medicore or actual work so I have to race to get more of it and then the money has its own mechanics as soon as I get interest in financial services where it exponentiates itself and to not

00:16:00

debase the value of the currency we have to extract more from the earth and turn into pollution and trash that is unique to money it's unbelievably powerful right a universal optionality token that has no intrinsic value but

00:16:13

can give me instantaneous choice for any type of value that I want but is inherently destructive to real value in the process so I just want to say it will be a while before the primary

00:16:27

way we mediate choices about physicality is not money we all know this it's not going to switch overnight we have a hundred trillion dollars exchanging every day being printed in central banks and ran through a complex Global

00:16:39

Financial system backed by nation-state militaries to secure the rule of law on all those contracts that means every one of those dollars is paying for those militaries and the issues that they cause and the supply chains behind them

00:16:51

and everything of the hundred trillion dollars that trades hands every day not one of those dollars really does not cause some harm across the supply chain because it's utilizing

00:17:03

resources or it depends upon hardware and other things so the long-term solution if humanity is to keep existing it will not have the thing we call money or Capital it will not

00:17:15

have a an idea that qualitative value can get turned into quantitative value and that all different Quantified metrics can be made fungible intercommentable into a single

00:17:27

value metric that has intrinsic exponentiation built into it if those Concepts don't go I bet everything that I know that Humanity goes extinct

00:17:38

and so money as a system has to go now in the next little while that's not going to happen so we have to use it better but it is like using the Ring of Sauron

00:17:52

like it just is it as a structure it is the one resource to rule all resources that intrinsically has power asymmetries and stuff built in it is a it is an intrinsically powerful technology

00:18:05

with that in mind one has to understand that it is not itself benign and it's just we do good things or bad things with it you can't do good things without depending upon Supply chains that do lots of bad things

00:18:19

and if you grow those things you grow the other things that's implicit to the structure anyone who is stewarding capital if they don't understand this will not be a good Steward of capital

00:18:30

I wanted to start with that so what will replace it so let's say one of the places where I recognize this I worked on a project in my early 20s it was trying to make a universal life cycle assessment for

00:18:54

Universal value assessment so that a big foundation could say I put this much donation money here and it saves this many trees but this much donation money feeds this many kids this one protects this many rhinos this much sequesters as

00:19:07

many tons of CO2 I want to optimize my input across the Scopes of output so that I know how to do that so let's make metrics where I can decide how many Rhino lives are worth how many children lives are worth how many tons of CO2 or

00:19:20

pounds per parts per million of Mercury insane right it just is actually insane you we understand why we want to do that because we only have one input metric so we want one output

00:19:31

metric right the one input metric is money so we would like to save money in one but okay so quantify the value of those children's lives no don't do that hold it as Boolean if we fail at saving them

00:19:44

we failed and it was Irreplaceable it was priceless it were replaceable it was an unacceptable failure and we just failed period and you try to quantify it and right now we quantify it you all know through

00:19:56

insurance and reinsurance and the way it's valued at depository trust Corporation and like that we quantify it based on the amount of taxes that person will pay and the amount that they'll contribute to GDP and like that and it's like it is that concept of

00:20:09

resource built into the whole thing so right now this is the thing everybody's excited about with AI oh the AI will be able to make a global resource optimization system that can Okay so the value of the Rhino's life is worth

00:20:22

this much but what if the Rhinos become slightly more endangered versus it becomes slightly more of them relative to the other things around it versus we have to be continuously changing the waiting functions it's just a nonsense

00:20:34

actual way to do it the way to think about it is I can't enter exchange rhinos for mercury for children they're different things they're not inter-exchangeable they're not fungible

00:20:47

so I have to think about each of them with their own accounting how do we tend to rhinos is a thing we must succeed at how do we tend to Children how do we tend to Mercury so if I think about the materials economy I can't make copper

00:20:59

out of Mercury right we just don't have that Alchemy like I can I have a certain amount of mercury if I don't make new Mercury out of Old Mercury then the numer the Old Mercury will be toxic

00:21:09

right and so and if I have to keep getting the new Mercury from mining that's going to be toxic so how do I make sure that I have closed loop accounting on Mercury closed loop accounting on nitrogen a little bit

00:21:22

counting on copper because each of those are in reality not fungible for each other so they need their own accounting system where the you don't have a token that gets traded in a way that isn't based on the

00:21:36

non-fungible physics of them so the future economic system will be much it'll be much more real but also more complex we don't try to reduce everything to a single thing because reduced at all the currency is

00:21:49

reducing all the paper clips it is what is a single silly ass metric that does not correspond to real value and you know the whole reason that money makes sense is because it does correspond to

00:22:01

real value because what the market will bear and where rational actors we want real and the best product or service at the best value but that's obviously nonsense right nobody who's serious can take that seriously because

00:22:12

all of the externalities are priced out and so the commons gets destroyed running that thing and behavioral econ has made it very clear that we don't have rational actors that make rational choices and on so the Invisible Hand of

00:22:25

the market is a bad God right it is a God that takes complex value and makes simple value optimized out of it and when you take a very complex thing and run an entropy pump on it and make it very simple you're in the process of

00:22:38

growing one thing while debasing what it depends upon towards a death we see an exponential curve on money on Tech on lots of things on caloric consumption exponential curves don't continue in

00:22:51

nature so they do one of three things you either get a logistic curve you get a curve up and then a curve down or you get a curve up and then you hit a cliff the idea that the U.N and everybody wants to tell us about how we'll have a

00:23:03

nine and a half billion person sustainable population that does this thing is just not based on real math and hopefully Nate and other people got that across like it's just not based on real math nor does the economic system even

00:23:16

allow for because it says to keep up with interest money has to keep doing this forever but to not debase the value of the currency have to be more goods and services oh we can make them all digital no you can't because the digital goods

00:23:28

and services still relate to physical ones or human time and attention right the software bits value either is moving atoms around in the real world more efficiently or it's for human attention

00:23:40

but human attention is finite so if I start to get a lot more software than human attention can engage I get diminishing return so there is no money go up forever there's no thing where that's possible

00:23:52

right that's a silly thing so the current path we're on is this so money is this is why I said it is a powerful like the one ring of power

00:24:06

fundamentally destructive because it will convert the complex power of nature that is not on anyone's balance sheet into game theoretic optionality tokens on someone's balance sheet that's what it does

00:24:19

and it will drive Innovation for how to do that thing more powerfully so given that right now if we want people working on projects and we want creativity and we want resources it's

00:24:31

going to equal money I want people who are stewarding money to do better rather than worse things with it totally want that I want to talk to you all about how to do that but we can't lose sight of the fact that we are using a fundamentally not just

00:24:44

broken instruments but something that is at the heart of what is breaking the world or we won't take deeply enough the externalities built into the thing that looks like maybe a good thing superficially

00:25:00

lihi raised her hand early here and said do you have something to build on yeah yeah thanks I'd love to build on that and I think just from that last point

00:25:13

for Danielle if any of us kind of work I also work with ubis with private Wells with people who recognize this point and yet they have access to this capital and so you know it's only

00:25:27

the Dilemma to engage or not to engage with people who have access to a lot of this controlling technology that they don't even they don't believe it anymore and so do you see any word I'll talk

00:25:40

about impact investing in climate finance and different kind of approaches and yet the incentive that we're talking about the whole structure is yeah we see it so do you have any ideas to

00:25:51

to follow up on that so what kind of money activity can actually help change the system to where we wanted to go in

00:26:04

addition to just more less bad things and trying to address more more intrinsic value and the change you want to see okay I so one thing I would offer for everybody is to just really do your own

00:26:27

kind of deep first principles thinking on a particular impact investment hypothesis and see if it really makes sense just the fact that lots of people are talking about how exciting it is at weft does not mean it makes sense

00:26:39

climate financing is so goofy in the fundamental idea because if I create CO2 out of hydrocarbons I

00:26:52

get net energy I can't take CO2 and turn it into hydrocarbons and get net energy I have to use energy to do that it's along a line of fundamental thermodynamics so I

00:27:06

can force people to internalize that cost with law but that's actually then not Finance its law and that would be a good thing to do I can make a carbon credit as a kind of

00:27:18

token that is people can do if they want to without it being law which basically means it's like a fashion statement of some kind but it won't fundamentally in the multi-polar traps but there isn't like a way to say oh there is a real

00:27:31

Market in the under market dynamics for a thing that is net when you break it down to the physics takes energy to do and doesn't give energy because there's a fundamental deep

00:27:44

correlation between the capital and free energy flow so it's just there's so much profound non-thinking gibberish in the system that is just a new another thing that props up the rest of the gibberish of

00:27:56

the system and I'm not saying that we like with regard to climate Delton chance carbon coin ideas or whatever could we actually get the price of carbon forced to be internalized to cost through a

00:28:09

multi-national agreement I'm into things like that but that really is a law more than finance and so much of the impact investment thesis also is I'm going to Define impact in a

00:28:22

narrow way this metric gets better but in the process of that metric getting better does the thing that I created interact with a lot of other things and does it make other things worse so if I had to give people one thought

00:28:36

it would be do try to do a good job with any proposed investment of what its externalities are if you're trying to do impact investment it's going to do some good thing what

00:28:48

are the externalities of that thing really succeeding and when you factor the externalities is it still a good thing the externalities will be physical it's going to take a lot of new hardware

00:29:01

materials Etc it's going to create some pollution waste use some resources to make that thing it's going to drive some arms races if it's successful does it threaten a current industry or a current political

00:29:12

party what do they do in response their response if driven by the thing we did is part of the effect of the thing that we did the factor there's going to be possible psychosocial externalities obviously you

00:29:24

make a thing like Facebook you change the minds of the entire planet right so understand physical and psychosocial externalities plus how other entities are forced to respond to a thing you do some of them align the

00:29:37

same direction some align very opposite directions and that's how you do externality calculus really try to do a deep job of that we've put together a framework for what we call Yellow teaming right classically blue teaming is how do I make the things succeed red

00:29:49

team is how might it fail we use the red teaming to solve the problems but might fail for these reasons let's recursively design so how it doesn't fail but then the yellow teaming is how might it succeed and actually suck for something

00:30:01

else so the how do we use red teaming we have a problem we want to solve let's make sure it doesn't fail and yellow teaming let's make sure it doesn't cause some other problem to recursively do better design on the blue teaming of how we

00:30:14

solve that problem without causing other problems and without failing so if people want to prototype a framework like that of consideration that becomes part of due diligence and impact thesis that's a really that would be my top

00:30:26

level things to offer another top level thing I would offer is think about the underlying generative dynamics that give rise to the many fold problems in the world and things that you can do that address that

00:30:38

so we know that for all planetary boundaries all ecological overshoot issues a linear materials economy rather than the closing materials economy attached

00:30:50

to a exponential growth financial system is the driver of that whole thing right linear materials economy meaning it takes resources from nature and after production distribution it turns them into a combination of pollution and

00:31:03

trash so how do you make a system where all the pollution and trash are captured and become the new input and the input does not require new version resources that happen faster than nature can replenish

00:31:16

so closed loop writ large in the packaging industry in the mining industry in the appliance industry and everything closed loop is fundamental we get closed loop or we die if you can invest in closed loop Technologies that's a category to invest

00:31:29

in but then really pay attention to the difference between the sales pitch this is closed loop in the reality of it like really look are you capturing one part of your waste stream so for instance plasma gasification for Waste Management

00:31:42

is not really closed loop it's in the right direction in some ways but I'm taking very complex forms of waste and just getting gas out of it that I burn which means at least it's not just trash I got something out of it but all this

00:31:56

stuff that was the trash I did not create a new co-product it means I don't have to take this from nature again so it's still highly entropic and doesn't close the loop so so really think through is this actually a closed loop

00:32:08

technology or Loop closing anything that is now don't think about them individually there's no piece of tech exists individually right what can I really do with a hammer by itself

00:32:21

not much I need the saws that made the lumber in the first place I need the smelting equipment that makes the nails in the first place I need lots of things the hammer is pretty useless it's part of a tech ecosystem right and

00:32:35

what is this computer without the satellite system that we're talking to each other like it doesn't do the same stuff and without the entire complex supply chain of computer systems that does the lithography and makes up this thing so

00:32:47

one of the major problems is that we focus on parts we do a good job of those parts nobody focuses on the whole so we the hole in the process right so we actually have to focus on new goals so your investment thesis should be more complex and say there's some hole

00:33:01

like the whole of the supply chain of Packaging right how we make the packaging what materials are used how much hydrocarbon we use how much energy how much water how much pfos we put on it Etc two that it winds up in the

00:33:14

oceans that it all those things I want to actually get the closed loop on the whole thing because I can de-necessitate the pfos and create a new market sector for a new kind of fluorinated surfactant that's just as bad or worse but say you know let's

00:33:27

actually Define how to get a self-sustaining system that is right it doesn't have to be the everything system but at least something right and I want to do now a series of Investments where none of them on their own fully did that but together I

00:33:39

actually get Loop closure so this is another principle of impact investing I'm offering is invest in ecosystems of Technologies which can that collectively do something that meets a minimum threshold that on their

00:33:52

own none of them maybe did and some of those will be not just physical Technologies but social technology some of which will not be for-profit right and this is where you have a blended Finance portfolio where your non-profit stuff and your

00:34:05

for-profit stuff and your lobbying stuff because those are three types of money right government money market money and non-profit money you'll do much better if you think of those three together and so can I use some non-profit money

00:34:18

to tend to some part of the commons that none of the market things will because nobody will pay for it and or to de-risk a thing that changes the investable portfolio or whatever can I use some percentage of the money to do legal stuff because laws have to

00:34:31

change because if I don't make a certain thing illegal the incentive will stay even with the new technology and some for-profit stuff where that entire bundle can be thought about in a regenerative way

00:34:44

right this is a much better way to think about it so for instance let's say I want to transition mining some category of mining and let's say in a particular category of mining the net profit is relatively

00:34:57

low because we've had a lot of diminishing return but the total volume is high right we're talking like trillions in volume but maybe at a two percent margin and the alternate way to get that metal

00:35:10

which is right now we're not recycling it out of the waste stream we're not mining the landfill for it because it's still slightly more profitable to extract it but there's also perverse subsidy still going on right we're still doing the perverse

00:35:23

subsidy on the dumb thing okay so let's I got trillions that are flowing from Pension funds in through the toxic thing and not into this other thing maybe your parents are outside what's that

00:35:37

oh maybe somebody should mute so I want to change the market parity where the toxic thing is just under profitability so all the money wants to divest even for the wrong reasons and the other thing becomes just above profitability

00:35:50

so I move trillions but maybe I can use a few million of the right non-profit lobbying money to change that topology so for instance can I do lobbying that moves the subsidy

00:36:04

from the bad thing to the new good Tech and can I do a bunch of public awareness that makes it to where the politicians have to do that because their people want so they'll do the public awareness of the non-profit I do the research with

00:36:16

the non-profit I do some lobbying to change the subsidies I also do some activist stuff that makes it to where more of the purchasers say we're not going to purchase stuff that comes from conflict metals or from polluting metals

00:36:29

or Mountaintop remove or whatever it is as a result I drive the cost of this thing up because it didn't have a huge margin I drive it up above the margin now money wants to divest from it naturally if I simultaneously took

00:36:41

something below Market parity the money will naturally follow the change gradients right it changed the topological gradient now I might be able to spend a few million non-profit maybe a few tens of millions of lobbying money

00:36:54

to move a trillion dollars of Market Capital that I don't actually even have to talk to the people and they don't have to have the right values sociopaths will make that change because it's in self-interest this is an example of how to think about the whole ecosystem of

00:37:06

types of Finance types of capital a whole ecosystem of projects an ecosystem of types of Leverage together so in the same way that we think of parts we optimize the parts we break the whole one of the things to do on the other

00:37:19

side is think about how to benefit the whole how to use Capital across a number of types of capital A number of types of interventions to build more robust complex anti-fragile ecosystems this of course requires more

00:37:32

understanding but this is something I would really like to offer so even in just the impact investment invest in a few technologies that EPS introduced I'll give you examples I'll give you another example take any time that something happened

00:37:45

that caused an environmental externality that actually ended up hurting another Market but the whatever Market did that didn't care because they weren't invested in the other thing we didn't

00:37:56

bother paying the extra money to do good sewage management because financially we didn't have the money we didn't care and so on our balance sheet as a state or whatever dumping the sewage in the

00:38:10

developing world into the river was cheaper than building the 10 million waste facility or whatever but now that happened to kill a whole bunch of Fisheries Downstream that don't even happen to be in our country right because the river crossed the country

00:38:22

line but those Fisheries were making 10 million a year and we just lost all those Industries and now I get to say if I make a sewer here do I get the Fisheries back here

00:38:33

and can I amateurize the future value on those fish fisheries and own the Futures on them to be able to invest in making this thing here because it's going to open up a new industry and I'll actually

00:38:46

be able to do that thing profitably I don't have to do this as a pure non-profit project because I look at ecosystems better connectivity so you can use Financial Capital to rebuild ecosystems if you can sync with more

00:38:58

complexity than the current system does so if I jump to the Practical stuff because I know people and the Practical is hard because if it was easy everyone would be

00:39:11

doing it and the moloch Machine is oriented in the wrong direction but there is practical stuff do really deep yellow teaming for any technology that you might invest in look at what it's going to up and either

00:39:24

don't invest in it or figure out how to change the technology to not that stuff up that's number one to look at domains of investment that are fundamental to everything that

00:39:37

needs to happen closing the materials economy is a domain that has to happen and that includes not just the inorganic fraction but the organic fraction right closing the loop on agriculture waste

00:39:49

management and soil regeneration is also a loop we have to close moving to sustainable sources of energy while factoring that the sustainable energy has material supply chains that have to be factored that has to happen

00:40:01

right and especially when you think about these things together so think about domains that have to happen for the world very deeply and look at those domains look at multiple Technologies together that have Synergy

00:40:14

values that they don't have on their own and not just only for-profit Technologies but for-profit things law things public opinion things that collectively would do the right thing where the portfolio as a whole actually

00:40:27

can make profit even though not all the money in it is for profit and already major corporations fund non-profits and lobbying to do on their behalf that's not that's a

00:40:42

thing it's just only only military contractors and big Pharma and big oil do Financial Warfare like this and they do it for purposes so they will end up doing lobbying on their behalf to

00:40:55

buy the sovereignty of a small country and whatever I want that level of financial engineering Global level Financial engineering to be done on behalf of the commons by people who actually understand how to do that I

00:41:06

want Soros level Financial engineering for not the privatization of wealth but the continuity of the wealth that is needed to keep having access to do that before the benefit of the commons those are there are more things but

00:41:19

those are a few directional tangible things about how to think about Capital allocation that still has some profit binding to it

00:41:31

that is directionally right I think that's a good moment for Patrick to come back in you had your hand raised for a while and you're one of the few people who actually

00:41:48

well I know actually do with this kind of work so Patrick I put my hand down again because I wasn't sure if that's the question is really valid because I

00:42:00

obviously agree with with anything I heard and it's broken down brilliantly I was struggling when Daniel was talking about comparing of the Rhino lives and the children's lives and

00:42:14

I was struggling because in reality that's what we do every day there's no way around because okay now I have I have a for-profit company for impact investing and I have a non-profit

00:42:25

charitable foundation so basically every Euro I spent in one of those two I cannot spend for something else because we only have that one input metric as you said at the money and the only reason I can do impact

00:42:39

investing and Mr Miller from the neighborhood cannot is because he does not have the money that I have so I I'm having this problem also with the foundation of trying to explain holistic and systemic changes to people nobody

00:42:53

wants to hear but even if they would want to hear what does it mean at one point I have to focus on something and I have to fund one for approach one organization one network whatever and I

00:43:05

make a decision that I don't know the education the alternative education program in Mali is the thing I think I want to do and the circular economy lab in Accra is the thing I want to do which means I

00:43:18

cannot do I don't know the human rights thing in Brazil so in the end I always take that decision but if I want or not and that that always leads me to the point

00:43:30

that I have to try to measure that impact than to bring it down and to measure how what do I get for that Euro that I spent so maybe I'm here but I'm I still don't get what else could I do I

00:43:44

know it's not the right thing to do but I still didn't really get yeah what else good I want to talk about very near the core of the driver of the

00:44:06

meta crisis is our relationship to measurement and standardization and even the philosophy of science and I am going to

00:44:23

address some golden calves in the process you're asking a practical question I want to come back to but I want to mention what's wrong with some of the pragmatics Frameworks because it

00:44:36

yeah I wrote a paper early on that talked about as long as a the value of a tree is worth more dead than alive on people's balance sheet or a whale is we'll continue deforestation and whaling

00:44:50

and it's clear that the whale in the ocean is not on anybody's balance sheet and so leaving it doesn't economically benefit me in any way if I leave it it doesn't ensure someone else doesn't kill it and if I do kill it

00:45:03

it's depending upon it's five hundred thousand dollars worth of sellable well-made that reverse incentive structure because Nature has no balance sheet and Sovereign beings are seen as resources

00:45:16

and whatever is is genocidal it just it can't be called anything else like we have to be clear what the it is but if we wanted to say what is the real value of a tree or a whale I don't know if you can still hear me

00:45:30

Patrick I lost your video nobody you can yeah I'm sorry I'm turning off my video sometimes because my connection is so bad sorry understood so if you think about the real value of

00:45:42

a tree the first big question becomes value to whom to which beneficiary because as soon as we realize that it's not only the value to whoever it gets to put the lumber on their economic balance

00:45:55

sheet but everybody that it is sequestering CO2 and producing oxygen for but also all the animals that get to live in it and all the migratory animals that are maintaining vast

00:46:09

inter-ecosystem interactions that use that as a critical part of the inter-ecosystem interaction the value of it you have to say to whom first and you find that there are so many beneficiaries and so many value types that are all non-fungible and when

00:46:24

you realize that the tree if I cut down all the trees in an area so now I get way worse floods right because they're not stabilizing the topsoil that also washes all the topsoil away I also get way worse droughts I also get increased

00:46:36

extreme weather events in the area independent of climate change so now this means all the people in the air end up moving from extreme weather events now I get resource conflicts now I get Wars now I have to invest more in

00:46:47

military-industrial complex do trees prevent Wars totally do trees prevent Mass poverty and famine totally do trees house the bats that keep the mosquitoes down that prevent the malaria overgrowth

00:47:01

and do they also stabilize the topsoil that keeps the water clean for the fish that keep the mosquitoes down totally do the trees stabilize the topsoil in a way that not only keeps the river healthy but where the river dumps into

00:47:14

the ocean where you all the trees in an area and the coastal ecosystem dies as a result down river what would it cost oh no it's fine we cut down the trees but we created a mechanical carbon sequestration and

00:47:25

we're sequestering as many tons of CO2 shut the up the tree doesn't just sequester CO2 it doesn't million things right so if I said what would it cost for me to maintain the soil microbiota and the migratory Pathways and the coral

00:47:38

with known Technologies the tree would cost a trillion dollars and I will destroy a trillion dollars of value to get a hundred dollars of lumber because a trillion dollars of value is not on my balance sheet and the hundred

00:47:52

dollars of lumber is when you realize it's not it's not like we externalize a few costs it's like the only thing we internalize is the cost to us that's it and everything else is I have to

00:48:09

be honest it's all just stealing and raping right we the default as we externalize all the costs we just take the and no to account for what it costs nature to make it or the waste we put back or anything

00:48:21

or the wars that get created over we just take the the only thing that we factor in is what it costs us to extract it that's it so we only internalize the marginal game theoretic utility to us

00:48:34

so externalities a bad concept we should talk about that we internalize just Game Theory units and otherwise are just doing raping and pillaging that would be honest at technological scale extincts

00:48:47

everything you cannot measure all the things a tree does you cannot because we don't even understand what the soil microbiota really does we're just starting to get a sense of it we're

00:49:03

discovering whole new phylums every we thought the Human Genome Project was going to solve all of the health issues in the world because we didn't know it oh when we were doing it the genetic modulation through an epigenome was a thing we didn't know about the

00:49:16

transcriptome or the proteome so our stupid ass hubris has us think we know more than we do we don't we affect that it's in the unknowns that we can't measure so when we do measure

00:49:29

and say I am paying attention to the thing that I can measure I'm affecting a huge amount of that I can't measure either because it's fundamentally not quantifiable it's only qualified or because it's in the unknown set and I don't know about it so if I over

00:49:42

optimize for what I can measure versus what I can't then I'm going to destroy most of the world for what's in my little measure Bloom build that is irresponsible that idea that mindset has to go

00:49:55

yes measure some but realize that you're measuring trillionth of a percent of what you're affecting and if you apply management Theory where you can only manage what you can measure so we're going to measure against we're going to manage against the measurement

00:50:08

you will be dangerous to the world wisdom is the Delta between what measurement-based management Theory tells you to do and what the right thing to do is that's how I would define wisdom and

00:50:23

that's the thing if you want to optimize for anything on the return on it's that is it's the only thing that and safely Steward the amount of technological power we have so I don't want data driven anything I

00:50:35

want data informed but there's so much sensible stuff that we can sense at some level that we cannot quantify that has to be factored when the

00:50:51

Old Testament says in the top 10 things not to do up there with murder and rape is not have false idols the measurement of reality and the modeling of reality is what it's talking

00:51:02

about the false idol is our model of reality where we optimize for that rather than reality we're rather than be in direct sensory connection to reality we look at reality through our model

00:51:15

oh my model is I'm decreasing CO2 look there's no Forest here there's a stupid type of genetically engineered grass that sequesters a bunch of CO2 and killed everything that was here you shut the up about the model that's being

00:51:28

optimized if you look if you felt that you would know that thing was wrong right and this is when krishnamurti talks about we have to have in immediate non-mediated relationship

00:51:40

to reality not mediated through measures or symbols or models like actually sense it if you actually sense you'll notice that most of the people in the name of progress are all existentially angstful

00:51:53

and depressed and most indigenous people if they have in if they haven't been totally genocided or not and that if someone in their wealthy life gets to have two weeks of vacation a year they want to go camping

00:52:09

they want to basically be a shitty indigenous person like they want to be in trees without all of the phones and around and with close amounts of family but they destroyed that in the name of a progress that is insane

00:52:22

so the if this is maybe the thing I want to share here the most is no I studied math I studied Sciences I like math and sciences

00:52:36

but in math girdle's theorem and then tarsky's theorem and all the unknowability theorems halting problems Etc show us that if I have a set of logical truths that are consistent they

00:52:49

will never be complete the whole set of measures I could ever have the whole set of laws I could ever have will be infinitely far away from the set that matters so I want to take it as useful but also

00:53:02

infinitely wrong so the thing that is sacred is unknowable but I have to continue to sense into it and not live inside the model idol worship is that thing right that's

00:53:16

what it is it's why when lautsu could write anything the first thing he wrote is everything else in this book is not it right the first line the doubt that is knowable is not the Eternal Dao why is that the first thing to write

00:53:29

because everything else is don't pay too much attention to the words because you can't say the thing in words try to get a sense from the words to a feeling that you have had right after someone you loved died about what actually matters before you die try to

00:53:42

get a sense of what is Meaningful at all of how you felt when your baby was born and you saw it that you forget on a day-to-day basis but in those moments I try to feel that and live where every one of your choices is optimizing for

00:53:54

what you felt was important there but for everybody there is no way to make a good enough model we can't replace capitalism with better capitalism or better Socialism or whatever you can't

00:54:08

make an AI that runs it we have to have people that make choices independent of the measures and models meaning that factor them but also Factor the limits and make the right choice anyways this is not systematizable systems are models

00:54:21

they are fundamental to everything wrong it's human Design Systems that have the known inside and optimized for and all of the unknown outside and externalized

00:54:33

so who has the like honesty and courage about the fact that they're gonna die they're not going to make it through this life alive and on their deathbed most of the hours of their life will not be what they wish they had done more of and very few of the things they

00:54:47

did will be what was really meaningful and that they will tell young people I wish you would do this and says I'm going to be loyal to that more than anything else I'm going to be loyal to that more than I won't sign a

00:54:59

fiduciary responsibility that makes me unloyal to that because I'm not going to have two masters I'm split between now if I'm going to Steward capital I have to Steward it in a way or on my deathbed

00:55:11

I say all of that was the best use of My Life Energy and the service of the life that continues after me I could have done and there is no way to systematize it it just takes Earnest wrestling with it

00:55:23

Moment by moment not Jake does that bring up something for you the honest wrestling Moment by moment is what I feel what I do anyway I'm not the

00:55:45

biggest measurer guy in the world so far but I was just yeah I have to think about it but because I still feel every minute I think about something and I wrestle with

00:55:56

it with energy or or with trying to Bear an open mind it always it will always bring my human Minds down to a decision that moves one across the other and then you

00:56:10

can name that what comes out in the end you can name that measurement or you can name that I found it in another way yeah I'm not quite I'm not quite this is

00:56:22

really important to draw the line yeah yeah so Hippocrates both for the doctor first Do no harm then if you can help do but don't in the name of

00:56:39

helping possibly do harm which is also ahimsa in The Vedic system most ethical systems have a first don't stuff up and then figure out how to help since almost everything

00:56:53

open AI was made to prevent AI risk because deepmind had so much Supremacy now it's driving it faster than anybody so the guys that in at open AI that were scared of it made anthropic to really focus on arist and

00:57:05

they took 300 million from Google Now They're racing ahead and they were major part of what made open AI release faster in the name of we'll make something better and then get captured by moloch most of the problems of the world are

00:57:18

actually the results of us trying to solve other problems so if the best thing you do is don't make worse like everybody's in the name of making better they're making worse

00:57:30

and then lying to themselves because their motivated reasoning requires them to if you don't know how to actually make stuff better do less stuff this is what the holdout Hing basically says is chill the out let the mud

00:57:43

settle until the water is clear and when something is really clear and there is something like and there's a feeling of clarity but humility at the same time not hubris then move forward

00:57:56

with it while maintaining heightened observation to change it if you need to change it so you don't make a once and final decision you can continue to change it because you won't be able to predict everything in advance so if I

00:58:10

could just say you're if you just do less stuff as opposed to stuff that ends up being net negative in the name of progress that would be way better and if you got other people to do that would be better then

00:58:23

work on yes you are not the UN right you are not trying to say how do we handle resource flows for the planet you're saying how do I handle a little bit I have a little bit of time and so I am going to finally decide to work on this

00:58:37

thing or this thing but you are not saying in that this other thing is less important you're saying of the things I'm aware of here's where I feel I can be a best service that's fine because you are you do have not just the input of capital of

00:58:50

the input of your knowledge your contacts all those things and so you're factoring those multiple inputs into where you feel you can do the best thing but if you just really check for the motivated reasoning of all the various types the one that will make the most

00:59:02

profit the one that will keep everybody else happy is the one that I can prove I'll give you a great example The Gates Foundation how for each dollar I can put into mosquito Nets I know that I'm going to save this many kids so any

00:59:15

philanthropist who's going to put a dollar in somewhere else has to say is it worth this many kids dying that I don't put the mosquito Nets in I hate that line of thinking in one way it seems very reasonable because that seems

00:59:27

like I could put that money there immediately but on the other hand why are there so many mosquitoes in the area why are there so many malariums filled mosquitoes because there's no fish in bats that eat them because all

00:59:40

the trees were cut down that the bats lived in and the fish were overfished in the area and so the problem will just keep getting worse the people why are the people in that shitty area to begin with and not

00:59:53

in the better areas because there are landmines covering Angola and covering Mozambique from the wars were there that were left and then civilian gets blown up every 19 minutes from one of the 100 million landmines left and we got to remove those things and move the

01:00:05

people back to the non-shit areas they had to move to the areas because of the landmines we left remove landmines get trees back get fish back get people out of shitty areas get sustainable agriculture we'll fix

01:00:16

malaria now the Deep Nets someone can't live their life inside of a deep net and since they're already malnourished people they're more susceptible to the fact that deed is a neurotoxin yes if I'm only measuring that one measure in

01:00:29

the narrowest way that seems to make sense but it's literally the stupidest strategy I can think of if I zoom out from that one metric now if I say how many bats we say let's bats

01:00:42

but it's also other predatory insects like mosquito eaters and it's also but the trees that get that don't just give me those bats they also give me soil stabilization and how do I say this other strategy was better because in the

01:00:54

short term it didn't maximize this one metric as much and the things that it benefits aren't even measurable they're not all measurable tell a story about it that's honest be honest about your sensing and then try

01:01:07

to communicate your sensing and have people who are willing to make real choices that include but are not limited to metrics and are really willing to look at the underlying Theory and sensing do that

01:01:22

it's something like a mixture between a comment and a question to build on that maybe which with as a species developed the sensing

01:01:33

or Dunbar 150. scale living scale life but that's the kind of the level of complexity the radius of our complexity

01:01:47

that we can usually manage as a normal human and even the global predicaments given the

01:01:59

potential also benefits of global coordination towards positive outcomes what could be a good strategy to manage those higher radiuses of complexity that

01:02:14

are necessary for the things you are describing then what we're actually capable of we're just going to lay out the two ends of the spectrum a few massive Galaxy brains when we're trying

01:02:28

to Outsource that to to a large language models at the moment and that's that can hold that complexity or can we somehow fractally move it up from a Dunbar 150 to a global coordination system or

01:02:41

anything in between what what's what are your thoughts it's a very technical question that goes well beyond the limits of what we can do in the next few minutes because

01:02:54

obviously at a 150 person scale where most things are not based on important export Twitter local you have a totally different set of Dynamics where you don't have

01:03:06

you don't have invisible externalities right if your waist is where you are you see it your resource extraction is where you are you see it if you are starting to cause on renewability issues it's Where You Are

01:03:19

that's really different right so you have direct sensing and the direct sensing is with an environment we co-evolved with so we actually have hardware for feeling a certain way about those things right we have mirror

01:03:32

neurons with each other and we have mere neuron like things about the integrative and environment most anyone who looks at the tar Sands compared to the forest that was there before without any ideology feels a thing just associated

01:03:44

with that from evolutionary reasons but we all buy that depends on the tar Sands but we don't look at the tar Sands right the thing we look at is the thing on Amazon we want and then we don't look at the plastic in

01:03:59

the ocean that comes from that or the landfill or whatever and so the ability to ship all the ugly away and stay in this area is a major part of the problem so when you have six continent Supply chains how do you possibly take

01:04:12

responsibility for the anth order effects and when you have people that seem so different than you and it doesn't seem like your life depends on them it actually seems like they are against you how do you care about them

01:04:24

and so obviously we're not going to go back to a world where everybody lives in 150 person tribes without a global supply chain and we either go that low Tech or

01:04:35

we figure out how to do lithography at every 150 people we're just not going to do that right so we do have to figure out is there 150-ish person like various re levels of coordination

01:04:48

that give the high touchness possible where then that whole unit as a cell interacts with another one right and that's what the Iroquois Confederacy or certain things were and then you get the governance of a bio region that is a

01:05:00

natural boundary it's not an arbitrary one defined in war and politics but basically things within Watershed things within a migratory system whatever it is and then those interact with each other and so you go all the way up to a planetary system but cells tissues

01:05:14

organs organ systems organisms environments you have these kind of layers of self-interaction and obviously the level at which an effect is occurring is the level at which governance has to be occurring so you want subsidiarity that pushes things out

01:05:27

to the edge as much as possible but that also can do governance at the level across them because that happens so then you say what is the total complexity of the system that we are managing at any

01:05:39

of those levels like how many bits of information under maximum compression are required to understand that thing if you wanted to say if you want to use complexity as a formal term and then does our information processing system have the complexity both in amount and

01:05:53

type to process that thing if it doesn't then our decision system will be an entropy pump right it will fundamentally be reducing the total information to less than the real amount under compression make a

01:06:05

decision based on that which means externalities will be proportional to that so how do we do the collective decision making what parts can the machines do like where can we use Ai and computational intelligence to Crunch

01:06:16

really big numbers and calculus it doesn't disintermediate human choice at the center how do we train humans to have better epistemology both in terms of cognitive sense making Specialists can't do

01:06:28

externality thinking as well there's some level of generality that is required to be able to Think Through externalities so there's something in the nature of the what is curriculum trained right in people so how do we

01:06:41

train the epistemology of people then how do we get collective intelligence one person one vote is dumb market dynamics are dumb we need things that are smarter than those things so what is the future of liquid democracy qualified democracy

01:06:55

subsidiarity blah blah blah all those types of things it ends up being a collective intelligence system augmented by computational capacities but not disintermediating it that is adequate

01:07:06

that is the what is the future of social systems right what is the future of governance economics writ large that has to be answered to replace this we don't just have one fungible input we

01:07:19

have lots of types of input at a resource accounting level and then lots of types of choice making at various levels that occur so that is critical to answer the long-term

01:07:30

question in the short term now we're in this system we're engaging with whatever business we want to do even if it's a local business still is supplied by six continent Supply chains that are supported by military industrial complex

01:07:43

and intelligence communities and all that driving the arms races it does otherwise the surgical contract of the Central Bank produced dollar wouldn't be there that is backed by OPEC and horizontal oil and climate change all of that is a part of every dollar we

01:07:56

generate can't not be the dollar as a contract doesn't mean without a military-industrial complex a Global Financial system OPEC backing and all those things okay so I can't Factor all

01:08:08

that I can't right galaxy brain or not but what I can do is try really hard to do a much better job than I have I'm not going to just be excited about the upside and then do a plausible

01:08:21

deniability box checking on risk assessment I'm going to really try hard and I'm going to talk to smart people in different disciplines and say do you think this is a good idea how could it be a bad idea

01:08:33

regenerative agriculture person how do you think this might be a bad idea a watershed person how do you think this might be problematic a person who's aware of the cultural Dynamics in this area and how it will affect wealth inequality and social dynamics and stuff

01:08:46

oh I would have never thought of those things so part of it is try part of it is engage people that know you don't right earnestly then engage them in okay I just have to kill the project

01:08:58

because it's obviously bad for a bunch of reasons I didn't know and wasn't in the pitch deck of the investors when they were trying to pitch it to me but I would really like this thing to happen do you can you help me innovate at all and if so you get some of the upside or

01:09:11

whatever it is can you help me innovate into how to make this problem that you're seeing in this domain better in this thing right so a yellow team and then we bring that back into a blue taming process and then no we can't figure it out then

01:09:24

go with the first Do no harm don't invest in it we can make it better okay now let's realize that there might be problems with it we didn't anticipate so let's

01:09:35

not go straight to full-scale deployment right let's not go to 100 million people in three weeks let's do a smaller scale deployment and say okay it's good enough we figured out how to do it enough that it's worth going forward but it's worth going

01:09:48

forward and watching four things we couldn't have anticipated and doing that again now this is going to go slower will it win Market races first to Market

01:09:59

Advantage nope will it cost more yep do you need the types of capital that are okay with that to not be directly the cause of Extinction in the

01:10:13

process of their Investment Portfolio yes you need a capital that is aligned with those things could not Steward anyone's Capital that is not otherwise you are fiducially bound to the extinction paradigm

01:10:32

thank you very helpful I don't know how your time is today but we're reaching the 90 minutes of our slots and sometimes those is also getting late ish

01:10:44

are you do you have a hard stop in um I'm happy to take another question okay and stuff I just I guess one thing I want to say is

01:11:00

foreign on this message is so much more exciting like everything's getting better and AI is going to solve all the problems and there it'll create some problems but

01:11:13

they've always been problems and Humanity are problem solvers and will rise to the occasion we'll innovate our way out of it it's going to bring an air of such abundance and it'll redistribute all of the wealth so blah blah blah and we'll be a space-faring and we'll live forever and

01:11:26

I would tell that story if it was true because it's a more fun story it's just not true is how as you as appointed that how are the Peter diamandis and the Tony siba stories related to one another are

01:11:40

they the same story or is there a difference I don't know the Tony sieber Story the rethink X story you'd have to walk me through it I've looked at rethink X but it's been a

01:11:52

while the reason why I ask is to me they're the same because ultimately they're beginning at very small boundary conditions let's say City level or

01:12:05

something like that and then hope they scale their way up to the globe by innovation but it's it's just hope and it isn't thought through deeply from a first principle's perspective

01:12:18

and it's a very powerful narrative when we say rethink X this is exactly the thing I'm saying I would say think is not adequate and you can't but rethink what the word resource means right

01:12:32

rethink the word mind rethink thinking and models and rethink the adequacy of thinking as a epistemic frame that doesn't also include other types of intelligence so we're saying the same thing but I think you're saying how deep

01:12:46

down in the stack of assumptions do we go it is my assessment that if you take the cumulative effect of the reality of History being written by the winners

01:13:00

the cumulative effect of that is the naive progress narrative because everybody that lost wouldn't have called that win progress and the technology and ideas that went along with their progress

01:13:19

so I I bought this I didn't know I bought the like Western civilization and democracy and modernity and getting out of the Dark Ages and the philosophy of

01:13:34

science and whatever were like generally pretty good things and there's some problems with modernity so we need some of the post-modern corrections but until I really studied it and then I'm like wait

01:13:46

my country the founding fathers that we canonize as almost saints were to the British Empire terrorists we call other people terrorists so a terrorist or a freedom fighter just depends on which side of

01:14:01

the story you're on and whether they win or not so they were seditious terrorists and it's very well documented that Thomas

01:14:14

Jefferson who wrote the unbelievably beautiful Declaration of Independence raped his underage slave continuously and it is documented that those same people

01:14:31

gave smallpox blankets to the Indians as gifts where we when we talk about how dare you question capitalism don't you know that it has brought all the people out of poverty and done all these

01:14:43

wonderful things didn't you read Pinker communism don't you know that Stalin killed 50 million people we killed 110 million Indians when we came here we dwarfed Stalin

01:14:55

we dwarfed mouth do the history we killed 110 million Indians of all these civilizations that had made it tens of thousands of years in relatively better sustainability their languages are gone

01:15:07

their knowledge of it so ask how the western civilization democracy progress narrative is to the Indians and to all the extinct species and all the animals in factory farms

01:15:20

it's not like I like novocaine I think novocaine is cool I would not like Dentistry without novocaine I'm down with the parts of the progress narrative that are authentic but also when Weston Price went to the

01:15:34

indigenous cultures before they had introduced hybridized grain they didn't get cavities go back and look at Western prices work we're not supposed to eat cranes as a hunter-gatherer people and the mineral density meant that they

01:15:46

didn't get cavities so even the you wouldn't want to go back to a world before novocaine would you if it was also without the grains that caused the anthropocene we're painting a

01:15:58

story so basically I think the naive progress narrative is apologism for moloch and I think we all have Stockholm systems we all have Stockholm syndrome with moloch

01:16:12

I think almost everyone who's successful is less fulfilled like actually fulfilled meaning waking up base happiness for no reason sense of meaningfulness can die

01:16:24

with peace almost everyone who's successful is less fulfilled than almost every indigenous person that we're the Savages we had to civilize and net way more harmful for the world

01:16:35

when krishnamurti said it is not a good measure of mental health to be well adjusted to an insane Society go to a factory farm and realize that our society is as insane as Nazi Germany was

01:16:47

but at way more scale we are driving it in the name of progress I want the I want anyone who gives a at all to extract themselves from

01:17:00

the insanity deeply enough to shake it off at the momentum of that system and oh but I have to do the bidding of that system I'll do a slightly better job no you don't just stop you have a choice stop you don't have to do that

01:17:13

then reorient yourself to life not moloch life get rid of look at all the concepts that are oh we're going to optimize based on measurement and natural resources and like

01:17:27

[Music] progress we civilized the Savages and start to understand life how do 70 trillion cells in my body do a trillion metabolic functions a second and work that's more complexity than the governance system we need to make nature

01:17:45

knows how to do it we don't know how to do it spend time in nature and start to understand but you can't understand it in words but you can't understand it I'm not saying a gibberish thing I'm saying a thing that can get reduced into

01:17:57

technology but a different way and then say there's this beautiful conversation I watched I believe it was with Edward Teller talking about the

01:18:11

physicists who did modern physics and the journalists asked him who was the smartest he's a Johnny Van Neumann was the smartest in terms of clock speed we all knew that no one had a question about no one was even in competition about it and he went on and on

01:18:25

and the interviewer then said does that mean that Von Neumann had the deepest insights and he teared up and he said no that would be sure Einstein and there's why

01:18:37

did someone who had less clock speed have deeper insights and he's like this was the question that boggled Von Neumann and we came to recognize it had something to

01:18:49

do with what happened when he played the violin and something to do with what happened when he puffed his pipe and looked at the clouds and went blank and

01:19:01

this was reducible to real intelligence that solved real problems through a different process that is not gibberish it's just a different process it was not purely semantically mediated which is what the

01:19:15

Tao teaching starts with which is what all of the wisdom Traditions say the symbol that mediates ground there's reality out there we make up symbols to refer to it the symbol is not the thing being referred to the symbol does not

01:19:28

have all the information of the thing being referred to you have to have a direct relationship to the ground not mediated by symbol meaning not mediated through thought if you don't know how to think not through word thought you will never think deeply

01:19:41

and that will be like thinking feeling sensing and then you can translate it towards and you'll always know they're inadequate and you'll write something that is somewhere between math prose and poetry

01:19:54

right because they do different things some of it I can do denotatively so I might have to do connotatively because the limits of denotation so how do 70 trillion cells work in timed Harmony at a trillion metabolic

01:20:10

functions the second how does an embryo grow itself where it's growing the placenta and umbilical cord that it's going to let drop off later while simultaneously growing the lungs and GI tract that are doing nothing now but we'll replace it later while growing the

01:20:23

endocrine system in the skeletal system and all that stuff without even having those systems to mediate how it does it what the the right try to understand how nature does it

01:20:35

better and then say this is what I am a steward of this is what I'm avowed to and I have there are not multiple gods that I'm a vowed to

01:20:47

and the one that I am doesn't have a name if you name it you it all up already you start a holy war over it but that intelligence that governs everything that is the basis of we don't we we do

01:21:01

not have a good answer to cosmogenesis or ABIA Genesis the emergence of Life the emergence of Cosmos all of the standard models have massive problems the emergence of Consciousness from brain which is a wrong presupposition

01:21:13

but you but reality does it all my my dad just passed a few weeks ago and I was reading all the old letters that we've written each other and he wrote me this beautiful

01:21:25

letter when I was like 20 something and and he said and he was a deep thinker from which I was initiated into thinking on these things and he said the world will see challenges in the age

01:21:38

of your growing up that it has never seen for which there are no precedence for which no previous models will be adequate and nation states will try to meet them and they will fail in the great market and Industrial forces will try to meet them

01:21:50

and fail the only thing I can tell you is pay attention to what nature wants and try to redirect the resources there and that's what I would say to people who are thinking of resource directing

01:22:05

is try to think about what nature wants and try to feel into it and don't think that you can in the same way that like it's a very right thing for someone in the

01:22:20

in a horror black neighborhood to say if you don't live here if you don't spend time here and you make the laws that govern here off like you can't make the right laws if you don't live here because you don't get it you're

01:22:32

wrong live here and make the laws if you don't spend enough time in nature and both nature and the tar Sands and destroyed coral and factory farms that we have turned nature into if you don't touch that you cannot know what nature

01:22:45

wants or needs if you do then can you let the mud settle until Clarity emerges and then act from there that's what I would say

01:23:04

it's beautiful thank you one last thing before we can let you go we ask everybody to buy and condense if you want us to take away from the

01:23:21

session in a single word what word would that be for you remember the deepest insights you've ever had about what matters we will

01:23:43

I promise I will try to remember I promise I will help us remember here in this group thank you you had mentioned that you would

01:23:58

dialogue with people about this afterwards I'm really curious to hear what what metabolizes and if if there are deep projects that want to happen if people feel that yes I want to Steward that I'm committed to it if I can help

01:24:11

you know how to find me we will thank you for that offer I will definitely be in touch about what's thumbs up here afterwards thanks Daniel thank you

01:24:30

foreign [Music]