The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Bend not Break #3: Sensemaking, Uncertainty, and Purpose"

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

On this episode we meet with founding member of The Consilience Project, Daniel Schmachtenberger. In Part 3 of their series, Schmachtenberger and Hagens explore metanarratives. Why are they threatening to various sections of society? Further, Schmachtenberger helps us understand how we can take in the systemic metacrisis facing humanity in ways that grant us agency, rather than despair. About Daniel Schmachtenberger:  Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.  The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal. Towards these ends, he's had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/31-daniel-schmachtenberger

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Greetings. Welcome to another episode of the Great Simplification. Today is part three with my friend and colleague Daniel Schmachtenberger, the founding director of the Consilience Project.

This one went in a completely different direction than I expected. I was fully energized to have a back-and-forth discussion on my system's overview of the world energy, ecology, money, systems, and see where Daniel agreed differed what we could converge on. And, of course, it went in a completely different direction where we talked about metanarratives themselves, why they're threatening to various sections of society, how and why Daniel became a vegetarian, how to take in the entire. systemic metacrisis that humanity faces in a way that gives you agency and not despair.

And whenever I finish one of these podcasts, I have a pretty good sense of whether I liked it, it was good. This one was fantastic. Though you will see that my energy at the beginning kind of faded into speechlessness after some of the 15 paragraph thoughts that Daniel dropped on me. So I hope you enjoy and learn and are inspired from this conversation with my friend Daniel, which is turning into a longer series than I originally intended. And see you next week. Thanks. Hello, Daniel.

Howdy, Nate? Good to see you. Good to see you again on our third podcast. together. It was great to see you a couple weeks ago in person at the conference. I don't know if you have seen, but some people have uploaded photos of our little presentation together. And I have to say that me sitting next to you on a chair, I kind of look like someone on human growth hormone next to you. But that's why I like the podcast thing. That was a good conversation we've got to have there. I was happy it happened.

Yeah, we have to do more of those. And that's kind of the purpose of this series is to expand on the meta-narrative, not only what is it, but how it can influence more human minds individually and collectively towards important outcomes. So here's what I have in mind. This is our third podcast in this series. What I would like to propose is I will do kind of an elevator pitch of my view of the human predicament, which we discussed in the first two episodes. Then I'm going to hand the mic to you and you can give your grand arc of the meta-narrative of the meta-crisis as you're kind of known for and interject how that rhymes. or overlaps with mine, where you might state things a little bit differently, but saying similar things, and then also where we might differ.

And we'll expand on that. And I don't know what's going to come out of that. I'm genuinely curious. And hopefully, like the last two episodes, we will, and not only our episodes, but all of our conversations and dozens of voxers, we'll learn from each other. in real time, which is something I greatly value. And then building on that, Daniel, I would like to talk about how not only yours and my stories, but others in our network when we meet each other and we're working on different

things, we are constraining each other's expertise and stories. And I would like your opinion on that. Then we could maybe discuss the importance of these grand narratives, not only why, they're important, but why they're socially constrained and threatening to some people, both we experience at that conference and at other conferences as well. And then finally, I would like to queue up the fourth episode in this series on what is the criteria for civilization and how can we think about this in a way that is productive to our future. So that's what I have in mind. Do you have anything to add or suggest?

Just a, it sounds like you're going to a brief recap of what we did in the first two and where we're going to go in the next one. So there's some continuity in the arc. I'm really happy about what we're getting to explore across these four episodes together. Cool. Okay. So the first episode, you interviewed me. about energy and our economy and the big system. The second episode we were trying to get to what we're going to discuss today, which is your meta-narrative, paper-click maximizer, things like that. So I'll briefly recap my component of the verse two, which is that humans are a social speech.

that has arrived here in 2022 as a self-organized economic system that as individuals, as small businesses, as corporations, as nation states, we are optimizing financial surplus that's tethered to energy, which is highly tethered to fossil energy, which we're drawing down 10 million times faster than it was sequestered. And there's waste that is not included in our economic prices. And so when you talk about climate change or overpopulation or some of these issues, those are all downstream. Those are symptoms of the core problem. The core issue is a biological social species finding a bolus of fossil sunlight that has boosted our goods and services and economic

output for a brief time in history. And embedded in there, and I expect we'll get into this, is everything in our economic system requires energy, materials, and technology. And so how those three things combine to create productivity and wealth has been the driver of our system. So my view is we have two possible pathways forward. And actually only one. But they will converge at some point. The first pathway is that we continue to innovate and either develop new technology or new access to energy and resources. And we continue to grow the size of the human economy globally.

And we grow it enough that we're able to service and maintain the prior financial claims. and we thus kick the can. That would be good for the human economy, probably would be bad for the natural world. The second path is the one that I think is becoming more imminent, which is that our technology, our central banks, our innovation are not enough to overcome the depletion of the high-quality, low entropy, energy and materials. And therefore, we have a date that our financial claims on reality end up retethering to our actual physical reality.

And that is what my work is focused on is how to have humans, individuals and groups and governments meet that future halfway. And so that's kind of my ecological, energy, material, human behavior, anthropological view of the human predicament. So hand in the mic to you. How does this match? How would you say things differently? Where do you disagree? Lay it on me.

So I hope that people are watching this. after having watched the previous ones in the series, and that you'll put the links to those in the show notes here. And if not, maybe pause this one and go back. Those other ones will be a better starting use of time, because I want to reference concepts that we constructed in there. Because the story, the way you just retold it, actually only makes deep sense if somebody has,

like what we discussed in the first episode, of really understanding Jevin's paradox and why the traditional idea of how we innovate our way out with efficiencies doesn't solve the issue. So I'll assume those concepts familiar. Yeah. I'll just pause you right there. That's part of the challenge of our work, isn't it? Because there is never a one-hour thing that we could just say, here it is.

These things are all nuanced and the human brain doesn't like nuance. The human brain generally likes certainty. And this story that we're telling is not only nuanced but complex. And it takes a long time to unpack. So that's why we're doing four of these. I think evolutionary psych is a very riddled field. It's very interesting, but very riddled because we study humans who have been ubiquitously conditioned, mostly in the kind of weird model.

And then we take that to be human nature. And then we try to describe why we are biologically oriented to be that. way and it's easy with reductionism to say, see, here's this gene that correlates or something. But this is why I like looking at different cultures where there's a difference in the median of an important quality, the difference in the distribution across the whole culture, because it shows it's not just an outlier person. It's actually a different development. And so I think we might have even talked about this before.

You have cultures that were radically more violent and radically more peaceful over fairly long periods of time in large populations and also ones that had much higher value on the quality of education ubiquitously. You know, Jewish culture is a very interesting example because even in the embedding environments, the education level and the pogroms, you know, low economic status, low access to public education, whatever was still very high relative to the embedding environment, in which case things like the capacity for like the value system on attention and nuance. and whatever can be developed.

So fortunately, I don't hold that human nature is an inexorable part of our problems, but a lot of human conditioning to develop the capacities that nature makes possible, but not a given, is an important part of it. And I will say that it is true culturally. I just watched one of those dreadful things last night where the interviewer goes around and asks, average American citizens or what's supposed to represent average American citizens, which state Utah is in and they have no idea,

and they think Africa's a country to kind of indicate how dumb the population is. Obviously, they're taking outlierdom cases and presenting them, or uneducated cases and presenting them as more median than they are. But I think it's important to understand that the things that we're going to suggest, especially in the next episode, are deeply informed by thoughts on human nature and the capacity for it to be able to meet requisites with different conditioning environments. Agreed.

My point, perhaps nuance was the wrong word. My point is that in today's Internet age, things that are short and concise and things that are certain, an absolute climate change is going to kill us all or climate change is a hoax, those things get more views, more attention seconds to use your language, than something that's, well, it could be this and it depends on this and those nuanced assertions. Well, so this is interesting. I think this is, obviously that's something about the way the brain, the neurophysiology and psyche together are being conditioned by tech and culture and the economy together. And obviously we're looking very specifically at things like the way that Facebook and platforms like that, trying to optimize time on site and engagement, identify the stickiest things keep people from bouncing and those happen to be the limbically hijacking things. So use literally personalized AI level technology to double down on the worst traits in humans at a multibillion person kind of trillion dollar scale.

but that's not our inexorable nature. That's our nature being conditioned for a specific purpose. But it is something we have to overcome and that we have to work with here. And I think this goes to the topic you're asking of like thinking about grand narratives, just in general, being able to think about the whole well enough that we can think about solutions even to parts that don't mess up other things. The minimum required complexity of just reality as such that we do have to recondition ourselves to be able to seek instantaneous certainty and instantaneous solutions

less and be able to take the time to go deep enough in the thing. You really get the insights of what the many different causes are, not a singular cause and what solutions. Is that a skill like meditation or how does someone develop that? Yeah, I think, you know, when we're talking about the social needs. media thing, and obviously this is not only social media, there are different kinds of reward circuits. This is kind of also why it's interesting to think about it in terms of brain and evolutionary biology versus conditioning. There are kind of one marshmallow reward circuits,

and there are two marshmallow reward circuits. And also people know the two marshmallow experiment. The one marshmallow reward circuits, when you have an economy that makes a lot of those available, Evolution didn't make a lot of one marshmallow reward circuits available. Typically, you had to actually perform evolutionarily relevant work to get rewards of various kinds. And one of the things that we've been able to do in that specifically economics has incentivized is being able to take the thing that there's a evolutionary reward attached to and strip it from the thing, the work that you would have to do to get it to make something that sells better. That's what the supply side is. The supply side is incentivized to drive demand, right? And so we've talked about this before of like what fast food is to food.

I didn't have to hunt or gather or whatever and I just get a concentration of salt, fat, and sugar with maximum palatibility stripped of fiber and micronutrients. So it hits all of the dopaminergic, you know, reward centers, but neither has nutrients in it, nor did it actually require any evolutionary activity of my body. Right. And that's pretty much the same thing that porn is to actual sex, which involves intimacy and relationship and, you know, lots of things like that. So we're getting the payoffs without the work in our culture. Without the work and without the actual even deeper nutrients, right? Without the deeper fulfillers. So if I'm hungry and I crave McDonald's, there's this fascinating thing where people who die of diseases of obesity are actually also dying of certain things. types of micronutrient starvation. Because every time they eat more stuff and they get filled with calories and micronutrients, they're actually not getting trace minerals.

They're not getting phytonutrients. And so then the hunger is even deeper. It's not a real satisfier, right? It's a pseudo-satisfier. So not only are they not doing the work. They're also not getting the deeper thing that the salt fat sugar was evolutionarily bound to the other micronutrients that were needed. And the same thing in terms of people don't get a sense.

sense of deep intimacy and connection and the meaningfulness of life from porn that they would from an actual intimate relationship. And they don't get it from social media that they would from real friendships. And the real friendships mean I can't just be an asshole and then bail. I actually have to work through all the human conflict, which means I have to look at how I contributed to it, which means I have to become a better person, but it's hard. Bringing it back to the original question, in ancestral times, we would have been sitting around to campfire hashing out the complex problem that we faced.

And so our brain power wasn't a limiter there. But what's happening now is two things. Number one, the situation is unbelievably complex. And it can only be understood in an individual mind. You can't get a climate expert, an energy expert, an AI expert, and a psychologist in a room. And each of them opine on their part of the metacrisis and then assume that everyone understands everything. It has to be assembled in an individual mind and then hopefully you'll grow the number of

those minds. But first of all, it's complex. And second of all, we're being bombarded by the Facebook and other things competing for things that are not relevant to our future that are not giving us a full, healthy, experience both calorically and mentally and otherwise. So that's kind of what I meant, Buzz. You know, I've been doing this longer than you have for 20 years. And finally, the real world, I mean, for better or worse, the real world is catching up

to this story. So more people are trying to understand it because they recognize something is quite wrong with our current cultural stories. And it took these things happening in real time for the that awareness, but I'm just observing that I know these things are difficult to be simplified and said clearly in a short bit of time. And here I've already spent our first 18 minutes on a sidetrack, but keep going, my friend. There's actually something that you said about the must be processed in a single human mind that's important I want to come back to, but just to make

sense of the detour and why I was mentioning the thing about in food and online relationships and all those areas, there's like a hypernormalimal stimuli that is separated from the rest of what made it evolutionarily relevant is, and that's kind of the one marshmallow reward circuit, rather than the two marshmallow reward circuit that involves some self-application for some kind of delayed and healthier gratification, is that obviously is also the case. with the kind of reward circuits associate with sense making and understanding. The one marshmallow reward circuits

are to get certainty very quickly without the work of actually trying to study and understand the situation. So that certainty is a one marshmallow. That makes sense. And so I know what in-group I'm a part of because we're all outraged at the terrible trumpers or the dumb libtards or whatever it is on the other side.

I know what in-group I'm a part of and I feel safe because there's lots of us and we're really certain and we're really sanctimonious. And I get that feeling of like there's a false sense of identity and esteem and kind of the Maslow's needs sense, which is sanctimony, right? I get to feel esteem because I feel so obviously smarter than the dumb ones who think the other wrong thing.

And I also get to feel the security that is associated with feeling certain, even though it's a false certainty. And so I would say those are the need for belonging and the need for security and the need for esteem are all getting hijacked, getting turned into political warfare in a way that is useful for political parties and people who want to sell their wares and whatever else it is. But those are all the one marshmallow reward circuits of like, wait, did I actually read all of the literature on climate change in depth or on vaccines or on whatever it is and really come to sense make this on. my own, or did I get a sense of certainty really prematurely and really kind of handed to me? So similarly, when you're saying, like, what are the skills underneath it? I think the skill of, like, the quality of earnestness in our desire to understand the reality we live in. And the earnestness associated with just a pure desire for clear understanding as well as a desire

to be effective. And the recognition that if my map is wrong, I'm not going to navigate well, even if, especially if I am falsely certain. And then the willingness to sit in uncertainty for a lot longer, the willingness to not be part of an in-group that is certain, the willingness to let go of the kind of moral, righteous superiority, and to sit in the uncertainty of that so that I can, without bias, actually come to make progressively better sense of the world. And then to still never get certain because there's always more stuff that I don't even know that I don't know that's going to continue to.

A high bar to reject certainty and sit with uncertainty and sit outside of your in-group. Isn't that a rare human that can do that? Statistically rare in the current environment, yes. Requiring genetics, everybody doesn't have, no. And is it now, we could say that's not possible for everybody, in which case we should say democracy is no longer relevant. We should get rid of democracy because having a bunch of people that are falsely certain and kind of angrily righteous about it, trying to do some system of open governance is obviously not going to work well, in which case we should find those small number of people and make them the new nobility. And that's the Chinese answer, right? Like in the current environment, there are other groups that are working on that.

If you want an open society where everyone gets to participate in choice making, then everybody has to do a good job of sense making. to do a good job of sense making and meaning making. What is really meaningful here and what's really going on here? If you want anything like a democratic or open society, the minimum required investment is authentic, deep, informantness about the nature of the issues, which also requires adequate educatedness to be capable of that. I personally fully agree with that, as you know, but I think that is a minority view, probably. Well, I think it's a minority of people that think about what the prerequisites of a democracy to really function well in a complex world.

Like, it's a minority of people that even think about theory of governance. I don't know that many people would really disagree with it if the logic was presented. Okay. I've kind of already changed the outline of this conversation, which was, of course, with you and I probably inevitable. you wanted to put a pin in the whole meta-narrative can be understood in an individual mind. You had something to say there. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually really important because one of the things that I would say, like one of the fundamental aspects of the metacrisis, if you want to call it that, is that for us to be able to coordinate lots of human activity in a,

a big corporation or military or whatever. We need to be able to decompose complex tasks into a bunch of small tasks. Everybody do those and recompose the small tasks. So we divide up understanding the world into the natural sciences and the social sciences and then the natural sciences into biology and chemistry and then biology into ecology and microbiology and whatever. And the idea that we can then somehow recompose that. But in doing so, and this.

this is kind of key to reductionism is we convert the complex to the complicated. We convert the self-organizing nature of nature to some taxonomy that you can separate, thinking you can understand the parts and that the parts are not fundamentally also defined by their relationship to each other. And so whenever that happens, we can optimize for a part without realizing. that it's at the expense of another part that is outside of our domain of study. And so this is why we end up getting iatrogenic medicines where we look at the cause of the disease in this very narrow way because we had to split up the complexity of the body into gastroenterology and oncology and neurology and et cetera.

So then we say, well, you have high cholesterol, so we're going to give you a statin or you have this, so we're going to give you that. That thing produces side effects and other parts of the body that didn't look into the deeper cause across the systems. It's why a complex chronic disease doesn't actually. actually have cures because we don't understand them because you have things that start in the gut and then affect the immune system and then affect the nervous system, right? And so you have to understand those complex causations. The same is true with can you fix the environment without

understanding industry and infrastructure and economics and human political theory. It's like it's all deeply connected. So when you decompose it and you try to solve the problems in isolation, you end up just moving the problem somewhere else. And so the new. So the new, you know, need for, of course no one person can understand everything, but they can seek to understand in a way that has more cognizance of the depth of interconnectedness. And that's the only way to be able to do something like any degree of specialization that is not itself part of the problem. Okay, so let's go into my second question that I had planned for you now and get back

to your changes and edits to the... my systems overview. So why is it that when we go to a conference or there's a presentation or something that the larger fly up high enough and look down at the topography of the human predicament, why there is so much pushback from people who are single issue focused on social justice or inequality or climate change or Bitcoin or politics. And yet, like you just said, you need to look at how all this stuff fits together in order to see the right map of our future.

Why is it so difficult? And what is happening socially here and how might it be overcome or at least steered so we can get more people looking at a squinting and seeing roughly what a more act. accurate systems map would look like. Yeah. So, I mean, the answer is begged in the question itself. So when let's say that someone starts to understand climate change and understand the significance of that issue portends to all life. And then they look at how long people have understood this and how long they've worked on it and that it's not making progress.

it by itself seems like an overwhelmingly large and bordering on impossible task. And so critical, existential, why would anyone move any attention to anything other than just move this thing forward? Right. And similarly, let's say that you witnessed firsthand what happens inside of a factory farm or the clear cutting of rainforest in an area. The idea that anyone else wants to go up to some higher. highfalutin abstraction place. It seems kind of academic when these orangutans are burning to death as the Indonesian force are getting cut down to make fucking paper bags. It's like the realness of the issues, the eminence of the issues. And so if you live in a, if you live in a

ghetto and you're focused on social justice because you have a direct relationship with what the what the police are like and institutional racism is like and what redlining is like and those things and then you hear something like these talks you're like we fucking live in existential risk every day like just walking around with our skin color with the police around is an existential risk every day and you want to talk about like fundamental problems of um worldviews like come live in our world and so it's easy to understand why anyone who is touching something right there existential risk for people in the Ukraine is not a hypothetical issue in the future, right? Or for people in Syria or for. And so what you and I are doing is a position of privilege in a way that we

aren't in Ukraine or we aren't in the ghetto or we aren't in a rainforest that's being clear cut where our way of life is being eminently destroyed. We're able to look at all those things and have our heartbreak from every single one of them. Be like, fuck, like all of those are existential for some people in some life, some animals, and all of them also portend patterns that could be existential catastrophic for everything. And none of them seem to be getting much better. Is there maybe more on the ground activism of that type isn't actually going to cut it? Maybe something else is actually required. And maybe we're wrong. Maybe we're wrong. That's an important point. But that's kind of how I came to it. And I'm guessing that you might have

had a similar story of like, I can't actually turn away from any of these issues. Once I've been exposed enough, I can't turn away from them. And I also don't think any of them are getting better. So I think the fundamental approach is missing something. So maybe there's something about the deeper structures that are all those problems are symptoms of that unless we understand it, we actually can't solve any of them. And if we do understand it, maybe we can do something more fundamentally effective everywhere. That's exactly my view. and just my observation to you, and we shared a couple of Voxers on it last week or two weeks ago,

was that since I feel that so deeply and viscerally and almost spiritually, I expect that other people, when they see the connections and the underlying structure, will feel the same way I do, and I'm often disappointed with that. But it's like, I can't feel what it's like. to be in an indigenous tribe living in the Amazon and then actually have mining companies or logging companies come in and devastate my whole world and have the petrol dumped in where everybody gets cancer from the water. Like I can't feel that if I don't have some grounding in it. Like I got to go there and be with them and still I'll only get a little bit of it. And I can't really feel what it's like to be a mother in Ukraine right now, right?

like I can kind of get a sense, but we have to ground in it to get it. The same thing is true. If you and I are sharing stories where we've spent years and years in data and abstract thought about it, of course, nobody else is going to be able to get all of that without some grounding in it. So then it's just our job to say, all right, what is the best? One, is it even relevant for everybody? It'll be relevant for some people and not others. Other people doing a better job with the issues that they're already connected to is the right thing.

And we want to just move our attention to say, is there anything from our domain of focus? it could help them with that thing. They're focused on because what they're doing is critical. And sometimes if being able to work on more fundamental systemic kinds of change is important. And it's like, all right, how do we actually help the concept, but also the experiential grounding of it to land? And it's a process. And this is the two marshmallow thing is in the same way we would like other people to not jump to certainty too quickly. We need to also, and that they would go through a process of sense making.

we also need to go through a process of people's sense making with them. And it's, you know, it takes some time. Okay. I'm with you on that. Okay, going back to the original choreography. Okay, the one thing I wanted to share here about worldviews and meta-narratives real quick. And then we go back. If you would have somebody in your team put in the show notes,

the conversations between David Bohm and Krishna-Merti, the link to that. Some of the most beautiful things ever recorded on video that I watched and influenced me growing up. And they were in this very deep inquiry about what is the fundamental nature of the problems in the world? And what's the fundamental nature of human conflict and poor human choices. And they both shared really insightful frames on it. Krishna-Mertes was, you know, and he said, the highest age of intelligence is two observances. without evaluation, meaning we actually don't see the world. We see the world through the very limited lens through which we meaning make it. And if you can see the world, if you can sense more

deeply, then you can do better sense making. But I can't sense make stuff I didn't even take in, and I'm not going to take it in if I'm pushing it through filters too quickly. So that's very relevant. But I'm actually going to emphasize the one Boehm shared here. Boehm said the fundamental cause of all the problems in the world, environmental war, all the way down to family conflict, is what he called a fragmented consciousness. And so he talked about wholeness and the implicate order. And that, because remember he studied with Einstein and Einstein said it's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things. There is in reality one thing we call universe. And it's such a deep thing to think about what Einstein was saying. Because it's like,

I think of myself as a separate human a lot of times, but what am I without the sun? I don't exist at all, right? What am I without the electromagnetic field? I don't exist. What am I without the Higgs boson? I don't exist. What am I without plants or algae or the biosphere or the ozone layer? So me as a separate thing is actually a misnomer.

It doesn't even exist. It's a what Einstein called a delusion of consciousness to believe that there are parts that just because there's distinction, we think they're separable and they're not separable. So then, of course, in that delusion, we can try to optimize for a part at the expense of something else, either on purpose or without knowing it, and we cause a lot of problems. If you do it without knowing it, we call it mistake theory and externalities. If you do it intentionally, we call it conflict theory, war, oppression, whatever. So David Bowman said the underlying cause of all the problems is not perceiving from wholeness first. And it's so true that like the generator function of the generator function, the deepest thing starts there, which is if you think about it in terms of I can try to benefit myself in the moment at the expense of my future self.

That's the one marshmallow activities. But that's the connection to my my temporally momentary self and not to the wholeness of myself across time. And so the addictive hit in the moment. message at my future life is this is a theory of tradeoffs based on not actually seeing the wholeness of myself across time. I can try to benefit one part of myself at the expense of another part, which is all of our internal conflicts, or myself relative to someone else, advantaging myself relative to them as traditional conflict, or I try to advantage somebody else at my own expense, murdering and codependence, which ends up creating resentment and passive

aggressiveness and problems, or my in-group relative to an out-group or my species relative to the biosphere. And when you recognize the interconnectedness, you see that all of those are short-term pump and dumps. And that if you see the interconnectivity of the whole thing, none of those parts can authentically and enduringly be optimized, independent of all the other ones. So we can get into how we do this systems framing and we should. But I hold in terms of the deepest way to look at it is that particular pattern of perception and identity. Two comments. One, that was trippy.

Two, you made me think that maybe instead of refining and simplifying the meta-narrative so that more people can understand it, which is my vocation right now, it may be more productive to boost the number of humans that are in a place where they perceive their role as a whole, as part of the whole, like you were saying. You know, I mean, we need more, a much, orders of magnitude, more humans from that cognitive development space that are able to see that. That's more important than, here, there's climate change, there's energy depletion, there's nuclear, there's AI, all that stuff.

It might seem like I'm forcing things as a fit here, but I believe that, you know, I believe that the ancient wisdom traditions had wise people that saw similar things and encoded them differently. It said by many Vedic philosophers that the Bhagwad Gita, the great kind of scripture of one of them of Hinduism, chapter 2 verse 48 is fundamental, established in yoga, perform action. Yoga means union with all that is. And it's this yogistakuru Karamani is the quote. And it says, established in yoga or union with all that is, from the place where you recognize that your existence doesn't exist without everything else.

And from the place where you cognitively but also experientially get that where there's an intimacy with all life, then act from there. Spontaneous right action emerges from that place. And when in the Bible it says, seeky first the kingdom and all these things shall be added on to you, the place at which everything is sons and daughters of the same reality, right? the place at which there is a sense of the sacredness of all life and the union with it, then right action starts to be informed from there. I do think it is a different orientation from which sense-making and meaning-making

happen differently and informed choice-making differently. Well, I'm beginning to get a suspicion that we may have an episode four and five, but let me just ask you a follow-up to that. So you know me pretty well by now. I have very limited experience with psychedelics. I had a magic mushroom omelad on Kosa Mui, Thailand, and I remember an 18-inch-tall Jesus Christ running up my leg, and I have not really done it since. But I do have spiritual epiphanies being in nature and feeling that on oneness that I'm

told happens on ayahuasca or some of these other. psychedelics, mushrooms. And some of my most profound mystical experiences in life are seeing the vibrant green in the trees and the birds and the insects. And I felt the connection then. And I've felt my heartbreak all along because I think some of the costs of our economic system are backloaded. And as we bend and hopefully not break, some of these.

things are going to get worse before they get better. And I live with that. You could call it trauma or grief or something every day, but that also motivates my work and the things that we're discussing. Okay. So this, you can't just get the cognitive model across to people because that's not even where it came from. Why did you do the work to get the cognitive model?

It came from that experience of sacredness and interconnectedness and the heartbreak. that's what actually motivates the desire to figure out how to serve the thing and protect the thing better. And so it's not just the understanding that resulted from what drove that work that has to come across to people. It's the facilitation of those experiences. So how do you merge that all together in a productive way? Well, first, the fact that you said, you know, you're inquiring into psychedelics, but that you just had experiences in nature, psychedelics are one way to access non-ordinary states of consciousness. You can do it with deep time in nature, with fasting, with meditation, with breathwork, with lots of things.

I think psychedelics can be profound tools, but I also think they can be one marshmallows to spirituality, where you get the high state hit without any of the work of really communing with nature or learning to calm the mind and then getting a false sense of knowingness, independent of some of the other important parts. So the depth of time in nature, I generally prefer. And this is actually something I want to say, because people ask me this, and I'm sure they ask you this sometimes,

in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, there is a very popular term called catastrophizing, that people end up having more, psychological pain and drama in their life because they anticipate the worst possible things that don't end up happening. There's that Mark Twain quote, I've suffered a great many terrible things in my life and a few of them actually happened, meaning most of the great terrible things or should we just made up that never happened and we suffered from them anyways, right? So CBT tries to help people get over catastrophizing. I've noticed that many people who focus on catastrophic risk

have a catastrophizing disposition. And it happens in other areas of their life. And the gift of it is it makes them think through possible catastrophes for the world better than most people so they can be protectors. Awesome. But it also has some pretty big downsides in that they oftentimes catastrophize their own personal life and relationships in ways that makes it hard for them to be collaborated with because they have hard time trusting people because they catastrophize that other people

will always fuck them over or whatever else it is. And so for what it's worth, I don't have a catastrophe. I actually have a very optimistic disposition. I got interested in catastrophic risk as a byproduct of that same thing of like a very local, small scale love of these animals and then the heartbreak at what happened, right? Love of these environments, like just actual a sense of sacredness of life and then that it was being harmed. I just wanted to solve that local issue. And then I started to understand that local issue wasn't just local. And then I got to start to understand, fuck, it's not just factory farms on cows.

It's factory farms on lots of animals, which also goes along with clear cutting and then overfishing of the oceans. And then it just kept expanding. So then, all right, man, what other great horrors are there that need tended to, but that are only horrific because life is beautiful. If life wasn't beautiful, if those cows' lives weren't sacred, I wouldn't give a shit. I'd just be like, fine. Let it happen. Let it burn down. If the Amazon didn't, if there wasn't something sacred about all the life there, it'd be like, I don't care.

And so the anger at the people who are hurting it or the heartbreak or the fear is the result of the, is an epiphenomenal of the fact that it's intrinsically meaningful and beautiful for everybody. And so it's important for them to remember that and realize, hey, the only reason I'm scared or pissed off is because there's something I really love. And then how do I come back into a direct relationship with what is sacred to me and how do I be a best service? And is the anger the right way or do I actually want to come back into the sense of love and beauty and sacredness and be more. more for than against. And so it's not like one has to have some like perverse obsession with doom porn to want to focus on, you know, AI risk and climate risk and economic risk and nuclear risk. It's like when one is wanting to serve life and then they think about all the things that

are going on, it can make natural sense to study those things, but from a fundamentally different place inside. Wow. So here's another question I didn't intend on asking you. I gave you my two-minute elevator pitch of my story. I think we are headed for, as you know, I call it a great simplification when our economic output is no longer able to continue to grow at the scale that our cultural and financial expectations have given it. And we're going to have to respond to this. that. Now, since I've had this pot... And you know, you know, I agree with you on that frame. What we do about it and get into it. Good. So I, I, that's a point on our original plan. What's been surprising to me, and maybe you'll have some thoughts on this, given what you just said, is six months into this podcast and after my movie and some of my other videos, I fully expected to be grilled and have stones cast at me from finance, MBAs and economists and technologists.

And there have not been that many of those, probably because they're just not paying attention. That could be a Occam's razor. But I have gotten a lot of stones, surprisingly, from people that think I'm too optimistic. You don't understand. We're headed for collapse. There's nothing we can do. Humans are going to go extinct by 2050. You don't understand climate.

We're already on runaway towards Venus. And there's nothing we can do. And as soon as global dimming kicks in, it's game over. And all these things, you know, anyone that's paying attention to the story that thinks collapse is not at least a reasonable possibility isn't paying attention. But I think it's a possibility. it's not a likelihood. And I want to do everything I can to make the future better than the default. But it's very fascinating to me that most of the pushback that I've gotten personally in my inbox,

I mean, there's a lot of congratulatory supportive stuff. But most people are poking holes saying I'm too optimistic, which is kind of ironic. Right. Okay. This is really interesting. I want to share a personal story about it. But first, most people have had the experience at some point in their life when they are really suffering about something. And somebody else tells them to just cheer up or be optimistic or it's not that bad.

And they feel much worse. And this is like the gaslighting phenomena, right? Where especially someone is, say somebody is dealing with someone in their life who they know is lying to them and whatever and someone else says, no, it's not really happening or it's not that bad or like, why don't you take responsibility for it? Or, you know, but of course people should take responsibility for what they can, but a superficial assessment. There's a place that when someone's really in pain, they just actually want someone else to feel

it with them. And they don't want to be made wrong. And they don't want it to be lessened because the thing that makes the pain even worse is the loneliness of no one else can hold this with me. me. And sometimes the optimism prematurely seems like a spiritual bypass to prevent the grief. And they actually just need to be in the grief. And they need to know anyone else sees the thing that they see and can feel it with them. And now, of course, there's the separation of like the cognitive thinking through it versus the emotional experience. And people conflate these and they're not all that clear on it. And they're like, no, it just is this way.

And I'm not trying to get empathy. and just trying to tell you the way it is. And I would say in that place, they're under-dissearning about the way internal process works. So there is a place where there's a space that is needed to not jump to the optimism too quickly and to actually be able to just feel collective trauma and grieve. And that then gets to bring us to a state that is capable of saying, without denying any of that or bypassing it, now what is the space of agency? What what is possible to do?

And again, this is tricky because we can't do this on a podcast of people. You know, like this is this is deep embodied in like personal work. So that was one thing I wanted to say about it. And the other one is I'll just, this is totally not where you and I thought we were going to go with this, but this is this podcast is where we're going. I'll share it. spiritual experience I had that was a big part of my process. Like I, like many people, you know, there was a series of life-defining experiences. And this was a young one.

So it sounds naive and it is. And, you know, please give the benefit of the doubt that I think about it in more refined ways than I did when I was 15. But this is a 15-year-old insight. I, because I was homeschooled, I got, I didn't have a curriculum. I got to study whatever I wanted. And when I got deeply into, I got into the animal activism stuff when I was nine, but from like 12 to 15, I was working with Greenpeace and PETA and whatever, lots of orgs and just kind of full-time studying all of the metrics that I could of species extinction

and soil erosion and biodiversity loss and planetary boundaries and all those things. And I had enough of a sense of science and math to be able to do some forecasting. 15. Yeah. And but I didn't, I wasn't doing that in addition to school. That was my school, right? I was spending all of my time doing that. And, and the, I came to the conclusion as inequipped as I was and naive as it was that self-induced human extinction was inevitable in the relatively near term. that the, because I was trying to look at the things that were getting better, that were adequate to solve the problems and what those curves looked like relative to the points of no return and they just weren't convergent, right? It was like the things get to points of no return before we get to the adequate solution spaces. And so that brought me to where I think many of those people who wrote to you was like you don't get the math. The math is bad. We're fucked.

And of course, then being unwilling to accept that and wanting to feel some sense of agency, again, as a emotionally disturbed but caring and emotionally immature 15-year-old, I started thinking about depopulation strategies. Because I'm like, we just can't do it with this many people. The collective ignorance mass is too high. The collective utilization of resources is too high. if there was a lot less people we could make it. And if we don't, then we'll end up doing things that end up leading to no people and a lot of harm to the rest of the species. So I started thinking about technological population reduction solutions. And this is one of the reasons that I'm concerned about decentralized exponential technologies like tabletop, CRISPR and stuff,

is because I know there are other people thinking about those things. And the technology to be able to act on it is getting much easier than it was back, you know, all those years ago when I was 15. and even then I was able to think about some things. And one of the experiences that took me off of that path was, I can't say exactly, you know, why it happened. But Bucky Fuller, I heard him say this so many times when I was a kid, but it hit me all of a sudden in a different way. He talked about this example of that when a bird is developing

inside of the egg. The yolk is what becomes the bird. The egg white is the kind of unrenewable amino acid resource it is using to develop itself. That it is using up an unrenewable resource and it is producing metabolic waste that isn't being processed in its finite little space in a way that is totally self-terminating. And the little bird doesn't know it's inside of an eggshell because it doesn't have a reference frame. And if we were to anthropomorphize, which of course the little bird's not doing this, but if we

were to anthropomorphize being the little bird embryo in their developing. And it recognized at a certain point, man, I'm running out of egg whites here. And I'm, you know, creating shit in my space. What am I going to do? I don't know. Just keep on eating. I guess we'll figure it out later. Because what else can I do? You get to a certain point, runs out of egg white. It just happens to be that there's evolution made it such that the amount of egg white was exactly what it needed to be able to then be at a place where it had a beak that could break free from the shell that could then also eat seeds on the outside, that its little developing GI track and underdeveloped beak couldn't have done. And now it's eating seeds that its poop fertilizes and it's part of this process.

But the developmental phase of it was unsustainable because it was a developmental phase, just like a fetus inside of a womb, if it continued there forever, would obviously kill the mom and kill itself, but it goes to this 40 week for human development. And then it goes through a discrete phase shift, right? The breaking out of the eggshell is different than the development in the eggshell and different than the development afterwards. And the birth process is different than the 40 weeks of development in utero and then different than the post-ambulical development afterwards.

And the same with the caterpillar to the chrysalis to the butterfly. And I just saw all of these cases of developmental periods where if you were to just take the trajectory and forecast it forward, you would just see self-termination, but there was a forecast, and then there was a discrete phase shift. And it took a minute, right? Like the birth might take 50 hours or 20 hours or whatever it takes, and the chrysalis takes a little while. But I was getting this experience that all the forecasting I was doing was a developmental period for humanity. And there was a discrete phase shift that I couldn't see possible. And of course, sometimes the baby dies in birth or the mom dies in birth. It's not a guaranteed thing. And so how to not just look at

changing the shape of the curves, but how to look at what types of discrete phase shifts could occur and what a world on the other side of certain phase shifts might look like and how to facilitate that became like a different way for me to think about the future than just a continuation of these curves and trying to change their shape of it. But one of the things it did was I had not studied discrete phase shifts. I hadn't studied how in lots of systems you have a movement towards a certain kind of far from equilibrium point and then a discrete phase shift to something totally different. And I didn't even know that was a structure I wasn't factoring when I thought I was forecasting well. So I had a false sense of certainty based on not understanding some phenomena,

but understanding other ones well, but I didn't know the ones I didn't know. And that false sense of certainty had me thinking from a moral place about depopulation strategy. And one of the things that I find is so scary about utilitarian calculus is how much if my goal is harm reduction, then I'm willing to commit some harm in a trolley problem to keep worse harm from happening. But if I get false certainty that X worse harm is for sure going to happen, it justifies me doing super fucked up stuff so long as it's less. So I feel like, and I know from my own experience, it is really easy to come to catastrophic certainties that just aren't true.

I remember everybody's concern about Y2K. I remember the concern about the Cuban Missile Crisis and 2012 and a gazillion things like it. And it's interesting how bad both our catastrophic and our hopeful predictions are historically. Like it doesn't go the good or the bad ways. we think it's going to go. And so I would love if the people who are really concerned about the world issues would recognize that they end up having the same premature certainty biases that the optimists have on the other side, that the Trump supporters and anti-Trumpers have, and that it's a lack

of a certain kind of cognitive, emotional, spiritual maturity needed to just keep sitting with the uncertainty. of maybe it's all catastrophic, but maybe it isn't. And if maybe it isn't, maybe there's shit you really should do. And maybe you don't know what the right thing to do is. And that's actually harder than just saying, wow, it's all fucked. I'm just going to be one of the mature people who accepts it. It's harder to be like, I actually don't know.

And so I'm obligated to work on it as best I can in the presence of still not knowing. You did make me cry at our last podcast with your story about the plow and animism. This was really profound what you just said, and I kind of agree with it because you're describing kind of my place. I veered towards certainty at times. But the more I know and the more I talk with people like you, there are lots of variables and the whole freaking thing is moving every day and events change and our understandings change. And I don't know what to do.

I'm reasonably confident what's not going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen. And my role is I want to pass the baton to more pro-social humans that can take a decent chunk of this on board and play a role. The other thought I had is when I was 15, I was freaking watching Gilgan's Island and Scooby-Doo. So I already respected you before this, but now I even have a higher level of respect for you that you were doing this when you were 12 to 15. I just can't imagine that.

I mean, I first started really caring about this when I was like 31. I was obviously homeschooled, exposed to certain things, which I think is pretty common for, I mean, anybody would respond to the things they're exposed to. The earlier part of that journey was just something so random. My family was in a gas station in Iowa.

and a actually in Texas we were on a trip and a tractor trailer pulled in and it was a cattle truck that was taking cows from a factory farm to the slaughterhouse and you know the ones with the holes in the side for air ventilation holes and I went up and I looked in the holes and the cow right near me was missing an eye and there was like blood and you know abscess coming from it but it was terrible stench all the cows were up obviously terrified. There was feces all over them. And it was just like a, it was just like Auschwitz scene, you know. And I didn't, I grew up eating meat, including from factory farms, McDonald's, whatever, just no cognizance. I just didn't put it together, right? And, but I also grew

up loving animals in that cognitive dissonance that so many people have where they don't get weight, dog, cow, not that different. And I, I, Ask my parents why those animals were in that condition and they said that's what the hamburgers come from and like my world just broke and I never ate animals again after that day and I read Diet for New America the next day starting the next day and then I just I couldn't think about anything else because I'm like wait, we're just focused on our own little life going well and there are billions of other sentient beings that are just being completely fucking tortured and then murdered in a torturous way like how can my what's wrong with my species and how can I just be focused on my own personal life and be stoked when that's happening like I can't like you you'd have to be so disconnected that you're a sociopath in a way to just be focused on your own life

and stoked and that was the beginning of feeling very suicidal about these things for me um Because I'm like, this planet is, like the way that we're operating is so fucked. I just can't be complicit with it. I want out. It doesn't make sense. And then I'm like, well, that doesn't help any of the animals. And so I can't do that. And then I'm like, but I also can't just feel like my life is a success with that being the case.

So like the only, I can't kill myself, but for my life to succeed, theirs has to be better. So how do we fix factory farms? And of course, that was the first one. Then I went from factory farms to also whaling. and then overfishing and then clear cutting of the forest. And then it started to look at extreme poverty of people. And it just grew. But it's that inside of like there is no,

there's no way to actually be sane in the world and see it clearly. And then just hold our life separate from everything else. So the only way through for me is actually how do we make a, how do we make a more sane kind of just world? And I think different people get exposed to things at different points. But if they have some time and space to feel, it's a very natural human process. Thank you for that. I feel much the same way.

I think I'm older than you, but I'm matured at a later age than you. And I think maybe that's why we've formed a deep friendship because, first of all, we care about the future and we want to influence things to the best of our skills. and our networks and our knowledge. But I think it feels good to meet another human who is aware of all these existential risks and the trajectory and the probability distribution of various futures and just admits, yeah, I don't know. It's all awful and I don't know what to do, but let's roll up our sleeves and find some

paths forward. Just the existence of that, another human being feeling that. is so buoying to my psychology and my feeling. Yeah, and I think when the people say, hey, you're being falsely optimistic, they're actually needing to feel or longing to feel met in the tragic place they're in. And I think you and I've talked about this before. Mark Gaffney is a friend who the first time we talked after it was clear we resonated for a while. He asked me if I was post-tragic and I asked him what the model was and he was saying there's a kind of pre-tragic optimism that people will have where they have ideals that have not yet been shattered on the reality of the world.

We call naivete. And then there's the encountering the tragedy of the world and having the ideal shatter. And there's a cynicism that can emerge there. And then there is a post-tragic place that is committed to being in service to the sacredness of life whether you can succeed or not. It's still the right way to – it's still the right hill to die on. And it doesn't even need the certainty of success to have it be the right sacred thing to be living that way. And then that also realizes that there is a false certainty of the tragic place. just like there was a false certainty of the naive place and that the universe is much bigger than

both of those false certainties. And so then it says cognizant of all the tragedy and cognizant of all the reason to be cynical and holding that, we're still going to look for solutions and still also operate with the sacredness of life at the center. And yeah, I mean, I think that's the task. And it's so interesting because, like, you and I both know we could we could solve all of these things make a economic system that doesn't have an embedded growth obligation and a closed-wit materials economy powered by regenerative energy and overcome war and bind AI and biotech. And then a solar flare just takes us all out in a way that we can't control for shit, right? And so there is something about just sitting also with the fragility and the

impermanence of the whole thing that we just have to hold. And, you know, when people think about, like how thin the crust of the earth is. It's like a little, it's like a ball of lava with a little bitty boat of a thin crust and a tiny thin atmosphere in a bunch of like vacuum matter space right next to a sun that can do solar flares. You're like, we're here at all. Like we're here at all. That's amazing. Who knows for how long it will be? So how do we both serve the con the continuation of life and be with the profundity and beauty of it in its fragility at the same time? So I don't really feel like going back to the egregore. and attention seconds and paperclip maximizer now.

So if we're going to do that, we're... I think we can do that next time. So given everything that you've just shared, looking ahead to next time, what would you like to say to the listeners to get them on board this way of thinking and to pay attention to our next conversation that we're going to ultimately try to get to the criteria for civilization.

And in my opinion, that's always two conversations or two things you need to check. One is what is conceptually, technologically, materially possible. And the other is how do we get there from where we are now? Those are separate questions. Yeah, Daniel, you've thrown me for a loop here. I wanted to talk about cognitive material economy and mesh with your worldview. And now I'm at a deeper place. So help me out.

Give me your thoughts. Some of the primary frames that people are related to in from the larger systems that have developed is they're seen as consumers or customers. in the market and they are seen as voters, if they're in the U.S. or another Democratic country for the state. And they're going to, they're going to buy a product or not buy a product. They're going to vote yes or no on a proposition or vote for this candidate or that. It's an extremely constrained set of choices that doesn't require them being creative or them understanding things well or them like it it's a supply side forcing right it's an institutional forcing of the choice to be very constrained so of course people have been conditioned that way for so

long that they don't even realize that they're just being conditioned that way and that it's not really deep or authentic choice and so of course if we're trying to get people to vote for us rather than the other guy or buy our product because it's going to our company is going to solve the industry's problem or whatever it is. We don't have to get them to make sense well or to, in fact, we actually just want to give them quick certainty and outrage to both join our side and get other people to join our side. We'll do the sense making for you. And neither you or I are trying to do that. We're not saying go vote for a specific party or a specific proposition or go purchase a thing. We're saying there's a deeper way of being able to make sense of how what seemed like

a lot of different issues in the world are interconnected, where understanding that gives us a different possibility space with which to think about how to forward. And so it's not oriented to immediate political action in the same way. And that doesn't mean it's not oriented to action, but in a different way, in a deeper way, but it is also much more to marshmallow. It requires a lot more of the people. And so something, a couple of things I want to say in terms of like, where we go and next time where we're sharing cognitive models about what about the relationship between our

infrastructure and our social structures and our cultures and worldview or superstructure and the biosphere and the nature of the exponential curves and technology. What about those things causes which kinds of problems and what would necessary and sufficient design criteria of a better economic system or a better supply chain or a better culture, educational system, or legal system look like. We have to figure that stuff out. Everything we've talked about today that we didn't intend to talk about is from where we approach figuring those things out, right, where it's not against the bad guys. It is for the thriving of life. It's not premature certainty of either the naive possibility or the cynical impossibility, but something that has been through

both of those and holds a deeper humility about how much is in the unknown, unknown set, including possible solutions. And it's a place that doesn't think that we get real security on a little planet with a thin biosphere floating next to a sun that does coronal mass injections. Like, we just don't get that thing. So there's a different emotional way of relating. And where the driver of all of it is the prima facie, the inherent sacredness of life that happens when you chill the fuck out of all the other agendas and disconnects and are just present with it.

Like, those are the places where if you come from there, the world, the sense making and the activity is differently motivated and differently informed. Now, understanding the models is still really important. So this is a, like, heart, will, mind, all working together. And it's pretty easy to see that any two of those three don't work, right? You get mind and heart and no will, and you get really smart, caring academics who feel broken and hopeless at the impossibility of the world. You get heart and will without deep mental frames, and you get activists who are willing to go, like, put their life at risk to chain themselves to a boat or whatever, but they don't know how to think through strategy at the scope of what has to change. you put will and mine together, but without heart where there's narrow value systems, and you get the kind of sociopathic rule that currently runs the world that knows how to be

highly strategic, knows how to be highly agentic, but to serve some narrow interests at the expense somebody else. Like it takes all three of those together. And so what we're going to be talking about next time is some of the strategic frames or the theoretical frames that inform better strategy and not a specific strategy, but kind of meta strategy, meaning in whatever domain, happens to be working and as the situation changes. That's where the theoretical frameworks come in.

I think it was Bertrand Russell. I don't remember who said something to the effect of if the only value of knowledge was its immediate clear utility, then just like mechanics would be the only thing really worth studying. The reason one studies philosophy is not so much what you immediately do with it, but what it can do to you. what it can do to you in the way that you relate to all information and all situations from a deeper place. So some of the philosophic inquiry that we go into is not that someone now knows, okay, now I know how to fix climate change or the American democracy or Facebook. It's now I'm perceiving the world with more nuance and more complexity and from a different place, whereby maybe the local PTA issue that I'm about to deal with all have new insights on.

and maybe the, you know, like all the things still need tended, all the local things need tended, there will be some people who are listening who are institutional, you know, who work at major institutions, who are oriented to how do we change the financial system and legal system and regulate tech. Most of the people won't be working in those domains, but that doesn't mean that it's irrelevant to understand the world we live in better. There's a relevance to have a better understanding of the world, even if you don't know what to do with it exactly, because it can help you perceive differently the situations that you're in

and where you can do something with it. So when we get into these frameworks next time, it's not to give certainty about catastrophe. It's to understand the principles that are driving it well enough that you can see applications of them in all kinds of domains. Think about those domains better and start to get a sense of what adequate solutions at scale might entail. Excellent.

I really looked forward to that. I had COVID. We were traveling, so this was a big gap, but maybe we could do that next conversation like at end of August-ish. I know you're also traveling. This conversation was completely unexpected and was like an everlasting marshmallow. So I thank you for your wisdom and grace. And yeah, I really value you as a fellow traveler and as a friend.

friend, and let's keep going, my friend. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.