The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Bend Not Break Part 5: Criteria and Categories for Response" | The Great Simplification #50

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Show Summary: On this 5th and final installment of the Bend Not Break series with Daniel Schmachtenberger, we unpack the framework and mindset needed to begin thinking about responses. This conversation touches on what it means to work on personal development in the light of a polycrisis, and how it is truly a never ending but necessary challenge. Finally, Daniel and Nate break down a 3x3 grid on time frame and category of responses.  Whilst this is the end of this series, there is, of course, much left to be unpacked. If there are any specific topics you want covered in a follow up Daniel/Nate conversation, we encourage you to leave your questions in the comments of the Youtube video, which can be found here -> https://youtu.be/Kep8Fi_rUUI    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 More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/50-daniel-schmachtenberger To watch this video episode on Youtube → https://youtu.be/Kep8Fi_rUUI 

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, in 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. We have arrived at episode five in the series with my friend and colleague Daniel Schmockenberger called Bend Not Break. In this final episode of this series, we do an overview of short-term, intermediate term, long-term, and culture, political economy, infrastructure, a three-by-three grid, and how do we think about responding to the upcoming metacrisis, to the upcoming great-time. simplification. At the end, Daniel and I invite viewers to put questions in the comment section on YouTube for what we might do a follow-up episode on. This was quite a journey. We

twended our way through the fifth episode, and I hope you enjoy it. Without any further ado, here is Daniel. Greetings, my friend. Good to see you, my friend. Happy to be back. You too. you look especially wise today. Yeah, that happens when I don't to trim the beard for a while. It's a nice effect. You had some wisdom 30 years ago or whenever that was. You chose to move from Iowa to San Diego. It's going to be zero Fahrenheit here tomorrow night.

It's freaking ridiculous, man. I don't know why I've chosen to live here because you can't exercise. You're like, yeah, I'm going to go for a snowshoe and you go outside and no, I'm going to go watch a podcast. Um, so I'm, it's very cold. One might say this is the grass is always greener thing, but I miss it. I, uh, I actually love snow. I love, uh, particularly my, um, body is happiest in the mountains and the snow. And, um, the feeling of the cold air and the lungs and everything.

Yeah, I love it. So I hope you enjoy it some in between the, yeah, I do enjoy it some, but my body is happiest in like 60 degree misty old growth redwoods. Um, um, year round, I would take it. All right. You're obviously there investing in a long-term climate change resilience strategy. Oh, yeah.

Well, that would be a full episode on itself. The medium-term models show this Minnesota-Wisconsin area that I live in not too bad, but, you know, that's a huge, huge topic. So, my friend, we have arrived at what I expect will be the conclusion of our series that we initially titled Bend versus Break. Based on the logic that we have unpacked these last four episodes between humans, how we use energy materials and monetary markers to create technology. And there is an embedded exponential growth in our current system combining these things that is heading us towards an inflection point. The inflection point is if we are able to continue to grow that has bigger environmental impacts, more material energy use, CO2 and other things, if we're not able to continue to grow, there is a Wiley Coyote biophysical moment that have to prepare for and your work with Conciliance project and my work with the great simplification

and the Institute for the Study of Energy in our future are to change the initial conditions of these future moments and kind of meet the future halfway so that we bend the civilization trajectory instead of break and break would be bad. So I think we've, you know, done a horizontal and vertical treatment of the risks and the drivers and the generator functions of humans for thousands of years arriving at this point. At the end of the last episode, you preferred a three by three grid on how we could think about responses, interventions, mitigations, what to do. And it was superstructure, social structure, infrastructure, and triage, transition, and long term.

And this podcast, we're going to, we're going to unpack that. First of all, if I say superstructure, social structure, infrastructure, we're going to have the word structure in like 270 sentences. Is there shorthand for those three that we could use? Yeah, so those terms come originally, as far as I know, from Marvin Harris's work in what's called cultural materialism, but that draws from previous work of Marxin. The people, superstructure basically means culture, means the ordinating values, the identity, the aesthetics, ethics, axiology that a civilization is oriented towards. So we'll just say culture. It's simplifying, but we get just social structure basically means the codified processes by which agreement across the population occurs.

So this is both this is a political economy, basically, the intersection of economics governance and the institutions that mediated judicial system law, the scientific institutions that are needed, etc. So we'll just call that political economy. And then infrastructure means the totality of the physical. technical stack that the civilization uses to support itself and meet all of its physical needs. That's energy, transportation, manufacturing, materials, waste management, blah, blah, all those things, food, water. So we'll call that tech. So by tech here we don't mean software or social media. We mean the totality of the human technology. And sometimes we use the term infrastructure because it's common. But if we just say technology, political economy and culture,

that roughly maps to this thing. Now, we already did this thing in episode two or four or whatever it was, so people can have that reference. And, yeah, I'm very happy to have arrived at the point in the podcast that many people have been looking for where they're asking. So what are solutions? And we will get to share some things that are hopefully inspiring while simultaneously probably disappointing people, that we're not going to offer something that looks like one easily tractable, simple thing that they can go do something about that solves everything. Something I wanted to say is just in recap, this episode will really be much more useful if people have watched the previous four. If you've got the time to watch this one and you haven't watched the previous ones, I would encourage that. Number one, we largely unpack a core of Nate's work regarding the relationship between energy, the environment, the materials, economy, and finance. and really a fundamentally critical thing to understand what break will mean and what bin requires.

Bin not break is obviously a term you have used for a long time, and then we're kind of going back and forth on models here. Number two and number four are unpacking additional frames for what we call the metacrisis, and we had a little break with number three, where unintentionally we ended up talking about psychologically. how do we hold being aware of the intersection of all the possible catastrophic risks and having any sense of human agency. And so there's like a psychological interlude number three. And so given that we have framed the problem set in a particular way, we'll be talking about solutions in light of that, where if someone doesn't have that framing, some of what we're talking about will seem like it doesn't make that much sense. I'm just offering that as preface for everybody.

Excellent. And those will make available. And I'd like to have Lizzie, the podcast curator, maybe do a summary of all five of these in one place. So at the risk of delaying the punchline even further, I do have a couple other things to add. When we talk about this three by three grid, culture, political economy, tech stack, and then short term, intermediate term, long term, It also is relevant to other frames. Number one, what do people care about? There may be people listening who just want to protect themselves and their family to what's coming.

There may be other people that deeply care about dolphins and cetaceans and other species. There may be people listening that work for governments or institutions. and I think what someone cares about is relevant to what we should do, number one. Number two is there's the scale of world government, national government, local, regional, community, neighborhood, individual family. And I think the what to do in your three by three grid will be different for those different scales. So I don't know how we want to treat that. this conversation.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that need done, right? There's a lot of things that are not in imminent catastrophic risk, but that are maintaining the, not the quality of life for existing life and also maintaining things that would become a catastrophic risk to at least that local area if they weren't attended. We want the nurses and the people that work at the animal shelter and the police officers and the firefighters and the educators to actually become increasingly passionate about what they do.

Even though what they're doing isn't at the scale of how does it solve all of climate change or AI risk or nuclear risk, the idea that people would in the face of those things become less passionate about the thing they're doing would just start the cascade of everything getting worse faster. And so if what you have in the scope of agency

that you can do something about is not the totality of the metacrisis, but it is something real. Your connection to something real and paying attention to and focusing on the part, you can do something about recognizing that the metacrisis is caused by the activity of all people cumulatively. It also has to be addressed by the activity of lots of people. Yeah, that's very important. I want to make sure that we say, and we mentioned this in number three, that we want these conversations to help contextualize where you are in the world,

to help you think about how to do a more effective job even at a local scale or even in a narrow vertical. But ultimately, to enhance your sense of the meaningfulness of everybody's actions rather than otherwise. The brief aside from what you just said, you mentioned people working at animal shelters. Every week, my girlfriend and I buy five powerball tickets, and we've agreed if we win, We're giving all the 10% of the money to animal shelters to protect dogs, especially that are also going to go through the great simplification. You know, there's 100 million dogs, et cetera, in this country. So that's something I think about a lot. But that's just a tiny, tiny thing out of everything that we're going to discuss.

So let's get into it. So we know the problem set roughly, and the problem set is huge and it goes beyond what we've discussed. We didn't talk much about climate or insect loss or some of these things. We know the problem set. We've got the framing, short term, long term, intermediate term and the different lenses. So before we get into that, how does one even begin to think about what to do? Like what would be the intellectual structure?

for how to think about this and what not to think about maybe. There's a few things I want to share that might seem like non-sequiters, but I think they're valuable frames. One is, I remember a long time ago reading books on leadership and psychology and business and then looking at the psychology of typology, whether you're looking at Myers-Briggs or other systems of typology, And it was clear how someone had succeeded in a particular business with a particular typology and then said these are the principles of success that would totally not apply to someone of a different type in maybe a different sector. Like, Warren Buffett would not do a good job at Steve Jobs' job or vice versa.

And so if Steve read Warren Buffett or Rockefeller's principles on how to be effective, he'd just be like, I have to give up. Like, I have no chance. I'm not an accountant mindset. And so what I'm going to share. The immediate application of that is we have tens of thousands of people listening to this that are going to have wildly different temperaments and value systems and skill sets, everything else. So pay attention to of all the things you hear anywhere, the ones that feel like they make sense to you and actually empower you. And pay more attention to those because, you know, I might share principles that have been useful to me that might not be that useful to you. You have different Dharma, different passions, different typology, different mind, things that Nate finds useful. So take these as hopeful offerings, but ultimately, if they don't feel empowering, then leave them and find other things.

Hopefully, though, we can share some things that can be adapted to any typology that are general principles. That's one thing I wanted to say, preface. The next thing I wanted to say actually goes back to animal shelters. I grew up spending a lot of time working and volunteering in animal shelters. shelters and then animal rescues, whether it was animals that come from circuses or, you know, various places. And in homeless shelters and just, you know, I had parents that were into activism and taken us to be socially engaged in. And so I grew up like just not being able to walk by a dog that was in bad shape or a cat that was in bad shape or a person on the sidewalk that

It was in bad shape and feel like it was okay to walk by. And it was actually that work that got me into the macro systemic work because working in the shelter and seeing how many of the dogs were being put down while people are still buying new bread puppies. And then feeling the great success of working my ass off to get a couple dogs adopted, but then seeing the scale of it, right? And then seeing that's just dogs, right? That's not cows in factory farms. I started thinking at scale, but motivated by the high touch, this dog, right? this cow. There's a lot of people who think about existential risk, like the EA community or Rationalist community, they think about existential risk in a very abstract way, not having actually

touched, this is an existential risk to this person living in this refugee camp or in this ghetto or this dog or this whatever. And it's abstract. It can be almost an intellectual curiosity rather than an expression of actually embodied care. And it can even be worse than that. it can be like a topic that seems like it has power associated. And so if someone can walk by the people on the street and not notice that much, and if they aren't actively bothered by the situation animals are in, I don't trust those people to be thinking about catastrophic risk. I only want, like I only really want to trust people thinking about medicine.

systemic stuff who actually ground it. Because otherwise you can you can say well long termism in the future this many trillions of people might die if we don't such and such therefore we should do these things now and these things now might cause lots of harm but it's a good expected value calculus utilitarian calculus long term. And it's like or you know we have to do this war but here's the benefit and we'll try to minimize collateral damage. It's like minimize collateral damage means how many moms are watching broken babies that are civilians and bomb buildings and it's like don't call it collateral damage. Don't sanitize it.

But the people who are high touch and who can't walk by a person who is high touch mean? I haven't heard that word before. Rather than high abstraction or thinking about the high tech, high orientation to the actual touch, right, like working with this animal. Like you know how much time you'll spend rehabilitating one dog or one animal. one animal that's covered in oil, one seagull, and you're like, fuck, this is a lot of time, right? But it's totally worth it when you're with that one, but then you think about scale. And if you don't move to scale, obviously you can't address the issues at scale.

For most people, that's fine. Like doing the high-touching is fine. If you feel like you can think systemically, you can't lose the high-touchness. otherwise the abstraction can make you disconnected enough to do evil in the name of moral things and that's a challenge but here's the other challenge that this harkens back to our video number three is the more high touch you are given world events the more likely you're going to be overwhelmed in what's going on and not be able to do things at scale because it's too overwhelming.

So you can be high abstraction and try to do things at scale, but then you're not connected in the way that you're just describing. Yeah. So if you really, if your heart is open and you feel and you see what I'm in New York City right now, it's not where I live, and it's cold this time of year. And it's a fucking terrible place to be homeless. cold and if you let yourself feel that and I was just in Istanbul and there were four million Syrian refugees there and there were you know they didn't speak the language we don't speak the

language necessarily of other places we might have to flee I saw a kid who I was talking to whose parents were both killed in the war he wasn't asking for anything he was just hiding because he said if he gets anything everybody will is violent towards him to take his stuff and it's like if you let yourself feel that it's easy to just feel completely broken right and and and and or get completely pulled into i just need to be at this refugee camp working here and not think about can i do something at scale this spiritual psychological work to feel the depth of those feelings and transmute it into more devotion and more agency and more strength to be able to serve and keep that high touch and figure out how to do strategy effectively is the only way forward i know

Well, I hope you don't mind me sharing this publicly, but in our private conversations, I have not criticized you, but observed that that's one of the reasons you are not being more effective globally is because you can't say no to helping people. I know so many examples where someone is struggling with something and you're giving them time and advice, and there's just only a certain number of hours in the day. So your high touch is, you know, a little bit of a loadstone to really being effective. But let's just go forward with that. I think I understand your point.

The thing there is I struggle with it. And there's so many places where I don't say yes to helping someone that I really wish I could because it would be saying no to work on projects that I really hope can change things at scale and believe can for a lot of people. But it's never easy for me to say no, where I really could make a difference. And I don't want it to be easy for anybody. Like, I struggle with it, and I might make wrong choices, but I would like anyone to struggle with it, right, as opposed to just turn something off where then it's easy. I would not like people, there's the dialectic of things to wrestle with.

I want someone to always be in the wrestling with. And it's interesting because someone can say, like, hey, this thing is not as important because of scale. but the person who can harden themselves to the people around them will think wrongly and do it wrongly about how to make a good world at scale. I trust them less. I trust more the person who feels the people around them enough that they have to do something they feel compelled to. And so this is where utilitarian ethics are not sufficient. Virtue ethics also are.

It's like the utilitarian ethics says, you know, what is the expected value for the world? of me doing this thing versus doing that thing. But of course, I can't forecast all the fucking things. And I can't forecast whether 10 days out, we're dealing with complex systems. I might be totally wrong. The virtue ethic says, if you do the thing that has the most integrity in the moment, the next moment will unfold

from a moment that had the most integrity in it. That also has limitations. You have to hold them both together. We probably should be scaling the number of people that think that way rather than scaling the project that you or someone else is working. on. This is why we're talking about this first on the show, and that's why I was happy that you brought

up the animal shelter topic, is because how do you think about solutions? Well, you don't only think about it, you feel about it, right? You have to, like when we talk about the metacrisis, we're saying you can't think about climate change and the economy and U.S. China power dynamics separately. They inter-effect each other. Obviously, we see a war happen in Eastern Europe, and we're going backwards on climate. change in terms of fossil fuels. And so you have to think about all the world together.

But the other corollary that is you have to use all the parts of yourself, right? You have to use your intuition and your intellect. You have to use your passion and your kind of calm dispassionateness. So how do I cultivate all of the capacities of self in service of all of the world is how I relate to that. Head, heart, and spirit, I think you said on a prior episode. Okay, how else should we be thinking about this pre-3-3-3-grid? Do you have any other things you'd like to share? I think the 3-by-3 is very tangible, and we will end with it.

A couple things I'd like to say are how not to think about solutions. I think this can be very helpful to start. First, I want to give an example that was actually really cool for me lately. I just met some guys. who are running an elite counterterrorism unit. And they had been special forces moved to domestic counterterrorism. And a number of people's work, Dave Snowden's work, my work, other people they had been looking at and seeing how that could apply in these domains and have come up with some very innovative

strategies to be able to protect life more effectively, well, with less resources, while also being less willing to cause harm to the other side in the process. Like they really just increased their effectiveness. This is obviously a very empirical, very tangible, maximally high consequence type real situation. And the thing that they said, and why we were talking, the thing they said that they had to train the guys out of the most, who were already special forces, counterterrorism, you know, moved to counterterrorism guys,

was they had to move them out of, thinking about solutions too quickly and into being able to assess the uniqueness of this problem that is different than any problem they've ever been in before because they too quickly want to see which of the eight forms of drills they've done in the past this is and yet as you're getting more innovative terrorism it might not be any of the drills it doesn't fit and so rather than look for which solution that I already know do I get a fit on this what they were training the guys to do is to be able to not think that their existing solution might be adequate so they could truly innovate.

So to start by saying, how do I assess the novelty of what's going on without letting my existing salience frameworks limit me? And that that was the core of empirically what actually has been making them more effective. So a frequent, periodic, personal ooh of the oot loops in an individual's way of looking at the world? observe orient and so often decide act when people say what's the solution they want to jump straight to decide and act without understanding the observe orient well enough and then oftentimes they have frameworks like the answer is and they know what the answer is so then of course they have a hammer and they're looking for nails but it means that their observation is actually deadened because they

have existing solution frameworks they're trying to apply so they're trying to look for which of my existing solution framework supplies or where can I apply this thing? And as a result, their observation to novelties didn't. So it was very interesting to see an environment that high consequence and that empirical, where they were testing the shit out of different training methods in, you know, live training scenarios coming up with the thing that messed the most qualified tactical operators up the most was them looking for solutions too quickly, rather than being able to drop that and really actually assess the novelty of this situation. So I just want to offer that first. Because I do find that the impulse to jump straight to solution is an uncomfort with uncertainty

that doesn't want to actually not know what to do and feel like those consequential stuff, but that makes it more likely you do the wrong thing. And it's more important to just be able to chill the fuck out enough that you can actually observe the real novel situation and come up with appropriate novel solutions. And so the comfort with certainty, the comfort with uncertainty allows you to observe well, which allows you to strategize well. That's one prerequisite idea I want to share.

I like it. It can be taken too far. I've been chilling the fuck out and observing and orienting for 20 years on this before deciding and acting. because that's kind of my job. But I totally agree with you. I think they're, and this ties into people's identity and their jobs as well.

It's hard to have a solution or a set, a suite of responses that is counter to one's built identity or their paycheck. Yes, I want to actually speak to two things there. I talk about perverse incentives oftentimes. So obviously if someone has a fiscal incentive to externalize the cost, they will, blah, blah, blah, but it's not just a perverse incentive in the traditional economic sense. It's if my job is measured in certain metrics, even if it's not a perverse

fiscal incentive for me, but I'm whatever, I'm some UN department focused on World Food Program focused on feeding kids or a refugee program focused on whatever the metrics are, bed nets, I can do something that will feed the kids through an environmentally unsustainable. sustainable strategy that erodes the soil faster and causes dead zones in the ocean faster, because those are the metrics that I'm tasked with. And so I think of that as an institutional choice architecture that is perverse to the totality of what the world needs. So it's not just perverse incentive equals greed. It's also that we can divide the world up into this is yours to focus on. Well, but that's fucking wrong. If what I'm tasked with is just these few metrics and I can harm other things

that are still interconnected, me just actually doing what the institution requires of me, optimizing those metrics, even if they're for a nonprofit, good or government positive things, seemingly positive things, can still be a corrupt choice-making architecture. So one of the things you want to think about is, is there a mandate that I have that is too narrow to think well, to strategize well? Because when you were saying earlier, some people care about narrow things. Well, it's very likely that things that you don't think you care about directly affect the shit you do care about. If you don't think that you care about coral and oceans, you're just wrong, because when they die, watch what happens to your life.

If you don't think you care about fluorinated surfactants passing planetary boundaries or nuclear issues, you're wrong. Like, you do care about those. And so whatever you're focused on, you still don't want to harm shit that your life depends upon and that all the things that you care about depends upon. You have to make sure that your choice-making architectures are not so narrow that you can't actually think about what you're doing in context of everything else. You don't have to be trying to solve everything, but you do have to ensure that what you're doing here is considerate enough of the other areas that you're not causing externality there. That's a first general principle. And how do you do that? Great.

How does someone listening to this do that? I want to come back to that. I want to say one thing first, but how do we avoid externality is one of the best topics we can do. for solution thinking. But what I wanted to say briefly first was just about you. Yes, of course, someone can do extended analysis and never act. And as a result, not be that effective and or even just hold delusions for a long time because they don't test them in the world and realize empirically it was wrong or whatever. Of course. I don't think that's your case at all. Like, I want to just kind of acknowledge, I don't think you think it is. There's so much importance in the

climate change movement. There's so many brilliant scientists associated with so many climate research projects. And yet the overall narrative is very focused on mostly CO2, a little bit methane and greenhouse gases as a whole, and temperature rising as a result of this. And the fact that that CO2 is largely being produced by the burning of hydrocarbons that is also completely attached to the growth of GDP, that is also going to, not be able to keep happening forever that portends a gazillion other fucking things it's a critical part of that whole story your extended analysis being able to emphasize that and now being able to tie that into all the other areas in this podcast i think is adding something more valuable to the world than

if you had been on the front line doing climate change work your whole life so i just want thank you i mean i agree and the decide and act is i decided we need orders of magnitude more people thinking in systems and caring with empathy and reason and joining this conversation. That was my decision and the podcast and my other work is the action. So thank you for clarifying that. I kind of was, you know, self-deprecating that I do observe and orient a lot. And, you know, learning from you and Tristan and learning from other people about geopolitics and nuclear risks. I mean, I'm still observing and orienting the world that we live in.

It is fascinatingly complex and fraught with risk. Okay, getting back, where were we? Some degree, the Udala loop is not supposed to just live in an individual. It's supposed to live in networks of people that are coordinating because you should have a soil scientist who is continuously learning more about how to effectively grow soil and what healthy soil is. And you should have farmers that are taking that info and applying it in very practical ways.

And they're not doing an equal amount of observing and orienting versus deciding and acting. So another principle that I would share is when you can't think about the whole problem set of the world and then think about you, as if you, for any individual, are going to be able to act in some way sufficient to the whole thing. You should care about the whole thing, but then you should care about lots of people's activity

and service of that. And so how do you relate in network with everyone else? And there will be some people who are much more like, look, I can do shit, tell me what to do, I can execute. And there will be people who are like, I don't know how to politically execute. I don't have good interpersonal skills. I'm great researcher. In which case, it's like, this is what I mean about typologies. Great.

Figure out where you actually can work your ass off all the time because you're enlivened by it. You enjoy it. So you can really excel and develop novel capacities and be in partnership with other people with different capabilities. But the default of the exponential tech, the exponential energy use, and the metabolism of our system has self-organized those typologies in the service of optimizing dollars or financial markers as our objective. So the typologies have all been structured in a way that is not helpful to the future that we face.

And so those typologies have to switch into maybe a different. an objective or parallel objective. Yeah, I mean, we talked about this in number two, I think, is that money equals optionality to do lots of things. So money is a decentralized incentive system to incentivize people to figure out how to get better at making it, which means novelty search and optimization, do a better job of whatever you already figured out how to do. And obviously, you can make money via production, but also extraction.

You can make money via value-adding, but also externalization of cost. And so when we're talking about organizing towards these other purposes, right, towards a fundamentally different master, you might still have to figure out how to pay your bills, but it's not what is motivating you. Still, you will need to be in coordination with other people who are similarly motivated to you, but have different capacities. Now, can we come back to externalities? How to avoid externalities?

Okay. This is I think there's a couple topics that I want to mention before we get into the three-by-three. So one is how to avoid externalities causing other problems in the process of trying to solve problem. The other is how to avoid feeling that the thing that you're doing is important enough. You have enough passion over it that you don't under-emphasize how important many other things are. And both of these speak to a kind of holisticness of consideration. So first on externality, I'm not going to give the examples of how trying to solve one problem causes others because we did that already in the conversation.

So go listen to it. But it is almost everything. It's so easy to say we can bring electricity to these people by burning more coal or making a hydroelectric dam that will extinct all these species in this area on the river or blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. Now, I'm not going to say there is no such thing as trade-offs. It is a childish view to pretend there are no trade-offs. What I'm saying is if you don't care about all the things, if you haven't monitored all the things that are involved and care about them all, you will make unnecessarily bad trade-offs. And in the process, you will also polarize the people that care about those things.

So, of course, it is mature to realize there will be some trade-offs, but at least consciously look at and care about all of them and come up with the best synergistic satisfiers you can, the thing that serves all the things that matter as best as possible. So on the topic of externalities, how do you think through? Actually, I just wrote up a list of questions that I think help people think through how to understand a problem space and how to understand a solution space. I'll send it to you as a document so you can include it in the show notes for this. But what we get to externalities, it asks questions like if you're looking at a problem, whether it's health care in my town or, you know, too many iatrogenic death.

at my hospital or why there are so many, so much soil erosion in this area or so much government corruption or whatever it is. In the assessment, there are questions that are universally relevant. Like, where in this system are there perverse incentives? Just see if we start to map where anyone has a financial incentive or a status incentive or a cover your ass incentive that is not aligned with doing the maximally good thing to the whole in honesty. Just by starting to notice that, and not in a partisan way, right? In the bipartisan, all directions way, you'll start to be like, oh, well, of course this thing isn't going well because there are these perverse incentives.

Well, the biggest perverse incentive of all is profits as our cultural goal, which means I can buy this iPhone for $400, $500. But if you included the external costs, it would be $5,000. and a lot more people wouldn't be able to afford it. So the fact that the externalization of cost to the environment and poor people is what allows the market to exist and that if we actually had to do the accounting and pay all of the costs so that we weren't stealing from anyone's balance sheet, that the market wouldn't exist and that not a single industry. Or it would look radically different.

I'm not sure it wouldn't exist, but go on. it wouldn't exist as it does right like it not any area as they exist currently would be profitable everything would have to get restructured in some very deep ways um i think any anyone who's ever become a like artisan craft person and made stuff and then thinks about how cheap factory stuff is like god damn how like such stuff should not be that cheap like it should we should have much less things that are much more expensive and much more oriented to reuse and durability um so yes that is one of the very deep perverse incentives, but that means for any particular problem you're looking at, look at within your area where there are fiscal perverse incentives that particularly go against

the problem you're trying to solve because that's where the opposition is going to come. And then you can start to think through, can we use law to bind this? Can we use collective value system and a cultural forcing function to bind this? Can we use a different profit motive and make a healthier profit motive where people are willing to pay for a more expensive, thing because it's better, you know. So being able to say the humans that are doing the thing have some motivators. Can we look at the human motivators across the system and align them with the thing we're trying to do better? That's just a question that it's very good for people to get good at thinking through. Another one is someone is thinking about a problem and you think through,

what are all the problems upstream from this problem? So they contribute to it. Let's say we're dealing with the factory farm issue. Well, people's value systems and not caring about animals enough is one. Language and sanitizing and calling it beef or pork rather than cows or animals. The invisibility is part of the problem, putting it far away where nobody can see it, as opposed to having to actually interact with it's part of the problem. The financial incentives are part of the problem. And so if your solution, whatever the solution is, there's one thing, but it doesn't address many of those things, those things are still going to show up somehow, right? Like the classic example I give of when the poachers couldn't poachers couldn't poach the elephant, but they were still poor. You still had a

macro economy that created poverty, they were in poverty, there was still a black market on animal products. They just moved to hunting other animals that were more endangered. If you don't want to protect the elephant and kill the rhino, then, or have the rhino get killed because those poachers have to move. You have to deal with the poverty upstream. You have to deal with the mindset towards animals. You have to deal with the mindset of the people buying the product. So that might not be something you can immediately execute on, but you have to know that whatever solution I'm doing right now is a partial solution. It's not a full solution.

And if I don't work towards a full solution, I might just displace that problem. So if someone can do an analysis of here's a problem, what are all the things upstream from it? And can I factor how to work on all of them? That's one question. I have more, but you're about to say something on that one. Well, I was just going to say that since we started this series,

one of the language changes that I've incorporated is I no longer talk about solutions. I talk about responses and there's a million responses rather than a discrete solution. So just minor clarification, but keep going. Keep going, although I fear there may be episode six, Daniel's three by three grid and episode five is the preface to Daniels three by three grid, but keep going. Richard Haas that head over at CFR

writes out the difference between problems and predicaments and solutions versus management and that's a good framework that problem I know of his work I've not read that a problem is

discreetly frameable and admits a complete solution predicament doesn't admit a complete solution it admits ongoing management because there will be conflicting forces or conflicting tradeoffs

or whatever So yeah, even just the reductive thinking about a solution as if it's a static thing and then it's done in a situation that is very complex is itself not thinking adequately. So yes. So you think about, so here's a problem or your predicament, the situation you're wanting to improve, you think about all the stuff upstream. You also want to think about all the things downstream. Whatever solution that I'm looking at doing will have effects other than just a few intended ones. This is one of the key insights is that when we generate a solution, whether it's a new piece of tech that will solve the problem or a new law or a new business or a new movement, typically what we're doing is defining the problem in a narrow way, right? The problem is soil erosion in this area.

The problem is the homelessness in this area, whatever it is. Or the problem is cancer, so we need to do the immunol oncology. We define a problem, some narrow way. And then we seek a solution that produces a first order, meaning a direct effect to solve it. Typically, we're not looking for cancer solutions that decrease carcinogenesis writ large. We're looking for something that can cut a cancer out

or burn a cancer out or poison a cancer out or a tune in immune system to killing cancers. We're not looking highly upstream. So we're almost always looking for a direct effect, right, on whatever the problem is. So it's a first-order effect on a narrowly defined problem that we will think about so that we can measure if we're doing a good job in a small number of metrics.

We'll have how many cancer cells or how many inches of topsoil or how many parts per million of CO2 or whatever it is or how much GDP per capita, but we're going to be measuring our success in a small number of fully explicated metrics from a first-order effect. That's actually quite simple. epistemologically to wrap your head around. But that solution that I do will also produce second

and third and endth order effects on a very large number of metrics that we've never thought about. And some of those will not be positive. And some of them, if this solution is going to overtake the problem, it has to be bigger or faster or have some more scale to it, some of those externalities might actually be worse issues. Aren't you just really saying that our species has chosen to simplify our economy and the backs of 500 billion energy workers and we optimize dollars when we should somehow mature to have a system's view of upstream and downstream effects. And if we did try to measure those second and third and endth order effects, the risk and the complexity would be so much that we would just grind everything to a halt. No. That's not true that we would

and everything to a halt. Okay. Though that will be the justification for why to continue with the stupid thing. So, but am I saying something that is very much like men are not the web of life? We are stranded in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves, think about seven generations into the future, think more holistically. Yes, I'm saying something like that, but I'm going to try to actually make it more formalizable so that you can actually think about how to apply it, not just feel it.

But it is, it's saying something very commensurate to that. When David Bowman and Krishna-Merti had their dialogues in the 80s on what is the fundamental cause of all of the metacrisis, the way they talked about. What's the fundamental cause of human conflict that leads to poor coordination and poor management? And David Bohm said it was fragmented consciousness. The underlying issue is being able to separate us versus them and benefit us at the expense of them, but they're just as smart and they upregulate stuff. And so we just get arms races to make the wars larger and larger in their potential. Or me versus you. So we get class systems and everybody fucking each other even within the us, right?

Like we'll be an us when it comes to this nation versus that nation, but we'll be a me versus or in us when it comes to our company versus their company, but me versus you when it comes to ladder climbing within the company and office politics. Or our species versus the other species in the earth or the right now benefit relative to the long term. harm, the ability to separate things that are in truth connected to benefit one part while harming another part, but that ultimately those causal loops come back to harm everything. The cause of all the problems is that. It is a consciousness that doesn't see how it all connects. If you see how it all connects and then you tend to all of it, only then that is considerate enough to manage the power of exponential tech.

Go ahead. Naive question. So the fractured consciousness, is that a human thing? Or do dogs and elephants have fractured consciousness? No, no, human thing. Yeah. The capability to take this whole totality of experience and then start naming everything and making things separate, right?

having a semantic interface, being able to have a symbol that I can relate to, that relates to the, represents the ground, but it's not the ground. This is what makes us so powerful is because we can upregulate one part relative to another part, right? Our toolmaking is the ability to take my fist and say, I want more of that and make a hammer, right, a stone tool, or take my ability to bite something and make a sharp knife, or it's the ability to say, I want more of this part and how do I increase it? but increase it at the expense of what? What is becoming less?

Where is the cost happening? If our technology is not that much and there's not that many of us, so what? When our technology becomes profound and there's lots of us, then it's a big so what. Then the us versus them can equal a war that kills everybody and the us versus nature equals planetary boundaries

that kills everybody. So the same consciousness that was viable because there were not that many of us and our tech was not that big, but the poor stewardship of tech the poor stewardship of our power, meaning poor in terms of whatever we're externalizing the harm to, that same mindset does not get to steward exponential power. It self-terminates.

So either, if we are to not self-terminate, we must have the wisdom to be able to steward exponential power. And it is something like exponentially more wisdom than we have been operating with. And it's not impossible, but it is. And this is where we said culture, political economy, tech. There is some radical cultural shifts that have to occur to instantiate a political economy that is the will of the people, but where the will of the people doesn't is not a will that wants to benefit some people at the expense of others and some people in the moment at the expense of our future and people at the expense of nature. If the government that is going to bind the tech and the economics is not an instantiation of the will of the people, it'll be oppressive. and then it has to justify violence to oppress the people and then it'll become corrupt and whatever. So the government has to be an expression of the will of the people, but if it's a will of the people who want what harms each other, that also doesn't work.

So you have to basically do the culture work to have people recognize that which they are fundamentally interconnected with, to then be able to have that expressed in a system of law that binds the economics that can bind guide and direct the tech, which is where they, physical power is to be viable. That conceptually makes sense. Should we move into the three by three grid then? And how should we? Okay. Almost. Okay.

On externalities, it's important to say, so how do you think through externalities better to avoid them? So we were saying, think through the upstream stuff, because if you don't solve some of the upstream causes of the problem, it's very likely they will be displaced somewhere else. Think about the downstream stuff of whatever you're going to do so that you aren't going to cause problems to something else that matters. Could you give an example of that, upstream and downstream on the level of the individual and a product or something? Sure.

I'm wanting to bring food to people in an area where there's food insecurity. Is my strategy going to increase the power of warlords to be able to count, capture huge surpluses of food and increase that type of political and civility in the area. Is it going to create increased dependency on other countries that are going to actually erode the culture of the people feeling like they have any agency? Is it going to use agricultural methods that actually kill more pollinators and more topsoil and cause more dead zones and oceans? Those are not the core problem I was trying to solve.

I was trying to solve food insecurity. But I don't want to make warlords worse. I don't want to erode the will of the people thing. They have no agency. I don't want to ruin the environment. So I have to say, how do I think about this problem? And how do I think about the connected problems well enough? Because can I bring sustainable agriculture, permaculture type things that don't hurt the soil,

actually make the soil better and grow it rather than not, that are inherently decentralizing rather than centralizing so they don't cause the warlord thing, that increase the agency of the people? It just means we have to deepen the understanding of the problem space enough to notice which solutions will be vital. You're really talking about embedding systems thinking, systems ecology in a central role in our governance systems. And in our culture, in the way that everyone thinks better.

Yeah. But we have no incentive to be systems thinkers in our culture right now, unless you're a hedge fund or a teacher. Well, two things. Not all motivation is extrinsic. Incentive is an extrinsic motivator where someone else is getting you to do something. And where I'm doing it because of what I get out of it, not because of my intrinsic motivation to the thing itself. So if I am trying to run a civilization where there's a lot of labor to do, and nobody really wants to do all the labor.

And so we have to incent them to do the labor because otherwise we have to beat them to do the labor. So we can in slavery by having wage slavery or something like that. but people aren't doing the things they want to do it. They're doing the things they want the money for some other purpose. Intrinsic motive is also a thing, right? So people's value systems, the culture work is I do certain things, not because I'm going to get anything financially from it or necessarily even status from it, but because I just intrinsically care about the thing, right?

So one is we're talking, I think most of the people listening are spending hours listening to this thing. And they're not getting paid to listen to this. And some of them might be taking this to their job as a consultant because they sound smarter and they get paid, but probably mostly not. Probably they're investing time doing this because they just authentically care independent of incentive. And there's a culture-wide starved for intrinsic motivation and purpose right now. But go on. I think the future is defined much less by extrinsic motivators and much more. by intrinsic motivators.

This doesn't mean there won't be any extrinsic ones. So, of course, we have to design our incentives and our deterrence better. We have to solve for perverse incentives and like that. But that's not the whole of the story. It shouldn't even be most of the story, right? And then there is also an incentive to care about these things, which is non-extinction is a good incentive. like just even from a personal extrinsic point of view, if I don't work to take to affect the world's trajectory, and if I don't work to help other people to affect the world's trajectory,

it might preclude anything that I care about. So I would say there is not an incentive in the formal monetary systemic sense for a lot of people, but that does not mean that there's not both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons if you pay attention. Okay. Okay, so we were saying upstream, downstream things, externalities. We were saying the solution is generally oriented to produce a first-order effect on a small number of defined variables, but we have to think through the second, third, fourth-order effects on a large number of variables that we don't know what are.

How do we do that? The first part is, I want people to endeavor to do it completely while knowing they never can. your best externality analysis will still miss it that there's no way you could have thought of, but I want you to try to think of everything as best you can. And then knowing that you didn't think of everything, I want you to have some kind of broad listening and watching after you do it to see what might be being affected that you wouldn't have even expected. And did we expect when smartphones came out that they would have the effect on dinner tables

or human attention in relationships or porn addiction or people's ability to study or we didn't expect those things. So we might have anticipated some. So anticipate all the things you can. But also maybe even in the visual human focal length of focusing on 2D things that affects focal length so much of the time and the effect of losing our navigation and orientation and what other things that does, neuropsychologically. So what I would say is you have to do the best job of anticipating externalities you can while recognizing there will be ones you didn't anticipate. So you want some very broad, diffuse listening to say after we started this thing, what new things started to occur that might have been connected? Are you kind of talking about the precautionary principle? Totally.

But I'm talking about specifically how to think about applying it, right? And so we're talking about a holistic principle and a precautionary principle, but we're trying to formalize it as like a way that people can think about applying this thing. So first, how do you think through the externalities on second, third, fourth order effects? By talking to more people with different perspectives about the thing. That's the first really key part. This is where diversity of perspective and pluralism is really a real thing. If I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to solve this issue or I'm gonna protect this area of the Amazon

from being harmed by this combination of law regarding mining rights and regarding agriculture rights and et cetera. Okay, cool, sounds good. Go talk to the indigenous people about the solution and they'll be like, no, no, no, there's some other groups that did things like that and here's what happens.

They just hire mercenaries that do this thing or it gets worse for this reason or whatever. And you're like, oh fuck, I didn't know them and go talk to the legal scholars. And they're like, oh, there's no way to implement this in law because of such and such. You go talk to the economists who are like law is written by lobbyists and they have more money to keep writing law than you do. You're going to lose this one.

And go, you go talk to the environmental scientists. And they'll be like, actually, you're protecting the wrong part of the forest. There's not even high biodiversity here relative to this area. And so there's a lot of people who will know stuff that you don't know. and they will be able to see where some of the externalities will occur, including people that are on the opposite political side of the thing, right? Whoever would fight against it, there's something that they care about that is real, even if they're wrong about some stuff, they're not wrong about 100% of everything.

So finding out why do they not like it and say, how can I factor that in? So, one, I can not cause the problems for them, and as a result, decrease their enmity and maybe get them as allies rather than fighting the thing, right? You'll become both more successful and it'll be a better solution. So the way to think through externalities better is when you come up with a possible solution, talk to lots of people about what might be wrong with it. So red team it. But then don't give up.

Ask them, okay, how would you make it better to still serve the thing I'm wanting to serve, but to improve the thing that you're seeing? And so you use it as a proposition or design refinement process. And so that's the first part. And then the second part is once you implement it, try to implement it in experimental ways, right? You have some safe to fail probes. You don't implement the largest thing possible. Okay, I think we figured out that this version of AI or this genetically modified organism is safe.

Let's just fucking take it everywhere. Maybe our safety experiments were not totally complete. Let's do contained experiments. So the first thing is think through it well, right? Which you can't do on your own. The next part is run some experiments and try to do, if you missed stuff that will show up in the experiment, try to do it in a contained way. Right. And then as you implemented at scale, there will still be stuff that you missed.

So have a broad listening and ensure that when you find where something is being harmed and you need to change the strategy, doesn't mean you stop it. It means you update it, that you maintain the governance capacity to do so, that you haven't turned it over to where now that it's initiated, the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders means you can never change that thing or whatever. I mean, ensure that the governance structure is such that when we learn new stuff, the underlying thing can be changed. And when you say you, who do you mean by you in this case? Whoever does she try to do anything, right? We're talking to people here because on the chance that people here are going to try to, they're running a nonprofit or they're running a institution or they're wanting to build a thing. If you are wanting to do things, these are things to keep in mind.

And if you are supporting someone who has more agency than you in the organization or whatever, these are things you would help support them with. So I haven't heard you. frame this holistic precautionary logic of the last few minutes. Did you just like have a sandwich yesterday and come up with this or have you been thinking about it for a while? This is the thing that I would arguably like to start with. But if someone doesn't have the metacrisis frame, they don't, yeah, it's not obvious that the way we try to solve problems is the cause of the other problems and is a major part of the generator function of the metacrisis.

And so once you've understood that, then you can be like, okay, so a part of how we solve it is by a much more holistic set of frames in how we go about doing things. Now, I don't think this is impossibly hard to teach or train. I think this should be being trained in K through 12 education at various levels of development. I think that people who are learning anything from design science to becoming technologists to being lawyer, or studying political economy should be thinking and being trained in these things and thinking through the specifics in their domains. Okay, now the next part is I want to identify two types of externalities. Physical externalities and psychosocial externalities.

A physical externality is where we do something to benefit, we do something that has a physical effect to benefit something. But part of the supply chain of that thing happening causes some physical harm. somewhere, right? So we want water repellent coats and water repellent umbrellas and everything like that. We want industrial surfactants, so we make fluorinated surfactants to be able to do that, but then they go into the water supply and they're forever chemicals and they never break down and their carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins. So that's a, you know, where we want an herbicide to make agriculture more effective, but it messes up the soil bacteria and human health and whatever.

Those are classic examples of physical externalities. Obviously, CO2 and climate change is a physical externality. No one is intending to cause climate change. They just want to generate energy. So everybody knows physical externalities. They didn't use to, but Rachel Carlson and friends kind of got people thinking about that now I think everybody is at least somewhat aware, but that the supply chains that make anything happen have lots of effects. That's physical externalities. There are also psycho. A point on that is the physical benefits we get in terms of profits or services aren't on

equal footing with the negative externalities that Rachel Carson warned about and others because those things happen in the future and we're a biological species. see so emotionally they have and culturally they have very little weight in our brains so that's why this stuff has happened because our capitalist exponential system has backloaded some of those costs that are second third order effects from our decisions and our products right i'd actually like to explain a few reasons why it happens so one is a lot of the harms will occur in the future but the benefits occur now and so there is a perverse orientation to now It's also that whoever does the thing that provides more advantage now probably wins having more power to influence the overall system.

And those who don't do the thing that will cause the future harm also don't get the power and then don't influence the whole system. So there's a perverse incentive, not just a psychological bias. There's also a game theoretic perverse incentive to do that thing. It's also true that, as we were mentioning earlier, making a tech that produces a certain benefit is a pitherto. systemologically easier than preventing all of the harms from doing so because creating a first-order effect on a small number of metrics is just epistemically easier than considering end-order effects on a very large number of undefined metrics. So there is also something epistemically about it.

And then the other thing is that many of the problems only occur through very large-scale cumulative action, but the individual action produces my benefit. If I cut this tree down, I get money from the lumber, but I have just as much air to breathe. It's everybody cutting it down that messes up the atmosphere, but me not cutting this tree down doesn't make any seeming difference to the atmosphere, but it does make a difference to my balance sheet. Tragedy of the commons. Each person, the risk-reward ratio, orientes them to do the thing, because the collective, because the harm is more collective and the benefit is more personal. You have to factor all of those asymmetries.

And then one version of this that I want to point out for people is that there's obviously many narratives that tech will make everything better. AI will solve all of our problems and healthcare is going to become awesome with genetic engineering and immunoncology and all those things. and nanotech is going to make environmentally friendly everything manufacturing and capitalism makes things better. There's obviously many narratives like the environment is fucked and every positive thing was the result of, was only positive for a few and the result of colonialism and et cetera. There's partial truth to both of these. And there's obviously risks associated with AI that some people are aware of and benefits or of any tech. but there is a perverse incentive that's worth paying attention to that those who focus on the opportunity

more than the risk will get ahead more than those that focus on avoiding the risk more than their own advancement of the opportunity. Even in our hunter-gatherer days, that was probably true. Well, even more now because the hunter, if he did something too risky, might have died. Now, I socialize the losses of the risk. I can declare bankruptcy. I'm not going to jail, limited length. ability corporation is just going to take a bit of a loss, whatever.

So I get to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. We can do an oil spill. It's not going to hurt me as the executive, but I am going to make money when I exploit more oil. Yeah. So the ability to privatize gain, socialize losses, the ability to cause some new tech, Facebook, social media, destroying democracy in the social contract and the Epistemic Commons, and yet no accountability for that thing, but just a fuck ton of profit. I can always say afterwards, oh, there's no way we could have known.

But nobody tried to do the external calculus that I'm mentioning, and or to the degree that anyone did, they said, shut up, we don't want to hear that. And the focus was, it's going to be amazing, it's going to connect the world, it's going to whatever. The narrative of, you're being too negative, let's focus on the, the opportunity, whoever runs that narrative will get wealthier and be able to upregulate the narrative and show the success and highlighting the thing.

Well, you've just described why I'm poor and still teaching, but go out. So there is this, as we move forward toward the tech now, where one, we can't keep externalizing costs to the commons because we're too close to planetary boundaries and the world is too fragile. And two, the new tech is way too fucking power. The speed at which everyone got smartphones compared to the speed at which everyone got railroad or the plow, right? It was like thousands of years for the whole world to get the plow, you know, a hundred years for a railroad, less than 10 years on the phone. It's like the speed and scope of impact and then you start to think about genetically modified or, you know, synthetic biology and AI.

We can't keep externalizing exponential. We can't keep externalizing harm with exponential tech. So we have to get much more fucking careful on the risk reward side and get less reward seeking and willing to externalize risk as a whole society. If we're going to make it, we actually have to get much more conscious of that. And the default in 47 years is one human is worth a quadrillion dollars. Everyone else is serfs and it's a dead planet. Yeah, that's one of the futures that we're not that interested in. Okay, where are we? I interrupted you a couple times. Are you on track? You had another part of the externalities that I kicked you off.

Yes, psychosocial externalities. So there are physical externalities, and the physical externalities were clear on. They produced a physical harm on the environment or human health, right? The psychosocial externality, and they're not always perfectly preventable. Sometimes you have to manage them. Like, I'm on a laptop right now. One of the externalities, of the convenience of being able to carry this computer as opposed to a desktop is that it's going to mess my neck up. And almost everybody today has neck issues because they look down too much. And we're not supposed to look down physiologically, evolutionarily that much. So at home, set your monitor up and you get the proper, you know, sea curvature in the cervical vertebra. I might not be able to have the benefit of portability and not have that, but I can at least say, all right, well, don't be lazy and stay on the laptop when I get home, really do get a monitor or so the physical externalities don't only look like effects on the environment they also

look like the ergonomic effects and the behavioral effects and lots and lots of things a tiny tiny observation i knew everything you just said but the social mirror neuron cultural evolution while you were saying that i straightened up in my chair a little bit subconsciously so thanks funny how that works so the psychosocial externality is that my technology is that my technology or my movement or my whatever might also have an effect on people's experience, people's emotions, beliefs, identities, not just individually, which has a psychological effect, but collectively which has a sociological effect. And I'll give a couple examples.

One of the biggest examples is anything that has to do with trying to win the minds and hearts of people, right? Like how do we get people to really care about the climate change, the mask wearing the vaccine, the whatever the thing is? Typically, we and particularly recently, egregiously, we focus on who our intended audiences and how to be able to get a political effect from that intended audience. And we don't focus that much on how the people that will not agree with this respond. And there are many reasons for this in the U.S., which has such an outsized media influence on much of the rest of the world. The nature of a bipartisan political situation and not having something like ranked choice voting is such that putting the other candidate down is actually in saying how bad they are and it'll be catastrophic if they get in is actually a very empirically effective way to get people to vote. or at least it has been.

But of course, that other side then does the same thing. If one side figured out a really effective communication strategy, the other side makes some innovations, comes back. So one side gets in and they do whatever they do for four years. The other side comes in and then undoes all that for four years. And most of the energy of the whole system just goes to infighting waste heat and no long-term continuity. So we have to stop that shit. That is so critical.

So one thing for anyone who's developing solutions that involve communication, that involve any kind of public perception, is to think about who's my intended audience? Awesome. You know, what do I want them to understand and maybe do? But who is not my intended audience and who's going to not like this message and what are they going to do? And am I radicalizing them? Am I polarizing them? Am I making them feel like what they care about is going to be attacked where they're more likely to become terrorists and, you know, or more likely to whatever? That's an effect. That's an externality of my choice. I might have made a choice that seemed like coalescing these people to do this thing was good, but I actually just upregulated extremism or terrorism or total polarization in a critical audience. And so one very simple.

But this gets back to your example, though, that if you can get rich or elected from doing that and you have made extremes of your enemies, who cares as long as you win is the current. logic. Yes. And so what I'm saying is if your politician is doing that and you actually care about the world more largely, they have the wrong logic. That's not the thing to support. And if you are working to do a nonprofit thing or whatever and there's a media campaign involved, don't do that thing. So of course, the world is where it is because the things we're talking about are not widely practiced, understood, or implemented. There is a huge amount of either political side. Correct.

And, but since you cannot actually kick the other half of the world off the planet, and since they aren't just inert pieces of wood, they are smart people with goals and values, they're political actors, and if they, if what you say anti-resonates with them and they get upregulated to do a bunch of action, so it's true that when you villainize somebody else, you can coalesce a bunch of people against them, and you can actually have moral people be willing to celebrate causing harm to others. That's very effective politically.

It also happens to be evil, calling women witches allowed seemingly moral people to burn them to death, right? And calling somebody terrorists or whatever. I don't think we've evolved that much from the burning witches era. I wish people understood, like, the lynching was not long ago.

Right. The lynching as like a form of entertainment was not long ago. The burning witches, the concentration camps of World War II, I mean, there still shit like that happening today. So how quickly, you know, when you look at the pictures of women wearing mini skirts in 1968 in Iran. And, you know, then the thing that happened in the Ayatollah and then the burghers, when you look at, how it relatively advanced Liberia was, and then the internal war and then child soldiers replacing what had been an economically prosperous area. When you look at Syria recently, like, if you, when you look at Ukraine, you can have an area that seems peaceful and economically prosperous, progressive, and liberal, and it collapses and turns into war, violence, extremism, you know, etc. It goes from any skirts to burkas to whatever. And so those are canaries in a coal mine of something that is possible for anywhere in the world, people should, in recognition of that,

not take for granted the stability of where they are and not taking for granted, work to protect it. That's the purpose of our work. I totally agree. Keep going. So you, the making, they are anti-vaxxers is another word for which, or terrorist, right?

Or on the other side, they're sheeple or their lib tards or whatever it is. Like both sides have their terms to dehumanize. This might be politically expedient. It is definitely moving us towards planetary extinction as a whole. Stop this. If you are doing that thing, you are definitely not part of the long-term solution. You are orienting a short-term narrow thing at the expense of increasing enmity, polarization, etc. So this is a place where the externality is psychosocial.

So one thing I want to think about is who cares about this issue? And then who cares about another issue that feels threatened by this, that's in theory of tradeoffs? What do they care about? How do I come up with a solution that could get more broad support and less enmity? It's just a more effective strategy also unless I don't care that the thing I worked real hard for gets undone in four years. but there are no groups of people that feel really good about being villainized and that will just sit comfortably and let the thing that villainized them continue to succeed. So that's one example of a psychosocial externality, which is where you are trying to create fervency of belief in some population without really paying attention to what you're doing in that process for another part of the population. At year end 22, Daniel, the externalities in our world are legion, both physical and psychosocial.

And you know that philosophically and emotionally, I completely agree with what you're saying. But we are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the intellectual discourse on the web. and the people that are listening to you right now, of course they agree with the sentiment of what you're advocating, but the reality is this energy-hungry superorganism with the tragedy of the commons and exponential everything. That is, what are the lever points to start to change if you buy into what you're advocating, which I certainly do?

You and I know that the superorganism, You know, there's $70 to $100 trillion that trades hands every day that pretty much every one of those dollars has some externality associated with it. That's a problem. And there's an exponential embedded growth obligation on it, which means exponential future externalities that are attached to the thing. And hitting the fragility points of planetary boundaries, like what we're up against is a big thing. And not only are people not educated to think and feel and care and understand. and holistically and like that. But they are continuously engaged in a media environment that will do everything that it can to capture them in a partisan, political, outraged, whatever kind of way.

And they will actually use AI split testing to figure out what shit does that the most effectively in terms of what will show up in their newsfeed. So the fact that we are dealing with some big issues here is obvious, right? Like the cards are kind of stacked in a rough direction. Now, what is the thing we need the most of? I think people that are oriented, I think everything we've been talking about today, people who are oriented with a very high touch, like I actually care about sentient beings and want their life to be good. And I'm not just interested in talking about topics that have power associated.

I'm not interested in just virtue signaling green something because make money in a fun that way. I'm not like it grounds in mere neurons, right? It grounds and I know what suffering feels like. I see it there. I want to solve it and I want to prevent it. People who are oriented that way who then also start learning how to be able to think at scale well, which means that it has to implement large numbers of people and technology. and things in culture and the political economy and in tech, right?

And that simultaneously think through these frameworks of how do I not jump to certainty and action too quickly, but make sure I actually understand the problem landscape, the many things that are causing it, the things that are downstream, the people who care about something else, and how do I come up with not a solution, but a series of solutions that actually addresses this and progressively gets more people on board? people that are capacitated this way is the rate limiting factor right now

as far as I can see it. There are people who care but have very poor strategy. The people who understand strategy well are mostly serving very narrow aims. So people who are kind of developed in these skill sets and this is why I'm excited to be talking about this

with you here. This is why we're working on training modules and an academy to be able to do this, etc. So in the three by three grid culture, political economy, tech stack, triage, meaning urgent near-term, transition, and long-term, education slash systems thinking is in all nine quadrants, all nine boxes. Yeah.

So I'll say something else. I said there was one of the thing, and it relates to this that I was going to say up front. So one is how do you understand how to think about us? solution in a way that will prevent unintended consequences and that will be better set to deal with in Madison.

The other thing I said I want to talk about was that people can get fundamentalist about their particular solution because if you're working on something, you should really care about it, but in really caring about it, you can become overly narrowly focused. So when I was

first starting to try to grab my around like what is upstream from all of these various problems or what are the underlying causes that everything from nuclear war to environmental degradation to animal rights issues to class issues what do these things have in common what do not a specific solution for one thing but a solution for civilization doing better look like I of course read the work of people and also had the fortune to talk to a lot of people that it's been their life thinking about these things and working on them and would ask their analysis and I got so many answers that sounded like this.

You know, at the end of the day, whenever somebody uses a phrase like that, at the end of the day, or the key is, you can usually expect a reductionist thing to come next. Not always, but, like, you know, sometimes you want to pay attention to that. At the end of the day, really the thing we have to shift is the economy

because perverse economic incentive is under the whole thing. There's no way that as long as you have a for-profit military industrial complex is the largest block of the global economy, that you could ever have peace. There's an anti-incentive on it as long as there's so much money to be made with mining, et cetera. Like, we have to fix the nature of economic incentive. I'd be nodding. I'm like, this makes perfect sense, right?

And then somebody else would be like, you know, the core of the thing that we have to address is education, because you can have so much change occur in a generation. If those children are growing up, different as different as it is learning Chinese as your first language versus learning English, we're so neuroplastic. By the time we're adults, we're not that neuroplastic. We're kind of screwed. If you get education right, we want adults who care about the animals and the oceans

and can tend to all of these things and can think complexly. If we really get education right, we'll be able to solve everything. It's upstream from all that. And like, I'm nodding. I'm like, oh, yeah, this is it. And then somebody else would be like, no, really, the thing is it's about media because we're continuously being bombarded. And that was before social media, then it was social media. We're being continuously bombarded. And we are ready to go do a capital riot or a George Floyd protester riot or whatever it is based on the stuff that's coming in. If we could change the media environment of what people were in taking, it would change all of these things. And someone else's like, no, no, the thing is really at the end of the day, it's about government and law. And how do we we get that right? Because the economic incentive wouldn't be that same issue if we could govern it properly. If we could force the internalization of the price of carbon and get carbon pricing properly and get costs of everything proper, all that would be fixed, but we have to do that through law. So how do we fix governance and law? And then somebody else would be like, you can't because

laws written by lobbyists that get paid for by somebody and wherever the economic motive is is what's going to pay for that, which is why you have to think about economics and a lot together. So the key is political economy and how do you get that? So, and on and on, people would say, no, really, the key is actually parenting. What we've really got to do is restore the family because before education, by the time that kid goes to school at five or six, that so much of their identity and psyche and value system has already said, it happens early on. We have to actually change the entire culture to have parenting, emphasize, raising better kids from the beginning. And what I came to learn is they were all right, right? Somebody else would be, everything you're saying is so anthropocentric.

The key is the fucking environment, because none of us are anything. without the environment. Like, you have to prioritize that. Everything else doesn't matter that much. And what is an economy? Like, we can breathe without money. We can't breathe without air. And so be less anthropocentric and focus on the integrity of the environment

because that's upstream from everything. And so what I learned was the answer to all of the problems is all of the solutions. There is not a theory of change. There's an ecology of theories of change. It's so often when someone says, what is the solution? it sounds like someone saying, like, what species is the forest? I don't know what you're even asking. Like, a forest is lots of species, lots and lots.

And if it's an old growth forest, it's even more complexly interacting. So what is the solution? There's not a solution. There's lots of things that need to happen. So if anything, I want patterns of how to think about it, and I want frameworks for how to think about it. And I don't want people to attach to those frameworks because they'll be useful but also limiting.

And to realize the cultural assets, do involve education and media and parenting and religion and lots of other things and the structure of cities. And, you know, and the political economy aspects involve lots of things. And so the getting past the zealotus and reductionist focus and being able to get, how do all these things come together is key to understanding properly. I love that. I got the systems ecology equivalent of goosebumps as you were unpacking that. And that's exactly right. But that's a lot for, that's a lot of complexity for most people to hold in their mind because

they've worked their whole life on climate and they think climate is the single problem and their identity is attached to it. their job is attached to it. So to say it's all these things, governance and love and law and pricing and everything that you just mentioned, how does someone shift from where they are now to that more holistic view of our system, not only to think about it, but also to apply it to their work and their lives? I don't know if you want to answer that now, but I'm curious.

I do actually. If you are young and you're listening to this and you're thinking about how do I do the most useful thing with my life and do I go to college or not or do I go back to college or what kind of work do I do. For most people, here's something I would offer. Figure out, if you are not already independently wealthy, if you are awesome, figure out how to keep your overhead as low as possible and make the money that you need to live in the least number of hours possible. doing something that isn't terrible. So you buy most of your time back to continue to train yourself on what is actually yours to do. This is what I did with my life. And many of the people I know who I really respect did something like this where,

you know, I rather than, okay, I've got the basic bills paid. Let's make more money and get more shit. It's like, no, no. The more shit is way less interesting than actually the time. I want my time back. so that I can keep understanding these things so I can know how to have my life actually be meaningful. And so it's both the learning and the development of capacity. So if you are young still and you're in this interest, figure out how to keep your overhead low,

figure out how to pay your bills in the least amount of hours, doing something that isn't terrible, and really keep investing in developing how you... Now, if there's already something that you feel very cold to do, and that feels right, then do it and keep investing in your development in the additional hours, both. If we're talking about someone who has kids in a mortgage and a job and whatever, if the job is not clearly making things better in a way that is aligned with your Dharma, be willing to change it all. Like, the shortness of your life and the urgency of the situation of the world

is such that, like, be willing to do that. If you're mostly in the right direction, you just feel like you wish you could do even more, then continue to do what you do while studying, is there a way I could do this with even more insightfulness? As you start learning how to think through externalities and system dynamics better, it might take a year or two of study while you're doing this

to start to come up with insights, but maybe in a few years you're actually revolutionizing the field that you're in. The other thing I would say is, people when you say like hey it's a lot of complexity the world situations are complex reducing them to be too narrow is at the core of everything wrong we can optimize some things harm other things

we have to and when we can act very powerfully because we can act through six continent supply chains and supercomputers and satellites and AI and steam engines and I mean the oil engines and like all of the powerful tools

from the Industrial Revolution on, you just can't do that in an oversimplifying way ongoingly. Like where the model of what you're optimizing is not reality is where reality gets harmed. You don't get to do cumulative and exponentially growing harm forever on a finite world. So we do have to actually wrestle with the reality of the world, which means the complexity of it. It is what it is. We don't get a, like, it just is what it is, right? And now not everybody has to to begin with because we go back to each of those partial narratives. It's just about media.

It's just about education, just about economics. Well, let's say somebody is wrestling with all this and really thinking, how do I make a better educational system? And maybe they have a transitional version and a long-term version, right? The long-term version might be like a radically different system of education that is based on a different system of community development where school is not just, a centralized thing. It's how the parents and how the extended family and community are all supported to support the development of children. Maybe that's some long-term future of education. And maybe it involves AI tutors and shit. Maybe the immediate transitional thing involves are there some curriculums in systemic thinking and whatever that we can start to add to existing

curricula? And is there a way of getting that through that both requires me to think through the content, the pedagogy, and the political actuation needed to make it happen. Not that many people have to be thinking effectively to get something to happen that will train a lot of people to where there's now a lot more people. In the same way that it didn't take that many people to make Facebook to affect the minds of lots of people. So it wouldn't take that many people to make new media systems that think strategically enough about how would we get Metcalf dynamics and how do we get the people

on there, whatever, that could be oriented very differently. And the same with perverse incentive. If some people figured out how to make laws that make particularly bad things for its their current incentives illegal, whether it's fishing or whatever, or create better regenerative economic systems, then everybody else who doesn't understand the whole complexity just has a slightly less perverse incentive system, like a lot of the complexities built into a better incentive system, incentive legal system. So not everybody has to get everything to begin with. Some people being able to do that and build things that affect other people at scale and affect

the world at scale is how the thing starts. So I don't want anyone who is wrestling with like, okay, I want to understand this well to get overwhelmed and they think about their family members who aren't even interested or whatever and say, if everybody has to understand this, we're screwed. No, everybody does not to begin. And the path by which people are enculturated in time can always start with some people building things that become on-ramps for more people.

So merging this with the logic of what I expect to happen, which is a great simplification, especially for young people, what I hear you saying is advocating to simplify your own life in the current economy, but at the same time, expand your capacity to look at the world in systems and not only the immediate feedback we get from a decision or a product or a strategy or a program, but the second and third order effects and start to think that. And if we have a scout team of of Consilience Jedi out there, that then that will potentially scale orders of magnitude in its passing the systems baton to other humans over time.

And in turn, that will affect all nine boxes of the three by three grid that you proposed. Yes, totally. And I want to just come back. I don't know how many of the people who watch your show are young or later everyone has. It's a wide variety, but a lot of young people. So yeah, I want to speak to younger people, again, thinking about this. Your development is personal and psychological as much as it is cognitive and skills. Really critical to understand that.

If you can't talk, whether it can't publicly speak or speak in front of someone who's intelligent because of insecurities, it'll mess up your ability to do stuff no matter how much you know. if you have to talk and you talk because you need to seem smart, even when you should shut up and listen, it's going to mess up your ability to do things. We all can observe in other people these quirks that maybe they don't see in themselves that totally make them less effective. I'm more the lagger, but keep going.

Look for these things in yourself and see how to work on them. So the personal development is more study and more therapy. for whatever it's worth, I did every therapy method I could ever find. And I still, actually, if I find a therapist, it does some new thing I haven't done. I engage in it because it's just investing in one's own understanding of themselves and their psyche is just like investing in their knowledge

or investing in their health. It matters. The things we invest in is where grow. So I would love to see. It's also part of how can I become undefended enough that I can actually feel the pain of the world in a high touch way and not be crippled. That also requires having worked through your own pain enough that you aren't crippled by it and regress back into childhood trauma states and things like that.

We've had a couple off-camera conversations on this. I've never had therapy in my whole life and I'm now interviewing coaches in the next couple weeks on this because I'm struggling with exactly what you just described. So, okay, did you, more comments on? Yeah, yeah. So the great simplification macro, so the micro version, as you said, is don't create an embedded growth obligation on your own earning, which is what most people do. As soon as you make more, then you get a bigger house and buy more shit and give more debt and need to make more. Um, stop the embedded growth obligation there because it really doesn't matter that much.

Make enough money that you can eat healthy food and, you know, if you want to see a therapist or whatever, you can do those things. But by the way, I will interject right there. There's a sociologist named Juliet Shore. She's a friend of mine. She did a book like 30 years ago where she studied how much money people made. And at the end of the year, ask them, how much would you like to make? And they, she followed a cohort over like.

20 years. And no matter how much you made in a certain year, every single year, people wanted to make more the following year. And if you internalize, that's what our culture is doing. The words you just said make even more profound sense. Keep going. Yeah, the embedded growth obligation goes macro and micro, right? But if you want to grow your own self and your own capacity to be in service of the world, then you can't be growing your, service to the existing world maximally at the same time. This is the two masters thing and you've got to decide which master you actually in service of. And then you want to be actually doing good work. You don't just want to be doing meditation and psychotherapy and study because one, there's a lot that you only learn by doing stuff and you want your life to be meaningful now and increasing your capacity for greater meaningfulness over time. And so as much as to the whole existential risk landscape, it might not make sense to go be at the animal shelter or go helping with this frontline work. If some of your life isn't doing that, you're missing

something. So the other thing I would say to young people is, in addition to your own private study and your formal education, the thing that will help them most is find mentors that are doing work that is most like the work you want to do and figure out what they need that you can become useful for. This was the thing I'm most grateful for in my own education was I had amazing mentors and I just figured out that they needed diapers changed or they needed construction or they needed whatever the hell it was and I just figured out how to learn how to do the things they needed so I could be around because you learn so much like, you know, if you get to go work with Nate and when he goes to DC and is talking with people about financial strategies for

the energy grid or things like that, you'll learn a lot about what actually happens in those rooms and how to think about and whatever that you just can't learn in college or online. So, but if someone knows how to do the things that you're interested in, they're too busy. So figure out what you can offer that they need because then you'll be gaining the capacity to become more of what you want to be. These are a few pieces of advice for younger people I'd offer. Yeah, the two bottlenecks there. One you mentioned, well, we're in the liminal space between, in my opinion, a growth on fumes world and a post-growth world.

There's a lot of people, big de-growth movement advocating for a smaller economy. I think de-growth is what we should do, but post-growth is what we're going to have to do. And I just don't think there's a lot of mentor-like people out there in the post-growth space because our current master, especially as things get more monetarily and civically stressful is we got to pay the bills. So I know you're not trying to speak to everyone. And I think it's excellent, excellent advice, but there aren't a lot of people living and focusing on the projects

that we're going to need in the next 10 or 20 years as potential mentors out there. There are some for sure. This is why the podcast is so cool as a format. is it allows people that you might not be able to access as a mentor one-on-one for you to be able to get some meaningful chunk of what they have to share, which is amazing. But, no, there are people who are, like, it may be that the capacities you want don't live in any one person, right? It may be that you really want to protect the Congo, and that's going to require some amazing political strategy capability,

but also some environmental knowledge and some cultural knowledge. So it may be that there are some environmentalists that understand the biodiversity risks associated with the common or whatever well, and you need to study with them for a while to know that. But there's also some just really effective political operators that are not working on that at all, but where you get to learn how to effectively get shit done in the political systems and you go study with them,

figuring out how to be in proximity of the people that have capabilities you're wanting to develop is the fastest way to develop those capabilities. Okay, getting to our three by three grid, I think some of the things you've been speaking to the last 30 minutes or so populate many of the boxes in this grid. how would you like to approach this? So when I talk about triage transition and long-term adequate solutions, sufficient solutions,

these are horizons of focus. There's lots of management theories to talk about something like this, but I'll tell you how I think about it. Triage basically means that there is some problem, and particularly some catastrophic risk,

that has a non-nell likelihood over, you know, in the near term. I'm mostly not focused on things like the sun blowing out someday. I'm focused on pretty, you know, things within a, within the years to decades timeframe. And there's some problem like that that it does not seem the world has an adequate set of solutions already in place for, so more needs done and probably needs done. fairly quickly through whatever means necessary to avoid that. When I say whatever means necessary, I mean not necessarily total systemic solutions, but more just like direct implementation.

So if we are looking at something like the risks associated with the speed of growth of synthetic biology and, you know, a direction of lots of viral hunting and gain of function research in legy laboratories with publishing of those gene sequences. That's just super, super, super, super risky. So things should be done to stop that that involve mostly some scientific work that says, okay, let's not do these things. The benefit is not worth the risk. And instead, let's do these things for zoonotic pandemic, you know, spillover prevention.

and these things regarding information sharing and lab security and whatever. And then there's like legal work to do, right? Like legal work to get a couple of the main countries to do and then maybe, you know, the WHO to do something, the G20 to do something that is adequate. That's a triage type thing. That's saying, okay, here's a risk. And we don't need to get everybody to buy into something. We basically need to show that the,

the risk opportunity space need something different done. So there's some scientific work, but this is a convening of a not large number of people. And obviously, you know, this is a topic we have both actively worked on, along with a number of other people. But this is just one that kind of makes sense. And then there's legislative work within existing legislative apparatus to be able to get that stuff done. We could say a very similar thing of like protecting the, ensuring that the Amazon doesn't get to the point of the hydrological pump breaking, right, a planetary boundary thing like that.

Okay, well, how would we think about how to do triage there effectively? I'm just going to talk through some principles of how to think about it, Because whether you're working in Ecuador to begin with it, the headwaters of the Amazon or Brazil, because it's the largest total amount of the Amazon or any of the other five countries touching it or nine countries that have some involvement in the watersheds, like you're going to do different things. But principles, the economic incentive, whether it's from mining, oil extraction or agriculture, is going to be an ongoing pressure because those things that are going to not only keep being worth money, many of them will keep being worth more money as population demands and et cetera needs that.

And those forces can bribe governments and they can put out commercials and campaigns that affect the minds and arts of people. and they can do campaign budgets and they can pay lobbyists. So if the NGOs that are fighting it are just fundamentally less capacitated in all those ways, this is not going to work. So you've got to think about, all right, factoring the forces that want to harm the thing, we're wanting to protect it, what forces are large enough to protect it, right? Just even basic kind of strategic thinking. and how could we get the forces that are large enough to care?

And it might not be by appealing to them with some kind of moral or environmental thing. It might be some other things. So in this case, this is an example you know I've talked about, if the hydrological pump of the Amazon breaks, meaning the water that transpires from all the trees, that then rains down and keeps it as a rainforest, but also pumps some of the groundwater into the air that becomes rain in North America that is somewhere between a third and a half of the rainfall in North America every year.

If the hydrological pump breaks because you've got enough destruction that you stop getting enough rainfall, that you stop getting enough plant growth to keep pumping the thing, right? You get this, like the climate change albedo effect, there's a positive runaway thing that happens at a certain point. And whether we're five years from that or 15 years from that depends upon how fast things are being destroyed and whose model you're looking at. But it's not like forever. There's a time scale there.

So then you're like, all right, so half the rainfall in North America goes away. That is absolutely a national security threat because it's a food security threat, a water security threat. It threatens the food sovereignty and food security. So the State Department would care about that, not because they necessarily care about the Amazon on its own, but because they care about food security. Now, is the State Department bigger than Amazon Watch and Rainforest Watch and whatever NGOs are there that could do more to intervene, obviously? Now, this is presenting the issue to someone else that has the capacity for a reason that they care about, even if it is not the reason that people caring about the rainforests care about it. And then who would they need to see that modeling? They would probably want to see that NOAA and NASA agreed modeling-wise.

Yes, this much can't be harmed or you'll get that runaway effect to occur. So if some people wanting to work on the Amazon were like, how do I get people at NOAA and NASA to explain the hydrological pump thing in a way that the State Department adds it to its list of things to ensure that it ameliorates, this is just an example of triage strategic thinking. We're not trying to make capitalism as a whole better. We're not trying to make the governments of each of those countries better. We're simply trying to think strategically more effectively about how to do a thing, right?

That needs to be done. Times a thousand things or 10,000 things. This is what I would call the triage category. And there are a lot of principles. So I just gave a principle of whatever are the forces arrayed against, the thing, make sure that you have competent forces similarly arrayed, but they don't have to care about it for the same reason. They have to care about it for a rationalized reason that speaks in the language they understand. So who can help translate that? That's one principle. We could do a whole

thing on how to do strategic thinking effectively, but triage is largely that. It's largely how do we get different players, how do we get the economic incentives, et cetera, to be able to do the things that are needed. And of course, we still have to think through the externalities because there might be issues of having the State Department to focus on the Amazon. So we have to think through that, but that's what I would call the triage category. And there is a lot in there. And of course, there's a lot of people already working on front-lined approaches for the Amazon. They're just not thinking about what is the total threat landscape to the Amazon. What are the tipping points to not hit? and what is a strategically adequate focus.

And so that's one triage. We could give a hundred other examples, but I think that is an example category. Do we want to go horizontal or vertical here? Maybe you could stick with that example and look at transition and long term briefly, or do you want to break the triage down between culture, political economy and tech stack?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll give you. transition example. So having something like a State Department or, and I'm giving one example, there's obviously groups other than the State Department that would also care, but in the same way that I said earlier about who are you politically polarizing against you and how could you get them on your side rather than not, how do you get groups that don't currently care to care either that are larger or with a cumulative effect of how they care, stacks functions enough, right? That's just straightforward principle of kind of political thinking.

This is not changing the overall economic incentives in those countries or the mindsets of the people or anything. So it's not a systemic effect. That's what I call triage. So transitional would be working with the institutions of those countries, right? their department of the interior or its equivalent, their academy, their academies and universities that are focused on these things, their government security bodies, their financial bodies, how could we make those smarter? How could we make the logics of them better? So they do a better

job of these types of things. So an example there could be something like, I learned this kind of thinking from a guy named Nelson Del Rio, prosperity of the commons, really smart lawyer who did a lot of the work on making the public-private partnership and then legal structure and then saw how that got weaponized in a different structure. But let's say that we focused on Ecuador because it's the headwaters of the Amazon. So even though it's not the most total square meters, it's the most critical square meters because you mess the headwaters up, obviously the entire basin gets messed up. And we see that, and I might have to. And I might have to be. And I might have some of my stats wrong because I looked at this a couple years ago, so I'm just using

this as a random example, but Ecuador owed a lot of money to both the World Bank and Chinese bank and some of that debt is collateralized with resource access and was not in a position to be able to pay that debt off well. So what happens? Does that threaten resource acquisition near the head order of the Amazon that could mess up the Amazon Basin. If you start thinking about the relationship between the State Department, it might want to prevent the hydrological pump breaking for food security and the World Bank. Obviously, the U.S. and the World Bank are very related institutions, right? And so could the State

Department get the World Bank to change its debt structure, debt forgiveness or things like that? Yeah, totally could. Could the World Bank work with the Chinese Bank, to get it to do it as well based on if it was motivated enough international financial agreements, yeah, it probably could do that as well. If somebody could negotiate how to set that whole thing up, of the State Department's support with the forgiveness of the debt, which is like $32 billion, like a lot of debt, and then that would mean a lot to the government of Ecuador, and it might not be know how to do that on their own. Now, the country needs an economic development plan that doesn't involve ruining its rainforest assets.

So they probably need an education process to do a lot more skilled labor, and they probably need tech. So let's say somebody put together an economic development plan that involved bringing more tech jobs and tech capacity to the area and more education for more skilled labor so that you could still have economic development without as much environmental exploitation. And let's say that to the degree there were some resources that needed to be extracted or exploited, we helped have that country develop its own national capability to do its mining or extraction that employed people there as opposed to, say, a Chinese contractor that was employing Chinese people to do it. And that because of that had much stricter environmental regulation, did a better version of it, and held more of the wealth for Ecuador rather than more of it going to a multinational. But they can't do that because they don't have that capacity on their own economically or whatever, but they could be supported to.

So again, I'm saying if there is some group that is really caring about the Amazon, they want to do a transitional thing, could someone say, all right, here's a 10, 20, 30 year economic development plan that involves some of those resources being extracted in a viable way that doesn't ruin the environment and provide jobs and whatever, but also provides a lot of economic development, not in the resource extraction category, and get you both a lot less environmental harm. extraction and more of the money from that extraction. And we will help set that up and open the capital markets, help negotiate the capital markets being able to fund this thing, and you'll bond back it so we can make sure that the capital markets can come into it. We'll also help negotiate the release of your debt. But here's the deal. We're going to offer this deal to you as a package that includes excluding

the mining rights of all these other companies and the logging and the ranching and like that. So you either get this deal in whole or not, but you can't take this other thing that's happening in this. Why this is unique is because most people who focus on for-benefit capitalism. They're like, okay, well, I can make money doing this good thing, but it doesn't bind other people from doing the bad thing. If I want to bind other people from doing the bad thing, I either have to create law that doesn't do it, like, you know, make it illegal, or contract law. where those who would say allow the person, allow the other, you know, multinational to come and do the thing are not going to because there's an exclusive contract. And so if I think about how to use markets more effectively, I don't just want to incentivize some positive thing. I also want to bind the negative thing from not happening, right?

So we all know that politically people bundle shit in ways that are really messed up. There's some clean water act that everybody's going to live. want with some like privatized prison or fucked up thing that's attached to it in the same thing. You're like, why did those things get together? They don't belong together. But can that same tool be utilized for positive purposes where you provide an actual healthy economic development plan and a protection plan for that country? You factor which choice makers are going to have to make the choice and what do they need in terms of public opinion and whatever to be able to do the thing and put something together that's a deal they will take that all.

also is exclusive to the other thing. Now this is helping their entire institutional complex to be better structured, right? Less perverse incentive in the whole thing, long-term development of new economic areas. This would be an example of a transitional strategy where you're helping the overall set of institutions get healthier, longer term.

And again, I gave an example here, but we could give an example in a coral reef or in the Congo or in whatever, a zillion things where you're thinking about principles like that. What things would we want to bundle together to ensure that they all happen together? Which ones would we want to force exclusion of? Who would

have to make which choices? What are the incentives that they need? Things like that. And what about long term? Long term is things like you don't have global capitalism

in a global financial system in the same way anymore. You don't have long term is things like real cost valuation on everything so that the actual market cost of a thing included the cost to make all of the raw ingredients renewably and the environmental cost long term, in which case you just don't have perverse incentive environmentally as a whole. Long term means education system where everyone is educated in this type of way so that you actually have culture where people are oriented about what is actual value fundamentally differently. Right.

So long term is food systems and manufacturing systems and whatever that are closed loop that don't need to keep exploiting new virgin areas forever. And do these things happen sequentially triage transition long term, or do you start all three of them now on parallel tracks? Not only do they have to have all three start now, they have to be in conversation and in turn form each other because what will long-term viable be, if the people who are doing the transition aren't thinking about it,

they might be transitioning more sideways than forward, right? Like they might be missing critical insights about what will long-term sufficiency look like. And if the people who are thinking about long-term solutions aren't paying attention to the details of the reality on the ground. They might not have enough detail to think about it rightly. They're thinking about too abstractly. So those are horizons of focus, but that doesn't mean sequential,

and they do need to be in dialogue. Okay. And then vertically, how do we think about culture, political economy, and tech stack infrastructure on the bottom with respect to what you were just saying? When you think about triage, it's hard to separate them because you're looking at an eminent issue happening in which they're all kind of happening together, right? I agree. So your triage might have to affect cultural things because the mindsets of the populace matter. It might not.

Like regulation of synthetic bio probably does not need everybody to agree. It probably needs a very small number of people to agree. So how important culture is or not depends. Most people don't really have a say in, do we go to nuclear war or not over a certain thing? What is the point of nuclear escalation is? So and yet those who would do it still have to pay attention to political will to some degree. So I would say that you want to use frameworks like this to think about, am I factoring what the cultural elements are, what the political economy elements, what the tech elements are, but your triage solutions are going to be focused on

just immediate efficacy, and they'll all three be very connected. When you're thinking longer-term transition, I can think about culture in terms of like, there are versions of all the religions that are more compatible with each other and less compatible. There are versions that are more kind of nonviolent forgiveness-oriented universalist and other ones that are more fundamentalist, religious, or oriented. Being able to support the more compatible versions of the religions flourishing more than the other ones is kind of a culture play long term that I don't have to think about the political economy and the tech to think about that, though they are very, very, very connected, right? If I think about how do I support the proliferation of a particular version?

Well, if I can help it develop more tech and more financial capacities, it becomes a lot easier for that version to proliferate if it also has more economic power behind it. Right? So I think we did a good job of giving a couple examples of triage. on transition, I'd like to give a different example. So like transition. And then the difference between transition and long term. Let's say we're taking the United States government, federal government. Long term, the underlying structure of representative democracy is just insufficient.

The U.S. structure made in 1776 when the world was radically more simple. is there is no way to retrofit it adequately. Specifically, things like markets just get advanced new tech, and only after it has caused health or environmental problems long enough for long-term studies to be done and watchdog groups to lobby enough and fight against the vested interest lobbying, does regulation happen post facto? And so, you know, 80 years after leaded gasoline was causing problems, you finally outlaw it or cigarettes or DDT, you don't get to keep having a post facto regulatory system with problems that cause harm at exponentially faster scale and more speed and live. So a new situation where when new tech emerges, you actually have to go through this externality process that we talked about to get regulatory.

okay for it to move forward. And of course, I'm aware that it's very hard to concentrate that much power and not have it become corrupt and dystopic. So of course, there have to be checks and balances on that power and transparencies. And there are really hard issues in there. We can get into that. But there is a need to be able to ensure the not terrible risk of things that have exponentially bigger and faster impacts ahead of time. That's an example of a fundamental change in our existence. system of government. Obviously, if we were going to rebuild a new open society, civilizational architecture from scratch today, we would do it differently than the retrofits of how we did it starting

in the early industrial era. So there are a lot of long-term shifts where we think about how do we implement all of the information technology tools to factor all of the things. I could get it. Actually, we should do one where we talk about the combinations of liquid democracy and qualified democracy and addressing arrows and possibilities here. I mean, all the things on what the future of a governance stack could look like. But I'll pass on that for a minute and just come back to transition because that was the example I wanted to do.

You said we should do one. What do you mean one podcast or one point? I mean, it would be worth talking about that at some point. If that was something people had questions on, like what does. What does a governance system that is adequate to the complexity of the issues actually look like? But let me go ahead and give an example of transition that is not yet adequate, but a lot better than we currently have. People like Larry Lessig, who, you know, constitutional lawyers and focused on these issues have identified a handful of issues that they see as being able to. And I don't mean to misquote him.

I spoke of them recently about this. And I think this is roughly right. He's focused on that if we can get the primaries to not be partisan, because one of the problems of the primaries being partisan is you get this heavy focus on appeal to your in-group and don't pay any attention to how the outgroup the other side is going to focus, and you get much more extreme polarizing things. Similarly, if you can get ranked choice voting rather than just the single vote, then if you highly polarize the other side,

you'll do much less well than if you appeal to your support base but also appeal or don't disappeal to the other side so you'll decrease the incentive for polarization with ring choice voting if you can fix gerrymandering which is such a just obviously corrupt nonsense thing and it's such a straightforward thing to be able to fix so districts start to make sense and if you can fix campaign finance then the in the perversion of the system to focus on party over a country to continuously polarize, which will make most of the energy turn into waste heat, fighting each other, and then four years do something and four years undo it. Like the current system with its existing logics would just be so much smarter if you did

a handful of things like that. Now, obviously, the only people who wouldn't want that are the people that benefit from the corruption of the system, which might be things like the people who run the political parties and stuff. So there is some work to do. But that is, that's not triage, right? That's not going to solve a particular biosecurity risk. It's not going to solve a nuclear risk, not going to solve environmental boundary.

But it's going to make something called the U.S. federal governments smarter and less stupid and less corrupt. So all the things that it does will be better. But it's going to do it in a way that works within its own existing system logics. So that's what I would call a transitional solution. Whereas how do we rebuild a digital democracy from scratch that is a totally different kind of structure is a long-term. solution. So that's an example of thinking about the distinction between triage, which is not systemic, transition, which is systemic, but a change to existing systems and then the build of fundamentally new systems. I'm agreeing with everything you're saying, but it's totally

different than what I expected this conversation would be about. I thought we would have discrete examples in the culture, political economy, tech energy, infrastructure stack. And as you're talking, it almost seems like the things

that I would put in these nine boxes, well, to me, it's all about triage now. And it's almost like preparing the economy for the financial energy rubber band

snapback. my work on that, it almost like enables you to work on all these other things. Like I think that is going to change the landscape of all these other examples that you were giving. And that has a very specific set of... I wouldn't say you're only focused on it. I wouldn't say you're only focused on all of it. But I just recognize that there's lots of these existential risks that may or may not

happen. Certainly climate is happening and is going to happen regardless of what we do. Our attempts now are to minimize it and to cope with it as a species and culture. But I think we are years or a decade away from a recalibration of the musical chairs of financial claims relative to the biophysical claims. So I thought we might talk about, oh, well, how does AI fit into that? Or how does blockchain fit into that? And my answer to that is they would help extend the metabolism for a while longer at best, but they're not solutions. They're short-term fixes.

So what is the triage on how effectively 8 billion people are going to have to deal with a smaller pie for the first time in 150 years? And that is a very large conversation. but I do like the conceptual way in which you're painting this, but I might have more discrete suggestions on each of these boxes. No, let me say that a different way. On the triage, I would. On the transition and longer term, I think we're largely in agreement,

at least on the things you've said so far. Yeah, I mean, I think with transition or triage, I gave an example of biosecurity and an example of something like that. hydrological pump of the Amazon. We didn't get to triage examples on... Right. There's triage on every single issue. Yeah. No, I think we could do that. I think we could say, let's pick 10 of the most pressing issues and give more examples there. So really what we did so far was just lay out a framework to think about these things, not anything like completion of that. And we couldn't complete it,

but we could do quite a lot more. So maybe if there was a follow- We should have 100 people at a three-day meeting talking about all those boxes. And we will. And if for this podcast as a follow-up, maybe it would be a combo of a handful of areas in which you're thinking about triage solutions and you share the things you're thinking about and we dialogue on them with questions that the audience has. That might be a really fun. Yeah. actually was really presenting frameworks to think about what do how do you approach the meta crisis more than something like a laundry list of the things to do I just feel this

that I emotionally feel the intensity of this bend versus break moment and I've come to that because of my awareness of the connection between energy and finance but it sure seems that geopolitically we also are approaching a bend versus break moment in many other ways. So I'm getting urgent texts that I have to go and deal with animals because it's going to be very cold tonight. So how would you like to wrap this up, my friend? I think it makes plenty of sense for us to do a follow-up if there are questions. I'm sure there will be questions. And if there's more examples of solutions we'd like to get into, and very likely ongoing

conversations will keep being fine and valuable. But I do feel like there's a certain arc of completion that we got to of problem framing, framing up how to be with that, and then talking through how to think about how to approach, how to work with it, which is not a solution. It's not a list of solutions. It's a way of thinking about and relating to the approach. And I feel really good about that we got to have this whole dialogue. And I am very interested to hear the questions that people have.

And if we have follow-up soon, that'll be great. Thank you. Next week is Thanksgiving. And I'm grateful for a lot of things. I'm grateful that our paths crossed. and that we continue to be colleagues and share notes and ideas and connections because what else should we be doing with our time on this planet is swinging for the fences on the human predicament.

You call it the metacrisis and we need orders of magnitude more people having these conversations in their communities and their networks around the world. So I deeply value your intellect and wisdom and your generous spirit of sharing your time with others on this. So thank you so much. It's a fun idea is a thing that some people could do if they felt called. If people have listened to all five of these and they felt it was meaningful and they decided they wanted in their community to host a watching series and then, you know, dialogue like create a support group of how do we help each other in our own development in this that'd be a cool thing and uh what else should we do we should go tend to the animals when it's cold outside

yeah so um i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna do that you know between the time that this is recorded and it's aired um there will be a podcast with thomas borkman who talks about inner development and having different perspectives is really, really good. And I do think somewhere out there, we need to have this ability to temporarily suppress your own identity to be part of a larger conversation, take other perspectives, think systemically the way that you talked about in this podcast. In a formal or semi-formal education system that you're experiencing this learning with other humans who then form bonds and there's this social network that that spills throughout the world and i i don't know how to formalize that but our education system is sorely lacking right now

for the future that we're facing so if you're going to set up some sort of a academy or whatever uh guy a speed to you on that my friend let me know if i can help you you are already uh employed as as a professor once it gets there, I just haven't told you again. Okay. Thank you. This concludes our Ben versus Break series. With the exception of a number six, we're going to have Ask Daniel and his colleague, Nate, about three-by-three grid questions or any questions pertaining to what we just discussed.

Thanks. Thanks, Daniel. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode, with a Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit thegreat simplification.com for more information on future releases.