YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Schmachtenberger

lines on the record: 278
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Could all do the Hegelian dialectic. Those ideas had emerged, right? And it was that. We could all, so our choice making, because we said a society is trying to coordinate choice making, the emergent order is the order of the choices that we're making, not just at the level of the individuals, but what groups of individuals, corporations, nations, states, whatever do. Our choices are based on our choicemaking is based on our sense-making and our meaning-making. Our sense-making is what we believe is happening in the world, and what do we believe the effects of a particular thing would be? Our meaning-making is what do we care about, right? Our values generation, what do we care about that we're trying to move the world in the direction of? If you ultimately are trying to move the world in a direction that is really, really different than the direction I'm trying to, we have very different values. We're going to have a hard time. And if you think the world is a very different world, right? If you think that systemic racism is rampant everywhere and one of the worst problems, and I think it's not even a thing. If you think climate change is almost existential and I think it's not even a thing, we're going to have a really hard time coordinating.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. I mean, I said at least the story because obviously it didn't do it for women and slaves early on. It doesn't do it for all classes equally, et cetera. But the idea of democracy is that is participatory governance. And so you notice that the modern democracies emerged out of the European Enlightenment and specifically because the idea that a lot of people, some huge number, not a tribal number, huge number of anonymous people who don't know each other are not bonded to each other who believe different things, who grew up in different ways, can all work together to make collective decisions well that affect everybody and where some of them will make compromises and the thing that matters to them for what matters to other strangers. That's actually wild. Like it's a wild idea that that would even be possible. And it was kind of the result of this high enlightenment idea that we could all do the philosophy of science.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it usually ends up breaking the previous social systems. The way the plow broke the tribal system, the way that the Industrial Revolution broke the feudal system, and then new social systems have to emerge that can deal with the new powers, the new dispositions, whatever with that tech. Obviously, the nuke broke nation-state governance being adequate and said we can't ever have that again. So then it created this international governance apparatus world. I guess what I'm saying is The solution is not exponential tech following the current path of what the market incentivizes exponential tech to do, market being a previous social tech. I would say that Exponential tech. We look at different types of social tech. So let's just briefly look at Democracy tried to do the emergent order thing. At least that's the story. And which is”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will also, as a result, both make people who have different kinds of predispositions with regard to rulership and different kinds of new capacities. And so we have to think about these things. It's kind of well understood that the printing press, and then early industrialism ended feudalism and created kind of nation states. So one thing I would say as a long trend that we can look at is that whenever there is a step function, a major leap in technology, physical technology, the underlying techno-industrial base with which we do stuff. It ends up coding for predisposing a whole bunch of human behavioral patterns that the previous social system had not emerged to try to solve.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying that People's use of technology will change their behavior. So it has behavioral dispositions built in. The change of the behavior will also change the values in the society.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that I haven't seen anything promising is that to be on track requires understanding and guiding some of the things differently than is currently happening. And it's possible. That's actually what I really care about. Couldn't have had a Stalin without having certain technologies emerge. He couldn't have ruled such a big area without transportation technologies, without the train, without the communication tech that made it possible. So when you say you'd rather have a tractor or a plough than a stall, and there's a relationship between them that is more recursive, which is New physical technologies allow rulers to rule with more power over larger distances historically.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is no matter what. And the externalities are not just physical to the environment, they're also to how the people are being conditioned and how the relationality between them is being conditioned.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have to look at what the psychological effects of specific tech applied certain ways are and be able to say it's not just doing the first order thing you intended. It's doing the effect on patriarchy and animism and the end of tribal culture and the beginning of empire and the class systems that came with that. We can go on and on about what the plow did. The beginning of surplus was inheritance, which then became the capital model and like lots of things. So we have to say when we're looking at the tech, what are the values built into the way the tech is being built that are not obvious?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the idea that technology is values agnostic is silly. Technology codes patterns of behavior that code rationalizing those patterns of behavior and believing in them. The plow also is the beginning of the Anthropocene, right? It was the beginning of us changing the environment radically to clear-cut areas, to just make them useful for people, which also meant the change of the view of where the web of life were just a part of it, et cetera. So all those types of things.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That particular line of thought then also says that feminism followed the tractor. And the rise of feminism in the West. Started to follow women being able to say we can do what men can because the male upper body strength wasn't differential once the internal combustion engine was much stronger. And we can drive a tractor. So I don't think to try to trace complex things to one cause is a good idea. So I think this is a reductionist view, but it has truth in it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corresponding with the use of a plow, animism went away everywhere that it existed because you can't talk about the spirit of the buffalo while beating the cow all day long to pull a plough. So the moment that we do animal husbandry of that kind, we have to beat the cow all day. You have to say it's just a dumb animal, man has dominion over earth, and the nature of even our religious and spiritual ideas change. You went from women primarily using the digging stick to do the horticulture or gathering before that, men doing the hunting stuff to now men had to use the plow because the upper body strength actually really mattered. Women would have miscarriages when they would do it, when they were pregnant. So all the caloric supply started to come from men where it had been from both before, and the ratio of male-female gods changed to being mostly male gods following that. Obviously, we went from very...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few of the changes that at least some theorists believe in is when the ox drawn plough started to proliferate, any culture that utilized, it was able to start to actually cultivate grain because just with a digging stick you couldn't get enough grain for it to matter. Grain was a storable caloric surplus. They could make it through the famines, they could grow their population. So the ones that used it got so much ahead that it became obligate and everybody used it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will not try to do this rigorously because there are academics who will disagree on the subtle details, but I'll do it kind of like illustratively. Think about the emergence of the plow, the ox drawn plough in the beginning of agriculture that came with it, where before that you had hunter-gatherer, and then you had horticulture kind of a digging stick, but not the plough. Well, the world changed a lot with that, right?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea that technology is values neutral, values agnostic, and people can use it for constructive or destructive purposes, but it doesn't predispose anything. Just silly and naive. Technology elicits patterns of human behavior because those who utilize it and get ahead in the behaving differently because of their utilization of it and then other people, then they end up shaping the world or other people race to also get the power of the technology. And so there's whole schools of anthropology that look at the effect on social systems and the minds of people of the change in our tooling. Marvin Harris's work, Call Cultural Materialism, looked at this deeply. Obviously, Marshall McLuhan looked specifically at the way that information technologies change the nature of our beliefs, minds, values, social systems.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Impost order. And we can see that if in the US, if let's look at Y real quick. We know why we created term limits so that we wouldn't have forever monarchs. That's the thing we were trying to get away from, and that there would be checks and balances on power and that kind of thing. But that also has created a negative second order effect, which is nobody does long-term planning. Because somebody comes in who's got four years, they want re-elected. They don't do anything that doesn't create a return within four years that will end up getting them elected, re-elected, and so the thirty-year industrial development to build high-speed trains or the new kind of fusion energy or whatever it is just doesn't get invested in. And then if you have left versus right, where whatever someone does for four years, then the other guy gets in and undoes it for four years. And most of the energy goes into campaigning against each other. This system is just dissipating as heat, right? Like it's just burning up as heat. And the system that has no term limits and no internal friction in fighting because they got rid of those people can actually coordinate better.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China has built high speed rail not just through its country but around the world and the US hasn't built any high speed rail yet. You can see that it brought 300 million people out of poverty in a time where we've had increasing economic inequality happening. You can see that if there was a single country that could make all of its own stuff, if the global supply chains failed, China would be the closest one to being able to start to go closed loop on fundamental things. Belt and road initiative supply chain on rare earth metals, transistor manufacturing that is like, oh, they're actually coordinating more effectively in some important ways. The last, call it 30 years.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the most kind of central question for me these days because We look at what different nation states are doing around the world and we see nation states that are more authoritarian That in some ways, you're actually coordinating much more effectively. So, for instance, we can see that.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Via imposition, via force, and so it fails on the side of oppression, which ends up being for a while functional ish for the thing as a whole, but miserable for most people in it until it fails either because of revolt or because it can't innovate enough or something like that. And so there's this like toggling between order via oppression and chaos. And I think the idea of democracy, not the way we've implemented it, but the idea of it, whether we're talking about a representative democracy or a direct digital democracy, liquid democracy, a republic, whatever, the idea of an open society, a participatory governance, is can we have order that is emergent rather than imposed so that we aren't stuck with chaos and infighting and inability to coordinate, and we're also not stuck with oppression? And what would it take to have emergent organizations?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we can look at civilizations failing on the side of not having enough coordination of choice makings where they fail on the side of chaos and then they cleave in an internal war comes about or whatever. Or they can't make smart decisions and they overuse their resources or whatever. Or it can fail on the side of trying to get order.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have some agency there. Probably neighborhoods and smaller scales within it, and also verticals, and some of it won't be geographic, it'll be network-based, right? Networks of affinities. So I don't think the future is one type of governance. Now, what we can say more broadly is say when we're talking about groups of people that interfect each other, the idea of a civilization is that we can figure out how to coordinate our choice making to not be at war with each other and hopefully increase total Productive capacity in a way that's good for everybody. Division of labor and specialty. So we all get more, better stuff and whatever. But it's a coordination of our choice making.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where there are both checks and balances in power, flows of information. So I think governance at the level of cities will be a bigger deal in the future than governance at the level of nation states, because I think nation states are largely fictitious things that are defined by wars and agreements to stop wars and like that. I think cities are based on real things that will keep being real, where the proximity of certain things together, the physical proximity of things together gives increased value of those things. So you look at like Jeffrey West's work on scale and finding that companies and nation states and things that have a kind of complicated agreement structure get diminishing return of production per capita as the total number of people increases beyond about the tribal scale, but the city actually gets increasing productivity per capita. But it's not designed. It's kind of this organic thing, right? So there should be governance at the level of cities because people can sense and actually”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's why I'm even using the word governance as a process rather than government as an imposed phenomena. And so I think we have to have global governance, but I think we also have to have local governance. And there has to be relationships between them that each...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Producer consumer taxpayer voter, and the massive nation state global complex, and not that much in the way of intermediate structures that we relate with, and not that much in the way of real personal dynamics, all impersonalized, made fungible. And so I think that we have to have global governance, meaning I think we have to have governance at the scale we affect stuff. And if anybody is messing up the oceans, that matters for everybody. So that can't only be national or only local. Everyone is scared of the idea of global governance because we think about some top-down system of imposition that now has no checks and balances on power. I'm scared of that same version, so I'm not talking about that kind of global governance.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you have cells and tissues, and then you have tissues and organs and organs and organ systems. And so you have these layers of organization. And then obviously the individual in a tribe in the ecosystem. And each of the higher layers are both based on the lower layers, but also influencing them. I think the future of civilization will be similar, which is there's a level of governance that happens at the level of the individual. My own governance of my own choice. I think there's a level that happens at the level of a family. We're making decisions together. We're inter-influencing each other and affecting each other, taking responsibility for. The idea of an extended family, and you can see that for a lot of human history, we had an extended family, we had a local community, a local church, or whatever it was. We had these intermediate structures. Whereas right now, this kind of like the individual”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you don't have like think about how ridiculous it would be to try to have all the tens of trillions of cells in it with no internal organization structure, right? Just like a sea of protoplasm.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ended with a few things. It ended with people having migrated enough that when you started to get resource wars, you couldn't just migrate away easily. And so tribal warfare became more obligated. It involved the plow in the beginning of real economic surplus. So there were a few different kind of forcing functions. But we're talking about what size should it be, right? What size should a society be? And I think the idea, like if we think about your body for a moment as a self-organizing complex system that is multiscaled, we think about...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree to be a part of a larger group where everyone can't be part of that council. And so I am going to now be subject to law that I have no say in if I could be part of a smaller group that could still survive and I get a say in the law that I'm subject to. So I think the cleaving and a way we can look at it beyond the Dunbar number two is we can look at that a civilization has binding energy that is holding them together and has cleaving energy. And if the binding energy exceeds the cleaving energy, that civilization will last. And so there are things that we can do to decrease the cleaving energy within the society, things we can do to increase the binding energy. I think naturally we saw that had certain characteristics up to a certain size kind of tribalism.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say there's also a communication protocol where up to about that number of people we could all sit around a tribal council and be part of a conversation around a really big decision. Do we migrate? Do we not migrate? Do we, you know, something like that? Do we get rid of this person? And why would I want to...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone is somewhat aware of what everybody else is doing. There's not groups that are very siloed. And as a result, it's actually very hard to get away with bad behavior. There's a forced kind of transparency. And so you don't need kind of like the state in that way, but lying to people doesn't actually get you ahead. Sociopathic behavior doesn't get you ahead because it gets seen. And so there's a conditioning environment where the individuals behaving in a way that is aligned with the interests of the tribe is what gets conditioned. When it gets to be a much larger system, it becomes easier to hide certain things from the group as a whole as well as to be less emotionally bound to a bunch of anonymous people.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can talk about some of the things that it probably has to do with up to a certain number of people, and this is going to be variable based on the social technologies that mediate it to some degree. We can talk about that in a minute. To a certain number of people, everybody can know everybody else pretty intimately. So let's go ahead and just take 150 as an average number. Everybody can know everyone intimately enough that if your actions made anyone else do poorly, it's your extended family and you're stuck living with them and you know who they are and there's no anonymous people. There's no just them and over there. And that's one part of what leads to a kind of tribal process where it's good for the individual and good for the whole has a coupling. Also below that scale”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we can say that the Natural state of humans if we want to describe such a thing was to live in tribes that were below the Dunbar number Meaning that for a few hundred thousand years of human history, All of the groups of humans mostly stayed under that size. And whenever it would get up to that size, it would end up cleaving. And so it seems like there's a pretty strong, but there weren't individual humans out in the wild doing really well, right? So we were a group animal, but with groups that had a specific size. So we could say, in a way, humans were being domesticated by those groups. They were learning how to have certain rules to participate with the group without which you'd get kicked out. But that's still the wild state of people.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to give these simplified good or bad things. What I like the state that we live in currently, the United States federal government, to stop existing today. No, I would really not like that. I think that would be quite bad for the world in a lot of ways. Do I think that it's a... Optimal social system and maximally just and humane and all those things, and I wanted to continue as is no. Going through the catastrophe phase that I think it's just non existence would give.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems like to self perpetuate. Egos do that. The idea that I might do something meaningful that future people appreciate, of course there's like a certain sweetness to that idea. But I know how many people did something that I wouldn't be here without, and that my life would be less without whose names I will never know. I feel a gratitude to them. I feel a closeness. I feel touched by that. And I think to the degree that the future people are conscious enough, there is a, you know, a lot of traditions had this kind of, are we being good ancestors in respect for the ancestors beyond the names? I think that's a very healthy idea.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The widening, you remember Einstein had that quote something to the effect of it's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe they're separate things. There's this one thing we call universe and something about us being inside of a prison of perception that can only see a very narrow little bit of it. This might be just some weird disposition of mine, but. When I think about the future after I'm dead and I think about Consciousness. I think about Young people falling in love for the first time and their experience. And I think about people being awed by sunsets and I think about Of it, right? I cannot feel connected to that.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember the first time I read this poem by Hofez, the Sufi poet, written in like 13th century or something like that. And he talked about that if you're lonely to think about him and he was kind of leaning his spirit into yours across the distance of a millennium and would comfort you with these poems. And if he's thinking about people, millennium from now and caring about their experience and what they'd be suffering if they'd be lonely and could he offer something that could touch them and it's just fucking beautiful. And so like the most beautiful parts of humans have to do with something that transcends what's in it for me. And death forces you to that.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about death and having finite time here, and we could talk about if we live for a thousand years instead of a hundred or something like that. It'd still be finite time. The one bummer with the age we die is that I generally find that people mostly start to emotionally mature just shortly before they die. If I get to live forever, I can just stay focused on what's in it for me forever. And if life continues and consciousness and sentience and people appreciating beauty and adding to it and becoming continues, my life doesn't, but my life can have effects that continue well beyond it. Then life with a capital L starts mattering more to me than my life. My life gets to be a part of it and in service to. And the whole thing about when old men plant trees, the shade of which they'll Get to be in.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, look at how it could be related. I've experienced fear of death. Also experienced Times where I thought I was going to die, it felt extremely peaceful and beautiful. It's funny because Can be afraid of death because we're afraid of hell or bad reincarnation or the bardo or some kind of idea of the afterlife we have where we're projecting some kind of sentient suffering. But if we're afraid of just non-experience, I noticed that every time I stay up late enough that I'm really tired, I'm longing for deep sleep and non-experience. Like I'm actually longing for experience to stop. And it's not morbid. It's not a bummer. And I don't mind falling asleep. And sometimes when I wake up, want to go back into it. And then when it's done, I'm happy to come out of it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think that is the cause of suffering. I think that is, you know, in the Western traditions, right? The Eastern traditions focused on that and kind of unconditional happiness outside of in the moment outside of time. Western traditions said, no, actually, desire is the source of creativity, and we are here to be made in the image and likeness of the Creator. We're here to be fundamentally creative. creating from where and in service of what, creating from a sense of connection to everything and wholeness, in service of the well-being of all of it, is very different. Is back to that compassion compersion axis”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when Buddha said, desire is the cause of all suffering, then later, the vow of the Bodhisattva, which was to show up for all sentient beings in universe forever, is a pretty intense, thing like desire. I would say there is a kind of desire, if we think of desire as a basis for movement, like a flow or a gradient, there's a kind of desire that comes from something missing inside seeking fulfillment of that in the world. That ends up being the cause of actions that perpetuate suffering. But there's also not just non-desire. There's a kind of desire that comes from feeling full at the beauty of life and wanting to add to it that is a flow this direction”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want moments. Where I am absorbed in the sunset and I am not thinking about what to do next. And then the fullness of that can make it to where my doing doesn't come from what's in it for me because I actually feel Overwhelmingly full already. And then it's like, how can I make life better for other people that don't have as much opportunities as I had? How can I add something wonderful? How can I just be in the creative process? So, I think where the doing comes from matters. And if the doing comes from a fullness of being, it's inherently going to be paying attention to externalities. It's more oriented to do that than if it comes from some emptiness that is trying to get full in some way that is willing to cause sacrifices, other places, and where a chunk of its attention is internally focused.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I hold that a meaningful life has to be all three of those, and where they're not in conflict with each other, ultimately it grounds in being, it grounds in the intrinsic meaningfulness of experience, and then my doing is ultimately something that will be able to increase the possibility of the quality of experience for others And my becoming is a deepening on those, so it grounds an experience and also the evolutionary possibility of experience.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Taking in the beauty of life. Doing is adding to the beauty of life. I'm going to produce some art. I'm going to produce some technology that will make life easier, more beautiful for somebody else. I'm going to Do some science that will end up leading to better insights or others' people's ability to appreciate the beauty of life more because they understand more about it or whatever it is, or protect it. I'm going to protect it in some way. But that's adding to or being in service of the beauty of life through our doing. And becoming is getting better at both of those. Being able to deepen our being, which is to be able to take in the beauty of life more profoundly, be more moved by it, touched by it. Increasing our capacity with doing to add to the beauty of life more”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we're talking about the essence of it, it is about taking in and appreciating the beauty of life that is now, it's a mode that is in the moment and that is largely about being with what is. Fundamentally grounded in the nature of experience and the meaningfulness of experience, the prima facie meaningfulness of when I'm having this experience, the Not actually asking what the meaning of life is. I'm actually full of it. I'm full of experiencing it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, when you were starting to say, okay, individual happiness, and you're like, wait, fuck, sadists can be happy while hurting people, it's not individual happiness, it's love, but wait, some people can self-sacrifice out of love in a way that actually ends up just creating codependency for everybody. Or, okay, so how do we think about all those things together? One like this kind of came to me as a simple way that I kind of relate to it is A meaningful life involves the mode of being, the mode of doing and the mode of becoming, and it involves a virtuous relationship between those three. Any of those modes on their own also have failure modes that are not a meaningful life. The mode of being, the way I would describe it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know like in Taoism, talking about the nature of it rather there's a fundamental what where the why can't go deeper is the nature of it. But I'm going to try to speak to a much simpler part, which is when people think about what is a meaningful human life. And kind of, if we were to optimize for something at the level of individual life, but also how does optimizing for this at the level of the individual life lead to the best society for insofar as people living that way affects others and long term, the world as a whole. And how would we then make a civilization that was trying to think about these things? You can see that there are a lot of dialectics where there's value on two sides individualism and collectivism. The ability to accept things and the ability to push harder and whatever. And there's failure modes on both sides.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a utilitarian concept the purpose of one thing is defined in relationship to other things that have assumed value and to say what is the purpose of everything well purpose is too small of a question it's fundamentally a relative question within everything what is the purpose of one thing relative to another what is the purpose of everything and there's nothing outside of it with which to say it you actually just got to the limits of the utility of the concept of purpose. It doesn't mean it's purposeless in the sense of something inside of it being purposeless. It means the concept is too small, which is why you end up getting to”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Semantics end up mattering because a lot of people Will take the word meaning and the word purpose. And they'll talk, they'll think kind of what is the meaning of my life, what is the meaning of human life, what is the meaning of life, what's the meaning of the universe, and what is the meaning of existence rather than non-existence? So there's a lot of kind of existential considerations there. And I think there's some cognitive mistakes that are very easy. Like taking the idea of purpose.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Healthy version, right? The root, I believe it's a Latin word that means to strive together. And it's that impulse of becoming where I want to become more, but I recognize that there's actually a hormesis. There's a challenge that is needed for me to be able to do that. But that means that, yes, there's an impulse where I'm trying to get ahead. Maybe I'm even trying to win, but I actually want a good opponent. And I want them to get ahead too, because that is where my ongoing becoming happens. And the win itself will get boring very quickly. The ongoing becoming is where there's aliveness. And for the ongoing becoming, they need to have it too. And that's the strive together. So in the healthy competition, I'm stoked when they're doing really well because my becoming is supported by it. Now, this is actually a very nice segue into”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You will also learn what gets in the way of it. How to work with it that if you wanted to help try to build systems at scale or apply Facebook or exponential technologies to do that, you would have more actual depth of real knowledge of what that takes. This is, you know, as you mentioned, that there's this virtuous cycle between when you get stoked on other people doing well and then they have a similar relationship to you and everyone is in the process of building each other up. This is what I would say the healthy version of competition is versus the unhealthy version.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is because notice that's not just saying love for you, where I might be self sacrificing and miserable and I love people, but I kill myself, which I don't think anybody thinks is a great idea. Or happiness, where I might be sociopathically happy where I'm causing problems all over the place, or even sadistically happy, but it's a coupling, right? That I'm actually feeling happiness in relationship to yours and even in causal relationship where my own agentic desire to get happier wants to support you two.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source