Daniel Schmachtenberger | Reality, Meaning & Self-Development | Modern Wisdom Podcast 179

1. 0:00 – 0:21

   Intro

   1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger0:00

      Wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic. You can't have a if this, then that algorithm that actually equals wisdom. And, and if you can, then we're just a intermediate boot loader for the AIs that are better creatures than us, right?

2. 0:21 – 5:26

   Selfdevelopment

   1. CWChris Williamson0:22

      Daniel, I, I'm very impressed that we finally managed to get this recording sorted. Not only b- between time difference challenges or me needing to rearrange or, or a global pandemic, we're finally here. We finally got each other on the line.

   2. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger0:38

      Yeah, the global pandemics fuck up our schedule sometimes.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:41

      It's very inconvenient.

   4. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger0:43

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:43

      It's incredibly inconvenient, you know. Um, so as you're aware, we talk a lot on this podcast about self-development, and you help people to make sense of the world, sense-making, preventing global catastrophic risks. So in light of the way that the world is at the moment, what are your thoughts about how people can develop themselves whilst still ensuring that we have a, a functioning world that isn't, uh, isn't risky?

   6. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:21

      We can go like a million places with that question, and so we'll just start and see w- see what happens. Even the topic of personal development, uh, what that means is pretty ambiguous. The idea of development means that something can progress to some stage of more refinement or more capacity. And so (clears throat) we know what that means in mathematics or in playing classical piano or weightlifting, right? There's some sense of progressive development. But what does it mean for a person to develop beyond early adulthood? We also have a very clear sense that children go through developmental stages of increasing their cognitive and social and linguistic and motor and all these types of capacities, but then when does that stop? Does it have to stop? There's a development of more skills, but what does becoming a more developed human being fundamentally mean is a philosophic, a spiritual, religious, existential question. (clears throat) And so the question of what is a meaningful human life is underneath that. Uh, and then how do I effectively develop myself aligned with what is, uh, most meaningful? And, uh, when I'm asking what is a meaningful human life, there's not just my own experience, but how do I relate to the whole of life? How, how does the meaningfulness of life relate to both what I experience and also what I contribute to the experience of others? And so (sighs) when we think about the current world situation, does the world situation we're in create a context for what kinds of human development are relevant within the general parameters of some u- universal truths? And it certainly does, because what the world needs if we want to really effectively serve to protect against unnecessary harm and to increase the quality of life, it needs different skills than it needed 1,000 years ago. And it needs different... It actually needs totally different kinds of minds and sense-making in many ways. And then some aspects of it are obviously gonna be the same across lots of contexts, like the refinement of our clarity and our own motivation, um, and our own emotional resilience and things like that. I think the motivation is an interesting one to start on, which is as soon as you have a concept of human development and there's some concept of more developed, and you can conceptually understand that to try and orient yourself, then there becomes an inherent comparison with other people of are they c- comprehensively more developed human than I am, and, uh, or am I more than they are? And is my thinking that I'm more than they are some sign of ego, which is actually a sign of low development, um, in some particular way? (clears throat) And i- it's easy to cognitively understand what some higher stage of development would express like and be able to act it without it actually being real. And so as soon as there's, you know, you read David Deida and you have the, uh, an authentic man is such and such or a embodied woman is such and such or whatever, well, you can just start acting that and having it be totally not real and having, uh, a bunch of personal development mimicking for basically status-seeking. And what's underneath that, the status-seeking impulse, which is usually fundamental insecurities, is actually not healing itself, which what the real personal development would be. It's actually doubling down on itself and building up a presentation package. And whether it's, "I'm rich," or, "I'm buff," or, "I'm enlightened," just depends on the subculture you're appealing to.

3. 5:26 – 10:47

   Virtue signaling

   1. CWChris Williamson5:26

      That is a very hard red pill to swallow. Um, and I, I couldn't agree more. The, there's a, a quote from Ben Bergeron who says that character will always beat strategy. He's a CrossFit coach. Um, and I think what he's talking about there is the virtue of doing the thing because it's the thing that you want to do from your innermost being as opposed to doing the thing because that's what you think you should do based on what you've been told so that you can then signal that you are a person who has these virtues. It's cart horse or horse cart.

   2. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger6:05

      When you mention virtue signaling, which will obviously show up very differently in different cultures, right? I- I'm a good Republican, versus I'm a good Democrat, is going to have totally... It'll be repulsive to the people of the different tribe. Um, or religions, or different types of aesthetics. Um, from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's mostly just mate signaling. Um, and so whether it's 150-foot super yacht, or it's, um, you know, having read all the books in a particular space and presenting yourself in, in a way that we say, "Okay, well, where is that imperative to want people to respond to me in a particular way?" Well, it has something to do with power dynamics in a tribe, and largely basically, mate signaling is the evolutionary origin of it. It's valuable to just admit that.

   3. CWChris Williamson7:02

      (laughs)

   4. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger7:02

      And to just kind of reflect on it to say, "The more I can reflect on the biological predispositions that arise, the less I'm controlled by them. And I don't want to be ashamed of or repress them, or just automatically go with them, right? Because they gave rise to the capacity for abstraction, and the abstraction can give rise to higher order interests than the base interests." So this is actually a very valuable thing in personal development, is, uh, just taking the time to very deeply, earnestly inquire into your motive. And, "Okay, I'm wanting to develop in this way, why?" Is- Because mostly, the whys are actually lies, right? It's, "I believe that when I'm buff, then I will..." And it's, and it's not gonna be true, right? So the thing happens, and then it's just some other set of goals. And, um, and so typically, whenever someone is going about doing some project to help the world or develop themselves or whatever, they usually have mixed motives. They have like a dozen different motives driving them, and they're usually only aware of half of them, and they'll usually only admit like one or two of them.

   5. CWChris Williamson8:28

      (laughs)

   6. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger8:29

      And, but this will affect your results and your trustworthiness, because those motives will pull in different ways. And so let's say I'm trying to develop myself as someone who's more capable of making a difference in the world, and so I'm doing some alleviating poverty project. And the re- the mission statement of why we're doing this is 'cause these kids don't have shoes and they don't have food, and we need to bring it to them and we care. That might actually be true. Like, I might actually care, as one of the 12 or so motives that has me doing that. I might also need to make some money, and this nonprofit is a way that I can make some money. I also might want to, uh, feel successful in a dif- different way, and this hits a certain idea of what w- what will make me feel successful. And then there might be a bunch of stuff that's unconscious, like insecurity from childhood in school and still wanting to hear that I did a good job that my parents didn't give me, or that they did projected onto the rest of the world. Um, the degree to which you can just really watch that, right? Just watch the things that are arising in the mind, and they'll show up when you notice where, who you're comparing yourself with, and where you feel jealousies. Um, which is something that you think that you're wanting that they're, someone else is getting socially or whatever. Um, and just in, in, in reflecting, then you can ask yourself the question, "So which of these seem like they're coming from wholeness, like from, from the deepest wholist version of myself I could imagine, and which of them feel like they're more coming from insecurity or woundedness? And if I imagine myself growing in my wholeness, which of these would deepen and which would lessen?" And then of the ones that would lessen, you can just ask, "If this wasn't there at all, how would my life be different?" Like, the desire that people like me, or whatever it is, if this wasn't there at all. And that doesn't mean to pathologize it, just, you just get to inquire into that and notice how does it move you. And maybe some ways that it moves you are fine, but it's good to at least be clear on it.

4. 10:47 – 12:38

   Signals for manifesting

   1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger10:47

   2. CWChris Williamson10:47

      Are those some of the signals that people can use to identify that? 'Cause the pernicious thing about our subconscious is that we're not conscious of it, not without doing a tremendous amount of introspective work, time in solitude, and all that sort of stuff. So are there any, um, signals that people can say, "That's, that's that thing manifesting again"?

   3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger11:17

      Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, if they just make time, kind of already know what some of the signals are. Um, say there's a project you wanna do, and you wanna do it because it actually feels intrinsically meaningful, right? There's a real intrinsic motive. And you think about someone else getting credit for it, you not getting credit for it, versus you getting credit for it. You just, or even notice in the process of a conversation where there is a credit-seeking impulse arise in you. And you say, "Oh, that impulse and the impulse to actually serve are not the same impulse." Those are two different impulses that are both arising. And they, maybe they can be made to be two sled dogs pulling in the same direction, but they might be sled dogs pulling in opposite directions.... because sometimes the way I can serve the project best is to let someone else take credit so they work harder to make the thing happen. And this is why, you know, if you read the Tao Te Ching as a book of leadership almost, it- it just says that thing again and again. The best leader is the one that nobody even knows is leading, who doesn't want to lead, who other people push to lead 'cause they trust them and really just empowers everyone else. Um, yeah.

5. 12:38 – 15:39

   What does this mean for people

   1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger12:38

   2. CWChris Williamson12:38

      I get it. So, thinking about what this means for people on a broader scale, what it means for an individual to understand their motivations toward leading a good life, I think one of the key insights that I've had from spending time exposed to this sort of content is that I didn't for a long time and still mostly don't know what I want to want, truthfully. It's a very hard question to answer.

   3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger13:14

      Yeah, there's a... In processes, in the process of development, of becoming more self-reflexively aware. So at first, you're living in a particular way and you aren't even really reflecting on if that's the right way to be living, right? And then you start reflecting on it and you realize, "Oh, I'm actually behaving ways that go against the things that I want." And so, I'm getting angrier, I'm getting jealous, or I'm... Whatever it is that isn't who I really wanna be. And this is kind of, like, tier one memetics and personal development. "Let me see if I can work on changing that." And some- and people will start to realize, wow, that pattern of being angry, or being habituated or whatever, being lazy, was conditioned in me, because had I grown up with the Sioux Indians or with the Machiganga tribe or whatever, I would be different, right? Like, there's no question that there would be a lot about me that's different. So, I don't want to just be the, kind of, default byproduct of how I happened to grow up that I didn't even really have a say in where I chose. So, can I recondition it? It's like, yeah, I can recondition it. And then there's some more reflection that says, so I can recondition my b- behaviors to be more aligned with what I want and what I value. And then you're like, "Fuck, what I want and what I value was conditioned also."

   4. CWChris Williamson14:31

      (laughs)

   5. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger14:33

      Because do I wanna be a good Christian, or I wanna be a good Muslim, or I wanna be a good Hindu, or a, a good scientist? Uh, do I (laughs) wanna be a Wall Street banker or a good family man? Do I... That was probably also conditioned, right?

   6. CWChris Williamson14:47

      (laughs)

   7. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger14:47

      All the way down to your- your metaphysical framework for what reality is and what the good life is in there. Now you've entered the heart of existentialism, because you're asking what is worth wanting. Uh, and then you have to say, "Well, what is the basis to answer that that wasn't just conditioned? Is there some deeper than my conditioning basis? Can I pierce through the conditioning?" And so what I'm trying to ask is, is there anything intrinsically meaningful about the nature of reality that I can come to understand that is beyond where I happen to have been conditioned? Where regardless of where I would have been conditioned, this is something I could come to? A- and it turns out that there are meaningful ways to address that.

   8. CWChris Williamson15:38

      Tell

6. 15:39 – 19:56

   What is a meaningful life

   1. CWChris Williamson15:39

      us. That's what we're here for, Daniel. We are- we are here to- to find out about that.

   2. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger15:45

      There's different ways of approaching this that have validity. So, I'm not gonna say what the truth of a meaningful life is. But I'll say some ways that I have found and that others I have seen have found that are meaningful, and also acknowledge you can walk one or multiple of these paths. I f- forget the author. There's a famous quote, "The heart knows reasons that reason knows nothing of." And there is a kind of poetic, artistic answer to the question, which is, it just is, right? There's a deep- there's a sense of, this is meaningful because it'll serve this, and then that because this. And then at a certain level, there's a sense of just, prima facie, it just is. And, like, life- life is fundamentally meaningful and worth serving. Why? Just is, right? L- there's no deeper, um, explanation that adds more clarification than that. It is based on your own direct experience of your experience of aliveness feeling intrinsically meaningful, and then your sensing the depth of other people's experience of life and seeing that that's meaningful, and your desire to serve life in that way, and it just... And so the answer there is not really a deep philosophical inquiry. It's more about a felt experience. Uh, that's great. And, you know, the first verse of the Tao Te Ching is that the knowledge that is knowable is not the eternal knowledge, and the Tao that is speakable is not the eternal Tao, which means the, t- to translate, the meaning or the purpose of everything that you can describe in words isn't really it, because it's fundamentally trans-semantic. Um, s- semantic is a symbol that has a very finite meaning that is supposed to represent a certain ground, right? Like, the word apple references apple, you know? But when I'm talking about meaningfulness of reality, there is no word that can actually hold the ground of everything.And so there can be, though, a certain kind of felt sense of connectedness with it. And we can also think about it more and come up with better answers, and it's actually nice when we do both of these and there's a confluence of the deepening of our own felt connection and the deepening of the clarity of how we understand it. (sighs) So some people go do Landmark and it starts with... Well, I, I don't wanna say what Landmark says. Um, there, there are some systems that would, will say reality is fundamentally meaningless, and that's empowering and beautiful 'cause you get to create the meaning. There isn't some, mm, a priori God that said, "This is how you win the race at the end," and you either get it right or you get it wrong by some, you know, predefined definition. That can feel empowering. There's actually some kind of metaphysics smuggled in there, which is to say you get to create the meaning is still actually holding some concept of meaningfulness and the value on your own creativity, right? So there, it's not actually doing the deeper inquiry to say, "Well, why do I value choice? Why do I value creativity and what is the basis for meaningfulness in my own assessment?" Um, so again, those are just, in prima facie, held as meaningful. So

7. 19:56 – 24:53

   What is science

   1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger19:56

      science is a process of trying to come to understand the objective world in a way that goes beyond my own subjective sense of what it is, which means beyond my conditioning and my bias, right? And so I might think that sound travels faster than light at room temperature and air. So I set up a experiment and measure it, and I find out that it just doesn't. And then I can do that 100 times or a million times and other people can do it and we can use different apparatus and there is a... The measurability and the repeatability gives us a certain sense of the objectivity of it, right? Well, so science has done a very good job of giving us a framework for is, what is, that is not based on what I think is. It doesn't, it hasn't given us the same basis for what ought to be. And there is this classic division between science and ethics, or science and existentialism, and it's called the is-ought distinction. Science can say what is, it can't say what ought, because the process of science is a process of observing and measuring observable things, which are inherently third-person objects, and then being able to find patterns or regularities expressed, that I can express in something like math. Um, and so it pertains to the domain of the things that are measurable and repeatable. Our experience isn't measurable. It's feelible. It's first-person, not third-person. They're fundamentally different categories, right? You can say, "Well, no, your mea- your experience is measurable 'cause we can measure brain waves." That's not measuring the experience, that's measuring a brain state that happens to correlate with your felt experience. But someone who studies the neuroscience of EEGs, who's looking at the brain pattern of a zen meditator can look at that and have no idea what the experience is like. And so the fact that there might be some neural correlates to experience doesn't mean you're measuring the experience. It means there's some neural correlate, right? But that's still the domain of third-person, which is fundamentally never first-person. So first-person is outside of the domain of science, formally. This is important because it says science is not a method of knowing all of reality. It's a method of knowing parts of reality, and there's parts of reality that are rigorously outside of the methods of science. But we want something like we had with science, which was a better process of knowing. And so are there better processes of knowing about the nature of first-person and the nature of the relationship between first-person and third-person? 'Cause a meaningful life is gonna involve the nature of the world. It's also gonna involve the nature of my experience, and it's gonna involve the relationship between me and the world, right? Well, that's at least three different ontological categories, third-person, first-person, and the relationship between the two, which is neither third-person nor first-person. So that requires a more robust philosophy that includes but transcends the philosophy of science. (sighs) So let's say we just look at a kind of, um, scientific story. We can frame this lots of different ways. There's a... A lot of people have made a universe story based on a limited part of science and then kind of made a metaphysical story related to it. Like, they'll take the second law of thermodynamics, increasing entropy, and say, "Okay, so there's a lot of energy at the Big Bang and basically the universe is running down and will eventually turn into just a cold vacuum and die in a f- a, a big freeze, a kind of heat death." And so the metaphysics of universe is just this very slow, inexorable march towards nothingness. Um, now, if all there was (laughs) of science was the second law, you might do that, but that's obviously pretty silly. Um, and there's a lot of things that aren't explained by that at all.... um, and people will take evolutionary biology and talk about, uh, m- make a metaphysical answer that's all about becoming apex predators and dog eat dog kind of stuff and whatever, right? (sniffs) That's actually an important one to address 'cause it's a still very pernicious worldview. Um, nature's kind of just cruel in optimizing it, uh, m- anyone who's spent time in nature and watched predation knows that it's pretty fucking cruel. And, um, th- the things that are the

8. 24:53 – 28:09

   Predatory dynamics

   1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger24:53

      fittest, and the fittest can involve effective cruelty, uh, survive. And so humans, uh, following suit of that, being capable of understanding Darwinian kind of process, uh, should seek to be as fit as they can be. And that that's just being part of the natural order of things. And that not, you know, of every species, the weak ones dying and getting culled is actually what strengthens the genetics and drives evolution forward. So that cruelty, the predator usually taking the weak prey out more is actually what's making the prey better, um, be- because they're getting the weak genes out and so then the stronger genes come, the slightly faster lion that eats the slow gazelle makes ga- gazelles slower over long periods of time. So ultimately, predatory dynamics, violence, winning, competition is what drives all good things and progress and like that. That's a very classic, very narrow i- idea that takes one very tiny part of science and tries to blow it up to be the meta-frame and then interpret it in a way that, uh, people wanted to interpret anyways, um, to basically justify shit that was, that they wanted to do. Um, I won't say the name, but, uh, a- a couple of people that are amongst the most powerful people in the world in terms of high finance have basically quoted almost all of this to me verbatim in conversations as how they see the world. And, um, and they said, you know, either, like, basically apex predators define the topology of the space. And so either you're the apex predator or somebody else is, but the apex predators are gonna be the one who run shit. And if you don't like that, you just won't be one of the ones who run shit. One of the guys said, pretty directly said, "If you... All animals are either predators or prey, and predators don't feel bad when they kill prey. And if you feel bad when the prey humans die, then you just said what kind of animal you are, and that animal doesn't run the world. And the, of the predators who don't make it to alpha apex, they also aren't the ones whose genes really go and run the world. And if you don't like the way that alpha apex are, it won't make any difference 'cause they'll still be the ones who run the world. You just won't be part of it." And, you know, this, the same conversation went to other places about why the Holocaust was a good thing for Jews and, um, because they got the state of Israel and nukes and anti-Semitism became a, a bad word and et cetera. Like, thinking about you can see what that worldview does, right? The worldview makes people to think like that. Um, the conversa- those conversations would go to much darker places too, but-

9. 28:09 – 29:15

   How did you feel hearing those concepts

   1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger28:09

   2. CWChris Williamson28:09

      Can I ask, how did you feel hearing those sorts of concepts come from people who not only can imagine it from an armchair philosophy perspective, but actually have the power to be able to wield it in the real world as well? Was that distressing to hear, to sit down opposite somebody and hear that?

   3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger28:28

      Yeah. Super distressing at first. It was something I didn't have, I didn't have a reference frame for from how I grew up. And that also meant I didn't understand critical things about the world that are important if you actually wanna be able to make a difference to things in the world. And so one of the things that I started noticing was how much there are certain psychological dispositions that seek power more than others, and that are also willing to use power in ways that give them more power, including by, uh, disempowering everybody else. And that those people have ended up being the people with most power most of

10. 29:15 – 35:20

    What are the most effective memes

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger29:15

       the time.

    2. CWChris Williamson29:15

       Well, they're the most effective. They're the ones-

    3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger29:18

       Absolutely.

    4. CWChris Williamson29:19

       ... pre- prepared to go to the places where other people's sense of empathy or virtue or inner compass or whatever it might be would stop them before that.

    5. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger29:30

       Right. So effective at a specific thing, and a specific thing that ends up winning in a natural selection of violence. And so you might have a, a peaceful culture that is way more effective at producing happy people and producing kind people and living in harmony with the land, but Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great or whatever will come slaughter them and take their space and take their stuff. And so then the memes that go on are the memes that were effective at winning in a natural selection of warfare. Um, it ends up being that if you... That drives an arms race, right? Because then somebody becomes better at war so somebody else has to get those same weapons plus the counter weapons plus better weapons and, and eventually you get an exponential curve where it turns into AI-powered drones and bio-weapons and et cetera, and it's actually too big to use any of the weapons safely and you destroy the whole world. And that's why I work on catastrophic risk is the pattern of how we have made it through the local issues is actually what's driving the global issues currently.Um, that kind of, uh, rival risk, be the apex predator kind of thing at scale is actually destroying the capability for civilization to keep going on, period. And so, this apex predator thing, we're not apex predators. That's just gibberish. This is a really important thing I'd like people to understand. An orca is an apex predator, right? Killer whale, top predator in their environment, or a polar bear, or a tiger. We're picking, right? There's lots of apex predators we could pick. But an orca is, like, the biggest one you can think of, so they're, they're a good example. An orca can catch one fish at a time, right? It's gonna go catch one tuna, and it's gonna miss most of the time, or one seal. It can't, it can't take a mile-long drift net and pull up 100,000 tuna at once, which we can now with, with, uh, industrialized dredge net kind of fishing. That, that's not the power of an apex predator, right? A, a polar bear can kill one walrus at a time, and it, and it's fucking dangerous to do that, and it's pretty hard to do. It can't slash and burn an acre of forest a second, right, or be able to do mountaintop removal mining or factory farm whole species of animal and hybridize new species and extinct species. So that's not the power of apex predators. That's the power of gods, we're just shitty gods. Um, if we say, do, do apex predators have the ability to extinct whole species quickly and destroy whole ecosystems and make new ecosystems and genetically engineer new species? No. That's a, that's not something that, that Darwinian process has anything to do with, right?

    6. NANarrator32:31

       (laughs)

    7. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger32:33

       And so you think about if a, if a polar bear got really pissed and went on a tirade and tried to break all that it could, how much harm could it do compared to Trump or Putin with nukes, right? Like, compared to one F-15. It's, so, um, so then you say, well, who has the ability to make new species and destroy species and make new environments and destroy them? Well, we've thought of that mythopoetically as the domain of the gods or nature itself. Since we have that much power, we can destroy nature itself, right? And to not do that, we have to be safe vessels for that much power. Which means that if you have the power of god, you have to have the love and the wisdom of gods to guide it and to hold it. And we have developed in our power through technology much, much better than we have developed in our love and wisdom to wield that power well. And we have wielded our power to just how do I, how do we use our power to beat the other guys? And then they try to develop their power in. But that process multiplied by exponential tech destroys everything. And so we are at the brink of a phase shift of either the end of civilization in the not too distant future as we know it, or the emergence into something that is actually worthy of calling civilization, right, that is actually civil, that can be able to hold the power of AI and the internet of things and geoengineering and bioengineering and actually not fuck everything up with that much capability. There's this very deep question that say, as the power's getting stronger, it's also getting more decentralized, right? So with CRISPR gene drives, you can do the level of bioengineering with a tiny little lab that used to be a whole, you know, the cutting edge of US military not that many years ago, and the same with drone weaponry and whatever. So we have, you know, during the Cold War, we, actually this is an important thing to understand. Until World War II, we didn't have the technological power to destroy everything quickly. As much as we would have wanted to try, we just couldn't. For the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, the most we could want to destroy would still be not that much, relative to the planet. And then with the bomb, that changed. It's like, oh shit, we can actually make this place not habitable for everybody pretty quickly with just some pushes of buttons. That's the begi- that was the beginning of a whole new world, right? And how d- how do we deal with having created a power that we can't use or we don't exist? And so when we created that,

11. 35:20 – 42:08

    The Bretton Woods Convention

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger35:20

       the entire world system had to be recreated just to protect us from using the bomb. The Bretton Woods Convention coming out of World War II was basically a whole new world system where we had to have a United Nations because individual national governments clearly didn't prevent world war. And we had to have a world bank, and we had to have a totally new international monetary policy, and, um, all of those kinds of structures emerged then. And we had to have mutually assured destruction, which emerged a little bit later, uh, to make sure that neither the US or the Soviets would ever use that power, right? Now, mutually assured destruction was this kind of automated locked-on process that if anybody started to fire up their, uh, nuke silos at the other one, the other ones would automatically go so you couldn't initiate the war without killing yourself, and that's what kept everybody from doing it. Mutually assured destruction was what saved us. The system had computer glitches that started to put us into launch sequence many times, and we only barely made it and largely by luck. Um, but that's where we only had two superpowers that had that totally catastrophic capability, and those two could fully spy on each other to know if the other one was gonna do something. And you only had one kind of catastrophe weapon, not lots of them. Two superpowers, one kind of catastrophe weapon. Um...... and so mutually assured destruction worked. And we, we also war when we start running out of resources and then we're competing for the same resources, 'cause everybody's greed wants to get more. Their per- their own national development interest, or their personal development interest expresses monetary abundance as, "If there's a fixed playing field of stuff, my more has to be your less. Okay, fuck it, war." Right? (sniffs) Um, so one of the other things that happened was creating this kind of monetary system coming out of World War II where we could just make up shit tons of new money and debt-based finance and be able to create this globalism and just create so much physical abundance of wealth that we didn't have to war. Right? Everybody could be getting richer simultaneously. That was the idea. It just happens to be that you're destroying the planet very rapidly doing that by basically taking all of nature and turning it into trash. Right? Which it, is (laughs) taking ecosystems that took billions of years to develop and unrenewably destroying them on one side and then turning them into pollution on the other side after a very short period of use. And you just don't get to keep doing that for very long on a finite planet before you destroy the planet's ability to let you keep doing that. (sniffs) And also, that debt-based finance thing starts to catch up with you because in order to pay back the debt, you gotta take out more debt and, you know, and so you get this embedded growth obligation. Right? You have to keep growing exponentially year over year just to break even because you get to keep up with the interest. (smacks lips) So we get to about where we are now and the Bretton Woods world has completely broken down because we can't keep just debt-based financing rapid growth to prevent conflict because we already have more of our total GDP going to servicing the debt than is sustainable and so we're at the end of the financial system's ability to do that, and COVID just made that worse by lowering GDP and increasing debt a lot, and it was already unsustainable. We're near the planetary boundaries on like 100 different boundaries and so we can't keep doing the turn nature into trash, but money briefly on the way to trash, um, process and we have dozens of catastrophe weapons now, not just one. And nukes, there's just not that many places that have uranium and it's very hard to enrich and it's not like a, it's not like small groups can really make nukes. They're really hard to make. (smacks lips) But that's not true for, for weaponized drones. They're really easy to make and for a lot of other new types of exponential tech that relatively small forces, not even state actors, can make. Plus there's lots of state actors that have nu- nukes now and chemical weapons and bioweapons and other things like that. So now you're in a world where you've got not two actors, but lots of actors, more than we can even identify, ones that we don't even know, who can have catastrophe weapons. And not one type of catastrophe weapon, but lots of them where you don't have clear counters for them and you're near the planetary boundaries environmentally and you're at the end of the economic system's capability to keep doing the thing it's done. That's a transition point and (laughs) so sh- I don't remember exactly how we got here, but-

    2. CWChris Williamson40:20

       (laughs)

    3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger40:20

       ... I think it's important in understanding this to say that the, um, the... Oh, I was talking about the apex predator model. So that even before we had nukes, an apex predator couldn't, doesn't make something like a city, right? Which is a, a completely altered environment. And we've been doing that for thousands of years. But... And we've been using that increased power destructively and driving this arms race of increasing destructive capacity. But at a certain point it became globally catastrophic destruction and now it's many, many different methods of globally catastrophic destruction initiatable by many, many actors and so this is now where we're like, "Oh, this is what the power of gods without the love or wisdom to guide it looks like." And so you could ask this question as exponential tech continues and we get more power that becomes more decentralized... Oh yeah, I said all that to say nukes are pretty centralized, but the new tech is decentralized, but catastrophic. How do we make a civilization that is anti-fragile with, with decentralized exponential technology? Which means if I've got lots of non-state actors that can make catastrophe weapons and I don't even know who they are, how do we make a world that doesn't break given the way that humans have historically used power? How do we make a world where anybody can have the power to break everything?

12. 42:08 – 45:18

    We face challenges

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger42:08

       That's a, that's an interesting question.

    2. CWChris Williamson42:10

       It's a very interesting question. It doesn't surprise me that we are in a situation where we face challenges when we consider the, the intro to this discussion which was our evolutionary predispositions, our socialized, um, values that we consider to be worth pursuing which are essentially repurposed versions of a genetic heritage and all this sort of stuff. It doesn't surprise me with the most shaky foundation ever-... that when you start to add an awful lot of weight in the form of, of power, um, destructive power, technological power, when you start to add that on top, that the system becomes incredibly unstable. I wonder whether because I, I, I consider myself to be a good person, I'm not perfect, but I, I, I don't, I don't plan on blowing up the, the world, right? I don't want to go out and hurt people, I don't want to go out and kill people. Um, for me, I think, uh, the idealist inside of me relating to self-development thinks, "Well, if everybody becomes more self-aware, is able to iterate, uh, the, the introspection and, and, and slowly become better over time, go to bed less stupid than when they woke up," um, naturally, out of that system, you wouldn't have any of the pathologies emerge. You wouldn't have any of the challenges emerge because every individual agent within the system would understand genuinely what is best for them, genuinely how to deploy that, and also, would be using any spare capacity that they have to then help others to understand that and then further progress their movement forward. Aubrey Marcus on this show said, "You do not serve others from your cup, you serve others from the saucer that overflows around your cup." And what that means is, you got to sort your shit first, and then what you have as a surplus, you use to help others sort their shit. That's how I saw that. Um, and I wonder whether that's, uh, naivety, ignorance, probably definitely a lot of ignorance. I've never been exposed to someone who has been able to wield the sort of power of the, uh, uh, the people that you mentioned and, and also have that, uh, that mindset. Um, so, probably some ignorance there that I just haven't seen this firsthand and it just sounds like a Hollywood movie to hear that happen, right? It just sounds totally detached from... Yeah, yeah, yeah, Daniel met a guy, but they don't really exist, do they? You're like, "No, these are actual people." Um, and yet, I wonder, I wonder how much of it is, um... (gasps) I wonder how much introspective work, self-development, working out what do you want to want, what should I want to want, what is genuinely good for me, and then how can I make what is good for me be good for others, I wonder how much of that can be the answer to some of these challenges that we face and where the upper bound to what that can achieve is.

13. 45:18 – 46:37

    The upper bound

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger45:18

       The body isn't just 70 or 90 trillion healthy cells all doing their own thing. That would just be a pile of goo, right? That would just be bioptoplasm. The body is actually a coordination between those that involves not just how they function individually in a Petri dish, but how they relate with each other to be able to make tissues and organs and organ systems and that whole thing, right? And so, a cell needs to do what it needs to do to be a healthy cell, but it also needs to communicate with all the ones around it to mediate what the tissue needs to do. And when it's... 'Cause it can't just be doing its own thing when the muscle needs to flex, that particular muscle cell has to be engaged in the, in the process, right? (gasps) And let's say that it's being a good, healthy cell, but there's a cancer cell nearby. If some cells don't actually take that cancer cell out, it'll replicate and kill the whole body. And so, there is a need to be a healthy cell. There's also a need to coordinate (laughs) with those around you for the things that need to happen. There's also a need to have an immune function when there are things happening that damage the health of the whole system. And so, if we're talking about, how do we want to develop people, we want to develop people in all three of those ways.

14. 46:37 – 47:02

    They want to be

    1. CWChris Williamson46:38

       They want to be... They want to have as much capacity to do the things that they should do individually. They want to have the capacity to synergize, to, to have synergy with the people that are around them and that they can access. Now, increasingly, access, I guess, with the tools that we have. Um, the immune function, I can't explain. How does that manifest?

15. 47:02 – 51:59

    What if you see harm

    1. CWChris Williamson47:02

       Is that law? Is that just police? What?

    2. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger47:06

       If you see harm happening, do you stop it? Do you do something to correct the, to, uh, correct the harm and correct the sources of harm? Who does, right?

    3. CWChris Williamson47:16

       How does that differ from synergy? Is it because the actor is malignant as opposed to, uh, compliant or, uh, cooperative?

    4. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger47:26

       Well, they're within a spectrum, right? Um, it's actually very interesting in terms of cancer, 'cause cancer isn't some external pathogen. It's a cell that mutated in a way that stops doing synergy with the other cells around it, right? And 'cause its genetic code is altered where it doesn't actually identify with the rest of the whole in the same way, and so it doesn't want to sacrifice its own maximum consumption of sugar and reproduction rate to synergize with everything. It's like, "Fuck it. I'm just going to, uh, consume and replicate as fast as I can," which not, which is, like, really good for it for a short while, but it ends up killing itself and it kills the host, which is what humans are doing with regard to the planet and also our relationships with each other, where you do that with someone else and it engenders enmity and war back and things like that, right? (gasps) The body's... There's oxidative stress and free radicals that are making cancer all the time. It's just, it's also getting addressed. So, the first stage of dealing with cancer in a healthy body is just not having that much carcinogenesis to begin with, right? That the body's actually doing a good job of, uh, dealing with carcinogenic factors, radicals and oxidants and like that, so cells aren't turning cancerous that often. If there's too much carcinogenesis, and this is why we don't want to expose to carcinogenic compounds, right? If there's too much carcinogenesis, it'll overload the body's ability to deal with cancerous cells, and then you'll start to get a proliferation.So this is the preventative side. How do we have people not become cancer cells in the first place? How do we not deal with it on the prison or judicial side later, but on the how do we develop humans that are psychologically healthy? And if s- psychologically healthy also means are part of a whole so they behave in a way that works well for them and the whole, right? Then the next step is, if a cell starts to get damaged, some oxidative damage happens to it, it try- uh, the rest of the body tries to heal it first. Can we actually bring antioxidants and correct that process? If that can't happen, then the body has to kill it. If that doesn't happen, then it'll replicate and usually kill the body. So when we start to think about the im- the staging of the immune function and what that represents as a basis for thinking about judicial type process, the basis of it should be prov- identify what makes people orient towards harming the commons, towards violence, towards sociopathy, towards greed, and also identify what conditions the best qualities in humans and try to support all humans to have better development, right? Then there is a protective function. If people are harming other people, how do we prevent the harm from happening and how do we try to actually rehabilitate, which is the, the corrective force. And it's only if rehabilitation can't happen that some ongoing protection from that being able to continue to cause harm has to occur. But when you look... Okay. So you don't go kill people in Nigeria to get... to advance, uh, your oil interest the way a Nigerian oil lord does, but you buy gas for your car or whatever the equivalent is, right? Which is ultimately paying the supply chain to do the thing it does, which means paying the Nigerian warlord to do what works at some part of the supply chain. You might never do the kind of gruesome torture that happens inside of a factory farm, but you might go to a restaurant and buy something that came from a factory farm, which is paying someone to do those wet works. And so there starts to be this deepened responsibility question of, "Oh, I'm affecting the world at scale in a way I'm not seeing through the supply chains I'm interacting with. And so now there's harm that's being caused that I'm not standing up to and I'm also complicit with."

    5. CWChris Williamson51:34

       (laughs)

    6. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger51:34

       And it's not the job of the police to stop that because it's granted by law that that can happen. But it's not right law. Right law wouldn't allow a factory farm, you know, or those other things to occur. So then we have to say, "So do I... What is mine to do to actually see the injustices and harms and problems in the world? What is mine to actually step up and resolve?" That's a also important part of the question.

16. 51:59 – 52:49

    Cancer cells

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger51:59

    2. CWChris Williamson51:59

       Very symbolic. I like the analogy to, uh, the, the cancer cells. I'm going back two years ago to an episode I did with Cory Allen, meditation teacher, and, uh, he had this analogy where he thinks when someone gets angry with him as a, a conversa- you know, someone cuts him off in traffic or, or something happens or cuts in line at the checkout and then, and then you can see they're itching for, for, to vent. And, um, he, he treats that anger like a, a pathogen, like a flu virus. And what he thinks in his mind is, "I wonder where that came from. Like, I wonder what the heritage of that anger is. Like, who passed it on to you, then who passed it on to them, then who passed it on to them, then where did that emerge from?" Um, and that's the interconnectedness, right?

    3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger52:48

       Yeah.

17. 52:49 – 53:14

    Immune function

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger52:50

       See, interconnectedness, it's a, it's a basis for compassion and understanding and it's also an, an immune function to keep yourself from getting infected. Because if you get pissed off back at them and you understand it as a pathogen, you'll realize that you actually just lost your sovereignty and just got infected. And if you see that as a, you know, I don't want to get infected, then you're like, "Oh, that means I'm going to relate to this differently."

18. 53:14 – 53:46

    Bookend

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger53:14

    2. CWChris Williamson53:14

       You can also be a, b- be a little bit of a, a bookend as well, right? If that is part of a cathartic venting procedure that allows that person to drop their anger down by X percent, but you don't then pass it, you don't hold that rock and then pass it on, then through being conscious, through the mindfulness gap of being aware of the trigger that's happened, you can let that go. You can be... You can reduce the entropy in the system, I guess you could say it as. Is that a way to put it?

19. 53:46 – 54:29

    Fine point

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger53:47

       Yeah. There's a f- there's a fine point of nuance here, which is not going into reaction about someone else's, um, poor behavior also doesn't mean condoning it, and doesn't mean not having boundaries. Um, it's actually very important to be able to say, "I know that that person does that abusive behavior because they were hurt when they were a kid. I know that wasn't their fault. I actually feel a fuck ton of compassion for that kid. I know they had a head injury in war, right? And that's really fucked them up and they still can't do that to me. And so I love them, I forgive them, and I won't let them do that anymore."

    2. CWChris Williamson54:28

       (chuckles)

20. 54:29 – 55:13

    The 7 deadly sins

    1. CWChris Williamson54:29

       It's a difficult line to balance. I had a neuroscientist on talking about the neuroscience underpinning the seven deadly sins. Very interesting, very cool, uh, rework of that guy called Jack Lewis, British guy. And, um, everything, all of them were in moderation, but not too much. In moderation, but not too much. Seneca's virtuous mean-

    2. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger54:55

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson54:55

       ... in moderation, but not too much. And it is so hard. We are absolutist creatures, that if you put a packet of biscuits in front of me and say I can eat none or I can eat all of them-... both of those situations are fine by me. If you say that I can only have one or like half a biscuit, torture.

21. 55:13 – 56:31

    Balance of boundaries and compassion

    1. CWChris Williamson55:13

    2. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger55:16

       Yeah. And so, this process of, um, the balance of right boundaries and right compassion, there is no algorithm for it to get it right. There isn't like a general rule of thumb that is always the right answer. It- it's- it's something you actually have to think about and feel into each situation, the instantiation of that situation, and you wrestle with it. Um, there are plenty of times where someone does the tough love thing to a friend that, or a family member that has addiction going on, and that's what it took for the person to finally turn around. Plenty of other times where someone does the tough love thing and the person just goes and kills themselves, and that same person, had they got to support at another therapy or rehab clinic or whatever could have turned around. And so, what the right answer is, is not, like if you have a very fast default, it's probably wrong. Um, it's something that you have to really take the time to reflect and to what is actually called for here and then reflect into what are my biases? Am I biasing in a, I don't want to take their burden on, or biasing in a codependent, “I must take it on,” direction? That's going to make me less clear.

22. 56:31 – 57:51

    What is selfdevelopment

    1. CWChris Williamson56:31

       It makes me think about the is and ought distinction that you brought up, and also about what self-development is at its very core, which is trying to model an effective way to operate within the world. It's trying to make, as scientific as possible, the way that you behave, the way that I behave, sometimes the way that we behave. There's books about relationships and friendship and- and- and stuff like that, but mostly it tends to be personal sovereignty, upward mobility agency, stuff like that. Um, but as you've just identified there, in that situation, like there is no one size fits all. There is no objective way to decide what the life that you should lead is, what your definition of a good life is. It's got a shaky foundation evolutionarily. It's got a very biased foundation culturally and socially. You know, that is what we're trying to achieve. What is the best way for me to operate within this world? But there is no... there is no universal answer to that. There's better and there's worse, but better by who? Worse by who? You know, you can- you can run this back as far as you want.

23. 57:51 – 1:31:02

    Wisdom is not algorithmic

    1. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger57:52

       Yeah. Uh, so I would say that wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic. Y- you can't have a if this, then that algorithm that actually equals wisdom. And- and if you can, then we're just a intermediate bootloader for the AIs that are better creatures than us, right?

    2. CWChris Williamson58:22

       Yeah.

    3. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger58:22

       Um, I could actually go through some long derivations as to why I think consciousness is not computational, not purely computational, but there's something happening in consciousness that is fundamentally transcomputational. So, strong computationalism is the idea that computation is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness, mind and universe, and I believe that's false. Uh, so there is something to the nature of choice and thus also good choice, ethics, that can be informed by lots of different principles and considerations, but not perfectly prescribed. And this is why, at lower stages of development, when people can't hold as much complexity and as much nuance, uh, with as much awareness, sometimes they need just simple rules to not go off the rails. So, you think of the 10 Commandments as rules, like that, right? If- if you need to know, don't kill anybody and don't rape anybody and don't adulterate and whatever, like, okay, we'll tell you those things. Don't do that. Like, the society will be better if people don't do those things. But then you notice New Testament comes along and Jesus gives a different kind of teaching, right? Uh, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, uh, love thy neighbor as thyself. It actually doesn't tell you what to do. It isn't a do something or don't do something. It's actually consider something a certain way. So, try to put yourself into the shoes of whoever you're about to act and ask how you would feel, engage in empathy. So, it's an ethic that guides... The guidance is consider something, but not do this or don't do that. So, it's ultimately not prescriptive, but there's still wisdom that can be offered. Um, so there's a lot of kind of general principles that we can offer that support wisdom, but it's not reducible to a prescription. Now, this is also something about personal development, if one is wanting to grow in wisdom, is it doesn't look like, do this thing. And so you also can't signal it very effectively by doing a particular thing.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:00:49

       Mm-hmm.

    5. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:00:50

       Um, I mean, someone could even try to signal aligned with what I just said, right? They could say, "Hmm, let me consider that," as just some kind of-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:01:03

       (laughs)

    7. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:01:04

       ... um, signaling. But the... what I'm talking about, like, is a depth of earnestness.... of, "What do I actually care about, and why do I care about it? And how do I reflect on what I believe to be both true and meaningful right now? And what is right action factoring what I understand to be true and what I understand to be meaningful? And how certain am I on what I think is true? And how biased am I on what I think is meaningful, and can I refine those as well?"

    8. CWChris Williamson1:01:37

       It surprises me that we're even able to get out of bed in the morning.

    9. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:01:40

       (laughs)

    10. CWChris Williamson1:01:42

        (laughs) You know? Like, should I? Well, I mean, is this ... Maybe. I, I don't know. Sh- I mean, do I take the covers off with my left hand? Do I take the covers off with my right hand? But this is the job of the ego, right? And this is part of, I suppose, the usefulness of the fact that we are still in some part primitive creatures, that it allows us to have sufficient momentum to overcome the inertia that a constant, rolling existential crisis would stop us from, from being able to do.

    11. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:02:12

        The rolling existential crisis, which I grew up with ... mostly comes, um ... Joseph Campbell had some nice quote, something about that, uh ... I'm, I'm getting the quote wrong, but paraphrasing, that people wonder about the purpose of life when they aren't engaged in the experience of feeling alive.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:02:40

        I love that.

    13. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:02:42

        And that, and this is that prima facie thing that we were talking about. In moments of full engagement with reality, right, whether it's fascination learning something, or awe at the beauty of something, or whatever it is, it's typically not when people are in existential angst, wondering what's meaningful or not, because it is, it is, it's present. It is, it, it is indwelling within the experience, right? The meaningfulness is eminent. Now, if I'm disconnected from feeling the meaningfulness of life, no thought will replace that feeling. And so then, you know, separate, I can say, "Well, what's, what's the m- m- purpose of life?" "Well, it's to learn." "Well, what's the fucking purpose of learning?" "Well, uh, 'cause you grow." "Well, what's the purpose of that?" "Well, then you can do more." "What's the purpose of ..." And there's no end to that, right? There's no terminal value that you get to where you don't say, "Why, why that?" And that's because what we're trying ... It's, it's actually just a ridiculous question. It's saying, "What part of reality is why all of it?" Right? That's the question. If I'm gon- trying to say the purpose of reality is it's love, or it's growth, or it's, mm, awakening, or whatever it is, I'm trying to, I'm trying to take some little simple part I can conceptualize, and make that the ordinating basis of everything. Which is just actually silly, right? Um ... You'll notice that purpose is a utilitarian concept. The purpose of X is Y. The purpose of my job is I do this function at the business. Well, if I, if, okay, I do the marketing at the business, or the accounting, or the whatever it is, well, if I assume the business existing matters, I, then it makes sense, why me doing that thing matters. But it's utilitarian, right? Assuming the value of Y, then I can say X relative to it. But purpose is always extrinsic relational utilitarian. So, if I say, "What is the purpose of all of reality," what is there outside of reality to ground that in reference to? So, it's just actually an ill-formed question, 'cause purpose is a smaller concept than reality is. So, yes, reality doesn't have a purpose in the sense that anything within reality does, but it's also not purposeless in the way that we think of purposelessness of things inside of reality. It's just the concept is too small to apply.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:05:27

        Do you know where I, I have my existential crises? It's when I'm in the supermarket at 3:00 AM. Every time. Every time I get in there, if I've been at work, and I've finished, I've finished at the, at the club, and there's this big state change from it being loud and, and full of havoc, and then I'm on my way home and I realize that I don't have X for tomorrow. And then that's when it ha- uh, it strikes me, when I'm in the supermarket. You're totally correct, it doesn't happen when you're sat with the people that you care about, it doesn't happen when you're on your morning walk and just considering what it feels like to have the sun on your skin, you know? Those aren't the times. So, does that not mean that seeking those experiences where we do feel connected and we do feel present, is that, w- why is that not the North Star for how we should spend our lives?

    15. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:06:18

        First, I would love to suggest that you go to the grocery store at 3:00 AM a few times on purpose to have the most meaningful connection with the people who are there you possibly can. Go with that intention.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:06:35

        To transcend the, the crisis.

    17. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:06:39

        Well, you have a Pavlovian conditioning now associated with that, right? You've had that experience there enough times that just going there triggers it. And you can recondition that. Um, and you can recognize having choice and agency that in a place where you're questioning meaningfulness, you can bring it.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:06:59

        Yeah, that's beautiful.

    19. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:07:06

        And it may simply be acknowledgment to one of the people who are working there. It may be a deeper conversation, but-... um, I've had so many experiences having a conversation with the person driving Uber for me instead of being on my phone that ended up being profoundly enlightening and some of whom are friends years later. So, it's interesting what happens when you, uh, explore that way.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:07:36

        100%. I mean, this is... before we get onto should we seek being present.

    21. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:07:42

        (sniffs)

    22. CWChris Williamson1:07:42

        Um, this is the, probably the most meaningful, the most important, one of the most important changes I've made over the last few years. As someone who's an only child, who spends a lot of time in solitude working, who is comfortable with my own company, m- overly comfortable with my own company, um, learning the fulfillment and the pleasure that comes from connecting with other people, for no reason other than they're there, and that they are there and you can connect with them, um, has been such a huge change. Like a, a ridiculously big change for me. And it sounds so stupid, you know, especially if you grew up with like five brothers and sisters and you all see each other every Christmas and do whatever, maybe your worldview and mine, you can't really understand why I wouldn't think that that would be a good thing to do. But I'm telling you that I did. I'm telling you that it was very much a single-focused, um, lack of... just lack of even awareness of other people, not even a consideration. Had I of been aware, I probably would have considered. But it was incredibly blinkers on. And, um... yeah, man. Like...

    23. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:09:07

        So this answers the question you were starting to ask-

    24. CWChris Williamson1:09:11

        Great.

    25. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:09:11

        ... about pursuing a state.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:09:13

        Okay.

    27. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:09:15

        That can be done narcissistically, and it won't produce a meaningful life.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:09:21

        Why?

    29. DSDaniel Schmachtenberger1:09:27

        So, you run a thought experiment. Everybody in the world dies. Th- and you're here by yourself. But, you can have like a fighter jet and Lamborghinis and like whatever mansion you want. There's just nobody else here. Most people, when they take time to really run through that scenario, try to figure out how to entertain themselves with experiences for a while, and then fundamentally can't find meaningfulness in it. And to the extent they can, it's because they have the idea of a god, which is still a being they're relating with, or they get really friendly with animals. But ultimately, consciousness wants to be in relationship with consciousness and is the basis of any way someone reifies meaningfulness.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:10:27

        Do you think that's fundamental to consciousness or do you think that that's embedded due to the social animals that we are and that every other animal is?

Episode duration: 1:31:03