Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191

The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmactenberger, a founding member of the Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sense-making and dialogue. He's interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals and as collectives at all scales. Quick mention of our sponsors: Ground News, NetSuite, Four Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a couple of days. We took a long walk the day before our conversation. I really enjoyed meeting him, just on a basic human level. We talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually contributing something of value to the colony. These conversations are the reasons I love human beings, our insatiable striving to lessen the suffering in the world. But more than that, there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends, and creating something that is far greater than the sum of our parts. I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few new friends, and in random bars in my travels across this country, where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation of this too short, too beautiful life. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmactenberger. If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history, just watching us, and, uh, were tasked with, uh, summarizing what happened until now, what do you think they would say? What do you think they would write up in that summary?

(laughs)

Like, it has to be pretty short, less than a page. Like in, uh, The Hitchhiker's Guide-

(laughs)

... there's, I think, uh, like a paragraph or a couple sentences. How would you summarize... How, sorry, how would the aliens summarize, do you think, uh, all of human civilization?

My f- first thoughts take more than a page. Uh, they'd probably distill it. 'Cause if they watched... Well, I mean, first, I have no idea if their senses are even attuned to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to or what the nature of their consciousness is like relative to ours. And so let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to get here from wherever they are. That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment. And then if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria. They saw that 2,000 years ago, in Greece, we were producing things like clocks, the Antikythera mechanism, and then that technology got lost. They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.

So every once in a while, there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things.