Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Bend not Break #3: Sensemaking, Uncertainty, and Purpose"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 555 Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2022
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode we meet with founding member of The Consilience Project, Daniel Schmachtenberger.
In Part 3 of their series, Schmachtenberger and Hagens explore metanarratives. Why are they threatening to various sections of society?
Further, Schmachtenberger helps us understand how we can take in the systemic metacrisis facing humanity in ways that grant us agency, rather than despair.
About Daniel Schmachtenberger:
Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.
The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.
Towards these ends, he's had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/31-daniel-schmachtenberger
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.0 | That's me. |
| 0:07.8 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, |
| 0:14.3 | the environment, and our society. |
| 0:17.6 | Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's |
| 0:23.0 | eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about |
| 0:28.6 | it as a society and as individuals. |
| 0:33.3 | Greetings. |
| 0:34.4 | Welcome to another episode of the Great Simplification. Today is part three with my friend and colleague Daniel Schmachtenberger, the founding director of the Consilience Project. |
| 0:49.3 | This one went in a completely different direction than I expected. I was fully energized to have a back |
| 0:57.6 | and forth discussion on my systems overview of the world, energy, ecology, money, systems, |
| 1:05.4 | and see where Daniel agreed, differed what we could converge on. |
| 1:12.4 | And of course, it went in a completely different direction where we talked about meta-narratives |
| 1:16.2 | themselves, why they're threatening to various sections of society, how and why Daniel |
| 1:26.4 | became a vegetarian, how to take in the entire systemic meta-crisis |
| 1:33.2 | that humanity faces in a way that gives you agency and not despair. |
| 1:39.5 | And whenever I finish one of these podcasts, I have a pretty good sense of whether I liked it. |
| 1:47.0 | It was good. |
| 1:47.8 | This one was fantastic. |
| 1:50.7 | Though you will see that my energy at the beginning kind of faded into speechlessness |
| 1:57.5 | after some of the 15 paragraph thoughts that Daniel dropped on me. |
| 2:03.9 | So I hope you enjoy and learn and are inspired from this conversation with my friend Daniel, |
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