Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Bend Not Break Part 1: Energy Blindness"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 555 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2022
⏱️ 94 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode we meet with founding member of The Consilience Project, Daniel Schmachtenberger.
In the first of a five-part series, Nate and Daniel outline the macro risks and pathways for civilization to 'bend' and avoid 'breaking' in coming decades.
In the Part 1 of 5 conversation, Schmachtenberger flips the script to interview Nate about the urgent problems his research and work on energy, money, and growth confront. Nate explains how we can come to understand energy blindness and the overlooked role of oil in consumption, production, and progress since the Industrial Revolution. The dominant narrative of human progress prioritizes capital and labor — but the omission of energy and materials leaves out a key component to understanding how the modern human ecosystem functions.
Further, Nate discusses how a growth economy will inevitably lead to increased energy production and consumption, and how new energy technologies like renewables end up creating more energy output, not less. Putting everything together, in outsourcing our decisions and planning to a market dependent on growth, we have not so metaphorically become an energy hungry superorganism.
Finally, Daniel and Nate look forward to answering: What are ways for us to prepare for a post-growth economy? How can we stay balanced in the face of existential crises? What type of policy can help shape a future that is yet to arrive, and how can we get ahead?
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/05-daniel-schmactenberger
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.0 | That's me. |
| 0:07.0 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. |
| 0:17.0 | 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. |
| 0:32.7 | Hello, today's conversation is with my friend and colleague Daniel Schmachtenberger. |
| 0:39.3 | Daniel and I met a couple years ago. |
| 0:42.0 | Turns out he's working on what he refers to as the meta-crisis, how climate and geopolitics |
| 0:49.2 | and artificial intelligence and everything fit together into this collective of risks. |
| 0:55.3 | I had never heard of him, and he had never heard of me or my work or my network looking |
| 1:01.0 | at energy, money, growth, ecology. |
| 1:04.6 | And we talked on the phone, and the first time I talked to him, I'll never forget it. |
| 1:09.7 | We talked for three hours. And at one time in the conversation time I talked to him, I'll never forget it. We talked for three hours and at one time in the conversation I got goosebumps on my left |
| 1:15.7 | arm because he connected ideas that were in my head that I had never connected. |
| 1:23.5 | And those of you that know Daniel and listen to his podcast know that he often does |
| 1:29.2 | someone's thinking for them. |
| 1:30.8 | He's that sort of an intellect. |
| 1:34.5 | Daniel's current main focus is on the risks that social media and artificial intelligence |
| 1:40.1 | pose as this exponentially growing function that's hijacking our minds as individuals, and at a |
| 1:47.7 | cultural level is impeding or even negating our collective ability to orient and adapt to our |
| 1:54.3 | current challenges. Daniel and I always talk for hours. I wish I would have recorded our previous long phone conversations, but we decided to |
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