Daniel Schmachtenberger studies existential risk. Here's how we might thread an Alt-Middle way to a civilization whose tech, healthcare, social structures, and built environment promote wellbeing rather than divisional apocalypse.

Video and transcript (timecodes shortly): https://zdoggmd.com/daniel-schmachten...

About Daniel: https://civilizationemerging.com/about/
Daniel's Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org/

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00:00 Intro
01:11 Humans as apex predators in every environment, enabled by technology
05:19 Paleolithic brains with tech that hacks dopamine reward circuits, hypernormal stimuli (porn, sugar, social media)
11:06 Polyamorous societies vs. monogamous societies, closing the “asshole” niche
18:00 Conservative vs. liberal moral intuitions, healthy and unhealthy reward circuits, the marshmallow study, limbic hijack in social media
26:28 The concept of hormesis (how systems increase capacity in response to stress)
30:45 Capitalism & the economics of addiction with regards to social media
38:36 Autopoietic (self-replicating) tech, externalized costs, and catastrophic risk
43:04 Public sensemaking in the age of screens and expert specialization, the role of “steelmanning” in debates
49:41 Education & sense making as central to function democracy
55:01 Naive, Cynical, & Post-cynical stances in discourse
1:04:41 The epidemic of subclinical mental illness in modern civilization
1:23:09 Existential threat to democracy, why China has an advantage, natural tech monopolies bigger than nation-states
1:37:22 Environmental psychology/broken windows theorem, the effect of the plow on civilization
1:48:55 Building tech optimized to better social values
1:53:56 Internalizing externalities, social tech like sweat lodges
2:05:17 Left brain vs right brain, spirituality vs reductionism, dealing with human conflict
2:12:36 These concepts applied to healthcare (environmental effect, sense making, reductionism, the complexity of autoimmune disease, Pharma)
2:21:29 The future of healthcare (toward an integral model of Health 3.0), hospitals as temples
2:26:42 The future of democratic systems, AI, and optimistic vision for the future