“We actually have to fundamentally  upgrade our worldview in a way that is commensurate with science, and includes but transcends science’” –Daniel Schmachtenberger

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a member of the Neurohacker Collective and founder of the Emergence Project. He is also 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.

Daniel talks with Commander Divine about how our technology has outstripped our ability to use it properly. In other words, we need to step up our game to be able to use our technology effectively. As a result, Daniel is dedicated to finding ways to enhance people’s cognitive ability so that they will be able to make better decisions about technology and life in general.

The Neurohacker Collective has recently come out with Qualia, an extensively researched nootropic that combines natural ingredients with the best synthetic ingredients to maximize our capacity to think effectively. It is the “Lamborghini” of nootropics, having been researched and held to higher standards than most new nootropics are.

Commander Divine uses the product, and he has arranged for the Unbeatable Mind community to be given a special opportunity to arrange for a monthly supply. When you purchase an ongoing subscription for Qualia at neurohacker.com, enter the code “unbeatablemind15r” to get 15% off the price.

Love the Unbeatable Mind Podcast? Click here to subscribe on iTunes. We’d love your feedback, please leave a rating and review.

Other episodes of our podcast that you might be interested in are  Ben Greenfield  or Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen.

Transcript & Shownotes

Hey folks Mark Divine coming at you with the unbeatable mind podcast. Welcome back. Thanks for joining me this week and we have a room really, really cool show for you this week.

Before I get going and introduce my really cool guest, friend and super-brain Daniel Schmachtenberger, let me remind you that nobody can find this podcast if you don’t go rated it on iTunes. And so my dream is that when people go and they search for, like, Joe Rogan or Tim Ferris, Unbeatable Mind podcast pops up and everyone says “Whoa, check that out. It’s got six thousand five star reviews, we better watch that.” So go rate it on iTunes if you have the time. And if you’re not on our email list, then you might be missing out so go to unbeatablemind.com/podcasts and just name drop your name on our email list and then you’ll see that we send you all sorts of cool things and we don’t spam you very often. But once in while we do. At any rate, that’s a different issue.

Introduction

[01:26 ]

So Daniel, super-cool to see you again, my friend. Wow. Welcome. So Daniel, I’m gonna do the best I can with a short introduction and then will let Daniel speak for himself. Which is the whole point of this podcast by the way. So Daniel was born in Colorado, lived many, many different places and now settled in, believe it or not, Encinitas, California, right down the road from us. Daniel is a deep thinker. He’s like a human big brain computer. He’s the founder of the emergence project which is a think tank to take a systems view of the world and to see if we can bring some new thinking to solve problems that are hitherto unsolvable, or intractable is the word you use.

Also on the board of the Center for Integral Wisdom, where I met him with Ken Wilber and a few other notable integral theorists. And trying to evolve the core source code for spirituality, which is fascinating work. And now more recently the co-founder of the Neurohacker Collective.

So were gonna talk about all those things today, and probably more. Daniel it’s super-cool to see you again and thanks for coming.

Daniel: Thanks for having me. Really good to see you.

Origins

[02:39 ]

Mark: You as well. So like I mentioned a little while ago, your work is very interesting and inspiring and every time we talk I leave the conversation feeling like not only do I have a little bit more knowledge but like for more some reason a couple more connections have been made. Like my consciousness, just by the expansiveness of the conversation has actually grown a little bit. I think that’s fascinating. Your brain doesn’t work the same way… I keep saying that your brain doesn’t work the same way as most people’s. How did you evolve as a human being? Like, where did Daniel come from? Besides the DNA part and the moment mother’s womb part. Where did you come from? What were your influences? What helped you become who you are today?

Daniel: When you talk about connecting different areas, and then the kind of interconnected worldview, being able to do transdisciplinary and kind of interdisciplinary work I had a really fortunate really head start which is that I was homeschooled growing up. And my parents were kind of educational theorists and they want to run an experiment…

Mark: You were the experiment of one…

Daniel: Exactly

Mark: n equals 1.

Daniel: And the experiment was if you give the kid no curriculum at all, and expose them to as many topics as possible, see what they’re interested in and facilitate the interest. See what happens.

Mark: Is that like un-schooling?

Daniel: Un-schooling is similar to that idea, but it didn’t exist when I was growing up. So when I was a kid I didn’t have a certain amount of math, social studies, English, right? I never… I actually still have illegible handwriting… I didn’t do all the letters. I never learned state capitals.

Mark: Can you string a sentence together? I’m pretty sure you can.

Daniel: I can string a sentence together. But there were just areas I wasn’t called towards, but I was fascinated by all the sciences. And one of the neat things was because there weren’t subject divisions, I didn’t…

Mark: You didn’t have to vertical eyes them and compartmentalize them like a normal student.

Daniel: Took physics and chemistry and biology and astrophysics explaining how the Adams got created that are in our body within the kind of biophysics of how the human organisms work. It was all interconnected.

It was all interconnected also with the philosophic systems that gave rise to why this universe work that way. And so growing up that was…

Mark: Were you thinking about those things as a, like a seventh grader? Or ninth grader or something?

Daniel: Much earlier as one of the other parts of my early education was activism. And so it was like all the philosophic traditions, all the sciences, and all the areas of activism, that was the braid of my early experience. And so activism was, animal rights were, environmental work, social justice work, and so I got to see the worst parts of the world and most the most extreme unnecessary kinds of suffering.

Mark: Were you parents traveling around a lot? Were you being traipsed around the world to do this activist work?

Daniel: Some of that. But we didn’t have to go that far to find factory farms. And then as I got a little bit older I did go to them International, frontline work but getting to start to really dive into the metrics of ocean acidification, and product biodiversity loss, and climate change, and species extinction in the causes for those things.

Interdisciplinary activism

[05:54 ]

One of the things that was really devastating for me early was because I was working a lot of across a lot of areas, I would see that there was a specific area… we’d be working on a certain organization’s, first one that really hit me wasn’t if elephant poaching project. And the solution to do decreased the poaching at that particular area was putting up big offenses around the preserves, to keep the poachers out, and increased sentencing for poaching. Which, after huge amounts of work, it finally worked. And the elephant poaching did go down in that proceeding particular preserve.

But the problem was the poverty of the people that had no solution other than poaching. The mindsets of people toward seeing animals as commodities, the economic system that created poverty in the first place… Like none of that could change.