In my previous post, I point out some problems with Eric Weinstein’s perspectives (many of which* I wildly disagree with). His guest, Daniel Schmachtenberger, however, is a genius who should either be running everything, or helping us all learn how we might actually survive the attempt to establish ‘Game B’, a plan for getting humanity to a new rung of our social, relational, economic and environmental evolution without wiping everything out in the process.

Here he explains both a few facts, and the actual answer to Eric’s initial presentation/question that precedes their discussion:

“So I don’t think that we can keep running a exponential capital expansion but I’ll make a simpler argument. Capitalism and nationalism — but feudalism is also an example — are rival risk game-theoretic structures. Some in-group competing against some out-group.

And we can play coordination games where we’ll coordinate with each other if it’s more advantageous — but we reserve the right to defect and go zero-sum on each other if that’s more advantageous…

And we have been employing more and more powerful technology to play rival risk games. That means more and more potent warfare more and more potent extraction — environmental extraction — and more and more potent information tech that can do narrative and information warfare — narrative control.

Something else I’ll say is that rival risk game dynamics necessarily are causing some harm in the system. Either I’m harming you directly, you’re harming me, or we’re externalizing harm to a Commons — an information or an ecological Commons.

You can’t keep externalizing harm exponentially, and so rival risk game dynamics multiplied by exponential tech end up self terminating. We can’t do exponential warfare, exponential extraction or exponential disinformation — and we’ve already gotten so far with exponential disinformation that we almost can’t make sense of anything because you have a system that, in a sense… IS disinformation.”

*Particularly that physics (leading to advanced space travel) is the way out of this problem (escape the world), A return to above-ground nuclear testing (in order to scare us straight), etc.