Overcoming Existential Risks by Redesigning Civilization with Daniel Schmachtenberger

Daniel Schmachtenberger joins Matt Ward on the FringeFM podcast to discuss how we overcome existential risks by redesigning our civilization. 

In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including:

• How Daniel thinks about civilization design and fixing current political and economic problems
• The importance of systems thinking in an age of interconnectedness
• Why humanity is destined to destroy itself if we can’t fix our incentive structures
• How exponential technology impacts existential risks of our species
• Why the governments of today are not set up to handle the challenges of tomorrow
• The Uber-ification of society and how it could save us
• How to achieve abundance for all by rewriting our society
• Why scarcity is such a destructive force
• The problems with profits and ways to change capitalism
• Why Daniel is worried about exponential technology
• How functional medicine and nutrient-based therapies have transformed Daniel’s life

Daniel Schmachtenberger is the co-founder and director of Research and Development at the Qualia, where he is focused on developing processes and technologies for advancing medicine and human optimization and hosts a podcast exploring those topics.

Daniel is particularly focused on personalized medicine, adequate approaches to complex illness, and deepening our knowledge of how the human regulatory systems function, how they break down, and how they can be supported to function with greater resilience and blogs at civilizationemerging.com

Growing up home-schooled, Daniel had early exposure to design science (Buckminster Fuller, Jacques Fresco, Permaculture, etc.), systems science and complexity (Fritjof Capra, Stuart Kauffman, etc.), philosophy and psychology (eastern and western approaches), and activism (animal rights, environmental issues, social justice, etc.) His passion has always been at the intersection of these topics – specifically, facilitating the emergence into a mature civilization – that can prevent otherwise impending catastrophes, remediate existing damage, make possible a radically higher quality of life for all sustainably, and support greater realization of our individual and collective potential.