Neurohackers Advice on What We Must Do to Stop the End of Civilization | Daniel Schmachtenberger

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with Daniel Schmachtenberger. And dude, you were the guy that showed up on my feed when I started researching the end of the world, uh which is a pretty fascinating thing to become known for. And I'm super curious, how did you you you've touched so many different things from the Neurohacker Hacker Collective and self-optimization and actually creating businesses? How did you end up getting so deep into civilizations and how they fall apart? What a good civilization is and how to improve things in our world, I would say was my interest since I was young and kind of the center line. So, how to improve How young are we talking? I was very fortunate to be homeschooled growing up and homeschooled in a way that's closer to what people would call unschooling now. I didn't have a fixed curriculum. So, I got to study what I wanted and so, seeing the things that seemed like the biggest problems in the world and finding out why are these things like this was actually what got to be my curriculum. So, very Now, are were you taught by your parents or did they have give you access to actual teachers? My parents facilitated and sometimes I'd go to a public school or private school for a while, but they were very actively engaged in how I was processing the information. And then other times finding tutors and other times just working with books. It was before internet, so couldn't Wikipedia things, but we could certainly use books and encyclopedias and and fortunately What was their logic? Did they not like school? They um didn't think it was going to be a good education. What was the the reasoning? Yeah, they they were kind of educational philosophers intuitively and had the sense that kids ask lots of questions. They have a deep curiosity and school mostly doesn't facilitate their questions. And so, when the kid asks, "Why is the sky blue? And why is fire hot? And what are emotions?" And whatever questions they ask, they're actually very deep questions that if you want to address why is the sky blue, there's atmospheric science, there's understanding the wavelengths of light, there's understanding the nature of our solar system and astronomy and what a sun is, and then there's the neuroscience and optics and eyes, and there's like a lot that goes into it that naturally starts to unfold that helps people understand a lot of topics and also in an interconnected rather than fragmented way if you follow the curiosity, but most parents and also most teachers don't know how to answer those things. And so then I was going to ask like how how did your parents answer that? Like if my kids asked me it another that I have kids keep in mind, but if my kids were to ask me a question that I didn't know the answer to, I'd be like yeah, let's get you to public school real fast cuz I don't want to keep answering these questions. So did one of your parents stay home? Yeah, both of them worked to work from home as much as they could to be pretty available. And um if they didn't know the answer, then it was let's go see how to figure that out. And so that would be, you know, going to the library and pulling out cards to find the right book, pulling out encyclopedias. Also something even better was them asking me why do you think it might be? How do you think it might be? So my answer was not instantly just defer to outside authority. It was to take the interest and facilitate my own thinking on it, but then to not just stay there cuz the answer I had come up with might be totally gibberish, but to investigate. So it was facilitating interest and facilitating the process of learning how to deepen the knowledge and deepen the interest as it goes. And of course, as you learn some things you become aware of how much other adjacent stuff that's interesting you don't know is. And so if you do that and you don't force the kid to focus on and memorize stuff with fear of punishment that they have no interest in, then you don't break their interest in life, and you actually facilitate deepened interest, and people tend to become good at things they really care about. That yeah, that is a powerful thing. When I think about part of getting good is building desire, and if you can capitalize on something that you're already on fire for, um and I've heard you talk about this in the the perspective of how you create that next civilization, you likened it to an iPhone. It's like, you don't have to convince people to get excited about technology. Like, it works and it brings some benefit to your life and so people just adopt things that they're really into. Um I'm super curious though, you I think you have a brother, right? Or by coincidence, there is a guy on the board of one of your companies with the exact same last name. Um is it just the two of you or are there more? So, how what's the age difference? He's 3 years younger. So, how did your parents handle that? Was he just sort of forced to come up to your level? Did they split it up and talking to one of you at one time and the other at another? Like I said, they had kind of intuitions about uh things that were wrong with society that related to how we developed humans and that kind of was a sense of how to do education differently, how to do parenting, how to do family differently, but it was very experimental. They actually called our family a guinea pig four. There were four of us and it was an experiment. Um and it didn't have the benefit of studying Montessori and Waldorf and lots of other systems that had figured some things out. So, there were a lot of um mistakes that could have been prevented, but there were there was also the the benefit of they were in their own kind of authentic inquiry and interest. Um it happened that my learning style innately worked with what my parents knew how to do better than my brother's did. And so, he had a bit of a rougher go because I think they expected his path to be more similar to mine and it took a little while for them to figure out that he had a very different set of interests and learning style. He ended up excelling at entrepreneurialism and political activism and things that were not my areas of focus, um once he kind of figured that out. Do you have kids? I don't. So, that would have been interesting to see like how you handled that. Have you given a thought to how the way that you came up and the fact that it wasn't crushed out of you could be systematized and could be something that could be rolled out? thought about that quite a lot, of course. So, what is that in terms of the ideal school system? What does that look like? I think it's less to think about it as an ideal school system and as a civilization cuz by the time the kid goes to school, they've already been profoundly imprinted. Right? By the time they're five or six years old and they're going to first grade or kindergarten or whatever it is they start, they've already fully learned the language in which they think and all of the ways that that language predisposes patterns of thought. They've already learned the beginning of uh emotional dispositions and social values and lots of things. And then, obviously, if the educational system has to prepare kids for the workforce, um so we think about economics as it is, then it has to do certain things that are not necessarily what would make them the healthiest, happiest people if it's preparing them for workforce. Um as the workforce changes through technological automation and uh peak resource issues of the planet and AI automation and other things like that, obviously, the role of education gets completely recontextualized. So, instead, if you were to ask, "How would we redesign civilization from scratch that included the thing we call education, but also we mostly evolved in small bands and villages where we didn't just have two parents that were influencing us, we had a whole crew of people that we had pretty deep connections with, sub Dunbar kind of connections. Is even the nuclear family within a very large uh city, metropolis where you don't know hardly anyone else, but have interactions with lots of people and then the mostly have huge numbers of superficial interactions via online social media platforms. Like, is that how What does that do to develop humans? So, this question of ontological design, we build environments, whether it's schools or economic systems, and the nature of the incentive of economics, right? As long as my ability to as long as the forest I go and enjoy the forest gives me no economic advantage, but if I cut it down and commoditize it, it gives me a lot of economic advantage, the economic system itself, the perverse incentive in the economic system is conditioning value systems in people. And whoever does better at getting the value systems that go along with the economic incentive system will end up getting more power within the system and thus continuing to evolve the system in the direction that benefits them and the other people do well with it. So, if you think about Let me Let me ask you so that I can make sense of the world view. So, um everything that gets designed has a goal in mind. So, um when you first started talking, I thought that your punchline is going to be sort of happiness, um health of the individual. Is that accurate or is it more the perpetuation of the species is your if you had to say a highest value, um would it be that a happy and healthy populace that, um you know, like imagine the the movie, um was it Children of Men, where there are no more kids and so population is is basically the world is just ending because they're not able to procreate anymore. But imagine that, but it was like everybody was having a great time right until the moment they died, or a civilization where people are not exactly loving life, but we find a way to get in balance with resources and we're able to go on and on and on. Which of those to you is um better? I think you set it up to make it obvious that those are both gibberish desires. Um that a civilization that is in an enduring hell like Well, I won't go that far. I'm I'm really trying to find the perfect way to ask a question where I can find out if it's more meaningful to you to find a way to continue on. And so cuz I'm I'm looking for what to optimize for and you can optimize for continuation, you can optimize for happiness. You obviously, I would assume want to do both, but I'm trying to I find it's it is very edifying when you force people to um force rank things so that you can't have sort of two number ones um because I I I now have spent enough time in your world and sort of where you go. I know sort of the the ending points of some of the arguments, um but I'm super curious as to what is the the big driver for you in terms of how you think about um waking up in the morning and constructing a civilization. Optimization theory itself is one of the underlying problems. This is actually super important, so indulge me a moment here. Yeah. If we do the thing you call stack ranking, which is an idea that comes from computer science. If I think about computers and I'm stack ranking trying to optimize things in a software system. That software system is a complicated system as opposed to a complex system and I'm going to define those formally the difference. The software and the hardware it runs on didn't self-organize. Right? We didn't get spontaneous self-organization of hydrocarbons into protocells and cells. We got somebody did the lithography to make the computer chips and there's a blueprint for the hardware and a blueprint for the software. In a complicated system, you'll notice like this computer and the software doesn't repair itself if it gets harmed. It doesn't self-evolve. And the phase space of all the things it can do are fully explicated and it has formal causation. If I hit this key, this will happen, necessary and sufficient causation. In complex systems like biology, there isn't a blueprint. The genome isn't a blueprint. It's a generator function to code new proteins under new environments where you can have it do things that it's never done before if you expose it to a novel pathogen or a novel environment, right? So, a generator function and a blueprint aren't the same thing. The in a in a complex system also, it does self-heal and self-repair. It does also self-evolve. It's a It's different in type. So, optimization theory from complicated systems, the metaphor where we thought our mind was a clock when we figured out clocks. Before that, Native Americans might have thought of the mind as an ecosystem, right? But then we got a clock. Now we know the mind is a computer. So, we pick whatever the metaphor that we're operating with is, but where the metaphor's wrong, it really [ __ ] stuff up. And so, it can give you some very partial insights and also some really dreadful differences. So, the definition of a complex system is that it has some emergent properties beyond what any complicated model of it assumes that the complicated model doesn't show. So, basically, if I take a cell and I try to model it, right? So, I try to make a software program for how that cell works. The cell will do some things that that model doesn't do, and as I keep making the model better, it'll keep doing some things that the model doesn't do. That's what we call an emergent property, right? So, what that means is if I make a model cuz the my model of reality isn't reality. That's the first verse of the Tao Te Ching, right? The The Tao that is speakable is not the eternal Tao. My model of the thing isn't the actual thing. So, if I think the model is the thing and then I try to optimize for the model, where the model and the thing are different, I actually destroy the real thing. Can you put that into real-world example? Yeah, I make a economic calculus. I make an economic system for humans or these rational self-serving agents, and they follow specific supply and demand uh economic models and laws. I can get more advanced things to be able to look at the laws of how they'll deal with things like derivative, like Black-Scholes, whatever, but they're basically simple mathematical laws, and say, "Here's how we optimize maximum productivity and generativity for everyone." And they don't work, right? Like they kind of work and then they also lead to environmental destruction, which wasn't part of the metric set. So, this is where I'm why I'm trying to get you to stack rank things, which is interesting that for you that's where it breaks down. For me to understand what you mean when you say it doesn't work, I have to understand what you're trying to optimize for. So, once I understand cuz I I in the beginning when I first started diving into you, I thought, "Okay, this is about optimizing for what all sort of round to human well-being. But, I think there's an important caveat in there, which to you it it is sort of beyond critical and and I think the whole meaning and purpose for you is that as long as it is um not a hell, that continuation is is a critical thing that you that is sort of behind every word that you say. But, I'm not sure I'm interpreting that right. Okay. So, let's say that we're maximizing for subjective happiness decoupled from objective measures. And so, we're going to find some types of states that we can subjectively report on. Well, then the matrix might actually be the best way to optimize for it. Right? Disconnect from any kind of objective reality outside of brain stimulus and just brain stimulate the [ __ ] out of the dopamine ergic response and say, "Great, we optimized for human happiness." Um and I don't think anyone actually thinks that's a maximally meaningful world. Or if we say maximize for the happiness at the individual level, well, some individuals might be sadists and really get off on hurting lots of other things. If we say maximize for continuance, a continuance that is really shitty, it's like, "Why?" What is meaningful about life that you would want to have continue? So, what you're what I hear that you're trying to ask is what is fundamentally meaningful? What is if we cannot I won't use the word optimize, but if we can act in ways that benefit different things. We can say optimize, but what you're going to end up saying is that it's not optimizing a single metric. Let me Let me actually make that clear. Let's say that I value the life of rhinos and I don't want them to go extinct. And then I also value the life of coral and I don't want it to go extinct. But I also value kids that I don't want to starve in the third world and I also value um subjective happiness of poets. Now, how many dead rhinos are worth how much dead coral are worth how many dead kids are worth how much lack of happiness are worth how many tons of CO2? How do I commensurate those metrics to then be able to say what my optimization algorithm is going to optimize for? I have to do some kind of weighting. And then I say, "Well, but in the context where the rhinos get below a certain number, they're worth more. But then when they get above a certain number, they get Oh, but then I didn't even account for all these things, these soil microbes without which everything dies, and I didn't even account for them in this system. Now I got to bring soil microbes into it. And then I didn't account for the fact that subjective reporting will have these biases or miss these things or orient towards addiction." So, whatever my optimization set is, there will be things that matter that are outside of it that I have to continuously bring in. So, the optimization is for the evolutionary integrity of the whole or wholeness itself, which is different than how we think of theory of optimization. So, do we care about people's subjective experience? Yes. We also care about objective metrics of the quality of their life, like longevity and physical health and things like that. Yes, also care about that. Do they correlate one for one? No, there are some very happy people who are crippled, and there are some very physically able people who are miserable. There are some people who are happy who make other people miserable. Um and so and do we care about just individual quality of life or also the relationships? What about happiness versus evolutionary rate? What if we could be happy but stagnate versus evolve quite quickly but never enjoy the things we're evolving to. And we all have this in our own life, right? Like if do I want to be bettering myself but in a way where I'm bettering myself because of the driver that I'm a piece of [ __ ] who's never enough so I always have to get better, but I never actually enjoy any of it. Or do I accept myself in a way that makes me complacent? Well, obviously neither of those. I want to enjoy what is fully and have my love of life have me want to keep growing. Not because of a dysfunctional driver, right? So, I'm optimizing for if anything the product of the dialectic of my experience of life now and my ability to experience life more deeply into the future. Now, if I take both sides, I say I want to in I want to be able to enjoy the beauty of life as fully as I can now. I also want to be able to add to the beauty of life for other people. I also want to deepen my capacity to experience the beauty of life and add to it. Being, doing, and becoming. And then you say, how do we optimize for a virtuous cycle between the modes of being, doing, becoming individually and collectively? Now we start to get in the right direction. So, basically this [ __ ] is complicated. So, when I think about um so, you I don't know how much you think of yourself as being tied to game B, but certainly your name comes up a lot with um this whole idea of game B. It'd be great if you can quickly sort of break down what game A is, what game B is, and then what I find interesting is, okay, can what one it do we believe it to be conceivable that we can actually construct realistically game B by putting systems or whatever it is that's going to be in place there. Um but first I think people have to understand what it is and then we can go down the road of that conversation. So, um if you don't mind really fast, what's game A, what's game B? The term game B was coined by um Jordan Hall and the Weinsteins and Jim Rutt and a number of other people that were brought together at Santa Fe Institute back in the day to think about a new civilization that had fundamentally new and better characteristics. And so in contradistinction to the idea that this thing, which is obviously the US civilization today and 100 years ago in the US versus Chinese civilization are different, but that they're all part of a meta system that has certain system dispositions like environmental destructions happening across the whole thing. Wealth inequality is happening across the whole thing. So game A is basically the idea of game theory, individual people, individual corporations, individual races, nations, whatever competing against each other in ways that maximize their benefit as much as they can even if it harms or externalizes harm to other players or the commons. So roughly game A is the civilization that emerges dominated by game theory. Game Which is basically what we're living in now. Right. And there was a recognition and I wasn't part of that crew. I made friends with them after they actually disbanded that thing and then it kind of recycled and I was working on similar things in a different context. Um So game B is the idea what would the game be? What would the kind of game dynamics or how people show up and play of a game that doesn't orient towards self-termination? So we'd have to unpack a bit why we would say game A does intrinsically self-terminate. What are the properties about it to say what would categorical solutions to those look like? Yeah, so um I don't know. I'll I'll answer the question at least as I understand it. Basically you have a world with finite resources where you are incentivized. Um so whaling is a great example I've heard you use before. If you capture that whale then you can sell it, you can monetize it. If you it has basically value to take it out of the ocean has zero value in the ocean. And even if you were to say, "No, no, no, I want to live in the world where the whale stays in the ocean." There's somebody else who goes, "Huh, all right, [ __ ] I'm going to go get the whale then." So, now it's like you're going to lose the whale anyway, so you might as well be the one that takes it. And in a world of infinite resources, you could actually get away with that, but in a world of finite resources, as you say it it ends itself eventually. So, you will run out of resources. Specifically because it's not that me seeing the whale in the ocean doesn't provide any value to me that I call value. I might feel a sense of awe seeing it, right? I might feel a sense of interconnectedness or beauty or whatever it is. But that doesn't increase my game theoretic capacity to do anything. I can't extract and exchange that value, that experiential value. But if I kill the whale and I sell it as meat and I get that money that I can then go buy weapons or building materials or employ people with, that actually increases my power. So, there are kinds of value that are extractable and exchangeable, extractable, accumulatable, exchangeable that increase power. And there are types of value that are appreciable, but don't increase power. So, those who orient to the power increasing value end up getting more power and then dominating the system dynamics. So, then that creates a race to do that thing because like you said, if I don't kill the whale, I I I I'm not protecting the whale cuz somebody else is going to kill the whale. Now, those guys might actually be my enemies and use that increased economic ability cuz they're going to feed more people, their population is going to grow, and then they're going to come kill us in war. So, actually for my own security, not only do I have to now kill the whale, I have to race to get them faster than that guy because now we're in a growth race. Which also means I'm going to advance whaling technologies to be able to take way more than I need, grow my population base, start exporting to other population bases so that I can get the optionality of money to build other kinds of things with. And so, what we end up getting is being able to see the industrialized fishing mechanisms that we have operating today that can fish more fish in a single net than maybe all of human history could in a year, you know, at previous points of human history. And it's like the that kind of arms race multiplied by the ability to keep increasing the tech. And when everybody increases the tech, whether it's military tech, you build an AI weapon, I have to build AI weapons and counter AI weapons, or I lose by default. And then I have to try to get an advantage on you cuz you probably have some advantage you're trying to get that is secret. So I have to spy on you. I have to lie to your spies and hide the stuff and have to try to keep advancing it. But when you're advancing your weaponry and so am I and I'm advancing it relative to you, you're advancing on the base of what exists, you get a compounding curve, which is an exponential curve. And we've only recently started to get to the verticalizing part of that curve. It started to go steep with the industrial revolution. And then it started to go very steep with the information kind of revolution. So we're just in that phase of what has really been a process that started since stone tools. It was just a very slow curve in the stone tools thing for a long time. And now it is in the quickly verticalizing. So the thing is when you look in nature and you see, "Well, animals compete." They don't increase their competitive capacity rapidly or irrespective of each other. Right? The tiger can't just become way better at hunting. Um it has a pretty fixed killing capacity. And it can only get better through natural selection, which is a pretty slow process. But the key is that it's a slow process that is evenly distributed across the whole forest. Because the things that lead to gene mutation in the tiger also lead to gene mutation in the deer. And the slightly faster tiger that eats the slightly slower deer makes the better genes, the faster genes in the deers inbreed together. And so everything steps up together very slowly and the whole environment does. What happened with stone tools is humans were able to increase our predative capacity way faster than the environment could increase its resilience to it. And so we could start extincting species and devastating whole environments, turning them to desert and moving on. That was the beginning of something very different. So when we think of social Darwinism, where we try to model ourselves as apex predators. We're just not [ __ ] apex predators. Apex predator theory doesn't apply because an orca can kill a tuna at a time and it misses most of the time. We can pull up 100,000 of them in a fishing net at once. And so, since the orca can't destroy it whole ecosystems and we can, if we keep modeling ourselves with apex predator theory and having to exponentially increase our destructive capacity, exponential destruction, whether in the form of extraction, pollution, or military destruction, or disinformation, when you start getting into the space of being able to win through information warfare, ends up destroying the commons. One thing I want to I want to put a fine point on that you just said that I I've heard you say this before and I've missed until just now is what's causing that ever escalation is because you're doing that in concert with people who are essentially your enemies. So, like with AI, it it almost certainly will be a winner-take-all game because if somebody can beat you by a month and for a computer that's like 100 years worth of learning, um, you can see how just being the first is they're going to be the victor. And so, now you've got the sort of ever escalating desire to either protect yourself or to monetize and thusly the tragedy of the commons. Um, so, this is part of the reason that I was trying to figure out sort of what you value most because for me everything comes down to if you want if you want to build a business, I will speak in those terms, which I understand very well. You have to have a goal. You have to know what you're trying to accomplish. And the clearer the goal, the more likely you are to hit it. And if you don't have a clear goal, then you're just sort of steering by a vague sense of what you want to accomplish and it's going to become very difficult. But there are what I call the physics of being human and the what I'm obsessed with is humans are a certain kind of way. They're you're having a biological experience. Your brain is a certain way. It processes data in a certain way. And whatever you do has to align with the reality of what humans are like. And so, going to game B and thinking about constructing that and building something, it's like, when you were describing how interconnected everything is, how complicated it is, um it really gives me pause about like thinking about Jesus, man, to really do something, it is going to be it's going to be really [ __ ] difficult. And when I when I go back through and look at the people that were a part of the game A game B conversation, it's like, I'll be very interested to see if ideas keep coming out and they're iterative and we find a way to actually migrate to an entirely new approach. I mean, it would be a new financial system. It would be new architecture at every conceivable level of society. And my first question is, what are we aiming at? Like, what what is it that we're I I I want to say optimize, but I know that that um trips something that I don't fully understand yet. Uh but what are we steering towards? I can give you a very concrete set of examples that will make this make more sense. Let's take COVID and say when we're the CDC or the White House or the WHO or whatever institutions are trying to respond competently to it. What should our goal be? What are we trying to optimize for? Well, let's say we pick the goal of optimizing for the least deaths from COVID. Okay, so we will um definitely institute quarantines and contact tracing and uh a bunch of things that will decrease total transmission. Well, there's a chunk of that that we did that led to the breakdown of the supply chains for food. And we're still in the middle of that rolling catastrophe and the news cycle has moved on to other parts of the rolling catastrophe, so we aren't paying attention to it. But when we wanted to stop travel because the virus can travel with stuff, right? Well, that meant that we stopped the the shipment of pesticides to areas that completely depend upon pesticides for their agriculture. So, Northern Africa and um parts of the Middle East got covered with the worst locusts in recent history because they didn't have pesticides and they lost a huge amount of crop. We stopped the flow of fertilizer to places in India and other areas that make the food supply for hundreds of millions of people and they lost crops. We also stopped the ability to ship food from where they were to where they need to get. So, huge amounts of them just rotted. We were actually culling animals, right? Killing thousands of pigs and millions of chickens and whatever when people are going hungry in other parts of the world because we couldn't send them to McDonald's if people aren't going to McDonald's. We didn't know how to supply chain route them on the other side. And so, we just were dealing with no change in demand, no change in supply, and a complete break of the food system, right? Now, we damaged the food system in a way that pertains to about 2 billion people. Woah. COVID could have never killed that many people. So, if we're optimizing for don't let like the least people die from COVID, we can destroy the world. Or, we mhm So, that's the example of what I'd call a second order effect, right? The It wasn't the or an unintended consequence or externality. The The solution that we implemented to a narrowly defined problem or optimization goal caused a worse problem. So, when we define our goals in very narrow ways, like make maximum amount of money from the thing I can do the whaling and destroy the ocean, right? But, is that what you hear me saying? Because I'm not I I'm not saying it needs to be narrowly defined. I'm saying what is like what is that as as somebody who is really [ __ ] thoughtful about this topic, how do you think about those second order consequences, third order consequences, like that crazy biome of interconnected things. Now now that how do we think about the interconnectedness? How do we think about not one thing that matters but all the things and the relationships between them? And then think about how to make not just individual choices but whole complexes of choices that benefit all those things and the relationships is how we start to think about it properly. And it's a much higher level of complexity of thinking. So when I think about uh COVID goal think okay, well we want to minimize the total number of COVID-related deaths. All right. But there are people who can die and recov- I mean there are people who can get it and not die but have permanent disabilities in terms of damage to heart or lung or kidneys or whatever. We'd also like to do something with that. Preventing ICU overwhelm was actually a really critical goal before prevent total number of deaths because the death spike would go up radically. So you have to think about upstream ones versus downstream ones. But then we start to think about okay, let's make sure that in doing that we don't damage other things significantly. So when people are on quarantine, how much does domestic violence go up? What happens to addiction patterns for kids who don't have school and just have 6 months of solid screen time? What happens to an economy where we you have 40 million jobs that go that are lost. Now we see a lot of violence. We always see more violence. Whether it was systemic racism as the trigger or other triggers. When people see more violence when people are out of work. Yeah. Right. So aren't being met by a system, they don't stay complacent with the system that's failing them. So if you think of this is like four or five dimensional chess, like where where is the human animal's capacity to deal with this? Like are we actually going to be able to get people to think in that many ways? We're already failing to do it with COVID. Um do you think that that is when I go back to the physics of being human, I begin My hypothesis is I'm not sure. I'm not sure that we'll be able to I take a I take a very optimistic view of most things, but on that one woo, building a brand new civilization without people first having to suffer a level of intolerability seems tough. Seems tough to get them to to believe the things that they would have to do to leave the whale in the ocean or whatever, you know, example we're going to use. Um do you have thoughts around how we give a simple enough narrative that people can latch on and understand, okay, cool, I get what we have to do here? For the most part we aren't even trying to think about second or third order effects currently. Like it's not even a thing we try to do. Do you think nobody's thinking about it or that people aren't listening cuz it's not sexy? Like when I think about what's going on right now, so with everything that was shaking down with um the death of George Floyd and how everything sparked off that, I started like really looking into it. I didn't want to just say some [ __ ] to say [ __ ] Like I wanted to actually understand like really truly what's going on. So I end up seeing this discussion about the difference between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And now Martin Luther King Jr. had a meta narrative which was religion, it was about unity, but he was measured and I mean he was very passionate obviously when he spoke, but it was like this sort of calming, soothing thing about bringing people together. Whereas Malcolm X was black power, there was energy, there was aggression, it was tapping into that anger that was right there below the surface. There was nothing counterintuitive about it, and so he was able to really get people motivated and rallied. And I thought that's interesting. Like when you think about human animus, there's something that pisses you off and it gives you the energy. I mean, literally, the world was burning last week and you gave people just a little bit of a justification to tap into that. There is something about tapping into that aggression, that level of animation. There's an intoxication to rage. And when you can even just nudge people a little bit into that, you get that. So, my thing is I hear people talking. You're talking about this crazy eloquently, but is it giving people that sexy level of animation to to to get visceral, to tap into something that's aggressive and and that feels so powerful? I think about the house that I'm in right now. It probably took about a year to build and I could take it down with a wrecking ball in minutes or fire. It takes 20 plus years to grow an adult human and kill him in a second. It's easier to break [ __ ] And the motivational complexes that break [ __ ] and the motivational complexes that figure out how to build complex things aren't the same. So, yes, there's power in Can you give me a little bit about what the motivations are? You You've talked very well about human motivations, status seeking. Like earlier when you mentioned power, I almost stopped you cuz I wanted you to actually define what is power? Why do we give a [ __ ] Um I think it would help people it would help me. I want to understand what is the difference specifically in those motivation types. I can't stay enraged for all that long. I mean, a certain amount of time. I can stay enraged long enough to break this house, but I couldn't stay enraged long enough for that to be the motivation to build it. That's [ __ ] yeah. And the rage wouldn't be the right frame of mind for me to learn the structural engineering to make the blueprints. Or to try to evolve metallurgy to be able to make bigger buildings that had better trusses. That requires a very different frame of mind that is doing planning over a longer period of time. And for the most part, the limbic process you're describing and the prefrontal process I'm describing are inversely proportional in the brain. The degree to which you're in one is the degree to which you're mostly not accessing the other. And so what kind of motives are useful for what kind of goals is an important question. And to the degree that we want to build things that have complexity long-term, we have to be able to access the places of our mind and capabilities that can think long-term and complexly. Can we nudge people in a direction? Okay, I That's actually a great question that I want to take in a slightly different place. Can we nudge people in a direction is a very interesting question. Which is so who is the we that would be doing the nudging and who is the people that some we is saying we want to influence them. We want to We want them to think and feel differently and change their behaviors for some goals we have that they may not have. Can How can we change their goals and change their behavior and manipulate their emotions? Do Do you want me to answer that question? Sure. So the this is exactly what I have given my life to, which is um I for a long time I tried to help my mother change. And my mother smoked my entire life, morbidly obese. She's amazing and I want her to live as long as humanly possible. And I as I say you can lead a horse water but you can't make them drink and then people say focus on making them thirsty and I'm like oh my god this is all amazing. Yes, I just need to make my mom thirsty. This is going to be amazing. Make her want change and I realized I can't. And now it may be that I just suck and I'm not able to find that thing in her. So it got me obsessed so I people that are that have followed me will have heard this many times forgive me but um I really I had at my last company I had a thousand employees and grew up hard as hell in the inner cities like [ __ ] crazy [ __ ] and shot in the my sister shot in the heart with an AK-47 in my front yard. I held my stepfather while he bled to death from a gunshot wound to the head. Another kid hid under a car while his best friend had to hold his intestines in from a point-blank range shotgun blast. I mean it's just story after story after story is insane. So I started thinking okay, how do I help them make change? Some people you can just tell them think like this act like this they do it it's radically transformative. It opens up avenues of learning and growth and and it's amazing. But I'll say that's about 2% of people at least with my skill level. 98% do not. They hear the information they may even get excited about it might be spiritual entertainment but they don't do anything. And so over the course of a month like I remember so many of them would show up to a book club not put on by me put on by other people. They would get amped up but then they wouldn't read the books they'd stop showing up. So it was just like it it it's just so short-lived. So I started asking myself the question no [ __ ] what would it take to give somebody a growth mindset even if they were antagonistic to a growth mindset. And I thought okay if I can solve for that which by the way I have not but if I can solve for that somebody who doesn't want to change not only doesn't they're not apathetic they're actively opposed to changing. If I can find the magic sequence of things of words of whatever to get that person to be like oh my god like I can actually do something I can learn I can express myself whatever but now I'm moving in a positive direction where before I was moving in a negative direction. So, it it is I have come to the conclusion with my desires and skillset that storytelling is the way to do that. So, I think a lot about nudging people. Like, how much can you shift the pop culture narrative in a non-sinister way, but to have a kid, so the more I looked into it, the more I realized, "Yo, I need to hit kids at the age of imprinting. I'm not talented enough to do this with adults that are truly antagonistic. But, if I can actually get somebody who is at that stage where they're a sponge, they're drinking things in, and I can introduce them to characters, ideas, thoughts, the way that Yoda led me to the Tao Te Ching, which I've heard you talk a lot about." I became obsessed, I self-identified as a Taoist, but all because of Yoda. So, it was like when I read the first page of the Tao Te Ching, I was like, "Oh my god, this is Yoda." So, it was like, I was so instantly connected to it. So, that has given me that obsession to be like, "Maybe you really can nudge people. Like, maybe you really can plant these ideas at the right time, and things from there will blossom." I don't know if I'm high on my own supply, or if that's actually real, but it gives me so much hope that that's why I'm keen So, I am the the sort of we of like I'm well-intentioned, but maybe there's a second or third order consequence, and I'm about to [ __ ] everybody up. I I'm very open to that. But, well-intentioned, the goal is to give an what I think of as an even playing field. I'm a game A person. I'm super open. I want somebody to show me there's a better way, but I'm I'm sort of locked in game A cuz I don't know any better. I'm I'm again happy to admit that that's just part of an evolution, and I'm stuck there. But, I'm I'm at game A trying to find a way to get more people to play game A well, in a way that is supportive and uplifting to other people. But, that is the we, and the people that are antagonistic are the they that I'm trying to nudge in a positive direction through story. Do you think the Chinese Communist Party wants to nudge the worldview of people in the US in particular directions? Yes. Through influencing media and what happens with social media? Yes. Do you think Russia does? Yes. Iran, Turkey, North Korea? Do you think they all want to assume the other? I would assume. Study Project Mockingbird, which was when the CIA started influencing Hollywood was when Hollywood started to become a very powerful force and it's like, "Oh, [ __ ] We need to make sure these memes do the right things and predispose particularly when the counterculture movement started to take off and there were parts of it that were dangerous to US interests because of people protesting against Vietnam and some of those ideas needed to be shifted. So, how do we use emotionally compelling things that use narrative because our evolutionary biology works with story well to be able to control humans for the purposes that we care about is a very ancient story. We just have much better tools to do it now. And I would say that narrative warfare, the war between controlling what people get emotionally riled up about so that they serve an agenda of whoever it is that's creating the narrative warfare and they don't even realize it and think it's their own agenda cuz they're being nudged, narrative warfare and memetic warfare and info warfare is the brunt of the unconventional warfare happening in the world. I would say that it's fair to say that today, and this is easier for people to hear today than it would have been 3 months ago, because cities are on fire in the places where we didn't expect cities to be on fire. And because the upcoming election in the US currently stands that no matter who gets elected a solid third of the population will think it was stolen. The Democrats are I'm freaked out by that, by the way. stealing it and the Trump supporters are set up to think the Dems are trying to steal it. So, whether anyone steals it or not, a third of the population will think it was stolen. So, what the [ __ ] happens from that? So, either you get massive violence or if you don't get massive violence, those who want to steal elections now know fully that they can with no repercussions. And how do we actually create the confidence both in the integrity of the elections and everyone knowing it when the information landscape is as fractured and the narrative landscape is as fractured as it is? Okay, so what I would say is that we are in World War currently. That's a bold statement. It's not a kinetic war. Meaning bullets. It's an unconventional war. Have Go Go read the doctrines on unrestricted warfare that uh Chinese Communist Party and PLA published or unconventional warfare that the US published. 99% of war isn't kinetic. It's economic warfare. It's narrative and info warfare. It's cyber warfare. It's political and diplomatic and supply chain um and trade warfare. And kinetic is kind of the last part that will back it up. Kinetic used to be a bigger percentage of the story than it is now cuz we didn't have powerful cyber attacks and we couldn't do narrative warfare as powerful as we can now because social media's just [ __ ] amazing for being able to control minds. Um detour on that. Social media will control minds and move people into war even with no one wanting it to. As I said Okay. So, if you haven't had the Tristan Harris on the show or discussed with him the issues around Facebook algorithms and Twitter and Tik Tok is even worse, you should, but I'll I'll the very brief version here. You go on Facebook, the total amount of info published on Facebook no one could ever possibly look at. So, your news feed you can scroll for a long time and not see it all and it represents almost no percentage of what's on Facebook. So, when you see Facebook and when I see Facebook, we think we're seeing the world. We're not seeing the world. We're seeing a very carefully curated AI algorithm curated world. Now, Facebook wants to expose you up front to enough of the things to see your likes and see your hover patterns of your mouse cuz once your mouse is hovered enough and once you've liked a couple hundred things, it can predict what you will like better than your spouse can. Jesus Christ. And it's important to understand that the kind of AIs that are optimizing the social algorithms are better than the AIs that beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Yeah, that's nuts. And he's so much better at chess than you are at at anything at controlling your own mind, right? And he knew he was at war and you don't even know when you're going on Facebook that it's not just a tool that you're using. It's an agent that wants to control you that's using you. And so what happens is its desire is to maximize the knowledge about you that it can sell to marketers. And to maximize your time on site that it can sell as attention to marketers. So, you will spend more time on site when your limbic system gets hijacked and when your prefrontal cortex that remembers your goals and you don't want to spend that much [ __ ] time on Facebook says engaged. So, the stuff that scares you and enrages you and elicits your greed and your horniness will make you spend more time on site than the things that make you think complexly about stuff. And so what ends up happening is people whatever it is that would emotionally get them, which appeals to their current biases, is what they get more of and they get driven in more extreme directions in all directions. So, the right gets more right, the left gets more left, and you get both antifa's and boogaloos coming out of it as the without any political goal at all. Really fast, I've heard people say Boogaloo, I don't know what it means. A a particular alt-right group that identifies accelerationists that want civil war in the US. They believe they're ready that they'll win, that it's eminent, and so they want to accelerate the movement towards civil war to get on with rebuilding the country. Why are they called Boogaloos? Long story. There's a bunch of names. Boogaloos, Hawaiian shirts, started as Big Igloo Boys, but um uh memes coming out of 4chan. Okay. But they go from 4chan to Facebook. Now um so it's important to understand that this algorithm that's happening on Facebook, it's also happening on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. Why'd you say that TikTok is the worst? As the social media platforms evolve they're evolving to be able to appeal to younger audiences more effectively in competing against the other one. So whatever is the most addictive that gets them to engage the most is what it gets optimized for. It on the supply side, right? If I have an MBA and I'm running a company, I know that I want to maximize the lifetime revenue of a customer. I also want to maximize the total number of customers. So multiple the number of customers multiplied by lifetime revenue is my desire. So on the supply side, there's nothing that would be better for me than addiction of my customers to my product. And then being able to make the widest population addicted possible, right? And this doesn't just happen with social media. This happened with fast food. Fast food is extract the most addictive things from food from an evolutionary perspective. Salt, fat, sugar, mix them together in the right combinations and with palatability, remove all the nutrients so that it doesn't even fill you up so you keep eating it and you you have what's called a hypernormal stimuli, right? You get a bigger dopamine hit from that than you ever would from a salad. And then the salad doesn't you get no joy from where you would have before because you're actually desensitizing to normal stimuli through normalizing hypernormal stimuli, which is why when you watch enough porn you can't eroticize with normal women, right? And so porn and fast food and social media and are all basically optimizing towards hypernormal stimuli because from a supply side it makes me more money. I maximize lifetime revenue when the people have to keep coming and getting a hit. And what will appeal to everybody? Well, social media knows that we're social primates and that we're lonely. And that what we want to spend all our time doing is looking at other people's faces. And like seeing other people and engaging and yet real interactions are vulnerable and difficult. So to be able to take the part of the interaction which is where I get a like on the thing I posted and I get to see the Photoshop versions of their faces and then other limbic hijacks and be able to optimize for that. Remove all the nutrients of actual authentic human interaction. That's what you get. And so each of the new platforms that has to emerge in the presence of the existing platforms has to offer some new hypernormal stimuli. Yeah, the social media is is something that So it's weird because I've built my business around social media. If you if you'll grant me I guess that YouTube falls into the social media category, um which is my primary focus, but that's rapidly become the only one that I really spend a lot of time on as just an individual. Um there is something about the way that it the the endless scrolling. Like if I do it enough, when I fall asleep I have this sense of like motion almost, but like a very disquieting sense of motion. Almost like a fever dream. If you've ever had a fever dream that just [ __ ] loops. So I was like, oh man, I can't I can't keep doing this. So yeah, that the What is happening to minds, especially of kids, with the change in social media, like I'm I'm always wary of being like, you know, the old fuddy-duddy who like, "Oh, kids today." But, when I the the thing that freaks me out, I want you to imagine a world with VR porn and a device that moves in conjunction with what you're seeing in the VR porn that of course is affixed to uh the more sensitive bits that you have. And when I think about I I'm not kidding, Daniel. I wouldn't have graduated high school. Certainly not with a GPA that I did. I I If my parents left, I would have had that out so fast. Like, the when you can construct uh different people, different partners every time that you go in, like, exaggerate um different features like uh peak shift, which I'm sure is something that you know about. Like, you can just peak shift something until it is dysmorphic, and your your brain is actually wiring to that thing. And when I think about like one of the recommendations that I have for couples, if you want like so my wife and I've been together almost 20 years. And my recommendation to couples is always, "Yo, you need to have more sex." I can just tell you right now. Like, if you want a a good long-lasting relationship, the neurochemistry, that cocktail that you get from intimacy is crazy. But, if you've been living in a VR world that is like your brain has wired to it. It is normalized to it. And then so that was the first one that I sort of put my finger on and was like, "Ooh, I'm glad I don't have kids cuz that one really [ __ ] scares me." Like, hey parents, I used to joke like all the time with people that I knew that had kids. Like, "Man, when your kid's 14, this [ __ ] is going to get weird." Like, where technology is going, it is going to get weird. And if you don't think that there are repercussions for that, like, man, it it is That one's worrisome. But, now as I back into just social media in general and what what it must be like to be 12 or 13. I remember as a kid, if you were going to get um sort of gossip bullied, they might spray paint something on the bridge that we all drove under to get to school, and that was like the height of oh man, like you just got burned. But now that people can create an anonymous account and gang up on somebody at the school, that is so gnarly. You ever come across the term stochastic terrorism? Never. So, if you read Sun Tzu or you read the 36 stratagems or any kind of text on military theory, and it doesn't have to be Chinese, it can be anywhere. Uh get the enemy to weaken himself is always one of the high principles. And so, if you can see that there's internal dissent within a people or a culture or corporation or whatever, and you can increase that internal dissent, great, right? If the goal is to be able to win game A competitively relative to them because you're competing for the same scarce resources, whether it's global control or uh actual physical resources or whatever else. So, stochastic terrorism, you've got groups of people who are very disaffected, who find each other online in a 4chan group or an 8chan group or in a Facebook group or in a chat room of various kinds. And talk about um hating blacks or hating whites or hating police or hating whatever it is or hating the kids at school. Well, if I am a state actor or a non-state actor, jihad terrorist, or whatever, I can make fake sock puppet accounts, go in there and egg them on, right? Share more stuff that pisses them off and gets them upset, tell them what a hero they'll be if they do it. And it's what we call stochastic terrorism because I don't know exactly who will do what harm at what point, but I'm increasing the statistical likelihood that more people will do more harm. And if the goal is to be able to delegitimize the enemy or weaken them or whatever, that's so easy, right? That's so easy. It never used to be easy like that. As easy as that is, it's also easy for any intelligence agency to just watch where the groups of people that are talking about stuff are and be able to share more interesting stuff to see what people are thinking as honeypots for information sharing. So, the thing about the arms race is that the tools escalate, right? But we don't have even distribution of the use of those tools. And as a result, the total asymmetries get more severe. And the whole idea that this increased tech that right now I have a computer that gives me access to more information than presidents had 10 years ago if I know how to use Google searches and that my phone has supercomputing power if I use Amazon Cloud or that's mostly just silly. Because yes, it's true that that tech has decentralized capacity in a way. But nobody's using their phone to use Amazon Cloud for supercomputing capacities to do what groups do with supercomputers or not that many people are using that. They're just [ __ ] scrolling Facebook and getting their mind hijacked and thinking they believe things that they that they wouldn't believe otherwise, right? Or thinking or having emotions or whatever where they're being nudged for agendas other than what is good for them or And so, when there's so much information, right? Oh, these bricks showed up in the protest. Well, they were put there by the cops to uh incite people to riot so the cops could use violence. No, they were put there by the far right and to blame on Antifa. No, they were really put there by Antifa. No, they were put there by Soros. They were put there by Chinese agents. They were put there by organized crime. They were How do you [ __ ] make sense of it, right? So, you look at your speed and depending upon who you've curated, you get one of those things. If you try to do a good job, you'll get all of them. You'll get overwhelmed and bail, right? So, either you'll get limbically and cognitively hijacked into nonsense and be certain that it's true and be willing to go take that enraged action on it, or you'll just be overwhelmed and no idea. Um so, when there's so much info and so much disinfo and there's so much noise and so little signal, but the signal there is is disaggregated. I don't have all the signal in a place well aggregated for actionable intel. Access to info isn't what empowers you, the ability to info process, to parse the signal from the noise, aggregate the signal, have actionable intel. Well, people don't really have that equally. If you think about a top-tier quantitative hedge fund and their ability to do AI-empowered high-speed trading with information that comes from lots of private intelligence agencies and big data analysis and the ability to front-run other large ones with algorithmic warfare in dark pools on derivatives compared to your ability to understand the market and try to invest. We're talking about so many orders of magnitude difference that you have no ability at all to play their game. When I hear Ray Dalio talk about that and he's like, "Look, you're trying to to play a game that I'm spending hundreds of millions of dollars to play and you you can't win." And he I I've met him a couple times and he seems like sincere. Like, I really think he's trying to keep people from putting their hand on the stove and getting burned, but it's like he has that peak behind the curtain of just the like you said that that description he's living. So, my question becomes, how are you making sense of all this? Like, you're a just a ridiculously intelligent person. You can obviously process data um very very well. So, the average person maybe can't do exactly what you do, but I think it would be edifying to hear what you do. I would love to say things the average person can do. Perfect. Average person is a term that doesn't actually make any sense to me. I don't know average people, but something that anyone can start doing progressively more if they want to to understand the world better. And the preface for that is if my map is wrong and I'm trying to navigate, I'm not going to get good results, right? So, I my ability to make good choices is depends upon my values, what I think is a good choice, which you're asking about earlier, but also depends upon what I think the actual reality is and the state of play and then what I think the effects of particular actions will be. Does it do the thing I want? Does it invoke a counter response of the other side that is that I'm trying to do something against that's more intense? Does it create second and third order effects that are worse? So, like strategy 101, if you aren't factoring counter response, right? You have a goal, you whether it's Black Lives Matter or it's climate change, whatever. If you recognize that your goal is not shared by everyone and you aren't factoring counter response, you aren't doing strategy, you're just being emotionally hijacked into playing a game for reasons you don't even understand. Um if you aren't factoring second and third order consequences, you're probably making the world worse. And so, that all means you need to slow the [ __ ] down. Now, this doesn't mean inaction, it means the possibility of effective action. Now, feeling effective and being effective aren't the same thing. Truth. And so, people have to get off the addiction of wanting to feel effective and actually step back and say, "Wait, wait, do I even know where what I'm going towards? Do I understand the lay of the land? Do I understand the various forces and do I have a path that makes any sense at all?" So, our ability to do choice making well depends on our ability to sense make well, which is why controlling people's sense making is the heart of the war that's happening. And the forces that are So, this is an important thing in terms of narrative and info warfare. When you ask, "What is power?" Power in a game A sense is power over other people. And there's a lot of ways of getting it. Some are more evil than others. Slavery is a particularly bad example, but the economic servitude of I can employ you and when I'm employing you, you are an extension of my will. You are no longer doing your own will. That's still an example of how do I get power over people to enhance some goal that I have, right? And when we look at left, right, it's power of that political party to control as many people as possible to get them to vote away. So, there's the power over the left and right against each other and their power over their bases to then be able to have power as a nation over other nations and of classes over other classes and those types of things, right? Because ultimately, if I didn't have other people that could do [ __ ] on my behalf, I couldn't do that much stuff. Like if I have to make everything with my own hands, I can't do that much stuff. So, if I want to do more stuff, I'm looking at how do I get more people to to be able to do that. Okay. So, when we start to realize that rather than try to control people's behaviors directly, influencing what they feel and what they think and what groups they're engaging in that will ongoingly use groupthink to affect what they think and feel is a much more powerful way than the brunt of the warfare the power game becomes control the hearts and minds of people. Now, when you're talking about making more Yodas, you aren't trying to control the hearts and minds of people to do your bidding. You're trying to say, "How do I nudge them in a direction where they will become more sovereign and self-determining as opposed to become more part of my in-group?" So, what I would say is that that is trying to use the tools of power to actually make the game of power less pathological. Which is a legitimate thing to do and a good thing to do. Typically, the tools of power, if if I have asymmetric power over somebody else and I get a lot of benefit from that, I have the capacity because of that asymmetric power to continue to get more of it and I have the motive to. So, um any business is not just focused on providing the thing they provide, but increasing their capacity to do stuff. And some places that will be omni-positive and in some places it'll be driving externalities. We celebrate because we just cornered the market, which means we drove a lot of people out of business and they can't feed their kids and we manufactured demand for people to want [ __ ] that they didn't want before that doesn't actually make them happier. Now, I'm following all of your logic, but how do people um employ this to actually make sense that makes sense? Yes. Okay. Understanding these things already will help. That's why I was starting to bring it up. When you understand more about that the as much more capacity as the top-level economic players have than you, the top-level narrative players and information players also do and they're engaging in that, then you realize that people's minds are the battlefield and also the treasure that is trying to be achieved and also the weapons. Right? And so, it's important to be like, "Oh, wait, to what degree am I a sovereign self-determining agent? To what degree am I thinking I'm a sovereign self-determining agent that is actually being influenced in ways I don't even recognize?" Dude, this is scary, man. This is like some your mind has been hijacked and you are now acting in the interest of somebody else. I don't know why, but that just really hit me as you were explaining that. Like, are my ideas my own? Um there was a band back in the '80s called Queensrÿche and they were the first people that really got me to think uh critically. So, I definitely owe them a debt of gratitude. And they had this whole concept album around this guy that was controlling people's minds by basically getting them addicted and then helping them clean up, but then like, "Hey, I did this for you, so you're going to do this for me." It's really terrifying. When you couple that with what you were saying about social media and how you've been essentially groomed to push they've pushed you in a direction that you started, right? Depending on what you hovered over and what you clicked on. Like, some you're very involved in this process, but the them optimizing, right? Second and third order consequences, them optimizing for time on site, the ability to leverage you to a marketer, but to do that they're optimizing you in a very specific direction. And that that is allowing either bad actors, state actors, algorithms, whatever to hijack your emotions, your limbic brain to get you to do whatever. Like, that shit's scary. Like, when I think about the thing about what's kicked off with the riots, like protesting, I love I'm all for it. When it kicked off into like looking out my window and seeing things burning, it was like, that's where I go, "Okay, like you that [ __ ] that gets really scary really fast." And when you get into the weeds of like the complicated who's actually breaking the windows, who's actually setting the fires, and the the sort of swirl of very difficult to parse apart things presents itself to you, that's where like understanding how to begin to extract the information, how to learn about something that you don't know about. There was a lot of pressure to speak out. And I was like, "I'm not saying [ __ ] until I understand what's actually going on." And even just going into that and beginning to realize, "Okay, this is a big world, this is complicated, there's there isn't a party line like it's being presented. There are a lot of different thinkers across sort of every statement that's being made, there's somebody that disagrees with it quite vehemently. So, my strategy for that, and I'll be super curious to to hear what you think on this. So, I've got what I what we talked about earlier, the physics of being human. So, any any data point that I take in has to jive with what I know is true about humans and the way that humans act and think and process. And when I see people just repeating mimetic statements over and over and over, it's like, odds are that's not an original thought for you because you're just repeating the same thing. And then also, looking at both sides of the argument. So, it's like, I know how algorithms work because as a person with a YouTube channel like you have to understand how it works to make sure that your stuff is getting presented to people. So, you learn real fast what the algorithm likes, what it doesn't. You learn what the algorithm is using as a barometer of whether this is something that should be pushed out more. So, you pay attention to that stuff. So, I'm like, I know if I watch this type of voice, I'm going to get more of that type of voice. So, then you've got to actively seek out the other side. And there's been so many times where I'm like, "Whoa, like that's brilliant coming from, you know, side A." And then, "Whoa, this is brilliant coming from side B." And so, it's like, until I get a sense of like the edges, right? Okay, this is edge case over here, this is edge case over here. Now, I actually understand filtered through what I know to be true of the way that the human mind works, now I think I'm beginning to understand this thing and I can begin to sort of try out my own ideas. And that's what I do. Then the next thing, so I've taken in all this data. The next thing I do, and I I my poor family, one of the coolest things to come out of quarantine has been we now I do these weekly calls with different people and I try out ideas on them and I'm like, "Yo, this is how I'm thinking about this, what do you think?" And I begin to realize where, "Oh Oh I thought I understood this, but like my own logic is breaking down. And in having to articulate it, I realize sort of where the edges, you know, of my ignorance are. And that helps me then, okay, this is where I need to go research. I need to figure this out more. Um but I don't have a particularly um useful way of going, "Oh [ __ ] that was all false propaganda to begin with." Do you have a way of like are there certain outlets that you trust? How do you build trust? Maybe that's the easiest way. Trust around information. I would say that the idea that there are any authorities that I just trust enough that I can cognitively offload the process of coming to belief to them is not a real thing currently. And that if you think about legitimate authority, whatever is seen as legitimate authority, for a while it was the Christian church, or um government, or then uh the academies and the, you know, the great Ivy League institutions. And they're supposed to be the bastions of what is true. That's [ __ ] powerful. So everyone who wants power has maximum incentive to try to capture and co-opt legitimate authority towards their purposes. And so you start funding the research institutes to research certain things and not others. And even if So I can easily manipulate statistics to say most anything I want. I can cherry-pick data out of very large data sets to say everything's getting better, everything's getting worse, or whatever it is that I want to say. Um we can of course do false methodology and lie, but we can even have information that is totally true that is mis- representative and will guide people in the wrong direction. let's say I have a phase space of information that's all this information, but I'm intentionally only doing research on this area over here and publishing a bunch of research so the preponderance of data points to such and such because there was an uneven distribution of what got funded based on those dollars came from somewhere and they're seeking return on investment. And so certain things are going to be more useful a patentable pharma drug is going to get more research dollars than a plant-based nutrient that no one can patent to ever be able to pay the money back. So the preponderance of data will say nutrients don't work as well as pharma drugs do. It's But the preponderance of that is gibberish. Um in that particular case. And then also what metrics was it looking at? Well, it didn't cause any um negative side effects cuz we looked for these four side effects. Well, the body's pretty [ __ ] complicated. You can cause lots of side effects that are outside of those few you measured for. So as soon as you understand the process of legitimate authority having a maximum incentive to get co-opted, then you start understanding, okay, this idea that I can offload the cognitive complexity of the world to an authority where I can continue to have a childlike consciousness and find the parent who will tell me how the world is and what to do stops being a desirable goal. And the desire to take the responsibility to make sense, to increasingly make sense of the world myself. Now, that doesn't become solipsistic where I think I'm not going to pay attention to people who've spent a lot of time studying, but let's say I'm looking at COVID and I'm looking at the topic of viral origin. Did it come from a wet market, naturally zoonotically, did it come from gain of function research accidentally or intentional bio warfare? Or let's say I'm looking at conferred immunity. Will getting it confer immunity? So will reach herd immunity. Will getting it confer immunity for some people but not others or for a short period of time where we'll not actually create enduring herd immunity or will it create ADE, antibody-dependent enhancements, where then one of the normal coronaviruses will kill you next time you get it. Nobody knows. I can tell you from looking at the research, the answer to that is not known. And so all the stuff on Sweden's about to reach herd immunity or this or like is all just people overextending what could actually be known. So, one of the key things is being able to identify what things do we have high confidence on based on what process and what things do we not have high confidence and just acknowledging that? So, that's a question I'm always asking. What are the knowns and what are the things that we know we don't know? Or at least we And the knowns are never 100% certain, right? There's some Bayesian confidence margin less than 100%, but I can say high confidence based on this process, but I'm still open to new data. And then here's the area of unknown, so I want no certainty at all here cuz any certainty at all, even a hunch, can bias me in terms of what I pay attention to. So, I just want to say I don't know. Do you Do you try to eliminate even your hunches? Like do you I try to run all the hunches. You try to what? I try to run all of them. I see. So, if I say there's a virologist who thinks or an immunologist who thinks one thing, we will get immunity and someone else thinks we won't and based on different ways that they're waiting data. So, do I pay it Do I think that experts who spent 30 years studying a field and are smart know things I don't that I should listen to? That is different than like what a TV personality who doesn't know anything about it thinks. Yes. So, I like to find experts who disagree. But that seem earnest as opposed to seem like they are doing some piece of propaganda. And then I like to see the dialectic where I think possibly to have to tell people what a dialectic is. How does it different How is it different from a debate? So, Yeah, this is important topic. I saw you and Eric Weinstein discussing this a bit. Um so dialectic is the idea that you can have a couple different perspectives that each have some truth value in them, but maybe neither of which are the whole truth. And that rather than a debate where the idea is one of them is true, one isn't, and there's going to be some kind of rhetorical warfare, and then someone will be the winner at the end. There's a co-exploration coming from different perspectives to see can we actually find a higher order truth together? Dude, this I I'm super obsessed with this. So, the the idea of trying to find a higher order truth. Th- This is You want to know what really grinds my gears? The fact that do people not give a [ __ ] about what actually works? Like, I swear to God, people just want to be right. And as somebody who used to be stuck in that loop, I get it. I have empathy. I [ __ ] have empathy. But, man, everything in my life changed when I stopped trying to be right, and I started saying cuz my thing was I was And trust me when I get the example I'm about to give you is like game A to the max, but when I was younger, my focus was entirely on getting rich. But, I wasn't acting I wasn't acting like I wanted to get rich. I was acting like I wanted to be right. And so, there was a day where they collided, and it was like I was arguing for an idea in the business because it was mine, and there was a voice in my head saying, "You know this is wrong. This isn't going to work. This is going to move the business backwards." But, I needed to be right. And so, I kept fighting for it. I ended up getting my way. My partners left, and I was like, "What the [ __ ] am I doing? Like, I know that what I just convinced them to do will move us backwards. So, do I want to be right, or do I want to be rich?" And finally, I realized, "Jesus, man, if I could build myself a team around something else, then I could actually achieve my goals." But, if I was focused on just being right, that I was never going to get where I wanted to go. And when I look at the screaming that's happening right now, I I don't think it ends in actually improving the situation. I don't think that by the rhetoric that I'm seeing about like defunding cops and all that that we're actually going to get to the beautiful place that I think people want to get to. So, it's like you're not going to be able to figure out how to actually solve the problem unless somebody can propose, "Hey, let's defund the police." Okay, right, let's look at that. Um hey, no, this is what we need to do over here. Cool, let's look at that. Like when you can actually stop and look at it, you can get to the goal. But, like I said at the beginning, most people don't know what their actual goal is. They can't state it. And then on top of that, they're so worried about being right or sticking to the party line or whatever that they're they're not in this dialectic where you're bringing like um Lincoln with his team of rivals. I was like, that's so powerful. In a business, I I go way out of my way to make sure that my team challenges my thinking. That if you're an intern, challenge me. If you think I'm saying something stupid, [ __ ] tell me because I might be actually being stupid. And I have so much on the line, all I care about is the truth. And that's like one of those things, it will be better for you. You will be happier if you focus on actually getting what you want. But, it is it's one of those things, man, the physics of being human, by default people want to be right. By default, doesn't mean that they can't switch it up and change. But, Jesus, by default people want to be right. There's this TED Talk this woman gave. It's one of my favorite TED Talks. And I think it's called on being wrong. It was a She was describing a book she'd written, which was studying the psychology of humans' experience of being wrong. And she asked the audience, um "What does it feel like to be wrong?" And people said, "Embarrassing, shameful, whatever." And she goes, "No, that's what it feels like to find out you were wrong." What it feels like to be wrong is to feel right, right? Typically, we're we're we actually think we are right about some stuff we're wrong about. That's insightful. it feels like is righteousness. And so you were fortunate in that you knew you were full of [ __ ] Right? That was actually fortunate. Most people when they are righteous and adamant and filled with you know, passion and certainty actually think they're right. That's much more dangerous because then it becomes harder to reflect on what the [ __ ] am I doing? Do you think they have unease or they are are there people who truly have no sense? Okay, so mhm memes live in complexes. They create worldviews that are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. So, let's say we take a particular fundamentalist religious memeplex. And there's a bunch of different ideas. There's ideas about if I die in holy war then I go to heaven and there's eternal life and there's hell and so I've got both I've got all of the evolutionary biology on punishment motives plus reward motives plus authority motives plus the desire for certainty plus in-group stuff plus the desire to not be out-grouped, right? It's it's appealing to every level of Maslow's hierarchy, every emotional aspect of evolutionary biology. But then you've you've got core memes, you've got supportive memes, you have protector memes, like a whole football team. And the protector memes are anything that would [ __ ] up believing that there is a way to deal with it, right? So, doubt comes from the devil. And will make you burn in hell forever and faith is the highest virtue. Which basically says critical thinking is evil and creates maximum limbic fear for you so that prefrontal cortex that would try and do the critical thinking will end up stimulating the amygdala to shut off the prefrontal cortex. And so that's actually a very neurologically advanced protector meme complex to make sure that the thing that could get you to question if all these beliefs are actually unfounded gibberish won't be effective against you. And so most worldviews have protector memes built in. And so that even if I'm feeling uncomfortable, I have a way of rationalizing it. Do you So, I've heard you talk about this before and I thought this was so brilliant. How do you go from um Jesus saying all the lovely things, bringing people together uh to fighting the Crusades in his name? Like how you do the mental gymnastics? Do you know like what was the protector meme in that meme complex that allowed people to pull that off? When the SS troop were being tried in The Hague for war crimes after World War II. I don't remember the um the exact way the questions were phrased, but they were being asked questions to determine to try to understand the phenomenon of what happened. How Germany that had been very um actual liberal before moved into that place and also the likelihood for those people to commit similar actions again. And so they were asked all the questions specific to the situation they were in, but then they were asked general questions of the type, "Did you believe everything you were doing was right?" And one of the things that was so fascinating was something like 90% of the Nazi said, "No. I didn't believe everything I was doing was right. I did at the beginning when we were hearing about what an oppressed people we were and the bad people that were trying to oppress us and the Jews seemed to be rich when we were poor as [ __ ] in the Weimar Republic and had to be selling our kids into slavery and like um it seemed like they were doing it consciously and and we were just standing up for ourselves. And so originally I did, but then we started to get into places that were really [ __ ] up. And so 90% of them said, "No, I didn't think it was all right." Then they were asked, "Did you ever try and stop?" And 100% of them said, "No, I never tried to stop." Woah. And then when they were asked why, they would quote German phrases that had been drilled into their heads or basically officers orders. And if I if I went against this, I'd be put in the gas chamber. It would and I wouldn't have made any difference. Like the whale saying, if I don't do it, somebody else will, right? And I have my kids to deal with and I I didn't have the power to stop it in the and yet 90% of the people actually felt that way. Right? So, the same was true with the Inquisitions or the or the Crusades or the And it's even true today of if you grow up in a very religious area, what is what happens if you give up on the religion? Right? So, we know what the punishment for apostasy in fundamentalist Islam is, but if you grow up in Utah in a strict Mormon area and you give up on Mormonism, then you get excommunicated depending upon how they relate to it. You lose all of the benefits. Your in-group completely destroys. Maybe the idea that you're going to lose heaven and all those kinds of things. So, people believe things less because they are true and more because they are useful than they realize. Useful in staying in the group, staying in the good graces. Meeting some need. Mostly people believe things because it seems like it will meet some need for them or believing something else will damage that need. And then they rationally backfill epistemology, but they didn't do epistemology to come to the belief. They emotionally came to the belief and then they backfill epistemology. So, rationalizing is the opposite of being rational. Being rational is not starting with a belief. Well said. Being rational is starting with I don't know. Let's go through the process. Let's try. What are all the hypotheses? What is the evidence for all the hypotheses? Rationalizing is I jump straight to belief and now I'm going to try to create backfilled rationale for it. And pretend that that's That's I got there. Woof. Woof. I'll give you actually a really interesting example. Um one of the things the political left in the US likes to do is make fun of the political right for being stupid. Um you can see this with Bill Maher or other kinds of comedians and um it's part of their narrative warfare strategy, feeling superior through being more educated and whatever, right? And um and the political right has its methods of narrative warfare and um so I'm not commenting on the rightness or not of the underlying ideas, but the the weaponry that's being used. And nobody wants to feel really stupid. And so you actually stay in group by laughing at the people who are on the out group as opposed to defending the people who are so obviously stupid that you're obviously stupid if you would even sympathize with them at all, right? So that's actually appealing to very not rational things in-group, out-group, desire not to seem stupid um in the name of higher intellect. So it's a very tricky and sophisticated. So there's a uh left comedian who went to some Trump rallies recently and interviewed Trump supporters and made a compilation of how utterly stupid Trump supporters are. Now of course he didn't include any of the places where there are Trump supporters that are well-educated and have good philosophy and there are other ones that will show right-oriented people going to a bunch of left or Antifa people making them look like utter idiots. So they they'll both use that tactic, right? So of course the first thing we have to see is as we're laughing at the dumb Trump supporters in this thing, it was cherry-picked for that purpose of all of the people to then give the sense that that was ubiquitous, that they're all that dumb, right? Okay, so you watch the thing and it's actually impressive how much these people have rejected there's actually pride around anti-intellectualism within this population. There's a particular part of the right that has a anti-intellectual pride. And so they the guy is, you know, saying very basic things about government or how a bill becomes a law or whatever, intentionally like showing how stupid the people are that they don't know the basics of politics and they're certain of wrong things and whatever. And then tries to take it further and says if if if Trump used the N-word, would you vote for him? Yeah, I'd still vote for him. If he whatever and they ran different things. And at one point it said something like if Trump said that everyone need to start [ __ ] pigs, would you vote for him? Yeah, I'd still vote for him. And what it was trying to say is that guy who says, "Yeah, I'd still vote for him." is saying "My mind is not open to new ideas." Right. Right? Like my mind has closed to new ideas. I have already made my decision. I'm going with it. So you have to say, "What made him get there?" Well, one of the things that's actually insightful is he he intuited in some place that he couldn't make sense of what was going on and when the pundits were talking, it was above his head and that they were trying to use intellectualism and data and statistics and whatever to say things that felt like they were going to [ __ ] his world up that weren't in his interest, right? That seemed against his interest. And so he basically said, "I know my mind." He He's not this sophisticated, but subconsciously, I know my mind is a battleground of people more sophisticated than me who are going to try to convince me what is true, but I don't think they have my interest in mind. So this Trump guy it doesn't matter if it's true or not. I actually feel safer being on his side in a world that feels like it's in war. He feels more like me and he feels like he might win. And I don't want the susceptibility of people trying to confuse me to be possible. So it's very interesting to see how the that anti-intellectual thing was actually a compensating weapon of intellectual weapons being used to control people in ways that they could tell weren't fully in their interest. That that's really interesting and this is where cognitive distribution to make it sound fancy, the fact that sadly not all minds are created equal. It's like man, when you have like when I look at people that are clearly smarter than me, I'm just like, dude this is um deeply problematic to try to make sense of what they're saying and to engage with what they're saying. It is uh I I get it, man. I I feel for people when it it you you can tell you're being moved around the board like a chess piece and you're not sure like where the trap is coming from, but you know that there is a trap coming. Uh and hold on one second cuz I have an alarm going off. Um All right. Sorry about that. I'm uh normally uh I don't film this late so I thought I didn't even think to check. My bad. Um so yeah, when you've got somebody that is just, you know, outperforming you and you can feel that you're being moved around that chessboard, it is so disconcerting um that I can see how people would end up shutting down. And so this is why we like debates as we think okay, that guy is saying something that I seem to disagree with, but he's smarter than me. I want to put my smart uh candidate up to battle with him, right? And the higher angel of our nature is wanting to actually understand by them going back and forth and then being smart enough to come up with the counters that we wouldn't have known. The lower angel of our nature is just watching a dog fight. And that's why you'll see Sam Harris eviscerates Noam Chomsky or whatever, those type of titles that go around, it's really those people when they're watching aren't trying to learn. They're trying to and that's why you'll see in a debate the people who were very, very strong fans of one of the people are sure that person won at the end on both sides. So almost no one's mind really moved cuz that's actually not appealing to the higher angels of their epistemic drive, but the lower angels of their desire. Cuz this is the thing, there isn't some way at the end to determine which one is actually right clearly. So the guy who's making the arguments of the people who resonate with the type of arguments he likes, his arguments resonate with him as true and the other one don't resonate as true. And ultimately my sense of truthiness is kind of a a felt sense. Dude, let me tell you as somebody who does a lot of public speaking, I will tell you right now that I can move an audience by changing not what I say, but how I say it. And I learned very early on that um by putting time and energy into getting good at the performative layer of a talk made a huge difference. And so when I was young, I wanted to be a stand-up comic and so I spent a lot of time in front of audiences. I spent a lot of time practicing like what I was doing with my face, modulating my voice. And it is it is a little it's exciting when you feel like you're doing things for the right reasons, but it's a little unnerving when I think about like charisma goes a long way, man. Just by the way that you make somebody feel. They always say, you don't remember what somebody did or what they said, you remember how they made you feel. And so if you can make somebody feel good, if you can hype them up. And I tell audiences all the time and this is sort of the core friction of my life is I have what I call a two-hour declining arc of influence. So if you if you get me in a room with somebody, my whole thing is get me in the room. If you get me in the room, I will [ __ ] make somebody feel something. I can be very persuasive when I really believe in something and I'm really passionate cuz I can bring that out and I can energy infects other people and so you can infect them with your enthusiasm. You can get them hyped up. But as soon as I walk away, it's like it that sense of like cuz I try to give people the sense that they can do it, right? Whatever it is. Like you can do it. You can make it come true and let me tell you and I know that when I walk away, that feeling begins to wane. And so it's like how do you get beyond just the the ability to whip people into an emotional frenzy and actually get them to think critically, to form an opinion, to say, "Okay, I actually think I understand how these pieces work together." And then it's like you can begin to form your own opinion. Then you can you know how to move through the world, but otherwise it like you said it's much teach things how to do that for your listeners right now? How to Please. How? Because similar, this conversation might have some impact on them for like a day, maybe, right? But the moment they have scrolled their Facebook feed, they've forgotten about it and they're now fully inundated with other things. And so why would why do we bother doing this at all? So if someone is feeling a particular kind of resonance and inspiration, they have to take some actions that will keep feeding or nurturing that. And so let's talk about a few things people can do because when you're in the room with them, whether it's just that you're giving them better information or you're emotionally influencing them, they're influenced by what they're around. And so if some but then when you leave, they're influenced by whatever they're around next. What you're trying to do is make them have more of a internal locus of control to be more self-influencing. Well, the the kind of influence I would say illegitimate power in a game B sense, illegitimate power is where I'm trying to influence people towards my agenda perpetually. Legitimate power is where I'm trying to influence them to be more self-directing. Which is basically what a good parent or a teacher is trying to do is to increase someone's capacity to make their own good sense-making and their own good decisions. And whereas to the degree that I'm trying to convince someone to think that aligns with an agenda I have, that is a you know, game theoretic thing that will then produce counter responses of other people who want to convince someone of some other thing. Um but as people are seeking to become more self-determined, the first thing is to recognize how much you are not self-determined. To recognize how much the information streams coming into your eyes and ears and who you're around influences and start changing that. One of the best acts of self-determination is to change the things other than you that are influencing you. And so, we've talked about the problem of social media. If you care about your own well-being enough, you'll just quit social media. Your own well-being and your ability to understand the world and you'll start finding sources of news that are better than social media, that aren't AI curated for limbic optimization for you, but that you're curating based on what seems to be good information. And you'll find left sources and right sources and sources from other countries and whatever to try to make sense of stuff. If you are going to stay on social media, there are some things you can do to do a better job, which is let's say that you are politically aligned in a direction. You're left aligned. Go find all of the right thinkers and follow them. And join a bunch of those groups. If you're right aligned, do that with the left. Um whatever your particular perspective is, and find the ones that seem to be the most actually smart and earnest. And then unfollow all the stuff that seems to be salacious and not well researched. So that your feed becomes the smartest stuff from all of the perspectives. And if this is working, you'll become less certain about everything. You'll know that it is working because you will know more than you knew before and you'll be less certain. Whereas right now, you know less and you're more certain. Yeah, that I think that's really powerful and the thing I I'm really obsessed with this idea. I want people to understand that what I normally say is skills have utility, but information has utility. And man, I don't care from where on the political spectrum an idea comes from. If it's real, if it has real-world implications and it lets me move towards a goal that I have, I'm going to take it. And I I I actually cannot understand um anything else. So, it's there are there are powerful I and I I this all came for me because of building businesses. Like when your house is on the line, you don't have time to worry about whether you thought of the idea or somebody else thought of the idea or somebody you like thought of it or somebody you don't like thought of it. It's just like, "Jesus, dude. I don't want to have to go home and tell my wife that we have to move out cuz we lost the house." Like, that was such a real thing for me and that kicked me into just a and I I'd already been sort of marching down that path, but that kicked me into a whole 'nother level of like, "I just need to know what works, man. I need to know what works. I have a goal. I need to know what's going to move me towards that goal and it also it felt better. Like, there there's a sense of relaxing because I'm not trying to posture. I'm not trying to campaign. I used to say all the time and unfortunately, I was wrong about this, but I used to say all the time to people, "Just be good because you can't campaign and convince people that you're good." Now, the sad reality is you actually can. You can bamboozle a lot of [ __ ] people with a lot of words, but being good itself is going to take you a lot farther and getting people interested in that. Like, gamifying in themselves. Like, "Okay, cool. I want this curated feed that is bringing me a diverse array of opinions um so that I can actually function. And if people got into that idea of functioning that the goal here is to function. It's to actually be useful to be able to So, I define power very differently than you, but the way that I define power, maybe it's just the wrong word at least for this conversation, is power is being able to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, and actually have the skills to move towards that to make that real. And I have become so obsessed with that idea that it helps like that becomes almost the filter by which I make sense of the world. Like if I really think about like what's what's one of my highest level filters, it's like I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. And if you're good at choosing your goal, then you suddenly become open to any good idea from wherever, even if it contradicts like I came into it thinking one thing, but like whoa, that's actually more that's real. That's actually going to take me. It's not something I ever thought. Like I never thought that and I don't know enough about GameB to know if if like I'm behind it or not, but it's like hey, if GameB ends up being the most real thing and there is a way to deal with the just freakish amount of complexity and that we actually can consciously build something that moves us towards that. Um and it becomes a My values would definitely be sustainability, human well-being, like those are sort of inextricably connected, um wanting the human race to go on long after I'm here, wanting people to struggle but struggle well so that they can be tough and be resilient. Like those are all things that that to me seem inherently good um more than say happiness or something like that which is very transient. Um But like seeking out the things that will actually get me there. And the process of iteration, and at the risk of just completely derailing on tangents here, that to me that sort of mixture of like iterate, get it out there, try, um, be sincere in the pursuit of what's actually going to move you towards your goal, like that is, you know, if I had magic fairy dust I could sprinkle on people to get them to act in accordance with that, I think they would be happier, um, and it certainly would lead to a better world in my estimation. This is interesting and it did at the risk of opening a very big can of worms. Um, did I do I remember right that you said that it isn't necessarily true that improving the individual will improve society or am I misremembering that? It is not necessarily true that improving some subset of individuals in a particular way will improve society. Like, okay, someone getting better at violin is improving them. It's improving their skills. Um, someone getting better at warfare is improving their skills. So, is society the result of the quality of the members? Yes. But are the members also the result of the quality of the civilization systems like the education and the economics and the culture and the governance that help condition and develop them? Also, yes. So, it's not just bottom up, individuals to society, or just top down, the quality of society evokes different things from the individuals. There's a recursion there. Um, so I But I don't think There's a tangent there I don't want to go down. I want to go back to something you said a moment ago. When you were talking about the desire to be right and how problematic that was and when you let that go, ego in that way makes you very easy to control. Um, because all I have to do is appeal to your desire to feel right and I can control you. I can give you information that I've taken more time than you have to process to frame it up that will make you feel right and I can do pick what you believe. I can also inflame you into emotion by attacking your sense of rightness or whatever. So, having a fragile ego that wants to seem right and that is fragile and identified with certain positions makes you very, very vulnerable to control. So, that's an important thing. Having a mindset where anything can uh, be brought up and your identity is not attached to specific belief structures. The belief could change and you don't crumble as a result of it. Makes you much more resilient. Yeah, resiliency is, um, is one of those things from an intrinsic standpoint that if people want that in themselves and they're actually willing to put that to use, um, you can begin to get anti-fragile. And anti-fragility, uh, in terms of building a new society, I know is, uh, is going to be a pretty important thing. Do you think that we have any ideas that could actually cuz so, anti-fragility for anybody that's never heard the phrase before, the more you attack it, the stronger it becomes. So, what on earth would that look like at the societal level? I I It is a failure of imagination for me. I can't imagine it. Capitalism has been anti-fragile. Um, as a system of resource distribution and, um, etc. It it has continued to evolve its capacity. So, we went from, say, barter to, uh, exchange mediated by currency to fiat currency to fractional reserve fiat currency. attacks upon it that made it stronger? Well, if one capitalist group say another nation or whatever was trying to advance their overall share of the pie relative to another one, they kept each strengthening their underlying capitalist base, becoming better at extraction, exchange, those types of things. Um when communism was emerging as an alternate system, it increased its capacity to be productive and defend itself and whatever. So, that's an example of antifragility. You were asking earlier, how does someone go from the forgiveness of Jesus to the to the Crusades? There was a belief system, Christianity, that continued to get stronger. And by stronger, it meant as it was attacked by other religious ideologies or or political ideologies, it was increasing its And this is actually interesting cuz antifragile's not always good cuz sometimes it just means a thing is getting better at warfare. Um I actually want to bring up the Trump campaign uh has elements of antifragility. So, whether it was Stormy Daniels or the Russia um issue or the impeachment, his base actually got stronger through each of those. And so, one of the things that the left has not recognized, they failed to recognize the antifragility and that they were lobbing attacks that would lose, but would actually strengthen. Mhm. And so, that's actually an important thing to recognize cuz if something has become antifragile and you think it's bad and you're going against it, you have to think in a different way. Um And actually, I'll use Trump as an example here of the thing you were mentioning around um um listening to diverse opinions. So, we we know that uh he's a different kind of president than the politically trained ones that have been there before. Uh whether people think that he is saving the nation from the corrupt evil deep state or whether he is destroying it to create his own evil dynasty um is one of the classically polarized things that people have a hard time grounding enough. They ground it in the thing that resonates as true to them without seeing the other things. But, I think everyone knows he's been effective at a particular thing. Um I know a couple people who have been who worked with him closely, been on the Security Council, or you know, in his uh advisory board, who've said the same thing about their experience working with him in the presidential or said one same thing I found very interesting is that where most of the presidents previously had positions that were fairly consistent and predictable. Bush did kind of Bush things, and Obama did kind of Obama things, and they got people around them that had a similar ideology and that had for some period of time, right? The Obama Democrats, before they were Obama Democrats, were Clinton Democrats. They were of a certain type, and same with Bush Republicans. Um Trump got people who were mostly not of that of a particular lineage system, and he got people who disagreed with each other vehemently. And so, if he would bring Petraeus into a room and Bannon into a room together to talk about China cuz they both knew more about it than he did, and he knew that. But, they disagreed vehemently. Then, what they what I was told would happen in the room is that he would invite a group of people in without giving them any advance notice of what they were going to talk about. So, they couldn't prepare how to manipulate his thinking. So, he got their extemporaneous real sense. He He in people who disagreed. He would ask a question without giving an indication of what he thought. He'd keep a poker face on the whole time to not indicate that what he believed and he'd just keep asking questions and have them fight it out. And And he would actually sit there quietly and listen for a couple hours. And once he had heard enough, then he still wouldn't tell them what he thought. He'd go straight to Twitter. Because he didn't care if they agreed with him or not. He cared if his support base did and Twitter gave him an instant way to communicate with his support base and get real-time analytics based on the big data analysis of the Twitter feed of whether what he was saying was coalescing his support base or not. Wow. And so that is an effective technology where what he's doing is listening to different viewpoints. Now, what he was listening for is not necessarily what is true, but what will be effective for coalescing my support base. Um but he also had much more direct communication with people and much faster feedback. Now, also when you don't have a position, kind of like Bruce Lee said about martial arts, right? When you don't have a fixed form. When you don't have rigorous positions, you can take the position that is coalescing the support base empirically more, which is both terrible and wonderful depending upon what your goal is. Woo. Man. So, yeah, this is I'm I'm I'm not surprised by this conversation given that you are the person I came across when researching the end of the world and how civilizations crumble. Um dude, the way that you are taking the entire um ecosystem of things that have to be taken into consideration uh into consideration, it is it is very interesting. I'm going to be watching you very carefully uh with what you continue to put out in terms of game B and how we move forward intelligently. I think we're in a super weird time. Um but dude, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for and maybe you would warn me against this, but thank you for being a part of my sense-making apparatus. Uh I will not take you literally. I will definitely look things up and form my own opinions, but man, you definitely fall into the category of people that I think are saying things in a rational way, a metered way that makes a lot of sense to me. So, word. Thank you. It's good to be here. It's fun to have the conversation with you. Dude, no joke. Hopefully, we will connect again soon and thanks again. Everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe so I can [ __ ] up your algorithm. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. The decisions we make in the next 20 years, 20, 30 years are going to have enduring consequences of the sort that previous decisions did not. We need to figure out how the problems that could that could threaten our extinction won't extinct us. We need to figure out how to avoid an anarchic society. We need to figure out how to avoid a dystopic society. We need to do all this in a span of let's say a couple decades.