"Society Is A Ponzi Scheme" - Why The Modern World Makes No Sense | Eric Weinstein

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with somebody that I am very excited to have a conversation with, Eric Weinstein. Thank you so much for joining me, man. I've watched so many videos with you and I think you have an extraordinary way of breaking things down in a hyper logical way. So, I thought this would be a lot of fun and we bumped into each other at the talks at Teal. Is that what it's called, Teal Talks? That's right. That's a series. Yes, uh which you guys sadly aren't releasing, which I'm horrified by. Well, we released one. And that's the one that you're do that you did with Werner Herzog, right? But that is your show, which I'm very excited about, called The Portal. Um which I want to start there, actually. I want to understand this concept. So, I'm obsessed with the movie The Matrix. And when I say obsessed, I really think it is the perfect metaphor for the human condition. It's become the dominant metaphor of my life. I think about it all the time when I am trying to explain to people the trajectory of my own life. Like that is the perfect thing. There was a period where I was um stuck in the Matrix. I had no sense that there were rules to the world, that some of them could be bent and broken and all that, and that I could completely change the outcome that I got by changing the way that I think about the world. Um and so, you said that the Matrix and other movies like that are a metaphor for something that is real. What is that real thing? Well, I I I think that um that you're pointing to it, that in essence, um it is by analogy talking about the real world. And once you make the connections, I mean, I don't know whether you're really down for all of the three films. down. Oh, oh, the other two? No, I did not enjoy the other two. Do you think they were good? Well, there's part There's a part of two that's necessary. Which part would that be? Well, the architect's speech, probably. What part? I don't remember two and three well. I'll just full disclosure, for years I used to pretend they didn't exist. I feel I hate them so much I need to rewatch them. That's the thing, shall we? Perfect. Okay. Um yeah, I think one was almost unbeatable. I mean, there was one serious flaw where humans were being used for batteries rather than computation. I don't know quite why they did that. But the way I saw it was that it was talking about the very real state uh of our world in which we are expected to believe some sort of cradle-to-grave illusion. Uh the world that has been pulled over our eyes. And by turning it into a sci-fi context, they were able to talk about it very directly. And you see this, for example, in Islam, where everybody understands what the metaphors are and that there are certain ways that you can bring up very dangerous topics uh through indirection. And that's the way I saw it was it was a nonfiction picture discussing our actual world through a layer of indirection so that uh it wouldn't be called a documentary. I actually have a shirt that says The Matrix was a documentary. And uh obviously I wear it tongue-in-cheek, but there there is something um So, my whole bent in life is that and I I probably take a far more simplistic approach than you do, and I actually want to talk to you about how consciousness comes into being, which normally I'm not interested in, but I think you might have some interesting insights. But um when I think about the the fact that what we're looking at really is a virtual interpretation of the stimulus coming into our brain, and it was David Eagleman who first gave me the way to think about it. And he said, "Think about it this way. Your brain is encased in total darkness, and yet you feel like light is actually reaching your brain, but in fact it's not. It's hitting your eyes, being translated into neurochemical signals or electrochemical signals, and your brain is interpreting it, and you create this reality that's good enough that you don't bump into too much [ __ ] But the reality is that it's it is not a one-for-one representation of existence. And even if you just think about the spectrum of light is already so narrowed in terms of what we're able to interpret, and you just start thinking about okay, wait a second. If this is if this isn't a one for one representation of reality, how much of my um belief system, to keep it really simple, how much of my belief system is shaping what I see? And that was like the first thread that I started to pull at, and then it was the brain is plastic and you can make, you can actually change the physical structures and function of your brain. And that was all coming to me at a time where I felt um hopelessly lost. And I felt like I was too stupid to succeed. You You might actually know this reference. Have you seen Amadeus, the movie? Uh long time ago. All right, there's a character in there called Salieri. And Salieri, I think Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you. So, I I have long thought it was a real dude. And the the punchline to his character is that he laments to God. He said, "Why did you make me just good enough to realize how much better Mozart is?" And that haunted him. And it was like, "Make me an imbecile. Leave me to the point where I can't understand this [ __ ] guy's genius, and I'm fine. Then I can just go about my day and enjoy his music. Or make me as good or better than him. But don't put me in this weird purgatory of I'm good enough to realize that he's truly extraordinary and that I'll never be that good." And so, I graduate college and that's exactly how I felt. I'm just smart enough to realize how dumb I really am. And that was emotionally destructive. And I was in a super, super dark place. And it was that what I I obviously didn't have the realization at that time, but it it ends up being this understanding that my I'm contributing to my brain's interpretation of the world. And if I switch this belief from I'm just smart enough to realize how dumb I am to realizing that humans can learn, then my entire life will change. And that that began the obsession with the Matrix. So, we have a few open threads here. We've got a David Eagleman perspective of the brain in a in a jar with the little help from Descartes. And the idea that, for example, you and I have never met. Um I sit here in my I'm just assuming that we actually are brains encased in a in a in a skull. I sit here in my jar, you sit here in yours, and we have the illusion that somehow we have met in a context, but in fact, there has been no no direct contact. Um So, how do you deal with this? And I think what's been fascinating for me is watching the world, let's say, wake up to the the dress or the Yanni Laurel puzzles. And suddenly What's that? Well, remember the dress was it was it black and blue or white and gold? Oh, yeah, yeah. I didn't know what it was called. All right. And then And then you hear some audio and somebody says, "Oh, he said Laurel." And the person says, "No, it was Yanni." And you realize that after a while your friend is not pulling your leg. That in fact, we are seeing totally different worlds. Now, I grew up color blind. And so, my brother and I share the exact same color blindness. So, we were always in perfect agreement. And our parents, you know, would would sort of freak out if one of them left town because then it would be two against one and clearly our reality was right and theirs was wrong. Um yeah, so you you do learn that your Umwelt, that that world that you can see uh or perceive or taste or touch or understand uh gets shifted. I don't know I just checked my my Wi-Fi um when I was in the green room in order to see what what networks were available, but I can't see them in here because I need I need an aid. And so, in essence, we don't think of that as being like a a jailbreak uh out of our Umwelt, but that's what it is. And that's what the portal concept is all about. Uh once you become convinced that you're not actually in the real world, that the stories that are being fed to you are manifestly untrue, that the entire uh, social construction uh, is not what it appears to be, that there are hidden passages, trapdoors, panic rooms everywhere, it becomes pretty addictive because you can't imagine that you never noticed this before. Now, so I want to I want to get into like what some of these are like in functioning reality, cuz I know that you're you seem pretty serious about your love of finding these moments that are these portals into another world. Um, and I've also heard you talk about like actual space travel. Like how much of this is shifting your perspective and just like, oh, I'm seeing life, you know, through somebody else's lens, and how much of this is like no, a fundamental base reality, um, we're we're sort of altering the state of consciousness kind of thing. Well, um, it's an interesting question. The altered consciousness issue, whether you're trying to get there through mindfulness, psychedelics, silent retreat, there are brain states that many people have never experienced. So for example, I did not understand that there are programs in my mind that are like fire extinguishers in a house you've lived in for several years. If you've never had a fire, you've never used the extinguisher. However, it doesn't mean the program isn't there, and they run only under exotic circumstances. a real example? Well, a real example would be when your hygiene drops below a certain level, I find that my risk-taking uh, changes character, and that once I've had a shower, my risk-taking goes back to its previous state. I didn't know that until I was on a trek across the Great Himalayan Range, uh, in in in Kashmir, and we went several days without showers, and it got really pretty rank. You mean more or less risk-taking? started taking all sorts of completely insane risks. Like like really serious. And you think that was tied to the hygiene and not being out with other people who were maybe influencing that? I would have thought that maybe. I mean it was wasn't controlled and then we found a waterfall in which to take a shower and suddenly I was back to my old reasonably like one shower was enough to kick me back into my previous uh setting. I've never heard anyone else discuss this, but it was a pretty clean you know, probably took uh you know, 10 minutes at post shower and I was back to worrying about what the risks were. Woah, that's really really interesting. And not to derail um too far down that particular rabbit hole cuz I am I want to come back out and um help me remember this if I forget. I want to come back out to the concept of portals but for a second. So um as a father, I'm sure you think about this kind of thing like so if I think about all right, we have these mechanisms. They've been honed over millions of years of evolution to exist in a certain way and now we exist in this relatively I mean in terms of the the scope of life on Earth, this is a [ __ ] blip. Like we are living in the span of a single blink in terms of like the stretch of time. So we haven't really evolved for the circumstances in which we live and if you know that all right, just not taking a shower for a few days completely changes my relationship to risk, what does living in a city do? What does technology do? Like you must begin to ask yourselves questions about how do I shape my kids um physical reality? Or do I want to? Right, exactly. Like me okay, so people talk about forest bathing. I want to [ __ ] Tokyo bathe. I want to go to a deeper more densely populated metropolis with Right. I I don't understand my own like fetish with robots and stuff like that. But dude, when I say I'm literally wearing a ring with a robot face on it. Okay. Um I I've got a thing. So like do you think about that? Like do do I just leave things the way they are? Do I shove my kid through a portal of like back to nature, go live on an organic farm, like that kind of thing or Well, both. I mean, in part I want them to spend time in what is closer to what you were describing as uh evolutionary Let's call it the EEA. EEA, what does that stand for? Environment of evolutionary adaptedness. This is our mythological savanna home in which presumably we're just like, oh, okay, this is this is what these these fingers and opposable thumbs were for. Right? So, the Why do you want to do that? Well, because in part that's where most of as I mean, I'm just riffing off what you were saying. That's where most of our up from a health perspective? Like that's what I think about, mental health, physical health. It just seems like if I were a parent, I'd probably be pushing them in that way. Well, wouldn't it be crazy not to spend at least a decent chunk where you were maximally adapted to make use of all of the millennia that you're talking about? So, that that would be my thinking. That there's a base assumption hiding in that that if you're right, so the base assumption hiding in that is that it would be I I think you were saying um that the base assumption is there would be a high degree of alignment maybe the right word uh spiritually uh physically so that there's a sense of deeper gratification or peace or joy or pleasure or something positive, yes? You know, when the grid goes down, too, suddenly uh all the things that you've been depending upon that are electricity based cease to function or when uh supply chains break down. So, I was in New York City when there was a hurricane and um I couldn't get a D batteries to save my life. So, we we live we live in a very I guess on top of very thin crust. So, it's good to have an idea of what happens when that crust breaks uh and you might have to start a fire without matches. It makes sense to have an idea that you can go for a period of time without food That's a different reason, so trying to Yep, trying to bring bring all these things together. it home for me. At some level, we're we're riding on a technological substrate and so it would be crazy to say, no, you kids need to learn how to push a plow because uh this word processing thing might not work out." On the other hand, um you want them to spend time closer to where humans have spent most of their evolutionary history, and you want them to be able to navigate the stack to understand how they got here. So, you know, um the same people who might operate a slingshot, might have shot a bow and arrow, might have shot uh a rifle, you know, and and have an idea of the evolution that is the Taser. So, you want people to have an idea from whence they came, um and what what what what is that thing? And then you want them to be absolutely in the moment making use of all the things that we have. Now, I find that the internet and digital consumption has totally changed the micro-chunking of my attention. Um you can't really easily understand what life was like before the internet if this is your only context. Oh, [ __ ] And can you explain micro-chunking? Well, um remember when it was you know, I I I tell a joke sometimes that uh I don't think Twitter's negatively affected my attention span because I can still get through most of the longer tweets in one sitting. That's good. Yeah. So, that problem of why is it that I can only pay attention to tiny uh punchy things ha- has to do with being habituated to wanting an instant gratification. I don't want to put in the time, the energy, the work to decode things, to you know, there's no canon. So, I have no, you know, you and I have really spent very little time together. If I start referencing a poem, uh think of that as me throwing a Frisbee. What are the odds you're going to catch that intellectual object? I don't know. We're a little bit shifted generationally. Yeah, that's the thing. Right? But if I use a song Hip-hop lyrics, yeah. Now now I'm with you. Yeah, but you can you know, people pass hip hop lyrics past me all the time. And as a result, most of us are not catching the uh the frisbees thrown our way. And so it's a lower level of communication. I'd be happier, let's say, using um the Indian canons. Uh if we all agreed on the same reference point, or the Western canon, or you know, the Buddhist canon. But something where we can actually go deep as opposed to just explore explore the surface of this kind of um cultural and intellectual diversity, which has a lot to offer, but most of us just don't have don't have deep architectural programming that prepares us for how deep the mind can go. Yeah, so the notion of portals, is that tied to how deep the mind can go, or is this um is the notion of a portal to shake somebody out of their sort of they're stuck in the the pink liquid and they don't realize they're in the matrix. Is that Is that the moment of the portal, or is the portal something that is glimpses into a mathematical reality that the world that we're experiencing has some sort of what I'm going to call fabric, because I am just terrible at math and physics and all that. Fascinated, yes, but I don't really understand it. I heard you make reference one time to a type of number that you said we we just can't explain it. Octoplets, something. Octonions, thank you. Um and you said, but it it really has existence in like physical reality, or something like that. And I was like, huh? So I want to to really understand your notion of the portals. So is this an intellectual exercise, or is this really grabbing punching through to the fabric of reality? Okay, so let's talk about huge wins. Huge win for me would be to take, let's say, some sector of the world that feels fenced out of math or music or language or whatever. And give them three superpowers. So, let me imagine, for example, that they got turned on to the idea that there was really deep math all around them that, strangely, was more advanced than the stuff that they studied in school, but they found it easier to understand, and that they had always thought that they were bad at math, and now, suddenly, they can't get enough. Then, with music, let's imagine that you're you're convinced that you're hopeless at music. You can't do anything. You're just not a musical person. And I give you a coffee mug and a guitar, and within 5 minutes, you realize that you can play 85% of the songs that mean something to you, um by following some very simple instructions. Or you say, "I can't do language. I studied Spanish in school, and if I ever have to hear about uh you know, ser versus estar, or or or irregular verbs, or why is it el agua, uh I'm going to shoot myself." And then I say, "Okay, well, what about we take you to Indonesia, and in the space of a couple of weeks, suddenly, if you're not um the world's greatest Indonesian speaker, you're rocking and rolling in a language that you never thought possible that it has not that much to do with English." Those superpowers, once you've seen the first one, you're like, "Wow, I didn't realize that I could actually just do this. I must be a mistake." Let me give you a second data point, and you're like, "Wow, that's really interesting. Now I've got two things under my belt." By the third one, almost everyone has the idea, "Oh my god, the entire world is just misexplained." And I think it's that idea that nobody talks about the octonions. And then you you run off to Wikipedia, and they're there. Or for example, I've had this really great experience um where I was able to point at this thing called the Hopf fibration on the Joe Rogan program visually and some people got really angry like he's he's pointing at but he's not explaining it and I don't get it. But you know, I've been I didn't get angry but I was like what the [ __ ] is he talking about? What is he talking about? Why is it the most important thing in the world? Why you know, okay. Well, the first thing is to just plant the flag like there is something here and you can if you if you hear somebody who you like all the stuff that they're talking about when you can understand them and then and then suddenly they go out of the visible spectrum and into the infrared or something. You say, okay, can I follow? Is there any way? So, you start doing a little bit of research. And I'm finding now that I've just been you know, talking to this artist Nico Meier who in his shop in Temecula is machining massive Hopf fibrations. Uh he was a little bit aware of it and then he saw the Rogan program and so now he's like trying to build these things and we're starting to collaborate on art projects to just push this out. Is it meant to visualize a Hopf vibration or actually create a Hopf vibration? To to actually create parts of the Hopf fibration that can be seen, touched, displayed. What I did on Rogan was to show a representation of the Hopf fibration pushed onto a two-dimensional screen representing three-dimensional screen representing a three-dimensional sphere in four-dimensional space blah blah blah blah blah. So, this would be one layer of those abstractions taken away. Where you now you're maybe you're able to walk around this and suddenly just like all those cool Escher paintings that took over the world, suddenly people are saying, okay, there is something discovered in 1931 by Heinz Hopf that nobody ever told me about and I was just like expecting to talk about mushrooms and wolves and you know, mixed martial arts. And then suddenly there's this thing intruding into my life. And that thing may turn out to be the person's calling in life. Because how if you don't even know this stuff is there. If you don't know that you're in a matrix and that there is Zion. Mhm. You can't make a decision. Like if you want to stay in your pod and just be in the goop, I'm not going to that's your choice. But at least you should know that there's a vacation destination called Zion and a revolution that's brewing. And so if you're interested in that lifestyle, that might be a choice you might be interested in making. So let me articulate that back to you. I think now I completely understand what you're talking about with portals. So portals to me sound exactly like the Matrix being a very perfect metaphor. Obviously taken to the extreme, but where you're seeing things one way because you don't like you said, the world has been explained poorly. So you don't understand that there's a simple shift that you could make and now see things in a totally different way. I'm not sure if this is the piece of art you were talking about when you said the MC Escher drawings took over, but I remember back in the probably early 90s there were these really weirdly colored posters. And they had like an ultra simplistic like it maybe it had a ballerina in one pose. And so you're looking at it doesn't look like much. And then if you relax your eyes it would suddenly become three-dimensional. And I remember the first time somebody said, "No, no, no, there's really an image there. It's a ballerina in in 3D." And I was like, "I don't see anything." Like you see two of these. It's all noise. Is it two of these? It's not random dot stereogram. If if I remember right, when you were when you first look at it, you don't see anything. You just see waves like collory waves. Got it. And I remember somebody was standing in front of it staring at it. I'm like, "Why are you staring at it?" They're like, "Oh, the ballerina's kind of cool." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? There's no ballerina." They're like, "No, no, no, there is." And I was like, "The [ __ ] are you talking about?" They said, "Look, it's this thing. You have to relax your eyes. If you relax your eyes like focus your eyes like you're looking past it." might be random dot stereogram. Okay, random dot stereogram. So I'm standing in front of it and I'm like, "You are lying." Literally lying. Like this I'm on [ __ ] punked. Like somebody is filming me. There's nothing here. I'm looking at it. I'm doing what you're telling me. And then all of a sudden you figure out what to do physically and this thing jumps out and you're like, "What the fuck?" discreet. Very fascinating. Like it really shows you that this this thing that has been sitting in front of you has been there the whole time. You didn't know how to look at it because you didn't know what to do. A whole world was hidden to you. You're a mathematician. You're a linguist. You're a computer programmer. You know, you're a musician. You're you're doing improv. You're you're doing all of these things that you felt fenced out of. And the thing that got me really crazy was that due to some of my learning issues, uh I did not have an easy time in school. And I watched it was very much a Cinderella story where you're watching all of the all of the uh smart kids go to the ball and you're sitting at home washing dishes trying to figure out um why is it my punctuation, random spelling, uh impressionistic capitalization holding me back? Why is everyone else able to pull a piece of paper that's, you know, neat and legible and mine is crumpled and folded and I don't even know what my assignment is. How old are you at this point? Oh, I would say that between age 10 and 16, I cannot buy a base hit to save my life and I'm just existing on charm. And do people at this point think you're not very bright? Um I wouldn't say that. I would say that they've got a problem because smart and trying are supposed to result in success. Mhm. So, what happens when you have somebody that you believe is smart, you believe is trying, seems to be good at lots of things that aren't on the on the agenda. Um now you've got a problem because that person is invalidating the educational system. So, the system gets angry at you. It tries, but there's a very limited help budget that's available. And before too long, you what you're doing is you're revealing what I call teaching disabilities because people don't have the time, the energy, the understanding necessary to help and reach that person. They don't even know what's going wrong. And so, what you what you're doing is is that you're invalidating what I would call the educational complex. And the educational complex is a it's a guild, it's a profession, it's a business. And so, one of the things I believe is that we're not taught subjects that max in a way that maximally benefits the largest number of learners. We're taught subjects uh due to the political economy of making these subjects take a very long time and rewarding the specialty that might have been uh the career choice of the person teaching. That's super [ __ ] interesting. So, what teaching method would optimize for the greatest number of learners? Well, first of all, um differential diagnosis. Like, are you a Are you mean? Are you a visual learner? Are you an auditory learner? And we now segment them out. Right. And you know, you start to to understand you you you present several different styles. You know, let's do some AB testing. Are you like you go to your optometrist. Is it better like this or like this? Right? And so, you you start to understand somebody's learning style and learning profile. Okay. Keep going. That's really [ __ ] simple and wonderfully interesting. Hard to execute. People can stop with the hate mail, but No, no, no. Not hard to execute. even better. I was being very uh preemptive. So, keep going. This is really [ __ ] interesting. And you know, then you start doing things that nobody does. Like, for example, most errors that we make um are not random errors. If you start collecting the errors that I used to do teach learning disabled kids in college for some extra shekels, right? And what I noticed is is that people would make the same errors all the time. And so I could just tell by recording what answer they gave. You know, if you give them 6 * 8 sometimes they're going to say 42, sometimes they're going to say 56. Whatever. You're going to have some collection of things that you can guess what they did to get there. Very seldom are they going to say a chicken salad sandwich. Fair. All right. And then you need to incarcerate that person because that that sounds dangerous. So in such circumstances, if you just collect errors, um you can very quickly figure out what you're supposed to be remediating rather than just saying that You lost me there. So your first step sounded [ __ ] awesome and the school system should immediately implement that cuz it sounds scalable. The second one, detecting errors and knowing what they mean, Yeah. Hmm. Uh give me say it another way cuz that one as I as my brain tries to process that, it it doesn't seem scalable. Well, if I say to you, what is 2 + 3 and you give me the answer 23, Yep. I bet I know what you did. Okay. You concatenated two strings rather than adding two integers. But how does that become a curriculum style? Like visual, auditory, got it. now I have a I have technology that can very quickly figure out what you're likely doing wrong. Or if I were to time how long it's taking you on some step, I could guess who didn't know how to set up the problem, right? All sorts of things that happen when when when things aren't going right. Just imagine that your brain and your body are giving off data. And that data can be measured when things aren't working to guess where the roadblocks are because in general, we don't have a million different roadblocks when we're trying to learn something. All right. I want to bring this back. This is let me give you a simple example. Assume that we're talking about the Big Bang. Right? And we're talking about the expanding universe. And I said, "You You don't even understand, man. This is so crazy. Not only is the universe expanding, it's expanding at an accelerating rate." My contention is almost no one has any idea what that means. The physicist will say that a million times, I think I know what it means, and I have no idea why anyone says it because anyone smart should hear that and say, "Expanding into what? What What does that even mean?" Uh-huh. And so, I know what sorts of errors people are going to make. They're not that original. Most of us get tripped up making the same kinds of errors as like a thousand other people out of 10,000 people would make. And so, if you just If you monitor these sorts of things, you It's diagnostic uh data for you to use. I think that's a super interesting way to um think about the educational system of doing a lot of um detective work, diagnostics, figuring out like how to group people. They did that back in band when I was in fifth grade going into sixth, like, play this. Do you have any like Where do you show any sort of natural aptitude? And they segment people out. That's super interesting. Now, coming back to um what you were talking about earlier with the um you Let me take you to Indonesia and show you that you can actually pick this language up fast. Let me give you the mug and the guitar, and you know, let me show you a few things. Let's make those real. What What are cuz I've I heard I've never heard you talk about it, but I actually heard your brother talk about it when referencing you that you do have the sort of freakish ability to identify like what those key things are. here? I do. Is that guitar tuned is an entirely different question. But yes, would you like me to have somebody get it? Well, yeah. Just Just to play, just to see whether you get anything out of it. It might It might be a dud. I don't know. It could be a total dud. We'll get We're going to take a big [ __ ] risk here. And Josh, since I know you're listening right now, uh if you could have Lisa, who should know where the guitar is hiding, but it's behind the door of my closet. Um bring it down. We will continue the conversation until it gets here. And uh it'd be great to do it with an empty coffee mug just to make the point. a real thing. Yeah. Okay, so we'll also need an empty coffee mug. And and if it's a if it's acoustic, that would be a plus because It is acoustic. I don't have anything else. All right. God, I hope it has strings on it. I haven't had that thing out in a very long time. Do you play? I did play and um I never got good, but I did enjoy it. And so back in the day before I um started on my entrepreneurial journey I was on I I would not so much anymore, but I used to self-identify as an artist. So my life was all about the creation of art. My primary form of creation is writing, so I spent a lot of time writing. I wanted to get into writing music. The crazy thing is just today I heard you talk about um I'm going to [ __ ] up his last name. Mike Einziger? Einziger? Einziger? Yeah. From uh Incubus. Yes. So Awesome. the that exact period of my life was an obsession with Incubus and uh trying to learn some of their songs on the guitar. And um never got good, but I wrote songs for my wife, who was my then girlfriend. And to this day she wishes I played more so that I would write her more songs. That's really nice. Um I did like that that gave me the impetus to really like push myself and try to get good, but then it became a question of time management. And so it fell lower on my priority list and and has thus collected dust, but finding a way to learn things fast, that is incredibly interesting, especially if, you know, the notion of the portals become real and there are these insights. So my obsession, the whole reason that I create content, because I I I know we don't know each other well, so you don't know this about me, but what I'm actually trying to do is build a studio, a film studio, film and TV. Okay. Uh because I believe that the way to impact people is to make the next Kung Fu Panda or the next Star Wars, something that has a message at its core, but entertains people, hits them at Olympic level. It's an emotional connection. Probably going to have to focus on youth. That bumps me out because um while I really enjoy that and I've always wanted that to be a part of it, I don't want to give up on adults, which is if you know Geoffrey Canada is very much his advice. Um but hitting people at an impressionable moment in their life, whether that's youth or they're just open with something that resonates emotionally that is uh able to incept them with a portal. I'm very much using your language on that. I would normally think of it as as growth mindset or whatever, but you're incepting them at a moment with a portal that causes their their Portals are more violent. Then I love it because I love that kind of [ __ ] So, let's use violent language. I'm going to In fact, know that anytime in the future, since I'm going to adopt the word portal, uh that it just comes with a TM and your name. Okay. So, I'm I'm certainly not trying to to rip it off, but I will help popularize it. they belong to us all and I think that that's, you know, really important to me is that the portal story like the Matrix, um is a universal. And if you think about it, Neo, just to see how well I remember the film, um you know, Neo is kind of searching for something. He's leading this underground lifestyle by night. And he's sort of pieced together that there's a something and this is what brings Trinity into his life. Where Trinity um is going to go out and contact him and let him know that if he follows the white rabbit, uh with an obvious homage to Lewis Carroll, so that the portal story within a portal story. And then, you know, he goes into this uh Australian S&M club, uh which is very funny. Um that this is his introduction to a world in which Morpheus is going to take him through the looking glass. And that scene of waking up, you know, uh in a completely different context, I think is it is the violence of the portal. I love that. Um Neil Strauss called me out one time. He said, "All your [ __ ] language is violent. Like, what is that about?" But I don't is an act of violence. Oh, can I pretend that that's exactly why I do it? I don't know why I do it, but that feels so wonderful. Well, you have to break something, right? And you know, if you think about how we come into this world, uh our our mother's water breaks, and that is a moment in which That's a [ __ ] portal. Right. And literally, this is something that I find mind-blowing in the Jewish tradition, um Passover is about the escape from Egypt, which whose name is Mitzrayim, which is a plural, masculine plural, and it's the narrow places, and it is the literal birth story of the Jewish people out of Egypt. think there are some people that just get I I have a hypothesis that goes like this. Some people think in archetypal metaphor. I'm not one of those people, and it actually has, I think, held me back as a writer. I've had to really like learn that. Or do you think that it is, um some people dream in archetypes, which is another reason that I think that? Or is it that just over these stories that we think of now as archetype are are told sort of bit by bit by bit and and shaped over time based on what gets a reaction? You need you know, uh the simple-minded have devils and angels on their shoulders. Um one step up from that, you have Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson whispering in opposite ears. And you need a camp and decamp between the hyper-rational. Now, of course, I've been unfair to them both. Jordan is a scientist, and Sam is a pretty spiritual guy. But their archetypes, um Sam is constantly reminding us of for the need uh of the need for rationality, and that spiritualism can be grounded in rationality. And Jordan is really reminding us that if you don't actually just let that spirit free, that your mind has the spiritual capacity built into it. Um yeah, there's there's danger on either side if you're too rational or or too spiritual and too moved by the archetype. Uh in both directions lies nonsense. But that tension is is magical. Have you read The Watchmen? The By Michael Moore, the comic? The graphic Yeah. So, there's a part in there if you remember, the book is broken into you've got the main story and then you have snippets from like a book, somebody's journal, a diary, that kind of thing. And one of the snippets in there, this hit me so [ __ ] hard, was a guy had written a book on ornithology. And he said, "You know, the problem with ornithology, which is the study of birds, the problem with ornithology is that we know the size of the feathers, we know the orientation of the feet, and we can tell you, you know, the gap between the feathers and down to the millimeter and what it all means and all that." He said, "But we've lost the poetry of flight. And we've lost the sense of awe that a bird could inspire that made it such a symbol that we would put it on coins or on temples." And he said, "I never want to get to that point where I'm so blinded by the science that I lose sight of the awe." And I was like, "Fuck." Like that gave me the chills. I was like, "That is so true." And that like so, I love Sam and Jordan. I think they're both extraordinary minds, but your notion of being able to camp and decamp, I think is so important. The ability to bounce back and forth. Talk a little bit about that and how you see that playing out today in particular where people are camping, but nobody's decamping. Well, it's very interesting. People sometimes accuse me of having it both ways or middle-of-the-road. And nothing could be further from the truth. People get annoyed with that? Well, they they have the idea that you're you know, pick a side, man. Why? Well, because it's pure. Because there's mush in the middle for the from their perspective. And what I view is wow, you imagine that these two sides have been warring, let's say, for thousands of years or hundreds of years or even decades, and it's not because both you know, both sides probably have a point. It's just not there's no synthesis of that dialectic. So, you have these these sides yelling at each other, and I always think if two sides have been yelling at each other with smart people on both sides for a long time, that's my cue that they're not they haven't found a frame outside of flatland. They're trapped. They have not found the portal. And so, what I start doing is I I invite them both into my mind, initially in a sandbox. You know, can I represent the other person's arguments so they would say, "Yeah, man, that's exactly what I'm saying." All right, can I do that for for both sides? Are there multiple sides beyond two? And so, once you sort of have all of these things playing in your head, then you start saying, "Okay, I'm going to make an outreach from one sand sandbox to the other. What if I'm convinced that there is no god, but that religion is super valuable?" What does that feel like? Or I'm convinced that there's absolutely a god, but that it leads us into madness with um people making claims that can't be substantiated and we have to revere them, right? Whatever these things are. So, once you start doing that, and that's why, for example, years ago on the Tim Ferriss program, I talked about using coprolalia. You just use a string of swear words to let your brain know, "We're not in Kansas anymore. This is not safe space. We're working blue. It's after hours. It's time to get creative. It's time to get violent." And you have to be decent about it. That's like, you know, comedians, if you go to a you know, I was just catching a set at the comedy club at The Comedy Store, and it's pretty pretty brutal. But, on the other hand, it's happening in a room. everybody's there voluntarily, and in general, you know, it there's a limit to how bad it's going to get. And so, these kind of rough spaces that aren't safe spaces are are important if we're going to be generative. And you know, my belief is is that we all have to recognize that the pure states are to be avoided. Or rather, that you have to embrace multiple pure states because purity of one particular kind or another is where madness comes from. We have to not uh we have to welcome the infection. And as you were talking, like I was getting the chills. That to me, that notion of being in what you're calling the sandbox, of being able to um steel-man the argument. Was it your brother that came up with that phrase, or did he just bring it to the No, I think I brought it to the wider world, but it came out of the sort of East Bay rationality community. At least that's where I found it. So, I love the the concept of steel-manning. I think that's so important of I think ideologically people have to believe it is their obligation to steel-man somebody instead of trying to um tear them down. Like, to first understand, right? To um and I say that selfishly. Like, one of the things I don't understand is when you and I think this is what you mean when you say that the madness happens in the purity, I think more from a biological perspective that once the crop is completely homogeneous, it is [ __ ] at risk. Like, one thing goes wrong and the entire crop is lost, right? One Well, even worse, imagine somebody uh who's eukaryotic decides that they're infec- infected with their own mitochondria. Like, you know, then the thing that's powering every cell in your body which was initially probably a prokaryotic infection uh it becomes something you you need to rid yourself of. Okay, well, in the process, you're going to just you know, you're going to go totally OCD. It's like somebody told you, "Hey, there's a quarter in your new leather couch, go get it." You know, and there's no quarter there, and you're just going to rip the thing to shreds. Yeah, so getting people to um as as a selfish driver to put themselves in a position where they're constantly trying to understand where the other person is coming from so that they can adopt uh anything that works, right? So, Bruce Lee said, "Take what works, discard what doesn't, add your own." So, having that anybody whose primary goal is self-development, and yes, we have the guitar. Anybody whose primary goal is self-development, I think has to have as a part of their operating system a desire to um first listen, hear what might be usable, even if you think that that's a rival camp, take on what works, discard what doesn't, and then find a way to leverage that so that you can do things in the world. And my obsession is getting people to understand, and this is one of my portals. Um and this is the path I was going down earlier. The reason that I'm so interested in this particular portal that I'm going to outline is it it will change your life forever. So, it's on one side of the portal, you think that you are made a certain way, and that is that, and life is about making the most of the gifts you were given or weren't, or you know, making the most of a bad situation, however you want to look at it. On the other side of that violent act of creation, of stepping through that portal, of being kicked through, or whatever, you realize that you can change your perception, and the perception will change your beliefs, which will change your behaviors, which will change your outcome, and the outcome, of course, is where I'm obsessed. So, the portal I'm trying to cram people through is realizing that, "Oh, I'm viewing the world from a fixed mindset," to use Carol Dweck's um famous book, uh Mindset, and I can have a growth mindset. So, in one, I believe my talent and intelligence are fixed traits, in the other, I believe they're malleable traits. And once I believe they're malleable traits, then I can get into my grand obsession, which is getting people to understand that skills have utility. So, since we have a guitar here, this may be the perfect um explanation. That guitar, that very guitar that you're about to pull out has gotten me laid many times. Now, that's a real outcome because I wrote songs for my then girlfriend, and she was moved by it. It was It was a full recognition of her psychology and what made her feel good and made us feel connected and made her feel sexual. And because I could make her feel sexual, then I got to have the experience that I wanted to have. And also, I wanted to connect and I wanted to convey something to her, and I wanted to create the shared lexicon that you were talking about, you know, we could adopt the the Indian canon or the East Asian canon, whatever the canon. Like, we were building a canon together, and it was like you to be able to reference the song that I had written for her. I mean, it just like it began to shape our lives together. But, that started with my dumb ass having to learn how to play a G chord, a C chord, a D chord, right? But, those skills have utility. They let me do something. And so, the thing that freaks me the [ __ ] out about people and leaning back now. About uh about people that um they they get lost in what you call the purity. They're They're stuck in their idea. They're not looking to steel man the other argument. They just want to know how they're right is skills have [ __ ] utility. Like, if you learn something from that person, you're going to be able to do something you weren't able to do That thing right there is based on an impurity. The guitar, which is even tempered You going to break it out while you explain? All right. So, I don't know whether your mics can pick this up. It'll probably pick it up barely. I'll narrate for anybody at home who's watching, and he will pick back up where he left off. Uh he is pulling out the guitar. Um and we're going to learn how the guitar itself is born of impurity. I'm excited to hear the answer to this. I'm not sure that I can predict it. I think there might be one more than you would imagine. That thing always uh surprised me with just how many latches it has. Help out? Oh, I see. There we go. There it is. All right, like I said, I make no promises about uh the tuning. Well, even if we have just one string, we can probably figure out something. All right, so first, what's the impurity this is based on? Well, so if you break the string into three pieces, so this would be your E string, but if I place my finger exactly at the midpoint, we'll double the frequency. And if I place it a third of the way through, it should be giving me three times the frequency. Now, that number of three times the frequency is not actually the even tempered version of three times the frequency. you mean even tempered? Well, we have 12 frets in an octave. Okay. Those have been specifically geared by the person who made the guitar to break that 12 uh break that octave, which is a doubling of the frequency, into 12 exactly equal steps. Okay. If you do 12 exactly equal steps, then you will never reach exactly three times the frequency as you go up an octave, which is 12 and then seven more half steps, which is 19 steps in total. That's as close as you can get. So, it's the difference between and that sounds almost the same. But there's actually a tiny discrepancy, and that's why we choose the number 12. Because only for 12 do we get that tiny discrepancy and have a reasonable number of steps in the octave. The equation, if you're trying at home, is two to the 19/12 is almost equal to three, but is slightly below. Okay, how does that help me understand? Well, yeah, I'm telling that impurity is the basis for Western harmony. That's the great thing that the West did that nobody else did. Because without that, what would happen? Um without that, you'd just have the pure So for example, But I couldn't harmonize with that. It seems like I could. Well, if you had those as the exact steps, you'd you'd notice that you couldn't switch keys. You couldn't modulate to other keys very easily. So you've taken a There's a crime in our fretboard, and you've taken the body, and you've chopped it up into 12 equal pieces, and that disguises the fact that third that our fifth in even temperament and our fifth in physics, which is the Pythagorean fifth, are not the same note. But they're so close that our ear can't tell the difference. sure what I was going to do at this moment in the podcast. I knew it would come where you're saying a whole lot of words, and I don't understand how they add up. I understand each individual word, but strung together in the way that you're stringing them together, I can only nod and smile. Is there another way to explain this? Cuz I Here's Here was my hypothesis with music. That you understand math so well that to you it is self-evident that a guitar is math, and to me it is not. And I experience a guitar entirely experientially. So whatever portal exists between the experience of music and the math of music, I desperately want to cram myself through because I think it'd be [ __ ] amazing to understand that to No, no, no, I don't want to understand it. I want to feel it. I want to I want to understand at a body level. Okay. And I don't know if my mind is I don't like to have a fixed mindset, so I'm very open to I just haven't had the key insight that's going to invite me through the portal, but it feels like the thing I don't understand is math and that there is a key insight to be had in math that until I have that key insight in math, your sentences will continue to sound cool. Like when you talk it almost sounds like poetry, but I don't understand it. Okay, well, the first thing you have to know is that there are certain things that are encoded in physics Okay. that sound to us as if they were are composed or like music. And if I understand them, they're going to make playing the guitar easier? Cuz I I want people to understand what the punchline is if we fight through and I figure out what I'm talking about. harmonics that would occur if we strung a catgut between two trees uh in Borneo. Okay. Okay. Do you recognize that? Uh yes. I couldn't tell you what it is if you played it again. It's I'm trying to do the lick from Pretty Woman. Oh, then definitely not. Like by Roy Orbison. know a lot of She walking back to me. So, those notes are encoded into the vibrating into the Fourier series of the vibrating string. Okay. So, the point was that I don't think that whoever wrote that song that Roy Orbison made famous I don't think that song is composed so much as discovered. It really just came out of uh expanding a series of vibrations for the wave equation of the of of the vibrating string. But what were you going to say? Because of that, right? There's certain things that people will say are cultural like Right? So, "Oh, heave ho from The Wizard of Oz or wise men say." Right? That alternation has to do with the natural modes of a vibrating string. So, all of our all over the world, people hear "Oh, heave ho." as a natural tone. Right? Okay. That's just It just has to do with the fact that your your vo- your vocal chords or any one-dimensional medium, like a flute or a string, is going to have those things as part of it. But, why does that matter? Like, to the average person, unless this is going to help me get laid, right? Skills have utility. Unless this is going to boil down to something that I can functionally get something that I desire from it. So, let's let's take the coffee mug. disappointed. Well, no. Is it Is it that the math of this is fascinating and beautiful to you? Are we like in that moment where I want the science and you want the awe? You want something. I want to give you whatever it is that you want, and then I want to come back to you. All right. So, for example, if I take the second, third, and fourth string, and I play those, that is a major chord if the guitar is tuned to standard tuning. Okay. Right? Now, I'm going to ignore the two strings closest to my head and the one closest to the floor. Right? And I have the coffee mug. So, assume that somebody has a guitar around the house and in standard tuning. So, now I go Now, I don't have to learn how to fret a G chord or a C chord or all the things that hurt my hand. I'm just I've got my claw around the mug. Right? So, I can start immediately playing songs or I'll admit that was [ __ ] cool. Okay. The next thing is is is that Because the hard [ __ ] just for people listening, forgive us since you can't see what's going on, but it the the part of learning the guitar that is infinitely harder is the fretting. Like using your fingers, which hurts in the beginning, and you're probably going to bleed, and you have to build these insane calluses, and yeah, I I went to my guitar teacher, and I said, "You know what? I'm I just don't think my hands are built for this." Cuz I could not do a bar chord to save my life. So, to see you use a mug that effectively is Right. So, I'm throwing away most of the or half of the guitar, strings one, five, and six. And now, this is going to be like a really bad version of the four-chord song, but go to YouTube, put in the four-chord song, look at the Axis of Awesome with all of their songs. So, here's the here's the key thing. In the four-chord song, three of the four chords are just strings two, three, and five with the mug at different positions along the fretboard. 12, seven, and five, these frets. Okay? The only thing that you have to throw in is that there's a minor chord, which is strings one, two, and three played at the 12th fret position. Now, this will be a lousy version of the four-chord song, but the key point is if it comes to you in under two minutes, that you can now play all of the songs in the four-chord song badly with a coffee mug and a guitar that somebody else tuned, then you're through a portal. So, for example, if you think let's try Beast of Burden, which is not it's going to be the wrong voicing, so the musicians will object to it. So, And I'll never be your beast of burden. Now, that's not a great version of the song, but for two minutes, and you think you're musically hopeless, it's not too bad. We're talking about Mike Einziger, right? This genius musician, everybody thinks is an amazing guy. What's even better about him is that he's a very generous teacher. He's a good friend, he's a great guy. How the hell did you meet him? The network, man. As soon as you break out, you meet all of these amazing people. When I followed the rules, I didn't meet anybody. That's interesting. That That's a conversation worth having, but finish this thought and then we'll come back. So, the thought I was going to have is is that if you think about that song that he wrote for more or less for Avicii that took over the world realize he wrote a song for Avicii. Didn't he do this um Wake Me Up When It's All Over? Maybe, I have no idea. Wiser and I'm older Wow, I had no idea that was so it's like it's the same four chords, but he starts from the minor chord in the in the cycle. So, if you put them around, it's like six minor, so Feeling my way through the darkness. It's that cycle. Now, my point is that those are things that once you learn the coffee mug trick Mhm. you think, okay, I completely misassessed how difficult this was. Now, was the coffee mug trick is that the portal or did you come to realize everything that you just said from first principles and that and I couldn't understand what was being said to me when people tried to teach me music the standard way. So, I had to find my own way. And you say you couldn't understand it. What do you mean? Actually, I want to go back to your learning disabilities. Sure. What What were they? How did you build confidence in yourself? Could you tell, I'm [ __ ] smart, man, there's just some translation error? I was recognized for being decent as a student to begin with. Okay. And what happened was that that recognition translated to my being skipped a grade even though I was already for my grade. So, I was like fairly advanced relative to the American system. You know, other people skip two, three, four grades. This was just one grade. But, to then have my handwriting and a lot of these sort of executive functioning issues take over, you know, like no matter how beautiful a poem I could write, I would always be graded on punctuation. And so, it was just this precipitous fall from educational grace. And that having had a memory, like the only remnant of my being have having been a good student was that I was somehow weirdly young for this grade, given that I was screwing up everything. And I was at a really good school, um which was hard to get into, that I'd gotten into before the superpower had fallen away. And so, there was just this like weird memory. And of course, in all the Cinderella stories, right? Cinderella's never really of lowly birth. She's always, you know, got something special. So, that was my little something special. And then when I found that I couldn't do music and I couldn't do math, because you had to rely so much on um calculation, and that required writing things down and being very careful about it, everything melted away. And I just became convinced that I wouldn't be fenced out of anything. That I was just going to be so aggressive that I was going to eat the system that was trying to eat me. And I made education the enemy, because that's what they were. They didn't realize it necessarily, but all of these people who prided themselves on being educators were just being incredibly abusive to me year after year, just tearing me to shreds because it was necessary for their fiction that the good students were getting ahead and the bad students were not putting in enough work or didn't have a gift. And you know, when I found out that in high school at this point? Oh, even through college. I mean, I was determined that I I I figured I was going to drop out of college. There was a language requirement and I took French and I was getting nowhere. Like you were having a hard time learning it? An impossible time learning it. Because it wouldn't stick? Because the number of things I could not figure out from the spellings, the accents, the irregularities, why is everything gendered? Were you frustrated with the nature of the language? Or cuz like so I'm I've heard you talk many many times and dude, your ability to logic through something is is really profound. That's why I'm saying Indonesian is special. Because Indonesian removes a lot of roadblocks. even saying like logic your way through like the following. Hey, I want to get a degree it'll be useful to me. I'm also by the way I've already done the whole [ __ ] degree except for the language thing. So I'm just going to brute force memorize this going to do worse. I was I was going I don't think anyone needs a BA to get a higher degree. So was part of it just the anger of the school system is the enemy and so [ __ ] these kids. I'm not going to get a degree if they're going to make me do something that I think is dumb. Well, I I I think that there's an aspect to that which is self-protective. Emotionally. This is dumb. motivating. Can you imagine that you're going to go up against the entire system and win? And you start envisioning your victory over a system that does not want you at the table? Yes. I mean, just try to try to imagine like being the blackest person possible at a KKK meeting and getting everybody singing your praises by the end. That's that's your goal. Right? You're just going to you were going to inflict yourself upon the world. And that that was necessary to build strength of character because when I you know, I got to Harvard in mathematics, there was no one remotely like me. You know, I I I And their approach to the system is broken and stupid. These were like the winners of the comp you know it was like a a tournament and people kept winning and so they kept advancing. You know and every once in a while I think you know I found out that Yo-Yo Ma didn't win any competitions when he was young. That's interesting. And I that was really distinguished because in general the way you got to be at Yo-Yo Ma's level was through a tournament model. And so what happened with me is I went to like the Museum of Science and Industry and I thought wow this is so cool. Uh I want to figure out how to become a scientist or a mathematician or an engineer or something like that. And then when I found out that you had to be really good at it I just thought well that's unfair. No literally like if the if the universe is written in differential geometry what are the odds that I'm not going to learn the language in which the cosmos was written? There's just no way you're going to fence me out of that. So I [ __ ] love that mentality so much you can't imagine. people don't like it. Uh I think that what you have to understand is is that like I'm sure that when I was singing there are musicians that are cringing you know? And they've got their hands over their ears and like you wanted to hear where do you really hear this difference uh between even temperament and the Pythagorean temperament? Um you know you hear it in the blue third. So the difference between like Like that is the place in which the maximum difference occurs that our third is wildly off. And so when I want to teach people about music I've got this problem always. Which is I've got this these very exceptionally good people who say you know you're teaching people wrong you're giving them the wrong ideas this isn't helpful. And I have to say screw you to all the people whose playing I know is better than mine and whose whose stuff I love but I'm not at I'm not talking to the people that they're going to reach. I'm talking about the people who are going to die never having a relationship with music. And this coffee mug may rescue some of them so that they will become the students of those great musicians. But what I'm interested is I'm interested in the losers. I'm interested in everyone who got left behind. You know, if I had a gang sign it would be an L in the middle of my forehead. If I if I ever make it to the Tonight Show I want them to play me on with maybe even the losers get lucky sometimes. It's just this idea of I will not be fenced out because of your hang-ups as an educator. There's no way I'm going to accept the D or the F or the you know, Johnny can try better or you know, Arena needs to turn in her homework more regularly. No, you're wrong. Those kids are not failing for the reasons you think. They don't think failing because you think they don't care. They they do care. They don't know how to do the things that come naturally to the kids you're calling the A students. And so I'm interested. Give me your F students. Give me the kids with the bad attitudes. Give me the kids with the learning disabilities you want to put in the corner and you want to hold back. Because mostly you've misassessed those people. Maybe I think 15 to 20% of our country is filled with unbelievable learners who are being held back by educators and nobody wants to take to the educators uh those kids are with me. And you got to get away from them because you're doing incalculable harm. And by the way, any parent who's listening to this who's got a kid who's not living up to potential is sitting there getting closer and closer to speaker. What did he just say? And if I say these are gifts, they're not they're not disabilities. Do not over medicate your children. Embrace entirely different ways of educating your kids. They can learn anything. One, I want to know how it's a gift. And two, are there actually places right now that people can go that specialize in educating people like that? Well, I think there's something called the Summit Center in the in Walnut Creek in the East Bay. Um there's a book called The Dyslexic Advantage. I think there's something called the Bridges Academy in LA. But there's an entire You know, what I found was is that there's a group of kids who meet in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to do LARPing. And I didn't know anything about LARPing. And the moms sit around bitching about the schools that their kids didn't get into. And say, you know, uh you know, my son Arun uh is an amazing computer programmer. He started his first business, but we can't get into the swanky private schools because they took one look at him and they don't want him. And I'm thinking like, yeah, they don't want him. But all we have to do is to make sure that this kid doesn't develop some sort of wrong idea about his his gifts. And we have to inflict our best people on the system because the system doesn't want our best people. Your beef with the system I find particularly interesting. There's something about your um imagine godlessly if I can recapture the words you used. Imagine taking on the whole system knowing you're going to win. It's not quite right, but that was certainly the sentiment. And that is that puts you in in a rarefied group. Most people are they're really broken by nobody believing in them. And I always tell people that the biggest gift anyone can ever give you, and it will never feel like a gift, but the biggest gift anyone can give you is doubt. The problem is it breaks most of the people that it touches. So, I liken it to the inner cities. The inner cities break virtually everybody that go through it. But the people that survive it come out the other side these extraordinarily driven um unbreakable people. And it's it's pretty extraordinary when you see it happen. But how do we begin to get those people into a position where they can um, and maybe it's reading the books that you listed or or going to the places, but I'm super curious if you know, like what is it about their method that they're teaching or or maybe more easily, what did you realize? What was the portal that you went through that allowed you to recognize your own struggles as an actual gift? Or was it just that it pissed you off enough that it made you fight? Well, for example, um, like the first portal for me really was music. And it was specifically the blues, which it is for many people. The blues is some of the most emotional music. Many people in my day didn't even know that it was a codified art form in large measure, but um, there was a 12-bar pattern, it was a formula. So there was sort of on a piano, it'd be your left-hand secret, which would be the progression. And your right-hand secret would be the scale that nobody taught you. Right? Um, it's not the major scale and it ain't the minor scale. And if you think about um, I was do this as uh, descending scales, if the major scale descending is Joy to the world, the Lord has come. But the blues scale descending sounds like the beginning to a song called Messin' With the Kid. Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee. And once you learn that scale, you realize how much of the stuff that you love was not in either the major or the minor. And you learn about these blues blue notes, and you learn about seventh chords, and you learn about how to put some grit and distortion in your guitar got an amp. And it's an alternate world. So the the portal in music that was a big breakthrough for you in terms of blues anyway, was that there are these left-hand right-hand secrets um in in a very simple scale that once you learn that, you've sort of got I mean maybe 80% isn't the real number, but it's like some big percent that you can very quickly start playing song unlocks that. And then, you know, for example, there was Because you realize how many songs you love are actually only four chords. Right. And then there was this weird Vivaldi piece, which is classical, you know, unapproachable classical music that went something like I I haven't played it forever, so I don't know if I'll remember. And I thought you know, that wasn't perfect. It's super rusty, but wait a minute. I can play that almost instantaneously. I don't need to wait. Maybe my technique is going to suck. Maybe I'm never going to make it to the Carnegie Hall stage. I don't care. That song is beautiful, and it makes me feel good, and there's no one who can fence me out. And I have my grandfather um that Brett and I both talk about to thank me for because he gave me this guitar, and my mom was dead set against it. She said, "You're giving him that guitar, it's just going to give him an inferiority complex." And my grandfather said, "Oh, all he needs to do is tune it. If he can learn how to tune it, he never has to play it." And he was such he was such a genius that he figured out how to get this thing into my life. And I tuned it, and then after you tune it, you say, "Well, I wonder if it's good for anything." Right? And then you start finding all of these techniques and hacks and and the craft behind it, and you realize you're behind the radio. It's like when you program a computer, you're on the other side of the screen that the person who's just using the apps is sitting, you know, they're sitting in front of a half-silvered mirror, and you're looking at them like you're the FBI, and they're just sitting there, you know, typing away. They don't even know that their computer is a computer. They can't find the place where you program the computer because now it's hidden. So, there's just this entire hidden world of everything. Like when you learn a language, why don't you learn linguistics along with the language that tells you why, you know, what is word production and and and morphology and and the orthography and what's the evolution of these things? You know, nobody tells you there's a book called the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language or the Loom of Language and that these books are like scrolls. They have all this extra information that people think, "Well, we can't bother the students with it." Are you kidding me? That's that's the sugar for for people like me. I'm going to get in behind that. I'm going to hack the hell out of it. I I wonder though, so when I think about and in fact maybe I can um give you insight into what it is like to be, I'm guessing, one of those teachers. The shortcuts and things that you're talking about, the portals, the ability to sort of understand the rules of the game. Would you say that that's a fair way to say that? Rules of the game? That once people understand that there are a computer is coded, it's not this mythical box, that there was a prompt line somewhere that you can go in and once you understand the rules and you can begin to edit the code and so on and so forth. You have to really understand how it works. Is that fair? Uh I don't know where you're going with it, but I'll play with that. Okay, so if that's roughly fair, and trust me, this isn't a trap, but I'm I'm thinking so cuz what the the perspective I want to give you is somebody who has has come to embrace that realization as fervently as you, but far slower and with less um like being hit with the awe and the wonder of like having this breakthrough moment with the guitar or whatever. So, I'm guessing the place the teachers are coming from is they don't get that same like big aha moment. It doesn't feel like a violent stumbling through a portal. What it feels like is an insecurity trigger of this is another thing that I have to learn and understand and be able to convey and teach to people. And I think it speaks to um when I think about the education system and mad love to everybody that's out there teaching because I used to teach. It is [ __ ] brutally difficult. It is a time suck of all time sucks. It is It will It will test your limits as as an intellect quite frankly and certainly as a um leader of minions, especially if you have uh you know, students at an age where they can properly rebel. Uh so, it it certainly isn't easy. But, it when you're in there trying to make it happen and you're realizing like this is intimidating and it's scary to try to put these lessons together. I went through school. I used sort of brute force. I was good at learning. They probably did reasonably well in school, which is why they continue. They got decent grades. They know how to play that game. And so, their entire life is about I've gotten good at this very finite thing. And people want to protect that sense of ego. And if their ego isn't that of being the learner, it's deeply more disturbingly that of being the teacher, the one who knows. students are you going to sac- How many students do you get Do you have the right Like what It's interesting. So, you and I you and I um who I don't know if we see this exactly the same and you are uh you have a righteous indignation that I find intoxicating, but I don't have. Okay. And so, um I heard Sam Harris talk about this one time. He said, "Maybe something broke in my brain when I was meditating." And I So, I don't get this anger. And remember I was telling you before we started rolling, people love it when I get like enraged about something. But, the only things I can get enraged about are things that I was doing to myself in my own life and it pissed me off about me. No. There's an ada- There's an adaptive aspect to my voice. I am I am aware frustration, To the aggression? cameras rolling and I now have a platform. And I have the ability to go back and save myself. So, that's who you're talking to. I'm talking to the parents Mhm. who are going to take their kid and they're going to say, "Where is your algebra homework? You forgot it at school again? You tore in a a ripped piece of paper? Did Did you not read the directions? Did Where are your notes? You know, I didn't know that I have this issue called kinesthetic reinforcement that when I take notes, instead of strengthening the pathway in the mind, it's so difficult for me to write that it erases whatever notes I'm taking. So, I wiped out the fancy private school education by taking the notes that were illegible and I didn't remember what was going on in class. And I only found this out when I was in graduate school at Harvard by the most precarious circumstances possible. I mean, my my view is is that my PhD belongs to every learning disabled family in the country because so so far as I'm concerned, the difficulty of getting through the system and surviving it is is that you're constantly causing a problem for every educator. And so, I am compassionate with the problem right up to a particular point. And that is the point where you say, "You know what? I don't have time for this shit." And I'm sorry, but you're getting a C. And I I some something in me knows that I'm doing you wrong, but I'm not allowed to do you right. I can't figure out why I'm allowed to give you an A in this class because you turned in some other project that I was not expecting. Because you showed brilliance. You You showed something else. And somehow, because of my needs for my job, I have to give you and your family the bad news that you're taking it for the team. And so, my righteous indignation is intended to start a blaze. If there was one thing I would love to do is to liberate the families that are going through this nightmare of looking at their kids and saying wow, you're really just you're not getting it. Don't worry, there'll be something in life for you. Like why are you giving up on your kids? If those kids are smart, like this race and IQ thing, I cannot stand this race and IQ thing. I I understand the idea that IQ is somewhat predictive. I understand that you can correlate it with various things. IQ is such a crude measure of all of the things that we really deeply care about. And I can't help, you know, my friend Nassim Taleb is brutal on this topic. He is not a nice person when it comes to this issue. But my energy is with him. How many people are we going to throw in the dummy pile? You know, I think about Louis Armstrong a lot. And I think about Louis Armstrong and the fact that we white Americans remember him as a novelty singer. Like hello, darling. And that's not what he is. He is the He is the singular genius who wrote our national classical music. And he invented it, for my money, modern jazz as we understand it. More or less single-handedly as an orphan out of New Orleans. Now, we can't acknowledge his genius. We can't acknowledge that this is an actual straight-up American genius like none other. I mean, like I don't know, maybe Art Tatum and Charlie Parker and a tiny number of people who are just completely out there. But we are so wrapped up in this nonsense about what makes a good student and what makes a first-class mind, we don't see. Like let me just give you the simplest one that I give a lot. People call me color blind and I say, "Oh, do you feel bad because you're contrast blind?" And they say, "What?" I say, "Well, I don't think you see contrast as well. So, if we ever need to depend on camouflage and spotting the enemy, you're going to really need me around. That's why my trait is retained in the gene pool." And I understand that color is something that gives you an advantage a lot of the time. But, don't think that we couldn't have driven my color blindness out of the system if it didn't confer an advantage. And you don't have that advantage and you don't even know that you don't have that advantage. Well, the same thing is true for most learning disabilities. The learning disability portion of the gift is the price paid. And you're not letting me use the other part. Like, I understand that a Bugatti is pretty noisy and it guzzles gas, but it does go rather fast if you know how to drive it. And you're telling me that I have to drive it in a school zone for 25 mph and that it has to be under a certain decibel level and that it can't guzzle gas that because it's too expensive and bad for the environment? Screw you. I want those learning disabled kids racing around the track at 300 mph and now you try to catch them. This is a This is an epidemic mischaracterization of a giant portion of the population from whom you will get vaccines and new industries. These are the people who will write your scripts that you'll you'll be riveted, must-see TV from the future. And right now what you're telling them is that they're a bunch of morons. So, yeah, there's a little bit of righteous indignation. No, man, I love it. I think that um I mean, it's interesting. So, not having lived through that, not having had that as my challenge, is something that I will say that I've just never really thought a lot about the way that people learn differently. But, you hear stories like you making it all the way to Harvard, getting a degree in mathematics, um and yet also being learning disabled. You hear people talk about how Einstein when he was young, people supposedly told him that he wasn't that bright. And you know, you you hear enough stories like that and you start to think, okay, maybe there are some people that are just so far outside of the box. Um your Bugatti analogy I think is is really spot on. It's uh yeah. Well, the great thing about it is that all those learning disabled kids really appreciate their their straight-A friends. Cuz that you know, you guys helped us out of our jams. You let us crib notes. Uh you very often got us through school. I don't look at me. I was a kid cheating. All right. Like like a fiend. All right. But what I'm trying to get at is I don't see the learning disabled students wanting to extinguish neurotypicals. I see the neurotypicals sc- neurotypicals freaked out of their minds that the kid who they think should be, you know, in the dummy pile might have some super talents. And if you think about a lot of the energy in Silicon Valley, a friend of mine uh and said something which I thought was very wise. And she said, "If only we could harness the energy of the billionaires who aren't still trying to prove to their middle school cafeteria table that they belong with the cool kids." That's pretty good. You know what's interesting and I think I heard you talk about this once before. What this needs is it needs a word. Like if people had a word, you hear learning disabled and you think, I mean, to be harsh, you think that they're low IQ. You think that they're not bright, that they're going to struggle their whole lives. And you definitely hear I've had a few of them on the show who've been like, "Yo, I was in the short bus classes and and you know, my wife struggled a little bit with that and people didn't think she was very bright, but this chick is just A, she's whip-it smart. And B, she is ungodly talented from an art standpoint, just ridiculous. But always got made fun of because she was a little bit dyslexic and just so it was like a real struggle for her. Um it needs a name. It needs a name where it's like cuz cuz what part of what people are struggling with is they don't know how to think of it. They don't know what to do with it. The system isn't wired for it. They're [ __ ] swamped. They've got a kid at home who's, you know, getting in trouble and trying drugs for the first time or having sex. Ah, [ __ ] I don't know what to do with this kid. Like he's he's a [ __ ] Bugatti. He's making all the noise. He's turning in the crumpled paper which seems like willful disobedience or whatever the [ __ ] do I do? So, what's wrong with mutant? We we watch No, seriously. As as a comic guy, I'm with you, man. Cuz that's [ __ ] rad. what I'm trying to get at. Our entire culture already knows this. Do you want to hang with the X-Men or do you want to hang with the Muggles, you know? I mean, it doesn't matter. It's the same story over and over again. Mix and match. I I There's some notion, right, that the mutants are cool because we all recognize our own mutations. I love giving the example of Elizabeth Taylor with her two rows of eyelashes because she was a mutant. She had two rows of eyelashes? Yeah, she was pretty hot. Interesting. Right? And the mutation helped make her hot. Huh. So, once you start to understand, like, you know, I I joke with everybody that the motto of my family is you can have my learning disabilities when you pry them from my cold dead fingers because I want to make that cool. You already have a word. It's like you It's like queer is an epithet. Yeah. Okay, I'll take that. And you want to say I'm low IQ? Okay. What is it going to feel like to get beat by somebody who's low IQ? Do you sure you want to choose that? Do you really want to put processing as one of the four categories of inputs to an intelligence quotient? Your call. Mhm. I mean, I think that the point is we have to turn this into a really fun blood sport. You had me at blood sport. Yeah, you see? Because what we need is we need people And I also, you know, there's a version of this that also works um for women. There's a whole version of this that works for African-Americans because there are different thought processes that have huge advantages. And what I believe is that we can lie about us all being the same or we can recognize that our gifts lie in different places. And I don't know of I mean, the gene pool seems to retain a lot of things that people claim are errors. I'm pretty sure that those things would be driven to frequency zero if that's what they were. Dude, have you read the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts? No. Oh my god. What is that? I've got a treat for you. So, it is a book, I think, written in 2011 by I think they were former Google engineers. Anyway, they were very savvy on search and they said, "Hey, the problem with sex research is that there's ethic ethics boards that like are convinced you're doing it for the wrong reasons, so nobody's ever really done this. People put you under a microscope. They wonder what's wrong with you. It can be career suicide, so nobody's looked at sex." Then they thought, "Well, wait a second. The internet is the world's largest experiment experiment of what people are actually desiring, not what they say they desire because if you put somebody into an environment and say, "Hey, we're going to keep these anonymous. Don't worry." Right. People still lie. They said, "But if you look for what they search, it tells you everything you need to know." Dude, that book is [ __ ] amazing and it makes it so clear. Like, I read it as a writer, as somebody who wants to write better characters. And not wanting to write men who think like women or women who think like men. I want to write like I I don't need to stay in the the purity of the archetype. I I like what you're talking about, the tension, but it's like if you don't understand the archetype, if you don't understand like that sort of this is a hyper male brain, this is a hyper female brain and and now I can nuance off of that into real characters who are far more diverse and heterogeneous and all that. But anyway, I like to to know where we're at. Right. The breakdown of what people search for pornographically, what they pay for pornographically was beyond [ __ ] enlightening. Give me three takeaways. Amazing. Takeaway number one. It's when you compare back-to-back descriptions in erotica uh written by women and basically smut is probably a better name written by men. So, words only descriptions of sexual acts, the women it's like he drew near to me with a steely gaze, he pressed against my body, he was engorged, okay? I mean, that's pretty [ __ ] close to direct quote. And then you have the guys. Um he grabbed her and anybody with kids right now would be the time to hit pause if there are children around. But it's like, you know, he grabbed her ass cheeks and like just I mean, I'll I'll stop myself there, but in the book they [ __ ] read the next like six lines which are just ridiculously pornographic about the body parts. So, you've got women talking about the relationship to bodies, it's not description of parts, and then you have guys obsessed with things, parts, anatomy. And like it it is hysterical seeing them read back-to-back. Number two, when you have female porn essentially, the female porn genre is all relationship-based and it is in the In fact, who would you say is the This is going to be ultra controversial, so I say this tongue-in-cheek. This is I'm quoting from the book, but who would you say is like the biggest perveyor of essentially female pornography, though it doesn't meet the typical criteria? Female pornography. I don't know You need to give me more of a clue. Stephanie Meyer, the author of Twilight. Oh, yeah. That is basically it is all romance, it's werewolves, it's vampires, it's all about lust and desire and this triangle of desirability where you have one woman at the middle being desired by two men and it's so fascinating to hear their breakdown of how like that is the swirl of what women are really drawn to and then you've got men that are doing your classic pornographic search and it's all about, you know, um God, men search for butts, breasts, and feet. Those are like the three big ones and they go into detail about why that is and I was like, "Fuck, this is so interesting to hear like how different the two takes on on sexuality are." And then you're getting sort of into the base desire. Now, what makes the book so [ __ ] interesting is they explain why it happens. So, with women where the cost of sex is child rearing, which is 9 months, potential death, and then years of having to take care of the child, it is extremely labor intensive. It is extremely calorically intensive, time, attention, all of it. Guys, exact opposite. You can the cost of sex is very low, you can abandon the child if you want. So, you have this super unequal um distribution. So, you have women in the book they called it a detective agency. The female psyche is a detective agency trying to figure out if you're a male that's going to stay around, help protect the child, rear it. That is incredibly important. So, they put them through the psychological ringer before they decide whether they're going to have sex or not. Whereas guys, it's cues basically of fertility. So, you're looking for youth and you're looking for a certain distribution of a certain type of fat, which is largely associated with youth And then with feet it comes down to, oddly enough, estrogen, which is a sign of fertility, tells feet to stop growing, which I didn't know. But so women with I guess ideal levels of estrogen tend to have a shorter feet, which is why there are cultures that practice foot binding because small feet in women are a point of attraction for men who over millennia have been sharpened to find women that have these signs of fertility. [ __ ] crazy. So you put those two together and now and clearly it is far more nuanced and all of that. I'm giving you like a real thumbnail sketch. But I found that so [ __ ] interesting in terms of what you were talking about of don't pretend that they're the same and don't pretend like they don't have advantages. Like when you really understand why a woman would need to focus on relationships and relationships with other women and being able to get the information that she needs about whether a partner is valuable. Um that finding ways to short circuit that. So one of the easiest ways to know if a man is is is worthy is whether or not other women desire him. And so like that whole thing of like one of the things that makes a guy attractive is already being in a relationship. And so all of the the interesting intersections of desire arising out of another woman's desire for somebody it's [ __ ] fascinating. So it's interesting. I I thought about why not do evolutionarily aware porn. Like allow Very interesting. allow the greatest evolutionary theorists to write the scripts. No, I'm not kidding. No, no, no. I'm actually It's funny because it would be a fantastic test. I believe that actually it wouldn't work because we are so far out of the EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, into this thing which I call the EEN, the environment of evolutionary novelty, that with the amount of birth control in our system, I think that a lot of we don't really understand what the pill has done to female eroticism. Um I think that with a failed economy, Uh changed what people desire, the number of women I find now talking about preferring really exaggerated age differences, which is probably a proxy for people who are willing to commit and have the resources to raise a child, um is changing some notion of attractiveness. Men are on a hedonic treadmill where they're cycling through porn at such a rate that they're becoming really deviant and things are not getting through to them that would have once been considered extremely exciting. So, then, you know, you you start to see um these podcasts, uh you know, we were just talking before about this show Call Her Daddy, which is extremely kind of I've never heard it. It's pretty raunchy, man. It's not what you Two women? Um they're funny, they're playful, but they're also really over the edge and I think you might you might learn something. I did because I was trying to understand podcast demographics and somebody said this has mostly a female uh listenership. Um I do think that a lot of the things that you're talking about about um women taking a cue as to who's desirable based on who other women find attractive uh is pretty highly conserved, but I think we are now somewhere so far east of Eden that even the evolutionary predictions of our erotic differences are probably being really challenged at the moment. I don't think it's as clean-cut as it used to be. That's interesting. So, one thing I'll say to that though is one of the predictions, of course, would be on the male side a desire for novelty. So, some element of that that would be a largely weighted part of this would play into it. Now, whether they could predict exactly what people would search for, but some of the stuff that um popped up as like being really high search for terms or websites that have done well from a pay standpoint or made the Alexa ranking. Now, keeping in mind this is back in 2011, so things may have changed, but um man, it's it's it it is surprising if the answer were anything other than novelty. Well, I think we're I think we're getting to the point that normal porn has gotten really sick. That if you're not a prude about eroticism, um some of the things that you're seeing pushed have to do with the fact that our brains are now habituated to all sorts of things that you probably would never have seen visually unless you were like Genghis Khan. Right? Because everything's on demand. And so the search for novelty uh I think is taking in some cases quite a dark turn even for people who are pretty okay with the idea of pornography and eroticism as being a an important part of an adult diet Mhm. for the mind. Where it where it worries me is kids, for sure. And I'm maybe even less worried about today than I am in 15 years when you have VR that is bordering on photorealistic, and that's where Photoshop whoever you want in, Yeah. you know, choose your own experience. That's very disturbing. But I I'll be honest, I'm more concerned right now about um people finding partners to have children with. I think that this is a an economic epidemic that we don't feel comfortable talking about, and people comfortable talking about Well, because for example, if you have a fair idea that you're at risk for not having the family thing work out, like it's gotten a little late in the day, and you don't see a lot of prospects lined up, and you've had a few relationships that haven't ended in commitment and resources and children and the economy doesn't seem to want to come up with a 30-year plan to fit a mortgage and getting some kids through college. Um I think that the transition from the previous world has been pretty brutal and a lot of people don't want to say, "Yeah, I really want a family and if it doesn't work out, I'm going to be it's going to be a major hit to my life and my sense of myself." And we need, you know, in part I think that a lot of us don't want to see um young women forced onto the apps. You know, which seems like it turns life into this From a dating perspective? Yeah, like a sing it's just, you know, somebody somebody said that this is a singles bar in my pocket. And wherever I'm bored, I just go to the singles bar and start swiping. And I thought, "Okay. And how do you feel about it?" So, well, in the aggregate I feel pretty terrible about that, but I can't stop. And so, you now you've commodified all of this stuff and I don't think it's a good deal for young women at all. Um I think that, you know, young women have been used to putting men through their paces and demanding a lot. And you know, saying, you know, jump this high and seeing who can clear the bar. And when that power is not present and when men can't win these competitions and have those competitions really mean something. We derange as a society because society is about continuity and continuity is about babies. So, no matter what you want to do, you can take it away from babies. I remember I was talking to a young woman who was like 26 or something. And she asked me if I had kids and I said, "Yes." And I said, "Do you have kids?" And she like practically spit out her beer. Like, "What?" And I thought, "Do you think it's really like crazy question that I would ask a 26-year-old woman if she had kids. Um and then, you know, she thought about it. It just feel felt very remote. And this is the economy that we're bequeathing to people. And my belief is is that if the median individual cannot count on being able to, you know, have a home in a reasonable city that has lots of jobs so that if one job doesn't work, they can switch, and one person can stay home. Doesn't have to be the dad. Doesn't have to be mom and a dad. Can any pair, but you need somebody with the freedom to stay home to raise children while somebody else can be counted upon to go be the breadwinner in an economy that isn't, you know, absolutely razor's edge. This is nuts. And, you know, it was driven home to me recently when my father turned 85. We were at a party for his friends, and some of their closest friends lived in in our neighborhood when I was growing up. They were saying, "Oh, yes, you know, when we moved in all those years ago, um there were 14 boys who used to play on the street, and now there are none." Wow. And I said, "What do you mean there are none?" She says, "What? Young families can't afford to live on this street." And I said, "Do you have any thought in your mind that that was a catastrophe that happened to your street? And that maybe your generation had some responsibility This is the silent generation, so before the baby had something to do to say, 'Hey, maybe this is not good for society if young families She said, 'Well, the these homes are perfect for families.'" And I said, "But you just told me that there are no families on your street." So, this is an epidemic, and this is deranging us, and this is a lot of what's behind this kind of sense of injustice and people trying to um find groups, I think, to take care of because you've got a lot of maternal instincts that are not grounding in happy, hopeful homes raising kids. That's really interesting. What do you think is um the sort of key driver? Is this uh student loans? Is it um the average salary isn't going up? Like And part of the what drives my question is I know what I pay. So my my previous company I had at one point 3,000 employees, about 1,500 full-time, and then another 1,500 part-time. Here I have 20-plus employees full-time, and then another, I don't know, seven or eight part-time. And I know what I pay them, and it's a good wage. Um it's a hell of a lot more than I was making at their age. That's probably the easiest way to say it. Okay. So where is it that just the way that we are and what we pay is not indicative of what other companies pay? Is it um is it something else? Is it something else? just going to be um really kind of brutal. First of all, uh we were in an orchard with lots of low-hanging scientific fruit, where you could take the scientific fruit and turn it into technology in short order. We're still making scientific advances, but most of those that are even fairly profound are not instantly convertible into technology. So there might be low-hanging fruit in a new orchard, but we haven't found the new orchard, so we're picking fruit that has a very different characteristic. So that's the first part is that our pipeline got screwed up. And But how does that really play out in like dollars and cents? So I'm thinking of the street, right? It's the perfect analogy. So you have a street. The houses have a price to buy, they have a price to rent. So when I think about, okay, what is stopping somebody from either buying or renting? So if the prices are too high Prices are too high. So then is it that the prices are artificially too high because we have a bunch of empty houses and people who are buying as an investment and they're just being stupid or you're you're fairly familiar with my theories and acronyms and things. So you you probably heard about the embedded growth obligation, the ego. what I have I and I get that and that scares me and I totally buy into it. What I don't and for anybody listening and tell me if I [ __ ] this up, but like basically we have a system that's entirely predicated on continued growth and that growth slowed down starting the 70s or 80s and we've done a lot of [ __ ] shell games to make it seem like we're growing and the one that when you give I'm always freaked the [ __ ] out by is the essentially Ponzi scheme of education. Yeah. Where higher education you're teaching people to be professors, um but there's only going to be so many professors or the law firm's only going to be so many partners. So it's like Every graph tells the same story. So but what I don't understand is if that's been the same since the 70s, like I didn't even graduate high school until the mid-90s and this is nothing ever seen I mean look, there were times I couldn't quite pay my bills, there were times where um you know, I was sharing an apartment with a bunch of people, but it's like it it never felt like the system had broken in some impossible way. And this isn't me saying that it isn't broken, this is me just saying I want to really understand like where we've gone wrong. this is what I say to my friends in San Francisco. So they've got good jobs, they're programmers, they're having a blast, they're going to Tulum and you know, traveling to Bali and all these things. And so I say um you're living in a group house. What do you think about buying your own home and asking that gal you've been um going out with for a couple years to get married? And like the conversation just gets really weird. Uh well, I'm not so confident that I can commit to a 30-year mortgage and you know, prices are insane and I'm not positive that she's the right one for me and you know, all these things. Or if I talk to my female friends, they have a a set of different stories. Um which is like, I'm so tired of little boys who never grow up. Um Is this a psychological malaise? Like cuz that explanation I can understand. We're not excited about low variance futures needed for children as we see them. don't see things popping off like this isn't Beijing in 2006 where it's just like the sky's the limit or Well, I think people have a have a pretty strong sense. Well, like I hired a millennial who I'm very good friends with. And I noticed that he was like not that committed to certain kinds of projects. He would he'd work hard, but he also had a very clear sense of you know, my obligation ends at this point. I said, I know this person. I think they work here. Okay. Keep going. And um I I said, well, why why why do we have a difference in in a sense of work ethic? And he said, "Oh, because my generation watched your generation get screwed by the baby boomers. And we're not falling for it." Do you buy that? Yeah. That sounds like [ __ ] to me. And and when I say I'm happy to be convinced, what I want is the [ __ ] truth, dude. Because I have no interest in the Let's get to the truth. Because so, I have a psychotic work ethic. Why? Because I didn't used to and my entire life changed when I changed my work ethic. But you Look, you're talk Sounds to me like you're talking about founding companies. I've done both. I've been an employee and I've founded companies. So, I've played both sides of the fence. And how did How did the employ Well, look, I I don't want to over index on I mean, because you know, there are particular lawyers and particular law firms who aren't founding anything who are doing just fine. But it's a minority position. And what I believe is is that we are in a situation in which we are not excited by the future. And the people who are real stakeholders in the system have in general been very focused on making sure that the pyramid is always supplied. So, this idea for example of you have to go to college, the debt has to become non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, we get to load up the universities with administration, all that kind of stuff. And then of course the main one which is really bizarre which is there's the secret weapon. And the secret weapon is immigration. And the great part about immigration as a as a invidious tool for one generation to screw another generation with is is that if you call it out, there's only one explanation for why you would fight having other people added to the bottom of a pyramid scheme. Which is you must be a xenophobe or probably a racist. And the answer is no, I'm really just trying to choke your supply of new virgins to add to this pyramid scheme so that you can continue to transfuse yourself. Yeah, that's interesting. Um So, let me see if I can uh steal man this quickly. I This is the one time in my life where I am the one that has a hard out in 5 minutes. I'm so [ __ ] horrified. This is so interesting to me. Um so, I'll try to do it quickly. Okay, so um we have a pyramid scheme in that there are only so many jobs and I'll even abstract it from being a lawyer which is very easy to understand. There's only so many people make partner, being a teacher, it's easy to understand. You can only create so many other teachers and obviously we're talking at higher education. Um and I'll just say your normal job. Now, I've told my employees this. Like, look, every step you go up, you there's fewer available positions until you get to the CEO and there's only one. So, there's only like you can get promotion. I've never thought of there being sort of a money does not strike me as the finite resource. The promotion strikes me as the finite resource. You can keep making more and more money depending on the health of the company and your contributions to it. So, that's part of my bias is that when I try to use just first principles, I'm like, if this person is that valuable to me, I'm going to [ __ ] pay them because I have fear of loss. I don't want to lose them. So, which is why I default to create fear of loss in your employer if you want more money, but the company has to be doing well. So, let me stick to the Ponzi scheme here. So, um very interesting take on immigration. So, you have people coming into the system. They're willing to work cheaper than the other people would otherwise work in the system. You got to be careful about that, but keep going. It's interesting. I'm trying to represent your position. no, but what I'm trying to say is that really the biggest issue is push out the labor supply curve. You say that another way. Your wage is your price. Yep. And I bring people from foreign countries to make sure you can't compete cuz they'll do it for cheap. Yes. No, it's it's not even that. I mean, maybe maybe the idea is that you're you'll you're a superior source of labor. Who's you? Whoever you are, you're the domestic Let's assume that you're a worker inside of the US. Yep. The big play in some sense of the previous generations, the silent generation and more importantly the baby boomers, was internationalism, which they called globalization. And the hidden part of globalization that wasn't the United Colors of Benetton was the idea if we can just break our dependence on each other and look abroad and talk tell a beautiful story about what we're going to do for Africa and Asia, then the idea is is that we can continue to grow our slice of the pie even though the pie might not be growing at the same rate because from my perspective as a silent generation or baby boomer, I'm focused on a slice, not the pie. And so, there was a huge amount of value gotten from tricking people into thinking that globalization was this beautiful Davos-inspired uh kind of philanthropy that was going to be a rising tide to raise all boats. And those Americans who had rights inside of our system, and this goes for Brits who had Brit- British rights, and French who had French rights, whatever. Had a right that was valuable, which is I have asymmetric access to my labor market, and that's how we worked as a nation. So, now you start the the world's greatest PR campaign, which is patriotism doesn't exist, it's only nationalism. And of course, nationalism is really ultra-nationalism, which is jingoism, which is a precursor to Nazism. So, you start saying, "You know, I kind of believe in citizenship and patriotism, and now you're telling me that that's I'm a bad person." And now you've got the Davos crowd talking about financial inclusion in Africa and Asia, and you notice that they're not really that interested in Michigan or Alabama. And it's a it's an Tell me why they're not, because I felt like I was interested in it until you told me that I was getting on the Because the amount of value, you see, if I had to purchase your rights Uh-huh. And I wrote a paper rights to what? Well, your asymmetric access to your labor market. I wrote a paper called migration for the benefit of all, published in the International in the, um, International Journal of Labor. I for- I forget what the title is. Migration for the benefit of all, which said, "If you pay people for their rights, like if the baby boomers in silence said, 'Look, we think we can get better labor outside, and we want to pay you for the right to shop elsewhere.' Then the idea is that everybody would have been better off, and we would have all screamed Kumbaya at each other as we got rich together. But instead, what they said is you're a protectionist, and a jingoist, and a xenophobe. We loaded them up with as much negative imagery as we could pos- You're just a bad person." And they were doing that though, so they can get cheaper labor, right? So, they can keep you from having leverage. But you keep saying it is we're will- we're willing to work below. But my point is is that if this coffee mug Mhm. cost $10, and now we have 10,000 coffee mugs, it's not that those coffee mugs are are willing to be uh bought for less. The entire cost of coffee mugs plummets. It's just pushing out the supply curve on labor. And wages it's price. So it behaves much as supply and demand should. Now you can then point out you can make lots of other arguments like, "Well, some of these people are starting business and people are not coffee mugs and these are the most vibrant members of our society." You know, you queue stars and stripes forever, you put your right hand over your heart, but the key point was is that all of these arguments were necessary to keep the institutional structure going as the Ponzi scheme ran out. And a lot of this has to do with what I've called fake growth. Downsizing, offshoring, immigration, securitization. It's just this mind-numbing uh parade of different techniques that these older generations have used to keep a system afloat that has been saying, "We're exhausted." Like the law firms are supposed to fail, the universities are supposed to fail. All sort of the the the newspapers are don't make sense as a business model and things that you're creating and that we all might create would be replacing these things. But instead what we've done is we've come up with an exotic kind of economic parabiosis where we're going to transfuse our fellow Americans and the younger generations to pay for a group of people who are just far too expensive to keep living in the style to which they have unjustly become accustomed. So, I'm sorry about your heart stop, but I think that there's a tremendous amount to be excited about and enthusiastic about because in essence, getting back to your original point, you're right about the Matrix. For 50 years, we've been in a constellation of ideas, suppressing the really interesting new ideas, and calling names on anybody who would propose ideas that would point out the unstable nature of of our market democracy. And right now, what we're doing is we're living through the beginning of a global, low-grade revolution of a type that we've never seen before. So, tune in next time to find out what happens. Oh [ __ ] I love that. That's a great place to end. Dude, thank you so much. It was absolutely amazing. I hope this is part one. I'd love to have you back. This is so [ __ ] fun. I could have gone on seriously for a lot more time. So, uh thank you. I am very keen to uh dive through some more portals with you. So, next time. Thank you so much. Thank you. Be well. Peace out, everybody. Till next time. Be legendary. Later. My first, you can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant. I mean, it's it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology, that really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just the the framing. It's just the story you're telling yourself.