TRIGGERnometry - Why Tension Between Both Sides is NEEDED - Tom Bilyeu

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00:00:22.600 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:00:26.800 Get tickets at murbish.com.

00:00:31.000 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:00:36.860 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:00:42.120 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:00:46.120 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:00:52.940 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:00:56.840 Get tickets at murbish.com.

00:01:00.000 When the culture war started kicking off, I just started asking myself, is this actually useful?

00:01:06.320 Ooh, all these ideas sound awesome, but there's something that tells me there's a problem lurking within.

00:01:11.740 Living in California, I began to realize, I don't know what metric we're using, but yikes, it isn't human flourishing.

00:01:18.160 And if something sounds good, but it doesn't work, you have to immediately change course.

00:01:22.060 And so I began to realize, in the culture war, in life in general, in a marriage, everything, it's a dynamic tension between two opposing views.

00:01:33.620 And by having the dynamic tension, you make progress.

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00:03:00.680 Tom, last time I was here, you were interviewing me,

00:03:04.000 and within about three seconds of meeting you, I was like,

00:03:08.320 dude, I love your mind.

00:03:10.360 And you are a guy who's into growth, into building,

00:03:14.900 and yet we were having a conversation about culture wars and woke culture.

00:03:19.720 How are you here?

00:03:22.640 Ooh, on that topic?

00:03:24.040 Yeah.

00:03:24.300 How are you on trigonometry?

00:03:26.740 Well, that's a really interesting question.

00:03:28.260 This is surreal for me.

00:03:29.200 This is a fun show to be on.

00:03:31.280 So I come from a place of actually believing that the only thing that's different between me

00:03:37.160 and somebody that hasn't achieved the kind of success that they want is a set of ideas.

00:03:41.100 Once you realize it's a set of ideas that is the difference between success and failure,

00:03:46.620 you get pretty obsessed with trying to get those ideas across to people.

00:03:50.500 If you really want to see other people shine, which I do, that's just my thing.

00:03:54.760 And so when the culture wars started kicking off, I just started asking myself,

00:04:00.360 is this actually useful?

00:04:01.720 Will this help somebody's life be better?

00:04:03.700 If an idea will help somebody's life be better, I'm going to get behind it.

00:04:06.220 I'm going to champion it.

00:04:07.180 If it is an idea that subtly feels right, but is going to move your life backwards,

00:04:14.140 then I get very worried.

00:04:15.620 And when this all started kicking off, I was like, ooh, all these ideas sound awesome,

00:04:21.300 but there's something that tells me there's a problem lurking within.

00:04:24.460 And so I really came at it feeling ignorant because I was like, I'm having a hard time

00:04:28.760 making sense of these incredibly complicated topics, but I have a gut feeling that there's

00:04:35.540 a problem.

00:04:36.220 And so in working through that and really trying to figure out what do I think about this stuff?

00:04:40.720 Why does this feel wrong when it sounds so right?

00:04:43.840 And then the Thomas Sowell quote really became like an obsession of mine.

00:04:51.120 He said this 20 years ago, so I'll just switch the number out for the difference for today.

00:04:57.280 I said, the last 50 years have been marked by exchanging what worked for what sounds good.

00:05:02.400 And I was like, oh my God, that's exactly what's happening is people are not thinking about,

00:05:07.680 hey, I have a hypothesis.

00:05:08.560 I think if we do this thing, it will yield this result.

00:05:11.780 And we have a North Star of human flourishing, let's say.

00:05:14.920 Maybe we don't agree on that, but you need a North Star and you need a metric by which

00:05:19.780 you're going to judge whether you've achieved that North Star.

00:05:21.980 It's like business 101.

00:05:23.700 And living in California, I began to realize, I don't know what metric we're using, but yikes,

00:05:29.320 it isn't human flourishing.

00:05:30.500 So that just started to all come together.

00:05:33.200 And I was like, okay, I need to actually understand this.

00:05:35.480 What are the ideas?

00:05:36.460 Where are they becoming problematic?

00:05:39.720 Why?

00:05:40.200 Why do they sound good, but not yield good results?

00:05:42.460 Like where does all this break down?

00:05:44.660 Because I've worked in the inner cities a lot.

00:05:47.220 And so I really have seen people get eaten alive by their zip code.

00:05:50.220 There really is a problem. 0.84

00:05:51.680 Very smart people meet very dumb ideas and it completely ruins their life.

00:05:56.700 And so the idea of like wanting to help people that are in a bad situation is the thrust of

00:06:02.600 my life.

00:06:03.120 That's what I want to do.

00:06:04.760 But as an entrepreneur, I'm like, you have to have a metric to know if you're actually

00:06:09.040 making progress.

00:06:10.140 And if something sounds good, but it doesn't work, you have to immediately change course.

00:06:14.660 So then I get into, stop me if I go, like if you have anything, but I start thinking

00:06:21.540 about, okay, why do we bifurcate into left and right?

00:06:25.060 Like, what is that?

00:06:25.920 Because the ideas sound awesome because they're coming from a place of compassion.

00:06:29.740 Okay, but is compassion always good or does it fall on a spectrum of pathology on one

00:06:35.680 side and maybe help in the middle and then pathology again on the other side?

00:06:41.020 And so I began to realize that in the culture war, in life in general, in a marriage, everything,

00:06:49.480 it's a dynamic tension between two opposing views.

00:06:52.940 And by having the dynamic tension, you make progress.

00:06:56.160 If you don't have dynamic tension, then you go to pathology.

00:07:00.580 And so if you think of the left and right divide, there's pathology on both sides.

00:07:04.000 So you can be pathologically left, you can be pathologically right.

00:07:08.040 They look different, but it's the same unchecked, just sort of where this runs right.

00:07:12.640 On my tombstone, my wife has very strict instructions to write the words, you're having a biological

00:07:19.220 experience.

00:07:21.060 And the reason that I want that on my tombstone is that, like, if I make that contribution

00:07:25.040 to the world, I'll be very happy.

00:07:26.420 If I just get people to understand that that's it.

00:07:29.420 Everything in your life is seen through the lens of the way your brain works, the way eyes

00:07:33.340 work, ears work, so on and so forth.

00:07:35.060 And so effectively, you are living in a simulation created by your biology.

00:07:41.020 And none of us know what is objectively true.

00:07:43.600 We're only able to perceive 0.0035% of the available electromagnetic spectrum.

00:07:50.900 And we confuse that with all there is to see.

00:07:53.640 But in reality, of course, it's just all we can see.

00:07:56.980 So once I realize that, then you start thinking about emotions and you start going, okay, we

00:08:00.340 have these emotions.

00:08:01.560 They feel real.

00:08:02.420 Well, they convince us to act a certain way, but are they real?

00:08:06.420 What does real mean?

00:08:07.460 All of that.

00:08:08.000 So anyway, as I break that down and I ask, as a species, we become the most dominant apex

00:08:12.320 predator the world has ever seen.

00:08:13.700 We're doing something right.

00:08:15.040 You've all know Harari talks about our ability not just to gather in groups, but to do so

00:08:19.760 flexibly and to do so around ideology and ideas.

00:08:24.560 And so that just got me thinking about left and right.

00:08:26.900 Okay, cool.

00:08:27.380 So is it possible then that left and right represent something biological and they both represent

00:08:32.380 something valuable, biological, and we happen to be moving through a time where it's becoming

00:08:37.080 pathologized, which would take the whole episode to sort of string together all the ways that

00:08:42.380 I think that happens.

00:08:43.160 But if you'll grant me that, that we're in a moment of pathology, something is broken,

00:08:47.200 it's going wrong.

00:08:48.440 What becomes the oversimplified fix for me is born out of understanding why the left and

00:08:54.220 right exist in the human psyche.

00:08:55.660 If I know I'm having a biological experience that has yielded the most effective animal

00:09:00.640 the world has ever seen.

00:09:01.840 Okay.

00:09:02.300 So I'm coming at it from that stance.

00:09:04.140 And I say to myself, okay, if the left is compassion, compassion's awesome.

00:09:08.820 I love it the most.

00:09:09.900 I want more compassion.

00:09:11.180 If the right is, call it self-responsibility, I love it the most.

00:09:15.360 I want more personal responsibility.

00:09:17.100 And so I'm like, why have we bifurcated such that it really does seem split almost exactly

00:09:24.060 down the middle that, and of course it's a spectrum.

00:09:26.480 And so I'm not saying everybody's hard in one direction or another, but like those two

00:09:30.280 really do seem to sum up the way that people lean.

00:09:34.540 So then using my marriage as a analogy, I was like, okay, I learned very early on in my

00:09:42.360 marriage that I didn't want to change my wife into thinking like me.

00:09:45.320 I needed to distrust myself and I needed to say, I'm not going to pretend I don't feel

00:09:50.180 this way, but I'm not going to pretend I know I'm right.

00:09:53.360 So I'm just going to say, ah, probably the reason that men and women have thrived so long

00:09:58.520 is that they really do see things very differently.

00:10:00.240 And it becomes the dynamic tension between the two that yields good results.

00:10:04.860 I can go into a whole diatribe about coming of age rituals, which I think are very missing.

00:10:09.520 They're why I got a tattoo and I got married.

00:10:11.460 I wanted to ritualistically scar myself to really go through something, to be like, I'm

00:10:15.680 different now.

00:10:16.940 But anyway, going in my marriage, I have been served by this dynamic tension.

00:10:21.700 Is it possible that we need a dynamic tension between the left and the right, that we need

00:10:27.000 them both?

00:10:27.780 We have to value them both.

00:10:30.180 But something has happened that has weakened one side and made the other side stronger such

00:10:37.580 that now things tip into pathology on one side.

00:10:41.800 I will take the, what will on your channel not be controversial, but on many channels it

00:10:46.840 would be very controversial stance that what's happened is we've let compassion become pathologized.

00:10:52.200 And it's so hard to push back on if you're wired anything like me, because all the ideas sound

00:10:59.100 amazing and they sound like the same kind of ideas that I'm dedicating my life to.

00:11:03.940 And for people that have never heard of impact theory, my whole thing is that I have a theory

00:11:08.040 that if you can get ideas into the hands of people growing up in the inner cities, that

00:11:11.360 those ideas will change the trajectory of their life.

00:11:13.800 So it's like, you would think that then I would spill to the left.

00:11:17.080 But as a business person, I'm like, yeah, but you have to judge the merit of an idea

00:11:23.080 based entirely on its efficacy.

00:11:25.580 And driving down LA, you just see homeless people literally everywhere.

00:11:32.360 So it's like, okay, something isn't working.

00:11:34.780 I don't know what that something is.

00:11:36.040 I just know something isn't working.

00:11:37.540 And so now you have to start to ask questions.

00:11:39.560 And then that's the first thing you realize is being a sale.

00:11:41.680 Like there are certain questions you can't ask.

00:11:44.320 So then I become like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:11:46.700 Like if it's the dynamic tension between the two, and again, maybe I'm wrong, but this

00:11:50.940 is my belief.

00:11:52.200 If it's the dynamic tension, the second you ask one group to shut up, you create the pathology.

00:11:59.260 And so now you've got social media, which spreads ideas very rapidly.

00:12:02.460 The left, their ideas just sound better.

00:12:04.940 They sound kinder.

00:12:05.860 They sound more loving.

00:12:06.860 They sound like what we should all aspire to.

00:12:09.260 The problem is just going left doesn't actually work.

00:12:13.120 If it did, I'd be all for it.

00:12:14.580 Remember, I know my North Star.

00:12:16.060 It is human flourishing for as many people as humanly possible.

00:12:20.960 So it's like, okay, cool.

00:12:23.120 Does going only one direction yield human flourishing?

00:12:26.600 Yes or no?

00:12:27.280 You can test this?

00:12:28.660 No, it does not.

00:12:29.660 Not on the right, not on the left.

00:12:31.780 So now, and I've seen this play out in business as well.

00:12:34.260 In fact, I'll speak to you guys as business partners.

00:12:36.700 Gentlemen, I would like to make an appeal. 1.00

00:12:38.880 There are going to be times where you both think the other person is an outright moron, 0.99

00:12:42.720 and you can't believe you've been business partners as long as you have. 0.99

00:12:46.100 And in that moment, you need to distrust yourself far more than the other person.

00:12:50.400 And you need to say the very thing that will make this relationship work is that we see

00:12:53.980 the world in a slightly different way.

00:12:55.700 And the fact that we see it differently means we will have fewer blind spots.

00:12:59.360 And so we need to respect the dynamic tension.

00:13:01.960 You get this all the time between a CEO and a COO. 0.97

00:13:06.080 And if either one of them thinks the other is a moron, so a CEO is visionary, a COO is implementation. 0.95

00:13:13.600 If the implementer is annoyed at the dreamer, you're going to have a problem. 0.92

00:13:18.420 And if the dreamer is annoyed that these things actually have to be implemented,

00:13:21.740 you're going to have a problem.

00:13:23.000 You need them both.

00:13:24.500 So to use the analogy of a kite and a string, if you have a kite with no string,

00:13:28.240 it flies off into nothing, crashes into a tree, and gets ruined.

00:13:30.680 If you have a string with no kite, it lays on the ground.

00:13:33.040 You need a string and a kite in dynamic tension to hold something aloft.

00:13:37.700 And so my whole thing about the culture war is I started feeling like a coward

00:13:42.120 because I was not speaking about things that I felt like,

00:13:45.720 ooh, I can see that this is going wrong.

00:13:47.820 This is not going to lead to human flourishing,

00:13:49.500 but I don't want anybody to ruin my YouTube channel that I've worked so hard to build.

00:13:53.480 And I'm trying to get into video games.

00:13:55.500 God, do I want people thinking about me on these controversial topics?

00:13:59.120 And then I was like, all that it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

00:14:03.940 So I thought, okay, I'm being quiet out of cowardice.

00:14:06.640 I don't like feeling like a coward.

00:14:08.820 And so here we are with me on Trigernometry.

00:14:10.920 It is so amazing because I think what you've summed up there is actually the ethos of why we started what we started.

00:14:18.320 The difference is it's that Fight Club quote, it's only once you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

00:14:24.280 That was our issue.

00:14:25.420 We didn't have anything to lose.

00:14:26.800 But for you, it's different.

00:14:30.220 Now, in terms of the practicality of these ideas, I agree with you.

00:14:34.400 It seems like we are now living in a world that is entirely driven by what sounds good.

00:14:43.180 Why don't we course correct?

00:14:45.560 Why has that not happened?

00:14:46.760 Why do people who live in California not drive down the highway and see homeless encampments and go, hmm, maybe what we're doing isn't working?

00:14:57.980 Okay, so there are a lot of reasons.

00:15:01.020 We'll try to tease them out one at a time.

00:15:02.940 So reason number one is that these ideas are very nuanced, very nuanced.

00:15:08.040 And the human mind has a very hard time conceptualizing a nuanced argument.

00:15:16.720 And even if they can get it, it's hard to remember.

00:15:20.300 And so they'll use a heuristic to make it easier.

00:15:23.620 And so they'll boil it down into a bumper sticker.

00:15:26.140 Now, the problem is the bumper sticker is where the pathology begins because now it's like no man left behind.

00:15:34.740 Okay, I love that.

00:15:35.460 It's an awesome idea.

00:15:36.340 And if I were in the Marines, maybe, but also you can just feed people to a sniper trying to go get the person who's wounded.

00:15:43.780 And so you'll see this in school systems where they – I don't know if they have this.

00:15:48.500 So I come from Washington State.

00:15:49.720 They have something called McKinney Vento.

00:15:51.620 And it's literally no child left behind.

00:15:53.580 And they will drive a bus two, three hours out of their way to go and get the kid and bring them back.

00:15:57.860 And I'm just like, whoa.

00:15:59.100 I get the sentiment.

00:16:00.480 I really get the sentiment.

00:16:01.780 But I don't know that it plays out well.

00:16:04.300 I haven't looked at that closely enough to stake my thing.

00:16:06.260 And I'm just using that as an example of where you take something so far to the extreme, you're not willing to let anything like fall through the cracks.

00:16:15.040 Now you're no longer prioritizing.

00:16:16.660 Or you just recognize that now becomes the priority.

00:16:20.600 And in reality, everything is going to be a give and take.

00:16:23.580 There's going to be no perfect solution.

00:16:26.040 There are no utopias, only tradeoffs.

00:16:28.320 That's a paraphrase, if not exact quote of Thomas Sowell again.

00:16:31.260 There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

00:16:32.840 Perfect.

00:16:34.000 So everything is going to be a give and take.

00:16:37.300 Like, ah, if we do this, then we're going to get this second or third order consequence, which is not ideal.

00:16:42.040 But if we don't, we end up in this dark place.

00:16:45.040 So, okay, now you combine that reality with people are having a hard time wrapping their own head around a very nuanced, very complicated idea, myself included, man.

00:16:54.680 Again, I come to this because I really struggled in the beginning to figure out why it felt wrong when it sounded so right.

00:17:00.840 So I think a lot of people exist in that.

00:17:03.020 They're given a bumper sticker, and certain bumper stickers sound way better than others.

00:17:08.700 Like, when I tell people, this is where I really get myself in trouble.

00:17:11.700 Okay, I once wrote a blog article.

00:17:14.260 And that blog article, when I wrote it, I was giddy, man.

00:17:17.740 This is back before I had a YouTube channel, nothing.

00:17:19.900 And I thought, okay, the idea that has made me very successful is a really simple idea.

00:17:26.900 And I turned it into a T-shirt and everything.

00:17:29.400 And my T-shirt says, everything is my fault.

00:17:33.140 And, bro, people did not like that idea.

00:17:38.060 So I wrote this article that said, hey, I want you to imagine I get hit by a drunk driver.

00:17:43.020 Whose fault is that?

00:17:44.760 And I'm like, I know all of you right now, even insurance companies, are saying that it's the drunk driver's fault.

00:17:49.900 And I'm like, no, it's my fault.

00:17:52.120 I chose to get into the car.

00:17:53.540 I had laid this whole thing out.

00:17:54.700 I chose to get in a car.

00:17:55.520 I chose to put myself in a position where I couldn't go forward or sideways or get out.

00:18:00.160 I set it up such that the horn didn't work, all this stuff.

00:18:02.540 I didn't take care of my car.

00:18:04.080 All of those things I could have done differently.

00:18:06.020 So, yes, I get why other people will say it's a drunk driver's fault.

00:18:08.720 But now you're taking away my power because I could have done something different and got a different result.

00:18:12.800 And so I would, for the next time, say, I want to make sure, since I can't control his behavior, that I prep myself to be able to do something different and get that different result.

00:18:22.080 Now, I honestly thought I'm going to publish this.

00:18:25.120 People are going to write and say, Tom, oh, my God, you just changed my life.

00:18:27.740 This is amazing.

00:18:28.400 Thank you so much.

00:18:28.920 And the feedback was vitriolic.

00:18:32.260 You're a victim blaming.

00:18:33.580 How dare you?

00:18:34.680 This is horrible.

00:18:35.900 And I was legitimately confused.

00:18:39.680 And I thought, well, hold on a second.

00:18:41.660 If you take responsibility for your life, your life is going to be better.

00:18:45.340 By every metric I can possibly think of, your mental health will be better because you'll never feel like a victim.

00:18:50.900 You will feel like, okay, it sucks that this happened to me, but I can now do something.

00:18:56.140 I can decide I want to do something else and make good on my life.

00:19:00.720 I can – one of my favorite songs from when I was a kid was called Best I Can by Queensryche.

00:19:06.220 Mad love.

00:19:06.720 Queensryche, shout out. 1.00

00:19:08.320 And the song is about a kid who accidentally shoots himself and becomes paralyzed and decides, I'm still going to do the best I can.

00:19:15.800 And I'm going to – maybe I'm not going to play sports, but I'm going to become a magazine editor and I'm going to blow up that way.

00:19:20.820 And that really spoke to me even as a kid.

00:19:22.840 I was just like, oh, word, like even if something bad happens to me, I'm always going to do the best I can.

00:19:28.260 And so I'm just like, wait, what's your north star?

00:19:32.240 And so I often will lead with that when people are saying something that doesn't make sense.

00:19:37.240 I want to, if I'm completely honest, I want to trap them by saying what they want.

00:19:42.580 And then I'm like, okay, what do you want?

00:19:44.680 By what metric will you judge it?

00:19:46.980 Write it down.

00:19:47.700 And now you have a hypothesis.

00:19:49.980 If I do this, let people put tents up wherever they want.

00:19:55.520 Don't arrest people for doing drugs.

00:19:57.420 Out of compassion.

00:19:59.420 But the thing that I will get is happiness, fewer homeless people, less people incarcerated, whatever metric.

00:20:06.680 And then if we can agree on that, then we just look and say, did that work?

00:20:09.920 Were there second and third order consequences that we didn't anticipate?

00:20:12.700 Do they outweigh the first order consequence of whatever?

00:20:15.600 And cool, now we're talking about the metrics.

00:20:18.240 We're talking about the things that we tested.

00:20:20.260 And then we're saying, did they work or not?

00:20:22.480 But people don't write down what they think is going to happen.

00:20:24.720 And so they make it up in their mind that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's roughly what I thought would happen.

00:20:28.160 Or they'll just default to this is too complicated or whatever, whatever, whatever.

00:20:32.540 But they're not holding themselves accountable.

00:20:34.420 So my whole thing is like, hey, because my north star is your life being better, happier, more love in your life, better mental health, making more money.

00:20:44.840 All of it, like the whole kit and caboodle that is a well-optimized human life.

00:20:48.980 I'm just looking at that going, accountability is the thing.

00:20:53.420 It's the thing.

00:20:54.900 And so if you don't have that, you will blow with the winds of chance and you will live your life by accident.

00:21:00.480 If you take responsibility for everything and say, my life is an exact reflection of my choices, even when that hurts, you still have an avenue to get better.

00:21:08.460 To me, what we're talking about a lot here is deferred gratification, Tom.

00:21:13.680 It's actually saying I'm not going to pick the thing that's easy, which is to blame someone else.

00:21:18.600 I'm going to do the thing that's more difficult, which is to have introspection.

00:21:22.920 Look not only at my actions, but my thought processes and my overall worldview in order to improve.

00:21:30.340 There's a lot of people who don't want to do that because it's not easy.

00:21:33.220 I don't think they get that far.

00:21:36.060 So I think the biggest problem people have is what they build their self-esteem around.

00:21:41.840 The number one problem we will all face in life is do I respect myself?

00:21:46.340 I will venture that most people cobble self-respect together through the echo instead of the shout.

00:21:53.980 What I mean by that is humans, no matter what they tell you, no matter if they say they don't care about what other people think, they care about what other people think.

00:22:01.260 We are a social creature.

00:22:02.260 Now, the thing that you may get people thinking about you in the way that you want them to think about you is by pushing back and not caring about people's feelings and all that.

00:22:12.700 But it's nested inside of that's how I earned my place in the group.

00:22:16.240 You still care very deeply about earning your place in the group.

00:22:19.440 So if you're trying to earn your place in the group and you earn it through loving acceptance by I have the right beliefs that are – I mean, let's even say that they're positive.

00:22:30.820 I have the right beliefs by showing how much I love people and I care about people and I stand for the right causes.

00:22:35.200 And I don't say that cynically.

00:22:36.800 I mean, you're really doing your best to be a good person.

00:22:39.740 And that's how you're gaining acceptance.

00:22:41.720 That's all the echo.

00:22:43.120 It's not the what are you actually doing?

00:22:45.420 Like, what are you doing to earn your respect?

00:22:48.720 So I believe that comes from you have a value system and you live in accordance with your values.

00:22:53.980 Most people do not map their values.

00:22:55.540 They don't know what they are.

00:22:56.340 And if you don't know what you value, now, again, you're left to the whims of, are other people telling me I'm a good person?

00:23:02.860 And if they are telling me I'm a good person and this is the bad news, they'll really believe it.

00:23:07.180 So I really do have self-respect because other people tell me that they respect me.

00:23:11.040 Cool.

00:23:11.400 Now I feel good about myself.

00:23:13.320 But the thing that they're actually getting lauded for is having the right opinions.

00:23:18.680 And now they're trapped because they can't think through hard problems because they run the risk of losing their own respect by losing the respect of others because they are a slave to the echo.

00:23:28.440 If, on the other hand, you build your self-esteem around the shout, the things that I do, whether they work or not, now you've really got a chance because it's respect that's truly emanating from within.

00:23:39.720 Now, the only thing I have found that is a safe way to build your self-esteem around internally is to be the learner because if you build it around being right, being smart, being worthy, being loved, being good, all of those things that people try to build their self-esteem around, they're very fragile.

00:23:58.340 And this is why, and I think people on the right take a little too much joy when people on the left eat their own, is that that's brutal to go through and to watch people, you know, sort of do that downward spiral.

00:24:11.880 If you can instead say, I don't know that I'm going to get it right.

00:24:16.400 I just know I'm going to learn from it.

00:24:17.980 And the very thing I'm going to value myself for is my willingness to stare nakedly at my own inadequacies.

00:24:25.200 Okay, cool.

00:24:25.900 Now you're in a position. 0.99

00:24:26.820 If you tell me I'm stupid, that's going to damage most people's self-esteem because they value themselves for being right, for being smart, for getting positive feedback from an outside group. 0.99

00:24:36.080 I'm on the other hand, and I'm not going to say it doesn't sting. 0.99

00:24:38.480 I'm still a human.

00:24:39.160 I still want people to think I'm cool.

00:24:40.540 I still like to be right the first time.

00:24:42.060 That's always the most fun.

00:24:43.840 But immediately I'm going to go, ooh, tell me more.

00:24:47.620 I'm not going to run away from that.

00:24:48.980 I'm not going to try to hide from that because I'm thinking to myself, wait, I've gotten this far by being wrong.

00:24:54.200 If you can really remove a scale from my eye, and look, I'm not a fool.

00:24:58.300 If you tell me something that doesn't match up with my life experience or what I have mapped the world to really be true, then I'm going to say, I really appreciate your feedback because that will ensure that I get more in the future.

00:25:09.340 I disagree, I disagree for this reason, right?

00:25:12.360 So I'm not just like, oh, my God, tell me what I need to believe.

00:25:15.100 But I really do open my heart up to this person may be about to tell me something that will make me more effective.

00:25:21.780 Okay, this is what I call true power.

00:25:23.400 True power is the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, acquire the skills that you would need to actually make that world come true, and then have the fortitude and the delayed gratification to actually make it come true.

00:25:37.200 That's power.

00:25:37.700 That's what my life is about.

00:25:39.740 So I'm just running through that whole circle to see if I'm doing things the way that I should.

00:25:47.560 So to get back to that core idea, if people are building their self-esteem around something external, they are so going to protect themselves from feeling badly about themselves, they don't ever get any farther than that.

00:26:01.500 They're going to reject any idea that makes them feel badly about themselves.

00:26:04.820 And that might be the primary reaction that we all have as a social creature is we're trying to figure out where we fall in the hierarchy.

00:26:13.260 And self-esteem is one very good guide, which is why as you go lower down, your self-esteem drops.

00:26:20.480 They're correlated in some way you'll have to have somebody smarter on to explain how and why.

00:26:24.760 But, like, I know that they are.

00:26:26.460 And so as you go down the hierarchy, you start feeling worse about yourself.

00:26:30.160 Okay, so now we've got the psychological immune system, which is that part of your brain that makes it everybody else's fault.

00:26:36.340 And so the reason I think people say, no, no, no, it's not my fault, is they have to say it's not their fault to maintain their self-esteem because they are building it on external feedback coming in, the echo and not the shout.

00:26:49.300 Whereas somebody who's done the work to say, my self-esteem is built entirely around my willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies, that I can be laughed at longer than somebody else.

00:26:58.440 I don't mind making mistakes because I learn from them and that's what I value myself for.

00:27:02.960 That person, when attacked, they actually get stronger and it becomes a truly anti-fragile identity.

00:27:07.880 But I don't, I think they say that all of life's problems are man's inability to sit alone in a room by himself.

00:27:14.480 I think it might be a slight variation on that, which is people can't be laughed at. 0.95

00:27:20.280 They can't have other people think they're stupid because their self-esteem requires it. 0.96

00:27:24.640 And they will fight subconsciously. 1.00

00:27:27.280 They're not even aware of it.

00:27:28.420 They'll fight subconsciously against any idea that attacks their sense of self or self-esteem.

00:27:34.380 We'll get back to the episode in a minute.

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00:29:25.820 Back to the interview.

00:29:28.280 You've just summed it up perfectly.

00:29:30.380 It's beautifully the way that you've just said that.

00:29:32.940 To me, these are the kind of lessons, actually, that a father should teach a son or a daughter.

00:29:39.680 To me, when I hear that, that is what every father should teach their kid.

00:29:45.000 So I guess my question to you is, do you think that the reason we're experiencing these crises

00:29:51.120 is we have an absence of fathers in the home?

00:29:54.840 It's interesting.

00:29:55.260 So I think that's going to be a huge part of it.

00:29:58.120 But maybe for a slightly different reason.

00:29:59.920 So I'll say that's a dynamic tension problem.

00:30:02.460 Because if we only had fathers and no mothers, we'd have an equally pathological society. 0.73

00:30:08.460 It would just be in a different direction.

00:30:10.080 So you want that dynamic tension between the two of them.

00:30:13.040 But yes, we need to be instilling values that lead to self-discovery and self-improvement.

00:30:20.040 This is one of the reasons that I am so enamored with the founding fathers, despite all of their

00:30:25.460 many and horrifying sins.

00:30:28.000 But they built a system that was marching it towards self-improvement, that would literally

00:30:34.360 improve itself, that had massive distrust for itself.

00:30:37.040 That, I think, is super healthy.

00:30:38.780 And so one of the first things I think anybody should teach their kids is, your emotions aren't

00:30:42.660 real.

00:30:43.000 They are part of the simulation.

00:30:44.380 You need to ask, does this emotion serve me?

00:30:48.080 Which, of course, kids are going to be like, I don't understand what the hell you were talking

00:30:51.520 about.

00:30:51.840 And they're just emotional creatures.

00:30:53.340 But ultimately, that's what you have to march them towards.

00:30:55.580 They need to get control of themselves, mind, body, spirit.

00:31:00.940 And until they can do that, they will run amok.

00:31:03.540 Tom, I want to say for the audience watching and listening that you're not just saying this

00:31:09.640 stuff.

00:31:09.920 You actually live it.

00:31:10.760 And I know this from experience because the way you and I have always communicated has

00:31:14.340 been on that basis.

00:31:15.180 So just, you know, giving a little bit away from behind the curtain.

00:31:19.040 We were sitting next door.

00:31:20.460 We were asking for some business advice.

00:31:22.340 I gave you an idea of what we're going to do.

00:31:23.900 And you were like, yep, that's a terrible idea.

00:31:27.560 And you say it in a way that's very comfortable for me to hear.

00:31:31.080 You've said stuff like that to me before.

00:31:32.840 And I've always been able to take it and use it because it's useful.

00:31:36.700 There's no emotion attached to it.

00:31:39.240 But at the same time, you've told me before that when you were working in the inner city

00:31:43.620 with people, 2% got it and transformed their lives.

00:31:49.180 98% did not.

00:31:51.200 Okay.

00:31:52.060 Why is that?

00:31:52.840 The darkest secret of my life is that I've given up on adults.

00:31:57.940 And the great irony is I make a lot of content for adults, but I'm making it for the 2%. 0.99

00:32:03.580 And I'm doing it as a part of a bigger strategy.

00:32:06.400 And I'm doing it because, of course, I love seeing the transformation of the 2%. 1.00

00:32:10.880 But if I'm honest, when the entertainment side of my life takes off, I don't know that I'll keep doing content aimed at adults because they're not as malleable.

00:32:25.700 Now, it doesn't mean that they're not capable of being malleable.

00:32:30.800 But dude, a frame of reference, which I should probably circle back to, so ask me if you're interested because I might forget.

00:32:39.540 But frame of reference is brutally difficult to pierce.

00:32:41.940 And if you can't pierce somebody's frame of reference, they actually do not understand you.

00:32:47.040 Well, explain that.

00:32:48.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

00:32:49.300 Okay, so frame of reference is your values and beliefs about what you believe is true of you and the world and what you believe ought to be true about the world and your own behavior.

00:33:04.440 People do not realize that they have made these things up, that they've been given to them by their parents, by the traumas that they've endured, by the country that they grew up in, by the person that was mean to them in second grade, by the time that they won something, whatever.

00:33:20.600 Like all these things that are happening to you through your whole life are informing to you the way the world, quote, unquote, is and the way the world, quote, unquote, ought to be.

00:33:29.520 And they don't recognize those are all choices, all of them.

00:33:32.360 And if they make different choices, they will see the world from a different perspective.

00:33:37.380 Now, we can get into post-truth.

00:33:39.580 We probably should because now people are going to say Tom doesn't think anything is real.

00:33:43.340 Quite the contrary.

00:33:44.280 I just don't think we're very good at figuring out what is real.

00:33:47.300 And I think the only way, given that our brain is creating a simulation and that we only see and are able to interact with a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what is actually there, and yet we have this feeling that we see everything, we know everything, we got it.

00:34:00.220 My feelings, they're real.

00:34:02.720 That people really don't understand that it's all made up and that you can construct a frame of reference, aka a worldview, based on things you have consciously chosen to believe because they yield a better result, which to me tells you that you're closer to ground truth.

00:34:20.380 The more you're able to predict the outcome of your actions, the more likely you are to be close to ground truth.

00:34:26.680 That's why Newtonian physics were never going to give you GPS.

00:34:30.540 Einstein got a little bit closer.

00:34:31.920 Still not all the way there, but he got a little bit closer, and that gave us the atomic age and GPS.

00:34:36.020 Cool.

00:34:36.180 So we're getting closer, and we know because it unlocks abilities.

00:34:39.700 Cool.

00:34:40.100 So that's how I approach the world.

00:34:41.720 I probably am wrong about virtually everything, but the things that I'm close to being right are the ones where I can make a hypothesis that makes a prediction.

00:34:48.560 I run a test to test that prediction, and it comes true.

00:34:52.000 Then I'm like, okay, I'm probably pretty close to ground truth on this one.

00:34:55.940 And if you can get close to building a frame of reference that gives you the ability to be wrong a little bit less than other people, you're moving in the right direction.

00:35:06.540 Now, the problem is that frame of reference is completely invisible to the person that has it unless they're spending a lot of time like I am really trying to think.

00:35:15.220 I'm probably wrong.

00:35:16.060 What am I wrong about?

00:35:17.100 So David Foster Wallace, this is water, becomes the perfect analogy.

00:35:22.100 Fish do not realize they're in water.

00:35:24.400 And just for, like, think about how long humans had no sense of, like, gravity is a force, and we're just in it, and air is a substrate, and we breathe it.

00:35:36.480 Like, we just had no sense of it, right?

00:35:39.100 You're the last to find out.

00:35:40.760 And so that's frame of reference.

00:35:43.000 And so if you can't pierce a person's frame of reference and get them to see, for instance, I believe you need tension between the left and the right.

00:35:51.400 And now, because I believe that, I look at people on the left or the right screaming at each other, and I'm like, you're both wrong. 0.96

00:35:58.640 But if you feel you are doing God's work and that God hates the other side and wants them all to perish and your job is to kill them, and I say, no, no, no. 0.74

00:36:08.860 First of all, there is no God.

00:36:10.240 And by the way, you have to respect the tension between each other.

00:36:14.160 I am just another bad person. 0.99

00:36:15.660 They'll kill you first. 1.00

00:36:16.560 Yeah. 0.94

00:36:16.920 So it's like, I won't make any sense to them.

00:36:20.820 And so now, that one's just super obvious.

00:36:24.000 Here's an example from my marriage.

00:36:27.300 My wife used to say, hey, it's important to me that you do this.

00:36:31.000 And I was like, oh, word.

00:36:32.140 That means that if I have time, I'll do it because it's important.

00:36:36.540 To her, it meant, I don't care if you're talking to the president.

00:36:40.180 You leave that room, and you do this thing.

00:36:43.160 And I won't ask you.

00:36:44.140 I won't say things that are important more than a couple times a year, but when I do.

00:36:47.940 But she never said that.

00:36:49.220 So I was constantly like, oh, I didn't get time to do that thing.

00:36:52.700 I had other things to do.

00:36:53.680 And she was like, what is happening?

00:36:55.880 Now, we had to actually articulate those so that we could both understand each other's frame of reference.

00:37:00.500 She's coming at the world where if a person says this is important, you drop everything and do it.

00:37:04.140 I came from a perspective of, no, you have a list of things that you're trying to get done.

00:37:08.460 You rank order them.

00:37:10.460 And then if that's number three, but I don't finish one and two, then of course I didn't do the third thing.

00:37:15.480 So these are such overly simplified ways.

00:37:18.700 I wish in less than an hour I could actually get to frame of reference.

00:37:22.020 But just know, like Einstein said, the most important decision any human has to make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe.

00:37:31.920 Now, the fact that he called that a decision tells you everything you need to know about what a frame of reference really is.

00:37:37.420 Because that will color everything about how you think and act.

00:37:40.640 And it also colors the energy you put out into the world.

00:37:43.360 So if you come in and you think everybody's hostile, you're going to come in an attack mode.

00:37:48.040 Because you're going to think to yourself, hang on a second, people are going to attack me.

00:37:52.160 I want to be first.

00:37:53.760 And you're going to create more tension as a result and more battles.

00:38:00.520 100%.

00:38:00.960 And which is, it just shows how ideology is so powerful.

00:38:06.760 And it's part of the reason or a lot of the reason why we started this, which is if your ideology is fundamentally negative and unhelpful and toxic, you are going to live an unhealthy, toxic life.

00:38:18.940 Yeah, there is no doubt.

00:38:20.840 And you guys have the very unenviable position of trying to pierce other people's frames of reference.

00:38:27.140 It isn't easy.

00:38:28.020 But you'll encounter the 2% who really love an idea.

00:38:32.420 And either they have a conscious or an intuitive understanding of some ideas help me make my life better.

00:38:38.340 And some ideas don't help me.

00:38:40.500 And so I'm just trying to collect the ones that are actually useful.

00:38:42.600 If I could even just get people onto two things, North Star and usability, like was this actually useful?

00:38:49.200 If people could just have a North Star.

00:38:51.060 Now, unfortunately, some people are going to have a North Star that is morally repugnant, can't help you there.

00:38:55.980 That's frame of reference. 0.99

00:38:57.360 But at least if they articulate what their North Star is, now we can go, oh, my God, you look and seem normal, but you're really a sociopath. 0.90

00:39:07.720 Or, whoa, I actually never considered that.

00:39:09.740 That's a really cool frame of reference, and maybe I'm going to update mine.

00:39:13.440 But if you knew what somebody's frame of reference was and you thought it was honorable, now it's like we can work together.

00:39:19.620 That's why telling you, hey, that's a bad idea, only because I know what your North Star is.

00:39:24.280 I know what you're trying to do.

00:39:25.620 And so now I'm just going to say the reason that's a bad idea is because it won't do the thing you think it's going to do.

00:39:32.600 And when you're discussing at that level and the person does not tie their self-esteem around being right, it becomes very easy.

00:39:39.000 So you just want to learn.

00:39:40.680 You actually care about your goals, which you'll be shocked.

00:39:42.680 Most people do not.

00:39:43.440 They just care about feeling smart, feeling good, feeling respected, whatever.

00:39:47.460 You actually care about your goals, and your self-esteem isn't tied up in being right.

00:39:52.320 So now it's like, yeah, it's very easy to say, that won't work.

00:39:55.160 Here's the data.

00:39:56.020 Check it out.

00:39:56.340 And by the way, if you show me that I'm wrong, I'll immediately adopt it and update my own mental model.

00:40:00.280 When you have people like that, dude, it's a joy.

00:40:02.340 And as entrepreneurs, I would just tell you, your job as people that are looking to hire is that.

00:40:07.940 Find those people.

00:40:09.380 They don't put their self-esteem around being right, and they are really just trying to figure out what's effective. 0.98

00:40:15.060 If you can collect a group of people like that that are also hardcore motherfuckers, you'll build a smashing business. 0.98

00:40:22.300 I love it. 0.87

00:40:22.940 And I suppose the immediately obvious question is, what is the most useful frame of reference that you found?

00:40:29.840 Well, so frame of reference gets really complicated really fast, so I'll give you some high-level things.

00:40:36.060 Number one, the universe is completely indifferent, so nobody's coming to save you.

00:40:41.880 It's not good or bad, right?

00:40:43.780 It just, it is.

00:40:44.760 It doesn't care.

00:40:45.560 Right.

00:40:46.060 It doesn't care.

00:40:47.120 Perfect.

00:40:47.600 That's very helpful.

00:40:49.840 Love of another human being is the greatest thing that life has to offer, Francis.

00:40:54.260 And so really taking that seriously and trying to find somebody.

00:40:59.180 Just for you guys watching, he's not hitting on him.

00:41:00.980 It's just we were talking about him getting married.

00:41:02.420 Or am I?

00:41:05.100 So, yeah, I think especially because I'm such a hustle porn guy and I'm constantly putting out the message, you need to be hardcore, you need to work harder.

00:41:12.180 I never wanted to get lost that the most important thing in my life is my marriage.

00:41:16.960 Why?

00:41:17.500 Because it's given me more than anything else.

00:41:20.920 So that's super important.

00:41:22.320 You can do anything you set your mind to without limitation.

00:41:25.120 That's a lie, but it's an empowering lie.

00:41:27.680 And I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals.

00:41:30.680 I call them useful beliefs.

00:41:32.120 Yeah.

00:41:32.320 Those lies.

00:41:32.920 Perfect.

00:41:33.520 So, again, I say it just because I know I'm more likely to believe negative things that are self-defeating just because that's how the brain keeps you alive.

00:41:42.600 So since I know that, I try to swing hard in the opposite direction.

00:41:45.820 But look, I'm not a fool.

00:41:47.120 I know there are things I'm not going to be able to accomplish no matter how much.

00:41:49.360 You can give me 1,000 years.

00:41:51.780 I almost can't let myself finish the sentence, which tells you something about me.

00:41:55.740 If you gave me 1,000 years, I want to believe I could find a way for humans to fly without the aid of jets and stuff. 0.99

00:42:00.900 But anyway, it's good to know somewhere in the recesses of your mind that you do have limitations so you don't do something stupid.

00:42:07.640 But to know that you're way more likely to stop short out of laziness, out of fear that you're not good enough, out of just boredom and how hard things are, entropy. 0.82

00:42:17.440 That you probably want to cobble together beliefs that push you to go farther than other people.

00:42:22.720 The idea that George Bernard Shaw captured in his quote, the reasonable man adjusts to the world.

00:42:29.180 The unreasonable man insists on trying to adjust the world to him.

00:42:32.520 Therefore, all progress relies on the unreasonable man.

00:42:37.220 That idea, like, is just so, so, so critical.

00:42:40.120 And what I find is I'm not smarter than most people.

00:42:42.240 I really do consider myself pretty average intellect.

00:42:45.140 But I'm really unreasonable.

00:42:46.780 And I've learned when being, like, super unreasonable is wise and then looking for the, like, telltale signs that, no, there's disaster ahead.

00:42:55.300 And so I should probably back off a little, but I always default to, if somebody tells me this is going to take, this is going to take three months, I'll be like, we're doing it by the end of today.

00:43:05.960 And just coming in with that attitude forces you to think in a totally different way.

00:43:09.200 And of course, we don't finish it that day.

00:43:11.020 But the number of times where we've gotten it done in 72 hours when somebody told me it was going to take three months, it's comical.

00:43:17.160 And so, look, that's the tip of a very large iceberg, but at the risk of rambling, I'll stop there.

00:43:24.120 But I published a list of 25 beliefs.

00:43:26.520 It doesn't cover the value side, but the 25 things I think you need to believe about yourself and the world that will move you forward.

00:43:32.880 And you just type in my name plus belief system, it'll pop up.

00:43:35.760 And you say most adults, 98% of adults, you've got, like, you could give them a clay tablet with these things and they just don't want it.

00:43:45.440 Yeah, a clay tablet's really not going to help you.

00:43:47.820 And in fact, that might trigger them more because now you're handing something down, like, you know better.

00:43:53.180 And they'd be like, who are you to put something on a stone tablet?

00:43:56.360 Yeah, you'll get that.

00:43:57.800 There's so much cultural energy moving people often in the wrong direction.

00:44:01.960 Like, I'll just, here's one.

00:44:03.540 I was taught to keep my head down, do as little work as possible, and avoid punishment at all costs.

00:44:09.940 But I didn't know that.

00:44:11.240 I just thought that's how you lived life.

00:44:14.920 I did not realize there were people who did not approach life that way.

00:44:18.660 People are going to hate me for this.

00:44:19.640 Some people are going to really get weird about this.

00:44:21.400 I had to train myself that some rules are meant to be broken.

00:44:24.280 And so I started, oh, you guys are in the UK.

00:44:26.560 This won't be weird for you.

00:44:27.700 I started parking facing the wrong way on the opposite side of the street.

00:44:32.960 Now, in the UK, you can, but here you get a ticket for it.

00:44:35.420 And so if you see somebody do that as an American, you look at them like, who does this guy think he is?

00:44:39.900 Like, you're not allowed to do that.

00:44:40.880 And I felt so uncomfortable doing it because I was like, who am I to think that I can park facing the wrong way?

00:44:45.880 But I was like, I have to train myself that there are some things, there's a reason for them, and you don't do them.

00:44:51.700 And then there are other things where it's like, honestly, it doesn't really matter.

00:44:54.740 And so I want to remind myself that some rules really are meant to be broken.

00:44:59.520 You have to have that mentality.

00:45:00.980 It will serve you far better.

00:45:02.920 And so doing things like that can be very useful as ways to puncture your frame of reference to realize, oh, this really is malleable.

00:45:11.200 It isn't me recognizing the truth of the human existence.

00:45:15.120 It's me having a belief system.

00:45:17.500 And those beliefs are malleable.

00:45:19.260 And some beliefs are more useful at driving me towards my North Star.

00:45:23.460 Tom, it seems that a lot that we're talking about here comes down to a few words, which is embracing discomfort.

00:45:31.140 Where actually, we live in a society, and I've made this point numerous times, where we're made ultra comfortable.

00:45:38.420 We seek comfort.

00:45:39.540 We desire it.

00:45:41.240 But actually, where we grow is in the discomfort.

00:45:46.340 And that's what you're talking about here, isn't it?

00:45:48.280 It's being uncomfortable, embracing it, because that's how you grow.

00:45:53.380 It's critically, critically, critically important.

00:45:55.960 So I have a sense that some people need to be chased by a lion.

00:46:02.360 And that was an idea that occurred to me really early on in my business life. 0.99

00:46:07.580 And I just saw people, like, spiraling on dumb shit to get attention or whatever. 0.99

00:46:12.840 And I was like, you have too many cycles, like spare cycles. 1.00

00:46:17.480 The stakes aren't high enough.

00:46:19.480 There's nothing to slap you back into line because you can get away with murder and there's no real consequences.

00:46:27.680 It's like printing money.

00:46:30.140 Printing money socializes losses.

00:46:33.140 And it makes it seem like that thing that we did, whatever that may be, wasn't really a big deal.

00:46:39.160 But in reality, it's an atrocity.

00:46:42.360 And you're going to have to pay the piper at some point.

00:46:45.500 And so when there's, like, the lion is chasing me, if I am out of shape and I can't outrun that lion, I get eaten.

00:46:53.300 The stakes are so high and so binary that, like, you learn real fast if you have the right skills or not.

00:47:00.280 This is why I like being an entrepreneur.

00:47:01.380 I don't like losing money, but if you're losing money, you haven't done the right thing.

00:47:06.780 The market doesn't care about your product or your marketing is terrible or whatever.

00:47:10.600 And so every time I do something and it doesn't work, I'm just like, I have done something wrong.

00:47:14.340 There is no one to blame but me.

00:47:15.880 And if I don't figure this out, I'm going to go broke.

00:47:17.960 That is so sobering.

00:47:19.600 And I love that.

00:47:20.700 Like, I love that just cold, hard reality.

00:47:24.540 There's no campaigning to be done.

00:47:26.340 There is only you've either added value to somebody's life or you haven't.

00:47:29.020 And, but there's a lot of people who spend their time escaping reality.

00:47:34.740 Yes.

00:47:35.360 Yeah.

00:47:35.700 Okay.

00:47:35.980 So now let's see if I can make you hate me.

00:47:38.220 I'm building a virtual world.

00:47:40.700 And part of me is like, you better be real careful because you can really fast become part of the problem and not part of the solution.

00:47:50.120 So that was tricky.

00:47:51.640 And I think about that a lot.

00:47:53.300 But yes, I think that, I think that it would be very fun to have a conversation with you gentlemen about end of empire vibes and what is it that actually happens.

00:48:07.980 And I'm going to guess that things being easy are part of it.

00:48:12.700 And when things are too easy and we've built too much comfort, that suddenly things that are terrible ideas don't reveal themselves to be terrible quickly.

00:48:22.080 They reveal themselves to be terrible slowly.

00:48:24.980 And when people push back, the pushback on the pushback is going to be, what's the harm?

00:48:30.980 It's no big deal.

00:48:32.320 Because we've built in so many buffers.

00:48:34.560 And so it's like, I want the buffers.

00:48:35.940 The buffers are amazing.

00:48:37.480 But is it?

00:48:38.620 I don't know the answer to this question.

00:48:40.180 This is not me putting forth a thing where I'm saying this is true.

00:48:43.740 But it does make me wonder if the reason that history is this big loop is because you end up getting into that cycle of tough men create good times, good times make weak men, weak men make tough times, so on and so forth.

00:48:59.540 And so as you have to harden again, because times are just so bad that we're like, yeah, we want the guy with the iron fist that's going to get everybody in line and it's just going to make things okay again.

00:49:11.420 I just don't want the chaos.

00:49:13.240 Cool.

00:49:13.860 And now we get under that thumb and then we finally fight out from under that and we get freedoms and, oh, my God, these are amazing.

00:49:18.780 And we get this society that's thriving and it's wonderful, but now it's easy and we devolve again.

00:49:24.220 So, again, I don't know that that's true.

00:49:26.800 But, ooh, when I look at Roman Empire and the collapse and, like, what happens and things get too good and I look at some of the things that are happening now and I'm just like, man, I worry.

00:49:38.360 I worry that it is inevitable.

00:49:41.180 That would make me sad and I need to be careful about believing that because that may not lead me to my North Star.

00:49:47.420 But every now and then in my really dark moments, I'm like, this is inevitable.

00:49:53.140 I'll lighten it up with a fun story of how this idea first started occurring to me.

00:49:58.020 I'm 16 and I hear about Roman orgies for the first time.

00:50:02.400 This is before the internet. 0.95

00:50:03.540 So, I don't have easy access to pornography, but as a 16-year-old male, orgies sound pretty awesome. 0.70

00:50:10.360 And I'm like, wait a second.

00:50:12.620 You're telling me that we had orgies 2,000 years ago, but we don't now?

00:50:16.360 Because I kind of thought if I just stay alive long enough because everything's getting more liberal that by the time I'm 25, orgies are going to be a thing again.

00:50:24.720 So, I was like, hold on.

00:50:26.400 If we've already had orgies, that means that we sort of hit some sort of hedonistic peak and then it dropped back.

00:50:34.260 So, I'm like, time out.

00:50:35.740 Because I thought everything was just one way. 0.79

00:50:37.680 Just more liberal over time, more free sex, all the things I wanted at 16, sex, drugs, rock and roll, sounded awesome.

00:50:45.040 And I was legitimately perplexed with, wait, how did we move backwards? 0.62

00:50:51.740 How did we get more prudish?

00:50:53.620 Because my whole life I had heard, oh, every day we're getting less and less prudish as if it were a bad thing to a 16-year-old boy, sounded awesome.

00:51:01.180 And, yeah.

00:51:02.140 So, now I'm like, wait a second. 0.54

00:51:04.400 Even though I'm still, honestly, I'm for orgies.

00:51:08.300 They sound awesome. 0.81

00:51:09.860 I'm about it.

00:51:10.680 But it could be that that's also tied to the part of this where all things end badly.

00:51:15.940 I don't know.

00:51:16.760 But that is, that's how that exploration began for me.

00:51:21.860 The printing money, we'll talk on your show about this at length, I'm sure.

00:51:26.660 But the printing money thing is interesting to me because I think it is the perfect example of what you're talking about and what Francis was talking about earlier, actually, which is comfort.

00:51:35.400 The reason we print money to spend on things we can't afford is that we are unwilling to be slightly less comfortable than we are.

00:51:45.640 And then you layer on top of that the way we do politics, which says if anybody is less well-off as a result of a policy, then you're killing people.

00:51:58.980 This is what people will say, right?

00:52:00.660 Well, if you reduce the amount of spending on public services, you're killing people.

00:52:05.340 And you probably, by the way, are reducing the number of people who survive, are reducing the, right?

00:52:12.320 But now you're into the thing that freaks me out because it really sounds terrible, but it really may be needed.

00:52:19.300 So it's like, I don't know what to do with that.

00:52:21.760 Oh, I mean, I know what to do with that, which is people have to live within the means. 0.97

00:52:26.720 I am probably killing you.

00:52:29.680 You were talking about the fact that in developing Kaizen, the video game that you're working on, you probably reduced your lifespan by 10 years.

00:52:38.060 Yeah, I'm certainly sure.

00:52:39.260 But you did that because you want to do something that's bigger than you.

00:52:45.080 Is that fair?

00:52:45.640 Yeah, all true.

00:52:46.360 Right?

00:52:47.000 So what's bigger than me or what's bigger than us as a society is the fact that we are impoverishing our grandchildren.

00:52:55.440 That's bigger than me living longer.

00:52:58.820 That's bigger than anything, actually.

00:53:01.520 We cannot saddle people who are not yet born with our debts because we refuse to be slightly less comfortable.

00:53:06.800 But the political system that we have prevents that incentive from being carried through to its logical conclusion.

00:53:15.700 And instead, we have people whose only priority is coming back to delayed gratification right here, right now.

00:53:22.720 I'm going to get reelected right here, right now.

00:53:24.700 What am I going to do?

00:53:25.520 Bribe you with your own money.

00:53:26.480 Yeah, I have a – because I know that human nature is knowable, even though it is so complex right now, obviously we're often surprised by it, but it is a knowable thing.

00:53:39.080 With enough compute power, we could literally predict, based on your genetics, your life experience, we could predict what you're going to do.

00:53:45.300 It is a knowable thing.

00:53:46.460 And because it's knowable is why history rhymes.

00:53:50.960 There's just only so many human responses to things.

00:53:55.260 And so Ray Dalio has mapped this out and shown how this cycle just repeats over and over and over and over, and the outcomes are predictable.

00:54:04.100 The buildup is predictable.

00:54:05.900 And so, again, worrying about things being inevitable, I don't know that there's a way to stop this train.

00:54:13.460 That's partly why I retreat to the individual.

00:54:15.680 So my show is all about what can the individual do in this time?

00:54:18.280 Because I'm not trying – society is an organism that has its own thing, and I don't know that I can stop it.

00:54:23.600 And there's certainly things that are happening right now that scare me about what happens when the masses start doing their thing.

00:54:31.540 People – I forget the quote. 0.99

00:54:32.900 It's like people are amazing, but populations are dumb. 1.00

00:54:36.640 It's like a mob will kill, murder, do things that an individual human just won't do. 1.00

00:54:41.640 It really, really scares me.

00:54:43.480 Like I mean that literally.

00:54:44.500 It scares me.

00:54:45.440 And we're in a moment right now where I can sort of feel the mob like right at the door, and we're all part of that mob.

00:54:51.200 That's the other part is like I put myself in that camp, man.

00:54:54.160 I fall into the camp of in history I'm probably a villain.

00:54:58.160 You know what I mean?

00:54:58.580 It's like I do not think, oh, yeah, I'm sure I would have been one of the good guys.

00:55:02.260 It's like without access to all these ideas, good Lord, I could have just as easily gone there, but for the grace of God go I.

00:55:08.520 I don't believe in God, but I believe in that statement.

00:55:11.380 So, yeah, I worry about the inevitability of this.

00:55:14.240 I worry that there's no stopping it.

00:55:15.760 I worry that what has to happen is the only way to do austerity measures is for there to already be so much pain and suffering that the austerity measures are less painful than what was happening right before.

00:55:31.260 Good example of this, some people would argue, is Britain in the 70s.

00:55:35.840 Yeah? Oh, I was literally thinking of this.

00:55:38.480 It's going down the toilet, three-day week, rubbish piling up in the streets. 0.99

00:55:43.740 The country is the sick man of Europe, and people get fed up, and they elect somebody who's got the balls to deal with it. 0.99

00:55:49.620 Yep. 0.99

00:55:50.360 That's the only hope.

00:55:53.480 She didn't have to deal with a 24-hour news cycle.

00:55:56.420 She didn't have to deal with Twitter or other social media.

00:56:00.200 She did have to deal with the IRA, though.

00:56:01.800 I don't know, man.

00:56:03.380 I think it's probably easier to deal with the IRA than Twitter.

00:56:07.880 You know what I'm saying?

00:56:08.760 Yeah, point taken, yeah.

00:56:09.360 You know what I'm saying?

00:56:10.060 Yeah.

00:56:10.240 So, that's maybe, that's the only answer I can see.

00:56:16.600 And then, and tell me if it's a terrible idea, as you always do, the reason we do what we do, I feel,

00:56:24.820 and the reason we're changing from being a YouTube channel to trigger media,

00:56:29.140 where we have other people working with us and expanding the scale of what we do,

00:56:33.700 is there has to be a cultural demand for the supply of a Thatcher-like figure, left or right.

00:56:41.300 I don't care what side of the political spectrum they're on,

00:56:44.580 but it's got to be someone who has your type of mindset about what works, what doesn't work.

00:56:51.420 Does it, see, and all of our debates get framed moralistically, which is precisely the problem,

00:56:56.960 right, because the question for me is, you know, is having an open border, as we do now in the UK,

00:57:05.160 and people coming illegally into the country on small boats, who we don't know where they're coming

00:57:09.440 from, is that working? Is that right? Is that going to improve society, or is that going to make

00:57:16.400 it worse? It's not about hating the people in the boats, which is what it is always made out to be.

00:57:21.600 It's about, is that making our society better or worse? Is printing money to buy things we can't

00:57:28.220 afford? Is that making society better or worse? Is endlessly amplifying division in society along

00:57:35.620 racial lines, is that, does that work? Does that make us better? That's always been my frame, 0.81

00:57:41.000 but we always get dragged, and it's true of both of us too, we always get dragged into the moralistic

00:57:46.520 side of the conversation. How do we, how do we step back from that as a society? Can we?

00:57:53.540 Can we change the culture?

00:57:55.020 Probably not. So, I have a, this really is a hypothesis, is not, not even making its way all

00:58:00.300 the way to theory. I ran this idea, I think it was by Heather Hying. Do you guys know?

00:58:05.360 Yeah, we've had her on the show. She's great. 1.00

00:58:07.060 I was going to say, she'd be right up your alley. So, I asked her, but I don't remember her answer.

00:58:11.780 I said, what is happening now feels like female hyper-aggression. So, that we've created a, 1.00

00:58:22.480 social media tends to bring this out, and because females tend to lean on that nurturing side, 1.00

00:58:28.600 they are, they use reputational damage and social savagery, whereas guys will just fucking fight and 0.98

00:58:36.520 tear you down and, you know, all that. It's far more direct. Super violent, but it's direct. You 0.75

00:58:42.180 see it a lot more. And I was like, I have a feeling that what's happening right now is what

00:58:47.440 happens when you get pathology in a feminine way of being. Again, I'm the guy that believes you need 1.00

00:58:53.160 both. You need masculine and feminine. But if you don't have them in dynamic tension, you get this.

00:58:58.860 And so, social media, the reason I don't know that we're going to be able to stop this train is,

00:59:02.380 again, compassionate ideas spread, and we're just trying to help people, all done in reputational

00:59:09.560 attacks, getting people canceled, getting people mobbed ideologically. There's a right way to think

00:59:16.460 and a wrong way to think. That until you restabilize the dynamic, and I don't know that you can when

00:59:27.840 there's no threat of violence, which would be the masculine problem-solving. Guys, so there's,

00:59:35.460 okay, I don't know what to make of this, but I want to share something I find utterly fascinating.

00:59:38.860 Have you read The Gulag Archipelago? Of course. Okay. Solzhenitsyn. For people that haven't read it,

00:59:43.800 read it. I sound way too excited for a book about a Holocaust. But it's about- 0.75

00:59:49.020 Watch Schindler's List. You'll have a great time. Yeah.

00:59:51.520 You're going to love it. There'll be a small minority that do, mate.

00:59:54.200 Right. That's fun. So it's about, for people that don't know, the gulags in Russia and how people

01:00:03.100 were whisked away to them. And in it, he said that, you know, everyone breaks. You get tortured,

01:00:10.500 you're going to break for sure, for sure. Except every now and then there will be somebody who

01:00:14.460 believes in the thing they believe in so much, they will sooner let them be tortured to death

01:00:19.400 than they will break. And he said, and every single one of them is a woman. And I was like,

01:00:25.340 that holds true with what I know about my wife. So if the two of us are tortured, odds are I'm

01:00:32.220 going to break. My wife, on the other hand, if she thinks she's right, forget it. Forget it.

01:00:37.360 She will let you torture her to death. She's just, she can't constitutionally. She cannot back down. 0.99

01:00:42.480 So anyway, you, if there is like, we look at these overlapping distributions, men and women are

01:00:47.320 basically the same, but on the edges of the distributions, it gets pretty meaningful.

01:00:52.040 And so if you have this like hyper sense of this is how the world should be, and I will let you 0.99

01:00:58.300 torture me to fucking death. I believe in it that strongly. And using the tools of social media, 0.99

01:01:06.000 reputation damage, alliances, that kind of stuff, instead of like, hey, you can't talk to me like that 1.00

01:01:11.360 and tell me I'm, I'm an idiot to my face because I might punch you in yours. So guys have a far more 0.99

01:01:17.120 like, I'm gonna be a little more standoffish because I know that this may escalate into a fight.

01:01:22.440 Women don't approach the world that way. It's starting to break down a little bit at the edges, 1.00

01:01:26.560 which is the thing that actually makes me uncomfortable. But historically speaking,

01:01:30.880 we have a lot of energy that keep it so that there's a far more sort of savage approach

01:01:35.820 to relationship damage than there is to that physical confrontation side.

01:01:41.360 And so in some ways, in the age of social media, it's going to be a lot harder to curb that.

01:01:46.540 Like this one, you could curb with police, don't be violent, build a structure around people.

01:01:52.240 So counterpoint, however, and you may disagree, but when I see the breakdown of the mainstream media,

01:02:00.600 who used to have a chokehold on the information, what it's being replaced by is this.

01:02:06.720 And if the medium is the message, this is a much better medium and the message is therefore much

01:02:13.540 healthier. I want to believe that so badly. And I really don't want to utter these words,

01:02:18.860 but I will because otherwise I feel like a coward. I am terrified to the core of my existence with

01:02:26.480 what's happening with the Israel-Palestine conflict as it's being portrayed on social media

01:02:32.340 and how quickly people are like, no, that was a lie. That thing that was said was a lie.

01:02:37.660 And then it just becomes what is true. I have no idea what's true. And you're watching in real time

01:02:44.080 people just coming out and saying that thing that was said that you saw the recording of,

01:02:51.040 that wasn't actually said. They said, you're like, no, no, no, but wait, you can still see it.

01:02:54.080 It's right here. It doesn't matter. And so I have a concept that I hold in my head as velocity of

01:03:00.540 information. And I have a feeling that velocity of information, while it would be the only thing

01:03:08.160 worse than high velocity information is top down slowing it down, but high velocity information

01:03:14.780 allows for confusion, allows for an inability to create a cohesive narrative that's tied to ground

01:03:21.300 truth. And so what it becomes is bumper stickers, bumper stickers, everywhere, bumper stickers.

01:03:25.940 And so I follow my favorite influencer who talks in my favorite bumper stickers.

01:03:29.820 The world is pre-masticated for me. And now I sort of know what to wrap my head around.

01:03:36.680 Like, bro, when election time comes up and there's 36 propositions on the ballot and you have to like

01:03:45.880 research them to know whether to vote yes or no, most people are just going to go, I'm Democrat.

01:03:50.280 What do all the Democrats vote for? And just fill it out along party lines because they just want

01:03:56.600 simple answers. They'd rather be at home playing a video game than thinking about all that, but it

01:04:02.080 feels important to vote. So give me the simplified version. So in a world where velocity of information

01:04:06.440 is so extreme, hopefully community notes on X helps. I don't know, just being a little pessimistic

01:04:12.460 on this one. I really want the problem to be solved because it's worrisome. This beautiful

01:04:19.040 thing. The citizen journalist is so amazing. And maybe the blockchain will help us. That would be

01:04:24.600 amazing. And so we know like everything is certified, right? That it's like, okay, this is real. This is

01:04:29.240 actually what's said. It's not spoofed. Because dude, right now you can go online and find me

01:04:34.200 speaking Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese, but somebody trained it on a thousand hours of me

01:04:41.500 speaking. So it sounds like me. And then they used AI to add in the Portuguese. And now it literally

01:04:47.780 sounds like me speaking Portuguese. So the rapidity with which the 2024 US elections will be inundated

01:04:54.340 with literal fake imagery is going to be very fast. That is terrifying. The other thing that I think

01:05:02.240 that is sending us insane, Tom, is we go on Twitter and we're exposed to, particularly with the Israel-Palestine

01:05:09.520 conflict, horrendously graphic images that we simply shouldn't be seeing. Do you remember when we were

01:05:16.100 kids growing up, or maybe this is a BBC thing, but they always used to say, if you were going to show

01:05:22.580 images that some viewers may find distressing? Basically saying to them that if you're of a

01:05:27.260 sensitive disposition, probably not a good idea to watch it because this is quite upsetting. But when

01:05:33.680 you go on social media, you just see graphic image after graphic video, after graphic video,

01:05:38.040 after graphic video. And then it's intercut with kittens playing and then you're back to graphic

01:05:42.260 video. So the way your emotions are getting manipulated, it almost feels that you're on

01:05:49.460 some kind of electronic bumper cars where you're getting shock after shock after shock. It gives you

01:05:58.100 an unhealthy rhythm that then seeps into the rest of your day. I think that's so dangerous. I don't think

01:06:05.680 we talk about it enough either. Yeah. I, um, I, I am not of a weak constitution and I've, I had to just

01:06:14.220 like set it down, man. I was like, this is so gnarly. Like war is gnarly, gnarly. And seeing image

01:06:22.080 after image, video after video, it's just, yeah, it really does mess with your head. You know what? I

01:06:26.680 actually don't agree with you guys. I really don't. You like to lean into it? No, no, no, no. I'm

01:06:31.600 not sitting there going, oh, more of this. But I mean, it's a very poignant moment to talk about

01:06:38.680 this, but if you think about how all of our society has been shaped in the last 70 years by

01:06:46.680 what we know about the Holocaust, that was because we were shown images that no human being really

01:06:53.260 should ever see. But we have to know the truth of what's going on. Now, do you need to be consuming

01:06:59.260 that on a daily basis all day, every day? No. But when an attack like that happens, I'm glad we saw

01:07:03.620 what happened. I think I'm too. I think it's really important that we saw what happened. I agree with

01:07:08.900 all of that. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't see it. And like I said, the only thing

01:07:13.440 that would be worse than high velocity information is top down trying to stop it. Yeah. Um, which I

01:07:18.760 actually already am worried about even with the negative images, because how quickly they

01:07:22.300 disappear. Um, but I do think that people need to be thoughtful, uh, about how much of that you

01:07:29.780 intake. Like there is like, I once saw long story. I will not get into on this show. Uh, but a friend

01:07:37.640 of mine invited me over, didn't tell me why he invited me over. And then he said, I'm going to show

01:07:41.840 you a video of a Chechen soldier being decapitated with a handheld knife. And he was basically like,

01:07:51.320 I want to see if you can watch it. So I'm like, all right, to this day, I remember the sights,

01:07:58.280 the sounds it, it really like, it can make my stomach drop now just thinking about it.

01:08:03.180 And the way that that image like locked itself into my mind, I find a little unnerving because

01:08:08.880 I find it easy to let go of things. So anyway, we need to see what is true. We need to face the truth.

01:08:14.780 We need to look at hard things. We need to not be as fatalistic as I've been at points in this

01:08:19.540 conversation about thinking things are inevitable and understanding that we can steer, um, the course

01:08:25.600 of history by being better people, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think it is good to look at it,

01:08:29.560 but I also think, man, be careful how much time you spend on it because it can be rough.

01:08:35.520 Yeah. Well, everyone's psychology is different too. Different people have different dispositions.

01:08:40.060 I think there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And social media is one of the greatest inventions

01:08:46.540 in human history. Facts, facts, facts. Right. You and I wouldn't be sitting here today. None of the

01:08:50.720 three of us would be sitting here today if it wasn't for that. Um, I mean, where that weighs up

01:08:55.080 against the end of civilization. It's been a nice chat, Josh. Yeah. Look, this has been great as the world

01:09:00.620 burns, but, um, it's interesting. It's interesting to me. I think, um,

01:09:06.060 um, I wonder whether a, an optimism bias is nonetheless useful. Oh, for sure. Yeah. If

01:09:17.920 you're, well, okay. It's, it's at an individual level. If somebody were asking me, I would say,

01:09:23.520 yes, go towards optimism. You will get more joy out of your life for sure. You will accomplish more

01:09:28.680 for sure. Things feel more possible. And that is an awesome feeling. But at a societal level,

01:09:34.620 I think it really does take the dynamic tension again between people that are like, wow, the

01:09:38.760 optimism, we can do anything. And people that are like, at some point you actually have to execute

01:09:41.760 on that. And if you thought about this side or the other. So I know in my business, when an idea is

01:09:46.800 fragile, I only want optimistic solution oriented people. When an idea is like fully thought out,

01:09:53.360 I want the pessimistic people to come in and like really try to find the holes in the idea so that we

01:09:58.820 can shore them up at the idea stage and not when we're deep into execution. So it is good to have

01:10:04.340 both sides. But as an individual, I would for sure want to be the optimistic one.

01:10:10.080 Yeah. I guess the ideal is to have, but that both sides. So when I write comedy, when I I'm in a

01:10:16.740 creative mode, I just write purely. And that's all I do. I don't limit. I try not to limit. I try not

01:10:22.760 to think about this or that or whatever else, or somebody has done that before. I write, write,

01:10:26.800 write, write, write. But then you have the editing process and the editing is when you're critical.

01:10:31.620 The problem is, is when you mix those two processes, then what it is, is like putting a

01:10:36.100 car into fourth gear straight away and it locks. Americans aren't going to get that. Yeah.

01:10:40.580 Yeah. I get it. I get it. I had to drive a stick for years. Yeah. But do you see what I mean? So

01:10:44.920 both of those processes, like you said, are so important. The problem comes is when you mix

01:10:50.460 the two or when one becomes more dominant over the other. Well said for sure. All right,

01:10:56.780 my brother. Thank you so much for your time. It's a pleasure. I can't wait for us to be on

01:11:00.660 your show. Yes, indeed. The last question we ask before we go to locals for questions from

01:11:05.460 our supporters is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think

01:11:10.260 we should be. For me, the core thing is what I was talking about earlier. You're having a biological

01:11:19.680 experience. If I could really get people to embrace that, to understand their life through

01:11:23.620 the lens of my body works a certain way, my emotions are a response to my gut as much as my

01:11:28.660 thoughts, getting all of that under wraps, your life will get a lot easier, a lot more predictable.

01:11:34.220 And when it's predictable, you're closer to the ground truth. Amazing. Thank you for being here

01:11:38.200 with us. Or rather, thank you for having us here. No, it was awesome. I really enjoyed it.

01:11:41.600 Yeah. What a conversation. What have you landed on food-wise and fasting durations that gives you

01:11:48.120 the greatest results from energy and clear mind to better sleep? Or are you still experimenting?

TRIGGERnometry - December 13, 2023

Why Tension Between Both Sides is NEEDED - Tom Bilyeu

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