00:01:00.000When the culture war started kicking off, I just started asking myself, is this actually useful?
00:01:06.320Ooh, all these ideas sound awesome, but there's something that tells me there's a problem lurking within.
00:01:11.740Living in California, I began to realize, I don't know what metric we're using, but yikes, it isn't human flourishing.
00:01:18.160And if something sounds good, but it doesn't work, you have to immediately change course.
00:01:22.060And 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.
00:01:33.620And by having the dynamic tension, you make progress.
00:01:36.460Hey guys, Trigonometry needs your help.
00:14:46.760Why 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?
00:16:01.780But I don't know that it plays out well.
00:16:04.300I haven't looked at that closely enough to stake my thing.
00:16:06.260And 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.
00:16:34.000So everything is going to be a give and take.
00:16:37.300Like, ah, if we do this, then we're going to get this second or third order consequence, which is not ideal.
00:16:42.040But if we don't, we end up in this dark place.
00:16:45.040So, 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.
00:16:54.680Again, I come to this because I really struggled in the beginning to figure out why it felt wrong when it sounded so right.
00:17:00.840So I think a lot of people exist in that.
00:17:03.020They're given a bumper sticker, and certain bumper stickers sound way better than others.
00:17:08.700Like, when I tell people, this is where I really get myself in trouble.
00:18:04.080All of those things I could have done differently.
00:18:06.020So, yes, I get why other people will say it's a drunk driver's fault.
00:18:08.720But now you're taking away my power because I could have done something different and got a different result.
00:18:12.800And 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.
00:18:22.080Now, I honestly thought I'm going to publish this.
00:18:25.120People are going to write and say, Tom, oh, my God, you just changed my life.
00:19:59.420But the thing that I will get is happiness, fewer homeless people, less people incarcerated, whatever metric.
00:20:06.680And then if we can agree on that, then we just look and say, did that work?
00:20:09.920Were there second and third order consequences that we didn't anticipate?
00:20:12.700Do they outweigh the first order consequence of whatever?
00:20:15.600And cool, now we're talking about the metrics.
00:20:18.240We're talking about the things that we tested.
00:20:20.260And then we're saying, did they work or not?
00:20:22.480But people don't write down what they think is going to happen.
00:20:24.720And so they make it up in their mind that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's roughly what I thought would happen.
00:20:28.160Or they'll just default to this is too complicated or whatever, whatever, whatever.
00:20:32.540But they're not holding themselves accountable.
00:20:34.420So 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.
00:20:44.840All of it, like the whole kit and caboodle that is a well-optimized human life.
00:20:48.980I'm just looking at that going, accountability is the thing.
00:20:54.900And so if you don't have that, you will blow with the winds of chance and you will live your life by accident.
00:21:00.480If 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.
00:21:08.460To me, what we're talking about a lot here is deferred gratification, Tom.
00:21:13.680It's actually saying I'm not going to pick the thing that's easy, which is to blame someone else.
00:21:18.600I'm going to do the thing that's more difficult, which is to have introspection.
00:21:22.920Look not only at my actions, but my thought processes and my overall worldview in order to improve.
00:21:30.340There's a lot of people who don't want to do that because it's not easy.
00:21:36.060So I think the biggest problem people have is what they build their self-esteem around.
00:21:41.840The number one problem we will all face in life is do I respect myself?
00:21:46.340I will venture that most people cobble self-respect together through the echo instead of the shout.
00:21:53.980What 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.
00:22:02.260Now, 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.
00:22:12.700But it's nested inside of that's how I earned my place in the group.
00:22:16.240You still care very deeply about earning your place in the group.
00:22:19.440So 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.
00:22:30.820I have the right beliefs by showing how much I love people and I care about people and I stand for the right causes.
00:23:13.320But the thing that they're actually getting lauded for is having the right opinions.
00:23:18.680And 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.
00:23:28.440If, 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.
00:23:39.720Now, 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.
00:23:58.340And 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.
00:24:11.880If you can instead say, I don't know that I'm going to get it right.
00:24:16.400I just know I'm going to learn from it.
00:24:17.980And the very thing I'm going to value myself for is my willingness to stare nakedly at my own inadequacies.
00:24:26.820If 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.
00:24:36.080I'm on the other hand, and I'm not going to say it doesn't sting.
00:24:48.980I'm not going to try to hide from that because I'm thinking to myself, wait, I've gotten this far by being wrong.
00:24:54.200If you can really remove a scale from my eye, and look, I'm not a fool.
00:24:58.300If 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.
00:25:09.340I disagree, I disagree for this reason, right?
00:25:12.360So I'm not just like, oh, my God, tell me what I need to believe.
00:25:15.100But I really do open my heart up to this person may be about to tell me something that will make me more effective.
00:25:23.400True 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.
00:25:39.740So I'm just running through that whole circle to see if I'm doing things the way that I should.
00:25:47.560So 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.
00:26:01.500They're going to reject any idea that makes them feel badly about themselves.
00:26:04.820And 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.
00:26:13.260And self-esteem is one very good guide, which is why as you go lower down, your self-esteem drops.
00:26:20.480They're correlated in some way you'll have to have somebody smarter on to explain how and why.
00:26:26.460And so as you go down the hierarchy, you start feeling worse about yourself.
00:26:30.160Okay, so now we've got the psychological immune system, which is that part of your brain that makes it everybody else's fault.
00:26:36.340And 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.
00:26:49.300Whereas 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.
00:26:58.440I don't mind making mistakes because I learn from them and that's what I value myself for.
00:27:02.960That person, when attacked, they actually get stronger and it becomes a truly anti-fragile identity.
00:27:07.880But 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.
00:27:14.480I think it might be a slight variation on that, which is people can't be laughed at.
00:27:20.280They can't have other people think they're stupid because their self-esteem requires it.
00:31:52.840The darkest secret of my life is that I've given up on adults.
00:31:57.940And the great irony is I make a lot of content for adults, but I'm making it for the 2%.
00:32:03.580And I'm doing it as a part of a bigger strategy.
00:32:06.400And I'm doing it because, of course, I love seeing the transformation of the 2%.
00:32:10.880But 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.
00:32:25.700Now, it doesn't mean that they're not capable of being malleable.
00:32:30.800But dude, a frame of reference, which I should probably circle back to, so ask me if you're interested because I might forget.
00:32:39.540But frame of reference is brutally difficult to pierce.
00:32:41.940And if you can't pierce somebody's frame of reference, they actually do not understand you.
00:32:49.300Okay, 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.
00:33:04.440People 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.
00:33:20.600Like 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.
00:33:29.520And they don't recognize those are all choices, all of them.
00:33:32.360And if they make different choices, they will see the world from a different perspective.
00:33:44.280I just don't think we're very good at figuring out what is real.
00:33:47.300And 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.
00:34:02.720That 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.
00:34:20.380The more you're able to predict the outcome of your actions, the more likely you are to be close to ground truth.
00:34:26.680That's why Newtonian physics were never going to give you GPS.
00:34:41.720I 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.
00:34:48.560I run a test to test that prediction, and it comes true.
00:34:52.000Then I'm like, okay, I'm probably pretty close to ground truth on this one.
00:34:55.940And 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.
00:35:06.540Now, 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.
00:35:24.400And 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.
00:35:36.480Like, we just had no sense of it, right?
00:35:43.000And 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.
00:35:51.400And 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.
00:35:58.640But 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.
00:37:10.460And then if that's number three, but I don't finish one and two, then of course I didn't do the third thing.
00:37:15.480So these are such overly simplified ways.
00:37:18.700I wish in less than an hour I could actually get to frame of reference.
00:37:22.020But 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.
00:37:31.920Now, the fact that he called that a decision tells you everything you need to know about what a frame of reference really is.
00:37:37.420Because that will color everything about how you think and act.
00:37:40.640And it also colors the energy you put out into the world.
00:37:43.360So if you come in and you think everybody's hostile, you're going to come in an attack mode.
00:37:48.040Because you're going to think to yourself, hang on a second, people are going to attack me.
00:38:00.960And which is, it just shows how ideology is so powerful.
00:38:06.760And 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.
00:38:57.360But 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.
00:39:07.720Or, whoa, I actually never considered that.
00:39:09.740That's a really cool frame of reference, and maybe I'm going to update mine.
00:39:13.440But if you knew what somebody's frame of reference was and you thought it was honorable, now it's like we can work together.
00:39:19.620That's why telling you, hey, that's a bad idea, only because I know what your North Star is.
00:41:05.100So, 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.
00:41:12.180I never wanted to get lost that the most important thing in my life is my marriage.
00:41:33.520So, 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.
00:41:42.600So since I know that, I try to swing hard in the opposite direction.
00:41:51.780I almost can't let myself finish the sentence, which tells you something about me.
00:41:55.740If 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.
00:42:00.900But 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.
00:42:07.640But 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.
00:42:17.440That you probably want to cobble together beliefs that push you to go farther than other people.
00:42:22.720The idea that George Bernard Shaw captured in his quote, the reasonable man adjusts to the world.
00:42:29.180The unreasonable man insists on trying to adjust the world to him.
00:42:32.520Therefore, all progress relies on the unreasonable man.
00:42:37.220That idea, like, is just so, so, so critical.
00:42:40.120And what I find is I'm not smarter than most people.
00:42:42.240I really do consider myself pretty average intellect.
00:42:46.780And I've learned when being, like, super unreasonable is wise and then looking for the, like, telltale signs that, no, there's disaster ahead.
00:42:55.300And 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.
00:43:05.960And just coming in with that attitude forces you to think in a totally different way.
00:43:09.200And of course, we don't finish it that day.
00:43:11.020But 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.
00:43:17.160And so, look, that's the tip of a very large iceberg, but at the risk of rambling, I'll stop there.
00:47:53.300But 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.
00:48:07.980And I'm going to guess that things being easy are part of it.
00:48:12.700And 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.
00:48:22.080They reveal themselves to be terrible slowly.
00:48:24.980And when people push back, the pushback on the pushback is going to be, what's the harm?
00:48:38.620I don't know the answer to this question.
00:48:40.180This is not me putting forth a thing where I'm saying this is true.
00:48:43.740But 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.
00:48:59.540And 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.
00:49:13.860And 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.
00:49:18.780And we get this society that's thriving and it's wonderful, but now it's easy and we devolve again.
00:49:24.220So, again, I don't know that that's true.
00:49:26.800But, 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.
00:50:12.620You're telling me that we had orgies 2,000 years ago, but we don't now?
00:50:16.360Because 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.
00:50:53.620Because 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.
00:51:16.760But that is, that's how that exploration began for me.
00:51:21.860The printing money, we'll talk on your show about this at length, I'm sure.
00:51:26.660But 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.
00:51:35.400The 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.
00:51:45.640And 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.
00:52:29.680You 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.
00:53:26.480Yeah, 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.
00:53:39.080With enough compute power, we could literally predict, based on your genetics, your life experience, we could predict what you're going to do.
00:53:46.460And because it's knowable is why history rhymes.
00:53:50.960There's just only so many human responses to things.
00:53:55.260And 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.
00:55:15.760I 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.
00:55:31.260Good example of this, some people would argue, is Britain in the 70s.
00:55:35.840Yeah? Oh, I was literally thinking of this.
00:55:38.480It's going down the toilet, three-day week, rubbish piling up in the streets.
00:55:43.740The 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.