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The Power of Principles: Tom Bilyeu on DarkHorse · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast inside rail. I have the pleasure and honor of sitting this morning with Tom Bilyeu it's not this morning. It's barely not this morning, but that doesn't matter to any of you.
• 0:13
  Tom is the co-founder of impact theory, quest nutrition. He's a popular YouTuber.
• 0:21
  So before anything else, let me just say, Tom, welcome to DarkHorse.
• 0:24
  Thank you, man. I am excited to be here.
• 0:26
  I am glad to have you here. I am going to kind of catch you off guard right up front. I know you have a very successful podcast impact theory and you're starting another one, the Tom Bilyeu show.
• 0:44
  I didn't watch it and there's a reason.
• 0:48
  And the reason is because I don't do product launches, book tours, this sort of thing every so often, somebody who's on a book tour shows up or something. But in any case, I think it's bad for me to put myself in a position where I could possibly be mistaken for an interviewer.
• 1:07
  I just don't think it's the highest and best use of my talents. But the reason that I wanted to have you on is that I do often encounter your work and you fascinate me. And I think if anything is going to drive people to check out your work, it's going to be the fact that you come from a very unusual place and you're a very deep thinker.(...) So what I've noticed in listening to you is that you have a deep philosophical bent that seems to affect all of the things you do. It affects the way you approach your work.
• 1:47
  It affects your approach to business. It affects your marriage. And so I appreciate anybody who's doing all of these things in a highly conscious way, which strikes me as as your nature. Does that fit with your understanding of yourself?
• 2:03
  Aggressively, yeah, I I'm always confused that people don't live by a set of principles.
• 2:10
  It just makes life a whole lot easier. So my obsession is utility. There are things that you can do that have high utility and moving you towards your goals. And there's things you can do that are low utility that move you away from your goals. So I predicate my life on something I call the physics of progress, which is the scientific method, recontextualized to other aspects of life. And that has proven wildly advantageous for me as a former young, aggressive, ambitious male of being able to actually generate energy in a direction.
• 2:47
  And so when you look back on your life and you realize, wait a second, this was a set of ideas that's allowed me to accomplish the things that I've accomplished. And nobody thought I was going to accomplish anything.
• 2:57
  My mom certainly didn't. My now father-in-law didn't. My best friend, in fact, did not think I was going to do anything with my life. So when you look back and go, OK, then why was I able to?
• 3:10
  For me, I came to the realization very quickly that I had cobbled together a set of ideas that forced a set of behaviors and those behaviors had natural outcomes.
• 3:22
  And yeah, I just became obsessed with formalizing that.
• 3:26
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• 5:29
  In fact, in normal circumstances, I think they have it right.
• 5:37
  And let me just put some flesh on those bones. What I would say is that the conscious mind is evolved for a purpose and the purpose was to deal with novel circumstances.
• 5:52
  And that is crazy. I use that term all the time. That's interesting. Keep going.
• 5:57
  Those circumstances should be pretty rare. In general, a human living in an environment that's normal for humans would spend almost all of their time not in this conscious mode. Now, their conscious mind would be present.(...) It would be present more or less as a spectator watching things unfold and it would become activated to direct the robot at the moments when the program that was already running wasn't adequate to the task. So if you sort of imagine a tennis player flowing across the court, a tennis player has a conscious mind. The conscious mind is there, but if the conscious mind is in control of the tennis, the tennis player is going to choke.
• 6:42
  So the tennis player is flowing across the court, not in conscious mode. And then maybe the opponent has been studying the tennis player and found a vulnerability and delivers a shot where the person didn't anticipate it. Then the conscious mind comes into play and it tries to field that new piece of information,(...) which once it's understood, will get driven down into the unconscious flow state. So the people who can flow through life and not have to be highly conscious about things, I think in some ways are involved in the more natural, better way of living.(...) The reason that you are so successful while being so unusually conscious is we are living in an era where almost nobody running an automatic program can do anything because everything is so new and so counterintuitive that flowing through modern civilization is just an impossibility.
• 7:40
  So anyway, I think it's the moment for people who have a conscious approach.
• 7:44
  (...) And anyway, that's clearly you. You know, you also spoke to another of my favorite ideas. You said you were bringing a scientific modality to features of life.
• 7:57
  And of course, before we move on to that, what you just said hit me way harder than I expected it to. And I've heard you say that before. I've heard you talk about that before, but for some reason I did not apply it to myself.
• 8:11
  This is going to sound super random, but the way that you just summed that up makes a weird thing in my life suddenly make sense.(...) I will at the most inopportune moments become hyper aware of how my teeth connect to each other and how my tongue moves. And I have at times had to, as a meditative practice, lose my awareness of my mouth in order to speak.
• 8:35
  And I've always thought that's so weird.
• 8:37
  (...) But if your assessment is correct, that is certainly in fact, your assessment of me makes the prediction that I would occasionally do that. And I do.
• 8:49
  That is a truly fascinating that I am simply.
• 8:53
  Defective you didn't say that, but this is actually a useful way to think about it, that I have a defective amount of self-awareness that has caused my anxiety in life for sure.
• 9:04
  And is the thing that makes me so aware of my physical body in space.
• 9:12
  Very interesting, Bret. Very interesting. You have named a thing that has been with me my whole life.
• 9:19
  That now I hope doesn't become even more obvious to me that I have a name for it.
• 9:23
  So that's fascinating.
• 9:25
  I think it might actually be useful to know about it. I will tell you my corresponding version of that.
• 9:31
  I'm somebody who's done a fair amount of public speaking. Of course, a lot of it since twenty seventeen.
• 9:38
  And, you know, sometimes it goes better, sometimes it goes worse. But when I have the experience of being at a podium in front of an audience delivering something, especially a spontaneous something, when it goes really well, I have the impression that I, the person I call, I am a spectator.(...) And I am watching this happen and I'm as interested to see what's going to be said as anybody else, because I don't know.
• 10:07
  It's coming from a non-conscious place.
• 10:09
  It's a flow state. And then one can become very conscious in the middle of such a speech. And it is. It's the exact experience that I think an elite athlete has, you know, at the plate becoming too aware of the bat or something.
• 10:28
  So anyway, I think I think this is maybe it's a natural tension, but you and I, I think, are biased heavily in the direction of thinking through.
• 10:41
  Things which in an era where so much is not straightforward turns out to be a kind of superpower.
• 10:46
  Yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like this moment for sure. What's been interesting for me is I used to apply that exclusively to business and I would try to explain to entrepreneurs that you have to understand this is where I use the exact same language, not having yet discovered you at that point. So it's two people coming to the same thing for different reasons. But explaining to an entrepreneur, your job is to solve novel problems. And when I say that, I mean a problem, not only that you've never seen before a problem no one has ever seen before. And the only answer to that is to think from first principles. And so all of my business teaching is about that.
• 11:24
  The reason I was able to be successful in business without a background in business was I realized very quickly that things fit together through cause and effect.
• 11:32
  And if you can understand the entire chain of cause and effect, then you can end up where you want to end up because you can just ask. What does that lead to?
• 11:39
  What does that lead to? What does that lead to? And if you're accurate enough across those steps, then you can figure out, OK, cool. If I do this, I'm going to end up roughly there. And of course, you're going to, you know, tack along the way differently to make sure that you actually stand course. But it's been a really useful way to organize my thinking, to organize my approach to something, to avoid being overwhelmed by uncertainty, which. Lesson number two for an entrepreneur is your job is to intoxicate other people with certainty about the direction you're moving in the product, whatever. And so you've got to be able to look up at the sky, see a bunch of stars and go, but if you look real close, that makes a dipper. And now, because I know where that dipper is, I can steer through the night sky. And you know that the dipper isn't actually there, but it allows you to navigate when you would otherwise be lost. And so the utility of that narrative becomes extremely high.
• 12:37
  So, yeah, that's very interesting to me is if you can think up from the ground up, you're going to get stuck a lot less.
• 12:46
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• 14:43
  And what that means is that you have to be able to approach some discipline that isn't yours and you have to be able to cobble together a model that is good enough to proceed from. And you just described something like this as a narrative. You described it as the illusion of, you know, objects in the sky drawn out of stars.
• 15:08
  And that model allows you to make progress. It's not a true model, but you have to be sensitive to the question of whether or not that model is accurate enough for you to navigate. And at the point that the model falters, you have to figure out what's wrong with it and upgrade it so you can move forward.
• 15:26
  So interesting to hear that two very different methods for confronting novelty converge on something that to me sounds very, very similar.
• 15:39
  Yeah, this is why I called the physics of progress. I there life works in a certain way. The human mind works in a certain way. There are certain forces when you take humans as a massive group that are just going to be true. And given that those things are mappable, you find yourself in the scientific method, whether you want to be or not. The great irony is that so I wasn't formally trained in science. I didn't remember anything from high school science and I was walking through my employees. I was teaching them the saying I call the physics of progress and one of my employees goes, you know, that's the scientific method, right? And I was like, actually, I didn't know that was a scientific method. And I'm like, but I'm not at all surprised that this thing that I was just doing to find the answers when I had deep uncertainty would lead to the same thing. That's how you know, you're getting close to ground truth that there's nothing else below. That is when multiple disciplines come at something from different angles and they come up with the same thing. Because if you're asking, does this work or not? And that is the arbiter by which I'm going to judge whether this thing is real or not.
• 16:43
  You're going to end up pretty close to ground level truth.(...) And my whole thing is that beliefs have utility in that.
• 16:55
  Believing one thing makes it easier to accomplish or end up where you want to end up with your goal or it makes it harder to end up where you want to end up for your goal. And if you judge all of your ideas by its utility, what you're actually doing is simply putting a proxy in for accuracy or truth. You're saying, oh, I have gotten close to modeling what is true, which is why I can predict the outcome of this behavior.(...) And in YouTube, just because this is in my world,(...) think of the truth is the algorithm. If you really understood the algorithm and you really understood the people watching it, you'd be able to predict what episode is going to crush and which ones won't. And Jimmy, Mr.
• 17:35
  Beast has gotten so good at that that he'll spend two million dollars on a video and kill it because he's like, nope, I know that's not going to hit. And then so many of his videos just crush, crush, crush. Now you can think his videos are soulless, but you cannot say that he doesn't understand the algorithm and the people watching those videos. And so to me, all of life falls not always that clearly, but fall into that category of this is knowable. And the more I learn about this thing by running tests, the more I can move from, and this is something I learned from you and it's such a brilliant thing. I can move from hypothesis to thesis. And I think your exact words were if the world understood the difference between a hypothesis and a thesis,(...) we would solve all the problems in the world. And I remember the first time you said that and I was like, okay, he's obviously being hyperbolic to be funny, but why would he say that? And then as you realize one is a guess and one is a survivor, all of a sudden you go, okay, wait a second. Now I get that there is a very big difference.
• 18:37
  Yeah, there's a huge difference. And I would point out if I can encapsulate what you're saying, in effect, all disciplines are tested. Disciplines are tests of one's understanding of the quality of one's model as assessed through predictive power. That's true whether or not you're a scientist at the lab bench or running a field experiment. It's true if you're a tennis player trying to figure out where the best place to be on the court is given the shot you just put across the net. It's true if you're a carpenter trying to imagine how small you can make a dovetail that will still hold the forces that are likely to be exerted on it. It's all a question of predictive power, which actually brings me to the next issue. Oh, one thing before I get there. You said that your employee called your attention to the fact that you were engaged in the scientific method. And the truth is actually one step deeper than the employee at least said, which is that the scientific method is itself a formalization of a process that we naturally do. We are born to falsify ideas and children do it. If you listen to children's questions about why things are the way they are, they are engaged in a, yeah, it's an informal version of the scientific method, which we then drum out of them in large measure in school. We train them to stop doing that for the dumbest of reasons.(...) I mean, my impression having gone through school and having been having found the experience painful and having been conscious through through it was that most teachers don't like the kinds of questions that children ask as soon as those questions extend beyond the knowledge that right or wrong.
• 20:29
  The teacher is certain of the teacher does not want to be exposed for not knowing things that they feel they should know. And so they shut down the instinct to ask.
• 20:40
  And I can't tell you it's like it's the worst possible instinct for an educator, right? You should be cultivating your students desire to know the answer to questions that you cannot answer. And the best thing, the best lesson you can deliver to them is showing them how you would address a question that neither of you know the answer to, right? How are we going to figure out the answer to that question you've posed or can we rephrase that question so it is answerable and then pursue the answer? That's a very powerful lesson. And, you know, I didn't encounter people capable of doing that until very late in my education. Yeah.
• 21:20
  So that one you encounter the same thing as an entrepreneur. The way that I always rationalize this is that people have to build their self-esteem around something.
• 21:29
  But what you build yourself a steam around matters a lot. And there seems to be what I would call an evolutionarily placed algorithm running in your brain that wants you to prize yourself for being better faster, stronger, smarter, being right. And so we have all this huge emotional reward system when we are in that camp, when we are right.(...) And if you lean into that and you build yourself a steam, you will learn over time. It's a super fragile position as the teacher learns. And so they learn to obfuscate and not want the students to understand that, like, oh, I don't understand that.
• 22:05
  So they use misdirection. They'll try to shut it down and they want to create the illusion that I know everything because that's what their self-esteem is predicated on instead. And this is what I try to do with the Tom Bill. You show what I'm trying to show people is listen, I approach the world in a fundamentally different way right now. This is a time of emotion and tribal answers. I have found that that has low predictive validity of getting you to a goal that you want to reach unless your goal is just I want to fit in great. If you do then just say it and go do your teammate thing.
• 22:36
  But for me, I'm saying I'm trying to do this thing over here. It's a very noble goal that has a date has a metric. I know exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and how I'm going to measure whether I accomplished that or not. And so now the things that I do are either moving me towards that or they're moving me away from that. If they're moving me towards it, I are sorry. If that's my goal, I'm trying to move towards something then I'm in a very fragile position if I'm just trying to be right all the time because now I either have to posture shut down questions double down on a dumb answer just because it was mine and I have to defend my ego or I can just say, hey, everybody listen. You've come to the Tom Billy show. Let me tell you right now.
• 23:11
  I'm be wrong about a lot of stuff. You're here to watch a human in real time. Try to find the ideas that have the highest predictive validity. So please as we're here live it's done as a both a live show and then a cut down later challenge me.
• 23:26
  If you think I'm wrong about something say it. I don't even mind if you try to be mean whatever just give me clarity because if you tell me that I'm stupid but you tell me why I'm stupid. I'll look at that and be like, oh actually I think they're right again going back to your idea. Just has higher predictive validity when I run a backwards check if I had believed that for the last 10 years would I have made more or less progress? I think I would have made more then it's like, okay cool. My ego is tied up in my willingness to do that my willingness to what I call stare nakedly at my inadequacies and the act of doing that makes me feel better about myself but it also propels me forward because skills have utility and now by getting wiser in that I'm holding on to beliefs that actually allow me to do a thing in the world that other people can't do I make progress.
• 24:15
  All right.(...) Couple points I want to follow up on one.
• 24:20
  Reality is not a team sport. Many people are confused about this. They want to be on the team that understands reality and the fact is no team understands reality and the team is a bastardization. It's a convenience.(...) Sometimes you have to be on a team to accomplish a goal but that's not what reality is about and you shouldn't mistake it for that.
• 24:42
  The other thing is.
• 24:44
  The you mention the idea of trying to be right all the time.
• 24:49
  And it's really suddenly off the mark.
• 24:54
  To try to be right all the time because what you should be trying to do if you really want to be right in a deep way in a way that is something other than just being able to you know. Point to the accuracy of what you said and say I told you so if you're in if you're interested in being right in a deep way what you're really trying to do is build a model.
• 25:16
  That allows you to extrapolate where you've never been before.(...) Right so you can figure out what the answer is when confronted with something new in some elegant way the better your model is the more accurate it will be at allowing you to extrapolate correctly so it does result in you being right a lot of the time. But it's not a matter of accumulate it's not like being your own Wikipedia and having a ton of facts at your disposal so when somebody answer ask you the question you can spit out the answer it's a question of having the elegant model as simple as possible that allows you to know the answer to questions you've never thought of before before other people do because you don't have it's not a question of looking it up and remembering it. And people.
• 26:02
  I'm I'm struck by and frustrated at.(...) The predicament I find myself in repeatedly which is my model is very good across a wide range of topics.
• 26:23
  I know that and other people should know that because over time the predictive power has been very high not perfect but why is it high it's high because as the model reveals itself not to be predictive I fix it I figure out what's wrong with it and I upgraded.
• 26:40
  So I'm very troubled in the present.
• 26:44
  At any present moment when people confront me with some isolated belief that is far off of the mainstream and say how could you possibly believe that.
• 26:56
  And I say well because my model tells me to question this and to put more weight over there and.
• 27:05
  It's up against nothing other than incredulity right the fact that a belief sounds preposterous doesn't argue one way or the other as to whether it's valid and so I you know I'm. I'm troubled by the fact that you can end up.
• 27:23
  Destroying your credibility following an accurate model to predictions that are ahead and you know I'm sorry I don't mean to be on the soapbox here. But I realized many years ago that scientifically speaking.
• 27:38
  The mythology is that we want you to find important stuff way ahead of.
• 27:47
  The moment that others will discover it right the farther ahead the better.
• 27:52
  But that is not how the system functions.
• 27:55
  The system functions it rewards you if you come up with insights just barely before others. If you come up with stuff way too early.
• 28:07
  They'll. Deride you as a heretic and drive you into the wilderness or you'll never be heard of right the point is it's too early for that realization and it will be lost to history and. That's that's a defect of the system a massive one because from the point of view of the well-being of civilization we do want you to come up with stuff that strikes us as just. So strange it's got to be wrong and then it turns out to be true if you figure that stuff out hundred years ahead of time what a huge.
• 28:40
  Act of wealth creation for all of humanity you've engaged in so anyway it's a it's a defect of our system and it's become increasingly a pet peeve of mine.
• 28:50
  Man understandably so the one that I always think of on that topic is a guy that came up with germ theory. I think this might be because we're touching cadavers and then delivering babies and that we just need to wash our hands and that guy died alone in an insane asylum if I'm not mistaken because people so broke him. And told him that he was out of his mind he was crazy and he just couldn't be anymore wrong and just come totally isolated from play society from his profession everything and I thought damn he ended up being right and. It would have been so easy to test and that they didn't want to test they just wanted to show how wrong he was I was like I am constantly vigilant for that in my own mind like I have a few things like inflation I'm a psychopath around inflation my own community knows like if you want to distract the teacher just ask him about inflation and. It's the one area where I'm like the most on the lookout for okay I'm there's for sure something that I have wrong there's some vision of this maybe just an oversimplification but this is the one that I'm most likely to blind myself on.
• 29:59
  And I just don't see that algorithm running in other people and it's like yeah this doesn't make.
• 30:04
  Me good somebody else bad this is just about utility which which one of those stances in life works so yeah when you look back I think everybody wants the real answer but in the moment everybody wants to be on the tribe.
• 30:19
  Everybody wants to be right more than they want to be smarter.(...) When you say inflation you're saying you're an inflation hawk. Yeah like it to me all the time.
• 30:31
  Certainly modern society stem from inflation like you can try to find other things I guess you could say human nature. But man one rung up from human nature is its first manifestation in the printing of money and the way that that dorages everything downstream is crazy and it's one where I'm like banging the drum screaming as loud as I can and it's an idea that is just complicated enough.
• 30:54
  That average people are never going to care even though when they're screaming that they can't make ends meet I'm just like well welcome to inflation.
• 31:03
  Yeah it's like.
• 31:06
  It's like a small breach in the wall of a ship. You know it's bringing on water and people are like yeah but you know the bilge pump pumps are handling.
• 31:19
  And it's like well how well are they handling it how much do you want to be depending on bilge pumps and shouldn't we be talking about the fact that there's a breach in the hull and that's a fundamental problem with a ship.
• 31:33
  Right and that it's like hey we want to let let's just say more people onto the ship so let's poke a hole in it. So it lowers down a little so more people can get on it's like what is happening this is the very thing that's going to destroy everybody's ability to save wealth make their kids lives better than their own it's it's one of those and I don't know how much you want to get into it. It's one of those that as you peel that onion back it reveals itself in more and more and more of the problems but it is complex like you do eventually butt up against that you don't want you want the perception of no inflation but you don't actually want no inflation so it is fascinating and that when it's done well you get the American perspective of the world. Fascinating and that when it's done well you get the American economy but you only get it for you know whatever two hundred and fifty years and then it does eventually implode and that every empire ever has fallen under the weight of debt and money printing ever it's just a loop.
• 32:37
  Yeah especially bad in an era where the elites who are in a position to shift the policy around money printing are also at least in the short term in a position to escape the consequences of the ship going down.
• 32:52
  I up or even benefiting from it because they get the money first before it actually goes down in value so for them is this double whammy of well I can buy these goods with extra dollars.(...) And if I waited say six months or a year now those same goods are going to seem more expensive and you don't have extra dollars so it's it's crazy this is one I never thought I would be talking about finance I never even thought I would care I knew how to get rich that was easy enough I don't want to belittle that journey but. Investing money growing wealth over time is a totally different game it is the game that the vast majority of humans play certainly in the West and people just don't understand like they fundamentally don't understand how many works and so they can tell the system is rigged against me but they don't know in what way. And given that they don't know how the system is rigged they don't know what to vote for what to push on how to say stop whatever this is and so they start looking at the wrong things but yeah that's that is my hobby horse if I could get people to understand.
• 33:56
  How to protect the average American that stop money printing yeah stop money printing is right. Okay, let me switch topics on us here a little bit. One of the places that I've heard you talk that I've been particularly struck has to do with relationships in particular I remember, I don't even remember how I ended up there but somehow I heard you responding to a question about your relationship with your wife.
• 34:27
  And the answer that I heard you give.
• 34:32
  Was.
• 34:35
  Strangely on target in a way that.
• 34:39
  I just don't hear from most people and I'll just I'll try to recover it whenever people tell me things that I've said it's often butchered and so I.
• 34:48
  I can't quite resonate with it but what you said was.
• 34:53
  That you were aware.
• 34:57
  That your wife.
• 35:00
  Had.
• 35:01
  A very powerful toolkit with which to incentivize you to be better and that instead of resenting being incentivized you were in favor of it because effectively you trusted her and it was good for you and good for her and good for your partnerships.
• 35:22
  So why wouldn't you be. That ring a bell.
• 35:26
  Very much. You did a phenomenal job. That is exactly what I believe.(...) And I am the recipient of two kids who were too dumb to know that like gender dynamics.
• 35:37
  Were this changing thing and so we got together when we were in our 20s. I was 24. She was 21 when we met got married not too long after that and at some point I realized whoa.
• 35:52
  I am trying to impress her and in trying to impress her I'm becoming a better person and I realized that.
• 36:02
  Initially she has since become an entrepreneur in her own right but in the beginning when we were just two broke kids.
• 36:09
  She saw herself as working through me to get the things done for our family that we wanted so I went off to go to work and to try to be an entrepreneur and to build a company and she was in the background like.
• 36:22
  Pushing me encouraging me trying to get me to do more pointing out if I wasn't doing something that I said that I was going to do pointing out when I could have asked for more and been more aggressive rewarding me in the way that only a wife can when she saw me do something that she thought was powerful and so I was like whoa my wife is shaping me in ways that have been profoundly advantageous for me as a man and certainly for us as a family and so at the beginning when we were really starting to be successful I was running a company I was racing towards a billion dollar valuation was crazy I was making real money for the first time in my life and I had put her through almost a decade of being like clipping coupons and you know not like unable to pay the bills but we were not you know thriving yet. And I broke down in tears one night and I was like the world is never going to know how instrumental you have become in who I am becoming and so I was starting to get celebrated this is like social media is coming along and you know founded this company is absolutely killing it and people are just like holding me up like look at this entrepreneur this is amazing oh my God so incredible and my wife is just quietly running a department in the company and not getting any money.
• 37:40
  credit and I thought yo like you have shaped me at a deep and fundamental level in all the ways that a woman can shape a man and I was like I will forever owe you a debt of gratitude and so then this was all before sort of the woke stuff or certainly before it got on my radar and so then the woke stuff gets on my radar I'm the guy that's like utility of beliefs will take you where you want to go I'm over here quietly telling people like hey get in a relationship there's a reason that this dyad has been so useful from an evolutionary perspective like ignore it at your own peril and then it was like men and women are the same and I was like wait what I'm like that doesn't make any sense from an end of one perspective I can certainly tell you that's nonsensical and then just as I look back and go okay if I had that belief all through evolutionary history would this have rang true and I'm like that's dumb once you start looking at evolutionary timescales and so I'm like that's going to derange the here and now culture which of course is a very important thing to remember is that that's not going to make your life worse and of course that hypothesis has turned into a thesis in the extreme as I watch online dating and cultural shifts change the way that men and women look at each other the way they look at relationships into something where I'm like that has low utility from where I'm sitting in terms of it's not going to make your life better and it's going to make your life worse so very very important that people identify like what their north star is so that we can say whether something is actually going to move you towards that or not but yeah that that one is the one that feels like an own goal that is people smashing themselves in a hand with a hammer and I just can't track yeah it's a tragedy in my opinion and increasingly I am preoccupied thinking about the nature of the tragedy of young people forming or in many cases not forming relationships and so anyway if I if I can take what you just said and reformulate it and it a little bit I would say we have the following puzzle human beings are exquisitely built for your romantic relationship to be to supercharge your capacity it makes sense that it would be because a permanent romantic relationship and I'm being careful not to say monogamous though I really in general mean that all the fun man are me here in a second if I have to but but a a permanent romantic relationship is a team that completely aligns interests in other words in any sort of a traditional role a wife would have every interest in her husband being as powerful and effective as she could help him be right because her well-being and more importantly the well-being of her brood is dependent on how well positioned and effective the father of her children is that makes her trustworthy in a way that is you know you couldn't buy at any price on the open market right if you go to McKinsey and company to find out what you should be doing they have all kinds of perverse incentives but your wife's alignment with you is this it's this very natural thing but at the same time you can't I'm we are living in modern hyper novel circumstances where the way in which that partnership functions has to be renegotiated even for the so-called Trads you're living in a post birth control world right a couple decides whether to have children how many children when to have them and so the point is the the architecture of the texture is still there for this very powerful relationship but the way in which it unfolds has to be navigated a new and nobody seems to have proper guidance for young people on hey here's what you're actually trying to accomplish and here are the obstacles to applying the program that you evolved with so the question is can you reconcile these things can you create a new kind of relationship in which you still get the power from the thing that evolution built into you and the degree to which I am seeing failure mode after failure mode amongst young people has me quite despairing I know nobody wants to hear an older guy talk about this but I just think the kids are in trouble and they don't even really know it agreed the problem is they don't understand frame of reference your frame of reference controls what you look at and what you see so you and I as quote unquote old guys we look at women in general men and women together and we see okay these are two different things they have their own drives their own impulses but they come together well as a unit things have to be negotiated for sure it's not like my wife and I got together and oh just this all fits perfectly we had to negotiate a lot of things to find terms how are we going to be with each other rules of engagement all that but you can negotiate those things well and you can thrive that is what I see when I look at a couple so when I see two people that are like oh my god we're in love and we're going to get married I have a warm feeling and I'm like yeah that's amazing take that same thing and you show it to somebody who's 22 and the odds that they have some sort of ironic detachment cynical take on like what all of that is borders on a hundred percent and so when they look at the same thing they see something fundamentally different and in what they see they will thusly make that come true each of them will be more standoffish they won't see this as a negotiated thing where we can both win and work together and so you really have to wait until the culture changes in order to get back to something that is more useful in the two sides coming together because this stuff is downstream culture culture imparts that frame of reference that colors how they view all of this now is not in a vacuum like they're real things that exacerbate this stuff for sure but if you begin to change your frame of reference you can avoid some of the traps like I have many times thought man very glad that I have my wife but if I didn't I still feel like I can navigate today's dating life and it's like I want to do it so bad to see like what are the things that I'm missing and how much of my approach into this would actually work the big thing that I think kids have to overcome today and this would be the main thing I would focus on if I were building a strategy to still be successful and find love in a stable relationship would be there is a wild distortion that happens cognitively when you feel like you can always find the next when I met my wife I felt like oh my god I happened upon this British woman in LA like this is crazy it gave me the sense of I've looked the whole world over and I found her which of course is not true she just happened to be the person that came across my path and everything else from there was like working it out because we decided once we were in love that we were not looking back so we're like divorces in an option that's not the game that we're playing like we're going to figure out how to make this work but if you feel like this is a bit frustrating there's always another there's always another there's always another and that's baked into your dopamine loop that you can literally pick up an app and just find the next find the next find the next you've got to not only break yourself out of that you've got to break the people that you're approaching out of the belief that now as soon as I have friction with this guy I'm just on to the next person and that's formidable like when I think about a foe that's a formidable foe getting somebody to change that lens isn't going to be easy but it feels doable.
• 46:02
  Yes it's especially problematic I suspect when the.
• 46:08
  What I think is a false sophistication pervade society where the idea is oh well the natural thing do is you know to have fun until you get bored of it and then you know if you feel like having a permanent relationship then you can form one and you know.
• 46:28
  Just don't date guys under six feet or I don't know what the modern stuff is but but the point is.
• 46:36
  That may create the conditions in which you actually can't solve the problem of how to build a relationship that works that a relationship that actually.(...) You've signed up with the right person and by the right person I mean somebody who has the.
• 46:54
  Underlying stuff and the interest in reforming themselves to be compatible and complimentary you find that person and then you're actually better off if whatever the obstacles are they are substantial to getting out and moving on somebody else you're forced to figure out how to solve the problem.
• 47:15
  Life is not a I'm sure modern video games don't work this way but back in the day you'll recall that a video game was something that. Accidentally trained you if you felt like you had bad luck and you should kill that alien and failed to you could restart the game and you know so your high score was like.
• 47:37
  20 games that you didn't complete and then one game which you got lucky in the beginning and you know and it worked out that's not a good model for life.
• 47:49
  And anyway I think.
• 47:54
  I just I just think people do not understand a that it is a solvable problem that because the mythology tends to be well you know you probably want to be married I guess but it kind of sucks.
• 48:08
  (...) Right that's the that's the message kids get and I ain't saying it's easy it's not easy and it's not all joy but.
• 48:21
  There is you even have built into you I believe programs that make it work but if you don't know that they're there then you may just take the struggle as the nature of the thing and you may not try to get past the struggle of it and. I don't know you know it seems to me that things were confused enough on this front when I was young and they've only gotten worse that it's very hard to convey.
• 48:53
  To people that although movies aren't life that old movies that report on romantic relationships are telling you something about how much the world has changed even if those things weren't perfectly accurate they do tell you what it was that you know inspired people.
• 49:11
  And cause them to to behave in the ways that they did there was a reality to it.
• 49:18
  Yeah no doubt my mantra is you're having a biological experience and the thing I would want anybody to understand young old doesn't matter figure out how much of this is a biological question so. If I know for instance that oxytocin vasopressin those are the neuro chemicals that cause you to bond then it's like okay let's not play around with the bonding hormones so when you an orgasm is one of the things that releases that so sleeping with a lot of people thinking that is casual that's probably going to range because of the impact on the neuro chemistry. Also now you've got a dopamine loop of like new new new and if I know that there is an evolutionarily placed algorithm certainly for men that rewards the pursuit of novelty it's like okay where you trying to get to because if you're trying to get to if you're North star is I want to sleep with a lot of women awesome get yourself in that dopamine loop you'll always be hungry for the next you're always going to be looking for the next novel female. You can have a great time the problem is that there's an algorithm in your brain running that you're going to hit a certain age and it's going to be something along the lines of does my life have meaning and purpose well guess what from an evolutionary perspective gives the most meaning and purpose ready made ready to go kids so it's like that's really this driver to get people to slow down take it seriously and realize okay now is the time where I need some fruits to grow on this tree and see if I can get a lot of people to get it. So when I play out like okay what is the human experience going to be like I'm playing it on the back of what I know are the evolutionarily placed algorithms running in my brain that are going to dictate XYZ things and so I want to make sure that I'm living in conjunction with them and so if you're telling yourself a story that men and women are opposing sides that there are these two colliding forces they don't make sense together in a modern context.
• 51:08
  You're going to have a disastrous run when the evolution kicks in and it just all starts to feel empty and you start to think man how are there no good insert man insert woman in my life why is this all been deranged and trying then to figure out that the very thing that's trapping you is your picture of how all of this works that there are so many people in the red pill community that really legitimately believe that women are the enemy. They are trying to get a hold of your financial resources that they just want to use sex to get a guy that's out of their league. They think they're having fun in the beginning. They don't realize that they're being used by a guy that's out of their league who can sleep with whoever he wants and controls the terms of commitment and is constantly moving on and then there's this phrase not your woman just your turn and all of that creates this image of these are two antagonistic forces rather than the call it and I don't believe in God so people need not flame me for this but the biblical interpretation of God created man and woman as a compliment your job on this earth is to have kids and raise them well it just gives you a ready made frame of reference true or not that's going to put you in lock step with the evolutionarily placed algorithms and without that you now have no bumpers other than the emotional pain and suffering of being isolated.
• 52:39
  Yeah I think that's quite right and it strikes me as the the game that occurs when the better game has broken down.
• 52:54
  Right. That's interesting. That the the fact that I think frankly somebody needs to tell young women is men have to reproductive modes evolutionarily one of them is non investing and the other is symmetrically investing to the way women reproduce women have the one mode that is highly investing.
• 53:23
  And the two modes are almost unrelated one of them is a bargain you know if a guy can find a fertile female who's willing to engage in reproductive behavior without requiring commitment that's so that's such a bargain from an evolutionary perspective that men have trouble ignoring that opportunity. So traditionally women have made that opportunity essentially non existent because raising somebody else's child without their help is such a huge loss for women but in the modern environment these rules don't apply sex is plentiful so men feel like their gang is calm and they're not. And it does not it basis of that mode in which men try to reproduce try to engage in reproductive behavior with women without committing to them is predatory that's what it is. It is taking advantage of a person in the most extreme way sticking them with a child that they're gonna have to raise for eighteen years.
• 54:28
  Right and you're not gonna participate that's a that is a decidedly predatory behavior and the problem is men find themselves in the dopamine loop where that behavior is being rewarded so they're in that mindset because why would you settle down when you could be sleeping with you know different women all the time. But stupidly women have signed up for the same game and they you know nth wave feminism has told women hey you know what you're not equal until you behave like men and behaving like men comes to mean behaving like men at their worst and so everybody is now behaving in this predatory way which then leads to exactly what you were describing. There is not there is not an instinct towards this collaborative mode of reproduction which is very human and has traditionally been much more important than the predatory mode. But the fashion of the moment has everybody in predatory mode and so they think it's sophisticated to recognize that that's just kind of what what it is and it isn't that's the problem it's it's an illusion but the counter examples.
• 55:40
  Well I don't know I wonder if part of the solution I mean it sounds to me you're in a monogamous relationship.
• 55:50
  And you don't feel burdened by that fact you feel enhanced by it.
• 55:55
  Right I do it is a trade off and so the I really had to sit down and be like I made a pros and cons list when I decided to propose to my wife and on one of the cons list was you'll only. Ever sleep with one woman again and are you okay with that and so by being aware that I was making a trade off that there were things that I was going to gain that I thought were worth that trade off it meant that I was coming into the relationship with my eyes wide open I also understood it from a hormonal perspective so I was like. We're going to feel and respond very differently in the beginning of this relationship than we will in five years and we will in 50 years and so we've got to be able to navigate that well and so we were always looking for the strategies that were going to help us move forward and so we talked very very early on. I said listen I don't have eyes only for you I am always going to find other women attractive and I was like the really bad news for you is they've done a study and the study shows that women find men attractive that are in a band within their age is like. Two years up two years down and however old they are that's the band in which they find men attractive men on the other hand find women who are 22 attractive it doesn't matter how old they are so I was like. You're going to turn into a bag of bones if things go well bag of wrinkles I should say if things go well I'm going to get wealthy over time which means there's going to be a period where you feel like your sexual market value is declining and my sexual market value is climbing and I said we exist to make that moment not matter. And so I want to tell you all of that now while you're still young and hot that while I appreciate it and I go out of my way my wife has done a phenomenal job of keeping herself very attractive. But I'm like it will only work for so long and so I want you to know that I'm interested in commitment I'm interested in knowing that if I lost my money you would be here and that you know and I mean feel in your bones. That if you inevitably lose your good looks and look I trust that my wife always be attractive for her age but the realities are that from a sexual market value perspective she will be going down and I was like I'm still going to be into you. I'm still going to want to be married to you and I am still not going to sleep with anybody else it's just going to be you and so by talking about that stuff by laying it out so I actually got a tattoo when we got married I did it as a an act of ritualistic scarification it is the only tattoo I've ever gotten it is the only tattoo I ever planned to get and I wanted to be different in the Joseph Campbell power of myth way from before my marriage to after my marriage.
• 58:38
  And on it I put the four words that I thought encapsulated what I wanted our life together to be and one of those is commitment I said listen I'm going to find other women attractive and I assume you're going to find other men attractive and it would just be crazy for me to not expect you to find somebody attractive and you expect me to not find somebody attractive. But the reality is I want you to know that I'm committed to you I want to be in a relationship with you and only you and I'm willing to make these sacrifices but holy be Jesus we are going to do the work to ensure that this relationship gives more than it takes and that's been our secret sauce is just making sure yeah that making these sacrifices to be together and to constantly be compromising is a small offering to what we get in return.
• 59:27
  Oh man that's a hell of a speech to have given your your would be or then newly wife that's that's amazing I did want to.
• 59:38
  Contribute a couple things from my tool kit here some some definitional stuff you may have heard me say before that hotness and beauty are two different things and so.
• 59:52
  Women do lose their hotness it goes away but there are attractive women at.(...) Dare I say every age certainly until very advanced ages that beauty is actually about it's more integrative and it's about something other than the amount of ones reproductive capacity that remains ahead and you know fertility.
• 1:00:16
  I'm.
• 1:00:18
  So there's that and then I guess the other thing I wanted to touch on was.
• 1:00:28
  The part of your speech reset you know I'm always going to be attracted to other women.
• 1:00:36
  I'm increasingly wondering if that's not the result of blurring some distinctions.
• 1:00:43
  I will just say at the risk of being too personal.
• 1:00:49
  I certainly see other women as attractive but I do not feel drawn to them in the way that one does when one is pursuing a mate and until I think one really finds the monogamous program within themself.
• 1:01:09
  And this is actually kind of liberating and I will say I learned something about this I think from my maternal grandfather who I was quite close with.
• 1:01:20
  So my maternal grandfather's name was Harry Harry was.
• 1:01:26
  First of all my grandmother who died pretty early in my life was a very attractive.
• 1:01:33
  Woman and after she was gone it was not.
• 1:01:38
  On known that my grandfather really appreciated beautiful women.
• 1:01:43
  I don't think he was lusting after them in fact I'm pretty sure he was.
• 1:01:49
  He had within him.
• 1:01:52
  Made his peace with the idea that there is a difference between.
• 1:02:00
  Appreciating the beauty of a woman and desiring her.
• 1:02:05
  And so the fact that he had made this distinction.
• 1:02:09
  Allowed him to delight in the beauty of a woman that he found attractive and have it not be creepy.
• 1:02:17
  Right he could sit next to a beautiful woman and have a very engaging conversation that he would feel very positive about and it wasn't about. You know trying to get her into the sack or thinking about her in that way and anyway I don't. I think our culture has become so.
• 1:02:37
  It has become almost absurdly sexually free.
• 1:02:42
  To the point that you know taboos are you're not even allowed to shame people for engaging in.
• 1:02:48
  Taboo stuff that's taboo for a very good reason like I don't know how we ended up there that seems to be where we are.
• 1:02:56
  So anyway that idea that sex is just some sort of a biological thing.(...) And therefore everything is valid between consenting adults and what goes on between your ears is your business and no one else's and all of these pseudo sophistication have resulted in.
• 1:03:16
  The boundaries that might once have been natural to people just simply not existing and I think modern people believing that they were always a fiction.
• 1:03:27
  Does that make any sense.
• 1:03:29
  It makes a lot of sense to me so I remember when Jordan Peterson got lit up for what he called culturally enforced monogamy but the reality is that.
• 1:03:39
  If you read history you learn very quickly that humans are capable of the most atrocious abhorrent things that you can imagine I mean just. Unbelievable cruelty torture murder death cannibalism on and on the list goes and so.(...) You couple that with what soldier Nixon said that the line between good and evil runs for every human heart and all of a sudden it's like. It's probably good that we have society around us to say hey for whatever reason in this moment, this is okay this is not okay. And there is such a thing as to permissible and I think it was along those lines that Nietzsche was talking about when he said that we've killed God will never wash the blood off her hands like he could just somehow see those second and third order consequences. Of a world where there isn't a big sky father who says this is how it's going to be because I said so and once you don't have that now it's like all the breaks come off and you have that line running through every human heart and now nobody's getting checked and all of a sudden the. The right context will bring out the worst of impulses and the right lens to view one's own self is that I am capable of.
• 1:04:58
  Moral colorblindness I don't know what the right way to think about it is but I'm just as prone to do something horrific that history will look back on me and be like yo I can't believe they did that. But in the moment it's going to seem fine and given that wanting there to be a culture that we respect that's high functioning and have it the reason I like it coming from culture is that's bottom up I despise all of this stuff from the top down. But when you're a part of a culture that just agrees this is what we're trying to do this is what's okay this is not what's not okay. If it's yielding the outcome that you want as a society then hey I'm all for it and I think that you strip those breaks off at your own peril.
• 1:05:39
  Yeah I think that's that's fair sometimes I think the distinction between bottom up and top down is not as clear as it might be in other words there's a lot of stuff that appears to be. Organic you know like the idea that kink shaming is somehow a morally defective thing to do.
• 1:06:04
  I don't think that emerged so organically I think that that. Was promoted that basically anyone who departed from that.
• 1:06:17
  That belief structure was portrayed as.
• 1:06:22
  Prudish or bigoted or something like that so anyway there's some aspect of a.
• 1:06:29
  Inorganic evolution of some new cultural sophistication and or maybe a better example would be.
• 1:06:39
  What I hear about modern porn and I must say I consume no porn. At all so I'm not in a position to say what's there firsthand but.
• 1:06:53
  That modern porn contains an awful lot of violence and that this violence is manifest in the mating and dating culture for young people that. Women are asking for violence men are.
• 1:07:09
  Inflicting it and that that.
• 1:07:15
  Is that a natural cultural evolution I don't think so at all I think that the pornography has.
• 1:07:24
  That there's a natural process within the market for porn that natural process is that different producers are competing for attention in the way that they. Get attention while they're selling fundamentally the same thing as everybody else is they.
• 1:07:40
  Become extreme right extremeness is the way. To get attention and that having done that with the porn in an arms race for extreme mess what that does is it creates.(...) A false developmental environment for people growing up who are consuming this stuff so that they come to think that that's what sex is about and the point is.(...) That's not top down exactly it is bottom up I guess but it's bottom up from a market the market is driving this cultural evolution that ends up manifesting in the biology of.
• 1:08:18
  Sex and romance which you know so anyway I think those distinctions are a little bit harder to draw in the present because we have these.(...) Centralized processes like the distribution of porn that result in the culture evolving to do something new as if it was being mandated from the top down even though technically it is.
• 1:08:42
  It's interesting I completely understand what you're saying and I'm going to quickly steel man it so that I can then disagree with it slightly and we'll see if it matters. So the steel man goes like this.
• 1:08:57
  It is not an entirely natural process for something to arise from a bottom up cultural perspective when there are markets and people are.
• 1:09:06
  Pursuing their optimal strategy from a monetary perspective but they're riding on an evolutionary thing. Novelty aggression whatever is different standing out from the market by being more extreme and.
• 1:09:22
  That market causes people to encounter a product. That has called evolutionary consequences that you otherwise would never have encountered and would therefore not have adopted those behaviors and we see it playing out in the sexual mores of kids today.
• 1:09:37
  That all makes sense to me do you recognize your statement in that retelling. Yeah OK so where I would say that this is different is probably just one of definition because I agree with everything you just said I just think that that doesn't break the way that.
• 1:09:56
  Evolution is it's just technology is forcing evolution to begin playing out in a new field and so things are moving a lot faster but all the mechanisms that.
• 1:10:07
  (...) When things are bottom up catch it from running out of control they're being caught and the only thing that scares me is when the top down comes and says hey don't be a bigot don't push back on transgender hey don't be a bigot don't kink shame. Then it's like well hold on a second now you're actually stopping me from talking on what is now the public square which is you know Twitter back in the day or YouTube current day still they'll really cancel you. So that distortions will bothers me I don't mind when other people go. You know this guy's bad can't let him talk horrible horrible bang pots and pans no problem because as a culture we're either going to push back against that and there's going to be a bigger what I'll call immune cultural immune. response to that or that response is the dominant thing in culture and it manages to grab the groundswell if the playing field is even everything is working as I would expect and I would expect different people to push back on different things in different ways and then. Whatever is truly I like to think the highest utility thing will be the thing that enough people eventually get behind and they push it forward now that might take 10 or 15 years and so take cell phones in the hands of kids oh we completely just smashed an entire generation of children with cell phones.
• 1:11:30
  So my thing does not protect from those moments occurring but I don't want to reduce technology I want people to be able to access the things they want to access I do not want somebody stepping in from the outside to say well this market's getting distorted and so we're going to try to stop the distortions inevitably that's going to go in the wrong direction so I may just be embracing and quite frankly I'm going to be able to do that. I love the velocity at which information travels now I get that it's it causes these weird pulses to work their way through culture that can temporarily have negative effects I just believe that what you'll see is that will always rebalance always rebalance always rebalance.
• 1:12:21
  Okay I will now steal man your position and then tell you why I think I disagree.
• 1:12:27
  There what you're saying is that in effect we have a.
• 1:12:34
  An evolutionary.
• 1:12:37
  Landscape and that even if market forces are distorting that landscape that it is still true that those who into it what is best to do will.
• 1:12:50
  Rise to the top ultimately that there may be a tremendous amount of carnage in the short term but that ultimately if violent porn is bad for you to consume.(...) That ultimately those who refuse to consume it will have an advantage and so in the end there's still no better way to get to the desirable system than to let that evolution play out rather than interfere with something like. The technology and the distribution of whatever people want to consume.
• 1:13:24
  That is correct okay.
• 1:13:27
  And I don't disagree with most of that either but I'm awfully troubled by a willingness to allow the carnage in the short term that said I'm not and nowhere in what I said am I defending the idea that.(...) We should interfere at the level of trying to hold back the technology.
• 1:13:47
  I'm squeamish about trying to restrict content.
• 1:13:53
  Because I you know I can rail all day against pornography but I will defend.
• 1:14:01
  Erotica and so the point is.
• 1:14:05
  I can even tell you what the distinction between them is but that doesn't make it something you can operationalize easily the question is was it produced.
• 1:14:15
  Because of profit or was it produced for some other reason if somebody is making a statement about sex.(...) That's erotica if somebody is wouldn't be involved in sex other than the paycheck that's porn.
• 1:14:31
  And the problem is you can get paid for erotica and doesn't mean it's the reason that you did it and you may not even know to what extent.
• 1:14:40
  Pay was involved but nonetheless we can we can draw the distinction and what that distinction says.
• 1:14:46
  Is you can't.
• 1:14:48
  You can't easily restrict the content that's destructive if there's a gray area with respect to you know we need to know the motive of the people who made it in order to know whether or not it's in the valley or the not valid category so anyway.(...) Free speech wise I lean very heavily in the direction of allowing people to say whatever they feel like saying. I wouldn't be interested in restricting the technology.
• 1:15:18
  I'm really just interested in the behavior of people and what to do about the fact people are being harmed.
• 1:15:25
  And from that perspective the.(...) The correct place to address it.
• 1:15:33
  Is at the level of.
• 1:15:36
  Our culture and what it tolerates in other words the whole point was king shaming.
• 1:15:44
  The behavior that shouldn't be showing up in people's sexual developmental environment shouldn't be showing up there because it's shameful behavior and there should be a social cost to producing it there should be a social cost to consuming it there should be a social cost to. Imitating it.
• 1:16:07
  And.
• 1:16:09
  I know I'm what I'm not saying that people will I'm sure here that I am but I'm really not.(...) I'm not saying I should be in charge of deciding what shameful and what isn't but I'm saying society has always decided what was shameful and what isn't and that is a place for the information about what behaviors might seem cool but really are bad for you. You know if. Some kind of sexual behavior is disease transmitting and therefore people should avoid it but you're 200 years before the germ theory of disease right the point is that information accumulates in the you know.
• 1:16:45
  Biblical stories about what you shouldn't do and what God thought of it so anyway I do think the natural cultural evolutionary mechanism is the correct remedy for the runaway permissiveness that we see that the permissiveness sounds like it is. Sex positive in fact that's the term used for it but it is really quite the opposite. You're taking something profound and important and you're degrading it by basically declaring it a postmodern landscape in which you know whatever whatever happens in your mind is perfectly valid.
• 1:17:26
  Have you go ahead have you read the power of myth by Joseph Campbell I have it I'm certainly aware of it of course man it it's really had a big impact on me it is the reason that I got the tattoo and the way that I got the tattoo.(...) One of the core of theses in the book is that there is no more ritual and because there's no more ritual nothing is sacred people don't have these transitional moments and so you don't have a moment where you're like I'm no longer a kid I'm now an adult I'm no longer single I'm now married and. I remember reading that going that is interesting and I don't want my life to fall prey to that I want to create these ritualistic moments where I say I am fundamentally different today than I was the day before.(...) And in a world where there isn't religion where you have these things handed down and you know it. It makes all kinds of proclamations but you shouldn't do this you shouldn't do that to your point it's all before germ theory but that's a lot of what they're getting at. And when it's encapsulated in religion and it feels very old this feels like well yeah like this is just how the world ought to be and. You can really get the average person behind the things that were always done, this is they don't question it, this is just how it was always done this is what my parents taught me it's written like this in the book the books been around forever.
• 1:18:44
  And so you're able to create these guardrails that people will stay on. In a modern context I see people reverting back to that so we are getting that swing but you're not going to pick people like me up in that swing but. The idea of making things intentionally sacred.
• 1:19:04
  I think could carry a lot of weight and so that's something that Lisa and I have done with each other to keep things new to keep things fresh obviously you can get. it's just so same as it ever was when you're with somebody for as long as we've been married now for almost 23 years.
• 1:19:22
  And so you can get to a point where I've heard all your stories there's nothing new here and so finding ways to make things sacred to make them special.
• 1:19:30
  Creating rituals in your life creating traditions things that not only do you do but they have meaning and you imbue them with meaning in fact ironically as I was talking. A story that jumps to mind is your brother invited me to a Shabbat dinner which I had never been to before and so going through all of the rituals of that and they were so novel to me certainly excited never done it before.
• 1:19:55
  That it was like whoa this is just like a dinner with friends but it's suddenly turned into something far heavier that's.
• 1:20:05
  It's galvanizing my thinking it's making me look at things and new now whether that's something that will scale without the this is literally the word of God that's a big question. But working those things back into your life for me has certainly been very advantageous I will credit the power of myth with locking me into my marriage and making me think about it in a way where it was like divorces off the table in our household we don't even say the word divorce we call it the D word. So it's off the table no matter how upset we are barring infidelity or abuse like we're we are going to find a way forward.
• 1:20:45
  That's been transformative.
• 1:20:48
  Yeah that's that's awesome and I must say in fact Heather and I wrote into our book about the absence of rites of passage and you know to the extent that we have rights of passage. You know to the extent that we have rights of passage they are pitiful.(...) Right graduated from high school well anybody can graduate from high school it's not.(...) An accomplishment and it doesn't mean that most graduates haven't accomplished something but it means that the ritual itself is almost devoid of meaning because it's so automatic.
• 1:21:22
  And likewise even you know marriage.
• 1:21:28
  Is a rite of passage but if both people are standing at the altar thinking.
• 1:21:34
  I think this is going to work but if it doesn't you know yeah I don't you know divorce is messy but how bad could it be if that's what you're thinking on the point is it doesn't have the power.
• 1:21:48
  To transform you and that I mean I often say.
• 1:21:53
  That if you understood how much was writing on the choice of who you marry that it would be an absolutely terrifying prospect.(...) Right the idea of saying I do to the wrong person oh my God is that terrifying but you are built. To overcome that you're built to not focus on it the way.
• 1:22:20
  I don't know parkour person jumps some gap that they'll die if they don't quite make it you're built to be able to overcome it in order to do the thing and the. I like how you.
• 1:22:37
  Describe your mindset that actually you just simply decided that no I'm not going to leave myself the mental option it's not on the table you don't even say it in your house that's perfect.
• 1:22:50
  And what I what I hope people will get.
• 1:22:53
  (...) And you know maybe there's room for those of us who have highly functional long standing marriages to talk to each other about this a little bit maybe this is the first of such a conversation but.
• 1:23:06
  I wish I had known when I was younger how much I was looking for latent programs that are already there I don't have to invent the ability to you know to. Remain passionately in love with my wife actually that capacity is there and to the extent that you think it can't be in that you know it's all about overcoming your biology.
• 1:23:33
  You will fail to discover that program and maybe you will get a divorce but if you know that you're looking for something and the real question is can I figure out how to activate that thing that's a much simpler puzzle right you.
• 1:23:46
  It's a really interesting way to think about it when you think about relationships specifically how did you find and tap into the just around it to something the joys of monogamy.
• 1:24:00
  Well I mean I will say because my because other and I have been together since we were you know eighteen ish.
• 1:24:10
  I know that I was just a dumb kid at that point and I mean I don't mean dumb and I wasn't any dumber than I am now but in terms of how much I understood about how the world works I was dumb.
• 1:24:22
  And so what that means is that I chose or some part of me chose very very wisely at a moment when I was not wise so anyway that's cool so something something understood that Heather was the right person for me to be.(...) And what that leaves me with now is the sense you know I never worry that I'm married to the wrong person that I could have been happy with somebody else it just doesn't doesn't occur to me because Heather and I have built our relationship together and there's I can't even imagine what it would be like.(...) It'd be impossible to replace that relationship right you know if Heather died I ended up with somebody else we build a relationship but.(...) It can't be the equal of what Heather and I have built over like literally our entire adult lives.
• 1:25:16
  So.
• 1:25:18
  What I didn't know.
• 1:25:21
  At the beginning was how much of the mythology.
• 1:25:26
  Of marriage was just nonsense it was.
• 1:25:30
  Fought her for sitcom laugh lines and. I just didn't realize that you know I thought monogamy was something you did in spite of your biology rather than it is a type of biology that if you understood what was riding on it you would prioritize figuring out how to make it work.
• 1:25:56
  Yeah it's one of those insights that I didn't feel like I earned always make me an easy because I'm like oh man what if I hadn't thought about that. But that seems bang on if if you understand that this isn't you overcoming your biology this is you figuring out what your biology is and living in accordance with it.
• 1:26:16
  You're gonna be in great shape this is why I said at the beginning I'm always trying to convince people you are having a biological experience and once people understand. Okay I better understand my biology I better understand how this works I better understand my impulses neurochemical cascades why I like this don't like that so that you're not fighting against your biology which I see people doing all the time.
• 1:26:40
  Which is just deranging.
• 1:26:44
  People do it.
• 1:26:44
  Yeah yeah I mean and you know I'm.
• 1:26:48
  It's uncomfortable talking about this stuff because it is very personal and you know I.
• 1:26:55
  It just also feels like somebody needs to put some bread crumbs into the world so somebody who's looking for answers knows that there's something to look for and so anyway the. Not sure exactly where I was headed but the.
• 1:27:16
  The question that I think people ought to wonder about young people you know if I'm if I report and I can I can report without you know there's no exaggeration here.(...) I'm happy at 56.
• 1:27:32
  My life has been very strange there would have been no way to predict it right no way at all it's too too strange but.
• 1:27:40
  The.
• 1:27:43
  If I think you know what might have been.
• 1:27:46
  There's kind of nothing there right it feels like oh well this is about this is about as good as I could hope to be feeling about my own life at this age the question is.
• 1:27:58
  For a young person is trying to figure out what to do with their life do I know something that you would be. Better off to know maybe not maybe my experience is so weird that it has no implication for you whatsoever but it's also possible.
• 1:28:13
  (...) That having arrived at a place that you'd be lucky to be in you know are you at 56 are you going to feel.(...) Great about your marriage are you going to feel you know.
• 1:28:26
  Are you going to feel satisfied with where you are in the trajectory you're on if the answer is no then you know maybe maybe my standards alone but I don't think so. I think it I think it's about.
• 1:28:39
  It's really the same thing we were talking about at the beginning of this discussion which is.
• 1:28:44
  If you're very careful to build a model it almost doesn't matter how bad it starts out if you have any tendency at all. To improve the quality of that model based on evidence than that model will get very good overtime.(...) Right if your model starts out great the rate at which you know the distance it has to cover is smaller if you're exquisitely sensitive to evidence that it's off and very quick to. Run the test necessary to improve it then it will change faster but the basic point is any tendency to build a model. And improve it overtime is enough to get you to an exquisitely good model given a long enough period and.
• 1:29:27
  Anyway looking back I I think that whatever weird process this was has worked out pretty great and that probably the advice for young people is. Figure out who in your life can say that and then figure out what they might know that you would benefit from because you know there's nothing riding on it but the game.
• 1:29:52
  Yeah yeah the breakdown that I was give for people is the Cassandra complex so.
• 1:29:58
  Listener hasn't heard of it it goes like this Greek mythology a woman does something to anger the gods they give her a curse and that curse is you're going to know the future but nobody's going to believe you. Now I am utterly convinced that that is an analogy for being a parent that somebody was raising kids and they were like oh my God I cannot get them to learn from my experience and so here I am I'm watching them. Repeat all of my mistakes suffer all the same things that I suffered and I was screaming at them this is going to happen you're going to try that and I know it feels like this but in reality.
• 1:30:32
  So the way that I think about the world is very simple.
• 1:30:35
  I think the Cassandra complex is that metaphor for real life in that.
• 1:30:43
  We're all trying to figure out what is true and I imagine truth as a very strange shape inside of a very black bag that you cannot see inside of and you can feel it and you get a sense of like okay I think it might be this somebody else feels it I think it might be that somebody else feels that I think it might be this other thing. And given that humans are not good at identifying what is true but that the more well intentioned intelligent people that you can get to touch this thing called life and figure out how it actually works and then give you their strong sincere take.
• 1:31:18
  It's my job or any of our jobs to say okay I don't think any one of you has it right but I think each one of you may be picking up on something about this shape that I'm going to find useful later. And so I'm just trying to do that I'm trying to get as many people that are smart as I can find to say hey what do you think this is what is marriage how does it work. What is I mean this is how you got on my radar in a big way during cove it when I watch people trying to silence you and I was like wait wait wait that's like the one guy that feels like he's asking the right questions. I would very much like to listen I want to find out he's running this the scientific method here so wanted to pay attention and that idea of.(...) I didn't care if you ended up being right or not what I cared about was you were giving me a sincere strong take and so I could pop in for a couple of hours and look at the problem through your lens then I could go somewhere else.
• 1:32:19
  Look at the problem through their lens and then I could make my own decision.
• 1:32:23
  Ultimately every young person is going to have to make their own decision all I'm saying is. Life is a noble thing but it's hidden inside of a black bag and there are people that have been experimenting with this thing for a long time. And you don't need to nor should you take them saying it's exactly like this go act like this because they'll they'll give you the dogmatic calcified vision of what that thing is and your job is to figure out the nimble adaptable new take on what that thing is. But as people give you a sense of what the shape is what the utility is how it works if you get enough of those you can really start to run your own hypotheses OK well if it is like that then I should be able to get this outcome by doing that thing and if you do great models working and if you don't you update.
• 1:33:18
  That's great I agree with you and I think it's. It is highly accurate that even in the sciences we are still I mean if there's the postmoderns have one important point it's that we are.
• 1:33:38
  Constrained by our tools and that can be anything from a microscope to your mind.
• 1:33:50
  We are constrained by the biases in those tools in the world we are capable of seeing it does not mean that reality doesn't exist but we are having we are hobbled by those tools and we are trying to overcome their biases in order to understand. In your metaphor what's inside the bag where we cannot look directly right we are in a universe that we cannot look at directly so that is the predicament.
• 1:34:16
  In that slowly we you touched on something that's very important to me it's troubling.
• 1:34:24
  Which is the following thing I feel like.
• 1:34:30
  I spend. Like really almost every waking hour.
• 1:34:35
  Trying to understand the world I live in whether that's. My pets my wife.
• 1:34:45
  The physics of some structure I'm trying to troubleshoot whatever it might be I spend a lot of time trying to understand how the universe works I am as we talked about at the beginning. Very.
• 1:34:59
  Biased in the direction of consciousness as my mode of getting through things.
• 1:35:05
  And I've got a long track record of.
• 1:35:09
  Getting stuff right.(...) And getting stuff wrong and then correcting it and getting it right.
• 1:35:15
  And I feel like that.
• 1:35:17
  Set of. What I think are truths about me.
• 1:35:18
  Should mean that when I say something really surprising something that sounds moronic.
• 1:35:30
  That people should have the thought huh.
• 1:35:33
  I wonder why he would think that.
• 1:35:36
  He may be wrong but he's not wrong for the dumb obvious reason that he would be wrong if he's wrong he's wrong because. Of something that is worth knowing.
• 1:35:42
  Rather than what I get from the world which is you said something we all know isn't true and it's like I said it knowing that everybody thinks that I probably believed it at some point I've come to a different perspective and why is your instinct not to think huh.
• 1:36:07
  I wonder how he got there. I just feel like he should do that and the fact that they don't.
• 1:36:10
  Disappoints me and annoys me.
• 1:36:17
  Well let me see if I can add scares you to the list so. Humans are very tribal humans want to be on a team they want to feel the way they want to feel and if the way they want to feel is enraged and they're coming and watching your content specifically to hate watch. They are using you as a drug that makes them feel the way they want to feel and they're not. They are using you as a drug that makes them feel the way they want to feel and if that hypothesis is right that basically humans are just drug addicts and we just do the things that make us feel the way we want to feel.
• 1:36:47
  And being on a team is often the thing that does that I don't want to try so hard so I'm on the team just tell me what to think what's what's our stance on all this stuff so I don't have to do the research.
• 1:36:55
  Then that means that this is exactly how cultures move and why a mob can turn violent in what seems like an instant and it seems like violence is just beneath the surface at all times and it can snap in a moment.
• 1:37:11
  I think that that view of humanity has the highest predictive validity of all time and that one scares me so I love humans they're the greatest thing ever God bless them all and they also scare the life out of me and Ray Dalio is very insightful in this because he's so just cut and dry.
• 1:37:31
  I've interviewed him several times and his whole thing is Tom go where people are good to each other and what he means by that is there's no permanent state of good to each other anywhere ever and it all he'll tell you it all runs on a debt cycle. But you can see it coming and as it starts happening you're going to move and you're going to go somewhere else where the energy is positive and people are good with each other and because people are running these algorithms that they're caught in they're not they don't have the conscious awareness to pull themselves up out of it when you start talking about people on mass and so look I want to your if your audience doesn't know me at all I'm always very careful to point out that from somebody else's awareness to the people that are good to each other.
• 1:38:16
  And so I do not see myself as above this fray it is it is my very likelihood to get sucked into this that leads me to all the gyrations of trying to like stand outside of my emotions and look back in because I know I'll get caught up just like anybody else. But that feels to me like a very it's not the sum total of humans again humans are wonderful and all the great things I love are born of humans but to lose sight of how predictable we get when resources get limited would be a mistake. Yeah but it's 2025 and anybody who has not seen things that they were sure were true upended by things that they thought couldn't possibly be right isn't paying attention.
• 1:39:11
  So my greed but you yourself know that people most people are not running that hyper aware script and they are running the team player. Team heuristic might be a better way to say it. I know how to think because this is what my team thinks these people make me feel included that feels good I want to feel included and so I think in this way.
• 1:39:33
  Yeah but but I want to push back there. I mean I'm not I'm not saying that that what you're reporting isn't accurate and the right answer if you can change my mind I'm here for it. Well here's here's my point.
• 1:39:44
  I think everybody on earth.
• 1:39:52
  At least anybody who's plugged into modernity so they're paying attention to the conventional wisdom has just been through multiple chapters where.
• 1:40:02
  Somebody has gotten into their programming and used it against them.
• 1:40:07
  Right and this is happening almost constantly to us right most advertising is somebody trying to get into your program. And use it against you and in an era where that pervades our experience and our beliefs and in an era in which it has so profoundly hobbled humanity. You ought to at least think huh I know my programming is not secure from people who do not have my interest getting in and shaping what I think. Which means I ought to be self skeptical of what I believe and when I hear somebody you know if you don't know the person at all fine you don't know maybe they are crazy but if you hear somebody and they basically sound rather than you. They basically sound rational and careful and well intentioned and then they say something that really catches you off guard.
• 1:41:04
  The instinct to shut them down is another it is you acting on behalf of somebody who is threatened by open exploration and that's the point is that I think what I'm hearing people do that troubles me is they are they are fending off.
• 1:41:26
  Because they don't want to be caught in possession of it.(...) Right if you know I'm saying no yeah yeah here's the thing you are correct you are accurately describing the world and you use the correct word you said ought people ought to do that which I take to be a moral statement. And I agree if people reacted the way that you're telling them to they life will be better what I'm pushing back on is you have a low predictive lament and you are lamenting an ought totally with you couldn't be more on your page. I am meeting your lamentation with but the world's not like that and I am not the thing that my wife always tries to remind me to do is sometimes you just need to make sure the people feel heard brother you are correct. And then the practical part of my brain kicks in and I'm like but I know that people aren't like that not on mass well but you know there is a reason that we humans do this hashing stuff out thing.
• 1:42:31
  Yeah and I fact let me ask you a direct question do you think by doing the dark horse and all the amazing things that you're doing truly and we did not give any first time listeners to the two of its any sense that we know each other but we know each other a little bit. And do you think of all the extraordinary things that you do that you are changing minds or are you filtering for minds that already run this algorithm of being open and wanting disconfirming evidence and then helping them along their journey.
• 1:43:04
  Great question.
• 1:43:06
  Let me tell you what I used to,(...) by the way, I think my job as a professor changed in 2017.(...) But I don't think it stopped being interesting.
• 1:43:16
  That's when it all went off the rails for you.
• 1:43:18
  Yeah, it may 23rd, 2017 at 930 in the morning.
• 1:43:23
  One of the craziest stories ever.
• 1:43:25
  Pretty wild but the point is yeah I was a professor in a classroom and a very unusual classroom in which I had because of the way evergreen was structured we taught one class at a time full time students took one class at a time full time and the class could go on for a full year.(...) So you really got to know your students and they really got to know you which was a tremendously awesome way to teach that is not possible.
• 1:43:51
  Over the Internet. I don't know most of the people who might be learning stuff from me and I can't think about them as individuals the way I could stand at a podium at evergreen and think about how every person in the room was hearing what I was saying and modify it to correct for blind spots and all that. So the job changed a bunch but it's still kind of the same job which is I am modeling a kind of thought out loud on topics that people either know they're interested in or don't yet know they're interested in but I'm trying to bring them in on why they should be interested in them. So I see it as sort of the same job what I used to say about teaching was that it is unfortunate that the term seduction has a sexual connotation because teaching properly done.
• 1:44:43
  First of all it has to overcome what I think is the most major obstacle to learning which is not cognitive in that calculating sense it is motivational.
• 1:44:55
  Right if you can get the student to want to understand something you don't have to do much more than that then you can just volley with them right if the student wants to know you can just let them ask you a question you volley back and answer they ask the next question you're off to the races because they can.
• 1:45:13
  They want to know they want the information they think it's going to make them better off to know it so your question if I understood it correctly was do I think that I am moving the needle of what people think or do I think I am reaching people who already think something compatible with what I think and bringing them into the audience.(...) Undoubtedly both are components but even for the people who find themselves in my audience because they resonate with the style of thinking or they have already been down that road a bit and they hear something that reflects back their own belief system even to the extent that that's true.
• 1:45:56
  I don't think you're going to find anybody.
• 1:46:00
  Who thinks for themselves sufficiently that they would get value from our content.
• 1:46:09
  Who has a completely overlapping belief system in other words if you're doing your own thinking you don't agree with me completely and so there is stuff at the interface the place where we don't agree to be hashed out and it may mean that I end up learning from an audience that knows.
• 1:46:24
  Things I don't and it may mean that I end up persuading the audience of things that I believe that they don't yet but that's kind of the game is finding the people with ears to hear and then presenting something to them that forces them to think and presenting it in a way that they want to get resolution enough that they pursue the matter and so the point is that creates a culture and that culture naturally goes to the world and it grows and it grows in the direction of insight and wisdom hopefully if I'm doing my job right and I think it's not worth overthinking it beyond that that as long as I know that both those components are there as long as I'm doing my job correctly so that it gets people to consider things that have significance then you can't really do much better so that's what I'm shooting for.
• 1:47:20
  I'll give you my take on this as you and I have clearly come to a very similar tension point asked and answered a question slightly differently so I really when I was running quest nutrition I really thought I'm going to change a lot of lives inside the company so we had 3000 employees a thousand of them grew up hard in the inner cities and when you're in manufacturing you're in the worst neighborhoods in America. And so we were literally in Compton and we had all these incredible people but they were going nowhere fast and I thought wow this is interesting there's a lot of them that are very smart smarter than me but they're running a software a belief system that's not taking them anywhere interesting so I got so excited I'm like all right I'm going to start this thing called quest University and I'm going to teach you anything and everything I know about entrepreneurship so that not only do I have a job but I want you to understand how to move through the world thinking from first principles all that stuff and I came in early I stayed late I taught them everything we even had people start competitive nutrition companies because I was like I won't hold anything back I'll tell you exactly how we're thinking through all these problems I want you to stay here because you know I care more about your future than your own mother that was like my whole quote so you guys aren't here because you couldn't go anywhere you could you take your skills wherever you want to go but you're going to be here because you know how much I care about your future.
• 1:48:50
  I care and I did it for years and what I found in the final analysis was 2% of people will actually take the information and it changes their life forever and I still this is a decade later I still get outreach from them from people that have gone on to be incredibly successful employees and fathers and some that have gone on to found their own companies I mean really really incredible but the day that I gave up on adults was the day that one of the students in the program punched another student in the program in the face because he said and I quote you've changed you've started reading and I was like oh my god now please keep in mind that was a straw that broke the canvas back I had seen a million little things like that where I'm like what is happening right now and I realized oh got it I'm a filtering mechanism I'm searching out the two percent of obviously ballpark two percent of people that are ready they have what I call a growth mindset or what Carol Dweck tagged a growth mindset if you've got a growth mindset cool then you can learn from anybody if you don't have a growth mindset all the world all the words in the world are not going to help that person and so I decided quite literally then and there that I was going to focus my time and attention on making entertainment for kids 11 to 15 now currently I'm far more known for the stuff that I do that I call for the two percent I'm just a filtering mechanism I'm just trying to find people that already have a growth mindset and they share a similar obsession and now we're just going to bring ideas to each other but my real focus is on kids that are in that group which the reason I picked that age group is because it's the age of imprinting it's where kids push away from their parents and begin drinking of culture and so in that moment I can hit them with empowering ideas in the form of story and my hope is that their seeds that are planted that take shape but I think once they're 18 even though they can change they won't yeah it's funny when I was when I was teaching in the classroom my thought was in one way this is where I should be I was good at teaching in an environment where you could tailor your lesson to students who were highly intelligent but not a good fit for school which is you know that's kind of where I was I was always a terrible student so it was a good place for me my time was productively spent but the benefit of the time that I spent I knew was a small fraction of what it would have been if I had been teaching much younger people and for exactly the reason you described by the time they get to college they are canalized in a particular way that requires a lot of working around whereas if you get to them much earlier and I mean frankly I don't even think it's you know I take your point about kids who are separating from their families and coming to understand who they are I think that is one place that one might do a tremendous amount of good but I also think you know as we talked about at the beginning I'm watching people have their instinct to think in a way that they're not in a more rigorous way driven out of them by lackluster teachers and if you can take a kid who has that instinct and instead of letting it be drummed out of them you can teach them to do it in a more productive rigorous I mean I'm struggling for words that sound more fun than that because if it's done correctly it is more fun than that but if you can hone that skill to critically inquire about how the universe works then you can do a tremendous amount of good and by the time you get to college you really are filtering for the ones who still have ears to hear in spite of what they've been through rather than interrupting the process that destroys that instinct.
• 1:53:07
  Man agreed agreed and agreed also about if you can get him even younger so much the better that one's more just personality I just find myself more drawn to the entertainment of an 11 to 15 year old than I do like a 16 year old.(...) But I could certainly one day see us doing content at that level as well.
• 1:53:25
  Yep.
• 1:53:27
  All right. I don't know how long we've been going here. It's been almost two hours.
• 1:53:33
  Are there other things that you feel we should focus on?
• 1:53:38
  No man I just wanted to sit down with you and and have more time. This has been magical for me so no agenda beyond that.
• 1:53:44
  Yeah no this has been this has been great at some point I think now it's not the time but at some point I'd love to hear what you see in the world what whether you think our trajectory is a good one or whether we're off track either still or again and maybe I'll ask you that right now we can close out with that.
• 1:54:06
  Yeah so I think right now we are in a transitional period the likes of which we have never seen before and I do mean never except for maybe if if there really was a younger dry as you know mega flood.
• 1:54:18
  (...) That is this moment I think that AI is a level of change at a pace that the human mind is going to struggle to deal with. I'm also we talked about this earlier I'm very aware that change does not care about a generation or two generations is just completely fine to hey mouse China 100 million people starved to death. So it's like yep there there will be a very difficult period where we go from sort of pre AI to post AI. And the right way to think about it is that we are standing on a technological singularity beyond which we really can't see now that might be digestible if we weren't also on a precipice of a populist moment. So right now you have the whole world going hold on a second I don't think things are good enough here I don't care about everybody else I want to collapse down to where we're at. And for anybody that understands Thucydides trap you will understand this moment so literally let me paint the picture for you you've got Taiwan which is the.
• 1:55:29
  seat of our modern way of life all the GPUs that we need for AI and AI is the race to end all races so that is all being made on the island. That China are now pure competitor has said we're going to reintegrate with Taiwan all happening at a time where America saying hey it's America first we want to start terrafing being the tough guy all around the globe and.
• 1:55:59
  I'll walk through each part of this carefully but i'll do it quickly and if you want to deep dive on anything trust me there's so much more to talk about.
• 1:56:06
  But you're setting up Thucydides trap which if you've never heard of that before it is. Where a declining superpower refuses to admit that it's a declining power and so it's going to do anything and everything that it can to.
• 1:56:19
  Continue to ensure that it the tithing is being paid to it that people are showing at the proper amount of deference and then you have a rising superpower and the rising superpower saying hey I know I used to be the little kid on the block.
• 1:56:31
  The reality is I'm not anymore and I expect you to show me the respect that I've duly earned.
• 1:56:37
  And these two powers inevitably collide I forget the exact percentage but it's north of 70% of the time the countries are poised we have a declining and arising in a period where the world order is changing. Which is that moment which has to do with the debt cycles again as much as you want to go deep just let me know and we are headed towards that collision with the one island that's going to control the most disruptive technology that's happening right now in this moment we are for sure already in a cold war with China. And behaving in a manner that seems designed to antagonize all of our allies not ideal but thank God we're at least with this set of problems versus the set of problems we had with the Biden administration which I would have voted for over my dead body and so if we don't play this moment well.
• 1:57:32
  This could get ugly fast but there is a way to navigate this well and so I want to see us do that by way of quick thumbnail sketch if you put Bessent together with Howard Lutnick and ignore Trump. You'll have a better idea of what the supposed path through all of this is which is you have unsustainable debts this is always what destroys the empire that becomes a declining power that exacerbates because they end up printing money and you spiral into madness so.
• 1:58:02
  Bessent and Lutnick are looking at this saying okay we have a two trillion dollar a year deficit we have to get that to zero so we're going to through waste fraud abuse we're going to identify a trillion dollars there by using doge and then through. Finding new opportunities Lutnick is going to find a trillion dollars in new revenue whether that's through tariffs whether that's tariffs plus the gold card trumps gold card whatever but they're confident that between that and sovereign wealth.
• 1:58:32
  Basically looking at the assets that we have as a country and putting it on the national balance sheet they feel very confident that they can do that okay I think it's a big if but if they can do it before the midterms and they can use tariffs to begin on shoring some manufacturing.(...) Whole host reasons why we have to do that but we'll just keep it focused on china for now cannot have your peer rival operating in such a fashion where they are they control your manufacturing and just like israel can turn off the water and power in. Gaza and that is a bad situation for people in Gaza great for israel you don't want to put yourself in that situation so we have to have enough independence on the things from the manufacturing standpoint that matter we have to do something. So trump is trying to use the tariffs as a way to get people to come back and start building in the us.(...) Again nutshell we go deeper if you want so if they can pull that off onshore critical manufacturing imagining a war where we go to war with china. That's critically important if they can balance the budget critically important and if they can drive costs down and wages up for the american worker by the midterms you've got a shot if you can't you're in real trouble.
• 1:59:48
  So the part of that that I find hard to imagine and I sounds like you do to potentially is. I could see that play over a much longer period.(...) The idea of being able to get past the economic hiccup that is sure to be caused by the terror so i don't want to say sure to because i don't know but seems sure to be caused by the tariffs.(...) Seems unlikely do you think that there is a good chance of them getting to a point where americans can actually feel the benefit in two years.
• 2:00:28
  I think they're playing a game of chicken and I don't think the outcome is anything approaching certain I think when I hear bessent and let nick talk this feels doable when I hear trump talk all I hear is international chaos. And even myself now as a capital allocator inside of a business i'm like hey.(...) I've got enough to worry about from I can't see the future perspective with a I please stop exacerbating that by.
• 2:00:59
  Policies that are so hated by one side and creating so much chaos in the stock market and with our international allies that it's like no one understands with the world is going to look like in two years, let alone four years so.(...) You've got to eliminate the own goal uncertainty which is the hokey pokey tariffs as I call it like stop doing that.(...) If you're going to do reciprocal tariffs focus on that that alone do it.(...) Move it forward be steady let everybody know that they can count on you to do that thing instead he's focusing on I'm flexible I just want to get the deal done I understand that I even get. Given that he wrote in his book the art of the deal that you want to create chaos and ask for way too much so that as you calm everything down and ask for something reasonable that you actually get people to say yes.(...) So the need to move the overtime window all of that I get it but it clearly has destabilizing effects on the economy it's having destabilizing effects on our allies.(...) Just yesterday I think it was you saw China Japan and South Korea doing the cross arm hand holding these are three nations that have so much animosity for each other. It's like if you've driven them together because they see instability and what you're doing with tariffs like hey.(...) Maybe you don't stop because they got to see what they believe in through I get it easy to Monday morning quarterback but yo if you're not taking that as a signal.
• 2:02:29
  You need to start paying attention so the second and third order consequences are already manifesting. And the thing driving costs down reassuring manufacturing so far is all on paper and isn't in reality so to me there is nothing sure there but I can see the lane that they're trying to get through. With again let Nick and best and explain it very well very cogently and they are two of the greatest capital allocators of all time. Showing you hey we we get wealthy year after year after year after year by understanding what's happening economically across the globe not just in America so they understand how the system works but boy oh boy they're on a tight timeline.
• 2:03:14
  Wow all right.
• 2:03:16
  And you touch there on doge a bit.
• 2:03:21
  There's a lot of chatter in my circle doge in both directions.
• 2:03:27
  Yeah.
• 2:03:28
  What do you see is are these you know.
• 2:03:33
  Is this Elon on a tear or is there.
• 2:03:37
  Is there rhyme and reason in obviously there's a huge amount of waste and if you could magically get rid of it. We'd all be better off on the other hand.
• 2:03:49
  The idea that you can rush in with a tiny team of young people find that stuff and I'm not expecting surgical removal but careful enough removal to do more good than harm. I'm yet to be persuaded what do you see.
• 2:04:05
  Okay so I have a very strong bias for as an entrepreneur I look at what Elon Musk has done and it is self evidence. To me that he is the greatest capital allocator of our time. There's a concept in business called velocity made good it's borrowed from sailing and it is an idea of being able to take all the chaos of a business environment and somehow get all of the energy of a company pointed in one direction. Despite the fact that the winds not blowing in the way that you want it to blow you still have to get where you're trying to go it is it is the thing that separates a wantrepreneur.
• 2:04:39
  From an entrepreneur and an even greater ability to do it from the good you know entrepreneurs to the truly extraordinary.
• 2:04:51
  Nobody alive has seen anything like Elon Musk okay that's just for you can hate him as much as you want nobody in the world of business has been able to do what he's done at that scale literally nobody. So you ignore that guy offering to help you figure out where the waste fraud and abuses at the level of technology at your peril like that that's nonsensical to me now.
• 2:05:17
  Having it all be public because there are many potential conflicts of interest I get why people scream about the Verizon thing and now it's star link but I will again remind people. Is Verizon known for making a better product than Starlink I'm gonna guess not so anyway but that should be debated people should have that in plain view they should be debating it but I look at somebody who. When I write them as a character who believes that the previous administration was bad for them personally and bad for their business and bad for America. And the current administration is better for their business better for them better for America then their actions make sense because. Elon Musk is many things but dumb is not one of them and so going into this. Trump said like four years ago I never could have predicted how bad being in politics would be for business now if I was aware of that I know that Elon is aware of that. I know that Elon is aware of that Elon knows what it's like to be in a firestorm he's watched like stock prices go up and down this is not somebody who got into this and was like surprised that people are now.(...) doing everything they can to tank his stock prices that he had 17,000 death threats going to Wisconsin he's not surprised by that this he's not confused so. It does not, in my opinion, even just thinking as a sci fi writer it doesn't make sense to write him as a guy that's trying to get richer. I guess it's illogical like he's already the richest man in the world he could have just kept his head down and kept cashing checks so this is somebody who believes huh there is a thing here that's going to be a problem that that can't be ignored and if I want to keep.
• 2:06:57
  The cash cow going I don't mind people being cynical about that I have to fix America as a country otherwise all these cool things I want to do are going to burn to the ground great no problem you can trust him to be selfish. But if he's really right about America then i'm glad to have him doing whatever thing he can to help now what is that thing people seem to misunderstand money printing I knew I get to talk about it eventually.
• 2:07:23
  And he understands that we're running deficits and that when you run a deficit you are still making hole on that and the way that you make hole on that is you print money. printing the US dollar very specifically taxes the entire world anybody anywhere that holds dollars or US debt gets taxed through inflation.
• 2:07:43
  It ends up hurting the poor and middle class the most and ends up feeding through a flywheel that I won't take our time up right now but it creates a flywheel that makes the rich richer and the poor poor. And yet it is the supposed people speaking up for the poor and underserved that are fighting the most to not have a balanced budget and to keep money printing it is immoral.(...) And I can't tell if they just don't understand it because money is complicated or if it's evil either way it yields an outcome that is absolutely terrible for the people that they say that they're trying to protect so. Judge a tree by the fruit that it bears and that bears absolutely rotten fruit so I look at Elon and I say cool greatest capital allocator of all time. While he does have a bunch of young people he did the interview to show all the different CEOs and stuff that are helping him it there's plenty of gray hair there now I think they're very disciplined in terms of. They are posting everything that they're finding this waste rotten abuse by all means people can and should challenge it if people see that they're spinning the data because, as I say there's lies damn lies and statistics so.(...) I assume that Elon and team are spinning the data to tell the story they want to tell so they can take the actions they want to take but I think every administration is going to do that. There's a guy named James Burnham who wrote a book called the Machiavellians it's one of those once you see it you can't unsee it. Everybody in political power will do and say whatever they need to to get and maintain power so I certainly don't think that Elon and Trump are somehow outside of that.(...) And so it just becomes a question of what is the end game that seems like it will be the most likely outcome of all of this the most likely end game is that. Elon almost ends up getting kicked off the boards of his company because he's doing so much brand damage but the fraud waste abuse becomes so clear that it's completely undeniable and. Finally people are going to realize that okay we hate him we think he's evil we think he's just trying to mess with social security but yeah somebody does need to do what he was doing and that at least will be a win.
• 2:10:00
  And we will I hope balance the budget and if we don't balance the budget we will quite literally drive America off a cliff and people think that there will never be a time where America won't be able to pay its debts and there will and that day is like distressingly close. I mean 10 years 15 years like at this rate now if you change it you stretch that out and you maybe even get to a surplus but not the way you're going prior to the Trump administration.
• 2:10:32
  Alright so.
• 2:10:37
  Do you take.
• 2:10:39
  There's a lot to unpack there do you take the actions of doge as a. Clearing the decks for the construction of something.
• 2:10:51
  Is I see doge go ahead. I see doge as best thought of as the modernization of the technical infrastructure of the government. And in so doing holding it accountable to expenditures and no longer accepting excuses like well it's actually cheaper and easier just to pay this bill than to try to track down like the.
• 2:11:14
  Whether it's legitimate or only whatever 80,000 people can retire in a month because the paperwork has to be sent to a mine which is a true story I still can't believe that's real but it is.
• 2:11:28
  So modernizing the government having accountability the ability to audit it which gives you transparency I'm not a transparency Maxi but I come very close.
• 2:11:37
  And I want every dollar that the government spends to be put on the blockchain to be visible to be unspoofable unhackable and just be present and everybody can look at it and anybody at any time can go through and show you why the government is or isn't wasting money.
• 2:11:51
  That is what I hope will be the legacy of the Department of government efficiency.
• 2:11:58
  And how that's a controversial thing how people don't want that is is crazy to me I was talking to so I do the Tom billy shows live. And I was talking to our audience today and I said listen the right way to think about this is as a thought experiment don't waste a bunch of time saying. I think that the data that Elon is proposing is fake instead ask if this data was real how would you feel about it because then. I'll know whether I'll know what your value system is because the data that he was showing recently that really spun people out of control was that the number of Social Security numbers. That have been handed out to new non citizen immigrants has gone up by like 10 X in the last four years and.(...) The question is do we think that that rate of new Social Security numbers being handed out to non citizens is a good idea and if the answer is yes. Cool all right so we want more immigrants we want to make sure that we get them paying into Social Security as fast as we can okay value system clear.
• 2:13:05
  Now the next step becomes if they're doing that how do we pro rate who gets what amount of. A refund back so would we want to see veterans at the top of the list do we want to see immigrants at the top of the list we want to see the average working American at the top of the list just rank order so I understand your value set.(...) Tom I think it should be veterans average American and the newest among us. Or I think they should all be at the same but it should all be pro rad so however much you put in you should never get more than 15% back whatever. Cool now we lay it out we can turn these all into proposed policies that will be debated at the level of legislation voters can get involved all wonderful all working as it should be.
• 2:13:47
  But instead on social media this derails not into interesting idea let's talk about the fundamental drivers at the level of values it's Elon Musk is just trying to make money he's corrupt get your hands off my Social Security and it's like good Lord that is not going to take us anywhere interesting that's the whole team battle we've been talking about this whole time.
• 2:14:07
  Yeah I agree with you I think the portrayal of this as a simple product of some.
• 2:14:15
  Kind of greedy motivation is preposterous you know I think that's also true in trump's case. Hopefully they're swinging for the fences and it may be that it's a selfish motivation in the sense that they want to be remembered for having done something that was truly significant but that's a selfish motivation that works in our interest. So I hope that that's closer to what they're doing and I agree with you that the.
• 2:14:41
  The critics are painting an absurd cartoon and it's not doing anyone a service.
• 2:14:48
  Nope and unfortunately this is populism this is the two sides get so far apart from each other that they don't see themselves as that tension that you would get between say a man and a wife. To find a sensible path forward they instead see themselves as mortal enemies and the other side is a legitimate existential threat to the country and this is why Ray Dalio again somebody who's made more money than anybody on reading what's going on in cultures around the world.
• 2:15:19
  Has said yeah I put the likelihood of a civil war in America somewhere around 50 to 60%. Wow I did not know that yeah yes he's been banging that drum now for years at first it was 30% and then it just kept climbing well I agree with you you know it's very clear to me that. The blue team does not want Trump to succeed they'd be happy to sabotage in order for him to fail and that that should never be the position you should always be hoping that the new administration does well by the country.
• 2:15:56
  And we've lost track of that 100% it's now a blood sport and that's it's unpatriotic frankly right yes by the way man I'm so glad we're talking about this.
• 2:16:05
  Dude I still stand in awe of what you did with the unity party.
• 2:16:13
  Amazing and basically nobody can get me to leave my house but I flew to DC for your event man for rescue their. Yes indeed so yeah dude I think your instincts are so in the right direction and I'm very grateful that you push these things I really appreciate that and I must say I. I think the republic is we dodged a bullet in this election and now we have a lot of hard work to do. Or we will have just staved off the inevitable so anyway I'm still very much in that mindset but I appreciate you I appreciate you having come out and that was great to see you there. No it was awesome and. And yeah I'm kind of on pins and needles to see where this administration goes because you know we've invested heavily in trying to put them in a position to do this and of course I've been nothing but surprised in some ways I've been absolutely delighted with the things they've done in other ways. I didn't see it coming and there was a lot of curve balls but the the objective is still the same come hell or high water we have to save the.
• 2:17:25
  The republic in order to preserve the West and I just don't see another game in town.
• 2:17:31
  No man it's getting weirder and weirder over in Europe that is for sure so we'll see we'll see but yeah this is what you say earlier this is the last thing we're going to do. I don't know if you're going to say earlier there's nothing to state but the game so yeah it's only everything writing on this right and that's the game is.
• 2:17:49
  All right Tom Bilyeu.
• 2:17:52
  People can find you your YouTube channel is impact theory at Tom Bilyeu know at Tom Bilyeu have to do your.
• 2:18:00
  Long standing podcast is impact theory your new podcast is the Tom bill you show and where are you on Twitter.
• 2:18:08
  On X Tom Bilyeu so I'm Tom Bilyeu everywhere that you're going to find me so you you don't you don't do the alias thing man you're just Tom Bilyeu.
• 2:18:18
  Yeah I I banked on that a long time ago yep my username is really me everywhere that's awesome all right good well I hope people will come find you I think people who don't know you. Are sure to have been impressed by the breadth of your thinking and your decency and the care with which you approach these things and I know that I appreciate those things tremendously it's been wonderful getting to know you and I'm already looking forward to the next conversation so.
• 2:18:45
  Thank you brother me too thanks for having me on it's wonderful be well everybody.