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

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Tom Bilyeu is a businessman and motivational speaker. In 2010 he co-founded Quest Nutrition, which creates high-protein, low-carb/sugar products. The company was wildly successful, earning more than $82 million in revenue just by 2013. With his wife Lisa, Tom founded Impact Theory, a media company whose aim is to motivate people to unlock their full potential. Check out his content here: https://www.youtube.com/tombilyeu SPONSORED BY Fum - Head to www.tryfum.com/TRIG and use code TRIG to save an additional 10% off your order today. Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the culture wars started kicking off, I just started asking myself, is this actually useful? Ooh, all these ideas sound awesome, but there's something that tells me there's a problem lurking within. Living in California, I began to realize, I don't know what metric we're using, but yikes, it isn't human flourishing. And if something sounds good, but it doesn't work, you have to immediately change course. And so I began to realize, in the culture war, in life in general, in a marriage, everything, it's a dynamic, tension between two opposing views, and by having the dynamic tension, you make progress. Hey guys, trigonometry needs your help. We took a big risk creating the show, and for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support. That's the only way we're going to stay

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Tom, last time I was here, you were interviewing me, and within about three seconds of meeting you, I was like, dude, I love your mind. And you are a guy who's into growth, into building, and yet we were having a conversation about culture wars and woke culture. How are you here? Oh, on that topic? Yeah. So how are you on trigonometry? Well, that's a really interesting question. This is surreal for me.

This is a fun show to be on. So I come from a place of actually believing that the only thing that's different between me and somebody that hasn't achieved the kind of success that they want is a set of ideas. Once you realize it's a set of ideas that is the difference between success and failure, you get pretty obsessed with trying to get those ideas across to people. If you really want to see other people shine, which I do, that's just my thing. And so when the culture wars started kicking off, I just started asking myself, is this actually useful? Will this help somebody's life be better? If an idea will help somebody's life be better, I'm going to get behind it. I'm going to champion it.

If it is an idea that subtly feels right but is going to move your life backwards, then I get very worried. And when this all started kicking off, I was like, ooh, all these ideas sound awesome. But there's something that tells me there's a problem lurking within. And so I really came at it feeling ignorant because I was like, I'm having a hard time making sense of these incredibly complicated topics. But I have a gut feeling that there's a problem. And so in working through that and really trying to figure out what do I think about this stuff? Why does this feel wrong when it sounds so right? And then the Thomas Soul quote really became like an obsession of mine.

He said this 20 years ago. So I'll just switch the number out for the difference for today. I said the last 50 years have been marked by exchanging what worked for what sounds good. And I was like, oh my God, that's exactly what's happening is people are not thinking about, hey, I have a hypothesis. I think if we do this thing, it will yield this result. And we have a North Star of human flourishing, let's say. Maybe we don't agree on that. But you need a North Star and you need a metric by which you're going to judge whether you've achieved that North Star.

It's like Business 101. And living in California, I began to realize, I don't know what metric we're using, but yikes, it isn't human flourishing. So that just started to all come together. And I was like, okay, I need to actually understand this. What are the ideas? Where are they becoming problematic? Why? Why do they sound good but not yield good results?

Like, where does all this break down? Because I've worked in the inner cities a lot. And so I really have seen people get eaten alive by their zip code. There really is a problem. Very smart people meet very dumb ideas and it completely ruins their life. And so the idea of like wanting to help people that are in a bad situation is the thrust of my life. That's what I want to do.

But as an entrepreneur, I'm like, you have to have a metric to know if you're actually making progress. And if something sounds good but it doesn't work, you have to immediately change course. So then I get into, stop me if I go like if you have anything. but I start thinking about, okay, why do we bifurcate into left and right? Like, what is that? Because the idea sounds awesome because they're coming from a place of compassion. Okay, but is compassion always good,

or does it fall on a spectrum of pathology on one side and maybe help in the middle and then pathology again on the other side? And so I began to realize that in the culture war, in life in general, in a marriage, everything, It's a dynamic tension between two opposing views. And by having the dynamic tension, you make progress. If you don't have dynamic tension, then you go to pathology. And so if you think of the left and right divide, there's pathology on both sides.

So you can be pathologically left. You can be pathologically right. They look different, but it's the same unchecked, just sort of where this runs right. On my tombstone, my wife has very strict instructions to write the words. you're having a biological experience. And the reason that I want that on my tombstone is that, if I make that contribution to the world, I'll be very happy. If I just get people to understand that that's it.

Everything in your life is seen to the lens of the way your brain works, the way eyes work, ears work, so on and so forth. And so effectively, you are living in a simulation created by your biology. And none of us know what is objectively true. We're only able to perceive 0.00355.000,000,000,000,000,000,000, of the available electromagnetic spectrum. And we confuse that with all there is to see. But in reality, of course, it's just all we can see.

So once I realize that, then you start thinking about emotions and you start going, okay, we have these emotions. They feel real. They convince us to act a certain way. But are they real? What does real mean? All of that. So anyway, as I break that down and I ask, as a species, we become the most dominant

apex predator of the world has ever seen. We're doing something right. You've all know. Harari talks about our ability, not just. to gather in groups, but to do so flexibly and to do so around ideology and ideas. And so that just got me thinking about left and right. Okay, cool. So is it possible then that left and right represents something biological and they both represent something valuable, biological? And we happen to be moving through a time where it's becoming pathologized,

which would take the whole episode to sort of stream together all the ways that I think that happens. But if you'll grant me that, that we're in a moment of pathology, something is broken, it's going wrong, what becomes the oversimplified fix for me is born out of understanding why the left and right exist in the human psyche if I know I'm having a biological experience that has yielded the most effective animal the world has ever seen. Okay. So I'm coming at it from that stance, and I say to myself, okay, if the left is compassion, compassion's awesome. I love it the most. I want more compassion. If the right is, call it self-responsibility, I love it the most. I want more personal responsibility.

And so I'm like, why have we bifurcated such that it really does seem split almost exactly down the middle? And of course, it's a spectrum. And so I'm not saying everybody's hard in one direction or another. But like, those two really do seem to sum up the way that people lean. So then using my marriage as a analogy, I was like, okay, I learned very early on in my marriage that I didn't want to change my wife into thinking like me. I needed to distrust myself.

And I needed to say, I'm not going to pretend I don't feel this way, but I'm not going to pretend I know I'm right. So I'm just going to say, probably the reason that men and women have thrived so long is that they really do see things very differently, and it becomes the dynamic tension between the two that yields good results. I can go into a whole diatribe about coming-of-age rituals,

which I think are very missing. They're why I got a tattoo and I got married. I wanted to ritualistically scar myself to really go through something, be like I'm different now. But anyway, going in my marriage, I have been served by this dynamic tension. Is it possible that we need a dynamic tension between the left and the right, that we need them both? We have to value them both. But something has happened that has weakened one side and made the other side stronger such that now things tip into pathology on one side.

I will take the what will on your channel not be controversial, but on many channels it would be very controversial stance. What's happened is we've let compassion become pathologized. And it's so hard to push back on if you're wired anything like me because all the ideas sound amazing. And they sound like the same kind of ideas that I'm dedicating my life to and for people that have never heard of impact theory. My whole thing is that I have a theory that if you can get ideas into the hands of people

growing up in the inner cities that those ideas will change the trajectory of their life. So it's like you would think that then I would spill to the left. But as a business person, I'm like, yeah, but you have to judge the merit of an idea based entirely on its efficacy. And driving down L.A., you just see homeless people literally everywhere. So it's like, okay, something isn't working. I don't know what that something is. I just know something isn't working. And so now you have to start to ask questions. And then that's the first thing you realize is being a sale. There are certain questions you can't ask. So then I become like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like if it's the dynamic tension between the two, and again, maybe I'm wrong,

but this is my belief. If it's the dynamic tension, the second you ask one group to shut up, you create the pathology. And so now you've got social media, which spreads ideas very rapidly. The left, their ideas just sound better. They sound kinder. They sound more loving. They sound like what we should all aspire to. The problem is just going left doesn't actually work. If it did, I'd be all for it. Remember, I know my North Star. It is human flourishing for as many people as humanly possible. So it's like, okay, cool. Does going only one direction yield human flourishing? Yes or no? You can test this? No, it does not. Not on the right, not on the left. So now, and I've seen this play out in business as well, in fact, I'll speak to you guys as business partners.

gentlemen, I would like to make an appeal. There are going to be times where you both think the other person is an outright moron, and you can't believe you've been business partners as long as you have. And in that moment, you need to distrust yourself far more than the other person, and you need to say the very thing that will make this relationship work is that we see the world in a slightly different way. And the fact that we see it differently means we will have fewer blind spots, and so we need to respect the dynamic tension.

You get this all the time between a CEO and a C-O-O. And if either one of them thinks the other is a moron, so a CEO is visionary, a C-O-O is implementation. If the implementer is annoyed at the dreamer, you're going to have a problem. And if the dreamer is annoyed that these things actually have to be implemented, you're going to have a problem.

You need them both. So to use the analogy of a kite and a string, if you have a kite with no string, it flies off into nothing, crashes into a tree and gets ruined. If you have a string with no kite, it lays on the ground. You need a string and a kite in dynamic tension

to hold something aloft. And so my whole thing about the culture war is I started feeling like a coward because I was not speaking about things that I felt like, ooh, I can see that this is going wrong. This is not going to lead to human flourishing, but I don't want anybody to ruin my YouTube channel that I've worked so hard to build. And I'm trying to get into video games. God, do I want people thinking about me on this controversial topics? And then I was like, all that it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

So I thought, okay, I'm being quiet. of cowardice. I don't like feeling like a coward. And so here we are with me on Trigonometry. It is so amazing because I think what you've summed up there is actually the ethos of why we started, what we started. The difference is it's that fight club court. It's only once you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. That was our issue. We didn't have anything to lose. But for you, it's different. Now, in terms of the practicality of these ideas, I agree with you, it seems like we are now living in a world that is entirely driven by what sounds good. Why don't we course correct? Why is that not happened? Why do people who live in California not drive

down the highway and see homeless encampments and go, hmm, maybe what we're doing isn't working? Okay, so there are a lot of reasons. We'll try to tease them out one at times. So, really, Reason number one is that these ideas are very nuanced, very nuanced. And the human mind has a very hard time conceptualizing a nuanced argument. And even if they can get it, it's hard to remember. And so they'll use a heuristic to make it easier. And so they'll boil it down into a bumper sticker. Now the problem is the bumper stickers where the pathology begins.

because now it's like no man left behind. Okay, I love that. It's an awesome idea. And if I were in the Marines, maybe, but also you can just feed people to a sniper trying to go get the person who's wounded. And so you'll see this in school systems where they, I don't know if they have this.

So I come from Washington State. They have something called McKinney Vento. And it's literally no child left behind. And they will drive a bus two, three hours out of their way to go and get the kid and bring them back. And I'm just like, whoa. I get the sentiment. I really get the sentiment, but I don't know that it plays out well. I haven't looked at

that closely enough to stake my thing. I'm just using that as an example of where you take something so far to the extreme, you're not willing to let anything like fall through the cracks. Now you're no longer prioritizing. Or you just recognize that now becomes the priority. And in reality, everything is going to be a give and take. There's going to be no perfect solution. There are no utopia's only trade-offs. That's a paraphrase of not exact quote of Thomas Sol again. There are no solutions only trade-offs. Perfect. So everything is going to be a give and take. Like, ah, if we do this, then we're going to get this second or third order consequence, which is not ideal. But if we don't, we end up in this dark place. So, okay, now you combine that reality with people

are having a hard time wrapping their own head around, a very nuanced, very complicated idea. Myself included, man, again, I come to this because I really struggle. in the beginning to figure out why it felt wrong when it sounded so right. So I think a lot of people exist in that. They're given a bumper sticker and certain bumper stickers sound way better than others. Like when I tell people, this is where I really get myself in trouble. Okay, I once wrote a blog article. And that blog article, when I wrote it, I was giddy, man. This is back before I had a YouTube channel, nothing. And I thought, okay, the idea that has made me very successful is a really simple idea. And I turned it into a t-shirt and everything. And my t-shirt says,

everything is my fault. And bro, people did. Not like that idea. So I wrote this article that said, hey, I want you to imagine I get hit by a drunk driver. Whose fault is that? And I'm like, I know all of you right now, even insurance companies are saying that it's the drunk driver's fault. And I'm like, no, it's my fault. I chose to get into the car. I had laid this whole thing out. I chose to get in a car. I chose to put myself in a position where I couldn't go forward or sideways or get out. I set it up such that the horn didn't work, all this stuff. I didn't take care of my car. All of those things I could have done differently. So yes, I get why other people will say it's a drunk driver's fault, but now you're taking away my power because I could have done something different and got a different result. And so I would for the next time say, I want to make sure, since I can't control his behavior, that I prep myself to be able to do something different and get that different result. Now, I honestly thought, I'm going to publish this. People are going to write and say, Tom, oh my God, you just changed my life. This is amazing. Thank you so much. And the feedback was vitriolic. Your victim blaming, how dare you? This is horrible. And I was like, I was legitimately confused. And I thought, but hold on a second. If you take responsibility for your life, your life is going to be

better. By every metric I can possibly think of, your mental health will be better because you'll never feel like a victim. You will feel like, okay, it sucks that this happened to me, but I can now do something. I can decide I want to do something else and make good on my life. I can, one of my favorite songs from when I was a kid was called Best I Can by Queens Reich, Mad Love, Queens Wright, shout out. And the song is about a kid who accidentally shoots himself and becomes paralyzed and decides, I'm still going to do the best I can. And I'm going to, maybe I'm not going to play sports, but I'm going to become a magazine editor and I'm going to blow up that way. And that really spoke to me, even as a kid, I was just like, oh, word. Like even if something bad happens to me,

I'm always going to do the best I can. And so I'm just like, wait, what's your North Star? And so I often will lead with that when people are saying something that doesn't make sense. I want to, if I'm completely honest, I want to trap them by saying what they want. And then I'm like, okay, what do you want? By what metric will you judge it? Write it down. and now you have a hypothesis. If I do this, let people put tense up wherever they want, don't arrest people for doing drugs, out of compassion. But the thing that I will get is happiness, fewer homeless people,

less people incarcerated, whatever metric. And then if we can agree on that, then we just look and say, did that work? Were there second and third order consequences that we didn't anticipate? Do they outweigh the first order consequence of whatever? And cool. Now we're talking about the metrics. We're talking about the things that we tested.

And then we're saying, did they work or not? But people don't write down what they think is going to happen. And so they make it up in their mind that yeah, yeah, yeah, that's roughly what I thought would happen. Or they'll just default to this is too complicated or whatever, whatever, whatever. But they're not holding themselves accountable. So my whole thing is like, hey, because my North Star is your life being better, happier, more love in your life, better mental health, making more money, all of it. like the whole kit and caboodle that is a well-optimized human life, I'm just looking at that going, accountability is the thing.

It's the thing. And so if you don't have that, you will blow with the winds of chance and you will live your life by accident. If you take responsibility for everything and say, my life is an exact reflection of my choices, even when that hurts, you still have an avenue to get better. To me, what we're talking about a lot here is deferred gratification time. It's actually saying,

I'm not going to pick the thing that's easy, which is to blame someone else. I'm going to do the thing that's more difficult, which is to have introspection. Look not only at my actions, but my thought processes and my overall worldview in order to improve. There's a lot of people who don't want to do that

because it's not easy. I don't think they get that far. So I think the biggest problem people have is what they build their self-esteem around. The number one problem we will all face in life is do I respect myself? I will venture that most people cobble self-respect together

through the echo instead of the shout. What I mean by that is humans, no matter what they tell you, no matter if they say they don't care about what other people think, they care about what other people think. We are a social creature. Now, the thing that you may get people thinking about you

and the way that you want them to think about you is by pushing back and not caring about people's feelings and all that, but it's nested inside of, that's how I earn my place in the group. You still care very deeply about earning your place in the group. So if you're trying to earn your place in the group and you earn it through loving acceptance by, I have the right beliefs that are, I mean, let's even say that they're positive. I have the right beliefs by showing how much I love people and I care about people and I stand for the right causes.

And I don't say that cynically. I mean, you're really doing your best to be a good person. And that's how you're gaining acceptance. That's all the echo. It's not the, what are you actually doing? Like, what are you doing to earn your respect? So I believe that comes from you have a value system and you live in accordance with your values. Most people do not map their values. They don't know what they are. And if you don't know what you value, now, again, you're left to the whims of are other people telling me I'm a good person. And if they are telling me I'm a good person, and this is the bad news, they'll really believe it. So I really do have self-respect because other people tell me that they respect me. Cool. Now I feel good about myself. But the thing that they're

actually getting lauded for is having the right opinions. And now they're trapped because they can't think through hard problems because they run the risk of losing their own respect by losing the respect of others because they are a slave to the echo. If on the other hand, you build your self-esteem around the shout, the things that I do, whether they work or not, now you've really got a chance because it's respect that's truly emanating from within. Now, the only thing I have found that is a safe way to build your self-esteem around internally is to be the learner. Because if you build it around being right, being smart, being worthy, being loved, being good, all of those things that people try to build their self-esteem around, they're very fragile. And this is why,

and I think people on the right take a little too much joy when people on the left eat their own, is that that's brutal to go through and to watch people sort of do that downward spiral. If you can instead say, I don't know that I'm going to get it right. I just know I'm going to learn from it. And the very thing I'm going to value myself for

is my willingness to stare nakedly at my own inadequacies. Okay, cool. Now you're in a position. If you tell me I'm stupid, that's going to damage most people's self-esteem because they value themselves for being right, for being smart,

for getting positive feedback. back from an outside group. I'm on the other hand, and I'm not going to say it doesn't sting. I'm still a human. I still want people to think I'm cool. I still like to be right the first time. That's always the most fun. But immediately, I'm going to go, ooh, tell me more. I'm not going to run away from that. I'm not going to try to hide from that because I'm thinking to myself, wait, I've gotten this far by being wrong, if you can really remove a scale from my eye, and look, I'm not a fool. If you tell me something that doesn't match up with my life experience or what I have map the world to really be true, then I'm going to say, I really appreciate your feedback,

because that will ensure that I get more in the future. I disagree. I disagree for this reason, right? So I'm not just like, oh, my God, tell me what I need to believe. But I really do open my heart up to this person may be about to tell me something that will make me more effective. Okay, this is what I call true power. True power is the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, acquire the skills that you would need to actually make that world come true, and then have the fortitude and the delayed gratification to actually make it come true. That's power. That's what my life is about. So I'm just running through that whole circle to see if I'm doing things the way that I should.

So to get back to that core idea, if people are building their self-esteem around something external, they are so going to protect themselves from feeling badly about themselves, they don't ever get any farther than that. They're going to reject any idea that makes them feel badly about themselves. And that might be the primary reaction that we all have as a social creature

is we're trying to figure out where we fall in the hierarchy and self-esteem is one very good guide, which is why as you go lower down, your self-esteem drops. They're correlated in some way you'll have to have somebody smarter on to explain how and why, but like, I know that they are. And so as you go down the hierarchy, you start feeling worse about yourself. Okay, so now we've got the psychological immune system,

which is that part of your brain that makes it everybody else's fault. And so the reason I think people say, no, no, no, it's not my fault, is they have to say it's not their fault to maintain their self-esteem because they're building it on external feedback coming in, the echo and not the out, whereas somebody who's done the work to say, my self-esteem is built entirely around my willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies, that I can be laughed at longer than somebody else. I don't mind making mistakes because I learn from them, and that's what I value myself for. That person, when attacked, they actually get stronger, and it becomes a truly anti-fragile identity. But I don't, I think they say that all of life's problems are man's inability to sit alone in a room by himself.

I think it might be a slight variation on that, which is people can't. be laughed at. They can't have other people think they're stupid because their self-esteem requires it, and they will fight subconsciously. They're not even aware of it. They'll fight subconsciously against any idea that attacks their sense of self or self-esteem. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account cover covers everything. Stream with added privacy. Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save

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So I guess my question to you is, do you think that the reason we're experiencing these crises is we have an absence of fathers in the home? It's interesting. So I think that's going to be a huge part of it, but maybe for a slightly different reason. So I'll say that's a dynamic tension problem because if we only had fathers and no mothers, we'd have an equally pathological society. It would just be in a different direction. So you want that dynamic tension between the two of them,

but yes, we need to be instilling values that lead to self-discovery and self-improvement. This is one of the reasons that I am so enamored with the founding fathers, despite all of their many and horrifying sins, but they built a system that was marching it towards self-improvement that would literally improve itself

that had massive distrust for itself. That, I think, is super. healthy. And so one of the first things I think anybody should teach their kids is your emotions aren't real. They are part of the simulation. You need to ask, does this emotion serve me? Which of course, kids are going to be like, I don't understand what the hell you were talking about. And they're just emotional creatures. But ultimately, that's what you have to march them towards. They need to get control of themselves, mind, body, spirit. And until they can do that, they will run amok. Tom, I want to say for the audience watching and listening that you're not,

just saying this stuff, you actually live it. And I know this from experience because the way you and I have always communicated has been on that basis. So just, you know, giving it a little bit away from behind the curtain. We were sitting next door. We were asking for some business advice. I gave you an idea of what we're going to do. And you were like, yep, that's a terrible idea. And you say it in a way that's very comfortable for me to hear. You've said stuff like that to me before. And I've always been able to take it and use it because it's useful. There's no emotion. attached to it. But at the same time, you've told me before that when you were working in the inner city with people, 2% got it and transformed their lives. Ninety-eight percent did not. Okay? Why is that?

The darkest secret of my life is that I've given up on adults. And the great irony is, I make a lot of content for adults, but I'm making it for the 2%. And I'm doing it as a part of a bigger strategy and I'm doing it because of course I love seeing the transformation of the 2% but if I'm honest when the entertainment side of my life takes off I don't know that I'll keep doing content aimed at adults because they're not as malleable now it doesn't mean that they're not capable of being malleable but dude a frame of reference which I should probably circle back to, so ask me if you're interesting because I might forget, but frame of reference is brutally difficult to pierce. And if you can't pierce somebody's frame of reference, they actually

do not understand you. Well, explain that. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Okay. So frame of reference is your values and beliefs about what you believe is true of you and the world and what you believe ought to be true about the world and your own behavior. People do not realize that they have made these things up, that they've been given to them by their parents, by the traumas that they've endured by the country that they grew up in, by the person that was mean to them in second grade, by the time that they won something, whatever. All these things that are happening to you through your whole life are informing to you the way the world, quote unquote, is and the way the world, quote unquote ought to be, and they don't recognize that those are all choices, all of them.

And if they make different choices, they will see the world from a different perspective. Now, we can get into post-truth, we probably should, because now people are going to say, Tom doesn't think anything is real. Quite the contrary. I just don't think we're very good at figuring out what is real. And I think the only way, given that our brain is creating a simulation and that we only see and are able to interact with a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what is actually there. and yet we have this feeling that we see everything, we know everything, we got it, my feelings, they're real, that people really don't understand that it's all made up

and that you can construct a frame of reference, aka a worldview, based on things you have consciously chosen to believe because they yield a better result, which to me tells you that you're closer to ground truth, the more you're able to predict the outcome of your actions, the more likely you are to be close to ground truth. That's why Newtonian physics, we're never going to give you GPS. Einstein got a little bit closer.

Still not all the way there, but he got a little bit closer, and that gave us the atomic age and GPS. Cool. So we're getting closer, and we know because it unlocks abilities. Cool. So that's how I approach the world. I probably am wrong about virtually everything, but the things that I'm close to being right are the ones where I can make a hypothesis that makes a prediction, I run a test to test that prediction, and it comes true.

Then I'm like, okay, I'm probably pretty close to ground truth on this one. and if you can get close to building a frame of reference that gives you the ability to be wrong a little bit less than other people, you're moving in the right direction. Now, the problem is that frame of reference is completely invisible to the person that has it unless they're spending a lot of time like I am really trying to think. I'm probably wrong. What am I wrong about? So David Foster Wallace, this is water, becomes the perfect analogy. Fish do not realize they're in water. and just for like think about how long humans had no sense of like gravity is a force and we're just in it and air is a substrate and we breathe it like we just had no sense of it right you're the last to find out and so that's frame of reference and so if you can't pierce a person's frame of reference and get them to see for instance i believe you need tension between the left and the right now because i believe that i look at people on the left or the right screaming at each other, and I'm like, you're both

wrong. But if you feel you are doing God's work and that God hates the other side and wants them all to perish and your job is to kill them, and I say, no, no, no, first of all, there is no God. And by the way, you have to respect the tension between each other. I'm just another bad they'll kill you first. Yeah. So it's like, I won't make any sense to them. And so now, that one's just super obvious. Here's an example for my marriage. My wife used to say, hey, it's important to me that you do this. And I was like, oh, word, that means that if I have time, I'll do it because it's important.

To her, it meant, I don't care if you're talking to the president, you leave that room and you do this thing. And I won't ask you, I won't say things are important more than a couple times a year. But when I do, but she never said that. So I was constantly like, oh, I didn't get time to do that thing. I had other things to do. And she was like, what is happening? Now, we had to actually articulate those so that we could both understand each other's frame of reference.

She's coming at the world where if a person says this is important, you drop everything and do it. I came from a perspective of, no, you have a list of things that you're trying to get done. You rank order them. And then if that's number three, but I don't finish one and two, then of course I didn't do the third thing. So these are such overly simplified ways. wish in less than an hour I could actually get to frame of reference, but just know, like Einstein

said, the most important decision any human has to make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe. Now, the fact that he called that a decision tells you everything you need to know about what a frame of reference really is, because that will color everything about how you think and act. And it also colors the energy you put out into the world. So if you come in and you think everybody's hostile, you're going to come in an attack mode because you're going to think to yourself, hang on a second, people are going to attack me, I want to be first. And you're going to create more tension as a result and more battles. 100%. And which is, it just shows how ideology is so powerful. And it's part of the reason, or a lot of the reason why we started this, which is

if your ideology is fundamentally negative and unhelpful and toxic, you are going to live an unhealthy, toxic life. Yeah, there is no doubt. And you guys have the very unenviable position of trying to pierce other people's frames of reference. It isn't easy, but you'll encounter the 2% who really love an idea, and either they have a conscious or an intuitive understanding

of some ideas help me, make my life better, and some ideas don't help me. and so I'm just trying to collect the ones that are actually useful. If I could even just get people onto two things, North Star and usability. Like, was this actually useful? If people could just have a North Star. Now, unfortunately, some people are going to have a North Star

that is morally repugnant. Can't help you there. That's frame of reference. But at least if they articulate what their North Star is, now we can go, oh my God, you look and seem normal, but you're really a sociopath. Or, whoa, I actually never considered that. That's a really cool frame of reference

and maybe I'm going to update mine. But if you knew what somebody's frame of reference was and you thought it was honorable, now it's like we can work together. That's why telling you, hey, that's a bad idea. Only because I know what you're North Star is. I know what you're trying to do. And so now I'm just going to say

the reason that's a bad idea is because it won't do the thing you think it's going to do. And when you're discussing at that level and the person does not tie their self-esteem around being right, it becomes very easy. So you just want to learn. You actually care about your goals, which you'll be shocked.

Most people do not. They just care about feeling smart, feeling good, feeling respected, whatever. You actually care about your goals and your self-esteem isn't tied up and being right. So now it's like, yeah, it's very easy to say, that won't work. Here's the data. Check it out. And by the way, if you show me that I'm wrong, I'll immediately adopt it and update my own mental model. When you have people like that, dude, it's a joy.

And as entrepreneurs, I would just tell you, your job as people that are looking to hire is that. Find those people. They don't put their self-esteem around being right, and they are really just trying to figure out what's effective. If you can collect a group of people like that that are also hardcore motherfuckers, you'll build a smashing business. I love it. And I suppose the immediately obvious question is, what is the most useful frame of reference that you found? Well, so frame of reference gets really complicated, really fast, so I'll give you some high-level things. number one the universe is completely indifferent

so nobody's coming to save you it's not good or bad right it just it is it doesn't care right it doesn't care perfect that's very helpful love of another human being is the greatest thing that life has to offer Francis

and so really taking that seriously just for you guys watching he's not hitting on him it's just we were talking about him getting my or am I So yeah, I think especially because I'm such a hustle porn guy and I'm constantly putting out the message. You need to be hardcore. You need to work harder. I never wanted to get lost.

That the most important thing in my life is my marriage. Why? Because it's given me more than anything else. So that's super important. You can do anything you set your mind to without limitation. That's a lie, but it's an empowering lie. And I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals. I call them useful beliefs.

Yeah. Those lies. Perfect. So again, I say it just because I know I'm more likely to believe negative things that are self-defeating just because that's how the brain keeps you alive. So since I know that, I try to swing hard in the opposite direction. But look, I'm not a fool. I know there are things I'm not going to be able to accomplish no matter how you can give

me a thousand years. I almost can't let myself finish the sentence, which tells you something about me. If you gave me a thousand years, I want to believe I could find a way for humans to fly without the aid of jets and stuff. But anyway, it's good to know somewhere in the recesses of your mind that you do have limitations so you don't do something stupid, but to know that you're way more likely to stop short out of laziness, out of fear that you're not good enough, out of just boredom and how hard things are, entropy, that you probably want to cobble together beliefs that push you to go farther than other people.

The idea that George Bernard Shaw captured in his quote, The reasonable man adjusts the world, the unreasonable man insists on trying to to adjust the world to him. Therefore, all progress relies on the unreasonable man. That idea is just so, so, so critical. And what I find is not smarter than most people, I really do consider myself pretty average intellect, but I'm really unreasonable.

And I've learned when being like super unreasonable is wise and then looking for the like telltale signs that know there's disaster ahead, and so I should probably back off a little. But I always default to if somebody tells me this is going to take, this is going to take three months. I'll be like,

we're doing it by the end of today. And just coming in with that attitude forces you to think in a totally different way. And of course, we don't finish it that day. But the number of times we've gotten it done in 72 hours when somebody told me it was going to take three months, it's comical.

And so, look, that's the tip of a very large iceberg, but at the risk of rambling, I'll stop there. But I published a list of 25 beliefs. It doesn't cover the value side. But the 25 things, I think, you need to believe about yourself in the world that will move you forward and you just type in my name plus belief system it'll pop up and you say most adults 98% of adults you you've got like

you could you could give them a clay tablet with these things and they just don't want it yeah yeah clay tablet's really not going to help you in fact that might trigger them more because now you're handing something down like you know better and maybe like who are you to put something on a stone tablet. Yeah, you'll get that. There's so much cultural energy moving people often in the wrong direction. Like, I'll just, here's one. I was taught to keep my head down, do as little work as possible, and avoid punishment at all costs. But I didn't know that. I just thought that's, I just thought that's how you lived life. I did not realize there were people who did not approach life that way. People are going to hate me for this. Some people are going to really get weird about

this. I had to train myself that some rules are meant to be broken. And so I started, oh, you guys, are in the UK. This won't be weird for you. I started parking facing the wrong way on the opposite side of the street. Now in the UK you can, but here you get a ticket for it. And so if you see somebody do that as an American, you look at them like, who does this guy think he is? Like, you're not allowed to do that. And I felt so uncomfortable doing it because I was like, who am I to think that I can park facing the wrong way? But I was like, I have to train myself that there are some things, there's a reason for them and you don't do them. And then there are other things where it's like, honestly, it doesn't really matter. And so I want to remind my

myself that some rules really are meant to be broken, you have to have that mentality. It will serve you far better. And so doing things like that can be very useful as ways to puncture your frame of reference to realize, oh, this really is malleable. It isn't me recognizing the truth of the human existence. It's me having a belief system. And those beliefs are malleable. And some beliefs are more useful at driving me towards my North Star. Tom, it seems that a lot that we're talking about here comes down to a few words, which is embracing discomfort. Well, actually, we live in a society, and I've made this point numerous times, where we're made ultra comfortable. We seek comfort. We desire it. But actually, where we grow is

in the discomfort. And that's what you're talking about here, isn't it? It's being uncomfortable, embracing it, because that's how you grow. It's critically, critically, critically important. So I have a sense that some people need to be chased by a line. And that was an idea that occurred to me really early on in my business life. And I just saw people like spiraling on dumb shit to get attention or whatever. And I was like, you have too many cycles, like spare cycles. The stakes aren't high enough. There's nothing to slap you back into line because you can get away with murder and there's no real consequences. Like printing money.

Printing money socializes losses. And it makes it seem like that thing that we did, whatever that may be, wasn't really a big deal. But in reality, it's an atrocity. And you're going to have to pay the piper at some point. And so when there's like, the lion is chasing me, if I am out of shape and I can't outrun that lion, I get eaten. the stakes are so high and so binary that like you learn real fast if you have the right skills or not. This is why I like being an entrepreneur. I don't like losing money.

But if you're losing money, you haven't done the right thing. The market doesn't care about your product or your marketing is terrible or whatever. And so every time I do something and it doesn't work, I'm just like, I have done something wrong. There is no one to blame but me. And if I don't figure this out, I'm going to go broke. That is so sobering. And I love that. Like, I love that just cold, hard reality.

There's no campaigning to be done. There's only you've either added value to somebody's life or you haven't. But there's a lot of people who spend their time escaping reality. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So now let's see if I can make you hate me. I'm building a virtual world. And part of me is like, you better be real careful. Because you can really fast become part of the problem and not part of the solution. So that was tricky.

And I think about that a lot. But yes, I think that I think that it would be very fun to have a conversation with you, gentlemen, about End of Empire vibes and what is it that actually happens? And I'm going to guess that things being easy are part of it.

And when things are too easy and we've built too much comfort, that suddenly things that are terrible ideas don't reveal themselves to be terrible quickly. They reveal themselves to be terrible slowly. And when people push back, the pushback on the pushback is going to be, what's the harm?

It's no big deal. Because we've built in so many buffers. And so it's like, I want the buffers. The buffers are amazing. But is it, I don't know the answer to this question. This is not me putting forth a thing where I'm saying, this is true. But it does make me wonder

if the reason that history is this big loop is because you end up getting into that cycle of tough men, create good times, good times, make weak men, weak men, make tough times, so on and so forth. And so as you have to harden again, because times are just so bad that we're like, yeah, we want the guy with the iron fist that's going to get everybody in line, and it's just going to make things okay again.

I just don't want the chaos. Cool. And now we get under that thumb, and then we finally fight out from under that, and we get freedoms and oh, my God, these are amazing and we get this society that's thriving and it's wonderful, but now it's easy and we devolve again. So again, I don't know that that's true, but when I look at Roman Empire and the collapse and like what happens and things get too good and I look at some of the things

that are happening now and I'm just like, and I worry, I worry that it is inevitable. That would make me sad and I need to be careful about believing that because that may not lead me to my nor a star. But every now and then in my really dark moments, I'm like, this is inevitable. I'll lighten it up with a fun story of how this idea first started occurring to me. I'm 16, and I hear about Roman orgies for the first time. This is before the internet. So I don't have easy access to pornography. But as the 16-year-old male, orgy sound pretty awesome. And I'm like, wait a second. You're telling me that we had orgies 2,000 years ago, but we don't now. Because I kind of thought, if I just stay alive long enough, because everything's getting more liberal, that by the time I'm 25, orgies are going to be a thing again.

So I was like, hold on. If we've already had orgies, that means that we sort of hit some sort of hedonistic peak and then it dropped back. So I'm like, time out. Because I thought everything was just one way, just more liberal overtime, more free sex, all the things I wanted at 16. Sex, drugs, rock and roll sounded awesome. and I was legitimately perplexed with weight. How did we move backwards? How did we get more prudish?

Because my whole life, I had heard, oh, every day we're getting less and less prudish, as if it were a bad thing to a six-year-old boy sounded awesome. And yeah, so now I'm like, wait a second, even though I'm still, honestly, I'm for orgies. They sound awesome. I'm about it. But it could be that that's also tied to the part of this word,

all things end badly. I don't know. But that is, that's how that exploration began for me. The printing money, we'll talk on your show about this at length, I'm sure. But the printing money thing

is interesting to me because I think it is the perfect example of what you're talking about and what Francis was talking about earlier, actually, which is comfort. The reason we print money to spend on things we can't afford is that we are unwilling to be

slightly less comfortable than we are. And then you layer on top of that the way we do politics, which says if anybody is less well off as a result of a policy, then you're killing people. This is what people will say, right? Well, if you reduce the amount of spending on public services, you're killing people. And you probably, by the way, are reducing the number of people who survive, are reducing the... Right?

But now you're into the thing that freaks me out because it really sounds terrible, but it really may be needed. So it's like, I don't know what to do with that. Oh, I mean, I know what to do with that, which is people have to live within the means. I am probably killing. You were talking about the fact that in developing Kaysen, the video game that you're working on, you probably reduce your lifespan by 10 years. Yeah, I'm certainly sure. Right? But you did that because you want to do something that's bigger than you.

Is that fair? Yeah, all true. Right. So what's bigger than me or what's bigger than us as a society is the fact that we are impoverishing our grandchildren. That's bigger than me living longer. That's bigger than anything, actually. We cannot saddle people who are not yet born with our debts because we refuse to be

slightly less comfortable. But the political system that we're not. we have prevents that incentive from being carried through to its logical conclusion. And instead, we have people whose only priority is coming back to delayed gratification, right here right now. I'm going to get reelected right here right now. What am I going to do? bribe you with your own money.

Yeah, I have a, because I know that human nature is knowable, even though it is so complex right now, obviously we're often surprised by it, but it is a knowable thing with enough compute power we could literally predict based in your genetics, your life experience, we could predict where you're going to do. It is a knowable thing. Because it's knowable is why history rhymes. There's just only so many human responses to things. And so Ray Dalio has mapped this out and shown how this cycle just repeats over and over and over and over and the outcomes are predictable. The buildup is predictable. And so again, worrying about things being in I don't know that there's a way to stop this train.

That's partly why I retreat to the individual. So my show is all about what can the individual do in this time? Because I'm not trying. Society is an organism that has its own thing, and I don't know that I can stop it. And there's certainly things that are happening right now that scare me about what happens when the masses start doing their thing. People, I forget the quote, but people are amazing, but populations are dumb. it's like a mob will kill murder do things that an individual human just won't do it really really scares me like i mean that

literally it scares me and we're in a moment right now where i can sort of feel the mob like right at the door and we're all part of that mob that's the other part is like i put myself in that camp man i fall into the camp of in history i'm probably a villain you know what i mean it's like i do not think oh yeah i'm sure i would have been one of the good guys it's like without access to all these ideas good lord i could have just as easy gone there but for the grace of God go I don't believe in God but I believe in that statement so yeah I worry about the inevitability of this I worry that there's no stopping it I worry that what has to happen is the only way to do austerity measures is for there to already be so much pain and suffering that the austerity measures

are less painful than what was happening right before good example of this some people would argue is Britain in the 70s Yeah? Oh, I was literally thinking of it. It's going down the toilet. Three-day week, rubbish piling up in the streets. The country is the sick man of Europe. And people get fed up.

And they elect somebody who's got the balls to deal with it. That's the only hope. She didn't have to deal with a 24-hour new cycle. She didn't have to deal with Twitter or other social media. She did have to deal with the IRA, though. I don't know, man. I think it's probably easier to deal with the IRA than Twitter.

You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? So that's maybe the only answer I can see. And then, and tell me if it's a terrible idea, as you always do, the reason we do what we do, I feel, and the reason we're changing from being a YouTube channel to trigger media where we have other people working with us and expanding the scale of what we do is there has to be,

be a cultural demand for the supply of a Thatcher-like figure left or right. I don't care what side of the political spectrum there on, but it's got to be someone who has your type of mindset about what works, what doesn't work. See, and all of our debates get framed moralistically, which is precisely the problem, right? Because the question for me is, you know, is having an open border as we do now in the UK and people coming illegally into the country on small boats who we don't know where they're coming from is that working is that right is that going to improve society or is that going to make it worse it's not about hating the people in the boats which is what it is always made out to be it's about is that making our society better or worse

is printing money to buy things we can't afford is that making society better or worse is endlessly amplifying division in society along racial lines. Does that work? Does that make us better? That's always been my frame. But we always get dragged, and it's true of both of us too, we always get dragged into the moralistic side of the conversation. How do we step back from that as a society? Can we? Can we change the culture?

Probably not. So this really is a hypothesis, is not even making its way all the way to theory around this idea. by Heather Heying. Do you guys know? Yeah, we've heard her on the show. She's great. I was going to say,

she'd be right up your alley. So I asked her, but I don't remember her answer. I said, what is happening now feels like female hyperaggression. So that we've created a social media tends to bring this out.

And because females tend to lean on that nurturing side, they are, they use reputational damage. and social savagery, whereas guys will just fucking fight and tear you down and all that. It's far more direct,

super violent, but it's direct. You see it a lot more. And I was like, I have a feeling that what's happening right now is what happens when you get pathology in a feminine way of being. Again, I'm the guy that believes you need both. You need masculine and feminine.

But if you don't have them in dynamic tension, you get this. And so social media, the reason I don't know that we're going to be able to stop this train is, again, compassionate ideas, spread and we're just trying to help people, all done in reputational attacks, getting people canceled, getting people mobbed ideologically. There's a right way to think and a wrong way to think. That, until you restabilize the dynamic, and I don't know that you can when there's no threat of violence,

which would be the masculine problem-solving. Guys, so there's... Okay, I don't know what to make of this, but I want to share something I find utterly fascinating. Have you read the Gulag Archipelago? Of course. Okay, Solgen-in-itsyn. For people that haven't read it.

I sound way too excited for a book about a Holocaust. But it's about... Yeah, what's chindless? You'll have a great time. You're going to love it. There'll be a small minority that do, mate. That's fun. So it's about, for people that don't know,

the gulags in Russia and how people were whisked away to them. And in it, he said that, you know, everyone breaks. You get tortured. You're going to break. For sure, for sure. Except every now and then, there will be somebody who believes in the thing they believe in so much. They will sooner let them be tortured to death than they will break. And he said, and every single one of them is a woman. And I was like, that holds true with what I know about my wife. So if the two of us are tortured, odds are, I'm going to break. My wife, on the other hand, if she thinks she's right, forget it. Forget it. She will let you torture her to death. She's just, she can't constitutionally. She cannot back down. So anyway, you, if there is, like, we look at these overlapping distributions,

men and women are basically the same, but on the edges of the distributions, it gets pretty meaningful. And so if you have this, like, hyper sense of this is how the world should be, and I will let you torture me to fucking death, I believe in it that strongly, and using the tools of social media, reputation damage, alliances, that kind of stuff, instead of like, hey, you can't talk to me like that and tell me I'm an idiot to my face, because I might punch you in yours. So guys have a far more like, I'm going to be a little more standoffish because I know that this may escalate into a fight. Women don't approach the world that way. Starting to break down a little bit at the edges, which is the thing that actually makes me uncomfortable.

but historically speaking, we have a lot of energy that keep it so that there's a far more sort of savage approach to relationship damage than there is to that physical confrontation side. And so in some ways, in the age of social media, it's going to be a lot harder to curb that. Like this one, you could curb with police.

Don't be violent, build a structure around people. Counterpoint, however, and you may disagree, but when I see the breakdown of the mainstream media, who used to have a chokehold on the information, what it's being replaced by is this. And if the medium is the message, this is a much better medium, and the message is therefore much healthier.

I want to believe that so badly, and I really don't want to utter these words, but I will, because otherwise I feel like a coward. I am terrified to the core of my existence with what's happening with the Israel-Palestine conflict as it's being portrayed on social media and how quickly people are like, no, that was a lie,

that thing that was said was a lie. And then it just becomes that what is true. I have no idea what's true. And you're watching in real time people just coming out and saying that thing that was said that you saw the recording of, that wasn't actually said. They said, you know, like, no, no, no, but wait,

you can still see it. It's right here. It doesn't matter. And so I have a concept that I hold in my head is velocity of information. And I have a feeling that velocity of information, while it would be the only thing worse than high velocity information is top down, slowing it down. But high velocity information allows for confusion, allows for an inability to create a cohesive narrative that's tied to ground truth. And so what it becomes is bumper stickers, bumper stickers, everywhere, bumper. stickers. And so I follow my favorite influencer who talks in my favorite bumper stickers. The world is

pre-masticated for me. And now I sort of know what to wrap my head around. Like, bro, when election time comes up and there's 36 propositions on the ballot and you have to like research them to know whether to vote yes or no, most people are just going to go, I'm Democrat. What do all the Democrats vote for and just fill it out along party lines? because they just want simple answers. They'd rather be at home playing a video game than thinking about all that, but it feels important to vote.

So give me the simplified version. So in a world where velocity of information is so extreme, hopefully community notes on X helps. I don't know, just being a little pessimistic on this one. I really want the problem to be solved because it's worrisome.

This beautiful thing, the citizen journalist, is so amazing. And maybe the blockchain will help us. That would be amazing. And so we know like everything is certified, right? That it's like, okay, this is real. This is actually what's said. It's not spoofed.

Because dude, right now, you can go online and find me speaking Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese. But somebody trained it on a thousand hours of me speaking. So it sounds like me. And then they used AI to add in the Portuguese. And now it literally sounds like me speaking Portuguese. So the rapidity with which the 2024 U.S. elections will be inundated with literal fake imagery is going to be very fast.

That is terrifying. The other thing that I think that is sending us insane, Tom, is we go on Twitter and we're exposed to, particularly with the Israel-Palestine conflict, horrendously graphic images that we simply shouldn't be seeing. Do you remember when we were kids growing up, or maybe this is a BBC thing, but they always used to say,

if we're going to show images that some viewers may find distress. basically saying to him that if you're of a sensitive disposition, probably not a good idea to watch it because this is quite upsetting. But when you go on social media, you just see graphic image after graphic video, after graphic video, after graphic video. And then it's intercut with kittens playing, and then you're back to graphic video. So the way your emotions are getting manipulated,

it almost feels that you're on some kind of electronic bumper cars where you're getting shock after shock, after shock, plus, it gives you an unhealthy rhythm that then seeps into the rest of your day. I think that's so dangerous. I don't think we talk about it enough either. Yeah, I am not of a weak constitution,

and I had to just, like, set it down, man. I was like, this is so gnarly. Like, war is gnarly, gnarly. and seeing image after image, video after video, just yeah, it really does mess with your head. You know what? I actually don't agree with you guys. I really don't.

You like to lean into it? No, no. No, I'm not sitting there going on more of this. But, I mean, it's a very point in moment to talk about this. But if you think about how all of our society has been shaped in the last 70 years by what we know about the Holocaust. That was because we were shown images

that no human being really should ever see. But we have to know the truth of what's going on. Now, do you need to be consuming that on a daily basis all day every day? No, but when an attack like that happens, I'm glad we saw what happened. I think it's really important that we saw what happened. I agree with all of that. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't see it. And like I said, the only thing that would be worse than high velocity information is

top down trying to stop it. Which I actually already am worried about even with the negative images because how quickly they disappear. But I do think that people need to be thoughtful about how much of that you intake. Like there is, like I once saw, long story I will not get into on this show, but a friend of mine invited me over, didn't tell me why I invited me over,

and then he said, I'm going to show you a video of a Chechen soldier being decapitated with a handheld knife. And he was basically, like, I want to see if you can watch it. So I'm like, all right. To this day, I remember the sights, the sounds. It really, like, it can make my stomach drop now just thinking about it. And the way that that image, like, locked itself into my mind, I find a little unnerving because I find it easy to let go of things. So anyway, we need to see what is true. We need to face the truth. We need to look at hard things.

We need to not be as fatalistic as I've been at points in this conversation about thinking. thinking things are inevitable and understanding that we can steer the course of history by being better people, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think it is good to look at it. But I also think, man, be careful how much time you spend on it. 100%. Yeah. Well, everyone's psychology is different too.

Different people have different dispositions. I think there are no solutions only tradeoffs. And social media is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Facts, facts, facts. Right. You and I wouldn't be sitting here today. None of the three of us would be sitting here today if it wasn't for that. I mean, where that weighs up against the end of civilization.

It's been a nice chat, Josh. Yeah, look, this has been great as the world burns. But it's interesting. It's interesting to me. I think I wonder whether an optimism bias is nonetheless useful. Oh, for sure. Yeah. If you're, okay.

It's at an individual level, if somebody were asking me, I would say yes. go towards optimism, you will get more joy out of your life, for sure. You will accomplish more, for sure. Things feel more possible, and that is an awesome feeling. But at a societal level, I think it really does take the dynamic tension again between people that are like, wow, we can do anything. And people that are like, at some point you actually have to execute on that, and have you thought about this side or the other? So I know in my business, when an idea is fragile, I only want optimistic, solution-oriented people. When an idea is like fully thought out, I want the pessimistic people to come in and like really try to find the holes in the idea

so that we can shore them up at the idea stage and not when we're deep into execution. So it is good to have both sides. But as an individual, I would for sure want to be the optimistic one. I guess the ideal is to have both sides. So when I write comedy, when I'm in a creative mode, I just write purely. And that's all I do. I don't limit. I try not to limit.

I try not to think about this or that or whatever else or somebody's done that before I write, right, right, right, right. But then you have the editing process. And the editing is when you're critical. The problem is, is when you mix those two processes, then what it is, it is like putting a car into fourth gear straight away, and it locks. Americans aren't going to get that. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I did drive a stick for years.

But do you see what I mean? So both of those processes, like you said, are so important. The problem comes is when you mix the two. or when one becomes more dominant over the other. Well said for sure. All right, my brother. Thank you so much for your time. It's a pleasure.

I can't wait for us to be on your show. Yes, indeed. The last question we ask before we go to locals for questions from our supporters is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be? For me, the core thing is what I was talking about earlier. You're having a biological experience.

If I could really get people to embrace that, to understand their life through the lens of my body works a certain way, my emotions are a response to my gut as much as my thoughts, getting all of that under wraps, your life will get a lot easier, a lot more predictable, and when it's predictable, you're closer to the ground truth. Amazing. Thank you for being here with us, or rather thank you for having us here. No, it was awesome. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, what a conversation.

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