TrueLife - Seeking Balance - Benjamin C. George

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

It is a testament to the power of the concept of learned behaviour. On the grandest scales we observe change a lack of absolutes in the fluidity to existence yet through repetition and lack of exposure we can lock ourselves into a seemingly finite box of existence with define walls removed from the flow of reality. https://benjamincgeorge.com/product/no-absolutes-a-framework-for-life/

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. And we are live. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only Benjamin C. George, who has written an awesome book called No absolutes. We have covered a lot of different areas of psychology and philosophy. And I've had some pretty good feedback on all our conversations. And we are just going to dive into it today.

And I'm sure we're going to cover a lot of different areas from balance to language to all kinds of cool stuff. So thanks for joining us today. And Benjamin, what do you, how are you? What, is there anything you want to start with before we dive head first into this pool of chaos? I'm doing pretty well nothing that comes to the top of my head so let's dive on in fantastic I wanted to start today with

I was reading through some of your book and I found myself thinking about the concept of balance and there's one part that I wrote that I highlighted in here that I want to read to you first and then I got a question about it so let me just start off with it here It says, it is a testament to the power of the concept of learned behavior.

On the grandest scales, we observe change, a lack of absolutes and a fluidity to existence. Yet through repetition and lack of exposure, we can lock ourselves into a seemingly finite box of existence with defined walls removed from the flow of reality. That's a big sentence right there. And I think I kind of grasp it, but can you unpack that a little bit for us? Sure, you know, it's, there's so many different things that are that are all in this massive interwoven, interconnected thing that we call existing. And, but we can choose to amplify certain signals above other. And when you, you know, whether through just, you know, the nature of the information that you're taking in or whether it be, you know, a direct conscious effort. When we start to ingest certain types of information and, you know, limit ourselves in any which way, shape, or form, we, you know, we can take this grand, seemingly infinite potentiality and put it into a tiny little perceptive box of the, these are the only possibilities and outcomes that could possibly happen with any choices that we can make in life.

Okay. That's a beautiful setup for one I want to go into. So when we think about putting ourselves in this box, I find myself coming to the idea of repetition. And it seems odd to me that in our society, so much of what we celebrate is an attempt to reach perfection by means of repetition. Like we are, you know, sometimes I grew up on the maxim. Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill.

You just say it. three times so it gets in people's head, right? Especially if you look at any sort of professionals in the sports world. You've got muscle memory. You have people in the academic world trying to remember pie to a certain decimal place. But this idea of perfection through repetition, it seems like a way of putting on blinders and stopping us from seeing the big picture. It seems like we're putting ourselves in a box. So why is it that we value repetition so much and yet it seems to be something that narrows our focus. Well, I would first approach it from a, from a biology perspective.

Okay. You know, this, our brains are this massive pattern recognition. Always grabbing information, all the sensory data that we're inputting into it. And it's constantly reinforcing and looking for the patterns in that whole process. So from a biological perspective, if, you know, we're focused on food, for instance, then, you know, our imperative becomes how to gain food more efficiently. You know, recognizing the patterns of the game that we're hunting, recognizing, you know, the patterns in fishmen, mating cycles are for fishermen. And so, you know, this kind of perception called focus, and that allows us to accomplish

very specific and complex tasks while ignoring the rest of the world. And I think there's an evolutionary prerogative that kind of, you know, underpins that type of behavior and that ability. You know, but when you look at it from different perspectives of, you know, like, how are you're operating in society, for instance. You know, you can have these very interesting aspects like sports and whatnot, but you can also have detrimental and, you know, other positive aspects as well. And so, you know, the question then becomes, well, where does one draw a line and where do you

want to be with your life and how do you want to operate? You know, what past do you want to take? And, you know, for me, that comes down to balance. you know, we all want these novel experiences. And, you know, we all have, we've heard a lot of maxims, you know, like it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, practice makes perfect, you know, many more of these things along the way. And, you know, they're very helpful if you are trying to master a skill. If you are trying to go out and learn something new, you know, being able to put yourself in a field of, focus, you know, and you can accelerate the learning of those skills, I would say on average it takes

to be truly proficient in something about two years of dedicated focus in my experience. And that dedicated focus isn't, you know, 24-hour focus, but it's a daily focus. And the daily part of it is very important. Our bodies are on our circadian rhythm. All of our processes are, you know, the release of neurochemical. how we interact with, you know, this whole biology is all kind of tuned to that 24-hour cycle. And so when you start to implement something daily in that 24-hour cycle, this pattern recognition machine picks up on that and starts to attenuate, you know, different ideas, pathways, releases of chemicals at different times, et cetera, to facilitate that kind of end, you know, that end result, whether it be focused or something more broad.

Yeah. So that brings me to the idea of change and how it works with balance. It seems like, you know, anytime there's too much change, and I've seen it in my life and I know people, other people who have, when faced with change, sometimes it causes paralysis because you're so set in those patterns. However, without change, like you'll never achieve that which you want to do, nor will you ever be able to see the goals that you're want to do without change. So it's kind of a tricky relationship between change and balance. How do you manage that? Well, you know, I think that goes back to the title as a book. No absolute. When, you know, the reason that change gets pretty tricky is because we get very attached to these whatever they happen to be, these tribes, these ideas, these, you know, behaviors, you know, whether they're internal or external, doesn't matter. You know, as soon as we get very attached, to these things and they become our reality and you know you're viewing your world as this is my

world without you know any sort of wiggle room or whatnot now those attachments you know the pattern recognition machine again gets really just it turns into a wall and now you're essentially trying to kick down a wall inside when you want to change these these patterns or these behaviors or what have you and that's going to cause conflict it's going to cause you know, because you've identified with this, because you've told some, you know, people who you love and care about that this is exactly how the world is, now you have to be like, well, I don't think the world's that anymore. You're like, are they ever going to take me seriously again? You know, there's all these existential kind of psychological crises that happen with those types of things.

And so when you have these affirmations that become absolute in your life, you run a much greater risk of running into these problems whenever you're trying to change. and grow. However, if you have a bit more of amorphous kind of view of things, you know, no absolute, where you're always ready for that new piece of evidence that will allow you to shift your focus without, you know, that friction of change, then you have the ability to really, you know, grow and change without having that conflict at such a high level. It still happens. I mean, you know, we naturally attach to things. So it's still going to happen.

But those perspectives can help you navigate those waters, you know, at a much more efficient pace. Yeah, that's well said. I often, I've found in my life that change is such an internal thing. It's something that can be as easy as, changing the words you use or as easy as changing the thoughts you think, which are kind of similar in nature. But those small changes in the way you use your words or those small changes in the way you think about things can have a radical impact on the way people perceive you. And it just comes

from the perception about yourself. And I wanted to ask you this question on the topic of change. think that radical change in your life comes or can at least be helped by different or alternate stages of consciousness like if you change your consciousness will that allow you to see yourself and the world different i you know i think all the change in my life just quickly reflecting back on it uh yeah you know it's always driven from either an emotional perspective or a conscious perspective you know, it's either, and usually a conjunction of both, you know, it's, I don't want this to be part of my life anymore. And I know that there has to be a change, so I'm going to do that change. You know, when I was 24, almost 25 years old, I spun a globe, landed in the ocean, and then it was like, well, I don't want to go to the ocean.

And then I went across and it ended up in Costa Rica. And I was left for a six-year journey, which I had no. idea how it was going to be such huge, you know, but it ended up going that long. And I had a point. I forgot where I was going to say, damn. Sorry. Talking about the nature of change. And it was emotional or? Right. So that was kind of like one of those physical moments where it was like, I just wanted an adventure in life. And so that was the result of that. And but, you know, a lot of the time, you know, a lot of the time. you know, like especially as you live longer, you see more and more people pass on.

And that's one of those things where it's really, you know, usually a sock in the gut almost every time, especially if you have a good relationship with the person. And it's usually a nice little reflection in the mirror being like, okay, well, what are you doing? I mean, you know, there's only so much time here, right? So, you know, I think you can get. you can get those radical changes in life from multiple different avenues. How you deal with those, I think, is important as well because, you know, you can be caught up on these things, you know, like the stages of depression and whatnot. You know, going, you know, if you could process through that type of emotional stuff at a, because you just have a different perspective and you can utilize, you know, the lessons from it, the, you know,

the memories, the metaphors that come from all of this, you know, the way that we deal with the grief. And you can put that into a practical application and use. Now all of a sudden, you know, you can enrich and empower yourself from these radical change moments and not have to be, it's fearful of that. Yeah. I once heard it said that there's two ways people change. One is through inspiration and one is due desperation. And it seems to me, when I look back on my life, those have been two of the main drivers that have allowed me to make what could have been conscious change, but started off as unconscious change. And I think as you said, as you go get older in life, like you have these two twin hammers of, of, you know, of inspiration and desperation. But as you get

older, they don't have to be such up and down. You can start to do in the middle of the road. you can begin to see, instead of having violent swings up and down, you can see the inspiration. You can see the desperation. You can mitigate those by, you know, duct diving the wave or swimming over the crest of it. And I think that's a big part of learning who you are and what you're capable of. And I think that brings us back to balance. I think that in the beginning, none but the most gifted among us understand what balance is until you've lost your balance in life. comes from losing loved ones. That comes from giant things that happen on some idle Tuesday

that you never thought of before. But once you go through them, you're able to become better at walking at tightrope. Absolutely. And, you know, tying it back to our first conversation we had, you know, one of the first things you asked me is, is that, you know, does there need to be some sort of suffering to formant some type of change? And, you know, this kind of goes back to that. And it's not necessarily suffering, but if you don't have those perspectives, those understandings of, you know, the loss and, you know,

how to deal with these things, then you might make some sort of change, but that change is going to be, you know, in the future, that boat's going to get rocked again, unless it's a balanced change. And, you know, so while it does take suffering to do this a lot, you do have the other side of that. where now, you know, you know, hopefully through conversations like this and projects that

people are working on in the world, you know, we can have these inspirational things that allow us to grow without the suffer. And, you know, that's kind of one of my hopes by, you know, sitting in front of a camera with a light in front of my head. Absolutely. Sometimes when I talk to people, I'm really fascinated by the stories they tell themselves like to help them see the world and get through life. Can you share like what what is it that goes on in your mind? Like how let me start by an example. Like let me tell you how I I see it that helps me and maybe you can share your ideas, you kind of your worldview and your narrative.

For me lately I've been seeing the world as whatever I manifest or whatever questions I ask myself, I see the answers begin to form in nature for me. And it's almost like a dance sometimes. I'll give you an example. I'm super stoked on this podcast in my YouTube channel. In the last, in the last like 28 days, I've seen my channel views go from like something like 20,000 to 2.5 million. And it's not my podcast.

I wish it was our exact conversation that was getting that many views. You know, but that's not the goal I had set. The goal I had set was like, look, I want to start getting millions of views. And it's almost like a dance. It's like I'm dancing with this beautiful woman called nature. And I'm not quite sure how it's going to happen, but it's happening. And the fact that it didn't go exactly like I wanted, it makes me laugh because it's so beautiful. Like maybe it's not supposed to go exactly the way I wanted it.

But look, here's the results. It's coming the way. It's coming. That's what you wanted. And it's almost like your. when you can see yourself as not in control of everything, but as a way of moving through everything or moving lockstep with everything, you may not end up exactly where you want to go, but you're definitely in that direction. And it's, I think if people could see that way,

at least that's the way I see it. Like, what you project inside is possible, can be possible. You may not, you may not, the vehicle you use may not be the one like you exactly thought of, but the vehicle will get you there. And so that's like one of the frameworks I've been learning. And it's helped change me. It's helped me see things better without the necessities for absolute. It has to be absolutely this way. No, no, it just has to be that.

You just have to get to that destination. So that's kind of one of the frameworks I've been using. What are some of the frameworks that you use when you find yourself? moving through life. Well, to what you said, I would say, you know, I would step back to last week and words are important. You know, and, you know, defining that intent, well, your intent was millions of views. It wasn't millions of views on these specific podcasts. Yeah. That's true. You know, so, and it is a funny dance. And, you know, this has been my observations over the past 15 some years is that, you know, in lots of anecdotal evidence in conversation with people who've

had similar observations is that this is kind of how that dance works. Is, you know, and then the more you are attenuated with that dance, the more you're aware of everything that's happening, the more you're able to kind of weave through and sway and flow with that dance. And the more you learn the nuances of the dance, right? Yeah. But to answer your question, my primary worldview is looking at everything as a series of systems. And all of these systems have an interplay to them and those mechanisms of interplay, you know, what affects what, how it affects what, when it affects what, why, et cetera, is kind of all like in a mental model form.

And so, you know, it's kind of like you can see a, a short. string being plucked and then see the resulting effect, you know, 17 steps down the line or whatever. I kind of developed that just from tech stuff, just because I was so heavily involved in building systems and, you know, websites and then, you know, full apps and now a lot of automation and artificial intelligence stuff. It's just kind of like, I would call it the programmer's mind. You know, everything has a loop. that kind of goes through the entire system. And, you know, you make little adjustments to what that loop does

when it goes through different parts of the system and you get something on the output that changes that you're looking for. And so you're constantly kind of like playing that game, if you will, to get the desired output. So that's kind of my default worldview with how I just kind of plug everything in. Yeah. But to what you, you said is also how I've observed, you know, everyday interactions and how people run their lives

in themselves, how that translates to, you know, reality. So. Yeah. Yeah. When you say, when you, when you spoke about the programmer's mind and you see yourself and you talk about the different loops and being able to change things, do you, when you speak about that, in your way, you know. worldview, are you looking at it from a third person or are you submerged in it? Does that kind of

make sense? Are you seeing it from like, there it is right there? Or are you like, okay, I'm in this thing right now? More of there it is right there from an outsider looking at. You know, I always have kind of like a mental visual space where I can imagine things and walk around them. And I've always found that helpful in my life, you know, especially when it's more of a technical type problem. But then I learned how to translate that into other type of problems and, you know, relating those same types of envisioning techniques in order to, you know, basically put yourself in somebody else's shoes for like an emotional problem or something like that. Because it's the same idea. It's just, you know, one, you have a defined, like, variable and you call it X. The other one is,

it's not really defined, but it's still a variable that you can call act. And you can do the same type of fascinations and manipulations to get the idea of what's going on in any given situation. But that's just me. I'm a nerd. Well, I would have to fit that same category in so many ways. You know, and you know what? Maybe you found this to be true, but you can spend a lot of time in those. mental maps. I can spend a lot of time as X, but pretending on F or pretending on G. You know, and it's easy to get stuck there. It's easy just to start thinking like, okay,

well, Bob did this, but I'm different than Bob in these five ways. So how would those outcomes be? The next thing you know, an hour and a half is going to buy. As you've walked around the cube and saw all corners of it and then put yourself in a position facing this way and then this way And then this way, you know, the next thing you know, two hours are gone. And people are like, what are you staring at? Indeed. But I think it's helpful. Oh, I think it's fantasticly helpful to be able to break it down in such a meticulous way.

But then I think we also, you know, after you do it for a while, you gain the ability of kind of intuition. And so you'll be able to see it. And instead of walking around it, you almost get like a flash of everything around it real quick. And you take away the salient points. And then you have a pretty. instant idea of what's going on. You can dissect it later. Or, you know, sometimes you think you have that idea and you get stuck and you can't figure it out, but then you wake up and in the first five minutes the next morning, you're like, oh, yeah, I know how to solve that. And that's a wonderful

aspect of this pattern recognition machine. It's trying to, in the more that you, you know, just like everything else, the more weight you lift, the more times you go out running, you know, the more endurance you're going to get, the more strength you're going to get. the more times you work on problems that are, you know, flexing different parts of the brain and you get stuck on things, the more that the brain adjusts and all of a sudden you wake up and it already found the answer. You know, whatever happened in that replaying of all of your sensory data throughout your sleep cycle and in printing into your hippocampus

and making memories and doing all of these little intricate things, now you wake up and all of a sudden, hey, the idea is there. Did you come up with the idea? well you know I mean kind of it's in there right but at the same time you know you were you were consciously involved in putting that process together that happens to me all the time and in fact so much to the point where now these days if I get stuck on a programming problem I won't bang my head against the wall I just move on and go on with my day and I wake up in the morning and try again and it's a pretty nice method saves myself

a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah, as I have, in the last year or so, I have realized that on a lot of levels, it seems to me that it's not so much that you have discovered the problem as the solution has been revealed to you. You know what I mean? Like, it seems to me, like, if you think about something long enough, I have found, I, I try to use the language of, it's not that I've solved it.

It's that it was revealed to me. And it was revealed to me by maybe, like you said, sometimes when you wake up in the morning, you have taken some time to think about other things, and you have subconsciously found the solution to, you know, how to solve this problem by watching a waterfall. Or there's this. And I really think there's a connection there.

I really think there's a connection between thinking about a problem in your mind and then seeing something in nature. I think that the majority of problems can be resolved by observing that in nature. And I think that the relationship is there's because we're part of this planet, when you think of something, when you imagine something, when you take time to use your cognitive apparatus to think about things, it's revealed to you in nature. It's almost like there's a bigger power talking to you. Like the whole planet's a classroom and you're, you have a problem?

Okay, I'm looking at this rose bush. Look at the way the flowers open up on every branch at like 47 degrees pointing towards the sun. There's some real geometry in there, you know? And if you just take some time to realize that you're not separate from everything else, the answer to the problem will be revealed to you. What do you think? Is that crazy? No, I think there's a lot to be said about that.

I would also, you know, kind of segue on that. is, you know, the well of information that we're drawing from, you know, to even envision what we classify as a problem is one in such that we've, is the only exposure we have is NNNJRA, right? Yeah. That's the greatest exposure we have to all this stuff. So, you know, and there's plenty of times where, and we've, we touched on this conversation a little bit of, you know, when you have expertise first, you know, just a broad, generalized knowledge and a passion for just learning in general. Well, when you have that expertise, you know, and you're constantly just looking at a very narrow pathway, you're not, you might not go out and see the waterfall that gives you your answer or the 47 degree tilt on the flower as the sunrises. You know, you're, you know, you might miss these things that allow you to have these

different perspectives. So, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot to be said about it. And it's been kind of replete throughout history by a lot of philosophers and thinkers and, you know, entrepreneurs and people like that is, you know, go out and do something hard and then go out and be in nature and go and then repeat that process as often as you can. And there is, you know, there's a lot to be said about, you know, just movement in general and how that, how that influences the human body. What sort of different neurochemicals get sent, you know, when you start those movement processes and how those facilitate thought and, you know, focus and all of these different things.

There's a great, are you familiar with Dr. Andrew Huberman? I've heard his name, but please enlighten me. He's a neuroscientist out of Stanford. He has a science-based podcast where he talks about all sorts of different things, neuroscience. And in the biology in general, but how it relates to the neuroscience, you know, all of the new papers, but then also breaks down, you know, practical or practical usages for those things, like breathing techniques, for instance, or, you know, what type, you know, how these supplements should affect X, Y, and Z.

So, you know, he's a fantastic tool to really kind of deep dive in and stuff like that, if you haven't done that before. I would recommend. Yeah, I definitely will. I, um, I, I, I think it's in the, the i can't think of the exact word of it but the uh yoga i'm probably gonna budge this but oh i'll just shoot for it what the hell i think it's in like the yoga sutures the vendantra tradition of like you know if you think of yourself as a thought in the mind of god like each one of us is but a thought in the mind of god and we are

struggling to become an idea and then an action and if you look at your life that way that way way, I think it helps to understand the bigger picture. Like, we're not here for that long. The same way that a passing thought goes through your mind, so too do you go through this life. However, if you focus on that which is important to you, and if you focus on that which fills your being, then you can turn this idle thought in the mind of God into an action. But, you know, you, I think there's something beautiful about that because the more you become fulfilled in life, the more you're become fulfilled and creating a better world around you. And I just, I really think there's a beautiful relationship correspondence there with, you know, finding your destiny or, you know, kind of bridges the free will gap. But it's an interesting way to look at life.

And I, it's just a beautiful tradition. and what you previously said made me tie into almost like a religious type of thought there. What's your take on that? You know, as when I first wrote this book, it was about four years ago. At that time, I had barely just scraped the surface in my anthropolateral study. At that time, you asked me this question, I would have a very different answer for you. But now after spending the past four years, you know, with a good deal of focus, you know, looking at ancient traditions, you know, different translations of ancient Sumerian texts, the Vedic texts, you know, looking at, you know, ancient oral myths from indigenous tribes around the world. All of a sudden, you start to see threads that, you know, the only way they could be connected is if they're connected.

you know you know there's too many there's too many correlated you know sometimes even down to names where it's like and it's separated by you know thousands and thousands of miles and potentially depending on

you know how you date things thousands of years or you know even at the same time but thousands of miles away when it's thousands of years before any of this should have ever been possible type ideas. And, you know, after looking at all of those things and, you know, the similar threads

and pulling on them, there's nothing new under the sun is how I would answer your question to be very vague. You know, it makes me, like, even the language about it. We have different hemispheres on the planet. We have different hemispheres of our brain. We have the left hemisphere, which is like this logical, analytical side. And we have this right hemisphere that is like this, you know, more conceptual side that sees things differently. Same goes for the eastern and western cultures.

It seems like we have this analytical side that's like, why? The Western is always asking why. And the right side has this concept of seeing balance in nature and learning from nature this you know, I wonder sometimes, I wish I had the big map behind me, because the idea of, if you look at a map, there's all these trade routes on a map, you know, and you have the ship goes from here to here. And on the big map, on a random Nally map, you can see all these lines crisscrossing the globe. It seems to me that that's a lot like a human brain and those are neural pathways. You know, if there's nothing new under the sun and we can learn from nature, could we learn how to solve? brain injuries by looking at trade routes on a map.

You know, I wonder maybe this is a question for Huberman, but it seems if you look at it like that. Well, you know, I would actually, the trade routes on a map is an interesting corollary to this. But, you know, they've grown, you know, different types of mold in petri dishes. And the way that those molds grow, depending on, you know, whatever obstruction,

they have in those dishes are found to be more efficient than the algorithms we use to sort data and things like this, you know, then in our biggest, you know, data centers in supercomputer. So, yes, I would think that there's a lot to be learned from that type of observation. You know, we're just, we're barely scratching the surface on how the brain works. you know, you ask somebody how the brain works. If you ask 20 people, you'll probably get 20 different answers. Yeah. And you could even ask 20 experts, and you'd probably still get 20 different answers,

just because we're that shallow of knowledge on how it all fits together. So, you know, I think there's a lot to be said about the potentiality of what we can do, you know, just by moving a bit more back to, nature from a pragmatic perspective of, hey, we're not the smartest thing under the sun. You know, most of this has probably already been done. How can we better mimic these systems to put ourselves in a, you know, a better position from sustainability to long-term value, you know, to, you know, back when I was growing up, it used to be pretty commonplace to hear that, you know, the children inherit the earth.

You really don't hear that much anymore. which is kind of a scary plight, you know. But, you know, moving back to the idea that this is weird generational species and, you know, a little bit probably less narcissistic from a societal perspective, I think is something that's going to be, I mean, it kind of already is an imperative, but I think, you know, we're quickly running up against that wall where, you know, instead of our inspirational change, we're going to reach a change of desperation. Yeah, I think you can definitely see that happening now.

And I often wonder if so much of what we're seeing right now is because such a large population, like if you look at the population of the boomers on a generational scale, they're so large. And I heard an interesting bit of information that said 10,000 baby boomers retiring a day. And if you look at it from a, you know, if we pan back out and we look at it from almost a fractal point of view, such a large percentage of the human race is reaching an age where they are coming to their end of life stage. Like that's enough for the world to be in chaos. When any organism is achieving a state where part of it is dying, that creates chaos throughout the entire organism. And if we look at us like that, so many people are uncertain. So many people haven't made peace with death. And rightfully so, it's a huge thing.

So many people are achieving this idea of, I didn't make it, or I'm going to die, or I have cancer, or my kids don't like me, or I wasn't a good parent, or I am a great parent. But just this aspect of us dying seems to me to be what you're talking about, desperation. Have you thought about it in those terms? far as generations? Yeah.

You know, part of my thought of exercises for how would you design a more sustainable type of system, you know, is how do you make something generation? And in that, you know, goes into all of those things that you just brought up. Well, you know, that fear of death, you know, that end of life cycle, you know, from what we have in today's current world, you know, that they call it a burden on society. right because you have all these things that are you know old post homes and all the stuff um whereas you know talk about the greatest untapped resource that exists yeah grandma's not going to sit in front of a classroom of 30 kids but a grandma can sit in front of six kids and

teach them you know everything she knows about gardening in the course of a you know a spring right You know, there's there's all these things where just because it doesn't fit in with, you know, protocols, regulations, permits, licenses, all this other crap that you're not allowed to do it in society. You know, you can't invite the neighbor's kids to come in your backyard today. Holy cow. You're just asking for somebody to call the cops one way or another, you know. So, you know, when you remove the ability, for us to utilize one of the most fantastic resources we have,

which is somebody who's lived a whole lifetime of experience. You know, regardless of, you know, what sort of information is dated, it goes back to our conversation about that broad perspective of thing. You know, my grandma has information on what her grandma taught them to use for Sal, how to make different types of, you know, remedies for different types of things that you won't find in any book. I mean, you know, these are, these are old recipes that were hundreds of years old passed down through families that are gone, right?

Because now all those people got put in old folks' homes because no one could afford to take care of them because of just the nature of everything and keeping up with the Joneses and yada, yada, yada. So, you know, there's a dysfunction in how we operate. And wherever those disfunctions are, especially at scale, they end up being these massive, massive drains on resources, you know, across the board, really. Man, that, you know, that makes me think a lot. I never thought about it from that perspective.

But maybe the message people should be taking away is that the people with the answers are rapidly leaving the planet and we're not extracting the answers from them because you can't put a price tag on it. You know, it's pretty sad. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, more so there's not a price tag in going off and seeking them answer.

Like, I'm not going to get awarded for doing so, right? So you have just, and, you know, I've gone to quite a few retirement homes over the years, and those people want nothing more. And when they sit there and talk about their experiences, what they know, what they've seen, and you're just, you know, all that data is just getting wiped out. And it's being replaced with people scrolling instead, right? I mean, you know, it doesn't take rocket science to extrapolation. where this goes after you fast forward for a generation or two.

Not good places. So, yeah, it is a, there's very daunting problems in society. And, you know, all of the top-down stuff that we've talked about prior to this, hasn't been able to solve those problems. And now a lot of them are coming home to Roos. You know, I don't know if you saw this one, kind of a, kind of a side note. the research about amylidoid plaque in Alzheimer's turned out to be fictitious. What?

I didn't know that. Tell me about that. I didn't read that study. Are you kidding? I just started reading this. It came out like yesterday. So definitely look it up and don't take it all the heart. But apparently some researchers went in and reviewed all of those studies about the

amylidoid plaque in its relation to Alzheimer's, dementia, things like that. And they found that it was, you know, some data was falsified, some data just wasn't true, you know, pictures were manipulated, all sorts of different things. So essentially, fraud across the board. So what does that say? What do we know about Alzheimer's and Dimension now? Fast forward 30 years, 20-some years of research down that very focused narrow pathway of Amploidoidoid. Now, you know, the veracity of that, I'm not entirely sure yet. I mean, even if it's 15, 20% true, I mean, that's a huge, you're talking billions of dollars

with wasted research money, let alone the actual time investment, the machines, you know, built, dedicated to this, all this stuff. So, yeah. Wow. I could totally see that. Like, that goes a long way in explaining why there's been no progress, you know? And it also goes a long way in explaining why it seems that modern medicine is moving towards a model of experimentation on people immediately. You know, like that would give that.

That would give you a reason why they're trying to speed that kind of stuff up. They're like, you know, Lord knows if you could just peel back the onion and that evidence was made public. Like, hey, we don't know anything. Here is, you know, 10,000 people a day dying of this stuff. We're better off experimenting. You know, not that that's a popular sentiment, but I wish the medical community would just be forthright with people and say, hey, here's what we have. Do people want to sign up for this? If you want to, you can. Here's these drugs that we have. And if you don't want to, that's fine. But, you know, I don't see why we can't move towards a model like that. I guess liabilities involved there. But maybe that's what's happening now. I don't know. Well, I think, you know, all that comes down to liabilities because now, you know, it's all fine and dandy. if Billy went and signed up and said he's okay with it.

But then when Billy's mom says, Billy has a mental condition, he wasn't capable of signing up for that. Now it turns into big lawsuits. You know, the litigious nature of Western society is an impediment on, you know, towards many innovations,

sometimes rightfully so. Yeah. You know, another one that's really interesting that, you know, kind of blew me away is, you know, all,

They found there's Brett Weinstein. Are you familiar with him? You know, are you familiar with his mice research and the telomere research? I'm familiar with telemere research. Maybe not his particular type. So what he found is, you know, they used these bread mice for all different sorts of laboratory testing. And that's how they do all these FDA trials and things like this. He found that the laboratory mice that were bred in captivity,

had a completely different telemere degradation rate or something, you know, I won't quote it, definitely something to look up. But the way that their telemeres were being, you know, recorded in these trials were very, very, very different than what would a field mouse would be. So what this would kind of break down to is, you know, is how harmful some sort of substance is to the cell. because if it looked like there was more telomeres and the cell was able to reproduce with the, you know, it's a greater amount of telomeres. It doesn't look like it's doing all that much damage to the cell.

The cell looks healthy and it'll have a longer life. But if it just so happens that these, you know, mice who, their entire existence for generations has been breeding to see if they have longer telomeres, just so happen to have just naturally longer telomere, then all of these trials that you're doing are very, you know, they're biased. They're completely, you know, they're not really related to what we would find in nature, which was kind of the idea behind those trials to begin with. And so that, you know,

and, you know, there's a lot more instances of that, and you have all those instances of that because of just the way that that academia system is set up. You're only going to get funding if you're in a narrow band of what we're funding. And you're only going to get funding. get funding in that narrow band if what you're trying to research, you know, says this is what we want to research or what contract we have to build a machine to, you know, and those are kind of how all

of this is set up. And then you have the gatekeepers of where the scientific papers get published. And so, you know, it's a, you know, we have, there's multiple imbalances to that system. But at the end of the day, the largest one is once you have all of that money filtered down those huge pathways, it takes a Hercules effort or a group of scientists for many, many years to go off and try to reproduce those results. You know, some of the equipment in these things is, you know, a billion dollar equipment. How are you going to try to reproduce results from, you know, if you don't have a billion dollar machine?

Yeah. And a lot of the times, like, you won't get funding unless you come up with the results they want. You know what I mean? Right. You know, the demonization of salt was all papers funded by the sugar industry. You know, in fact, just recently there's somebody got accused of funding a whole slew of climate papers. You know, imagine that. So, you know, it's, so we have these imperfect systems and then we've scaled into hundreds and millions of participants.

and then wherever there's a break in the system, there's also an opportunity to make money. And so you have this chessboard that's very disproportional on what sort of actions, what sort of choices dictate real world responses or how to change something or how to fix these problems. And then oftentimes, because there's such concentrations of influence and resources

and power these days, you know, you don't get the, you don't get too many opportunities to see those other, those other paths, the past less taken, which should be more taken, but here we are. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think you can break it down to like, it seems that the problem we're having across the board is language. You know, and maybe language is the fire that Prometheus, Aetheist stole and gave to us that we weren't ready to have. Or maybe language is the ripe fig on the tree of knowledge that was plucked by Eve and given to us so that we know, quote-unquote, good and evil, which we don't. But language gives us this opportunity to explain things in a way that can make other people think or better yet feel a certain way.

And it's this idea of language that allows a credible scientist to get funding for a certain type of pill that is probably less effective than a placebo. You know, I, and on some ways, I think that if we can come to an understanding, if we can figure out a way to communicate more effectively with each other, then we can solve a lot of these problems. And, you know, that makes me want to shift gears here towards, like, what do you think about using symbols? I've got to figure this out on the fly here. Maybe you can help me, like, I think that we should be incorporating some sort of some enhanced symbology in our language.

And let me try to unpack that a little bit. Go ahead, please. What do you got? What do you think about that? Well, I was going to say, that's kind of emerging natural. if you look at if you look at memes oh yeah okay you know now a lot of them do have written stuff on them but you know they're all instantly recognizable from their base symbology and those symbologies transcend borders more than any other text you know even i would even argue these days you know your

biblical text um so and then you also have your emojis and you know all these little you know, identicons and all these things. So I would say that there is an emerging kind of symbolic culture that's kind of moving across the world. And then at the same time, I think there is precedence sort of moving towards English in general and has been for a while. It's been, you know, the, you know, every, all airline companies typically use English. You know, it's been the, you know, for the internet, it's been kind of. the primary between, you know, all the regulatory bodies and things like this.

And so I see a lot of English combining with these symbolologies. And then, you know, to the point where there are some things that I see out there that pop up. And it looks like English. It looks like it doesn't look like it's any other language, but it's all these acronyms and abbreviations and, you know, things that, you know, nobody used, bother or used the period. like I was taught you were supposed to. But, you know, so you do have this emergent idea of symbology. That's kind of the internet age speak.

And tying into your point, you know, about, you know, all the baby boomers retiring, you know, my dad just had a seminar in his work and they were talking about how the Generation Z is now going to be the number one incoming work for. even though despite how low they are, you know, in terms of population numbers, just because of how big the baby boomer and, you know, the earlier generation exploit. So, you know, now they're talking about how to incorporate, you know, how these people interact with the world into the, you know, these corporate practices, which is, you know, it's how do you get, you know, go from an office where you're talking with a boss in meeting, to everybody's virtual and just doing it on a phone.

That's kind of the transition that a lot of these companies are looking at. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. That is a fascinating change taking place. And I think that, let me start at the beginning of that one. I think that on the topic of memes and symbology, you know, it would be interesting to put together like a meme alphabet. Then you can put together like a meme, you know, you could put together different memes.

Because I always think of a picture is worth a thousand words. So if you have a meme, you know, that you, if every meme is like a story, it's like a, if every picture is worth a thousand words and maybe a meme is like a paragraph, you know, and if you put a couple of those memes together, you could really tell the story. And it harkens back to the idea of it, I think it was once said that a more perfect logos would be a language that can be seen instead of just heard. And if you can put those two things together, if you can hear something and see something, or if you can hear a picture. And in a way, it's kind of like a synesthesia. When you can hear a picture, you can have a better understanding of what that person means.

And that's why they're probably so funny sometimes. He's like, you, oh, I get it, you know. You can almost hear it. It's so loud. Yeah, I think so. I think that's why there's such a prevalent, immersive kind of subculture. Like, you know, it came out of nowhere and, you know, to the point where people talk about people's mean game. Yeah, I have no idea what that means personally because I'm too old, I guess.

But, you know, it's one of those things when I heard it. I was like, okay, that's interesting, you know. But the other part of this problem, because what you're trying to get to, I think, is you're trying to solve the larger problem. And in that education system to get that language becomes the, you know, where does that education come from? And how is that facilitated on a worldwide level? because, you know, even if we decided today that the language was going to be this memeology and we put together an alphabet, you know, good for us. It doesn't really do anything, right?

You know, unless everybody around the world adopts it. And in order to do that, you know, they would have to forego all of these cultural, you know, things, you know, so it's an interesting thought experiment, but then the other additional thought experiment I would tie to it is how does one get there? Because, I mean, if I agree with you that if all of a sudden, you know, we could speak a language where, you know, maybe it was, you know, we had some, some memes or symbology attached to it. And everybody was able to speak that same language, the ability to articulate ideas to, you know, paint a picture on somebody's head to, you know, have somebody understand that,

it's not me against you, it's us against everything else. You know, having those ideas being conveyed in a proper way would be fantastic. The practical step of getting there is, you know, it didn't work top down. It didn't work when everybody connected to the Internet. So then what becomes the potential next step for next iteration to try and get that solution? And I think you approach it from the bottom up personally. Yeah, I often, I think, I think that's a big part of what's going on is the power structure, the ideas that we are confined in are no longer holding us,

especially like you said, like Generation Z, they're, there's so much quicker. And they have such a better understanding of the world they live in than the world we want them to live in. And I think that that's what's changing is it is it is from the bottom up. I see where I work, the next generation of leaders coming in. And they have seen their parents go through 2008 crisis. The crisis we're in now. They've seen them lose everything in the stock market.

They've seen this world of business that is so just top heavy with halves and have nots that they're changing that and there's no amount of maybe maybe there is but it seems to me that the incentive structure is not worth it for them and that's why they're dropping out of the workforce like ah you want me to work 60 80 hours a week for what nah I don't think so I think I'll stay at home and the people on top are like what are you talking you have to come back to the office and they're like what why I'm just work from right here so much better and I'm so thankful for that because I think that is a better life for them. And I think it's a better life for society.

And I think that they're building it. I think it's happening from the bottom of. Well, I mean, you know, and if you look at it, if you were to span out again and look back, you know, it's been happening for the past 120-some years ever since, you know, really kind of industrialization unions kind of started coming into play. You know, it's just kind of the natural evolution.

We went from having to, you know, fight with bulls. bullets and baseball bats for weekend to, you know, now we're fighting, you know, with our words and our actions and our time for, you know, remote work and freedom of access and movement in these things. So, but yeah, you know, so I think that's been kind of a ground-swelled movement of Western society for the past 127 years, really. And now we're just, kind of seeing, you know, where does that end? And I think, you know, and it's coming to contention more so than it ever did. You know, first it came to contention because capitalism was milk everything that you can. Then capitalism realized that, well, you can't do that with humans necessarily. You can try and you can get away with a lot of stuff, but eventually you have to

give a little bit. And now the, you know, the reality is, is, hey, there's a whole bunch of us we're all on the same rock, you know, what's the purpose? What are we trying to do? What are we trying to accomplish? Now instead of these, you know, very local or regional things, you know, there's a lot more questions about the world and worldwide things. And, you know, how we are the largest threat to ourselves in many, you know, where these systems are broken.

And so, and then it's interesting that, you know, a lot of these questions are then taken and then try to be and try to utilize for profit, you know, like a climate change type thing. You know, you can't go to a corporate VC thing and not your ESG score, which is wild. Yeah. And, you know, and, you know, a whole generation of things to the point where they want to assign you a personal carbon counter, you know, which is, there's a lot to be said about things like that. Most of them, whenever it gets to the personal and a sign, whenever those two words

are put together, typically doesn't end well for the individual. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's both frightening and amusing. And to think about what's happening in the world of carbon capture, you know, I'm sure it's a lot of other things besides those two things. I was talking to an indigenous American, American Indian on the guy names, I did an interview with him. His name is Dan Hawk. He's just really brilliant on a lot of different areas. And we were talking about this book, I quote this book way too much, but I was talking about this book called Black Elk Speaks. And in this book, Black Elk speaks, he's telling the story about how the white men came to the indigenous people and said, we want to

buy your land. And he said, we laughed at him. We're like, you can't buy the land. The land belongs to everybody you dummy we laughed at i'm like yeah here okay give us your money you can't buy the land but no one was laughing when they rounded up indians and put them on reservations and while it seems funny to us today about oh we want to we want to buy the air because that's essentially what putting giving you a score is like we want to buy the air you breathe and it's an abstract idea but it's not funny when you think how they said the same thing about the land and a carbon being the most abundant thing out there. Like it seems silly.

Oh, you can't buy the air. But that's exactly what they're trying to do is buy the very air you breathe. Like, it's frightening to think that they might be able to do it. Well, to the tune that they've even estimated that they're going to be successful and that the value of all this thing is in the hundreds of trillions of dollars by 2030 or something like that. Yeah. So, you know, these types of things. you know, it is. It's a funny, like, oh, ha ha, that's cute. You can't on the air. And, you know,

but that was the same response, as you said, as the Native Americans who were like, ha, that's funny. You can't on the land. Yeah. But, you know, the greater reality of that situation is, is, you know, sadly, might is right. You know, and in a lot of times, might these days is kind of an equation for money. And those who control all of that, you know, if they say you jump, eventually you're going to say how high. Otherwise, you just don't jump anymore. And, you know, that's the dangerous, that's the dangerous road that we're creeping down

by, you know, allowing central groups of authority to make decisions for greater, the greater popular. it. You know, there's great value in decentralizing power. You know, every, I think all of the great thinkers throughout history realized that in some way, shape,

or form that the decentralization of power, you know, was greater for the common individual. You know, for us to move away from that, we know where that road goes. And it doesn't end up

in any situation that, the common person wants to be in. So it's one of those things where, you know, we are at a crossroads. We're at a precipice where, you know, one way is right off the mountain. And the other way is to turn and find solutions, which they exist. The thing is, is you're not going to be able to take these solutions and enact them overnight. And more so, you're not going to be able to enact them and have every, you know, a lappist luxury item of society today,

you know, some of those things have to be, you know, compromised at least for a time in order to invest in the proper, you know, systems and mechanisms. You know, we have seven garbage patches on the world that, you know, the size of these things is unsavailable on scale. You know, we have all of these ecological disasters that are potentially impacting us, you know, that has nothing to do with carbon and whatnot. That's just another way to backbone the debt-based economy.

You know, if people are always in debt, then they can't own anything. If they can't own anything, then they have no kind of, you know, point to rally around nothing. You get the eventual removal of liberty. And then, you know, you have a whole bunch of cities where everybody is, you know, using the central digital bank currency that gets deposited in their account every, you know, every two days, every two weeks, every month, what have you. And they get their, you know, that's on their state-assigned cell phone. And they show up and, you know, they do minimal tax or they donate blood or whatnot.

And it just, you have these kind of dystopian city centers of the future where there's nobody who's going to, you know, exceed through these echelons, the cost of living in these places, you know, you're only allowed to afford rent because it's subsidized type idea. You know, and so that's where these economic policies take us whenever, you know, they're trying to gain more and more ability to indebt you to that system. And, you know, you can see what they've done with water resources around the world. I mean, Nestle is in the forest. for what they've done.

And, you know, it used to be, I remember the joke back in late 80s, early 90s, you know, there was a water fountain everywhere in every place you went, every mall, everything like that. And then somebody was selling bottled water and they're like, who's going to buy that? Yeah. Well, there we are. You can't, there's hardly a water fountain to be found and you're paying a buck 99 for some

Dysini. Yeah, there was a great deal. skit, I think it, I forgot who it was by, but they were talking about the French company Avion. And he's like, oh, Pierre, I think we can sell the Americans water. He's like, no, they're not that dumb. He's like, oh, I don't know, no, you know. But yeah, it's, it's amazing what a great marketing campaign with the right

language directed to the right people can begin to do. You know, I think it was Edward Bernays in his book propaganda. It's said the minds of the common man are molded by people whom you'll never know. And it's just an article placed here and a right picture over there and the right shirt over here. And you can see it today with, you know, if you go on LinkedIn and you look at job offers, you can see, you know, 30 to 100 a day for people in TikTok for marketing. And they're just, here's your, here's your talking points. We want two minutes of these talking points with these.

these images go. You know, like it's right there and funny. And it's being done. And in a way, it's fascinating to think about how modern day propaganda is a form of, it's, it's kind of sad, but it's almost like the highest art that we have is our propaganda these days. You know, and you can look at campaigns like obey or some of these other people who have gone out and changed the way you think by showing us images of the way they want things to be. Yeah.

Okay, go ahead. Okay. Do you see what's happening in Sri Lanka as something that is pushed back against the system that is happening because people went too far? And by they, I mean like the World Economic Forum, the Atlantic Council on Formulations. Do you see the breakdown of society in Sri Lanka as something that is pushed back or something that was orchestrated? Well, you know, simply because all the media is owned by a very small select group of people, typically, you know, it's very hard to make any sort of assessment if anything was orchestrated or not. I would say that there is evidence to support a consistent narrative of, you know, the policies that were adopted by the Sri Lankan government in cahoots, with people like the world economic forums and, you know, the carbon capture agendas and things like that.

And then the resulting policies, regardless of the kickbacks that were made, enabled this kind of reality that we're seeing now where yields were so far down that it was just, it was basically, you know, the ablation of farmers in that country after just a couple years. So orchestrated, I think everything is orchestrated to at least a little degree this day and age, simply because everything paid for. You know, if we had a system that was based on barter and goodwill, you know, I would say there's a lot less orchestration. But when you have everything that's based on dollars and barrels of oil, things become pretty orchestrated pretty quick, at least at some level. Yeah, I often wonder, like I, you know, it's, my mind shifts back and forth between, oh, gosh, I can see how this works to this is just chaos and they're trying to control things, you know, and it's maybe that's exactly, maybe it's a combination of those two things. Like there's people that have money who think they're in power and they have plant A, B, and C.

And even A, B, and C aren't good enough because this whole thing's coming down and they need D, E, F, G. well sure i mean if if you look at the just the nature and concentration of power resources money you know it's relatively small concentrations of that as you go through history you know by and large most people have been poor for a long time you know so you have to imagine that a lot of this is and we know you know just from people who talked about it a lot of this is multi-generational kind of ideas. You call them plots in some instances. You could call them, you know, Liberations and others and all of these, you know, different ideas. But a lot of this stuff is inherited at this point. And I think, you know, I don't think it's too much of a coincidence that we're seeing the same old playbooks being used.

I don't think it's too much of coincidence that, you know, the people with all the resources are lacking original ideas. You can't see, you know, when's the last time you saw an original movie? When's the last time that a new, a new Tolkien came about, right? You know, you know, we, our artistic creativity has all been stifled by the pursuit of the almighty dollar. And the people who control those dollars, they lack imagination just because, you know, a lot of, you know, like what we talked about before. If you didn't go through the struggles, if you don't go through the suffering,

if you didn't see those perspectives, well, you know, you didn't grow. You didn't understand those emotions, what it was to be human in that moment. You know, and you're going to be so detached from these real ideas of where, really, I would argue, that art is born and creativity is born,

that, you know, you're not going to go off and fund these creativity, creativity and art ideas. You're going to fund a thing. that works or you know the thing that we've always done and and then you end up in this quagmire which you know i kind of see from if you're looking at big media mainstream media all large it is pretty much a quagmire of idea there's nothing novel really coming out so yeah it brings me back to our idea of symbols and i heard a good quote that i wrote down that a word is

A word is symbolic of meaning. However, it is rendered powerless without experience. And so many people today, if we look at multi-generational plans of people in positions of authority, people, maybe the person that started that family or maybe the CEO of that company had the symbolic idea and the power behind that idea to make their family or company great. but when it's passed down to a child who didn't have to work for anything, they no longer have the ability or the respect of the community to make those ideas work. It's like a full-scale Billy Madison, only Billy doesn't get the company.

You know what I mean? It's this idea that you haven't earned it. And so it's going to die in your family. And you know what? The question is like, if you had a conversation. company or you built, say, a system that works unbelievable. And you get to a point in your life and you have your daughter versus some guy from a third world country, who are you going to give that idea to? Are you going to give it to your daughter? Or are you going to give it to a guy in a

third world country who's probably the best person to run it? But it's not your blood and you don't trust them. You know, I'm not sure anybody can answer that question until they get there, but, you know, what do you do? Right. But I would think most people, if they were being honest, would say their daughter. Yeah. I think so too. And that's, I think there's, you could dissect that and you could figure out a good chunk of the evidence and reasons why that may be. But at the end of the day, you know, it's, it's the way that we structure these things. You know, if, for instance, like health care for profit. Okay. How does how does that make sense from an ethical point of view? If, You know, if you know that profit is going to be the driver, eventually the drive for profit ignores, you know, all ethic.

So eventually you're going to run into a place where the drive for profit outweighs the ethical boundaries of practicing medicine, and you end up with a very broken system and a very dangerous system. I would say we're pretty close to that right now in a lot of places in the world. And, you know, news is another one. Should news be for profit? The same thing. If all of a sudden profit is the motivation, news ends up in a position where it's not about news,

it's about making profit, and thereby the news, the integrity of that dissipates. You know, and we see this with, and I would say anything, you know, that we deem as kind of like a pillar of society, you know, to have these things, is for-profit centers where, you know, the idea behind it is that, you know, somebody can come in with a better idea and take over the system.

The reality being that you'll get bought out far, far before you ever get that opportunity, and the amount of money that you're up against is, you know, makes, you know, the mountains of work that everybody does look like molehills compared to the amount of effort it would take to overcome. You know, these types of situations that we set ourselves up in don't know, they eventually, you know,

they will allow us to propel ourselves, but eventually we stagnate out. And I think we're seeing a lot of those stagnations right now. So I think the solution is really to just remove that for profit, or the start of the solution, is to remove that for profit from the, kind of pillars of society. You know, even things like when you get down to it like real estate, same type of idea.

The fact that you have this real estate market where now there's probably not a major city in the United States where a working family of two from, you know, even a moderate college education would afford to be able to a 30-year mortgage in some of the larger. city. You know, it's just, it's outside of their range of even thinking about it in, in some cases, right? So, you know, where does that end up? You know, if we keep running these things out, kicking the can down the road and keeping them unsustainable and, you know, knowing that we have these roadblocks and things like health care and information and medias, and, you know, just allowing this massive redistribution of resources, we don't have too much longer for it to work

before something breaks at a dramatic level. And I think we're kind of already seeing those fractures become very apparent of how detrimental they can be. If you were to rewind the world 15 years and ask if you ever thought that there would be conflict between nation states ever again. Everybody would look at you and be like, oh, no way.

It's peaceful, man. Look at this world, right? Yeah, here we are. And World War III is threatening to break out more and more every single day that goes by. Yeah. I think you could definitely make the case that we're in World War III. You know, we're in this world of, you know, trade war, currency war, world war. We've seen the trade war.

seen the tanker ships, you just sat outside the docks. That's clearly a trade war, currency war. Like, who's devaluing their money faster? And you could argue that the billions of dollars we're sending to Ukraine is really just going to recapitalize banks in Europe. You know, and the lines have been drawn. The only thing that hasn't been drawn is the first spot where the next Hiroshima is going to be.

That's an interesting argument. I can definitely see that perspective. There's another one that I see as well where, you know, I see this as the end of nation states. If you think about it from who has the money and who's pulling the punches here, we have for the first time, you know, these multinational companies that operate pretty much, you know, they can get around any tax, any regulation, they can act with autonomy throughout the world by, you know, one loophole or another.

And they're just more agile. They have, they have the ability to pivot. They have the ability to not, wait, not have to deal with populist movements. You know, we, we saw what, you know, everybody wanted to do a union in Tesla or what it was and he fired them all or something like that.

You know, so, you know, they have a lot more capability to be much more agile in the world. And I, because of the amount of resources that they have, I think, and if you look at things like the World Economic Forum and what they talk about, I think you see that there's a concerted effort to remove the influence and power of nation states across the world to bring it under the umbrella of, you know, a one world government type idea. Because realistically, you know, you could talk about it all you want, but how do you go from these nation states where everybody's taught, you know, their pledge of allegiance from when they were the youngest babe, you know, to, and have these mass militaries to everybody singing

kumbaya around the fire. Well, the reality is you probably don't. But if you were, wanted to get even close, you couldn't have the people who were shouting their national anthem. So you'd have to dismantle that in some way, shape, or form. And I think, you know, I think there's an argument to be made that this is the dismantling of those nation states. Yeah, that's a great argument to be made. And I read a book recent, well, a while back called connectography. And it was by Dr. Parag-Kana. And that's exactly what he was talking about is the end of nation states and the development of city states. It would be sort of like the Shenzhen model or, you know, I would call them.

Yeah, I call them technocratic city state, kind of how I think of them. You know, basically instead of where you have Apple owns the baseball field, Apple owns San Francisco type idea. Yeah. Yeah, and they already have it. I think that there's been, gosh, people should probably look this up. But I think that in Nevada somewhere, They're already trying.

Like that's what a smart city is, right? A smart city would be owned by Microsoft. They'd have all the, they'd have their own police force. They'd have their own currency. They'd have their own military. They'd have their own data centers and the people that would be employees are kind of like citizens. I mean, an employee at a company is like a citizen of a country.

You know, you're subjected to their laws, their rules. It's, it's almost there. Like you said, they operate worldwide. And you could even extrapolate the whole, let's, let's make everybody skeptical of government and get rid of and collapse the governments and then we'll just step in and pick up the pieces. Yeah, because everybody, everybody tries to Apple, right? You got one in your pocket. Yeah. So they, and then, and so, and if you look, by and large, there is a massive erosion of trust in state.

You know, it's easy to make the argument that that's for a good cause. you know, when you look at just the, just everything that's happened over the past 20-some years, I mean, the erosion of trust in government has just been a consistent downhill slide. You know, even back, even back in the late 90s, you had some rumbling to this. But ever since, you know, September 11th, it's really been, you know, just a continual one event after another.

then all of a sudden a revelation about a scandal and then another scandal and then another scandal that was covered up by these 10 people and then another scandal. And then eventually it's to the point where it's like, well, if there's so many scandals, it must all be a scandal. And, you know, that's a lot of people's takeaway. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, pretty soon you get a company dollar that you can only use for goods at the company store. right right that's that's pretty dark to think about you know and then you know you'll still have you know there's always been a free market it was the barter system way back in the day um right and free markets just evolved because you have something that i don't have and i have something that you don't have your your one goat looks pretty good for four chickens um and so you know uh depending on

where all of this fractures from a technological perspective, you know, there's already systems out there that use different cryptocurrencies as pure to peer market. Right. That are essentially, you know, you know, technical barter systems where, you know, people would be selling a cow for a Bitcoin type idea. Now, I think that's a ways off and you would have to have, you know, kind of a really large fracturing of nation states. but I could easily see something like that developing because even if there is a fraction of nation states,

all these technocratic city states are all going to want that interconnectivity, that access, that internet, whatever, what have you. So I think that would be one of those things that would persist technologically. Do you think that that would make like, it seems, you know, it seems it is the idea of nationalism that truly keeps or the belief in in our government that keeps people this idea of potential fairness or we the people to create a more perfect union this idea that i think still permeates the american continent is that we are one people we do believe in this country that's what stops an incredible revolt from happening i think there's a lot less belief in the corporate system like you know, I know people where I work that thoroughly detest the management there and believe them, you know, so I'm not sure what would protect the corporate leaders from running the city from all out, just death and destruction.

People would want to murder those guys. Well, I think, you know, it comes down to, you know, the idea is that a lot of these countries, in combined with World Economic Forum, the IMF had said that they're going to have, you know, these central bank digital currency. By 2025, the idea is to roll this out worldwide. You know, now if all of a sudden you get people on this system, a cashless system, and this cashless system break, now what happens? The only thing that has value is the access to all of these systems, for one, but then, you know, just common goods and, you know, things like that.

So the tech companies, the companies who would be able to keep these things, systems up and floating, they would be able to provide different qualities of life depending on, you know, their smart city level. So you would have people who would be like an Apple who would have their trillion dollar campus that would, you know, and then, you know, Appletown where everything was, you know, white and glossy. and the only way to get in there was be to have a certain amount of status, a certain amount of Apple coin, right? And so, and, you know, why wouldn't they? If you look at just the ideology of Apple people, they would love it if everybody around them was an Apple person, right? Especially the more nerdy people about it and the more tribalistic people about it,

you know, so would Android people, you know, and so would, you know, people who, you know, people who, loved Liddix, they would have their little breakaway mountain colonies, you know, you know. But the idea would be you would have to have some sort of central infrastructure to keep everything connected. And so the resources to do that, those companies have those resources now. Every nation state on this planet is up to their isn't debt from on the books, if you look at it on the book. Whereas where's all the money? Where's all the resources? It's sitting in the bank accounts of apples and Googles and Teslas and SpaceXes and people like that.

It's so, it's fascinating to think about because I can totally see, you know, if you look at Davos, that seems to me like a bunch of just CEOs talking, you know what, we could rule the world so much better than these governments. We're so much smarter than them. We're so much better than and we deserve it, you know, because look who we are. But I can just see it. I could see them putting this plan in motion and they get to 2020 and it's just failing spectacularly and they're like yeah maybe we don't want to but they're already pocket like we got to do it just look at sri lanka and people burning down government homes and it's like you sure you want to be in charge are you sure about that you know and it's it's fascinating to think about i and i and i can

see them throwing the government's under the bus like yeah it's the government's fault it's all these guys they did it you know and the government's like wait i mean this isn't a deal we had we thought we were working in this together you know it's well but i mean you have to you have to look at these guys they've look at the deals they've been cutting right i mean businesses have been cutting deals with governments that are pretty dang one-sided for the business um you know so and again it goes back to the idea that you know that at the top of these businesses you've got maybe a boardroom at best if not one guy who's able to just absurd authoritarian role.

And so, you know, they can, you know, they can make decisions. They can act faster. They can, if all of a sudden Apple wanted to give, really making fun of Apple here, but if all of a sudden they wanted to give everybody $1,000 who is an Apple customer, they can do that. They don't have to go through this infrastructure of the IRS and all these other things and the amount of institutional costs and all that. they just become a much more efficient operator at the end of the day because that's what businesses were, you know, built to do is to efficiently make money.

And, you know, now instead of just making money, it's making money, power, influence, data, accumulating resources. And, you know, as businesses, as data, really, and as, you know, resources become basically the arbiter of power and control today, I think that's, I think we're seeing that kind of almost a natural progression, if you will, towards that type of behavior, that sort of system. Yeah. Do you think that you can make the case that like the Chinese model of state-run capitalism is very similar to a business model, like of corporate. Corporateism?

Oh, yeah, sure. It's just a corporation with a lot of subdivisions. That's all it is. It's so true. Yeah. It makes sense. And it allows them, it allows them a lot of fluidity, allows them a lot of growth opportunity, which we've seen. It also allows for a lot of carelessness.

Yeah. You know, they don't broadcast it far and wide, but economically, they've been screwing the pooch for a long time. They've been lying and fudgeon in numbers for the past 20 years of this mass economic boom. so much so that you got, you know, you know, what was that one company? It was $300 billion or something asset fund that was, that couldn't afford to pay back its loan. And that's just like tip of the iceberg, you know, bad investment strategies. They have entire cities that were erected with zero people in, you know, that could hold 200,000 people.

You have a laundry list of these things. So from an economic perspective, it allows you to cheat. and they cheated. Now, the thing about economics and free markets is typically, you know, whenever you cheat, it comes home to Roost in one way, shape, or form. By and large, the world I would still consider a free market, even though it's heavily manipulated by each one of the individual players that are playing at that level.

But it's still a free market. And those things do eventually come home to Roos. That's why, you know, like you see, you know, kind of what happened to the Soviet Union and the breaking of that. You see, you know, kind of essentially what's happening in Russia and Ukraine right now and the way that those resources are being utilized to put pressures and break down these massive systems of influence. Let me ask you this one. When we, since we're talking about the Chinese model, do you see any difference between the Chinese model of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Americans model of the IMF where you, you know, you go in, you get it. people loans, they can't afford, and then you get their resources in return.

Is it the same thing with the Chinese model? You know, I think there's an argument to be made there. You know, it's, and it's refactured colonial. Yeah, it is. You know, we've done that before, you know, from multiple countries have done it. And, you know, now it's, it's just more socially acceptable to go in and be like, oh, hey, we actually invested. You just couldn't pay for it.

which shouldn't be more socially acceptable, but because it's not so overt, because you just can't capture it on a single shot of an image or even a video for that matter, then it kind of loses its effect. But, yeah, it's the same process, really. You know, it's going in, knowing that you're creating an unfair system, that eventually you're going to win simply because it's unfair. you know, I mean, it's, but then again, you know, people love to gamble. And, you know, that's the same idea behind gambling in casinos, except the idea in those systems is that there is a potential for you to win.

When you're talking colonialism or what the, the Belt and Road initiative or the IMF, there's no way to win. It's not a gamble. It's just simply a matter of time. You know, it's a question of resources and they have them all and you have none. Yeah, it's, you know, if we look at it like that, if we see the pattern of colonialism, then we see the idea that the guy with the most is like the house in Vegas, he's probably going to win or just a matter of time. Can the same be said for the structure of society in the United States? Like the people on the bottom don't have a chance and the people with the same.

all the resources have all the opportunity? Well, I, you know, I would move away from the absolutist of all or none. Of course you will. You had a book called No Absolutes. But, you know, there's an adage of, I'll pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Yeah. Which once upon a time in this country,

when as a single income family, you could afford a house, a car, and a retirement. Sure, that made a lot of sense. because there was the opportunity if a single individual worked hard that they could achieve you know pretty much the American dream quote unquote

that hasn't been true for quite some time you know there's there's places in this country that if you just so happen to be born into them the chances of you pulling yourself up by your boot shafts is you know may as well be negative if you factor in that early death as part of that equation.

You know, so there is a large socioeconomic problem that is, you know, the crux of many of these issues. And when you don't have that ability just because of the location that you were born into, to, you know, have a roof over your head, have water, have communication, have access to the internet, have a school that doesn't try to indoctrinate you or classify you or forget about you or, you know, any of the any of the other travesties that we're seeing, unfortunately, more and more with public education, especially in lower, you know, socioeconomic places, you know, factoring in all of this stuff, all of these, all of these nuances of where and when and how, you know, it gets to the point where the chance for me to succeed is so far removed from what I can see potentially as an individual that, you know,

this becomes a much more simple solution to my problem. As does, you know, not continuing to grow as an individual, as is, you know, if you start to see these things, you know, it's like, well, gosh, I don't want to deal with that. You know, I can't deal with that. I have, you know, I have bills to pay. I have people to feed. I have, you know, all this stuff. And, you know, you get these recursive loops that, these feedback loops that, you know, we're seeing, you know, again, this goes back to the, the amount of people who have a sixth grade education in this country, you know, was only 52 some percent.

18 percent are illiterate. Now, that's not to say that they're not functional in society. They can't pick up trades and things like this. and I'm sure that that's how they're getting by. But at the same time, you know, for in the realm of looking at it as a potential opportunity, how many opportunities did they get versus the other person who grew up in the right neighborhood and had a decent education,

a good upbringing, you know, or even, heck, had a full-time parent. You don't meet too many of those well-adjusted kids anymore. But, you know, there's a good upbringing, you know, there's a couple out there, right? Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a travesty that we really don't talk about the underlying problem. You know, it's nice to have an idea of how, you know, it would look if we solved it.

But what are we doing to solve these things? I don't see much in the way of solving these things. And usually when somebody comes out with a solution, it's tied to, you know, either a government subsidy, a grant, or venture capital money, which at the end of the day, all are subjected to somebody wants to make a profit eventually. And again, tying it back into when you have these profit as motivation for these pillars of society, these foundations of society, you know, you run yourself into this problem consistently over and over again.

Yeah. It's quite a conundrum. I'm inspired though. I'm inspired for multiple reasons. One is that I think the younger generation has had to see their parents walk such a tightrope that they themselves have learned to balance what's important. And because the older generation is getting older, because there are so many cracks in the system, I think that presents a lot of opportunity. And those are the things that I see coming forward.

I think that someone who may only have one parent, but has access to YouTube or can find something that they enjoy. Maybe they go to a school that... I didn't mean it that way, by the way. No, I hear you. I agree. I meant those as separate things, you know. even, you know, one parent, full-time parent, you know, well-adjusted, those were all

supposed to be separate ideas. I didn't want those to run together. Yeah, I hear you. I think, I'm sorry. Go ahead. It's what you're saying. I'm optimistic as well. Yes. You know, because the reality is that all these kids are getting exposed to all of this craziness. And, you know, typically, You know, you don't know until you know. And once you know, yeah, you're seeing a lot of different decision.

You know, you're seeing, you know, one of the statistics that came out of something was that, you know, most of the Generation Z aren't getting their driver's license until 18 or later. Whereas, you know, Generation X, it was the day they turned 16 type idea. You know, so, and there's a lot of, a lot of reasons for that. But a lot of it is, you know, the exposure to. what the world is, how the world operate. When we were growing up, yeah, you could turn

on the TV, but you couldn't go research things unless you wanted to go to the library and look through encyclopedias. And by the time you ingested a fraction of what you would get in a podcast like this, your eyes were already blurry and you couldn't even see straight anymore.

Now all of a sudden, you can be running and exercising and have a podcast and you can be You're driving your car on a commute and have a podcast. And then the exposure, the amount of information that, you know, everybody, but especially the younger generations because they're just more inclined to interact with it, is getting in contact with, you know, I think we're seeing those changes kind of happen in real time. And it makes me optimistic, too, because I, you know, at the end of the whole thing,

I think you get what's left of it as a group of people who realize where we made mistakes, where the, you know, what sort of pitfalls were be falling to us and how to extract ourselves from those situations, how to build around them, you know, or how or what not to build, you know, in, you know, when we're talking like things like nuclear technology, instead of, you know, uranium-based reactors, we can build thorium-based reactors. So yeah, nobody's going to have nuclear weapons, but we still have nuclear power with a lot less of the nuclear waste. You know, and these types of things could power, you know, millions of people and be very clean for the environment. But, you know, we won't get there in the climate of today.

It's going to take that next generation of all of those people seeing, you know, the pitfalls. And then also understanding that there is other solutions. you know, being exposed to new ideas and having conversations like this and, you know, looking at those podcasts and wondering what the heck's a thorium reactor. Why have I never heard of that one? You know, those types of, that type of information is, I think, what makes me the most optimistic. It's just the raw access to it. Yeah, that's so awesome.

You said that. I have a real-world example. I'm staying here with my wife's parents and her nephew came over. Young gentleman named Tyler, brilliant young kid. I think he's 19 or 20. Hasn't quite got his driver's license yet. However, he was talking to his dad. We were having a conversation in the living room and his dad was telling him all these things and he's like,

Dad, I don't believe any of that's true. In fact, I looked it up and what you're saying is a lot of, you know, you're just, you're really blustering right now. It was like everything you just said about a young guy who was kind of withdrawn from the norms of a gen Xer, but super analytical. And it's like, hmm. When it came to authority, he's like, yeah, I don't think that's actually accurate. In fact, what you're saying is completely this, this, and this. And it's so beautiful the way you summed it up because I just noticed that.

And mind you, I'm sitting next to him and his cousin was in town from Singapore. and she was giving us an idea about Singapore and why some of the pitfalls but beauty of it. This girl was 14 years old and she goes, you know, in Singapore we don't have a lot of homeless people because you need a license to become a beggar, to which I'm like, is it expensive to get a license to become a beggar? You know, but it's just, it's fascinating

because everything we were talking about, I got to see firsthand in a living room conversation with a 14-year-old, a 19-year-old, a 50-year-old, and a 47-year-old. It played out right there. It is inspiring to see. And I am thankful for those kids coming up. And I do think they have a lot of opportunity.

And I think that kids that age would really do well to listen to me and you talk more because, you know, it's an awesome podcast. But at least they have access to people like us giving us our opinions over 47 or, you know, 50 years. and they can condense it down into a bite-sized two-hour chunk and take away from it what they will. But it is a greater resource. It's like a condensed nutritious meal that you can get away some calories from. But I got to tell you, this is a fascinating conversation. I really enjoy them. And I really hope that people can take away from our conversations what you and I both take away from it.

I'm having a lot of fun, man. Thank you. Yeah, me too, man. Yeah, it's been a wonderful conversation. You know, I think if people just start to have these conversations on their own, you know, just ask a couple questions. Well, why is it that way? I mean, you know, we've gone down probably, I don't know, easily 48 rabbit holes that should be able to inspire at least one or two questions that, you know, we barely scratched the surface on. but you know it's been it's been fun painting the scene yeah it has been and i i i find the deeper

our conversations go the more questions i end up having and so i uh it's it's been it's an absolute pleasure benjamin i really appreciate him i because again people the book's called no absolutes and if you want to have a jump-off point to any one of these rabbit holes i got to do is buy the book and check it out and you'll come away with a better understanding of not only one of what we're talking about, but the way I think you'll be able to understand the framework from which we're operating. It's an awesome read, and it's fun to read. If you go to Benjamin's website, which will be in the show notes below, you can check it out, and you can always ask us questions, and that's what we've got for today. Is there anything else you want to leave anybody with, Benjamin?

I don't think so. I just hope everybody has a wonderful week. You as well, and enjoy the rest of your travel. I will, my friend, and it's always a pleasure. And I look forward to talking to you next week at our regular time and we'll do it again. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending time with us and we'll talk to you next week. All right. Aloha. Let's see if I can do this again.