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An essay called Intimations of a New Worldview.
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It's easily the best thing I've read this year, if not in many years.
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I'm making an argument for the existence of objective value.
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We experience meaning in life when we are subjectively attracted to something that's objectively attractive.
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You hit all of the catnip words for me there, Brett.
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Complexity is a precondition for the existence of anything and and life being the most complex phenomenon that there is.
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A living, breathing thing that we are in effect creating as we go.
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Complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos.
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The sort of solution lies at the level of the individual, and that's where we need to be looking in the first instance.
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What led to the greatest advancement in the scope of cooperation among civilizations was primarily war.
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Admitting your mistakes, and that's gonna acquire a lot of pain and that's gonna acquire a lot of humility and redirection.
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But following your heart is absolutely delightful.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone, it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another addition of Infinite Loops.
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Today, something very different.
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As Monty Python would say, now for something completely different.
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Although really it isn't because I did this with my friend, Tom Morgan, who is a guest today, as well as Brett Anderson, who is an evolutionary psychologist, PhD student at the University of New Mexico.
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You had me at evolutionary psychology, Brett.
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But what we're going to do today, also today, I have a co-host, my colleague and teammate at Infinite Loops, Ed William.
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Okay, we're going to get, this is a training session for Ed.
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Okay, so today we're going to follow a similar format to what I did the last time I recorded with Tom, and we are going to turn the floor over to Tom and Brett to outline their thesis, which is going to take a while.
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It's very, very interesting thesis, and thus their appearance here on Infinite Loops.
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And then we are going to pepper them with questions afterwards.
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So Tom, throwing it over to you.
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Tom Morgan: Thanks, Jim, and thanks for having me back again.
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Although I'd like the focus today to be Brett, a couple of months ago, a good friend of mine, Sammy, sent me an article by Brett, an essay called ‘Intimations of a New Worldview’.
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I read it and there's like eight bullet points up top, and I read those eight bullet points and I was like, "All right, I'm subscribing for the maximum tier of Brett’s Substack. This is unbelievable."
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And I read the rest of it.
2:29
It takes 90 minutes, it's absolutely worth it, and it has completely blown me away.
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It's easily the best thing I've read this year, if not in many years.
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read this year, if not in many years. Tom Morgan: And the basic reason why is that, the reason why my friend sent it to me is that there's all these ideas in there that I think are monstrously important, but rather than just being the insane ramblings of some guy in his bedroom like me, it's actually incredibly well
3:01
founded and sourced in evolutionary psychology and complex adaptive systems and actual quote unquote science in that it seems like physics is catching up with a lot of indigenous wisdom and there's a lot of other really fascinating kind of overlaps and agreements. And Brett just
3:14
And Brett just pulled them all together in this kind of unbelievable synthesis, something that I know you and I are both obsessed with.
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So I think Brett's going to lay out that argument right now, and then we'll probably try and untie it afterwards with some thoughts.
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So Brett, floor's yours, mate. Brett Andersen: Sure.
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Thank you for that very kind introduction, Tom, and thanks for having me, Jim.
3:36
Yeah, so in this article, in this essay called ‘Intimations of a New Worldview’, one of the ways of thinking about what I'm doing, I don't really construe it this way in the essay, but one of the ways of thinking about what I'm doing is that I'm making an argument for the existence of objective value.
3:55
And this is a problem because moral philosophers have wrestled with this for a very long time because there is this strange fact about human morality, which is that we construe morality and we construe, well, there's two reasons why objective values are important.
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Brett Andersen: The first one has to do with what John Vervaeke calls the meaning crisis.
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Susan Wolf is a philosopher who wrote this very nice book called ‘Meaning in Life’.
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And what she argues in that book, and I think she's essentially correct about this, is that we experience meaning in life when we are subjectively attracted to something that's objectively attractive.
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And what she argues in that book is that modern people have a very hard time, or that the idea of objective attractiveness is not viable to many modern people.
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Brett Andersen: The way that we used to construe things as being objectively attractive is that they're objectively attractive because they are emanating from a transcendent world.
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And many of us don't believe in that kind of transcendent world anymore.
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But the other reason why objective values are important is because, there was a very nice paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2018 by a guy named Kyle Stanford, and what he pointed out is that we construe morality as objective.
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Even if we don't say that it’s objective, we still think about it as objective.
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Brett Andersen: And so if you were to say you like pistachio ice cream, and I were to say that I like chocolate ice cream, we can disagree about that without anybody being wrong.
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So that's a subjective preference.
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But if you were to say, "You know what, I really like Hitler.
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I really think that Hitler was a good guy."
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Okay, well, I'm not going to treat that in the same way that I would treat your preference for ice cream.
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We treat those kinds of moral claims as if they're objective.
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We act as if somebody is objectively wrong if they say something off the wall, like murder is good.
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We would act as if that person is objectively wrong.
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Brett Andersen: So moral philosophers have wrestled with this question because where does that objectivity come from?
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It's certainly not clear.
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But I'm making the case here for objective value, but it's a little bit different than the case that's been made before.
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So I have these eight points that I want to make and I'll go through them relatively quickly.
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Brett Andersen: The first point that I make is that, so there's a recent book published by Bobby Azarian called ‘The Romance of Reality’, and in that book, he's making the case, it's a synthesis of about the last 30 years of advancements and complexity science in the scientific study of complexity.
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Complexity is a very interesting phenomenon.
6:26
So Lee Smolin, Lee Smolin's this physicist, he wrote this great book in 1997 called ‘The Life of the Cosmos’.
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And in that book he had a discussion of complexity that I think is very, very interesting.
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He said that the newfound understanding of complexity in science was going to change the way that we understand the world, because in the old sort of Newtonian understanding of the world, life is an accident, life is an accidental byproduct.
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But in the newfound understanding of complexity, our very understandings of space and time, our very understandings of where things are located in space and time require a complex world.
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Brett Andersen: And so complexity cannot be a byproduct.
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Complexity is a precondition for the existence of anything, and life being the most complex phenomenon that there is.
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What Smolin argues is that this means that life and complexity are not byproducts, are not accidents.
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They were in some sense inevitable.
7:15
What Bobby Azarian does is he takes, again, it's probably the last 25, 30 years of scientific study in this area, and shows how there is this process of complexification that is inevitable in some sense.
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Brett Andersen: It's a process by which particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become stars, galaxies life and so on.
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So from the beginning of the universe, we've seen this increase in complexity.
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And Bobby argues that this increase in complexity is in some sense inevitable.
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And there was a paper published in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that laid out the sort of contours of this process, what the actual pieces of this process are.
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Brett Andersen: One of the pieces is something called self-organized criticality.
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So that's a technical term, but what it means is that complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos.
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So a crystal is like an ordered system and a crystal is not complex because if you know what one part of the system looks like, you know what the whole thing looks like.
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A gas is on the other end of the continuum. A gas is chaos. It's a chaotic system.
8:26
But it's also not complex because, again, if you know what one part looks like, you know what the whole thing looks like.
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Complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos.
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Brett Andersen: The question, and Pere Bosch was the physicist who did a lot of this work, the question for Pere Bosch was how do systems get to that narrow window between order and chaos in nature?
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How do they get there without any tuning from an outside agent because, of course, we can tune systems to that critical point, but systems in nature have to get there all on their own, and so they self-organize.
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They self-organize from the bottom up then.
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So we refer to that as self-organized criticality.
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That's one piece of the puzzle in explaining the emergence of complexity in nature.
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Brett Andersen: What Yuri Wolf and colleagues argue in this 2018 paper is that there's another puzzle piece that has to be included in this in order to explain the emergence of hierarchical complexity, which is the fact that different patterns emerge at different levels of analysis.
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And what they argue that this other piece is, is competing interactions.
9:20
So at all levels of analysis, what they argue is that there are competing interactions, and those competing interactions create tension.
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And that tension leads to self-organized criticality, which is it manifests as these avalanche events.
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But that tension leads to self-organized criticality and complexity.
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So I'll give a couple examples of that.
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And then they argue that this is true in biology, but it's also true in the pre biological world as well.
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Brett Andersen: So long distance versus short distance interactions in a molecular structure can lead to this kind of tension.
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Competing interactions between the interests of individuals and the interests of the group that they're embedded in, competing interactions between the interests of males and females of a species, that's sexual selection, competing interactions between parasites and hosts.
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All of these things can lead to complexification, both in the physical world, the pre biological world, and in the biological world.
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So that's basically point one.
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So I argue that there's a process of complexification and I sort of outline what the contours of this process look like.
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Brett Andersen: The second point is that this process of complexification manifests in biology.
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So there's a couple of books that were both published in 2000.
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One is John Stewart's book called ‘Evolution's Arrow’.
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So he argues that there's a direction to evolution, that direction is in the direction of increasing complexity.
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Robert Wright wrote a book called Nonzero, and he also argues that in cultural evolution there's a direction towards increasing complexity.
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And what Robert Wright really makes clear in that book, and it winds up very nicely with what Yuri Wolf and colleagues were doing in that 2018 paper, what Robert Wright makes clear in his book, Nonzero, is that it's competition that has led to cultural complexification.
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Brett Andersen: So especially competition between groups leads to increased cooperation within groups because more cooperative groups tend to win in the competitive landscape.
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But also competition between people within groups leads to specialization.
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And so that competition leads to both integration and differentiation.
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And that's actually the definition of complexity.
11:34
So the definition of complexity, there's multiple definitions floating around, but one definition that has been used across multiple literatures is that a more complex system is both highly differentiated and highly integrated.
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And so we see that this process of competing interactions leading to self-organized criticality, leading to complexification, manifests in biology, and it manifests in cultural evolution as well.
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So that's basically point two.
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Brett Andersen: Point three is that we have been selected for our participation in this process of complexification.
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So a couple of people that I point to, to make this case.
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So Geoffrey Miller wrote a book in 2000 as well called ‘The Mating Mind’, and he argued in that book, so there's this problem in human biology, which is trying to understand why we have such big brains.
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So human beings, for our body size, we have huge brains.
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We have brains that are extremely, oh, what's the word, convoluted, extremely complex and large brains.
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And these are very costly because they're calorically costly, but they're also developmentally costly.
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And so the question is why did we evolve these big brains and why did we evolve them so rapidly?
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Because it only took maybe two and a half million years, which sounds like a long time, but in evolutionary terms, it's pretty quick.
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Brett Andersen: What Geoffrey Miller argued is that this was very likely to be due to runaway sexual selection.
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So one of the ways you can get rapid evolutionary change is that you can get this feedback loop caused by sexual selection where you see this in, for example, birds, so like peacocks.
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The preference in females for the tail of the male peacock becomes genetically correlated with the genes that promote the tail in the male peacock.
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When that correlation happens, you end up getting this rapid positive feedback loop where you can get massive evolutionary change in a very short time.
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Brett Andersen: And Geoffrey argues, and I think somewhat convincingly, that that was likely the case for human encephalization.
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But it doesn't tell the whole story because one of the things that it doesn't explain is why there isn't a large sex difference in brain size, which you normally get with sexual selection.
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And the process of runaway sexual selection would probably be faster actually than two and a half million years.
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That's what Geoffrey argued anyways.
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Brett Andersen: A more recent paper came out which argued that yes, sexual selection played a role, but they also explained why we don't see this sex difference.
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And also it makes it clear why we were selected for our participation in this process of complexification.
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So this was Ed Hagen and Zachary Garfield in a 2019, I believe it's still a pre-print.
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And what they argue, so first off, they point out that leaders have increased reproductive success.
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So especially like male leaders have increased reproductive success.
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And this poses an evolutionary problem because reproductive success is a zero sum game.
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So if one man succeeds in terms of reproductive success, that's success that comes at the cost of the success of every other man in that group.
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Brett Andersen: And so the question is, why in the world would men select somebody for leadership if that person is going to have greater success that comes at the cost of their success?
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This poses an evolutionary puzzle.
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What they argue is that leaders provide benefits to the group.
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So what they do is they solve problems in such a way that it benefits themselves at the same time as it benefits everybody else in the group.
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So they call this joint utility improvement.
15:41
Really what that is is the discovery and facilitation of non-zero sum games.
15:45
Brett Andersen: I left out something, so going back to point two, I actually left out the fact that in biology and in cultural evolution, the process of complexification manifests as an increase in the scope of non-zero sum games over time.
15:58
So over cultural evolution, we see these larger and larger civilizations which become more integrated and more differentiated through specialization over time.
16:05
And what Robert Wright argued in ‘Nonzero’ is that's just the increase in the scope of non-zero sum games.
16:09
You see the same thing in biology where you go from single celled organisms to multicellular organisms.
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Brett Andersen: What this idea from Ed Hagen and Zachary Garfield suggests is that we were selected based on our propensity to discover and facilitate non-zero sum games.
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And women were selected based on their propensity to do this in the context of motherhood and the family.
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That's what they argue, that motherhood represents the sort of paradigm of this kind of leadership that they're arguing for.
16:40
And so it sort of solves the problem of why there wasn't a sex difference.
16:45
Brett Andersen: And what they argue is that this capacity to discover and facilitate non-zero sum games largely involves the ability to solve combinatorially explosive problems.
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Because when you're solving a problem just for yourself, it can sometimes be relatively simple.
16:58
But if you have to solve a problem such that it's good for you, it's good for your family, it's good for your reciprocal relationships, and it's good for the group at large, and it's good for all of those things at the same time, this can quickly become combinatorially explosive.
17:14
So a combinatorially explosive problem is one where there's a potentially infinite number of solutions, only a few of which are optimal or close to optimal.
17:24
And generally speaking, there's not an algorithm for solving these problems.
17:29
So how is it that we solve these kinds of problems?
17:29
And that brings us to point four, which is that our ability to solve combinatorially explosive problems relies on our ability to realize relevance.
17:42
Brett Andersen: So John Vervaeke, who is somebody who has massively influenced me, has this YouTube series called ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’.
17:51
And one of John's sort of main shticks in that series and in his academic work is relevance realization.
17:58
And John and I have published on this subject.
18:02
Relevance realization, John calls it the criterion of the cognitive, relevance realization refers to this fact that within cognitive science there are a family of problems and they can all be reduced to the problem of how is it that with the infinite complexity of the world around us, how is it that we intelligently ignore all of the irrelevant inputs and zero in on only those things that are relevant to us?
18:29
And this also goes for things like our own long-term memory, because we have a huge number of things in our long-term memory.
18:33
How is it that we zero in on the relevant aspects of that?
18:37
Brett Andersen: And John has a theory of relevance realization, a theory of a process, the process by which we realize relevance.
18:48
And so what my argument is, to connect this to the third point is that, and what he argues, is that our ability to solve combinatorially explosive problems relies on our ability to realize relevance.
18:58
And what's so interesting about this in the context of this essay is that the process that John describes as relevance realization is the same as the process of complexification described by Yuri Wolf and colleagues.
19:14
And the overlap between them is really uncanny because they talk about it in terms of competing interactions that lead to self-organized criticality that leads to an increase in integration.
19:25
Brett Andersen: Okay, well, for John, he doesn't use the term competing interaction.
19:26
He uses the term opponent processing.
19:32
So there's an opponent processing relationship between the pursuit of efficiency on the one hand and the pursuit of resiliency on the other.
19:38
And he argues that it's the tension caused by this opponent processing that that tension leads, and he explicitly refers to self-organized criticality, leads to self-organized criticality in the brain, which leads to increased complexification over time.
19:54
And so that process that we've been selected for participating in, which is relevance realization, is the process of complexification. So that's point four.
20:06
Brett Andersen: Point five relates this to the work of Jordan Peterson.
20:07
So Jordan Peterson wrote this book in 1999 called ‘Maps of Meaning’.
20:14
And whatever you may think about Jordan these days, he's a little bit abrasive on Twitter, let's say, but whatever you may think about him these days, he spent a lot of time on that book, and the lectures that go along with that book are really, really great.
20:30
And they were really helpful to me.
20:30
But in that book, he lays out a process and he lays out this pattern that he calls the meta-mythology. It's a process.
20:45
And what I argued in this essay and in a previous essay is that that pattern that he lays out, that he calls the meta-mythology, is relevance realization.
20:51
It is the same pattern as relevance realization.
20:56
So what are the overlaps?
20:56
Brett Andersen: Well, one of the overlaps is that it occurs at the border between order and chaos.
20:58
It involves this descent into chaos.
21:05
And within relevance realization that descent into chaos manifests as an insight.
21:09
And insight is the way that we break the way that we're framing the world in order to frame the world in a new way so that we can better solve combinatorially explosive problems.
21:20
Brett Andersen: The meta-mythology involves the same pattern as an insight.
21:22
So it involves an initial period of stability, an anomaly that disrupts that stability, a dissent into chaos, and a re-emergence into a higher order.
21:32
And that's a process that occurs at the border between order and chaos.
21:32
And it's represented mythologically as the hero figure.
21:37
So what he argues is that mythological narratives have a general structure.
21:49
And of course, Jordan isn't the first person to argue this.
21:49
Carl Jung made this argument.
21:53
Joseph Campbell made this argument.
21:53
Mythological narratives have a general structure, which Campbell called the monomyth, and which Jordan calls the meta-mythology.
22:04
But that general structure is what I just described, order, descend into chaos, reemergence into a higher order.
22:09
Brett Andersen: So how is it that disparate cultures could arrive at a general structure within their mythological narratives?
22:20
And what Jordan argues is that over the course of human evolution, we have observed individuals who have engaged in heroic behavior.
22:26
We have observed individuals who have achieved great things, let's say, and we tell stories about them.
22:32
And we have all these stories about these particular individuals engaging in whatever it may be, whether they're a great hunter or an innovator or a leader.
22:45
Brett Andersen: And what we do, so we love to tell stories, so there's a study that showed that like 80% of nighttime talk among this hunter gatherer group was storytelling.
22:54
But we also love to engage in abstraction. We generalize.
22:58
And so what we've done is we've attempted to find the general pattern underlying these particular narratives, sort of like the line of best fit, a pattern that conveys the wisdom that's inherent to all of these particular stories. And we tell that. And it's a fiction.
23:14
But it's not a fiction in terms of being untrue.
23:14
But it's a fiction in terms of conveying the general pattern underlying many particular narratives.
23:24
Brett Andersen: Erik Hole argues that, well, I mean, Erik Hoel and Jordan Peterson have both said that these fictions in some sense, they're more real than real because they have a general ability that's not inherent to any...
23:52
I'll find my place here in just a second.
23:52
And the point is that that pattern lines up very nicely with relevance realization.
24:00
It's the same pattern as relevance realization.
24:00
So we love to tell stories and we also love to engage in abstraction.
24:05
And so what we do is, we've told all these stories about particular people doing particular things, but then we abstract out the general pattern, the general pattern underlying these heroic behaviors and we tell that as a story.
24:15
And it's a fiction, but it's not a fiction in terms of being untrue.
24:20
So Erik Hoel is this neuroscientist who has made a very similar argument to Jordan Peterson in some ways, but he argues that these fictions are more real than real, because they convey a generalizability that's not inherent to any of the particular narratives.
24:36
And so that's basically point 5, right?
24:36
Our mythological narratives are conveying this pattern, right?
24:43
Conveying this pattern of relevance realization, which is also this process of complexification. Brett Andersen: Point 6.
24:49
I argue that our participation in this process is optimal.
24:49
It's optimal because, so this process is the same thing as self-organized criticality.
24:56
The argument has been made.
25:01
So self-organized criticality, that concept originated in statistical physics, but it's become an important concept in biology and neuroscience.
25:05
In biology, the theoretical case has been made that biological systems function optimally at criticality, meaning that they function optimally at the border between order and chaos. This is true.
25:18
And they're also empirical studies which have found that systems in nature are actually functioning at or near criticality.
25:29
This is true of things like genetic regulatory systems, flocks of birds, and most importantly for our purposes, the brain.
25:34
And that's why this concept has become important in neuroscience, because criticality has all these very strange properties that make it very interesting in terms of analyzing the brain, in terms of self-organized criticality.
25:47
So one argument that's been made is that the brain functions optimally at criticality.
25:54
Brett Andersen: Another very interesting argument that's been made is that consciousness emerges at criticality in the brain.
26:02
So what sedatives do is they take you out of criticality by increasing order in the brain.
26:09
And it's been argued that the reason why sedatives work is because consciousness emerges at criticality and by tilting you towards too much order, they take you out of criticality and therefore take you out of consciousness.
26:20
Interestingly enough, psychedelics increase entropy in the brain, which is essentially chaos.
26:24
And it's been argued that they actually move you slightly closer to true criticality.
26:29
But the point being that this process that occurs at the border between order and chaos, it involves this dissent into chaos and reemergence, it's the process of relevance realization.
26:42
That process represents the optimal pattern of behavior biologically and psychologically.
26:48
Brett Andersen: So psychologically, there is a nice paper written by my collaborator, Mark Miller published this earlier this year, where he's looking at wellbeing, he's looking at psychological wellbeing from a predictive processing perspective.
27:00
Predictive processing is this emerging framework within cognitive science.
27:05
And basically what he argues in that paper is that there's all sorts of indicators that psychological wellbeing emerges at the border between order and chaos.
27:15
And that this process, so he uses some technical terms to describe it, he describes it in terms of destroying your own fixed point to tractors.
27:20
Just another way of saying breaking frame really, involving these sorts of dissents into chaos, that that process is necessary for psychological wellbeing.
27:32
So it's both biologically and psychologically optimal. So that's point 6.
27:37
Point 7 is that our participation in this process, not only is it optimal, it represents our participation in the process of creation itself.
27:43
So in point 1, I talked about Bobby Azarian's book, which argued that this process of complexification underlies the emergence of novelty in nature, it underlies the emergence of new phenomenon.
28:02
And so our participation in this process represents our participation in that process, the process by which novelty emerges in nature, the process of creation itself.
28:15
And then point 8 is probably the strangest and craziest point that I make.
28:15
So there's a nice paper published this year or to be published soon this year in Human Nature again by Ed Hagen, where Hagen and Aaron Lightner is the other person on the paper.
28:30
They argue that, it's a new theory about supernatural beliefs.
28:35
And in the old sort of understanding, especially among cognitive scientists, supernatural beliefs are generally construed as being essentially bullshit, and the task is to understand how it is that we could believe this bullshit, basically was the task.
28:54
What they're arguing is that, this is not the case, that actually supernatural beliefs are a cognitive strategy that we use to get a grip on the world.
29:04
Brett Andersen: We personify things.
29:04
Part of the reason we do this is because human beings, especially among primates, we're intensely social creatures.
29:14
So what an analogy is, right?
29:14
An analogy is just using a familiar pattern to get a grip on a novel pattern.
29:20
Well, social patterns are extremely familiar to us, and we use those kinds of social patterns to get a grip on novel, complex patterns.
29:26
And what they argue is that complex systems, it's especially useful to personify complex systems.
29:34
Because you can think about complex systems in terms of intentionality.
29:39
And so I'll give an example of this and complex phenomenon in general.
29:46
An example of this which Jordan Peterson argued for in his series on the biblical lectures.
29:53
And I don't know if this is true, but I think it's a nice example of how this could work.
29:58
He argues that the God of the Old Testament was really a personification of the future.
30:04
Because we were discovering this idea of sacrifice, of sacrificing something in the present to get something in the future.
30:09
Brett Andersen: And the God of the Old Testament is a harsh judge.
30:11
The God of the Old Testament is a harsh judge who demands sacrifice, and that is what the future is like.
30:16
Unless you make the proper sacrifices in the present, the future will judge you harshly.
30:21
And so perhaps it's the case that as we're getting a grip on this idea of sacrificing something in the present for the future, it's very useful for us to personify this concept.
30:32
Now, what I argue is that this process of complexification that I'm talking about, it's been personified in terms of these hero figures.
30:38
So the Marduk in Babylon, Horus in Egypt, Jesus Christ, in our own culture, The Buddha, these are all personifications of this process of complexification.
30:50
And we have called that process, we've called those hero figures, God, right?
30:55
Well, it's interesting to me because that conception of God is actually almost identical to the conception of God put forward by a guy named Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher who I really enjoy.
31:08
Brett Andersen: He's known as the sort of founder of the process philosophy in the 20th century.
31:15
But Alfred North Whitehead essentially argued that God is a creative process that permeates nature that we can participate in.
31:20
Now, he came to that conclusion from a somewhat different line of thought than I'm coming at it from, but the overlap is really uncanny, but it's also the same conception of God that was put forward by Jordan Peterson, both in ‘Maps of Meaning’, somewhat implicitly in ‘Maps of Meaning’.
31:34
But he made it very explicit in this conversation that he had with, I think it was like Dave Rubin.
31:40
And so this conception of God is not original to me, but this argument that I've made here seems to make it extremely viable, or at least, it's made it somewhat viable to me as a sort of scientifically...
31:57
I ground my worldview in the scientific enterprise to some degree.
32:05
Brett Andersen: And then at the end of the essay, I sort of argue that this worldview that I put forward here can potentially be used as a response to the meaning crisis.
32:13
So John Vervaeke wrote a book called Zombies In...
32:20
I think it was called ‘Zombies in Western Culture’.
32:25
And in that book, he puts forward these three orders that were lost when we lost our ability to believe, at least in the way that we once did, in the sort of Christian Aristotelian worldview.
32:37
He calls these the nomological order, the narrative order and the normative order and the nomological order is basically the connection that exists between the mind and reality.
32:41
Now, in the sort of Christian Aristotelian worldview, this was a teleological connection because Aristotle of course, construed the world in terms of teleology, right?
32:51
The rock falls to the earth because it wants to meet the earth or however he talked about it.
33:02
Brett Andersen: But of course, our mind is teleological as well.
33:04
And so there was that connection, but we lost that connection.
33:04
The connection here is that, well, relevance realization is the process by which cognitive development occurs, right?
33:09
Relevance realization is the general process by which the mind works, and that process is the same as the process by which novelty emerges in nature.
33:19
And so there's this deep continuity between the process of complexification on nature in the process of complexification in our own mind.
33:28
And that's a kind of nomological order. The narrative order.
33:28
The narrative order involves a participation, or at least in the Christian worldview, it involved a participation in the process by which the kingdom of God would be built on earth, is basically what it was.
33:43
In this worldview that I put forward, there is a kind of narrative order, it's a little different than that I think, but it's participating in the process of creation itself, which it doesn't result in some sort of final utopia, but it's an ongoing...
33:55
The process itself is the goal.
34:02
Brett Andersen: Participating in the process itself is the goal, it's not like there's some final utopia that's the end goal.
34:04
And it's because participating in that process is, well, it's optimal, but as far as I'm concerned, it's almost equivalent to living a good life.
34:17
And then the normative order.
34:17
The normative order requires a connection between ontology and values.
34:26
So a connection between what is really real and what is valuable.
34:32
And in the Christian worldview, of course, what was really real is, God is emanating values to us, we have values because they were given to us essentially by a transcending God.
34:45
Brett Andersen: But in this worldview, it's somewhat different because what's really real is this process of complexification, it's the grounding of what's real.
34:53
And it also represents the existence of objective value because our participation in this process is optimal, and that optimality is supported by mainstream scientific findings.
35:01
And what I want to make clear here is that with the exception of some of the obvious ones, whether this is participating in creation, all this stuff that I'm citing here is mainstream science, these are papers published in human nature and so on.
35:18
So I'm not relying on fringe science, but yeah, that's basically it.
35:26
So it's a connection between all these eight points.
35:30
And I argue that this can be a response to the meaning crisis. Yeah.
35:35
Tom Morgan: I think that's amazing, Brett.
35:37
And I don't expect that to be easy for people straight off the bat. There's so many ideas.
35:37
And what I find interesting is that there's so much agreement between what are relatively disparate parts.
35:48
Having sat on it for a couple of months, I'll maybe tell you what's come out of it for me in terms of landing the plane, and then maybe Jim would like to jump in.
35:54
But it's like, all right, I think Jim and I both kind of closet Daoists, and there's a flow of things.
35:59
There's a line in Bobby Azarian's book that you tipped me onto ‘Romance of Reality’, which is, "The goal of any species is to become statistically correlated with its environment."
36:09
Which doesn't sound very romantic, but basically it just means getting the maximum amount of bang for your buck, moving through the world as efficiently as possible.
36:20
Tom Morgan: And I always think of the example of the Daoist sage who clicks his fingers and creates a thunderstorm.
36:24
You're getting the most amount of egoic action for the least amount of expiration as it were, and that your opponent processing is perfect.
36:31
How do you actually do that?
36:35
What does this mean for our lives?
36:35
I think you've nailed it with the positive sum games, that you basically are attracted to playing some sort of positive sum games in your own life because it feels intrinsically meaningful and fun and joyful, and you love it, and it pulls you down into a niche, while also making you more integrated into the whole system.
36:56
Tom Morgan: And that's also tied into relevance realization, which appears to me to be kind of functionally equivalent to wisdom. And wisdom.
36:59
It turns out correlates with happiness, flourishing like your wellbeing in life, your psychological wellbeing, kind of everything.
37:09
And whilst I think it's going to be difficult to necessarily pull this all together, it's fascinating to me that all of these different factors seem to correlate with real life flourishing, despite them being relatively abstract concepts.
37:20
I think that's all I had to say, but maybe Jim wants to jump in on Brett.
37:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I will jump in.
37:29
You hit all of the catnip words for me there, Brett.
37:39
Just a few observations and then a question.
37:39
If you read the early quantum physicists in their non physics writing, all of them, or mostly all of them, I'm thinking of David Bohm, I'm thinking of Schrodinger, I'm thinking of all of those, that early crew, they wrote things that were very, very similar to your thesis.
38:02
The whole idea, they started to see the world, the universe, as a participatory thing, not as in the Newtonian sense, a machine, no, quite far away from that, it was exactly in their writings that I've read, and that is consistent with the quantum physics that they're finding is, no, no, it's actually a living, breathing thing that we are in effect creating as we go.
38:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so I find that absolutely fascinating.
38:39
And then on consciousness, there is some speculation right now, again, mostly from physicists, that consciousness might involve or be explainable through the idea of quantum entanglement, where we as a species, other species as well, are entangled in some way that we can't describe right now because it needs to violate things being able to move faster than the speed of light.
39:20
And so if we have information A, here and a million light years away, information B, here, experimental or experimenting on this has proven that you change this right here at A instantly changes B.
39:45
So that's a quandary, because that means that either Einstein is wrong and that light does not travel at a constant, or it means that there is something happening at the quantum level where these two things change instantaneously because they're connected.
40:01
And so that loop of connection allows for changing something here, and then a million light years away, changes here.
40:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So that's just more of a comment than anything else, I'd like your insights into that.
40:22
But the second one, to go back to the more pedestrian, but very important idea of competition leading to positive sum cooperation, I fully subscribe to that.
40:37
If you look at what I'm doing right now with a new company, it's all based on positive sum games.
40:43
And I think that we are at an inflection point in society, and I have said often that I personally believe the Promethean are among us, and they are going to be bringing lots of changes to the world.
41:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I guess, to put it in the form of a question, what do you think about this idea of quantum entanglement?
41:11
I'm fascinated by the way, about sedatives leading to you turning off consciousness, that's another hint I think, that there's obviously some involvement there, and especially psychedelics opening the aperture of our brain and seeing a world that is very, very different than naive realism would suggest.
41:40
So let's first get your thoughts on quantum entanglement and then shift it over to a more practical, if competition between groups leads to more cooperation and then competition within the in group leads to specialization, how do we practically take advantage of that to get us to better outcomes? Brett Andersen: Yeah.
42:06
So in terms of quantum entanglement, or what are my thoughts, and I don't really have any thoughts on quantum entanglement, mostly because I don't may have any illusions about understanding it.
42:16
What's so interesting to me is that Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy I highly resonate with, and I think it's very consistent with a lot of the arguments that I'm making, Whitehead was motivated, so Whitehead was somebody who did understand the mathematics of quantum theory.
42:29
So he was a very unique character in the sense that he was a mathematical genius.
42:37
So he wrote this book with Bertrand Russell called the ‘Principia Mathematica’, sort of broke math essentially.
42:41
But he was also somebody who was educated in a way that basically nobody's educated anymore.
42:46
He had read the entire western canon, essentially, all of the major Western philosophers.
42:50
And so what he realized was that quantum theory and general relativity and special relativity broke western philosophy.
42:59
Brett Andersen: The assumptions that were inherent in western philosophy we're essentially broken by quantum mechanics.
43:01
And so what he argued is that this would require a shift in our ontology from what had been essentially mainstream metaphysics, mainstream ontology since Plato, which was a substance ontology, the idea that what is really real are things, substances, particles, however you want to say that.
43:21
What he argued is that, "No, no.
43:29
What's really real at bottom is our processes and the relations between processes."
43:29
He called it a process relational ontology.
43:37
And this was apparent to him because of quantum theory.
43:37
Now, other people have said the same thing.
43:43
So despite the fact that I don't understand quantum theory, I don't understand the math at all, but there have been papers written recently, a paper published in nature recently that said, and it was this physicist who said, "We have got to learn to stop thinking in terms of things.
43:55
Things are not real in the way that we think that they are.
44:03
What's real are processes."
44:03
Brett Andersen: And interestingly enough, Iain McGilchrist, who I know has affected Tom's thought a lot, makes this argument in his newest book, and to some degree in its first book, ‘The Master and His Emissary’, and argues that process thinking is right hemisphere thinking, really.
44:17
And I think that's largely correct.
44:24
So yeah, and in terms of the relationship between that and consciousness, I don't know, I suspect there's some relationship there.
44:30
Now, the theory of consciousness that I personally think is the most plausible at the moment is integrated information theory in terms of the theories about the nature of consciousness.
44:40
So when we're talking about consciousness, really, there's two questions.
44:45
There's the question of what's it good for?
44:45
So the function, what is it doing for us, if anything?
44:51
But then there's the question about the nature of it.
44:55
Brett Andersen: And the question about the nature of it is a problem for us because of really this substance ontology that we have that's really implicit in our thinking, because for many people, what's really real are things that you can knock on them, they sort of have this billiard ball causality.
45:10
Well, consciousness is clearly not like that, it has this internal quality, and philosophers have rung their hands about this for at least, the last hundred...
45:22
Well, since Descartes, at least.
45:22
And so this is a real problem for us.
45:22
Integrated information theory, part of the reason why I'm attracted to it is because it's so concordant with everything that I've written here.
45:34
Brett Andersen: Because what integrated information theory says that what consciousness is, is essentially complexity.
45:40
So it's a particular kind of complexity.
45:44
It's not all complexity, because a civilization might be extremely complex, but a civilization is not conscious as a whole, a person is.
45:49
It's a particular kind of integration that occurs, and the more differentiated an entity is that can be integrated in this way, the more conscious it is.
46:00
And so it would attribute consciousness to a slug or a bee or whatever, but not as much consciousness as we have.
46:05
So the intensity of the experience is greater in us.
46:05
So anyway, and the relationship between that and quantum mechanics, who knows?
46:12
I suspect there is a relationship there, but it's hard to say what it is.
46:16
And then- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Thank you.
46:20
And then just the more practical side here of competition between groups leads to more cooperation, not less.
46:33
And then within the in group competition there leads to specialization.
46:45
This is also super, as you were talking, I'm sure you probably have read many of these books, but ‘The WEIRDest People in the World’ covers this quite extensively about cultural evolution as opposed to mama nature evolution, and is quite compelling in many of the respects and seems to be supportive of what you are saying.
47:07
A book that you probably haven't read that I'm recommending a lot now is, ‘The Genius of the Beast’ by Howard Bloom.
47:14
He talks about markets, pre-market work better than any other solution because they essentially are based on the very biology of nature.
47:33
And his main lament in the book is that we have so removed emotion from our study of markets that we get a lot of bad output from the econometric models that are based purely on abstraction.
47:57
Now, I'm a huge fan of abstraction, because if we didn't have it, we would have no quantum physics, Claude Shannon wouldn't have had anything to write about.
48:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But interesting for me was his development of this idea of, listen, so-called to use all of the economic terms, supply and demand.
48:21
Demand is a human emotion.
48:21
It is generated from a human desire.
48:21
And he advocates in the book, which came to convince me that he's right, is you need to understand that markets are us, they're human beings.
48:38
And that, you mentioned bees, bees are quite sophisticated if you go through studying bees, which is something I've done, which is really interesting.
48:48
The mathematics of the dance of the bee, to show the other bees where the nectar is, requires advanced calculus.
48:55
And then I love that some bees get unemployed and basically just hang around the hive to look for new employment.
49:10
My point being that these seemingly disparate things, right, bees, ants, termites, actually, when you study them, the underlying process that we're looking at is very similar to the underlying process to human markets, to human societies, to all of these things.
49:28
So I very much buy the idea that there's something else going on here and the need to get a better handle on it is there.
49:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I tend to go back to ...
49:47
Okay, so Wittgenstein, "Don't look for meaning, look for use."
49:47
So I'm trying to figure out, okay, let's stipulate that many of your eight points are correct.
49:54
Where does that lead us as people who want to help other people understand, "If you changed this about the way you looked at the world or if you changed this about the way you felt about something, your outcomes might improve dramatically?"
50:17
Ed William: I think, Jim, just to jump in very quickly there to sort of contribute to that question; one thing that sort of interests me is the idea that in both Brett's and Tom's writing, the sort of solution lies at the level of the individual and that's where we need to be looking in the first instance.
50:39
Ed William: And I suppose some of what you both write about, about the ideas of needing to look for positive sum games and to sort of find the right competitive environments and the right cooperative environments, to me, that
50:56
suggests that there's a certain need for a level of, well, political and economic decision making and some top down cultivation of the environment, and that doesn't seem to be something that either of you write about that much. Ed William:
51:09
Ed William: And it sort of ties into Jim's question as to what the practical implications of what you're writing about are. Brett Andersen: Okay.
51:19
So there's a few things there, and I'll try to go through them in order.
51:22
Brett Andersen: So Jim, one of the first things you talked about was this process of cultural evolution and how competition between groups leads to cooperation within groups.
51:31
Brett Andersen: Now, there's something very interesting about this, because we are at the end of the road when it comes to that.
51:35
Brett Andersen: We shouldn't be romantic about this, right?
51:37
What led to this great advancement and the scope of cooperation among civilizations was war, was primarily war.
51:44
And we're at the end of that road.
51:49
We can't go to war with each other anymore.
51:49
We don't want to, we can't do it. We have nuclear weapons.
51:54
If we do that, we're all dead.
51:54
Brett Andersen: So the question is, what happens now?
51:55
And my answer is, I don't know what happens now, but we have to find a way to create a non-zero sum game that is going to preclude us from going to nuclear war with each other, but also that we're not just going to fractionate into our little tribes or something.
52:17
Brett Andersen: I don't know what the future holds there, but this sort of leads me, and I'll skip the part of that about the individual ...
52:26
So it leads me to the point that Ed made, which is the focus on the individual.
52:30
And I do think that this is the only viable solution, which is we're having some real problems in the western world at the moment with ...
52:41
Brett Andersen: You know, in my own sphere of academia, as far as I'm concerned, there is a real pathology within academia, this ideology that has essentially taken over academia.
52:52
And I'm very worried about it because I do believe that the universities really are and have been at the heart of Western civilization and they've been sort of infected by this thing.
53:04
Brett Andersen: And so the question is, what do we do about it?
53:05
And for me, the answer is not ...
53:05
I don't like naming names here, but I don't want to do what James Lindsay does.
53:12
What James Lindsay does is essentially call names and go down that road.
53:17
I think that all that's going to lead to this intense moral polarization.
53:25
Brett Andersen: To my mind, the solution to that problem and the solution to other problems is facilitating this process in as many individuals as possible; facilitating the process by which you become a powerful, competent, forthright individual who's capable of saying what you actually believe in the face of people who will punish you for those beliefs.
53:46
That's the solution to that kind of problem.
53:52
Brett Andersen: But I think it's a meta solution, because competent groups come from the interactions of competent and forthright individuals.
54:00
And so facilitating that process in individuals is like a meta solution.
54:05
Brett Andersen: And I've argued that ...
54:06
John Vervaeke in his Meaning Crisis series talks about agape.
54:06
To my mind, that's what agape is.
54:13
Agape is another word for love, but it's not romantic love, it's the kind of love that a parent has for their child.
54:18
What you want for your child is for your child to become a powerful and competent and forthright individual.
54:22
Well, the facilitation of that process in other people is agape, as far as I'm concerned.
54:27
Now, you also talked about how these patterns manifest at different levels of analysis.
54:36
So you talked about bees and ants and all this, and there are similar patterns in manifesting.
54:45
Brett Andersen: I just read a very interesting book about this, called ‘Life Finds A Way’, where they were arguing that patterns associated with creativity manifest at every level of analysis.
54:56
And the reason why is because ...
54:56
And this has to do with relevance realization and the solving of combinatorially explosive problems, but it's true of biology too and of the evolutionary process ...
55:07
Brett Andersen: What they're basically arguing in that book is that chaos is necessary for creativity, a certain amount of chaos.
55:20
Because what happens is that you get stuck in these attractors, which are basically ruts.
55:25
You get stuck in a solution to a problem, but it's not the optimal solution, there's another optimal solution that may be over here; a deeper attractor.
55:29
What you have to do is you have to inject chaos into the system in order to escape from this shallow attractor, and then maybe you can find the deeper attractor.
55:39
Brett Andersen: Well, that's what an insight is.
55:41
Brett Andersen: It's also why psychedelics can induce insights in people.
55:47
Brett Andersen: Now, I don't think psychedelics are an unerring good, but they've clearly shown their potential for facilitating transformations in people.
55:57
And the way that they do this, it seems, is by essentially injecting noise and allowing you to escape, is why.
56:01
Brett Andersen: For example, they are the single best pharmaceutical intervention for smoking that's ever been done.
56:07
And the reason why is because they help you to escape these ruts.
56:14
Brett Andersen: But that same principle applies, for example, in artificial intelligence systems that are trying to find the best route for logistics in terms of routing trucks that are shipping; the best route for routing 10,000 trucks at a time.
56:30
Brett Andersen: Well, that's a ridiculously combinatorially explosive problem, and the way that the algorithms attempt to solve this problem is essentially they explore a landscape of solutions, they get stuck in these attracts, you have to inject noise, and then they potentially find a deeper attractor.
56:43
Brett Andersen: And so, yeah, we do see these same patterns play out at every level of an analysis, and it's very interesting that they do, to my mind.
56:49
But it is this process that we can also participate in as individuals.
56:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So- Brett Andersen: Well, I actually think that's sort of an answer, Ed, sorry, Jim, which is that ...
56:57
Something I wrote about last week was, what does the king do in an archetypal fashion?
57:02
He basically creates a container for other people to explore their own infinite game.
57:09
He is effectively a patron like the Medici's that is like, "I'm going to make everyone safe enough, like the hero, like the positive sum leader, that you can all do you in a way that makes you both integrated and more individualized."
57:26
Brett Andersen: And whilst I think that's kind of a fluffy answer for, "Cool, what do we do next?"
57:28
, I think that's one way to look for solutions in terms of breaking people out of these very rugged fitness landscapes.
57:37
Brett Andersen: Sorry, Jim.
57:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, no, you actually picked up on what I was going to say, which is, again, we're back to myths now.
57:46
And Tom mentioned earlier ...
57:46
I'm not a pretend Daoist.
57:46
I mean, if you forced me and they said, "You must list your religion", even though I don't have one, I would list Daoism to really fuck with their minds.
58:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So these are everywhere, to get back to Brett's point.
58:06
And you brought up two things that are near and dear to my heart; psychedelics.
58:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that I personally am supporting all of the movement to experiment with psychedelics.
58:23
It's not only smoking, Brett.
58:23
It is post-traumatic stress disorder, it is the addiction to opioids.
58:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm financing ...
58:35
Or not just me; I'm participating in financing two documentaries that are being made on this.
58:43
And watching bits of the raw film is just unbelievable.
58:43
There's a woman who had been addicted to opioids for 12 years, and literally three psilocybin guided ...
59:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, let's be very clear; this is not her buying mushrooms from someone on the street.
59:03
This is her working in a supervised guided environment with a doctor present and a specialist in ...
59:11
I guess we'd call the shaman, present.
59:11
But completely free of her opioid addiction.
59:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So there is obviously something very deep going on there.
59:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But then AI.
59:30
So I've always been interested in AI, and then I took the plunge and made an investment in Stability AI, of which I am the executive chair of the board.
59:42
And one of our goals is actually to study all of the world's myths and put them into the AI to see what it makes of it.
59:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And we are attempting to have AI also programmed in all the known languages of the world.
1:00:06
And I've made actually the assertion that, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could at least get them to do Latin and Ancient Greek and all of those things?"
1:00:11
Because if you study mythology, you study these stories, you see the origination point is often eons ago.
1:00:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So that's a work in progress.
1:00:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And really, what the argument is, is that our Shannon Limits as human beings are limited, whereas an AI can look at a raise of 10 million, a hundred million combinations.
1:00:43
And what that unlocks is access to the liminal spaces that are unseen by we humans, And we think that we're going to find a lot of information there as we aggregate all of the world's myths, as far back as we can get them, in machine readable format.
1:01:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I'm super excited about what that outcome might be because I think we're going to find a lot of similarities to what you've outlined.
1:01:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Why did ancient humans have prohibitions?
1:01:26
So for example, intermarrying within closely genetically related people; why did the Christian Church ... ?
1:01:37
There was no science that said interbreeding with close genetic people leads to really bad outcomes.
1:01:50
And yet, what was the first thing when the Christian Church took over?
1:01:58
It was, "A, we're going to break up the clans."
1:01:58
So in a way, early Christian doctrine created the western world because it moved society away from its clannish behavior.
1:02:06
But what was also interesting was their prohibition, just outright prohibition.
1:02:16
It got to the point where they were saying you couldn't even marry your third cousin.
1:02:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So that was brought back, but that was all the early Christian Church with no scientific data backing up that.
1:02:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then if you read about other early taboos, what you find is that many of them occurred centuries before the scientific evidence said, "Oh, that's right."
1:02:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'd love a response to that insight, because I find that fascinating.
1:02:55
Brett Andersen: Yeah, well, I mean, this is cultural evolution.
1:02:58
Brett Andersen: In terms of the particular instance with Christianity and the outlawing of cousin marriages, I mean, I think that's an interesting one, because that didn't necessarily, at least my understanding of it is that, that in particular didn't necessarily evolve.
1:03:15
Brett Andersen: Now what did happen was it made the group under the auspices of the Catholic Church way more powerful than it otherwise would be, and way more united than it otherwise would be.
1:03:24
Brett Andersen: So in that sense, there was a selection phenomenon, because for whatever reason, whatever the reason was that they adopted that rule, it made the Christian world incredibly successful because it broke up the family ties and made ...
1:03:37
Brett Andersen: So by breaking up the family ties ...
1:03:42
I mean, Hendrick's argument, and you've read the book, I mean, Hendrick's argument is that this made the Catholic Church more powerful in some sense, because instead of your allegiance going to the family, it went more to the group.
1:03:55
Brett Andersen: Now in terms of these taboos and stuff, yeah, it's incredibly interesting that you find, for example, pregnancy taboos about foods that you can't eat while you're pregnant.
1:04:04
And it just so happens that many of these foods would be toxic for the baby, right?
1:04:08
Well, they have no idea.
1:04:08
They have no idea that this is going on, that this is happening.
1:04:12
And I don't think there's anything magical going on here.
1:04:12
I mean, I think this can largely be explained via cultural evolutionary processes by which people observe ...
1:04:27
They just copy what successful people do.
1:04:27
Brett Andersen: So for whatever reason, whether it was just luck of the draw, some people decided that they were going to not eat certain foods during certain times, right?
1:04:38
Brett Andersen: Well, if that ended up making that lineage of people more successful, whether it's that person or their granddaughter or whatever, on average, those people are going to be copied.
1:04:46
And so in that way, these strange taboos can evolve even if nobody has any conscious understanding of them.
1:04:54
Brett Andersen: Another example that Hendricks talks about is this example of food processing.
1:04:57
The specific example he uses is manioc and people in the Amazon.
1:05:05
They go through this extremely complex process by which they detoxify this plant that they eat.
1:05:10
And if you ask them why they do this, what they'll basically say is that, "Well, this is just how we do it.
1:05:16
It's tradition", or whatever.
1:05:20
Brett Andersen: It's not even clear that they understand that they're detoxifying it, they definitely don't have any chemical understanding of it, but it's a very complex process where they have to mix it with ash and cook it at a certain temperature and all this.
1:05:33
Brett Andersen: And those kinds of things are ...
1:05:33
It's very mysterious in some way how it could happen, but it's no more mysterious than how an eye could evolve through biological evolution, really.
1:05:41
Brett Andersen: I mean, when I was younger, I was very skeptical about biological evolution for the same reason that many people are.
1:05:49
It's like, how do we get something as complex as an eye or complex as an ear? That makes no sense.
1:05:52
But these evolutionary processes are ...
1:05:58
I don't think our intuitions pick up on just how powerful they can be, this process of selection by which the more successful people or the more successful organisms, or whatever, are selected and you get the shaping of ...
1:06:09
Whether it's cultural practices or biological phenomena, you get this very powerful shaping mechanism.
1:06:16
Brett Andersen: So does that answer the question, Jim?
1:06:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah.
1:06:22
I'm going to have one more question and then I want to invite Ed to ask a few.
1:06:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think this probably is covered under chaos, but you mentioned the human brain.
1:06:35
Well, one of the reasons the human brain grew so dramatically is we discovered fire and we started cooking our food.
1:06:41
And biologically speaking, that is a pretty good reason for why we got this part.
1:06:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so I wonder, was that a random ... ?
1:06:55
When I think about complexity, I often think of random shocks to the system.
1:07:02
Was the finding of fire just like, "Ooh, look at that.
1:07:10
Maybe if we put the rabbit in there, we'll get better outcomes?"
1:07:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: How much in your view is ... ?
1:07:21
And now I'm speaking specifically about the chaos, right?
1:07:21
How much of that is truly just random events that happened that we happen to notice fire, being the example I'm using here, and how much of that is actually us ... ?
1:07:40
As David Deutsch would say, "Humans are the only universal explainers and connectors."
1:07:51
How much of that was also that early human, thank you, who said, "Hey, why don't we stick the rabbit in there?"
1:07:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I mean, is it based on some observant human, in this case, or just a random shot?
1:08:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What do you think, Brett?
1:08:10
And Tom, I welcome your thoughts too.
1:08:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then I'm going to throw it to Ed.
1:08:14
Brett Andersen: I think that way more than most people think is random.
1:08:16
I think that way more evolves through systemic processes than is consciously designed than people tend to think.
1:08:21
And this is true of things like the discovery of fire.
1:08:28
Brett Andersen: Now, of course, I can't say for sure in that particular instance, but my sense is that many people tend to have this, at least an implicit belief, that humans design complex systems, and this is true in a very small subset of things.
1:08:43
Brett Andersen: But the legal system was not designed by anybody. It evolved, right?
1:08:46
It evolved over many thousands of years.
1:08:51
Even our political system; it was designed, to some extent, by the founding fathers, but those ideas, the ideas that were inherent in that system, those ideas had evolved through trial and error over many thousands of years.
1:09:02
Brett Andersen: So these systemic processes are way more powerful and they result in way more outcomes than I think many people realize, and a lot less is due to conscious design.
1:09:16
Brett Andersen: In fact, conscious design gets us into trouble quite often.
1:09:17
The smart guy who says, "Why are we putting the manioc in ash? This is idiotic.
1:09:26
I think this is stupid and I'm going to do the smart thing, the rational thing.
1:09:32
I'm going to stop putting my ...
1:09:32
" Well, that guy gets poisoned, right?
1:09:36
Brett Andersen: There's a very interesting example of this, talked about quite a bit in this literature, of these water temples in Bali where they would ...
1:09:46
So they had a system of agriculture where they had a system of temples, and this is how they irrigated their water.
1:09:51
So it was regulated through this temple system where the temples at the base of the river regulated the temples that were downstream of them.
1:09:56
And there was a whole system of ritual and a whole system of mythology that went along with this.
1:10:05
Brett Andersen: This is how they had done it for thousands of years, and it was not a system that was designed by anybody; it was a system that evolved from the bottom up.
1:10:12
Brett Andersen: And in the 1970s, these geniuses came along and said, "This is all really stupid.
1:10:13
We're going to implement a scientific way of doing agriculture, a rational way of doing agriculture."
1:10:23
And they stopped using the temple system.
1:10:23
And within 10 years, the crops were infested by pests and they were back to using the temple system within 10 years.
1:10:33
Brett Andersen: And so these evolved systems, these systemically evolved systems, often work in ways that we don't consciously understand them, they weren't designed by anybody.
1:10:43
Brett Andersen: Another quick example is marriage, monogamous marriage.
1:10:45
Hendrick argues that this has a function.
1:10:55
And it's a function that I would never have guessed, but what it basically does is it tames men, right?
1:10:59
Because if you get a culture with a lot of polygamy, what you get are a lot of leftover men, men who have no chance of getting married.
1:11:07
Brett Andersen: So biologically, they tend to have higher testosterone levels, because your testosterone goes down when you get married.
1:11:13
But in terms of behavior, basically what they do is they get together into roving bands and they go around raping and pillaging, right?
1:11:19
Brett Andersen: Well, a good way to stop ...
1:11:21
Monogamous marriage means that there's fewer leftover men, and you get increased peace and cooperation within the society.
1:11:31
Brett Andersen: And so that's one of these evolved systems that it was probably taken up through trial and error, but the cultures that adopted it thrived and the ones that didn't got out competed.
1:11:41
Brett Andersen: And so it's just another example of something that wasn't designed, it was evolved.
1:11:42
And so that's basically [inaudible].
1:11:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I'll just make a quick comment.
1:11:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree with what you just said about the evolution.
1:11:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And again, why do free markets work?
1:11:56
Well, because they're complex adaptive systems where all of the new… emerges, it's an emergent system, and it emerges from the bottom, not from the top.
1:12:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then, of course, I think of Robert Oppenheimer's line, which is, "Of course the world is going to hell, and the only way we can stop that from happening is to do absolutely nothing about it."
1:12:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I think there's a lot in that line.
1:12:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Tom, do you want to jump in?
1:12:26
And then we'll have Ed start leading the questions. Tom Morgan: Yeah.
1:12:28
Tom Morgan: One single point really, which is that, yes, but I feel that the stories that have real power reflect the underlying flow that Brett's talking about in terms of this propensity towards more integrated consciousness and positive sum games.
1:12:46
Tom Morgan: The two things I believe that are heretical is that there is a flow of things.
1:12:48
There is an objectively good Dao, and you can align yourself with that typically by subjugating your ego to it.
1:12:55
They're two very unfashionable ideas, but I think they're rather good.
1:13:01
Tom Morgan: And I think if you look at modern morality tales like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and those kind of TV shows which really capture everyone's attention, it shows you that if you start paddling against that flow, your life is going to go to hell.
1:13:15
Tom Morgan: And that is sort of the objective proof that I have that this works, is if you do watch these people who are rowing in the right direction, their lives tend to go very, very well.
1:13:22
And I think that is a message in a lot of the myths that, to use Brett's term, is more real than real.
1:13:28
That not all of these evolutions are just random; that there is a direction of travel.
1:13:34
And I think you neglect that at your peril. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:13:37
And obviously, having read the Tao Te Ching since age 18, probably two to three times a year every year since then, there is a great amount of wisdom that took this dummy until about age 50 to figure out what he was actually talking about.
1:13:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you think of the good ruler, right?
1:13:59
And the good ruler, as you mentioned earlier, Tom, the good ruler is the monarch who provides a safe environment for his people.
1:14:06
And of course, the way it goes is the worst kind of ruler is feared, the next is loved, but the best ruler of all rulers is the ruler who rules when something is accomplished and the people said, "Look what we did by ourselves."
1:14:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So totally in line with that. I agree with the Dao.
1:14:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The only quibble I would have there is the normal Daoistic interpretation of ...
1:14:42
We talked about morality earlier, right?
1:14:42
So to the Dao, no, there is no good, there is no bad; there is flow, there is universal flow.
1:14:51
And trying to insert more modern concepts of right and wrong to the Dao misses the theory of the Dao, the real Dao, the Dao that can't be named. Yeah?
1:15:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The Dao that can be named is "the mother of a million things", and the Dao tht cannot be named is the flow of this participatory universe that we live in.
1:15:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I do agree, by the way, with your assertion that if you understand that flow, it's a bit like ...
1:15:31
The simple way to put it is, swim with the current, don't swim against the current.
1:15:38
The salmons are idiots, man.
1:15:38
Swim with the current and let it take you and you immediately have far greater success.
1:15:44
If we're going to have a swimming race and I choose to swim with the current and you choose to swim against it, I'm going to win.
1:15:58
And so putting it back in human terms, I definitely think that you're correct in the assertion of by understanding and being in this flow, the outcomes just are dramatically superior.
1:16:16
And when people say, "Well, how did you know that?"
1:16:16
Half of it is I always try to explain things as practically as possible.
1:16:23
And so on the one hand, pattern recognition, imbued intuition.
1:16:33
Imbued intuition, it comes along when you've seen the same pattern so many times that you just know, "Okay. Right.
1:16:42
I've seen that one 50 times, I'm going to take advantage of that."
1:16:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the quant analytical side of me, I started noting every intuition I ever had and then rating it. Was I right? Was I wrong?
1:17:03
And interestingly enough, I haven't been doing it, the sample size is too small, but for the most part it's still hovering it about like 64% correct.
1:17:08
But I think that there's also information in where I got it wrong.
1:17:18
And so I want to, maybe five years from now, we'll do this again and we'll have a larger sample.
1:17:26
Ed, we have not turned to you, and you are the guy who did all the brilliant research for us.
1:17:35
Ed William: Well, I was just going to say, I think it's really interesting that Tom just brought up a Breaking Bad because literally that was the question I was about to ask, but I think I'm going to ask it anyway because I think I see it a slightly different way to Tom.
1:17:47
From my perspective, the main cultural storytelling trend over the last probably 10, 15 years, aside from superheroes, which is a whole different thing, is the anti-hero.
1:18:03
And society loves the story of someone who just says, "Fuck it" and does increasingly evil things basically. And we love it. We love it.
1:18:17
I love Breaking Bad, everyone loves ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘The Boys’ on Amazon, ‘Game of Thrones’, all these different shows.
1:18:22
Ed William: And I think, Tom, you were saying you saw the fact that it usually goes wrong for these people is a reaffirmation of the hero's journey and of the monomyth.
1:18:30
But I wonder whether the extent to which we as a society like those stories actually is a contradiction of it, and whether our society's relationship to these stories actually tells us something different about how we're relating to the hero's journey today.
1:18:51
So- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Or Brett- Brett Andersen: Go ahead, Tom.
1:18:56
You have something to add.
1:18:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, no. You go, Brett. Ed William: Yeah. Go, Brett.
1:19:00
Brett Andersen: Well, I just wanted to say in response to the question of whether it's contradicts the hero myth, my answer is no, I don't think so because the hero myth is not the only story that we're attracted to.
1:19:10
We love romantic stories, we love tragedies, we love comedies.
1:19:10
But the hero myth is the story that became the central story of many of our great civilizations. Why did it become the...
1:19:23
Why was Marduk the central story of Babylon?
1:19:23
Why was Horus the central story of Egypt?
1:19:29
Why did Jesus Christ become the central story of our culture, and the Buddha, and so on?
1:19:32
Brett Andersen: So the hero myth is not the only story we're attracted to, but it's the story that through these systemic evolutionary processes came to be the foundation for these great civilizations of the past.
1:19:38
And so the question is why that story?
1:19:43
Well, the answer to that would just be that story is a story that we can...
1:19:49
What Christians ask is what would Jesus do?
1:19:49
Well, that is what you're supposed to ask about the hero.
1:19:54
It's a story, it's a pattern of behavior that we can aspire to, and it's abstract enough that everybody in the civilization can aspire to it.
1:20:01
And so it provides a central sacred narrative around which a civilization can focus in terms of our attraction to the anti-hero and things like that.
1:20:18
Brett Andersen: Part of that is that morality...
1:20:24
I'm a big fan of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche says a lot of very provocative things and one of the things he says is that all morality is cowardice.
1:20:34
Well, it's important to understand what he means by that.
1:20:34
But there is a sense to it in which people are attracted to these stories because they deep down really would love to do something like that.
1:20:44
And they get to live that out in their fantasy because they can't do it in their real life for whatever reason because the consequences are too great.
1:20:54
But the fact that these stories do end up in death and destruction for everybody involved is an important lesson because if you engage in zero-sum games, I think that is what happens.
1:21:01
I think that's generally what happens.
1:21:07
Not always, there's not a happy ending to every real story.
1:21:07
But yeah, I guess that's all I had to say about that.
1:21:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I just want to jump in on the Breaking Bad because as fate would have it, my wife and I just completed re-watching the entire series.
1:21:21
And when you re-watch the entire series, you see...
1:21:28
First off, I think Gilligan is a genius.
1:21:28
I think that he's amazing in just so many ways.
1:21:28
We'll put that to the side.
1:21:40
But there is, at the climax, we see Walter White's transformation into Heisenberg.
1:21:46
And we see his increasingly evil actions, poisoning the child, watching the girlfriend of Jesse die without the- Ed William: Prison murders.
1:22:01
The prison murders, which is brutal. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:22:02
With the prison murders, which is this brilliant thing.
1:22:06
But here's the thing that brings it back to the idea of this is a story that you don't want to do because it leads to death and destruction at the end.
1:22:16
Walter White, after Jesse gives him up and they're out in the desert and he orders Jesse to be killed.
1:22:29
And then Hank comes along, his brother-in-law, and he won't kill family, kith and kin.
1:22:29
That's back to maybe the idea of the blank slate, and that's a whole different story.
1:22:38
But what happens is he tells them not to kill Hank and leave Jesse alone.
1:22:45
But then they kill Hank, they kill his partner, they haul Jesse out from the car, and they say, "What do you want?"
1:23:00
And Walter White says, " Kill him."
1:23:00
And then the kid says, "Wait, wait.
1:23:00
We might be able to get some information out of this."
1:23:09
We can torture this guy and get some really good information, and Walter's pissed off by that.
1:23:14
And the uncle says to Walter, "You good with it?
1:23:14
As long as we kill him after we get the info out of him, is that cool?"
1:23:22
And Walter asserts that that is cool.
1:23:27
But at the end, the final episode, what happens?
1:23:27
Walter, in a weird way, redeems himself.
1:23:38
He redeems himself by knowing that he's going into a situation he will die in.
1:23:47
But he redeems himself by saving Jesse.
1:23:47
And it shouldn't surprise us that Jesse was the only one who was the most conflicted about what they were doing, and Jesse had a true or good heart.
1:24:02
So yeah, really attracted to all of the mayhem that Walter...
1:24:02
Sons of Anarchy, another one, same ending.
1:24:11
The main character finally redeems himself, giving himself over to death to make things right. Just an observation. Tom.
1:24:22
Tom Morgan: I want to tie this all together because I think you can.
1:24:29
So Walt pursues power and becomes Heisenberg, in Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill pursues power and becomes Saul Goodman, they literally change identity. Why?
1:24:43
Because they use their gifts, either chemistry or incredible loquaciousness for evil or for material gains, and they gradually make cascadingly poor moral decisions.
1:24:57
And it takes them so far off base that the only way they redeem themselves is by inverting those skills back towards the good.
1:25:02
And they do achieve redemption.
1:25:02
I'm not going to just spoil the movie there.
1:25:07
Tom Morgan: But the thing that you used to phrase there, and it's not going to surprise you, Jim, given the topic of our last podcast, but C. S.
1:25:12
Lewis talked about men without chests.
1:25:17
That you had this society where the rational was in charge of the spiritual, where these left hemispheric skills were not being used in service at the right.
1:25:23
And the way for us to reconcile everything was to return the left hemisphere into the service at the right.
1:25:33
And the organ of that was that actually the heart and the heart is this, in my opinion, this organ of relevance realization that is tied to the Dao in this possibly very literal sense that allows us to, both individually and from a societal perspective to realign with the good, because we hear all these stories about what happens when we go the other route.
1:25:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Good observation. Ed.
1:26:04
Ed William: So yeah, well, one comment on that and then another question.
1:26:06
So the other spanner in the works in the Breaking Bad story is that Gus Fring, he is the archetypal pure rationalist character, and that is his superpower, but his downfall is his emotion, and it's only when he lets his emotion come into it that he falls.
1:26:29
So I don't know how that interacts with what we've talking about.
1:26:29
But a different question going off myth is that, Tom, you write a lot about slack and the importance of slack in the system.
1:26:44
My understanding from Brett's work is that this emergence into new forms of complexity comes from tension, moments of tension.
1:26:52
And to me, the concept of slack intention are almost diametrically opposed.
1:26:58
So I'm just interested how they interact with each other in this wider theory.
1:27:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's a good question. Tom? Tom Morgan: Yeah.
1:27:09
I think Brett can probably handle this better, but I think slack, slack is room for expiration.
1:27:15
So slack is almost noise.
1:27:15
So it's like I've got this incredibly rigid structure, which is my nine to five, I'm going to pull that back 10% and inject noise expiration.
1:27:21
And that's going to allow me to experiment in the same way that psychedelic starts to what Brett's saying.
1:27:31
But sorry, Brett, you're next.
1:27:31
Brett Andersen: That's very much along the lines of what I was going to say.
1:27:34
So the tension is caused by competition.
1:27:37
And that tension leads to specialization, it leads to this increased efficiency.
1:27:43
And that is what you get when you have massive competition, highly efficient, highly specialized systems.
1:27:48
Now the problem with efficient and specialized systems is that they're not very resilient.
1:27:52
They don't change very well.
1:27:52
Now what happens eventually is that you get the tension leads to this dissent into chaos.
1:27:57
And it's the descend in the chaos that is the slack.
1:28:03
It's the slack that allows novelty to emerge.
1:28:03
So I'm all in favor of competition.
1:28:12
But if you have a competition that's too intense, it doesn't give you the slack that is necessary for a certain amount of creativity.
1:28:16
So we see this, for example, in life finds a way he talked about this in terms of Asian cultures, who the standardized testing in those cultures is extremely competitive.
1:28:31
Brett Andersen: And what you find is that these kids do very well on standardized tests and they don't tend to have very much creative output at all compared to, for example, American kids.
1:28:38
That competition doesn't give you enough slack to allow for the exploration that is necessary for creativity.
1:28:44
So competition is great, but too intense competition will not allow for the emergence of novelty.
1:28:51
But yeah, so the tension is caused by competition, but that competition will...
1:28:57
The tension caches out in a descent into chaos.
1:29:05
And it's in that chaos is where you get the slack that allows for novelty to emerge.
1:29:09
For example, this is punctuated equilibrium and evolutionary theory.
1:29:09
So evolution is not necessarily a fully gradual process.
1:29:15
What we see are these periods where you get the Cambrian explosion, where you get the emergence of massive amounts of novelty all at once.
1:29:25
Brett Andersen: Well, what they think happened in the Cambria explosion, for example, is that you had the emergence of a new type of organism, which was a predator basically.
1:29:33
You had the emergence of a predator, one theory about what happened.
1:29:36
And because of the emergence of the predator, it disrupted the whole system.
1:29:36
So you had a equilibrium state because there was all this competition, massive specialization.
1:29:40
The emergence of this novel phenomenon caused this massive chaos which allowed for the slack that allowed for the emergence of all these novel forms.
1:29:51
And so I think that's how I conceptualized the relationship. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:29:56
And I'm just remembering the Whitehead quote that “all great ages were chaotic ages”, I think, if I'm getting that right, if my memory's wrong, correct me on that quote.
1:30:05
Brett Andersen: I don't remember that quote, but I haven't read all of Whitehead. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Okay.
1:30:12
So I was taken by that comment that he made as I was reading him, and I'm like, "That's right."
1:30:14
And it tie it into why we're so interested in having you brilliant guys on the show is we believe that we are in such a period right now.
1:30:28
It's the whole concept of our series, The Great Reshuffle, whereby we believe that this period is going to become even more chaotic in terms of the novelty generation that occurs.
1:30:46
And what we're seeing is the collapse of all of the old models.
1:30:56
And if we want to make it for our listeners who want ideas for startups, well, start there.
1:31:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because all of these old models that worked very, very well and over limited periods of history, that's another problem, our recency bias blinds us to the fact that all of this has been done in a different form, albeit but before really good to study history because it will give you a good idea about what happens during chaotic periods.
1:31:33
And so this concept, what's the zen idea that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
1:31:42
And I have certainly seen in your work, Brett and Tom, in some of the things that you've written, this is five years ago, we probably wouldn't be talking about this not because we weren't interested, but because other people would say what...
1:31:55
These are a bunch of think boy word cells and I don't want to pay attention to that shit.
1:32:10
Tom Morgan: They probably still are in my case. But yeah, thanks.
1:32:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You're my favorite think boy word cell. Tom Morgan: No.
1:32:19
You probably say that [inaudible]. Ed William: Yeah. You're [inaudible].
1:32:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, listen, this could be one of those that goes for God knows how many hours, but we want to make it listenable and have it make an impact.
1:32:32
So I think that already, I can...
1:32:43
With just the notes I took here and reading Ed's notes and reading your work directly, Brett, especially you, we got to revisit this for a second section because as Tom knows, I love speculations.
1:33:00
I love thinking about this stuff.
1:33:00
I do try to have a practical bent in terms of...
1:33:09
I launched an entire company because of thinking about this.
1:33:09
And I think that now's the time, we're at the inflection point.
1:33:19
This is going to become an increasingly chaotic era as we bring things like AI and its revelations into the mix as that becomes normalized, and it affects people's thinking, because when you see insights that we humans weren't capable of making, we are capable of recognizing, "Wow, that's an amazingly good idea.
1:33:42
Hadn't thought about that."
1:33:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So on the schedule, we will put the four of us together again. Absolutely fascinating.
1:33:53
I love that this is bleeding into just what I would call normal folks.
1:34:02
Over the last year, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way at all, but people who they're not into these types of speculations and whatnot have increasingly come to me with questions that are very much directly addressed, Brett, in your work and, Tom, in your work as well.
1:34:30
So I'm excited about that because as people who I would normally not think who would want to really interrogate me about these types of ideas, when I see that happening, I think that's a really great thing.
1:34:44
So thank you for this first part, which I've already deemed first part, and we'll set up a second one.
1:34:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I always end the show, as Tom knows by...
1:35:03
And guess what, Ed, I didn't tell you I was going to do this, but I'm going to ask you too, even though you are part of the team.
1:35:08
So I'm going to start with Brett though.
1:35:08
We always ask at the end, if we made you that monarch, if made you the ruler, we're going to make you the ruler of the entire world though, you can't do anything violent, you can't compel people to do anything bad or reeducation camps.
1:35:30
But what you can do is speak into a magic microphone and you're going to give me two ideas that you want to incept in all 8 billion of us here on earth right now. And this is important.
1:35:47
Whatever their morning comes, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, "I just had two of the greatest ideas and I'm going to do both of those things."
1:35:56
What two things, Brett, are you going to incept in the world?
1:36:03
Brett Andersen: What two things am I going to incept?
1:36:05
So yeah, very interesting question.
1:36:05
I think the first one is that, and I actually believe this, this is one of those things that I tend to stay away from saying stuff like this because I don't like saying cheesy things, but I actually believe this.
1:36:18
I actually believe that every time an individual gets their act together and sets forth on the path to becoming a competent and powerful individual, the world moves one step further from the brink and one step closer to something resembling paradise potentially, and so do that.
1:36:34
So that's the first thing I would say is that in yourself and others become who you could be.
1:36:39
Brett Andersen: And the second thing I would say is that who you are right now is not okay because you could be way more than what you are.
1:36:45
And I feel like this is something that is we talk too much about self-esteem in our culture and feeling good about yourself.
1:36:52
None of this has ever resonated with me personally. Okay?
1:36:57
It's not that I don't feel good about myself, and it's not that I don't think people ought to feel somewhat good, it's that you could be way more than you are, and you should be.
1:37:01
And what would happen if you took five years and you really put yourself together, what would you be like?
1:37:06
Well, try it and find out and I guarantee you things will get way better.
1:37:10
And if many people do that, things will get way better for everybody. And I believe that.
1:37:15
And so those are the two things I guess I would say if I was king and had a big- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I will second both of those inceptions. Yeah.
1:37:23
I agree with both of them.
1:37:23
Ed, you didn't get a chance to think about this, did you?
1:37:30
Ed William: No, I didn't. Jim O'Shaughnessy: No?
1:37:33
Ed William: No, I wish I've done this.
1:37:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you're on the spot.
1:37:34
Give me two things you're going to incept. Ed William: Okay. Two things.
1:37:38
I think the first one would be find something you're passionate about and do it.
1:37:44
Loads of people don't have passions, and it doesn't have to be anything that has any productive use or any meaning or anything, just find something you love and then just do it because it just gives your life so much more meaning. So that's one.
1:37:53
And two is related that it's work out what you're stopping yourself from doing and then do it so that...
1:38:00
Everyone's stopping themselves from doing something that they feel like they should or they could, but there's always a reason they don't want to do it and work out what that reason is and then do it.
1:38:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Like both of those. And on the spot too.
1:38:15
Now Tom, you've had several bites at this apple, but I bet you're going to bet you're going to have two more for me. Tom Morgan: Yeah.
1:38:25
But I didn't realize I was going to have to do it this episode, so I'm just as unprepared as everyone else.
1:38:29
So I'm going to piggyback, I'm going to piggyback, which is, I've noticed the quality of people's lives is directly correlated to the amount of intelligence they put on things outside of their own brains specifically.
1:38:43
So that can be their hearts, that can be people around them, and that can be the whole world.
1:38:49
And I think that if I could incept that idea and be like, just assume that everything else is pretty damn intelligent and not just matter to be manipulated, and that it might actually be giving you signals to help you, which is again, a weird idea.
1:39:06
Tom Morgan: And I think the second part of that, which I think both Ed and Brett have intimated as well is that that's going to require admitting your mistakes and that's going to require a lot of pain and that's going to require a lot of humility and redirection, but following your heart is absolutely delightful.
1:39:19
And finding a way to submit your ego to that as hard as it is is absolutely worth it.
1:39:26
So they're two kind of related ideas but saying the same thing. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I love those.
1:39:33
And what a great series of inceptions.
1:39:33
Ed, I think we're probably going to have to put a book out of all of these inceptions. What do you think? Ed William: Yeah. Let's do it. That's great.
1:39:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, first off, thank you both for such a fascinating conversation.
1:39:54
We'll definitely going to do part two because I'm fascinated by this and I think we only really scratched the surface as an introduction, so we will set that up.
1:40:00
But for the meantime, thank you so much.
1:40:07
And since, by the way, this airs the last week of December, Happy New Year. Happy 2023.
1:40:14
Tom Morgan: Happy New Year, guys. Happy New Year.
1:40:19
Ed William: Happy New Year.
1:40:20
Brett Andersen: Thanks for having me, Jim, and thanks for recommending me, Tom. Cheers, Tom.