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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 Infinite Loops today is going to be a very special day on Infinite Loops because my friend, Tom Morgan, is my guest again.
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I think you all know Tom, he's the director of communications and content, oh my, how I hate that word content, for KCP Group.
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But what he really is a knowledge seeker extraordinaire, but more importantly, a synthesizer of said knowledge, who I think is one of the best that I've seen.
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I read him religiously and always love to have him on as a guest. Welcome, Tom.
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Tom Morgan: Thanks so much, Jim, and thank you for such a lovely invitation.
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Coming on this the first time was honestly one of the most fun to things I've ever done.
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And the response from people shooting the emails all over the world, 100% of them nice, was completely unexpected and has just been an extraordinary way to live over the last couple of months.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Excellent, I'm so happy to hear it.
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All right, Tom, I'm going to give you the floor for maybe the next 15 to 20 minutes because you are going to outline a pretty interesting and in- depth series of thoughts that you and I have discussed via email, in person, et cetera, but we mutually agree the best way for you and for me to let this unfold naturally is to let you explain where you're at.
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So my friend, the floor is yours. Tom Morgan: Yeah. Thank you.
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And you know I absolutely hate people monologuing on podcasts, but I think there's really no other way to do this.
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I've spent the last six or seven years synthesizing ideas.
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And as I've always said, literally none of these ideas are mine.
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There's two ways to do synthesis.
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There's either you start off with a big block of marble and chip it down until you've got Michelangelo's David, something that's intrinsically true, or you start with something that's incredibly false and just find confirmation bias to build it up to something that's still untrue, but makes even less sense.
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Tom Morgan: And I think I've done option A, but I might have done option B, so I'll lay out the ideas as they've come to me, and then after that, we'll take them apart one by one.
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I think I can only get away with something this grandiose because none of them are my ideas, but this is really about the meaning of life and saving the world.
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And what's weird is that they are one and the same thing.
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Tom Morgan: And I think that a fun place to start is Stephen Spielberg's Raiders of a Lost Ark, where it obviously puts me at a certain age by having seen it, and if you haven't seen it, go out and see it, but there's a scene where Indi is looking for the burial place of the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
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And he's using this medallion and the Nazis in their classic rationalist format only have access to one side of the medallion and he has access to both, and he's able to dig in the right place and they're digging in the wrong place.
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Tom Morgan: And I just think of that as a fun metaphor for people using both sides of their brain, the intellectual and rational, and the creative and intuitive.
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And I know that's over simplification, but I'll come to that in a minute.
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But what's been really fun for me as you and I have been thinking about the way the world's going to play out from here and what's important, and that reconnection back to the sacred that I think we're all craving, if you ask intellectuals for their forecasts, you're going to get either a linear extrapolation or a shruggy emoji.
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Tom Morgan: And I think that one of the key takeaways that I've realized over the last four or five years is that if you want to predict the future, look at the stories that people are telling, because the artists are first to every trend.
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And if I was to say, what should you read, it would be, one, the stories, but it would be the people that have analyzed the stories.
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So Joseph Campbell, even though he's dead, he's probably the best forecaster that there is right now.
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Tom Morgan: And I wouldn't say read The Hero With a Thousand Faces because I'm on my second read right now, and I find it literally impenetrable.
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That's the ingredients that he's assembled, but the dialogue with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, is extraordinary and one of the best things I've ever read.
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And the reason why this is interesting is that I think the stories reflect what people want from their inner lives, and they don't change over time.
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Tom Morgan: We've always wanted the same thing, but what happens is that the trends ebb and flow.
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And I think about the world's most competitive environment for stories that ever has been right now with the amount of content, the word you hate, that is being produced by every single channel and is competing for our attention.
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So the stories that are winning doesn't always mean something, but sometimes it means something incredible.
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Tom Morgan: And Joseph Campbell was most famous for the monomyth, which is the hero's journey, which is this narrative arc that existed across time and culture.
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And I think a lot of people look at it and they're like, "Hero faces adversity."
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And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no."
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It's this really complicated 15 to 20-stage process that you see in all of the most resonant stories of our time, Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Avatar.
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And in fact, 13 of the 20 highest grossing movies of all time are explicit monomyths.
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Tom Morgan: And I think the reason why that blows me away is that the monomyth is actually about how individuals and societies evolve.
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So you can tell me the stories don't mean anything, but it's really, really weird that at a time of transition that I think we're both at, the dominant story is a story about how societies evolve, and that's an insight that gives me chills.
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And I think stepping back for a second and returning to an anecdote from nature that we discussed on my first podcast about ants, that basically ants go out and they find a food source, and then they layer a pheromone trail to that food source so everyone else can find it.
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Tom Morgan: But then every so often, ants will peel off that trail to go and find new food sources, but the rate at which they peel off is directly correlated to the uncertainty of the environment around them, implying that there's some form of signal or that they get that their environment is deteriorating, and then something else that tells them to go into expiration mode.
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And you can look at that as a random process, but I think that's a pretty limited perspective.
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Tom Morgan: And I know that you and I are totally obsessed with this book, The Usual Illusion.
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And I'm not going to paraphrase the whole thing, but the relevant piece that we probably are aware of 60 bits of information at any given moment, but there's 11 million that are potentially available to us.
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If I say to you, "Wiggle your big toe," you're suddenly aware of your big toe.
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That information was coming into you all this time.
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Tom Morgan: You are having a conversation with a cocktail party with one person, and you hear someone else across the room say your name and you swivel your attention to that.
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You were taking that information in some way, it just wasn't being served to your conscious awareness.
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It's a filtering process.
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That feels like something that's intuitive and is easy for us to understand.
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The bit that took me a really long time to understand is the idea that outside of that million to one ratio, there's a trillion to one ratio of things that we're never aware of and never can be aware of.
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Tom Morgan: When you think about an earthworm, an earthworm has never seen a sunset and it will never see a sunset because it has not evolved to see a sunset.
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We will never experience the way a Bloodhound does with 200 million receptors in its nose because it's not relevant to us.
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So the reason why that's important is that if you think about a trillion to one ratio of things outside of us, the things that we're aware of, the idea that there wouldn't be a force influencing us that was hidden goes from a possibility to, I think, a probability.
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Tom Morgan: And this is what unifies the user illusion and the ant analogy.
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And this, I think, just proves how staggeringly unoriginal this idea is because it was the subject of a blockbuster.
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It was Chris Nolan's Interstellar, which is an extremely explicit monomyth and is a brilliant movie.
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When I first saw it, I was like, "That's good, weird sound mixing, can't really hear the dialogue, but pretty cool."
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Tom Morgan: And then I started digging into it and the environment is deteriorating, there's crop blight, the same as the ants noticing their environment deteriorating.
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There's the call to adventure which Matthew McConaughey's character experiences through the watch in his daughter's room, and unfortunately, I'm going to spoil the rest of the movie over the course of this talk, so turn off the podcast now if you haven't seen it before because it's a great movie.
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Tom Morgan: But basically, there's a scene in the movie with Anne Hathaway where she talks about there's all these available planets for them to find their own salvation, and there's a man that she used to love and still does love on one of the three planets.
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And she describes to Matthew McConaughey's character that love is this thing that exists beyond time and space and is tangible in the way that gravity is.
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Tom Morgan: And I heard that and I thought, "Hmm, that seems fairly hokey, particularly because of the connotations of love in our society."
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And I think that's a linguistic problem, that we have this very limited conception of love, particularly in the West.
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On your previous podcast, I talked about how Sanskrit languages have 96 different descriptions of words for love.
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But the idea here is an incredibly deep one, which is love is a driver of exploratory attention.
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And I'll explain what that means.
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Tom Morgan: So the other book that I mentioned on your first podcast was Iain McGilchrist, Master and his Emissary.
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And he talks about the two sides of the brain controlling two different kinds of attention.
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And he uses the metaphor of a bird, that a bird uses narrow attention of the left hemisphere to distinguish which is a piece of gravel and which is a piece of grain.
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And in this exploratory attention, which is looking out for cats, it's the piece of your attention that's listening to your name at a cocktail party, whereas the narrow attention is the thing that's having the conversation with the person you are speaking to at that time.
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Tom Morgan: The really interesting implication is that that exploratory attention, because it's much, much more connected to your body and the outside world, is also connected to something that we experience as love and is something that is mediated by the heart center, follow your heart, heart's truth, all of these different metaphors that we keep using throughout our society but don't really seem to give any credibility.
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Tom Morgan: I think about the way that this was told in our very, very earlier story, one of our very early stories, which is the Genesis myth, where Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in this continuous flow of reality, and then
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they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and they fall, which I think is a metaphor for our ability to abstract ideas, which has been the source of all of our power, we can communicate like we're doing right now, but it abstracts us away from the experience of life and that glorious flow and love. Tom Morgan: And then the very next story in the Bible
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Tom Morgan: And then the very next story in the Bible is about Cain and Abel, the warring brothers, which I think is a metaphor for our conflicting hemisphere, where Cain is divorced from God, his sacrifices are not understood, much like how our left hemisphere ego does a bunch of things and we don't understand why we're not getting rewarded for it. But Abel was.
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And there's a line in the Bible that was the subject of an entire book from John Steinbeck, East of Eden, which is that, the key word is Timshel, which is thou mayest, you have the ability to choose.
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Tom Morgan: And I think the relevance to this discussion is that when you are orienting yourself through space and time, you have the choice of making something with a relatively narrow egoic decision or something that's much more connected to the world around you in this Daoist flowing way.
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And this is where the idea, I think, gets crazy, if it hasn't got too crazy already, which was this concept that Young had, which was that your interests somehow directed you through time.
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So what you loved and what you were drawn to unstoppably would be the best source of your future growth.
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Tom Morgan: And I think that's an unbelievably powerful idea.
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I raised it on a previous podcast and I was like, "Is this explicitly talked about in Interstellar as a well?" And like, "Oh, it is."
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There's a bit when the hero throws himself into the black hole and he explains, "It's love, TARS, love."
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TARS is the name of his robot that allows him to communicate back through time and put the coordinates in the watch so that his daughter can find the equation that saves the world.
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Tom Morgan: And I think this is a metaphor for the ability of our own interests and our own love for things to signal a direction of future growth.
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And I think that speaks to the limitations of our left hemisphere which only knows what is currently around us.
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And Joseph Campbell talked about following your bliss, which is exactly the same concept, which is, he said the doors were open when previously there were only walls, which is, of course, that would happen because your right hemisphere has access to at least a million times more, if not a trillion times more information, because it's being guided by whatever we perceive as love.
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Tom Morgan: And this is where things get very, very, very difficult, that the idea of following your bliss sounds very easy.
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But one of McGilchrist's insights was that the left hemisphere is fundamentally competitive.
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It does not relinquish control and it stands for everything that keeps you safe, everything that society says you should be, and getting through that is almost like swimming through the football field, the crap that Andy Dufresne needs to get through in Shawshank to get to the other side.
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Tom Morgan: You do literally have to face your greatest fears to follow your bliss, that is the dragon that Joseph Campbell was talking about through all this.
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But the implication from Daoism is that if you managed to surrender to your interests, your life would work out better than any other way, it just wasn't going to work out necessarily in the way that you expected it to.
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Tom Morgan: And I think of a funny example from a guy Michael Singer who wrote a whole book about this, where he tried to meditate himself to enlightenment, it wasn't working out, and so he just said to himself, "I'm going to go with these binary decisions, these Cain or Abel Timshel-style decisions every time someone asks me to do something," and he ends up founding a company taking it public and being worth like $200 million.
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Tom Morgan: So it's not to say that money's always inconsistent with this kind of spiritual growth, but it is saying that if you pursue something that's abstract, you'll end up in the wrong place.
15:47
And I think to bring this back home to the hero's journey, the only original idea I thought I ever had was that the hero's journey was a metaphor for this hemispheric transition, where you give the right hemisphere and love and all this broad awareness, the steering wheel, and you surrender.
16:01
Tom Morgan: And then I read this book by Jill Bolte Taylor, who had this incredibly famous left hemisphere stroke at the start of this year, and she's like, "Oh yeah, that's totally what the hero's journey is about."
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And I was like, "Oh crap.
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Okay, I haven't even had an original insight."
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Tom Morgan: And I think just the last thing I'll say on this whole idea is, why does this mean you save the world?
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Why do all of the monomyths end with the hero saving the world?
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Well, I think the first example is the ant.
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The ant comes back with a new route to food.
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He says, "Guys, it's over here, if you follow this pheromone trail, you will get new food." And he saves everyone.
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Tom Morgan: And I think the implication here is also an important warning, which is, if the ant comes back from the food and says, "Worship me," everyone starves.
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He is offering a direction for other people to go in, but the idea being that the ant has gone outside of the existing paradigm, he's found something, and then he's communicating to everyone else.
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Tom Morgan: And I think the thing that Daoist realized that is staggeringly optimistic is that if an individual rediscovers his own creativity, he manages to subjugate his ego through this love.
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He doesn't know how he's going to influence the system, but if he co-creates with it, he can become like a butterfly in a typhoon, he can subtly influence it.
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And if everyone finds a way to do this, the whole system starts to move.
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But like a piece of sand in a sand pile, one single person bringing an idea through can change the whole model.
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Tom Morgan: And I think an literal historical example of that is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who basically used his time in the Gulag in Soviet Russia suffering to, in his words, basically purify his own soul.
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He comes out and basically says, "I'm not going to go along with a lie anymore."
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So he writes the Gulag Archipelago and it contributes considerably to bringing down the entire Soviet Union.
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So this guy acts as a butterfly in the typhoon, and he does it by coming back to the rest of the tribe and telling the truth, like the hero returning with the boon.
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Tom Morgan: And it's interesting that, a topic that I know your super interested is prophets and heretics.
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Heretics are people that overthrow an existing power structure, in this case, the ego and the left hemisphere and the society that it now dominates.
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And it's a very, very dangerous place to be, but the prophet is someone who goes outside and says, "Guys, there's truth out here, there's something that's real."
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And in this case, it would be love, that there's a guiding intelligence that's bigger than us that if you can surrender to, it's an incredibly benign force.
18:30
Tom Morgan: And I think that the one thing to come away with is that if you follow your attention and you follow your interests, your environment will start to signal back to you that you are in the right direction.
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It will start to offer you coincidences and synchronicities that there's this reciprocal exchange of gifts that's very, very, very opposed to the Western ideology of every man for himself.
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And I think we're slowly shifting away from that.
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So there's a bunch of other much crazier directions I can go in, but that's the thesis as I see it. Come at me.
19:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think you know me well enough to know that I share a lot of your ideas, it's something that has consumed my entire life really.
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I started reading Lao Tzu when I was 18 years old and I started actually understanding what he meant when I was about 55 years old, because I think that one of the challenges that we face is that we are a linguistically oriented society, and often times, words obscure rather than illuminate.
19:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I think that what you are talking about is actually what...
19:39
By the way, I honestly cannot believe that you have not read Jed McKenna, because when you do read Jed McKenna, you are going to love this guy and you will not shut up about him, I swear that that is what...
19:54
Because you are distilling many of his ideas with your thesis.
19:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Also, Anthony de Mello, also Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there are so many examples of awareness.
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Again, linguistically, when you say spiritual, people hear that word based on what their label machine inside their brain attributes to that word.
20:19
And so it's a rule of thumb, it's a heuristic, and they make sense in 75% of the cases of our everyday life.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: You use these simple rules of thumb so that you don't have to fucking think about every single thing you're going to do.
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But the 25% where they're wrong, they're really, really wrong, and they can get you into a mode where you are literally putting a blindfold on yourself, not knowing that you're doing that.
20:45
And so I think that you are hitting on themes that go all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm reading a series of books right now where it's talking about the development of the global brain and not just for humans.
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Bacteria, of course, where the first to develop a global brain.
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And they were around for like a couple hundred million years before we even decided to get out of the ocean.
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And by the way, like ants, they do the same thing.
21:17
Bacteria, on the other hand, are able to literally change essentially their own DNA genes to find and or to exist in this new environment that they find themselves in.
21:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And of course, it's not just ants, it's bees, the bees do the same thing.
21:41
When it looks like their situation is deteriorating, bees go out and look for new sources and they come back and they actually do a dance that the other bees understand and follow them. Termites, same thing.
21:54
If you ever go to Africa, look at the termite hills and have somebody there who's an expert in termites because it will blow your mind how incredibly sophisticated and advanced termites are.
22:05
So I guess my starting premise here would be, yep, you're right.
22:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The challenge that I see is threefold. First off, you often...
22:20
So I use the phrase, the great reshuffle, you call it a phase change, those are two fundamentally different things.
22:33
So what I'm talking about is the far more pedestrian, what is the world that your average...
22:37
My one-year-old granddaughter is here visiting.
22:37
And so I was holding her and looking at her, and I like to imagine, "What is the world that you're leaving, what's that going to look like?
22:46
And so that's my goal with the great reshuffle series.
22:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's like, this is what I think, and it's speculation and I'm probably going to be wrong, but it's at least at a stab at looking at that world.
23:00
A phase change, as you use the term, is a really different thing.
23:00
A phase change is literally, in my opinion, a step in our evolution.
23:07
And then you've got to be reading people like Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Bucky Fuller, all of those people, because that was their obsession.
23:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what's interesting too is, this goes back, Plato was talking about this stuff.
23:23
He was wrong in my opinion, he decided that his consciousness was to cherry a tear, of course he did, because that's what he knew.
23:35
And now you'll see a lot of our metaphors and analogies to computers.
23:41
Well, of course, it's very easy to understand.
23:41
But on the phase change angle, I have some interesting thoughts.
23:47
First off, you're too young to know this, but there was a, and this is the part that sounds weird.
23:53
And people just go like, what are you smoking, man?
23:53
But it is a, literally it is a change in the environment and or the collective consciousness.
23:57
I don't care what you want to call it.
24:07
But like, so I've always said that the ground state reality is what the majority of humans alive at any given time. Believe.
24:11
And that you've got to also understand that probably the majority of those beliefs come to them from long dead humans and that they believe them because they're convenient, quite frankly.
24:22
You can come out and you can have a shrink wrapped right off the shelf belief system.
24:28
And you can be very happy in your life and yep.
24:34
There's God in the heaven and Satan's down below and I'm going to be a good boy and I'm going to go to heaven.
24:39
It may lead to a very happy life, but not a life where you uncover any truths, in my opinion.
24:44
Because I think that most of that, everything began as a marketing campaign.
24:49
The deeper you go into all the various religions, and I'm not saying this to be nasty to religions is like their command and control structures.
25:01
And if I was going to be running a society, I'd have 10 commandments too.
25:01
I might even have 15, because when you go through the various commandments and I'm not just to pick on Christianity, it's one of the oldest.
25:11
And interestingly enough, from what this book I'm reading, and I never knew this...
25:15
Christianity was the first religion that memefied beliefs and, and Paul who used to be Saul before he fell off his horse and suddenly saw the light had, I can't remember, I guess it was 138 precepts or whatever, but the key thing was, it didn't matter what tribe you were a member of.
25:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It didn't matter what color you were.
25:38
It didn't matter where you were born.
25:40
So therefore, Christianity was in effect the world's first global religion.
25:47
They accepted converts to their faith from anywhere, any tribe, anything which is, I think interesting but back to base change.
25:55
So in the mid sixties to mid seventies, if you, the easiest way to see this is watch the music videos from that time.
26:07
Again the artists, right, the artists were at the forefront.
26:07
They were the tip of the spear in this and the spear scared the shit out of the left-brained dominant society and the man, so to speak.
26:22
Psychedelics were broadly being misused in many cases.
26:22
But all of the elements required for a phase change to happen successfully were in place in the mid sixties to the mid seventies and tell the man in this case, Richard Nixon, but everyone in con, and I'm speaking pretty specifically about the US here, but it happened in the UK too.
26:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it happened in Germany.
26:50
It was a global phenomenon, but the man or the woman, I think it might have been...
26:53
No Maggie Thatcher was later.
26:55
But the conventional keepers of the social truths in quotes shut it the fuck down.
27:04
And they did that because they could.
27:04
They did that because back then there was no global communication network... Like we have today.
27:10
There were in the United States, there were three networks that they could control completely.
27:14
They did control completely.
27:14
People for example, didn't know that Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. They did not know that.
27:22
Can you imagine in our day and age, even trying to comprehend that is wild.
27:27
So they were the keepers of the in quotes truth and it was a narrative that everyone believed and described and held to, and they were able to shut that base change down because it was frightening.
27:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that's an aspect that you do touch on, which I think often people don't, which is, this is scary as shit, this stuff, because it's like, I love Bucky Fuller's line that there's nothing about a caterpillar that suggests the butterfly, right?
28:01
And yet that it's the death and rebirth cycle of every enlightenment thinker I've ever read.
28:09
All of them have a death and rebirth.
28:09
So does the heroes journey, so does, I mean, literally anything you're going to read about you go all the way back to the oldest oldest bits when it was, as goddess is by the way, not gods who were doing all of the dying and rebirthing, but it is part and parcel to that storyline.
28:26
So I think that that time, that phase change got shut down because they could shut it down. They made...
28:39
and of course, this is just amazing to me.
28:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They made drugs, almost all of which are the non addicting drugs...
28:46
illegal fed max prison for going.
28:46
They made an example of Timothy leery.
28:54
He became the scapegoat for like, having a couple of joints in his pocket. I think.
29:00
They didn't even get him with any kind of psychedelic.
29:00
You got to remember this guy was a tenured professor at Harvard, who was a well thought of psychologist.
29:04
And, so they made an example of him because; now this is getting into kind of my take on this.
29:10
People are terrified of what the implications are for being free.
29:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They are society, and this is not a conspiracy by the way, society wants us all to be good little boys and girls, and to play by their rules.
29:35
And those rules evolve over time.
29:35
And anyone not playing by those rules, the heretics, the prophets, the gestures, they, you know, and what you would in the UK would call the tall poppy syndrome.
29:46
They get cut down because no, no, no, you can't. You can't be like that.
29:53
So I think that probably the most controversial thing that is part of your thesis is the idea that love, right?
30:01
, That love is the answer.
30:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, so the challenge that I find there, and then I'll show up, because I'd be interested in your response to several of these [inaudible] .
30:08
But the challenge that I find there is like, I think that again, we just have the wrong idea of what love is globally. Right?
30:14
So again, listen to the music, read the poems, read the novels.
30:23
Many of them, the theme is love as, you can understand, right?
30:29
That is a basic human thing.
30:29
But I think the guy who got it, the closest was again, Tony Demello, who was in my opinion, awake, he was enlightened.
30:42
And he would call, he wouldn't say he wouldn't give himself that term.
30:42
He would say that he was aware. Big difference.
30:46
I think the Buddha said the same thing when they asked him, are you a God? No. Are you a semi deity? Jim O'Shaughnessy: No. Are, are you a man? Yes. Well, but what are you? And he said, I am awake. Okay.
30:56
So Demello says, I am aware, but then he challenges you.
31:02
Because what Demello says is the source of all sorrow is our illusions coming into conflict with in quotes reality, a Taoist would say illusions coming into conflict with the Tao with the way.
31:19
And if you're a betting person and you want to put a bet on the Tao winning or your illusions of your beliefs winning, I'm going to bet on the Tao.
31:34
So, but what, what Demello was so good at was pointing that out.
31:39
He was very good at saying the primary source of sorrow is your illusions.
31:47
If you get rid of your illusions, you can be happy. And now I don't know.
31:47
I think happiness is a byproduct.
31:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I don't think it's an end in itself, but back to love.
31:52
So I mean, just think of everyone and one of your favorite rock songs about love, right?
31:58
And they're all oh I need you so much without you, my life is nothing. You, you completely.
32:03
And so Demello says, you should be able to say this.
32:09
If you truly love someone, truly, he said, you should be able to say to them, I love you, I leave you free to be yourself, to indulge your taste, to follow your inclinations and behave in any way you decide is to your liking.
32:23
Whoa, because basically what he's saying, if you can't say that you're a clinger, exploiter, conditional person, if then, if you do this, then I will love you.
32:39
If you don't do this, then I will not love you.
32:45
And he, and I'm putting words in his mouth here, but Demello basically says, how fucking dare you?
32:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: How dare you make some other person responsible for your happiness.
32:53
It is the ultimate in being unenlightened...
33:03
in being so deeply asleep that you can't understand that you are beyond almost redemption.
33:10
Because you are saying, you are going to be the one who makes my life good or bad. No, no.
33:17
I think if I've learned anything and probably I haven't, but if I've learned anything, it's that I am the only person responsible in my life. For me and for my life.
33:31
Can I help the change that you were talking about in your original thesis? Absolutely. Oh, you bet.
33:39
But can I compel Tom to see things the way I think the way Tom should see them? No.
33:48
No, because that is in my opinion, kind of the lowest form of, you know, being able to coerce someone.
33:56
There's a great passage in the Tao Te Ching about this, and I don't have it in front of me, but it's along the lines of the greatest leader makes the people feel that there is no leader that they've done everything themselves.
34:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that the worst leader is the one that makes people afraid of him or her and Mets out, you know, consequences for your actions.
34:21
Yeah, of course there are consequences for all of our actions and we should all know that, but it shouldn't be in my opinion for someone else to determine.
34:26
So I'll stop there and just get your take on like suffering as a result of your clashing with reality, reality is the Tao and by the Tao, I mean the eternal Tao, the unnamable Tao.
34:38
We're back to a place where our words fail us, because our words can't describe what that is. Music maybe... drawings, certainly.
34:53
I love your take about artists being the leading edge, because I think that is absolutely correct.
34:58
The joke that I'm lefthanded, everyone would say, well, you're lefthanded, you know, make the normal joke.
35:04
[inaudible] The Romans called that sinister.
35:09
And I said, yes, but I am the only one that is in my right mind. So what do you think?
35:14
Tom Morgan: Step back for a second?
35:14
What do we, what do talking about here?
35:17
Like what do I mean by phase change?
35:17
I'm like, I don't even know if I'm using that term, right. That's how dumb I am. Right.
35:21
But what I think of when I think of the phase change idea that I've stolen from a million different sources is the idea of the Kung Kalahari tribesman in Africa.
35:29
Where they dance and they dance and they dance.
35:35
And they get hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter.
35:35
Which seems to be a metaphor for the way the world's going right now.
35:40
It's getting hotter and hotter and more and more connected and faster and faster and faster.
35:42
And at some point the con cross a threshold, a state that hasn't really been integrated into Western culture in any meaningful way, where the ego structure dissolves and their heart opens.
35:56
Tom Morgan: And I think about this heart opening all the time, I was on a run yesterday and I thought to myself what Superman does when he opens his shirt, right?
36:02
He pulls open his shirt and there's the Superman logo beneath it.
36:07
And I think that movement, although it's probably a coincidence, it's kind of the source of us societal superpower.
36:12
And it's really interesting to me how super like, you know, Ironman, it's always in his chest...
36:16
Spiderman, it's on his chest.
36:16
That's where our superpower lies.
36:20
And if we can connect from our head to our heart, again, I'm using sort of horrible cliched terms and it, and the words annoy me as they come out of my mouth.
36:26
Because they're so insufficient.
36:31
But what's interesting is that when you do actually end up getting an embodied heart sense, which for me was only possible through having completely come apart for the first time in my life.
36:42
Tom Morgan: In my forties, I know what's true.
36:43
So people can make really, really smart, incredibly, entirely consistent arguments to me.
36:49
And I'm like, no, I don't think that's true.
36:49
I'm not sure I'm right, but I know what I believe for the first time.
36:54
And I think that when you apply that to a whole society, so many of our problems have been about us not feeling connection to anything solid, no connection to anything true.
37:05
And I think of the idea as love, whether this proves correct or not is something we are receivers for. Right.
37:14
We may receive it in kind of horrible hand fisted ways.
37:14
We may not receive it at all.
37:19
But it's that sense of disconnection that then gets steadily better.
37:19
And if you think about love as sort of like the force from star wars, this binding agent that we are receptive to, that guides us in this infinitely intelligent way.
37:32
Tom Morgan: If our heart opens, we get better at accepting that kind of guidance.
37:35
And we start to achieve a direct experie.
37:35
And I think it's very, very, very easy.
37:40
Too easy to crap on religion.
37:40
Because you can look at the fingers and be like, well, that thing's really dumb.
37:46
But actually they're all pointing at the moon and the moon is what's important.
37:51
And the moon is the same for every religion.
37:51
And, you know, I think if there is a criticism of organized religion, it's that maybe that they've tended to abstract us away from direct experience.
37:59
That, you know, you had Brian Muraresku on your pod.
38:03
And I think his thesis is fascinating.
38:03
That there used to be some form of mediated, direct experience to the spiritual world, whether it's through plant-based medicine or something else, which has been a semi ubiquitous feature of all my, all other cultures, that's helped ground us in the world around us.
38:18
Tom Morgan: And I think that's sort of like, one thing you said is that I think the modern conception of spirituality is like higher consciousness.
38:25
I think that's an awful, awful way of putting it.
38:29
It's almost lower consciousness.
38:29
It's more integrated consciousness.
38:29
Where you are like, I'm going to put my, well, I want to one side and let whatever's guiding this entire system take broader control.
38:38
Because the only thing that you'll get, if you try and make a five year plan is anxiety.
38:45
Because we can't control the world. Like it's .
38:45
And you'll notice that the more you try and control it, the unhappier you get.
38:49
I think in terms of separation, I think of the example of Brene brown.
38:53
She studied shame, which, you know, is tribally interpreted as a sense of disconnection.
38:58
And it's associated with cane enable.
38:58
The idea of being, you know, thrown from Eden and then, and then the shame of disconnection.
39:07
Tom Morgan: And it's what, you know, if you are mega depressed, it's almost one of the only emotions that you can feel.
39:10
Which is this sense of deep, deep, worthlessness, and insufficiency that prevents you from, you know, manifesting the self that you probably should be.
39:20
And when she realized the only way to get that connection back was through...
39:27
Like unavoidable vulnerability.
39:27
She had an 18 month nervous breakdown, like a horrifying, nervous breakdown.
39:33
And I think that's maybe the last thing I want to say about the death and rebirth point, right?
39:36
Is that the thing you realize, particularly once you read Miguel, Chris is you can't have safety and vitality.
39:45
Tom Morgan: It's a, it's a trade off, you can't have them both.
39:48
And at the moment we've optimized for safety at the cost of vitality.
39:48
And if you want vitality, you have to a give up certainty.
39:53
You have to give up the certainty of what you want, and you have to give up all forms of security, but not all forms of security.
40:02
I don't want to overstate this.
40:02
Everything's a balance right? To perfect balance.
40:02
We've just gone too far in one direction.
40:05
And I think that's sort of the prescription.
40:05
It doesn't involve a huge societal meltdown.
40:09
It just involves an kind of more of an awareness of our own vulnerability and our own holistic inclusiveness.
40:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I agree, especially with the last part, about certainty. I think, you know.
40:21
I believe that the only one who is certain is a madman and that we, it's in our base code, Tom.
40:26
People crave what I call the illusion of certainty, so much that it is so out of balance.
40:34
And so it strikes your theme as well.
40:34
It is so out of balance with the way one should live one's life.
40:41
That you will have no vitality.
40:48
And of course that goes right back to Lao Tzu, right?
40:48
That, which is young and supple, bends and does not break.
40:53
That, which is old and brittle breaks.
40:53
So it is the theme, right? Of the Tao throughout.
41:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's that the life is energy. Life is glow.
41:03
Life is movements, and then he uses water as a metaphor so often.
41:12
Because it is, you know, I put up a quote, you know, how I do the two quotes every day, the two thoughts from..
41:17
So I put up one from an pre Socratic Greek philosopher, Thales of wherever.
41:23
And I was reading and it was mentioned in this book, I'm reading and so I kind of went back and looked up his stuff.
41:27
And like, one of the quotes I chose, which is really kind of fun, which is the entire universe was born from water.
41:36
And then I appended it with another one of his quotes, which are, everything is full of gods.
41:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So it's not like we haven't been thinking about this as human beings.
41:44
Forever we have, and we let traditions, and I'm not anti-tradition, but I am opposed to traditions which have osified and are not serving us anymore.
41:56
And it's like our school system, it's like every, this is the kind of the main central heart of the great reshuffle.
42:03
All of those old systems are broken or breaking.
42:08
And we need to make new ones.
42:08
And making new ones is going to be scary, but the only way you do that is to understand vitality, right?
42:15
Movement and not be brittle.
42:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because what is brittle breaks.
42:25
On the religion thing, I would say that many of the traditional religions do, in fact, not advocate, you having a direct experience.
42:31
In fact, there was a big Kurfuffle over that very thing when good old Martin Luther knocked up the, [inaudible] , all of those precepts, because he thought that people could have a direct experience with God or whatever we want to call God.
42:50
You know, you could call it the universal intelligence, the Brahman, whatever.
42:54
Whereas the Catholic church at that time, and even to some extent of now thinks that needs to be intermediated, right?
43:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That only through the priest or priestess, can you reach God.
43:07
Not so much according to those other religions.
43:07
So I think that the, and here we are again, in a challenging place because of terminology, right?
43:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love the idea of the, that I think is really absolutely true, which is if you get so out of balance that you just see everything from this one point of view, you are so limiting your scope, that you're not going to be able to make good choices. The idea of co-creation. I very much believe it.
43:39
That requires you though, letting go as, so Zorba would say, letting go of the rope and being free.
43:46
And that's scary as hell.
43:53
And so, but that is the only way if you want to flow with the Tao, for example.
43:58
You it's the only way you can do it.
43:58
The only way you can do it is to understand how ridiculously stupid you are and, understand that there are forces in the universe that maybe we humans will never fully comprehend.
44:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And, the minute you do that, it's really interesting.
44:21
Like the universe, Terrance McKinnon had a great quote, which is along the lines of the universe, loves courage, man, if you dare, and you really mean it, and you strike forth very, very much with the you know, with a thousand phases type thing.
44:33
And you jump into that Abys, you're going to find that it's filled with cotton.
44:39
I'm doing, I'm butchering his quote.
44:41
But you know, this is also, and I can't remember the name of the poet, but as a lunatic, I memorized a hundred poems when I was a teenager.
44:45
And it came in handy for two things.
44:51
The first I, you would probably know what that was for, but the second was, it was good because it gave you context that you could allow you to synthesize things because you had it in your memory, but I can't remember the poet, but it starts out with, goes something like, "The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our power, little we see in natures that is ours.
45:13
We have given our hearts away assorted boon." Right.
45:20
And I'll look up who wrote that later, but, oh, I mean, if honestly, sometimes people will say to me, "Well what's the best way to do X?"
45:29
I'm like, "Read a lot of poetry, read a lot of literature, listen to a ton of music and understand that you are probably wrong."
45:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm like, okay.
45:44
But anyway, the reason I do that is because listen, I have no monopoly on truth.
45:49
The one thing that I think, and I don't know if you're doing this, but I think that it's hard to find a grand theory, that is going to fit everything.
45:54
Physicists have been trying to do it forever.
46:00
And they're forever being knocked off by new research, like, ah, I thought I had it.
46:06
And then we think we know about history and then they discover a mummy that is 10,000 years older than we thought, but I'm with you.
46:11
And so I always try to balance my much more kind of intuitive side with the more practical side, right.
46:23
Because I think that only in a balance, it's walking on The Razor's Edge, which by the way is a great book.
46:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: If you have not read that, I would recommend it. That isn't the title. It's The Razor's Edge.
46:36
It's by Maugham, I think.
46:36
Anyway, I think that if we do anyone any good, if they're listening to this podcast, right.
46:42
And all of the people who listen to our podcasts are self selected.
46:46
I'm not selling anything.
46:46
You're not selling anything.
46:46
All we're doing is saying, "Hey, what about this?
46:52
What do you think about this?" I'm sure that 80%...
46:52
and another great Jed McKenna quote, if you went and said your theories, Jed's theories to all of your friends, what would they say?
47:04
They would look at you and say, "You're a real dip shit."
47:04
So you've got to also not care.
47:09
And that is another thing that we are programmed to not be like that.
47:15
So you have to come in and it's a life's work to reprogram and meta program yourself. No?
47:22
Tom Morgan: Well, so let's look at that again.
47:24
So you've talked about how there's no sort of overarching theory of everything.
47:27
And I think that, well, what the hell am I going to know? Right.
47:27
Like I'm not Stephen Hawking or any of those guys.
47:31
But I think what you can- Jim O'Shaughnessy: By the way, sorry, but by the way I think he was wrong, I think Hawking was wrong.
47:35
Tom Morgan: Well, I think any kind of reductionist theory is always going to be incomplete, right?
47:37
You can get to the Higgs boson, but the Higgs boson isn't going to tell you how to live your life. Right?
47:44
You need values for that.
47:44
I think there are actual universal values.
47:48
They may be expressed in a ten commandment or something like that.
47:48
But there is some sort of metaphysical truth out there.
47:51
But the root to that individual creativity, that way you co-create with the environment around you, that I think is intrinsically unique.
48:01
And that sounds incredibly saccharin.
48:01
Because it's like, everyone's special.
48:01
Everyone's got creativity inside them.
48:05
Again, terrible words, right.
48:05
When I heard creativity, I would've thought finger painting.
48:09
And when you talk about reading poetry and listening to songs and that just annoys my intellect.
48:14
Tom Morgan: And one thing that you have to remember is that your intellect is fiercely resistant to all of these ideas because it requires it giving up the steering wheel.
48:18
But one thing that like, all right, but what you do need to be is actually practical, because spiritual regressiveness and spiritual bypassing gets us nowhere in the same direction. Right?
48:27
So you need to be looking for people that are building the bridge.
48:31
And I think in this case, it's people that are building the bridge from science back to spirituality.
48:35
That's why I love McGilchrist.
48:38
But like, how do you- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree, by the way.
48:39
Tom Morgan: How do you do it in your life? Right.
48:40
And I think there was a million different ways.
48:43
It's the topic of almost every spiritual text, right?
48:43
What did I do in my own relatively insignificant life, is that without knowing I was doing it, I basically assembled a bunch of meaningful quotes.
48:52
And then I turned it into a book.
48:52
And then when I finished a book, I realized that I was the thread running through those quotes.
48:57
And I was writing something about it this week.
49:01
And someone reached out from Switzerland who had heard the first infinite loops podcast and was like, you should listen to this podcast about people unconsciously using quotes to signal their direction in life.
49:11
And it's that exchange- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Was that Arnold Vanderberg? Tom Morgan: Yes, yes.
49:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I talked to him. I love that guy. I love him.
49:20
He's such a amazing man, but continue.
49:20
Tom Morgan: This is exactly my point, right?
49:22
Is that you hear resonance.
49:22
So the resonance comes from outside of you, but it's your resonance with it that's important.
49:26
And that I think is how you start to build that bridge.
49:31
And I think the other thing that's staggeringly universal and came out in John Cleese's recent book and almost every study of a genius I've ever encountered, is that they cultivate these boundary spaces between the hemispheres, where for Edison, it was the boundary between waking and sleeping.
49:46
And it's the same for me too, or you go and take a cold shower, and that puts you a little bit more in your body, or you do breath-work and that gets you a little bit more in your body.
49:54
But there's all these different places you can go, that take you into a boundary where it's like, yes, you can go on a bit past retreat.
50:02
Tom Morgan: But I think we kind of over egg that in the other direction, it's all about just getting things a little bit more in balance rather than this whole sales swing back the other way.
50:13
And I think that's one thing, right?
50:13
When you talk about the sixties getting out of control.
50:17
Is that one, it was on a completely different scale to today, but also it kind of had this hedonistic culture.
50:22
When actually I think a lot of the plant medicine is supposed to be medicine, it's supposed to be sparingly used when you are in real crisis. Right?
50:27
And that's what makes today's movement difference.
50:32
It's coming at things from a fundamentally healing perspective, which makes it very hard to shut down.
50:36
But you do have this interplay that is probably necessary between the priesthood and the Prometheans, right?
50:41
Is that the Prometheans still fire everything goes haywire for a little while, everything gets burnt down and then the priesthood comes in and shuts it all down. Right.
50:51
They come at 4:00 AM and close the party down, right?
50:54
Like that probably needs to happen.
50:54
But at the moment, we don't have enough of that chaotic spark in the system, which we would ordinarily experience through vitality.
51:03
And I think that's what we're coming back to now.
51:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's a great way of putting it I think Tom, because what you really want to do...
51:08
So I'll tell you a personal experience.
51:08
When I was young, when I was a teenager, and I don't know why, I was amazingly hooked into resonance.
51:22
And by that, I mean, like I could...
51:22
The classic example I'll give was, I'm the youngest by seven years, my oldest, I have a brother's seven years older than I am.
51:28
And then my sister, the youngest of my sister's nine years older than I am.
51:32
So I was like, kind of an only kid, but I had this big family.
51:36
And then obviously as I grew older I became much closer to my sisters and everything.
51:42
So I was 16 and the youngest of my sisters was at my house.
51:47
We had a big house and I was walking in from the garage and they were at the most distant point in this large house, a living room.
51:52
And I was hit by what at the time I called a wall of emotion.
52:01
It was like, literally, you were in a blast radius.
52:01
And the minute I opened the door, I felt almost knocked over by this.
52:08
And I later learned that my sister was telling my father that she was going to divorce her first husband.
52:16
But I want to tell you the reaction that I had to it.
52:20
And that was, I was terrified.
52:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wait a minute, I'm not in control here.
52:25
In other words, when that happens to you and you experience that kind of resonance for the first time, honestly, I spent the next years trying to deaden that. No, I don't want that. I don't want that.
52:42
And it was way later in life that I realized that what an idiot I had been, right.
52:49
Instead of being afraid, which I think is a natural reaction, I don't know if you've ever experienced it, but whew, if you have, you'll know exactly why I was terrified.
53:01
But anyway, if I had been even given it a moments more thought, but I was 16, I mean, 16 year old male, please.
53:08
But the reaction was fear. I was terrified.
53:08
And the reason I bring it up here is because I think it's a good metaphor for honestly, what you are advocating for, by the way, which I agree with.
53:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I support.
53:24
I absolutely think that we have gotten out of balance.
53:28
I think we need to get back in balance.
53:28
The only way to be in balance is to have these parameters. Right.
53:33
And so that ultimately the end of that story was that's ultimately when I started reading the Tao and trying to figure out, okay, so I want X, Y and Z, what do I got to do?
53:43
And what I had to do was have a balance, right?
53:49
And I'm a quant for God's sakes.
53:49
I took that entire side looked at it and thought, no.
53:56
My human programming, I'm not going to be able to conquer that no way.
53:56
And so it amusingly left me toward being the most analytical of investors betting what...
54:01
But you're also in a way, which people don't really understand, quants are really the only people who are saying, we are not smarter than the market.
54:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We're not smarter than the collective wisdom of every investor.
54:15
And so, you know what we're going to do, in a way if you wanted to really go for us, go for our throats.
54:22
You'd say, you're fucking free riders man.
54:27
What you're doing is, you are just using the results of those endless hours that analysts put in and everything else and distilled into numbers and then aggregated and you are horrible because you are not pulling your weight.
54:41
I think, I look at it the other way.
54:46
And I'm like, no, no, I know that there's no way I can be smarter than the market.
54:51
Are there people like George Soros with this famous back problem?
54:56
Of course, of course there are, there are artists. Absolutely.
54:56
I totally believe in them.
55:01
I just happen not to be one of those.
55:01
And so I think the other thing a quant is very willing to do is accept failure rates, right?
55:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so I think, the reason I bring this up is because I think it does fit in with a broader theme that your thesis is speaking to, which is that, A, things that hit you like a wave, they're terrifying to an individual or person.
55:25
Having experienced it, I can attest to that.
55:25
Number two, we have built a society where it's almost a crime to be wrong. In quotes, wrong. And that is so foolish. And so shortsighted.
55:40
Anyway, that a lot of the things that you are advocating for, and I am too, by the way, let's make that very clear. But they're scary. Tom Morgan: Yeah.
55:48
I mean, what are we talking about here?
55:48
I read a resonant quote, two days ago, wisdom is knowing what information is important.
55:56
Well that's simple and incredibly profound, right?
56:03
And to go back to the user illusion example, you can't take in 11 million bits, you'd be burn out like a light bulb in a nuclear reactor.
56:09
You can't take in a trillion bits, you'd be jello. Right?
56:14
So all this is about, is all we're talking about is how do you calibrate your filter to get the full range of human experience, including the shit stuff, which is the problem, right.
56:26
Is if you hide in your intellect, as a lot of people I know have, it's typically a coping mechanism to prevent yourself from experiencing the full range of human emotion.
56:35
And if you do get blown open, a blowing open experience tends to be incapacitating and overwhelming.
56:41
Tom Morgan: And that's the point.
56:43
You're not supposed to have a direct experience of that, right?
56:47
Too many crazy psychedelic experiences make you too open.
56:47
You believe everything, you need a good filter.
56:52
And that's the definition of wisdom.
56:52
And I think that George Soros example is brilliant.
56:57
So like, for those of you that don't know the George Soros anecdote, it was that he used to give all these really clever, retroactive reasons why he did things and then his son gave an interview I think to the Irish Times where he was like, oh no, it's just his back hurts when his portfolio positioned wrong.
57:08
I thought about that for a long time, a long, long time.
57:13
And my interpretation of it, whether right or wrong is that, so we lay down a whole bunch of information from pattern recognition and he laid down a whole bunch of information from seeing an enormous number of different trading scenarios play out.
57:28
Tom Morgan: But those pattern recognition patterns run in the background.
57:29
Because if they're running in the foreground, you're not going to get anything done, right.
57:32
You're going to be using your 60 bit consciousness to act in the world.
57:36
But when something trips that, because it's not running in your intellect, it's running in your unconscious, you're going to feel it as a sensation first.
57:45
And that's the point you need to be smart enough.
57:45
Well, smart's completely the wrong word, but you need to be in tune enough and embodied enough that when you feel that, you don't just feel it and discount it, you feel it and know what it means.
58:00
So you are serving the correct emotions, you're serving the correct physical sensations to your consciousness.
58:06
And then you are able to interpret them and act on them in the correct way.
58:11
That is a well calibrated filter.
58:11
It's not about feeling everything all the time, because then you're just going to be mush.
58:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Correct.
58:18
And what you have to do, which is very hard to do, which most people struggle with.
58:24
I wrote a piece that proved to be pretty popular called The Thinker and the Prover, which of course is technically completely wrong because it says that your brain is divided into the thinker and the prover, right?
58:34
So the thinker can think anything it wants and the prover takes that as reality and proves it. Right.
58:38
But it gets back to also this whole idea of co-creating right?
58:44
So when you ultimately do read Jed McKenna, oh man, you're going to be intolerable, but that'll be good.
58:49
We'll be able to have a lot of really fun talks.
58:54
But the thing that he warns about, which is so true, which is so true, which is be careful what you ask the universe for.
59:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because if you are genuine you in this request, the universe is likely to give it to you.
59:11
But you know what, the universe is also going to turn you into the instrument that can achieve that.
59:18
And the example that he gave was the making of Apocalypse Now, which basically the documentary on that is actually better than the movie, because he went through the real apocalypse.
59:29
He literally contemplated suicide.
59:29
He had to finance the film for himself. He was broke.
59:35
No one believed in him, the universe broke him down, rebuilt him and said, oh, by the way, now you're going to be able to make that movie Apocalypse Now.
59:42
And it will be an achievement.
59:46
I mean, personally, I think it's his greatest movie.
59:46
I think that as much as I love The Godfather, it's a soap opera, really, if you break it down.
59:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Apocalypse Now, which is based on the Heart of Darkness, is about much deeper...
59:58
And actually, it's kind of about what we're talking about right now.
1:00:00
It's about unbridled parts of our nature being let run wild. Right?
1:00:00
We don't want that happen because then you get really bad shit happening.
1:00:07
But the thing that I think that we should focus on is if we do anything for anyone, it's only going to make sense if they go, "Hey, did you hear that podcast with Tom and Jim?" Yeah. Tom. Yeah.
1:00:22
That was a really good thesis.
1:00:26
I'm going to start thinking about that. Right.
1:00:26
And I'm going to start trying to become more balanced.
1:00:31
To me, that's the biggest win in the world.
1:00:37
Let's say you get a chance to give this course at Columbia or wherever NYU.
1:00:37
Do you think A, you could do it?
1:00:43
B, I know what your reading list would look like.
1:00:43
So that'd be pretty cool. But how many...
1:00:50
And I'm asking this honestly, how many people do you think that you can truly teach in a way that they change themselves?
1:01:00
Tom Morgan: Don't think it matters.
1:01:00
And that's the crazy thing is that if everything I've said is consistent, which again, it may not be, I may be disproven next week is that it's the butterfly effect. Right?
1:01:07
It would be nice if I got a tenure and became a professor and reached an audience of millions with this message, right.
1:01:13
But maybe you just reach one person and that one person becomes Nelson Mandela or something.
1:01:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:01:21
Tom Morgan: Assuming this isn't complete bullshit in the first part.
1:01:23
And I do you think about my wife every time I write, I write for my wife and her one raised eyebrow.
1:01:28
Every time I try and talk to her about any of this nonsense.
1:01:28
Because she's so practical and so much more successful than me.
1:01:32
And just never got lost in the same way that I got lost.
1:01:37
But I want to address something.
1:01:37
And I think it's interesting that you pick Apocalypse Now because that, I believe it's an adaptation of Heart of Darkness.
1:01:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It is.
1:01:44
Tom Morgan: It's a story about what he wanted, which is not a coincidence.
1:01:46
But it makes me think of the Midas myth, which everything he touched turned to gold until he tied to drink things.
1:01:50
And then his children turned to gold and everyone's like, oh, stupid Midas, until we realize we are all Midas.
1:01:55
And I think of the David Foster Wallace quote that if you worship anything, anything that isn't the Dow or whatever, horrible word you want to use for it, it will eat you alive.
1:02:05
And there's this absolutely terrifying, terrifying, terrifying, terrifying over long, typical piece from Scott Alexander, Scott Siskind, the guy that writes Slate Star Codex called meditations on Moloch. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I've read it. Tom Morgan: Oh my God.
1:02:22
It gives me chills and I'm not even sure why, but it's basically about what maximum competition looks like.
1:02:23
The Squid Games like mentality, which I think we are all understanding now where we worship the market and there's nothing wrong with the market, but when it's the only thing you worship, it gets you in trouble and Moloch is the God of child sacrifice.
1:02:37
And it gets deeper and much darker than even than that.
1:02:42
But basically the idea being that you give up that which is most valuable to you in exchange for power.
1:02:47
And the implication being that if you wish for the wrong thing, you'll get the power, but it will take something of extraordinary value from you.
1:02:59
Tom Morgan: And I think the idea being that this is incredibly deep idea, that sacrifice is real.
1:03:00
It's not a symbolic act, that there is a form of sacrifice and there's a form of psychological sacrifice that you can make in order to create something of value.
1:03:11
And I think that may be as part of the hero myth as well, is that this person is willing to put himself in a state of extraordinary psychological dissonance and suffering to bring something new into reality that's worthwhile.
1:03:28
So instead of sacrificing his child for gold, he sacrifices himself that everyone else. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:03:34
And also that leads us to probably yet another podcast, because that leads to the discussion between if you do become enlightened, most people, if you look at the Jed McKennas of the world or Buddha himself, right. If you become...
1:03:50
Buddha never wrote anything down.
1:03:50
I think that's very important for people to understand.
1:03:55
Neither did Jesus Christ. Okay.
1:03:55
So these incredible prophets or enlightened beings never, ever wrote anything down.
1:04:01
So you should think about that deeply because what you're getting are those that venerate and worship them, not necessarily what they said, right?
1:04:15
And so you don't want to do that.
1:04:15
It's like the Zen story about the guy... Sorry.
1:04:21
I think it's actually from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.
1:04:21
Anyway, it's the story of this guy who was seeking enlightenment and so he keeps going to the various monasteries and everything.
1:04:32
And he learns and he learns and he learns but he just keeps going until he finally gets to the one at the top of the very highest mountain that he's ever been on.
1:04:36
And there he is met by the master and he starts talking to him going, "Oh, this is amazing."
1:04:42
And he goes, "That's the master.
1:04:48
Did any of your pupils ever leave here?"
1:04:48
And the master says, "Yes, but only one."
1:04:56
And he was a bit bitter when he said it.
1:04:56
And the zen character says "Which way did he go?"
1:05:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And he points and he gets up without saying anything and goes that way.
1:05:05
So the point is that you've got what you wanted.
1:05:11
There's so many ways that we try to make this clear and it's so difficult to make clear.
1:05:14
What you want is the idea, what you want is the ability to go through that hero's journey.
1:05:22
But one of the things that is equally likely outcome is that...
1:05:31
Jed McKenna wrote a great piece about, if you were to instantly become enlightened, right?
1:05:37
He said, "You would become immediately a Taoist Sage.
1:05:37
And you would also immediately and concurrently not care about power, about money, about outward appearances, about virtually anything." We know that Buddha sat.
1:05:54
He didn't rouse the troops so to speak, that was all of his followers.
1:06:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But there's a second way which is that way of what is called the Bodhisattva.
1:06:03
The Bodhisattva is what you're talking about which is the hero who becomes enlightened but goes back.
1:06:18
So I'm interested in the Bodhisattvas of the world because they're the Prometheans I believe.
1:06:24
They're the ones that are bringing the fire...
1:06:24
And that by the way is why when you read like my good friend Dan Jeffries who's written two excellent essays on this about enlightenment and specifically looking at Jed.
1:06:34
In Jed's most recent stuff, he says "Enlightenment, true enlightenment is actually the booby prize man."
1:06:40
What you want is to become a human adult and what a human adult is, is someone who is awake in the dream state but that is also what a Bodhisattva is. They don't give up.
1:06:53
They care enough about their fellow human beings to become Prometheans bringing the fire back.
1:06:57
That's what I think you're advocating for.
1:07:03
I think that makes great sense. Tom Morgan: Yeah.
1:07:05
This is really, really interesting multi-level conceptualization of this.
1:07:05
So McGilchrist has this idea where the way that we interact with the world is that there's this massive flow of information going past us that we can't interact with unless we divide it up into parts and categories so that we can articulate it and understand it.
1:07:20
But then we put it back into the flow afterwards.
1:07:26
It's like someone listening to a piece of music, deconstructing it into notes and then playing it intuitively and beautifully afterwards.
1:07:34
Tom Morgan: And what we've done as a society is been unbelievably good at passing things down into the individual notes.
1:07:39
But to build them back up again requires magic and emergence.
1:07:45
And it's super interesting to me that in reading about shamanic cultures, it wasn't that the shaman fell apart that mattered.
1:07:51
It was how they reconstituted themselves afterwards that they effectively became Bodhisattva human adults.
1:07:57
And rationality, pure rationality, dark Jed McKenna rationality...
1:08:04
I read the first book by the way and I was like, "This does not sound desirable at all."
1:08:07
I missed the point because the second two parts are about how you build yourself back up, right?
1:08:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:08:14
Tom Morgan: It's about participation and it's about the fact that...
1:08:15
So if you give Western science any of these ideas, they'll be like you'll take a cow and science gets out the scalpel and divides it into a bunch of beef, piles of beef.
1:08:21
And you're like, "There's a cow there."
1:08:25
And they're like, "No there's just some beef."
1:08:25
And in order for you to bring that beef back there needs to, as I said, be magic.
1:08:29
And the way that Joseph Campbell put it was that basically you go away and you learn the craft.
1:08:36
It's why it's not just at 12 years old going away and following your bliss, you have to learn the craft.
1:08:43
Tom Morgan: You have to put in the time, there has to be a foundation.
1:08:45
You learn the craft and then you will end up playing it intuitively like the martial artists who does the wax on wax off and then brings something new into the world.
1:08:54
And that's what the Bodhisattva does.
1:08:54
And I think if Jesus allegedly said this or not but in the gospel of Thomas, "If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you.
1:09:05
If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." That's the idea.
1:09:09
Is you bringing forth this latent creativity and the only way you can bring forth that creativity is one, the subjugation of the ego.
1:09:16
And two, aligning yourself with the system.
1:09:22
And to go back to your original point, that means there's something to align yourself with.
1:09:26
There's something that's real that exists outside of us, where not everything is abstract, not everything is debatable.
1:09:30
There are real things and you can align yourself with them and you'll know when you are aligned with them because you will see coincidences and you'll be offered gifts back.
1:09:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
1:09:42
And that in a nutshell is the explanation of human adulthood with the doubt of these things that we seem to have been grasping at that guys three or 4,000 years ago, figured out.
1:09:57
What I love, what I absolutely love, I've been incredibly fortunate in life in the number of experiences I've been able to have.
1:10:12
So I was sitting in on a presentation by a genius quantum physicist and literally as I'm listening to him, I'm just like, okay.
1:10:19
So what he's saying here is he's translated the [inaudible] into numbers.
1:10:26
But what's also interesting is when I have a chance to actually talk to some of these people, literally one of the first books that got me interested in quantum physics was called the Dancing Wu Li Masters.
1:10:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I haven't re-read it, it was written a long time ago, but they converge.
1:10:42
And the final thing that I wanted to get out because I think it's really important is this idea...
1:10:49
So this is Tony DeMello again and he is saying, "When you fight with something you're tied to it forever."
1:10:54
It puts you out of alignment with the flow of the Tao.
1:10:59
If you decide, "No, that's wrong and this is right.
1:10:59
I'm going to swim this way."
1:11:05
You may go ahead give it a try but you're probably going to make yourselves, again what he would say, "Suffering is caused by clashing with reality."
1:11:13
I'm saying the Tao, the flow of the Tao is reality and many people say, "Oh, well that's crazy talk."
1:11:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, not really.
1:11:25
And I love your idea of you'll see all of these synchronicities back as gifts that are telling you that you're going in the right direction. That is so true.
1:11:33
I cannot tell you how true that is because just like in my own life I found just the number of so-called synchronicities is just like, "Okay."
1:11:46
I don't believe that but the minute you try to be honest and forthright about that and you're talking to a materialist who is 100% intellect.
1:11:54
Well, that's a very hard person to try to convince because yeah, I know...
1:12:01
Listeners Tom shrugged his shoulders and that's what I do all the time too.
1:12:07
It's like, listen the final step I think is that if you ever get even close to there, that's what you got to do because all you're doing like Prometheus.
1:12:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Here's the fire, have at it.
1:12:20
Do with it what you want.
1:12:20
It can be incredibly good.
1:12:20
You can use it to warm yourself and do all these things or you can burn shit to the ground. It can be very bad.
1:12:33
So it's not like we're saying that any of this is cut and dry, this is the only way. No, not at all. But understand you do...
1:12:40
And that's why I love the metaphors.
1:12:48
By the way, one other thing that makes it easy for people.
1:12:48
There are a group of movies that are so amazing.
1:12:55
I've got a list on Twitter, I'll put it up when we release this podcast.
1:13:02
But there's a new one which has literally blown me away and it's called Free Guy.
1:13:02
And Free Guy is remarkable in that it is the most Zen, Buddha, Taoist movie I've ever seen in my life.
1:13:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And yet it is 100% a commercial popcorn Hollywood movie that manages to make this point.
1:13:21
And the reason I'm bringing it up now is because I'm going back to the beginning of our conversation where you say, "Look at the stories that are coming out."
1:13:34
And when you said that I was like, "Oh God I've got to talk about Free Guy because you're right."
1:13:41
All of a sudden everything and the stories, if all you do is pay attention to those.
1:13:48
If I was a macro investor, which I don't think you can be because complex adaptive systems, all change comes from the bottom not the top.
1:13:59
And the quote I gave you, the Oppenheimer quote, which I love.
1:14:04
Yeah, of course the world's going to hell.
1:14:04
The only possible way that we can do to make that not happen is to not try and make it not happen.
1:14:10
So it is so contrary to our Western methods of thought that an awakening is a good term for it. Well, my friend.
1:14:20
I see that we are at the hour and a half mark.
1:14:27
And when I go beyond an hour and a half...
1:14:33
Jamie sent me a text and said, "I love how you always use me as the bad guy."
1:14:33
And he says, "You call me a school Marm and how can you be so young and yet be such an old foggy."
1:14:48
But I think things take as much time as they need and one thing that I would like to tell the audience though.
1:14:53
And it's a compliment to Tom.
1:14:53
Synthesizing data is really fucking hard and so you take something that's really hard but then add on top of it, you got to be able to choose which data you want to synthesize.
1:15:09
And that my friends is even harder but here's another thing that I think listeners really want to pay attention to and listen closely to.
1:15:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Synthesizers like Tom are the future.
1:15:25
If you want to do really, really, really, really well in the new world, information is not enough.
1:15:32
We're in an information tsunami and it is enough to blast us out.
1:15:38
You've got to be able to have the selectivity to understand what is worth it and what is not.
1:15:46
And then you got to be able to synthesize it and create new understanding, that is a gift that you my friend have.
1:15:51
And so from here, what's next man?
1:15:55
You've come up with this incredibly good theory, where do we go next? I know where we go next.
1:15:58
How do we make this relatable to investment advice?
1:16:02
Tom Morgan: Well, firstly, I don't care where it goes next because that would be a contradiction of my entire thesis.
1:16:05
I don't have a one week plan let alone a five year plan. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure. Right.
1:16:13
Tom Morgan: There's a couple of things to say first.
1:16:14
I think actually, and I'm very, very, very flattered about what you say about synthesis.
1:16:16
But really only something I realized in the last two weeks about synthesis is that you tend to think about synthesis as sort of like a thing that certain people do.
1:16:24
But if you paid attention to what we've been talking about, if you do your own synthesis of what you think is important, you will become wiser.
1:16:31
Because you yourself will start chipping away at what's important to you.
1:16:37
And there's a great, great quote I love from a Japanese designer called Yohji Yamamoto where he says, "Start by copying what you love."
1:16:48
Tom Morgan: Copy, copy, copy, copy, copy and at the end of the copy, you will find yourself.
1:16:49
And the idea being that if you follow your interest and you don't try and create, you just assemble pieces from other people.
1:16:58
At the end of that process, as something Nietzsche said as well, you will find maybe what's driving your soul.
1:17:02
But all those pieces that you've pulled apart will come back together and that thing that comes back together is you.
1:17:07
Because otherwise you get into this deeply paradoxical situation where you're trying really, really hard. "What do I love? What do I love?
1:17:16
How do I follow my bliss?
1:17:16
How do I follow my bliss?"
1:17:16
And you're just putting it back in the left hemisphere again and you're trying to take hold the steering wheel.
1:17:22
So you have this really awkward, incredibly difficult paradoxical situation where you have to not think very much about what you love.
1:17:27
You have to pay subtle attention to what's driving your interests and then follow those rabbit holes.
1:17:33
If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
1:17:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:17:39
Tom Morgan: I think for the investment advice and obviously nothing I say is investment advice.
1:17:40
Particularly for me- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Nor anything I say [crosstalk].
1:17:45
Tom Morgan: So I ran into a great geopolitical strategist who I've been following for a while called Marko Papic And he talks about this emergence shift in voters towards more government intervention.
1:17:58
If Squid Game represent something and I think it does, it's the understanding that we need more slack in the system.
1:18:02
And slack is just as easily translatable as love as anything else.
1:18:06
It's capacity and that we're going to see more intervention and we're going to see more stimulus because that makes the system a little less punitive.
1:18:14
Tom Morgan: And I was thinking today looking at this insane Shiba Inu stat about this guy that turned eight grand into 5. 7 billion, if it's true. I don't know if it is.
1:18:22
But it's the idea of this emergent decentralization of wealth, however it ends up playing out.
1:18:28
And Crypto and Blockchain may not be the way but NFTs, artists are making as much money as speculators and that must be the first time to bubble ever.
1:18:38
But if you think about McGilchrist, I would be studying, what does the right hemisphere want?
1:18:43
How does it see the world?
1:18:43
And then thinking about the ways that will manifest itself in markets.
1:18:47
And I've written about this a lot so people can check it out on our website in sort of a lot more detail and it's something that I'm going to be...
1:18:51
Yeah, there's literally nothing more interesting than this so I'm going to be dedicating my life to it for the next few years.
1:18:58
But that's sort of the way that I'd be thinking about things.
1:19:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
1:19:02
Again, the challenge that I have is that I think it's difficult to ignite creativity in people...
1:19:05
Not creativity, I'm sorry. Curiosity, curiosity.
1:19:12
One of my thoughts that I've been thinking a lot about is what are the commonalities of people that I've met?
1:19:18
And again I've been so lucky to be able to have met extraordinary people.
1:19:24
And everyone's going to say [inaudible] well, okay.
1:19:24
Yeah but that shouldn't stop us from looking at what we see as commonalities.
1:19:30
And one that I've noticed that I don't know that it's flattering, but they're obsessive.
1:19:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Not to a point of obsessive OCD but they are obsessive.
1:19:41
And when you're curious you don't really have a choice, when you're curious and you are driven by curiosity, what I can tell you is that you really don't have a choice.
1:19:57
But oh my oh my, what a wonderful life you can create for yourself.
1:20:06
Sometimes I get distraught when I just see behavior that I just know where it's going to end up.
1:20:14
You can't really say anything because you're not going to be able to change human nature at its core.
1:20:18
You can make it a little bit better.
1:20:18
And so it's at the margin.
1:20:24
That's also the concept of being the butterfly which I fully agree with by the way. Tom Morgan: Yeah.
1:20:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the last plug I'll give before we say goodbye is to Bob Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I've re-read many, many times.
1:20:37
And the reason I thought about it today was I was thinking about the Human idea of the charioteer and it was not lost on me that, that came from Plato's dialogue with Phaedrus which is what Bob Pirsig calls his earlier self in the book.
1:21:00
And of course his earlier self was a genius who literally got to this place but then went insane or so society said.
1:21:07
And what he talks about is this what McGilchrist would say it's the left and right hemisphere, Pirsig would call the classicist and the romantic.
1:21:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And he would say that there is forever the knife and the knife is what we're trying to gently suggest here...
1:21:31
At least this is my interpretation.
1:21:31
The knife's going to get used because it is, because we are human beings and because that frankly is how we progress.
1:21:43
We invent new things and we figure them out and we get problems and then we have to figure those out.
1:21:50
If you think of only the knife, you're not thinking about it right.
1:21:50
So kind Sir, I think that this is great stuff.
1:21:57
You know what we'll probably have to do, which might be fun actually.
1:22:01
I think we're going to do this though, aren't we?
1:22:01
We're going to do it in a salon, right? Tom Morgan: Yes.
1:22:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But that's your salon.
1:22:07
I'm just going to be a bystander there.
1:22:09
Tom Morgan: We wouldn't have a salon without you. Yeah.
1:22:12
Probably first week of December, maybe the second on Interintellect.
1:22:12
We're going to have- Jim O'Shaughnessy: So here we go.
1:22:15
Anna, you owe us big time because we are just plugging the hell out of you.
1:22:18
That's actually exciting because that will allow for a bunch of questions that you and I haven't thought about, I'm sure.
1:22:23
And the salon format is real...
1:22:28
I've done two as the speaker and they're fun.
1:22:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well my friend, as always I come away with probably more questions than I had before I came.
1:22:36
You've thrown me into a recursive loop.
1:22:40
I won't be any good to anyone for the rest of today because all I'm going to be doing is thinking about this.
1:22:46
But that's I think the highest compliment I can give you Tom.
1:22:49
So thank you for throwing me into this recursive loop.
1:22:49
I hope that many of our listeners are in the same loop but it's not going to be an infinite loop guys.
1:22:54
We're going to break out of it. Thank you Tom. Tom Morgan: Thank you.