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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, good afternoon everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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I have to say, I have been getting the absolute best group of guests in, I don't know, the last year.
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It's just been fantastic.
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Today I have Sam McRoberts, the CEO of [VUDU], am I saying that right, Sam? Sam McRoberts: VUDU. VUDU Marketing.
2:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, VUDU.
2:34
It's spelled differently, cool. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
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V-O-O-D-O-O was taken so I went with that.
2:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I like VUDU. That's even better.
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And, where I found you, author of Screw the Zoo. Welcome.
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Sam McRoberts: Thank you, Jim.
2:50
I appreciate you having me.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: These are always really fun for me.
2:55
We're going to talk about work a little bit.
2:55
I want to actually ask you a question about that first.
3:00
Then, we're going to pretty quickly get into [Jed McKenna], Tony De Mello [crosstalk]- Sam McRoberts: Nice.
3:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: At all, because we are brothers under the skin in turn...
3:09
One of the things that I want you to explain a little bit though, is you lead a really cool lifestyle, as far as I'm concerned.
3:19
You're a digital nomad, meaning you spend 90 days in a different country working and living from there.
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Number one, how is that going?
3:26
Number two, you have a son, I believe, how are you educating him?
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Number three, best experience, worst experience. Go.
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Sam McRoberts: All right. How's it going? It's going well.
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A little harder with COVID, although we've discovered that hiring a van to drive you from country to country is a hell of a lot more fun and relaxing than flying.
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With COVID, we do that instead, so we avoid airplanes and crowds.
3:58
That's actually been really nice.
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My son, he is more unschooled than homeschooled.
4:04
He was technically homeschooled before we started traveling.
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Really, I just, I leave his education largely to him. He's self-directed.
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If he's interested in something, he'll figure it out.
4:14
I consider it an experiment, but he's happy, I'm happy. What was the third?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: The third... I love that answer. How old is he? Sam McRoberts: He's 11.
4:26
Oh, best experience and worst experience, that was the third one. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
4:27
But before you get there, Anna Lorena Fabrega, did you see, did you listen to that podcast?
4:32
Sam McRoberts: I haven't heard that one.
4:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You listen to it because it's basically- Sam McRoberts: [crosstalk] Synthesis school, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
4:38
It's really interesting because it's the first to acknowledge that our current system is shit.
4:42
It was designed for the industrial era.
4:50
It was essentially designed, industrialists said to the states, "Hey, could you make it easy for them to like sitting in a room for eight hours without doing anything?
4:57
Because, they were going to go to the factory after that.
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I think that you might enjoy that, and I'd bet your son would love because it's all self-directed.
5:09
I was, became a convert, just watching these kids, man.
5:15
It's like, if you let a child behave the way they're supposed to behave, I think, they are incredibly curious. They love learning.
5:21
They just, you have to pull him away from it if, time for dinner.
5:30
I'm a big member of that camp.
5:30
Sam McRoberts: He's a big gamer.
5:34
He's learning scripting so he can build Roblox games.
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He is constantly on with friends, coordinating campaigns and projects and all kinds of crazy stuff, so he'll do just fine.
5:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So cool.
5:48
The Flynn effect where the IQ went up so [crosstalk] dramatically, but a lot of that was attributed to gaming actually.
6:01
Sam McRoberts: I think gaming is a part, and I read somewhere that... What was it?
6:03
It was the addition of iodine in salt, may have also played a significant role in it.
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I'll credit it to gaming though. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
6:14
We're going to go down all sorts of different rabbit holes, but I was reading last night that...
6:17
You know the phrase, the great unwashed? Sam McRoberts: No.
6:24
Actually, I don't think I've heard that. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
6:25
That was a term of derision that the upper classes would talk about the lower classes.
6:25
They would call them, the great unwashed.
6:32
I didn't realize that that didn't really come into play until the mid 1800s because soap wasn't marketed until around that time.
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The Empress Josephine, for while she was Empress, which was a very short period of time, was the celebrity influencer who got everyone to start taking baths with this new thing called soap.
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Sure enough, all of the elite aristocrats started bathing every day.
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They also had cotton now because the Brits figured out how to make cheap cotton.
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Originally made in India, but now it was machine made in England.
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Literally, when you about this stuff, it just blows your mind.
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Before that, they took two baths a year, the clothes were wool.
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You stunk to high heaven and no one would say, "Oh, the great unwashed."
7:27
But, the aristocrats started bathing every day then immediately became derisive towards the working class. Typical, right? Sam McRoberts: Sure. Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. Let's get back to you.
7:44
Best and worst experience.
7:48
Sam McRoberts: Best and worst.
7:48
Oh boy, honestly, I'd say one of the best is probably just getting to wander around Paris.
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We spent a month there, went to everything, just so amazing. There's so much to see.
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All the museums, just absolutely stunning city, fantastic food and really, really, really good restaurants.
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I went to the [Guy Savoy] restaurant there and did their tasting menu. It was stupid good. Loved it.
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I'd say Barcelona might be a close second though.
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Worst experience was actually in Barcelona.
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Our first time there, my wife had her backpack stolen by the waterway.
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She sat down with my son to eat something and had the backpack sitting next to her and somebody just lifted it right off her while she was sitting there.
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She never even heard him or noticed until she reached for her water bottle and oops, backpack's gone.
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That's probably the worst.
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Although I don't know, actually no, we were in Zagreb, Croatia two years ago, almost two years ago.
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We were there for their big earthquake. That was nuts. It was like a 5. 7 or eight.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: It was a big one. Yeah. Sam McRoberts: Yeah. It was terrifying.
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It was probably the worst at the time, but in hindsight, it's a cool experience and we are fine, so I don't know, [crosstalk].
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I guess we're probably quantumly entangled because Paris is one of my favorite cities.
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My wife and I would go there almost every year.
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Pre pandemic, we did go to Italy at least once a year, often, twice a year because we love- Sam McRoberts: Italy is great too.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: We just love the Italians and we love everything about Italy, literally. But, we love Paris too.
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My wife is a big walker so I would grumble, but it is the best way to see a city.
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Sam McRoberts: Hundred percent.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's just to walk through every part of it.
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We've seen Paris that way, we've seen Barcelona that way.
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We've seen all over the places we've ever gone, so I'm a bit envious with you because it sounds very cool to be able to go from place to place.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, how about your work though?
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You're an SEO consultant.
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Do you find that being on the road constantly, is it helpful for your work, or hindering? Sam McRoberts: Neutral.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Neutral?
10:06
Sam McRoberts: Doesn't really, doesn't affect a lot.
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I mean, people who have websites, I help them get more traffic from Google.
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I do a lot of consulting with different agencies, random companies, some big, some small.
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It's probably one of the best skill sets you could have if you want to live anywhere and wander around because it's just, it's all online and it's very asynchronous.
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There are no emergencies in SEO, or almost none, so it's nice.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is nice.
10:33
This nice segue into all things Jed, at all.
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My friend Dan Jeffreys is an elite programmer.
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He can literally work from anywhere in the world that he wants.
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Like you, he bounces around. He is a little more...
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He stays places longer, but he is able to do that.
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I just think it's pretty cool.
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I guess I could do it too.
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I mean, as we've got zoom, we've got all these things. Let's go into Jed land.
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Your book that you wrote, Screw the Zoo, I read, I loved it.
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I liked the way you led in to it because I had a similar experience when I was reading something.
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You basically credit Tim Ferris with the awakening, if you will, about how life doesn't need to be lived under the terms of this preexisting social contract, but also Jed McKenna, who I always call the fictional character known as Jed McKenna.
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Because, A, I've always thought that he was a fictional character and I always thought that I loved it.
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It was essentially so meta that a fictional character was telling you that you are a fictional character. What do you think?
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Sam McRoberts: It's amazing.
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I didn't realize it the first time through. I had no idea.
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I thought this was some guy named Jed.
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I was like, "I wonder if he was related to Terrence McKenna. It took me a while.
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Once I found out that it was a pseudonym, I was like, "Wait, really?"
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I get the whole finger and moon thing, but I've always had a knack for reading people.
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If I can see somebody and spend a little time with them, I get a really good read on them.
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I was hoping he was a real person so I could find a video, or something, and get a read on him to see, is this bullshit?
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Is this guy suffering from some Schizoaffective disorder?
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Is he actually enlightened? I don't know.
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It's hard to get that read without actually meeting somebody. That was funny.
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I guess we know who he is now, but he doesn't want anybody to find him. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I used to be like that.
12:56
I used to want to be in the same room with somebody because I had similar skills in terms of reading people.
13:11
If you're with somebody microexpressions are really important.
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The way they hold themselves, the way they carry themselves, the way they say things.
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You can get, I don't know, 70% of it, what we're doing right now over.
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Because I'm looking at you, you [inaudible] me, but you can't get it, nor can you get any of the [inaudible] information because that's nowhere to be found. Sam McRoberts: Yes. You're missing that.
13:38
You're missing the energy. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. The energy's a huge one.
13:41
That was a monster one for me.
13:41
I was saying to somebody recently, and it actually grew out of that.
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Anybody who continues to insist I'm in charge here, is not in charge here. Sam McRoberts: So true. That's so true.
14:00
The loudest person in the room has the least control.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Always.
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I mean, it's axiomatic almost.
14:11
The other one that I just can't, it just [inaudible] me, I cannot figure out why people don't get this is, don't mistreat people's assistance.
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You have no idea how badly they could [crosstalk] you if they want to. Sam McRoberts: Oh, yeah.
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I mean, anybody, servers.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Everybody.
14:27
Sam McRoberts: Just all the people.
14:27
Just treat everybody nice. Why? I don't get it.
14:27
When you see somebody go off in a restaurant or go off to, what they think of as a peon, it's like, all smart.
14:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I just don't understand why people just don’t get that being kind to people, it pains me that this is now seen as some advantage.
14:54
What happened, what do you think?
14:54
Sam McRoberts: I don't know.
14:57
I can view this from a couple of different angles.
14:57
One, a while back Elon Musk said something to the equivalent of the most entertaining outcome, from the perspective of an observer not a participant, is the most likely.
15:07
Tying that into Jed and the fact that this is all one big drama, sometimes I wonder if it isn't just a show.
15:13
If they're not just acting out their scripts and it's for me to observe and be amused by, and I don't know.
15:23
I don't know if that's it.
15:23
On the other hand, I just, assuming that this is all real, I think a lot of our social cohesion bits are decaying.
15:28
In part, because of social media, in part, because of just the constant flow of information, the slant from journalism, always focusing on the negative to get the eyes on their ads.
15:46
It's really messing with mass psychology and then you get the weird group dynamics.
15:46
People think something is normal because it's getting called out by the media and even though it's maybe a one in 10,000 event, the media makes it look like it's a one in 10.
15:55
And so now they adjust their behavior and their mindsets as if this is a norm when it's not, and then it becomes a norm.
16:05
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
16:05
So I don't know, it's some mix of those.
16:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I stopped watching TV news 12 years ago.
16:14
Just because it was like...
16:14
I can't remember why, but I was watching something and it was just so hand handedly wrong, and so obviously just bull shit.
16:28
I looked at my wife and I said, "I think we should just literally stop watching TV news."
16:35
And I got to tell you, it's one of the first things I tell people. "Stop watching TV news. It's just propaganda."
16:40
And one of the interesting things that I'll get back from people is, they'll be like, you know, you're absolutely right.
16:45
You know those guys on Fox, it's all lies, but NPR does a good job. And I'm like, Dude, no. Sam McRoberts: No.
16:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's all propaganda.
16:54
What you're watching are two zombie tribes fighting it out with their talking items. They're all brain dead.
17:00
The indoctrinators are fully indoctrinated themselves, and I'm not so sure that I agree with you on social media.
17:09
I think that social media well curated is going to be a massive advantage. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
17:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it's going to follow power law as it always does. The Matthew effect.
17:25
You study [amoebae] all the way to monkeys.
17:32
All the way from ants and bees to human beings.
17:32
It's all the same, we all do it the same way.
17:37
And so the unfortunate thing about complex adaptive learning systems is, the ones that aren't cutting it, apoptosis happens.
17:45
If it's your immune system and they have built in suicide instructions.
17:54
Cells that are not being of any value to you, die.
17:54
And you know what you call a cell that refuses to follow those instructions? Sam McRoberts: Answer.
18:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, indeed.
18:05
And so, it's really hard for people to accept that there's a lot of us, and myself included, that so much of our programming was done before we even had a say, whoa, wait.
18:23
Sam McRoberts: Usually, yes.
18:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And- Sam McRoberts: Yeah, that- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Go.
18:28
Sam McRoberts: I was just going to say I agree with the social media well curated.
18:33
Pretty much anything is what you make of it.
18:33
But it's the incentive stack.
18:40
So as a marketer, I have a lot of insight into the marketing incentive stack and the way ads work.
18:45
And unfortunately, when you're dealing with ads where you make money based on views as opposed to clicks, you're incentivized to do all of the dirtiest antics.
18:50
If it bleeds, it leads, it's been that way forever, it's still that way and unfortunately that, especially, it depends on the platform.
19:00
Twitter is more click-based than view-based.
19:00
Whereas Facebook is view-based over clicks for a lot of stuff.
19:05
And so, different platforms have different incentives, but ads in general are one of the worst possible incentive drivers for bad behavior I think, which is the downside to social media.
19:16
The other half is that there's so much anonymity.
19:22
And so you have no skin in the game.
19:22
It doesn't mean an [anon] can't put out really good material, but if you don't really have any true skin in the game, if you can just throw away the anon and start again, you don't have the same set of incentives as somebody who's there who has their name on the line, who's going to stick around for a long time and so you get worse behavior. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
19:43
I just responded to a tweet that somebody put up and said the notion of taking responsibility.
19:50
And I said that's why in the past, in previous eras, almost every company was named after the guy who founded it, right.
19:58
And that was done for a reason.
19:58
The reason being, there was no one who was going to come and save him or her if they fucked up.
20:06
And putting the name on it, put their reputation on the line. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
20:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you know, there's a lot to be said for that.
20:16
Sam McRoberts: Also, probably makes it a lot harder to get ousted via acquisition, hostile takeover.
20:20
If your name's on the company, they're going to want to keep you around so you don't scare everybody off.
20:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
20:31
Well, I also have a lot of friends who are anons, and for the most part they are what I kind of call soft anons.
20:40
There are anon, but if you want to find out who they are, it's really easy to do so.
20:46
And for most of those people, they're anon because they work at a financial institution for example, that doesn't want anyone on social media. And so, I get it. And I personally... Doesn't bother me.
21:01
I've had a lot of anons on the podcast. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
21:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But yeah, I'm like you.
21:10
I think put your name on it, man. Let's see.
21:14
Let's put all your skin...
21:14
Let's put your soul in the game.
21:19
Sam McRoberts: There you go. I like the soft anon.
21:19
I like the idea of breaking them into two camps.
21:22
Cause you look at any tweet from any big name, something from Elon Musk, or maybe Chamath Palihapitiya latest [foo] bar.
21:28
But you look at the comments, right?
21:35
It's the string of anons, spewing vitriol, no skin in the game.
21:35
And you go and look at their profiles and look at their past tweets and it's the same thing, right?
21:43
They're probably bots, sock puppets, state sponsored, something.
21:47
And there's so much of that, and as long as you have that ad incentive like Twitter.
21:51
Twitter knows they have a problem with bots, sock puppets, state sponsored accounts.
21:55
They only prune out the ones that are most problematic because the other ones drive ad impressions.
22:01
They have no incentive to get rid of all of them.
22:01
They could, I absolutely believe they could.
22:07
It wouldn't be that hard programmatically, but they don't.
22:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah well, ad incentives right?
22:12
I've studied incentives for all of my business life and they really do matter.
22:16
And you got to be really careful because sometimes you think it's going to work and not.
22:23
And everyone always gives the [British Raj] Cobra effect.
22:32
But also, they had one with rats.
22:32
Where if you brought them a rat tail, they'd pay you for it.
22:37
And so of course, what is your average entrepreneurial Indian do? He breeds rats.
22:48
Cuts their tails off and then he keeps breeding them. So it incentives.
22:48
I've also found that there are incentives well outside financial incentives.
22:56
That sometimes if you structure them right, can work even better.
23:04
Because I think your average human is somebody who wants to take pride in what they do.
23:15
They want to feel like there's a purpose to what they're doing.
23:15
Now look, I believe life is a campus that you paint your own masterpiece on, right.
23:22
I often call it sort of getting to the bridge of Nihilism.
23:31
And the challenge is, you got to go across the bridge.
23:31
Because, across the bridge is where you are like, you know what, there is no exogenous meaning to life.
23:47
But that means that I get to pick my own adventure, and I get to decide where meaning lays for me.
23:55
What do you think about that?
23:55
Sam McRoberts: I think it depends on where you fall on the free will debate and the nature of reality.
24:07
I would like to believe it's to choose your own adventure and I have a say in it.
24:07
I'm not sure that that's the case.
24:11
I generally operate as if it is, but I'm always holding in the back of my mind the knowledge that this may not be what...
24:18
I may not have any free will whatsoever.
24:18
I may just be operating according to a script and programming that I can't fully see and that's that.
24:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, that's a good one to chat about a little bit.
24:38
So the whole free will thing.
24:38
I don't even read all that stuff.
24:38
And the reason I don't is I don't know if I'm right, whether there is free will or not, but I have determined that my life goes better if I act as if I have free will.
24:50
And because that's a slope that gets pretty ugly pretty fast.
25:00
Because if you make the case for you don't have free will, well, agency goes away.
25:08
You can't retain an agency if you never had it in the beginning, right?
25:14
If agency goes away, then so does responsibility, because it was my genes judge.
25:14
That's why I killed all those people.
25:22
It's my script, I'm the murderer.
25:22
There's a great passage in the book Apotheosis now that is...
25:29
The author, editor Hesse Siddhartha.
25:39
I collect a lot of art, and for a reason that I really didn't understand to be honest.
25:44
I really like this artist who would do portraits of people, but with no face.
25:51
Sam McRoberts: Interesting.
25:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then I read the passage in Siddhartha where a guy who had been traveling with him, I can't remember his name, but anyway, he becomes enlightened when he's sitting by the stream next to Siddhartha and he says he no longer sees Siddhartha.
26:10
He sees thousands of faces.
26:10
A baby being born, an old man dying, an executioner chopping somebody's head off, blah, blah, blah.
26:18
And it's a beautiful passage. I put it up on Twitter.
26:23
I just think that operating as if we have free will is probably better.
26:23
Not only for each of us as individuals, but for society in general.
26:33
Sam McRoberts: I think that seems like that generally should be true.
26:38
Where I get hung up is on the idea, the Zen concept of surrender.
26:44
What are you surrendering to?
26:44
If you surrender, and things flow along as they're supposed to, that would seem to indicate that the only choice you may be made was surrendering, and now everything else is operating on autopilot which would indicate that you're not in control and therefore you don't really have free will.
27:00
So do you work to surrender and let the universe carry you where it may or do you resist and exert what you believe is free will to try and change it?
27:13
I mean, I know which one is the more entertaining.
27:18
It's by far more entertaining to exert will and try and control things and edit your story as you go along.
27:24
But I don't know if that's true.
27:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I mean, this is really interesting because this is the very topic I've just been writing and thinking about.
27:35
And I was doing it for a friend who asked me point blank, you've said so often release the [tiller].
27:44
You know, you quote Zorba the Greek, "You lack one thing boss, and that's madness".
27:50
You need a little madness to let go of the rope and be free."
27:55
And so trying to tell somebody how to get into the state of Wu Wei actionless activity is like, you can't do it with words alone, right.
28:06
And so I can just tell you my own experience, which is, I think that flowing with the ebbs and flows of the universe is possible, but it isn't possible all the time.
28:23
And I would use my own experience of...
28:23
I would say that I would be in a go with the flow state about 65, 70% of the time.
28:41
And that's really cool and it's really enjoyable.
28:41
And I'll write threads, I'll write a whole bunch of stuff that I'm not even consciously thinking about.
28:48
But then there's the 30% of the time that I'm not in the fucking flow.
28:56
And you know what I love about it is to pick up on your thing.
28:56
It is usually much more entertaining when you're watching somebody else, but I've also come to the point of view that I've fucked up so many times in life that if you can't laugh about it and learn from it, you're doing it wrong, right. Sam McRoberts: A 100%. I feel like laughter...
29:25
You have to be able to laugh at almost anything in order to get through it because life is absurd.
29:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: [crosstalk] Go please.
29:36
Sam McRoberts: I'm still trying to...
29:39
I'm forming my thoughts on your...
29:39
So you're talking about the percentages of control and the degree to which you have it.
29:45
It's more entertaining if you assume that you do.
29:54
I also think it may be a case of putting the cart before the horse.
29:54
So one of the things that [Jed] pointed out repeatedly is that there are a number of things that people will say and you can't work on those things to get to enlightenment.
30:05
This is something that comes after.
30:11
So it may be that the surrender is something that only comes after when you're no longer you, there's nothing to hang onto.
30:18
And so surrender is the natural state.
30:18
Same thing for releasing the sense of [I] or attachment.
30:24
You can't force yourself to drop attachments, they drop naturally as you go through that awakening process and then, when they're all gone, you're not attached to anything, but it wasn't so much that you worked on disattaching, you just worked on observing.
30:38
I wonder if the surrender is another one of those things.
30:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It could very well be.
30:43
That's an interesting perspective.
30:45
Because, one of the things that I guess learned the most from, are all the deletions that I've made.
30:56
Not the additions so much, but the deletions, and I have kept journals since I was 18 years old.
31:07
And when you a) it's really great to do because there's nothing like being called a liar in your own handwriting.
31:15
Our memories try to do us kindness as I'm using an air quote here for people who are listening.
31:21
By updating our memories with what we think now.
31:27
And I have seen this in myself so often, and I see it in other people all the time.
31:33
Sam McRoberts: I think, and I don't know where we get this implanted, but we have this concept that a memory is this encapsulated thing, kind of like an inside out, right.
31:41
The little memory spheres and it's all neat and tidy and complete, and you can pull it back out whenever you want.
31:45
And that is not even remotely the case.
31:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Not even in the same ballpark.
31:52
Sam McRoberts: It's like we have the [lossiest] storage algorithm ever.
31:54
And whenever it's time to remember something, what you're really doing is reassembling an approximation of it on the fly.
31:58
Often with little pieces changed because we don't store the exact thing unless you have an eidetic memory.
32:04
So you're pulling something out, and then every time you pull out your memory, it gets re encoded with all that new information that's fucked up and it happens over and over again.
32:14
So it's like playing the old game of operator.
32:18
You remember something a handful of times and the original thing is gone.
32:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it's so funny.
32:21
So I have a very good memory for anything I read.
32:25
I wouldn't call it eidetic, but it's close.
32:25
I can look up over here and tell you a lot of quotes from the book that I'm reading right now.
32:38
But, what I can't do and what I suck at, is pretty much everything else.
32:38
In other words, I don't have a great memory for conversations, unless they're really intense.
32:44
I prefer the transcript, right. Like TV, forget it.
32:56
I don't really remember anything of that at all.
33:10
The only exception there was when I was a kid, I decided I was going to memorize a hundred poems.
33:17
And that has paid more dividends in my life than almost any other thing I could have done.
33:24
Because, what it allows me to do is make an association much faster.
33:24
And when you can make that association much faster, people are like, whoa, how'd you know that?
33:30
And you're like, well, I really didn't, cause I memorized that poem that made me think of this, which made me think of this.
33:41
It's kind of the whole memory palace thing.
33:45
Sam McRoberts: I think that is actually the better way to think of memory as a Latticework.
33:48
A framework that you pin things to.
33:48
And the more things you have pinned up, the larger your Latticework, and the more you can make unusual connections.
33:58
So, you get true Renaissance men who dabble in so many different areas, go deep in a handful, and they can pull together concepts that just aren't immediately apparent to others. So I think that's great.
34:09
I mean, doing anything you can do to expand that Latticework,, especially when you're young probably pays enormous dividends.
34:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh totally.
34:16
And I work a lot with younger people just because I like young people.
34:16
I think their brains are firing so fast and I just find it really cool, and if I can be helpful, I like to be helpful.
34:31
And one of the things that I often recommend is what we've just been talking about, but can I tell you that my take-up rate is close to zero.
34:42
They're like memorize something. Dude, you're old.
34:42
Why would I ever do that? I can Google it.
34:49
And I said, yeah but can you tell me who wrote "The World Is Too Much with Us; late and soon getting and spending we lay waste our powers, little we see in nature that is ours.
35:00
We have given our hearts away a sordid Boon".
35:00
And they just state at Google.
35:11
But the other thing that you're able to do, cause I agree with you entirely on this ability, the Latticework and the ability to connectedness, is really what we're after.
35:24
We're not really after... Cause information...
35:24
Our perception filters are not built for the amount of information that are hitting [crosstalk] our senses.
35:34
Sam McRoberts: Not remotely.
35:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Not even remotely, right.
35:37
You know, information theory was written long ago and it gave us all of this, which a-okay, very cool, I love it.
35:45
But you know, we definitely are not meant for it.
35:45
In fact, I was talking one time to a psychiatrist who had a speculative theory that what schizophrenia was, was filter failure, essentially.
36:01
Sam McRoberts: Interesting.
36:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That what was happening to these poor people and I have a cousin who's schizophrenic, so you know, kind of near and dear to my heart.
36:07
They were perfectly bright because that's the other connection.
36:12
Schizophrenics are often very smart.
36:12
And so he said okay, so you and I take in X number of bits per second, and our brain sorts all of the other ones out that we never think about.
36:32
With them, it's all there.
36:32
And he goes, that explains the voices. It explains...
36:38
Because they're there and you and I just able to filter them out.
36:44
Sam McRoberts: The latent inhibition, I think it's called. It's fascinating.
36:47
I don't know how much studies that there's been on this, but the idea of the Shannon limit.
36:52
I don't feel that's fixed.
36:52
I think that that probably scales with IQ to a point.
36:52
And that's part of why extremely high IQ people can flit across so many concepts and hold so many pieces of data simultaneously.
37:03
Whereas, other people tend to be lost.
37:03
If somebody's done a study on that, I would love to read it.
37:09
But you reach a point where it's just too much. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
37:13
So Claude Shannon, one of my heroes along with Feynman, and I think that I did come across a study and I'll look for it.
37:25
And if I find it, I'll send it to you.
37:25
Because about your statement with the ability, with G, which stands for General Intelligence, the old IQ test that we can't give anyone anymore.
37:39
I had Robert Plomin on, who does genetic behavioral work, and I found it fascinating.
37:44
And he's the kind of guy who, because of his openness, because of his preceding almost everything he says with, "If other research proves this to be wrong, I will say this is wrong and give the credit to the new research."
37:58
In other words, wait, what?
38:05
A scientist actually using the scientific method?
38:05
Sam McRoberts: The proper scientific method. Yeah, exactly.
38:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, wait, oh wait.
38:11
But so yeah, the correlates of G are just, you have to willfully ignore them if you want to stay within the Overton Window today. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
38:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so that is a very interesting thing.
38:28
I do think that some of the smartest people I've ever met have that ability.
38:33
And I was talking about it with another friend, actually his podcast is going to drop right before yours.
38:39
And we were talking about people who are very creative and the association with seizures, cluster headaches, which I used to get, a variety of painful events.
38:58
And so I just started my research on that, so I don't have any info on that.
39:07
Have you thought about that ever?
39:07
Sam McRoberts: I have a little and I have a couple of guesses.
39:09
One, I think, so again, tying to IQ or G, I guess, your brain runs primarily on glucose.
39:19
The more intense your mental activity, the more of that glucose you burn through.
39:24
I imagine somebody with high intelligence is essentially running an overclocked computer, so they're sucking down more fuel, more glucose.
39:34
So they are probably more likely to be hypoglycemic, more likely to drain that glucose and get headaches.
39:40
Because that's the response from your brain, I believe, when your glucose is low is you start to get headaches and feel shitty.
39:43
I imagine that it's probably tied to that in some fashion, but I don't know.
39:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that's really interesting.
39:51
Thanks for the hypoglycemia, because my sister has it and it's all beginning to make sense.
39:56
But I want to get back to Jed, and are you a big de Mello fan or not so much?
40:04
Sam McRoberts: I love de Mello, de Mello's ...
40:06
Yeah, I think I've heard you say the kinder, gentler Jed.
40:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly.
40:12
Sam McRoberts: He's a great entry into that space to not make you feel completely like shit.
40:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, that's right.
40:18
And so I love his work and yet, I'll tell you, man, on attachments or your willingness to give attachments up, he is straight gangster about it.
40:27
And I don't have it in front of me, but essentially the gist of it is, he's talking about love.
40:37
Sam McRoberts: Yes, the chapter on love. Yes.
40:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I mean, I embrace that.
40:39
I actually, on my wife's 60th birthday, I wrote her that exact sentence that de Mello has in his book.
40:50
And she was looking at me like, " Do I not know something? What's going on here?"
40:57
And I'm like, "No, I just think he's right."
40:57
I think he's right, because then when people ... And I get so ...
41:01
I think I get more pushback on this than on any other concept.
41:10
Sam McRoberts: Usually taboo. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I could tell people ...
41:14
Actually, remember that last scene in Men and Black where our universe is in the marble that the alien kid is playing with?
41:22
Sam McRoberts: I love that.
41:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They're fine with that. That's okay, no problem.
41:25
But the minute I touch love and give them the de Mello lines, people get really, really upset.
41:33
And so I was talking to one person, and my wife took it much better interestingly enough.
41:40
But it's, if you add to it an ad lib on it.
41:48
For our listeners, de Mello basically says you should be able to say to someone you love that they are free to pursue what they wish to pursue.
41:55
They are free to live their life in the manner that they choose.
42:00
They are free to, if they want to, leave you and go elsewhere.
42:00
You have no claim on them.
42:07
You do love them, but it has to be without [inaudible] and quid pro quos.
42:15
Sam McRoberts: Yeah, he essentially is saying that love, as we think of it, is just attachment.
42:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
42:20
Sam McRoberts: And real love is something completely different with no attachment, but just pleasure.
42:20
Just an enjoyment of who and what they are, when they're there.
42:24
And when it's gone, c'est la vie.
42:24
Yeah, which is terrifying to a lot of people.
42:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It is to a lot of people, but the minute I read it, I had had those kinds of thoughts bubbling around.
42:40
And of course I'm sure because I was reading ...
42:40
I'm a lunatic and I read everything.
42:46
So I read everything Robert Anton Wilson wrote, I read everything Jed wrote.
42:50
And then I started on Tony, and I came across that and I'm like, first I was a little bit shocked.
42:55
But then I thought about it and the extemp I had on it, which got my wife to really understand it, was think about it for a minute.
43:02
How narcissistic and controlling would I have to be to say to you, another human being, that you are responsible for my happiness. That is insane.
43:19
When you put it that way, it's like, "Sam, I've just met you.
43:23
But from now on, I'm going to make you responsible for everyone of my moods.
43:29
And Goddammit, you better make me happy."
43:29
You just see the insanity of it, right? Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
43:35
But that's what we do, we attach so many of our emotions to the actions and ideas of others.
43:38
How could you ever possibly be free when you have so many puppet strings? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
43:47
And so that's part of the ...
43:47
You had a quote, from my friend, actually, [Erika Jeanne 00:06:36], and the quote is this.
43:57
"You take your life and you take it into your own hands. What happens? Something terrible."
44:03
You have no one to blame.
44:08
Sam McRoberts: Nobody to blame.
44:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But see, I hate that idea because life gets so much better, at least in my way of looking at it, when you retain your agency.
44:12
And so every time I try to make a list of when people are saying, "Well, how can I get this done," et cetera.
44:29
And I'll be talking about it and whatnot.
44:29
And so there's this whole group over here. Example, perseverance.
44:38
As Babe Ruth said, "It's really hard to beat the guy who would just never gives up."
44:44
And so I'll say perseverance ...
44:44
Calvin Coolidlge, who was best known for never saying anything.
44:52
I think the longest thing he ever said was this quote on perseverance.
44:56
And yet I always have this group, and I bet you know this group too, "That's survivorship bias." Well, okay. Okay.
45:06
So we then can't study anything.
45:06
We can't come to any conclusions, because other people came to those conclusions and fucked up or drove their car off a cliff or whatever.
45:22
This kind of swings back to your idea about free will a little bit.
45:28
Sam McRoberts: I like this, yeah.
45:28
And the people who say, "Oh, well, it's survivorship bias," I think you're missing a point.
45:32
Sure, I think there are a lot of examples that we have of somebody who persevered and succeeded.
45:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
45:42
Sam McRoberts: And the fact that they succeeded may be survivorship bias, but that doesn't mean that perseverance wasn't a factor.
45:48
So it could be that's ... Yeah.
45:48
Persevering will not guarantee your success, but failing to persevere may almost certainly guarantee your failure.
45:54
That makes perfect sense.
45:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
45:57
Invert and be a negativia.
46:01
And what's really interesting is I had a chat with the founder of Gumroad, and that's his deal.
46:10
He's basically, the way he looks at the world is, "I'm just going to keep persevering."
46:17
And he went through a bunch of shit where he took VC funding, he probably shouldn't have taken it.
46:21
Instead of begging for more, he was like, "No, I'm firing all the employees, except for myself."
46:26
And even himself, he didn't take any income from it to make it right.
46:33
And anyway, we got on this subject and he's like, "The way I look at it is really straightforward.
46:39
It's, A, I persevere and I don't make it, but I'd die doing what I love. I'd die trying."
46:45
And he goes, "But if I succeed, well, great." What do you think?
46:53
Sam McRoberts: I forget who gave the baseball example, but it's a world-class batter hits maybe one ball out of three.
46:55
And so it's really, it's not about being perfect, it's about number of times at that.
47:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally.
47:04
Sam McRoberts: It's just a statistics game. Yeah.
47:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It is so easy.
47:07
And I try to make the simplest arguments that I can about that, and about anything.
47:13
And what you run into is this shrink- wrapped programming that I think is totally fucked up.
47:24
It's fucked up from the point of view of an individual.
47:29
It might not be fucked up from the view of society as a whole.
47:29
And by the way, I'm not saying this that there's some conspiracy, some grand conspiracy out there.
47:40
I'm saying that, yeah- Sam McRoberts: Immersion property.
47:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, right.
47:43
I mean, "Okay, we don't want Mad Max so we got these commandments. Look at them, here.
47:51
Ah, but look at the first five of those commandments. Hear me, oh, Israel."
47:58
And then he gets into, "Because if you don't, I'm going to smite your ass down and really bad, bad things are going to happen to you."
48:05
And I was reading the book Happy by Derren Brown.
48:12
And he's got this passage in there, I should have printed it out so I could read it to you, and I have memorized it.
48:16
But it goes along the lines of think about the actual results of a society that has original sin as one of its main concepts.
48:25
And then when you think about that for a minute, and I have three grandchildren.
48:35
And when I was holding my youngest grandchild, Langdon, and looking at her innocent, beautiful face.
48:41
And I'd been reading the book and I'm like, "Oh, well, of course."
48:48
If you actually believe this myth that there was an Adam and an Eve and they fucked up by seeking knowledge, just that alone, are you kidding me?
48:57
I mean, I'll take Roman and Greek myths much quicker.
49:04
Sam McRoberts: I vastly prefer the Eckhart Tolle interpretation, which is the original sin had nothing to do with sin as it's explained, it was simply shifting from the state of enlightened to non-enlightened.
49:14
Going from knowing that you're one and you're everything to acquiring knowledge, which is then separates and starts you down that path of duality. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
49:26
Sam McRoberts: That's it, the original sin.
49:26
And so you think about it, it would really be the exact opposite.
49:32
Any kid is born essentially with no knowledge, no attachments.
49:32
They're as enlightened as you get, and then they form all of those along the way.
49:39
So they fall well after birth, there could be no original sin in that sense.
49:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that, that's a great ...
49:47
I'm going to think about it from that angle.
49:47
I really like that because if you ...
49:54
I always try to frame things so that people with a wide variety of beliefs can get some benefit from them.
50:03
Sam McRoberts: I don't know anything.
50:05
I suspect a lot of things, some things seem to be true.
50:05
There are a lot of things that we would call laws, they're axiomatic and they apply everywhere we've looked so far.
50:15
But nothing rules out the possibility that it's wrong somewhere, incorrect for someone and so it's strong beliefs, weakly held.
50:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We are so simpatico because that's a Richard Anton Wilson quote that I always use, which is, "I don't have any beliefs, but I have many suspicions."
50:30
Sam McRoberts: Many suspicions.
50:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so if you're like that and you learn to train yourself to be a probabilistic as opposed to a deterministic thinker, life just gets a lot better.
50:45
I was having a really long conversation with a guy I'm working with who is ...
50:45
He has some really bad beliefs and he's built himself ... He's very smart.
50:52
He's built himself a nice little mental prison.
50:58
And I'm trying to help him break out of jail.
50:58
And one of the things that he just has the hardest time with is this idea of there is no grand purpose.
51:09
Man created God in man's image, because- Sam McRoberts: That's how we've reinterpreted it, yeah.
51:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, because we had to.
51:32
And I get that, but this idea ...
51:32
I just see so many people on these wild goose chases, where they're trying to find the overriding meaning and reason for life.
51:43
And it's kind of, I always throw the Doug Adams 42 at them, and they don't like me doing that.
52:01
Sam McRoberts: I mean, if you figure it out, let me know.
52:02
The more I poke, the more questions I find.
52:02
It's questions all the way down, not turtles. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
52:08
Sam McRoberts: But I have no idea, I don't know.
52:08
And to your friend's perspective, okay, maybe there's meaning, maybe there's not.
52:12
If you don't know and you don't have any way to know, then pick a way to operate that makes you feel good and operate according to that.
52:23
If you can do it, it's fine.
52:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so I started down this path for that very reason, for a very pragmatic reason.
52:34
And my pragmatic reason was I realized that my reality goggles were very, very badly smudged and that I needed to clean them off a little bit.
52:44
And so I started reading the Tao Te Ching.
52:44
I started reading all of that, the Dao of Physics, because I'm really interested in those things coming together.
53:00
A lot of poetry, William Blake.
53:00
Most people don't understand that it's been around for a long, long time.
53:07
William Blake, who is a mystic English poet, said the doors of perception, if they were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
53:14
But we essentially see things through this tiny crack of the cell that we built around ourselves. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
53:29
I mean, you've got that in early Christianity as well, "We see now through a glass, darkly." Or the idea of a veil.
53:36
Or all the way back to Plato and Plato's cave, the idea that we're not really seeing reality as it is, is ancient, ancient. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
53:44
And so Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, literally he was the first guy that was like, "Hey, everything's change.
53:53
You can't step in this ..." It's his quote.
53:58
"The man cannot step in the same river twice, because he is not the same man and it's not the same river."
54:02
Sam McRoberts: I love that quote.
54:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's a great quote.
54:05
And so it's just like, what?
54:05
As you study the history of knowledge, you see just this in incredible activity with the Greeks and with the Romans.
54:14
The Romans were more practical than the Greeks, but they took all the good stuff.
54:21
They were the ultimate freeloaders.
54:28
But then all of a sudden Rome gets sacked and whoops, 1, 000 years of darkness.
54:36
Do you think that we have a chance for another 1,000 years of darkness?
54:39
Sam McRoberts: I don't know.
54:42
I think we need to release a lot of the stuff that we cling to so fervently.
54:42
I think we owe that 1,000 years of darkness largely to religion.
54:48
Religion took over and became the dominant force throughout the world.
54:52
And it determined what was and wasn't acceptable and what the rules of reality were, and there was no ...
54:56
Dissenting opinions were met with fire and death.
55:02
And I think until we can step back and stop taking religion so seriously, and look for the messages that are hidden in there that aren't immediately apparent, and the non-literal stuff, I don't see how it'll change.
55:18
I mean, I don't expect to see any sort of en masse enlightenment or en masse waking up.
55:22
I think it will continue to be a few people at a time, for a number of reasons.
55:28
But I hope, I hope that with technology, because it is such an enormously long lever, that the small number of awoken people may be able to pull us in a better direction, but we'll see.
55:42
So far, I mean, technology's a double-edged sword and it's not looking so hot.
55:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, obviously, clearly it is a double-edged sword, as you say.
55:54
I'm a huge friend of Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.
55:54
But the reason I always am going on about his book is because I've read it twice.
55:59
The second time I read it, I got a lot more out of it, because what he does is he doesn't just flippantly say shit.
56:05
He builds this foundation of- Sam McRoberts: Yes.
56:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "This is what happened.
56:15
And then we thought that we could only see of the world through our senses." Woo.
56:18
Well, that was wrong, but it was a step in the right direction.
56:24
And so he basically is ...
56:24
One of the best things that I got from him was, pessimists or the precautionary principle, religion dined out on that one for those 1,000 years.
56:43
Because, I mean, if you really want to figure it out, follow the money, follow the power and you can see, of course. Sam McRoberts: Yep, yep.
56:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course they're going to say this.
56:53
And then we had the enlightenment and they're like, "Yeah, not so much.
56:58
No, I don't really agree here."
56:58
But what he says that we fail to do, and this is like Feynman would say, "You can't fool yourself, and remember you're the easiest person to fool." Sam McRoberts: Easiest.
57:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which is totally true.
57:13
And so one thing that I didn't really keep in the forefront of my brain is something that he hammers that in that book endlessly.
57:23
And that is, we slip up by thinking that we know what future knowledge is going to be. We have no idea. And.
57:31
He's got a great quote in it, which is, "What arguments were physicists in 1900 having about nuclear power and the internet?
57:40
None because they hadn't thought of it." Sam McRoberts: Yes.
57:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They hadn't thought of it at all. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
57:51
We're not wired for exponential thinking.
57:51
We're wired for linear because, I mean, the environment that we evolved in was linear.
57:56
It was roughly the same set of things for many lifetimes in a row.
58:02
We didn't have to think of compound growth.
58:02
And now, thanks to technology, literally, we are now living in an exponential reality.
58:09
The brain can't keep up, it's stuck 50,000 years in the past. And so things are wild.
58:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I do think though that there is a lot to be said, and there's a lot of evidence for, aggregate social evolution.
58:25
In other words, that we are, our bodies, mine and yours, are affected, our actual shape of our birth, me and you, are different than those of people who can't read.
58:43
And so literacy literally changed the human brain.
58:43
There's a really good book about this, The Weirdest People in the World, and why we are the way we are.
58:54
But so we're all getting rewired currently by these bad boys, I'm holding up a cell phone for people who are listening.
58:59
And the research that I've done into this is, yeah, our brains are getting rewired.
59:06
Yes, Mama evolution, Darwin's evolution, that is a very, very, very slow process.
59:16
But aggregate social evolution is a thing.
59:23
And we are, in fact, as Deutsch says, he hearkens back to the old school man as the measure of all things.
59:32
But his twist on it is, well, for right now, as best we know, we are currently the only explainers and builders in our little corner of the universe here.
59:41
If we find other people or things that are able to do this, fantastic, but for right now, we're all we got, and we're the best at it because our brains have evolved to be able to conceptualize, build a symbol stack.
1:00:00
And as you build that symbol stack, things get more and more interesting because you can think of new and different ways to come up with stuff.
1:00:08
So kind of back to Jed McKenna and people being just almost unable or unwilling to communicate with each other.
1:00:32
I did this thing called the thinker and the prover.
1:00:32
And I paraphrased Kipling in it.
1:00:32
I said, "Humans are all islands of differing beliefs, shouting at each other over seas of misunderstanding."
1:00:44
And so, one of the things that I just do, I've trained myself to do. I just mute immediately.
1:00:52
If somebody is saying something stupid, that I find stupid, I don't block them because I think that there's maybe a 5% to 10% chance that they're just having a bad day and they got pissed off at something or I triggered them.
1:01:15
Because I do put up some things that trigger people, especially the Tony De Mello quote, man, on being able to look at love that way. Whoo.
1:01:22
I mean, that was a tough one.
1:01:22
So I have no interest in trying to convince anyone of anything.
1:01:34
I'm not selling anything. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
1:01:42
So I use social media largely to think out loud. I'm tossing things out.
1:01:42
Here's a current thought.
1:01:48
I've been thinking about it. It's on my mind.
1:01:48
See if anybody else can surface anything interesting, give me another rabbit hole that's tangent to go down. Something like that. It's never static. My opinions change.
1:01:59
I'm a radically different thinker now than I was a year ago, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years.
1:02:04
And I expect it will continue to be that way until I die.
1:02:08
So assume, if it's out there, it is impermanence as I don't hold anything very seriously. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I'm the same way.
1:02:18
Sam McRoberts: I think that's the way it should be.
1:02:18
But yeah, you put anything on social media and people often assume that you're picking a fight, and they jump in there to try and convince you how you're wrong.
1:02:26
And it's like, I don't know.
1:02:29
I never said I was right.
1:02:29
I've observed this or thinking about this, but sure.
1:02:29
I mean, if you can show me another way of thinking of it, thank you.
1:02:35
But I mute and block, depending on the situation.
1:02:42
With muting, they can still show up in your comments and other people have to see it.
1:02:42
So your fans have to see whatever they're spouting in there and you no longer can see it to police it. So that's the downside.
1:02:50
I block more aggressively.
1:02:50
If I think their pattern of posting is really stupid or really antagonistic, if they're not showing good faith, they're gone.
1:03:06
If they show that they're locked in a pattern of thinking that I consider low tier, if they're stuck somewhere, like religion, I can't deal with it.
1:03:10
And I don't want to have to see or go back and forth with that.
1:03:18
I'm looking for a very, very select set of people who are open, and constantly looking and searching, and not fixed and not combative.
1:03:23
And so, I'm cleaning my house by blocking the situation.
1:03:28
And some of them just go to too far.
1:03:28
I had one person, they were an idiot.
1:03:35
And I was like, this is stupid. Blocked them.
1:03:35
They created a fake account on LinkedIn to track me down and send a message to bitch about what I said on Twitter.
1:03:41
And I was like, this is exactly why I block idiots. I don't need you.
1:03:47
I don't need you in my life. It's just some people.
1:03:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then it kind of brings us back to, what is the nature of reality? I don't know.
1:03:59
I do know that I got far enough.
1:04:07
I started, and I told you, I started this for pragmatic reasons.
1:04:15
I think that knowing helps you know what to do. Sam McRoberts: Yeah. And I made that case.
1:04:20
In that article, I think you read it, the nature of reality. I explored that.
1:04:26
And that was essentially my case, like, there are these set of possibilities and I clustered them into seven fanatic buckets.
1:04:31
But essentially, depending on which is accurate, that does change the way you play the game.
1:04:35
And I feel like I know I'm in a game of some sort, and I'm trying to find the rule book so I can figure out how to play the game the best possible way. And I don't have that.
1:04:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Exactly.
1:04:50
And so that does not dissuade me from trying to continue to learn.
1:04:56
And more importantly, as I mentioned earlier, what I'm learning is, it's far more important for me to delete beliefs that are wrong than even get those that are right.
1:05:10
One of the things you mentioned that I happen to agree with is that virtual reality, your thoughts on it are, I think, pretty much similar to mine, that it probably is going to happen.
1:05:25
Sam McRoberts: Inevitable, I think.
1:05:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Inevitable.
1:05:28
And that's the way I try to think about things in the practical sense as well.
1:05:29
So I always try to think, okay, so what's the end? Where is the end?
1:05:35
And so, one of the tools that I use is, how were rich people treated in America and the UK in 1925, 1930?
1:05:45
Well, they all had drivers. Hello, Uber.
1:05:45
Well, they all had multiple homes.
1:05:57
Hello, the multiplicity of- Sam McRoberts: Airbnb, VRBO.
1:06:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Airbnb.
1:06:05
And then that stratifies, right?
1:06:05
And one of our things, which is customization of portfolios, that's exactly how those people had their money managed, just for them.
1:06:19
And then you think, well, retail, with the tools that we have right now, this'll scan my body and I'll get my bespoke clothing a week later.
1:06:27
You also have an interesting thing about robots, which I tend to agree with you.
1:06:33
But as I was making notes before our podcast, I was reading your stuff on robots.
1:06:40
And you make a really good point, which is, guys, maybe a century and 50 years ago, 70% of the people in America were farmers.
1:06:47
They were farmers tied to the land.
1:06:56
And so you pause at robots.
1:06:56
And the question I wanted to ask you is, not replicants as in- Sam McRoberts: [inaudible]?
1:07:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And, or fabricants.
1:07:09
Have you read Cloud Atlas?
1:07:09
Sam McRoberts: I've seen the movie. I haven't read the book.
1:07:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, oh, oh, oh, you got to read the book.
1:07:15
The movie just does no justice.
1:07:21
Sam McRoberts: Movie was weird. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Was weird.
1:07:24
He's my favorite literary fiction author.
1:07:24
And the book is a masterpiece.
1:07:24
You got to read the book.
1:07:34
Sam McRoberts: I'll read it.
1:07:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: In the book he's got, and it jumps across time.
1:07:37
Basically in the far future, and he has it set in Seoul, New Korea, because of all the fuck ups that happened along the way.
1:07:46
But they have fabricants, what they call in that.
1:07:53
And they're humans that are bred to be basically slaves.
1:07:53
And so, they don't have any of the higher functions, supposedly.
1:08:05
But try and fuck around with a complex- Sam McRoberts: New world stuff. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:08:09
But when you try to fuck around with a complex adaptive system from the top, things emerge from the bottom, and one of those things happens to be an enlightened fabricant.
1:08:19
And the story goes from there.
1:08:19
I think you would really enjoy it.
1:08:28
Sam McRoberts: I'll check it out.
1:08:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you think robots, you think we'll program them with Asimov's rules for robots?
1:08:33
Sam McRoberts: I don't know what we'll end up using for rules.
1:08:36
I think it'd be incredibly difficult to find a set of rules that had no potential for loopholes or exceptions, like unknown unknowns. We can only go so far.
1:08:48
But I do think that we'll continue to follow the trend of using automation to get rid of laborious tasks that suck for humans to do, where we can do them, but we are not optimized for them. They're not pleasant. They're just necessary.
1:09:00
And I think the not pleasant, but necessary stuff will all end up going to machines at some point. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:09:08
I'm totally there with you.
1:09:08
It should, because if there is, kind of my own little personal theory, which I have absolutely no idea whether it's correct.
1:09:20
Probably is not correct, given the odds.
1:09:20
But that we are evolving as a species, not all at the same rate, not all in the same manner.
1:09:28
Timothy Leary had a great thing on the various imprintings that happened to us, and that you can re-imprint with psychedelics.
1:09:43
So I'm all for the legalization and use of psychedelics, first and foremost, as medicines.
1:09:52
I support a group called MAPS that has been shepherding this forward.
1:09:52
What kind of person do you have to be to say no?
1:09:59
That veteran who tried to kill himself because he had PTSD, and was serving our country, that caused him to have that PTSD.
1:10:07
No, you should not be able to give him psilocybin.
1:10:12
Sam McRoberts: It pisses me off.
1:10:14
All you have to do is look at a harm scale, list of substances and in their relative harm.
1:10:19
Alcohol and tobacco are near the top.
1:10:19
Everybody's fine with that.
1:10:19
But psychedelics are literally at the fucking bottom of that list, and we have a problem there. Really?
1:10:32
They're nonaddictive, man. They're nonaddictive.
1:10:32
Animals that take them only end up taking them once.
1:10:37
Humans develop tolerance to them so fast that you really can't abuse them. It's absurd.
1:10:43
The reason that they're illegal, that they're schedule one, is because of what they do. They rewire your brain.
1:10:47
They help you to disconnect from a lot of your belief systems, and they make you question everything.
1:10:51
And nobody in charge wants people who are questioning everything.
1:10:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:10:57
And also because the lunatic occupying the White House at that time, Richard Nixon, needed a convenient fall guy.
1:11:06
And by the way, the drugs that those kids were using on the street, that wasn't real LSD.
1:11:13
That wasn't real psilocybin, unless they actually found the magic mushroom and ate it.
1:11:19
And so, they did the same thing, if you know your history, they actually made movies like Reefer Madness.
1:11:27
I don't know- Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
1:11:30
I don't think I've seen it.
1:11:30
I feel like I've seen clips.
1:11:30
But I definitely recognize the name.
1:11:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sam, it is a treat. Watch it.
1:11:38
It is so hysterical how ham-handed.
1:11:38
And by the way, propaganda's getting more and more sophisticated.
1:11:47
They still are using Bernays' template, because it works.
1:11:47
But it's getting more and more sophisticated, but so are people.
1:11:55
And so, if you keep hitting the same lie and trying to turn it into a truth, what's also happening is the people are going to be like, "Please just fucking stop.
1:12:08
We know that that isn't true.
1:12:08
Just stop" Sam McRoberts: It's comical to watch, we used to be so good at propaganda.
1:12:19
And now it's like, really?
1:12:19
This is what passes for good propaganda now?
1:12:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, I think it's because we've gotten much more sophisticated.
1:12:26
We've upgraded our knowledge base.
1:12:34
Sam McRoberts: And we have so much access to data.
1:12:36
I think being able to quickly go and search things, find papers, find citations, Snopes, it's so easy to pick things apart if you'll take the time and effort to do it.
1:12:41
And the amount of time and effort is diminishing, so it gets easier.
1:12:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And easier and easier. All right.
1:12:49
So this has been super fun.
1:12:49
I recommend everyone read your book, Screw the Zoo, because it's a great book and it's a great metaphor.
1:12:56
A lion in a cage is not a lion anymore. It's a captive. It's a prisoner. I love Africa.
1:13:04
I love going there and watching animals in nature.
1:13:12
And it's made me fiercely anti-zoo because, man, when you watch a family of lions just hanging out, and the play.
1:13:21
Lions, they got it right out in the wild.
1:13:33
Play and hunt when you need to, but be free.
1:13:33
Sam McRoberts: You take a creature out of its environment, the environment that it's supposed to be in, and it changes the creature.
1:13:42
It can't be what it's supposed to be if it's not in a conducive environment.
1:13:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the other thing that I would add, and then I'm going to ask you the questions we always ask at the end is, there's another example of this that is equally horrid.
1:13:56
And that is that, in parts of Asia, I don't think they do it as much now as they used to.
1:13:56
But I know it's still being done.
1:14:04
When they capture a wild elephant, they chain it.
1:14:11
They chain it to a huge stake. It's massive.
1:14:11
And given all the power of this mighty beast, and man, I'll tell you, having seen them close up, they are fucking powerful.
1:14:21
So it'll fight for the first two weeks.
1:14:29
It'll fight, and then it will give up.
1:14:29
Sam McRoberts: Learned helplessness. Yes.
1:14:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Learned helplessness.
1:14:36
They can then take a tiny stick with a light rope that the elephant could just move his or her head and be free.
1:14:41
But they have created a prison in their mind.
1:14:48
And it's so brutal because we do the same thing. All right, my friend.
1:14:57
Sam McRoberts: We sure do.
1:14:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm going to make you the emperor of the world.
1:14:59
You can't kill anybody, no reeducation camps.
1:15:05
But what you can do is incept them.
1:15:05
So you are going to able to take the world microphone and whisper because what we want this to be is, we want people to wake up the next day and think they had this idea on their own.
1:15:23
What two things are you going to incept in people that you think would help?
1:15:30
Sam McRoberts: Man, I don't know if I can think of two.
1:15:33
But I think one would just be to incept the idea of probabilistic thinking.
1:15:39
Drop certainty, and look at everything in terms of percentages, likelihoods.
1:15:45
Don't hold anything so seriously.
1:15:45
And maybe a second would be, what if life was a game? How would you play? Give it a shot. See how that goes.
1:15:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's wonderful. I love that second one.
1:15:56
The first one, that's one of my hobby horses that I'm on all day, every day.
1:15:59
Oh, stop with the zero to one.
1:16:08
Stop with this no, yes, no.
1:16:08
Most things are mu, M-U, which is, it's neither one or the other. All right, my friend.
1:16:18
Sam McRoberts: A hundred percent. Jim O'Shaughnessy: 100%? 99%. Sam McRoberts: 99. 9%. There you go. Yep. Good one.
1:16:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sam, thank you so much.
1:16:27
This has been a lot of fun.
1:16:30
All of our listeners, they can find you on Twitter.
1:16:30
What's your handle there?
1:16:34
Sam McRoberts: Sams_Antics.
1:16:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
1:16:35
And also, they can find your book where? Screw the Zoo?
1:16:41
Sam McRoberts: It's on Gumroad.
1:16:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's on Gumroad.
1:16:43
Sam McRoberts: I only have it on Gumroad. It's free.
1:16:45
I took it off Amazon for a bunch of reasons. But yeah.
1:16:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, I wish I would've known that.
1:16:50
I would've asked you about all of those.
1:16:52
Sam McRoberts: Round two. Round two.
1:16:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All right, my friend.
1:16:56
Thank you so much for being a guest.
1:16:58
Sam McRoberts: Thank you, Jim.