we have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for the doors have been thrown open and we're suddenly exposed to this massive world that our brains just can't comprehend people have this kind of defense mechanism it's not that I'm wrong it's that the facts must be wrong I've always believed that the truth should be predictive I really
tried to train myself to convince myself Jim you're probably wrong there's only one way you can predict the future and that is by having an accurate model of reality if we can create systems that incentivize people putting skin in the game then we can create small networks of people that are really interested in [Music] truth well hello everybody it's Jim oaly
with yet another infinite Loops today's guest is one of my favorite thinkers Ginder Bal you are you you defy categorization which I love you're kind of a modernday William of akam right because you you become you become you've become quite well known for your razors and for your trenchant observations on just what the is going on that seems to be the
the question of the decade to me what is going on we have like the saturation using your term the saturation of idiocy uh you know we're seeing it on social media my idea is that one of the effects one of the reasons that this is happening is we're emerging from a very long period of human history where many societies were essentially closed I.E if you lived in Alabama in
1910 you didn't probably know what was going on in India you know in Nepal you might know a little bit of what's going on in like the UK but probably not too much and every society had its Village Idiot and then of course we invented social media and made it the worldwide Town Square for the all of the village idiots into this new world you stride
with some I think wonderful advice and so I guess my first question for you is let's let's go into the the this emergence of like idiocy and the politization of Babel uh verse what I call the human Colossus and I want to get your ideas of how we can change the politization of Babel into the human Colossus welcome thank you it's a pleasure to be here we
had a great conversation last time and I'm sure we'll have a great one this time as well uh so yeah I mean yeah I think you you summed up the the problem I think quite uh astutely there and I think really it all comes down to the fact that we have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for um and what you were just mentioning there is
is something called scope neglect which is this idea that we sort of evolved for the small scale of tribal life we evolved for small numbers we have there's a thing called dumbar Lumber which is apparently the sort of the cognitive limit of the number of people you can have a relationship with and Robin dumbar who's a chares he I think he uh said the number was about 150 so
uh it's not exactly 150 it varies from Individual to individual but there's a certain cognitive limit to the amount of people we can consider in our everyday existence and the number of people we can have compassion towards empathy towards uh even hostility towards uh because obviously we spent 300,000 years of Our Lives as hunter gatherers in small tight-knit
communities and that's where the majority of our modern Evolution really occurred was in that environment so now suddenly as you as you mentioned we now find ourselves in a world where the doors have been thrown open and we're suddenly exposed to this massive world that our brains just can't comprehend um we're now as you put it you know dealing with issues in India and China and
Russia and even you know across Europe and it's bad enough even looking outside of our town you know even that is too much but we're now looking at the whole world and I think most of our problems really stem from this mismatch between the world that we evolve for and the world that we now find ourselves in and so I think what my interest is is in trying
to recalibrate our minds to this new world that we've created to try to find a way to live in this world where we're just exposed to far too much information uh where people are always trying to get us to care about various things going on in the world uh this kind of constant Avalanche of concerns that are being sort of vomited over us you know through
our laptop screens our phones our TV screens um and in conversations so I think that is for me the Crux of all of the problems it's where all of the the major problems that are novel to our age so things like polarization and the sort of Mis misinformation pandemic and Al ation uh and all of these issues I think really stem from that mismatch uh so I think that's yeah that
is the the thing that I'm trying to sort of navigate I think well one of the things I as I was getting ready and reading back through your stuff I came across a tweet from one of my colleagues Dylan O Sullivan who works for me at infinite he's one of our top editors at infinite books and it's a wh Oden quote which is I'm going to bot it here
because I just scratched it out really quick we would rather be ruined than changed we would rather die in dread then let our Illusions die yeah very powerful I think that that's very true I think the way I look at it is people when they form beliefs about the world it's like erecting a tall edifice uh they have these little bricks and each opin is a brick and what happens is that
once a sort of crude edifice has been built if you sort of disabuse somebody of their Illusions that's essentially the equivalent of pulling out a brick from under the the edifice it means that the entire world view topples and that is such a huge sort of burden to bear to have everything fought all of your life's beliefs to just crumble like that
and so we have these kinds of defense mechanisms which protect us psychologically from these kinds of things happening uh and that is that we find ways to essentially rationalize beliefs even when they've been disproven uh so there's a concept in in Psychology known as belief perseverance not a particularly imaginative name but it's
you know it does the job it does what it says on the tin and um it's this idea I mean it I think there was there was experiments that were conducted um uh with a group of uh sort of essentially religious extremists called The Seekers who were around in the 1950s and they believed that the world was going to end uh they believed that the aliens were going to come down and
they were going to uh sort of beam up the faithful and then there was going to be a huge flood and it was going to wipe out all life on Earth so it's going to be like a second uh biblical flood uh and what happened is when the day came the event didn't transpire so they were there they were all in this one lady's house and they were waiting for the the
end to come they waited through the night and they were like any minute now any minute it's going to happen but it never happened and instead of doing the obvious thing instead of you know adopting aram's Razer and believing that their whole worldview had been wrong that their prophecies had been wrong they instead decided to rationalize why it hadn't occurred and they came up with
all kinds of weird exp explanations like um one of them said that well you know maybe the aliens essentially got stuck in traffic you know uh but those might have been an asteroid field and you know got in the way of them coming to Earth and then another one you know said oh well maybe they changed their minds about destroying the world maybe they
saw us and they saw how pure we were and how um how sort of you know uh essentially how virtuous we were and they decided oh maybe there's Hope For Humanity after all so they came out with all these different explanations except for the possibility that they were wrong you know and it shows that the imagination is essentially put into the service of the delusion so people have
this kind of defense mechanism the first thing that will always assume is uh it's not that I'm wrong it's that the facts must be wrong you know it's not my beliefs that are wrong it's the facts that are wrong that's always the first instinct and that's why it's very dangerous and very hard to try to get people to change their minds because we
have this reflex to become like a lawyer for our own beliefs and to try to find some loophole that will allow us to keep believing Adam grat has a great book called uh think again I think it's the title of it will store I love his work because he he Dives very deeply into this I sometimes think humor can be helpful I I was reminded as I was getting ready of this hysterical Monty
Python sketch which is like I don't know 40 or 50 years old right so by the way this is nothing new Eric Hoffer wrote a book called The True Believer back in I think the 1950s brilliant book but these types of behavior patterns have persisted throughout Humanity's history right the Bonnie python skit though was it shows all these these guys sitting
around in tuxedos and they're drinking this beautiful wine and then they get into well you know uh who would have imagined 40 years ago us sitting drinking this fine wine and then they get into this competition over who was poorer when they were in their youth and they take it to absurdest levels right like the one guy says you know well yeah our house didn't have heating
or any Refrigeration then the other guy goes you had a house stand we had a live in the gutter and then and then it just progressively goes down to well we only lived in a in a hallway and then finally the other guy well we had to live in a water tank and then they had the this competition right to see who could get win the prize of being the biggest
victim right yeah and and the reason I thought of that one was that seems to ALS be part of what I call this mind virus that seemed to have gotten released around 2017 2018 in in Earnest right it's always been there but like it started actually affecting people right yeah and like one of the uh theories on uh schizophrenia for example is that it's filter failure
essentially as you know we we're bombarded by millions of stimuli and our perception filters in a healthy mind get rid of like 99.99% of them right and and they try to goear around the ones that uh that make sense to them uh the theory states that schizophrenics their filters have failed and literally they are taking in every bit of information and that would drive
anyone crazy right with the amount of of uh stimuli that come into our minds but I was also listening to uh a conversation you had with our mutual friend uh Chris Williamson and Chris said something interesting because you were talking about um the idiotic things people post on Twitter or other social media and I loved your explanation it
was like people don't like it's an afterthought right and they're like oh God damn it I'm gonna right they're they're they're responding to the game as it were and they're not thinking about it they're they're just in haste putting up what some random thought and and Chris said well maybe that's because they're Boomers right and which I thought was funny because I'm marginally
a boomer I I I still dispute it because I think that the boomer generation is too big they say 1946 to 1964 ah I'm more of a fan of Jonathan pontel saying no the people born between 56 and say 64 he had a horrible name for us called generation Jones but when you awful awful right he needs he needs he needs somebody to help him retitle that
but his thesis is really interesting because what he does is he he contrasts uh attitudinal surveys experiences Etc and I'm the youngest in my family I all of my sisters are real Boomers and the difference between what they experienced in life and what I experien in life very very different very different takes a ton of things but I'm I I'm wondering
whether it's generational or whether it's that we've essentially gamified everything you you've talked a lot about that I have I want to get your opinion on first off like they maximize the objective function for the wrong thing in my opinion right they maximize the objective function to get you to give them money I I think that you can use the same sort of techniques that
gamification uh uses but to do good things what do what do you think about that yeah so uh so yeah the gamification thing is I think that's probably more of a a more modern sort of issue I think it's something that really only took off sort of with the Advent of the digital uh Revolution so um there was a sort of stage where you know the the sort of
early social media companies began to gamified products this was around sort of 2004 with dig.com uh and then later on Facebook uh and Twitter and all that but really it really took off with with smartphones and with social media I think those were the two things that really sort of drove um sort of gamification but particularly smartphones so this was a just a massive
sort of change in the ways that people lived because now people could keep score of anything uh in their lives you know just they were carrying around a sort of this thing that could just keep score of anything and I think that really allowed gamification to take off I think but going to your earlier point I think that there was a generational
difference before this and I think it probably has less to do with gamification because I think although there was gamification in the 20th century um you know for instance with a freen flyer uh points and buying uh getting little toys and serial boxes in Happy Meals and all that kind of stuff even Boy Scout uh h house points and things like that uh but it wasn't as
sort of uh endemic as it is now I think there were probably different generational differences which were responsible for the kinds of culture that we're seeing now um I think Jonathan height actually and Jee twang uh have this great piece where they talk about how there's been a gradual change in the ways in which we approach problem solving and just problems in the world
uh whereas sort of prior to 1970 people tended to have what is called an internal locus of control so I'm sure you know this but just for your audience um a locus of control is the sort of degree to which you believe that uh problems in your life are due to your own actions or due to external circumstances and also the degree to which you believe you can affect your
destiny or determine your destiny versus external circumstances so people who have an internal locus of control they tend to believe that they are in charge of their destiny that their actions are what determine the trajectory of their life whereas people who have an external locus of control believe that no matter what they do they don't really have much
power like their their fate is already sealed by external circumstances and what um hyp and twang found uh based on their analysis of the um the ameran survey data through the decades was that they found that uh school kids when they were asked in questionnaires whether they believe that they are responsible for their own uh sort of Fate there's
been a gradual externalization of the locus of control so this began around in the 1970s and it's become much worse over time and it gets way worse uh with the Advent of smartphones and social media so there's a huge jump in the externalization of the locus of control people believe that they are now sort of essentially powerless they believe that
the events that occur that the sort of the bad things that happen in their lives are not their own fault they can't do anything about it uh they sort of have to just live with you know this kind of system and I suppose this dvet tales with what you were saying earlier about the Mind virus uh some people might call it the woke mind virus uh but it essentially boils down to this kind
of excessive victimization self victimization where you believe uh where you kind there's kind of almost like a kind of uh this sort of Championship to be as victimized as possible and some people call this the oppression Olympics uh and it's it's a form of Purity spiral where people are trying to sort of essentially uh be it's it's almost fashionable to be
oppressed but I think this Dove tells nicely with the sort of externalization of the locus of control because when you when you believe you're not in control of your own actions when you believe that all the bad things that happen to you are a result of sort of social systems or you know whether it be systemic racism or the patriarchy or capitalism there's some kind of system
in place which is preventing you from proceeding in your life and nothing you do is going to be able to overcome that so you're basically doomed if you're a certain if you're a certain race or if you're a certain gender or if you're a certain socioeconomic class um and I think that this really feeds into this kind of victimization sort of mentality that
people have nowadays where it's much easier to just assume that you just don't have control it's much easier to relinquish responsibility uh to the external World say look I could make my life better if only the systems were in place to allow me to do so but it's not my fault and it's true that you know it's not always somebody's fault if they if something
goes wrong in their lives but the thing is is that this kind of thinking makes this a lot worse it makes the problem a lot worse if you believe believe you don't have control in your life then you don't and it prevents people from actually rectifying any sort of environmental problems that that may be sort of you know preventing them from achieving what they want to um and so I
think that this issue I think is probably much greater issue in the 20th century particularly when it comes to the ways in which culture changed the ways the kinds of problems we're having now with regards to the sort of this W mind virus I think a big part of it is due to this externalization of the locus of control but I think what's very
interesting is to ask ourselves why this has happened why has there been an externalization of a locus of control and I think well Jonathan he um in in his essay he posits that it's due to the kinds of culture that we have uh allowed to essentially uh proliferate within our school systems within our University Systems which sort of teach a distorted
view of History and which teach uh distorted science particularly distorted social sciences uh which sort of essentially dimin they sort of they tend to like for instance the social sciences that we have now they tend to uh downplay the effects of individual agency and they sort of tend to uh overemphasize uh systemic issues so that that could be again systemic racism it
could be the patriarchy uh capitalism M uh colonialism uh many of these isms which apparently are these overarching systems which are preventing people from accomplishing their goals and this is very prevalent in the social sciences and the problem is is that this information um it tends to leech out from the social sciences uh and the humanities and it tends to sort of
infect uh the sort of school system generally so the the preschool system the primary school system uh the uh the college system and of course the university system and um so it seems like we've allowed a culture to proliferate un unimpeded and this happened sort of beginning in the 1960s with a guy called Herbert maruza uh who was uh sort of some people
would say he's a cultural Marxist but if you type in cultural Marxism into Wikipedia it would tell you this is a far right white supremacist anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which is kind of strange because cultural Marxism was used as a term by academics until very recently um to describe the sort of shift away from economic Marxism to a more identity-based
Marxism uh when Marx's economic prophecies failed so they needed something new to sort of latch on to and this was how the Franko school and all that kind of came about but yeah I mean maruza is is widely credited with starting these kinds of revolutions uh that similar almost to the kinds of Campus revolutions that we've seen you know earlier a few months ago the
sort of the campus protests against the the Gaza War uh these kinds of protests occurred sort of 1968 19769 primarily against the Vietnam War but generally against uh what was seen as uh a kind of excess uh almost sort of rigidity uh sort of moral rigidity there was this kind of sexual Revolution and uh you know all these other things that sort of occurred
in the 1960s and that sort of created a culture on campuses which are very much was about fighting the Traditions that had sort of that were the foundation of of Western culture and this tradition has been kept by U all the big universities um there's a great article in I think it's uh in the Atlantic by Tyler Austin Harper in which he describes how the the recent
Gaza protests uh which were completely out of control in some parts of uh the US and across the West these were actually encouraged initially they were encouraged by the universities uh and the universities glorify um for instance I think at Brown University uh and at Stanford and uh Berkeley and a lot of these other universities they glorify the sort of 1960s protests because they
saw it as a as a fight for Liberation and even there are actually some people uh who have gotten into the university who have actually been admitted into the university not because of their academic qualifications but because um they showed that they were interested in social justice issues there's actually one guy who managed to get into Stanford
University because his during his his admittance essay his his uh I I can't what the name of it is but the essay that you write to get admitted into a university um he wrote black lives matter a hundred times and that was the winning essay and that was basically that got him into the into Stanford and this shows that there's a culture of
essentially victimization and it's I'll be clear self victimization so it's a culture of self victimization and it's one that's been proliferating in the 19 since the 1960s it's gotten much worse over the past 20 years particularly I think social media did a lot to uh really amplify it uh because a lot of the letter C the letter class the literarity uh sort of are
sympathetic to this View and they obviously have a lot of sway over the publishing world the broadcasting world um Silicon Valley Hollywood all of that kind of all the knowledge producing institutions of the of the West and so I think what happened is this culture that was initially a revolutionary culture and it was initially about just about
straightforward equality it really began with the Civil Rights Movement but then it it sort of became something worse it became something a lot more Sinister than that um I think it was Eric Hoffer who whom you mentioned earlier said that every great movement uh what was it every yeah every great cause begins as a movement then becomes a business then devolves into a
racket and uh I think that that's what's happened with the Civil Rights Movement essentially it began as a as a movement with very you know uh sort of virtuous uh causes behind it but what happened is it gradually became a business and then from a business it's now a racket and that's what we're seeing now and it's become I think the basis of this mind
virus that you were alluding alluding to earlier uh it's a belief that essentially that there is uh that the world can be divided into oppressors and oppressed it it's a very simple view of life so in reality it's not that simple you know there are you can't split Humanity into oppressors and human oppressed you know some oppressors are also oppressed themselves and some uh
people who are oppressed are also oppressors in their own way it's a very messy world in the in the real world but it's much easier on the mind to believe that you can divide the world into different groups of people uh some of them oppressors some of them oppressed and I think that's one of the reasons why this world viiew has become so
popular because it's easy and it applies it applies very basic easy to understand Concepts uh to complex problems and makes them seem much more simpler than they actually are so much to unpack there um I I think on your last Point uh I I think that that might be because we so long clung to Aristotle's uh either or yes no zero 100 black white dichotomies are much easier
for the ACT average person to understand uh but you know when you label me you negate me right and it label thinking is a big part of what you're talking about right people prefer you know but I can't remember who said it but most people think that they're thinking when they're simply rearranging their prejudices and and so basically a lot of
people are cognitively lazy right and so the idea of victimization so if I were evil and I had unlimited resources what I would do is not too dissimilar to what's been happening over like the last 10 years particularly in the west right I I would do my very best to baffle people with I would throw tons of conspiracy theories out there I would get them to believe that they were
victims that they had no agency Brave New World right Brave New World is probably a better predictive book than 1984 right it's like what do you mean we're going to burn or Fahrenheit height 451 right but we don't need to burn books all we got to do is get people not want to read them and and keep the masses infinitely amused right but but
this is a big part of what the Romans used to do bread and circuses right and when things were getting shittier and shittier what did they do bigger and bigger extravaganzas they had Naval battles in the Coliseum for example because it wouldn't just wouldn't do anymore to just let the lions eat the Christians right and so you see this this arms rat for bigger and bigger
spectacles bigger and bigger diversions bigger and bigger uh events that make people feel like they don't have agency that would be the other thing that I would do I would do everything I could if I were evil in trying to destroy destroy a society I would say you have zero agency you nothing you do will matter and it will never matter right yeah yeah I was just going to say so
there are two ways to negate agency there are two ways to make a population zombified um one of them is to convince them that they can't do anything and the other is to actually make them do the wrong thing and I think that both of these things are at play now you know so um I think like for instance a good example of the latter would be going
back to the campus protests uh what we saw was we saw a lot of people uh starting to sort of essentially engage in a role play a lot liveaction roleplay where they were sort of talking about liberating campus buildings and they were talking about sort of um they needed humanitarian Aid you know and they were getting their friends to like
give them sandwiches through the fence you know and they were like you know we're going to you know engage in like you know we're being oppressed here you know by the by the University Deans and all this kind of stuff and they were using the language the Revolutionary language that say even Hamas is using but on a completely trivial level uh and it was they were essentially
fictionalizing the struggle and they were they were engaging in a fictional struggle and that all of their energy was essentially in this lap and and obviously as long as they were in this lap they were not doing any harm in the real world essentially I mean yes okay they were blocking a few roads here and there and they were obviously making
life hard for the University administrators but their protests were essentially just contained because they were completely fictional and I think that that's really that's a good sort of metaphor I think for today's activism generally uh where you have a lot of people who are just completely engaging in the wrong they're just engaging in this kind of recreational activism
that're they're essentially they're they're engaging with fictional villains and fictional Heroes and they they're putting all of their energy into these struggles and that is essentially the same as having no agency at all because they're just all they're doing is they're playing a game they're not um they're not actually making any real difference in the real world and so I
think that that's just as dangerous as convincing people that they don't have agency it's convincing people that they do have agency but then getting them to do completely the wrong thing my uh friend Robert uh Henderson uh dubbed it luxury beliefs yeah and and what's interesting about that is the thing that I think a lot of people Miss is uh because we so venerated
accreditation again that if you go down the status Loop you see why we did right like Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford etc those are the tip tippy top uh universities a piece of paper from there gives you accreditation and gives you in many people's eyes the right to say my opinion is superior to yours because I have this little piece of paper here but
you know the thing that's interesting about uh universities is their followers in my opinion they're not leaders I mean as an example back in the 20s guess what all of the elite most prestigious universities were rushing and falling all over themselves to put entire department ments together around ug genetics right and then suddenly this was the this was the it even led to some
catastrophic US Supreme Court decisions that allowed people to neuter people that they viewed as somehow uh uh ill-formed let's avoid all of the horrible names that they used but then of course Al can this fellow with the little funny mustache and he wrecked it for them they they quietly shut down all of their eug gentics departments and
everything now is that saying that genes don't have an influence on human behavior well maybe but all of the evidence we have at least that I've been able to review shows that a lot of things are genetic in nature there have been you know reproduced studies on identical twins separated at Birth the similarities between them are astounding and and yet the the idea of
fashion is what always Springs to my mind right so back in the 20s you genetics was fashionable right and and so all the university departments did it then we get different Fashions right Dei is a current uh fashion and and they they seem to they seem to fail their own test in my opinion in other words these universities what they are doing is they are indoctrinating they are not teaching
anyone how to think in my opinion and and I've always believed that the truth should be predictive right and so I I really tried to train myself to convince myself Jim you're probably wrong what you believe is probably wrong and one of the most helpful ways that I did that was if you look back let's call it 500 years and if we could collect let's do a thought
experiment it's we get into a time machine we go back 500 years and we manage to assemble the upper 1% of the world's population by their genius right and by what they think how many of the beliefs of 500 years ago do you think would sustain inquiry today very very few right so the idea that they're culturally transmitted um and that you know the
importance of memes the importance of that type of transference I I find fascinating but again there are there are solutions and you and you write about these Solutions so so let's shift gears and and talk a little bit about how do we solve this problem of the you know dumbing the idiocracy and politization of the Tower of Babel and and how do we make it the human Colossus
where the interconnectedness actually is a positive sum game okay so I don't think there's an easy answer to this I think um I don't think there's a way to do it at scale uh because I think the obviously there are two options here there is a top- down approach and there's a bottom up approach and each of these approaches has significant problems that I think
are insurmountable when you're trying to do it at scale um obviously with the sort of regulatory approach who's going to decide you know what regulations and and how they're going to work so that's obviously got problems and then the bottom of approach is a bit of a problem also because there's no way to sort of coordinate there's obviously a coordination problem here so um I think
ultimately this is something that can only be done in small Comm ities small groups um you know it's it's I've tried to find a way that this could be done at scale I don't think it can so I think it's really a case of small groups of high agency high integrity people uh who are willing to sort of step away from the morass of all this you know sort of
infectious viral ideas and to try to go back to First principles and to try to sort of essentially uh B ways of looking at the world that are as you say predictive of the future because I that I think being predictive is the ultimate measure of whether you are aligned with the truth or not the degree to which you can predict the future is the best gauge
I know of of the accuracy of your model of reality and so I think there are several ways in which people could do this and one of them is by forming small networks of people and I think this is happening already uh we have you know communities of people who are coming together we have a wonderful community on substack for instance of people who
are sort of uh moving away from the kinds of cultural mores that you find um in the mainstream media with an alternative media that's not it's not gone you know bad because a lot of alternative media tends to go bashit crazy and tends to just go way into the crazy conspiracy theories but that hasn't happened with substack generally substack is a place where you know you
get a lot of people who don't think in Orthodox ways who have got a heterodox view of the world a lot of communication is occurring now between these people they're forming connections they're forming um you know sort of uh Partnerships and I think this is probably happening with your podcast and and with your sort of vertical other vertical sort of um media that you have
and there are other people who are pioneering these new ways of of sort of you know doing things Elon for example you know Elon is a very controversial figure I don't agree with him on a lot of things I think he's he's quite crazy in some ways but I think his genius can't really be denied and although I think that he's not done a great job
with Twitter I think not as good as he's done with SpaceX or with Tesla uh he's definitely changed the conversation I think because by buying Twitter and essentially um opening up the the the Overton window he's allowed conversations to be happening now on Twitter that couldn't be couldn't happen you know three years ago so I think it really comes down to indiv ual actions
by people um who are willing to sort of put their money where their mouth is or essentially have some skin in the game I think skin in the game is probably the most important thing I think when people really have skin in the game that's when people have to uh follow what's true rather than what what's fashionable or what's popular I think one of the
problems one of the reasons why we got into this mess in the first place was because people didn't have skill in the game uh so if you look at Academia for instance and social sciences what you were mentioning earlier about genetics um it's it's you know it's fashionable to believe that there are no um differences between populations for instance on average uh that's the
fashionable thing to believe it's it's fashionable to believe that everybody's born a blank slate and that culture is the only thing that that affects a person's life but if you go to a hospital where there is actually skin in the game where if you have you know you have to believe things that are actually true in a hospital you'll realize that
for instance if you go into a hospital as a patient one of the first things they're going to want to know about you is is your ethnicity because when they know your ethnicity then they can know whether you're predisposed to certain genetic issues you know whether you might respond well to certain medications all of these things obviously with male and female they need
to know your biological sex as well these that's because in hospital there's skin in the game you know it's life or death whether you you know you can't just pretend uh to have these you know the these kind of beliefs in hospital you have to believe what's true in hospital because if you don't people are going to die that's not the case in
Academia in Academia you can believe whatever you like and people going to die and so at least not in the short term maybe in the long term but uh you know it's it leads to I think having a la of skin of the game people will automatically believe whatever is most fashionable to believe whatever increases their status uh rather than what's true so I think if we can find
people who have skin in the game and if we can create systems that incentivize people putting skin in the game then we can create small networks of people that are really interested in truth um and then when people are interested in truth I think that lays a good foundation for essentially sanity um we can kind of begin to restore sanity because I think
as long as people are interested in Truth uh they they will always want to make the best decisions they will always want to um believe the right things believe the correct things rather than what's going to make them look good uh so really it comes down to that and I think I think it's happening but it's happening very slowly it's happening in
small patches in on the web you know like small communities are forming where people are genuinely interested in what's true I think what's going to happen is um I think AI is probably going to play a part in this as well because there is at the moment I think I I think on our last conversation we actually did a we did touch on this where we have like you know where you
you don't really know what's real now because we have deep fakes that are as good as real video you know we have um we have llms that can create essays that are almost as good as a human and being able to discern what's true and what's not is becoming much more important now than it was maybe you know five years ago because of the amount of
that that's just being produced you know there was a lot of before uh being produced by humans and troll Farms but now it it it's just accelerating and so it's becoming an essential skill now to actually be able to discern what's true and what's not in a way that it wasn't before because it's just so easy to uh believe false things now and I think there's going to be
maybe a division in in human between people who are actually interested in sort of mastering technology and people who are just going to allow themselves to be Mastered by it because um I don't think that there's much I don't think there's much Middle Ground here I think that if we don't learn to master the technology if we don't learn to discern
truth if we don't learn how to see through deep fakes then we are going to become man manipulated by them and we'll become enslaved by the technology so I think there's two two paths ahead where we either become enslaved or we take agency and we actually become the Masters uh I think it'll probably split Humanity into two you'll have some people who will be able to discern
what's happening and I think probably the majority of the population there may be some kind of Bereta distribution here uh where the majority of the population will probably just take the the the path of least resistance which will mean just acquiescing to uh malignant culture and and to the you know the kind of the garbage that's being fed To Us by AIS
and look you know these AI are propagating this kind of mind virus that that we were talking about earlier um you know you saw it with the Google sort of fiasco where it was you know all the history figures were like black you know like Hitler was black and all this you know it was it was just churning out this stuff because you know the programmers are basically told it to respect
Dei uh and this is going to continue to happen I think AI will become a tool by which this Creed this uh sort of Dei sort of uh narrative will be propagated you know and you see it if you go on any of the major llms now if you go on chat GPT or Claude or any of the others and you type in um you know things about say history it will give you a distorted
view of History one that sort of portrays white people as evil um you know black people as victims and and only as victims and it's I think that if you allow yourself to just you if if you just acques if you just if you're passive then you will be manipulated by this by these machines because they're going to be they already are they already are everywhere and
they're going to be probably in the future they will be responsible for the majority of information production I think uh they'll be producing information at a greater far greater rate than humans are and they'll be you know everywhere on on the on the way I mean this is already happening now it's not this is not you know something that this is not a prophecy this is an
observation of of how things already are and I think it's only going to get worse and so it really comes down to I think we need to we're at phase in history now where we need to finally put skin in the game and develop agency and to actually go back to First principles and to actually try to make logical inductions and deductions as the basis of our
sort of belief forming rather than what we read you know just casually em bibing culture is no longer safe I don't think it ever was completely safe but I think now it's actually dangerous to just be passive and to passively absorb information from the web and just develop your belief based on that because of the amount of misinformation that is going to be that is already uh
being propagated again You' just give me so much to unpack um I'm I'm reminded of uh Jed McKinnon's quote where he says uh if you're having a little tea party with Lord lion and Lady gazelle and somebody who comes along and doesn't quite believe your fantasy narrative it's not that they're mean it's that your fantasy narrative is a bit fragile and I think
that one of the things you're I mean the the event of the moment right now is the debate between Biden and Trump I'm not a fan of either of those people let me let my listeners be very very clear on that my only political Creed really is I am fiercely anti-authoritarian I don't care what flavor it comes in and yet it's a great example of the fake narratives and
collapsing before the very eyes of the population I think that you're going to see that type of thing happen more and more and only the truly committed or the uh or or or those employed and well compensated for trying to persist with a narrative the world economic forum is another one like I I I watch their ads and their and their speeches for Laughs I think that they
are so hamand it and so I mean Eddie bernes who was the father of uh PR right he would be he would be just you know he would be face palming at the idiocy that they have devolved into it's so obvious what they're trying to do it is the future you owe nothing you will eat the bugs and and I do think I do think that your average person is going to be
confronted with enough of these disconnects right where pay no attention to the man behind the curtain the man behind the curtain is the curtain's been drawn back and what I think I think this uh uh coincides with your view that these deep fakes for example are in a sense inoculating us against deep fakes in other words when we see so many things that are deep fakes we we our our
reticular activating system gets engaged and we're like huh I guess I can't trust anything that I watch or see online so I'm going to try to fact check myself so to speak yeah um I see this evidence kind of everywhere coalescent right now where people you know like we shocked shocked that um that uh the W the world economic Forum really wants to control
everything and make you a surf or that you know uh our our our president in the United States has some cognitive uh malfunction and I think that I'm watching with great interest how people are reacting right and it's it's the whole you know common knowledge versus private knowledge and and you know there's a reason Ben Hunt who runs Epsilon Theory and I've had on the
podcast he had a piece on it today where he says the reason that they crown Kings or Queens in public or hang people in public is not so much because of the king or the Badman being hung it's so that everyone sees it right and then of course you have H Christian Anderson who wrote The Emperor's New Clothes and and there is also a methodology that worked
quite well where you can call out the thing that sort of everyone knows but no one dares speak right and you see it with preference falsification especially among younger people a lot of the young people that I sort of mentor I I've asked a simple question how often do you falsify your preferences and literally every single person I've asked that the answer is
often and and and so it's kind of like Solan ichin had a great thing they lied to us and they knew they were lying to us and we knew that they were lying to us and they knew that we knew that they were lying to us but they kept lying to us nevertheless and then there's this idea of the chesu moment right chesu for people who don't know was the last
dictator of Romania and he ruled through fear and there was a moment when even the people who were meant to be guarding him were like sorry dude sorry we're going to give you to these guys and they're going to put you up against the wall and shoot you which is exactly what they did how how do we avoid those kind of violent spasms um as we go into this period
where people's where where the the the blinkers are falling from not everyone but from more people's eyes than say they have 10 years ago so with regards to sort of all of this sort of information or the misinformation that's coming out of AI my my biggest fear is not actually that people will believe what the llms are telling them it's that they will stop believing
everything because they as you said you that we will just develop this kind of just this persistent doubt that anything we see is real and what will happen is that in such a case people will default to believe in what they want to believe so they will choose uh to just essentially ignore anything that they don't like as AI misinformation uh and then they will
just focus on the things that they want to believe and those things will be they won't be AI misinformation those will be real facts and so what would happen in such a situation is that there will be further atomization uh because the sort of the cultures that bind people together will gradually fragment and as that happens people are
going to fall deeper and deeper into subcultures uh that are completely divorced from the outside world so there's going to be essentially a million enclaves within every country in which people just choose to believe the same myths uh it will be almost like how life was at the very beginning of civilization where you had everybody live you know living in this kind of
close proximity and sharing these local myths um you know which they might have gotten from the constellations or whatever but uh it will be people will have joined the dots in certain ways and they will form these small com common narratives about it and I think we're already seeing this happen where you have a lot of subcultures now online
subcultures uh who all you know believe different things about the world and who essentially there are a lot of people who don't believe anything now that comes out of the mainstream media for instance uh that comes out of uh anything that they see through mainstream sources so the violence that you're talking about I think is going to be very fragmented if it does you know
sort of happen it'll be very it will be extremely hard to predict it will be true stochastics terrorism you know there's a very popular word floating around to nowadays stochastic terrorism this will be stochastic in the sense that it it could happen at any time from any group and it would be very hard to predict because it's not going to be like the old forms of terrorism and the
old forms of terrorism you know you have these big monolithic sort of ideologies you know like jihadism or neo-nazism and you so if somebody followed these Creeds you would know that there were there were a liability that they could you know they could essentially be dangerous but when you have a million different ideologies it's going to be very hard to predict which
ones are going to be dangerous um because because the amount of information that you can get from each of these is going to be limited given how many there's going to be and so it's going to be harder to predict terrorist attacks I think in the future it's going to be harder to predict violence in the future because there's not going to be as many links between people as there
were if you're dealing with Isis for instance you got these big monolithic uh cultures it's not going to be the same it's going to be very fragmented I think um and this is hard to overcome because again you know people need to have some kind of skin in the game in order to have an incentive to follow the truth and I think that a lot of people
are not going to have any skin in the game because they they're just going to they're just going to be online you know they're going to be online whatever they believe is not going to impact the world in any real meaningful way um they'll be going to their jobs as usual they'll be you know they'll be bringing home the bacon you know they'll be doing
the things that they need to do in life but they'll just go online maybe in the evenings and they'll start believing crazy stuff because they'll they'll piece together a few things that they want to believe based on all the stuff and then they'll ignore all the all the rest is conspiracy theory or whatever and it's not going to impact their life it's not going to change their life in
any real meaningful way unless they obviously go out and commit violence in which case they probably will end up going to jail or something like that but the majority of these narratives are going to spread through just ordinary people just going about their daily lives in the daytime and then at night time going online forming you know go to
these forums or on social media these small social social networks and they'll just get you know crazy beliefs about the world whatever they want to believe and it's going to be very hard to predict what beliefs are going to emerge what uh the kinds of things people believing them are going to do um so this is something that's I think is a big problem in the in the future when
everybody is Jaded when everybody has seen enough AI misinformation that they no longer trust what they see and so they default to believe in what they want to believe and that I think is something that kind of is something that I don't think many people are really considering this I don't think it's something that is on people's radar you know people just
assume that oh you know what's going to happen is uh there's going to be a few centralized systems that are going to feed people misinformation and then everybody's going to follow these these these protocols these narratives uh so for instance you know uh there will be the kind of the wef one for instance you know the WF obviously as you said you
they're really bad at their jobs they're crap they're crap at propaganda and so I don't think they're actually going to succeed at anything they've already turned most of the world against them I mean everybody is suspicious of the wef pretty much and so they've made a pig Zer of it already they're not going to they're Nar narratives are not going to
be the ones that control people people it's going to be they're just another tool by which people are disabused of any notion that what they're seeing is real so the WF are actually providing a service in a way they're providing a good service to people because they're making people realize that they can't trust these organizations they can't trust what they see online and they
can't trust what the governments are telling them because you know look at look at WF look at what they're saying you know they're saying stuff that's completely batshit and so the real issue is what happens when people stop believing in anything they see and I personally I find it very hard to really I think this is why I don't really have much faith in humanity as a
whole as a whole I have I have faith in individual humans and I have faith in individual communities I think that communities can do some amazing things but as a whole I don't have much faith in humanity because I think that um I think most people just don't have enough interest and the principle of least effort is a big problem for humans
they will always take the easiest route the quickest route the simplest route to whatever they want you know and you see it all the time we see with Google search for instance people get all their information from the first couple of search results um you know those those first few search results determine pretty much I I would say probably about
80% so again petto distribution probably about 80% of what people discuss online and just where they get their beliefs from same with Wikipedia people get I think a large portion of what they believe about the world from what they read on wikkipedia um you know if they if they want to know what about some concept the first thing they'll do is just type it in Google and
then usually Wikipedia is a first result they'll type they'll press a Wikipedia link they'll maybe read a few paragraphs of it and then they oh okay that's what it is you so it's I think we have to sort of I don't think we could put much faith in in human race as as a whole because most people statistically are going to take the easiest simplest path
forward and we can't stop them from doing that because they've got busy lives you know they obviously have probably have families they have jobs to do they don't have the time to really focus on uh believing the right things you know they they have this satisficing strategy where they just believe what is good enough you know so they believe things that are just true
enough they believe that if they drive off a cliff they're going to die and that's enough you know that's the amount of truth that they that they need they know that if they um eat chicken without cooking it there's a chance they might get a disease they might get salala that's a belief that they they need to have but beyond that kind of basic truth
they don't really have any real need to believe you know uh correct things about uh say what what the WF are telling them or you know because these are things that are never they're never going to use they're never going to use this information in their lives so for that reason we can't trust Humanity as a whole I think to to to solve this issue it's it's a it's an
issue I think that is going to be solved by people who actually have the time and the will to actually believe what's true and to actually try to get to the bottom of what's going on uh and that have the agency as well and the Integrity to to actually act on it and I think that's a very small percentage of humans so I would counter that with the idea that it's always been a small
percentage of humans throughout any society through history right it the Paro distribution the power law these things are seen in like every society we analy so one of the things that I would swing back to on gamification is we can push all the same buttons we can use all the same levers if the truth is predictive and you're playing a game right and you're winning
that game you're consistently winning that game then all of a sudden you might have a Tipping Point where the people who normally wouldn't look into you know uh or put skin in a particular type of belief or whatnot start saying you know these guys over here they're doing really really well and if it's a capitalist Society maybe they're they got rich with a startup if it's a more
communal Society Maybe their part of the community is you know doing better farming or doing uh higher productivity in whatever they're engaging in and so isn't it a bit of human OS is human OS right so the human operating system I think is mostly emotionally driven it is and so we we make decisions emotionally and then we rationalize them after the
fact and and so these are all hooks in my opinion that you can use if you're trying to get people to play along the lines of you know what I wonder what would happen if I thought I had a higher agency I I wonder what I wonder if I just for a day or just for a week decided that no I'm not a victim I I'm I'm quite the opposite of a victim and
and there are role models for these things there's even terms for them cuses right if you can create a cenus in which that serves as kind of a beacon and a magnet to attract the type of people who are like huh these guys over here man they're killing it and what do they all what do they have in common right they all act with high agency they don't look
at themselves as victims etc etc at some point don't you think that that reaches a Tipping Point and maybe it never goes beyond a Paro distribution right maybe maybe it's maybe we're stuck with 80% our NPCs and 20% are our actual active agents but you can aspire to be part of that 20% no absolutely I agree with you um I think you know in my piece on
gamification that's my conclusion is that essentially you can be part of that 20% but you you've got to have the agency the agency is where it comes from and I think most people don't have their agency unfortunately but it's something that if you do you know if you're interested in actually bettering your understanding of the world from you if
you actually care about what's true and if you actually want to improve your life in that sense um then there are plenty of ways you can do that through gamification you know we live in a world where you can essentially create your own games you can make anything you want fun literally anything you want fun so you can make all kinds of work fun and I
think that that's a great opportunity for people I I use gamification in my life I use it for Fitness um is it to learn about the world you know and I think all you've got to do is pretty much you know like people always say there's an app for that well now there's a game for that you know there's a game for pretty much anything you want to achieve in life and you can if you have
the will you can um accomplish that my only issue is I think most people don't have the will for that I think uh and most people unfortunately are just playing the games that are given to them by corporations and corporations obviously have their own agendas they want to make money and so what they they're going to do is they're going to make the most addictive gains that they
can and those you know pretty much they don't really have much of a concern about whether you uh whether it benefits you because they just want you to play their game and we're seeing that a lot with for instance dating apps we're seeing it with the tmu which is like a the Chinese rival to Amazon where they try to just get you to buy as much as
you as as you possibly can through games by making it into a game uh we see it with even you know with sort of sleeping apps fitness apps they there's a lot of bad fitness apps around which just um you know basically try to they use fake metrics to try to uh motivate you to just keep doing whatever you're doing but there are a lot of good fitness apps as well it's just a case of
being wary of how they work um but basically the the ones the games that are made by big corporations tend to just be games that are only interested in getting you addicted to some activity and that activity isn't usually good for you it's usually um just a syn on your time you might enjoy it I mean obviously you'll enjoy it if it's addictive but in
the long term it's not going to improve your life but with that said there are good games out there as well there are a minority of games but they are they do exist um so you know for instance there's one game that I really like called uh zombies Ro this is a very simple game uh it's a game that you download on your phone and uh it basically takes the form of a radio
broadcast during a zombie apocalypse uh so basically the world has been overrun by zombies and basically the the game just tells you which way the zombies are coming from whether they're coming from the north from the south which road you have to run down in order to avoid the zombies so it's basically a fitness app you just run in the directions away from
the zombies basically and you know there might be some surprises and they say oh you know you got to quickly change course you know because the zombies are coming from ahead oh no now now they're coming from behind you so it keeps you on your feet and it's a good way to stay fit so that's that's a fitness but there are also games that you can play for
truth as well and one of the games that I like for truth is prediction markets uh so prediction markets are essentially you could sort of say that they're kind of gambling um but you you don't have to gamble with real money you can just gamble with virtual resources if you wish um and what happens is whenever there's some event in the future that may or may not happen people will wager
on it they'll try to reason they'll try to find some kind of way of determining whether it's going to happen and you see it's it's interesting because unlike the gambling Community it's actually um bored of people who are genuinely interested in rationality because uh these prediction markets really came out of uh sort of this the the sort of
rationality sort of space uh less wrong space uh a big sort of figure in in that is uh Robin Hansen Who's Got a Theory called futaki or faki which is his sort of way of creating a government um by its ability to predict the future essentially a government through um uh through prediction markets which is I think is a really interesting idea which could you know once humanity is more
enlightened maybe that could be the form of government that we have where we have a government based on who is best at predicting the future but um yeah these prediction markets I think are a very interesting game because they incentivize you to try to predict the future and obviously there's only one way you can predict the future and that
is by having an accurate model of reality you can't predict the future consistently in any way you can predict it by chance you can get it right by chance but you can't consistently predict it without having an accurate model of reality so it's a game that incentivizes you to not believe what's fashionable or you know what's going to uh in get you money or whatever in the
short term it's it's money it's about believing what is actually the case what is actually going to happen and so this is a game you can play to get your your mind more in tuned uh with with reality with with rationality uh so there is you know gamification is is an excellent tool as long as you know uh not to be sort of essentially uh puppeteered by it because
if you if you just follow fun if you just do whatever's fun you're not going to you probably find games that are bad for you because the bad games tend to be the most fun in the short term anyway you have to be very selective about the kinds of games you want to play that's the key you have to understand and I think there are certain criteria that
you can use to determine whether you're playing a good game or a bad game uh so for instance one would be um what is the long-term effect of playing this game what is it going to do to you in the long term uh so if you ask yourself you know if you if you were playing a game today if you were to play that game just as you played today for every day of
your life for the next 10 years where will you be in 10 years and you know that way you can determin because there are some games that that put you on a downward trajectory for instance a lot of video games you know gambling machines for instance um if you gamble if you go to Las Vegas and you spend all your day on slot machines in 10 years you're going to be broke um you know if
you play video games and you do nothing else you're gonna probably uh be quite unhealthy because you won't leave the house you know you'll be you'll be sitting on your couch all day uh you'll probably put on a lot of weight you'll probably have high blood pressure um it's probably you're not going to meet many people U you know so it's it's
probably not a good good idea to play that in the long term uh but there are games that you can play in the that will benefit you in the long term so for instance if you play prediction markets and assuming you don't gamble you know you don't have to gamble to play prediction markets uh because you can play with virtual currencies uh if you play those kinds of games you'll get
better and better at truth and obviously you know this is not to say that you should spend your whole life playing prediction Market games but it's it's a good side hustle it's something you can do on the side you know um also fitness apps are great if if you use uh games to uh motivate you to be active physically then within 10 years you'll be much
healthier than you would have been if you hadn't played that game uh so that's that's one and then there are other things like for instance play positive some games rather than zero some or negative some games you know in the past in the distant past we had to generally play negative sum games uh because resources were very scarce and uh you know it was life was generally about
survival um you know if you lived in the desert for instance uh you couldn't really share water with the neighboring tribe you know because if you did then neither of you would survive so you had to take it all but in the modern society that we live and especially in societies of abundance like we live in the west uh resources are plentiful enough that you
can work together to share rewards with people um and you know I think that those kinds of games are much healthier mentally than playing uh zero sum or negative Su I mean negative sum games are dangerous and because they harm everybody but and the problem is is a lot of negative some games that really exist um particularly on social media
you know on social media you have the sort of the beauty pageant on on Instagram where a lot of young women are trying to look as beautiful as they can be and they're trying to out beautify their Rivals and what this does is this leads to uh women getting plastic surgery it leads to them pumping um lip fillers it leads to them using digital
filters and what happens in the long term is that all the women involved in this game feel uglier as a result because they realize that they have to wear all this this artificial stuff to make themselves look good and when they look at their faces in the mirror without any makeup without any digital FS they look ugly to themselves and so it makes them feel depressed and I think
it might be a contributor to the rise in anxiety and depression amongst uh young girls and and young women that we're seeing currently um there are also games like the culture wars which you know um you know there are people arguing about politics on all day on Twitter um they may have good causes they may be arguing for good causes but the problem is is
that nobody gets their mind changed through an argument online you know and so all that happens is that everybody just gets angry and I call it a state of mutually assured distraction you know where people are just arguing because their opponents are arguing but nobody's mind's being changed um so these games are very dangerous and these are negative some games these are games in
which nobody wins and everybody loses um and we have to avoid those kinds of games because they're they're not good for anybody zero some games are not good either because there are games in which you can win something but at the expense of somebody else and the reason that these are generally not good games is that they create a mentality of um dog
eat dog and what happens is that this is bad psychologically you know you you you make enemies with people uh you become you know you you cease to see the people around you as human beings you just see them as competitors and you become hyper competitive you have to win because if you don't you're going to lose and so that can exert a stress a stressful toll
on people's minds um it can you know it can just hurt people mentally um so I think that's not a very good uh s type of gamees to play positive some games are very good positive some games like wealth creation for instance you know if you if you start a business with somebody uh and you create wealth everybody benefits and nobody loses out um another game would be educational
games if you play you there are plenty of educational games you can play with people now where you answer questions like a quiz for instance and the good thing about these games is that even if you lose you still learn you know so you learn things from other people so in that sense it's positive sum so there are games that you can play in which you
don't have to lose anything and you can actually you can win even if you lose essentially I think those are very good games to play um and there are you know there are plenty of other criteria that you can use uh to determine whether you want to play you should play hard games rather than easy games because if you play easy games easy games are usually a
trap because they exist usually only to addict you and for no other reason they don't develop you in any way hard games they have a point to them they actually exist to refine your abilities they you know because their challenges you have to develop your character in order to win at them and so I would say play hard games rather than easy games easy games
you're not going to benefit from them they just they'll be fun to play in the short term but they're going to harm you in the long term because if if they're easy you don't need to use your mind you don't need to use your muscles as much and so they will atrophy if you have to put in a lot of effort to win a game then you have to improve your abilities
you have to you have to train you have to uh you have to essentially be uh on the ball as it is so you know that's the key I think in this game that we in this well it is a game but this world that we're living in now you know there is an incentive Now to turn everything into games corporations have found that they can control human behavior by gamifying
it and so we're seeing it happen we're seeing um you seeing status bars uh progress progress bars rather we're seeing you know point system scores we're seeing um uh the kinds of all the kinds of mechanics of games we're seeing them being applied to non-game activities uh and so you know now the dating apps for instance have got um XP levels where the more you use
the app the higher you score and you can use that score to as a resource to buy things and you know it's you can buy emojis to send to prospective dates and all this kind of stuff um you know so I I think personally based on what I've research I spent six months researching this article on my gamification that um the world is going to become more and more gamified now
that corporations have realized that the best way to control people is by turning desired behaviors into gains we're going to see a lot more of it we're already see it we're seeing more and more things being turned into games and so it becomes essential to be able to determine what is a good game and what is a bad game if you can answer that one question I think you can thrive
in the future in the near future um just being able to discern between bad games and good games that is I think one of the most important questions people should be asking themselves if they want agency and if they want to be able to sort of restore sanity to themselves in this world that's just constantly trying to make them crazy it's uh something
that I thought about deeply when coming up with my various investment strategies uh because what you learn when you study people's results in investing is that there's a term called hyperbolic discounting and hyperbolic discounting is where you only really care about what your payoff is going to be next week or next month and you fall into this trap quite easily because it's
highly emot emotionally based you get emotionally involved you see it with the meme stocks like gamestock and AMC Etc but when you hyperbolic discount you essentially are trading your long-term future for some perceived payoff in the short term and the problem with that is that most people don't understand that most short-term gations in markets are
pure noise and so what they're trying to do is they are trying to insert a pattern where none exists right we're pattern recognizing creatures so it's an easy thing to fall into and uh I I'm I like you believe passionately that long-term games that are positive some for example every vertical in oano Ventures was set up with the norstar of only playing positive sum games only
playing games where everybody wins right so so when you use that as your filter you design things differently uh we were talking before we started uh the podcast about infinite books we're taking a completely different mindset and Rule structure there where we can still make a lot of money even though many of our deals are 70% to the author 30% to
infinite books wait a minute how does that happen well it happens because we pay attention to the technologies that are available to us that the traditional Publishers are kind of like don't again don't look at the man behind the curtain over there these tools you don't you don't want to use these tools they're they're bad and they're new and oh goodness well
what they're really trying to do is protect protect their massive uh advantage and moat uh where it's easy to destroy it so I do think that you're going to see more and more uh groups individuals Etc set up companies like a try Ventures look I'm a capitalist uh but it doesn't mean that I by being a believer in free markets that I believe
in zero some games I think markets are the ultimate example if you use them right of positive some games right there's a reason why where all of the isms of the world all the religions all of the ideologies from communism to socialism to Catholicism and protestantism Etc they all make a promise right we are going to bring you to the promised land here's
the promised land what is the onlyism that is actually delivered on its promises capitalism now does that mean I love capitalism and it can't be it's perfect and it can't be changed absolutely not there's a lot wrong with capitalism and we should Endeavor to come up with better explanations which lead to better methodologies and improvements and error
correction right but open systems in my opinion dominate usually not always but dominate closed systems for the most part because closed systems tend to be topped down they tend to not understand that complex adaptive systems emergence comes from below not from above and you know that's why all of the planned economies failed so horribly and so
miserably not only because they had a up version of what human beings are but also because they thought that there was this this was this singular truth that everyone had to comply with and gosh the truth was wrong and it kind of brings this back to your comments about skin in the game uh again back to my my uh uh the guy I admired Jed mcken who him self is a fictional character I
love that it's So Meta he is a fictional character telling you that you are a fictional character I love it but one of the things that he brings up endlessly is this idea that if you surrender your agency if you surrender your internal locus of control you are essentially what the ancient Greeks would have called a natural slave right A Slave mentality you are letting
yourself have a slave mentality which if I think if your average human knew that they wouldn't like I am what no I'm you know I'm not that and they would at least sort of take steps to try to correct that and then the idea of like metag games right change the rules I I don't know if you're a Star Trek fan but the Kashi Maru Maru right the
Kash and and how did Kirk be how was he the only one to beat it he reprogrammed the simulation I love that because that's the way I like to approach life it's like yeah no I'm not gonna play by those rules I'm gonna make up new rules and play by those and that's what's kind of guiding our entire series that we're kind of doing in a halting fashion but
that we call the great ruffle right it's like all all of these old Rule books are collapsing and you've got a lot of people going what the what what this worked all of this time and it no longer works well because we're going into this new world right and if you understand that and one of the things I admire about you with your razors and the maxims is those are excellent
they're compressed knowledge right why why do we have maxims because they they' they've made it through generations and they're compressed compressed compressed until you get down to you know very very useful yeah the essence of why people should do things a certain way and so I think that you know the the idea of gamification you made the point where when you've got
skin in the game you take it a lot more seriously my friend Annie Duke says if you really want to nail somebody down if they make some statement just look at them and say how much would you bet on that because I'll take the other side if you ask them that way and that's why I like organizations like long bets. org like put your money where your mouth is
and you know who are kind of the three groups that again a Jed mckin or a Robert per would would say had the highest chances of becoming enlightened or truth realized there are people who are surgeons I.E emergency room doctors because all of the decisions they're making literally are life and death Special Forces again every decision that they make is literally a life or death
situation and then one that I didn't think about too much my friend my friend Dan Jeff eyelight at this Traders people who trade for big Financial houses like it's kind of a psychic death if you lose you know a billion dollars for the institution that you are training for and so I'm fascinated by like one of the things we're doing is I'm doing a meta
study of what of one of those characters have in common with one another what do emergency room doctors Special Forces operators Traders and there's others too that uh we are including in and guess what when you when you do kind of a summation of of the way they look super high agency skin in the game Locust internal Locust of control Perpetual Learners fuzzy logic
probabilistic reasoning as opposed to deterministic reasoning these are things that you can learn to be better at right yeah yeah absolutely yeah it really comes down to I think willpower um that's the sort of the the key because people have to want to actually improve their their thinking they have to want to improve their rationality and to
develop agency it's unfortunately that is the the sort of the bottleneck is willpower U I think like I said and this is why I think it's something that it's going to remain a sort of petto distribution because for the majority of people it's just they just don't have the will for it they don't actually care about being rational they don't care about
uh truth as in you know truth with a capital T they're just they're just interested in satisficing so they they just want to know what's the bare minimum that they need to know in order to be able to function in their lives in order to be able to do whatever they want to do in life um and so it really does come down to that that you know how much do people want it and there's I
think if somebody wants it enough enough then there are plenty of tools that people can use in this age that we're living in now where they can essentially achieve you know pretty much anything they want as long as they have the willpower because there are there are so many tools now available you know AI has just opened up the game now but it's not
just AI there there's just the internet itself is an amazing resource you can use it to find out anything you can form connections with people on the other side of the world you know there's amazing sort of ways as long as you are intent on it as long as you have the willpower uh then nothing else is really an obstacle because the you know hortic for instance if you
if you're not um you know if you don't have a particularly good memory for instance you can just rely on hortic hortic are very simple and they're very easy to remember I mean I use hortic all the time because I don't actually have a particularly great memory I don't you know I'm not great at at reading large tracks of text um in you know and I like
to just do things quickly so for me I just rely on theistic and I can get them very easily online and I can also just get them from thinking and it's you know there there are so many tools available to people that there is no excuse really if you want to uh be more rational if you want to uh sort of develop your agency and if you w to you know uh essentially whatever you want to do you
can do it it's just a case of having the willpower so I think if we could find a way to improve willpower that would be that would be something I I think I I think Willow is the starting point but Willow is very difficult to liely on consistently over long periods of time because willpower is like a tank of gas and it gets depleted pretty quickly that's why so
many people fail on diets fail on fitness programs fail on all of those things I would suggest to you that there is a better way to do that and that is to use a little willpower in the initial phases so that you habituate the behavior if something becomes habituated as a opposed to a matter of will it becomes a lot easier to consistently
follow that I've written a lot about that actually and if if you I think it's sometimes when people hear willpower they're like you know like ah but developing habits right Bo if you can develop use your willpower initially use it all you got to submit those habits and then you habituate eating better reading better exercising better Etc then I think that that becomes a lot
easier another thing that I would say is that in this new environment there will be all sorts of competing entities like I'm competing I'm in the arena here you're in the arena here and to me that's a good thing because what happens is what happens if we start curating things better what happens if people are like you know God they they when I I Le
I read him because like he's always right about this that that is like that's a social scoring system right there too so people playing for different reasons playing a long longterm game right could not even intentionally uh get the people who might otherwise be satisfied with just yeah you know they might actually gain their attention on AI there's going to
be deep competition there there is a very good reason why oan Ventures is using on Prem models why because we don't want the uh we don't want the lobotomized models that the commercial uh powers that be are um voice St now I I use chat GPT all the time is it lobotomized not entirely but it's certainly what what they would call debiased in other
words biased bi in other words it is biased toward their biases yeah right and and so if people realize I I just think ultimately we're back to the truth ought to be predictive and yeah if all of a sudden our unbiased non- lobotomized AI models that we're building in the house start running circles around the other models that are biased people are going to start to
notice and they're gonna be like huh I wonder what hey could you tell us a little bit more about that unbiased bottle that you're using and why are people afraid of it well they're afraid of it for obvious reasons most of the things that is coming out of the mouths of all of our politicians all of the so-called influencers all of that is pure it's just and it
doesn't lead you anywhere that is going to be predictively good for your future right and and people people do not do not want their secred cows turned into birders and yet that's what's gonna happen and and that's why you see this in my opinion that's why you see this meltdown in the traditional press in the traditional political circles they they they they can't
believe that people are like looking at them and saying man you are just incredibly full of and that's where the what I call the global Colossus right the the interconnectedness amplifies like if I said that if it was just me and you talking and it wasn't a podcast and like what's the effect there's no network effect right there are network effects that are huge and
amplify and there does come points of tipping points where people are like you know I think that politician and fill in the blank I don't I red blue purple I don't like to me they're all the same right they're our polit I personally believe that at least in the United States this is the worst political class on both sides of the aisles so let's be
fair here CNN and fox are just different versions doing the same thing spewing propaganda it's just different paring points really and so like one thing I say to people do yourself a favor stop passively consuming information like through a TV I stopped watching TV news almost 15 years ago and honestly I cannot tell you when I see Clips they horrify me it's like I can't believe
that people sit and watch this and again back to different Generations my dear uh mother-in-law is nearly 98 years old and she sit and listens to news I'm doing air quotes here for people just listening news all day long and she's filled with despair because like it's just a doom doom doom you can counter program these days and like that's one of the things I
you know I I sort of believe if you can make a difference you've got to try to make a difference I don't try to engage myself in non-computable problems ra Roger penose calls a lot of things that people spend endless times arguing about non-computable right Robert ping would say the answer is Moo mu which is like there like there is no answer to that
particular question and yet one of the things that you see people online endlessly arguing and screaming at each other about for hours and hours and hours noncomputable problems and and so if you learn to just say yeah I'm not going to bother with that one because that's non that's not computable like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin I'm not like okay many evil
Scholars spent like entire careers going back and forth in their little well oered environment as to what that can do I think that you can turn the network effect on its head and say guess what you want social proof well the social proof is that film had you know made a ton of money and people loved it and maybe its message was one of inspiration
and empowerment and all of those things so I I think that well we naturally get more clicks as it were by trying to scare the out of people I think that you can also get quite a bit and do quite well with things that inspire people with things that get people to think you know what maybe I can develop that habit maybe I can become better is
it going to always be a a Paro distribution probably those things have remained incredibly stable over long periods of time in a variety of civilizations but I also think that there is a thing that the that I first learned about in the book the weirdest people in the world cumulative cultural Evolution right like if we if we went back in time and I'm holding up an
iPhone here um and showed this to somebody from 1900 they would be magic like what is this this this magical thing that you have in in your pocket there and then there's also finally you can adjust your attitude which is by that I mean there is no thing there is no such thing as Perfection right what what we are trying to do is continually come up with better
explanations so that we have better problems to solve we're always gonna have problems anyone who's just like lists these are all the problems and it's really easy to be against things like it doesn't take any cognitive uh your neural uh expenditure of caloric intake is going to be really low if it's just like I'm against that I'm against that I'm against that it takes a lot
more to be in favor of something so I'm always looking for things to root for like I root for you man I I root for people I root for people like you who are doing really great work and and doing it in such a manner that you you you you're using you you're You're such a good writer and that's important because like Mark Twain had a great quote the difference between the right
word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and lightning bug and you are lightning my friend I I I I could talk to you like literally for the rest of the day but my producers are giving me the hook uh here so you might remember from your last visit with us that we are going to give you an opportunity to hypnotize and
Mesmerize and incept the world we're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but what you can do is give we're going to give you a magical microphone and you're going to say two things into it that every human being on the planet even the 80% that we worry about are
going to say you know what I've just had the two greatest ideas and unlike all the other times I'm GNA actually take action on these two ideas and I'm going to try to really make them part of my life what two things are you going to be incepting in the world's population so in the theme of this conversation it would be gamification and skin in the game yeah skin in the game I love that
one if if we made everyone have skin in the game the world would be a very very different place by the way that's what it used to be in the old days like there's a reason there's a reason I put my name on all the companies I found except for one guess what happened to the one that I didn't put my name on it it failed wow the ones the ones the ones
that I put my name on was great advice from my wife when I was trying to name my first company that I created in 1987 where I was 27 years old she's like call it shasy Capital Management she goes you you yourself lectured me all the time about in the old days people put their name on those Banks JP Morgan Merill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith why did they do that because they were all in
they were all in it was their name yeah skin in the name stole in the game blooded in the game because and they were part and they were Partnerships why were they Partnerships because guess who had to Pony up when you made a Bad Bet the partners you didn't get a chance to socialize your losses back then so I I try to keep it as if so I I love both of
those inceptions and let's hope we get more people with skin and the again thank you so much it is always so much fun talking with you and I'm gonna already have Ina schedule uh uh version three because I didn't even get to like 70% of the stuff I wanted to pick your brain on yeah it's been a pleasure J I'd love to do it again thanks all right thanks so much