self-deception is basically never single player right there are always other people around you who are complicit in this thing and that's an essential part of why it works I don't know that you'd want to live in a world of absolute 100 honest right it's like you don't want to know right you really really don't want to know there's a great science fiction
book called The Fifth science and he's talking about planets that go into narrative collapse because nobody knows what's real or not real all we're really doing here is participating in the maintenance of other people's fantasies in order to make it okay I help your Coke you help my cope and we are both better off right against everything theater the point of Don Quixote of the matcha is like is it in fact heroic to support the
delusions of others and prevent them from crashing down the answer is quite possibly well hello everyone it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with one of my favorite guests my supposedly recurring guests who ain't been recurring Alex Danko welcome to fix it Jim thank you so much for having me back
I'll find I I it was very bizarre how much I looked forward to this today like I saw I was telling her I'm like awesome this is great oh this is this is this is this is a fan is a fantastic
um uh um side quest on my day which is otherwise a wall to wall all day including unfortunately normally we try to get like two good hours in on these shows today I've got to run because I don't have to talk to lawyers oh like oh man you just killed the bot right there the vibe's dead they're cool lawyer they're cool lawyers um we actually have a we have we have I'm honestly this is what
like our our current GC and our legal team at Shopify are like some of my favorite people to work with at the company they're honestly like really really really like an impressive team so I actually like getting the chance to talk to them but it also means that when I talk to you beforehand I have to have to say like oh sorry I gotta go I have to talk to lawyers so yeah
it's time under tradition in that so um the let's let's start right there man uh for for people who have not heard my previous chats with Alex this is really a long-term experiment which essentially is and a complex adaptive system generate enough emergence from the bottom even from a seemingly random series of conversations which we generally try to make our conversations
we adhere to the randomness part we're committed to the bit we really are and uh my my principal writer Ed William uh sent me a long email and he said Jim you know I've been going through the transcripts with you and Alex and [ __ ] a man you're right there is an amazing conversation coming out of this so so let's draw lawyers since we're on lawyers let's throw lawyers
I've always thought that there are the kinds of lawyers I always wanted to hire which were they look for ways for me to be able to do what I want to do but legally but illegally if they offer they play offense for you right they play offense for me and when I have to deal with
the other kind of lawyers which are the ones that just want to say no they want to say no to everything like who hires these just want to say no to everything lawyers in the first place
hmm is there is is there a is there a reverse Peter Principle for lawyers uh where it's like you you you you rise in legal seniority until the point that you can only say no to things at which point you hire people who also say no to things that could be it that in fact be it you get you know you you spend all of your time trying to figure out a way to say yes and then
you get burned enough times right and you go up the pecking order to get to the point where you're just like [ __ ] it man no no right okay and then if you're reporting to a person who's only saying no then you can also only say no to things exactly right and you know so in contrast I think like again um uh our current GC just hurts is one of these like very very very strong leaders who
has built this legal team that's full of people who can say yes to things because they're very dumb the case they're that they're working for you all this stuff which is if you are lucky and have a leader who can rise all the way to the GC or role or whatever while actually being on offense for you then subsequently everybody in the legal department can be great as opposed to it's
like no but if somebody at that point is saying no then it's on them yeah maybe that's that's there's your Peter Principle at work there we go I totally agree and like we did legal luckily I
uh I maintain my lawyers who mostly say yes yeah um okay great we saw a lot let's do medicine now okay what do you think what do you think about okay so everything is AI now right everything oh man and as you know I'm I'm involved uh but but let's let's talk about the medical use
cases of AI it's one of the things that I'm most excited by you um so my my wife is a family doctor um and it's it's really an interesting seeing um a couple things that are sort of like things I've noticed about you know practicing medicine now and all this stuff which is one um something that she has Point like there is this interesting divide in the younger generation of
doctors at least I think where they're more willing to go look things up on the computer um it's like you have an older generation of doctor where it's like the thing that was the most important was like the white coat and the formality of like the doctor is always right right and like you will respect me and I actually get it like I get that as a characteristic that
actually has this sort of like quality that is almost like the Divine where it's like it's like when you if like if you if you if you tear back the curtain it's just like this little man and not the Wizard of Oz um something is in fact lost like I get that but also it's like it's really nice to have somebody just be like okay I want to know the answer to that offhand I'm
gonna google it right not Google you're using up to date or presumably something like that but it's like let me go look that up it's like that's kind of nice and it feels like that to
me is like forget the AI or whatever it's like just like being in your practice and having a computer that you are searching continuously for things it's like you know that's actually most of the way I think I I agree uh do you remember look I sent you gamesmanship oh I
sure do where where the author Stevens Potter was a dog doctorsmanship yeah or whatever that section was called yeah yeah and it was basically that he he maintained in the book that it was virtually impossible to be one up on a doctor because they were the doctors in the white Co his solution of course is what I love he says be buck naked behind the doctor's desk on his
phone and when he walks in saying hang on just just a minute hold on wait a minute a minute but the whole white cup thing it actually makes sense too because the placebo effect is incredibly powerful right yeah and so if you see the guy and the white or woman in the white coat with the stethoscope all that I read a thing about placebos and the efficacy right so are you sure you read it yes I am sure he's shooting
well I I thought so I learned things as a large language model I can only say that I don't have a memory so I I'm not sure if I read it or not no actually but so the whole Placebo thing and the efficacy of placebos right so the lowest form of efficacy of a placebo is hey man trust me right it's like me saying it to you Alex hey trust me on this listen yeah why not one out of one doctors recommended exactly yeah exactly
and then what it it keeps going up kind of export goes exponential when it's a very colorful pill or shot actually shots are even the most oh sure yeah yeah but administered by someone in a white coat you know the stethoscope and all that right yeah right yeah oh totally but it's um but it also it doesn't I mean like isn't everything theater at the end of the day I was just talking to my
team right and we're talking about a guy who got one of my guys who got caught up at an airport and I'm like I started going off on the whole TSA security theater right it's basically theater dude it's called security theater um the well you know okay so here here's here's here's something we can talk about um I actually did some homework for this um for this show uh which is I went and read
a book on exactly this topic uh one of one of one of the great books of all time on this topic okay um the novel that ushered in the modern era which is of course I'm talking about Don Quixote yes one of the one of the one of the one of the great books man I've never actually read it before um people I think it's like you've never read I never I read like the wishbone version as a
kid or something like that which like then um but no I never I never read it before and so um I actually haven't read the whole thing I've now finished uh part one so it's two books right it's part one and then part two which I just finished part one
um yeah so Doug as like first of all it's like the thing that everybody has sort of told me is like why they read this book it's like you gotta read this book man it's like one of the funniest books
ever written I was like yeah yeah okay and then turns out it is it actually is one of those points um but like okay let me actually I'll give a sort of like let me give my my setup for for listeners who may not have read Don Quixote what is this book what's the big deal why should you read it the overall setup to Don Quixote is follows right yeah this aging mid-level like um like not that
not so important landowner who's in in Spain in the uh late 1500s so post Ferdinand and Isabella era in sort of like the slight decline of the of the of that Peak Spanish Golden Era and the very very beginning of the actual like early early modern period and so he's he's this guy who um later into his life he starts really getting into these books about chivalry and knights and
King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table and he gets into this idea that he should be one of these people he's like I'm a knight I'm gonna go be a knight and he starts basically like he he becomes so committed to the bit that he starts play acting as a knight right so he goes he goes and puts on all this stupid fake armor he gets his horse that he dubs rosinante which means the original
Last Question he's LARPing he's LARPing he goes and gets his friend this guy named Sancho who accompanies around the square right and basically he pretends to be a knight all over the place looking for adventure charging windmills you've heard the stories and so the books plays out
on three levels right level one is the slapstick comedy level so he's right Sophie have a good day um level one this sort of like slapstick comedy level is just him and his Squire Sancho just
having unbelievably bad things happen to him in slapstick comedy ways he gets beaten up all the time by people he is like gets an accents where it's like he's he's like that it's like all these unbelievably funny recountings of him like having really bad diarrhea because of something it's like it's actual just it's like an Adam Sandler movie right just unbelievably well executed physical
comedy as a result of this delusion of his that he's a knight and everybody else around him being like all right man like whatever I guess I'll go along with him right it says level one level two of the book is deeply sad it's like oh my God like this guy is cannot face reality right he is unwilling he's dug himself so far into this narrative hole and he can't get himself out even
though it is causing real harm to himself and to his friends that's a recurring thing it's like as bad as he gets it his friend gets it even worse every time and it's like your delusion is causing pain to other people right like and you can't get out of it that's so sad right what you're doing is cope but then the third level which is the deepest level of the book is like life is cope
like he's the hero of the book for doing this unironically it's like life is coping with the stories that we tell ourselves in order to make it okay right and the big sort of amazing thing that happens over the course of this book is that all the people around him sort of evolve from bemused tolerating and putting up with this to actively participating in maintaining his delusion because
of this wonderful message which is like all we're really doing here is participating in the maintenance of other people's fantasies in order to make it okay right it's like I help your cope you help my cope and we are both better off right it's like because life is just making it be okay right which is this why it's this wonderful story right so highly recommend reading it but I think
it fits it fits into this like level of theater that you have of life is theater it's like life is three levels of theater right level one is the slapstick comedy level of theater right level two is the like we are so deeply lying to ourselves all the time man and then level three levels layer is just like yeah but that's life like life is cope and we help each other cope and that's
actually the highest form of friendship it's just holding up other people's cope right so that they don't have to face that don't have to face their fantasies breaking apart you know which I thought it's like it's a it's a wonderful message right it's really the Eternal story I love it there you go like there's that's Summer Don Quixote ladies and gentlemen and it actually is right like we
go through life confabulating and we're always the hero of Our Own Story right and and what you sometimes need to remember is that you're the hero of your own story but in many other people's stories you're the villain and that that is a hard thing for some people to grasp right because it's in the one part they're like I'm the hero here right and and I am I am doing all of these
heroic things Etc and then you could you could have somebody like you could have dinner with them and and their story you're the villain are you the villain story do you think yeah probably
um um I use it as a litmus test if you're not the villain in somebody's story you really gotta up your game man um it's like have you ever been the main character on Twitter um exactly that's right and and both of us have done a very good job I would think of avoiding
that Faith you know you know what came up to this morning um of thinking about that was um do you know do you know the odd Lots podcast with Joe weisenthal and Tracy yeah um so they had on Nasim Talib as a guest to talk about all kinds of stuff and uh the the the their title was just genius it was this is why you're blocked by Talib on Twitter it's like he talks about it yeah
and it just made me so bad um because um like like many esteemed people online I have also been blocked by Talib on Twitter he's probably the block that I'm I'm both most famous and most frustrated by or sorry most proud and most frustrated by um I'm proud of being blocked by tala because that's a badge of accomplishment of any poster but I'm frustrated by it because he I didn't get like he blocked me very politely um like
he was actually he was like nice about it which is no I didn't know what he is it's not [ __ ] it's you imbecile yeah that's his word right he calls you an episode before I didn't get it I blocked him I block um why did you block him because I've read all of his books I thought many of them were really profoundly good and I loved what a lot of the things he wrote about I loved his intellectual
yet idiot series I loved it all but I just was be I was getting to the point Alex where his juvenile histrionics online were making me think less of his actual body of work through the point where I can't remember why or what the event was but he went on some like incredible tirade and I was just watching it I'm like you know if I keep watching I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna think so much less of his
actual body of work that it'll affect me so [ __ ] it I'm just gonna block him is trying to think of other like comparable people like that who whose personalities on Twitter have so shaped the interpretation of the right like Joyce Carol Oaths maybe um uh I don't follow her so I don't know I know I'm Joyce you're all alone sure surely some some of her tweets have found her way out here
um yeah ever go Google to miss Carol Oates Twitter I will for a good time uh uh yeah well what about okay well that brings us to Elon of course sure we now have the Doge dog and as the new mascot right so I looked at it I saw it I started laughing out loud honestly I did yeah and and I and so I put up a tweet with the Doge dog like laughing doing one of these yeah doing with the head yeah
and and and I said say what you will about him the sky is entertaining as [ __ ] what do you think um oh God there's so many there's so many like meta theories of Elon right now right um I think sort of like the the the the the the correct the correct way to think about Elon is that Elon is a reply guy who wants to be a poster so bad um that he invented the world's best rocket company and the car the company that's going to
make all the electric cars that's gonna make the world go green as a Prelude to him doing reverse Barbarians at the gate the most the most yeah it really it really it really is okay actually that that's probably the right launching off point is should they make Barbarians at the gate too the story of Elon buying Twitter right first Elon is like for first at like Peak Peak bubble Elon
is like I'm gonna buy Twitter Twitter's board is like over our dead body you're gonna buy Twitter to six weeks later Twitter is trading for 45 cents on the dollar or whatever and then the board is like psych we're gonna force you to buy Twitter he then tries everything he can at avoiding getting out of the deal and absolutely nothing works he ends up paying full price
okay and that actually went by with people not really commenting the world's richest man a modern day Julius Caesar is like ah [ __ ] like I don't want to pay all this money I'm gonna try to throw all these tricks at the book to see if I can get out of pain and the Twitter board the clown car in a gold mine company Ford gets in to pay 100 cents on the dollar man truly reverse barbarians
of the game Bizarro Edition um he then promptly very well you then then it's like the current modern tragic history of Twitter where it's like you know he gets rid of everybody except for that selfie of like the like 18 Engineers remember that one when they're all in the war room and everybody's like oh [ __ ] he is gonna turn this around this guy's like hardcore as [ __ ]
um with a whiteboard on the drawing of like Twitter's database structure it's like they're working on that you guys are gonna make it I was like yeah um it doesn't crash but then it's like because then what happens so they do Twitter blue and this like what it's like
4 500 people have signed up or something like that just like some tiny number of people but yet this thing won't die right it can't die because we need it too much right we're all too addicted to
Twitter for Twitter to actually die so it can't die it just has to live on in this incredibly bizarre uh um yeah it's it's RJR Nabisco for the modern times it's like it really is like so the the whole I I just read a thing uh by Lulu Missouri who I think is comms uh person for for our era and like At first I just didn't get right so I think you know I got the the the the Twitter
blue check fairy visited me I never applied I think it's because they did it Dave Patrick uh a blue check mark and so sorry Patrick wait wait Sir Patrick does have the check mark and you didn't
right this is all in the old days in the old days Patrick had women are you okay no actually we got him at the same time oh okay so so I think what happened because I never replied and I asked Patrick did you apply because that's a very unpetric like thing to do and he was like
right I like I didn't it just showed up and I said same with me so my theory was they saw Patrick you know podcast King we gotta verify this guy right and then yeah beyond the old man therefore sure are going to be Saint Patrick's with fate podcast pumping random cryptocurrency actually actually that's a pretty good business because that's what that's when we both got was
pretty much at the height of the whole [ __ ] coin thing so maybe that's why they did it I don't know I still wait a minute is this where is this where we find out that web3 breakdowns is actually entirely fake and it's done by a Patrick impersonator in order to [ __ ] I promised him I wouldn't tell much one web three breakdowns is actually entirely deep fake content in order to pump ship coins
at the end of the year it's all going to be revealed it was all AI it was all gpt4 that's true I can actually speak I I could actually I'm qualified to speak on this because I did an episode on web3 breakdowns and it wasn't me it was an AI version of me I never actually consented to being on web3 breakdowns all of this is deep fake yes but think about that think um get out of jail free cards right no it wasn't me it wasn't me
that was that's a deep fight that wasn't me they because somebody called me and they're like a security type person right Twitter huh no not at Twitter at Twitter okay yeah anyway I get this I lost the plan and he's like uh you know you should have a safe word and I'm like what and of course I didn't mean you got a full call assist all right I know exactly you go to Club Med or something like
yeah and and I immediately go to the uh the gift from um 30 Rock right where the where the wrestler is with Liz and and he's saying my safe word is keep oh yeah yes that's right that's right yeah and so I'm like this is but this is the way the conversation I'm not kidding I know the guy right so not like really weird but yeah hey Jim yeah hey what's going on how you doing I'm fine blah blah
blah uh you know you should get a safe word and I'm like what um this has taken a very unexpected turn and and he goes right now because you have a podcast with lots and lots and lots of episodes they're going to be able to fake your voice super easy and apparently one of the big scams right now is they clone your voice and then they call your elderly relatives yeah tell them hey I'm
in trouble I'm backpacking out in exactly you know Albania some I only I owe someone a kidney grandma grandma grandma I'm gonna need you to go into the drawer and get this piece of paper with 12 words written on it 19 I had those 12 words into something yeah
But but so there's a great book a science fiction book called The Fifth science and in it he's got this little uh part where he says we're a multi uh Planet uh species in this book and and he's
talking about planets that go into narrative collapse and and what is by narrative collapse is everything has been so faked and nothing nobody knows what's real what's not real and so literally the the entire Society begins to collapse right because nobody knows what's real or not real and and and I'm thinking like as he's telling me this I'm like okay this is getting weird
okay I don't understand how the safe word works though it's a word that you never say or it's a word that you say all the time like it's no no no no it's a word that only you tell your family and friends and business people yeah if you get a call from me and it sounds just like me and you think wow it's really oh you can say what's the word yeah I thought this was for the
podcast where it's like hey everybody it's Jimbo's honestly an infinite Loops pineapple that would be even better yeah let's say doesn't that stop working after the first one it's a different it's a different it's a different secret word each episode that's the goal of the listeners what's your uh What's My Line or what was the name of that uh say the secret word and win the fifty dollars what was that yeah I don't
know 50s after well I wasn't I wasn't alive in the 50s Sports in 1988. you must neither was I smart guy I I did have the capacity to watch reruns I mean for Christ's sake Jeremiah lowen is your age and he knows every Marx brother movie yeah that's not a surprise
okay bad examples um okay so all right so by the way okay listen listeners to the show um after you're done listening call in tweet at Jim uh what you think the secret word for this episode was
hey copy me please at Alex underscore deco let us know what you think the secret word for this episode is and if you get it right we will send you Bitcoin to the wallet address of your choice we couldn't back send them oshana's Adventures Swag yeah okay that's a bad idea um yeah okay if if the guest gets the secret word we're right yeah um what what what what what should the
secret word be well we have to figure that out don't we and we should figure that out off air what do you think like I so I had my mother-in-law who's 96 for dinner that very same night and I asked her Terry you know if if you got a phone call from me and I told you to like you know send me a check or or when when this nice man calls give him your banking details sure what would
you do and she goes well if you told me to do it I probably would and I'm like okay this is bad how do we solve it um commercial and I don't know what it is this is hard I mean look look okay let's back up scams are hard generally right scams are a thing that happened right and there are old scams in their new scams and people get used to the old ones and then we get new ones and things like that um all
of these sorts like two versions of the future one is like same as it ever was people get better at scamming and we get better at filtering around the scams and then people move on to do scams version two is no this is actually the one that breaks everyone um in you know in uh in in 15 years we're all gonna be hopelessly in debt to like one huge call center operator in the
Balkans who is gonna just actually have all of our identities in all of our bank account passwords uh and this is how the this is gonna be chapter two uh Cold War gets restarted but on on cyber crime you know write a write us write a Sci-Fi book about it I like um I don't know I like it I think that I think uh because we are incredibly adaptive as a species I think your first uh bit is right
that like we become endured to the scams right and then they think of new ones right because you know the whole idea of a con man that was short for confidence confidence and like and the original confidence man admitted to it it was like basically he said I just build up people's
confidence in both themselves but and in me well that's like that's the essence that's the essence of a good lie right a good lie is not just one where you've made the LIE the good lie is on
where the recipient of the LIE has a very powerful reason why they want to believe it because they cannot face being wrong right it's like there is some reason why they are reinforcing the mechanism of not wanting to investigate whether it could be false exactly right like it's a very very important part of how these things work super important and it's also one of the reasons why
one of the things that I have noticed uh a lot for a long time but now it yeah I'm noticing it even more very very smart people are actually much better at diluting themselves than maybe not so bright people because what happens more practicing much more practice but also they build better stories they just they build like they bulletproof they steal man their own
uh you know fantasy and hallucination to the point where like they believe it so deeply you know the indoctrinators themselves are deeply indoctrinated and then they go and spread it everywhere else yeah um well back to your back to Don Quixote again right because it's like within this novel which is about self-deception uh it's like they're in the in the the style of all these great books
right you have these sort of sub books which is like someone in the book tells a story and then that story is like five chapters long or whatever and it's like all these different stories of they're all stories on the theme of self-deception right like this the incredible skill and craft within which people do this um it sort of makes me wonder if like this is actually something that people were more aware of centuries ago because we were
not yet lying to ourselves that we did not do this I don't know this is like this is uh on the generally interesting topic of what are we Dumber at now than 400 years ago um which there are certainly things what are those things right it's like it's not all like how to you know cook food off the land and things like that it's like there are definitely interpersonal
phenomena that we have gotten Dumber about no question and like you know we it we go all the way back to even pre-socratic uh Greek philosophers and self-deception was like topic one right um yeah yes it's the thing the thing the the thing that is so interesting about the the topic of self-deception is that it is basically never single player right is that there's all
there are always other people around you who are complicit in this thing and that's an essential part of why it works um and and again to the the point of Don Quixote of the Manchester it's like is it in fact heroic to support the delusions of others and prevent them from crashing down the answer is quite possibly you know it may be that this is actually our life's work if
it was to support the delusions of others um well you know and that's you know the whole white lie genre right like you really wouldn't I don't think I don't know that you'd want to live in a world of absolute 100 honesty right oh God no you don't um there's that um there's that study I don't know if you call this a study or if it's just sort of a general a piece of wisdom which is like imagine or it's the great it's the great example
of like why opacity is good it's like imagine you have a group of 10 friends in high school or whatever and if you have 10 friends and it is in fact determinable determinable what the ranking of coolness of those people are right if you actually set out to do it you could figure out who was number one and who's number 10. yeah right what actually happens in real life right so
it's like in real life you do in fact know who number one is and number 10 is and not anybody else right it is essential that you have the bookends established but non-clarity in the middle exactly the reason why is establishing a number one anchors everybody to as good as that guy establishing a number 10 establishes everybody as being better than that guy except for that
person feels happy to be a part of the group that is cooler than them right so that's okay because there's only one person but for everybody else in the middle you really really do not want to know because if you will suddenly one day woke up and found yourself all wearing name tags that's like four or six or something it's like well the people in the top hack would immediately try to detach
themselves from the people in the bottom half the people in the bottom half would would all um try to fight among themselves to escape from each other right and the whole group cohesion would get destroyed right it's like you don't want to know right you really really don't
want to know exactly and you know pecking order right that that's will stores uh the status game and uh he had his earlier work also touched on actually it wasn't him it was William Bloom uh
yeah the Lucifer principle but there was a gap it's it's actually a really good book you should read it I'll I'll email you I'll email you the title anyway so there was a I love the fact that there are people in the world who do this [ __ ] okay so he was uh home from college right and this is in the 1920s or the the teens the 19 uh hundreds anyway and he gets this idea is parents
live on a farm and he gets this idea I wonder why the chickens always eat in the same order right it's always yeah and then so he decided to find out and so what he did was he went to the neighbor borrowed a new hen from the neighbors Coupe screw the hen in with the other ones Mayhem and they literally pecked each other thus the pecking order from the the alpha pen basically
is unscathed she doesn't have any marks on her the bottom hand is dead is dead they pecked it to death and then but what's really interesting is after the melee is over again order go comes back and and the new chick who was introduced finds her place in the pecking order so tomorrow is the moral of the story um of this this deeply nuanced social thing about um status and rank or is it that there can only be ten hands
there's only room for 10 hands I think it's not another person they're like we gotta kill someone damn it yeah one of you has got to go no new hands we know it's Mayhem Occam's Razer it's not actually about status it's just like there's so much food there is exactly and if there are 11 of us we'll all slowly go hungry yes and all be worse off over a prolonged agonizing amount of
time whereas let me just get rid of that one hand over there we'll be fine we'll have enough to eat very easy that's it we've been over analyzing it the whole time it's the simplified trolley problem man right just like okay let's uh just get rid of that ad right um I wonder that's true well yeah welcome to old old sociological studies that have been over in lives Stanford who was that what if what's the simpler simplified Stanford
Prison Experiment yeah turns out that the guards were just jerks they had a lot of [ __ ] going on at home exactly and you could tell it was the the whole body language they they they were a self-selected uh sample that was the problem they all came in and they were all [ __ ] grumpy and pissed off because of all the bad [ __ ] going on at home and so the researchers unsubconsciously said you know what I'm gonna make you a guard
that's right um yeah I know right now we're getting somewhere so now we are literally in a world where nothing reproduces no social experiment reproduces that's right that's right sorry science nice surprise surprise science you're not gonna pull a fast one on us but you know like this is this is this is truly the the chimath school of thought that
I was trained on so well right who cares if it's true it's true now well and again in my theory that Seinfeld covered everything that was worth covering right do you remember the scene where uh George is saying to Jerry uh it's not a lie if you believe you believe it right
um Seinfeld the one of the great one of the great shows on self-deception oh totally one of the one of the great one of the great cannons um I really like um have we talked on the show
about Seinfeld as the best way of explaining um the ID the ego and the um oral versus anal um ego types we're going to right now I'm going to yeah okay all right so um a real a really nice way to sort of explain like hey what's going on with this whole idea of like the ID versus the ego versus different like ego characters that the ego can take and like a really really simplified
version of this is like there are three ways that you can be as a person plus this Fourth Way which is the ID which is you can be the child the parent or the adult right and this is covered at a bunch of different topics one one book about this is a book called games people play um great book strong records I know but um it's like you can play the role of the child which is like the ego state of
the child which is basically seeking parenting you can play the role of the parent which is seeking to do parenting or you can play the role of the adult which is basically matured beyond the ability to do those things exactly right so the general idea that you can hold in working is like as we go through our lives we are periodically switching between these three ego States all
the time right sometimes you're one sometimes the other and the important thing is that the parent ego state is not the state of being a grown-up the parent-ego state is the parent as imagined by the child exactly right so it's like as a child you have these two concepts right called child and parent and then as you grow up you mature pass that into this form called adult right so
back to Seinfeld it's like the basic idea of Seinfeld is you have these four characters right you have Jerry who is adult right he's the ego he's sort of the center of the show he is not funny but he brings out all the funniness of everybody else right he holds the thing together
um then you have um um George who is the child right you have Elaine who is parent and then you have um uh uh Kramer who's the ID right and what makes the show work is that every time a
pair of people is having a conversation that is the dialogue between those two ego States so Jerry talking to Kramer is dialogue between the ID and the ego um your orange talking to Kramer is the dialogue between ID and child right Jerry talking to George's child adult right and so on and like the quintessential thing that happens in Seinfeld right it's like the main
the standard mechanic of the show is two people talking and establishing a dialogue that is like um let's say like George and Jerry or something and then suddenly a third character enters the room and the Dynamics of the whole conversation change right it's like oh the ID has entered the chat right or with the panel or Elaine shows up the parent has enters the chat right and you know
that great thing which is that like every single one of them um enters the room differently yes yes so Kramer always bursts in Theatrical uh whereas Elaine always um rings and then it's a minute of delay before she arrives right because oh the parents are showing up whereas
George has already just already there right um there's like they're all these rules right to how this is structured they're all just really really really well done because Jerry and Larry
David they're these Geniuses that understand these things but yeah like it's a very useful thing too if you're trying to understand this like oh like how do these ego Dynamics play out you can just basically substitute for what would the Seinfeld characters do I obviously know them really well that works on so many different levels and of course Larry David if you're a fan of
Curb Your Enthusiasm you see that Larry was throttled on bedroom TV obviously obviously but but he is the king of the comedic Arc in my opinion if if it's mentioned in the beginning of a show it is always resolved almost always hysterically yes by the end of the show um let's think of it there it is interesting about far toward the musical there's a New Yorker profile on someone rush to eat the after he got stabbed they spent slightly
too long he was a Curb Your Enthusiasm what do you think the joke about this this is not funny I know I know but it is it is like generally speak I can't remember who whose line it was but my friend Dan McMurtry uh was the one who highlighted it uh the the the usual result to is expect is the most hysterical yeah well that's that's like that's uh that's the Elon
buying Twitter role it's like if Elon says he's gonna buy Twitter then the funniest outcome is Twitter then forcing Elon to buy them to buy it and following through on the funniest outcome um actually a very entertaining outcome right no it's very entertaining okay very good um all right we got 15 minutes left before I gotta go uh what else on your list all right
what else where are we in getting to the points where are we well we don't have any points as usual remember because anything that I actually write down we positively have to avoid yeah so what is it that we can't talk about okay we cannot talk about gerardian explanations for taboo desires yeah good and no we're all over that that was that was last year yeah I know that's so yeah I mean that's that's busted right it's done so over yeah
he is he's really over he had his mom right and and now he's cancer okay well what about to what extent are great Innovations already baked into the system um well what extent are great Innovations already based into the system okay is this a like when the student is ready the teacher will appear thing where it's like an idea whose time it's like if an
idea has if an idea's time has come then it will be invented in parallel all three different times yeah like calculus or something yeah let's leave this and Newton both figured it out yeah yeah and and so the answer is is it or is it baked in um um it may be that the thing that is actually happening when these discoveries are happening in parallel is a set of circumstances that allows Society to temporarily tolerate the people who are
hallucinating enough to have the ideas first um like it's all new I all new ideas are lunacy at the time yeah right um and you have this idea it was like maybe a calculus was invented a few different times before and people were like well that guy's crazy right that's not how math Works um until we were ready to accept that a couple times um well you know what that that picks up on Bucky Fuller's idea of you're either tuned in
or not tuned in right and he uses the example of the microscopic World until we invented a microscope right we had no [ __ ] idea what was going on there and and then but he made makes the point which is kind of similar to the point you're making which is the first guy what's his name Lewin uh anyway so he invents it and he's like looking through it he's like holy [ __ ]
200 years go by welcome down there because everybody is like you're batshit crazy man there are no little things going on so I think that that's not a bad Theory actually yeah I wish I knew offhand what the reaction okay so the the classic thing that everyone that everybody talks about is like Mendel counting peas this garden and figuring out genetics um and then you know it's
some number of many years later uh we actually see DNA and he's like yeah you're right um like I don't actually know but think about it the William Blake his drawing is is a is a DNA double helix you've seen that I'm sure yeah well the the way it's like we we figure out the whole thread that all goes back to mendelian genetics where he's like yeah that guy counting peas was right
um and it's like I don't actually know at the time if people were like oh yes like oh you're you're counting all the color your opponent squares are very good sir or if everybody was like you quack like oh what I I can tell you I can tell you that you quack right I don't know he was a mug so people might have respected them there's a great book called Mendel's dwarfs and I'm trying
to for the author it's uh it's excellent he's a great literary fiction author I can't remember his name well okay if you bring us back to the theme of our show right it's like maybe the thing that has to happen for these breakthroughs to make sure is for people to have their Sancho
panzas around with them to sustain the delusion along the way to making the genius Insight that becomes indisputable right it's like to have the Insight that's indisputable you have to go
through this period of time of people calling you crazy absolutely and your ability to sustain that gets you there or not that's the great filter yeah maybe that's the great filter of the ideas whose Time Has Come which is most ideas are filtered out by people being unwilling to talk to listen to you yeah right like on the way where you're still wrong but you're getting at something
well I know that state where it's like he's still he's like you're still wrong but it's interesting yeah you know it's like how long can you tolerate that it's like the Jed McKenna quote crazy is a numbers game and then his conversion says you mean and he goes yeah if enough people believe it ain't crazy anymore it's the exact reverse opposite it's the exact reverse of um it's not panicking if you're first right [Laughter]
I just saw the situation and acted upon it um what's that line even from oh it's from Margin Call that's what it's from yes being like it's not panicking if you're first out the door and if you're first out the door it's not called pen okay we we can actually Margin Call if we've only got another 10 minutes like greatest movie in my opinion having been a Wall Street guy right
Margin Call is the most realistic of all of those movies I think there are two schools of thought on Margin Call right school of thought one is what you said is it's the most realistic it's
really good like it says everything correctly this is what it's like two is it's boring um like literally [Laughter] um and to me okay margin called to me the what the reason why I liked the movie and I think the reason why it stands up on second or third year watch is you
realize who are the main characters that the movie is actually about right you realize which is uh Demi Moore and um what's her counterparty who's the head of the the division head or whatever the two people who both report to Jeremy Irons yes right where it becomes very clear over the course of movies that like they've known about this for like a year right and they both could not
say anything right and now they're both trying to blame each other and one guy's faster right and so he lives when she dies right it's like everything else is basically structure around that figuring out how to get the story to unfold and then you realize it's like both of them are like anything of course and it's all we all knew the underlying theme is the whole private knowledge first public
knowledge right like as you say they they both knew they they knew that for a year right and and again and the and the and the opposite of them is Kevin Spacey's character who is like I don't want to know exactly how do you think I've survived here so long I do not tell me I'm leaving the room yeah that's right and then he then he went home and it becomes clear that he loved
his dog more than his son yes much more yeah burying the dog at the end that's right like I like that though because it also the undercurrent of the public knowledge first private knowledge and preference falsification and lying to others and yourself because you don't want to know which feeds right back into our original theme Here Right which is Pancho saying yeah man you really are a knight yeah um or the um you know
you know that you know the the the Sancho and Margin Call was what's his name the um the analyst yes it's like tagging along the whole time just being like how much money is that guy make Taylor Swift is that guy he's like shut the [ __ ] up why are you here go away it's always that one character you've gotta have there and you so that everyone is like why why is
why was he not right why is he here why is he here is he providing any useful transfer or anything to the story okay so the next question then becomes what is your favorite movie about Wall Street just in terms of pure entertainment in terms of pure entertainment uh I think pie was really good um let me see I mean Wall Street just the the classic the movement like that that movie's killer
um that has to be that's that's you know what I love about Wall Street is that Oliver Stone made that movie explicitly to expose Wall Street he wanted yeah and then everybody was like this was
like The Social Network 20 years later everybody's like wow this is exactly what I want to do it was the best recruiting film yeah working on Wall Street that of any of them small street it's pretty good can I say something super heretical of course I didn't find Trading
Spaces that funny really I thought it was fine I thought it was funny I it's not in my it's not on my Podium huh all right yeah no it is okay um that is okay I liked it I I haven't watched it I liked it but I haven't I haven't watched it in a long time it's got good gifts yes that's true um that's my new thing it's like I judge all of these movies and the cultural artifacts simply
are are they good gifts are they yeah dude again is the meme game strong can you just can you just steal an entire Vibe into a three second looping video yeah that's that's it right can you what about what about you what are your favorite Wall Street movies uh I love uh The Big Short which I just recently re-watched with my wife who uh we both looked at each other and we're like wow
that actually was a pretty good movie we hadn't seen it in a while we I like the book as well um I can't figure out why they haven't made a good movie about liars poker same author I don't know that's a great question I mean right maybe it's one of those just sort of truths is where everybody agrees not to because the movie won't be as good so everybody agrees not to do it exactly but that you know my part of the vanities right one of wolves
if you love the book the movie is unwatchable another another Wall Street book that was just dramatically better than the movie was um smartest guys in the room that book was so good um what's your name uh Bethany McLean yeah she's great yeah I love her stuff um she's really good on on those but horrible movie yeah um we need to have um there needs to be a movie about 2021 and about like the year of SPAC Insanity oh you know we are
um yeah there needs to be a movie about this great movie right about well I mean you know that they're gonna make a movie you know they're going to make a movie about FTX and about um all that like that that has to be something totally um you know I'm trying to think like if in all and like I I just want there to be a movie where I can have my Cameo appearance where I give my little
anecdote about the Waterloo Co-op student and the spax Have I told you about this yes yeah tell our audience then I gotta go okay so this is you know back in 2017 or something like that um when I was a social capital sits us down and he's like all right listen up everybody all hands meeting in the kitchen we're gonna do this thing called SPAC um this is the this is gonna be the
new way companies go public it's gonna be so much better at all these ways we're assist Geniuses we're gonna do and of course because this is chamoth and he has the reality Distortion field around him where if you're in a physical room with him everything he says is the Smart first thing you've ever heard we're all like oh wow like it's so great so I'm gonna go home to Canada
thinking like oh this is gonna be so cool and um I'm at I find myself like at a party or something with a like a bunch of like Waterloo students um and um I get a couple I've had some drinks at this point I'm sort of talking this thing and I'm running my mouth like oh we're gonna do this thing calls back and like remember one of these guys kids is like oh we know what spax
are he's like I took a fake Mining Company oh like with a spack as a Waterloo Co-op student an awesome moment where it's like I'm in danger I realized like oh oh no something's wrong it's
like why do Canadians all know what specs are ah and it turns out that like the most dangerous question you can ask in finance is why do all the Canadians know about acts yeah oh no you should be admit all right I'm leaving on that note because I gotta go all right see you