we now have much higher possibility space than anyone in human history possibility is destabilizing and people are uncomfortable with that we're really building the plane in midair while we're falling through the sky having an open aperture you're going to see more pessimism is a kind of depth it's a kind of let's not change things let's not try new things let's just hold what we have and die right there's always more to do
there's always more to do by putting together different types of Minds that's where the magic happens let me get my friend who might be on the other side of the planet and see what he thinks about this the rate of collision is so much higher focus on what you want to see more of right focus on the good [Music] stuff well hello everybody it's Jim oan with another infinite loops and I gotta
tell you I have been looking forward to this one for a long time my favorite friendly ambitious nerd Visa is back Visa so good to see you hey Jim I'm so glad to be back thank you for having me I just love everything you do man I I love what you write I love your your books uh congratulations on being a dad we were chatting about that a little bit before we started to record so so let's just let's go in
there there's a there's a before times before children and an after children how's it how's it going how's it going for you yeah uh I'm so first of all I'm loving it like uh you know I so I I did worry because i' I've read some of the worst things that people have had to say over the years right so I did worry oh what if I don't feel love for my child or what if I feel overwhelmed what if I feel um I haven't had to worry about
that so much I think I'm quite blessed like we are quite blessed we seem to have a really adorable easy baby like he he he cries but you know I let other people deal with much worse uh you know there are moments of Joy like I was giving him a bath and my wife was like playing peekaboo with him from behind my back and when he starts laughing it's just I feel my whole it's like ah everything in my life up until that
point suddenly felt worth it like every you know every heartbreak and grief and betrayal and upset like all of that like if there were like if previously they felt like like SCS or like open wounds or whatever like just you know like things that hurt they suddenly all like faded substantially like oh all of that is not important I have this joy in front of me and that's been amazing um
but it is also you know it's it's chaotic and Relentless and so uh I can't remember who was it who said something like um this babies will like you know how um I think some some software companies they have these like a to to prepare for like malicious attacks or something like just to to have their their code architecture do well they actually have somebody in house deliberately mess with things on
purpose just so that they call them like chaos monkeys or something like that and like a child is a chaos monkey like whatever plans you have whatever you might not even I didn't even think of myself as a person with plans and structure until I had a child and I realized oh I was counting on not being interrupted for 30 minutes and I can no longer count on that exactly uh which is a challenge but an interesting challenge
I guess um but yeah I I love it I I'm so thrilled to be a dad I fall in love with my wife all over again watching her care for my son and uh you know I I reinhabit the world from a whole fresh perspective right just thinking of how what am I modeling for him right or what am I going to teach him or what am I going to show him or like you know um things just feel so much more um concrete like a lot of things
that used to feel abstract right like like if I were ever uncertain about how something is relevant to me now a lot of it comes through like well you know does this help me put put on the table for my kid or does this help me you know become more of the Dead that I want to be right and and stuff like that so it's it's wonderful yeah context is is uh very very different after having children I I had uh the same experience um with my
kids I wasn't terribly worried about loving them um and when my first child Patrick came out like instant literally instant the the I I could just feel my body flooding with those wonderful chemicals and then when when we were anticipating our first Grand uh child Pierce who a Patrick's son I spoke with my wife about her and I said do you think we're going to have that same instant love for a grandchild that we
had for our children and we chatted about it and then when he was born and they brought him out man exactly the same yeah and and and the context it gives is just so wonderful right yeah I so even so when I first had my son um I remember feeling you know for the first time I really felt viscerally like oh my grandparents had to take care of my parents and their grandparents their parents had to take
care of them and like some I mean they might not have done it perfectly but all the way back to to went all the way right like somebody had to feed and and care for the child one way or another and that was so that was a trip right just feeling the sense of continuity and Connection to the Past and also recently I brought my kid over to my my parents place for I think my mom's birthday and
I got to see my dad hold my son and I could see my dad getting emotional looking at his grandson and I'm just I'm watching that I'm getting emotional too like you know this this is it this is what life is about life is what what it's for right it's that that that continuity and um yeah it's just just wonderful you know uh I I often say that when when you're feeling down you're feeling blue remember you are the result
of millions of years of success basically it it and and what your point is well taken by me I had the same kind of thought process just thinking oh my God like think of all of the other Generations that had to succeed in caring for loving uh hopefully loving uh and and bringing that child into the world to the point where they could be on their own I I I I just just think it's an amazing uh uh
way to look at the world because it really does open your eyes uh well congratulations I and I'm delighted for you you know now I've got a bone to fit with you which is how the hell did you get David Deutsch onto a podcast you know that I love this guy and I recommend his book to everybody and then I'm getting I'm getting ready to talk to you I see the podcast like oh my God it was great by the way yeah I mean well I
do that was that was actually one of my first few recorded conversations with somebody else and there is actually one issue with it which is that I'm so excited to try and make sure that he has a good time that I keep saying yeah uhhuh uhhuh yeah like I'm just trying to affirm him and I I should have edited that out but I didn't any but um so that's one of those like strange magical flukes where I didn't reach out to him
it's like we had a mutual friend who and she is like his F like um so her name is Lully and David is her family friend from when she was very young so like she and David go way back she's like a she's almost like a like a surrogate daughter is to him maybe and it just what happened I think this was early in the pandemic I guess I I don't know if so like I don't think he had like a media strategy planned at
that point in time I wasn't it was very random almost like um just yeah it was it was super random I don't think I would have gotten him by like doing a media outreach kind of thing and like uh I remember at the end of our chat um he was so gracious and I said hey if there's anything that I can share with you based on our chat like shall I email it to you and he said the most gracious
thing he said um I I most likely won't get around to reading it but I shall be very eternally grateful that you sent it or that you thought to send it I was like oh that's lovely yeah and like um he he's a wonderful guy he's so thoughtful and curious and uh and you know I feel that you know in so in preparing for my chat with him I went to watch a bunch of his interviews and I felt like everybody that he talks to or
I mean I don't know if I'm biased but um it felt like all the videos if you look up David D on YouTube it's always an interviewer interviewing him being like esteemed sir please regil us with you know your talking points and I was like I want I want to do something different like for him as well right I want to I want to be just a guy chatting with him and I asked him like what what was it
like when you were a kid when did you remember first conceiving of infinity like you know I wanted to approach it on that level and so if you see the comments in my videos there's like this interesting spread where some people say wow you've asked questions that nobody else has asked before and some people are like oh interviewer talks way too much about himself and I I I didn't conceive of it as an interview I really
thought of it as a chat and I I for me my metric of success was I wanted to make sure that David had a great time and I think he did and of course he might have just been being polite but I think he did and uh I I think that's an interesting point of like departure for some people like uh elsewhere people have talked about how like all a lot of podcasts start to sound the same because it's the same inter the same like people
promoting their books going on the same dozen or so famous podcast and they all ask the same questions and I'm like yeah what what could we talk about that would be different so I I can try and introduce you but I'm guessing he wouldn't get my email if if i s it to him but actually that's what I loved about it as you know the format of this podcast tries to aim for that kind of vibe right uh because I agree with you
like the world yeah the world do simar you I yeah I know we are and I that's why I always look forward to reading your stuff and and chatting with you uh but the world doesn't need another podcast with the same format and you know there are plenty that are so much better at that than I could ever ever be and so it's just like from my point of view I loved it for all of the reasons that that you're you're
pointing out so what what do you what do what did you think what do you think about uh the beginning of infinity thought great yeah yeah yeah and what what like give me your your biggest takeaways and and what changed in your own mind after reading it because it really profoundly affected me yeah um so I feel like I've had some exposure to like just techno optimism in like scientific optimism in general in the
abstract so it's not like the ideas in it were like alien to me and like shocking but I deeply admire so I did I did do a Twitter threat reading the the book which which is what um got LLY to introduce us but uh yeah uh I was even in the first chapter I was like astounded at how masterfully David um is aware of all of the possible wrong turns that can be taken in trying to understand something and like he lays it
out and he lays out the objection and then he he very fluidly he's like a he's like a judo karate master you know kind of like deafly slicing through things and then I remember in when I was reading his book I underlined certain bits where I'm like how can he say that he's saying that so confidently like if I were to try so I think at some point he says something he says some things like uh oh the only way we know anything
is through conjecture and criticism I'm like that's a very bold thing like how do you and then I think about it and I think about it I'm like it's right you know it's like it's so elegant and compressed and condensed there's this passage at some point where he talks about um you know once upon a time a lot of parts of the earth that we currently inhabit were once uninhabitable and we
you know with inhuman Ingenuity and Science and figuring stuff out made life support systems in the form of heating and clothing and all of whatever to allow us to inhabit certain spaces and then he just casually drops things like you know we don't yet have a nuclear reactor like it's just the way he navigates things it's so um it's the confidence that's based on having gone through all the possibilities like he he
knows all the areas in his idea mze very very well and it's it's such a pleasure right to inhabit that space and to know that um know so so that when he is optimistic it's not like a blind faith of like oh you know surely things will get better he's like no if if you look at the numbers if you look at the the history of the thing and you see what's possible and what's not and so on and so forth and yeah it really um
reinvigorated me to want to be more ambitious I think that's my main the thing that I got away from it like I'm sure if I reread it so it's been a while since I last read it I'm sure if I reread it now I would be like oh wait this this thing should get more attention this thing should get more uh so on and but really he he captures the pleasure of Effective Thinking and not so like not just thinking in like this
you know ruminating on philosophical ideas for the pleasure of that which is fine also you know but like he has this kind of um Direction like there's a vector to it right like like um you know human advancing human capability right in this and and not in this overr like we're trying to do something different but just we've already been doing it you know like another one of my favorite R
from him is the idea of like um how so i' I've I've quoted this so many times I've kind of remixed it into my own language so I don't know where his idea starts and mine begins but it's like the idea that you know historically most human creativity was deployed in supressing human creativity because change is a natural constant like everything's always in flux all the time and that makes people uncomfortable and
so people you so and another phrase I I got remixing that was if you ever think someone isn't creative just look at the excuses because it it takes you know like like oh I can't do this because of that I can't do this because of that like you keep having to rearrange matter or rearrange Concepts or rearrange something to explain why you can't do something and you could just as much deploy that same skill set to explain
why something might be possible but you know possibility is destabilizing and people are uncomfortable with that and so for most of human history and you know David um explains this more substantially with more substantiated uh evidence and stuff but like what I remember was like U so this idea like anti-mimetic idea something like that it's like the sense that a lot of intellectual and Creative Energy was
deployed to try and throttle change down so that people could have more stable environments there like there's some good to it but um you know once you see that you realize that like oh man now that now that you asked me about this I think about it more I realize this must have like that understanding like this cascaded through my my own entire like idea lce of all the other things that I care about which is
like you know so some of the questions people ask are like why do we not already live in a much better world right like in terms of like like why do we not have better education systems why do we not have better XYZ and it's usually that that you know there is a lot of resistance to change and like we have to really understand the truth of it in order to actually make a difference and I feel like I'm rambling
this this you know this everything everything around that is just so intoxicating to me it's it's so exciting it's like once you understand then you can you know you understand that people are uncomfortable with change that means if you want to change things you have to kind of demonstrate how the change is going to be um survivable and manageable right I know there andy grow quote where
he says something like uh only if you've been through The Crucible of change can you have any kind of like hope for the future cuz if you haven't then the future is scary and dis izing and you'll do everything you can to resist it and uh yeah and I'm also thinking about things like you know and we came up with um the car we had to call it the Horseless Carriage so that people who were familiar with horse drawn carriages
were like oh it's like this but that you know it's like so it's there there's a lot to get into about like how to think about change and creativity and even so even I think so um you know when I talk about friendly ambitious n like I I think David is excellent example especially like ambitious nerd and he's also really friendly like he doesn't he doesn't write so much about that in his
book itself like he's fixated on going deep into the nerd stuff ambitiously right and he's also really friendly but it's not a part of his book but um you know uh curiosity so I Define the nerd as someone who's driven by their curiosity and the more of your behavior is determined by your curiosity the bigger of a nerd you are it's very useful definition and a sufficiently advanced nerd is dangerous to people
it's perceived as dangerous on multiple Dimensions right like if you ask too many questions you figure out how to make bombs and TNT and split the atom and that's now you're a you're a state asset of like National Security weapon blah blah blah and also like TNT also makes fertilizer nuclear bombs also makes power and even if you set aside that knowledge is power Dimension even in like the social realm like a person
who observant and curious and like you can notice it's it's funny like and I I I noticed this even on Twitter itself like people will say things that are incredibly revealing about what their experiences must have been and so you can sometimes scroll through the timeline and see huh this person feels very strongly about this issue they must have had some past experience that if influenc their perception and then you
know so maybe they like arguing about something to do with gender right and then you're hm then you do a from their username search which can be done and you put uh from username divorce and then you find you see that oh their parents got divorced when they were young and it's it's like the information is all there but what do I do with it you know it's like it it would be weird and awkward and rude to like bring it up
in conversation when you can see that they wrote about it once but they were not expecting someone to bring it up in the next exchange and so like so again that's why I write friendly ambitious n because the friendly part is about being socially savy enough to know not to you know like bring up hey so how about your parents divorce like but like a a nerd who is sufficiently curious and seeks
out all the information that's available to them will arrive at an understanding that is a violation basically right and even in locally in Singapore like um I remember there was a minister who was giving a speech somewhere saying like where are all our creative uh Geniuses you know where are like our Ro dos and and it blighton and like JK rowlings or whatever and I was like well you know if
you want people to be creative they have to be asking questions and they have to be making mistakes and they like you have to have an environment where that's possible and it's it's like this very funny analogy I'm familiar with is like um oh it's when the the arsonist is also the firefighter like you set the building on fire and then come to put it out and it's like well you cause the very problem that you're trying to solve
and it's like I we have this in so many dimensions in Singapore I thought about this for hours like another quick one is like we introduced this thing decades ago I don't think it's it's now probably a different form but I used to call the like the singles development unit or something like trying to get people to date more and their idea was that oh they're very busy and something and they need like a a government initiative to
encourage people it didn't really work out well and like the thing is the the the idea is like they kept trying to introduce new things to solve the problem of like people being overly stressed when the actual solution would actually be closer to give people more freedom and space to do whatever they want and then they'll naturally be more free to do those things and uh it it all Rhymes somehow I
I haven't figured out how to say it in a way that's like oh all the several different things that I've just said they're all kind of the same thing like it's the same thing why people are not more creative why people are not more curious why people are not more flirty it's it's kind of connected right like FL flirtiness is a kind of creative curiosity about interpersonal relation ship right and yeah that can go on
forever but let me know what you think I I agree completely and and I'm just reminded of the idea that really we are emotional creatures we humans and and I think that the governing emotion is fear and when when you make decisions from a fearful place you start becoming a stronger adherent to the precautionary principle which David talks about a lot yeah and and if that is allowed to go too far you get to
stasis which is death in my opinion yeah and and movement is life and if if you're looking at Friendly ambitious nerds curiosity that's movement that's all movement and and so you're you're always trying to like your example of Singapore you know the ideal balance is very very very difficult to find right because the thing that I think is I'm I'm very optimistic about the future of humanity I am not at all ignorant of the
problems that we will face and and the the idea is that it pessimists sounds smart right it's pretty e and it's also easy it's very easy to look at something a proposal or whatever and just all over it right like this won't work this work this won't work this won't work it takes creativity and a lot of thought to en courage exactly you know great great artists are courageous right yeah and
the the way I look uh at the idea is that part of the you know the inter uh weaving of all of our all of humanity real really and the human Colossus is that we now can have have a greater Coalition and by that I mean we know each other now and we We Vibe now and the idea that I would have never met you in the previous world I I right and and so my idea is that we can now coales with the with the creative side
in a way that we really couldn't have done in the past which which I find remark able and encouraging I always yeah so in my second edition of fan which which I'm working on now I have I think even in my first one I I mentioned it somewhere but I I'm making a stronger point of it like as a kind of um you know so the idea is that we honor our predecessors by fulfilling their dreams like we do what they dreamt of but
couldn't accomplish one of my favorite stories is a there's a letter from Marshall mcluhan to Ezra pound in 1948 and he's it's it's so beautiful and sad he's like dreaming of coalescing right he's like saying you know we have a few friends here I have a few friends there uh who are smart thoughtful people I just want to bring a dozen great minds together you know it might have to be in
a university it might have to be I'm not sure precisely how but I'm always thinking about this I'm always thinking how do we get a dozen people together to basically imagine the future into existence and I read that and I want to cry because I'm like they didn't have the internet you know they didn't have Twitter they couldn't do what we can do so trivially right and so I I feel like those of us who feel like we are nerds
we owe it to our predecessors to achieve their dreams just just as like we're talking about parenting and so these are like spiritual parents right or creative parents like when we read the books and we you know you read something from montine or Emerson and you're like I I feel this this is my guy and you're like well Emerson and montine did not have CA right and so I I just feel like um and
and at the same time I see so many people uh on who's online particularly but everywhere really who feel like oh well there's nothing much to do anymore I don't really feel a sense of purpose I'm kind of bored I'm kind of depressed I'm like we can assemble you know the greatest Coalition of all time not even because we are superior people to our predecessors we just have the technology right we we have access to tools that
allow us to do what our predecessors could not so I'm yeah I'm very passionate about this yeah and and you've that feeds into your idea of possibility space right we now have much higher possibility space than anyone in human history talk about that all that yeah I I even so like if you read uh isaacson's uh biography of DaVinci he he lists out a DaVinci to-do list and it's like ask Mr X about how to draw um a
circumference of something ask someone else about how something else it's basically a list of things that we can Google in 15 minutes like and it took him I think month like a year of his life just to answer the questions that he had right like because he has to go and talk to this guy and that guy has to go and check the library somewhere else and it's just such an involved process whereas now like again I'm such I'm
still such a Twitter Fanboy because you can have a conversation with someone and then you can you can do the equivalent of hey let me get my friend who might be on the other side of the planet and see what he thinks about this and then those two people might have an change and they be like huh maybe we should start a company or maybe we should you know do something together and like you can just
the the rate of collision is so much higher that and I mean so it's interesting because for people who are like high agency have a strong sense of self understand culture understand media understand how to read and and not get like messed up by chaos uh for those people which I consider our people like we're going to flourish we're going to do really really well but at the same time I I do have this par concern like
uh and I I think this is like one of the dominant like modern anxieties of our time which is that oh the smartphone is driving us crazy because this again it's the same thing it's that possibility space is getting so heated up people don't know what to do with their lives they're like should I take this job but what if AI changes everything next year or what if you know this and what if that and
um so you asked to talk about possibilities yes it's still relevant right um I describe this as the problem of wretchedness wretched as like you know we used to say and we don't really use there are some words we don't use very much anymore we don't use virtue very much anymore we don't use wretchedness very much I'm bringing wretchedness back I feel like uh it's a better word than incel for example
because incel implies that the problem is that the guy can't have sex but it's not actually the problem but so wretchedness is the sense of uh and you know um Martin Luther the guy who did the Protestant Reformation 95 thesis he described himself as feeling wretched at some point he's like oh God has forsaken me I I'm a I'm such a despairing loser you know and and his mentor was like you know stop stop fixating on your sins
that's still kind of narcissistic like Focus your attention on so he was saying like the love of Christ but you can also say focus on what you want to see more of right focus on the good stuff and uh I I do think that like when dealing with insane possibility space it's basically magic and is this is another one of the essays I'm working on um called Universal cursed artifact right which is
that everybody so every smartphone is a kind of magic mirror a kind of crystal ball and you know in Snow White for example the wicked witch has a magic mirror and she asks a question that she can't handle the answer to that someone else is prettier than her and she basically goes insane and now everybody has a smartphone so everybody has access to information that they might not be ready to receive and so there's like
multiple parts to solving this problem right one is um some people want to put restrictions on the magic mirror itself which is I I understand the impulse I do feel like that ship has sailed somewhat it's like we have to you know so like in fiction we have all these uh oh if you want to join the wizard Association not the wizard Clan you've got to go for training before you get to touch the
crystal ball you have to steal yourself you have to be a person of virtue and not not give into your Temptations to ask for something that you shouldn't ask for like you know we have all these cautionary tales like Midas Touch and stuff like that and now it's like oh well every child has a crystal ball in their hands right what are we going to do and we we don't have you know there we have to educate our El we're really
building the plane in midair while we are falling through the sky but we probably can do it that's the crazy that's the insane exciting thing about being alive right um but yeah so I do think that the wretchedness problem is real the wretchedness spiral where you know you have some negative beliefs about yourself you go online you can find any evidence to confirm your negative beliefs about anything or
positive beliefs if you want right so you have that choice and you know so half of what I do so what I've done so far with like friendly ambitious n and so I think introspect is somewhere in between so friendly ambitious is a vision of how we can use possibility space to spiral positively into better and better outcomes introspect is kind of how to consider how you might have some negative spirals in you and like
identify them so that you don't get like dragged by them against your will U but I do want to do a bit more kind of um helping people I don't know if I can help the people who are like the worst like down bad like really really bad I think like those people need a certain kind of professional help that I may not be able to do much for but for like regular people who feel like they're
struggling with that stuff I think I can help and again it's it's interesting like I I have to reflect on how come I'm good at this like you know it's not like and it's it it's how meaning how come I'm good at like chaos surfing right like dealing with possibility space and coming out of it optimistic and cheerful and not you know like overwhelmed and I think part of it is like my childhood background being like a minority with a
weird name and like being so being Singaporean again is like being at this cultural crossroads between east and west but like I was saying elsewhere like a lot of single for I think don't develop Like This Global curiosity because of like so the word that David D used a lot is parochial which I love like it's it's a way of saying like oldfashioned and kind of sty and it's it's it's it's by using a slightly
different but you avoids a lot of connotations that that people would assume that you're saying like so it's it's almost it's a negative way to say something that we might Loosely associate with conservative but because it's not saying conservative people don't assume that it's like a political idea right it's just parochial this oldfashioned old timey noninvolved way of of seeing things right so yeah I do think Singapore has
like this remarkably lit onset parochialism which is like and I think that's fix especially because it's so recent like the country itself is like 5ish years old but it's like we've already in three generations become like very become very like you were saying right like um stasis is death and movement is life like you know I think it's a Paul Graham essay where he says something like some startup Founders are
very Nimble with ideas it's like they're moving a lot they're like B jumping around bouncing off things and some people in idea space they're like frail old people so they're afraid that if they go to if they they move around so gingerly because it's like if they go hard on an idea they might like fall and hurt themselves right and Singapore feels like to me growing up here right like I love this country but I also uh
James baldwi had a quote he saying something like I love America and as such I reserve the right to criticize her indefinitely and I feel the same way as a Singapore like I love my country and I feel the right to criticize and I I feel like yeah like in a very short amount of time we've experienced a lot of economic success but we've like like we're afraid of of what you we're afraid
to break it we're afraid to drop it and then it becomes stiff and it's the same it's kind of like a you know if a lot of artists they do a great first album and then they get a softt more slump because they don't know how to how do you do how do you do a second act right like where you do something fresh but also similar but Al it's just very difficult and uh yeah there's so much stuff going on I
I'm just realizing now that this is the first like intelligent conversation I've had in months CU I'm always talking to my baby and like oh there's all this stuff stewing in my head um yeah so to try and recap everything you asking about possibility space there's so much going on um we need to help people who are struggling with it manage it better uh find the people who are doing it well and encourage them to do it better still
with each other it's like there there's many kind of parts to it and there's like opport there's so much opportunity for people to like get involved and and like refresh life refresh the species refresh thinking like uh I still believe that a good blog post or a good essay can change the world I I still even a good video or a good movie or a good something that presents like a fresh way of thinking or a fresh way of seeing
things and it doesn't need to be like completely novel in a way that's never ever been done before but like just something sufficiently inspiring challenging provoking you know giving people something to kind of uh not revolve around but like uh you know I I I think one of my stranger beliefs is that like a lot of what people think are the problems with the present day are like problems with
language but just the words that we use and the way that we read or don't read and and like our it's it's again this goes back to possibility space again it's like we are constrained by our lack of imagination and our imagination is constrained by like our language and if we're only using the same few words then we only think the same few thoughts and then like we don't see different
possibilities yeah I'm just rambling you're not rambling uh I couldn't agree more on the problem of language labels are convenient but they are also confining and and what what happens with people in my opinion is when you when they become label thinkers they they literally stop thinking right I I wrote A multi- Part thread called The Thinker and the pro for Twitter and and basically the The Thinker can think
anything it wants literally The Thinker would be translating in our vernacular The Thinker is the uh idea space right so you you can you can think uh you know three impossible things before breakfast as leis Carol said in Allison Wonderland but often what happens is as we as after we thought yeah this is right we KCK it over to the prover and and the prover has one job and that job is to make you
right to make your idea correct and so what happens is I think that we sometimes get caught up in the Prov space right but then I would bring in to paraphrase Victor Hugo no Army can stop an idea which time has come and and and so the that is the tension in my opinion the tension is there's a lot of people there are many many people who belong in this idea space right and haven't gotten there yet but I think that the ability
your idea that a Blog can change the world I agree and the more access they have I love your idea about the smartphone right being the magic mirror um Can can bad things happen yeah absolutely if you don't acknowledge that then you're just Pang glossy and in your outlook and you know that's that's not going to really carry you through but the idea of the inquisitive mirror go ahead jump in I just want say every
every tool is a weapon like in the creative hands right so if you have a whatever anything that can make anything that can accomplish things right like if you can if you can build something really fast you can build a thing that drops on people and kill like you know if if it if you want to make something that has effects there's always some creative way you can weaponize it right
and and the inverse is also I think true like there's any kind of weapon you can probably find some way to use it for good or just use like if you strip it down the first principles right what does this what does this tool do right every Everything is a kind of hammer everything is a kind of so on and so forth uh you know you you mentioned um Lis Carol and yeah I was just I was I was just thinking when you said that
like who is today's Lewis Caroll you know like Alis in Wonderland as a as a idea as a motive is so strong like it's still remixed into the Matrix you know it's remixed into so much media everywhere I you know maybe I so I think I've had revisit Louis Carol like on in my to-do list somewhere buried under some pile of things but yeah you know how I do wonder how do people who have managed to open everyone's eyes around
them to possibility or to like considering an alternate way of seeing things or doing things uh I was just listen this is completely random but I was just listening to an interview with John Cena on Kelly Clarkson Show John Cena being the wrestler Kelly claron singer and she was saying to him you are such a lovely person so much Integrity so much everything like all the qualities that we would want in a
political leader would you ever go into politics and I love so much that I have so much resonance in what John Cena said John Cena was like I'm I'm not going to go into politics and he said um I do what I can from so I'm completely paraphrasing his thing into my words because I say similar things just like I do what I can from where I'm at but what he said was if we can influence enough people to care about things
appropriately and get involved appropriately or I guess more succinctly if you can Elevate the public enough you don't necessarily need need like um superum political leaders to accomplish things for the people cuz the people basically accomplish it themselves which you know again like we're skipping a bunch of steps here and there but like it makes sense to me right like we roughly get you know the leaders that we
quote unquote deserve or it's like it's a strange Loop right the people and the politicians or whatever the the the structure of power is in some ecosystem and we now have this very interesting opportunity which is like in the last 50 like even last couple of decades right since since we got the magic mirror right since since we got the magic mirror we now can directly engage with people and mass this is not a new you
know like it used to be that and I love this this thing that um who pointed this out Al land Bon he pointed out that in his book the news he pointed out that uh if you were to overthrow a government right so this happens in a lot of like third world countries and stuff like oh in anywhere where they you you you the moment you've successfully done a coup what's the first thing you do the first thing you do is you drive to the News
headquarters and then you do a broadcast and say announcement breaking news there's new people in charge this is a new government and you have to do that because you need to get that information into everybody's minds and it used to be that whoever control the flow of information control everything right I'm skipping some steps but like oversimplifying slightly but it it the the media is the nervous system of the
the species right and this is why I really I really want to reread Marshall mcclan I have the book somewhere here but like he he really got into like the depth of things and I I feel like he's he is he remains underappreciated to this day Marshall mccluhan like he really foresaw how people's relationship with the media um intermediates everything like how we conceive of like you know like the history of
radio and TV enabled states to exist in a way that they couldn't exist prior because it was not possible to coordinate people at that scale and so one of my core thesis is like so real social media has never been tried and the analogy I don't I feel like I might have brought this up in our last podcast but I'll say it again just in case um you know the electric guitar was invented in like 1940 something like so
there were guitars before that and then people put pickups on guitars around the 1940s but I I argue that really the electric guitar was born came into fruition with Jimmy Hendricks and that was like 1970 something right Woodstock 69 right like almost 30 years from so like theoretically hypothetically the possibility existed that if you could drop Jimmy Hendrick in 1940 something
you could have had that moment then maybe but the limiting factor for the electric guitar to happen was that you needed someone like Hendrix to show up who did not conceive of the electric guitar as oh it's like an acoustic guitar but louder you needed someone who saw it from first principles to be like I can do anything I want with this I don't have to treat it like a guitar I can treat it like a screaming wailing
banshi and that took roughly 30 years from the start of it the lifetime of Jimmy Hendrick and I feel that social media today has been around for 15 plus years 20 20 years depending on how you see it and smartphones have been around depending on how you see it like 15 issu years and people approach it with their old thinking so just as like the Horseless Carriage thing we still think of social media as oh it's like
broadcast media but with your phones and it's like no it's it's a completely different way of coordinating a way of different way of imagining things like the just as the radio changed the concept of the nation state radio and TV and books like social media is changing the way people can conceive of themselves in tribes and in fandoms and you know have you been to a Taylor Swift concert yet it's the most in I just went
like last week with my wife it's our first date night it's it's amazing she sells out like six a stadium six times is like 300,000 people you know you know in a week like the Taylor Swift religion fandom is UNC it's like incredibly powerful and it's like so swifties understand how big that is but like mainstream understanding has not caught up to that yet like the amount of power that uh celebrity influencer can have
it's like they're basically they have the capacity to be like Nation they are the leaders of their own nations in a sense and when people say things like do you want to why don't you run for politics it's like you're still thinking in the old way of organizing human behavior right why do you need to be in political office to have power and influence so even even during the time of like Lincoln I remember Emerson was
quoting saying something like um Emerson said you know for for the to give the impression of being you know having the highest honors the a man has to debase some of his best qualities to like sit uh with be sit at the throne while the people with the real power are like behind the throne you know pulling strings or whatever I mean it sounds a little bit consp conspiratorial but like
it makes sense like you have to make all these compromises because you're so visible and you have all these challenges whereas like you know if you think really from first principles about like what are the outcomes you want and like do we really need to go through the channels that of the past like I familiar with the with the joke about um the pot roast like Grandma's pot roast so it's it's like yeah like why do we
why do we cut off the ends oh because grandma said we do why do we cut so you ask her you ask her oh it's because the part was too small so yeah we we all like that all the time and all of human social reality is pot roast that's cut with the with the ends cut off and like how do we begin to help people see that we can not do that right and I I've seen so like on social media for example the
thing I'm talking about with uh so the the the way that we evaluate broadcast media success was scale and scope like the most person the most followers is the winner that's not at all true today or it doesn't have to be true in according to the games you want to play but people are so used to old ways of thinking that even some of my smartest friends they feel like oh shouldn't I want to grow my following raw numbers
shouldn't I do what gets you more views and it's like maybe but like what is the outcome you actually want like people forget to think that because they're just inherited this old ways of thinking so yeah it's it's like it's exciting that alternative ways are possible and I guess we need more stories and more examples of like what can happen and I'm seeing it like you know like the people
like a bunch of our Twitter mutuals like people are organizing events and they're organizing meetups and they're like moving together around the same neighborhoods and there all this very interesting activity that's starting to happen so I'm very excited about that I tell you man you you just wrote three books right there there is there is so there is so much to unpack and again we are incredibly sympatico on these ideas
because I've been reading rereading the book power vers Sports he chooses I I wish he wouldn't have used the the term power because again because of yeah Hawkins because of the the label think ears power has a very different uh meaning than it does in Hawkins sense and I do believe that we are at a place where we are moving from historically the way Society was organized was through force was through political machination
was through who controls the nervous system of society which is Media right and and everything was forced which links us back to Lau right what is the greatest leader the greatest leader is one who the people say we did it ourselves and then he goes down the line saying who like who's the worst leader who rules by fear intimidation Etc and and moving from that sort of scarcity mindset Force to the abundance mindset
of power but he's using hawkins's using power in the way that I think you and I understand it which is influence not not not compelling you I'm not GNA say Visa you must do this I'm going to try to influence you to think hey I might want to like look into that that might be interesting and I just finished an author I really like Howard Bloom who wrote uh the Lucifer principle and the god problem and I I just
finished a book about his time as a uh promoter of of Music which I thought was really interesting but he's got this great example in it where he says if you you can put a lot of salt into a beaker and if you boil that Beaker and then let it cool the salt becomes invisible to the eye and and he says however if you drop a single grain of salt into it what you see is all of the salt comes together
because of that the introduction of that one grain of salt and he uses that as the metaphor for the Taylor Swifts of the world he says great artists great artists are that single drop and what it allows is many people who thought thought they were weird or thought that no one else thinks this way they you drop that in like a Taylor Swift and suddenly you see that no no no there is a huge mass of people that feel the same
way and and and I think these tools that we have now for the first time allow us to do this right to drop that single grain of salt into the beaker because in the past like everything as you pointed out was was devoted towards numbers right who wins well I Love Lucy had 69 million viewers right and so we had a monoculture and that was really the only way you created a counterculture now
like everything can be its own culture and its own area but that doesn't mean they can't intersect at very interesting at very interesting points that's very you just helped me cl clarify something that I I I was stewing on but I didn't quite know what to make of it okay so you know I I think a lot of people um who admired past countercultures want to participate in something that feels like a
counterculture in N like you know in some sense like trying to do something better trying to make something great whatever but um nothing feels quote unquote countercultural anymore because there is no monoculture right so the interesting thing there means I'm I'm like connecting the dots in real time it means that if you want to create some kind of new culture you have you know so the cool thing is you have the
freedom to do it but I guess the difficult thing is you don't really have uh convenient you know Monarch to rail against right so you have which means which which means that you have to say what you're for rather than what you're against which is which is you know like the first line on my Twitter bio is focus on what you want to see more of and so I'm always preaching that I guess but um it's interesting to connect the
dots about I hadn't thought to think of how does this relate back to how people used to think about monocultures and counter cultur so thanks for that I think this I think that's going to be there might be an essay in that somewhere like helping people see why the language of counterculture is no longer quite relevant or like it'ses if it's not working that's probably why like there's something there it's
interesting I also think you know you mentioned who is our Lewis car today well I I I wrote several term papers about him and Allison Wonderland in College Basic and and and and basically um we also have to remember that he was a famed logician uh Charles Dodson right and if you if you if you look at Allison Wonderland through the lens of uh you know what the tortoise said to aill um it which is what he wrote as Dodson
basically it's he was talking about a gri is the tremma right that grippa was an ancient uh Greek philosopher who basically pointed out the fact that you can never get down to ultimate truth through logic and and that's what what the toris said to Achilles is also about right it's basically if you look at all of the logical axioms right and and you go okay if a is true or if B is true
then a is true anyway what Carol wrote in a very brief thing that is really like mindbending is that if you get down to the final Axiom right the the ground state Axiom what you're gonna find is there is no evidence a human basically asserted this is true and then we built the rest of it on top of that human assertion and when you think about that the idea that the it opens possibility space
enormously right because essentially it it it acknowledges we are all living in reality tunnels we're not living in reality right corre we are living in our version and my version and your version might be really similar in fact I have kind of a pet theory that when you really Vibe with somebody what you're really doing is you're your reality tunnels really kind of align and when they align resonance that you your
res the resonance goes off the charts right and and so that doesn't mean that you can't interact with people with very different reality tunnels but where you got to start is you got to understand that the map is not the territory you you and and that's one of our fundamental problems in my opinion people like most of my opinions are probably wrong and if if if I'm open to being willing to say that then then you
get to be a lot more playful you get to look at a lot more ideas you because right you you you don't it's like you another thing you always see on Twitter this is a he'll all die on and and I always I always joke I'm I'm of the view of General patent which is I want to let the other poor dumb bastard die on his Hill yeah and and and so I think that one of the things you're uniquely good at is creating that space where reality
tunnels kind of collide and and I don't mean Collide in a bad way I mean it in a oh I never thought about that what do you think that's a very that's a very graci it's an excellent compliment because is very kind and it's also it's true I think it's true and I also think I hadn't quite thought to frame it for myself that way and I think it's a useful description I think I I can use that like I can you know like so I could
write something about reality tunnel Collision or overlap or framing or something and that that it that again like yeah this I I do periodically wake up with like the mystery of how come I seem to be good at what I do and most people don't right and it's like yeah I spent a bunch of time I I I allocated my resources a bit weirdly but it seemed obvious to me right this is how we should do things um
yeah like that's that's so that's very interesting so like you know so okay let's Starting Over Again everybody has different reality tunnels um when we have good collisions amazing things can happen when you have bad collisions there's conflict and like war and everything and so the question becomes how do you create like sandbox environments or contexts in which people can in good faith Collide their reality
tunnels and potentially see things that they couldn't see by themselves or like without each other's help and it's funny that reminds me like sometimes people ask me like what is my end goal with connecting and this goes back to mlan as well right like uh and asra pound right like what is the point of bringing together all these wonderful people like what do you want them to do and I'm like
I don't know if I knew I I would just say what I want but I want the collective to imagine what I cannot imagine and that comes from the reality tunnels colliding right so I only have my reality tunnel and you have yours they're similar they're slightly different we bang in some way some some Sparks that can be interesting but like what if you have a dozen of us and each person kind of focuses on a different
thing and you have like you have like a prism of some kind like what what can you make right and and what will you see that no one else is seeing and sometimes you know you have you have a dozen people you you get everyone together for a discussion on topic X and then you discuss topic X for an hour it seems all right and then you all go for drinks afterwards and someone makes a joke and that joke somehow just sets everyone off
and you're like there's something incredible there that somehow is again it's beyond the scope of what was discussed prior but because everyone has Attunement in some way there's just something there and then yeah I just watched this video of um so one of my favorite comedians these days is Taylor Tomlinson and she's now hosting this thing called after midnight which is like a daily recap of Internet culture
something like that and this is I'm it's not really an important detail but like uh so there's a video of like an ostrich race and all the comedians on the panel are making are like trying to make jokes about the the ostrich race like a guy on ostrich racing and one guy spots that in the background of the ostrich race there's a kid at his dad watching and he puts on a voice pretending to be the kid
and like Dad why why doesn't Mommy here with us anymore like whatever and like it's not I mean and tayor just loses her she's like laughing she she almost can't continue hosting the show and it's even just witnessing that I found it so enlivening and I I enjoy it deeply watching that this tiny segment of you know so there there's a comedy show of some kind there and uh it's like a game
show format but like it has so while it's a game show format they're not fixated on sticking to the format it's like if anything interesting happens it's impro rules right like anything interesting happens you're obliged to go with the interestingness and so this this comedian comes up with this on the-light joke of an unrelated thing and it just sets off the host that she is laughing uncontrollably and I feel like it's
related it's like there was no way at the start of the show for any of them to have planned it out and if they had planned it out it would not have evoked that response and in in themselves in the audience it's like the unexpected like how do you how do we design for unexpectedness I think is or like how how do we yeah like whatever this there's a good chance it seems to me it seems likelier than not that the grand
Solutions of our time will be things that we cannot currently see or imagine or even describe which is crazy like that's crazy how do we do that right so we're going to have to collide reality tunnels and you know there's something like between what you see and what I see there maybe something neither of us sees from the friction in between like it's like I think who said um the best thing for a scientist to say is not
everything's going according to plan but H that's strange you know like what's exactly right so yeah the uh uh the idea that that it's one of the reasons why I'm such a strong supporter of Open Source uh software and in the current AI debates because Co cognitive diversity is basically what you're just talking about right so if like and and I'm always using the same quote but it really fits beautifully which is no
matter how brilliant somebody is no matter how intuitively insightful no matter how clever you can never ask them to make a list of things that would never occur to them and the idea is by putting together different types of Minds that's where the magic happens and you also have to be willing to be open to the idea that we're going in we don't know we can't that's why committees ruin
everything right they because not not only are they not diverse for the most part of in at least cognitively but but they go in like we're going to accomplish X Y and Z and and and they they really turn it into a bollock when you when you create I love the idea of creating an environment a Sandbox in which you can invite diverse clever creative curious people that's where magic I think has the opportunity to
really happen that's almost a a perfect description of like what Miles Davis accomplished in jazz like over career right he just brought in Young Musicians from random environments and like just put them together they would say hey miles shouldn't we rehearse and he's like no I PID you to rehearse on stage in front of the crowd and make your mistakes there and fix them on the spot I don't want you to play stuff that you
prepared I want you to be at the edge of your comfort and ability and like push the limits on stage and then they're like oh the crowd's not going to like that then he said um I'll I'll handle the crowd you just play and I'm like there's so much there and you know he he was an exceptional case study and like until he died he was constantly at The Cutting Edge of what he was doing like
he never calcified he never got into the dep of stasis right and it's it's the strange thing to me is that he is not more and not just like so M Davis is one example but there's like a dozen examples I could get into of like people who accomplish remarkable things and then they seem to be like under theorized and I I guess it's because people assume that is esoteric genius like there's something about them that's
like we should just worship that oh there's something in their childhood there's something that whatever and like I'm like no what what what are the chops like what what what do they do like can we learn from what they do right like I'm always on that I was going to say something else as well um what were we saying before the sandbox thing we were talking about Cog cognitive diversity and how it can
help with Sparks of new ideas can you oh uh can you make a list of things that would never occur to you I actually have an interesting like uh so that's like the the grand version of that which is like an idea that you've never thought of but I can actually point to you like a very um mundane version of this which which is um so I I've written a book right and and when I share it with people uh when people read it they quote
from it and the interesting to me interesting thing to me is when readers emphasize quotes that I did not think were quot worthy in a in a particular sense so it's like my readers emphasize parts of my books that I didn't think to emphasize so like I have a paragraph somewhere about like so the paragraph starts with like doing 100 things and like how to something something about helping people and then like almost a
throwaway sentence towards the end and I'm like and the worst way of the worst way to help someone or the worst way to serve someone is to try to fix them like as though you know better than them and you're going to tell them what to do and I just meant that as a throwaway sentence at the end of the thing but someone quoted it with like so he screenshotted the whole paragraph and then he just put the text the worst way
to serve someone I was like hauh that's a that's an excellent sentence I wrot that who I did but like I didn't think that was an important sentence it was just a throwaway thing right so that's a very like and and it's it's a striking example to me because um I can honestly say that I can't take credit for that like I was just I was just talking you know I just writing out stuff and if
that reader hadn't spotted that quote and quoted it I would not have thought to emphasize that and it's objectively once I see someone emphasize it I'm like oh that's a great sentence right and a productive scene a productive like a group of friend friends who are you know riffing and jamming and quoting each other I always say on Twitter like people should quote one another because should quote your friends a lot because
your friends don't have the freedom to no I mean so okay the interesting thing about quotes is that it's understood that a quot is not necessarily the entirety of what someone says so I could say uh you know I could I could quote you and I could do a TW that's like quote um why committies rote everything unquote D Jim oan SE right and like you wouldn't have to defend that sentence with an essay because it's
understood that I'm quoting something from you and like and you get what I'm saying it's like when each person is speaking for themselves there's this expectation that they're supposed to like defend everything they say with like a dissertation but when people are quoting each other there is a lot it's kind of an annoying it's a quirk of like how social reality works I think that people are more charitable with heay and
like second order like second but you know you know what it is it's a it's it's the same logic of frame stories you know the narrative device where instead of so like even like a so many ancient folkl does this which is like the story of Sinbad the Sailor begins with oh this guy met this other guy and at uh like by the beach or by somewhere then he says have you heard the story of sbad the
Sailor well I met the this guy one day and so anything good in the story is because the story is good anything bad in the story well the Storyteller is probably crap so it's not it's not the author's fault it's the that imperfect storyteller's fault and which is such a great device right like Shar and the th1 Arabian Knights it's the same same idea and you can put in all these um and this is also connect so it's like I I have
like a dozen essays I'm basically telling you about all of them that I'm trying to work on and they're all connected this is also connected to language and it's also connected the possibility space where when people feel like they have to be the sole custodian of their idea and present it as if it's a finished polished product that can't be that has to be perfect they just won't do it or they'll procrastinate
forever or they'll like have one idea in a dozen years or something but if you give people the freedom to present imperfect unfinished kind of interesting I don't know where this is going but maybe it's something you know then they can be much more creative and um you know it it's like a clever way to avoid the retaliation against um creativity where it's like oh you know that's not a good idea well yeah here is an
unfinished you know I heard this thing from that guy like you have a pro I heard this at the market today and someone's like well that person at the Market's an idiot well maybe you know it's but I don't know like it's not me right and so yeah giving people the the freedom to be somewhat detached from their ideas and not not identify with them so strongly so that if it's wrong it's fine I I think that's going to be
an important part of like cultivating a healthy scene of reality tunnel Collision something like that I'm I'm I'm workshopping it I'm going to it's it's going to be good when you I think you know you can tell right there's something that complely completely agree and one of the things that worked really well for me that I got from Jed McKenna and really internalized was I just look
at myself as the co-creator of everything I think up and and and when you think about yourself as the co-creator internally that reframes you in such a powerful way of like you were just uh giving the examples of Sinbad and the sharzad and the uh night of all the stories it it allows you to also tame your own ego right yes when when when when you think listen I'm a co-creator here it it it takes away that
mind mind mind this is mine and you can't touch it or no Visa this is my idea and I'm gonna hang on to it I'm gonna defend it I'm G to write essays about it and it tames the ego to such a degree that it allows you to like not only welcome that but encourage that it's like yeah hey B what do you think about it right yeah so so in fact like so right now if anyone has been listening to this so far and they've
heard some of the stuff that we've been talking about and they think huh I would totally like to write an essay about that but oh I can't because it's Visa's idea I said please please take it off my plate like please write your version of whatever you think I've just said and I will be delighted to share it with my people my audience whatever like like again like we all we are all collectively co-creating this idea space
possibility space together and like I I don't need to be Visa is the author of this idea right like I just want to see these ideas be remixed and you know I just want more possibility space um you know more bubbling in in the in the primordial soup of of the time that we're in right now and so if anybody wants to write anything about anything in in this domain like I'm I would be thrilled to read it right and
yeah yeah same with me uh and and on the idea of you know uh colliding ideas different Traditions Etc like that's what America used to be in physical space right yes it's it's not surprising that jazz is an American creation right yeah had had to be and and and and it's not surprising that hip hop is mostly an American creation right correct because because we had uh all all of these people everyone in America is from
somewhere else ultimately right and and so it's another reason why I'm I'm like so pounding the table about us having sensible uh immigration policies like yeah come on it's it's this combination of and what they used to an old term that I'd never hear anymore America was a Melting Pot right yeah where where where literally if you like Chase down some ideas that were you well pragmatism
is another great example right if you chase down Emon you chase down thoro you chase down Walt Whitman Etc and you try to isolate right well we did dis idea have its Origins right like everywhere because we put we put all of the high and that's the other part what was typical about the early people who came to America and even people coming here no high agency yeah and the willingness to abandon all that is familiar and
comfortable and all of that from the country of origin and let out to come here right and and and we can do this in idea space now in my opinion yeah you just reminded me there's this great story of uh the artist YW kusama so she's like Japanese or but she's she's 100% American in in the moment you know that because when she decided to like she has this great her her origin story is like she knew that
she couldn't do what she wanted to do in Japan at the time that she was young like a completely different world and like she burned all of her artworks right before getting on the boat to the US and you just read that story and like that is so American like like just that that willingness to be like I always tell my friends like uh like there's that Spirit of you I can do it you know I'll figure it out I I'll get it
done I'm just going to just going to do it same for like Arnold shga there's a photo of when Arnold became a citizen he's holding the flag and but even then is you know he was he was like in this rural part of Austria and he was like I got a I want to be a bodybuilder and the only way I can do that is to go to the US and like there just there's something about that Spirit which you know some people say
has like dimmed a little bit or something but like it's clearly still there from it's I think it can be more obvious from the outside cuz from the outside you can see you know sometimes sometimes in Asia for example when people try to do irreverent Maverick people say this isn't America you can't just do that and it's like and then the people think of well then if I want to do I got to go to the
America right and like maybe when they get there they're like oh maybe the market the the pr around this country is not you know the the country might not perfectly live up to its ideals but it at least it has them right because elsewhere those ideals don't even really exist they're like H you know what can you do you can't do anything and the US is like at least you say that you can do stuff and sometimes you do it and it's
like you know great let's let's you know more of that please and and and I think that that's the other wonder of the magic mirrors right yeah the we it's really easy to CH change your digital zip code it's really hard to change your physical zip code that's true and and and now and also the other thing as I was listening to you like that sprang into my mind is a lot of people don't understand how new all
this is that's true yeah like like if you read bill Bryson's story of America One Summer I think 1921 you realize holy the first time that the guy announcing lindberg's landing on radio that was the first human to speak to more than a million humans simult anly and that my father was alive you know what I mean and and and then when you look at like just the how much the world has changed since I was
born in 1960 like in 1971 a woman in America could not have a credit card without her husband's permission how up is that and so rather to think oh that's really up I always look at it the other way around look at how far we have come in such a short period now does that mean that I think that we that like there isn't still more to do there's always more to do there's always more to do if you basically have great
ideas and great Innovations and great progress you're creating a better set of problems but you're creating problems so so so so so this idea that things are going to be that's why Utopia there is no such place as utopia in the material or in this reality tunnel in which we find ourselves and and that's why again quoting one of my previous guess uh Perfection is a 100% tax and that's good right and and so the
idea that the you know and this is said a million different ways the the perfect is the enemy of the good right yeah and and but what that's getting across is that frame of ref is always going to fail you and the the reason why the why I'm so in favor of everything that's going on right now is back to your idea of possibility space possibility space is bigger than it's ever been in human history in my opinion
correct easily Yeah by a lot by by a ridiculous amount it's not like twice byic oh no by a ridiculous ridiculous amount and so the the like I I I am just so chuffed man about the world and where we find ourselves and right I I I I I it sometimes uh uh bums me out when I just see the the constant refrain of pessimism and oh we could you know and and and that's why I I love people like you because you open minds to
possibilities P pessimism is really funny to me actually like so again like you know so the general refrain of pessimism is that things don't work but like look back 10 years in your own life 10 years ago gay marriage was illegal in the US and it did not 10 years ago you know like and like in 2014 pessimist would say oh it's never going to Happ I I considered myself an optimist in 2014 if you ask me in 2014 will the US
legalize same sex next year I would say maybe another 10 years and I'm like oh what the do I know about like I have I have allowed the pessimist because I'm trying to be a like a sensible reasonable person so I'm like change is possible but a lot of pessimist seem to think it's not possible so somewhere in between maybe things will take 20 years it took another year and it's done and I think
one of the right Brothers he said two years before they made flight he himself said we're not going to make flight for 50 years and then two years later they did it and then he's like I have since distrust distrusted myself as a prophet of what is possible right because it's like so don't let your your limited imagination and Concepts like prevent you from accomplishing what you cannot imagine right because our
imaginations are so limited it's like it's the thing you were saying about um you can't make a list of things that would never occur to you right like it so it never occurred to me that I could get David Dutch on my podcast or my YouTube channel like I not conceive it at all so all how that happened was I was open to possibility and it came along and I was prepared enough to be like oh yeah sure I can show up and I
can talk and I can make it work and like yeah so I got more to say about pessimism it's like um you know so one I have a blog post somewhere titled like status quo soldiers which is there are a lot of people who are very you know they I get it they're anxious about change and they're worried about things like I I I get the the emotional quality of why people are status quo soldiers but like
if there's one thing that has never lasted it's the status quo because it's always changing like and so like what you're investing all of this time and effort and energy into trying to preserve something that's already gone it's like like it you know it's like um while it's really while you're busy telling people what can't be done other people are already doing it so it's it's just and especially people
who try to persuade other people of pessimism like so like I I've joked before that um you know if you're truly despairing if you truly think that all is hopeless you wouldn't do anything and you wouldn't say anything you'll just be kind of desponded but to decide to go around telling other people what can or cannot be done there's an optimism in that you believe that what you you believe that what you say has impact you
believe that you can change people's minds you believe that communication is a worthwhile thing to do so there's some part of you that's optimistic about the utility of pessimism or you wouldn't do it you wouldn't say stuff to people and and that again goes back to the thing about most human creativity was expended suppressing creativity and it's like yeah so like we we have magical powers
and we use it to create the illusion that nothing is magical everything is just boring in life nothing ever changes and like everything will change dramatically and people say nothing ever changes right right after it happens and it's just uh it's it's funny like we have to see the humor in it I think in order to like have a good time messing around and screwing around like there's a comedy to the like there's a futility
to it there's a paradox to it and um I I I wonder if we can try and recruit some of the you know like uh I think an idea I got a bit of mileage out of in the realm of like critics and naysayers is that they are part of the theater production like they provide the so just as like the counterculture resists against the monoculture like when somebody's trying to get something done like the naysayers going n like they
they're providing like background music you know like providing the orchestration to The Cinematic score to your accomplishment like so um that's one way of looking at it but yeah you know um pessimism is just it's uh it's it's so it's I I don't want to say it's misplaced like again I get I get the emotional um veence to it like it's there's grief there's grief in it there's heartbreak in it there's uh fear
right one of the strongest oldest emotions but um it's it's you know I I think it's again you're saying stasis is a kind of death right so pessimism is a kind of death it's a kind of let's not change things let's not try new things let's just hold what we have and die right keep like we don't want to lose more but everything's changing so we have to it's really um I I get that it's difficult for some people but like
probably for most people right and I I hope that we can do better to kind of initiate more people into The Crucible of change so that they can experience some change in some domains and be like oh it feels it actually feels good to change some things and improve in some dimensions and see that I can still be me and I can still have meaning in my life and all those things while chaos is
happening around me because I know my values I know my priorities I know my friends and and all those things and then I think when when those things happen like I I expect we will see no I mean no I I it tend to you know encourage more people to no as I'm saying this I'm like the phrasing is always a bit off like I was going to I was going to say I want to encourage more people to be optimistic but it's not like I want to
change like optimism just it just works it just it's just it we we look around you wherever you are in civilized life look around you and you see the love projects of optimists I have this bottle of ISO profile alcohol disinfectant spray it's the most boring thing in some D who who made this like who made the nozzle right who made this liquid that can kill viruses it's it's it took probably
hundreds of you know who made the system that delivered this to my house like it's just it's magic it's made of of like everywhere around us is just Optimist who made a computer mouse it's ah man it's it's we we live it's like we walking on just this this uh ah really really it's like imagine we are in a field of leaves like like a in a fall I'm thinking Central Park like leaves everywhere and then you're
stepping on them and every leaf that you step on is just pure magic and then you're like you know there there's there's no leaves around here you know leaves are real something like that I'm not doing it justice but there's something to Workshop there of like how it's like we're walking on air pretending that magic isn't real right which is like every everything that we do in our daily life is so magical and
we don't see it it's Bonkers and and uh I I love that metaphor because that's another exercise I do a lot I and and it's exercise of look at something like you're seeing it for the first time and then your mind will be literally blown throughout the day it's like holy I I I can I can uh all of the things that I can do in this little device I'm holding up an iPhone here for people are just listening and and like
The Wonder of that right and and we it's funny because we immediately not immediately but we do adopt and then we forget how as you point out how magical so much of the modern world actually is right yeah and and it's so easy to you know bad off but you know what I agree with the point you were making a moment ago those voices are actually necessary right yeah because because like literally they
might point out something really interesting that we optimists hadn't thought about right it's like huh that's an interesting that's an interesting idea to Workshop they're probably right like like thinking about the so it's not like I am I am you know uh panglossian and we live in the best of all perfect worlds right yeah but we are striving to move always right if we did live in the best possible world I think we' be both
we all chill out more like we just just kind this very dionan kind of drink wine you know just relax everything's great everything's done but like no the reason we're so hyped is that possibility is everywhere but we have to manifest it and we have to make it work and it cannot work it can it can go wrong right so we got to do stuff totally right I gave uh a salon for an aat uh at inter intellect and in fact I
opened with the right brothers and I'm like what I'm interested in is so their their flight lasted a few seconds they only went a 100 odd feet but they got off the ground and and so I always put myself in like what if I was there that day right what if I was watching this because apparently a lot of people were like eh no big deal took a long time for the newspapers to cover it you can look this up there's a YouTube
recording no so there there there's a video on YouTube and this itself is magical right there was someone who was there who was interviewed about 60 70 years ago when he so he was a young man then he's an old man in the interview from about 60 70 years ago is and that video is on YouTube and you can go look look it up like guy who was at the right I can try find for you and said it to
you and and and he was saying that uh like even being present like he didn't quite believe it I think like it didn't seem real like is it a trick is it a something and like like he's very proud to have witnessed that bit of history and again like we get to hear this firsthand testimony like on our phones or on what like oh my God magic right and and the way the the way that I was using the metaphor for
the salon was basically you know of the two or two dominant types of people there I I I'm interested in the one who was like I just witnessed a miracle and my possibility space just opened up ridiculously right because like all of the old myths were about you know don't fly too close to the Sun you know all all of as you say we use our creativity to suppress creativity in others and and that leads to the
precautionary principle and everything else well I'm I'm looking at my clock here and you've already warned me that you only had a certain amount of time we gotta we got yeah because we we gota Act plan our our second one because there's just so many ideas that we just left on the table here like like like like the idea though that I I wanted to also follow up on with you because you're particularly good at it is the the I
have another guy I love uh who's been a guest on the show a couple of times and and he the idea of possibility space he changes his name's George Mack and what he does so so he changes it to the Lux surface right oh yeah expanded Lu and and they're basically the same thing right like the if you're looking at possibility space that's really a way to get lucky more right and the way you get
lucky more is open your aperture right you can't like yes do do sometimes if we're focusing on something very specific specific and very technical and everything else then of course then you want to limit your your focus on that particular thing but in general in general as you're developing thoughts having an open aperture you're G to see more one of my favorite stories is that this is how stainless steel was
invented so there was a guy in doing like World War I in Britain his job was to come up with just experiment with gun barrels to try and make better gun barrels and so he try different Alloys and stuff and he accidentally you know semi like tangentially allo steel with chromium and it's like oh why is this so shiny and he could have gone that's not relevant to my job but he was like this that's interesting you know and
stainless still and like yeah so people need to have that H you know the interesting thing for a scientist is to say that's interesting that's strange H what's going on here right like the of famously penicillin right like all this so much things is just noticing yeah never be so attached to the thing that you're doing that you completely whiff when something like 10 times a thousand like so saying a thousand sounds
dramatic but it's happened before where you're trying to achieve a you know a nice pleasant outcome and you accidentally might stumble onto something a thousand times more powerful and then you got to be kind of chill about it and be like oh you know just another day at the office I just you know um I always think about how when I describe what Alexander Fleming did I say he punched pestilence in the dick
For All Mankind we used to we used to have the four The Four Horsemen of like plague pestilence uh poverty I can't remember the spe like one of it was pestilence and he did it like and when he presented his findings to to like his esteemed colleagues and asked them if they had any questions they're like no I looks good I guess like they did not have in their model of what was possible in science in medicine that oh we could
just remove infections entirely like so they they did not it just seems so like like what you're saying about like I IUS and flight and like it's just it just didn't seem possible to like completely do that and so when presented with it they're like doesn't look like anything to me like see it seems good I guess and it takes years for people to see the applications and then like you know when
they trying to fund um the like commercial application for like antibiotics like it was a to fundraise for ending illness of a Kind a certain kind for for mankind and again that like that's why we don't oh we live in the best world that's great like no like somewhere around us someone has just solved an incredible problem and no one around them is seeing it and like I'm like oh my God we have to we have to
teach everyone to pay attention so that they can notice when their neighbor solves a huge problem and like doesn't realize that they've done it exactly and and again human OS such that you know it's it it's probably a feature and not a bug that attitude right like I I'm reminded of the story about during the Middle Ages uh when they when they first started uh dissecting cadavers right um
the the the auditoriums were set up such that they people sitting around were would were in an elevation right and then the person doing the dissecting was here in the center of the theater and what's really interesting in this story is the body is right in front of them right right but but they are reciting what Galen said about the internal part of a medicine of the body which was wrong right and they're reciting it from
memory well looking at the body they're dissecting and they literally can't see it yeah yeah set set back Neuroscience by like Century almost right they're looking for the census Galen Aristotle and all and it's yeah it's like just a bunch of guys so another great Emerson quote is something like um you know people say to like young men in libraries worship you know the writings of Cicero and Loy and so
and so forgetting that those guys were young men in libraries when they wrote their books right and so it's just that that privileging it's not it's not like get a lot of me I know what best for everyone but like it's like you know you are a co-creator right of of whatever it is that you're experiencing and like your perceptions are valid and you know you which is scary I guess in some ways but like it's exciting like because your
life matters so much oh my God right like every like just looking around and seeing what's going on and and noticing it's so crazy to me that like value can be created just by noticing things like it's just like I I used when I was a kid I used to think I want to work in like science and technology and then along the way I as like based on my reading and stuff and so part of it is I encountered like hardcore
technologists and like and I met engineer mindset people and I'm like they have a they have a tinkering with their hands that I don't quite have and I can't compete on that front but also like again with like the right Brothers flight for example like Morgan H talks about this about how after the flight was made it was several years before the information spread and I'm like okay so
you make flight happen and then it takes years for the ideas to spread and if you spread the ideas faster it's functionally the same as if you had invented the technology sooner right you get what I'm saying like from the end users perspective it doesn't matter how fast it takes you know it doesn't matter who you don't the consumer doesn't really think about diff attributing what different parts of the
ecosystem contributed what to getting the thing to the door right so like if you recommended a great book to me you are as responsible for me reading that book as the author of the book and so it's like making good recommendations can be as fulfilling as writing good books and like similarly like you know um yeah just just observing what's going on in the world and noticing good things happening and sharing that information
like from some people some some people are dismissive of this as like oh it's just talking sharp or it's just whatever but like oh my God it's the best possible will like if again like if we lived in a world where information was being perfectly distributed all the time then again like I would do something else but the idea that this is a bottle deck drives me insane like that that
there exists like so many people right now have problems that already have Solutions and they just don't have a connection to the solution and like why you know so it's I think another example anyone any case study we discussed we can find that the fact that a solution exists or could exist a sign that we live in a very possible possibility bubbling world but the fact that it hasn't happened yet means that you know
we got work to do exactly and and you know like the other example great example of that is semble whites with handwashing remember and like the poor guy ends up uh dying in in in an asylum it well well if if people had noticed and put their social es to the side right like the story is just mindboggling he's like all of these women are dying after being attended by the male Physicians well maybe that's
because they're going from dissecting cabers to giving helping the woman give birth without washing their hands and so he made them wash their hands but it was the social Convention of the era that was unmanly to wash your hands and so I always use that as a great example of the data is right in front of you and you totally ignore it yeah and and and that's what happened with semites but on the upside the the time for data to get
out into the wild so to speak has compressed dramatically yeah and so because of this interconnected World in which we live because you and I can talk to each other in real time right now even though you're in Singapore and I'm in Connecticut across the planet yeah it's amazing and and so like that's why I am so chucked about the world in which we're going into it's just like amazing what an amazing time to be alive yeah
all right my friend you get to be Emperor again here we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna let you uh incept the world's po we're giving you the magic mic and you're going to say two things into the magic microphone and whenever the world's population tomorrow is they're going to wake up and they're going to think to themselves I have just have two of the greatest ideas and what I'm going
to do that's different from all the other times is I'm gonna act on each of these two ideas what are you going to incept into the world's population all right so okay uh here's how I'm going to think about it uh so I have I have my Domino's meme which is like my vision for how things get better I love that one yeah and the F the first Domino is love plus curiosity and so I'm going to pick one thing that is like
love related and one thing that's like curiosity related uh so with regards to love I think I'm going to talk about skinship and so okay here here's here's one um everybody already knows people right like you already have friends you have like childhood friends you have um you know people that you've know like you can you can go and scroll through your phone contact list or scroll through your Facebook list and see how
you feel about each person at a at at a glance like Oh I like that guy oh that guy's weird oh you know whatever so like I would say scroll through your phone find the person that evokes in you the most like excitement or like fond feeling or like ah this person is great I haven't talked to them in years and talk to them you know is like people don't do that you can do that at any point in time and like if you ask people
when was the last time you went your list and found someone you admire and talk to them and they always oh you know they're great but I don't want to like waste their time I don't want to make them feel like no like okay do a little bit so okay if they're busy famous important person or something like do a little bit of prep like figure out what they would be interested in hearing and
like send them a thing say Oh I thought about you know maybe they're working on some project and you're like hey I saw this thing and I thought of you how how's that you know like be thoughtful about it and then just have an open-ended conversation about whatever you can and so that's that's like step one and that's the step step two is like do that for multiple people and then three is introduce them to each other if
you can like have a dinner party and have all of them and if if like some small percentage of people do that in the world like this that achieves a whole lot of outcomes so that's one right so like um let's call that social game right or like Connecting People the other thing would be curiosity and uh let me think about what feels right for me with this uh right okay um so I wrote a whole book
called introspect and then when I tried to condense it and rewrite it and whatever I think one of the most interesting things that came up for me is just the sense of if you were formulating your problems correctly you would not feel like they were problems and I mean his problems with the capital P right so like you know like if you got to get the groceries it's a task you have to do it's not a problem like you have oh my
God I have a problem of grocery like maybe if you're like you have no money in the bank you're like okay I have a problem of how am I going to get the groceries I got to figure out how I'm gonna get the money blah blah blah but okay so if if you have a problem um and it it feels like a problem it's probably because so unless you have like a so okay some in some cases it's because you lack some resource or you lack some and
you may need to figure out how to get that resource right but generally speaking the problems that people get stuck with are misf framed or like you know so like we avoid the problems we know how to avoid we solve the problems we know how to solve and so we are left with the problems we could not avoid and could not solve and the reason we could not avoid them or could not solve them and this actually kind of do now I think
about it it's like like like David talks about stuff like this like it's because our current way of thinking is poorly fit to the problem so it's like we we are misdiagnosing the problem in some way but we don't feel we don't wake up in the morning thinking I feel like I've misdiagnosed all my problems today like you wake up feeling like I know what my problems are right and there's a I think
the Bernard Shaw quote maybe or Emerson I think it's Bernard Shaw like the problem with communication is the illusion that has taken place and like the problem the problem with problems is the illusion that we know what our problems are like we're framing our problems wrongly and like I I'm I'm surely doing this at the same time as well like even in conversation with you I realized I'm always carrying in my
mind oh I have all these essays that I need to write what if that's not my problem what if my problem is I need to have conversations to people about these ideas and I'm like oh it's got to wait until I'm done with the essays but like I spent two years and it's not I'm making some progress but it's really slow so maybe I shouldn't be thinking I have an essay problem maybe it's I have an idea communication problem an idea
sharing problem you know and so yeah so all of that is to say um consider the possibility that your current description of your problems is Miss diagnosed and so even even simpler than that would be describe your problems bro right so I I have I have a I have a essay essay idea which is like just describe things bro where people get so hung up on trying to convey some Grand idea or trying to convey something
important and then they get all all twisted and nuts and it turns out you can't help but share your understandings and your ideas and your perspectives of things just in the process of trying to describe something so you just try to describe a day in your life or you try to describe you know like so I I just casually happen to mention Taylor Swift at some point I'm not like a huge fan or
anything but like I went to see a concert if I wrote you so if Jim you said Visa write me a thous thousand words about what it was like to watch Taylor Swift so in that essay writing out so I went to seea if the concept was like this blah blah as I start writing along the way I will accidentally reveal things about myself to you about like what I'm thinking about you know I might say things like huh her relationship
with her audience is certain so and like her the way she approaches this is like that and it turns out like you you can't help but when talking about something you can't help but talk about everything else right and so this is this is and this is the essence of introspection in my opinion so it's like I I when people think that introspection should be oh I should talk about my feelings like yes
kind of true but you can't help but have your feelings contaminate or like influence everything that you do so you might well just do something sometimes it can be helpful to do something kind of randomish or something seemingly Superfluous so that you don't don't feel like this burdened with this has to be good this has to be important this has to be whatever and then you'll accidentally do something good maybe if
you can see it so so the first thing was social game find the best people that you know and talk to them uh you already and these are people you already know right so like find the best person you already know and talk to them and for the Curiosity thing is about like consider a different interpretation of your problem so even just okay so write down for fun like you're the silly sing
songy voice what are my problem problems today oh I have a problem with my wife I have a problem with my son I have a problem with my boss I have a problem like in a in a jokey silly way so you don't feel like it has to be serious and then once you come up with those problems try experimenting with an alternate frame an alternate description which can also be silly so you can say something fake even right like so my
problem with my wife is that she's too sexy or so okay it doesn't feel too my problem with my wife is that um we don't uh talk enough or we don't like improv rules right you try and find something that doesn't feel great too what would feel funny the how let me try and make it funny right the problem with my wife is uh she's too obsessed with me no my problem with my wife is um she she
works too hard no she you know you keep you keep briefing the problem my wife is um she solves all our problems too well and I'm like H that's that's she's to good she's too good at solving our problem like and then so like you know and and you laughed right so like uh David oil has a quote which is like make your thinking as funny as possible because the best ideas come as jokes and like yeah you see the first you just
witnessed this the first seven or six ideas were like H okay whatever but when you get to oh my problem my wife is she's stillo good at solving problems I'm so like you're like what do you mean how how is that a problem I'm like I'll tell you and then you you start going there right and and I love that I just got to go through like seven bad ideas to get the good one right so you have to persist and you have to keep
experiment until you have the feeling and if you do it with someone so in Step One meet someone in step two try this thing and you can do it in their presence so if if the person you admire is laughing oh my God you're doing great like they're going to spot something fantastic right um yeah and so even if it's not quite true exploring that idea space will get you somewhere interesting
and it will that's how you get the sparking a connection trying something different or weird or new and then you reframe your you reconceptualize your problem and then you always find I think that with these big capital P problems the way that the problem goes away is never what you initially thought it was going to be right because if it was you have done it already right it's something strange it's like you know
um often I hear from people who like quit smoking or drinking or something it's like you don't do it by trying to do it it's like oh I picked up weightlifting and it was I really liked it and I realized that cigarettes were like affecting my gains so I wanted more gains so I stopped smoking like it's it's like that like you you some some strange reorganization of the problem is what makes the problem redundant rather
than like whereas if you're trying too hard to be like oh I didn't smoke today oh I didn't smoke today every day cigarettes are still on your mind like you're a smoker with zero cigarettes smoked so you have to reconceptualize the problem entirely and like rechange your relationship with things yeah very long-winded very very longwinded but yeah so the first so to compress first thing is talk to the best people you
know and two is like Riff on your problems playfully until you find something fun and experiment with that a a tour to force vza a tour to force I love talking here thank you so much so we we we'll set up the next time and we will continue to rip it's great to see you and thanks for coming on thank you so much for having me this was great for me as well I feel like I have several I I got to listen to this after
it's done so that I can huh did I say that oh that's interesting you know like I think especially conversation especially in conversation with someone else that you you Vibe with uh it's not even you anymore it's you're co-creating it right so it's like you're so ins sympathic with the interestingness that you forget to suppress yourself right so again like usually our creativity is used to suppress our creativity but and
you know people don't that sounds weird when you say it that way but when you say it as oh we use creativity to suppress um weirdness we use it to suppress awkwardness we use it to suppress like all of the bad outcome associated with creativity right so it's doing that that suppresses the creativity so in a good conversation when you're vibing like you forget to get in your own way and then like you
just spit good all the time and then you're like oh yeah and that's how that's how we that's how we do what we want to do we just we just have to have this thing that we just had we just need to scale it to several billion people then maybe even like half a less than half a billion and like the rest will pick it up from osmosis exactly all right man great to see you and hope see you soon all right take care