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The most successful people that I've met are the least probably self-aware and they are motivated by certain pathologies and delusions that they are not themselves aware.
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What motivates action is actually not truth. It is forgetting.
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It is the ability to forget certain things.
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If you were to choose the best men of action at a certain time, I think they would almost always be motivated by delusion.
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Delusions that would pop if they were too introspective.
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If you want to produce an innovative society, I think you're going to have to have a lot of crazy people.
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My guest today is a repeat guest, Jonathan B.
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And today we cover a wide range of topics from his great books lecture series to his partnership with Cosmos and a very intriguing idea about what great founders are truly like.
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This is a great conversation [music] with Jonathan. Please enjoy.
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Jonathan, what third time that you've been on Infinite Loops? >> Welcome.
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Not the 10th time I've been told.
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I was [laughter] quite proud of that coming into this, but then I realized I'm just >> Yeah, Alex Danco has you really beat for right now, but that doesn't mean you can't catch up.
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>> Is three pretty good amongst >> Three is definitely pretty good.
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Uh and you know, it's kind of a lead-in to my first uh question.
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It seems like you've had three different lives, right?
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You were a math competitor, you were a at a startup, so you understand that ecosystem, and now you're having a great success with the lecture series.
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Um anything across all those three that you either learned where you're like, "Wow, that's just like a startup."
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Or that's just like what I had to do for the math competition.
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Yeah, I I I think that more difficult question would be what's what's changed, you know, cuz I I I see why uh from an outside perspective those seem like quite different career paths, but um it just boils down to like execution in terms of the the day-to-day.
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And when it comes to, you know, boils down to the same kind of ruthless kind of execution um in all three because when you're running a podcast, as you well know, uh you got there's a lot of work when it comes to doing it and you need to, you know, uh be very effective at doing that.
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Um and there's a deep intellectual component to to all three.
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Now, I'm choosing what I'm doing right now because it is the most uh intellectual in the way I care about, but yeah, I definitely think that they they they definitely tie together.
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And and, you know, I'm like you, I'm a generalist.
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I I I kind of love uh you know, being uh being involved in a lot of stuff.
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And, you know, there's this big brouhaha right now with uh Marc Andreessen saying that founders were not introspective.
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I don't know whether you saw that.
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It was on David Sacks's new podcast. >> I I did.
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Yeah, yeah, Sacks's new podcast.
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And he agreed Sacks agreed with with Andreessen.
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>> Yeah, I disagree with both. What's your view?
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I actually agree with him.
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Yeah, I actually agree with him.
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Yeah, I I I think >> Convince me.
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So But but before you do are you going to bring Marcus Aurelius into the conversation?
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I'm going to bring the Straussians and maybe Plato into the conversation >> Okay.
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>> who sees uh maybe a slightly bigger tension between action and contemplation, right?
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Because this is the key tension between the active life, the life of the Roman general or today the business founder and the life of contemplation, of thought.
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And I think throughout antiquity these two strands have been deeply in tension, so much so that when Plato, by the way, suggested the philosopher king, right, which is the the combination of these two it was structured in the Republic as the the last of three waves.
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So, this is the part in the dialogue when Plato's like, "I'm going to give you three ridiculous ideas about how to organize society."
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I believe the first one was communism.
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It was like abolishment of of private property.
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The second one was feminism, the elevation of women.
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And the third one, which is supposed to be even more ridiculous than these two, is the philosopher king.
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Because to the Athenians of his age, philosophers are these kind of they think Diogenes the Cynic, right?
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>> [laughter] >> They're kind of living in a barrel with dogs.
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Um so so maybe that's the kind of aesthetic picture I'll paint, but I'll just say empirically, cuz I've been involved in the startup sphere, the most successful people that I've met are probably the least uh introspective and the least probably self-aware and they are motivated by certain pathologies and delusions that they are not themselves aware, and that's what keeps them going.
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So, I'll tell you a funny story if that's if that's okay.
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I won't name the person, but um he he's he's a good friend and someone I look look up to quite a bit.
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And he was like, "Jonathan, you know, I've been motivated by this one story ever since I was a kid in Rome.
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This is during this the civil war.
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And it's Caesar against Pompey.
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And Caesar needs to cross the Mediterranean to do some, I don't know, reconnaissance mission or something like that.
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And Mediterranean, you know, has terrible seas.
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It's very difficult to pass.
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So, Caesar hides himself in a cloak and convinces these fishermen, okay, to go past to to like to basically carry him across.
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And in the midway of his passing the seas get really rough and the fishermen want to turn back.
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So, Caesar so my friend tells me, reveals lifts up his hood, says, "I am Caesar.
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I'm destined to rule Rome. Therefore, have no fear.
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You will make it across." And then he does.
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And my friend, who again is this like super successful uh men of action um was like, "Every time I'm in a big struggle, that's what I think about.
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That's that's what I want to imitate." Here's the issue.
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I went back and I read Plutarch.
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And I went read uh Suetonius, I think.
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>> could see this coming a mile away.
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Caesar does not make it across. >> I know.
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>> He lifts his [laughter] hood. The fishermen turn back. And he fails.
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I texted to my friend the screenshot, okay, of of I again, I think it was Plutarch.
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What does he text back to me?
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What would you text back?
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You'd be like, "Okay, my bad, you know."
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He texts back, "Haha, that's not how I remembered it."
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>> [laughter] >> As if he were there. Okay?
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And initially I thought, "What a ridiculous way Like I I I was so shocked, right?"
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Because as a trained in philosophy, I the people I looked up to I I always thought that they had a strong drive, a will to truth, that they took of truth very seriously.
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And here in one one hand I had a model who I really looked up to.
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And on the other hand, he just seemed to completely disregard like like the very fact of of existence.
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And but then I realized like him refusing to be uh uh uh him not caring about facts and having his own self-identity, his own narrative matter more than the mere facts is exactly the Caesarean way.
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Because Caesar didn't say, "Well, I lifted my hood and you know, I didn't make it across.
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Therefore, I shouldn't have ruled Rome."
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And you know, Caesar just treated it as my friend did. Haha, right?
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Like I you know, I guess the gods are wrong or or something like that.
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And I see this just again and again and again, whether it's in Musk and him making promises that clearly are fake but get the company to a place that wouldn't have been able to get otherwise.
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Whether it's Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field.
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The the text that I'll point to here is Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations. It's his second book.
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And one of the theses is that what motivates action is actually not truth. It is forgetting.
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It is the ability to forget certain things.
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And Nietzsche frames this as a lesson in history, where modern man wants to collect all the facts.
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We want to know what the Aztecs ate, how they shat.
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Whereas in in antiquity, history, as we talked about in Plutarch, is not like that at all.
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Plutarch sometimes just invents stuff to say, to put in the mouths of these great men.
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But it's to inspire action in his day. Right?
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It's to It's to have a pedagogical function.
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And so, one way to interpret Nietzsche's claim is that this will to truth that I and the other philosophers have that is at best orthogonal to action.
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And I I I I want to go even stronger and say maybe it's it's it's it's uh in tension with action.
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Whereas activity, I think if you were to choose the best men of action at a certain time, I think they would almost always be motivated by delusion.
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Delusions that would pop if they were too introspective.
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So, my my son Patrick always jokes that I ruin every sample I'm included in.
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Um but I I I think that they the two are not mutually exclusive.
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>> I don't think they're mutually exclusive.
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I think they're deeply in tension. Yeah.
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>> Yeah, because I would not call myself the most introspected person and I'm definitely delusional.
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>> [laughter] >> Uh and I I I want to push in on that, but I also want to go back to Plato in the Republic.
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>> [clears throat] >> Like my thesis about the Republic changed a lot when I I'm a history nerd, as you know.
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And I kind of started seeing the Republic as Plato's reaction to the loss to Sparta.
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Where Athens lost the war.
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And so he he wanted to make sure he was still one of the in kids.
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And and thus the Republic was born.
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If not of course, the ideas are the ideas.
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But I am interested in what motivated him.
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And by the way, like Plato, one of the best marketers in like history, really.
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Like he would name cuz his whole academy had patrons, and he would name his the things he wrote after those people.
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And you know, it all became a status prestige game.
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But staying on the the action versus contemplation, like the famous, probably apocryphal story about the way Alexander the Great and his generals would look at the facts, so to speak, on the ground, and then develop a battle plan.
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Then they would get rip-roaring drunk at night.
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And if they woke up the next day and still like the plan, they would do it.
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But if they woke up the next day, kind of like we probably might want to rethink this.
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I Maybe maybe it's just a definition problem here.
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I Because contemplation, right?
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Like that does kind of scream philosophy, will to truth, all of those types of things.
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But can't one do a pretty deep dive on one's own motivations that one can see.
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I'm sure that there are a lot that are hidden.
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Um even though I fully admit that I am delusional.
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Uh I Because I honestly believe that to get anything done that's new, you kind of have to be. Yeah, totally.
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So let me be more precise about my claim.
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I don't think it's necessarily mutually exclusive, um even to be the full form of both philosopher and king.
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I don't think that I I do think there's many mechanisms where one helps the other, right?
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If you're fully delusional maybe you can't manage people or maybe you just you know, there's so many Clearly there is an upper limit there is an upper limit. On delusion, right?
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I think what I'm trying to tease out is the unintuitive mechanisms by which delusion helps action, actually.
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And so, you know, as you know, I also have a interview series, and one of the series is interviewing philosopher [snorts] builders, right?
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And you you are you're on the right.
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This is why podcasting is just a big incestual kind of you interview me, I interview but and then, you know, people like Colin Moran, Francis Pengraza and partially the reasons I'm I'm interested in interviewing these people, like yourself, is that you've been able to synthesize these things. And it's so rare.
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But you you also know what know what?
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Like none of the people that I interviewed are the best at what they do in terms of worldly success.
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You didn't build Fidelity, right?
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You didn't build Vanguard.
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Colin is not George Soros.
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Francis didn't build Palantir, right?
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So so what I'm trying to point out is that in terms of one's desires for for living.
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Um and this was the kind of the the change I had to go through.
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I was purely on the action side, motivated by delusion.
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And I can tell you, if you wanted like billionaire like Elon, Jonathan, you wouldn't have wanted me to do the introspection that I did in college.
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But I did that because I wanted to live a good life. Right. Right?
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And so from my own perspective and how I would would want to raise kids, I want them to have to be both philosopher and builders, to be both action and contemplation.
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But I'm saying if you took um if you looked at who the the best men of action are, you have the really sober ones, right?
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And they they can go quite far.
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You have a hundred delusional ones, 99 of them are crashed out, right?
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Suicides, tyrants, terrorists.
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>> [laughter] >> But one of them kind of just gets it right.
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I mean, there's a back there's a recent book by Hofstadter, I can't remember his first name, but his thesis was that evolution does not actually filter for truth, right?
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For example, the the kind of optic nerve where the the nerve enters your brain, you you should see like a black hole in your visual field. The blind spot. Exactly.
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Over here or somewhere, right?
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And your brain fills it in cuz it's better for evolution to not have a distracting black blob there.
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And that's what I'm trying to get at.
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And and maybe the deeper thing I'm trying to get at is and this might this might be surprising coming from a philosopher is that we need to examine what is the value of truth.
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And this is [snorts] what Nietzsche asks in his in his uh uh book Untimely Meditations.
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Which is we think truth is this exhaustive, complete value.
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But maybe there are times where it's good to not believe in truths.
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I mean, certainly societies, very successful society has been found founded on just complete lies, right?
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Egyptian gods or if you believe in Egyptian gods and the Aztec gods, at least one of the Abrahamic religion and most one of the Abrahamic religions is right about their core claim, right?
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And so so clearly falsehood, delusion grounds society.
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And the question is I think the individual question is very clear to me of where you want to go.
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You want to go on truth, you want to go on understanding.
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But the civilizational question of if you want to produce an innovative society, I think you're going to have to have a lot of crazy people. I I completely agree.
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And I agree on the numbers, right? It's a power law.
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The the the the Yeah, the 99 crash out, commit suicide, become tyrants, etc. The one figures it out.
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And on the societies founded on lies, I mean, like in my eyes, one of the best examples of that is when Babylonia wanted to rule Sumeria.
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Uh they they realized they had a problem.
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Their god, Marduk, was a puny god.
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He He was like a local god.
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And so they were like let's do a rewrite.
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And so literally they came up with a new myth for Marduk, and he took on this supernatural creature and tore it in half and threw half up creating the sky and heavens, the other half down creating the earth, and he subsumed all of the other gods, and it worked.
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Like everyone [laughter] was like, "Whoa, that new Marduk, like we should let them run things."
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So I I absolutely And by the way, this goes on and on throughout history, right?
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Like any institution, be it the ancient rulers of Babylonia, there were the philosophers and thinkers like writing the script, so to speak.
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Um and so I I Listen, I think we also would have to get into a conversation, is there such a thing other than like the notions of physics?
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And even there, they're we don't call them most of them are still theses or hypothesis, right?
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If they don't make it through the scientific method, if they're falsified, etc.
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, then they got to find a new theory.
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But is there like a truth with a capital T?
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I I I find people searching for truth with a capital T often end up brain dead in ideologies and religious beliefs in a whole variety of beliefs that are patently untrue, right?
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In in regard to can we empirically test this, right?
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But so I'm I'm totally on board with you on on that front.
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I just wonder if like the age we're going into, right?
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With with AI getting smarter and smarter and smarter, will we see a shift to people who are more generalist, who are more polymatic in in their interests, because they can now understand, but more importantly, if they also combine action with it, create real new entities based on things that if you're just a man of action, right?
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Like if you lack the understanding for where this is going, Yeah, I I uh I think so.
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And maybe I'll give you even even more provocative example other than Babylon.
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It was it was Babylon, right?
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Uh about lies grounding society.
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I'm doing a lot of work in the American founding right now in preparation of 250, which is coming in July 4th.
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And you know, I was reading the Declaration, and it just struck me.
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No one really believes in the key philosophical underpinning of the Declaration anymore.
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Uh I I still think America's majority Christian, although um but even among America, I don't think most of them believe in the natural rights tradition.
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Like like God has given people these natural Inalienable inalienable rights that are somehow self-evident.
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And so again, that just goes to show that in a fully functioning, the most powerful society in the world, it could be grounded on things that I'm not saying whether they're true or not.
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I'm saying that the people don't believe.
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That that truth doesn't have this kind of um again, this kind of ultimate value in social life.
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>> Yeah, and now we're circling around a a point where I think we can come to agreement because I I've always thought of America as really one of the first countries found on ideas, right?
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Not necessarily true ideas.
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Aspirational ideas, most definitely.
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as I'm sure you know, the original line was the pursuit of property.
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And they're like, "Ah, we should maybe make it a little more general."
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But in much the same way that Kennedy got us to the moon.
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When Kennedy made that speech in the early 1960s, every engineer that was at NASA or in the United States, they were like, "Yeah, we we don't have any ability to do everything he just said."
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But he set the goal right out here, outlandish at the time, and ultimately we we got to it.
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That's why I'm a huge believer in the power of fiction.
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And specifically, in terms of innovation, science fiction. Right?
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Like science fiction becomes science faction.
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Um and What do What do you think about that process?
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I'm I'm really intrigued by it.
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Because if you don't have this thing to get people's minds engaged, right?
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Even if it sounds at the time that you say it, a more contemporary example would be Bezos.
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I'm going to be the biggest bookstore in the world. What? >> Yeah. You know, like, "Huh?"
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Um and of course, he became much more than that. Yeah.
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I am When I When I talk about delusion, I think I'm referring to something slightly different than these things in the objective world, like Amazon's going to be the the biggest we're going to go to the moon, which did end up being true.
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I think what I'm really referring to is like megalomania.
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Like what America does really well, especially if you've lived outside of America as I have, is how it encourages megalomania among its citizens.
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It tells them every American child knows that he or she can be the president, too.
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And that's what American culture cultivates in the children. You can be this, too.
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You can You can be a billionaire, as well.
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Whether Whether how likely that that is, right?
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It's what American media tells.
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It encourages these these these these >> just let me stop you there. Right?
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It's what American media used to do.
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I don't think that modern contemporary media is >> like Marvel, like Spider-Man.
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But maybe that's that's old media.
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Maybe that's already old media. >> old media.
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Because can be, you know, Peter Parker.
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I think I think one of the things that is causing so much distress in America right now is that most of like the media is incredibly negative.
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Negative about the future, negative about everything. >> That's right.
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And so, um you know, now this might sound good, this kind of you you can be anything you want.
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Um but but the the danger is that the empowering can can soon become a debilitating ought.
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And Tocqueville had a I think it was Tocqueville's observation where he said, obviously aristocratic societies aren't like this, right?
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Aristocratic society, you you stay in your place.
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Okay, you do what is your function.
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And he says that even though no French peasant needs to have an excuse for why they're not the lord.
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Oh, what do you mean, why am I not the lord? I was born a peasant.
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Each American feels somewhat guilty that he or she is not the president.
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Because he or she can be. >> Yeah.
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The The I think I've told you about the the book The Hypomanic Edge, Why America Is Different.
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The book itself is not great.
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The theory, however, is very intriguing to me.
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Because the author basically says it wasn't just the founders with these aspirational goals, right?
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It was the people who came here because of those aspirations.
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And the author makes a pretty persuasive case that if you do DNA samples of your average American whose families have been here for a while, right?
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Because we're not We got to see the time element.
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He He basically says these are very different people than everyone else in the world.
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And then he makes the case, he's like, "Just think about it. It's, you know, 1885.
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You're a peasant farmer in Ireland.
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The British have starved you out for a long time.
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And yet all your family's there.
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You've been there for generations.
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Everything you know is there.
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And yet you're like, "Nah.
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I'm going to take what little money I have left, take a ship, which in itself at that time was dangerous, to this new promised land, America, and I'm going to leave behind my entire family, my network, my my ecosystem, everything I know, and I'm going to strike out, right?"
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And then he said, "Now supersize it, and you've got your average American." Yeah.
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And And By the way, I I I I think you're exactly right.
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It's the circumstances around America that created You know, I mean, you're just provocatively now I'll explain the kind of benefits and negatives of this megalomania.
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I actually don't think it's something the founders themselves intended.
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In fact, if you read the founders' writing, they were worried about this kind of grandiosity.
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They were worried about aristocratic heroism um being in to the extent where they actively discourage certain types of like novel reading.
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Like poetry was a bit too dangerous, right?
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Like novels, they're they're too grandiose.
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They But anyways, so bucket that aside, I think you're right that the structure around America has created this kind of empowerment of everyone to exceed.
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Now, not Obviously, not everyone can exceed.
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And so, I think it's this kind of megalomania, this kind of delusion that just kid being born in Bronx in a single-family home can become a billionaire or can become the president or can become a NBA superstar.
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That is the cause of both America's best qualities and her worst qualities.
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It is the rise of her entrepreneurs.
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The This is why when you talk to top investment funds, I Again, I won't name the fund.
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Uh one one of the top partners told me we invest in three kinds of people.
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Megalomania, autis- autism, and revenge.
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Cuz there has to be something pathological to make you want to push on this kind of journey that kind of rationally doesn't make sense.
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Like why do you need, you know, a trillion dollars when you already have hundreds of millions? And Right?
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Like you need some kind of external external drive there.
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And when you read Musk's biography, it's clear that he wants to be the guy who changes the world.
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It It's less He's less concerned about changing the world, more more concerned about him being the one doing it, right?
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And so, I think um however, I think this [snorts] is also the psychology of the school shooter. Right?
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So, we talked about the best of America, the worst of America, the the greatest like domestic terrorist.
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I think they're all also motivated by this kind of desire.
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Which is that I want myself to be elevated >> Wouldn't Wouldn't you think that they're motivated more by your final one there, revenge, rather than grandiosity and or the desire to be the guy or gal to build the the way to Mars?
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>> If If you read their manifesto, it is actually strikingly similar to the psychology of a lot of founders.
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Which is I am not at the station of life where I where I want to be.
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I do not have enough respect from society that or attention from society or even a sign from society that I exist.
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So, I'm going to do this outrageous act to prove myself.
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In the case of the founders, it's it's productive.
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In the case of the school shooters, it's terribly destructive.
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But the core psychology is the same.
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And this is why I say in America, you can't get rid of your school shooters without destroying your pipeline of founders.
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And then when people >> What a pull quote that's going to And then when people when people [laughter] get upset at me, I remind them that Thiel wrote in Zero to One that all but I think one or two of the founders of PayPal built bombs in high school.
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That what America encourages is this deeply disruptive, I can be the best, I can be I can far exceed my station.
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That's the message you have to pump into your kids.
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And you know, one of them's going to be great.
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50 of them is going to like be really really upset.
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Two of them might become domestic terrorists.
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But you don't know which kid is going to do what.
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So, you kind of have to pump everyone with with this kind of rhetoric.
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And that Again, this is already there in Tocqueville.
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Tocqueville says that the American worker is driven in frenzy by their neighbors who have a slightly better life.
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>> That is absolutely true.
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>> Even though the French peasant looks at the aristocrat and be like, "Hey, yeah. He's an aristocrat. I'm a peasant."
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And again, this is kind of Tocqueville's duality of equality, the benefits and negatives.
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But But that Again, this is not a good or bad thing.
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This is just an observation about I think how how how the psychology of America works.
28:47
I used to joke quite a bit about the fact that I had How many traits are there in a serial killer?
28:55
I think there's seven, and I had five of them.
28:58
>> [laughter] >> Exactly. Exactly.
28:59
And And again, I'll bring more kind of serious philosophical defenders on my side.
29:04
One of my favorite essays by Rousseau is his second discourse.
29:08
And he talks about amour propre, the desire for vanity, recognition, to stand out, to esteem.
29:13
And he's a great line, he says, "To this drive we owe our conquerors, our and our philosophers, our scientists, but also our our kind of evildoers and thieves and scoundrels."
29:22
And that is to say, a few good things and and much many bad things.
29:28
And so, again, this is the kind of ambiguity that Sorry, this is the kind of ambivalence that I'm kind of highlighting between Again, it ties back to the Andreessen thing.
29:38
That Again, that the people you need to build a good society are not always good people. Yeah. Yeah.
29:45
And And And the qualities you need to build a good life are not always necessarily the best Well, you know, the the book about the guy who built New York City, the power broker. Great example. Robert Moses? Yeah, Robert Moses. Um Exactly. Not a good guy.
30:03
And then the author chose to write about LBJ. Uh and not a great guy. Yeah.
30:07
[laughter] You mentioned religion.
30:12
I I I am I am definitely of two minds about formal religion. I'm not an atheist.
30:20
Um but I'm and I'm not an atheist because like how delusional is that?
30:25
Like I, Jim O'Shaughnessy That's a religion. a human Exactly. Exactly. It's it's own religion.
30:33
And and so I I I But I'm not like I was raised Catholic, but I'm not a practicing Catholic.
30:39
Um I I don't understand institutional religion.
30:45
And primarily like I'm sure you're Well, I shouldn't say I'm sure.
30:50
Are you a fan of Spinoza?
30:50
Uh I haven't read any Spinoza, but Okay, he like dissects the Roman Catholic Church better than almost any philosopher.
31:01
And And I'd always had the idea, right, that all they did was recreate Imperial Rome.
31:09
We've got the emperor, the Pope, the Praetorian Guard, the Cardinals, the generals and foot soldiers, the bishops and then the foot soldiers, actually the priests out there.
31:20
But if you dissect the Roman Catholic mass, it is, to my mind, one of the greatest innovations in controlling society ever invented.
31:30
I agree with you, although my interest in religion I think is less historical, social, anthropological as yours seems to be, and it's much more personal.
31:40
So, I was raised It's hard to say raised atheist, but I I didn't grow up with a faith.
31:46
My parents sent me to Sunday school so I could practice English.
31:52
>> [laughter] >> So, they didn't want to pay for a tutor.
31:55
So, hey, worked out pretty well.
31:55
That's very enterprising of them. Worked out pretty well.
31:58
So, >> [laughter] >> can't blame them.
31:59
And so, I you know, I I converted as a six-year-old or something like that.
32:04
What religion, if I may ask? >> Protestantism. Right.
32:07
Some some kind of strand.
32:09
I don't I don't even know. Right?
32:11
That's how That's how That's how devoted I was.
32:12
In high school in Canada, I became, again, deconverted and atheist again for very similar reasons many young people do.
32:21
And then in college, I had this period of suffering, this-worldly suffering, you know, growing pains and teenage angst and a quarter-life crisis about what should I be doing with my life and how much should I care about the attention of others.
32:32
And I got into Girard, Catholicism, which problematized desire socially, and I got into Buddhism, which problematized desire phenomenologically.
32:39
And so, my second foray into religion was to to to study their text, unlike the first time, seriously, to do their practice.
32:49
I practiced in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal for a while and studied there, rather I should say.
32:54
But I didn't engage with them on their own grounds.
32:56
So, I was I was I was going to these traditions and saying, "Hey, what what resources do you have to solve my this-worldly suffering?" Okay.
33:04
I started this project, um which is about the great books, philosophy, religion, literature, and I interviewed this one Yale professor called Carlos Eire.
33:15
And he wrote a book called They Flew. Okay.
33:19
And the thesis of the book is that there is fairly conclusive historical evidence that people levitated in medieval Europe.
33:26
That there were levitating saints in medieval Europe.
33:30
And it was published Again, he's a tenured at Yale.
33:33
He's published by Yale University Press.
33:35
This is not something you see coming out of the academy.
33:39
I was somewhat convinced about the arguments of that book and I would I'm happy to to go through for our audience if you want.
33:46
But because of that, while I was reading it, one of my Orthodox Christian friends said, "Oh, I've seen a miracle before."
33:52
And I was like, "Okay, do do tell."
33:55
And he told about this icon that oozed oil infinitely uh of of the Virgin Mary in an Orthodox church.
34:04
And the crazy thing is, Jim, you can just go drive and see it. Okay?
34:06
It's in Taylor, Pennsylvania.
34:08
They host like uh they host sessions uh Sunday, of course, and then Wednesday evening, which is when I went.
34:15
I went with Jeremy, whom you know, and our third friend.
34:20
And uh yeah, lo and behold, it was just an icon and I saw it just dripping oil for like 15 minutes straight.
34:26
>> Did you see them changing the oil?
34:26
I did not see them changing [laughter] the oil.
34:29
And of course, it could be faked.
34:31
There's a There's a There's actually that exact instance of things being faked.
34:35
I would if I had to put a number on it, I would say 60% it's not fake, 70% it's it's legitimate just because of the people around that.
34:41
And so, that kind of opened up a metaphysical door for me.
34:44
Um and then I started investigating.
34:50
Basically, I wanted to defeat scientific atheism, materialism. Not defeat.
34:55
I want to challenge it on its own grounds, right?
35:00
And so, that's not saying, "Well, you know, I have this scripture.
35:02
It's clearly given by God, therefore you're you're wrong."
35:05
It's an imminent critique.
35:06
It's saying, "Can we use empirical, scientific, historical methods, as Eire used, to challenge this dominant kind of narrative?"
35:12
And it turns out, Jim, that there is just Well, some some some being does not want me to talk about this.
35:23
>> I I Yeah, you you've you've >> You've angered the gods.
35:25
You've angered the house spirits, Jonathan.
35:26
Uh [laughter] >> Be careful on your way home.
35:32
Basically, I uh it turns out there's tremendous just empirical research that shows the materialist that the materialist worldview is limited.
35:42
I'll just give I'll just give you a few examples.
35:45
One example is um have you heard of the um lab lab at at at at the University of Virginia that studies reincarnation? I know.
35:54
So, this is the founded by the founder of Xerox.
35:56
And for 50 years, I'm going there to interview the team next month.
36:02
They've been collecting stories, testimonials of children who claim they had reincarnation. What's the big deal?
36:10
Okay, there's over 3,000 reports over the last 50 years.
36:14
Um I believe all of the claims So, the children are very specific about what they claimed. Like, I My name was XYZ. I had this sister. I lived here and there.
36:23
And I think for most of these cases, not all of them, it was the researchers who validated the claims.
36:27
So, it wasn't like the child already knew that family and then the researchers came in documented.
36:33
>> How old were the children?
36:35
>> All before six, I think.
36:35
Because after a certain time, the memory fades. >> Right.
36:39
Um many of them grew up in non-reincarnating cultures. Okay?
36:41
So, they were not culturally encouraged to do this.
36:44
In fact, a lot of them grew up in Christian cultures or non-reincarnating cultures.
36:48
They were actually discouraged.
36:49
And it was very troubling.
36:51
Um and so, there was no really ulterior motive.
36:53
For some of them, there there were, but for a lot of them, there weren't.
36:56
And about 300 of the 3,000 had a birthmark that matched the death wound of the previous personality.
37:04
And so, that is again Have you read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas? Mhm.
37:09
Oh, you should you have to read it. Yeah.
37:12
Because he he makes He's a literary fiction writer I love.
37:17
But essentially, the case that he's making in Cloud Atlas is the same one you're making. >> Yeah.
37:22
But but basically, there's just tons of stuff like this out there.
37:26
There's In the same lab, they did a lot of again, like like testimonial gathering I I would call it.
37:34
Maybe that's too That's not serious enough.
37:35
It's It's something like empirical like anthropology or something.
37:38
They've gathered a lot of testimonials from doctors who witnessed near-death experiences from their patients. That I know more about.
37:44
So, a patient is on the verge of death.
37:48
Happened to my mom, by the way.
37:48
And they're This didn't happen to my mom.
37:52
They able to report things they couldn't have possibly sensed even if they were awake. Right.
37:57
Like what happens a few doors down.
38:00
And again, these are secular, usually atheist scientists doctors who are reporting this.
38:05
And it's not like, you know, every time a patient is about to die, they guess something and one in a thousand gets it right.
38:11
No, these are like fairly good hit rates about these things.
38:15
And uh another example out of Duke University.
38:18
JB Rhine, I think was a researcher that did like basically like telepathy, essentially.
38:27
And um there was just there was one guy who were able to guess cards at a like a 33% rate continuously.
38:36
It was It was like a five-card kind of setup.
38:38
So, you'd expect the rate to be 20%, right?
38:40
Statistically, if you want to do 33, that's maybe one in a million or something like that.
38:45
So, that was kind of my first foray into this.
38:47
And we're going to talk about my my my seeker's journey developed further, but that was my first journey into this, which is just looking at, "Hey, serious, dependable studies out of Duke, out of Yale, out of UVA, out of Stanford.
39:01
What are they saying that makes us doubt the empirical materialist paradigm?"
39:06
And even there, I think there's I think it's quite conclusive.
39:09
Have you followed the work of Rupert Sheldrake, the physicist?
39:12
There's another one you're going to really want to tune in to. He gave a TED Talk.
39:16
He's very He's brilliant guy.
39:21
Um poster child for the materialist worldview who broke bad, according to them.
39:30
They literally did everything they could to destroy him.
39:32
He wrote a book that questioned the materialist view from essentially inside the materialist view. >> Exactly.
39:41
And uh the the uh head of I think Nature magazine basically did a a completely non logical or rational jihad against Rupert.
39:56
Uh basically just you know saying if I if I were Pope I'd be burning him at the stake.
40:04
>> [laughter] >> And I'm like that's doesn't really reflect the view you you seem to be claiming you know.
40:11
So so I think you might find his work very interesting.
40:13
Robert Anton Wilson he was 50 years ago making all of these assertions and looking seriously into them from the point of view of a uh somebody who I've I've always believed that Apollo and Dionysus if you can unite the two you're going to have a pretty interesting lens to look at the world through.
40:36
Um and materialism did a lot for us and the advancement of humanity but it's not the be all and end all and now we're seeing all of the breaks.
40:47
They hate the quantum guys right?
40:50
And and and yet we assume >> [laughter] >> that we are these modern incredibly well informed but it's not the be all and end all and now we're seeing all of the breaks.
40:54
They hate the quantum guys right?
40:55
And and and yet we assume that we are these modern incredibly well informed but it's not the be all and end all and now we're seeing all of the breaks.
40:58
They hate the quantum guys right?
40:59
>> it's kind of or a lot of these rather popular materialism is based off of you know billiard balls colliding matter is a real thing And and you know sort of the old quote uh you know science progresses one funeral at a time right?
41:11
I think it was Max Planck. Someone like that yeah.
41:13
But uh I kind of think society advances one funeral at a time.
41:19
I think that the social web in which we grow up in has so many invisible threads into us that we are completely unaware of.
41:32
I used to play this mind game where I would say like what would a conversation really look like if I was able to time travel back and and talk to the most brilliant minds of say 1500 right?
41:48
I basically the the lack of any kind of shared context other than the basic human ones right?
41:57
Like I don't think any of those would be different right?
41:58
I think that the underlying human OS we are fear driven creatures we are prestige junkies we want like you you made earlier the reference about the guy not liking his neighbor because he had a better car.
42:14
That is incredibly well proven in economic theory right?
42:16
It makes no sense and it basically dismantles most economic models right?
42:22
Because like Keynesian econometric models assume no no no no you're everyone is a rational actor not true at all and like study after study after study shows you know Jonathan I'm going to give you the opportunity to get 50% more in compensation but if you know that your competitor at work is getting a hundred I'm going to feel shitty yeah.
42:49
You're going to feel shitty and you will actively try to suppress both. Yeah right right right.
42:54
And so we the whole idea that that I you know my degree in economics totally worthless because most of the axioms that it's built on are wrong right?
43:06
Like we are not rational actors for the most part.
43:12
For the most part we make decisions and then afterward paper over rational reasons for why we made them.
43:19
But so I'm I'm totally open minded about look I think that we are just at the beginning.
43:27
I I'm a huge fan of David Deutsch and his book The Beginning of Infinity like that's where we are.
43:34
We we we don't know half of 1% about nothing. Yeah.
43:38
And and yet we assume that we are these modern incredibly well informed >> science closes off kind of all the all the questions we're asking right?
43:48
the questions we're asking right? So wrong and imagine if again we did our time travel and I'm stealing this from Deutsch and and rephrasing it but he he he sort of in in The Beginning of Infinity says hey what what what if you talk to the greatest physical physicists of 1890 and ask them what they thought about
44:10
quantum and about the internet and he said they wouldn't think anything about it because neither existed and he he makes the point that we human beings and the tools we make are the best explainers the best extenders of ideas and that we're literally sort of perpetually at the beginning of infinity because that knowledge compounds. The only way it doesn't
44:33
The only way it doesn't compound is if you are ruled by a society that hates change.
44:40
Back to your American observations right?
44:43
Like America whether the founders wanted it to be or not got populated by people who loved change and look at what we got right?
44:57
Um and so I'm totally open minded about anything that for example the oil thing.
45:04
Now if I went down there I would be intrigued but I would be I used my first job was as a stage magician right? Oh yeah. And I loved magic.
45:13
You know other kids growing up had Farrah Fawcett in my era on their wall I had a poster of Harry Houdini.
45:20
I loved magic and and I just I don't really know why at a young age my dad gave me these magic books that his my grandfather had given him I was just like what?
45:34
But so I also that got me to understand human psychology a lot better.
45:37
Because I had I used to do a lot of mental effects right?
45:43
right? Where I'd say Jonathan think of a number any number it can be anywhere between negative number all the way up to whatever and you'd give me a number and then I'd point to another person in the audience you know think of any line from any work of literature that you love just just one line and then the third think of any animal and you can
46:05
make that animal different you can make it a pink elephant if you want and then at then I would write it down and then at the end of the effect I would remove what I had written above I'd already writ I wrote it ahead of time and I would remove each of the coverings and they matched the person what they said exactly. To the audience like they thought I was
46:29
To the audience like they thought I was legit psychic right?
46:32
And I had one woman at one come up and say you are unbeli you are truly a psychic and I and I felt bad I was like no no no I'm I'm a magician that this is there's a trick to this and and literally I ended up showing her the cardinal sin for a magician showing her how it worked and even after I did that she was like I don't believe it I think I know you're a psychic.
47:01
So the will to believe Totally yeah. is strong.
47:05
And as you caveat um I I would have tested the icon for in the obvious ways if it weren't this like holy object that I think right?
47:15
And so so there's like limitations to it.
47:18
>> also reminds me of like the selling of relics the the medieval Catholic Church. It does.
47:24
>> pick they just pick bones up from anywhere and this is the the bone of one of the disciples or Jesus Christ himself.
47:31
So so this is my biggest unlock while exploring this space and my favorite person I've interviewed I would say ever on the great book side is a is a scholar by the name of Jeff Kripal at Rice and so this is this is his idea which is the existence of fraud does not preclude the legitimate act.
47:52
So I'll I'll give you an example that you and I are both aware of entrepreneurs that we fund so many are fraudulent.
48:00
>> [laughter] >> But but do you say just because you know the WeWork guy is a fraud and you know Sam Bankman-Fried is a fraud that means all of them are fraudulent? Of course right yeah.
48:09
Of course you say we use discernment to try to figure out who's a fraud and who's not.
48:12
And I think the same is with again I I I investigated cases like the mirror icon and I found a case of fraud.
48:18
Turns out they were also a pedophile ring in like Texas and so there's a lot of other signs that that that that that are yeah.
48:26
Yeah and so You're spitting fire today Jonathan.
48:29
I I think we yeah we'll definitely get you up to 10 episodes.
48:33
Yeah [laughter] that's what that's what I'm really going for.
48:35
But the even stronger case that Jeff made I think is totally right is that even with the existence of one single person the fact that he or she did fraud at one time does not preclude that he is authentic another time.
48:48
Again we've talked about this before right?
48:52
Elon and his fraudulent claims about how forward Tesla is does not preclude it in fact it might be the cause of the fact that the the stock goes up and I think that is true probably for a lot of these holy men as well.
49:06
Just just because we can find cases where it's fraudulent where it's untrue doesn't mean everything they say is untrue.
49:13
And this is this I I think this is this is kind of my perspective on organized religion which is and this is going to continue my seeker story right?
49:20
I kind of blown open the metaphysical door I don't have a denomination but at this point it's quite recent I'm kind of worried about the existential consequences like if you take these religious traditions seriously you're going to end up in a pretty bad place most of the time [laughter] if you don't do Hey man I have I have I have a of ice right next to Satan himself reserved with my name on it. There you go.
49:42
So, um I again, just like I was just like I try to be charitable with the scientists critiquing things from their own perspective.
49:50
I want I want to do that with the religious traditions because here's my issue, which is my my Christian friends are teasing me.
49:57
You saw this Christian miracle, why didn't you convert?
49:59
Most people don't even have this and converted.
50:00
And I said, "Okay, but what about the Buddhist miracle?
50:03
What about the the case about reincarnation?
50:05
What about this this Hindu thing that that that's like awfully like well documented?
50:09
Like my my if it were just between Christianity or or atheism, I think it's an easy leap.
50:19
But you need to have reasons for leap to for making the leap, right?
50:21
Not to say that the leap is a fully rational act, but surely even the Christian would say, "Yeah, the first guy on the street corner trying to join you his cult, don't take a leap of faith there. You have to investigate. You have to use reason.
50:35
Reason has a role in this kind of process to to play."
50:39
And basically, my claim against the apologists, this is why I think I'm a very weird interlocutor for a lot of these religious people want to convert you, is I say even if I agree with everything that you said, he came back from the dead, you know, he did all these miracles. So what?
50:55
There there's other traditions who say the exact same things including the I am God statements.
51:01
>> Yeah, by the way, there and I'm I'm blanking on the title cuz I haven't read the book yet, but I did buy it.
51:05
Um there are like many many other religious traditions with the exact same story as Jesus Christ. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:17
>> And and like you see the movie Heretic by A24? Mhm.
51:20
Oh, you'll want to watch that for sure.
51:24
>> a lot of homework after this.
51:25
Because it basically um uh makes the case that all religions borrow from other religions. Have you read the book? >> and yeah. Yeah, yeah.
51:36
But have you also read the book The The Immortality Key? Mhm.
51:41
That's another one you're Brian Muraresku. I had him on the pod. He's fascinating.
51:46
His thesis was the Eleusinian mysteries used psychedelics.
51:51
And literally, their pitch was come to our group and talk to the gods. Exactly, yeah.
51:58
Well, when you're Ayahuasca Yeah, same same idea.
52:02
And so we finally were able to test them, the ancient chalices and things, and they did in fact find Really?
52:09
>> residue of psychedelics. >> Really, wow.
52:11
>> Yeah, that's what his book is about.
52:13
Aha, it's called the Immortality Key. Yeah.
52:14
And and so Brian Muraresku, uh fascinating guy.
52:21
Anyway, so I'm all for this kind of exploration. Exactly, yeah.
52:24
That was my question, which is, you know, the Christians are often often say, "Hey, be charitable to or the Muslims or to take whatever faith, you know, be charitable to us. Take our scripture.
52:34
It's Read it in the most charitable light.
52:38
It's allegory, not everything has to be true."
52:41
But then they don't they they don't apply the same charity to the other religions, right?
52:44
They they when when you ask, this is an interesting exercise, ask them about their religion and ask them about the existence of other religions, and usually the the answer is threefold.
52:53
If they're feeling if they're having a bad day, they say they're demons.
52:57
If they're having a decent day, they say they're like hallucinations or man-made.
53:01
If they're having a really good day, they'll say they're a lesser revelation, right?
53:04
And and and and this by the way, shows the Catholic Church's different attitude towards the other religions.
53:08
In the Florentine Council, everyone else is going to hell.
53:12
In Vatican II, Jesus can work grace through these other traditions.
53:15
So, anyways, that's kind of my problem.
53:17
And it's the exact opposite of the modern's problem.
53:20
The modern doesn't see anything in the religious project. I see too much.
53:25
Again, if if human history was just Buddhism or just Islam or just Christianity, that's a pretty easy leap for me to make.
53:33
But it's this what Sextus Empiricus called equivalence, these like these arguments that I don't necessarily are wrong, but they're in tension with with each other, and I don't have I don't see a clear difference between them. That's kind of my issue.
53:45
So, my my current project now is going into these religious traditions and figuring out kind of whether they they hold up to to scrutiny or or whether their exclusivist orthodox forms hold up to scrutiny.
53:58
So, one example is Mormonism.
54:00
Okay, I I probably not it.
54:04
Like in its most orthodox exclusive interpretation, there's King James Bible translation errors in the Mormon text. There's Oops.
54:12
Yeah, I can just go on and on and on.
54:16
But again, I I want to I still want to be charitable to let's say the Mormons because what I said about even if a holy man has certain fraudulent acts.
54:28
And by the way, these were the huge scandals of the Buddhists in the 20th century when these holy teachers from Tibet had all these sexual scandals. >> Yeah.
54:36
But I think it's wrong to say >> gave them a run for their money. That's true.
54:41
It was [laughter] it was a great com- contest, the the religious battle.
54:45
But I'm but I don't want to say, "Look, just because this guy had this one bad moral thing, it means everything he said is fake."
54:51
I think in the same way we don't say, "Hey, Elon lied about this one thing, everything he does is fake."
54:57
We don't do that when we're investing, we shouldn't do that in religion >> Well, and but but also under underneath that, right, is a analogy I used to use for social or political opinions.
55:07
If you can infer all of my beliefs by hearing one of them, I am brain dead and I have been captured by an ideology. Yeah. Right?
55:18
You're basically saying the same thing here. Exactly.
55:20
And so, that's what I'm kind of doing now, which is I've kind of brushed aside the the atheist the scientific worldview, and now it's it's a weird wild world.
55:29
It's the beginning of of infinity, as you say.
55:34
And now I'm kind of exploring the different religious traditions and just seeing what holds up to scrutiny.
55:39
I'll give I'll give you another example.
55:40
I have a video coming out about Daniel in the Old Testament here.
55:45
And I spent about a few months on Daniel interviewing some of the best scholars both apologetic and critical because I think it's actually a great way for reason to get a sense of the truth of Christianity.
55:57
And for the following reason.
55:59
Daniel 11, so Daniel is allegedly a captive in the Babylonian captivity, okay? So, 6th century.
56:08
In Daniel 11, Daniel has a vision, and he has this insane prophecy.
56:13
There's nothing else like it in the Bible.
56:17
11:1-35, where he perfectly foresees the next 400 years. He sees Alexander.
56:22
He sees these minute battles and deals.
56:24
He sees Alexander's kingdom breaking into four.
56:30
And then the prophecy stops working in 11:36 around the 2nd century, the Maccabean revolt.
56:34
The king that was supposed to die in Israel does not die in Israel. The end never comes.
56:42
And basically, this is very very short summary, the apologists think that, "Hey, Daniel 11:36, that's about the future Antichrist."
56:49
Okay, so this is about 6th to 2nd century, then there's a jump in time.
56:53
This is a classic Christian move.
56:55
The critics say, "No, no, no, even that 6th to 2nd century stuff, that was written after things happened."
57:03
In the Maccabean revolt, they wanted the Jews wanted a symbol of hope to motivate them.
57:10
So, they told their history in the form of a prophecy, put it in the words of Daniel, and then wrote out the death of their main antagonist, Antiochus IV, that and that hopeful prophecy never happened. >> Very clever.
57:24
>> [laughter] >> So, I think this is a good example where reason has a lot of work to do to help you decide whether a leap is appropriate or not.
57:32
Now, it doesn't fully collapse down, but deciding whether Daniel is a 6th century or 2nd century text, that's something historical methods can do.
57:43
And so, that's why I've spent so much time investigating it.
57:44
So, so it's things like these that I think for a seeker, I'm just spending all of my time on investigating and seeing kind of what what what's the shape that comes comes out of this.
57:54
So, what do you conclude?
57:56
I'm I'm sort of a Taoist if I have to define myself. I I I I don't know yet.
57:59
I I again, I'm I'm a seeker, right?
58:02
I I could So, you're you're a bit like >> what's wrong. I know what's wrong.
58:08
>> You're a bit like Buddha himself, right?
58:10
If you read Siddhartha by Hesse, what I love about that book is Buddha's just like, "Yeah, I I'm doing the whole drinking my own urine thing, and I'm standing on one leg, and I'm not getting anywhere. So, thanks, guys.
58:23
I'm I'm glad I learned this lesson, but I'm going to move on."
58:27
I think the seeker category is the most interesting one because it keeps you open to things that we don't yet even know about.
58:38
>> Yeah, and so I definitely seeker, by the way, and most people don't don't remember this, philosopher is meant to be a diminutive. Diminutive. Right?
58:46
Because this is in the symposium.
58:49
If you are a lover of wisdom, you don't have it.
58:50
If [laughter] you have it, you wouldn't sort of pursue it so fervently.
58:55
So, to say that one is a philosopher is a diminutive in my case because it means you're not a wise man yet.
58:59
And I think seeker is the same same What I'm trying to say is I don't romanticize the seeker category.
59:04
This is just where I'm at.
59:07
I I really want to answer this question to the best of my abilities, um and that's where I'm going.
59:11
I I now know that certain things I think are certainly wrong.
59:15
Like again, materialism, the orthodox interpretations of Mormonism, probably the orthodox interpretation of Christian Judeo-Christianity as well.
59:24
That's kind of what my Daniel kind of research has led me to.
59:26
And I'm just going to go through these religious traditions and see what they have to offer.
59:31
And and and and by the way, I'm not just doing this rationally.
59:34
I I'm also practicing this in in in some sense for Buddhism meditation.
59:38
I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos Orthodox Christianity. Um yeah.
59:44
I had an experience at a Buddhist temple which listening to you reminded me of it.
59:50
It was in 1987 in Hawaii.
59:56
And um obviously I knew about Buddhism but I hadn't spent much time like visiting their temples or anything like that.
1:00:04
And literally my wife was with me and it happened to both of us.
1:00:10
We crossed over into the temple and we literally felt our physical bodies just absolutely change.
1:00:21
All tension everything just like literally left our body.
1:00:26
And I looked at my wife and I said did did that just happen to you too? And she's like, yeah.
1:00:33
And that was the closest I have come to any like physical >> mystical experience >> mystical type experience.
1:00:39
Yeah and and what's really interesting to me now is and and and and definitely from this episode I think you and I are both going to get some inbounds on email for for people who want to reach out cuz >> [laughter] >> we were quite open about these things.
1:00:55
There's not a lot of people who are serious who are also open about these things. >> Right.
1:00:59
And even in the past year I've just heard incredible stories more even more incredible than than than than the ones you told me that again are from like super sober minded people who have no agenda unlike the Roman church case that to share this with me.
1:01:11
Like like for example, my mom and her like near death experience which she didn't see anything but like she has she has no agenda to try to trick anyone, right?
1:01:21
And um again, I've just heard I I think majority has a tendency to diminish testimony. That's just testimony. Right.
1:01:29
>> [snorts] >> But on the other hand like if let's say your son or someone else you really really trust tells you, hey this thing happened to me and you work through all the possibility was it a hallucination or were they trying to get something out of me? It's no.
1:01:42
Then you kind of believe them, right?
1:01:43
You kind of believe like in other words don't hold on to your metaphysical views so tightly that makes you disregard this stuff.
1:01:52
And I'll actually tell you a funny thing tie back to investing.
1:01:56
Um I've developed uh somewhat of a new thesis that will end either end up disastrously bad or fantastically lucrative from from my uh angel investing.
1:02:05
Which is investing in people who have had mystical experiences.
1:02:10
So again, this is a Jeff Kripal's idea.
1:02:13
He basically claims every single great book in the canon was because the author had a mystical experience that they were trying to process.
1:02:23
That literally the muses are real.
1:02:26
So a good example is Nietzsche.
1:02:26
What are we told about Nietzsche? He's a naturalist, okay?
1:02:29
He he he hates the religious stuff. He does.
1:02:32
He actually says a few good things about Christ even though he doesn't like Christians.
1:02:37
But Nietzsche had an experience two experiences one at Sils Maria I believe where he was in front of this boulder and he describes it as a mystical experience and that's when eternal recurrence this metaphysical idea was imputed upon him.
1:02:49
Another example, Nietzsche had what is called a precognitive dream which is when you are able to see things in the future.
1:02:56
And Nietzsche basically after his father died he dreamt that his father came from the grave and took his brother or a young young young child walked back into the grave.
1:03:09
A few days later his brother died. And so Mark Twain too. E- exactly.
1:03:11
Twain is is another good his brother died, right?
1:03:17
On on the shipping accident. Exactly.
1:03:19
And so >> it down to the coffin which was very unusual and provided for um them by people Twain didn't even know. Exactly.
1:03:30
>> And the flowers on the brother's uh grasp it's really interesting.
1:03:34
Yeah and so uh basically Jeff and again, my first interview with him is already out.
1:03:42
I can't I can't uh stop recommending him enough.
1:03:44
He basically re-reads the entire canon this way.
1:03:48
Like at the end of the Republic when uh the near death experience where where where they see Odysseus choosing his reincarnation.
1:03:56
What we're told in school is that this is for stupid people, okay?
1:03:59
If you don't get the high philosophy, here's a little children's tale to tell you the kind of moral of the story.
1:04:04
But Jeff kind of flips it.
1:04:06
Like this is actually the culmination of the Republic.
1:04:08
And by the way, we call that the myth of Er.
1:04:12
Nowhere does Plato call it the myth of Er. >> Right. >> Right. It's a story for Plato.
1:04:15
So anyways, his claim is that all the great writers this actually this may be an interesting thesis for you as well.
1:04:22
All the great writers in antiquity were actually mystics. Okay. What about in modernity?
1:04:30
And he wrote a book called Mutants and Mystics where he showed that conclusively I believe so much of popular media today is by mystics.
1:04:41
Like so much of the comic books you're familiar with Esalen Institute.
1:04:43
Esalen popped up I think on the West Coast the same time the X-Men were were were written in the East Coast.
1:04:50
So there was this kind of >> I thought Esalen had much earlier.
1:04:53
When did they write X-Men?
1:04:56
Because Esalen's been around forever. It was a big big deal. >> age.
1:05:01
It was the core new age institution. Yeah yeah.
1:05:03
I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure they they they they were the same time.
1:05:06
And his point is when you look at the most popular media, right? This is what you do. Movies, documentaries.
1:05:13
You want to in do mystics.
1:05:17
So that's my thesis actually.
1:05:17
What's so funny about that is William Blake talk about great mystic.
1:05:22
Like I I I don't know how much you've read about him or read of his work.
1:05:27
Uh you should because like he he he's also a fabulous artist and he's got the the I don't know I don't recall what the etching is called but is essentially it's the infinite staircase but it's a DNA strand. Yeah yeah.
1:05:44
If if you take his painting and then put it next to DNA they're the same. Yeah exactly.
1:05:48
And so this is my investment thesis which is it seems like and I think Jeff is right so much of the great ancient cultural works were created by mystics.
1:06:03
So much of the great modern cultural works were people who mystics. >> Interesting.
1:06:07
If you read Jed McKenna, he has a whole lot to say.
1:06:10
In fact, I think the second book in his series on spiritual enlightenment the damnedest thing is a treatise on Moby Dick.
1:06:24
Because he basically says Moby Dick is about non-duality. Yeah.
1:06:27
And so [snorts] long story short, uh I I have I have started an angel investing strategy where I go after mystics who are able to keep it under control.
1:06:37
>> And and okay, so walk me through that process.
1:06:40
How do you discover It's mostly inbound at this point.
1:06:43
Yeah so I get I get a lot of inbound of like a lot of weird weird people and before I used to just dismiss this all the time and now I think there might be an edge here.
1:06:52
Um so one guy he um I won't reveal his name because again, this is like most people don't want to talk about this. >> Right.
1:07:00
They they don't want to be seen oh this unserious you know clearly.
1:07:04
And if I tell you his name I think you definitely know his his name or at least the certain Tell me off air. Yeah.
1:07:10
>> [laughter] >> Certain things he's worked on and he's just a straight up mystic, man.
1:07:12
And and he watched one of my interviews and he opened and he opened up to me.
1:07:16
He had I had a precognitive dream. This is crazy.
1:07:19
And again, he's one of the most successful let's call it tech entrepreneurs or or or or tech adjacent tech entertainment entrepreneurs.
1:07:26
And then another guy came to me where again, he had a mystical experience and and the way that they relate to their company is just fundamentally different.
1:07:34
You know a lot of I think Dirac the a lot of the quantum physics guys all if you retrospectively look at like when um I'm blanking on his name.
1:07:49
Um the the meaning of life guy.
1:07:52
Schro- no not was it Schrödinger?
1:07:57
Anyway, he they they had all the Upanishads like all and and if you look deeply into their bios like almost all of them Exactly.
1:08:09
were what you would call a mystic.
1:08:12
But I I'm I'm fascinated because I've had I've had precog dreams.
1:08:16
I mean I had them all the time.
1:08:20
>> Uh oh oh oh can you tell us about the the precog dream? Yeah.
1:08:23
Um so this isn't a recent one but it's probably the most colorful.
1:08:29
When I was a kid um I had a dream that I actually ended up writing down because my mom recounted it to me so much.
1:08:40
I it's not like it was my own memory but she was like, yeah when you were a little you you told us about a dream that really freaked us out.
1:08:47
I guess I was I don't know eight.
1:08:50
Um and I had a dream that I was dead and I went and visited my mom and dad to tell them that it was okay.
1:09:00
I was just going elsewhere and I said, but my luggage had these really weird tags on it.
1:09:08
And and uh my dad said, well what were the tags?
1:09:12
And I said, one said Isis and another one said Osiris or something like that.
1:09:18
And you know the the way I would rationalize it is my my eldest sister died when I was 10.
1:09:27
And I had several dreams that were about death prior to her death. >> Right.
1:09:33
And you know, what the the way my mom would tell it was like Was she sick before it it was unforeseen or it was expected?
1:09:40
>> No, yeah, she had lupus and this is yeah, this is back when nobody knew what lupus was.
1:09:45
And so that's the way I rationalized it like obviously I knew that my sister was sick and this was me trying to but the When I was eight, I didn't know about Isis and Osiris, right?
1:09:57
Yeah, [laughter] exactly.
1:10:00
And so basically again, I'm not an expert on on this realm, but at least the most convincing things I see on precognition are a lot stronger than than when you suggest.
1:10:11
Number one, they don't really appear as dreams, they appear more as like visions.
1:10:16
>> Well, that's that's where you're Yeah, that's where you're getting Okay, I got I have another one for you though. Okay, there we go.
1:10:20
So I used to get cluster headaches which they used to call suicide headaches because they are they I used to be told by neurologists that they were the worst pain a man could feel childbirth being the worst and then I don't get them anymore by the way.
1:10:36
But I saw a female neurologist and I used that line on her and she was like, "No, they're the worst pain a human being can feel." And they're horrible.
1:10:45
I do I would not wish them on my worst enemy.
1:10:51
But I had [clears throat] discovered that sitting and this is pre-internet right, so the '80s and I was a research junkie then too.
1:10:57
So I went to all the libraries and found that sitting on pure oxygen could alleviate or at least ameliorate the headache.
1:11:08
And so I had a headache and was sitting on oxygen and I had my eyes closed and I suddenly was elsewhere.
1:11:16
And the elsewhere and I and I wrote it out, I described where I was.
1:11:21
I did a diagram of me walking into the house and I kind of forgot about it and after I was moving I found this journal.
1:11:34
It describes the house I'm living in right now. Really? >> Almost to a T. Yeah.
1:11:40
>> The front entryway is the same with the same layout, the way to my office is the same with a living room and here's the freaky part.
1:11:51
I also have an office for my chief of staff next to my office. And that was there too.
1:11:57
Yeah, so so that that that would definitely be something something like like that and again, if if I invested in you, I would have done pretty damn well.
1:12:06
>> [laughter] >> So I think my thesis is panning out.
1:12:07
But but yeah, I I basically >> myself as a mystic.
1:12:10
Do you think of yourself as a mystic? >> No, no, no, no.
1:12:13
But but Okay, here's here's what I'm really trying to say which is it seems like some people are just more open to these experiences than others.
1:12:21
Like they're they're they're more they're better receptacles of these experiences. Tesla Tesla.
1:12:28
I haven't had a single one of these I haven't had it sounds like you've had a few. I have.
1:12:35
And um basically Jeff a lot of people have this called a filter thesis which is the materialist think that you know, the brain creates the mind it's emergent.
1:12:47
The filter people think the reverse that the brain isn't creating something it's actually reducing a lot of things and the analogy they use is like TV back in the kind of radio wave days which is a million radio waves get one TV if an alien comes down the alien's going to think well, this TV's creating this image but it's actually receiving it.
1:13:05
And it's receiving it by reducing the radio waves all to a single channel.
1:13:12
And what this explains is how certain times of low brain activity terminal lucidity would be a good good good one corresponds to heightened consciousness or or like superconscious states like near-death experiences.
1:13:29
I definitely have to introduce you to Rupert Sheldrake because his thesis is that we and animals and everyone have a morphogenetic field that contains like all human thought, all human history, everything and that we're interacting with it in much the same manner you've just described.
1:13:50
>> in in his Meno I believe when he says that knowing is actually remembering we're actually just remembering things.
1:13:56
And again one of the conclusions not necessarily conclusion one of the conclusions you can draw from this is you really need to mess up your antennas to be open to these mystical experiences.
1:14:09
And so you were quite messed up because you had the brain trauma and then you had oxygen.
1:14:16
Um psychedelics is another way chemically to mess up the kind of radio.
1:14:20
And so what this thesis is called is uh the trauma hypothesis which is that you need to kind of mess up the radio in order to in order to receive all of this stuff.
1:14:32
You know, there there there I I was quite intrigued I can't remember when I read it.
1:14:38
It was just a few years ago maybe six or seven.
1:14:41
Um and it was a thesis about schizophrenia.
1:14:44
And it was exactly that the the author was basically arguing that schizophrenia is filter failure.
1:14:55
And and that the the filter that you've just described like goes haywire and it or it's way too wide thus the voices thus all of that.
1:15:05
It's like you're getting most of us are getting that one radio channel or that one TV. >> image.
1:15:12
>> Exactly where where they're getting like 10 channels. 10, 20, 30.
1:15:19
And uh so I I am 100% open to all of these ideas because the the more people I talk to like Rupert and others like Brian with the uh immortality key.
1:15:33
Look, I started out as a pure empiricist like that's how I built all of the way I invested like yeah.
1:15:43
>> Let's look at the data. Yeah, exactly.
1:15:44
Let's look at the data but I think maybe I've become much more open to it as I've gotten older actually to because like intuition and another great one.
1:15:53
Um I the empiricist in me says well, sure.
1:16:00
It's saturated or imbued intuition.
1:16:00
When I look at the same chart pattern or price pattern for decades, well, yeah, of course I'm going to get it into it.
1:16:10
I call it my Spidey sense.
1:16:11
Um and yet as as my stated I'm I'm I'm happy that I'm no longer managing other people's money because I do things a little differently now.
1:16:22
Um but I would get these intuitions and I wouldn't do anything because the quant model that I had developed myself or with my team was not telling me to do it.
1:16:32
Yeah, I mean on one hand I don't want to then jump to the other conclusion say well all of it is you [laughter] know, like all all of it is just like >> I'm only going long mystics.
1:16:44
Exactly, yeah, but I'm saying I think this is a huge part that this is this is probably the biggest blind spot of of modernity.
1:16:54
And so by the way, when you when you look into the anecdotal testimonies of these kind of experiences, they're almost always negative.
1:17:00
They're almost always traumatic.
1:17:03
The precognitive dreams or the signs they get is almost always someone dying someone they care really a lot about dying.
1:17:09
It's hardly ever oh, tomorrow's going to be sunny.
1:17:14
>> [laughter] >> Tomorrow's going to be great for wearing a sweater like Um and this is why by the way it's called telepathy.
1:17:22
It's tele distance pathos emotion.
1:17:24
There's some strong emotion that's being communicated.
1:17:29
>> The emotional aspect again, I've I've actually read quite a bit about I didn't know that this was your new thesis.
1:17:35
That's why this is so much fun for me.
1:17:37
Um the the um the heightened emotions is def it's been in my experience a must. Right?
1:17:47
Like after my mother died, I was very close to my mother.
1:17:54
Um and after she died, I wrote out a list of a hundred things that I wanted to do. Right? I was 29 years old.
1:18:06
On that list was become the chairman of a major arts organization.
1:18:12
I was 29 >> [laughter] >> when I wrote that but I just they weren't like considered goals or anything.
1:18:19
I just was like free forming.
1:18:22
Here's all the things I want to do.
1:18:24
Write books, make movies, start a you know Everything except for maybe two or three on that list has a check mark next to it.
1:18:34
What are the two or three left?
1:18:36
>> [laughter] >> Not going to tell you.
1:18:38
>> [clears throat] >> You don't want to jinx it.
1:18:40
>> I'm working on those right now.
1:18:41
>> [laughter] >> But yeah, I just I I think this is probably the biggest blind spot of of modernity which is in all the science and technology that we develop.
1:18:49
By the way, I don't think it's not relevant for this like when we discuss one important question is will will human writers still be valuable with AI writing?
1:19:00
If you believe the things I said by the way, I I don't believe I'm not saying I believe that.
1:19:07
I'm a skeptic at the end of the day.
1:19:07
So I write I'm kind of testing these things out.
1:19:11
But if you believe that I think there's probably some credence to it then humans just have a fundamental source they're tapping into that the machines are not.
1:19:19
So I actually think you know what?
1:19:22
I actually think this is like a very productive thing in the AI age because if we looked at like what is this human source that we're tapping into this mystical source >> yeah.
1:19:32
and we outline those attributes, maybe we can design experiments to test if LLMs can do that as well.
1:19:36
Like I'm just saying this is this is a fundamental reconception of man that I think is going to help us even maybe especially in this technological age. >> Yeah.
1:19:46
Like so I think again it's it's kind of all connected.
1:19:47
You asked me like all these things I've done like math and like entrepreneurship and computer science and AI and philosophy and now this is it all connected?
1:19:55
Number one is I kind of don't worry if they're all connected or not.
1:19:59
I'm just like what I've learned is if I do something I'm passionate about, I'm going to go so much further Totally agree.
1:20:07
and I'm going to have so much more fun.
1:20:09
That's the most important thing.
1:20:10
I'm going to have so much more fun.
1:20:11
So who gives a if I go further or not, right?
1:20:14
The very fact that I I have more and more fun, that's the key thing.
1:20:16
But the cool thing is everything kind of kind of ties back together.
1:20:20
Like all these things I'm interested in like AI and like yeah.
1:20:23
Yeah, I definitely have found the same.
1:20:28
Um it it if you can make something fun and you can entertain people that is if you really want to teach people, that's the way to do it.
1:20:38
Like get them engaged on their own kind of level of what animates them etc.
1:20:43
And it's these these though are what's interesting to me is these ideas to many people would be like these guys are wackos. >> Yeah, exactly.
1:20:57
[laughter] But there are a lot of practical things from this Yeah. >> investigation.
1:21:03
>> not what I'm doing it or what you're doing it, but there are, right? There are. >> Yeah.
1:21:08
Whereas maybe that's my still my bent toward action.
1:21:10
Like I don't want to just think about things. I want to do them.
1:21:13
I want to bring them into the world.
1:21:18
And and so I mean maybe that's another You know, I was thinking as we were talking about that about the in the beginning of our conversation, I had Nick Maju- Do you know Nick Majuli?
1:21:28
He's he's a friend of mine.
1:21:30
He works for Ritholtz Wealth Management here and he wrote a book about the wealth ladder and he his final rung of the ladder is a hundred million USD and up.
1:21:40
And we started talking about those people.
1:21:45
And I did a deep dive on the profile of those people.
1:21:50
And they're like all the same.
1:21:51
Like the the the move from like rich, right?
1:21:55
It's like if you've got 25 million bucks, you're doing okay.
1:22:00
But there seems to be this final rung of the ladder and when you get up there it's completely different.
1:22:05
Delusion enters, the burn the ships mentality enters.
1:22:11
Height actually changes, I believe.
1:22:13
If you look at CEOs >> all six feet, but if you look at billionaires, they're all Yeah, [laughter] six feet. Exactly.
1:22:19
But also the big five profile is different and but and it's quite unique, but when you apply it's really fascinating.
1:22:27
And so I think that there are a lot of even from the most esoteric stuff you can get inspiration for things that you want to put into the world, right? On the action part. >> Yeah.
1:22:44
And Jim, I think because I remember in our in when I was interviewing you, you said the kind of final stage of your four act right correct of life is mind body and and and building teams around that.
1:22:55
I just want to say in the last few months I I think we're in a better place.
1:23:00
I know you don't think about it in terms of the religious question, I do, but those type of questions, I think we are in the best place in human history Oh, I agree. I absolutely agree.
1:23:10
And people think you know, I'm kind of crazy.
1:23:13
They're like, you think you can know more than Augustine like you than than Nagarjuna than Al-Ghazali and I'm like, yeah. Yeah.
1:23:20
Not because I'm necessarily >> Modest, maybe.
1:23:25
>> [clears throat and laughter] >> Not because, you know, we are smarter than them in raw horsepower.
1:23:30
>> But we have all of that as our context.
1:23:35
This example I always give, Augustine, right?
1:23:37
He's known for combining Platonic tradition with Christianity.
1:23:42
How much of Plato did he read in the Greek?
1:23:47
There's debates, but a popular understanding is he's only read the Timaeus in the Greek.
1:23:53
Cuz cuz his Greek was not that good, but the texts were lost. Plato was lost.
1:23:58
Like we have better access to the traditions to a lot of these historical traditions than they did.
1:24:04
than the founders of those traditions. That's number one.
1:24:08
Number two, we have access to the other traditions as well. Yeah.
1:24:10
It's it's been a narrow you're a big fan of Taoism.
1:24:14
When was it translated to English?
1:24:14
Like less than a hundred years ago? Little over a hundred? Two hundred? Something like that?
1:24:20
>> And it's only been such a short time in human history that we don't we don't like those monkeys over there and then their primitive religion, right?
1:24:26
It's only been a short amount of time since we learned to really respect the different possibilities of other religions. That's number two.
1:24:34
We have each independent religious tradition, we have more access.
1:24:39
We have other traditions.
1:24:39
And number three, I think technology is going to play a huge huge part of here. >> Could not agree more.
1:24:45
One example of it is near-death experiences.
1:24:49
Why were we able to get so much more accounts of near-death experiences?
1:24:51
Cuz we got better and better at saving people from the brink of death.
1:24:57
Psychedelics, another crazy technology, right?
1:24:59
That these chemical substances I know there was obviously like ayahuasca and like but now we're able to manufacture chemical substances that are able to mess up your radio in a way that, you know, before you had to get like molested or like traumatized or had get your arm cut off, right?
1:25:13
Like if you want to if you want to really mess up your rate.
1:25:16
This is why the aesthetics beat themselves, starve them- starve themselves. >> Yeah.
1:25:21
And I think because of all this, we are at maybe culturally we're so stagnant and people are doom scrolling and and that's the big issue.
1:25:29
But for someone who's really passionate, I think we can answer this question.
1:25:33
We can go further than anyone in human history has ever gone. I actually agree.
1:25:38
Um I think um I I I am somewhat bewildered by the uh what I look at as kind of Luddite uh view about AI and things.
1:25:50
I honestly think it is like Jobs said computers were bicycles for the mind.
1:25:55
This is a rocket ship for the mind.
1:25:58
And [clears throat] the the ability I'm a huge believer in what I call the centaur model, man or human plus machine.
1:26:05
And it sounds like you're agreeing.
1:26:08
The the ability of the unique way that we might actually process reality such that it is the machine's probably not going to be able to do that, but we're going to be able to use that tool >> Unless you're a materialist, right?
1:26:24
The materialist kind of and Silicon Valley is materialist.
1:26:27
That's why they think they can they can replicate that.
1:26:29
I'm much more suspicious of that. I as am I.
1:26:33
>> I think we have a special connection to the muses that they may not, yeah. I totally agree.
1:26:38
You know, from my point of view is like it seems to me my ability to test this is what's the result, right? Like Show me the goods. Exactly. Show me the goods. Yeah.
1:26:51
And and so I definitely think and to your point about we're so much better at saving people's lives.
1:27:00
Things that killed people routinely no longer do.
1:27:05
And so and we have the ability to really you can actually use the scientific method on these.
1:27:11
You've read Kubler-Ross on death and dying? >> Mhm.
1:27:15
Oh man, I got to give you a I have to give you a new list.
1:27:19
>> few books very very carefully [laughter] over and over again. Well, good for you.
1:27:24
Um so Thankfully for your publishing business, most people aren't like me.
1:27:28
>> [laughter] >> You I think you would you would gain some insight if you read.
1:27:31
She was the pioneer of um a lot of the research into um near-death experiences.
1:27:38
Another factoid about that that's really interesting that also includes psychedelics is atheists who are um dying.
1:27:50
Um they have found that a single psilocybin intervention works like for the majority.
1:27:59
Uh and like What what what stops the dying? Fear of death. >> Right, yeah.
1:28:04
Cuz you're dissolving your ego.
1:28:06
>> your ego and I I've read a lot of I've worked with a couple of institutes that are trying to bring some sanity around uh the use of psychedelics.
1:28:14
Johns Hopkins has done a tremendous amount of research as have other universities and they're finding like it's a great example, another reason to read Robert Anton Wilson.
1:28:27
You you know all of this research into psychedelics and Michael has this in his book, Michael Pollan.
1:28:39
The Germans did a tremendous amount of real scientific research on psychedelics and we burned it all because Nazis, right?
1:28:50
So it was lost on the people who were burning all of this that virtually every one of those German researchers was a Jew.
1:29:02
>> [laughter] >> And so burning it because of the the scourge of Nazism probably a mistake.
1:29:08
But imagine had we not done that, right?
1:29:11
Like and that makes me think about what you alluded to earlier.
1:29:16
All of the things that we can We're making a movie about the scrolls found at Pompeii. >> Yeah, Alex Petkus.
1:29:23
>> Yeah, and um the the they were all, you know, turned to ash, but you can still read them.
1:29:32
Um if if you put them in a particle accelerator and use AI.
1:29:34
Anyway, just think of how much was lost, right?
1:29:39
The burning of the Library at Alexandria.
1:29:41
Like And and now we're finding ways like we're doing with this documentary we're making, who knows what's in those scrolls?
1:29:50
So, I definitely believe that with these new tools, etc.
1:29:55
, we're going to be able to unlock a lot of stuff that has been in plain sight, right?
1:30:02
>> people are underestimating just like how much just translation itself, right?
1:30:04
Is like like you don't need to learn like 50 languages to read the Dao De Jing, the Bible, and the Quran, and that is quite it's quite it's quite new, especially like the the East-West kind of kind of thing.
1:30:16
Like to take like take um Hinduism or Buddhism seriously.
1:30:19
These were kind of people that I studied with that really put them in a way that made them respectable, right? >> Yeah.
1:30:27
And um yeah, I I I definitely think we're we're at a place where we can trade new ground here.
1:30:35
Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Jonathan.
1:30:36
I didn't know I honestly didn't know that you were on this version of the journey.
1:30:43
>> I I didn't either, and that's the beauty of of the journey, right?
1:30:44
You're I again, I started this Great Books project about 2 years ago, and this chance occurrence I interviewed Carlos Air through me into a rabbit hole, but the cool thing about doing what I'm doing is I can just kind of throw everything out the door and be like, >> [laughter] >> "Okay, I'm I'm going to go all into this this direction."
1:31:00
>> And and just a practical, you know, the inner capitalist question, is there an audience for this?
1:31:05
There's a there's a huge audience. We're at 1.
1:31:08
4 million subscribers >> I'm really actually quite happy to hear that.
1:31:14
>> Yeah, like probably a year and a half a year and a half a year and a half in since since the launch of this Great Books series.
1:31:22
Uh and this is a whole other story a whole other conversation to go down, but the Chinese audience has eclipsed the rest of the world combined.
1:31:29
And we we don't even dub things, we just subtitle stuff.
1:31:34
So, people are reading subtitles uh in in the big Chinese um sites, and so that was super surprising.
1:31:40
Um you know, I I would like the growth on YouTube and long-form to be a bit bigger, but Instagram has been super strong for us.
1:31:46
The Chinese side has been super strong for us.
1:31:48
X recently has been working.
1:31:50
So, I think um again, you know, my story, and I think I talked to you about this before, was I was building this rocket ship fintech startup with Joe Lonsdale, and it was going great, and but I I kind of just wasn't feeling it.
1:32:03
This goes back to the doing what you love kind of thing.
1:32:05
And when I did this this project, um initially I was ready to take a monk's vow of of poverty and not celibacy, but poverty.
1:32:16
>> [laughter] >> Uh and uh certainly not giving up my gluttony.
1:32:19
Um Uh and I you know, I had generous support from people such as yourself, and and I was just happy to go down that, you know, like make sub-substance wages in New York City, and and I was happy to make that trade-off cuz I got to do what I what I loved.
1:32:33
And now it's barely been again a year and a half since the launch, and I already have money-making opportunities that were better than building the startup full-time.
1:32:42
And so, um it really is a kind of leap of faith, and then it'll catch you.
1:32:46
The air will catch you kind of moment, yeah.
1:32:48
>> Yeah, I think Ken Stanley makes the the great point in his book Greatness Can't Be Planned, right?
1:32:54
And what you do, the way I break that down is if you just completely iterate as you're moving along, you end up somewhere that's much better.
1:33:06
>> And it's so much more fun. >> Oh, much more fun. >> much more fun. >> Right?
1:33:09
Like it's just >> you're on an adventure. You're Odysseus.
1:33:12
Well, Odysseus never had a lot of fun, but >> [laughter] >> It's the same Probably was not fun would not be the first thought that came to mind.
1:33:20
But like it it scares a lot of people because it by very definition, it doesn't There's no ladder that says, "No, you got to do this wrong, this wrong, this wrong." Right?
1:33:33
And it is a much more circuitous route.
1:33:36
>> know you totally agree with me on this one, um which is the ladders are all collapsing.
1:33:41
Like like the the least secure route now is the ladder route, right?
1:33:45
Like going to consulting, going to law school, like like that that Yeah, and so, you know, maybe 20 years ago, if your normative scheme was I I I value safety and and security, there could be a good case of, "Hey, just go down the safe and secure route."
1:34:00
But now, that's not even an option like the like that route doesn't even get you that anymore, you know?
1:34:07
>> Yeah, the but I I am taken by your idea about the the nature of of founders because like I intentionally went all in, and like everyone thought I was absolutely crazy.
1:34:21
When I started my first company, I was like 28 years old, and I had no backers.
1:34:26
And I was having I was having lunch or dinner, rather, with a conventional Wait, he would hate to hear himself called conventional.
1:34:32
A very bright, very successful guy.
1:34:35
Um and and he just could not get his head around.
1:34:40
He's like, "Wait a minute.
1:34:43
You just started at you Goldman, you know, not one of the big firms backed you." And I went, "Yeah, no."
1:34:50
He goes, "That's insane."
1:34:52
And then but I tried to increase the pressure on myself.
1:34:54
So, not only did I do that, I also put my own name on it. Yeah.
1:35:01
Because if you really really really want to put your soul in the game, >> I I remember, you told me you your wife and you had the conversation, and you were like we're like JP Morgan >> Right.
1:35:11
If you And historically, if you look, all the financial companies were named after the founders. >> Yeah.
1:35:18
>> Because that sends the signal, "Hey, >> Hey, I'm I'm sinking with the ship.
1:35:20
I'm going down with the ship." I'm going down.
1:35:22
And and and a lot of that re- re-thought through my conversation with you is in fact quite delusional. Yeah, [laughter] it is. It is. It is.
1:35:33
I I would say that you and I, maybe this shows my lack of self-awareness, I think we have a degree of introspection that is absent in the really really successful people.
1:35:48
Like the really like world history like the Caesars of the world or the Elons of the world.
1:35:52
I think they they they fear it even.
1:35:56
Um but to to to that point, you know, I I I had a similar relationship not with the, you know, Goldman in the financial world, uh but with the academy, right?
1:36:05
Because as self-conception as a philosopher, which again I can take as a diminutive, you want to be recognized by by the people in the academy, and so just like in the in the same way I was ready to take a vow of poverty, I was ready to just be this like weird effing kid who's like does a little podcast and be this like non-serious intellectual.
1:36:25
And again, the crazy thing is like I've built stronger relationships with the professors I so admired than if I would went into grad school.
1:36:34
Cuz now now I have now I have a platform that is very unique in the world.
1:36:38
I, you know, I I I read their books very carefully before I interview them.
1:36:41
So, again, it's just this Um and by the way, this is not an advice I kind of give I I would give sort of everyone indiscriminately.
1:36:49
But for people who are very competent, I think always the best thing to do is to do what is fun.
1:36:57
Now, if you're if you're mediocre, I think, you know, maybe the the the standard route is actually better. Yeah.
1:37:03
>> I mean, honestly, aren't we all the stars of our the stories we tell ourselves?
1:37:07
And who's got Talk about in- introspection.
1:37:10
If you >> [laughter] >> the level of introspection it would take to understand, "Yeah, I'm totally mid."
1:37:18
>> [laughter] >> Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
1:37:20
So, it's like my friend Adam Robinson wrote a book called How Not to Be Stupid.
1:37:25
And I said, "You have a massive marketing problem, Adam, because your target [snorts] market doesn't know they're stupid."
1:37:33
>> [clears throat and laughter] >> Not be How to not be stupid for dummies for dummies.
1:37:40
Well, I'm delighted with your success.
1:37:42
This is a really I I will watch with great interest you going down the mystic path and this path you're going down.
1:37:47
Um and you know, you get to incept yet again, Jonathan.
1:37:55
So, maybe when we get you up to 10 episodes, you will be the most you will have incepted the most people.
1:38:00
You know the rule, we make you the emperor of the world, you get to speak into a magical microphone and incept the entire population of the world.
1:38:09
You got two things you can say, they're going to all think it was their own idea when they wake up whenever their tomorrow is.
1:38:15
What two things you're going to say into the magic mic to incept the world's population?
1:38:22
>> answer was pumping a shitcoin that I would invest in before.
1:38:26
[laughter] My second answer was to tell that was to remind everyone that the Greeks valued the small phallus over the large phallus because it symbolized the the virtue of moderation.
1:38:39
>> [laughter] >> So, I really, you know, it's a really hard uh hard thing to to to one-up myself here.
1:38:46
Um I think I I don't know.
1:38:48
I I I think You know what?
1:38:51
Here's what I'm going to do.
1:38:53
I'm going to put the exact same number in everyone's head. 01 0198365. Something like that.
1:39:03
And then when people all wake up, they're all going to independently uh have come to this, and then they're going to realize that material world is not all that there is. Wow. That's very heavy.
1:39:15
Okay, you still got another one.
1:39:16
You want to put another number?
1:39:18
>> [laughter] >> I'll think I'll just re-emphasize the Greeks and the phallus thing.
1:39:22
I think they were very wise.
1:39:23
That's [laughter] That was very funny.
1:39:25
Jonathan, always a pleasure to chat with you.
1:39:27
Thank you so much for coming. Thanks, Jonathan.