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[Music] there are so many things in the modern world that keep our brains inth but our hearts still feel empty the Buddhists they love to say this thing your emotions are like the waves on the ocean but your Center is actually the depth of
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the ocean and the depth of the ocean is what we're after with deep happiness I think that Dogma is the end of life honestly I think you are brain dead if you are trapped inside of a Dogma this especially with the internet you really need to follow widely get into deep
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conversations with people who you don't agree with you got to let people you utterly despise say what they want to say too or you're not really for free speech when people are stressed their mind gets kind of narrow and they can
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only think about the the one thing they're stressed about but a really uncompressed person usually a hiker a ski buom a Buddhist monk you know the world is totally open to them right well hello everyone it's jimo shaas with another episode of infinite
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Loops today I have a very special guest because number one I've been trying and it's been my fault that I've had to switch this uh recording many many times to have a good long chat with Will Scher who is a video ESS essayist who uses a variety of popular culture uh and books
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and all sorts of things that guess who's interested in yeah that would be me to make really really great both short and long form essays via video will welcome thanks Jim it's great to be here I'm big fan big fan of yours I was rewatching
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some of your videos and noted that uh some of the the short form ones like they're as short as a little under 10 minutes then you shift it over to the series on happiness hopefully we're going to talk about all of these uh the series on happiness is long form so I
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guess my first question is when you were having so much success with the short form why did you bump over the long form I've been asked that question many times uh by fans who are wondering the same question uh I was so interested in
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the topic of happiness that I didn't I stopped caring about the potential success in terms of views that it might have and I wanted to go all in on something that I was super interested in and once I got into it I realized it had
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to be long form in order to do it justice and that's how it ended up being long form um I know that it was probably going to be less successful than my other content because short form just tends to do better but uh I just went forward with what I wanted to
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DOI which is something I do uh to exess according to everyone in my family so I can totally get behind that um did you find that it materially impacted uh either your artcore fans or uh you know people who might have just stumbled upon your Channel
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um and really got hooked uh because you wrote you did one on the attention economy which we're also going to talk about so you got their attention uh did you did did did did you find that it transferred over to the longer form yeah there is a large thirst out
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there for long form content and there's plenty of people who want it and those types of people are looking for it and they do find you and when they find you they want to support you and so actually when I first released the happiness series my paid support went up like
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300% um but yes the views definitely went way down because there's just not as many people who are interested in an hourong video but yes uh the strength of the closer community and the people who are interested in that stuff got stronger
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for sure that's kind of along the lines of the 1,000 true fans right um 100% you know it's it's like this podcast is I break every single rule that you know that they L you know 10 things you must do to have a successful podcast and like I had a friend asked me did you
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intentionally go through that list and and do the opposite to each one but you know I think I think that uh unless you want to be you know uh a pop star or you know know I Love Lucy whatever like it's my opinion that you're going to find your audience and I
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I think the metric you cited there is really telling your paid went up 300% your views went way down that's Mr paredo uh RIT large 100% it it was a choice that I knew I had to make because the video essay genre is so effort intensive and takes so long to make that
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you just need to take the time and have paid support because you're not releasing enough content to you know make enough off ad Revenue alone yeah and one of the things that I want to jump into now is one of the reasons why we're doing this like when I
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found you it was like catnip for me because like you seem to love all the same things that I love and I and I love the way you weave together both popular culture like you use Rick and Morty you look at uh the effects of cartoons on
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satire again I I watched maybe way too many cartoons pre pre-war Warner Brothers were my favorite interesting uh and but then you also bring in like the heavy hitter philosophers the heavy hitter uh philosophies that they uh that they contend for um and and the first one
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that I saw of yours was actually sent to me by a colleague and it was your short on eight books that changed your life and when I watched it I'm like oh wait a minute these eight books changed my life too what what what what was the was it
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just you were sitting there and in a reading one of them you thought you know what godd damn it I'm I'm gonna do something on the other books as well yeah I think part of it was my audience uh are voracious readers and so they want to know what I was reading um
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that was part of it and then sort of the way I founded the channel in the first place was this idea behind sort of Paradigm shifts um that sort of lift a weight off your shoulders or release you from a cage you didn't think you were in
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and the reason I chose those books is because each of those books kind of did that for me um they really sort of just you know bended my bra in a way that I came out of them a completely different person and that's why I chose them and I would say of the eight that I
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chose the Righteous Mind really sticks out as the one that really um just totally changed the way I saw the world um but they all did but the Righteous Mind really sticks out yeah so so let's go right to the righteous mind then uh and I think one of your comments
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was the most dangerous thing in the world is dogma and that come that comes right out of the righteous mind that is something with which the the vehement with which you said that I share I think that Dogma is the end of life honestly I think you
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are brain dead if you are trapped inside of a Dogma because you literally can't see or think about anything else other than prescribed way but you're you're going to be far more eloquent than I on this so tell tell everyone listening and watching what why that particular one
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what's the one that really changed your life well I think for me I came from uh fairly Elite schooling and I had definitely felt uh in a very Progressive Dogma um and Jonathan height gives this great Ted Talk where he asks the Ted audience
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you know how many of you are on the left how many of you are Libertarians how many are on the right and pretty much everybody in the audience raises their hand and says uh they're on the left and he says this is a problem because we
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don't understand each other um we're just in our sort of sections and he talks about how a lot of changing people's minds has to do with actually getting to know people um and if you're just arguing with an avatar online or sort of writing someone off
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immediately you're not actually seeing the world clearly um and you're blinded to how a lot of other people see the world and he explains this really well through his moral foundations Theory and um it just really sort of opened my
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brain up to a whole different world of um perspectives and things like that that I feel like I had written off for much of my life yeah and uh the uh Robert Anton Wilson who is an author I love uh I think he was baby on many things 50 years ahead of his time uh stole the
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term from Timothy Larry uh reality tunnels and he writes very extensively on How These reality tunnels literally blind us truly blind us to uh what other people see when they have their reality goggles on right and I that really affected me
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in much the way that Height's book uh affected you I've read the book and liked it as well um and and I just wonder it's it's something that I see people increasingly dancing around for the first time like man this tribalism is now getting out of hand it is now
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getting to the point where literally if you look at certain ideologies they will not consider even befriending someone who has a different Viewpoint than than they and and I think that you know there's a lot of reasons for the cause
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of it uh I you know one of them is modern technology itself like if you had some kind of bizarre kind of Niche uh reality tunnel uh and you lived in I don't know Iowa uh and it was 1950 well you were just the weird kid um but but now it doesn't matter where you live
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you'll find all the other weird kids on the internet who have that particular reality tunnel and then you'll join it we'll become an echo chamber and you'll reinforce each other's ideas and you know it's just and so on and so on and so on what what's your
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prescription for breaking out of it I really think you just especially with the internet you really need to follow widely um is is one remedy to it and another is to get into deep conversations with people who you know you don't agree with uh I actually think
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pod have been amazing tools for just wider culture because of this especially ones that bring on people who disagree and you know you might not change your mind in the middle of listening to a podcast but perhaps afterwards as you mull on it and listen to the debate that
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you just heard in your head you might change your mind and I think podcasts actually have have done a lot for that um yeah following widely on Twitter and and and and listening widely and um it's pretty hard in the real world to seek
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out you know people who think differently than you but if you can power to you that's awesome yeah I I I agree with all of those I follow many accounts on social media where I know that they are going to be espousing things that I really
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really disagree with um and uh it's helpful uh but I actually wrote a a multi series thread on Twitter called The Thinker and the pr on this very idea uh and and I got I got it from uh Robert Anton Wilson uh whereby what he says is you know your thinker can think anything
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it wants right that you could think that the US is the greatest country in the world or it's a colonialized of all of the other countries you could think that free markets are the best thing in the world or that collectives kutes are
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going to be the way to the future but then the the point that gets made that I think is very helpful is once the Thinker latches on to one of those ideas The Thinker shuts down and the pr takes over and the pr is just our subconscious saying oh you
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believe that baseball is the national sport of America okay I'm going to reinforce that idea with everything you see everything you consume everything and literally some proponents of this say blinds you to all of the contrary evidence you I mean literally you it is
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invisible to you so another thing that I started to do uh was I would try to take an argument I didn't think was right and Steelman it in other words I would go and and I would try to insert myself in that reality tunnel and said okay I'm a
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Marxist who believes that free markets are exploitation and now let's steal that and what's interesting about it is what you do find and I want to get your opinion on this is that it is not the entirety of the other argument that
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you're disagreeing with that's wrough in fact many times there's a lot of things in it that are right and when when you do that you start to think and and and you you you try to introduce something that maintain uh things uh as they currently are have killed and that's
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nuance and context and perspective what what do you think I think that's absolutely true and a rule that I live by is that there are very few if any arguments in life where someone is not a little bit right and a little bit wrong
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it's very rare to be in a discussion with someone that's totally wrong and someone else is totally right I it's exceedingly rare and so I think the reason why Dogma is so dangerous is because you don't get to pick up on the nuances of the other person and the
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places where they might be right um you've already framed it as completely wrong from the start so yeah I definitely think that it is it's so important to recognize that you are wrong in some places and they are right in some places and every argument
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you get into yeah and one of the things that I of I've gotten in the habit of purposing many statements of opinion uh with hey I'm probably wrong but yeah because actually you're saying it to yourself right and so you're kind of preconditioning yourself to not like
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I always make fun of the people who put up on social media saying this is thei will die on and I always respect on with exactly the same response and I say I subscribe to the George S Patton School of making the other poor dumb bastards die on their
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Hills but I wonder great quote I wonder is it is it just that um that because I was I was rereading another uh guy I love Jed mck who's himself a fictional character and he's housed under spirituality but he ain't about spirituality he's much more about like
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no this is the way the world world really works and he was saying if you really want to destroy a people you just want to decimate a decent group of people and make them turn into barbarians with their belief systems and their belief structures and
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then you know you think of Alexander every time he conquered somewhere he left generals there and he said you marry the locals you worship their gods you learn their language and all of those things and like how brilliant that was right because they weren't coming in
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and inserting Macedonian complete rule or totality and do you think there's a way out do you think that um the same tools that maybe have in in essence captured us uh can liberate us 100% And I actually see it happening if just compare the way we talk now
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versus I think like 2016 2017 it's it's much healthier I think maybe people would disagree with me but I find that there's way more open-minded people than there were just you know eight years ago so I think it's it is currently getting better
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and relatively speaking the internet is still an extremely new tool and we're still in the midst of sort of as as you say on this podcast a great reshuffling part of that is reshuffling the internet you know and figuring out how it
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works um how how it can best serve us rather and and so do you have some ideas about that what would you do if I made you internet Zar I hate Zars by the way but if I made you an internet Zar what what would you do to further that that's a that is a tough question I
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think we need to be more exploratory than the ad model um you know the incentives on the internet are such that uh they can really cause you to create a lot of Devil's Bargains where you know the only way to get attention and money is a
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particular way of acting and I think we need to explore potentially different monetary incentive models I know that's that's really tricky but I would love to see some more experimentation there um some people think crypto can do it I'm not sure about that yet uh there have
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been the rise of things like substack and and um I know X just started paying uh but that's still based on the ad model so yeah something with the ad model I'd be really interested in um but I I can't really you know this is not my
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expertise and I'm not sure what that would look like the thing that I think is helpful is as you mentioned the number of unique voices that now can find platforms is larger than it has ever been in human history like and to to understand how important and how like
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fundamentally what what a Quantum jump that is readed Bill Bryson America One Summer I think 1921 is the full title of the book in which he he recounts that when Lindberg landed back uh here in the United States after flying across the ocean the guy
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who was speaking on the radio to announce and and give the listeners a sense of what was going on where Lindberg was Landing was the first human in human history to address more than I think it was 10 million other humans and and like I that line for
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whatever reason just stopped me dead when I was reading book was like holy we're brand we're babies we're brand new with all of this stuff and so like people always going well it's human nature and it's going to be this and be this yes absolutely it's very difficult
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to fight against our base code and DNA in human OS but by the same token you you're you're in a Cambrian like explosion of video channels like yours of new substacks of new podcasts and and we've gone from this idea of broadcast right I mentioned I
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Love Lucy right 63 million viewers was an average number of people watch I Love Lucy and then you understand well of course Society seemed much more homogeneous because everybody watch the same TV shows there were there were
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three networks there were two newspapers that mattered and no one else existed essentially yeah to this amazing you know Buffet of various views fiction non-fiction Etc and I kind of think one of the things that's going to come out of it is going to be like
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duration platforms are going to become are going to become really really important because I think that it isn't so much information like information with too much information man it's the idea of what kind of information that you is the particular type person that
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you are or me anyone go like oh I I love X Y and Z so I'm GNA go to this particular platform um is that something you see emerging in like your work as well 100% I I really see my work as curation um I'm really just looking at a lot of different sources
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that I think work and trying to put it together on a topic that's really just a type of curation and I see uh what you just talked about like curation platforms I think would would be a huge product um I would be interested in them I think think you know you had people
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watching KRON kite and that was maybe too too much of a a reality tunnel and then we have this explosion of maybe too many reality tunnels uh and it's now going back the other direction to maybe be a little bit more ordered and I think
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curation is going to be a big part of that absolutely you know one of the things that you do that I really love is you draw very broadly um you you can you can go from wienstein and igger to dappy duck and Rick and Morty and and and maybe that's motivated reasoning on my
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part because like I did an entire salon on Rick and Morty Jed McKenna and the meaning of life for my friends at inter intellect I've always told Anna she needs a new name because that's really hard to say yeah but but I'm a big fan of Anna
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too yeah but but Wonder like do you think do you ever get any push back on that do you ever like I I I I hate dichotomies for the most part because I think that most of the world is gray and either black nor white uh but like when
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whenever somebody is like well you can't talk about uh what wienstein said about uh suffering uh in the same tone of brick and Morty and I'm like well you can't they're talking about exactly the same thing like succession is King Le right and and Rick and Morty is the
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hero's journey except his story Circle and you know do does anyone ever like well that's not serious because you're bringing in the cartoons or I another one you had that I loved was Mr Rogers and the power of persuasion like I'd never thought about that and when I saw
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it I was like God damn it he's [Laughter] right I I get pushed back I I don't think I've gotten too much P push back for for pop culture things the only time I've ever seen push back is when there are super fans of somebody and they say
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that you know he meant something else so in my David Foster Wallace video I get push back from Super fence who like well he didn't quite mean it like that um you know that that happens occasionally or like in the Mr Rogers video I got push
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back from some people who are like he's not using these persu tactics on purpose he's just being persuasive because he's a nice and kind guy and so why would you bring him into this more persuasive manipulative frame and I think that's
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you know I understand why they're coming from there uh but whether Mr Rogers meant to do that or not it's kind of what he did and that was the point of the video is that maybe he just is so good it persuasive because that's just who he is and he used these things
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really well so um yeah I get for YouTube which tends to have pretty toxic comment sections I find my comic section to be full of love and support which is great that that that that that is great uh do you think what do you think about YouTube now you
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think they're ready to be disintermediated or are they goingon to continue to be the ones bringing the Ruckus I think I think they've just got such great Network effects um you know I don't know about the younger generation with how powerful Tik Tok is right now
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but YouTube just has the the network effects big time and they they did this thing where when they launched shorts which was competitor to Tik Tok they you know sent emails to all the creators saying if you do shorts we'll do a 50%
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Revenue share so they're trying these things and and that's way higher than normal so they're trying these things to get people to stay on the platform um and I think they'll probably be successful especially with the us being more friendly with Google
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obviously than Tik Tok yeah I I in speaking of uh things that sometimes get get push people's buttons like I don't have Tik Tok on my phone uh and for the very simple reason that I see it as an enormously power ful and successful brainwashing uh mechanism that and
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that's kind of run by the cccp and like okay I do see Tik Tok videos right because people put them on Twitter yes right but but but like the uh the idea that I mean I it made me think about it like you see all these people ban Tik Tok you can't have Tik Tok I don't know
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that I'm in that camp um because I hey I'm I'm I'm delighted that I live in a country that has uh the First Amendment like um and and and the litus test for free speech is you got to let people you utterly despise say what they want to
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say too or you're not really for free speech um but but what do you think about that because it it made it sent me down a rabbit hole of you know the kind of the Marshall clue and the medium is the message do do do you do you see that like hyper
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short uh real that Tik Tok has made so famous is that gonna take over or or no I think it it already has um it really that that short form content those bite-sized snacks are I work with uh you know youth in the summer and it's definitely taken control of their
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attention spans they are one two three four nothing too long um and yeah I think I think the Tik Tock method is is the norm now um and it's interesting how do you it's much harder to go from short to Long than long to short so once we're there I don't know
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how you bring it back out the other way the the thought on it is that you know I I kind of think well where can I get an edge where can I get an advantage and and I think that um and and I mean that just sort of I just like to do these
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puzzles and I'm not talking about me specifically uh but it does seem to me that uh the the people who are going to do really really well in the world have attention spans that are longer than a goldfishes uh are interested in a
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variety of things and willing to put the time effort and work in to to understand those things in other words are we creating a world where like we are signif and I and I don't mean this in a conspiratorial way at all right I don't mean like there's some nefarious group
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up here doing it I'm just saying is it emerging that like the majority of people are getting hooked on like these really short videos and that in a way that's dumbing them down and then there's this other group over here that is like I love
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those two but I'm gonna spend a lot more time watching Will's threp part series on happiness what do you think I think the world is is further dividing into those two camps and we are creating I think as you said unintentionally this um this world there's a great book uh
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that's sort of a an an ODed to mcluen and Postman amusing ourselves to death called the shallows um and it's somewhat of a pop science book but it's all about this idea that the internet just is great for you know broad strokes but it really
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fails most of the time in terms of depth and a lot of people are caught in the quote unquote shallows and it's interesting I find that Twitter for me is an incredible tool for idea Discovery but after I discover those ideas I need to get off of Twitter in
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order to really go deep on them and that is the extra step that everybody has to take because if I stayed on Twitter oh soon those ideas are down the river and I'm here's a new set of broad ideas that I'm interested in we just stay in the
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shallows you know so I think uh it's really important to jump out when you can um and I'm really interested in doing that and and trying to bring some of that to the Internet with with my videos uh as much as I can but well yeah I think you you definitely
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succeeded that you you certainly have one convert that you're talking to right now um but but you know on that what's interesting is I was not a YouTube guy right and uh I have a lot of young people who work for me and with this podcast in particular they're like Jim
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you got to release this on YouTube you got to release this on you and I'm like I don't YouTube I just like like I I why would I do that because I again talking about reality tunnels my reality tunnel was I love music and so I would
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often go to YouTube here checking out new music but that was my kind of single use case for it and and then I have one particular regly persuad some young guy who worked for me he's like just do me a favor just like I'm going to send you
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some links some YouTube links just watch what I send you and then tell me again that YouTube is and so he was very clever and crafty because he knew what would immediately like get me um and and but but then I what happened was I went down the YouTube rabbit hole and
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completely changed my opinion on YouTube it's like I like I I went back to him and I'm like Jesus like YouTube a search engine really it is and and especially the thing that's great about it being a search engine is it's a search engine
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for knowledge right and things you want to learn about and I've never had that kind of Paradigm in my mind and once that got in there like by use of YouTube Skyrocket it because like yeah there are so many really really bad fascinating things people ideas Etc that you can
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that you can discover via YouTube um that you simply couldn't before but then it kind of goes back to well yeah that now we're in an attention economy something you did a a a video essay on and what do you think about that are do you have like any rules for
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the the way you you follow uh that you that you dull out your attention I do I have very strict uh limitations on uh particular websites YouTube is is an example I have an add-on to my uh browser that blocks everything that's suggested so for me YouTube is a pure
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search engine I only go there to watch something that I want to watch I will not watch anything that is served to me um so that I that installation was great for me I Now go to YouTube very intentionally um on Twitter I don't follow anybody directly in the app but I
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have lists uh that I follow um through different software and so that is very helpful for me um you know separating my own tweeting although I haven't done much of it recently uh from following people and yeah I just Tred to really
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limit myself I would say when I first read amusing ourselves to death Neil postman's book um it really kind of almost shocked out of me the usage of streaming services Twitter YouTube by about 50% um and really turned me back towards
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books which I think was a good change um so yeah I'm I'm I'm very mindful of it of of how I use the different services and I think it's important because otherwise the services use you right right yeah that and you're kind of back to uh mclan again right we we we
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first make invent our tools and then our tools invent us I'm watching that uh but um I the the idea of having the limits I love the idea of not taking anything the algo gives you I'm going to try that that's very interesting to me um and lists on uh Twitter X let me ask you
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that like are you excited about like everyone I talk about a polarizing figure right Elon uh like so you either hate him I'm leaving Twitter forever and you know they you see the next day there they are no way yeah no way but with this whole
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new video thing he's doing you ever see yourself going over there and and putting your series there I do I am not loyal to a platform I am simply interested in a place that treats creators the best um so if Twitter creates a uh way of Revenue and uh discovery
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that is better than YouTube I have no quals going to Twitter um there are sort of scary moments I I would guess as a Creator you know famously ninja who was a famous video game streamer went from twitch to this thing called mixer which was Microsoft's
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twitch and it failed horribly and then when he came back he didn't have nearly as many people following him so there are concerns not that I'm any kind of ninja or anything but there are concerns around um you know losing your audience
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once you try something else and if that thing doesn't work coming back is really tough but I could see Twitter working out I don't know too much about their plan but I'd be loyal to something that just is is gives the best deal to creators yeah and that's kind of what we
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are trying to do with my new company trony Ventures right it's like we are we think that there's this huge cultural lag um and that people are thinking oh well the old models work right and gee they're perfect no they're not they're
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collapsing and not only are they collapsing people are really I think kind of asleep at I'll give you an example so one of our under our infinite media vertical we're doing a book publishing uh concern it's really straightforward um the author is going
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to get 70% of the royalties we're going to take 30 we're going to give the author a dashboard so that he or she can look every day as to how many of their books sold where they sold we're going to uh use AI agents on it that the author can say either go full agent and
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if you go full agent it would mean oh Will's book just spiked in Omaha we're going to send our agents to look for podcasts and substacks that are there that might be interested in Will's book and oh we found them we're going to make
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an appointment for you to be on that podcast and then report it all back to you like these tools have been around well not all of them the AI agents are relatively new but like the the it seems to me that that there's this huge gaping hole
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where you can do it you can make loads of money as the publisher and yet still change the economics dramatically in favor of the Creator and I'm I'm kind of a a a Gass that this is the case in a variety of Industries not just book publisher right which is notoriously you
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know uh stiff like and in in a in a constant state of stasis and and death um but like the the thing that I find found interesting about what you said is also the key to this matter I think you said you don't care about the platform you just want what's going to
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be best for you as the Creator and your audience right I think like that is just that is a basic thing that yeah I'm sure that there are some people would say no I'm a YouTuber until I die right that's a hill I'll die on well go ahead sure
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die on that Hill uh but I think that the the uh the Confluence of these things in other words creators finally have up the greatest variance amplifier in human history the internet right now they also have tools that make things like
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publishing a book or doing video essays Etc relatively easier than they certainly were like 10 years ago and and next up we're going to have people like us and I'm sure we'll have a lot of competitors I hope um doing like oh well why are we using that model when we can
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make a ton of money by just keeping 30% over here and we give all this other simplification and and so I think that it's you know you you mentioned earlier that the when we were chatting about attention it seems to me that like in AI
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what they did was to be a real nerdy geek here they maximize the objective function which means what's our goal for revenue and clicks right well guess what you can turn that dial over to creativity you can turn turn that dial over to you know brilliant essays
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to a variety of things and and now we have that and it just seems to me that it's going to be this I it's so cliche but like a golden age for a diversity of thought opinion Etc am I just a raving lunatic here no I'm also quite optimistic uh about the future for creators
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I know there are other people who vly disagree with me on that but I I really think that the Innovation that you know different Technologies are bringing about and different you know as you just discussed uh models for creators to make a living
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they're just going to grow and and people are going to get more creative with them and I yeah I'm optimistic like you Jim I I totally see it becoming more of a golden age I think uh that that's what's uh gotten me kind of so excited
44:04
about this but it also kind of leads into another one of my favorite of your videos and that was about our our great friend uh Joseph Campbell and his hero with thousand faces and then of course the story Circle that Hamond uh simplified that to like if we're going
44:22
to write a book about this right what would what would be the what would be the hero's journey of let's let's use you you're you're a great Creator so how how do you take your hero's journey in this in this new environment I you know I think we talked about
44:46
different we talked about Tik Tok earlier being this different place um and how to get a leg up and I think for me uh being in a a place of relative Comfort right now in having done YouTube since 2014 I feel the need to uh get a little uncomfortable
45:10
and try a bunch of different things um you know use use social platforms a little more integrate maybe shorts into my long form and uh and just try a bunch of different things to see where they go um merch uh I'm really good friends with
45:32
another YouTuber named coffeezilla and we discuss all the time the different places that we could go and we like to challenge each other on on different ideas and I see him as really helping me through being a supporting character in the hero's journey um and yeah just
45:53
diving into darkness and seeing what I find and uh shedding the things that fail and keeping the things that uh end up going well and returning home there you go yeah you're you're searching for the her patterns of that story Circle and
46:12
then you're gonna do great essays about them in in the one you did on um I think it was on Dan harman's Story Circle uh it was you know basically three things that you looked at you looked at Life Death Consciousness unconsciousness order chaos the one I'm
46:33
really interested in is the order chaos talk to me talk to me a bit about that and how that informs your own work well I think stories in general are one of our most powerful tools to fight entropy you know um we dive into the chaos and
46:55
come out out with a more ordered existence uh a lesson and how to fight the chaos um and really cultures in general are collections of stories that we have um you know made to help us survive and uh they are somewhat you know their structures of order against a crazy
47:20
world out there and so I find you know order chaos is is also my most I'm most interested in it uh of the three as well and it's it comes up so much in my work it comes up in the happiness series all the time uh but stories in particular I really I see them as the
47:43
best way for us to fight entropy because we go in we figure out the problem and we solve it or we go in and we realize the problem is unsolvable and we accept it both are a way of dealing with with entropy yeah and that leads us right
47:59
into the happiness Trilogy which I thought was absolutely great have you read uh Darren Brown's book on happiness I have yeah it's great yeah I thought it was great too um and uh I discovered it uh you know it was just Serendipity uh
48:17
we have a family uh Amazon account and another member of my family had bought had bought that book and I'm like oh what's this I'm like oh seren tiity I love it what what uh what spurred on uh because that caused a lot of changes looking at your prior work then into
48:38
happiness right so yeah first off why why were you drawn so significantly to the idea of Happiness it's because it's a rough one man it's really R really hard so that that kind of goes into the two to hard which probably led to the long form but you know I just have like
49:01
a ton of questions let's go with the first one why did why was that one where you thought okay you know what this one's gonna got to be a this is a minseries and it's gonna be long form all those 10 minute like this needs this needs the longer
49:17
treatment yeah you know it was something that started to bother me in the mid 20 like around 2015 I noticed discussions of the the subject were really every what everybody had common sense about this notion I kept saying to myself I think that's
49:41
wrong um you know there there are all these sort of things that people repeat about the subject and I'm thinking to myself I don't think that's right at all I think most of what people are talking about here is actually wrong and it really started to bother me so
49:58
much so that I was really looking for someone else out there particularly someone who's a well-known philosopher who put words to this and I found him his name is Dan hin and I think he is probably the best living philosopher on the
50:17
subject uh and the way he was able to explain it really solved a bunch of things for me and I said wow I need to do this you know you had Derek cers on recently and he he made this he said this thing uh you know that's shallow happy and I'm interested in deep happy
50:39
and that's exactly right I wanted to find someone who explained deep happy because deep happy doesn't explain much but I wanted to find a philosopher who really took deep happy and explained it in depth and I found him and I said I
50:54
need to spread this and I ended up you know talking to him a bunch uh he endorsed my work and then I ended up connecting his work to a bunch of other research and I said oh this thing's really exploded I gotta make a series out of this yeah all right well let's drive
51:12
some more viewers to the series and give us give us the uh tease on deep happy so that our listeners and Watchers can are going to the next thing they're going to do after they listen to our entire podcast right guys you're listen to the
51:26
whole thing you're not going to click over but teas them on on un deep ver shallow yeah well if you just think about um a lot of people say definitions are not important but I think a lot of those people haven't been hit by a definition so good that it's completely changed
51:50
their life and um there there's really three ways we talk about the word the first is satisfact talking about satisfaction so people say I was really happy with that meal most people aren't chasing that kind of that's not the happiness most
52:05
people are thinking about it's an important uh type of happiness but that's not the happiness most people talk about then you know people might uh eat a really good meal or watch a really good movie and and say wellow I feel really happy right now but then an hour
52:22
later it it's faded but then there's this third version of Happiness um that I was looking for and found and it's a lasting one it is uh meant to last weeks months um if you're lucky years and the way it's explained is that there's multiple levels so the Buddhists
52:46
they love to say this thing where you know your emotions are like the waves on the ocean but your Center is actually the depth of the ocean it's it's unchanged um and the depth of the ocean is what we're after with deep happiness
53:03
um and then you know the other stuff is is icing on the cake and the depth of the ocean are things like confidence lasting Tranquility uh this concept that I love called compression versus uncompression which is basically just how free do you feel you know when
53:22
people are stressed their mind gets kind of narrow and they can only think about the the one thing they're stressed about but a really uncompressed person usually a I don't know a hiker a ski bum a a Buddhist monk you know the world is
53:35
totally open to them right uh and you think of a compressed wesser oh getting to my next meeting um those are the things that can actually be quite lasting for somebody and they are a very deep happiness for that person and then
53:52
the things that are sort of uh a little bit more passing but still important um are things like flow which is really being super engaged with life and exuberance you know being really excited about life I think of like you know a Jack Black who's genuinely exuberant
54:09
about everything um and then there's things that are and this is where I think we we take so many missteps on happiness and why happiness is seen as kind of shallow is that the most visible aspects of Happiness are the most shallow aspects which are sort of of
54:25
cheerfulness laughing Joy um you know Joy can be a window into a deeper happiness but it still tends to be a much shorter State than others so um those are the the sort of deep happy States and I think it's important to sort of think about them and figure
54:45
out how you can find them in your life because I think the last the lasting version is much much more important than any of these other shallow and inauthentic notion we talk about in American culture yeah and uh I I agree let's the one that I really resonates
55:04
with me is compression versus uncompressed yeah uh because that seems to have the broadest effect that I've seen at least in one's overall life yeah um and and do you think there's a way that people listening to us right now or
55:24
watching us right now like after they're done with us is there a way that they can start un or decompressing their life if they like a typical Westerner are at a pretty compressed light you know I the reason uncompression is the maybe the trickiest
55:43
one and and so overlooked is because I would say it's one of the most environmental ones um in the sense that it's very hard to just get your mind uncompressed um by just staying in your desk chair uncom compassion really is one of those things that comes to you when you
56:03
are somewhere else um in fact the Dan hin the philosopher one of the reasons he wrote the book is you know he was this he was this professor at this really well-known philosophy Department you know great success thought he was happy and then he went on this vacation
56:19
and went surfing and he's like oh my god I've been unhappy this whole time and it was because he had this sudden uncompression being in a different place surfing just watching the birds and he realized wow I have been so stressed out
56:35
and I really think unfortunately it is one of those harder ones where you have to kind of change your environment a little bit or change your activities to um something completely different and I think the out not everybody loves the outdoors but I really think the outdoors
56:51
is a is a great way um just expand space nature uncompression and expansiveness are very similar um yeah uncompression is a tough one but that that's like the easiest one is is trying to just change up your environment and and be some somewhere a
57:11
little more relaxed the other versions of it that are more individualized are probably a bit tougher the uh the importance of your environment is really interesting to me because I there's a lot lot of research that points to exactly the point you are
57:28
making um that's like unhappy uh stuck whatever go someplace else do do do something else something that I used to do just naturally um I feel very lucky and very grateful that in in under the terms that you conclude lead to happiness I'm I'm very happy um and and
57:53
and one of them is this and why I asked specifically about it is this uh uncompression uh I'm very UNC compressed but but but but I also wonder whether that was something that I just locked into let me give you the example
58:09
and see what your responses I for the longest time had what my wife considered like a bizarre habit and my bizarre habit was I would do things at random and and so and I really mean random like I would flip a coin and let where it landed decide where what I was
58:30
going to go and do that day I would go into to Tower Records and buy 50 CDs literally at random just to see what was new and what was different I would go to a book or in bookstore this is what really drove her crazy I would just go and I would just grab books at random
58:50
and buy them and and read and she went like you're not rich enough yet this is when I was younger you're not rich enough to be so eccentric Jim you can't that but but but what what happened was I think in a way and I had this thought when I was
59:11
getting ready to chat with you and going through your stuff and and watching your stuff again and then reading my researchers write up it's like I wonder if that didn't lead to that because it was kind of like the first thing and by
59:25
the way I discovered some of for example I I was one of the earliest uh listeners to techno and house music back when it was called European new beat and the only the only reason I was well was because I bought several of those CDs randomly I love that and I'm like w this
59:48
is really good what do you think I think that you you know there's probably some genetic or or personality component where you're just naturally that way and you know when I when when I think of the word compression I also think and this is why
1:00:06
environment matters so much a lot of compression is people kind of compressing you compressing your spirit making you be a certain way and um so in that sense it's kind of the sleep of indiv individuality to be compressed and so when you say that you kind of
1:00:24
centrically pulling things off the shelf at at a whim that sounds like you're just very comfortable being yourself and not worried about what your wife is thinking or what other people in the store are thinking and that is just naturally going to lead to a certain
1:00:40
kind of uncompression definitely yeah and I I I'm I'm fascinated by it because like I do think you you you brought up the idea that maybe that's just you maybe that's a genetic predisposition right and and I and I do wonder about
1:00:57
that because um I I've told other people about this and it's really interesting because most people's reaction is to give me this and for those who are listening and not watching I'm just staring hey you are so weird Jim like why why would you ever ever do that
1:01:21
and yet I like when when I was kid and literally I I got punished for being smart I I I I I was in a Catholic school I'm 63 so this is back in the 60s in the real Dark Ages the 60s Children of the 20th century not the upcoming 16s and
1:01:43
and they had this little Sr reading thing that you you know basically it was a card you read the card you wrote up the answer to the question and then you went out to the next one and I Lov I loved reading and so I just I read to the end of the thing I not not knowing
1:02:01
that this was in third grade and that I had read all the way through the end of eth grade so instead of sending me to the library what did they make me do they made me sit quietly with my hands making a Christmas tree at my desk when
1:02:20
the other kids were doing the hour of the SR reading exactly right it's crazy and so I went home and I'm complaining about this and my dad goes come here and I went okay and so we walked into our formal living room where he had a I grew up with books
1:02:40
everywhere and and so he brings me over to the encyclopedia mechanica he takes out the a volume gives it to me and he goes read these but I did and what was really cool is and and I'm trying I'm trying to figure out a way to get people who like didn't
1:03:04
have that experience or whatever just to naturally fall into that habit so one of the things that happened there was I got so fascinated by some of the things that I was reading earlier right like you know a for Albania let's just take
1:03:21
Albania and that that I did like like looked up and back then there was no internet to like figure this stuff out my mom even complained to my dad she was like now he makes me take him to the public library all the time uh but like are there are like could you do you
1:03:38
think you could do a course do you think that you could like put together a series on YouTube that whose net result would be at the end of it somebody who would through it became more uncompressed I think so definitely I think you know the fir the
1:03:58
the very the thing is is it becomes natural to you but there are people out there who need it defined for them before they can even understand what they're doing um and so that's why the series starts out with the being kind of heavy on the philosophy and the definitions
1:04:13
but it's the Practical stuff obviously is the most important stuff um and I do think it's possible you know you I would say despite the fact that genetics are definitely a part of this whole thing I would say they're pretty underrated uh
1:04:30
or sorry pretty overrated in terms of what uh what changes you can make and I would definitely like when you talked about reading the encyclopedia and getting interested in things what's interesting to me there is that you did so kind of volitionally even though your
1:04:50
dad put it in front of you you were the one that ended up being interested in things and going for it and it's pretty clear in research on education and stuff that it's volition that leads to learning um and how we get people to do
1:05:06
things volitionally is to me the most important thing in the world uh because that's how you actually create change the brain isn't going to change if it doesn't feel delici doing what it's doing so I think one of the big parts of the series uh one of the
1:05:24
big major sources of happiness is autonomy and getting people to understand autonomy on a deep level and the ways it functions and how you can use it in your life to kind of become more yourself and less at uh less at the behest of your environment um the more
1:05:42
uncompressed you could become definitely absolutely yeah and that makes me think of uh in another context I uh I used a quote from Kurt vonet uh actually it was John Irvine quoting vaget uh something vaget said to him when they were both
1:06:00
teaching at I think it was the Iowa school for writing um and it was along the lines of by all means you can treat serious subjects you absolutely you can be a serious writer but if you're gonna be a serious writer you also better be
1:06:19
entertaining and and like that's what but that's what you do quite naturally like the when I watched your your video series and yes I did watch them all um I but then I went back and rewatched in anticipation of our conversation today you do it in what I think is exactly
1:06:41
that right mix in other words I love the way you you you jumble up popular culture with heavyweight philosophers with you know kind of the full story the way you lift it happy you went through all of the various views on it which I thought was great because that gives
1:07:00
context um and it just seems to me that you're right though but I wonder is your ability to both be entertaining while you are educating is that enough to get that person's bition engage you see what I mean I'm looking for kind of cause and
1:07:21
effect right and I think one of the causes of that volition would be the fact that hey you're very entertaining when you're doing your video essays I think you're absolutely right if people think back to their favorite teachers I guarantee you that they tend
1:07:38
to be someone they really liked um and that made them more valal towards the subject uh you know part of the reason I ended up loving history was because I had a string of incredible history teachers uh versus extremely boring Math teachers
1:07:54
and turns out math is my worst subject interesting so um I think it it's very clear to me that entertainment matters uh and likability all these things that people don't think are important when learning about something are super
1:08:11
important uh it's just about the line where entertainment goes so you know edutainment has a line I think where you can go too far and then the education kind of stops and people are more interested in what what's his next joke going to be or what's the next cut scene
1:08:29
going to be and I'm I'm always trying to be very careful about that yeah and I and I I think you do it particularly well I don't know that there's a formula per se but I am enamored of that idea that uh like your approach seems to me to be the winning
1:08:53
formula so to speak that if you were going for I I honestly believe that we are approaching a a time when great teachers are going to be able to make millions of dollars because they're going to they're one to many right like that radio guy from The Bill Bryson book
1:09:11
if you have now had the ability to educate and entertain and then you can monetize that through YouTube or whatever platform happens to be the most uh beneficial to you is that uh uh educator Entertainer um the better but like I
1:09:29
that's what gets me excited about it and so what are you excited about working on right now in addition to um everything we've been talking about like what's what's the thing that is making you super excited to be getting it done I'm really uh interested in a
1:09:50
couple it's funny happiness is such this big topic and then the next one I'm interested in is also this crazily huge thing um called the free energy principle uh and some it's a theory about the brain and uh it kind of lines up with a lot of recent brain research
1:10:14
and depending on who you ask they might tell you it's the biggest Theory since natural selection but uh other people would say not even close uh and it's from a British psychologist psychiatrist uh in the schizophrenia field and he's his name is Carl friston
1:10:33
total genius um and free energy is being used in AI systems as a concept uh because one of the umbrella terms for it uh is active inference and uh the brain is just a prediction machine um so I'm super interested in in the free energy principle and and how it
1:10:56
can describe so many different things and again it goes back it it's very relevant to the whole order chaos thing we were talking about earlier too um that that's that's a project I'm really interested in that's still kind of in
1:11:10
the nent stages uh but I also took a break for a while because I had some health issues and I needed to make that my full-time job uh and I'm kind of the out on those thankfully finally and um I'm also because I've taken this break I don't
1:11:30
feel Tethered to any one particular style I'd like to kind of be a little more exploratory while still making videos uh some videos in the same way I used to you know um the I the you bring up the schizophrenia and I know a little bit about the free energy principle um
1:11:52
probably not nearly as much is you um but I I remember reading one time uh about a speculative psychological uh theory about schizophrenia that essentially found that it it posited it that schizophrenia was simply filter failure and and that what as you know
1:12:17
our brains and our minds can only process a a very limited amount of information per second for example and you know it's something like I'm making these numbers up so don't anyone say actually on Twitter um but we can of the of the million that
1:12:37
hit our perception Fields every second we can process 44 of them yeah and and you know that links to attention things that you've already worked on um and that schizophrenia simply doesn't have that filter and they're getting bombarded with all
1:12:56
the the one million and yeah guess what those are all the voices like I I love the book all the light we cannot see and I just discovered I don't watch TV very often but I was reading and I found that Netflix had made a miniseries of this book and I'm like wow I'm gonna
1:13:13
definitely watch that and and I did and it was fun but uh you know it's the the idea behind the free energy principle that that could actually be that could be like a 12p part series Almost if I if what I know about it is by the very
1:13:33
little that I know about it I can already I can already get to 12 are you thinking something Grand and ambitious like that uh pretty grand um and I may I may try and cut it down and just hit on the main points we'll see it's the way way I do research is I
1:13:54
really try and read everything first to get that bird's eye view and I think once you sort of immerse yourself in literature for long enough you come to a point where you're like I know how I'm going to structure this it just comes to
1:14:08
you um but you need to spend the time in it long enough and I think it'll be interesting I'm not sure I want to trudge through the same thing I did with the happiness series like it was a blast to make but I don't know if I want to go straight into something else like that
1:14:24
immediately so we'll see but I I'm definitely interested in in making something on on that subject and to go back to the sort of the filter failure there there's really interesting especially in psychedelic research about how maybe the the Paragon of mental
1:14:43
health is mental flexibility and part of the reason why psychedelics help is it maybe takes a brain that's too ordered something that's hyperfocused on some maybe OCD or or hyperfocused on something that's giving them anxiety sort suddenly opens that up and
1:15:01
allows them more flexibility and then on the total other side of the spectrum is schizophrenia where it's way too open and so it's really interesting to see these different sort of things come into consilience where maybe flexibility is
1:15:17
the thing that everybody's after with the brain rather than something that's maybe a little too ordered a little too chaotic um and I'm super interested in that just because in the same way I'm interested in happiness I'm interested in mental
1:15:31
health and and all that kind of stuff so yeah I and as I said to you before we started recording the challenge here might be that we're not going to disagree on anything and we all have we both have exactly the same interests because like like uh I I am fascinated
1:15:51
by happiness uh after reading Michael pollen's book how to change your mind I completely changed my mind about psychedelics I grew up under the nixonian lies of uh you know this will fry your brain and I believed it I never would have touched a
1:16:10
psychedelic when I was a kid because the propaganda worked and then I read that book and I gotta tell you I was really angry uh because like when you when you look at the real history of psychedelics um and the research I'm a big supporter of maps I'm a big
1:16:29
supporter of of professionally overseeing psychedelic experiences for helping with mental health issues the John's Hopkins research is pretty bulletproof uh lot of other research coming online that by the way he details from all the research they burned
1:16:51
literally I mean I just had the hardest yeah I mean it's really it's like almost a crime well not almost a crime it is CRI it is a crime what they did right and even now we're financing a movie uh about the experience of five separate individuals using psychedelic
1:17:12
therapy um through our infinite films Division and like the stories in some circumstances are heartbreakingly sad but also just also heartwarmingly just like oh my God look at what happened from just three sessions with the medically supervised
1:17:35
psychedelic therapy and and and it just seems to me that um I think you're absolutely right about your observation about a mind that is too rigid you know that brings you back to Lau right and and the dowy you know the being rigid and and stiff is a disciple of death being
1:17:57
flexible and uh Supple and uh bendable is a disciple of life and like it does seem to me that we finally are creating uh uh a world and the tools in which we can make these connections uh make sense again and and that gets you back to the kind of
1:18:19
curated platform which I think you know you would you would probably be like really great at oh I appreciate that and it would be really interesting to me and I can just see the idea of multiple series connecting kind of saying maybe even having notes on the
1:18:36
side saying you know if you liked this episode you should watch these curated things over here because there's a lot of connection between these two things you know um all right I'll stew on that Jim I like that to and and you might
1:18:54
even be able to contact a certain corporation .c that might be very very interested in that project okay well listen well this has been absolutely delightful I highly recommend all of your work to all of our listeners and viewers uh you can find it on uh
1:19:19
YouTube and where where else are you available to people uh my socials and my YouTube channel is just my name will Scot SC o d r you can find me pretty much everywhere through um that name uh and that yeah that's where you can find me everywhere
1:19:39
yep I don't post on X much but I plan on it I'll be back yeah all right well now we've come to the the time where we are going to in fact make you the emperor of the world for a day you can't you know the rules I think you can't kill anybody and you
1:19:59
can't send anyone to a reeducation camp but what you can do is we're GNA hand you that magic microphone and you can speak two things into it that you will incept the entire eight billion population of the planet the next day whenever their day begins they're going
1:20:17
to wake up and they're going to look at their significant other and say God honey I've just had two of the best ideas of the world and I'm going to act on them that hey what do you got for us the first one I think uh I don't know
1:20:32
who wrote this but it it just it stuck in my brain so much and I think about it all the time and it's whatever keeps your brain inthrall doesn't necessarily do anything for your heart um I think about that all the time because there are so many things in the
1:20:51
modern world that keep our brains inthrall but our hearts still feel empty and I think about you know just seeking the things that make you feel like a fully formed human being a whole person uh with full Vitality more than following the things that just keep you
1:21:09
engaged and absorbed um in the bad sense there's good versions of absorbed and engaged of course um and I guess the second it uh comes from a mentor of mine which was um in life not Stories the supporting characters are the main
1:21:33
characters um and you know just the people who drop everything they're doing to help that pay attention even when they're busy are kind to you unselfish in Friendship thoughtful when you're having trouble eager to Bear your burdens those
1:21:50
are the people we remember on our deathbed and I think um I I think about that saying all the time the supporting characters are the real main characters and I guess I'll have to add a third because it's one of my favorite quotes of all time from uh
1:22:06
one of my favorite movies Bill and Ted's Excellent Venture be excellent to each other and party on dudes I am going to allow a special dispensation for three inceptions you are three Inception guest because I also love that movie and I love that quote be
1:22:29
excellent to one another and party on that makes a lot of sense to me well listen will this has been absolutely delightful I wish you the very best and I will be watching very closely because I think you're on to something thank you Jim it's been an absolute pleasure that