"School & The Modern World Failed Us!"- #1 Reason This Generation Is Struggling | Eric Weinstein

[Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with Tom I am here with somebody that I am very excited to have a conversation with Eric Weinstein thank you so much for joining me man I've watched so many videos with you and I think you have an extraordinary way of breaking things down in a hyper logical way so I thought this would be a lot of fun and we bumped into each other at the talks at teal is aptly called teal talks that's right it's a series yes which you guys sadly aren't releasing which I'm horrified by at least one and that's the one that your dude that you did with werner herzog right but that is your show which I'm very excited about called the portal which I want to start there I should I want to understand this concept so I'm obsessed with the movie The Matrix and when I say obsessed I really think it is the perfect metaphor for the human condition it's become the dominant metaphor of my life I think about it all the time when I'm trying to explain to people the trajectory of my own life like that is the perfect thing there was a period where I was stuck in the matrix I had no sense that there were rules to the world that some of them could be bent and broken and all that and that I could completely change the outcome that I got by changing the way that I think about the world and so you said that the matrix and other movies like that are a metaphor for something that is real what is that real thing well I think that that you're pointing to it that in essence it is by analogy talking about the real world and once you make the connections I mean I don't know whether you're really down for all three funds literally down oh oh the other two no I did not think they were good well there's part there's a part of - that's necessary which part would that well they architects speech probably what part I don't remember - and three well I was just full disclosure for years I used to pretend they didn't exist I feel I hate them so much I need to re-watch them let's stick with one of the things Oh perfect okay yeah I think one was almost unbeatable I mean there was one serious flaw where humans were being used for batteries rather than computation I don't know quite why they did that but it the way I saw it was that it was talking about the very real state of our world in which we are expected to believe some sort of cradle to grave illusion the world that has been pulled over our eyes and by turning it into a sci-fi context they were able to talk about it very directly and you see this for example in Islam where everybody understands what the metaphors are and that there are certain ways that you can bring up very dangerous topics through indirection and that's the way I saw it was it was a non-fiction picture discussing our actual world through a layer of indirection so that it wouldn't be called a documentary I actually have a shirt that says The Matrix was a documentary and obviously I wear it tongue-in-cheek but there there is something so my whole bent in life is that and I probably take a far more simplistic approach than you do and I actually want to talk to you about how consciousness comes into being which normally I'm not interested in but I think you might have some interesting insights but when I think about the fact that what we're looking at really is a virtual interpretation of the stimulus coming into our brain and it was David Eagleman who first gave me the way to think about it and he said think of it this way your brain is encased in total darkness and yet you feel like light is actually reaching your brain but in fact it's not it's hitting your eye it's being translated into neural chemical signals or electrochemical signals and your brain is interpreting it and you create this reality that's good enough that you don't bump into too much [ __ ] but the reality is that it's it is not a one-for-one representation of existence and even if you just think about the spectrum of light is already so narrowed in terms of what we're able to interpret you just start thinking about okay wait a second if this is if this isn't a one-for-one representation of reality how much of my belief system to keep it really simple how much of my belief system is shaping what I see and that was like the first thread that I started to pull out and then it was the brain is plastic and you can make you can actually change the physical structures and function of your brain and that was all coming to me at a time where I felt hopelessly lost and I felt like I was too stupid to succeed you you might actually know this reference have you seen Amadeus the movie a long time ago right there's a character in there called solely airy and solely airy I used to yeah yeah okay thank you so I I have long thought it was a real dude and the the punch line to his character is that he laments to God he said why did you make me just good enough to realize how much better Mozart is and that haunted him and it was like make me an imbecile leave me to the point where I can't understand this [ __ ] guy's genius and I'm fine then I can just go about my day and enjoy his music or make me as good or better than him but don't put me in this weird purgatory of I'm good enough to realize that he's truly extraordinary and that I'll never be that good and so I graduate college and that's exactly how I felt I'm just smart enough to realize how dumb I really am and that was emotionally destructive and I was in a super super dark place and it was that what obviously didn't have the realization at that time but it ends up being this understanding that my I'm contributing to my brains interpretation of the world and if I switch this belief from I'm just smart enough to realize how dumb I am to realizing that humans can learn then my entire life will change and that began the obsession with the matrix so we have a few open threads here we've got a David Eagleman tear respective of the brain in a jar with the law from Descartes and the idea that for example you and I have never met I sit here in my I mean just assuming that we actually our brains encased in a skull I sit here in my jar you sit here in yours and we have the illusion that somehow we have met in a context but in fact there has been no no direct contact so how do you deal with this and I think what's been fascinating for me is watching the world let's say wake up to the the dress or the yani Laurel puzzles and suddenly Laurel what's that well remember the dress was it was a black and blue or white and gold oh yeah I didn't know what it's called alright then you hear some audio and somebody says oh he said Laurel the person says no it was eme and you realize that after a while your friend is not pulling your leg that in fact we are seeing totally different worlds now I grew up colorblind and so my brother and I share the exact same color blindness so we were always in perfect agreement and our parents you know it would sort of freak out if one of them left town because then it would be two against one and clearly our reality was right in theirs was wrong yeah so that you you do learn that your oom felt that that world that you can see or perceive or taste or touch or understand get shifted I don't know I just checked my my Wi-Fi when I was in the green room in order to see what what networks were available but I can't see them in here because I need I need an aid and so in essence we don't think of that as being like a jailbreak out of our own belt but that's what it is and that's what the portal concept is all about once you become convinced that you're not actually in the real world that the stories that are being fed to you were manifestly untrue that the entire social construction is not what it appears to be that there are hidden passages trapdoors panic rooms everywhere it becomes pretty addictive because you can't imagine that you never noticed this before now so I want to I want to get into like what some of these are like in functioning reality because I know that you're you seem pretty serious about your love of finding these moments that are these portals into another world and I've also heard you talk about like actual space travel like how much of this is shifting your perspective and just like oh I'm seeing life you know through somebody else's lense and how much of this is like know a fundamental based reality were we're sort of altering the state of consciousness kind of thing well it's an interesting question the altered consciousness issue whether you're trying to get through through mindfulness psychedelics silent retreat there are brain states that many people have never experienced so for example I did not understand that there are programs in my mind that are like fire extinguishers in a house you've lived in for several years if you've never had a fire you've never used the extinguisher however it doesn't mean the program isn't there and they run an only under exotic circumstance is it a real example well a real example would be when your hygiene drops below a certain level I find that my risk-taking changes character and that once I've had a shower my risk-taking goes back to its previous state I didn't know that until I was on a trek across the great Himalayan range in in Kashmir and we went several days without showers and it got really pretty ranked and more or less risk just started taking all sorts of completely insane risks like really serious and you think that was tied to the hygiene well I went out with other people who were maybe influencing that I would have thought that maybe I mean it was wasn't controlled and then we found a waterfall wish to take a shower and suddenly I was back to my old reasonably liked one shower was enough to kick me back into my previous setting I've never heard anyone else discuss this but it was a pretty clean you know probably took you know ten minutes at post shower I was back to worrying about what the risks were whoa that's really really interesting and not to derail too far down that particular rabba hoax I and I want to come back out and help me remember this if I forget I want to come back out to the concept of portals but for a second so as a father I'm sure you think about this kind of thing like so if I think about all right we have these mechanisms they've been honed over millions of years of evolution to exist in a certain way and now we exist in this relatively I mean in terms of the the scope of life on earth this is a [ __ ] blip like we are living in the span of a single blink in terms of like the stretch of time so we haven't really evolved for the circumstances in which we live and if you know that all right just not taking a shower for a few days completely changes my relationship to risk what does living in a city do what does technology do like you must begin to ask yourself questions about how do i shape my kids physical reality or do I want to write exactly like me okay so people talk about forest bathing I want to [ __ ] Tokyo bathe I want to go to a deeper more densely populated metropolis right I don't understand my own like fetish with robots and stuff like that but dude when I say I'm literally wearing a ring with a robot face on it okay I've got a thing so like do you think about that like do I just leave things the way they are do I shove my kid through a portal of like back to nature go live on an organic farm like that kind of thing or well both I mean in part I want them to spend time and what is closer to what you were describing is evolutionary theorists call it lazy ei EE ei what does the environment of evolutionary adapted okay this is our mythological savanna home in which presumably were just like oh okay this is this is what these these fingers and opposable thumbs were for right so then why do you want to do that well because in part that's where most of as you mean I'm just riffing off what you were saying but are you sign up from a health perspective like that's what I think about mental health physical health it just seems like if I wouldn't parent I'd probably be pushing them in that way well wouldn't it be crazy not to spend at least a decent chunk where you were maximally adapted to make use of all of the millennia that you're talking about so that that would be my dad there is a base assumption hiding in that but if you're right so the base assumption hiding in that is that it would be I think you were saying that the base assumption is there would be a higher degree of alignment maybe the right word spiritually physically so that there's a sense of deeper gratification or peace or joy or pleasure or something positive yes you know when the grid goes down to suddenly all the things that you've been depending upon that are electricity based cease to function yes or when supply chains break down so I was in New York City when there was a hurricane and I couldn't get a D batteries to save my life so we live we live in a very I guess on top of very thin crust so it's good to have an idea of what happens when that crust breaks and you might have to start a fire without matches it makes sense to have an idea that you can go for a period of time without food lots of different reasons so printed yep trying to bring bringing all these things at home at some level we're riding on a technological substrate and so it would be crazy to say no you kids need to learn how to push a plow because this word-processing thing might not work out on the other hand you want them to spend time closer to where humans have spent most of their evolutionary history and you want them to be able to navigate the stack to understand how they got here so you know the same people who might operate a slingshot might have shot a bow and arrow might have shot a rifle you know and have an idea of the evolution that is the Taser so you want people to have an idea from whence they came and what is that thing and then you want them to be absolutely in the moment making use of all the things that we have now I find that the internet and digital consumption has totally changed the micro chunking of my attention you can't really easily understand what life was like before the internet if this is your only context and can you explain micro chunking well remember when it was you know I tell a joke sometimes that I don't think Twitter's negatively affected my attention span because I could still get through most of the longer tweets in one sitting it's good yeah so that problem of why is it that I can only pay attention to tiny punchy things has to do with being habituated to wanting an instant gratification I don't want to put in the time the energy the work to decode things that you know there's no Canon so I have no you know you and I have really spent very little time together if I start referencing a poem I think of that as me throwing a frisbee what are the odds you're gonna catch that intellectual object I don't know we're a little bit shifted Sheryl oh yeah right but if I use a song hip-hop lyrics yeah okay I'm with you yeah but you can you know people pass hip-hop lyrics past me all the time and as a result most of us are not catching the the frisbees thrown our way and so it's a lower level of communication I'd be happier let's say using the indian canons if we all agreed on the same reference point or the western canon or you know the buddhist canon but something where we can actually go deep as opposed to just floor explore the surface of this kind of cultural and intellectual diversity which has a lot to offer but most of us just don't have don't have deep architectural programming that prepares us for how deep the mind can go yeah so the notion of portals is that tied to how deep the mind can go or is this is the notion of a portal to shake somebody out of there sort of they're stuck in the the pink liquid and they don't realize they're in the matrix is that is that the moment of the portal or is the portal something that is glimpses into a mathematical reality that the world that we're experiencing has some sort of what I'm gonna call fabric because I'm just terrible at math and physics and all that fascinated yes but I don't really understand it I heard you make reference one time to a type of number that you said we just can't explain it octuplets octonal octo nians thank you and you said but it really has existence in like physical reality or something like that and I was like huh so I want to to really understand your tradition of the portals so is this an intellectual exercise or is this really grabbing a punching through to the fabric of reality okay so let's talk about huge wins huge win for me would be to take let's say some sector of the world that feels fenced out of math or music or language or whatever and give them three superpowers so let me imagine for example that they got turned onto the idea that there was really deep math all around them that strangely was more advanced than the stuff that they studied in school but they found it easier to understand and that they had always thought that they were bad at math and now suddenly they can't get it off then with music let's imagine that you're you're convinced that you're hopeless in music you can't do anything you're just not a musical person and I give you a coffee mug and a guitar and within five minutes you realize that you can play 85% of the songs that mean something to you by following some very simple instructions are you saying I can't do language I studied Spanish in school and if I ever have to hear about you know Sarah versus a star or irregular verbs or why is it el agua I'm gonna shoot myself and then I say okay well what about we take you to Indonesia and in the space of a couple of weeks suddenly if you're not the most greatest indonesian speaker you're rockin and rollin in a language that you never thought possible that it has not that much to do with english those superpowers once you've seen the first one you're like wow i didn't realize that i could actually just do this i must be a mistake let me give you a second data point anyway wow that's really interesting that now i've got two things that do my belt by the third one almost everyone has the idea oh my god the entire world is just miss explained and i think it's that idea that nobody talks about the octo nians and then you run off to wikipedia and they're there or for example i've had this really great experience where i was able to point at this thing called the hopf fibration on the Joe Rogan program visually and some people got really angry like he's pointing it but he's not explaining it and I don't get it but you know I didn't get angry but I was like what the [ __ ] is he talking what is he talking about why is it the most important thing in the world why you know okay well the first thing is to just plant the flag like there is something here and you can if you if you hear somebody who you like all the stuff that they're talking about when you can understand them and then and then suddenly they go out of the visible spectrum and into the infrared or something you say okay can I follow is there any way so you start doing a little bit of research and I'm finding now that I've just been you know talking to this artist Niko Meyer who in his shop in Temecula is machining massive hop vibrations he was a little bit aware of it and then he saw the Rogan program and so now he's like trying to build these things since we're starting to collaborate on art projects to just push this out has him into visualize a vibration or actually create a hot vibration to to actually create parts of the hopf fibration that can be seen touched displayed what I did on Rogan was to show a representation of the hopf fibration pushed on to a two-dimensional screen representing three-dimensional screen representing a three-dimensional sphere in 4-dimensional space blah-blah-blah-blah-blah so this would be one layer of those abstractions taken away where you now you're maybe you're able to walk around this and suddenly just like all those cool asure paintings that took over the world suddenly people are saying okay there is something discovered in 1931 by Heinz Hopf that nobody ever told me about and I was just like expecting to talk about mushrooms and wolves and you know mixed martial arts and then suddenly there's this thing intruding into my life and that thing may turn out to be the person's calling in life because how if you don't even know this stuff is there if you don't know that you're in a matrix and that there is Zion mmm you can't make a decision like if you want to stay in your pod and just be in the GUP I'm not going to that's your choice but at least you should know that there's a vacation destination called Zion and a revolution that's brewing and so if you're interested in that lifestyle that might be a choice you might be interested in making so let me articulate that back to you I think now I completely understand what you're talking about with portals so portals to me sound exactly like the matrix being a very perfect metaphor obviously taking to the extreme but where you're seeing things one way because you don't like you said the world has been explained poorly so you don't understand that there's a simple shift you could make and now see things in a totally different way I'm not sure if this is the piece of art you were talking about when you said the MC Escher drawings took over but I remember back in the probably early 90s they were these really weirdly colored posters and they had like an ultra simplistic like it maybe it had a ballerina in one pose and so you're looking at it doesn't look like much and then if you relax your eyes it would suddenly become three-dimensional and I remember the first time somebody said no no there's really an image there it's a ballerina in 3d and I was like I don't see anything like use my visual noise is it two of those no I read that stare even if I remember right when you were when you first look at it you don't see anything you just see waves like colory waves got it and I remember somebody was standing in front of a staring I'm like why staring and they're like no the ballerinas kind of cool and I'm like what are you talking about there's no ballerina they're like no no there is and that's what are you talking about they said look it's this thing you have to relax your eyes and if you relax your eyes like focus your eyes like you're looking past it it might be random-dot stereogram okay random-dot stereogram so I'm standing in front of it and I'm like you are lying literally yeah like this I'm on [ __ ] punks like somebody is filming me there's nothing here I'm looking at it I'm doing what you're telling and then all of a sudden you figure out what to do physically and this thing jumps out you're like what the fairy discreet very fascinating it really shows you that this this thing that has been sitting in front of you has been there the whole time you didn't know how to look at it because you didn't know what to do you're a whole world was a thing you're a mathematician you're a linguist you're a computer programmer you know you're a musician you're doing improv you you're doing all of these things that you felt fenced out of and the thing that got me really crazy was that due to some of my learning issues I did not have an easy time in school and I watched it was very much a Cinderella story where you're watching all of the all of the smart kids go to the ball and you're sitting at home washing dishes try to figure why is it my punctuation random spelling impressionistic capitalization holding me back why is everyone else I'd be able to pull a piece of paper that's you know neat and legible and mine is crumpled and folded and I don't even know what my assignment is how old you at this point oh I would say that between age 10 and 16 I cannot buy a base hit to save my life and I'm existing on charm and do people at this point think you're not very bright I wouldn't say that I would say that they've got a problem because smart and trying are supposed to result in success so what happens when you have somebody that you believe is smart you believe is trying seems to be good at lots of things that aren't on the on the agenda now you've got a problem because that person is validating the educational system so the system gets angry at you it tries but there's a very limited help budget that's available and before too long what you're doing is you're revealing what I call teaching disabilities because people don't have the time the energy the understanding necessary to help and reach that person they don't even know what's going wrong and so what you're doing is is that you're invalidating what I would call the educational complex and the educational complex is a it's a guild it's a profession as a business and so one of the things I believe is that we're not taught subjects that machs in a way that maximally benefits the largest number of learners we're taught subjects due to the political economy of making these subjects take a very long time and rewarding the specialty that might have been the career choice of the person teaching that's super [ __ ] interesting so what teaching method would optimize for the greatest number of learners well first of all differential diagnosis like are you a are you mean are you a visual learner are you an auditory learner and we now segment them out right and you know you start to understand you present several different styles you know let's do some a be testing use like you go to your optometrist this is better like this or like this right and so you start to understand somebody's learning style and learning profile okay going that's really [ __ ] simple and wonderfully interesting hard to execute people can stop with the hate mail but like ducks okay even better I was being very preemptive so keep going this is really [ __ ] interesting and you know then you start doing things that nobody does like for example most errors that we make are not random errors if you start collecting the errors that I used to do teach learning disabled kids in college for some extra shekels right and what I noticed is is that people would make the same errors all the time and so I could just tell by recording what answer they gave you know if you give them six times eight sometimes they're gonna say forty two sometimes they're gonna say fifty-six whatever you're gonna have some collection of things that you can guess what they did to get there very seldom are they gonna say a chicken salad sandwich fair all right and then you need to incarcerate that person because it sounds dangerous so in such circumstances if you just collect errors you can very quickly figure out what you're supposed to be remediating rather than just saying you lost me there so your first step sounded [ __ ] awesome and the school system should immediately implement X it sounds scalable the second one detecting errors and knowing what they mean yeah mmm give me say it another way because that one as I as my brain tries to process that it doesn't seem scalable well if I say to you what is two plus three and you give me the answer 23 yeah I bet I know what you did okay you concatenated two strings rather than adding two integers but how does that become a curriculum style like visual auditory got it well because now I have it I have technology that can very quickly figure out what you're likely doing wrong okay where if I were to time how long it's taking you on some step I could guess all you didn't know how to set up the problem right all sorts of things that happen winds whence that when things aren't going right just imagine that your brain and your body are giving off data and that data can be measured when things aren't working to guess where the roadblocks are because in general we don't have a million different roadblocks when we're trying to learn something I want to bring this back this is simple example assume that we're talking about the Big Bang right and we're talking about expanding universe and I said he you don't even understand man it's just so crazy not only is the universe expanding its expanding at an accelerating rate my contention is almost no one has any idea what that means the physicists will say that a million times I think I know what it means and I have no idea why anyone says it because anyone smart should hear that and say expanding into what what does that even mean and so I know what sorts of errors people are going to make they're not that original most of us get tripped up making the same kinds of errors is like a thousand other people out of ten thousand people would make and so if you just if you monitor these sorts of things it's diagnostic data for you to use I think that's a super interesting way to think about the educational system of doing a lot of detective work Diagnostics figuring out like how to group people they did that back in band when I was in fifth grade going into six like play this do you have any like where do you show any sort of natural aptitude and they segment people out that's super interesting now coming back to what you were talking about earlier with the you let me take you to Indonesia and show you that you can actually pick this language up fast let me give you the mug and the guitar and you know let me show you a few things let's make those real what what are cuz I heard I've never heard you talk about but actually heard your brother talk about it when referencing you that you do have this sort of freakish ability to identify like what those key things are here I do is that guitar tuned is an entirely different limit but yes would you like me to have somebody get it well yeah just just to play just to see whether you get anything at it might might be a dud I don't know it could be a total dud we'll get that we're gonna take a big [ __ ] risk here and josh has since I know you're listening right now if you could have Lisa who should know where the guitar is hiding but it's behind the door of my closet bring it down we will continue the conversation until it gets here and it would be great to do it with an empty coffee mug just to make the point that was a real thing yeah okay so we'll also need an empty coffee and if it's a if its acoustic that would be a plus B's acoustic I don't have anything all right god I hope it has strings on it I haven't had that thing out in a very long time do you play I did play and I never got good but I did enjoy it and so back in the day before I started on my entrepreneurial journey I was on I I would not so much anymore but I used to self-identify as an artist so my life was all about the creation of art my primary form of creation is writing so I spent a lot of time writing I wanted to get into writing music the crazy thing is just today I heard you talk about I'm gonna [ __ ] up his last name mic isn't your eysan eysan ger yeah from Incubus yes so awesome that exact period of my life was an obsession with Incubus and trying to learn some of their songs on the guitar and never got good but I wrote songs for my wife who was my then-girlfriend and to this day she wishes I played more so that I would write her more songs that's really nice I did like that that gave me the impetus to really like push myself and try to get good but then it became a question of time management and so it fell lower on my priority list and and has thus collected dust but finding a way to learn things fast that is incredibly interesting especially if you know the notion of the portals become real and there are these insights so my obsession the whole reason that I create content because I I know we don't know each other well so you don't know this about me but what I'm actually trying to do is build a studio a film studio film and TV okay because I believe that the way to impact people is to make the next Kung Fu Panda or the next Star Wars something that has a message at its core but entertains people hits them at a limbic level it's an emotional connection probably gonna have to focus on youth that bums me out because while I really enjoy that and I've always wanted that to be a part of it I don't want to give up on adults which is if you know Geoffrey Canada is very much his advice but hitting people at an impressionable moment in their life whether that's youth or they're just open with something that resonates emotionally that is able to incept them with a portal I'm very much using your language on that I would normally think of it as growth mindset or whatever but your incepting them in a moment with a portal that causes their they're also more violent then I love it because I love that kind of [ __ ] so let's use violent language I'm in it in fact know that anytime in the future since I'm going to adopt the word portal okay that it just comes with a TM and your name so I'm certainly not trying to rip it off but I would help popularize it belong to us all and I think that that's you know really important to me is that the portal story like the matrix is a universal and if you think about it neo just to see how well I remember the film you know neo is kind of searching for something he's leading this underground lifestyle by night and he's sort of pieced together that there's a something and this is what brings Trinity into his life where a Trinity is gonna go out and contact him and let him know that if he follows the white rabbit with an obvious homage to Lewis Carroll so that the portal story within a portal story and he you know he goes into this Australian S&M Club which is very funny that this is his introduction to a world in which Morpheus is going to take him through the looking-glass and that scene of waking up you know in a completely different context I think is it is the violence of the portal I love that Neil Strauss called me out one time he said all your [ __ ] language is violent like what is that about my creation is an act of violence how can I pretend that that's exactly why I do it I don't know why I do it but that feels so wonderful well you have to break something right and you know if you think about how we come into this world are our mothers water breaks and that is a moment in which that's a [ __ ] portal right and literally this is something that I find mind-blowing in the Jewish tradition Passover is about the escape from Egypt which whose name is mitzrayim which is a plural masculine plural and it's the narrow places and it is the literal birth story of the Jewish people out of Egypt do you think there are some people that just get I I have a hypothesis that goes like this some people think in archetypal metaphor I'm not one of those people and it actually as I think held me back as a writer I've had to really like learn that or do you think that it is some people dream in archetypes which is another reason that I think that or is it that just over these stories that we think of now as archetype are told sort of bit by bit by bit and and shaped over time based on what gets a reaction you need you know the simple-minded have devils and angels on their shoulders one step up from that you have Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson whispering in opposite ears and you need a camp and D camp between the hyper-rational now of course I've been unfair to them both Jordan as a scientist and Sam is a pretty spiritual guy but they're archetypes Sam is constantly reminding us for the need of the need for rationality and that spiritualism can be grounded in rationality and Jordan is really reminding us that if you don't actually just let that spirit free that your mind has the spiritual capacity built into it yeah there's there's danger on either side if you're too rational or too spiritual and - moved by the archetype in both directions lies nonsense but that tension is is magical have you read The Watchmen the by Michael Moore the comic the graphic yeah yeah so there's a part in there if you remember the book is broken into you've got the main story and then you have snippets from like a book somebody's journal a diary that kind of thing and one of the snippets in there this hit me so [ __ ] hard was a guy had written a book on ornithology and he said you know the problem with ornithology was just to study birds the problem with ornithology is that we know the size of the feathers we know the orientation of the feet and we can tell you you know the gap between the feathers and you know down to the millimeter and what it all means and all that he said but we've lost the poetry of flight and we've lost the sense of awe that a bird could inspire that made it such a symbol that we would put it on coins or on temples and he said I never want to get to that point where I'm so blinded by the science that I lose sight of the awe and I was like [ __ ] like that gave me the chills I was like that is so true and that like so I love Sam and Jordan I think they're both extraordinary minds but your notion of being able to camp Indy camp I think is so important the ability to bounce back and forth talk a little bit about that and how you see that playing out today in particular where people are camping but nobody's D camping well it's very interesting people sometimes accuse me of having it both ways or middle-of-the-road and nothing could be further from the truth people get annoyed with that well they have the idea that you're you know pick a side man why well because it's pure because there's mush in the middle for the from their perspective and what I view is Wow you imagine that these two sides have been warring let's say for thousands of years or hundreds of years or even decades and it's not because both you know both sides probably have a point it's just not there's no synthesis of that dialectic so you have these these sides and yelling at each other and I always think if two sides have been yelling at each other with smart people on both sides for a long time that's my cue that they're not they haven't found a frame outside of flatland they're trapped they have not found the portal and so what I start doing is I invite them both into my mind initially in a sandbox you know can I represent the other person's argument so they would say yeah man that's exactly what I'm saying all right can I do that for both sides or their multiple sides beyond - and so once you sort of have all of these things playing your head then you start saying okay I'm going to make an outreach from one sound sandbox to the other what if I'm convinced that there is no god but the religion is super valuable what does that feel like or I'm convinced that there's absolutely a god but that it leads us into madness with people making claims that can't be substantiated and we have to revere them right whatever these things are so once you start doing that that's why for example years ago on the Tim Ferriss program about using coprolalia you just using a string of swear words to let your brain we're not in Kansas anymore this is not safe space we're working blue it's after hours it's time to get creative it's time to get violent and you have to be decent about it that's like you know comedians if you go to a you know I was just catching a set at the comedy club at the Comedy Store and that's pretty pretty brutal but on the other hand it's happening in a room everybody's there voluntarily and in general you know it there's a limit to how bad it's gonna get and so these kind of rough spaces that aren't safe spaces are important if we're going to be generative and you know my belief is is that we all have to recognize that the pure States are to be avoided or rather that you have to embrace multiple pure States because purity of one particular kind or another is where madness comes from we have to not we have to welcome the infection and as you were talking like I was getting the chills that to me that notion of being and what you're calling the sandbox of being able to steal man the argument was it your brother that came up with that phrase or did he just bring it to the and I think I brought it to the wider world but it came out of the sort of East Bay rationality community at least that's where I found it so I love the the concept of steel Manning I think that's so important of I think ideologically people have to believe it is their obligation to steal man somebody instead of trying to tear them down like to first understand right and I say that selfishly like one of the things I don't understand is when you and I think this is what you mean when you say that the madness happens in the purity I think more from a biological perspective that once the crop is completely homogeneous it is [ __ ] at risk like one thing goes wrong and the entire crop is lost right one well even worse imagine somebody who's eukaryotic decides that they're in fact infected with their own mitochondria I you know then the thing that's powering every cell in your body which was initially probably a procurer a confection hmm and become something you need to rid yourself of okay well in the process you're gonna just you know you're gonna go totally OCD it's like somebody told you hey there's a quarter in your new leather couch go get it you know and there's no quarter there and you're just gonna rip the thing to shreds yeah so getting people to as a selfish driver to put themselves in a position with a constant trying to understand what the other person is coming from so that they can adopt anything that works right so Bruce Lee said take what works discard what doesn't add your own so having that anybody whose primary goal is self-development and yes we have the guitar anybody whose primary goal is self-development I think has to have as a part of their operating system a desire to first listen hear what might be usable even if you think that that's a rival camp take on what works discard what doesn't and then find a way to leverage that so that you can do things in the world and my obsession is getting people to understand and this is one of my portals and this was the path I was going down earlier the reason that I'm so interested in this particular portal that I'm an outline is it will change your life forever so it's on one side of the portal you think that you are made a certain way and that is that and life is about making the most of the gifts you were given or weren't or you know making the most of a bad situation however you want to look at it on the other side of that violent act of creation of stepping through that portal of being kicked through or whatever yeah you realize that you can change your perception and the perception will change your beliefs which will change your behaviors which will change your outcome and the outcome of course is where I'm obsessed so the portal I'm trying to cram people through who is realizing that oh I'm viewing the world from a fixed mindset to use Carol Dweck's famous book mindset and I can have a growth mindset so and one I believe my talent intelligence are fixed rates and the other I believe they're malleable traits and once I believe they're malleable traits then I can get into my grand obsession which is getting people to understand that skills have utility so since we have a guitar here this may be the perfect explanation that guitar that very guitar that you're about to pull out has gotten me laid many times now that's a real outcome because I wrote songs for my then girlfriend and she was moved by it it was it was a full recognition of her psychology and what made her feel good and and made us feel connected and made her feel sexual and because I could make her feel sexual then I got to have the experience that I wanted to have and also I wanted to connect and I wanted to convey something to her and I wanted to create the shared lexicon you were talking about you know we could adopt the Indian Canon or the East Asian kin whatever the can like we were building a Canon together and it was like you to be able to reference a song that I had written for I mean it just like it began to shape our lives together but that started with my dumb ass having to learn how to play a G chord a C chord a D chord right but those skills have utility they let me do something and so the thing that freaks me the [ __ ] out about people and leaning back nest about haha about people that they get lost in what you call the purity they're they're stuck in their idea they're not looking to steal man the other argument they just want to know how their right is skills have [ __ ] utility like if you learn something from that person you're going to be able to do something with that thing right there is based on an impurity the guitar which is even-tempered you gonna break it out while you explain it'll probably pick it up barely I'll narrate for anybody at home who's watching and he will pick back up where he left off I is pulling out the guitar and we're going to learn how the guitar itself is born of impurity I'm excited to hear the answer this I'm not sure that I can predict it I think there might be one more than you would imagine that thing always surprised me with just how many latches it has helped out there we go there it is all right like I said I make no promises about the tuning well even if we have just one string we can probably figure out something all right so first what's the impurity this is based on well so if you break the string into three pieces so this would be your E string but if I place my finger exactly at the midpoint it will double the frequency and if I place it a third of the way through it should be giving me three times the frequency now that number of three times the frequency is not actually the even-tempered version of three times the frequency what do you mean even-tempered well we have 12 frets in an octave okay those have been specifically geared by the person who made the guitar to break that 12 break that octave which is a doubling of the frequency into 12 exactly equal steps okay if you do 12 exactly equal steps then you will never reach exactly three times the frequency as you go up an octave which is 12 and then seven more half steps which is 19 steps in total that's as close as you can get so it's the difference between and that sounds almost the same but there's actually a tiny discrepancy and that's why we choose the number 12 because only for 12 do we get that tiny discrepancy and have a reasonable number of steps in the octave the equation if you're trying at home is 2 to the 19 twelfths is almost equal to 3 that is slightly below okay that help you ready monkey I'm telling okay that impurity is the basis for Western harmony that's the great thing that the West did that nobody else because without that what would happen without that you just have the pure [Music] so for example I couldn't harmonize with that it seems like I could well if you had those as the exact steps you'd notice that you couldn't switch keys you couldn't modulate two other keys very easily so you've taken a there's a crime in our fret board and you've taken the body and you've chopped it up into 12 equal pieces and that disguises the fact that our third and that our fifth in even temperament and our fifth in physics which is the Pythagorean fifth are not the same note but they're so close that our ear can't tell the difference I wasn't sure what I was gonna do at this moment in the podcast I knew it would come where you're saying a whole lot of words and I don't understand how they add up I understand each individual word but strung together in the way that you're stringing them together I can only nod and smile is there another way to explain this because I hear that here was my hypothesis with music that you understand math so well that to you it is self-evident that a guitar is math and to me it is not and I experienced the guitar entirely experientially so whatever portal exists between the experience of music and the math of music I desperately want to cram myself through because I think it'd be [ __ ] amazing to understand that - I don't know I don't want to understand it I want to feel it I want two hundred I want to understand at a body level okay and I don't know if my mind is I don't like to have a fixed mindset so I'm very open to I just haven't had the key insight that's going to invite me through the portal but it feels like the thing I don't understand is math and that there is a key insight to be had in math that until I have that key inside a math your sentences will continue to sound cool like when you talk it almost sounds like poetry but I don't understand it okay well the first thing you have to know is that there are certain things that are encoded in physics okay that sound to us as if they were are composed or like music and if I understand them they're gonna be playing the guitar easier because I want people to understand what the punch line is if we fight when I figure I'm gonna just play harmonics that would occur if we strung a catgut between two trees in Borneo okay okay do you recognize that yes I couldn't tell you what it is if he's played it again it's imprinted the lick from pretty woman oh then definitely not like by Rory or be walking back to me so those notes are encoded into the vibrating into the Fourier series of the vibrating string okay so the point was that I don't think that whoever wrote that song that Roy Orbison made famous I don't think that song is composed so much is discovered it really just came out of expanding a series of vibrations for the wave equation of the of the vibrating string but because of because of that right there's certain things that people will say our cultural like right so Oh Eve home from The Wizard of Oz or wise men's right that alternation has to do with the natural modes of a vibrating string so all of our all over the world people here Oh Eve ooh as a natural tone right okay that's just it just has to do with the fact that your vote your vocal chords or any one dimensional medium like a flute or a string is going to have those things as part of it why does that matter like - yeah average person unless this is going to help me get laid right skills have utility unless this is gonna boil down to something that I can functionally get something that I want to do that so let's let's take the coffee you seem disappointed well no is it is it that the math of this is fascinating and beautiful to you are we like in that moment where I want the science you want the awe you want something I want to give you whatever it is that you want and then I want you baby so for example if I take the second third and fourth string and I play those that is a major chord if the guitar is tuned to standard tuning okay right now I'm gonna ignore the two strings closest to my head and the one closest to the floor right and I have the coffee mug so assume that somebody has a guitar around the house and since the Ender tuning so now I go now I don't have to learn how to fret a G chord or a C chord or all the things that hurt my hand I'm just I got my claw around like a mud so I can start immediately playing songs or I'll admit that was [ __ ] cool okay the next thing is is is that because the hard [ __ ] just for people listening forgive us since you can't see what's going on but the the part of learning the guitar that is infinitely harder is the fretting like using your fingers which hurts in the beginning and you're probably gonna bleed and you have to build these insane calluses and yeah I I went to my guitar teacher and I said you know what I'm I just don't think my hands are built for this because I could not do a barre chord to save my life so to see you use a mug that effectively is right so I'm throwing away most of the guitar half of the guitar strings one five and six and now I this is gonna be like a really bad version of the four chord song but go to youtube put in the four chord song look at the axis of awesome with all of their songs so here's the here's the key thing in the four chord song three of the four chords are just strings two three and five with the mug at different positions along the fretboard twelve seven and five these frets okay the only thing that you have to throw in is that there's a minor chord which just strings one two and three placed played at the twelfth fret position now this will be a lousy version of the four chord sign but the key point is if it comes to you in under two minutes that you can now play all of the song in the 4 chord song badly with a coffee mug and a guitar that somebody else to then you're through a portal so for example if you think let's try beast of burden which isn't it's gonna be of the wrong voicings so the musicians will object to it so and I'll never be a beast of burden now that's not a great version of the song but for two minutes and you think there's no hopeless it's not too bad we're talking about my kinds occur right yep this genius musician everybody thinks is an amazing guy what's even better about him is that he's a very generous teacher his good friend who's very kind he'll did you meet him the network man as soon as you break out you meet all these amazing people and I followed the rules I didn't meet anybody that's interesting that that's a conversation worth having but finish his thought and so the thought I was gonna have is is that if you think about that song that he wrote for more or less for Avicii that took over the world I realize he wrote a song for VG didn't he do this um wake me up when it's all over maybe I've no idea yeah so it's like it's the same four chords but he starts from the minor chord in the in the cycle so if you put them around its like six minor so feeling my way through the darkness it's that cycle now my point is that those are things that once you learn the coffee mug trick mm-hmm you think okay I completely miss assess how difficult this was now was the coffee mug trick is that the portal or did you come to realize everything that you just said from first music and I couldn't understand what was being said to me when people tried to teach me music the standard way so I had to find my own way and you say you couldn't understand it what do you mean actually I want to go back to your learning disabilites sure what what were they how did you build confidence in yourself could you tell I'm [ __ ] smart man there's just some translation error was recognized for being decent as a student to begin with okay and what happened was that that recognition translated to my being skipped a grade even though I was already young for my grade so I was like fairly advanced relative to the American system you know other people skip two three four grades this was just one grade but to then have my handwriting and a lot of these sort of executive functioning issues take over you know like no matter how beautiful a poem I could write I would always be graded on punctuation and so it was just this precipitous fall from educational grace and that having had a memory like the only remnant of my being have having been a good student was that I was somehow weirdly young for this grade given that I was screwing up everything and I was at a really good school which was hard to get into be that I had gotten into before the superpower had fallen away and so there was just this like weird memory and of course in all the Cinderella stories right Cinderella's never really of lowly birth she's always you know got something special so that was my little something special and then when I found that I couldn't do music and I couldn't do math because you had to rely so much on calculation and that required writing things down and being very careful about it everything melted away and I just became convinced that I wouldn't be fenced out of anything that I was just gonna be so aggressive that I was going to eat the system that was trying to eat me and I made education the enemy because that's what they were they didn't realize it necessarily but all these people who prided themselves on being educators were just being incredibly abusive to me year after year just tearing me to shreds because it was necessary for their fiction that the good students were getting ahead and the bad students were not putting in enough work or didn't have a gift and you know when I found out this is on high school at this point I even through college I mean I was determined I figured I was gonna drop out of college there was a language requirement I took French I was getting nowhere like you were having a hard time learning it an impossible time learning because it wouldn't stick because the number of things I could not figure out from the Spelling's the accents the irregularities why is everything gendered were you frustrated with the nature of the language because like so I'm I've heard you talk many many times and dude your ability to logic through something is is really but that's why I'm saying Indonesian is special because Indonesian removes a lot of Road I'm even saying like logic your way through like the following hey I want to get a degree it'll be useful to me I'm also by the way I've already done the whole [ __ ] degree except for the language saying so I'm just gonna brute-force memorized I was gonna do worse I was I was going I don't think anything anyone needs a BA to get a higher degree so it was part of it just the anger of the school system is the enemy and so [ __ ] these kids I'm not gonna get a degree if they're gonna make me do something that I think is dumb well I I I think that there's an aspect to that which is self protective emotionally this is that is also motivating can you imagine that you're gonna go up against the entire system and win and you start envisioning your victory over a system that does not want you at the table yes I mean just try to try to imagine like being the blackest person possible at a KKK meeting and getting everybody singing your praises by the end that's that's your goal right you're just gonna you were going to inflict yourself upon the world and that that was necessary to build strength of character because when I you know I got to Harvard in mathematics there was no one remotely like me you know in their approach to this everybody broke competitions these were like the winners of the company it was like a tournament and people kept winning and so they kept advancing and in every one snow I think you know I found out that yo-yo ma didn't win any competitions when he was young and that was really distinguished because in general the way you got to be it you Yama's level was through a tournament model and so what happened with me is I went to like the Museum of Science and Industry and I thought wow this is so cool I want to figure out how to become a scientist or a mathematician or an engineer or something like that and then when I found out that you had to be really good at it I just thought well that's unfair no literally like if the if the universe is written in differential geometry what are the odds that I'm not going to learn the language in which the cosmos was written there's just no way you're gonna fence me out of it so I [ __ ] love that mentality so much you can't well but it people don't like it I think that what you have to understand is is that like I'm sure that when I was singing there musicians that are cringing you know or they've got their hands over their ears I'm like you wanted to hear where do you really hear this difference between even temperament and the Pythagorean temperament you know you hear it in the blue third so the difference between like like that is the place in which the maximum difference occurs that our third is wildly off and so when I want to teach people about music I've got this problem always which is I've got this these very exceptionally good people who say you know you're teaching people wrong you're giving them the wrong ideas this isn't helpful and I have to say screw you to all the people whose playing I know is better than mine and whose stuff I love but I'm not I'm not talking to the people that they're going to reach I'm talking about the people who are gonna die never having a relationship with music and this coffee mug may rescue some of them so that they will become the students of those great musicians but what I'm interested is I'm interested in the losers I'm interested in everyone who got left behind you know if I had a gang sign it would be an L in the middle of my forehead if I ever make it to the Tonight Show I want them to play me on with baby even the losers get lucky sometimes it's just this idea of I will not be fenced out because of your hang-ups as an educator there's no way I'm going except the D or the F or the you know Johnny can try better or you know arena needs to turn in our homework more regularly no you're wrong those kids are not failing for the reasons you think they don't think failing because you think they don't care they do care they don't know how to do the things that come naturally to the kids you're calling the a students and so I'm interested give me your F students give me the kids with the bad attitudes give me the kids with the learning disabilities you want to put in the corner and you want to hold back because mostly you've miss assess those people maybe I think 15 to 20 percent of our country is filled with unbelievable learners who were being held back by educators and nobody wants to take to the educators those kids are with me and you've got to get away from them because you're doing incalculable harm and by the way any parent who's listening to this who's got a kid who's not living up to potential is sitting there getting closer and closer to speaker what did he just say and if I say these are gifts they're not they're not disabilities do not over medicate your children embrace entirely different ways of educating your kids they can learn anything what I want to know how it's a gift and two are there actually places right now that people can go that specialize and educating people like that well I think there's something called the summit Center in in Walnut Creek in the East Bay there's a book called the dyslexic advantage I think there's something called the bridges Academy in LA but there's an entire you know what I found was is that there's a group of kids who meet in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to do LARPing and I didn't know anything about LARPing and the moms sit around bitching about the schools that their kids didn't get into and say you know you know my son Arun is an amazing computer programmer he started his first business but we can't get into the swanky private schools because they took one look at him and they don't want him and I'm thinking like yeah they don't want him but all we have to do is to make sure that this kid doesn't develop some so wrong idea about his his gifts and we have to inflict our best people on the system because the system doesn't want our best people your beef with the system I find particularly interesting there's something about your imagined God let's see if I can recapture the words you used imagine taking on the whole system knowing you're gonna win it's not quite right but that was certainly the sentiment and that is that puts you in a rarefied group most people are they're really broken by nobody believing in them and I always tell people the the biggest gift anyone can ever give you and it will never feel like a gift but the biggest gift anyone can give you is doubt the problem is it breaks most of the people that it touches so I liken it to the inner cities the inner cities break virtually everybody that go through it but the people that survive it come out the other side these extraordinarily driven unbreakable people and it's it's pretty extraordinary when you see it happen but how do we begin to get those people into a position where they can and maybe it's reading the books that you listed or going to the places but I'm super curious if you know like what is it about their method that they're teaching or maybe more easily what did you realize what was the portal that you went through that allowed you to recognize your own struggles as an actual gift or was it just that it pissed you off enough that it made you fight well for example like the first portal for me really was music and it was specifically the Blues which it is for many people the Blues is some of the most emotional music many people in my day didn't even know that it was a codified art form in large measure but there was a 12 bar pattern it was a formula so there was sort of on a piano be your left hand secret which would be the progression your right hand secret would be the scale that nobody taught you right it's not the major scale and it ain't the minor scale and if you think about I always do this as descending scales the major scale descending is joy two three world the Lord has come but the blue scale descending sounds like the beginning to a song called messin with the kid dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee and once you learn that scale you realize how much of the stuff that you loved was not in either the major or the minor and you learn about these blues blue notes you learn about seventh chords and you learn about how to put some grit and distortion in your guitar I've got an amp and it's an alternate world so the the portal in music that was a big breakthrough for you in terms of blues anyway was that there are these left hand right hand secrets in a very simple scale that once you learn that you've sort of got I mean maybe 80 percent isn't the real number but it's like some big percent you can vary with a 4-quart song for example there because you realize how many songs you love are actually only four chords right and then there was this weird Vivaldi piece which is classical you know unapproachable classical music that went something like I'm I haven't played it forever so I don't know if I remember [Music] and I thought that wasn't perfect it's super rusty but wait a minute I can play that almost instantaneously I don't need to wait maybe my technique is gonna suck maybe I'm never gonna make it to the Carnegie Hall stage I don't care that song is beautiful and it makes me feel good and there's no one who can fence me on it I have my grandfather that Brett and I both talked about to thank me for because he gave me this guitar and my mom was dead set against it she said you give him that guitar he's just gonna give him an inferiority complex my grandfather so I all he needs to do is tune it if he can learn how to tune it he never has to play it and he was such he was such a genius that he figured out how to get this thing into my life and I tuned it and then after you tuning you say well I wonder if it's good for anything right and then you start finding all of these techniques and hacks and the craft behind it and you realize you're behind the radio it's like when you program a computer you're on the other side of the screen that the person is just using the apps is sitting you know they're sitting in front of a half-silvered mirror and you're looking at them like you're the FBI and they're just sitting there you know typing away they don't even know that their computer is a computer they can't find the place where you program the computer because now it's hidden so there's just this entire hidden world of everything like when you learn a language why don't you learn linguistics along with the language that tells you why you know what is word production and and morphology and orthography and what's the evolution of these things you know nobody tells you there's a book called the Cambridge encyclopedia of language or the loom of language and that these books are like Scrolls they have all this extra information that people think well we can't bother the students with it are you kidding me that's that's the sugar for people like me I'm gonna get in behind that I'm gonna hack the hell out of it I wonder though so when I think about and in fact maybe I can give you insight into what it is like to be I'm guessing one of those teachers the shortcuts and things that you're talking about the portals the ability to sort of understand the rules of the game would you say that that's a fair way to say that rules of the game that once people understand that there are a computer is coded it's not this mythical box that there was a prompt line somewhere that you can go in and once you understand the rules and you can begin to edit the code and so on and so forth but you have to really understand how it works is that fair I don't know where you're going with it but I'll play with that okay so if that's roughly fair and trust me this isn't a trap but I'm thinking so because what the the perspective I want to give you is somebody who has has come to embrace that realization as fervently as you but far slower and with less like being hit with the AH and the wonder of like having this breakthrough moment with a guitar or whatever so I'm guessing the place the teachers are coming from is they don't get that same like big aha moment it doesn't feel like a violent stumbling through a portal what it feels like is an insecurity trigger of this is another thing that I have to learn and understand and be able to convey and teach to people and I think it speaks to when I think about the education system and mad love to everybody that's out there teaching because I used to teach it is [ __ ] brutally difficult it is a time suck of all time sucks it is it will it will test your limits as as an intellect quite frankly and certainly as a leader of minions especially if you have you know students at an age where they can properly rebel so it certainly isn't easy but it when you're in there trying to make it happen and you're realizing like this is intimidating and it's scary to try to put these lessons together I went through school I use sort of brute force I was good at learning they probably did reasonably well in school which is why they continued they got decent grades they know how to play that game and so their entire life is about I've gotten good at this very finite thing and people want to protect that sense of ego and if their ego isn't that of being the learner it's deeply more troublingly that of being the teacher that one who knows in a sec how many students do you get you have the right like look I'm so you and I you and I who I don't know if we see this exactly the same and you are you have a righteous indignation that I find intoxicating but I don't have okay and so I heard Sam Harris talk about this one time he said maybe something broke in my brain when I was meditating and I so I don't get this anger and remember I was telling you before we started rolling people love it when I get like enraged about something but the only things I can get enraged about are things that I was doing myself in my own opinions about me no there's an addict there's an adaptive aspect to my voice I am I am a where frustration you mean the aggression they're cameras rolling and I now have a platform and I have the ability to go back and save myself so that's who you're talking to I'm talking to the parents who are gonna take their kid anything I say where is your algebra homework you forgot it at school again you torreón a ripped piece of paper did you not read the directions did where are your notes you know I didn't know that I have this issue called kinesthetic reinforcement that when I take notes instead of strengthening the pathway in the mind it's so difficult for me to write that it erases whatever notes I'm taking so I wiped out the fancy private school education by taking the notes that were illegible and I didn't remember what was going on in class and I only found this out when I was in graduate school at Harvard by the most precarious circumstances possibly my view is is that my PhD belongs to every learning disabled family in the country because so so far as I'm concerned the difficulty of getting through the system and surviving it is is that you're constantly causing a problem for every educator and so I am compassionate with the problem right up to a particular point and that is the point where you say you know what I don't have time for this [ __ ] and I'm sorry but you're getting a C and I some something in me knows that I'm doing you wrong but I'm not allowed to do you right I can't figure out I am allowed to give you an A in this class because you turned in some other project that I was not expecting because you showed brilliance you showed something else and somehow because of my needs for my job I have to give you and your family the bad news that you're taking it for the team and so my righteous indignation is intended to start a blaze if there was one thing I would love to do is to liberate the families that are going through this nightmare of looking at their kids and saying wow you're really just you're not getting it don't worry there'll be something in life for you like why are you giving up on your kids if those kids are smart like this race and IQ thing I cannot stand this race and IQ thing I understand the idea that IQ is somewhat predictive I understand that you can correlate it with various things iq is such a crude measure of all of the things that we really deeply care about and I can't help you know my friend Nassim Taleb is brutal on this topic he is not a nice person when it comes to this issue but my energy is with him how many people are we gonna throw in the dummy pile you know I think about Louis Armstrong a lot and I think about Louis Armstrong and the fact that we white Americans remember him as a novelty singer like Hello Dolly and that's not what he is he is that he is the singular genius who wrote our national classical music and he invented it for my money modern jazz as we understand it more or less single-handedly is an orphan out of New Orleans now we can't acknowledge his genius we can't acknowledge that this is an actual straight-up American genius like none other I mean like I don't know maybe Art Tatum and Charlie Parker and a tiny number of people who are just completely out there but we are so wrapped up in this nonsense about what makes a good student and what makes a first-class mind we don't see like let me just give the simplest one that I give a lot people call me colorblind and I say oh do you feel bad because your contrast blind and they say what I said well I don't think you see contrast as well so if we ever need to depend on camouflage and spotting the enemy you're gonna really need me around that's why my trait is retained in the gene pool and I understand that color is something that gives you an advantage a lot of the time but don't think that we couldn't have driven my colorblindness out of the system if it didn't confer an advantage and you don't have that advantage and you don't even know that you don't have that advantage well the same thing is true for most learning disabilities the learning disability portion of the gift is the price paid and you're not letting me use the other part like I understand the de Bugatti is pretty noisy and at guzzles gas but it does go rather fast if you know how to drive it and you're telling me that I have to drive it in a school zone for 25 miles an hour and that it has to be under a certain decibel level and that it can't guzzle gas because it's too expensive and bad for the environment screw you I want those learning disabled kids racing around the track at 300 miles an hour and now you try to catch them this is a this is an epidemic mischaracterization of a giant portion of the population from whom you will get vaccines and new industries these are the people who will write your scripts that you'll be riveted must see TV from the future and right now what you're telling them is that they're a bunch of morons so yeah there's a little bit of righteous indignation oh man I love it I think that I mean it's interesting so not having lived through that not having had that as my challenge is something that I will say that I've just never really thought a lot about the way that people learn differently but you hear stories like you making it all the way to Harvard getting a degree in mathematics and yet also being learning disabled you hear people talk about how Einstein when he was young people supposedly told him that he wasn't that bright and you know you you hear enough stories like that and you started to think okay maybe there are some people that are just so far outside of the box your Bugatti analogy I think is is really spot-on that's uh yeah was a great thing about it is that all those learning disabled kids really appreciate their Kara straight-a friends because that you know you guys helped us out of our jams you let us crib notes you very often got us through school and don't look at me I was a kid cheating all right like a fiend alright but what I'm trying to get at is I don't see the learning disabled students wanting to extinguish neurotypical I see the neurotypical neurotypical freaked out of their minds that the kid who they think should be you know in the dummy pile might have some super talents and if you think about a lot of the energy in Silicon Valley a friend of mine said something which I thought was very wise and she said if only we could harness the energy of the billionaire's who aren't still trying to prove to their middle school cafeteria table that they belong with the world that's pretty good you know what's interesting and I think I heard you talk about this once before what this needs is it needs a word like if people had a word you hear learning-disabled and you think I mean to be harsh you think that they're low IQ you think that they're not bright that they're going to struggle their whole lives and you definitely hear I've had a few of them on the show who've been like yo I was in the short bus classes and and you know my wife struggled a little bit with that and people didn't think she was very bright but this chick is just a she's whip it smart and B she is ungodly talented from an arts standpoint just ridiculous but always got made fun of because she was a little bit dyslexic and just so it was like a real struggle for her it needs a name it needs a name where it's like cuz cuz what part of what people are struggling with is they don't know how to think of it they don't know what to do with it the system isn't wired for it they're [ __ ] swamped they've got a kid at home who's you know getting in trouble and trying drugs for the first time we're having sex yeah [ __ ] I don't know what to do with this kid like he's he's [ __ ] Bugattis making all the noise he's turning in the crumpled paper which seems like willful decide what's wrong with you we watch serious as a comic I'm that's what I'm trying to [ __ ] rat that's what I'm trying to get at our entire culture already knows this do you want to hang with the x-men or do you wanna hang with the muggles you know I mean it doesn't matter it's the same story over and over again mix and match and I did there's some notion right that the mutants are cool because we all recognize our own mutations I love giving the example of Elizabeth Taylor with her two rows of eyelashes because she was a mutant she had two rows well yeah she was pretty hot interesting right and the mutation helped make her hot so once you start to understand like you know I joke with everybody that the motto of my family is you can have my learning disabilities when you pry them from my cold dead fingers because I want to make that cool you already have a word it's like you it's like queer as an epithet yeah okay I'll take that and you want to say I'm low IQ okay what is it gonna feel like to get beat by somebody with low IQ do you sure you want to choose that do you really want to put processing as one of the four categories of inputs to an intelligence quotient your call I mean I think that the point is we have to turn this into a really fun bloodsport you had me at blood sport yeah you see because what we need is we need people when I asked you know there's a version of this that also works for women there's a version of this that works for african-americans because there are different thought processes that have huge advantages and what I believe is that we can lie about us all being the same or we can recognize that our gifts lie in different places and I don't know of I mean the gene pool seems to retain a lot of things that people claim our errors I'm pretty sure that those things would be driven to frequency zero if that's what they were dude have you read the book a billion wicked thoughts no oh my huh what is that I've got a treat for you all right so it is a book I think written in 2011 by I think they were former Google engineers anyway they were very savvy on search and they said hey the problem with sex research is that there's ethics boards that like are convinced you're doing it for the wrong reasons so nobody's ever really done this people put you under a microscope they wonder what's wrong with you it can be career suicide so nobody's looked at sex then they thought well wait a second the Internet is the world's largest experience experiment of what people are actually desiring not what they say they desire because if you put somebody into an environment and say hey we're gonna keep these anonymous don't worry right people still lie they said but if you look for what they search it tells you everything you need to know dude that book is [ __ ] amazing and it makes it so clear like I read it as a writer as somebody who wants to write better characters okay and not wanting to write men who think like women or women who think like men I want to write like I I don't need to stay in the the purity of the archetype I like what you're talking about the tension but it's like if you don't understand the archetype if you don't understand like that sort of this is a hyper male brain this is a hyper female brain and now I can nuance off of that into real characters who were far more diverse and heterogeneous and all that but anyway I like to know where at write the breakdown of what people search for pornographically what they pay for pornographically was beyond [ __ ] enlightening give me three takeaways amazing takeaway number one it's when you compare back-to-back descriptions in erotica written by women and basically smut is probably a better name written by men so words only descriptions of sexual acts the women it's like he drew near to me with a steely gaze he pressed against my body he was engorged okay and that's pretty [ __ ] close to direct quote and then you have the guys he grabbed her and anybody with kids right now would be the time to hit pause if there are children around but it's like you know he grabbed her ass cheeks and like just I mean I'll stop myself there but in the book they [ __ ] read the next like six lines which are just ridiculously pornographic about the body parts so you've got women talking about the relationship to bodies it's not description of parts and then you have guys obsessed with things parts anatomy and like it is hysterical seeing them read back-to-back number two when you have female porn essentially the female porn genre is all relationship based and it is in the in fact who would you say is that this is gonna be ultra controversial so I say this tongue-in-cheek this is I'm quoting from the book but who would you say is like the biggest purveyor of essentially female pornography though it doesn't meet the typical criteria female pornography I don't know you need to give me more of a Stephenie Meyer the author of Twilight that is basically it is all romance it's werewolves it's vampires it's all about lust and desire and this triangle of desirability where you have one woman at the middle being desired by two men and it's so fascinating to hear their breakdown of how like that is the swirl of what women are really drawn to and then you've got men that are doing your classic pornographic search and it's all about you know God men search for butts breasts and feet those are like the three big ones and they go into detail about why that is and I was like [ __ ] this is so interesting to hear like how different the two takes on on sexuality are and then you're getting sort of into the base desire now what makes the book so [ __ ] interesting is they explain why it happens so with women where the cost of sex is child rearing which is nine months potential death and then years of having to take care of the child it is extremely labor intensive it is extremely calorically intensive time attention all of it guys exact opposite you can the cost of sex is very low you can abandon the child if you want so you have this super unequal distribution so you have women in the book they called it a detective agency the female psyche is a detective agency try to figure out if you're a male that's gonna stay around help protect a child rear it that is incredibly important so they put them through the psychological wringer before they decide whether they're gonna have sex or not whereas guys its cues basically of fertility so you're looking for youth and you're looking for a certain distribution of a certain type of fat which is largely associated with youth and fertility and then with feet it comes down to oddly enough estrogen which is a sign of fertility tells feet to stop growing which I didn't know but so women with I guess ideal levels of estrogen tend to have shorter feet which is why there are cultures that practise foot binding because small feet and women are a point of attraction for men who over millennia been sharpened to find women to have these signs of fertility [ __ ] crazy so you put those two together and now and clearly it is far more nuanced and all of that I'm giving you like a real thumbnail sketch but I found that so [ __ ] interesting in terms of what you were talking about if don't pretend that they're the same and don't pretend like they don't have advantages like when you really understand why a woman would need to focus on relationships and relationships with other women and being able to get the information that she needs about whether a partner is valuable that finding ways to short-circuit that so one of the easiest ways to know if a man is worthy is whether or not other women desire him and so like that whole thing of like one of the things that makes a guy attractive is already being in a relationship and so all of the the interesting intersections of desire arising out of another woman's desire for somebody it's [ __ ] fascinating so it's interesting I I thought about why not do evolutionarily aware porn like allow very interesting allow the greatest evolutionary theorists to write the scripts no not kidding no no no I'm actually it's funny because it would be a fantastic and I believe that actually it wouldn't work because we are so far out of the EEA the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness into this thing which I call the EE and the environment of evolutionary novelty that with the amount of birth control in our system I think that a lot of we don't really understand what the pill has done to female eroticism I think that with a failed economy it's changed what people desire the number of women I find now talking about preferring really exaggerated age differences which is probably a proxy for people who are willing to commit and have the resources to raise a child is changing some notion of attractiveness Mariana donek treadmill where they're cycling through porn at such a rate that they're becoming really deviant and things are not getting through to them that would have once been considered extremely exciting so then you know you start to see these podcasts you know we were just talking before about this show call her daddy which is extremely kind of ever heard in it's pretty raunchy man it's not what you two women they're funny they're playful but they're also really over the edge and I think you might you might learn something I did because I was trying to understand podcast demographics and somebody said this has mostly a female listenership I do think that a lot of things that you're talking about about women taking a cue as to who's desirable based on who other women find attractive is pretty highly conserved but I think we are now somewhere so far east of eden that even the evolutionary predictions of our erotic differences are probably being really challenged at the moment I don't think it's as clean-cut as it used to be that's interesting so one thing I'll say to that though is one of the predictions of course would be on the male side a desire for novelty so some element of that that would be a largely weighted part of this would play into it now whether they could predict exactly what people would search for but some of the stuff that popped up is like being really high search for terms or websites that have done well pay standpoint or made the Alexa ranking now keeping in mind this back in 2011 so things may have changed but man it's it's it is surprising if the answer were anything other than novelty well I think we're I think we're getting to the point that normal porn has gotten really sick that if you're not a prude about eroticism some of the things that you're seeing pushed have to do with the fact that our brains are now habituated to all sorts of things that you probably would never have seen visually unless you were like Genghis Khan right because everything's on demand and so the search for novelty I think is taking in some cases quite a dark term even for people who are pretty okay with the idea of pornography and eroticism as being a an important part of an adult diet for the mind where we're worries me as kids for sure and I may be even less worried about today than I am in 15 years when you have VR that is bordering on photorealistic and that's when Photoshop whoever you want in ya you know choose your own experience that's very disturbing but I'll be honest I'm more concerned right now about people finding partners to have children with I think that this is a an economic epidemic that we don't feel comfortable talking about and people comfortable talking well because for example if you have a fair idea that you're at risk for not having the family thing work out like it's gotten a little late in the day and you don't see a lot of prospects lined up and you've had a few relationships that haven't ended in commitment and resources and children and the economy doesn't seem to want to come up with a 30 year plan to fit a mortgage and getting some kids through college I think that the transition from the previous world has been pretty brutal and a lot of people don't want to say yeah I really want to fan if it doesn't work out I'm gonna be it's gonna be a major hit to my life in my sense of myself and we need you know in part I think that a lot of us don't want to see young women forced onto the apps you know which seems like it turns life into this ever had a ting perspective like a sink it's just you know somebody somebody said this is a singles bar in my pocket and wherever I'm bored I just go to the singles bar and start swiping and I thought okay and how do you feel about so well in the aggregate I feel pretty terrible about it but I can't stop and so you know you've commodified all of this stuff and I don't think it's a good deal for young women at all I think that you know young women have been used to putting men through their paces and demanding a lot and you know saying you know jump this high and seeing who can clear the bar and when that power is not present and when men can't win these competitions and have those competitions really mean something we'd arranged as a society because society is about continuity and continuity is about babies so no matter what you want to do you can take it away from babies I remember I was talking to a young woman who was like 26 or something did you ask me if I had kids and I said yes I said do you have kids and she's like practically spit out her beer like what I thought do you think it's really the crazy question that I would ask a 26 year old woman if she had kids and then you know she thought about it just feel felt very remote and this is the economy that were bequeathing to people and my belief is is that if the median individual cannot count on being able to you know have a home in a reasonable city that has lots of jobs so that if one job doesn't work they can switch and one person can stay home doesn't have to be the dad doesn't have to be a mom and a dad can any pair but you need somebody with the freedom to stay home to raise children while somebody else can be counted upon to go be the breadwinner in an economy that isn't you no absolutely razor's edge this is nuts and you know it's driven home to me recently and my father turned 85 we were at a party for his friends and some of their closest friends lived in our neighborhood when I was growing out there saying oh yes you know when we moved in all those years ago there were 14 boys who used to play on the street and now there are not well and I said what do you mean they're not just what young families can't afford to live on the street and I said do you have any thought in your mind that that was a catastrophe that happened to your street and that maybe your generation had some response but this is the Silent Generation so before the baby had something to do to say hey maybe this is not good for society if young families she said well these homes are perfect for families and I said but you just told me that there are no families on your street so this is an epidemic and this is deranging us and this is a lot of what's behind this kind of sense of injustice and people trying to find groups I think to take care of because you have got a lot of maternal instincts that are not grounding in happy hopeful homes raising kids that's really interesting what do you think is the sort of key driver is this student loans is it the average salary isn't going up like and part of the what drives my question is I know what I pay so my previous company I had at one point 3,000 employees about 1,500 full-time and then another 1,500 part-time here I have 20 plus employees full-time and then another I don't know seven or eight part-time and I know what I pay them and it's a good wage it's a hell of a lot more than I was making at their age that's probably the easiest way to say it okay so where is it that just the way that we are and what we pay is not indicative of what other companies pay is it is it something else is just going to be really kind of brutal first of all we were in an orchard with lots of low-hanging scientific fruit where you could take the scientific fruit and turn it into technology in short order we're still making scientific advances but most of those that are even fairly profound are not instantly convertible into technology so there might be low-hanging fruit in a new orchard but we haven't found the new orchard so we're picking fruit that has a very different characteristic so that's the first part is that our pipeline got screwed up how does that really play out in like dollars and cents well I'm thinking of this street right it's the perfect analogy so you have a street the houses have a price to buy they have a price to rent so when I think about okay what is stopping somebody from either buying or renting so if the prices are too high prices are too high so then is it that the prices are artificially too high because we have a bunch of empty houses and people who are buying as an investment well they're just being stupid so you weren't you you're fairly familiar with my theories and acronyms and things so you've probably heard about the embedded growth obligation yeah you go but what I had I and I get that and that scares me and I totally buy into it what I don't and for anybody listening and tell me if I [ __ ] this up but like basically we have a system that's entirely predicated on continued growth and that growth slowed down starting the 70s or 80s and we've done a lot of [ __ ] shell games to make it seem like we're growing and the one that when you give I'm always freak the [ __ ] out by is the essentially Ponzi scheme of Education yeah where higher education you're teaching people to be professors but there's only gonna be so many professors or two law firms only gonna be so many partners so it's like every graph tells the same story so but what I don't understand is if that's been the same since the 70s like I didn't even graduate high school until the mid 90s and this has nothing ever seen I mean look there were times I couldn't quite pay my bills there were times where you know I was sharing an apartment with a bunch of people but it's like it it never felt like the system had broken in some impossible way and this isn't me saying that it isn't broken this is me just saying I want to really understand okay like where we've gone wrong also this what I say to my friends in San Francisco so they've got good jobs their programmers they're having a blast they're going to Tulum and you know traveling to Bali and all these things and so I say you're living in a group house what do you think about buying your own home and asking that gal you've been going out with for a couple years to get married and like the conversation just gets really weird oh I'm not so confident that I can commit to a 30-year mortgage and you know prices are insane and I'm not positive that she's the right one for me and you know all these things or if I talk to my female friends they have a set of different stories which is like I'm so tired of little boys who never grow up is this a psychological malaise like because that explanation I can understand we're not excited about low variance futures needed for children as we cuz we don't see things popping off like this isn't Beijing in 2006 where it's just like the sky is the limit or I think people have a have a pretty strong sense well like I hired a millennial who I'm very good friends with and I noticed that he was like not that committed to certain kinds of projects he worked hard but he also had a very clear sense of you know my obligation ends at this point I said well know this person I think they work here okay and I said well why why why do we have a difference in in a sense of work ethic and he said oh because my generation watched your generation get screwed by the baby boomers and we're not falling for it do you buy that yeah that sounds like [ __ ] to me and and when I say I am happy to be convinced what I want is the [ __ ] truth dude all right cuz I have no interest in the truth let's get to the truth because so I have a psychotic work ethic why because I didn't use to and my entire life changed when I changed my work ethic but you fit look you're tense to me like you're talking about founding companies I've done both I've been in employee and I founded company so I've played both sides of the fence and how did how did the employee well look I don't want to over index I mean because you know there are particular lawyers in particular law firms who aren't founding anything or doing just fine but it's a minority position and what I believe is is that we are in a situation in which we are not excited by the future and the people who are real stakeholders in the system have in general been very focused on making sure that the pyramid is always supplied so this idea for example if you have to go to college the debt has to become non dischargeable in bankruptcy we get to load up the universities with administrators all that kind of stuff and then of course the main one which is really bizarre which is there's the secret weapon and the secret weapon is immigration and the great part about immigration as a as a invidious tool for one generation to screw another generation with is is that if you call it out there's only one explanation for why you would fight having other people added to the bottom of a pyramid scheme which is you must be a xenophobe or probably a racist and the answer is no I'm really just trying to choke your supply of new virgins to add to this pyramid scheme so that you can continue to transfuse yourself yeah that's interesting so let me see if I can steal men as quickly I this is the one time in my life where I am the one that has a heart out in five minutes I'm so [ __ ] horrified this is so interesting to me so I'll try to do it quickly okay so we have a pyramid scheme in that there are only so many jobs and I'll even abstract it from being a lawyer which is very easy to understand there's only so many people make partner being a teacher it's easy to understand you can only create so many other teachers and obviously we're talking at higher education and I'll just say your normal job and I've told my employees this like look every step you go up you there's fewer available positions until you get to the CEO and there's only one so there's only like you can get promotion I've never thought of there being sort of a money does not strike me as the finite resource the promotion strikes me as a finite resource you can keep making more and more money depending on the health of the company and your contributions to it so that's part of my bias is that when I try to use just first principles I'm like if this person is that valuable to me I'm going to [ __ ] pay them because I have fear of loss I don't want to lose them so which is why default to create fear of loss in your employer if you want more money but the company has to be doing well so let me stick to the Ponzi scheme here so very interesting take on immigration so you have people coming into the system they are willing to work cheaper than the other people would otherwise work in the system you got to be careful about that but keep going it's interesting I'm trying to represent your position or no but what I'm trying to say is it really the biggest issue is push out the labor supply curve you say that another one or wage is your price yep and I bring people from foreign country you can't compete because they'll do it for cheap you know it's not even that I mean maybe the idea is that you're you're a superior source of labor who's you whoever you are you're the domestic let's assume that you're a worker inside of the US yep the big play in some sense of the previous generations the Silent Generation and more importantly the baby boomers was internationalism which they called globalization and the hidden part of globalization that wasn't the United Colors of Benetton was the idea if we can just break our dependence on each other and look abroad and talk tell a beautiful story about what we're going to do for Africa and Asia then the idea is is that we can continue to grow our slice of the pie even though the pie might not be growing at the same rate because from my perspective as a Silent Generation or baby boomer I'm focused on a slice not the pie and so there was a huge amount of value gotten from tricking people into thinking that globalization was this beautiful Davos inspired kind of philanthropy that was going to be a rising tide to raise all boats and those Americans who had rights inside of our system and this goes for Brits weds British rights and French right French whatever had a right that was valuable which is I have asymmetric access to my labour market and that's how we worked as a nation so now you start the world's greatest PR campaign which is patriotism doesn't exist it's only nationalism and of course nationalism is really ultra nationalism which is jingoism which is a precursor to Nazism so you start saying you know I kind of believe in citizenship and patriotism and now you're telling me that that's I'm a bad person and now you've got the Davos crowd talking about Financial Inclusion in Africa and Asia and you notice that they're not really that interested in Michigan or Alabama and it's a it's an enemy why they're not because I felt like I understood it until you told me that I was good because the amount of value you see if I had to purchase your rights and I wrote arrive to what well your asymmetric access to your labor market I wrote a paper called migration for the benefit of all published in the International in the International Journal of labor if every what the title is migration for the benefit of all which said if you pay people for their rights like if the baby boomers in silence said look we think we can get better labor outside and we want to pay you for the right to shop elsewhere then the idea is that everybody would have been better off and we would have all screamed Kumbaya to each other as we got rich together but instead what they said is you're a protectionist and a jingoist and a xenophobe we loaded them up with as much negative imagery as we could pop you're just a bad person and they were doing that though so they can get cheaper labor right so they can keep you from having leverage but you keep saying it is well what we're willing to work below but my point is is that if this coffee mug costs $10 and now we have 10,000 coffee mugs it's not that those coffee mugs are willing to be bought for less the entire cost of coffee mugs plummets it's just pushing out the supply curve on labor and wages it's price so it behaved as much as supply and demand should now you can then point out you can make lots of other arguments like well some of these people are starting business and people are not coffee mug these are the most vibrant members of us and say you know you cue Stars and Stripes forever you put your right hand over your heart but the key point was is that all of these arguments were necessary to keep the institutional structure going as the Ponzi scheme ran out and a lot of this has to do with what I've called fake growth downsizing offshoring immigration securitization it's just this mind-numbing parade of different techniques that these older generations have used to keep a system afloat that has been saying we're exhausted like the law firms are supposed to fail the universities are supposed to fail all sort of the newspapers are dying don't make sense as a business model and things that you're creating and that we all might create would be replacing these things but instead what we've done is we've come up with an exotic kind of economic para by osis where we're gonna transfuse our fellow Americans and the younger generations to pay for a group of people who are just far too expensive to keep living in the style to which they have unjustly become accustomed so I'm sorry about your hard stuff but I think that there's a tremendous amount to be excited about and enthusiastic about because in an essence getting back to your original point you're right about the matrix for 50 years we've been in a constellation of ideas suppressing the really interesting new ideas and calling names on anybody who would propose ideas that would point out the unstable nature of our market democracy and right now what we're doing is we're living through the beginning of a global low-grade revolution of a type that we've never seen before so tune in next time to find out what happens how [ __ ] I love that it's a great place to end dude thank you so much it was absolutely amazing I hope this is part one I'd love to have you back this is so [ __ ] fun I could have gone on really obviously for a lot more time so thank you I am very keen to dive through some more portals with you so next time thank you so much thank you be well peace out everybody till next time be legendary later [Music] my first Eva knows that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology that really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 815,810

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Eric Weinstein, Conversations with Tom, Matrix, altered consciousness, The Watchmen, archetypes, education, intellectual dark web, violence, portals, music, learning, sexuality, superpowers, billion wicked thoughts, learning disability, impurity, technology.

Id: XbKXeVOUQYY

Length: 114min 21sec (6861 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020