Bret Weinstein speaks with Tom Bilyeu on the subject of consciousness, philosophy, and the scientific method. They discuss the importance of a conscious approach to life, the utility of principles in achieving goals, and the challenges of navigating novelty in a rapidly changing world. Find Tom Bilyeu on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu and on X at https://x.com/tombilyeu. ***** Sponsors: Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club: Scrumptious & freshly harvested. Go to http://www.GetF...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
I have the pleasure and honor of sitting this morning with Tom Bilyeu.
It's not this morning.
It's barely not this morning, but that doesn't matter to any of you.
Tom is the co-founder of Impact Theory Quest Nutrition.
He's a popular YouTuber.
So before anything else, let me just say, Tom, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you, man.
I am excited to be here.
I am glad to have you here.
I am gonna kind of catch you off guard right up front.
I know you have a very successful podcast, Impact Theory, and you're starting another one, The Tom Bilyeu Show.
I didn't watch it, and there's a reason.
And the reason is because I don't do product launches, book tours, this sort of thing.
Every so often, somebody who's on a book tour shows up or something.
But in any case, I think it's bad for me to put myself in a position where I could possibly be mistaken for an interviewer.
I just don't think it's the highest and best use of my talents.
But the reason that I wanted to have you on is that I do often encounter your work and you fascinate me.
And I think if anything's going to drive people to check out your work, it's going to be the fact that you come from a very unusual place and you're a very deep thinker.
So what I've noticed in listening to you is that you have a...
A deep philosophical bent that seems to affect all of the things you do.
It affects the way you approach your work.
It affects your approach to business.
It affects your marriage.
And so I appreciate anybody who's doing all of these things in a highly conscious way, which strikes me as your nature.
Does that fit with your understanding of yourself?
Aggressively. Yeah, I'm always confused that people don't live by a set of principles.
It just makes life a whole lot easier.
So my obsession is utility.
There are things that you can do that have high utility in moving you towards your goals, and there's things that you can do that are low utility that move you away from your goals.
So I predicate my life on something I call the physics of progress, which is the scientific method recontextualized to other aspects of life.
That has proven wildly advantageous for me as a former, young, aggressive, ambitious male, being able to actually generate energy in a direction.
When you look back on your life and you realize, wait a second, this was a set of ideas that's allowed me to accomplish the things that I've accomplished, and nobody thought I was going to accomplish anything.
My mom certainly didn't.
My now father-in-law didn't.
My best friend, in fact, did not think I was going to do anything with my life.
So when you look back and go, okay, then why was I able to?
For me, I came to the realization very quickly that I had cobbled together a set of ideas.
That forced a set of behaviors and those behaviors had natural outcomes.
And yeah, I just became obsessed with formalizing that.
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Now I do want to go back and defend the people who are not like you and me.
In fact, in normal circumstances, I think they have it right.
And let me just put some flesh on those bones.
What I would say is that the conscious mind is evolved for a purpose.
And the purpose was to deal with novel circumstances.
That is crazy.
I use that term all the time.
That's interesting.
Keep going.
Those circumstances should be pretty rare.
In general, a human living in an environment that's normal for humans.
Would spend almost all of their time not in this conscious mode.
Now their conscious mind would be present.
It would be present more or less as a spectator watching things unfold.
And it would become activated to direct the robot at the moments when the program that was already running wasn't adequate to the task.
So if you sort of imagine a tennis player flowing across the court, that tennis player has a conscious mind.
The conscious mind is there.
But if the conscious mind is in control of the tennis, the tennis player is going to choke.
So the tennis player is flowing across the court, not in conscious mode.
And then maybe the opponent has been studying the tennis player and found a vulnerability and delivers a shot where the person didn't anticipate it.
Then the conscious mind comes into play and it tries to field that I think in some ways are involved in the more natural,
better way of living.
The reason that you are so successful while being so unusually conscious is We are living in an era where almost nobody running an automatic program can do anything because everything is so new and so counterintuitive that flowing through modern civilization is just an impossibility.
So anyway, I think it's the moment for people who have a conscious approach.
And anyway, that's clearly you.
You also spoke to another of my favorite ideas.
You said you were bringing a scientific modality to features of life.
Before we move on to that, what you just said hit me way harder than I expected it to.
And I've heard you say that before.
I've heard you talk about that before, but for some reason I did not apply it to myself.
This is going to sound super random, but the way that you just summed that up makes a weird thing in my life suddenly make sense.
I will, at the most inopportune moments, become hyper-aware of how my teeth connect to each other and how my tongue moves.
And I have at times had to, as a meditative practice, lose my awareness of my mouth in order to speak.
And I've always thought, that's so weird.
But if your assessment is correct, that is certainly, in fact, your assessment of me makes the prediction that I would occasionally do that, and I do.
That is utterly fascinating.
That I am simply defective.
You didn't say that, but this is actually a useful way to think about it.
That I have a defective amount of self-awareness that has caused my anxiety in life, for sure, and is the thing that makes me so aware of my physical body in space.
Very interesting, Brett.
Very interesting.
You have named a thing that has been with me my whole life.
That now I hope doesn't become even more obvious to me that I have a name for it.
That's fascinating.
I think it might actually be useful to know about it.
I will tell you my corresponding version of that.
I'm somebody who's done a fair amount of public speaking.
Of course, a lot of it since 2017.
And, you know, sometimes it goes better, sometimes it goes worse.
But when I have the experience of being at a podium in front of an audience delivering something, Especially a spontaneous something.
When it goes really well, I have the impression that I, the person I call, I am a spectator.
And I'm watching this happen and I'm as interested to see what's going to be said as anybody else because I don't know.
It's coming from a non-conscious place.
It's a flow state.
And then...
One can become very conscious in the middle of such a speech, and it's the exact experience that I think an elite athlete has at the plate, becoming too aware of the bat or something.
So anyway, I think this is maybe, it's a natural tension, but you and I, I think, are biased heavily in the direction of thinking through Yeah,
I mean, it definitely feels like this moment, for sure.
What's been interesting for me is I used to apply that exclusively to business.
And I would try to explain to entrepreneurs that you have to understand, this is where I use the exact same language, not having yet discovered you at that point.
So it's two people coming to the same thing for different reasons.
But explaining to an entrepreneur, your job is to solve novel problems.
And when I say that, I mean a problem not only that you've never seen before, a problem no one has ever seen before.
And the only answer to that is to think from first principles.
And so all of my business teaching is about that.
The reason I was able to be successful in business without a background in business was I realized very quickly...
That things fit together through cause and effect.
And if you can understand the entire chain of cause and effect, then you can end up where you want to end up because you can just ask, what does that lead to?
What does that lead to?
What does that lead to?
And if you're accurate enough across those steps, then you can figure out, okay, cool.
If I do this, I'm going to end up roughly there.
And of course, you're going to, you know...
It's been a really useful way to organize my thinking, to organize my approach to something, to avoid being overwhelmed by uncertainty, which lesson number two for an entrepreneur is your job is to intoxicate other people with certainty about the direction you're moving in,
the product, whatever.
And so you've got to be able to look up at the sky, see a bunch of stars, and go, but if you look real close...
That makes a dipper.
And now, because I know where that dipper is, I can steer through the night sky.
And you know that the dipper isn't actually there, but it allows you to navigate when you would otherwise be lost.
And so the utility of that narrative becomes extremely high.
So, yeah, that's very interesting to me, is if you can think up from the ground up, you're going to get stuck a lot less.
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Yeah, I agree with this, and I've experienced something similar scientifically, where if you're a generalist, A, it's not your era.
Well, it is and it is not your era.
It's not your era professionally.
It's the era of specialists.
But if you want to make profit where others get stuck, being a generalist is a marvelous thing scientifically at the moment.
In fact, you don't have very many competitors because the generalists are driven out.
And what that means is that you have to be able to approach some discipline that isn't yours and you have to be able to Cobble together a model that is good enough to proceed from.
And you just described something like this as a narrative.
You described it as the illusion of, you know, objects in the sky drawn out of stars.
And that model allows you to make progress.
It's not a true model, but you have to be sensitive to the question of whether or not that model is accurate enough for you to navigate.
And at the point that the model falters, you have to figure out what's wrong with it and upgrade it so you can move forward.
So interesting to hear that two very different methods for confronting novelty converge on something that to me sounds very, very similar.
Yeah, this is why I call it the physics of progress.
Life works in a certain way.
The human mind works in a certain way.
There are certain forces when you take humans as a massive group that are just going to be true.
And given that those things are mappable, you find yourself in the scientific method whether you want to be or not.
The great irony is that...
So I wasn't formally trained in science.
I didn't remember anything from high school science.
And I was walking through my employees.
I was...
Teaching them this thing I call the physics of progress.
And one of my employees goes, you know that's the scientific method, right?
And I was like, actually, I didn't know that was the scientific method.
And I'm like, but I'm not at all surprised that this thing that I was just doing to find the answers when I had deep uncertainty would lead to the same thing.
That's how you know you're getting close to ground truth, that there's nothing else below that, is when multiple disciplines come at something from different angles and they come up with the same thing.
Because if you're asking, Does this work or not?
And that is the arbiter by which I'm going to judge whether this thing is real or not.
You're going to end up pretty close to ground-level truth.
And my whole thing is that beliefs have utility in that believing one thing makes it easier to accomplish or end up...
Where you want to end up with your goal, or it makes it harder to end up where you want to end up for your goal.
And if you judge all of your ideas by its utility, what you're actually doing is simply putting a proxy in for accuracy or truth.
You're saying, oh, I have gotten close to modeling what is true, which is why I can predict the outcome of this behavior.
And in YouTube, just because this is in my world, think of the truth as the algorithm.
If you really understood the algorithm and you really understood the people watching it, you'd be able to predict what episode is going to crush and which ones won't.
And Jimmy, Mr. Beast, has gotten so good at that that he'll spend $2 million on a video and kill it because he's like, nope, I know that's not going to hit.
And then so many of his videos just crush, crush, crush.
Now, you can think his videos are soulless, but you cannot say that he doesn't understand the algorithm and the people watching those videos.
And I think your exact words were, If the world understood the difference between a hypothesis and a thesis, we would solve all the problems in the world.
And I remember the first time you said that, and I was like, okay, he's obviously being hyperbolic to be funny, but why would he say that?
And then as you realize one is a guess and one is a survivor, all of a sudden you go, okay, wait a second.
Now I get that there is a very big difference.
Yeah, there's a huge difference.
And I would point out, if I can...
In effect, all disciplines are tests of one's understanding of the quality of one's model as assessed through predictive power.
That's true whether or not you're a scientist at the lab bench or running a field experiment.
It's true if you're a tennis player trying to figure out where the best place to be on the court is given the shot you just put across the net.
It's true if you're a carpenter.
Trying to imagine how small you can make a dovetail that will still hold the forces that are likely to be exerted on it.
It's all a question of predictive power.
Which actually brings me to the next issue.
Oh, one thing before I get there.
You said that your employee called your attention to the fact that you were engaged in the scientific method.
And the truth is actually one step deeper than the employee at least said.
Which is that the scientific method is itself a formalization of a process that we naturally do.
We're born to falsify ideas and children do it.
If you listen to children's questions about why things are the way they are, they are engaged in a, yeah, it's an informal version of the scientific method, which we then drum out of them in large measure in school.
We train them to stop doing that for the dumbest of reasons.
I mean, my impression, having gone through school and having found the experience painful and having been conscious through it, was that most teachers don't like the kinds of questions that children ask as soon as those questions extend beyond the knowledge that right or wrong the teacher is certain of.
The teacher does not want to be exposed for not knowing things that they feel they should know, and so they shut down the instinct to ask.
And I can't tell you, it's the worst possible instinct for an educator.
You should be cultivating your student's desire to know the answer to questions that you cannot answer.
And the best thing, the best lesson you can deliver to them is...
Showing them how you would address a question that neither of you know the answer to, right?
How are we going to figure out the answer to that question you've posed?
Or can we rephrase that question so it is answerable and then pursue the answer?
That's a very powerful lesson.
And, you know, I didn't encounter people capable of doing that until very late in my education.
Yeah, so that one, you encounter the same thing as an entrepreneur.
The way that I always rationalize this is that people have to build their self-esteem around something, but what you build your self-esteem around matters a lot.
And there seems to be what I would call an evolutionarily placed algorithm running in your brain that wants you to prize yourself for being better, faster, stronger, smarter, being right.
And so we have all this huge emotional reward system when we are in that camp, when we are right.
If you lean into that and you build your self-esteem, you will learn over time it's a super fragile position as the teacher learns.
And so they learn to obfuscate and not want the students to understand that like, oh, I don't understand that.
So they use misdirection.
They'll try to shut it down.
And they want to create the illusion that I know everything because that's what their self-esteem is predicated on.
Instead, and this is what I try to do with the Tom Bilyeu show, what I'm trying to show people is, listen, I approach the world in a fundamentally different way.
Right now, this is a time of emotion and tribal answers.
I have found that that has low predictive validity of getting you to a goal that you want to reach.
Unless your goal is just, I want to fit in.
Great! If you do, then just say it and go do your teammate thing.
But for me, I'm saying, I'm trying to do this thing over here.
It's a very knowable goal that has a date, has a metric.
I know exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and how I'm going to measure whether I accomplish that or not.
And so now the things that I do are either moving me towards that or they're moving me away from that.
If they're moving me towards it, or sorry, if that's my goal, I'm trying to move towards something, then I'm in a very fragile position if I'm just trying to be right all the time.
Because now I either have to posture, shut down questions, double down on a dumb answer just because it was mine and I have to defend my ego.
Or I can just say, hey, everybody, listen.
You've come to the Tom Billy Show.
Let me tell you right now.
I'm going to be wrong about a lot of stuff.
You're here to watch a human in real time.
Try to find the ideas that have the highest predictive validity.
So please, as we're here live, it's done as both a live show and then a cut down later.
Challenge me.
If you think I'm wrong about something, say it.
I don't even mind if you try to be mean, whatever.
Just give me clarity.
Because if you tell me that I'm stupid, but you tell me why I'm stupid, I'll look at that and be like, oh, actually, I think they're right.
Again, going back to your idea just has higher predictive validity.
When I run a backwards check, if I had believed that for the last 10 years, would I have made more or less progress?
I think I would have made more.
Then it's like, okay, cool.
My ego is tied up in my willingness to do that, my willingness to what I call stare nakedly at my inadequacies.
And the act of doing that makes me feel better about myself, but it also propels me forward because skills have utility.
And now by getting wiser in that I'm holding on to beliefs that actually allow me to do a thing in the world that other people can't do, I make progress.
All right.
A couple of points I want to follow up on.
Reality is not a team sport.
Many people are confused about this.
They want to be on the team that understands reality.
And the fact is, no team understands reality.
And a team is a bastardization.
It's a convenience.
Sometimes you have to be on a team to accomplish a goal.
But that's not what reality is about, and you shouldn't mistake it for that.
The other thing is, you mentioned the idea of trying to be right all the time.
And it's really subtly off the mark to try to be right all the time.
Because what you should be trying to do, if you really want to be right in a deep way, in a way that is something other than just being able to, you know, point to the accuracy of what you said and say, I told you so.
If you're interested in being right in a deep way, what you're really trying to do is build a model Where you've never been before, right?
So you can figure out what the answer is when confronted with something new in some elegant way.
The better your model is, the more accurate it will be at allowing you to extrapolate correctly.
So it does result in you being right a lot of the time.
But it's not a matter of...
It's not like being your own Wikipedia and having a ton of facts at your disposal.
So when somebody asks you the question, you can spit out the answer.
It's a question of having the elegant model, as simple as possible, that allows you to know the answer to questions you've never thought of before, before other people do, because you don't have, it's not a question of looking it up and remembering it.
And people, I'm struck by and frustrated at The predicament I find myself in repeatedly, which is my model is very good across a wide range of topics.
I know that, and other people should know that, because over time the predictive power has been very high.
Not perfect.
But why is it high?
It's high because as the model reveals itself not to be predictive, I fix it.
I figure out what's wrong with it and I upgrade it.
So I'm very troubled in the present, at any present moment, when people confront me with some isolated belief that is far off of the mainstream and say, how could you possibly believe that?
And I say, well, because my model tells me to question this and to put more weight over there.
It's up against nothing other than incredulity, right?
The fact that a belief sounds preposterous doesn't argue one way or the other as to whether it's valid.
And so, you know, I'm troubled by the fact that you can end up destroying your credibility following an accurate model to predictions that are ahead.
And, you know, sorry, I don't mean to be on a soapbox here.
But I realized many years ago that scientifically speaking, the mythology is that we want you to find important stuff way ahead of the moment that others will discover it,
right? The farther ahead, the better.
But that is not how the system functions.
The system functions.
It rewards you if you come up with insights just barely before others.
If you come up with stuff way too early, they'll deride you as a heretic and drive you into the wilderness, or you'll never be heard of, right?
The point is it's too early for that realization, and it will be lost to history.
And that's a defect of the system, a massive one, because from the point of view of the well-being of civilization, we do want you to come up with stuff that strikes us as just so strange, it's got to be wrong.
And then it turns out to be true.
Well, if you figure that stuff out 100 years ahead of time, what a huge act of wealth creation for all of humanity you've engaged in.
So anyway, it's a defect of our system, and it's become increasingly a pet peeve of mine.
Man, understandably so.
The one that I always think of on that topic is a guy that came up with germ theory.
He's like, I think this might be because we're touching cadavers and then delivering babies and that we just need to wash our hands.
And that guy died alone in an insane asylum, if I'm not mistaken, because people so broke him and told him that he was out of his mind.
He was crazy and he just couldn't be any more wrong.
Totally isolated from polite society, from his profession, everything.
And I just thought, damn, he ended up being right.
And it would have been so easy to test and that they didn't want to test.
They just wanted to show how wrong he was.
I was like, I am constantly vigilant for that in my own mind.
I have a few things like inflation.
I'm a psychopath around inflation.
My own community knows.
If you want to distract the teacher, just ask him about inflation.
It's the one area where I'm like the most on the lookout for, okay, there's for sure something that I have wrong.
There's some vision of this.
Maybe just an oversimplification.
But this is the one that I'm most likely to blind myself on.
And I just don't see that algorithm running in other people.
And it's like, yeah, this doesn't make me good, somebody else bad.
This is just about utility.
Which one of those stances in life works?
So, yeah, when you look back, I think everybody wants the real answer.
But in the moment, everybody wants to be on the tribe.
Everybody wants to be right more than they want to be smarter.
When you say inflation, you're saying you're an inflation hawk?
Yeah. To me, all of the problems in, certainly, modern society stem from inflation.
You can try to find other things.
I guess you could say human nature.
But man, one rung up from human nature is its first manifestation in the printing of money.
And the way that that deranges everything downstream is crazy.
And it's one where I'm like banging the drum, screaming as loud as I can.
And it's an idea that is just complicated enough that average people are never going to care.
Even though when they're screaming that they can't make ends meet, I'm just like,
Yeah, it's like, um, it's like a small There's a breach in the wall of a ship.
You know, it's bringing on water and people are like, yeah, but you know, the bilge pumps are handling it.
And it's like, well, how well are they handling it?
How much do you want to be depending on bilge pumps?
Shouldn't we be talking about the fact that there's a breach in the hull and that's a fundamental problem with a ship?
And that it's like, hey, We want to let, let's just say, more people onto the ship.
So let's poke a hole in it so it lowers down a little so more people can get on.
It's like, what is happening?
This is the very thing that's going to destroy everybody's ability to save wealth, make their kids' lives better than their own.
It's one of those, and I don't know how much you want to get into it.
It's one of those that as you peel that onion back...
It reveals itself in more and more and more of the problems.
But it is complex.
You do eventually butt up against that.
You want the perception of no inflation, but you don't actually want no inflation.
So it is fascinating.
And that when it's done well, you get the American economy, but you only get it for, you know, whatever, 250 years, and then it does eventually implode.
And that every empire ever has fallen under the weight of debt and money printing, ever.
It's just a loop.
Yeah, especially bad in an era where the elites who are in a position to shift the policy around money printing are also...
At least in the short term in a position to escape the consequences of the ship going down.
Yup. Or even benefiting from it because they get the money first before it actually goes down in value.
So for them, it's this double whammy of, whoa, I can buy these goods with extra dollars.
And if I waited, say, six months or a year, now those same goods are going to seem more expensive.
And you don't have extra dollars.
So it's crazy.
This is one I never thought I would be talking about finance.
I never even thought I would care.
I knew how to get rich.
That was easy enough.
I don't want to belittle that journey.
But investing money, growing wealth over time is a totally different game.
It is the game that the vast majority of humans play, certainly in the West.
And people just don't understand, like they fundamentally don't understand how money works.
And so they can tell the system is rigged against me, but they don't know in what way.
And given that they don't know how the system is rigged, they don't know what to vote for, what to push on, how to say stop, whatever this is.
And so they start looking at the wrong things.
But yeah, that is my hobby horse.
If I could get people to understand how to protect the average American that...
Stop money printing.
Yeah, stop money printing is right.
Okay, let me switch topics on us here a little bit.
One of the places that I've heard you talk that I've been particularly struck has to do with relationships.
In particular, I remember, I don't even remember how I ended up there, but somehow I heard you responding to a question about your relationship with your wife.
And the answer that I heard you give was strangely on target in a way that I just don't hear from most people.
I'll try to recover it.
Whenever people tell me things that I've said, it's often butchered, and so I can't quite resonate with it.
But what you said was that you were aware That your wife had a very powerful toolkit with which to incentivize you to be better.
And that instead of resenting being incentivized, you were in favor of it because effectively you trusted her and it was good for you and good for her and good for your partnership.
So why wouldn't you be?
Does that ring a bell?
Very much.
You did a phenomenal job.
That is exactly what I believe.
And I am the recipient of two kids who were too dumb to know that gender dynamics were this changing thing.
And so we got together when we were in our 20s.
I was 24. She was 21 when we met.
Got married not too long after that.
At some point, I realized, whoa, I am trying to impress her, and in trying to impress her, I'm becoming a better person.
And I realized that initially, she has since become an entrepreneur in her own right, but in the beginning, when we were just two broke kids, she saw herself as working through me.
To get the things done for our family that we wanted.
So I went off to go to work and to try to be an entrepreneur and to build a company.
And she was in the background, like pushing me, encouraging me, trying to get me to do more, pointing out if I wasn't doing something that I said that I was going to do, pointing out when I could have asked for more and been more aggressive, rewarding me in the way that only a wife can, when she saw me do something that she thought was powerful.
And so I was like, Whoa, my wife is shaping me in ways that have been profoundly advantageous for me as a man and certainly for us as a family.
And so at the beginning when we were really starting to be successful, I was running a company.
I was racing towards a billion dollar valuation.
It was crazy.
I was making real money for the first time in my life.
And I had put her through almost a decade of being like clipping coupons and, you know, not like unable to pay the bills, but we were not.
You know, thriving yet.
And I broke down in tears one night and I was like, the world is never going to know how instrumental you have become in who I am becoming.
And so I was starting to get celebrated.
This is like social media is coming along and, you know, founded this company that's absolutely killing it.
And people are just like holding me up, like, look at this entrepreneur.
This is amazing.
Oh my God, so incredible.
My wife was just quietly running a department in the company and not getting any credit.
And I thought, yo, you have shaped me at a deep and fundamental level in all the ways that a woman can shape a man.
And I was like, I will forever owe you a debt of gratitude.
And so then, this was all before sort of the woke stuff, or certainly before it got on my radar.
Then the woke stuff gets on my radar.
I'm the guy that's like, utility of beliefs will take you where you want to go.
I'm over here quietly telling people like, hey, get in a relationship.
There's a reason that this dyad has been so useful from an evolutionary perspective, like ignore it at your own peril.
And then it was like, men and women are the same.
And I was like, wait, what?
I'm like, that doesn't make any sense.
From an end of one perspective, I can certainly tell you that's nonsensical.
And then just as I look back and go, okay, if I had that belief all through evolutionary history, would this have rang true?
And I'm like, that's dumb once you start looking at evolutionary timescales.
And so I'm like, that's going to derange.
The here and now culture, which of course that hypothesis has turned into a thesis in the extreme, as I watch online dating and cultural shifts change the way that men and women look at each other, the way they look at relationships, into something where I'm like,
that has low utility from where I'm sitting in terms of it's not going to make your life better.
It's going to make your life worse.
Very important that people identify what their North Star is so that we can say whether something is actually going to move you towards that or not.
But yeah, that one is the one that feels like an own goal.
That is people smashing themselves in a hand with a hammer, and I just can't track.
Yeah, it's a tragedy, in my opinion.
And increasingly, I am preoccupied thinking about the nature of the tragedy of young people Forming or in many cases not forming relationships.
And so anyway, if I can take what you just said and reformulate it a little bit, I would say we have the following puzzle.
Human beings are exquisitely built for your romantic relationship to supercharge your capacity.
It makes sense that it would be, because a permanent romantic relationship, and I'm being careful not to say monogamous, though I really in general mean that.
I'll defend monogamy here in a second if I have to.
But a permanent romantic relationship is a team that completely aligns interests.
In other words, in any sort of a traditional A wife would have every interest in her husband being as powerful and effective as she could help him be, right?
Because her well-being, and more importantly the well-being of her brood, is dependent on how well-positioned and effective the father of her children is.
That makes her trustworthy in a way that is, you know, you couldn't buy at any price on the open market.
Right? If you go to McKinsey& Company to find out what you should be doing, they have all kinds of perverse incentives.
But your wife's alignment with you is this very natural thing.
But at the same time, we are living in modern, hyper-novel circumstances where the way in which that partnership functions has to be renegotiated.
Even for the so-called trads, you're living in a post-birth control world, right?
A couple decides whether to have children, how many children, when to have them.
And so the point is the architecture is still there for this very powerful relationship.
But the way in which it unfolds has to be navigated anew.
And nobody seems to have proper guidance for young people on, hey, here's what you're actually trying to accomplish, and here are the obstacles to applying the program that you evolved with.
So the question is, can you reconcile these things?
Can you create a new kind of relationship in which you still get the power from the thing that evolution built into you?
And the degree to which I am seeing Failure mode after failure mode amongst young people has me quite despairing.
I know nobody wants to hear an older guy talk about this, but I just think the kids are in trouble and they don't even really know it.
Agreed. The problem is they don't understand frame of reference.
Your frame of reference controls what you look at and what you see.
So you and I, as quote-unquote old guys, we look at women in general, men and women together, and we see, okay, these are two different things.
They have their own drives, their own impulses, but they come together well as a unit.
Things have to be...
Negotiate it for sure.
It's not like my wife and I got together and, oh, just this all fits perfectly.
We had to negotiate a lot of things, define terms, how are we going to be with each other, rules of engagement, all that.
But you can negotiate those things well and you can thrive.
That is what I see when I look at a couple.
So when I see two people that are like, oh my God, we're in love and we're going to get married, I have a warm feeling.
And I'm like, yeah, that's amazing.
Take that same thing and you show it to somebody who's 22 and the odds that they have some sort of ironic detachment, cynical take on what all of that is borders on 100%.
And so when they look at the same thing, they see something fundamentally different.
And in what they see, they will thusly make that come true.
Each of them will be more standoffish.
They won't see this as a negotiated thing where we can both win and work together.
And so you really have to wait until the culture changes in order to get back to something that is more useful.
In the two sides coming together, because this stuff is downstream of culture.
Culture imparts that frame of reference, that colors, how they view all of this.
Now, it's not in a vacuum.
There are real things that exacerbate this stuff, for sure.
But if you...
Begin to change your frame of reference.
You can avoid some of the traps.
Like, I have many times thought, man, very glad that I have my wife.
But if I didn't, I still feel like I could navigate today's dating life and it's like, oh, I want to do it so bad to see, like, what are the things that I'm missing and how much of my approach into this would actually work.
The big thing that I think kids have to overcome today, and this would be the main thing I would focus on if I were building a strategy to still be successful and find love in a stable relationship, would be there is a wild distortion that happens cognitively when you feel like you can always find the next.
When I met my wife, I felt like, oh my God, I happened upon this British woman in LA.
Like, this is crazy.
It gave me the sense that I've looked the whole world over and I found her, which of course is not true.
She just happened to be the person that came across my path.
And everything else from there was like working it out because we decided once we were in love that we were not looking back.
So we're like, divorce isn't an option.
That's not the game that we're playing.
Like, we're going to figure out how to make this work.
But if you feel like, nah, this is a bit frustrating, there's always another, there's always another, there's always another, and that's baked into your dopamine loop that you can literally pick up an app and just find the next, find the next, find the next.
You've got to not only break yourself out of that, you've got to break the people that you're approaching out of the belief that, nah, as soon as I hit friction with this guy, I'm just on to the next person.
And that's formidable.
Like when I think about a foe, that's a formidable foe.
Getting somebody to change that lens.
Isn't going to be easy, but it feels doable.
Yes, it's especially problematic, I suspect, when the, what I think is a false sophistication pervades society, where the idea is, oh, well, the natural thing to do is, you know, to have fun until you get bored of it,
and then, you know, if you feel like having a permanent relationship, then you can form one and, you know, Just don't date guys under six feet.
I don't know what the modern stuff is.
But the point is that may create the conditions in which you actually can't solve the problem of how to build a relationship that works.
That a relationship that actually you've signed up with the right person.
And by the right person, I mean somebody who has the underlying stuff and the interest in Reforming themselves to be compatible and complementary.
You find that person, and then you're actually better off if whatever the obstacles are, they are substantial to getting out and moving on to somebody else.
You're forced to figure out how to solve the problem.
You know, life is not a...
I'm sure modern video games don't work this way, but back in the day, you'll recall that a video game was something that...
If you accidentally trained you, if you felt like you had bad luck and you should have killed that alien and failed to, you could restart the game.
So your high score was like 20 games that you didn't complete and then one game which you got lucky in the beginning and it worked out.
That's not a good model for life.
Anyway, I think...
I just think people do not understand, A, that it is a solvable problem.
That because the mythology tends to be, well, you know, you probably want to be married, I guess, but it kind of sucks.
Right? That's the message kids get.
And I ain't saying it's easy.
It's not easy.
And it's not all joy.
But there is.
I don't know.
You know, it seems to me that
were confused enough on this front when I was young, and they've only gotten worse, that it's very hard to convey...
To people that although movies aren't life, that old movies that report on romantic relationships are telling you something about how much the world has changed.
Even if those things weren't perfectly accurate, they do tell you what it was that inspired people and caused them to behave in the ways that they did.
There was a reality to it.
Yeah, no doubt.
My mantra is you're having a biological experience.
And the thing I would want anybody to understand, young, old, doesn't matter, figure out how much of this is a biological question.
So if I know, for instance, that oxytocin, vasopressin, those are the neurochemicals that cause you to bond.
Then it's like, okay, let's not play around with the bonding hormones.
So an orgasm is one of the things it releases that.
So sleeping with a lot of people, thinking that it's casual, that's probably going to derange because of the impact on the neurochemistry.
Also, now you've got a dopamine loop of like new, new, new.
And if I know that there is an evolutionarily placed algorithm, certainly for men, that rewards the pursuit of novelty, it's like, okay, where are you trying to get to?
Because if you're trying to get to, if your North Star is, I want to sleep with a lot of women.
Awesome. Get yourself in that dopamine loop.
You'll always be hungry for the next.
You're always going to be looking for the next novel female.
You're going to have a great time.
The problem is that there's an algorithm in your brain running that you're going to hit a certain age, and it's going to be something along the lines of, does my life have meaning and purpose?
Well, guess what?
From an evolutionary perspective, gives the most meaning and purpose ready made, ready to go.
Kids. So it's like, that's really this driver to get people to slow down, take it seriously and realize, okay, now's the time where I need some fruits to grow on this tree.
And so...
When I play out like, okay, what is the human experience going to be like?
I'm playing it on the back of what I know are the evolutionarily placed algorithms running in my brain that are going to dictate X, Y, Z things.
And so I want to make sure that I'm living in conjunction with them.
And so if you're telling yourself a story that men and women are opposing sides, that there are these two colliding forces, they don't make sense together in a modern context, you're going to have a disastrous run.
When the evolution kicks in and it just all starts to feel empty and you start to think, man, how are there no good, insert man, insert woman, in my life?
Why has this all been deranged?
And trying then to figure out that the very thing that's trapping you is your picture of how all of this works.
That there are so many people in the red pill community that really legitimately believe that women are the enemy.
They are trying to get a hold of your financial resources.
That they just want to use sex to get a guy that's out of their league.
They think they're having fun in the beginning.
They don't realize that they're being used by a guy that's out of their league who can sleep with whoever he wants and controls the terms of commitment and is constantly moving on.
And then there's this phrase, not your woman, just your turn.
And all of that creates this image of these are two antagonistic forces rather than the...
And I don't believe in God, so people need not flame me for this.
But the biblical interpretation of God created man and woman as a complement, your job on this earth is to have kids and raise them well, it just gives you a ready-made frame of reference, true or not, that's going to put you in lockstep with the evolutionarily placed algorithms.
And without that, you now have no bumpers other than the emotional pain and suffering of being isolated.
Yeah, I think that's quite right.
And it strikes me as the game that occurs when the better game has broken down.
Right? That's interesting.
That the fact that I think, frankly, somebody needs to tell young women is men have two reproductive modes.
One of them is non-investing, and the other is symmetrically investing to the way women reproduce.
Women have the one mode that is highly investing.
And the two modes are almost unrelated.
One of them is a bargain.
You know, if a guy can find a fertile female who's willing to engage in reproductive behavior without requiring commitment, that's so...
That's such a bargain from an evolutionary perspective that men have trouble ignoring that opportunity.
So traditionally, women have made that opportunity essentially non-existent because raising somebody else's child without their help is such a huge loss for women.
But in the modern environment, these rules don't apply.
Sex is plentiful, so men feel like they're Genghis Khan, and they're not.
And it does not—so that mode in which men try to reproduce, try to engage in reproductive behavior with women without committing to them is predatory.
That's what it is.
It is taking advantage of a person in the most extreme way, sticking them with a child that they're going to have to raise for 18 years, right, and you're not going to participate.
That is a decidedly predatory behavior.
The problem is, men find themselves in the dopamine loop where that behavior is being rewarded, so they're in that mindset, because why would you settle down when you could be sleeping with, you know, different women all the time?
But, stupidly, women have signed up for the same game, and they, you know, Nth Wave Feminism has told women, hey, you know what?
You're not equal until you behave like men, and behaving like men comes...
To mean behaving like men at their worst.
And so everybody is now behaving in this predatory way, which then leads to exactly what you were describing.
There is not an instinct towards this collaborative mode of reproduction, which is very human and has traditionally been much more important than the predatory mode.
But the fashion of the moment has everybody in predatory mode, and so they think it's sophisticated to recognize that that's just kind of what it is, and it isn't.
That's the problem.
It's an illusion.
But the counterexamples, well, I don't know.
I wonder if part of the solution, I mean, it sounds to me you're in a monogamous relationship, and you don't feel burdened by that fact.
You feel enhanced by it.
I do.
It is a trade-off.
And so I really had to sit down and be like, I made a pros and cons list when I decided to propose to my wife.
And on one of the cons lists was, you'll only ever sleep with one woman again.
And are you okay with that?
And so by being aware that I was making a trade-off, that there were things that I was going to gain that I thought were worth that trade-off, it meant that I was coming into the relationship with my eyes wide open.
I also understood it from a hormonal perspective.
So I was like...
We're going to feel and respond very differently in the beginning of this relationship than we will in five years and we will in 50 years.
And so we've got to be able to navigate that well.
And so we were always looking for the strategies that were going to help us move forward.
And so we talked very, very early on.
I said, listen, I don't have eyes only for you.
I am always going to find other women attractive.
And I was like, the really bad news for you is they've done a study, and the study shows that women find men attractive that are in a band within their age.
It's like two years up, two years down.
And however old they are, that's the band in which they find men attractive.
Men, on the other hand, find women who are 22 attractive.
It doesn't matter how old they are.
So I was like, you're going to turn into a bag of bones.
If things go well, a bag of wrinkles, I should say.
If things go well, I'm going to get wealthy over time, which means there's going to be a period where you feel like your sexual market value is declining and my sexual market value is climbing.
And I said, we exist to make that moment not matter.
And so I want to tell you all of that now while you're still young and hot that...
While I appreciate it and I go out of my way, my wife has done a phenomenal job of keeping herself very attractive.
But I'm like, it will only work for so long.
And so I want you to know that I'm interested in commitment.
I'm interested in knowing that if I lost my money, you would be here.
And that you know, and I mean feel in your bones, that if you inevitably lose your good looks, and look, I trust that my wife will always be attractive for her age.
The realities are that from a sexual market value perspective, she will be going down.
And I was like, I'm still going to be into you.
I'm still going to want to be married to you.
And I am still not going to sleep with anybody else.
It's just going to be you.
By talking about that stuff, by laying it out.
So I actually got a tattoo when we got married.
I did it as an act of ritualistic scarification.
It is the only tattoo I've ever gotten.
It is the only tattoo I ever planned to get.
And I wanted to be different in the Joseph Campbell power of myth way from before my marriage to after my marriage.
And on it, I put the four words that I thought encapsulated.
What I wanted our life together to be.
And one of those is commitment.
And I said, listen, I'm going to find other women attractive.
And I assume you're going to find other men attractive.
And it would just be crazy for me to not expect you to find somebody attractive and you expect me to not find somebody attractive.
But the reality is, I want you to know that I'm committed to you.
I want to be in a relationship with you and only you.
And I'm willing to make these sacrifices.
But holy bejesus, we are going to do the work.
To ensure that this relationship gives more than it takes.
And that's been our secret sauce, is just making sure, yeah, that making these sacrifices to be together and to constantly be compromising is a small offering to what we get in return.
Oh, man, that's a hell of a speech to have given your your would be or then newly wife.
That's that's amazing.
I did want to contribute a couple of things.
From my toolkit here, some definitional stuff.
You may have heard me say before that hotness and beauty are two different things.
And so, women do lose their hotness.
It goes away.
But there are attractive women at, dare I say, every age, certainly until very advanced ages.
That beauty is actually about, it's more integrative and it's about something other than the amount of one's reproductive capacity that remains ahead and, you know, fertility.
So there's that.
And then I guess the other thing I wanted to touch on was the part of your speech where you said, you know, I'm always going to be attracted to other I'm increasingly wondering if that's not the result of blurring some distinctions.
I will just say at the risk of being too personal, I certainly see other women as attractive, but I do not feel drawn to them.
In the way that one does when one is pursuing a mate, and until I think one really finds the monogamous program within themself.
And this is actually kind of liberating, and I will say I learned something about this, I think, from my maternal grandfather, who I was quite close with.
So my maternal grandfather's name was Harry.
Harry was...
First of all, my grandmother, who died pretty early in my life, was a very attractive woman.
And after she was gone, it was not unknown that my grandfather really appreciated beautiful women.
I don't think he was lusting after them.
In fact, I'm pretty sure he wasn't.
He had within him...
Made his peace with the idea that there is a difference between appreciating the beauty of a woman and desiring her.
And so the fact that he had made this distinction allowed him to delight in the beauty of a woman that he found attractive and have it not be creepy.
Right? He could sit next to a beautiful woman and have a very engaging conversation that he would feel very positive about.
And it wasn't about, you know, trying to get her into the sack or thinking about her in that way.
And anyway, I don't, I think our culture has become so, it has become almost absurdly sexually free to the point that, you know, taboos are, you're not even allowed to shame people for,
we're engaging in taboo stuff that's taboo for a very good reason,
I don't know how we ended up there, but it seems to be where we are.
So anyway, that idea that sex is just some sort of a biological thing, and therefore everything is valid between consenting adults and what goes on between your ears is your business and no one else's, and all of these pseudo-sophistications have resulted in The boundaries that might once have been natural to people just simply not existing,
and I think modern people believing that they were always a fiction.
Does that make any sense?
It makes a lot of sense to me.
So I remember when Jordan Peterson got lit up for what he called culturally enforced monogamy, but the reality is that...
If you read history, you learn very quickly that humans are capable of the most atrocious, abhorrent things that you can imagine.
I mean, just unbelievable cruelty, torture, murder, death, cannibalism, on and on the list goes.
And so you couple that with what Solzhenitsyn said, that the line between good and evil runs for every human heart.
And all of a sudden, it's like, it's probably good.
That we have society around us to say, hey, for whatever reason in this moment, this is okay, this is not okay.
And there is such a thing as too permissible.
And I think it was along those lines that Nietzsche was talking about when he said that we've killed God and we'll never wash the blood off our hands.
Like he could just somehow see those second and third order consequences of a world where there isn't a big sky father who says, this is how it's going to be because I said so.
And once you don't have that, Now it's like all the brakes come off and you have that line running through every human heart and now nobody's getting checked and all of a sudden the right context will bring out the worst of impulses and the right lens to view one's own self is that I am capable of Moral colorblindness.
I don't know what the right way to think about it is, but I'm just as prone to do something horrific that history will look back on me and be like, yo, I can't believe they did that.
But in the moment, it's going to seem fine.
And given that, wanting there to be a culture that we respect that's high-functioning and have it, the reason I like it coming from culture is that's bottom-up.
I despise all of this stuff from the top down.
But when you're a part of a culture that just agrees, this is what we're trying to do, this is what's okay, this is what's not okay, if it's yielding the outcome that you want as a society, then, hey, I'm all for it.
And I think that you strip those brakes off at your own peril.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Sometimes I think the distinction between bottom-up and top-down is not as clear as it might be.
In other words, there's a lot of stuff that appears to be organic.
You know, like the idea that kink-shaming is somehow a morally defective thing to do, I don't think that emerged so organically.
I think that that was promoted, that basically anyone who departed from that belief structure was portrayed as Prudish or bigoted or something like that.
So anyway, there's some aspect of an inorganic evolution of some new cultural sophistication.
Or maybe a better example would be what I hear about modern porn, and I must say I consume no porn at all, so I'm not in a position to say what's there firsthand.
But that modern porn contains an awful lot of violence, and that this violence is manifest in the mating and dating culture for young people, that women are asking for violence,
men are inflicting it, and that that, is that a natural cultural evolution?
I don't think so at all.
That there's a natural process within the market for porn.
That natural process is that different producers are competing for attention and the way that they get attention while they're selling fundamentally the same thing as everybody else is they become extreme.
Extremeness is the way to get attention.
Having done that with porn in an arms race for extremeness, what that does is it creates a false developmental environment for people growing up who are consuming this stuff so that they come to think that that's what sex is about.
And the point is, that's not top-down exactly.
It is bottom-up, I guess.
But it's bottom-up from a market.
The market is driving this cultural evolution that ends up manifesting in The biology of sex and romance, which, you know, so anyway, I think those distinctions are a little bit harder to draw in the present because we have these centralized processes like the distribution of porn that result in the culture evolving to do something new as if it was being mandated from
the top down, even though technically it isn't.
It's interesting.
I completely understand what you're saying.
And I'm going to quickly steelman it so that I can then disagree with it slightly and we'll see if it matters.
So the steelman goes like this.
It is not an entirely natural process for something to arise from a bottom-up cultural perspective when there are markets and people are...
Pursuing their optimal strategy from a monetary perspective, but they're riding on an evolutionary thing, novelty, aggression, whatever's different, standing out from the market by being more extreme.
And that market causes people to encounter a product that has evolutionary consequences that you otherwise would never have encountered and would therefore not have adopted those behaviors.
And we see it playing out in the sexual mores of kids today.
That all makes sense to me.
Do you recognize your statement in that retelling?
Yeah. Okay.
So where I would say that this is different is probably just one of definition, because I agree with everything that you just said.
I just think that that doesn't break.
The way that evolution is, it's just technology is forcing evolution to begin playing out in a new field.
And so things are moving a lot faster, but all the mechanisms that, when things are bottom up, catch it from running out of control, they're being caught.
And the only thing that scares me is when the top down comes and says, hey, don't be a bigot.
Don't push back on transgender.
Hey, don't be a bigot.
Don't kink shame.
Then it's like, well, hold on a second.
Now you're actually stopping me from talking on what is now the public square, which is, you know, Twitter back in the day or YouTube current day.
Still, they'll really cancel you.
That distortion is what bothers me.
I don't mind when other people go, you know, this guy's bad, can't let him talk, horrible, horrible, bang pots and pans, no problem.
Because as a culture, we're either going to push back against that and there's going to be a bigger what I'll call immune, cultural immune response to that, or that response is the dominant thing in culture and it manages to grab the groundswell.
If the playing field is even, everything is working.
As I would expect.
And I would expect different people to push back on different things in different ways.
And then whatever is truly, I like to think, the highest utility thing will be the thing that enough people eventually get behind and they push it forward.
Now that might take 10 or 15 years.
And so take cell phones in the hands of kids.
Oh, we completely just smashed an entire generation of children with cell phones.
So my thing does not protect from those.
Moments occurring, but I don't want to reduce technology.
I want people to be able to access the things they want to access.
I do not want somebody stepping in from the outside to say, well, this market's getting distorted, and so we're going to try to stop the distortions.
Inevitably, that's going to go in the wrong direction.
So I may just be embracing and, quite frankly, celebrating as a techno-optimist.
I love the velocity at which information travels now.
I get that it causes these weird pulses to work their way through culture that can temporarily have negative effects.
I just believe that what you'll see is that we'll always rebalance, always rebalance, always rebalance.
Okay. Uh, I will now steel man your position and then tell you why I think I disagree.
Fair. Um, what you're saying is that in effect we have a,
An evolutionary landscape.
And that even if market forces are distorting that landscape, that it is still true that those who intuit what is best to do will rise to the top ultimately.
That there may be a tremendous amount of carnage in the short term, but that ultimately if violent porn is bad for you to consume, that ultimately those who Refuse to consume it will have an advantage.
And so in the end, there's still no better way to get to the desirable system than to let that evolution play out rather than interfere with something like the technology and the distribution of whatever people want to consume.
That is correct.
Okay. And I don't disagree with most of that either, but I'm awfully troubled by...
We should interfere at the level of trying to hold back the technology.
I'm squeamish about trying to restrict content because I can rail all day against pornography, but I will defend And so the point is,
I can even tell you what the distinction between them is, but that doesn't make it something you can operationalize easily.
The question is, was it produced because of profit, or was it produced for some other reason?
If somebody's making a statement about sex, that's erotica.
If somebody wouldn't be involved in sex other than the paycheck, that's porn.
And the problem is you can get paid for erotica.
It doesn't mean it's the reason that you did it.
And you may not even know to what extent pay was involved.
But nonetheless, we can draw the distinction.
And what that distinction says is you can't easily restrict the content that's destructive if there's a gray area.
We need to know the motive of the people who made it in order to know whether or not it's in the valid or the not valid category.
So anyway, free speech-wise, I lean very heavily in the direction of allowing people to say whatever they feel like saying.
And I wouldn't be interested in restricting the technology.
So I'm really just interested in the behavior of people and what to do about the fact that people are being harmed.
And from that perspective, the correct place to address it is at the level of our culture and what it tolerates.
In other words, the whole point was kink shaming.
The behavior that shouldn't be showing up in people's sexual developmental environment shouldn't be showing up there because It's shameful behavior, and there should be a social cost to producing it.
There should be a social cost to consuming it.
There should be a social cost to imitating it.
And what I'm not saying that people will, I'm sure, hear that I am, but I'm really not.
I'm not saying I should be in charge of deciding what's shameful and what isn't.
But I'm saying society has always decided what was shameful and what isn't.
And that is a place for the information about what behaviors might seem cool but really are bad for you.
You know, if some kind of sexual behavior is disease transmitting and therefore people should avoid it, but you're 200 years before the germ theory of disease, right?
The point is that information accumulates in the, you know, Biblical stories about what you shouldn't do and what God thought of it.
So, anyway, I do think the natural cultural evolutionary mechanism is the correct remedy for the runaway permissiveness that we see.
That the permissiveness sounds like it is sex positive.
In fact, that's the term used for it.
But it is really quite the opposite.
You're taking something profound and important and you're...
And degrading it by basically declaring it a postmodern landscape in which whatever happens in your mind is perfectly valid.
Have you read The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell?
I haven't.
I'm certainly aware of it, of course.
Oh, man.
It's really had a big impact on me.
It is the reason that I got the tattoo.
And one of the core theses in the book is that...
There's no more ritual.
And because there's no more ritual, nothing is sacred.
People don't have these transitional moments.
And so you don't have a moment where you're like, I'm no longer a kid.
I'm now an adult.
I'm no longer single.
I'm now married.
And I remember reading that going, that is interesting.
And I don't want my life to fall prey to that.
I want to create these ritualistic moments where I say I am fundamentally different today than I was the day before.
And in a world Where there isn't religion, where you have these things handed down and, you know, it makes all kinds of proclamations about you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that.
To your point, it's all before germ theory, but that's a lot of what they're getting at.
And when it's encapsulated in religion and it feels very old, this feels like, well, yeah, like this is just how the world ought to be.
You can really get the average person behind the things that were always done.
They don't question it.
This is just how it was always done.
This is what my parents taught me.
It's written like this in the book.
The book's been around forever.
And so you're able to create these guardrails that people will stay on.
In a modern context, I see people reverting back to that.
So we are getting that swing.
But you're not going to pick people like me up in that swing.
The idea of making things intentionally sacred I think could carry a lot of weight.
And so that's something that Lisa and I have done with each other to keep things new, to keep things fresh.
Obviously, you can get, it's just so same as it ever was when you're with somebody for as long as we, we've been married now for almost 23 years.
And so you can get to a point where I've heard all your stories, there's nothing new here.
And so finding ways to make things sacred, to make them special.
Creating rituals in your life, creating traditions, things that not only do you do, but they have meaning and you imbue them with meaning.
A story that jumps to mind is your brother invited me to a Shabbat dinner, which I had never been to before.
And so going through all of the rituals of that, and they were so novel to me, certainly, because I'd never done it before, that it was like, whoa, this is just like a dinner with friends, but it suddenly turned into something far heavier.
It's galvanizing my thinking.
It's making me look at things anew.
Now, whether that's something that will scale without the, this is literally the word of God, that's a big question.
But working those things back into your life, for me, has certainly been very advantageous.
I will credit the power of myth with locking me into my marriage and making me think about it in a way where it was like, divorce is off the table.
In our household, we don't even say the word divorce.
We call it the D word.
So it's off the table no matter how upset we are, barring infidelity or abuse, like we are going to find a way forward.
That's been transformative.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And I must say, in fact, Heather and I wrote into our book about the absence of rites of passage.
And to the extent that we have rites of passage, They are pitiful.
Graduated from high school.
Well, anybody can graduate from high school.
It's not an accomplishment.
And that doesn't mean that most graduates haven't accomplished something, but it means that the ritual itself is almost devoid of meaning because it's so automatic.
And likewise, even marriage is a rite of passage.
Both people are standing at the altar thinking, eh, I think this is going to work, but if it doesn't, divorce is messy, but how bad could it be?
If that's what you're thinking, then the point is it doesn't have the power to transform you.
I often say that if you understood how much was riding on the choice of who you marry, That it would be an absolutely terrifying prospect.
right the idea of saying i do to the wrong person oh my god is that terrifying but you are built to overcome that you're built to not focus on it the way i don't
know a parkour person jumps some gap that they'll die if they don't quite make it you're built to be able to overcome it in order to do the thing and the um
I liked how you described your mindset, that actually you just simply decided that, no, I'm not going to leave myself the mental option.
It's not on the table.
You don't even say it in your house.
That's perfect.
And what I hope people will get, and maybe there's room for those of us who have highly functional, long-standing marriages.
I wish I had known when I was younger how much I was looking for latent programs that are already there.
I don't have to invent the ability to, you know, to remain passionately in love with my wife.
Actually, that capacity is there.
And to the extent that you think it can't be and that, you know, it's all about If you're overcoming your biology, you will fail to discover that program and maybe you will get a divorce.
But if you know that you're looking for something and the real question is, can I figure out how to activate that thing?
That's a much simpler puzzle, right?
That's a really interesting way to think about it.
When you think about relationships specifically, how did you find and tap into the, just to round it to something, the joys of monogamy?
Well, I mean, I will say, because Heather and I have been together since we were, you know, 18-ish, I know that I was just a dumb kid at that point.
And I mean, I don't mean dumb.
You know, I wasn't any dumber than I am now.
But in terms of how much I understood about how the world works, I was dumb.
And so what that means is that I chose, or some part of me chose, Very, very wisely at a moment when I was not wise.
So anyway, that's cool.
So something understood that Heather was the right person for me to be with.
And what that leaves me with now is the sense, you know, I never worry that I'm married to the wrong person, that I could have been happier with somebody else.
It just doesn't occur to me because Heather and I have built our relationship together and I can't even imagine what it would be like.
It'd be impossible to replace that relationship.
If Heather died, I ended up with somebody else.
We'd build a relationship.
But it can't be the equal of what Heather and I have built over literally our entire adult lives.
So what I didn't know at the beginning was how much of the mythology of marriage was just Nonsense.
It was fodder for sitcom laugh lines.
And I just didn't realize that, you know, I thought monogamy was something you did in spite of your biology rather than it is a type of biology that if you understood what was riding on it,
you would prioritize figuring out how to make it work.
Yeah, it's one of those insights that I didn't feel like I earned always make me uneasy because I'm like, oh man, what if I hadn't thought about that?
But that seems bang on.
If you understand that this isn't you overcoming your biology, this is you figuring out what your biology is and living in accordance with it, you're going to be in great shape.
This is why I said at the beginning, I'm always trying to convince people you are having a biological experience.
And once people understand, Okay, I better understand my biology.
I better understand how this works.
I better understand my impulses, neurochemical cascades, why I like this, don't like that, so that you're not fighting against your biology, which I see people doing all the time, which is just deranging.
But people do it.
Yep. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's uncomfortable talking about this stuff because it is very personal.
It just also feels like somebody needs to put some breadcrumbs into the world so somebody who's looking for answers knows that there's something to look for.
And so, anyway, the...
Not sure exactly where I was headed, but the question that I think people ought to wonder about, young people, you know, if I'm...
If I report, and I can report without, you know, there's no exaggeration here.
I'm happy at 56. My life has been very strange.
There would have been no way to predict it, right?
No way at all.
It's too strange.
But if I think, you know, what might have been, there's kind of nothing there, right?
It feels like, oh.
Well, this is about as good as I could hope to be feeling about my own life at this age.
The question is, for a young person who's trying to figure out what to do with their life, do I know something that you would be better off to know?
Or maybe not.
Maybe my experience is so weird that it has no implication for you whatsoever.
But it's also possible that having arrived at a place that you'd be lucky to be in, you know, at 56, are you going to feel Are you going to feel, you know, are you going to feel satisfied with where you are and the trajectory you're on?
If the answer is no, then, you know, maybe my standards are low, but I don't think so.
I think it's about really the same thing we were talking about at the beginning of this discussion, which is if you're very careful to build a model, it almost doesn't matter how bad it starts out.
If you have any tendency at all to improve the quality of that model based on evidence, then that model will get very good over time.
If your model starts out great, the rate at which the distance it has to cover is smaller.
If you're exquisitely sensitive to evidence that it's off and very quick to run the test necessary to improve it, then it will change faster.
But the basic point is any tendency...
To build a model and improve it over time is enough to get you to an exquisitely good model given a long enough period.
And anyway, looking back, I think that whatever weird process this was has worked out pretty great.
And that probably the advice for young people is figure out who in your life can say that and then figure out what they might know.
That you would benefit from because, you know, there's nothing riding on it but the game.
Yeah, yeah.
The breakdown that I always give for people is the Cassandra complex.
So if a listener hasn't heard of it, it goes like this.
Greek mythology, a woman does something to anger the gods.
They give her a curse, and that curse is you're going to know the future, but nobody's going to believe you.
Now, I am utterly convinced that that is an analogy for being a parent, that somebody was raising kids, and they were like, oh my God, I cannot get them to learn from my experience.
And so here I am.
I'm watching them repeat all of my mistakes, suffer all the same things that I suffered.
And I was screaming at them, this is going to happen.
You're going to try that.
And I know it feels like this, but in reality, so the way that I think about the world is very simple.
I think the Cassandra complex is that metaphor for real life in that.
We're all trying to figure out what is true.
And I imagine truth as a very strange shape inside of a very black bag that you cannot see inside of.
And you can feel it and you get a sense of like, okay, I think it might be this.
Somebody else feels it.
I think it might be that.
Somebody else feels it.
I think it might be this other thing.
And given that humans are not good at identifying what is true, but that the more Well-intentioned, intelligent people that you can get to touch this thing called life and figure out how it actually works and then give you their strong,
sincere take.
It's my job or any of our jobs to say, okay, I don't think any one of you has it right, but I think each one of you may be picking up on something about this shape that I'm going to find useful later.
And so I'm just trying to do that.
I'm trying to get as many people that are smart as I can find to say, hey, What do you think this is?
What is marriage?
How does it work?
I mean, this is how you got on my radar in a big way.
During COVID, when I watched people trying to silence you, and I was like, wait, wait, wait.
That's like the one guy that feels like he's asking the right questions.
I would very much like to listen.
I want to find out he's running the scientific method here.
So, wanted to pay attention.
And that idea of...
I didn't care if you ended up being right or not.
What I cared about was you were giving me a sincere, strong take, and so I could pop in for a couple of hours and look at the problem through your lens.
Then I could go somewhere else, look at the problem through their lens, and then I could make my own decision.
Ultimately, every young person is going to have to make their own decision.
All I'm saying is...
Life is a knowable thing, but it's hidden inside of a black bag.
And there are people that have been experimenting with this thing for a long time.
And you don't need to, nor should you, take them saying, it's exactly like this, go act like this.
Because they'll give you the dogmatic, calcified vision of what that thing is.
And your job is to figure out the nimble, adaptable, new take on what that thing is.
But as people give you a sense of what the shape is, what the utility is, how it works, if you get enough of those, you can really start to run your own hypotheses.
Okay, well, if it is like that, then I should be able to get this outcome by doing that thing.
And if you do, great.
Model's working.
And if you don't, you update.
That's great.
I agree with you, and I think it is highly accurate that even in the sciences, we are still, I mean, if the postmoderns have one important point, it's that we are constrained by our tools,
and that can be anything from a microscope to your mind.
We are constrained by the biases in those tools in the world we are capable of seeing.
It does not mean that reality doesn't exist, but we are hobbled by those tools and we are trying to overcome their biases in order to understand, in your metaphor, what's inside the bag where we cannot look directly, right?
We are in a universe that we cannot look at directly.
So that is the predicament.
In that soliloquy, You touched on something though that's very important to me.
It's troubling.
Which is the following thing.
I feel like I spend like really almost every waking hour trying to understand the world I live in.
Whether that's my pets, my wife, the physics of some I spend a lot of time trying to understand how the universe works.
I am, as we talked about at the beginning, very biased in the direction of consciousness as my mode of getting through things.
And I've got a long track record of getting stuff right and getting stuff wrong and then correcting it and getting it right.
And I feel like that Set of what I think are truths about me should mean that when I say something really surprising, something that sounds moronic, that people should have the thought,
huh, I wonder why he would think that.
He may be wrong, but he's not wrong for the dumb, obvious reason that he would be wrong.
If he's wrong, he's wrong because Of something that is worth knowing.
Rather than what I get from the world, which is, you said something we all know isn't true.
And it's like, I said it knowing that everybody thinks that.
I probably believed it at some point.
I've come to a different perspective.
And why is your instinct not to think, huh, I wonder how we got there?
I just feel like people should do that.
And the fact that they don't disappoints me.
Well, let me see if I can add scares you to the list.
So humans are very tribal.
Humans want to be on a team.
They want to feel the way they want to feel.
And if the way they want to feel is enraged and they're coming and watching your content specifically to hate watch, they are using you as a drug that makes them feel the way they want to feel.
If that hypothesis is right, that basically humans are just drug addicts and we just do the things that make us feel the way we want to feel, and being on a team is often the thing that does that, I don't want to try so hard, so I'm on the team, just tell me what to think.
What's our stance on all this stuff so I don't have to do the research?
Then that means that this is exactly how cultures move and why a mob can turn violent in what seems like an instant.
And it seems like violence is just beneath the surface at all times.
And it can snap in a moment.
I think that that view of humanity has the highest predictive validity of all time.
And that one scares me.
So I love humans.
They're the greatest thing ever.
God bless them all.
And they also scare the life out of me.
And Ray Dalio is very insightful on this because he's so just cut and dry.
I've interviewed him several times.
And his whole thing is, Tom, go where people are good to each other.
And what he means by that is there's no permanent state of good to each other anywhere, ever.
And he'll tell you it all runs on a debt cycle, but you can see it coming.
And as it starts happening, you're going to move and you're going to go somewhere else where the energy is positive and people are good with each other.
And because people are running these algorithms that they're caught in, they're not...
They don't have the conscious awareness to pull themselves up out of it when you start talking about people en masse.
And so look, if your audience doesn't know me at all, I'm always very careful to point out that from somebody else's lens, I'm one of the dumb ones.
And so I do not see myself as above this fray.
It is my very likelihood to get sucked into this.
That leads me to all the gyrations of trying to like stand outside of my emotions and look back in because I know I'll get caught up just like anybody else.
But that feels to me like a very, it's not the sum total of humans.
Again, humans are wonderful and all the great things I love are born of humans.
But to lose sight of how predictable we get when resources get limited would be a mistake.
Yeah, but it's 2025, and anybody who has not seen things that they were sure were true upended by things that they thought couldn't possibly be right isn't paying attention.
Agreed, but you yourself know that most people are not running that hyper-aware script, and they are running the team player, team heuristic might be a better way to say it.
I know how to think because this is what my team thinks.
These people make me feel included.
That feels good.
I want to feel included.
And so I think in this way.
Yeah, but I want to push back there.
I mean, I'm not saying that what you're reporting isn't accurate and the right answer.
If you can change my mind, I'm here for it.
Well, here's my point.
I think everybody on Earth At least anybody who's plugged into modernity, so they're paying attention to the conventional wisdom, has just been through multiple chapters where somebody has gotten into their programming and used it against them.
And this is happening almost constantly to us.
Most advertising is somebody trying to get into your programming and use it against you.
And in an era where that Pervades our experience and our beliefs.
And in an era in which it has so profoundly hobbled humanity, you ought to at least think, huh, I know my programming is not secure from people who do not have my interests getting in and shaping what I think.
Which means I ought to be self-skeptical.
Of what I believe.
And when I hear somebody, you know, if you don't know the person at all, fine, you don't know, maybe they are crazy.
But if you hear somebody and they basically sound rational and careful and well-intentioned, and then they say something that really catches you off guard, the instinct to shut them down is another, it is you acting on behalf of somebody who is threatened by open exploration.
And that's the point, is that I think what I'm hearing people do that troubles me is they are fending off information because they don't want to be caught in possession of it.
Right? You know what I'm saying?
No, yeah, yeah.
Here's the thing.
You are correct.
You are accurately describing the world and you used the correct word.
You said ought.
People ought to do that, which I take to be a moral statement.
And I agree.
If people reacted the way that you're telling them to, life will be better.
What I'm pushing back on is you have a low predictive lament.
And you are lamenting an ought.
Totally with you.
Couldn't be more on your page.
I am meeting your ought lamentation with a, but the world's not like that.
The thing that my wife always tries to remind me to do is sometimes you just need to make sure that people feel heard.
Brother, you are correct.
And then the practical part of my brain kicks in.
And I'm like, but I know that people aren't like that.
Not en masse.
Well, but, you know, there is a reason that we humans do this hashing stuff out thing.
Yeah. In fact, let me ask you a direct question.
Do you think by doing the dark horse and all the amazing things that you're doing, Truly, and we did not give any first-time listeners to the two of us any sense that we know each other, but we know each other a little bit.
And do you think, of all the extraordinary things that you do, that you are changing minds or are you filtering for minds that already run this algorithm of being open and wanting disconfirming evidence and then helping them along their journey?
Great question.
Let me tell you what I used to...
By the way, I think my job as a professor changed in 2017, but I don't think it stopped being...
Interesting. That's when it all went off the rails for you?
Yeah. May 23rd, 2017, at 9.30 in the morning.
One of the craziest stories ever.
Pretty wild.
But the point is, yeah, I was a professor in a classroom, in a very unusual classroom, in which I had...
Because of the way Evergreen was structured, we taught one class at a time, full-time.
Students took one class at a time, full-time, and the class could go on for a full year.
So you really got to know your students, and they really got to know you, which was a tremendously awesome way to teach.
That is not possible over the internet.
I don't know most of the people who might be learning stuff from me, and I can't think about them as individuals the way I could stand at a podium at Evergreen.
Think about how every person in the room was hearing what I was saying and modify it to correct for blind spots and all that.
So the job changed a bunch, but it's still kind of the same job, which is I am modeling a kind of thought out loud on topics that people either know they're interested in or don't yet know they're interested in,
but I'm trying to bring them in on why they should be interested in them.
So I see it as sort of the same job.
What I used to say about teaching was that it is unfortunate that the term seduction has a sexual connotation.
Because teaching properly done, first of all, it has to overcome what I think is the most major obstacle to learning, which is not cognitive in the calculating sense.
It is motivational.
If you can get the student...
To want to understand something.
You don't have to do much more than that.
Then you can just volley with them, right?
If the student wants to know, you can just let them ask you a question, you volley back an answer, they ask the next question, you're off to the races.
Because they want to know.
They want the information.
They think it's going to make them better off to know it.
So, your question, if I understood it correctly...
Do I think that I am moving the needle of what people think, or do I think I am reaching people who already think something compatible with what I think and bringing them into the audience?
Undoubtedly, both are components.
But even for the people who find themselves in my audience because They resonate with the style of thinking or they have already been down that road a bit and they hear something that reflects back their own belief system, even to the extent that that's true.
I don't think you're going to find anybody who thinks for themselves sufficiently that they would get value from our content who has a
overlapping belief system.
In other words, if you're doing your own thinking, you don't agree with me completely.
And so there is stuff at the interface, the place where we don't agree to be hashed out.
And it may mean that I end up learning from an audience that knows things I don't.
And it may mean that I end up persuading the audience of things that I believe that they don't yet.
But that's kind of the game is finding the people with ears to hear and then presenting something to them that forces them to think and presenting it in a way that.
That they want to get resolution enough that they pursue the matter.
And so the point is that creates a culture and that culture naturally grows and it grows in the direction of insight and wisdom, hopefully, if I'm doing my job right.
And I think it's not worth overthinking it beyond that.
That as long as I know that both those components are there, and as long as I'm doing my job correctly so that it gets people to consider things that have significance, then you can't really do much better.
So that's what I'm shooting for.
I'll give you my take on this as you and I have clearly come to a very similar tension point, asked and answered a question slightly differently.
So I really, when I was running Quest Nutrition, I really thought I'm going to change.
A lot of lives inside the company.
So we had 3,000 employees.
1,000 of them grew up hard in the inner cities.
And when you're in manufacturing, you're in the worst neighborhoods in America.
And so we were literally in Compton.
And we had all these incredible people, but they were going nowhere fast.
And I thought, wow, this is interesting.
There's a lot of them that are very smart.
Smarter than me.
But they're running a software, a belief system that's not taking them anywhere interesting.
So I got so excited.
I'm like, all right, I'm going to start this thing called Quest University.
And I'm going to teach you anything and everything I know about entrepreneurship so that I don't think all of you are going to start your own business, but I want you to understand how to move through the world, thinking from first principles, all that stuff.
I came in early.
I stayed late.
I taught them everything.
We even had people start competitive nutrition companies because I was like, I won't hold anything back.
I'll tell you exactly how we're thinking through all these problems.
I want you to stay here because you know I care more about your future than your own mother.
That was like my whole quote.
So you guys aren't here because you couldn't go anywhere.
You could.
You can take your skills wherever you want to go, but you're going to be here because you know how much I care.
And I did it for years.
And what I found in the final analysis was 2% of people, We'll actually take the information and it changes their life forever.
And I still, this is a decade later, I still get outreach from them, from people that have gone on to be incredibly successful employees and fathers and some that have gone on to found their own companies.
I mean, really, really incredible.
But the day that I gave up on adults was the day that one of the students in the program punched another student in the program in the face because he said, And I quote, you've changed.
You've started reading.
And I was like, oh my God.
Now, please keep in mind, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I had seen a million little things like that where I'm like, what is happening right now?
And I realized, oh, got it.
I'm a filtering mechanism.
I'm searching out the 2%, obviously ballpark, 2% of people that are ready.
They have what I call a growth mindset or what Carol Dweck Tagged a growth mindset.
If you've got a growth mindset, cool!
Then you can learn from anybody.
If you don't have a growth mindset, all the words in the world are not going to help that person.
And so I decided quite literally then and there that I was going to focus my time and attention on Making entertainment for kids 11 to 15. Now, currently, I'm far more known for the stuff that I do that I call for the 2%.
I'm just a filtering mechanism.
I'm just trying to find people that already have a growth mindset and they share a similar obsession and now we're just going to bring ideas to each other.
But my real focus is on kids that are in that That group, which the reason I picked that age group is because it's the age of imprinting.
It's where kids push away from their parents and begin drinking of culture.
And so in that moment, I can hit them with empowering ideas in the form of story.
And my hope is that there are seeds that are planted that take shape.
But I think once they're 18, even though they can change, they won't.
Yeah, it's funny.
When I was teaching in the classroom, my thought was...
In one way, this is where I should be.
I was good at teaching in an environment where you could tailor your lesson to students who were highly intelligent but not a good fit for school, which is, you know, that's kind of where I was.
I was always a terrible student.
So it was a good place for me.
My time was productively spent, but the benefit of the time that I spent, I knew Was a small fraction of what it would have been if I had been teaching much younger people.
And for exactly the reason you described.
By the time they get to college, they are canalized in a particular way that requires a lot of working around.
Whereas if you get to them much earlier, and I mean, frankly, I don't even think it's...
I take your point about...
I think that is one place that one might do a tremendous amount of good.
But I also think, you know, as we talked about at the beginning, I'm watching people have their instinct to think in a rigorous way, driven out of them by lackluster teachers.
And if you can take a kid who has that instinct, and instead of letting it be drummed out of them, you can teach them to do it in a more productive,
I mean, I'm struggling for words that sound more fun than that, because if it's done correctly, it is more fun than that.
But if you can hone that skill to critically inquire about how the universe works, then you can do a tremendous amount of good.
By the time you get to college, you really are filtering for the ones who still have ears to hear in spite of what they've been through rather than interrupting the process that destroys that instinct.
Man, agreed.
Agreed and agreed also about if you can get them even younger, so much the better.
That one's more just personality.
I just find myself more drawn to the entertainment of an 11 to 15-year-old than I do like a 6-year-old, but I could certainly one day see us doing content at that level as well.
Yep. All right.
I don't know how long we've been going here.
It's been almost two hours.
Are there other things that you feel we should focus on?
No, man.
I just wanted to sit down with you and have more time.
This has been magical for me, so no agenda beyond that.
Yeah. No, this has been great.
At some point, I think now is not the time, but at some point I'd love to hear what you see in the world, whether you think our trajectory is a good one or whether we're off track, either still.
Yeah. So I think right now we are in a transitional period, the likes of which we have never seen before.
And I do mean never, except for maybe if there really was a Younger Dryas mega flood.
That is this moment.
I think.
That AI is a level of change at a pace that the human mind is going to struggle to deal with.
I'm also, we talked about this earlier, I'm very aware that change does not care about a generation or two generations.
It's just completely fine to, hey, mouth China, 100 million people starve to death.
So it's like, yep.
There will be a very difficult period where we go from sort of pre-AI to post-AI.
And the right way to think about it is that we are standing on a technological singularity beyond which we really can't see.
Now, that might be digestible if we weren't also on a precipice of a populist moment.
So right now, you have the whole world going, hold on a second.
I don't think things are good enough here.
I don't care about everybody else.
I want to collapse down to where we're at.
And for anybody that understands Thucydides trap, you will understand this moment.
So literally, let me paint the picture for you.
You've got Taiwan, which is the seat of our modern way of life, all the GPUs that we need for AI, and AI is the race to end all races.
That is all being made on the island that China, our now peer competitor, has said, we're going to reintegrate with Taiwan.
All happening at a time where America is saying, hey, it's America first.
We want to start tariffing, being the tough guy all around the globe.
And I'll walk through each part of this carefully, but I'll do it quickly.
And if you want a deep dive on anything, trust me, there's so much more to talk about.
But you're setting up Thucydides Trap, which if you've never heard of that before, it is where a declining superpower refuses to admit that it's a declining power.
And so it's going to do anything and everything that it can to continue to ensure that the tithing is being paid to it, that people are showing it the proper amount of deference.
And then you have a rising superpower.
And the rising superpower is saying, hey, I know I used to be the little kid on the block, but the reality is I'm not anymore.
And I expect you to show me the respect that I've done.
And we are headed towards that collision with...
The one island that's going to control the most disruptive technology that's happening right now in this moment.
We are for sure already in a Cold War with China and behaving in a manner that seems designed to antagonize all of our allies.
Not ideal.
But thank God we're at least with this set of problems versus the set of problems we had with the Biden administration, which I would have voted for over my dead body.
Don't play this moment well.
This could get ugly fast, but there is a way to navigate this well.
And so I want to see us do that by way of quick thumbnail sketch.
If you put Besant together with Howard Lutnick and ignore Trump, you'll have a better idea of what the supposed path through all of this is, which is you have unsustainable debts.
This is always what destroys the empire that becomes a declining power that exacerbates because they end up printing money and you spiral into
So, Besant, And Lutnik are looking at this saying, okay, we have a $2 trillion a year deficit.
We have to get that to zero.
So we're going to, through waste, fraud, and abuse, we're going to identify a trillion dollars there by using Doge.
And then through finding new opportunities, Lutnik is going to find a trillion dollars in new revenue, whether that's through tariffs, whether that's tariffs plus the gold card, Trump's gold card.
Whatever. But they're confident that between that and sovereign wealth, basically looking at the assets that we have as a country and putting it on the national balance sheet, they feel very confident that they can do that.
Okay. I think it's a big if, but if they can do it before the midterms and they can use tariffs to begin on-shoring some manufacturing.
Whole host of reasons why we have to do that, but we'll just keep it focused on China for now.
Cannot have your peer rival operating in such a fashion where they control your manufacturing, and just like Israel can turn off the water and power in Gaza, and that is a bad situation for people in Gaza, great for Israel,
you don't want to put yourself in that situation.
So we have to...
We have to do something.
So Trump is trying to use the tariffs as a way to get people to come back and start building in the U.S. Again, nutshell, we can go deeper if you want.
So if they can pull that off, onshore critical manufacturing, imagining a war where we go to war with China, that's critically important.
If they can balance the budget, critically important.
And if they can drive costs down and wages up for the American worker, By the midterms, you've got a shot.
If you can't, you're in real trouble.
So, the part of that that I find hard to imagine, and it sounds like you do too, potentially, is I could see that play over a much longer period.
The idea of being able to get past the economic hiccup that is sure to be caused by the tariffs.
I don't want to say sure to be caused.
I don't know.
Seems sure to be caused by the tariffs.
Seems unlikely.
Do you think that there's a good chance of them getting to a point where Americans can actually feel the benefit in two years?
I think they're playing a game of chicken, and I don't think the outcome is anything approaching certain.
I think when I hear...
Besant and Lutnik talk, this feels doable.
When I hear Trump talk, all I hear is international chaos.
And even myself now, as a capital allocator inside of a business, I'm like, hey, I've got enough to worry about from an I can't see the future perspective with AI.
Please stop exacerbating that by...
Policies that are so hated by one side and creating so much chaos in the stock market and with our international allies that it's like no one understands what the world is going to look like in two years, let alone four years.
So you've got to eliminate the own goal uncertainty, which is the hokey pokey tariffs, as I call it.
Like, stop doing that.
If you're going to do reciprocal tariffs, focus on that.
That alone.
Do it.
Move it forward.
Be steady.
Let everybody know that they can count on you to do that thing.
Instead, he's focusing on, I'm flexible.
I just want to get the deal done.
I understand that.
I even get, given that he wrote in his book, The Art of the Deal, that you want to create chaos and ask for way too much so that as you calm everything down and ask for something reasonable, that you actually get people to say yes.
So the need to move the Overton window, all of that, I get it.
Clearly has destabilizing effects on the economy.
It's having destabilizing effects on our allies.
Just yesterday, I think it was, you saw China, Japan, and South Korea doing the cross-arm hand-holding.
These are three nations that have so much animosity for each other.
It's like, if you've driven them together because they see instability in what you're doing with tariffs, like, hey...
Maybe you don't stop because they got to see what they believe in through.
I get it.
Easy to Monday morning quarterback.
But yo, if you're not taking that as a signal, you need to start paying attention.
So the second and third order consequences are already manifesting.
And the thing, driving costs down, reshoring manufacturing, so far is all on paper and isn't in reality.
So to me, there is nothing sure there, but I can see the lane that they're trying to get through with, again, Lutnik and Besant explain it very well, very cogently, and they are two of the greatest capital allocators.
Of all time, showing you, hey, we get wealthy year after year after year after year by understanding what's happening economically across the globe, not just in America.
So they understand how the system works.
But boy, oh boy, they're on a tight timeline.
Wow. All right.
And you touched there on Doge a bit.
There's a lot of chatter in my circle about Doge in both directions.
Yeah. What do you see?
Is this Elon on a tear?
Or is there rhyme and reason in...
Obviously, there's a huge amount of waste, and if you could magically get rid of it, we'd all be better off.
On the other hand, the idea that you can rush in with a tiny team of young people, find that stuff, and I'm not expecting...
Surgical removal, but careful enough removal to do more good than harm.
I'm yet to be persuaded.
What do you see?
Okay, so I have a very strong bias for, as an entrepreneur, I look at what Elon Musk has done, and it is self-evident to me that he is The greatest capital allocator of our time.
There's a concept in business called Velocity Made Good.
It's borrowed from sailing, and it is an idea of being able to take all the chaos of a business environment and somehow get all of the energy of a company pointed in one direction, despite the fact that the wind's not blowing in the way that you want it to blow.
You still have to get where you're trying to go.
It is the thing that separates a entrepreneur from an entrepreneur and an even greater ability to do it from the good entrepreneurs to the truly extraordinary.
Nobody alive has seen anything like Elon Musk.
Okay, that's just from, you can hate him as much as you want.
Nobody in the world of business has been able to do what he's done at that scale.
Literally nobody.
You ignore that guy offering to help you figure out where the waste, fraud, and abuse is at the level of technology at your peril.
That's nonsensical to me.
Now, having it all be public because there are many potential conflicts of interest.
I get why people scream about the Verizon thing and now it's Starlink.
But I will again remind people, is Verizon known for making a better product than Starlink?
I'm going to guess not.
So anyway, but that should be debated.
People should have that in plain view.
They should be debating it.
But I look at somebody who, when I write them as a character who believes that the previous administration was bad for them personally and bad for their business and bad for America, and the current administration is better for their business, better for them,
better for America, then their actions make sense.
Because Elon Musk is many things, but dumb is not one of them.
Going into this, Trump said like four years ago, I never could have predicted how bad being in politics would be for business.
Now, if I was aware of that, I know that Elon is aware of that.
Elon knows what it's like to be in a firestorm.
He's watched like stock prices go up and down.
This is not somebody who got into this and was like surprised that people are now...
Doing everything they can to tank his stock prices that he had 17,000 death threats going to Wisconsin.
He's not surprised by that.
He's not confused.
So it does not, in my opinion, even just thinking as a sci-fi writer, it doesn't make sense to write him as a guy that's trying to get richer.
Oh, I agree.
It's illogical.
He's already the richest man in the world.
He could have just kept his head down and kept cashing checks.
So this is somebody who believes, huh, there is a thing here that's going to be a problem that can't be ignored.
And if I want to keep the cash cow going, I don't mind people being cynical about that.
I have to fix America as a country.
Otherwise, all these cool things I want to do are going to burn to the ground.
Great. No problem.
You can trust him to be selfish.
But if he's really right about America...
Then I'm glad to have him doing whatever thing he can to help.
Now, what is that thing?
People seem to misunderstand money printing.
I knew I'd get to talk about it eventually.
And he understands that we're running deficits and that when you run a deficit, you are still making hole on that.
And the way that you make hole on that is you print money.
Printing the U.S. dollar, very specifically, taxes the entire world.
Anybody, anywhere that holds dollars or U.S. debt gets taxed through inflation.
It ends up hurting the poor and middle class the most and ends up feeding through a flywheel that I won't take our time up right now, but it creates a flywheel that makes the rich richer and the poorer poorer.
And yet, it is the supposed people speaking up for the poor and underserved that are fighting the most.
To not have a balanced budget and to keep money printing.
It is immoral, and I can't tell if they just don't understand it, because money is complicated, or if it's evil.
Either way, it yields an outcome that is absolutely terrible for the people that they say that they're trying to protect.
So judge a tree by the fruit that it bears, and that bears absolutely rotten fruit.
So I look at Elon and I say, cool, greatest capital allocator of all time.
While he does have a bunch of young people, he did the interview to show all the different CEOs and stuff that are helping him.
There's plenty of gray hair there now.
I think they're very disciplined in terms of they are posting everything that they're finding that's waste, fraud, and abuse.
By all means, people can and should challenge it if people see that they're spinning the data.
Because as I say, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I assume that Elon and team are spinning the data to tell the story they want to tell so they can take the actions they want to take.
But I think every administration is going to do that.
There's a guy named James Burnham who wrote a book called The Machiavellians.
It's one of those, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Everybody in political power will do and say whatever they need to to get and maintain power.
So I certainly don't think that Elon and Trump are somehow outside of that.
And so it just becomes a question of, what is the endgame that seems like it will be the most likely outcome of all of this?
The most likely endgame is that Elon almost ends up getting kicked off the boards of his company because he's doing so much brand damage.
But the fraud, waste, and abuse becomes so clear that it's completely undeniable.
Finally, people are going to realize that, okay, we hate him.
We think he's evil.
We think he's just trying to mess with Social Security.
But yeah, somebody does need to do what he was doing.
And that at least will be a win.
And we will, I hope, balance the budget.
And if we don't balance the budget, we will quite literally drive America off a cliff.
And people think that there will never be a time where America won't be able to pay its debts and their will.
And that day is like distressingly close.
I mean, 10 years, 15 years, like at this rate.
Now, if you change it, you stretch that out and you maybe even get to a surplus, but not the way you're going prior to the Trump administration.
All right.
So do you take, there's a lot to unpack there.
Do you take the actions of Doge as a,
Clearing the decks for the construction of something?
Go ahead.
I see Doge as best thought of as the modernization of the technical infrastructure of the government.
And in so doing, holding it accountable to expenditures and no longer accepting excuses like Well, it's actually cheaper and easier just to pay this bill than to try to track down like whether it's legitimate or only whatever 80,000
people can retire in a month because the paperwork has to be sent to a mine, which is a true story.
I still can't believe that's real.
But it is.
So modernizing the government, having accountability, the ability to audit it, which gives you transparency.
I'm not a transparency maxi, but I come very close.
And I want every dollar that the government spends to be put on the blockchain, to be visible, to be unspoofable, unhackable, and just be present.
And everybody can look at it.
And anybody at any time can go through and show you why the government is or isn't wasting money.
That is what I hope will be the legacy of the Department of Government Efficiency.
And how that's a controversial thing, how people don't want that is crazy to me.
I was talking to him, so I do the Tom Bilyeu shows live, and...
I was talking to our audience today and I said, listen, the right way to think about this is as a thought experiment.
Don't waste a bunch of time saying, I think that the data that Elon is proposing is fake.
Instead, ask, if this data was real, how would you feel about it?
Because then I'll know what your value system is.
Because the data that he was showing recently that really spun people out of control was that the number of Social Security numbers That have been handed out to new non-citizen immigrants has gone up by like 10x in the last four years.
And the question is, do we think that that rate of new social security numbers being handed out to non-citizens is a good idea?
And if the answer is yes, cool.
All right.
So we want...
More immigrants.
We want to make sure that we get them paying into Social Security as fast as we can.
Okay, value system clear.
Now the next step becomes, if they're doing that, how do we prorate Who gets what amount of a refund back?
So would we want to see veterans at the top of the list?
Do we want to see immigrants at the top of the list?
Do we want to see the average working American at the top of the list?
Just rank order.
So I understand your value set.
Tom, I think it should be veterans, average American, and the newest among us.
Or I think they should all be at the same, but it should all be pro rata.
So however much you put in, you should never get more than 15% back.
Whatever. Cool.
Now we lay it out.
We can turn these all into proposed policies that will be debated at the level of legislation.
Voters can get involved.
All wonderful, all working as it should be.
But instead, on social media, this derails not into interesting idea, let's talk about the fundamental drivers at the level of values.
It's Elon Musk is just trying to make money.
He's corrupt.
Get your hands off my social security.
And it's like...
Good Lord, that is not going to take us anywhere interesting.
That's the whole team battle we've been talking about this whole time.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think the portrayal of this as a simple product of some kind of greedy motivation is preposterous.
You know, I think that's also true in Trump's case.
Hopefully they're swinging for the fences, and it may be that it's a selfish motivation in the sense that they want to be remembered for having done something that was truly significant, but that's a selfish motivation that works in our interest.
So I hope that that's closer to what they're doing, and I agree with you that the critics are painting an absurd cartoon, and it's not doing anyone a service.
Nope. And unfortunately, this is populism.
The two sides get so far apart from each other that they don't see themselves as that tension that you would get between, say, a man and a wife to find a sensible path forward.
They instead see themselves as mortal enemies, and the other side is a legitimate existential threat to the country.
And this is why Ray Dalio, again, somebody who's made more money than...
Anybody on reading what's going on in cultures around the world has said, yeah, I put the likelihood of a civil war in America somewhere around 50 to 60%.
Wow. I did not know that.
Yeah. Yes.
He's been banging that drum now for years.
At first it was 30% and then it just kept climbing.
Well, I agree with you.
You know, it's very clear to me that the blue team does not want And we've lost track of that.
A hundred percent.
Yes. Right?
Yes. By the way, oh man, I'm so glad we're talking about this.
Dude, I still stand in awe of what you did with the unity party.
Amazing. And basically nobody can get me to leave my house, but I flew to DC for your event, man.
For Rescue the Republic.
Yes, indeed.
So, yeah, dude, I think your instincts are so in the right direction.
Very grateful that you push these things.
I really appreciate that, and I must say, I think the Republic is, we dodged a bullet in this election, and now we have a lot of hard work to do, or we will have just staved off the inevitable.
So anyway, I'm still very much in that mindset, but I appreciate you.
I appreciate you having come out, and it was great to see you there.
That was awesome, man.
Yeah, I'm kind of on pins and needles to see where this administration goes because, you know, we've invested heavily in trying to put them in a position to do this.
And, of course, I've been nothing but surprised.
In some ways, I've been absolutely delighted with the things they've done.
In other ways, I didn't see it coming, and there was a lot of curveballs.
But the objective is still the same.
Come hell or high water, we have to save the republic.
In order to preserve the West.
And I just don't see another game in town.
No, man.
It's getting weirder and weirder over in Europe.
That is for sure.
So we'll see.
We'll see.
But yeah, this is what you say earlier.
There's nothing but the game.
Yep. So yeah, it's only everything riding on this.
Nothing riding on it.
That's the good news.
All right, Tom Bilyeu.
People can find you.
Your YouTube channel is Impact Theory.
At Tom Bilyeu.
No, at Tom Bilyeu.
At Tom Bilyeu.
Your long-standing podcast is Impact Theory.
Your new podcast is The Tom Bilyeu Show.
And where are you on Twitter?
On xTomBilyeu.
So I'm Tom Bilyeu everywhere that you're going to find me.
So you don't do the alias thing, man.
You're just Tom Bilyeu.
Yeah, I banked on that a long time ago.
Yep, my username is ReallyMeEverywhere.
That's awesome.
All right, good.
Well, I hope people will come find you.
I think people who don't know you are sure to have been impressed by the breadth of your thinking and your decency and the care with which you approach these things.
And I know that...
I appreciate those things tremendously.
It's been wonderful getting to know you, and I'm already looking forward to the next conversation.
