18: Tom Morgan - Wisdom in the Woo

27:38And so you've got a random number generated, but slots make it look like there's a solvable pattern. Whereas in the real world, there is actually a solvable pattern. I believe this. It's like a simulacrum of curiosity. Or it's like, yeah, it's a false representation of curiosity to be solved. That's like getting short circuited or something. Exactly. Where like we're looking for hidden patterns because I think there is a hidden pattern. And when we find it, it makes a big difference to our lives. Whereas like there is no hidden pattern in those random signals. We just think they are. So it's like it's the ultimate evil in some respects.

28:15because in all these mystical traditions, they basically say the worst thing you could do is infringe upon someone else's free will because it's free will. Free will is the point of everything. And so if you have a system that basically co-ops people's free will by giving them an unsolvable problem that everyone knows is unsolvable, that's really close to evil, in my opinion. Yeah, it's interesting to think about free will in parallel to this sort of idea of there being an intelligent environment and a forced pulling you to things. But I suppose the right metaphor there would be, it's almost a, yeah, it's a green light or it's a fishing hook.

28:53It's something that's pulling you versus anything that's forcing you or pushing you. Yeah. Versus, yeah. Now a quick break from the episode to talk about something for dialectic listeners from Hampton. Hampton is a membership for founders and entrepreneurs that provides both in-person and online community for support, advice, and accountability in the founder journey. One critical part of being an entrepreneur is managing your own financial life. I think unfortunately for most of us, talking about finances, even with close friends, is a little bit taboo, let alone getting a more holistic view from a wider set of peers or people.

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30:02It's a fascinating data set that Hampton's added editorial and commentary over the top on too, and it takes a topic that is typically opaque, or at the very least, you'd only have a small handful of data points on and gives a much more transparent look at it. I found it really valuable to look through. And if you're interested, I've linked Hampton's 2024 wealth report in the description. You can also just go to joinhampton.com, click reports in the menu, and fill out some basic information to get the report. Thanks again to Hampton for supporting Dialectic. Now back to Tom. I want to talk about how to make this a little bit more practical around curiosity.

30:41And obviously we're talking around this like idea of the intelligence in the environment. There's an idea from Christopher Alexander of like unfolding that's kind of similar to this. And it's very attractive. But I think sometimes this stuff can be very paradoxical to use your earlier language. You have this amazing, amazing excerpt where you quote Ed Slingerland and then also talk about the Tao. I'll read it in full. We advance our consciousness through greater integration, not intellect. The Tao is literally translated as the way or the path. It implies a degree of agency. I want to come back to that.

31:15One compelling interpretation is that the path is the same pursuit of what we love, differentiation, using the left hemisphere, in service of love, and integration using the right hemisphere. The Tao is the path of integration and complexity, so much of what we talked about. This creates the almost paradoxical feeling of trying not to try.

32:14In some sense, this is like an incredibly beautiful passage and idea. You referenced earlier, like the ways that, I mean, there's, that rhymes with stuff Jesus said. It comes across in so many mystical texts. but it's also kind of like unbelievably frustrating it's like try like yeah you don't have to try it's like this deeply almost paralyzing paradox and you've been really clear across so much your writing that curiosity is not a head thing it's like doing it's action you say it's difficult to connect with your curiosity unless you know who you are it's really hard to connect with your curiosity unless you believe you actually have gifts the earlier quote talked about agencies as well maybe one place to start is how do you actually get to know yourself better how do you actually discover gifts or begin to sense what your gifts might be doing doing doing doing like it's and it's not even immediately obvious to yourself a lot of the time often it's people like, oh, dude, you're really good at that.

33:18I am patient zero for paralyzing introspection, having had like a multiple year nervous breakdown. So like do as I say, not as I do. You know, I took, I went on an elimination diet when I was at my physically most disastrous. And after my energy levels went bananas, I started writing because I couldn't not. And then after I got better years later from my kind of dark night of the soul experience, I learned about Ian McGilchrist. And I learned about it and I was like, oh my God, there's a theory in here that changes the world. And if you told me that like, I couldn't tell anyone that, I would have exploded.

34:05Like, I would have been like, I'm not one of those people that can just sit quietly in their study and learn interesting things and like nod to themselves and be like, well, that's a really interesting thing. I'm never going to tell anyone. I got to text the group text. My wife wants to kill me because I tell her everything I learn, but that's in my personality. And so for me, there is this slightly cliched thing now, which is like, do what you can't not do. But that's very helpful. And also, does it put you in flow? How does time pass when you're doing something? so on one hand i i've had similar experience of of being way too over analytical i love the idea of do what you cannot do i love there's david center has this idea of like what if you what can i give you a billion dollars what can i not give you a billion dollars to stop doing like it's it's empowering but i think for a lot of people it's like i mean you you you brought up writing like why could you not why did you have to write to go maybe even upstream like what does that actually feel like you have another idea that like i think there are a lot of blockers to this type of stuff in curiosity broadly you have another idea you say belief that if you end up pursuing your curiosity you'll lose any intrinsic value because you have no intrinsic value so is it how much of it is tied to confidence versus just like this is fun versus like it's an intellectual rabbit hole there's different ways this might show up michael jordan it's shooting a basketball like there's some parallel that maybe you're writing but i think the unsatisfying answer for a rationalist is feedback which is that um the universe has to tell you that it's the thing you're supposed to be doing and that often shows up in the way of synchronicity that when you do it there are strange meaningful coincidences or there's a really strong response oh there's a lot of focus now on the sense of worthlessness that people have which i think is is almost ubiquitous Like I think with our separation, with the separation of our psyche from the whole that's necessary for us to be independent entities, there comes this intrinsic sense of bedrock shame that they say at the bottom of all psychological work.

36:08There's this like sense of original sin and primal shame. And so like a lot of people spend their time focusing on like, how do I get rid of this sense of shame that's actually secretly attached to everything? and whilst like all of this psychological work and shadow work i'm sure is really important what's actually helped me the most of anything is getting feedback that my work is not worthless in a way that's meaningful to me i don't mean a bonus i've been there i mean i get emails from people maybe it's bigger than you in a part yeah well i'm channeling stuff through me not to sound too grandiose but ideas that i didn't generate like i didn't generate any of emma gilchrist ideas right Like I'm just, I'm amplifying them in my, using my modest audience.

36:49And then people email me back to be like, I didn't kill myself because I encountered these ideas. Like I get emails like that sometimes. And then you're like, I'm not worthless. Right. You can't get an email like that and think you're worthless. Like it's just, and trust me, I mean, like my buttocks clench, like to the extent that they could create diamonds whenever anyone gives me a compliment. Right. Like I'm really, really unable to receive love of any kind. But when the universe just shows it back to you through the feedback for your work, that does create this positive spiral where you can be like, oh, I'm just going to keep doing more of that because other people seem to like it.

37:27And you know what? I love doing it too. But I've never considered myself a writer. When people describe me as a writer, I do feel like an imposter. How much of this and curiosity is specifically about leading to creativity? Do you think creativity is the necessary sort of output of it? Dude, every time people use the C word, I can just feel my energy level just drop because I don't know what creativity is. Oh, I'm sorry. No, but it's just like, well, I'll ask you, what does creativity mean? Hmm. I think I've used a word or I've used a frame to describe art, which I realize is not quite the same thing.

38:07is sort of something along the lines of transmuting an experience you've had into some kind of form that another person could experience. And so to me, creativity is probably close to that, which is something around, again, new, novel, like these things are less important, but some kind of inward out expression of something to give. I like that a lot. That's really brilliant. my concern having been like a 20-year recovering finance professional is when people hear creativity they think poetry finger painting yeah you know knitting like it has this it's just something you do on the side man like you're probably not that good at it and it's a hobby and I think what creativity actually is is something existentially important and I think that what almost everyone I know is wrestling with is like can you have meaning in the mortgage, right?

39:02Can you have something that is intrinsically creative that doesn't represent a hobby that is essentially differentiated and integrated? But when people say creative, I think people are maybe I'm just over, maybe I'm projecting here. I think that people just put that into a box marked hobby instead of a box marked kind of necessity. Yep. Yep. Yeah. One of the more empowering ideas, I think, is this notion that you can do something creatively, too, which may maybe conflicts my definition a little bit. But there are certainly way more creative and way more rote things to do accounting or whatever it might be.

39:41And for what it's worth, there's plenty of things in the world that I think we're fortunate that people are trying to do more creatively. So it's it's fuzzy. We'll get more into sort of some specifics around that. The last question I have on this broad piece is, well, you have one line you say if you're in stasis you will lose interest in what you were doing i think anyone can relate to that but it does bring up this question of like what does it mean to maintain curiosity what makes curiosity deepen versus sort of run out of rope we've all been in the place of like or you mentioned the autistic kids like you have your whatever it's called your special special interest special interest like that's an extreme version but everyone's had everyone's gone down a rabbit hole and then you're not interested in that anymore and oftentimes maybe it's like i was interested in this when i was a kid or i had more of the time how does this become a an infinite game i think this is where you can tap in the left hemisphere and be like i have to have some degree of faith that following this is a is like a fruitful rabbit hole but also a little bit of discernment that this isn't the dumbest thing you've ever seen like i'm i'm not gonna be playing in the NFL, right?

40:50And so you have to have certain guardrails around your curiosity, but you want to let your curiosity lead the dance at all times. I think you need to have, again, I'm going to go back to the energy diary and the passage of time, which is that you need to be increasingly aware when your energy levels are running out somewhere of how the passage of time feels. And I think what eventually will happen is you will get in a, particularly in a corporate context, you will be put in a place where the passage of time is so tortuous that either you need to numb yourself using some additional substances or you're just going to have to move before like evolution selects against you.

41:28And I know many, many such cases of that because I was one. So you kind of have to have this fine sensitivity. And then something I think we've talked about, which is, I think it's a very, very sensible idea to keep like, you know, your fitness landscape shallow, which is like to keep your outgoings, to not need many things, right? So that you can pivot rapidly. Like me and my wife keep probably more savings on hand than the book, much more savings on hand than the book would tell us to do. But so it means that if I, as I did a year ago, decide to immediately zero out my salary to found Leading Edge, I can do that with a much lower level of anxiety than if we had a huge mortgage and 50 different outgoings that we did.

42:14I think it's for a certain kind of person that wants to live life in a Taoist way, you have to have a certain attitude towards material goods. The degree of sacrifice there is unclear to me. I think abundance does come through this lifestyle in ways that I can tell you about that are mega crazy woo. But ultimately, when you're living a positive sum game, you stop being comparative anyway. when you're living a positive sum game, you care much, much, much less about material things, not from the spiritual perspective of now I'm enlightened. It's just because you're having so much fun, you actually don't have time for the distractions, right?

42:53You don't need - So much of a better framing of it too. Yeah, but it's realistic, right? It's not a denial of something. Yeah. It's that you, it's like your daily life - It's the billionaires don't go on vacation because they're working. Right, right, exactly. But also you don't need to go on vacation because your work is a vacation. Yes, yes. Right? Yeah. you you tease that it one of the things that seems to be one of the ways I think you seem to think about what you're doing and at least who you're serving is this idea of the sort of like semi lost I don't know if it's necessarily middle age but middle something man in America and I think this is like super practical I've gone through something like this fairly recently I think you did too which is like real exploration and pivots and changing when you're in that earlier place of stasis.

43:41You have a frame around this, like when you've hit your peak earning years and you just don't care about what you're working on anymore. I think a lot of people can relate to that. You say our society is a window of tolerance for men figuring it out, which is about three weeks to three months. A real expiration can take closer to three years and there are little to no safety nets in American culture, especially. And then how can you be unhappy if you're rich? A common refrain. So it's circling, all circling. And again, I don't think this is certainly not specific to men or even specific to an age group or anything.

44:09But I think anyone who's like a little bit into their career or life has either experienced something like this or known someone who has. And there's really what this seems to be distilled down to is this like complete and utter fear of leaving the local maximum. You talked about like the steepness of the curve to go down and at root there, and this goes back to the material stuff, a little bit of the last question of like some kind of sacrifice. My question is how can anyone, but maybe especially people feeling some relation to one or all of the things I just said, and particularly people who are sort of have some pressure to be a provider, whether it be to family or other people in their life, or just frankly like be serious at their life stage or whatever it might be, how can they think about curiosity and all this stuff we just spent the first part of the conversation talking about and like real material changes or pivots in their life yeah i think about walled gardens a lot they're a trend i am more bullish on than anything i've seen in my entire life where essentially you need an incubator for your next identity where you can be like okay i was earning a half million dollars as an md on wall street and i'm just going to quit my job, right?

45:30Like, and you know, in that situation, my wife worked. So like I had, I had some flex and I had no kids. Now I have two. I just don't think that's realistic for a lot of people. And by the way, there are plenty of Americans probably who would say just full stop. I don't need any other details. You quitting to take no income to follow your bliss while your wife works is like already failing as a man. Yeah. Oh my God. But that was how I felt as well. And there were no shortage of people telling me that, right? but you don't need to do that, I don't think. I don't know. I'm reluctant to give anyone else advice in this area, but what I would say is that Anne LaRey, her book is about tiny experiments, which is that I think your odds of being right first time on that Taoist path of differentiation, integration, it's probably pretty low, right?

46:18Like the degree of self-knowledge it requires and then faith in the universe it requires, two things that we are not strong on are like a lot. So your odds of being right first time I think, are low. At least I've been studying this really for the best part of 10 years. And the people that get it right first time, I don't think I've seen one. So what you need is a way to conduct tiny experiments without blowing up your life, which is to work out what are the answers to both of those questions, where what only you can do meets what the world needs, and then find ways of doing it. They're a little bit scary, but maybe they're anonymous, right?

46:50Or maybe you can talk to other people that have this job that you want and work out what their daily routine is actually like and whether that's something that would be energetically positive for you. Yes. Yeah. Whereas we're so tempted to do the like either change nothing or like blow it up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I quit my job, moved across the country, like all the and and we rarely people don't really talk about that middle thing, which is so much more both plausible and realistic, but to your point, maybe actually better for finding the thing. Because it doesn't exist. Yeah. Right. We don't have it.

47:23Yeah. Like, at least to the best of my knowledge, like it's the thing that's needed. But there's really no money in it. Right. Like there's no money in providing these communities to people, mostly because they're going through a period of financial insecurity. But like I run one. Right. And I think that they're going to be everywhere within a matter of years because it's this intermediary stage. You know, I think that. There's a phenomenal interview I did recently with this, my personal Yoda, this guy, Brian Whetton. Oh, I heard part of this. And he's brilliant. And he talks about this idea of like people playing win-lose systems, you know, tech and finance and mostly win-lose systems.

47:58And life is sort of a win-lose system at that stage where it's like, I just feel better because you're doing worse. Right. And like, and I'm winning, man. But also you need to lose. And then people get a bit older, usually around the age of 36 for whatever reason. And they're like, well, that's all a bit stupid and I'm burning out. So I'm just going to only play win-win games from now on. I'm going to find my infinite game and play it. and then you just fail over and over again. And, you know, Brian calls it the poor but pure valley. It's like, oh, I can't take money for consciousness work right now or I'm going to start a conscious startup and you just get eaten by predators because you have no defenses.

48:34And there's this naivety that comes with it being like, can't everyone see that the world should work this way? And actually, I think the system is collapsing outside. So it's actually going to get an even worse environment for those kinds of businesses right now. But it's, you know, what's interesting is if this were half, if you, if this were the common realization when you were 22, society might just be better at handling it. But the fact that it happens when you're 30 to 40, like might even be part of the reason like society doesn't want to tolerate that. Society wants you to have started.

49:05And maybe that goes back to the school system or whatever. But yeah, it's telling that it takes 10 to 12 years or 15 years of grinding and being super competitive to. Well, yes and no. I think I meet a lot of people that are like, God, I can't believe I've just wasted 15 years as an accountant. And what I say to them is actually I've dealt with a lot of hyper spiritual people since I've gone into the more woo adjacent community. And a lot of them have horrendous executive function. Right. Like it just it's it just if you've worked in the front office of investment bank dealing with spiritual people, just like it drives you insane.

49:42Yeah. Like, and, and so I've always said the left brain and right brain. Yeah. But I'd rather have a left hemisphere person working on themselves than a right hemisphere person working on the world. Right. Like it's degrees of agency. And, and so like those people, when they start to put these incredibly agentic skills in service of something that actually matters, they have sage like impact on the world. But when you have someone who's like mega wafty. They're like super tapped in, but they can't really talk about it. They don't do anything, right? Like maybe being in an ashram is great, right?

50:17But it's not interesting to me and I don't think it's needed right now. And so that's kind of where I land on that. Maybe it's a bit on charity. Yeah, that's helpful. We talked a little bit about finding your gifts, but a few quotes I wrote down that I thought would be useful to frame for the conversation and for the listener. You don't come out of the womb with a skill set that is valuable. I think it's from Joseph Campbell. or Joseph Campbell goes on to say, you learn the rules, then you break the rules, then you follow your bliss. It's like this martial arts kind of metaphor that I thought was great.

50:44And then you, the first time I quit, I passively sat on the couch waiting for the quote universe to send me a sign. I was sure it would protect me from falling into the darkness. It decidedly did not. This was because I was not actively manifesting my individual skills in an iterated way. It was only when I started publicly exploring my strange mix of finance and meaning, a win-win creation, the world has responded so positively. I then received direct feedback and has been it has produced material and spiritual abundance in my life faith means first believing you have a gift and then cultivating it then offering it to the world.

51:14This is difficult. So much of what we just talked about the last one your niche needs to love you back, which I love my question on a few of these things is. And I've talked to so many people about this. Clearly, it's about both doing things and being attuned to feedback from the world. but there's this weird dynamic in almost anything worthwhile which is like it's it it eventually gets to being what i call like aerodynamic or like downhill i mean you're you're in your bliss and you're in flow state and you're good at it but and maybe for a very rare set of people it's just instantly like that but for almost everyone real like jujitsu is a perfect example i would presume the first 30 times you i've rolled three times and like they were bad um i don't know if that's anywhere near something that could be a gift for me or something I would love.

52:04And it takes probably 20 times trudging through the mud or more. Some skills way more than that. And generalize this to writing or to whatever it might be, to posting podcasts on the internet, any of these things. As people are experimenting, doing the walled garden thing, do you have any sense of how long to just sort of blindly push the rock or versus go back and find a new hill? A couple of answers. The jujitsu thing is really funny, actually. I did jujitsu for about six months, got injured, got depressed, and quit for four years. Okay. Classic example of what I'm saying. I had to walk past the jujitsu gym.

52:42It's two blocks from my house. I had to walk past it God knows how many times in the next four years. And every time I walked past it, a little voice in my head said, you're a coward. Oh, wow. But it was also like, it wasn't a shaming voice. it was like, it was also like, you need this. And I've been back now for four years and it's the single best, it's the single most material change in my life that has had the most positive impact, right? But there was something in me that was extremely adamant. It was like, sometimes you just know. And it's, again, it goes back to this kind of energetic idea.

53:19I think you can also narrow the constraints a little bit by thinking in terms of head, body, heart. they're like okay what have i got this head okay cool is that positive sum is that in service of love am i enjoying it what about body body's probably not in service of much but is it positive sum you know is it a pickleball is probably positive sum both people get better from playing it right is it something i can sustain intrinsically is it something i i would do is it something you would have to pay me money not to do right to use david's framing and then you have heart which is you know like how are my heart to heart interactions and and and how positive some of those which i think in that case is like how are how are my daily interactions who am i interacting with and do those interactions fill me up or not that at least narrows the framework a little bit and i think it gives you something more practical to kind of hang on to yeah yeah there's something around maybe the intention point too which is you were maybe you were attuned in a woo sense to the voice in your head or maybe it was you were literally just walking by the place but it is interesting to think about the ways we might set up environment or just like, I don't know, to your earlier point, like I have to do something with my body to stay healthy, to do all the other things I want to do.

54:29Like that. I think there are maybe, maybe one interpretation would be that there are parts of this that are really about attunement to like the deeper purpose and the other parts that are just like surface area or like. I think something that's really helpful is understanding and feeling qualitatively the difference between a challenge and a grind. Yeah, this is exactly what I'm getting at. I think maybe you've just got to climb hills sometimes, right? That's why it's so hard. Yeah, like I think you've maybe just got to, for some people, like my nephew is like a world famous DJ and like he came out of the womb knowing what he was going to do and he's just been on a parabolic trajectory.

55:12Lucky bastard. Yeah, he's just been on that trajectory the whole of his life and will probably be there till the day he dies. But for me, like if you'd asked me at 21, like when people did, like what do you want to do with your life? Like no idea. And so I needed to go and climb a hill. And I achieved like medium success but also a set of skills that have served me incredibly well for the stuff that I actually do want to do. And you know what? Climbing that hill felt like a challenge. It was deeply challenging but it was mega fun. I did 12-hour days for the best part of, you know, 15, 20 years, right?

55:41Like this was building executive function. but if when it becomes a grind and we all know the difference you all know the difference like at least at the extremes between a challenge and a grind but we're told particularly hustle culture says just grind it out and that means you climb the wrong hill and that is the worst advice you can give well the other part of the paradox is that if you do climb a hill most people who finally climb a hill are like i'm staying on this hill i'm never going back down a hill again and it's if you grinded up that hill it's going to even be harder to sort of give up that that peak wall street has very very high hills yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah if you're looking to yeah one last piece of this is that the bridges into woo territory a little bit is is synchronicities or or maybe let's call like more slightly mystical feedback can you just talk about that a little bit in terms of what that has meant for you?

56:38Oddly, for something that's a little bit woo-seeming, synchronicity has been probably the most practical way that I perceive integration. Now, for those who don't know, synchronicity is the concept of a meaningful coincidence, which to go into right hemispheric terms, a coincidence is just like, wow, you're old two sixes one after another. It could be totally random. A synchronicity is something that feels meaningful. And one of the most frustrating things about synchronicities is when you describe them to someone else, particularly, they're like, oh, it's just a coincidence. Partially because I think we now have a meta-awareness of our being a pattern-obsessed species that will literally just find patterns in anything.

57:29And that's that overhang of skepticism, I think. But it's because it doesn't come with a feeling. It's a right hemispheric impulse that it's like, oh, this felt meaningful. And when you're explaining the mechanics of it to other people, they're like, I'm just hearing the mechanics. I'm not getting the accompanying feeling. Explaining the painting you saw. Exactly. That's a perfect, that's a perfect example. And so like, you know, it was meaningful. And actually, I believe based on my own experience and many others is that the more you build your right hemispheric sensitivity, the better you're able to determine if a synchronicity is a synchronicity or if it's just a random occurrence, right?

58:03At least that's how it's helped me. And when synchronicities stop, you're probably going in the wrong direction. And when they accelerate, you're going in the right direction. And synchronicity can often just mean, you know, two weeks ago, I was studying the concept of creative thought. And I was like, you know, I really don't understand this one concept. And the next day, I randomly picked up a podcast from someone I follow because it was about another topic that I enjoy. And all All she does is talk about the concept of creative thought. And like, I'm interested in these topics. So it's explicable.

58:32But the timing of that piece of information coming to me was for me a very profound synchronicity. And there's also there's an element here, too, of like, oh, people could be like whatever that phenomenon where you see more of the thing. But it's like it's almost not that serious. It's just like, oh, this is another sign that I'm like on the track. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't believe that availability heuristic thing that like once once people tell you about elephants, you see elephants everywhere. I just don't believe that. Sure, I'm sure that is true as well as. But let's go back to what integration is.

59:03And from people that run markets, like for the absolutely devastatingly good investors that I've studied, you realize that one of the primary determinants of their success is the ability to the market. market, that they start with the assumption that the market's right and they're wrong. The rocket science intellects that I've seen fail the fastest in the stock market are the ones that start from the presumption that they're right and then work backwards. Everybody else is a loser. Right? And you have all of the Drachemillus and Soros types. They start from the assumption that they're wrong and the market's right.

59:40And in macrocosm, I think that one of the biggest improvements you can make to your life is to assume that the world that you inhabit, that we definitely don't understand. Like we definitely don't understand the way reality works. I need to make that abundantly clear. But if you assume that the world you inhabit is intelligent and relational and actually trying to help you, trying to help guide you on a certain path, that has just an extravagantly positive impact on your life. And I don't necessarily need to know how it works. Dude, I've got lots of theories, but synchronicity, I feel, is one of them, which is like if integration was a thing, if the concept of you bringing your gifts to bear in the environment was rewarded by your environment, the best way your environment could show that to you would be a meaningful coincidence.

1:00:31it would show you that you synced. You've literally, here, you just synced up. You just synced up with the flow of everything. Here it is. And have something that your right hemisphere, which determines your direction, can feel is meaningful. You get a little ping. You get the ping from your right hemisphere that's like, this feels nice. Yeah, it's like air under your wings. Yeah. And it keeps going. That's like the Taoist thing. As the synchronicities increase, reality is harmonizing around you. you said uh the number one correlate of wisdom is openness what is like what does openness mean is that everything we've talking about is that something else is it curiosity well that's actually just a paper that has it on the big five yeah so there's the big five um don't ask me to name what they are conscientiousness openness neuroticism extroversion and disagreeability yeah yeah yeah so yeah the 30 years of wisdom research found the number one correlate of wisdom was openness i mean it makes sense but also let's go back to where we started thermodynamics right like openness you are thermodynamically open i notice a difference in the brightness of people's eyes based on their curiosity levels and how close-minded people are they get the very dead eyes right and wisdom wisdom is the number one correlate of life satisfaction in old age based on the papers that i've read which is amazing given how little attention people pay to the conscious cultivation of it.

1:01:55But like... Yeah, we almost act like it's just something that happens. Like you're out of your control almost. No, that's why I spent all of last year studying ways to make you more right hemispheric. Like that we don't do, mostly because some of them like sound woo-woo. Yeah. But like, for me, I look at the context of the... Well, so let's do openness for a second. I think let's look at the risks of openness. People that do a boatload of psychedelics or are too open, they start seeing patterns everywhere. Right. And that's obviously like wildly problematic. It's like when people who have amazing patent recognition in finance suddenly enter the new age era, they believe every conspiracy theory and they think that they have high discernment because they're a finance person.

1:02:36I'm very guilty of that sometimes myself. I'm like, well, I'm seeing all these patents here, so they must be true. You don't have any domain expertise here. Right. So that's like super dangerous. But at this conference I spoke at last week, someone asked me about super forecasting. Are you familiar with that? So what makes a super forecaster is that when something new happens, they can update their forecast by a basis point. Super forecasters take this perverse pride in the granularity with which they can update their forecasts, which makes them amazing, better than experts, right? Experts quotes.

1:03:13So why? Why? Because they're very open-minded and they know exactly how relevant each piece of information is. And they can use that information to calibrate their priors. What's that got to do with anything? Well, imagine if that's the way you approach everything. Your level of alignment with reality is going to get closer and closer and closer. And something I read once is that the goal of any species is to become correlated with its environment. If you're the bacterium that swims away from the sugar solution, you are not going to last very long. And so if your openness is allowing you to continuously get closer and closer to the flow of reality, that's going to make things really fun for you.

1:03:52And that is effectively wisdom. I've always said the opposite of wisdom is anxiety, which is not knowing what you're supposed to be doing and when. So you're concentrating all these news headlines, all these pieces of information. You don't know where your agency is. And as a result, you're just spinning in circles, burning all this energy. And the wise person just knows exactly what to do and when, which is why it correlates with happiness so much. But all of that is about openness because it's about how you're interacting with your environment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One last bit on this that I find interesting as I think about is because it feels very mechanical and almost left brain, but it has that wisdom part you're talking about is I think you were talking about Ed Thorpe somewhere and you brought up error correction, which is like the root of, in a very rational sense, fallibilism and this kind of fascinating kind of foundation of science with David Deutsch and so on.

1:04:38in some sense it sort of feels like so much of what we just talked about is just taking a truly like open and integrated approach to error correction because we're really good at applying error correction to like certain things and there's like a category of stuff where it's like off limits almost yeah but okay and i correct me if i don't understand error correction but for me error correction sounds like survival of the fittest and survival of the fittest is only half of the equation the thing that people do not understand about actual darwinism rather than darwinism you read about is that darwin believed as is true that cooperation was a superior long-term strategy right and therefore there is a force in the universe whether it's centropy or the holotropic attractor, whatever you want to call it, that guides people in a beneficial direction towards integration and complexity and wholeness, right?

1:05:34That's not error correction, right? Right, right, right. One of the things I read was that the odds of us being here having this conversation based on chance collisions of chances, right, is the same as a hurricane moving through a junkyard and assembling a working 747, right? And then the rebuttal to that is there's an infinite number of worlds, this must be happening somewhere. And I get that, but I prefer the first one. I want to talk about your work a little bit. You've described yourself as being part of like this group of meaning nerds on the internet, which is awesome. And you've also described your skill, at least this was maybe a couple of years ago, so maybe it's evolved, but going from finance to what you do now, it's sort of like going through a huge amount of info, extracting it and synthesizing it and sharing with people in a way that kind of respects people's attention.

1:06:24And then the last part of this, you've said, what is sort of like your prompt for people? Like, what question do you need to know the answer to that will also help other people? My question is, what is the game that you're playing? And if you were to try to pull things forward and see the journey you're on, what is it? Maybe a simpler version of that question would just be like, what is the question that you're answering? The question I'm answering right now is the meaning mortgage question. Which is the question that everyone who comes to me has, which is that, is the limit of possibility for me the material constraints within which I live?

1:07:12Or if I choose the right path, will abundance come as a consequence? And what does that abundance look like and how much discomfort comes with it? That I feel actually is the main quest for humanity right now, particularly in the West. Put a super, super trivial way, like, does this have to be a hobby? Yeah, I guess. Can I, if I do what I love in service of what I love, will it make me money? Will it make me enough money to live and not be ashamed in my family? Will I have abundance? Yeah, yeah. And I think actually, like, maybe to be a bit cheesy, but it never fails to make me a bit emotional.

1:07:50does the universe love me which is that ultimately like ultimately ultimately ultimately at the bottom of everything is the universe love and maybe conditional on me choosing the right the right direction maybe not ultimately if i leap will i be held and or is it just an indifferent box of atoms that is survival of the fittest. And I think that plays into this view of separation and shame and anxiety that ultimately I've just got to grind it out because there's so many people I've got to make happy. There's all these different requirements that I have. But actually you realize that if you did manifest your potential, things would work out even better.

1:08:35So I'm helping answer that question in my own life. And I'm helping other people explore the answer to that question. Hmm. That gets another thread I had, which is there's this sort of connection between fear, faith and love. There in many ways, like those are kind of the three themes running across all of this. How do you think those are connected? One of the other guys that's been a big part of my scientific explorations is this guy, Donald Hoffman. He's a cognitive scientist and he has what's called the interface theory. so we all assume i think most of the time that what we're seeing is the totality of what there is but we don't know that the visible light spectrum that we see is one ten trillionth of what's available right the idea being that you need to see only as much as you need to see in order to survive in the moment everything else just gets filtered out because it's extraneous and I think maybe a lot of people when they take psychedelics, their senses and filters explode, the doors of perception open, and they realize all the things they're not ordinarily seeing.

1:09:46Maybe it's colors on trees. Maybe it sounds. Maybe it's like my senses blew open for a few weeks in Manhattan and it was absolutely bloody insane. So basically the idea is that you have these cognitive filters. And what's interesting, I believe to a ludicrously profound degree, is that fear narrows those filters. When you're in a state of fear, the aperture just gets smaller and smaller and smaller, which I think we all know, like our ability to think creatively or to enjoy the things in life when we're really stressed about something is really limited. And so the idea is, is that when you're in a state of relative abundance, you can see more opportunities and you can see better opportunities and you also have the time to cooperate and collaborate and enjoy more love.

1:10:30I think this is all quite intuitive. But then when you think about it from a civilizational perspective, we are now in a, for us, most of us, like, don't know, it's going to come over the wrong way, but we're in a post-scarcity world. If we learn how to allocate resources correctly, we are effectively in a post-scarcity world. So it follows from that, that if we are in a post-scarcity world, this species, we as a species can now evolve to see more of reality, to see more truth. And I think specifically the part of reality that we haven't been able to see that we are now seeing, and I use the word see when it isn't seeing, it's feeling, is this centripe.

1:11:09Is this holotropic attractor that when things get a little bit less bonkers and you're not concerned with what the left hemisphere is concerned with, which is competition and self-regard, you can see more of the system and then you can integrate with it. So as fear diminishes and love increases, love, I believe, is just simply how reality feels at base. So like once you can get more of that, you can see more of the world. And when you can see more of the world, you can actually navigate it better. And so that spectrum of fear to love, I think, actually also corresponds to the amount of reality that you can see.

1:11:44Is faith that gap? Faith to me has been a very charged word. faith is propositional for a lot of people, which is like, if you don't believe he was born and resurrected, you're going to hell. And that for me was a very difficult phase of my life when I was trying to save myself through the forced application of propositional beliefs to my life. That's not how I see faith anymore. I see faith as a conversation where typically I need to make the first move. If you believe that synchronicity exists and ultimately reality is responsive, what you do is you make a move. You make a move and you see a response, which means it's not that much faith is required because then you make another move and you see another response.

1:12:28And then you make another move and you make another response. You just have to move first. The faith is being able to move first and understanding that when that move is the right move, you see a response. That's faith. And then it becomes easier and easier to have faith the more evidence you have that reality actually works that way. It's again, the first step you make is probably out of fear right but then the more you move out of love the more faith you have because the more you actually witness the results of your actions it's not some vague propositional bullshit you are in this interesting seat where you are kind of like in many ways the speaker for the for the weird stuff the woo stuff to a bunch of otherwise fairly rational people or left-hand people i think i don't know if it was you or someone else like the great challenge is that we have to communicate this right brain wisdom on left brain rails, this idea that like, in some sense, it's back to the sort of thing we're talking about earlier, which is like the people who join the collective or whatever, they're sort of not necessarily executive function or high agency enough to translate some of it.

1:13:34And I think at times it can be, this stuff can be really unbelievable. Like I read, just reading it, it's like, feels right or empowering or whatever. Other times it's fuzzy. You have this frame too that I think is great of minimum viable woo. And you have woo ratings at the top of your post and stuff. I open-ended question, but like what is it like to strike this balance? You also seem to keep like a pretty loose grip on everything versus like being super dogmatic. Yeah, like how do you think about this balance of doing what you do, communicating it, being really open to new ideas, holding them with a loose grip.

1:14:09And then also, by the way, trying to make all of it not just heady and idea-based, but practical. It's adorable to think that I would succeed at any one of those impossible missions. My wife really helps. Yeah. My wife does not give a shit about anything that I write in the nicest possible way. And it used to really annoy me. She's like mega successful, curious, interested, but just not curious and interested in any of the things that I'm interested in, which is almost a universal dynamic in like the spiritual mystical phase, which is an interesting thing. like i think mostly because it's a men problem at the moment um oh interesting yeah but you know like i spent 35 hours over christmas reading an alien transmission called the law of one which is legit one of the most interesting things i've ever read but my wife comes out the other end of it i'm like wow i've been reading this alien like and then that even for me this is like 10 out of 10 on the woo rating and she's like cool like what's the takeaway right and she's like and she's like, if this is taking time away from your kids, which it was, how is it making you a better dad?

1:15:15How is it making you a better husband? What are this you bringing into the world? And I think that's a great framing that, you know, like there were ideas that came out of that alien transmission that materially altered my worldview in ways that have changed my behavior. And that for me is sort of the threshold for an incremental piece of information, which is how is it going to change how I act in the world? It's how I work out if a rabbit hole is productive, right? Like I've got like interested in the topic of alien disclosure. I got like interested in the topic of like alien disclosure for like a few weeks.

1:15:45And then I was like, one, the discourse is psychotic, but also the timing of disclosure is not something I have any agency over and it actually like won't make a material difference in my life until it does. So like you just file that away in like the not wise pile, right? It's like, it's a question of agency, like where like is how how productive is this rabbit hole going to be to the extent that i know and then how is it going to change my behavior on the other side i have a couple of quotes about stories i want to read this fractal mono mono myth the hero's journey is the story that humans tell to describe how to participate in the process of complex of vacation as individuals we encounter the anomaly a new understanding of consciousness This presents the reality of a force that's superior to our egocentric perception of the world and then forces us to surrender to it, surrender control to it.

1:16:37A death and rebirth switches our locus of control from the left hemispheric ego to a right hemisphere that's significantly more connected to this emergent force. And then the next quote, the success of a story directly corresponds to the degree of the evolutionarily important information it communicates. Why does so much wisdom begin with stories? But how else are you going to communicate something? Reality flows. Stories flow. Right? And we've had written language for like one second. One second of humanity's history. So things need to be memorable and stories are memorable. And that's a bit of a circular reference because then like why are stories memorable?

1:17:21But I think the stories that are memorable mimic the structure of deep reality. And the hero's journey mimics the structure of deep reality by being an instruction manual for the most important process that we can go through, which is this one. What are your favorite stories? That's a really tough one. My favorite hero's journey is The Matrix because it's about what's happening right now. so i really really love that um my my favorite fiction book i really love east of eden because that's about this as well one of my best friends has been recommending me that for years and yeah it's on the list i mean this is like a really really dumb thing to say that it is because i i have a weird pathology that i will not read fiction and everyone judges me for it so harshly but i still regard like reading as semi-work because it is semi-work for me and so i won't allow myself to read fiction so like i've only read like three fiction books in like the last decade oh my god so i've read like shantaram and like east of eden shantaram's fantastic and east of eden is like transcendent what caused something to move past that filter uh curiosity well clearly that that almost seems in contradiction you have plenty of curiosity I was curious enough about them to get over the hump.

1:18:49I like that a lot. On love, two more quotes. Sorry to barrage you. Evolution also rewards complexification, so this force feels like love. The word love is probably the greatest linguistic limitation in Western culture. In the specific context of the attractor, you can redefine love as the felt sense of increasing integration. And then Dr. Mossbridge's definition of unconditional love is totally different. Unconditional love is the heartfelt, benevolent desire that everyone and everything, ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may be.

1:19:23This love is freely given with no consideration of merit and with no strings attached, with no expectation of return. And it is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves. Beautiful. The thing, and it goes to the first part of the quote that made me wonder about is, are there other words that you use to add fidelity here? One that kind of came to my mind would be maybe beauty. But I'm curious if there's love such a baggage, maybe it doesn't matter. And maybe it goes back to some of the core stuff you were saying about love as being like the base thing. But that feels very different than most of the ways we, and by the way, part, one thing hanging over all of this is like curiosity and desire and love.

1:20:01Like in some sense, there are similar feelings attached to this constellation of things. I think maybe the scientific, I love scientific terms because that's what my intellect is, the bouncer. It won't let things up like this, right? Like, so I like attractors, right? Like Tinder. Attraction is the thing that binds you both together. And they're attractors in nature. And I think Irvin Laszlo calls the thing that we're talking about the holotropic attractor, which is an attractor that drives you towards wholeness. And I love that. Like, it's a bit wordy, but like an attractor that drives you towards wholeness.

1:20:40And that theoretically is driving like my cells all the way up to me. Yes. No, up to and beyond you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? That's the bit where your brain gets scrambled. Yeah, yeah. But of course we're the top of consciousness. Right, right. So like the human, that's interesting to me. Like I wrote an essay recently about whether the sun was conscious because based on a lot of different theories of consciousness, the sun could be conscious. And actually stars move in what's called a volitional way. Okay. That we've created dark energy and dark matter to explain away the fact that stars move more than they should based on their mass.

1:21:15Whereas like if they were conscious, of course they would move in different ways that we couldn't fully forecast, right? But then when you're like, is the sun conscious? You moron. And you're like, well, first define conscious and then look at the various different theories of consciousness and like work out whether the sun describes the emergence is crazy, man. Yeah. Well, the crazy thing about emergence is that different traits emerge at every different level of integration. Right, right, right. Right. And the funny thing is we're, I'm obviously somewhat less bought in on all of this than you, but we are totally bought in on emergence around, like, I don't know, Santa Fe, complexity, like ant colony, like emergence we're all in.

1:21:54But I guess it stops with us. There is a place where people will not go to the point that it makes them angry. Now, anger is the most lateralized of all emotions. Where is it lateralized? It's in the left hemisphere. What is the characteristic of the left hemisphere? It lies when it doesn't understand something, it confabulates, and it will not surrender control. If there is an idea or class of ideas that is guaranteed to reliably make people disdainful of you, it is any concept that implies a degree of intelligence that's superior to the human intellect. Just try it. Try it with friends. Like, go out and talk about, like, is the sun conscious?

1:22:35And people will be like, you have lost your goddamn mind. Whereas actually like the science behind it's like not a joke. Erotic relative to all the AI stuff. I mean, if anything, you can imagine that being one of the things that maybe tips the scales towards more openness is that intelligence isn't precious anymore. Yeah. We're nearing the end. I have two sections that go together. The first is about what you've called this sort of meta crisis that we may be in. And there's prescriptive views on the timing here. There's more broad views. I think this ties to like, I don't know, in the tech world, everybody's freaking out about AI.

1:23:12Broadly, it seems that there are all kinds of crises happening. There's stuff like the fourth turning. You hear different articulations of sort of like, I don't know, there's this Bo Burnham song a few years ago called that funny feeling, which I always think about. It's just this, like, the vibes are off. And you have this awesome quote where you basically lay it all out as coordination problems. You say, now we're operating at a planetary scale. The next conflict is primarily about mindset. It's within ourselves. When you reflect a minute, it's incredible to realize how many of our hardest problems are almost entirely coordination problems.

1:23:44This goes back to the scarcity, lack of scarcity. For example, politics, cooperate to pass legislation, rebuild effective institutions, war, agree not to kill each other, environment, agree not to kill everything else, innovation, collaborate on technical innovation, hunger, getting abundant food where it's needed, inequality, allocate resources more equally, end quote. I think you also believe something else is happening, that there's an anomaly, that there's some shift that's happened. I think my observation might be that it almost feels like the world is barbelling, where you have this extreme shift.

1:24:15And it's like every 19-year-old is just sports betting and nihilistic and addicted to their phone. Like, it's almost this extreme shift to the left brain of zero-sum selfishness. And then meanwhile, there's something else happening around more hippie new age spiritualism. Yeah, what's happening? I think it's I think the anomaly, if you ask if you ask me what it was. Like systems blow up when they encounter an anomaly they can't explain. And then they reconfigure themselves around that anomaly. I think it's the belief in non-local consciousness. Every single thing that you have that people would describe as woo, psychic abilities, reincarnation, clairvoyance, prophecy, precognition, everything pretty much like aliens, right?

1:25:02Like everything goes back on the table. I'm not saying it's true. It just goes back on the table with one jujitsu move, which is that consciousness is bound by neither time and space. And like, that's a pretty uncontroversial proposition that we've had since quantum physics, right? Like, but people don't seem to want to apply it to consciousness. If you're willing to countenance that, that remakes the world. And if you think about there being a direction to non-local consciousness as described by the holotropic attractor and curiosity or whatever it is we're talking about, that also remakes the world.

1:25:38And this probably sounds like either elitist or culty or whatever, but I've noticed a bifurcation that you describe, that you can have a conversation with people well they'll be like hmm that's interesting sounds a bit crazy but like that's interesting i'm i'm interested and i would like to hear more and there's people that are like you're an idiot shut down and those you are an idiot people their lives don't seem to be going that great and maybe this is just selection bias for me and i'm worried about those people um because they're almost exclusively playing zero-sum games um and the people that are open to that idea, I'm not interested in convincing people that aren't.

1:26:19I'm interested in helping the people that are starting to understand that that could be possible lean into the right hemispheric traits that make that come alive. I do not even believe any of these things 100%. I am not an evangelist for these in many different cases. I have just seen it work. So I am like, you know, worth another seven hour digression that we don't have time for. But at the moment, there's these telepathy tape podcasts that come out that I've been having this very difficult relationship with skepticism about, but it's ultimately comes down to is consciousness non-local. And some days I think that there's a 50 % chance that they're all fake.

1:26:56And some days I think there's a 90 % chance they're all true. And holding these tensions right now is something that we're going to have to be doing as a culture. It's interesting too, on the point of who sort of is open to it versus not. I think it's specifically also just highly ambitious, highly educated people on the coast, probably in the US. You ask the average remotely religious person anywhere in the world, and none of these ideas are that crazy. And so it's interesting sort of where the seeds come from. You brought up telepathy tapes. I think when we met, you called them paradigm of reality.

1:27:29Your paradigm of reality being obliterated, there's one just amazing excerpt that gives a sense of maybe the wildness here. The primary obstacle to human cooperation has been the cognitive constraint on the number of people we can know and trust. But imagine how quickly that prisoner's dilemma would break if all participants are increasingly telepathic. There's a sense almost of like a boiling of the frog of humanity towards some openness here, as well as you've written somewhat about weird other things and special powers and the PSI stuff. I have two final main quotes I want to read before I ask you a last question, at least on this segment.

1:28:10The first, in the epilogue to the passion of the Western mind, Richard Tarnas argues this prodigal return may have been the entire point. I skipped a little. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also finally to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, to differentiate itself from, but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of the soul.

1:28:50And he goes on to say, The telos, the inner direction and goal of the Western mind, has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation. And then finally, one more quote from somebody I love. Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. Pierre Chardin. Maybe it's your one chance to blast out the Wu rating or whatever.

1:29:37What journey are we on? The one idea, and this is probably just recency bias because it's the one I've been learning about over the last few months, that I think might be true is the idea of Earth School. Never heard of it. One of the bombs I'll just drop now is that there's a surprisingly robust degree of empirical proof for reincarnation. If you look up Ian Stevenson's work, which is bananas. What's that on the Wu rating? Read the papers. It's low Wu rating, man. This is published research. I strongly recommend people go and check it out. Ian Stevenson at UVA. that we essentially make a set of pre-incarnative choices.

1:30:19Our soul makes a set of pre-incarnative choices as to what lessons it would like to learn in an incarnation. We then incarnate into a body, into a set of circumstances, your parents and your place, and you know what the curriculum is. But as any college student knows, just because you have a curriculum doesn't mean you're going to study for it and doesn't mean you're going to learn the lessons. and life progresses as essentially a mechanism for you to learn lessons. And the purpose of the lessons is always the same, which is for you to find this form of loving service, for you to become more open and loving and God-like and able to give and receive love.

1:30:55So you know what the direction of travel is, always the same, but reality is responsive to your ability to learn those lessons. So essentially when you learn the lesson, you get more abundance. And when you keep failing to learn the lessons, the beatings get get more and more savage. Contracts on you. Now, to bring it back to the Tarnas quote, in the law of one, the alien transmission, they talk about the fact that on a lot of other worlds, the purpose of third density, where we are right now, is to learn how to make conscious choices. That's what humanity can do. We're self-aware so we can make conscious choices.

1:31:28And it's to effectively learn lessons. On a lot of other worlds, the veil of forgetting that said that actually we're divine creators, was very, very thin. So there was no urgency to do anything. On Earth, allegedly, the veil of forgetting is incredibly thick. So we all feel very separate, and this is a really tough college. So we're very strongly separated from the divine, to the extent that everyone thinks it's a ridiculous proposition. But that means that your growth here is accelerated really, really quickly. This is like the Harvard of the universe, but it's a really tough school. And so the extent to which you feel this catalyst and this friction in your life, it's actually an accelerant, but it's an accelerant only to the extent you're willing to have some metacognition to learn the lessons you're being presented with and to exhibit some agency to continue to make better choices.

1:32:20Because the idea is that you will just keep reincarnating for ebbs until you notice that there's a direction and there are lessons you're supposed to be learning, right? And that's the nature of karma. The nature of karma is not a punishment. It's simply if you needed to learn a particular lesson that perhaps you hadn't learned in the last life, you will be learning it with greater intensity in this life. It's a really helpful framing and it allows you to treat... It's not like everything happens for a reason. It's that everything happens for a reason and it's actually your job to find out what the reason is, Right.

1:32:53And that approach to the adversity that has come my way since I've learned about it has made me extremely resilient. Yeah, it's very it rhymes with so much of religious ideas around struggle as well. But I'm starting to think that it's literally true. Right. That's the purpose of the intellect in this, which is I've done enough research across mysticism and science that when I see this pattern and it matches all these different patterns. and I reserve the right to change my mind next week if I learn something different. But it aligns with so many different areas that when it comes from like an alien transmission, I'm less liable to discount it because it fits in something else.

1:33:33I think part of what I'm saying is that like all this stuff seems to be pointing at the same kind of spot in the sky. Yep. But most people make fun of the finger rather than realize there's a moon there. Yeah. Yeah. Last set of just a few lightning round questions as we wrap up. Can you explain your frame? Pseudoscience is the Streisand effect. Just so good, man. For whatever reason, if anything gets labeled pseudoscience, go and check it out and study it. I don't know why, but synchronicity is labeled as pseudoscience. Integrated information theory is labeled as pseudoscience. All of Rupert Sheldrake's work on morphic resonance is labeled as pseudoscience.

1:34:10I think his son on a podcast, his son's like a mushroom guy. Merlin. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like all of like Graham Hancock stuff, that probably is a little bit more pseudoscience-y. Yeah, the problem is there are some real pseudoscience labeled pseudoscience. Again, that's the role of the left hemisphere, right? The role of the left hemisphere is, the right hemisphere is open and pseudoscience is usually, like pseudoscience implies that science has got angry about it. Yeah, right, right. Because otherwise it would just be factually wrong. Right. Pseudoscience is like, it's like a slur. It's a slur, yeah.

1:34:44Yeah. You mentioned at the top Gurdjieff has become a recent area of interest. Broadly, like a number of these people have come up, both modern and historical. What do you think happens with these people, these mystics or sometimes scientists or gurus or even prophets of the past, like who sort of tap in? yeah a lot of there's most of most of them it goes horribly horribly wrong and i i think the lightning round answer is that we need to increasingly rely on communities where no one too much for one person to hold too much for one person to hold there's a great sorry i was just gonna say there's a great book um about a bunch of physicists who go through something like this that's partially fiction called um when we cease to understand the world people like alexander grotendijk and schrodinger and uh heisenberg and it's it's actually similarly shaped which is like this is too much for one person to bear in the case of quantum mechanics but all kind of comes back around one thing that came up that i didn't get to watch the full video i'd love for just the quick primer on is the jacob's ladder jordan peterson thing you said was really meaningful to you i think it's i think it's brilliant and i then had to put in the standard disclaimer that a lot of a lot of his work is extremely not brilliant um and this was It was a while ago, I think.

1:35:58It was pre-crisis. Literally, I was in the line to Newark, in Newark security. And he talks about Jung believing that your future self is the guide in the present by directing your interests. That one moment changed my life. I was like, there's something in me. There was something in me that just went ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And that in itself was a sign. And actually the whole podcast is about shamanic initiation, which is essentially being how are you a bridge between two worlds to keep both worlds on track? And what role does attention play in that in terms of driving people?

1:36:42At the moment, we're off track. And I think a lot of people are being drawn back on track by their attention. And that's kind of the role that he's talking about. That's powerful. It's brilliant. We talked about like, I think one of the things I really admire about you is you have a pretty loose grip on all this stuff while holding it. Through all of this, is there anything that you found yourself really starting to grip firmly that would be most rattling if you were to find out it was totally not true? Oof, it's a good one. I think if someone like, I think if someone ruthlessly debunked McGilchrist's work, that would hurt me a lot.

1:37:20But then even McGilchrist himself says, even if everything I have is debunked, it works as an explanatory metaphor for the world. And it kind of does. But I think if someone, if he was exposed as like a massive fraud. At least it reduces a lot of the quote unquote scientific foundation that gets to some of this higher level stuff. Yeah. I think ultimately really the answer to that is that the universe is an empty and different box that doesn't care about me. And it's all just stuff. It's aimless stuff. We're accidents. That would kill me. it's so not new given everything we talked about but you've said your favorite quote is joseph campbell's follow your bliss and doors will open where there are only walls why is that frame so powerful because you have to believe all the premises follow your bliss differentiation path first you've got to do it first that's faith doors will open you have to have the faith that the doors will open, but then they do actually open.

1:38:17Doors will open where there were only walls. Walls, as in you're looking at a wall, you're looking at a situation which is not rationally obvious that there's a good path forward, right? You're there staring at a wall. There are no options. Yeah, there are no options or at least no sensible options except your bliss. You either have no options or an infinite array of options and your bliss is the signal. And then when you step towards it, something really weird happens.

1:38:46You mentioned earlier your nephew, Fred, again, for those viewers who don't, listeners who don't know. After seeing him live, a friend of mine observed that he basically was comparing Fred to Christian artists. And his idea was that like, there's a lot of imagery and the raised hand and language, and it sort of created this spiritual experience what do you think he's tapped into him yeah like no him i think it's what he's tapped into like there's a moment if you haven't seen the boiler room set yeah it's one of the best sets i've ever seen and obviously i'm biased um but i listen to thousands of hours of edm a year like i worked edm and anyway so that set's transcendent and then there's a bit in the set where this guy in a yellow t-shirt knocks into the decks and turns off the dj decks in the middle of the performance so it's one of the best dj sets of all time every you can tell everyone in the room tells it's one of the best sets of all time and then some dude turns off the decks and what does fred do fred laughs wags his finger and turns the decks back on how many artists do you think would behave that way spontaneously completely spontaneously as in like yeah no No panic.

1:40:01Yeah. And, you know, I don't want to talk too much about him, but like that's how, that's who he is. That's exactly who he is as a person. And that moment was totally spontaneous in that he couldn't have planned it. Yeah. And I think when people see that, he is exactly how he is. Yeah, it's in the flow. Yeah. And like all of his work, it's what he's feeling. Like we've lost dancing was his breakout and that's what he was feeling. And that was the things that he was going through. and he's able to communicate that through his music. Total authenticity. It's extremely appropriate to what we're talking about.

1:40:37Yeah, yeah. He has D. He has that effortless charisma. My final question, and I suspect maybe you would argue that this question even misses some of the point, but if you were going to go on a walk with 20-year-old Tom and just try to assure him a little bit, what would you say to him?

1:40:59i'm gonna get into like marty mcfly territory where i would i would create some paradox and then i would cease to exist um it's been a long road i think never underestimate the power of just keeping going just keep going like when you're going through hell just keep going so on churchill's lines and like there have been some really really dark places that i've been to that I think that like I was a very, very small amount of time away from killing myself. And I think that, I guess I didn't, so I don't need to tell him that, but on a different timeline, maybe I would say that. And I think to have more faith in my own curiosity.

1:41:42Again, maybe I wouldn't believe that now if I hadn't gone through that darkness. But like, I think if I have only one thing I want to tell the world, it would be that. And therefore, that was what I would probably want to tell myself. Thank you. I think like, I don't know, I'm new to this, but in many ways, what I'm trying to do with this podcast is like talk to people about their attractors and their curiosity and how they're being pulled forward by the world. And both this conversation and all the prep, yeah, just felt very aligned and empowering and a lot of stuff going in the right direction.

1:42:15So I appreciate you. Thank you. I'm continuously very surprised that anyone would read so much of my stuff. but you've obviously did so much of my reading of my stuff and I'm always I find that very meaningful thank you of course thanks