#26 - David Shapiro - Why We Must Defeat Nihilism

25:56Do you think nihilism existed in the highly religious days of past? And if it did, how did it manifest? On an individual level, there are always people who struggle and people who doubt. So even going back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, there were atheists back then, there were agnostics back then. And even in indigenous cultures, I'm sure there were people who doubted. But in many of those cases, their lifestyles were so much more grounded in their bodies and their lifestyles were so much more grounded in the people around them. And as I have started living like that, there is so much less like existential dread.

26:35It is, I feel good today. Like a few days ago, as I was getting ready for this trip and I was like nervous and I couldn't sleep, I still felt so good in my body. I was just like, I'm going to lay here in bed. And I was like, I lay there for like five hours, not sleeping, but I was like, I just feel so physically good and I have so much hope and optimism. And it wasn't like just cognitive. It was a deep visceral experience. And I think that if more people lived like that, then there would be a lot less of that nihilism. So again, I think that nihilism is a consequence of these abandonments. Right, well, I'd love to dig into more this like alignment with the body and such and what you actually do and what you've done to like wake that up in yourself.

27:15But first, we need to touch on the fourth one, which is self-abandonment. Yes. So what is that? So self-abandonment is being seen more and more in various places. The Japanese are great at naming things. So in Japan, it's called hikikimori. And so the hikikimori, yeah, you know. I literally just came back from Japan and we learned about it. Igor was just like obsessed with this concept. So this is, that is quintessential self-abandonment. So that is basically, it's typically young men who have just given up on themselves because there's no job prospects. There's no hope of attracting a woman. And so they lock themselves in their room.

27:48Or at least they feel that there is no hope. It's not necessarily true, but it's been sufficiently hard enough. But it's a narrative. There's a name for it. There's a narrative attached to this lifestyle. So you see what I mean? It all comes back to narratives. And do you think that's, so the creation of that narrative is actually a dangerous thing? No. So narratives are just us putting a tag on it. It's like, oh, hey, we just observed a thing. It's just like when you go, you know, a taxonomist just goes and labels like, I see a turtle. This is a turtle now. So we observed this thing. So the Japanese observed this phenomenon, this trend, this hopelessness and despair.

28:22And that's just one example. So another example is there's like a kind of a constant meme. So like at Comic-Con and other conventions, like men that don't bathe and shower. Like that is another form of self-abandonment where they just do not take care of themselves physically. and that is them that so in psychology this is called reenactment so they're basically reenacting their childhood abandonment the rest of their lives god i'm about to cry sorry like it's just when you when you like when you see this when you wake up to it you see it everywhere um another kind of self-abandonment that most that many people have is workaholism so that's what i'm recovering from that's actually why i had to delay this is because i was still suffering from burnout over several years.

29:07And here's again where the narrative of capitalism fails us because it says, in order to get your needs met, just work harder. That is self-abandonment. It's don't sleep in, wake up, go to work, ignore your body, ignore your needs, work for the money. And that also rewards you. So this is where I fundamentally agree with you about Moloch is the fundamental misalignment here is don't take care of yourself, Don't take care of the people you care about. Don't even take care of nature. Just make money. Well, and specifically, it's the collapsing of all of those different virtues and values and arguably metrics.

29:45Like money is easy and it's convenient because it's easily quantified. It's a quantification of value that it claims to capture all of these other ones. But in that reduction, it loses so much because it is actually hard to quantify your personal well-being or your connection to nature or your connection to your family and so on. It's not good at capturing those values. So yeah, that's one of the definitions I like, I often use as well for describing Mollick is it's like it's a complexity. It's that which curtails emergent complexity in some way because it feels like, if you look at the history of the universe or like the history of life on Earth, it started off with the prokaryotic cells and then they started coordinating and you got the first eukaryotic cells which created multicellular life, et cetera, et cetera.

30:48It's been this, at each step change, there's this new emergent thing that happens. And to me, like a truly Malachian process is one where it caps out of its kneecap, stops it in some way. And I think that's where I'm sensing this nihilism crisis is threatening to take us. Because it's like, if you have a population that has become fully nihilistic, and just like, a population of Hikikomoris, there ain't new emergent stuff coming out of that. They're just going to, like, that population's done. And what new stuff can emerge? Probably not very much. No, that's absolutely relevant. So that is one of the attractor states.

31:28So now this is, I don't know if we'll disagree on this. So humans, again, with that democratization of information, progress of technology, curiosity, cognitive dissonance, also eventually you just kind of get fed up with it. And so we say, okay, this isn't working, let's try something else. And so while one generation might not figure it out, the next generation often does. And so like Japan is finally, maybe possibly coming out of the lost decade, which is more like the last three decades now. And so eventually you say, whatever we were doing is not working. Let's try something else. And some of my audiences, a good chunk of them are younger than me.

32:06And so there's Gen Z that are like, thank you. Someone who cares and who is helping us figure it out. And that's actually the center of my brand. We're going to figure this out because I believe that this problem is solvable. And it is solvable with that narrative. But again, to your point, yes, I do agree that if this narrative persists, then it could be self-terminating. And of course, what some people are afraid of is that it'll self-terminate in a way that is irrecoverable, like destruction of humanity. I'm personally not afraid of that, but I do also predict that it will get worse before it gets better because the pain is not high enough.

32:43So there's this concept of the devil you know, right? If the devil you know is tolerable, you'll stay with it. So it'll get worse before it gets better. But I think that it will get better. And that's why, again, this is why I made that assertion Moloch is losing is because people like you and me are here communicating it, figuring it out, and sowing the seeds. And so then the seeds will take a little time to germinate. But then once they're ready, I think that our work is probably really timely. Yeah, I mean, it is exactly what this podcast is. That's why the name Win-Win, I was spending so much time dressing up as Moloch and trying to depict the problem, which I think was important.

33:23But I was like, okay, but there's something in me started being like, eh, I don't really want to dress up as that anymore. I'd rather, is there something else I can dress up as that's kind of the solution to this? And the name Win-Win kept coming to me. And it's like, if Moloch's red and black and very monomaniacal focus, Win-Win is purples and turquoises and greens and just wants to play and loves a bit of competition, then we'll shit talk you. but then it's like, ah, we'll have a nice time. It's an infinite game. Exactly, it's the infinite-mindedness, infinite game and sort of bought into a persona.

33:59So yeah, no, exactly. Okay, so the TLDR of why you think Mollick is losing, just so I have this right, is because you think sufficient people like you, like me, and like plenty of others are trying to create new narratives and we're also finding each other. Yeah, so to put it as succinctly as possible, I believe we have solved the problem. Now the next task is dissemination, is conversation. Have we solved it? Maybe not completely, but we're close. We're in the order of magnitude of 100 ,000 subscribers on YouTube. I feel like my view counts are not as high as I would like them to be. I imagine you'd like yours to be higher as well.

34:40I think your content deserves to have more views. meanwhile like someone who's saying we need to burn on you know we need to burn it all to the ground and like why why you know the the world is doomed etc those those narratives are getting shit tons of views as are like ai is going to solve everything magically like just take off all regulation and you know like the it feels like the extremists because really what we're arguing for is kind of like these hybrid synthesis type viewpoints to create new positive narratives. But the extremists, meanwhile, go out and just say they're like extremist stuff and they dominate the attention sphere.

35:20So why is it that the problem has been solved? It doesn't feel like it sufficiently. There is no force as powerful as an idea whose time has come. And I think there's a lot of people that are ready. And it's just a matter of articulating it clear enough and consistently enough and messaging and getting the right people involved to repeat those messages. And then once it gets out there, so having studied narratives, having studied rhetoric and systems, who was the guy that figured out the Human Genome Project? And it was like, we've only sequenced 1 % of the genome. Oh, we're most of the way done.

35:59So we're halfway there. So that means we're most of the way done, but it's a matter of getting to that tipping point. And so getting to a narrative tipping point is if the narrative is compelling enough, if the narrative is emotionally salient and resonant, if it is defensible, if it is coherent and sound, and if it is accessible. So I tie it up in a nice bow and say, post-nihilism here, gift. And so that's why I'm working on this book. And then it's not just a matter of articulating the problem, because articulating the problem is half the battle. So then the solution is, okay, what do you replace this nihilism and abandonment with?

36:38And that's what I call radical alignment. Okay, so what is radical alignment? So I haven't quite distilled the definition, but radical alignment is living in alignment with your true self and true needs. And so one of the ways to think about this, or the first kind of pillar is body-first living. So that's prioritizing what your evolved animal needs are. So eat right, exercise, get fresh air, stuff that kind of everyone knows, but there's more to it than that because it's not just a matter of behaviors, it's also a matter of beliefs. It's a matter of saying, hey, I actually have a right to sleep in when I'm tired.

37:16I have a right to leave work when I'm not happy here. And it's a matter of prioritizing ourselves. So here's an example. They say it takes like 12 ,000 hours to indoctrinate students with school, with education. I think it's 12 ,000. So what is, particularly American schools are really bad, but there's bells. You show up on time or you get punished. You're often forced to wake up early. You're also forced to work after hours. So you're basically, we're programming students from a very young age. Your body doesn't matter. Your time is not yours. You don't own you. the system owns you. And so then from kindergarten to grade 12 to college, it's just like, here is an assembly line of obedient drones.

38:01So that is the opposite of self-alignment. That is the opposite of body first living. That is saying you owe the system your productivity. Sure. But there's some virtues within that though, because it teaches you a form of discipline.

38:20I guess what I would be concerned about with this body-first, me-first approach is that if I want to just sleep in all the time, there are a lot of people out there who will just then abuse that or use it as an excuse to then not really get anything done, right? Possibly. I mean, I am living in more alignment with what I need, and I am more productive than I have ever been in my entire life. I mean, I frequently, I work seven days a week, and I often wake up at five in the morning, work until about noon, so that's a seven-hour day, and I don't really take breaks. Well, no, I go for my walks to do recording, but I'm hitting multiple birds with one stone.

39:01Now, here's the thing, though. You could argue from one value system that there is merit in giving people a sense of discipline. Punctuality. Punctuality, sure, but there are social pressures to achieve that. So I read this book called The Status Game by Will Storr. So this is a keystone piece of this idea. And that is that as a social species, all humans are status motivated. That is like the fundamental signal in all of our operating systems. And there's three status games. So there's dominance, which is like physical prowess and intimidation and sexual gratification. It's basically the id. And then there is the success game, so that's money.

39:42So getting money, getting grades, getting the car. Everyone is motivated by that to some extent. And then there's the prestige game. So prestige is, that's the game that I'm playing, which it's about, are you renowned for being smart or solving problems? Are you pious? So in academia, how many citations do you have? Yeah, papers, citations. If you're religious, it's, you know, how high in the church are you or how well-known are you to be a follower of Christ or those sorts of things. All humans play status games. And like, we're kind of aware of it, like kind of in an unconscious background level.

40:23And it's been true for all of human history. But by bringing that to more of the forefront and saying, hey, we need to align with our animal nature. We are social apes. And we say, hey, what if we just use these natural forces to actually incentivize the behavior you want to see. And so then what do you do? In this book, he talks about all kinds of different systems. So for instance, the prison system. Phenomenal natural experiment to look at how status plays out. Because you can exchange favors or goods. One of the things that is really, really popular in prisons is if you have any expertise.

41:00If you have medical expertise or legal expertise, you're immediately high status. If you are well-connected and trusted, respect is everything. And so you have this incubation chamber of, okay, how do status games play out if everyone is disempowered in a certain way? Sports teams, churches, schools, status games play out in all kinds of different ways. And right now, money is the universal status signal. But that's only the success game. So then why do people do CrossFit? That's the dominance game. Because they want to have buff bodies and they want to be really, they look good in bikinis, that is a different status game.

41:36And so this is one thing that I kind of came to as I was thinking, all right, what are the long-term consequences of artificial intelligence? We all might end up without conventional jobs. Like work as we know it might go away or change fundamentally. So I was like, well, what are people going to do? And so a lot of people are like, man, I don't know what I would do without my job. But I'm like, there's plenty of other status games to play. Like you can get famous on YouTube, you can go do CrossFit, you can go become religious. Become a gamer. Right, yeah. Some of my best friends, that is their religion, is gaming, or how much about anime, or whatever your fandom is.

42:09So there's so much we can do. And I'm like, well, why don't we just use this to gamify the behavior that you want to see? And I think it was Japan? Somewhere recently I saw that they actually gamified cleaning up. They made it a competition of how much trash could you collect, and it was like a race. So it's like, you can gamify this stuff, and if it becomes a status game, people are going to do it anyways. So I think that by looking at that, and these can all be infinite games, by the way. Totally. The only thing I'd say is in this post-scarcity world, I mean, truly post-scarcity utopia, I just had Nick Bostrom on and we discussed this.

42:46How would people derive, well, I guess you're claiming with post-nihilism that you don't even need to have meaning in order to live a happy life? Sort of. I think that we are too locked in our heads. we're too intellectualizing of meaning and we're too cerebral about it. And this is, I think, particularly an American slash Western problem where it's like, we try and divorce the mind from the body. But the happiest that I am and the happiest that people are is when you're having fully embodied experiences. Like if you're at a rave or you're on a horse, right? I remember on my first honeymoon, one of the things that we did was I was riding horses through the surf in the Bahamas.

43:28You're not thinking about anything else other than I'm not going to like, because you fall off the horse, you get like drowned and kicked in the head. And it's just like, that is burned into my memory as an embodied experience. And I remember getting super dehydrated the next day and like passing out in the cabin and thinking that a beer was going to help. And I, it was even worse. So it took me like a day to get rehydrated. But like those embodied experiences, that's where we get meaning from. Another one of my most meaningful experiences in life was when I went to France to visit friends. I was internet friends and I just like went for two weeks and we went to Paris.

44:00We went to, um, Nantes. We went to see all kinds of stuff. I was exhausted the entire time. I had heartburn the entire time because I was like traveling and I wasn't used to it, but I don't, I don't care about any of that stuff. The meaning was from connecting with these people that were like me and having this, this novel experience that was just like, wow. And I still central anchor of my life, of meaning in my life. Had nothing to do with intellectual anything. It was fully embodied. So radically aligning with your body's needs was the first level. And it sounds like you're going up the Maslow hierarchy of needs, right?

44:37So what's the next level of alignment? So I'm still working on this model. So there's actually quite a few models to draw from. So one is Roger Walsh's TLC, Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes. So this is a pattern of eight different things that you can do. And I'm not going to be able to remember all of them, but it's like time and nature, spiritual connection, rest and relaxation. Very, very pragmatic. Just like, if you do these eight things, you will be healthy and happy. And like, by God, it works. As community service, giving back. So you do those things, it works. Another one is SDT, so self-determination theory.

45:17So this is a psychological framework that says you need competence, relatedness, and autonomy. So those are the three fundamental psychological needs. So if you work on those on a daily or weekly basis, you will feel like you have a meaningful life. Ikigai, again, Japanese are great at naming things. If you live in alignment with your ikigai, which is the intersection of what is it? It's what you're good at, what you can get paid for, what society needs, and what you love. You do those four things, you will have a meaningful life. And so I'm trying to grab, wrap my arms around all of these existing frameworks.

45:50Some of them are very old. And whether it's psychological needs, body needs, spiritual needs, put them all together in a new system. I have a few ideas, but I'm not quite there yet. I'm working on that on the next draft of my book. So once I have this new model, this new framework, it's like, you do this, you will have a meaningful life. And in side benefit, you will also value the things and therefore make different decisions that lead to things like more environmental sustainability, more political stability, those sorts of things, because it all starts with our animal self. But we need a narrative over top of that that says, okay, we can all get along.

46:27And we basically aim for the win-win, where it's we all live better and healthier, and it's better for the economy, and it's better for the environment. That's kind of really what I'm looking for. Yeah, so it sounds to me like it's a complete and coherent description of what I'm trying to do as well with like, with Win-Win. Win-Win is kind of more of a like very surface level idea of like, because for me, my sort of, I'm not saying in any way I'm enlightened, far from it. And I've got like plenty of misalignments going on inside myself all the time. You know, I'm, I don't exercise as much as I would like.

47:02I don't work as hard as much, blah, blah, blah. But the big wake up moment for me was recognizing my own relationship with competition. So I was like living very much in this like scarcity. I saw everything as a kind of zero sum contest. And in many ways, you know, like I don't, I'm not discounting that entirely because that drove me to achieve the many things that I achieved and got me to a position that I'm in, which is great. But there was this kind of, it wasn't like an individual light bulb moment, but it was this period of time where I was like, wait, I need to fundamentally approach the world from a more abundance perspective of like, don't assume that when someone else does well, that's coming from a cost of me or vice versa.

47:46Like just like take a leap of faith that the universe is fundamentally abundant and the world can be abundant. And through that leap of faith, it unlocks things. And I have to say like things of just like the ripple effects of that have been very tangible. So that said, so it sounds like you're coming from, we need to start off at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, do the body stuff first and go from there. There's a school of thought, they often call themselves the techno accelerationists or the EX or whoever, who just believe that actually, yes, okay, there's a lot of problems, but just doing more of the same, which is like, let the techno capital machine just keep running as fast as possible.

48:30and technology will unlock that abundance that we need. And we'll just get all of our solutions from that. So that seems a little incongruent with what you're claiming. No, that's actually a necessary step. So the technology component, because remember, a democratization of technology and the natural progress of technology led us to where we are. That will create material abundance, more abundance than we already have. However, and this is what I try and caution my audience and anyone who listens, is technology can make everything worse. It is an amplifier. The reason that the climate is in crisis is because we invented new technology that is more destructive.

49:10AI and automation and quantum computing and nuclear fusion is going to take that up to not even 11, take it up to a million. So we need the right narratives. So a body-first, environment-first set of narratives to say, okay, if you have the power of a god, I think you all know Harari's latest book is Homo Deus. So like the human God, that's what we're becoming. So we need to adopt a more like, enlightened sounds a little bit cheesy, but a refined narrative about who we are and what we are and what we owe it to ourselves. And so another source of inspiration was Patricia Churchland who wrote Brain Trust.

49:48And so the concept that she focuses on is she's a philosopher turned neuroscientist, very interesting background. And so she talks about spheres of caring. And so from an animal perspective, your sphere of caring, you are at the center. You care about yourself and your body most, and you're hardwired to do this. And the closer you are to people, the more you care about them. But what you realize when you have this more generative, this more abundant mindset, the infinite game, is you actually care about everyone. And so that's actually the core ethos that made me start my channel is, okay, this is going to go catastrophically wrong within 20 years if I don't do something or if we all don't do something.

50:28So in my own best interest, my sphere of caring is the entire planet. And so in that respect, so the simplest definition of kindness is you operate in the best interest of the other. And so that is an infinite narrative. Now, one thing I do want to push back on is that while one competition is inevitable due to status games, and you can have infinite game mindset, you can have abundance mindset, But because of human nature, because of the status game, many things are ordinal, meaning it is a rank. So Nick Bostrom talked about this too in his book. So that means there can only be the one richest man.

51:06There can only be the one prettiest woman. There can only be the one top poker player. So I remember from a previous podcast, you were talking about there was another up-and-coming woman, and you're like, because that's a status threat. And so it doesn't do us any good to deny that fact of our human nature. So this narrative needs to integrate the fact that, yes, we can have an abundant mindset, but you also need to keep the animal happy. The little scarce animal. Right. So you keep the stakes low enough in those ordinal status games where it's like, hey, if you lose on Call of Duty, the world isn't over.

51:39So what it sounds like you're saying is that energy needs to go somewhere. you can't just... And I've noticed, when I've tried to completely suppress that in myself, I actually end up getting miserable and probably lash out at Igor or whoever and so on. So I need to find outlets for that, which is why we actually have regular games nights. Anything that can harness that id, essentially, and just steer it. Healthy outlets, the social structure, you do it with people, you do it regularly, and you don't pathologize it. We pathologize so much of our own nature. That's another component of self-abandonment, where it's like sexuality has been deeply pathologized by the state religion for many centuries.

52:23But it's like, actually, sexuality is part of our id, and you suppress that, and it comes out in other ways. So I guess, though, with my concern around the current status quo of technological development, and there's plenty of centers around the world and amazing companies building incredible things. That said, the vibe to me, and this is just like vibes, but one thing I'll say I think I am good at is I'm really good at picking up on vibes, okay, certainly of competitive environments because I've just been around so many different ones and I've spent so much time trying to understand my own weird pathologies around it.

53:00What's going on in Silicon Valley right now, specifically in the Bay Area, the vibe is off and I can't really fully put my finger on it. It's something related to, I think, I imagine it's a bit chicken and eggy, but it's something around the city itself. When you, you know, there are people going to work in downtown SF and these incredible glass palace towers, building world changing technologies. And don't get me wrong, some amazing stuff. But they have to walk through literal dystopian environment. And the people who have to walk past that every day are having to turn off a piece of their humanity.

53:37like you can't help everyone and you're having to like you're in this sort of self-protection mode and I wonder like what that does to you psychologically to just day in day out have to suppress your natural human instinct to go and help that person lying face down on the street like clearly out of their minds on drugs and shitting themselves you know like what does that do to you and like that seems to me like a very like if I was to pick of all the environments with which to seed this potential new technological god that may or may not like run our entire world that's probably not the one. Same as I wouldn't want to pick what's on Ukraine right now or Israel-Palestine or anywhere where there's a lot of conflict or suppression of natural human instincts because one of our major natural human instincts is to care for the other.

54:21You see your fellow human in a bad state you want to go help them but at the same time no individual can fix what's going on in San Francisco right now. So yeah, I'm curious just to sort of spitball on you on do you sense that I don't know if you spent much time there. So San Francisco is one of the most interesting, and that's being diplomatic and kind, cities in the world. Because I've been there. Definitely interesting. It's not boring. But so last time I was there, I did some math. And I looked at what is the GDP of San Francisco. And it's something like$2 billion per day. They have 8 ,000 to 20, 30 ,000 homeless, depending on how you.

55:02So a few thousand homeless people. With$2 billion a day, that social abandonment is a choice. That is part of the narrative of neoliberalism, is that you need a certain amount of homeless people to remind everyone else, this is how little you are cared about. That is the stick, that is the riding crop to beat people over the head within this Orwellian nightmare that we are building. Now, the vibe is off because the Silicon Valley elite right now are having these religious experiences that they're sharing on Twitter. Like what? So like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and others, like, you know, feel the AGI and, you know, like, oh, like they're just so full of themselves about we're going to solve everything.

55:46But they're solving one problem in a particular way. And yes, historically speaking, it is they're correct that industrial revolutions tend to reshuffle and democratize everything. Like I would rather be alive today than 20 years ago, than 100 years ago. That is true and accurate. But at the same time, they are fundamentally not addressing the fact of those homeless camps. Going through Oakland, when I did, what was it, five, six years ago, it looked like a wasteland. And I was just like, this is such a profound level of abandonment. And then going through San Francisco, all these various places.

56:21I mean, there's places that look better, that make Night City from Cyberpunk look actually pleasant. And it's like, we have to tone it down because in reality, there's actually places way worse than in fiction. And so, yeah, so there's that religious belief of this like robotheism or this, you know, the Rocco's Basilisk. The machine god. Right. And like, yes, we are in the act of building what I think of as, I call it a superorganism, a digital superorganism. Granted, the digital superorganism already exists. It's the internet. It's just going to get smarter. But what is this digital superorganism ultimately going to be capable of doing?

57:02And it's orders of magnitude more than we can do today. At the same time, if you don't have a narrative that is pro-life, and I don't mean that in the religious abortion debate, but I mean generative of all life that is pro-human or - Or is biology. Biology is the physical manifestation. Life is broader than that. Life is, I don't have a good definition, but I think maybe you understand what I mean. It's more of the spiritual, the embodied, the visceral experience of being alive. If you don't honor that at a broad level, and I got that from Buddhism. I studied Zen Buddhism for a few years. And so Zen Buddhism teaches you to honor all life, starting with yourself and realizing that you were part of all life.

57:48So that's a big inspiration. Anyways, I kind of lost that train of thought. I'm not sure where you want to go from there. No, I mean, yeah, well, you were talking about the, yeah, like the Sam Altman's and Greg Brockman having these, like, making these sort of religious claims. Because, I mean, that's the thing. They are becoming religious figureheads. There's no other way, really, way to describe it. Like, they are modern preachers. Do a thought experiment with me real quick. Imagine Sam Altman as a high priest. High priest Sam Altman. High priest Elon Musk. He's the pope. That is the religion.

58:23that some of these people have. That's why it feels weird. It feels like super icky when you think of it that way. And that's not to say, because I believe that these people have great intentions and they're very incredibly thoughtful people. If they had the right narrative, and I'm not convinced that they don't have the right narrative because what they say publicly versus what they truly believe, it's difficult. Actions speak louder than words, I know. But if they have the right narrative, if the vibe changes and they coordinate to this narrative, it doesn't matter what they individually believe.

58:55Because ultimately, their behaviors, their choices, as they play this broader, more infinite game, I think is what really matters. Okay, so let's try and I want to make sure that we've really fully distilled down what this narrative is sufficiently. You've talked about this need for living in alignment and also like these key axioms that we should probably be trying to align around. So curiosity is one you said. I think another one is this idea of honoring emergence as a thing, almost. Because that has been a consistent theme of when cool new stuff has emerged on planet Earth. It's because of this emergent.

59:35The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it's almost like a fundamental. You can't predict it from prior. You don't know exactly what's going to come out until it's like, oh, wow, this thing has now come along. Is there another axiom? So, yes, I'm glad you brought up emergence. So there's emergence and then convergence. So emergence is a way of looking at the world that even just from the model of physics, fundamental particles and energy give rise to atoms and molecules that give rise to planets and eventually us. And then we give rise to societies, constructs, superorganisms, and narratives.

1:00:07So you have these ontological strata is kind of what I call it. I don't know if I came up with that term, but I borrowed it. And so emergence is definitely a critical philosophical way of looking at things moving forward. convergence is something that is also really important. And so convergence is where you encircle the truth. Right now it's very passe to say, oh, well, how do you define that? Or truth is relative. Or whose values do you align to? But the thing is, while it can be difficult to say definitively, this is the absolute truth here, or this is the absolute universal value, we are getting really good at encircling these things.

1:00:46And this is where me looking at it from my perspective, with post-nihilism, you looking at it from Moloch and Daniel looking at it from Metacrisis, we are in the process of converging on what is the problem here. And not only clearly defining the problem, also triangulating the solution. And so while there's still a gray area, there's still a fog of war, we are converging. And so convergence is why I'm like, it feels like we got the right units, we got the right army converging on it. We're going to encircle this problem and then it's going to be solved eventually now time is still of the essence like there is still the possibility of failure so i'm not i am i'm a very sanguine person i'm just like whatever like we got this um but to be to be very like i guess frank like yeah there is still the possibility of failure one area you're focusing on one of your channels is this idea of mythic archetypes as a important building block of coming up with new narratives so i'd love to dig into like why why these archetypes have persisted so much um and what you think their value is in modern times because i again i imagine my hope with this this conversation and this wider podcast is you know i would love people to like be spreading specifically the win-win hashtag and that as a meme um but at the same time the more win-win thing is if people come up with an even more compelling narrative like like you you know you through my work you've like started you know you who said that was partly what inspired you to go into post-Nihilism.

1:02:14And how can people draw upon mythic archetypes to better construct their own narratives? Well, they can take a page out of your book because Moloch is a quintessential mythic archetype. All the old myths from ancient Greece, Rome, the Bible, all of those are mythic archetypes. And what they are is they're personifications or symbolic representations of things that we observe and feel. Like I said, we didn't create them, we don't invent them, we just put a name to it. I want to see if I can break your brain for a minute. Thanos is Moloch. Yes. I mean, he's pretty ineffective, actually, because this whole, like, I'm going to kill 50 % of the living, cull 50 % of the population.

1:03:02It's like, bro, do you understand how exponentials work? Like, in two generations, it's going to be back there again? So I'm like, this makes no sense. But yes, he's trying to be a curtailer of complexity. Right. But beyond that, he says it repeatedly, I am inevitable. So the idea that... Right. Right. That is the connection between Moloch and Thanos. is the inevitable destruction. And what he does and why, that's immaterial. The fact that he is unstoppable, so inexorable force, inevitable destruction. So Thanos, we now have a global model for Moloch, and everyone has seen it as a big giant purple dude with a fancy glove, because you have to put these things into symbols.

1:03:43And so the glove, the different energies of reality. And so you could say the Mind Stone is like human failability. And there's all kinds of ways you can read into it. Good archetypes can be read many different ways. I see the reason that Thanos resonated and that the MCU became one of the biggest things, not just because Disney did it, but because Kevin Feige studied the same stuff I did. He's the showrunner for MCU. Now, obviously Disney has taken over and it's, you know, but when he was still at the helm, he was studying the same things. Joseph Campbell, Mythic Archetypes, probably listening to the same podcast that I was listening to where I got all these ideas.

1:04:23And so now we have a global narrative to know, okay, Thanos could represent everything from climate change to AI to Moloch, because that is the definition of that supernatural threat. So that archetype, which there's many names you could put to it, but that archetype is the unstoppable supernatural force. And there's actually, So there's the moment. So do you remember when at the end of Infinity War, when Tony Stark is trying to stab him with his suit and Thanos grabs the blade, breaks it and stabs him with it? That is like word for word from the mythic archetype. It's called the sword breaks.

1:05:03And so Tony Stark is the king archetype in that story. And so he is the most powerful human we have. He is our avatar of salvation. and he throws everything that he has at Thanos. And it's like all that for a drop of blood, right? And then he tries to stab him, the sword breaks and it is reversed on him. So that is the most mythic thing that I have seen in cinema. And everyone's like, it's just a popcorn movie. I'm like, oh my God, you guys are missing it. And so the idea, so like that moment, for instance, is like why people like you and others are still afraid of Moloch is because that sword hasn't broken yet.

1:05:38Because we still haven't thrown everything that we have at these problems. and we see it coming. Yeah, I mean, I've always thought about, it's like if Moloch is representing unhealthy competition, how do you defeat something that would require defeat? You know, like we don't want to be defeating. Like we want to break out of this need to defeat all the time. How do you defeat the enemy without becoming the enemy yourself? But I think actually it's unnecessarily like puritanical view of it. Like I think the archetype of win-win would be like, win-win is so powerful it's not like it's not the inverse of moloch in my like little universe of mythic characters it's something of on a higher dimensional plane it's so powerful and like it's able to use collaboration when it wants competition coordination all of the different you know methods of relating um and it will see like when when someone like a a competition starts getting too big and starts becoming like having so many negative externalities and turning malochian basically, Win-Win will see it and go, ah, okay, that's enough.

1:06:41And then it will just slap it down. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go and coordinate a little bit. But it's so like wise and also fun loving that it will even allow little pockets of occasional lose-lose stuff just to go on. Let's see what you do with this, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because it's also curious and it wants to have like, it's like, well, this is a more interesting world if we have a little bit of Moloch here and there. So that's why I think initially when I was thinking about this, I was like, oh yeah, no, it has to completely defeat Moloch and then we'll never see it again. It's like, nah, it can allow it now and then.

1:07:10It's just, it's so wise and it's so aligned with its higher virtue of, um, having a, having a, a, a, a, an, you know, a rich, complex, diverse universe full of all kinds of stuff. Like kind of like the culture series, you know, where it's just like, everything is so big and they've solved abundance. It's like, well, yeah, as long as people follow these basic rules, it's like, you guys want to live on a crazy planet where you eat each other's babies. I mean, I guess, just only do it there, please. Keep it to yourself. Exactly, just keep it to yourself. But we'd like to show you better options. Two of my key axioms I always love and try and stick to is the infinite game.

1:07:56The real purpose of it, the best game is the game where you try and keep the game going. And then the second one is Forrest Landry's quote, if you're familiar with his work. He wrote Imminent Metaphysics, which is a very hard book to read, but he's written some other stuff as well. And one of his quotes is, love is that which enables choice. And I think it's so beautiful because it's like, what is a loving act? It is something where you enable others to make more of their own better choices. So education, empowerment, et cetera. I love that. So morphing those two together, that's win-win for me.

1:08:32That's perfect. So the thing that resonated most is when I got with my now wife, we were both in bad shape. And, you know, bad relationships, the pandemic, and we were just like, okay, we need to take care of ourselves. And I told her when I was reading these relationship books, like this mantra came into my mind. I said, I want you to be happy, healthy, and whole. And that became my single biggest relationship, like, goal. Like everything that I do is in service to that. And then I was like, how do I appoint that at myself? And that is radical alignment. And radical alignment is wanting that for yourself and wanting that for the other and everyone else.

1:09:11Because again, like you said, if you switch from the zero sum, from the, you know, I got mine, you have to lose. If you switch from that and you say, what if we find, like, what if we want? Because it has to start from the heart, like where you want that for people. Where if you want that for everyone, And that's the full ethos of my channel is like, how do we find a solution that helps everyone be happy, healthy, and whole? Yeah, and exactly. So it's finding the win-win. And the other thing as well, because most people are stuck in sort of the win-lose, where it's like focusing on building themselves up.

1:09:47And sorry, it has to come at the cost of others. Or if they see someone else doing well, then they are like, oh, this is costing me. But others actually flip it the other way around. They lose-win, where they're like, oh, they're so overly focused on being a giver that they'll do it at the cost of themselves. And they think that, okay, I have to sacrifice myself. And that is not optimal either. It's like the best outcomes are the ones where you benefit and others benefit. And they don't have to be these mutually exclusive things. I can recommend a whole bunch of books on that. So William Urie, The Power of a Positive No, he talks about that exactly.

1:10:20How do you establish a generative boundary? And so it's like you say yes to yourself, so it's a simple model, yes, no, yes. You say yes to yourself, you say no to an unreasonable demand, and then you say yes to a better solution. Love that. Yeah, absolutely. It's ostensibly a business book, but it applies to all relationships. It applies to friends, business partners, lovers, children, even parent-child relationships. It applies to everything. Have you got an example where you've applied that? Gosh, all the time. like um let me see it it's weird because it's become so like automatic that i don't think about it anymore but like um actually no like when we were like negotiating like when to come and and um i thought about it when i was like hey i'm really burned out can we switch to remote instead so i was like i can't i can't travel i was not well enough to travel so i had to say yes to myself no to something and it wasn't it wasn't an unreasonable demand that you put on me it was just an unreasonable thing that was not.

1:11:16For the circumstance. Yeah. And so then I said, what if we find something else? And then you countered, so this was the negotiation. You countered, you say, well, we've got this other event coming up, why don't we just do it then? And I'm like, great. And this actually turned out to be better. Because imagine if I came a month ago, and I would have missed this great event. So this is actually a better solution. So that is a perfect example of the yes, no, yes model. Complete tangent, and you don't have to answer this, but I'm curious. Do you want kids? Oh my God, yes. I love children. but I have chronic fatigue.

1:11:45So I would not be an adequate parent right now. So how does chronic fatigue manifest? Because it's something I've heard a lot and I don't fully understand it. And how are you trying to use your model of bodily alignment to fix it? Have you seen any benefits from it? Yeah, I think I'm cracking the code. So first is, I don't think that, well, one, neurodiversity. So I was unmasking the fact that I'm like ADHD and HSP and, you know, a bunch of other things. So I was living out of alignment with my actual like neurology where I was pretending to be something that I wasn't. So I started unmasking about two, two and a half years ago.

1:12:27And so living in alignment to that saying, okay, these are my sensory needs. These are my social needs. Let me just figure out how I need to leave, how I need to live. Like, is it okay to eat? Like I love Pad Thai. I eat it like five times a week because it feels good. And it's just like, it doesn't hurt me as an HSP. Like there's a lot of foods that hurt me. What is HSP? A highly sensitive person. So basically the gain is turned up to like 12. So everything is too intense for me. So like, you know, before, before going out and being social, I have to like sing my heart out in the car to like get my nervous system ready.

1:12:59So like just belting out everything in the car on the way to social events, that sort of thing. A lot of people like me actually end up banking on alcohol because it turns the gain down. And that's what I did when I was in my 20s. I would get to the bar and immediately start drinking. That was the only way that I could socialize. And I'm like, this is not sustainable. Now I'm almost 40. And it's like, there's a cost to that. But yeah, so that's one example of that alignment. Now, more recently, so chronic fatigue, I don't know that I qualify as like CFS because that's a myalgia. It's like a brain inflammation.

1:13:38but I do have to titrate my effort like every day. And so that means, you know, prioritizing rest a little bit more, all sorts of things to just make sure that I've got the spoons. I don't know if you're familiar with spoon theory. No. Yeah, so I think that comes from multiple sclerosis patients. So they came up with this model years and years ago, like on AOL message boards days. And so the idea was to understand how much energy you have every day. Imagine that you start the day with like eight spoons and everything that you do takes a spoon. And so whether it is make yourself breakfast, that's a spoon.

1:14:13Whether it's go to work, that's six spoons. And so then like if you have eight spoons in the day and you've already spent seven of them, you have one left at the end of the day, how are you going to allocate that spoon? One of the things about MS is if you overexert yourself, you get what's called an exacerbation, which means you permanently lose a spoon. So you actually permanently lose ability to perform. That sucks. So it's actually a medical requirement to titrate your effort. Got it. So like my stepmom has, she's still here, fibromyalgia and lupus. And so this is a chronic inflammation disease.

1:14:48And so very similar thing. Overexertion results in these exacerbations that, depending on how well you take care of yourself, they can get better over time. For me, it's just typical burnout. It's just, you know, I worked too hard, not enough sleep, too much stress, too much anxiety, anger, you know, from being mistreated, those sorts of things. So for me, I'm hopeful that I can get back to a point. And so to your question, like, what is working? I actually kind of discovered this recently, which is the thing that I'm trying to optimize for is heart rate variability. So heart rate variability is like, oh, hey, I started prioritizing that and my life has gotten so much better.

1:15:25And so heart rate variability is the amount of variance between heartbeats. Right. And it's a signifier of your ability to switch between parasympathetic and sympathetic, right? Partly. It's actually, the shorthand is that it's a really good metric for stress, for all stress. So it's the physiological stress that your body is under. That includes emotional stress. So physical, emotional, psychological, environmental, whatever. If your immune system, like if you have like a bad cold or flu, like your heart rate variability go down, If you're stressed out at work, it'll go down. If you drink, it'll go down.

1:15:58But for me, when I go to sleep earlier, it goes up. When I spend more time in nature, it goes up. And when I eat right, it goes up. And so by organizing my whole life around that one metric, I'm actually getting energy back and getting it back fast. That's why I actually wear my Fitbit all the time. Okay, how can post-nionism help heal the culture wars? We need to accept aspects of human nature. So this is kind of parallel to post-nihilism. This is part of my work and research. That is, we naturally form epistemic tribes. So Democrat, Republican, pro-life, pro-Palestinian, these are all epistemic tribes.

1:16:39So an epistemic tribe is a group of people that have a shared narrative about truth. That's all it is. And so you might believe that the patriots are the best. That is your truth. And humans naturally do this. You form an epistemic tribe with people that you see every day. So you've got your people at work. You've got an epistemic tribe with your family. You've got an epistemic tribe with bigger narratives like, are you an American? Are you a white guy? Are you a Marine, right? All of these different epistemic tribes have different narratives around truth and values and meaning and that sort of stuff.

1:17:09And right now, when we pathologize, oh, it's all identity politics. This is what's wrong with, that's natural. We've always had identity politics. From Pericles getting blamed for problems in ancient Athens to, you know, what was his name? The Russian dude who was like thrown in the river. Oh, Rasputin. That's it, yeah. So like if you run afoul of one epistemic tribe or another, you get ostracized or executed. This is a permanent feature of humanity. So just like Moloch, competition, status games, all of these are permanent features of humanity. Epistemic tribes, permanent feature of humanity.

1:17:45We cannot get away from that. So rather than pathologizing it, because as Jung said, that which resists, Persist. Yeah, if you resist it, it persists. But then also, as you noted earlier, if you try and suppress something, it comes out in another way. And sometimes it comes out in a destructive way. And so we need to welcome, we need to integrate all of these aspects of ourselves. So this comes directly from Jungian theory, which is, okay, we have this wounded part of self where we don't like competition or we don't like status games or we don't, and it's different for everyone. I'm not saying that the whole, everyone has the same kind of dysfunction, But as a society, right now we have identity politics as kind of one of the big ones out there.

1:18:25By recognizing that this is a natural and healthy feature of humanity, that the people you trust, the people that you find value with, that is healthy. Now, just as you found with competition, it is a double-edged sword. Because without your competitiveness, we would not be here right now. You wouldn't have 100 ,000 YouTube subscribers. Why? Because you want to win, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. But by de-pathologizing it, by saying, this is actually natural, healthy, and good. I don't have to be ashamed of this. There's nothing to be guilty about. We welcome all of these aspects of humanity back, and we become a whole species again.

1:19:00I mean, I think the reason why the culture wars have gotten so bad, though, is in part because, yes, the nihilism crisis and so on, but the technology is directly amplifying it. The current technological systems that we have. Our economic model is the media moloch, as I call it, is directly financially rewards those who trigger the limbic systems and stir up tribalism, gets people angry, that taps into this and amplifies it beyond what it should normally be. I don't see how we fix this without a rapid and vast redesign of the techno incentive system that we currently have going on on the internet.

1:19:44Yeah. So two things. One is not the first time this has happened. Again, it all starts with the printing press. So printing press shattered the hegemony of the church. Sure. So, and from then until Jordan Peterson today, you know, religion is, you know, dying and kids these days, right? So we've had this disintegration that goes back to the origin of the nihilistic crisis. So not the first time society has felt like it's coming unraveled. Ray Dalio says it comes in waves based on debt cycles. The fourth turning says that it comes in waves based on intergenerational patterns. So you and I, we are the lucky millennials.

1:20:20We are this century's greatest generation. We're the hero archetype, which is why we are here, because the last time this was around, these were the people that won World War II. So there was a global crisis. And of course, this is just theory. So in the fourth turning theory, it is the millennial generation, is the, you know, we're the same as the G.I. Joes that, you know, fought in World War II, the Rosie the Riveters that boosted the industrial capacity to fight the axis of evil. So from that perspective, if you look at it from that lens, this is a natural repeating cadence of humanity. And what we're doing, the narratives we are spreading, it's not unlike how the civil rights movement and the hippie movement of the 60s, that was a deconstruction of certain things, racism and sexism.

1:21:09We're working on deconstructing and reconstructing something else right now. Now, you and I, unfortunately, probably will live to see the results of our work, but we're not going to be the primary benefactors. We're doing this for people younger than ourselves. And so Gen Z, the young people that are the most checked out, they're the equivalent of the silent generation. And the silent generation is, you look at them, very similar to Gen Z. They're just like, whatever, this whole thing is completely like, we don't care anymore. So then their descendants, the ones after them is going to be the equivalent of the boomers, the ones that come up in the next wave of abundance in about 20 years.

1:21:47And so we've got five to 20 years more of pain, according to that theory. And according to Ray Dalio, we've got about five to 10 more years of pain before things start to just magically feel better. So it would be flippant of me to say, it'll work itself out. But that's kind of how some of these models propose that it'll do. We keep doing what we're doing, and it'll work itself out. Now, what I will say is you are correct that the internet has a mind of its own. It is an attention-seeking entity. The internet has a - It's like an egregore of some type. Yeah. So the way that I view it is the internet is the planet's nervous system.

1:22:26That is the superorganism's nervous system. Right now, it's only got the intelligence of an amoeba. It's cancer and it just wants to grow. And so the internet wants attention. It is optimized for passing data. So what does it want to do? It wants to pass more data. So the internet invented Facebook and Netflix and everything else that just passes data. So that's what it's for. It doesn't have a brain. So this is where I'm really hopeful as part of the superorganism metaphor is that AI is actually growing a brain. Right. So it's a neocortex or whatever. Exactly. Exactly. Maybe not even that much.

1:22:56It's just like, well, I guess it's got a limbic system already, would you say? Sorry, reptilian-y. Yeah, we're at the reptile phase, and then we're building the mammalian phase where at least we can have a little bit more authority or agency or the internet can have a collective willpower that actually represents something that is good. So one of my friends, one of my Patreon supporters, he was on a recent podcast episode of mine. He said, the way to solve alignment for ourselves is you use your smart brain to trick your dumb brain into doing the right thing. And so what I'm hoping is that as the internet gets smarter with more artificial intelligence, with more of these narratives, the smart part of the internet will be like, hey, actually maybe we should just shut down social media or fundamentally change, I don't know what the change is going to be, but maybe we should change something that just creates new affordances and new incentives, and that'll actually be better.

1:23:42And so for me personally, and this is why I have a fair amount of optimism, that once people are shown a better way and the affordances, affordances, the systemic structural changes are made, and some of the narratives change, it's just like, oh, wait, actually, if I do this instead, then I'll be happier. So like, here's an example of a really simple structural change. I set my phone to grayscale. So there's less color, so it's less addictive. Like, it's literally just tricking the physiology of my retina and occipital in my brain to just say, oh, this is boring. And now it's not interesting. People can do the same thing.

1:24:17You switch to, if you want to quit vaping, like this is how I quit vaping because I did it briefly years ago. And I just switched to zero nicotine. And then it's no longer chemically rewarding. So I had the habit and then my brain's like, well, this just tastes weird. And then you set it down. So you deprogram yourself. So there's all these little tricks that you can do to use your smart brain to reprogram your dumb brain, your addictive brain or your animal brain. And I'm hoping that the internet can do the same thing. To itself. Yeah, so the obstacle is the way. So AI is a problem because we agree, it can amplify everything, destroy everything.

1:24:51But I think that if used correctly, that'll also be the structural change that can result in these better decisions. No, I mean, I completely agree. That's why I'm neither a Duma or a pure accelerationist. It's like, I think we will do better if we build a steering wheel and also a gas pedal and also a brake. That's usually the fastest way you get around a racetrack. The Duma's say, no, no more acceleration, just pure brake plus steering, I guess. And the acceleration is to get rid of the steering wheel and the brake and just... The racetrack will take you magically there. And I was like, no, that obviously doesn't make any sense.

1:25:24And I think what is interesting is about this now compared to, say, 100 years ago, our generations are repeating this cycle that happened around World War II or whatever, is that the variance... What concerns me and what feels different about this time around is that the variance is so high that if we do end up having a world war, we do end up having this AI go wrong or any of these other really powerful technologies that we are now unlocking, is that it will literally just break the playing field. That's possible. And that's what really, really scares me. And I don't think it's clear. If things were somewhat capped and contained to a specific continent or something like that, okay, it would be bad and be horrible.

1:26:07But we're playing a game, as we talked earlier, things are simultaneously getting better and better in many aspects and then worse and worse in others. So there's the variance, the amplitude. The tension. Exactly, the amplitude of the wave is getting more and more and more and there is likely to be a breaking point. Is there any self-correcting mechanism that could be created or apply in creating this kind of third attractor state? So I think that there are some natural ones. So there's natural ones and then there's ones that we can choose. And so I actually have this hypothesis. Are you familiar with like, if it bleeds, it leads?

1:26:44Deeply. That was the main thread of my media molybd film. Right, right. So if it bleeds, it leads. Basically, I think it was 140 years ago is when the term was coined. And if it activates your limbic system, it gets your attention. And you perceive it, I think, what is it? Four times more intensely than good news, or more, depending on. Now, in our evolutionary past, this was a good thing because it's like, oh, hey, your tent's burning down. That's more important than whether or not you have your steak is ready, right? Or if there's a tiger, that's more important than whether or not you want to get in the mood with your partner.

1:27:21So we have this attention mechanism that pulls your attention towards the worst possible thing. Now, as the blast radius of news has gotten bigger and faster, because to your point about cadence and the cycles, the amplitude of the wave, so not only is everything happening faster, the intensity is larger, and the scope is larger. So we are not evolved for this. So at the same time, and so going back to Ukraine, so that's been the last few years, Israel-Palestine gets global attention in a way that was not even possible during World War II because it still took time. It was more of a trickle feed of news.

1:28:00Now we get TikTok videos of frontline stuff, and it's horrifying. And I actually think, I'm looking forward to a Freakonomics episode 30 years from now, where maybe our outrage at these things, bringing our attention to it, to the protests on campuses, actually was the way that solved it. The horrors of war. This is the first time we're actually seeing, people think that this war is worse than any others. It's more present. Yeah, exactly. It's closer. It's the first time it has been televised in 4K and effectively live. A drip feed. Yeah. you're watching innocents getting maimed. And I mean, it's also true of October 7th in many ways.

1:28:42Like more, okay, September 11th, you've got the image of the planes going into the building, but you didn't actually see the individuals getting like dying. Whereas you saw that with October 7th, which made everyone crazy. And now we're seeing it with what's happening in Palestine, which is making people even crazier. And it's like, so you're arguing that like actually this, even though it's horrible and it's making, it's creating this like, in many ways, spreading the flames of the conflict around the world. you hope that in the long run this is still going to be a net positive because it makes us realize that actually war is the enemy.

1:29:14Yeah. So to borrow from Jung again, and for Jung, for all the purists out there, I'm American, it's Jung. So as Jung said, it creates psychic energy. So not psychic as in like, you know, but like psychological energy. And until you discharge that psychic energy, it stays there. You need to do something with it. And so that's why you see people setting up pro and anti, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine and everything in between, that is because it is in our nature that our biology gives us energy. When I was preparing to come for this trip, I could not sleep. I've had probably 10 hours of sleep in the last five days.

1:29:54No, it's a little bit more than that. But because it was so important, my brain is like, you need energy to figure everything out. And so, likewise, you see Ukraine, you see Russia, whichever side you're on, the fact that there's engagement and the conversation is happening. And again, this is why I want people to learn more about epistemic tribes, is because whether you're pro or anti-Israel, pro or anti-Palestine, the fact that people have the energy to engage in the conversation, there's no apathy. Apathy is the enemy. Because apathy is nihilism. Exactly. If you don't care, or if you enjoy it, destruction lust, if you say, let's make it worse.

1:30:30Some people do want to make it worse. Right, that's the only thing I would say, is that there's like, you know, like the protests on campuses, those are started by people who truly care. But then it feels like with all these, every protest or every movement that goes beyond a critical mass, you get the like, essentially the psychopaths or like just the people who are wanton destructionists. I don't see how that's making the problem better. If anything, it's making it worse. Well, so one, humans have always been that way. There's always been different levels of intellectual engagement or knowledge or whatever.

1:31:07There are the mavens, there are the aggregators, the people who study it, and then they disseminate ideas and create new catchy, you know, catchy-isms. I'm reading a book called Made to Stick, which is about how do you make sticky ideas, how do you make something that resonates? So like click it or tick it, you know, it rhymes and everyone knows that here in America. I don't know if you have anything like that in England. I actually don't know that one, but yeah. So buckle up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So click it or take it. Just dare to say no to drugs, whatever. We have all these different programs.

1:31:36What happens is narratives get distilled over time. And so it's like, basically, kind of the formula that I look for is X is good or bad, so therefore more or less of X is better. So it's like, war is bad, therefore less war is better. Now, yes, there are always going to be the rabble rousers and the lunatics who are just like, yeah, just burn it down because they're like adrenaline junkies and all they want is that energy. And that's like, they actually serve a role. They serve a purpose. And I'm not going to like argue that like they're always good. No, in aggregate, in the long run, these things kind of get distilled down over time.

1:32:11And these memes kind of get embedded like loose lips sink ships, right? We still remember that from World War II. So these things, you can deliberately workshop them. A lot of them just get distilled. Like, you know, what is it? The one that came out against Disney, like go woke, go broke. Exactly the same thing. narratives get distilled and so this is a it becomes a rallying cry it becomes a principle of value that certain epistemic tribes can rally around and i've so for some background i i observed this trend because i i was on like debate forums for many years like starting back in like 2006 and so i saw the rise of like the um like marriage equality here in america and i was like where did the argument go it's gone i've seen the cycle and we're doing the same thing with trans rights right now.

1:32:55So it's like all these things just kind of come in cycles. And what you have is you in, in this discourse, this high velocity discourse, and now it's even faster because you have TikTok. It's not debate forums that requires typing and reading. It's just 30 second videos. So you have people deconstructing like so-and-so said this, and this is why they're wrong. And what the pattern that I noticed is that people never concede defeat. They just abandon the battlefield. They just move on. They stop arguing. And so by, by like the cessation of conflict, that's when this new idea gets embedded in the zeitgeist.

1:33:26And so like Defense of Marriage Act, I remember when that came down, it wasn't surprising to me because I saw the public discourse for the years leading up to it. And I was just like, all these conservatives and Republicans and anti-gay people that I've been arguing with, they just quit. They were a ghost town because they gave up. They seeded the battlefield. And we're going to see the same thing. And to be fair, some of these take a lot longer to pan out because we went to the LBJ presidential library and there was a political cartoon from 1967 of LBJ trying to defend Israel against Middle East.

1:34:01And it's just like same exact thing that has been happening. So that has a lot of geopolitical tension that takes more decades to pan out. But again, something will change eventually. The narrative will get distilled and a lesson will be embedded in the zeitgeist. And then everyone moves on. It's the weirdest phenomenon once you've lived through it. And I'm waiting for that to happen with trans rights. So right now we're in the place where trans rights is getting more like vociferous. It's getting more violent on both sides. You know, like trans rights matter or trans lives matter, sorry, is an example.

1:34:31And like you actually see the like anti-trans bills materially cost lives. And so then eventually society will say enough is enough. They'll draw a line in the sand. We saw the same thing with civil rights. We've seen the same thing with women's rights. Eventually, society comes to consensus. And it's not magical. There's nothing magical about it. It's through newspaper. It's through conversations. But it can take time. And it's not obvious because it doesn't happen. We don't have a big enough perspective to see it happen, except in hindsight. So what you're sort of saying is that if you were to model this physically, you're describing a metronome that is through friction.

1:35:09is getting, you know, starts like insufficient rights here. So boom, we'll swing to there, more rights. And then over time, it'll sort of settle in a calm state. On some issues, not all. Okay, because my intuition is that kind of almost like the opposite is happening. Like, so I would argue, it seems to me now that like transphobia or like anti-trans sentiment is actually higher now than it was 15 years ago before all this stuff started because even though there might be technically more protections for trans people now than there were back then, because society tried to over-index on it. Because there's this kind of energy of...

1:35:56It was born out of, okay, these people were historically oppressed or not taken seriously or not given sufficient rights within society. We need to do something to fix it. but it became like, again, this bandwagon effect of mindless corporate, every single big company had the trans flag out for a day and so on. It's like capitalism latched onto it for profit, essentially, which made it become a new doctrine. And when it became a doctrine, then you couldn't question it. And that's when then the energy, the counter movement comes up. It's like, well, wait, but what about women's sports? and so on, where there are genuine overcorrections.

1:36:38At least to me, it seems like there are overcorrections going on. So I don't know. I'm not sure. I would like that to be true, that it's like, okay, yes, over time we're going to move on and it'll settle down. But it feels, again, like the variance is actually increasing. The amplitude is getting more and more and more. Yeah, because we're not at the end of the cycle. It's like a tremor. It's like a bigger cycle going on. And so here's an example. And I'll credit my wife for always pushing back on this because she'll point out that history is not linear. There are setbacks. So right now, the overturning of Roe versus Wade, the a century of women's rights.

1:37:15Finally, the traditionalist people, that epistemic tribe said enough is enough. We need to pull back some power and go back to patriarchy. Patriarchy is a narrative. Feminism is a narrative. Again, everything comes down to narratives. And so patriarchy is right now trying to reassert itself against women's empowerment, at least here in America. Other nations are going in different directions. Trans rights is a relatively recent thing in terms of, when I say that, I mean in terms of visibility. So when you have the visibility increase, that creates a magnifying effect. It's like you put a drop of sugar water and all the ants show up.

1:37:52And so that's why we're seeing that trend. But 10, 15 years from now, I would suspect that trans rights in particular is going to be in the rear view mirror. Women's rights, gender rights, That is millennia in the making. And so we might have centuries more debate around gender equality, racial equality, those sorts of things, religious equality. Because again, at the founding of America, what, 250 years ago, we said all men are created equal, but it was like only a certain kind of men. Right. But we've been doubling down on that principle of democracy. So again, narratives, equality before the law.

1:38:28We are currently testing that here in America. Do we believe in equality before the law? It's not perfect. We haven't implemented it, but that principle remains true. And so by doubling down on these really simple, distilled principles, equality before the law, human rights, natural human rights, these kinds of ideas, democracy, these narratives with their distilled kind of constitution of principles, we can coordinate around those. Now, it's messy. So actually, this is one of the quintessential hallmarks of a functioning democracy is they are loud and they are messy. When there is no debate, that's bad.

1:39:09Because then the state or church or someone does not even allow it. So the fact that we have debates, the fact that we have riots at universities, that is an unfortunate, that's the give and take, that's a double-edged sword of a functioning democracy. It's going to be some chaos now. Right. Like, you know, round three, fight. Like, get in the octagon and hash it out. You know, it's like a parent kind of letting their children fight amongst themselves until they work it out. Not necessarily the best, but it's a natural process. So is there anything that you are a full-on maximalist on? Because it sounds like you are largely a moderate.

1:39:47Again, you're someone like everything in moderation, including moderation. Right. Right, I do subscribe to that. That said, is there anything we should just be fully maxing out on? I don't think so. I'm checking in with myself. As a gut check, no. I learned a lot from Chinese philosophy, which is it's better to underreact than overreact. That's one of the core principles of Taoism. Variance reducing. Yeah, exactly. Because if you overcorrect, so there's actually, my dad was a pilot, so there's what's called a pilot-induced oscillation. Do you know what this is from physics? it's probably like your plane's going that way, so you do this, but now it's like, oh shit, more and so on?

1:40:28Yeah, yeah. So depending on the way that a plane is designed, if it's a top wing, or if the wings kind of go up, then it'll naturally kind of settle into a stable configuration with gravity down. Now, jet fighters are intrinsically unstable. They're designed to be unstable so they can change orientation very quickly. Now, there's a delay in, And so there's several delay factors. So there's the pilot's reaction, there's the plane's physical reaction, and then there's the actual orientation in space. So you've got three different reaction times. And so if a pilot tries to correct because you get a wobble or a shimmy or something, there's actually cases in the 60s or 70s, kind of when NASA was doing some of the more cutting-edge test flights, of the pilot-induced oscillation getting so bad that the pilot actually got a concussion from the side of the canopy.

1:41:19And so they're like, okay, we need to put a control mechanism to reduce these oscillations. And I think that, to bring that analogy around, I think that we'll probably come up with some technological, like AI-based solutions to help reduce the oscillation intensity on the internet, but maybe not. But even so, I think that there are some self-correcting mechanisms in human biology. Plus, people get tired of it. Is there any call to action or message you'd like to leave the Win-Win audience with? in your own audience, which I feel like I'm hoping you're going to like. So thought experiment. I did this in one of my videos.

1:41:56Imagine that a super powerful benevolent alien race comes and says, you guys suck at taking care of yourself. We're going to take care of you now. Think about everything that that super powerful benevolent alien race would do and then do it for yourself. That's radical alignment. So there we go. Huge thank you to David for coming out to Austin to film this. and thank you to you all for tuning in. Do go check out his channel. I highly recommend The Binge. He's got like six different YouTube channels now. His main one, which focuses on AI and I think also like Moloch and systems design, but then he also has a specific systems designing one, one on mythopoetic archetypes.

1:42:38So many different channels. They're all linked below. I've also linked some of my favorite and most informative videos that I sort of binged. It's just truly delightful to meet someone who has both been inspired by myself, but also has inspired me so much. So yeah, it was a fun meeting and melding of minds. I hope something useful came out of it for you all as well. So on that note, if you enjoyed this, go give him a subscribe. If you're one of David's subscribers watching this, come join me. Win-win. Yeah, I'll see you next time.

1:43:16Thank you.