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- [00:00]
A
We're taught, know your destination. You know, follow that one path. Be better than other people on the same stuff.
- [00:07]
B
It's so crazy.
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A
Like, that's the kiss of death. You're not thinking for yourself. You're just following the flow. And it's like nothing brilliant ever gets created that way.
- [00:21]
B
Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim o' Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today I have a return guest. My friend Todd Rose, author of Collective Illusions, found of Populous, former Harvard professor. Please enjoy my conversation with Todd Rose. Well, Todd, I have been looking forward to this forever because while we talked a lot about your books and a lot about your thesis on why we're seeing what we're seeing, we didn't really spend too much time on you. And I love origin stories. So if you wouldn't mind, tell us a little bit more about your background before we get to this. So what of it?
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A
That's great. Yeah. Happy to be here again. So good to see you. I'm always interested in why people end up caring about what they care about. And there's almost always some personal side to it. My scientific interests are definitely informed. My personal story. And it sort of starts at, like, rock bottom. Right. So I grew up in. In rural Utah. Had some pluses to it, but in a environment that really prized conformity, that was not really gonna work very well for me.
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B
Especially for you.
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A
For me? Yeah. It's like asking why was not a good question. Got you in more trouble than it was worth.
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B
But they tried to install the correct answer machine in your brain.
- [01:48]
A
Correct one right answer for things. For me, school didn't work very well, which is kind of funny.
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B
That's why we get along.
- [01:56]
A
That's exactly. But it's like, by not working out well, I mean, I failed out of high school with a 0.9 GPA, which I think you actually have to work really hard. I'm impressed to do that. I didn't even get socially promoted. But it just kind of snowballs, right? And it's funny, I like to say it was like a mutual decision, but in reality, they just kicked me out because they're like, you can't graduate. You're starting your senior year. You're just messing around. You need to leave. I leave, and a few months later, my girlfriend, who was my wife for 29 years, found out she was pregnant, which, again, is not something one does in rural Utah. So this is a good way to start.
- [02:42]
B
You were on the three strikes, in your way.
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A
It was really close.
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B
I was surprised they didn't run you out of town on rail.
- [02:48]
A
My father in law tried. So for like the first two years we had another kid, so we stopped there. And I had 10 minimum wage jobs in that span. You just bounce around from. I sold computers at Circuit City, I was a 4am shift manager at Einstein's Bagels, I sold cell phones, whatever, but the stuff you can do with no high school diploma turns out not a lot. But you know, I sold fence. Which by the way, on a different conversation, we'll talk. It was actually quite an enjoyable job. But it culminates with the job that really kicked me in the rear was I was a nurse assistant and I was working at an old folks home. But I moved on to home health care. And my job, no kidding, because they paid $1 more an hour, was to drive around and give people enemas. That was my actual job. No, it's an honest living. Somebody has to do it. But this is no kidding. The piece of advice that stuck in my head, my boss, I don't even remember her name, but I remember her advice. She said, you need to invest in longer gloves because the ones they give you for free are not long enough. And she was spot on. So I'm doing that work and I'm like, something has to change, man. And my dad, I got a lot of inspiration. My dad, he was a mechanic for most of his life. When I was in middle school, I remember he came home one day and he told my mom, I think there's something more for me. And so he decided to go to school at night at Weber State University, open enrollment school in Ogden, Utah. And he became a mechanical engineer. And he just retired as one of the most prolific innovators in airbags that ever. He has so many patents, he's created all kinds of things that save people's lives. But I also watched education transform our lives and life circumstances. We went from poor to solidly middle class. And so I was like, well, I gotta do something. I said, maybe I'll go to college. Which is funny because they're like, well, first you have to get a ged, right? Turns out I aced that test. But my family, my in laws, they were really frustrated with me, as they probably should have been. You know, I'd taken their daughter and didn't really look like I was going to be able to give her much security or anything. But everybody had like my family, their family cobbled together just enough money for me to go for one year. And it was not that much. It was like $800 a term. But that was all we had. And they said, okay, if you really care about this, you'll make it work. And so I started Weber State, and I promise this is my long winded way of getting to stuff I've done. But it was really in trying to figure out how to make that work that I discovered a lot of ideas that would ultimately become part of my scientific work. And I show up on campus, they only let me go at night to start. They wouldn't let me through into the day. But I get this. My dad tells me, he said, look, you don't have any study skills, so you should probably pick classes that you're passionate about so you can build that muscle. Well, I go to the counselor that's assigned to me because of my last name, right? Covers, like, you know, whatever. And he says, well, you know, you failed algebra three times in high school. You should probably take remedial math. And I was like, even I knew that was the most taken and failed class in the country, right? I'm like, why would I be over, right? He's like, you probably should take remedial English. And so I didn't do any of that. I started picking just classes that would keep my interest. And I took an economics class because being poor, it was nice. And so I'm doing these things. And I realized I didn't know what would work, but I knew what I'd done before didn't work, which was there seemed to be one way that people were smart and that they studied and that they achieved that didn't work for me. And so I was just groping, trying to figure out, out of desperation to not go back to giving enemas, like, what to do.
- [07:03]
B
That is a powerful motivator.
- [07:05]
A
Unbelievable motivator. It still drives me today, but I'm making decisions. I start to realize, like, there's certain kinds of topics, fine. Everybody knows that they're interested in some things, not others. But I noticed that the type of professor made a difference. I also knew that, like, this was an open enrollment school, so I was with people I went to school with. And I knew when I was in that environment, the pool to be like the class clown was powerful, so I'd immediately enroll in something else. But this really, you know, I saw this as like, okay, some people are just smart, they can make it. I have to. There's something wrong with me. I have to, like, do it differently. But this defining moment for me completely changed my life. I'm sitting in this big lecture hall which is not good for me for history class. And I'm sitting next to my buddy Steve, and I'm just like, this is torture. But there's no other option. I gotta get through it. And class is ending. And he goes, I don't know what you're complaining about. This is nothing compared to what I got myself into in the Honors Program. I never heard of the Honors. I thought it was the same, just more work or whatever. But he disabuses me of that really quick. He says, no, no, no, no. There's no lecture halls. There's just, like, 10 people in a room. And you just talk. And he's like, there are no tests. You just write essays. He goes, I don't even think there are right answers. All we do is debate. And I'm like, wait, wait, hold on. This sounds like it's his nightmare credit for. I was like, this is. Are you kidding me? This can't be how education is. So I get really excited and race up the top of the hill. The Honors Program's on the second floor of the library. Top of the hill. I skip my next class to go because I got to be in the Honors Program. So I go right up there. I go in the secretary, Marilyn Dimon. She'll play an important role in a moment here. I said, hey, I want to be in the Honors Program. Great. We're really proud of this. Let me get you in to see the director. So let me meet. I sit down with this guy. He's really nice. We're sitting about like this, across from his desk. And he said, okay, well, just. Look, just formality. Let me just get you in the system. My name, everything. And he said, hey, just, you know, what was your high school GPA? And I said, 0.9. And this is no kidding. He says, what? 0.9. Like, I left off the most important part of the story. And I said, oh, 0.9. And he was so nice about it, but he just looks at me. He goes, you can't be in the Honors Program. He was really kind, but I took it as. We have standards, right? And I was, like, mortified. I just rushed into this thing almost impulsively. And here I am just sitting there, just so embarrassed. And I was like, I'm so sorry. Like, how quickly can I get out of here? So I'm packing up stuff. Like, stand up, shake his hand. Thanks for your time. And I'm bolting out the door. As I'm walking out, Marilyn Dimon, the secretary, her desk is right next to the door. And I'm walking out, really almost holding back tears, being so embarrassed. And she reaches out and grabs my arm and she says, hey, I overheard the conversation. Don't take no for an answer. And I was like, what? What do you mean? Like, what is that? I don't even know what you can do that. Like. He said, no, don't take no. She, go sit on that couch and don't leave until he let you in. So I was like, okay. So I sat on the couch. He comes out and goes to teach a class. He comes back a couple hours later. I'm still there. It was felt like an entire day. And he's like, what are you doing? I said, well, I want to be in the honors program. And so he says, okay, just come in my office for a minute. We sit down and he said, look, why do you want to be in the honors program? Because on paper, it makes no sense. So I started explaining what I'd learned about myself and this idea of a good fit for me. And I said, look, I know it doesn't look like it, but this seems perfect for me. And to his credit, you know, he couldn't let me in straight up. But he said, look, I'll let you in on a provisional basis. And here's what I. You can choose one class, and if you do well, I'll let you choose another class and we'll go from there. And he made it really clear. He said, by doing well, I don't mean that you got the best grade in the class. He said, I am going to ask that professor at the end of the semester, and they should tell me. They can't imagine the class without you in terms of your contributions. Okay. So I picked really, really carefully, like, went through all the options. I. I picked plagues of the modern era. Scared the living out of me. Like, I was like almost a vegan after that. It was kind of terrifying. Kept my attention, but it turned out to be exactly right. It was such a good fit for my own individuality. And I did extremely well. And then I did extremely well. And flash forward, I came into Weber State with a high school, a GED and a 0.9 GPA. And I graduated in pre med and psychology with a 397. And I was the honors student of the year the year I graduated. And I tell that story for two reasons. There's two important takeaways. One is this idea of fit. And we'll come back to that later, because so often we think about, you're either talented you're not. You're smart, you're not. And I had internalized that. I just wasn't smart. Boy, it taught me in a hurry that it's really about knowing yourself and getting yourself in these environments where that individuality is such a good. Fitness and learning got easier. You know, you just. It changed how I thought about myself. But the second thing that I'll just never forget is the role of Marilyn diamond. Because I worked really hard. I did. I put in the effort. I still, you know, had to work during the day, went to school at night for quite a while, but none of that was going to matter if she didn't intervene. And what I think is so funny about this is, so just a few years ago, I get asked to come back to Weber State. They want to celebrate me as this former student of the year, give me this award, and I'm like, fantastic. So I'm there to give this speech in this auditorium. It turns out that Marilyn diamond is retiring that year. So I thought, well, you know what I'll do? I'll use this time to tell some version of this story and really celebrate her. So I share it. It's great. The university president says, well, Marilyn, why don't you come on up and say a few things? And she comes up slowly to the stage, and she's quite a bit shorter than I am, and she gives me a hug and then gets up there and adjusts the mic. And she says, well, thank you, Todd. It's good to see you. But I have to admit, I don't remember that story. And I thought she was saying, you're lying. But it turned out, no, it's that everybody had a Marilyn diamond story. She was just that person. And it really struck me that when we think about the way we support one another in our development, in our ability to accomplish what we wanna accomplish, we tend to think it requires some Herculean effort. Sometimes it does. But here's something where Marilyn intervened. It literally changed my life. And it was so inconsequential to her, she didn't even remember it. And so I think so often when we want to think about supporting one another that it's like we think, oh, it's going to take so much effort. But now we can be Marilyn diamond for one another. It's pretty shocking.
- [14:46]
B
Yeah. And it's funny because I just had on the podcast an author named Mike Perry, and his most recent book is called Improbable Mentors, and he tells a story very similar to your diamond story in other Words. The people that we expect to be the ones to, you know, really change our life or do any of that actually aren't at all. They're the Marilyn diamonds of the world. It's a short, fun little book, and it looks at the world that way. It's basically. He had a really circuitous backstory, not unlike your own. He grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, was a farm boy, but also the class clown. All of the above. And he ended up getting a nursing degree because he figured that would be his parachute. But he really wanted to be a writer. Right. And so I won't give the book away. It's got a lot of really great. But what really struck me as you were telling that story, I just finished the book on the way in, and that's her. That is her.
- [16:02]
A
This is amazing because I could basically tell my entire story through a series of improbable mentors, Right? And it's funny. So I am basically okay now. I have this straight A student, and I'm thinking of going to grad school. No one in my family's ever gone to graduate school, so I have no idea what I'm doing. As luck may have it, I applied to a number of things. I wanted to work with this renowned scholar named Kurt Fisher, because I'd got a book about this new science that was emerging, kind of the science of individuality, where we were getting away from aggregate data and starting to think about humans as unique individuals. And that you could still build a science that gave some universal sort of insights from that. That resonated with me quite deeply. The book I had gotten said he was at the University of Denver. I was like, well, this is great. This is, like, right up the road, eight hours. But, you know, it turns out he was at Harvard. I didn't even know where Harvard was. The idea of Harvard isn't even in the conversation for people like me. That's just not. It's not like, oh, we couldn't. It's like, I don't even know what it is, right? So I thought, well, okay, but if I don't apply, you'll never know, right? You just gotta.
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B
Can't tell till. Yes.
- [17:16]
A
Yeah. And it's funny when you're. I applied to, like, 13 schools because it's like, I don't know. I don't know how qualified I am. And we're, like, eating ramen noodles to try to afford these applications, right? So I get into Harvard, and we pack up everything we have into a minivan and a little U Haul which, to my dad's everlasting shame as an engineer, I don't know how to load. So I front loaded it, jammed it full of everything. We can't go more than 42 miles an hour or at fishtails. So I'm rather than just like, maybe we should unpack. I'm like, what's wrong? I don't know what's the matter. So we're just driving on the freeway in the right hand lane all across the country. But that wasn't the worst part. We had cash in envelopes. Like, this is how much money it's going to take to get to Cambridge. We get to Chicago and they start charging you to drive on roads. I've never heard of toll roads in my life. And I'm like, what is this? So I'm like, okay. So I'm paying. We start realizing we're not going to make it. Get about to like up into New York. I'm like, we don't have money for gas or these. So. So we get to the toll road. I still remember this. I pull up and I'm like, do you guys take checks, guys? Like, no one's ever asked me that. He's like, I guess we do. I wrote a bunch of checks that bounced like all the way through. So we, we get to Cambridge and it's only, you know, not that long before school starts. We go driving out to see where we're gonna. My kids going to school. Because in Cambridge you just didn't go to the, the public school right next to you. They kind of move you around. As we're leaving the school and we're at an intersection, this person ran a red light, totaled our Minivan and my 3 year old son. It broke his femur in half. So we end up at Children's Hospital in Boston. I don't know a soul. We've only been there for six days. And we're like, what is going on? And we get the first tranche of student loans because that's how I'm going to live, right? I debt financed my way through school, but that's as much as I know about finance. How's that? So we have to pay for some of the surgery. So we're already in the hole right off the bat. So it's not going very well. I am like, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how do you like the play? Well, it's so funny. I'm like, I don't have enough money. Student orientation starting. And I am like, I don't have enough money. To get a haircut, but I need a haircut. So I'm like, how hard could it be, right? Turns out, way harder than you think. Okay, Way harder. Or at least for me. So I keep cutting it. It doesn't work. And I'm trying to get it even out. So I finally have to shave it. So I show up for my class photo with, like, I look like a skinhead, Like. Like a wannabe skinhead, not like a cool skinhead, Right? And that's the photo I get for, like, my entire. So it's not going very well. I have my first class that I'm taking is Howard Gardner, which he of multiple intelligence theory, you would imagine would be like, practice what you preach. He was. He's a brilliant man. He's a mentor now. That is not how his classes played out. This was on cognitive and symbolic development at 8:00am like, okay. So I'm like, listen, this isn't going very well, but I know I'm good at school. I know I can do well here. Well, I write my first paper. I get back. What was the topic on? You know, I don't even remember. I have literally trauma buried that I actually have it. I will. I'll send it to you.
- [20:46]
B
We'll put it in the show notes.
- [20:48]
A
Yes, the show notes. I'll do a little PDF version. Everyone see what you'll see when you get this paper. Howard Gardner went out of his way to write something to me. As he failed me, he said, judging by your work on this paper, I do not believe you have the writing skills to succeed in graduate school.
- [21:07]
B
Wow.
- [21:08]
A
I was like, what? Like at Weber State, I was a really good writer. And I was like. So like, are you kidding me? Is like the last straw. Here's the thing I thought I was good at, and even this, I'm a fraud. So I go walking back to our student housing. I just left school. I'm in tears. I'm like, I shipped my family all the way out to Cambridge, Massachusetts, all for my pride and ego. My son's in a full body cast. This is just not working well. It's funny. I got back to the housing, Comcast was on strike, so we didn't have a phone yet. So I went to a pay phone to call my mom, and she didn't answer. And later she told me she's glad she didn't answer because she would have told me to come home. And so I sat down and I was just pity party, like nobody's business. And then I got mad, right? This is how it usually goes for me. I can pity party with the best of them. And then I just got really, really mad. And I. And I was like, how dare he? So I started reading it again. Not only did he say that, but there's a lot of suggestions. And I was like, he's not wrong. That was the hardest part. He's not wrong. And so I was like, okay, I need some writing help. I don't want to go to the grad student writing because those are my peers and that reputation, that'd be kind of tough. So I go to Lamont Library for undergrad writing support. They kind of wait in the background. And there's this young woman. She looks like she's 13, okay? And she's the writing tutor. And she's like, I wait and wait and wait. And I kind of come up to her toward the end of the thing, and I said, hey, where do I sign up for writing help? And she's like, you look a little old to be an undergrad. And I was like, well, you're right. I'm not. She's like, I only get paid to support undergrad. And I was like, okay. And she was like, look, I'll tell you what. If you come back here on Thursdays at a certain time, I'll tutor you for free. And she did. And she really helped me get up to speed on what it meant to write at that level. And I ended up getting an A in Howard's class on that same thing. You know, it just. So this idea of, like, working hard, but in the end, like, these. What do you call them? Improbable mentors. Right? Would not have thought that would be. And so while I'm at Harvard, and then we'll kind of get to, like, some of the meat of professional work. So I got to work with Curt Fisher, who is this pioneer in this science of individuality. And what was remarkable is so many of the things that I internalized as something wrong with me or just didn't fit in. But it must work for everyone else we're starting to see from this new science is just not true. It's a product of how we've designed our standardized systems that ignores individuality. And I'll never forget at a professional level when it really changed for me. And I knew this was what I'd want to start my professional career around. As I was at Mass General Hospital working and doing FMRI research when a colleague of mine and I wrote about this in the end of Average, he's studying brain scans on something very basic, which is how your brain codes memories, things like that. And he's putting. And this is how we do it. This is. No kidding. Would bring you in, put you in a scanner, give you a task, scan your brain while you're doing it. And then weirdly, reflexively, we average all of the brain scans. We had time series data on you. You didn't have to. But it's so built into our assumption that you do this, and then we'd get the average response, we'd publish it, and that was it. But the assumption was that average, while not perfect, must apply to a lot of people, or else it would be kind of useless. Well, here's my colleagues. Like, well, I happened to be in there when we were scanning these brains, and I was looking at the individual brains, and like, none of them look like the average that came from these people. And so he's like, well, I'm. Maybe I'm just wrong. So he puts it away in the filing cabinet, and it just nags at him, nags him. So he does it again, finds the same result. There's literally just no average brain. So he publishes this, and it just shook neuroscience. Like, what are we doing? And it turns out that insight that there's no average brain is true about everything to do with humans. And so I think it's like one New York Times expose away from being like a massive embarrassment that we've funded all this aggregate level science. It's fine if you're a sociologist where the aggregate is the point, but in psychology and neuroscience and medicine, the individual has always been the focus. So I got to be at Harvard when this sort of revolution in the science happened and got to contribute, participate in developing methods around this individuality modeling as we're working on this stuff. And I graduated in 2007, and I went and did a postdoc at the Smithsonian center for Astrophysics. It was a lot of fun. Not bad. It was a lot of fun.
- [26:20]
B
9.
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A
Yeah, it's not too bad. What was crazy is there I really learned how to be a scientist. There's no bs, right? It was great. I also learned a lot about we all have our strengths and weaknesses, because the guy in the office next door, we was the guy that discovered background radiation in the universe, right? And he sucked at statistics. It was awesome. I was like, you're a genius. And he was like, can you help me with this multiple regression model? And I was like, really? Yes, I can. Right? So I do that, and then I come back to Harvard as a Professor. And I'm doing work in this science of individuality. And the people that are coming to me and are interested are all the people that run these big systems where they rightly. You think about, like, Amazon, which has so many dimensions of you as a consumer, it's not even funny. Right. And they start to realize that this matters for how we think about consumers.
- [27:16]
B
Great.
- [27:17]
A
But it kind of terrified me, to be honest, because I felt like in an age of standardization, you could feel the sort of oppressive weight of that. Right. Trying to force you into a mold that doesn't fit that brute force of it all. But you could imagine pretty quickly, as we learn to really get to know you at a level you don't even know yourself, that this could become manipulation, and you wouldn't even know it. You'd probably thank them for personalizing it. And so, you know, I saw the potential of that, but I felt like if we didn't have this conversation with the public, that these assumptions we've made about ourselves are just incorrect, that that's where it might lead. And so I wrote my first commercially successful book called the End of Average, which kind of lays this out. Great book, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really proud of it. So I'm doing this, and it becomes a bestseller, which I really did not expect. Right. And so it takes off. We get a lot of interest in folks being like, well, what do you want to do? And Partner and I, we had thought about. We were working at Harvard, right. And we had thought about leaving because it just seemed like all the interesting problems were outside of academia, which I think is 100% true.
- [28:30]
B
I agree completely.
- [28:32]
A
So we were going to leave, but they were doing capital campaign, and they had really bet the farm on this individuality and personalization. And we were the only people doing it, really. And so we made a deal with the Dean that if we stayed for a few more years, they would basically give back any claims to intellectual property. Not that we really had anything valuable, but, you know, it's still nice in the interim. And this is how we get to the second piece. So we're in the space of understanding individuality. And I just want to say, before we jump to the next one, when I say there's no average person, I am not kidding. Like, it is one of those relics of the past that is holding us back in profound ways. I'm going to give you a really concrete example. You know, diabetes kind of runs in my extended family. And I was just like, hey, always, always Try to be thoughtful about this. I went to see a nutritionist as a young adult and she was like, listen, grapefruit, pink grapefruit is like magical, with respect. And it turns out, on average, it's true. It actually does quite help. So I am literally having a half a grapefruit every morning for most of my adult life. So my colleagues in Israel used this new science, these methods that would help develop to ask a pretty simple question. You think about the glycemic index, right? This is what this food does to your blood sugar. That's all average based. They were like, how many people around the world actually respond the way the glycemic index says they should? Hundreds of Thousands of people later, 00. And for some, they're a little off. For some, they're literally spectacularly off. So they actually took that science. Now you start thinking, wait a minute, hold on. If we're all so unique, isn't that chaos? No, it turns out that's just the way we were wrong about that. And we just think it's chaotic. Because what they did was they used some basic machine learning techniques. They realized they could scale up prediction using technology. They have a company called DayTwo. I actually bought the kit because I was like, this is amazing. Even I was a little skeptical. I'm like, you could really with gut biome, some blood work you could truly predict. For me, turns out spectacularly right. The glycemic index was only true 40% of the time. For me, the single worst thing that spikes my blood sugar is grapefruit. No kidding. More than chocolate cake. Wow. Which I took as. You should have more chocolate cake. Yes, of course. That's a good scientist. You think about that insight and this is true for everyone, right? My son who did it, that was different for him, funny enough, I couldn't even get the kit in Massachusetts. They're like, no, you have to go through a nutritionist. So I had it shipped to Utah, smuggled across the border. What's fascinating with that is by understanding someone's uniqueness, it doesn't devolve into chaos. It allows us to even scale population level health one person at a time. So this is what I say, and this has been true for how we think about cancer research and treatment. It's true in nutrition, it's true in brain science, it's true in education for how kids learn. So here I am. It's like, this is amazing. It's so fun to contribute to this field and this core idea of individuality. Well, my Dean's like, okay, you can't leave. So we're back to that. And he's like, and we're also raising money and we need you to be doing something so you can't just run out the three years and then leave. So he's like, I'm gonna give you some money. Just do whatever you want to do. But I need you to be doing something, some research.
- [32:12]
B
And it better be sexy.
- [32:13]
A
And it was sexy. That's the thing. It better be sexy. It really is. It better be sexy. We gotta sell this stuff in. End of average, I had been able to go and meet with founders of companies that I thought had done a pretty great job dealing with individuality. So everything from like Zoho in India, Morningstar, Tomato, which is ridiculous story. And what I kept doing is I kept meeting all these really cool people that were in these kind of unique jobs. And I'm like, okay, I get how it works right now for you. The fit. What I don't understand is how you got here because you've got this really, like, non traditional path. And so I thought, well, okay, somebody's gotta have already studied that. I kept digging in, I just couldn't find anything. So I'm like, okay, I want to study these dark horses. Like, is there anything we could learn? And a little selfishly, I was like, just curious about it. And I felt like, well, I have this dark horse journey, right? And so it was my first time ever. I'm a very, very strong quant person in terms of my approach to research, but I didn't have any real hypothesis. So it was the first time I ever did qualitative research. Turns out you can learn a lot by listening to people who would have known, who knew? Who knew, right? I thought the smug superiority of an academic was the way you did it, but no, you just got to listen. It's incredible.
- [33:30]
B
Which academics, at least those in my career, are in a fairly large deficit at their ability to do that.
- [33:38]
A
Yeah, it's amazing, right? The. So I'm thinking, I just want to know how these people got good at stuff, right? So we ended up studying hundreds of people from all walks of life. And the only criteria to start was that you were like, objectively good at what you were doing, right? And then we wanted. And you had this kind of atypical path. So we start out, and I'm like wanting to ask them about how they mastered things, and right off the bat, it's not what they wanted to talk about. They talked about how they found out what they loved what motivated them. Right. And then time after time, some people would talk about, like, the pursuit of fulfillment. Some would say that word directly, others would talk about meaning and purpose, you know, this kind of stuff. And I was like, yeah, is that like a nice story we tell after you're successful? You know what I mean? Yeah, it cleans up. So we shifted the research. Okay, you keep saying it's about the pursuit of fulfillment instead of like, I'm gonna be excellent at this thing. How did you do that? And what was remarkable is it doesn't take very long. A pattern emerges where there's just some things that these people know that sort of form a mindset of how they think about living their life that makes this sort of dark horse, non standard path pretty secure. Right? And it's funny, like the big four. And we can talk about them because I think it matters for where we're going in society right now, where we're so used to following this one size fits all path, that our mutual nemesis, Frederick Taylor, back in the day, scientific management did more to destroy. Yes, we got more stuff through efficiency, but this guy. We all live in the shadow of Frederick Taylor and we don't even realize it.
- [35:23]
B
No, I know. And you can see you've struck a chord with me. I despise that man. And like everybody celebrated him. As you mentioned, before we started recording, the only person he wouldn't apply those scientific management was to himself. And then we went through a list of other people who were very boss.
- [35:50]
A
It's funny, the hypocrisy of this, but yeah, Frederick Taylor, what a piece of work. Right?
- [35:56]
B
Just briefly, we have a very highly educated audience, but just Frederick Taylor. Two sentences on Frederick Taylor to give.
- [36:04]
A
Him a fair shake. Taylorism before Taylorism. In the early 20th century, the US had gone through a lot of ebbs and flows and depressions, not just the Great Depression. And they kind of thought like, there just was scarcity, there's just not enough. And he starts to think, well, wait a minute, you know, he was a deep believer in averages and standardization and that there's always one right answer to everything. Which turns out is decidedly not true. But okay, catastrophically. Catastrophically not true. Yeah, like that's. If you come from any complex systems or biology, a singular path is like the weakest way you could design anything. One point of failure and the whole thing collapses. Makes no sense, but here we are. So he decides he's got this genius idea to rearrange not just the workplace, but eventually all of society and he says something and he's really, really upfront about it. In his book on scientific management, he said, in the US in the past, people were first. In the future, the system has to be first. He inverted the relationship between the public and our institutions. And we live in that shadow. You think about it, you take education, parents have no say unless you just get out of it, right? And it's like they don't care. And so he does that. He invented the idea of a manager. So there are going to be people who are smart enough to figure out what to do. Then you just do what you're told as fast as possible. And they would do these. They'd use a stopwatch and measure. Like there's one right way. Like in every task you do, they would measure footsteps and like, where to stand and how to do something. And just robbed everyone of their autonomy and in some sense, their dignity. That way, on the promise of through efficiency, we'll get more stuff. Totally true. He wasn't wrong about that. I'd like to believe, if I were back in. That day at the arsenal in Watertown was one of the main. One of the major sites early on, he's there trying to get these workers to do it his way. And they're like, we've been doing this for a decade. We know things, the nuances about this, didn't want to listen, right? So he's just given this guy an earful. Guy turns around and just punches him in the face. I'm not endorsing violence, except for that time. I feel like that was a good response.
- [38:18]
B
I don't even know.
- [38:19]
A
So it changes the workplace. Then it seeps into the scientific management and this cult of efficiency, which is funny. Efficiency is good, but it's never an ultimate goal. It's crazy. I mean, it's like Hitler was efficient. What you're trying to achieve should matter more than how efficient you are at doing it. So it just seeps into education, where we get the factory bells, we get the rotating classes, we get the sort of one size fits all approaches. It even seeped into. There were books written for housewives at the time. How to save an hour a day by being more efficient. Okay, whatever. So we're all living in that world. It really sits on the faulty assumption of averages being a way you could understand individuals. So back to the dark horse stuff, right? So these guys are all trying to get around the scientific management Taylorized society. And it was remarkable. The key things that kept showing up over and over again, the big four and we can come to these in a minute. They knew what we called their micro motives. They had this unbelievable set of insights about what truly motivated them. It was wild. Like, wild. Like stuff that I'm like, there's no way. Like one guy we studied, the biggest motivator for him was he liked to align physical objects with his hands. And when he didn't get to do that, he was not very good at anything. It's just wild. I'm like, what do you do with that? Well, it turns out back in the day as an engineer, he was working for one of the big telecom companies and he solved a major problem. Anyway, it's crazy stuff, right? The best insight I ever learned from dark horses is they never hoarded their choices. You got to make choices, right? And this was the filter they put on it, which I've used ever since. In your range of choices, everybody has a choice. Some may have more, but you always have a choice. You bias to the thing that is the most aligned for your fulfillment and then this is the secondary thing. Can you live with the worst case scenario if you can't? Like for me, I had two kids I was providing for. Yeah, it might be cool if I could go take a bow poverty and go do something at a startup, but I can't. So you move on to the next one.
- [40:34]
B
It's called a fitness landscape.
- [40:36]
A
That's right. Exactly right. And so anyway, they make these choices. The third one which was so remarkable is this idea of strategies being so fundamental to achievement, which seems obvious, but if you think about it back for me when I was in school, well, there's one way to study, there's one way. This is how smart kids do it. So I try it. It doesn't work. Well, I guess I'm not that smart. And of course they give me tests that tell me exactly how not smart I am. I had this moment on this one of know your strategies that was so profound to me. So back to undergrad. Now I'm the straight A student. I'm the honor student of the year. And I'm going to think about graduate school. But I have to take the gre, which I've never really been good at standardized tests, but I was like, but I'm smart now, right? So I do the test prep for it. You know, I pay for that. I go every Saturday. There's someone who got a perfect score on the GRE so that he's teaching us the class and he keeps telling us how to do these ones. And back in the day, they Changed it now, but there were three sections for it. There was the verbal, the quant, and then they had analytical reasoning. The analytical reasoning was like, okay, Farmer John has four rows and he's got corn and peas and carrots and carrots. Can't be next to peas and da da da. And it's like, which one is planted in row two, column three? I don't know, like. And I tried and tried and he had taught us how to do it, which was very much just in your head.
- [42:07]
B
Yeah.
- [42:08]
A
And I'm just like, I don't get this. So I've been at this for like eight weeks, taking practice exams and all this stuff. I've managed to get my verbal score up in something that's respectable. My cost score up is respectable. Up until that point I had not cracked the 13th percentile on analytical reasoning. Because if you like there's one setup and then there's like five questions off of it. So, right. So I'm like, well, I'm screwed, right? This was silly. What am I doing? Well, it's, it's about a week and a half before I have to take the actual exam and I'm at my parents house studying because we lived in a 400 square foot apartment with two kids and I did something which I, it was just a little bit, right. I could lay down and put my arms in all, and legs in all the different rooms. So I'm sitting there and I got really frustrated doing this practice exam and I took my pencil and I whipped it across the room just out of anger as my dad's walking in it, just boom, right past him. Now he does not take kindly to those kind of acts of aggression. He's like, what's wrong with you? What do you know? I said, I just don't get it. Now luckily he comes walking over and he goes, well, what is it? And he's an engineer by training. And I'm telling him, he goes, oh, this is a degrees of freedom problem. And I'm like, I don't know what this degrees of freedom thing you're talking about is, but like, go on. And he says, well, how you, how you solve that? I'm telling him I'm doing it in my head. And he goes, but Todd, you have terrible working memory. Which is true. Like I have to write everything down. I just, if I told you I was going to do something two hours from now, unless I put it, write it down, it's never happening. So I'm like, what? He goes, well look, that must work.
- [43:49]
B
Very well, with your wife.
- [43:51]
A
Oh, it's fantastic. You know, these kind of things, they're really good. It's a great get out of jail free card for everything. Yeah.
- [43:56]
B
My. Mine was selective underperformance. So essentially, anything I did not want to do, that she asked me to do. The first time I did it, I did it so badly that she never asked me to do it again. She brought me a drill, right? And like, I'm hopeless in that. So I'm looking at this drill and I'm thinking about all the things she's going to want me to drill, and I'm like, this is not going to work out well. Right. It could even lead to divorce. And so what I did was I took the drill down to our basement workroom and I just drilled random holes in the wall. She came down, snatched it away from me and said, I'm never letting you touch this again. I'm like, I'm so sorry, but I really want to.
- [44:53]
A
That's amazing. That's amazing. So my dad's like, look, there's a really easy way to do this. Visually, I'm like, okay. He's like, just. Just graph it out like this. And he's doing it. And like that. That there's one problem. He does it, like, without even thinking about it. I'm like, wait, like, leaves one answer. It's like, very, very easy. And like, that can't be right. So I apply that same strategy to the other ones where I have answers in the back of the book a hundred percent, like, this can't be true. So I go to. On that Saturday to my teacher, and I'm like, hey, my dad said this is another way to do it. And he's looking at. And he goes, I mean, yeah, I guess that works. Okay, hold on. So only a few days later, less than a week later, I go and take the test. I only missed one question on the entire analytical reasoning section. So now I'm this analytical genius, right? And it's like, or maybe, just maybe it's super important to align your strategies to your own individuality. And this is what you saw with these dark horses is like, they need to get good at something. They figure out what motivates them, right? They're good at making choices. And then there's a time when you just gotta get good at something. And what was remarkable is, without fail, they'd be just plugging along, plugging along, and then they'd get stuck and it would look like they're not making progress. But what they're doing is swapping strategies just believing that there is a right strategy. They just gotta cycle through them. Amazing right? Complete unlock for me there. It was funny we studied a whole bunch of these psalms, right? For the Somalia is like for wine which master level is ridiculously hard. It's one standardized test. There are more people who have gone to outer space than pass that exam. But yet you think well obviously it's one test. There must be like one right way. They all had this unique like crazy different ways that they would do this to get to that same kind of outcome. And, and the last one I'll tell you about is which was I think the most controversial but has been pretty profound is called it ignoring the destination. They had goals but they did not talk about five year, ten year plans. What I'm going to do when I grow up. Because it doesn't make any sense. What they have is a choice in front of them. They know who they are, right. They can set a short term goal. But the idea is you're like I'm going to be a lawyer. You're 12, right? You're 12. And with AI it was probably going to be a bad bet anyway. So it's like make your choices as you go. And it was really cool. You know in computer science like this sort of gradient descent the way you can solve a problem that is mathematically intractable is exactly how they approach it. Take a step, make a decision, right? Then make another.
- [47:45]
B
What's so fascinating is we also do early stage venture, right? I don't like regular venture. I'm no good at it. And you know it is kind of just kind of bores me.
- [47:59]
A
I'm. I'm not either. We have so much in common. This is going to.
- [48:01]
B
But I love precede and seed, right? Very different. Yeah, much works better with my individual skills. And one of the things that we always look for is exactly what you're talking about. Agility and the ability to understand that pivoting is a fact of life. That's the way everything works. The most spectacular failures we've seen are the people coming in and going right to the end state, right? Like yes, I am going to have the best SaaS program in this particular thing. And here are all of the steps that I am going to take to achieve it. Pass. Pass.
- [48:46]
A
It's like, you know how many contingencies are built into that that like the environment has a say in what happens. Other people have a say and you have no agility. But these guys are just hyper agile and what Looks a little chaotic, is actually quite deliberate. And so they inverted that idea that if you want to be excellent, you pursue fulfillment this way. Excellence is the byproduct. Whereas we're taught, know your destination, you know, follow that one path. Be better than other people on the same stuff, right? Be the same as everyone else, only better. It's so crazy, it makes no sense. Listen, maybe in a early stages of standardization, whatever, I don't know. But now that's the kiss of death.
- [49:28]
B
And you know what's interesting is it's a kiss of death everywhere. It's not just in academia, in school, in business, it's literally everywhere. And this whole idea of mass marketing, mass everything, thank God that we now have the technology to make it right, right? Like we did very well by coming up with custom portfolio creation. Because you're absolutely right. The person that you think is going to want, you know, everything, standard, all of that, there is no. You're absolutely right. There is no average person. And that just that statement alone is such an unlock. Because if you believe that, and I do, yes, of course, medians are useful, averages are useful. They have a role. But when you don't. As you were talking, I was thinking about a relative of mine who is degreed up the yin yang. And he's got an MD, a PhD, an MBA. And what he ended up doing was helping pharmaceutical companies doing exactly what you were describing, they would spend lots of money on a test on the old way, right? And it would come back, yeah, it failed. This just doesn't work. And he's like, can I borrow the data? And he borrows the data and he comes back with this works. The efficacious nature of this drug is off the charts with this cohort, middle aged women who are slightly overweight and postmenopausal there it's clocking in at 99% efficacious. And so something that would have been thrown out and all the loss taken is now an incredibly profitable line for the company.
- [51:30]
A
By the way, we've seen this over and over again, right? That because some things do work on average, most things don't. We're holding back innovation. I remember MIT studied an approach to that triple negative breast cancer, which is like hard. And it was like what they found was there were two drugs that individually had no real effect, could not get approval or anything. It turned out together in the right sequence. It was the best medicine you could possibly take for this, for the right.
- [52:01]
B
Hiding in plain sight, right? And that's been one of my Obsessions recently, there is so many things where there's a huge arbitrage available and nobody sees it.
- [52:17]
A
Well, and you're doing it because you're doing this. How you think about AI and how you apply these things, it's like, this is where it's all at now. Like, under the hood of this average standardized society, we've created mounds of data in all these areas where we looked at this and said, this doesn't work and it's there for the taking. But the barrier is not technological. It's not these resources. It's this mindset we keep applying.
- [52:41]
B
Totally agree.
- [52:41]
A
And these dark horses are just like, well, this is society right now. But I'm not going to play that game Right. And I'll tell you, probably the most inspiring story in that whole book is a woman named Susan Rogers. It's worth just telling you her story because she taught me that pursuing fulfillment sometimes means getting out of a hole that you're in. In this case, her story, she starts out in an abusive marriage. She's like, but I don't have a degree, I don't have anything. Like, what am I supposed to do? And she loved music. And she was at a concert with her friends at the LA Forum back in the day, and she was like, I loved it. And she gets home and her husband kind of, you know, ridicules her, smacks around a bit, and she just realized, I'm done. She literally gets up and she leaves. She has nowhere to go. But that's the start of the journey. She knew she loved music. She was like, but I can't sing to save my life and I don't want to be on stage, so what do you do? And she remembered seeing on the back of one album she loved, I think it was a Sonny and Cher album, there was a thing called a sound engineer. And she was like, wait, hold on. That's awesome. I want to do that. Right? Well, she has no high school diploma, no nothing. And she's like, well, how would I begin this journey? Well, most people say that's not the journey. Sorry, that journey's past. You don't get to do that. She finds out that the top school to train these sound engineers is right in la, where she's at, but she can't get in. So she goes and she's like, I'd like to apply for a job as the secretary. That's a job that's open. And, oh, by the way, all I ask is, in my off time, could I just sit in on classes and audit them. I won't say anything. I won't disrupt. They're like, yeah, no one's ever asked for that before. Fine. So she's doing that and she's learning a lot. And then she gets to this point where it's going to be deeply technical and she can't just audit to get this. And they won't let her take classes. And she realizes that the U.S. army, for whatever reason, has literally the gold standard on this. So she reaches out to them and she's like, could you send me all the manuals? And they were like, are you thinking of enrolling? And she, to her credit, goes, well, I'm not. Not thinking of enrolling. Right.
- [55:01]
B
Maybe.
- [55:02]
A
So she studies this. She does all this stuff, and then she's like, okay, well, I don't actually have a degree for this whatever, but I've got this training. So she starts taking small jobs that she can. That no one else wants to do. Well, her dream, and her idol was Prince. And at that time, Prince had decided he was gonna leave la and he set up shop in Minnesota.
- [55:25]
B
Yep. My hometown.
- [55:26]
A
Yeah. And so he's literally built the studio in his basement.
- [55:30]
B
Turns out Paisley Park.
- [55:31]
A
Yes. And a lot of people didn't really want to leave California for Minnesota. For Minnesota.
- [55:37]
B
Note it.
- [55:38]
A
I would. I'll be perfectly honest. But she's like, I'm going. Right? And she gets there, and she gets to know Prince, and she's a sound engineer. She didn't realize there were different kinds of engineers. Right. And Prince didn't really know either. So she just starts talking to him, and so he likes her, and he starts asking her advice on things. Flash forward. She's the sound engineer for Purple Rain.
- [56:04]
B
Amazing.
- [56:05]
A
And it culminates that part of her life. She's back in LA on his final tour in the same place where she started her journey, where she decided, I'm coming back someday. And she's the sound engineer. And they end up having this bonding moment as they're sharing their stories. But here's what's crazy about it. That alone is worthy of having her in the book. That was part one for her. She achieves something that is like, are you kidding me? You're the sound engineer for Purple Rain. She's like, but you know what I'm really interested in is neuroscience and how music affects the brain. I'm going to go to school. She goes to the University of Minnesota. She's like, I'd like to go to school. They're like, yeah, that's not how that works, right? They're like, you didn't even write an application. She literally sat there in the office and hand wrote an application, an essay. They let her in. Here's what's wild. She was in her 40s. Flash forward. She is a professor of neuroscience and music to this day.
- [57:07]
B
Amazing.
- [57:08]
A
So what I love about that story is just, it's like if you understand what motivates you, if you're not afraid to make those choices in reality, what was the worst case scenario when she became a secretary there? She could handle it. So you make that decision, put the work in, and she's achieving things that if she would have tried to speculate what the end goal would have been, forget it. Never, never in a million years.
- [57:34]
B
I have an interesting follow up story about Prince and Purple Rain. So I admire the work of Howard Bloom, who I've recommended to you several times. He's way ahead of his time and very much like the story you're telling. He has done everything right. He was a PR guy for music. He built the biggest company in that. He did a lot of work in science. He has this quest just for knowing. And he was writing about his time as a music promoter and he covers Prince. And what's interesting is how it fits so well into the story you've been telling thus far. When they let Prince make Purple Rain, right? None of the music people and none of the movie people wanted that made nobody. But he was selling so many records that they had to indulge him, right? And so Howard knew that they were going to try to tank his movie. Nobody wanted it to happen again. That, top down, this isn't going to fit our average audience. Everything's wrong about it. This guy's just too wrong. He's not right on screen. Every possible objection you could think of, and Howard is trying to think, how am I going to reverse this? Because they had essentially the buzz about it was all deathly bad, right? And so they were gonna try to release the movie on the qt, essentially. They were gonna do a premiere in San Diego and Los Angeles, I think two theaters. That's.
- [59:29]
A
Wow.
- [59:30]
B
And then they were hoping that they would get the normal response. Nobody would say anything. They would say the public hated it, bury it and be done with it. Howard decides that's not going to happen. This guy is a genius. This movie is a genius movie. So he went against all the people he was ostensibly working for and invited the top critics from the Rolling Stone, from all of the big magazines at the time, without telling the Bosses, they didn't know they were there. They come away blown away by the movie, write incredibly positive things, and that's how Purple Rain actually made it. Wow.
- [60:20]
A
That's incredible. Yes. Isn't that funny? It's like, you know, you think about everybody's like, oh, we know best practices, or, we know the right thing bullshit. Like, this is just. You're not thinking for yourself. You're just following the flow. And it's like nothing brilliant ever gets created that way.
- [60:37]
B
Well, monoculture.
- [60:38]
A
Right.
- [60:39]
B
Any. If you're trying to install a monoculture, you're dead right. Why. Why did the United States make all of these incredible advances when we were industrializing? I was thinking about this as you were talking about our mutual nemesis. The. The idea was, I'm reading a book on. On the. The Gilded Age and some of the tycoons of that period, and I was completely unaware how threatened, particularly the British were by what was happening in the United States. And it's the same argument you're making in Britain. They had been making guns and machines and all that for hundreds of years, and they had fallen into the rut. It isn't done that way here. Meanwhile, over in America, we're just like.
- [61:29]
A
We're just like, got to get by. We got to figure it out.
- [61:32]
B
We got to figure this out. And so, literally, Americans followed the path.
- [61:38]
A
You'Re advocating is exactly right. Right. Have you ever seen there was a little radio show called Engines of Our Ingenuity.
- [61:45]
B
Yes. Yeah.
- [61:46]
A
So great. Right. Telling you stories of like, and I remember similarly, like, invention of the double bited axe, which is. Right. Highly unstable.
- [61:55]
B
Right.
- [61:55]
A
You have to learn a new skill to make it work or you cut your foot off. But, boy, if you learn, you can clear a lot of stuff. Well, it gets invented here because we don't have the baggage of the past of, like, it's not the way it's done. Like, we have a job to do and we don't have all that. The prior assumptions.
- [62:12]
B
And we don't have Taylor yet.
- [62:14]
A
Right. Not yet.
- [62:14]
B
Because, like, literally, what I found so fascinating about this era, it was all pivoting. It was all, well, I have no idea, but I'm going to figure it out.
- [62:26]
A
It's true. Like, hustle. Entrepreneurial culture. Totally. And now entrepreneurs are this segment of the population that we think do specific things, when in reality, Americans have always been entrepreneurs. Totally. Always. Until Taylor robbed us of that. We get this.
- [62:42]
B
Turned us all into robots.
- [62:43]
A
Yes. It's a paternalistic society that we've lived in for About a hundred years. And it's devastating as you shake free of this standardized path and you start to embrace this idea of like, if I can know my own individuality and what motivates me, if I can make choices, pick good strategies, ignore the destination, it is a reliable path. Right. People would have asked me like, well, you're a dark horse. I'm like, yeah, I guess first of all, I thought all dark horses would be people who screwed up like I did and then aren't screw ups. Right. About half of them, it wasn't. They were unbelievably great at one thing.
- [63:17]
B
Yeah.
- [63:17]
A
And then they wake up one day and be like, I'm not happy. And they pivot into things that on paper look like they have nothing to do with each other. But if you get under the hood and you start to know them, you're like, oh, that makes perfect sense. Right? Well, just to say, like, how scary it is to let go of, you know, it's wrong, but the devil, you know, kind of thing. So I'm on. This was in 2018, I'm on media tour for Dark Horse and it's doing well. And I get this text from my youngest son who was in college. Like, when you get home, we need to talk. I was like, uh, oh, who's pregnant? Right. That's my default reaction, like, we can handle this, it's okay. I get home and he's got Dark Horse dog eared marked up like this. And he's like, I think I need to make a change. And my immediate thought was, no, no, no, I meant this for other people's kids. Just finish your diploma, you'll be fine. Right? We'll figure it out. But it's like, no, no. Okay. So we work through, like, turns out he was always good at school, but he loves the practicality of working with his hands. And he's like, as I went through, he's a mechanical engineer, basically. He's like, I've gone through school, I'm getting close to the end. I kept waiting for it to be practical and it just got more abstract. And he was like, oh, I don't even want to go into this field. What am I going to do? So we worked through a series of helping him understand what really motivates him. And the thing I always tell him is, and I tell parents this all the time, how do I know when an older kid is actually pursuing a dark horse path or just lazy? And it's really about taking responsibility. Like, you know, dark horses, they didn't Follow the traditional path, but they never expected someone else to subsidize them. Right. There's a lot I'll do if someone else is paying the bills. Right. So. So we get him on the path. He. It's so great. He ended up finding this perfect fit in a cryogenic startup. They're doing amazing things, but like any good startup, he got to be both the engineer and design the lab.
- [65:26]
B
Cool.
- [65:27]
A
He got to do everything. Yeah, right. And so it's just. And now I'm trying to teach him about equity. Hey, definitely want to have that conversation. But, but, but it was just great, you know, and he's just crushing it and happy. And the thing that dark horse stuff really taught me and I think is sort of relevant to today is, yeah, okay, those are people who just. They're dark horses. They came out of nowhere. But when we think about. In our private opinion research, we kind of talked a little about last time. This isn't just about dark horses. The things that they think about and want are the latent desires of the general population. The only difference is they pulled the trigger on it. They made the choices. The rest of us are just quiet despair of these empty lives and jobs that don't mean anything. And, you know, when we look at the kind of lives people want to live, this desire for authenticity, this desire for meaning and contribution are the highest ranked attributes we find across the board. And they're not getting it. And what I see right now is we're so trained in the Frederick Taylor kind of model of we look to other people for permission or to tell us how to do it. And so they want this, but they don't know how to get it. And I think there are plenty of ways to do that. I think dark horse offers one path, but for me, the real unlock there is you. And I share this deep belief in the future of this country as being positive sum. What makes it possible at a level of meaning and purpose is this idea of subjective value, which is obviously a term that anyone in economics knows, but I think the general public doesn't really appreciate that. They think value is objective. They think if I like this glass of water for a dollar, that's what it's worth. That's what everybody cares, not how it works, not at all. The beauty of our individuality is it's not just our composition, it's in what we value. So we either value different things or we'll value the same thing at different rates. And why that's so critical is it's what makes Mutual benefit possible you and I can transact. We can do things where we both come out believing we're better off because of the transaction.
- [67:34]
B
And you know what's so funny about that? I have been looking for ways to get people to understand that while I was still doing my asset management career. That simple notion. And I'm pretty good at explaining things and being persuasive. It just, it's like it hits this armor that is armoring the brain from people understanding that and like the reason it's so important, it, it makes markets possible.
- [68:04]
A
Yes.
- [68:05]
B
If, if markets don't clear, they're not going to work.
- [68:10]
A
If we all value things the exact same way, there's no someone always has to lose.
- [68:14]
B
Exactly.
- [68:14]
A
And by the way, this is why some of these really terrible ideas like Marxism don't die is it's. But they're rooted in zero sum scarcity. Right?
- [68:24]
B
Negative sum.
- [68:24]
A
Negative sum. It's the exploitation. It's the oppressor and the oppressed and there's no in between. If you're a billionaire, it's because you stole it from somebody. It's like these ideas are colossally dumb, but they're attractive when people don't understand how things really work.
- [68:39]
B
Yeah.
- [68:39]
A
And it's like once you realize that, that your best bet is figure out what you care about. And the more unique, the better.
- [68:49]
B
Yes.
- [68:50]
A
And that's true both from your own fulfillment, but it's also true for the best contribution you're gonna make to society.
- [68:57]
B
What you can do for society. Because look, look inward first.
- [69:00]
A
Yes. Because if you just play the same game, then all I can do is add like marginal value by being faster or better.
- [69:09]
B
Yeah.
- [69:09]
A
Barely. If that, if that. When I can get into my own uniqueness, my contribution becomes qualitatively better.
- [69:16]
B
Totally.
- [69:17]
A
And so again, in a space where we're worried about what happens with AI and it's like, yeah, the bullshit jobs are going to go and some of those white collar bullshit jobs are going to go. Right. The industrial revolution was just artificial muscle. That's it. This is artificial brains.
- [69:33]
B
But the size of the lever is much bigger.
- [69:38]
A
It's order of magnitude. It's like, forget it. Like it is going to be. But this is why for me, so time ends at Harvard, which I will say it was so crazy, like everything I've been writing about and doing. You got to kind of eat your own dog food. It is unbelievably attractive to be able to say you're a professor at Harvard. Maybe not these days, but you know, Back in the day. But, you know, the. Talk about ruining a brand.
- [70:04]
B
One of my favorite Onion headlines was, texan who went to Harvard doesn't know which dimension first.
- [70:16]
A
That's amazing.
- [70:16]
B
And my daughter went to Yale, and she. She was joking about how Yales go out of their way because of the H bomb to not say that they were at Yale. And sometimes it can get really comedic.
- [70:33]
A
Yeah, you're like.
- [70:34]
B
Like, why won't you tell me where you went?
- [70:36]
A
You know, New Haven. You know what? Connecticut. Wait, where? Like, well, New Haven.
- [70:41]
B
You know, it's like, I once played with a guy when I had my company Netfolio, which was basically customization of portfolios. I was just 20 years too early because the tech wasn't really there. And I had an interview with a guy, and we're quants, right? And so this guy, first off, I'd read his cv. I knew he went to Harvard, Right? But I intentionally, just to humor myself, did not ask him where he went to school. Because, like, if you're a quant, you want to see Chicago, you don't. Or mit, you don't want to see Harvard. Right. Case. Case studies. Very interesting. For different purposes. But anyway, so the conversation goes like this. It's 1999. We have one of those phones, you know, the ones with the multiple microphones.
- [71:33]
A
By the way, I sold those for a time at Getner Communication. Little Star phone that has the different microphone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're welcome.
- [71:40]
B
So, so anyway, he starts out the interview, and I'm like, so why do you want to work for Netfolio? And he's, you know, gives me the standard and. And tags on. You know, when I was at school in the Northeast, this is where this passion of mine grew. And I'm like, okay. What he was hoping for, of course, was me to say, oh, where were you at school? I wouldn't do it. And so my colleagues are, like, watching, and they're like.
- [72:06]
A
He's like, did someone say Harvard?
- [72:08]
B
You're so evil. It progressed to more and more specificity, right. When I was in Cambridge. And then I refused, refused, refused. And then finally, he just couldn't take it anymore. And on my next question, he was like, when I was at Harvard, and I didn't miss a beat. I'm like, harvard? Why would you want to be at Quant? Why would you go there?
- [72:36]
A
He was so bad at that. So anyway, when I was at Harvard, on my way out, this is a kind of a good pivoting story. So we had decided we were going to phase out. Time was up, got out. Right. For the pandemic, which was good timing, but we're doing the work earlier and we were starting to build. The foundation would be our new kind of think tank populace, which the sort of wonky kind of academic side of this is we're backgrounds in social paradigms. Right. Like. Cause I think what we're facing as a society right now is not on the margins arguing over things. We are arguing over fundamental assumptions about society right now. We've been here before in world history and up until now I believe we got decent at explaining paradigm shifts after they happen. You know, like Thomas Kuhn kind of stuff. Structure of science, which is. Yes, exactly. And great. Right. But what's often forgotten is at the social level, when these paradigms change, the utter collapse of what came before and the misery until the new thing comes about. So we kind of condense that. We're like went from here to here. It's like, no, it didn't. It got really, really bad for people. We feel like we know what the next paradigm could be, which you and I will share. Like this is that we've proven that you can have abundance materially. Like, I mean, at the end of the day, like, you just take basic classical liberalism applied there, you add Adam Smith division of labor, and you add Ricardo's comparative advantage and you get the ingredients for abundance economically.
- [74:21]
B
Yep.
- [74:21]
A
Amazing.
- [74:22]
B
Well, we throw in rule of law.
- [74:24]
A
Rule of law, property rights, and they flow. And the reality is commitment to individual rights flows off of that totally. Like it's necessary to secure that kind of abundance. It's amazing. They were largely silent about some of these other assumptions with respect to, I'll call it like the psychological side. Right. What motivates me, it's the meaning and purpose side. It wasn't that these early classical liberals were against that. They just one thing at a time, let's take the assumption of dignity and run as far as we can with it.
- [74:57]
B
And maybe when you look at the world in which they existed, they just assumed that they didn't feel they needed to spell it out.
- [75:07]
A
That's right. I think that's exactly right. If you look at those, the early writings, they did just assume it. And I still think, first of all, from a paradigm change, my intellectual hero is Adam Smith. First of all, he was a moral philosopher, as we talked about last time. But I think of this, you write a book, wealth of nations, and you lay out the whole idea. It's like, what if it doesn't have to be zero? Sum. And then it just takes off. And he had written it well enough that people could act on it. William Pitt Jr. The youngest prime minister, reads him and is like, there's something here. And I think about. Think how outrageous that risk feels. The entire history, economically, besides feudalism, was mercantilism, which is. It's zero sum. If you're trading, you're losing.
- [75:59]
B
And beyond idiotic.
- [76:00]
A
Beyond idiotic. Well, we're about dragged back into it. This stuff doesn't ever die.
- [76:07]
B
I know.
- [76:07]
A
It's like, hey, this. This golden goose, let's kill it.
- [76:10]
B
Yeah. I have this thesis that is essentially that it's like, oh, I know, we're talking about socialism and communism, Right. Like, it's like they neuralize everyone, right?
- [76:23]
A
So men in blacks.
- [76:24]
B
Yeah, Men in black. Neural eyes. Because every example that we have where it has been tried historically, leads ultimately to people eating the animals in the zoo because they're so poor.
- [76:37]
A
Best case scenario.
- [76:38]
B
Best case scenario. I had an academic career not unlike yours. I didn't do that badly. But I switched schools a lot and only have a degree. I barely have my BA and that was just to please my mother. But I remember. And this is 1980. Yeah, 1980. So I had transferred to the University of Minnesota from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, which I loved, but I loved my wife now of 43 years more. And so I decided I was going to hang out there so I didn't lose her. I was taking a mandatory class in astronomy. Yeah, astronomy. And so the. The professor comes in and she proceeds to explain how she is going to be teaching us astronomy, but through a Marxist perspective, astronomy. And I'm just in the back like this, right? And so, like, literally, she made the mistake of calling on me. Maybe I was a little too young and aggressive, but I made her kind.
- [77:48]
A
Of look dumb, but she made herself look dumb. You just pointed it out.
- [77:51]
B
But here's the funny thing, and I'll skip the rest of it because I keep doing this. And at the end of maybe the second week, she says, Mr. O', Shaughnessy, stay after, please. I'm like, oh, good. Because I love to fight back then. And so I go down and she looks at me and she goes, look, I hate you, you hate me, but I'm going to make a deal with you. I said, I don't hate you. I think you're a lovely person. I think your ideas are horrible. And she's like, let's make a deal. And I said, what's the deal? And she goes, if you never set foot in this classroom again. I will give you an A. And I said, spoken like a true Marxist.
- [78:38]
A
But I did take it according to that. But this is, it's funny, like the, the, the rise of this kind of. The appeal of the, the socialism and Marxism we see historically, it's always when people are resentful. Yes. And it's resentment. It gets at a neurological level. It's like, because basically we are a social species and we dominate the planet because we cooperate. And you should then have a mechanism to know when you shouldn't cooperate anymore because you're being taken advantage of. And we have private opinion data on this. Levels of resentment in the US are higher than they have ever been. They're higher than during the Great Depression, which is then, look, if I'm getting screwed, then burn the thing down, right? So we've got to be. And it's funny, Adam Smith actually saw this early where he said, with these positive sum economic systems, unfairness is not absolute disadvantage, it's relative deprivation. And so when the pie is growing, there will always be people at any given time who get access to certain things that will take longer before everybody else gets. Yeah, but I can look at that and say, wait a minute, why you and not me? Why?
- [79:50]
B
You know, and the resentment thing, let's be very clear, they have good reason. There are filled with resentment. And I hate this idea. Like, people are such label thinkers, right? Like, why do I believe in free markets? Well, because historically no other system has provided as much material benefit as free markets. Like all of the things that all of the major religions promised free markets delivered on in a couple hundred years. But that does not mean that they are perfect. It does not mean that you should adhere to a zero sum game. Because for markets to work really efficiently, cooperation is a must. You've got to have it. And then you make the transition to it being a positive sum outcome, which is what you and I are working fervently in favor of. Because this, either or everything is not a dichotomy. The world is not 0 or 100. It is not black or white. It is decidingly gray.
- [81:02]
A
You're exactly right. So the work we're doing right now at Populist, the thing takes, we found it is the next big project we have is getting under the hood of the resentment to understand exactly why we think this is unfair, to find the places where we can start making progress. And I, I would argue that we're in this place because as you said, the resentment is real. You know, There might be some illusions around that, but, like, there is a core where people feel like the social contract is not being met. But if you don't know exactly what's going on, like, what can we do? Like, I feel like we people that, that believe in classical liberalism, let things into the system. Crony capitalism, racism, sexism. And at some point, without us being the watcher on the wall, like, it got to the point where now it's like, okay, this guy, he's promised me free everything okay. You know, and it's like, you can't just, like, tell them they're dumb. That's not how that works. Right. We've got to have better, better solutions. So was one of the things that we got excited about, my co founder, and I was like, we want to be in the world doing something. So we started this think tank called Populous. I don't know what else to call it. Right. It turns out you can raise more money if you call it a think tank. But, you know, it's funny how the category matters quite a bit.
- [82:20]
B
Oh, it's our love of labels.
- [82:23]
A
It's the love of labels. And so it's like pretty much every other think tank. We really don't like politics, and we're not very good at policy because we also believe those are all downstream from culture. Exactly. And culture is downstream from mindset.
- [82:35]
B
Yeah, everything is downstream of culture, ultimately. But your correction is the right correction. It's completely downstream of mindset, and that's where you want.
- [82:48]
A
And so especially when you're thinking about paradigm shifts. So we're. We're arrogant enough to believe we've developed the most comprehensive model of how social paradigms change so you can actually do something about it. Because it would be such a shame for this American experiment to end, like, essentially end because of its success. Schumpeter actually said this in socialism.
- [83:07]
B
Creative destruction.
- [83:08]
A
Yeah. He said, look, capitalism and free markets are going to lose if they don't really tend to the unfairness. I think it's because they won't lose because they fail. They'll lose because they're so, so good at what they do. Right. And it's like, there'll be no one left to defend it. Everyone's. Because no system is perfect, as you said. Right. Just like, you know, it's funny when people say, like, yeah, inequality, I'm like, yeah, no, it's not that we like inequality. It's just under the right circumstances, it is a downside that we're willing to bear for all the benefits that are actually created. That's fine. It doesn't mean we worship it.
- [83:43]
B
Right?
- [83:43]
A
Like we don't want it to happen.
- [83:45]
B
But the challenge there, of course is that historically all of the evidence shows that either a communist system or a socialist system don't work. Right. There are no nirvanas that are socialist. None. And yet the reason they are still around is the point you're making people like I always get amused by the people. I'm going to debate that Marxist and I'm going to explain to him or her why she or he is wrong. It's a religion. It has very little to do with argument or debate or any of those things. But the in that those of us who are in favor of free markets, nuanced and all allow is all of those attacks, they're. What they are doing is they are pushing the right button. Yes, of course inequality exists. Inequality is not inherently good. But some of it is going to be necessary because you can't equalize everyone's outcome.
- [84:56]
A
And we shouldn't. This is the thing is exactly when you think about core fairness, historically Americans have seen it as equal treatment, right? Very classical liberal. And then this kind of moving into more of a like equal opportunity space. Right. It's not just that I'm treated equally for the law. It's like I believe I have a fair shot at earning my own success. That's been the core of the American dream. That's been our view of success. We're seeing in the data already. Marxism has a core belief system of equal outcomes as being the definition of fair. The logic doesn't really matter because you're arguing over assumptions which makes it more like a religion. Right?
- [85:30]
B
Totally.
- [85:31]
A
No amount of data. If you're like, I'm Catholic, I'm Buddhist, or like, well let me tell you all the ways you're wrong. That's not how that works. Right. Religious conversion isn't a fact based enterprise.
- [85:41]
B
Not at all.
- [85:42]
A
It's that feeling it's connected to something I care about or a pain point you're solving. And so we have to be more sympathetic to the experience people are having. And we have to show them that our paradigm made truly good actually solves those felt pain points better than anything else.
- [86:02]
B
So walk us through a paradigm shift that you see coming.
- [86:06]
A
So we are barely scratching the surface of what free societies can deliver. And we did the materialism like nobody else. That's great, but materialism was never the end goal. It's to what end? And this gets us in that space of what I would See as a very humanistic view, which is the purpose, the meaning. Like Viktor Frankl's correction to everybody else has said, this is about will to power. Says will to meaning. Yeah, you need meaning and purpose in your life.
- [86:35]
B
One of my foundational books that I reread every other year for sure, Frankel.
- [86:42]
A
It'S me too, because it's always such a reminder of what he did. Which is the best takeaway from that book. I've probably read it 12 times. It's just, it is that meaning isn't this big macro thing. It's in the everyday small things. It's in, you know, he talked about it can be in sacrifice, but beyond that, it's, you know, being part of something bigger than yourself and losing yourself in service of another human being. And when you start realizing it, like so much becomes. Life becomes richer and fuller in ways. That is what we meant by the American dream. It's what we meant by this promise we made. And people just see us accumulating stuff. They want the meaning and purpose. We know that from our private opinion research. They don't know how to get it. And so you fall back on that. Well, but then why do you have more stuff than I do? But you don't want the stuff, but it doesn't matter. And so we think that it's very, very simple with a few tweaks to the assumptions of classical liberalism, to get to a society of not just material abundance, but psychological and spiritual abundance as well. And for us, those core. So now it'll kind of make sense why we've written the books we've written and things like that. If you don't have a deep belief in human individuality, not as selfishness but as distinctiveness, then it doesn't work. Right. If you don't understand subjective value and that like you converting your individuality into what do you want to be, how do you want to contribute, that gives you fulfillment and again, contribution. You make a difference, then we're cooked. Right. And paternalism only ever has a leg to stand on. If value is objective. If my Senator Elizabeth Warren can be like, I have a plan for your life, I'm like, I don't want you to have a plan for my life. I don't. I want you to help me with my plan for my life. Once you realize, wait a minute, we can all pursue our things we care about, we can support one another. We're not. Yes. Even when there will be zero sum games we play sometimes, right. Like, I just went to the Patriots Atlanta Falcons game, which we, you know, another podcast, we'll talk about football. Yeah, that game is a zero sum game. That one game. Yes. But the NFL is not a zero sum game. That pie grows. And every single person involved in that is way better off. And so understanding how that works is really important. The other core assumption that we're betting on is human dignity, which sounds obvious, but that was the backbone of classical liberalism. That leads to human rights. It leads to all the things we care about in our data. We've seen it being eroded. It's pretty shocking because dignity from a Kantian perspective is that unearned. Because you're a human being, you're never a means to someone else's end. Taylor would have disagreed. And you have that moral equality. It doesn't mean we're equal in capabilities or anything like that, but it is the core foundation for all things that matter.
- [89:38]
B
You know what's really interesting? One of my earliest guests on the podcast was an author named Chris Arnady, and he wrote a book. I think the title is Dignity and what he did. He gave up his very lucrative career on Wall Street. He's a photographer and he loves to walk. And, and what he would do is walk around the poorest neighbors. First neighborhoods, first of New York, but then state, countrywide, and then worldwide. And the one thing he found was when he interviewed these people who were really down on their luck, et cetera, and he would try to throw up everything they should do. Well, why don't you go and get food stamps? Why don't you go and do this? And the reason that was common among them all is I have dignity. And they treat me like I'm a slave. If I don't do it their way, I don't get anything. They're all power mad. They just want to run my life and I'd rather starve.
- [90:47]
A
I had. This strikes a chord with me because back in the day, in the 10 minimum wage jobs I had, we ended up on welfare. We literally were stealing toilet paper from rest stops. This is how bad it got. I didn't want to go on welfare for all the reasons you're talking about. My dad pulled me aside and he said, listen, it depends on how you think about it going in, right? You are owed nothing. Nobody owes you anything. But if you see this as a government program, it's easy to start. That dissonance that kicks in, well, I'm owed this. Somebody owes me. He said, you can't get there. He's like, you have to see this as Your neighbors are willing to give up a little portion of their hard earned money so that they can invest in you so you can have another shot. If you see it as an investment, you have a responsibility to make that investment pay off. Never forgot that. And it leads you to a certain place. But I had this experience where you go and buy food with food stamps. And it was back in the day, it was like, it wasn't as, here's a card that you can secretly put in, like it's a debit card. No, this was like, there you go. Yeah, it was always humiliating. And I'll never forget this. Like we were at a Walmart in the evening, the Walmart superstores kind of things. And my youngest son loved chunky peanut butter. Okay, so I'm getting stuff. We're really trying to be responsible. We're not buying beer or whatever, you know, whatever candy. And I'm on that. You know, you just always want to kind of get in and get out and hope no one notices. There's a long line behind me, woman's scanning stuff and all of a sudden goes beep, beep. And she looks at it, she goes, sir, you can't buy chunky peanut butter on food stamps. And I was just like, you just.
- [92:33]
B
See, it's designed, the system is designed to humiliate you.
- [92:39]
A
And like I just was like, we have enough to ensure people, when people are in deficiency, they are zero sum, they have to be. So it's in our best interest not to allow people to be in a state of deficiency. And then there's a way you can do it that either enables more choice and dignity or robs that from them in the name of control. And it's funny, it's like they're like, well, if we did more trust based stuff, well, maybe some single mom would make a bad decision. Like, yeah, that'll happen. As opposed to what's going on right now. We spend. The overhead percentage on food stamps is ridiculous. It's close to like 30%.
- [93:15]
B
And it's because the people running that system want it to be that way, because they want power over those.
- [93:24]
A
And think how funny this is. We're willing to spend billions of dollars a year to pay six figure bureaucrats. It's insane to make sure that a single mom doesn't buy the wrong thing for her kids.
- [93:36]
B
Whereas if we took that money and put it on a credit card and sent it to everyone who needed it, not only would we save money literally 30%, but we would also allow that single mom or you and when you were in those circumstances, to have. To not be robbed of the dignity that they have.
- [93:59]
A
And I think that we miss that. Right. The aspect of dignity and giving people choice, it's huge. And there's a couple of things. Number one, in a free market, I want their preferences factored in.
- [94:08]
B
Yeah.
- [94:09]
A
They might be down on the look now, that won't always be true. Markets work best with those kind of clean signals back and forth. And if it's only like. Well, it's funny, you remember in the Great Depression, there was in Utah, had the only bank that hadn't foreclosed on anybody. FDR is like, what is going on here? And you can't get Republicans to kind of go out, like a lot of stuff they shouldn't have gone along with. That's fine. They have this whole thing of like, okay, we're going to foreclose. We're going to do, you know, like, you didn't pay your. Your bills. Right. So he's like, can you come talk to other Republicans? Like, we need help. So he testifies. Congress is like, okay, this is amazing. And there must be something about Utah. What's going on? Why have you not foreclosed? Is it just not hitting you? And he said no. And one, one senator asked him, well, wait, hold on. So do you have people that can't pay their bills? He's like, yeah, I have farmers that couldn't make. What do you do? He's like, I gave him another loan. He said, look, for capitalism to work, for free markets to work, you need a middle class with expendable income. It just doesn't work. The machine gets gummed up when. When you've got haves and have nots.
- [95:13]
B
Yep.
- [95:13]
A
Right.
- [95:13]
B
And so it's like the Jimmy Stewart character and It's a Wonderful Life.
- [95:17]
A
Yeah, right. It's exactly right.
- [95:18]
B
The only institution that old man Potter couldn't take over was the savings and loan. Because that's the way not only Jimmy Stewart's father, but Jimmy Stewart himself ran it. And they never had to close down because everyone was there and there. And he's literally talking to them as individual. I mean, it's your thesis. It's like, how much do you really need? And everyone was different. Yep, everyone. Well, I can get by on $12. And you know. And they didn't close. Everyone else did.
- [95:53]
A
That's right. It's funny, when we started Populous, we had same ideas. We want to get into the game of paradigms. First of all, you can't tell people that because they're like, what are you doing? You got to earn some credibility. For a while, it was like we finally started whispering to donors like, this is what we're actually about. Oh, okay. By going after these things, okay, individuality, dignity, not as just moral worth, but self determination, which is what Kant actually meant, we have the cognitive ability to envision a future of our own and the ability to order our own behavior in order to accomplish it.
- [96:24]
B
You've just outlined humanism.
- [96:26]
A
Exactly right.
- [96:27]
B
Like one of the greatest paintings unfortunately looted by the Nazis was Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man. And it got this reputation that it was almost this schnelling point or lighthouse because for the first time, people looking at it would say, hey, maybe I can figure things out on my own. Maybe I really don't need the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or God, that guy who's the King to tell me what I need to do. Maybe, just maybe, I can come up with these ideas that are better than the ones they're telling me.
- [97:08]
A
That's exactly right. And it's like as Americans, that's our heritage, right? Like, you know, you think about even the founding of the country, you know, this idea that we would share power with other white land owning males is as radically inclusive at the time as it is radically exclusive. Today. It's only viewed radically as exclusive because of its success.
- [97:31]
B
Well, and you know, Cicero said, I think it was Cicero said that to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.
- [97:41]
A
Karl Popper said, you cannot criticize an idea if you don't understand the problem they were trying to solve at the time. You remove from that and you think this is silly. It's very easy to turn that into a caricature. But it's like our history is one of progress, of expanding the we of we the people. And something happened recently where it's. I do think we've been so used to the top down paternalism that we've lost that muscle that can do spirit. It's why for me, we're a part of hundreds of organizations around the 250th trying to understand American identity. And it's like, we've got to get back to that. I matter. I can solve problems. We can solve problems together from the bottom up. We don't need. Not everything is a federal issue. Not everything requires a politician to save us. They rarely do. And we can get back to that attitude. And so funny at populist. So we're all about getting to this positive Sum society that blends classical liberalism and humanism. We've got these core assumptions of dignity as self determination, which means I want choice. Rich environments. Choice is not just this far right weird. No, it matters to human beings that they're able to make their own decisions. Economists have a thing called procedural utility, which. They're terrible at naming things.
- [98:57]
B
They're awful. Awful.
- [98:59]
A
Which is good for us. We can just rebrand and take credit for it. But it's just people will take a worse outcome if they're the one that gets to make the decision consistently.
- [99:08]
B
It is absolutely.
- [99:09]
A
There is value in the choice itself. And for me that means I want choice not reserved for people who have. I want it for everybody. Right. And so for us it's about how we start to socialize. You know, the dignity as self determination. What's scary in our data is there it splits now in private, a third of people still believe everyone has dignity. That's just it, full stop. A third don't believe that people are born with inherent dignity anymore. And a third believe you are. But you can lose it if you have the right. The wrong views. Wow, that's terrifying to me.
- [99:44]
B
That is terrifying.
- [99:45]
A
This is literally the foundational. It's the AWS east one. The thing that's sitting underneath the whole system. And you let that slide and the whole thing comes down.
- [99:58]
B
I also sense that we are in the beginning innings of a fight about this. And I kind of view it through Star wars, right? So the old way is Darth Vader and the Death Star Star. That's the classic Taylorism. That's the classic top down. We know better than you what's right for you. It's very School Marmish. I hate people like that. Right?
- [100:31]
A
And.
- [100:31]
B
But people, you know, and I hate this word, but everyone uses it. Oh well, the elites this and the elites that. What the fuck are you talking about? Right. But if there are those two groups, like there's that one group that. And AI has been one of the things that I think set this off because a lot of people who are very elite in their status, they're the most terrified by AI. ChatGPT said it was going to henceforth no longer give legal or health advice. What is everyone using ChatGPT for? For the most part, legal and health advice advice. And I'm sure that they will reverse that because their subscriptions will plumage and. Or one of the other big ones.
- [101:19]
A
They're just covering their ass.
- [101:20]
B
That's all they're doing. Let's put it this way. You and I are on the side of the Rebel alliance. But you can't just say we're on the side of the Rebel Alliance. You actually have to do things for people to say, oh, wow, like that is a much better way.
- [101:38]
A
Yep. So you basically have to look, at the end of the day, there's like three things that have to happen. One is we have to instill mindset, like a private belief. I have to believe something, but from a cultural perspective, I have to believe that we believe it. Yes. Because that's what drives the norms and the expectations. Yes. And then you, at the end of the day, you need the exemplars. You have to show them that it works a better way. Right. It doesn't have to be perfect yet, it just has to be possible. So we work across that full spectrum. Socializing, core ideas, the dignity, the individuality. The third one, which I think is going to be the biggest barrier if we don't get over it, is the way we think about human potential. We see it as a bell curve, we see it as a one dimensional thing. We think it's, you know, the talented tenth. We think, you know, whatever, and we think we can use these tests to divine worth. It's so nonsensical. We're going to look back on this, you know, we look back and go, why did you let people's blood put leeches on them? It's like, why did you give them this stupid test that was literally developed? IQ tests were developed. The guy that invented them was like, they're just cultural artifacts that are meant to know whether we put kids in special ed to help them or not. That was it. And the eugenicists in the US were like, we have a test that can say who's better inherently than others.
- [102:49]
B
The eugenicists were everywhere. It wasn't just the U.S. no today.
- [102:54]
A
But of course Hitler did cite the U.S. as a good example, but.
- [102:57]
B
Yeah, well, he also. Maybe the one decent thing he did was put that to death. Right. The whole Eugenetics movement was just huge.
- [103:09]
A
I mean, the New York Times ran it front page saying it was this great new science that would. Absolutely.
- [103:15]
B
And your alma mater, Harvard had one of the biggest departments. In fact, all of the Ivies competed with each other to see who could have a better Eugenetics department.
- [103:27]
A
And the only time biology becomes deterministic is when you artificially constrain the environment.
- [103:31]
B
Yes.
- [103:32]
A
When you let that be dynamic too. There's no deterministic biology. And so what's funny is Frederick Taylor standardizes our environment, which Then does make variation in biology predictive.
- [103:43]
B
Yep.
- [103:44]
A
And then we're like, look how smart we are. You're like, come on guys. And so it's not that there aren't tests that we can't use, but like here's the thing. I would tell you that over the last 60 to 70 years, the research on human potential comes to two conclusions. One, every single human being has something meaningful to contribute. Okay? That's the first thing. So this idea that. Now look, not everyone can be excellent at everything, that's not how that works. Our individuality guarantees it. Right. There's trade offs, but this is the key that we have to get over. The second piece is you cannot know in advance what any one person's capable of. You can't, you can pretend, right? The biggest study on IQ ever was a 40 year longitudinal study that turned out, oh, look how good we'll predict society. You predicted middle management. That was it that you predicted people who could fit into this one size fits all system. Follow the rules. And you like that study literally missed every genius in those 40 years, including the top statistician of the time whose methods they were using to analyze their data.
- [104:47]
B
I love it.
- [104:48]
A
And the irony was lost on them.
- [104:50]
B
And you know, it's also though part of that system, right? Because like g. General intelligence, if you look at it as a single factor, it does correlate very highly with a lot of outcomes, both positive and negative.
- [105:05]
A
On average.
- [105:06]
B
On average. Which is the missing piece. This is why I was have been so intrigued by you and your work.
- [105:14]
A
Glycemic index, nutrition. On average.
- [105:16]
B
On average. Right. And there ain't no average.
- [105:20]
A
And the thing is you don't care about that. Just like if someone tells me, like here's how I always tell people, like you're, you're beyond average already. God forbid you get cancer. And I give you two choices. Gold standard average based treatment or molecular fingerprinting and precision medicine to treat it.
- [105:36]
B
You know which one I'm picking?
- [105:37]
A
Everybody, everybody chooses it. Because you know, deep down there's something, something distinctive about you that matters. And it turns out that's true. When you apply that to human potential, we've got this artificially constrained cap, like it's just right here for the taking. People can contribute so much more. And again, it doesn't mean everybody's Einstein, but it doesn't mean everybody can be excellent at something. And our job becomes, our institutions change. Say education is no longer a selection institution anymore. It has to be about cultivation. It's a very different thing. So bringing these mindsets to bear. And then we put it in this era right now where, I mean, and you're the expert on this, but as we talked about, like, AI makes all these stuff that came before, like child's play in terms of what it's about to do to society. Oh, yeah. And you and I talked about this earlier, but, you know, for me, I think about historically when major technologies have come into society and transform them. You know, we always think about the upside, and then we get smacked with the downside. And it usually requires the acquisition of a new mindset or skill to make the trade off worth it. So, for example, when we went from oral tradition to the written word, Right. Socrates, if you believe Plato, was like, this is going to be awful.
- [106:52]
B
Yeah.
- [106:52]
A
Memory, worst thing ever. Memory is going to get destroyed. Now, if by memory you mean reciting Homer, yeah, this is definitely true. Yes. Right. But we all kind of thought, well, yeah, look, hold on. There's something too, if you could write all the knowledge down, right?
- [107:05]
B
So first of all, it's time binding your knowledge so that it goes forward into the future, and that's how it accumulates.
- [107:13]
A
Exactly. And you know what's funny is I think a lot of people forget that off of that technology, we invented a whole new type of logic. Aristotle was the first sort of written word native. And it's not until you can write all these things down and start to compare.
- [107:27]
B
Yep.
- [107:27]
A
That you can come up with a whole new way of thinking that we take for granted as sort of Western logic. Totally agree. But here's the thing. For the general public, it was a really terrible trade early because oral tradition, I just had to be around. I have ears. I can hear. We can pass on knowledge. For the written word to be generally valuable, you had to learn an incredibly artificial skill called literacy that literally, you have to be taught. You can't learn it. It's not like language. You just pick it up.
- [107:55]
B
Right.
- [107:56]
A
And that skill was hoarded, arguably till the Reformation. Yep. An act of God to democratize access. And then you get the full benefit.
- [108:04]
B
The part that is so nefarious, it was held intentionally.
- [108:09]
A
Intentionally by these people.
- [108:12]
B
The priesthood never wants the laity to understand the incantations.
- [108:17]
A
What a great gig to be like, listen, you. To talk to God, you got to go through me.
- [108:20]
B
Got to go through me.
- [108:21]
A
Amazing.
- [108:22]
B
Classic middleman.
- [108:23]
A
Give me the ultimate gatekeeper.
- [108:26]
B
Exactly.
- [108:27]
A
It's as though power corrupts.
- [108:28]
B
It's kind of funny. And absolute power must corrupt absolutely.
- [108:32]
A
So when we think about the time we're in right now is all the news is about the technology itself with AI. But history would tell us that the way you get the upside and mitigate the downside is realizing it's actually never just about the technology. It's always about our values. And if we're not clear about our values, we're in trouble. And my best example. I told you I had to find a place to tell this story. And I'll probably butcher it because it's been 10 years since I wanted to tell it. The mechanical clock, arguably one of the most important technologies. Like everything, it's the escapement mechanism that allows for precise keeping of time.
- [109:09]
B
Exactly.
- [109:10]
A
Seconds now down to milliseconds, hundreds of milliseconds. Literally nothing about modern society. Seconds. Didn't know that. There we go. I learned something today. Literally nothing about modern society works without it. Pacemakers going to outer space, your basic phone, your cell phone, nothing. Yeah. Okay. So it's pretty interesting to me, the power of that precision in time, that in Europe, we don't even know who invented it. We just know it kind of came onto the scene late 13th century, early 14th century. We don't even. We don't know the person because it didn't matter. And what's wild to me is it actually emerges in Europe roughly about the same time as the hourglass. Talk about a rudimentary technology. Literally an hour, right? Roughly.
- [109:56]
B
This is very easy to use.
- [109:58]
A
Yes.
- [109:58]
B
But may I show you this over here? And they're all like, no, I don't want to see that.
- [110:02]
A
I want to see that. I'm like, wait, so you're faced. This society in Europe is faced with these two different. Of technologies around time. One obviously has massive upside. The other is really just repeating what you had before. You can just whatever. And you think, well, obviously you're going to choose this. And they didn't. The hourglass becomes the dominant way of keeping time within 30 years. And the mechanical clock is relegated to chiming hours on clock on towers. Right. And it takes like almost 200 years. It's amazing. Of hourglass. And the reason being is that there was no conception of precise time. Time meant hours, the canonical hours.
- [110:45]
B
Yep.
- [110:46]
A
And so that's why we still have the legacy in our language where we say half past the hour. A quarter past. Approximate was good enough.
- [110:53]
B
Yeah.
- [110:54]
A
And so into that world where it meant hours and time was kind of fuzzy. Actually, the hourglass is pretty useful. I can keep that time until I value precision. I cannot even see the latent potential in that Technology. It took scientists trying to solve problems where the hourglass really doesn't work very well to start to make improvements on the escapement mechanism, the pendulum, things like that. You solve the longitudinal problem, you solve a bunch of other things. Galileo. With falling objects. So suddenly it becomes quite valuable. That spreads into industry and then is a fundamental part of the first industrial revolution. But it took hundreds of years and you had it right there. So I think about as someone who's not an expert in AI like you, but I apply history.
- [111:39]
B
I'm not an expert.
- [111:40]
A
Well, in the land of the blind, yeah.
- [111:41]
B
Okay. Yeah, I'm definitely a one eye. And the one eye is not seeing all that.
- [111:46]
A
Listen, I'm betting on your expertise here. I believe in you, but it's like, look, you think it's about the technology, but it is about what we value. And I think the bifurcation point is this technology will either advance human freedom and flourishing by actually anchoring in our fundamental principles as Americans that we've kind of lost, and it can lead to the great empowerment.
- [112:16]
B
I love that phrase because that's what it is. AI is the biggest lever. Archimedes would be beside himself because what it is, is. And it also fits your idea, Todd. You can use it completely differently than I use it. We're both successful because it is empowering our natural strengths, what we're good at, et cetera. And it's giving us a lever that we've never seen the light.
- [112:44]
A
I mean, it really is Steve Jobs bicycle for the mind. Oh, yeah, right.
- [112:48]
B
No, it's a rocket ship for the mind.
- [112:50]
A
It's just. And. Or if we carry over these old. Yep, Panopticism. You carry over the old failed assumptions of Frederick Taylor and the industrialized society. We treat people as interchangeable parts. Averages are fine. And paternalism. The smart people need to decide what the goals are and how we do it. And AI will cement that because it is the new operating system for our society. Totally. And so there's a moment here where we have a choice. And. And you don't need to know anything about AI, but you need to. We need to be speaking up about what we value and where we want to go as a people.
- [113:24]
B
Could not agree more. And one of the reasons why I am so active in AI and in investing in those types of companies is because I have six grandchildren and I do not want them to grow up with the Panopticon because that's what everyone in power right now really secretly wants.
- [113:44]
A
And you know what's funny is even when these big players now go to Congress and be like, oh, this needs to be regulated, it's very scary. They're saying, put a firewall around me because I've already won and make it impossible for anybody to compete with me. Yeah.
- [113:56]
B
And I'm really just here to capture you and. But everyone's going to die.
- [114:03]
A
The fear mongering is hilarious. Like, you know when, when in Germany, when they first did passenger trains, people got like, crazy vertigo. And the experts were like, nope, we have to ban this. Yeah. Humans were not meant to travel like this. We're like. Or just don't look right out the window. Right. You learned a simple skill of like, just look into the distance. Right. And we're done.
- [114:24]
B
Like, isn't that kind of part of our human os? Because I think of Semmelweis, I'm sure, you know, so he discovered. He was a doctor in Vienna and he was on the women's maternity ward and he was noticing, you know, all the women who are attended by male doctors are dying.
- [114:48]
A
But they chopped it up as like, this is just the risk of giving birth.
- [114:51]
B
That's right.
- [114:52]
A
It was like 45%, like, serious issues. Fatality rates were like, lower than that, but still really high.
- [114:58]
B
And so some of this. Maybe it's that or it could be, I don't know, just spitballing here. But they go from dissecting cadavers without washing instruments and the same instruments working on the woman. I wonder if there might be something to that.
- [115:17]
A
Well, it's funny because when we think about paradigm shifts, the shift from miasma to germ theory is such a great example because it's not just scientific, it affects all of society. And so what's funny is people intuitively think, well, yeah, so they came up with this new idea. It's definitely better. The evidence is there some. Why is everything. And so obviously medicine would adopt it. Nope. In fact, the best predictor of whether you would accept germ theory was how far away from medicine you were. Yep. Because they have all this built in motivated reasoning.
- [115:47]
B
So doctors back and plank or progress happens one funeral at a time.
- [115:55]
A
And so it's like, you don't. What you want is. It was funny how that actually transformed. There's a couple of things. One is because again, we always like to think, well, we knew germ theory, germs theory's promise was, yeah, we'll have better public health, but actually we can eradicate, like, you can vaccinate, we can inoculate you from. That's a huge promise. It was over 35 years from when people believed in germ theory till the first vaccine. So it's not.
- [116:20]
B
That is cultural leg.
- [116:22]
A
That's right. And so how do you transform this is what we bet the farm on is you've got to build the cultural expectation that we believe this to create the expectation on institutions. Medicine was the last to go. You think about. We had a president that died from a bullet wound because they fished around inside him and it was like, he would have survived the bullet but not your dirty instruments. You know what I mean? And you had. It's like so. So it's like we look to, like right now, don't look to the experts in the institutions that are captured by the old status quo because they have too much incentive to protect it. They really do. And in fairness to them, I don't know that I wouldn't feel that way too.
- [117:04]
B
Exactly. And it's like a perfectly horrible problem because if you or I were sitting in their seat, we'd probably be thinking.
- [117:14]
A
And so as the rebel alliance, we have to be smarter. Right. The. The best thing about germ theory that the thing that really drove it in the culture had nothing to do with germs. It was a group called the Rainy Day Club in New York. And it was these women who didn't like the Victorian era dress norms. But you can't break a norm or you look like, quite frankly, like you're a whore. That's really what you get drummed out of polite society. So every time it rained, they'd put on their badges, they'd hike up their skirts and they come out like, we're doing this for you, for germ theory. And they turned these old pearl clutchers into merchants of death, because that's what they were. Right. I mean, you'd have like. Like, was it Teddy Roosevelt's. Like she was a germaphobe but didn't know that she was a miasma phobe at the time. You know, like she literally died from it. Yeah.
- [118:05]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [118:05]
A
And so it was like, wait a minute. People are like, wait, if rich. If they're one. One of the richest women around, can't escape this something. You know, so. But. But you get the. The people who have vested interest in the new paradigm succeeding. Yep. So it's like, I don't care that you're not a true believer in germ theory yet. Exactly. The thing you care about more than anything in the world only works if germ theory is true.
- [118:24]
B
Yep.
- [118:24]
A
And now you're going to create the Social proof that this is something we could believe in.
- [118:28]
B
Yet, of course, you've got to watch out for that too because you know another fucker kid would be Eddie Bernays.
- [118:34]
A
Yes.
- [118:34]
B
Who was the nephew of Freud.
- [118:37]
A
Yeah. Thank you for public relations.
- [118:41]
B
He's like, I don't like this term propaganda.
- [118:44]
A
I think that's such a bad connotation.
- [118:45]
B
Let's rebrand it and call it. Oh, I know.
- [118:48]
A
Public relations. Well, you're right. So the thing is. Is what? The difference in mechanism between manipulation and persuasion is just intent.
- [118:56]
B
Exactly.
- [118:57]
A
So social proof can work, you know, so you just got to be on the side of angels a little bit here and be transparent and honest about what you're trying to accomplish.
- [119:05]
B
That is actually what I have come to conclude is the techniques work, but you have to be brutally transparent and honest that that's what you're doing.
- [119:14]
A
And it turns out when you're using that and you're brutally honest, it's actually more effective. Unlike paternalistic things like nudges.
- [119:22]
B
Right.
- [119:22]
A
Which we get a whole thing on. That drives me nuts. They only work if you hide it from people. Right. The second you explain I'm doing this for your own good, it doesn't work.
- [119:31]
B
Exactly.
- [119:31]
A
That should tell you something. If you're on the side of we have to treat people as idiots and we can't respect their dignity and their ability to make their own choices. Maybe look in the mirror because I promise you, you wouldn't let anyone treat you that way.
- [119:43]
B
Yeah. And what you just said, we should underline. If these people who so think and are so impressed and are so certain of their superiority, of their intellect, of their better, more enlightened way of thinking, could ever, ever try to figure out how would I respond if someone else came and did that to me? They would see that they are doing real damage. Todd, this, as always, has been super fun. And you're going to be able to really influence the world because I'm going to have you on for the super long one.
- [120:27]
A
Yeah. Our filibuster podcast. It's going to be amazing.
- [120:29]
B
I might even, I might even ask you more of these because I'm going to only give you two, like I did last time, but we're going to wave a wand. We're going to make you emperor of the world. You cannot kill anyone, you cannot lecture them, you cannot nudge them. But what you can do is just say two things. That everyone on the planet is going to wake up the next day and think, hey, these are two really good ideas. And you know what? I'm going to act on them just because I want to. What are you going to incept?
- [121:00]
A
So last time I remember I talked about trust because it's really critical. So I'm still going to double down on that. And we talked about the sort of positive sub mindset. I'm going to keep the trust one in place because I just, I cannot stress this enough. Most people are trustworthy and we just have the lowest levels of social trust in the US Ever recorded. Every generation since Frederick Taylor has had lower levels of social trust because our institutions do not trust us. Why wouldn't I conclude there's a reason for that? And the right reason is they want power over us. We interpret it as we must not be trustworthy. We will not get through this paradigm shift that AI is going to drive if we can't get back to trusting one another, not trusting our government. I don't need to trust the government. It needs to be accountable and transparent. That's it. But we do need to trust each other. The other thing I would say as we enter into this paradigm shift, the biggest motivation for your brain is not reward, it's reducing uncertainty because uncertainty kills you and your brain is trying to survive. The problem is we experience uncertainty as fear instead of just this. Like it's just telling you something's changing. There are really easy ways to reduce uncertainty in our relationships. Getting back into community. Right. We don't like right now. The powers that be have abstracted that power so far beyond where it should reside. This is a long run for our future conversation. I think the most important concept that people don't understand is the Catholic idea of subsidiarity, which is the. The smallest unit capable of solving a problem should have the power to solve it. Anything above that is a power grab.
- [122:44]
B
I love that.
- [122:45]
A
And so this idea of remembering.
- [122:47]
B
I, I, I was brought up Catholic, but I missed that one.
- [122:52]
A
Yeah. As an ex Mormon, I guess I have to teach you about your, your.
- [122:57]
B
Well, I'm an ex Catholic.
- [122:58]
A
Yeah, there we go. Ago. But this just, I want you to pay attention to that feeling of uncertainty. It feels like the wheels fell off of society. It feels like. And when we get afraid, we become zero sum. We look for scapegoats that always ends in violence. We have to resist that. We have to remember that people are far more like us than we realize. We've talked about this last episode in our private opinion, people are trustworthy and our country succeeded because we bet on each other from the bottom up. If we reclaim that man. The next century is ours for the taking. And if we don't, we have no one else to blame.
- [123:35]
B
Amen to both of those. Todd, thank you so much for being with me.
- [123:38]
A
Thank. You.