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Welcome back. It's been a while, but sometimes that's how these things go. I decided that nobody needs to hear from me. Once a week, maybe once every month or two, when I had something useful to say was a better cadence. So that's why it's been a while. But we're back. One big idea that I've always believed is that if you have a good idea, a powerful idea about how the world works could be for money, investing, politics. Doesn't matter what it is. If it's a big idea, you can probably explain it very quickly. You don't need a book to explain it. A couple of lines, a short little story should do before you're like, okay, that's. That's a good one. I can now look for that in the rest of the world and contextualize my own life around that. And so what I want to do in today's episode is share with you eight or so points that I've been thinking about lately in the last couple of months. And I try to look for these points in other areas of the world because I'm like, oh, I think that's. That's a big one. That explains what's going on in my life, what's going on in the world, how the rest of the world works. So let me share with you a couple of stories are big things that I'm pretty sure about. All right, Number one, I broke my back skiing when I was a teenager. It's a miserable experience, and many decades later, it is still screwed up. I've got a bad back, and I occasionally tweak it. And when it tweaks it, and it could be anything, I could be brushing my teeth, putting on a seat belt. Doesn't matter what it is. I tweak it in a funny way, and it leaves me in absolute agony for three or four days. If you've had a back injury, you know what I'm talking about, it is excruciating. And when I'm in these moments, when I'm in a lot of pain, something that I've noticed. I'm not proud of this. It's just. The truth is that I become irritable and short tempered and impatient. That's not who I want to think I normally am, but when I'm in pain, it's obvious I don't have a lot of patience or tolerance for people who are annoying me. I tried hard not to be, but pain can really override the best of intentions. And the important lesson that I've tried to learn from this is that now whenever I see somebody else being a jerk, whatever it might be, they're being rude to a waiter, they're impatient, waiting in line, whatever it is, my knee jerk reaction is to say, what an asshole. Look at that person being a jerk. My second reaction is to say, maybe his back hurts. Of course that's not an excuse for bad behavior, but it's a reminder that all behavior makes sense. With enough information, you can always see other people's actions, their external actions, but rarely, if ever, do you understand what's going on inside their head that is justifying, maybe pushing those actions that they're taking. Here's a related point, number two. Most harm that is done to others is unintentional. I think the vast majority of people are good and well meaning, well intentioned. But in a competitive and stressful world, it is easy to ignore how your actions affect other people. Roy Baum Meister writes in his book Evil. He writes, evil usually enters the world unrecognized by the people who open the door and let it in. Most people who perpetuate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim. Now, I think one consequence of this is that it's easy to underestimate bad things happening in the world. Because if I ask myself how many people that I know or just in the world actively want to do harm, wake up every morning choosing violence, as they say. I would say very few. It's not zero, of course, but very few. But if I ask myself how many people in the world can do mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their actions are either not harmful or that the harm is justified, I would answer almost everybody. All right, number three, an iron rule of math is that 50% of the population has to be below average, has to be below the median. That's true for income, intelligence, health, wealth, everything. Half the population has to be below average. And that is a brutal reality in a world where social media stuffs the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people in your face. Now look, as a society you can raise the quality of life for those who are below average or set a floor on how low they can go. But when a majority of people expect a life that is actually a top 5% outcome, the result is guaranteed mass disappointment. All right, next one. Right now, I think the majority of societal problems in the United States and in many areas of the world are all downstream of housing affordability. The median age of a first time home buyer went from 29 in 1981 to 40 today. And the shock that causes is so much deeper than just housing. Because when young people are shut out of the life defining step of owning their own place, having their own place, they are less likely to get married, they're less likely to have kids, they have worse mental health. And here's my theory, they are more likely to have extreme political views because when you don't feel financially invested in your community, you're less likely to care about the consequences of bad policy. Every economic issue is complicated. You can't just distill it down to something easy. But this one seems pretty straightforward. We should build more homes, millions of them, as fast as we can. It is the biggest opportunity to make the biggest positive impact on society. All right, next one. I heard someone say recently that the reason so many people are skeptical that AI will improve society, or in fact they're terrified that it will do the opposite, is because it's not clear at all that the Internet and phones made people's lives better. That's a subjective point, but it got me thinking. Imagine if you asked people 25 years after this list of inventions that I'm about to say were invented whether their life was better or worse because of their existence. Electricity, radio, the airplane refrigeration, air conditioning, antibiotics. If you ask people 25 years after those things were invented, is life better or worse because of them? I think nearly everybody would say better. It would not even be a question whether life was better or worse because of air conditioning. Right. The Internet and phones though is is kind of unique in the history of technology because of course there's a list of things that they improved communication and access to information. But there's another very long list of things that got worse because of them. For almost everybody. Political polarization, the dopamine addiction that we many people have to social media, less in person interaction, lower attention spans, the spread of misinformation. Of course there are many examples throughout history of a technology that is so universal with so many obvious downsides relative to what existed before it. But the wounds are so fresh from that and ongoing that it's not surprising that many people today look at AI with the same sense of fear and dread. All right, next one. This is more a hope than a prediction. But I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years, we look back at this era of political nastiness as a generational bottom that we grew out of. There's a long history of Americans cycling through how they feel about government and how politicians treat each other. The 1930s, during the Great Depression were unbelievably vicious. There was in the 1930s this well organized plot, it's called the business plot, to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and replace him with a Marine general named Smedley Butler, who had effectively become dictator. The Great Depression made Americans lose so much faith in government that the prevailing view was basically, hey, might as well give something else a shot. An era of a lot of extreme views. And it would have sounded preposterous if somebody told you in the 1930s that by the 1950s, 20 years later, more than 70% of Americans said that they trusted the government to do the right thing almost all the time. But that's what happened. It went from this generational bottom of how people felt about government to the highest levels they'd ever seen. And it would have sounded Preposterous in the 1950s if you told Americans that within 20 years, trust in government would have collapsed amid the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. And again, it would have sounded Preposterous in the 1970s if you told Americans that within 20 years, by the 1990s, faith in government would have surged amid the 1990s prosperity and balanced budgets. It would have sounded equally absurd in the 1990s if you had told somebody in 1999, let's say that we would be where we are today. Cycles are so hard to predict because it's easier to forecast in straight lines. You just assume that whatever just happened is going to keep happening forever. But that's almost never how it works. The biggest trends in the world are always cyclical. What's almost impossible to detect in real time is that the same forces fueling public opinion plant the seeds of their own demise. When times are good, people get complacent and they stop caring about good governance. And when times are bad, they eventually get fed up and they say, enough of this. And I think, or at least I hope that we're not far from that today. All right, my last one. I have a theory. About nostalgia. Nostalgia happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to over worry. And when you look back, you forget about all the things that you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight, there wasn't as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time. Kind of a hopeful note to leave you on. But that's it for this episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.