We’ve Lost the Plot – Why Partisan Political Media Is Failing Everyone & How To Fix It | David Pakman PT 1

Summary

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Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu:

We’ve Lost the Plot – Why Partisan Political Media Is Failing Everyone & How To Fix It | David Pakman PT 1

Date: March 25, 2025
Guest: David Pakman

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Episode Overview

This episode features Tom Bilyeu in conversation with political commentator David Pakman, delving deep into the fractured state of political media, rampant misinformation, and the seemingly intractable division across political lines. With contentious issues like economic policy, tribalism, critical thinking, and partisan echo chambers at the forefront, Tom and David dissect why we're “lost in the plot” and what it would really take to forge a more constructive, truth-seeking society. The tone is earnest, inquisitive, occasionally combative, but always rooted in a mutual pursuit of clarity rather than outrage.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. The Inherent Biases in Media and Human Perception

• [02:11] David Pakman: Argues it's naïve to imagine we could completely eliminate bias or partisanship due to deep influences like upbringing, class, geography, and personal history:

  “The awareness of these tendencies and a foundation in critical thinking and media literacy is actually the North Star.”

• [03:22] Tom Bilyeu: Agrees that critical thinking is crucial, asserting true objectivity is nearly impossible due to the interpretive nature of human perception.

2. Objective Truth vs. Perception in Politics and Policy

• [03:48-06:28]
  • Tom explains the complexity of “truth” in human affairs—noting that physics is objective, but politics and economics are shaped by perception.
  • David provides an example: Tax policy debates can indeed be informed by historical economic data, even if they're not as absolute as physics (“For the purposes of decision makers, I think it's probably good enough.” – [05:59]).

3. Economic Policy, Asset Inflation, and Wealth Inequality

• [06:28-09:06] Tom Bilyeu:**
  • Argues the real engine creating inequality isn't primarily taxation, but systemic money printing and asset inflation:

  “When you inflate somebody's money, you force them to buy an asset, and it is the only way to keep up with inflation... Otherwise they are going to lose their purchasing power. And it is distressingly fast.”

• [09:06] David Pakman:**
  • Concedes these are all important levers (“there is a debate about what the tax rates should be, and there is…”), but for practical politics, tax policy is still highly relevant.

Notable Quotes:

“The rich get richer by the price of their assets, maintaining with inflation… If you own assets, that price appears to be going up, but it's not. It's actually just keeping up with inflation.” – Tom Bilyeu [15:03]

4. COVID-19, Direct Stimulus, and the Middle Class

• [13:06-14:28] Tom: Claims COVID relief money largely flowed into assets or was gambled, benefiting the already-wealthy.
• [13:52-14:28] David: Pushes back, pointing to data on higher savings rates and reduced consumer debt (“Savings rates for every quintile did go up… consumer debt did go down during COVID.”).

5. The Echo Machine and Partisan Media

• [17:50-22:29]
  • Tom confronts David about his book, suggesting it lays more blame on right-wing media.
  • David Pakman: Unambiguously confirms:

    “The proactive echo machine I think is disproportionately on the right. But... they're just better at a bunch of this stuff… Political shorthands for policy positions are way simpler, pithier and more salient sounding from the right... The right has become way better at building and funding media ecosystems than the left.” ([18:18-20:59])

  • The left, he laments, lacks comparable infrastructure and message discipline.

6. Can the Left Compete—And Should This Be a “Game”?

• [21:46-25:35]
  • David resists the “game” framing, focusing on policy outcomes and a desire for constructive messaging.
  • Shares an anecdote about advising the Biden administration:

    “Starting to engage with us on October 15th for 12 minute interviews where someone is standing just off camera going, pointing to their watch. Doesn't work like that.” ([22:29])

  • Believes the real issue is society's failure to agree on foundational facts, which prevents policy problem-solving.

7. Root Causes of Division: Tribalism, Heuristics, and Human Nature

• [27:36-31:47]
  • Tom raises the idea that tribal thinking is “baked into the architecture of the human mind,” possibly giving Homo sapiens an edge over Neanderthals (Robin Dunbar’s work—Dunbar’s number—cited by David).
  • Pakman: Agrees that group limits and ‘tribal’ thinking are evolutionary, though this has ambiguous moral value in modern politics.

8. Are We Truly Polarized, or Is That an Illusion?

• [31:47-37:25]
  • Tom sees alarming political divergence—“these two teams… are racing away from each other at a rate that, for me, is quite terrifying.”
  • David Pakman: Suggests much polarization is an illusion exacerbated by media's “narcissism of small differences,” arguing people agree on far more than they realize, especially on broad organizing principles (military, police, market economy).

“We agree about the vast majority of this stuff. The difference over which people are, you know, at knives over socialism versus capitalism is like, should health care be a little more the purview of the government?” – David Pakman [35:45]

9. Underlying Values, Core Beliefs, and Debating Economic Systems

• [37:25-43:03]
  • The conversation pivots to how values and “base assumptions” drive passionate disagreement. Tom fears social democracy (as practiced in Europe) stifles American-style innovation, while David emphasizes that his stance is pro-capitalist but for wise regulation to prevent market abuses.

Key Definitions:

[41:32] David Pakman:

“Social democracy is an economic system where capitalism is regulated to ensure that nobody falls below a certain standard of living... appropriately regulating business in such a way that we maximize the innovation and fruits of entrepreneurship while at the same time protect those with less market power…”

10. America vs. Europe: Innovation, Regulation, and Economic Outcomes

• [43:03-51:02]
  • Tom asserts US dominance in innovation and business scale is rooted in lighter regulation; fears European-style systems make entrepreneurship harder.
  • David counters with recent research that per capita, countries like Denmark and Sweden are comparably entrepreneurial, and that for average citizens, tax rates are not as divergent as pundits claim. Additionally, most $10B+ American companies originate in blue (progressive) states mirroring European policies.

11. Finding the Path Forward: The Value of ‘Dynamic Tension’

• [55:03-57:13] Tom:**
  • Proposes forcing “dynamic tension” between left and right: the only way a nation can move forward is through the creative debate between fundamentally different, but necessary worldviews.
  • Emphasizes that no one person, no matter how smart, should be trusted to perfectly see all sides.

“Everybody has [biases]. Most people are either unintentionally or even willfully blind to them. So getting people to understand, oh, yeah, the odds that I see the world perfectly is effectively zero. And so I want dynamic tension with the other side.” – Tom Bilyeu [56:50]

12. Are Political Differences Biological or Environmental?

• [57:13-62:39]
  • Tom postulates left/right polarity is rooted in evolutionary psychology, necessary to solve the “free rider problem.”
  • David, citing modern research, claims the underlying biological basis for political leanings is “tiny, tiny, tiny, almost as to be insignificant,” with urban vs. rural upbringing, class, and parental beliefs being far greater predictors.

13. Is “Left/Right” Still Relevant?

• [62:17-65:19]
  • David argues the left/right binary is outdated, advocating a more nuanced, multi-axis view (e.g., social/authoritarian vs. libertarian/quadrants).
  • Modern populist and establishment divides complicate the old paradigms (e.g., the current right’s complicated stances on authoritarianism).

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On the right’s media savvy:

  “The proactive echo machine I think is disproportionately on the right... they're just better at a bunch of this stuff.” – David Pakman [18:18]

• On dynamic tension:

  “I want dynamic tension with the other side. I want people who disagree with me…and then hopefully they go get a whole bunch of more people that are thinking sincerely and then they come up with their own vision of what they believe to be true. Like that to me, is the only way for this to work because I don't trust any one person, no matter how smart they are, to accurately see everything.” – Tom Bilyeu [56:50]

• On the illusion of polarization:

  “I think we're a lot closer than the perception is, and your perspective about these two groups are rushing away as fast as possible. I think that's a deliberately contrived perspective meant to divide people.” – David Pakman [32:02]

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Timestamps for Core Segments

| Timestamp | Topic / Segment | |---------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:00 | Opening Statement: What’s “broken and deranged” about politics? | | 02:11 | Why eliminating bias & partisanship is unrealistic | | 03:48 | Human perception, truth, and policy debates | | 06:28 | Economics: Taxes, money printing, inflation, and asset bubbles | | 13:06 | COVID stimulus fallout and the wealth transfer debate | | 17:50 | Echo chambers and media—right vs. left | | 22:26 | Behind the scenes: Pakman’s White House conversation | | 27:36 | Tribalism, Dunbar’s Number, and the roots of division | | 31:47 | Are Americans really racing apart? | | 35:45 | The myth vs. reality of economic policy debates | | 41:32 | Social democracy defined: Capitalism with protective regulation | | 43:03 | US vs. Europe: Innovation and regulatory models | | 55:03 | “Dynamic tension” as a solution—embracing disagreement | | 57:43 | Biology vs. environment—what predicts left/right politics? | | 62:39 | Moving beyond “left/right” – multi-dimensional political spectrums |

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Concluding Insights

• The episode ends with both host and guest conceding the limitations of their perspectives, united in a desire for more rigorous, honest, and inclusive debate.
• David Pakman advocates for a regulated capitalism that ensures baseline protections, not full socialism; Tom Bilyeu emphasizes innovation and skepticism toward government overreach.
• Both agree the tendency toward tribalism and ideological 'teams' is deeply rooted, but the real enemy is the loss of critical thinking, honest debate, and media literacy.

“We're no longer having productive debates. And honestly, I'll be very curious to see if you agree with this. I'm not saying what I'm saying to convince you that I'm right.… [but so] anybody listening can step into my shoes, view the world through my lens, then step into your shoes, view the world [through yours]…”
— Tom Bilyeu [56:36]

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PREVIEW: What’s Next (in Part 2)

• Deep dive into how political narratives are weaponized
• The rise of AI, deepfakes, and the coming chaos in media and elections
• Why outrage is media’s fuel—and how audiences can fight back

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Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. Right now, politics is an absolute mess. Misinformation is running wild and the media is feeding outrage 247 and nobody can even agree on basic facts. And if you don't understand how the system actually works, who's pulling the strings, how narratives themselves are being shaped, and what's really at stakeholders, you are going to get lost. That's why I brought David Pakman back on the show. David has spent years analyzing the political machine from the inside, breaking down the tactics politicians and the media use to control public opinion. And whether you agree with him or not, he is very good at exposing the strategies that people use to manipulate you. Today we're tackling the real game being played behind the scenes. How propaganda is shaping what you believe, how tribalism is keeping you distracted, and why the biggest threat to democracy might not be what you think.

So if you want to actually understand

what's happening right now and not just react to the headlines, this episode is for you. Without further ado, I bring you David Pacman.

My question becomes why is it broken and deranged and what can we do to fix it?

[David Pakman]

One of the things that I'm trying to kind of explain in the book is that sometimes the North Star or the ideal for people is to eliminate bias, partizanship and whatever right to be. These kind of like almost mathematical instantiations of objective analysis of every fact. I think that it's a waste of time to even really talk about that because the influence of our upbringing, like I said, in terms of economic class, the families, communities, rural versus urban and all these different things, the effect is so significant that for me the North Star is some kind of framework to recognize. Oh, you know What I'm doing, I'm doing confirmation bias. You know what I'm doing? I'm applying, like me as an immigrant, I'm applying my history as an immigrant somewhere where you could evaluate the situation differently. And so I think the awareness of these tendencies and a foundation in critical thinking and media literacy is actually the North Star. I don't think it's even reasonable or realistic to say, let's eliminate bias and partisanship.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I don't think there's any conceivable way, given the nature of the human mind, that you could do that. The getting people to be able to think critically, I think is very important. Educating people so that they understand how to navigate the modern world is clearly not happening. And so being able to do that, I think would be wonderful. However, as we start to look at, like, if I were going to go through your book chapter by chapter,

one

of the things you say at the very beginning that is just critically important is I. This is not me quoting you, though you did say this earlier in the interview. I don't think it is possible to define what is true in the realm of human perception. What is true is physics, cause and effect. What is human perception is basically everything else. So everybody has a frame of reference. And I will certainly give you a chance to debate that. And I come to this with man, if you can improve my thinking, I will take it all day long. But for now, the highest predictive validity way to think through it I have seen is this, that figuring out what is true is next to impossible because so much of quote, unquote truth is perception. We look at something and we see two different things. Like we're seeing the same thing. We can explain it in the same way, but yet we walk away with different conclusions about what it really is or the consequences of that thing. How do you want to see people come to an agreement about what is true?

[David Pakman]

I think there is more to objective truth that's good enough for figuring out a lot of policy. Now, I think that you are right that physics provides a sort of truth that is different than economic theory, psychological theory. I do think that there is a difference there. But just like as an example, to open the conversation a little bit, cutting taxes for the rich, stimulating the economy by trickling down the reality. And what I would love to be true with regard to tax rates don't seem to coincide. I would love to have a lower tax rate. Right. That's my. I would just. I would love to keep more of my money. Why not? Right? I mean, it would be a great thing. If I look at the last 150 years of looking at tax rates around the world, changes to gdp, you know, doing, like, what we would consider a reasonably detailed analysis, I can't find any evidence that when you cut taxes for the rich, it trickles down the way some people believe. Now, is there an environment possible where that could happen? Yeah, I mean, I think it's possible. But for the purposes of figuring out policy in 2025 in the United States, for example, I do think that 150 years of economic history gives us a good enough sense of the truth. It may not be physics, it might not be wave theory or chemistry. Like, I acknowledge that. But for the purposes of decision makers, I think it's probably good enough.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting. So this is a case where we look at the same thing and we come away with something completely different. So when I look at that, I'm like, taxes. Yep, it's very interesting. And I do think that it matters in terms of certainly giving people the ability to decide what they want to spend their money on versus forcing them to. You're going to spend your money on this. But by way of making the economy better for people in the long run, people are barking up the wrong tree with taxes up or taxes down. The thing that they need to be thinking about is money printing. Because here is one of my foundational beliefs. The average person does not understand the economy, nor will they ever understand the economy. They may not be intellectually capable, and they certainly aren't interested even if they can. Which is why I think it's 50% of people in America own assets and the rest don't, which is insane to me. When you inflate somebody's money, you force them to buy an asset, and it is the only way to keep up with inflation. Otherwise they are going to lose their purchasing power. And it is distressingly fast. So at whatever 2% inflation, you're losing 20% of your purchasing power in 10 years. It's crazy. So. Because it's a compounding effect. So if that's true, now you've created a situation where people are disincentivized to save money. So don't save money. You need to get into assets, but they're not going to get into assets because it's too complicated. So then the government begins spinning a story and they say, hey, the American dream is to own a house, go buy a house. But then to make good on that, they start deranging the marketplace by doing things from making it harder to build additional homes, to government sponsored loans, to too big to fail and going in and backstopping people when they do lose their money on a house and you create a housing bubble and now the people that already own the homes, the price is going up and the people below that just can't get on the property ladder. And when I look at that, I'm like, this problem is not going to be changed by taxes up, taxes down. This problem is going to be changed by economic policy that says you can't inflate the currency, which using my vernacular, is to steal from the people and force them to gamble in assets. So that's where it's like, okay, we're both looking at the same problem. I honestly, I think people do care about tax objectively. However, people would care about tax a lot less if when they got taxed, they got the things out of that that they wanted. Not that everybody will agree. It's when you're getting taxed and not getting the things you want that I think people really get up in arms. So we've got the tax code, we've got, and yet the wealth, the wealthy continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer. But that has nothing to do with tax.

[David Pakman]

Everything you mentioned about economic policy is true. Those are all different levers. But it doesn't change that. There is a debate in the political system where there is discussion as to what should the top tax rate be and what should the next tax rate be. To the extent that that discussion continues to exist, all the other stuff you mentioned also exists. If there is a debate about what the tax rates should be, and there is, it is a political question, it would be awesome for you to come convince everybody it's the wrong debate. Awesome, but it still is a debate. I, for the purposes of saying, can we know some truth? I do think that looking at 150 years of history and saying, can we tie a tax cut for this group versus this group versus this group to growth GDP changes, inflation changes, etc. And say, has that worked before in order to inform whether we do it again? As a concept, as a heuristic, I think it's acceptable. I'm not denying all the other things you said are also important.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you're taxing people, do they invest more or less into their companies? Now I would say that there is a reason somebody like Jeff Bezos is like, I'm going to run Amazon at break even all the time. And the reason that I'm going to do it is the Government is the world's worst capital allocator and I am one of the best capital allocators of all time. So this money is far better off in my hands so I can reallocate this capital to things that the world wants. Now, I don't have the data in front of me to be able to show you that other than to say again, America and the companies and the value that they've created seems correlated, even if not causative. Hang tight.

Up next, David and I continue our conversation around modern politics.

We'll be right back.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

[David Pakman]

A lot of the things that work great about the American economy we are absolutely on the same page about I think where we maybe disagree or there are people in your audience who disagree with me about is that given all of the things that work really well about this economy, the relative cost to instead of like, do we need 50 bases for the military in Germany, maybe we'd be okay with 20, right? But everybody has health care and nobody goes hungry and veterans have a place to live and food to eat. The relative cost of that is so small compared to the innovation that you and I agree exists and how market forces have generated so much of this innovation and wealth. I don't even know if we disagree. But my argument is that it's a relatively small ask and it's only political will that prevents those issues from being solved. It's not that we don't have the money. It's really just a question of political will and logistics and a lot of the people in this country don't want to do it. And so I see that as the problem. I think if, if more folks better understood the relatively small lift that fix financially that fixing some of these issues would be but also from a selfish standpoint, it is demand side stimulus. When you Give more people security and money that they can then go and spend in communities. It's good for every business owner. It's demand side stimulus, which I'm a far bigger supporter of than the trickle down, supply side stuff.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But we saw in Covid that doesn't work. What ends up happening is you put money in people's pocket and they either gamble it, so they go in, oh my God, I'm flush with cash, I'm going into crypto and I'm going to get rich overnight, or they go buy tennis shoes, bracelets, et cetera, and they make the asset holders more wealthy. This is one of those where I feel like it is so brazenly obvious how Covid was the greatest theft from the poor and middle class to the wealthy ever. You're getting this from a wealthy guy, so you've got to ask, why the fuck does he care? Why is he ratting everybody out? And the reason is if you do not have a thriving middle class, you are racing towards people getting beheaded, beheaded in the streets. Also. I just want to see people thrive. And if you want to get rich, sell to the middle class. There's just.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, I just don't know that I agree with the facts on that though, Tom, because, yes, I mean, I know that the luxury watch market and luxury cars, it went crazy during COVID as money was pouring into that. And also you are true that some people gambled on crypto, but savings rates for every quintile did go up. And so, yeah, but if you want

[Tom Bilyeu]

to obliterate somebody, have them save their money. What I'm saying is when you are saving your money in the modern monetary theory system that we live in, you are fucked. You are dead in the water. You are doing the only thing you can't do. You're saying because of inflation, 100%.

[David Pakman]

Yeah. No, I mean, listen, there are two different parallel conversations here. One is it's the same argument why you shouldn't give the rich a tax cut because their marginal propensity to consume is so much lower. They are also just saving the money and the economic multiplier is lower. On the other hand, when you're talking about financial irresponsibility, I'm not now arguing about the drag effect of inflation. I'm just saying your assertion that everybody gambled their money on, you know, watches and crypto just is not borne out by the fact. These are two different conversations. And we can have either.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If people understood exactly how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, I think people will be like, hold on a second. Most people do not understand that flywheel. They think the rich get richer because they're not paying taxes. That is not how the rich get richer. The rich get richer by the price of their assets, maintaining with inflation, just maintaining. And so everybody else, their net worth is going down. Even if you still see a hundred dollars in your bank account, now it's worth 90, now it's worth 80, 70, 60. But if you own assets, that price appears to be going up, but it's not. It's actually just keeping up with inflation. And so if your house used to cost 100,000, now it's 200,000. That's a commentary. Barring you being in a very lucky neighborhood, that's a commentary on the dollar lowering in value through inflation. It is not your house actually going up in value. And so if people really could internalize that, then it's like, okay, hold on. The game that we're trying to play here, because I understand, I get. I don't want the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It is dangerous. Like, even if you, you're just trusting me to be selfish, we can't have it. We have to solve that problem. But when I hear people say tax the rich, I'm like, it won't work. You could tax the rich at a hundred percent. It is not going to get you where you want to go. If you allow them to keep printing money, first solve the underlying problem. Money printing is the underlying problem. Then we can start talking about your ideas, which if your ideas bear out, I love it. If we could stop spending money on certain things, balance the budget so that we could start spending money on other safety nets. I'm totally here for it. But when people want to do that by printing money doesn't work, you just ratchet up the rate at which you steal from the poor and middle class.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, I think we're now like at three tangents away from the original concept of truth, which is fine. But just even on the facts of some of what you're saying, I think neither one of us has the data in front of us. But when you say I hope that during COVID people use their. Was it 1600 bucks or something to pay down debt? Consumer debt did go down during COVID And so I just think that a lot of these things did happen the way you're hoping they did rather than the way you're saying they did. But I just don't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, if you look on it, if you look at the data, the data will Tell you this, I assure you.

[David Pakman]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Asset prices skyrocketed and asset prices skyrocketing is not a function of people got richer. It is a function of the dollar got weaker. That much I'm confident. The data could not possibly say anything else. Everybody understands that when you have the same amount of goods fighting for an increased supply of dollars, the cost of that thing goes up. That is the equation of inflation.

[David Pakman]

That is that. That part is true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Going back to the book, one thing that I wanted to talk to you about is. And if you think I'm misreading this, now is the time I'm very open to. I just misinterpreted, but reading the book, it felt like you were saying that the echo machine is specifically the right, that there is something happening on the right that is not happening on the left, and that if we're really going to get ourselves out of this problem, we have to address the right.

[David Pakman]

Yes, well, the proactive echo machine, not this passive echo chamber in which we must might be, but the proactive echo machine I think is disproportionately on the right. But to a degree it's that way because they're just better at a bunch of this stuff. And I explain that in the book. A lot of the political shorthands for policy positions are way simpler, pithier and more salient sounding from the right. I mean, good for them. They've done that better. Right. I mean, pro life has inbuilt in it at a linguistic level, something that is much clearer and pithier and more salient than what happens on the pro choice side, which is, of course, we have to understand fetal development and bodily autonomy. We've lost. Okay? Right. Like we're already at a disadvantage. So number one, tax relief from the burden of taxes. On my side, I don't go, I want the highest taxes possible. I actually, I want the lowest taxes possible while being able to afford the basic services that I think that any. Well, I've lost. I'm. We lost. Right. So this is a structural thing and so this is like part one of the echo machine that the right is just better at. Secondly, and we. I talk about this in the book, but a lot of this happened kind of like after I turned in the manuscript. So it's sort of like an addendum. The right has become way better at building and funding media ecosystems than the left. And I understand that now I'm using the same shorthand, left and right that I said doesn't work. But like we. I'm you know, to have some way to still communicate with the audience. I'm still using these, these words. You know, when you saw during the election, Trump and Vance, they go and they talk to Lex Friedman and they're hanging out with Rogan and they're talking to the Nelk boys. And it's relaxed, it feels genuine. Even though I would argue I could fact check 100 lies an hour that they tell. Doesn't matter. The point here is who's better at the game that created an environment where it's like this seems relaxed and cool to some degree. And on the other side, we heard about how Kamala Harris just couldn't make it work to appear on Rogan's show. I don't think that would have won her the election. Right. But it's just kind of like representative of the problem. When she did the interview with Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy, it ended up where Alex Cooper had to fly to Harris to some contrived one time use studio that wasn't even the normal studio and it was much shorter than the episodes and. Right. So my point here is they are just better at a lot of this stuff. And then on the funding, they've got Turning Point usa, they have Daily Wire, they have a lot of this infrastructure. We have nothing on the left. Like, I'm audience funded and I have some advertisers. And then, you know, we're part of like the YouTube system. And I'm not complaining, like we do fine, but we just don't have the machine that they have built. So I know that you kind of opened this by saying, am I just saying the right is in the wrong for this stuff? They're succeeding with what they've built. And so to a degree it's like, I'm not, I'm not envious, but I think that they've figured out something that the left just has not figured out yet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is this a winnable game for the left?

[David Pakman]

I, you know, to some degree I hate to even buy into this winnable thing because really, for me it's just like, how can we improve the lives of as many people as possible? So that, that's, that's my goal. It's less about gamifying it, but to the extent that there is a competitive, gamified aspect of it, the answer is we're going to find out in the next three and a half years. The things that make me think it's winnable include. Since Harris lost in November, I was invited to go to the White House, met with top Biden advisers and Biden himself to talk about what they didn't do. Right. With regard to how they deal with us. Calling us on October.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tell me the, what was your punchline? What'd you tell them?

[David Pakman]

Well, what, what I said is I've said all this stuff publicly. Starting to engage with us on October 15th for 12 minute interviews where someone is standing just off camera going, pointing to their watch. Doesn't work like that. It's just not going to, it's not going to create an environment or a community or an ecosystem. So you can't. That, that certainly doesn't work. I am cautiously optimistic because now they're, they're engaging with me and with kind of our little circle of, of people who do what I do significantly more than they were in the previous four years. Just in the last two months. There seems to be a desire to get on message without five bullet point plans that are just sort of like, what are you even talking about? You know, if you start a business, you'll get a $5,000 deduction and then a credit and people are like, what's the difference between a deduction? Like it's, this is a loser's game. Right? So you know, from my perspective, this is where my partisanship comes out. Where are we on. Listen, they are offering you nothing. Trump promised the health care plan in August of 2020. That was two weeks away. We still don't have the damn health care plan. Their only plan is get rid of Obamacare. Elon Musk is here, not out of the goodness of his heart, to improve the lives of people in Idaho and Ohio. And he is here to turn the government into a tool for his gain, for his business. Right. So we, you don't have to agree with me on this stuff. But the point is there needs to be a more coherent message that is not about PowerPoint presentations and bullet points that go into the ether. And so I think it is winnable. I'm seeing some of the turnaround, but the proof will be, I guess November of 26 will be the first test. From my perspective, what has really broken about politics has been that we waste a lot of time not agreeing on the basic facts, which should serve as the start of a conversation rather than the area that we are debating. We waste a lot of time with what I see as contrived issues that often distract from really improving the day to day lives of as many people as possible when it comes to poverty, class, mobility, access to health care, education. Now, depending on one's political leaning, you would see the problem in these areas differently. And I'm completely sensitive to that. In my book. I lay it out as I see it. But fundamentally, the big break and the big problem, and what makes me hate politics, as I write about in the book, is that we are a rich enough country with enough smart people to be able to agree on the facts and move on to figuring out the policy and solving the problems. But. But we get stuck without a shared understanding or agreement as to what the facts are or what the problem is. And it's a very difficult place to be if you want to fix problems.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if the fundamental nature of this is that we can't agree on what is true, how do you navigate that in your life? And do you see this as a scalable problem that can be solved, or is this just the nature of people?

[David Pakman]

Well, as I say in the book, by the time people are 25, 35, 45, 55, in a sense, it's kind of too late. And that doesn't mean as a, as an individual thing, we wouldn't want to engage with whoever and try to get people on the same page, but at scale. A lot of what I talk about in the book relates to the lack of critical thinking and media literacy, which you really have to start at at age 8, 9, 10. Just like really fundament mental questions about how can you determine for yourself whether something you've been told is true? When you get a message from a media outlet, how can you ascertain what biases or inaccuracies they may be? It's like really structural stuff. And again, I am both a partizan person in that I have an opinion like anybody else, but I also want to be as objective as possible. So like, on the question of are Democrats or Republicans better at the media literacy aspect, the data I found shows that Democrats are better, but barely. Right? Like, I'm not coming in here saying this is only a problem on the political right. Democrats have it all figured out. A bunch of the studies I looked at on are you good at identifying whether statements are statements of fact or opinion, which is like a critical aspect to media literacy? Am I listening to an opinion or something that is presumably a report? Democrats are a little bit better, but like every, everybody's pretty bad at it. So this is not aside from my, my personal leanings being on the left relatively moderately. So I would argue, and maybe we'll get into that. This is an issue for across the political spectrum that we need to solve.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so one thing that haunts me I'm beginning to toy with a hypothesis that I find interesting. I don't. There's not enough data to back it up yet. But that Neanderthals and humans existed at the same time, Neanderthals had a bigger brain, conceivably higher intellect, more sophisticated tools, potentially earlier usage. I'm not as clear on that part, but that one possible hypothesis for how Homo sapiens out competed the potentially smarter Neanderthals is that we used tribal thinking to be able to group up in much larger numbers to defeat superior intellect. The reason that freaks me out is I'm always looking for ideas that have high predictive validity. And you can use that looking backwards. And if I look backwards at exactly how humans have gotten here, I see a lot of tribalism. Do you worry that tribalism and tribalistic thinking is baked into the architecture of the human mind?

[David Pakman]

It's more complicated than this. And so what? The way I like to approach it in terms of the outcompeting of Neanderthals, which is a really interesting topic, is to look at someone like Robin Dunbar's work. I don't know if you're familiar with Dunbar's number, but it's this idea that once you get to groups of 150 people, those are. That's kind of the natural limit to the number of relatively close relationships or acquaintances that we can manage, how you can organize without some kind of centralization of control. So there's this idea. It's not a magical number of 150, but is it 120? Is it 180? And so what we might say from one perspective is there's like an evolutionary adaptability to tribalism. The other side of it would be that there's just a natural physiological limit in terms of the relationships we can manage. And once you get beyond that 150, you need to specialize and centralize to some degree, or the group's got to break down into subgroups. So where I think I do agree with you, Tom, is that there is something inherent to Homo sapiens about once you get to certain group size, you do have to in some sense break down into groups, teams, cohorts, organizations. Now, we can put a pejorative label on it and say it simply leads to tribal thinking and it's bad. The science side of it might actually say it's a necessary way to actually grow as societies and develop technology and specialization. That's part of the debate. But so I do think that you are right to a degree, taking a

[Tom Bilyeu]

short break, but do not go anywhere. You are going to want to hear some of the disagreements that David and I get into next.

Stay tuned. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. If we agree that tribal thinking is innate to the human mind, that's just going to be that. And one additional thing that I'll add is that part of how this gets exacerbated and just turns into this flywheel is that we're all looking for heuristics, shortcuts. I don't want to think through all these problems. I'm just trying to raise my kids. I'm trying to have a nice life. So just tell me. I know what team I'm on. Just tell me how that team thinks. And now it becomes very easy for the oligarchs to use that and the way that it translates literally as in just the few that lead. And so the leaders end up cramming down information into the masses that they can control through narrative. And so now we're living in a world where we have hypervelocity of information because of social media. We have teams and we have the shorthand that each team is feeding to the other team of like, hey, we think like this, they think like this. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. And so it sounds like we pretty much agree on that. And I'll add one more thing I haven't heard you say, but I think you'll agree that those two teams, because of the setup of the modern world and that this is a populist moment, they're racing away from each other at a rate that, for me, is quite terrifying. So when you think about that's the problem set, what becomes the way that we address that problem set.

[David Pakman]

I don't think I agree with the last premise that these two groups are racing away from each other faster than ever. I think that there is that perception because of something called the narcissism of small differences, which looks to focus in only in the areas where there is disagreement, and it looks to exacerbate the disagreement. And where I would pull in, you know, you use the term oligarchs, we could use the robber baron billionaires, the oligarchs, the elites. Everybody has some shorthand for what we're talking about. But there's a degree to which, if we are talking about what was it, Bud Light, or if we are talking about the trans sports issue, or we are talking about what I would consider the mostly contrived issues, we aren't talking about how the disproportionate amount of so many of the tax cuts go to the richest people. We aren't talking about how education is being deliberately made dysfunctional to justify its privatization, for example, or insert whatever is important to you. But the point I'm trying to make is I think we're a lot closer than the perception is, and your perspective about these two groups are rushing away as fast as possible. I think that that's a deliberately contrived perspective meant to divide people when we are much more united on a lot of these issues than you might believe if you watch a little bit of Fox News or msnbc.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so walk me through that, because when I look at the world, I see both evidence of what I'm saying plus I. It matches the foundational building blocks of my belief system. And so you get that one, two punch of this is how I believe the world is, which predicts that people will, in a populous moment, begin racing away from each other. And I see we're actually, again, my perspective racing away from each other. So walk me through, like, if what you're saying is true, and it's a very hopeful message, so I want it to be true, how would we show people? No, no, you're. You're falling for essentially propaganda. The reality is that there are very small differences between us, and let's talk about them. How would you go about messaging that?

[David Pakman]

Well, one thing I would mention is what you just described as why you are reinforced in your initial belief by what you see. That's textbook confirmation bias, and we're all victims of it. Right? In other words, what you just said is the definition of confirmation bias. You have a belief about how the world works, and when you look around, all you see is stuff that makes you more secure that you are correct. Whereas someone who comes in with a different initial belief will say, I only see things that reinforce what I already believe. That's textbook confirmation bias. That's one of the things I write about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I don't know how far we want to derail on this, but confirmation bias from where I'm sitting is where you apply a greater likelihood of truth to something that you already believe. And I would say that's an emotional phenomena that ties back to heuristics. Your emotions give you a signal that you don't need to think any more deeply about this. It feels right. Therefore, it is right very much. Not how I approach the world. So for me, I'm always looking for disconfirming evidence. And I'm looking. I'M basing the things that I believe on and still a heuristic. But does believing this thing give me a higher or less degree of ability to predict the outcome of my actions or somebody else's actions, often, by the way, looking backwards? So, oh, if I adopt that belief, can I make sense of the last 50 years of history? So I certainly understand that my mind is primed to give me a positive emotional reaction when I encounter something that I already believe. But because my North Star is efficacy of prediction, I'm at least running things through that filter.

[David Pakman]

Put aside the rhetoric for a while. You know, oh, Biden was a communist and Kamal is a communist. Put all of that aside for a second. For the most part, if this is the spectrum of economic ideas, and I'm holding my hand several feet apart, where the majority of the disagreement is, listen, just about everybody agrees the military should be socialized. We shouldn't have a variety of different militaries that the US Will contract out to depending. We have the US Military for the most part. For the most part, we agree that firefighting and police should be socialized. We agree about the vast majority of this stuff. The difference over which people are, you know, at knives over socialism versus capitalism is like, should health care be a little more the purview of the government? We've got Medicare and Medicaid. Should we just put everybody in there? That's an example of how the debate is socialism and capitalism. And then we kind of get down to him and go, okay, so it's like health care is one of the areas of disagreement, but for the most part, everybody agrees making cell phones should be part of the market economy. The military should be socialized and under the umbrella of the government. And there's like three or maybe four areas in the middle which are really the disagreement. So this is just an example to kind of illuminate how the rhetoric is of dramatically different perspectives. In reality, we're talking about mostly agreement on what shouldn't be socialized and what should with a little bit of disagreement in the middle. That's a lot closer to reality. It doesn't make for good television.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Heard definitely understand that. I would say, though, there is something else going on. And I found this when I had multiple business partners. And I would see these two very intelligent guys going at each other saying, the other person was stupid. Like, just very confusing to me. And I was like, okay, what does it mean when two highly intelligent, very sincere people look at the other person and go, this guy's an idiot. That's when I realized oh, we're all writing on the back of base assumptions. And so we have base assumptions, we have core values, base assumptions being a form of belief. And it seems like we're, we're just a little bit off. But if you understand that your value systems are very different, you understand why within the scope of what humans believe. Yes. You're. You're going to be relatively close. Even somebody who's just a die hard communist. To me I would say they simply violate some of my core beliefs about the way the human mind works. Even if I, I grant that rather than being a psychopath that they actually want good things for people violates one of my core beliefs about the physics of the human experience. And so now I'm going to fight vociferously with anybody that even though like we're pretty close, but it's like the, the value or the core belief upon which you base that we should do XYZ thing to me is so anathema to the reality that that cannot help but play out in a horrible way. And so that's where I think some of the things that despite how reasonable you sound right now, I know that there is this underlying belief. Having read your book, you and I have a fundamentally different foundational block that because we have this very different foundational block around where things go when you begin to socialize them that to you it seems morally self evident that we should be a social democracy. And to me it seems morally self evident that you want to avoid that. Not at all costs because you are very right that, that you. I don't want no government, I don't want no regulation. You want light touch but spilling over into that categorization as you define it in the book. Not me straw manning. The way that you see it now violates something I think is fundamentally true about the human mind.

[David Pakman]

And because of that now just, just as like a sanity check. So we're on the same page. Your takeaway from reading the book is that I'm a capitalist or a socialist.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're very careful in the book to say that you need a wisely regulated capitalist system and we are not going to socialism.

[David Pakman]

Right. In other words, I am not a social like I am flat out not a socialist like I think that, that for this conversation to make sense we have to kind of start from that. Because I think that when I the examples I talk about in the book, which of course there's always the cliche of Sweden and Denmark, but in the book I talk about Portugal and I talk about German, I talk about Uruguay and parts of India. I make super clear, like, what I'm talking about is a slightly more regulated form of capitalism where capitalism does make sense for the vast majority of our economy. I just don't want your audience that's not familiar with me to think that I'm here advocating for or a believer in socialism. The socialists hate me. They call into my show and they say, why aren't you a socialist? And, you know, we have that conversation. But I just think for the conversation to be fruitful, it's good to clarify that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That I think, a, yes, that's very smart, and B, given that we are now, without having expressly said it, we are already heading down the road of how we fix all of this. Just to reorient everybody to that opening question set, define for people. So you're not socialist. You, you are very clear in the book. You've been very clear right now, but define social democracy for people, because my foundational block was tripped by your very careful and very reasonable measured definition of what social democracy is.

[David Pakman]

Put as simply as possible, social democracy is an economic system where capitalism is regulated to ensure that nobody falls below a certain standard of living and that we are appropriately. And of course, appropriateness is in the eye of the beholder and we'll talk about it. But. But appropriately regulating business in such a way that we maximize the innovation and fruits of entrepreneurship while at the same time protect those with less market power, as the term may be, to protect and defend themselves. So there's nothing in there about, you know, socializing means of production or shared ownership. Co ops are welcome in social democracy, but they are not mandated. I consider myself a small L. Libertarian. Like, I'm not a part of the Libertarian party, but on the spectrum of authoritarianism and libertarianism, I want the government involved only when I can make a good case that it makes sense. And so I think in the vast majority of industries, yes, we want some framework of regulation to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of people with no market power, but I think only when it makes sense for government to be involved. Health care, the military, police, administration of elections, etc. That's where I want the government involved.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, if I were to extrapolate that out just to make sure that we're in agreement, and you say this in the book, so I don't think this will be controversial, but you hold up different European countries and some of the other countries that you just mentioned as examples of what this looks like when it's done. Well, and so that's where I look at that and I say to me, that's exactly the thing that I'm trying to avoid. And the building block for me that so much of my worldview is predicated on is the belief that you're only going to get the level of innovation that we get here in America. When you try to be far lighter touch that you really are a capitalist system with guardrails, there's no doubt, I want to be very clear on my side, unchecked capitalism will create a bunch of winners who will ice out all of the losers and it will become tyrannical and horrible. In monopolistic practice is very fast. And so the human mind, for better or worse, has good parts and bad parts. And so I am well aware that there's pathology on both sides. So for me, the North Star is human flourishing for as many people as possible. If I were going to really oversimplify, and obviously we have long form here, so we can get deeper into it as we go, but I oversimplify the thing that leads us there as innovation. And when you look at Europe and their ability to generate companies that you may or may not even like, but to me, this is a very positive signal. Europe does not generate the number of companies that have a value of over 10 billion at anywhere near the rate of the U.S. the U.S. remains by orders of magnitude the place that's able to output companies of that kind of size and scale. Now, if, like I you believe that things reach that scale because they are creating something of value that makes the world better, which is why people would rather have that thing than the money. And that innovation is the very thing that pulls us forward. And you look at China and how did China finally stop starving its citizens? It finally accepted, oh, we're going to have to let in capitalistic principles. Now they do it in a very different way, which I'm happy to talk about, but that ultimately it is the people that are able to produce these things, these innovations that the world wants that drive us forward with progress, innovation, and therefore lead us to the most human thriving. And that comparing Europe now, which protects people on the downside but caps their upside, you just don't get that innovation.

[David Pakman]

When I was younger, I used to be much more on economic issues, which a person that would align with what you just said. I was always socially very much on the left and progressive, libertarian, but on a lot of this economic stuff, I took a much more kind of traditional approach. And what changed my view was going out and looking at some of the talking points that are often repeated about the American economy as related to European economies and finding out that a lot of it isn't true. So I'll give you a couple of examples. First of all, I don't think it's fair to compare the United States to Europe because what's going on in Serbia versus what's going on in Denmark or Belgium or Spain, these are completely different business environments, totally different systems in terms of how corrupt are governments or the expectation that a contract is going to be upheld and enforced by courts. I mean, these are very different business environments. But let's just take the examples I use in the book, which are Sweden and Denmark. One of the things that I often believed before I investigated was that you have significantly a larger share of your income taken to taxes in some of these countries. When you look into the detail and you account for the fact that college education and health care are paid for through taxation for people of average incomes and one standard deviation to either side, the tax rates are often identical or even lower than in the United States when you account for not having health care premiums and co pays and coinsurance and paying for college, etc. So like the first big awakening for me was, wow, it's not true that on balance, you're just paying way higher effective tax rates now at the very top. You are correct. It is true that billionaires, assuming you know that we're not taking advantage of very specific tax loopholes and mechanisms, billionaires in Sweden and Denmark are going to pay more than in the United States. That is true. But for the average person, you're really not. And with college and health care included, it's not a bad deal. So then I went to the next level and I said, okay, there must be something that generates an environment that is better for entrepreneurship in the United States than in these countries. So I started looking into the business environment and entrepreneurship and sort of friendliness to startups. And it turns out that Denmark especially. But Denmark and Sweden are considered as friendly to entrepreneurship as the United States. Now you might say, how could that possibly be? They don't have as many billionaires and $10 billion companies, etc. You do have to scale that for their population. We are talking about populations in Denmark and Sweden that are like relatively small US States. And when you compare on per capita basis, it is a completely different story. But for the most part, their business environments, which include how bureaucratic is it to start a business, how easy is it to raise capital and sort of other factors can you rely that the contractual system is going to support the legal basis? It's really like, fine. And so I don't want to go on and on, but the point was a lot of these things that get repeated aren't really true when you look into it. And I want, I just want to say one other thing on this. In the United States, disproportionately not even close, those $10 billion companies you're talking about are coming out of the blue states whose governments are much more like Denmark and Sweden. And I think that that's also something we shouldn't ignore when we say where in the United States is most of that innovation happening? It's California, it's New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, et cetera. And that mirrors much more the way that Denmark and Sweden are organized.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The reason that I aggregated Europe was so that you wouldn't make that argument that you have to look at them on a per capita basis. Once you roll Europe up together, you're now approaching the same per capita, not per capita, the same number of people as you're getting in the US you have an economy that's roughly the same size. So now the.

[David Pakman]

But why would you do that? It just doesn't seem, it doesn't seem relevant.

[Tom Bilyeu]

For the same reason that you're saying that, hey, there's a gotcha coming, and that the blue states are actually churning out better companies. So you're asking me to look at the different, as if these are experiments in governance, but you're saying don't look at Europe as experiments in governance.

[David Pakman]

No, I don't think it's. I don't think it's systematically fair or unfair to either group or disaggregate, but I think we would want to have specific reasons to do it. I think if you want it in Europe, for example, if you wanted to group the uk, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, countries that are more similar in governance, and you wanted to do the same thing in the United States, group the states that are more similar and look at per capita on both. That seems like the fairest thing to me. The entire United States has these sub states that in some cases do make sense to look at in total or not, depending on what we're comparing. I would apply the same standard to Europe. I think it's just a details thing. It may or may not make sense to separate or combine depending on what we're trying to say. When it comes to the innovation aspect, things are so different.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let me ask, I don't understand how you can look at a group of, call it 350 million people and say, cool. Compare these 350 million people to these 350 million people and tell me what answer you get. And the answer is so overwhelming that it's not like the US has 10% more or 50% more, it's hundreds of percent more. So this is not a minor difference. And I have a feeling, though I have not run this data specifically, but I cannot imagine a universe in which you could literally pick any state or even any group of European states and compare them to the US as a whole. And they're always going to lose just the sheer volume of companies. Companies. Again, my belief is companies get large by doing an innovation that people care about. So America collecting the best and brightest from all over the world because they know this is the place that you can go for those entrepreneurial opportunities, they flock here. And so the question becomes, well, the one thing we know, whatever hypothesis you come up with has to say that whatever's going on in the us, whether it's draconian blue states or the mix of blue and red or whatever, but the US out innovates Europe by a lot. And so now I would say that it's pretty easy to address why that's happening. And you, I think, are very wise not to name the countries that I'm about to name. But like, if you look at France and the way that they get bogged down, 20% youth based unemployment, because a lot of the stuff that's going on where you hire somebody, you're not allowed to fire them. There's so many regulations that protect the employee that they become onerous on the employer. If you look at ikea, IKEA fled Sweden, right? If I remember correct. So they're like, yeah, no, this, the all the things that you do to make your average employee so expensive, we're going to take our headquarters somewhere else. And so you get all of these regulations that I think are, they have taken too far a positive impulse. And so I agree with you. I don't want to live in Sparta. I don't want to live in a world where the weak among us are put up on a hill and let to die. That's not interesting to me. So at the same time though, I think you have to be so careful that my foundational brick is if you err on the side and you don't create enough regulations, you can always add them later. But when you start adding too many regulations now, this gets brutally difficult to unwind. I think of them as barnacles on a turtle. If you put enough barnacles on a turtle, the turtle drowns. So it's like any one barnacle, not a big deal. But you start overloading these things and you start seeing what we're seeing in the data, which is America is exploding with, of this value creation for the world and then Europe is not. So that's where I'm like, okay, I like you. I don't want to see people un, I don't want to see people left behind that we could have helped in a way that does not diminish innovation, that does not confuse redistribution of wealth as the miracle for production as the miracle. And I feel like I haven't seen that done in a way in real life where it plays out, leading to the thing that I value, which is innovation. So this actually may be more interesting because you're probably, I'm not going to convince you. I understand that. So.

[David Pakman]

Well, let me just say one thing. Much of the what you're laying out I agree with completely. It's, I, I, and again, this goes to, to the earlier idea that I had, which is that a lot of this is calibrating within a much narrower band than one might think from like four minute cable news debates about this stuff. And a lot of it is about the how do we get there and where do we draw the line. But what you're laying out does not sound crazy to me. Now in practice, you may want to implement it in a way that I would say that doesn't make sense. But the principles you're laying out make a lot of sense to me as a social Democrat regulated capitalism sort of supporter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I love that. And so for me, if I were going to put a simple sentence around how do we fix the problem? I'm a big believer you literally have to force people into the middle. Like you've got to find a way and I don't mean literally force, but you've got to find a way to create a sense that the only way that a nation can move forward sensibly together is to understand that. I look at it through an evolutionary lens. There is an evolutionary reason why we have people that, that tend towards what we consider leftist personality traits. And there is an evolutionary reason why we have people that tend to what we would call right personality traits. And so I believe, and I see I'm losing you for anybody just listening. He's making faces that say he is not on board with this. I believe it is only in the dynamic tension between the two of those that we can find a path forward. But that rides on a belief that I have that nobody should trust themselves in the way that people do. Because we are all blind. We are all. You talked about the biases that people bring to the table earlier. Everybody has them. Most people are either unintentionally or even willfully blind to them. So getting people to understand, oh, yeah, the odds that I see the world perfectly is effectively zero. And so I want dynamic tension with the other side. I want people who disagree with me, me, and I want to debate that. And then my thing about we're flying apart is just to what you said in the opening of the book. We're no longer having productive debates. And honestly, I'll be very curious to see if you agree with this. I'm not saying what I'm saying to convince you that I'm right. I'm saying what I'm saying so that anybody listening can step into my shoes, view the world through my lens, then step into your shoes, view the world to your lens, and go back and go, oh, interesting. Those are two very fascinating looks on this very hard to ascertain object, which is what we call the truth. And then hopefully they go get a whole bunch of more people that are thinking sincerely and then they come up with their own vision of what they believe to be true. Like that to me, is the only way for this to work because I don't trust any one person, no matter how smart they are, to accurately see everything.

[David Pakman]

No, I don't think there is any single source of truth. And, you know, that's why I cringe whenever Donald Trump says things like he knows more than the generals and the scientists and the immunologists. You know, we'll get back to that. But I used to believe what you said a couple minutes ago about the biological or evolutionary basis for some of our political beliefs. I used to believe that because that's what I thought the science pointed to. I recently did a bunch more research into it based on a book I read. And it seems that the.

[Vrbal/Grainger Advertiser]

The.

[David Pakman]

The book is how it's by two brothers whose last name is Louis L E W I S It's like the left and right is broken, something like that. How left and right have broken America or something along these lines. And it disputes a lot of the kind of conventional wisdom around this stuff. And it found that if you really go to the original source studies on some of those physiological brain or evolutionary bases for our political beliefs, the effect sizes are tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, almost as to be insignificant. And very often, often the way that the questions are asked of the groups that are categorized as being on the left or right are slightly different. And it creates arguably some bias even in the way some of those studies are organized. So right now my view has changed on this where I used to think, you know, the larger fear centers in the brain, which has an evolutionary value, but in modern day it doesn't work. I used to believe a lot of that and the latest scholarship I've seen on it really calls it into question. So at least for now it's a question mark for me. I don't know that that's really a explanation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, what do you put in its place? So any theory has to explain the world that we see. So we know that we have a left and a right, not just in America, seems to rear its head basically everywhere. Yep, there is. And maybe you're saying this is also being questioned, but I certainly have not seen anything that questions this. The whole idea of the free rider problem, that game theoretics tell you that if you have a system that takes care of people, that people will take advantage of that system. And so any organism that has survived as long as we have will have a self correcting mechanism. And to me, the self correcting mechanism for the right's pathologies is the left, and the self correcting mechanism for the left's pathologies are the right. So do you have an explanation that shows us the same picture that we see today, but just as higher fidelity than the one that I'm putting forward?

[David Pakman]

It's. It's a combination of herb. This is in no particular order. Border, urban versus rural seems to be a major factor following your parents beliefs highly correlated with our own beliefs. In other words, we are much more likely to follow the beliefs of our parents in the household we grew up in than we are to oppose that. Although of course people end up going against their parents. But these are just, these are associations, things we know are associated, meaning these

[Tom Bilyeu]

are things that are more predictive of someone being on the right or left, left or so. Interesting. I don't know that I want to drag us down into that. I will say, if that's what you're saying, that does not necessarily mean that biology isn't driving that. No, no.

[David Pakman]

Also my point is the biology studies show a very weak association. Whereas urban versus rural economic class, your political environment you grew up in, these sorts of things show a much stronger association.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep, that all makes sense to me. In terms of culture, everything's going to be downstream of culture. But to your earlier point, there is a finite number of things that we're talking about when we're talking about, you know, building out the government. Humans have so much in common. I wouldn't expect these differences to be, like, wildly pronounced. And look, we're. We're definitely at the edges of something. I don't think either of us have the scholarship memorized here, but one thing that I see people do all the time is they'll be like, hey, listen, there's more difference between two women than there are between a man and a woman. And while that is statistically accurate, anybody whose takeaway from that is that men and women are basically interchangeable will have no predictive validity as they try to navigate life. And so I'd have to look at the studies and see how this all plays out. But from a. I'm trying to get to predictive validity. If I look at the world and I say the world does break into left and right, maybe I'm wrong, that it's from a biological reality, but honestly, that just allows me to verbalize it. The truth is that I have a left and a right to contend with and mapping out what the left and right are important and contending with. What do the left and right do from a stability of a very large. An organism that cooperates in very large numbers. So why is that dichotomy so present from. From a outcome perspective? Forget the progenitor of why we ended up here. Just what does it do from an outcome perspective? That stuff still feels like that would be the place to zone in. Like, if you and I can't agree on how we get there now that we're here, what does it tell us and what do we do about it?

[David Pakman]

I kind of feel the need to just a little bit challenge the notion that left and right is still a good shorthand for political beliefs. I mean, I think that in the last 10 years especially, that is really just broken. You know, some examples would be. It used to be.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Sorry, before you just that. Do you. Can you define very clearly, Tom, Left and right is wrong. It's establishment and populist.

[David Pakman]

I think that one ruler that goes left to right is just not dynamic enough. I think, you know, a better step, and it's not perfect, but a better step would be the sort of social spectrum and then authoritarian, libertarian. So then we imagine four quadrants now. So you could be socially liberal authoritarian, where you want a government enforcing a lot of this stuff, or you could be socially liberal libertarian, where you're kind of like get the let people do whatever they want by getting out of the way rather than by enforcing it. This is a little better. I mean, like what we're up against is that this is actually pretty complicated stuff. And Left right, especially now, I argue, is woefully kind of underpowered to really describe political beliefs. But just to give you one little example, it used to be the case that the right in the 80s, in the 90s, it started to shift somewhere in there. The the right was very much opposed to the rule of people like Putin, Kim Jong Un, Duterte, Erdogan, Bukele, etc. Right now you see a very different perspective on that issue. Does Left Right really encompass why now all of a sudden it's the right that is much more friendly with the authoritari authoritarians and it's the left that is more skeptical of the authoritarians. Now, no one example is going to fully kind of like illuminate a better approach, which I'm trying to outline here. But that's just like one example of how the shorthand of Left Right is falling very short, especially, I would argue, for one reason that applies to what used to be the left and one reason that applies to what used to be the right. On the right. MAGA and Trumpism have completely upended our understanding of Left Right. You know, they have these populist claims and the anti war stuff, and at one point Trump said he has no issue with lgbt, but then now he's doing a lot of the trans stuff. It's just kind of a mishmash of stuff on the left. Where I see the term starting to fall short is what I've criticized as kind of like exclusionary purity testing from the left that I find very authoritarian, which is not the kind of left of 10 to 15 years ago. So I think both sides have not blame, but there are things that have changed on both sides that have made Left Right kind of a faulty shorthand.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting, I love that. Certainly a more nuanced take on what is going on. Yeah, anything that has higher predictive validity for me is a win. So that makes sense.

That's it for part one with David Pakman, but we are just getting started. In part two, we're diving into straight into how political narratives are weaponized, the role AI is already playing in shaping elections, and what happens when deepfakes make it impossible to tell fact from fiction. Plus, David lays out exactly how the media keeps you locked in a cycle of outrage and why breaking free is harder than you think. If you haven't already, make sure you follow the podcast so you do not miss part two when it drops. Until then, my friends, be legendary.

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