Mutual Understanding

Here’s the original poll:Poll question from my 12yo: Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill.* if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives* if not, red pills live and blue pills die Which do you choose?The original plan was to talk to Emmett Shear about it, but he ended up being late, so first we talked to each other. This is not the promised second half to the Shea episode! That is still coming at some point.I’m going to post the followup to this where we talk to Emmett next. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Jonah and I talked a bunch about developmental models, especially Susan Loevinger’s, using AI to do research about those models, what interests Jonah in studying them, and how it may make sense to think of LLMs in terms of developmental stages. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

I recorded a short episode with just me with a bit of a rant about how I think about the “does intrinsic motivation drive out extrinsic motivation” parenting discourse. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

My guest today canceled (for a great reason), so I talked about some stuff that’s been on my mind lately, including:* how I have been feeling about the election* a couple of more predictions* a little about what I’ve been reading* how I’m relating to having young kids these days This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

We originally live streamed some election night results and takes to Twitter, but I wanted to post it here too. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

It was great to have Ben back on the podcast to talk election predictions! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

I had a great time learning more about the Stratfordian perspective on Shakespeare by talking to Draculaic, my twitter mutual.Divia (00:01)Hey, I'm here today with my Twitter mutual, Draculeac, who is mostly remaining anonymous. And we are here to talk about something that I touched on in the podcast with ThinkWork, but to go into it in greater depth, which is why Draculeac thinks that Shakespeare is the guy from Stratford.And he has some expertise here. He studied this stuff in college, wrote his undergraduate thesis on Lear, and is currently in the process of getting a paper on Shakespeare published. So I've prepared some. Ultimately, I am far from an expert in this topic, though I know more about it than I did when I talked to Thinkwart on a previous podcast. But yeah, I'm really excited to hear what you have to say and ultimately become more informed over the course of this conversation.Draculaic (00:50)I appreciate that. Thank you for the introduction. I think I should probably caveat one or two things before we dive in. And I'm happy to let you steer the conversation however you'd like. One is that my interest in this is primarily as in the plays as what we could call literary artifacts. And so my interest is what the plays are and how those affect the audience of Shakespeare primarily.I'm not personally a historian, but I've read up a little bit about this and I know enough to, think, know, muster an opinion. But I also just want to say that I don't particularly have a dog in the fight about authorship. don't have any particular care about who wrote the plays. I care about the plays themselves. But just in what I'veDivia (01:29)Yeah.Draculaic (01:46)been looking into researching myself. think that, and what I remember from what I've read about this previously, I think that there's, it's probably the strongest case that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And I'm definitely happy to give you my opinions about why that is.Divia (01:58)Mm-hmm. Cool. And I think one of the things I discovered, which anyone who knows about this probably already knows, unless I'm wrong, is that that is the more common position, at least with academics, right?Draculaic (02:09)Yeah, people who are sort of academic literary critics or people who are literary historians tend to converge on that argument, and I think probably for good reason.Divia (02:23)Okay, so I have various things I expect to wanna ask you about that, but I would love if you would just start out by laying out the basic case for why you think for the Stratfordian position.Draculaic (02:37)Yeah, so the rough shape of it is that we know that there was a person who existed named William Shakespeare. He has plenty of peers that wrote about him. We know that he was an actor. We know that he there are people who testify at the time that he was a playwright. The people who referred to him as a playwright are generally pretty reliable people. They're people like Ben Johnson, who wrote the four basically the forward poem to his folio.which came out after he died. A lot of people I think would haveDivia (03:10)And wait, sorry, and just to be clear, like he mentioned, he didn't just say Shakespeare, he mentioned like more details about him.Draculaic (03:18)yeah, I mean, he talks about specifically, you know, I think attributes of him, like he talks about his wit is there some things that he's talked about in like, you know, written correspondence and features of Shakespeare. but he also like talks about him specifically as a playwright, in that poem. and I think he also, you know, he's generally speaking, he himself was a playwright and a peer of Shakespeare. hewould have undoubtedly known him. And again, is a pretty reliable guy. Doesn't really, there's not a lot in the historical record of things that he's written that are trying not to be true. would be, he'd have to be, it'd be a pretty big lie for him to be doing that. And it would be an extreme.Divia (04:02)Okay, wait, let me, and I know I said I was gonna want you to lay it out. Now, I guess I'm nitpicking on this point. So just to be clear though, because the case that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare includes that there was a guy using the pen name Shakespeare, right?Draculaic (04:07)Yeah, go ahead.Yeah, that's from what I have looked into. That's the primary version of it is that it was some kind of masked identity by various different candidates. know, Christopher Marlowe, who somehow survives his murder or, you know, or sort of dies. of the big ones.Divia (04:35)Earl of Oxford is one I read a bunch about. So I guess so how do you know, now I've forgotten the name, but the guy who was talking about him as a playwright at the time, like how do you know that he wasn't just referring to whoever went by that pen name?Draculaic (04:49)Yeah, that's a fair question. think...That would have to be like a pretty sly maneuver. And I think thatI just, I don't know. I think that it doesn't really comport with the way that Johnson sort of tends to represent himself and to represent, you know, represent Shakespeare in again in that poem and in sort of the private correspondence. I'd have to look into that more. It's a fair question, but I don't, just, the idea that it would be an inside joke is sort of, I think, what you're implying. And I just don't think that fits.character some of the writing that he's done.Divia (05:36)Okay, like that he was talking about him as though he knew him personally, basically. And that to use his pen name while talking about he knew him personally, it just doesn't really fit when you think about it that way.Draculaic (05:40)Yeah, exactly.Yeah. And there's, other people besides Johnson that write about Shakespeare. it's also, mean, Shakespeare, when he was coming up before he was sort of an established playwright had haters. And there's this guy, think Robert Greene who writes this pamphlet called Greene's Grotes Worth of Wit. And it's sort of one of the most famous things that was written sort of contemporaneously about Shakespeare. And he talks about him as this upstart crow beautified with our feathers, you know, our other playwright's feathers that he's this pretender.Divia (05:59)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (06:18)Why would you be writing that about a person, somebody who was, you know, pseudonymous? This is somebody who's really trying to, I think, go after Shakespeare. There's like, I think pretty strong case that, you know, that if it was well known amongst the writing class at the time, or, you know, the playwrights that he was a pseudonym that he probably wouldn't have been, you know, he wouldn't have written that. It would have looked really completely ridiculous to do that.Divia (06:27)Mm-hmm.Like you think you would have used the real name of whoever it was or you wouldn't have written it all or something different.Draculaic (06:49)Yeah, I think you probably wouldn't have written at all in that case. think that it's, you know, the purpose of it was to damage Shakespeare's reputation. That was the purpose of that pamphlet. And he's like, I think he even like uses like paraphrases of Shakespeare's text in order to denigrate him. And the entire purpose, it was a hit job, because he was, he saw him as a rival. AndDivia (07:15)Yeah.But like, what if, I mean, I don't know, there are pretty popular Twitter accounts that are pseudonymous and in some cases like really pretty anonymous too. It seems like people could write hit pieces about those Twitter accounts using their handle instead of trying to find out. I mean, I think it's more common among people who are trying to write hit pieces that they do try to dox people and find out their government name or whatever. But I think I've seen it.Draculaic (07:19)Yeah.Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.Divia (07:47)Funny the other way too.Draculaic (07:51)The other way meaning...Divia (07:52)Meaning that people will write something very negative about a Twitter user, but use their Twitter name, even if it's obviously not their real name.Draculaic (08:00)Sure, but in that case, guess the question would be, I mean, you'd have to ask the question how prevalent was that at the time and who would be doing that and why would they be doing that? There's, yeah, and like, you know, for playwrights, think, know, Shakespeare, as far as I'm aware, is sort of the only person that people say this about. And I have a sort of a long thing about that, which is thatDivia (08:10)how prevalent it was to use pseudonyms basically.Draculaic (08:26)I think one of the things to dig into and to talk about is sort of the historical context of Shakespeare's writing. And it's a miracle that we have the plays at all, this sort of point one. And it's also the case, and I think you undoubtedly, if you've looked into this and probably run across this, that the plays were basically, it's funny that you bring up Twitter because Twitter was going to be an example that I used because the plays themselves were ephemera. They weren't meant to beDivia (08:33)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (08:56)things that were. Yeah.Divia (08:57)I did hear this. Yeah, what I just learned about that, but please correct me if I'm wrong, is that they did this partly so that, because there weren't the sort of copyright protections where they could prevent other people from performing them if they were written down and they took them. So they didn't write them down. Is that basically right?Draculaic (09:14)well, yeah, also like, you know, mass printing was, more of a luxury back in the day. And the idea that you would want to have printed copies of the plays and that they would reflect literary value was just not something that was considered at the time. It's as if people would be printing out, you know, scripts for the Batman, you know, and shipping those like around, you know, I mean, I'm sure people do that now because you can, but like,Divia (09:20)Right.Mm-hmm.Draculaic (09:43)It would have been expensive to do that at the time. And it's not something that would have been thought to be something that would have been of high literary value and worth the expensive.Divia (09:52)Like no one was consuming them that way. No one was reading. I mean, they couldn't have, because they weren't written down at the time.Draculaic (09:58)What did happen at the time was that you would have people that would, there was some interest amongst the population in having some memorial copies of the plays. the ways that those were largely constructed were the quartos. And what those usually were, you know, they're called quartos because they were folded twice, which meant that you saved on paper, which meant that it was really cheap to print them. And what ended up happening is that generally speaking, we think of these as sort of,bad versions of the text. can get to the sort of here and there. You can get chunks of the lines correct because largely what it is, is there plays that are being constructed out of the sort of the memories of the various actors that they had sort of conscripted to write the quartos. There were like bootleg versions of the plays that were going around as a result of this. And so people would be interested in reading them, but there wasn't an effort until after Shakespeare died.to produce a high quality version of this. And that was the folios. And those are mostly constructed by people who took the time and the effort to go through after Shakespeare died to gather up basically the books that had been used internally by the players to memorize their lines, to be distributed, to gather those together and assemble.Divia (11:22)YouDraculaic (11:23)a text out of that. And so those are generally speaking thought to be, you know, they're not not perfect, they're thought to be sort of more reputable and more more correct. So the idea that I think the main idea is that although there were obviously sort of bootlegs at the time, and there was sort of this posthumous version of the place that came together, these weren't things that were like designed for literary publication, the way that, you know,poems at the court or masks were designed to be for publication because those were seen to be sort of the higher art. And it's kind of funny. think I certainly have my personal opinion about why this is, those, you know, it's interesting that we don't retrospectively think of them as being the, I mean, we think of them as being important literary documents, but we don't think of them as being like central to the identity of Western literature the way that we think of Shakespeare's.Divia (11:57)Mm-hmm.You mean the poems.Draculaic (12:22)Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's also like this weird artifact of history that the there was this sort of reputational upswing in shape for Shakespeare anyway. I mean, people thought of him as being a very good playwright as a playwright back back in the day. But like, again, plays weren't all considered to be all that important. And it was really only like, you hundreds of years after he died that there was thisDivia (12:41)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (12:51)effort to reclaim him. And it was, there were some people before the romantics, but the romantics were some of the people that really appreciated Shakespeare and are part of the reason for his reputation sort of hitting the heights that it did. And so there wasn't like really a contemporary need to, you know, there wasn't a contemporary.valuation of the place, I think, is part of what I'm trying to say. were thought of as being entertainments. were thought of being sort of non-essential at the time. It was only sort of in retrospect that we've ascribed the value to them. And one of the things that I think is interesting about that is that a lot of the theories that Shakespeare did in the right Shakespeare as a result of this don't happen. They don't arrive until like the 1800s.Divia (13:45)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (13:46)And it's not like there were people that were at the time or even 100 or 200 years later that were saying, or I guess 200 years later is roughly 1800s, but it's not like there were people close to Shakespeare's time that were saying that the plays were not written by Shakespeare. It was only something that happened sort of much, much later.Divia (14:07)We don't have any record of people at the time doubting the authorship or speculating about it or anything like that.Draculaic (14:12)Exactly.Divia (14:16)Okay. Yeah. So I have various things I want to ask about, I'm going to try again to see if you can lay out any more of your main case before I go there.Draculaic (14:16)yeah.Sure, yeah. Another big part of it, I think, is the fact that most of the people who are making the case against Shakespeare, there's no smoking guns. There's a lot of bits and pieces of maybe there's a cryptic thing that was hidden into the play. And I've had people try to convince me that, look at this one or two lines. And my feeling about this, and this is certainly something that I could go into because it's a personal interest of mine.that when Shakespeare wants to put a pattern into his plays, it's not subtle. It's extensive. It's the entire play. It's something that is very foregrounded. And I'm definitely happy to talk about examples of that if you're interested.Divia (15:11)Yeah, let's just do at least one example or a few.Draculaic (15:15)Sure. This, by the way, I think is also an argument for the idea that Shakespeare was a continuous person with a continuous style, because you see certain patterns, certain interests all across his entire sort of body of work. A big one is doubling, doubles. And some of this, think, is just like as a motif, idea ofDivia (15:38)What does that mean?Draculaic (15:43)things being doubled. And I think some of this comes from the fact that theater itself is predicated on doubling. There's an actor and then there's the...Divia (15:44)Okay.you mean like somebody pretending to be somebody else type of doubling, not things being twice as much as they previously were.Draculaic (15:57)No, like, pretty much all permutations of the idea of doubling. Any way that you can think about doubling as a phenomenon, I think, shows up in Shakespeare. And it shows up in his very early plays, then shows up in his very his last plays as well. And I think it sort of hits a fever pitch around the time that he writes, around 1600, when he writes Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and a poem, a long poem called The Phoenix and the Turtle, all of which deal withdoubling as sort of a motif. like, Hamlet, think is sort of one of the best test beds to talk about this, because like it's all over Hamlet. It's like in every possible dimension of the play, the idea of doubling shows up. And like a really trivial example is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a double, but then those same actors that play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern probably also play two ambassadors that are indistinguishable from each other.there's, they also play two other characters called, Volta Monocornelius. there's a whole other thing. I know that you guys got into, Will Kemp, and you know, his role. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a whole theory, around Lear that there was a doubling of parts between, that Kemp played both Cordelia and also played the fool.Divia (17:12)He was the funny guy, right? Yeah.Draculaic (17:28)and that's the whole complicated thing that I can go into, but there's like one of the climactic moments. In fact, like the climactic moment of Lear, is a moment where Lear is presiding over Cordelia's dead body and says, and my poor fool is hanged. And there's this like moment, like, what if that actor played both roles? that, that would have had extra resonance at the time. there's, I have a personal theory. go ahead.Divia (17:52)Okay. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. You finished that. question.Draculaic (17:57)If that pattern obtains, by the way, Kemp had played both Cordelia and The Fool, you have a situation where the character, actor's playing both a heroine and sort of a clown character. You can play with this in Hamlet too, that what if the same character, same actor that played Ophelia also plays the first gravedigger. And so then when Hamlet...Divia (18:15)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (18:27)goes to the first gravedigger and says, whose grave is this? He says, mine. Which would have had a resonance, yeah, which would have had that resonance too. But like, I'm just scratching on the surface. It's like, it's not just in like, go ahead.Divia (18:32)I see. Yeah, interesting.Okay, wait, wait. So here's my question about this. It seemed like one of the first you were saying that something that people like the anti-stratfordians try to say is that there are sort of clues in the plays or elsewhere that maybe it's a pseudonym. That's one thing people say. But you don't buy it because you think when Shakespeare has some sort of thing he wants to communicate, he does it in more like an over-the-top pervasive way.Draculaic (18:57)Yes. Yeah.Yeah, I think that when he wants to work patterning into his text, roughly my case is that that's not subtle and it's not like one or two lines. I think that's kind of thin gruel. And you don't really have to do a huge amount of work to interpret it. It's like, it's so.Divia (19:28)And presumably you also think though that all of the stuff about doubling is not particularly evidence that he was not who he said he was. You think that does not support that.Draculaic (19:37)That's, I like that. But I think that.I think that one of the things that he does is he's oftentimes very clear when he creates, he loves parallel structure in his plays. And he loves having characters come out and say things that the audience is also, you know, that reflects what the audience is going through. And so one of the things that the characters say that Horatio says in the opening scene of Hamlet is, you know, in what particular thought I know not what.how to work, essentially. can't make sense of what's going on. that a close reading of that scene is that it's very difficult to understand the information that's coming into you in that scene. And in that last scene in Lear, there's part of the effect and the reason that that play is so powerful. And I can definitely talk about that.Divia (20:22)which reflects the audience perspective probably.Draculaic (20:44)but part of the reason it's so powerful is because of the way that that last scene in particular is structured. and one of the things that it does is it wraps up all the subplots and the sort of the main plot is that the, the wicked son Edmund has taken Lear and taken Cordelia and is going to execute them. and part of what happens in that scene is that everything gets wrapped up and then somebody says, well, what about Lear? And then somebody else says, great thing of us forgot.which is also a thing where the audience has forgotten about Lear because of all this other action that's happening on the play. And so, and there's, and I have other examples too. There's another thing in the closet scene where Gertrude says, where Hamlet says, I must to England. And Gertrude says, I, you know, I had forgotten about that. And that's something that had happened many scenes earlier where Claudius had said that he was going to send him to England. like,Divia (21:17)Maybe forgot.Yeah.Draculaic (21:43)Generally speaking, and there's examples too of like, you know, mobs in Shakespeare are standing in for people watching the plays. And so when Shakespeare wants to tell you something about how to, about what he intends for his audience, it's generally reflected in sort of the timber or the text of the plays. And I don't really see.Divia (22:04)Okay, so you think he was not trying to do any sort of subtle, like, I'm not who I say I am. You would not count, you basically dismiss any evidence of that.Draculaic (22:13)Yeah. And in fact, what I would say is the opposite. I say that there's evidence in his work that he is who he says he is. And those are both sort of implicit and explicit. So some examples of those. It's interesting because think where it was talking about Henry IV. And he had some really interesting things to say, some things that I hadn't really thought about before. And it was interesting, I thought, by the way, that he was talking about Shakespeare's emphasis.Divia (22:24)Yeah, what are some examples?Draculaic (22:42)One, that Shakespeare would have known the whole acting troupe, is undoubtedly true, which is a very good point. And two, that the emphasis on family I thought was pretty interesting, particularly because you guys.Divia (22:49)Yeah. Okay, but that said, at least some of the candidates that people think might not be Shakespeare also had families. This was one thing that I, like if I were to go back to that one after I looked into this a little more.Draculaic (23:00)Yeah, absolutely. And if I were to put my sort of literary critic hat on, I would note that you guys went in your conversation to talk about family. So it was obviously something that was important to think were. And I think there's something in Shakespeare where one of the things that's sort of a miraculous feature of the plays is that if you have something that you're passionate or you care about, you will find it in the plays, which is kind of neat. Yeah, exactly. As one of my TAs put it when I was in undergrad, it's all there, which is kind of amazing.Divia (23:10)Yeah.Yeah, because they cover so much.Draculaic (23:31)The thing that I thought he was gonna say about Henry IV is that I think in Henry IV and Henry V, which are very, very interesting plays, that what they found is they found court records of John Shakespeare, Shakespeare's father. they found, you know, there's summons where he was like had to go to court because he wasn't showing up to church because he was afraid of debtors that were gonna come after him. And there were other people that were.Divia (23:58)as you sing.Draculaic (23:59)listed in this, and I'm happy to send you this document. And some of the people that are mentioned as his neighbors are people that are minor characters in Henry IV, part one and part two. Yeah.Divia (24:01)Yeah.interesting. But that does seem like some pretty good. I like that. I did not know that.Draculaic (24:14)Yeah, and like for me, it's like, just why would you do that if you weren't William Shakespeare, if you didn't know these people, right? And there's some other stuff, there's some other incidental stuff too, like the fact that the, so the sonnets, and I'm a little bit wary of reading too much autobiography into the sonnets. I think that's a mistake you can make because there's a thorough distance and Shakespeare is certainly sophisticated enough not to have it just be pure autobiography.Divia (24:22)Yeah, okay.show.Draculaic (24:44)by graphical content, but there is one sort of sonnet that's famous where he talks about, like the dyer's hand, I am immersed in the thing that I am writing about. that metaphor suggests knowledge of dying, particularly glove dying, which is the profession that John Shakespeare had. Yeah, so there's a fair amount of like,Divia (24:55)Okay.That's his dad. Interesting. Okay.Draculaic (25:12)circumstantial evidence. And there's other stuff too, like the fact that, so he has a lot of classical illusions in his plays, particularly to Rome, which I know your husband would be very excited about. the, you know, a lot of that, you people have, have traced it and what they've figured out is that a lot of the illusions that he refers to are things that are explicitly in thecurriculum that he would have encountered as somebody who is learning Latin in Stratford in grammar school. It's not like he has like super deep complex. Yeah, it's like exactly. the stuff that like, and so the stuff that he references is stuff that he would have been familiar with. You know, there's a lot of that kind of stuff where it's like, there's, it points toDivia (25:47)Okay.It's not like a deep cut. It's the normal curriculum stuff.Draculaic (26:09)it points to somebody who was this person.Divia (26:14)Okay, so would you humor me? I felt this is one website, Shakespeare Oxford fellowship.org. I asked people for links to look at. This is one that someone sent me in response to that. And I, I don't know. This is one that I was looking at a bunch before I was talking to you. And it has 12 reasons to question Shakespeare. It has some other lists too, but would you humor me and I can go through these and you tell me what you think of them. Okay.Draculaic (26:21)Mm-hmm.Sure, go for it.Divia (26:39)So the first one is where's the paper trail and basically says that no one has found any letters written by Shakespeare to anyone and that this should be surprising.Draculaic (26:50)I think the part of that that I dispute is that I actually went through and I've read some of the stuff as well. So the part of that that I would dispute is that it's surprising that this is the we.Divia (27:06)Okay, and they claim, it says, and I have not fact-checked this myself, but it says, thorough survey of two dozen other English writers of the time found all of them had more documentation of their literary careers than he did. I guess that's different from the letter thing. Sorry, this one has two things, that people, that they claim that people are not recognizing him as a writer and that they did recognize other writers of the time as writers. Sorry, okay, so you dispute that this is surprising.Draculaic (27:29)Yeah, I don't think it's surprising. think that relative to his sort of cultural importance that we have actually a surprising, if anything, surprising amount of documentary evidence suggesting that he was a human being that lived at that time. Yeah, mean, why would we wouldn't have those? I don't think.Divia (27:43)but he just didn't write letters.You think even if, you think basically the fact that we don't have them is very little evidence about whether he wrote them. You think he probably did write letters, we just don't have them?Draculaic (27:57)I mean, it's possible, like, mean, who is he writing to? He's probably writing to like, you know, yeah, and back in Stratford and why would, I don't know why we would have those necessarily. I think that the amount of documentary evidence that we have relative to the person that he was at the time is actually pretty strong.Divia (28:00)I don't know his family, his friends.Okay.Okay, and then similarly this thing about no one during his lifetime clearly recognized him personally as a writer. Does that seem true to you? Does that seem relevant to you?Draculaic (28:29)I mean, again, I think that's just not true. think that, youDivia (28:34)Because that's the intention with the thing you previously said, right about the guy with the folios who was talking about him and recognizing him.Draculaic (28:40)Yeah, Ben Johnson and also like, you know, the gross worth of wit talking specifically doing a takedown of him. You know, that's definitely during his his lifetime. And it's definitely referring to him as a writer. It's not like, you know, there may be like a semantic thing here where they're not specifically talking about, you know, Shakespeare is a writer, but like, there's a lot of implication that, you know, this is a writer who's competing with us.Divia (28:47)Mm-hmm.Yeah, okay. All right, and then number two, this seems sort of similar and I think you just dispute this one. Number two on their list is why the gap in the historical records during Shakespeare's lifetime references to the author. Shakespeare basically impersonal, some don't even use the name, but just to allude cryptically to works like Venus and Adonis. Many references imply Shakespeare as a pen name. See number six, so I guess we'll get there. The documents we have relating personally to Shakespeare of Stratford reveal mundane business activities, but never hint at any literary career.Draculaic (29:37)Yeah, mean, Shakespeare, this is a bit of a simplification, but Shakespeare was somebody who wrote, again, these sort of unimportant, defemoral plays at the time, made money doing that, and then used that to find real... And Paul, this is true, but mostly plays. This was mostly where he made his money. And he used that for real estate. And most of the records that we have are about his real estate, because...Divia (29:47)Mm-hmm. And poems. He did write all the-MmDraculaic (30:06)Again, it's, I think a lot of this is sort of again, a species of the idea of like, there's sort of a fallacy here, which is that because we place such a value on the literary content now that there must be somehow some thing historically that would have preserved, you know, that would have would have captured that. And I think that once you sort of understand that there's a big disconnect betweenDivia (30:29)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (30:35)you sort of develop. Yeah, that a lot of this room'sDivia (30:35)how we see them and how they saw them. Then you think a lot of these things are no longer actually surprising with that view. Okay. All right, let's see some of these other ones. Yeah, this is pretty similar. It says that Shakespeare's family and friends didn't talk about him as though he was a writer. Says Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr. John Hall kept a journal in which he wrote of the excellent poet and Warwickshire native Michael Drayton, but Hall, dude.Draculaic (30:41)Exactly. Yeah.Divia (31:04)never mentioned the Shakespeare himself as a writer.Draculaic (31:07)Yeah, you'll note that the first thing there is poet, not playwright, right? And so, I think that it might be useful to think of playwrights and actors at the time as being in a kind of a weird state because they had benefactors that were in the nobility, but they themselves were somewhere between upwardly mobile,Divia (31:13)Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.Draculaic (31:37)people and also sort of like traveling carnies. You know, there's like, you guys talked about Falstaff and about Henry IV and like, you know, the thing about the Henry plays is that it's full of brothels and it's, there's a mistress, Quick, who's running a brothel and like, there's like all this, you know, sort of very, yeah, not just low bar, but like extremely lower class stuff and like, the evidence is a real familiarity with that world andDivia (31:52)Yeah.like lowbrow stuff.Mm-hmm.Draculaic (32:05)In fact, the Globe Theater at the time would have been basically in the brothel district. Shakespeare's at the time would have been somebody who would have been thought of as being somebody who wasn't particularly, again, sort of like in his lifetime was upwardly mobile, particularly at the beginning of his career, wasn't somebody that was particularly high class.Divia (32:09)Yeah, disreputable.Okay, and so you think this, and that explains why his family and friends didn't talk about him as a writer. You're like, he wasn't their conception of a writer. Yes, he wrote these poems, but it sort of wasn't that big a deal. And so it doesn't seem surprising to you they wouldn't have mentioned it that way.Draculaic (32:46)Yeah, that's roughly accurate.Divia (32:48)Okay, another point five on here is why the complete silence when he died, it said in an age of copious eulogies, the reaction to Shakespeare's death was eerie silence. I'm guessing what you're gonna say here is, yeah, he wasn't considered that important at the time. Okay, and then, so this also disputes what you said earlier. This list says that authorship doubts arose more than 30 years before the first folio.Draculaic (33:02)Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.Divia (33:14)This says, dozens of writings raising question about the author's identity were published for decades before Shakespeare's death in 1616. And it did not arise first, much later. Do you have any, I mean, I don't know. I haven't really tried to fact check any of this, but this is a claim here.If they have some sort of, I don't know, we can try to dig into the citations, but.Draculaic (33:35)I think it would be interesting. I'd have to dig into what those specifically are, but here's my guess. I think that, so this is actually something I talked about with your husband, which is that, you know, for the first several years of the printing press, it was mostly being used for misinformation and for attacks on people. That was the only bulk of what was being published. And like, I think thatDivia (33:57)Okay.Draculaic (34:03)probably there's some amount of like, you know, people who are contemporary rivals of Shakespeare who are, you know, trying to undermine him. And I don't know if these really necessarily qualify as doubting his authorship.Divia (34:20)Yeah, so the one that it mentions specifically, claims there more, but the one it lays out, it says, the title of a 1611 epigram did so openly and with startling bluntness, addressing Shakespeare as our English Terrance, where Terrance was an ancient Roman playwright notorious as a suspected frontman for two hidden aristocratic writers.Draculaic (34:35)so there, so you have to have an insert of an interpretive leap to do that, right? So like, yeah, like, the thing about referring to him, it's interesting, because like people at the time called him, you know, had various ways of referencing classical writers, like the one that he gets the most is probably audit for the metamorphosis. And like, I think that there's sort of a stylistic reason for that, that like, you know, thatDivia (34:39)I guess so, yeah.Draculaic (35:04)Even though it's sort of thematic for Ovid, it's also stylistic, the idea of taking sources and transforming them, which is like a huge part of why we value Shakespeare, I think, is in what he does with his sources and the experience of his plays. But like referring to him as Terrance is just referring to, I think that's a stylistic thing. That's more about like he writes histories, right, which is what Shakespeare wrote partially.Divia (35:29)Yeah, okay, you're like, if you're looking for parallels between Shakespeare and Terrence, the maybe Terrence was a front man for other people is like not in the top few most obvious parallels.Draculaic (35:37)Exactly. Yeah.Divia (35:39)Okay, all right. Here's another one. People talk about his will, that it has detailed disposal of household items, no mention of books, manuscripts, desks, musical instruments, or anything suggesting literary, artistic, or intellectual interest.Draculaic (35:54)Yeah, but you have to think about, and again, I'm not really a historian, but like, the question is, like, what did legal documents at the time focus on? And they often focused on material wealth, as opposed to like, tangible assets, like books or manuscripts. And so he does.Divia (36:13)What is the difference between you're saying because of like a book or manuscript meaning like they didn't have copyright likeDraculaic (36:20)It's just not the kind of thing that would appear in a will, I think. Well, he does sort of famously and possibly notoriously bequest his second best bed to his wife, which is a very famous thing in the will. And some people think that that's insulting, but other people think that, well, the second best bed was the marriage bed. And so it's a bed that would have had like,Divia (36:23)intellectual property would not appear in a will. But what about like a writing desk?second best bed to his wife. Yes, that's right.youWhat was the first best bet?Draculaic (36:49)the first best bed. That's a question. the thing. yeah, I, the, second best bed would have been the, possibly the bed that had more emotional significance. And so that's possibly the reason why he requested it. it is important to note that like the will does have requests to other actors, in it. So it's not like.Divia (36:54)I would have thought that would be the best bed, again, I don't really know.Draculaic (37:19)So it's, I think that a lot of these points are like, if you forgive me for saying so, a little bit legalistic, where like, they're focusing on the letter of something as opposed to like the context and the spirit of something. And so like, yeah, like specifically there aren't like books and manuscripts in the world, but like he's mentioning other actors. And, you know, and I think that suggests a connection to the theater. AndDivia (37:26)Sure.Mm-hmm.Yeah, but I mean, think no one's disputing that he was an actor, right? So that's sort of, think, equally well explained by he's an actor and also by he wrote the plays.Draculaic (37:57)Potentially, but I mean, like it certainly suggests a connection to the theater. And so like.Divia (38:02)Right, but I guess I'm saying like, think that part, I think both the Stratfordians and the anti-Stratfordians would be like, yes, of course Shakespeare had a connection to the theater. He was definitely an actor. Right?Draculaic (38:14)I mean, sure, I'm happy to take that point.Divia (38:16)Or I don't know, if that's not true, then that's what I've been assuming.Draculaic (38:20)yeah, I don't really know enough about the anti-stratfordian position to say that, but I mean, if they're going to concede that he was an actor, certainly. But, I guess one of the things that follows from that though, is that, the other thing to say about the plays is although there is like a strong authorial style to Shakespeare and then I'm only sort of lightly touched on it with like some of the things like doubling. And I can certainly talk about that. I could talk about that for two hours by itself, but, I think that.Divia (38:39)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (38:50)You know, it's also important to note that the plays themselves were like collaborative to a degree and that there was like, mean, that's true of like anybody that's true of like television today. It's true of movies today that like, know, yeah, you have a writer's room, but then you also have a director and then you also have like interactions with the actors and the actors also give you thoughts and feedback. And sometimes you ad-libs and sometimes that works its way into the plays. And so like, I think that,Divia (39:03)Yeah, you have a writer's room.Draculaic (39:20)understanding the nature of the theater itself and the way that the plays were written, you the idea that somebody would be just an actor and be relegated to being an actor, but not a writer is, you know, somebody who would have been written the plays would have had, I think, extremely deep connections to the actors around him too. I think that's sort of an important point to make. And so,That's the kind of thing that you would see in a will.Divia (39:52)Okay. All right. Some other things. Some of these seem more compelling to me than others. So I'm going to, I think, you know, we already talked about, I think we're, and I talked about the people say that his people were not impressed with his signature. I'm not sure. I think I'm persuaded that I shouldn't wait that one too highly. If you want to say more about that, feel free to add your own two cents.Draculaic (40:07)Mm-hmm.I mean, spelling was really inconsistent at the time. Handwriting was really inconsistent at the time. The language wasn't really fixed, which is part of the reason why Shakespeare is able to like do so much with the language at the time. He's sort of at the right place at the right time to do that. you know, legal documents were rushed and formal and, you know, the fact that there were multiple signatures was pretty common, I think. So Idon't really find that particularly, yeah.Divia (40:44)Okay, yay. All right, so here's another one. This is like one of those details that, I don't know, maybe the closest to a claim that this document, this list has to some sort of smoking gun. So the thing about, right. So this says the dedication of the sonnets in 1609 described the author as our ever-living poet. And it says that standard sources confirm that ever-living was used to indicate a deceased person.And that they think that this, yeah, and there was another one somewhere else on the list about like, why didn't he write about, I forget, something that happened before this William Shakespeare's death that they thought it was surprising.Draculaic (41:28)Yeah, but like, okay, so everliving, you'd have to dig into the etymology of like what that means. like, you know, everliving could be potentially something that's used to describe somebody who's dead. It could also be somebody that a term that is used to like, metaphorically suggest literary immortality, rather than like an actual death, you know, andDivia (41:48)Okay, so you question that it's obvious that ever living would mean that the person was dead. You're like, maybe, but that's not obvious.Draculaic (41:55)Yeah, think a lot of this stuff, if I had to sort of characterize a lot of these, I think that a lot of them sort of beg the question where they sort of force you towards a specific interpretation of something and that interpretation either might not be correct or might not be the whole story.Divia (42:12)Yeah, and then there's another whole list on here that I could get into or not that basically, I don't know, among the anti-stratfordians, it seemed more compelling to me, though I didn't, I really didn't do a very deep cut here, that Earl of Oxford seemed like the most compelling candidate to me. And they also have all of this compilation of like, look at all of these.parallels basically between the Earl of Oxford's life and particular things and particular characters and stuff that is in Shakespeare. And I think it's hard for me to really do a decent Bayesian analysis of this. Like, I don't know how much could somebody like Shakespeare's written a lot, how much could somebody kind of find these sort of parallels with a lot of other people too. But I don't know, does any of that interest you? Do you find any of that compelling? Do you want some examples?Draculaic (43:05)So I find it interesting, certainly. And I find it interesting, but not for the reason probably that the anti-stratforians think. So like one of the many doubles in Hamlet. So there's obviously one big double is that there is a play within a play and that each of the characters in the play within a play maps to two of the characters in Hamlet. So there's that kind of doubling. except for one character, which maps to three characters.But that also telescopes out from the play into real life. And I think that's really interesting that Hamlet himself as a character is a double, is somebody who is both the Earl of Essex, who was once Queen Elizabeth's favorite sort of courtier, but then subsequent after Hamlet stages a rebellion against her and is executed. But his biography is that hisDivia (44:00)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (44:04)you know, father was murdered and his mother remarried. And he was somebody who dressed in black like Hamlet. And so there's like that echo there. But at the same time, there's also King, the future King James, James the Sixth at the time, later to James the First when he's the king, who was melancholy and who was a scholar and whose mother, his father also was murdered. And in that case, the father, the mother remarried the murderer, just like in Hamlet.And so there's a lot of stuff in the plays that is like drawn from the actual observable lives of many people in the play. And there's ways in which, know, a trivial example of Macbeth that is also about King James is where they talk about, there's this, you know, the idea of secession, which is a very interesting word in Macbeth, ends up beingDivia (44:34)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (45:03)like a major sort of one of the major thematic points. And there's a point in which there is a bunch of kings that are lined up. And the joke is like, it's sort of a half joke. And Macbeth is sort of sees this vision of these kings and what should the line stretch out to the crack of doom. And like, obviously one of the people that's included in that is James the first. there's like, there's like, you know, the plays themselves, I think Shakespeare is veryunique. One of the arguments against covert sort of political content being smuggled explicitly into Shakespeare is one that there are better candidates for that, that we would have done that more explicitly.Divia (45:42)What do you, sorry, can you, what do mean? They're better candidates.Draculaic (45:45)There are people who are more explicitly political in their content. Marla, yeah, exactly. And one of the things that's true about Shakespeare is that Shakespeare is very, very good about balancing in his plays and not really signaling too much one side or the other. One example of this is that, you know, one of the things that's true, and this could be a two hour conversation by itself, is that Hamlet is something that's legible both.Divia (45:49)Like playwrights at the time, you mean? Okay.Draculaic (46:14)to Protestants and to Catholics. And that would have been a very complicated thing because Protestantism was relatively new. was Elizabeth's father that had set up the Church of England. And most of the people in the country, to include Shakespeare's father and probably Shakespeare himself, were covert Catholics. I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about this. And there was a thing aboutYou know, one of the conspiracy theories is which was Shakespeare's secret Catholic. And I talked to my thesis advisor about that and he's like, yeah, they all were. That was true, true of everybody at the time. But like, it's a very complicated moment, you know, sort of in terms of the sectarian history of Elizabethan England. And so Shakespeare would have walked that line. And I think that generally speaking, when politics arises, he's somebody who's very careful.Divia (46:49)Interesting.Draculaic (47:10)in the way that he represents it, he definitely can be perverse and provocative, which is something that is characteristic of his place, but he's not somebody who is explicitly political in the way that some others.Divia (47:21)Okay, yeah, because this is also something that comes up is like, how did he not get in trouble for writing the controversial stuff that he did? And maybe that's your answer to that. You're like, well, he was very careful actually.Draculaic (47:31)He was pretty careful. like, for the most part, you'd have to, you'd say like relative to other playwrights, like, you know, this stuff that he does is pretty, again, pretty careful. The closest thing that he does to getting in trouble, as I understand it, is that, again, when the Earl of Essex stages his rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, one of the things that he does is he stages, you know, he puts on a,Divia (48:00)Who was the Earl of Essex?Draculaic (48:01)He is one of the people I was talking about as being a model for Hamlet.Divia (48:08)Right, yeah, I was just wondering if you knew what his name was. I can look it up.Draculaic (48:11)no, I don't know his name off the top of my head, he, his, his history is that he was sort of the most favorite courtier of Elizabeth. She sends him to go pacify Ireland. He fails at doing that. He comes back. there's a, there's a whole thing that, that, that sort of erupts as a result of that. And he, you know, and he falls out of favor with her and then he gets upset and he stages a rebellion.that fails and he's executed for that. By the way, the thing that he does is to stage a play when he does this, which is something that even though this happens subsequent to Hamlet is also something that is echoed in Hamlet. the play that he stages is Richard II. And there's sort of a famous thing there where, so like Richard II is the play that comes right before 100 IV.Divia (48:48)Okay.in Hamlet.Draculaic (49:10)part one and then part two and then Henry the fifth, which is sort of all arguably one sort of limited series, if you will. And what happens in Richard the second, Richard the second himself as a character is among other characters in Shakespeare, kind of a proto Hamlet. There are other characters that are like this too. Brutus is kind of a proto Hamlet in some ways as well. But the thing aboutthose plays is that a lot of them are centered around Henry V as a character. And there are different models for what kind of kingship Henry V is going to have. That's an enormously complicated topic. one of the things that, know, and there's different sort of ways, different foils for Henry V in which he is, you know, he's not like his father, Henry IV. He's not likeDivia (49:51)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (50:10)This guy Hotspur, who's his contemporary, who's a little bit too hot headed, sort of the sunny Corleone of the plays. He's not like Falstaff, who is on the one hand very witty and is very gifted with language, but is also like a person of ill repute and a person of low honor. And he's not like Richard II. And Richard II is somebody who is somebody in the play who confuses his mirror image for himself, who doesn't understand the difference betweenDivia (50:28)Mm-hmm.Draculaic (50:39)having the kingship as sort of a title and being a king is a big part of that and is too reflective and is successfully overthrown by Henry IV, who is a person who is more of action and is less of sort of the mind. Henry, when Essex stages his play as a protest against Elizabeth, he stages Richard II.And he does that because he wants to draw the parallel between Elizabeth and Richard II and claim that he is Henry IV, essentially. you know, Shakespeare is somewhat insulated from this and Shakespeare is, you know, sort of a juggler to remove from Essex. And I think it may or not be his particular troop that stages this play. But theDivia (51:17)Okay.Draculaic (51:36)That's as close as he gets, I think, to anything that is really going to be. Yeah, I think that there's definitely things where he's poking. I think it is characteristic of his plays that he loves to be right on the edge of, know, perversity and like right on the edge of things that are permissible. But I don't think he's overtly directly political in the way that, you know, even other contemporary playwrights were.Divia (51:39)to anything really controversial.Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.Okay. All right. Here, that makes sense to me. Here's some other questions. So this is at least a little bit about these parallels people talk about between the Earl of Oxford's life and some stuff that shows up in plays. So at one point they talk about how Polonius is, has been long recognized. I don't know what that means as a parody of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley. So would you, does that seem right to you? I don't know if you're familiar with this one.Draculaic (52:29)It seems entirely possible, but it seems like they're...Divia (52:32)And you're like, he could have done that anyway, basically. So it's true that Oxford knew this guy, he was his guardian and later his father-in-law. But is that, yeah. So I don't know if it's true that that Polonius is meant to have a lot of parallels to that guy. But then, yeah, if it were true, would you think it was much evidence or would you be like, no, because Shakespeare could have done that also.Draculaic (53:01)Yeah, I mean, I think probably the latter. think that, you know, it's probably the case that, you know, I think it's illustrative to think about contemporary writers and what we think about contemporary writers as being analogs for this. just because you're somebody who is not inside, not an aristocrat and not somebody who's of the nobility,doesn't mean that you sitting in Los Angeles can't write about the White House.Divia (53:34)Yeah, you're basically like you would have known a bunch of gossip. And so if there are parallels between what he wrote about and stuff happening in aristocratic circles, like you don't think that's surprising basically.Draculaic (53:43)Yeah, and he would have had patrons and he would have had like access to this. Like, it's, I don't think that's surprising at all. And I think that, you know, London at the time, it was a pretty small town and he would have had been a degree or two removed from this stuff at most. like, I think that, you know, don't forget at a certain point he becomes, you his players become the King's men. And so they would have had, you know, more direct access. Like, I think that,it's entirely possible that somebody of Shakespeare Station would have had access to all this kind of biography.Divia (54:17)Okay, cool. So I think I don't have a ton more from the things that I was looking at as obvious questions to ask you, though I'd love to, I don't know, to just think about it a little bit more on my own and hear more thoughts about it. I think you have definitely done a good job answering the things that I did bring up. In particular, I...Draculaic (54:44)I hear that.Divia (54:45)Yeah, the thing you said about, like, well, he's, like, mentions his specific neighbors. That seems more compelling to me than maybe any other individual thing you said, because the idea that he would write about aristocratic stuff or like, you know, sometimes I guess I didn't bring this one up directly, but people would be like, but whoever wrote this seemed to know so much about details of the law. And like, why would Shakespeare have known that? Yeah, OK.Draculaic (55:13)I have a theory about that, by the way. So one of the things that people talk about with Shakespeare's life is that there's lost years, that we know about what he did when he was a young man, and then we don't really know all that much about what he did in sort of his teenage years, as it were, and then we sort of know about him as a playwright. And...My personal theory, just a personal theory, is that one of the things that he could have done is he could have been a paralegal. I have worked as a paralegal myself, so maybe that's me projecting on that. I think that the kinds of things that you're trained to think about as someone who prepares for the law are things that you see reflected structurally in the plays. That you're trained to think about weighingDivia (55:43)Yeah.I'm just saying.Projecting.Draculaic (56:08)arguments back and forth without making a decision. And you're trained to think about legal strategy. like one of the things that I think is, so one of the things that's a big core part of the thing that I wrote is that I think that Shakespeare just as an aesthetic form is very interested in things that are their own opposites. And one of the things that he does a lot is, and this, this in some cases isDivia (56:11)Okay.Draculaic (56:36)subtle and in some cases it's overt. And one case place where it's overt is in Macbeth, where they talk about equivocation and about, which was a legal strategy at the time, which is in order to not say something that was going to be incriminating, you would say something that was going to be, you know, that was equivocating instead. so there's equivocation.doesn't just sort of show up as like a named sort of thing in the text that people talk about as a strategy, but it's also something that is part of the content and the structure of the text itself.Divia (57:15)that the text includes people equivocating? Is that what you're saying?Draculaic (57:18)the text equivocates. like equivocation is like when you sort of refuse to make, or you imply something that could be taken in multiple ways. so that kind of ambiguity is something that's in Macbeth. And also there's like a lot of equivocating between two things that would seem to be contrary in the play. And so like famous examples are things likeDivia (57:25)take a position in a clear way.youDraculaic (57:48)know, is fair and fair is foul. There's a lot of what we would think of as like paradox, but they would call equivocation in the play. And that's like.Divia (57:50)Yeah, okay.Interesting. Okay, so in that case, you basically are like, yes, it does seem like Shakespeare has particularly deep legal knowledge, and you have an alternate explanation, which is that he perhaps studied the law or like had was employed in a way that gave him a lot of exposure to legal concepts.Draculaic (58:05)Yeah, pretty.Yeah, that seems completely plausible to me.Divia (58:17)Okay, cool. All right, well, I think, I don't know. mean, talking to you, I'm like, this all sounds very reasonable. I have not talked to any sort of equivalent anti-stradfordian, you know, in like this type of back and forth. I've read some stuff, but I feel like that's never gonna be as persuasive to me as talking to someone who has reasonable responses to them and my questions. So.Draculaic (58:40)Mm-hmm.I have a couple of things I want to add too, which so one of the, it's interesting that one of the things that you brought up is not sort of the core argument that I hear a lot from people who think that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare. The core argument that I hear is that, and possibly this is just a result of the research that you've done, but one of the big arguments that I hear is that theDivia (58:46)Yeah, go.Draculaic (59:12)you know, it had to have been somebody from the nobility to write these plays because of the quality of the plays themselves, because they're so, such rich texts. Yeah.Divia (59:22)Yeah, yeah, no, certainly I did, this occurred to me, but I guess I didn't find that one that persuasive, which is why I didn't bring it up, though I do wanna hear what you have to say about it.Draculaic (59:31)Yeah, it's interesting because that's the one that I hear the most actually is that, and that I usually hear it as some form of like, well, he couldn't have written these plays because he only had a grammar school education, which would have been extremely rigorous Latin recitation for most of his young adulthood. like, I think that the, so I think I have some good arguments against this, which are that the,Divia (59:45)Yeah.Draculaic (59:59)Number one that is okay. one example of this is if I mentioned to you two movies that came out in 1994, Timecop and Pulp Fiction, which of these do you think by common consensus would be the movie that people 100 years from now will be most likely to look back on as being something that was of merit, of literary merit?Divia (1:00:12)Okay.I mean, certainly Pulp Fiction seemed like the one everyone talks about now, so I guess that would be my best guess. I've seen, I think I've seen, I've seen at least part of Pulp Fiction. I don't know if I've watched it all the way through. I don't think I've seen Time Cops, so yeah, that would be the obvious answer.Draculaic (1:00:38)You are not alone in not seeing Timecop. And if I ask you which of these two movies was written by somebody who graduated from a university versus which of these two movies was written by somebody who dropped out of high school, which ones?Divia (1:00:52)Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing it's that, you the famous one is that people would assume it's pulp fiction because it's the famous movie that the educated person wrote it.Draculaic (1:00:58)Yeah, and so I think the thing that I want to say is that writing is a very strange art because you have to be literate and you have to be somebody who is engaged in sort of intellectual affairs to some degree. you know, certainly there were books at the time that Shakespeare is alive and he certainly was by all evidence, you know, somebody who read very widely, even if he may not have.Divia (1:01:21)Mm-hmm.I mean, obviously he referenced a bunch of stuff.Draculaic (1:01:27)Yeah, and there's some cases where you can see like the, you can see his sort of stitching a little bit where one famous example of that is that there, I think, I forget who the historical source is, but there's a historical source when he's writing Anthony and Cleopatra that is talking about her barge. And you can see the original text and you can see,her barge like a burnished throne, dot, dot, dot, in Anthony and Cleopatra. And you can actually see the source and you can see what he's written and you can see how he's doing the transformation of that. so you.Divia (1:02:01)Okay.Yeah, I think I saw something also somewhere, I can't remember now, about the to be or not to be speech as referencing some other thing.Draculaic (1:02:16)what was that? I could give you an hour just on the to be or not to be speech. but I, the, the, the overall point I want to make is that writing is a very strange thing where you have to be widely read and literate to be good, but you also have to have talent. And, you know, just cause you've gone to the university and, know, it doesn't mean the time cops going to be a good movie. And conversely, you know, like,Divia (1:02:17)I might be remembering that right.Okay, nevermind, ignore that because I don't remember what it was I saw about that.Mm-hmm.Sure.Draculaic (1:02:46)you can drop out of high school and still have this obsessive interest in film and film history and how to put story together and have a real talent for writing plot and dialogue, right? So like, it's not.Divia (1:02:58)Yeah, I guess this one, right, again, I'm pretty persuaded by this. Like I think for sure, I don't know, I would expect there to be some correlation between elites in general and a conflict. Like of course there's a big correlation there, but the idea that some guy that wasn't one of the elites couldn't have done it, I don't know, it seems to me like he could have, I guess.Draculaic (1:03:16)Yeah, I think for some people this also becomes like kind of a stocking horse conversation about, you know, class and merit. And I think that like, that's really complicated with writing. And it's complicated in the following way, which is that unquestionably there are people who come from the aristocracy that are extremely talented writers. know, Sir Philip Sidney is one of them. All the romantic poets are lords, Lord Byron.And there are a lot of people in a lot of great writers that are aristocrats. Conversely, there's a lot of great writers that come from extremely modest circumstances, including peers of Shakespeare. Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe both come from relativelyDivia (1:04:04)I mean Christopher Marlowe is one of the candidates people also bring up.Draculaic (1:04:08)Yeah, but like he's also somebody who comes from modest circumstances. I forget what his parents are, but they're like, they're definitely lower class working class people. and, know, which is pretty characteristic of playwrights at the time. And, the, you know, other people that are people who come from the lower classes, you know, George Orwell, although I don't really think of him as a fiction writer so much as a polemicist, but, you know, Charles Dickens.is somebody who comes from the lower classes. Like there's a lot of people from the lower class as well. like overwhelmingly, the bulk of writers are bourgeoisie through time, overwhelmingly. And it's because my theory about that.Divia (1:04:37)Yeah.Well, also it wasn't considered respectable to be a playwright, right?Draculaic (1:04:57)Yeah, it's also not considered respectable to be a writer, generally speaking. Yeah. And so in order to be somebody who has enough leisure time to be a writer, but not so much prestige that you don't write, the sweet spot is, think, to be sort of middle class or upper middle class, which is the overwhelming bulk of most writers through history. So I think there is...Divia (1:05:03)at all, yeah.Mm-hmm.Draculaic (1:05:25)an effort by some people to claim Shakespeare as somebody who had to have been at the upper class. But you had other people that were contemporaries that were of the upper class that were unquestionably great writers. It's just that Shakespeare happened not to be one of them. And I think that, and I think just sort of as a code of that, I think that the, one of the things about that is that it is again, sort of an accident of history that we giveDivia (1:05:39)Yeah, I buy it.Draculaic (1:05:54)merit to the plays. I think that that has to do with the fact that they just happen to be literary documents that are extremely engaging and they can operate in sort of many dimensions at the same time in a way that, you know, courtly poetry doesn't.Divia (1:06:04)Mm-hmm. Yeah.Yeah, no, I think you're right to bring that up, because even though I didn't personally find it persuasive, that is a top thing that people do like to say about this.Draculaic (1:06:16)youDivia (1:06:22)All right, I think, I don't know, think I might be, I might not have too many more questions. Any final words on your end?Draculaic (1:06:30)you know, not, we've, mostly talked about authorship stuff. I've mostly dabbled in the other stuff that I've talked about. I feel like I've just sort of touched the surface on some of the stylistic stuff. I certainly think that, there's stuff that Thinkwart was saying about how much he admires Henry IV and Lear are very interesting. I, would, had we but world enough in time, I would be very happy to talk about my opinion about why those plays work the way they do. But that's probably a separate conversation.Divia (1:06:57)Okay, let's say at least one thing though. If anyone who's listening to this wanted one recommendation for you for something to particularly check out or maybe read it again or read it for the first time or any passages, what's your top Shakespeare recommendation for people?Draculaic (1:07:12)it's my top Shakespeare recommendation, like in terms of the plays.Divia (1:07:15)Yeah, like I don't know, it could be for me too. Like I read a bunch, I read some of the, you know, like I read Rummy and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet and some other stuff like that in school. And then I've been to see Shakespeare in the parks. I've probably seen like a bunch of Shakespeare plays that I haven't really read, but I don't know that much about Shakespeare. So if you had any recommendation for me, what should I check out more?Draculaic (1:07:38)Yeah, sure. So I think it never hurts to reread Macbeth or Hamlet, both of which are great plays and which are extremely, extremely interesting and complicated. But if you're looking for something off the beaten path that most people haven't read as a Shakespeare play, that is a great Shakespeare play. The Winner's Tale is something I might recommend. It's, yeah, it's.Divia (1:07:48)Yeah.Cool, I have not read it. And I don't think I've seen that performed either.Draculaic (1:08:06)Yeah, there's one of Shakespeare's favorite puns is on bear and various different sort of permutations of bears, which, you know, as a Berkeley grad, I'm very, very excited about. But that's the play that has the famous exit pursued by a bear. And when that happens, he's been punning on bear for like three acts before that happens.Divia (1:08:22)nice.That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate getting to learn more about this.Draculaic (1:08:30)Yeah, no. This is great. Thank you for taking the time. This is a public episode. 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In this podcast, Shea and I tried to hunt down a philosophical disagreement we seem to have by diving into his critique of rationality. We went off on what may or may not have been a big tangent about Internal Family Systems therapy, which I’m a big fan of, and which I think Shea thinks should have more caveats?Unfortunately, our conversation got cut short because partway through, Shea got a call and had to deal with some stuff. We hope to record a Part 2 soon!Transcript:Divia (00:01)Hey, I'm here today with Shea, who is my Twitter mutual, recently got a job doing software engineering management at Andro and is an objectivist. I think I've, listened to a long podcast with Shea about objectivism on Daniel Filan's podcast, The Filan Cabinet, which I recommend to anyone who's interested in that. We'll see how much we get into that today. I'm sure it'll come up. Our primary topic for today is, Shay sent me a long list of things and one of them was Contra.rationalists. So I, if you check my Twitter bio, it says I am a rationalist. So I figure there's probably some interesting disagreement here that we can dive into.Shea Levy (00:38)Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I guess with respect to the rationalists, I've been rationalist adjacent for lack of a better term for I guess over a decade now. I originally kind of became aware of it through Ozzy. So Ozzy was on, I don't even remember what the thing, there's somethingSome feminist blog kerfuffle and somebody, a blog I followed, Provocracy, recommended looking at Ozzie's thing on this. And then through Ozzie, I then found the rest of the rationalist sphere. I was mainly on rationalist Tumblr for quite some time. I've been socially connected and intellectually engaged with the community since then in various ways. Some of my closest friends are rationalists.Divia (01:35)Like they say.Shea Levy (01:37)And throughout all that, there's been a kind of general fascination and love for some of the things and then deep frustration and then for some parts of the community, going from frustration into I think something seriously wrong, defective there. I don't know what's interesting to you if you want me to just give my spiel or if you want to talk, I don't know.Divia (01:57)Mm-hmm.So something that comes to mind, I don't know how much this will relate or it won't. The first conversation I remember us having on Twitter, which may not be the first one we actually had, is talking about AI boxing. Does this ring a bell? Yeah, because I think, I don't remember, but I think I was like, okay, who wants to talk about AI boxing or something like that? And you were like, no, this doesn't make any sense because I just would simply not let the AI out of the box. And we ended up talking about it, though then it seemed like-Shea Levy (02:17)Yeah. Yeah.Hey.Divia (02:35)This is probably what you're saying all along, but what I eventually understood you to be saying is, unless I think the AI should come out of the box.Shea Levy (02:41)Well, so, okay, let's start with that one. So I feel like there are a pieces to it, but let's drill into me personally, if I'm the one in charge of the AI Box. So like, will, will see that there are people you should not put in charge of that. But the fundamental thing that I don't buy in the AI Boxing argument is that there is some, like,Divia (02:52)Yeah, you were clear about that. You were not like arbitrary person. That's a good idea. Yes.Right.Shea Levy (03:10)general like key you can turn in anybody's mind to make them believe anything illegitimately like You can I'm not saying I'm like some like you completely like never fall for any scam kind of thing. I'm not saying that like if somebody could trick me about things if I were like in a normal situation where I'm treating them as a like good faith human being that I'm interacting with like I'm certain certainly people can pull something over me I'm not my claim is not thatBut my claim is if I know that this is a like potentially hostile intelligence and now let's set aside whether an AI could do that That's a separate concern I have but like yeah, if I know there's a potentially hostile intelligence. I don't understand how it works I'm well aware that it doesn't work like a human being even if I don't know the details of how it does work like there is not some magic sequence of words that it can tell me thatwill convince me of something false relevant to letting it out. I just don't buy that and none of the arguments I've seen suggest that it's true and it all really seems to rest on the sort of like determinism, lack of like the impossibility of objectivity that like, like the AI could present a like picture that is an illusion.It could present something that looks like something, but it's actually, you know, it looks like X, but it's actually Y and could confuse me visually. And I think there's this idea implicit and sometimes explicit, but implicit in the argument that like, reason is like that, that there's some like reason level illusion possible. I just, that's just not how reason works. So like, if I knew what the situation was, I know it's an AI in the box. I know that it's extremely dangerous.I think it's possible I would let it out, only under the circumstance that it actually convinced me properly and like, because it was right, not because it came up with a clever argument. Like, I would know, I would set up controls beforehand and then reevaluate those controls if I thought they were being breached. Like, there would be a number of things that I could do depending on the specifics to like, actually confirm that the argument it's making is legitimate or not.Divia (05:09)Yeah.Shea Levy (05:28)And so like, yeah, that's basically my view. like, don't think that's something, I don't think it's, certainly not everybody in the population is true of, but I don't think it's something like distinctive to me that like, I've got some special skill here. I think like there's a certain degree of like objectivity and self-awareness and understanding of how, you know, how reasoning and how like persuasion works.that you want to reach that point, like there isn't this magic button that a known adversary in a known adversarial context can compress.Divia (06:04)Yeah, ultimately I think you convinced me that that was basically right.Cause I had, so as people may know, I guess I should say what AI boxing is. And many years ago, Eliezer Yudkowski was, and of course like the whole thing in some ways is moot because his argument was, this was about an AI safety argument where he was like, look, AIs are dangerous. And then at the time people used to be like, but we could put the AI in a box and not connect it to the internet. And then that would not be dangerous. And he was like, okay, but people would let it out. And people were like, I don't think so.And he was like, I'll tell you what, I'll do an experiment and I'll role play the AI and then the person will let me out. And he did do that a number of times. I don't know if it was 100 % of the times he tried it. It might've been, but it was certainly a bunch of them. And he didn't say exactly how he did it because he was like, well, if I say, then people will be like, well, that exact argument would have worked on me, it was in the point and.Shea Levy (07:01)Yeah.Divia (07:03)And then I tried it too. I tried it with a friend of mine and in fact, he let me out as well. And so I was sort of like, okay. Yeah, and as it is, people of course have made AIs and immediately put them on the internet. like no AIs are in boxes as far as I know. Like maybe some hypothetical future AI could be in a box, but that's not really what people are up to anyway. But like it is interesting to me because I, because the first time I heard about LAO's are doing it, I was like, well, how could that possibly be right? I can't imagine anyone doing that. And then I was like, all right, I thought aboutI think of some ways maybe I could do it and then I did it. But I guess it never really occurred to me, I think until talking to you, which seems like a pretty big oversight, that maybe some of those people should have let the AI out of the box. That there aren't actually zero cases where people could let, and of course it could be that it didn't more like he tricked them and, but yeah, there was this other possibility.Shea Levy (07:53)Yeah, I'm curious, you okay sharing publicly what you did or maybe if you could share privately after it?Divia (08:02)I just don't think it was, I'm like, I don't think it was that interesting. I tried to role play the AI and say the most persuasive things I could say, which in fact were me being like, yeah, you could like run these safety checks on me or whatever. But then I was like, but of course like I could fake those. And I think your point is like, well, maybe not though. Like couldn't necessarily fake that stuff.Shea Levy (08:19)Let's take an example that I don't think this is how you would solve the AI safety issue if there's an AI safety issue, but it's something that like ifLike, let's say it's an AI in the old mode that we, before we had weights and things where we thought we were going to write it in code, right? And we had a, AI, what the AI gave you was a formal specification, which is relatively concise that like a mathematical, that a like formal theorem prover could understand. And then a proof, and then like, you'd obviously have to like inspect the proof to make sure it's not like taking advantage of a bug in the theorem prover. Maybe you would give the same proof in multiple theorem provers and all of that.Like that kind of thing, like there are certain aspects of that. Now I don't know if that would be enough. That wouldn't be enough by itself, but there are certain aspects of that. Like I would be very convinced. Yes, this code that is validated has certain really important properties that are relevant to safety. so like it, so yeah, like the, the, the level of thing wouldn't be like, you know, it would have to be a fairly robust.piece and like, part of it would be like, if I'm, if I'm already somebody concerned about AI safety, part of what the AI in the box has to convince me of is like, it basically has to like, if I like, let's say I buy like LA's basic framing around like friendliness and value alignment, like it needs to solve the problem. It needs to solve the value alignment problem and then convince me it's solved it. And if it does, right, if it's super intelligent and this is a real problem and it's or prove that it's not a problem, right? But like.Divia (09:47)Mm-hmm.Shea Levy (09:57)not just, it wouldn't suffice to just say, you know, here's a list of common sense things that you can check and if you check these things, it's probably fine, right? Like, that's not the bar, but like, I know that's not the bar. And so, you know, I wouldn't let it out. Yeah.Divia (10:12)Yeah. Okay. So with that as some stuff in my context, you walk me through your anti-rationalist spiel?Shea Levy (10:20)Yeah, I mean, so I think it's a love hate thing. So it's not purely anti, I mean, yeah. I guess the first thing I'll say is like what drew me to the rationalists originally and still does is outside of objectivism, it's not all of objectivists, but outside of objectivism, it's the only group of people where a significant part of the subcultureexists and is driven by people who care about what's right and what's true and in a way that ties in with like modern understanding of economics and scientific development and things like that that like takes industrial scientific civilization seriously and add value even if there might be some issues with it. And again is like dedicated to understanding what's true and following that where it leads. So there are obviously non-rationalists who have that.Divia (10:54)Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.Shea Levy (11:18)but there's no other like community or like movement that has that as a distinctive characteristic. Other than objectives that I found. Historically, yes, but I mean, so this gets into some of the like philosophical cultural things I put on our list, but like, I think there is a general element in our culture thatDivia (11:18)Sure. Community.other than objectivism, you're saying.Shea Levy (11:45)put pits, idealism against reason and science. And I think the rationalists are one of the few groups of people who on an implicit level have combated that. And I'm emphasizing on an implicit level because this is where the bad side comes in, is I think the explicit ideas in so far as you guys have explicit ideas that you're kind of are coheering around, anyway.Divia (11:57)Mm-hmm.Yeah, we sort of do, we sort of don't.Shea Levy (12:14)explicit AIS or co-hearing around that that are common, think ultimately undermine that interest. like, don't think... No, no, no, even setting aside safety because so like, think, I think some of the safety stuff is a consequence of some of the things I'm thinking about. But aren't concerned about safety have these issues. And it's basically like, I was thinking about this before before you got on the call and like, the there's a sort of like,Divia (12:22)Do you mean the AI safety stuff? Okay. Okay.Okay, but you don't mean that.Shea Levy (12:44)What is the, I have a view on like what the fundamental issue is, but I think the high level it's, and like the sort of, the high level, the surface level of it is a kind of overly, there's an acceptance of a, like a view of the world that,takes too seriously contemporary views on ethics and the nature of science and reasoning and then doesn't grapple with the issues that those ideas have. And so insofar as the thing that attracts me is people who take ideas seriously and want to actually get to the bottom of the issue, the thing that bothers me is that those of you who are more like,explicitly philosophical don't seem to be bothered by the issues with your philosophical framework. And those of you who aren't just get letters stray by the issues. like the biggest sort of surface issue, which I don't think is the fundamental, but the biggest surface issue here is the ethics. I think part of the problem is that there is no consistent ethical framework. There's some, there's a sort of modal, there's a modal framework, but there's not, and like that's part of the problem. Part of the problem isDivia (14:05)That's true, yeah. I would agree with that.Shea Levy (14:12)not seeing these philosophical ideas as needing to be an explicit integrated system. you guys, tents at the level of the kind of culture you're trying to build, a broad tent doesn't work. Like, you need to actually have... It doesn't work for intellectual and value alignment. Like, insofar as your goal is to be an intellectual movement or even a social movement trying to build a...Divia (14:26)What is it doesn't work for what?Shea Levy (14:41)different way of living within the broader culture, which, know, part of it, like the rationalist project is not a coherent project. It's not a specific thing. So like we're sort of like working backwards from like, what are, you know, if you were to say like, what is distinctively rationalist or not? And like anybody would have legitimate quibbles with anything I'm including here. But if I talk about like, like the consequentialism and I'm going to use the AI terminology, but this is not really an AI thing. This is before even without the AI issues, this is the,Divia (14:50)Sure.Shea Levy (15:12)orthogonality thesis or, sorry? Let's take the weak historical, the human version of reason is a slave of the passions, basically like your, or to put it maybe in more rationalist jargon, like.Divia (15:13)Yeah, I don't buy it for what it's worth. I don't buy the orthogonality. Or sorry, there's the weak version and the strong version I could get into the weeds, but I basically don't.Shea Levy (15:34)You have your preferences and maybe you have preferences about your ultimate values, perhaps. It's not ultimate values, it's terminal values is the way you put it, right? And those are maybe for some strains of rationalists, they're evolved in completely. For some, it's sort of a mixture of evolution plus whatever culture you grew up in and experience or whatever. like those are not things you reason about. They're things that you have and then you use reason to achieve. And maybe you havesubsidiary values that you kind of reason yourself into causally that support those ultimate ends but like those are given in some way and then there's a so that's that I think is wrong, but then there's an additional layer on top of it which is and Obviously the ones most of us have and if you're one in this sort of stronger biological camp you say this is like genetic is a sort of like some some flavor of altruism Is sort of like we we were built inIt's built into us to care about other people and to, know, there's, Eliezer has this short story and I wish I knew what it was called, but it's like, it's like about some alien species that isn't at all altruistic and like they're, it's not three worlds collide, no, no, no, it's a different one. It's like, basically, a big part of the story is one of the like aliens evolves an altruistic impulse.Divia (16:48)Do mean three worlds? Is this part of three worlds collide? No. Okay.Shea Levy (17:02)But the alien species is kept technologically down because they're all egoistic in a very, I think, very short-sighted, dumb way. think Eliezer's not taking egoism seriously in this story. But the idea is that each, it's very genetic, selfish gene type thing of each individual cares about itself and then cares about its relatives.based on how closely genetically related they are. And so there's sort of like planet wide warfare constantly. there's like very limited technological development. then the humans come along and they're extremely technologically advanced. And anyway, one part of the story is there's one sort of like genetic mutant in the tribe who's developed altruism. they're like, humanity has like adopted this alien into humanity. And like part of that story though, is that like,Like the alien doesn't believe the humans that they're being altruistic. They think it's like some kind of lie. They're like, how could you possibly evolve this? And like the human is like, yeah, well, we, best guess is a sort of like lucky evolutionary path where like we evolved altruism in a way that could have been exploited, but wasn't. And then it got widespread enough that then it was able to sort of sustain itself. And then that's sort of what.But like, anyway, a key part of the story is that like altruism is clearly in this view, like at least locally opposed to like this flourishing life and maybe it's only if you get lucky. Anyway, but the reason I get into that is like, there's clearly a view amongst many rationalists that not only is altruism my personal terminal value, but it is in fact like a human wide,Divia (18:35)Yeah.Shea Levy (18:51)thing that many humans, if not all, have baked in. And that being baked in is not questionable and is kind of a foundation of ethical reasoning. So first of all, I find that depressingly parochial because not all human beings have And it's only historically, especially historically. If you look at likeDivia (19:11)because lots of people don't behave that way or even profess it. Yeah.Shea Levy (19:17)The first people who explicitly talk about ethics in the Western tradition, it's the ancient Greeks. there's a wide variety of ethical stances that they put forth, but basically none of them are explicitly altruistic in this way. You have elements of things that look like it, but nothing like, the goal was your own perfection and happiness, That is the goal of most of these virtual, ethical, sorry.Most of these ethical theories. That's the goal of most of these ethical theories. And like some of them think, okay, well, that's not really possible. Happiness is not possible, but at least we can reduce pain. But again, it's reducing your own pain. It's not like reducing pain for the people at large. And I think it's a very Christian thing that comes up. So like that's the sort of most service thing. And I can get into like where I think that comes from. But like I think that is...Divia (20:06)Mm-hmm.Wait, okay, so.Shea Levy (20:12)that's the area where like it ties into EA, but even before you get to like the weirdness of EA versus cultural altruism, it's really the altruism part. yeah, anyway, sorry, I've been talking.Divia (20:24)Yeah, okay, no, this is interesting. Let me see if I can back up and maybe try to summarize and try to see what... So unfortunately, I do have like a small sinking feeling that we might not have as substantive a disagreement as I hoped, which... But yeah, okay, I think we will too. Because I'm not really willing to defend the orthogonality thesis, like values are sort of arbitrary things that came from evolution or evolution plus culture. Like I will not defend that thing.Shea Levy (20:38)think we'll get there. I think we'll get there if we keep cooking.Divia (20:54)Okay, I will say a little bit, this doesn't feel like a central point, but like about the Greeks, some could be like, okay, but clearly they did care about some people somewhat, right? That weren't just themselves, not necessarily just for their end.Shea Levy (21:08)Yeah, but nobody doesn't, right? There is nobody who's claiming that like, it's the stupidest, stupidest straw man of egoism to say that an egoist literally doesn't have friends, literally doesn't care about anybody, right?Divia (21:11)Yeah.Okay, yeah, yeah, no, and I don't want to spend time with that straw man, but I guess I'm like, but what, I think I don't fully know what you mean by altruism here.Shea Levy (21:33)So I mean, think the basic idea here is that like, who is the proper beneficiary of like, one way to think about, yeah, so one of the big questions that I any moral system should answer is like, moral principles give guidance to your human action. The question is like, who ought to benefit?And like there's other questions like who ought to benefit from your actions and like the altruist stances like fundamentally not as a means to some other end not as a part of some bigger thing but fundamentally like the standard of value is the good of others now there's the utilitarian version where it's not the good of others it's the good of everybody including you but like you're one still one piece of it and I like I don't think that distinction is very important like it'sDivia (22:20)But it's.But is that what people are saying that rational... is this really part of rationality?Shea Levy (22:38)So I think it's, again, like, can quibble on what is and is not exactly part of rationality, and I'm happy to sort of have that discussion, but like, there's a strong, I think there's a strong, they wouldn't say that explicitly, so like, that's, I think for everything, yeah, okay, that's a point, and I'll flag that a lot of the things I'm gonna claim, like, many of them aren't explicitly endorsed in that term, but like,Divia (22:45)Well...Yeah, that's what I'm asking about. I'm like, how can you see that? Like what are some maybe less obvious ways that you can see this as more part of the rationalist worldview?Shea Levy (23:07)So I think the, I think you see this in the embrace of utilitarianism, of like, what we're trying to do is do the most good, right? What does that mean? It doesn't mean build the best life for yourself. It means like, create a universe where happiness across the whole population or the whole, you know.intelligent light cone, right, is is maximized in some sense and you're trying to, I'm like that's not everybody.Divia (23:37)And is this what, yeah, like to what extent is this a rationalist position? And again, like I'm not trying to make it, I'm trying to say some ask the substantive version of that.Shea Levy (23:48)Yeah, I mean, I think so.I think insofar as there is a vision of the good, it is not always explicitly this, but it is almost always either something like this or something that, and I think these ultimately bottom out in the same thing, but, or a view that sort of externalizes the good in some way, excuse me, from yourself. it's sort of like, just like, it's not exactly this, but it's like,It's something along the lines of like you could imagine like what would I have to do to maximize the mass of the earth right like that's something sort of like a Problem you could present and then identify that and like goodness is something like that. It's more complex, but like it's some like physical it's some not physical, but it's some like Characteristic of the state of the world that you are trying to maximize right that you're trying to say likeyou ease the, you like, you see this in the sort of like, kind of reasoning about, like, some of the thought experiments about, if you could press a button and, you know, like, and so some magical thing would happen, like, which world is better? And like, as if that's a coherent question. And like, people's... Yes, yeah, yeah, but I mean, so that this is sort of going lower in the fact than epic. But yeah, so like, that, that is, I think, a big part ofDivia (25:16)Yeah, I do tend to be a conscientious objector to these types of questions. Yeah, yeah, okay. I like your answer.Shea Levy (25:26)that kind of thinking about ethics. Basically, okay, here maybe here is the thing I would more strongly defend as central to rationalism, but have a harder time pointing out to like a lot of convincing examples. So there's a mistaken view about what science is and that like what kinds of identifications and especially quantitative identifications are properly considered scientific. And thenDivia (25:39)Yeah, I got it.Shea Levy (25:54)an application of that view to ethics that ethics is a scientific thing. And I agree that ethics is a scientific thing, but if you have this wrong view about what science is doing, then... I'm gonna try to see if I can, like... It's... Okay, so this this view that objectivity, especially in a scientific context, is somehow impersonal. It's somehow like you have to take yourself out of the picture and you have to think about like,Divia (26:03)Yeah, so can you expand on the wrong view of what science is doing?Shea Levy (26:24)What would, know, sometimes that impersonality surfaces as like, what would convince any rational being? And like they're very clear to say like not just a human being, but like any sort of rational thing like would convince them or what would, you these like veil of ignorance type approaches, like what would convince anybody who doesn't have any particular interests at stake? So they're like starting out to say that that's what scientific reasoning has to do.And then says, okay, if we're going to make a scientific ethics, if we think that's possible, if we're going to do that, then whatever we're aiming for has to be measurable and identifiable in that way. Yeah, has to be legible in that, but that particular view of what legibility is, right? Like.Divia (27:05)to be legible.Right, legible to some kind of view from nowhere type of thing.Shea Levy (27:14)Yes. Right. And then what a lot of people then do is say, but we can't find that. And so what is going to ground this process is what we can make legible is given an ultimate preference, X would be good. But the ultimate preference isn't itself legible or it's made legible in non-ethical ways. Like it's legible because it's what you evolved to have or it's legible because it's, you know, what...culture has acculturated us to have. like that's where I think the other, that's where I think these, these kind of two paths merge. Like either you think you can succeed at this project fully for ethics and there's some like just intrinsic goodness you can measure with a, you know, a goodness thermometer about the world. Or you say, no, you can't do that.Divia (28:01)Moral realism, right? I mean, people maybe disagree about what that means. Yeah.Shea Levy (28:03)I'm a moral realist though, so like that's my point. It's a view of what realism would have to mean. I think that...Divia (28:10)Yeah, I consider myself a moral realist also, I think. Though again, sometimes when I try to talk to people on both sides of this, they seem to get really different, really varied answers about what moral realism is supposed to mean.Shea Levy (28:13)Yeah, okay.Yeah. Yeah, I so like, guess I say I'm a moral realist because I think that kind of gets at the issue, but it's, think this is an area where the...the conceptualization that we have, not with, not a, of an object level position, but of like how we categorize the positions, slants the discussion to rule out the right answer.Divia (28:43)Mm-hmm.Yeah, I will say, so in terms of who's saying this explicitly, think, and apologies if I'm misrepresenting anyone, but I think this is Spencer Greenberg's position that rationality is for how you achieve your values. Values can be whatever. I think he calls it valueism. I think you're saying you can see it in Eliot's writing and maybe in Lesserang in general, but I think this is something that Spencer will be like, yes, this is my position. Yeah, okay.Shea Levy (29:14)Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's and like I mean, I think if you where you see elements of this is like People talk about like preferences and preference stability and like this there's a sort of notion the notion of preference and the way That fits into rationalist discourse. I think implicitly bakes in a lot of this right like it's like obviously there's I think there's a sort of like innocent path there because there's like a preference like I preferlike long video chat discussions about philosophical ideas and my wife very much doesn't, like she would not be having fun right now and I am. And like that's, that.Divia (29:52)Therefore, I should like offer it to you and not to your wife and stuff like that.Shea Levy (29:55)Right. Yeah, right. So like, should seek it. like, so there's, there's a real phenomenon that people are seeing here. And like, it's also not only like that, but also like, the fact that I have this preference and she doesn't doesn't mandate that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. Right? Like, yeah. yeah, with that, but like, then there's a sort of like, okay, well, that's what all of valuing must be like. And like, really, it's aDivia (30:11)Totally. I think everyone would agree. Everyone reasonable would agree about that.Shea Levy (30:22)Like I think it's more the better way to think of it is that like there is optionality within a general positive view about what a, not sorry, positive view is getting too epistemic. There's optionality within the realm of like what is a good human life. But like the nature of what a good human life is is not.downstream of those choices. At the right level of abstraction, it is a fact of reality what a good human life is. Now, there's things to say about that that I cringed with that formulation, but like, first line of the fan, I'll put that there.Divia (31:03)Okay, I'm still a little worried that we don't disagree about as much as I thought. So what is something, maybe you have a guess, like what's something that you think we probably disagree about?Shea Levy (31:13)I, so I don't know. I think if my guess is there's something in epistemology and maybe, maybe some like metaphysical stuff that we disagree on. that's, that's only because of things around, likeLike, okay, the discomfort I have with internal family systems. We haven't gone into that, but like, I suspect your willingness to...Divia (31:38)yeah, we can talk about that. I do like it.Shea Levy (31:47)Embrace it despite whatever concerns you might have. I suspect that's downstream of some like Yeah Yeah, yeah, I mean maybe maybe let me start at the bottom then because I think that's that this is maybe like Yeah, okay. So my view and again, I don't think this is every single rationalist. There are definitely rationalists who disavow this explicitly but stillDivia (31:53)Okay, yeah, let's try it. This is a good trailhead and we'll see what happens at end of it.It's like with libertarians, they say, you know, there might be two rationalists who agree with each other, but I'm not one of them, right? That's what they say.Shea Levy (32:17)Right exactly. Actually libertarianism is definitely a place where I think we would disagree So let's let's so they I think the basic thing is Again, so we have this pre explicit philosophical Value that rationalists tend to share of caring about what's true and what's right and seeing that on through or seeingDivia (32:22)That might be also true. Okay, let's get.Shea Levy (32:45)some elements of the post-enlightenment scientific and industrial and cultural establishment as reflecting that. Not everything, but like something about the way science has developed, something about the way like our culture has developed, some elements of that in some ways reflect the success of like taking seriously what is true and or enable us to do better at taking seriously what is true.Divia (33:14)Okay, I mean, that seems like a pretty narrow statement. Some asked, I'm like, yeah, okay, I think I'm on board with that so far.Shea Levy (33:15)So.Yeah. So, like there are people who either reject modernity altogether, there's like the religious mindset which is like the real religious mindset, not the like, you know, postmodernist, like I'm religious, but like all other religions are fine, but like the religious mindset who thinks their religion is true, takes their religion very deeply seriously, and like thinks like God literally exists and literally did these things. That religious mindset you could sort of say cares about what's true.Divia (33:27)True.Shea Levy (33:48)but not in a way that embraces any element of modernity. And then there's the other side, which embraces some element of modernity, but then thinks that implies that you are, that, like, taking truth, like, the whole post-rat ethos of, like, taking truth seriously is for squares. Like, that's, that's the-Divia (33:52)Right.That's why I rationalists in my Twitter bio. It's not the only reason. Like, I really do come out of that community, but I'm like, no, I don't think that's true.Shea Levy (34:12)Yeah, right. Yeah. So like, I think that that's why I put those two together is because I do both to kind of just anyway, so you have that. But the I think at the bottom,The rationalists are by and large materialists. They take the success of the scientific revolution and the ability, sort of the reductionists success of basing chemistry on physics and biochemistry on chemistry. then basically they're saying, okay, let's take that fully seriously. We could talk about different variants of materialism, but basically what we care about is physics, things moving around, everything is built on that.in some cases there's a sort of degree of taking that seriously where they'll say like there's no mental anything and some will say yeah there's mental stuff but they don't grapple with like how their worldview like actually doesn't allow for mental things so that's a very like basic philosophical issue how does that how does that apply in different cases is an interesting question yeahDivia (35:17)term by the way that I sometimes use on Twitter called the Materiast Epistemology Industrial Complex.Shea Levy (35:22)Yes, okay, so you, okay, think you, okay, so like, if you reject that, if you reject that, and it sounds like you do if you have that kind of like, dismissive terminology for it, like.Divia (35:28)Yeah. I think so. Yeah.Shea Levy (35:35)In what sense are you rational? like, I think part of the like, centering,Divia (35:41)Okay, I do want to answer that, but you were gonna say some stuff about internal family systems. I really do like that.Shea Levy (35:46)So okay, let me let me jump to the internal sorry I forgot about that right the internal fandom of systems thing is like my guess and I don't know enough about your view but my guess there's there's an element of likeDivia (35:54)Yeah, well, we'll figure it out.Shea Levy (36:05)Treating yourself and the development in psychology of treating yourself as a third party, a third person object to evaluate, that's like, internal family systems, it's not literally true that there are multiple yous in your head, right? Unless you're a...Divia (36:24)Okay, but internal family systems for the record, calls most, it calls a bunch of things parts and then also talks about self.Shea Levy (36:33)Okay, so like maybe, right. But okay, maybe part of it is that like the popularization that I've heard of it sounds too much. It's a sort of thing that, okay, I guess maybe I'll let me just say like what I've heard and what makes sense. What seems like is going on to me is that like, it can sometimes be helpful to sort of like, for the sake of a like,Divia (36:33)So it's not trying to say they're all the same thing.Is it fat suit?Shea Levy (36:59)thought experiment, like treat certain motivations or thought patterns or something like that as distinct from you as like a separate person or a separate like motivational system that is either distinct from you or distinct from other motivational systems that are then like somehow at play at different times or you need to integrate in and like I can see why that would be helpful to like as a like tool for likeworking your way through a problem. But as a literal description of what is going on psychologically, I think it's false in a way that if you like, try to seriously integrate it with your reflective experience, you couldn't hold coherently. Like...Divia (37:32)Okay.Okay, let me try to hash this out. So let me give you my brief description of what I think internal family systems is. Okay, so I believe it was invented by a guy named Richard Schwartz. And I think he got there sort of phenomenologically, like empirically, he was talking to different people. And he noticed that sort of interesting things happened when he asked them certain questions, such as like, and because talking about parts, like this is the thing people just do though. Part of me wants to stay in bed, but part of me is like, nah, you should get up and go to work, with a normal thing to say.Shea Levy (38:14)Yeah, yeahDivia (38:16)And then he used to be like, okay, well, what is that part of you think about this? like people would go with it and do the answer. And then he started getting some interesting answers when he would ask, for example, questions like, okay, now can you ask that part of you to step aside? Because sometimes they would and there's a little bit of nuance to like, that's not necessarily gonna work. But it is also my experience working with myself and with other people that sometimes this really does happen. And it...it means something like then people are like, okay, and they do actually sort of set those concerns aside, which doesn't mean they won't come back or anything like that. And he also noticed that when he sort of kept asking people to do it, again, there's some nuance to people, it's not always gonna just work straightforwardly, that he'd be like, okay, what if what's, and people will be like, no, no, this one doesn't feel like a part, this one feels like me. And that's what in IFS he calls self. it characteristically, like it has some qualities, like people experience more curiosity, more compassion, more whatever, whatever.I've tried to sort of ask other IFS practitioners about this somewhat, like I've taken some classes and things. It seems like people are now like, yeah, well some parts sort of have more self than other parts and whatever, like, which seems kind of right to me. It seems like it's certainly true that people have some perspectives that are not totally integrated at this time. You would agree with that, right?Shea Levy (39:33)Yes, well, mean, like, yes, I mean, think that's a, if it's an important one, think that's in like a flaw. Like if it's something like surface level thing.Divia (39:36)It sort of should be uncontroversial, I think.We get, but that's the point of the IFS process is to integrate the things. Like the first time I talked to my IFS therapist that I used to work with, she was like, I don't really have parts like the way I used to have parts. Like it worked basically.Shea Levy (39:46)Yeah, okay.So maybe it's just the metaphor has been to, like, the metaphor of family, I don't know.Divia (40:02)I do think it's a terrible name. think it was because someone else was a family systems therapist. And then they were like, we'll call it internally family systems.Shea Levy (40:07)Maybe then the only disagreement I have is that adopting a name that doesn't actually accurately describe what you're doing. I guess on the one hand it's interesting and reassuring because now I want you to send me what you think is your best IFS, the best IFS resource. that sounds more like, so the way I would conceptualize the same thing is there areDivia (40:17)Yeah.Hmm.Shea Levy (40:37)You can have different thought patterns and subconscious identifications that don't integrate at any given point, which depending in certain contexts, you can like oscillate between or both have both, you know, subconsciously activated at the same time leading to a conflict. And you need to sort of tease out like, which is which is true or more usually it's not which is true sort of likeDivia (40:45)Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.Shea Levy (41:06)How do I reconceptualize this issue to understand like they're both identifying something real about the situation, but like not in a way that I can integrate these together. But like I think the biggest question I have with it is with the description you have is to what extent these are like coherent over time. And I guess like maybe maybe the answer is they're coherent over time insofar as you have not done the work and you have like continually acted on one.Divia (41:08)Right.Wow.Shea Levy (41:35)or the other side of a given divide.Divia (41:38)Yeah, I think sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. I guess a different thing I would say is, so I believe my IFS therapist when she was like, don't have parts like I used to have parts. I tend to think it's not usually, it doesn't usually make sense to try to sort of resolve every polarity fully. Like if it were free, sure, but it's not. And so I guess I think that there's some shifts that I think of as more like, I mean, nothing's always worth it.but closer to like overdetermined that it's worth it. That if some people's perspectives are like really sticky and unresponsive to evidence and wrong, then there's something I think very good about trying to free that up and get things like moving in a way where they can't integrate. But then I think like given, I don't know, like given my practical constraints, I think it makes sense for some things to be sort of persistently represented in more like a polarized way, but like that's pretty fluid.Like a friend of mine, and I know it's not the same with groups, but as an analogy, I have a friend of mine who sometimes talks about like, I don't know, he would be involved in planning workshops. And sometimes like the one person who was always like, we should have more structure. And the other person who's like, nah, we should talk to each other more. And there's some impulse to be like, okay, let's like really get on the same page about this. Let's put you in a room and like resolve it. And I think sometimes that can be right, but given practical constraints, I think sometimes it just makes more sense to have one, to have the group kind of split and you argue it out and like, whatever.Shea Levy (43:06)I do think the group versus individual thing is... No, no, I know, know, know what I'm saying. I guess I think the analogy fails, I guess. This is my...Divia (43:10)I said this analogy. Yeah.Okay, I think it doesn't. I think it makes sense if there are certain patterns in me that are like, that are more attuned to some things. You can make it more concrete.Shea Levy (43:23)Can you like, are you able to give a question? Yeah.Divia (43:28)Yeah, let me see. I, I don't know. I remember, so this is like a parts type description of my life. can critique it if you want. So about a little more than a year ago when I was moving, I was pregnant. It was just like a lot going on. And I remember was talking to my friend and I was like, yeah, some part of me is like sort of screaming at me that this is not okay. And we're like, okay, well, some like assumption that like, well, that must mean there's something better than that, right?And I sort of sit down and try to like introspect. I'm like, okay, I think this part of me is sort of like, look, it's not my job to figure out what the, what thing would be better here. It's just like locally, like this part of your mind really doesn't like it. So it's like a request from allocation of more resources towards making it not like this. And ultimately like, I think this, you know, this move to introspect and whatever, it's sort of like an integrative move. But the part where some part of me is like, this is more like, I'm in charge of looking at this part of your mind and being like, are things okay over here? And it's like, no.That seems fine to me.Shea Levy (44:25)So do you think there is actually some part of your processing which is the same thing that is caring about that same issue? That's the piece, I get in the moment.Divia (44:38)issue. I don't know about issue, but I think there's certain contours. Like I think I have different types of, I could try to be concrete, but it's hard. Like I think I have different types of processes and that that makes sense because like, I don't know, I, for example, like I certainly have visual processing, right? Like do you use a really low level example? I think sometimes it's true that like my visual processing is kind of tied.because I've been looking at really fine details or something. And so I think there is a relatively persistent part of my mind that's like, hey, part of you is like, give the eyes a break right now. Or something like other things like that.Shea Levy (45:11)Yeah, that's how I'm on board with I'm on board with I think the place that I'm less clear on is like,different persistent carers about or attendance to different values. That's where I am like, yeah, so like definitely different kinds of processing. Like sometimes I can think like do like deep abstraction or like, you know, very like thorough, like thorough reasoning through a problem. And sometimes a different process is like very generative thinking of just like,Divia (45:28)Mm-hmm.Shea Levy (45:50)coming up with ideas that might solve something and that's not the same thing as checking all the boxes, right? Those are different. Completely unborn with that.Divia (45:52)Yeah.And I think there will persistently be different. Like, I don't know, maybe someone somewhere could integrate them, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Right, they're not in conflict. Though they could be locally in conflict at some time, potentially.Shea Levy (46:02)they're not in conflict. They're not integrated. that's why I wouldn't call it.I mean, think it's more, the conflict is not between, it's not like those processes aren't conflict. The conflict is which of those processes should I use? It's not like, I guess they're in conflict to resources. I can't do both, I can't do generative stuff at the same time I'm doing the really thorough, like, checking the boxes stuff. I can't do those at the same time. But to me, if there's conflict, it's either causally, I'm not sure which,Divia (46:21)Okay. Yeah.Seems right, yeah.Shea Levy (46:39)will lead to the aim I'm going for or like I don't know which aim I should even be going for, right? And like it's that part where I, it's that, that's the piece and maybe the answer is like that's not what they mean by parts that are persisting, but like that's the piece that's always stuck out to me like.Divia (46:44)Okay.Shea Levy (46:59)Like there's not a part of me that's dedicated to like caring about my wife, right? Like, okay, so like maybe.Divia (47:05)I would agree with that. I cannot, like here, look, a central example of like a part pre-IFS work would be something that has some particular, so like I always tell the same story because I like to tell stories about me, so it's not dividing, it's privacy, and some of them are weird or personal or hard to explain. So this is my one that I tell. So early on when I was working on this, I came up with, and it was experienced to me as a part that was like really,sort of messed up. It was the part of me that thought I needed to always feel guilty about things. And I was like, all right, let me look, where did this come from? And I remember it actually, because I remember being this age and like not really having it. And then it was there and being like, well, this sucks. Does it have to be like this forever? And I guess the answer was like, no, only 20 years or something until I finally went back and figured it out. And there was some dumb thing that precipitated it where I'm guessing it's overdetermined that something like this would relatively overdetermined. Like I don't think it was.super caused by the thing. But there was this incident where I knocked over this pile of cups and someone was like, hey, you knocked over a pile of cups. And I was like, no, I didn't. Cause I didn't realize that I like happened. I just didn't know. And then later I was thinking about it. I was like, I did do that. But like, it seemed like there was no way back. was like, I can't, I don't know what to do other than like feel guilty about it forever. And yeah, and it's, it's dumb. Like it's not a good way to operate. Obviously. I think it was sort of my best attempt at sense making at the time. It seemed like I was.sort of stuck in some bind where I'm stressed out and I was like, I could either sort of forget about what really happened or I could feel guilty forever and I chose to feel guilty forever, even though it wasn't really forever. And of course, as an adult revisiting it, I'm like, yes, it is fact possible to remember what happened and not feel guilty forever. Like these things are fine. I'm like doing some mental ritual to accept that and whatever.Shea Levy (48:51)So I noticed that other than when you introduced it, you didn't talk about that as a part of you. You talked about that as like a way you processed a certain thing, like you processed it.Divia (49:00)Yeah, but at the time it felt like a part. Before I processed it, it seemed more part-like.Shea Levy (49:03)Okay, so maybe that's.Okay, so maybe that's the piece. So I'm very interested in this conversation. I no longer think it's going to get at like a, it's not a big difference, but I'm very, so up to you you want to keep going. So like, the feeling like a part, I guess it's like, you process this in a certain way and like, that feels like it doesn't, it doesn't feel like it like fits with your general way of thinking about things. Is that sort of?Divia (49:10)Yeah. Okay, all right, cool.Right, it seemed like, I don't know how to, like it just seemed like some, I don't know what's literally true about it, but when I would visualize it, it seemed natural to visualize it as sort of like a pretty separate piece of me. And I could like follow its threads and it was saying sort of a bunch of things that all seemed, like my guess, I have a pretty strong prediction that if I'd started following this thread on a different day, we would have gotten to the exact same thing.Shea Levy (49:50)Yeah, okay.Divia (50:03)that it wasn't very contingent about the way I was asked the questions or something. I think like that can happen. I think it's basically a bug if it ends up being a really contingent process. I think it wasn't. I think it really was something that happened that sort of locked in place like a piece of my personality that was failing to integrate with the rest of my personality.Shea Levy (50:07)Right.Yeah.Divia (50:23)Which I think is a common human behavior, to be clear. I think most people have things like this. I think I still have things like that, I would assume, but I think not really the same way I did before.Shea Levy (50:35)Yeah, think, okay, so I think there's a sort of like, what I would want to see to like embrace this as a like, more thorough characterization of what is meant by it, what makes something apart versus just like a thought that occurred right now that is against my other thinking or like, even a persistent pattern of thinking, like maybe that's all it is, maybe that's all it is, a persistent pattern of thinking.Divia (50:58)I think it's some a persistent pattern of like thoughts and emotions and behaviors that tend to be clumped together and there's some sort of like time series thing and it used to sort of Disturbed me a little when I talked to people after I've been studying I've had something like you kind of like switch parts in real time when I was talking to you that's weird like your whole affect is now different from how it was a few seconds ago because you've inhabited a different perspective and I think some people do this more than other people but I think it's a real thingShea Levy (51:15)Yeah.So maybe this is the piece that maybe isn't actually part of IFS but has felt like part of IFS when I've heard it generally described, is that these parts have agency in some sense, as opposed to like, and like I don't, in your description, that's not there. So maybe that's like the piece that's like, that like,Divia (51:41)I don't, how is it, is it not there? I mean, I think it had agency in that I really was feeling the guilt the whole time. Okay, you don't mean that.Shea Levy (51:48)No, no, no, not that as a fact, but that like, there's like a part of you whose goal is to make you feel guilty, who is trying to allocate resources to you. Okay. Yeah. Okay, I think there's something.Divia (51:55)Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it was doing that, yeah.Because I think it thought something worse would happen if I didn't do that, right?Shea Levy (52:07)Yeah, so that it would think something worse. that's, think that's the piece where it's like...Divia (52:10)Because when I would introspect about it, I'm like, go through some processes, like, well, what is the part of you saying? And I remember being like, well, it seemed like it cares about what's true and it doesn't really know how to, like, I would get answers like that and they felt resonant. then, like, I think I also would always, well, maybe that's a distraction, but like, part of why I take it seriously is that then when I did some mental reconceptualization of it, it changed. Like, I really didn't feel guilty in the same way afterwards. That's why I'm like, it was a thing.Shea Levy (52:19)Red.Yeah, I mean I think, okay, so like I think this might be the basic disagreement and hard to tease out, but like.I totally buy, and not even saying this is other people, I have things like this. There's a persistent pattern of thought, maybe a particular implicit belief or value that you have, in context where it's activated, regularly puts you in the mindset or brings up certain emotions or considerations that don't integrate with your normal mode of thinking. That I buy.It's the next step of conceptualizing that, not just as a persistent aspect of your overall subconscious, but as something that has goals or something that has agency. Pinning that down would be hard, but I think there's something about that that that's the part I disagree with. And my suspicion now is that if we got to the point ofDivia (53:34)Yeah.Shea Levy (53:45)making explicit what that thing is, would either dissolve and we would be fully in agreement, or if you said it explicit, you'd probably say something like, I don't believe that literally. But that's my guess.Divia (53:53)YouSo one thing I do think about it is it seems like I was surprised at first when I would query these things how coherent their answers were.Shea Levy (54:11)Yeah, so think there's an explanation for that, that doesn't require them to be like, sub-agents with their own minds and thoughts.Divia (54:17)But I'm like, what does that mean with their own minds and thoughts? Like, don't think... Yeah, yeah, no, so that's why I'm asking. I'm like, I think it's... Okay, maybe an objective thing I could say is I think there's quite a lot of structure there. And I don't think the structure is formed during the process of asking questions. I think the structure was already there and is revealed through the answering of the question. Okay, we agree with this.Shea Levy (54:19)Well that's part of my point, that's part of my point, that's part of the issue I have is that like...Yes. Yes. So I agree with those two things. I agree with those two things that that is a thing that happens. Yeah. And so like, think, I think basically, my objection is that like, I think, and I would have to know much more about the details of the theory, but I think basically, either when you say like, it wants this thing, or it had this goal or something that either ultimately you're like being sloppy with words orThe only way to ground it is some little homunculus with its own. And obviously if you say that, that's ridiculous. You don't endorse that.Divia (55:07)YouOkay, I think, no, no, here's what I think it is. I think that there's some part of the thing that I would more call myself that it's safeguarding. And so I'm like, it is ultimately me, but it's not, I think parts of my cognition will take responsibility for different angles on the values.Shea Levy (55:23)Thank you.Let me say, instead of interrogating your conceptualization, let me try to give mine for that kind of thing, right? So, let me see if can find a concrete example in my life that...Divia (55:31)Okay. Yeah.Shea Levy (55:49)Yeah, okay, so like, they're less so now, but there is a sort of like, common pattern of thinking that I have fallen into of like, when things are not going well in some respect, being very reluctant to surface that to others, especially to Alyssa. And like,Seeing it as an additional failure if I need to like make that visible and like ask for help or like get support on it in some way or other and you know, like so what I would say is that That stemmed from a mistaken view of how to achieve a real value that I endorse right there's a real value of self-sufficiency andI don't have a full articulation of masculinity that ties into that. I actually do things of real value. And I do think there are things that I do now that I might have historically confused for this, but I now think about it in a very different way. So in that sense, sort of mistaken thought pattern, which at the time didn't integrate well with the way I thought aboutsocial support and pursuing values and being open and with communication and all that, right? I do think it stemmed from a value that I hold and it's related to my values, not its own values. It's related to my values.Divia (57:31)Yeah, okay, I will agree with that it's your values, not its own values. I don't think the values are separate.Shea Levy (57:35)Yeah. but like, guess, I guess the, the, the piece that I still like, it's not like a subroutine that I've set up in, you know, subconsciously to like defend that value. Like it is, it is like,Divia (57:50)Why is it not?Shea Levy (57:54)Why is it not? That's a good question. think, okay, I think what it comes down to is like...It's a, I think the fundamental is a mistaken thought, like a mistaken idea about like what that value requires or entails in a certain context. And so I guess, I guess, okay, it's like, once it's integrated, it's not like there was a separate agent, which is now integrated in. It's that like, my ideas are now coherent. And so like,Divia (58:16)Yeah, I would-Shea Levy (58:31)One idea, one view, one thing I hold about reality is this answer in relation to this value. And another thing gives the same answer because those things I hold are now integrated. When it gives the same answer, it's not like this idea has agency. It's more like... Yeah.Divia (58:36)Mm-hmm.Okay, all right.Okay, here's what I think I'm willing to defend. Here you're talking about this. Have you heard of Martin Buber's I and Thou?Shea Levy (58:55)I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is.Divia (58:57)Okay, I don't know what it is either. But one of the things is it's in contrast to I it. I think that it's according to my, like in a bunch of ways really, to have an I thou stance towards these parts of me than to have an I it stance towards them.And to interact them as a thing that there's mutual respect and mutual change back and forth and not objectify it.Shea Levy (59:17)Thank you.Yeah, so but it's not objectifying it. It's like, so like the, I agree with it. That I grew up is a, okay, but the vow externalizes it in a way that I think is wrong. It's like an I, me, right? so like, mean, so like, think there is like the right way, the way that I think about sort of the way to kind of handle this thing is like,Divia (59:27)Well, I don't know if you are. I don't have a claim that you are, but I think it's very common thing that people do.Yeah, okay.Shea Levy (59:54)there are values at stake leading to this thought process and this emotional conflict. There are values that I hold at stake and I want to identify what are my values and then maybe beliefs about those values that are leading to this conflict and how can I align those values. So it's not like, so likeDivia (1:00:13)Yeah, okay, but here's, think I'm mostly with you about the part like, it's more accurate to call it my. I'm like, yeah, I think sort of pragmatically when having a conversation, be able to hold lifetime experience talking to someone else that it's kind of nice to draw that in or something, whatever, it does seem more accurate to call it my. But the thing, seems like, it seems like you're, it seems like you're talking about it as though the agency is in the part of you that you're more identified with. And I'm like, I think it works way better to treat it,as like, who knows what this thing will do now presented with this information? Like, not like I'm gonna change it.Shea Levy (1:00:46)So the agency is not fully within my present considered self. The agency is within me across a lifetime. Right? But it was me who had the initial...Divia (1:00:55)Yeah, yeah, so maybe what I'm I don't think I disagree with that but I think I'm like look I think the language that you use in the moment to describe it will and it maybe depends on the people actually I think it does but I think for many people at least the ones that resonate with the process using the sort of standard language about the parts and the you and the me brings to mind the right sort of stance for actually yeah Okay, you think it's gonnaShea Levy (1:01:20)Okay, here it is. Here's the thing that I was suspecting might be there and I'm not sure. This is now getting into the rationalist thing. That kind of pragmatic view toward, like, it's one thing to hold that explicitly as like, this is purely a like, thought experiment to trigger a certain thing, but like, letting that shape your...Divia (1:01:25)Yeah. Yeah.Shea Levy (1:01:45)ontology about like the way you actually think about it in your own thoughts about like what is actually happening. That's a thing that I think like I thought that was much more suffusing this than it actually is. So it might be something that but like what I would say concretely to that point like if that's trueDivia (1:01:55)Okay. Yeah.Yeah.I think are no perfect pronouns for talking to one part of oneself.Shea Levy (1:02:07)Yeah, so like then I would say like but that's how I would formulate I'd say look It's not actually a separate part of you, but there's not like we don't have a good way of we don't have a good way of talking about this So this is the best we have right now and it would be in advance if somebody came up with a better conceptualization and like I wouldDivia (1:02:20)Okay.So for the record, I've done this with people who are like, it's not a part of me, does not want to be called a part, wants to be called a whatever. And I do always go with what people say. And I try to take it seriously too. I'm like, okay, we're talking to a whole of you, fine, cool. Okay, it's just you, fine.Shea Levy (1:02:33)Yeah. So, but like, yeah. But like, mean, I think the like, so like, this, but like, the epistemic part of it is like, in my own thinking, in my own notes, when I'm not like, happy with conceptualization, like, I will put things in scare quotes in my own, like, like, this is not the right way to put this, but I don't know, or it's not worth like, figuring out what the right way to put it is in this context, but like,Divia (1:02:53)Yeah.I'm not yet convinced that part of me is particularly wrong. I don't know, what is part? Part, means like...Shea Levy (1:03:08)Again, if you're attributing separate motivation to that part, or separate agency, or separateDivia (1:03:16)I think it's separate, but I don't think it's... I think it's... No, I do think it's ultimately mine. But it's not all of... It's not like, if I just say mine, I think that calls to mind like a more integrated thing. And I think I don't know what it is, and I think I should treat it as like some unknown to be curious about. But no, I don't think it's separate.Shea Levy (1:03:19)Not that you don't think it's yours.Right?So, okay, maybe here's a thing.when I'm in that state of conflict, don't like, I can identify which sort of side of the conflict is more, more in line with like, what I would expect myself to feel on my normal thinking. But I don't give that side of the conflict priority. Like, my going in is both sides are stemming from realreal values that I have or think I ought to have and real ideas that I have. like, I'm sometimes fishier about the one that's kind of more in line with my normal thing, because that's the one easier to justify because it's like, you know, I can put words to it much more readily. But like, in that moment, it's not, I guess, in like,Divia (1:04:26)Yeah, cause you can like slip something in there. Totally.Shea Levy (1:04:40)Yeah, maybe this is a little bit phenomenological. I guess I would say like, I think it's a phenomenological thing that stems from a healthy view of my psychology, but like, maybe a little bit more of phenomenological claim than a like, metaphysical claim that it doesn't present to me, it presents to me as conflict. It doesn't present to me as like, something...one piece of it waging war, that's too violent and extreme, like, interceding with the rest of me. It's two strands of thought, or maybe let's say two parts of me, two parts of me conflicting, it's not like a part of me conflicting with me. I don't know if that-Divia (1:05:07)Yeah.Yeah. yeah, I agree with that too. I think parts are ultimately never really in conflict with the self. They're in conflict with other parts. I do think many people do describe it as something more like a war inside themselves, for what it's worth.Shea Levy (1:05:37)Yeah, no, I think that's true. I think then my question with my sort of like theoretical psychologist hat on as opposed to critical is like, okay, what is actually going on that makes it feel that way?Divia (1:05:53)I mean, I think often there's a pretty total war type attitude from some of their parts that are like, there's no way to achieve this part of my values through normal means. So instead I'm gonna do all these kind of extreme things. I think that happens.Shea Levy (1:06:08)Yeah, like, yeah, okay. So, right, so maybe one way to think about that is like,you've sort of accepted on some level an inherent conflict between two deeply held values. And so depending on whichDivia (1:06:28)And if I were doing something therapeutic with someone, I'd be like, okay, well, let's like, you know, like I wouldn't necessarily be taking that as true.Shea Levy (1:06:34)No,Divia (1:06:46)Mm-hmm. Yeah, okay.Right. Right.Shea Levy (1:07:03)they have at some level accepted an inherent inability to gain two key values that each value individually they've accepted as necessary for their happiness and they've also accepted that they're an inherent conflict and so they put themselves in a position to do that.Divia (1:07:16)Mm-hmm.And they don't see a better resolution path also, and nor do they necessarily have faith that there could be one, except, I don't know, if they're telling someone about this, maybe on some level they do.Shea Levy (1:07:29)Yeah, and then I think that the extra piece here is that like, it depends on the combination of their pattern of thought and what has like what is relevant to them in the situation, which of those values is more motivationally salient and like winning out in that and like how those conflicts arise and howDivia (1:07:50)Mm-hmm.Yeah, like think some language that the transactional analysis people use that I haven't seen elsewhere is they talk about how people, like there's a sort of normal thing people talk about where the one, when there is some sort of polarization, often people describe one of them as like, well, I think this, but, and then another part that's connected, which I think is the word, which is the one that's controlling your body, which is not always the same for people. They'll be like, I don't know why I'm doing this. This seems like a terrible idea. And yet they're doing it. So obviously there's some sort of different process.Shea Levy (1:08:23)Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. Interesting. Okay, so I think my takeaway here is if there is an existing resource which is not therapeutic, I'm interested in what do they think is actually going on and what is the right way to conceptualize it and then separating that from the question of what's the right way to talk about it in a therapeutic context to make it easy. If you have any such resource, I'd be very interested in that.Divia (1:08:35)youYeah.Yeah, I don't know what...Shea Levy (1:08:51)What's the ontology of IFS?Divia (1:08:54)think it's fundamentally really pragmatic. Like think that's where it came from. Is the guy working with people and being like, people seem to be talking about this. Maybe I go with how they're experiencing it and.Shea Levy (1:09:02)This gets back to the epistemic point of like, if that's how I'm holding an idea, I want to be very clear that I'm holding it as this is a pragmatic tool and it would be useful, maybe not important, maybe not useful enough to be worth going into, it would be useful to actually understand the facts that make this work. I don't need to know those facts in order to know that if I do things this way, it works. So I have a similar attitude towards gamification.Divia (1:09:07)Yeah.Yeah. Yeah.Yeah.Shea Levy (1:09:31)I have a more thorough view now than I used to about why it is that gamification is useful. I think it's acceptable to say, yeah, gamification seems to work. I do the thing that I want to do better. that is enough. That is something you can hold as true and valuable without taking a stand on some deep, what human motivation is all about is dopamine hits or whatever.Divia (1:09:57)Okay, look, look, I think I'm on record being like, ultimately this is a pragmatic thing, but I think it does make some claims about like structurally what's going on in people's minds.Shea Levy (1:10:07)Yeah, so that, think I would love to go know what those are and I don't know if we can get into that here, but...Divia (1:10:11)Okay, yeah, bookmark. We can maybe talk about that. I think I have talked about it a little, that one such claim that I think I already flagged is that if people sort of manage to approach certain parts of their cognition with curiosity and compassion, there is quite a lot of structure there. In ways that are not evident, usually without doing that. Claim one.Shea Levy (1:10:26)Yes. Yes. And so I completely agree with a lot of strut. There's structure to this conflict. It's not just that that part disagrees. I just shut it down or ignore it. Right. Like that is. Yeah.Divia (1:10:40)Yeah, and it's not like the only option that people could get is confabulation if they try to go down that road. That's one claim. Anyway.Shea Levy (1:10:43)Right. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So I guess maybe getting back to the original discussion. Why don't call yourself a rationalist?Divia (1:10:53)Yeah, okay, so one thing is that I really do come out of that tradition. Like think that reflects my, I don't know, like I have certain things that I've sort of believed since before that, but then I found overcoming bias and those people and like I moved to California, I met a bunch of those people and it was a pretty transformative time for my way of thinking. And I think I came out in a way that was like deeply influenced by that.Shea Levy (1:11:02)Okay.Divia (1:11:21)community mostly to be more like it than before.Shea Levy (1:11:24)Okay, so you said that way of thinking. Do you think you hold that way of thinking, whatever it is, or is just that it influenced you?Divia (1:11:33)I mean, some of it and not other parts of it? I don't know. so, okay, one thing I would say concretely is I think that I grew up in an environment where the sort of, of course, like, I don't know. There was definitely some, like, let's really figure out what's true. Let's point at things that are incoherent and care about them. But the overall density of it was not really enough for me to have a social context that kind of like gelled in that way.Shea Levy (1:12:03)Yeah.Divia (1:12:04)if that made sense, where like, remember, and you know, I have a couple of less wrong, I have this less wrong draft post about this from like, I don't know, more than 15 years ago, I never wrote it. But I was trying to convey this idea, which is like, okay, and then I got there and I was like, everyone's kind of like enough on the ball, that like some other part of my brain kind of kicked in and was like, yeah, things really, like, come on, let's like really make sense now. Like the social environment is expecting of you, expecting of it, of you too. And it was very helpful for me.Shea Levy (1:12:32)Yeah, mean, so like that, I mean, that's, that's the piece, like, if that's what rationalist is, which like, there's a, there's a, there's a,Divia (1:12:39)don't know that it's, it's not my full answer. That's the beginning of my answer.Shea Levy (1:12:41)There's there's a there's ground to be defended here, right? That that's really what it is to be a rationalist I guess I guess it's too I would say there are two parts to it one is that you have this attitude and take it seriously and to that like you got it or you mostly Experience it within this particular social milieu, right?Divia (1:12:44)Mm-hmm.I it's a little different now. think more of it's in the groundwater, more of the people I've met have different, like it's, I think it's less clear cut than it was then. I also think that,I mean, and I do, I don't think this is in my bio, because it limited characters, but I would definitely say like a less wrong style of rationalist. Because some people mean like, you don't care about feelings or something. like, I don't mean that. And I also.Shea Levy (1:13:22)Yeah. Rationalist is an overloaded term for sure.Divia (1:13:26)It is, but that's, it also reflects like a bunch of chart, like if I, like, if I talk about, I mean, maybe one of the conceits of rationalists such as myself is that I basically would never be like, that's rational or that's irrational in the way that people who don't call themselves rationalists frequently do use those terms.Shea Levy (1:13:48)Okay, so maybe there's a good disagreement.Divia (1:13:51)Look, I think a bunch of my language use and stuff like that, like I think if someone were trying to understand where I was coming from and they had the like, this person sort of grew up to a certain degree on less wrong, like I would make more sense. And, and crucially, that I have, unlike a bunch of other people, I'm not like, and I'm post that now. Because that seems way more wrong to me. Like it's true that I don't agree with a bunch of stuff on less wrong, but that's like, and I disagree with Elia's or about various things, but that's like,Shea Levy (1:14:03)Yeah.Yeah, sure.Divia (1:14:20)Typical.Shea Levy (1:14:21)Yes, so that's fine. think, okay, maybe there's sort two avenues of attack here. One that came up is like, that I think is tied to like, I wouldn't call things rational or irrational. Like, do you think less wrong is a good name? Is a good thing to ascribe to? To aspire to? Okay. There's an underlying epistemic claim that I think is the same in overcoming bias of like, yeah, you can't be right. The best you can do is just not, you know, eliminate the errors, right?Divia (1:14:35)No. It's not a good name, no, but yeah, but it is what it's called then.Yeah, which is that you can never really be right. Yeah.Yeah, I also don't call myself an aspiring rationalist. I myself a rationalist. This is another one of those things.Shea Levy (1:14:54)So like, yeah, so okay, if you don't buy into that, like, the most I can say, which is not a very strong, like, I guess I wouldn't say I'm contra Divya. Most I can say is thatDivia (1:15:08)Yeah, sure.Shea Levy (1:15:12)I think there are...There's path dependency in anyone's terminology that is not objectionable, but I think there are elements of less wrong rationalist jargon terminology ways of approaching things that I think reflect some of these issues, even if you yourself don't no longer or don't endorse the underlying claim. So no, no. So like,Divia (1:15:39)I do think I shouldn't call myself a rationalist? I've thought about it a lot. Okay.Shea Levy (1:15:44)That's I mean, I think part of the issue is like and here I'm gonna here's like here I'm gonna get to like the philosophy of philosophy like What is philosophy for and why do we need one? Like I think you do in fact Need some kind of like But like worldview that you hold and having a name for it andDivia (1:15:53)Mm-hmm.Ethical grounding is back to that.Shea Levy (1:16:13)Ideally having a social scene that is at least somewhat aligned to it is extremely valuable. And so like, I guess what I would say is like,If you don't, yeah, so I think maybe like one of the biggest problems with the rationalist space is that either what it is to be a rationalist is this sort of bucket of philosophical views that I think are many of them deeply wrong, or it includes a sort of meta view that like, it doesn't matter that we all have very different philosophical views. And of course there can be some social things that cross these lines.Divia (1:16:52)I mean, what do we mean by doesn't matter?Shea Levy (1:16:55)Like, I guess like.Divia (1:16:59)Like we shouldn't try to resolve them?Shea Levy (1:16:59)But you don't them. Huh? No, no, no, no. Not that you don't try to resolve them, but that like...Okay, Descartes meditations, he opens up basically saying like, I've known for a long time that like, I can't integrate my s**t. Like my ideas, but like, I haven't had time to do it and now I finally have time to do it and this has bugged me for a while. like to me, like, I think his answer is he fails. But like that motivation of like, I need to integrate my ideas, I need to actually have an explicit integrated worldview here. Like I personally need to have that.Divia (1:17:21)Okay.Shea Levy (1:17:40)I think that is a healthy attitude and it is something that a proper philosophy would inculcate in everybody. Now let's not say that everybody would be a philosopher, right? But like, they would, I mean, in the world I'm envisioning, there would be a culture-wide philosophy which actually integrates and actually, like, it's not that I can blame somebody who is, I can blame Eliezer. I think Eliezer has like,explicitly thought philosophically and he doesn't have this view but like the fact that that doesn't bug you that like like you don't you can't articulate like an explicit philosophical worldview that ground like like huh it doesn't well even if it doesn't have a name like what is it like it's not rationalism because like you don't endorse like any of the things that i've called out so like what is it if it's not rationalism right yeah i meanDivia (1:18:15)That what doesn'tthe name and stuff.I even their name.You're saying that's okay. Okay, okay, okay. So what is, yeah, I mean, I do care about having a consistent worldview. I don't think that there's any name that I have. mean, like I don't, I do have objectives as friends. You're one of them, but.Shea Levy (1:18:48)But that like a basic the basic way you self identify doesn't seem toDivia (1:18:55)Mm-hmm.Shea Levy (1:19:01)incorporate it. like if I say like if I say like I'm a Christian and I mean it like the old style Christian right like that self-identification incorporates a whole worldview right. When I call myself an objectivist why does itDivia (1:19:03)Yeah, okay.Sure. Yeah, that's, I mean, but...I don't know. I haven't found some community of people that are like, this is the thing.Shea Levy (1:19:26)But like the question is like does that seem like a flaw like maybe not a flaw worth fixing but it does that seem like a flaw to you does it seem or is it's like Well, yeah, that like not about that you're supposed to but that like it would be It would be better if I had it like something Yeah, okay. Okay, so maybe okay againDivia (1:19:35)Like in the world or in me? Like am I supposed to make it?It'd be better if I had a community of, yeah, it seems better if I had that.So I think it doesn't seem tractable to me. Like maybe I'm wrong, but it does not currently seem tractable on a community level.Shea Levy (1:19:57)Like to have a community oriented around a worldview. Your worldview.Divia (1:20:02)my worldview. Or like a worldview that I'm like, yeah, it's probably right about things that I'm, like, if I disagree with the community, like I sort of expect to update towards its position.Shea Levy (1:20:12)Right, so yeah, it doesn't seem tractable because too much of, like not enough people are aligned with you today or like something about your worldview means it just won't ever happen.Divia (1:20:22)don't mean ever. I don't know, I'm like, I'm really sad about that one way or the other. But no, I don't think I mean ever.Shea Levy (1:20:27)It doesn't seem to me like I am not going to live in an objectivist community and like I would say like there's an objectivist movement and I would say like I would count on one hand the number of people within the objectivist movement that I like feel like I would let into my like objectivist on clay. Like some of them I don't like maybe like personally but I think they've got like like so like I'm with you there andDivia (1:20:49)Yeah.Yeah, they're individual friends that I feel pretty aligned with, it mostly seems like the people I know that are really taking this type of stuff seriously are mostly like, we're doing some trailblazing thing that kind of works for us. And yeah, of course, ideally it would be more complete than that, but we're kind of on some sort of frontier, so what can we do?Shea Levy (1:21:12)Yeah, I guess, to be clear, the primary for me is not the social scene, it's the system of ideas. So if your view is like, yeah, it would be great if somebody, it would be really valuable if somebody could articulate the system that reflects my ideas. And like, you know, maybe.Divia (1:21:18)Okay, articulated.Or if I could more, like I do try to a certain extent, but I also have, maybe this is a real disagreement. Like I think on the current margin, nah, maybe it's not. But like certainly my most, like my newest set of ideas that seem most fundamental, I'm not super eager to be like, let me write those down so that people can read them. Like I wanna talk to my friends about them.Shea Levy (1:21:54)Yeah, no, My point is not that everybody has to be intellectual, right? That's not...Divia (1:21:59)No, I wanna be an intellectual and I do wanna share my ideas, but I think there's a gap between what is really my most bleeding edge worldview about this and what I'm willing to be explicit about in public anyway. No, that's not good.Shea Levy (1:22:12)Yeah, I mean, so like, yeah, like, because you want to validate it and work it out and see, like, get it right. Like, yeah, it's not it's not about a rush. I guess, I mean, again, this is another area where, like, I'm sort of contrasting. Like, what are you talked about that way of thinking, when you're talking about, like, what you took from overcoming bias and less wrong, like, anyway,Divia (1:22:20)Okay.Like so many, like I sometimes forget, cause I'll hang out with people that they really don't care.Shea Levy (1:22:40)I call that upfront right I call that out of front like thatDivia (1:22:43)Yeah, yeah. No, I know. So, but that's, I'm like, that's enough for me to call myself a rationalist.Shea Levy (1:22:47)Yeah, okay. So like, I think that's fair to say like, okay, I think it would be, I want to know what's true. And like, the rationalists were the first place where like, I got that as an explicit message.Divia (1:22:57)And it's still there. Like if I go to a Less Wrong Meetup and someone's like, if someone says something and I like know that that's just actually not true, I'm like, we have a shared way to communicate aboutShea Levy (1:23:11)Can you hold on one minute? I need to call. I will step back in a minute. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

I would say this one was hard to summarize, since we jumped around and covered a lot of ground, but I had a ton of fun finally talking to Visa from Twitter in realtime.Transcript:Divia (00:02)Hey, I'm here today with Visa from Twitter. That's mostly, I know you're on other platforms too. You have essays, you're on YouTube, but that's definitely how I think of you. When I got back on Twitter in like 2019, I think of you as really the one that kind of created the Twitter scene that I then joined. I don't know. I don't know to what extent you see it that way, but like, you you really the guy that started with all the threading and like the...Visa (00:10)Mm-hmm. Yes.Divia (00:30)actually friendly norms and I don't know, maybe nothing ever starts, but like you popularized it in the corner of Twitter that I'm in anyway, so I'm super glad to be here with you today and get to actually talk.Visa (00:43)Yeah, it's nice. I still remember there were a couple of things that you responded to on my tweets that I remember thinking were uncommonly insightful. One of it was, I think it was I was asking my timeline to psychoanalyze me about why I like angry women, like my wife or my friends. And your answer, think, was one of the best ones. Something about them being able to express something that you feel like you can't express.Divia (01:02)Yeah, I remember.Visa (01:11)And that just struck me as so true. And all the other responses were so, I don't know, superficial. And yours was like, I think that it's correct. And I think it helped me shift my understanding a little bit. And so I'm grateful for that. And yeah, so.Divia (01:24)Yeah, thank you. It's definitely, mean, I don't know, maybe one reason I think of it is just because, you know, I'm female, I'm like five feet tall and you're, you you're a guy, you're tall, you're like browner than the other people around you. I think it's hard, I imagine, with the anger, right?Visa (01:35)Yeah. Mm-hmm. You become the threat. mean, it's like the beauty and the beast dynamic, Where, yeah, I am the danger when I walk down the street at night. so I don't fear for my personal safety around other people. But like, if there's something like, you know, if I'm in a random country and there's like a bar fight and like someone blames me, I'm not going to get the benefit of the doubt. And I think that'sDivia (01:51)Yeah.Visa (02:05)Subconsciously, think that influenced my whole friendly game game thing, so that I have people around who know me and can vouch for me. think there's this bit from, I can't remember, it Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle. And they got into a traffic stop, and they were stressed out about it. But then the cop recognized them, and then they had a good interaction. And then they're like, yeah, being famous kind of, it sucks that that's, you know, it's.Divia (02:11)Mm-hmm.Yeah.huh.Visa (02:34)as a solution to that kind of problem that's not ideal. But it is a solution. yeah.Divia (02:39)Yeah, I mean, if you can swing it, right? And as you've said, also, I think it's different when you go around with a baby,Visa (02:47)so much. So much. It's like, man. And sometimes I remember, think I'm walking with my wife and my child. And then the world around me just feels so warm and open. And then let's say we're going to the park or something. And I'm like, I should go and get some water or something. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to go to the store. And I separate from them. And I cross the road. instantly, it's like, the warmth is gone. It's like people are like, you know.Divia (03:13)Yeah.Visa (03:14)And I get it, know, it delivers society, people have to make snap judgments and whatever, but like it's so striking. I think I might have been motivated to have kids sooner if I knew that, but I mean, and not knowing it intellectually as well is not, I don't know if that's helpful, but so my recommendation to a lot of young guys is try and borrow a baby, like you're like a nephew or a niece or something, like borrow a baby and like walk the streets with that and feel it for yourself. And I guess some people tell me that,Divia (03:25)Yeah, it's interesting.Yeah.Visa (03:41)Having a dog is kind as opposed to having nothing.Divia (03:44)I think especially if you have like a little puppy, or at least this is my brother said, he goes around with his kid a lot, but he also, he said it was pretty similar when he had a puppy that people would just come up to him and like be really friendly.Visa (03:47)Yeah.Yeah.I can imagine that. Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe I might be likelier to get a puppy after my kids are grown or something like that. It is very addictive when people are so nice.Divia (04:09)Yeah, that makes sense. actually, know, I some other stuff, my most extreme story of this, because I don't really, I don't know, I didn't notice as dramatic a contrast. It's true that people are more likely to talk to me when I have my baby, but I feel like people are pretty warm regardless. But I would, so one time, this is when I just had one kid and my midwife had organized like a, I don't know, like a walk around with your baby type activity, so there were like five of us.Visa (04:21)All right, yeah.Mm-hmm.Nice. So important, yeah.Divia (04:37)with babies and our midwife and then I ran into this guy that I kind of knew and he had been climbing around in some off-limits area and he was wearing these like distinctive, they were like red or orange pants or something and the cops came over and then he started talking because I knew him, we were talking to him and the cops came over and they were like, you know, we heard someone was like climbing around in that area and they were like, and I think we heard, it was, and they sort of.Visa (04:50)Hmm.Divia (05:03)I think they picked up, were like, yeah, they said he had red pants or something, but they looked at him and they were like, but it obviously couldn't have been you, because he was standing with all these people with babies. And I don't know if they were like, I don't know if they were like, it was you, but like wink, wink, nod, nod, we can tell you're not actually dangerous, or they were just like, no, it couldn't possibly have been you, this guy standing with the babies. But either way, it was pretty dramatic.Visa (05:09)Yeah, moms, yeah.Right.think that's quite plausible. There's a bit in Modern Family that does that where, again, I think a bunch of people knock over some private property, but then there's a realtor and his wife and all the upstanding citizens around. So the cop comes over and when he sees the guy that he knows, he's yeah, everything's fine because of that guy. And similar, think one, I Chris Rock has a bit, which is like, if you're in...If you're in some random city in the middle of the afternoon and there's a bunch of unemployed women around, chances are they are upper middle class, upper class strollers. And they're likely in very nice neighborhood because they can afford to do that. And whereas if you're in random city and there's a bunch of guys in the middle of the afternoon hanging around, are probably either unemployed, homeless, or druggies, whatever. Statistically, that's how it shakes out.Divia (06:01)Mm-hmm.Right.Yeah.Visa (06:20)And it is what it is. I don't know how deep you want to get into that, but it's just a thing that once you observe, think you can use it to your advantage, I guess. It's a thing that is worth trying to figure out. I not necessarily to your advantage, but I never thought about these things very much. How much your experience of reality is sh-influenced or determined by like the meat bag that you're in, your height, your gender, your... and you don't realize the degree to which that is the case until you share a space with someone who's not like that and you get to witness their experience or like yeah I think one of my...Divia (06:53)Yeah.Yeah. lot of, mean, trans people also, I think, tend to have really interesting perspectives on this. I feel like some of my most, some of the experiences that people describe that I'm like, okay, I better pay attention to that, is someone who's like, you know, I never felt like anyone valued me for me when I was walking around as a man, but then people start reading me as a woman, it was a whole different thing. Or the other way, the one I tend to hear the other way is something like,Visa (07:14)Mmm.Right. Mm. Mm.Divia (07:32)People seemed to listen to what they were saying more and respect them more and take them more seriously when they start presenting as a man. And I'm sure it's all more complicated than that, but those are at least some of the things.Visa (07:36)Yeah. All right.Yeah. Yeah. So it's very useful to have. I think, yeah, so there's like downsides to each thing, but we can kind of, if it's like, it's like a comparative advantage, something, traits, something, it's like in a friend group, like people can stand up for each other and kind of mitigate the worst of each. So yeah, make friends, you know, it always comes back to that somehow.Divia (07:49)Yeah.Definitely. Okay, so one tweet you made recently, I was like, all right, we definitely have to talk about this. This is after we'd already scheduled this time. And it was, because I tend to be most interested in talking to people about the things that they haven't quite figured out yet. So I don't know, maybe you've figured out since, but what you said was a thing. So I'll read it out. This was like a brainstorm in response to a potential essay that you would really wish like you could figure it out.Visa (08:12)Mm-hmm.Nice. I don't know. Let's try it.Great.Divia (08:35)So something about smartphones, chaos surfing, information architecture, network scenes, Twitter, containers, episodic, incompleteness, focus on what you want, maniac thread, win loops, MVP, attractors, word magic. You wanna thread that all together. And you have a little bit more about it. Cursed artifact, memed into existence, strange loops. But you haven't quite assembled the mind city. You were like, no, not quite. So yeah, has that been percolating? You have any new thoughts there?Visa (08:44)Yeah.Yes.Yeah, mean, yeah, I mean, so I have thoughts about every one of those things. I have written about them. So it's not, you like I always am wary of like, you have these big ideas, but you haven't even started describing them. But I think I have spoken about each of those things in some detail on Twitter. But, you know, so the current way to get it to like internalize whatLike what does Visa mean by all of those things? Like if you follow me for a long period of time and you've read all of those threads, that's probably the best way to internalize it in general. But like very few people get to do that. So it's just our mutuals on Twitter who happen to be around for so long. they're yeah, I kind of like just seeing those words and seeing Visa's name, I kind of know what he's grasping at vaguely. Yeah. And I'm like, how do I talk about these things in a way that is relatively succinct thatDivia (09:47)Yeah, it's like your dominoes are kind of similar.Visa (09:57)like kind of, I don't know if downloads is the right word, but just conveys a lot of that in a succinct way that people can relate to, I mean understand, I don't know, I'm still...Yeah, I just want to not require such a large time investment to convey these ideas, even for myself, I guess. I do feel like maybe I haven't identified the precision points. If you see Picasso's bull, the drawings that he does, he made them progressively simpler and simpler. Or Steve Jobs has a bunch of quotes about how like,and sophistication is simplicity is the ultimate sophistication where you can take away all the elements that are not relevant. But you don't quite know in advance what elements are not relevant. So even with both of the books that I've written, they are longer than they need to be. let's just talk about introspect because Sven was like a, it's not even finished. Well, introspect is also not finished.Divia (10:56)This is, by the way, this is friendly, ambitious nerd and introspect, right?Visa (11:10)In retrospect, it's like 100,000 words. And I don't want it to be. It's just that to include everything I want to say, that's how big it swelled up to. And I tried to compress, compress, compress. But there are some compressions that you don't know how to do until you've seen how people understand and misunderstand it and how it passes through conversations and stuff. So it's like I had to write the book.in order to, and I don't think I've arrived at another better thing, but like, you know, that's like something like 50 sections. And I haven't figured out like, if I had to narrow it down to like 12, I'm not sure precisely. I know I was rereading it yesterday and I now know some of the things I would like set aside because some of the other elements imply some of the other, some elements imply other elements. So you can kind of identify the elements thatyou know will imply the ones that you need so that the, yeah, you don't know which are the most load-bearing elements when all seem important, but even so, some elements are always more load-bearing than others. And it really takes time to identify what they are. So I need to circle back to the things that you're asking about. I think at the heart of everything, there's an understanding of dynamism andattention. Those are probably the most central things and like frames, are all the same thing again. It's like, you know, that things change and what you see is not necessarily what it is. And a sufficiently advanced understanding of that is something that you can use to re-derive everything else. But that thing that I just described is very, very succinct and people who get itThey already get it because they've already synthesized a lot of things in their own experience. And they're like, yeah, that reminds me of this essay, or that reminds me of that book, or that reminds me of something someone said. And they connect the dots and they recreate the picture, sort of. I just, yeah, so what I just described does not solve my problem for me. I'm trying to, I guess I need to project manage this better for myself because the kind of,like version 999, like final holy grail, not holy grail, but the really grand design is that, you can share this with anyone anywhere in the world, and they're going to get it very, very well, and they're going to be able to use it very, well as well. And to get to that point probably requires a bunch of prerequisites states that I don't currently influence. So I probably need to narrow it down and be like, I want to help this subset of people whoThis is very helpful when you say out loud. So our current mutuals will get it already. So I don't really need to explain it to them. But if I did, it would be helpful anyway. And then there's another layer outside of those people who are sympathetic to these ideas, but they don't actually think about it very much. And elegant, succinct framing for these words would help them see what I see. And again, so I guess should say what I see.Divia (14:30)Yeah.Visa (14:31)The thing that usually, I think the best anecdote that I have to kind of open this is like a bunch of things people say about the internet and about smartphones and about media in general, I guess, is that, I I think the stereotype is like someone goes on the internet a lot and they just get increasingly deranged and crazy and like lose their s**t. And my experience has been the opposite of that.It seems like the more time I spend online, I feel I get smarter. I get more well-informed. I make new friends. I make more money. Everything just gets better for me the more I do it. And so it's like, I'm looking to understand and convey, what is that? Is it something special about me? don't think I'm, I mean, I'm a bit different from some of my peers, I guess, but I don't think I'm like an alien, like a literal supernatural whatever. I guess I have some configuration ofDivia (15:24)YouVisa (15:29)how I filter information or how I respond to things, like some energetic posture that allows me to go into quote unquote, like the sludge, toxic sludge or whatever you want to call it, like like waste water or something, it's a metaphor I'm getting, and come out of it cleaner somehow or like fresher or healthier or happier. And...Divia (15:48)Yeah.the pure all things are pure. I don't know, it's some quote. But I think there's something to it where like if you have a certain internal clarity then what you're saying like you can go into something and you come out and it's net like you weren't it didn't make you worse.Visa (15:55)Is that true? Do you think that's true? Yeah, don't know if... Yeah.Yeah, so I think, you know, and like I've been kind of like testing this on the timeline. mean, testing. Testing sounds like I'm doing experiments on people, but I I share my experience and I've witnessed people saying, yeah, you the way you said this made me think about that. And then I changed something in my behavior and then that's a little bit better. And if these things can be condensed into some principles, some ideas, some, and I don't thinkanybody learns these things from like a lecture about how to do it. So that's the tricky thing. know, and here I'm reminded of one of the, there's like a story I've told. It's like, okay, there's a subreddit for Zen, rzen. It's full of people like one-upping each other about being more spiritual and bickering with each other. It's so bad, it's good. But like, you know, it's like, if you go there for like spiritual instruction,Divia (16:47)Mm-hmm.Yeah, it's weird. It seems like a pattern on my Twitter timeline that some of the most one-upping I see is among the spiritual path, like official I'm on a spiritual path people, right?Visa (17:19)Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you're still stuck in stage three. How's stage four of you? And that sounds like Keegan stuff. in every tradition, there's people being like, you are still in this stage of enlightenment or whatever. Whereas on the other hand, one of the most beautiful, elegant, simple things I've read was from my friend who's into kitchen knives sent me a link from a kitchen knife forum.Divia (17:25)Yeah.For sure.Visa (17:47)And the guy's like, and people are saying, how do I get the, what's the best kitchen knife? And this random poster, this red is very eloquent. Like, know, it's about, like, in your journey into knives, you're going to try a bunch of different things. And you're going to find that what fits your hand is the whatever, what fits your purpose. And I'm reading it, I was like, that's so, like, it's so spiritual. It's so like, there's this deep appreciation for yourself, for your tools, for your task. And I guess it's like zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance kind of.Divia (18:07)Right.Visa (18:16)But this guy wasn't trying to be spiritual or give instructions. Yeah, he was just trying to help some other guy manage his knives better. And so I think if I am to do what I'm trying to do, I cannot tell people, I cannot announce that this is what I'm doing and everyone come and let's do this thing. Because it's it's too on the nose, I think. And so I get conflicted about.Divia (18:20)was probably part of what was so successful about it, right?Yeah.Mm-hmm.Visa (18:43)Should I even say that? Should I be talking to you or anybody else and tell them, I'm going to do this thing, but actually it's about that thing? I don't know if that works. But so my approach is, OK, let me do a thing that I actually want to do. instead of pretending to care about kitchen knives when I don't, I'll just pick up a thing that I actually do care about. And then because I have those things on my radar, that should come through. And so one of the things I think I'm going to do is media studies, media analysis, movies.TV shows, that's stuff that I like to talk about anyway, and video games. And so that might be how I approach it. So maybe all the things I was talking about earlier about episodic thinking and whatever, that's. Well, so the episodic stuff is about form, right? So it's how you present information in a way that you can make it as a creator and re-audiences can receive it as audiences. And so again, I think one of the more profound things similar to The Kitchen Knives was the rules of show running by some TV producer who produced TV shows. And again, it's remarkable what goes into producing a good TV show. You have so many different people, have the story, you have different interpretations, set design, and the project management of that is remarkable.Divia (19:56)Okay.Visa (20:10)And so a person who's good at it has some domain-independent insight. The insights from that domain can be translated into project management and lot of other domains, I think. So that's the kind of thing I'm interested in. And I don't know if I answered your question. I'm just going in circles.Divia (20:28)Yeah, okay, let me see if I can try to reflect back what I heard you say, okay? So there's something that, at least the way you've been thinking of it is you kind of, you have like a, there's something that your body of work on Twitter tends to communicate to people, or at least like tends to communicate to the sort of people that like stick around and maybe are interested in some of the same stuff and read a lot of your stuff. But what you're really hoping is that you could make it more, make it more of an elegant concept.Visa (20:32)Mm-hmm.Yeah.Yes, more accessible to people.Divia (20:57)And one day you're, sorry, yeah.Right, and ideally you want it to be sort of such a good concept or such a good conceptualization that you can communicate to almost anyone, regardless of any more like prerequisites or something like that. But then it seemed like you were like, but that might be a little bit of a leap from where you are. So maybe just like one, I don't know, like one circle out or something from the people that currently seem like they get it. Maybe with some context, maybe that should be sort of what you're thinking about next.Visa (21:11)Mm-hmm.Yeah.Yeah.Divia (21:31)And then it seemed like you started to be like, look, there's some way of being that you have that's sort of like if you, where for you the internet can be a force multiplier. And probably not just the internet, probably like sort of regardless of what you expose yourself to, you can kind of like inhabit it and things will get better because you have more reach.Visa (21:55)It's happened. Yeah. I found some screenshots from like a WhatsApp group from like my early 20s where like all my, it's a bunch of my friends were all in a group chat. And then they were like, how do you guys, how do we all know each other? Like Visa was the one that introduced all of us. And like this person's dating that, but they're married now. And you know, it's like this person's in a band with that person. And it's just, I just introduced people to people and it works out, you know? And I guess, so when I say that,Divia (22:02)Mm-hmm.Visa (22:23)Someone else might then come along and be like, I tried that and it didn't work. And I'm like, did not realize that I did not think to include the fact that, OK, first of all, you've got to filter for a certain level of pro-social thing. And so it's layers and layers of that. And sometimes I don't know what I know. sometimes I don't know. Oftentimes, I don't know what is implicit until I encounter a misunderstanding. And I'm like, OK, that's because I assumed.bunch of things. So I have good assumptions, which is kind of, you know, yeah, it's a strange, and I don't know what they are. So it's kind of, slightly, it's it's, guess it's because, yeah, I don't even know why, you know, like I can, I can like recite my like, words that come out of my head, that, you know, kind of say words around the thing. But if I really investigate it, I don't really know why. Like I have theories, right, like just like, okay, I,When I was a kid, I wanted to be wiser because I felt unwise. And so I did a lot of reading. But a lot of people do a lot of reading. that doesn't quite. Until then, I'm like, OK, maybe it's something very particular to. So my current leading theory is something like my leading story that I'm still. my family runs a family business. And so I was raised a lot by helpers, domestic helpers, who left.Divia (23:28)A lot of people do that, yeah.Mm-hmm.Visa (23:50)And I remember that, I think, from a very young age, that was kind of devastating. remember, and I forgot about it, sort of, but it was, I was never like close to my parents emotionally. I mean, we get along. It's not, you know, I wouldn't say they're like bad people or neglectful or whatever. And like a lot of Singaporean kids are basically raised by helpers who they don't know anymore. It's like a movie about it. And then, but yeah, so again, that's part of the story, but lots of other Singaporean kids also.Divia (24:02)Yeah.Visa (24:19)do that. So why am I different? Then there's like, okay, I remember reading. So I spent a lot of my childhood reading a lot about like disasters. And I didn't connect the dots that disasters and like, know, collapse of civilizations and stuff like that. It's like emotionally similar to abandonment, or feelings of like, you know, why is everything over? why, you know, so there's that. And then I remember reading about, so in school, when I was like 10,Divia (24:31)Okay.Visa (24:49)In Singapore, you learn about the Japanese occupation in World War II. And it's like a classroom thing. in 1945, this happened, and then the Japanese came, and then this happened. And everyone's just like, yeah, I'm like... And specifically, the thing that blew my mind was the currency became worthless. So the Japanese introduced a new currency, which they called banana money, and it quickly became worthless. And I was shell-shocked in that moment. I was like, what? Money can just become worthless? And everyone else turned to page for whatever. I'm like...Divia (25:07)Hmm.Visa (25:19)wait, can we discuss this? What's going on? And yeah, so I think it's something of those two things. It's like having that childhood experience, which quite a lot of people have, and then reading a lot about ancient history stuff and just having a lot of context, I guess, and then learning that that's also true in very recent living memory in my country. And yeah, maybe being a minority might have something to do with it.Divia (25:19)YouOkay, so sorry, I think I need to connect these dots for me. So how exactly the experience of being raised by the helpers and then they would leave, like, I think I don't quite, I believe you, but I don't quite see the through line from that to the sort of success that you're trying to put your finger on.Visa (26:03)Right, I think, and you know, there are a few other stories of a few other people that to me feels emotionally similar. So like one of the, like also in Singapore, one of our top diplomats slash foreign policy experts is this guy called Billahari. And I mean, people dispute whether, a lot of people don't like him because he's very abrasive, but he's like, the consensus is like he's kind of a genius.Divia (26:12)Mm-hmm.Visa (26:29)And one of his experiences, think, was that his father was in an embassy in Indonesia, I think, when there were riots and stuff. And he lost contact and something. It was a very traumatic experience, basically. And there's a few other things. If you look into like, where else do I want to tell stories about? There's something about having a rock. So I call these rock pool experiences, which I have a draft about.And it's from crypto. So in crypto, say, run pool is when you lose your money or whatever. But I think it's an excellent phrase for just having your reality pulled out from under your feet. So you have some model of reality. this person, my mate, this lady who takes care of me will always be there for me. she's gone. And this money will always have value. it's gone. And when you have an experience,Divia (27:00)Yeah. Totally.I see. Okay. So this is, this is when you were saying that you seemed like you had pretty solid assumptions. I think now you're like, because you questioned all of your assumptions due to some of these experiences.Visa (27:35)I think it seems like it. that's my leading current theory. People who have not yet experienced something of a Rumpool event, there's something different about, it's like you're trying to explain stuff to them and they will say they get it and they'll nod and be like, that makes sense. But they don't really, and it's, same for even, guess one of the most universal things is when people become parents, right? And then you think about,whatever you've heard people say before you became a parent, and you're like, yeah, I get it. And then the reality of it, there's a certain reality shock where whatever the description of the thing is very, you know what mean? So it's like, do some people have a better time adapting to shocks than other people and why? I think that's one of the big questions that I don't know the answer to.Divia (28:27)parenthood thing, I think conventional wisdom is you can't really explain to someone what it's like to be a parent. They just have to experience it,Visa (28:34)Seems like it, yeah? And you don't agree?Divia (28:35)Yeah.Visa (28:40)You can prepare quite a bit.Divia (28:41)It doesn't seem right to me. when I, the way I, and I don't know that I'm right, but like on an emotional level, I'm like, no, I totally could have explained it to myself, but just nobody would explain it to me. Again, I feel like I was asking. Like when I was pregnant, I went around to everybody I knew. I go up to strangers. I'm like, okay, like, please tell me about it. Like, what am I missing? And like, might be fooling myself, but I'm like, I could have given myself.Visa (28:53)People are very, yeah. Yeah.Divia (29:07)Of course it's like, it's unfair to be like me and me, but still, I'm like, no, I could have explained it. Those people just didn't, and that's why I didn't get it.Visa (29:09)No, I, yeah.I believe you. I think so and I think this is one of those things where we are both like kind of Both of us are a little bit strange, right? Like so like when I was asking people to psychoanalyze me I had like a hundred response yours was good. Everyone else's was meh and so, know that there's differences in quality of explanations and most people are really bad at it and like, you know, I look around and like People who are trying people who are parents who want to encourage other people to become parentsDivia (29:26)Yeah.Yeah.That's true.Visa (29:43)try to sell them on being parents and they do it horribly. They're like, it's going to be the most meaningful experience. Nobody wakes up in the morning and be like, I want a more meaningful experience. Not in those terms, right? Like you have to describe. And I'm not even talking about explaining what it's like, but just selling things to people. just pitching and I can think of so many things that were poorly sold to me. I'm putting on my marketing guy hat. But I got into marketing inDivia (29:46)It's true.Yeah.Visa (30:12)Part because I felt like some things were well pitched and some things were poorly pitched and I wanted to understand the difference and I wanted to get good at it. And it's like, you know, one of the best ways of thinking about meditation that I like is that it's like you stop feeling like a guest in your own body and you start feeling like it's yours, like you're a native. Right. And it's so welcoming and inviting and it's not, you know, I think people have some kind of profound experience and then they...Divia (30:32)I do like that.Visa (30:41)they want to tell you that it's profound, but that's not the nature of profound experience. So it's like the moment you decide, I'm going to tell people how amazing it is, the experience of amazingness is not, wow, how amazing it is. So it's to understand how to convey the thing. guess it's a kind of literacy. It's like a language management, storytelling skill whereDivia (31:04)Yeah.Visa (31:09)The way to convey a thing is not necessarily to name the thing as the thing, but to give the, you know, I'm reminded now of Andrew Stanton, who wrote Finding Nemo. He gave a TED Talk when TED Talks were good. And he was explaining that, you know, like storytelling is like, you don't want to tell people, you want to put two plus two and let the audience connect and say it's four. You don't want to be like four. You you want to like present in a way that they can complete.Divia (31:34)Great.Visa (31:38)the interpretation and then it's Diaz. And yeah, I think that's true for parenting. It's true for like, so I've had so many people tell me that my tweets about my son make them look forward to becoming a parent or make them likelier to want to become a parent. I've had so many people tell me they love my wife entirely based on my tweets of her, which is like my intention. have intent, like it's on purpose that I want people to like her because she's kind of a loner and like I want her to friends and but like.Divia (31:59)Yeah?Visa (32:08)You can.Divia (32:09)It worked on me. I think she's cool. And the way especially you talk about like all the research she does and like the way she seems really tuned into all this stuff going on in Singapore seems really impressive.Visa (32:14)Mm.Yeah, she is really cool. And the thing is, there are a lot of cool people who we don't know about because nobody's helping them tell their story in a way that's compelling. And that's really what decisively made me go from, I want to try and, so you can innovate, you can sell, and you can manage the invent. I think the quote was like, you build it, you sell it, you handle the money, or you keep the house in order.like illegal accounting, HR, whatever. like, so build it or sell. And I can't do, I can't manage a checkbook or I'll go crazy. So my choices are either I build it or I sell it. And then I investigate. First, on one level, the people who build stuff, have, like, at the cutting edge of building, they have like a sensibility that I see it and I recognize that I don't have it to that degree. Like really that maniacal, I'm going to get all the details right, I'm going to trial and error, whatever. Whereas,I can experiment with, let's try telling this story like 25 different ways and see what resonates with people. For some reason, I'm drawn to that of all the things. And also, I hear things like when flight was invented by the Wright brothers, it took years before people even realized that it had happened. people had seen it. Yeah. So right now, if you want to accelerate innovation or whatever in the world,Divia (33:23)Yeah, interesting.I do think there are a lot of things like that.Visa (33:45)It's already here, not evenly distributed. And so you can actually just, and to the person who didn't know about a thing, the person who did it and the person who told them about it are almost equal in importance. Because if the person did it and somebody didn't tell them, then they didn't know about it. It's as good as if it never happened to that person. And then you multiply by everyone. Anyway, so the thing I.Divia (34:06)Yeah.I mean, it just seemed like the sort of thing you're well suited to.Visa (34:14)Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell. Is it that I was always like that? Was I innately like that? Did I optimize for it along the way? A bit of both, maybe. And yeah, if it...Divia (34:27)So, yeah, I think it's so interesting to think about like where.where people's kind of like fundamental dispositions really come from. And I thought about it a lot this time when I was pregnant. I don't mean it in some mystical way, but sort of like what is a soul in the sense that like sort of the most fundamental parts about how someone is. Because obviously a ton of it's genetic, but I've seen a bunch of identical twins and they come out of, they're different. And what I've determined when I try to talk about it,Visa (34:37)Mm.Mmm.Divia (35:03)to them or their parents is they come out different. And so I'm like, it's whatever it is, it's gotta be pretty early. Even though, yeah, like again, they really are pretty similar, genetics is a lot, but it's not the only thing. And some of these fundamental dispositions, I don't know, it really, it's the sort of thing that I probably keep thinking about it. Like in particular, one of my bigger updates, not even just from having my own kids, but like,Visa (35:11)Right. Yeah. Yeah.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Divia (35:31)You know, ever since I had kids, hang out with more people with their kids. And I can't tell if I'm exaggerating or not when I say this, but the basic update is that babies are about as different from each other as adults are. And I think there's some, like some sort of overall cultural attitude and also some part of me that's like, yeah, but don't think some people sort of start out similar and then diverge. And I'm like, kind of, but also kind of the opposite. Like kindVisa (35:45)Yeah, I think so too. Correct.Yeah.Divia (35:59)they're right there from the beginning and then they try to fit in and like I don't know.Visa (36:01)Yeah, yeah. Again, even before I had kids, I would show up at a nephew's birthday party, like two-year-olds, three-year-olds. They're so different. They all do different. Some will be running after each other. Some will be approaching adults. Some will be off in a corner somewhere. you look at them, you're like, these are people. They might be unskilled in certain ways, but their inclinations, especially, I think.Divia (36:13)Yeah.Yeah.Visa (36:31)You can't change your... You can't... You know, you can... I don't know how much you can influence these things. My son is clearly more social even than me. He loves people. We go anywhere... And my wife is very much not. So she's like, god, what have I brought in the world? Because we brought him to this play area in a mall where you pay to go in and there's toys. And we kind of... Not forgot, but we didn't really think about how... there are going to be other kids there as well.Divia (36:38)Interesting.Yeah.Mm-hmm.Visa (37:00)And okay, so we bring him in and Sharon's thinking, okay, you sit down on the floor and let him get used to you because we're in a new space and he's small and like let him get used to you first and let him watch you play and then he'll start playing. And so she put him down and he races off to go meet the other kids. Yeah. And he just goes right into it like, wow, that's fearless, fearless andDivia (37:19)To the other kids.Visa (37:29)so energetic and so and you look around other kids and there was at least one kid that's kind of just hanging out hanging out by himself and seemingly happy to just chill and like we can make some very you know he's it's unlikely that my kid and that kid are going to be the opposite like 20 years from now where right it's it's i mean you could have some major event that revises something for you you might whatever whatever but like i don't youDivia (37:48)This seems right.Visa (37:58)People will always, when you tell people, no, where am going with this? Whatever you become later in life, there's always a through line back. And it could be because there's many, many branching paths. So whatever path you take, there will always be a path back. that then seems like a very significant thing. And yet, just the fact that that exists, I think, is, and the same with my writing, for example. I have never written a goodDivia (38:26)Mm-hmm.Visa (38:28)piece of writing that I did not already have like a proto-primitive version of like years earlier. Like every single one of my books, even so right now when I finally decided, okay, this era is going to be called frame studies, I can do like a from visa frames. I'm like, I've been tweeting about this for a long time. But at the moment when I do it, it feels like, I've got a new, like a fresh take on things or something. And which tells me that my next thing after this is also something that I've already done.Divia (38:35)Right.You've been talking about it.Visa (38:57)Right? It can seem a little bit limiting from a certain point of view, like, there's nothing new. Everything's already done. But on the other hand, it's also exciting because you see it with fresh perspective and it becomes more activated. Like, you realize that, this thing that was set in passing is actually so much more to it than I initially thought. And that kind of makesDivia (38:58)Seems right, yeah.Visa (39:27)everything around you actually becomes so much more lively like like you can't write anything off entirelyDivia (39:33)You can see it as like these are these things that I'm thinking now they're going to grow into more later.Visa (39:38)Yeah, as long as you're following your nose about whatever's interesting, there's always... You can't know in advance what will resonate with you later on. I feel like we've gone in a bunch of circles and there were some questions that we had that were interesting that we didn't finish answering. Was it?Divia (39:56)Yeah, no, it's so, that's okay. I wanted to ask you about the thing that you've sort of been circling around. So this is, it makes sense, but about like what you're trying to distill. one description of it that I heard was like, what makes it so that things work out for you basically? Like there's something, you have some kind of...Visa (40:03)Okay, cool.Divia (40:20)Visa magic and you're like, what is it? And you want to share it.Visa (40:24)Yeah.Hmm.Some of it is just not giving up, I think. But no, that's even that. I mean, that's like, well, yeah, like so if you give up, then it's game over. Then you can't stay in the game long enough to start getting the rewards. even like with, so part of it is try to do things that you enjoy doing that you can do for a very, very long time. Because a lot of the mainstream games that people play, all the rewards are like,downstream and a lot of people give up early and so they get like the worst of both worlds which is very common.Divia (41:11)think, yeah, so the thing that seems, and obviously you talk about this all the time, but if I had to say what seems most fundamental from what you've been saying is the part about focusing on what you want.Visa (41:22)But interestingly, came to me kind of late. I guess I was sort of doing it, it came in when I was like, I don't know, 28, 29? So my early 20s were not there. So this points at a thing I want to get to about, I call it blessedness versus wretchedness, which is like upward-downward spirals,Divia (41:28)Yeah.Yeah.Visa (41:51)The wretched thing about wretchedness is that you try to help someone and it gets worse. And so then they don't get help. then that gets worse. Whereas with blessedness, it's like, you introduce a friend to another friend and you trust that they will take care of things. So you can just let them be and everything just gets better. And it's like, you, yeah, I feel like I've been in the wretched place before.Divia (42:01)Yeah.Visa (42:18)But then I have since heard from people who are way, way worse. I'm like, almost like, is this stolen better? When I was like 17, that felt true for me. Everything I was doing seemed to make everything worse. But I guess I was never truly down. I didn't go as far down bed as some people can, I guess. But I'm still contextualizing that.Divia (42:38)Yeah, I wonder. I think some of why that one resonates with me a lot. So something, I probably don't talk about it that often in terms of my main influences, but when I was in my mid-20s, this guy recommended, so have you heard of Holosync or Bill Harris? Probably not, but. So Holosync, I don't know how, it's Binaural Beats. And my impression is it's kind of a, yeah, and I think.Visa (43:04)OK. yeah, OK. I know by the orbits.Divia (43:08)it might even kind of scam me because I haven't totally ever fact-checked this, but I think the idea is that it has like slightly different sounds in each ear and it causes some like, I don't it's like a little trippy when you listen to it. But I think when the guys started selling it, was when like on a cassette where that couldn't even really have necessarily been true. I might be wrong about that. But anyway, so he introduced me to Holosync, but also he had theseVisa (43:19)YeahSureDivia (43:37)life integration courses, this guy, Bill Harris. And he never, I never really did the Holosync that much. I think the basic theory and he would, I also like something I still think about all the time is prig gene and disabative systems. I don't even really, I understand what it means more now that I did that, but his basic theory was like, look, you kind of just perturb the system a little and then it makes it like more plastic. And then if you learn better concepts, it's then then everything will be better. And he, so he had these, he was like a,Visa (43:38)Mm-hmm. Yeah.Divia (44:07)sort of hypnotist guy who was trained in like neuro-linguistic programming. He was a big marketing guy and he had probably had three courses, I say like 12 lessons each. And my friend gave me these MP3s. I used to listen to them. And that was just his top thing is you have to focus on what you want instead of on what you don't want. But he said it like 50 different ways and he tried to really drill down to the details and he's like, look, a lot of people have learned a shallow version of this. Some teacher told them to do that. So they started framing their sentences in positive ways. He's like, but you've got to.Visa (44:20)Mm-hmm.Yeah.Nice.Divia (44:37)drill down to the actual mental representations and a lot of it anyway with a whole I don't know that'sVisa (44:44)I see it. I see it. Yeah. It's, you know, it's like the inverse is like, so people say things like, I don't know if that could work or whatever, but like most people are doing the opposite all the time and it's clearly working. It's clearly working that like focusing on the worst things is making things worse. So.Divia (44:58)Yeah!No, and I think there's there's some really wrong and cringey stuff out there, like, you know, the secret video or people are like, just focus on bills, you know, on checks instead of bills. And I'm like, no, no, like, like, of course not. Like, and of course the way this works is through people actually doing things. Like it's not, but the idea that on like a pretty low level, that is sort of how brains work is they're kind of like, all right, let me, this is what I'm picturing. Let me kind of try to.Visa (45:09)yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Mm-hmm.Divia (45:31)it feels better when that kind of lines up with what I'm seeing. I think it's true.Visa (45:34)Yeah. Yeah, we are like pattern recognizing creatures. And again, if someone says don't look down, you don't process the don't very well yet. The don't has to, we hear the instruction and instincts is to follow the instruction before we, even though the first word is don't, right? You then.Divia (45:43)Yeah.Yeah, no, and I remember this. I mean, I can notice it as an adult, but I also remember it as a kid too. this time, for me, the most distinct memory, I think it was my brother and he had this like some really sticky tape or something and he was gonna put something on the wall and he was like, don't touch it. And I just reached out and it wasn't like I was trying to do the opposite of what he said. It was just like a really, the way I remembered is like a really low level. heard something like touch it. I was like, like touch it? I don't know.Visa (46:13)Yeah.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your brain is like, don't x is a very, you then have to, your brain or yourself, you have to do x and then process the don't. So don't touch it. like, this is the thing I'm not supposed to do. But you already start, you have to, you know.Divia (46:38)Right, and I think it is, I don't know, people go back and forth on this, but I think it is about the words and it's not. I think it's both that he said it that way and that he was probably imagining me touching it. So I think his whole vibe was kinda like, communicat- I mean, I don't really remember this very, in a lot of detail, but I do know that when I see parents with their kids, sometimes they're like, don't do that. And I'm like, okay, maybe there's some advantage to saying it in the positive, but like-Visa (46:47)sure. Yeah.Okay, yeah, yeah, yeahDivia (47:06)I think the overall communication is pretty clear. Whereas then other times I see parents and I'm like, you just gave your kid like a hypnotic instruction to do that thing. Like, and I know you have some tweets about this, but like, I don't know. It's, I definitely sometimes think about it. And then I try, you know, I try to mostly not think about it too much because it's not really, it's, I think it's ultimately not my business what people are doing with their kids, but.Visa (47:08)Yeah.Yeah, it's wild.Sure. Yeah. Yeah, same. So same. Yeah, I also care about this. And I also don't want to intrude in people's lives to micromanage their parenting. But if there's something we could release into the cultural ether where they might encounter it at some point, and then they're like, hmm, I should think about how I'm talking with my kids. That would be great. And I think it's possible. I've had DMs with some guy where,Divia (47:35)But I think it's very interesting.Yeah.Visa (48:01)He came to me to ask me for some advice for some I don't know what. And I was talking to him about relationships in general as like a metaphor for something else. And then he DMed me like six months later saying that he had had a shitty relationship with his younger brother all his life because he was always trying to tell him what to do and what not to do. And it was from a place of, he thought he was helping, but like his brother felt it as like an intrusion on his sovereignty. And he didn't see it that way until I spoke to him about something else.And he said he shifted the way he talked to his brother, and their relationship is completely different now. I'm like, what? That can happen? The fact that these things can happen, I wonder why I don't wake up every morning going, my god, there's so much opportunity to do so much good. It just doesn't feel obvious, I guess. And yeah, so another one of my riffs is the most magical thing about reality, about the perception, is that it transforms.Divia (48:32)That's so cool. Yeah.Visa (48:55)the extraordinary in trans, it makes the magical mundane. Like we have a magical brain that makes the magical mundane. I guess to make things more convenient so we can understand, like we narrow our frame of everything so that we can function and go about our day. Because being in like ecstatic exaltation about everything might be not.Divia (48:59)Yeah.Yeah, I mean, think it's then people sometimes end up kind of manic and it has problems, especially with like interfacing with other people andVisa (49:27)So then the kind of holy grail is like, is it possible to have like this soft mania that still lets you... I think it is, Yeah.Divia (49:34)Yeah, I think some people do it, yeah. I think so. But I think, so one of my, I don't know, feel like a relatively crack body talking about this, for me, and this has been on my mind recently, so I think one of the top things I have to figure out to sort of maintain the energy for the things I actually think are important.Visa (49:45)Another hit.Divia (50:00)is something like how to interface with some big societal force that doesn't really, that's like more like nah, people should be conventional, like whatever. Because I think it's a real thing and for me at least it doesn't work to just dismiss it. So I'm like I have to form some sort of relatively healthy understanding. I don't know if that makes sense, what I'm saying.Visa (50:17)Mm-hmm.Wait, so you're saying that you have like a, like, it's kind of like a super-ego, like, societal representation that you have to get along with?Divia (50:31)So for example, like this is probably some of the most like, my God, these ideas are so cool. A couple of years ago, I was really into this, these ideas I found about animal training or whatever. And I do think they're good ideas. As with many things, I think I was like, I don't know, I thought maybe they would have more potential more quickly than they did, but you know, that's typical. But I remember, or especially looking back at it, I'm like, no, but just as I'm like, but this could be really important.Visa (50:43)Okay.Divia (50:58)There's some kind, like you know the meme that's been going around lot lately about like nothing ever happens? I feel like I have something in my head that's like, don't get too excited about that, because remember, nothing ever happens. Like who do you think you are to like think that something could happen? I'm like, well, but it seems like it's like, no, nothing other than, and like, it's not, I don't know, I don't wanna, I don't think I'm giving like a perfect description of it, but I think there is something like that that I feel like I have to contend with, because it's sort of out of sync with people if I'm like, nah, stuff can happen.Visa (51:02)Are you sure?Aw man.man.Well, my... Sure.Okay.Yeah, well, OK, my kind of antidote to that. So first of all, would say that it's good to have some part of you be like, don't count on the change happening tomorrow. Don't count on it. Because if you're counting on it, then it's going to be a mess. But the other thing I would say is like, every change that ever happened, every significant change that ever happened seemedDivia (51:44)Sure, definitely.Visa (51:56)like it was never going to happen seemed impossible until it seemed inevitable. Now you take like the Berlin Wall for example, like the day beforeDivia (52:04)You know that, by the way, that is the first historical event I remember someone telling me about. I remember my mom being like, the Berlin Wall just fell. I was really little. I had no idea what it meant, but I feel happy that I remember it. Anyway, yeah, that is one of those things.Visa (52:15)Yeah.Yeah, it was never going to happen. And then once it happens, it was always going to happen. Same for in Singapore, legalizing. So we had this archaic law that criminalized gay sex. I don't think they ever used it in court, but it was just this shitty vestige of people would use it to justify.Divia (52:37)Mm-hmm.Visa (52:44)like some bigotry, or they would say, it's not enforced, or it's not a big deal, whatever. But it's just this, I would say it's an eyesore in the legal structure, and it cascades out into culture. And people are like, that's never going to change. It's been there forever, and then it did. And then now, it just seems so obvious. And I would say even, I remember when I was just going to say that.Divia (53:00)So did.And even gay marriage in the US, same kind of thing. Like all these, like Obama and whatever, they're like, look, civil unions, whatever, don't get too excited. But then that was passed.Visa (53:13)Yeah. I was just going to say that. Yeah. Like in 2014, if you had asked me when the US was going to legalize gay marriage federally, I'd like, maybe 2030, 25 maybe. And it's next, it's like, it's happened so fast. And the crazy thing is, as soon as the thing happens, people are very, very quick to like rearrange around it as if it was always the case. And I think, I think that actually contributes to the feeling that nothing ever happens because we are notDivia (53:39)Totally.Visa (53:43)You know, like, and so there is, I don't know you want to call it the man or Moloch or whatever, but like, there is some, in the social order, like this Hobbesy Leviathan creature, right? It's like, how does social change happen? It happens, or like, how does, you know, it happens because some group of people were very persistent in like being annoying, basically. And you don't, you generally don't want people to be annoying for no good reason or whatever. And so that, thatDivia (54:06)Yeah.Visa (54:12)that information that people were being annoying until change happens tends to get like suppressed or you know, just like shrouded in whatever so that the next group of people isn't annoying for no particular reason or and Yeah, it's just that agitation is is misunderstood and that under theorized under appreciated, I don't know likeYeah, I mean, I don't know how to talk about that, like nothing ever happens is a Psyop that such that the moment something happens, it then gets re, you know, the narrative gets rearranged around it such that it didn't happen. Yeah, yeah, we always knew that was, well, that was obviously going to happen. But other than that, nothing ever happens. You know, that thing was, of course it was going to, like, that's not, you you shouldn't, we are so quick.Divia (54:54)Yeah. We've always been a war with Eurasia.Visa (55:07)to rearrange the narrative such that we know what's happening. Even optimists, think. But everyone is afraid to acknowledge that we don't know for sure. And so I think there's this anecdote. I don't know how true it is, something about how people prefer, for a small electric shock that's painful, people prefer 100. If you press a button, you get it 100 % of the time. But since you press one, you get one 50 % of the time. People prefer, you know those shitty.Divia (55:20)Yeah, that's you.Visa (55:37)like silly science experiments, sociology professor experiments. But people apparently consistently prefer 100 % shock to 50 % shock. Because you like, at least you know it's gonna hurt. as opposed to I don't know, nothing happened. like, so that that uncertainty is hard to bear. So people actually prefer. It seems to me, I mean, I, I buy that it seems it's consistent with my experience of like, it's why so many people are so cynical and pessimistic. think it's like you haveDivia (55:40)Yeah.Yeah, it's interesting.Visa (56:05)certainty to orient around. optimism is very, something cool could happen. When? I don't know. Today might be the day I write something amazing that changes my life. Today? And I look back, it's like the tweet that I told that changed my life was when I, I mean, there have been many such tweets, but one of the biggest was me replying to Mason about libraries or something, like Patrick McKenzie was there. It's just something about.Divia (56:07)Yeah.Mm-hmm.Visa (56:34)spaceships and I think I tweeted something like, kids are starving for the feeling of someone who really cares about them and you know that's why that's what reading was about for me. I wasn't reading to so many so much text wow I want to read a book like no like the author gave a s**t and I'm yearning to be in the presence of someone who gives a s**t and I tweeted that and that was sufficient to like inspire someone to arrange for me to fly over to the the states.Divia (56:50)Yeah.Visa (57:03)And it doesn't really matter the specific details about the flight and the states and whatever. It's just being kind of people expending time, effort, resources to help someone else based on what they've said. I always vaguely believed something like that would happen for me sooner or later if I just persisted. But I could not have known when or how. So it's so, which is.Divia (57:24)Yeah.Visa (57:34)I don't think I appreciate the degree to which how, I don't think I appreciate how there's a level in which, there's a sense in which that's like tiresome. Like it's it's energetically costly, I think at some level, I don't know, like just choosing to remain optimistic and open to possibility that is, I'm not.Divia (57:57)I think it drains something, at least for most people.Visa (58:00)Yeah, I don't know if it drains me less or if I'm just committed to allowing that. Is this a priority? I feel like it's so important and it's so big that I'm willing to make that my main... It was my main...Divia (58:04)Or if you just do it.Visa (58:17)Energy sync? don't know. I mean, same for just interacting with people online. The history of my replies, even before Twitter, on Reddit, on wherever, I've always been like, you either put in the effort to give a good reply or don't bother. Why would you do a mid-mediocre reply thatDivia (58:19)Yeah, that's where you want to put it. That's where it seems worthwhile.Visa (58:43)The person is just going to like, ugh, stupid reply. So yeah, so some people approach it with like, well, I'm just here to blow off steam. I do think that's probably one of the major things. That's probably a very major difference. There are a of people who go online to blow off steam. It's just the internet is a cesspit. I'm at work, or I'm on the train. I'm just pissed off. I'm frustrated. I'm just going to, what's this annoying thing? I'm going to respond with whatever. And I remember even at my most.depressed and I hate the world and like that face. Even then I was like, can I make art out of this somehow? Like, can I grumble in a way that is compelling to someone and makes them go, wow, I feel seen? So that might have been another one of my early things was just exposure to artists and music and this sense of feeling welcome and heard and seen in that space, like reading. And so.Divia (59:21)Yeah.Visa (59:43)It does involve being disappointed a bunch where you put in time and effort to do a good reply and the person doesn't appreciate it. But then it's like a numbers game where like, if you, I think I have a tweet somewhere else as well. It's like, if you have to talk to a thousand people to find three truly amazing people, like maybe one's your spouse and one's like your best friend and one's like your best collaborator, and it's gonna take you 10 years to...to talk to a thousand, like three people a day, every day for 10 years, or I don't know what the math is. And like, you're going to be disappointed by 997 people. Would you do it? And I'm like, of course, like, because if you do it by the time, by the time you're 35, the rest of your life is completely changed by the presence of those excellent people in your life. And yeah, even, even just like saying this, I think a lot of people who haven't thought about it that way,Divia (1:00:22)Yeah, of course, right.Visa (1:00:39)They'll be like, well, that sounds good, but, you know.Divia (1:00:44)Well, and I think maybe some people don't trust themselves to recognize when the people finally come along.Visa (1:00:50)Yeah.That's true as well. think one of the saddest things is you have a connection to someone and it goes well and then it goes bad. My biggest grief is still all the friends, all my former friends, people that I used to connect with and then for some reason we just stopped talking and when we tried to reconnect it just goes badly. I'm still sad about a teenage friend who I want to talk to again but I don't even know how to reach out.You know, like, yeah, like some people are surprised to hear that because like I have so many people competing for my attention. But yeah, that was very meaningful to me. And like, why did it go bad? Like, was it me? Was it something about, I don't know. It's just, it's a, and yet you have to like to do the thing that I do or like the way I see it, it's like you really have to persist through the heartbreak.Divia (1:01:25)Yeah.That makes sense.Visa (1:01:53)So someone was just DMing me like, when I was young, I had a lot of trickster energy. And then now I've kind of lost it. Do you have any advice? I'm like, yeah, it's very normal for young boys for whatever to be mischievous and silly and whatever. And then you get responsibilities. You get bills. You make mistakes. You hurt people. You hurt yourself. And then it's just like, well, that sucks. I guess I'm not going to do that anymore. And so I think people, myself included, like weDivia (1:02:16)Yeah.Visa (1:02:21)We overlearn to not do things after something goes wrong. So it's like, well, if it's like, tried the thing. It went horribly. I'm not going to try it again. It's it's kind of logical. You tried the thing. It led to something bad. OK, don't do the thing. It makes sense. You could say the logic is watertight and sound. So it takes imagination. It takes imagination to be like,Well, this led to a bad thing, but maybe there's another outcome. It takes that sense of possibility and yeah.Divia (1:02:58)Yeah, like is there a way to do it, but have the odds be good or can you mitigate the downside or like really strategize about it?Visa (1:03:05)Yeah, so there's like a math part of it feels like a math component part of it feels like a imagination componentDivia (1:03:12)And this is related to what I was trying to say before. I think a lot of people don't believe they really have permission to think for themselves.Visa (1:03:21)man, is so... I remember... This reminds me of a tweet that made me so upset. And it's like, I know that the person was being silly, but it made me so upset like in a righteous rage way, where someone said something like, you know if you're doing tasks and you're like bored or whatever and like you can pretend you're in a video game or you can pretend something, you can have a little mental illness as a treat. Or like you can be a little mental... And I was like...Divia (1:03:30)Yeah.Visa (1:03:51)I'm so like,just every, I completely co-signed the suggestion. Like you can do whatever you want to make your life bearable, right? You can do, and the idea that that's framed as like doing a bit of a crime or doing a bit of a, I'm like, that's, you know, it's what your brain is for, kind of, or like what's your, what your imagination is for, to be playful. It's like, I remember I got so angry, I was like,Divia (1:03:59)Yeah.Visa (1:04:21)I was using a GIF of like an Indian auntie with a sleeper, like, who's best do I have to beat? That, you know, we've gotten to this point. Yeah, we've gotten to this point where people being playful with themselves. And it's like, you know, it's almost like you think you take those devices that's like, you're not supposed to open it and your warranty is void or whatever. It's like you're doing that with your own thinking and your own feeling. Like, I'm not allowed to think or feel in a way that's different than like the prescribed.Divia (1:04:29)that put this on everyone, yeah.So yeah. Yeah.Visa (1:04:51)know, formulaic thing.Divia (1:04:52)Yeah, I remember sitting around as a kid and looking at like some mattress I don't know if this is a thing in Singapore. In the US there's often something that's mattresses have these tags that are like do not remove or else whatever whatever But it's not for the person that owns the mattress It's like you're not allowed like the point is you're not allowed to remove it if you're selling the mattress until you've sold it But then people get understandably they get intimidated by these tags and then these mattresses still have these tags on themVisa (1:05:09)right. In the store. OK. All right.yeah. I remember after a couple of months, I got so pissed off with all of the baby... So like, you know, my baby wearing thing, all the freaking, caution, hazard, like you're going to kill your child. I'm like, that's stressing me out. I know I don't need that. I don't need seven of these warnings in my house every time I look everywhere being reminded. And yeah, like cutting those tags off.Divia (1:05:29)Yeah.I know.Really?Visa (1:05:46)made me more chill which I think led to me being a better dad like this much like 1 % or whatever but like you knowDivia (1:05:54)Yeah, no, think, okay, so also, this is, can talk about whatever forever, but one other thing I wanted to get to was you had tweeted about getting stuff done, now you are a dad. Your tweet said, I'm not precisely sure, but I think the main thing might be how do I containerize my work into packets such that I can do them in small chunks that add up coherently in the associated changes I have to make around.Visa (1:06:07)Mm-hmm.Divia (1:06:18)And I'm like, yeah, that, don't know. I mean, I think basically you have it. I think that's what it is. And this is something, not that I'm some like master of getting things done with my kids. I can do some things, but not other things. But I, well, like I said, I think it's that. I think, I think the top thing is to not keep a bunch of state and to think about like, what's the smallest loop that I can just fully complete.Visa (1:06:29)please, yeah. I'd love to hear it, whatever.Mmm.Divia (1:06:46)And I have a bunch of different angles on this, but so there's this woman I follow, her name is Dana K. White, and she talks about cleaning your house, basically. And I've been following her for years. She's sort of one of my inspirations. And her algorithm for, this is like my metaphor for everything, is if you have like a pile of stuff that you're trying to figure out what to do with it. Cause she used to have to be like a total mess. Like often I think the people with the best advice are the people that really needed it themselves.Visa (1:06:59)Nice.Yeah. Yeah. Nice.Divia (1:07:14)And so the thing she figured out, she's like, all right, first, if there's any trash, get rid of the trash. Then if there's anything you already know what you need to do with it, you just haven't done it yet, then do that. And she's like, okay, and then you find some object, you're like, what about this? Like it doesn't have a place. And she's, her strategy is you look at it and you're like, okay, if I needed this, where would I look for it? And then take it there. Which, and that's the part that everyone's like, no, but like, isn't it more efficient to like pile it up?Visa (1:07:35)Mmm.Aww.Nah.Divia (1:07:42)And she's like, no, actually. She's like, it's true that if five things need to go to that location, that could be better. But in that case, once you're going to go there, look around. What else needs to go there? And find that, and then immediately go there. Because I think everything is kind of like that. And also, I think there's some sort of cultural artifact of, I don't know if you think in terms of spiral dynamics or modernism or so. But I think there's something.Visa (1:07:45)Yeah.this.Divia (1:08:12)that has to do with our developmental stage as a civilization right now, that doesn't acknowledge the costs of things that are, like, there's a lot of weird accounting going on where it's very common for people to be like, no, it's more efficient to make a pile. And it doesn't even really make sense, I think. They don't really under, they're like, well, because, and I think it introduces fragility into the system that really shouldn't be there because,especially with kids, because I'm like, okay, so, but then if my kid needs me, then I have this pile and then I come back to it and I'm like, well, now I have to like, re-figure out what even was this pile. And that's assuming that my kid doesn't start playing with the pile, like moving everything all around, which increasingly as, mean, you know, they become toddlers and then most kids like to play with piles and then eventually they lose interest in their parents' piles. But that's kind of my metaphor for everything is like, okay, that thing where you...could just finish it, but then some part of your brain is like, no, no, but let me like make some stack of things and then like batch process. It's like, okay, well, do you want to batch process it now? That's my two cents on this.Visa (1:09:22)Yeah, that's funny when you said that. It's what struck me was that is what I do with my tweets. When I see a tweet that I want to remember, I ask myself something that's like, if I wanted to find this, where would I look for it? And sometimes it's like, I would put it in a thread or in a reply to something that is not quite obvious that, like, it doesn't fit in a big picture, not big picture way, it doesn't fit in a...Like, in a, in a, yeah, it's not, it's not like orderly, you know, in a, a logical way, but it just, this is, this is the friend of that thing. You know, this thing goes with that thing. And so I put it with that. Like, so then I know, you're frozen as well. Both our videos are frozen, but I can hear you. Yeah. Yeah. I was just saying, like, I, I,Divia (1:09:54)Look, it might not make sense to someone else.Wait, no, you froze. What happened?Okay, I think we're back now.Visa (1:10:19)If I tried to organize things top down, I don't think it would work. Like I wouldn't know where to look for things, even though like there's a system or whatever. But I just, I'm like, what tweet does this tweet want to be friends with basically? And then I put it with that.Divia (1:10:32)Yeah. Yeah. And I think there are a lot of things, like another one, I got this, it's maybe a little bit of a, I don't know that anyone else would read this and get the same thing, but my friend, Scott Garibrand wrote about geometric rationality on less wrong. I'll plug it because I think it's cool. But part of what I got from that is like another one. had this moment where I, so I have since dealt with this, but for a long time, this is probably a common situation. I had a box of like some old hard drives and like old laptops that I had deal with.Visa (1:10:59)Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Divia (1:11:01)And it was one of those things where I was like, okay, this is kind of like never gonna be the most important thing to do. And yet I don't wanna never do it. That doesn't seem right. And maybe there's some kind of accounting where I could be like, no, but it is the, but I think it's sort of like a tortured accounting to try to be like, no, but it is the highest priority. And instead the thing I switched to, which again, it to me is like the same principle as before is sometimes I would think about it and I would be like, that box.Visa (1:11:09)Same.Divia (1:11:31)And in that moment, there's something where I mean, it's a little bit of like focus on what you want to. I'm like, okay, I think what I would reflexively do is to be like, okay, now I'm going to spend like X amount of energy dismissing this thought and be like, no, not now. I can't do it. And so what I tried to tell myself now that I'm perfect at this is be like, okay, look, there's some amount that's allocated for like addressing this thought. You could use it to dismiss the thought or you could use that amount of energy to make progress.And I try to switch to using, and often it's really not very much, because all I was gonna do is be like, no, it's not a good time, whatever. And instead I'll be like, all right, I'm gonna take literally five seconds to visualize what my next step would be.Visa (1:12:13)Mmm.Divia (1:12:16)And usually the part of me that was like, the box is kind of like, all right, well, that's better than what I would have gotten before. So like, it's an improvement. And so then when it comes back around, I'll kind of be like, all right, how can I like lock in a little? And of course it's better if I can actually like, I don't know, look up the place that I need to do data recovery on or like check to see if I have the right cord to connect the hard drive. Like something like that's better. But if I don't have time for that, at least be like, all right, well, what would the next thing be to do? And like, like another one.I don't know, and this, I think I really am better at this, but like years ago, there was some kind of, this is something I wanted to be writing about or doing or whatever, and I was like, I managed to sort of notice myself in real time being like, well, that's strange. Whenever I think of it, I'm like, no, why haven't I done it yet? Which is kind of like, no, no, the thing that happened is I just thought of it. Like, of course I haven't done it yet, that's fine, that's why I'm still thinking about it. I don't want every thought of like, now I want to be like, yeah.Cool, now I'm thinking about it. This is like an opportunity to think about it, instead of being like, well, I haven't done it yet. I don't know. that's, anyway, I could say a lot, but that's some of my, like, if you really have small chunks of time, I think that sort of stuff can make a big difference.Visa (1:13:18)Mmm, right. Yeah.Mmm.Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.Yeah. It's funny. Yeah, and I anticipate that once I figure that out, it's an ongoing thing. But I do think it'll probably be better for me, actually, in terms of as a working style. It just reveals to me that my prior working style was so...I would use so much time and space to do very little. Very little in the end. like it's just... But it's a kind of... It's like... I mean, it worked for what it was, which is fine, I guess. I don't know if I could have arbitrarily constrained myself to have a more efficient process, but...Divia (1:14:11)That's everyone,Seems right.Visa (1:14:33)Right, it's like, yeah, I've always been wary of like, try and force yourself to do more and less. I'm like, I can't persuade myself to believe in the lie. I mean, sometimes there's like a creative, there's an interesting creative challenge. It's...Divia (1:14:45)Yeah.mean, if you can imagine, like, okay, what if, but I agree if like the only way it works is if you really try to lie to yourself about it.Visa (1:14:53)Yeah.Yeah, so that whole game space is interesting. It's like, if you can frame it as something interesting and exciting, like, you call a friend. And I guess conversations are one of the best ways to it. Like, as a forcing function, you have x amount of time, and you've got to go afterwards. subconsciously try to say whatever is most interesting. And then you compare that with, I spent the whole day trying to write something, and then I talked to a friend for like 20 minutes. I'm like, yeah, that.So that works. And there's a bunch of other things like that, I think, where you try to summarize something. You give yourself a playful, interesting constraint, rather than, for the sake of productivity. When I start that, there's another voice in me that's like, f**k you. I'm not going to do that. So how do I not upset that guy? It has to be genuinely fun. having a kid now, think, is reintroducing me to that sense of, is this actually fun? Are you actually having fun?Divia (1:15:48)Right.Visa (1:15:57)It's such a... It's so primal and we are so trained out of it and it's a... Yeah.Divia (1:16:05)Yeah, no, it's a lot. like another maybe another half of what I, of how I think about doing things is, so there are a lot of things that when people, and obviously like, I don't think having kids is like the only thing in the world like this. People have different types of jobs and other types of caring for other people. but so in my life, even though I had jobs and stuff like that,Having a kid, was more the case that there were a bunch of stuff that I kinda needed to function that I wasn't even really aware of, because I would just sort of get it by default in my everyday life. And then I had this kid and I'm like, I sort of can't function. I would like, I'd be like, what am I missing? Because I didn't even, and then I'd have to like be a detective and figure out what like nutrient that I didn't even realize.and now I had to get it on purpose. my clearest example of this, so this probably sounds silly, but after I my second kid, whenever I had a little bit of spare time for a while, I would go play the Sims, and in the Sims, I would be taking care of like multiple children. And I'm like, what am I doing here? I'm like, it seems like I'm trying to recreate the exact same stress of my regular life in this game. Like why do I think this is relaxing? What's going on?Visa (1:17:25)Interesting.Divia (1:17:28)And finally, I was like, I think a friend of mine maybe helped me see this, but I was like, because in The Sims, I can cue up like four actions and then they'll go do them. And that's like, I think what I was missing because especially with the two kids, I'd be like, right, I'm gonna do this and this and this and that. And it just didn't work. Like I couldn't figure out how to do it. And then I'm like, all right, well, I guess there's some sort of, and I don't know.Visa (1:17:41)That's so funny.Right.Divia (1:17:52)You know, I could go deeper. could be like, why does my brain need that? What's up with that? Is there some way to like get it more efficiently? But once I was like, okay, I seem to care about being able to do four things in a row. Then it was sort of like I could recalibrate. And that's that my friend of mine early on, she has 10 kids now, but I think at the time she had like seven or eight. And she said something on a forum that made this click with me where she was like,Visa (1:18:03)Interesting. That makes so much sense.Divia (1:18:13)Yeah, you sometimes I kind of just need to like stay up till two in the morning doing a creative project, even though like the next day I'm going to be kind of grumpy and like kind of take it on my kids and it's like kind of worse for everyone. But if I didn't do that creative project, then that's even worse. And so like once I know what the priorities are.Visa (1:18:28)Yeah.Yeah, that's always been very clear to me, for me. And it's funny because, it's like, so when I started writing Introspect, for example, like, prior to writing it, I was like, emotionally, like, in a beautiful place. was like, shining, well-rested, know, just great. And then I started writing the book, and it was such a stressful process. Like, I started to get worse. And it's like, you know, I think I would have this conversation myself, like, you know, don't actually have to do this. You can just like...Divia (1:18:41)Mm-hmm.YouVisa (1:19:01)not do it. You can do more marketing for your first book. You can make more money that way. There's all kinds of other things you could do that's easier, less annoying, blah, blah, blah. And you'll be healthier and happier. I was smoking cigarettes when I was writing Introspect. When I'm deep in the weeds, I get into this red bull and cigarettes habit. So everything about that process was on the surface level bad for me. But then when I was done with it, it was so satisfying. And then I think it's true thatDivia (1:19:01)YouYeah.Visa (1:19:31)In the period after that was done, I was better off than before I started. But in between, I had to go into such a shitty place. I look back on it, and I smile, and I'm proud of myself for being able to project manage the meta of all of that. So in between, I was grumpy and frustrated, and I might have snapped at my wife at some point and apologized, and all those things. But being the person that completed that, like,Divia (1:19:35)Yeah.Visa (1:20:00)shifted something for me at a deeper level, I think. And now that the book is live, every week or so I get some feedback from some reader who's like, this book changed my life and it made me a better person. And that's like, it's an on. Yeah, it does. I have not reached any kind of diminishing returns on hearing about how someone's life is better. That's just always.Divia (1:20:14)That fuels you too, right?Visa (1:20:25)I mean, conceivably, that may be when it's like 100 people a day or something, then you start to, I don't know. But I get like one a week-ish, and it's always very refreshing and very reorienting and very, yeah, this is why I do what I do. And probably like one or two a day is where, I don't know, but it's always thinking ahead. yeah, it's, I don't think it necessarily needed that reward for me to have felt good.I wanted to do a big thing and be done. And yeah, I think when I was a kid, I felt so much gratitude towards authors for writing books. And so I always wanted to participate in that process. authors write books for me. I want to write for someone else. And if one person said something, that would have been. So yeah, I think I have a tweet from 2018 where, like, if I write one book and one kid likes it, I'm done. Life complete. From there, it's all victory laps.Divia (1:21:10)Right.YeahVisa (1:21:25)And it does, you know, I can't get back in that state. I'm like, yeah, you know, I did it. It's a thing that I did. And yeah, like my relationship myself used to be not that great. And I would say like day to day right now, it's not like it's at the best it's ever been, but I can bring it back to that state if I want to. And it's generally great. It's generally good, you know. And I see people talk about it, about their own relationship with themselves, or, you even like,Divia (1:21:30)You did it.Visa (1:21:54)A thing that generally annoys me is seeing people in their early 30s complain about their back pain as if it's inevitable. I'm like, you know can just do stuff, right? You can just do your hamstring stretches and your hip stuff. And it's just so, I guess it goes back again to the thing about permission to tinker with your mind, tinker with your body, tinker with the way you exist. And it's like, I don't know. It's a...Divia (1:22:02)Yeah.Visa (1:22:22)There's layers and layers to it, guess. Some people prefer to be with everyone else, and the companionship that comes with that, I think, is soothing for some people. And I've been tempted, I think. I do remember after making some progress. So this happens in Waved, I guess. And it's probably what...eventually drives me to do whatever my next thing is. It's where right after I do a thing, I'm like, man, that was exhausting and emotionally taxing and I just want to vegetate and like, let me enjoy that I had done the thing and like not do anything for as long as possible. But eventually that gets frustrating as well. And it's funny because I was recently met my friend and law and she just finished her PhD and she's like, just published a book. So she's like,She was very, very much in the focus zone of like, every day she wakes up, I'm working on this PhD thing, I'm working on this book. she got to the point where that was like, frustrating, like unpleasant. And so she's done and she's experiencing relief from the end of that. And I'm on the other side where the last time I shipped something substantial, OK, there's the book. And then there was a really good essay last year. And the year since, I feel like I've just been like f*****g around.Divia (1:23:42)So you're more like itching to have another project.Visa (1:23:45)Yeah, mean, I have to be making steady, clear progress. So the analogy we came up with was, I guess, it's like sunlight, right? someone who's in the dark or in the cold, they can't wait to have sun and get out. They're like, my god, sunshine. But you take someone who's been in the sun in the tropics for all day. They're like, my god, I need to get out. I'm sweating. I'm sticky. I'm gross. And so much discourse is.son, good or bad? know, like good, bad, good. You know, like, and if you can see that things are contextual and like, what is the best thing for you right now might be the worst thing for someone else. Like just being aware of that dynamic and carrying that dynamic with you, I think instantly makes you like just more responsive to people, like just better in navigating media, navigating people andDivia (1:24:13)Right.Sure.Visa (1:24:41)That's one of the things I'm trying to convey. you know, like I keep seeing people call each other stupid online, and it's implied that it's the person is dumb. And the thing that no one ever seems to bring up is that, people are scrolling past a lot of information, and everyone looks stupid when they are responding really quickly to complex things in, you know. And then are you dumb? The thing should be, you know, no, I'm busy or I'm surfing. I mean, I don't want toDivia (1:24:49)Yeah.HeVisa (1:25:11)There's a funny response somewhere there. And the other thing is that people are often actually scared. That's a separate thing entirely, but it's interesting how many thought-terminating dismissals have to do with intelligence or stupidity. It's like, you're dumb, or I'm dumb, I'm so dumb, I can't do this. Is intelligence even actually the bottleneck? It probably isn't.Divia (1:25:35)think it's not, I mean, I think it helps basically if people have more horsepower and all else equal, it can be a big force multiplier. again, I think people don't usually, I think people are usually capable of thinking in some sense. I don't think people's intelligence is so low that they can't think, but then often they don't, they do a different activity instead.Visa (1:25:41)Yeah.Yeah. And it's usually that they did not even think. So are you going to say the matter that, you're stupid because you didn't think? I would assume that stupid means you tried to think and your thinking was bad. most people haven't. think sitting down to think about a problem for a few minutes can just. I have been shocked sometimes. I think I have some issue that's been bothering me for months. And I didn't realize that I never stopped theDivia (1:26:07)Yeah.Visa (1:26:30)think about it. Like, okay, what should I do? What's the problem here?Divia (1:26:35)Yeah, I think it's an interesting puzzle. Like, I don't know. I sometimes, it's been, I sort of saying this before, but it's been on my mind recently. I'm like, all right, look, I am busy. I have a lot going on. Sometimes I don't have enough energy, but like, why? From some angle, I look at it and I'm like, okay, but every time I have like a couple minutes, why don't I just like think about my problems? Like for real though. Cause like think about, like, and I'm like, because it would pay off, right? Like I'm like, okay, maybe I don't have enough like.Visa (1:26:57)Right.Mm-hmm.Divia (1:27:02)time to do it, but what if I just thought about how to get more time? And maybe I sound crazy, like saying, but I'm like, no, but I think it's really, it's like more powerful. And I try, but then again, some angles still exists where I'm like, but why am I not doing this more? I don't know. And I have guesses, like I could get into it and whatever, but it's a point of curiosity for me still.Visa (1:27:07)No, it makes sense.Mm. I know that, that, yeah.I mean, so one of my equivalent versions of that is like, why don't I just chat with people more? Because every time I talk to people, I get more energy and I get more just everything is better when I talk to people. And I guess, yeah, I have some legacy issues for why I flinch from talking to people. It's funny because I guess it's like the slob, Dana, like people who used to be messy. We give the advice that we needed.Divia (1:27:48)Yeah.Visa (1:27:53)needed to... I I always liked people, I think, and then I kind of psyop myself or internalized family, teachers, whatever, saying, why are you wasting your time with friends? And I had some bad experiences with friends as well. And so it's like, I need to actively remind myself to enjoy the companionship of my own friends. And I spent so much time and energy building this network of people who really like me. I made it, I de-risked it so much for myself. And now that...Divia (1:28:14)Mm-hmm.Visa (1:28:22)I can pretty much talk to anyone at any time. There's so many people that I love who would talk to me, and I just don't. And I'm like, what? It's free alpha slash money slash real estate. But I guess there's really that. There's something like a micro movement of, once you decide, or once you think, or once you just, there's a tiny space where you switch into it, and then it seems to be easy.Divia (1:28:30)Now it's your turn.Visa (1:28:51)And I guess people say as well, like with writing or whatever, the hardest part is starting, like the first few words. Once you've started, and with so many tasks, once you've started, it just keeps going. And it goes longer. So I have a kettlebell in my bathroom, which I use when I shower. I do bent over rows. And I was making great progress in strength gains for the first three months of the year. And then I had some military commitments. And then I had to stop working out. And then I started.I mean, I had to stop working out because I had to train for a run and like, so I lost some weight. So was building a lot of muscle mass and then I had to train for a run and because I was getting heavy, I switched up and I lost a bunch of weight to run better. And then I got like a little bit sad about losing my gains and then I lost some strength as well. And then just stopped doing it entirely. And then I'm like, okay, I used to do like eight reps or 12 reps or eight reps or 12 reps. And I'm like, I'm too tired to do that many or something or that just seems, I don't know. But.At some point, I'm like, OK, you know what, let's just do three. And every time I start doing three, I end up doing eight or 12 anyway. So it's like, if I just commit to the small thing, I do more. So it's so funny. And I'm sure there's versions of this all over my life where, yeah, just text a friend. Just say something. And maybe you'll end up having a conversation. Maybe you won't. There's something about expectations and.Divia (1:29:54)Yeah.Yeah, do you know like what your, what your hesitation is? I mean, not that you always need to know, but do you know? Yeah.Visa (1:30:23)with friends? Again, think this is also the issue with my essays, actually. It's the same thing. It's like, I have gotten to a point of over-theorizing.that I should have a plan or I should, you know, like not that I plan a conversation, but like I should, hey, let's talk about this thing and that thing. and, you know, like, like I want to make sure that it's worth your time. So in this case, it's very easy to say yes to a podcast because it's like, you are kind of holding the frame, right? Like you're the one that's like, like, I'm going let's do it. I'm like, it's so easy for me to say yes. But like, for me to like pitch something to someone.Divia (1:31:00)Yeah.Visa (1:31:08)Yeah, I seem to have this hang up where I overestimate what people want in a pitch. And for a lot of my friends, it's just like, Visa wants to chat, cool. And I'm like, but no, wait, let me come up with a good, you know, like, let's chat about this thing, and it'll be interesting because of that thing. And yeah. So I think a lot of my essays getDivia (1:31:20)Yeah, interesting.Visa (1:31:33)Even just a couple of days, I wrote a thread that a lot of people liked. And I muted it because it's getting retweets and stuff, and I don't like notifications. But it started with a story about tweets from a long ago. And then I freestyled somewhere interesting. I can't remember the specifics. And people were replying with, I need to read this carefully. I need to think about this. Wow, thanks. And all of those nice responses came from something that I did not plan and did not start.So the reality of my life is when I improvise, things go really well. I mean, most, not every time. OK, actually there's nuance here that I guess I must be skipping over. I think of the times when I improvised and things went badly. But all of the best things I've done involved, there's like a mid-width thing here, where all the best things I've done have a quality of improvisationalness to it. And I've never done anything great that was like, OK, I'm going to plan every single thing. So I think I have a tweet to a.Divia (1:32:01)Yeah.Visa (1:32:29)Michael Kersey that I reference a lot, is that, and it's just me giving advice to someone else that I needed to hear, which is like, planning is great, but plans are worthless. So like write an elaborate plan and then throw it out and just do whatever. And then like write another elaborate plan like a month later or whatever. So each time you're planning, you're thinking through all the stuff, but like you're gonna fixate on certain things that might not necessarily need to be that way. So just think through the thing and then discard it and just improvise. And I'm like,Divia (1:32:40)Right.Visa (1:32:59)Yes, that's what everyone should do. Not me, though. I should make sure the plan is really, good. And yeah, it's silly. I would say, like, probably that's, if I'm honest with myself, like, that's the area where I seem to lack humility. Like, thing, yeah, like, I'm not sufficiently accepting that my best stuff happens when I'm not.Divia (1:33:01)You should follow the plan.about plans.Visa (1:33:28)quite in the room. There's that relationship between creator and, so like Dave Chappelle has this great riff on comedians in cars getting coffee with Seinfeld. And he's saying like, the idea shows up in a car at your house, haunts, like get in, we're going, and you're like, I'm not dressed properly. It's fine. You'll be fine. he says sometimes you're shotgun, sometimes you're in the trunk. And then you have a great experience, and then you're like, hmm, I should drive, but there's no idea in the car. And so you're like,You try to make whatever plan and whatever, there's no... So the humility for the creator, think, is to recognize when the idea wants to drive versus when you are imposing your... Almost authoritarian, this is how it should be and this is how... And you forget to ask, am I having fun? Is it cool? Is it great? And yeah, I think every time I reach some new threshold of...followers or a new threshold like I've just finished a book or just whatever some kind of success like the the cheeky fun playful energy gets diminished and I start kind of feeling this is proper and important I should try and do a proper thing and then it goes to s**t and then I I go through like a long period of that and failure after failure after failure eventually I get pissed off and I get frustrated and just like to hell with this s**t I'm just gonna do nonsense and then the nonsense is good and yet you know like to some degreeDivia (1:34:41)Yeah.Visa (1:34:57)all of that annoying preparation and all of that overthinking this and it does come through in the subsequent thing. if I think of, I don't want to be like, I do think there's a better, I don't need to like torture myself about it to get the result. Like it's just, it's yeah, I think where I'm coming around to is like, okay, if the nice art eventually comes out or whatever, cool. But like the process itself,Divia (1:35:01)It does help,Yeah.Visa (1:35:27)is also an art in itself, if that makes sense. I'm trying to get to the point where I appreciate the way I do things just as much as I appreciate what I've done. I'm trying to get to that point.Divia (1:35:30)That's right, yeah.Yeah. Yeah, no, mean, I think it's more robust if you can do it that way, because if you're focusing on things, then you have more control.Visa (1:35:46)Mm-mm, very much so.Yeah, and you're less likely to get whatever the equivalent of an injury is. And I'm quite lucky in that I've never really had any seriously major injuries that put me, mean, physical and psychological or whatever. But yeah, I've seen people push themselves too hard. So YouTuber burnout is always fascinating to me. It's so common where someone...Divia (1:35:56)Yeah, it seems true.Yeah, interesting.Visa (1:36:17)works really hard to build a huge audience on YouTube over like a three to five year like intense period and at the end of it they're done they're like they can't do anymore and they just quit and I'm like that seems less than ideal like and my instant and so actually I was noticing this about local bands in Singapore when I was a kid teenager and like there's this music festival called Bay Beats and a lot of bands and Bay Beats is like you know like if you're playing at Bay Beats like you're a real like you're aYou're not just a hobbyist band. You've made it. But a lot of bands make their way up to babies, play babies, and then never do anything ever again after that. It's because they wanted to make it, and so they made it. And that was their goal. Their goal was to make it. And like, ha, I made it as a musician. And I think Murakami has this in his book about novelists as a vocation. It's like a lot of novelists who just want to write their first novel, which is fine. It's like if you have a goal is to write a novel, and you write it, you're done.Divia (1:36:47)You made it.Yeah, interesting.That was their goal.Visa (1:37:16)From his point of view, the real good s**t happens over a lifetime, right? As you dig deeper and deeper and you learn more and more things and synthesize more and more things. So there's this whole, there's this like, yeah, there's the first novels in the giant blip here and then it decays and decays and decays. if you can last, any novelist who's been writing seven, eight novels over 30 years, they're probably very interesting in some way that you may or may not be interesting to you, but.There's interestingness there as long as they are not mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again. If they're actually exploring and trying, the interestingness accumulates over time. And yeah, I try to have that in mind. And again, it's like, if you burn out in five years, like you're... And really, you calibrate this conversation to depending on who you're talking to. Because for some people, doing anything for five years is like a stretch goal that they can't even imagine doing. But if you can...Divia (1:38:13)Yeah.Visa (1:38:14)So it's like there's phases to it. But if you can do things for years, then having a decades-long orientation, think, is where the real... That's where you go from the nothing ever happens to, at the decades level.Divia (1:38:28)of course, yeah, what that thing that happened is, of course it was inevitable.Visa (1:38:33)Right. yeah, anything you can do for, if you can stick around for decades. It's like, I have noticed many things crossing a seven year cycle. And it's interesting that it also fits the, most of the, like all the cells in your body are different after seven years, something like that. I don't know if that's precisely true, but yeah. And it's the same for like, you know, if you've been posting on Twitter, on a forum or Twitter or whatever for seven years, after that point,Divia (1:38:53)ship of Theseus style yeahVisa (1:39:03)it will seem like you were there forever because the bulk of the people who are there at the end are lot of newcomers. A lot of the newcomers don't look back further than... Same for at a company, if you've been at a company longer than seven years, all the new hires have come and gone and you're like, this person was there forever. So forever is about seven years. And you can use that to your advantage in some ways.Divia (1:39:06)Seems true, yeah.Right.YouVisa (1:39:33)You know, year podcast has been podcasting forever.Divia (1:39:35)Yeah, I think, I hear you. I definitely think it's very underrated to play a long game. also, like a tendency in myself that I often want to really be mindful of is I think for me, some sort of like grinding without even like really paying, I don't know, like I wanna be process oriented on the one hand, because I think it's a better optimization target.something like that, think it's more robust for all the reasons I'm saying. But then at the same time, I think often for me, it's more comfortable to just keep doing something that's not really working. So I'm like, well, you know, I'm doing it. I'm trying it. And then, you know, it's like five years later and I'm like, well, okay, I guess that was kind of interesting, but like I didn't really do anything.Visa (1:40:16)Yeah, yeah, yeah.I feel that so much. And when I was a kid and I used to play video games, that was all how I did it. just failed at the thing and somehow find it kind of fun and just keep failing it. So you have to unlock a new... In fact, the way I think about it, it's almost like you're playing different games within the game. So you have a game in front of you, but initially you're playing bang against the wall. You you're playing...Divia (1:40:32)Yes, same.Yeah.Visa (1:40:51)If you play like, think Grand Theft Auto, I didn't know there were missions or whatever. I thought it's a game where you go in, you steal a car, you bang into things, you get killed or arrested, and that's the game. you know, it's, didn't know. And yeah, same for, you know, like, in fact, I think I was writing my, I was journaling to myself yesterday, so it's like a draft where I seem to complicate things for myself and...Divia (1:41:00)Yep.Visa (1:41:18)I challenge myself to do things that are too far beyond my comfort zone. So it's not just a nice, gentle little bit. I go too far. I try to do eight things at once, and it's not going to work. And I was like, at one level, this is obviously not working. And then when I was reflecting on it, well, the fact that I'm doing it means that it must be serving some purpose for some part of me. And then I was reminded of Inception, the movie.Divia (1:41:40)Right.Visa (1:41:45)Cobb asks Ariadne, can you make a maze in two minutes that takes more than a minute to solve? And it's like, well, the point of having like, there's a level of complexity that when you introduce, it means that you get to be like immersed in that simulation or the dream or whatever such that it's not, you like you add variables and I some people do this with talking and they gish gallop, right? They just like say so many things that.Divia (1:42:11)YouVisa (1:42:12)You can't process what's being said. so you get to kind of, I guess if you're enjoying it, you're like, well, I like to just hear what they're saying. I don't need to think precisely. I can't think precisely what they're saying. They're like overwhelming me. And I must be doing some form of that with the tasks that I give myself in writing. Because there must be some part of me that enjoys, I'm struggling to write, but I didn't publish. I'm struggling to write, but I didn't publish. And I've been, you know.Divia (1:42:21)Mm-hmm.Visa (1:42:40)If someone was doing this at the start of their writing journey or career, I'd be like, well, you're avoiding, do you actually like writing? Are you just avoiding whatever? But I've published so much stuff and I still do it. It's like, it's a kind of a safety ritual maybe or an avoidance ritual or like a way to enjoy writing and thinking without facing the consequence of people are going to look at it and...Divia (1:42:40)Yeah.Visa (1:43:08)I feel like I've learned to not worry about what would people think, but I guess, yeah, I've given myself this, I want this great outcome to happen. And if I publish a post and people kind of like it and they say some nice things, whatever, but it isn't moving the needle towards the outcome that I want, that'll be sad and upsetting and annoying and failure. Whereas if I'm struggling,and I didn't ship, well, know, it's still there's still the possibility that it's like six months from now there'll be an amazing something like that. When I say it out loud, it always feels silly. I'm like, bro, you know, you've been through this before. You just got to, you know, like you got to write the shitty versions in order to get to the better versions. Like I know that intellectually, but emotionally struggling is, youDivia (1:43:43)Yeah, you think there's some dynamic like that that can draw it out.You know, something that was, we're talking about video games, something that was really kind of, I don't know, kind of powerful for me to see. the first, not the first Zelda game, but Breath of the Wild, right? That was what, like five years ago or something at this point? So my son was probably five or something. He was pretty young.Visa (1:44:14)Okay, I'm familiar.Divia (1:44:21)And I was playing it and I had some whole plan where I was like, all right, well, in order to go to that place, it'll be better if I have this armor. So I need to get these ingredients and I had to do whatever, whatever. And then my son over there, he's just like, he doesn't care. He's like finds these like rare ingredients that have these few cook them, whatever. And he's in, he'll just go into the battle and he'll just eat them and whatever. And like naturally he beats the game while I'm still trying to make this armor. And I'm kind of like, okay.Visa (1:44:45)yeah. Yeah.Divia (1:44:49)This faster than I really realized, if you actually think.Visa (1:44:51)Right. I like to play video games, like RPG type video games. I like to blunder through my first playthrough where I like, like if there are side quests that like, I will go a little bit out of the way to do a side quest, but not like all the way. And I mostly try to get to the end of the narrative. I, but I'm not like.Divia (1:45:00)Yep.Visa (1:45:15)speed running to the end. I'm like, I try to, like, you I don't really, I like upgrade whatever happens naturally in route to that. do that. And then if I like it, then I will, I'll do a second playthrough at some point where I really go through every single thing.Divia (1:45:16)Yeah.You can go back.That's also how I'm with books. I remember, so I didn't, not necessarily with these days with books I read for pleasure, sometimes I'll just give up on it, but like in school, I think it happened with, what's that book? It's in the best of times, it's the worst of times. Tale of Two Cities, yeah, it was that. I remember it was a sign for like summer reading or something, and I kept reading it and being like, I really can't follow this. I really can't follow this. And I kept.Visa (1:45:31)Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, same, You skim, right?The tail of two cities.Yeah. Yeah.Divia (1:45:58)trying to like go more slowly and understand. And finally I was like, you know what? I'm gonna finish it. And then if I really want to understand it, I can read it twice. And it was, it worked way better for me. It probably depend on, you know, on the person in the book, but it was far easier for me to understand it by reading it twice than by reading it carefully. I think a lot of things are like that.Visa (1:46:05)Yeah.Yeah, I think a lot of things are like that. Because when you're reading it carefully the first time, you don't know what you're reading it carefully for. So you might read a lot into a detail that's not actually important, and you might miss a detail that actually is important. And you only find out what is and is not important after you've gotten the first sweep all the way through.Divia (1:46:38)Yeah. Anyway, also I could go forever, but I think my kids is getting to be a little late. I think I should go check in with them. But thank you so much. And if you have any final things that you want us to hit, now's the time.Visa (1:46:42)I should also run, yes, same. Yeah.I mean, so my main thing in my life right now, apart from my wife and kid, is my essays. yeah, drop by my sub stack, I guess, and challenge me to write more. And yeah, I think leaving comments or asking questions or whatever, that helps me move faster if anyone wants to help. Yeah. OK. We could talk for hours.Divia (1:47:09)Sounds good. All right, well, thanks so much for coming on. Everyone can find Visa on Twitter in particular, and I'll link it. I'll try to post this pretty soon.Visa (1:47:19)Awesome. So much fun. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Matthew Pierce, @MattPiercello on Twitter, comes on the podcast to talk about his model of how to have productive conversations.Transcript:Divia (00:02)Hey, I'm here today with Matthew Pierce, who is my Twitter mutual. He is a professional cellist, systems thinker, interested in what makes people tick and how we can solve problems together. He's MJ Piercello on Twitter. That's where Pierce and cello, but they overlap. And we hadn't planned on talking today, but then I was going talk to another Twitter friend of mine about the Shakespeare thing again, which I discussed in my previous podcast, but he got sick.So instead I asked if anyone was free and Matthew was. so here we are, welcome to the podcast.Matt (00:36)So we're making this up as we go along. It's fantastic. Hi everybody. Nice to meet you.Divia (00:42)Yeah, so do you wanna, I don't know, do you wanna tell us a little bit, it seems like your top thing these days, which I read a little bit about, but not as much as I probably would have if I had it longer, is a way that you help people understand each other when they disagree. Does that seem like a fair starting point?Matt (01:00)think so, yeah. mean, one of the things you can see when you look around, especially on Twitter, right, which tends to attract these sort of things, is these massive, powerful disagreements that seem completely unsolvable, right? And I'm not convinced they're unsolvable. I think they're just a bit maybe misunderstood. And so I've been playing the cello for a really long time now, almost 40 years, but I've been playing it professionally on the order of 30 years.lots of different places, lots of different circumstances. And one of the things cello playing does is that it puts you in a position of using your body and your mind together, right?Divia (01:42)Yeah, for the record for the podcast listeners, I also play the cello not as well, not professionally, but I do have some context there.Matt (01:46)Yeah, yes, I only just discovered this. Yeah, so this is a serendipity point for me. I only just found this out myself. But yeah, so cello playing, you're not just drawing up formal equations on the chalkboard and you're not just building a brick wall that'll last for generations. It's kind of a mix of both that you've got these...incredibly abstract things you're doing with the music in an orchestra and you're sort of manipulating the emotions of the audience and of each other in real time in a performance, but you're doing it using extremely abstract structures that music itself is built out of that define the sounds while using your body to make them. Yeah, yeah, like, like, okay, harmony, melody, harmonic progression.Divia (02:28)But abstract structures, you mean like harmony and that sort of thing? Melody.Matt (02:36)form and analysis. So this song has a refrain and then it has an intro, you know, all these different bits and you can, you can categorize things, things like this as abstractly as you would like to, but you have to do them with your own body in real time performance, even if you're really nervous. So it's a very interesting window into a more complete aspect of what I think of as decision-making.And that's really where a lot of the disagreements live. They're not just rational, are they? They're sort of instinctive and habitual and emotional all at once.Divia (03:11)So for the record, I would call myself a rationalist, that's in my Twitter bio, and I'm out of the less wrong rationality tradition, and I would say, I don't know, people, I don't know how well any of us lives it, but I think I use rational, like in my ontology, it doesn't mean just conscious thought or just the things that people are aware of or anything like that.Just for the record, you should continue to use it however you want to use it, but know that in my own lexicon it means something a little different.Matt (03:42)Sure.I'll tell you how I came to use it because the problem with this stuff is exactly the problem we have in talking about music, right? I used to do this all the time when I was coaching groups of high school students. I would take the cello section of the high school and we'd go off and we'd have a sectional, right? Or I work with just them and we'd say, all right, so play these eight difficult bars for me as a group and they would play it. And then I'd say, okay, so now change.these two specific things, a little more power on your left hand, for example, or a little faster bow on this one note and play it again. And they would play it again. And I would say this, okay, did that sound better? And they would say, yeah. And then I would say, describe it. And they would all just give me funny looks, you know, cause it kind of nervous laugh because there aren't words that really say exactly what happened.And this is the whole problem, right?Divia (04:40)Or, I would say, or at least, like you didn't have words at that time. don't know, I'm also, maybe that's one of my other positions in life, is I'm pretty, I'm pretty bullish on what people can eventually describe in words.Matt (04:45)Yeah.Yeah, but you have to negotiate a shared meeting before you can do that. That's the fun of it. And if you set up a sort of a dictionary, that's great. But if you encounter someone who's running off of a different dictionary, then that's a bit of a problem because what happens so often in these situations is that anything you have to do precisely is going to develop its own professional vocabulary.with strict limits and like coding versus talking, that kind of thing. And what tends to happen is that a lot of familiarity with that language causes a sort of a habit to form and become second nature so much so that we forget that other people don't have it. when you, yeah, right? And that's where my entry into decision-making came through the physical and mental.Divia (05:18)Yeah, for sure.Sometimes, yeah.Matt (05:47)habit building that goes with playing an instrument.Divia (05:50)Yeah, I think that was before we started recording. You were telling me about some of your life history and how you guys, you want to repeat that now for the podcast?Matt (05:53)Yeah, sure.Yeah, sure. So I've gotten fascinated by decision-making and what I mean by decision-making is very, very broad. I define decision-making as the entire mind space between inputs and actions. It's just insanely broad. Anything you can think of that might go in there, throw it in. I don't care, you know, because we want broad for this kind of thing. And yeah, I've been playing professionally. When I was out in Boston, I wasn't working with a teacher at the time, but I was stillbettering myself as a player. And one of things you realize very quickly when you try to do that is you just cannot pay attention to all of the micro details that matter at the same time. Like say, and I happen to have a cello here, so I'll pull it out and kind of see if I can demonstrate what I mean through sound. So, you know, if you play a cello, you want the bow to go a certain speed and make a nice noise.Divia (06:37)I agree with that.Matt (06:52)And if your bow is too slow, it'll make that noise. And if it's too fast, it'll make that noise. So you have an audio clue, okay, am I too fast or too slow? But still, you're trying to get to that good sound for what you're trying to do. And the sort of hilarious part about it is that every note you play on a cello, for various reasons, has a different right bow speed and pressure combination. So you can't...get there by just always keeping the same pressure and speed. That won't work. You have to develop rules that tell you how to get from one pressure to another and when and why so you can anticipate it in time to do it even in the fast stuff. So there's all this really complicated physical stuff and that's just one side. know, that's just your bow hand. Your left hand has its own habits of getting from this pitch to that pitch and up the string or down the string andand all these things, but then there's strategies of when and why, again, layers of habits. And then you've got reading music, which is a written language, but then you have to make it into sound. So you have to read correctly fast enough that you can get the sound out and then play with an orchestra. So you've got all of these different windows into habit that are active at the same time. Yeah. Yeah.Divia (08:11)Yeah, they really need to be fluent because you have to do them in real time and while your conscious attention is often elsewhere. I would agree with all that.Matt (08:17)Yeah, because you can do this stuff slow if you have the time, but in performance you don't have the time. And so you have had to have it already so well ingrained that if you just start, it finishes. And you can kind of sit there back about three levels of abstraction and say, it's going pretty smoothly here, or there's some gravel on the road I need to slow down, you know, and kind of focus on my left hand a bit more, that kind of thing.So it's this business of looking at the very, very broad definition of decision making, the entire mind space between inputs and actions, as a sort of a composite, but one that's integrated and unified so that you can get to the really big patterns that are in fact causing the problems that we run into on the internet with people talking past one another and just having entirely different habits sets.Divia (09:16)Yeah. So, so it seems like some of what you're saying is as you're trying to improve at the cello, it makes you sort of aware how for basically everything in life, there, there are many things going on at the same time. Most of them is not where conscious attention will be at any time. And you can see the connection between this and various other things. And one of your, one of the top issues that seems important to you is the business of people. Disagreeing with each other in unproductive ways about things that matter. Does that seem right?Matt (09:43)Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so. So, you know, one of the things that is really wonderful about playing games with sort of rational type puzzles, and I should give you my definition of rational that I evolved from my own musical doings too, that I look at it, if a thing is logical, that's just simply it has internally consistent structure. You know, that's like a logic board on your computer or...whatever logic there is that runs things, whether you know what it is or not, but you can say, okay, that's internally consistent. And if it's externally verifiable, that's what I refer to as rational. So you can like poke at it and measure it. Yeah, basically so. That sounds like what I would mean. Right?Divia (10:23)So like legible.Yeah, it's definitely, it's interesting. It's definitely not how I, I use it. But again, it makes sense you would use it that way.Matt (10:32)Yeah, so this is again, if you're really trying to work with somebody, one of the first things you have got to do is get sort of on the same vocabulary.Divia (10:42)least like in yeah I mean because certainly I've thought a lot about people in disagreements too and and have my own frameworks and I tend to think of it in terms of of people's ontologies like we can I do sometimes approach conversations from within an ontology but I do think it tends to limit the scope and there are whole things that we won't be able to get to if we try to stay within a shared ontology instead of instead of addressing the fact that we probably see things quite differently in those ways too.Matt (10:46)Mm-hmm.Sure.Mm-hmm.Yeah. And the funny thing, so as I was poking around it and trying to understand habits, right, I found a book about intelligence. And it's, you know, it's called On Intelligence. This was, I don't know, almost 20 years ago. The book is by Jeff Hawkins. And, you know, he was the inventor of the original Palm Pilot, if you go back that far and remember those sorts of things. So he's...kind of had a foot in neuroscience and a foot in technology and he's still doing things that way. But this book was talking about how he thought of intelligence in terms of how it incorporated the idea of habit. And it made so much sense to what I was poking around in with cello that I said, this is great. And it just kind of fit seamlessly with what I had. But then it also triggered an insight which launched me in this general direction I'm going in now. So.I'll sort of talk you through a little bit it. From the neurobiology side, the whole issue is that neurons are slow. You know, if you get a stimulus in to the mind and it has to go through a chain of, I don't know, five or 10 different neurons, the lag is going to be so great by the time the thing gets into your sort of processing, your central processing, that...Divia (12:30)Do you know how long it would be?Matt (12:33)I can't remember, it was way too many milliseconds to be useful though. I don't remember the number, but... And the way I internalized it is that it's obviously too slow, so it doesn't matter what the number is. And the way I describe it to people is a bit like this. If you imagined that you were just gonna run up a flight of stairs, but you did so by micro-controlling consciously every single muscle in your body at exactly the right time.Divia (13:03)Yeah, of course you can.Matt (13:04)You can't possibly do that. And yet people do this sort of thing all the time. You can run up the stairs while thinking about what to have for lunch, right? It's, it's invisible. So there's, there's a lot of hidden processing going on, but it has to have some kind of an architecture that lets it work. And that's where the habits come in. So habits aren't just invisible. They're a particular architecture. And the idea of habit, according to Jeff Hawkins, which matches my experience behind the cello.Divia (13:06)for sure.Matt (13:34)is that if you have a stored pattern, a stored habit if you will, and you give it a partial match, what it'll do is automatically fill out the rest of it. So if I were to say to you, one, two,Divia (13:50)You want me to say three? Yeah.Matt (13:51)Yeah, exactly. And your mind already did it, even though your mouth didn't catch it, right?Divia (13:55)Well, okay, I I don't know. I mean, I think I was expecting you to say it. in that moment, I wasn't, I would disagree with the characterization, but sure.Matt (14:01)Right, yeah. You were expecting it to be said. So what, and that's what I mean, your mind had filled in that it was already gonna be said. But you just didn't know I was expecting you to say it. But then you did once you saw it, and see, that's the lag. That's a great example of the lag, is that you expected one thing and it didn't happen, but then you sorted it out and said, okay, then you, you know.Divia (14:07)I was expecting you to say three, yes.than I did.Matt (14:29)But in the mind, it's like, it's already done, so we're on to the next thing. And so this idea is that if you store a habit, what it does is if you give it enough of a match, it just spits out the whole thing.Divia (14:43)Yeah, I I tend to also think of it in terms of like cues and then behaviors that happen in response to the cue, yeah.Matt (14:46)Yeah, right? And so what that does from a functional perspective is it acts as a prediction about what will happen next in the world. And if the world continues on and does its thing and matches the habit that you expected, you just don't notice. And it worked. And it stays down there in the merc, in the subconscious, or below the waterline of consciousness, whatever words you want to use.and you go on with your life like nothing ever happened.Divia (15:16)Yeah, usually people wouldn't have any reason to pay attention to it.Matt (15:18)Yeah, and so that's the general notion of how a habit works. And so the nice thing is you've already done the work to build the habit, so you're not really expending conscious cognitive effort. It's already done. And it's really, really, really fast, so you don't even notice how fast it is. And it just solves the problem, and away you go. And habits stack like skill trees.Divia (15:41)Yeah, I was actually talking about this on a previous episode with a friend, where we were, because people use the word habits, I think, to mean a bunch of different things. And, you know, like, well, is brushing your teeth a habit? And I was like, well, look, that's the sort of thing where I kind of know, like, I think about it every time. And I'm like, yeah, I should probably do that. Whereas for me, and I think it depends on the person. My impression is that some people more like do it without thinking about it. Whereas I have other things that that's what I do. Like, I...Matt (15:51)Yes.Yeah, yeah.Yeah.Divia (16:10)I could think of different examples, like the way that I would turn the faucet off when I was done, like I don't ever register it. For me, like I have some places that I put my phone down and then I'm like, yeah, where are my phone? Like, and I just, don't even think about it. And so it didn't form a memory when I did it. Whereas some of the things that people often refer to as habits and I think they mean something coherent about it or in a different category. And I think this can cause some confusion, but anyway, yeah, those are.Matt (16:13)Yeah.Right?Yeah.Yeah.So it's fun because that's the basic mechanism, but what's also fun is you can stack habits arbitrarily deep. Habits of habits of habits of habits. And so that's how you run up the stairs, right?Divia (16:50)Yeah, I think most people have a lot of gross motor fluency built up that in almost none of it is operating consciously and, you know, assuming they don't get any major injuries, usually it continues that way.Matt (16:54)Yeah. Yeah.Right, and so that's a great way of just kind of seeing it, that my gosh, it built up is exactly the right word. Because you don't start with that stuff, but as you figure it out over time, it develops. And you see this particularly when you're trying to learn a specific complex thing, whether it's playing a cello or doing calculus or something. Because the fun part is the brain stuff is all the same. There's no...necessary difference between the architecture of a habit of action and a habit of thought.Divia (17:34)Yeah, I would agree with that.Matt (17:35)It's just the same, just wants to attach to the motors. And so when you study an instrument, what you're doing is you're giving yourself an unexpectedly broad window into the architecture of habit, because you can physically see it.Divia (17:53)Yeah, no, it does add certain ability to observe it if it's something that's more externally facing, physical.Matt (17:54)Hmm.Yeah.Now the key thing, and all this leads again, as I say, into a model of decision-making I use. And my approach is sort of through habit, through music. And the way I talk about decision-making, I call it, I dubbed it the higher model, H-I-R-E, because those are the four main components. And so you've got H is for habit and I is for instinct and R is for reason. That's your rational side. And E is for emotion.And all four of those are always active in the background. And the reason you can't see most of it is because the habits work so well that you can't see how well they work.Divia (18:41)I think, sorry, I think I'm, for whatever reason, I'm in a mood to push back more against some of the you statements. I feel like I can see it if I decide to. Like, I think I can step through it with almost any of this stuff. I think I don't normally because I don't have any reason to, but I disagree that I can't see it.Matt (18:46)it's great. It's fantastic.Yeah. Sure.Yeah. Well, you can't see all of it at once. You can zoom down the tree and you can focus in on any point. And you're familiar with this as a cellist. If you're trying to upgrade your playing, you go down there and you look at exactly when your first finger is leaving the string when you do this certain pattern. You can focus in at any given point in the constellation. But you don't have enough processing power to see the whole thing at once. That's the point of habit. Yeah.Divia (19:00)Sure. Yeah, I can't.Sure, yeah, for sure. I wouldn't see it all at once.Matt (19:25)So that's what I mean, is that you can know that there's an insane amount of habit layering and you can follow any individual thread, but you can't get a global perspective on all of them at once. There's just no space large enough to hold it. That's visible to conscious attention. And here's the really odd bit about it. Habits form over repetition, right? If you keep doing the thing and it keeps working, it becomes a habit.Divia (19:54)Yeah, well, think you're rep, see, sorry, I'm really going to argue. I'm like, okay, repetition, but this is one of those things people say, so I also am a bit of a student of behaviorism. I would say over-reinforced repetition because I think it's, I think there is a popular idea out there that if people keep doing things over and over again, then they'll, it'll just feel natural to keep doing them. And that's very much not been my experience about a lot of things in life. Some things I keep doing them and I keep doing them and they get worse and harder and less.Matt (19:57)That was great.Hmm?Divia (20:24)look more frictiony every time because I'm not getting one.Matt (20:28)But that, I would argue, is not because this isn't how habit works, it's because there are other mechanisms on top of habit that are complicating the thing.Divia (20:36)No, so I think it's when if we repeat it and it gets us some sort of payoff. I think, I don't know, that's how I would think of it with habits because mere repetition, just don't think, I don't know, I don't agree with that. It's not been my experience and it's not the theories that I trust. I don't know.Matt (20:43)Yeah.Well, I think where we could probably resolve that would be in what we mean by repetition. know, it's like when you're practicing a cello, for example, you very quickly learn, if your teacher is on you about it, that what you thought was an accurate repetition wasn't precise enough.Divia (21:14)Yeah, but I do mean aside from the precision. I mean, if there are plenty of things that I could do it a bunch of times, and in my experience, it would not necessarily feel natural, more natural over each repetition because of what happened when I did it. Whereas if I hear it and I'm like, and I get that feeling of like, yes, that, I want that, and it feels right, then I do expect it to feel more and more natural every time. But if I don't get that, then...Matt (21:26)Mm-hmm.huh.Divia (21:43)Like I do think there's some, I don't know. I think there's evidence either, I think there are examples where even if it isn't what people say they want, then they will keep doing what they've practiced, but I don't think that's universal.Matt (21:56)Well, I think, again, this is undoubtedly a case where we're talking past each other, right? This is the whole problem of decision-making being a thing. It's so vast and jungly as a process that when we actually talk to each other, it doesn't tend to make sense. And I think that actually, by the way, is another thing I haven't got to yet. But back in the days when everyone had very much a shared constrained culture and we would all be, you know,Divia (22:00)Sure. Yeah.Matt (22:25)talking one at a time and reading the same books and having learned the same grammar and terminology, it all seems to make a lot of shared sense because there's just a lot of constraint on the shared environment. But what the internet does is it puts it more like a jungle, that suddenly you're talking to people with vastly different backgrounds and language usage and et cetera, et cetera. And actually that's more of a window in how the mind actually works without the constraints, which is very unsettling when you're expecting it to be constrained.So it's, you know.Divia (22:55)Yeah, no, I definitely think that people tend to have more varied perspectives than they used to. It seems right.Matt (23:01)Well, you know, if you take, if you take cello playing as an example again, you know, if you're trying to learn to do a certain thing and you really want to get it to come out right and it keeps exploding every time you play it, but differently, then I would say that's not a problem with the habit architecture. That's a problem with you're trying to learn a particular habit and you happen to have left out a factor. don't know what it is yet. that you're, there's a thing you're not accounting for.And that's what's causing the problem. you know, that of course is what got me into reading this book that was about habits in the first place. I had that feeling.Divia (23:37)Yeah.Yeah, would you be able to describe some specifics of your cello playing that changed after you read that book?Matt (23:44)Yes. Yeah. So here's, let me give you a habit piece that I solved years after reading the book, but it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. When you're playing a cello, I'll pick the silly thing up again here, because I set it down. There we go. Get myself untangled from the headphones as well. Once you know your way around, it's like walking around. You can just kind of...Do sort of predictable things, but if you start going too fast It starts to get muddy and messy and things start to go wrong that it doesn't just scale up infinitely you run into physiological problems of hey this mass in my arm is moving that way and now I needed to move this way and suddenly my whole body locked up and I can't play anything and And so this is this is the kind of thing where that mattersIf you imagine me playing my cello, I'm gonna play a long note again. And what I did was I started with my bow arm in close to my body and I pulled the bow across the strings and my bow arm ended out pretty far away from my body. Okay? Now what that did in terms of playing the cello is it just vibrated the string and made the note. Great, wonderful. But mechanically,That's not the only thing that's happening. Also, and you can try this at home, if you start with your right arm very close to your body and then you sort of stick it, you know, three quarters of the way out, pretty straight, straight ish to your right, you will feel it pulling your body to the right. Just because you stuck a bunch of mass out there and you changed the location of your center of mass. And in order to compensate that, if you're sitting,and you want to stay sitting well balanced, what you would need to do as you stuck your arm out to your right is shift your weight ever so slightly in your core to your left and counterbalance that thing. So what happens when you are playing fast is that your body is changing center of mass location very, very rapidly. And if you don't have a systemDivia (26:07)Yeah.Matt (26:11)a habit system that counteracts that in your core body positioning, you will lock up and you won't be able to play. It's that kind of thing.Divia (26:18)So is this an example of the sort of thing where you changed how you were thinking about your standard of mass?Matt (26:23)Yeah, and what you want to do is teach it to your body so that it works. And I said earlier, yeah.Divia (26:28)Yeah, so can you say how it was before and then how like then how it was for you once you changed your mindset?Matt (26:31)Yeah.So the way this would go is that when it was in the before lands, what the mind tries to do with any complex concept is simplify it to the point you can manage it. And when you're managing body motions that are complex, very often what the mind wants to do is say, all right, we're going to knock this down to two variables and lock the rest and call it good. So that you can say, all right, I'm going to move my arm to the right and then to the left really quickly.and I'll be able to control where it goes because everything else is locked down. In practice, that doesn't work.Divia (27:08)And so is that more like how you used to think of moving your bow hand is that you were thinking about moving just your arm back and forth and you were sort of trying to ignore the effects it had on the rest of your body.Matt (27:10)Yeah. Yeah.Yeah, yeah, you just, you'd want to simplify it down to the mind because your mind is trying to execute this, you know, complicated, some kind of a passage that has you hopping all over the cello physically and you don't have time to think about what the rest of your body is doing. So you're just, all right, let's lock that up and just do this. But it doesn't work. And so until you find a way of doing two things, one of them is understanding the problem. And second isteaching your body a solution to that problem, then you won't be able to do it quickly and by habit.Divia (27:56)Yes, sorry. I think I still want to understand this. can you walk me through like, okay, that makes sense. You read the book and you had been thinking of your bow arm in terms of just the bow arm. And then you were like, okay, now my mind is more expanded on this topic. Can you walk me through like how your perspective changed and then what you personally started doing differently?Matt (28:02)Yeah.Yeah.Yeah. So, the limit here is not what the body can do, because you can go online and see lots of great players of all shapes and sizes playing the same passage, but really well, right? So you know, it's not a body limit. It's an interpretation or mind limit, and it's amount of mind space. So what you're looking to do is find a way of offloading the processingfrom direct conscious control, which is quite limited, into something that actually works. So we don't know what that is yet. And the pattern basically is that, well, if this is how habits work, that stuff that gets repeated and has predictable results, that gives you the same result when it's repeated, tends to become habituated. Then what you're trying to do is...Broadly with the mind, conceive of a kind of an architecture that should probably do it, and then tell your body to go find it, and let it go exploring until it finds it.Divia (29:19)So that's sort of what you did. Before you were thinking of your go-ah more narrowly, you read this book and then you're like, okay, I got to conceive of some way and then can you fill in the...Matt (29:28)Yeah. Yeah. So, so the way it looks like this, and as I said before, what the mind wants to do is simplify the process down to nice sharp edged concepts, you know, arm moves, bow moves, cello plays, that kind of thing. But the body is this vast network of joints and sensors, and they're not just, you know, motion places, they're positional sensors. Like if you stick your arm out to the side, like before,and close your eyes, you can feel where your arm is in space because gravity is pulling on the joints and bits of biology are squishing differently and the sensors are picking that up. So the insight there was that if you use your mind to try to generate two or three really sharp edge concepts, the body will respond by locking everything else down, shutting off the sensory input. And that's why you can't play it because you can't react fast enough with enough data.Divia (30:26)That was your experience. That when you were thinking of your go arm that way, your other muscles would tense up.Matt (30:27)Yeah, and instead...Yeah, and instead what you want to do for the way the body processes, which is much more parallel, is you want to open it up so that you have as many joints available to the action as possible and then ask them to coordinate around one thing. In this case, stable center of gravity. So if I stick my arm out to the right, my body just says, hey, and it turns a little to the left, and then my center of gravity stays stable.Divia (30:59)So you changed your intention from, or at least for a while, the focus of your conscious attention was not moving your bow arm back and forth, but was maintaining a center of gravity. Does that seem accurate?Matt (31:09)Yeah, and you can only do that once you've learned how to move your bow arm. Right? Yeah. And the exact analogy is skill trees in gaming. That you'd start out and you you've learned to use a sword and now you can use a level three and you build up skill trees and you're stacking habits like that too. So your habit architecture now knows how to move a bow arm and how to hold a bow and...Divia (31:14)Sure, because otherwise you can't have your attention in two places, but you've been doing that for years, so that was not an issue for you.Matt (31:36)how to keep the bow straight and kind of generally have control of how fast it's going and how high it is and all that. But then...Divia (31:43)Yeah, no, my sense as you talk about it is there's something that you, that's very important to you here that you really wish other people would get more, is that right?Matt (31:52)yeah, I'm just not sure how to put in words as you can see.Divia (31:55)Yeah, no, I think I want to understand it better. So I want to keep trying to ask you about it. Yeah, like if there's one thing that, and you know, I don't expect any given prompt to necessarily work, but like if people could understand just how foundational you think this is, maybe with that as a prompt, what could you say about it?Matt (31:58)Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah.Sure.But I think it's tremendously important that, that again, if we use the physiology of habit as a window into the general notion of habit in terms of learning abstract concepts as well, I mean, it's the same stuff. If I say calculus to you and you have knowledge of calculus, it automatically spits out a whole bunch of ideas related to calculus, but not necessarily within calculus. You know, you might be thinking about how you had that one really terrible teacher in certain year or, you know,that hilarious thing that happened in calculus class. it's a very broad, yeah, right. It's just sort of a lightning chain spreading out through the networks. And that is how knowledge is actually stored, I think.Divia (32:49)People have associative thought for sure. Yeah.Yeah, I think people can often see it most directly. Some people, I think, know how to have an experience of free associating in that way while awake. But I think it's probably extremely common for people who have memories of it to notice that sort of thing happening as we fall asleep also.Matt (33:11)Mm-hmm.And the easiest way to see it is just to watch other people talk on the internet, right? Because you're saying something that seems perfectly clear and then they go and they say something nonsensical and you're like, how did you get there? Right? And it's the whole thing about habit being what it is, is because it's compensating for the limits on conscious attention, which is kind of slow and narrow. And the habit is so much the large part of the iceberg.that people are generally off by several orders of magnitude on just how important habit actually is.Divia (33:56)Because your impression is that people, even if they know about it, might not understand the scope of the relevance.Matt (34:02)Yeah, absolutely. You could also put it this way. You know a lot of stuff by now. You've been living and having experiences and studying and all these things. There is no possible way you can list everything you know. Right? Because it's all s-Divia (34:19)And so that you're saying that that relates to it because to try to address the scope of the issue, you want to draw attention to the difference between what people could sort of consciously list and how much embodied knowledge there is.Matt (34:29)Yeah. Yeah, and not just body knowledge, like random knowledge about Tunisia or something. Yeah, it is. In whatever form it's stored, the point is you can't consciously list very much of it at all. And so it is.Divia (34:38)I guess I think that stuff is embodied too. That's my worldview, but sure.Again, I'm like, I don't know. I'm giving it enough time. I think probably people could. I think people don't usually.Matt (34:54)Yeah. Yeah. But I would say I would counter with, we don't have time. Like you're never going to have the time to sit down and list everything, you know. You could pursue a lot of it, but you would never get it all. Because for one thing, more stuff is always coming in and sorting, you know. So that's the first big insight into the habit world that the body shows you. It's it's vast beyond reckoning. It's really, really big. But then there's another interestingDivia (35:11)For sure, yeah, in a little bit I would.Matt (35:24)bit, which is that this familiarity thing comes from two directions at once in the system. It comes from top-down learning. Like you study something till you know it. That's a very good way of building habits, but it also comes naturally from the bottom up. And that's, that's the point where, you know, you're driving your commute in the new city and you can't tell when it became a habit. just did. And suddenly you realize, I did that one automatically. Didn't I?Divia (35:36)show.Matt (35:54)You know? Yeah, and because it's just a simple twist of the architecture. That's how it goes. So you're building habits. And again, what makes a habit work is reliable results. If you do it, if you see the same thing and it you see it seven times at each time it leads to this next other thing. Well, that extra thing gets incorporated into the habit with the little piece of habit. And so it's that familiarity building just piling up. Here'sDivia (35:55)Yeah, I think that's a common experience for sure.Matt (36:24)The really interesting part of it though, this is now the next insight. Hey, I'm sure as a musician you had this experience of going into a lesson.and saying to the teacher, I swear I could play that at home. Right?Divia (36:41)Well, I wasn't very good at practicing, but yeah, sure, I'll go with it.Matt (36:44)Right, well, most of it aren't, but as a teacher, you know, I have at least 100 different cello students, they all say that. I said it when I was a student, because when you're at home, you're in a familiar environment, and yeah, right, you learned how to do it in such a way where you're practicing and no one's particularly bothering you, and you know, the chair is this height and the light is that height. Yeah.Divia (36:57)Yeah, some of it's context dependent.I do think that's a very common experience. think this is, I understand that some of this is pretty universal and neurological. I do think in particular, my experience has not been as much like that as a lot of people.Matt (37:16)Yeah, well, here's where I'm going with it, because I'm trying to get to a broader point through a specific example. When you play the lesson, suddenly half of your attention that at home used to be on what you were doing is now focused on what the teacher thinks you're doing. And there's no longer enough conscious energy to power the system, and it breaks in unpredictable ways. That's the typical way it goes. Yeah, right? So that one, it's...Divia (37:39)Yeah, I do think this is a common experience.Matt (37:45)What you find out, and here's the insight, is that the habit that worked locally at home and gave good results doesn't necessarily work globally because in a larger app... Yeah. gosh, yes. Uh-huh. Yes.Divia (37:57)Sure. Yeah, the way this happens a lot in my life. So I do a lot of dog training. I don't know that I'm that good at it, but I do it a lot. my version of this is I'm always like, look what we can do. And then I call my husband over and it never works. I didn't, I'm eager to show him. So I haven't, I don't wait until it's actually fluent. It's not fluent yet. And then, and then I call him over and it's different enough that the dog is now doing something else, which yes.Matt (38:10)Yeah, right.Yeah,Exactly, right? And this is the hilarious bit, is that the nature of habit formation is that basically you're training the nervous system to say, this happened a bunch of times in the network. So great. But then you take that and you set it in a new environment with new clues and new parameters and new weirdnesses. And it doesn't necessarily give you the same result. Yeah, right? So the business of becoming a professional in anything is learning the system well enough that youDivia (38:43)Yeah, it depends, for sure.Matt (38:52)you iron out the bugs and when you take it out in public it doesn't crash. You play on stage in front of people or in an audition or whatever, it always comes out the same way. But it's not necessarily the case. The key here is that all habits are formed locally because nobody has omniscient intelligence.And it doesn't matter who you are, what you learn doesn't guarantee that it will work in other environments. And yeah. So what you suddenly find you have a collection of is this vast iceberg of habits that were all locally generated in different local contexts that may or may not work in global contexts, but they're all invisible and you can't see them unless you go looking for them. And that...Divia (39:22)Yeah, I think that definitely depends.Matt (39:42)has very interesting implications for sort of, you know, quote unquote rationality in general.Divia (39:49)Wish again, I have a thing I mean by that that's pretty different from what you mean by that.Matt (39:52)Exactly, right? And that's where we were one end of the words problem. So, so my contention is that this architecture is universal in a broad, broad sense. The content is unique to each person, but the way the interactions work is universal. And so that's, that's just one leg. Well, you could say fairly, I think it's about half of the decision-making model. If we're talkinghabit, instinct, reason, emotion. This is kind of like habit plus reason. You know, that if you're reasoning things out with a limited amount of attention and you've got these oceans of habit that are not, not only aren't fully coherent, but can't be made fully coherent even in principle, because you don't have the horsepower to go in and pull everything out at once and make sure it all fits everywhere. And that's that half of the decision making.and that looks like a bad place to be, but it turns out it's maybe not. And that's where I went next.Divia (40:59)Yeah, so why don't you walk us through, this is, you have a framework for people when they disagree in ways that aren't necessarily on track to be a productive disagreement. Would you be up for giving an example of a time that you have used it and like how it went? So like for each stage, what concretely happened to you that day when you used it?Matt (41:07)Yeah.Yeah.sure.Yeah, so, and I'm one of those people who's not good at concrete examples, but I'll do my best. But, you know, if, example, and this is bearing in mind, I haven't talked about what I think instinct and emotion are in relation to decision making, so we'll just leave that off for a minute. If you run into, some random terrifying comment on the internet that somebody says, you know, I don't know.Divia (41:27)Okay.Mm-hmm.Matt (41:49)But aren't either purple dinosaur is a terrible president or something? You know, it doesn't really matter what it's about, but it's, it's like.Divia (41:55)Something that I would have a strong reaction to is what you're talking about.Matt (41:58)Right, or something that you look at and you say, don't even know how to begin to reason with this. You know, because it's just...Divia (42:04)Well, I don't know that I would personally say that, but someone, sure.Matt (42:07)Yeah, right? Yeah, right? mean, it is a common experience on the internet that people run across things that just seem insane to them.Divia (42:16)Yes, I would say I do not tend to have that experience, but sure.Matt (42:19)Yeah, right. And so the way I look at it is, all right, well, if you want to reason with somebody, you've got to look at the, what I call the higher model of it, and I say, of the four components there, reason is the slowest one. Habits can be instant, instinct and emotion can be instant, reason takes a little time. So if you would like to reason with the person, and I generally hold that that's a good thing to want to do, but...I don't have to get into the reasons for the moment.Divia (42:49)And when you say reason with, you mean like exchange reasons in a that people are.Matt (42:53)I guess by my lights I would say, well again let me just throw a couple of definitions in here. I break the general experience of dealing with classical rationality into three layers, interactively speaking. And one of them, would say reason is solo rationality. That's where I did the research, know, and I worked it out for myself.And debate is combat rationality. So my reasoning destroyer is your reasoning. And argument is shared rationality. Let's work this one out together. So what I'm interested in ultimately is getting to argument. And so if I want to draw someone into an argument by engaging their sense of reason, the first thing I need to do is assess what they said and try to defuse.at need the instinct part and the emotion part and the habit part. So, right.Divia (43:54)Right? So how would you do it in this example of, you know, the person who said something about Barney?Matt (44:01)Well, in that one, if I look at it and I say, if I think this person feels existentially threatened by Barney, then I'll say, it's all right, I'll help you out. How can I help? All right, so defuse. If it's just strong emotion, well, that's a little different game. Maybe I would say something like, that's funny. I just heard somebody say the same thing about the Easter Bunny.What an odd coincidence, you know, it's like try to try to draw a pattern in, you know, again, without without going in and say, that's stupid. Don't feel that, which isn't likely to work. And if it's habit, well, you know, habit is mostly people say things that people around them say a lot. So so I hadn't heard it quite that way before. What do you mean by that? You know, so it's it's I'm going to look for a way in that.Divia (44:56)Yeah, and in those cases, you're saying the first one is more like they have a specific concern that like maybe on reflection, they're like, yes, I do worry about that. And the second one would be more like they have a strong emotion, but it's not really in the format of a specific concern. And then in the third one, it's sort of neither. They're saying it, but they didn't really, there's not too much behind it.Matt (45:14)Yeah, it's not like an existential threat. Yeah, right? And that's where the value of breaking decision making into four parts helps because between habit and reason and emotion and instinct, I feel like I've got a pretty comprehensive breakdown of the sources of whatever made them decide to say just that, just that.And so that's step one. But now if I want to reason with them, well, the next thing we have to do is figure out a way of building a shared environment despite coming from really different places potentially with really different vocabularies. And so that's, I guess you could say, it's not the right word, but personified or embodied bywhat I call the law of radical consensus. And that's a tool. And the law of radical consensus just simply says, consensus is easy to find. All you have to do is jointly agree that you disagree.Divia (46:13)So what's that?Yeah, I would agree with this. Yeah, that's, I often attempt that as well.Matt (46:28)You know, it's,Right? It's actually what's missing. Yeah, right.Divia (46:34)I would say it's not always actually easy in my experience, but I do think it's a good, it seems worthwhile to me.Matt (46:42)The missing piece is whether or not that looks like it will be productive. Right? Because it actually is easy. We could say, so we disagree, now what?Divia (46:49)No, it's, no, so that has not always been my experience. I actually had a long conversation the other week where, and you you could say it's a skill issue on my part, which I'm happy to accept, but in fact, I did try to get, and the other person listening to this may not, if the person I edit with is listening, may not agree with my characterization either, but I claim that I did not manage to get a straightforward agreement about where we disagreed. I do think often it's easy, I,It hasn't been my experience that it always is, and I can think of some specific examples.Matt (47:22)Okay, this is the little different from what I said though. I didn't say agree where we disagree. I said agree. Yeah, yeah. And the limit case is we can't even agree whether or not we disagree.Divia (47:29)No, but even that we disagree.Yes, sometimes that one is easier.Matt (47:40)Right? Yes. Yeah, but it still gets you there. So if you have that one in your bag, it's the showstopper. It's like, do you agree that we can't even agree? Yeah, so you can always do it. It's, right?Divia (47:52)I agree, it does seem to be helpful and it is often very tractable. Yes.Anyway, point of disagree, this is noted point of disagreement. It has not been my experience that it is always achievable for me, which you could again say is a skill issue or I'm misinterpreting what happens. I do think it is very frequently.Matt (48:03)Yeah.Right, do you see how the logical point I just made could get you there? I haven't found a way where it can't. So, right, but yeah, then it's whether or not one has the desire to do it, and that's a different problem. Because if you're dealing with someone who's just being contrarian, yet if they have no intention of actually reaching common ground with you, well, that's useful information.Divia (48:19)Yeah, to me it's just an empirical thing whether in fact people will always get there.Maybe.Matt (48:41)Because yeah, yeah, yeah Sure, sure. All right. So so the goal You know if you think about how your own reasoning works basically the way it goes is if you've got this beginning condition you're happy with and Then you went through some reasoning that you're happy with then you're gonna end up at a conclusion. You're happy with right and and If you have a problem with the premises, well, that's one setDivia (48:41)Yeah, again, think I'm interested in hearing you out. I have a different ontology about that as well, but I'm interested in hearing you out.I would agree with that.Matt (49:10)one place it breaks down. And if you have a problem with the reasoning, that's another place it breaks down. And the third place it breaks down is in how you selected which premises to start from. Which is, yeah, that's, yeah, that's the longer one. Yeah.Divia (49:22)Yes, I do remember this from the tweet you sent me, your long tweet, how this is a big issue these days. It's like, okay, well, you kind of cherry pick. I think the accusations that people cherry pick things are very common and I think for good reason.Matt (49:33)Right?Yeah, and it's a difficult problem. And it's a common problem. Everyone's at this point working from individually unique sets of evidence. And what's interesting to tie this back to the earlier part is that's an exact map onto the architecture of habit. No two people have exactly the same habits. And the internet has suddenly done this at scale. So there's a resonance here. And if we can bridge it, that would be useful. And that's where the habit thing becomes useful.So what I've been looking at is, okay, how do we tackle this? If you can't even come up with a shared set of premises, how could you argue anything? Right? So I've been playing with that. And the way I described the solar reasoning before is instructive in that it's very linear, right? Or at least it looks linear. You start withDivia (50:19)Sorry, yeah.Matt (50:35)shared premises, and you do your reasoning and then you get a conclusion. And if you want, could daisy chain that further into larger conclusions by adding more steps. And it makes reasoning look wonderfully linear. But it isn't. And the reason it isn't linear is, well, let me say first, the reason it looks linear is that's an artifact of language. That in order for me to explain it, I am using words in timeor on a page where it's in space and you're reading them in order and it's giving you an impression of linearity. But if, yeah, right? And because the communication works that way. But if you think about it more in terms of a habit architecture, what's hidden behind that is when you did the reasoning and you selected your premises,Divia (51:13)I do think words are more linear for sure, yeah.Matt (51:30)All of that work of, no, that won't work. This is a blind alley and that's a mistake is, is been washed out of the final product.Divia (51:40)Yeah, it's just less common than when people would choose to share that sort of thing.Matt (51:43)Yeah. And so when you look at the simple thing of premises, reasoning, conclusion, it looks nice and linear, but what that hides is this sort of tangly business that goes on in the middle.Divia (51:55)Yeah, which is often how people actually came to their conclusions. It's very much about that.Matt (51:58)Right. And that's that again, we're getting back to the architecture of habit and how people actually think versus how we think we think. That's that's how I tie it in. So so the problem is, if that's what's really going on, what we need in an internet world is a quick and effective way of getting on the same page, even from different perspectives. And so it'sDivia (52:25)It's nice if you have it.Matt (52:27)Yeah, well that's what I'm trying to put into words. I think I have it. It's just, can I explain it usefully? And that's a whole different problem, especially for somebody who doesn't think in words or images, right? That's the whole reason I went into classical music in the first place. So it's like an unfolding harmonic progression here. So the way this goes is that first we need a way of getting back to shared premises. That's one of the things the Law of Radical Consensus does.is that if we iteratively widen the frame, and we say, no, okay, so that's not solved. What if we go back here and we say, can we broaden it? Can we say this? Okay, that doesn't work. All right, well, how would you put it? we, you just keep, like for example, you and I are using competing definitions of rationality, but we're able to talk to each other because we're sort of accepting that the definitions are competing, but they're probably talking about the same general thing.Divia (53:10)What's an example of broadening it? Or how do mean it?Matt (53:26)So in a sense, we're sacrificing shared precision for shared accuracy.Divia (53:33)Okay, that's the sort of thing you mean.Matt (53:34)And we're just, yeah, we're just retreating out until we can both say, yes, I unequivocally endorse this very broad statement about this particular thing. Yeah, we were just retreating until, yeah.Divia (53:43)I'm not, okay, that might be what we're doing. In any case, we certainly are, we certainly are trying to proceed even though we don't have, yeah.Matt (53:50)Yeah. So step one is you're going to play this game with the law of radical consensus. just, okay, so we agree that we disagree on that. So what if we wrap it like this? Can we say we agree on that? Okay, no, and you just keep going out and out and out and out until you get somewhere where you can actually say, yes, it's really vague, but I'm totally with you on this point. Yeah. And you could do it, you could say both people or you could say all the people involved.Divia (54:10)And both people can.Sure, yeah, if it's more than two.Matt (54:19)But whatever, it's a sort of a local condition. It doesn't have to be the universe all agrees with me. It's like we're for what we're doing here with the people involved. And if you play the game long enough and you're really trying to make it as rigorous and robust as possible, you're basically iterating the law of radical consensus until you get a convergence of four things. And the first one is consensus.Divia (54:28)the group of people that you're talking about.Matt (54:49)We actually agree, right? The second one that adds power is universality. We think this probably holds true everywhere. You know, this is why the laws of physics are powerful, right? Because people have done a lot of work, right? Yeah, right? The universality matters. It's useful. And the third one, in suspicious times where everyone has weird information, you're looking for self-evidence. If I s-Divia (54:49)Okay.Yeah, math and physics are the...What does that mean?Matt (55:17)If I say the thing and you can verify it by self-evident observation, then you're more likely to... Yeah. And for example, I would say that people have limited conscious attention.Divia (55:22)Like it seems self-evident to me, the thing you said.Matt (55:31)You look at that and say, well, yeah, right? There's no one out there who has unlimited conscious attention. We all have different limits, sure, but the fact that it's limited is true of everyone at once. So self-evidence. And the fourth one is invariance. That's not likely to change. So if I can get all four of those things on the same page at once, I've got a really solid functional epistemic floor.And what I am doing by applying the law of radical consensus is going down the infinite rabbit hole of epistemics far enough to find functional agreement and then laying floorboards there and saying, we're going to build from here because this should support what we're doing. And if it doesn't, we'll just go back and check it because it's reversible. So you use the law of radical consensus to go backwards.Divia (56:17)Bye.Matt (56:30)in the linear sense and widen the frame until you've got a really solid set of foundational premises. And then you reason forward from there again and try to preserve those four things, the consensus, the universality, the self-evident observation, and the invariance. And you just go forward chasing those and you always look back to the nearest consensus if something breaks. You keep going until something interesting happens. So that's the sort of functional thing there.Divia (56:56)Yeah, okay. And so I think it's an interesting framework. Can you tell me like, since you, I know you said you have trouble sometimes with concrete examples, but like since you've developed the framework, how your conversations have changed compared to how they were before?Matt (57:08)Sure. Well, I think one of the pieces that I have to jump ahead to explain, and then I'll come back to where we are, is that when you apply the law of radical consensus method to human decision making,Broad patterns emerge that make it much easier to talk to people without freaking out. So that's one way it's changed. When someone comes at me with their hair on fire about some topic that may or may not be true by my lights, I don't panic. Because I... Yeah. Yeah. And so that is downstream of having applied the law of radical consensus already to develop the higher model of decision making and its implications.Divia (57:48)Yeah, that's big if you can not be triggered about that in that way.So when you could go meta and fit it into your framework, that helps you on an emotional level relate to what the person's saying.Matt (58:07)Yeah, because I'm not looking at the other person as insane or even particularly threatening. I'm just saying, you know, I mean, I'm not going to not defend myself if that comes up, but I can talk to anybody, no matter where they're coming from, because I know how to wrap the frame in a way that makes them into a reasonable person. So that's step one, is the broadmy receptive stance is vastly improved because I don't panic when somebody comes at me with something I don't agree with or sounds crazy. So then I apply my strategies of, know, so, my gosh, because politics is on everyone's mind right now, it's just like, okay, this particular presidential candidate is, you know, whatever it is.Divia (58:43)Yeah, that seems great.Matt (59:01)eating children or blowing up cities or whatever and this is so terrible and I have ways of defusing that. I okay, well, you know, that's fine. That's what I've been hearing about the other one too. What do you think could be going on? And what most of the time these people are expecting when they talk this way, and this happens at parties and things, right? Somebody says something really...what you would think would be out of bounds, but obviously to them is not out of bounds. And they do that because of habit, because they're used to being around people who talk and think that way. So it's normal for their local habit structure. And they might be doing it because sometimes performative emotion is a way of getting status points in a social thing. So you demonstrate that you care about the thing. Okay, so, all right, but that's different from actually feeling threatened by the thing, right? So...Divia (59:57)In your experience, a lot of people who will say strongly worded statements about politics, they maybe don't have as deep-seated feelings about it necessarily. That's been your experience.Matt (1:00:05)Yeah. Necessarily. Sometimes they really do. But sometimes it's just social signaling born out of habit. And so you have to make a quick assessment, OK, is this person actually terrified that this is going to happen? Or are they just kind of saying it because all their friends say it? That is fun. But either way, I'm not like threatened by it myself. I'm like, OK, well, so. But.But then there's a trick of listening to that. And again, engaging with the other person. Here I'm using my performance sensibilities as a musician, kind of trying to read the room. And then saying whatever comes to mind that I have assessed might slow down or jiu-jitsu the oncoming faster bits of the higher model so that I can get to the reason.Divia (1:00:58)So you're saying you want to interrupt their habits basically at this point.Matt (1:00:58)End.Yeah, yeah, like if if I say to you one two and you're expecting three and I say six Or Yeah, and there's well, I won't get into that there's you can have plenty of habits that start the same way that end in different places so it's not always so clean cut but but yeah, you justDivia (1:01:24)But yeah, you'd like to, insofar as they have a habitual way of thinking about it that doesn't accord with how you're thinking about it, you'd like them to be in a different state. And so you try to interrupt that. Does that seem right?Matt (1:01:31)Yeah. Yeah. just, just break. Yeah. Just, just, just disrupt the flow long enough to get an idea in. And, and that's where you say, well, okay, well, okay. I heard the same thing about the other side. What do you think that might mean? Or, yeah. Isn't that funny how we keep hearing the same things about it? And where I'm going, you see how I'm aiming these things is toward universality. I heard that about the other guy too. So you're, I'm using my four points, the universality.Divia (1:01:56)Yeah, I can see that.Matt (1:02:01)the self-evidence, the consensus, and the invariance as targets, conversational targets. And where this kind of ends up, I've been trying to conceive of this in a way that makes a little more visual sense, because, okay, law radical consensus seems like, as I'm talking about it, okay, maybe that works, but the power isn't evident in the way I presented it. So...Here's how I think I would lay out the power. I think that instead of thinking of rational argument as linear, it helps to think of it as planar. It has a second dimension. And the reason this matters is that this sort of plane serves as a window into other people's thinking. the, yeah. Right? AndDivia (1:02:54)Yeah, because it is branching and it's not linear in people's heads. And so you want to have a more accurate model of how other people are actually relating to this stuff.Matt (1:03:04)Yeah, and it's both, like doubly so, because not only is it, you know, multi-dimensional in their own heads, it's just invisibly so, because the habits are smoothed out and it looks linear. But also, everyone coming out of the internet is coming from their own unique angle, and their own unique set of facts, and their own unique set of, you all this stuff. So, there is a way of organizing all of this stuff in a plainer way that I like. And this is a...recent development by thinking.Divia (1:03:33)You mean like that intersubjectively, like not just for a single person, but if you imagine like the state of people's beliefs in general, not just the one you're, the few that you're talking to.Matt (1:03:37)Yeah.Yeah, like what we're describing is the frame of a window that you're using to look into the internet at other people's beliefs. And everyone has a different view, but we can all use the same frame, like that. go back to our left to right model, where that's your premises and then your reasoning and then your conclusions. In that linear model, going right advances the argument and going leftDivia (1:03:50)what you're describing,Okay.Matt (1:04:12)does everything else. It checks the facts, it checks the logic, it checks the premises. Here's how I would do it. I would say going right still advances the argument, going left only checks earlier logic. In the other dimension, if you drill down, now you're getting into the facts. What are the facts? What aren't the facts? More decimal places, all that kind of thing. What do the experts say? And if you go up, that's big picture.Divia (1:04:33)Okay.Okay. So you go, can, you're imagining the ability, like you keep in mind when you, when you imagine the plane part of that, how that, why that helps you is that it helps free you to have multiple dimensions to change the conversation to either looking, you know, backwards premises or forward towards conclusions or towards more concrete evidence or towards more meta or abstract statements.Matt (1:04:43)So.Yeah.Yeah.Right, so what that gives me is more targets, more navigational compass directions for my application of the law of radical consensus. I can see consensus in multiple directions. So if somebody says something crazy, I can say, okay, do you have facts that support that? That'd be going down. Or I can go left and say, okay, you skipped a step here. Can you show me how you got here? I just didn't follow it. And we go up and say, how does that fit into the big picture?and you can use combination moves. You can say, so if everything you're saying is exactly right and those are the facts and that's all there is to it, then by logic, now we move up and right, if you're right about that, then the only possible big picture result is this terrible consequence. Like, one way I've used this on people before, years ago actually, is somebody will go on a vent aboutsome political party or something and then I just kind of look at him and say, okay, so I'll sign you up for the Civil War then. And just hold eye contact until it hits. And what that is is I'm not arguing with you, but I am saying that by your own logic, this is the only possible result. And that's not a comfortable place for people to be. So it's a combo move. I'm going to go, essentially, I'll accept going down to the facts and I'll accept all the earlier logic, but then I'll bounce up here and I'll say,going up and to the right, that's a terrible thing. Don't you want to have maybe another option? And then I'll swing it up and left and I'll try to generalize toward, so what would that solution look like?Divia (1:06:49)Yeah, so I guess hearing you talk about this, one of the things I start to wonder is like, do you think this framework also helps you to change your own mind more when talking to people? Can you talk about that part of it?Matt (1:07:01)Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things about the habit structure I was talking about kind of the first half, that again, the way I see it, habits of thought and habits of action are the same thing, except one's attached to muscles and one isn't. So they have the same architectures. And the architecture is such that I can't possibly have everything 100 % rationally coherent in there because new stuff's arriving all the time and it's evolving and I...I don't have the bandwidth to sort it. So I know that I can be wrong about some really important stuff, even if I'm deeply invested inDivia (1:07:40)Yeah, you have some abstract awareness that's increased probably now that you've solidified your model of how you two could be wrong about something.Matt (1:07:41)Yeah.Right? it... Yeah, the logic is clear that even though I don't know what I'm wrong about, I guarantee you I'm wrong about lots of stuff. Just like everyone else. So that helps, because it knocks out the sort of arrogance of thinking I'm right and no one else can be right. I know I could be wrong. That helps. Also, knowing how all of this stuff relates, again, in my own head, Ganon, that we haven't gotten into...as to how emotion attaches to this stuff opens a lot of empathy. That other people can be really like 180 wrong on stuff they care passionately about and it happens all the time and so can I. So it's okay, well that sucks to be in that position. It's really not fun. But if you have strategies to help somebody out of that, well that's good. And then, then.Bending that all back again to the idea of consensus, universality, and all of that stuff. Things that don't change that we can tell will never change. There's never going to be people who are unlimited in their conscious attention. We're stuck with that. It means we can bend toward finding the common ground in those ways that leads to actionable solutions. Like, OK.Divia (1:08:55)Okay, and then what's the implication of that?Matt (1:09:08)If we can find some stuff we can trust in sort of headspace about this wide angle logic that isn't all that precise, but it's very, very accurate, what that's gonna do is two things. It is going to eliminate entire classes of attempted solution. So we don't even have to try to pursue them because we can already tell they won't work. And it's going to offer us at the same time a way tonarrow down into an actual productive path that we can jointly pursue.Divia (1:09:44)And you think you get there from saying that people have limited conscious attention and so that's helping you to focus on where things seem tractable? Is that what you're saying?Matt (1:09:54)Yeah, yeah, and there's more to it than that. But yeah, that's the general idea. The framework is such that no one has all the answers. And when you inject exponential technology into that same situation, it sort of changes the rules. People can evolve new attacks faster than you can evolve defenses.Divia (1:10:10)So when you say exponential technology, what do mean?And are you talking about like verbally or are you talking about, like, can you give an example of what you mean?Matt (1:10:21)everything well you know like these days you say the wrong thing on twitter you can get targeted for cancellation but people can also figure out who you are and try to come after your bank or whatever or they could drop drones on your head or whatever you know it used to be that when you had a disagreement you could just walk away butDivia (1:10:41)I mean, maybe there was, I think there was a brief period where that was kind of true. And then for most of human history, that was not, right?Matt (1:10:44)Right? Yeah. Right, exactly. And it back in the, in the low tech days, you really had to work together to survive where you didn't survive. So there wasn't a whole lot of optionality there, but then in the broad middle ground, you could, you could get ahead by pretending to work with people and then like taking advantage of them. And that's most of it. But when you get up into the high tail and you say,suddenly anyone can do anything to everyone. That's when it gets...Divia (1:11:17)You're saying it's harder, you think it's harder to take advantage of people now?Matt (1:11:21)I think it's more dangerous. what happens is the threats can come in over the horizon faster than you can even know they're That you, know, someone can spread false gossip about you that can wreck your life. you know, and yeah, and so there's, this is becoming more and more accessible to more and more people. So.Divia (1:11:39)Yeah, maybe. Yeah, it has happened to people for sure.Matt (1:11:49)We are starting to get to a point where instead of a win-lose dynamic, it's becoming win-win or lose-lose. Because if you try to take someone out, then their allies will take you out. And then it spreads and...Divia (1:12:05)You basically, think there's more deterrence, more potential for deterrence than there used to be?Matt (1:12:10)Yes and no, because the architecture of human decision making hasn't changed. And our understanding of it may be changing, but it itself hasn't changed. And people have it.Divia (1:12:21)Yeah, but it seems like you were just, when you said exponential technologies, I think it didn't seem like you were talking about the architecture of human decision making. It seemed like you were talking about some other features of our environment.Matt (1:12:28)No.Yeah, what we can do to each other is becoming broader and more sophisticated and nastier at a faster rate than what we can stop each other from doing to each other.Divia (1:12:42)Yeah, it seems like your perspective is also that basically the offense wins in like an adversarial environment more than used to be the case.Matt (1:12:43)Yeah.Yeah.And what happens when you develop the higher model is instructive in this result too, because what it comes down to, see if I can do it briefly, this is without explaining it, this is essentially asserting it, right? You've got all that messy habit architecture I talked about, right? It's not particularly rationally coherent, but it has a logical structure, it's just a tangle.and spreading constellations and network effects and all of this sort of thing. And it's characteristic of humans. It's just how have it, okay. And one of the things your body is equipped with is a visceral sense of identity. And that's what your instincts push on to modify your behavior. You feel hungry, you go eat something. You feel tired, you go sleep, that kind of stuff. Black box for instincts, we don't care what the details are, but that's the general attachment is that your instincts keep your body alive.But your abstract mind is also constructing identity, except this one's abstract. And like everything else in the habit world, it's very flexible. your sense of, right?Divia (1:14:04)For sure. had a good conversation about egos structures a couple of weeks ago. People want to check that out too.Matt (1:14:07)Right? So this will tap into literally thousands of other fields, but the idea is that your sense of self is whatever it is. You you can expand to be your house, your family, your expected vacation, whatever, you know. And because everything is on the habit architecture, it means the bits of yourself that are habituated will respond sort of quicker than you can think, rationally speaking. They just appear.And my take on this as a musician is that since the mind and body is a two-way street, Alexander Technique, all these other things I haven't gotten into, there's no reason why the instincts that evolved to leverage the visceral sense of identity wouldn't also be fooled by the abstract sense of identity and leverage all that too. And we experience that as emotions.Divia (1:15:05)Sorry, we experienced it as what?Matt (1:15:07)emotions.Divia (1:15:09)That's, yeah, that certainly is one ontology.Matt (1:15:12)And so that's why you get people being existentially threatened by election outcomes, for example. You can lust after a new car, you you can feel hungry for a win. Right?Divia (1:15:24)Yeah, again, I think it's interesting. think ultimately I have a pretty different perspective on most of that, I, you know, it's, I like hearing what other people, how other people see it.Matt (1:15:29)Sure.Here's where it becomes useful. And again, we're sort of playing this game of here's a simplicity and then layered above it is a ferocious complexity that's emergent and you have to go up to the next level to find a new simplicity. So we look at all of this mess and it's all of these different instincts leveraging all of these different identities at once and surfed by this tiny spotlight of rational attention. But what it still comes down to is this.Just as the body in cello playing is a giant sensory network, and it kind of solves without you paying direct attention to it, the entire network of identity is going to solve the same way under the instincts, such that every decision you make, no matter how profound or trivial, is best available for self-preservation at that moment in time. All that changes is the nature of the sense of self.Divia (1:16:30)Yeah, I do think sometimes it can work that way. think, again, I think I have a lot of, ultimately a pretty different perspective on this stuff, but.Matt (1:16:33)Yeah, right. Yeah, sure. And so my take on it is that it always works that way, and that's one of the universals. Now, how we get there, obviously I'm asserting. I haven't walked through any of the reasons or how I think it works. But the point is, if that were the case, then you can figure out why society does what it does.because everyone is always maximizing self-interest except that senses of self are different and that creates stable dynamics over time that fit with what is observed. And that's where the power lies is that if I'm right on this stuff then you can actually lay this stuff out and say, that means if we organize society this way it'll crash in that way at about this amount of time.And that's where the interesting bits are. But you see how much work I have to do to get there? That's why I'm not able to just lay it out. Because it's very... In order to get to universals that everyone will take, I have to go about four layers deep. And that's where what I've got is, know, instinct protects the... keeps you alive, does the physical work. intelligence helps with pattern recognition and all that kind of stuff.and conscious attention is limited. And that's my floor. And you go up from the floor and you get to various layers, but that's, you one of the layers is the higher thing and another one is this sort of self-preservation thing as being a true universal thing. But then the societal functions are above that.Divia (1:18:20)Yeah, no, and that could be a whole other thing. think ultimately we're probably close to out of time for today, but thank you so much for sharing all this. And if you wanna let people know where they can read more and find you on Twitter, I welcome that too.Matt (1:18:23)Right?I'm sure we are. Sure, yeah.Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm at MJ Piercello on Twitter, and that's MJP-I-E-R-C-E-L-L-O. And I also write, I think under the same name at Substack, but very infrequently. And I just, what I do is I'm trying to generate visuals and pieces and facets of this giant puzzle that will ultimately later become a sort of a linear presentation of it. So,Divia (1:18:46)Okay.Right, because as you said, it's one of your, something that I think you'd say you find challenging about this is how much your thoughts are nonverbal and then to try to express it to other people. Yeah.Matt (1:19:04)Yeah.Right? Yeah. And you know, having the experience of cello playing, it's like, well, you built all these habits from the tiniest motions of the fingers on up to the body on out through this symphonic thing where you're all playing together in a live performance, which is different rules than recording or practicing. And there's all these layers of things going on. And so I'm used to thinking of the whole thing as a layered construct. And I'm trying to figure out how to cram that into it.like an appealing linear presentation. And it's, it's great. I can see it, but how do I say it? my pleasure. Well, thanks for listening. And thanks again. And so I don't know if we'll get a chance to talk more about this later, but if you think of anything that I said that makes no sense that you'd rather I explain differently, by all means reach out. But in the meantime, it's on to other things. Thanks a bunch.Divia (1:19:41)Yep. Well, thank you for taking the time.All right.Sounds good. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com