*Dialectic Episode 18: Tom Morgan - Wisdom in the Woo is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6J2BlVxh29CxWRw4d1QsDp?si=2cc6ddcf5e834d43), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/18-tom-morgan-wisdom-in-the-woo/id1780282402?i=1000710300820), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/blT3I-4_3VE).* ![[18-TomMorgan.jpg]] <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/6J2BlVxh29CxWRw4d1QsDp?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/18-tom-morgan-wisdom-in-the-woo/id1780282402?i=1000710300820"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/blT3I-4_3VE?si=pYcZ45Chi5U2pm-I" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Tom Morgan ([X](https://x.com/tomowenmorgan), [Substack](https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/)) is a "curiosity sherpa," writer, and podcaster who runs [The Leading Edge](https://www.theleading-edge.org/about/), a community for leaders focused on personal transformation and authenticity. I first encountered Tom and his ideas during his [talk at Sohn on Iain McGilchrist, left vs. right brain, and curiosity](https://x.com/tomowenmorgan/status/1775957154521821593). Tom writes about complexity, curiosity, and consciousness, and wades into the deep end of various topics that most of us would place in "woo," mystic, and spiritual territories. He spent most of his career on Wall Street and brings a scientifically-inclined, rationalist approach to researching and amplifying some of the most surprising modern and ancient ideas about the nature of humanity and the universe. With this conversation, I aimed to create a primer on Tom's writing, approach, and the ideas he returns to most. We discuss following your energy, how curiosity is a guiding force, complexity and emergence, and why the world is overrated toward left-brain rationalism. We explore practical questions—How do you know your gifts? When should you pivot or persevere? What does real exploration look like when the world offers no safety nets? And then we wade into much stranger, or even heretical ideas—at least for a modern, intellectual, western audience—including the notion that consciousness is much vaster than what we've come to understand, and how we are just a small part of a much bigger whole. I hope you enjoy the conversation and consider some ideas that are much more fringe than you're used to. I definitely left it with more questions than answers. And more than that, I hope you are inspired to attune yourself to your curiosity. Perhaps, you may even have the faith to follow that thread pulling you toward what appears today only to be a wall. --- **This episode is brought to you by [Hampton](https://joinhampton.com/community)**, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton surveyed over 100 members with net worths of $1M-100M to create its **2024 Wealth Report.** They asked about financial goals, spending habits, how much founders themselves, investment portfolio breakdowns, risk tolerance, estate planning and philanthropy, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to access the report. # Timestamps - 2:03: Following Your Energy and Positive-Sum Games - 6:04: Curiosity and Complexity: Differentiation and Integration - 8:12: Entropy & Syntropy: Unpacking Curiosity, Love, and Desire - 12:34: Emergence and What All the Mystics Point to: Integration - 15:14: Left Brain & Right Brain: A Primer on McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things" - 28:58: Hampton - 30:34: Discovering Your Gifts - 37:35: Creativity and Sustaining Curiosity - 43:12: Life Pivots, Especially When You Aren't 22 - 50:24: A Challenge vs. A Grind: When to Keep Going or Try Something Else - 56:19: Synchronicities - 1:00:58: Openness and Wisdom - 1:04:19: Error Correction, or Something Else? - 1:06:02: Tom's Mission and The Meaning-Mortgage Question: Can you really do what you love? - 1:08:45: Fear, Faith, Love, and Seeing Reality - 1:12:59: "Minimum Viable Woo" and Exploring Out There Topics with a Pragmatic Lens - 1:16:10: Stories - 1:18:51: Love, Emergence, and Intelligence Beyond Us - 1:22:52: A Looming Meta-Crisis, Global Consciousness, and Earth School: Blowing Out the "Woo" Rating - 1:33:41: Lightning Round: Pseudoscience as the Streisand Effect, Mystics, What Would Rattle Tom’s Worldview Most, Joseph Campbell, Fred Again - 1:40:41: Tom's Encouragement for His 20 Year Old Self # Links & References - [Thinking the Unthinkable - Tom Morgan](https://www.theleading-edge.org/thinking-the-unthinkable/) - [Anne-Laure Le Cunff (X)](https://x.com/neuranne) - [Tiny Experiments](https://t.co/ZENCqbS4TO) - [George Gurdjieff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff) - [Exploring Gurdjieff's Mysteries - Tom Morgan](https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/p/exploring-gurdjieffs-mysteries?r=8rxu&triedRedirect=true) - [A Transformational Heresy? (Syntropy) - Tom Morgan](https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/p/a-transformational-heresy) - [The Lottery of Fascinations](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/) - [Michael Levin (biologist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)) - [Tom's talk at Sohn Conference](https://x.com/tomowenmorgan/status/1775957154521821593) - [Iain McGilchrist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_McGilchrist) - [The Matter With Things - Iain McGilchrist](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58955313-the-matter-with-things) - [Tom Morgan - Audience of One](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1WGC5OpN7Z3Hl6yLRDa0rd) - [Brian Whetten](https://x.com/WhettenBrian) - [Test Your Network - Tom Morgan](https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/p/test-your-network) - [Donald D. Hoffman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman) - [The Law of One (The Ra Material)](https://www.lawofone.info/) - [Our Unspoken Future - Tom Morgan](https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/p/our-unspoken-future) - [East of Eden - John Steinbeck](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4406.East_of_Eden) - [Ervin László](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3) - [Laszlo on the Holotropic Attractor](https://noetic.org/blog/evolution-the-force-that-is-with-us/) - [That Funny Feeling -- Bo Burnham](https://youtu.be/ObOqq1knVxs?si=31U650v8SFXAIEcs) - [The Telepathy Tapes](https://thetelepathytapes.com/) - [The Passion of the Western Mind - Richard Tarnas](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/586992.The_Passion_of_the_Western_Mind) - [Ian Stevenson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson) - [Integrated information theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory) - [Rupert Sheldrake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake) - [When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62069739-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world) - [Lecture: Biblical Series XIII: Jacob's Ladder - Jordan Peterson](https://youtu.be/A9JtQN_GoVI?si=SS9e9igOAPsYCxf7) - [Fred again.. Boiler Room: London](https://youtu.be/c0-hvjV2A5Y?si=yUlKrQs00RqlZsuD) Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow Dialectic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript ## [00:02:03] Following Your Energy and Positive-Sum Games **Jackson:** Tom Morgan, I'm sure we'll get into much more fidelity about what this means, but I'll start relatively simply. More and more people are talking about energy these days: what gives you energy, what takes away energy, what people energize you. My first question is, what does it mean to follow your energy? **Tom:** Let's keep it simple. The best advice from all the people I've asked over the last two years on how to improve your life is to pay attention to what gave you energy or took away energy at the end of the day. It's as simple as noticing after a conversation: Are you more energized? Are you more upbeat? Are you excited? Are you vibrating a little bit, like the concept of excitation? When someone recommends a book, does it come with an accompanying frequency that resonates with a whole bunch of things you've been looking at recently, making you eager to dig into it? Then, when you open it, you're tearing through it. There's a wonderful neuroscientist, Dr. Hamalä Lääkämpf, who has just written a book I recommend called \*Tiny Experiments\*. **Jackson:** I think I might follow her on Twitter. **Tom:** She's great; she's just fantastic. She calls it becoming a scientist of your own life. For two weeks, you observe everything you did and note what was energetically negative, what was energetically neutral, and what was really energetically additive. Then you just try to increase the additive things. **Jackson:** I like that answer a lot. Where do you get your energy? **Tom:** Positive sum games. There's a lovely framing that I only realized afterwards comes from this completely bonkers Greek-Armenian mystic called Gurdjieff: you need to have head, heart, and body practices in your life. In fact, he said you should aim for things that involve all three at once, which is maybe something else we can talk about. **Jackson:** But I've realized that's difficult. That's like multitasking. **Tom:** An example would be going out and mowing the lawn while listening to an intellectual podcast and simultaneously giving thanks for the beauty of the day. That sounds like good fun to me; that's my kind of fun. I realized that—and this was completely by accident, rather than design your life—I spend my mornings reading and writing about topics that I deeply care about, and my audience also tells me they deeply care about based on incoming feedback. Then I roll Jiu Jitsu at lunchtime, which is an archetypal positive sum game because the people really enjoy beating me up. The afternoon is meeting new people and spending time with my family. They're all nested positive sum games. The writing is positive sum, the rolling is positive sum, and meeting people is positive sum. Mostly in my life now, because I don't have to take any meeting I don't want to take and I'm not selling anything, which is often a bit energetically draining, most of my interactions are energetically positive. This shouldn't be possible if you consider the second law of thermodynamics. It shouldn't be possible that you go into a situation and you both emerge energized at the end. **Jackson:** Certainly happens. **Tom:** It happens. And that magic is what I look for. **Jackson:** Or extracting something from the air, I... **Tom:** ...guess. Or generating it. Who knows? But it's great, and it feels great. I don't think you can burn out that way. ## [00:06:04] Curiosity and Complexity: Differentiation and Integration **Jackson:** I want to talk a lot about curiosity, which is attached to energy. My first question related to it: there's this essay I love from Scott Alexander where he talks about the lottery of fascinations. He's playing with this idea: you don't get to pick what you drew in the lottery of what you have to care about. He begins it by complaining that he didn't draw math as an intellectual. My first question about curiosity is, why can't we force ourselves to be interested in something? As a second point, is curiosity inwardly driven or outwardly driven? **Tom:** There's an idea that the universe trends towards greater complexity, and complexity is differentiation and integration. It's almost a paradox. All the pieces are different, but they're all perfectly integrated. The most intuitive example of that is you right now listening to this. How many parts of your body can you name? Even with biology class, how many? Thousands? Tens of thousands? There's this nested series of all these different parts in your body that are all completely integrated. You don't have to think about anything that you're doing right now—even paying attention to your breath, even your digestion. Everything is happening in a completely integrated way. Complexity theory says that everything is evolving towards that. There's this force, or maybe series of forces, that's pulling you to be the most differentiated version of yourself. If you're just shooting for differentiation, you're a cancer. You're essentially dissociated from the whole. If you're integrated with the whole, the whole system gets more resilient because it's very diverse, but it also gets more integrated. You have this relational conversation with the system where: "I actually don't care about that." And that's a feature, not a bug, as long as what you do care about is integrated with the system. That's something else we can talk about. ## [00:08:12] Entropy & Syntropy: Unpacking Curiosity, Love, and Desire **Jackson:** This Carl Jung quote came up that I think is amazing. I don't have a ton of strong thoughts on him generally, but he said: "Your future self calls to you in the present through what you're interested in." That rhymes with a lot of what you just said. I want to talk more about complexity before we get into it. "Interested in" is pretty vague language. I think it's empowering in some ways, but it's also vague. I have a set of questions: What does curiosity feel like? Are there different types of curiosity? For instance, intellectual excitement and romantic attraction: are they a similar kind of feeling? Maybe it's a spectrum. **Tom:** I think there's love. Love and curiosity are very closely tied together, and it is tied to excitement. To be a bit reductively scientific, there should be an unlimited number of choices in front of you. But it seems very weird that the right one wouldn't feel different from an evolutionary perspective. If there are indeed forces beyond our current perception, why wouldn't there be one that gives you some sense of an optimal direction? Science is increasingly thinking maybe that comes from the future. There's this wonderful idea of something called syntropy entropy. You're going to die, everything falls apart. But at the same time, there's a symmetrical force called syntropy that drives us towards complexification, that energetic integration drive. The guy that came up with it thinks it actually comes from the future. That's a bit brain scrambling, and all this time travel stuff always breaks my brain. But for me, it's: what am I in love with right now? That does extend to partners. I've always thought about Tinder for the soul. Particularly in Manhattan, you have an effectively limitless number of romantic partners. How would nature narrow that? It would make you attracted to that person, but that's not enough. As any man on Tinder has ever discovered, it's not enough to be attracted to something; it has to love you back. Maybe that's one way to think about curiosity: you can be curious about things that don't love you back. That's when you get dissociated or go down non-productive rabbit holes. This is very common in left-hemisphere lateralized autism, where you get really interested in something that isn't remotely integrated, and then you're in real trouble. **Jackson:** what's the difference between curiosity and desire? Perhaps desire is a bit one-directional. It might be received, but you can imagine all the things we desire, whether romantic or not. It's sort of just about me and what I want. Do you think that's right? **Tom:** I can't stop thinking about this because I'm curious about it. There's this guy, Michael Levin. **Jackson:** He came up in an episode I just put out with a guy who's making this hardware device. He has some range. **Tom:** He has this theory—I never assume I understand anything—where cancer cells are dissociated from the magnetic field of the body. When you bring them back into the electromagnetic field of the body, they stop being cancerous. When I think about people's interests and desires: is it aligned with the system? Is it aligned with the love of the whole system? Is it in service of love, as hokey as that may sound? If it's something you desire but it's not aligned with that complexifying direction of the system, is that the right thing to want if you want something from the narrow ego? Humanity tells basically only two stories over the millennia. One is the hero's journey: how do you become more aligned with the system? The other one is "be careful what you wish for," which includes Aladdin, King Midas, Sorcerer's Apprentice. The dude goes to the witch and asks for the thing, it's always the wrong thing, and hilarity or death ensues. It's a disaster because you desired something that wasn't integrated with the system. But then, what you should want becomes a bit of a head scratcher as well. **Jackson:** I want ## [00:12:34] Emergence and What All the Mystics Point to: Integration **Jackson:** to talk about complexity a little bit more. One line you have is: evolution's solution to combinatorial explosiveness is curiosity. What's compelling to me is that we all grew up with this idea of entropy. Entropy rules everything around me. I think it actually came from you. I'd never heard entropy framed this way, which is just "things fall apart"—a beautiful and brilliant frame for its effect. And yet, things aren't just falling apart. If anything, they're getting more complex and specifically, they're becoming emergent. You see this across everything. You talked about my body or societies, but even in cities, like Jane Jacobs, you see this pattern everywhere. You gave a helpful explanation of complexity. Can you talk a little bit more about how that leads to emergence? And then also, why is curiosity—or what is this force you talked about, this thing, this curiosity, this straw, this pole—that is driving what you call complexity? **Tom:** I don't have good answers to either of those questions. But I look at the more esoteric and mystical sources I've read, and it's always: what is the direction of travel? The direction of travel always seems to be towards more love, more unity, and more integrated consciousness. That means less dissociation. **Jackson:** Does it always seem to be that way in humans, in nature, in life, at a cosmic level? **Tom:** No, I'm talking about the mystical traditions. If you parse out every mystical tradition, or if you literally go on ChatGPT and ask, "Give me the common factors of all the world's mystical traditions," that's roughly what it spits out. But it also now increasingly has support from leading-edge science. When you become more integrated as a human being, even from an Internal Family Systems perspective, if you're full of warring sub-personalities that are dissociated, want different things, and are traumatized, you're never going to get anything done. Yet, if you're completely integrated, loving, and focused on the good, you're going to become incredibly powerful, but in a really beautiful, aligned way. That appears to be what this force of syntropy, or whatever you want to call it, is driving towards: more integration, more power, and more alignment. ## [00:15:14]  Left Brain & Right Brain: A Primer on McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things" **Jackson:** but people who aren't familiar with you at all have probably sensed some level of woo. One of my favorite things about you is that you play with this idea, and we'll talk more about that. But can you talk a little bit about... You've referenced the science around syntropy specifically and a lot of this stuff broadly. What types of science, scientists? How much of it is psychiatry versus quantum mechanics and things like that? What is the emergent field here, broadly? Perhaps another way of putting the question is: Is there a beachhead area you would suggest people start to peer into if they're totally skeptical off the bat? **Tom:** Categorically, yes. **Jackson:** Okay. **Tom:** I have had this conversation—and we can even define what "this conversation" is—500 times in the last three to four years. **Jackson:** Okay. **Tom:** The beachhead definitively for me is the work of Dr. Ian McGilchrist. We can go into it in as much detail as possible. I was professionally paid directly for three years and indirectly for 20 years to find the most interesting things in the world for very rich, time-starved people. I am of the conclusion that Dr. Iain McGilchrist is the dude that people will look back a century from now and be like, that guy had his hand on a model of reality that was both accurate and explanatory in a way that no one else had. I met him again a week ago on Zoom, and I stand by it. Until I find anyone else better, he's the guy. **Jackson:** People can read more, so we don't need to cover the incredibly deep separation between the two in full detail. But McGilchrist focused on hemispheres. People have heard about left brain and right brain too. Can you give us a two or three-minute overview of what you basically need to know? I have a lot more specific questions. **Tom:** Sure. **Jackson:** A primer would probably be helpful. **Tom:** When we were growing up, you were told that one side of your brain is mathematical and one side is creative. That is not true. Science then claimed that both sides of the brain are effectively the same for redundancy purposes. That's also not true. McGilchrist's thesis is that both sides of the brain can do roughly the same thing; it's just the way that they do them is very different. **Jackson:** He's a neuroscientist. **Tom:** He is a neuroscientist, an ex-practicing psychiatrist, and professor of imaging at Johns Hopkins. He started in humanities. He's a polymath; he's a legit polymath. He went to All Souls College at Oxford three times, which is the genius college. His last book is 1500 pages with 7000 footnotes and an 180-page bibliography. **Jackson:** But critically, and maybe for the most skeptical, there's the neuroscience. It gets into what we're going to talk about, but I think has a different kind of weight than almost everything else you just said. **Tom:** He is a scientist of the brain, and I think an elite one. The good thing about being a scientist of the hemispheres is that they reliably get knocked out by stuff. Strokes knock out one side, and accidents knock out one side. Some people, very bad epilepsy sufferers, actually have a corpus callosotomy, which is when the connection between the hemispheres gets cut. **Jackson:** Wow. **Tom:** It's really easy to test the differences between the hemispheres. The TLDR, if I can TLDR a 1500-page book... **Jackson:** The Matter with Things. **Tom:** The Matter with Things. Best book I've ever read. Go buy it. I've probably sold a few copies of that in my life. The left hemisphere is narrowly focused, linear, logical, loves abstractions, loves control, is hyper, hyper linguistic, and concerned with logic. The right hemisphere is holistic, emotional, somatic, and almost entirely non-verbal. But it has a better understanding of the world across almost every dimension relative to the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere lies; the right hemisphere never lies. It is competitive, and it won't surrender control. McGilchrist's contention, which once you see it, you cannot unsee it, is that the world is lateralized unhealthily towards the left hemisphere, and it is creating all these horrendous knock-on effects that are quite literally destroying the world. **Jackson:** There's plenty more there. The specific element of over-focusing on the left side: is that a nature problem? Is it something more genetic? Is it mysterious forces? **Tom:** Yes is the answer. First, you've had assortive mating. In the last couple of hundred years, if you were really smart, you would both be working in Manhattan—hyper-intellectual people—and you'll be marrying each other in a way that has never happened before in human history. All of those cities are dominated by the left brain industries. Then you also have the percentage of your daily life relative to 200 years ago that happens in your head, in abstraction—way more. All of it. All of our lives are conducted in abstraction, or at least the lives of the people we hang out with. So, much more of the world is interacting. **Jackson:** It's almost like you're using that muscle more. **Tom:** Yes. There could be lots and lots of factors, but that's what I think of. **Jackson:** One obvious thing you talk about is that we need more balance. That's part of McGilchrist's whole idea. My first exposure to you was this talk you did last year, which was the five-minute version of this. I'll link to it if people are interested; it's great. Part of the conclusion here is that we need more balance from left to right. But I also get this sense, even in your description of their strengths, of the notion that it should be the right as the director—the master and the emissary analogy, or the steering wheel and the engine. So, one question I have is: Is it really about balance, or do we need to shift to being a right-brain-dominant culture, society, or species? Or what does balance in this equation actually mean? Perhaps part of this too is, what is a healthy version of the left brain? What does that balance look like? **Tom:** I think that's the ultimate question. We have to go back to where we started: What does an energy diary look like, and why? In my personal situation, I have seen a tragically massive number of people get trapped in left-brain, abstracted places and industries. They're feeling an energetic and somatic pull to something non-logical that actually will possibly be their salvation. But they downweight its importance because it's not coming from a linear, logical, rational, and verbal place. It's just a feeling they have, and they don't understand that it's actually coming. It might even be coming from the future; we don't know yet. **Jackson:** Even if you want to take the least woo view, it's just a sense, an instinct they don't have language or rationality to put around and thus devalue. **Tom:** Yes, that's all this means. McGilchrist, speaking for him, would say that most societies have been right-hemispherically driven. Interesting. In fact, there are all these myths we've been telling throughout humanity about what happens when societies are not right-hemispherically driven. The Lion King is one. Essentially, you have the king, and he gets overthrown by a character with a British accent. That's actually relevant, as the British accent is often associated with intellectualism. So you have this slightly effete mad scientist or intellectual who overthrows the king. Then what happens to Pride Rock? Pride Rock becomes barren, a wasteland. Then the king returns, and it becomes balanced again. McGilchrist shows this again and again: we've been telling this myth for millennia that when the right hemisphere becomes dominant, the entire ecosystem collapses. And 70% of the species on Earth have died in the last 50 years. It's like a scoreboard. **Jackson:** Another part of this is that as I found myself going through this, there is this empowering frame: it's not that the left brain is useless; it's the brush strokes, and the right brain is the picture. Or it's the forest and the trees. You've talked about this a little bit, and I want to get into it more in terms of what it practically means. One other piece on this: attention is a really critical part of this. There was one point that you listed somewhere—I the conscious brain can process roughly 60 bits per second. The unconscious, apparently, 11 million bits per second. It's broad versus narrow focus, or narrow versus broad. How do you think about intention around attention and the way it connects to this, left brain, right brain, and curiosity? **Tom:** I think about it increasingly in the context of AI. For example, you type into AI, "What should I do with the rest of my life?" **Jackson:** I did this with a three. That's crazy. **Tom:** I don't know what you would get back. Maybe, "Drink lots of water." What did it do? **Jackson:** It was remarkably thoughtful. It wasn't wise so much as it was thoughtful. **Tom:** Okay. **Jackson:** But it was. **Jackson:** I felt seen. **Tom:** Really? Okay, that's absolutely terrifying. I'll have to do it then. My sense was that AI can't determine relevance. For example, if you face an issue. **Jackson:** It wasn't a random new fresh LLM. It was ChatGPT with memory, which I've been using for months. **Tom:** Okay, that's slightly different. But if you also said to it, "Who should I marry in New York?" **Jackson:** It had some thoughtful ideas around the category, but obviously, it's not going to know. **Tom:** That perhaps speaks to what the left and right hemispheres do. The right hemisphere is your neck; it orients you in the world and says, "This is something relevant for you to pay attention to." Then the left hemisphere is exploit. Exactly. Explore, exploit. The left hemisphere will analyze this, tear it to pieces, work out how rational it is, and see if it can use it. Then it's returned to the right hemisphere again. It's this right-left-right cadence that McGilchrist talks about a lot, which you see in many different places. It almost describes cognitive dissonance and the trajectory of a human life. Basically, you see something. Does it match your model of the world? And then you put it back. I think it's brilliant. Human life goes the same way. You start off undifferentiated as a kid, then you become this very abstracted professional, and then you return those professional skills back into the world. Everything follows this right-left-right cadence. But you never discount the left. The left can be used as an analytical tool to help tear things apart, but you don't leave things torn apart. **Jackson:** The feeling I get is that the left brain is in control. The left brain is being hijacked by things that are mainly digital, things that are really good at hijacking attention. Thus, one sense I have is that if you were to ask most people what they are curious about, they wouldn't be able to answer because they're so shut off. Their attention is so shut off that there's no signal coming through that screen. **Tom:** It scares me a lot. One thing I always think about is slot machines. Everyone knows that social media design came from slot machines. I was reading a book about this where a woman was saying that she has to wear dark pants because she knows she's going to soil herself every time she goes on the cushion because she's so tied in to the machine she can't get off them. **Jackson:** They call it the machine zone. **Tom:** Part of that is the unresolved mystery that we're pattern recognition machines. You've got a random number generator, but slots make it look like there's a solvable pattern, whereas in the real world there is actually a solvable pattern. **Jackson:** It's a simulacrum of curiosity or a false representation of curiosity to be solved. That's getting short-circuited. **Tom:** We're looking for hidden patterns because I think there is a hidden pattern, and when we find it, it makes a big difference to our lives. There is no hidden pattern in those random signals; we just think there are. It's the ultimate evil in some respects. In all these mystical traditions, they say the worst thing you could do is infringe upon someone else's free will. Free will is the point of everything. If you have a system that co-opts people's free will by giving them an unsolvable problem that everyone knows is unsolvable, that's really close to evil. **Jackson:** It's interesting to think about free will in parallel to this idea of there being an intelligent environment and a force pulling you to things. I suppose the right metaphor there would be a green light, or a fishing hook; it's something that's pulling you versus anything that's forcing you or pushing you. ## [00:28:58] Hampton ## [00:30:34] Discovering Your Gifts **Jackson:** I want to talk about how to make this a little bit more practical around curiosity. We're talking around this idea of the intelligence in the environment. There's an idea from Christopher Alexander of unfolding that's kind of similar to this, and it's very attractive. Sometimes this stuff can be very paradoxical. To use your earlier language, you have this amazing, amazing excerpt where you quote Ed Slingerland and then also talk about the Tao. I'll read it in full: "We advance our consciousness through greater integration, not intellect. The Tao is literally translated as the way or the path. It implies a degree of agency." I want to come back to that. "One compelling interpretation is that the path is the same pursuit of what we love." Differentiation using the left hemisphere in service of love, and integration using the right hemisphere. The Tao is the path of integration and complexity. **Tom:** So much of what we talked about. **Jackson:** This creates the almost paradoxical feeling of trying not to try. Successful alignment with the Tao brings effortless action, or Wu Wei. Someone in Wu Wei gains a charismatic power called day, as explained by Ed Slingerland. The result is an easy oneness of things, a state of going along with whatever presents itself, with no expectations and no calculation. Such perfect relaxation brings with it incredible efficacy in the world, as well as social success, as we would expect from the connection between Wu Wei and day. The state of true day, the highest virtue that doesn't think itself virtuous, represents a perfect harmony with heaven and the way, which gives the Lausanne sage remarkable powers over man, woman, and beast. Because he thinks nothing of himself, he is valued by others. Because he wants nothing, everything is given to him. This is an incredibly beautiful passage and idea you referenced earlier. It rhymes with stuff Jesus said. It comes across in so many mystical texts, but it's also unbelievably frustrating. You don't have to try. It's this deeply, almost paralyzing paradox. You've been clear across so much of your writing that curiosity is not a head thing. It's doing; it's action. You say it's difficult to connect with your curiosity unless you know who you are. It's really hard to connect with your curiosity unless you believe you actually have gifts. The earlier quote talked about agency as well. One place to start is how do you get to know yourself better? How do you discover gifts or begin to sense what your gifts might be? **Tom:** Doing, doing, doing, doing. It's not immediately obvious to yourself. Often, people say, "You're really good at that." I am patient zero for paralyzing introspection, having had a multiple-year nervous breakdown. Do as I say, not as I do. I went on an elimination diet when I was at my physically most disastrous. After my energy levels went bananas, I started writing because I couldn't not. After I got better years later from my dark night of the soul experience, I learned about Ian McGilchrist. I learned there's a theory in here that changes the world. If you told me that I couldn't tell anyone, I would have exploded. I'm not one of those people that can sit quietly in their study, learn interesting things, nod to themselves, and think, "That's a really interesting thing. I'm never going to tell anyone." **Jackson:** I got to text the group text. **Tom:** My wife wants to kill me because I tell her everything I learn. That's in my personality. There is this cliched thing: do what you can't not do. That's very helpful. Does it put you in flow? How does time pass when you're doing something? **Jackson:** I've had a similar experience of being way too over-analytical. I love the idea of "do what you cannot do." David Senra has this idea: What could I not give you a billion dollars to stop doing? It's empowering. But for a lot of people, you brought up writing. Why did you have to write? To go maybe even upstream, what does that actually feel like? I think there are a lot of blockers to this type of stuff and curiosity broadly. You have another idea. You say: a belief that if you end up pursuing your curiosity, you'll lose any intrinsic value because you have no intrinsic value. So how much of it is tied to confidence versus this is fun, versus it's an intellectual rabbit hole? There are different ways this might show up. For Michael Jordan, it's shooting a basketball. There's some parallel to maybe your writing. **Tom:** I think the unsatisfying answer for a rationalist is feedback: the universe has to tell you that it's the thing you're supposed to be doing. That often shows up as synchronicity. When you do it, there are strange, meaningful coincidences, or there's a really strong response. There's a lot of focus now on the sense of worthlessness that people have, which I think is almost ubiquitous. I think with our separation—the separation of our psyche from the whole that's necessary for us to be independent entities—there comes this intrinsic sense of bedrock shame. They say at the bottom of all psychological work, there's this sense of original sin and primal shame. A lot of people spend their time focusing on how to get rid of this sense of shame that's actually secretly attached to everything. While all of this psychological work and shadow work is surely important, what's actually helped me the most is getting feedback that my work is not worthless in a way that's meaningful to me. I don't mean a bonus; I've been there. I get emails from people. **Jackson:** Maybe it's bigger than you, in part. **Tom:** I'm channeling stuff through me—not to sound too grandiose—but ideas that I didn't generate. I didn't generate any of Gilchrist's ideas. I'm just amplifying them using my modest audience. Then people email me back saying things like, "I didn't kill myself because I encountered these ideas." I get emails like that sometimes. Then you think, "I'm not worthless." You can't get an email like that and think you're worthless. Trust me, my buttocks clench to the extent that they could create diamonds whenever anyone gives me a compliment. I'm really, really unable to receive love of any kind. But when the universe shows it back to you through the feedback for your work, that creates this positive spiral where you can think, "Oh, I'm just going to keep doing more of that because other people seem to like it." And I love doing it too. But I've never considered myself a writer. When people describe me as a writer, I feel like an impostor. ## [00:37:35] Creativity and Sustaining Curiosity **Jackson:** How much of this and curiosity is specifically about leading to creativity? Do you think creativity is the necessary output of it? **Tom:** Every time people use the C-word, I can feel my energy level drop. Because I don't know what creativity is. **Jackson:** I'm sorry to lower your energy. **Tom:** What does creativity mean? **Jackson:** I've used a word or a frame to describe art, which I realize is not quite the same thing, as something along the lines of transmuting an experience you've had into some kind of form that another person could experience. To me, creativity is probably close to that, which is something around an inward-out expression of something to give. Again, new, novel, these things are less important. **Tom:** I like that a lot. That's really brilliant. My concern, having been a 20-year recovering finance professional, is when people hear creativity, they think poetry, finger painting, knitting. It's just something you do on the side. You're probably not that good at it, and it's a hobby. Creativity actually is something existentially important. Almost everyone I know is wrestling with: can you have meaning in the mortgage? Can you have something that is intrinsically creative, that doesn't represent a hobby, that is essentially differentiated and integrated? When people say creative, I think people immediately put that into a box marked hobby instead of a box marked necessity. Maybe I'm projecting here. **Jackson:** One of the more empowering ideas is this notion that you can do something creatively too, which maybe conflicts with my definition a little bit. There are certainly way more creative and way more rote things to do, accounting or whatever it might be. For what it's worth, there are plenty of things in the world that I think we're fortunate people aren't trying to do more creatively. So it's fuzzy. We'll get more into some specifics around that. The last question I have on this broad piece is, you have one line where you say, "If you're in stasis, you will lose interest in what you are doing." I think anyone can relate to that. But it does bring up this question of what does it mean to maintain curiosity? What makes curiosity deepen versus run out of rope? We've all been in the place, or you mentioned the autistic kids, like you have your special interest. That's an extreme version, but everyone's gone down a rabbit hole and then you're not interested in that anymore. Oftentimes maybe it's, "I was interested in this when I was a kid," or "I had more of the time." How does this become an infinite game? **Tom:** This is where you can tap into the left hemisphere. You have to have some degree of faith that following this is a fruitful rabbit hole, but also a little bit of discernment that this isn't the dumbest thing you've ever seen. I'm not going to be playing in the NFL. You have to have certain guardrails around your curiosity, but you want to let your curiosity lead the dance at all times. Going back to the energy diary and the passage of time, you need to be increasingly aware of how the passage of time feels when your energy levels are running out. Eventually, particularly in a corporate context, you will be put in a place where the passage of time is so torturous that either you need to numb yourself using some additional substances, or you are going to have to move before evolution selects against you. I know many, many such cases of that because I was one. You have to have this fine sensitivity. It's a very, very sensible idea to keep your fitness landscape shallow, which is to keep your outgoings, to not need many things so that you can pivot rapidly. My wife and I keep much more savings on hand than the book would tell us to do. It means that if I, as I did a year ago, decide to immediately zero out my salary to found Leading Edge, I can do that with a much lower level of anxiety than if we had a huge mortgage and 50 different outgoings. It's for a certain kind of person that wants to live life in a Taoist way. You have to have a certain attitude towards material goods. The degree of sacrifice there is unclear to me. Abundance does come through this lifestyle in ways that I can tell you about that are mega crazy. Ultimately, when you're living a positive sum game, you stop being comparative. When you're living a positive sum game, you care much, much, much less about material things. Not from the spiritual perspective of, 'Now I'm enlightened.' It's because you're having so much fun, you don't have time for the distractions. **Jackson:** You don't need so much. A better framing of it, too. **Tom:** It's realistic. It's not a denial of something. **Jackson:** The billionaires don't go on vacation because they're working. **Tom:** You don't need to go on vacation because your work is a vacation. **Jackson:** You teased at ## [00:43:12] Life Pivots, Especially When You Aren't 22 **Jackson:** it. One of the ways you think about what you're doing and who you're serving is this idea of the semi-lost, middle-something man in America. It's not necessarily middle age. This is super practical. I've gone through something like this fairly recently, and I think you did too: real exploration, pivots, and changing. You have a frame around this for when you're in that earlier place of stasis, when you've hit your peak earning years and you don't care about what you're working on anymore. A lot of people can relate to that. You say our society is a window of tolerance for men figuring it out, which is about three weeks to three months. A real exploration can take closer to three years. There are little to no safety nets in American culture, especially. And then, "How can you be unhappy if you're rich?" is a common refrain. This is not specific to men or an age group. Anyone a little bit into their career or life has either experienced something like this or knows someone who has. What this seems to distill down to is this complete and utter fear of leaving the local maximum. You talked about the steepness of the curve to go down. At its root, and this goes back to the material stuff and the last question, is some kind of sacrifice. How can anyone think about curiosity, all this stuff we just spent the first part of the conversation talking about, and real material changes or pivots in their life? Especially people feeling some relation to what I just said. And particularly people who have pressure to be a provider—whether to family, other people in their life, or just to be serious at their life stage. **Tom:** I think about walled gardens a lot. They're a trend I am more bullish on than anything I've seen in my entire life. You need an incubator for your next identity, where you can say, "Okay, I was earning half a million dollars as an MD on Wall Street and I'm just going to quit my job." In that situation, my wife worked, so I had some flex, and I had no kids. Now I have two. I don't think that's realistic for a lot of people. **Jackson:** There are plenty of Americans who would probably say, full stop, that you quitting to take no income to follow your bliss while your wife works is already failing as a man. **Tom:** That was how I felt as well, and there were no shortage of people telling me that. You don't need to do that. I'm reluctant to give anyone else advice in this area, but what I would say is that Anne-Laure Le Cunff, her book is about tiny experiments. Your odds of being right first time on that Taoist path of differentiation integration, it's probably pretty low. The degree of self-knowledge it requires and then faith in the universe it requires—two things that we are not strong on—are a lot. So your odds of being right first time, I think, are low. At least, I've been studying this really for the best part of 10 years, and the people that get it right first time, I don't think I've seen one. What you need is a way to conduct tiny experiments without blowing up your life, which is to work out what are the answers to both of those questions: where what only you can do meets what the world needs. Then find ways of doing it that are a little bit scary. But maybe they're anonymous, or maybe you can talk to other people that have this job that you want and work out what their daily routine is actually like and whether that's something that would be energetically positive for you. **Jackson:** Yes. **Tom:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Whereas we're so tempted to do the either change nothing or blow it up. I quit my job, moved across the country. People don't really talk about that middle thing, which is so much more both plausible and realistic, but to your point, maybe actually better for finding the thing. **Tom:** Because it doesn't exist. We don't have it, at least to the best of my knowledge. It's the thing that's needed, but there's really no money in it. There's no money in providing these communities to people, mostly because they're going through a period of financial insecurity. But I run one, and I think that they're going to be everywhere within a matter of years because it's this intermediary stage. There's a phenomenal interview I did recently with my personal Yoda, this guy Brian Wetton. **Jackson:** Oh, I heard part of this, and he's brilliant. **Tom:** And he talks about this idea of people playing win-lose systems. Tech and finance are mostly win-lose systems. And life is sort of a win-lose system at that stage where it's like, I just feel better because you're doing worse, and I'm winning, man, but also you need to lose. Then people get a bit older, usually around the age of 36 for whatever reason, and they're like, well, that's all a bit stupid, and I'm burning out. So I'm just going to only play win-win games from now on. I'm going to find my infinite game and play it. And then you just fail over and over again. Brian calls it the poor but pure valley. It's like, oh, I can't take money for consciousness work right now, or I'm going to start a conscious startup, and you just get eaten by predators because you have no defenses. There's this naivety that comes with it, being like, can't everyone see that the world should work this way? Actually, I think the system is collapsing outside, so it's actually going to get an even worse environment for those kinds of businesses right now. **Jackson:** You know what's interesting is if this were the common realization when you were 22, society might just be better at handling it. But the fact that it happens when you're 30 to 40 might even be part of the reason. Society doesn't want to tolerate that. Society wants you to have started. Maybe that goes back to the school system or whatever. But it's telling that it takes 10 to 12 years or 15 years of grinding and being super competitive to... **Tom:** Yes and no. I meet a lot of people who say, "God, I can't believe I've just wasted 15 years as an accountant." What I say to them is, I've dealt with a lot of hyper-spiritual people since I've gone into the more woo-adjacent community, and a lot of them have horrendous executive function. If you've worked in the front office of an investment bank, dealing with spiritual people just drives you insane. **Jackson:** I've always said the left brain and right brain. **Tom:** But I'd rather have a left-hemisphere person working on themselves than a right-hemisphere person working on the world. It's degrees of agency. Those people, when they start to put these incredibly agentic skills in service of something that actually matters, they have sage-like impact on the world. But when you have someone who's mega... **Jackson:** Wafty. They're super tapped in, but they can't really do anything. **Tom:** Maybe being in an ashram is great. But it's not interesting to me, and I don't think it's needed right now. That's where I land on that. Maybe it's a bit uncharted. ## [00:50:24] A Challenge vs. A Grind: When to Keep Going or Try Something Else **Jackson:** We talked a little bit about finding your gifts. A few quotes I wrote down might be useful to frame for the conversation and for the listener. "You don't come out of the womb with a skill set that is valuable." I think that's from Joseph Campbell. Or Joseph Campbell goes on to say, "You learn the rules, then you break the rules, then you follow your bliss." It's a martial arts kind of metaphor that I thought was great. "The first time I quit, I passively sat on the couch waiting for the 'universe' to send me a sign. I was sure it would protect me from falling into the darkness. It decidedly did not. This was because I was not actively manifesting my individual skills in an iterated way. It was only when I started publicly exploring my strange mix of finance and meaning, a win-win creation, that the world responded so positively. I then received direct feedback, and it has produced material and spiritual abundance in my life. Faith means first believing you have a gift, then cultivating it, then offering it to the world. This is difficult." The last one is, "Your niche needs to love you back," which I love. My question on a few of these things is—and I've talked to so many people about this—clearly it's about both doing things and being attuned to feedback from the world. But there's this weird dynamic in almost anything worthwhile: it eventually gets to being what I call aerodynamic or downhill. You're in your bliss, in flow state, and you're good at it. Maybe for a very rare set of people, it's instantly like that. But for almost everyone—jiu-jitsu is a perfect example—I would presume the first 30 times... I've rolled three times, and they were bad. I don't know if that's anywhere near something that could be a gift for me or something I would love. It takes probably 20 times or more of trudging through the mud. Some skills take way more than that. Generalize this to writing, posting podcasts on the internet, any of these things, as people are experimenting, doing the walled-garden thing. Do you have any sense of how long to blindly push the rock versus go back and find a new hill? **Tom:** A couple of answers. The jiu-jitsu thing is really funny, actually. I did jiu-jitsu for about six months, got injured, got depressed, and quit for four years. **Jackson:** Classic example of what I'm saying. **Tom:** I had to walk past the jiu-jitsu gym; it's two blocks from my house. I had to walk past it God knows how many times in the next four years. And every time I walked past it, a little voice in my head said, "You're a coward." **Jackson:** Oh, wow. **Tom:** But it was also not a shaming voice. It was also like, "You want to do it; you need this." I've been back now for four years, and it's the single best, the single most material change in my life that has had the most positive impact. There was something in me that was extremely adamant. Sometimes you just know, and it goes back to this energetic idea. I think you can also narrow the constraints a little bit by thinking in terms of head, body, heart. What have I got that's head? Is that positive sum? Is that in service of love? Am I enjoying it? What about body? Body's probably not in service of much, but is it positive sum? Is it pickleball? Probably positive sum; both people get better from playing it. Is it something I can sustain intrinsically? Is it something I would do? Is it something you would have to pay me money not to do, to use David's framing? And then you have heart. How are my heart-to-heart interactions, and how positive sum are those? Which, in that case, is how are my daily interactions? Who am I interacting with, and do those interactions fill me up or not? That at least narrows the framework a little bit and gives you something more practical to hang on to. **Jackson:** There's something around the attention point too. Maybe you were attuned in a woo sense to the voice in your head, or maybe you were literally just walking by the place. It is interesting to think about the ways we might set up an environment. To your earlier point, I have to do something with my body to stay healthy to do all the other things I want to do. One interpretation might be that there are parts of this that are really about attunement to the deeper purpose, and other parts that are just surface area. **Tom:** Something that's really helpful is understanding and feeling qualitatively the difference between a challenge and a grind. **Jackson:** This is exactly what I'm getting. **Tom:** Maybe you've just got to climb hills sometimes. **Jackson:** That's why this is so hard. **Tom:** You've maybe just got it for some people. My nephew is a world-famous DJ. He came out of the womb knowing what he was going to do, and it's just been on a parabolic trajectory. He's just been on that trajectory the whole of his life and will probably be there till the day he dies. But for me, if he'd asked me at 21, or when people asked, "What do you want to do with your life?" I had no idea. So I needed to go and climb a hill, and I achieved medium success, but also a set of skills that have served me incredibly well for the stuff that I actually do want to do. Climbing that hill felt like a challenge. It was deeply challenging, but it was mega fun. I did 12-hour days for the best part of 15-20 years. This was building executive function. But when it becomes a grind—and we all know the difference, at least at the extremes, between a challenge and a grind—we're told, particularly by hustle culture, "Just grind it out." That means you climbed the wrong hill. And that is the worst advice you can give. **Jackson:** The other part of the paradox is that if you do climb a hill, most people who finally climb a hill think, "I'm staying on this hill. I'm never going back down a hill again." If you grinded up that hill, it's going to be even harder to give up that peak. **Tom:** Wall Street has very, very high hills. ## [00:56:19] Synchronisities **Jackson:** One last piece of this that bridges into Wu territory a little bit is synchronicities—or, maybe let's call it, more slightly mystical feedback. Can you talk about what that has meant for you? **Tom:** Oddly, for something that's a little bit woo-seeming, synchronicity has probably been the most practical way I perceive integration. For those who don't know, synchronicity is the concept of a meaningful coincidence. To go into right-hemispheric terms, a coincidence is like, "Wow, you rolled two sixes one after another." It could be totally random. A synchronicity is something that feels meaningful. One of the most frustrating things about synchronicities is when you describe them to someone else particularly, they say, "It's just a coincidence." **Jackson:** Partially because we now have a meta-awareness of our being a pattern-obsessed species that will literally find patterns in anything. That's the overhang of skepticism. **Tom:** But it's because it doesn't come with a feeling. It's a right-hemispheric impulse; the feeling is, "Oh, this felt meaningful." When you're explaining the mechanics of it to other people, they say, "I'm just hearing the mechanics; I'm not getting the accompanying feeling." **Jackson:** You're explaining the painting you saw. **Tom:** Exactly. That's a perfect example. It was meaningful. Based on my own experience and that of many others, I believe the more you build your right-hemispheric sensitivity, the better you're able to determine if a synchronicity is a synchronicity or if it's just a random occurrence. At least that's how it's helped me. When synchronicities stop, you're probably going in the wrong direction. When they accelerate, you're going in the right direction. Synchronicity can often mean something like this: two weeks ago, I was studying the concept of creative thought, and I thought, "I really don't understand this one concept." The next day, I randomly picked up a podcast from someone I follow because it was about another topic I enjoy, and all she does is talk about the concept of creative thought. I'm interested in these topics, so it's explicable. But the timing of that piece of information coming to me was, for me, a very profound synchronicity. **Jackson:** There's also an element here. People might say, "Whatever, it's just that phenomenon where you see more of the thing." But it's almost not that serious. It's more a case of, "Oh, this is another sign that I'm on the track." **Tom:** I don't believe that availability heuristic, that once people tell you about elephants, you see elephants everywhere. I just don't believe that. Sure, that may be true as well. But let's go back to what integration is for people that integrate run markets. For the absolutely devastatingly good investors I've studied, you realize one of the primary determinants of their success is the ability to attribute a very high level of intelligence to the stock market. They start with the assumption that the market's right and they're wrong. The rocket-science intellects I've seen fail the fastest in the stock market are the ones that start from the presumption that they're right and then work backwards. **Jackson:** Everybody else is a loser. **Tom:** You have all of the Druckenmiller and Soros types. They start from the assumption that they're wrong and the market's right. In macrocosm, one of the biggest improvements you can make to your life is to assume that the world that you inhabit... We definitely don't understand the way reality works; I need to make that abundantly clear. But if you assume that the world you inhabit is intelligent and relational and actually trying to help you, trying to help guide you on a certain path, that has an extravagantly positive impact on your life. And I don't necessarily need to know how it works. I've got lots of theories, but synchronicity is one of them. If integration was a thing, if the concept of you bringing your gifts to bear in the environment was rewarded by your environment, the best way your environment could show that to you would be a meaningful coincidence. It would show you that you've synced. You've literally synced up. You just synced up with the flow of everything. Here it is. And have something that your right hemisphere, which determines your direction, can feel is meaningful. You get a little ping. You get the ping from your right hemisphere that this feels nice. **Jackson:** It's like air under your wings. **Tom:** And it keeps going. It's the Taoist thing: as the synchronicities increase, reality is harmonizing around you. ## [01:00:58] Openness and Wisdom **Jackson:** You said the number one correlate of wisdom is openness. What does openness mean? Is it everything we've talked about? Is it something else? Is it curiosity? **Tom:** That's a paper that has it on the Big Five. There's the Big Five. Don't ask me to name what they are. **Jackson:** Conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, extroversion, and... **Tom:** Disagreeability. The 30 years of wisdom research found the number one correlate of wisdom openness. It makes sense. Let's go back to where we started: thermodynamics. Openness: you are thermodynamically open. I notice a difference in the brightness of people's eyes based on their curiosity levels and how close-minded people are. They get very dead eyes. Wisdom is the number one correlate of life satisfaction in old age, based on the papers that I've read. This is amazing given how little attention people pay to the conscious cultivation of it. **Jackson:** We almost act like it's something that happens, out of your control. **Tom:** That's why I spent all of last year studying ways to make you more right-hemispheric. That's something we don't do, mostly because some of them sound woo-woo. For me, I look at the context. Let's consider openness for a second. Let's look at the risks of openness. People that do a boatload of psychedelics or are too open start seeing patterns everywhere. That's obviously wildly problematic. It's like when people who have amazing pattern recognition in finance suddenly enter the new age era. They believe every conspiracy theory and think they have high discernment because they're a finance person. I'm very guilty of that sometimes myself; I think, "Well, I'm seeing all these patterns here, so they must be true." You don't have any domain expertise here, so that's super dangerous. At a conference I spoke at last week, someone asked me about super forecasting. Are you familiar with that? What makes a super forecaster is that when something new happens, they can update their forecast by a basis point. Superforecasters take this perverse pride in the granularity with which they can update their forecasts, which makes them amazing—better than "experts." Why? Because they're very open-minded, know exactly how relevant each piece of information is, and can use that information to calibrate their priors. What's that got to do with anything? Imagine if that's the way you approach everything. Your level of alignment with reality is going to get closer and closer. Something I read once is that the goal of any species is to become correlated with its environment. If you're the bacterium that swims away from the sugar solution, you are not going to last very long. If your openness allows you to continuously get closer to the flow of reality, that's going to make things really fun for you. That is effectively wisdom. I've always said the opposite of wisdom is anxiety, which is not knowing what you're supposed to be doing and when. You're concentrating on all these news headlines, all these pieces of information; you don't know where your agency is, and as a result, you're spinning in circles, burning all this energy. The wise person knows exactly what to do and when, which is why it correlates with happiness so much. All of that is about openness because it's about how you're interacting with your environment. **Jackson:** One last bit ## [01:04:19] Error Correction, or Something Else? **Jackson:** on this that I find interesting: it feels very mechanical and almost left-brain, but it has that wisdom part you're talking about. I think you were talking about Ed Thorpe somewhere and brought up error correction, which is the root of, in a very rational sense, fallibilism and this fascinating foundation of science with David Deutsch and so on. In some sense, it feels like so much of what we just talked about is taking a truly open and integrated approach to error correction. We're very good at applying error correction to certain things, but there's a category of stuff where it's almost off-limits. **Tom:** Correct me if I don't understand error correction, but for me, error correction sounds like survival of the fittest, and survival of the fittest is only half of the equation. The thing people do not understand about actual Darwinism, rather than the Darwinism you read about, is that Darwin believed, as is true, that cooperation was a superior long-term strategy. **Jackson:** Right. **Tom:** Therefore, there is a force in the universe—whether it's syntropy or the holotropic attractor, whatever you want to call it—that guides people in a beneficial direction towards integration, complexity, and wholeness. That's not error correction. **Jackson:** Right. **Tom:** One of the things I read was that the odds of us being here, having this conversation based on chance collisions of chances, is the same as a hurricane moving through a junkyard and assembling a working 747. The rebuttal for that is, there's an infinite number of worlds; this must be happening somewhere. I get that, but I prefer the first one. ## [01:06:02] Tom's Mission and The Meaning-Mortgage Question: Can you really do what you love? **Jackson:** I want to talk about your work. You've described yourself as being part of this group of meaning nerds on the Internet. You've also described your skill in going from finance to what you do now as going through a huge amount of info, extracting it, synthesizing it, and sharing it with people in a way that respects people's attention. Lastly, you've said your prompt for people is: what question do you need to know the answer to that will also help other people? My question is, what is the game that you're playing? If you were to try to pull things forward and see the journey you're on, what is it? A simpler version of that question might be: what is the question that you're answering? **Tom:** The question I'm answering right now is the meaning mortgage question. This is the question that everyone who comes to me has. Is the limit of possibility for me the material constraints within which I live, or if I choose the right path, will abundance come as a consequence? What does that abundance look like, and how much discomfort comes with it? That is the main quest for humanity right now, particularly in the West. **Jackson:** To put it in a super trivial way, does this have to be a hobby? **Tom:** If I do what I love in service of what I love, will it make me money? Will it make me enough money to live and not be ashamed in my family? **Jackson:** Will I have abundance? **Tom:** Yes. Maybe it's a bit cheesy, but it never fails to make me a bit emotional: Does the universe love me? Ultimately, at the bottom of everything, is the universe love? Is it conditional on me choosing the right direction, or not? Ultimately, if I leap, will I be held? Or is it just an indifferent box of atoms, a survival of the fittest? That plays into this view of separation, shame, and anxiety: that ultimately I've got to grind it out because there are so many people I have to make happy. There are all these different requirements that I have. But if you manifest your potential, things work out even better. I'm helping answer that question in my own life, and I'm helping other  people explore the answer to that question. **Jackson:** that brings up another thread: ## [01:08:45] Fear, Faith, Love, and Seeing Reality **Jackson:** there's a connection between fear, faith, and love. Those are the three themes running across all of this. How do you think those are connected? **Tom:** One of the other guys who's been a big part of my scientific explorations is Donald Hoffman. He's a cognitive scientist, and he has what's called the interface theory. We all assume that what we're seeing is the totality of what there is, but we don't know that. The visible light spectrum that we see is 1/10 trillionth of what's available. The idea is that you need to see only as much as you need to see in order to survive in the moment. Everything else gets filtered out because it's extraneous. A lot of people, when they take psychedelics, their senses and filters explode, the doors of perception open, and they realize all the things they're not ordinarily seeing. Maybe it's colors on trees, maybe it's sounds. My senses blew open for a few weeks in Manhattan, and it was absolutely bloody insane. The idea is that you have these cognitive filters. What's interesting, to a ludicrously profound degree, is that fear narrows those filters. When you're in a state of fear, the aperture gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Our ability to think creatively or to enjoy the things in life when we're really stressed about something is really limited. When you're in a state of relative abundance, you can see more opportunities and you can see better opportunities. You also have the time to cooperate and collaborate and enjoy more love. This is all quite intuitive. When you think about it from a civilizational perspective, we are now in a post-scarcity world. If we learn how to allocate resources correctly, we are effectively in a post-scarcity world. If we are in a post-scarcity world, this species, we as a species, can now evolve to see more of reality, to see more truth. The part of reality that we haven't been able to see, that we are now seeing—it's feeling—is this syntropy, this holotropic attractor. When things get a little bit less bonkers and you're not concerned with what the left hemisphere is concerned with, which is competition and self-regard, you can see more of the system and then you can integrate with it. As fear diminishes and love increases, love is how reality feels at base. Once you can get more of that, you can see more of the world. And when you can see more of the world, you can actually navigate it better. That spectrum of fear to love corresponds to the amount of reality that you can see is faith. **Jackson:** That gap. **Tom:** Faith to me has been a very charged word. Faith is propositional for a lot of people: if you don't believe he was born and resurrected, you're going to hell. That was a very difficult phase of my life when I was trying to save myself through the forced application of propositional beliefs to my life. That's not how I see faith anymore. I see faith as a conversation where I need to make the first move. If you believe that synchronicity exists and ultimately reality is responsive, you make a move. You make a move and you see a response. Not that much faith is required because then you make another move and you see another response, and then you make another move and you make another response. You just have to move first. The faith is being able to move first and understanding that when that move is the right move, you see a response. That's faith. It becomes easier and easier to have faith the more evidence you have that reality actually works that way. The first step you make is probably out of fear. The more you move out of love, the more faith you have because the more you actually witness the results of your actions. It's not some vague propositional bullshit. ## [01:12:59] "Minimum Viable Woo" and Exploring Out There Topics with a Pragmatic Lens **Jackson:** You are in this interesting seat where you are, in many ways, the speaker for the weird stuff, the woo stuff, to a bunch of otherwise fairly rational people or left-brain people. I don't know if it was you or someone else. "The great challenge is that we have to communicate this right-brain wisdom on left-brain rails." This idea, in some sense, is back to what we were talking about earlier: the people who join the collective are not necessarily executive function or high agency enough to translate some of it. At times, this stuff can be unbelievable. Just reading it feels right or empowering. Other times, it's fuzzy. You also have this frame that I think is great: minimum viable woo. You have woo ratings at the top of your posts. What is it like to strike this balance? You also seem to keep a pretty loose grip on everything, versus being super dogmatic. How do you think about this balance of doing what you do, communicating it, being really open to new ideas, holding them with a loose grip, and also trying to make all of it not just heady and idea-based, but practical? **Tom:** It's adorable to think that I would succeed at any one of those impossible missions. My wife really helps. My wife does not give a shit about anything that I write, in the nicest possible way. It used to really annoy me. She's mega-successful, curious, interested, but just not curious and interested in any of the things that I'm interested in. This is almost a universal dynamic in the spiritual mystical phase, which is an interesting thing, I think mostly because it's a men problem at the moment. **Jackson:** Oh, interesting. **Tom:** I spent 35 hours over Christmas reading an alien transmission called the Law of One, which is legitimately one of the most interesting things I've ever read. My wife comes out the other end of it, and I say, "Wow, I've been reading this alien transmission," and even for me, this is 10 out of 10 on the woo rating. She says, "Cool, what's the takeaway?" Then she asks, "If this is taking time away from your kids"—which it was—"how is it making you a better dad? How is it making you a better husband? What are you bringing into the world?" That's a great framing. There were ideas that came out of that alien transmission that materially altered my worldview in ways that have changed my behavior. For me, that is the threshold for an incremental piece of information: how is it going to change how I act in the world? It's how I work out if a rabbit hole is productive. I got interested in the topic of alien disclosure for a few weeks. Then I realized, one, the discourse is psychotic. Also, the timing of disclosure is not something I have any agency over, and it actually won't make a material difference in my life until it does. So you just file that away in the "not wise" pile. It's a question of agency: how productive is this rabbit hole going to be, to the extent that I know? And then, how is it going to change my behavior on the other side? ## [01:16:10] Stories **Jackson:** I have a couple of quotes about stories I want to read. "This fractal model monomyth, the hero's journey, is the story that humans tell to describe how to participate in the process of complexification as individuals. we encounter the anomaly: a new understanding of consciousness. This presents the reality of a force that's superior to our egocentric perception of the world and forces us to surrender to it. A death and rebirth switches our locus of control from the left hemispheric ego to a right hemisphere that's significantly more connected to this emergent force." And the next quote: " The success of a story directly corresponds to the degree of the evolutionarily important information it communicates." Why does so much wisdom begin with stories? **Tom:** How else are you going to communicate something? Reality flows. Stories flow. We've had written language for one second of humanity's history. So things need to be memorable, and stories are memorable. That's a bit of a circular reference: why are stories memorable? But I think the stories that are memorable mimic the structure of deep reality. The hero's journey mimics the structure of deep reality by being an instruction manual for the most important process that we can go through, which is this one. **Jackson:** What are your favorite stories? **Tom:** That's a really tough one. My favorite hero's journey is The Matrix because it's about what's happening right now. I really, really love that. My favorite fiction book, I really love East of Eden because that's about me as well. **Jackson:** One of my best friends has been recommending me that for years. It's on the list. **Tom:** This is a really, really dumb thing to say, because I have a weird pathology: I will not read fiction, and everyone judges me for it so harshly. But I still regard reading as semi-work because it is semi-work for me. I won't allow myself to read fiction. I've only read three fiction books in the last decade. **Jackson:** Oh my gosh. **Tom:** I've read Shantaram and East of Eden. Shantaram's fantastic, and East of Eden is transcendent. **Jackson:** What caused something to move past that filter? **Tom:** Curiosity. **Jackson:** That almost seems in contradiction. You have plenty of curiosity. **Tom:** I was curious enough about them to get over the hump. **Jackson:** I like that a lot. ## [01:18:51] Love, Emergence, and Intelligence Beyond Us **Jackson:** On love. Two more quotes. "Evolution also rewards complexification, so this force feels like love. The word love is probably the greatest linguistic limitation in Western culture. In the specific context of the attractor, you can redefine love as the felt sense of increasing integration." And then: "Dr. Mossbridge's definition of unconditional love is totally different. Unconditional love is the heartfelt, benevolent desire that everyone and everything—ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe—reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may be. This love is freely given, with no consideration of merit, with no strings attached, with no expectation of return. It is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves." Beautiful. It goes to the first part of the quote that made me wonder: are there other words that you use to add fidelity here? One that came to my mind would be beauty. But I'm curious. Love has such baggage. Maybe it doesn't matter. And maybe it goes back to some of the core stuff you were saying about love being the base thing. But that feels very different than most of the ways we... One thing hanging over all of this is curiosity, desire, and love. In some sense, there are similar feelings attached to this constellation of things. **Tom:** I love scientific terms because my intellect is a bouncer; it won't let things out. I like attractors. In Tinder, attraction is the thing that binds you both together. There are attractors in nature. Irvin Laszlo calls the thing we're talking about the holotropic attractor, which is an attractor that drives you towards wholeness. I love that. It's a bit wordy, but an attractor that drives you towards... **Jackson:** And that theoretically is driving my cells all the way up to... **Tom:** Yes. **Jackson:** Me. **Tom:** No, up to and beyond you. **Jackson:** Right. **Tom:** That's the bit where your brain gets scrambled, that it's... **Jackson:** No, but of course, we're the top of consciousness, right? **Tom:** That's interesting to me. I wrote an essay recently about whether the sun was conscious because, based on a lot of different theories of consciousness, the sun could be conscious. Actually, stars move in what's called a volitional way. We've created dark energy and dark matter to explain away the fact that stars move more than they should based on their mass. If they were conscious, of course, they would move in different ways that we couldn't fully forecast. But then when you ask, "Is the sun conscious, you moron?" the response is, "Well, first define conscious. Then look at the various different theories of consciousness and work out whether the sun describes emergence." Emergence is crazy. The crazy thing about emergence is that different traits emerge at every different level of integration. **Jackson:** The funny thing is, I'm obviously somewhat less bought in on all of us than you, but we are totally bought in on emergence. Around Santa Fe complexity, ant colony emergence, we're all in. But I guess it stops with us. **Tom:** There is a place where people will not go, to the point that it makes them angry. Anger is the most lateralized of all emotions. Where is it lateralized to? Naturalized in the left hemisphere. What is the characteristic of the left hemisphere? It lies. When it doesn't understand something, it confabulates and will not surrender control. There is an idea or class of ideas guaranteed to reliably make people disdainful of you: any concept that implies a degree of intelligence superior to the human intellectual. Try it. Try it with friends. Go out and talk about whether the sun is conscious, and people will say, "You have lost your goddamn mind." Whereas actually, the science behind it is not a joke. **Jackson:** It's ironic relative to all the AI stuff. If anything, you can imagine that being one of the things that maybe tips the scales towards more openness is that intelligence isn't precious anymore. ## [01:22:52] A Looming Meta-Crisis, Global Consciousness, and Earth School: Blowing Out the "Woo" Rating **Jackson:** We're nearing the end, and I have two sections that go together. The first is about what you've called this meta-crisis that we may be in. There's prescriptive views on the timing here, and there's more broad views. I think this ties to, in the tech world, that everybody's freaking out about AI. Broadly, it seems that there are all kinds of crises happening. There's stuff like the Fourth Turning. You hear different articulations; for example, there's this Bo Burnham song a few years ago called 'That Funny Feeling,' which I always think about. It's just that the vibes are off. You have this awesome quote where you lay it all out as coordination problems. You say: "Now we're operating at a planetary scale. The next conflict is primarily about mindset. It's within ourselves. When you reflect a minute, it's incredible to realize how many of our hardest problems are almost entirely coordination problems. This goes back to this scarcity, lack of scarcity. For example: Politics: cooperate to pass legislation, rebuild effective institutions. War: agree not to kill each other. Environment: agree not to kill everything else. Innovation: collaborate on technical innovation. Hunger: getting abundant food where it's needed. Inequality: allocate resources more equally." I think you also believe something else is happening: that there's an anomaly, that some shift has happened. My observation might be that it almost feels like the world is barbelling. You have this extreme shift where every 19-year-old is sports betting, nihilistic, and addicted to their phone. It's almost this extreme shift to the left brain of zero-sum selfishness. Meanwhile, there's something else happening around more hippie, New Age spiritualism. What's happening? **Tom:** The anomaly, if you ask me what it was like, systems blow up when they encounter an anomaly they can't explain, and then they reconfigure themselves around that anomaly. I think it's the belief in non-local consciousness. Every single thing that people would describe as woo—psychic abilities, reincarnation, clairvoyance, prophecy, precognition, everything, aliens—everything goes back on the table. Not saying it's true, it just goes back on the table with one jujitsu move, which is that consciousness is bound by neither time and space. That's a pretty uncontroversial proposition that we've had since quantum physics, but people don't seem to want to apply it to consciousness. If you're willing to countenance that, that remakes the world. And if you think about there being a direction to non-local consciousness as described by the Holotropic Attractor and what curiosity or whatever it is we're talking about, that also remakes the world. This probably sounds elitist or culty or whatever, but I've noticed a bifurcation that you describe. You can have a conversation with people, and they'll be like, "That's interesting. Sounds a bit crazy, but that's interesting. I'm interested and I would like to hear more." And there's people that are like, "You're an idiot," shut down. And those "you are an idiot" people, their lives don't seem to be going that great. Maybe this is just selection bias for me. I'm worried about those people because they're almost exclusively playing zero-sum games. And the people that are open to that idea—I'm not interested in convincing people that aren't. I'm interested in helping the people that are starting to understand that that could be possible lean into the right hemispheric traits that make that possible come alive. I do not even believe any of these things 100%. I am not an evangelist for these. In many different cases, I have just seen it work. It's worth another seven-hour digression that we don't have time for, but at the moment, there's these telepathy tape podcasts that come out that I've been having this very difficult relationship with skepticism about. But it ultimately comes down to, is consciousness non-local? Some days I think that there's a 50% chance that they're all fake, and some days I think there's a 90% chance they're all true. Holding these tensions right now is something that we're going to have to be doing as a culture. **Jackson:** It's interesting on the point of who is open to it versus not. I think it's specifically highly ambitious, highly educated people on the coasts, probably in the US. If you ask the average remotely religious person anywhere in the world, none of these ideas are that crazy. It's interesting where the seeds come from. You brought up the telepathy tapes. When we met, I think you called them "paradigm of reality being obliterated." There's one amazing excerpt that gives a sense of the wildness here. "The primary obstacle been the cognitive constraint on the number of people we can know and trust. But imagine how quickly that prisoner's dilemma would break if all participants are increasingly telepathic. There's a sense almost of a boiling of the frog of humanity towards some openness here. You've written somewhat about weird other things, special powers, and the psi stuff. I have two final main quotes I want to read before I ask you a last question on this segment. The first, "in the epilogue to \*The Passion of the Western Mind\*, Richard Tarnas argues this prodigal return may have been the entire point. I skipped a little. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest: not only to realize itself and forge its own autonomy, but also finally to recover its connection with the whole. It's a quest to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, to differentiate itself from, but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine—with the mystery of life, of nature, of the soul." He goes on to say "the telos—the inner direction and goal of the Western mind—has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation. Finally, one more quote from somebody I love: "Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." Pierre De Chardin. Maybe as your one chance to blast out the WOO rating, what journey are we on? **Tom:** The one idea I think might be true, and this is probably recency bias because I've been learning about it over the last few months, is the idea of Earth School. **Jackson:** Never heard of it. **Tom:** One of the bombs I'll drop now is that there's a surprisingly robust degree of empirical proof for reincarnation. If you look up Ian Stevenson's work, it's bananas. **Jackson:** What's that on the WOO rating? **Tom:** Read the papers. It's low woo rating. This is published research. I strongly recommend people go and check it out: Ian Stevenson at UVA. We essentially make a set of pre-incarnative choices. Our soul makes a set of pre-incarnative choices as to what lessons it would like to learn in an incarnation. We then incarnate into a body, into a set of circumstances—your parents, your place—and you know what the curriculum is. But as any college student knows, just because you have a curriculum doesn't mean you're going to study for it, and it doesn't mean you're going to learn the lessons. Life progresses as essentially a mechanism for you to learn lessons. The purpose of the lessons is always the same: for you to find this form of loving service, for you to become more open, loving, godlike, and able to give and receive love. The direction of travel is always the same. But reality is responsive to your ability to learn those lessons. Essentially, when you learn the lesson, you get more abundance. When you keep failing to learn the lessons, the beatings get more and more saturated. To bring it back to the Tarnas quote in The Law of One, the alien transmission, they talk about the fact that on a lot of other worlds, the purpose of third density, where we are right now, is to learn how to make conscious choices. That's what humanity can do. We're self-aware, so we can make conscious choices. It's to effectively learn lessons. On a lot of other worlds, the veil of forgetting—that we're divine creators—was very, very thin, so there was no urgency to do anything. On Earth, allegedly, the veil of forgetting is incredibly thick, so we all feel very separate. This is a really tough college. We're very strongly separated from the divine, to the extent that everyone thinks it's a ridiculous proposition. But that means that your growth here is accelerated really, really quickly. This is like the Harvard of the universe, but it's a really tough school. The extent to which you feel this catalyst and this friction in your life, it's actually an accelerant. But it's an accelerant only to the extent that you're willing to have some metacognition to learn the lessons you're being presented with and to exhibit some agency to continue to make better choices. The idea is that you will just keep reincarnating for eons until you notice that there's a direction and there are lessons you're supposed to be learning. That's the nature of karma. The nature of karma is not a punishment. It's simply that if you needed to learn a particular lesson that perhaps you hadn't learned in the last life, you will be learning it with greater intensity in this life. It's a really helpful framing. It's not that everything happens for a reason; it's that everything happens for a reason, and it's actually your job to find out what the reason is. That approach to the adversity that has come my way since I've learned about it has made me extremely resilient. **Jackson:** It rhymes with so much of religious ideas around struggle as well. **Tom:** I'm starting to think that it's literally true. That's the purpose of the intellect in this. I've done enough research across mysticism and science that when I see this pattern, and it matches all these different patterns [and I reserve the right to change my mind next week if I learn something different], it allies with so many different areas that when it comes from an alien transmission, I'm less liable to discount it. **Jackson:** All this stuff seems to be pointing at the same kind of spot in the sky. **Tom:** Most people make fun of the finger rather than realize there's a moon there. ## [01:33:41] Lightning Round: Pseudoscience as the Streisand Effect, Mystics, What Would Rattle Tom’s Worldview Most, Joseph Campbell, Fred Again **Jackson:** Last set of a few lightning round questions as we wrap up. Can you explain your frame: Pseudoscience is the Streisand effect? **Tom:** If anything gets labeled pseudoscience, go and check it out and study it. Synchronicity is labeled as pseudoscience. Integrated information theory is labeled as pseudoscience. All of Rupert Sheldrake's work on morphic resonance is labeled as pseudoscience. **Jackson:** I think his son was on a podcast. His son's a mushroom guy. **Tom:** Merlin. All of Graham Hancock's stuff probably is a little bit more pseudoscience. **Jackson:** The problem is there is some real pseudoscience labeled pseudoscience. **Tom:** Again, that's the role of the left hemisphere. The role of the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere is open, and pseudoscience has used it. Pseudoscience implies that science has gotten angry about it. **Jackson:** Right. **Tom:** Because otherwise, it would just be factually wrong. **Jackson:** Right. **Tom:** Pseudoscience is a slur. **Jackson:** You mentioned Gurdjieff at the top. Gurdjieff has become a recent area of interest. Broadly, a number of these people have come up, both modern and historical. What do you think happens with these people—these mystics, or sometimes scientists, gurus, or even prophets of the past who tap in? **Tom:** Most of them, it goes horribly, horribly wrong. The lightning round answer is that we need to increasingly rely on communities where no one... **Jackson:** It's too much for one person to hold. **Tom:** Too much for one person to hold. **Jackson:** There's a great book about a bunch of physicists who go through something like this that's partially fiction, called \*When We Cease to Understand the World\*. It features people like Alexander Grothendieck, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg. It's similarly shaped: this is too much for one person to bear, in the case of quantum mechanics. But it all comes back around. One thing that came up, and I didn't get to watch the full video, I'd love for you to give a quick primer on: the Jacob's Ladder, Jordan Peterson thing you said was really meaningful to you. **Tom:** I think it's brilliant. I then had to put in the standard disclaimer that a lot of his work is extremely not brilliant. This was also a while ago; I think it was pre-crisis. Literally, I was in the security line at Newark. He talks about Jung believing that your future self is the guide in the present by directing your interests. That one moment changed my life. There was something in me that just went, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And that in itself was a sign. The whole podcast is about shamanic initiation, which is essentially: how are you a bridge between two worlds to keep both worlds on track? And what role does attention play in that, in terms of driving people? At the moment, we're off track, and I think a lot of people are being drawn back on track by their attention. That's the role that he's talking about. **Jackson:** That's powerful. **Tom:** It's brilliant. **Jackson:** One of the things I admire about you is that you have a pretty loose grip on all this stuff while holding it. Through all of this, is there anything you've found yourself starting to grip firmly that would be most rattling if you were to find out it was not true? **Tom:** If someone ruthlessly debunked McGilchrist's work, that would hurt me a lot. But even McGilchrist himself says, "Even if everything I have is debunked, it works as an explanatory metaphor for the world." And it does. But if he was exposed as a massive fraud, that would be rattling. **Jackson:** At least it reduces a lot of the, quote-unquote, scientific foundation that gets to some of this higher-level stuff. **Tom:** I think the answer to that is that the universe is an empty, indifferent box that doesn't care about me. It's all just aimless stuff. We're accidents. That would kill me. **Jackson:** You've said your favorite quote is Joseph Campbell's "Follow your bliss, and doors will open where there are only walls." Why is that frame so powerful? **Tom:** Because you have to believe all the premises. Follow your bliss, the differentiation path, first. You've got to do it first. That's faith. Doors will open. You have to have the faith that the doors will open, but then they do actually open. Doors will open where there were only walls. Walls, as in you're looking at a wall. You're looking at a situation where it's not rationally obvious that there's a good path forward. You're there staring at a wall. **Jackson:** There are no options. **Tom:** There are no options, or at least no sensible options, except your bliss. You either have no options or an infinite array of options, and your bliss is the signal. Then when you step towards it, something really weird happens. **Jackson:** You mentioned your nephew Fred earlier. For those listeners who don't know, after seeing him live, a friend of mine observed that he was comparing Fred to Christian artists. His idea was that there's a lot of imagery, the raised hand, and language, and it created this experience. What do you think he's tapped into? Fred, I mean. **Tom:** No, it's him. I think it's what he's tapped into. There's a moment. If you haven't seen the Boiler Room set—have you seen the Boiler Room set? The Boiler Room set is one of the best sets I've ever seen. Obviously I'm biased, but I listen to thousands of hours of EDM a year. I worked EDM. Anyway, that set is transcendent. Then there's a bit in the set where this guy in a yellow T-shirt knocks into the decks and turns them off in the middle of the performance. It's one of the best DJ sets of all time. You can tell. Everyone in the room tells you it's one of the best; everyone believes it's one of the best sets of all time. Then some dude turns off the decks. And what does Fred do? Fred laughs, wags his finger, and turns the decks back on. How many artists do you think would behave that way? Spontaneously. Completely spontaneously. **Jackson:** No panic. **Tom:** I don't want to talk too much about him, but that's who he is. That's exactly who he is as a person. That moment was totally spontaneous; he couldn't have planned it. **Jackson:** Yes. **Tom:** And I think when people see that he is exactly how he is. **Jackson:** Yes, it's in the flow. **Tom:** And like all of his work, it's what he's feeling. Like, "We've Lost Dancing" was his breakout, and that's what he was feeling, and those were the things he was going through. He's able to communicate that through his music. Total authenticity. It's extremely appropriate to what we're talking about. **Jackson:** Yes. **Tom:** He has "De", he has that effortless charisma. ## [01:40:41] Tom's Encouragement for His 20 Year Old Self **Jackson:** My final question. I suspect you might argue that this question misses some of the point, but if you were to go on a walk with 20-year-old Tom and try to assure him a little bit, what would you say to him? him? **Tom:** I'm going to get into Marty McFly territory where I would create some paradox and then I would cease to exist. **Jackson:** It's been a long road. **Tom:** Never underestimate the power of just keeping going. Just keep going. When you're going through hell, just keep going. Churchill's lines. There have been some really, really dark places that I've been to, that I was a very, very small amount of time away from killing myself. I didn't, so I don't need to tell him that, but on a different timeline, maybe I would say that. To have more faith in my own curiosity again. Maybe I wouldn't believe that now if I hadn't gone through that darkness. If I have only one thing I want to tell the world, it would be that, and therefore that was what I would probably want to tell myself. **Jackson:** Thank you. I'm new to this, but in many ways what I'm trying to do with this podcast is talk to people about their attractors and their curiosity and how they're being pulled forward by the world. Both this conversation and all the prep just felt very aligned and empowering and a lot of stuff going in the right direction. So I appreciate you. **Tom:** Thank you. I'm continuously very surprised that anyone would read so much of my stuff, but you obviously did so much reading of my stuff. I find that very meaningful. Thank you. **Jackson:** Of course. Thanks.