Pattern Breakers & the Future of Humanity with Mike Maples Jr.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Love Conquers Fear podcast. As I said in the last episode, I'm on the road in San Francisco. This is the week of TED AI. Not the first time I'm attending that. Big TED fan. Go every year. And actually, as of this recording, Chris Anderson just announced that Saw Khan is now taking over TED. So that's really, really big news. I think Sawhan's going to do an amazing job with that. I've been on a big reading journey to prepare for the interview you're about to see. I just reread Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which I had initially read to one of our children a long time ago. An amazing, amazing book. And we'll get into that today because my guest, it's one of his favorite books. He's actually the one that told me about it in the first place. I also just finished Into the Magic Shop by James Dodim. And I didn't realize when I started it that he is a two-lane medical school grad. That's where our oldest daughter goes to school and she's a junior there. And it's an amazing, amazing book. I can't recommend it more. I teared up multiple times reading the book. It's basically about James or Jim growing up and having a really, really tough childhood. Alcoholic father, abusive parent, his mom trying to kill herself. Just horrible, horrible circumstances. And he goes into this magic shop which is owned by this gentleman Neil and his mom happens to be there, Neil's mom, and her name is Ruth and she takes a liking to Jim and decides to mentor him on what she calls real magic. And the real magic that she teaches him is how to gain control over his mind and how to radiate love from his heart and how to manifest and visualize what he wants in his life. And he achieves unbelievable things in his life until he has a really hard crash and realizes the secrets of the heart. And I just can't recommend it enough. Amazing book. I wish he was alive today. After reading it, I immediately looked up how to reach out to him and I found out that he actually passed away unfortunately on July 16th of this year. But he was most recently at Stanford University running a center that he and the Dalai Lama actually co-founded together. And what a beautiful human being. I can't recommend it enough. It was recommended to me by a friend. And the other thing is that the Telepathy Tapes is back and so season 2 is on now and once again covers non-local consciousness, which this is happening a lot. So as I mentioned in a prior episode, Dan Brown's newest book, of course he wrote The Da Vinci Code, is about non-local consciousness. It's a novel of course. And Michael Pollan's new book is coming out in February. It's also about consciousness and the nature of consciousness. And I mentioned on episode one that Annaka Harris, who is Sam Harris's wife, wrote a book on consciousness called Lights On, and the final chapter that consciousness is fundamental, which is another way of saying non-local consciousness. And so this really seems to be the year that this is hitting a tipping point and people are really starting to dig into near-death experiences and all types of forms of non-local consciousness. I just heard a mind-blowing story when I was in New York City, not someone that was on the podcast, and I'll keep their name confidential, but it was the eighth near-death experience story that I heard, and it really blew my mind. And it's someone that I've known for two decades and never told me about it. So me doing this podcast as well as saying that I've read and love books like Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, it's really leading to more people opening up to me that prior would have been afraid of being written off as too woo. And these are amazing experiences that have happened in their life that they describe as the ultra real, more real than the reality we're in right now. And I personally have not had a near-death experience. I don't wish to have a near-death experience, but you just can't write off the fact that eight of your friends have had experiences like this that transform their lives and they describe as one of the most important experiences, maybe the most important experience of their life, to ultimately get them on a much better track and really make them realize the value of life and the value of living life from the heart and radiating as much love and help as possible for our fellow human beings as well as the animals on this earth. So definitely check those out. I listened to episode one of the Telepathy Tapes season 2 and I can tell you it does not disappoint. And it actually starts out with Eben Alexander who wrote Proof of Heaven and Eben is actually going to be staying at her home in February and is speaking at a few events in Austin. And I'm going to have him on the podcast then. One of my favorite books of all time and his second book, The Map of Heaven, is just incredible. So, I'm very happy to be here with Mike Maples Jr.

Should be fun.

Yep.

Yeah. Well, it's a beautiful office here and we're here in a beautiful...

And there's thunder lizards everywhere.

So, I want to talk a bit about Pattern Breakers to start out. I love this book and I wrote a pretty long essay on it.

You bet. I mean, I compared it to books like Good to Great or The Innovator's Dilemma. I think it's one of the most important books that an entrepreneur can get and I just want to talk about that to open up. So, tell me what a pattern breaker is. I could say it, but it's going to be best coming from you and how do you spot the inflection point that a pattern breaker is ultimately going to exploit?

And you want to talk to only the people who value the advantages of bananas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you give the example in the book you backed Lyft and one of the examples is the inflection point of GPS now being embedded in the iPhone so that people could actually do something like summon a stranger to come pick them up.

Yeah. You know, and I'm a big fan of TED and I'll never forget when Bill Gross gave his TED talk.

And he analyzed hundreds of companies that they backed at Idea Lab. I remember incubated and do you remember what he said the number one factor was?

Yeah. So timing and inflection point really are kind of very much the same thing.

How do you think about Facebook, with all the predecessors that came before it, like Friendster and MySpace and why Facebook? Like why was that timing better?

Yeah. I don't think that anybody could have predicted that he would be at dinner with President Trump a couple of weeks ago saying that he's going to spend $600 billion dollars on an AI data center the size of Manhattan by 2028. That going from the niche of colleges to that is quite extraordinary.

Yeah.

You know, with Bizarre Voice, I can tell you that people thought that Brandt and I were insane to leave Core Metrics and start it. And it was hard to leave the company that I'd founded. But I knew it was in good hands. I knew it was going to be on a path to an exit. And I felt like I had accomplished what I meant to accomplish. It was profitable and I saw this inflection point of social and I saw that social would impact e-commerce in a big way. And the reason we named the company Bizarre Voice is it's named after chapter 4, the Cluetrain Manifesto. And Bizarre Voice started in 2005. That book was written in 1999. Kind of amazing. It's a great book.

Still I know that you have a background in marketing. I would say to anybody listening to this, it is the best chapter in my opinion of any book I've ever read on marketing. Chapter 4, the Cluetrain Manifesto. You can get it for free online. But people really thought we were crazy. And a lot of VCs passed because they thought it was crazy. And in your book, Pattern Breakers, you talk about that that actually is common, that people are going to think you're crazy. And the key is to find people that are the true believers versus the consensus people that are going to grind you down. As Guy Kawasaki said in The Art of the Start, it's like, don't let the bastards beat you down. That was the way he talked about it.

Right.

And you know, I didn't know you back in the Core Metrics days, but I can tell you a lot of people passed on that too because I was espousing a term that didn't exist. I didn't have any terminology to relate to it. But with Core Metrics, it was one of the first software as a service companies. And I was when I was pitching, I was trying to get VCs to understand something that they could relate it to. I was like this like mainframes and dumb terminals or clients and servers, that I can update the software anytime I want. I can wrap services around it to make sure the customer is successful. It'll constantly be able to learn from the customer network. So, we'll be some of the smartest guys in the room in terms of seeing what patterns work as they roll out different campaigns and try different merchandising promotions, etc. But I can tell you a lot of people weren't buying it and they were like, 'Wait, hold on. You're not shipping a CD and isn't that higher margin? And aren't the services costs going to eat you alive?' And yeah, and it was actually when I saw Benioff present. He was presenting at Stanford. I'm not a Stanford grad. But I was there attending his presentation. And there were only 80 people and he was talking about the end of software and I picked up a lot of my language from him because he was very non-consensus at the time. Like a lot of people including Larlesson thought he was an idiot back then.

That term came along. I was so happy at Core Metrics. I was like finally have something to get a shorthand to it.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally. And one of the companies which I really charted the rise of during the Bizarre Voice years was Netflix. And one of the books that was really foundational, you read lots of books at the beginning of Bizarre Voice, was Fred Reichheld's book The Ultimate Question. And that's the book where he invented the net promoter score, which a lot of people use. But one of the concepts in that book was the concept of bad profits. And you may remember when Netflix launched, they had one marketing slogan and they only needed one. Do you remember what it was?

The end of late fees.

And it brought back all those bad profit emotions of like suffering at Blockbuster. And I literally had to do the walk of shame, because when Deborah and I got married, I had $1,000. She had $2,000. So if I actually held on to that damn DVD to the point where I had to pay like 40 bucks to return this thing. That was their slogan. It was just the end of late fees and they ran away with the market and it was the demise of Blockbuster. But I charted the rise in a four-part series on the Bizarre Voice blog. Well, and the other thing they got right is they announced the end of something that Blockbuster couldn't announce the end of.

So, it was dependent on that.

That's right. That's right. And eventually they did have to do that. And you're right.

Yeah.

So, this also intersects with a mutual friend and this is someone who you kindly introduced me to, Christopher Lockhead, and one of the foundational books for us at data.world, which ServiceNow bought on 77, was Play Bigger and it's all about category creation. But I almost think those are Play Bigger and Pattern Breakers are like companion books in my mind.

Oh, it's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah. I really appreciate him and I also appreciate him as a Jewish guy because he actually talked about category creation with Hamas. So when the deal was on the table for the hostages to come back, he talked about this is a category creation moment where Gaza can make a choice. And ultimately, he put out some of the best content out there on what the choice was. And thank goodness it actually happened and the hostages are back now.

Now Gaza can become like a Dubai if they want or they could become that. I mean, they could recreate their category.

You know, he thinks that most marketing isn't courageous enough. Most people when they start a company, they say, 'I'm going to take this big risk.' But then when it's time to take a stand or pick a fight or use extreme enough language to show how different they are, they flinch because everybody around them is conspiring to get them to sound similar, right? But what happens in my opinion is when you sound similar, you fade into what I call the sea of sameness, right? And so, the Thunder Lizard startups refuse to be compared and they try to be a category of one. They try to be the only, not the best. And that's very much consistent with the category design kind of premise.

Yeah.

One thing that I wanted to cover if you don't mind is that Benjamin Franklin said pain is instructive.

That's easy. Yeah.

Well, so it was funny because Michael Seibel, who was one of the guys at Justin.tv at the time, introduced them to me. Keep in mind, he didn't think they were ready to apply to YC yet. So he was an adviser, and I don't think Michael even had stock in the company, right? So he's just trying to help these guys out, right? The prior week, Ann and I met with this company called Mojo Mix, and they sold cereal online. So you go online, you pick out the ingredients of your cereal, it assembles them in a box and ships you a cereal box. And so we get done with this meeting and Ann says to me, 'Why did you agree to take this meeting? This is a waste of time. We're not in this business. We got no business doing this.' So I said, 'Okay, that's fair, I guess.' So a week later comes by and we walk into the conference room and it's a room full of cereal boxes. It's Captain Obama O's and Captain McCain Crunch. And Ann sort of looks at me like, 'What the hell, Maples?' And run a cereal company. So I was already on the defensive. And Brian says, 'Hey, we're funding the company so far by selling these cereal boxes. It costs $30 each. Do you want one?' And that was my first mistake. I declined that offer.

Yeah. And it's not really confident. 'Hey, we haven't been able to raise money, so we're funding it by selling the cereal boxes.' Right.

So then he says, 'Hey, why don't we just show you the product?' I'm like, 'Great.' And he says, 'Michael says that you prefer demos over slides.' I said, 'That's exactly right.' So he tries to fire up the site. He can't get it to work. So for some reason, it was crashing, right? And so I'm like, 'Okay, well, let's just do the slides then.' And he's like, 'Well, I didn't bring any slides.' Right? So we're like 20 minutes into this meeting. We were just looking at each other in a room full of cereal boxes. And unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind. At the time, there was this thing called CouchSurfing.com that had a similar product that they were giving away that Benchmark had just funded. They weren't really going anywhere. And I thought, 'How is somebody not going to get killed in one of these things?' It was around the time of the Craigslist killer and all this other stuff. And so I just didn't see it.

So I just didn't see it. And the meeting was so discombobulated that I didn't understand that his real insight was around trust. And I should have known this even with what became Bizarre Voice, right? Like I should have known that people online and networks could be a substitute for the trust that is normally accorded to a brand like a hotel operation. But also, basically it was just a WordPress site on steroids. It was really early. I mean, it was even before Facebook Connect came out, which had a big impact on their success. But I just didn't see it. And as one thing led to another, it became this gigantic business. But I committed myself for the next several years to understand, 'Okay, what did I miss on that one?' Not to let myself off the hook for just being unlucky, but to say, 'Okay, there was something I needed to understand that I didn't understand.'

Yeah. And I mean, fortunately, when Lyft says, 'Hey, we're going to let people share a ride in a stranger's car,' I'll take that bait. I'll take a walk on that wild side. And so our minds were much more prepared to receive the insight that time. And if only the meeting had been set up a little different, you never know if the circumstances had been different, might we have seen it? Hard to say.

Yeah, that hurts. There's been a few. We've done just fine, Mike. We've had some good ones. If we'd said no to Twitter and Twitch and Lyft and Okta and some of these, I'd be apoplectic.

I wouldn't be in business. Yeah. But what I learned is a lot of what matters in my business is if you see a lot of the really good ones, you're always in the game, right? They're always crazy, right? This is what people don't get. The ones that are worth funding are like capitalist mutations, and they look wild and they make you uncomfortable in some way most of the time. So you're going to get a bunch of them wrong. What matters is the magnitude of how right you are on the occasion that you're right. And so that's the thing that I've just kind of come to learn in a very humbling, painful way over time. And part of that, you've got to have grit to have luck. But one of the things I always remind people is there are lots of people in America that have grit. There's people that are working multiple manual labor jobs. But you do also have to have luck. And when that luck lines up and you hit one where it literally just knocks the ball out of the park.

If you'd known, you would have only done 12.

It's pretty fun. And it's interesting. Not long ago, I was talking to David Deutsch, who's this famous physicist who wrote 'The Beginning of Infinity,' and he was telling me that when he would be solving a physics problem, he almost gets a high in his mind about the anomaly and about the contradiction. It's like a dopamine hit. And he almost feels bad when he solves it. It's almost like, 'Oh man, I don't get to enjoy that sleuthing thing anymore.' And I've got to say that one thing I think people don't fully appreciate about it is, for me, the journey is a lot more fun. Like when Bizarre Voice had an exit, I was like, 'That's great,' but I was like, 'I might not get to work with Brett again.' That kind of sucks, right? Or when Ngmoco got bought by DeNA, or when Okta went public, or all these things. And so the fun time you remember about it was when the journey was happening, not what the exit was or how big it was. I mean, that's a great reward to get, don't get me wrong, but it's the 'Are we going to pull this off?' phase of things that's the fun part for me.

Yeah. And you realize that deciding what problems to work on is not just a question of, 'Do I think it's going to be a big outcome if it works?' but 'Am I going to enjoy the time that I spent working on the problem?' Right? And I think that's the more important part of it. Because everybody I know who's had one of these really big outcomes really enjoyed the journey of working on the problem, even though it wasn't necessarily a great job to have. Being a founder is a really hard job, as you know. But it's funny, you talked about how you started Bizarre Voice when you were at Coremetrics. I imagine there was a part of you that didn't feel like it was a choice. It's like you become called and drawn to some new problem. And it's like you're going to find a way to work on that problem, and you're going to reverse engineer the justification of why you're going to work on it. But it's like, 'I'm doing this.' And so, 'I must do.'

Yes. No, that's a great way to say it. You do need, especially if you're a founder at your own startup, you do need to give yourself permission. And that actually is pretty hard because it is a bit like a marriage, or a baby really. I mean, I don't want to infantilize it, but it's like you're giving birth to something. And you're ultimately the parent trying to help it grow. And then it has a soul, and the soul is the collective of the company and all the people in it. And you can feel it. You can really feel whether or not it has a soul. But it's funny because a lot of times I'll get asked by somebody, 'Do you think I should pursue this idea?' And I'll say, 'If you have to ask me, the answer is no.' Right? Because the best ideas, the ones that are worth pursuing, you can't not do it. You'll do it even if you can't raise the money, even if you have no line of sight to raise the money. Those are the problems worth chasing, because those are the ones that you care enough about to overcome all the impossible obstacles that you'll face.

Yeah. So let's shift for a second and talk about this inflection point of inflection points, in my opinion, the AI inflection point. Technology tends to be combinatorial. Sometimes there are truly novel breakthroughs, but everything tends to build on itself. And this moment kind of caught me a little bit off guard. When I first used ChatGPT, my co-founder and CTO at data.world had early access to OpenAI's API, so he was using very early versions of this. But November 30th, 2022, I'll never forget logging in, being one of the first users of ChatGPT. And I knew that everything changed at that moment. And as of this recording, we're just over a thousand days since it launched. And just to mark this moment in time, because I like to look at this moment compared to historical moments: when President Trump announced on January 21st of this year, 2025, the Stargate Project alongside Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison, that was $500 billion of funding. And I looked it up at the time because I was like, 'That seems like a lot of money.' But it's also a little bit warped because we had come out of the pandemic and there were trillions and trillions of dollars spent. So people forget how much money that is. And it's more money, inflation-adjusted, $500 billion, than we spent on the Manhattan Project to win World War II versus the Nazis. And it's more money, inflation-adjusted, than we spent on the space race versus the Russians to make sure we didn't cede control of space as a strategic asset. And we are so far past $500 billion right now. I mean, there was the UAE deal, I think that was reported to be around $4.5 trillion. There was the White House dinner just recently where they went around the table, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, all of these guys there. That was over $2 trillion of pledging towards this race. And my personal opinion is it's happening for two reasons: one is hope. I think that there's something in our human spirit that we can viscerally see, like, 'Wow, this time this could really manifest an age of abundance for all.' But I think it's also fear. It's this fear of, 'If China gets AGI before us, it's all over for us. If we get AGI before them, etc.' And so I think that both things can be true at the same time. It's both hope and fear. And I'm just curious, with you in the thick of it, sitting here in Silicon Valley right next to Stanford, what do you make of this moment?

Hard to say. I mean, most of what we've done so far has been related to highly multidisciplinary ideas. So we invested a few years ago in a company called Applied Intuition that makes software to simulate autonomous vehicle miles and to help all the big car companies become software-defined. And so if you're Porsche or General Motors or one of these big car companies, you look at a Tesla and it's just fundamentally different architecture for a car. It's basically a computer with wheels and GPUs and AI and sensors, right? And that's not what an ICE vehicle is. An ICE vehicle is a bajillion supply chain partners coming together, mostly about marketing and brand. So they have to redefine what their product is. And the Applied Intuition guys have a bunch of people from Waymo and Tesla and Zoox and all these good companies. And so they can look across the table from somebody like a Porsche or a GM and ask for hundreds of millions of dollars, because they alone can help take that company to the promised land. So most of my investing in AI so far has been that type of company, where they have some type of an enterprise value proposition that you can't get by just being a wrapper on top of these models, where you have to have a mix of AI knowledge and industry knowledge. Like Kasser and Unnice and Peter, the co-founders, had spent their childhoods in Detroit, and Kasser went to General Motors Institute and worked at GM. So they were made in Detroit before they went to Silicon Valley and hung out at Google and Waymo. So I've been liking ideas like that. But the broader question is kind of more of a human question in some ways. In a world where Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am,' that was a statement about what it means to be human. But what happens if thinking is abundant and plentiful and ubiquitous and it flows like electricity? What does it mean even to be uniquely human? And what are the things that we need to be careful not to lose? Because people talk about AGI and it taking over the world, but that may be worrying about the wrong apocalypse. The apocalypse might be what happens if we lose who we are along the way.

Yeah. And there are simple questions. The other day I hit send on an email where the AI helped me edit the email, and it sounded better than I sounded. It was a better version of me. It was a better answer to the question I got. But I got to thinking, in what ways is that not so great? So did I have the same human connection with that person that I would have if I just composed a messy email? Probably not. And so you start to say, 'Okay, part of what makes us human is our human connections.' And is AI in some cases going to make those human connections something that you think are sort of optional and tactical and avoidable? And I'm not sure that's always a good thing. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it's good if your young son asks you about the stars at night rather than ask ChatGPT about it. There are aspects of going outside and looking at the stars together that matter. So I think that there's a lot of subtlety to it as well. I wish David Foster Wallace was still alive, who wrote 'Infinite Jest,' because he talked about a lot of the things that technology and the culture allowed you to do was to spend your time on easy things to do that weren't good for you ultimately. So that weighs heavy on my mind these days.

Yeah. One of my theses, and I'm starting to see a lot of companies like this, is that the neat thing about AI, the big opportunity, is you get to remake a lot of old industries. And I'm starting to see pitches in everything from remaking the lumber mill to retrofitting the railways. All of these things that literally have been left behind, and some of these revitalizing entire communities. One of the most inspirational pitches I saw recently is this guy, serial entrepreneur Tim Nunan, and he's retrofitting the rail lines that are made out of timber with recycled plastic, and 80% of his workforce are ex-prisoners. And he's giving them a second chance on life. He says that people are rushing out of big companies like Tesla, SpaceX, etc. to work for him. Like literally, people are already pretty wealthy. They're like, 'I don't even care how much money I make. I just want to be a part of this movement and really do something that matters for American infrastructure, that really revitalizes these communities.' And I'm seeing a lot of things like that. And that actually gives me hope. Those aren't things I think that will be easily replicated either. There's some real stickiness there in terms of focusing on a vertical that frankly a lot of people have forgot about.

Yeah, if you find any, let me know. That's what I'm on the hunt for.

Yeah, it's interesting because both things can be true at the same time. So in the dot-com era, it was a bubble. NASDAQ 5000, right? And you could have even bought Amazon and you would have lost 95% of your money before you made 500 times your money. Now having said that, you still wouldn't have wanted to buy Amazon when you lost 95%. And so I think everything that people thought the internet would bring about happened, but you could still get crushed in the early innings of it. And so my only way out of that dilemma is to look at these companies one at a time. So I think in tech, great outcomes are such radical exceptional outcomes that what you're really looking for is that capitalist mutation.

And never will be seen that way quite the same way again.

And so if you're looking for only the exceptional thing, I think that it's worth looking. But I think that the challenge right now is everything is so exciting that it's easy to get excited about things that lots of people are excited about. That's expensive.

And so the AI panache companies, that's where a lot of the funding, the vast majority, I mean, it's probably like 90% or an insane amount. And most of that's going to the frontier models in terms of by dollar volume.

It rhymes.

And so, you know, Global Crossing went out of business, but broadband was real.

You know, I guess I'm leaning optimistic, but I don't know, right? Like I don't predict futures. And so, what I try to do is be really clear about what's hidden in plain sight about the present. And so, I don't know. I can see a set of scenarios where we do, and I can see a set of scenarios where we don't. If you look at time as an infinite horizon, then we need to be multiplanetary because there's never a point in the future where you can say infinity just happened. We didn't destroy ourselves, right? So the probability that we'll kill ourselves on Earth is 100% given enough time to transpire. But you could say that means we shouldn't be part of abundance. Abundance is not having us be a single point of failure, and you know, being multiplanetary. Because the thing about infinity is you can never say you've reached it, right? No matter how big it is, it's infinitesimal compared to infinity. But do I think that we've got a huge amount of running room ahead? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty impressive, different than any time I can remember in my lifetime.

I think our minds would be completely blown. First of all, we would have had to make it to that time, which I think we will. But I mean, we are in the exponential of exponentials. To me, a week of tech progress right now feels like a year 10 years ago. So what is it going to feel like 10 years from now? Is it going to be like an hour or two is going to feel like a week today, which feels like a year 10 years ago? You project out a hundred years.

I need to read it.

I have heard a lot of his speeches.

Yeah. And plus, you got the atom itself, right? And so yeah, I mean there's a world where we get out of our own way and we make nuclear power too cheap to meter. And there's a lot of correlation between energy output and progress in general, and so that feels like a pretty important part of it. But personalized medicine and curing a bunch of diseases seems like a big part of it. Making it easier to move atoms from point A to point B than we've made it seems like part of it. But all of those things, we're just a couple of degrees of freedom away from having a big breakthrough, I think.

I don't know him. I read his book after you told me about it.

Yeah, I did. Cover to cover.

Yeah. And some of the ideas that I would like to see more people get acquainted with. So the first, we sort of talked about it briefly, this idea of constructor theory. So constructor theory basically says that one way to think about physics is like Newtonian mechanics and motion, trying to predict the path of an object or where it ends up. What constructor theory says is that another way to look at physics is it allows you to transform matter from one state to another state. And so some transformations are impossible or at least not conceivable by what we know. A spaceship that goes faster than the speed of light, perpetual motion machine, things like that. There are other things that we just talk about that are in the realm of possible. We just don't know how to do it. Gene editing much more than we can now, right? And then there's some things we just know how to do. And so when I wrote Pattern Breakers, what I was really doing is describing inflections, and those are kind of breakthroughs at the realm of the adjacent possible. But what I like about constructor theory is it basically says there is a way to understand what problems are solvable. And what you try to do is you try to create a constructor that converts matter from one state to your desired state. But that any problem that can be expressed that way with a possible transformation can be solved. And so I like that way of thinking about things a lot because that theory of how the world works can be applied not just to physics but economics, startups, a bunch of things. The other thing I like is the ideas of Karl Popper. So Karl Popper used to say science is never settled. You can never say Newtonian mechanics is right. You can never say Einstein is right. All you can say is it's the best explanation we have now. And so why is that important? A theory is not a statement about absolute truth with a capital T. It's a better explanation than any other that we've ever had before. It explains reality better. Right. And what Popper would say is therefore rather than say I have the capital T truth, express an explanation in a way that it can be falsified. And so if your idea can't be falsified, it's not a real idea. And so that idea of falsification combined with Deutsch's constructor theory I think is a really interesting way of thinking about abundance because it defines the solution space of where abundance can happen and it also defines the ways of framing reality as better explanations for how that abundance can come about.

Yeah. So lately I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Christianity. And I don't mean Christianity as opposed to Judaism or anything else for that matter. I tried to think about what aspects of it do I fundamentally believe in other than just believing the dogma. Right? And I think it's an important question because you can look at Jesus through two lenses: as a religious figure or as a philosopher king. And I think that the western world underappreciates the contributions he had to our philosophical grounding. So for example, Jesus was the person that caused humanity to assume as a given that people had fundamental human rights and that everybody had rights. That wasn't true in pagan religions before when you had sacrifice and things like that. Jesus believed in unconditional love. He believed in a forward arc of progress, not just cyclical the world just repeats itself. He believed in the value for its own sake of common work. And the whole term the Judeo-Christian work ethic came from. So it's interesting. You almost can't think about the western world without thinking about his contributions to our thinking. The western world is undefined without it. And part of what's missing today is people, because they have lost their connection to that, they don't appreciate the importance of those ideas and where they came from. Right? So that's the first thought. And by the way, everything I've said so far, you don't have to believe in God to say it's important. You don't have to believe it in a literal sense. In fact, you could say whether you believe it in a literal sense or not, you're better off acting as if you do because the philosophical underpinnings would cause you to do the same set of things. Where do I think God comes in? One way to think about infinity is it's something that can't be reached because you can never say you got there. You could be one to the billion zeros more abundant than we are now and you're still infinitesimal compared to infinity. Right? So, one way I like to think of infinity is just because we can't reach it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to always get better. Right? And so, to me, godliness is the continued pursuit of always going down the path to infinity, always knowing that there's more knowable things, always knowing that we can be better and that we should try. That's the way we honor the gift of our time, right? And so, to me, God is like the limit of it, does reach infinity. And then the question is just do you believe that that limit exists somewhere that we don't know about or not. If you believe that it exists then anything that's infinite magnitude like that would have to be all-seeing, all-knowing, because infinity is everything. It's like every single scenario. People have a hard time grasping the idea of infinity. But when you really think about it, it's like every possible outcome happens all at the same time because there is no single thing that you can describe that's not included in it. Right? And so if you go down that road of thinking, then you start to say there probably is a god. The other thing that I think is interesting, and I haven't quite gotten there yet, but I've been rereading René Girard's books. And so René Girard started as kind of an agnostic and thought that Christianity was important philosophically, but he wasn't like religious with a capital R. But he came to believe in his later years, he came to believe all of it over time. And his reasoning was that once you realize the depth of what it all means, you can't not believe. So, I don't know. I'm not sure, but I can't rule it out. And part of the problem that we have in the West today is you're not allowed to ask those kind of questions. You ask those kind of questions, people think you're some religious crazy person. And to me it's more of a question of what are the real limits and what do we say doesn't have to exist as a limit.

Yeah. So, a couple of thoughts on that. One is that, and this is a little bit of a René Girardian thought. So Girard believed that humans have a natural tendency to imitate each other. And so he called it this theory of mimetic behavior. And so humans don't always want the thing they want just on their own for its own sake. You and I might both want a certain kind of car because we think that both of us wants that kind of a car. And so, humans tend to desire the thing that others desire. And that works in some degree because when you're a baby, you get positive reinforcement when you imitate your mom, when she makes a face at you or things like that. But what it causes is this thing called mimetic rivalry. And it causes societies to get into these mimetic contagions or you have wars and people fighting over things. So one way that René Girard looked at God was we need to stop looking at each other and look up. And so the idea is that it relates to what you're saying from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. If you realize the sanctity of everybody and you're able to practice unconditional love for all things, you don't worry anymore about comparing yourself to others. You live the best life you can as an expression of your gratitude for the time you get. But your gratitude points upward to the fact that you get to exist at all. And you worry less about, hey, how does my journey compare to that other person's journey? And you think more about just how do you honor the gift of your time. And so that was the thing that I really admired about my dad. He didn't want to be the best because he wanted to be better than everybody else. My dad wanted to be the best because that was an expression of his gratitude for the time he had. He's like, 'Hey, every day is a gift, and the way to honor the gift of your time is to actualize your talents in a way that makes the world better to the very best of your ability. Your ability and yours alone.' So for him, doing your best wasn't about beating the other guy. He got into the spirit of competition, but for him doing your best was about expressing gratitude. And none of us knows how much time we have, but the fact that you have any time at all is amazing. And every day is an opportunity to honor the gift of that time or to just let life drift on by and you just forget, one day to the next, just one after the other, just blends in a blur. And so that was the other thing I got from Jonathan Livingston Seagull: the gift of your time really is profound and we all have choices about how we want to treat that gift. And we all have choices about what it means to us and what meaning we make from it.

Yeah. And that's the part of us that if I have a worry about us, the part of us that I worry about that we're not highly evolved enough on is this reflexive desire to compare ourselves to other people. So if I take that question you asked earlier, are we going to make it or not? Whether we make it, I think is a function of evolving past that. That to me is a single point of failure in our operating system as people. And if we can transcend that, then I think we're going to be in pretty good shape. But if we can't transcend that, there will always be another mimetic contagion around the corner. And I agree with you, the comparison game never ends. If you've got to have more than the next guy, there's always an ex guy who has more. There's always somebody who's got something more than you've got, and you'll just never be happy. Whereas, if you say every day is a gift, all you can be is your best, then every day you're happy no matter what. As long as you live true, as long as you kept that bargain with yourself. And so I hope that we could get past some of the mimetic contagion issues, but to me that's kind of one of the hinge factors for us.

Yeah. And I guess the way I might internalize it, I think I agree, is that one way to think of spirituality is it transcends comparing yourself to others and you realize that there's something else that's more worthy of your attention and time and more worthy of what you care about in this world, what your definition of success is even. And the more you can avoid comparing yourselves to others and the more you can lean into comparing yourself to the best standard you can possibly conceive of, the closer you get to that, it rounds off to you end up becoming spiritual. Because you say that you're pursuing a higher purpose that can only be considered through the lens of approaching spirituality.

Yeah. And it's like infinity, right? You can't ever get there, but it gives you a lot of running room.

And so make it count, right? Make it count. And so, that's kind of how I look at it. They're kind of related thoughts, I suppose.

Yeah. Me too. Looking forward to seeing your much better half who has believed in me since I was years old. But yeah, thank you so much.