Everybody, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. We're going to be talking about the one and probably only 2024 presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. I think it was very different than a lot of people expected.
It certainly was for me, but there's something far bigger than the things that were discussed on the stage that we really need to be talking about. We're going to be getting into it right now. Forgive the running start to this episode because we just started talking off the cuff as everything was getting set up, but I think that it was worthwhile conversation, so we just kept going. Without further ado, here's our take on the 2024 presidential debate.
That's life. Adjust. Fix it. But I need to, what are the base assumptions that you're going to use when it doesn't work?
How are you going to adjust? And so you've got Kamala Harris, and you're going to want to write this down because I definitely want to talk about it. Whoever recording, keep going with this. But you've got Kamala Harris and she is, she's changed her position on a lot of things.
Now personally, I'm okay with that. Like I want people to learn and grow. Now I say that I'm okay with it in the reality that I know I'm being manipulated. I understand that politics is a game of manipulation, but I still am not so cynical that I don't want somebody to change their opinion.
And I think it would be a fool's errand to be like, this person said something four years ago, and now I'm going to duct tape them to that forever. That is just stupid to me. So I want somebody that updates their thinking. Now, because I'm not stupid, I understand that she may just be saying the things I want to hear.
So I need to see the policy and I need to understand the base assumptions. But what I'm getting is this top line idea of I haven't changed my values. I've changed my positions. Okay, that's a dope talking point, but now you've got to back that up with, what do you mean?
What are your values? Tell me your values. And then what data do you look at to see if you're actually living in accordance with your values or not? And you know, this is my whole beef.
This is my beef at the level of a company. This is my beef at the level of politics before, before you put a policy in place, you have to say, this is what I expect to happen from this policy. Specifics, real data points that you can be checked on. And then you actually check and you see, is this policy taking us where we thought it was going to or not?
And the thing is they don't because, and this is what makes me really sad, man. Politics is a game of manipulation. It's about setting a frame. Okay, so there's a really important axiomatic idea that, that people need to really hold on to.
It does not matter what you look at. It matters what you see. It's a fancy way of saying, is the glass half empty or half full? We're both looking at the same glass.
So they set the frame, glass half empty, glass half full. Then they have to control the frame. Hey, everybody, because the glass is half empty, it means all of these things. And they're not going to, they, the parties are not going to allow anything that might change the frame.
This is why I think the DNC is so ruthless in keeping people off the ballot because they know that people are going to challenge their frame. And the Democrats are doing a very good job, a very good job. Like as, as somebody who has studied magic, I'm like, this, this is masterful because you have to control where people look so that you can pull the sleight of hand. And from getting RFK off the ballot to stopping people in the green party to keep them off the ballot, to working so closely with mainstream media to just keep that frame, keep that frame.
Social media. Yeah. It's really interesting. And every now and then I will be in an interview and I will have come in with a frame, not even necessarily intentionally.
I just, we all have a frame of reference. And so I'll come in with my frame of reference and then the guest will say something so unexpected to me. They change the frame so hard and so far because I'm not trying to control frame. I go with them.
And then when I'm in their frame, I feel completely unmoored and unmoored is the right answer. All of a sudden, I, I don't know, it's like, we all live in a fortress of our frame of reference. Hey, I understand the world from here. When someone takes you out of that frame of reference and puts you somewhere completely new, you feel defenseless.
Like you, you don't know how to even talk about it. You don't know how to process the information and that the need to stop that from happening on both sides is so intense that we're, we're not talking policy. We're not talking expected outcomes because then you can be held to account. Uh, I feel Trump is so, he's so un-ideological.
I don't know. I don't know what the right way to categorize Trump is. He doesn't have a set, um, concretized beliefs. I, I don't know.
You never know what he's going to say. I don't think he knows what he's going to say. So you have this sense of being uncontrolled. In fact, this is a really interesting point about the debate because Trump does not come in with pre, pre-prepared talking points because he's going to say whatever's on his mind because he is largely emotional.
The first time we, as the voting public encountered him, it was, to quote Dave Chappelle, a star was born because he said, oh, I know the system is corrupt because I've been using it and they know it's corrupt, but they're still not going to stop it because their donors give them money. It, it was so shocking the way he changed the frame of reference. He said the quiet part out loud. Yeah.
That people were like, whoa! But now he feels constrained somehow. He's, it's like he knows, okay, if I go full blown wild card, you have no idea what I'm going to say. He's going to lose because he's already played that card.
People already know that side of him. It doesn't win people over anymore. It now turns people off. But he's lost some of that wild man appeal by doing that.
And so now it's, that was on display. She became presidential. He became a watered down version of himself. So the parts where he was, you know, they're eating cats and dogs and like, I didn't lose the election.
And like when he's hitting those points and he's getting really animated, he still feels restrained. So he is going just far enough to seem unhinged, but not so far that people are like, yeah, like get him, Trump. And so I have a feeling something is going to break down there. I think she kind of used that against him in certain places where she almost kind of baited him into doing it.
Like, that's why people are leaving at his rally. Had nothing to do with foreign policy, nothing to do with what they're saying, but she knew it would agitate him, get him involved, get him excited. And then he kind of bit for the trap. Had the best rallies ever, had the most votes of a Republican president and just kind of riffing and saying things.
And to your point, it's not classic Trump. It's not the Trump that has got him into the office. It's the 2020 Trump who's kind of been taken out. Who's like, what you're doing too much, sit down.
The wild card that we are now getting turned off. Yeah. Do you know who Anderson Silva is? The MMA fighter?
Yeah, from Brazil. He used to be able to mind control people. And he would go into the octagon, he would like dodge punches, slip punches, and people lost before they ever got in the ring with him because he really did seem invincible. It just seemed like people couldn't hit him.
It looked like he was Neo in the Matrix. He could like dodge punches, dodge kicks. It felt like he was just superhuman. And then he goes in one fight and he gets knocked out.
He's doing his thing and bank, done. And then after that, that mystique was gone. And I will be interested to see if Trump can deal with that because going again, I can't state this enough. The heartbreaking reality of politics is at its essence, politics is manipulation.
And I'll say it again and again because people know what I mean by that. It's setting a frame, controlling a frame. It's not, here's a policy. Here's the expected outcome of that policy.
Let's judge whether that policy worked or not. It's not that. And I don't know, and I think that politics is an evolutionary format. I think it has become what it's become, not because people are evil, but because the masses of people, that's how they respond.
They need heuristics, which is a fancy word for shortcuts, which I should have just said that. People need shortcuts. They want you to tell them in really simple ways, like what it means to ride with you. So what does it say about me if I'm on your side?
Tell them that. Then tell them the words to use when they encounter somebody that's like, you're bad for following that person. And then they can say, no, I'm not. I'm for whatever.
And you give them the talking points, which is why people talk about talking points. And it is excruciatingly disheartening to watch because I have a base assumption that we are in a positive feedback loop and the positive feedback loop is going to break capitalism. And in breaking capitalism, you and you will get it. Innovation took us from being in fights with bears over salmon, having wolverines come and steal your store of food, or just straight up starving to death.
Like people don't understand how hard it would have been for the human animal to finally get enough cultural momentum where we could pass knowledge on through culture that we could get stable tribes that could survive a harsh winter. Or, I mean, there have been times in the past where you'll have mini ice ages, you'll have full ice ages, and humans have managed to get on the other side of that. How? Through ingenuity.
And once you understand, if you don't promote innovation culturally, the culture begins to stagnate. So you have to create that opportunity. And so there was a time in the 80s where Japan was just on fire. And if you look at movies, American movies made in the 80s, like Back to the Future, 2, I think very specifically, but it was always they, Oh, I work for a Japanese corporation.
Because it just seemed like the Japanese were going to take over everything. Even Die Hard, early 90s, right? Worked for a Japanese corporation. It just seemed like the Japanese were going to take everything over.
But then they have such a collectivist society. It just never ended up breaking free of that. They ended up having economic woes where their debt to GDP now is just way, way, way out of whack. They ended up in stagflation.
I don't know all the specifics of how it broke down, but for anybody that wants to go use that as a case study of how you go from looking like the rising global economic superpower to effectively relegating yourself to just steady. Now, they're not a bad country. It's amazing. But they're not the economic superpower that they were.
And so right now in the U.S., we're having a debate about whether we want to continue to promote that kind of pursuit of excellence, being better than other people, which makes people today very, very, very uncomfortable. And once you begin to villainize excellence, then people stop pursuing that because that's not how you get the admiration of your tribe. And if you get the admiration of your tribe by keeping your head down, doing as little work as possible, and avoiding punishment at all costs, it's like you're not going to go very far with that. Or you're going to get a bunch of people that just run roughshod over you, and you get that growing divide.
And that's what we're seeing now is you get some people that are just wired for it. They are going to build gigantic businesses. They are going to go with the government and engage with them and try to come up with policies that behoove them and allow them to just hoover everything up and get bigger and bigger and bigger. And as soon as you get that massive economic divide, you have a society that is unstable.
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There was a lot of discourse on Twitter, a lot of people saying Kamala won, Trump won, Kamala lost, Trump lost. There was an underlying notice that I noticed from a lot of people talking about how they wished the third-party candidate was on the stage. They wished Kennedy was up there. They wished Jill Stein was up there.
What advice, how would you tell people to approach this problem if their ideal candidate didn't make that stage and they were caught with these two choices that they don't really love? How should they evaluate their election process? How should they approach? How would you break down that problem of who should I vote for?
Whoa, those are two very different questions. So how you break down who you vote for is you really have to ascertain what their base assumptions are. So what makes for a great entrepreneur is somebody that can solve a novel problem. That is one of the things that I try to get young entrepreneurs to understand is your job is to solve not only a problem you've never seen before, but to be able to solve a problem nobody has ever seen before.
The thing I teach entrepreneurs in Impact Theory University is what I call the physics of progress. The reason I call it the physics is there's nothing below it. It just is how you get better at something. But to do that, you have to know where you want to go.
You have to know that in the political sense, the policy that you're going to pursue to get there, before you implement it, you have to say, this is what we think will happen. And ideally, based on historical things that have happened, this is what we think will happen. And then you run the experiment. It should have a very finite time period.
There should be early indications. Like if you think that it's going to lower the debt by 50%, well, you don't wait 10 years to find out if it lowered by 50%. You back into that, some reasonable growth rate. You don't just say, well, for the next four years, conveniently, we're really not going to see anything, but starting in year six, this is going to be amazing, just long enough for the next person to get into office.
But you lay that out and you see if you're actually making it. So base assumptions allow you to understand how somebody is going to approach a novel problem. That's just absolutely critical. We're not seeing that.
That's not the public discourse. And if I'm completely honest, I don't think it ever will be. Just it is the architecture of the human mind. The architecture of the human mind is I have a family, I need to take care of them.
My life is hard enough. I don't have a lot of free time. I just please, you, I trust you. Distill this down for me.
Give me the talking points. Again, going back to tell me what it means to align with you and give me the words that I say to somebody who thinks I'm stupid for doing so. That's what people need. And then ultimately, they're going to vote based on emotion.
So it becomes a, I mean, we can talk about that at some point, but people will ultimately make this decision emotionally. The complex calculus of that is largely about set the frame, control the frame. Because in setting the frame and controlling the frame, what they're trying to do is influence you emotionally. And so each side is pulling for your emotion.
They are not talking to you logically. They are not saying how their policies are going to help you. They are, and I think Harris does a better job of this, but it unnerves me far more, is to say, I'm doing these policies and it's going to have this impact on your life. Emotion, emotion, emotion.
Not, hey, looking back at the economic history, when things like this have been put into place, we've seen an uptick and whatever, whatever. And that's why we're doing this policy. We're not seeing I think history tells us that that's an absolutely abhorrent idea because the only way to do that is by force because of the fact that you have Elon Musk's and you have not Elon Musk's, right? And so people have to deal with the world the way that it is, not the way they wish it were.
I also wish it were, that it was just all equally distributed intelligence because I wish I were a lot smarter. But the reality is it's not. We all have to deal with the hand that we're dealt. And currently we don't.
So people are gonna have to get the right people on the ballot. You have to evaluate things from base assumptions. I just, I don't think the average person is going, has the bandwidth or the desire to think through that. You are famously a one-issue voter.
You talk about inflation to every guest that walks through this door. I feel like you have told the neighbors about inflation. After watching this debate, do you feel better about inflation? Do you feel like one candidate or the other has a plan that makes you less anxious about it?
Literally neither of them. Talk about it. I don't know that they think about it. We've had both a Biden-Harris presidency and a Trump presidency, and they're each as bad as the other.
I mean, it's really crazy. It's really crazy that people are not paying attention, that people think that you can just go deeper and deeper and deeper into debt forever and that there's never going to be a piper to pay. And so this is where, man, as a student of history, you step back. This is what I talk about with the feedback loop.
The feedback loop is the human mind. And the way that we are is if we can borrow from the future, we will do it. And that's even people with kids, man. So at some point, always, forever, throughout human history, you end up with a debt jubilee.
It is the most heinously named thing in the world because what you really end up with is bloodshed that allows people to overturn the tables and say, you're never getting your money back. That's what actually happens. And so you sometimes just bomb them into submission and say, we win, you get nothing. Or you literally start decapitating people in the streets.
Hey, France, looking at you. And you're never getting your money back. So that's the only way to get to a debt jubilee is to blow things up. So I don't think people are being realistic.
And I shouldn't say the only because there's something like 15% of the time it doesn't end in bloodshed, 85% of the time it does. And so there are real consequences to our behavior. Do you think we're closer to Venezuela where hyperinflation, our economy tanks, we lose our ranking as that number one economic superpower, or is it more bloodshed war, you think is the way out at the end of the day? I mean, given what's going on in the world right now, it feels like bloodshed is the most likely outcome.
So now one thing I will say is utterly fascinating, and I don't know what to read into this yet, but China hasn't moved on Taiwan and Biden is still president. Let that one sink in. Biden is still president. They removed him from running because they knew he has cognitively declined.
Nobody's arguing that point. So you had a sitting president that has some form of dementia and that's insane. So I kept thinking maybe Taiwan's gonna make a move. Like if you're gonna do it, now seems like the time.
So either China understands that whoever represents Biden or whoever Biden represents is probably a better way to say it, that they're actually afraid of them and they think that they would retaliate or whatever. Or they have their own dysfunction to the point where they're like, oh man, we're missing our opportunity. Now would have been the time, but we're not ready. I don't know, but that is fascinating.
So anyway, given what's going on in Israel, Gaza, given what's going on in Russia, Ukraine, I think that violence is in the air, to be sure. If the Middle East keeps growing and that sparks into something bigger, that could be very problematic. But the one that we should probably be the most afraid of is Russia, Ukraine. I mean, unless that just becomes a stalemate and they say, we've diminished the Ukraine so much that they're now what John Mearsheimer calls a rump state.
And we don't really have to worry about them. They're effectively just a puppet for us. And we can say, look, we took this back and now NATO knows to not play on our borders. But if NATO keeps messing around and pushing the issue, or if we escalate what we send to them, bro, like it's as if people don't understand that there could be real consequences.
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And when I was growing up in the 80s, people knew enough to be like, they have a lot of nukes. We have a lot of nukes. That does not end any way good. And we were always trying to deescalate, turn down the tensions.
And now it feels like people have just been so cavalier that it's just ratcheting up, up, up. Cool. Any final thoughts about the debate? Anything you want the people to kind of leave with?
And then I got some rapid fire questions. Yes. So very much, boys and girls, the policies you choose have very important consequences to the economy. I think people should think a lot about the economy.
I think that you should think about now and the future. Think about your kids. Think about your friend's kids. Again, I don't have kids, but I think a lot about the kids.
And we all want to live in a world that's dope, where the economy feels good, where we can create things that we think make people's lives better. And if your only thought is, I want to win this election, you're going to be in trouble. If on the other hand, you step back and go, hey, I really want to map out how are people thinking through these problems. And it's interesting to me that Trump is going on long-form podcasts, but I actually haven't watched any of them.
So I doubt that they're asking him policy questions. I would love to see Harris do the same so that we can understand, again, how will this person react when something unexpected happens? So just to give people an idea, your frame of reference is built with three things, your biology. So we're 50% of us is hardwired.
And then the remaining 50% is a combination of beliefs and values. Now, people mistake beliefs for objective truth. Beliefs are rarely objective truth. Objective truth from where I'm sitting is physical reality, meaning physics.
We don't even understand all the laws of physics. So the odds that we understand what is truly true, we know we don't have a complete picture. So we're dealing with only approximations. And that's why people like even Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris can get bogged down in a two-hour episode just trying to define truth.
So anybody that thinks, oh, truth is self-evident, it's really not. That's why I say it doesn't matter what you look at. It matters what you see. So we really have to be thoughtful about mapping out the candidates' beliefs and values.
So beliefs is what you believe is true about the world. Values are what you believe ought to be true in the world. So ought meaning a stand-in for morality. So I believe that people ought to have the opportunity to pursue excellence.
Some people believe people ought to have the same outcomes, okay? That's a value judgment. It's not an is judgment. It's what we think the world ought to be.
If you can map your candidate there, then it's like, okay, cool. If those are really their beliefs, then when they encounter an unknown problem, they're going to anchor around those beliefs. Now, if what you find when you look at a candidate, and this is my fear with Donald Trump, that he's not cognitively aware of what his beliefs and values are. So if you said, hey, give me the beliefs and values that make up your policies or that make up your worldview, that you wouldn't necessarily get them because he feels very confident in his gut reactions, which is why he doesn't prepare.
And he just comes in and he's like, this is how I see the world. And I've been around and I understand. I know how to broker a deal and all that stuff. And there's a lot of bravado.
And look, it's super effective. Like he's done what he's done, but it doesn't help you when you encounter an unknown problem. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, I have fears because she was acting and thinking one way. And now she's changing on a lot of Oh yeah, now I'm just like, I need to know if the thing she's saying now represent her actual change in core beliefs.
Like if she's actually updated her base assumptions and she can articulate them, cool. If she can't, and this is just political manipulation, then I sound the alarms and run for the hills. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do.
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