https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=y9GvLgYLoQ4
So one of the things that I want to cover today is this idea that our ego sort of gets in the way of what we’re doing but also everybody else’s ego gets in the way of what they’re doing and it’s important to sort of think about this both ways around and the way this manifests sort of in the modern world the way we see it the most in the modern world is this phenomena where smart people don’t like simple things and this happens to us like we become too smart and we don’t like simple things and it happens to others and you see it kind of all over the place so if somebody wants to be smart or think they’re smart or they’re in a position where they want to take over authority or dominance or or be in charge leadership whatever they’ll prefer complicated problems and complicated formulations and complicated explanations to simple ones and the same with solutions they’ll prefer very complicated solutions to very simple solutions because it doesn’t feel right it doesn’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything if you’ve just discovered something somebody else has already discovered or you’re discovering something that can be summed up in two words and this is very disturbing and it happens all the time and so that’s what I like to talk about today this idea that smart people or people who want to be smart don’t like simple problems or solutions now the reason why this is important is because this happens all the time it’s happening constantly and I think the confusion is that it’s easy to make things complicated relatively if you’re smart and so you can come up in your head with all kinds of complicated ways of talking about things so maybe a simple example of this is and you’ve seen this and and there’s a way in which this bleeds into a different problem where people get too too legalistic or too precise or too exact about things where let’s suppose for example that I drive a small pickup truck to work I do not have a small pickup truck but maybe someday I’ll have enough money to buy a small pickup truck that I desperately need by the way and and you say oh I drove my car to work and people are like oh you don’t own a car you own a truck that’s like well yeah okay you know whatever right and and people do this all the time like I’ve well I’ve done this to people too so people do it all the time and the reason why is because they want to seem like they have something to contribute right and also to kind of knock you down like well you don’t really drive a car to work right but there’s lots of ways to describe what a truck is like a truck and calling a truck a car when you’re using it to get from point A to point B seems perfectly reasonable to me you know it’s it’s not wrong it’s not precise maybe sure but you know most of our language is imprecise anyway without us realizing it and when you do that you’re knocking somebody down because you could just as easily say it’s a vehicle because it is it’s also a vehicle so a truck is a vehicle and it’s a truck and then you know you have the truck purists and fair enough to them they’re like small trucks aren’t trucks you know it needs to be able to carry you know so many tons or tow so many whatever’s or have an eight-cylinder motor in it or whatever the heck it is there’s all kinds of purity standards that people apply to these things and you know maybe they should right but not in all cases and so people tend to complicate things deliberately so that either they seem smarter or they take over the conversation or they involve themselves inappropriately in a discussion with you or with somebody else and you see this all the time and another way that that that people do this is they’ll add extra facts about something that sort of aren’t within the realm of what you’re discussing in the moment so if you’re on a topic and say you’re talking about your cell phone and you’re like oh you know my my cell phone has this new app on it and the app allows me to scan with the camera at the room and it shows me where the where the constellations and stars are which which I do have an app for that by the way it’s awesome you know and then somebody’s like oh yeah well you know the new the those new cell phone apps you know there’s all kinds of new augmented reality features you know for games I was like well yeah but I was like tracking about astronomy and how cool the app was on my phone we’re really discussing you and your expertise on gaming and you know augmented reality necessarily even though that’s an augmented reality app sure kind of it’s more like a highlighting reality but it is augmenting reality too you know they’re they’re honing in on the conversation to sound smart or to be smart and smart people often get caught up in this but but that also leaves when you’re trying to be smart about something and anybody can be can get caught in this trap when trying to be smart about something you can get overly complicated about things right you can get really really caught up in the in the enchantment of big words and really difficult solutions that really need some grappling when much simpler solutions available and one example of this is and I yeah it’s something that I hate to bring it up but Eric Weinstein talked a number of years ago I think it was 2009 on YouTube you can find it I think it’s still on YouTube I saw this years back he was talking about the financial crisis and how you know had they listened to physicists and mathematicians the 2008 financial crisis never would have happened now unfortunately I’m a victim of the crisis I went to court for five years about this I did a ton of research as anybody who actually knows me really well who’s known me for years knows I research and I research really well compared to the average researcher at a college I’m pretty thorough I’ll read white papers I’ve read thousands of white papers I have no problem with most of that language and I look stuff up and I’ll spend whatever hours it takes I won’t read a long book but I’ll read you know books worth of white papers no problem I’m I went through a legal case I went through actual case law on this I know a lot about what happened in the in the housing crisis it wasn’t difficult it wasn’t complicated I’m not saying there weren’t tranches and you know second-order derivatives and crazy things like that there were that was 1% of the market though you can look that up I’m sure you’ll find the data and if you don’t you can do the numbers yourself because it just tranches and all that nonsense that they were selling you on is an overly complicated explanation for what happened what happens very simple people committed fraud basic fraud they just lied about what they owned that’s it and nobody could trace it right nobody could trace it because the registered owners of the properties the only central registry there is are the counties in which the your house your mortgage is registered where the where the mortgage services and they were not because they separated the mortgage and the and the actual note from one another that was not reflecting who owned anything and so what happened is the same thing that happened in the savings and loan scandal in the 80s so you can look up savings loan scandal countrywide the company that was countrywide mortgage was also in the saves the loan scandal and got bailed out and then changed counties and pulled the same scam again the other thing you can do is you can look up Taylor Bean and Whitaker on Wikipedia and look at the dates of when they got caught doing what they were doing and look at what they were doing what they got away with as an audited company that was what every mortgage company was doing Taylor Bean Whitaker made up physical addresses and houses that never existed and sold mortgages on them made them up did not exist that’s the whole 2008 housing crisis the whole thing everybody thought everybody owned things that they didn’t own in many cases in my case in particular four different banks claimed to own my house at different times for four banks not loan services loan services stayed the same four different banks tried to foreclose on my house okay obviously four banks did not own my house they weren’t foreclosing on a part they weren’t claiming they owned 25% or 20% or 10% or 2% or 1% they claim they own the whole thing because that’s usually how that’s done by the way like I said tranches 1% they don’t usually slice up mortgage paper that that was common practice and it’s not relevant because if you own a slice of it you own none of it legally sorry just how it works you can’t you can’t by slicing the mortgage up you abrogate the contract actual contract law basic contract law by the way so there’s no way that that happened the way it happened so for somebody like Eric Weinstein who did no research on this at all because anybody who did any research realizes that this is what was going on to sit there and say oh a smart people would have been able to solve this for you is bullshit it’s wrong it’s a lie it’s a lie and I say it’s a lie because he could have done his research there was a guy in Kentucky when I was doing my research which I think it was in 2011 or 2012 might have been earlier than that but it was somewhere in that range his house was foreclosed on and he paid cash for it there was no mortgage on his house in his name and his house actually got foreclosed on or I think that lawsuit lasted three years three years to resolve ten minutes of paperwork oh look I paid cash there’s no mortgage three years in courts the courts are screwed up we need to fix that there is no justice in the United States there wasn’t back then and it hasn’t changed it’s gotten worse if anything but smart people like Eric Weinstein would have you believe that this is a complicated problem that only somebody with a big brain like his could solve it’s nonsense the whole thing’s a lie it’s a lie and and that’s the problem they don’t like simple probably who like who wants to hear this message you you me and everybody else was fooled by basic fraud people just put things on pieces of paper and said that they were true that’s all that happened and the people that put them on paper knew they weren’t true and and this is the best part long before I went to court long before 60 minutes did a whole piece on there was a company I forget which state it was in that was falsifying signatures on mortgage paperwork for the banks they didn’t cover the falsified signatures of the individuals which they also did and I know this because they did it to a friend of mine I saw the evidence myself and he called them up and said I know this is a forged signature because my wife and I signed all of the paperwork together and this only has my signature on it so we have proof positive that it was forged so forged document they were forging documents all over the place simple forgery on a mass scale on a corporate scale known reported in the news court still wouldn’t roll for against the banks even though they knew or could have known that the banks were lying about what they owned and it’s that simple and nobody wants to hear that message nobody wants to know that there’s a simple problem like that with a simple solution called yeah all the fraudsters lose that’s all that had to happen nobody wants to know that and and I don’t blame you like I don’t blame anybody you know I didn’t want to hear it I spent five years in court I should have given up and not spent all the money I you know I could have saved a lot of money it’s a lot it costs a lot of money to stay in court for five years but but that’s the problem we we don’t want to believe that something so simple could fool us I who wants to believe that who wants to believe the world is full of fraud at that level that no one is catching even though it’s clearly against the rules and we all agree that it’s against the rules and we all know it’s wrong and nobody wants to believe that because we want to believe that we’re smarter than we are or that we’re more attentive than we are or that the systems that we have in place to protect us from these things are working when in fact they’re not and so I understand the sentiment but you can see this a lot you you see this when people people do a lot of sort of talking around words so you can take a very simple concept you know like purpose in life or meaning in life and you can start putting crazy words around it right you can add Greek terms like till off tell us and you know you can start talking about well you know you know there’s there’s reasons why you do things but that’s not the purpose of what you do and then you have goals and like these are all talking about the same thing even though they’re not the same words and they have different you know different definitions for a reason but it’s very easy because words bleed into one another right in many cases and you can alter the meanings of words right and I have a video on words and meaning if you if you’re confused about what that is and why that’s important to understand the meanings can be altered and so you can use a bunch of different words that actually point at the same concept and people who want to be smart do that all the time and they’ll do things like well you see you know so you’ve got a crisis like let’s just say a crisis might be that that you know there’s the mortgage crisis and then you know there’s a currency crisis but then there are these meta crises so you see what I did there I just put another word in front of the word crises to make you think that there’s like another level or a higher order or like more important crises and then I can talk about the climate is a meta crises right because it affects the whole planet it’s like maybe but maybe I just did that to sound smart and the use of the word meta isn’t appropriate which which it is anyway because it just means after that’s what it means so people get caught up in trying to sound smart or trying to make things sound bigger or more complicated than they actually are because then they have these big complicated solutions right so you know one solution to the climate is that we you know do these complicated programs where we have this carbon swapping between countries right carbon credits and that will take care of the problem even though basically any fourth grade idiot can figure out that growing more trees in the Ukraine or wherever does not offset the carbon that goes into the atmosphere as the result of the factory in the United States okay that obviously doesn’t happen so why you would set up a complicated system like that if you’re like Al Gore or something and who got caught with a bunch of emails admitting that it was just a financial scam is beyond me unless of course you wanted to sound smart and steal lots of money which is basically what happened in that case and maybe many of the other cases when people start talking about the meta crisis right people like to make things sound very complicated and there’s a there was a book I think it was in Freakonomics actually where they were talking about some of the solutions simple and cheap solutions to climate change or at least to the part of climate change where they’re removing greenhouse gases and I talked to a number of very bright people that I know who are legitimately smart much smarter than I am about this and they all rejected all of it so I’m gonna know that books full of garbage and that’s all nonsense and I was like what what do you mean it’s all nonsense are you sure it’s all nonsense it sounded pretty reasonable to me and it was all cheap solutions I mean they were all like you know I think the most expensive solution was five billion dollars that’s nothing the global economy’s trillions of dollars five billions like nothing that’s pocket change and and yeah this was a while ago five billion was a lot more back then but it still wasn’t that much they didn’t like any of those solutions because they were too simple that’s why they didn’t like them they didn’t like them because they were too simple and they didn’t think of them I’m sure if they had thought of them they thought the best ideas ever and like look I respect these people they’re very smart I know they’re very smart but we’re all prone to our ego and we all fall down this trap where we get into complicated explanations complicated problems so that we can come up with complicated solutions so we can sound smart or we can use big words to sound smart like we all I do it all the time people do this it’s not a big deal but it’s good to notice it’s good to look for to say all right why maybe maybe this person’s putting together a really good story and maybe they’re really smart absolutely maybe they’re super articulate whatever and it sounds good because it all hangs together and they seem confident they know what they’re talking about and you know they have the IQ to back this up you know it absolutely this happens all the time but but maybe they’re just coming up with something complicated to feel good about their solution or to feel good about the fact that they can play at that level right and they know they’re leaving you behind and so if you feel left behind you know like how good is an idea that you can’t explain to others is that idea actually worth anything at that point you know and maybe you maybe you’re maybe you’d be fair about it right you say well some people won’t understand it yeah okay but what if the people that need to implement it like the people that need to work on it physically and do the thing in the world can’t understand it maybe then it’s not a good idea no matter how well it would work otherwise and that’s where we get caught up and that goes back to my last video magical thinking right we’re definitely people are into this magical thinking where it’s like look if I were in charge none of this would have happened because I would have seen this coming it’s like you think with all the information you would have coming at you while you were in charge that you would have picked up on this one thing that maybe you never could hear about because you can’t hear about everything in fact you can’t hear about most things and and you know you would have thought about it in the right frame at the right time and come up with that particular solution with all the other voices yelling at you about other things or other frames or whatever right because you can always take any problem frame it more difficultly right you can say well look we’ve got this small skirmish going on with the Kurds and you can say but look it’s 400 Kurds and you know what are we going to do for 400 Kurds all right or you can take that same incident and say look the Kurds have been fighting for a long time you know they they they’re the most stable controller to the oil fields I’m not making claims I’m just sort of spinning stories here just as illustrative examples although maybe my claims are also accurate I don’t know I’m but I’m not gonna make them right maybe maybe they’re the best people to run the oil fields or to keep them stable and and make sure they don’t get blown up for various reasons right and and also they’re a buffer for other countries you know stability because they’re unstable in the middle they keep the whole region stable well that’s a different argument now it’s not about 400 people anymore now it could be about three countries or four countries or the stability of an entire global region and then it’s like well why wouldn’t you help 400 people if you could stabilize four countries or two countries even or stabilize the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people or a few million people right so the framing matters and and maybe you know maybe that’s over complicating things and maybe it’s not so it’s I’m not saying these are easy to tease out but there’s a way in which you can always do that right you can always make it about well if that region became destabilized then we’d have more terrorism and so really it benefits the world if we help the Kurds like there’s always ways that if you’re in charge people can frame things for you in a way that makes it sound plausible whatever proposal solution they have so complexifying things right making things really really complex or complicated can really change what’s salient to you what you’re looking at what you’re aiming for and what you’re willing to do and that’s why people tend to do it because then they sound smart or they get to implement their their really big solution and the problem with larger solutions with with more complicated solutions with with wider reaching sort of big brain solutions is that the larger something is the more unintended consequences it has and unintended consequences is a sneaky thing right because really what it’s saying is you don’t know the results of your actions no matter how much you understand the world that’s what that means and that’s really important to understand and that’s why you should prefer simple problem formulations and simple solutions now unfortunately there’s a way in which we’re fooled by simple solutions you can always say homeless people just buy them homes but as I’ve discussed before that doesn’t work and we know it because it’s been tried it’s been tried in this country it’s been tried in whole states it’s been tried in the entire city of New York it’s been tried in other countries it doesn’t work it doesn’t work because the people didn’t become homeless for the same reason and reasons matter starting points matter I’ll do a video on that at some point I’ll try to pin it here so it’s not an easy thing to say oh just you know gin together a simple so because the simple solution turns out to be a bunch of complicated you know ridiculous sorts of hoops that you have to jump through and and sometimes these things can’t be simplified because we’re framing them wrong the homelessness problem is not a homelessness problem there are a bunch of people that are homeless but they don’t all have the same problem they did not all get homeless the same way and so there’s a way in which oversimplification is also a problem and when we’re not smart we prefer oversimplified solutions to complicated ones fair enough but hopefully if we’re not smart we’re humble enough to believe that we don’t have the answers and that’s really the key to this smart people tend to believe that they have answers or that they could have answers and they tend to couch their answers as pure good and you should always watch out for that if somebody’s not telling you what the downside is maybe they don’t know what it is or maybe they know full well and they don’t care which I would argue is a worse situation or maybe they haven’t thought about it which is a really dangerous thing and that’s not good probably them you know it’s probably dangerous when people come up with solutions and you ask them well what are the possible side effects and they don’t know you know or they insist there aren’t any that’s yeah that’s a good way to know and also it’s good when people are using big words to kind of find out when you say that is there a simpler way to say it right and sometimes you can do that on your own sometimes you have to ask them and see if they can make it more accessible easier to understand because if you can’t make something easy to understand and like I’m guilty of this all the time we you know we all are to some extent because we only have our own perspective then maybe it’s just too complicated and you’ve made it too complicated on purpose you know because you haven’t thought about it enough right if you don’t have enough perspectives on the idea in your head that you can simplify it then maybe you don’t have enough perspectives and that’s true for other people if they don’t have enough perspectives that they can talk about it in different ways to different audiences then they probably haven’t given it enough thought and so that’s one thing that you can use you know on yourself do I have enough perspectives to make this understandable to somebody simpler right somebody with a simpler vocabulary or simpler formulations does somebody else because maybe they just haven’t thought about it enough and so the fact that they’re quote really smart doesn’t help and that’s what we want to avoid right we want to avoid listening to people who aren’t even necessarily wrong I’m not saying they’re wrong but maybe their intelligence is getting in their way of coming up with an answer that you can implement reasonably in the world and or coming up with an answer that will work at all even though it sounds like it’ll work because again we do engage in that magical thinking and everything works in your head it’s when it hits the ground that things start to fail so that’s what we have to watch out for and it’s a tricky problem as I pointed out there’s two sides to that for sure like there are with most things and I’m not trying to make it easy so I apologize if it’s not easy but life’s not easy but maybe we can have a little bit of humility both for ourself and and maybe extend ourselves and others some grace because we’re all prone to these problems because they’re deep problem to the ego we want to be smart being smart getting points for being smart means solving complicated problems are not simple ones you know in some cases and feeling smart is certainly all about that and people want to feel smart and if they can convince you that they’re right even if they may suspect that or may know flat out that you didn’t understand a word they said they’ll usually settle for that because your ego is sneaky and I’m not saying they’re doing it maliciously but your ego is a sneaky little puppy and it’ll it’ll do things like that to you and and that’s what that’s why rocketing to fame is a problem right because that’s what it does you start to hear a lot of positive feedback right and a lot of praise and you don’t hear a lot of well you could have done this better you could have done that better and and that’s people are afraid of that and maybe they should be but usually the people that are afraid of that aren’t prone to it anyway and there’s an easy way around that you get a disagreeable person like me and I’ll just always tell you the truth because I just don’t care I do care about the truth but I just care less about you than I do about the truth sorry about that there are solutions but we do always have to keep in mind that we’re small creatures in a large world that we cannot understand we don’t have the capacity to and neither can anyone else and to the extent that one person can maybe understand everything about the cell phone I can’t even understand everything about the damn cell phone it’s my field roughly speaking computers that doesn’t mean that that that their solutions are good ones it doesn’t mean that there are complicated ways of understanding are good ways to understand because you can always understand things in a complicated fashion no matter how simple they are and you want to or at least part of you does and that part of you is something you have to fight against internally yourself and you have to help other people fight against it themselves just by asking them simple questions that usually works and when it doesn’t work you know they’re up to something you know maybe they don’t know they’re up to something and that’s fair but at least you can avoid putting too much stock in them and putting more stock in your own senses because if you listen to your own senses clearly you’ll get better answers for yourself and that’s really important we don’t want to have to rely on other people for everything especially not for better answers so hopefully this gives you a sense for what I’m talking about with complication and smart people and our egos wanting us to be smart and getting cred getting that support you know making things complicated on purpose or complexifying things on purpose just to sort of feel good about what we can do mentally instead of what we can do say in the real world physically and and you know hopefully that’ll help you to focus in on that and notice it as a problem and give it some time and attention which as always is the thing I’m the most grateful for when you’re watching my videos because I really do believe and try to act as if that is the thing that sort of where we are collective energies can be focused right is on time our time and attention focuses that to make the world a better place and we can’t do that unless we’re not falling prey to some of these traps and so I’m always very grateful for your time and attention because I believe it gives me and you and everybody else whether they watch the videos or not better insight into what’s going on and how to do better in the world and that I think is the key to making the world a better place is if we can all focus on how to be better thank you