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Japan is one of the biggest book reading cultures out there. I don't know how it compares to China, but China may be doing more tech. What is it about knowledge and wisdom transfer that happens differently in the east than the West?

The Japanese are very right brained. What it means for Americans is that we can learn from the Japanese, I think to help balance ourselves better.

This is Richard Conrad, a thinker and cultural decoder who spent decades immersed in Eastern philosophy and Western systems. In this episode, he joins Dave Asprey to unpack how our idea of truth isn't universal, but shaped by culture, tradition and the invisible code we're born into. He's here to share his simple line of thinking that can change the world.

Americans, we tend to reason in a linear manner, subject, object, step by step. The Japanese or Chinese don't have a native word for the word logic. In East Asia, you can have your God, I can have my God. We can both be right.

If Westerns are too linear, does that mean we should become less linear?

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Well, let's just get right to it. There's a war breaking out in the Middle East. How are Westerners going to see this versus how someone from Japan or China would see it?

Well, so I've lived and worked and studied in Asia for over 30 years now. And over that time I've developed a framework to help me understand differences in the way Americans and Chinese and Japanese think. And one layer of that framework is Americans and Europeans. Western Europeans tend to see the world with an absolute truth framework, whereas in East Asia they see it in a relative truth framework. And fundamentally, if you look at the situation in the Middle east, you've got groups that in an absolute truth belief framework, my God is the only God. The first commandment is I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall pray to no other gods before me. And so if you're a Christian, you believe the Christian God is the one true God. If you're Jewish, Yahweh is the one true God. If you're Muslim, it's Allah is the one true God. A very strange experience for me as an American. When I first moved to Japan, I was in a Buddhist temple and they had a shrine in the corner for Shinto gods. And I thought, how can that be in the West? This is blasphemy. You would get stoned or burned at the stake for this. But in their mind, in a relative truth culture, there are many paths to the mountaintop. And the goal is the Mountain path, not the top. But in an absolute truth thinking society, if I'm right, by definition, anyone else is wrong. And so Joseph Campbell always said that Lebanon was the heart of the problem because you had three religions, the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims all fighting each other over the same God, of the same biblical God. And what's happening in the Middle east is obviously there's a big tension between Israelis and Iranians have a lot in common, actually. They should be able to get along, but the religion gets in the way. And my God is right, your God is wrong. And your God is right, my God is wrong. And it becomes an existential issue for them in East Asia. They don't even understand that because you can have your God, I can have my God, we can both be right. It's a totally different framework. And so on this level, in the absolute truth level, we see it as who's right and who's wrong and where. As in the relative truth framework, they see it more of who has the power to determine who's right or who's wrong. And where it gets interesting is if you look at it from say, the Chinese point of view, I'm sorry to say they think this is great. Like the Ukraine war was a big benefit to China. It weakens Russia. US Weapons are all traveling to the Ukraine instead of going towards Taiwan. This is a win, win, win for the Chinese. They get to watch how drone warfare develops. China builds more drones in a day than the US Builds in a year.

Oh, yeah. Quantity, Quantity wise, like 500,000 a day.

A day, yeah. We jump into something here. But when we let China into the WTO and this was the Democratic Party that did this, it was a deal where we're going to trade off our middle class, middle class manufacturing jobs in exchange for our finance industry getting more exposure to China. Not exactly representing the people today. US banks have less market share in China than they had when China entered the wto. It was a complete and total failure.

Is that because China just went back on the deal or US banks just didn't do a good job?

China went back on the deal.

Shocking.

They never had any intention. Relative truth society. A contract in China is a starting point. It's a relative truth. Okay, this is what we've agreed on today and it's negotiable going forward. To absolute truth believers, a contract is set in stone. This is what we've agreed on. We are going to follow this. And we didn't understand that. It was a huge mistake going into that. Wow, that Deal with them. So with China, they're looking at. And so all of our manufacturing, a lot of it has shifted to China. And, you know, in World War II, we did really well because we could convert our manufacturing plants to weapon plants. Well, China has shifted them all, a lot of it, to China. It's called the fallacy of composition. If one factory goes to China, it's fine, but if a lot of them go, it becomes a huge problem. So they're looking at this drone warfare development, and it's, it's helping them a lot. It's also weakening Russia, which helps China because it puts Russia into the little brother position. And, you know, the reality is China has eyes on southeastern Russia. A lot of that land belonged to China in the past.

Yes.

The Chinese have not forgotten that. And the weaker China gets, the more likely China is to be able to bargain away that land as it goes to the Middle East. The US had that disastrous war in Iraq, just totally pointless. And China loved it because it weakened the US power relative to China. The Chinese have a phrase, it's Yu Bang Chang Yu Wang de Li. If the. I think it translated as like the clam and the guttersnipe, two shellfish at the seashore or fight each other. The fisherman can walk by and just pick them up. He's the winner. And so if the US Gets bogged down in Iran, that would be wonderful for the Chinese because it would relatively weaken the US Taiwan is an ally of China's, but really they don't see the relationship. They're not helping Iran right now because Iran proved to be so weak relative to Israel. Israel took out their air defense so, so easily. And from that distance, they're still able to, to bomb them at will. And China only respects strength.

Right.

So that's why they're not helping Iran directly, but if Iran can, can outlast Israel. You know, Netanyahu right now is the dog that's caught the, the car. He's got the car bumper in his mouth and he doesn't know what to do. And if Iran can outlast them, then the Chinese will, will help Iran. That's the situation, I think, from the Chinese point of view today.

Got it. So they're not as worried about whatever agreements they've made because they're all negotiable all the time. Okay. How would someone from Japan view this differently than someone from China?

Japan's different. The fundamental belief in China is a fear of invasion. 350 of the last 700 years, they've been controlled by non Han Chinese, the Mongolians and the Manchurians. And then they have what they call now the century of humiliation, where the foreign powers came in and carved up interest inside of China.

Yeah, we won't talk about Carlos Goes. That's the Nissan guy, guys.

Carlos go.

Yes. Who. Who made the fatal mistake of being an outsider who tried to take over car manufacturers in Japan and paid a price for that.

So the Japanese fear is China is a very inclusive culture. Japan is a very exclusive culture. It's an island culture. They did not like Carlos going for that. The Japanese experience was shaped by the atomic bombs in World War II. They have a very strong pacifist streak now. And so when they look at the Middle east, they're troubled. They're worried because they know the truth, the common sense truth that wars are easy to start and they're very difficult to stop and they're troubled. The media in Japan, interestingly, I just left there, I lived there for 13 years total felt that Israel had a disproportionate response in Gaza. So it's a different lens than you get in the West. And they're worried about the. The conflict now with Iran because they're worried that it could spiral into something worse. They really are for. For a samurai culture that underlies them and that hasn't gone away. It's part of their nature, but their consciousness now is very pacifist.

Interesting. Do you think the samurai nature would come back?

It could. It is there. It lurks in Japanese society. Yeah. When Americans see the Japanese and we interact with them, we do see that pacifist side. And it is an aging society. Right. You're not going to start a war when your average age in the mid to upper 40s. Right. And you have so few kids. You know, the birth are so low there. But the. But the samurai spirit is so ingrained in Japanese consciousness that if push came to shove, Lee Kuan Yew once said, pushing Japan to remilitarize is like giving chocolate liqueurs to a recovering alcoholic.

That's a great quote.

It's still there. The Japanese are a warrior people. They were migrant people, so they, they had to fight. It's always been the warrior culture was there. The Chinese are agrarian by background. The Chinese were not expensive. When they were the strongest country in the world, they did not look to expand their empire. They actually built a wall, a really big wall, a great wall to keep the foreigners out. It's a very different mindset.

I've seen some things online about how all of the Turrets on the wall are pointing into China, not out of China, that perhaps it was the people on the other side of the wall that built it to keep the, the Chinese out of the Mongols out. Is there any truth to that?

No, it was to keep the Mongols out. The Mongols were a nomadic people. They were a warlike people. And the, the Chinese really are, I mean they're, they're, they're agrarian, they're poets. They were, they were, they were not an aggressive people. Yeah, the, where the Mongols were.

It's really interesting because when you look at meditation styles that come out of these things, most humans in the last few thousand years, 90% plus, were they're working in agriculture. So a lot of the meditations are the ones that would come out of a Chinese practice. They're agrarian meditation. So if you're going to be planting rice all day, right. Which is a very common thing in China. Right. Then you need this calm mind. And if you look at the Japanese meditations, you have things like satori, which is actually part of the namesake of the home neurofeedback company that's part of 40 years and it's called satoria. And that's a moment of connectedness, but it's moment to moment because you're a warrior. Or zazen, a two minute meditation for warriors instead of farmers. Because warriors won't do a two hour meditation because they want to go kill something.

Right.

So you see it all the way down into neurological regulation. That seems like it's based on society. So how does this relate to Americans? Like what are we doing?

It's interesting. This goes all the way back to Star wars for me as a seven year old watching that movie. And what I'm more and more convinced is that George Lucas was writing about the left brain that was dominating Western society. The machines were taking over. And that Obi Wan was telling Luke to take off, to, to put on the mask, to close his eyes, not to trust his rational mind, to trust his intuition. And he said, turn off the guidance computer at the end. Use the force. You trust your instincts for destroying the Death Star. And maybe the Death Star is AI. And the Japanese people reason very differently. Americans, we tend to reason in a linear manner, subject, object, step by step. The Japanese or Chinese don't have a native word for the word logic. Hajime Nakamura, the great scholar of Japan, said they never even conceived of the concept of knowledge, of logic. Sorry. Because there was no need for logic in Japanese society. It's always contextual, it's always context based. Right. It's a very hierarchical society. It's a very harmony based society, consensus.

Based and interdependence versus independence, interdependence.

We think of everything as step by step. They think of it as systems, systems thinking. The Chinese too. And so the Western mind may have gone a little bit too far in terms of linear logic and linear thinking. And what's interesting about that is when you become too rational, the Japanese call it means you're overly rational. And it's very much a negative term because you're not considering context. The Japanese are very right brained in this sense. And what we can learn, what it means for Americans is that we can learn from the Japanese, I think to help balance ourselves better. The Japanese image of meditation is to be like a pond at night. And if you can be perfectly still, it will very accurately reflect the moonlight. And if you can get your mind to be perfectly still. And Steve Jobs talked about this a lot. That intuition, he said, trust your heart, it knows what you want to become. That he spent six, seven months in India and he found the discovered how intuition is more powerful than rational and abstract thought. And I think that's what we can learn from the Japanese because when we've got our devices now, people doom scrolling all the time, we're very distracted, we're very cause and effect oriented. That if we can learn from the Japanese the, the art of mindfulness. The character on my T shirt is mu. It means nothing as in complete nothingness. And when they say mushin means it's the Buddhist term of it is without obstructive thoughts. And if we could practice that discipline and Steve Jobs says it's a discipline, you have to work at it. But if you work at it and you calm the mind, eventually the expanse opens up in the moment. I think that's what we could really learn from Japanese thinking.

I could not agree more. When you do Joe Dispenza's meditation work, he talks about step into nothingness. When people reach that state at 40 years is then when they're doing a neurofeedback. I call it the unmanifest. But there's this kind of blank thing where you, you truly stop thinking. And if you're not thinking, well, there's a signal, you just weren't paying attention to it. And you can direct the signal. But it's hard to put words to all these states, which is why I use tech. How can someone listening to this apply this understanding of, you know, if westerns are too linear, does that mean we should become less linear. Is there a way we can when for working with someone who is from Japan or from China or from somewhere else, is it better to see it their way? Do we need to call Chris Voss and you know, do some negotiating? Like how is this applicable to helping me navigate better?

So I think to the first point that, that no thought, it's. It's a mindfulness. And for linear thinkers, it tends to go towards thinking that it's mindlessness that's different. That's because we have, we believe in linear time. When we think of the concept of eternity, to us it means a long, long, long, long, long time. But if you're in a circular time framework, eternity actually is time getting shut out. And for a Westerner, yes, I think being less linear and allowing the right brain more scope to the left brain's really good at solving problems. I think Joseph Sock said that, said this, the guy that discovered the polio vaccine. He said the is great at telling the rational mind what to think about and that we as Westerners could use our intuitive minds more. Our mindfulness. Forgetting the past, you know, depress. Depressing thoughts come from worrying about the past. Anxiety comes from worrying about the future and focusing on the present. There was a Zen story, my Aikido teacher always used to say that there was a guy hanging on a branch, a rickety, weak branch on the side of a cliff, and there was a tiger at the top of the cliff that was going to eat him and he was going to fall 100 meters to his death below. But he noticed a strawberry right next to him growing out of the side of the cliff. He ate the strawberry and it was delicious. I love that. And I couldn't understand it at first, but eventually what he meant was, you have to forget about the depressing facts about the past and the anxiety of the future and focus on the moment and enjoy the moment. Because to the Japanese, life is really ephemeral and you have to enjoy it here and now and be present in the here and now. So I think for Westerners and Americans, that is what's missing in our society. You know, Tony Robbins always talks about the science of achievement and the art of fulfillment. Westerners are, we're the best in the world at the science of achievement. The, the advances have been incredible, but the art of fulfillment is where we really need work.

When you put it that way. I've taken all the stuff that I learned in Silicon Valley about the art of achievement and said, well, why don't I just apply that towards fulfillment? What are the pros and cons of that strategy?

You have to live in this world. And if you go to ancient Indian philosophy, the ideal was you wore the outside robes of a member of society, a contributing member of society, but you had the inside robes of someone that was meditative, that understood the ephemeral nature of life. And in their belief system, circular time, this world, there are infinite worlds that come in and out of being. And when you accept that, you let go of all the attachments of life. And that's how you get, you know, Satori you're talking about, that's actually the first name of the inventor of bitcoin, interestingly.

Ah, Satoshi.

Yeah, yeah, Satoshi. Yeah. It's the same derivation. Nakamoto means the source. Interesting there. And so we can get, I guess satoru means to wake up in the sense of enlightenment, waking up. And you have to balance both those outside robes of being a contributing member of society, but also your own inner salvation.

Have you looked in the mirror and.

Noticed your hair isn't as full as.

It used to be? It's because your scalp ages just like your skin.

But instead of fine lines and wrinkles, aging can affect your hair follicles and how your hair actually grows. Senescent cells, or what you know as zombie cells, if you read my books, are major causes of age related hair loss, even thinning. And they can start to build starting in your 20s. And when those cells accumulate, they contribute to having thinner hair, a shorter hair growth cycle, and they're linked to male pattern hair loss and stress induced hair loss. So what do you do about it? One Skin, the company that makes amazing skin care things that I use, just came out with a peptide scalp serum called os1 hair and it's incredible. It contains the powerful os1 peptide. The scientists at Oneskin formulated the serum to target the cellular senescence that's up primary cause of age related hair loss and thinning. Two months after I started using it, people started commenting, wow, your hair looks a lot thicker than it did before. And I'm really genuinely impressed with how quickly it works. And the science is very strong backing it up. In fact, the studies show 40% improvement in thickness and density of new hair. That's a big number, your hair. It's just not about looking good. It's a sign of overall health and longevity. So if you want to make your hair better than it is today, give it a try. Get to the root of hair loss and thinning with One Skin's peptide scalp serum. It's Called OS one hair. And it is on my list of I must have this because I like my hair. Go to Oneskin co Dave. They'll give you 15% off. This stuff really works. The universe is actually quantum. At least that's what quantum physics, hard science is showing us. Even though we don't really see it, a lot of things that we do in our life drains your energy and it disrupts your quantum energy. There are things you can do about it. Chronic stress, EMFs, environmental toxins make you feel bad. I think we all know that and we work to eliminate those or to reduce them as much as we can. But what if you could actually increase your quantum energy field so that you were more resilient to these things? It turns out you can. And there's a technology called Quantum Upgrade that comes in. It's a cutting edge quantum streaming service that provides quantum energy. Yeah, I know that doesn't sound believable, except it works. And it's not a woo woo concept. The team at Quantum Upgrade ran randomized double blind placebo controlled studies to get the hard data. And in one study, Quantum Upgrade as a service completely neutralized the negative effects of 5G exposure on blood flow. Another double blind study found it makes red blood cells more flexible and improved improves their ability to carry oxygen. It increases ATP production by up to 29%. And those are just a few of the cool things it can do. When you sign up, you can link your phone, your home, your business, even your pet with their energy source. And the cool thing is you don't need to believe in something for it to work. Quantum Upgrade has the science, the testimonials, and now over 13 placebo controlled studies backing what they do. Even though it sounds pretty incredible, I use it because I like to follow the the science. Try Quantum Upgrade free for 15 days. You don't even need to enter your credit card. Go to QuantumUpgrade IO Dave and just click Pay later at checkout. 15 days. Give it a try, See what you see.

You know, I want to say last time we met was six years ago at 40 years of Zen and six years later, you look younger than you did in 2019. So whatever you're doing, everyone listening, we should all be listening and learning from Dave.

Well, thank you. I do have to confess. Part of it is I had a facial circumcision. I had so much extra skin from being obese. I had 28 square inches of skin just on my face. I had a picture of me like grabbing a handful on each side. More than you would get from aging. And I just said, you know, I cut my toenails when they get too long, like I'm going to do something about this. I did a bunch of stem cells and I, like, put it all up on Instagram. I tell people what I do, but my skin is way better than it was. That's all the nutritional and all the other things. And the rest of us have very young tissues. But what do you do with, you know, half a bath towel worth of extra skin? I haven't figured that one out yet. So maybe the Japanese. No.

Well, seeing you today made me think of something. Yeah. If people listening to your show are following these protocols and they're living to 120, 150, 180 years old, then we need to rethink finance.

I've been saying this to very ultra wealthy people. In fact, the way I funded Bulletproof, I don't know if we ever talked about this. An investment bank in, in Asia hired me to fly around the world and teach hedge fund managers how to increase their IQs. So I, I was basically the bait to get their salespeople into the room with the money traders. And that was my seed capital for Bulletproof. So I, I got to know what's happening at the very high level of finance with, with biohacking. And part of my pitch was, you know, about compound interest. Right. Well, what happens if you extend life even by 20 years, like your own life? So you should put 5% of your annual income, even if you're a billionaire with a lot of capital gains, put that into longevity, because it's the highest roi, even if you just get a few years just looking at the interest returns. So not to mention quality of life and all the other good stuff that people are after. You said something earlier, really important about the population crash in Japan. It's happening in the US and Italy and most of the developed nations. So either society collapses, which I'm serious about in our lifetime, or we make our old people young again. It's the only choice. And we should probably pay our young kids to have a lot of kids, but I don't think most societies are going to do that for whatever reason.

So it's really interesting. My background is East Asia and Confucian societies, when they're poor, have more kids than anyone else.

Almost everywhere on the planet does that.

Right.

Africa's that way.

Well, that's how we ended up with 1.4 billion Chinese. The opposite end of the spectrum is when they become wealthy, everyone has fewer kids. When they become wealthy. But Confucian societies have even fewer.

Oh, wow.

So if you look at China today, the total fertility rates down to one one child.

Wow.

Japan's a little better, about 1.2 Kore. Korea is the outlier at 0.7. So Korea's going away, Korean is going away. They've stopped having babies in Korea. And there are a number of reasons for it.

Is it blue LEDs?

Absolutely.

There are, That's a contributor.

Yeah. Wi fi. The pollutants in China especially the pollution's so bad. It's a factor there. The sperm counts in China. I was investing in a company that, that looked into this and they stopped releasing the data. But when I first met them, they would tell you how the sperm counts had. You know, I think in the US for my kids it's one quarter the level of my grandfather. But in China it was something like 1/8.

And testosterone also and sperm count. So we're just, just losing our fertility.

But there, there are also other factors where as you become rich, you want your kids to have good educations. And in China it's so time and money intensive to raise a child that people are just choosing to have one child because you, the, the goal is to get them into Harvard. So they're, they're really just focusing on that one kid instead of having three or four. And you would ask them, well, why don't you just have three kids and send them to like the University of Texas great schools? And that in their face driven society. That's not the, that's not an option.

And I guess they forgot about Genghis Khan. You know, he had a few kids in Asia.

Yeah, that's another interesting point of view. I mean that's, that would be a little more controversial. But when I, when I study the Chinese population issue, in the old days, China had the concept of multiple wives. Right. You've heard of the second wife, third wife? They weren't actually wives, they were concubines. But you would, but you would have kids with them. And, and the communists put an end to that, which was a good thing.

But why was it a good thing?

Well, as a Western, you know, I'm a Catholic, so as a Catholic, it.

Was a good thing.

I'm for monogamy.

Okay.

Right.

As a Chinese, like, you know, you want the country, like if they're having less babies as it, maybe it wasn't a good thing for that society.

Yeah, well, they had the overpopulation problem, so they went with the one child policy, but they kept it for far too long. And then when they removed it, the birth rate actually collapsed from that level. It had a short term bump as the people pulled forward. Oh, I'm allowed to have another baby. But once they had their babies, it's really collapsed since then. And Chinese women, it's become a very materialistic society because they don't have religion pretty much. And the women talk about the five C's A man has to have a condo, a car, a career, a club, you know, belong to a social club. I think carat for diamond, there's probably a 6C, I'm forgetting. And if men don't fit these criteria, they don't want to marry them. And in Chinese society, women do not like to marry a man with lower education level. It's really a face issue. I'm sure it's a human characteristic, but it tends more strongly in China. And so there's been this big crash in marriages also. And in China they don't have many babies out of wedlock. So it's led to this big decline in babies. And also because China's nonlinear, they tend to sometimes miss cause and effects. So in order to reduce the number of divorces, they've created laws that make it much more difficult to get divorced. But they didn't think of the effect of that, which is women. Unmarried women today are saying, well, if I don't have the option of getting divorced, I don't want to get married. So new marriages fell even further. So these societies are ahead of us in the west in terms of the population crash. Japan started first, but Korea is declining at a faster rate in their belief system. I feel they are okay with it in Japan and Korea. They want to maintain the homogenous society. There's no immigration, virtually none. And they're going to replace the labor with robots. So they're going to have smaller societies with robot labor. And if robots and AI really do take the jobs away, then they're not going to have an unemployed working class because they're not going to have that population group.

They're going to have to have a lot of robot army people too, to protect their empty cities.

Then yeah, economically it's going to be very, very difficult. China, everyone's extrapolating this big growth for China, the Chinese century, but it's not going. There'll be a strong economy in the 21st century, but it's not going to be dominated by China. They're on trajectory for a long slowdown. No crash in China. People always get it wrong. They're either super China bulls and they extrapolate the growth. That's wrong, or they see a China crash coming that's wrong. It's going to be a long landing. There's no hard landing. There's no long sustained growth either.

So what India, is that, is that what's going to happen? And they're going to, they've, they're not having the same population crash. So just by virtue of having more people, will that be dominant?

So India is tricky. They're coming from a very low base and their economy is growing very fast. And Prime Prime Minister Modi has put in some very good growth policies. They've got a fantastic population pyramid compared to Asia. Indians are abstract, intuitive thinkers. They're very good at software. And as we go into an AI world, I think India is very well positioned for an AI world. Japan is very, they're literal intuitive thinkers. They're very good at the hardware. Japan's probably going to provide a lot of the hardware for the AI world. India's not good at hardware, they're not good at infrastructure. And they simply didn't follow China's growth model. So they're not going to have that type of fast growth and they may end up with an excess of population in this AI robot autonomous production automation world.

Are you arguing that the reason that India hasn't been as good at hardware and infrastructure, it's a cultural lens on the world?

Yes, absolutely.

That's interesting.

I remember talking to a government official in India and he was, I was, you know, this was 2005. I was saying, you, you should follow the Chinese economic model. It's working. You guys can adopt it too. Free trade zones. If you invest in infrastructure, when your country has very little infrastructure, the multiplier is very high. Building those first bridges, those first highways, it's great. And he said, no, the Chinese bridges are to nowhere. They're very little utilization, very few cars on them. In India, when we have a bridge, they're full of people on them. And I thought we're talking about completely different realities. I've traveled around China, I've traveled around India. India is crying out for better and more infrastructure. But they couldn't see it. And I think it's because of their abstract thinking and their focus.

And it's interesting, as a Westerner, I say, well, show me the data, right, let's get a spreadsheet like, like there is a, an objective reality here. And that said, I know I have a bunch of cognitive biases that I have no visibility into because they're built into my reality. Is there a strategy you found because you've, you've moved between these different cultures and said them so much a way that we can become more aware of our cognitive biases.

So, like you, I had an epiphany in Tibet. I was in Tibet in the 90s, and it's such a completely different culture than America. It couldn't be more different. And as you're there and you're watching people walking around with their prayer wheels and they're chanting, they have different chants, but the. And they would say this over and over and over, and I'm not an expert here, I think it means the jewel is in the eye of the Buddha or something. Someone could correct me on that. But it's a, it's a meta. It's a mantra. They say over and over all day long. And you see people that are prostrating themselves on this very dirty ground, on pilgrimages that could go for hundreds of miles, one body length at a time. It didn't make any sense to my rational mind.

Like their, their knees and their forearms are just callous. Like they've been doing this for impossible levels of things. Right.

And what is the mythology that supports this culture, this society? I. I was. And so you. I did have the yak butter tea when I was there. Because that's what you ate. That's so cool. And I didn't realize to go back and put butter in my coffee. But what came to me was I was watching this woman and we had a connection. I couldn't speak her language, she couldn't speak mine, but we were just sitting there observing each other. And she was sitting, spinning a prayer wheel, and I was watching her spin it, and it was very hypnotic. And I realized that the belief system in that part of the world is that time is always circular. And we believe in circular time seconds. You know, it's Monday again, it's 8pm Again, it's spring, it's summer, it's June again. But in terms of years, we believe in linear time. You can't say it's 1989 again. As much as I wish that would happen, it just can't be. We think time goes forward. There was the big bang 13, 8 billion years ago. Science told us, and that was the beginning. And time goes forward from there. Or religion tells us God created heaven and earth. God said, let there be light. And that was the beginning of the world. To Westerners, to Easterners, from India eastward, it's infinite. Universes come in and out of being. Every time Brahman opened and closes his eyes. And that has profound implications because one, it means that there are no set reference points. For them everything is relative. Whereas for us we do have fixed points. And because of linear time we developed linear logic. Whereas for them everything's relative. And then also because you infinite worlds coming in and out of being. That means we've existed infinite times before we're going to exist infinite times again. The diminution of the ego is something in the west that we don't get. Because in a linear world, we're unique, one of a kind, one time only. Snowflakes. You know, in the west we have resurrection. When Lazarus woke up, he's still Lazarus. But in the east they have reincarnation. And you could be reincarnated as a butterfly or a king or a banana. It could go in depending on your karma.

I would choose eggplant.

Eggplant. It's a totally different conception. Just to jump in. I think this is interesting on the economic point of view. If you go to 1800, China and India were 50 over 50% of global GDP at the time.

Wow.

But the linear thinking Westerners developed the scientific method. It's not that these societies never noticed gravity, but you know, there's no word which in Chinese or Japanese, which, which, you know, the apple fell to the earth, which was drawn by gravity, which was caused by a larger mass attracting a smaller mass.

They can't connect the thoughts linearly.

They couldn't connect them linearly.

Wow.

And so we did with the scientific method. And then from 1820 on, there was this massive development of the West. And if you go to 1970, China and India were sub 10% of global GDP, closer to 5%. China was so bad, their GDP per capita was below India in 1975. And that's why out of the west we've developed everything. You know, so much science here, cars, electricity, computers, the Internet, light bulb, capitalism, market economics, it all came out of the West. But they were able to imitate the scientific method. And that's why China and Japan were able to catch up so fast. They haven't been able to readapt their economy for the next phase of growth. That's a separate issue. But it's that linear thinking that helped us develop so fast in the West. And we've been in a Newtonian science world, but as we develop, as we move forward into a quantum mechanics world, you know, with entanglement, and something is and isn't at the same time, linear logic no longer works in Fact, it's.

Provable that cause and effect are not real. They're just a really useful model for navigating reality. That always throws me for a loop. It took me a long time to, to get to that because if you study the, the deep quantum physics, reincarnation or at least lack of dying, or dying being a change of state, it appears to be what's actually happening. We just are unable to see it with our eyes and our senses. Doesn't mean it's not real though. And so I've looked really deeply into that when I was writing, heavily meditated and just the, all the spiritual work I've done before that and got to the point where I believe the most rational thing that you can, you could choose around this afterlife thing is just belief in reincarnation. Aside from my own direct experiences with it and things I don't think are deniable, it doesn't matter, it's rational. So if you're a Westerner who's very logical, left brain, you want to believe in reincarnation because if you're wrong, you won't know. And if you're right, great, you'll have benefits. But in the meantime, having less fear of death means that you have a more fulfilled life. So it is just provably in every system of logic I'm aware of the belief system that leads to the best life, regardless of whether it's actually real.

Problems with that? No, I have no problem with that. Joseph Campbell always said, stick with the software you grew up with, that's what's going to serve you best. And I think there are people out there, like you and me that like to test other softwares and see what works for us, virtual machines everywhere. And I encourage anyone to do that. But in general, the software you grew up with is what's going to work best for you.

It's funny when you talk about linear time. I think maybe Ken Wilbur, who was on the show with his spiral dynamics, has a good picture of that and time being non straight or nonlinear. It's more of a spiral. When you really get into the deep teachings in the east, right? So it's circular, but it's not the same circle. It's a, it's spiraling up and maybe spiraling out. But if you're on a road, that's that spiral, it's going to look like a straight flat road, just like flat Earthers are saying, well I looked around, it looks flat here, it must be flat, I think in the west when it comes to time. So I Looked around, time sure looks like it's linear, but we're missing the spiral. It's the same problem.

It's fascinating for you to say that for me, you know, Einstein said time is, to a physicist, just a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Yes.

The Chinese view of the world, you know, we thought, oh, they'll come into the WTO as they get wealthy, they'll become democratic because we think it's this linear process. But so I studied when I finished college, I went to Japan. I was there for two years, learned Japanese and I thought, oh, I want to learn Chinese, you know, before I get married and have a mortgage and kids. So I went to China to learn Chinese and I thought, who learns English? The best in America are the kids that study at US Universities. So I thought, I'm going to study at a Chinese university. I tested into one as a local student. Took me a long time. And I studied there as a local student.

Wow.

And I learned to see the world through their point of view. And their model of the world is what you were describing, a circular spiral going up. And their view is that originally pre agriculture, we were primitive communist societies. And then as agriculture developed, we became slave societies. And then that developed into feudalistic societies. Feudalistic societies develop and it's all technological changes develop into capitalist societies. And they believe that technology, AI, big data, you can hear this in Xi Jinping's speeches, are going to push us into a socialist economy. Because if AI and automation end up doing all the jobs, how are you going to manage society? And that socialism eventually develops back into communism. And if you're looking at the spiral from above, it just looks like a circle. It goes communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism. But if you look at it from the side, it's actually a rising spiral. That's their view because they have a non linear view of the world. And Deng Xiaoping had the great problem of China was very feudalistic. And Mao tried to bring them straight to communism. That was a disaster with the Great Leap Forward and you know, the madness of the Cultural Revolution. And how do you go from feudalism to. To socialism? Capitalism's the middle step. But they were communist, but they're also relative truth believers. So Deng said, we're going to call this market economics with Chinese characteristics. And China became more capitalistic in many ways than the US and the growth was fantastic. They pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Deng was a huge success with this. Because of relative truth, he was able to change the name of it. And now they what they call it is early socialism now, I think is what they're calling capitalism. And then Xi Jinping wants to take them into like, develop advanced socialism, which is really the real socialism phase before we get to. To the communist phase. But it's that spiral you are talking about. Wow.

One of the things that, that frustrates me about the west, and I'm, you know, a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S. so that makes me definitely a Westerner. And I can speak a little bit of Spanish when I want to, but not that much. So definitely a Westerner. But I've traveled the world and seen all these things. The problem I have is that in the west, we've fetishized democracy. And if you look at all the different types of government that there are, the role of government is to extract as much from the population as possible. Ultimately, that's what they do. Well, it turns out democracy results in the highest amount of income for the government from the people, more so than communism or socialism or even just a king or a dictator, especially a benevolent one. So when the west is like, we will force democracy down your throats. I'm not sure that's what we want. And people say, well, it's so good, Dave, you're lowering the cost of biohacking. You're democratizing. I'm like, no, I don't want people to vote for whether I can do biohacking. I just want to make it affordable for everyone. So democratizing has a pretty dark side to means mob rule unless you have rules behind it. And those rules, even if it's a republic, they're moving it away from democracy more towards socialism.

Right.

So maybe I'm becoming a relative truther. That's kind of scary.

So what's interesting about Americans, for me, going over and spending 30 years in Asia, I've. I've developed a new LE to understand America. And the challenge with Americans is with our belief in absolute truth is it crowds out common sense. And so you get the ideas such as fat is bad for you. It's an absolute statement. And if you were to say to a Japanese person or Chinese person, good fat is good for you, bad fat is bad for you, they would say, why? Why? That's common sense. Why? But if you tell an American that, they would get confused. They'd say, oh, I thought fat was bad for you.

Ah, that's more nuanced.

And so the more, you know, the, the more people try and take fat out of their diet in America, the fatter they get. And it happens with Our government too. We think democracy is an absolute good, but it depends upon context. The prerequisite for a democracy is an educated populace. And if you're going to go to a country like Iraq with a completely different historical background, a completely different educational system, a completely different religious system that believes there's no separation between the state and religion, the church and state is not separate in Iraq. In their belief system, it's the same. And you're going to try and force democracy onto that system. It's going, it has to be a total failure.

So this, it's kind of like installing Windows on your Mac. Yeah, it's, you might really want it to work, but it's not.

It's the wrong software for the hardware. And Americans with their absolute truth belief that if it's right for us, if this is the correct path to the top mountain peak, it's the right path for everybody and our goal should be the mountain peak, not the path.

Very well said. I, I've just learned, I, I definitely was that exact mindset, very, very scientific rational. But I'm like, enjoy your path to the top. And if you fall off the side of it, it's not like I didn't tell you, but you still have a right to fall off the side of it. And I'm not going to suffer because you chose to do something stupid, but that, you know, you're not allowed to make me suffer because you chose to do something stupid. And it's funny because that becomes almost libertarian, but it allows for freedom of religion and freedom of governance and everything else like that. So maybe it's the, the don't tread on me old, you know, 17, 1800American thing. Where's the role for individualism in all these, these discussions we're having around the different cultures?

It's ironic. In the west we definitely develop the culture of individualism. And this predates Judeo Christian impact on the West. It actually comes out of our hunting societies. Oh, interesting that when you're chasing woolly mammoths around, the person that's really good with the spear to kill them is, is super important. The role of the individual is paramount. Whereas if you're in a rice farming community where it's everyone working as a group, the, the harmony of contributing to the group and not standing out. And you know, the Japanese say the nail that sticks out gets hammered back in. It's a totally different mindset. And we in the west believe one person, one vote, all people are created equal. This to hierarchical relative truth societies. That doesn't make any sense. So they have a totally different philosophy on it. The irony of it is their education system can become very, especially in Japan, very individualistic, very. Because to our left brain minds, you're teaching one thing. The teacher gets in front of the class and teaches it, and everyone learns the same thing. And either the smart kids are bored because you're teaching at this level, or the kids that are not as good at it are lost because you're teaching at that level. In Japan, they don't believe knowledge can be transferred person to person. As Mr. Miyagi said to Daniel San and Karate Kid learn karate from a book. You have to learn it experientially. And so in math class, all the kids are working on different problems because they're working at their own level. And the teacher's not there to teach them to do the math. It's just to make sure they're working at their own level and improving incrementally. And the results on math scores, you know, speak for themselves how much better they do and that it is actually teaching at an individual level. In American math, you know, we don't want kids practicing. We don't want them getting good at math. Totally bizarre. We have this belief. This is the one part. You know, the greatest thing about American culture is this can do attitude. We're optimists. You know, the people that got on the boats that came to America were optimists, otherwise they wouldn't get on the boat. We believe I. I can find a way. You know, in Japan and China, they say Shogun AI or Mei Ban fa, There's nothing can be done about it. We believe something can be done. Except for math. Oh, he's good at math. Oh, she's bad at math. And that's that. Whereas in Asia, in China or Japan, they're like, she's bad at math. Well, then have her practice more. She'll get good at math. It's the one area they believe can improve.

You're reminding me of a YouTube video I saw a while back, and someone had made like a fake book jacket, and it said math for non Asians. And they're sitting on the subway reading this book and just recording all the people laughing at them. Mostly Asians going, right, he's right, he's right. And you're explaining that it's the way that they're learning it. But there, there are some things that I, I wanted to ask you about. One is, so I wrote the Bulletproof Diet, and this book really changed the way we talk about Fat and health. It sold 600,000 copies in Japan without any marketing. That's a lot of copies of books. So I flew over there and because I know something about Japanese culture, I've always just respected Japan deeply. I know about the Hokkaido region where the good grass fed butter in Japan is. And I said, well, this is the kind of butter to use. But I go to do a book signing. I don't speak Japanese, not even a little bit. And the first book, you know, this couple, this young couple comes and they set the book down to sign and then they lift up their shirts. You don't lift up your shirt in Japan ever. And, and I'm sort of stunned. Like this is a polite culture. I'm wearing a sport coat here. Like I'm being respectful. And they said ab. And I'm like, what do they say? And I was like, oh, abs. They were showing me the abs. They grew because they're willing to try something new. And Japan is one of the biggest book reading cultures out there. I don't know how it compares to China, but I may be doing more tech. What is it about knowledge and wisdom transfer that happens differently in the east and the West?

So what's funny about the story is Japan's original religion is Shintoism. That's a nature religion. So in the west we had the fall in the garden. Nature's corrupted. In Japan, there was no fall in the garden. Anything natural is by definition good. So they don't have the taboos that we have, for example, around sex or nudity.

Well, they don't have any sex in Japan.

I thought they don't have many babies.

Okay, I'm kidding.

But. But yeah, there's been a big decline in sex and.

But there's all the weird kinky stuff in Japan beyond belief.

Oh yeah, because they call it weird in the west. But I think they have no qualms about that because it's natural. And so if you're in a bathroom in Japan, there'll be a woman there cleaning the toilets right next to you. And that always was weird to me. In China that would not happen happen. But in Japan with the nature religion, you go to the bath houses, there are still some mixed bath houses. But you know, everyone gets naked in the, in the onsen because it's natural. It's natural. There's nothing. So the person lifting up their shirt to show you their stomach, it's natural, there's nothing wrong.

That makes so much sense.

Okay. Yeah.

Thank you for explaining that.

Sharing their belly, their abs that they're proud of with you. They don't have the hang ups on that. The problem with the nature religion is that, you know, like In World War II they went a little crazy. They don't have any rules of warfare because how do you have rules for nature? It's unrestrained. Yeah.

Big lions don't have rules about hunting.

Yeah, it's unrestricted. So that's another different angle on the difference between us and them. Your question was the transfer of knowledge in Asia and wisdom. So we believe, and it worked great for us, that you have a theory, you prove it and you show step by step how it works and the brilliance of this and why the west, you know, groove to dominate the world economically was because if you do that step by step, other people can see it and learn from it. Whereas in the east, knowledge is transferred indirectly and it must be individually learned, learned through experience. It's so for example, if you're building a nuclear reactor and you want a nuclear reactor vessel, this multi ton steel sphere in the middle of it, only one company in the world, a Japanese company, can make it as a single piece. Oh wow. The Russians can make it, but it's two halves welded together. But the safest is this individual piece and it comes from a company that 300 years ago was making samurai swords.

Of course it does.

And when you.

They're alchemists.

They're alchemists. And what temperature do you dip the, dip the sword into the water? What temperature is the water? How long do you leave it there? It was never recorded. It was taught to, you know, master, to disciple. And it was, it was intuition. It was a felt sense. And over many, many, many generations that technology is what they use to build these giant. Turn a giant, an ingot into a giant reactor vessel. It's as much art as it is science. And so their transfer of knowledge. And so the Japanese, if you take a Japanese machine tool, so a six axis machine tool, cutting machine, and you're cutting precise parts, their precision is going to be 3 to 4 microns per axis. If it's a Korean or Taiwanese machine tool, it's going to be 7 or 8 or 9 microns. The Chinese one's about 15 and they haven't been able to improve on that. Wow. And it's because of the art as much of science aspect, the craftsmanship aspect of how Japanese knowledge wisdom gets passed down generation to generation.

That is so cool. And it's something that you would never see if you're just looking at it. But you can, can you can measure it and it, it makes a lot of sense. If we go downstairs after recording this, I have a, a handful of carefully crafted folded steel knives because I always appreciate the workmanship that it took to fold the knives. Good thing I'm not in Britain where apparently having a steak knife is illegal these days. That's so weird. All right, I want to talk about personal finance with you because in addition to studying all these different views on reality, you've spent 30 years in finance and you're focusing on helping people with personal finance. So walk me through the big overview, especially in the west, what do we get wrong about personal finance?

Let me start by saying sorry, I'm very Eastern now. I like to provide context. My philosophy on life is learn, earn, return. From 0 to 30, you want to focus on to learn. 30 to 60, it's time to earn and 60 to 90 to return. And after it's a 25 year career in finance, I want to shift to the return phase. And so my goal now is to help teach Americans how to be better at personal finance and personal finance. It's not easy, it's difficult, but it's very simple. You need to earn money, you need to save money and you need to invest money. And the biggest problem Americans make, there are two problems. One is on the earning phase. Kids get degrees in college and they get racked up with student loans.

Disgusting.

Slavery. These are non recourse loans. They're stuck with them for their life and they're getting degrees that aren't going to provide income to help them pay off those loans. And they become debt slaves, really, the rest of their life paying that off and then they end up with debt and other parts of their lives. Credit card, auto loan.

It's brutal.

Brutal. So that's a huge mistake that kids make.

So number one, don't get student loans.

Well, so I knew you're going to. So the master, the guru on this that we want to learn from is Warren Buffett. And he summed it up perfectly. He said, do not borrow money unless the return on that money is higher than the cost of borrowing that money. If you're getting a student loan to get a master's degree or undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering, you know, the US is going to build a lot of nuclear plants over the next 30 years. Can be huge demand for nuclear engineers. If you're getting a STEM degree or perhaps a business degree or accounting or something where you have a line of sight on a strong income after graduation, you should get student loans. If you're getting an English literature degree, you really, really, really need to rethink that or think very carefully about how much money you're borrowing and in the invest phase of life. Also, if you're buying a car, the return on that money is negative. Your car depreciates in value as soon as you drive it off the lot. And every year that you own it, you do not want to borrow money, you know, at 8% or 10% to buy a car that's going to be losing value.

I've never bought a new car.

Yeah, and you don't want to probably never borrow to buy a car either.

When I was younger I did, but no, I, Yeah, there's no reason to do that. It's just, it's bad because you can't earn that much money and that you're paying on the loan. So I wouldn't do that.

And the part that people really miss is, so I'm paying 8 or 10% for the auto loan. I've got a car that's a depreciating asset. But the worst part of it is that money that you spent on this car when you could have bought a much cheaper option is money you could have invested. And for the last 70 years, the US equity market's risen 8% on average. Of course, some years up more, some years down more, but on average 8% plus 2 or 3% dividends, which if you reinvest them, you're getting compound 11, 10, 11% a year, meaning your money's doubling every seven years. So this money that you're spending in your youth that you could be investing is going, could have compounded and created wealth for you in your lifetime and then generational wealth for your family.

Do you think the markets are still fair? I mean, we're not trading on fundamentals in stock anymore. They're just moving like weird economic instant, real time traded. Things like the decisions around whether a stock goes up or down are quite often not based on the stuff Warren Buffett looked at in 1950.

I'm maybe going to get the quote wrong here. In the short term, the stock market is, I can't remember. In the long term, it's a weighing machine. Eventually equities do return to their fundamental values. It's just, it can be very irrational in the short term.

Okay.

And when you look at the market Today, I think BlackRock came out and said valuations look high. I think that could be a consensus. When you're thinking about investing and you're thinking about personal finance, inflation has averaged 4% per year for the last 70 years. So every year your money's losing 4% of its value. So that means every 18 years your money's losing half its value. And then you get periods like the last four years where the government just printed money like crazy and created inflation. And inflation is a terrible, terribly regressive tax. It's very bad for poor people.

And they didn't cut any of our other taxes when they taxed us with inflation. It doesn't seem fair.

No, it was very bad economic policy. And they had budget deficits up 7% of GDP. This is. You want that during wartime, not during peacetime. And so the US debt is so big now that you realize the only way out of it is pretty much they're going to be printing a lot of money in the future.

So should we invest elsewhere or get out of US Dollars now or get into gold or bitcoin?

So the US dollar loses half its value every 18 years. So in my lifetime it's lost its, you know, 87.5% of its value.

It's pretty terrifying.

Yeah, but when you look at other countries, their currencies have lost value relative to the dollar, like the Indian rupiah has lost 90% of its value since I was born relative to a dollar that's losing value. So you've lost 90%, 9% of your value there. You know, no wonder Indian people like to own gold. Yeah, but if you. Everyone owns gold. There's no multiplier for the banking system to lend that money out. That's another reason India hasn't developed well. So you do want to hold dollars relative to other currencies. But of course, diversification is good investment for anybody. And owning some gold is maybe a good idea, or owning some real estate, maybe some bitcoin, probably, when, you know, we're talking about don't borrow money unless the return on the investment is higher than the cost of the investment. And you were talking about investing in your health. That's a good place for people to invest your money. If you're investing in your health, investing in yourself is a good idea. You just have to have to do it rationally. And if we're going to be living 150 years or 180 years, the general rule in finance, personal finance, was the amount of investment you want to put in equities is 100 minus your age. So if I'm 20 years old, 100 minus 20 is 80. I want to be 80% equities because I have a lot of Time to withstand the volatility. If I'm 80 years old, 100 minus 80 is 20. I only want to hold 20% equities because I want more predictable returns because I don't know how much longer I have and I need to rely on this money. But if people are going to live much, much longer, that formula has to adapt. And you need to probably hold a higher. This is not financial advice. This is just an idea to consider. But consider holding more equities for longer because equities are protection against inflation because these companies do have pricing power.

Here's another tweak to it. You mentioned that first 10 years is learning and then you move into earning. And I, I would say keep that. Although it does appear that people are maturing a little bit later. I think it's because it's just we have less hormones. Like, there's less testosterone. There's less, like, everything's not working right. So maybe it's, you know, 22 to 32 instead of 20 to 30 or something. But it's around there. It's just creeping up. But not only are you learning, where should you invest then? I don't think it's probably equities because you don't make very much. But if you take that and you invest it in your health, you get the highest ROI on health investments that you make as a teenager and as a young adult because you're spending $5 on slightly better food that is going to save you $50,000 40 years from now or 30 years now. It's a really high ROI. So I'm like, stop spending money on alcohol and shift it into food quality and an air filter.

Right.

Get good curtains that block out light. Like the basic biohacking stuff is not very expensive and the return is lifelong. Right. So do you like that? Maybe like, allocate a percentage to health that's higher when you're young to avoid having to do it when you're later.

So I was a lost kid and. And boys tend to mature later than girls.

Yeah, a lot later, apparently. I'm still working on it.

Yeah, that's right. Something I learned from. I got those personal power tapes from Tony Robbins when I was 18 years old. And something he said really helped. He said, you look at behaviors that are bad for you and bad for society, or you don't like them, it doesn't feel good and it's bad for society, or you do like it, but it's bad for society. You don't like it, it's good for Society, Good for you, good for society. And it feels good. Good for you, good for society. And the one that stood out for me is it was bad for me and bad for. And I didn't like and bad for society was binge drinking. And I thought I should stop that.

Yeah.

And after I heard him, he gave me the idea and so I stopped drinking. I'm 30 years sober. It was the best decision I ever made. The ROI on that is incredible because your brain is clearer, you have more free time. Absolutely. People should be investing in themselves at that age. And the investment you make when you're younger helps you so much more in the future. Like the things we grew up with, like we didn't have seat belts in the car and my mom would buy Twinkies and we, we had just horrible health habits as kids. And, and I'm sorry that I couldn't go back in time and fix that. But young people today, there's so much knowledge there that they do have access to. And I think you do want to think about what are those behaviors I have that are not good for me that I should stop and that could free up money to put into areas where, oh, okay, so for me, I didn't like it, but it was good for me. Good for society was eating a better diet, exercising regularly and maybe knowing what.

A better diet is and knowing what.

A better diet is investing in. Like your books. People should buy your books and read these books because that's an investment of your time and money that's going to have a huge payoff that compounds over their lifetime. And if you can find out, I like to do it, it's good for me, it's good for society. And you bring together the Venn diagram of I'm good at this, I like doing it and society needs this. That is where you could really find your career. And I think for young people that's something that they, they should contemplate.

Have you seen the book the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity?

No.

Okay, you said something that brought it up. This is a book from an economics professor at Berkeley in the 1920s and it's actually a math based book. It takes 52 minutes to listen to audiobook and it's fantastic. And the basic gist of it is that a lot of the problems in society come from stupid people. And the definition of stupid is you will do something that provides no good for you and no good or even negative good for other people. And the rules in the book are number one, people are not stupid, always underestimate the number of stupid people. And they cannot see stupid people. And there's no defense against them because, you know, if you're Napoleon trying to. You assume that they'll be rational. But no one's going to assume that someone does something that's counter to your interest and their interest because you can't predict it. And he has all equations for all this stuff. And this is like, this is one of the reasons that society has a problem. And it has nothing to do with education, gender, race, class systems, nothing. It's just evenly distributed across people and you can't spot them. And that for me, filled in a big hole because I understand narcissism and sociopathy. And I write about those in heavily meditated. So there's people, they're not necessarily dumb, they're just self interested and willing to, you know, throw you over a cliff so they can have your cheese. Okay, fine, they got the cheese. So they're not stupid, they're just evil. But understanding that's a factor here really made me reconsider everything. And you mentioned something about binge drinking. That would be one of those two behaviors. No benefit to you. Maybe short term pleasure, but you don't remember that. And long term, everything, including your bank account taking a hit. So I'm with you on that. So don't be one of the stupid. My rule there, in terms of personal finance, I only drink things older than I am.

All right?

Which pretty much means I don't drink, right? You know, and so I've, I've, let's see, I've been dating Christina for two and a half years or something. We've had, I think, two drinks together. So like, it's just not a part of life. And interestingly, in Austin, most of the parties I go to, there's no alcohol. And there might be other substances that aren't as bad for your brain and are arguably more fun, but alcohol is just not a thing. And so I'm, I'm hopeful that that advice you're sharing with people is don't do it. The other one is about real estate though. I wanted to ask you. So when I first got going in Silicon Valley, rents were insane. So I looked and I said, I can buy a condo for half the price that I would pay for rent. So I bought the condo, right? And then it increased in value by $50,000 in two years. Like, that was amazing. Especially it was $110,000 condo. That was a nice return. But when I look around now, like the house where the studio Is it would cost me four times what I'm paying for this house to buy it. I can't find a reason to do it, except it'd be nice to get some tax benefits and, you know, appreciation and all that stuff. But it feels like for most of the us, unless you've had rich parents or some sort of big windfall, buying a house is really not likely to happen, at least not now. So real estate, homeownership, good thing, bad thing.

Today, we'll give you the Chinese answer. It depends. But when you look at the circumstances of what US policy has been, and inflation, and inflation really is. Is an evil, and a Little bit of 2% inflation is good, you need it. But when inflation got up much higher, it's very bad. And the reason is we focus on consumer price inflation, and that's really bad because poor people spend a much higher portion of their income on, say, food. And whereas rich people, it's a very small portion, they notice it, but it doesn't impact them. But the real evil is that inflation pushes up asset prices. Also, 89% of stocks are owned by the top 10% in America. And so when there's inflation, the rich really benefit it. And not to pick sides here, it doesn't change under each party. Every four years, you know, asset prices go up and the wealth cap gets bigger. It doesn't matter who's in charge.

You're not allowed to tell people that the appearance of having a choice doesn't do anything.

Yeah. Sheeple of America, wake up. The majority does win elections. Yeah.

But when they do, amazingly, not a lot changes.

Yeah. Because. Well, this gets into a different topic, but the. The poor in America have been divided into two separate groups that believes the other side's always wrong. And then the poor on this side vote and the poor on this side vote and they cancel each other out, and then they lose all their agency.

Oh, so then just the rich vote is all that's counted. Interesting. I never thought of that.

Yeah. If the poor got together and voted together, they could put people in office that would actually make policies that would benefit.

Assuming that the voting system was intact. Hacked. But as a computer hacker.

Well, I think it would work. It's just that they're prevented from coming together.

Of course.

Of course.

So what happened with this? Just massive inflation over the. Over the last 44 years. And then Trump's come in and his budget deficits, 6%, it's falling to 5%. It's still a very high level. And our debt level is so high that the interest payments on the debt are now becoming, you know, compounding, causing the debt.

Debt.

I think it's going up a trillion dollars every hundred days now or something.

That means inflation has to go up and taxes have to go up. Like what, what are Americans to do with our money?

Yeah, so inflation does have to go up to offset that debt. So you need to invest in hard assets to.

That's more like gold or business.

It could be gold. It could be as your question here is real estate businesses. Absolutely. The stock market is just an indirect way of investing in businesses. Again, Bitcoin should, could, could be part of a portfolio, something for people to consider, to study on their own and learn about. Because the supply is limited, it's actually fixed.

Right.

You know, gold goes up 2, 2 or 3% a year. Dollars supply grows faster than that. Other currencies grow even faster than that, but that has a fixed supply. So because of that inflation, real estate prices went up a lot. And so what you're talking about is affordability is not nearly as good as it used to be. And we really do fix the supply of housing in the US we don't build as much as we could. And so that leads to these high prices. And so it is a difficult decision today relative to the past on whether real estate's a good investment. Always location, location, location. If you think the return on this home you're buying is going to be higher than the cost of your mortgage and mortgages are now high 6%. It's much more difficult decision than when mortgages were 3% and home prices were much lower in a much smaller portion of income. So, so yes. And then, you know, owning a home does have costs. You have to think about that leaky.

Roof is a problem. Right.

Okay.

So would you recommend that someone young, maybe towards the end of their learning years, stretches to get into a home because they're going to ladder up?

It depends. If this is a home that you want to be in for a long period of time and paying that mortgage, because when you pay a mortgage, the, the interest goes to the bank, but the principal is paying yourself. You're paying down the equity, the principal, the equity grows, you're getting that own. If that's more than you would be paying in rent, then that's a good idea. In the US you can get 30 year fixed mortgage. You know, in an inflationary environment that fixed mortgage is a really nice option. And US homes are, are non recourse. You can walk away in, in, you know, in a bad, if you made a big mistake there. So people should still be open minded about investing in that home. But if you're going to be moving, then you have to consider will I be able to rent this house? And if it's a house in a growing city and you can get a good rent and those rents are going to grow over time but your mortgage is fixed, that could be a good idea. That could be something to consider. If it's not going to be a good place to rent and you're not going to be, you know, wedded to that place, you really probably want to keep the optionality of renting. Ask your financial advisor.

Well, Richard, your book is Culture Hacks and it's been really fun to explore how people see the world differently than you or I do. Admittedly we both have weird brains because we've been around the world a bunch, but it was enlightening. So thank you.

Thanks Dave.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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