Philosopher Johnathan Bi returns to Infinite Loops! We explore why some of the most effective builders may be the least introspective, why societies often run on useful fictions, how America encourages megalomania, the limits of materialism, and more.
My favorite episodes all end up going down paths I didn’t expect. This conversation certainly did that, moving from Plato and Caesar to mystics, the muses, and near-death experiences.
I’ve shared some highlights of our conversation below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Highlights
What is the Value of Truth?
Johnathan Bi: And so, from my own perspective and how I would want to raise kids, I want them to have to be both philosopher and builder, to be both action and contemplation. But I’m saying, if you looked at who the best men of action are, you have the really sober ones, right? And they can go quite far. You have 100 delusional ones, 99 of them are crashed out, right? Suicides, tyrants, terrorists. But one of them kind of just gets it, right? I mean, there was a recent book by Hofstadter. I can’t remember his first name, but his thesis was that evolution does not actually filter for truth, right? For example, the kind of optic nerve, where the nerve enters your brain, you should see like a black hole in your visual field.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The blind spot.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Over here somewhere, right? And your brain fills it in, because it’s better for evolution to not have a distracting black blob there. And that’s what I’m trying to get at. And maybe the deeper thing I’m trying to get at is, and this might be surprising coming from a philosopher, is that we need to examine what is the value of truth? And this is what Nietzsche asks in his book Untimely Meditations, which is, we think truth is this exhaustive, complete value. But maybe there are times where it’s good to not believe in truths. I mean, certainly societies, very successful societies, have been founded on just complete lies, right? Egyptian gods, or if you believe in the Egyptian gods and the Aztec gods, at least one of the Abrahamic religions, at most one of the Abrahamic religions is right about their core claim, right?
And so clearly falsehood, delusion ground society. And the question is, I think the individual question is very clear to me of where you want to go. You want to go on truth, you want to go on understanding. But the civilizational question of if you want to produce an innovative society, I think you’re going to have a lot of crazy people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I completely agree. And I agree on the numbers, right? It’s a power law. The 99 crash out, commit suicide, become tyrants, et cetera. The 1 figures it out. And on the societies founded on lies, I mean, in my eyes, one of the best examples of that is when Babylonia wanted to rule Sumeria, they realized they had a problem. Their god, Marduk, was a puny god. He was like a local god. And so they were like, let’s do a rewrite. And so literally they came up with a new myth for Marduk. And he took on this supernatural creature and tore it in half and threw half up creating the sky and heavens, the other half down, creating the earth. And he subsumed all of the other gods. And it worked.
Like, everyone was like, whoa, that new Marduk, we should let them run things. So I absolutely—and by the way, this goes on and on throughout history, right? Like any institution, be it the ancient rulers of Babylonia, there were the philosophers and thinkers writing the script, so to speak. And so listen, I think we also would have to get into a conversation, is there such a thing other than the notions of physics? And even there we don’t call them—most of them are still theses or hypotheses, right? If they don’t make it through the scientific method, if they’re falsified, et cetera, then they got to find a new theory. But is there like a truth with a capital T?
I find people searching for truth with a capital T often end up brain dead in ideologies, in religious beliefs, in a whole variety of beliefs that are patently untrue, right, in regard to, can we empirically test this? Right. But so I’m totally on board with you on that front. I just wonder if the age we’re going into, right, with AI getting smarter and smarter and smarter, will we see a shift to people who are more generalist, who are more polymathic in their interests because they can now understand. But more importantly, if they also combine action with it, create real new entities based on things that—if you’re just a man of action, right, if you lack the understanding for where this is going
Why Johnathan is a Seeker
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So what do you conclude?I’m—I’m sort of a Taoist. If I have to define myself.
Johnathan Bi:, I don’t know yet. Again, I’m a seeker, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So you’re a bit like.
Johnathan Bi: I know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You’re a bit like Buddha himself, right? If you read Siddhartha by Hesse, what I love about that book is Buddha’s just like, yeah, I’m doing the whole drinking my own urine thing and I’m standing on one leg and I’m not getting anywhere. So thanks, guys. I’m glad I learned this lesson, but I’m going to move on. I think the seeker category is the most interesting one because it keeps you open to things that we don’t yet even know about.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so I definitely seeker, by the way. And most people don’t remember this—philosopher is meant to be a diminutive, right? Because this is in the Symposium. If you are a lover of wisdom, you don’t have it. If you have it, you wouldn’t pursue it so fervently. So to say that one is a philosopher is a diminutive in my case.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Johnathan Bi: Because it means you’re not a wise man. And I think seeker is the same. What I’m trying to say is I don’t romanticize the seeker category. This is just where I’m at. I really want to answer this question to the best of my abilities and that’s where I’m going. I now know that certain things I think are certainly wrong.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Johnathan, what? Third time that you’ve been on Infinite Loops?
Johnathan Bi: Third time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Welcome.
Johnathan Bi: Not the tenth time I’ve been told. I was quite proud of that coming into this, but then I realized, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Alex Danco has you really beat for right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t catch up.
Johnathan Bi: Is three pretty good?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Three is definitely pretty good. And it’s kind of a lead in to my first question. It seems like you’ve had three different lives, right? You were a math competitor, you were at a startup, so you understand that ecosystem, and now you’re having great success with the lecture series. Anything across all those three that you either learned where you were like, wow, that’s just like a startup, or that’s just like what I had to do for the math competition?
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. I think the more difficult question would be what’s changed, because I see why from an outside perspective those seem like quite different career paths. But it just boils down to execution in terms of the day to day. And when it comes to it, it boils down to the same kind of ruthless execution in all three. Because when you’re running a podcast, as you well know, there’s a lot of work when it comes to doing it, and you need to be very effective at doing that. And there’s a deep intellectual component to all three. Now I’m choosing what I’m doing right now because it is the most intellectual in the way I care about. But yeah, I definitely think that they tie in together. And I’m like you, I’m a generalist. I kind of love being involved in a lot of stuff.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And there’s this big brouhaha right now with Marc Andreessen saying that founders were not introspective. I don’t know whether you saw that. It was on David Senra’s new podcast.
Johnathan Bi: I did, yeah. Senra’s a friend. And he agreed. Senra agreed with Andreessen.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. I disagree with both. What’s your view?
Johnathan Bi: I actually agree with him. Yeah, I actually agree with him.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Convince me. But before you do, are you going to bring Marcus Aurelius into the conversation?
Johnathan Bi: I’m going to bring the Straussians and maybe Plato into the conversation, who sees maybe a slightly bigger tension between action and contemplation, right? Because this is the key tension between the active life, the life of the Roman general or today the business founder, and the life of contemplation of thought. And I think throughout antiquity, these two strands have been deeply in tension. So much so that when Plato, by the way, suggested the philosopher king, right, which is the combination of these two, it was structured in the Republic as the last of three waves. So this is the part in the dialogue when Plato’s like, I’m going to give you three ridiculous ideas about how to organize society. I believe the first one was communism. It was like abolishment of private property. The second one is feminism, the elevation of women.
And the third one, which is supposed to be even more ridiculous than these two, is the philosopher king, because to the Athenians of his age, philosophers are these kind of—they think Diogenes the Cynic, right? They’re kind of living in a barrel with dogs. So maybe that’s the kind of aesthetic picture I’ll paint. But I’ll just say empirically, because I’ve been involved in the startup sphere, the most successful people that I’ve met are probably the least introspective and the least probably self-aware. And they are motivated by certain pathologies and delusions that they are not themselves aware. And that’s what keeps them going. So I’ll tell you a funny story, if that’s okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Sure.
Johnathan Bi: I won’t name the person, but he’s a good friend and someone I look up to quite a bit. And he was like, Johnathan, I’ve been motivated by this one story ever since I was a kid in Rome. This is during the civil war and it’s Caesar against Pompey. And Caesar needs to cross the Mediterranean to do some, I don’t know, reconnaissance mission or something like that. And the Mediterranean has terrible seas. It’s very difficult to pass. So Caesar hides himself in a cloak and convinces these fishermen to carry him across. And in the middle way of his passing, the seas get really rough and the fishermen want to turn back. So Caesar, so my friend tells me, reveals, lifts up his hood, says, “I am Caesar. I am destined to rule Rome. Therefore, have no fear, you will make it across.” And then he does.
And my friend, who again is this super successful man of action, was like, every time I’m in a big struggle, that’s who I think about. That’s who I want to imitate. Here’s the issue. I went back and I read Plutarch, I read Suetonius.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I could see this coming a mile away.
Johnathan Bi: Caesar does not make it across. He lifts his hood, the fishermen turn back, and he fails. I text it to my friend, the screenshot of, again, I think it was Plutarch. What does he text back to me? What would you text back? You’d be like, okay, my bad. He texts back, “Haha. That’s not how I remembered it.” As if he were there, okay? And initially I thought, what a ridiculous way—I was so shocked, right? Because as a trained in philosophy, the people I looked up to, I always thought that they had a strong drive of will to truth, that they took truth very seriously. And here in one hand, I had a model who I really looked up to. And on the other hand, he just seemed to completely disregard the very fact of existence.
But then I realized him refusing to be—him not caring about facts and having his own self-identity, his own narrative matter more than the mere facts is exactly the Caesarean way. Because Caesar didn’t say, “Well, I lifted my hood and I didn’t make it across, therefore I shouldn’t have ruled Rome.” Caesar just treated it as my friend did. “Ha ha,” right? Like, I guess the gods are wrong or something like that. And I see this just again and again, whether it’s in Musk and him making promises that clearly are fake but get the company to a place that it wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, whether it’s Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field. The text that I’ll point to here is Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. It’s his second book.
And one of the theses is that what motivates action is actually not truth, it is forgetting. It is the ability to forget certain things. And Nietzsche frames this as a lesson in history, where modern man wants to collect all the facts. We want to know what the Aztecs ate, how they shat. We want to know every single detail about their lives. Whereas in antiquity, history, as we talked about in Plutarch, is not like that at all. Plutarch sometimes just invents stuff to say, to put in the mouths of these great men, but it’s to inspire action in his day, right? It’s to have a pedagogical function. And so one way to interpret Nietzsche’s claim is that this will to truth that I and the other philosophers have, that is at best orthogonal to action.
And I want to go even stronger and say, maybe it’s in tension with action, whereas activity—I think if you were to choose the best men of action at a certain time, I think they would almost always be motivated by delusions that would pop if they were too introspective.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So my son Patrick always jokes that I ruin every sample I’m included in. But I think that the two are not mutually exclusive.
Johnathan Bi: I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think they’re deeply in tension.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Because I would not call myself the most introspective person and I’m definitely delusional and I want to push in on that. But I also want to go back to Plato and the Republic. My thesis about the Republic changed a lot when—I’m a history nerd, as you know. And I kind of started seeing the Republic as Plato’s reaction to the loss to Sparta, where Athens lost the war. And so he wanted to make sure he was still one of the in kids. And thus the Republic was born. Of course, the ideas are the ideas, but I am interested in what motivated him.
And by the way, like Plato, one of the best marketers in history, really. He would name—because his whole academy had patrons and he would name the things he wrote after those people and it all became a status prestige game. But staying on the action versus contemplation, like the famous, probably apocryphal story about the way Alexander the Great and his generals would look at the facts, so to speak, on the ground and then develop a battle plan, then they would get rip-roaring drunk at night and if they woke up the next day and still liked the plan, they would do it. But if they woke up the next day, kind of like, we probably might want to rethink this. Maybe it’s just a definition problem here.
Because contemplation, right, that does kind of scream philosophy, will to truth, all of those types of things. But can’t one do a pretty deep dive on one’s own motivations that one can see? I’m sure that there are a lot that are hidden, even though I fully admit that I am delusional, because I honestly believe that to get anything done that’s new, you kind of have to be.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, totally. So let me be more precise about my claim. I don’t think it’s necessarily mutually exclusive even to be the full form of both philosopher and king. I don’t think that. I do think there’s many mechanisms where one helps the other, right? If you’re fully delusional, maybe you can’t manage people or maybe you just—there’s so many clearly clear issues that there’s an upper limit on delusion, right? I think what I’m trying to tease out is the unintuitive mechanisms by which delusion helps action, actually. And so, as you know, I also have an interview series. And one of the series is interviewing philosopher builders, right? And you are—this is why podcasting is just a big, ancestral kind of—you interview me, I interview. Yeah, but.
And then, you know, people like Colin Moran, Francis Pedraza, and partially the reasons I’m interested in interviewing these people like yourself is that you’ve been able to synthesize these things, and it’s so rare. But you also know what? None of the people that I interviewed are the best at what they do in terms of worldly success. You didn’t build Fidelity, right? You didn’t build Vanguard. Colin is not George Soros. Francis didn’t build Palantir, right? So what I’m trying to point out is that in terms of one’s desires for living, and this was kind of the change I had to go through, I was purely on the action side, motivated by delusion. And I can tell you, if you wanted billionaire like Elon Johnathan, you wouldn’t have wanted me to do the introspection that I did in college.
But I did that because I wanted to live a good life. And so, from my own perspective and how I would want to raise kids, I want them to have to be both philosopher and builder, to be both action and contemplation. But I’m saying, if you looked at who the best men of action are, you have the really sober ones, right? And they can go quite far. You have 100 delusional ones, 99 of them are crashed out, right? Suicides, tyrants, terrorists. But one of them kind of just gets it, right? I mean, there was a recent book by Hofstadter. I can’t remember his first name, but his thesis was that evolution does not actually filter for truth, right?
For example, the kind of optic nerve, where the nerve enters your brain, you should see like a black hole in your visual field.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The blind spot.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Over here somewhere, right? And your brain fills it in, because it’s better for evolution to not have a distracting black blob there. And that’s what I’m trying to get at. And maybe the deeper thing I’m trying to get at is, and this might be surprising coming from a philosopher, is that we need to examine what is the value of truth? And this is what Nietzsche asks in his book Untimely Meditations, which is, we think truth is this exhaustive, complete value. But maybe there are times where it’s good to not believe in truths. I mean, certainly societies, very successful societies, have been founded on just complete lies, right? Egyptian gods, or if you believe in the Egyptian gods and the Aztec gods, at least one of the Abrahamic religions, at most one of the Abrahamic religions is right about their core claim, right?
And so clearly falsehood, delusion ground society. And the question is, I think the individual question is very clear to me of where you want to go. You want to go on truth, you want to go on understanding. But the civilizational question of if you want to produce an innovative society, I think you’re going to have a lot of crazy people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I completely agree. And I agree on the numbers, right? It’s a power law. The 99 crash out, commit suicide, become tyrants, et cetera. The 1 figures it out. And on the societies founded on lies, I mean, in my eyes, one of the best examples of that is when Babylonia wanted to rule Sumeria, they realized they had a problem. Their god, Marduk, was a puny god. He was like a local god. And so they were like, let’s do a rewrite. And so literally they came up with a new myth for Marduk. And he took on this supernatural creature and tore it in half and threw half up creating the sky and heavens, the other half down, creating the earth. And he subsumed all of the other gods. And it worked.
Like, everyone was like, whoa, that new Marduk, we should let them run things. So I absolutely—and by the way, this goes on and on throughout history, right? Like any institution, be it the ancient rulers of Babylonia, there were the philosophers and thinkers writing the script, so to speak. And so listen, I think we also would have to get into a conversation, is there such a thing other than the notions of physics? And even there we don’t call them—most of them are still theses or hypotheses, right? If they don’t make it through the scientific method, if they’re falsified, et cetera, then they got to find a new theory. But is there like a truth with a capital T?
I find people searching for truth with a capital T often end up brain dead in ideologies, in religious beliefs, in a whole variety of beliefs that are patently untrue, right, in regard to, can we empirically test this? Right. But so I’m totally on board with you on that front. I just wonder if the age we’re going into, right, with AI getting smarter and smarter and smarter, will we see a shift to people who are more generalist, who are more polymathic in their interests because they can now understand. But more importantly, if they also combine action with it, create real new entities based on things that—if you’re just a man of action, right, if you lack the understanding for where this is going.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, I think so. And maybe I’ll give you an even more provocative example other than Babylon. It was Babylon, right, about lies grounding society. I’m doing a lot of work on the American founding right now in preparation of 250, which is coming in July 4th. And I was reading the Declaration and it just struck me—no one really believes in the key philosophical underpinning of the Declaration anymore. I still think America is majority Christian, although—but even among Christians in America, I don’t think most of them believe in the natural rights tradition. Like God has given people these natural rights.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Inalienable.
Johnathan Bi: Inalienable rights that are somehow self-evident. And so again, that just goes to show that in a fully functioning, in the most powerful society in the world, it could be grounded on things that—I’m not saying whether they’re true or not. I’m saying that the people don’t believe that truth doesn’t have this kind of, again, this kind of ultimate value in social life. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And now we’re circling around a point where I think we can come to agreement because I’ve always thought of America as really one of the first countries founded on ideas, right? Not necessarily true ideas, aspirational ideas, most definitely. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And as I’m sure you know, the original line was the pursuit of property. And they’re like, we should maybe make it a little more general. But in much the same way that Kennedy got us to the moon. When Kennedy made that speech in the early 1960s, every engineer that was at NASA or in the United States, they were like, yeah, we don’t have any ability to do everything he just said, but he set the goal right out here. Outlandish at the time and ultimately we got to it.
That’s why I’m a huge believer in the power of fiction and specifically in terms of innovation, science fiction becomes science faction. And what do you think about that process? I’m really intrigued by it because if you don’t have this thing to get people’s minds engaged, even if it sounds at the time that you say it—a more contemporary example would be Bezos. “I’m going to be the biggest bookstore in the world.” What? Yeah, you know, like, huh. And of course he became much more than that.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. When I talk about delusion, I think I’m referring to something slightly different than these things in the objective world, like Amazon’s going to be the biggest, we’re going to go to the moon, which did end up being true. I think what I’m really referring to is like megalomania. Like, what America does really well, especially if you’ve lived outside of America, as I have, is how it encourages megalomania among its citizens. It tells them, every American child knows that he or she can be the president, too. And that’s what American culture cultivates in the children. You can be this, too. You can be a billionaire as well. How likely that is, right? It’s what American media tells. It encourages these.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Just let me stop you there. Yeah, right. It’s what American media used to do. I don’t think that modern contemporary media.
Johnathan Bi: Look at Marvel like Spider-Man, but maybe that’s—that’s old media. Maybe that’s already.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think of that as old because.
Johnathan Bi: You can be you know, Peter Parker.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think one of the things that is causing so much distress in America right now is that most of the media is incredibly negative. Negative about the future, negative about everything.
Johnathan Bi: That’s right. And so, you know, now this might sound good. This kind of—you can be anything you want, but the danger is that the empowering can soon become a debilitating ought. And Tocqueville had a—I think it was Tocqueville’s observation where he said, obviously, aristocratic societies aren’t like this, right? Aristocratic society, you stay in your place, okay? You do what is your function. And he says that even though no French peasant needs to have an excuse for why they’re not the lord. What do you mean, why they’re not the lord? I was born peasant. Each American feels somewhat guilty that he or she is not the president, because he or she can be.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think I’ve told you about the book, The Hypomanic Edge: Why America Is Different. The book itself is not great. The theory, however, is very intriguing to me because the author basically says it wasn’t just the founders with these aspirational goals, right? It was the people who came here because of those aspirations. And the author makes a pretty persuasive case that if you do DNA samples of your average American whose families have been here for a while, right? Because we got to see the time element. He basically says, these are very different people than everyone else in the world. And then he makes the case. He’s like, just think about it. It’s, you know, 1885, you’re a peasant farmer in Ireland. The British have starved you out for a long time, and yet all your family is there.
You’ve been there for generations and everything you know is there. And yet you’re like, nah, I’m going to take what little money I have left, take a ship, which in itself at that time is dangerous, to this new promised land, America, and I’m going to leave behind my entire family, my network, my ecosystem, everything I know, and I’m going to strike out, right? And then he said, now supersize it and you’ve got your average American.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And by the way, I think you’re exactly right. It’s the circumstances around America that created, you know, just provocatively—and I’ll explain the kind of benefits and negatives of this megalomania. I actually don’t think it’s something the founders themselves intended. In fact, if you read the founders’ writing, they were worried about this kind of grandiosity. They were worried about aristocratic heroism being in—to the extent where they actively discourage certain types of, like, novel reading. Like poetry was a bit too dangerous, right? Like novels, they’re too grandiose. But anyways, so bucket that aside, I think you’re right that the structure around America has created this kind of empowerment of everyone to exceed. Now, obviously not everyone can exceed.
And so I think it’s this kind of megalomania, this kind of delusion that just a kid being born in the Bronx in a single family home can become a billionaire, can become the president or can become an NBA superstar. That is the cause of both America’s best qualities and her worst qualities. It is the rise of her entrepreneurs. This is why when you talk top investment funds, again, I won’t name the fund. One of the top partners told me we invest in three kinds of people: megalomania, autism and revenge. Because there has to be something pathological to make you want to push on this kind of journey that kind of rationally doesn’t make sense. Like why do you need a trillion dollars when you already have hundreds of millions? You need some kind of external drive there.
And when you read Musk’s biography, it’s clear that he wants to be the guy who changes the world. He’s less concerned about changing the world, more concerned about him being the one doing it, right? And so I think, however, I think this is also the psychology of the school shooter.
So we talked about the best of America, the worst of America, the greatest domestic terrorists. I think they’re all also motivated by this kind of desire, which is that I want myself to be elevated.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wouldn’t you think that they’re motivated more by your final one, revenge, rather than grandiosity and the desire to be the guy or gal to build the way to Mars?
Johnathan Bi: If you read their manifestos, it is actually strikingly similar to the psychology of a lot of founders, which is, I am not at the station of life where I want to be. I do not have enough respect from society or attention from society or even a sign from society that I exist. So I’m going to do this outrageous act to prove myself. In the case of the founders, it’s productive. In the case of school shooters, it’s terribly destructive. But the core psychology is the same. And this is why I say, in America, you can’t get rid of your school shooters without destroying your pipeline of founders. And then when people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What a pull quote that’s going to be.
Johnathan Bi: And then when people get upset at me, I remind them that Thiel wrote in Zero to One that all but I think one or two of the founders of PayPal built bombs in high school. That what America encourages is this deeply disruptive, I can be the best, I can far exceed my station. That’s the message you have to pump into your kids. And you know, one of them’s going to be great. 50 of them is going to be really upset. Two of them might become domestic terrorists, but you don’t know which kid is going to do what. So you kind of have to pump everyone with this kind of rhetoric. And that, again, this is already there in Tocqueville. Tocqueville says that the American worker is driven in frenzy by their neighbors who have a slightly better car.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Definitely. That is absolutely true.
Johnathan Bi: Even though the French peasant looks at the aristocrat and be like, hey, yeah, he’s an aristocrat. I’m a peasant. And again, this is kind of Tocqueville’s duality of equality, the benefits and negatives. But that, again, this is not a good or bad thing. This is just an observation about, I think, how the psychology of America works.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I used to joke quite a bit about the fact that I had—how many traits are there in a serial killer? I think there’s seven, and I had five of them.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly, exactly. And again, I’ll bring more kind of serious philosophical defenders on my side. One of my favorite essays by Rousseau is his Second Discourse. And he talks about amour-propre, the desire for vanity, recognition, to stand out, to esteem. And he has this great line. He says, “To this drive we owe our conquerors and our philosophers, our scientists, but also our kind of evildoers and thieves and scoundrels, that is to say, a few good things and many bad things.” And so, again, this is the kind of ambiguity that—sorry, this is the kind of ambivalence that I’m kind of highlighting between—again, it ties back to the Andreessen thing that, again, that the people you need to build a good society are not always good people. And the qualities you need to build a good life are not always necessarily.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, you know the book about the guy who built New York City, The Power Broker? Great example.
Johnathan Bi: Robert Moses.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, Robert Moses, exactly. Not a good guy. And then the author chose to write about LBJ and not a great guy.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You mentioned religion. I am definitely of two minds about formal religion. I’m not an atheist, and I’m not an atheist because how delusional is that? I, Jim O’Shaughnessy:—
Johnathan Bi: That’s a religion
Jim O’Shaughnessy: A human. Exactly, exactly. Its own religion. And so I—but I’m not, like, I was raised Catholic, but I’m not a practicing Catholic. I don’t understand institutional religion. And primarily, like, I—I’m sure you’re—well, I shouldn’t say I’m sure. Are you a fan of Spinoza?
Johnathan Bi: I haven’t read any Spinoza, but.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay, he dissects the Roman Catholic Church better than almost any philosopher. And I’d always had the idea, right, that all they did was recreate imperial Rome. We’ve got the emperor, the Pope, the Praetorian Guard, the cardinals, the generals and foot soldiers, the bishops, and then the foot soldiers, actually, the priests out there. But if you dissect the Roman Catholic Mass, it is, to my mind, one of the greatest innovations in controlling society ever invented.
Johnathan Bi: I agree with you. Although my interest in religion, I think, is less historical, social, anthropological, as yours seems to be, and it’s much more personal. So I was raised, it’s hard to say, raised atheist. But I didn’t grow up with the faith. My parents sent me to Sunday school so I could practice English, so—and they didn’t want to pay for a tutor, so. Hey,
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That’s very enterprising of them.
Johnathan Bi: Worked out pretty well, so I can’t blame them. And so I, you know, I converted as a six-year-old or something like that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What religion, if I may ask?
Johnathan Bi: It’s just Protestantism, some kind of strand. I don’t even know, right? That’s how devout I was. In high school in Canada, I became again deconverted and atheist again for very similar reasons many young people do. And then in college, I had this period of suffering, this worldly suffering, you know, growing pains and teenage angst and a quarter-life crisis about what should I be doing with my life and how much do I care about the attention of others? And I got into Girardian Catholicism, which problematized desire socially, and I got into Buddhism, which problematized desire phenomenologically. And so my second foray into religion was to study their texts, unlike the first time, seriously, to do their practice. I practiced in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal for a while and studied there rather, I should say. But I didn’t engage with them on their own grounds.
So I was going to these traditions and saying, hey, what resources do you have to solve my this-worldly suffering? Okay. I started this project which is about the great books, philosophy, religion, literature. And I interviewed this one Yale professor called Carlos Eire, and he wrote a book called They Flew, okay? And the thesis of the book is that there is fairly conclusive historical evidence that people levitated in medieval Europe, that there were levitating saints in medieval Europe. And it was published again. He’s tenured at Yale. He’s published by Yale University Press. This is not something you see coming out of the academy. I was somewhat convinced about the arguments of that book, and I’m happy to go through for our audience if you want.
But because of that, while I was reading it, one of my Orthodox Christian friends said, “Oh, I’ve seen a miracle before.” And I was like, okay, tell me. And he told about this icon that oozed oil infinitely of the Virgin Mary in an Orthodox church. And the crazy thing is, Jim, you can just go drive and see it, okay? It’s in Taylor, Pennsylvania. They host sessions Sunday, of course, and then Wednesday evening, which is when I went. I went with Jeremy, whom you know, and our third friend. And yeah, lo and behold, it was just an icon. And I saw it just dripping oil for like 15 minutes straight.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Did you see them changing the oil?
Johnathan Bi: I did not see them changing the oil. And of course, it could be faked. There’s actually that exact instance of things being faked. I would—if I were to put a number on it, I would say 60% it’s not fake, 70% it’s legitimate just because of the people around that. And so that kind of opened up a metaphysical door for me. And then I started investigating. Basically I wanted to defeat scientific atheism, materialism—not defeat. I want to challenge it on its own grounds, right? And so that’s not saying, well, you know, I have this scripture, it’s clearly given by God, therefore you’re wrong. It’s an immanent critique. It’s saying, can we use empirical, scientific, historical methods as Eire used to challenge this dominant kind of narrative. And it turns out, Jim, that there is just—well, some being does not want me to talk about this. Angered the gods,
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, you’ve angered the house spirits. Johnathan, be careful on your way home.
Johnathan Bi: Basically, it turns out there’s tremendous, just empirical research that shows that the materialist worldview is limited. I’ll just give you a few examples. One example is have you heard of the lab at University of Virginia that studies reincarnation?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No.
Johnathan Bi: So this is founded by the founder of Xerox. And for 50 years—I’m going there to interview the team next month. They’ve been collecting stories, testimonials of children who claim they had reincarnation. What’s the big deal? Okay. There’s over 3,000 reports over the last 50 years. I believe all of the claims—so the children were very specific about what they claimed. Like, my name was XYZ, I had this sister, I lived here and there. And I think for most of these cases, if not all of them, it was the researchers who validated the claims. So it wasn’t like the child already knew that family. And then the researchers came in, documented.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: How old were the children?
Johnathan Bi: All before six, I think, because after a certain time the memory fades.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
Johnathan Bi: Many of them grew up in non-reincarnating cultures, okay? So they were not culturally encouraged to do this. In fact, a lot of them grew up in Christian cultures or non-reincarnating cultures. They were actively discouraged and it was very troubling. And so there was no really ulterior motive. For some of them there were, but for a lot of them there weren’t. And about 300 of the 3,000 had a birthmark that matched the death wound of the previous personality. And so that is again.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Have you read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? Oh, you should, you have to read it. Yeah, because he makes—he’s a literary fiction writer, I love. But essentially the case that he’s making in Cloud Atlas is the same one you’re making.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, but basically there’s just tons of stuff like this out there. There’s in the same lab, they did a lot of again, like testimonial gathering I would call it. Maybe that’s too—that’s not serious enough. It’s something like empirical, like anthropology or something. They’ve gathered a lot of testimonials from doctors who witness near-death experiences from their patients.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That I know more about.
Johnathan Bi: So a patient is on the verge of death. Happened to my mom, by the way. And they’re—this didn’t happen to my mom. They’re able to report things they couldn’t have possibly sensed even if they were awake. Like what happens a few doors down. And again, these are secular, usually atheist scientists, doctors who are reporting this. And it’s not like, you know, every time a patient is about to die they get something and one of the thousand gets it right. These are like fairly good hit rates about these things. And another example out of Duke University, J.B. Rhine, I think was a researcher that did like basically like telepathy essentially. And there was just—there was one guy who was able to guess cards at a like a 33% rate continuously. It was like a five-card kind of setup.
So you’d expect the rate to be 20%, right? Statistically if you want to do 33, that’s maybe one in a million or something like that. So that was kind of my first foray into this. And we’re going to talk about my seeker’s journey developed further. But that was my first journey into this which is just looking at, hey, serious dependable studies out of Duke, out of Yale, out of UVA, out of Stanford. What are they saying that makes us doubt the empirical materialist paradigm? And even there, I think there’s—I think it’s quite conclusive.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Have you followed the work of Rupert Sheldrake, the physicist? There’s another one you’re going to really want to tune into. He gave a TED talk. He’s very—he’s a brilliant guy, poster child for the materialist worldview who broke bad according to them. They literally did everything they could to destroy him. He wrote a book that questioned the materialist view from essentially inside the materialist view.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And the head of I think Nature magazine basically did a completely non-logical or rational jihad against Rupert. Basically just, you know, saying if I were Pope, I’d be burning him at the stake. And I’m like, that doesn’t really reflect the view you seem to be supporting at all. So I think you might find his work very interesting. Robert Anton Wilson, he was 50 years ago making all of these assertions and looking seriously into them from the point of view of somebody who—I’ve always believed that Apollo and Dionysus, if you can unite the two, you’re going to have a pretty interesting lens to look at the world through. And materialism did a lot for us and the advancement of humanity, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. And now we’re seeing all of the breaks. They hate the quantum guys, right?
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah. This is another kind of strand which is—materialism is based off of 19th century physics. It’s not even—it’s kind of—or a lot of these rather popular materialisms are based off of, you know, billiard balls colliding, matter is a real thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you know, sort of the old quote, science progresses one funeral at a time, right? I think it was Max Planck, but I kind of think society advances one funeral at a time. I think that the social web in which we grow up in has so many invisible threads into us that we are completely unaware of. I used to play this mind game where I would say like, what would a conversation really look like if I was able to time travel back and talk to the most brilliant minds of say 1500, right? Basically the lack of any kind of shared context other than the basic human ones, right? I don’t think any of those would be different, right? I think that the underlying human OS, we are fear-driven creatures. We are prestige junkies. We want.
Like you made earlier the reference about the guy not liking his neighbor because he had a better car. That is incredibly well proven in economic theory, right? It makes no sense. And it basically dismantles most economic models, right? Because like Keynesian econometric models assume, no, no, no, everyone is a rational actor. Not true at all. And like study after study shows, you know, Johnathan, I’m going to give you the opportunity to get 50% more in compensation. But if you know that your competitor at work is getting 100, I’m going to feel shitty. You’re going to feel shitty and you will actively try to suppress both.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so we—the whole idea that I, you know, my degree in economics totally worthless because most of the axioms that it’s built on are wrong.
Johnathan Bi: Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Like we are not rational actors for the most part. For the most part we make decisions and then afterward paper over rational reasons for why we made them. But so I’m totally open-minded about—look, I think that we are just at the beginning. I’m a huge fan of David Deutsch and his book The Beginning of Infinity. That’s where we are. We don’t know half of 1% about nothing.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And yet we assume that we are these modern, incredibly well-informed.
Johnathan Bi: We’re this close until science closes off kind of all the questions worth asking.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And that is so wrong. And imagine if again we did our time travel. And I’m stealing this from Deutsch and rephrasing it, but he sort of in The Beginning of Infinity says, hey, what if you talk to the greatest physicists of 1890 and ask them what they thought about quantum and about the Internet? And he said they wouldn’t think anything about it because neither existed. And he makes the point that we human beings, the tools we make, are the best explainers, the best extenders of ideas. And that we’re literally sort of perpetually at the beginning of infinity because that knowledge compounds. The only way it doesn’t compound is if you are ruled by a society that hates change. Back to your American observations, right? Like America, whether the founders wanted it to be or not, got populated by people who loved change and look at what we got, right?
And so I’m totally open-minded about anything that—for example, the oil thing, now if I went down there, I would be intrigued, but I would—I used—my first job was as a stage magician, right?
Johnathan Bi: Really?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh yeah. And I love magic. You know, other kids growing up had Farrah Fawcett in my era on their wall. I had a poster of Harry Houdini. I loved magic and I just, I don’t really know why. At a young age my dad gave me these magic books that my grandfather had given him. And I was just like, what? But so I also, that got me to understand human psychology a lot better because I used to do a lot of mental effects, right? Where I’d say, Johnathan, think of a number, any number, it can be anywhere between negative number all the way up to whatever. And you’d give me a number and then I’d point to another person in the audience. You know, think of any line from any work of literature that you love.
Just, just one line and then the third, think of any animal. And you can make that animal different. You can make it a pink elephant if you want. And then I would write it down. And then at the end of the effect, I would remove what I had written—I’d already written. I wrote it ahead of time. And I would remove each of the coverings and they matched the person, what they said exactly. To the audience, like they thought I was legit psychic, right? And I had one woman at one come up and say, you are unbelievable. You are truly a psychic. And I felt bad. I was like, no, no. I’m a magician. This is—there’s a trick to this.
And literally, I ended up showing her the cardinal sin for a magician, showing her how it worked. And even after I did that, she was like, I don’t believe it. I think I know you’re psychic. So the will to believe is totally strong.
Johnathan Bi: And I should caveat. I would have tested the icon in obvious ways if it weren’t this holy object that I think, right? And so—so there’s limitations,.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But it also reminds me of the selling of relics to the medieval Catholic church.
Johnathan Bi: It does.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: They just pick—they just pick bones up from anywhere. And this is the bone of one of the disciples or Jesus Christ himself.
Johnathan Bi: So this is my biggest unlock while exploring this space. And my favorite person I’ve interviewed, I would say, ever on the great book side is a scholar by the name of Jeff Kripal at Rice. And so this is his idea, which is the existence of fraud does not preclude a legitimate act. So I’ll give you an example that you and I are both aware of, entrepreneurs that we fund. So many are fraudulent. But do you say just because the WeWork guy is a fraud and Sam Bankman-Fried is a fraud, that means all of them are fraudulent?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No, of course not.
Johnathan Bi: You say we use discernment to try to figure out who’s a fraud and who’s not. And I think the same is with—again, I investigated cases like the myrrh icon, and I found a case of fraud. Turns out they were also a pedophile ring in Texas. And so there’s a lot of other signs that—that are. Yeah, yeah. And so…
Jim O’Shaughnessy: you’re spitting fire today, Johnathan. I think—yeah, we’ll definitely get you up to 10 episodes.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, that’s what—that’s what I’m really going for. But the even stronger case that Jeff made that I think is totally right, is that even with the existence of one single person, the act that he or she did, fraud in one time does not preclude that he is authentic another time. Again, we’ve talked about this before, right? Elon and his fraudulent claims about how forward Tesla is does not preclude—in fact, it might be the cause of the fact that the stock goes up. And I think that is true probably for a lot of these holy men as well. Just because we can find cases where it’s fraudulent or it’s untrue doesn’t mean everything they say is untrue. And this is, I think this is kind of my perspective on organized religion, which is, and it’s going to continue my seeker story, right?
I kind of blown open the metaphysical door. I don’t have a denomination, but at this point it’s quite recent. I’m kind of worried about the existential consequences. Like if you take these religious traditions seriously, you’re going to end up in a pretty bad place most of the time if you don’t do very specific—.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Hey man, I have a block of ice right next to Satan himself reserved with my name on it.
Johnathan Bi: There you go. So I again, just like, I was just like, I try to be charitable with the scientists critiquing things from their own perspective. I want to do that with the religious traditions because here’s my issue, which is my Christian friends are teasing me. You saw this Christian miracle, why didn’t you convert? Most people don’t even have this and converted. And I said, okay, but what about the Buddhist miracle? What about the case about reincarnation? What about this Hindu thing that’s like awfully well documented? Like if it were just between Christianity or atheism, I think it’s an easy leap, but you need to have reasons for making the leap, right?
Not to say that the leap is a fully rational act, but surely even the Christian would say, yeah, the first guy on the street corner trying to join you, his cult, don’t take a leap of faith there. You have to investigate, you have to use reason. Reason has a role in this kind of process to play. And basically my claim against the apologist—this is why I think I’m a very weird interlocutor for a lot of these religious people who want to convert you—is I say, even if I agree with everything that you said, he came back from the dead, you know, he did all these miracles, so what? There’s other traditions who say the exact same things, including the “I am God” statements, by the way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, by the way. And I’m blanking on the title because I haven’t read the book yet, but I did buy it. There are like many other religious traditions with the exact same story as Jesus Christ.
Johnathan Bi: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And like you see the movie Heretic by A24? Oh, you’ll want to watch that for sure.
Johnathan Bi: I’ll have a lot of homework after.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: This because it basically makes the case that all religions borrow from other religions. Have you read the book?
Johnathan Bi: The flood and.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah. But have you also read the book The Immortality Key? That’s another one. Brian Muraresku, I had him on the pod. It’s fascinating. His thesis was the Eleusinian Mysteries use psychedelics. And literally their pitch was come to our group and talk to the gods.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Ayahuasca, same idea.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so we finally were able to test the ancient chalices and things. And they did in fact find residue of psychedelics.
Johnathan Bi: Really? Wow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s what his book is about.
Johnathan Bi: It’s called The Immortality Key.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so Brian Muraresku, fascinating guy. Anyway, so I’m all for this kind of exploration.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Yeah, that was my question, which is, you know, the Christians often say hey, be charitable to—or the Muslims or to take whatever faith, you know, be charitable to us. Take our scripture, read it in the most charitable light. It’s allegory. Not everything has to be true. But then they don’t apply the same charity to the other religions, right? When you ask, this is an interesting exercise. Ask them about their religion and ask them about the existence of other religions. And usually the answer is threefold. If they’re feeling they’re having a bad day, they say they’re demons. If they’re having a decent day, they say they’re like hallucinations, they’re man-made. If they’re having a really good day, they’ll say they’re a lesser revelation, right? And this by the way, shows the Catholic Church’s different attitude towards the other religions.
In the Florentine Council, everyone else is going to hell. In Vatican II, Jesus can work grace through these other traditions. So anyways, that’s kind of my problem. And it’s the exact opposite of the modern’s problem. The modern doesn’t see anything in the religious project. I see too much. Again, if human history was just Buddhism or just Islam or just Christianity, that’s a pretty easy leap for me to make. But it’s this, what Sextus Empiricus has called equivalence. These arguments that don’t necessarily are wrong, but they’re in tension with each other. And I don’t see a clear difference between them. That’s kind of my issue. So my current project now is going into these religious traditions and figuring out kind of whether they hold up to scrutiny or whether their exclusivist orthodox forms hold up to scrutiny. So one example is Mormonism.
Okay, probably not. It like in its most orthodox exclusive interpretation, there’s King James Bible translation errors in the Mormon text. There’s—yeah, I can just go on and on. But again, I want to, I still want to be charitable to, let’s say, the Mormons, because what I said about even if a holy man has certain fraudulent acts, and by the way, these were the huge scandals of the Buddhists in the 20th century when these holy teachers from Tibet had all these sexual scandals. But I think it’s wrong to say.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The evangelicals gave them a run for their money.
Johnathan Bi: It was a great contest, the religious battle. But I don’t want to say, look, just because this guy had this one bad moral thing, it means everything he said is fake. I think in the same way we don’t say, hey, Elon lied about this one thing, everything he does is fake. We don’t do that when we’re investing. We shouldn’t do that in religion either.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, but also underneath that, right, is an analogy I used to use for social or political opinions. If you can infer all of my beliefs by hearing one of them, I am brain dead and I have been captured by an ideology. Yeah, right? You’re basically saying the same thing here.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. And so that’s what I’m kind of doing now, which is I’ve kind of brushed aside the atheist, the scientific worldview, and now it’s a weird, wild world. It’s the beginning of infinity, as you say. And now I’m kind of exploring the different religious traditions and just seeing what holds up to scrutiny. I’ll give you another example. I have a video coming out about Daniel in the Old Testament here. And I spent about a few months on Daniel interviewing some of the best scholars, both apologetic and critical, because I think it’s actually a great way for reason to get a sense of the truth of Christianity for the following reason. Daniel 11. So Daniel is allegedly a captive in the Babylonian captivity, okay, so 6th century. In Daniel 11, Daniel has a vision and he has this insane prophecy.
There’s nothing else like it in the Bible. 11:1 to 35, where he perfectly foresees the next 400 years. He sees Alexander. He sees these minute battles and deals. He sees Alexander’s kingdom breaking into four. And then the prophecy stops working in 11:36, around the second century, the Maccabean revolt. The king that was supposed to die in Israel does not die in Israel. The end never comes. And basically this is very short summary. The apologists think that, hey, Daniel 11:36, that’s about the future Antichrist, okay? So this was about 6th to 2nd century. Then there’s a jump in time. This is a classic Christian move. The critics say, no, no. Even that 6th to 2nd century stuff, that was written after things happened in the Maccabean revolt. They wanted, the Jews wanted a symbol of hope to motivate them.
So they told their history in the form of a prophecy, put it in the words of Daniel, and then wrote out the death of their main antagonist, Antiochus IV, and that hopeful prophecy never happened.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Very clever.
Johnathan Bi: So I think this is a good example where reason has a lot of work to do to help you decide whether a leap is appropriate or not. Now, it doesn’t fully collapse down, but deciding whether Daniel is a 6th century or 2nd century text, that’s something historical methods can do. And so that’s why I’ve spent so much time investigating it. So it’s things like these that I think for a seeker, I’m just spending all of my time on investigating and seeing kind of what’s the shape that comes out of this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So what do you conclude?I’m—I’m sort of a Taoist. If I have to define myself.
Johnathan Bi:, I don’t know yet. Again, I’m a seeker, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So you’re a bit like.
Johnathan Bi: I know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You’re a bit like Buddha himself, right? If you read Siddhartha by Hesse, what I love about that book is Buddha’s just like, yeah, I’m doing the whole drinking my own urine thing and I’m standing on one leg and I’m not getting anywhere. So thanks, guys. I’m glad I learned this lesson, but I’m going to move on. I think the seeker category is the most interesting one because it keeps you open to things that we don’t yet even know about.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so I definitely seeker, by the way. And most people don’t remember this—philosopher is meant to be a diminutive, right? Because this is in the Symposium. If you are a lover of wisdom, you don’t have it. If you have it, you wouldn’t pursue it so fervently. So to say that one is a philosopher is a diminutive in my case.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Johnathan Bi: Because it means you’re not a wise man. And I think seeker is the same. What I’m trying to say is I don’t romanticize the seeker category. This is just where I’m at. I really want to answer this question to the best of my abilities and that’s where I’m going. I now know that certain things I think are certainly wrong. Like again, materialism, the orthodox interpretations of Mormonism, probably the orthodox interpretation of Judeo-Christianity as well. That’s kind of what my Daniel kind of research has led me to. And I’m just going to go through these religious traditions and see what they have to offer. And by the way, I’m not just doing this rationally, I’m also practicing this in some sense—for Buddhism, meditation. I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Orthodox Christianity. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I had an experience at a Buddhist temple which, listening to you reminded me of it. It was in 1987 in Hawaii and obviously I knew about Buddhism, but I hadn’t spent much time like visiting their temples or anything like that. And literally my wife was with me and it happened to both of us. We crossed over into the temple and we literally felt our physical bodies just absolutely change. All tension, everything just like literally left our body. And I looked at my wife and I said, did that just happen to you too? And she’s like, yeah. And that was the closest I have come to any like physical mystical experience.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And what’s really interesting to me now is, and definitely from this episode, I think you and I are both going to get some inbounds on email.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh for sure.
Johnathan Bi: To reach out. Because when you’re quite open about these things, there’s not a lot of people who are serious who are also open about these things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
Johnathan Bi: And even the past year I’ve just heard incredible stories. More, even more incredible than the ones you told me. That again, are from super sober-minded people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Johnathan Bi: Who have no agenda, unlike the Roman Church case, to share this with me. Like, like for example my mom and her near-death experience, which she didn’t see anything but she has no agenda to try to trick anyone, right? And again, I’ve just heard—I think modernity has a tendency to diminish testimony. That’s just testimony. But on the other hand, if, let’s say your son or someone else you really trust tells you, hey, this thing happened to me and you work through all the possibilities. Was it a hallucination? Whether they’re trying to get something out of me. No. Then you kind of believe them, right? You kind of believe—in other words, don’t hold onto your metaphysical views so tightly that makes you disregard this stuff. And I’ll actually tell you a funny thing.
It’s going to tie back to investing. I’ve developed somewhat of a new thesis that will either end up disastrously bad or fantastically lucrative for my angel investing, which is investing in people who’ve had mystical experiences. So again, this is Jeff Kripal’s idea. He basically claims every single great book in the canon was because the author had a mystical experience that they were trying to process, that literally the muses are real. So a good example is Nietzsche. What are we told about Nietzsche? He’s a naturalist, okay? He hates the religious stuff. He does. He actually says a few good things about Christ even though he doesn’t like Christians. But Nietzsche had an experience, two experiences. One at Sils-Maria, I believe, where he was in front of this boulder. And he describes it as a mystical experience.
And that’s where eternal recurrence, this metaphysical idea was imputed upon him. Another example, Nietzsche had what is called a precognitive dream, which is when you are able to see things in the future. And Nietzsche basically, after his father died, he dreamt that his father came from the grave and took his brother or a young child, walked back into the grave. A few days later his brother died. And so…
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Mark Twain too.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Twain is another good—his brother died.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: His brother. Yeah.
Johnathan Bi: On the shipping accident. Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so he had it down to the coffin, which was very unusual and provided for them by people Twain didn’t even know.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And the flowers on the brother’s casket. It’s really interesting.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so basically Jeff—and again, my first interview with him was already out. I can’t stop recommending him enough. He basically rereads the entire canon this way, like at the end of the Republic when the near-death experience where they see Odysseus choosing his reincarnation.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Johnathan Bi: What we’re told in school is that this is for stupid people, okay? If you don’t get the high philosophy, here’s a little children’s tale to tell you the kind of moral of the story. But Jeff kind of flips it—this is actually the culmination of the Republic. And by the way, we call that the Myth of Er. Nowhere does Plato call it the Myth of Er, right? It’s a story for Plato. So anyways, his claim is that all the great writers—this might be interesting thesis for you as well. All the great writers in antiquity were actually mystics, okay? What about in modernity? And he wrote a book called Mutants and Mystics where he showed that conclusively, I believe, so much of popular media today is by mystics.
Like so much of the comic books you’re familiar with, Esalen Institute—Esalen popped up, I think, on the West Coast, the same time the X-Men were written in the East Coast. So there was.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I thought Esalen had much earlier. When did they write X-Men? Because Esalen’s been around forever. It was a big thing.
Johnathan Bi: It was the New Age. It was the core New Age institution. Yeah, yeah, I’m pretty sure they were the same time. And his point is, when you look at the most popular media, right—this is what you do. Movies, documentaries, you want to—in Dune, mystics. So that’s my thesis, actually.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What’s so funny about that is William Blake, talk about a great mystic. Like, I don’t know how much you’ve read about him or read of his work. You should, because he’s also a fabulous artist and he’s got the—I don’t know, I don’t recall what the etching is called, but it’s essentially—it’s the infinite staircase. But it’s a DNA strand. If you take his painting and then put it next to DNA, they’re the same.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, exactly. And so this is my investment thesis, which is, it seems like—and I think Jeff is right. So much of the great ancient cultural works were created by mystics. So much of the great modern cultural works were people who were mystics.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Interesting. If you read Jed McKenna, he has a whole lot to say. In fact, I think the second book in his series on spiritual enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing, is a treatise on Moby-Dick, because he basically says Moby-Dick is about non-duality.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And so, long story short, I started an angel investing strategy where I go after mystics who are able to keep it under control.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay, so walk me through that process. How do you discover…
Johnathan Bi: It’s mostly inbound at this point.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, okay.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. So I get a lot of inbound of a lot of weird people. And before I used to just dismiss this all the time. And now I think there might be an edge here. So one guy, he—I won’t reveal his name because again, this is—most people don’t want to talk about this. They don’t want to be seen—oh, this is unserious. And if I tell you his name, I think you definitely know his name. Or at least…
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Tell me off air.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Certain things he’s worked on and he’s just a straight-up mystic, man. And he watched one of my interviews and he opened up to me. “I had a precognitive dream. This is crazy.” And again, he’s one of the most successful, let’s call it tech entrepreneurs or tech-adjacent, tech-entertainment entrepreneurs.
And then another guy came to me where, again, he’s a mystical experience. And the way that they relate to their company is just fundamentally different.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, a lot of—I think Dirac, the—a lot of the quantum physics guys, all—if you retrospectively look at, like, when—I’m blanking on his name, the—Meaning of Life guy. Short. No, not—was it Schrödinger? Anyway, they had all the Upanishads.
Johnathan Bi: Oh, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And if you look deeply into their bios, almost all of them exactly were what you would call a mystic. But I’m fascinated because I’ve had precog dreams. Aren’t they common?
Johnathan Bi: Can you tell us about the precog dream? Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So this isn’t a recent one, but it’s probably the most colorful. When I was a kid, I had a dream that I actually ended up writing down because my mom recounted it to me so much. It’s not like it was my own memory, but she was like, yeah, when you were little, you told us about a dream that really freaked us out. I guess I was, I don’t know, eight, and I had a dream that I was dead, and I went and visited my mom and dad to tell them that it was okay, I was just going elsewhere. And I said, but my luggage had these really weird tags on it. And my dad said, well, what were the tags? And I said, one said Isis and another one said Osiris or something like that.
And, you know, the way I would rationalize it is my eldest sister died when I was 10, and I had several dreams that were about death prior to her death.
Johnathan Bi: Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you know, the way my mom would tell it was like..
Johnathan Bi: Was she sick before, it was unforeseen or.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No. Yeah, she had lupus, so it was expected. Yeah, this is back when nobody knew what lupus was. And so that’s the way I rationalized it. Like, obviously I knew that my sister was sick and this was me trying to—but when I was 8, I didn’t know about Isis and Osiris.
Johnathan Bi: Right, yeah, exactly. And so, basically, again, I’m not an expert on this realm, but at least the most convincing things I see on precognition are a lot stronger than when you suggest, number one, they don’t really appear as dreams. They appear more as visions. Like it appears real.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, that’s—that’s—yeah, that’s where you’re getting.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay. I have another one for you.
Johnathan Bi: Okay. There we go.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So I used to get cluster headaches, which they used to call suicide headaches, because they are— I used to be told by neurologists that they were the worst pain a man could feel, childbirth being the worst. And then I don’t get them anymore, by the way. But I saw a female neurologist, and I use that line on her, and she’s like, no, they’re the worst pain a human being can feel, and they’re horrible. I would not wish them on my worst enemy. But I had discovered that sitting—and this is pre-Internet, right? So the ‘80s. And I was a research junkie then, too. So I went to all the libraries and found that sitting on pure oxygen could alleviate or at least ameliorate the headache.
And so I had a headache and was sitting on oxygen, and I had my eyes closed, and I suddenly was elsewhere. And the elsewhere—and I wrote it out. I described where I was. I did a diagram of me walking into the house and—and I kind of forgot about it. And after I was moving, I found this journal. It describes the house I’m living in right now almost to a T. The front entryway is the same with the same layout. The way to my office is the same with a living room. And here’s the freaky part. I also have an office for my chief of staff next to my office, and that was there, too.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, so that would definitely be something like that. And again, if I invested in you, I would have done pretty damn well. So I think my thesis is panning out. But, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I don’t think of myself as a mystic. Do you think of yourself as a mystic?
Johnathan Bi: No, no, no. But—okay, here’s what I’m really trying to say, which is it seems like some people are just more open to these experiences than others. Like, they’re more—they’re better receptacles of these experiences.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Tesla. Tesla.
Johnathan Bi: I haven’t had a single one of these. Yeah, I haven’t had—it sounds like you’ve had a few.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I have.
Johnathan Bi: And basically, Jeff, or a lot of people have this called a filter thesis, which is the materialists think that, you know, the brain creates the mind. It’s emergent. The filter people think the reverse. That the brain isn’t creating something, it’s actually reducing a lot of things. And the analogy they use is like TV back in the kind of radio wave days, which is you have a million radio waves, you get one TV. If an alien comes down, the alien’s going to think, well, this TV’s creating this image, but it’s actually receiving it. And it’s receiving it by reducing the radio waves all to a single channel. And what this explains is how certain times of low brain activity, terminal lucidity would be a good one, corresponds to heightened consciousness or super-conscious states, like near-death experience.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I definitely have to introduce you to Rupert Sheldrake because his thesis is that we and animals and everyone have a morphogenic field that contains like all human thoughts, all human history, everything, and that we’re interacting with it in much the same manner you’ve just described.
Johnathan Bi: This is Plato in his Meno, I believe, when he says that knowing is actually remembering. You’re actually just remembering things. And again, one of the conclusions, not a necessary conclusion, one of the conclusions you can draw from this is you really need to mess up your antennas to be open to these mystical experiences. And so you were quite messed up because you had the brain trauma and then you had oxygen. Psychedelics is another way chemically to mess up the kind of radio. And so what this thesis is called is the trauma hypothesis, which is that you need to kind of mess up the radio in order to receive all this stuff.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, I was quite intrigued. I can’t remember when I read it. It was just a few years ago, maybe six or seven, and it was a thesis about schizophrenia. And it was exactly that. The author was basically arguing that schizophrenia is filter failure and that the filter that you’ve just described goes haywire and, or it’s way too wide, thus the voices, thus all of that. It’s like you’re getting, most of us are getting that one radio channel or that one clean image exactly where they’re getting like 10 channels, 10, 20, 30. And so I am 100% open to all of these ideas because the more people I talk to, like Rupert and others like Brian, with The Immortality Key. Look, I started out as a pure empiricist. Like, that’s how I built all of the way I invested.
Johnathan Bi: Like, yeah, let’s look at the data.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly, let’s look at the data. But I think maybe I’ve become much more open to it as I’ve gotten older, actually, because like intuition, another great one, the empiricist in me says, well, sure, it’s saturated or imbued intuition. When I look at the same chart pattern or price pattern for decades, well, yeah, of course I’m going to get it into it. I call it my spidey sense. And yet as my stated, I’m happy that I’m no longer managing other people’s money because I do things a little differently now. But I would get these intuitions and I wouldn’t do anything because the quant model that I had developed myself or with my team was not telling me to do it.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. I mean on one hand I don’t want to then jump to the other conclusion and say well all of it is, you know, like all of it is.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’m under. I’m only going long mystics.
Johnathan Bi: Exactly. Yeah. But I’m saying I think this is a huge part that this is probably the big piece, blind spot of modernity. And so it’s—by the way when you look into the anecdotal testimonies, these kind of experiences, they’re almost always negative. They’re almost always traumatic. The precognitive dreams or the signs they get is almost always someone dying, something they care really a lot about dying. It’s hardly ever “oh, tomorrow’s going to be sunny. Tomorrow’s going to be great for wearing a sweater.” And this is why by the way, it’s called telepathy. It’s tele, distance, pathos, emotion. There’s some strong emotion that’s being communicated.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The emotional aspect again, I’ve actually read quite a bit about—I didn’t know that this was your new thesis. That’s why this is so much fun for me. The heightened emotions is definitely—it’s been in my experience a must, right? Like I—after my mother died, I was very close to my mother and after she died I wrote out a list of 100 things that I wanted to do, right? I was 29 years old. On that list was become the chairman of a major arts organization. I was 29 when I wrote that. But I just—they weren’t like considered goals or I just was like freeforming. Here’s all the things I want to do. Write books, make movies, start a—you know, everything except for maybe two or three on that list has a check mark next to it.
Johnathan Bi: What are the two or three left?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Not going to tell you.
Johnathan Bi: You don’t want to jinx it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’m working on those right now.
Johnathan Bi: But yeah, I just—I think this is probably the biggest blind spot of modernity which is in all the science and technology that we develop—by the way, I don’t think it’s not relevant for this. Like when we discuss one important question is will human writers still be valuable with AI writing? If you believe the things I said, by the way—I don’t believe—not necessarily. I believe that I’m a skeptic. At the end of the day, I’m kind of testing these things out. But if you believe that, I think there’s probably some credence to it, then humans just have a fundamental source they’re tapping into that the machines are not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
Johnathan Bi: So I actually think—you know what? I actually think this is like a very productive thing in the AI age, because if we looked at what is this human source that we’re tapping into, this mystical source.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah.
Johnathan Bi: And we outline those attributes, maybe we can design experiments to test if LLMs can do that as well. Like, I’m just saying this is—this is a fundamental reconception of man that I think is going to help us even—maybe especially in this technological age.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Johnathan Bi: Like, so I think, again, it’s kind of all connected. You asked me, like, all these things I’ve done like math and entrepreneurship and computer science and AI and philosophy, and now this—is it all connected? Number one is I kind of don’t worry if they’re all connected or not. I’m just like—what I’ve learned is if I do something I’m passionate about, I’m going to go so much further.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
Johnathan Bi: And I’m going to have so much more fun. That’s the most important thing. I’m going to have so much more fun. So who gives a fuck if I go further or not? The very fact that I have more and more fun, that’s the key thing. But the cool thing is everything kind of ties back together. Yeah. Like, all these things I’m interested in, like AI and—yeah, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I definitely have found the same. If you can make something fun and you can entertain people, that is, if you really want to teach people, that’s the way to do it. Like, get them engaged on their own kind of level of what animates them, et cetera. And these, though, are—what’s interesting to me is these ideas to many people would be like, these guys are wackos.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But there are a lot of practical things from this investigation.
Johnathan Bi: But that’s not why I’m doing it or why you’re doing it. But there are, right? There are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Whereas maybe that’s my—still my bent toward action. Like, I don’t want to just think about things, I want to do them. I want to bring them into the world. And—and so, I mean, maybe that’s another—you know, I was thinking as we were talking about that, about the—in the beginning of our conversation I had Nick Maggiulli. Do you know Nick Maggiulli? He’s a friend of mine, he works for Ritholtz Wealth Management here and he wrote a book about the wealth ladder. And his final rung of the ladder is $100 million USD and up. And we started talking about those people and I did a deep dive on the profile of those people. And they’re all the same—the move from like rich, right? You’ve got $25 million bucks, you’re doing okay.
But there seems to be this final rung of the ladder and when you get up there, it’s completely different. Delusion enters, the burn-the-ships mentality enters.
Johnathan Bi: Height actually changes. I believe if you look at CEOs…
Jim O’Shaughnessy:Yeah, they’re six feet all…
Johnathan Bi: But if you look at billionaires, they go down.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. But also the Big Five profile is different and it’s quite unique. But when you apply, it’s really fascinating. And so I think that there are a lot of, even from the most esoteric stuff you can get inspiration for things that you want to put into the world, right, on the action part.
Johnathan Bi: And Jim, I think, because I remember in our—when I was interviewing you you said the kind of final stage of your four acts of life is mind, body and building teams around that. I just want to say in the last few months I think we’re in a better place. I know you don’t think about it in terms of the religious question. I do. But those type of questions, I think we are in the best place in human history.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, I agree with you. I absolutely agree.
Johnathan Bi: And people think, you know, I’m kind of crazy. They’re like, you think you can know more than Augustine, than Nagarjuna, than Al-Ghazali? And I’m like, yeah. Not because I’m necessarily…
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Modest ain’t he?
Johnathan Bi: Not because, you know, we are smarter than them in raw horsepower.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But we have all of that as our context.
Johnathan Bi: So this is the crazy thing which is this example I always give—Augustine, right? He’s known for combining Platonic tradition with Christianity. How much of Plato did he read in the Greek? There’s debates, but a popular understanding is he’s only read the Timaeus in the Greek because his Greek was not that good. But the texts were lost. Plato was lost. We have better access to the traditions, to a lot of these historical traditions than the founders of those traditions.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Absolutely right.
Johnathan Bi: That’s number one. Number two, we have access to the other traditions as well. Yeah, it’s been a narrow—you’re a big fan of Daoism. When was it translated to English? Like let’s say 100 years ago, a little over 100, 200, something like that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Johnathan Bi: And it’s only been such a short time of human history that we don’t—like those monkeys over there and their primitive religion, right? It’s only been a short amount of time since we’ve learned to really respect the different possibilities of other religions. That’s number two. We have each independent religious tradition. We have more access, we have other traditions. And number three, I think technology is going to play a huge part here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Could not agree more.
Johnathan Bi: One example of it is near-death experiences. Why were we able to get so much more accounts of near-death experiences? Because we got better and better at saving people from the brink of death. Psychedelics. Another crazy technology, right? That these chemical substances—I know there was obviously like ayahuasca and—but now we’re able to manufacture chemical substances that are able to mess up your radio in a way that you know, before you had to get molested or traumatized or had get your arm cut off, right? Like if you want to—if you don’t really mess up your radio. This is why the ascetics beat themselves, starve themselves. Yeah. And I think because of all of this we are at, maybe culturally we’re so stagnant, people are doom scrolling and that’s the big issue.
But for someone who’s really passionate, I think we can answer this question. We can go further than anyone in human history has ever gone.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I actually agree. I think I am somewhat bewildered by what I look at as kind of Luddite view about AI and things. I honestly think it is like Jobs said, computers were bicycles for the mind. This is a rocket ship for the mind and the ability—I’m a huge believer in what I call the centaur model, man or human plus machine. And it sounds like you’re agreeing—the ability of the unique way that we might actually process reality such that it is. The machine’s probably not going to be able to do that, but we’re going to be able to use that tool.
Johnathan Bi: Unless you’re a materialist, right? The materialist kind of—and Silicon Valley is materialist. That’s why they think they can replicate that. I’m much more suspicious of that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: As am I.
Johnathan Bi: I think we have a special connection to the muses that they may not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I totally agree. You know, from my point of view is like, it seems to me my ability to test this is what’s the result, right? Like, yeah.
Johnathan Bi: Show me the goods.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly, show me the goods.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so I definitely think, and to your point about—we’re so much better at saving people’s lives. Things that killed people routinely no longer do. And so—and we have the ability to really—you can actually use the scientific method on these. You’ve read Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying? Oh, man. I’m going to give you a—I have to give you a new list.
Johnathan Bi: I read a few books very carefully over and over again.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, good for you.
Johnathan Bi: Thankfully for your publishing business, most people aren’t like me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think you would gain some insight if you read—she was the pioneer of a lot of the research into near-death experiences. Another factoid about that’s really interesting, that also includes psychedelics is atheists who are dying. They have found that a single psilocybin intervention works for the majority and.
Johnathan Bi: For what stops the dying?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Fear of death.
Johnathan Bi: Right. Yeah. Because you’re dissolving your ego.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You’re dissolving your ego. And I’ve read a lot of—I work with a couple of institutes that are trying to bring some sanity around the use of psychedelics. Johns Hopkins has done a tremendous amount of research, as have other universities. And they’re finding—it’s a great example. Another reason to read Robert Anton Wilson, you know, all of this research into psychedelics. And Michael has this in his book, Michael Pollan. The Germans did a tremendous amount of real scientific research on psychedelics. And we burned it all because Nazis, right? So it was lost on the people who were burning all of this that virtually every one of those German researchers was a Jew. And so burning it because of the scourge of Nazism. Probably a mistake, but imagine had we not done that, right?
And that makes me think about what you alluded to earlier. All of the things that we can—we’re making a movie about the scrolls found at Pompeii.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Alex Petkas.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And they were all, you know, turned to ash, but you can still read them if you put them in a particle accelerator and use AI. Anyway, just think of how much was lost, right? The burning of the Library at Alexandria.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And now we’re finding ways, like we’re doing with this documentary we’re making. Who knows what’s in those scrolls? But so I definitely believe that with these new tools, et cetera, we’re going to be able to unlock a lot of stuff that has been in plain sight, right?
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. And again, but I think people are underestimating just how much just translation itself, right, is—you don’t need to learn like 50 languages to read the Daodejing and the Bible and the Quran. And that is quite, it’s quite new. Especially the East-West kind of thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally.
Johnathan Bi: Like to take Hinduism or Buddhism seriously. These were kind of people that I studied with that really put them in a way that made them respect. Yeah. And yeah, I definitely think we’re at a place where we can tread new ground here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Johnathan. I didn’t know—I honestly didn’t know that you were on this version of the journey.
Johnathan Bi: I didn’t either. And that’s the beauty of the journey, right? Again, I started this great books project about two years ago and this chance occurrence—I interviewed Carlos Eire, threw me into a rabbit hole. But the cool thing about doing what I’m doing is I can just kind of throw everything out the door and be like, okay, I’m going to go all in this direction.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And just a practical, the inner capitalist question. Is there an audience for this?
Johnathan Bi: There’s a huge audience. We’re at 1.4 million subscribers.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Amazing.I’m really actually quite happy to hear that.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Like probably a year and a half—a year and a half in since the launch of this great book series and this is a whole other conversation to go down. But the Chinese audience has eclipsed the rest of the world combined. And we don’t even dub things, we just subtitle stuff. So people are reading subtitles in the big Chinese sites. And so that was super surprising. I would like the growth on YouTube and long form to be a bit bigger. But Instagram has been super strong for us. The Chinese side has been super strong for us. X recently has been working.
So I think again, you know my story and I think I talked to you about this before—I was building this rocket ship fintech startup with Joe Lonsdale and it was going great and but I kind of just wasn’t feeling it. This goes back to the doing what you love kind of thing. And when I did this project initially I was ready to take a monk’s vow of poverty and not celibacy, but poverty and certainly not giving up my gluttony. And I had generous support from people such as yourself and I was just happy to go down that—make subsistence wages in New York City. I was happy to make that trade-off because I got to do what I loved.
And now it’s barely been again a year and a half since launch and I already have money-making opportunities that were better than building the startup full time. And so it really is a kind of leap of faith. And then it’ll catch you. The air will catch you in a moment.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. I think Ken Stanley makes the great point in his book, Greatness Cannot Be Planned, right? And what you do, the way I break that down is if you just completely iterate as you’re moving along, you end up somewhere that’s much better.
Johnathan Bi: And it’s so much more fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, much more fun.
Johnathan Bi: It’s so much more fun, right? You’re an adventurer, you’re Odysseus. Well, Odysseus has never had a lot of fun. But that’s separate.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Probably was not fun, would not be the first thought that came to mind. But it scares a lot of people because it by very definition—there’s no ladder that says no, you got to do this rung, this rung, this rung, right? And it is a much more circuitous route.
Johnathan Bi: And I know you totally agree with me on this one, which is the ladders are all collapsing. The least secure route now is the ladder route, right? Like going to consulting, going to law school. Like they’re all going away. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe 20 years ago, if your normative scheme was—I value safety and security, there could be a good case of hey, just go down this safe and secure route. But now that’s not even an option. Like that route doesn’t even get you that anymore.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. But I am taken by your idea about the nature of founders because I intentionally went all in and everyone thought I was absolutely crazy. When I started my first company, I was like 28 years old and I had no backers—having lunch or dinner rather with a conventional—he would hate to hear himself called conventional. A very bright, very successful guy. And he just could not get his head around. He’s like, wait a minute, you just started it. Goldman, you know, not one of the big firms backed you. And I went, yeah. He goes, that’s insane.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And then—but I tried to increase the pressure on myself. So not only did I do that, I also put my own name on it.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Because if you really, really want to put your soul in the game.
Johnathan Bi: I remember you told me your wife and you had the conversation and you were like, J.P. Morgan.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right. If you, and historically, if you look, all the financial companies were named after the founders.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Because that sends the signal, hey.
Johnathan Bi: I’m sinking with the ship, I’m going down.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’m going down. And a lot of that rethought through my conversation with you is in fact quite delusional.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, it is, it is. I would say that you and I, maybe this shows my lack of self-awareness. I think we have a degree of introspection that is absent in the really successful people. Like the really world-historic, like the Caesars of the world or the Elons of the world. I think they fear it even. But to that point I had a similar relationship not with the Goldman in the financial world, but with the academy. Because as a self-conception, as a philosopher, which again I can take as a diminutive, you want to be recognized by the people in the academy. And so just in the same way I was ready to take a vow of poverty, I was ready to just be this weird effing kid who does a little podcast and be this not serious intellectual.
And again, the crazy thing is I’ve built stronger relationships with the professors I so admired than if I went into grad school. Because now I have a platform that is very unique in the world. Yeah. You know, I read their books very carefully before I interview them. So again, it’s just this, by the way, this is not an advice I kind of give—I would give to everyone indiscriminately, but for people who are very competent, I think always the best thing to do is to do what is fun. Now if you’re mediocre, I think, you know, maybe the standard route is actually better.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, but yeah, I mean, honestly, aren’t we all the stars of the stories we tell ourselves and who’s—talk about introspection if you—the level of introspection it would take to understand. Yeah, I’m totally mid.
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So it’s like my friend Adam Robinson wrote a book called How Not to Be Stupid. And I said, you have a massive marketing problem, Adam, because your target market doesn’t know they’re stupid.
Johnathan Bi: Not be—how to not be stupid for dummies.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I’m delighted with your success. This is a really—I will watch with great interest you going down the mystic path and this path you’re going down. And you know, you get to incept yet again, Johnathan. So maybe when we get you up to 10 episodes, you will be the most—you will have incepted the most people. You know the rule. We make you the emperor of the world. You get to speak into a magical microphone and incept the entire population of the world. You got two things you can say. They’re going to all think it was their own idea when they wake up whenever their tomorrow is. What two things are you going to say into the magic mic to incept the world’s population?
Johnathan Bi: My first answer was pumping a shitcoin that I would invest in before. My second answer was to tell—it was to remind everyone that the Greeks valued the small phallus over the large phallus because it symbolizes the virtue of moderation. So I’ve really, you know, it’s a really hard thing to one-up myself here, I think. I don’t know, I think—you know what, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put the exact same number in everyone’s head. 010198365. Something like that. And then when people all wake up, they’re all going to independently have come to this. And then they’re going to realize that the material world is not all that there is.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Wow, that’s very heavy. Okay, you still got another one. You want to put another number?
Johnathan Bi: I think I’ll just reemphasize the Greeks and the phallus thing. I think they were very wise.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That was very funny, Johnathan. Always a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much for coming.
Johnathan Bi: Thanks, Jim.
