Ben Hunt on Industrially Necessary Paths & How To Live In The Now
Ben Hunt is a father, husband, former academic, the author turned blogger, former hedge fund analyst, investment advisor, and farmer.
And he’s also my podcast guest in this episode.
Apple Podcasts · Spotify His writing has been an inspiration to me as I try to carve my own path after leaving what he calls “Team Elite.” Let’s take a journey through some of his ideas…
“Make, Protect Teach”
Ben made my list of people that inspire me when in the early months of the pandemic he leaped to action. While most of the country was gearing up for political debates, he launched a non-profit to work behind the scenes to acquire and distribute masks to healthcare professionals across the country. He was embracing his self-described ethos of “make, protect, teach”:
What does it mean to Make?
It means you are an investor. A manufacturer. An artist. A craftsman. A kid at a Maker Fair. A farmer. An engineer. A home builder. A coder. It’s the creation of some THING through the application of some creative IDEA.
What does it mean to Protect?
It means you are a soldier. A policeman. A fireman. An EMT. A nurse. A doctor. It’s a Neighborhood Watch. It’s a mechanic fixing a car. It’s also a unionization drive. It’s also a fiduciary managing a portfolio.
What does it mean to Teach?
It means you are a teacher, of course. Or a writer. Or a researcher. Or a priest. Or a homeschooling mom. It means you’ve got something to say to your Pack, and you’ve got the guts to say it.
In our conversation, we talked about why this matters to him. At the simplest level, it’s about enabling people to “connect with the real.” He shared that all around the world he sees good people doing great things, helping their neighbors, and contributing where they can. But those same people, “have been told that it doesn’t matter.”
This resonates with my own story. At I rose in the ranks of the strategy consulting world it amazed me as almost everyone was obsessed with the broad idea of “impact.” It didn’t seem to have a connection to anything except what could be quantified on a spreadsheet. It was not, as Ben says, connected to the “real.”
Ben’s interest is in, “creating bottoms-up social movements that embrace make, protect, teach.” While many people dismiss such notions as too simple, preferring large-scale political ideas, he feels that a local focus on what matters – helping your neighbors and giving where you can, is what matters.
He says that his writing revolves around a simple question, “how do we reconnect with the real?” or put another way, “how do we reconnect with our own human lives?”
These questions attract hundreds of thousands each month to his site, Epsilon Theory, which he runs with his partner Rusty Guinn.
He’s been writing for years but the real journey started at the age of 32.
When Time Flipped
Everything became real for Ben at the age of 32, when he lost his father. The news came a few weeks after declining an offer from his parents to pay for a flight to visit them on a trip to London. When he heard the news of the loss, he felt his future was stolen from him, “There’s something about the dynamic of your father dying suddenly that changes your relationship with the future and with time.”
This shifted his perspective to living in the present instead of focusing on the future. However, as he embraced this philosophy, he found himself at odds with the direction of broader society and culture.
He started to notice that political, economic, and business leaders were increasingly focused on investing in the present and replacing the optimism of the future with a permanent state of political fear. We all know what he’s talking about. We need to do something NOW because the future will be worse. Or another spin, we need to go BACK to how things were because now is not so great.
He calls this state of affairs the “Long Now”
The Long Now is everything we pull into the present from our future selves and our children.
The Long Now is the constant stimulus that Management applies to our economy and the constant fear that Management applies to our politics.
The Long Now is the Fiat World of reality by declaration, where we are TOLD that inflation does not exist, where we are TOLD that wealth inequality and meager productivity and negative savings rates just “happen”, where we are TOLD we must vote for ridiculous candidates to be a good Republican or a good Democrat, where we are TOLD that we must buy ridiculous securities to be a good investor, where we are TOLD we must borrow ridiculous sums to be a good parent or a good spouse or a good child.
“I think it’s a mistake to romanticize the past or demonize the present,” he argues. Instead “The threat of the future INSPIRES me. The threat of the future DRIVES me.” It keeps him in the now.
Narrative World & Industrially Necessary Work
Ben and his partner Rusty look at this broad shift through the lens of narratives. Their research has found that institutions are increasingly embracing “missionary statements.” These are statements or sets of ideas that are presented as facts but are really opinions.
The goal is not to inform anyone, it is to flood the information ecosystem with a preferred narrative so effectively that it shifts common knowledge. Everyone knows that everyone knows it is true.
One of the areas we have both explored is the common knowledge of work. Our scripts are so deeply embedded around work that we have a hard time understanding that they emerged hundreds of years ago. Our current remixes of these work beliefs are so deeply intertwined with the success of our current institutions, we have a hard time knowing what is real anymore. As we discussed on the podcast, people have a hard time seeing me as a “real” worker because I spent my time outside the default path.
Ben calls these scripts the “industrially necessary” stories that keep the whole thing going. Except now these scripts might not be so necessary. They are shifting from necessary to preferable. Which means politics and narratives are what matter.
I reached out after he and Rusty published “Working Narrative” talking about the emerging remote versus in-office “debate.” We both felt this was inning 1 of a baseball game that may go into extra innings. It’s not that we think that work is headed in a definite direction, its that it feels more up for grabs than ever. Both political parties still center their narratives around jobs than the kind of work that is emerging in the new economy.
As I like to say, the only career path left is “go tech, go finance or SOL”
In writing about work we have both found that the topic elicits and strange and outsized response relative to the facts conveyed. What people are reacting to is often not the information itself but the sense that things they knew to be true are under attack.
The sense that the common knowledge that had seemed like the settled fact is shakier than ever.
I’ve experienced this in my own path. I don’t work a typical but I still spend time working, I support myself and spend a lot more time helping other people than I did in a previous life. It’s much more meaningful and feels like it matters. Nonetheless, people get upset at how I’ve organized my life. They think I am cheating, or that it’s not possible, or that I’m abdicating a sacred duty.
The reality is that I’m living in the now. Investing in the future. I believe in the future and I’m excited that I have people like Ben to follow.
Still Carving His Path
The most impressive people I know are the ones that are committed to a long-term path. Ben is living what he claims to care about and I hope to be doing the same at his age. As he says:
“I’m still trying to find my path in the world”
Transcript
Ben Hunt is a father, husband, former academic, author turned blogger, former hedge fund analyst, investment advisor, and farmer. And he’s also my podcast guest in this episode.
Read the full transcript
Paul: Today I'm talking with Ben Hunt. The best way I describe Ben after following him for several years is an open-hearted truth warrior. He's a father, husband, former academic, writer, investment advisor, farmer, and all-around curious human. Each week he drops wisdom into over 100,000 email inboxes. I'll have to verify the number on that, but with his creative and thoughtful reflections on the economy, politics, and society. In 2020, he spent the early months of the pandemic getting PPE and other materials to frontline health professionals, which I think was a perfect embodiment of his ethic of make, protect, teach.
Which I'm excited to dive into. Welcome to the podcast, Ben.
Ben Hunt: Thank you, Paul. It's great to be here. And yeah, I can't believe it myself. I mean, it's been a long journey to get— I think that's true for everyone, right? You get to a certain age and it's a long journey to get to where you are. But yeah, the Epsilon Theory writing, we've got— over 100,000, as you said, kind of email subscribers, and we get about a quarter million people a month coming to the website.
It's gratifying because we've never done any sort of promotion. We've never done any sort of marketing around that. It's all been through word of mouth. It's all been for people, and I'm sure this is what drives your podcast audience too, who are looking for, who are truth seekers. Let's call it, yeah, truth seekers. And if you speak your truth and you're authentic, that's the rarest thing in the world today, to speak authentically, people will come.
And so that's, I'm really glad to see that you're doing the same with this podcast.
Paul: Speaking of truth seekers, Digging into your bio, the one person that pops into my head, you can probably guess this, is Wendell Berry. If I had to bet, he's probably some influence on you. How do you think about comparing your path to Wendell's?
Ben Hunt: I'll call it an influence. I think that there are so many authors. Who influences the most? Is that from I think it's the people we read. And if you read someone at just the right time in your life, then that has an enormous impact. I think that Barry was influenced by the— we'll get into it, right?
The Transcendentalists, right? So Thoreau and that whole crew. Of American transcendentalists who were trying to get connected to what's real. And I come at that at a very different place. I come at it from the world of finance. So yeah, I was an academic.
I was a professor for 10 years in political science, of all oxymorons. I left to start a software company, sold that, and then I got into the investing world. Ran a hedge fund for a lot of years. We can talk about all that, right? But the world of finance, the world of markets has become so divorced from what is real. Not just in kind of the obvious sense, right, that in finance, you're dealing with abstracted symbols that are representative of some real-world thing.
That's what stock is. It's a token, to use a word that is used a lot today around crypto. It's a token that represents a fractional ownership share in the real-world cash flows of a real-world company doing real-world things. That's what the stock market has always been, but it has evolved over the last— certainly over the last 12 years since the great financial crisis. Obviously, the roots of these things go back a lot longer, but more and more, there is this chasm, this gulf between anything that happens in the real world, whether it's a real company doing real things with real cash flows, whether it's real people who make real stuff, whether it's real people who are working and laboring for whatever, there's this gigantic distance now between everything that happens in markets and that. The idea of epsilon theory, the idea of the writing here is How do we reconnect with the real?
How do we, whether it's in terms of our social lives as investors, our social lives as citizens, how do we reconnect with our own human lives? And it's not easy. Because I think that every concentration of political and economic power in the world, the status quo works. The status quo works for them. And so there is a real effort that plays out, I think, particularly in media and the words we use, the narratives that we tell each other about how we should lead our lives. That maintains that gulf, that maintains that distance between the real, living in the real world, and these constructed worlds of politics and markets.
So anyway, a long intro there. But that's what it's all about for me, is how do we reconnect these social worlds that have been constructed around politics and markets with real-world lives as autonomous human beings?
Paul: That's a beautiful intro. And I think it connects to work, why I reached out to you, and we'll dig into that. But it seems like this kind of flipped for you, losing your father. You wrote about this and you said it changed your relationship with the future and with time and made you want to really be present and inspired by the future except you found yourself in a world where people are investing in the now and living in the future. Can you just say a little what that means and like what was the feeling of that in the '90s when this happened?
Ben Hunt: Yeah, it's a— I'll answer that last question first. It's exactly the same feeling of today. That's not good. Right, right. Well, what I mean by that is that I think it's a— it can be a mistake to— and maybe I've been guilty a little bit of it also from that, that introduction. I think it's a mistake to either romanticize the past or to, I'll say, demonize the present, to make it seem like, oh my God, it's never been this horrible today than it's ever been, than ever before.
In terms, again, of this gulf, this chasm between our social lives and our real lives. And there are elements of that that are true. It is different today. I point in particular to social media, to the social practice of presenting what we call in game theory missionary statements, presenting opinions as fact to— and this is what all political and economic leaders do. They don't tell you the facts. They don't tell you what to think.
They tell you how to think. And that's always been done, but it's being done more today.
Paul: It seems my model of the world, and I think I became aware of this working in the strategy consulting world, I came into the real world in '07. And what I started to slowly realize is more people know how the game is played and are actively playing it, whereas maybe in the '90s it was kind of in, in these clichéd closed-door rooms.
Ben Hunt: I, I think that's a great way to describe it, Paul. I, I really do. So there is a difference today, but if you kind of— but if the question is, you know, How did it feel in the '90s in terms of, I'll say, this jarring, searing personal moment I had when the future changed for me? And the scales fall off your eyes, and you see, oh, OK, this is how— I'll mix all sorts of metaphors here. This is how the image on the back of the cave wall is being projected for us. And yet here's what I've lost in terms of what's very personal.
So the, the, the event we're talking about was in, um, summer of '96, and I was, uh, I was, I was still a professor. I had gotten this, this great summer gig to teach up at Simmons College in Boston. They have a summer program, so it was a great gig to make some extra money in the summer. My wife's a lawyer, or I think she was just finishing up law school at the time. She was pregnant with our first child. She was clerking down in Dallas.
So I'm in Boston, she's in Dallas. I'm doing this to make some bucks. Money's not easy. And, uh, but, but I'm having a great time. It's, it's, it's, it's Boston in the summer, so it's, it's, it's very nice. I get a call from my dad, and he and my mom had gone to live for a month in London.
It was their big trip. They've been planning it for years. It's a city that my father loves. We're from Alabama, right? So we're from a little town outside of Birmingham, Alabama. And these trips to Europe— I think we went 3 times as kids— this was such a focus of my father's life, right?
He'd spend all this time planning the trip. And then there was going on the trip. And then there was, you know, constant taking pictures and then slideshows, right? I mean, it's like out of Mad Men, right? Where you sit down and you watch an hour-long carousel of slides being projected up on the projector. It, you know, it was such a focus of his life, my parents' life.
And they were in London. They had rented a flat. So he was just— they were just living in London, again, the city that my father loved. And he was calling, saying, hey, you know, what do you think about— you're in Boston— is it— would it be possible for you to come over and visit? I was 32. Yeah, I was 32 years old.
Father's 62. And as it happened, it was a 5-day weekend. So this is back in the 1990s, right, where there was no Travelocity or online stuff. So I walked down to this physical travel agency on Boylston Street. That— some of your listeners are old enough to remember this stuff, right? Where they've got the city and then the dollars for how much it costs to get there, the big board that's placed in the window.
And I looked at the board and went in and talked to them, and it would be possible I could do this round trip to London for $600, which, yeah, $600 is a lot of money today. It was a lot of money to me. A lot of money. Could I afford it? Yes, if by afford it you mean, could I— did I have room on my credit card for $600? Um, absolutely.
And yet I thought about it, I said, ah, no, it's, it's, it's too much. I just— nah, I'm just not going to do it. So I called my dad back, and it was a very brief call, and because, you know, international phone calls, that costs a lot of money. It's crazy, this stuff. Again, those of us of a certain age remember a phone call to the grandparents on the kitchen phone with a really long cord where, you know, you were on the clock to talk to grandma or grandpa, right? Because those international, those long-distance calls, man, that adds up.
So it was a brief call. He totally understood. And I said, ah, just can't swing it. And I never saw my father again. He died of a heart attack soon after they returned from that trip. And I often think back to that moment in time, and I would give anything to go back and buy the ticket that I couldn't really afford, but I could afford, and see my father in the city he loved, go to this pub that I remember him talking about it, and I can't remember the name of the pub.
And for some reason, that's what bugs me most of all. It was this lost opportunity to connect with someone, in this case my father, who was so important to us. And I think back about that moment a lot. Now that I have children of my own, now that they are engaged on their paths, I'm still trying to find my path in the world. And it was— that my commitment is to make those connections whenever and however they're possible. Because the moving hand writes, and having writ, moves on.
There's no reset button. There's no replay available. This is it. This is what we get. Making those connections, living in the now, is what we have to do. To do that, we have to invest in the future.
What I strongly believe, these concentrated institutions of power, politically and economic, I believe that they reverse that. For us. It's what I like to call the long now, where we pull forward our economic future mostly through debt. That's the, the main mechanism that, that works through. And we construct a future of, of political fear, right? So you pull forward the economic future, and you create an image, a very fearful political image in the future.
And I believe that those are the two ways in which we've reversed the way we should live, I view, to connect with what's real. We don't live in the now. We live in this constructed future, and that's made possible by bringing forward the economic goodies of the future and constructing a fearful political future. That's the kind of stuff I write about. It is all about how do we connect with what's real. I was so happy to come on the show because what you write about work is, I think, how all of us form that identity of connecting with the real.
And so anyway, that's, that's where I'm coming from, and that was that searing moment for me. Everyone's going to have that moment. It won't be that particular moment, right? But everybody experiences that at some time in your life. There's some point in your life where time, you experience it differently. In that moment when my father was gone, time changed for me.
Uh, it, it became— there's this old line, you know, we can talk about who wrote it, this guy named Delmore Schwartz, right? That the time is the crucible which we burn. That's what happened for me. And I, I understood time differently and the importance of living in the now, but also how TikTok That moving hand writes and having written moves on.
Paul: That's a powerful story. Thank you for sharing that. And I think the, the timepiece really connects to how I experienced my, the first stage of my career, as I call it. But now that the way you're describing that, I experienced exactly what you're saying. I faced a really terrible case of Lyme disease. And basically had to take a leave of absence at 27, just graduated from business school, was at the top of the world, and I literally sat in bed not doing anything.
And my identity paused because my identity had been in the future. I had— in a— if you're a driven young person in a career these days, you're never able to really enjoy the present because you constantly need to be nurturing a career that's always moving up and to the right.
Ben Hunt: Yep.
Paul: I think something broke for me. And I mean, this is the way you frame that is kind of an aha for me making sense of this right now. But I think people are experiencing what you're saying in terms of the long now in their jobs, right? They don't feel the political fear, or a lot of people are feeling the political fear, but they're feeling the fear of scarcity, right? If I don't cash in now, I'll be screwed in the future. And when I walked away from my path, like, it was merely just the last step.
And it was just like, okay, of course I have to leave now. But the comments were just unreal. Like, people with way more money than me saying, how are you going to pay rent? Right? So this plays out in a very weird perception of reality in which people never feel like they have enough to even take a break to live the life they might otherwise want to live. And that's kind of what I've been exploring.
And I mean, I think your writing has definitely connected a lot of those dots for me.
Ben Hunt: It's the hedonic treadmill, that experience that when you acquire something, hedonics being the measurement of happiness, it's never enough. Then it's always, well, what's the next thing? And oh, I'll be happy then.
Paul: Well, I don't even know. I, I'm not even sure it's the hedonic treadmill. I think the hedonic treadmill provides the convenient excuses or reasons. I think what's drawn me to explore work is that I think it's actually way deeper than that, and we don't actually have access to that deeper— like, these work things are so deeply embedded in our scripts of how we experience things that We can't even begin to talk about it. And that's why I eventually reached out after you wrote this working narrative piece, because what made me reach out was your podcast you did with Rusty, and you commented, I'm getting all these bizarre responses.
Ben Hunt: Yes.
Paul: And I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, somebody else is getting the same things I'm getting, which is I write about work and then people send me these large things like, well, 'You can't just not work.' And it's like, okay, sure, that's— but that's just a statement. That doesn't get us to the root of anything.
Ben Hunt: That's a good point. That's a good point. You're right, that hedonic treadmill is just, you know, just a description of that particular facet that you described about not being satisfied with what you get. You're totally right that I find that work is it's the water in which we swim. Meaning that's the old, you know, David Foster Wallace story, right? That the two little fish are swimming around along.
I'm sure you've heard this before. The old fish comes swimming the other direction. Old fish says to the— just says, hey boys, how's the water today? And the two-year-old fish, hey yeah, whatever, Gramps. And you can swim on. And then the younger fish turns to the other younger fish, says, What the hell is water?
Work is the water in which we swim. And there are so many of these waters in which we swim. We don't see them because they are, to your word, the script by which we live our lives. We, we live in a real physical world, yes. We also live in, I like to call it, narrative world. As a social animal, as a biologically defined social animal, of which there are very few species on Earth that are true social animals, but they happen to be the most successful species on the planet, right?
It's the termite, it's the ant, it's the bee, and it's Homo sapiens. That's pretty much it, right, for, for true social animals. The hallmark of a social animal— and there, there are a lot, right? It's multiple generations living in the same nest, you know, shared responsibilities for caring for young. But the most important one is social animals are immersed in intraspecies communications. For those insect species that I was describing, that intraspecies communication that they— the water in which they swim are chemical communications, pheromones.
For human beings, the water in which we swim are our words to each other, the messages we go across, to your point, the scripts with which those messages are arranged and by which we are hardwired to respond to. So work, this most powerful of scripts, we are hardwired to respond to it. And we're similarly hardwired not to see it. As a script. It's phenomenal, right? I mean, it just— it's so that if you write anything about work, it is literally— I don't mean this in a woke sense— it is a triggering event.
There should be a trigger warning anytime any of us write something about work because it absolutely triggers something in our reptile brain that's been evolved to follow a script. And to embed it in how we define our own lives. Because those are the most powerful scripts, Paul.
Paul: Right.
Ben Hunt: It's not the scripts of the stories that others tell us. It's the stories we tell ourselves to give our own lives meaning. And if you try to chip away at that, or if you try to pull that rug out, some people will respond, oddly, but ultimately people respond very angrily because you are in fact chipping away at that core. It's crazy stuff, man.
Paul: I think I've been lucky. It also could just be my tone. I've— I try to write about this with care, and I'd say the majority of responses I get are wildly just like, oh my God, I can't believe you're letting me see these things. And the funny thing is I get people that will tell me, you know, Paul, I have not told my spouse these things. They're very dangerous to bring up. And I think what we've done is we've kind of taken this, uh, for this criteria of morality, living a good life, making money and work, and like brought it all together, and we don't really know how to separate it anymore.
So we just decide, you know what, let's just move about in these clichés. Let's not unpack it. And I have these very weird conversations where now I'm supporting my life. I've kind of figured out a good model. I'm loving my work. I feel more alive than ever.
And I'll try to convey this, and then people will be like, Well, don't you worry about the future? Don't you think you should get a job? And it's like, wait, I don't get that angry anymore. I did get defensive at first, but now I'm just like, this is fascinating. I'm invisible in a sense.
Ben Hunt: That's right, you are invisible. And that's one of the reactions I have when I write about work. I'll write something like, well, you know, I gotta say, I think I've got something interesting to say. And then you'll put it out there. And it's as if people look right through it. They literally can't see it.
It's a hard feeling to describe, Paul, unless like you and I, like you live it. It's— or look, I think there are other things that define identity and could have that similar sort of impact. Race and gender being two of them. I think that these are things that form that bedrock of identity. And it's something that, again, it's the water in which we swim. So we can't see it and the way it impacts others.
And if it impacts others differently, if questions of— if race impacts the lived experience of someone else differently than it's impacted me, right? I don't see it. And I think, for example, you know, Invisible Man, right, rather, that, that's, that's a big part of the, the point here, that you are invisible, and that it can be what you write is invisible. It can't be seen because it's that transparent water in which we swim. I want to bring up one more point, Paul, because there's, there's absolutely this personal aspect of how we deal with identity and questions of work. There's also a social aspect to this, right?
The scripts, the scripts in which we are presented, by which we form our own identity, like you must work. That's a script that is also shaped by us as the collective, right? As, as our organization of social animals in a society. So these powerful messages and scripts, narrative archetypes around work, many of them are what I like to call industrially necessary. So industrially necessary is a phrase I use to describe something that is common knowledge. Common knowledge is not necessarily public knowledge.
Common knowledge is what we all know that we all know, which is a little bit of a different thing, and the game dynamics around common knowledge are interesting, but we'll leave that aside for right now. An example of something that is industrially necessary and becomes common knowledge would be compulsory childhood education K through 12 supported by tax dollars and the government. That's an issue of what is industrially necessary. By industrially necessary, I mean, what is the structure by which it is presented to us? Amazingly enough, the hours of the modern school system match the hours of the modern workweek. That is not an accident.
It is not an accident how this is constructed. Once you start looking for what is industrially necessary, meaning the structure and the system and the, the edifice that's required for this function to exist in a mass society, you start to see it everywhere. The example I love to use, because I, you know, live out on this farm where we've got some chickens and sheep and goats and all that good stuff, is what I like to call the industrially necessary egg. So we get eggs from our chickens. Occasionally we'll put half a dozen, a dozen together. We'll give it to a friend or a neighbor.
Eggs that come from the home farm, they never go in the refrigerator. They never go in the refrigerator. We keep our eggs out on the kitchen counter.
Paul: Like in the rest of the world too.
Ben Hunt: Like in the rest of the world too. Exactly, Paul. Exactly. They're also not spotlessly clean. They're what we like to call fingernail clean. You know, you get off the dirt and like, but you don't want to scrub the egg clean because that removes the, the biome there.
There's a thin layer of, you know, what keeps that egg fresh. You know, nature's amazing, that you remove if you scrub it clean. However, if I give someone who's not familiar with this, you know, a dozen eggs, amazing eggs, eggs that were laid yesterday, and it's not in a refrigerated carton, they're not spotlessly clean, they look at me like I've given them, you know, something that's not good. Because here's what happens, Paul. What is industrially necessary, in this case, refrigerated eggs that are scrubbed clean, they're not refrigerated and scrubbed clean because that's what makes for a good egg. They're refrigerated and scrubbed clean because that is what is necessary for the industrial production of eggs in one of our protein factories.
Those are awful places. And for that, that food, that protein to be transported safely, you've got to scrub it clean and you've got to refrigerate it. And yet, in so many aspects of our lives, what is industrially necessary, the narrative has been created around it, the script has been created around it, that that is not just what's necessary that's what's good. That's the good egg. And then an alternative egg, an egg that was laid yesterday but isn't refrigerated, it isn't scrubbed clean, well, that must be the bad egg. That's what we have to address, Paul, is this.
I'm not like— I love our local school system. But it's recognizing that it's not there for the benefit of the children, right? The structure is there for what is industrially necessary here.
Paul: Well, and if you homeschool, you're a bad egg.
Ben Hunt: And that's what we've done, right? We homeschooled our kids, and the immediate presumption is you're the bad egg. And this is true for narratives, for scripts around food, around education, around health, and as you're discovering, as you have discovered, around work. Oh, you're not following that industrially necessary path? You're a bad egg, Paul. You're a bad egg.
What is hopeful to me, though, it's both hopeful and difficult. Let me describe what I mean. In so many aspects of our lives, the things that we've taken to be industrially necessary, like education, like food, like work, are frankly no longer industrially necessary. I think COVID woke a lot of people up to that because the common knowledge, the industrially necessary solution was, well, do you work? Well, of course, you go into the office to work. Everyone knows that.
Everyone knows you have to work from an office. Post-COVID, the response is, well, wait a second, is that really right? I don't think I have to go into the office to do good work. But why did we ever really think that before? It's the transition from what is industrially necessary to what is industrially preferable. And preferences, that's a different animal.
That's where politics comes in. So that's why I think you're going to be seeing more and more of these issues of work Oh, you should go back to the office. I don't think I should go back to the office. That becomes a political question in ways that it never was before. Now, that's the problematic aspect of it. I mean, we're going to see work become more and more a political issue because we're moving away from this notion that it's industrially necessary, the way in which we work to what is industrially preferable.
And when that happens, you've got different people with different preferences and they get sorted out in politics.
Paul: It's been a bit fascinating to watch. I decided to only work remotely in 2018 and just do that indefinitely. And then in 2020, I probably had about 100 people. I had conversations with 100 people. I have these curiosity conversations every Wednesday and It was mind-blowing seeing people start to see that these are actual preferences now. And then like people in my family, I, some of my full-time working cousins were working remotely in different locations and suddenly they were like, oh, you're just doing it like, like Paul.
But it, yeah, I think it's so early. It's, we are at, we haven't even started the first inning. It's. It's fascinating being this illegible worker in a world in which people assume everything is polarized. But then you look at the political parties and they're basically in lockstep on work. They only look at work through the lens of jobs, which I think 35% of Americans have full-time jobs, probably less with good benefits.
And they only differ on like what kinds of jobs they support. But there isn't really any group that's like, hey, that industrial economy of the 1950s to the 1990s isn't actually there anymore. What are we going to do about this? And it's, it's global too, because I mean, Taiwan is freaking out with people working remotely during COVID They're, they're basically just ignoring the issue and letting people keep going into work.
Ben Hunt: The political dimensions of this are phenomenal, Paul, because you're exactly right. The leadership in the states, right, with the two political parties, there's really no distance between them on the question of work. Beneath that top-level leadership, when you look at different political entrepreneurs on every side of these political dimensions, the— that's the old phrase, right? Politics makes strange bedfellows. But on this dimension of work, I've never seen an issue that is so at odds with the existing dominant hierarchy of the political dimension. You'll find right-wing MAGA types who on the question of work are actually so closely aligned with really proto-communist people on the left.
This issue of work, it— let me say this, though. For a political entrepreneur, for someone who said, I need an issue which with which to find a coalition that can get me elected somewhere. Work is a pretty interesting topic, right? Because it is something that hits everyone so deeply at that identity level. And it can cut across political lines. It's going to be really interesting, I think, what happens politically around work.
At least in the States.
Paul: Yeah, it's probably an Andrew Yang 2.0 version.
Ben Hunt: That's a great way to describe it. I think you're exactly right. Yang kind of had an inkling of it there. And then I don't know what the hell he was doing with the mayoral run. And that seemed awfully ill-conceived in terms of, let's say, not developing your constituency and figuring out where to kind of make a stand and where to make this happen. But what the hell?
You know, everyone has to find their own path, right? Andrew Yang 2.0, I think that's a great way to describe it.
Paul: I think people are waking up that there's a different path. Hopefully listening to this, more people are interested in embracing the now. What is Make Protect Teach about?
Ben Hunt: Well, Make Protect Teach, those are the 3 things I think that give life meaning in a social sense. In a sense of what do we do with our lives from a bottom-up perspective. I think you can make— and I have a very broad vision of each of these three verbs or gerunds, making, protecting, and teaching. What is not part of make, protect, teach is management. If there is a vocation, if there is an activity that is not part of make, protect, teach, it is management. Management is a top-down imposition.
It is not a bottoms-up exercise of making or protecting or teaching. I think that where we as human beings I'll be normative about this. I think where we should find our identity, where we can connect with the real and the now, is through making, protecting, and teaching. So I have zero interest in encouraging or participating in some new top-down vision, some, oh, let's form a new political party that will, you know, do X, Y, and Z. No thanks. My interest is in creating from the bottom up localized social movements that are focused on make, protect, teach.
It's, it's doing, it's solving small riddles, it's overcoming small problems, It's looking locally for ways in which you connect with the real and knowing your neighbors and creating a community. It sounds trite, it sounds trivial. That's the reaction I get. And that's, again, one of these scripts that have been imposed on us. Here's what I mean. I travel a lot, or I did before COVID I'm sure I will again, all around the world.
And all around the world, I see men and women of goodwill and good hearts doing small good deeds, figuring out problems, answering questions. It gives me such enormous hope and confidence in the future of our world. And yet, to an individual, each of these human beings doing these small steps of good deeds and good works, they don't think it matters. They don't think it's enough because we have been told that unless you act on the national stage, right? Unless you are supporting this candidate and this party Well, you're really not doing enough. You don't matter.
And if there's one message I've got, it's that the only thing that matters are those small acts of charity and goodwill and helping your neighbor.
Paul: I love that.
Ben Hunt: Bottoms up, man. That's how we've got to do this. It's never going to come from the top down because it gets subverted by concentrations of political and economic power. I'm sorry, that's— I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that is.
Paul: Yeah. And the way it shows up is, I think this is where work hacks our consciousness a little. We have these desires to work. We all have desires to work because we want to contribute. I've never met a person that doesn't actually want to contribute to the world, but we've narrowed work to what can be paid for. And then what I experienced in these elite worlds— I worked at places like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and went to a top business school.
And there people are so hungry to have an impact, but impact after they've been given great jobs and stuff turns out only to be these top-down bold visions which are quantified on a spreadsheet. Pair that with, oh, you're a good person if you make money and you have a good career. The craziest thing is 10 years, I had a couple of good managers I had great relationships with and they were incredibly kind to me, But I don't think I received a thank you. Now I write a blog for free and I develop these incredible friendships, these meaningful long-term things. And it's like, holy crap. Like, I just wish I could let people feel what I'm feeling when I get some of these thank yous.
And to realize that like an impact of leading an NGO or making it to the top of the consulting firm might get you approval from your parents, but it's not going to be the life that's going to bring you alive. And I, I mean, it's even scary, like in my head right now, I'm like, it's a little scary to say that. Am I being too bold? Should I not make people feel bad for being in these good careers? But yeah, it's It's so hard. And like, in the deepest parts of me, it's like that stuff, it just doesn't make sense.
Like, I'm willing to go broke exploring these other paths.
Ben Hunt: That's right. I have such a similar story. Paul, it's— I started writing 8 years ago and it's so personally gratifying, right? And that's an ego word, you know, gratification. I'm going to use it anyway because it's okay. Because what I know, what I know is that there's a hunger out there to connect with the real.
There, you know, we talk about these narratives of work and society being invisible, being the water in which we swim. I think It's, it's not quite invisible. I think everybody kind of gets it. There are more and more people kind of get it that it's narratives all the way down, and that what we all can work for is then to find that reconnection with the, the real world and real communities and do it in a bottoms-up way. And, and that is why, you know, we started this. I can't believe we've got, you know, 100,000 subscribers and all these people.
This is how it works, Paul. It's not because of what I'm writing. It's not because of, you know, you're a good writer, I'm a good writer. So we're good writers, but it's not, it's not the quality of the writing that's doing it. It's the engine. It's again, this hunger to reconnect this out there.
This is how, this is how the world changes.
Paul: And I'm sure you see the same thing I see, which is all these people in these jobs are just waiting for that common knowledge to switch. Like, they don't want to be there. They don't even like the work. They're just looking for the, the better socially acceptable option. And I'm willing to incur a lot more social costs than other people, but other people are not. But I think that is shifting.
Ben Hunt: I absolutely believe it's shifting, and it's Everyone is going to experience this differently, Paul. And I think the real issue is not that, oh, you're a manager, you're a bad person. That's not it. That's not it at all. What I'm saying is that your identity, what makes you you, is not created by that work role as a manager. I was a freaking hedge fund manager.
I was a hedge fund manager too. I was a strategy consultant. I may be a hedge fund manager again. I want to make money. I want to provide for the family, and I like nice— I want to do all that. I'm not saying don't make money.
What I'm saying is that can't define you. That can't be the story you tell yourself about who you are. Because you'll wake up one morning and you'll realize that aha moment, which is that moving hand writes, having read it moves on, and it's moved on, man. Yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's what we got to wrestle with. Tick tock.
Paul: That's beautiful. Uh, I know you are running up against time, but would love to just know What do you tell your daughters about work and the quote-unquote real world?
Ben Hunt: I think everyone has got to burn themselves on that hot stove, Paul. I think that these— I'm not going to call them lessons, but the aha moment, the piercing of the veil. Seeing the water in which we swim, it has to come from inside. I think that what you can do with your children and your friends and your neighbors, you can try to communicate your experiences and maintain that openness of spirit. But everybody's got to do this journey on their own. And they've got to, like I say, burn themselves on that hot stove.
Yeah. Everyone does. The crux of it, though, and it gets back to not saying, oh, you're a manager, so you're a bad person. The crux of it is to see the world with clear eyes, meaning try to see the invisible water, right? Try to see the stories and the scripts that we all live by. So college, two of my daughters were comparative literature majors.
Which I love. That, to me, that's the best major to have because it's, it's the study of these stories. Beyond that though, it's, it's seeing the world with clear eyes and engaging with other humans, whether they're your family or your colleagues or anyone in the world, with a full heart. Which is, you know, it's Friday Night Lights. That's the slogan, which is about high school football and you know, Odessa, Texas, and— but it's also a good motto for life. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.
I, I think that's it, Paul. I think that's what you try to communicate and instill in your children, and what we strive for, should strive for ourselves. See the world with clear eyes, engage with other humans with full hearts, find others who will engage with us on those same terms. That's our pack, that's our team, and that's what changes the world.
Paul: I love it. Uh, appreciate all the insights today. This is a fun conversation. Where can people, uh, join the pack?
Ben Hunt: It's Epsilon Theory all over the place. So it's @EpsilonTheory on Twitter, it's epsilontheory.com. Do a search on Epsilon Theory. We put all the stuff out there. It's how we're trying to change the world, is how we do it together.
