 Konnichiwa. Today I'm coming to you from Kyoto, Japan, and I want to talk to you guys about culture. So what I'm learning in my travels is that I think I have consistently overestimated the importance of politics on people's lives and underestimated the importance of culture. I think there's a two-way relationship between culture and politics. I think out of a cultural set of ideas you get political ideas and I think out of a political structure you get cultural ideas. I do think the cultural ideas are more primary in a sense. And here's what I'm pretty confident in concluding that in terms of how you live your everyday life what is going to be more impactful on your well-being and happiness is culture more than the political structure you find yourself within. There are some extremes on the edges where maybe that's not the case if you live in like a totalitarian dictatorship, maybe that's going to be more important than the culture you're around, though maybe not. But here's what I mean. Here's a set of questions that are not political questions and yet will greatly affect your everyday life. What is the appropriate role for women in the household? Is it okay to litter in public places? Is it okay to treat people like crap in the street? Are people who are poor in a lower social class and worthy of derision? Are people who are rich worthy of respect? How late can you show up to an event and it's still be acceptable? What is the appropriate reaction to somebody's tardiness? If you are wearing clothing that other people find provocative, what should your reaction be to them? Should you call them out in public? Should you publicly shame them? Should you try to get them to lose their job? If somebody else is speaking their mind and you don't like what they have to say, do you talk over them? Do you try to shut them up? Do you try to shame them? Do you try to embarrass them? How much free expression is okay in a society and how much of it is unstable? If you don't play in accordance with the social gender roles in your society, should you be treated as an outcast? Or is it okay to be an independent human who doesn't play by other people's rules? None of these are political questions and yet all of them are massively important for how your life is going to be lived in the context of being around other people. If the majority of people around you are going to shame you constantly for holding social beliefs that aren't in accordance with the majority, that's going to give you a pretty miserable lifestyle. Even if you have less freedom but you have more social toleration, let's say, I would claim it's a more liberating society. Even if you have to give up an additional 10% in your taxes, if you can have a culture around you that encourages individual independence and encourages you to flourish in whatever way you want and isn't judgmental about you not achieving some kind of social norms or social status, I'd say that's desirable. I would give up 10% of my income and live in a less free place if I were around a culture that I found productive instead of toxic. I'll give you just a couple of examples of my travels to illustrate what I mean. When we were in London, we stayed in a Turkish district and we didn't know this at the time. It was very, very heavily Turkish and lots of people there were Muslim and this is obviously a very controversial topic in the West, the West versus Islam. I'll just tell you my own experiences. The place that we were staying, I had some very unsettling or uncomfortable social interactions. I was at a grocery store one time and I had developed a little bit of a rapport with the person who owned the grocery store. It was at least working at the grocery store and we were talking one day I was getting, I was buying some fruit or whatever and he said, he was from Turkey. He said, so what brings you to London? He said, are you in the military? I said, no, I'm not in the military. I'm just traveling. I'm traveling doing a work travel thing. He said, are you here for the bitches? I said, no, I'm married. I'm not here for the bitches. He said, oh, well, if you're married, you can still be here for the bitches. And I was a little bit off put because that's not exactly how I roll. And I went in again at a future date and he kept asking me about whether or not I was involved in the military, like the U.S. military. And I said, no, I'm not, I don't really even support the U.S. military. He said, okay, well, we'll kill you last. Now, yes, he was probably kidding, I hope, but in the context of our experiences and where we were in London and the engagements we were having with people, it was uncomfortable. Yes, he's, of course, free to say whatever he wants to say, but that interaction with that culture there, I found, like I said, unsettling. And when we were walking around, it was very clear that the women, female attire, is supposed to be extremely conservative in that culture, wearing either full body dress or Nikav or whatever it's called. I don't really like that. I think people should be free, of course, to cover their body however they want, but if there's overwhelming social pressure because the woman's not supposed to reveal herself because she's property of the man, I have an issue with that. Let me give you another example. We've been in Japan for probably a week and a half or so, and I found it very freeing. I was expecting to feel stifled by Japanese culture. I probably would if I were Japanese, but the way that the Japanese treat Westerners is wonderful. They're incredibly polite. When you're out in public, they're not boisterous and, you know, puking in the streets. They're unbelievably respectful and helpful. And though they may have a less free or maybe they have a more free in some way, political structure, I like Japanese culture. I like the way that they treat Westerners here. If I were going to live here versus some other place in the world, what would most likely be way more important is a set of cultural beliefs rather than a political structure. From my conversations, I think that Japanese culture, if you're Japanese, is way more rigid and way less fluid and way less individualistic. So I probably wouldn't like it if I was a Japanese person myself, but being here, this is one of my favorite countries in the world just because the culture meshes with my own. Like if you walk around in Japan, a lot of the advertisements are all like fantasy, RPG, anime, nerdy, techno stuff, which would be kind of shameful and geeky in the United States. People are uneasy about being dweeby, but they totally embrace their dweebiness here in Japan. I'm a dweeb. I love it. And the last example I give is just being in the United States. I can give lots more examples, but the difference in culture between rural America, rural upstate New York, let's say, and living in Atlanta or living outside of New York City or living in D.C. I lived in all these places. It's totally different. Where I was living in upstate New York, very toxic culture, not big on individualism, very, they would consider it like backwoods type culture. I don't really identify with that. And so there was social pressure on me to act in a way that I'm really not. And living in big cities, I feel more, I feel a little bit more free as an individual, but also there's a lot of left-wing social justice warriors in cities who have their noses in everybody else's business and who flout their social leftism. I find it nauseating. So there's these radical trade-offs, even though the political structure isn't that fundamentally different, what's way more important for your daily life is the belief systems of people around you that aren't just political. So if I had to come up with my ideal society, yes, it would be politically free. And yes, I think political freedom affects culture. But really, probably more fundamentally, it would be the individualist mentality, that culture which accepts differences in individuals, supports them, supports different people's lifestyles, doesn't have this rigorous social hierarchy where you are judged based on how much income you have or the status of whatever job you're partaking in, one that is rationalist, not dogmatic, one that isn't hyper-religious or religious in a very limited, respectable context, open-minded, that's the kind of culture I want to be around. And even if it costs more being in a less free political structure, I would definitely choose to live there. So that's something I think we can build. I think we can create that, especially online. If you like that, leave a comment, talk about it, talk about the cultural norms and values that you think you would find would help you flourish in this idealized society.