I sat down after I graduated. I saw a lot of former teammates and friends from other sports who are a couple years older go through the same process. Nature abhors a vacuum. When that time disappears, when your craft disappears, you can fill it with something productive, or something disruptive, or, of course, something in between that as well.

I’ve seen so many friends. For the first time in your life, you have a little bit of money, and you’re working in a big city. The temptation to just kind of go out and party is pretty strong. I didn’t want to fall into that trap, knowing how easy that was and how seductive that was. 

I sat down and I thought through how I would want to spend my time. When I look back at the end of my life, what would I never regret. I came to the point where I was pretty comfortable that reading, learning, meeting fascinating people, traveling, and those sorts of experiences would be things I would never regret. 

I treated that process just like I did with tennis where I set aside a couple hours every day, and I “practice.” I would get up early in the morning and read a couple hours before work. At the end of work, instead of going to the tennis courts or the gym, I would go home or go to the library and just read some more. 

That combination is kind of what you see on The Rabbit Hole. The essays, writing, and book summaries, instead of doing that for myself and leaving it just up to me, I decided to start sharing it with other people. Of course, at the beginning, it was just shared with close friends and family. It was a little email newsletter. 

It became a little bit unwieldy, so I thought, “Hey, why not create a little website and not really expecting anything of it, but just kind of chronicling my learning and sharing it with others that are close to me.” It’s been really fun to see. I would say maybe in the last year or so, it’s really taken off. Some other people have gotten what seems like a lot of value out of it. That makes me feel good. I’m excited about that.

Sean Murray  4:31  

There’s a lot of value there. I’m one of those fans. You have stated on the website a personal goal. It says that, “You set for yourself this goal to learn, grow, and everyday become a slightly better version of who I was yesterday.” I think that’s a great motto.

Blas Moros  4:50  

I think there are two key elements to that portion of it. Let’s start with the latter. It is “Comparing yourself to yourself.” There’s not a lot of good to be taken from comparing yourself to anybody else in the world. 

Today, with connectivity and how accessible many people are, that’s increasingly enticing. You can see what anybody in the world is up to pretty much. That comparison is so easy. “Oh, I’m just sitting on my bed not doing anything, and I see X, Y, Z people out in the world doing something amazing.” 

It should serve as inspiration, right? I think we can learn a lot from what other people are doing. But I don’t think it’s healthy to compare yourself with who you are today with what this person is doing right now. Often, it’s that 10-year overnight success where these people have been honing their craft for a long time, and only now does it look like they’re coming out to the scene, out of nowhere. That hardly ever is the case, right? 

Comparing yourself to yourself, who you were yesterday, who you were last week, who you were a month ago, do you feel like you’re a little bit smarter, a little bit wiser, a little bit better? Whatever that means to you. The first portion of that sentence, “Learning and becoming a little bit better every day,” I think, harnesses this power of compounding. On a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t look all that impressive. It doesn’t seem like a Herculean effort, but that consistent incremental progress, eternally repeated, adds up to some incredible results.

I’m still very early in my process. I’m relatively young. But I’ve seen the benefit of this just over the last 5 to 7 years of really honing my craft. I feel like I’m learning a lot at both self-education and what I’m doing at work, with friends, and with mentors. It’s really starting to pay off and it’s exciting to see that progress.

Sean Murray  6:28  

This idea of not comparing yourself to others, and compounding are two great concepts. I was first introduced to them through studying value investing, and reading about people like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Mohnish, Pabrai, and others. They talk about compounding their investment returns, but they also talk about applying compounding to other parts of their lives. 

These include areas like learning, relationships, and exercising. There’s another concept from Buffett in particular that he calls “The inner scorecard.” This applies directly to what I think you were talking about there, which is not comparing ourselves to others. It’s much more useful and healthy to keep our own inner scorecard, compare ourselves to ourselves yesterday, and measure how we’re improving instead of comparing to others. 

The whole idea behind this podcast is to apply the principles of value investing to achieve something beyond financial wealth. It is something I believe is even more important. That is living a good life. I believe you were introduced to these concepts through value investing as well by studying people like Charlie Munger and others. Can you talk about that?

Blas Moros  7:41  

I studied finance in college and kind of fell into that world through that. I read all the books and got excited about this idea of being multidisciplinary. What I really got out of it is that these big universal ideas that you should focus on are applicable across domains. 

Education departmentalized in silos everything in order to make it easier to manage and handle. But knowledge is in fact, one. It’s intertwined. It’s interconnected. While it can be helpful to think of things as finance, history and biology, the power comes from this inner weaving of this knowledge. How does this idea from finance apply to your life, to relationships, and to learning? That’s where this compound learning I think really comes in. It’s not magic. 

It’s just that you have more context to hang ideas off of, and you have previous knowledge. When you learn something new, you can attach that to your previous knowledge. The bigger base that you have, the more and faster you can learn and master this idea of compound learning. It will really take off. 

Like you said, there’s beautiful ideas from physics and chemistry that we can take into our lives and apply. That is regardless if we’re an author, or an investor, or an operator, or whatever it might be, whatever you do. That’s the beauty of becoming multidisciplinary. 

It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot. It took me at least a little bit of time to understand what that really meant and why it’s powerful. But once you see those interconnections from one field to the next, you’ll understand that there’s tremendous value looking outside of your day-to-day. You can look outside of your field for inspiration, ideas and learning, and how you can apply that to your craft, or whatever that might be.

Sean Murray  9:17  

Let’s talk a little bit about the different areas that you expand on in The Rabbit Hole. One is books. You summarize the books you read. I don’t know if you summarize every book. It would be kind of interesting to have you talk about that. But tell us a little bit about how you find the next book, and then when you read a book, how do you go about creating these notes that get published on The Rabbit Hole?

Blas Moros  9:37  

I started a lot of books that I didn’t finish. I’m comfortable with that. What you see on there are just the books that I finished. If I read something a quarter of the way, unless there’s something really interesting there, I usually don’t share it. It’s usually just books that I find interesting enough to get through. 

My process for selection is, I have 3 to 5 friends that I trust a lot. If they mentioned something, I put it on my Amazon wishlist. I generally buy it when 2 or 3 of them sort of mentioned the same thing. “You need to read this book. You need to read this book. You need to read this book.” “Okay, it passes the filter,” and I buy it. 

Now, of course, there’s this idea of an anti-library. These are the books that sit on your shelf that you haven’t read. That very much resonates with me. I have a bunch of books sitting out at home that I haven’t gotten to. I might never get to. But that’s okay. 

The filter for what I read is pretty high. I think that’s how it should be. Everything has an opportunity cost. If you’re reading something now, it means you can’t read something else. I try to apply that filter, but you have to be a little bit stringent. If there’s something you don’t enjoy, toss it, start on something else, and do not fall into this sunk cost idea. I just kind of keep going with it.

Sean Murray  10:39  

When you read a book all the way through, how do you decide what you pull out? What goes into the notes?

Blas Moros  10:46  

When I read it, it’s been a process. I’ve learned a lot through the couple hundred books I’ve read and what works for me. These things I will talk about. They’re just what’s worked for me, so I don’t feel like it’s the right way to do it. When I sit down with a book, I kind of have an idea of what I want to get out of it, what questions do I have going into it. 

I read the summary, the epilogue, and the prologue to get an idea of what the author is trying to get across. That way with a big picture idea, you can have that in the back of your head. As you get into the details, you sort of understand where each of those ideas fall into this bigger picture, if that makes sense. Then I feel like I have a conversation with the author. I write questions. I underline. I highlight. I asked myself questions. 

The big thing that’s really been beneficial to me and really took some time is asking myself: “How did these ideas, these learnings, these concepts apply to my life today?” I’m trying to make them concrete. It’s just that simple question. It’s amazing how often an answer comes up. Even if it’s not in the moment, or if a couple weeks go by, just the fact that you’ve molded that over your subconscious is working on it. 

When the moment comes, or when you come across that situation, it kind of pops into your head. But if you don’t give yourself that opportunity to ask yourself those questions, to really stop, and to think about the book, at least for me, I don’t think those flashes or intuitions would come as readily.

Sean Murray  12:04  

I think it’s an excellent practice. It’s something that I’ve noticed in my life. I’d read a book. I’d feel really energized and excited about the ideas. And then six months or a year later, I’d see it on my shelf and think, “What did I really get out of that book?” If you can take the time to write down the ideas, it just sticks so much better. 

You said something about opportunity cost. That’s really important too. We have just a limited amount of time. Everyone has a limited amount of time on earth. And so if you’re spending time reading one book, that means you’re not reading another. It also means that if you want to get a return on that investment of your time, you could spend 4 hours just reading the book while not doing any of the practices that you talked about, And then move on to the next book. 

It is what I did. You could also spend maybe an extra 2 hours. That’s 6 hours instead of 4 hours. Write up the notes, have the conversation with the author, connect the author’s ideas with maybe another author in the same subject, and then publish it. It could lead to connections with other people and sharing your knowledge. 

All of a sudden, you’re getting a lot more out of that investment. Put it extra 2 hours and a little bit more effort. Most people don’t do it, but it’s a huge payoff in my mind. 

What about this idea of these challenges? I love this idea. You recently picked up the challenge of, I think, learning how to skateboard. Talk about some of these challenges, where this came from, and how that’s working for you.

Blas Moros  13:25  

In my senior year of college, I saw a 2-minute TED Talk. I forgot the guy’s name, actually, but he’s had a big influence on me. He talks about this idea of a monthly challenge. It resonated with me. It started in my senior year of college. That’s maybe a couple of months before I graduated. I’ve kept it up ever since.

6 or 7 years later, I’m still doing something pretty much every single one. It gives me a couple of benefits. Number one of these things that I’ve always wanted to learn and early on was pretty easy, right? That is learning how to juggle and learning how to do a handstand. These are pretty arbitrary and silly things that I’ve always wanted to learn, but I just never set aside to really get around to it. 

It gives me a framework. It gives me a scheduled block of time every day or every week. It sort of depends on the challenge, such as when I sit down and practice this thing. 

The second thing, Sean, that’s been surprising, and I wouldn’t have guessed this from the beginning. It gives me an excuse, a reason to try something. If I fail, I fail. It’s not part of my ego, or my identity. It’s not like tennis was before. When I lost, I took it personally. I’m competitive by practice. I wanted to win. 

These monthly challenges fall into a different mental bucket. Maybe that’s just my shortcoming where I need this excuse to tell people that I’m doing this monthly challenge. I’m learning how to skateboard. If I fall, I fall. That’s just kind of part of the process. 

It gives me that excuse. People see me doing something silly, something that is somewhat arbitrary, but something that I find fun and worthwhile. I think it sparks something in a lot of people because I think most people have something they’ve wanted to learn but just never set aside the time for, or are afraid of failing. They make it this colossal thing that they want to overcome. 

What the monthly challenge does is it just breaks it down into something really simple. Can I learn this in a month or not? And if I do amazing, that’s exciting. And if not, you either dedicate another month to it, or you move on. At least you tried it. It keeps me curious. It keeps me a little playful. It keeps my ego in check. All these things that have been interesting benefits me from doing something like this.

Sean Murray  15:17  

Talk a bit about skateboarding. I think there was another one. It’s making the perfect espresso. These aren’t necessarily learning French, or maybe that was one of yours, I don’t know. But they can be very playful and fun too. Is there one in the last 12 months that you really took something away that’s long lasting?

Blas Moros  15:35  

The skateboarding one is just recent. That’s been fun. It’s been something I’ve always wanted to do. I never bought the skateboard on Amazon. I never got on it. I never found 5 minutes to 10 minutes a day to do that. And when I come up with this monthly challenge, whatever it takes, if it takes a little bit of research, or I need to buy a product or whatever it is, I just commit to that. 

And when it shows up on my doorstep, or I do that research, I feel committed to it. That’s the first really small step. I’ve heard that if you want to start running in the morning, just put on a shoe. That small stuff is enough to sort of get you out of bed and get you moving. 

The monthly challenge is the same thing. It’s just a tiny step that overcomes the friction that allows this idea from physics, or this activation energy to take over. So with skateboarding, all it really was, Sean, was 5 minutes every single day before I drove to work. 

We have a wide street close to me. I got on it. I tried pedaling. I fell a couple times. But by the end of the month, I felt pretty comfortable cruising around. I could turn, go up slopes, and go down slopes. I don’t ever see myself really skateboarding to work or doing it on the weekends, but it was fun. It felt good to learn that and to overcome that in some way at some point.

I want to learn how to surf. I’m sure some of those things will come into play. That’s another unexpected benefit, Sean. It’s been all these silly little ideas, skills and tricks, and counting to 100 in these various languages, whatever it might be. You have no idea how it will benefit you and help you at some point in your life. But with learning these skills, and with reading, the thing that’s helped me endlessly curious is this really deep belief that all these things you learn and do will at some point become valuable. It will at some point become useful. 

Looking forward, it’s really hard to connect those dots. But at the end of your life, you can see how this skill, that experience, that opportunity, and that learning help you get to where you are. Soren Kierkegaard and Steve Jobs had these beautiful quotes that you can’t look at life forward. You have to connect the dots. You have to sort of get to the end of your life and look backwards. That deep faith and all these things that they will someday be valuable keeps me curious. It keeps me hungry.

Sean Murray  17:34  

There’s a couple of things I really like about this monthly challenge. One is that when we’re learning, we’re energized, we’re growing, we get excited about that. It just adds a little spark to life. It keeps us curious, as you said. It’s also connected to this idea of evolution and mutation, which I think is really important. 

In evolution, it’s those slight changes and mutations that you don’t know where they’re going to lead. Mother Nature doesn’t know where they’re going to lead. But eventually they lead to amazing things, like the human body. In our life, you’re introducing yourself to lots of different concepts. It’s almost like an option. You’re creating lots of options out there. A few of them are going to pay off really big. Some of them may pay off smaller. 

You may stumble across something that becomes really impactful and becomes a part of your life. It may be surfing, skateboarding, espresso, or whatever it is. That kind of brings us to this other section of your website called, “The Latticework,” which is a concept I first came across in Charlie Munger’s, “Poor Charlie’s Almanac.”

He talks about the importance of being multidisciplinary in our thinking and having something he calls, “The latticework of mental models.” I know you’re also working on a project that is going to build off of this kind of section of your website. 

Talk a little bit about maybe this idea of what a “Latticework of mental models” is in Charlie’s concept of it. What are you doing in that area?

Blas Moros  19:01  

It’s a project I’m really excited about. I think by the time this comes out, we’ll have released it. It’ll be really exciting to get people’s feedback and get people’s take on it. 

For me, this idea of a latticework became really powerful when I understood what Charlie was saying a little bit *inaudible*. And for me, we did a lot of work around the house growing up, and all that. I was really familiar with this idea of a lattice. That is a criss-cross shape that you can hang blinds and plants also. They can offer shade. 

The point of the whole thing is it creates these intersections on which you can hang things. What Charlie was saying with this Latticework of Mental Models is that you should aim to do the same thing with your thinking. It is by becoming multi-disciplinary, by understanding these core ideas from physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology, and all these different areas. 

You create this mental structure, this mental framework, this lattice work that allows you to hang ideas off of. We touched on it a little bit earlier. This idea of compound learning comes when you have a mental framework to hang ideas off of. All of a sudden when you learn something new, you have previous knowledge, and you can hang on top of that. 

Learning anything in isolation is almost impossible. Most people learn by analogy and through lateral thinking, I know ABC really well, which allows me to learn XYZ really well. That’s what the latticework has, and why it’s been beneficial for me, at least. 

By coming to define these big disciplines, by coming to find the ideas within those disciplines, it gives me that mental framework to understand where an idea might fit in, to understand where I have gaps in knowledge, and to understand where I have blind spots. 

That’s what this project is aiming to do. It’s aiming to help provide a mental framework of sorts to explain what we call, “These big ideas from the big disciplines,” in a fun, curated interconnected way. This is so that you don’t have to go out and read the 600 books, thousands of podcasts, interviews, and conversations I’ve had with people to create this. 

It serves as a paved road in a lot of ways, whereas I had to cautiously stumble over a dirt path. The Latticework provides that for other people. I’m really excited about it. The whole idea is to create this valuable multidisciplinary resource. The next phase would be to build an all-in community around that. We’re working on creating a tool that’s embedded directly into it that allows people to add comments, to add highlights, to converse with each other, to do virtual meetings, to create a master-apprentice relationship of sorts, all through this website; all through this resource. 

Its early days, like you said, evolution, the beautiful thing is, when you adapt, it gives you a better chance of surviving. I have no idea exactly where this thing will end up. But I’m excited about this shift from a top-down hierarchical education system where you have a professor preaching to the class to a more communal, decentralized, collaborative situation that allows for us to learn from and with each other. There are hundreds of ideas and dozens of disciplines on here right now. 

I am an expert in exactly 0 of them. I haven’t spent my life studying any one of these, but I am incredibly curious. I am really hungry. I enjoy thinking about how these ideas fit together. I think the latticework provides a resource, a structure, a framework that will allow for all sorts of people from different walks of life, and experts who know these ideas better than I do, to contribute. I think, together, we can make this a really valuable resource.

Sean Murray  22:22  

It’s a very powerful concept. It comes from this idea that, any one great idea, certainly has value. But the value increases when you can connect it to another great idea, from another discipline, and see how they’re connected. I had the good fortune because you let me see kind of a sneak peek of this new project that you’re launching called, “The Latticework.” Can you remind the audience how to find it? What’s the website or the URL?

Blas Moros  22:49  

It’s ltcwrk.com. We’ll have it on Twitter, on my personal handle, and all that, so we’ll make sure that it’s easy to find.

Sean Murray  22:59  

It’s just a beautiful website. It visually helps people connect some of these great ideas. The other thing I’m really energized about this project is that your undertaking is developing a community of like-minded individuals that are interested in learning, in growing, and in developing further this latticework. 

You can draw on many minds, and the creativity of the community to build out these resources. Like you said, you don’t have to go through 100 podcasts, or read 50 books in a subject. You can go to The Latticework and see where these other experts and like-minded individuals suggest. I start my journey to learn more about say, quantum mechanics, philosophy, engineering, economics, or any of these major areas. 

Blas Moros  23:48  

I think that’s right, Sean. What I’m excited about is that with so many options, with so many choices, with everything we have access to today, the dearth of information is no longer the problem. Throughout history, that was sort of the problem. Now, because of everything we have, such as connectivity. The value comes, I think from curation, from interconnection, from this idea of a really high signal to noise ratio. 

That’s what I’m aiming to do with The Latticework. We don’t want to, and frankly, I don’t think we ever could become what Wikipedia is today. It’s a world wonder. It is just incredible how much you can learn. All the topics that are covered there are really just amazing. 

The Latticework is aiming to do something different. It aims to make these ideas, to understand a little bit thinner and crisper, and how they’re interconnected. And then on top of it, how do you apply them to your life? We talked about that step a little bit earlier where it’s great if something sounds beautiful on paper and on theory, but that next step, how do you make it concrete? How do you apply it to your life? That’s where I at least had trouble. 

It took me a long time to sort of understand what that looked like. How do I do that? What questions do I ask? How do I apply these things to my life so that they actually benefit you? And that’s what The Latticework is hoping to achieve. 

I aim to make it fun, simple and beautiful. I think that a lot of these complex topics turned people off because you start getting into technical equations right away, or you don’t see how it’s applicable to your life, or why you should even care? 

That’s kind of the foundation of The Latticework. It is helping people understand why they should care, why all these ideas from these different disciplines that you probably never touched on are really understood, and why they matter to you. They get that conveyed really clearly up front. 

We want to make it playful, to make it simple, to make it fun, to make it concrete and interconnected. That’s the base that we’re starting off of. And, yeah, we’re excited about that. I’ve seen the benefit of my own life and the small group of people that I shared it with. They are of course biased. You will see how many of them were willing to share the truth with me. But it seems like they got a lot of value out of it. 

Over time, like you mentioned, I really think the community that develops around this will be more valuable than the resource itself. This chicken and the egg problem that every little network sort of deals with at the beginning is one way that I’ve read or learned to overcome. It is something that’s valuable on a standalone basis. 

I think a lot of his work is done. I think on a standalone basis, the ideas conveyed and how they’re conveyed is valuable. But another idea we covered, which is this idea of Lollapalooza effects, again, taken from Mr. Munger. These are really special things, emergent things that happen when this community gets together. We’re excited about that. We’re trying to build that up in the right way. We’ll do so organically, methodically and thoughtfully. We’ll see where it goes.

Sean Murray  26:27  

One of the first big mental models that you encounter when you go into The Latticework is worldly wisdom. This is another concept from Charlie Munger which I remember was first being introduced to it in “Poor Charlie’s Almanac.” It was in one of his speeches when he talks about the importance of having worldly wisdom. 

Could you talk a little bit about that? What is worldly wisdom? Maybe they’ll give the audience just a sense for what some of these big concepts are about.

Blas Moros  26:52  

Worldly wisdom is the first big discipline that we cover. Other disciplines included as I mentioned are physics, chemistry, mathematics, and later philosophy. A lot more human centric, but we start with the hard sciences. We can get into why that is. 

Charlie talked about worldly wisdom. The way that I understood it is as meta principles, meta ideas, essentially instruction manuals for life. My goal with The Latticework is to make it as accessible, give away as much value as I possibly can while ensuring that we’re viable and that we can become a self-sustaining long term business. 

We can get into what that means and what that looks like in a little bit. I really think that worldly wisdom is one of the most valuable disciplines that we cover. We’re giving it away for free. We’ll always give it away for free. At the beginning, while we gather feedback, we’ve created this waitlist. All you need to do is give us your email, then you get access to this worldly wisdom discipline. 

There are 12 core ideas in there. And again, this is not static that can change very quickly. Ideas can be added, removed or refined over time. In fact, I hope they are as we get this community involved and engaged. Right now, these instruction manuals, I think, are a great place to start because they serve as a foundation, or the bedrock for our lattice work. 

If we come to understand these ideas really deeply and well, it serves as a great launching point for the rest of the ideas. It’s a great place to learn how to learn. It’s a great place to understand why these ideas are important, and to how you should go about it. 

I start there because it’s a good launching point, like I said. We’ll make the rest of the journey a little bit more comprehensible, a little bit easier, a little bit smoother. So that’s why worldly wisdom is the first discipline we come across within The Latticework.

Sean Murray  28:35  

What are you hoping to create as far as the community? What do you expect of people that might want to join this community?

Blas Moros  28:42  

It’s a really good question. An experience that really resonated with me and really influenced me was an entrepreneurial paper that I found the PDF online. This PDF had Khosla’s writing on. He’s a famous venture capitalist and founder of Sun Microsystems. He’s a very interesting thinker. 

This PDF that was online had his notes. He highlighted that he wrote what he had questions about. He connected it to his day-to-day, and who he wanted to share it with and why. I thought that was so cool, Sean, because it’s like a glimpse into somebody else’s head. 

You can understand the connections they made, whereas you would naturally make totally different connections. You really get their perspective, you get where they’re coming from, and maybe a glimpse into how they think. I’ve had the good fortune of being able to do that with some pretty incredible thinkers. It has taught me how to think. 

Let’s say I had a coach since I was really young. He showed me the technique for a serve, a volley, a forehand, and all that. At least my experience with formal education is I never went through that. Nobody really taught me how to ask a good question, how to do good research, or what good public speaking looks like. 

But all these skills that are incredibly important in the real world, at least in my case, weren’t really touched on. With The Latticework and these ideas, I think, in a big portion of it is learning how to learn. What does that look like? What are the steps to take? 

Going back to this Vinod Khosla paper, it inspired me. Imagine if we could do that on a global scale. Imagine if we could get all these incredible thinkers in this community built up around these ideas that can contribute. They can add their own comments and their own highlights. Again, we have brevity and curation on top of mind. It won’t become this onslaught of random highlights that just sort of bombard you. We’re working through that right now. 

The ability to scale that and to learn from each other with this structure in mind, with these ideas in mind got me so fired up. I think that’s the power of the community that we’re looking to build.

Sean Murray  30:40  

That’s a great example. If you think back on history, how valuable would it be to say, “See Shakespeare’s notes on reading Plutarch.” He read Plutarch because we know he did. He then turned it into a play. In some way maybe he connected it to some other passages or some other Roman historian. Sometimes biographers come across notes like this. It’s just really interesting to their subject because they get a glimpse into their mind. I think it’s great. 

Talk a little bit more about this idea of applying it. I get really fired up when I read Charlie Munger’s speeches, “Poor Charlie’s Almanac”, or even when I’m reading a blog post on a subject I’m interested in. It could be about a philosopher. I recently read Sean Carroll’s book on quantum mechanics. 

I just got really fascinated about the multiverse, and about some of the interesting properties of quantum mechanics, such as spooky action at a distance. It gets my mind thinking, and I can sometimes spend hours writing notes and putting it in my journal, but then I think, “Okay, how do I really make it work?” 

I think that’s where if you can help people just make that last step from consuming these ideas, really trying to absorb them, making them a part of our thinking, and making them applicable. What’s your thoughts on that, and how can The Latticework potentially help us kind of cross that bridge?

Blas Moros  32:01  

Let me start one step back with the format in which we describe and explain ideas. It follows this idea of an ADEPT framework. It’s something that I learned from Kalid Azad. He runs a really interesting website called BetterExplained. 

With this ADEPT framework, I found it really helpful to learn new things. It’s an acronym. It stands for analogy, diagram, example, plain English, and technical description. For each idea that we cover, we describe it from these different vantage points. I think that’s really powerful because we hope and we expect a really diverse group of people to join this. 

They may have different backgrounds and different levels of expertise. If I wrote it through just one frame, I would naturally only be touching and be resonating with people who might understand that frame. With this ADEPT framework, you can really get the people with a variety of backgrounds and expertise. 

I really like plain English. That’s sort of how my mind works. I like getting to the core or the essence of something. My wife is much more visual. She likes the diagram. She likes the analogies. That’s how she understands things. First, it’s explaining these ideas in a way that might resonate with more people than they otherwise would. That’s what the ADEPT framework is hoping to achieve. 

In addition, we have a couple of other sections. We have a bunch of quotes. It serves the same purpose really, when you have 10, or 12, or 15 people from a variety of disciplines and different points in history touch on the same idea. At least for me, I found that so powerful. Coming at this core concept in a lot of different ways helped me better understand it. 

Then we have a section called Interconnected Ideas. That’s a portion of what I’m trying to do to help ignite people’s own personal latticework. We’re talking about idea A, and in this section, you can see how ideas B, C, D and E are interconnected. 

For me, it’s the start of your own personal latticework. Whether you’re starting from point A, you’re a total newbie who doesn’t really know what being multidisciplinary means, or you’re someone who’s been spending their life reading and learning about these things. I think it’s still valuable. That’s the first aspect of it. That is trying to meet people where they’re at, rather than forcing them to see things in one way or a particular way. That ADEPT framework is really helpful. 

And then that last part, Sean, is really difficult. To turn these ideas from theory to practice is hard. It’s different depending on your circumstances, your contacts, your field, and what you’re trying to achieve. But through these variety of perspectives, and through a community, we’re looking to incentivize people to work together both digitally and physically. If that means building something, or getting together or whatever that looks like. 

To have some sort of accountability, some sort of group that you’re working with and learning with and learning from is how we’re trying to make some of these ideas a little bit more concrete and actionable. We don’t have the answers yet. Maybe we never will. But that’s part of our core vision to help make these ideas more applicable.

Sean Murray  34:52  

Can you give us an idea beyond worldly wisdom? How is this latticework going to build out, and some of the other subjects that will be emerging on the latticework?

Blas Moros  35:03  

One core framework that we use to build this lattice work is this idea of the three buckets. A mentor of mine described these three buckets in the following way. Bucket 1 is everything inorganic. That would be chemistry, physics, or these things that have existed for over 13 billion years. 

Bucket 2 is the biological world. These are the things that have existed for 3.7 billion years. Bucket 3 is a sort of human system. Let’s call it “Recorded human history.” Put your number on it, whatever that means to you. Through these three buckets, you arrive at a really helpful framework to come up with multidisciplinary ideas. 

The thought is if an idea passes Bucket 1, it passes Bucket 2, then it passes Bucket 3. But there’s a lot of clout behind it. We should give it a lot of weight and respect. A simple one is reciprocation. It follows Newton’s laws of motion. 

In biology, if you mess with a cat is going to scratch your face off. Human system is the same thing. If I do you wrong, people look for revenge. It’s just a natural part of the world. That’s one simple example. But one that I show is the power of this 3-bucket framework.

Within the latticework, that’s how we’ve thought about the disciplines and how we’re organizing them. We’ll come up with diagrams and networks to show and make this a little bit more concrete and visual. 

The first bucket, which is the inorganic world, we have physics and chemistry, science and engineering, and experimenting with those types of disciplines. In Bucket 2, there’s only one, but it’s immensely powerful. This biology and nature, in which within it falls evolution and natural selection, hierarchies, and all these beautiful ideas that we can learn from biology. 

In the third bucket, are most of the ideas actually. If you’re put off by the hard sciences, don’t be because most of the ideas cover this human element. That’s philosophy, religion, spirituality, competing, and all these beautiful areas that maybe we have a little bit of an easier time understanding how they apply to us. 

That’s our 3-bucket framework. That’s how The Latticework is laid out. We’ll start with the hard sciences. We’re moving through it somewhat linearly. But of course, there’s no correct way to organize it. There’s no proper way to think about these things. They’re all interconnected. They’re all one. 

It’s just a sign of human frailty, or of human thinking that we have to divide all these things into different silos. But in the back of our minds, we have to remember that all these things are interconnected. They’re all one. Even though we have all these different disciplines, the whole point is to find ways to interconnect them. We’ll get into philosophy and some beautiful disciplines a little bit after the hard sciences.

Sean Murray  37:28  

The idea is that people will be able to chart their own learning journey through these models and through worldly wisdom. There’s no path that’s going to be right for everyone, nor is going to work for everyone. You got to find your own. People will be able to bounce from subject to subject, maybe following connections, or just where their interests lie. Is that right?

Blas Moros  37:50  

Yes, absolutely. With the early release in late August that we just talked about, we only have a couple of disciplines built up. But by the time we get feedback and make a couple improvements, and hear what the community has to say, the idea is to release maybe not all but a vast majority of the discipline so that people can follow their curiosity. 

They can jump into their own rabbit holes and see where those interconnections lie and really make it fun for them. We’ve laid out a learning roadmap that works for us that we might recommend, let’s say. But the whole point of what makes this really fun is that it’s unique to each person. 

Follow your own intuition. Follow your own curiosity. If you don’t want to go through this thing linearly, then don’t bounce around and have fun. So yeah, exactly right. The whole point is to make this your own, to make it your own learning journey, and to make it work for you.

Sean Murray  38:39  

Can you tell the audience how to get started in this and what they might expect when they get there? How to become a part of the community?

Blas Moros  38:47  

So again, the website is The Latticework. That is ltcwrk.com. We’ve really tried to condense what we want to accomplish and what the whole point of this thing is and just two simple pages. There’s a really brief introduction. 

And then the second page is our vision, which outlines where we want to go, and where we want to take this thing. I really recommend starting there. That gives you I think, a big understanding, a big picture context of what The Latticework is about. 

And lastly, there’s a join us page. There, you can understand a little bit about how we’re approaching this. But like I mentioned, worldly wisdom is free. All you need to do is sign up for our waitlist with your email, and then you’ll get access to all those contents. 

Again, I really recommend the introduction and the vision as a great starting point. From there, the whole journey after that will make more sense. You’ll understand where we’re coming from. 

One of the main things I hope to accomplish with this early release is getting people’s feedback. Please reach out to me. We have a contact form that’s easy to find on the website. You can reach out to me directly on Twitter. I want to hear from you. I want to make this something really valuable, beautiful, and special. I can’t do it alone. 

Again, like I said, I’m just a student. I’m no expert. We’re looking for people’s feedback. We’re looking for people to get involved. I hope people take that call to action seriously, do reach out to me, and help me make this something special. I think it can be.

Sean Murray  40:05  

If you’re interested in learning, self development, self education, or if this idea of the latticework of mental models and building that out for yourself is something that you are excited about, I highly recommend checking out The Latticework. Give it a try, poke around there, give Blas some feedback. I certainly enjoy doing it. It’s been really fascinating. 

I’m excited to watch and see how this emerges and grows, and to be a part of the community, Blas. Thanks for being on The Good Life.

Blas Moros  40:39  

Thank you, Sean. It means a lot. It’s been really fun talking to you today. Going through this with you has helped me flesh out some ideas. I’m excited. Again, thank you for having me on. It’s been really fun.

Outro  40:49  

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