Hey, it's shame parish and welcome to a new episode of the knowledge project where we deconstruct actionable strategies that you can use to make better decisions learn new things and live a better life this time around we have the amazing navall ramakant. Navall is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He's invested in more than a hundred companies including Uber Twitter Yammer and so many others. Don't worry. We're not going to talk a bit early stage investing Duvall is an incredibly deep thinker who challenges the status quo and so many things he thought deeply about stuff that's near and dear to us like reading habits decision-making in life. Just a heads up. This is the longest podcast I've ever done our conversation lasted over two hours. And if you're like me, you're going to take a lot of notes a complete list of books and site's mentioned is available in the show notes at Farnam Street blog.com podcast. That's fa RNA.
M Street blog.com podcast I transcript is available for members of our learning tribe. If you want to join head on over to furnham Street blog.com tribe in addition to transcripts. We have the world's best online reading group and a host of other goodies without further Ado. Here's Nepal.
Before I get started, here's a quick word from our sponsor.
I believe in full disclosure. So I want to point out that not only do I use the sponsor personally for my weekly meal planning, but I'm also one of the owners me lime is one of the most downloaded food Ops in the world Everybody Eats some just do it better than others. If you've ever had trouble sticking to a diet or wander the grocery store in lessly with no real menu in mind. Well, I'm gets you organized with quick and easy meals matched up to your personal dietary preferences. Just pick the recipes for the week Neil. I'm build you a shopping list with all the ingredients you need and helps you cook once you try it, you'll see it's crazy to grocery shop. Any other way you save time and money reduce stress and eat. Well download the free meal Lime app for your Android or iPhone or check them out on the web at meal on.com. That's mea L IM e.com.
Duvall welcome to the show. I am so excited to get to talk to you today and you know ask you a whole bunch of questions that I have on my mind. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've been a longtime fan of your work. Thank you. Let's get started with something simple. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?
It's actually not that simple. I have a hard time saying what I do my day job is that I am CEO of Angel list the company that started
almost seven years ago now and Angeles is sort of this platform for startups in the tech industry and we help entrepreneurs raise money. We help entrepreneurs recruit Talent into their startups, and we also help people find jobs into startups and now recently we acquired product hunt. So we also help companies launched the customers. So it's basically a One Stop Shop for the early-stage tech ecosystem whether you're raising money or you're investing money with the largest online platform for that whether you're recruiting Talent or whether you're being recruited with largest online class.
I'm for start-up recruiting and then whether you're looking for a new product try out or were they looking for customers for your product will also the largest online product that platform for launching that
so it's sort of become this bigger thing and that's sort of my day job, but I'm also involved in a bunch
of other things. I'm an investor push something about 200 companies advisor to a bunch a bunch of boards occasionally blog and tweet. I'm also a small partner in a cryptocurrency fun because I'm really into these coins that Bitcoin the theory of easy cash and so forth and I'm always cooking up something you always have a bunch of side projects that I forget. Hey keep track of that all like what is your typical day look like well, that's the good part. I don't have a typical day nor do I want a typical day,
you know if there is a typical day, I'm usually inside my office at Angel
list, but I'm basically just operating mostly on email or phone or meetings or or squirreled up at home. So there are days where I just work completely from home.
To do that. I don't work. I've actually been trying to get rid of this concept of having to be the specific place at a specific time. You know, all I care about is am I doing what I want to do and being productive and am I happy
I really want to break away from this
idea of 40 hour weeks or 60 hour weeks or 80 hour weeks or 9 to 5 or rules or jogger
identities. It just
all feels like a straitjacket. You're one of the most voracious readers. I know you've called yourself a conscious Bookworm and you've read a ton. How did you first get interested in reading
reading was my first
love? You know, I know that in my childhood when I was on 9 10 11 years old. I was
a latchkey kid. My mom was working
multiple jobs, and then she was going to school at night. We were raised by a single mother my brother and I were in New York City and we weren't a part of New York city that has been very safe. So I basically the library was my was my after-school Center. So
Back from school. I just go straight to the library and I just hang out there until they closed and then I'd come home. So that was just my daily routine. But
I think even by that point in time, I
already loved books. I was reading books the child. I remember my grandparents house in India. I'd be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather's readers digests, which is just all he had to read there. I mean now of course, there's a smorgasbord of information out there. Everybody can read anything all the time but back then it was much more limited. So I would read comic books. I would read Readers Digest. I would read story books, you know, whatever I can get my hands on Mysteries. I was big into Mysteries. So I think I just always loved to read because I'm actually an anti-social introvert and I was just lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age.
I think some of it comes from
the happy circumstance that when I was young nobody forced me on what to read. I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say. Oh
You should read this but don't read that the reality is I just read a lot that by today's standards would be considered mental junk food, but eventually you just get to like reading you run out of the junk food. And then you start eating the healthy food right earlier tastes kind of graduate. So I think to some extent that's what happened with me because I started from comic books and they run from that it's a mystery is and we're from that into fantasy that the Sci-Fi and then from sci-fi made into science and then mathematics and philosophy. So it just kind of kept climbing up the stack but I'm lucky that there was no one around when I was seven years old or 60 years old say, oh you shouldn't read that you should be this instead. It's most of what you read today physical or on a computer Kindle for convenience. It's mostly Kindle. It's not the Kindle device itself for the iPad and but for books that I really really like
I will also buy a physical copy
so I have both so there's no excuse not to read it,
you know a really good.
Book cost ten or Twenty Dollars in can change your life in a meaningful way. So it's not something I believe in saving money
on it because even back when I was broken. I had no money. I always spend money on books. I never viewed
that as an expense. That's an investment to me and I probably spend 10 times as much money on books that I actually get through. So in other words, like for every 200 dollars worth of books that by actually end up making it through ten percent. So I'll read twenty dollars worth of books, but it's still absolutely worth it. You know, how
uncommon. Yeah and anything that's one of the greats like if I read a book and I know that it's amazing. I'll buy multiple copies parsley to give away partially because I have them lying around the house and these days I find myself reading
as much or more as I do reading
because I think this
was a tweet coming to town on on Twitter that I saw this guy illustrate is and he basically said, you know, I don't want to read everything. I just want to read the hundred great books over and over again, and I think there's a lot to that so it's really more about identifying.
And what are the great books to you? Because different book speak to different people and then really absorbing those because
I don't know about you but I don't I have very poor
attention.
I have to escape my speed read I jump
around and I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books, but I bet it's
some deep level you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche.
So they do kind of weave in there. There are there are books that I'm sure you've had this feeling where you pick up a book. You start reading it I
got this is pretty interesting. This is pretty good and you getting this increasing
sense of deja vu and then about two-thirds or half way through the book you rise over this put before
and that's perfectly fine. It means you were ready to reread it.
What are the books you're rereading now, it's a good question. I'll pull up my Kindle app as we talk but usually I'm always reading some books and science. Like I just
read I read a seven brief lesson.
Physics, you know the name of it. I read that one. At least twice. I'm reading sapiens again, the love that book so much. I'm pretty much always reading. We reading something by either jiddu krishnamurti or ocean show. Those are kind of my favorite philosophers. I'm reading a book on Rene Girard mimetic Theory. It's more of an overview book because I couldn't make it through his actual writings.
I'm reading tools for Titan tools of Titans. Tim Ferriss has somebody Brooke of what
he's learned from a lot of gay performers. I'm reading stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang. It's one of my favorite sci-fi novels.
I'm reading a book on
called thyroid for complexity. It's actually by friend of mine. It's not published yet. I just finished reading pre suasion watch as I finish skimming persuasion Robert Kelly. I don't think I needed to read the entire book to get the point, but it was still good to read it to read what I did.
I recently
reread the lessons of History by willing Ariel Durant.
It's a great little look through book. Yeah, I am currently reading story of philosophy also by Will Durant. I have a young kid now. So I got a lot of child related books that I use more is reference materials. Anything else recently read some Emerson some Chesterfield. Let's see. I've got a little storybook here. I've got another Osho book of a delusion damage, which is blog that I used to love. I have pieces of it saved up. Alan Watts see Scott Adams. I re-read God's debris recently without a chaiienge a friend of mine is rereading it. So I picked it up again. There's tons maybe just go on and on little Von mises book here. There's a the undercover Economist the Richard Bach book their subject. Meccano books. I was really trying to Read Moby Dick in Hamlet just to try and get back into fiction, but I didn't make it to either what
And
do you set aside time in your day to reread or like to read it? All or is it like a consistent thing or do you fit it in when you have time?
I read what I'm bored of everything else
but the good news is I get bored very easily. So there's always a book to capture the imagination usually at night time before I go to bed. I'll read but it's not it's not a Flawless thing when I'm on vacation. I'll read but if I'm sitting in a lift or an Uber of read sometimes in the morning at home after I worked out, I'll just read sometimes when I wake up. I'll just grab my phone and read it. So I just I don't set. I'm not a very disciplined person. So I dont really set these hard and fast rules for myself because I'm but the good news is I just love to read because I love to read I whenever I'm bored and I have time I just do it and thanks to the the iPhone and the Kindle and the iPad, you know, this is make it really easy. I've got two books here in Fineman perfectly reasonable deviations is by him and then G
Yes, which is a gem collect book about Fineman. So this is we're talking I'm flipping through and looking more evolution of everything by Matt Ridley is one of my favorite authors read everything of his reread everything. That is so Dale Carnegie in here the three body problem Man's Search for meaning there's lots of sex at dawn and a lot of books out there to kill cells like my dream.
Well, I'm going to right now it's
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books are downloaded. It's not even like we could sit here the entire podcast. I think I think you've said before you think of books as throwaways. How did you come to think about books like that? And what impact has that had on what you read?
I mean that's really an impact of the internet. Once the internet came along.
I think it's stroyed. Everybody's attention span because now all of Humanity's works are available to you at any given time and you're being interrupted constantly. So just our attention span goes down or bit of focus goes down, but at the same
time we just become more
judicious. We also want we want the meat
and
The problem with books is that to write a book to publish it publisher physical dead tree
book just takes a lot of work and effort and money. So sometimes people
start putting long wrapping long books around simple ideas. Those are probably my least favorite books and
it's kind of why I avoid the whole business and self-help category because you generally have one
good idea and it's buried in
hundreds of thousands of pages in lots of anecdotes.
So what happened was I just noticed that sometime in the late 90s. I stopped reading as much as I used to
and I started reading more blogs. I'm still reading less books are more
blogs and great blogs like Farnam Street, Kevin similars blog melting asphalt and so on you get incredibly smart people that justifying simplifying and and writing these great things but it's only a page or two or three pages. So I got really into blogs, but then I stopped reading books and a lot of the oldest wisdom is actually in books and with books you're not
Talking about the combined works of all of humanity the post just who happened to be blogging right now. So I realize I missed that and then with the Kindle and iBooks coming along that allowed me to start treating books like I treat blogs which is when I go to a Blog I'll actually skin to
lots of Articles until I find one that looks really interesting to read that whole article all the way through it, maybe
take notes. So now I treat books the same way, which is
I'll skim through a large
number of books. I'll put him down. I'll jump around back forward middle until I find a part that's interesting. They all just consume that piece and I won't feel guilty about having to finish the entire book because there's this view it
as a Blog archive, right? It's like a like a Blog might have three hundred posts on it
and you can read just the two three five that you need right now anything you can think of a book the same way and then that opens the world that web of books back open to us instead of it being
buried somewhere.
I think, you know, like many people I know of a lot
of friends who are currently stuck on a book.
And if you ask people if they read everybody says they read everybody says they're reading a book that can answer which book They're reading. The reality is very few people actually read and actually finished books and I think and I think that's probably because of all these societal and personal rules that we put up like you must finish a book and you must read books that are good for you and you can't read junk food books. And this is a hot book right now and so on the reality is I don't actually read that much compared to what people think like the I probably read one to two hours a day which and that puts me in the top .001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and in the intelligence that I might have because real people don't read an hour a day real people I think freedom is
or less so
making it an actual habit is the most important thing and how you make it habit doesn't matter.
It's very much like exercise or working out do something everyday. It almost doesn't matter what you do. So the people who are obsessing over like should I be weight training or should I be doing tennis or should I be doing Pilates or should I be doing the high intensity Training Method versus the happy body which is whatever they're missing. The point. The important thing is to do something every day. It doesn't matter what it is. So the same way I would argue the important thing is to read every day and it's not it doesn't matter it almost doesn't matter what you read because eventually the read enough things and your interest will
lead you there that will dramatically improve your
life. So just like the best workout for you is the one that you're excited enough to do every day the same way. I would say the best books to read or the ones that are books or blogs or Twitter or whatever anything with ideas and information and learning the best ones to read it are the ones that you're excited about reading all the time
this the people that I know that read quite a bit that they have a reading habit like you your described as a very habitual person. Where did that come from?
Okay, that might have come from the tin.
First podcast. I don't think I'm more
habitual anybody else. I think human beings are entirely creatures of habit, you know as a young children are born with no habit Loops, they're essentially born as blank slates and then
they habituate themselves to thing the learn patterns and they get conditioned and they use that to get through everyday life and habits are good, you know habits can allow you to background
process certain things so that your neocortex your for group your
frontal lobe stays available to solve brand new problems. But we also unconsciously pick up habits in the background and we keep them for decades and we may not realize that they're
bad for us. So we're ready to move on from them
to some extent, you know, our attitude in life our mood our happiness levels depression level. These are also habits. Do we judge people? How often do we eat? What kinds of food do we eat? Do we walk or do we sit do we move to the exercise do we read these are habits as well? And we you absolutely need habits to
You can't solve every problem in life as if it's the first time what's thrown at you? But
but what we do is we accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity ego ourselves. And then we get attached to that. I'm Shane. This is the
way I am. I'm Le Vol. This is the way I am
and it's really important to be able to uncondition yourself to be able to take your habits apart and say, okay. Well that's that's a habit that I probably
picked up for when I was a toddler and I was trying to get my parents
attention and now I'm just reinforced it and reinforce it reinforce it and I call the part of my identity but is it
serving me anymore? It make me happier. The big me healthier. Is it making me accomplish whatever. I want to set out to accomplish right now.
So I don't think I'm any more. In fact, I would argue less habitual than most people like I don't like to structure my day. But to the extent that I do have habits. I'm trying to make
them more deliberate rather than accidents of History. So what's I have it that you're trying to change right now? What are you working on?
Well, I did a lot of habit changes or last few years. So I'm good. Now got a daily work got that I do which is a great habit. I cut down heavily on drinking. It's not fully eliminated, but it's mostly gone. I drop caffeine. I'm not on the paleo diet although like to be so I'm at a variation of it that I called a failure diet, which is I try to be paleo, but I feel the constantly but I don't beat myself up over it because I feel that even approximating towards it is better than where I have been historically so, you know like that. I tried to build a meditation have it but I failed but I have made a habit of being meditative. So I've gone through lots of habits. Probably the one that I'm currently
would like to cultivate is doing yoga more regularly, but I haven't really
I haven't formed in a plan around that and by the way, I reject a lot of the stuff that's being peddled around today about how you perform in break habits. I know there's this very popular book one that I even recommended which talks about the study science behind habit and one of its depression.
This came out of Stanford was that you can't break habits. You can only replace them. And that's BS. I've definitely broken habits completely. And so I think you can uncondition yourself. You can train yourself. It's just hard
so it just takes work it takes effort and
usually the big habit changes come when they're strong
desire motivators attached to them.
So, you know, the yoga one I'm going to
work on I don't yet. Have a great plan on that one. I haven't tackled that one properly yet a big habit that I'm working on which is
going to be really hard to explain in any way that any normal human being will understand this but I'm trying to turn
off my monkey mind. It's like I think we are
when we were born as children were pretty blank slates were living very much in the moment
and we're essentially just
reacting to our environment to our instincts and we're living in what I would call the real world and then when puberty comes along that's the onset of desire it
First time you really really want
something and you start long range planning for it and then because of that you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and ego to go and get what you want. And this is all normal and healthy. It's part of being the human animal but I think at some point it gets out of control and then we are constantly just talking to ourselves and our
heads. We're playing little movies in our heads walking down the street but no one's actually there
now, of course you started voicing this thought in your head that you're always having you'd be a madman and they lock you up. But the reality is if you walk down the street near 2,000 people in the street, I think all thousand are
talking to themselves and they're headed and
given point the constantly judging everything that they see they're playing back movies of things that happen to them yesterday. They're living in
fantasy worlds of what's going to happen tomorrow
and they're just told out of Base reality and that could be good when you're doing long range planning can be good when you're solving problems, it's good for the survival of replication machines that we are but I think it's actually very bad.
Your happiness and so in my mind the Mind should be
a servant nor tool my master. It's not something that should be controlling me and driving the 24/7. So I've taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking which is hard because if I say to you don't think of a pink elephant,
I just put a pink elephant in your head.
So it's an almost impossible problem. So it's more something that has to be guided by feel then
Guided by actual thinking or thought process,
but I'm deliberately cultivating experiences states of Mind locations activities that will help me get out of my mind and I know you know all of society does that to
some extent in some sense the the
people chasing Thrills and action sports or flow States or orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own.
At the trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self at the very least. I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become
stronger as I get older. I wanted to be weaker and more muted so that I
can live much more in present everyday reality and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much in the childhood and then not have to seek happiness through external circumstances chasing if it's a preconceived notion that I have
while there's a lot that I want to ask questions on
is there any yeah, that's really the tough one that will take years.
That's that's that's not a six-month habit. That's a tender have it. Do you think there's a difference between turning off or surprise versus suppressing your monkey mind? Absolutely. Yeah
suppression doesn't work because when you try to suppress that's the Mind suppression the line that's just you playing games with yourself. So I think it's I think it's a very hard
problem and I want to go back to kind of unconditional you you you basically stop drinking alcohol. How did how did you work on deep probe?
Yourself form from the social settings and environments that you're in where alcohol is probably available all the time and what benefits have you seen as a result of like, are you isolating these habits when you're changing them? So, you know, oh I sleep better because I'm not
yeah, you know, the the alcohol one is an interesting case study because the alcohol have it came from two things one was availability just being in situations
where alcohol is available and accepted in some vegetables
to do and then the second is the desire right you want to do it because you're trying to accomplish something else. So when I unpack that I realized a couple of things the availability came from I'm just out if I'm out at night in an environment where alcohol is being served at the availability. So if you want to avoid that stay in not staying in is not fun. So what do you do? Well, I started this daily workout regimen in the mornings if you're working out in the mornings and you can't stay up too late at night. He can't stay up too late at night. You can't
Drinking too much you screw up a few times and your morning workout is terrible. You have a headache you feel bad. You don't feel as and when you're working out every day, you can check point yourself very easily like, oh, well this exact thing that I do every single morning is
suddenly harder. So therefore I'm we can from the alcohol from last night. So
the morning workout checkpoint really helped me understand the
consequences of consuming alcohol before
and in the more interesting question is well, why am I doing it and that's basically boils down to I was doing it to survive longer and social environment that I wasn't particularly happy and I essentially had to stun my brain into submission. So there are better ways to do that. One of those is only associate with people where you don't have to drink to be around them and that really narrowed my friend Circle and narrowed the kinds of events that I go to there's a little bit of a substitution effect and some of what the substitution effect was. I was drinking so that I wouldn't be thinking because and so what I went back to is like well, can I cultivate these states of not thinking too much?
If I can get there another way, then that will take away some of the urge to drink and then there's some substitution for example a switch from hard alcohol to red wine and red wine is inherently self-limiting, you know, you have to cocktail the next thing you want is not a cocktail. You have two glasses of red wine. At least for me. I usually have a headache. So I'm
done at that point. It's very self limiting
that some of it is just a function of age. I mean, I'm 43 now. I don't think I can make it through a single glass of wine without having some negative consequence build up. So I still I still drink I don't believe in the words like never and always because I think that's that's a way of limiting yourself and self discipline yourself makes you less free and less happy at some level but I just want to be naturally in a position
where I don't need it and I don't desire it. And so that's kind of what I've been working more on. What happened would you say most positively impacts your life.
I think it's the daily
morning workout.
That has been a complete Game Changer.
It's made me feel healthier younger. It's maybe not go out late and it came from one simple thing, which is everybody said I don't have time right basically whenever you throw any so-called good habitat, somebody they'll have an excuse for themselves. And usually the most
common is I don't have time and
I don't have time to just another way of saying it's not a priority. So what you really have to do to say, is it
a priority or not?
And if it if something is your
number one priority, then you will get it that's just the way life works.
But if you got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different
priorities, you're going to end up getting none of them.
So what I did there was I basically just said my number one priority in life
above my happiness above my family above my work is
my own health and starts with my physical health and then second is my mental health and then third is my spiritual health and then it's my family's health then it's my family's well-being
and then
That I can go out and do whatever I need to do the rest of the world. There's a series of concentric Circle starting out for me.
And so because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don't have time. So in the mornings, I just work out and however long it takes is how long it takes and I do not start my day and
I don't care if the world is imploding and melting down it can wait another 30 minutes until I'm done working out and do you take any breaks from that or is that every day?
It's pretty much every day. There are a few days where I've had to take
a break because I'm traveling or I'm injured or sick or something, but I can count on one hand the number of breaks. I take every year you mentioned happiness being one of your top priorities. What is happiness to you? Look what does that mean? What does that word mean? Can you unpack that?
Yeah. It's a very evolving thing. I think like all the great questions. You know, when you're when you're a little kid you go to your mommy. Say what happens when we die.
Is there a Santa Claus their
God should I be happy? You know who should hurry those kinds of things. There are no glib answers to that because there are no there are no
Answers that apply to everybody so these questions the search for truth, you know, these kinds of questions. They ultimately do have answers but they have personal answers. So the answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you and vice versa. So whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you and it means something different to the listener, but I think it's very important to explore what it is and for some people and it's a flow state for some people's satisfaction
for some people. It's a feeling of
contentment the best my definition keeps evolving. So the answer would have given you a year ago be different than what I tell you now, but today I believe that happiness is it's really a default state it was there when you
remove the sense that something is missing in your life
and we are highly judgmental survival replication machines were constantly walking around thinking I need this. I need that.
In the web of desires and happiness is that state when nothing is missing and when nothing is missing your mind shuts down and your mind stops running into the future or running in the past. They regret something with a plan something and then in that absence for a moment you have internal silence and when you have internal silence, then you are content and you're happy. I think people believe
mistakenly, you know, feel free to disagree because again, it's different for everybody but people believe mistakenly that happiness is about positive thoughts and positive actions. But the more I read the more I learned the more of
experience because I verify this for myself every positive thought essentially holds within a
negative thought is a contrast is something negative.
The daodejing says it's more articulately than I ever could but it's all it's all dualities polarity. So if I say, I'm happy that means that I was sad at some point if I say he's
attractive then that means it's somebody else's unattractive
so every positive
I thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness and life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive. So all that said long-winded to me happiness is not about positive thoughts about not about negative thoughts. It's about the absence of Desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. And so the fewer desires I can have the happier. I can or more than accept the current state of things the less my mind is moving because the mind really exist in motion towards the future of the past the more present. I am the happier and more content I will be but if I latched onto that if I say who I'm happy now and I want to stay happy that I'm going to drop out of that happiness because now suddenly the mind is moving is trying to attach to something. It's trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation. So happiness to me is mainly not suffering not Desiring not thinking too much about
Feature of the past really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is the way it is because Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness to a tree there is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad nature follows unbroken mathematical laws in a chain of cause and effect from The Big Bang to now and everything is perfect. Exactly the way it is. It's only in our particular Minds that we run happy. You're not happy and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we
desire,
but I think I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self and I think that helps a lot like for example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe, then you have to bend the entire universe to
your will because if you're the most important thing in the universe
than how could it not
conform to your desires and if it doesn't conform to your desire something's wrong.
However, if you view yourself as a tempura terior an amoeba, or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand that you have no expectation.
How life should actually be like it's just the way it is and then you sort of accept that and you have no cause to be happy or unhappy
those things almost don't apply
and what you're left with in that neutral state is not neutrality. I think people think oh, that would be a very Bland existence. No, this is the existence the little children live and if you look at little children on balance, they're generally pretty happy because they're really immersed into the environment and the moment without any thought of how it should be given their
personal preferences and desires.
So, I think the neutral state is actually a Perfection State and one can be very happy
as long as one isn't too caught up in their own heads. What is your internal? Monologue go like when you find yourself trying to attach to something by
default?
Yeah, I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn't always work. But in the in the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in debugging
mode as much as possible.
And when I'm talking to someone like I'm talking
to you right now or when I'm engaged in a group activity. It's almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle
but if I'm by myself like just this morning, you know, I'm brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to the podcast and I started going to this little fantasy where I imagine you asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy answering them and then I caught myself I put my brain in debug mode and just watch Every Little Instruction go by and I said, why am I fantasy future planning? Why can't you stand here and brush my teeth? Right? And it's just it's just the awareness that my brain was running off in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego that that I was like, well do I really care if I embarrass myself and Shane's podcast who cares I want to die. Anyway, this is all very good is 0 and I won't remember anything. This is pointless.
So at that point I shut down I went back to brushing my teeth. And then I was noticing how great the toothbrush was and how good it felt and the next moment. I'm often thinking something else and then I have to look at my brain again say do I really need to solve this problem right now? And the reality is that 95% of what my brain runs off and tries to do I don't need to tackle at that exact moment. In fact, if it's like a muscle then I'll be better off resting it being at peace. And then when the particular
problem arises immersed myself in it.
So what I would rather dedicate myself to it for example right now as we're talking to be completely lost in the conversation and to be 100% focused on this as opposed to thinking about. Oh when I brush my teeth it and do it the right way or you know, planning something else in my mind. So I think the ability to singularly focused is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present happy and actually ironically
more effective. That's fasten. It is almost like a relativity issue where you're taking yourself out of a certain frame and you're just moving over to another frame and watch
You things from a different perspective, even though you're in your own mind?
Yeah, I think that a lot of the haploid Buddhist talk about as awareness sources the Eco what they're really talking about is you can you can think of your brain your Consciousness is a multi-layered mechanism and there's kind of a core base kernel level OS that's running and then there's applications that are running on top and I like to think of it as you know computer speak speak. I'm actually going back to my awareness level of less which is always calm always peaceful and generally happy and content and I'm trying to stay in that mode and not activate the monkey mind which is always worried frightened and anxious but serves incredible purpose, but I'm trying not to activate that program until I need it because when I need it, I want to just focus on that program, but if I'm running it 24/7 all the time and wasting energy and it's just it and it becomes me and I am more than that, right? I think like another thing that
Spirituality or religion or Buddhism or any anything you follow will teach you over time is that you are more than just your mind. You are more than just your habits your more than just your preferences
your level of awareness your body
and you know modern humans. We don't live enough in our body. We don't live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads all of which by the way is just programmed into you by society and by and by the environment from when you were younger, you're basically a bunch of Hardware DNA written that then reacted to environmental effects. When you were younger, then you recorded the things that were good and bad we use that to prejudge everything that's going to be thrown against you and then you're using that to constantly try and predict and change the future but as you get older and older the some of these preferences that you've accumulated is very very large that some of these reactions habitual reactions that you
That is very very large.
And then they end up as runaway freight train that control your mood. Well, we should control our own moods. Why don't we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing that would be if you could say well right now I would like to be in the Curious State and then you can genuinely set yourself into the Curious state or you say I want to be in a morning state. I'm mourning a loved one and I want to grieve for them. But I really want to grieve I really want to feel that I want to be distracted right now by my computer programming problem. It's due tomorrow. So I think that the Mind itself is a muscle and it can be trained and it can be conditioned. It has just been haphazardly conditioned by Society out of our control and if you look at it with awareness and intent and it's 24/7 job, you're working at every moment of every day. I think you can unpack your own mind and your emotions
and your thoughts and your reactions. You've
sorry configurating you can start rewriting this program to what you
want.
Dimension before in one of your interviews that you have foundational values, but you didn't elaborate what so I'm curious. What are those?
Yeah. I it's a good question. I've never actually listed them or
articulated them.
But to Define values first of all as a set of things that you will not compromise on upon so foundational values to me or think that I've looked at very carefully about myself and I've deliberately Chosen and said, you know what this is a habit. This is a way of life
and I'm not going to compromise on it. I'm going to stay this way forever. I just don't want to live life any other way
now, I've never fully enumerated them but you know
examples of them. Like I think Honesty is a core core core value
to do to give you examples of what I mean by honesty is I want to be able to just be me. I don't want to I never want to be in an environment around people who have to watch what I say because if I disconnect what I'm thinking from what I'm saying that creates multiple threads in my mind that mean
No longer in the moment. That means that I now have to work in future planning or pass regretting every time talking to somebody so anyone around whom I can't be fully
honest. I don't want to be around
another example of foundational value is I don't believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. So if I see anybody who's even around me, like let's say I'm doing business with somebody and they think in a short term manner with somebody else then I don't want to do business with that person anymore because I think all the benefits and life come from compound interest whether in money or in relationships or love or health or activities or habits. So I only want to be around people that I know I'm going to be
around with for the rest of my life and I only want to work on things that I know have the long-term
payout another one is like I only believe in peer relationships. I don't believe in hierarchical relationship. So I don't want to be above anybody and I don't be below anybody if I can treat someone like a peer and if they can't treat me like a pier then we have then I just don't want to wreck without human know.
When I don't believe in Anger anymore,
I mean that was something that was good when I was young and
full of testosterone, but now I always like the Buddha saying that anger is a
hot coal that you hold your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody so, you
know, I don't wanna be angry and I want to be around angry people. So I just cut them out of my life and I'm not judging them. I mean, I went through a lot of anger
to and so, you know, they have to work through it on their own
but go be angry at someone
else somewhere else.
So I don't know if that Nestle falls into the classical definition of value but it's a set of things that I won't compromise on and that I just lived my entire life by and I think everybody has values and a lot of finding great relationships great
co-workers great lovers wives husbands is finding other people where your values just line up
and then the little things don't matter. Generally. I find that if people are fighting or quarreling about something it's because their values
don't line up because their value has lined up a little think would matter. How is radical honesty. Look how radical is your honesty? And how is that kind of impact?
Your life.
I mean, it's pretty obvious. I'm not like the I think Ray dalio from Bridgewater is same as the radically honest so I'm not going to go and call somebody ugly to their face. Like I'm not trying to make a big show of it and that trying to say hey, I'm so honest and I'm going to shock you what radical honesty just means that I Want to Be Free part of being free means that I can say what I think and think what I say, they're highly congruent and integrated and it also means to Richard Fineman famously said you should never ever fool anybody and you are the easiest person to fool. So the moment you tell somebody else something that's not honest you've lied to yourself and then you'll
start believing your own lie, and then that
will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road. So it's really important for me to be honest, but I don't go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with
Rule that Warren Buffett has which is pretty
specifically criticized generally
and I try to follow this. I don't always follow it but you know, I think I
followed enough that it made a difference in my
life, which is if you have a criticism of someone then don't criticize the person criticized the general approach or criticize kind of that class of activities, but if you have to pray somebody then always try and find the person who best who's the best example of what you're praising in and appraise that
person specifically
and that way people's Egos and identities which we all have don't work against you they work for you
have your values changed at all, or have you given more thought to them since becoming married and becoming a parent? I mean, how is that changed you?
Values almost by definition don't change that much overtime, but they take some it takes some time for you to figure out your own foundational values. I think everybody has them. It's just that maybe we're not that aware of them until later and so might have changed a little bit but not a lot. I mean my my wife is an
incredibly loving family oriented person. And so am I and so that was one of the foundational values that brought us together
the moment you have a child.
It's this really weird thing but a sort of
it answers the built-in meaning of
life purpose of life question all of a sudden the most
important thing in the universe moves from being in your body into being
moving in from child's body. So that that changes
you and your values inherently become a lot
less selfish.
You know, I would say that like probably the biggest such change was when I was younger. I really really really valued freedom freedom
was one of my core core values
and ironically it still is it's probably
My top three values, but
it's a different definition of freedom get my old definition was freedom to freedom to do anything. I want freedom to do
whatever I feel like whenever I feel like
and now I would say that the freedom that I'm
looking for is internal freedoms. Its freedom from
its freedom from reaction. Its freedom from feeling angry. Its freedom from being
sad for freedom from
being forced to do things. But I'm Looking For Freedom from internally and externally whereas before I was looking for freedom to
like that a lot. What's the the biggest mistake you've ever made in your life. And how did you recover I've made a
class of mistakes that I would summarize in the same way and I made this clapping mistakes and it was obvious to me that these mistakes were only in hindsight do one exercise, which is you probably heard the you know, when you're 30, what advice would you give your 20 year old self? Yeah. I mean, you're 40 like what advice would you give your 20 or 30 year old self? So if you do that
Sighs decade by decade or maybe if you feel younger, you can do it in five really sit down and say okay, you know 2007. What was I doing? How was I feeling 2008? What was I do? And how is that feeling 2009? What was I doing? How is that feeling and at least for me this remarkable consistency emerged and that consistency was that everything that I was doing? I should have still done but with less emotion
and especially less anger because I used to be very angry when I was younger.
But especially this less emotion life is going to play out the way it's going to play out some good some bad, but most of it is actually just up to your interpretation and you're born you have a set of sensory experiences when he died and how you choose to interpret those sensory inputs is
up to you in different people to interpret them in different ways.
But really, I wish I had done all of this in things but with less emotion and less anger like the most celebrated example would be you know, when I was younger I start a company and a company did well, but I
Do well so I see some of the people involved and it was a good outcome for me in the end. Everything worked out. Okay, but there was a lot of angst in a lot of anger and really today, you know, what I would do is I wouldn't go down the angst in the anger. I would have just walked up to the people and said look this is what happened is what I'm going to do. This is I'm going to do it. This is what's fair. This is what's not but it would have realized that the anger and the emotion themselves have this
huge consequences just completely unnecessary.
So now I'm just trying to learn from that and to do the same things that I think are the right thing to do but to do them without anger and to do them with a very
long term point of view.
So I think if you take a very long term point of view, if you take the emotion
out of it, then I wouldn't consider those things mistakes anymore.
Other than that, I mean that there was a, you know, the perspective of like to adopt is that everything that I did and everything that was done to me and you know, there's some impossible to separate combination brought me to this.
That moment here today talking to you
and this is a good moment.
So the grammar whatever is yeah, so whatever set of circumstances conspired to bring us here. Well good because here I am.
Was there a moment you would say when you realized that you could control how you interpreted. I mean, I think one of the problems that a lot of people have is they don't recognize that they can control not what happens to them per se but how they respond and how they interpret a situation.
I think everyone knows it's possible and the reason that no it's possible is it is a great social lecture that he calls the title the attraction of drugs is spiritual and he talks about why do people
do drugs everything from alcohol psychedelics to cannabis? So you name it
and they're doing it to control their mental state and they're doing it to control how they react and sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better but some people drink because then they don't care as much or they their
potheads could they can zone out or they do psychedelic
They can feel you know, very present or connected to Nature. What have you
but the attraction of drugs is spiritual. So to some extent we already know that we can control our internal State. We just use external bio active substances to do it. And now there are a lot more techniques that are out there in the public domain many of them dug up from older times, but you know these range from cognitive therapy and behavioral psychology to meditation to taking long walks in nature. You can control your mental state. It's just we're used to doing it by hacking our external circumstances to then come back around and control our
mental state and for example, sitting on
a famous line that says that all of man's problems arise because
he can't sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes. Although yeah
plus the women too. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, if a man or a woman can sit by themselves on a cushion for 30 minutes and it's hard it's really hard to do that's meditation. You are essentially struggling with and controlling your internal state.
And the first thing the first thing to realize is that you can actually observe your mental state. So just be be the advantage of meditation is not that you're suddenly going to gain a super power to control the internal State. It's that you will recognize this how out of control your mind is it is like a monkey fling feces that's running around the room making trouble shouting breaking things. It's completely uncontrollable. It's an out-of-control mad person and you have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste towards it and you start separating yourself from it. And in that separation is Liberation when you realize that oh, I don't want to be that person. Why am I so out of control just that awareness alone calms you down. So there are there are many techniques one can use another one. For example that I think a lot of smart people say is if you're angry about something or if you get it on Happy email and you want to respond don't respond for 24 hours. All right, what does that do it?
Your you calm down your the
emotions subside the hormones go down and your mental state in a better mental state 24 hours later.
So I think people already know this but we just don't act on it because socially we're not conditioned to act on socially. We're told go workout go look good because that's a multiplayer competitive game other people can see if I'm doing a good job or not, or we are told go make money go buy a big house again external
multiplayer competitive game,
but when it comes to learn to be happy train yourself to be happy completely internal no external progress. No external validation hundred percent you competing against yourself single player game and we're such social creatures were more like bees or ants that were externally programmed and driven that we just don't know how to play and
win at the single-player games anymore. We
compete purely on multiplayer games, but the reality is life is a single-player game. You're born alone. You're gonna die alone.
All the interpretations are loan all your memories are alone and you're gone three generations. Nobody cares before you showed up. Nobody cared. It's all single player. I think
Bob has a great example of that when he gives the do you want to be the world's best lover and known as the worst or the world's worst lover and known as the best in reference to an inner or external scorecard
exactly. Right? I mean all the real Square cards are internal and the sad thing is, you know, we sit there like jealousy jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome when I was young. I had a lot of jealousy in me and by and by, you know, I learned to get rid of it and it still crops up every now and then but it's such a poisonous emotion because at the end of the day, you're no better off you're unhappy and the person you're jealous of a still discuss floor good-looking or whatever they are. But the real breakthrough was for me was when I realized at a better personal fundamental level. I mean, I the problem with these kinds of podcast is I can give glib answers all day long, but you have to discover your own.
She'll answer because your personal answers would be different than mine L speak to you. But the one that I discovered that spoke to me was a day. I realized that all these people that I was jealous of I couldn't just cherry pick and choose a little aspects of their life. I couldn't say I want his body. I want her money on one his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions their desires their family their happiness level their Outlook of Life their self-image and if you're not willing to do a wholesale 24 seven hundred percent slot with who that person is, then there's no point in being jealous.
I think that's and so look at it.
Once I came to that realization jealousy sort of faded away because I don't want to be anybody else. I'm perfectly happy being me. And by the way, even that is under my control to be happy being
it's just been a social rewards for it. But there's a lot of internal rewards.
Yeah. There's it's almost antisocial rewards because when you're when you're working on your inner,
Stuff people don't love that is that they don't dislike it your friends, of course support you but they're not getting anything out of it. And even when I look at my own peer group and to the extent that they're working on themselves and everyone in their 40s at some level is most ever engage in group two activities. Hey, let's do a group meditation. Hey, let's group is that hey, let's go to this group lecture and I keep coming back to this one line that I read like everything. I just read but which was said only the individual transcends nobody reaches Enlightenment orders or or internal happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. It is a very lonely kind of task. So to some extent I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work aren't that serious about it? What good and it's fine. I'm not judging but just their craving more social interaction than they're really craving internal work.
What Big Ideas have you changed your mind on in the last few years?
There's a lot on kind of Life level. There's a couple obviously in the business level I think on a more practical basis. I've just stopped believing in macroeconomics thing that Grey Cup. I study I studied economics in school and computer science and their the time when I thought I was going to go be it a PhD in economics and all that. But the further I get the more I realize microeconomics the combination of who do complex systems and politics and you can find macro economists to take every side of every argument. So I think that discipline because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions which is a Hallmark of science because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions has become corrupted because you never have the counter example on the economy. You never you never take the US economy and run two different experiments the same time and because there's so much data people kind of cherry pick for whatever political narrative. They're trying to push. So to the extent that people spend all their time.
Watching the macro economy or the FED forecasts are you know, which way the stocks are going to go to next year? It's gonna be a good year value. That's all junk. It's no better than astrology. In fact, it's probably even worse. There's less entertaining. It is more stress inducing. So I just think of macroeconomics not junk science with all apologies the macro economists that said micro economics and Game Theory or fundamental. I don't think you can be successful in business or even navigating through most of our modern capitalist Society without an extremely good understanding of supply and demand and labor versus capital and Game Theory and tit-for-tat those kind of things so that microeconomics in the religion that I gave up but there are many others. I mean, I've changed my mind on deaf on the nature of life on the purpose of life on
on
marriage. I was originally that someone were to be married and have kids so there have been a lot of fun, too.
All changes, but the most practical one is I gave up macro and I embrace micro and I would say that's just not true in macroeconomics. That's true in everything. I don't believe in macro environmentalism. I believe in micro environmentalism. I don't believe in macro charity. I believe in micro charity. I don't believe in macro improving the world. Like there's a lot of people out there who get really fired up about my change the world of my changes person would change the way people think I think the micro it's like change yourself then maybe change your family and your neighbor before you get into abstract Concepts about him and change the world
who part of your base knowledge that you have today that you believe. Do you consider the least solid or most likely to change over the coming
years?
Question. I mean I try not to have too much that I've pre decided upon I think that creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth. So I used to identify as libertarian but then I have to find myself defending positions that you know, I really thought through just because they're part of libertarian Cannon and the reality is that if all of your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious because they're prepackaged and put together. So I don't like to self-identify and almost any level any more and that keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs. So it's hard for me to point to something that I think is shaky because if I thought it was really shaky then then I wouldn't I wouldn't stand on it. I guess the the areas were in becoming least certain is kind of all the called the Grand category of how should we organize Society?
Everybody has them, you know, some people think we should be communist. Some people are capitalists. Some are anarchists some say we need a larger welfare state. We need Universal Health Care and basic income and other say no we need to all I think that entire class of beliefs that are unfalsifiable. They're based that almost religious, you know, there are things that people got into when they were young. Nobody actually knows which system is the better one. Nobody actually knows which one maximizes happiness versus output which is whatever I know there's a lot of smart Economist and people studying it. There's a lot of good data and science but the end of the day, I just entered the more I look into it the more I Come Away saying well, maybe I don't know how best to organize Society maybe Society, you know should not have just one organization but should have multiple organizations so you can choose you can go into which our society where you are most bound to thrive but I don't think there is a single right answer for human culture and Society anymore except to the extent that given the
Equally destructive power of Technology, you know long enough time scale a longer time scale. You can 3D print a nuclear weapon along of time scale. You can create a singularity in your backyard is part of your high school physics project. So I think as a human race, we do have to
sort of get past this idea of that we're separate organisms
and kind of almost getting some kind of a multicellular organism situation. Otherwise, we'll just destroy ourselves. It would just be too easy to blow ourselves up and that obviously runs very very counter to my libertarian instincts of everyone should be free and whatever they want Sarah Etc. So I just don't know how to organize Society anymore. And I think any beliefs that I have any Remnant beliefs that I have from being younger about the
optimal way to Optima to organize
Society probably wrong and the future thriving society that we end up with the maybe a thousand years from now, we'll probably look like something that I would argue very strongly against today because they will have no room for the individual.
Maybe you can explain for listeners the singularity
And kind of what your thoughts are around that
yeah, the singularity is this idea that technological change is accelerating and then at some point the acceleration gets so great that there's massive change in our lifetimes. We create things like General AI
we start living forever and
just the nature of who we are as humans change the consequence of that its most associate with a general AI if we produce a general-purpose artificial intelligence that artificial intelligence could then hack its own code make itself smarter and out of all those the point where we are either obsolete or Immortal or something in between my thoughts on it. I think it's fanciful to say the least Nick Bostrom wrote a very famous book called Super intelligence which lays out the past did it there are good rebuttals super intelligent. So I wouldn't just read that book, you know breathless and wide-eyed and
believe everything and there are people like the singularity
Institute were looking forward to this coming. I think it's religion for nerds, you know.
It's got all the same characteristics unfalsifiable until it happens. It basically says the chosen ones will be saved the world's going to end. You know, we will be immortal. It's very hard heard this before exactly. It's very hard to tell apart from a Biblical kind of story and I find the people who are pushing it the most are what I would call sort of armchair technologists like they might understand a little bit of science but these are not the phds in physics who are pushing this it's not like the fields medal winning mathematician who's pushing this, you know, I was trained and a little bit of Science and I consider myself an amateur scientist and I know just enough to know how little we know, you know, Felix still can't solve the three body problem caught Collide three billiard ball together can't tell you what happens. We cannot properly model complex systems. We can't tell the weather next week. We still can't solve the vast majority of chronic diseases. We're just starting to connect the gut and the brain and bacteria.
Assisting together there is so much complexity in nature and humans have just begun to scratch the surface that to believe that we are going to sort of go into this world of perfection through technology. I think it's far-fetched represent a i and we'll talk about AI none of these people have written real code. We are no closer to creating a general AI I think that we were 20 years ago. Now there are actual huge advances that have been made specifically I but these are data processing problems. Basically if I dump huge amounts of real-world images into a neural network, then I can do better image recognition. No question that is real that is a data driven solution, but the algorithms haven't gotten any better and a structure of how the human brain works and how the human body works is still so far Advanced beyond our machine capabilities that certainly if they're going to Singularity. It's not going to happen in my lifetime and I think in that sense something's like the singularity or pernicious their pernicious for the same.
That the afterlife is pernicious because it takes you out of the moment it gives you hope for the Futures you stop living for today and you start living for tomorrow. And I know that doesn't sound like much but it's actually a big deal any given time when you're walking down the streets a very small percentage your brain is focus in the present. The rest is future planning or regretting the past and that's keeping you from an incredible experience. It's keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are and I think it can literally destroy your happiness. If you spend all your time living in delusions of the future, so I do think the singularity thing is good in the sense that it pushes forward technological advancement. We put more resources on it. We spend more time develop some of the great things that the human race that sort of great Technologies are going to take advantage of so and that's a name that pushes science forward is a good thing. But I think it's delusional to think that you're somehow going to be saved before you die by it's some combination of AI and Magic science.
You just have to live the life you have
That's pretty profound. Even when you're living backwards, you're not really living right you kind of have to be in the moment have any
sort of is nothing there. There is actually nothing but this moment you no one has ever gotten back in time and no one has ever been able to predict the future successful in any way that matters and so literally the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at that exact time that you happen to be and it's like all the great profound truths. It's all paradoxes. So any two points are infinitely different any moment is perfectly unique, but that moment itself slips by
so quickly that you can't grab it. What's your opinion on the current education says when I asked people on Twitter what they wanted to ask you this question came up a couple of times which was you know, how would you fix it? What's your opinion on the education system? What are your thoughts around that
I think there's no question. It's completely obsolete. The education system is a path dependent outcome from the need for daycare from the need for
Prisons for college aged males would otherwise over and society and cause a lot of Havoc the original medieval universities and guard towers that face inwards for example, and yeah cuz you you have to put a curfew in they need to lock up the young 18 year old males before they go out with swords and daggers and create trouble. So call a college and schools and what were the way we think about them they come from a time period when books were rare knowledge was rare babysitting was a rare crime was common violence was prevalent. There was no such a self-guided learning. So I think schools are just buy products that these kinds of Institutions and now we have the internet which is the greatest Web of Knowledge ever created completely interconnected. So it's very very easy to learn if you actually have the desire to learn everything is on the internet. You can go on Khan Academy get MIT and Yale lectures online you can get all the coursework and get
Timothy you can read blogs by brilliant people who can read all these great books. So it's so the ability to learn the means of learning tools and learning are abundant and infinite. It's a desire2learn that's incredibly scarce. So I don't I just don't think that schools matter for self motivate students with the school's matter for is wanted to keep the kids out of the parents hair while the parents go to work. It creates socialization because kids want to be around their peers and they want to learn how to
operate Society of their
peers. But I think if it's purely learning your actor that learning can be done much more either on your own or through the internet or by uniting through the internet with like-minded groups. So I think that's one problem with the current educational system. The second problem is what do you choose to learn and the current educational system has to have a one-size-fits-all model has to say, well you have to learn X now and then you have to learn why and you know to give you examples of where it's obsolete memorization right in a day and age of Google and smartphones.
Relations obsolete why should you be memorizing the Battle of Trafalgar why you should be memorizing what the capital of this or that state is but we still put undue weight on that just because that's the way it's always been done. And we lived in the pre-google world. Another example is how when we're moving along at a certain Pace. I'm sure every not every one but I'm sure 90% of your listeners have had this happen to them, which is their learning mathematics and at some point they were they were keeping up they were doing arithmetic then they were doing geometry than they did manometry. Do they pre calculate the calc and somewhere in there. They got lost somewhere in there while building the massive edifice logical structure that mathematics is they missed one lesson. They missed one Concept in this five classes, or they just didn't they just their brain couldn't think a certain way that something was being explained to them and get should have been explained visually, but it was be explained numerically or should have been explicit symbolically and it was being explained in cartography what have you but they were not able to keep
And the moment you lose that rung in mathematics moment you miss that rung of the ladder. You can't go to the next one because now the next one the teachers like okay, we're done with precalculus and I were moving at a calculus you're saying wait. I don't understand precalculus and I understand how precalculus leads from trigonometry to calculus and missed that whole part. So now you get to calculus you don't understand the fundamentals and now you reduced it memorization. So now you like okay dxdy when I see that symbol I do this, but now you've lost the actual learning you lost the connection to the underlying principles. So I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and burning them really well over and over because life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out, but that's not how our system is built. We teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all. When really they would have been better off serve just doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time.
So I think there's a there's a pace of learning issue and then there's finally a what to learn and there's a whole set of things. We don't even bother trying to teach. We don't teach nutrition. We don't teach cooking. We don't teach how to be in happy positive relationships. We don't teach how to keep your body healthy and fit, you know, we just say sports. We don't teach happiness. We don't teach meditation. Maybe we shouldn't teach some of these things different kids will have different aptitudes, but maybe we should maybe we should teach practical construction of technology and can and maybe everyone in the science project instead of building a little chemistry. Volcano. Maybe you should be building a smartphone right? So we just haven't kept up and I have to believe that we can change the system, but we're not but you never you never change the system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. I don't believe I've been in Silicon Valley Tech business long enough to know.
You're better off changing it just by creating something brand new. So one fantasy idea I've had is you know after I'm done with Angel list or if I had more time on my hands. I would like to create a successor to the one laptop project in MIT Nicholas negroponte. He had the one laptop per child project, but then I saw this fascinating right up. This is really long time ago, maybe even five years ago. Maybe it was an economist or somewhere and it's a story about how they left a box full of open Android tablets in a little village in Pakistan and when they came back months later the kids have opened up the box. They've all figured out a boot at the tablets there hacked them. They've gotten past the user Administration root log in they've installed a whole bunch of apps. They've got a little economy set up. The older kids are teaching the younger kids the teaching their grandmothers had to run businesses. They're surfing the web. They taught themselves in English, you know kids are learning Sheen's they just need the tools So to that end, what I would love to do is create.
Very low cost very rugged easily powered cheap Android tablet that's hard to destroy and basically distribute them around the world with pre-built learning applications so that you can literally fire one up and it works with you interactively and 30 seconds and figures out what language do you speak? You know, if any you're going to speed symbolic and what level of absolute are you at your second grade third grade fifth grade, and of course it varies by different discipline and then let you dive into and let you learn anything you want that will make your life better. Just I'm going back to my original button see exactly it always keeps you on the edge and always keeps pushing you and then you can Network in all the teachers of the world. So anyone who wants to be teacher can contributes not to Salman Khan doing Khan Academy, but essentially you could Network connect all the teachers of the world and all the students of the world using tablets and do it at a pace and level where it's essentially customized for each child and they're learning the things that have a practical outcome in their life, and I know there's advantage of liberal arts education.
Pushing things that people are doing this they want to learn on their own but they have to have some desire for it. It's better to wait until their think they're ready and then give it all to them
because I think that's the way that learning sticks. So
that's the kind of project. I like to work on but I don't I don't think it's solvable with the current school system.
I hope you get a chance to work on that. I think that would be a phenomenal impact to the world.
Yeah. I think I think would be fun and I'm thinking about this now more because I have a young infants Island. Honestly, I don't want to send him to school.
How do you as an adult? I mean, you mentioned a couple physics books in the the start of the interview here how to use an adult go but learning new subjects you specifically and
yeah, mostly I just stay on the basics. So even when I'm learning physics or science, I'm sticking to the basics. So I'll read concepts for fun. But I'm more likely to you know, do something that is arithmetic in it then calculus. I'm not going to be a great physicist this point maybe in the next life time. We my kid will do it.
But it's too late for me. So I have to stick to what I enjoy and what I love about Sciences mathematics is the language of nature science has to me the study of Truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions actually changes the world and applied science becomes technology and
technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones and houses and cars and heat electricity
so science to me the study of Truth and Mathematics is the language of Science and nature. So in that sense, I'm not going to Jesus but I'm spiritual and to me that is the most devotional thing that I could do to study the laws
of the universe.
And so the same kick that you know, some guy might get out of being in Mecca or medina and you know bowing to you know, the profit I get that same feeling of awe and that same small.
Self when I study science, so for me, it's you know, it's unparalleled and I'd rather stay at the basics and start at the end and this is the beauty of reading. So one thing I don't like to do but whenever you my books on the Kindle, I skip two thirds of them. And the reason I skip two thirds of then it's because they're kind of embarrassing they won't sound like good books you read they'll sound like trivial or silly or whatever but who cares? I mean, I don't have to tell everybody everything. I read. I read all kinds of stuff that other people consider junk or even reprehensible. I read all kinds of stuff that I disagree with because the mind Bender. Yeah, I found myself in some random dark hole in Twitter the other day where I was reading this guy's tweets and like wow, he's really smart and it's really interesting - very clever like wait a minute. This guy's a full-blown white supremacist. I mean, he's not even like mildly a white supremacist. He just thinks like everyone in the white race should be gone and people like me shouldn't be allowed on the streets, but it was still fascinating and he's still really smart and I
Reading it and I read it read it read it after awhile. I built up my own sense of his coherent view of the world and where he was coming from but to do that I could have judged too much and I'm certainly not going to go around bragging to my friend. Hey, I learned this from a white supremacist the other day, right? So to some level you almost have to read the stuff you're reading because you're into it and that's it. You don't need any other reason there's no there's no Mission here to accomplish if he's read Because you enjoy it
if you read what everybody else is reading. I mean, there's wisdom that you're going to think what everybody else is thinking. So you need the diversity and almost like an index fund approach right where you're going to catch the winners, but you can't really identify a lot of them beforehand that are going to change you as a person because so much of that is
contextual. Yeah, I think almost everything that people read these days. It's designed for social
approval, you know, all the best sellers are about social Improvement social conditioning
if you really want to be successful happy blah blah blah all
those external metrics
you're looking for a
Non average outcome
and so you can't be reading the average think to your point and all these things are actually an old as the hills. You can go read Adam Smith In The Wealth of Nations. You could read Benjamin Franklin and his aphorisms understand how to live your life. You could read Charlie Munger you could read you can read Charles Darwin understand evolution of the source, you could read Watson and Crick understand structure double helix and DNA, but instead what we choose to read are just you know, whatever is number one at the airport bestseller or whatever friends are reading or we read. I know people who have read a hundred regurgitated books of evolution and they've never read Darwin or they read they've got or or think of the number of macro economists and they're out there. I think the most of them who have read tons of treatises and economics but haven't read any atom snack. Yeah, right. So it's some level you're doing it for social approval you're doing it to fit in with the other monkey's you're fitting to get along with a herd, but that's not where the
Our life returns in
life are being out of the herd social approval
inside inside her.
So if you want social approval definitely go read what the hurt is reading, but it takes a level of contrarian ISM and saying nope. I'm just going to do my own thing regardless of the social outcome to learn anything. I think that's
interesting. Do you think there's some sort of loss aversion there? Because once you diverge you're pushing out say there's a gaussian distribution, you're pushing it to one of the Tails and if you feel that you're going to lose out on that you'd rather just stay in the middle. If there's a chance that you're not going to be in the in the fat tail for a positive.
Absolutely. I think that's quite the smartest and most successful people. I know started out of losers if you view yourself as a loser as someone who's been cast out by society and has no role in normal society. Then you will do your own thing and you're much more
likely to find out winning
path. So it helps you just start out by saying up. I'm never going to be popular and I'm going to be accepted. I'm already a loser. I'm not going to get but all the other kids have I'm just got to be happy to be me. Yeah,
I think
It's true. When you reading you just read and it sticks in your head or is it more like you take notes to have a system for how you keep track of that or review them?
I'm both lazy and I'm really focused on being present. So I think taking notes to the same as taking photos when you're on a trip all it's doing is taking you out of the moment and then who really sits there, you know, your litter goes back and looks at all their trip photos gets nostalgic just go take your next trip. So I just don't believe in anything from the past anything. No memories. No regrets.
No people no trips nothing because a
lot of our unhappiness also comes from comparing things from the past to the present. First time. You saw Sunset. It was amazing was jaw-dropping you forgot yourself the second time you saw it as cool, you know a hundred times you say it's nothing that thousand time you're saying and so it shows you a sunset. You're like, well, actually I saw this one sensitive Mexico this time. That was really cool. You're not even there. So I just don't believe in clinging to much the
And that includes in reading so I do highlight I catch myself doing that but I do it more because it's just kind of a way of reading and rereading that particular paragraph at that moment in time. And then once in a blue moon for my specially favorite books, I want to read the book, but I'll be short of time. So I'll just read the highlighted passages until something catches my eye and then I got sucked back into the book. But the reality is I could stop highlighting tomorrow and would make no difference and note-taking is even
I think
harder than that. So I do not take notes, but everyone's brain works differently, you know, some people love to take notes. Actually my note taking is Twitter. So what I do is I read and read and read and if I have some fundamental aha Insight or concept than what I like about Twitter is it forces me to distill that into a hundred forty characters and then I try and put out there is an aphorism and then I get attacked by all kinds of random people in the point at all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat like what I do this again, then I go into hiding.
Give one of those thoughtful Twitter feeds that I know of so, I don't I hope nobody jumps down your throat too bad there. Thank you. When you first pick up a book. Are you skimming for something interesting? Like how do you go about reading it or do you just flip to a random page and start reading or what's your process for that
now? I'll start at the beginning but I'll move fast. So if it's not interesting, I'll just start looking ahead. I'll start skimming or speed reading if it doesn't grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningfully positive way all of the drop the book or I'll skip ahead a few chapters. I don't believe it until you gratification when there's an infinite number of books out there read there so many great books. Yeah and there are so many of them that are so well written that, you know, I just can't spend my time on these one thing I will do though is if I find that early on in the book The author starts making statements that I think could just factually untrue and one should always be open to new ideas. But if they're starting to make contradictions where the epistemological
Load of acknowledging that contradictory use a 50 Cent word, but just just I would have to revisit my entire lifetime of learning and undo it and start over gravity to something truth. Yeah, exactly or like, you know, I had a very good conversation recently with a guy who sounded really really smart and was throwing all kinds of science at me and my head was spinning and then he basically said and as we know, you know, thermodynamics isn't really true. What's the point of it was like, okay, I gotta just start everything you just said because thermodynamics is fundamental for the undo button is for yeah that's over there is not even a theory. It's a law it comes from the mathematics. So if you want to that out, then we just have to we have no basis for conversation. So if I find something like that in a book where someone says, oh, yes, I cleared my mind and I watched my thought process and then I was able to levitate then I had to put the book down because now I don't know what in here is true. And what is false? Basically what I'm looking for is the
A third knowingly lying or completely diluted right? If they are then I can't feel my brain with that junk because I can't separate truth from from fiction. So generally I'll skim I'll fast-forward of try and find a part that catches me. Usually though what happens in most books. Those most books have one point to make and obviously nonfiction not talk about fiction, but they have one point to make they make it in and they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world and you once I feel like I've gotten the gist of it I feel very comfortable putting the book down. So there's a lot of these what I would call it pseudo science best
sellers that are all over you know, that everyone's always reading and people
like, oh, did you read this book? I'm good. And I would say yes, but the reality is already two chapters of it, but I got the gist
I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about decision making which is kind of what you get paid to do both as an investor and the CEO of AngelList your kind of paid to be right when other
Ramdev a processor and how you make decisions?
Yeah, so decision making and everything and in fact someone who makes decisions, right 80% of time. So 70% of time will be valued and compensate in the market hundreds of
times more
and I think people have a hard time understanding that but that's a fundamental fact of Leverage if I'm managing a billion dollars and I'm right, you know 10% more of the time that somebody else and that's a hundred million dollars worth of value on a judgment call and with modern technology and large workforces and capital decisions getting leverage more and more. So if you can be more right more
rational and that's one of the reasons why I love your blog because it's really focuses on helping you be
more right better decision-making more rational then you're going to just get nonlinear returns in your life. So decision-making is everything and decision making what was going on. We're basically what the brain is a memory prediction machine. It is a memory of things that work in the past and what it's red and it's true.
Predict the future and the lousy way to do memory prediction is X happened in the past. Therefore X will happen in the future. It's to based on specific circumstances. So what you want is you want principal you want to mental models? So the best mental model that I have found have come through Evolution game theory and Charlie Munger who I'm sure you quote a lot on your walk with Charlie Munger who's Warren Buffett's partner very good investor, but he's tons and tons of great mental models Nassim taleb has great mental models the Benjamin Franklin had great mental models. So I basically load my head full of mental models, but then different ones apply to every situation so I don't really want a checklist but for example, let's take a lot of complexity
Theory when I was younger.
It's a field that I got into a garden occasionally just getting these things. I just learned a lot about that field and my most recent ones cryptography, but I was really into into complexity Theory back.
In the mid 90s and the more I got into it the more I understand the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our production capability and that's been super helpful to me. So that has helped me come to the system that operates in the face of ignorance and I believe that fundamentally we are ignorant and very very bad at predicting the future so I don't look for and I don't believe that I have the ability to say what is going to work. So rather than what I try to do is I try to eliminate what's not going to work. So I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It's not about you know having correct judgment. It's about avoiding the incorrect judgments. So I have mental
models around. How do I determine if I can trust somebody
around you know, what are the actual odds that this is going to work how much margin of safety do I have if it works out, you know, the angel bets and Venture bets are great because if nonlinear outcome the positive but on the downside you
Moo's 1X but the upside you can make 10,000 x so I tried to rig the game. So I don't believe it's the gold Scott Adams said famously also set up systems Mongols. So use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in and then build a system to create that environment around you so that you're statistically likely to succeed. I don't I'm not going to be the most successful person on the planet nor do I want to be I just want to be the most successful version of me while working the least hard possible right? I want to be like in a thousand universes Nevada successful 999 there that he's not a billionaire but you know, he's done pretty well in all of this, right. So whatever the metric is or he's happily married and most of them he may not have you know, nailed it in every regard but he set up system such that he's failed in very few places. So so basically I just try and set up good systems and in the individual decisions aren't that don't don't matter that much.
Because I think our ability to make individual decisions is actually not great. So for example an investor, I would rather invest I would rather my system is I want to see 10,000 companies and I want to pick 500 that have a shot of being huge and then I want the option to double down on the five winners. I don't want to just look at a hundred companies and pick 10 and that I think are winners and go all in on those
right because I don't think I had that
capability and I think there's a lot of ex post
facto reasoning and and sort of origin
stories that people make up about why they were successful but the real separation here is you look at which people are consistently successful especially in Silicon Valley there lots of one-hit wonders, but how many people consistently seem to do something interesting build something interesting make money and do something new? I'm not I'm not in this to make money money is just a piece of paper and every time I see one of these billionaire Founders, you know giving away to a hospital or whatever, you know, they overshot didn't
That much money. So there's huge diminishing returns the money after a certain point, especially now that I'm more into freedom from rather than freedom to their thing. I want to do that I can't do so literally money in that sense of the boat. Anchor on my neck because all it is something that I've been fearful of losing something getting it jealousy debates about my people want from me. So I'm not even in more for the money. It's like can I do something interesting and you can I create something brand new to the world had never seen that it gets value out of that. It uses that is congruent with my morals. So I never have problems sleeping at night and I never have to worry about selling something that I wouldn't buy so much more into that but I don't I don't have a checklist system for decision-making. I know that's like a big thing recently a tool good Wanda wrote the checklist Manifesto and there's good for pilots and surgeons. I don't think it's necessarily great for investor area or he
totally misses the point or decision-making.
I agree. And by the way, that's another one of those books where you just read the first
Captain you're done. It was a very great blog post. But yeah, so I I also don't think you need to be that hard on yourself. If I had a lot of a lot of what goes on
today that a lot of your listeners
are right now like beating themselves up and scribbling notes and saying I need to do this and I need to do that and I need to know you don't need to do anything. You know, all you should do is what you want to do. And if you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them. Then you get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way and then you get to BU and no one in the world is going to beat you at being you you're never going to be as good at being me as I am and I'm never going to be as good at being viewed as you are. So certainly listen absorb, but don't try and emulate it's a Fool's errand instead. Each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge capability and desire that nobody else in the world does that's just purely from the combinatoric that human DNA and development.
And so big and so your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most to find out the business that needs you the most find a project in the art that needs you the most because there's something out there just for you. But what you don't want to do is be building checklist and decision Frameworks built on what other people are because you're never going to be there. You'll never be good at being
somebody else. Yeah and you're inevitably going to miss stuff to and checklist and you mentioned kind of like how you determine if you can trust somebody and I know you've said in the past he's kind of used buffets criteria for evaluating people, which is the combination of intelligence energy and integrity what Percy what predictive signals do you pay attention to for each. How do you determine if you can trust someone a large part of
you just the hardest one? Yeah Integrity is the hardest one and integrity's usually comes out in two ways one is long term which is just you know, somebody for a while and you kind of know, you know how to think about things but the most the more interesting one there's a short-term one, which is you just kind of
See how they treat other people. So there are lots and lots of people who will you know, not screw over square root of strong word, but they will do something that is self feeling or slightly unethical relative to another business partner when the whole time they'll say to you nudge nudge wink wink, you know, I'm taking advantage that person because they deserve it but you're my friend. I would never do that to you. Of course, I would and the thing is yeah exactly. It's very easy to change your definition of who friends are I find the people who really do it things out of Integrity. They have an internal moral compass. So they don't they don't do unfair unethical or bad deals with other people because it would soil their own view of themselves and they wouldn't be able to sleep with themselves at night. So some of the highest Integrity people. I know the worst thing you can do is you can tell them what I think yourself doing on that one and they will get so unhappy because they're like, oh no, that's not who I am. I can't be that person and they'll bend over backwards. Yeah.
Usually I find that people that have negotiate with who are high integrity deal. They're very easy to negotiate with don't give you things that they don't need to give you because they think it's fair and vice versa. So negotiations with high integrity people usually very easy you giving each other things to make sure the other person's happy enough the deal survives because unhappy deals get on the ground and they become short term relationships, which don't have any compounding benefits. And then finally if someone is going around and talking about how honest they are. They're probably dishonest that's just like a little telltale's indicator of learn when someone spends too much time talking about their own values or talking themselves up there covering for something. So there's actually a good book. It's kind of out of print. I think it's hard to track down.
We may be defined online somewhere
and it's not the obvious one. The name of the book is called the art of manipulation and I found it because of a tweet that I followed from illustrators and it was really good. It was because this guy basically goes undercover to
It's with con men and he spends time with them running columns and learning all about cons and he just very without judgment. You just lay it down how con con men work and he puts down there how to spot them when they're being dishonest and some of The Tell-Tale signs are they will they'll push the deal a little bit too hard. They'll sell just a little bit too hard. They'll talk about how honest they are. But I have great people in my life who are extremely successful very desirable. Like everybody wants to be their friend very smart and yet I've seen them do one or two things that are slightly not great to other people. And the first time I'll tell them I'll go back and say hey look I don't I don't think you should do that to that other person not because you won't get away with it. You will get away with it. But because it'll hurt you in the end not in some Cosmic Karma kind of way, but just I I believe that deep down. We all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself and so your
Own failures are written within your psyche in their obvious to you. And so if you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. And the worst the worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem if you don't love yourself who will so I think that you just have to be very careful about doing things that you were fundamentally not going to be proud of because they will damage you. So the first time around I warned them by the way, nobody changes, right and then I just kind of distance myself from them. It's sort of, you know, cut them out of my life. Like I I just have this saying inside my head the closer you want to get to me the better your values have
to be
exact alignment like yeah when I met my wife it was a great test because I really wanted to be with her and she wasn't so sure at the beginning and so and the end we ended up together because she's so my values and I'm lucky I had developed and by that point because if I hadn't I wouldn't have gotten her not that I own her anything. There's no attachment like that. But but I wouldn't have deserved her that's like
Charlie Munger says the find a worthy made be worthy of a worthy mate. So I think you know working on your values is long-term selfish. Although short term.
It's absolutely pop sacrifices
it be ethical or profitable. Everybody would do it. It would have to have a separate concept when we talk about it. There would be no books on it. There would be no no one would ever talk about value is going to be profitable but it's not it's obviously unprofitable involves sacrifices, but like everything in life, if you wanted to make the short-term sacrifice, you'll have a long-term benefit my physical trainer Jersey Greg Erick really wise brilliant guy. He always says, you know easy choices hard life hard choices easy life. So basically if you're making the hard choices right now and what to eat you're not eating all the junk food you want make the hard choice to work out then your life long term will be easy. You won't be sick. You won't be unhealthy same is true of value same is true of saving up for a rainy day. Same is true of how you approach a relationships.
But if you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.
I like I want to dive into intelligence a little bit there to like how do you separate the people who know what they're talking about from these people who pretend they know what they're doing. I mean, we're full of a world where it's so easy to pretend you have knowledge that you don't actually have
real knowledge is intrinsic in that it and it's and it's built from the ground up. So going back to my math example earlier, you can understand trigonometry without understanding the arithmetic or geometry. So basically someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big Concepts, they're probably don't know what they're talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child and if you can't explain to a child and you don't know it and I think that's very true and of the common saying but Richard Fineman, you know, very famously if you go into his lecture six Easy Pieces where his early physics lectures, he has one where he basically
The explains mathematics and three pages he starts from number line counting and then he goes all the way up the precalculus and it just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic. He doesn't rely on any definitions, you know, for example, if somebody says like oh that bird is called this or you know, the rule for this thing is that they're not really telling you think fundamentally tell you about humans. They're telling you about naming systems true understanding is about algorithms but understanding how things connect to each other. So if I think it's the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complicated ways as the mark of a genius to explain
complicated things in simple ways,
so really they should be able to do it very very very very simply and I have to catch myself on this because I have a big vocabulary because I read a lot so I can sound smarter than I am just like using big words, but in the process I'm being dishonest with myself. It's okay to use more precise words English is a big language with a lot of words.
And so that allows for a lot of
precision, but if you're
Using words that your audience doesn't know or if you even think you're using a word that your audience doesn't know you don't catch yourself incorrect that then you're essentially being dishonest. You just trying to show off your trying to pull one over their eyes. There's a great book by Randall Munroe
who is the
creator of XKCD that very science-oriented comic and it's called up Core 5. It's a reference the
Saturn V rocket that took
the Apollo missions into space and what he's doing in that book. Is he explains? All these very complicated
Concepts all the way from
climate change to physical systems the submarines and so on but it does it using only the Thousand most common words in the English language. So that's why I called the Saturn five rocket up go or
five because see its
color rocket. You can't Define a rocket as a spaceship or a rocket. It's your of referential. He says up gorgeous thing that goes up and kids get that right away.
That's the thing your honor write the book. I think.
Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. You're right that the name of the book is thing explainer. Yeah.
And of course five is one of the pages is another great book that I call thinking physics. I open this one all the time and I love on the back cover. It has this great little pitch. It says the only book that's used in both grade school and graduate school. It's true. It's all simple physics puzzles that are can be explained to a 12 year old child. They can puzzle over and can be explained to a 25 year old grad student physics and they all kind of have fundamental insights and physics. They're all kind of tricky but anyone can get to the answer through purely logical
reasoning.
I love reading the history of how scientists came up with their various breakthroughs. And if you have ever gone, like whatever relativity relativity is a fascinating thing the very Advanced concept. But anyway, it's very simple because Einstein came up with it with what are called get Duncan fancy word for thought experiments because we thought experiment German so he was able to basically just do logical thought experiments in his mind until he came up with relativity and then he formalized it we would mathematics and with
Prediction that he made that were later
on falsified that
were basically shown to be true. So really brilliant physicist like that they get there by pure reasoning and pure logical reasoning. It's not like he had to go draw lots of complicated diagrams and so on. He just understood things that are very
basic fundamental level.
So again, this goes back to I think the really smart thinkers are clear thinkers and they understand things at the understand the basics that are very very fundamental level and I would rather understand the basics really. Well then have memorized all kinds of complicated Concepts, but then I can't stitch together and I can't read derive them from the basics. If you can't read arriving from the basics that you need it. You're lost. You just memorize. Yeah,
exactly. It seems like a large part of making effective decisions kind of boils down to dealing with reality. How do you make sure you're dealing with reality when you're making decisions
by not having a strong sense of self or
judgments or mind?
The monkey mind will always respond with regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be and that will Cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times and people are mixing politics and business like for example in January this year. We're like little piece and on the election that kind of predicted that Trump or Bernie he's going to win one of those two characters that I went. That's not what I wanted to have happen necessarily. I'm an elite. My life is pretty good. Right? I'm not looking for rabble-rousers and change everything but I wanted to see a reality the way it was as opposed to the way I wanted it to be. So I think the number one thing that clouds us from being able to see reality is just that we we just have preconceived notions of the way. It should be there's a one definition of a moment of suffering is that it's that moment when you see things exactly the way they are so this whole time you've been convinced your business is doing great and really have ignored the signs. It's not doing that. Well, then your business failed and You Suffer Well, it's just because you've been putting off reality even hiding it from yourself.
So the good news is that when you're suffering when you're in pain, that's a moment of truth. That is the moment where you're forced to embrace reality. Actually the way it is and then you can make meaningful change in progress because you can only make something you can only do that when you're starting with the truth. So I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth and to see the truth. You have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn't want to face the truth. So the smaller you can make your ego the less condition. You can make your reactions the less desires you can have about the outcome you want the easier it is to see the reality the clear example of this is when we're going through difficult things like a breakup or a job loss or business failure or health problem and our friends are advising us, right? Well when we're advising them the answer is so obvious it comes to us in a minute and we tell them exactly Oh that girl get over her she wasn't good for you. Anyway, you'll be happier trust. You'll find someone you know what the correct answer is but that person can't see it because in that moment of suffering and pain and they're still wishing that reality.
With
different so the problem is in reality. The problem is their desire colliding with reality. It's preventing them from seeing the truth. No matter how much you say. It's the same thing happens when I'm making decisions the more of a desire that I have that it worked out a certain way the less likely I am to see the truth. So especially in business if something isn't going well, I try to acknowledge that publicly and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers because that way that I'm not hiding it from anybody else if I'm not hiding it from anybody else then I'm not going to basically delude myself and what's actually going on
you want said anything you can think of has been thought of and tried the only way you're going to find something is if you stick to it, I don't know rational level and try a whole bunch of things. This kind of makes an idea commodity but the judgment and execution incredibly rare. How do you evaluate if someone is picking the right idea and if they have the capacity to execute on that idea,
the best Founders are found are the ones who are very long-term thinkers. So even decisions that maybe they should
Here that much about early on they fix it on because they're not building a house. They're putting bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper
at least in their minds. And
so what you're looking for looking for someone who knows the space. Well who understands how difficult it's going to be but doesn't care because they're they just love whatever they're doing. They're into it and they commit to it a long haul so, you know passion and vision alone are not enough I think Steve case so that Vision Without execution is hallucination execution alone isn't enough and then unfortunately at least in technology business, there's a lot of luck required right place right time Market forces timing, you know regulatory action against or Pro. So there's a lot of things that you control where the platforms are shifting what open source efforts show up so you can never predict the outside successes, but you can predict the failures you can say. Oh this person doesn't know this field at all their way either death or this person their short-term thinker, they're not going to last the game. They're not going to be there we go. It's
As needed because as I was saying there are no new ideas, all the ideas have been thought of but it's about the combination of the idea plus the execution plus the passion like Steve Jobs was a Visionary in a great designer not because he came with the idea to build a smartphone many people had tried to build a smartphone but it's because he had a very high bar for the design he understood the manufacturing
tolerances and what the technology was cabling what it was and
he could rally the people and the resources to get it done. He actually didn't care about the financial outcome. He took a dollars in salary from Apple. He just wanted to see it done and he was willing to do it for long as it takes until it work. So it's kind of magic Compass affected and then the timing in the world happened to be right the technology was around and Johnny I was there and who knows how many other factors intersect make it happen, but just many factors intersected on his side there were ones that intersected against him, you know, for example, it took over Apple which was a horribly feeling company at the time poor guy died of pancreatic cancer.
He got taken out curly think about what more he could have created what more we could have done for the world. He probably wasn't happy in the whole process, you know, he drove himself to ruin. So I think you do have to be irrationally optimistic to succeed and passionate but you also have to really know your stuff and I meet a lot of entrepreneurs whether short-term thinkers in which case that's okay. Just mean this is not the thing for you right go find anything you can commit to for 10 years, but that's how long it's going to take minimum to get a good outcome. And you've enjoy the journey because there's no guarantee on the outcome and you have to be really really good at it, which means that you probably love it so much that you're willing to put in the time before there's even any return on it. So I think the best Founders they have a deep understanding of the space and going into in F to be contrarian and they have a deep passion for it so that they'll just keep working on it and they have execution skills. We just get things done this
off.
Problems, they're capable. I love that. Yeah, I don't get to invest with Angel Founders. So I don't we all deal with people with similar, you know, in business or life, of course that wishing a partnership whether it's with a customer or supplier, you know a relationship. We have similar concerns about their short-term thinking and will it take advantage of us and how should we go about entering that relationship? And is this relationship fragile? I think that's a good way to think of it.
One thing I figured out kind of late is that generally at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley great people have great outcomes using be patient every person that I met at the beginning of my career 20 years ago where looked at and say wow that guy or that girl is super capable. They're so smart and dedicated blah blah now, we'll just be friends or hang out or whatever. You can't forgot about them all of them almost without exception became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough time scale. It never happens in the time scale you want or they want but it
Happen I want to Circle back and ask you a few more questions about life before we wrap up. You've kind of called your philosophy rational Buddhism. How does that differ from traditional Buddhism and what type of exploration did you go through to arrive at that?
Yeah, the rational part means that I have to reconcile with science and evolution.
So and
I have to reject all the pieces that I can't verify for myself. So for example is meditation good for you. Yes is clear your mind a good thing. Yes. Is there a base layer of awareness kind of below your monkey mind? Yes, all these things. I verified for myself and some of the beliefs that come out of Buddhism. I believe in followed because again, I verified or reasoned with thought experiments there myself, but what I will not accept is things that are written down is just so like oh you're there's a there's a past life that you're paying off the car before but I haven't seen it. I don't remember any past lives. I don't have any memory. So I just have to not believe that or when people say, you know, your third chakra is opening in your second chakra is when I don't know this is fancy.
Enclosure right? I have not been able to verify and confirm any of that on my own. So if I can't verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then I just then it may be true. It may be false, but it's not falsifiable. So I cannot view it as a
fundamental truth
on the other side. I do know that evolution is true. I do know that we are you know involves survival and replication machines. I do know that we have an ego so that we get up off the ground and worms don't eat us and we actually take action. So what rational budem to me means understanding the the internal work that Buddhism is spouses to make yourself happier and better off and more present
more in control of your emotions
and being a better human being but I don't subscribe to any thing fanciful just because it was written down in the
book. I don't
think I can levitate. I don't think that meditation
is going to give me superpowers and those kinds of things
so it's you know, it's basically
Try everything test it for yourself be skeptical. Keep what's useful and discard. What's not so I would say My Philosophy falls down to and one one pole is evolution and and The Binding principle because it
explains so much about humans
and neither side is Buddhism, which is the oldest most time-tested spiritual philosophy on the internal state of being inside each of us and I think those are absolutely reconcilable. I actually wanna write a blog post at some point about how you can map the tenets of Buddhism, especially the non fanciful ones directly into a virtual reality simulation what I mean by that is if you believe we're living in a VR Sim, which I know some people are espousing or you believe the Buddhist view the world with some Sarah and Nirvana and all that. You would actually come to the same conclusions on how to move your life.
What are the areas of your life right now that you'd like to change the most and
why?
I would like to be less I'd like to be less time bound and I like to be less greedy about signing up for things. I know how to describe it. You know what it really is. I had to tweet recently where I was going back and forth with somebody and they came up with this concept of this should be a two-factor authentication on your calendar. All right. We're two facts. You're right. Exactly. It was two Factor authentication when you're logging into a web sites that if your password gets stolen the attacker doesn't the thief or hacker doesn't have your phone so they can't log in because the phone has generated unique code. Well, I wish to the to factor code against my calendar because current me present me is always making promises for future current means tired exhausted hungry wants to go home. Let's go to sleep once read a book once the hang out with the wife and baby, but future me is this Dynamic high-energy individual who always show up to every meeting and we'll have a lot of energy and will want to get a lot of things done.
So I commit myself to all these commitments in the future that when the future may arise exactly this presently the back to being lazy and hungry and tired. So I wanted to factor against myself and the way I would like to do that is I think every time I make a commitment to anything I should instead just write it down and then check back in 48 hours later and then clear mind say do I commit to doing this or even better would be saying if I commit to doing something that I commit to doing it right now? Yeah, I think I'm not what I do it right now then don't do it. Don't commit to
it. Yeah, that's the Dirk servers approach right? Like if you're not saying hell. Yes right now than you should just be saying no, I think
yeah, so I think this is this is something of every busy person that's going to be much better at managing my own time because you go through life through an exploration phase and then you switch to exploitation phase and I'm very much the exploitation films not looking for more exploration, but that all that said I have a hard time saying no if I mean if I had one wish the most important thing to me would be I would constantly be
My mind and debug mode. I would literally be watching every single thought I have and letting no no reaction pass without him being stopped inspected stripped searched examined understood and then let go but the reality that took a lot of time and we're just highly condition creatures. So I do view a lot of my goals over the next few years of unconditional previous learned responses or habituated responses so that I can make decisions more cleanly in the moment without relying upon
memory or or prepackaged heuristics in judgments. What's the most common mistake? You see people make over and over.
I think the most common I mean it's a very tough question
because so contextual, right? It really depends on the
context. I think the most common mistake if I look at out there in on planet Earth, like for Humanity is the idea or the belief that you're going to be made happy because of some external circumstance and I know that's not original that's not new that's fundamental Buddhist wisdom. So I'm not taking credit for it. But I think I really just recognize it now the fundamental level including in myself like we just bought a new car with a baby. So we need a safer car. We were driving a little Mini Cooper before not enough room in there. So we bought a new car and now waiting for the new car to arrive and of course every night. I'm on the forums reading about the car. Why am I doing that? It is silly objects leak are it's not going to change my life that much or at all. And I know that the instant the car arrives I will care about it anymore. Yeah, but what it is is I'm addicted to the Desiring. I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the idea that this external
Fingers going to bring me some kind of happiness and joy, and that's just completely delusional. So I think just looking outside for anything. I think it is the fundamental solution, which is not to say you shouldn't do things in the outside. You absolutely should your you're living creature, you know, there are things that you do you locally reverse entropy. That's why you're here you're meant to do something. You're not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. So you should self-actualization. You should do what you're meant to do. But the idea that you're going to change something in the outside world that is going to bring you the peace and everlasting joy and the happiness that you deserve that is a fundamental solution that we all suffer from including me and so the mistake over and over and over is to say oh I'll be happy when I get that thing. Whatever that is. That's the fundamental mistake that we all met
including me 24/7 all day long and definitely see myself from that answer
because you're human you're human
all of us do it.
I want to end with a really unbounded big question, which is what is the meaning and purpose of life.
Yeah. It's a big question. I think I'll give you three and I'll get it goes. It's a big question. I'll give you three answers one. Is this personal you have to find your own meaning any piece of wisdom that anybody else gives you willing to Buddha or you or me is going to sound like nonsense. So I think fundamentally you just have to find for yourself. So the
important part is not the answer to the question is have to sit there and dig
with a question that it might take you years or decades, but when you find an answer you're happy with that will be fundamental to your life. The second answer I would give is there is
no meaning to life. There's no purpose to
life. OSHA says it's like writing on water or building houses and sand the reality is you've been dead for the history of the universe where 10 billion years or more. You will be for the next 70 billion years or so until the heat death of the universe and anything you do will fade. It will disappear just like the human race.
Superior the planet will
disappear get to Mars even even that group will disappear so no one's going to remember you pass a certain number of generations whether you're an artist or a poet or a
conqueror or Poplar or nothing so there's no
meaning so you have to create your own meeting which is what it boils down to you have to decide is this a play that I'm going through that I'm just watching is there a self actualization dance that I'm doing is there a specific thing that I just desire just for the heck of it but these are all meanings you are making up there's no fundamental intrinsic purposeful meaning to the universe because if there was then you would just ask the next question yourself well why is that the meaning right so it would just be as Richard find inside be Turtles all the way down the Y's would just keep accumulating there is no answer you can give that question that wouldn't have another why and I don't buy the Everlasting afterlife answers because it seems insane to me with absolutely no evidence to believe that because of how you live 70 years here in this planet that you going to spend an eternity which is a very long time in some afterlife what kind of silly God judges you for it
Energy based on some small period of time here. So I think that after this life it's very much like before you were born. Remember that it's going to be just like that and and but before you were born you didn't care about anything or anyone including your loved ones including yourself including humans, including whether we go to Mars or whether we stay on planet Earth and whether there's an AI or not, it's don't care. So like I met this entrepreneur who was obsessed with Steve Jobs and he was making all these sacrifices try and be like the next Steve Jobs and I said to him do you want to be exactly like Steve Jobs right now? He said yes, and so Steve Jobs is dead. He doesn't care about anything. He's gone for like zero he's not registering at all. So if you want to be like Steve Jobs, you don't want to be like Steve Jobs just be you right now. He would trade places with you right now in an instant if he could so, I don't think there's any real meaning or purpose to life. The last answer I'll give you is little more complicated than that from what I've been reading in science friends of mine have written books on this so kind of stitched together.
Here is and maybe there is a meaning to life, but it's not a very satisfying purpose basically in physics, you know, the arrow time comes from entropy second law of Thermodynamics is that in Tripoli only goes up which means disorderly Universe only goes up which means concentrated free energy only goes down and if you look at what living things are living systems humans plants civilizations, what have you they these are systems that are locally reversing entropy humans locally reverse entropy because we have action but in the process we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the universe so you could come up with some fanciful Theory which I had which I'd like that we're headed towards the heat death of the universe wouldn't know concentrated energy. You can wear everything is sort of at the same energy level and therefore we're all one thing. We're essentially indistinguishable. And what we are doing is living systems were accelerating getting to that state. So the more complex of a system you create whether through computers and civilization or through ART and math.
Maddox or just through creating a family. You're actually accelerating the heat death of the universe. So you're pushing us to at this point where we end up as one thing, but I think that's the kind of an unsatisfying answer if you're looking for a personal meeting today in your life.
That was phenomenal. Listen developed. Thank you so much. This was just absolutely mind-blowing. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you
Twitter at Nepal or on my blog at startup boy.com. Thank you so much.
Thank you. It's been great.
Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at Farnam Street blog.com podcast. That's F AR n am stre. ET b l OG.com podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript and if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food go to Farm Street blog.com newsletter. This is all the good stuff. I found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends books. I'm reading and so much more. Thank you for listening.
